Take That, America
John Swanson, the guy who designed the railcars for Phoenix’s new light rail line, burns us bigtime in an online interview — it’s pretty funny:
Q: What was most challenging about designing the train?
A: There was a lot of education. When you sit down with a client and people who have been doing this in the industry a long time, a lot of people are bringing the baggage of what they’ve done before with them. . . . In North America, design has not exactly been what you’d call state of the art or progressive. It has always been 10 years behind what Europe has been doing. North American design is real conservative and often based on traditional heavy-rail experience. People bring to the table what they’ve seen in the past, so they’re starting with a system that they commissioned 10 years ago which was already 10 years out of date.
I spent an awful lot of time showing them what’s possible and convincing them that it’s practical. To my great astonishment, I actually managed to get almost everything I wanted to get done. I’m quite optimistic that we’ll be setting a new standard for North American light-rail vehicles. It certainly incorporates a lot of things that nobody else is doing.
Ouch!
Yes, we Americans are pretty much the biggest rednecks in the world.
I imagine Swanson must have been going crazy when he first started sitting down with the good ‘ol boys from down yonder who had probably never been on a light rail or subway system before. Kind of crazy. If you watch some of the YouTube videos of the Phoenix light rail system, you’ll see that that is actually the case - lots of people have never been on any type of rail system at all. Ever. Until the Phoenix system opened, that is.
One thing is for sure, I dig on his railcar design. When you put the Phoenix cars up against our SF Muni Metro cars, you can see what he’s talking about with the ‘10 + 10 years out of date’ stuff. Again - ouch.
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