Lab rats contemplating alternately Fermi’s Paradox and the Pauli Exclusion Principle (click images to enlarge)

Fermi’s Paradox: Given the vast size and age of the universe (the sheer number of stars, amount of matter, and how long it’s all been swooshing around), probabilistically you’d expect life to be cropping up all over the place. You’d also expect, unless the earth is very atypical, that some life would be much less advanced than us, and some much more. It follows that the more advanced life forms should really be out there, travelling around and colonising the galaxy. But — we haven’t seen anyone much. Hence the paradox.

The Pauli Exclusion Principle: This states that no two electrons can share the same space (or more precisely, the same quantum numbers). As a result of the exclusion principle, electrons are prevented from all bunching up in the lowest energy tier next to the nucleus, and as a result — the need for different energy tiers, the structure of the atom, the shape of the periodic table, all of chemistry, and the reasons for how almost everything in the universe looks, sounds, feels and behaves.

Rats drawings by Hannah Marcus
Concepts for the possible volume The Secret Life of the Lab Rat: C is for Cheese

Han dynasty silk painting from China; Julio Romero de Torres painting from Spain

A team of geneticists at the Broad Institute in Cambridge Massachusetts is investigating how DNA differs among human genomes from around the world. Over the course of human history, naturally, different mutations have sprung up in different regions, and became prevalent or not depending on local conditions. Having identified region-specific pieces of DNA, the interesting part is then trying to figure out what those pieces of DNA do.

An example under current investigation is the EDAR370A gene, which is found in Asian people, and is thought to have arisen in China 30,000 years ago. To determine EDAR370A’s thing, the experimenters snipped it out, pasted it into mouse embryos, and waited to see how the mice turned out. They grew up to have thicker hair fibres, more sweat glands on their foot pads, and less fatty mammary glands. The implication, in short, is that Chinese girls have sweaty palms and small breasts.

This in itself is perhaps unastonishing, but the real question is: why? The gene not only emerged in China (and could well have emerged elsewhere at some point too), but became prevalent in China. For this to have happened, it must have offered a selective advantage in that environment. I.e. Chinese men must have especially liked Chinese women with small breasts — to the extent that they shifted the entire gene pool in that direction. Compare this with, for example, what happened in Spain, where the women are also quite sweaty, but generally have large breasts, implying a predilection among Spanish men that massaged the gene pool in the opposite direction.

This explanation may however simply lead to another genetic regression, and a hunt for gene variants that make Chinese men say ‘wow’ to little breasts, and Spanish men to big ones. But is it conceivable that breast-size preference is in fact not genetically determined? It is apparent, looking at global culture, that there are many different ideals of human beauty, most of which have significant cross-cultural appeal. This would suggest that the regional associations of one beauty ideal or another are perhaps less genetically programmed than culturally determined.

Let’s imagine a particularly beautiful Chinese woman — one with small breasts — happened to sashay past a Chinese poet 30,000 years ago. He came up with a poem about her, which became a favourite of the day, and promoted a small-breasted female archetype. Further tropes were added through the millenia (modesty, reserve, small feet etc.) to create the traditional Chinese paradigm of beauty. With this in place, selective advantages followed, creating an evolutionary pressure in favour of the EDAR370A gene, and hence its flourishing in that geographic region.

A similar speculative genetic history could be written for Spain, involving a particular busty prehistoric woman, a moustachioed popular cave musician, a hit song etc. etc., leading to the paradigm of a full-breasted fiery lady, and a consequent selective mechanism to promote those mutations, and produce a typical Spanish genome.

Contemporary magazine covers from Spain and China. Which model has the EDAR370A gene?

The intriguing thing here is the clear case it presents for culture shaping the genome. Normally we think about the genome shaping culture: nature comes first, and nurture follows. But what if nurtured aspects of human culture, as they are handed down through generations, influence the genetic script, and the nature it encodes? As part-artificers of our own genome, are we peeling away from nature to become beings of our own invention?

In one sense, this suggests a greater authorial power for humanity. In reality, it means something more like this: arbitrary fads and viral memes among your prehistoric ancestors have messed with the essential proteins that make you a human being.

As Philip Larkin put it,

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.

Only it’s not just your mum and dad – it goes way back …

N.B. Information in this post about genetic research at the Broad Institute in Cambridge Massachusetts was reported in the New Scientist, 23/02/2013, in an article by Michael Marshall. The association of EDAR370A with Asian people and less fatty mammmary glands in mice is experimentally supported. The theory of a Spanish “big breast” gene, and the reflection upon culture moving the genome, is mine, and has not been experimentally tested. For the purposes of the argument made here, I am assuming that sweaty palms and thicker hair fibres are not selective drivers.

Inspired wordcraft such as this is enough to leave you dizzy. But, alas, this is not the time to praise good similes but to bemoan the bad ones.

