This post is inspired by two things:
- Two chats at the 21st Global Summit, one over dinner last night about how one would model the impacts of giving a city a low cost high bandwidth service, and what other socio-economic things would change (settlement patterns, industries etc) and the other a talk today by Phil Pavitt, CIO of Transport for London about his thought that the transport infrastructure has to be integrated into the network architecture.
- Work I did some 15 years ago on the use of electronic highways rather than physical ones – sadly its not on the web, it was written up in Management Today in the pre Web 1990's.
This post is a thoughtpiece for comment / criticism etc, and thus is more a jotting down of thoughts rather than specific hard opinions.
Re modelling – it may be obvious to anyone looking at say Korea’s adoption of 100Mb bandwidth with an independent point of view that the impact is huge – new industries are possible, people consume new services, the cities attract and incubate old and new companies to provide these services. However, for change to happen you are typically up against vested interests, conflicting demand for budgets, a variety of resource gatekeepers who don’t give a f*ck about Korea, or new industries etc etc – you know the litany – as Machiavelli noted:
It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who would profit by the old order, only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new.
Hence modelling – being able to show in some trusted way that This Is a good Thing, and conversely, not doing this is a Very Dumb Thing. It also provides a capability for supporters to rally.
Secondly, megacities like London - some general observations re megacities:
(i) Megacities are expanding their populations, its one of the current “long wave” trends and for a variety of sociodemographic reasons its not going to stop anytime soon. (And despite dreams of the Internet providing electronic cottages and cybervillages, in reality the wired generation are by and large migrating to big cities)
(ii) There is no way that motorcars and roads are sustainable with these sorts of populations, regardless of square area of a city, population density etc – the network effects mean choke points. Taxing them in various ways without providing alternatives does not solve the problem, it just increases the cost for the average citizen.
(iii) The public transport alternatives are not sustainable – there is a limit to the amount of people a train/underground/bus system can affordably carry in any given physical area. Some cities/countries subsidise more than others so the curve to the limit differs, some have fewer bottlenecks (river bridges etc) so a greater natural capacity, but at some point it fills up in every city. This is again due to network effects – you can only send N buses down the main arterials at any one time
Now there are some things that can be done by just making some real life shifts in the journeys that need to be made – the most obvious are:
(i) Timeshift - get away from the rush hour, as it forces the provisioning of physical systems of far greater capacity than is required on average
(ii) Spaceshift - get away from centralised CBD workplaces, as that means fewer journeys compete for the limited central facilities.
Unfortunately, experience has shown that spaceshifting is hard - dispersing journeys from the centre is often more onerous as (i) most initial city networks are built to “get me to the centre” topologies, and you now add on an extra journey from the centre out to get to the new beltway locations, or (ii) there is total overconsumption of the (typically far thinner) point to point arterials across a city – so you wind up having to build urban freeways, beltways etc. Timeshifting seems to offer more benefits but requires significant changes to the Way we Live Now.
But, at some point you still come to the inevitable conclusion that there have to be fewer journeys (and you did even 15 years ago – it’s a testament in some ways to society’s inertia that despite the huge impact of the Internet in the interim, this issue is still a growing, not receding issue). Unfortunately megacities are growing with more people, more households (each with fewer people) so the number of journeys is actually increasing
Anyway, in the last 3 years we have achieved c 2/3 penetration of broadband internet – what can we do with this to reduce the number of journeys? The first thing is to find out what those journeys are, and in descending order these would appear to be (for London)
- Commuting to and from work
- School runs
- Shopping trips
The simple answer is to replace or timeshift as many of these as possible using modern technology – but this is easier said than done. Taking them in order:
Commuting to and from work
At first glance this would seem quite easy – give people a terminal at home, a fast connection, and bingo off you go – work from home, avoid the rush hour if you are going to the office, bingo. Except that:
(i) Many companies do not want to change their existing cultures, for various reasons – let others do it, not us, is the refrain
(ii) Some people have to work together with other people physically to get their “stuff” done
(iii) Some businesses have walk in customers and ave to have people there over certain hours
School Runs
Its less clear to me how the digital pipes can help here as the issues are (i) parents don't trust the safety of the streets and drive the kids to school (there being no Yellow Bus system in London as exists in New York, and (ii) Schools tend to start at the same time as rush hour.
Shopping Trips
We have modelled this a number of times - the amount of vehicle miles travelled by a "travelling salesman" pattern delivery truck from say Ocado, or the Royal Mail etc is far lower than all those customers driving to the supermarket and back to buy the goods (ring vs star topology). Thus any system that can increase online ordering and reduce journeys must be useful.
There is also the issue of dealing with the Digital Dispossessed – the 1/3rd of people who don’t use these electronic highways. These people present fairly interesting issues as they are typically (in non PC terms):
(i) Poorer – thus no one wants to serve them commercially, and there are also risks in giving them expensive IT equipment free - as they have been known (we are told) to sell it down the pub.
(ii) Less educated and/or less familiar with English and/or older – so many simply cannot use more complex internet based services – or at least the helpdesk / user service load is uneconomically high
In other words they are usually left to government agencies to deal with, or to subsidize companies to deal with.
I'll be the first to admit I don't have an answer here - in theory one would like to think that giving equal access is possible, but I'm not sure it is in reality. Perhaps there are options via mobile, or cable /digital TV, or gaming systems which has higher penetration. But if it isn't, do do you limit everyone else so that this segment has some form of equal access, or do you deliver a 2 tier service (the digital equivalent of red telephone boxes) until penetration is in the near full range.
