Who Gets the Blame for the BP Disaster?
a look at consumption, tacit encouragement, and societal acceptance of systemic risk
Posted 2010-05-20 22:07 in business, culture, environment, ethics, human nature, sustainability
The BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is set to be one of, if not the biggest, environmental disasters in history. There’s been a lot of talk about about BP’s negligence and how their abject greed and lack of concern for safety precautions led to this problem. While I agree that BP probably did neglect their duties in some ways (evidence does seem to suggest this), and in a lot of ways should be held responsible for their failures, I also think that blaming BP is a very myopic way of looking at the problem and in preventing future disasters.
It’s a longstanding theme— a trope, if you will— within the progressive cultural narrative to blame corporations for all our global and national problems, or at least to finger them as the root cause of all unwanted consumption-related externalities. This view also conveniently avoids having to take serious looks at our own behaviors as individuals and as a society, and how these continually place our country and our environment at risk. When I say this, my point is not to absolve companies of responsibility and to place blame elsewhere. I advocate a holistic view of the entire system— being contemplative about our own roles in the functioning of our society and our complicity in creating it.
Fact: there are serious risks endemic to our energy policy. An error can definitely be blamed on an oil company’s negligence, but simply blaming them does little to stem the damage the disaster creates. As a country, we seem unable or unwilling to face this. Stated another way: there are systemic risks that are inherent in the way our society has chosen to build its infrastructure, and the energy chain we now rely on to achieve the basic functionality of our society.
Blaming BP is a little like going skydiving and having your parachute fail to deploy. Yes, maybe you are right to curse, during your last 30 seconds of life, the skydiving company for their failure to properly prepare the parachute. But as you can quickly see with this example, when you’re falling 120mph towards the hard, cold earth, it’s a bit too late for finger pointing to be productive. What would have been useful to know beforehand was that there is serious risk involved in skydiving to begin with. There will eventually be an accident. No matter what. The statistics might change, but there will at some point be an accident that someone will pay dearly for. And you might be the one affected by that accident. Maybe you should think about that before you go skydiving.
Inadvertent environmental damage. Inadvertent pollution. Inadvertent destruction of natural habitats. Inadvertent damage to ecosystems. Inadvertent killing of important portions of the food chain. These are but a few of the risks we assume with our energy policy. And I would describe this as systemic risk because damage to any one of these spheres could have serious ripple effects in other spheres. A failure of one off-shore oil drilling platform could potentially kill off a vast amount of ocean life. We do not know what degree of damage this might end up being once the effects of this echo throughout the chain. The interplay of factors is complex enough that it’s difficult to predict what kind of collapse we might trigger through one disaster stemming from energy procurement. Realistically, we must come to grips with the idea that things will go wrong from time to time. But to only criticize the companies behind such environmental disasters is to look askance at our own roles in creating the conditions for things like this to happen.
Like it or not, these companies sustain us and our way of life, which is why they are drilling out there in the first place. Unless we are willing to make compromises or wholesale shifts in our consumption as a society, then we’ll continue to have periodic disasters from things like off-shore drilling because things inevitably go wrong every now and then. There is no avoiding this; it’s the nature of a complex system for periodic failures to occur. It’s naive to think that companies simply don’t care about disasters like this; for BP, it’s not only bad PR, but they’re losing billions in profit from all this spilled oil.
Yet, regardless of what happens to the companies, we all suffer for these errors, and maybe in ways we haven’t even thought of yet. One error can be devastating to the entire human race and all life on earth. Yet, we allow companies to engage in activities that expose us to these risks. Why? Because it enables our lifestyle. We could easily prevent them from doing it if we as a society (through our elected officials) agreed that this was not something that was worth risking. But we don’t. We have comfortable lives that we receive as a benefit of allowing the behavior to continue (at least until the inevitable disaster); politicians feel pressure to support risky activities because as a society, we don’t appreciate the level of risk we’re investing ourselves in until it’s too late. Yet, it’s clear that the fewer risky behaviors we encourage or allow as a society, the less number of disasters we’ll have as a whole.
Currently the cap for all damages is $75 million, to be paid by BP. This, as you might imagine, is far lower than either the estimated dollar value of the damages or the amount of money it will take to clean up the spill. Some outraged people think that we should raise that cap into the tens of billions. This sounds good, until you realize that some things are just unfixable. This oil spill (more like a geyser) is pretty much unfixable at any cost. It’s just too late.
It’s for that reason, I think we shouldn’t increase the cap. If anything, I think we should lower it. Why? Having a huge cap will offer us psychological relief that we can keep allowing industries to do things that impose great risks to our society and planet. The larger this cap is, the more we feel like we will have someone to blame and someone who is “responsible” for fixing the problem. But like I said earlier, some things simply are not fixable. A money-back guarantee from a skydiving company isn’t going to do you much good when when you’re falling out of an airplane without a functioning parachute.
If we believe this disaster to be an exemplar of the kind of risk we are not willing to accept as a byproduct of off-shore oil drilling, then we should never have allowed this kind of drilling to be authorized in the first place. If we have low caps on similarly risky pursuits in the future, we’ll probably think a lot harder about what we allow to go on. Getting someone to fork over money for cleanup is the easy part. Actually undoing damage that a disaster on this scale causes is another, largely intractable problem that we’ll suffer the consequences for for a good long time. Lowering the cap forces us, from the very beginning, to think about what we’re doing when we authorize something. That’s what having no insurance policy forces you to do; you have to evaluate things based on an uncolored view of the risks because you are the one who is going to suffer the consequences. This is a realistic proposition because in the case of environmental disaster, we are all affected; a closed system like planet Earth is at jeopardy in its entirety when just one of the checks in a network of environmental checks and balances is threatened. It’s just easy to forget it when you can bill someone else for the problems.
