Transport – Page 20 – Brian Micklethwait's New Blog

I We It – January 2004

All this coughing I’ve been doing lately, and the consequent not sleeping properly, is keeping me confined to my quarters, which means that photo-ops have been few.

So, I’ve done more than my usual amount of rootling around in the archives. In which archives, this evening, I found these photos:

I remember being quite impressed by these artworks, when I first came across them, in (as we can see) Gloucester Road tube. Kudos to me for taking a photo of the poster that told me now, this evening, who did these Things and what he called them, as well as just lots of photos of the Things themselves. There’s even a clear date on the poster, which corroborates the date Windows Photo Viewer offers, as the date when these photos were “first modified”.

I do not recall being as impressed by any other artwork in a tube station since then. Maybe this was the first art I ever properly saw (properly because for the first time I was looking for stuff to photo (with my recently acquired Canon A70 (had I had a better camera the photos would have been a lot prettier))) in a tube station, and maybe that’s why it made quite an impression on me.

I say “quite” because even these Things were not really that great. Quite striking. Quite impressive. And more so than just about all Art in the Tube that I have encountered since then, which has mostly been very disappointing. Well, quite disappointing.

LATER (FRIDAY MORNING): The above done in some haste. I now, with some difficulty, found my way to this, which says more concerning the above images. Summary: Corporate capitalism is scary because it is totalitarian. (He’s quoting adverts for various capitalist goods and services.)

Suspicion: he thinks we should all believe in what would actually, I think, turn into actual totalitarianism. He has a quite big point. Corporate capitalism is becoming rather totalitarian. But he is wrong on the even bigger point. No wonder I only quite liked it. It is a quite expert attack on my opinions, and he’d surely agree about that, if about little else of a political sort, if we ever talked it through.

An e-scooter obliges me by stopping

For some time now I’ve been wanting to exhibit a photo here, of an e-scooter. Any e-scooter. Trouble is, e-scooters have a way of e-scooting by and being gone, before I can get my camera out and functioning.

But this evening, that changed. Yes the e-scooter scooted by, but then it stopped, at one of the local shops, and parked itself outside:

It’s not the best photo you’ll ever see, but that’s not my point. My point is, that’s an e-scooter, and I’m starting to see them around, quite a lot. Even though riding them on public roads or pavements is apparently still illegal.

By the way, in case you’re wondering, this photo was taken with the permission of its rider. This guy wasn’t behaving like he knew he was breaking any law. At the time, I had no idea about such a thing either.

I don’t know, but I can well imagine a quite near future, for places like London, where e-scooters are having a noticeable impact on transport, especially by commuters, while more elaborate technologies, like robot cars, continue to be Just About To Happen Real Soon Now but still not actually happening. E-scooters, unlike robot cars, already work perfectly adequately. All that’s needed is for the law to catch up, and for cycle lanes and general non-car areas to keep spreading.

A particular plus from where I stand, on the pavement, e-scooters are definitely less scary than rogue cyclists

The thing about bikes is that using them is rather strenuous, and bikes are a bit hard to store. E-scooters are basically vehicles you stand still on, and are surely far easier to store. Next to your desk basically.

E-scooters look to me like a transport technology that is just about to happen. Soon, as opposed to Real Soon Now. I will continue to try to photo these gizmos. Preferably during the hours of daylight, and with people on board.

How London is moving downstream

What do you suppose this is?:

Okay, no silly games, this is Disneyland London. They have in mind to construct this during the next few years, out east, on the south bank, on that bit of land that sticks upwards into the beginnings of the Estuary (“Swanscombe Peninsula”), just this side of Tilbury.

The details don’t interest me. I’m pretty sure I’ll never go, not to the finished object. I don’t know when or even if they’ll build this.

What does interest me is that this huge project, even if it never gets beyond being thought about and puffed in the media, illustrates how the centre of gravity of London is moving inexorably downstream. The other Thing as big as this in that part of London is London Gateway, the big container port now being built on the north side of the Estuary, a long walk beyond Tilbury.

