Kinesis

On rhetoric, motion, and technical projects var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-30145564-1']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })();

[kinesis]

What on Earth! was directed by Les Drew and Kaj Pindal for the National Film Board of Canada. Published in 1966.

[kinesis]

This is the Rinspeed micromax, a short-distance city pod car of sorts designed for the Eurpean market (hypothetically). Rinspeed is known for their oddball designs, though what's interesting about this one is that it mimics other small personal transportation vehicles (PTVs), most notably rain-based ones. This is technically a hybrid-form of vehicle - a hybrid between an autonomous podcar (like the VIPA) and a tall city car. So, that's a first, I suppose.

[kinesis]

Not new, but I'm getting ready to think about mobility studies again. Prepping for a project for the summer, perhaps.

[kinesis]

Peugeot Ad referencing our supposedly innate desire to grasp.

[kinesis]

French Traffic Jams

As it turns out, France has some of the worst traffic in the Western world, though only on major vacation days. The response is anger, but acceptance. This article from the LA Times is from a few years ago, though I'm just getting around to posting it now.

A great quote, though:

"As usual, the first weekend in August was the dark vortex of the summer stampede. On Saturday, French highways experienced a total of 434 miles of traffic jams. Government transport analysts designated the day with the worst level in the color-coded hierarchy of congestion: "Black Saturday." "That means the traffic jams start at 3 a.m. and keep going," Arnold said with a wry grin. "Black Saturday is black all day and all night.""

[kinesis]

Carmageddon

It's amazing how much we affect the planet and recognize only in brief glimpses. From a good article from earlier this summer:

"Nature doesn’t normally present the kind of opportunity that "Carmageddon" did in Los Angeles last year, an opportunity to catch a glimpse of atmosphere that’s typically saturated with pollutants on a suddenly pristine day. As you'll recall, Los Angeles shut down a 10-mile stretch of one of its busiest highways, the 405, for a July weekend in 2011 (the city reprised the closure this past weekend to finish the project). Locals predicted apocalyptic gridlock. Instead, out of fear of just such a scene, drivers stayed home in dramatic numbers – from the 405, but also throughout the entire region."

"Air quality near the normally busy highway improved by 83 percent that day last July, relative to comparable weekends. Elsewhere in West Los Angeles, the improvement was equally dramatic. Air quality improved by 75 percent on that side of the city and in Santa Monica, and by 25 percent throughout the entire region, as a measure of the drop in ultrafine particulate matter associated with tailpipe emissions."

[kinesis]

Transit Culture

In reading this recent article on This Big City, it struck a chord with me about the major difference I see between cycling in Lafayette, Indiana and Corvallis, Oregon. In the article, Drew Reed explains that when he moved to Buenos Aires, he was "surprised by the universality of bus ridership. Ask anyone on the street which bus to take and chances are they will know. Even people who commute by car will have some familiarity with the bus system in their area. Absent are the perplexed looks when you tell a stranger you need to take a bus, and the occasional inquiry of, “You mean you don’t have a car?”

I get some of the same feeling in Corvallis in that almost everyone rides a bike to get somewhere. Not everyone bike commutes, though about 10% of the town does, and not everyone bikes throughout the year, though there's a recognition that biking is a common way of getting around. Add to that the civic architecture of bike shelters, plentiful parking, and planning committees that ask "how can our urban and suburban environment support biking as well as automobiles" and you get a cultural shift in biking culture. Instead of biking being something done by "fitness nuts," the economically underprivileged, or those with a DUI, it is both a part of "everyday" culture and can be said to be z strong culture of its own. The half-dozen bike shops in a town of less than 60,000 attest to that. 

I don't use the word "culture" much in my work anymore, especially since I'm wait-deep in actor-network theory and object-oriented ontology, but there's something indescribable about the emergence and stickyness of these human networks that the word "culture" describes well.

[kinesis]

This is a video from Yuri Suzuki and the AIAIAI Sound Taxi project called Make the City Sound Better. They've equipped a "sound taxi" with microphones that record all of the street noise that goes on outside of a vehicle, record that sounds in multiple layers, and then syncopate them to a specific beat. All of this happens in real-time. "Passersby will hear the music via the 67 speakers built into the entire car body and the big, shiny Indian horns mounted on top of the taxi’s roof. Finally, the passengers of the sound taxi can tune-in to the converted sounds via headphones installed inside of the vehicle."

