It sounds clean, and it is clean. The problem is isolating the hydrogen, an element found everywhere but, problematically, always attached to something else. Thus, hydrogen fuel is either made by electrolysis with water (a lot of water, though not as much as the petroleum industry uses to produce gasoline, pro-hydrogenists argue), or by running super-heated steam through natural gas or methane gas, which breaks the molecular bonds and allows the hydrogen to be released and stored. The result is hydrogen as a compressed gas that you’d keep in a canister in the back of your car. This is the reason that all the gas and chemical companies are at the Hydrogen Expo, as well as the reason that Mead and I spend a lot of time talking to the guy selling the new kind of hydrogen pump.

A hydrogen car is not difficult to imagine: just an Hµ tank under the backseat. Hydrogen pumps, however, are more complicated, and here in Long Beach there are conflicting visions. In 1956, in Cloquet, Minnesota, Frank Lloyd Wright built a gas station that doubled as a civic center, thinking that gas stations would be community hubs in the 21st century and not seeing that, with only speed in mind, we would want only coffee and pastries. With hydrogen, the fueling station might become a solar-powered electrolysis operation sitting in the middle of a cul-de-sac, fueling an entire neighborhood.

“I can see a condominium complex having one of your units for all the members,” says Mead.

“Yes, yes!” says the hydrogen-fueling-station salesman. Stations that run on natural gas are being used experimentally in New York state to fuel cars. “People were not satisfied with electric cars,” a Honda hydrogen-car salesman tells us. “On the flip side, they loved filling up at home. They liked doing it while they slept.”

Out in the lot, Mead is generally unimpressed with the hydrogen cars, which look like gas-fueled cars. “Technology has to go into it in a value-added way,” he says. “The style here is besides the point.” We drive a Nissan SUV, which looks like a regular Nissan SUV. It is smooth and quiet, like an electric car but more powerful. We drive the Audi, which feels great, fantastic really. “This is the fastest one out there,” says an Audi employee.

“Well, the torque curve is very good,” says Mead, which impresses me because I don’t know much about torque.

“I like the Mercedes,” Mead says. It’s my favorite too, as we zip around downtown Long Beach a few more times then head back out in Mead’s Cadillac, to wait longer still for the car of the future. On my way to the airport, in a tinny rental car, I stop at one of those gas stations that makes me feel like I am holding it up: The modern L.A. gas station is all about speed and security. Topping off the tank, I feel hopeful for the future, even if it’s not a hydrogen future. I feel good about the possibility of communal fuel supply, of a shared hydrogen fuel pump in the neighborhood, powered perhaps by a solar panel, the residual power used by the community for heating or hot water. We can’t reverse the environmental damage caused by cars, but maybe we can reverse the community-destroying aspect. Maybe we’ll all be sharing fuel and vehicles one day, which brings me to the future of the giant city and transportation therein.

When hydrogen cars have at last arrived, or electric cars have taken over, the city—or the idea of it at least—will expand. Currently, land is developing seven times faster than the population is increasing, and by 2050 it is thought that 307 million Americans will live in eight “super cities.” And whether people want it or not, whether we have clean cars or dirty ones, this unbridled urban sprawl will require more mass transit, like BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system.

I enter the BART station on Powell Street in San Francisco and head to Berkeley. The ride is nothing like that of the elevated trains in Chicago; the spacious, carpeted interior seems luxurious to a New Yorker, though it is loud to the uninitiated, along the lines of a small jet. On my right, a guy in black pants and a white dress shirt reviews papers. To my left two teenagers are talking and laughing—about the ride!

We arrive at the Downtown Berkeley station and I exit to the street. I’ve come to Berkeley to meet with Elizabeth Deakin, the co-director of the Center for Global Metropolitan Studies and the director of the University of California Transportation Center, and she knows enough about land use and transportation that it really means something when she praises BART’s essential fabric-of-life success. Part of its success, Deakin explains, is the acceptance of the idea of dense and diverse populations in the Bay Area—in a country where density is often disparaged. “You have to think about cities as big, vital places and places you want to have,” she says.

