The Design of a Solar Vehicle Town

Noah Vawter

Cross-Registered Graduate Student from MIT

Submitted as part of the requirements of Studies of the Built North American Environment Since 1580, Fall 2005, taught by Professor John Stilgoe, Harvard University, Cambridge, 2005

Introduction

In Nevada on Saturday, August 23^rd, 2003, we were traveling in a rented Ranger truck. It is the smallest pickup in Ford's line, yet it fit four of us and our gear. We had piled the bed higher than the cab with equipment, and stacked four bicycles and strapped them down on top of that. We had been driving all morning on Interstate 80 from Oakland through the Tahoe National Forest. Almost immediately after taking exit 15 north onto state highway 447, we found ourselves in an area the United State's Attorney's Office still refers to as “Indian Country.” [Indian Country Case Update, http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/nv/home/textonly/aboutus_t/indian_news/caseupdate_t.htm] It was a 475,000 acre Indian reservation, one of the largest in Nevada, and included a large lake. Although the highway is on reservation land, the public is allowed to drive on it to get to destinations beyond it. When we passed a convenience store, we stopped because we knew it would be the last one for a long time.

Black Rock City as Inspiration

We were on our way to the Burning Man festival, a week long, annual gathering of around 30,000 people in the desert. It turned out to be a major inspiration, encouraging me to consider the future of bicycles and solar vehicles, because I saw many of them during that week camping in the desert. I was amazed at how easy it was to get around in the temporary town of Black Rock City (BRC) where the festival takes place. There was also an abundance of sun and photovoltaic panels, enabling all sorts of electrical appliances to be used. It felt very liberating to walk the streets safe from almost all motor vehicles. I began wondering how to create a town like this that could last all year long.

This paper is about how the concepts learned in Studies of the Built North American Environment: 1580 to the Present could make such a town possible. I mentioned the convenience store because while stopped in the parking lot for half an hour, I saw the first solar vehicle whose design astonished me. That is the single most important thing taught in this course: how one can learn a great deal just from looking around.

When I returned from the desert, I put a great deal of energy into learning about solar vehicle design. I also found some small movements organized via Internet for the purpose of creating a carfree city. One notable one is the Carfree Cities site, organized by J.H. Crawford, author of Carfree Cities. [Carfree Cities. <http://carfreecity.us/>]. One of the good things about his community is that it is actively seeking investors to develop some carfree areas, while its design ideas are nascent. This is a very good time to start looking into this. However, the book Carfree Design was not exactly what I was looking for, as it focuses on light rail and pedestrian paths in existing cities. Carfree European shopping districts are given too much attention. Like much of the literature on bicycles and planning, it is about fitting bicycles into established cities, or about building smaller communities within a larger city. While there is plenty of wisdom in those materials, there are several reasons why it is much more interesting to observe and study Black Rock City.

First, Black Rock City is rebuilt every year. This makes the city into a laboratory, where experiments can take place with lower stakes than in established cities. For example, road widths and layout can be altered from year to year, based on the previous years' experiences and rules regarding human and vehicle interactions can be rewritten annually. With less inertia, technological innovations do not get slowed down because of investments in existing networks. For example, consider the Gaza Strip, where the nation of Israel is incurring into sparsely populated Palestinian land. Instead of building expensive, vulnerable telephone lines, they are simply installing cellular telephone towers. Finally, there are lots of people experimenting in Black Rock City. They are working with shelter designs, vehicle designs, machine designs, and more. Many of them are following the tradition of the “informed hippie,” typified by Buckminster Fuller. In fact, many geodesic dome houses are found in the city each year, often with improvements that were discovered while living in the desert. Many residents are artisans, skilled in welding and bicycle construction. Their work is usually out in the open parts of their camps for all to see and learn from. Also, everyone is friendly there.

