Ian's Blocker Blog 2022

 It has been about a month and since the implementation of the 9€ Ticket here in Germany on the first of June. In my last post on the subject I claimed that "[The 9€ Ticket] very well could be the type of thing that changes the way Germany conceptualizes it's transit network." and after a month of personal experience and an outpouring of public opinion I feel the time is right to once again put pen to paper and explore the deaths of 9€ Deutschland.  So the first thing I want to say is, never in my life have I experienced a policy so socially pervasive at the 9€ Ticket. It holds the type of esteem and infamy which local projects (Stuttgart 21) can sometimes gain amongst a population, but on a national scale. There is no one in Germany right now that does not have an opinion on the 9€ Ticket. Whether as a user, a critic, a sceptic, or a devotee I could (and have) asked total strangers about this ticket.  At the offset there were concerns over capacity of the rail network me...

      I grew up in the town of Avon Connecticut; a place whose sole icon—if the pictures at our local pizza places are to be believed—is the six-story hilltop Heublein Tower. Built by the German immigrant Gilbert Heubline who promised his wife Louise he would build her a castle. I spent many a summer afternoon hiking to the top of Talcott Mountain to visit this tower. It isn't something I thought to much about at the time, or even reflected upon, until recently I found myself hiking up a a muddy cliffside on the way to visit Burg Hohenzollern in the town of Hechingen. It was funny in one of those, "the more things change the more they stay the same" type of ways, because for the first time in years I actually began to reflect on Heublein towner as a holdover of the type of Cultural practice and phenomenon I was experiencing in Baden-Württemberg. Now I don't want to confuse anyone into thinking these buildings are aesthetically similar, but rather I want to make a cas...