Anybody who’s spent time in front of a gaping white page knows that expressing oneself in a clear, original, and incisive manner is Herculean chore requiring both persistence and wit. Similes are a particular gamble because a good one can invigorate your work, while a bad one can leave readers unmoved, or worse, wincing. (Would students across America be memorizing King’s speech if he spoke of justice rolling down like a stray tennis ball on a uneven court?) The task is challenging enough for novelists and poets, but as agonizing as creation may be, the most these writers risk with a bad simile is their pride. (In a memoir, Fania Pascal recalled telling Ludwig Wittgenstein that a tonsil operation had left her feeling ‘like a dog that has been run over.’ Wittgenstein promptly castigated her use of language because she couldn’t possibly know what a run-over dog felt like.)

No, the mettle of a simile is truly tested in non-fiction, specifically when a writer’s efforts to inform or persuade have broad and lasting consequences. An apt simile might sway a presidency is used during the debates or inspire a massive investment if unleashed during a business pitch. Or, that same apt metaphor might have the power to save the planet.

Consider the case of James Hansen, the environmental scientist who has emerged as the world’s foremost authority on the dangers of global warming. In his unnerving book Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity, Hansen recounts the various times he was called to Washington D.C. to give briefings on climate change. At one point in 2001, it seemed the Bush government was ready to take the problem seriously and Hansen was asked to address a select group of officials that included Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice. Hansen discussed the problem of carbon and what he considered the terrifying rise in the atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide from 280 ppm in 1750 to 370 ppm in 2000. And then he hit them with his big simile. He pulled a tiny 1-watt Christmas tree bulb from his pocket and brandished it before his powerful audience. The net effect of human-made climate change on the planet, he announced, “was equivalent to having two of those bulbs burning night and day over every square meter of Earth’s surface.”

Now, be honest: Does the Christmas bulb simile work for you? Are you terrified? Flooded with angst over global warning? Compelled to change your energy consumption patterns? I thought so. And, guess what, Cheney, Powell, Rice, and company weren’t persuaded either. They left the meeting underwhelmed by the climate change threat and whatever interest the Bush government once showed in the issue evaporated after the events of September 11, 2001.

Can we blame this crucial missed opportunity on one scientist’s bad simile? Probably not. But, as carbon dioxide emissions continue to soar and the American government continues to dither, we can legitimately wonder where we would be today if there had been a splash of Nabakov and a dash of Churchill in Hansen that day.

2.
Q: What did the strange quark say to the W boson?
A: Fishfish wibble — I am a teapot!

3.
Bottom quark pulls the gag from his mouth and says to top quark, ‘Ok, but before we get into this whole BDSM collision, what’s the safeword?’ Top quark says, ‘How about, unified-theory-of-quantum-gravity?’ Bottom quark pauses. ‘Ok …’ he says. ‘Right on,’ top quark says, and speeds off.

Bottom quark watches top quark rush away, but as he sits waiting in the accelerator, he starts to get antsy. Just as he sees top quark speeding back round the ring toward him at 99.99999999% of the speed of light, he suddenly thinks, Man, I don’t know if I’m ready for this shit. ‘Unified-theory-of-quaaa-’ he starts to cry, but right then, top quark smashes into him in a blinding ball of plasmic energy.

After all the smatters and smithereens have traced out their trails, top quark and bottom quark are sat next each other on the CERN ring fence. Top quark is smoking a cigarette. Bottom is rubbing his backside. It’s sore.

‘You know,’ bottom quark says, ‘for next time, can we find a slightly shorter safeword? Maybe just something like “Higgs” or “c” or something?’

‘How about Shrödingerian-wave-particle-duality?’ top quark suggests.

‘Yeah, you know, that’s exactly not what I mean,’ bottom quark says.

‘The truth is,’ top quark says, ‘whatever we choose, there’s always going to be a degree of uncertainty. Like, there’s always going to be this uncertainty with quantum situations, as to whether I’ve really heard the safeword or not.’

‘Yeah,’ bottom quark says. ‘Arsehole.’

click to see poem pre-cut-up-text

written and directed by Hannah Marie Marcus
performed by The Holiday Recording Party House Band (Hannah Marie Marcus, voice, keys; Meg Reichardt, guitar; Kurt Hoffman, clarinet; Paul Watson, trumpet; Ray Parker, upright bass; Michael Hearst, washboard; Rick Moody, voice)
special appearance by Raymond the dog
camera by Adrian Hornsby

www.holidayrecordingparty.com

Jason Bogdaneris’ moody movie of Hannah Marcus’ shadowy song, Ain’t No Way To Love Me

