a transparent noise barrier
Most rail noise barriers in Germany are completely covered in graffiti [0], so I wouldn't expect them to remain transparent for more than a few weeks.
[0] https://ga.de/imgs/93/8/5/9/3/0/9/1/9/tok_8596521c60eeaa53ee...
I love this. I read so much criticism here, but noise pollution is a main issue when it comes to railroads in residential zones.
Yes, punctuality is an issue with Deutsche Bahn. No, this doesn’t fix that instantly. But as an organisation you can work on two things at the same time.
This invention is spectacular. I wish more people would work on noise pollution. It makes a huge difference.
Noise reduction with trains is probably best done with improving the trains. I live next to a frequent trainline, so I can say:
There are modern long electric passenger trains, that barely make a noise at all. And then there are old freight trains, that can be heard from miles away. Since I doubt this noise barrier will be placed everywhere except at some very special key areas, I rather want the Bahn to focus on better trains in general.
Rolling stock lives for many decades and replacing it early is cost prohibitive. So I don’t think changing something about the trains is the best option for reducing noise.
Building noise barriers everywhere is probably expensive as well.
You only have to build them were tracks are close to homes.
Yet up-post said "miles" from homes. That means a lot more tha just close to houses. It means miles from towns.
„Can be heard“ is not the problem we’re trying to fix, and no reasonable amount of engineering can fix that . Maybe if you converted everything to maglev and limited speeds to 20mph.
If something can be heard miles away, it usually means it is very loud close by. And this could be reduced.
Indeed, but you don't need to do stuff to tracks that are miles away from homes.
Yes, but in crowded germany, there aren't that many tracks "miles away from homes".
could the old wagons have noise canceling skirts?
For intercity trains it doesn't matter what the propulsion method is though, since every train will make a lot of noise at speed. It's improved with aerodynamics and better wheel / tracks, but ultimately noise will be an issue. Consider also cars where at speed the noise is not due to the engine, but to wheel / road noise.
I live outside the city, so I know the difference in sound at high speed when they pass by. It makes a great difference. Combustion vs electric but also the manufacturing and damping of the wheels etc.
Steelwheel on steel can be very silent.
huh. rubber on asphalt is very loud on high speeds, could steel on steel really be quieter? (for downvoters: this is a real question, I'm not trying to suggest it can't be)
Yes, because rubber and asphalt do not really have a smooth surface unlike polished steel. So all the little bumbs give your car grip, but also cause friction, which is noise.
One of the reasons, why trains are better suited in theory for long distance transport, than trucks. Little friction, so more energy efficient.
Friction produces heat, not sound...
Both. What are the rapidly heated molecules going to do? Create turbulence in the air. That is sound.
We lived fifty yards from a railroad embankment, just where it bridged a street. It was very loud.
you see, why? ;-)
Yes, there are many components to train noise.
I used to live by rails with a small incline, and the diesel locomotives made a loud low noise accelerating uphill from a station, while downhill the trains moved far faster and the engines were quite insignificant compared to noises due to speed: mainly the wheel noise and going over the expansion joints.
What evidence other than your anecdotal evidence that a lightweight passenger train creates less noises then a heavy load freight? I am sure there are some differences in regards to design and age but wouldn't you imagine the majority of the difference is in weight? Passenger trains weigh nothing.
"Passenger trains weigh nothing."
A bit more than that. And old freight trains are loud, even when empty.
Another example, there is a small local passenger train with a combustion engine. Very loud, whether slow or fast. Unlike the mentioned modern electric one from Alstom, who are so silent, that they are dangerous when they pass by a train station and you are too close to the track. You only notice them moments before they wooosh by.
And if you want more than my anecdota of everyday experience, there are tons of youtube videos of different trains to see that trains can be loud, if that was not a manufacturing concern, or silent. Usually, the older the louder.
Sorry I don't do youtube anecdotes.
I think you missed my point, my fault. Passenger trains and individual train cars do indeed weigh considerably less than fully loaded freight. So yes....its not nothing but they are easily double the weight. Leading to my point that when you are 2.5x+ the weight, its a different engineering problem along with an issue of economics.
Freight cars are not loud only because of age but also because of weight and the challenges on both engineering and cost to remedy it. It is hard to compare a passenger train with a freight train, entirely different beasts.
"It is hard to compare a passenger train with a freight train, entirely different beasts."
Hm, for me they are quite simimlar. Just one was build to be more silent mainly for passenger comfort (it is inded nicer in the modern silent ones) and the other for most weight. But you could optimize freight trains for silence as well. All the loud metal scratching noises for example are avoidable, even with more weight. The ones I am talking about were just not build with noise in mind.
Glad you agree with me then. It’s not about just buying new trains.
Just adding my own data: I’ve been living next to a train station for a few years now, I’d say that freight is insanely more noisy than passenger trains, 100% of the time. I live in France btw, so it’s all electric trains.
No argument there. Freight is not designed for comfort or sound.
I wish more people would work on noise pollution
Absolutely agree.
It's one of the most insidious kinds of pollution that has big effects on mental and cardio-vascular health, and is accumulative.
Everything from aircraft, to emergency vehicle sirens, to construction and poor housing, is slowly killing people.
In Europe we've actually made big leaps forward with regulation, building standards for isolation, and abatement laws. But these often go unenforced or even flippantly dismissed and mocked because people don't recognise the harm pathways and effects.
Whenever this topic comes up I am reminded of this (very funny) curmudgeon's screed "On Noise". Although Arthur Schopenhauer was "serious" about this, his acerbic style only gets more funny with time [0].
[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10732/10732-h/10732-h.htm
Contrast with John von Neumann, who "could not work without some noise or at least the possibility of noise. Some of his best work was done in crowded railroad stations and airports, trains, planes, ships, hotel lobbies, lively cocktail parties or even among a bunch of shrieking very minor minors whooping it up."
I’m more impressed if his best sleep was done in noise areas.
I think this is the classic introvert/extravert axis.
Introverts are chronically overstimulated, and seek to reduce stimulation.
Extraverts are under-stimulated, and therefore work better with even more stimulation.
A very good point. I find myself helped by having the radio (quietly) on for certain tasks. But for others, only silence will do. I'd love to see more modern and detailed cognitive studies of this sort of thing. Many years ago my audio/acoustics students did some bachelors final projects on "distraction" (focus, concentration and annoyance of noises) and that was interesting. Some people scored higher on SATS style tests while pumped up on drum'n'bass, others were totally destroyed by it, IIRC the most devastating soundtrack was random cartoon SFX :)
People can be different
Some progress in Europe yes but the harms are still far from getting enough attention and policy responses. One problem is that there's so little organized effort against noise pollution, there's need for a movement with grass root organizations that puts sustained pressure on this issue.
Also, the noise pollution regulations that are in place exempt trains.
It's all about whip cracking! Who knew that was such a thing. Like the mindless honking horn of the past. Thanks for sharing :)
Unfortunately, where I live, more and more people have dogs. It's now a risky proposition to live in an apartment in a closed city block, because it's almost guaranteed that someone will leave a dog barking outside for hours.
This is an international site and I think people don’t understand just how big Deutsche Bahn’s problems with delays are and how incredible dissatisfied its customers are. The situation with DB is really unique compared to its neighbors in any direction.
While the tech described probably has merits, anyone who has been near DB lately would instinctively go: why are you doing this when you cannot get the basics right?
DB is a gigantic organization. Do you think it is reasonable for them not not make progress or advancement in anything as long as the ICE delays are not fixed? They can never change a train interior, improve the food menu, or 1000s of other things? This is a totally unreasonable suggestion.
The reason for DB reliability problem is 50+ years of infrastructure neglect, fixing it will not be improved by shutting down every other group at DB.
Personally having traveled threw Germany many times, its a mostly amazing. Yes sometimes trains are late sometimes, but the trains themselves are great and travel in them is a joy.
I think what Germans don't understand is how good they have it compared to many places in the world.
Someone turned on the DB signal[1] so here I am.
sometimes trains are late sometimes, but the trains themselves are great and travel in them is a joy.
"Sometimes"? Let me tell you about my friends in the German area of NRW. The one that commutes far away regularly gets stranded on the way because the trains arrive so late that there's no connection home till the next day and because, of the two lines that take her home, one is closed. The second one commutes within the city and has decided to buy a car because the SBahn was closed for over a year with a repair that took longer than planned. The other two don't even consider trains in their daily life. My GF at the time had a year-long line closure, we moved to a place with a year-long train closure and I'm living now in an area where my regular train won't run until November (assuming no delay).
Yes, DB trains are pretty nice on the inside. Quiet, too. But what good is a nice train that doesn't take me to where I need to go, or at all? If anything, I think those that don't rely on the trains daily fail to realize how bad the situation is. Ten minutes delay on the one ICE trip on holidays? Sure, whatever, it's fine. Ten minutes delay on a five minutes connection to work? Enjoy wasting half an hour of your life every other day, like I did during my studies.
Switzerland has cut DB off [2] and Scottish fans received warnings [3] about how unreliable German trains are. It is bad.
[1] The DB signal is like the bat signal for comments downplaying DBs issues, but you often don't see it because there's a "Signalstörung" and it shows up an hour later. They usually apologize for the inconvenience.
[2] https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/german-expat-news/deutsch...
[3] https://www.indonewyork.com/m/science/european-football-cham...
Look I understand all that. And Im all for fixing it. But its still objectivly better then in many other places. Rail overall in Germany is great. ICE are the weakness for sure. But its still much better then many other places in the world.
Under normal circumstances I would agree with you. But is DB and they really need to go all hands on deck and fix their reliability problem.
But they had it better only a few years ago. DB has really crumbled.
I think what Germans don't understand is how good they have it compared to many places in the world.
They should care about how other transportation systems are around the world as a coping mechanism?
I mostly travel around DACH region + Nordics/Spain/Netherlands and sometimes the contrast in terms of reliability, maintenance, and integration makes me feel that Germany is 10+ years back in time.
While the tech described probably has merits, anyone who has been near DB lately would instinctively go: why are you doing this when you cannot get the basics right?
DB is facing the problem that the network needs substantial overhaul - the problem is that when you do a large-scale renovation, you gotta adhere to current code, not late 19th century code (which is when quite a few of the railways had been built). And that means noise protection anywhere where the tracks are adjacent to residential areas, but NIMBYs will launch intensive protests if they get presented with a massive wall of steel in their backyard - understandably so, these things are an eyesore.
So, it's a prerequisite for DB to tackle its problems... because most of them are caused by the aged infrastructure. Right next to Munich, on the route to Mühldorf, there are still mechanical switches in place, built around 1900 [1].
