Bowblog

Playing in the road

Yesterday the suburban street outside our house was closed all day. It’s a busy road so the contrast with an ordinary day was pronounced – the silence lovely. We all rushed out into the street to enjoy the calm. Olly brought his scooter and raced down the hill (achieving some kind of scary, wobbly land speed record in the process), we tight-roped along the white line, played chicken with the absent trucks and 4x4s (we’ve done this before, actually) A holiday atmosphere arose.

After a while, as people realised what was going on, others sent their kids out with bikes and skates and footballs (and Heelys, natch). I crossed the road for no reason. And then back again. I chatted with neighbours I hardly ever talk to. Children I’ve never even seen emerged from houses only a few doors down. Gorblimey guv, it was like the 1950s.

I’ve said this before but I’m going to say it again anyway: the dominion of the car has made our streets and communities miserable, inward-looking places. Take the cars away, even if only for a day, and life returns. Yesterday, when the cars came back, all in a disappointing rush at about 5 O’Clock, the kids disappeared into their houses like mice into the skirting – in a blink they were gone, exiled from the street again. It was genuinely sad.

Jane Jacobs, humane urbanist, recorded variations in the rates of interaction amongst neighbours on opposite sides of the same street. Simplifying: the faster the traffic in your street, the less likely you are to cross the road to talk to the people who live there. Above a certain speed you’ll never bother. Slowing traffic, logically, increases interaction and, below a certain speed, you’ll be as friendly with opposite neighbours as you are with the ones on either side (your sociability may vary).

Here’s an article about shared streets, a successful Dutch way of making streets more friendly by, paradoxically, mixing up the cars and the people. Here are some more pics from our quiet day.

What I have learnt about Iran lately

Iran is not monolothic. The country is (weakly) democratic, has a (partially) independent press and a (moderately) autonomous judiciary. Dissent and criticism exist.
Iran is not entirely Shia. Nor even entirely Muslim. Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians, Buddhists and tens of millions of secularists live there.
Iran is the largest exporter of pistachios in the world.
Iran is a theocratic state but not a very good one. An imperfect separation of church and state persists – inconveniently for the Ayatollahs.
Iran is huge. Well over 70M people (a larger population than every European country except Germany).
Iran is nose job capital of the world. Per capita, cosmetic surgery is bigger than in the US.
Iran is not Arab. OK, you already knew this, but it’s worth remembering when looking for likely alliances in the region.
Iran is an ancient nation. The Persian civilisation is 6000 years old and hasn’t attacked another nation for hundreds. Its borders are among the most stable on the planet. Its people are very proud of all this.
Iran’s economy is not centrally-run. It’s an Islamic Republic, not a People’s Republic. Wealthy kids in Iran drive to the mall in their Lamborghinis and take cocaine. Working people struggle. Poor people die young.
Iran’s infrastructure is shot – nearly three decades of US sanctions mean they don’t have the expertise (or the materials) to build oil refineries. Iran is the largest exporter of natural gas and one of the largest exporters of crude oil in the region but imports nearly half of its petrol from refining states. Iranians hate this dependency.
Iran’s basic industries are decades out of date. Ordinary people drive around in cars based on a 1960s Hillman Hunter.
Iranians are big bloggers. Probably the biggest bloggers on earth, if measured by blogs-per-thousand-population.

Better than reading the menu

You mean your club doesn’t have a dirty great, broadsheet- sized, full-colour intellectual quarterly? Really? Mine does. Clever Giuseppe Mascoli, who’s been sprucing up Blacks in Dean Street a bit lately, has a hand in The Drawbridge, a really quite amazing pinkish newspaper full of the kind of tousled sociopaths you used to see only in The New Left Review.

A roster that includes cheeky Slavoj Zižek, cuddly John Berger, prickly Noam Chomsky and bloody Gerry Adams (plus loads of other lefties, situationists and topers you’ve heard of). Fair takes the breath away.

All, I’m reliably assured, were chivvied into producing copy (this issue’s theme is ‘Failure’) because they are members and no money changed hands. This I don’t believe. If Gerry Adams is a member of Blacks it’s definitely news to me: I’ve seen various former Pythons, a few think-tankers and billions of media types at Blacks, but definitely not Noam Chomsky. I wonder if they’re doling out honorary memberships in return for contributions…

Think before you sign that petition

Stationary traffic on Britain's main M1 motorway. Photo: Steve Bowbrick
I like road pricing but it’s a big, important policy and – inevitably – it’s a proper curate’s egg. To start with we need to understand what’s good and what’s bad about it.

The good parts:

It’s subtle. Much subtler, for instance, than the sledgehammer of general taxation.

