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As cars get bigger, heavier and more numerous, our roads are becoming more dangerous and congested. In the US, the number of pedestrians killed by cars has reached a 40-year high. What’s so infuriating about this statistic is that many of these deaths are preventable through better design and planning.
In his short explainer video How the Dutch Solved Street Design, Adam Yates nicely summarises the basic concepts of urban planning and traffic engineering that allow cars, pedestrians and cyclists to coexist in relative harmony. Yates mentions a key concept that I think everyone who moves around a city should understand.
When roads are widened or improved, it actually encourages more people to drive, resulting in more traffic rather than less. This means that – despite how politicians sell it to us – adding more lanes to a road actually makes traffic worse. This is called ‘induced demand’.
The so-called Downs-Thomson paradox states that traffic will grow indefinitely until alternative options – public and active transport – become as fast or faster than the equivalent journey by car. It sounds counter-intuitive, but to reduce congestion and fatalities in our cities, pedestrians, cyclists, public transport and private vehicles must coexist, and they can do so safely if it takes them roughly the same time to get from A to B.
There is a truth here that I wish more drivers would understand: investing heavily in public transport and in more and safer cycling and walking infrastructure – rather than in more space for cars – will ultimately benefit everyone, including those who drive.
– Kai
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What’s Next in Tech SPONSOR
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Semafor Tech is a twice weekly newsletter covering the people, money and ideas at the centre of the new era of tech. We track the shifting dynamics and the new ideas that just might be crazy enough to change the industry as we know it. For a thoughtful injection of tech news to your inbox – and as a complementary read to this great newsletter – subscribe for free now.
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Apps & Sites
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Threads-based chat platform
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Struct is a team chat platform that structures conversations in threads to make them easier to follow and catch up on. It also offers built-in AI tools to, for instance, get summaries of past conversations or pull information from, say, Google Drive into a chat. I find the ‘2x your productivity’ sales pitch a bit tired and off-putting. I’d rather be sold on ‘0.5x your screen time’.
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Here’s a handy, free helper app for your next camping trip with friends: “Define the items your group needs for your next trip, festival or gathering and let the people decide who can bring what. Never have more than necessary and less than needed!”
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NOOR is an Amsterdam-based platform for documentary photography and visual storytelling. You will find a long list of stories from around the world, with stunning on-the-ground photo journalism, like the uprising in the Middle East or the youth of Russia. Each story links to an extensive catalogue of photos. Don’t miss their shop, featuring gorgeous photography books and prints.
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Privacy-first Chrome-based browser
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I’ve been a Firefox user for years, but some recent performance issues made me look for alternatives. I’ve known of the Brave browser for ages, but never actually tried it until last week; now I’m a convert. Open source and built off the Chrome engine – it supports all Chrome extensions – Brave is not without issues. I have no interest in the crypto features (off by default) but it offers some decent privacy features, is fast and has a solid iOS companion app.
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Worthy Five: Jo Tennant
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Five recommendations by digital memory curator and bikepacking enthusiast Jo Tennant
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A video worth watching:
I love that Mickey Smith’s humble speech is at odds with the awe and poetry of his music and films – a bit of all of this is contained in this film. I’ve revisited this regularly for the last decade.
A recipe worth trying:
We’ve been making these vegetarian burgers since 2014. A note scribbled in my cookbook says: ‘Satisfying and delicious; don’t skip the quick pickle.’
A book worth reading:
The Daily Stoic sits beside my bed, well thumbed. Two minutes each day to nudge me to be a little less puppet-on-a-string through life and a bit more aware of what I’m doing on this earth and why.
An activity worth doing:
Bikepacking: I’ve seen the wildest parts of my country that I could never have known by foot or car, woken up in breathtaking landscapes and had the biggest laughs with friends. Each trip, I dig deeper than I thought possible, finish stronger (mentally and physically) and with a greater appreciation for my body, relationships, and our wild places.
A word worth knowing:
Thrawn is a Scottish word that means ‘stubborn’ and unbending. Sometimes it’s an insult but increasingly an admirable characteristic. I was particularly proud when my daughter was described this way when she stuck to her guns. To believe in yourself is a wonderful thing. This is a joyous short film by the same name.
