One small step

There is a well known anecdote of a man walking along a beach and seeing thousands of starfish that have been washed up on shore. Without water for a short period of time, they face certain death. so he starts picking them up one at a time and throwing back in the ocean. A passerby comments "there are so many, you can't save them all - how does it matter?" The man throws a starfish into the water, turns and says "It matters to that one".

The lesson, of course, being that while a task might seem enormous and beyond our capability to address on our own, that is no excuse for inaction. Focusing on the piece that we can fix is sometimes the catalyst that can show others the way forward to act in their own way. Very quickly you go from one person to an entire movement that will make a noticeable difference.

This story is, of course, very relevant for the modern day problems such as overpopulation, poverty, resource consumption, pollution and climate change. It has come to a point where one cannot distinguish the independent and dependent variables as the different issues are all interlinked. In trying to get our hands around the entire problem, we get so wrapped up in complicated solutions that we even fail to take the first step. What results is a very detailed plan that never sees the light of day.

 My humble contribution to reducing carbon emissions and (hopefully) slowing climate change is in eliminating one car from my life. Not buying a smaller car, or driving it less, or changing the fuel type - but essentially erasing it from ever being a requirement. The realization that I could do this came about as a result of having lived in the UK for a couple of years and seeing what truly walkable communities were like. While I did have a car there to get to/from work, I could essentially manage everything else (shopping, eating out, going to the gym etc) without ever needing to start the engine.

Now the US is of course very different from the UK and you would be hard pressed to find an environment here, other than in the middle of NYC or Chicago, where you could handle all your daily needs without a car. But I was lucky enough to live close to work (~ 3 miles) and there was a fairly frequent bus service that plied at all hours that I could use. To add to that, my wife travels during the week and we are both together only 3 days (Fri-Sun). I was able to convince her that we would not need a second car that would just sit idle during the week - and that she would have first dibs on it. So now I go to work and back on Friday by bus and we share the car on weekends.

Of course, this solution will not work for everyone. there are so many things that had to fall into place to make it work - my wife's travel schedule, the availability of a bus, the fact that we are able to do things together and don't end up going in opposite directions. It also takes some adjustment and planning to make sure our schedules are aligned - but in this age of the smartphone, how difficult is it to make plans in advance? Yes, there are times when we've had some conflicts because of "double booking" but those have been few and far between.

So by living off one car only, we have essentially "saved" the cost of a second vehicle - but did we stop it from being built? After all, auto companies are going to make the car whether I buy it or not (the same for practically any other consumer product - it gets manufactured without any owner in mind, and then companies spend tons in advertising getting you to buy it, and if they don't succeed then they trash it and start all over again). So I'm not sure whether my "sacrifice" has really helped in the grand scheme of things.

If you really want to make a change though, there are two decisions that will have the biggest effect - The size of your house -  and its location.

The size of your house dictates how much energy you will use and also how much junk you will fill it with. Humans have this amazing ability to occupy the entire space they are given - a bigger house will not have any more open space than a small one because the tendency is to buy more things to put in it. And how many bathrooms can you use at one time? We would be so much better off if privately owned houses were at most 2-3 bedrooms (for a family with 2 kids) and there were community "guest houses" where visitors could stay close by if they were visiting. After all, how many guest rooms are occupied ever? Makes you wonder why hotels were invented??

The location of your house dictates how much energy you will spend in getting around to work and other activities. This is basically measured as high or low density living. So the ideal environment would be a small house/condo/aptt in a densely populated area (i.e. a city) and the worst would be a sprawling mansion in the boonies. I've chosen the former, or at least as close as I could get to city living.

These are choices that are made independent of the economics - that is to say, I did not choose this lifestyle because it is the cheapest for me, but I chose it because I knew I would enjoy it more than any of the other alternatives, and then proceeded to figure out how the rest of my life should be built around it. This is in contrast to the typical decision making process mandated for the "American dream" which says that one should pick the biggest house one can afford, live far away from other people where you have plenty of empty room such as a huge lawn where you can display all the junk you have in your house so that others can come and buy it.