The project reminds me of a great quotation from de Certeau about rail travel: "Only the partition makes noise. As it moves forward and creates two inverted silences, it taps out a rhythm, it whistles or moans."

[kinesis]

With all of the new designs for electric vehicles out there, some say "I'm an electric vehicle" more than things like the Aptera (though the production plans for that are supposedly over). This offering from Lit Motors, however, seems to scream "I'm different!" Seems like it makes sense for city dwellers who might not take as easily to a scooter or motorcycle because of balance and weather.

See more on the unveiling here.

[kinesis]

I love this 1992 video of the GM Ultralite concept car. Unfortunately, like so many GM concept car designs from the era, much of this tech was largely ignored in the coming SUV craze of the 90s. It's perhaps easy to dismiss GM as ignoring these concepts for 20 years or so, as their bottom line rested upon large sport utilities, but it's very likely that smaller aspects from this car made it into production (though in less dramatic ways).

[kinesis]

Coming Back to the Blog

So, I've been neglecting this blog lately, and my reasons are good. I've moved across the country, taken a new job, and begun to figure out what it means to be an Associate Professor. That said, I'm keen to keep it up again, as I don't want the last two years to go to waste. Further, there are so many new research opportunities that I feel like writing about and I live somewhere where transportation is significantly different from where I used to love. Lafayette IN (where I was) had almost no bike lanes, a very spread out population (for a small town), and little cycling infrastructure. Corvallis, OR (where I now live) is structured around cycling  - not as much as it is structured around automobile travel, but better than almost any other small town in the US. I'm sure that will be an interesting topic, as will my goal to bike commute every day of the week, instead of "nice days."

[kinesis]

According to the Christian Science Monitor, Italians bought more bikes than cars in this past year - the first time that has happened since the end of WW2. There are a lot of factors at play here, most notably that the Italian economy is in a very rough place - that, combined with high gas prices and a fairly high urban population has apparently led to higher rates of bike ownership and lower car-per-houshold numbers. From the article:

"Italy may be home to legendary brands such as Fiat, Ferrari, and Lamborghini, but 1,750,000 bikes were bought last year, compared to 1,748,000 motor vehicles. [...] Italy has one of the highest car ownership levels in the world – there are around six cars for every 10 people. Owning a family car became one of the symbols of the country’s post-war industrialization and economic “miracle.” But the glory days of streaking down the autostrada or rattling down country lanes seem to have hit the skids, with driving now an unaffordable luxury for many. Gas prices recently hit two euros a liter ($9.50 a gallon) – the highest in Europe – and keeping the average car on the road costs around 7,000 euros ($9,000) a year.

[kinesis]

Walking

Though I'm generally fascinated by all forms of transportation, urban walking is one that I've only considered briefly up until the last month or so. Looks like Tom Vanderbilt (of Traffic fame) is working on a new walking book. Here's a great article about the science behind studying walking.

[kinesis]

Jonathan Schipper’s art exhibit at the AV Festival in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, showed a car crashing into a wall. Every hour, the car was moved forward 7 millimeters. Over the course of a month, visitors saw it impact and crumple against the wall. The video above shows week three.

[kinesis]

So At&T and Carnegie Mellon are collaborating to envision a haptic steering wheel for future vehicles. Supposedly, small vibrational inputs suggest actions on the part of the driver, thus focusing his/her attention. Technically, aren't all steering wheels haptic? Time will tell whether this is an "everyday" technology or something best saved for a warning system. From this Autoblog article.

[kinesis]

Fantastic. This little animation comes from a The Atlantic Cities article which wonders (and answers, to some degree) what intersections will look like in an age of driverless cars. From the piece:

"intersections will change not just because they’ll need to accommodate driverless cars, but because driverless cars will make intersections much more efficient. Right now, you may wind up sitting at a red light for 45 seconds even though no one is passing through the green light in the opposite direction. But you don’t have to do that in a world where traffic flows according to computer communication instead of the systems that have been built with human behavior in mind."

What is especially interesting is that this intersection, as understood here, makes no concessions for urban life, that is, no recognition that humans, bicycles, or other forms of mobility share space with automobiles.

[kinesis]

Mercedes-Benz's promotion of their F-cell hydrogen fuel cell propulsion system. It's an "invisible" car, which I suppose is their astonishing-looking, but clunky metaphor for how their technology makes the ecological impact of automobiles invisible. Clever, and good-looking, but still a little too "marketing ploy" for my taste.