De-Pave Paradise: Driverless Cars Will Kill the Parking Lot

The sharing ecosystem that driverless cars are going to usher in is going to cut down on the number of cars on the road and as a consequence, will kill the modern parking lot. Cities could look completely different with 80 percent fewer cars on the road, you know. The vision (and that number), put forward by Carlos Ratti, director of MIT‘s Sensible City Lab earlier this week, isn’t new: Autonomous cars and buses will supplement public transit by providing “last mile” transport. People will share rides instead of owning cars, cutting down the number of vehicles needed for mobility in congested cities dramatically. “Your car could give you a lift to work in the morning and then, rather than sitting idle in a […] Read More

2014: De-Pave Paradise: Driverless Cars Will Kill the Parking Lot

The sharing ecosystem that driverless cars are going to usher in is going to cut down on the number of cars on the road and as a consequence, will kill the modern parking lot. Cities could look completely different with 80 percent fewer cars on the road, you know. The vision (and that number), put forward by Carlos Ratti, director of MIT‘s Sensible City Lab earlier this week, isn’t new: Autonomous cars and buses will supplement public transit by providing “last mile” transport. People will share rides instead of owning cars, cutting down the number of vehicles needed for mobility in congested cities dramatically. “Your car could give you a lift to work in the morning and then, rather than sitting idle in a […] Read More

Time and its Discontents

By John Zerzan Anarchy: a journal of desire armed. #39, Winter ’94. The dimension of time seems to be attracting great notice, to judge from the number of recent movies that focus on it, such as Back to the Future, Terminator, Peggy Sue Got Married, etc. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (1989) was a best-seller and became, even more surprisingly, a popular film. Remarkable, in addition to the number of books that deal with time, are the larger number which don’t, really, but which feature the word in their titles nonetheless, such as Virginia Spate’s The Color of Time: Claude Monet (1992). Such references have to do, albeit indirectly, with the sudden, panicky awareness of time, the frightening sense of our being tied to it. Time is increasingly […] Read More