Miha Tamura loves escalators and she photographs really cool ones in Japan.
In an interview with PingMag, she talks about escalator behavior:
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 rest of the series is worth checking out.
(via kottke.org)
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.
(via Reuters, Transportation Nation)
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)
