2030_ The Real Story of What Happens to America - Albert Brooks [114]
When Wo was a little boy he saw his father spending hours sitting in traffic, not moving, wasting what he thought was valuable time. And when there was an accident, things got even worse. Why couldn’t these cars simply be lifted out of here immediately? Wo could never get that out of his mind and years later, when he was awarded the largest contract ever given for new highway construction in China, that’s exactly what he did.
Every few miles, in heavily traveled areas, small cranes would lift any wreckage up and move it over the guardrail, off to the side, and get traffic moving again within ten minutes, as opposed to the hour and a half it took to get a tow truck and clear the area the old-fashioned way. The cranes would be spaced out so they could reach any accident in five minutes, and when they were not in use they disappeared, lying flat behind the rail.
The technology was imported to several crowded cities around the world, but never to America, which needed it the most. So Wo was going to use it in rebuilding the road system of Los Angeles.
He had also designed double-decker freeways in the downtown areas of China’s bigger cities, areas where there were always traffic jams whether there was an accident or not. As he looked at the layout of Los Angeles he felt that having twenty or so miles of double-decker roads would eliminate seventy percent of the congestion. The roads would split into two levels where traffic would always slow, and then join back into one after the bottlenecks. Traffic jams were a mathematical problem, and if the worst areas could be helped, the rest of the road system would benefit exponentially.
Another area of Wo’s expertise was high-speed rail travel. Wo had never understood why highways, which already existed, could not be used for trains, too. He put high-speed trains down the middle of many superhighways in China, and helped his country take its place as the owner of the most advanced rail system in the world. Wo’s introduction of what were known as Road Trains revolutionized travel, and Los Angeles, he thought, was the perfect city in the world to build them.
Wo was also friends with Shen Li. They were both wealthy, young, and beloved in their home country, and they were not competitive, which in China was rare. Wo had no interest in the health business and worked with Li over the years on many issues involving greener and more cost-efficient ways to improve medical care. He loved Li’s idea of putting a small health facility in each new building complex so people would have immediate access to care without having to travel. They were a great team and they both relished the idea of re-imagining Los Angeles.
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The first jumbo cargo jets started landing at Los Angeles International Airport in late November 2030. Supplies were flown in from all around the world. Sometimes a skyscraper was constructed using materials from thirty different countries, and these materials arrived exactly when needed so they could go directly to the building site without having to be stored. Storage was the bane of construction budgets, and if materials could go from airport to installation without sitting for weeks and months, the savings were enormous. In order for that to happen, suppliers and transporters and builders and architects all had to be talking together 24/7, and that required a type of communication that the Chinese were the best at. Their logistic software was admired by every architect and contractor in the world.
When Lee Dong Wo constructed the world’s first floating hotel in Abu Dhabi, it went up in sixteen months, a record for such a complicated build. And the Abu Dhabi government, which had experience with every nation’s best construction companies, watched in amazement at the coordination of the Chinese, something that Los Angeles was about to see.
The first thing the Chinese needed to do was supply housing