Wheelchair test

After few years of managing software development teams, I realised that it is not easy to figure out when a particular project is done.  Especially if you are working with multiple teams, multiple departments, sometimes in different cities, complicated requirements, demanding clients and so on.  This is worse when your team members are lying, cheating crooks, who are delusional and paranoid that someone is going to discover what they have actually done.  (Just kidding.)  So a hapless manager can only do one thing.  Ask an independent testing team to create tests that the software must pass.  Clear and simple.  Pass or fail.  This works especially well if the testers are paranoid about missing a bug (a error in a software) and latch on to the developer like a crazy street dog until you fix the problem.

I assume all this is true when it comes to city administration.  Competing claims, lobbies, unwieldy unions, lying cheating crooks, whiny public, and so on.  How do we even know when the authorities are done building safe, clean footpaths?  What does clean and safe mean anyway ?  In fact, what does footpath mean ? 

Well, why not create a simple test and get a bunch of people, who will latch on to the city administrators until the footpath passes the test.  So here is my test for footpaths.

Assume you have an old person in your family.  Grandpa, grandma, annoying old uncle. He or she is really old and is wheelchair bound.  Now the test for the quality of your city’s footpath is that you should be able to push this old person’s wheelchair, with the old person in it of course, from any point in the city to any other point in the city.  Without the old person having to get out of the wheelchair.  Without you having to carry the wheelchair with the old person in it.  Without bystanders and you having to carry …   Ahhhh… My lawyers are working on this to get the words right and loopholes free !

There is a reason for the wheelchair being part of the test.  A person who can walk can also jump over holes and pot holes.  He can get off the footpath and get on with relative ease.  A wheelchair cannot. 

If you have seen the footpaths in Chennai you will realise that even a Olympic Decathlon champ would have difficulty staying on it.  The footpaths are build at heights that only superman can climb.  Even if you climb on a footpath, it lasts only for a few feet.  Because the footpath dips downs again, a sharp fall that is, in front of every house and shop’s entrance.  All this if you are lucky and the footpath is not obstructed by parked cars, autos, shops, gates, illegal constructions of all sorts.  Crap, crap and more crap, usually literally.

Hence the wheelchair.  If the wheelchair can roll smoothly, then you can walk, run or skip on the footpath, from point A to point B.

Now as for testers….  Why not ask old people groups ?  (Yes I realise old people are no longer called old people.  They are, I suppose, differently youthed people or something like that.)  But I figured when old people can actually walk on the streets, without the fear of being mowed down by an assorted variety of vehicular manslaughterites, especially because of my patented ‘Wheelchair Test’ idea, that would be respect enough.

When a road and its footpaths are built, or so claimed by the road and footpath czars, let the elderly unleash themselves on them.  Whip out the wheelchairs and run the test.  Count the number of old people and their wheelchair pushers in the test team.  Chalk out the routes.  A to B. B to C. C to Z.  Ready, set, go!  After the trip count the number of people in the team.  If no one is missing, the team did not have to get down from the sidewalk, etc. test passed.  Else failed.  Sue government.  Take authorities to court.  Picket the city corporation.  Repeat until success.

Wouldn’t that be an inspiring sight ?  Large groups of old people and their well wishers testing their footpath.  Also, no complicated physics, chemistry or mechanical and civil engineering to tell us whether the road and the footpath actually work.

(My apologies to the old people, for any perceived slight of their physical abilities.  Many of them are healthier than so called young people.  If this is the case, the young person can sit in the wheelchair and the old person can push it.  My test is flexible.)

Jokes aside, this would come handy whether the road is being built by the government or by private companies.  This could be part of the bidding process for road building contracts.  Old people association certified.  Like ISO 9000 certified.  The point is that private groups and associations should have more say in these matters.  Old people or not, consumers should have a choice.  Roads should be built by agencies who satisfy consumers’ demand.  If government agencies cannot do this, then let the private companies do it.  Reward private companies if they deliver.  Punish them if the fail.  When it comes to many things, including roads and sidewalks, pedestrians are not treated as tax paying consumers.  This must change.

Broken Window

Two of my all time favorite theories have something to do with broken windows. One is the classic essay by the French economist Frederic Bastiat. The broken window fallacy, the essence of this essay, is one of those counter intuitive, stunning, uncommon insights that everyone should be aware of, but are not. Most hare-brain schemes of governments wouldn’t find an audience if all of us understood the significance of what Bastiat wrote. Unfortunately, many of us don’t. This ‘broken window’ is very much relevant to urban governance, as it is to any form of public governance, but we will discuss it another time.

