Commuting in a metropolitan society

Why is it that many people seem not to want answers to reasonable questions?

About ten years ago, I was reading the editorial column of a magazine, which boasted of its new premises in central London.  I think it was the very next month that the editorial column complained about the problems of commuting into London, and invited readers to contact them with solutions.

I emailed a solution, which was not acknowledged.  So far as I am aware, it was not published in the magazine.  Presumably therefore my proposed solution did not appeal to them.

Quite simply, my solution was that people should live and work in the same place, thereby eliminating the need to commute to work.  If you locate your business in central London, then you should aim to recruit people who already live in London.  If you want to employ people who live in Essex, then maybe you should locate your business in Colchester.

We seem to be living in a society which is increasingly metropolitan, by which I mean that it appears to be increasingly the case that jobs are concentrated in cities and large towns.  Consider some facts.

There has been a decline in rural employment in the past fifty years or so, resulting in part from increased mechanisation of farm work.  The number of people employed at deep coal mines has fallen from roughly  500,000 sixty years ago to precisely zero today, and most of the deep coal mines were located in villages, although a few were located close to towns.

There has also been a substantial decline in high street banking.  The result is that jobs are lost in small towns, and there has been a roughly corresponding rise in the use of call centres, which tend to be located in either cities or the larger towns.

In other words, it appears that if you want a job then you benefit from living in a city or a larger town.  One consequence of this is overcrowding in cities, and another is that people who live outside of the cities find it hard to avoid commuting to work – sometimes very long distances.  For example it was reported many years ago that Doncaster had become a popular commuter town for people working in London.

Next time you find yourself stuck in gridlocked traffic on the way to work, reflect that maybe it would make sense for the government to look for ways whereby more jobs can be located in villages and small towns.

Related previous posts include:
Railways need better management

Global warming: it's all about the money.

Life used to be so much simpler in the old days, but then everything changed.  A key date is 15 June 1989, on which day the Green Party polled more than two million votes in the European Parliament elections.  This was widely interpreted as the British electorate indicating that they wanted the major parties to focus more on environmental issues.

The two major issues which were gaining a lot of attention at the time were global warming and the depletion of the ozone layer, and those issues are still with us today, except that there is now a high level of public scepticism – especially where global warming is concerned.

Many years ago I was discussing this topic with a man who was very much into the green scaremongering.  I mentioned to him that I had read an essay in a magazine which argued that the scaremongering was not based on good science.  If I remember rightly, it observed among other things that the hole in the ozone layer was merely seasonal.

I was then taken aback when the man retorted to the effect that big business would want to hide the truth.  He did not enlarge on that, probably because there was very little substance in what he was saying.

I concede that any company which is in the business of making money may be tempted to conceal the truth on occasions, but it is also fair to say that businesses can often make money out of environmental scaremongering.  Before 15 June 1989, the only way to sell washing powder was to argue that it cleaned your clothes.  Afterwards you could also argue that it contained fewer chemicals, and so was less harmful to the environment – and I can recall at least one television commercial which took that exact line.

Suppose you run a company which manufactures wind turbines.  Generally speaking, wind turbines are ugly and useless, and the only reason they are prolific is because they attract generous subsidies.  These subsidies are justified by environmental scaremongering, and so your company’s fortunes depend heavily upon the acceptance of the scare stories – even if they are completely untrue.

Suppose also that you are the director of an environmental lobby organisation.  Your income derives largely from membership dues paid by ordinary members of the public.  It is therefore vital that at least some people believe the latest environmental scare stories, because otherwise your organisation would probably have to close owing to a lack of money.

Global warming has kept many people on the gravy train, and I don’t expect that to change any time soon.

Some readers may accuse me of overlooking the compelling scientific evidence, and yes I’m sure the evidence is compelling to anyone whose place on the gravy train depends on us believing in scare stories.

Related previous posts include:

BBC bias: criminal law and global warming

The economics of buying online

We make more people employed if we shop on line. One to receive your order, one to process it, one to search for it, one to load the van & one to deliver it.

