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A new invention on Berlin streets, stolen in Asia and sponsered by Siemens.
Please see picture in diary 27.09.02
We have a new invention in Berlin. May be stolen in Asia. The rickshaw. You can see them around of the new centre of Berlin, called “Mitte”. Of course the new Mitte-ricksaw comes along in a modern aerodynamic design. But there is no special technique. It is still a bike basically. But sponsored by Siemens you can read in big letters on the surface (see pict on diary platform). Why Siemens? I asked Sven one of the drivers. Or better say coolie? He is student. He rent his rickshaw on daily contract from a company who owns the rickshaw. Sven did not know why Siemens put his Logo on it. He thought it is just a good place for a logo, moving the whole day trough the new build and renovated Mitte. Around Potsdamer Place, Brandenburger Gate, Reichstag and Friedrichstraße.
Sven started to complain about bad business in late September (lack of tourists) and tried to convince me that his rickshaw is very catchy.
I guess putting there logo on the ricksaw cabin, Siemens has just the right sense for the future. On www.siemens.com you can read: “Wherever you look you’ll find Siemens innovative thinking changing the world.”
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paragraphs - 28/09/2002, webmaster,
berlin
sorry, it was my mistake.
paragraphs - 28/09/2002, webmaster,
berlin
please indicate paragraphs with a linespace for more comfortable reading. thank you.
On foot and wishing for streetcars - 28/09/2002, Harryk@richmag.com
Greetings, Dirk, et al:
Why not battery-powered, funky curvy rickshaws? Guess then they wouldn't be rickshaws but taxis. Bet you there's some kind of tax or money related issue that prevents Siemens from such a bold move. And it's also a unique advertising opportunity since they don't move real fast, the logo is in sight longer.
Where I am writing from, Richmond, Virginia, was the first city in the nation, and perhaps in the world, to operate an efficient electric street car system (1887). It was built over objections in City Council and other officials who thought it would be too dangerous and costly. Yet, by 1899, the regional electric utility, built a hydroelectric plant along the mighty James River specifically to power the trolley system. That builidng is still there and until recently was the center of a skirmish between an outside developer, preservationists and visionaries, who sought something else within the great old building than a franchise restaurant-store opportunity. Many believed, as I do, that local investors and restaurateurs should've been encouraged to go into it while the city not have to spend a dime--which now it must do as an incentive to get the Cordish Company to work its magic.
The streetcars the powerplant ran caused neighborhoods distant from the city center to blossom and circulated folks around who didn't want to walk more than 10 minutes or couldn't get to work otherwise. Then, in 1949, it call came to a screeching halt and the entire system was yanked out and the mahogany and brass cars burned in a Wagnerian pyre. A film survives of the destruction and due to an airpocket, one of the burning cars suddenly righted itself as if realizing it was ablaze and sought instead to dash down a rail.
II.
This ripping out of the street cars was a foolish and short-sighted sacrifice to the automobile. Ever since, the city has debated about reviving the streetcars and for a while in the late 1980s the transit company ran rubber-wheeled ''trolleys" that were actually redressed buses. Now, with a gleaming incredibly expanding convention center (like something out of a 1950s Hammer Studios movie), the reopening of the glorious Beaux Arts Main Street Center and the need to get visitors around to museums and historic sites, we get a light rail system again, with all the improvements in technology that a century's passing has made.
For six years I drove some 30 minutes, more-or-less, one way from my fashionably unfashionable abode in Richmond, Va.'s East End to a suburban West End location. The magazine's offices were shunted into a exurb office building whose only character was derived from being set into a hall and a series of large, old oak trees lining the parking lot left from a long gone farm house's entrance drive. The commute, while not long by many people's standards in these United States, was annoying to me because the nation's passion for archaic hunks of molded plastic and metal representing our neurotic psychosexual desires for success and attention doesn't extend to me. I appreciate older cars (I was raised here on an Edsel Farm--an entirely different story) but as pieces of rolling art. I don't appreciate hundreds of them logjamming to get on an exit ramp at unsafe rates of speed.
III.
