The shortest route - the geometry of comfort







We can all of us be directed, and in many cases we expect to be. We expect to be informed in certain situations, and our eyes seach, as if trained, for the source of information, be it a street sign, and arrow, a clock, a light or a dial on a car dashboard. It became part of the division of work that we find reliable summarising signs in instutionalised places. We orientate ourselves and for the sake of comfort, we leave them to treat us like a voting block. This is the case on the small scale and on the large, from representational democracy to adverts, from the fire-exit to the bus station. It is known in the case of a beaten path through a park, and also when the general public treads out a path, the shortest, leading to the bus stop, the newspaper kiosk, the shop, in other words, to somewhere important. It is interesting that in local politics, evaluating them as votes (voting with feet, money), they are increasingly respected and the beaten path is preserved. Probably because it is possible by this to most simply demonstrate paternalistic attention and tolerance. The evolution of public transportation is based on this kind of election; mass transportation follows the cities geographical conditions, historical dynamics, the structure that have formed over generations. It then has become a huge, influencing force, since its easy and cheap accessibility, which is to say, comfort, has become a serious value. Otherwise, since when has the shortest been the quickest? Metro lines pretty much underline all the important points in each large city, and another city forms from the connections that have been made in this way. The actual movement between these points however, as in all networks, is characteristically uninteresting, and, in the interest of automation and acceleration, impersonal, a non-space ("Cyberspace is when we telephone" J. P. Barlow) since because of the conditions, it can also be a forum, not merely a route which does not recognise purposlessness, but one rationally connecting interchanges. A movement factory, but at the same time, a gigantic milk-shake machine, outlying districts and suburbs homogenised through mass transport. It is a unique characteristic of the world's metro lines, with their capacity for permeation, that they have not really evolved their own culture. People are incapable of humanising the condition of movement on the network. It is not accidental that they conform best to nurseries. It seems that inspite of every attempt, it is impossible to make the condition of waiting for transportation and public transportation personal and experience-like. The adverts for musuems and newspapers (the very characteristic solution) are in vain, this kind of travel takes place in a space of impersonality, we transport ourselves characterlessly, like computer bits, between two (important) points; basic demands and inhibitions being choked for practical reasons. Our movements are standardised: stepping out of reality, we go under the ground, and folding up our social space (like a map) we travel in a "stand by" state, so we can return at the destined metro station back to the lost time. Since the development of metro stations were dictated by practical and non utopistic architectural thought processes, their places are misleadingly similar. This is served primarily by our behaviour in entering and leaving the trains. My plan endeavours to break free in the switched off lemming state with a practical exertion, with the realisation of a thought which has very probably occured to everyone who travels regularly. If it was clearly written on the platform which was the best door to enter inorder to get off closest to the exit of your intended metro station, then we could smuggle in a new dimension into this impersonal medium. It could be a conversational topic, but perhaps the greatest importance is that is could, should, defined my personal, very real, claim for personal space: whether I want to travel quickly with the masses or alone but slowly. In summary: it would bring a certain consciousness into the alienating state of public transportation.

Ja´nos Sug´r

Operating Instructions for the Budapest Metro (Print it out and use it!)