The existing literature on fitting bicycles into established cities is disappointing because the two entities are fundamentally incompatible. Many cities were designed for automobiles or horses, disregarding how the sun reaches into the streets. While many are at least cited with buildings facing south, few can take advantage of the most recent innovations in solar electricity: The buildings are too high, casting shadows on the streets for all but a few hours of the day. They were made with too many assumptions and are already too densely populated to regress to using less electricity.

Although he omits solar power, Crawford does at least dedicate two pages in the appendix of Carfree Cities to a bicycle city design. He writes, “Some of my bicycle-advocate friends cannot understand why I lay so much emphasis on rail-based transit (and metros in particular). The reason is simple: not everybody wants to bike everywhere they go.” [Crawford, p. 293] Although bike enthusiasts would populate the city I am proposing, I do recognize the people who do not wish to bike everywhere. Solar vehicles are the way to solve that problem.

With nothing satisfactory to rely upon, a new design is called for: a landscape that favors solar vehicles. I am proposing a new town: A version of Black Rock City that stays open all year long. It will not be for everyone, but it will have a diverse population. Ecological design concepts will inform it where necessary, but not out of ideology. The sun will be its transportation and power source.

Siting a Bicycle City

One of the lessons taught in Studies of the Built North American Environment is that constructing the proper landscape can make a person wealthy. It is a matter of figuring out how to get people to go someplace and stay for some time, rather than just passing through: how to make a place into a destination, not merely a stopping point. One method is to be a good observer; to pay attention to what most people are not paying attention to. This involves a good deal of traveling, looking around, and observing what hidden treasures lay within the Republic. When evaluating a location, one should pay attention to the existing landscape, as well as the natural features of the area. In the case of a solar bicycle city, some features are already constrained. The process is about scouting locations and paying attention to what would attract people, walking around and asking, “What could be built here? What would bicycle fans want? How can knowledge of the landscape enable this?"

Elevation

During the course, much attention is paid to the elevation of land, with particular concern for floods. In citing a bicycle town, this must be given special consideration. The obvious criterion is that the territory should be as flat as possible, because of the expense of energy when climbing hills. However, very wide open areas, large enough to allow great winds to propagate should be avoided because they will tend to blow bicyclists around. Therefore, valleys between large, natural windbreaks are the best types of terrain.

Climate

The single most important feature of the climate is that the rainfall must be low. There are two reasons for this: First, clouds diminish solar energy. Second: riding bicycles in the rain is not desirable. In Bicycle Planning, a graph shows the effect on commuter cycling of eight conditions: humidity, heat, cold, wind, poor air quality, dark, rain and snow. Rain and snow cut cycling in half and by 75%, respectively. None of the other conditions reduce cycling by more than 15%. [Hudon, p. 13]

The next criterion is temperature. Bicycle riding raises the temperature of the human body slightly. A comfortable temperature range would be 50 – 70 degrees.

Shelter

Currently in Black Rock City, people tend to live in tents for shade. One of the most popular designs is a half of a geodesic dome. The frame is made from 1.5” PVC pipe and rope strung through the pipes holds them together. The entire frame is covered with a parachute, since they are inexpensive to purchase in the surplus market. For larger structures, green American parachutes are used. For smaller spaces, white Japanese parachutes are used. Since they are so commodious, the large domes tend to get very hot at noon. A simple air conditioning system has evolved: The lower 4 feet of the parachute “skirt” can be tied up in hot weather to allow a breeze to flow through. Often people connect two or more of these domes together to create large interior spaces. Cooking can take place inside.

In the more permanent setting of the hypothetical town, it will be interesting to see what forms evolve. In theory, the warm, sunny climate suggests concrete-covered adobe houses would be one of the best types of house. Shade is one the most important points of all. Perhaps arrays of solar panels could be mounted above the dwelling to create a cool microclimate.

Rail Connection

A major part of the course deals with railroads because of their great influence on the development of the Republic. They are still valuable, still cheaper than trucking and the oil shortage haunting us will only make them more so. It makes sense to locate the new bicycle town near an Amtrak stop, for several reasons. First, in a town without cars, tractor-trailer trucks would certainly be banned as well, so transporting the large amounts of goods into the town and garbage out must be accomplished in some other way. Rail lines will make it possible for people to come to the city on a regular basis and spend money, as well as enable residents of the town to make it out from to time to time.

