Transit
Design
19 rabbit holes · 10 people exploring
Common starting questions
- How are Japanese railways profitable?
- Why is the Netherlands so good for cycling?
Rabbit holes
- Stockholm's metro is a 110 km art gallery
Samuel Okafor · 4 sources
- why Japanese train staff point at things and say them out loud
Lin Chen · 4 sources
- the Moscow Metro was built to look like palaces
'Palaces for the people'. Chandeliers, mosaics, marble. Also built deep enough to double as bomb shelters.
Kate Lindqvist · 5 sources
- the 2.5 km iron ore train across the Sahara
One of the longest and heaviest trains in the world, and people ride on top of the ore for free. Saw a travel video and couldn't stop thinking about it.
Yuki Tanabe · 4 sources
- ghost stations
The Berlin ones are the best part: during the Cold War, West Berlin trains passed through East Berlin stations that were sealed and guarded, without stopping.
Lou Tremblay · 5 sources
- Why are Spain's high-speed trains so cheap to build?
Desmond Achebe · 4 sources
- the Clearview font saga on US highway signs
Clearview was designed to fix how Highway Gothic's letters blur at night in headlights (the holes in letters like e and a fill in with glare). The FHWA approved it in 2004, withdrew the approval in 2016 saying later research didn't show a clear benefit, then restored it in 2018.
Marco Bianchi · 6 sources
- how American cities ran highways through their downtowns
Started with why a freeway cuts my city in half. Ended up at Robert Moses vs Jane Jacobs, which is basically the origin story of modern urbanism fights.
Jun Hayashi · 6 sources
- the map Romans used to plan trips
The Peutinger map distorts geography the same way the tube map does: it only cares about the order of stops and the distances between them.
Yuki Tanabe · 6 sources
- Tokyo's trains make money because the railways own the neighborhoods
Kate Lindqvist · 6 sources
- the tube map isn't a map
Ingrid Solberg · 5 sources
- Preston bus station almost got demolished
Designed so 80 buses can park nose-in, with those curved concrete parking-deck edges. The council wanted to tear it down; it got listed instead and restored.
Kate Lindqvist · 3 sources
- Did car companies really kill the streetcar?
Kate Lindqvist · 4 sources
- a bird-watching engineer redesigned the Shinkansen nose
Trains entering tunnels at high speed were making sonic booms at the exit. Eiji Nakatsu, a birdwatcher, modeled the nose on a kingfisher's beak, which dives into water without a splash. Quieter and more efficient.
Kate Lindqvist · 5 sources
- the Swiss railway clock's second hand pauses at 12
It sweeps around in about 58.5 seconds, waits at 12 for the minute pulse from the master clock, then all the station clocks jump together. Apple got into trouble for using the design.
Hannah Kim · 3 sources
- why are new subway lines so expensive in the US?
Phase 1 of the Second Avenue Subway cost roughly $1.5+ billion per km. Similar projects in Paris or Madrid cost a fraction. Overstaffing, oversized stations, consultants, and lack of in-house expertise come up again and again.
Kate Lindqvist · 4 sources
- Dutch cities weren't always bike cities
Ingrid Solberg · 5 sources
- railways invented time zones
Kate Lindqvist · 5 sources
- Hong Kong has an 800 m outdoor escalator as public transit
Runs downhill in the morning and uphill the rest of the day. Commute direction as a setting.
Kate Lindqvist · 3 sources