Boredom in Kodoka Ⅰ

Pot Holes: Kyurem

You'd ever just lived somewhere for so long that anytime someone called the place you live in quirky you had to double check yourself?

So, here's the funny thing about Kodoka. A few decades ago, some of our representatives got together and predicted some problems regarding carbon emissions and public health. Our government sought to find ways to reduce emissions for the future but had trouble finding effective ways to do it besides giving out comically high fines to big corporations and forcing them to do the clean up. It's a great way sure, but it's probably not going to be as effective when your country doesn't have that many corporate conglomerates in the first place.

That and most of them weren't based in Kodoka anyway. The reps decided to save that for when the country had mostly recovered from Japanese and American colonialism.

Of course, they had to find other ways. Debate after debate (in which anyone can look at themselves because of transparency laws), someone eventually had the big-brained idea of incentivizing the reduction of car usage by making it absolutely miserable to drive from not regularly maintaining roads. In their view, this would make more people prefer to use other methods of transportation that the government could actually want to fund and not have to deal with the infinite money pit called stroads. In one fell swoop, the government gets to put its tax money into something better and make the increase of average weight more manageable in the future. Can't complain about people not walking enough when you make it inconvenient to not walk.

Yes, car dependency used to be a problem here. We were trying to prove to other countries we were "good" by trying to emulate them. Unfortunately, this mimicry lead to said problems manifesting in the future, so they had to do something. Why would anyone want to travel to a country that's nothing but road after road when you paid for an "exotic getaway" in some island nation?

Of course, a fair chunk of people were annoyed initially. However, when the reps promised to fund the absolute fuck on public transport and informing the populace what could happen had this wasn't done did support for this seemingly stupid decree increase. Overtime, as urbanisation increased, what would've turned our country into a parking lot hellscape ended up being way more manageable than initially anticipated. By this point, Kodokans have gotten used to public transport and not being ashamed of using bikes and buses to get around.

I'd say this move actually increased the popularity of Poké-Taxis. This led to more tourists coming in to try out riding on these "magical creatures". Some playing into being "exotic" and having a decent system and oh look. Now the country's not broke.

"What about storage?"

You how the inventory for you Pokemon character is infinite? Yeah, that's a thing for a fair chunk of people. There's also a thing called "bakfiets" and "rental vans" a lot of people use. You're not lunging around large machinery regularly anyway and if you are, you probably know some magic that helps or have an ability called having friends.

Back to the lack of road maintenance.

After this plan went into action, the density of buildings increased by a lot. There was less and less incentive to use cars as the grocers and apartments got closer. Eventually, the redirection from fixing roads finally showed up in the form of one of the world's first bullet trains and some additional advancements in buses and trams. Of course, this plan had the caveat of making the bus riding experience notably worse compared to other options of transportation. This eventually stopped being as big of a problem when the roads got patched after a period tactile neglect.

Later on, there was a law requiring having to cooperate with local wildlife before building anything in their environment. This decreased the amount of roads that could be built and subsequently dunked the viability of cars as they got unnecessarily bigger and couldn't fit onto the smaller, older roads. Compound that with the strict safety standards for any and all automobiles and you'll see the noticeable lack of SUVs.

You'd be surprised at the lack of safety regulations for "light trucks" in some countries. How the hell are any of you guys surprised from automotive deaths when you keep letting these death machines run around? Oh yeah right: money.

Today, Kodoka has somehow found a way to be carbon negative. And it only took a some decades of resisting the allure of cars and some Pokémon workers' rights violations until 4 or 5 decades ago.

Did I tell you about the Pokémon civil rights movement that happened before the Team Plasma shtick? Well I'm not diving into that rabbit hole today because that is a hole can of worms I don't feel like opening any time soon. TLDR: one of the reasons Kodoka was able to get a head start on being carbon negative because of questionable Pokemon rights protections.

At least nowadays, they're given the same protections as humans. I think there's some programs where grass-type Pokémon are paid to suck out CO2 from the air alongside some operations to make spells that could control other greenhouse gasses. Most nuclear facilities use Pokémon to help maintain stability and predict issues that may come up before it evolves into a big fucking problem. Doesn't mean we still have some problems to iron out, but that's what voting's for. As long as the majority is content with each other & themselves and are pretty educated, this system should make do.