Human Transit

when the bus doesn't come and you want to scream

Some bus shelters in Italy have supplies for this purpose.  

This is not just a quick laugh; there's an important insight here about how customers perceive time.  But no, I don't think it's a reason to tolerate lower frequencies ...

hope this saves lives, because it's messing with my head

If after watching this you really want the iTunes track, then you are truly a masochist.  Here's the now-viral Metro Trains Melbourne rail safety video "Dumb Ways to Die," with infernal-tune-that-you'll-never-ever-get-out-of-your-head by Tangerine Kitty.

You were warned.

graphic artists! seeking ideas for book's cover

If you're a talented illustrator who's willing to volunteer a few hours in return for a possible publication credit, read on.

My book Human Transit, which I hope will come out by November, needs some ideas for a cover.  The publisher has developed one that has promise but would like to see some alternatives.

The visual message of the cover must be:

1. Hey!  Eye catching.
2. Cool!  Minimalist, not emotional, not "hot"
3. Transit can be simple.  The image must not convey a sense of complexity or confusion.  That's why I'm thinking "minimalist."
4. Transit is about humans, their needs and desires, their joy and success, their jobs and families and recreation. 
5. Transit is not about technology choice.  That's why I tend to prefer images that are based on transit map imagery rather than images of transit vehicles. 

The cover text is:

Title:

Human Transit

Subtitle:

How clear thinking
about public transit
can enrich our communities
and our lives

(I like this "four-line poem" layout, but it can be in any configuration.)

Author:Jarrett Walker

All this text must be clearly legible on the cover, though the subtitle should be smaller than the rest.

The cover dimensions are 6x9 inches.

If you provide the image that becomes the basis for the selected cover, you'll be credited on the title page.  Please note, however, that I'm not running a contest, just welcoming ideas from anyone who wants to share them.  The final decision about the cover will be made by the publisher.

Please pass this on to graphic artists, or aspiring talented ones, that you know!  I would need to see your ideas by July 20 to keep the project moving.

Thanks!

 

bus signage: a literary view

A great exterior sign on a transit vehicle conveys empowering information with just a few words.  In the last post, I suggested we could learn a lot from the way San Francisco does it. 

Among the many excellent comments, Matt Johnson shared an example of a Prince George's County (Maryland) sign that's typical of what many other transit agencies do.  To me, it overflows the bounds of wayfinding and can only really be appreciated as poetry, so on a rainy Saturday morning, I'm going to let myself riff on it a bit.  The text:

17 MOUNT
RAINIER/IKEA
(NORTHBOUND)
HAVE A
NICE DAY
DRIVE SAFELY
(repeats)

That's six pages of one-line text.  Matt says each line displays for 10 seconds.  That would mean it takes a minute to see the whole sign, which must be an exaggeration.  Matt probably means "each line displays for what feels like forever," and usually 2-3 seconds are enough to create that effect. 

Obviously this is a limited sign, apparently not able to hold more than 12 characters, but as we all know, formal constraints like length limits are often liberating.  Much of the joy of art lies in watching creativity press against some kind of limitation.  If you didn't learn this from reading sonnets or writing haiku, you've probably learned it from Twitter.

In the literature world, it's common to see great poetry published with some kind of annotation that helps pry the piece open for the reader.  So just for fun, I thought I'd do one on this.  As literary critics like to say, there's a lot here.

17 MOUNT

The poem begins with a burst of masculine energy, ambitious, thrusting upward, perhaps with a tinge of hope?

RAINIER/IKEA

In one line, the poem explodes into many dimensions of significance.  Indeed, we could say that this is the line where the sign reveals itself as a poem.

First of all, the artificial separation of "Mount Rainier" into two lines, technically called enjambment, recalls some of the great suspenseful line-breaks of modernist poetry.  William Carlos Williams, say:

So much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

In "RAINIER/IKEA" the slash (/) could be a meta-poetic reference.  When we quote poems in the middle of a paragraph, we use the slash to indicate the line breaks ("So much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow ...")  So the slash used mid-line in poetry signals a winking inversion of that convention.  As in many arts, postmodern consumers know they're looking at an artifice, so the artwork gains credibility by saying "I know I'm just a poem," or whatever.  The mid-line slash could be a clever way of doing that.