It would be especially useful if the train were within an hour or two of an airport, as well. On the other hand, one must be careful about the town's location relative to large metropolises. Crawford recommends about 40 miles (65km) between an existing large, urban area and a new city, warning: “One danger must be avoided: the new cities must become genuine urban centers, with their own employment and cultural institutions. They must not become merely bedroom communities for existing cities; this simply exacerbates the problem with excessively long commutes.” [Crawford, p. 241]

Proximity to Town

Siting the town relative to the railroad is a major issue. Most importantly, it takes time and energy to transport goods between the train stop and the town, suggesting that the distance ought to be minimized. Unfortunately, train lines make a good deal of noise and minimizing distance will produce unacceptable volume levels. Most likely, all Amtrak stops will already have towns around them, so siting a new town beyond them will suffice to keep the sound level down. Nevertheless, a successful town might invite an Amtrak stop where there was none before, so noise reduction should be considered.

A train's engine can be expected to produce about 85 dBA at 110 feet away, while its horn makes 96 dBA. [Raub, p. 10] These levels are significantly louder than the 55 dB point at which “road and rail traffic annoy most people.” [Egan, p. 13] Using standard design concepts, the train's engine can be treated as a barrel source, getting quieter by 3.5 dB each time the distance is doubled, making the desired distance about 7.5 miles. The train's horn is much louder, but can be treated as a point source, getting quieter more quickly, so the limiting factor is the train engine noise. (See Appendix A for calculation details)

If 7.5 miles from the train to the edge of town is determined to be too far, some simple noise reduction strategies are available. The simplest would be requiring the existence of natural hills between the town and the train line which would act as berms. Such structures can reduce the sound by 10 to 15 dB according to the US DOT Federal Highway Administration. [ Highway Traffic Noise. <http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/environment/htnoise.htm>] If a 12.5 dB reduction were possible, it would mean the distance between the train station and the town could be reduced significantly-to about 2/3 of a mile. If such structures are not naturally present, manmade ones could be built. As a rule of thumb, the length of the berm must be 4 times the distance between the berm and the town it is intended to protect. [Frequently Asked Questions – Noise Abatement. <http://www.dot.state.il.us/desenv/noise/faqAbatement.html>] For a 2/3 mile distance, the berm must extend 2.6 miles long. At 12 feet high, and 72 feet wide at the base, this is a significant quantity of earth. To allow people and goods from the train to pass through it, the berm should have a split halfway through its length. See Figure 1 to see the layout of the berm relative to the town and the train tracks.

Figure 1. The elongated layout of the town, sited near railroad tracks. The town is organized for maximum commuter ease, using solar vehicles to power travel between the two sections.

Position Relative to Town

The positioning of the town relative to the railroad corridor is another important concern. As I will demonstrate later, the ideal shape for a town of solar vehicles is an ellipse elongated east to west. Therefore, to minimize exposure to the train noise, the town should be sited near tracks running north and south.

Highway Connection

Connecting the city to the national network of roads is a tricky topic. The main advantage of highway access is the increased visitor traffic. Standard practice in bicycle communities is to locate a large garage near the edge of town. Since this town should be located near a rail station, that parking lot should be used.

Telecommunications

While the town's culture can improve transportation and resource usage, its communications technology will resemble the rest of the rest of the Republic. It will still be subject to all the regulations of the Federal Communications Commission. The biggest difference is that wireless systems will be deployed instead of wired networks for ease of installation and prevention of obsolescence.

