Parking meters from Magnum

Magnum Photos put together a collection of parking meter photographs.

(via Slate)

Insull transit posters

Samuel Insull, a Brit who came to the U.S. to work for Thomas Edison, became a major shareholder in the Chicago utilities and transit sectors by the 1920s. J.J. Sedelmaier describes Insull's campaign promote to the transit industry:

Chicago’s transit lines had been doing advertising and even some poster designs since the 1910s, but there was no consistent graphic approach or what we now know to be “branding” in the direction of the marketing. This all changed once Insull took hold of the Elevated Rapid Transit System and the associated interurban lines. He soon assigned the poster project to the railroads’ president, Britton I. Budd, who later brought people like the North Shore Line’s Publicity Manager Luke Grant and Commercial Department Head John J. Moran, into the fold.

The design of the posters covered a wide range of styles. From the figurative work of artists like Willard Frederic Elmes and the young Oscar Rabe Hanson to the flat graphic interpretations of Ervine Metzl, many of the works produced were as strong and bold as anything being created simultaneously in the U.K. or Germany. The series not only utilized the talents of professional artists like Leslie Ragan, Elmes and Metzl, but also was a proving ground for newcomers like Hanson, and other art school students like Clara Fahrenbach and Wallace Swanson.

Sedelmaier's piece includes a treasure trove of poster images. The poster campaign ended in 1930 and, reports Sedelmaier, the posters faded from the forefront until Dave Garlter of Poster Plus in Chicago came across a bunch of unused posters 45 years later. He mounted and exhibited the posters and renewed interest in the Insull transit posters followed. 

(via Salon)

Compressed on the Tokyo subway

Michael Wolf is a photographer whose collective body of work focuses on life in mega cities. He creates amazing, beautiful, and haunting visual representations of architecture, street life, domestic interiors, and - my favorite - people crammed in like sweaty sardines on the Tokyo subway in a series called tokyo compression.

he aims his camera at captive passengers pressed against the windows of the crammed tokyo subway. the density is no longer architectural but human, as commuters fill every available square inch of these subway cars. as with architecture of density wolf uses a ‘no exit’ photographic style, trapping the gaze of the viewer within the frame just as the passengers are unable to escape the confinement of these temporary cells. the images create a sense of discomfort as his victims attempt to squirm out of view or simply close their eyes, wishing the photographer to go away. tokyo compression depicts an urban hell and by hunting down these commuters with his camera, wolf highlights their complete vulnerability to the city at its most extreme.

In another series called street view, he finds photos in Google's collection of street view images from cities including Paris and New York. Many of these involve various modes of travel: 

using google’s universal interface, he navigates the french capital, cropping and blowing up isolated moments that are both evocative of the classic street photography of the 1950s, but which also transcend the distinctiveness of paris architecture to suggest an abstract, universal city.

I love Wolf's photography, and you'll likely get lost in his online portfolio. Other favorite series are 100x100, the box men of shinjuku station, and architecture of density.

(via Slate)

Dumb ways to die

A seemingly adorable, but really quite graphic animated PSA for the Metro in Melbourne, Australia, ticks off the various dumb things that can be done to virtually ensure one's quick demise (my favorite: "use your private parts as piranha bait," which rhymes with "eat medicine that's out of date"):

“The campaign evolved out of discussion with platform staff and drivers who witness people risking their safety around train stations and at level crossings,” Metro Trains’ Leah Waymark, told an Australian outlet. [Ollie] McGill says the tune came to him after a late night out.

Here's a closeup of the little purple guy who jumped down on the tracks to catch a balloon and now he's about to get hit by a train.

(via Co.CREATE)

Passengers radio documentary

Passengers is a radio documentary that a public radio project called Humankind put out in 2011. It's a well-produced and ambitious two-hour program covering many different aspects of and issues related to travel in metropolitan areas. It includes a diverse group of interviewees - transit advocates, transportation officials, transportation researchers, and riders. It's definitely worth a listen for people who just want to learn more about transportation as well as those immersed in the world of transportation as students, practitioners, and scholars.

Buses and Margaret Thatcher

As someone very interested in the stigmas around public transit, I was delighted a number of years ago to come across this quote attributed to Margaret Thatcher: "A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure."

It turns out that the back story about this utterance is not as straightforward as it seems. David McKie from the Guardian did some digging around to get to the bottom of things:

I have quite often read that Margaret Thatcher declared that any man seen riding on a bus after the age of 30 should consider himself a failure. That most of those who have quoted this merciless sentiment have done so without checking their source is clear from the number of variants, with the qualifying age for establishing that you're one of life's losers being variously quoted as 30, 29 or even 26. Having spent much of a day trying to discover where and when she said it, I began to suspect that it might be apocryphal too.

He points out that other famous quotes have similarly questionable origins and they're difficult to validate once they're embedded in the cultural lore. The Thatcher bus quote even has its own section in Wikiquotes.

(via The Guardian)

Urban images

The Luskin School of Public Affairs building at UCLA wasn't the most inspiring place for a long time. It was drab and it felt like the hand-me-down place it was (it was the Anderson School of Management's building before they moved to their new and really fancy digs nearby).

