Tyler's Blog Death of Destiny

MetroQuest

A few weeks ago, my ASIC 200 class participated in a "lab" which involved using software called MetroQuest to simulate our ideal lifestyle choices and see the outcome of our choices.

With respect to housing density, our class voted to support more compact growth as opposed to current trends; other options included favouring homes with yards, and mostly compact growth. With respect to job density, our class voted to maintain the current mix of job density; other options included favouring business parks, and mostly compact growth. With respect to agricultural land, our class voted to protect agricultural land as opposed to the current trend of developing it. With respect to roads and transit, our class voted for a regional transit network as opposed to the current trend of having a regional road network; other options included splitting investment into roads and transit evenly, and developing a city transit network. With respect to transportation policy, our class voted to strongly favour alternatives as opposed to maintaining current trends; other options included favouring drivers, and supporting alternatives. With respect to energy and air quality, our class voted to spend more on programs as opposed to maintaining our current program; other options included spending less on programs, and achieving best practices. With respect to water and waste, our class voted to spend more on programs as opposed to maintaining our current program; other options included spending less on programs, and achieving best practices.

For housing density, some people said that they would eventually like to have a garden of their own, and thus favoured homes with yards. An argument against this, urban agricultural is one viable solution to maintaining a "garden" in a situation involving mostly compact growth. Some people also brought up the issues of privacy raising a family to support homes with yards. Support for compact growth included developing a sense of community, less land use change, and the somewhat discouraging of people from reproducing.

For job density, favouring business parks pretty much got support from the idea that commercial/industrial areas would be kept separate from residential areas. Favouring mostly compact growth included arguments supporting less land use change and shorter commute times to work.

The decision on development of agricultural land was pretty unanimous. Developing agricultural land would make the land unusable for agriculture in the future--it would be an irreversible decision.

The decision on roads versus transit was also pretty unanimous, although it was a slightly biased opinion coming from a bunch of kids armed with U-passes. Nonetheless, attempting to be objective, I think with a wide-spread, well-performing transit system, it would be much more effective than individual transport.

My group's decision on transportation policy was based entirely on the previous decision on transit. We assumed that if the transit system was effective enough, it would only make sense to strongly support that transit system and push people to use it.

The last two groups, which consisted on energy, air quality, water, and waste, appeared to have their decisions made on observations of recent events: although it would be optimal to achieve best practices, everybody was aware (or at least, they thought they were aware) of the taxes that would follow making such large changes to our way of life.

And as for some questions I needed to discuss for my class...

In order to make this future scenario real, there are a few things that would need to be done. Two things immediately come to my mind. First, as mentioned in our #asic200 Twitter discussion with @arjunknanda and @gord_katic, awareness of the issues at hand needs to be accomplished. Obviously, in order to properly target and fix a problem, one first needs to be aware of the problem. Hence the requirement of awareness. Taking into account the overall opinion of my ASIC 200 class, we were only satisfied with one of the seven choices presented with us. The awareness of the existence of these choices/problems is the first step in fixing them. However, although necessary, awareness is definitely not sufficient to accomplish this task. In addition to awareness, it is also necessary to "cure" the apathy of the people to fix these problems. To illustrate, most people are currently aware of the issue of anthropogenic accelerated global warming, yet almost all of those aware do not move towards a solution due to their apathy towards the issue. I personally consider this to be the biggest of the two problems, especially seeing as we currently live in a largely apathetic world. Maybe apathetic is too strong a word. After all, one can expect for most aware people to be willing to raise their hand in support of change; unfortunately, that's about all the effort one should expect from our current state of the population. It would seem that people only care about problems directly affecting them that are in both the here AND now (hence the apathy towards the South Fraser Perimeter Road, which is in the here but not in the now, and the apathy towards the Haiti, which is in the now but not in the here)¹. Thus, a bigger problem emerges in how to cure that apathy². To conclude, although we have already taken the first step in raising awareness of many of the world's problems, the issue of apathy towards those problems remains; making people genuinely concerned about these issues is the next step towards creating change.

Although I found the MetroQuest software to provide an interesting outlook on our ideal choices and their outcomes, I am not convinced that it would be an effective tool in persuading individuals to adopt sustainability as a general part of their culture. Referring to the above issue of apathy, I do not think that MetroQuest's scenarios are nearly enough to break that barrier. They provide an interesting perspective into the potential future, but I didn't find it to be anything so extravagant to give anybody a "Eureka!" moment. I'm also not convinced that people will find the scenarios entirely believable. Anybody not currently convinced of the reality of the issues at hand will not likely take anything to heart if it is created by somebody who does. Additionally, even people who are likely aware of the issues (such as students in our ASIC 200 class) were not entirely convinced of all the information presented by the software. The financial costs provided for the ideal changes, for example, are probably of largest concern to the general population, and yet this part of the results wasn't received perfectly by our class. There were many concerns as to what the prospective "stat" represented, and also what it was based on. Seeing as this came from a class of concerned post-secondary students, I would expect to see further scrutiny from parties who are currently less than concerned. Thus, to make the MetroQuest software have more utility is a difficult problem. I think it would be particularly important to indicate what each stat represents and what it is based on. Additionally, I think some outcomes could be better represented; that is, I think it would be more effective to represent each "stat" on a personal level that individuals could actually connect to (for a random example, it's one thing to hear that something will cost a billion dollars, and another thing to hear that it will cost each person a mere quarter (or on the other side, ten thousand dollars) per year). I think changes such as these would make the software a more potent educational tool, hopefully a starting point to bringing these issues to light in such a way that will actually bring about change.

So, just out of curiousity, which choices would you have made?

¹Although there appears to be some caring towards many issues, it does not excuse the overall apathy towards them. For example, the catastrophe that captured Haiti managed to engulf the news for a few days after it occurred, and many people texted donations towards the relief fund. However, texting is hardly more effort than raising your hand, and shortly after the event, the news was quickly displaced by something in both the here and now: the Olympics. Also, consumerism. Although many people recognize consumerism as a problem, they refuse to give up many of their material possessions, or to stop their excess purchasing. Thus, this case, like the other example, presents the coexistence of both awareness and apathy.
²Apathy, in my opinion, will be a difficult problem to solve. After all, it's difficult to negotiate something when you have nothing to bargain with. I'm not sure exactly how to tackle the problem effectively. One idea would be to take the prospective future (assuming a B.A.U. model) and then to raise current taxes to match that level (lowering them as the prospective future changes); this would be in the hopes that people would realize what track we're on (with our rapid depletion of resources such as water, food, gas, and energy) and then change so as to stray from that path. But I'm no economist (or whatever would deal with this), so I don't know how effective it would be (taking into account my lack of knowledge in this field, it's probably not effective at all :P)... ...and thus, apathy is difficult to solve...