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.
What's love got to do with it?
Slack embodied the belief, so common in Silicon Valley, that the best product would win in the end. “Building a product that allows for significant improvements in how people communicate requires a degree of thoughtfulness and craftsmanship that is not common in the development of enterprise software,” the company wrote in its open letter to Microsoft. “How far you go in helping companies truly transform to take advantage of this shift in working is even more important than the individual software features you are duplicating.”
And yet, if there’s a lesson of the past four years, it’s that thoughtfulness and craftsmanship only got the company about 10 percent as far as Microsoft did by copy-pasting Slack’s basic design. In its open letter, Slack famously told Microsoft: “You’ve got to do this with love.” In 2020, looking at Slack’s size, the idea seems laughable. What’s love got to do with it?