Annals of Motordom – 29

An occasional update on items from Motordom – the world of auto dominance.

______________________________________________________________

.

URBAN BALLET IN BARCELONA

Thanks to Yule Heibel for linking me to this extraordinary video at Pattern Cities:

This incredible film, shot from the front of a Barcelona streetcar in 1908, demonstrates the degree to which modern society has engineered complexity out of our streets. It also provides a glimpse into how our city streets operated before the automobile went mainstream, a seminal 20th century moment that has damaged cities the world over.

But surely the streets of the 1900′s were not entirely crash-free, or as romantic as this film and its whimsical music make them out to be. Yet, the inherent complexity– the organized chaos of streetcars, pedestrians, horse-drawn carriages, and yes, motorists all mixing together–is instructive and should make any urbanist long for a time when the tyranny of the automobile didn’t dominate the project of city building.

______________________________________________________________

.

TWO WORLD VIEWS

Research completed by the Australian Council for Education Research found that children who travelled to school by car had a remarkably narrow view of their community.

“When researchers asked car-borne kids to draw pictures of the way they saw their world they drew abstract, isolated images of neighbour-hoods where the car and the road were the central theme. Traffic lights, road signs, office buildings, shopping centres and fast food outlets dominated.

Researchers contrasted this alarmingly stunted vision with that of children who rode or walked to school. Their drawings were dominated by green spaces and people doing things; trees, grass, people playing sport, riding bikes, walking dogs.

It is hard to image a more contrasting world view. And from this springs the obvious question of why, why are we allowing many of our children to become increasingly (alarmingly) inactive?

- Scott Whiffin, The Age, 14/3/11

______________________________________________________________

.

ON THE DANGER OF MOTORDOM

Nassim Taleb (iterary essayist, hedge fund manager, derivatives trader, and professor of risk engineering at The Polytechnic Institute of New York University, best known these days as the author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable) spoke with Wharton finance professor Richard Herring, who taught Taleb when he was a Wharton MBA student.

Herring: Given your view on the fragility of Saudi Arabia, how should we think about making direct investments in Saudi Arabia, the supply of oil, or military alliances?

Taleb: I think that an oil shock would be very good, because we need to be trained to finally give up on these stupid cars. We have so many alternative sources, and people are too lazy. We need to enhance anti-fragility in this area. You can move from wild randomness into mild randomness by creating some. It is like hormesis: You give someone a little bit of poison, and they get stronger. Economic life gets stronger not with bailouts but with bankruptcies.

Evolution works not with bailouts — there are no bailouts in nature — but with competition and natural selection. So you need to have some stressors and to use stressors to strengthen the system. We have not been stressed enough about the oil crisis, and it has led to a horrible situation in which the U.S. government is playing a hypocritical role driven by humanitarian forces in Libya, but at the same time supporting the Saudi royal family, essentially one tribe running a place — even giving its name to it. It is the most unstable place and the most backward of regimes in the world — all in the name of oil security.

So you realize that you have some schizophrenia as far as how a lot of Western governments are behaving. So we need a little bit of oil shock. …

Herring: It requires more than a shock, doesn’t it? Because we have had those before. … In fact, the price of oil in real terms was even lower than just after the OPEC increase. So the motives for making substitutions just were not there.

Taleb: I see. But do you think that we will eventually wean ourselves from that nasty dark product from the ground?

Herring: One hopes. But it is hard to see how, given the reality of the way we have built our society, with remote suburbs and interstate highways linking everything. We cannot make a very quick substitution out of the petroleum-based economy. But you are absolutely right. It has got to be faced.

Taleb: This is the fragility of having dependence on one source — one product — rather than more than one. … It is optimal to use oil visibly. But it is more dangerous. In my new book, I focus on optimization; almost 99 cases out of 100, optimizations make you vulnerable and fragile.

Herring: Yes. That’s the darker side of Adam Smith’s pin factory. You become more efficient by becoming more specialized, but you also become more vulnerable to some kinds of shocks.

Taleb: [When a company becomes] more specialized with things, and it works better, the numbers look better. But your hidden risks rise and rise. And then when you are faced with a problem, you don’t know what to do about it, whereas in other cases you have more variations all the time. You have more fluctuations, and, of course, you are a lot more robust.

Full transcript here at Motley Fool.

______________________________________________________________

Advertisement