Ged Maybury – 25/4/98
Design. You hear a lot about it these days. Social programmes are designed. Software is designed. Coffee is designed. Everything is designed, including the genes of our most famous fruit. I’m talking about the ‘Zespri’, that jet-setting designer kiwifruit of the nineties. It has also been patented and copyrighted and trademarked, leaving some of us quietly wondering if our Code of Social Responsibility will be very far behind.
But I digress. I want to talk about design. I studied it once. Interesting stuff. ‘Form follows function’ and all that. Eh? What’s that? Oh, some old fashioned notion that if you designed things strictly to fulfil their function, then you would naturally arrive at the perfect ‘form’, or shape of the thing.
Example: if you were designing a place where vehicles turn from one road to another; say bicycles, cars, trucks and buses; then the intersection would end up being the perfectly shaped place for said turnings.
Let’s get a little technical here. Have you noticed that the back wheels of all vehicles (except railway trains) tend to want to cut the corner as they follow the front wheels around the curve? They’re lazy or impatient or something, or smarter. They’ve seen a quicker way across the corner and they just go for it. Or maybe it’s because they really want to be the wheels out the front, having all the fun and getting the best view. Anyway, for whatever reason, they do it. It’s a kind of fundamental law of physics.
And the longer the vehicle, the greater the corner-cutting effect. With me so far? So intersections need to be wider, right? Wrong! What do you know about design?! Haven’t you noticed, all around your city, that the intersections are getting narrower and narrower? This is because all those highly trained and highly paid road designers of the nineties have finally lucked onto one of those perverse secrets of the universe: that turning traffic must be calmed.
That’s what they call it; ‘traffic calming’. Traffic, you see, is a kind of life-form, restlessly roaming the streets looking to get into a fight or mate with another traffic, or at the very least to scratch its flanks against a lamp-post. You will sometimes come across the places where it likes to sharpen its claws. It leaves dark patches of dribble in places. You can sometimes hear it rumbling and farting all night.
And the best way to calm this life-form is to create a multitude of constrictions, especially where it likes to turn. The presence of brick pavers, little trees and strips of guttering that actually look like private driveways also really helps. It’s pretty expensive, but worth it. It must be. Why else would our city councils spend so much on these places?
Of course it’s hell on humans. They get pretty crazed, trying to turn through these traffic calmers that are just plain too narrow for safe turning. And too bad for cyclists. But then they aren’t really traffic, are they? And hey, those trucks and buses are just ridiculously oversized anyway! Their back wheels just need a severe talking-to. Then they’ll calm right down and toe the line again, as the traffic engineers know they should.
Okay, the rest of the universe needs a little more design work, but hey, we’ve got all of these highly trained professionals, just itching to do the job. Roll over, God!
I’m really going to stick my neck out and claim that I know better than all the traffic engineers in New Zealand.
Seriously, I cannot believe they can be a stupid as they are. ‘By their works ye shall know them’. And their works are every where, and pretty suspect. I live in South Canterbury. Here, as in most other parts, they are gradually giving the main highways ‘the treatment’. i.e. – kerbing every intersection that isn’t quick enough to get away. And it’s the same old same old: – ‘traffic calming’.
Highway traffic, however, is a slightly different animal to town traffic. Like: it’s faster. And bigger. Have you ever passed an ‘artic’-and-trailer at 100 km/hr? How about if it’s a sheep truck? That’s really choice. You hit this solid wall of vapourised sheep pee which actually slows you down. It is a little known scientific fact that it causes the atmosphere to double in density right beside the sheep truck, causing you to take twice as long as usual to get past or to accumulate ten litres of the stuff on your face and clothing, whichever comes first.
But I digress. My point is that an ‘artic’-and-trailer needs extensive near-side clearance to get around a corner. Say a left-turn. Say a left-turn that you are going past at 100km/hr in the main lane, holding your breath and squinting your eyes to keep out all that sheep-pee vapour, when the forty-four tonne truck beside you suddenly lurches to the right to avoid the silly piece of kerbing that the really stupid traffic engineer went and stuck right where the truck needed more road-width not less! Would you be annoyed? Or would you be calmed? Or would you have to change your pants at the next public facility?
If you enjoyed this article, then check out
“ Designasaur 2 – Another Design Award”.
