Roody

Yeah, I'm a troll who hopes someday to be a yooper.

Machka 

I'm just trying to assist you to think through your ideas.


Personally, I do like the idea of bike share. And bike share is used at a lot of train stations in Europe. I just don't see it reducing the number of personal bicycles parked at train stations in parts of Europe ... because of the "rush hour" factor.

tandempower

It's sad that the corporatization of economic responsibility has come to the point of prohibiting people from performing even the simplest tasks without licensing and supervision, yet if you asked me if I wanted to ride a bike that had been fixed in an unreliable way, I wouldn't. Of course, I can't think of too many consequences for a badly fixed flat tire besides getting another flat tire later, so that may be something that users could be entrusted with without supervision along with some other minor repairs/maintenance such as chain-replacement, seat adjustment, etc.

Part of the reason I like to avoid posting location and other personal specificities is because I think reasons should be explicated as their true reason instead of by association. For example, if the issue of climate, it's not where you live but rather weather patterns, cultural habits for dealing with weather, etc. that are a factor. To just say that you live in a certain place and therefore X or Y implies that a place is a fixed cultural territory or in some way determinant of other things. I'm not going to get into a philosophical/sociological discussion of whether place determines certain factors of individual life or not because it's just an age-old political battle that's never going to be won one way or the other. Suffice it to say that resigning oneself to the idea, "I live here therefore that's just the way things are for me," is giving in to determinism to some degree so no one has the right to force that position on anyone else and it has whatever implications and consequences that it does for those who take it as a position.

Thank you for the support but sorry if I don't warmly welcome the label, "left-field stuff." There's a difference between conservatism with regards to resources and spending and conservatism with regard to culture. Conserving resources and money are just rational, since waste is deleterious of future potential. Conserving culture, on the other hand, is either automatic to the extent that practices are institutionalized or habituated, or it's assumed despite the fact that any rational person or business makes choices based on current circumstances and opportunities that potentially differ from the way they've done things in the past. Therefore, I don't appreciate cultural conservatism much because it really just amounts to creating yet another social-cultural barrier to rational/reasonable choice, action, and future planning.

Examining ideas closely and critically is constructive. Bemoaning them and otherwise putting them down without constructive reasoning as to what would or could work and why it wouldn't is just bullying anything innovative by taking sides with unreasonable resistance.

cooker

You might be confusing left field with left wing. Something coming "out of left field" means from an unexpected direction - so something novel, and unpredictable, that challenges conventional thinking. It comes from the left field position in baseball being the farthest out from the home base. "Left wing" refers to political liberal, socialist or progressive parties or notions, and comes from which side the progressives were seated on, in the French Revolutionary government.

tandempower

Well said, but if you think about it, one of the first steps toward undermining any idea is to label it as "different." Doing so invokes the premise of holistic culture that independent thoughts and actions must all either 'fit' within some cultural whole or deviate from it. If they are deemed to deviate, they become subject to discreditation simply by that fact. You'll even hear people say things like, "well, that might be a good idea but it just doesn't fit within the system" or something to that effect.

The big lie of this kind of thinking is that 1) any cultural system actually exists as a unified whole except in people's mind and maybe rule books 2) things that operate within the system are not adapting to changing situations constantly. E.g. every time someone runs low on fuel in their car, they buy fuel. That's effectively changing the situation from their tank being low to it being full (or at least full-er). However, they conceptualize the routine of driving and tanking up as a system and then something like walking might seem like a deviation from 'the system' when in fact it is just what they would do naturally if they ran out of gas and more wasn't available or affordable enough to justify filling the tank.

When automobiles first became accessible to common people, they were showcased around various small towns and people found them mostly curiosities with little practical value. I.e. people saw automobiles as something "coming out of left field." If that mentality would have won, cars would have remained curiosities and people wouldn't have wasted resources on buying and maintaining them and creating lots of infrastructure, filling stations, etc. So regarding something as "coming out of left field" is really a first step in rejecting it at worst and a challenge to prove itself at best.

My point is that ideas shouldn't have to fight harder for fair consideration because they're perceived as normal or "out of left field." You simply try to understand an idea and evaluate it accordingly. The fact of whether it is popular or marginal is a diversion from its content.

gerv 

That sounds like a good idea theoretically, but most good ideas advance knowledge and change those cultural systems you talk about. But not all good ideas can take hold. The Native American Indian civilizations knew what wheels were, but they never needed them enough apparently to put 4 of them on a wagon. Many North Americans lived and died viewing bicycles as a toy, but never seeing them as a mode of transportation.

