THE INTRODUCTION

I think I need to come out and say that first of all, I don’t own a car. I use them from time to time, but I find something slightly off-putting about automotive culture in general, and something fundamentally wrong with the fabric of cities that come out of our exaggerated car-centric society. Still, I need to interact with cars every day, and couldn’t avoid them if I tried.

This concept was inspired by a situation I’m sure many of you have been in. I was in a rental car, stopped at a light on a dark night. I saw a friend on foot crossing the street right a little ways in front of me. I tried gently tapping the horn, in hopes of making a friendly little beep. Instead, the car spewed out an angry-sounding honk, and the friend of mine, not knowing who I was, promptly gave me the finger.

THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM

Drivers, for the most part, are largely anonymous to the other drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists they interact with. On foot, if you cut someone off or act rudely, you risk being in a direct confrontation. In a car, you’re not only usually shrouded from view, your only methods of communication are essentially your horn, flashing your lights, or revving your engine. All are ambiguous at best, aggressive at worst. I’m sure I’m not alone in asserting that driving does not bring out the best in people.

There are a lot of things you often can’t express while driving. You can’t say sorry for a mistake, you can’t say hello, and yes, sometimes you can’t express the anger you wish you could.

MY DESIGN

This concept takes the idea of the horn but multiplies it. In this case there are three horns which each make a different sound. The goal being to provide the driver with multiple ways of expressing themselves through series of short, musical tones.

Happy: Plays happy notes, useful for saying hello or “after you”.

Sad: Apologetic notes, useful for saying sorry.

Angry: Says what sometimes needs to be said.

As an alternate idea, I would try making the angry button much smaller than the other two, in hopes that people would only use it when they really had to.

The driver will likely never be able to express themselves as clearly as they would while walking or biking, but the goal is to provide them with better communication tools than they have.

CONCLUSION

In the end, this is more of an art piece than a true design concept. I have not looked into the legal or technical limitations, nor do I know if it would have any real impact if put in the real world.

Driving has come to be an awkward hybrid of a public and a private space. In many ways, it borrows some of the worst qualities from each one - you interact with many people, but in a way that’s anonymous and unpleasant. This is no magic bullet, but hopefully gets people thinking about the way that drivers interact with the world around them.

Chicago used to use an extensive series of small underground trains for transport between large downtown buildings.

- - -
Here’s a road which had been cut with grooves in order to create musical notes. It’s reminiscent of a very late-night (possibly slightly drunken) conversation I had several years ago with a musician friend about outlandish possible ways of distributing his music. They’ve actually done it.

- - -
Paradoxes of Creative People

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of Flow fame writes a piece on creative types and their many paradoxes.

Creative people are humble and proud at the same time. It is remarkable to meet a famous person who you expect to be arrogant or supercilious, only to encounter self-deprecation and shyness instead. Yet there are good reasons why this should be so. These individuals are well aware that they stand, in Newton’s words, “on the shoulders of giants.” Their respect for the area in which they work makes them aware of the long line of previous contributions to it, putting their own in perspective. They’re also aware of the role that luck played in their own achievements

Guilloches

An article about making those beautiful geometric patterns often used on banknotes and certificates. They were formerly used mainly for security, but have become more of an aesthetic thing now.

- - -

Parking Day

An event which aims to reclaim parking spots by creating small parks or social spaces in them for a single day.

- - -

Ta-Ka-Ta-Ka-Boom

For those of you who don’t live here, or who aren’t aware, Canada’s nationalized broadcaster, the CBC, is holding a contest to find new theme music for our major hockey broadcast, Hockey Night in Canada. The entries are all online for people to listen to, comment, and rate them.

This is an entry to the contest. Listen to the pre-amble for a bit (it’s important for comedic effect) and then jump to 2:20 for the actual song. I couldn’t stop laughing.

Looks like it was submitted after the August 31st deadline though, so HNIC may not be able to use it.

My Photos of Port in the City

Yesterday, Montreal’s port had an open house. There were tours by train, bus and boat which carried visitors into the heart of the city’s port operations. It was great to see the inner workings of a system which is easy to take for granted. We saw ocean-going freighters being unloaded, and the much smaller lake-going ships readying themselves to take cargo to the great-lake cities of Toronto, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Thunder Bay.

- - -

Time Fountain

A relatively simple little fountain that ingeniously seems to bend time.

- - -

Zoom into Concrete

A powers of 10 style video that shows the structures of concrete in great detail, down to a molecular level. Like the original poster, I would love to see this done for other materials.

Zinc Air Batteries

You’ve likely heard of what some are heralding as the coming Hydrogen Economy, which some think may replace the fossil-fuel economy we have now. Problem is, hydrogen isn’t a fuel source, it has to be created by electricity. That makes it more akin to a storage medium than a source.

Apparently some are also looking forward to a Zinc Economy, using Zinc Air batteries. They apparently hold a great deal of power, but they need to be recharged in a central location. Just like with hydrogen, there are a number of companies announcing miraculous breakthroughs which they say will revolutionize everything, but I’m a little more skeptical. I’ll believe it when I see it.