A big donation to the school a few years ago started the ball rolling in terms of renovating and remodeling major parts of the building. Now the classrooms are sleek and high-tech, the student lounge doesn't look like it's from an undergrad dorm in the 80s, and the research centers are comfortable spaces where you want to go in to work.

My favorite addition, however, is the fantastic art that's gone up on the walls throughout the building. The artist is Yasmine Diaz, who is also a staff person at the Lewis Center. She does oil painting as well as photography and captures urban scenes from cities around the world, including Los Angeles, New York, Rome, and Buenos Aires - what she calls "urban studies of abstracted realism."

(via yasminediaz.com)

Transportation musicality

Alexander Chen takes the routes of subways trains and turns them into an amazing aural and visual piece of art:

At www.mta.me, Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA’s actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop. The visuals are based on Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 diagram.

At the Isle of Tune, described as a "musical sequencer for the modern colonial," cars move along roads and trigger sounds when they pass a series of markers (trees, planters, houses, lamp posts). 

You can built your own sequence of sounds. Or you can check out popular tunes such as Beat It, Don't Stop Believing, YMCA, and even Katy Perry's California Gurls (under the "View Shared Islands" link). Very cool - though if you listen to the loop of any of these too long, you'll either want to stab your ears with a pencil or run out and buy an electronic keyboard. It was the former for me, so I urge you to listen with caution.

Miss Subways

Here's a really delightful piece from NPR's All Things Considered and Radio Diaries about the Miss Subways beauty contest that started in the 1940s:

For more than 35 years, riders on the New York City subways and buses during their daily commute were graced with posters of beaming young women. While the women featured in each poster — all New Yorkers — were billed as "average girls," they were also beauty queens in the nation's first integrated beauty contest: Miss Subways, selected each month starting in 1941 by the public and professionally photographed by the country's leading modeling agency.

The inclusion of women of color and Jewish women, particularly in those early years, is really quite remarkable.

(via All Things Considered)

Munich subway photos

A slideshow of photos by Nick Frank shows a deserted Munich subway:

Subway stations are typically drab, functional destinations--places where people come, go, and get on about their day. But they’re always a bit more than that, too. They’re spaces that reflect the personality of the city they’re in and often tell us something about the people who live there. I’m not sure, however, that the residents of Munich would like what their subway says about them. At least not as Nick Frank photographs it. His deftly composed shots show a subterranean infrastructure that’s gorgeously futuristic but also unshakably creepy.

The author of the article mentions zombie movies, and these photos did remind me of 28 Days Later right away - although zombies tend to wreak havoc and sully public spaces. They never leave places immaculate like this train car.

(via Co.DESIGN)

A Scottish-Korean bagpiper and a white-collar zombie meet on a bus....

This Starburst commercial makes me laugh every time I watch it. I tried to use it in a research presentation, but it didn't go over so well. I blame that mostly on the fact that I couldn't run the video and so I had to explain the bagpiper-zombie exchange through still photos. I'll be honest, it's not the easiest thing to narrate and starting off with "a Scottish-Korean bagpiper* and a white-collar zombie meet on a bus" is a risky venture.

However, I think it was also partly that the audience wasn't all that receptive to the assertion (as light and comical as I tried to make it) that only on a bus would a slightly naive and good-natured Scottish-Korean bagpiper meet and be forced to have an ongoing exchange with a snarky, cynical zombie. Oh, you transportation planners, I wanted to show you via a weird candy ad that buses are unique mobile public spaces, but all I heard were chirping crickets. Well, at least now I know what it's like to be a comic bombing on stage. 

In any case, I think Zach Woods (Gabe from The Office and Erin's ex-main squeeze) is the zombie here, but I'm not a hundred percent sure. For some reason, I especially love his sarcastic "uh, everything's a contest, SIR" comment, even more than "you are boring me back to death."

* The Scottish-Korean bagpiper explains his ethnic identity in another commercial - though I never thought this was a good example of a contradiction of the solid-yet-juicy variety.

All aboard!

Thanks for stopping by! I'm starting this blog to share all the interesting transportation tidbits I come across that I don't see on other transportation blogs. I especially love transportation things that reference popular culture, examine social life and norms, and document transportation worlds through photography, art, film, and audio. I'm also planning to talk about (and decipher, if necessary) more academic work that considers transportation in a variety of non-transportation planning ways - by drawing from the emerging and interdisciplinary field of mobilities as well as cultural studies, visual studies, and literature.

I hope this becomes a fun and engaging hodgepodge of transportation-related items.  I would love if this collection helps planners think in alternative and innovative ways about measuring, understanding, and engaging transportation worlds, and helps non-planners appreciate the complexities of this aspect of everyday life. There's just more to transportation than discrete choice modeling and asphalt versus concrete debates. A lot more.
  
To kick off this blog, here's a photo I absolutely love that brings together my last name, a pugsley, and public transit. (You will see in the links to the right that I'm mildly obsessed with anything involving animals and transportation.)

Thanks again for coming along on the ride!

(via I Can Has Cheezburger)