cities – Jenneral HQ

The Waterloo<>Toronto Facebook Carpool Scene, 2015-2020

I’m trying to write a new post but it seems like every blog drafting client I use is full of old almost finished posts. Here’s one from 2022 or so that I’ve cleaned up. I’m not entirely happy with it; I feel like I didn’t do enough to justify my conclusion that the current status quo is worse, but I also don’t want to work on this post anymore and done might be better than perfect.

I first moved to Waterloo from Toronto in September 2015, for university. For the first term, I used the chartered bus service ran by the undergraduate student union, which was called Fedbus. I think the rates were pretty good, something like $12 for a one way trip and $20 for a round trip. Chartered school buses would pick us up from campus and drop us off at a specific destination. Each destination had its own bus, so it was a direct route. There would typically be one trip offered on Friday evening, and another offered Sunday afternoon.

Taking the public transit option would have been the range of ~$16 one-way, and also an hour and a half longer (3.5 hours, compared to 2 hours), so using Fedbus was a no-brainer.

Over the first winter break, an upperclassman (family friend) clued me in to the carpool network. What this was was a Facebook group that had like 30,000 members¹. On Fridays and weekend days there would be ~30 posts per day, with the majority being Toronto <> Waterloo routes. On weekdays, it would be more like 10 posts a day. Still, definitely enough to catch a ride to the city whenever you wanted, basically.

Unitary Advantage Windows: Scale, Schelling Points, and City Size

A simple, wrong model of human settlements is that they have a “tech tree” of amenities. As your population grows, you unlock more of them. Here’s an example with made up numbers:

pop 500: 1 elementary school, 1 convenience store
pop 5000: 1 bank, 1 Tim Hortons
pop 50,000: 1 movie theatre, 1 community centre
pop 500,000: 1 good independent record store, 1 local airport that no one uses
pop 5,000,000: 1 fancypants museum with Greek revival architecture and a wing dedicated to large dinosaur skeleton reconstructions, 1 large amusement park complex

As your settlement grows, the tech you unlock at lower populations proliferate. At a medium city of 500k, you might have 80 cafes, 35 elementary schools, 18 grocery stores, and 7 DMVs (the first one of each amenity being “unlocked” at a lower population, and then increasing every so often as the population grows). One interesting thing I’ve noticed is that there are often benefits of having specifically one of a specific entity, for reasons that rhyme with the concepts of schelling points, natural monopolies, and network effects.

Now, Less Than Ever

On my corner of Tumblr, there’s a good meme going around, inspired possibly by something Matt Yglesias did a few years back? And it’s been a good workout for my brain, now that school doesn’t seem real anymore because the entire world sort of went on hiatus.

Anyways, so you know how every time there’s a crisis, there’s a bunch of people on Twitter saying “if we only had implemented [my preferred policy] years ago, this could have been totally averted”? ¹ The idea is to flip that for the sake of nuance and intellectual honesty. To think of policies you unreservedly support that would have made things a lot worse now, or conversely, ideas that you absolutely will not support, that would have absolutely helped.

I’ve thought of a few things that fit this profile for me:

- - I want higher dependence on mass transit and a severe reduction of car culture. But if more households did not have cars and were dependent on public transportation to get around, then our transit systems would have been truly terrible vectors of disease. Instead, buses currently are near-empty here in Waterloo, meaning that if you absolutely had to go someplace, it’s not as dangerous to use. (I think there’s still decent ridership at peak hours, which is bad. But it could be a lot worse.)
    
    NUMTOT asked for “angry reacts only”, but where is the lie :^(

- - Downsizing your fridge and doing near-daily grocery runs for your food is a fantastic way to increase the freshness of what you eat and reduce food waste. But without the ability to shop for a weeks’ worth of food at a time, households would need to be in more frequent contact with the community.

- - Relatedly, as a #millennial, the whole #supportlocal lifestyle where I go to 4 specialty grocers for specific ingredients instead of one (1) Loblaw is very appealing to me. Now, the thought of visiting even two different stores back to back makes my hair stand on end and I’m very grateful for big-box stores that sell most of what I need.
  - Mass surveillance. Hoo boy, to say that I am not a fan would be a giant understatement. But I can’t deny that contact/proximity tracing would have helped prevent the spread, even if that feels like pulling teeth to admit. I am very angry that many countries are working on developing such tools, and extremely concerned about the further erosion of privacy that this symbolizes as well as the fact that, let’s be real, it won’t be rolled back.
    
    I’m anticipating some quibble about whether surveillance at our current fidelity level is actually effective, but I’m obviously against higher quality surveillance that is 100% effective even more than I am against our current level of surveillance. ² Basically, surveillance will help save lives and I’m big mad about that.

What are some things that you support, that would have been pretty bad?

To be clear, I’m not bashing on the “[my preferred policy] would have solved this crisis years ago” folk – such commentary is often valuable and true, and I do not agree with the characterisation that that is opportunistic/in bad taste. [↩]
Okay, so this might not be strictly true. It looks like clumsy surveillance screws over more innocents than having more comprehensive profiles, which might be a worse state of affairs on balance. But in case it wasn’t obvious, I would consider both clumsy and sophisticated state surveillance to be worse than no state surveillance. [↩]