[1] https://www.merkur.de/lokales/erding/der-bahnausbau-nach-mue...
And that means noise protection anywhere where the tracks are adjacent to residential areas, but NIMBYs will launch intensive protests if they get presented with a massive wall of steel in their backyard - understandably so, these things are an eyesore.
Though to some extent people got themselves into that situation of their own fault by constantly screaming about noise and nothing else – politicians listened and tightened up the rules for noise protection, with the result that legally noise protection is now weighted 100 % and visual aesthetics 0 %. Whereas to my knowledge the Swiss still take a somewhat more balanced approach, and don't completely disregard the visual impact of noise protection barriers.
Though to some extent people got themselves into that situation of their own fault by constantly screaming about noise and nothing else
It's not like they don't have a point... a lot of former switchyards were converted to residential use in the early 90s and ever since then, but of course the rail tracks that these yards were laid adjacent to still kept operating, and freight trains make an awful lot of noise.
Silent-brake requirements (basically, composite brake pads instead of the old metal-on-metal pads) have eased the noise emissions quite a bit, but damages in the wheels ("flat spots") or in axles still cause persistent and annoying noise. Unfortunately, 99.999% of freight cars are still dumb as fuck and have no sensorics on-board to detect issues, so it takes a loooong time until such cars are taken out of service. Maybe with the adoption of the new automated couplers ("DAK") that are in research at the moment, this will change as all cars have to be retrofit with electricity and smart components anyway so it is cheap to install monitoring on wheels and axles, but that will take another few years.
Additionally, the tracks themselves can cause ungodly amounts of noise due to neglected maintenance. Where rails aren't (properly!) welded together, they cause a bump noise, switches need to be properly lubricated and the wheels need lubrication as well to prevent those horrible screeches... but DB hasn't had the money to properly take care of that for decades now.
Whereas to my knowledge the Swiss still take a somewhat more balanced approach, and don't completely disregard the visual impact of noise protection barriers.
The Swiss have more silent rail in the first place. Lots of rail-side detectors to check for damages on passing rail cars (an absolute necessity due to the high amount of tunnels, you do not want a train de-railing due to an axle or wheel issue inside a tunnel and catching fire) and about 5-6x the amount per capita invested into their rail system every year.
On top of that, Germany has to deal with rail cars (and trucks) from across the entirety of Europe passing through it - basically all transport from the Dutch and German sea ports towards Eastern and South Eastern Europe goes through Germany, the Swiss have to deal with far less traffic than we do.
It’s also gotten so expensive and unreliable that some people I’ve spoken to are just driving again instead whereas years ago they would have always gone by train. I can’t help but feel that the weird ownership model contributes to this and the whole company should just be properly nationalised.
Hell I used to bike 20km to work to avoid it
I fly to germany when I can, or take any other operator's train. I am way, way more familiar with Karlsruhe than I would like to be.
Or basic information about when and where a train comes late or not at all. Sometimes the information is there and correct - sometimes not at all or is wrong and 100+ people waiting for a train that is never coming. Experienced that way too often. But hey, the Bahn management achieved all their self proclaimed targets (non of them related to reliable trains) so they surely deserved their fat bonus.
No other railway has to deal with with so much traffic on infrastructure that is so old and out of step with the demands placed on it.
People tend to obsess over DB and it's management, but they only control maintenance. All decisions about renovations are made by the government.
So what do you want?
- Wait years for large renovation projects on all major routes, including lengthy closures for work(the current strategy)
- Cancel 25-50%% of all trains permanently, if then people can't travel because it's impossible to get through the door, tough
The latter one is the French solution - just run very few trains, regardless of demand. The last time I wanted to travel by train in France, I simply couldn't because all trains on the route for the entire day were 100% sold out.
Then there's Spain. The last time I wanted to travel there, I didn't because the first(!) train of the day left at lunchtime and arrived mid-afternoon.
My hart jumped when I initially thought that they had implemented an idea that I had once.
Turns out MetaWindow is not an augmented reality display in the train's window, where one can read information on the scenery that one passes through while traveling. What is that city in the distance? When was that church built? How many cows are in that meadow? Stuff one has to know.
I don't think this would make looking out of (or at) the window as enjoyable as with a normal transparent window.
Unless you mean that there would still be a normal window, too?
The idea is to install only a few of these, possibly only in designated railway carriages. It would make for a great conversation starter, which might be an improvement over people staring at their own screens.
Ah, I see. I thought the idea might be to replace windows completely, like on the fridge doors of some supermarkets.
Also, the envisioned displays are transparent, as in science fiction movies.
Edit: partially transparent, obviously.
A public institution doing this, fine fire away. A private train company? This will be an obnoxious video ad space.
DB is still a 100% state-owned enterprise; it’s “private” in name only.
Sort of like Singapore Airlines, which is listed but majority-owned by one of Singapore’s sovereign wealth funds.
A large fraction of trains and buses in Europe are already equipped with large full-color monitors. They are primarily used to show trip progress, potential transfers, and basic informative messages. Ads are rare, and are usually static images advertising the transport company's own products.
Just sit at home and stare at a video of the scenery at that point.
The (highly recommended) Belgian television series "In de gloria" [1] had a teleshopping sketch in which one could order VHS tapes of their favorite tracks. The target audience was pensioners who had traveled the same boring track for years.
The irony is that some years later a television channel started broadcasting railway videos all day long.
I had to read like 5 times to understand that "favorite tracks" is the train tracks haha.
Some aircraft designers have proposed doing this, because a screen can be lighter than a pressure resistant window.
I get the idea but I’m glad I can look through windows without being distracted by animated digital information
This historical fact is brought to you by McDonalds™! flash flash flash
A startup with wrong product focus would be insolvent in a few months. Deutsche Bahn can rot for decades spending money on technology that would not make any difference when a quarter of its trains is delayed or cancelled.
Care to explain how trains being delayed or canceled is related to a new technology reducing sound pollution?
The article posits it could make approvals to build new rail lines near noise sensitive areas easier.
The prospects of building something new with this tech are very distant. Just to get an approval for construction in Germany it can take years and then there will be traditional delays along the way. We won’t see it in any meaningful quantities before 2030-2040 - whether this project will survive until then is an open question. The acute service problem on the other side could be addressed by simpler means like investment in IT and better internal processes. My last trip was cancelled one hour in advance, despite that they knew it couldn’t happen days before. I had to visit their travel center, because the app couldn’t apply my seat reservation to alternative route, and that experience was awful. It is very hard to understand why some tech that may never see the light due to bureaucratic hurdles deserves investment at the time where service doesn’t show any signs of improvement.
A decades old national train company is about as far from a startup as can be. That's a really strange comment.
Deutsche Bahn is not a startup, but provides public service. Are the Autobahns profitable?
That they have problems with service quality does not mean other problems should not be addressed. Noise pollution has massive health consequences for those living in affected areas.
My understanding is that some of the mitigation for delayed or cancelled trains will involve new construction, and that might be facilitated by reducing the noise impact.
Terrible press release. The first picture shows an _intransparent_ barrier. Is that a before after picture? And what is "meta technology"?
My guess is it's related to "metamaterials", which are materials engineered to have interesting properties by including structures smaller than the wavelength of whatever is going through them (sound, microwaves, even visible light if the structures are fine enough). There is quite a lot of research into sound-absorbing yet porous acoustic metamaterials.
(Related, but maybe not technically a metamaterial, previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38678415 )
Sounds like it, yes. I remember negative refractive index materials, now that I think about it. The press release should not invent its own term (meta technology) just to sound fancy. Just say meta material.
This [1] is the official press release by Deutsche Bahn. I wanted to post this instead, but it is in German.
[1] https://www.deutschebahn.com/de/presse/pressestart_zentrales...
Thanks that one is better! At least it says: "m Bild: Herkömmliche Lärmschutzwand und MetaWindow im Vergleich (Visualisierung)"
They should just use the new picture and not make the previous way of doing things so central. If one just looks at the picture it could appear as if the wall changes translucency dynamically.
This is such a pet peeve for me too, images in articles should always have captions!
Seems to be a before picture. There's an "after" picture further down the page. Meta technology maybe because it's not actual train related tech, but meta tech related to trains.
Now could Deutsche Bahn please also invest in some actual infrastructure, trains and make them go on time?
That‘d be great! Thanks.
Deutsche Bahn pays for the usage of the infrastructure just like any other company using it (e.g. Flix or any of the regional carriers). The infrastructure is the responsibility of DV InfraGO (formerly DB Netz).
What are you talking about? DB Infrago is a subsidiary of DB and is as such governed by the board. The fact that they are separate entities has purely corporate legal reasons.
Deutsche Bahn still pays for the usage of the infrastructure and has nothing to do with maintaining it.
They are separate entities because it's mandated by the EU, the idea being it should promote competition in rail transport.
Now could Deutsche Bahn please also invest in some actual infrastructure
The main "problem" currently is not that they modernise too little, but too much.
For the last 5 years or so, during the summer months I need to add one or two hours to nearly all my connections because of construction work that slowly seems to move from cities into the rural regions (I'm not complaining though, no matter what the Bahn does, travellers will be affected one way or another, and I bet most of the delays you are seeing are caused by construction work somewhere at the 'leaf nodes' of the network).
Of course a couple of decades of the "kaputtsparen" mentality didn't help, it would obviously have been better to spread out the required maintenance work and modernization over those decades of infrastructure negligence.
Yes that’s why track redundancies are important. And not just for construction. Local and Intercity connections would benefit as well.
In the article they say that one of their main motivations for this is that they hope it will speed up the approval times for train routes, because it'll lessen the noise and visual complaints.
This article goes into a little more detail: https://www.heise.de/en/news/MetaWindow-Laermschutz-an-Gleis...
And the PhotonicVibes site is here: https://phononic-vibes.com/metawindow-for-railway/
Here is a demo video for a meta material made by them: https://youtu.be/NElK8qKRrBU?si=CfBjUESlu_XUvnn_
That's a really cool demo!
Weirdly it says "up to 10dB" attenuation.. which isn't actually that much at all. 10dB would be a halving/doubling. I'm not sure how the apparent loudness / change in waveform amplitude display is so great, considering that actual hard stat...
3 dB would be halving/doubling. With 10 dB, you would get a ratio of 10x.
Honestly, that demo alone would be enough to get funding at any demo day, really cool stuff.
The quality of my life would be better improved through public transportation and these sound absorbers than almost any app I use. Hooray for basic infrastructure.
I would go further, and say that public transport improves quality of life far more than sound absorbers for public transport do. It's nice that these things exist, but we should be spending money on more public transport, not necessarily on making public transport more palatable to people. I realise that's an unfortunate necessity, but it's clear that people pushing back on public transport just haven't seen its benefits enough.