Telephone

The American telephone system was the subject of an entire day's lecture in Studies of the Built North American Environment. The Republic is at a critical time in its history now, because we are witnessing the disappearance of the landline, also known as POTS (Plain Old Telephone System). POTS is losing ground to the cellular telephone industry. We should pay careful attention to what we are losing. For example, landlines have been extremely reliable for several decades now, while cellular service has noticeable interruptions, to which anyone who has used the system can attest. Therefore, as an emergency backup system, I propose an alternate, simpler communications network within the home: the familiar citizen's band radio. These devices can be portable, run on common batteries, or even be hand-cranked. Their range can be several miles. If they were in every home, cellular outages would not be life threatening.

Radio

AM/FM radio service will resemble conventional American service. No matter where the town is located in the Republic, it will probably receive some radio signals anyway. If the location is anything like Black Rock City, much of the band will be free for local use.

Television

In Black Rock City, there is simply too much excitement, from parades of vehicles with blinking lights to amplified troubadours and topless bicycle races, to ever consider watching television. No one there ever reports missing it. However, in the long term, people may get interested in television, e.g. for news. The level of interest will not be high enough to justify running cable wires everywhere though. Access to television would be only through satellite dish.

Internet

The most modern technology available is WiMax, which enables people to share 70 Megabits of data per second. [Technical Information. <http://www.wimaxforum.org/technology>] This is the equivalent of about 50 broadband interconnections. Since not everyone is using the service constantly, each WiMax tower can be provisioned for many more people than 50. Uplinks to the Internet will be possible through microwave dishes, or fiber optic connection.

Solar Vehicles

Solar vehicles get little attention relative to gasoline-powered vehicles. New models are not announced on television regularly. Unlike Thunderbirds and Corvettes, there are no popular songs about their technical specifications. We have very few expectations of their use and performance. One of the only times most people see one is in the news following competitions between educational institutions. Such races, although they drive new technology development, do little to educate the public because the designs bear little resemblance to the common, practical vehicles people need and use. Few of the vehicles look comfortable, for example. They do not have any place to put cargo or children. They seem delicate.

Regardless of our level of detail of knowledge about solar vehicles, it is generally and correctly understood that they have much less power than gas vehicles. As solar vehicles get overlooked, the design of cities appropriate to them gets even less attention. As a result there is a general belief that a city based on them would be impossible. Therefore Black Rock City is an important counterpoint. People build experimental solar vehicles and use them there. They demonstrate that a bicycle city, starting from scratch, can at least operate for a week.

In BRC, most bicycles and solar vehicles are used for pleasure cruising while gas vehicles are used as work vehicles. There are some exceptions though, such as bicycle trailers used to haul aluminum cans for recycling. The situation is also somewhat artificial, because with virtually no stores, there is little need to haul large, heavy things around, although it does happen as part of the art scene! In the city I am proposing, the abundance of solar energy would be used to power solar work vehicles, especially flat bed trucks for hauling heavy items like furniture and building materials from the train station.

Our images of work vehicles in this country sometimes lead us to believe that only gas vehicles can be used to transport heavy things. A competing series of images, available via the Internet, is helping to change that opinion. For example, the Bikes-At-Work website includes pictures of bicycle trailers moving refrigerators, lathes, and household washer and driers. This is not entirely easy work: most of those who do it have some conditioning, which is why electric vehicles are valuable- they offset the amount of work that must be done pedaling.

Since every American over a certain age sees gasoline-powered cars in motion nearly everyday, we have a good intuition about what performance to expect from them without observing any of their parts in detail. Looking at a solar vehicle to evaluate it is a more rare skill. Often, when seeing one for the first time, it is such a novelty that people are instantly awed, regardless of the objective quality of the vehicle. It is important to be able to critically evaluate solar vehicles. Fortunately, most of their workings are wide open for inspection.

The first thing to do you when you see one is to estimate the power it can get from the sun. Add up the surface area of solar panels you see. The most common and economical type, measuring 18” by 48” (.5m x 1.3m) produces about 90W. Sum the wattage of all of them and compare it to a human rider. A completely unconditioned human rider pedals at about 100 Watts. [Wilson, p. 44] A vehicle with four typical panels generates about 360W, so expect it to be about 3 and a half times as powerful as a human rider under best conditions. Subtract some power to account for the weight of the cells, structure and load. While looking at the panels, you should ask yourself, how much can the panels change their orientation? Can it be done easily while the vehicle is in motion?