Flying horses

Found at the blog of Chuck Pergiel, who has occasionally commented here:

Read the whole posting here.

4-4-0

This evening I happened upon episode 1 of Trains That Changed The World on Yesterday TV, the show which has Steve Davies in it. This was the episode I missed the first time around, so I am very happy about this.

For the first half of the show, we were in Britain, covering the Stephensons and the transformation that trains wrought, as you’d expect, upon Britain. But then we crossed the Atlantic, and learned how trains put the U in USA. Which all the talking heads, including Davies, agreed that they did.

In particular I learned about this loco:

On the left, an Old Photo of what I take to be, more or less, the original. And on the right, painted in totally implausible paints of many colours, and also photoed in full colour, a Reproduction produced in the 1970s. And looking like it’s just got the part of its lifetime in Back to the Future 3.

This is the 4-4-0, the Model T of the railroad track. The big thing I learned about the 4-4-0 (which gets its name from its wheels) is that it burns wood rather than coal, on account of America being made of trees rather than coal; and that the big bulge on its chimney is to stop solid bits of burning wood pouring out and setting fire to America. I did not know this.

The City – 5 years ago

Horrid weekend, having a cold that I’d postponed on Friday because I had a meeting to host. Sleep shot to hell. Tidying up to be done. So, quota photo time, or so I thought. Inevitably, it got out of hand:

All of that was exactly five years ago, to the day. Having assembled them all, I couldn’t then postpone shoving them up.

There was a Lego Gherkin next to the regular Gherkin. They still thought, or were pretending to think, that they were building the Helter Skelter, which they have now turned into something else, even bigger and a lot duller. Otherwise, it all looked much as it does now.

I really like this bus filled with architecture

As quite often noted here, I am fond of photoing tourist crap. So it was that, earlier this month, I photoed a whole clutch of photos like this:

Well, I like them. But in among them was a photo that I now think to have a bit more to it. This photo:

What I like about this is that cameras these days don’t just have better eyesight than I do; they have better eyesight than almost everyone. And by zooming in on this bus filled with Big Things, well, it’s a bit like looking through a rather weak microscope. But still one strong enough to show you something you don’t regularly see. You know what it is, but you don’t ever look closely at such a thing.

With things like flowers and insects, we all get to see lots of close-up zoom photos, because they are considered worthy of the close-up zoom treatment. There are competitions if you photo photos like that.

But tourist crap, close-up? You don’t see that very often, do you?

So, I don’t just like this photo, I really like it.

Also, note how Portcullis House made it into the bus, entirely because it is across the road from Big Ben.

Black car – yellow leaves

Photoed a few minutes before that photo below of Sherlock Holmes smoking at Baker Street tube, just outside the Indian restaurant where me and the Boys Curry Night gang had just been dining:

This is one of those photos which is actually better than the original scene, as seen through my aging human eyes. The original scene was pretty dull. The car wasn’t shiny black, just a black car. The leaves were’t bright yellow, merely somewhat yellow. Ish. It would seem that my camera took all this dullness and cranked up the contrast and brightness of its own accord. I thought something like this might happen, which is why I photoed the photo. What was there to lose? (Digital photoing is not that cheap, but the marginal cost of the next photo is zero, as good as.)

The opposite of sunsets, in other words. They look fabulous for real, but in my photos, not nearly so dramatic.

No smoking Sherlock

There’s not been a photo photoed by me here for a while, but here’s one I photoed last night, in a tube train.

I was trying to get a photo of the Baker Street version of the Underground logo featuring poppies, as seen in photo number 6 here.

Instead I got something rather more entertaining, in the form of a No Smoking sign (in focus) on top of a regular Baker Street sign (a bit blurry), alongside Sherlock Holmes himself. Smoking.

Bad Sherlock.