I think you're missing the point.
Many public transport projects are dependant on the community around allowing them to be built, mitigating the impact of said projects allows more public transport to be built.
E.g. a tram doesn't go very fast and is also pretty quiet. A train usually runs a lot faster, and causes more noise pollution.
If you can mitigate the noise, then you'll probably be able to build the railway instead of the tram. Allowing more capacity, higher speeds, and a better public transport solution.
I don't think that is really true. In principle, a slower train is quieter, but a tram usually has very tight curves in lots of places, resulting in screeching, as opposed to a (modern) mainline railway which has much wider curves. A tram also needs to run closer to the homes, to still be attractive despite the lower speeds, increasing noise levels at the homes and also requiring more road space near people. Meanwhile a mainline train is much faster, thus can run farther away from home as the access penalty is offset by higher speeds. Low-floor trams also often feature more screeching due to the inability to use conventional bogies.
Anecdotally, in germany, projects to (re-)build trams in cities often fail over local protests, while rail reactivations don't usually succumb to that. HSR does get a lot of local protests, but (IMHO) not really because of the noise and fails less often compared to trams.
There is a balance to be struck though. For example where I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, there are millions of people whose commutes are objectively faster and cheaper on the BART train, but the vast majority of commuters still choose to drive a personal vehicle over a congested and expensive toll bridge. The primary reason for this is that the train is just so damn unpleasant for a multitude of reasons (including noise) that most people find the extra wasted hour worth it to them to have a more pleasant commute. Whenever the agency that runs the train proposes spending more money on things like human excrement abatement, noise abatement, etc. people complain and protest about mismanagement and money wasting, so nothing ever gets better and the infrastructure continues to be underutilized.
A semi-related surprising fact I only learned recently is that the ultra-long nose of Japanese bullet trains is not for aerodynamics, but to reduce noise. Specifically, "tunnel boom."
Random source: https://www.jrpass.com/blog/why-shinkansen-bullet-trains-no-...
this is only a problem in japan because the shinkansen is the oldest high speed network in existence.
new train tunnels built in Europe are wider and flare out at the end so that there isn't a tunnel boom.
Fascinating, and now I learned another new thing! Thank you for sharing.
yup. for a more detailed explanation, there's this segment of the article:
Basically what happens is when a train enters a tunnel at high speed, the air in front of it is compressed and does not have enough time to flow past the trains body. When all released at once, the pressure causes a shockwave that goes boom!
This is basically a very rudimentary version of the piston effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piston_effect
Ok, now they have an excuse to employ a crew to keep them clean like any other window-like product... instead of it just being a wall? I don't get it.
There's maintenance management fees to be earned!
I don't know about how this stuff works, but as a matter of fact there's management bonuses for new development for DB execs, whereas nothing is gained from plain bleak maintenance. So guess why many major train stations in Germany have been undergoing major, multi-billion relocations and redesigns (often with worse throughput metrics).
Complaining about train noise is a national hobby, so the legal rules for noise protection have been significantly tightened up in the last decades and now multi-metre high noise barriers (up to four, five or even six metres) are a legal requirement. The end result being that people still complain about fear of more noise when infrastructure upgrades are proposed, but new they complain about visual blight, too. Even where local property owners would be okay with somewhat more elevated noise levels (or having sound-insulating windows installed) in return for lower noise barriers, the infrastructure operator is legally required to build the full-height wall even against the wishes of the adjacent property owners/local municipalities.
In the absence of national sensibilities on noise returning to e.g. Swiss levels (where AFAIK balancing noise protection vs. its visual impacts actually is an official planning goal), less ugly noise protection barriers are a worthwhile development. (They've also managed to make freight train noticeably quieter by requiring composite-materials brake shoes, which don't roughen up the wheel treads so much, but beyond that there aren't many more easy gains in noise reduction to be had…)
Best way to make a city look crappier is replace a dirty wall with a dirty window
MetaWindow, a transparent noise barrier boasting unparalleled sound-absorbing capabilities
This is about a physical product. Not a software window; and unrelated to Meta, of Facebook and Instagram fame.
Nobody outside of tech circles actually cares about how facebook's parent company is called this month. It's still facebook, it's still google, it's still twitter. Not meta, alphabet or x.
This is a tech website though. It’s not unusual to see Facebook’s parent company mentioned in a hn submission’s title.
Ask the typical DB customer if they want their trains to be on time or more silent and I promise you, the answer will not be surprising.
Both problems are unrelated
This project was probably very cheap compared to the cost of fixing the Deutsche Bahn's horrendous problems with delays and cancelations.
The Deutsche Bahn has literally decades of maintenance to catch up on. Even if the Deutsche Bahn does everything right from now on, the next decade is going to be very painful for German train commuters.
They specifically mention railway noise. I wonder whether there's something special about railways, or whether it would work for other noise as well? Especially roads with cars on them?
I think there are noises specific to railways. And from what I believe this "MetaWindow" targets relevant frequencies. However, I am sure this also works for the frequencies generated by car traffic.
At least the linked youtube video in this comment [1] does not mention anything about frequencies.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40384778
EDIT: I was wrong about the video. There is _no mention_ about frequencies.
Railways are unique because they go right through the densest part of towns and cities. For them to be most effective, they should be within biking or ideally even walking distance of a significant number of homes and offices. If you place a railway on the outskirts of a city, nobody is going to use it. This means you're going to have to use very significant noise reduction to keep the area livable.
Highways care a lot less about location. Place them a one-minute car ride outside the city, and its noise becomes basically irrelevant. The city grows and swallows the highway? Just place an industrial area or mall between the highway and any homes. When homes aren't an arms-length away you can get away with far more primitive noise reduction.
_This new system integrates meta technology_
What is meta technology?
I assume it refers to metamaterials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamaterial
They don't give any numbers on the amount of resistances to the expansion of the infrastructure, based on noise alone.
This reads like a "we did a cool thing" but without qualitatively demonstrating the merits for the need.
Qualitatively speaking it definitely is a problem in Germany. DB planning rules used to include a guidance note that noise barriers higher than the typical lower edge of a train window should only be considered in exceptional cases. Two or three decades of constant complaints about train noise have led to legal rules and planning regulations having been significantly tightened up and now mean that four, five or even six metre high noise barriers are nothing out of the ordinary for new-built infrastructure.
The result being that people still complain about fear of more noise when new infrastructure is proposed (despite freight trains having gotten quieter, too, due to the introduction of new brake shoes), but now they're also complaining about the visual blight, too. (And nobody cares about the views of the train passengers.)
Meanwhile in Switzerland for example the current state is that balancing noise reduction needs vs. the visual impact of noise barriers still is an official planning goal because apparently people haven't been screaming so loudly about noise and nothing else, so the Swiss tend to build fewer and lower noise barriers even today.
(Also purely empirically from my visits there, the UK also doesn't seem to build as many and as high noise barriers, even on infrastructure that has been newly built or rebuilt within the last two decades.)
Cool, one day CP will install those along their tracks and my high-rise will shake silently every time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMD_F59PH#F59PHI departs from the station.
I think the reason DB introduces this kind of measures over the obviously superior first steps like "building a quieter train" is this: Walls are paid for by the state or community annoyed by the train noise. New or improved trains would be paid for by DB (a nominally private company).
Which is why stuff like "putting quieter brakes on freight trains that don't sound like fingernails on a chalk board" will take at least 20 more years if it will happen at all.
Or you could follow the way of thinking practiced by planners in London:
Analyst: "We could really use a bridge here..." Decision Maker: "I hear you, let's dig a tunnel!"
germany gets this while NYC still has to grit our teeth and plug our ears for the rickety 100+ year old metal elevated structures with lead paint
Lots of negative comments on this. I, for one, am glad to see work that supports better transport infrastructure while not being insanely ugly like a lot of transport infrastructure is (like the giant concrete birds nests of highways in US cities). I want to live in cities that are visually appealing.
Now the trains have to actually arrive and depart within, say, 5 minutes of the planned time, and we will be in the 21st century finally.
I mean it's cool, but how about getting some basics like punctuality and cleanliness right first.
Okay it's clear-ish...but where's the noise level sample vs. the alternatives?
edit: I did find this cool demo of a similar product of theirs, but seems to be nothing more online about the noise barrier.
I can't find it any more but I read a paper decades ago on the sound modulation effects of different plants, at scale and how designed planting around motorways can help reduce local resident impact.
Its design minimizes visual disruptions,
It's kind of laughable to see this giant, pristine pane of glass in the middle of a city on a train track. The photographer must have come the first day, because by the next this will be covered in graffiti. Which, presumably, won't at all affect its function as a sound barrier, but it think graffiti on a solid background is less grating than graffiti on a clear background will be.
I cannot be the only person that read this as “MetalWindow”, a.k.a. “walls”.
Now they just need to be on time.
How about replacing antiques with modern trains? Repairing tracks? Electrifying all tracks? Those steps would not only reduce noise, but actually make their service usable.
A train does not make noise if it's cancelled
The startup behind the tech: - https://phononic-vibes.com/about-us/
If you dive into the graffiti scene a bit you will start to appreciate all those graffitis. The story behind some of them is super interesting. There is a lot of "competition", "collaboration", and group dynamics involved. It is truly fascinating. I was living in Cologne (Ehrenfeld) for a while in a place with awesome graffiti and every weekend there were people taking pictures "collecting" and documenting the graffiti.
Edit: Not "all of those" but "many of those"
I can also start a subculture about competing for the best type of bank robberies, doesn't make bank robberies a nice thing to do. But yeah fascinating
When graffiti is done on public owned objects or walls, it's impact is merely aesthetic. Not like a bank robbery.
And I'd rather see graffiti, even if I find some ugly, than ads all over. And there's way more public ads anywhere than graffiti. I think local urban expressions like stickers and graffiti is pretty cool. The mainstream prefers ads I guess.
The impact isn't merely aesthetic.
For one thing, it can be costly to remove graffiti. And when it's on publicly owned property, who pays for that removal? The public, of course.
If, for example, a train is the target of graffiti, it will often need to be taken out of service. This, then, results in a degraded service to the travelling public.
Furthermore, graffiti artists often put themselves in dangerous situations. Numerous people have been seriously injured or killed when doing graffiti. That not only sucks for them, but also has various knock-on effects.
Some graffiti art can look really nice, whereas others have little artistic value. Regardless, the negative impacts of graffiti should not be overlooked.
The cost incurred here is a choice the owner makes when they disagree with the aesthetics of the graffiti.