Has any punctuation mark become as meaningless as the slash?  In signage it can mean 'or' (as when it separates two alternative destinations served by branches), or it can separate two descriptions of the same thing, or it can mean "between" as in "from one of these to the other."  Here, the poem doesn't let on what it means.   Only patient contextual research has established that the relevant meaning here is "between."  This bus runs from Mount Rainier to Ikea, or from Ikea to Mount Rainier.

Still, the ambivalence invites us to imagine other possible relationships between Rainier and Ikea. For example, we can notice the strangeness of conjoining a permanent-sounding placename with the name of a business.  What would happen to this sign, and this route, if the Ikea moved or merged?  Mountains don't move, we note, which is why we name neighborhoods after them. 

As if that all weren't enough, "RAINIER" in all caps can't signal that it's a proper name, as "Rainier" would do.  Is the bus promising to take us somewhere where it rains more than it does here?

(NORTHBOUND)

Parentheses are unusual on electric bus signs, and they're not too common in poetry either.  Literally, parentheses mean "this might be interesting but don't let it distract you."  So to use a parenthesis on an entire line of text, which forces itself on your attention for a few seconds, contradicts the basic meaning of a parenthesis.  As always, that's how we know to look beyond the basic meaning, to look at the sign as a poem.

Yet the visual look of parentheses also suggests a kind of protective enclosure, like two hands cupping a fragile little idea.  Is this bus insecure about being northbound?  Is it afraid that "northbound" is not what everyone wants to hear? 

Compass directions are tricky, of course, because not everyone knows them.  I'm told that on the North American prairies, where all roads are north-south or east-west, some people develop such a compass-based sense of space that they'll refer to the southeast burner on their stove.  This bus isn't in such a place, though; suburban Maryland has lots of diagonal and curving roads at various angles, so perhaps the parentheses are apologetic in the sense of "we're actually going north, but if you can't think about that, it's ok.  We're not trying to seem that we're smarter than you.  Like Mister Rogers, we like you just the way you are."

All this nuance and richness would have been lost if the sign had tried to tell people what the bus does.  In that case, it would say either MOUNT RAINIER or IKEA, but not both, depending on which way it's going.  That would be Zen in its transparency, but this poet has already signaled that Zen is not his genre. 

HAVE A

A what?  Again, the line break creates suspense.  Am I going to like this?  Should I be hopeful or scared?

NICE DAY

Comforting, unpretentious closure to the suspense.  Yet even here, we can wonder.  "NICE DAY" displays all by itself for a few seconds, so if you see the sign then, it seems to say "It's a nice day!"  If the bus says "NICE DAY" as it comes at you through a blizzard, you might get a deeply spiritual message: "Whatever's happening, this is a nice day, because it's the present and that's the only thing we have."  (The saccharine level in this sentiment is easily turned up or down to suit your taste; that's the liberating quality of the simple "NICE DAY.")   

DRIVE SAFELY

Here we thought the sign was just for us transit customers!  In fact, it's talking to motorists!  Poems often take dramatic turns by suddenly enlarging or shifting the audience.  It's as though we thought we were in an intimate space walled with warm curtains, listening to a poetry reading, when suddenly the curtains drop and we're in the middle of a stadium.  T. S. Eliot was a master at keeping us wondering where we are and who's watching, and playing with our desire to be sure about that.  Who is the audience, really?  How big and diverse is it?  For that matter, is anyone paying attention?  Great postmodern questions, all, and in the poem's climactic moment, we finally confront them.

The sentiment is finely tuned.  Like "HAVE A / NICE DAY," "DRIVE SAFELY" is strategically commonplace, as though the bus company is trying to assure us that it shares our values.  Still, "DRIVE SAFELY" refers to the possibility of danger.  You can read it as plaintive ("Please don't run into us or our customers!") or as confident, maybe even with the necessary toughness of the policeman ("We've looked danger and tragedy in the eye, and we're trying to protect you from it, so don't mess with us.") 

This, of course, is the basic ambivalence of every bus's stance in the modern city, especially the noisy diesel bus.  As a bus operator, you know that your mass, noise, and vibration aren't entirely welcome on most streets, yet you're trying to perform an essential service.  Firefighters are in that situation too, but you can't command the deference that fire trucks do, because it's your job to be routine and predictable even though that almost implies being unappreciated.  How can you get some appreciation?  Say what people on the street want to hear.  "HAVE A / NICE DAY / DRIVE SAFELY."  Who can argue with that? 

And who cares if, while that message is playing, nobody can tell which bus this is?  That's how you know this is poetry.

music video for subway map lovers

I'm advised that I'd like this subway-map-themed R.E.M. video, though R.E.M. is not really my thing.