Development is happening in cities all around the country. Condos are going up everywhere, but most are expensive to the average income earner. “We’ve got to make it possible for people to live with us and not just slink off somewhere after work,” Deakin says. And it’s not just BART that makes the system. Buses connect neighborhoods, linking employees and employers and intertwining income levels. Deakin calls the bus “the real workhorse and backbone of any transit system.” She asks: “How do you make transit work for everyone?”

As BART extends into the Northern California countryside, planners are attempting to encourage transit-oriented development, but it doesn’t always work. Deakin sends me off to see where it has—first northeast, to Walnut Creek, then southeast to Oakland’s Fruitvale stop. On my way, I keep thinking of Deakin’s parting words, spoken along the stream that runs through the small woods in Berkeley’s campus: “More and more, to have an urban policy you have to have a rural policy.”

At the Rockridge station, I hop on a northbound train, which races along the middle of the highway, bypassing heavy afternoon traffic, and cuts through the Berkeley hills. As I leave the urban-seeming stations of Oakland, I begin to pass stations set up in what not too long ago was farmland—the BART stops at Orinda and Lafayette seem to be nothing more than giant parking lots. The BART system began in 1964 and has now become a tool for coordinating the megacity, to make way for more Chicago-like neighborhoods throughout Northern California, rather than cover it all with cul-de-sacs, or strip malls and parking lots, as has been done in so many places between San Jose and San Francisco.

When I first get to Walnut Creek, I think that I am in for another park-and-ride experience, but the little town, a BART-accessible village in a pretty, still-green valley, shows the surest sign of people rushing and communing: a hot dog stand. Crossing a Walnut Creek street is not like crossing the street in downtown Berkeley, which is pedestrian friendly, but it’s doable, if a little lonely. As I stand at a traffic light alongside a gas station whose shrubs are in the shape of the letters “USA,” I am joined by two men in work boots, speaking Spanish. When the light changes we only have a few seconds. “Loco,” one of the guys says, as we jog to beat the lanes of anxious cars. The semi-modern transit-oriented downtown is a little desolate at times, but for the most part feels alive: Cars park at an angle, traffic moves slowly, side-street restaurants thrive, pedestrians wander, posters at the Arts Center advertise the weekend’s events.

South on the train to Fruitvale, which was once a blown-out section of Oakland but now—as evinced by a soccer game and its many spectators—is happening. At the station, people are everywhere, and there’s a brand-new commercial development, linking a plaza and the adjacent business districts, via Avenida de la Fuente. It’s a Hispanic neighborhood: Around me, everyone is speaking Spanish. “Curandera y consejera” says the psychic’s sign. Old bars and pawn shops stand warily alongside new development; across the street are a busy dental clinic, a nonchain pharmacy, and a luggage store. The station is full of people, so that it’s sad to leave. If a stranger feels camaraderie in a place he’s never been, imagine how the place might feel for a local! And it’s amazing how different my perception of this BART stop is, given that it is all just a different configuration of concrete and roadway, of wallboard and windows. The BART train nourishes the human activity, the pedestrian drama, which in turn inspires more of the drama, making me feel as though good places can be made, making me want to stay for the farmer’s market.

But I have to catch a plane north, to Oregon. BART takes me right to the San Francisco airport, hills populated by houses that, despite what the old song says, don’t seem so ticky-tacky.

For the last leg of the transportation road, I grab the light rail from the Portland International Airport into the city’s downtown, a place that has been revised over the past few decades with transportation in mind. Portland’s light rail works great, though never has a transportation system done so much to the scorn of so many. The light rail in Portland is a beacon of hope for cities and their planners. Yet anti–public transit experts continue to argue that Portland’s light rail does not work, that it is riderless and ineffective, and that its development is irrelevant. These people have obviously never lived in Portland. This evening, the MAX train, as it is locally known, is pleasantly (if you ask me) crowded as we pass through fields and an undeveloped station toward the highway, where we’ll ride alongside the interstate into downtown. In the morning, I catch a bus near Pioneer Courthouse Square, the 17.