But that cost is not paid by the person creating the graffiti. The owner has a cost forced on them.
The aesthetic argument here is trying to validate a violent act. A lot of graffiti is beautiful, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay.
What violent act?
Modifying someone else's property, or public property, without consent.
This is a fascinating comment. How would you define violence?
They definitely have a very hyper-capitalist definition of violence. It's sort of pathetic how much people somehow care about the property of the ruling classes that they will never own.
I am not at all a hyper capitalist. I would even consider myself anti-capitalist.
But imposing your own preferred art on public commons is a (minor) form of violence, in any economic system. Especially when you do so with paints of questionable chemical composition, or with images/text that is likely to offend.
I would also say that doing the same thing even on your own property can be reprehensible, as long as it is visible to the public. Just because you own a house doesn't mean you should be able to make it look however you want on the outside, especially not in ways that are actively unpleasant to those of us that need to walk by it every day: we the public should have a say in how your private property looks. A most anti-capitalist position.
Think about it this way, if we all owned all public structures, then we all have equal rights to paint it just as much as you have the right to paint your own house. The graffiti artist has the right to paint it, you have the right to hate it. You have the right to paint something they hate, or paint over their stuff. Nobody should be being prosecuted by a higher power for a minor disagreement about artistic taste. Unless someone is full on painting swastika-ridden explicitly racist murals or sth of that nature, it's not violent. The only reason the ruling class wants you to think it's violent is because property is important to them as a source of power, and therefore must be god above all under this system.
No, this is completely wrong. If we own a public structure together, then neither of us has any right to change it except if we both agree to the change. You can't take individual actions on shared goods: you need a process of attaining the consensus of everyone involved (such as voting).
I wonder how you think this works in practice. Do you think the public structures we have and how they look are not just basically whatever aesthetic taste the people we elect have?
Sometimes councils put up several designs to be voted on by the public, but they will largely follow a bunch of design norms that will be whatever the architecture firms they hired think is trendy, for example.
And how many election programs even talk about artistic taste? That's not why we elect people, and making that an election point would be a distraction from real problems, so why not let society be and if people are more artistic in one area and make more public art, let them make it?
While I agree that public control of public buildings is relatively vague in modern times, it still exists to some extent. If a mayor wanted to tear down a beloved building and replaced with an ugly one (as judged by the esthetics of the public in the town), they would face significant backlash and may lose a future election based on that: people in certain places care a lot about the look of their town (and in others, only vaguely).
Even beyond electoral politics, many cities have public NGOs and other organizations that seek to shape this sort of thing from an early stage through various legal means (and sometimes even through civil disobedience, like tying themselves to a building to protect it). If they are broadly in line with the tastes of the people, they tend to thrive; if they are not, they will often die out.
And yes, in certain cities and towns, people actually like the way grafitti looks and are bothered when someone goes and whitewashes a beautifully painted wall. That's perfectly fine, and is a part of the culture and esthetics of that place (and here, destroying the art that people enjoy is an act of violence against the public and/or the artist). But it's also perfectly fine for other places to want neat walls with clean textures, and marring their beautiful walls with grafitti would be an act that goes against the public.
I concur that sounds really good. That's not how it works now though, which is why graffiti artists reclaim the space as the people that use it. Right now, the space is decided by people in power and with money. Rarely do we ever get real say about how it looks, and we never will. If we did own the public spaces and could make these decisions together, then I'd be down for that, and graffiti probably wouldn't be the same sort of subculture that it is.
As opposed to people who define words written on the internet and not even directed at a specific person as "violence"?
What are you referring to? I don't see that in this discussion.
I never said anything like that so why are you implying that I am? Nice strawman bro, I'm not crying over things people say to me on the internet. Anyone who sees a mean comment on the internet that doesn't actually threaten or incite violence as violence is just as pathetic as people who think art they don't like on a wall is violence. Can you please argue against points I actually made, thank you.
If I smash your car, is that violence or not? What if I take care to smash your car only so much that it will still be able carry you to work and back?
What if I apply a protective coating to an unprotected wall, using my own money to supply the materials?
Same as adjusting other people's tire pressure: perfectly fine if you have explicit approval.
Definitely not violence though?
You mean like how poisoning isn't violence?
Not. Was this supposed to be a hard question?
not op but violence is traditionally defined as physical force to cause harm. but now there's financial violence and social media violence and here the message in the graffiti causes harm. eg die techy scum. it's not physically violent, but some think it's helpful to frame it as a non-physical violent act because of the expression of dislike for a particular community. it doesn't cause any grave harm, but everyone who walks by and sees it is affected by it.
Violence has always extended beyond pure physical force. Calling someone a slur to their face, or spitting in their food, or defacing their clothes or home (especially with hateful symbols) would be recognized as forms of violence at many times in history way before modern times. Holding someone at knife or gun point is also very clearly a violent act.
We're talking about public property here. Many authorities have a 'no tolerance' approach to graffiti. Even if it looks nice, it will be removed. There is a belief that removing graffiti quickly discourages it. If graffiti artists find that their work won't last long, they may be discouraged from doing it in the first place. Aesthetics doesn't really come into it.
It's the other way around, if it isn't quickly removed it will be encouraged: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
That's not really the other way around. That's 2 ways of stating basically the same thing.
I'll have to disagree... the goal is to stop encouragement, rather than to start discouragement - stopping acceleration is not the same as starting deceleration.
When it comes to acceleration, it's possible to define 0 acceleration. So we can define acceleration and deceleration in relation to that 0 acceleration.
What is 0 encouragement/discouragement? It's not obviously easy to define. One definition is doing nothing = 0 encouragement and 0 discouragement. By that definition, not removing graffiti (aka doing nothing) is not encouragement, it's simply doing nothing: a lack of encouragement and a lack of discouragement.
Because we haven't agreed on a definition of 0 encouragement and 0 discouragement, saying "decreasing encouragement" and "increasing discouragement" mean basically the same thing.
To add a bit.. the gist of the broken windows theory is that the world (environment) evolves even without you or me. A broken window is an action demanding a reaction. If no reaction is taken, "doing nothing" will be read as the reaction. I think that's fascinating!
There's also the same analogy to refactoring in software engineering. If a project is well maintained with every incoming feature, then a big refactor epic won't be necessary.
"The stop of encouragement will prevent the start of discouragement" doesn't mean that the reverse is true ("the start of discouragement will promote the stop of encouragement"). So it isn't stating basically the same thing.
The big irony in social studies with the broken windows theory is that discouragement often feels easier to practice than maintenance to an outsider. Or, in analogy to software engineering, a one time big refactor feels easier to do than continuous maintenance, as all the work actually included in a refactor (team syncing, product without features etc.) is mostly overlooked during the development if maintenance is not well practiced.
"Doing nothing" results in encouragement in the broken windows theory:
In my understanding stopping encouragement is maintenance work, while starting discouragement is social work. And by doing the (simpler) maintenance work a (costlier) social work won't be necessary.I dunno about the entirety of Germany, but I don't think I've ever seen graffiti removed in Berlin, and there's a ton of it. It's fine, nobody cares.
Graffiti on trains in Berlin is very quickly removed.
Haha thanks for the light chuckle as I wake up
Is it fine or public just fed up constantly removing it?
Ephemerality is known, understood, accepted, and even leveraged in art. I don't think this is an efficient deterrent, or even a deterrent at all.
Nice.
I'm going to spray a can of paint on your car and explain to judge that "it's thuuuomas's problem now, since he disagrees with aesthetics of his new car color".
No, the owner or rather operator (if the carriage is publicly owned) might be legally obliged to remove it just for the carriage identification to be clearly visible, the windows to be clean etc.
This has got to be the most insane comment in this thread.
“Hey, I’m going to hold a gun to your head. If you don’t give me $100 I’ll shoot you. Remember though that the cost incurred here is a choice you’re going to make if you disagree with my actions. I can’t truly force you to do anything…”
Why does this comment read like it's written by AI?
Observations affect the observer?
Because the only other group of people who use transitions so often are third graders making sentences from templates.
Possibly because AI was trained on humans.
The "furthermore" and the "Regardless, the negative impacts of graffiti should not be overlooked" do feel a bit AI-esq these days, but it was only yesterday that I myself felt like I was writing like an LLM by responding to a "you misunderstood, I meant …" with an "ah, now I understand": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40380692
Why remove it?
Because 99.99% of it is shit and the rest is barely above shit.
They're very cool until it's your apartment or commercial building, and you have to clean it up - because let's face it, for every clever graffiti, there are fifty that are just tags, swear words, or worse.
And your framing is odd - can you only dislike one of these things? Graffiti or ads? There are successful movements to rid cities and scenic areas of ads, or to tone them down.
I solved this problem by contracting an artist to put a painting on the wall of my house. Sprayers are artists, they won't paint over it.
I've seen a lot of tags put on top of pretty nice-looking murals, many sprayers won't care.
Tags always looks better on an empty wall.
but not better than the empty wall
Of course. As opposed to over other grafittis I mean.
If only. The murals under canal bridges in Worcester (UK) have been defaced beyond recognition with tags.
Fifty? More like fifty thousands.
in toronto it's embraced to the extent that in areas where it's common, there's funding by businesses and even residences or local gov commission it or permit it and nice work by local artists is less likely to get tagged or covered. there's at least some upside to cooperating when there's a culture to it (to some extent)
Private individuals should not get to decide what public building aesthetic I need to accept
Who are these public individuals that can decide? All choices are done by some person.
Yes of course they should. Youth gangs on the other hand shouldn't.
I don't think the reason that ads are allowed is because people prefer them.
The reason is that whoever puts an ad does so on their own property. You don't put an ad on someone else's wall against their will.
Graffiti, on the other hand, is usually done without authorization from the owner of the wall or facade being graffitied.
People do this all the time…
How about neither?
This debate over graffiti aesthetics seems like it’s semantically adjacent to the rift between political left and right. And so: Have you seen Japanese graffiti? Compared to Japanese ads? Average tokyo ads/grafs are at least more aesthetic than the median in Western cities. With graffiti strangely better than ads by most measures. No , it’s not eye of the beholder, more like the soul of the despoiler.
EDIT, for the mods, artificial or not: Japanese spoliation aesthetics are a safe-ish counterexample for rightwingers as they localize the field of contention to the high local effort-high social payoff quadrant, where existing metrics are not questioned. You really want to constrain debate to the low local effort-high global payoff quadrant, which triggers all stripes, but are most relevant for humanity. Consider a GPT7 that requires only 10 dollars to train. Its worthwhile to think about but scares the bejeezus out of most folks.
Analogously, left wingers want to move the debate to low local effort-low global cost quadrant, because it seems straightforward to redefine cost metrics… moat and bailey dynamics really, quite curious.
