Archive for April 27th, 2009

Fuel efficiency standards, government bailouts, intransigent corporate cultures, Americans’ undying thirst for large cars… it’s beginning to sound like 1980 again. Where’s my K car?

From the archives of the New Yorker, this Detroit dispatch, by Joseph Kraft and titled “The Downsizing Decision,” (interestingly, the word only seems to refer to making cars smaller, and not laying off workers) is worth a look.

Sample paragraph:

Then, in April, 1979, G.M. introduced a compact four-cylinder, front-wheel-drive vehicle, produced as the X-Car and marketed as the Chevrolet Citation, the Pontiac Phoenix, the Oldsmobile Omega, and the Buick Skylark. Thanks to the comprehensive reduction in size, G.M. more than held its own at the time of the second round of gas lines. Its share of the market for American-built cars soared to over sixty per cent—and set new monthly records, which, among other factors, put Ford in trouble and sent Chrysler running to the government for help. Even though hard hit by the recent slump, with first-quarter profits down eighty-eight per cent from a year ago, G.M. is the only major American car manufacturer in the black. In April, it has accounted for sixty-five per cent of sales of American-built cars. Robert Stempel, the general manager at Pontiac, told me, “These days, it’s exciting to be at G.M.”

On a rooftop, actually.

The image (of a “super driving school”) comes from the Japanese architecture firm Atelier Bow Wow. It is one of many urban oddities found in their fascinating study Made in Tokyo, an offbeat and highly recommended “guidebook” I’ve only recently gotten around to reading. The rooftop-driving-school in Kanamachi is part of a category they call “da-me architecture,” or “no-good architecture”: “Anonymous buildings, not beautiful, and not accepted in architectural culture to date.”

A number of these odd buildings seem to have an unusual relationship to cars and roads (in particular, the expressways, which as the book points out were put up rather frantically ahead of the Tokyo Olympics, and thus are “mainly sited over public land, parks, the palace moat and rivers”); as the authors note, “traffic space has introduced into architecture in order to allow the execution of the highly developed goods transportation systems.” An “expressway patrol building” in Roppongi abuts directly on the freeway, its parking lot bleeding into a line of highway traffic. There’s a car park buried underneath a city park in Shibuya; also in Shibuya is the aptly named “bus housing,” a big apartment complex built over a bus terminal. If you went looking for a driving range (golf, that is) in Meguro, your best bet would be the roof of the taxi office. In Nishikahei, meanwhile, there’s a set of tennis courts within the spiral interchange linking the expressway to the Kannana (seventh) traffic ring road. And at the giant AutoTech department store in Kitamachi, you can head to the store’s in-house bowling lanes while you wait for your car to be repaired.

Not to mention the famous automated parking garages, for cars and bikes alike.

The latest from the U.K.’s Think! campaign, a bit in the “j-horror,” ghostly revisitation school of traffic safety film making (sans the girls with long black hair).

As an aside, given that there’s some tooth-brushing here, have you ever noticed how 99% of feature films feature a shot of dental hygiene? I sometimes wonder if it’s some great conspiracy by the ADA, or if it’s just a quick and cheap way to show “humdrum domesticity.” Start making a census of this and you’ll be surprised (when you’re finished with that game, you can move on to regurgitation; I mean, it really is shocking how many films feature people throwing up).

I found the most telling — and really, the only actionable — bit of this whole piece in the New Scientist piece about a computer model on the pros/cons of mandatory cycle helmet laws came in the last line:

However de Jong, a native of bike-loving Holland, makes clear that he would not discourage people from wearing helmets. “I go to Holland and places like that, and I don’t wear a helmet,” he says. “I used to live in London, and I wore a helmet all the time.”

Sydney’s transport commissioner was recently talking about congestion in his city and made this analogy:

“It’s like being in love. If you think you are in love, you are in love. If you think you are in traffic, you are in traffic.”

He was trying to make the point that people tend not to think of traffic in relative terms. To wit: “It’s no good for me saying, ‘Oh, it’s much worse in New York or Paris.’ ”

I’m not sure if this is some kind of power-of-positive thinking exercise, in which case the next time you encounter heavy traffic you could repeat the following mantra: “I am not in traffic. I am not in traffic.”

It also hints at how elusive traffic is; sure, the engineers have their “level of service” designations and all that, but there is no universal standard for “bad” or “good” traffic. People in North Dakota might get itchy when they fail to make it through a traffic light on the first pass; a person in L.A. might feel lucky to make a left turn on the second arrow. And when one hears figures comparing early 20th century urban speeds in London or Manhattan being the same as they are now, should this even be termed as congestion or “bad traffic” and not simply be the default operating condition?

(thanks Richard)

This story from the Houston Chronicle details a very typical traffic happening: A group of residents on a well-to-do street got their block cut off to through traffic, which has resulted in more traffic on every other nearby street.

There is a kind of paradox that exists in terms of how people feel about traffic in their neighborhoods: Everyone wants a.) to drive, and b.) wants quick access to fast roads, but no one wants traffic on their street. But you can’t have one without the other, unless, of course, as in the story above, you redistribute inequitably.