It’s direct. Tweak the price for this evening’s rush hour and you’ll see the effect tomorrow (politics notwithstanding). Achieving the policy’s goals (reducing congestion) should be possible.

It’s green. It’s about reassignment of capacity and reduction of load and it requires a better understanding of demand. All of this is good.

It explains itself. Nothing like a forty-foot illuminated road-sign with a price on it to communicate public policy.

The bad parts:

It’s not progressive. Worse, making it progressive would require huge violations of privacy (connecting government computers to provide discounts for pensioners, for instance).

It’s a potential privacy nightmare. The instinct of officials and legislators is always threefold: capture everything, link it with everything else and keep it forever. That erodes liberty and damages public trust.

It’s also a potential public IT money pit (we’re good at those).

It’s politically difficult. No one likes new taxes, everyone assumes it will duplicate existing taxes (difficult to argue with, that one) – and then there’s ‘the motoring lobby’.

It’s indiscriminate. It will punish people who work in low-skill, labour-rich businesses – employers won’t have much incentive to provide flexible working hours so these workers will just have to fork out for rush-hour charges.

It doesn’t address the underlying problem. In a modern, growth-oriented society (i.e. all of them except North Korea) demand must continue to grow. Providing alternatives to congested roads will become even more important once incentives to stop using them are in place.

It ought to be:

Accountable. Prices should be set by a body you can vote for – a local authority or central government – not by the Highways Agency or a new Quango.

Not Big Brother. Everyone knows that you can make even big real world systems like this one ‘blind’, with a parsimonious data policy: recording only the data needed, connecting it with other data only in an emergency and dumping records as soon as they’ve been used, for instance. It’s just that the instinct of Governments and officials is always to go further. A project like this could be an opportunity to show that public IT doesn’t need to be elephantine, intrusive, broken. How about a system designed from scratch as an exemplar of Big Brother-Free data policy? Fat chance, I suppose.

Simple: designed by a couple of geeks in a room, not by KPMG or Accenture. Design goals like: small, elegant and simple should come ahead of mega-contractor priorities like: redundant, integrated, comprehensive. The totalising instincts of the big boys have got us into enough of a mess over the years. We could take this opportunity to reverse a malignant trend.

I wonder if the big petition might provide the kind of opportunity for a debate about road pricing that Big Brother provided last month about racism and bullying. If it does, I’d say that’s a small victory for Number 10’s openness and readiness to host dissenting voices.

Message to whingeing motorists: shut up!

Jeremy Clarkson driving too fast
Did you notice the unsavoury emergence of so-called ‘motoring advocates’ into the pop media after last week’s letter bombs? Their disreputable message: “what did you expect? You pushed us around for long enough. Sooner or later one of us was going to crack…” makes me feel slightly sick. I’m a motorist. I drive my kids around in a an over-sized people mover. I even laugh like a drain at Clarkson and his exploits from time to time. Maybe I should identify with these ‘advocates’ and their hermetic worldview. Don’t feel like it, though.

Driving a tonne or more of steel around too fast is a bad thing. Can’t really find it in my heart to object when police forces and local authorities skewer speeding drivers. Can’t really think of a good reason for painting speed cameras yellow and putting them on maps either. I’d like to see them concealed in trees and switched on randomly. As to avoiding the fines and keeping your license, I’ve got an idea: slow down you jerk!

BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House picked up on the motoring advocates’ intervention and ran a heartbreaking interview with a driver who blames his own speeding for the death of his five year-old boy. Click to listen to the show. For balance I feel I should link to the nutty Association of British Drivers which is a sort of catch-all protest group for old blokes in car coats.

Adaptation in action

A nifty coin tray adaptation at Tesco's in Radlett
You’re looking at the kind of spontaneous local adaptation that new technology often undergoes after it’s arrived in its intended home. It’s the coin tray of one of those self-service supermarket check-outs.

The machine spits your change into the tray and – a few weeks after the thing was first installed – everybody now knows that, about half the time, your change bounces out of the hard, metal tray and onto the sticky floor. It’s become a popular comedy moment. Regulars stand around waiting for the next show (not much going on round my way). Your in-the-know punter puts his hand over the thing just in case, of course. Your newbie loses his change.

So the clever staff have ‘installed’ a little piece of J-Cloth in the tray and, of course, it bloody works. Your change now lands softly in the tray so you can pick it up and leave sharpish – as planned by the machine’s ace designer. This is the kind of teeny-tiny unplanned variation that really cheers me up (the kind of thing I’d like to see web sites allow, by the way).

Blue thought

Nothing like 97,000 pictures of the sky from every corner of the earth to remind you that our planet is just a big lump of hot rock wrapped in the slimmest envelope of air.

