I was made aware of a typo in the last post. I said “I don’t know she will be back” with regards to my sister returning to France. That should have been “I know she will be back”.
Today we took an Uber to and from the Catacombs and while we were on that side of town, we came across one of the things I wanted to see while I am here. And art supply store. Specifically, one associated with Sennelier. I managed to spend no more than I would have spent at home if I’d ordered online. We also came across a bookstore and I bought a few books. I guess I’ll need to learn more French to go with the German so I can read them. Why not.
More when I get home and have a moment to unpack my things and my thoughts.
As I noted at the end of my last post on induced demand, I do want to discuss that a little more, just not this week. I’m traveling. I was traveling last week too, for work, the day job. They wanted to do a sort of team building get the whole department together event. I would say it was reasonably successful with regards to accomplishing the goal. Probably a mixed result for some people though. About a third of the team got sick the first night which caused a need for adjustments the next couple of days. I was not one of the ones who got sick and I’m very grateful for that.
I was not excited about the trip initially. I’m very good at getting stuck into a routine and it required a complete disruption of all my routines. And I don’t usually like group exercises, so I was quite reticent about going. However, it allowed me a chance to catch up with some colleagues outside my department and reconnect and connect face to face. A nice treat. An even bigger and better treat was what my sister had in mind.
I usually take the last week of April for vacation because it includes my birthday. It’s my treat for myself. This year my sister asked what I was doing for my birthday. At the time I didn’t know but when I mentioned the timing of the work trip, she said it was perfect. As it turned out my sister wanted to take me on a trip to Paris, France for my birthday. Yes. Please.
When you travel a lot for work and earn travel miles with airlines, sometimes, you just have to use them because why not.
So now I am in Paris and having a great time. We’ve seen the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs Elysée, walked to the Louvre, and through the gardens, and had some lovely chocolate. Not to mention the croissants for breakfast. We’ve also been rained on pretty good but it’s Paris so who cares.
I’ve enjoyed our hotel which is in the middle of the city, maybe not exactly the middle. Certainly, the middle of things we want to see. It is very modern in its décor which I really like. We are located between the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe. And yes, we walked to both in the same day. I may go home in better shape and having lost a few pounds as compared to when we arrived. We’ve walked a few miles and have many more miles to walk before the week ends. That is not a bad thing.
I’ve learned a few things about myself so far. One being that in spite of my Taekwondo workouts I do not move near enough and I don’t walk near enough. Of course, where I live does not lend itself to a lot of useful walking and that is a problem. Walking in my neighborhood for ‘exercise’ is not the same as walking as part of your everyday going about your business. When we walk for exercise, we often walk for a certain amount of time or a certain distance. And we walk differently. The pace and the gait are a little different, and our hands are often empty. When we walk as part of our everyday, we might be carrying things in our hands or in a bag over our shoulder or in a backpack. We might stop for lights or street crossings. We also might need to do a fair bit of direction changing to avoid others. All of this requires a different awareness of our bodies and the environment. We still get exercise, but it is very different and involves so much more than just the physical exercise.
Some other things I’ve noticed are more a recognition, or re-recognition of things I already knew or felt. Like feeling like I don’t really have the type of clothing and shoes that make it easy to pack a bag for travel. Not to mention the right luggage. And, ironically, I have too much stuff. At least that’s how I feel. I know, how do you have too much stuff and yet not enough? It’s about having the right stuff. The stuff that allows you to live the way you want to live or travel. Which is something that will come up in one of the upcoming posts related to induced demand.
I am having a great time in Paris and am so thankful to my sister for wanting to bring me. I may be a little slow to get going, a little creaky in the body, and need an extra stop or two, but I would not have missed it for anything. And I won’t let any achy body parts keep me from seeing as much as we can. I don’t know she will be back, and I have a feeling I will too. She was here in November and now it’s April and she is already planning her next trip back. And I understand. I could definitely come back.
Enjoy the photos. I’ll be getting back to the topic of induced demand and its cousins soon.
So that title looks a little technical or academic or something. Definitely not artistic or musical. And you would be right. It’s not. It is, however, something I’ve been thinking about after some of the reading I’ve done over the last couple of years. If you’d like to know more about it see my earlier blog post about what I’ve been reading and watching lately.
