Interlude: A Pattern of Repair (Episode 6)
Poynton, UK is the only example one needs to get started
Please watch the first three minutes or so of the following video:
One could imagine writing up some patterns that emerge from the installation of this feature. Both ‘anti-patterns’, or problems that characterize the before state, and the patterns involved in the repaired state. (low/no signage, low-obstacle, etc etc)
The whole video is really worth a watch.
Feel free to look at the intersection and surrounds in google street view, both as it exists today, and as it existed before the repair, in 2009.
Here’s the intersection, before:
Here’s the same view, after:
In some ways, the difference seems trivial. In other ways, the difference is astounding.
To me, that these two views can coexist (and both can be correct) should provoke big feelings in a sensitive-enough reader.
Notice, next, a comment about three different factors, with time-stamps to the related portions of the video.
Change is… change. It hurts, things look different. (6:48)
There was skepticism and risk, right out the gate. Norms were violated, but then they said “I’m glad I turned out to be wrong. Thank you.” (7:09, 8:20, 8:49, “happy to eat humble pie and I’m no longer skeptical”, 8:59)
Every change that was made was made in compliance with the local highway code. (9:35)
Road networks at their best, permit/rely-upon free-flowing traffic, appropriate use of judgement, and responsiveness from all users.
I’ve not yet found the right spot to dig into this issue in a way that helps me de-conflict my style with others.
I’m usually best experienced in person, probably while doing a shared activity. Walking, scooting, climbing.
I’m trying hard to go ‘by the book’, enough, with the local authorities to get something like this sanctioned. There’s indeed a local governing body with a design document for traffic circles, it reads like this. Please take a moment to feel the induced dissociation of experiencing text like this. Spend 30 seconds reading it aloud, and meditate on the experience:
This language is obtuse by design, and can be subverted, but isn’t exactly designed to be responsive or accommodating.
There are dozens of available counterfactuals that could be listed, that show that the status quo is grossely inadequate. I keep imagining what it’s like to talk to flat earthers or fundamentalists, when I engage with the american zoning/mobility network community.
I resent, strongly, how much of my energy keeps leaking out into that black hole of sadness, misery, ethnic cleansing. Politically powerful white americans (pardon the redundancy) often present a carefully maintained imperviousness to optimism, hope, and imagination that anything could be different.
Because of this, I am choosing to sometimes present like an engineer, but am actually an anarchist.
This is the only intellectually honest approach, however, because city planners/traffic engineers have nothing to do with actual engineering. They’re propagandistic regimes hell-bent on replicating a regime of social control, intermediated by paperwork and pseudo-scientific ‘design standards’.
Remember, the intellectual parents of the modern zoning regime wanted to accomplish a single goal - maintain adequate separation between the races, to maintain harmony for one of those ‘races’. (White people).
When you use ‘science’ to try to support eugenics, you’re not doing science anymore. I feel a cold rage towards those who should know better and refuse to play even the roll of witness.
It’s known that the ‘good’ engineers used to get thrown out of their jobs (and the entire industry) if they properly witnessed the evils they were asked to implement. Robert Moses ruined the careers of hundreds of people who opposed him, casually. NYC has been ruined because of this energy he forced into the world around him. NYC (and America) could have had japan level, france level, china-level high-speed rail, which would cause an order-of-magnitude improvement in connectedness, an order-of-magnitude decrease in costs, and an order-of-magnitude improvement in the overall health of society and cities.
Moses directly cost several generations of humans a three order-of-magnitude improvement of well-being, because he used power, relentlessly, to implement his eugenicist, supremacist view of reality, and he was damned good at it.
ROBERT MOSES IS DEAD!
Can we please, as a society, start directing shame, ridicule, ire, and condemnation towards him and his structures? If anything today smells like him, lets take it outside, air it out in the sun, and if it still smells like him throw it in the dumpster?
Once city planners and mobility engineers decide that risking their jobs to oppose his legacy is the only ethical stance, we’ll see that they finally start getting celebrated.
Power will accrue to those kinds of people, quickly, and in lumpy ways. The first person to move on this will get criticized, and might get fired. This is not a bad outcome.
Now his or her resume/career narratie can say “fired from my last job for oppossing a further implementation of a eugencists’ plans”.
I’d wear that as a badge of honor, and this person will quickly find ‘his people’ and get re-hired and given power. A few stories will get written about this person, he or she might get invited to speak at a conference, and now they are spear-heading a ‘revolution’ within their industry.
It is a pattern of repair. Not necessarily the only pattern of repair, but the best one as I can see so far.
A system like this is most effectively subverted ‘from the inside’, and since Robert Moses is dead and long gone, there’s not many people left able/willing to use power and violence to maintain it.
And besides, it’s more interesting than dissociating in front of Netflix for 5 hours this month. If you are not sure where to get started, get in touch with me. I’ll give you some pointers, and I’ll help make you think through risk-management strategies. This is my jam. I promise it’ll be interesting.