The term “global warming” was first coined in the ’70s, though it didn’t start to get popular until the early ’90s, when it embarked upon an exponential of its own. With science and worldwide concern mounting, the first Kyoto Protocol was held in 1997 (which took 1990 as the benchmark for future emissions assessments — symbolically establishing this as the year when humanity started to get serious about things). Since then of course, there has been more Kyoto, as well as Copenhagen, Doha, the Stern report, not to mention annual global talks sponsored by the UN, semi-continuous EU sessions, country by country enquiries, targets and resolutions, and countless conferences among myriad industries. Accompanying all this has been the ever ecstatic media, by turns: forecasting environmental armageddon; dispensing cool inconvenient truths; and offering hopeful-helpful tips on home wind turbines, and how to grow your own tomatoes. Naturally these have come with products galore, sensitive biobrands, options for green lifestyle choices, and innumerable favourite conversations among the environmentally switched-on. It’s hard to put all this into simple units of data, but here is a concept graph showing global talking about CO₂ emissions over the years 1990-2011. It demonstrates a similar general mounting of intensity, again with the blip in 2008 as everyone flipped to talking about banks, before the bank talk started to incorporate visions of how to use the crisis to reinvent the global economy as a newer, fairer, greener and less-emitting beast.

Thinking about these two graphs, I was reminded of another graph I saw not so long ago showing the size of the Brazilian Amazon over the years 1970-2008. Here we see a relatively steady progressive destruction – increasing in pace a little around the start of the ’80s, and then settling to a whack-rate of around 20,000 km²/year. Again the data I have on talk derives less from satellite measurements than from research-by-feel techniques, but again, the concept graph shows a neat mirroring with what is actually happening on the ground. As with the rising emissions / talk about reducing emissions scenario, we see the diminishing forest cover matched by roughly equal levels of year-on-year talk of preserving it. The talk-curve shows the slow-starting of the save-the-rainforests and save-the-Amazon memes in the ’70s, before they both found their feet in the ’80s, and kept to a firm climb ever since.

source data: (left) from Brazilian National Institute of Space Research (INPE) and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), quoted http://rainforests.mongabay.com/amazon/deforestation_calculations.html; (right) research-by-feel

Both these examples relate to environmental issues, but I would argue that this “mirror effect”, by which what is happening in the world is reflected perfectly — only in reverse — by what the world is talking about, can be observed more widely. Here are a few other fields and opposing fact-talk graphs that come to mind:

1. Graph showing bankers’ and chief executives’ pay (shooting up) and talk about cutting bankers’ and chief executives’ pay (shooting up a reverse axis)

2. Graph showing global inequality (strong rise) and talk about efforts to redress global inequality (strong rise on a reverse axis)

3. Graph showing world population (shooting up) and talk about overpopulation (shooting up a reverse axis)

4. Graph showing how fucked Greece is (a big jag followed by a high and rocky line) and talk about fixing how fucked Greece is (a big jag followed by a high and rocky line on a reverse axis)

5. Graph showing talk about China (shooting up) and actual understanding of China (shooting down). N.B. In this I include the 1.3bn people in China (after all, you can’t realistically exclude them when considering levels of global talk), who, as much as people in the West, have been talking explosively more and more about China, while knowing less and less about what the hell is actually going on.

These examples relate mostly to global or socio-political concerns in a collective capacity, but is it not possible to think also about how mirror graphs may relate to the personal sphere? The development of personal understanding, and how much people talk about the thing in question, may produce similarly opposing curves. As might such pairs as talking and lovelife (in terms of sexual activity, fidelity etc.); talking and resisting a temptation of some kind (e.g. booze, cakes, smokes); talking and being fair or “exhibiting fairness”; and indeed talking, and valuing the quality of restraint from talking too much (especially in the case of spiritual people). It is easy to imagine how with all of these, talking and occurrence can show strong mirroring. Which leads to the suggestion of a more general and-all encompassing concept graph, showing the relationship between what we talk about, and what’s really going on. Or, put more Carverishly, what we talk about when we talk about anything.

Dismembering them put me in mind of the French restaurant where they kill a cow on the weekend and prepare every part for food. Nose to tail carpentry. The noises that came out of the carcass - as one by one the strings were cut, as the age-jammed creaking screws were forced loose with brace and bit, as the hide-glue joins were split with a wooden club and meat cleaver – composed the most extraordinary swan song. As with good butchery, great care is taken to preserve the best cuts and though to the faint hearted observer the scene is perhaps macabre, to the butcher it is an honour to pay homage to the life that has passed in this way. Even in the dry acoustic of the studio every sound resonates through the body of the instrument creating the effect of a large stone hall.

For one thing it is remarkable to discover, through the process of reverse construction, how much craft and skill goes into making even the most humble piano. The solid maple frame is fleshed out with boards of poplar or birch under a dark swirling skin of walnut or mahogany veneer. Hard, curved beach limbs form the pinblock to space the strings over the thin, flat straight-grained soundboard of Sitka spruce. Metatarsals of hornbeam connect felted hammers through an intricate arrangement of joints and pivots to long fingers of basswood coated with wafer thin slices of white bone ivory and in the gaps between these teeth, black ebony wood.

