If you could time travel back 400 years to see the thick, green forests and clear streams of pre-urban New York City, would it change the way you feel about the environment today? Ecologist Eric Sanderson thinks so. In preparation for the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson's arrival in New York's harbor, he's been putting together a series of computer-generated images of New York as it was four centuries ago, based on old maps and extrapolations from ecological data. He calls it Project Manhatta, and you can see an image from it above, showing Times Square 400 years ago and today. Why would an ecologist want to time travel rather than recycle?
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Urban history is littered with the dead bodies of scrapped public transit projects. When eager commuters and car companies turned the automobile into the most popular form of transit in the world in the twentieth century, many cities set aside plans for expanding their public transit systems, such as the electric tram system planned for regions feeding into Melbourne, Australia. In some cases, city planners actually ripped out existing transit systems like Los Angeles' once-enormous cable car network. What would these cities and others look like if their public transit systems had continued to thrive and we lived in a world without cars? We've got five alternate urban histories of public transport for you below.
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