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L.A. Artist Contemplates Future Traffic Flow, With Hot Wheels
John3 writes "American artist Chris Burden is finishing up his latest work titled Metropolis II for display this fall in Los Angeles. There's a fascinating five minute documentary on YouTube about his miniature city and the traffic that flows through it. He comments 'The idea that a car runs free, those days are about to close.' Whether you agree or disagree, he certainly has built one of the coolest Hot Wheels layouts I've ever seen."
Me in a giant Big Wheels running over all the Hot Wheels! Muahahaha!
'The idea that a car runs free, those days are about to close.'
"About to close"? Laugh at mental picture of hordes of people trapped in long rush hours jams on a at least twice a day basis for years feeling like their cars has been running free all that time.
The video mostly consists of annoying closeups of tiny parts of the contraption.
For a few seconds of a full view on the quite impressive thing, jump to about 4:30.
Ted Kazinski, is that you? I didn't think you had internet access! What you say makes complete and utter sense. I wish I could say it so clearly. Big fan of your writing!
It's hard to see the scale of the project since the video is presented as 'artsy'. The best view of it is at 4:32-4:52 where you see an overlook of the whole thing.
Better the internet than the postal system.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Perhaps even more interesting is what this artist has done in the past.
Check out the wikipedia entry about his life:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Chris_Burden
It's almost surprising that they let him in the museum.
...from the philip bloom school of being unable to tell a story.
there's about 4 lines of dialog and far from 'contemplating future traffic flow' its just something that could exist in a funpark aimed at children.
could somebody please do a nice color grade on Koyaanisqatsi and re release it so these wafer thin DOF idiots can get a clue that making something that looks like an advert and goes on for 5 minutes is a boring as f*ck?
If we built a closed-circuit freeway-style system we wouldn't be using cars now would we, we'd be using personal rapid transit because it'd be considerably cheaper to implement rather than retrofitting an entire country of cars.
It has the environmentalists' dream for years now for high-density living with mostly public transportation. What they call sprawl and fight tooth and nail against is what most of us call personal space, a yard for children, and a nice house. They would rather cram everybody in the smallest area possible and hope we all convert to riding buses because the traffic congestion is so bad. Urban planning classes pump out more and more people with this same view every year, so I can only imagine it getting worse.
Since it doesn't serve the ultra-rich, the right wing won't support it, no matter how much it might possibly help everyone.
As for the left? They've long since given up doing anything big and useful, and have mostly turned into a reactionary set of frightened groups, who couldn't even begin to imagine doing something like Roosevelt did, losing all the progress they made, chunk by chunk, weeping all the while, but not actually doing anything meaningful enough to save the things they care about.
We're too busy giving our car industries sweetheart loans, while they outsource as much labor as they possibly can, to ever expect any meaningful change like this fantasy.
Sure, we make noise about raising fuel efficiency standards every couple of years, but that's more to convince voters that we can at least pretend to act in their interests.
We used to be able to do big things - but the only big things we do now, is wage useless wars against token enemies for bogus purposes. That, and protest taxes when they are the lowest they've been in living memory for most people.
But for science, for basic infrastructure, for human rights, lower-than-upper-class living standards, for helping the bulk of the American people - progress on those fronts is now dead for a generation, given away by the democratic party that used to stand for them.
Ryan Fenton
Seriously. However cool it may be, humans weren't meant to live this way... All packed on top of each other, so tightly that moving around one another is no longer possible to do with just a human brain... It's just badness, all the way down. In nature, overpopulation is naturally corrected for. Humans, ever so smart, are always finding ways to stick yet another finger in the proverbial dam. It's a beautiful piece of art in that it is totally, and utterly terrifying.
overpasses, overpasses everywhere!
I don't think you can prove the idea bad because of bad (terrible) implementation.
Allowing density to increase without allowing space for increased transit is a recipe for disaster - and it's what's happened here in Seattle. Once all available space is already built on, the acquisition costs to expand highways or light rail, or anything - skyrocket to the point of a political inability to get anything funded.
