Hasta La Ideas

This post is part of the Inspiration series, made possible by Veer.com.

While in Europe recently, we couldn’t help but notice the narrower streets, the increased volume of pedestrian traffic and the incomprehensibly more efficient rail system. So far we have talked principally about sources of inspiration, but we would be remiss to neglect the discussion of historical precedents and structural constraints. As authors like Jared Diamond and Richard Wright have rightly observed, a variety of factors shape both the location and timing of revolutionary insights. European infrastructure, with cities reliant on foot and animal traffic, lent itself to narrow streets and non-orthogonal city plans, while massive public road projects in the (then) less-developed New World paved the way for the multi-lane roadways that spawned drive-in “cuisine.” Even the seating arrangements in modern cars weren’t structured to be the most effective possible location for a driver, but instead a consequence of the legacy seating arrangements of carriages dating back to the Roman era for the British Empire and carriage wagons in the 18th Century for everyone else.

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