This is a mantra that honestly applies to pretty much every industry these days. Everything from writing, to design, and even all the way to politics, perfectionism and our insistence on being 100% truly perfect, is what’s getting in the way of progress.
Progression and innovation come with taking risks, and the difference between success and failure is the level of progress made by those risks. The truest failure though, comes from not taking risks at all.
Case in point, the idea that EVs are unsustainable that Urbanists like to throw around a lot.
The tragedy of Perth’s trams, and why it doesn’t matter that they’re gone.
Perth, like most cities in Australia, had a comprehensive tram network at one stage. (which you can learn about by taking a look at the Perth Electric Tramway Society’s page), which basically performed the role of what CAT buses performed today. The reasoning behind why we ripped out our trams was a combination of factors. The Second World War took its toll on resources and the funds used for public infrastructure maintenance, as those were re-diverted into the war effort, especially the latter. There was also an economic downturn after the war, as Australia shifted from a Wartime economy to a peacetime economy. These adjustments come with a significant rise in labor costs. In addition, a massive baby boom lead to the need for the tramways to be modernised, a lot of which were single-track and road-side, instead of Melbourne’s more modern, road-centred, double-track layout. Trams also required additional personnel to operate when compared to buses, each tram needed a driver to operate the tram, and a conductor to collect tickets.
Therefore, it was fundamentally cheaper to rip out our tram tracks and replace them with buses, which could be operated by a single driver, could run on any paved, or even unpaved road, especially with the ending of fuel rationing in 1949. Private cars were also coming down dramatically in terms of costs, meaning that the revenue from car registration fees and fuel excises allowed vehicles to pay for their infrastructure use.
This gave the WA government a clear incentive. Scrap the trams, rip up the tracks, and run buses instead. It also completely reshaped our development towards a sprawling, suburban development model, meaning that Perth how has the reputation for being the single longest city on the planet. It sure as hell made Nigel Satterley and his developer mates happy, but it costs us pretty dearly on a day to day basis.
So… What do urbanists assume we should do?
Burn all the cars to the ground! Make everybody walk or take public transit! That’s how we all should live. Everyone is going to live in an apartment complex. You’re all going to have to pay Strata fees to a strata manager who barely upkeeps the building, and this is all going to happen overnight. Better yet, we’ll just staple a pair of clamps to Lee Kwan Yew’s nipples and resurrect him from the dead, put him in a durian wood box and ship him to Canberra, where he’ll repeatedly kick Anthony Albanese in the nuts until either his bollocks are a meaty paste, or we end up with an Australian Housing Development Board.
Sarcasm is completely implied here. I do not wish for the Prime Minister to have his nuts turned into Pate.
My point is that this inherent demand of Urbanists, whilst it is absolutely correct, it is a much more sustainable way to live, it completely ignores the fact that most humans really, really like living in big houses. Makes you feel like you’ve got your own personal little castle, y’know?
My particular situation is honestly pretty good. I live in an area that’s close enough for me to walk to a train station, and have a workplace that allows me to not bother with the whole driving thing (well, when the train line I live on comes back online, that is), so I can essentially rely on the use of my vehicle purely for enjoyment purposes. I can enjoy a Tesla for all of its positive qualities. The speed, the torque, the silence, all powered by renewables (since my apartment has solar), but to most people, commuting by car is a chore, or a necessity. A side-effect of suburbanist design, the price you pay for living in a big house.
Put it this way, If I showed my sister, who lives in a frankly, palatial house in a rural area of the city, which has a kitchen that has its own sub-kitchen, which in and of itself has its own pantry, my apartment, and asked her if she’d like to live in it, she’d guffaw at the thought. You could fit ten of my apartment’s living spaces into her home. You could fit my entire bedroom into her sub-pantry. That’s how big her place is. It’s gorgeous.
Australians unironically like the idea of the single family home so much, that the “Australian Dream” is literally a 4×2, two kids, a dog, a pool, and a ute. Sounds frankly, idyllic, right?
I’d honestly agree with you… Right up until the point where i’d have to clean a home of that size… Then you realise why Robot Vacuums are so popular these days.