Next, check the carrying capacity of the vehicle. Does it have a long, flat bed? Can the rider wear a backpack while seated? How high are the sides, can you pile things high inside it? Can other vehicles attach behind it?

The frame structure should also be examined. Some vehicles have very light, elegant aluminum designs. Others are boxy steel, with too much redundant structure. For delicate loads, cushioning shocks will be necessary. What about the overall width? Will it take up too much of the road to be used regularly?

What about the number of riders? Can two people pedal it at once? Are there other ways for additional riders to attach themselves temporarily to it? Often car-like designs end up being inefficient because so much structure is needed to form their frames.

Two-wheeled designs can be difficult to balance when heavily loaded. Since they will be operated in the sun, another important question is the amount of shade. Elegant designs leverage the panels to provide the rider with shade.

Finally, the batteries, motor and drivetrain should be examined. Batteries are often a necessary evil in electric vehicles that cannot charge themselves in the sun. In the proper environment, though, they can be eliminated. The size of the motor is important, too. The larger and heavier the motor, the more expensive and efficient it is. That is one of the most serious tradeoffs that can be made in a solar electric vehicle. A key distinguishing feature in drivetrains is whether it applies power to the wheels through a transmission or simple gears.

There are so many design parameters and still so many completed designs that have not been built and tested yet. To constrain it further, the vehicle should be considered in the context of the town in which it will operate. To do that, it is first necessary to examine the landscape of a solar vehicle town.

How Solar Constraints Inform City Layout

Siting structures is an important topic in Studies of the Built North American Environment. One of the concepts is paying attention to the orientation of the sun, especially when dealing with buildings in which people will be living. In the hypothetical solar vehicle town, this concept is explored with regard to moving vehicles.

Shape

The sun rises in the southeast and sets in the southwest. It is most heavily concentrated in the south. Therefore, one sites stationary solar equipment with panels facing south. “Tracking” solar panels use motors and other means to continuously reorient themselves toward the sun during the day. This practice is generally said to double the harvested energy. Optimal panel siting on a vehicle requires special design because the vehicles can change direction, even more importantly, the solar panels act like a kite or sail.

Though not enough to lift the vehicle into the air, PV panels tend to work against the motion of the vehicle. If solar vehicles track their panels, they will often find themselves moving with them perpendicular to the direction of travel, causing wind drag. In solar racing contests, this issue is avoided because the panels are all located perpendicular to the sky, but that restricts them to operation near the middle of the day. A functioning solar vehicle town can be planned such that the majority of vehicular travel is perpendicular to the sun.

Assuming initially that the wind in the town has no prevailing direction, the efficient directions in which to drive a solar vehicle in the morning are northeast and southwest. See Figure 2. In the evening, one travels best southeast and northwest. At noon, east-west travel is best. Except for the longest days of summer, it is least efficient to travel north-south. These observations inform the overall shape of the town. Since the east-west paths are most easily traveled, the town will be shaped like an ellipse, elongated east to west.

Figure 2. Because the orientation of the PV panels on a vehicle affects its aerodynamic profile, the time of the day dictates the most efficient axis of travel.

Paths

The sun-drag phenomenon means the typical American movement pattern from home to work in the morning and back via the same route in the evening is not mathematically optimal for solar vehicles. If one were to drive to work in the morning with the sun and panels facing southeast, the optimal route in the evening will be at a right angle to where he or she wishes to go. There are several responses to this. One option is to tack home, which actually has some interesting benefits, like taking people past shopping centers on their ride home. Another possibility is to compensate with stored up battery power. Although batteries are generally to be avoided due to their weight, there will be plenty of time to recharge them during the workday. Finally, one can simply make the most of it, siting the workspaces at one end of the town, with housing at the other, as in Figure 1.