The dependence of pre-Civil War Virginia's dependence on slavery is similar to present-day reliance on the automobile. While not all slave owners considered their chattel as unhuman or subhuman, their relation to the system which kept people in bondage, caused a considerable amount of elaborate denial. Slaves needed to be considered more as "things" than people. Chief Justice John Marshall, one of Richmond's greatest residents, ruled in a 1830s case in which a slave owner tried suing a shipping company for 'damages' when a boat carrying his slaves sank and drowned them, that slaves had the volition of "people, not packages." That caused some mighty fanning on the verandahs of the plantations Down South. Marshall is one of the U.S.'s great contributions to the world, but more of him elsewhere.
Patrick Henry, born just outside of Richmond in Hanover County, sensed the irony that he, a champion of liberty, was the owner of slaves “of his own purchase.” He wrote to Robert Pleasants, a prominent Quaker friend (and a direct relative of a 20th century hardware store family), that he was "drawn along by the inconvenience of doing without" chattel labor in a system he "would not, could not justify."
Despite motor culture's negative impacts on cities, countryside, mortality, families and the environment, Americans want their cars. The culture is inextricably tied around making, maintaining and moving cars around and the "inconvenience of doing without" them. Alternatives are derided as impractical and socialistic. The auto culture is held hostage by its own predilections just as Virginians were by slavery. Despite warnings and faint misgivings the "peculiar institution" ultimately ended through wrenching, cataclysmic civil war.
What will it take to wrest our reliance upon speeding metal boxes that kill approximately 65,000 people a year in this country is not clear to me. I hope merely market pressure and innovation will force the choice. I'd prefer that, rather than a descent into a Mad Max-esque existence where, even more than is common, only the strong and petrol-driven survive.
IV.
I, too, am drawn along by the inconvenience of doing without my car. In my job as a journalist, I must frequently drive to the ahistoric outer burbs and tertiary towns of plastic and metal. Richmond, too, because it did undergo a growth spurt due to streetcars, is a bit larger than can be walked if I have a few interivews stacked together.
But, my life has undergone a considerable and positive change due to, first, the magazine moving into a former book bindery much closer to the activity of the city and Fan District, a wonderful collection of late 19th and early 20th century houses, shops, restaurants and commerical spaces that has undergone considerable life improvements due to the proximity of Virginia Commonwealth University and a vital neighborhood organization.
Second, earlier this year, my wife and I moved to the also fashionably unfashionable West of Boulevard South of Cary [WoBSoC] neighborhood. This narrow collection of older houses borders the bustling retail district of Carytown and put me within 18 minutes of walking to my office, and about 25 minutes of the Firehouse Theatre, where my life and heart is intertwined.
V.
Walking is for me an oasis in a clamoring, distracting world. Walking allows me greet people, gaze at architecture features that would be a blur from a car, admire a gardener's touches and I am consistently seeing people and making connections that I'd never get the opportunity otherwise while inside the metal box that pollutes.
The city is different every morning when I go to office and when I leave. The early mornings are best as I make my zigzag way across the neighborhood, my feet crunching on alley gravel, I feel the city coming to life; screen doors slam, people walking their dogs, lady joggers with ponytails swishing, men and women in sharp business suits lining up for coffee at the corner store, if passing some houses I can actually smell breakfast cooking.
At times, I feel as though I should be able to hear, in the distance, the sound of a boat in a harbor, blowing its whistle. Some mornings, when the wind is up, and in the alleyways where I pass stands of bamboo, or see the backyards of a few narrow houses which are adorned, in some cases, by just one huge tree and white picket fence, hear those screen doors whacking shut, looking up at the enclosed sleeping porches and "Florida rooms," I almost expect to feel the tang of salt air assaulting my nose--but Richmond is about two hours miles from the Atlantic beaches.
In the evening, late dusk, amber light striking the old red bricks of the houses, people coming home, shaking off the day, fixing their drinks, picking up their kids. It is a sense of home that you cannot get from angry drives in strange lanes.
Like the Cunard lines used to say about their North Atlantic run, getting there is half the fun.
--HEK
 http://www.fandistrict.org/
Equality: Patrick Henry to Robert Pleasants
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