我们虽仅有60年的历史，但我们渴望永生一城之中，和平相处。
We are only 60 years old, but we want to live forever as a city, to live in peace.
有些城市的工业化程度刚刚好，比如杜塞尔多夫，或者路易维尔。
Some cities are calmly industrious, like Dusseldorf or Louisville.
而有些城市已经早已不堪重负，像纽约，或香港。
Others project an energy that they can hardly contain, like New York or Hong Kong.
然后，还有像巴黎，伊斯坦堡这样充满历史的城市。
And then you have Paris or Istanbul, and their patina full of history.
什么都没有——没有广播节目，没有播客，
Nothing — not public radio, no podcast —
连能让这些时间变得有点意义的专注的冥想都做不到。
Not even mindfulness meditation makes this time worth living.
仅仅在美国，2014年我们就花了296亿小时在通勤上。
In the US alone, we spent 29.6 billion hours commuting in 2014.
在这么多的时间里，古埃及人都能造出26个胡夫金字塔了。
With that amount of time, ancient Egyptians could have built 26 Pyramids of Giza.
我们用了一年就做到了。
We do that in one year.
这是对时间，精力和人类潜能巨大的浪费。
A monumental waste of time, energy and human potential.
我们现有的思维方式已经不起作用了。
Our current way of thinking is not working.
为了让交通流动起来，我们需要一种新的灵感。
For our transportation to flow, we need a new source of inspiration.
我在交通部门工作了16年，在和一个生物技术背景的顾客交谈时突然茅塞顿开。
So after 16 years working in transportation, my "aha moment" happened when speaking with a biotech customer.
她告诉我她的研究如何影响了我们血液循环系统的一些特殊性质。
She was telling me how her treatment was leveraging specific properties of our vascular system.
“哇”，我想到，“我们的血液循环系统，我们身体内的所有动脉和静脉，每天都在创造生理的奇迹。"
"Wow," I thought, "Our vascular system — all the veins and arteries in our body making miracles of logistics every day."
就是那个时候我意识到，生物学已经存在于交通方面几十亿年了。
This is the moment I realized that biology has been in the transportation business for billions of years.
它已经测试过无数方法，转移养分，气体和蛋白质。
It has been testing countless solutions to move nutrients, gases and proteins.
这真的是世界上最复杂的交通系统。
It really is the world's most sophisticated transportation laboratory.
但是，看看我们的城市，是，我们的确有一些地铁系统，一些隧道和桥梁，以及天空中的直升机。
But if you look at our cities, yes, we have some underground subway systems and some tunnels and bridges, and also some helicopters in the sky.
但是绝大多数的交通都是在地面，在地表上。
But the vast majority of our traffic is focused on the ground, on the surface.
换句话说，我们体内的血管系统是立体结构的，而绝大多数的城市交通系统都是平面结构的。
So in other words, while our vascular system uses the three dimensions inside us, our urban transportation is mostly two-dimensional.
所以我们需要利用更多的纵向空间。
And so what we need is to embrace that verticality.
如果地表已经没有多余的空间，那我们就把交通系统抬高。
If our surface grid is saturated, well, let's elevate our traffic.
这个中国的概念巴士能够凌驾于拥堵的交通道路之上，这种对城市内部的空间和移动的思考方式多么让人大开眼界。
This Chinese concept of a bus that can straddle traffic jams — that was an eye-opener on new ways to think about space and movement inside our cities.