(Did you know? Friends of DD can respond to and engage with guest contributors like Jo Tennant in one click.)
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Books & Accessories
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The great rewiring of childhood
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is known for illuminating us on the devastating impacts of social media on the mental health of Gen Z. In his newest book (out today!) he lays out his in-depth research and how we can turn the tide. “The Anxious Generation is a penetrating and alarming accounting of how we adults began to overprotect children in the real world while giving essentially no protection in the brutal online world. Haidt documents the four fundamental harms of the phone-based sleep deprivation, social deprivation, cognitive fragmentation, and addiction. He draws on ancient wisdom and modern psychology to help everyone understand what healthy development would look like in the digital age.”
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Humans’ entanglement with nature
Award-winning nature writer David Abram with a literary gem that opens our senses beyond our bodies, offering us a philosophical and animistic perspective of our living planet. “As the climate veers toward catastrophe, the innumerable losses cascading through the biosphere make vividly evident the need for a metamorphosis in our relation to the living land. For too long we’ve ignored the wild intelligence of our bodies, taking our primary truths from technologies that hold the living world at a distance. Abram’s writing subverts this distance, drawing readers ever closer to their animal senses in order to explore, from within, the elemental kinship between the human body and the breathing Earth.”
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Overheard on Twitter
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Doing brain laundry (separating my thoughts into lights and darks).
Update: left one dark thought in the lights, ruined the whole load.
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Food for Thought
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With somewhat bombastic language to make his point, Ted Gioia puts forward a stark indictment of what he calls ‘the dopamine cartel’: the tech companies that turn everything – from arts, entertainment, politics, even relationships – into a dopamine-infused activity that ends in addiction. “This is a familiar model for addiction. Only now it is getting applied to culture and the creative world – and billions of people. They are unwitting volunteers in the largest social engineering experiment in human history. ... This is the new culture. And its most striking feature is the absence of Culture (with a capital C) or even mindless entertainment – both get replaced by compulsive activity.”
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If you’re relatively new to urban planning and traffic engineering, this is a great introduction video showing you how Dutch street design managed to decrease (solve?) traffic congestion by making it a little harder for cars and easier for people and public transport to move about the city. For a model like this to succeed, it certainly requires a cultural shift, but the Netherlands started with the same car-centric system that is still in place in almost every other country.
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A friend of mine put me onto this fascinating blog “that aims to educate the masses about architectural concepts, urban planning, environmentalism and history by making examples out of the places we love to hate the most: the suburbs”. The best place to start is to dive into the McMansions 101 section. Expect genuine architectural insights mixed with rich satire and cynicism, and lots and lots of photos of just god-awful design.
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Aesthetically Pleasing
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Netherlands-based PSTR studio offers a huge selection of high quality posters and art exhibition prints.
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One of the most interested sculptural art pieces I’ve come across: Lily Clark is a Los Angeles based artist and designer working across a variety of materials, including stone, ceramic and metal, but water is her primary medium. In the piece at the top, water droplets seem to appear out of nowhere and slide down the hydrophobic surface disappearing into a tiny slot.
(via)
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Analogue ASCII art! UK artist James Cook uses one of his nearly 60 typewriters to create type-based drawings, from architecture to portraits. “Each drawing is assembled from a variety of characters, letters and punctuation marks using the forty-four keys of a typical typewriter. Information is overlaid and the keys are tapped at variable pressures to achieve tonal shading.”
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Gwen is a modern typeface with sharp, expressive serifs. The variable type system comes in seven weights with beautiful alternates, special glyphs and ornaments.
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Notable Numbers
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Policies to help people walk and cycle, such as low-traffic neighbourhoods, can create public health benefits as much as 100 times greater than the cost of the schemes, a long-term study of active travel measures has concluded.
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Snap Inc., the parent company of Snapchat, revealed another quarter in the red earlier this year, taking the ephemeral messaging service’s cumulative loss to some $10.8 billion since 2015.
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Sony has agreed to acquire half of Michael Jackson’s catalogue from the star’s estate, in what is likely the biggest transaction ever for a single musician’s work. The deal is said to value Jackson’s assets at $1.2 billion or more.
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Classifieds
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The Week in a GIF
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Reply with your favourite GIF and it might get featured here in a future issue.
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