There is a system of courtesy with Japanese escalators, especially in Tokyo and Osaka, that you leave one side clear for walking. However, with the recently increase in escalator accidents among the elderly, the Japan Elevator Association has in principle prohibited walking on escalators. On the other hand, in subway stations in London, China and so on there are posters advising people to leave one side of the escalator clear for people who are in a hurry.
She's also apparently fond of bridge supports for elevated highways and is part of a fan club that has some great photos. (via kottke.org)
While this isn't a transportation-specific thing, I came across some very cool photos today and one was transit-themed. Flora Borsi takes old photos from the days before digital cameras and smartphones and cleverly puts herself in the photos using these devices. One of the photos is on a bus.
The U.S. National Archives has some interesting Rosa Parks items - a diagram showing where she was seated on the bus when she refused to give up her seat to a white rider and the 1955 City of Montgomery police report. The diagram provides some interesting insight into the spatial segregation of bus spaces. In a 1966 study, researchers looked at the seating patterns of black and whites on buses in New Orleans, where public transit had been desegregated since 1958. They used a variety of approaches to measuring "precedence violators," those individuals who violated traditional black-white social expectations about where people should sit. While they acknowledge the challenges in doing a segregation-integration study and the many factors that can influence seating in the confines of a bus, their measures show that generally buses remained racially segregated spaces. (thx Nick K!) (via U.S. National Archives)
Transportation Nation and American Public Media collaborated on a radio documentary put out last year called Back of the Bus: Mass Transit, Race, and Inequality. It's a collection of different pieces about a variety of topics, including the devastation of the African American neighborhood of Rondo in St. Paul after the interstate highway system came through, the Oakland Airport Connector and the politics of transit financing, race and public transit disparities in Atlanta, and the relationship between transit and housing values in Washington, DC and Denver. It's well-produced and worth a listen. (via Transportation Nation, American Public Media)
In an earlier post, I talked about Pope Francis' use of transit - both in Argentina during his pre-Pope days and in Rome more recently. Yesterday Nicolas Maduro was declared the winner of Venezuela's presidential election. It turns out he's a former bus driver who likes to use transit metaphors in his campaign speeches:
"We're all going in the bus of the fatherland, which
has a driver," Maduro said upon launching his election campaign from the
late president's childhood home. "Here he is, Chavez's driver!"
The transit-related pasts of social and political leaders continue to be noteworthy and an effective way to bolster images of their connections to the masses.
Last month I wrote about Amtrak's Quiet Car (apparently it's a proper noun) and some of the rules of social order discussions that have been popping up about noise levels and reprimanding violators. I've come across a couple other things since then.
In an article in The Atlantic, Andrea Bartoli at George Mason University's School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution provides an interesting take on the social structure of quiet car space:
"Fundamentally, the Quiet Car is a perfect microcosm,
because you have all the elements of a primordial society," Bartoli says.
"You're not in a family. You're not in a work environment where someone is
more important. You don't have responsibility or power structure. You just have
anonymous people sharing the space."
Bartoli's approach to dealing with offenders is to walk up to them and point to the Quiet Car sign, what he calls a "silent reminder." Apparently this works about two-thirds of the time. In the other one-third of instances, people respond in hostile ways and conductors or fellow passengers get involved. I suppose two out of three isn't that bad - though a seventy-five percent success rate isn't an unreasonable expectation for a conflict resolution expert (I think). In discussing the quiet car violators, Ta-Nehisi Coates is less conciliatory in understanding people's behaviors:
These people are almost always dealt with by a conductor or
other passengers. But I've never quite been able to figure out why they come to
the Quiet Car. It's not a matter of not knowing the rules, so much as a matter
of not caring. It's almost as if the offenders regard the regular cars as a
public lavatory, and the Quiet Car as a private bathroom where they may repair
to handle their shit.