Actually, it's a nice test of whether you're more interested in transit graphics than in transit!

san francisco: transit and endangered species

San Francisco artist Todd Gilens has four major works now on display in that city.  To find them, though, you'll need a special bus tracker:

From the Muni Diaries:

Instead of thinking about buses an advertising space, Gilens wondered if buses can be a vehicle for visual impact. “We use buses without thinking, like using a paper towel, but what if we used images to transform the bus, to give an emotive quality to buses?”

Gilens raised money to wrap four buses in photographs of the Brown Pelicans, Coho Salmon, Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse and Mission Blue Butterfly.

They're quite beautiful:

Images of all four buses are here.  Just click the little forward and back buttons.

Todd lays out the background for his work in a short statement here, and in a longer article in Antennae (PDF here).  Here's his conceptual bridge from transit to endangered species, by way of urban form:

A way to think of settlement patterns would be: how can mutual needs or living space be courteously accommodated?  Just as we do when crowded around other humans (as on a bus for example) being close enough to all fit while everyone gets at least somewhat of the space they need.  In the framework of regional settlement, this means checking to see if the streams, the coyotes, the polliwogs or ferns are not getting trampled, and if they are, maybe shifting over a bit to give them some room.

It was courageous of Todd to even tell me about this project, given what I've written elsewhere about advertising wraps.  I also long to see bus exteriors used for the primary mission of helping people figure out the bus system.  I especially like simple color-coding schemes that distinguish fundamentally different kinds of service, such as the simple Los Angeles paint scheme where red means Rapid and orange means Local.

But as a temporary exhibit, which is what this is, I'm all for it.  These buses operate through surprise. (True beauty is always surprising, which is why it can be hard to appreciate in a museum.)   So even if the bus wraps were permanent, their beauty would diminish as people got used to them.

The four buses will be wrapped through the end of March and a bit into April.

los angeles: before you board, there's a quiz

Highlight of my transit tour of Los Angeles today: Vermont / Santa Monica subway station.  It's by Ellerbe Becket.  Striking, certainly, but an entrance so ominous that if I didn't know what it was, I'd guess it was a memorial to a horrible event. Enter under a heavy almond-shaped mass that looks like it's about to fall on you, or perhaps a jaw about to close.

Vertical constriction at the entrance makes it feel like you're descending into a dark hole.

Quite disturbing until you adjust to the massive gray vertical space, and those strange hints at words on the wall.  Again, it could be a memorial. 

I should add that the fuzziness of this pic captures pretty well what it looked like at first, as my eyes were in the process of dilating to transition from a bright sunny day. 

Those words on the wall?  They're questions.  A quiz.

And they're hard questions!  Some are almost koans.  For example:

Was the planning of this public transportation system the best use of public funds?

Do we create psychology or do we discover psychology?

What social policies discourage urban decay?

Who would want to live in a world without theatre?

Why do we participate in athletics?

Why do we participate in social activities?

Who participates in art?

Is art used to divide?

Who controls how an urban transportation system is created?

Can architects contribute to the creation of successful urban environments?

Do architects contribute to the creation of successful urban environments?

Who proposed an additional entrance for this station?

How would an additional entrance affect the use of this station?

Who is curiosity important to?

How do we rely upon systems?

Why do we live in buildings?

What social policies discourage urban decay?

Who seeks beauty?

Who seeks pleasure?

Why seek pleasure?

Why not seek pleasure?

How does a public transportation system connect disparate landscapes?

Would the world exist without weather?

Text is common enough in public art now.  But these questions that cover the vast grey walls are also hard to read, which is also an interesting choice.  Only people interested in both transit and public art will stop and try to read them.  You can imagine how garish it would be if they were too prominent.  But the effect, especially all of those verticals that look like water tracks, also suggests a ruin. 

Maybe it's only my literature training that makes me impulsively want to read partly obscured words.  Or perhaps I get it from my mother, an artist and an expert in cemetery preservation, who's read a lot of damaged gravestones that look much like this. 

If you've used this station, how did it strike you?

amsterdam: the flying wheel

From the pinnacle of Amsterdam Central station, as seen from my hotel room last month.  I'm guessing it's from the Deco era, early 20th century.  There's an exuberant optimism about European rail architecture of that era that needs to find new expressions.

Note:  I'm back in Sydney, but detritus of the just-completed round the world will probably continue showing up here for a while.