Don’t trust a blogger! Well …

In the knowledge society one should be able to find the information one needs. Alas, only if one has unlimited time. Otherwise, a blogger is liable to succumb to apoplexy and despair with the result that she may write a post based on inaccurate or insufficient information.

Dear reader, that may have happened on 9th June when we wrote about diversions.

Then yesterday came, and the celebration known as Helsinki Day, a carneval on which the weather-gods bestowed the best they have! Many of us did, as the poster promised, indeed party and many were charmed. (Meanwhile Jonathan Glancey’s welcome plea to our city not to “spoil itself” was also published yesterday in The Usual. We here were particularly gratified by his love of the buildings that “grow out of Helsinki’s ground” and his disdain for the parachuted offensiveness that is Eiranranta. So offensive is it, in fact, that we only have ancient photos of it, here).

We digress, as usual. The point of this post was to be that we were (possibly) wrong in our rant of last week, about trams, tourism-directed “regeneration” and the corruption of Helsinki’s Senate Square by 21st century luxury tat. We wrote that the original proposals for turning the old streets, like Katariinankatu, into shopping heavens with big windows, shop doors and massively high rents and making Helsinki’s tram network vulnerable in the process, were going to be pushed through.

As it turns out, well… WE DO NOT KNOW. We tried to find out, without spending hours or phoning anyone up (the internet after all should make that kind of inter-personal contact unnecessary), but we STILL DO NOT KNOW FOR SURE.  Some info in Finnish, here, as in, “Helsinki at last to have a live(ly) old centre”.

What we do know is that the ever-narrowing repertoire of Helsinki’s economy will still be on show and on sale here:

 

Helsinki diverted

Or perhaps just going around in circles? For this city is certainly going around in the same circles that have been doodled and then set in concrete by many a wealthier city than Helsinki in the past with varied success. You know, urban policy’s regeneration, renewal, revitalisation, re-this, re-that (re-awakening even on the Finnish-language site of the Torikorttelit scheme that has so enraged JHJ). Everything except re-membering.

Apart from a few enthusiastic shopaholics, who has benefited from this global fashion for creating tourist bubbles? A few individuals and corporate winners maybe, but it’s not fattened up any city’s coffers or helped them sustain themselves. Wonder why city authorities keep doing it!

But returning to Helsinki’s trams – for it is they that are actually diverted. They are in a mess. If you tried to find your way around the peninsula by tram this week, you may well have failed. But here is a little map to help you navigate this summer.

So, our trams are diverted for the summer. And not just the fun craziness caused by transport planners a couple of years ago. Diverted from sanity more like.

Alas, this all goes back to the idiocy that involves turning Katariinankatu into a shopping heaven and messing up Helsinki’s already very slow and fragile tram-network (as reported here earlier), and widening the pavement at Senate Square to put terrace bars in a space that never gets any sunshine, and hiking up the rents in a row of unique buildings that were until very recently uniquely untainted by the deadening embrace of high-rent commercialism … all this idiocy against which we railed in anger 15 months ago, is now diverting trams.

Seems its also diverting city planning from whatever remains of sanity and common sense it used to have. Anecdotally speaking this wouldn’t be a surprise. I heard about a planner in a city not so far away who struggled with the introduction of new, mostly neo-libearalist imperatives to put a market price on everything in the city. She had found it almost impossible, apparently, to get her head around doing this as a planner. Impossible, that is, until she realised that all she had to do was to change her view of reality. Simple, huh?

(By the way, on the topic of re-things – like remembering – if you are at all academically inclined and at all annoyed with what passes for a sense of reality these days, you might get some comfort from reading Paul Connerton’s wonderful How Modernity Forgets).

Tram jam

Cars in recent decades have reproduced as societies have acquired more money. No wonder Helsinki’s traffic jams just get worse and worse. And that’s despite all the effort that goes into shoving cars underground in this fair city.

For at least ten years the occasional solitary online commentator has quipped on the holey-cheesey nature of subterranean Helsinki. Meanwhile even reddish Greens like Osmo Soininvaara have advocated more underground parking while sustainable transport campaigners observe in bewilderment as the city throws vast amounts of money not just into holes in the ground, but into building them. However, only a more patient googler than yours truly has time to find the recent ones, not to mention to draw a straightforward and punchy blog post on the topic.

The most recent hit was not about Helsinki but about Tampere, that former-industrial city with the two lakes and quite a nice music scene, where construction for “massive” new underground car parking has caused some protected industrial heritage (now used as a music venue) to crack horribly. A facebook group was even set up to “monitor” the situation. (Back to Helsinki. Ed.)

The author of the book The Ethics of Metropolitan Growth, Robert Kirkman, who also calls himself an ‘environmental ethicist’ writes about the really intractable problem of cars and space. Average driving slownesses on urban streets differ little from those of 100 years ago. Kirkman also makes the painfully obvious point that driving is “bounded by physical limitations that cannot be negotiated. In this case, there are upper and lower limits to the size and agility of a private automobile that can safely transport a small number of passengers, and it will always be physically impossible to put more than one car in the same space at the same time. The only way to avoid this limitation and the storage problems it entails would be to reject the automobile altogether, a take-it-or-leave-it choice even for those included in the automotive frame.”

Well, Kirkman is no moralising git trying to offer one-size-suits-all remedies and hair-shirt lives to save the planet, so he spends a good part of the book trying to figure out how society might learn to talk about the damage it does to our environment whilst working out how to live together, sharing the same spaces and not stepping too heavily on others’ toes. He is very thoughtful about not slagging off America’s drivers who, thanks to their urban planners of yore, mostly have little option. And anyway, even Americans may be falling out of love with the automobile. (Oh, yeah. Ed.) Oh yeah, see this.

