America’s First ‘Truly Sustainable’ Town, Babcock Ranch, Will Run on Driverless Transit
Jennifer van der Kleut
A former ranch in Florida is aiming to be America’s first truly sustainable town, powered by solar panels and natural gas, and run on driverless transit through a public ride-hailing app.
When the expansive property first went up for sale 10 years ago, the owners received offers from all around the world, according to FastCoexist.com. But the owners decided to sell it to Kitson and Partners, a developer who had a very special plan in mind.
After selling 74,000 acres to the state of Florida to be a nature preserve-the Florida Panther and black bear are found on the land, according to TIME Magazine-Kitson and Partners set about designing the town of Babcock Ranch, which could soon be home to 50,000 pioneering residents.
Babcock Ranch will reportedly be an optimally planned city that is largely walkable. A majority of homes will be close enough to downtown that most people can walk or bike to work or shopping. For those that need to go longer distances, or who will need to commute to another city for work, will be able to hail a driverless electric car through a public app similar to Uber or Lyft, explains Syd Kitson.
Kitson and Partners have other revolutionary plans in the works as well. Eventually, they want homes to be equipped with tele-health and graywater-recycling infrastructure, and they will be built to withstand all types of weather, so that residents can shelter in place during tornados or hurricanes without having to be evacuated out of town.
They are also researching the newest technology in energy storage. The current plan is that solar energy will power the town during the day when the sun is out, and at night, it will switch over to a grid powered by natural gas. Eventually, Kitson says they want to find a way to store up energy created by the solar panels during the day so that they no longer have to rely on the grid at night.
“The holy grail for renewable energy is figuring out how to store it so you don’t need to turn to the grid at night,” Kitson says. “We’re talking to several companies about how we can do that, even at a neighborhood scale, almost like a micro-community of a system,” Kitson told FastCoexist.com.
Excitingly, construction on the town is already underway. The driverless electric public transportation system is already in the works, and homes should start being built this summer, FastCoexist reports.
TIME Magazine says the town is approximately five times the size of Manhattan, and will be powered by a solar energy plant that features more than 350,000 panels.
Kilson says starting a town like Babcock Ranch from scratch is easier than trying to transform a already existing town.
“How you design your roads—thinking about pedestrian walkways and bike paths, if you’re making it walkable and bikeable and pedestrian-friendly—doing that from the beginning is much easier,” he told FastCoexist.com.
“Babcock Ranch will exemplify what it means to be a town of the future,” he told TIME. “The first residents will be settling into a whole new way of life—one that is conscientious, engaging and connected.”
Images of renderings created by Babcock Ranch.