If we think from the beginning about the costs we all have to deal with instead of the costs “some company” has to deal with, we’ll be a lot more careful in the future. If there is a future.
Comment [6]
Is Recognition of Human Empathy the Solution to our Environmental Problems?
according to Jeremy Rifkin, we’re on the verge of a massive revolution
Posted 2010-02-19 11:36 in biology, consumerism, culture, economics, environment, human nature, improvements, marketing, politics, sustainability
There’s a fascinating interview with writer Jeremy Rifkin over at the New Scientist website. In it, he lays out why he thinks there is going to a be a massive shift in human consciousness as a result of new forms of information accessibility combining with the human ability for expressing empathy. This revolution, in his estimation, will solve the energy and environmental problems our world is facing. Borrowing from evolutionary biology, philosophy, marketing, and many other fields, Rifkin sees hope in the current turmoil where others don’t.
Incidentally, Rifkin’s vision of changing human behavior runs completely contrary to that of Steven Levitt (of Superfreakanomics fame), who as I stated in a previous entry is stuck in neutral with his “solve problems created by technology with more technology” rut.
Incentivization and the Superfreakanomics Controversy
Why Levitt and Dubner’s take on climate change is too limited a view
Posted 2009-12-26 12:40 in book reviews, environment, human nature, politics
In 2005, a pop economics book called Freakanomics climbed the nation’s bestseller list. Written by University of Chicago economics professor Steven Levitt and New York Times journalist Stephen Dubner, the book claimed to unlock mysteries surrounding many social phenomena. For example, chapters explained through the lens of statistics and economic theory, why drug dealers live with their parents and the reasons for the popularity of certain baby names to particular races of people. The explanations given in the book were interesting and thought-provoking, and earned a great deal of critical acclaim and popular press.1 Whatever the legitimacy of the claims made in the book, there was always a sense that Levitt was a sharp guy; he came from a respected academic institution, and was well-known in his field.
Earlier this year (2009), the highly-anticipated followup to their bestselling book, entitled Superfreakanomics, was released. But even before the book had hit shelves, a massive amount of public controversy had built up— much of it very negative. Many critics who had formerly been gushing about the authors suddenly had lost all respect, viewing the book as a compendium of contrarianism, arguments made to deliberately jostle one’s sense of intuition about things— in a bad way. For example, Levitt and Dubner argued that drunk-driving is safer than walking home drunk. Not only did this incense organizations that had made so many strides against this sort of behavior, but many found there to be surprisingly weak chains of logic in their methodological approaches.
But where the book really enraged the scientific community at large was in their highly controversial chapter on global warming. Climate change is already a hot-button topic; one that has generated a large level of heated public debate. Levitt and Dubner decided to throw gas on the flame by claiming that the only serious way to address the problem is to engage in geoengineering. We should, they argue, release large amounts of certain chemicals into the atmosphere; these chemicals will absorb the problems created by excess CO2 and begin a global cooling process. There’s a lot you could say about their “solution” in terms of the science (which they claim supports them, but which many strongly dispute); for starters, it’s dangerous to so offhandedly suggest a solution on this scale that could have serious downstream problems. Efforts in using human measures to balance biological processes have often had unforeseeable and difficult to correct consequences (one example being the recurring problems we have had with invasive species). But I’m not in the loop enough with that world to argue those points. What irks me is that they specifically downplayed the idea that change in human behavior was warranted or possible at all. In an interview, Levitt was quoted as saying:
If you look at the history of modern mankind, I think you will be hard pressed to find any particular problem that was serious that was solved by a behavioral change, as opposed to by a technological solution…
As a social scientist and student of economic behavior, I find this assertion not only misguided, but ill-conceived as well. First, it is built on a false premise: that there are two types of change, behavioral and technological. This is untrue; often, behavioral change goes hand in hand with technological change. How is it fair to say that our society’s transition to motor vehicles, or our adoption of cellular telephones are solely the purview of technological change? Sure there are clear technological changes involved, but simple shifts in technological wizardry do not, by themselves, account for widespread shifts in adoption rates (for example, natural gas vehicles have been invented, but few people actually own a natural gas powered car). For any technological advance to take root, it has to be accompanied by behavioral changes.