He likens a cellphone conversation on the quiet car to a drunk person in a bar using racial epithet, which I found a bit much. I felt like he was mashing together two types of social interactions he hates, but that really are not analogous. On a different (yet kind of related) topic, while I obviously don't think anyone should be using racial slurs or swearing at Coates' wife, I do have a soft spot for the life story folks he describes. Since I can strike up a conversation with pretty much anyone, I usually hear at least one life story a day. It's a habit that borders on a compulsion and I should probably curb the urge, but I've talked to some unexpectedly interesting people - an excommunicated Mormon, a troubled former child
star, and a cat hoarder, for example. I'm fascinated by the everyday stories me as much as the more unusual
ones - accounts of familial relations, parenthood, work, aging, and sickness. (Recently,
a woman told me about losing seventy pounds after struggling with her weight for
years and the ways in which her life has forever changed. It was very moving to hear.) In any case, I hang out in cafes a lot and not bars and so my people, if anything, are over-caffeinated. Maybe chatty drunk people are a whole different story. (via The Atlantic)
I have a fondness for tiny houses that my friends don't really understand. It's mostly from enjoying creative uses of limited space (having faced this dilemma myself many times), appreciating the small carbon footprint of tiny houses, and finding the enthusiasm of tiny house aficionados quite infectious. Or maybe I just have an adult doll house fetish. I also find tight, confined spaces (like MRI machines) comfortable rather than panic-inducing. So, my love of tiny houses I suppose is the result of any of a number of understandable and kind of weird factors. The range of structures that fall under the tiny house umbrella vary considerably. Some are fixed structures and others are transportable. They can be built from scratch, converted, or salvaged. And some are utterly unique living spaces - like this caboose house that I came across recently. It's utterly adorable and it even has a washer/dryer in the unit!
I have a number of interesting transportation-related films to share: two new documentaries, one experimental nonfiction film, a badass film from the 60s, and an old-timey film from way back when. First up is La Camioneta:
Every day dozens of decommissioned school
buses leave the United States on a southward migration that carries them to
Guatemala, where they are repaired, repainted, and resurrected as the
brightly-colored camionetas that bring the vast majority of Guatemalans to work
each day. Since 2006, nearly 1,000 camioneta drivers and fare-collectors have
been murdered for either refusing or being unable to pay the extortion money
demanded by local Guatemalan gangs. LA CAMIONETA follows one such bus on its
transformative journey: a journey between North and South, between life and
death, and through an unfolding collection of moments, people, and places that
serve to quietly remind us of the interconnected worlds in which we live.
Next is Go Grandriders, a film from Taiwan about the trials and tribulations of a group of elderly men on a motorcycle trip:
In Go Grandriders, a group of senior citizens embark on what
may be the most daring adventure of their lives: a thirteen-day tour—entirely
on motorcycle—around the island of Taiwan. A number in the group have heart
problems, two have had cancer, and their average age is 81. The trip brings
harrowing escapes (one rider falls asleep at the wheel, while another is
knocked off his bike by a truck), pure exhilaration (including a gleeful romp
in the waves when riders reach Taiwan’s east coast), and somber reflection, as
riders recall their youths fighting in the Sino-Japanese War.
Then we move to a beautiful film called Trains of Winnipeg: 14 Film Poems available through MUBI.* There's a 17-minute version of the film available, and the full length version on MUBI which is 89 minutes:
Trains of Winnipeg: 14 Film Poems is a feature-length film cycle that straddles the borders between the balkanized worlds of cinema, visual art, music and literature. The 14 films in this major cycle employ a wide variety of non-linear digital and filmic formal experiments in depicting suburban and urban dystopias, in essays exploring the politics of form and the form of personal politics, as well as in audiovisual tone poems celebrating the raw joy of moving pictures, sound, colour and light.
The films are pulled together with the overarching metaphor of a train journey, culminating in the title film, an unabashed love ballad for the rusty grace and brute power of the Trains of Winnipeg. The film also acts as a portal from the analog century to the digital beyond, where everything looks the same, but we know it’s not.
More about Clive Holden's project is on his website, including information about a related book and CD. Another film on MUBI, the 1968 filmThe Girl on a Motorcycle, is described as a "counterculture classic" about a woman "on a doomed psychedelic and erotic journey":
It looks like you can watch the entire film here. And finally, Arrival of a Train, a fascinating short silent film by the Lumière brothers:
For many, cinema began on December 28, 1895, with the first
public projection of short films like Arrival of a Train and The Card Party by Louis and Auguste Lumière. But these iconic films also exist
in alternative versions, sometimes with each frame of the print colored by
hand! Lobster Films purchased the original Lumiere-perforation negatives of Arrival of a Train and fifty other titles at an auction in Lyon for about fifty
U.S. dollars. They were wrapped up in old paper, which turned out to be an
original poster of Watering the Gardener, perhaps the very first poster in
the history of moving pictures!
