Inertia Pattern

Well, the 2010 Winter Olympics are over, and what a ride they were! As you may recall, in a previous blog post I told you that my workplace had planned to run itself entirely remotely for the full two weeks of the Olympics. Our heads were filled with visions of traffic jams clogging the city streets, and hour-long waits for the SkyTrain. We had even planned for riots breaking out: meeting rooms in the office were labeled “safe room” if they didn’t have a line-of-sight to the street. None of that happened. If anything, traffic was lighter than normal, and the longest I had to wait for a train was an extra three minutes or so.

Instead, it was as if the entire world showed up for a gigantic two-week long street festival with a side plate of sports thrown in for fun. After a couple of days of this, all of the residents of Vancouver sort of looked at each other and said, “Hey, this isn’t so bad. Let’s join in!” If anything, the only part of the Olympics which felt poorly planned to me was the suburban train line to my house. The line’s capacity was doubled with extra runs, but they could have easily tripled capacity and still filled all the seats. I’m certain that the transit planners had access to the ticket sale numbers broken down by suburb, but they underestimated the number of people who would want to come in, well, just to join the party.

One thing which made it such a great experience was that the city had created a network of pedestrian-only streets in the downtown core, connected together by the subway lines. This meant that families could easily walk between venues with young children, jumping onto the metro system if the distances were too large, or just wandering around the streets, free from traffic worries. During the first week of the Olympics, my family came down on one of the extra afternoon trains, and we stayed until 9:30 PM. We wandered for hours through the venues. On Granville Street, a large exhibit of lantern trees had sprouted up through the pavement, much to the delight of my kids. Dinner even came with a show -- a troupe of fire jugglers set up on the street next to our patio table.

Granville Street Lantern Forest

The whole thing was such a great experience, it made me wonder why urban life couldn’t always be that way. Do people really need cars to get around a modern city? Do they have to spend their evenings in their living rooms watching Survivor reruns on their big screen TVs? Must all food come in boxes and cans found within warehouse-style grocery stores, themselves surrounded by giant parking lots? I think that most people (myself included) are focused on things like getting that assignment completed for work, or taking the kids to the park, or trying to figure out what to cook for dinner. Few of us have either the time or the energy to contemplate a different way of living. The way this all sums up is that society operates on an inertia which keeps everything moving in more or less the same direction it did yesterday. Even if we are presented with a wonderfully different way of living, as occurred during the Olympics, it's simply too easy to lapse back to the old ways.

Many people commented to me how traffic was never lighter than during the Olympics, and how the pedestrian streets were full of life. Within a few days after the closing ceremonies, the barricades came down, the cars returned, and children could no longer to be seen eating warm Nutella crepes in the middle of the street.

Back to the inertia pattern.

Sigh...