1 June 2022. Traffic | Games

Traffic? It’s complicated. No—it’s complex. // Using games to rehearse tough futures.

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1: Traffic? It’s complicated. No—it’s complex.

One of the problems about talking to car advocates about transport, and traffic, is that things that seem as if they ought to be common sense are actually wrong. This is because traffic behaves in systemic ways that are often counter-intuitive.

For example: if you reduce the top speed on a motorway, journey times get faster. (The narrower spread of speeds between faster and slower vehicles means that the gaps between vehicles get smaller.)

If you reduce the amount of road space for vehicles, a significant amount of traffic ‘evaporates’—because it’s easier or quicker to use an alternative mode of transport, or to access the thing you want in a different way.

Similarly, when you give more space to bike lands, traffic speeds don’t change much, despite car advocates claiming that they increase congestion. There’s a reason that average speeds in London are barely unchanged in something more than 100 years.

This all came to mind while watching a short (5’) video on the Guardian’s site which set out to investigate the claims made about the impact of London’s cycle lanes on congestion by the US-based traffic analysts Inrix, whose model was that this was all about demand and supply.

(Video: The Guardian. Click on the link to play.)

But that’s not actually what happens. Traffic demand responds to supply: build more roads, and you get more cars. There’s some striking footage in the video about the building of the Westway in London, a four lane elevated highway that took traffic out to the west of the city, and its effect on car use.

The reason for this is that when journey times fall, demand for those journeys increases. (This is one of the reasons why the UK Treasury’s model to decide on which road schemes to fund, which was based on the value of reduced journey times, was a contradiction in terms.)

And vice versa. If car journeys become slower, if parking becomes harder to find, or more expensive, people will walk or cycle instead, or order it online.

In London, Transport for London reckons that a million journeys a day are cyclable, and that figure goes up if you factor in electric bikes.

(Source: Glenn Lyons)

This is why transport planning has moved from the ‘predict and provide’ model that dominated the last part of the 20th century, to the ‘decide and provide’ model that now dominates. Despite our present government’s predilection for random road building.

A good model for understanding the systemic behaviour is the Triple Access Model, developed by my sometimes colleague Glenn Lyons and Cody Davidson:

(Source: Glenn Lyons)

Instead of seeing transport planning in a linear way, the Triple Access Model plays out between the three axes (pun intended) of physical mobility, land use, and digital connectivity. Glenn writes:

Triple access is about recognising, understanding and shaping the world in which we live – a world in which there are three means to access people, goods, jobs, services and opportunities: physical mobility (transport system), spatial proximity (land use system) and digital connectivity (telecommunications system). The Triple Access System requires us to lift our heads up from a rather myopic focus on transport solutions to transport problems in transport planning.

This all makes sense. The demand for transport is a derived demand—as we have seen in the collapse in demand for commuting journeys in response to changing expectations around white collar work and increased digital connectivity.

A second article by Glenn on the same site has a useful systems diagram that shows how the car-driven mobility system of the late 20th century became a vicious self-reinforcing circle.

(Source: Glenn Lyons)

But as he observes, looking at this diagram also helps us to see how to break these links:

Normalisation of digitally accessed activities and services could arise (telecommunications system).

This could reduce demand for distant face-to-face activities and services, in turn reducing the demand for motorised mobility, then reducing the policy priority for access based upon motorised mobility (transport system).

This could make way for continued or heightened policy priority for access based upon active travel, leading to improved availability and demand for proximate face-to-face activities and services (land-use system).

And one of the benefits of the Triple Access Model is that it allows planners, and citizens, to have an informed conversation about alternatives. Boosting the prominence of land use, for example, is likely to increase inclusiveness, but only if there are local public and community assets.

It also allows you to explore trade-offs. If the digital connectivity node balloons (as it did for delivery during the pandemic), when does that become a problem for physical mobility, in the form of congestion or air pollution? What can we do to rebalance that by improving the Land Use elements of the model?

And so on.

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2: Using games to rehearse tough futures

It is hard to find ways to enable groups or communities to have honest discussions about the difficult choices that we are all going to have to make in a way that allows informed reflection and also removes at least some of the power from the conversation. It’s one of the reasons why there’s been an uptick in things like citizen’s juries and citizen’s dialogue.

So it was interesting to read a piece in Grist about a board game that has been developed to help a Maori community, or hapu, discuss the future of the marae, their meeting place, which is in serious danger of flooding.

The game is called Marae-opoly (I hope no Hasbro lawyers are reading this) and it was designed by the community with help from researchers from New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA).

A turn in Marae-opoly plays out in several steps. First, teams debate how to address the flood risk and choose to either make the marae more flood resistant by waterproofing buildings, raising the flood banks, or improving drainage works; move its location; or wait and save money.

In each round, a random “rainmaker” event reflecting the real odds of extreme weather determines the rainfall for that decade. Sometimes the team is hit by a devastating flood, other times it is dry, but it is impossible to predict what will happen when. Turns go on like this until players have experienced 100 years of climate change, with the decisions they made early on compounding over time.

The game play allowed people to try out decisions and see their consequences. But there’s also a random element that is designed to mirror the unpredictability of the weather.

For instance, the type of flood that is of particular danger in New Zealand is often referred to as a 100-year flood, which makes it sound unlikely to happen any time soon. The reality is that every year has an equal chance of seeing a 100-year flood, and it’s possible to get two 100-year floods back to back. Climate change is also making these extreme floods more likely.

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(Image via Researchgate)

Why a board game rather than—say—a video simulation? Rebecca Bayeck, who specialises in the educational value of games (but wasn’t involved in the Marae-opoly project} points to particular features:

Unlike video games, Bayeck sees board games as fostering a welcoming space because they facilitate in-person connections. Playing the game “invites personal interaction where you can see the face of the other (players), see their expression, ask a question,” she says.

Paula Blackett, a social scientist who was involved in the design, points to the benefits of the game in opening up the conversation:

“It allows people to express their thoughts on what could be done (to address the flood risk), and why. It’s quite an inclusive approach because you consider all of the different things that could be possible.”...

“Most people struggle with being able to integrate all of the different streams of information that they need in order to make robust climate change adaptation decisions in an unknown future,” says Blackett. Games make that kind of information more manageable and let people experience it at a small scale.

And not just about climate change. Similar ‘serious games’ have helped to explore pandemic responses and to help Mexican farmers make decisions about pest control.

All of this reminded me of a well-known paper written by Alex Pang on the benefits of what he called ‘paper spaces’. It’s literally about the physicality of paper and the material experience of it in producing group knowledge, but there’s something similar in games about the value of the game as a shared object whose outcomes are co-produced by the group.

In my experience of designing simulations, they also help people access more visceral experiences of change, as well as the views of their ‘rational’ selves.

As it happens, there’s a happy ending for this particular community.

Through a stroke of luck, a local farm recently sold them a patch of land just 300 meters away from the marae’s current site, on slightly higher ground. “Over time, we still may need to move further,” cautions (hapu chair Tania) Hopmans, as the floods may eventually catch up with the new site. But, she adds, “at this point, we are definitely moving up the road.”

The game made a big decision easier to process. It acted as a low stakes trial.

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