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8 posts total
The fact that the "Beg Button" exists in so many cities is messed up. For the privilege of crossing the street, pedestrians are required to press a button, wait, and then scurry across while cars + trucks give them a few seconds of grace. Here's one I'd press in a second... Your Moment of Zen. Toshiba produced this typewriter for offices starting in 1940. It has 1,172 Japanese and Chinese characters (as well as the Latin alphabet) on its horizontal cylinder. ✍️🧵 More on the fascinating story of Chinese typewriters here: https://www.fastcompany.com/90635203/ibm-chinese-typewriter-lois-lew  @straphanger @bryan Oh, that’s a neat design. I hadn’t realized at first that the character on the wood (?) doesn’t correspond to the metal under it, but it’s offset by several rows. Very clever! Walt Disney World has significantly better transit than most cities in the US. Its 12-train-set monorail, 325 buses would make it the 16th most ridden transit system in the nation. America's fantasy world, it turns out, is a place you can get around without getting into a car. 🧵
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@straphanger Defunctland's video on EPCOT makes very clear that Walt thought cars were a problem @straphanger It has to do with motivations and resources. Disney is a commercial enterprise with a direct profit motive for providing excellent transportation services. Public transportation, on the other hand, is publicly funded and built to operate as cheaply as possible without a profit motive. Those differences result in vastly different executions. "Motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink. They create distances for all, and shrink them for only a few."
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 @straphanger dear sweet Frank Lloyd Wright, lookit all that WASTED space... having just been in the Netherlands for a week and a half, I realise they *can't* commit an atrocity like that. They don't have the space!  @straphanger I imagine “popping out to buy a litre of milk” from that building would be a major expedition. Thanks for bringing Ivan Illich to my mind again. His analysis in "Energy and Equity" about the relations, which place the passenger of a motorized vehicle actually in another space/time-frame than the cyclist or pedestrian thereby imposing ecological destruction and physical dangers on slower moving living beings is about the best I know in bringing the dilemma of fossilized #mobility and social stress to its essence. "In a quality city, a person should be able to live their entire life without a car, and not feel deprived."
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@straphanger Most (might be all now) old stations have been refurbished so that the train doors are level with the stations ground. Avoiding any need for lifts or elevators for accessibility. @straphanger if only more cities and towns worked that way instead of kneeling to the auto industry Where does this bike path lead? Because that's how you actually build urban transport infrastructure in the time of a climate crisis. Here's what the ride to the bike parking at Utrecht Centraal Station in the #Netherlands looks like. It has room for 12,500 bikes. Then you get on the train and go...just about anywhere. (Photo above by @modacitylife ) The city of #Ljubljana in #Slovenia, population 280,000, kicked cars out of the center in 2007. Since then, car use has dropped by 32%, black carbon emissions are down 70%, noise pollution is down by 6 decibels. Unfortunately, going car-free has made the center into a living hell, as this video shows: More on the transformation of #Ljubljana. The horror, the horror... https://www.vice.com/en/article/jg8wq7/slovenia-car-free-city-ljubljana |
Gregory's Server
In a rightside-up world, it would be drivers—not pedestrians—who would have to press a beg button just to use the street.
[drawing by Dhiru Thadani]