While the sun boosts commuter travel speed, it will make other kinds of vehicular traffic ideal. For example, periodic delivery vehicles like mail trucks can take the most optimal route possible: an arc formed by heading NE (The entire route can also be reversed) in the morning, heading ENE around 10 AM and due east by noon. As the day afternoon comes around, he or she should bear ESE, in time to be heading due SW before the sun goes down. A route like this could be spread out all day long, to cross the town once per day in the north, reaching the southern parts of town the next day. The only downside is that the drivers of the vehicles would spend every other night at a different end of the city, but a clever arrangement can be made. See Figure 3. In this scheme, the driver switches trucks with a second driver moving in the opposite direction at noon. The driver resumes the other truck's route, and ends up at home in the evening! In order to make the route traverse the length of the city in one day, the vehicle's average speed of the vehicle (including stops) should be 1.8 miles per hour.

Figure 2. Using this scheme, both truck drivers arrive home at night, while the vehicles themselves follow a two-day path optimized for exposure to sunlight.

Since east-west travel makes the most sense, paths on this axis should be prepared to handle faster vehicles and vehicles carrying heavier loads. They should be wider than north-south roads to accommodate the extra traffic and have fewer building entrances accessible from them. The east-west roads should be wider still to stay out of the shadows of the city blocks. See Figure 4. These “shadow zones” are not wasted space. They could be used for parks, or have vendors set up in them.

Figure 3. Bird's eye view of city blocks. The east-west roads are wider than the north-south. Solar vehicles are avoiding the shadows of the city block south of them.

Finally, night travel should be addressed. The obvious negative point is that solar energy is unavailable at night. This is actually an advantage, because it means lower speed travel in the dark. It is also important for people who might be intoxicated: They do much less damage on a bike than in a car.

Density

The sun is a finite resource. The harvestable electricity from it varies geographically across the Republic. The most reliable region for solar energy is the Southwest. One can expect about 5 Kilowatt Hours per meter squared per day in this region. Since this quantity includes a spatial term, it means that any area has a limit on the amount of solar electricity it can harvest. If residents require a minimum amount, then that limit translates into a population density. How dense? Complex models can be made accurate, but will still vary with all kinds of circumstances. In the spirit of shop knowledge, some rough calculations can be performed a single time that will inform all future judgments:

First, begin with the town layout in figure 1, whose area is 27 square miles. This translates to 70 Million square meters, or 350 Gigawatt Hours (GWh) per day. At typical 20% efficiency rates, PV panels could harvest 70 GWh per day. Glancing at my most recent electricity bill, an apartment of three uses about 8KWh daily. However, residential use of electricity is only about one-tenth of national use, so a better estimate of per person use would be 80KWh/3. Therefore, very roughly speaking, the town's sunshine could potentially sustain about 2.6 million people. That calculation assumes 100% overhead coverage of the sky with PV panels, though, which is undesirable. A more likely coverage might be one-tenth of one-percent, which means 2,600 people per square mile, or 1,000 per square kilometer. The hypothetical town can sustain no more than 70,200 people.

...And Back to Vehicle Design

Since they will primarily travel east and west, commuter vehicles should be streamlined to do this well. The mounting of the panels should be transformable, capable of moving from the left side (for the morning commute) to the right side without much difficulty. Other vehicles, designed for more random travel, should have panels that can be more generally aimed. The sailboat should serve as inspiration for this design. The panel becomes like the sail, and the steering wheel, a tiller. In fact, one might even conceptualize a solar vehicle design with a single steering tire in the rear like a sailboat, and ropes to direct the panels.

Wealth and Resources

As stated earlier, most of the literature on carfree design is concerned with integrating bicycles into existing cities. Black Rock City, on the other hand, is starting from nothing. To use it as the basis of a new, year-round city one should investigate the economic model. An extensive analysis is beyond the scope of this paper, but several points like food, water, and waste should be examined because they relate to the concepts taught in Studies of the Built North American Environment.

