No great city, company, person or government is anything without crisis. Crisis -when overcome – proves determination and resolve. It hardens the mettle, stiffens the spine. It makes us work, innovate, improvise and toughen up. New York had the 1970’s Bankruptcy. San Francisco the 1906 Earthquake. The London Fire. Montreal’s October Crisis. Barcelona under Franco....
Gimme’ what the other guy’s got. That’s all City Hall tends to want. Buzzwords. Hype. Tourists. That’s why every city’s racing to be Green, World Class and Creative. City Hall thinks that’s good marketing and it is . . . if you actually are Green, World Class and Creative. But what if you’re not? You...
Well that didn’t take long at all. Matthew Thredgold of New Zealand was the first to figure out that at one time or another, The Grateful Dead, Rodney Dangerfield, Alvin & The Chipmunks and Andrea Bocelli all sang the famous Italian song Funiculi Funicula. Congrats, Matthew! 50 bucks is yours! Why does this matter? Well, apparently...
What do The Grateful Dead, Alvin & The Chipmunks, Rodney Dangerfield & Andrea Bocelli share in common? (as relates to cable?) Fifty bucks (Canadian) to the first person who can answer the above question. The winner will be announced either tomorrow or sometime in the near future, depending on whether this question is easier than I thought...
In his book, The Design of Future Things, Donald A. Norman writes: “We must design our technologies for the way people actually behave, not the way we would like them to behave.” Now replace technologies with cities. Or transit. Or government. Or customer service. Or the justice system. Or public policy. Or hospitals. Or lawyers. Or the postal...
Adam Butler is an Australian blogger and advocate of Zero Fare Public Transport. Recently, Adam posted a column on his website called The Public Transport Bandwagon. It’s an excellent piece of writing with an interesting hook. As Adam explains, the Victoria government in Australia has recently spent over $1 billion dollars on an automated ticketing system....
(This is Part 2 of a 2-Part piece on the Bondada-Neumann Study from the late 1980’s. In Part 1, I focused on the issue of Familiarity. In Part 2, I discuss the differences in perceptions between planners with cable experience and those without.) Bondada and Neumann’s discovery that transit planners and engineers had little familiarity...
(This is Part 1 of a 2-Part piece on the Bondada-Neumann Study from the late 1980’s. In Part 1, I focus on the issue of Familiarity. In Part 2, I’ll discuss the differences in perceptions between planners with cable experience and those without.) In the late 1980’s two civil engineers from West Virginia University (WVU)...
Last night I went for a ride in San Francisco. I was on the west coast learning about various cable systems and I was at the end of a long week of traveling and research. I needed room to clear my head, get out of the hotel. I found myself jumping on a cable car at...
On Monday, February 15th an older man and a young man engaged in a fistfight on a public transit bus in Oakland, California. The fight left the young man bloodied, bruised and asking for an ambulance. The incident – as is so characteristic of our world today – was videotaped via cell phone and then...