The second reason, which dovetails perfectly with the aforementioned reason, is that because people do make behavioral changes that aren’t part of technological changes. It’s not clear what serious historical events Levitt is talking about when he says that he doesn’t have confidence in people changing behavior, but there’s tremendous, almost incontrovertible evidence that behavioral change can happen in the absence of technological change. Here’s one simple example: high gas prices in 2007 drastically reduced the amount of driving done by the average American. This might seem like a trivial rebuttal, but the reality is that external conditions force people to change behavior all the time. Here, the fact that prices went up disincentivized people from driving around needlessly. Technology played no part in this. Admittedly, it can be argued that this is not a “serious” situation on the scale that Levitt is referring to in that quote, but aside from climate change, what serious situations of global proportions that involved 6 billion— or even 50 million— atomized individual actors has plagued this planet in the past? I can’t think of one. Regardless, it’s not hard to see that many situations, particularly ones involving imminent crises, effect rapid changes in human behavior. For Levitt— an economist— to make an argument asserting the pre-eminence of technology as a force is a little surprising to me.2
I don’t mean to discount the role of technology at all. But just as often, it comes down to our governments and society to create the conditions necessary for behavioral change. Sometimes this happens on its own, sometimes it happens through deliberate processes. Regardless, my argument against Levitt’s assertion is one that I thought should have been obvious to someone of Levitt’s stature; as an economist, his entire field is about incentivization. Surely he, of all people, would know that you can change behavior— not simply by asking for change, which is the straw man he seems to be knocking down— but by changing incentives structures and changing the conditions that push individuals towards the choices they make (perhaps he should have taken some lessons from his colleague at the University of Chicago Richard Thaler, whose book Nudge discusses this idea at length).
Though I can’t make any arguments about geoengineering because I simply don’t know enough about it, I will say that saying that Levitt and Dubner’s attitude towards behavioral change is somewhat defeatist and cynical; I agree, it can be difficult to change behavior, but it’s important to realize how it can and can’t be done. Simply asking for it doesn’t typically work, as people have resistance to change; but creating conditions that encourage behavioral change is exactly how the world and our society was able to transform so dramatically over the past few millennia, and how we can expect it to be shaped in the future.
1 I can’t say that I cared much for the book myself (again making myself the oddball amongst my peer set), mostly because the title was misleading and the book had no applied value whatsoever. It was fairly interesting if viewed as a trivia book, however— putting aside any questions regarding its accuracy.
2 Surprising at least initially, until I realized that mainstream economic theory didn’t even introduce concepts about the behavioral irrationality of the consumer until just a few years back. This shocking and bewildering oversight will eventually lay waste to the entire field if it is not immediately adopted into the economic mainstream. The field is already getting a lot of heat because of the recent economic meltdown, which was due in large part to irrational consumer processes that were not even considered by the big names in economics!
Comment [1]
The Trader Joe's Paradox Revisited
how the most progressive grocery store came in last for sustainability
Posted 2009-09-22 21:18 in consumerism, environment, experiences, marketing, sustainability
Trader Joe’s, the much celebrated “progressive” grocery store is a favorite of those consumers who favor such adjectives as “green” and “eco-friendly.” Unfortunately, as I described in a previous article, the reality is that Trader Joe’s is nothing of the sort. Amazingly, they manage to maintain that undeserved image without promoting it or even living up to the standards that these values would suggest. Case in point: this article in the New York Times places Trader Joe’s dead last in a national survey of grocery store seafood sustainability. It really takes some doing to lose out to guys like Safeway and Kroger. But then, Trader Joe’s never claimed to be eco-friendly and green in the first place, so maybe it’s not that surprising.
As I mentioned in my previous article about TJ’s (see the update at bottom), I talked to a Trader Joe’s manager about this very issue about their fish last November when I noticed that almost all the fish they sell there were on the “AVOID” column of the Monterrey Bay Aquarium guide to sustainable fish). The manager told me that Trader Joe’s is a “democracy” and they stock things that people buy, and well, the people like unsustainable fish. I suppose he seemed somewhat apologetic about it, but at the same time he was able to take umbrage under this lofty ideology of populism.
Of course, by the same token we can view this democracy as a means by which we are able to use our buying power to promote our ideals through selective purchasing; that is, if we don’t believe a company is representing our values, we can avoid buying there. Being concerned about the state of our collapsing oceans, I did exactly that and stopped buying fish there. I also tried to share this information with friends, colleagues, and anyone who would listen. What I discovered about this is that it’s quite hard to gain credence with others regarding something when your statements directly contradict what others think they know; nearly everyone I told this to seemed to doubt my claims because of Trader Joe’s pervasive “progressive” reputation.
Earlier this year, I decided to write to Trader Joe’s headquarters about it. In my letter, I expressed that while I appreciated their apparent democratic ideals, Trader Joe’s could implement a “high road” approach on this, given the scientifically-validated reality that overfishing is destroying the world’s oceans. I attached a copy of the Monterrey Bay Aquarium guide to sustainable fish. Much to my surprise, soon after I sent it, they updated their website to add something about how they are now sourcing their fish based on the Monterrey Bay Aquarium guide. I’m not sure if it was my letter that elicited this, but the timing was pretty remarkable, and I was pleased that maybe one customer’s opinion did matter!
Well, it’s been several months or so since that update on their website. Since then, I’ve gone back numerous times and have not seen any change in their inventory of fish. I’m disappointed, especially since so many people are convinced that they are a company with “principles” and “ideals” relating to environmentalism, and thus do all their shopping there with the implicit understanding that their shopping list has already been filtered for eco-friendliness. Of course, to be fair, TJ’s never claimed that they serve this function.
But boy, they’ve shown that they can really cash in on this misconception.
