“Innovation” has become an empty, even actively unhelpful buzzword in public discourse, but I’d like to reclaim it in the way I find it most useful: a definition that specifically refers to solving an unsolved problem. This more general framing opens up the possibility that any given innovation need not be a new idea per se, but could for example be an application of an old idea to a new problem (or an old idea to an old problem, for that matter).
John Patrick Leary, in Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism, via The Outline
“Language is not merely a passive reflection of things as they are… [It is] also a tool for imagining and making things as they could be.”
Bus ridership is down — what should we do about it? How about new technologies? Well, high-quality real-time data would help if you would still consider that “new” (I’ll grant that it would be genuinely new for a transit executive to add or improve real-time data with ridership as a primary justification), and, while Wi-Fi on the buses probably won’t help with ridership, sure, it’s nice to have. At the end of the day, we need better bus service, cities designing streets to support transit, fewer subsidies for drivers, fewer tax incentives for single family homeowners, less restrictive zoning, and various other common-sense reforms. These aren’t new ideas, but city and transit agency governing bodies around the country can apply them in new ways to solve an old problem (bus ridership has declined nationally before) that is manifesting in new ways.
The title of this blog post (and working title of this blog) references the fact that to solve society’s hardest, shared problems we should more often start by looking at the fundamentals, the underlying and often historical context in which those problems have emerged, in order to understand the root cause. Usually it’s something boring, which is the reason that new technologies generally cannot truly ‘solve’ serious problems. ‘Innovation’ — in the popular sense of creating something truly new — is not a real solution for most problems, because the absence of innovation is not a real root cause.
Talking about the imperative for technological innovation is thus, in a sense, revisionist history — “why didn’t transit agencies offer Uber-style services first?” is not helpful, because Uber et al. did not destabilize the transit industry, they have merely taken advantage of the transit industry’s pre-existing lack of stability (this would also like asking “why didn’t we realize sooner that you could require *even larger subsidies* to provide on-demand, door-to-door service?”, but I digress). It was not a failure to innovate, but rather a failure to maintain, that brought the transit industry to where it is today.
“The most unappreciated and undervalued forms of technological labour are also the most ordinary: those who repair and maintain technologies that already exist, that were ‘innovated’ long ago.”
Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel, Innovation is overvalued. Maintenance often matters more
If you lament the impact that on-demand transportation providers have had on public transit ridership, you would do better to ask yourself how the quality of public transit systems became so poor in US cities almost across the board. If you did, you would find out that their quality has been bad even since before Uber was founded in 2009. You might also come to the conclusion that public transit’s biggest problems are bad land use planning and grossly misaligned public subsidies for cars relative to all other transportation options — things that are under the control of neither transit agencies nor Uber.
Once you understand root causes, you can start to design real solutions. The most effective among them are likely not to be especially shiny but instead to address institutional failures, misaligned incentives, and structural inefficiencies — or in other words, bad system design. In an increasingly distractible world, it is easy for anyone to lose sight of this. To the best of our abilities, though, we should try to maintain focus on what really matters — the fundamentals.
Zak Accuardi 