Economically, little or no wealth is created inside Black Rock City. People work outside the city to earn money for an entrance ticket (about $200) and to purchase the food and water they bring in with them for the week. If such a city were to be transformed into a year-round one, there would have to be a way to generate wealth inside it to meet the expenses of food, water, and waste disposal.

In the most extreme hypothetical situation, the wealth could be generated purely via information. Residents could communicate with the outside world, performing economical activities like trading stock, computer programming and creating art. The income they earn could then be used to import food and water and export waste. An advantage of such a town is that it may be located far away from natural resources, such as water supplies and arable land. However, there are disadvantages to such a configuration. It is exclusionary, requiring everyone to be highly skilled. Even worse, it makes everyone dependent on outside supplies: for example, if all water were trucked in, the town would be at the mercy of the water suppliers. The town would be vulnerable to all kinds of natural disasters, too, such as the water source drying up, weather extremes preventing the import of water, etc.

The other extreme resembles the ville configuration, with the population located intimately close to water supplies and fields. The main disadvantage of this configuration is that little money changes hands, which makes it difficult to save up for something unusual and special. Not everyone wants to live an austere life of subsistence. Clearly, it would be ideal if wealth could be generated inside the city through diverse means. Finally, the overall amount of work necessary to generate the wealth can be reduced through conservation.

Water

Consider the water cycle inside Black Rock City, which is a major economic drain. Normally, visitors bring water in themselves via automobile. The rule of thumb is one and a half gallons of water per person per day. This amounts to 16 million gallons of water each year at peak population. One possibility is to bring in it via train, but this is a fragile, expensive solution. It would be preferable to locate the new town on a source of water, such as a river. Even better would be near a lake that is filled from a river. Harvesting rainwater is not an option, because it is at odds with the requirement of having good weather to make the electricity work.

In addition to the water that gets trucked out, human excrement must be trucked out. Why spend money to remove wastewater, when money has already been spent importing it? A permanent city should have a proper waste treatment system that recovers the water from human waste. This would provide jobs-both skilled and unskilled-for residents and it would reduce dependence on outside resources. Putting together two negatives and turning them into a positive like this is a principle of Taoism. It is related to feng shui, which in the Western world is referred to as a geomantic system. [Wood, p. 22]

Food

Food, a major concern, requires a tremendous amount of water and good soil to grow. In the U.S., crops are grown in areas that either have adequate precipitation or are irrigated at great cost, but a requirement of the hypothetical city is that it almost never rains. Therefore, precipitation cannot be counted on to grow crops. Food must be imported, irrigated, or grown in greenhouses. This negative point can be combined with an abstractly related lesson taught in Studies of the Built North American Landscape and turned into a positive one.

The original lesson was taught in several ways. In the original version, Professor Stilgoe and his friends were moving a house down one of the main streets of their town when the police confronted them in response to complaints about slowed traffic. The officer was familiar with all or most of the men though and let them get on with their business. The punch line of the story is “Get to know your local police and let them arrest the tourists.” In the hypothetical town, the key is to make all your visitors pay for your food. The link between the two thoughts may seem a bit opaque. There is a connection though. In both cases. two parties want or need something. The friends and the tourists want road access. The residents and the visitors want food. In the first case, the police officer is co-opted into an agent for the local party. In the hypothetical town, the visitors themselves are co-opted into an agent for the local party. This is the basis of what it means to be local, and in charge.

Making it into a Destination

The way to get the visitors to pay for all the food is to give the town a reputation for having the greatest food and restaurants. This gets people to come to your area, justifies marking up the cost of food, and creates occupations. There are several arms to this strategy. The first is to locate the town near a reliable source of fresh and healthy vegetables. One of the biggest sources of them in this country is the Valley in Northern California, so railroad lines out of that area should be examined.