This comment was recently left on the website of a national newspaper.  It related to a news item about the impact of changes to business rates on some independent shops in the town of Hatfield in Hertfordshire.

A lot of the comments are along the lines that the government is not on the side of small independent shops, but rather on the side of big business.  The comment cited above suggests that buying online makes more sense, and appears to refer to buying online from a large retailer.

My first comment is that I read somewhere a few years back that a pound spent in an independent shop creates more jobs than a pound spent in a supermarket.  I have no idea what evidence if any supported this assertion, and I merely repeat it.

My second comment is that an online retailer is not necessarily a large company.  I often buy things on the internet, and so far as I can make out I am often buying from small traders.  In fact it appears that a lot of the things I buy are sold by people trading from their own homes.

As an aside, I can think of one large online retailer from which I have never bought anything, and never plan to buy anything.

If I buy something from a large company, whether or not that be an online purchase, then I may well be contributing to the salaries of a number of people.  I make the purchase, and an accounts clerk processes my payment.  My order is printed in a warehouse, and a picker collects the item I have bought.  This is then taken to a packer who begins the process of actually delivering the item to me.  The eventual delivery could be made via Royal Mail or a private courier firm.

By contrast, if I buy something from an independent trader, then I would be contributing to that trader’s revenues, but I might not be contributing to the salary of a single employee.  Quite simply the trader might not have any employees, although delivery would presumably still be via either Royal Mail or a private courier firm, and so I would in that sense be contributing to someone’s salary.

Nevertheless the salaries earned by the employees of the large companies would derive not merely from my purchase, but from the purchases of many customers.  Also, it is likely that the large company will employ many of its workers on a salary of the minimum wage or not much more.  It is also questionable to what extent the employees would benefit from the company having a higher turnover.  Higher turnover might well result in the company recruiting more staff, but that is not the same as improving the salaries.

By contrast, if I buy from an independent retailer, then I am tending to increase the income of that trader.  The trader might scrape by or might enjoy a substantial income.  If the trader employs any staff, then he or she has an obvious incentive to pay above the minimum wage.

A large company can more easily cope with a high staff turnover than a small business.  If you have a business and employ just one person, then you are likely to be seriously inconvenienced if that one employee leaves to get another job.  By contrast, a company with hundreds of employees will tend to find the loss of one employee to be less of an inconvenience.

This is of course a generalisation, and I accept that not all small businesses pay good wages – but that is in part because not all of them can afford to.

The demise of the minicab driver

It appears that self-driving cars could be on our streets in just a few years from now, and it is reported also that Google is developing plans for a driverless minicab service.  The implications appear considerable.

I can think of four reasons why driverless minicabs might be preferable to traditional ones.

With no need to pay a driver’s wages, a driverless minicab would presumably be less expensive.

There have been numerous instances over the years of women travelling alone being raped by minicab drivers.  A driverless cab would therefore appear as the safer option to many women.

A driverless minicab could be available at any time of the day or night, and on any day of the year.  Have you ever tried booking a minicab on Christmas day?

There is no obvious reason why a driverless minicab would be more expensive to hire on public holidays than on any other day of the year.

In short, there is good reason to believe that the days of the minicab driver are numbered.  A simple search on the internet indicates that there are in the region of 298,000 cab drivers in the whole of the United Kingdom, and so we are potentially looking at 298,000 people losing their livelihoods – or at least having to change their occupation.

If the price of your minicab journey decreases, then you are left with more money to spend on something else.  It is how you choose to spend that money which will determine what happens to the people currently working as minicab drivers.

Update: since writing this, I have become aware that driverless buses are being trialled in various cities, such as Paris.  Buses are not like minicabs, however.

Driverless buses would need either to operate free of charge or else have some mechanism to ensure that every passenger either pays a fare or else is exempt from paying a fare (for example a small child).  Also, many passengers might not feel as safe on a driverless bus as they would on a bus with a driver.

Related previous posts include:

Uber lose tribunal claim