Hot take: EVs are Urbanist Infrastructure
So this is where my spicyness comes into play. EVs are inherently, urbanist infrastructure, because they help to reduce the impact of such a suburbanist lifestyle, and allow that lifestyle to be sustained. There is no way in hell that people would actively vote for building massive apartments in the bush, unless there was a serious economic need for it. On top of this, Western Australia is the second largest state in the world, and yet it has only got two and a half million people living in it. Frankly, all those stickers that used to say “Fuck Off, we’re full” that I saw back in the early 2010s made me chuckle at the thought. Brother, there’s three Texases worth of land here, we ain’t full yet.
So, EVs perform the role of allowing us to essentially continue this lifestyle of big houses, whilst we spend the decades of time we need to fill in and plug up housing gaps… Provided we have pro-urbanist governments in power, that is. It’s an imperfect solution, sure. It’s absolutely not going to fix traffic, because the only way to fix traffic is to get rid of traffic, however one cursory look at Cockburn Central’s parking lot of a morning will tell you just how effective and popular WA’s Metronet train network is, even for drivers.
If you live in the suburbs? All you do is drive to a train station, park your car (and if it’s an EV, plug it in and charge it if you need to), hop on the train, and go to the city. Yes, it means you need to build multi-story carparks and such to accomodate all those cars, but this is the beauty about EVs. They’re basically just rolling batteries on wheels, meaning that you can use them to harvest excess solar energy that’s being generated from rooftop solar. If and when V2G standards get nailed down, it means you can drive your car to said carpark, charge off of excess rooftop solar, bring your car home, plug it in, and then power it from the electricity you pulled from the grid when parked, essentially using your EV a bit like an electrical shopping bag.
Enough ranting! What’s your point?!
Okay, fine. My point is that we, and yes, that means you too, cannot let perfectionism get in the way of making something or making progress. Put it this way, EVs are a great stopgap for us to eventually build out urbanist infrastructure like railways and housing. It is a good solution which avoids the delays that would come with implementing a perfect one. Likewise, you should apply the same philosophy to your creative works. If you have an idea? Write it down. It might suck, but you can always develop it, make it just good enough to publish. Engineers get their roles because they are good at making a structure just good enough so that it doesn’t kill people, without it costing the government or company who contracted them a bunch of money. Engineers and creative professionals both occupy that same bracket of “How good can we make this thing to make it work without wasting money chasing the perfectionist dragon”
In fact, i’d argue Engineering is a creative industry in and of itself, and the creative industries are just artists that think like Engineers do.
Anyone can paint a picture, build a bridge, build a piece of furniture. This doesn’t make you an artist, an engineer or a woodworker, what does is when you can get the process down to a point where you can make a product that is just good enough to be profitable and/or progressive. Yes, there are always going to be examples of true brilliance, where something is not only incredible to look at, but it’s also incredibly designed. There’s things like that all over the world, especially in Politics.
The thing that stops progress is the belief that you can’t release your thing until the world is ready for it. You, unfortunately, cannot change the world. You can’t suddenly revive LKY and turn Perth into Singapore, there’s many, many factors stopping you from doing this, what you can do, is take the skeleton of what you have, and just nudge it enough to make it a little better. You give battery incentives to homeowners to ease stress on the grid, you build vanadium batteries in the regions, you incentivise people to buy EVs, and then, over time, you build up the train network so that it’s safer, easier to use, better for motorists, and also better for all users in general, and build more houses in areas servicable by the train network.
The former can be done faster, because it doesn’t require much to change for it to work. The latter will take time, so you make some small gains initially, to make big impacts eventually.
Oh, and if anyone poo-poos you for your choice to live in a big home, or to buy a Tesla, or whatever? Tell them to kick rocks. You’re doing what’s good for you, not what’s perfect for them.
Just because people tell you that such a thing is the correct thing to do, doesn’t it means it’s the correct thing to do, because smug idiots have no clue what is going on in your world, unless they’re accountants, and then all they’re concerned about is “is number big enough to do thing you want to do”, and if this is the case, you should listen to them.
My point is, don’t let their perfect get in the way of your good. What is good for you might not be good for them, and that’s fine. That’s the beauty of the world. We’re all different, some of us make stuff, most of us buy stuff, and that’s how the world works. Stop arguing, and don’t let perfection get in the way of goodness.
Beano out.