"What Do I Buy?" vs. "Do I Buy?"
making sense of the ‘environmentalism-through-consumption’ movement
Posted 2009-04-23 15:25 in consumerism, economics, environment, sustainability
Continuing on the Earth Day themes I’ve been thinking about for the past few days, I’d like to talk about one of the latest environmental trends I’ve seen lately: commercial reuse. Before I start, let me say that I’m all for reuse in the sense that I support the idea of using resources we already have rather than producing new ones. Clearly, reuse can be a good way of avoiding all sorts of needless waste. Why buy a new lamp when you can, as I found out, get a perfectly good used one free on Freecycle?*
That said, yesterday, I saw a program on the National Geographic Channel called Garbage Moguls that managed to perturb me despite its focus on reuse. The premise of this particular episode, according to the show’s webpage:
Recycling gets a makeover with a quirky group of young “eco-capitalists” at TerraCycle, Inc. Using only materials found in the trash, the team will transform cereal boxes into notebooks, newspaper into pencils and cookie wrappers into kites.
An interview with the company’s founder at the opening of the show had him making the following statement (paraphrased): “I want to prove to people that you can save the world and make a boatload of money doing it.”
In and of themselves, I have no problem with either the description of the company or the founder’s statement. However, what I am finding increasingly disturbing is the environmental movement’s seeming exclusionary focus on the What Do I Buy? piece of the retail value chain, and the total lack of acknowledgment of the preceding Do I Buy? piece. I understand that reuse is a valuable contribution to the environmental movement, but it is increasingly worrisome to me that companies like this simply market and sell the ideas of “environmentalism-through-consumption,” which is at best a tacit approach to a problem that requires active solutions. Note, for example, that the quote from the founder explicitly likens buying TerraCycle’s products to saving the world.
Again, I don’t disagree that buying a recycled notebook is better than buying a new one; it is almost definitely better (provided that the energy costs of producing the recycled notebook more than offsets the environmental and energy costs of making a new one). But it’s not so much Terracycle’s products themselves that are offputting to me so much as the ideological by-products, which reinforce myths like “recycling = environmentalism.” I am concerned this attitude may be almost as harmful as a lack of environmental awareness.
Why? Because when this attitude is promoted, it leads people to believe that along with recycling, buying Terracycle’s products (and products like them) is tantamount to saving the planet, and therefore a complete strategy to offset environmental damage. But this isn’t exactly true. What it does is alleviate some of the damages caused by consumption. The only way to avoid causing damage in the first place is to cease consumption entirely; this is because ceasing consumption causes manufacturers to stop producing. But I should reiterate that my argument is not that we shouldn’t buy at all; instead, I would argue that along with reusing and recycling, more emphasis needs to be placed on the Do I Buy? decision (in the purple “consumer” section of the above diagram). Exercising this discretion could make all the difference.
*I’ve used, and continue to use, Freecycle, a website that connects you with people who want to get rid of perfectly good stuff (and often less than perfect stuff as well) and lets you take that stuff for free, and that will also connect you with people who will take your weird, useless knick-knacks lying in your closet that are only taking up space. I think it’s a cool service that has great potential to save you money and clean up your house, while enjoying some positive social impacts. I strongly recommend it.
Comment [1]
The Mystery of Coffee Refills
barriers to behavioral change are not always obvious
Posted 2009-04-21 00:30 in business, economics, environment, human nature, marketing, sustainability, unanswered questions
There is a Peet’s Coffee stand in the cafeteria of the building where I spend my days. They have a deal where you can bring in any size container and get a refill for $1.50. The cheapest size of coffee you can buy without getting a refill is $1.65, for a small size. I’m not a big coffee drinker, but as the semester rolls to a close, I find myself going there somewhat frequently. I always bring my old cup so I can get the refill. It saves me a few cents, and besides, I don’t like throwing away coffee cups. It’s not just the cup that bothers me, it’s the heat-insulating jacket and the plastic lid as well. It seems like a lot of stuff to be throwing out, especially if you buy coffee every day, or multiple times a day.
What I find very strange is that I’m surrounded by people who drink a lot of coffee— like 3-4 cups a day— and yet I feel like I’m the lone soul who brings in his used cup to refill. This seems particularly odd because a lot of the people around me are other students who, like me, are living their lives dangerously close to the poverty line and could probably use every cent that they might save.
Unsure about this incongruity, I asked the cashier one day if many people refill their cups. “Hardly anyone,” she replied, “but there are some people who refill huge containers.” She motioned with her hands to show how big the containers were. They were rather large.
Peet’s is apparently okay with this abuse of their refill policy, but the cashier seemed to think it was crazy. The reason Peet’s is okay with it probably has something to do with the facts that 1) they want to promote some kind of environmentalism, 2) refills save money on cups, lids, and insulators which are somewhat expensive, 3) it serves to reduce their waste disposal costs, and 4) hardly anyone gets refills.
But I find the fact that few people get refills curious. Of the people who frequent this coffee shop, many of them are graduate students, staff, and professors, who have offices within the building. Many of the undergraduates have storage lockers in the building as well. Yet the incentive structure is apparently not appealing enough for many of these people to get refills.
For a number of reasons, it is very interesting to observe the lack of consumer response to this initiative. First, it’s not very difficult for anyone to take advantage of it; that is, it doesn’t really create much inconvenience (especially for the customers who have offices or lockers within the building). Second, it demands very little change to habitualized behavior to get the refill (people just have to remember to take the cup with them to the coffee shop). Third, people— particularly those who drink a lot of coffee and multiple coffees per day— stand to save a good amount of money (if you buy a large coffee, you can save some 60 cents per drink, which can add up very quickly). Fourth, it demonstrates how inured we are to our disposable culture; the thought of refilling probably doesn’t occur to most people because they’ve simply never lived their lives in this manner.
