Originally Posted by Colnago Mixte

It's always fun to dream about the perfect city, where you can ride your bike to work an optimum distance, and do all your shopping on it safely. Breathe pristine air and drink pristine water. Grow food on your roof, have solar panels to take you off the grid. Lots of leisure time to pursue the arts.

When you look at cities in the ancient world like the Roman city of Pompei, they were probably as close to this as you could get, provided you were not born a slave. They walked everywhere or rode in carts, grew food locally, ate fresh fish, breathed clean air and drank clean water. Seemed to have a lot of spare time. Even had running water and sewer systems. They didn't have our modern medicine, but they probably needed a lot less of it than we do these days, living the way that we do.

I'm not so sure we're headed in the right direction sometimes.