*MUBI (formerly The Auteurs) is a really fantastic independent and alternative site that streams films. It's described as an "online cinematheque." I don't love the new film format - where they upload a new film each day and have an ongoing collection of 30 films available to view (so one rotates out each day) - because I like taking forever to watch a film if I feel like it. But, still it's only $4.99 a month and there's always a well-curated and diverse group of films. This month Nick Broomfield's films are being featured. There are also lots of free things to watch in MUBI's general library of films.
I've become a bit fascinated with this whole idea of collaborative consumption (also known as the sharing economy) lately and the arguments that it alters notions of ownership, fosters trust and a sense of community, and can potentially change the social and physical landscape of cities. Some of the discussions are convincing and others are less so. For me, it's partly that a lot of very disparate things are grouped under the general category of collaborative consumption. When money is part of the "transaction," very different dynamics and sets of expectations emerge (for example, Airbnb versus Couchsurfing). I'm far from an expert on collaborative consumption, but I'm interested in seeing how things evolve and the concept is refined or redefined. Some mobility-related, peer-to-peer car sharing examples of this new culture of sharing are Zipcar, Getaround, RelayRides, and SideCar. Downtown Project is the brainchild of Tony Hsieh of Zappos. It's a $350 million plan to revitalize Downtown Las Vegas through increased urban density and a mix of industries and creative communities. Yesterday, Project 100 was announced, the transportation part of this initiative:
Project 100 is the code name for a complete transportation
system designed to let you get rid of your car and be more connected to your
neighborhood. It includes on-demand cars with drivers, shared cars you can
drive yourself, bikesharing, shuttle buses and more. The experience is simple:
open an app so we know where you are and tell us what zone you want to travel
to. With that information we’ll give you a set of options, for example, 1 – Be
picked up by a driver in a Tesla in 3 minutes, 2 – Drive yourself in a low range
electric vehicle that’s 0.2 miles away, 3 – Grab a bike that’s 0.1 miles away
or 4 – Hop on the party bus that will be near you in 4 minutes.
They have indeed teamed up with Tesla for the car part of the program. I'm curious to see how the system plays out and the types of social interactions that emerge from the people-people and people-mode relationships. (via TIME, The Atlantic Cities, TED, Green Car Reports)
A few weeks ago I came across the photo below of a poster that was part of a Queensland Rail campaign. My initial reaction was, Wow, those Australians and their edgy public transit ads! They did it again!
Then I got a little suspicious and started to look around for more details. It turns out that these are not real posters (surprise, surprise), but rather one of those meme* things from a public service outreach campaign that went awry. Apparently, Queensland Rail put up an application where people could create custom etiquette posters and people did just that.
So, instead of posters about where to stand and where to place one's bag, they ended up with posters about public drunkenness, sexual deviancy, and other such unsavory or delay-inducing behavior.
A collection of the infamous Queensland Rail etiquette posters is here and another here (note: these are not for the easily offended). While many of these are repugnant and reflect racist, misogynist, homophobic, and other discriminatory attitudes, they are interesting as manifestations of social and cultural tensions. Some of them are about the unsavory things that do happen (or people think happen) on public transit, such as masturbating, passing gas, and drinking. Some are about societal insecurities around race, gender, religion, and ability/disability that are expressed by marking the Other through this anonymous medium. And, some just make no sense - the tampon in the trash one falling into this category. *I never really understood how a meme was different from
something that went viral, but here's what I learned from the site Know Your Meme (an impressive site "considered
the most authoritative source on news, history and origins of viral phenomena
and Internet memes" - it claims to have its own editorial and research
staff):
An Internet meme is a piece of content or an idea that's passed
from person to person, changing and evolving along the way. A piece of content
that is passed from person to person, but does not evolve or change during the
transmission process is considered viral content.