As a person interested in understanding how to make behavioral change more appealing in social marketing contexts (this being of environmental concern to me), I note this: despite the bevy of benefits (reduced costs to the consumer, access to virtually infinite quantities of coffee, significant reduction of environmental waste) and the relatively minor drawbacks (you have to keep the cup and remember to bring it when you visit the store), this effort to promote refilling has generally failed. So I ask: what kinds of changes need to happen to make the reuse of coffee cups appealing for the customers of this particular store?
Post your thoughts or comments below, particularly if you are a regular customer of this or any coffee shop!
[Note: I realize that if you read the previous entry on this blog, it may seem to conflict with my attitude here. I should explain: this entry is about encouraging behavioral change that promotes certain ideals; the previous entry was expressing frustration with the repeated insinuations from industry that behavioral change is unnecessary if you just buy the right products. That said, I do not mean to discount the importance of careful and well-considered consumption, and its role in making social impacts; I simply reject it as a singular strategy.]
Comment [3]
Rethinking Green
easy approaches to being ‘green’ are en vogue, but do they shoulder the environmental burden?
Posted 2009-04-18 11:56 in environment, human nature, improvements, sustainability
Note: This article is a response to this “eco-business”, which sells standard cleaning products in reused containers.
I don’t mean to engage in the perfect solution fallacy here, but a business selling Windex in reused bottles encapsulates a lot of the things that I think are misguided about the green movement. I do believe that reusing materials is a very good thing, but I am concerned that ‘green marketing’ efforts like this hoodwink well-intentioned people into thinking that minor and convenient consumption changes can offset the huge environmental problems we create by not making serious inquiries to our overall lifestyle choices.
In my mind, efforts like this have the worrying effect of diverting attention away from the real problems (overconsumption), and instead breeding attitudes founded on ease and ignorance (e.g. “well, as long as I recycle, I’m doing my part”) and reliance on consumer goods to promote ideas that really require behavioral changes. I understand that recycling is generally a good thing, but I’ve met countless people who think that just recycling is equivalent to being environmentally conscious. And it’s not; it is simply one expression of it. Buying Windex in recycled bottles and recycling aluminum cans is not, as many people will likely see it, absolution for our collective extravagance. If you read up on the economics of recycling you might see why this is the case (to put it shortly, recycling takes a lot of energy, uses a lot of resources, and has a huge carbon footprint of its own).
The conversation about environmentalism has been so dumbed-down and reduced to quick-fix solutions that it has started to promote the problem by making consumers feel like the only role in the consumption process (with regards to social impact) is the last stage— recycling the empty bottles, cans, and cardboard boxes of the stuff they buy. And while this one way to make a contribution, it’s not even close to being the most effective way to transform concern for the environment into action; it’s just the easiest way— and that’s a big difference.
The reality is that if we really care about the environment, we will need to consume less overall. We will likely need to make major sacrifices to our comfort levels. If we really care, we may need to accept some major inconveniences in our lives. We cannot get something for nothing.
Buying a reused plastic bottle is indeed a small step towards a massive goal, but we should not be tricked into thinking that answers can be bought so easily and shipped to our houses. As I mentioned before, with true commitment comes sacrifice.
We like quick solutions, but it is time to start thinking harder about our roles in creating the problems, instead of trying to consume our way out, which is the way we got in in the first place. But unfortunately, modern culture hinges so much on consumption and consumer products being the solutions to our problems that it is our instinctual response to look for our solutions there— externally— instead of within ourselves and our behavior. Unfortunately, that is precisely the wrong place to look.
Consumers and Commitment to a Cause
how committed are you to your ideals?
Posted 2009-02-08 08:07 in consumerism, environment, human nature
This week had an interesting article in the New York Times about environmentally-conscious people ditching their refrigerators, and living their lives without chilling their food. That’s real commitment; our society is not really structured to make a lifestyle change like this easy. Grocery stores are usually far from peoples’ houses, and going there regularly is not convenient. There are any number of reasons that making a change like this would be very difficult. Yet, as I’ve argued before, these difficult changes are the ones that actually make a difference; these are the types of conscious choices that if we took to en masse, would make strong steps towards making serious environmental impacts. But most people still believe that the best way they can change their impacts and lifestyles is by buying recycled toilet paper.
Here is a very telling quote from the article (emphases are mine):
“The refrigerator was a smart advance for society,” said Gretchen Willis, 37, an environmentally conscious mother of four in Arlington, Tex., who recently read about the practice [of living without refrigerators] on a popular eco-themed blog. “I never would have thought of it,” Ms. Willis said, explaining that although she’s committed to recycling and using fluorescent bulbs, she draws the line at any environmental practice that will result in great expense or inconvenience.
It may be worth considering: if you are unwilling to make personal sacrifices, and will only consider changes that are convenient or that won’t cause you any discomfort, are you really committed?
Why BART Needs an Overhaul
how basic marketing could fix the Bay Area’s mass transit systems
Posted 2009-01-12 04:00 in environment, experiences, improvements, marketing, pictures, transportation
Last week, I was back in the Bay Area for a day after a trip to Asia. An excursion from the airport on BART reminded me what an egregious marketing disaster the system is for residents of Northern California. It’s a classic example of a well-meaning institution that does not take stock of how it does things, how its methods affect customers, and how that affects their overall revenues and performance. To understand why this is important, we first have to understand the current context of BART and the role it serves in the Bay Area.