- - -

Mini Moleskines

I really like my Moleskine notebooks, but I sometimes find them too large to carry in my pocket all the time. Luckily, I stumbled across someone who decided to simply cut theirs in half. Looks like it worked pretty well too. Here are instructions on how to do it.

- - -

TED Talk: Robert Full: How Engineers Learn from Evolution

How he and his fellow researchers are making robots that walk, climb, jump and run by copying animals in nature. His solutions are often elegant and simple, but not always intuitive.

Boing Boing has a little post about a traffic engineer famed for his work in Drachten, The Netherlands, in which he successfully pushed to have all traffic signals and signage removed from the center of the city. This idea has been copied elsewhere, and in some places the philosophy has been extended to also integrating pedestrian space with the automobile carriageway, creating what is referred to as a shared space or naked street. The result is an alleged decrease in travel times and better safety, because drivers are forced to pay attention.

I find the concept interesting, but perhaps much less practical in a large city. On a certain level, however, it can be seen as mainly a scheme to reduce both car usage and travel speeds, which it does well. This is a laudable goal, but one which seems to go against everything current North American planning stands for (that is, accommodating as many cars as possible, as quickly as possible, while ignoring pedestrians and cyclists).

New Urbanists have been singing the tune of slower cars for years, and haven’t made any noticeable headway. The fundamental nature of American cities, and the attitudes of those who inhabit them, would need to change before this became even remotely possible on this side of the ocean on any kind of scale.

Demolishing a Building One Story at a Time

Here’s an amazing video of a building being demolished by slowly lowering it to the ground and dismantling it one floor at a time.

- - -

Do Gas Taxes Cover the Costs of Roads?

This article just barely scratches the surface of something I’d like to see a whole lot more about. They discus information released in Texas that reveals that gas taxes are not actually high enough to cover Texas’ expensive road system. I had the hunch that driving was subsidized by general taxes, but hadn’t seen any numbers. I’d love to see more on this.

- - -

Lord of the Memes

David Brooks at the New York Times captures the changing state of intellectualism and taste: “prestige has shifted from the producer of art to the aggregator and the appraiser. Inventors, artists and writers come and go, but buzz is forever.” Nothing remotely groundbreaking, but this tongue-in-cheek article describes exactly what most prominent blogs have become.

Note: This is the first post in what might become a regular series of posts from guest writers. Our first writer is Montréal-based Sylvan Lanken, who has been deeply concerned with environmental and social issues for as long as I can remember. His pieces, as currently planned, will center around information culled from the Canadian Census.

The table below was constructed using data from the 2001 Census of Canada. I chose to include the largest city in each of the ten provinces, and arranged these cities in alphabetical order. In each category, I highlighted the “best” and “worst” values, according to my own views on the environment and society. The exception to this was in the last column, the percentage of commuters traveling by car as passengers. While a higher value is arguably better than a lower one, the fact remains that these commuters are traveling by car as opposed to more sustainable methods.

Commuting Methods in Ten Canadian Cities

Source: 2001 Census of Canada

Statistics used are for the cities proper, as opposed to those for greater metropolitan areas

Inadequate public transit is a chronic problem in Canada, and there’s no single reason why this is the case. A lack of transportation planning and vision at all levels of government, unchecked suburban growth, and an entrenched car culture, among other factors, are to blame. Even so, I was surprised to find that, except for Montréal and Toronto, less than a fifth of commuters in these cities use public transit. And, alarmingly, more than half of all commuters drive to and from their place of work in all cities except Montréal.

NYC Bike Rack Design Competition

A jury including David Byrne is judging a competition to come up with a design for bike racks for New York City. The finalists are up and the winner is going to be announced in October.

- - -

Smart Cookie

A cookie designed with a small indent for removing it from the package without breaking it. Pretty dang smart.

- - -

Trading Places - The Demographic Inversion of the American City

This article from The New Republic examines what they call Demographic Inversion, a process allegedly occurring in some American Cities where affluent middle-classers from the suburbs are moving back into downtown urban environments, while poor inner-city minority populations are moving outside the city. I don’t think Houston is going to turn into Paris anytime soon, but the author cites Chicago as a prime example of a city where the process is already underway. I can definitely see signs of it here in my home of Montréal, where small urban condos are getting ever pricier, and formerly-working class inner-city neighborhoods are gentrifying like lightning.

As oil becomes ever more expensive, the peak oil theory is making our car-centric suburbs look like more of a burden than a blessing. Urban planners like Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander have been criticizing suburbs for decades, though mostly for social rather than economic reasons. I personally couldn’t imagine myself living in a cookie-cutter house in the suburbs, or living in a place that was more than a few minutes walk to a park, café, community centre, bakery, subway, restaurants, and grocery store.

This is a photo I snapped out the window of the plane as we were landing in Frankfurt, Germany. It’s a suburb, but it isn’t suburban in the North American sense. It’s small enough to easily walk across, yet large enough to have a station on the regional commuter rail line (and trust me, there isn’t much that the Germans seem to love more than their trains).