Environment
The construction of the O-Bahn, rather than the previously touted Modbury Freeway, was motivated by a desire to reduce car dependency. $6 million was used for the redevelopment of the Torrens Gorge, in which the Torrens Linear Park was created. About 150,000 trees, plants and shrubs were planted alongside the track for aesthetic, environmental and noise-reduction purposes; planting was completed in 1997. Walking trails and cycling paths were built along the park to encourage public use. Torrens Linear Park rejuvenated the river, which had deteriorated to the extent of being a de facto "urban drain, littered with rubbish and inaccessible to the public". Arising from environmental considerations, the O-Bahn is carbon-neutral due to the absorption of carbon dioxide by the trees alongside it. The track itself is situated in a valley due to it being near a riverbed and the elevation was further lowered by digging further depressions in order to reduce the noise impact on adjacent dwellings.
The original buses ran on diesel fuel, but the system allows for buses that run on alternative energy sources. Biodiesel fuel was trialled between July 2005 and May 2006. Buses using natural gas have been trialled, although they have not seen regular usage due to a perceived lack of power, especially on the section of the down track immediately after Paradise Interchange where the track rises sharply. The design of the O-Bahn provides for the installation of overhead wires for trolleybuses.
Read more about this topic: O-Bahn Busway
Famous quotes containing the word environment:
“If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)
“... several generations of slum environment will produce a slum heredity ...”
—Albion Fellows Bacon (1865–1933)
“Autonomy means women defining themselves and the values by which they will live, and beginning to think of institutional arrangements which will order their environment in line with their needs.... Autonomy means moving out from a world in which one is born to marginality, to a past without meaning, and a future determined by others—into a world in which one acts and chooses, aware of a meaningful past and free to shape one’s future.”
—Gerda Lerner (b. 1920)