BART was developed in the 1960s as a means of getting residents of outlying suburbs in the Bay Area to the city centers of Oakland and San Francisco. It was fashioned as an inter city (between cities) transport system, not an intra city (within a single city) transport system like New York, Tokyo, or Hong Kong. Therefore, the station distribution of the BART system is wider, but with lower density. That means that while BART travels further than most other subway systems across the world, it’s also harder to get to a station, your trip is significantly more likely to involve several legs involving different types of transport, and you have to wait longer between the arrival of two trains. These facts already pose a psychological barrier to potential ridership, so it is important that if administrators want to encourage BART usage, that annoyances be minimized; after all, any excuse a rider can find not to take BART, they likely will employ.
It is for that reason that it is tragic that BART is from top to bottom such a frustrating transit system, and seems to me the perfect example of a wasted opportunity— so much so that it is really an embarrassment for an area of the country that prides itself on technological leadership and progressive thought. At every turn, the BART system seems to want to discourage ridership, and make it ridiculously hard for passengers to do things that should be very simple. Here are some observations about BART that I’ve made, culled from years of experience riding it.
- Marketing Problem #1 – Station Layout and Orientation
Almost all BART stations have unique designs that share few attributes between them besides being uniformly confusing and utterly confounding for people who are unfamiliar with their layouts. I realize that the BART system was largely designed in the 1960s, but a public transit system is not the place to experiment with post-modern design. Some BART stations are so poorly designed that they seem to actively thwart passengers from catching trains. For example, in the 12th street / Oakland City Center station, for a passenger to switch trains, he must climb up one set of stairs to another level, and then climb down a different set of stairs to access the second BART platform. This is despite the fact that the first set of stairs that you climb up actually passes right by the level you are trying to get to; for some reason, access to that floor from the first set of stairs is blocked. In certain other stations, the passenger waiting platforms are placed not in the center between the two train tracks, but on the opposite sides of the train; this means that instead of allowing passengers to access either train from one platform, you have to decide which platform you want to go to before you walk onto it. If you select the wrong one the first time, you have to run back up the flight of stairs you took to get to the one you went to, and run down another flight of stairs to get to the other (New York’s subway system has this same problem— except that there, if you go in the wrong side, you actually have to pay the subway toll again to switch platforms!). This is not problematic for people familiar with the stations, but for visitors and for people new to the area, this can be maddening.
Solution for Problem #1
Short of total redesign, this is a tough one. Better signage would help a lot. It’s impossible to know where to go when all the signs just say things like ‘Platform 1’ and ‘North-bound train.’ This presupposes the customer already has previous understanding of the station layout and geographical sense of the Bay Area. Spell out everything, so people who have no idea know what they’re supposed to do.
- Marketing Problem #2 – Inflexible Payment System
The BART card, which gives a passenger access to the trains, is made of a flimsy piece of magnetic paper that inspires exactly zero confidence. They are easily bent, and will de-magnetize if you happen to place one next to your mobile phone. Bent or de-magnetized tickets are rejected by the turnstiles, and the BART attendants aren’t particularly concerned about helping passengers with problem cards (my girlfriend told an uninterested attendant that her card, which still had $5 on it, wasn’t working. The attendant took it, said that it was “too old” and then told my girlfriend to buy a new one. One wonders, is 1.5 years really a long time in BART years?). If you’re lucky, you can write to some address listed in BART informational literature and get a refund on the money you put on the card, but I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.
Solution to Marketing Problem #2
Many other subway systems have much sturdier cards that aren’t so easy to mangle or otherwise damage, like Hong Kong’s system, which has something resembling a credit card. And you can use them to buy all kinds of other stuff too (like food at convenient stores), which make you more likely to keep one around and using them and the BART system too.
- Marketing Problem #3 – Abhorrent Aesthetics
Visually, the BART trains themselves are hardly the stuff of envy for other countries looking to the US for mass transport leadership. I often wonder how wide-eyed visitors to Silicon Valley with dreams of a sunny land filled with the world’s most cutting edge companies must react when they first enter a dingy retro-future steel train with dirty carpeted floors and filthy green upholstered seats. It must have a way of shattering the grandiose illusions about the Californian dream. In what world is it a good idea to make a public mass transit system with seats and floors that can’t be wiped clean with a high pressure hose? With the level of traffic that passes through the BART system every day, why would a designer choose to use materials like carpet and upholstery that retain dirt and which are near impossible to keep clean? For professionals traveling on BART, there’s definitely a sense that you’re ‘slumming’ when you enter a weirdly foul-smelling and visually unappealing environment like a BART train.
Solution to Marketing Problem #3:
My advice is to ditch the upholstery and carpeted floor in favor of the hard plastic used by nearly every other transit system. It’s much cheaper to maintain, it smells a lot better after constant use, it doesn’t get as dirty, and it looks a hell of a lot better than dirty green. Shallow as it may be, initial visual impression is one of the strongest drivers of attitudes towards things. Impress people visually about BART and they’re more likely to ride it.