On the other hand, I personally know what an e-bike is, but doubt I'll ever need one.

Many great ideas take time and cultural change before adoption.

tandempower

It can be hard to see how the language that's been propagated to even discuss culture is designed to imply system-holism and that everything does or should be identified vis-a-vis 'the system(s)'

By "take hold," I assume you mean that they become popular among many individuals. If individuals, at the individual level, are biased in favor of popularly accepted ideas and against marginal ones, you're automatically going to have a 'system' that is resistant to ideas 'taking hold' just because no one wants to be an early taker. This is the problem we're seeing with regard to car-free living. Probably most conformists would do it if they viewed it as 'the system' or 'the dominant culture' as is the case in, say, Amsterdam. However, because few people want to be pioneers, the sheeple maintain the dominance of culture simply by resisting it as being 'non-dominant.' See the catch?

Ultimately culture is just about choices and habits. If you choose to walk and take the bus or ride a bike or whatever, that's just a choice. It only becomes an issue whether it's a dominant or 'normal' choice when you have to deal with other people validating or invalidating you on the basis of how they regard your cultural choices. Of course there's all the practical benefits of having your choices agree with large numbers of other people, such as empathy based on common experiences and economic solutions that emerge to fill widespread needs. But calling it a 'system' implies unification beyond what is actual. If anything, it implies that cultural choices and expectations are fixed and must be changed in some centralized way to take effect. A trivial example of this is happening in Dutch news lately, I've noticed, where this Christmas tradition is being argued as if everyone is required to conform to doing Christmas according to some centralized standard and if the standard gets changed then everyone has to change to that way of doing it. Conformism is sheeple-herding by means of popularizing false beliefs and assumptions about how culture works.

And many people have gone camping or lived homeless without ever seeing any similarity with Native American outdoor living. People also viewed cars, airplanes, and boats as toys. Many people viewed transportation as itself a frivolity insofar as everything was attainable by working the family farm. What's your point?

Everything takes time and cultural change, no matter how big or small, popular or marginal. Filling up your gas tank takes cultural change when you pull into the station and switch into self-serve mode (assuming you don't use full-service filling stations). When an idea takes more time than it needs, it's usually because people are resisting for one or more reasons. I only point this out because it's not like there is just some form of inertia to human behavior. Humans resist what they perceive as change and adopt what they perceive as necessary to adopt.

Also, Idk if you've noticed but fossil-fuels have been putting in overtime to rebuild market dominance lately. I recently read an article pointing out that there were twice as many refineries making gasoline in the 1980s and that is part of the reason why gas prices spike with small variations in supply and demand. The implication is that the public should push to expand the number of refineries again so that gas prices will go lower and stay more stable. Obviously the corollary of that would be more gasoline being produced and marketed/priced to sell.

Every so often I've noticed the fossil-fuel business does this to try to promote as much expansion of demand as possible so that when prices do start rising again, their sales stay as high as possible and thus generate as much revenue as possible, despite people being unhappy that prices are rising. It's not natural demand. People are being seduced into taking advantage of gasoline-promotions. This isn't to say it's not their fault if they don't wise up and maintain a trajectory toward greater fossil-fuel independence, but the more they succeed in building up ever-cheaper gas dependency, the more sprawl and car-unfree pressure we'll see. It's not that change is slow but that anti-change works hard against the emergence of alternatives and choice because it threatens their bottom-line.

gerv 

Yes.

But a society needs to achieve a certain education level before some ideas can be even partly understood. For example, although Einstein's notion of relativity in physics has been proven and taught, its implication is not completely grasped. Even Einstein seemed to have a little queasiness in following its conclusions.

In the same way, you might be able to watch a long flow of car traffic, with each car being a massive metal container with one occupant... you still might not see what a disaster this is for our modern societies. You roughly understand that it's a bloated way to do things... but you might not be able to work towards a real solution.

Ekdog

The great thing about these bike share programs is that they get people cycling, especially if combined with good cycling infrastructure. Yesterday I spent two hours in the street counting bicycles for a study that is being done by the local university. From 1:30 to 3:30 in the afternoon, out of 977 cyclists that passed by, 250 were riding shared bikes. I'm convinced that a lot of those 250 would not be cycling if it weren't for bike share and that many of the rest started commuting on the shared bikes and then, when they realized it could be done, decided to get their own bikes.

cooker

There's value to that. You don't want your culture to be completely disrupted very time some new idea comes along, even if it is better than what you have. Change is stressful and dangerous and even the best ideas will have unforseen consequences. And a lot of new ideas "out of left field" are actually bad. So there's a natural resistance and even hostility to new ideas, that serves to protect the status quo and thus protect us all from rapid and unpredictable cultural, social and economic ricocheting. New ideas have to work their way into the public consciousness and gradually win over enough forward thinking people, that they start to seem feasible and safe.

