Comment by deeg
3 days ago
I have a friend who sees what he thinks is a problem and starts off with "I don't know why they just didn't...", as if he could come up with a better solution in 2 minutes of thinking than experts in the field. The reality is that he just doesn't know all the competing interests and problems. The article feels the same way.
Knowing that there is a reason just boils down to the same thing.
You can overcome the forced working against you if you care enough, but nobody does.
I see this fallacy a lot in the US. I think it's because of our individualism. Attention and hard-work can't overcome everything, we aren't all-powerful beings.
If you care enough and have the resources available. It's rare for someone to care only about one specific thing like a bicycle ramp to put in the resources to make a difference, though.
(i.e. my experience is that people do, on the whole, care. But they generally care about different things, and especially have different priorities in terms of how they allocate their resources, especially time. This blog is a rant about people caring about things that the author cares about, a lot of which are reasonable, but are not the be-all end-all of priorities)
You're more likely to burn out butting your head against the incentives working against you. If you're lucky, you may get a few successes before you burn out.
That's partly true, but "competing interests and problems" have a tendency to accumulate in much the same way as technical debt.
Particularly so in a world of longer lifespans and careers, higher information connectivity and so on.
It's arguably one of the reasons nations tend to experience boom periods in the aftermath of major wars. The destruction has a way of clearing out the accumulated complexity, giving people a clean slate to decide what's _really_ important/valuable/productive.
(To avoid any doubt, this is not an argument in favour of major wars.)
I live on the fringes of an old European city which was damaged but, largely, not destroyed by WWII bombing. The difficulty of building new transit lines here is legendary, essentially they're almost entirely paralysed by the web of competing interests, and this grows more every year, not less, as new ones arise.
Places that suffered nearer total war damage have a two-fold advantage. First, they could build back a city-plan that was more suited to the modern era - and secondly, nobody had time to get all that attached to the new city-plan, so they've had the flexibility to iterate further, things like retrofitting trams, relocating the main traffic arterials further from the city centre, new metro lines to adjust to changing demographic/geographic patterns and so on.
To this specific example - it's not that the competing interests are worthless exactly, but their sum total value is surely orders of magnitude less than a new metro line. However, because of the due processes that hold sway in a peaceful, democratic and rights-based society, they're able to gum up the works to the point that we can only build about one genuinely new metro line every 30 years, despite being one of the richest cities in the Western world.