- Marketing Problem #4 – Seat Arrangement
The arrangement of the seats in BART is at best curious. Space is used inefficiently and arbitrarily; some seats face forwards and others face backwards; some seats are placed perpendicular to the train, while others are parallel; and some seats face other seats so you can stare awkwardly at strangers). You’d think there was some rationale for this arrangement, like perhaps flexibility for special situations; but it’s clear that the arrangement doesn’t even afford this. For example, if you are returning from SFO, San Francisco’s international airport, and you have bags, you can forget about having a place to put your bags without using up seats or blocking access to doors. If you have a bike, there is absolutely no place for it on a BART train where it won’t create serious chaos in how people can sit, or how others can walk around or access the BART car. Here, we have a situation in which the arrangement is neither most convenient for passengers, nor accommodating for special situations; instead, it serves mostly to taunt you and make the whole system seem poorly planned.
Solution to Marketing Problem #4:
I suggest the rearrangement of seats to maximize seating capacity in most cars, but to set aside [a] special car[s] with a different seating arrangement that better accommodates people with packages, baggage, and bicycles.
- Marketing Problem #5 – Biking on BART
Speaking of bikes, BART does allow you to bring a bike on— but not at the times that you’d most likely want to bring your bike on, which is during normal commuting hours. If you want to use your bike as part of your commute to work, don’t even think about it. Not only are they are prohibited during those times, you’ll have to hold it awkwardly while it blocks doors and access to seats— which is why they forbid them in the first place. Bring one on during peak hours, and the train driver will tell you to get off the train.
Solution to Marketing Problem #5: As I mentioned previously, I would suggest adding a special bike car to encourage bikers to use BART and to further encourage use of mass transit— though the BART system has been systematically reducing the number of BART cars in operation in order to cut costs. Ironically, these efforts in cost-cutting also discourage ridership, which along with reducing costs, reduces revenues. To give BART some credit, they have been adding bicycle parking units outside some BART stations, like El Cerrito, where you can store your bike at the station in a special holding container for 3 cents an hour. But this still doesn’t solve the problem of those who need bikes on both ends of their daily commute.
- Marketing Problem #6 – Maps and Signage
The BART system lacks an adequate number of maps, and also offers poor information quality on existing maps. There should be BART maps everywhere, but it’s often hard to find one. There’s usually only one on an entire BART train, when there should be at least 4 in my opinion. Furthermore, if you don’t understand the geography of the area or are unfamiliar with subway maps, you’ll have a heck of a time figuring out how to get from point A to point B. It’s not at all intuitive which train you should be getting on if you want to get from, say, Daly City to Union City, particularly if you don’t understand where those places are in the Bay Area. Not all trains go to all places, so it’s important to understand which ones go where, but it’s especially infuriating to newcomers to understand the idea of transfer points and switching trains, as making sense of the train maps when you don’t have a sense for the geography takes too much effort.
Solution to Marketing Problem #6: I would propose that instead of showing a geographical depiction of cities, BART’s map should be shown as a linear continuum to eliminate unnecessary or confusing information. Perhaps something like this, where flashing lights can indicate where you are (indicated in the diagram by the yellow light in circle 13) and the next station the train will stop at (indicated by the flashing orange light in circle 14):
- Marketing Problem #7 – Communication between System and Passengers
It also doesn’t help that conductors don’t always give helpful messages over the intercoms about where passengers should transfer and whether the train is currently at a transfer point. In fact, it’s often impossible to understand what is being said on the intercom. And too often it’s hard to figure out what station you’re at! If you’re lucky, there’s a tiny sign that you might see posted in the station if you look out your dirty window long enough to find it, but it’s not always there and it’s often surprisingly difficult to spot.
Solution to Problem #7: Tokyo’s subway system has an interactive map on every wall of the train car showing exactly where you are at any given time, what station you are about to arrive at, and most basically, what direction you’re traveling. That would be a great and welcome addition to BART.
- Marketing Problem #8 – Intermodality Issues
BART’s apparent slogan is “BART… and you’re there!”, a phrase that sounds great on paper. Yet, anyone who’s ever ridden BART knows well that BART is anything but that simple. With its few stations positioned in San Francisco and Oakland, as well as places like Fruitvale and Bay Point, you can make a decent argument that BART’s geographical reaches are significant; still, what it means in that slogan to ‘be there’ is clearly up to debate. Sure, you can get from the town of Orinda to the city San Francisco relatively easily if you happen to already be at the originating BART station, but it’s rarely convenient to get either to your originating BART station or from the destination BART station to wherever it is that you’re trying to go. This often means that a range of transport is necessitated for a given trip. You might need to drive or walk to a BART station, take the BART, and hop on a bus to your final destination. Or you might need to get on CalTrain, catch the BART, and hail a taxi for the last leg of the trip. “BART… and you’re there!” is a phrase that not only rings untrue and hollow for the bulk of passengers, but serves mostly as a reminder for how long and tedious it is to get anywhere using BART and Bay Area mass transit in general (which probably explains in large part the ridiculous amount of traffic to be found on any given stretch of highway in the Bay Area during any given time, particularly around commute times).
Solution to Marketing Problem #8: Unfortunately, short of overhauling the entire mass transit system of the Bay Area, there’s little that can be done about this now, but it should be seen as a cautionary example for other up-and-coming systems.
- Marketing Problem #9 – Too Hard to Pay for Tickets
Yet, I have repeatedly mentioned on this blog, any organization that is attempting to increase its patronage needs to make it easy for people to switch to them. The mass transit in the Bay Area does an absolutely abysmal job of this. Infrequent trains and buses as well as limited routes are a big part of the problem, but are for understandable budgetary reasons not easy to fix. But one thing that Bay Area mass transit absolutely should do ASAP is to make it easier to pay for tickets and get on board mass transit.