You have to put the big rocks in first.
The problem is a lack of rapid transit. Cars alone cannot deal with the traffic of a large, dense city.
But of course, American's would never do something as sensible as vote to build rapid, socialist, transit, when highly subsidised roads, gas, etc.. are so free market.
Anarchists never rule
If the Republicans will keep dipshits like you off the Internet I'll vote for them.
..because they shot it with DSLR, I'm guessing, and didn't use a small enough aperture or even bother to carefully set the focus.
Please help metamoderate.
Nor would we ever use an apostrophe to pluralize "Americans." Well, many would, but I don't.
well main roads can be auto drive but rural and maybe parking lot's can be manual.
The start of any kind of auto drive system will be auto drive road ways and it will take time to get rid of the old cars. Also trucks may need there own system as well.
An example of this would be "smart roads," as people were calling them about 15 years ago, where you lay wires into the roads, which are basically virtual rails they can follow. This eases automation to an incredible degree vs. the high-end computer vision approach. For the foreseeable future of course it would only be built into expensive, high-volume roads that get resurfaced fairly frequently.
...That hides a shining car!
A brilliant red Barchetta,
From a better vanished time.
I fire up the willing engine!
Responding with a roar!
Tires spitting gravel,
I commit my weekly crime!
Sing it with me now!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAvQSkK8Z8U
This dude loves Rush. I love Rush.
It's all coming together.
Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an I.Q. of 48, and am what some people call "mentally retarded".
Given that traffic congestion is a type of shortage (a shortage of available space on a road at a given time of day), and that a shortage happens when when the price of an item is set below the going rate determined by supply and demand, the solution is made obvious: raise the price of freeway access just high enough to eliminate the traffic congestion, but no higher. Then lower the toll when demand is low, to give people the ability to economize. Variable tolls permanently eliminates any need to expand the freeway just to eliminate congestion. There are other ways to justify expanding a freeway, but congestion is no longer one of them.
Efficiently pricing freeway access saves a lot of money that would be spent expanding the freeway. For example, the USA's Congressional Budget Office found that southern California's SR-91 express lanes generate net social benefits of at least $12 million per year, compared with a scenario in which the lanes had been built but drivers did not pay to use them.
Because many if not all states currently fund freeways with general sales tax revenue, As a group low-income residents, on average, pay more out-of-pocket with sales taxes" for freeways than with tolls. Therefore, tolls are less regressive than the alternative.
The free market works remarkably well, when it's allowed to work.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
What people don't seem to understand, we would have flying cars by now if the free market was allowed to work in the transportation industry.
When you take into account the costs to build and maintain all of the roads, flying is cheaper.
http://mises.org/resources/6528/Its-a-Jetsons-World-Private-Miracles-and-Public-Crimes
Typical Slashdot readers are probably not aware of what Burden is actually notorious for in fine arts circles. As a relatively early performance artist back in the 70s, he had his hands nailed to a VW Beetle crucifixion-style. Apocryphal variants regarding this performance piece when I was in art school had him being fully nailed and driven around LA that way, which would certainly have upped the fun level had it only been true. (Just in case you might be wondering if his current interest in cars is in any way... obsessive.)
And you can't even pull a Madrid and dig tunnels, because there's a whole other city underneath...
Depends on where you dig and how deep. They're actually planning on digging a deep-bore tunnel underneath downtown Seattle, and have already begun digging tunnels in other parts of the city. The deep bore one downtown may be cancelled, but only due to stupid city leaders and stupid citizens. The 'underground' city in Seattle isn't that deep, but it is a pretty cool tour (especially the very humorous (and true!) history lecture at the start of the tour).
This is just a guy making a big hotwheels track the way someone might make a model train track, then calling himself an artist and, with nothing whatsoever to back it up, claiming that this is how cars will run in the future... Yes, every person who wants to go from point A to point B in a city will have to visit EVERY POSSIBLE LOCATION IN BETWEEN THOSE TWO POINTS either on the way there or on the way back. And it's better because they go fast instead of having to sit in traffic. Makes perfect sense. Fucking stupid.