Also, famous chefs should be lured to the area. A subtle point about celebrity chefs should be noted. Unlike entertainment stars, whose works can be mechanically reproduced, the work of a chef is singular. Since only a limited number of people can enjoy his work in a limited time, it is difficult to attain national fame. From time to time

however, a chef will gain a brief period of fame from engaging in a mediated experience, such as publishing a book of recipes, or performing on a television show. Since the fame of chefs and restaurants is manufactured or at least amplified through media, the town mayor should arrange a steady stream of media attention to the outside world. Chefs from the town should visit the regular world and exhibit their cuisine. In contrast to the homey, ambiguous signs like “Mike's Pies” often seen in the American countryside, signage outside this town should announce quotes from food reviewers like Zagat's.

Furthermore, the structure of places where this delectable food will be consumed should be construed as attractively as possible. While researching this topic, I came upon a fascinating book called Recycled As Restaurants. Initially thinking it was about conservation, I was surprised to find it was actually about converting old buildings into restaurants. The book is well produced: for each of the 25 restaurants it presents, there is a pair of identically framed before and after pictures and floor plan drawings. More photos are included of the interior and descriptions of each. Page 10 has a very powerful quote:

The appeal of reuse is easy to understand. In a time of rapid change, old buildings provide a sense of continuity, a bridge to the past. They also offer a quiet note of romance, an aura of mystery. We wonder what stories they could tell. We are free to imagine a dramatic or even an ordinary past, while we are also somehow comforted by the building's ongoing presence, its endurance.” [Croft, p. 10]

What are some buildings that offer that sense of mystery and drama? In Recycled As Restaurants, the majority of buildings are urban, although some unusual structures such as gristmills and kilns get transmogrified as well. In Studies of the Built North American Environment, however, a special emphasis was put on learning the history of a region. Putting this together with the constraint of being somewhere in the West of the Republic (due to lower precipitation), I propose to appropriate a ghost town. If a proper ghost town is nowhere near a (working) railroad station, river or any other important feature, buildings from one should be moved to the destination site.

Although it might seem to be a "guy" thing, gender distribution at Burning Man events appears to be approximately equal, even though some of the survivalist elements of the culture are "male." Perhaps women come for the adventure? Perhaps, like the story Professor Stilgoe related about the women who said it was nice to be around men who had been around the world after World War II, these are the “real men”? Either way, in order to ensure a diverse population in the hypothetical town, the restaurants are meant to attract a large number of women, because they are more likely to be super-tasters, who "live in a neon food world." [Patterson, June 2003] This means they will be more responsive to good food. This will attract women especially because they have a higher proportion of super-tasters than men - approximately 35% of women versus 15% of men.

In addition to catering to women, the town should be good for children, too. It will provide them with an environment safe from cars, offering lots of exercise and fresh air. Growing up there also give them experience in constructing their own shelter, building and repairing their own electric vehicles and possibly cooking their own food. They will more than likely see the rest of the world as being very unecological.

University

In addition to high-quality restaurants in a ghost town, a university is an establishment that generates wealth without a significant amount of resources. Crawford states “The establishment of a large government installation, a major university or a research facility can provide the economic basis for reasonably rapid development of a new city.” [Crawford, p. 241]

Conclusion

This is not the kind of research that can determine whether a year-round solar vehicle town would be feasible or not. Instead, the most important results are the investigations into the major landscape features of the town. The most original contributions in this paper are the siting of the town, its elliptical layout, the spacing of the streets, and noise reduction measures.

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Appendix A – Calculations of train noise.

96dB – 55 dB = 41 dB. 41 dB/6 dB = 6.8. 2^6.8 = 114. 114*110 = 2.375 miles.

85dB – 55 dB = 30 dB. 30dB / 3.5 dB = 8.5. 2^8.5 = 362. 262*110 ft = 39820 = 7.5 miles.

85dB – 12.5dB – 55dB = 17.5 dB. 17.5dB/ 3.5dB = 5. 2^5 = 32. 32*110 = 3520 = 2/3 mile.