Town & Country Planning, June/July 2007
They say that all roads lead to Rome. That may be so, but I know one thing for sure: all bus routes end in Crystal Palace. I know this partly because I live there, and partly because of the crowds of dazed bus passengers wandering around near the bus station, tipped out unexpectedly at the terminus, some miles short of their homes.
But it does mean I get a choice of buses where I live, and two in particular go nearly past my house. I tend to catch whichever one comes first, but there’s a big difference between them – a very big difference.
If I get the 450, it’s a small single-decker bus. It’s usually packed full of pensioners hanging onto the supports for dear life as the Transport for London-trained driver swings them round the park. When everybody gets off, young and old, they thank the driver. If somebody very old is clambering aboard, someone always leaps off and helps them on. And people chat to each other – an almost unheard phenomenon, even in Crystal Palace. Slightly disturbing when first encountered.
But if the 468 comes first, it’s a different experience. It’s the same cross-section of passengers – my neighbours are generally nice people, but you can recognise them immediately. But this is one of those gigantic red double-decker buses, the motoring equivalent of the brontosaurus who made a hefty meal out of its own tail. And the atmosphere is completely different: nobody talks. Nobody even smiles. Nobody speaks to the driver, though he occasionally swears at us. Nobody helps anyone on or off. You can cut the distrust with a knife, and unfortunately people occasionally do.
I’ve thought about this a great deal. It isn’t that there are more regulations on the smaller bus – we ignore them anyway. The government doesn’t regulate smaller buses more intensely. It is subject to no extra government targets or funding for social cohesion. We have undergone no extra community training.
Yet I can’t help feeling that, if we could package whatever quality it was that made the 450 friendly, we might solve the nation’s crime and community problems overnight. But I don’t suppose many Whitehall ministers travel along the 450 route to Thornton Heath. It has the air of a mandarin free zone.
But actually, I know what the difference is. The 450 is smaller, and because it is smaller, then the driver’s human factor comes into play. We are aware of him as a person: he can – and often does – make people’s day. On the 468, the poor benighted drivers are forced to be adjuncts of their machines. Like the policeman in Flann O’Brien, they are already part metal. No wonder travelling that way can be an unfriendly business.
Yet all over the developed world, in corporations and in government services, that human factor is being removed – because it is the source of uncertainty and error.
The technocratic management systems are being imported into every corporation and organisation we deal with, and with disastrous results. The systems do not recognise detail or complexity or humanity, yet reality is detailed, complex and human. Because those that run the world have forgotten something tremendously important: the human factor may be a source of error, but it is also the only source of genuine change.
Without it, we are stuck, unable to change our situation. Thus, we have sent space ships to the very edge of the solar system and designed welfare systems to slay the giants of human ignorance, hunger and disease – but we still can’t manage an efficient train service between Norbury and London Bridge.
Yet without human relationships, big, bureaucratic and virtual systems are great lumbering machines dedicated to providing the illusion of change. They spurt metrics and targets which can satisfy the poor deluded managers and politicians, but they have only the tiniest effect on real human problems and demands. The sad truth (sad for the McKinsey consultants) is that only small, human systems can make things happen, and they are being driven out.
When politicians discuss decentralisation and localism, they tend to think this is all about making things more democratic. Perhaps they would think that: they tend to be particularly interested in democracy of the voting kind.
It is true that localism means more democracy, but I’m not sure that is the core of the argument. Any localism worth having means smaller, and therefore more human institutions, where people’s humanity is important – and because of that, change becomes possible again. Real change, not the stuff that governments measure.
If we don’t learn this rather important lesson, it seems to me, we can hardly be surprised when society gets more like the 468 and less like the 450.