Bruno Latour, Aramis, or the Love of Technology, PDF - Dss-edit.com

"It's the 'stop-and-go' disease, Norhert--that much we know.""Yes, but they're reformulating the project, so we 're going to findout whether the technology is capable of coping with the politics. TheAramis we knew prior to 1981 has to he redesigned to cope \',,-ith theWorld's Fair.""But I've studied the technological documentation, as I was told,and I've summarized the interviews you sent me to. The engineers \verevery pleased with that phase; everything went very well. So the problemisn't there. The hidden staircase, as you put it, can't be in this phase.""It has to be, or else everything happens in the CET stage."[SUMMARY OF A GROUP INTERVIEW]On the boulevard Victor, in the now-abandoned offices that had belongedto the RATP team, the engineers in charge of the project summarize thedevelopment of Phase 38."Matra hod to work out quite a few new things during that phose. If Aramiscan only take curves greater than ten meters, then it's hard to fit it in betweenthe World's Fair pavilions or in lightly populated urban areas-or heavilypopulated ones. If Aramis is hard to implement, then the flexibility argumentdisappears."Since highly flexible implementation is the main argument in Aramis' favorin the eyes of the municipal authorities, especially because of Montpellier, it'sessential to keep the curve radius as tight as possible. So Matra has to comeup with a curve radius of ten meters."During this perioo, the old Orly site was reopened. They constructed acurve with a ten-meter radius to see if the vehicle could toke it without slippingand without pulling the contact shoes away from the power source. At the priceof shifting the location of the shoes and widening the gUide-roils from 1,400to 1 ,440 millimeters, Aramis become capable of ta king curves with a ten-meterradius"The other major problem was that of availability. If Aramis cars are to bein circulation, they have to be able to run ten hours a day without breakingdown . Now the only way to achieve greater availability is to double or triplethe rolling stock. But each vehicle has only ten seats. So any improvement inreliability will be paid for by only ten passengers.