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."

Comments

"About to close"?

[drobety]

'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.

Re:"About to close"?

[blackraven14250]

I imagine it has something to do with this design involving cars on set tracks, rather than free-to-navigate roads.

Re:"About to close"?

[Anonymous Coward]

But he has run hundreds of unpowered toy cars downhill along pre-set non-intersecting routes - don't you see how that makes him an expert on traffic flow?

Re:"About to close"?

[Ironchew]

google car that crashed the other day

A person was driving that when it crashed. No robot apocalypse here, move along.

Re:"About to close"?

[RobbieThe1st]

Great pipe dream.
What will really happen, however, is that any time someone in charge wants to be re-elected, or want funding for something he/she will make the roads run slower(though selective false info, etc) until people vote to fix it.

On top of that, someone will figure out how to get priority for their cars, and that will further mess things up. And that's on top of the kids who will mess things up *just* to cause problems.

Sorry, but any system that's computer controlled can be exploited, either by the users or "big brother".

Re:"About to close"?

[tpstigers]

And Mel Gibson is an expert on Christ because he made one crappy film about him.

Welcome to America, where it doesn't take actual knowledge to become an expert on any given subject.

All it takes is exposure.

Annoying closeups

[the_other_chewey]

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.

Re:Annoying closeups

[timeOday]

It's all closeups because it's really just a commercial, a tease for the exhibit at the museum.

Switching power sources will help polution and eventually cost, but not congestion. There's a limit on the density achievable by big vehicles moving independently. That said, the US is not one of the more dense nations around and won't be anytime soon (our own population growth has now shifted to places like Texas that are less overcrowded) so I would be surprised if it isn't China that takes the lead in this. (High speed rail counts, sort of, but I'm really thinking of something more individualized, taking each party to their own destination).

Re:Annoying closeups

[wasme]

I could be wrong, but the impression I got from the video was that the artist wasn't trying to produce a [realistic] model of traffic flow (future, present, or past) at all. I think people get confused when he makes the comment about the cars' going 230 miles per hour and how that gives him 'hope for the future.' I don't think that's equivalent to saying 'this is (my idea of) the traffic flow of the future.'

A couple of quotes from the artist in the video I think show otherwise:

"the idea that the car runs free. Those days are about to close. So it's a little bit like making a model of New York city at the turn of the last century and your modeling horse buggies everywhere and then the automobile is about to arrive. So something else is about to arrive."

So he's making a 'model' of a car-centric city on the idea that soon that will be an anachronism.

"It wasn't about trying to make this a scale model of something. It was more to invoke the energy of a city."

In other words this is art for art's sake. Something I personally am often rather ambivilant about but I still think this is cool for the sake of the amount of time and effort put into this. It's a giant working mechanism. If he called himself a 'geek' instead of an 'artist' would the comments here have been less hostile?

And who doesn't remember playing with Hot Wheels and the like as a kid. Wouldn't you have loved to have a setup like this back then?

Re:This is bad. As if downing the 405 wasn't enoug

[Optic7]

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!

Re:Blame the greenies

[Trepidity]

It'd be hard to claim that L.A.'s highway system is the result of "greenies"; it's just about the most generous possible highway system you could imagine. In L.A., unlike in most cities, if I miss my freeway exit, I take the next freeway, which comes up in 5-15 miles, instead of bothering to figure out how to turn around. Oh, and if I miss that, I take the freeway after that. Because in L.A., there are so many freeways that they're like arterial streets in other cities.

I'm not sure how many more freeways L.A. could put in, even if its ideology was 100% pro-sprawl (which it sort of is). The 10 is 8-10 lanes, the 210 is 8 lanes. Are you going to bulldoze another 10-lane freeway in the mere 5-10-mile strip between the two?

Re:This is bad. As if downing the 405 wasn't enoug

[canadian_right]

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.

Re:Blame the greenies

[OctaviusIII]

Actually, the concerns you raise are serious for not just urban planners but urban politicians. The twenty-somethings of this generation are moving to the cities and want to stay there in a way their parents didn't, and city leaders are desperate to have them stay. The District of Columbia, for example, is doing its damndest to improve its schools, as it's already done a lot to improve the crime situation. One of the political barriers is the memory that people who came of age in the 70s and 80s have of cities: rotten, crime-ridden slums aching under decay. Those people generally left the city for precisely the reasons you give and would rather not see tax money go to what they remember as a black hole of waste, corruption, blight and crime.

American cities have come a long way in the last decade and will keep moving back towards the good this coming decade. Many are growing again, and almost all are growing in their downtown cores. Even downtown Detroit has a housing shortage. Anyway, I think you'd be surprised how fantastic some cities are and just how far they've come. They're not as bad as you think.

Re:This is bad. As if downing the 405 wasn't enoug

[rjch]

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.

Re:Blame the greenies

[drinkypoo]

If we all spread out, take over a bunch of space, and clear it for our use, then we will leave nothing else but residential areas. My personal vision of hell is neverending suburbia punctuated by refineries and strip malls... you know, kind of like in Snow Crash. And that is precisely what you are advocating.

Cities are more efficient places for people to live (if their food is not produced too far away) and we need people to live in them if we are going to have massive populations needed for modern society. The only way we don't need cities is if we're moving to a post-industrial society in which the poor are simply killed off when they are inconvenient. (Some say we're there now.)

We simply cannot sustain everyone having their own house and land. Especially if they're just going to put a lawn on it, or some other similar waste of space and water.