There's also a whole separate theme in your message about how businesses use psychology and propaganda to discredit ideas that are a threat to their interests and there I agree with you.

I-Like-To-Bike

Really? When automobiles became accessible to the common man they were first showcased to people in small towns? And the people found them curiosities with little practical value? You have a source for that interesting tidbit, perhaps as to any place, any time or any location?

Roody

Henry Ford was a farm boy. He saw a need for farmers to be able to connect with the larger world, and saw the automobile as a means to make that connection. The Model T was therefore designed as a product mainly for farmers. Ford didn't think city people would be very interested in cars, presumably because they already had good connections to the larger world (like streetcars, mail delivery, and telegraph). Ford Motor Co. almost went out of business because it's founder was resistant to selling cars in cities.

General Motors started the dealership structures that we still have today. The first dealers were located in small towns, because that's where they thought car sales would be strongest. Also, prior to commercial auto loans, the only personal loans were made by local banks. Small town bankers, who knew their customers personally, were willing to make loans to purchase cars when their big city counterparts were not.

i don't know if that answers your questions, but it's a start.

Roody

The question of Native Americans and the wheel is an interesting one. I think it's been established that they invented the wheel, at least as a toy. What they failed to invent was the road. Wheels are mostly useless without roads. Underlying the lack of roads was possibly a failure to invent governments that were capable of building a useful (for wheels) network of roads. (I'm not sure of that last point--just throwing it out there.)

tandempower

I'm not sure what you're point is about Einstein's relativity. As for the role of education in understanding broader implications of something like mass personal car reliance, I think it's very complex. Even WITH education, there's no reason why people can't be convinced to abandon reason in favor of believing what suits them according to smaller issues like comfort, convenience, status, etc. that all feel closer to home than more important issues like economic sustainability, long-term health, etc.

When you view the world through this lens of 'a culture' being a unified body of individual thought patterns, habits, choices, etc. it becomes sort of like the blinders that make horses feel safe enough not to spook despite all sorts of other things going on around it. Consider two models: 1) a free market of ideas where there is no notion of 'culture' in the collective sense you describe it. People are rational/reasonable individuals who observe and respond to new ideas on a case-by-case basis without caring whether anything is a disruption to a 'status quo' or not. 2) an ideological structured worldview where every idea is filtered through the lens of its relationship to 'status quo,' where not only do new ideas get evaluated on their merits or weaknesses but also on how well they mesh with existing systems and social patterns.

The second model errs in favor of protecting people from anything and everything they don't actively welcome, even if they resist on unreasonable grounds. I recently read Ayn Rand's Anthem for the first time (no, I don't read Ayn Rand books constantly although I probably sound like a person who would). It describes something similar when the main character discovers electricity in a collectivist authoritarian society and gets shunned because it doesn't 'fit' into the progress that's been made in the 'system' of the candle industry.

I'll grant you that many business strategies involve abusing the deployment of new ideas just for the sake of increasing confusion or promoting certain products as being superior and trustworth and thereby upping their price/sales. Still, I think if people are rational and reasonable, new ideas succeed or fail based on whether they are good or bad, not whether or not the 'fit' with other things.

Romans had to use massive amounts of slave labor to produce large-scale public works, I believe. Even with modern equipment and materials, road construction still requires a lot of labor. I think native americans focussed more on adaptation to the immediate environment wherever they went, though I know it's ridiculous to generalize across so many different people and tribal cultures. Also, think about all the mining needed to make steel, as well as the huge fires, etc. to have a foundry. I've seen poor people in Africa melting aluminum on an open fire in a pot to make cookware on a piece-by-piece basis but if you did that in a rural/forest environment without roads, you'd probably focus on making tools, weapons, etc. with the metal, not wheels.

I wonder about Asian history with roads and wheels. I know once upon a time the silk routes between Europe and Asia were traversed by lots of pedestrians with livestock carrying wares, etc. but I don't know whether carts/wagons with wheels emerged within that 'pedestrian superhighway' culture. I do think that from a practical standpoint, even today whether you walk or bike (assuming you're going somewhere unmotorized) depends on a lot of factors. If time is an issue and I know there's going to be no problems finding parts, there will be adequate paved roads/trails etc. taking a bike is better because you can move longer distances in shorter time spans. However, if I was going to take an extended trip into an area without many roads or without paved roads, I would walk/hike simply because time is not an issue and it's easier to get around unpaved areas by foot than by bike.