One bad does not legitimize another.
Most of the graffiti I see is on bridges over the freeway. This is distracting while driving, especially because freeway signs are also hung in that same place, so I look up there for relevant information and instead am distracted by various phrases that I don't understand. Often there's even graffiti on the freeway signs, sometimes covering up the text, making it unreadable. Yes, billboards have some similar problems, but that's somewhat mitigated because those are on the side of the road, not directly above it.
But you're right, certainly not as bad as a bank robbery.
Implying that graffiti is as bad as bank robberies is wild.
Dunno dude. If my bank is robbed there’s no real impact to me - all the money is insured. If someone graffitis my house then it looks horrible and I have to spend time and money cleaning it up.
Most houses in Germany are not covered in graffiti.
Except in Berlin. My house front is covered completely with ugly tags. Not even nice graffiti. My 2 year old can draw better.
Seems like you got the idea. Give her some stencils and have some fun.
So your solution to vandalism is to give in to vandals and vandalize your building yourself?
You're typing vandalism to make it seem like I also support breaking stuff or something? I have no problem with living in a building with stuff scribbled on it, and it sounds cool to have a customized building by the neighbours. Imagine all the kids that live in the building leave their name somewhere, it'd add to the history. Right now my building is white, and has bright orange metal bars. Is white with orange bars better? I don't know, it's just what it is and I didn't decide it either. I really don't see scribbles as counting as vandalism. I know it counts by law, but I don't have to agree to the law I just have to follow it, and out of all the laws that can be broken, it's one that never lost me any sleep when I see people doing it.
My university for example, in every single room, every single table is scribbled on and marked for years and years. When I arrived there as a fresh faced student I saw scribbles that were 30 years old. Some people left their names, some people said they didn't like professor X, some people left Maxwell's equations on there. I'm so glad the university didn't consider it vandalism. This could be applied to so many more things. It had zero negative impact on my education or experience in the classroom, so how can it be considered vandalism?
fr breaking things and making them not unfunctional is not the same as drawing on them. you make a great point. I really doubt that most of the people writing here have ever even painted the outside of the building they live in. We don't actually choose any of these things. But if we all DIY customised everything, we would actually have more agency. And I love seeing evidence of actual public interaction with things around me.
I actually wouldn't mind if the house would be covered in nice grafiti! Get some cool artist and have him spray the front, i don't mind. The bullshit tagging is just the worst and stupidest thing to do.
It's the difference between vandalism and art.
Same here, especially since they put scaffolding for construction work on our building.
How many times has that happened to you?
I don’t know, it’s not like the bank publishes heist metrics :)
Touché.
I was thinking about societies in general. Bank robberies are absolutely worse.
They can involve multiple lives being at much greater risk and a large amount of resources allocated to criminals. The fact that it doesn't come from the bank but an insurance agency doesn't change anything. The money comes from somewhere.
The context was the graffiti subculture around the German rail system, although I didn't specify, that's what I was referring to. Of course graffiti on private residences is practically just vandalism. There aren't subcultures around that though, besides subcultures that just revolve around general vandalism.
In that vein, you should probably get graffiti insurance if that's a concern.
The point of the post was that merely having a subculture attached to something doesn't make it good or bad. The addition of the bank robbing was to make that point obvious by attaching a subculture to something obviously bad. If you thought they were saying that graffiti is bad because it's like bank robbery (which is bad) then you misunderstood the point of the post.
Two of my replies just said that graffiti was worse than bank robberies. That's hilarious and crazy to me.
I get your point though, on reading the comment I replied to, after reading yours, it's clear to me that the equivalence implication is fairly weak. Your interpretation seems more accurate.
I am not sure I agree. You are making the life a little worse to hundred of thousands of people by making them feel like they live in a trash city every day.
I am for tough penalties on the authors of grafitis. At least make them pay the full cost of cleaning them up plus heavy fines.
I was thinking about this in the context of the graffiti subculture around the German rail system. It's pretty interesting and different from random tagging.
I somewhat agree with you if we are talking about low effort tagging, especially on homes.
However if I had to choose between some ambitious criminals being given a large amount of money or if some wall getting a bad piece of art on it, I would always choose the latter.
Comparing Graffiti with Bank robbery is crazy.
Its Art.
I would like to understand why people take offense in it - especially if done on places that are so non-important.
Because at best it is ugly. On average you are defacing someone's property and worst case you are causing serious economic damage to someone.
It's a reason it is a crime, although sadly it doesn't seem to be really enforced or punished, given the prevalence.
It’s a coping mechanism for youth culture. Your distain has already lost
99% of it is not art, sorry, just litter on the walls made by delinquents.
Some of it can be art, but 99.9% is not, it's territory marking.
No, it's not.
Bank robberies also are art.
If you want a realistic example look at football ultra fans.
There is whole subculture, competition and collaboration networks between fan groups.
Some call it bestial street fighting where people lose lives and health but some might find it fascinating…
Or, on a larger scale, military history.
But in a bank robbery you’re taking someone else’s property no no no do not have a moral philosophy argument on HN in conclusion, that’s why a Georgist land value tax is one of the most economically efficient forms of taxation.
There is exactly nothing about defacing public infrastructure which elicits the tiniest spark of "admiration" or "interest" in me.
If you want to live out your "artistic ambitions" do it somewhere away from public property.
Unfortunately, life is not black and white. Even without knowing anything about graffiti culture, there is a border between defacing and improving. And graffiti artists are moving over that border back and forth.
Some of the most beautiful art I have seen are graffiti
What a strange argument that seems to romanticise this "border" called "the law".
It is black and white: someone is defacing something that doesn't belong to them. You can call the result whatever you want ("art","expression" etc) but the fundamental issue doesn't change.
Would you be happy to wake up and see your car covered in paint? What about the windows on your house? Would you see this as an "improvement" too?
I think I’d be relatively happy if I woke up one day and saw a banksy or an invader mosaic on my wall.
I’ve seen graffiti art that definitely improved grey ugly walls and barriers. I’ve also seen ugly tags that are nothing more than letters. It’s relative
Is not relative at all to rational people.
Let me just put it this way, do I get to just move into your home and take it over simply because I believe that I can make it a better home than you can? Do I get to steal your car/property because I believe I can make better use of it?
Stop rationalizing narcissistic behavior and people trying to impose themselves on others. It’s not relative at all. You or the narcissistic graffiti vandals have no right to impose themselves on others.
The nice thing is that in democracies you can influence what is done against graffitis. Don't like graffitis? try to push your local representatives etc to be stricter on them or move to a country that has no graffiti like Singapore. One of the most sterile, boring city in the world.
For whatever reasons, Germany is rather lenient towards graffiti artists which, in my eyes, makes Berlin more enjoyable than it would be otherwise.
I've lived in a lot of places and I've learned that I hate grey boring walls a lot, I much prefer it when they're covered by colorful graffitis. It seems I'm not the only one so some localities tend to be rather lenient towards graffiti artists and even invite them, other places are much stricter and so you can enjoy bleak concrete walls unblemished by any graffitis.
As to your example about homes, well, in France and in some other European countries, in the 90s there was a bit of a left leaning political push for "right to lodgings". This movement made squatting much easier (in France, it was extremely difficult to get rid of squatters if they moved in past 48 hours). I've always personally thought those laws were stupid and they were eventually repealed and amended recently. But that's the way it is with governments, you don't get to agree with all the decisions made. If it's a democracy you have some measures of influence.
People who pretend to make art on walls are absolute minority compared to those who'd prefer to keep walls clean, or painted, or whatever (there are plenty of options between gray, and wannabe artists spraying smileys). But somehow you offer the majority to leave. I don't think that's how it can work really
I don't offer the majority to leave. Like it or not, currently in most European countries, the law and application of laws is done so as to either encourage or at least not discourage graffitis. A lot of cities even give space to graffiti artists to paint and try to entice them.
If the actual majority wanted to get rid of this problem, then it would be stopped, I'm not the one making the laws or deciding whether to apply them.
As for grey walls, there are plenty of gray boring walls in any city in the world, usually those tend to be painted on, in my experience, not colorful walls nor brick walls nor older buildings.
Well, no offence, but you idea of how society works is not particulatly correct. Both individuals, and institutions have to prioritize thousands of issues against limited resources. Because of that majority opinions doesn't necessary become policies. Only those urgent/emotional/tribal enough to become election fuel. Apparently, graffiti cannot compete with plenty of pains citizens experience now.
Try researching where it came from, and you'll see it's an attempt to civilize behavior cities found impossible to control.
So reality is that graffitists are active, and numerous to extent it's hard to fought them off the walls so to say, and while majority doesn't like it, it's not ready to re-allocate resources from other issues. This leads to equilibrium we are in at the time.
It makes a good excuse in the internet discussion, but it doesn't correspond to street reality. I'm in a nice medieval quarter now, and see lots of graffity across buildings which neither gray, nor boring. It is as if people who do that don't care about beauty, other humans, and all those good things usually claimed to legitimize the phenomenon
Ok, point to you there, that would infuriate me. To be fair, I haven't traveled back to Europe since Covid (moved to Asia 20ish years ago) and I don't know if the situation has deteriorated. I didn't experience graffitis as much in places that are actually nice but I've liked them in places that are gray and drab and I remember enjoying them in Berlin and in Bruxels.
I live in Hong Kong and here quite a few people express disagreement over the government removing the works of invader and other graffiti artist (the "King of Kowloon") but to be fair, graffitis are really limited to exactly the type of places where not many would complain.
I think it's not only limited resources, it's a political wish to be lenient against petty crime, there are plenty of countries with the same resource in term of police that are much stricter against petty crime with much more success. There's more policemen per capita in European countries like Germany, France, Spain than in Singapore, Malaysia or Japan (I was surprised looking at Wikipedia that Hong Kong as more but that makes sense given the response to the protests before COVID) [1]. They could absolutely enforce fines but they don't. Whenever I traveled back to Europe, I've not been as bothered by graffitis nearly as much as I was bothered by dog feces and littering which is absolutely everywhere and never fined.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
What are property laws if not an imposition? Do I get to decide what laws to follow because I don't like being imposed upon?
It only emphasizes the problem. There's only one Banksy, and millions prolific wall-defacers. You are unlikely to get the former, and almost guaranteed - the latter
Honestly, I would too. Illegal or not, whether it's "defacing" is definitely subjective.
An ugly beton brut building defaces the landscape and the view that should belong to everyone. A beautiful graffiti can improve that view and landscape. Under those circumstances, a graffiti can be legally wrong but morally right.
