Comments on: Join the dots

By: Ashley Barrett

Ashley Barrett — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 03:03:25 +0000

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By: don

don — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:23:12 +0000

I’m with Doug. The cars aren’t nodes at all — they are, er, the “traffic.”

By: doug

doug — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 04:52:14 +0000

Are cars actually the nodes? Or are nodes more accurately the destinations connected by the roads? I would argue for the latter. Cars are more like bits of information. and what is broken is the management of the bits, much like Robin notes above.

So what are the nodes then? Citiies. And it is these nodes that are broken, because they require more car trips than would be necessary if they were better designed. for example, if people were able to live within walking distance to their work, or the grocery store.

By: emmetc

emmetc — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 19:03:55 +0000

@MacDara I think people are fairly selfish by nature, in that it’s really difficult to convince people to make small personal changes to their lifestyle for some intangible greater good. For example, it’s hard to get people to not use plastic bags when they go shopping, even if they know they shouldn’t, until you charge them some nominal amount and it becomes a tangible reason not to. I don’t know that most people will change their car buying habits until there is some tangible reason to do so, like traffic becoming so unbearable that it’s worth making a change. Even though driving SUVs is now considered to be A Bad Thing, all those Dubliners are still doing it because it makes their own personal experience a bit more comfortable. And car design has only been working to convince everyone that this is a sustainable solution with backwards bullshit like hybrid SUVs. That’s not design, IMHO.

@Robin Maybe Gavin there has got the right answer. Bike sharing is working well in Paris and is due to arrive in Dublin next year. Whether they end up covering that last mile or filling the Liffey remains to be seen.

Also, I have no idea how I managed to leave this perspective on car design out of my original post. Thoughtwax regrets the error.

By: Gavin

Gavin — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:45:30 +0000

Bicycle.

By: Robin Blandford

Robin Blandford — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:00:40 +0000

Well it’s just like bits on a wire right? Too many and it gets clogged.

The solution is bundling them together into frames and then into packets and then into packets containing packets to avoid all the network chatter (individual cars).

i.e. public transport.

Fast direct transport from A-B then jump out of your super-packet and hop into a car for the last mile.

How do you solve the last mile?

By: MacDara

MacDara — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 12:34:28 +0000

Bravery in car design may only arrive when forced, and when the problem of too many cars on the road is threatened with extinction.

I would say that bravery in car-buyers’ choices, or commuters’ choices as a whole, would be more significant to achieving what you envisage. One can optimise the design of the car to fit any number of requirements for the ideal transit network (which is already happening) but when trends in buying habits seem to be going the other way (I’ve seen more Hummers on the streets of Dublin than Smart cars, believe it or not) then it wouldn’t have any practical, tangible benefit. The car users’ behaviour needs to change first (that’s starting to happen — I never imagined that SatNav would become so ubiquitous so quickly — but there’s a lot further to go).