Yup -- we have the technology -- just not the budget it seems.
The problem is a lack of rapid transit. Cars alone cannot deal with the traffic of a large, dense city.
But of course, American's would never do something as sensible as vote to build rapid, socialist, transit, when highly subsidised roads, gas, etc.. are so free market.
I was over in California in April/May this year for a holiday and it amazed me just how fragmented and confusing the public transportation was. San Francisco was okay (even if BART was ear-splittingly loud) but LA was atrocious. Different fare structures for just about everything, seemingly no attempt whatsoever to match bus and "train" services and as often as not, two or three separate operators at the edge of coverage zones.
I still think Melbourne's public transport system isn't that great - it's fairly expensive and anywhere between 10-20% of services run late or get cancelled. But for a city that's about three times the size of Melbourne, Los Angeles' public transportation is a bad joke.
I'm from LA, and I can say that the fragmentation problem is major, but there's also a socio-economic problem in that most middle class people in LA (my family included) are unwilling to use mass transit, viewing it as low-class or not allowing for enough personal freedom. This is the attitude of my parents and unfortunately I have inherited it. The couple of times I have taken the bus have been rather awful--it's easy to get confused as to where you're going, you can't just turn around and get back on track, and truthfully the condition of the buses is not good. What's more, the bus routes simply do not go to the places they need to, and certainly not at the speed they should. All that said, I don't think that my own distaste for mass transit is insurmountable: when I visited Paris I enjoyed using the Métro, and to a lesser extent in New York. LA does have major earthquakes, thus making the prospect of building a full-fledged subway more difficult than it would be on an East-Coast city. That said, it seems to me that building an above-ground mass transit system rather than adding lanes to existing freeways would be the best solution--in fact, why not close down one freeway lane in each direction, elevate it, and put in rail? To some extent this has already been done, but again not in a way that services the whole city. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has been discussing a subway expansion, yet that is only in planning stages and has been for years. It mostly runs into opposition from land-owning no in my backyard types. Anyway this city's either farked or headed to a glorious traffic-free future.
Just to remind all of you, in coalescence with the OP, the increase in population is from impation 3rd-world immigrants increasing their family-sizes for the State benefits of Assisted Living through HUD a& Human Resources. Notice how Americans don't have more than 3 children on average, and consider the fact that the schools are full of children of the 3rd-world immigrants that are nowhere near becoming gentele until maybe the 2nd or 3rd generation of them actually proves to be Americanized.
Meanwhile, Mexicans and Blacks talk about how great their homeland and such like they are only visitting America on a long vacation. Christians say they aren't of this world either, but at-least they aren't strip-mining the land like the Chinese to import more Chinese lifestyle. And the native Indians enjoy the dryest of Reservations with the lowest lifespan and highest death-rate and highest poverty-level but don't complain because they truly are in another foreign country known as America whereas everyone else is in the United States.
Considering recent theories about how small underpowered cars are really dangerous, this exhibit should be immediately destroyed to stop the public seeing these tiny unpowered little cars whizzing around in perfect harmony. It'll never happen! In the real world, thousands of leprechauns would be killed under the wheels of SUVs, 18-wheelers, Winnebagos and Segways the very second they drove onto the public roads in these things! Ban the tiny cars! BAN THEM!
To me it seems more like that past.
There's nothing that says mass transit needs to be socialized... but non-socialized mass transit has pretty much failed or is failing.
People want privacy and freedom. They don't want to be driven to the same spot as everyone else and dropped off in some cattle call.
The last time I rode on the "L" in Chicago they had hard plastic seats because it's too much of a pain to clean piss and paint off nicer seats. I decided at that point that I'd never ride the train again.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
There's nothing that says mass transit needs to be socialized... but non-socialized mass transit has pretty much failed or is failing.
I think Tokyo has private railway lines and services. I've not been, but I've read that this is inconvenient for some people -- there isn't sufficient integration.