If more people started to focus on what is really important, and also took a step to examine what part of their daily existence is truly important, they would perhaps make small changes that cumulatively alter the face of society.

Getting back to basics

After almost a hundred years in which it has churned out perhaps close to a billion cars, the auto industry worldwide seems to have imploded in the recent past. The high profile cases of Toyota, with stuck accelerator pedals, and recently GM, who apparently tried to cover up the fact that it had known about a major problem for over a decade, seems to point towards a group of otherwise talented and skilled individuals who just seemed to have lost their way. Even the maverick startup Tesla which has so far done an outstanding job of bringing out a luxury electric vehicle (I confess I am a fan!) had to deal with some well publicized fires. It's as though they suddenly decided to hire music majors instead of engineers to design and manufacture cars!

This is not to say that the car industry is doing everything wrong - for the most part, they still do a very good job of making quality products that meet their need of getting people from point A to B in a safe and comfortable manner. Nor would it be correct to say that problems have not existed to some degree from the time car manufacturing started - indeed, the history of just about any technology is replete with examples of missteps and goof-ups that helped pave the way for improvements that might otherwise not have been realized. As the saying goes - good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.

But while our tools and techniques to make ever more sophisticated cars has gone up, so has their overall complexity. The car of the 1960s that Ralph Nader attacked so viciously had very little thought put into it - designs were quite garish, the focus was on making more powerful engines with no attention paid to fuel economy and of course safety was a distant concept. And while we have learnt quite a lot from that time (in no small part to the advances made by the Japanese and Germans, as well as sound environmental regulations), the internet age has transformed a mere instrument of conveyance into a giant computer, unfortunately with some of the same drawbacks.

While in the past, most systems in a car were mechanical, these have almost all been replaced by electronics today. The accelerator pedal in the Toyota (and in virtually ever other car) communicates to the engine not through some simple tie rod that could be inspected and replaced as required, but by an electronic signal that is generated as and the pedal moves through a magnetic field. The same concept applies to sensors - a car today has dozens of different lights that turn on when you first crank the engine (or push an off/off button, as many cars now have, further proof that that the car is starting to be designed to appeal to the computer loving generation). Some of these sensors are merely for reporting, but others are also for control and could potentially disable a vehicle at the wrong time if they happen to fail (or seem to have failed). In the best of cases, an annoying light comes on and you have to pay good money to get it fixed - in the worst, it could lead to death, as happened in the case of GM and Toyota.

The solution to the above is not to stop making cars - but it does lead one to question the wisdom of "accessorizing" this otherwise simple piece of machinery to make it something that it was never designed to be. I'm sure Henry "You can have them in any color as long as its black" Ford would roll over in his grave if he were to sit inside one of his company's creations today - while he might appreciate the comfort of the seats and the suspension as compared to the boneshaking ride of a Model T, he would likely scoff at the iPod connector, the DVD player setup to amuse kids in the backseat or any other "knick-knack" that has been introduced in the century since his creation first took to the roads.

The aircraft industry has also gone from mechanical to electronic and no doubt faced challenges in doing so - a 747 or A380 is far more complicated than a car, but then again, there is no pressure to release a new model every year, and there are only two established manufacturers. Testing of a new aircraft model is also extremely rigorous and requires thousands of hours of mandatory tests before it is allowed to fly commercially. The testing for cars is designed only to check the integrity of frame (a mechanical property) and does not probe the electronics to ascertain how they might potentially cause harm.

With the prospect of self driving cars in the not too distant future (being promoted by Silicon valley), it is high time that the industry in general looked to simplifying their products to avoid losing total control. The freedom to go anywhere, anytime was the USP of the auto industry which has led to the spectacular adoption of the private car as the most sought after mode of transport worldwide. But it has come at a price, one that future generations might not be willing to pay.