Transport Infrastructures - Between Utopias and Science fiction. Lifting passengers on elevated sidewalks or shooting them below the ground?

“A sustainable transportation system is one in which fuel consumption, vehicle emissions, safety, congestion, and social and economic access are of such levels that they can be sustained into the indefinite future without causing great or irreparable harm to future generations of people throughout the world.” (RICHARDSON, 1999) Since the 20th century, the solutions offered by planners, utopists and artists to manage traffic and transportation were predominantly concerned with the main symptom of traffic, the ‘car’, neglecting to consider the actual disease, which was ‘unlivable and alienating cities’. For the past two centuries many architects, planners, artists and politicians attempted to offer solutions based on spatial differentiation of transportation means and on infrastructural layering, separating the realm for cars, public transportation and pedestrians. This article intends to offer a new perspective on mobility issues, reviewing and exploring strategies for a softer, accessible, integrated and regenerative mobility.