This blog will chronicle a class that I am taking at Georgia Tech this semester. The course is entitled Sustainable Transportation Abroad and will be considering the way transportation is planned and implemented in other cultures with sustainability in mind.
To begin; this is your Host, Adam Borsch. I grew up in Bristol, TN a small city (Around 20,000 folks) in northeast Tennessee in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. I have had a chance to visit some amazing places around the world and every single one of them has shaped my word view, including the way I think about transportation.
Growing up in Bristol public transportation is limited. There is a bus service that I have never ride but I had some friends who used it get to around prior to turning 16 - in additional there is access to the greyhound bus network out of Bristol. The city was developed in part because of a rail line that ran through downtown. The train station exists to this day as an event space even though passengers quit riding long ago. There is talk however of reopening passenger service on that line.
My interest in transportation began to really develop while I was at Georgia Tech Lorraine in the summer of 2013. Here I was exposed to the expansive European rail network and traveled over 25,000 kilometers in 11 countries without ever getting behind the wheel of a car. Carrying this this experience forward I have had an eye for the transportation systems that existing in every country I have been to. There are several sections on this website that show some of these in more detail but Europe and Southeast Asia have been the most interesting from a transportation perspective.
My goals for this course are to gain some of the backstory behind the beautiful transportation networks I have experiences in Europe and to begin to apply some of these principles to transportation issues here in the United States and more specifically in the Atlanta metro region.
In addition, I am looking forward to building relationships with the other students in the class, as well as the speakers and individuals we meet during out time abroad.