However only very few graffiti "artists" rise above the skill level where their work could be considered beautiful. Usually it's just plain old dick measuring contests like spraying political slogans and overspraying the opposition's, putting your name on as many places as possible or proving their "worth" in the danger of getting caught, with no aesthetically relevant outcome whatsoever.
If it should belong to everyone as you claim, then every aspiring graffiti maker must ask everyone's opinion before starting spraying.
Basically, in my ideal world, whoever builds an ugly enough building should be liable to remove it or improve it if it is deemed too ugly by a majority.
Graffiti is (partially) just the consequence of not living in that ideal world, but because of all the other problems with graffiti, I'd rather just treat it as the vandalism it usually is in all cases. No sense holding an election before every prosecution or clean and paint job.
This sounds like the words of a “community oversight” committee obstructing the construction of housing, and we already know the effects of that on the housing market. Society has swung too far into allowing other people to tell someone what to do with their property already.
In a way you are just debating who gets the power, and saying the people you like should have it. The fact that you or I like someone isn't a reason to give them power.
The buildings have a lot more impact then the graffiti, and arguably should have more community voices involved.
People wouldn't need to outright show they're bigots, they can just vote your house too ugly to be on their street...
Just because something is illegal, does not make it immoral or unethical by itself.
I do understand the argument against graffiti, but there’s also something to be said about any kind of expression that’s inherently rebellious and counter-culture.
Correct me if I’m wrong but the vast majority of graffiti is on public walls and facades, and not on houses or cars. At least here in the Netherlands that’s what I’ve seen.
Graffiti tends to appear on every surface which is not actively guarded. Including beautiful historical buildings, and including private properties. "Public" walls are just a visible example of a property which nobody cares about strong enough, and nobody is held responsible for (compared to a private owner who often can be fined for keeping vandalized facade as it is).
Where do you live that you see that? I see it in places that are isolated, and as a proportion of urban surface area, very small.
You apparently read only part of what I wrote really. You see it in places which are not guarded, or cleaned. So if there are not a lot of them - kudos to you city administration, and businesses. It's not because grafffiti is inherently benign. It isn't, and cost if keeping public spaces tidy is higher because of it
People tend to apply such hard-core legal standards to those they don't like. As the corrupt dictator says, 'For my enemies, the law! For my friends, everything!' Law-and-order leaders almost exclusively mean it for people they dislike.
Let's apply some strict law-and-order to the wealthy and powerful, to corporations, to government officials. Then to all adults. Then I think it would be reasonable for kids with spray cans.
I have never seen a good looking graffiti which was defacing public property.
Granted, I have seen competent images which obviously were commissioned by building owners. All of it was bad art though and immensely displeasing.
Have you seen any Banksy? Do you consider his work graffiti?
Most of his work is graffiti’d onto public property without permission.
https://www.artsy.net/artist/banksy
Of course it’s graffiti and it’s still imposing on others against their will, regardless of whether it’s peak narcissist Banksy or someone else. Is very much about transgression and imposition and sadistic domination for personalities like Banksy and graffiti artists in general; it’s precisely why they put their “art” in other people’s things against their will.
So if I graffiti your car because I believe it improves your car; would that be ok with you? It’s art. You should be happy, right?
In what kind of city do graffiti happen on cars and households? mostly it's on public property
Certainly in the cities mentioned in the Article, e.g. Berlin and Hamburg.
Yes and yes. Overhyped "I'm 14 and this is deep" energy.
Of course you can find stuff that's high quality, but that is rare. Rather than looking at outliers, it might be more sensible to look at the average and the reality is that the average graffiti does not have any artistic value.
I grant Banksy that he has some technical competency and is able to do something somewhat visually interesting (his use of color works quite well and makes his pieces stand out within the medium), but I really hate him as an artist.
There is basically no one who makes greater kitsch than him. Everything he makes is steeped in the middle class, liberal, mediocrity of someone who points out that things, which everyone agrees are bad, actually are bad. It seriously is something of the worst "art" I have ever seen and actually makes me quite sympathetic to the post modernists whose movement is a reaction to people like him.
The middle schooler, scribbling on canvas, is at least not trying desperately to impress the most bourgeois group of people the world has ever seen. That alone puts everything he does a serious step above Banksy.
There are a few here that are actually pretty good:
https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=40...
Ahh yeah, the typical reason people hate forums nowadays. Registration-wall/paywall. Amazing
"Nowadays", Something Awful has required paid registration since like 2001
I didn't realize that thread was totally paywalled. Here are direct links to two of the images:
https://lpix.org/4545647/IMG_8335.jpeg https://lpix.org/4545648/IMG_8336.jpeg
Defacing is your opinion, I think a city without graffiti is a dead city, it's an improvement.
Good for you. Keep it to your backyard.
Life would be meaningless if it was just black and white. Fortunately there are times that we're reminded that people do live in cities and do stuff other than just minding their own.
Someone should probably tell that to the graffiti "artists" in my town
I really wish people minded their own more, then my ears wouldn’t be assaulted by boomboxes on the subway and I wouldn’t be accosted at an atm vestibule
Then let us buy them some large white boards so they can paint on it and move them somewhere else later
Some areas had, if not fully formally, dedicated areas for graffiti.
As in, "we will leave this unadorned wall, and we won't clean up the graffiti unless it's truly an eyesore, and we won't chase you for it". The wall I most recall was close to quite utilized road, so yes it was very "public facing".
The end result was that it was the one place where I would see actually impressive graffiti, with competition to make better stuff, instead of random vandal tags.
Most of the time this is a black and white matter.
It’s always a struggle for me to accept that many people actually like graffiti. Maybe graffiti can add flavour to a city if it’s really drab and ugly (although I’m not too sure about this), but it only defiles cities which are aesthetically pleasing and beautiful. The technicality of graffiti has little to do with its appeal or it’s appropriateness. Something can be hard to make but still be garbage and/or misplaced w.r.t it’s surroundings.
Most so-called ‘pleasing’ cities are full of advertisement pollution. If I have to choose one of them, I’d choose art over advertising.
I wish people would be as much against advertising as they are against graffiti.
Fr. Its so wierd for me when people get super mad about graffiti like they own any of these walls and could choose what was on them. If the graffiti wasn't there it would just be an ad, but I guess we're okay with that because consumerism is good because the our overlords tell us to like it.
Most graffitis I've seen are on empty walls or buildings with no ads. Brick wall looks way better without them. And to me it looks more like it's the graffiti maker that thinks that they own the wall and can choose what should be on it.
Property that is used by the public should be owned by the public. By that logic, graffiti artists as regular people who use public infrastructure in the area should as much right to paint on the wall as you do to paint the wall in your house. And you can paint over it if you hate it so much. But its all down to the community. It should not be a crime enforced by a ruling class who nominally owns the wall but doesn't use it, so is totally not actually inconvenienced by it being painted. You are part of the community. So is the artist. The person who owns the wall is mostly likely not. Stop pretending you're on the same side because you think you may also become a millionare by osmosis.
Yeah this seems on-brand. Graffiti artist imagines himself as the hero in some epic class struggle, anyone who opposes him must be an enemy sympathizer!
In reality we just want to live in a city that doesn’t have ugly graffiti all over it.
It’s OK, when you grow up you’ll understand. Walking little kids past a wall that reads FUCK because “the community” (aka a single edgy teen) decided it should is not a comfortable experience.
I have nieces and nephews and if I walked past a wall with them that reads FUCK i'd probably laugh and tell them its a bad word and move on with my life.
Would it still be funny if it was a swastika? Or the n-word? Is that also a part of your glorious fight against evil capitalists? If not, why is it any less legitimate? Clearly the “community” must want it there if it was left up.
If it was a swastika or the n-word I would be very concerned about the nature of the community in that neighbourhood and if I'm in danger. But in terms of how i'd deal with kids seeing it, I'd take it as a teachable moment. I don't have to hide my kids from everything I don't believe in (besides they probably see crazy shit online anyway), I just need to teach them how to deal with it. Anyway, theres a wall near where i live where someone has made a massive mural making a political statement. People keep defacing it with the opposite opinion, and people keep painting back over that. If you really need the authorities to tell your community that swastika graffiti should make them angry and call them to action, then your community is screwed already. Either way, yeah just as we have laws to deal with incitement to violence and hatespeech we can have that with walls if you'd prefer, it just has to be sth actually extreme and targeted.
Your comment is baffling, bordering nonsensical.
If you lived in a large city like NY or London and you saw a random swastika, your immediate reaction would be to blame your neighbors? How do you know it wasn’t someone from somewhere else?
Hopefully nobody needs the authorities to tell them things, but they do need authorities to help them enforce already agreed-upon laws. I can’t spent my time running around cleaning up all the graffiti.
Do you think it should be the duty of citizens to stop bank robbers, too?
We literally already have this which is why vandalism is ILLEGAL, but your previous comments were completely dismissive of this!
—-
Seriously, this is like Basic Empathy and Human Emotions 101. Imagine yourself seeing the n-word written several times around your city. Contemplate the anger that you would feel, the desire for someone to do something about it, the realization that even if you dedicated all your free time to finding and stopping these people you probably couldn’t do it yourself. Now replace “n-word” with something someone else finds deeply offensive and imagine yourself as them. Do you STILL think graffiti is totally harmless, or justified as long as you’re vandalizing a megacorp?
A “teachable moment” like this is not how childless people imagine it to be, with the parent didactically educating the child with words of wisdom. Instead, the kid absorbs what they see or hear and it appears later on in their drawings or what they say on the playground. Children understand the power of transgression and all ideas are eligible for them to play with.
I'm not thinking that I'm on some side or defending some class. As you said, I'm part of the community, the public. Why should the right to have wall painted override the right to have the wall as it is? I'm betting most would want it without graffitis, but apparently one person can decide themselves how it should look. It's a simple conflict of opposing tastes.
Again, they have the right to have that taste and you have the right to hate it. You both should have equal ownership over the wall. Therefore you should also have the right to paint something they don't like on the wall. Or paint over their art. Or paint a different wall in a way you like. Nobody should be prosecuting anyone for the case of a minor disagreement over personal artistic taste.
What if I'm not skilled enough to paint it back to how it was? Or don't want to break the law. Or some other barrier. My point is that if given equal rights, it isn't clear cut if you should paint at all. For example, on dedicated graffiti walls the situation is different since people generally agree how they should be used. Sure, one way to solve a conflict is to let everyone do what they want and see what happens, but it's just a version of "might makes right", imo.
If we decided on all public use of space collectively, then yeah sure that would probably be better since it would be fairer. Unfortunately, this is not the system we live under. Therefore graffiti is a legitimate way for the community to express themselves in the face of undemocratic rule.