Solution to Problem #9: One way they could facilitate this is to add RFID systems like Hong Kong’s subway system has, where you can have your funds deducted simply by flicking your card— or now, specially-enabled wristwatch— at a receiver. That’s a technological improvement, and while worthwhile, will only do so much.
- Marketing Problem #10 – Integrated Payment System
But more importantly than the previous note is the main thing that should be adequately addressed: the (potentially) intermodal nature of most mass transit trips taken by Bay Area commuters. There’s BART, CalTrain, MUNI, AC Transit, WestCAT, SamTrans, Golden Gate Transit, and the Oakland Ferry (among the countless other mass transit operators), and they all have different payment forms. Can you imagine what a pain it is to manage multiple transit passes? In the past I’ve had commutes involving AC Transit, BART, and MUNI in a single day. No one wants to fumble around with all these transit cards, constantly monitoring whether they have credit on those cards or not. People want one card. Why should transit be such a big hassle? It’s already a huge time sink.
Solution to Problem #10: Transit operators should be making every effort to sync with other transit operators. This sort of system standardization will not only result in cost savings for the overall system, but will also result in increased system throughput, which is, presumably the goal of all this. Mass transit operators are supposed to be trying to alleviate traffic congestion and reducing pollution, so why should they drag their feet about implementing a universal payment system? I do realize that they are all different agencies, and that there are logistical issues involving funding that likely form the root of the problem here, but they are worth overcoming not just for the good of the public, but also for the environment.
The Space Between Us
The developed world is balanced precariously on a bed of dependency
Posted 2008-09-17 12:03 in consumerism, environment, human nature, human resources, sustainability
The growth of the number of linkages that our society depends on has been staggering over the past century. If you look back at books that detail the lifestyles of pioneer families in the American West, or farmers in rural India, or peasants in England during medieval times, you’ll notice that there the organizational distance that took any given commodity from its point of growth or manufacture to the end user was quite small, and typically involved only a few parties. Nowadays, there are countless organizational linkages that are involved in any given product we might own.
Take this computer I’m typing on right now, for example. There were probably 100+ manufacturers involved in the creation of this computer if you include all the components and parts, and many of those manufacturers purchased parts from other manufacturers, and so on. When it comes down to it, maybe 50,000 people were involved in building this computer in some way. And while computers might be an extreme case, by no means is it atypical of the amount of organizational growth in the economy.
The number of middlemen and organizations that separate manufacturers from end users has increased dramatically. There are the people that source materials, people who manufacture them, people who store them, people who distribute them, and people who sell them. Compare that to the maybe 25-50 people that were probably involved in the creation and sale of everyday items in simpler times, where blacksmiths bought iron ore from some organization, forged tools from the iron, and sold the tools directly to end users.
Even if you held the number of items constant in a comparison of items in your home to that of a medieval person’s home, the number of people involved in the process of furnishing your home would dwarf the number of people involved in the processing of the home from a distant time ago. Consider even the house itself: your wood, nails, and tiles come from far away, and involve many transporters, salesmen, manufacturers, etc. A peasant’s hut in the middle ages was made from wood from a local forest that didn’t need to be transported far, and essentially crafted from scratch (that is, without many pre-manufactured parts) by locals.
In other words, the number of people who are working for you now is much, much higher that it was for people in the past. This is important for several reasons.
Firstly, this means that there is an interconnectedness in the current economy that was never experienced to this degree in the past. This is what Thomas Friedman describes as the “flattening” of the world (of course, as Matt Taibbi points out, this choice of phrase defies the significance of the word “flat,” since it was actually the roundness of the earth that made us realize the interconnectedness more than previously thought!).
Secondly, it means that there are many, many more things that can go wrong in the functioning of our society. If you are more dependent on more people to get you your daily food and water, it also suggests that there are more places where problems can develop, and many more ways in which the chain can fail. Any such failures in the chain will affect more people, which is bad not only because of the potential magnitude of the inconvenience (or perhaps crisis), but also because the ever extending length of this chain has divorced people from having basic knowledge how they can get what they might need in the absence of the middlemen.
Think about what would happen if there was a crisis in the supply chain that prevented food from getting to all the grocery stores in your area, and you can start to imagine the severity of this problem. Not only are people completely dependent on grocery stores to get them their food, but in the event that the stores are unable to provide, people have no idea how to get the food they need. They might figure out that they need to grow vegetables themselves, but would they know how to do that? Would they have space to do it?
People in third world countries are used to dealing with breakages in the chain. They don’t rely on electricity. They don’t depend on getting water delivered directly to their houses. For that reason, they have organically developed street smarts about how to get what they need whenever they need it, and they are never overreliant, or even confident, that the system will be able to deliver it to them.
While many in developed countries might look down on the apparent primitiveness of this situation, in many ways, it is the Westerners who are at a long-term disadvantage in a survivalist sense. They are the ones who can be easily brought down by something like a terrorist plot, an oil crisis, a natural disaster, or a transportation strike.
A friend of mine described how the recent onset of Hurricane Gustav took out power in her hometown in Indiana last week. As of yesterday— several days later— the power was still out. How well do you think the people were adapting to this? Certainly not as well as my relatives in my parents’ hometown in India would, since, for reasons that have never fully been explained, they don’t have power every Tuesday of the week.