Maybe more on Kirkman later – Helsinki certainly has plenty of folks in high places for whom metropolitan growth is an unequivocal good along with plenty of other dubious ambitions to forget Helsinki’s geography, history and its cultural heritage. (Stop moaning. Ed.)

That heritage includes the slowest trams around. According to Muukalaisia Vesirajassa, a delightful blog (Finnish readers wanting to keep up with confidently flowing geekiness will find a link on the right), that Helsinki’s average speed is 14.3 km/h compared to a similar system in Paris doing 19km/h, and that a main culprit is too much standing at lights. I’ve heard others comment not just on the annoying slowness (and not just when something’s broken down as above, a couple of days ago on Mannerheimintie) but on the probability that trams would offer the restructured HSL (Helsinki METROPOLITAN Transport, or something [Region. Ed]) a chance to make money as well as save time, but for some reason they don’t.

“Don’t forget to breathe”

Protagonist: I don’t want to go.

Narrator: From the way you talk I’d have thought you’d be happy to see the back of all that’s going wrong in your darling Helsinki.

P: Yeah, but London.

N: Point taken. Snow in the UK too, though.

P: Groan.

N: OK, then think of something nice to tell your readers other than wingeing about personal circumstances. Something not about snow? Something out of The Usual, perhaps.

P: Well, there’s the item on cycle lanes (available on HS.fi). The city announces that it’s going to start maintaining them properly so that commuters can use them summers-winters, as we say in Finland. Might as well, they can’t keep trains on track, can they?

N: Ha-ha.

P: Trams they can. Took this nice picture on Hämeentie the other day. I wish I’d taken one inside the tram too. It was a 6 so went past Braahe or Kallio ice rink, so there were quite a few people with ice-hockey sticks, a few people with pulkkas

N: huh?

P: Plastic toboggans by Sarvis. Another design classic, as The Usual wrote and as if you wanted to know. It was still school holidays, the sun was shining, there was snow on the ground and smiles on most people’s faces, even the wino leaning on the back of the tram. And I spotted this. “Don’t forget to breathe” written in some kind of tape on a wire fence outside the old people’s home in Sörnäinen.

N: Wow! Did you know that was run by the Russian Orthodox Church in Finland? Helenan Vanhainkoti, I mean, and the building’s been there for the good of Russian emigres and their families since 1913?

P: Who’s the narrator here.

N: You ARE in a bad mood.

P: It’s cos I’d like to stay. Even if those in charge suffer from c**p self esteem or low self worth, or whatever it is that makes people make such idiotic decisions, designed to impress outsiders rather than serve their constituents … even if that is mostly the case in Helsinki, there’s so much else going on, and there’s so much so good it’ll take a long time to destroy it. Assuming that the destroyers are from within, as they are now.

N: Bravo! You know, someone in the City must be behind that cycling improvement too …

Too old to be a tram geek

I went around in a circle today. On the number 7 tram to Pasila Library and back. It must have been a 7A rather than a 7B because in the picture below, the 7A is going in the direction I went today – clockwise.

In the (good) old days, there was a tram that did a figure of 8 around the city. In fact, you could say there were two trams that did a figure of 8 around the city, but in opposite directions. These were the 3T and the 3B. Most people, one assumes, must have got them confused around Stockmanns and the railway station. That was where they crossed paths. If you were heading south towards Eira (as I often was as a kid) a 3B would go from Stockmann’s main door, on its north side on Alexanterinkatu and end up going to the market and taking ‘the long way round’. For the more direct 3T you’d head (out of the store) to Mannerheimintie (as in the photo below), from where the tram would transport you swiftly home along Bulevardi and Freda. (By the way, the first time I typed that I got ‘B’ and ‘T’ the wrong way around).

That was then. A tram line doing a figure of 8 is not the easiest for anyone to negotiate and anecdotally we know what a scramble of trial and error it has been, not least for tourists. So the City launched a new route earlier this year. We still have 3B and 3T and they still do 2 figures of 8 between them, more or less past those locations (the lovely zoological museum or, to give it its English-language branded identity, Natural History Museum, however, being a casualty of the new route). But now you get the same number on both sides of the street. When you put it like that, it almost sounds as if there is a logic to it. But anecdotally and personally speaking, it still confuses.

We do know that somewhere between Kauppatori and Eira hospital, the tram that was 3T when a passenger got on has switched to a 3B by the time they get off. We also know that the only tram one could get on at Eira hospital (in the image below) is a 3B (both trams below are thus 3B). Where does this leave us? Confused but still in Ullanlinna/Eira. Anyway, at the ‘edge’ of the route, it doesn’t really matter – you kind of know where you want to go.

(Spot the risk-taking individual cycling on the pavement wearing a helmet. Maybe just to avoid cobbles, let’s be charitable.)

Anyone interested in where the letters came from would have a minefield of transport planners’ rationalities to navigate.

Rumour had it that T was for tourist. The myth actually has some substance – from time to time the City produces little leaflets to encourage tourists to use this tram route for sight-seeing, from the south harbour, through bourgeois Töölö to grungy Kallio to busy Hakaniemi past the railway station to elegant Bulevardi and expensive Eira and via Kaivopuisto’s embassy-neighbourhood back again to the market.

Would B then, logically, stand for Brunnsparken, the Swedish for Kaivopuisto? And would it also explain why the 14B which goes to Hernesaari (quite close to Kaivopuisto/Brunnsparken, particularly if you look at it from Helsinki-Vantaa airport or, for that matter, Vanuatu) also has the letter B? And why so many Vs on buses? But train-spotting or any other kind of transport-geekishness isn’t actually a household concept in Finland, so we are unlikely to return to this lovely topic too many times.