Not sure why that follows, or how it would avoid the tragedy of the commons, or why we should act as if that’s already the case.
That all aside, how would you feel about people reclaiming public space, parks and public transportation, by blasting loud music in there?
It's a struggle for everyone to accept different perspectives on art and aesthetics, but we need to accept that others' perspectives exist and are as legitimate as our own.
Meanwhile in non-defaced public property: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/1_times_...
The thing about a big city is it's not just about the people who own the stuff you look at, it's about all the other people who have to look at it. I'll take graffiti over advertising any day. At least graffiti isn't trying to sell me anything or make me depressed or addicted or whatever.
Everybody is selling something, especially graffiti artists. You just aren't the target demographic.
What are they selling
Usually their personal brand or gang affiliation.
Maybe it just boils down to the right to property and having your own stuff just the (legal) way you want it.
It's all great until your stuff gets destroyed because someone thinks it's better a different way. And when the graffiti is truly spectacular you can find some consolation in the result, maybe truly appreciate it. But that's not the case 99.99% of the time. Most graffiti is just trash, some rando spraying their name somewhere. Takes 10 seconds and 0 talent. It causes extra expense for people or the city to clean up, or it stays there as an eye sore for everyone.
It's usually on public property, or sometimes on corporate property. I don't think I've seen much graffiti on some private individual's property. It's not on the front of people's houses.
People say that about modern art, and about that crazy 'rock'n'roll'!
Which gets cleaned up with public money that could be used elsewhere, or stays there as an eyesore.
Sometimes the sides too.
Did you just compare modern art and rock and roll to the few letter “tag” sprayed in 10 seconds again and again hundreds of time throughout a city? Because that’s what 99.99% of graffiti is, simple tags and doodles [0][1] anyone can make.
Charitably I’ll say you just didn’t pay attention to tagging’s aesthetic effect on a city. The less charitable alternative seeing the “tag = modern art + rock and roll” opinion is that you’re one of the “artist”.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fy...
[1] https://cooltourspain.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/tag-gra...
Apples to oranges. The issue with graffiti is not that there are too many, it’s that they’re illegal. I doubt you’d admire an unrequested graffiti war over every wall and window of your house.
People do lots of illegal things. When some tech titan does it, many on HN decry the laws, the government, etc. Painting graffiti is relatively, completely, harmless.
As someone with an art degree (with no great admiration for street art per sé) I have to ask one question:
Could you imagine that one person's "defaced" is another person's "finally some colors"?
The destruction of property, trespassing etc. is obviously on the wrong side of the law, but on purely aesthetical terms this could be argued either way making it for that narrow category a subjective thing. Proponents of graffiti could argue you cannot deface a faceless thing, opponents would argue they like their lawn short, their fence white, the sky blue. One persons order is another persons prison.
Note that I tried to look at the aesthetic question while ignoring the legal question — mainly because you made an aesthetic argument. For many people the two would be entangled however: Something being illegal makes them look at the result unfavourable, even if a similar legal wall mural would strike them as aesthetically superior to the 10 years weathered white wall that it was before.
As an art person I really see truly good graffiti, yet I have to notice that heavily graffitied parts of my city are tourist magnets — so many people tend to like those "defaced" walls.
That's easy:
Was the graffiti made with approval of the owner of the building? Does it fit general aesthetics of the city? Yes and yes - it's finally some colors. Otherwise it's a vandalism.
If it's a public building - it's vandalism, unless it was decided by all people living there.
Yeah, way to make life hell for residents of the neighborhood.
Many cities here also have walls dedicated for graffiti and such to give street artists some space and bring some color. Some small infra-related buildings also have street art done on commission and they look great! But shitty tags and graffitis still exist and my impression has always been that the maker probably wasn't thinking about art or anything deeper for that matter...
Let's be honest, 99.999% of graffiti is smeared black lines barely recognizable as tags, over more smeared tags and curse words and just dirt. If that is aesthetic, we might have a very different definition of aesthetic than the art schools you mention. Do I see sometimes street art? Yes, but almost never on such places - the real street art is one done on commission (I assume) on some private house walls, while the rest is at best ignored. There's a reason you never see trains stations on Instagram.
There is a word missing in the English language that confuses this discussion. Graffiti has come to mean air brush, whether it's art or vandalism. Other languages have separate words for these things.
No. The graffiti I have seen in my life was clearly put there as narcissistic self expression by (usually criminal, if only by trespassing) youths, very rarely I have seen something which comes close to presenting an attempt at improving the environment.
I grant you that I can emphazwith the idea of clearing withering concrete slab with anything at all. But the few times I have seen it be an improvement were when it was a commissioned piece. But even then it was a small improvement at best.
This is pretty ironic to read on a forum called "Hacker" News, which also originated as a counter-culture that considered itself creative but was regarded as criminal by the general public.
lol, the hacker in hacker news is not in reference to the blackhat, but a tinkerer
Fr. God you have to be so boring and pro-authoritarian to really be offended by buildings you don't own and will never have the power to own, being drawn on by the public. Sometimes I think graffiti is nice looking. Sometimes I think its ugly as shit. I would never begrudge someone doing it though, since I appreciate the spirit of reclaiming public spaces by the people who actually live there, who will often never be able to own spaces of their own. I am not offended for the ruling classes when their property, that they do not use, gets some paint on it. That's some crazy bootlicking behaviour.
This website is literally run by a venture capital corporation.
"Hacker" can have different meanings, but certainly in this case it isn't meant to reference the tech enthusuast anarcho communist subculture.
Berlin is colorful, live with it. If you place a gray wall somewhere, it will first be sprayed by some noobie. Then later by a better artist and a few years later, no one even dares to cross it because someone put a beautiful piece there.
Every shitty graffiti is about to be replaced by a better one!
Berlin is also trying to improve it's standard of living, social structure, economic outlook and overall cleanliness. Graffiti vandalism will have less and less of a place there, and have a lessening acceptance.
Bah, sorry, but most modern concrete buildings do indeed look better with graffity, no matter whether you see it as art or not. Every bit of color helps on those grey/dirty glass and concrete monstrosities.
(the OPs photo is actually a perfect example of that, without graffity it would just be a depressing grey wall, I much prefer the colorful "defaced" version)
Everything has been vandalized but we shouldn't blame the vandals. [They were] built by vandals and those who added the graffiti merely finished the job. - Scruton.
I know it's commonplace, but let's consider whether extreme expression has any rational substance to it, whether it's somehow more meaningful than an argument with actual reasons.
Outrage is a weapon. Do we want it to be? I think (apologies to the parent comment) it should be disqualifying, shunned, excluded. It's a demonstration that they have no reasoned basis and will not contribute.
I found an example of graffiti that both sides of this conversation can agree on.
As always, reality has some nuance, and we need to be careful about assumptions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_graffiti
call it whataboutism (not directed towards your comment, but related): every time i'm in a discussion involving graffiti and people complain about it i ask about advertisements plastered though the city - people just shrug
Can't tell if you speak about architecture of graffiti artists...
I'm from a country where they once called up the fucking Interpol when someone vandalized a subway car and ran away. There are many things I complain about my country, but this isn't one of them.
You wouldn't admire it if you were in a coffee shop and someone decided to unload their artistic ejaculation on your MacBook. Public infrastructure belongs to the public, no single person is the owner, and you don't get to deface it just because you think it's pretty that way.
Cleanly maintained public infrastructure sends a message: that this is a place where people take these things seriously.
Are graffiti artists not part of the public?
What makes a billboard, for example, more legitimate than graffiti?
consent. same as the difference between a shower and getting caught out in the rain
I never consent to billboards.
majority of ppl voted for some party, a party that gave consent to place/allow billboards, so indirectly, you gave consent. In the graffity's case - even the ruling party didn't gave consent, it's that they don't have resources to penalize and clean this mess
That implies that there was a party available that would ban billboards. There isn't, so graffiti is a way of actually taking back agency over our public spaces by underrepresented counterculture. Deal with it.
Incentivizing violence? Bold strategy.
It's scribbles on the wall, it's hardly violence.
Painting a wall is not violence. That is an extremely pro-authoritarian, hyper-capitalist viewpoint that is useful for the state and the property-owning ruling classes to enforce their rule. It has no basis in fact. Painting a wall does zero harm. If you own a massive building that is not your home, you can afford to paint over it. You don't need to though, because it is used by members of the public, not you, so it's actually meaningless to you. It's not the same as if graffiti artists painted over the front of your house as a middle class person. So there is no reason for you to be mad for uber-rich people who do not care about you. Walls that are used by the public should be owned by the public, and by that logic we all have the right to paint it whenever we want to. Just as you could paint a wall in your house.
Most clasic graffiti to me look like trash left on the street, it doesn't convey the 'taking back of public space'. I like some graffiti concepts like in Berlin where ppl pay some artists to paint something over their building or some cool looking art on walls even when it's illegal/not approved (but would like to just go the approval way, or push for adding laws for such cases). But in the case of those random words/letters that maybe do have a meaning for some ppl - those are perceived by a lot of ppl just like trash, not a counterculture. Related to billboards- there are many places where cities do have a design code that basically forbids most of billboard types, esp in city center and it's not like you can't create your own party to push for this idea. If you don't gain votes, that means ppl are ok with billboards
Yes, you did.
Who are you to say what I consented to and what I did not?
Go deface them then.
The kids painting street art have no power to consent or not consent to anything. If they had access to art supplies, a loft, and a gallery, they'd probably use them.
What does have billboard to do with ugly graffiti? They're not defacing billboards, are they?
Billboards are an ugly smear on the face of the urban environment, whose sole purpose is to enrich the owners of the billboard, and those that rent them.
The difference between billboards and graffiti is that one is “OK” and the other is not. But in neither case do we get a real choice.
I don’t think billboards have much political legitimacy at all, but there is lots of money behind them, so they’re probably here to stay.
Planning permission.
Permission is not remotely the same as legitimacy.
In the same sense bike thieves are.
My city is filled with horrible graffitis. Some types of ugly signatures, even on historical buildings. It takes only a few weeks after walls are cleaned up to see new graffitis reappearing. It's really sad.
The money would probably be better spent in community outreach than cleaning services
It's not clear to me the profile of the people making these graffitis. At least some of them are made by left-wing anarchists given the slogan. Also, I suspect it's a very small number of people who are responsible for most of them: when paying attention, it's clear that a lot of these "signatures" refer to the same groups or persons.
So not sure community outreach would help with those.
Some people just want to see the world burn, no amount community outreach will fix that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
That's fair, but even interesting graffiti still won't let any sunshine come through. Also, I would rather look out the window [0] than appreciate artwork when riding on a train.