Now imagine those early automotive pioneers who would take a model T Ford on a dirt road to go 100 miles in two days, including all the stops for repairs and overboiling of the coolant reservoir. Speed and distance were the holy grails of the 20th century. Their culmination in mass popularity has brought middle-class culture to its limits in terms of the ability to grow. If large numbers of people don't adopt biking, bussing, and trains, I don't know how the automobile and passenger jet economies could grow much more except through periodic recessions to prune them back enough that their resurgence in popularity leads to short periods of recovery. Is that an economic pattern that is desirable to sustain?

BTW Rudy, thanks for backing up what I said about the small town introduction of Model T Fords. You fleshed it out more clearly than I could have.

Machka 

It's called ... creating a business case.

Google business case, and you'll see what I am talking about.

All new ideas do need to fight for fair consideration. When you have an idea, the onus is on you to create the business case to back the idea. You have to think it through, create the scope, consider the risks, look at all the pros and cons, consider all the difficulties, obstacles, and dissenting opinions. Then you have to carefully address all of that. Through that process, you may discover certain inherent difficulties, and you may have to change all or part of your idea to come to a viable compromise. Or maybe you'll discover that your idea is solid.



I'm not sure why, but you seem to take the comment that your ideas are "left field" as a bit of an insult. It's not. Lots of creative ideas were "left field". But those with "left field" ideas cannot assume that everyone is going to embrace the idea ... left field thinkers, in particular, need to put together a well-thought-out business case to back their ideas.

kmv2

and thieves to steal things off of them. Any bike share bike I've seen looks like its more of a task to get into the drive train or get the wheels off than for a regular bike.

Also, ours have 3 speed IGH, thick wide tires and are built like a tank, so its not like they break down alot.

tandempower

That's not what I'm talking about. Making a case for something based on reason and rationality is necessary. No one should embark on any action without assessing reasonability and rationality. The problem is when 'reason' degenerates into social-cultural logics. This happens a lot because there is so much disposable money in the global economy that the things that make money are often based on irrational/unreasonable preferences of those who spend money on such things.

We already know that fossil fuels are a non-renewable energy source and that sprawl is a recipe for boom-bust economics. These are the signs that more car-free living opportunities are needed to avoid future problems. Nevertheless, there is nothing stopping people from simply ignoring the problems and pressing forward with fossil-fuel heavy, sprawl-boom-bust economics. You can make money during the boom and also on the bust so what would prevent the majority of people from simply milking the profits of each cycle perpetually until they are drowning in concrete and other economic and environmental problems? If it isn't popular to create potential means of living differently, people will simply avoid investing in it and we'll just be back to making due however possible. Innovative ideas are just opportunities to create something better. If people hate, ignore, or otherwise resist them as potential business failures, then they will die and be reborn periodically to see if there are any takers yet. Until then, we suffer without their implementation. It's that simple, isn't it?

I told you, because the converse is that foolish ideas get support and funding without actually being all that reasonable or rational just because they seem NOT to "come out of left field." Economics is filled with 'filler' business that's not very good for the world but it makes money because it taps into some situational need within the unsustainabilities that have grown through time. If all the weak and detrimental ideas would be allowed to fail and people would disinvest in them, there would be a lot of unused resources to devote to reform. The problem is that that is what has happened through many years of recession but there are STILL foolish minds that look to the past for examples of what was going on the last time the boom started (long before the bust hit) and believe that it's a good idea to attempt to replicate it because they just can't connect the boom periods with the busts/recessions in their minds.

Some business people may understand bigger economic pictures but too many can only see money-making as one isolated investment at a time. If oil prices are rising, they buy. If they're falling, they sell. If people are investing in car-free living, they buy into stocks that are going up. If those same stocks are falling, they sell and look for something else that IS going up. Without perspective on the big picture, the game is open to suppressing good ideas for profitable bad ones and the profitable bad ones tend to win because of how many people invest out of greed and fear.

I-Like-To-Bike

It is a start. I'm particularly interested in the claim that people found cars to have "little value" after they were made accessible to the common man (presumably with the introduction of the Model T).

wolfchild

The main reason why Native American Tribes never used wagons and wheels was because they didn't have large domesticated animals to pull those wagons. The only domesticated animal they had was dogs which were used for hunting and food sometimes... Middle Eastern civilizations and Europe started domesticating cattle, goats, sheep, donkeys about 8000 years ago, and horses were domesticated in Ukraine about 4000 years ago.. Europeans and Middle Eastern civilizations have been using cattle, donkeys and horses to pull wagons and transport heavy things for thousands of years. Native Americans never had those things until they came in contact with Europeans and they were very quick to adopt horses for transportation and warfare.