I think I first came across the phrase ‘induced demand’ when I was reading one of the books on urban planning. I’d guess the phrase is typically used with regard to the phenomenon of widening roads and making traffic even worse than it was before. They have done studies that show if you widen a congested road when it is complete the traffic increases to the point that not only has all the excess capacity been utilized the entire road then becomes over utilized. So, say a road can handle 100 cars in 5 minutes, but you want to make it easier or quicker to get all 100 cars through so you increase the capacity of the road so it can handle 200 cars. You do this thinking that at 200 cars the commute time on that stretch of road will decrease so instead of taking the 10 minutes to get someplace caused by the traffic, it will take the 5 minutes that was expected. Except, that’s not what happens. Once you add the extra capacity, instead of that road handling the original 100 cars in 5 minutes or even the 200 cars in 5 minutes, the usage will actually be more like 300 or so cars trying to use the same road. When this happens the engineers then say something like ‘see. I told you we needed a bigger road.’
So now that we have a base idea of induced demand let’s look at how messed up that is and how it happens in other areas of our lives. Because this is what really hit me when I was doing all that reading and as I’ve watched a couple of those YouTube channels I noted before.
What happens with induced demand on our roads is that now that the road has increased capacity more people will use that route because they think it will be faster, instead of their previous route that they used that spread out or dispersed the traffic over a wider area. Now the same volume that 5 square kilometers could handle is funneled into .5 square kilometers. As an example. I don’t know how real these numbers are. It’s kind of like if you have to leave a stadium through just one door or if they open all the doors to let people out.
Some will talk about those extra cars and car trips as pent-up demand and that is true to an extent. But I would argue, as some of the planners, authors and creators have, that it would be better to build sidewalks, trains, trams, bus routes, true bike lanes, and to bring the destinations of those drives closer to the residential neighborhoods or even office space neighborhoods so that people don’t need to get in the car to pick up a liter of milk and a loaf of bread.
And this is where induced demand starts to get insidious while looking like efficiency.
If it takes me 20 minutes to drive my car to the supermarket to get a loaf of bread or a liter of milk, then I’m more likely to buy more while I’m at the store so I don’t have to make that trip too often because it’s a pain. I’ll buy stuff that I maybe need but not really. Because, just in case. Now I have food that is more likely to go to waste because I bought produce beyond the capacity of one person (me) to eat in the timeframe I need to for it to be at its freshest and at its best level of ripeness. And now I’ve wasted my money on something that ends up in a landfill without ever being used, eaten, etc.
And that is all because some fool decided to widen the road instead of giving me a safe way to get to the nearest place to buy food on a regular basis without wasting huge amounts of time.
Let’s look at induced demand in relation to food from a different reference. The refrigerator. There is no standard size for a refrigerator. I found this out a couple of years ago when I bought a new one that barely fits in the space allotted. It wasn’t that I wanted or needed a big refrigerator, it was the best price for the features. But it is a bit big. And we are told that refrigerators work best and are most efficient when full. So, to operate my refrigerator at its optimal level I need to fill it with food. I’m one person. And the food I tend to keep in the refrigerator is perishables. Things that will go bad faster if I leave them on the counter. Or so we are told. They still go bad. They go bad faster than say a bag of flour, or a bag of beans, or a bag of rice, or you get the idea. If I fill my refrigerator with enough perishables to make it operate at its most efficient, then I have more food than I can eat before it spoils, even in a refrigerator, and has to be thrown out. Induced demand, again. And waste.
The thing about induced demand is that we don’t even realize that is what is happening and how it is being used to convince us to buy more stuff. If we had, by default, smaller refrigerators, and easier to access food markets, then we might be able to cut food waste. Seriously. If, when I finish working for the day, I could walk to the nearest food market, safely and in a reasonable amount of time, or even bike, then I might buy a couple of pieces of fruit for breakfast for the next couple of days and some veggies to go with dinner for the night. I could get produce that was reasonably fresh and would be less likely to have to throw it out.
Induced demand is wasteful. And yes, I just realized that as I wrote this.
I’m not some paragon of virtue when it comes to this. Really. I’ve only recently come to see what has been happening and I certainly have and still do succumb to the thinking that it encourages. And as I’ve started to see it, I see it happening in more and more areas of my/our lives. It’s frustrating.
