2-Keepers

Suppose Money is Like Water

Posted on June 3, 2009 in 2-Keepers, Simulation

Steven Strogatz has a intriguing column in the NY Times about a 1950s era “hydraulic computer,” which modelled the operation of a national economy using fluids flowing through a machine. As the water circulates it fills or empties tanks, trips levers, and occasionally plots a graph of the level of a particular tank through time. For example, when a tank called “Minimum Working Balance” fills up, it begins overflowing into a stream called “Income.” (Click to enlarge.) The thing has a series of input points where you can change something (modelling an external input of some kind) and see what happens as a result.

The commenters seem to focus on how charmingly obsolete the thing is, but my first reaction was: What a great teaching tool! Someone should create working online model of it, complete with all the rushing and gurgling sounds, that we can all play with on our laptops.

In a democracy, the greatest threat to national security is public ignorance. The same is true of a democratically governed city. That’s why as a transit planner, I’ve come to view explaining what I do as one of the most important parts of my job.

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Why Circulators (Often) Don’t Work

Posted on April 26, 2009 in 2-Keepers, Seattle

Seattle Transit Blog reported some grief from the Rainier Valley area in southeast Seattle, regarding King County Metro’s proposed new bus route structure to accompany the opening of Sound Transit’s light rail line. The issue looks like a good opportunity to look at the whole question of very short routes, or “circulators.”

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The Disneyland Theory of Transit

Posted on April 17, 2009 in 2-Keepers, Books, Tourism

Darrin Nordahl. My Kind of Transit: Rethinking Public Transportation in America. Center for American Places, 2008.

Like streets themselves, transit stations and vehicles are part of the common space of a city, and the experience of using them tells us a great deal, often at a crucial subconscious level, about our city and our place in it.

One of the great challenges of the transit business is to make every rider feel welcomed. It’s easy to do this if you’re running a few buses in a small town; there, you have so few riders that you can greet them all by name. But the challenge of big-city transit is to give a welcoming sensation to huge masses of people at once.
The great cathedral-like train stations of American railroad era did this; many great European stations still do, and contemporary station design is finding its way back to those principles.

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