Separated from the useless bulk of the junked piano and cleaned of centuries of dust the different woods begin to speak of the trees that bore them. Some parts are labelled with a name and date in the deft script of a maker. A fragment of card from a box of screws packing a joint or an old foreign coin under the keys is a seed from which flowery imagined histories grow. A faded paper pasted inside the lid notes that this piano was last tuned on March 11th 1904. Spacers in arrays of green, red and purple felt set the colours of the wood singing. The cast iron harp, the backbone of a piano, despite its delicate curves and spaces is surprisingly heavy and black.

My client, a cellist with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra amongst other accolades, is very glamorous and I like to imagine that the finished staircase is somewhat in the shape of a high-healed shoe. One panel of curved wood with a dark veneer frames a mirror that reflects the staircase to form the other shoe. This inversion is itself mirrored figuratively in the symmetry of the two iron harps at right angles to each other. The vertical keys on the risers even hope to induce a feeling that one has somehow been turned through ninety degrees and is standing on a wooden wall looking down on successive keyboards that in turn pass through ninety degrees as they round the corner of the room. The weight of the pianos has become the lightness of a floating bed, their sound the flowing waveform of a banister.

Thanks to Quinn, Alma and Leon for help with construction and to Su-a Lee for the conception and funding of the project.

The trouble is, cities don’t whisper to each other about liking each other’s moves. Quite the opposite — they complain incessantly about congestion. They complain about how blocked up they are, how they need to cut traffic, how difficult transport is to manage, how expensive transport infrastructure is to build, how expensive it is to maintain, how it’s crumbling everywhere …. Once on a roll, they berate themselves further for being massively expensive on all fronts really, as well as being shot through with poverty, riddled with crime, racked by sickness, socially isolating and alienating, and often dirty to boot. The apparently endemic nature of all of these problems inevitably drags on the question, ‘Why build cities at all?’ Certainly governments for the most part have neither liked nor wanted them, and historically have tended to push for the development of towns and smaller cities over larger urban agglomerations. Yet in spite this, and all the costs and problems, big cities continue to mushroom. Why?

Alain Bertaud gives this explanation:

“large labour markets are the only raison d’être of large cities”

By this, the purpose of drawing together so many people in one place is to gain the competitive advantages of a large labour market, which, if well-managed, outweighs the costs of building the city. For the large market to work however, it needs to be unified (efficiency gains are lost as soon as the market starts to fragment — i.e. it starts to operate as multiple smaller markets, which together present the form and costs of a city, but without the benefits). The concept of labour market unity — and thereby the concept of the city — rests upon the assumption that any worker in the city is able to access any potential job, and reciprocally, any employer in the city is able to draw indiscriminately from across the pool of urban workers. After all, why have the workers on one side of the city in the same city as workers on the other side if they can’t both access the same labour opportunities? They might as well be in two separate smaller cities, which would be cheaper and easier to run.

This need for access lays out a very clear principle: the key for cities is mobility. Mobility is what allows large cities to do what they exist to do.

This theory is however incomplete, as cities are as much about consumption as they are about production. If we strike the word “only” from the above Bertaud quote, we can add the following condition:

large consumer markets are the corollary raison d’être of large cities

And again, the need for unity, and therefore mobility, is paramount. For businesses setting up in a large city, the reason to pay the higher rents involved (generated by the high costs city-building and city-upkeep), is to be able to access a large market of potential customers. And equally for customers, what the city offers is the advantage of a large number of providers of products and services all competing with each other. For the competition to work, the businesses must be on a level, such that any consumer from any part of the city is able to access any business in any other part of the city, or vice versa.

Curiously however, this fundamental need for all parts of the city to support mutual flows of movement is missed completely by the favourite urban form of urban planners, viz., the “village-within-a-city”, or “mixed-use self-sufficient development”. Repeatedly planning officials demand, and architects supply, developments within cities that balance the number of jobs with the number of residents with the number of shops — all in the hope that somehow people will work and live within the bounds of a little urban-village. When thought about however, this is a remarkably peculiar idea. The essential question, if you’re in a village-within-a-city, is why pay the extra rent of being in the city when you could be in a village well outside of the city? If all you’re doing is staying in the village, then why not be in a village in Shropshire? What possible advantage can there be to being huddled up next to all the other villages-within-the-city? Why bunch the villages at all? The only answer can be: so that you can get easily from one village to the next. I.e. the villages give ready access to each other, and support mutual flows (and thereby mutual competition and choice). And in that case, if the villages are all contiguous and free-flowing, how are they presenting anything other than a unified city? The concept of multiple villages just melts away.

