Mind the Gap

Especially the one between collectivist vision and collectivist reality:

Every traveler to London loves the tube. There is no better way to get around this great city than with a multi-day Underground pass.

But as a tourist, I have always tended to ride the underground during the day, or late at night after a show. For the first time, for a couple of days in a row, I have had to brave the tube and Victoria Station at around 6PM.

As a result of this experience, I have a message for “smart growth” urban density-seeking urban planners: please don’t do this to me. Never have I been so uncomfortable, so claustraphobic, and so ready to go Postal than I was in those tremendous moving crowds. It is a system designed to move a maximum amount of people efficiently, but it does so by forcing human beings to conform to the requirements of the system, rather than the other way around.

Unfortunately, it is exactly this dehumanizing vision that so enraptures modern planners.

Of course, most of these planners are happy to live in a two-tier system: mass service delivery for the masses, and a more convenient service delivery for those who run the system.