From A to B
Like trying to cure obesity by loosening your belt
A sensitively tailored combination of modes
Induced demand
Choked by their own redundancy
51. Green Streets
Putting the streets to use
Roads to nowhere
A gradual refinement
The steel rail is an artifact whose form has been carefully optimized. This gradual refinement of the design was done not by a single brilliant engineer but by more than a century of industrial evolution. The rail was never meant to be an object of beauty, but its cross section has all the elegance of fine typography.
Hyperart: U.S. Rail
The steepest grade on U.S. main-line track is at the small town of Saluda, on a Norfolk Southern route between Spartanburg, South Carolina, and Asheville, North Carolina. The grade goes on for three miles at a slope of 4 or 5 percent. Trains have not been running on the line since 2001, but the tracks are still maintained.
Speaking people
Surely those who oversee and guide municipal transportation systems ought to use public transit during their work days. Why not put a clause to that effect in their job description or contract?
Requiring those whose work has a major impact on people's lives to experience some of the impact is really not too much ask. It means that they speak "people" rather than French, Cree, or Spanish.
Penn Station
In the same way that physical architecture can affect a mind, so too can software. Slower, less reliable software is like Penn Station: Sure, you can catch a transfer from one train to another but the dreary lowness of the place, the lack of sunlight or sensible wayfinding will make you feel like a rat, truculent and worthless, and worse: You’ll acclimate to that feeling and accept it as a norm.
Tokyo
Anatomical Drawings of Staircase Spaces
A Book by Tomoyuki TanakaWhy buses represent democracy in action
A Talk by Enrique PeñalosaAn advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport.
Snowpiercer
A FilmIn a future where a failed climate-change experiment has killed all life except for the lucky few who boarded the Snowpiercer, a train that travels around the globe, a new class system emerges.
A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics
Listings and jottings
Most likely to succeed in defining Japanese aesthetics is a net of associations composed of listings or jottings, connected intuitively, that fills in a background and renders the subject visible.
Process vs. product
...more concerned with process than with product, with the actual construction of a self than with self-expression.
We have been given a standard
We have been given a standard to use. It is there, handy daily: things as they are, or Nature itself. This makes good sense, the only sense really—Nature should be our model.
Merely ornate
There is nothing merely ornate about nature: every branch, twig, or leaf counts.
No words to describe
If there is no term for something, it might be thought that the commodity is of small importance. But it is just as likely that this something is of such importance that it is taken for granted, and thus any conveniences, like words, for discussing it are unnecessary.
Mimesis
Realism played small part in the realities of life as experienced by the traditional Japanese artist. The expectations of the artist's cultivated sensibilities did not demand mimesis. Rather, indication, suggestion, simplicity took the place of any fidelity to outward appearance.
Cherry blossoms
Cherry blossoms are to be preferred not when they are at their fullest but afterward, when the air is thick with their falling petals and with the unavoidable reminder that they too have had their day and must rightly perish.
Immortality, in that it is considered at all, is to be found through nature's way. The form is kept though the contents evaporate.
Wabi-sabi
Sabi is an aesthetic term, rooted in a given concern. It is concerned with chronology, with time and its effects, with product.
Wabi is a more philosophical concept, a quality not attached merely to a given object. It is concerned with manner, with process, with direction.
How painful life here would be
A mountain village
Where there is not even hope
Of a visitor:
If not for the loneliness,
How painful life here would be.— Saigyo (Donald Keene translation)