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Comment by tripzilch | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I travel in Germany (indeed usually by train), I marvel at how much prettier most graffiti is than it is over here in NL (basically, more & larger colourful "pieces", rather than ugly "tags").

That makes me kind of ambivalent about this undertaking :) But I also understand that for the Deutsche Bahn this means substantial damage and costs. On the other hand, more effective enforcement is probably mostly going to result in a larger ratio of quick-n-dirty tags, making the overall appearance messier, uglier and more vandalised.

Now I don't think that people should just be able to paint their murals on whatever property they don't own. That's not right. I just think it won't really change the appearance for the better.

I also don't like drones, btw. Flying surveillance robots? Brrr. At least ED-209 couldn't climb stairs ...

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> On the other hand, more effective enforcement is probably mostly going to result in a larger ratio of quick-n-dirty tags, making the overall appearance messier, uglier and more vandalised.

bingo. back in the day in Poland, the Tricity railway picked up a fight against graffiti, they cleaned stuff up quickly, when they couldn't afford to clean they just painted over (kind of vandalised the graffiti, lol), the security got really brutal on writers, and stuff got ugly to a point where people got hurt. as a result, a lot of writers around there pivoted from only painting to some really crazy vandalism action. that attracts more people that less identify themselves as independent artists and more as vandals opposed to the opressive system, and as you can imagine those are harder to work with. fighting youth movements with surveillance and force always gets ugly.

There is also a form of respect among writers, usually nices pieces don't get vandalised/overwritten. Hire or just ask actually good writers to make your trains less horrible looking and both parties would be happy. A lot of cities do that nowadays (for walls), at least where I live, and this has been quite a success.

I am not saying this will prevent the die hards who like the thrill of going into depots at 3am for a 15min job that most of the time ends up very poorly, but this would probably be more effective and cost way less than drones!

>But I also understand that for the Deutsche Bahn this means substantial damage and costs.

In what sense?

If the don't want repaint damages, then don't fucking repaint them.

People like them fine as they are. Young people at least. As for the older people, they will give their place to younger people sooner or later.

>People like them fine as they are. Young people at least. As for the older people, they will give their place to younger people sooner or later.

I doubt that. At least I am a young German and I prefer my trains to be clean. And I'm absolutely certain most young people here think the same way.

There is graffiti that I enjoy, but the majority of it doesn't exactly improve the looks of things.

Also, there is a slight problem with people feeling insecure when using public transportation due to repeated incidents where people were beaten up or stabbed in trains. Having graffiti all over the place makes especially older people less likely to use public transportation and therefore reduces the income.

>I doubt that. At least I am a young German and I prefer my trains to be clean. And I'm absolutely certain most young people here think the same way.

Were? In squareville? Because the young Germans I've talked to in Mitte sure didn't think that way.

>Also, there is a slight problem with people feeling insecure when using public transportation due to repeated incidents where people were beaten up or stabbed in trains.

That's orthogonal.

>Having graffiti all over the place makes especially older people less likely to use public transportation and therefore reduces the income.

Huh? How is that conclusion reached? I hope not with the "broken window" theory -- there are graffiti in affluent and well maintained city districts too.

squareville? Let's not act like we are five years old and calling each other names. That makes for a terrible environment.

Remember that your opinion isn't The One and that everybody has different likes. I agree that graffiti on trains normally looks terrible, but in other places graffiti can be very interesting.

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