The link below will take you to the other ‘Broken Window’ theory. This is an essay, bound to become a classic, written by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in The Atlantic Monthly in March 1982. They basically argues that preventing public nuisance – aggressive panhandling, turnstile jumping at subway stations (jumping over the machine that collects your token to avoid paying the fare), squeegeemen (men who come and forcibly clean your windows while you are at a red light and demand payment for their ‘service’) and small crimes go a long way in preventing violent crimes. Put it another way, not preventing public nuisance and small crimes leads to higher levels of violent crimes. Disorder leads to fear among innocent and vulnerable citizen, it leads to crime and eventual urban decay. Now this may sound obvious when we put it this way, but it is not. I will let the essay and related books and articles explain why.

I don’t remember when exactly I first heard about this theory. I think it was sometime in the mid-90s. I was so fascinated by it, I even got Kelling’s book Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities, which he coauthored with Catherine Coles.

This theory and its practice is credited with drastically reducing crime in many US cities, most prominently, in New York city. There are some interesting stories about how this theory was put into practice in the NY subway system when Mayor Dinkins was in office. Later, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, with the help of his police department, put this theory into much wider use, thereby reducing crime to historically low levels.

I put the links below. Otherwise you would go straight to the links and skip my pieces of wisdom and observations. So here we go.

1) Take the Stanford psychologist, Philip Zimbardo’s interesting experiment. In my opinion, the experiment also explains why socialist countries fall apart. Socialist countries either do not recognise property rights or actively undermine them. When property rights are denied or underminded, property become ownerless – no one owns them. Which means, no one is there to take care of them. Damages, intentional human inflicted or natural wear and tear, goes unrepaired. This is a very tempting invitation to one and all to inflict further damage, loot and plunder.

Don’t buy my argument? Check out any government owned building in India. In Chennai there is a government railway’s ticket booking office near Chintamani. Stand in front of this building and you will see what neglect looks like. As you walk up the stairs, of this very public building, you would find that people-as in by the people, for the people-have spit tobacco and pan all over the walls. Now ask yourselves why the same people don’t spit inside a privately owned airline company’s office building.

Now magnify this problem a million times and you get a Soviet Union, a government housing project in the US, a government railway station in India, and so on.

Some of you may argue this is an issue of enforcement. That is, the authorities should prevent such uncivil activities like spitting in public and punish the ones that spit. You do have a point. People who do spit in public, say, in India, wouldn’t do the same in Singapore. So good policing does matter.

But that still does not answer ‘who will keep the building from falling apart?’ This is where private property rights matter. Hopefully, more about property rights, von Mises’ price information theory and why socialism does not work, etc. and how they are related to urban governance later.

2) The theory and its practise, as one might expect, is not without its critics and controversies. How does one define public nuisance? What prevents the police from becoming a moral police force? At what point does preventing public nuisance become an infringement on a person’s freedoms ? Good questions. Need to be answered with checks and balances, to prevent the society from Talibanisation. (Glib answers to complicated questions.)

3) Is there good chaos and if so, shouldn’t it be part of our urban life? On one hand I love the ‘Broken Window’ theory and understand its importance in reducing crime and ‘cleaning’ up cities. I hope more cities would adopt it. On the other hand, I lived in Berkeley, CA, USA and loved it precisely because of all the weirdos, clowns, protesters (with whom I disagreed most of the time), park bench speakers who rambled and raved nonsense, the noisy drumming, pot smokers (I didn’t inhale or exhale, if you are curious!), etc. etc.

Of-course, speakers and drummers are not the same as drunken public urinator, public on-your-door-step crappers, squeegee cum your neighbourhood’s unfriendly intimidator and so on. But if you visit Berkeley, you will realise that there is a fine line that separates the two sides. How do you police a city and keep it safe while keeping it fun ? This is a tough one I suppose. How do I ensure that while my right brain votes for Giuliani to make sure that my kids are safe on the street, my left brain can continue to dance to the rhythms of the pot smoking noisy drummer on the same street ?

Check out.

1. www.manhattan-institute.org/pdf/_atlantic_monthly-broken_windows.pdf
2. www.manhattan-institute.org/html/critical_acclaim-fixing_broken.htm
3. Giuliani’s autobiography.