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.
On Greatness
What’s important to you in the development of a product?
One of the things that really hurt Apple was that after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. And that disease — I’ve seen other people get it too — it’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work, and if you just tell all these other people “here’s this great idea,” then of course they can just go off and make it happen.
The problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts, because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it, and you also find there are tremendous tradeoffs you have to make, there are just certain things you can’t make electrons do, there are certain things you can’t make plastic, or glass, or factories, or robots do. And as you get into all these things, you find that designing a product is keeping 5,000 things in your brain, these concepts, and just fitting them all together and continuing to push to fit them together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover a new problem or a new opportunity to do it a little differently. And it’s that process that is the magic.