Let’s talk about this some more because these are just a couple of examples of induced demand, and it is more prevalent than in just traffic and refrigerators.
Here’s the update on the art that I promised to tell you more about in the last post. I decided to try another oil painting. Only this time do it a little more painterly. If that’s a thing. The Telecaster painting felt a little like a paint by numbers in that I drew the whole thing out first and then colored it in. Yes, there was more to it than that, but it still started from a draftspersons view and then became a painting. I wanted to try a painting as just a painting. And I wanted to do something that fits more with what a lot of people like about my art in most other mediums. I wanted to do a creature. It could be human or animal, it just needed to be a creature. I settled on a bird, a crane that I have done in pencil, and even in Zbrush.
Octopus in Pastel on Paper – In Progress
I painted a background of sorts on a canvas board a couple of weeks ago so that it could be ready for last week. And, since I haven’t been sketching as much this past year as I did for those few months the year before, I felt like I needed to sketch out the shape before I tried to put paint to canvas. I’m glad I did because it took a little work to get the shape right. Initially when I started writing this I hadn’t got very far. Then last week I added more paint to canvas and have the shape blocked in and some shading started. I am hopeful that it will turn out nice. So far it is on track for it to.
I have also done a very small bit more on my octopus. Just enough to be surprised that I might be able to get the effect I’m looking for and that it could turn out the way I envisioned it.
Things are a little crazy and busy with the day job right now so I haven’t had quite the time I want to work on things more. And the rest of this month isn’t looking much better. However, I have a cool adventure coming up and expect to have lots more to post about and even art about. It could be an exciting summer.
(There are affiliate links in this article and I may earn a modest sum on any purchases made through the links.)
Since I don’t really have anything art or music related to share right now I thought I’d share something a little bit different. Before I jump in, I do have a new painting I’m about to start so there will be more art to come, just not this post. Now, on to the good stuff.
How it started. Well, that’s probably not true. It probably goes back farther than this. This is when I really started looking at some things differently, and it’s why travel outside of packaged tours and outside of your home country is really, really important. I made a trip to Australia a few years ago, just before the Covid-19 pandemic, I wrote about it on this blog. I landed in Sydney on my own and was free to see the city the first day, the only thing on that day’s agenda was a tour of the Sydney Opera House. And yes, that was cool and I have some great pictures from it. What I think was more impactful was the experience of being in a vibrant, bustling, lived in city.
I grew up in suburbia. I am not bashing my childhood experiences. Some of mine were much different than my peers and cohort. And a very early experience likely shaped my thinking about things even today. Sydney was my first experience where I saw a living city, not just one for working in. I’d been to Los Angeles a few times, but I never felt like it was someplace where people lived in the city. In Sydney, I walked from my hotel, that was just at the edge of the Asian district, to the Opera House. I walked. And on the way I noticed how there were shops interspersed with apartments, or maybe condos. I saw people coming out of their homes on the way to work or wherever and not getting into cars and driving. Oh, there were plenty of cars, don’t get me wrong. There was also public transport in abundance. This was a different view for me. And even visiting my friends in Melbourne our car time was specific. We took a road trip and there were specific things that we used the car for. But we walked and took the train. Where I live, I have to get into a car to pickup take-out from the Chinese Restaurant across the street from me or I risk my life trying to cross the road on foot or bike.
Since that trip I’ve read a few things on a different economic model, a bike centric city, and some history that I was not at all taught in school. And more recently we have had the degrading of Twitter. Not that it was likely a very healthy place to begin with. However, the shift in the environment at Twitter encouraged me to look at other social media type of places that might be more interesting. I landed on Mastodon. I’ve mentioned it before. There is easier access to a more diverse viewpoint, or not, it’s up to you. And that’s the beauty of it. Because I choose to read more than just my myopic feed, I come across some interesting things that I might not have encountered without consciously looking for them. Remember how bookstores and libraries were places for that?
