While it hasn’t often come across on this blog, due to most of the focus being on architectures of control, I am, both personally and professionally, very interested in lightweight transport – its design, use and potential.
All posts filed under “Motoring”
Ticket off (reprise)
Last year we looked at the way that the pricing structure of no-change-given ticket machines is often – apparently – designed to lead to overpayment, and I posed the question of whether councils/car park operators actually draw up their budget based on a significant proportion […]
A lengthy debate
Norwich City Council is introducing a system of parking permit charges determined by the length of the vehicle: The move away from flat-fee permits will penalise drivers who own vehicles more than 4.45 metres (14½ft) in length, such as the Vauxhall Vectra. Brian Morrey, vice-chairman […]
GPS External Speed Control in Canada
Via Slashdot, a CNN story reports that: Canadian auto regulators are testing a system that would enforce speed limits by making it harder to push down the car’s gas pedal once the speed limit is passed… [using] a global positioning satellite device installed in the […]
Motor insurance ‘black boxes’
Last month, Norwich Union (one of the UK’s largest insurers) opened up its ‘black box’-based car insurance policy (see here) to a wider range of drivers, with a lot of publicity.
Self-enforcing speed limits, and control through deterioration
Interesting discussion at the SABRE roads forum on self-enforcing speed limits in the UK–current regulations mean that if a 20 mph zone can be created through a ‘self-enforcing’ architecture of control (i.e. traffic calming) then it doesn’t legally need any signs to remind drivers, other […]
Controlling Shoppers
The ‘anarchitect’ group, Space Hijackers* have an interesting A-Z of Retail Tricks To Make You Shop – mostly psychological – including a couple of fascinating examples which aren’t well known, e.g. “Supermarkets used to have a trick placing slightly smaller tiles on the floor in […]
Changing norms
Via Steve Portigal’s All this ChittahChattah, a short but succinct article by John King, from the San Francisco Chronicle noting just how quietly certain features have started to become embedded in our environment, most notably (from this blog’s point of view), anti-skateboarding measures, traffic calming […]
BBC: Bram Cohen on network neutrality
This BBC Newsnight story, by Adam Livingstone, about the possibilities of a two-tier internet – ‘BitTorrent: Shedding no tiers’ – has an interesting fictional ‘architectures of control’ example to illustrate the possibilities of price discrimination in networks (see also Control & Networks): “So there’s me […]
An interlock example
It’s been a while since I posted about an architecture of control designed to assist/protect the user rather than to frustrate or intimidate, but just reading a great article about the MG SV-R supercar formerly produced by MG Sports & Racing*, a very simple interlock […]