You can put your bike on the front of a bus in Portland, which is a good way to get to a farm, which is where I’m headed, Elizabeth Deakin’s words still ringing in my head: “More and more, to have an urban policy you have to have a rural policy.” The bus traverses through Northwest Portland, an area made famous by Gus Van Sant’s film Drugstore Cowboy. The industrial district remains such, and out beyond more factories, the bus picks up St. Helens Road, named for Portland’s still-active volcano. To my right is the Willamette River and to my left, Forest Park, a vast inner-city park that connects the downtown woods to the mountains and serves as a corridor of water and unpaved life, a highway for things nonhuman. There’s a gas station and a feed store, and farms are now visible to the right, still only ten minutes from hyperdesigned urban espresso shops and grocery stores. The bus drops a biker off at the bridge to Sauvie Island, a big island in the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers, and it’s just a few country miles past farms of all kind to Ford Farms. Here, if you are lucky, Kristin Ford, who sells beef to Portland restaurants and cider around the country, arrives in either her Ford truck or her farm-dirty Mercedes, fresh from a delivery—at which point she walks you out into a field to meet the cows, which are grazing a little less than 15 miles from downtown.

There is no statistic that celebrates this farm-to-city proximity, no number that points to farm-to-city-center convenience in an area that, according to the U.S. Census, grew by a modest 4 percent between 2000 and 2004, though there are lots of other accolades. Portland has been showered with superlatives of all kind: Bicycling magazine named it the best biking city. AmericanStyle called it the tenth-best arts city in the country. Forbes called it the 20th-best place to do business in the U.S. It’s the best city in America to have a baby according to FitPregnancy.com (even if the school system was nearly defunded in the ’90s). It’s the best walking city in America, as per Prevention magazine, and a group studying sustainability called it one of the best cities equipped to handle an energy crisis. But if I were handing out awards, I would compliment Portland on its accessibility to farms via public transit.

The city and the country are linked—this is what I see again, here at the end of the road—the mutual relationship. At the moment, 18 percent of all farmland in the U.S. is located within metropolitan areas. Urban threatens rural, even though rural keeps urban alive. Portland has worked to control growth, the reason, in part, for a whole new small city in the Pearl District: The city’s Urban Growth Boundary, as the regional government calls it, has come under fire by building interests, who want it moved out, who say the influx of population needs more, who argue that planners just like the look of farms, that it’s an elitist choice. But after you tour the country for a year or more, you see that a healthy connection between the city and farms is not just for the aesthetic benefit of the city dweller who wants to take a long bike ride past a country farm, or the rural cider maker who wants to go to a play or have a drink. The city’s survival depends on the survival of its greenways and watersheds, for its food supply, for life.

“I hope it’s always like this here,” Ford says. But of course, there is a good chance that it won’t be. Farmland in the U.S. is disappearing at a rate of two acres per minute, by one estimate. And why? For roads. And homes near new roads. And roads that will spawn new road-needing homes. And yet, the last time someone worked out the math, the average item on the average American dinner table travels 1,300 miles from farm to plate. According to the GrassRoots Action Center for the Environment, 17 percent of all fossil fuel used in the U.S. is consumed by the food-production system. Then there are the pollution issues associated with the increase in amount of packaging to send food traveling, not to mention that farmers generally make less selling hundreds of miles away than they do locally. With all our connections, with all our highways, we remain disconnected.

In the past ten years, Portland has expanded, engorged, put all its goodness at risk. Traffic’s bad—no question—and congestion has increased. But for all that you can still drive (or bike) out of town on the weekends and get to the mountains, which are not completely condominiumed, thanks to regional planning, thanks to governors who cared. It seems absolutely clear to me that the place would be a mess had there been no public transit in place. Portland is like everywhere in the U.S. where there is uncontrolled growth and more affordable houses that come at a cost not listed in the closing papers—in commuting hours and gas prices, in watershed destruction, in the loss of local farms, the ultimate price of which is health and sustenance.

In the end, the way you get around, the way you get your food, the way you commute has everything to do with the place you live. For a lot of years, we have been so preoccupied with getting there, with building an interstate system and then building our local roads to look like I-80, that we forgot about what we were leaving behind. Our jobs, our safety, the physical happiness involved in going for a walk around the block have in many places just disappeared. Fortunately, it’s not all gone, and we’re starting to realize that we can’t get there faster or even at all if there’s no place left to go.