London as a unified large urban labour and consumer market is replaced by a cluster of “villages-within-the-city”. While the idea is a planners’ darling, there is no logical grounds for it, nor a credible example of it working.

Sure enough, this is what repeatedly happens when villages-within-cities are built. The “village” development itself may present carefully balanced mixed-use real-estate, but for the most part, those living within the “village” travel elsewhere in the city to work, while those working in the “village” travel in from other parts of the city where they live. This happens even in the extreme circumstances of satellite towns, where in a failed effort to cordon the new development off from the city, it is thrown geographically outside of it. Shanghai provides a perfect example: over the last decade, large-scale top-down government planning created a string of satellite towns outside the city proper, in the belief that this would ease congestive pressures. However far from staying put, the satellite residents commuted into Shanghai, the satellite workers commuted out from Shanghai, consumers went in both directions, and the satellites operated effectively as unified parts of the city — only at the far end of a set of artificially created congestion corridors.

The idea of the city as a cluster of self-contained villages, while endlessly irresistible to urban planners, repeatedly defeats itself both in theory and practice, and should be tossed in the trash.

To take its place however, a new planners’ darling is emerging in the form of the “networked city”. In the networked city, the beloved villages genuinely are villages, in that they are spatially disaggregated, only they are now all hooked up via the internet. This enables the residents of the networked city to live variously in the Cotswolds, on the sea, by Lake Windermere etc., with their laptop, alternately working away in the global marketplace, and regaling themselves with the view.

The idea that this will happen is in fact not so new. It finds its precedent, as does the technology, in the telephone. When the telephone was first rolled out, it was predicted that no one would bother to leave their home any more, the need for transport would implode, and people would live ever more remotely. What happened was in fact the complete opposite. The telephone provoked a transport explosion, as people called each other, and immediately said, “Hey, let’s meet up!”

Spatially disaggregated villages are linked up via the internet to create a “networked city”

The telephone proved to be a net trip-generator, and the same is certainly true of the internet. While odd bits of online shopping result in some reduction in trip numbers, this effect is vastly outstripped by the plethora of new connections made as people social network, business network, online date, google search for things to do and places to go — all of which, if they lead to anything, more often than not lead to the need for a “flesh meeting”, and therefore, the need for trips to be made. Because of the physical trips, it’s easier if the people involved are close to each other, and the most convenient solution is thus for everyone to locate themselves in a large city.

Which is precisely what people are doing. While the internet is getting ever faster and more ubiquitous, urbanisation trends are equally relentless. The proportion of urban to rural residents tipped over the global 50% mark in 2008, and continues apace. Moreover, the urban locations people are flocking to are the large ones: cities of over one million residents are rising fast, as are megacities of over 10 million. London is looking to join the megacity club, posting a 12% population increase between 2001 and 2011 to bring the recent total up to 8.1m. Together these trends are enough to put the “networked city” firmly in the trash can too.

reading left to right: percentage of world population living in urban (blue) vs. rural (green) environments, 1950-2050; number of cities with population over 1m, 1975, 1995, 2015; number of cities with a population over 10m, 1990-2010; networked city in the trash

The effect of the internet on urban movement has been to increase the number of trips people make, and consequently the need for urban aggregation. But more interestingly perhaps, it has also increased the randomness of trips. This is due in part to the way the internet provides a medium for people to perform space-insensitive searches, and to make space-insensitive connections. Put less abstractly: if you are searching online for a particular business or social link, the internet will readily return results from across any geographical field you define (e.g. the city you live in). The likelihood as a result of finding yourself more aware of, and therefore potentially more drawn to, service-providers, restaurants, friends, dates etc. outside of your local area, is that much greater. The internet effectively collapses the distances that previously separated the raw information, and in so doing helps the city to operate as a unified market, and for customers, clients, employers and socialisers alike to have equal access to knowledge about who and where each other are. If the knowledge then precipitates a trip, as often it will, the next point for the hardware of the city is to allow these people to get to each other, irrespective of where in the city they start out, and whether or not they’ve travelled that route before (or will again).

This randomness effect is in fact augmented by the “networked workforce” concept, in that while technological networking doesn’t support people extracting themselves from the city entirely, what has been falling off is the extent to which people work in a single stable place within the city. Flexible working practices lead to people increasingly working in part from home, in part from cafés, travelling around to have meetings in different places, hot-desking in different hub locations, etc.. As a result, the workplace is becoming less one place than a set of disparate locations distributed randomly across the city. This effectively does away with the predictability (from the transport planner’s perspective) of the traditional work-home commute.

Worse still, the trend is now for people to change jobs more often, wanting less a job for life than a job to get them to the next stage of their career. Consequently, the likelihood that the location of their home will be rationalised in relation to their place of work is considerably reduced. In the stable desk-based job-for-life era, it was easy enough to buy a home near a station on a direct link to wherever your office was. But if your office is constantly moving around, through the twin forces of flexible working practices and frequent job-switching, it’s really not so straight-forward.