Many towns in England have privately run buses -- the local government sets the routes and service frequency, but the company has some influence on the fares. I don't think anyone except the shareholders of the transport companies think this is a good idea.
Here in London, the government company (TfL) decide on the route, frequency, fares and vehicles, and pay one of the transport companies to run the service. If you're going to privatise transport this is the correct way to do it -- otherwise you are effectively granting a monopoly.
People want privacy and freedom. They don't want to be driven to the same spot as everyone else and dropped off in some cattle call.
Ironic, then, that they choose instead to pay to drive in the same direction to almost the same places on congested roads.
The last time I rode on the "L" in Chicago they had hard plastic seats because it's too much of a pain to clean piss and paint off nicer seats.
Most towns and cities in Europe have cloth (or fake leather) -covered, foam filled seats on their public transport. Perhaps if it wasn't just poor people using Chicago's trains the city might put more effort into maintaining the system.
Who's buying all that shit from China? Oh yeah, the Christians. And everyone else. Guess who's strip-mining by proxy?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Some cities do have fairly effective local mass transit systems. For instance, visiting Boston and Chicago provided a breath of fresh air compared to the mediocre bus system in my hometown. (I've heard good things about the NYC subway system, but I've never been to the Big Apple for any length of time.)
By the way, one characteristic of a local mass transit system would be how well it supports going to/from the suburbs.
However, the local network in some cities is a problem, and the US intercity rail system ... enough said.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Thanks for this post. I'm one of those guys who always starts the video at the 50% point to skip the pointless preamble. If you want some great still shots, check here.
Twinstiq, game news
there's also a socio-economic problem in that most middle class people in LA (my family included) are unwilling to use mass transit, viewing it as low-class or not allowing for enough personal freedom.
Visited LA. Live in a different major city.
If I'm trying to get to work, there IS NOT a valid bus or train line to get me there. And I live 10 miles from my workplace right down one of the main freeways.
If I'm trying to get to something on the other side of the city, likewise. It'd take me 4 hours.
Plus, I have to run the risk of getting mugged. Sure, I can get mugged on the freeway too, but at least then I'm being mugged by some asshole with a badge who wants to meet his ticket quota and doesn't care how many false tickets he writes to do it, which means he's not interested in shooting or stabbing me.
This won't work because people don't make their own schedules - their boss does. Since the ones making the decision isn't the one impacted by the fee they will rarely take it into consideration as part of the decision. Likewise, people flying in for business meeting aren't going to plan their trip around the cost of tolls, if they even know it varies.
The express lanes are an economic plus because it lets impatient people with money subsidize the cost of the road for everyone else. This doesn't extend to your time-variable toll rate as everyone has to pay it. Furthermore, it makes it much harder to pay by cash and have exact change, pushing more people into using "easy-pay" systems with all the privacy concerns that come with them.
Finally, the type of fee charged has nothing to do with the "free market". Markets exist when consumers have choice between multiple competing providers. People have little to no choice about which roads they take. The endpoints dictate the begining and end sections, and there are only a small number of ways to connect them in between. The decision to charge based on miles driven, or gallons of gas used, or flat monthly fees, or periodic toll points are all just business decisions and which one works best will vary on the circumstances.
These aren't Hot Wheels. Calling them Hot Wheels is like calling tissue paper "Kleenex". These are generic die-cast toy cars, made more cheaply than Hot Wheels, and typically sold in large packs for half the price or less. The presumed advantage for the project is that the cars are lighter and destroy each other more slowly over time.
liabilities and laws are much bigger things to deal with.
To make it sort the 2 big things are
*Who is at fault
*Who will do the time if some dies.
Of course they can - just keep on building more and more new road until there is no land between the roads for people to do unimportant things like living and running businesses on. At that point, you've reached maximum density and there is nothing more to do but to spread laterally.
Anyone who tells you differently is a liar. And no, I don't believe in Tokyo. Or Germany.
Sgd. for and on behalf of the GGGA (Global Gas Guzzler's Alliance), not that that pay cheque influences my opinions at all.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"