Recently someone linked to the video for the ‘Not Just Bikes’ channel on YouTube. Awesome. This is a guy who, I believe, is an urban planner, or works in urban planning, something like that, who has moved from Canada to Amsterdam and shares his take on the differences between living in Amsterdam and North America particularly when it comes to the urban/suburban environment as well as city livability. He did a collaboration with the guy who has the ‘Climate Town’ channel that was really interesting and informative. And it turns out, some of the discussion is relevant to a book I’m currently reading. ‘Palo Alto – A History of California, Capitalism, and The World’ by Malcom Harris. The collaboration between Not Just Bikes and Climate Town centered on zoning laws and how that came about. In ‘Palo Alto’ there is also a discussion of how some of the zoning in California came about, and just a hint of why Oakland and Compton are what they are today. Don’t get me wrong. I have fond memories of living in California and have relished every visit I’ve made since leaving after high school, and I definitely benefitted from some of what I’m reading about in the book, because, the ideas, concepts, laws, and thinking didn’t just stay in Palo Alto. However, it is definitely not the history I was taught in school, even there.
The book I read about the city of bikes is about Amsterdam and the history of bicycling in the city. And it is fascinating. That one is called ‘In the City of Bikes – The story of the Amsterdam Cyclist’ by Pete Jordan. It really just covers what it says it is about, it also has just a little bit of the history of the automobile in it and its relationship to bikes, particularly in Amsterdam, also in North American cities, just enough that when you put it together with a couple of other books I read, ‘Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream’ by Andres Duany and Jeff Speck, and ‘Walkable City – How Downtown Can Save America, On Step at a Time’ by Jeff Speck, you start to get an idea of how the United States has become what it is, and just maybe how and why we’ve become more polarized, less healthy, and more depressed as a nation. It’s really interesting to see that there is a different way to live that might be more beneficial to people and the planet.
I’ve read a whole host of other books in the past few years that have covered histories of various areas and how we got to where we are, from David Attenborough’s ‘A Life on Our Planet’ to Kate Raworth’s ‘Doughnut Economics’, Tim Jackson’s ‘Prosperity Without Growth’, books that offer the analysis of how we got here and even some ideas of what we could do to change things, including ‘How to Save the World for just a Trillian Dollars- the Ten Biggest Problems We Can Actually Fix’ by Rowan Hooper. I’ve even read Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. Whatever you may have thought of him as a politician, set that aside and have a read. That book along with Attenborough’s will give a really good picture of how things have changed.
And as I read these books I am fascinated, appalled, disgusted, enlightened, and frustrated. I feel like I have always known that there was a different and probably better way to live. I think I’ve been saying something along those lines since I was about 10. One year, while visiting my father, my mother sent me a newspaper clipping of a study that was done by a Pennsylvania university that essentially said, I was right. So this many years later, to see that we haven’t made changes that would make things better and that they have only gotten worse, it’s frustrating. And mind boggling. There is so much evidence that what we are doing isn’t working that it is dumbfounding that we aren’t doing something about it. We say we want change and then do the exact same things we have always done. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. Or at least one definition of it.
I would like to see things change. After I finished reading one of these books I wanted to order take out food from the Chinese restaurant across the street. I was so inspired by the idea of doing something different that when I got to my garage, I briefly thought of taking my bike. It would be so much less hassle. Well, except that I probably needed to air up the tires. After thinking about that for a moment I realized that taking my bike, though on the surface better for me, was actually the most dangerous thing I could do. I was irritated and dismayed as I got in my car to go get my food. The mood lasted because a few days later as I was driving, again, to my Taekwondo class, less than five miles away by the way, I saw a nice shiny suburban light truck and thought ‘damn it, it’s my planet too.’ That truck wasn’t some farmer or construction worker it was some suburbanite who thought it looked cool or tough and I know, as you know, that they guzzle gas like nobody’s business.
All of this is to say, there is a lot of really good, informative reading out there and if you want to understand why the United States of America is in the state it is in, it might be worth doing some reading. And look beyond the obvious titles. The ones that say ‘this is how America became what it is’ or ‘how America got here’. I suspect that even those books will only offer a small slice of what the cause is. I only suspect that because, in all fairness, I haven’t read a book that has that sort of analysis. And don’t just read one book. Read a few more. Because the problem is bigger than one little corner of the society.
You know I have more to say about this. But this post is getting a little long so I’ll save it for another post. Until then I’ve linked to some of the YouTube Creators and Books that I’ve found really interesting lately and that I mentioned above. There are easily a few missing, these are just for a start.
Sites
Not Just Bikes – YouTube channel – also has a Nebula channel and a Patreon
Climate Town – YouTube channel – also has a Patreon