So what does all this suggest? Three principles emerge. Firstly:

1. Both urbanisation and technological trends indicate a strong move toward larger cities, characterised by more trips, to increasingly unique destinations, of a continuously shifting and fundamentally unplottable nature.

With the trashing of the “village-within-a-city” and “networked city” concepts, we return to the unified city as the only viable model, with its essential reliance on high levels of internal mobility. Urbanisation evidence shows this model to be strongly favoured, while technological and social change all increase the demand not only for mobility, but for free, unfettered, non-linear, unidirectional mobility.

So how does the city cope with this? On the one hand, there seems to be the city’s almost inexhaustible ability to generate desire among its residents to make connections and trips — indeed this is its strength. However the city rapidly runs into congestion problems as the physical infrastructure fills up. Both the congestion and related costs accrue, creating trip aversion, which cuts back against trip desire. Thus principle two:

2. The city achieves a homeostasis between trip desire and trip aversion. This is its congestive capacity.

Congestive capacity is reached at the point where the desire of residents to go to places is balanced out by how expensive it is, how long it takes, and how uncomfortable the ride. The specific level of congestion at which this congestive capacity is reached will vary from city to city, and depend on things like economic factors, demographics, local culture etc.. The essential point however is that cities should expect this congestive capacity to exist. Increasing or decreasing, for example, the volume of infrastructure (such as by building more roads) will not lead to dramatic changes in the level of congestion, as the number of people using the infrastructure will increase or decrease accordingly, thereby returning it to the previously established level of what residents will happily tolerate. Given this idea of a congestive capacity, and adding it with the earlier premise that the city’s key advantage lies in its provision of access, leads to principle three:

3. The more trips the city is able to process when operating at its congestive capacity, the more efficient and competitive the city.

And this one is the killer, because the standard way to frame the debate around congestion is to ask continuously, “How can we reduce it?”

The most obvious way to achieve a reduction, in the face of strong trip desire, is to increase trip aversion, thus lowering the level of congestion at which congestive capacity is reached. But this cuts into the volume of trips being processed, and so injures the city. This is the paradox of contemporary transport measures.

On one level, it is astonishing how many people involved in urban transport approach it from the position that the fact of people moving is somehow the problem, and the best transport solution would therefore be to get them to stay at home. And while such a position is rarely stated explicitly, the urge to somehow negate “excess” movement is frequently at work within congestion curbing measures. Yet the real effects of such negation are rarely considered.

In a typical cost benefit analysis of congestion, the hours people spend in stuck in traffic appear on the cost side of the ledger, monetised at an average income rate (or some equivalent). But what this fails to account for is the counterfactual — i.e., if those people don’t make those trips, and are therefore not stuck in traffic, what are they doing with the time instead, and are they really monetising it at their average income rate? Because if they stay at home and, say, meditate, this may be beneficial for their well-being, but it certainly won’t result in an overall gain in urban GDP (as the cost benefit analysis would try to suggest). Conversely, when someone makes a trip, the likelihood is they are going to engage either in some kind of productive work (to deliver a service or product, to have a meeting etc.), or some kind of consumptive activity (to have dinner, go to a movie, go shopping etc.) — i.e., the trip leads either to spending or making money, and so contributes to urban GDP. The traffic is a crucial part of how the city achieves its turnover, and knocking it out knocks out much more than a time cost.

Nevertheless, negation-based aversion strategies are frequently favoured, not least because they are the easiest ones to imagine. The easiest of all is to impose additional costs, such as the introduction of, or an increase to, a congestion charge. Congestion charges unsurprisingly are unpopular, not least because the trips they bite into are inevitably those made by people who don’t have the money to pay. The move toward making driving in the city less and less affordable, and more and more a preserve of the wealthy, is not only hideously undemocratic, but oddly ironic. The era of mass production, and of making sophisticated products available to a wide range of people, was driven in no small way by Fordism — i.e. by the opening up of economic access to the benefits of, precisely, the automobile. Just over 100 years on from the introduction of the Ford Model T, it would seem to be a shame now to start rolling back — not cars — but instead roads, to the rich.

It can of course be argued that if someone doesn’t drive, the trip itself needn’t be negated, nor the access lost. Instead, costing people out of cars, 100 years on the the Ford Model T, can be thought of as a progressive measure. After all, it’s a new century: we’ve now seen all the ways in which cars can be damaging to cities, and we should have some better ideas. Bringing down the number of cars on the road needn’t reduce the ability of the city to process trips. Quite the opposite — trip numbers can be maintained or even improved by boosting the uptake of other transport options. In essence, the trip aversion implicit in a car trip can be increased so long as there is a corresponding decrease in the trip aversion of using another mode of transport.

