Piotr Smolnicki

“There’s little need to invest in the comprehensive instrumentation of the urban fabric with sensors, device controllers or informational displays when people themselves are already equipped with something that can act in all of these roles.”
― Adam Greenfield, Against the smart city

“As theoretical physicist Max Planck (1858–1947) noted, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
― Anonymous

“Wider lanes were, obviously, safer than narrower ones. Only they’re not. This time, the problem with the cost-benefit equation wasn’t a faulty premise, but the data itself. In order to test the wider-lanes-are-safer-lanes hypothesis, I studied every crash that occurred on the bridge over a three-year period and marked each one on a map. If that notion had been true, I reasoned, more crashes would have occurred where the lanes were narrowest, that is, at the towers. Just the opposite turned out to be the case. The towers, it turned out, were the safest places on the entire bridge; my explanation is that when lanes get very narrow motorists drive more carefully. Even though every traffic engineer in the country had been taught the gospel of wider lanes, the opposite appeared to be true: “grossly substandard lanes seemed to be the safest of all.” This was the traffic engineering equivalent of saying the Earth was round when the masses knew it was flat. Still, most engineers do not accept this fact.”
― Samuel I. Schwartz, Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars

“quoting John Howard from MIT, “It does not belittle them to say that, just as war is too important to be left to the generals, so highways are too important to leave to the highway engineers.”
― Samuel I. Schwartz, Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars