My relatives returned from a trip to wonderful Firenze, and shared some terrible experiences trying to get their rental car back to the rental office in that ancient city’s dense traffic. Which brought to mind my own experience in the matter some years back.
I was trying to steer a course through all the one-way streets back to the car drop off location in downtown Florence, and no matter how hard I tried to navigate the narrow streets with my map, I always kept finding myself forced back to the same spot by the one-way street signs. The only way to the rental office seemed to be through a street blocked with a “no entry either way” sign.
It was only after the second or third try that I noticed a tiny text sign under the round no entry sign.
It said “except for car rental returns”.
In pure Italian...
Photo courtesy echiner1, shared on flickr under CC license.
One sign of the times is that movie halls are closing one by one around us, victims to the surge in electronic alternatives. We know this from direct observation – they really are closing – but I had an unexpected demonstration of this fact in a TV ad.
The ad was by the Hot cable company we subscribe to, and was aimed to convince us to use their Video on Demand service. It showed how difficult it supposedly is to get a movie without their VOD: it graphically showed how you need to go down 20 stairs to the street, walk a mile to the Videomat, check if it has a movie you want. No? Walk another mile to the video store, get the movie, walk back… you get the idea.
Nice ad, but what amused me is that 20 years ago they would’ve said “Go down 20 stairs, get in the car, ride downtown, and enter the movie theater”. These days, that just isn’t seen as a viable alternative! You’re expected to either slump on the couch in front of a cable movie, or rent a video and slump in front of that… and these guys want to deprive you of even the little exercise you’d get walking to the video store 🙁
Was filling up the car at a gas station when I noticed a bicycle chained to a signpost at the corner. Well, part of a bicycle…
As you see, this bike has been there for a long time (enough to develop serious rust), and in the meantime it lost wheels, seat, handlebars and more. Only a bare skeleton remained, as if the bike had been dropped into a river of mechanical Piranhas.
So what? So it suddenly reminded me of the image of a human skeleton chained to a wall, a literary device used all too often in the pulp horror fiction of my childhood, in more recent action movies, and even in some respectable literature. The poor bike had lost all its removable organs, but the predators that did this never bothered to unchain it from the signpost…
More from Amir’s visit to Japan:
This staircase gives access to the trains at a Tokyo underground station. Given rush hour crowd density, its designers did well to split it in two, to separate the up and down streams of commuters.
But note how the two sides are of different width. Someone characterized the traffic and found that at peak times more people will be going up than down. Other staircases might have the reverse arrangement, each optimized to its location and usage. These designers took a scarce resource, in this case stairwell width, and allocated it in a totally optimized manner; a very Japanese (and very intelligent) design approach.
Amir is back from Japan, and sent in some interesting photos attesting to that country’s outstanding and different ways of solving life’s daily problems.
For starters, here is yellow path marked out on a Tokyo sidewalk, whose surface is textured with the little rubber bumps that are so annoying at some airport terminals. Turns out these strips are quite common in major cities in Japan.
This is not a way to mark the road to the Wizard of Oz; it has a very practical and worthwhile function: it allows blind or low-vision individuals to find their way safely. The bumps have different patterns where the trail changes direction – they are linear on the straight and round at intersections, allowing the users to sense through their feet where they should pay attention.
In addition, the strips continue in public buildings like railway stations, where they mark the way to the ticket office and other key locations. There are also plaques with Braille directions in strategic locations along the paths. The photo below is from the train station at Kurashiki.
That is one simple, ingenious and commendable practice that other nations ought to emulate!
A piece of thoughtful design on the Renault Clio:
When you activate the windshield washer, the fluid is squirted onto the glass and the wipers are activated for four consecutive cycles. This is pretty much standard these days. But in the Clio, they then rest for three seconds, and give the windshield another single wipe.
The added wipe gets rid of the annoying trickle of fluid that often forms at the top center of the windshield after the first wash/wipe action. It’s not hard for the driver to reactivate the wipers, but the Renault designers took care of it for us. Good thinking!