With this in mind, I want briefly to run through a couple of these other modes, and to think about how they match up in the specific case of London.

The first one naturally is public transport, which in London is phenomenally expensive. In terms of cost, and relative levels of aversion, public transport and driving a car into London come up surprisingly even in some ways. An annual zones 1-6 travelcard is priced at £2,136. It’s less commonly bought in this form however than as twelve one month travelcards, yielding an annual cost of £2,461.20. In comparison, paying the congestion charge every weekday of the year, minus public holidays when it doesn’t apply, and less 5 weeks holiday a year, comes in at £2,260 — just under the median of the annual/monthly travelcard range.[1]

The other point to make about public transport in London is that it is currently fairly full. If people were all to jump out of their cars, would the tube realistically be able to take them? Rush hour tube trains are unquestionably crammed. Moreover they run fairly frequently, and the frequent system failures would suggest that Transport for London’s immediate ability to up the number of trains running at rush hour is at least questionable. Aversion techniques can again be brought in to try to persuade people not to travel at rush hour, and peak fares exist to do precisely this. However, the ability of people to travel at rush hour is critical to the functioning of the large urban labour market.[2]

The next option is the bicycle. Here cost is very low, but there is a different aversion factor at work in the form of safety. Below is a Googlemap showing cycling accidents in a section of central London. The blue pins indicate serious injuries, the red pins fatalities.

The map is impressive as it shows the spread. Note in particular how accidents are not so much clustered in “black spots”, which could be addressed or avoided, but rather are distributed fairly comprehensively throughout the network. It’s an slightly old map though, from 2008. Here is a more recent one in a slightly different format:

The numbers, covering August 2011 to July 2010, are astonishing: 179 accidents in Westminster, 307 in the West End, 313 in the City, 175 in Southwark. These includes slight injuries, serious injuries and fatalities. If we take it down to just serious injuries and fatalities, it looks like this:

Again look at the numbers: 22 in Westminster, 25 in the West End, 45 in the City, 26 in Southwark. Well over 100 serious injuries or fatalities just in the very centre of London in one year. It’s brutal. Who would ride a bike? Or recommend their children ride bikes?

There is no doubt the cycling infrastructure in London leaves an enormous amount to be desired. The key strategy over the last ten years has been to paint either green or blue stripes along the sides of otherwise unchanged roads — an intervention which is almost entirely cosmetic. The chief effect has been that motorists can now enjoy driving with two of their four wheels rolling over green or blue, as opposed to black, tarmac.

The promising thing about this however is that a real effort to improve the cycling infrastructure could lead to significant gains in safety, and a corresponding decrease in trip aversion to using this mode of transport. Notably bicycles are a far more efficient use of urban road space than cars, and so the same road network could process many times more trips, with corresponding gains in mobility and competitiveness (think of the number of cyclists that can pass through one cycle of a green light as opposed to how many cars get through in the same time).

However, as a magic bullet, cycling does have its limitations. These are imposed by the fact that a good proportion of urban trips are hard to convert to cycling because of an essential unsuitability of one kind or another. These include trips made by travellers who are, for example, elderly, infirm, obese, disabled, or underconfident. With clinical obesity alone accounting for 26% of the UK population and rising, this is already a sizeable group. But it goes on. Cycling is often unsuitable for people travelling with children, and children’s things; or with babies, and babies’ things (e.g. nappies, bottles, wipes, toys). Equally, getting rid of the baby, but keeping stuff as an issue, cycling is unsuitable for people who need to be transporting anything much, and so isn’t all that good for people going shopping. And, as in London you can anticipate bike rides of easily 20 minutes plus, quite possibly including a hill, and appreciable sweating, cycling can be unsuitable for people expecting to arrive at their destination at a high level of presentability. If you’re going to a business meeting, or a date, or a party, or want to wear a dress, or smart clothes etc., then the bicycle can be a problem. And finally, aversion to cycling becomes significantly greater anytime that it’s raining, or looks like it’s about to rain, or looks like it might be raining around the time you think you’ll be wanting to come back. If you remove all these groups and trips from the register, then all of a sudden cycling appears as a much slimmer solution to the issue of urban congestion than is often made out.

Lastly walking remains, but walking implies a limited range, and throws you back to the village scale, and the village-within-a-city dead end.

So what is the point I am trying to make? Certainly that non-car transport options in London, in their current state, are underequipped to do much more. But more, that simply hammering away at car usage, which seems to be the prevalent strategy, is an upsidedown way to go about things.

To set them rightsideup: firstly I’d advocate for a substantial reframing of the approach to transport and congestion. Congestion is best seen as a powerful indicator of a healthy city operating at full capacity. Cities that are free of congestion tend to be ones either in eerie free fall or political lockdown. On the other hand, cities that suffer from congestion are typically full of people trying to get to places to do things. If we embrace congestion as a condition of dynamic urbanism, we can start to move on.