Roody

The people didn't find cars to be valueless, IMO. It was the car companies themselves that initially undervalued their product.

Roody

That makes a lot more sense than my left field theory about the roads.

One very minor quibble--a few South American societies also domesticated the llama and alpacas. I dont know if those animals could possibly pull carts. Also, I believe the North Americans used dogs to pull goods with a travois.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travois

wolfchild

I forgot to mention the dog and travois. I also know about lamas. Those forms of transportation were very inefficient and primitive compared to European horses and wagons. Lamas were kept mostly for it's wool and meat and they had a very limited use as pack animals. I've never heard of an Inca warrior riding a Lama into battle or traveling on one for hundreds of miles . One of the main reasons why Europeans were able to conquer Native Americans was because of their superior form of transportation.

cooker

You say that like it's a bad thing. It protects the horse as well as rider or passengers from harm. I'm saying there is value in people and society viewing new ideas with skepticism and throwing up obstacles; not immediately adopting every new thing. It gives stability. We need to have a balance between novelty and conventionality, not all of one or the other.

Mobile 155

In all of this aren't you simply promoting your own idea of what a "reasonable society or Business" should be? Is there an example of what you are trying to say? So far you have walked around issues like where you are from with excuses, almost like a politician who will not respond to a direct question. How can where you are from put your ideas in some box? What Machka posted has merit in that just because you post a thought doesn't mean it has the the weight as something that has history or practice behind it. People will not try and make a perpetual motion machine with instructions from someone that didn't take friction and gravity into account. They also will find it hard to invest in a losing system, even if some minority sees doing so as good for us all. If an idea is a good one business wise it should be profitable. If it isn't profitable it is a bad one, from a business perspective. Making the mistake of merging business, finances, profitability with perceived good ideas is the very thing that got Greece into trouble and injured the future of so many people. It might also be a mistake to link irrevocably fossil fuel and personal motorized transportation. (much as some might like to.)

tandempower

There are direct questions about substance and direct questions that shift a discussion in the direction of ad hominem issues about the people involved. Where someone is "from" is one of those ad hominem diversions. I avoid giving power to diversion.

People only try to make perpetual motion machines and invest in losing systems because someone with status and credentials misleads them into doing so. If they exercised independent thought to determine what is wrong with a given idea, they wouldn't invest it in it at all. Mainstream transit, infrastructure, and the resulting sprawl are losing systems but they have so much economic backing through a century of people investing in an ultimately unsustainable economic project instead of developing more efficient alternatives for the long term. Some people realized this and spoke up about it but no amount of credentials or status is sufficient to convince people of what they don't want to be convinced of. They will continue down dead-end paths until they have no choice but to change course. The best we can hope to do in the mean time is create alternatives so that there will be paths to change over to when people begin to realize that the one they're on is coming to a dead-end.

Cycling is profitable in comparison with walking. If you had to walk three miles twice a day, you'd save a huge amount of time riding a bicycle, which you could spend on other productive activities. Compared with driving, cycling 10 miles seems unprofitable because you believe you could save time by driving. However, when you factor in all the costs of the roads and parking needed for a significant population of people to drive, not to mention all the health care costs due to lack of exercise, cycling starts looking profitable once again. That doesn't mean that from the individual cyclist's point of view, it doesn't look profitable to save some time by driving instead of biking. The same is true of even faster forms of transportation but you wouldn't think how much time you could save by helicoptering around for commuting and errands because it's just not a popular form of transportation, whereas driving is.

The fact is that there's nothing ultimately valuable about continuing to allow sprawl and driving to dominate human living. If it's profitable to do so, it's because there are large-scale investments to produce and maintain sprawling cities that render profits which can be exported and used to fund more livable cities elsewhere. However, if you compare the two options, 1) convert all human-populations to driving-dependent sprawl or 2) convert all human-populations to car-free/car-light geographies, the second option is the sustainable one and the first option is the one that generates large short-term growth followed by unsustainability and related economic failures. These economic failures just don't totally undermine the sprawl paradigm because profit made in one area can always be used to stimulate growth in other areas. Nevertheless, all sprawl-growth areas are in a state of progressing degeneracy because it's just not a sustainable form of growth.