[0] https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/rheinland-pfalz/trier/17134459...
When I ride my local rail, I look forward to getting to pass another train to see all the amazing artwork.
It's far nicer and more interesting than yet another development or parking lot.
Oh lucky you. Most of the defaced trains I see are not amazing. They are hastily done and would hardly qualify as artwork. :(
Considering the look of the train to the vast majority of people outside of it, I'm fine with not seeing anything - I'm staring at my book anyway for the most part, and there's another window on the other side. And I prefer it a lot over those ads that anyway otherwise contaminate the window with some random, probably sexist, racist, or otherwise shite nonsense.
If you only call graffiti the so-called "street art" then yeah but when most are bullshit tags from teenagers in the same cliche style with 0 creativity then it's trash.
And the problem is that 99% of the graffiti in the world is trash tags in stations/trains which has the direct impact of giving a rough feel to any well-meaning location.
So to me, that kind of graffiti is the result of a "me important" mentality which totally disregards the rest of the community who just loses in all fronts (including aesthetics and monetary).
Once you've seen "Becky and Stace" written large on every train station from Basel to Frankfurt, you can't help but admire the effort.
This entire sub-thread has me worried about society. People that thinks this way about the common good is why we can't have nice things. This is why it'll always be "50% vs 50%" and why we can't all get along and need to be separated.
In our city graffiti is allowed on a couple select bridge pillars and retaining walls. Those often have excellent artworks that anyone can appreciate.
Not that illegal graffiti can't produce great art too, and the illegality is a part of what fuels the culture. But I've come to the conclusion that if a place is likely to be "vandalized" by graffiti anyways you are better off just allowing it and see what people do without the time pressure of avoiding arrest.
Ugly defacement of public property.
Highly recommend the movies by the 1UP crew to get a feel for why this is actually great art.
Reminder: You're replying to a comment about graffiti potentially covering something that's supposed to be transparent.
Shiny pile of shit is still pile of shit, I’m glad people are starting to remove the graffiti. Nobody except hippies likes it.
Sure but it's been like that since forever and doesn't change the original point that you may be ever so innovative but it's gonna be painted over
If you dive into: [wine, jazz, modern art, craft beer, tennis, …] (pick one), you’d also appreciate it more.
Thing is, if I decide not to do that, the impact on my life is relatively minor. What gives graffiti artists the right to impose their personal predilection unto others?
In other words, given your reasoning, what’s stopping me from playing John Coltrane at 110dBA the whole day and night?
The vast majority has no aesthetic value to 99% of people and certainly not to the owner of the property.
Everybody can see the difference between graffiti art and graffiti vandalism. No need to look into the story behind it. Most people appreciate beautiful graffiti and hate the ugly tags and other untalented crap.
The “competition” associated with the MS13 “artwork” that covers up stop signs and street names in my neighborhood sure seems to involve a lot of guns and human rights violations.
I mean, if they appreciate the effort going into the keeping the infrastructure working, they can have some (un)written rules like not spraying identification numbers, street signs, transparent surfaces (like windows), I think many people will appreciate what they do and the story behind more.
I’m all for street art, but not fond of not being able to navigate because some group decided to let me they were here by making a road sign unintelligible.
Some people actually have to live in your decadent cyberpunk wet dream, you know?
The same can be said about cartel killings.
Would you be happy to wake up to your car covered in graffiti? It's "art" after all! If not, why not?
DB is also deploying robot dogs against graffiti painters: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40388114
God I hope they graffiti the robot dogs as well because that would be so funny.
They will. We're talking of poeple that have no problem stopping a train in a busy station to completely paint it from one side to the other. They'll spray the dog, put a couple stickers on it, and run away.
I'm confused - how do the vandals stop the train?
Like this:
https://youtu.be/vg5OrytF_a0?t=65
TL;DW: Basically, the conductor alerts the police and stops the train, once they realize that the train is being decorated. If they started moving forward, it could seriously endanger the graffiti sprayers. So that's really the best course of action here.
If one graffiti artist delays my train for one minute, that’s one minute too many
ego much? if they get hurt, train is delayed, if they don't get hurt, train is delayed. you cannot win.
Well, you might assume that they only get hurt once. Maybe it would make their co-conspirators re-evaluate their actions too...
Is outrage somehow a rational reason for anything?
Whoa, TIL that suspension railways exist!
My first thought after seeing the end of the video was "why is this video flipped?" until I realized that it was only the train that was "upside down".
Your tax Euros at work: Buying expensive useless robot dogs.
But who do they deploy when the robot dogs get out of hand?
Many things are covered in graffiti in Western Europe. It always baffles me that people are in such a defeated state of mind that graffiti is just simply accepted and seemingly nothing is done about it.
I mean, one way to look at it is just that graffiti is just... fine, really. It's not generally a huge deal in the scheme of things.
And this attitude is why there is so much of it.
Why don’t you call it what it is: destruction of public property?
Factually, the property isn't destroyed. Beyond that, I think the street art often enhances it and otherwise is easily ignored.
You may see it differently, but what you see isn't "what it is", it's just your perspective.
In Portugal you can see poetry being embedded in graffiti which is awesome, TBH
At some point someone made me realise that almost anything that can be said about graffiti can also be said about outdoor advertising.
One is vandalism, which is a crime, and one is not.
There, we have at least one delta now.
If it were up to me, billboards WOULD be a crime - and in some places that take pride in their land's beauty, they are!
Another difference is that one of them is intentionally designed to capture my attention, usually while I'm driving, to try and get me to fork over my money. So that's another delta.
I don't love graffiti, but I do hate outdoor advertisements.
As usual, the answer is found by examining assumptions: 1) It's somehow bad, and 2) People strongly want it removed. (And by accepting those two assumptions as true, and it's also true that the street art remains, that argument infers despair.)
I and many people don't think it's Bad (avoiding a specific definition, an endless discussion). I don't mean it's always Good or never Bad, but generally IMHO it ranges from easily ignored to decent to some really inspiring stuff.
And I find it generally inspiring that some kids have the spirit, creativity, initiative, and determination to do it; to express themselves and not be suppressed by society. Adults have so much agency; it's great to see kids seize some, and in a harmless way (they aren't injuring people, risking anything, etc.). I see the suppression of graffiti as telling kids to be 'seen and not heard'. People embrace billionaires who break rules and then kill and impovrish on a mass scale; all these kids are doing is painting something.
I'd almost advocate that kids have free reign to paint public property (that would seem to get out of control, and any announced limit may be an invitation to break it). It's their city too, and adults should have to live with what the kids have to say. (Still - how could that work? Any undecorated or unfinished surface?)
I understand you may not agree; we need to find a balance.
You're right, but let’s be honest, most of “spray painting” is just tagging. Even as a kid I found big spray painted murals “cool”, but thought tagged places as “ran down”. I met a guy a few years ago who told stories about spray painting large murals in underpasses, but gave up when others started to tag over his creations.
I obviously don’t have a solution to this, but it’s hard to argue how spray painting is net good even for kids.
Isn't vandalism an offense in Germany?
Almost everywhere, but it's fairly low priority and impossible to prosecute without Orwellian levels of surveillance.
We already have those levels of surveillance. It's just an unwillingness to do anything.
Honestly, it's just paint, it has no direct victims. With most police departments understaffed and underfunded (at least where I live, Portugal), I would rather they focused on more serious problems.
In many places in Europe there is a de-facto truce between graffiti artist and the local governments: You can paint/tag some areas.
Typically noise barriers are such, while trains themselves or stations are not.
Harder persecution both by authorities and self-policing in the subcult community after some prominents were persecuted and agreed with to help normalize the situation has led to the current status quo, which for example in Hungary has normalized the situation pretty much, public transport and stations are generally not vandalized, and some larger well exposed areas were designated as local "legal walls".
I guess the panopticon (cameras becoming cheap and ubiquitous) also helped
I think if it was put to a vote, most people would be against graffiti.
These guys know the city in and out. Only in cases where you already expect them, you could be able to catch them. Also, police always has to prove you did it, and not some other member of the group.
https://youtu.be/Y9Lm0dkkVAw?si=NDHBYtciFPDhp78I
I'm pretty certain it's an offense in most developed countries.
That's because the current ones are all ugly metal walls. Painting stuff on them makes it at least slightly less depressing.
No, it doesn't. Before it was a plain metal wall, now it's ugly metal wall with idiotic tags on it.
Do you think this "MetaWindow" is much more attractive? Here's a similar looking transparent sound barrier in a new building area that is already starting to be covered in graffiti: https://youtu.be/e7-Fd1HOw_g?si=OTNn_NyV_W7iJStz&t=265
At least some light will still get through in the gaps between graffiti, but I don't think they will end up looking much different than non-transparent barriers.
It makes it more depressing to see them though. Who likes to be reminded that people will just deface public property for fun?
It's interesting to read this conversation about graffiti happening on a hacker forum, yet it seems stuck in a polarised stand-off around aesthetics and ownership rights.
That's a shame, because the root issues are in information warfare, the battle to control information spaces.
To the extent The Internet is still considered a "public space";
Is spamming and trolling not a form of digital graffiti?
Is the creation of products and apps that have a negative impact on society not a "narcissistic imposition"?
Is the appropriation of the commons or other private property to spread messages (advertising or graffiti) not the same in the digital realm?
And those who "clean up" graffiti... do we not call then "censors" or "like down/up-voting" when we wish to amplify or make other people's communications in the world disappear because we disagree with them?
At the end of the day we are all still animals shouting to be heard the loudest in our jungle. Online or offline we're party to the same personality traits of quiet orderliness or disorganised expression. What happens in cyberspace hardly seems different from what happens IRL with spray-paint.
Yeah I'm deeply disappointed that these so called "hackers" are so united on such a tired, pro-authoritarian view on the use of public space.
TBH I didn't really mean to situate the remark on an authoritarian-liberal axis, rather to comment on the congruence between meat-space and cyberspace in regard to these themes.
I don’t know, I doubt I would want a URL this long on my wall.
The aesthetics of qr codes are sublime
With the goals stated in the article they only really need to stay transparent in concept renders of new projects. Once built they only need to fulfill the noise insulation targets and be less of an eyesore than their solid counterparts
And those vandals are doing this for a while now!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_art
The article ends "the potential for faster planning approvals and reduced objection rates from communities, ultimately speeding up project completions." so their goal might be to build faster regardless how they'll look soon after.
Sad, but true. Some people even spray paint the windows of the actual passenger cars [1]. It's not rare and most sprayers do not have the skill of the person who painted this car. I don't get it.
[1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/kami68k/50329760658