The appropriate question then to ask is not how to reduce congestion, but how is it possible, given congestion, to maximise the number of trips the city is able to process at minimum cost, and minimum incidence of serious injury or death? The role of transport planners is therefore to focus on increasing transport efficiency. Measures that work up costs or other forms of aversion should only be considered if they can be balanced by the provision of credible alternatives, and trips negated by one mode should be more than compensated for by trips created by another. People are in the city essentially because they want to move — because they want to have access to the benefits the city offers. The responsibility of the city is therefore to provide safe, cheap, attractive transport options covering the full range of people who need to get around.

These points are in truth elemental and crushingly obvious. They are also bizarrely underaddressed. If we can move from a congestion-is-a-problem, we-need-to-stop-people-travelling, trip-aversion-driven form of thinking, to a solutions-orientated, maximise-processing, trip-desire-embracing form of thinking, then the chances of coming up with ideas that offer real alternatives, as opposed to just disincentives, are that much greater. The truth is cars are a very inefficient way to move around cities, and should be easy to beat. But instead of focusing on getting rid of them, we need to concentrate on putting in something better. And as soon as one large city is able to do this, the others may indeed cluster to whisper, “I like the way you move.”

Adrian Hornsby

Speech delivered at the House of Lords, UK, 16/10/2012
for the conference ‘Cities of the Future: Smart Ways to Move’
organised by Vision

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[1] Obviously owning a car implies substantial further expenses, but if you have one anyway, the high cost of public transport makes driving and paying the congestion charge not such a bad option. And if you’re taking two people in the car, let alone three or four, it becomes more and more attractive.
[2] The only way round this would be for workplaces to start to decohere their workhours, but having most people working at roughly the same time is so enormously advantageous, both in social and business terms, that it’s obviously not going to happen.

N.B. not two Tokyo parakeets

This is a news story, but of the kind the world lets fall every now and then, that read like parables of indeterminable meaning. Here’s the story.

A bird — a parakeet — is found perching on the shoulder of a man in Tokyo. The man is a hotel guest. The bird is not. Or the bird perhaps is — ? The man doesn’t know. He pets the bird. It chirrups. Unsure what to do next, the man walks — bird on shoulder — to reception. Within a hotel, reception is like the government. They set the rules. They know how behaviour is supposed to happen. Within the context of a hotel. The bird is taken to reception, where it is immediately declared a vagrant (a vagabond, a drifter, an itinerant without a wallet, a peddler without a case of goods). It chirrups again, then flies to perch on the lobby chandelier. Reception staff spend the morning in agitated efforts directing bellhops over the bird’s capture. With this eventually accomplished, they call the police. This is a police matter: a vagabond bird. A parakeet. The police collect the bird and take it into custody. A metal wastepaper basket is upturned for a holding cell, and the bird is placed within upon the chief’s desk, where it continues to chirrup and caw, raise one leg and then the other, flick its tail, and squawk. On day two, among the curling notes and whistles of its song, it utters: a piece of language. It recites, to the chief as he trails his pen down the page of a report, an address. He looks at the parakeet, who ducks his head twice, and sings the address again. The words are quickly jotted down, and the bird taken to the named district and apartment. A woman opens the door, and immediately identifies herself as the bird’s owner. The bird is handed over to the woman, who returns it to its cage. “Yes,” she explains, “I taught the bird to sing my address, so that if it ever escaped, it would be brought back. I had lost a bird before — a parakeet — and I was not going to let it happen again.”

How is the story to be interpreted? Is it that the parakeet had made its escape, but found, beneath the wide and wild skies of freedom, that the one song it knew how to sing was in fact the message of its former jailor — ? That its fate was to repeat — haplessly, uncomprehendingly, and to anyone who would listen — the words that would return it to the prison whence it had broken? Or is it that the address in the song, and the cage it implies, should really be understood as home? That without linguistic consciousness, but through the language of song, the bird is really finding its way back to the place of security and ownership where it will be safe, tended to, petted, and loved? Or is it that prison and home, within the story, should be understood as analogs, if not synonyms? The only words the bird has — and even these it doesn’t really have, not as words as such, but only as signifiers within a programme that runs in the basal ganglia of its brain — these words are the address of a place that is both prison and home; both a cage, and a cage in which to be — ? And if so, and if it is indeed a parable, then how are we to feel about it? And what does it say for us? Are we not, in some way, with the programmes in our own brains, wandering the world, chirruping on the shoulders of hotel guests, endlessly and uncomprehendingly repeating the signifiers of an ownership that we at best dimly understand? Are our songs, as we sing them, returning us always to our prisons, which are our homes?

(Link to BBC news article …)