Going on strike

A 1971 strike in Knoxville, Tennessee
Industrial action is pointless, wasteful and destructive – and essential for a healthy society

Why do people still go on strike? Haven’t we got past all that? Didn’t we leave the pointless conflict of boss and worker back in the eighties? Obviously not. Cabin crew at British Airways are flexing their muscles (although their strike is off for the time being). Railway workers are staging one-day strikes. Civil servants are at it too. New Yorkers are into it too. We don’t seem to be able to transcend the wasteful non-communication of labour vs capital. Sooner or later (at least where unions still exist) push comes to shove and labour is withdrawn. Strikes do permanent damage to reputations, jobs and the bottom line and they hardly ever produce the effect desired by workers. Everyone suffers. So why do we keep doing it?

A strike (a dispute, a standoff, a work-to-rule… Any kind of labour-side argy-bargy) is a response to some kind of imbalance… an asymmetry. These asymmetries used to have simpler names: exploitation, inequity. They were about unequal access to resources – shitty pay, diabolical conditions, long hours. That’s why trade unions came into being. These days the asymmetries are subtler. Circumstances have changed and it’s usually about unequal access to information, poorly distributed knowledge or failed communication.

Capitalism is imperfect. Markets are powerful tools for producing and distributing value but they do it mechanically and arbitrarily. Capitalism, of course, actually depends on these asymmetries. Between the value of an asset to you and its value to me. Between businesses with pricing power and those who follow. Between those who make efficient use of capital and those who waste it. Without asymmetries opportunities never arise. Capitalism conducted without unequal access to one kind of resource or another is unimaginable.

In a capitalist system – let’s get this straight – value can only be created where there is a useful asymmetry to exploit. So, while these critical asymmetries produce economic value, labour must retain the last resort power to challenge an injustice, to rectify an inequity, to face down capital. Strikes may be crude and often counterproductive but any reading of the contemporary economy must acknowledge that they’re a necessary and proportionate corrective to out-of-whack capital. Strikes are an awkward holdover from the first half of the industrial revolution but, it turns out, they retain their value. Strikes are aggressive and negative and messy but they’re also direct, appropriate and authentic: we’re pissed off and we’re not going to take it any more…

The pic is from an excellent flickr set about Knoxville, Tennessee in 1971 by willie_901.

Leave the Catholics alone…

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, Catholic Archbishop of Westminster
Should a modern nation allow religious groups an exception from laws protecting minorities from discrimination? Should groups professing essentially 1st Century prejudices be exempt from 21st Century legislation?

You can’t innoculate a society against intolerance. It’s probably written into the genome by hundreds of thousands of years of adrenaline-fueled tribal existence and by the pretty basic caveman fear of the unknown. Prejudice towards minorities is atavistic – a throwback to simpler, scarier times when the unknown might… well… eat you.

You can aspire to transcend your intolerance, though, and our body of laws expresses this aspiration. Permitting Catholics (or Muslims or Scientologists) to opt-out and ignore these laws is a crappy compromise with the history of bigotry but probably a necessity. I hate the idea that loving couples ready to care for needy children should be shown a big ‘No Gays’ sign by these backward adoption agencies but, on balance, I think we need to be tolerant even of backwardness occasionally.

Taking a legislative cosh to the Catholics would be mean-spirited and unhistoric. Seeking proposals for reform and setting reasonable deadlines would be better: a grown-up approach, respectful of the church’s difficulty reconciling the here-and-now with ancient doctrine.

Magnus Linklater in The Times is worried about the consequences of a possible Kelly resignation. Stephen Bates in The Guardian knows that the Archbishop of Canterbury has personal experience of the quality of gay parenting. The Beeb has a handy gay adoption Q&A.

What does a deliberative democracy look like?

Britain's new deliberative parliament
Well, I reckon it’ll probably look a bit like the last ten days of Celebrity Big Brother. Why? Well, look at what happened: an ugly incident of racist bullying took place on national TV (the kind of incident, by the way, that probably happens all the the time but usually without the cameras) and the incident produced a huge and inclusive public debate about racism and a wave of support for the abused party.

No organised debate or formal consultative process could have come close to the number and variety of contributions from all corners of society that we’ve seen in the last ten days. Channel 4’s entirely spontaneous ‘big conversation’ has been more useful and more productive than anything organised by a politician for decades. Friday’s big Shilpa vs Jade vote was a proper referendum on racism in Britain – and one that went better than almost anyone could have hoped.

The opportunistic politicians calling for Channel 4 to be censured, managers sacked and shows cancelled are either confused (they don’t seem to be able to tell the difference between the medium and the message) or venal (they see political advantage in looking tough on racism). I think Andy Duncan, his commissioners and producers (and his board) have done Britain a great service and, in the future, the whole episode will be remembered as a case study in the value of a second public service broadcaster.