the logic of political survival

If you're looking for a next book to read, pick up Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's (et. al.) "The Logic of Political Survival" (MIT Press).

(This might be of particular interest to you, Koikaze)



Bueno de Mesquita's thoughts on the "selectorate" and the "winning coalition" could pretty well explain the Arroyo-Estrada love dance and even explain the conduct of our national politics. (It also echoes MLQ's own thoughts in the early paragraphs of this post) .

Bueno de Mesquita and his colleagues apply game theory to political analysis and actually use mathematical models to predict political outcomes.

His track record has been impressive:

A sample of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita’s wilder—and most accurate—predictions:

• Forecasted the second Intifada and the death of the Mideast peace process, two years before it happened.
• Defied Russia specialists by predicting who would succeed Brezhnev. “The model identified Andropov, who nobody at the time even considered a possibility,” he says.
• Predicted that Daniel Ortega and the Sandanistas would be voted out of office in Nicaragua, two years before it happened.
• Four months before Tiananmen Square, said China’s hardliners would crack down harshly on dissidents.
• Predicted France’s hair’s-breadth passage of the European Union’s Maastricht Treaty.
• Predicted the exact implementation of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement between Britain and the IRA.
• Predicted China’s reclaiming of Hong Kong and the exact manner the handover would take place, 12 years before it happened.

That list is from a great article in GOOD Magazine on Bueno de Mesquita.

You can also download two podcasts from EconTalk featuring the man and his thoughts:

• The Political Economy of Power (August 14, 2006)
• On Reagan, Yeltsin, and the Strategy of Political Campaigning (July 23, 2007 -he also talks about his latest book)

More on Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and his previous work here.

I'm still reading through their work -which is admittedly a very cynical view of politics, but on first blush, the theories do appeal to me as a designer.

Image credit:
Cover art feat. B. Bueno de Mesquita
by Ethan Hill for GOOD Magazine

reprint: on the boundary system

Note: OK, I'm being lazy. Here's a replay of my old post -from August of 2008 2005 (thanks, chesca), on how the economic model of public transport in the city shapes both driver behavior and our actual built environment. You can catch the original post and the comments here. And here's the whole series on disorganized transport.

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The Boundary System as a city shaper.

Cities are self-organizing systems. With the exception of planned cities like Brasilia or Chandigarh, very few cities arise ex-nihilo.

Cities respond to the needs of the individuals that comprise it and one of the key needs is mobility -to get from one point to another.

Cities are shaped by the current mode of transportation available when they grew up. So older european cities have narrow winding streets, suitable for carts and donkeys or walking. London grew up around the tube, and New York around the subway system. L.A., like Metro Manila, grew up around the automobile -so roads (at least in the newer parts of the metropolis) are wide and traffic fast.

The mode of transportation shapes the city and the demands of the city also shapes the transportation -particularly public transportation.

In our own city, public transport, as I previously discussed has been given over to the free market. The rewards/remuneration system of this particular urban sub-system, has shaped our city in ways that may have been invisible to us all these years.

The Boundary System is basically a vehicle rent system. The driver is "hired" by the transport operator, to run and maintain his jeep, bus, or FX cab. The driver can run as many trips within the boundary period (standard is 12 hours) as he wants but he basically has to pay the "boundary fee" (usually, daily) to the owner -and his source of income is whatever he makes over and above the boundary fee. The driver covers the cost of gasoline and minor repairs.

This remuneration/rent system has shaped metro-manila in subtle and not so subtle ways.

The boundary system brings a logic to earning money that shapes the driving habits of the renting drivers. If the driver only earns above the boundary, then logic dictates that he must get as many passengers as he can in as many trips as possible . The driver also benefits by having the vehicle on the road as many days as possible - as repairs and shutdowns mean no income for the day.

So, a driver will:

1. soak up passengers by basically waiting as long as he can in a high traffic/passenger volume area and then
2. speed up to the next high volume pickup point to soak in more passengers.
3. he will also see other public utility vehicles plying the route as competition so waiting in a line does not make much sense,
4. he will try to get ahead of the line (usually by doubling up on the pickup lane) so he can be closer to the "source" of passengers and so
5. he won't be tied down on the line and can speed up to the next destination.
6. It also means that shorter trips are preferred to longer trips and
7. vehicle downtime and thus vehicle maintenance is kept to a minimum (=inefficient engines, =more pollution).

This system is behind the traffic chokepoints at the major junctions and intersections. The underpass in cubao, the flyovers in ortigas, the overpasses in santolan, even the grade separations in EDSA in Makati were driven by the logic of separating the buses, who spent an inordinate amount of time at the intersections waiting for passengers, from the rest of the road traffic.

The government has also probably thrown millions of pesos in soft costs at trying to manage the behavior of the public utility vehicles by throwing hundreds of traffic enforcers and by coming up with several management programs (from Oscar Orbos' bus numbering system, to Bayani Fernando's Organized Bus Routes).

The flyovers/overpasses/underpasses have made EDSA completely un-friendly to pedestrians, and the accumulation of vehicles in the intersections have concentrated exhaust/pollution in the areas around these passenger pickup junctions so these have become some of the worst parts of the city. (Ordinarily, the high pedestrian traffic junctions would be the most suitable places for commerce and retail.)

A serious re-thinking of the boundary system (legislating a wage based system seems the easy way out -but that will create it's own problems) would go a long way not only in solving intractable traffic problems but also in re-shaping the fabric of the city.

*-Part of "Konting ipit lang po, pituhan yan."

Roughly translated, "Please squeeze your thighs a bit more, this jeepney fits seven to a side."

Image credit:Manfred's Travel Pictures

congestion

Note: Anyone still here? The operative word, as far as work is concerned, is "tuliro" -- and I've been running around like a headless chicken working to close several projects.

I wrote this sitting in a DC airport, waiting for a flight that was delayed for three hours. rather than working on my projects, I squeaked in some-not-so-quality blog time.

I wound up in wifi hell on the shores of Lake Huron in Ontario, so I missed both the news and the blog posts.

I hope you're all ok.

My thoughts and prayers go out to the victims of the bombing in G2: A good friend of mine was a mere hundred feet away from the explosion. I'm glad he's ok. Another friend is on the front lines for ALI helping the victims and their families. Strength and endurance for her.

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Further on rethinking public transport, here's a quick work-up on why our roads are so congested.

An average bus, carrying full capacity, can seat about 70 passengers. An average car, about 4. (Five, if you want to squeeze people in.)

Let's do a side by side comparison. Assume the bus is not full to capacity and carries only 60 people. (Of course, rush hour buses in Metro Manila probably carry close to 100). Then, assume 4 passengers per car. What effect does that have on our roads?

Here are the numbers:

You'll need 15 cars to transport as many people as one bus. You'll need 30 full cars to be on par withtwo buses (120 passengers).

How much road space do these vehicles take up? The two buses will take up 38 meters (124.6 feet) of road space. Bumper to bumper, the 30 cars will take up 152 meters (498.6 feet). Even if you double up on two lanes, the cars will still stretch to 76 meters -twice the road space of the two buses.

What does this mean as far as road capacity? Take two lanes on EDSA's 23 kilometers, fill it up with buses -and you can theoretically move 145,440 people. Fill those same two lanes with cars instead and you will only carry 36,360 people. Barely a fourth of the bus capacity.

You will need at least 8 lanes of road, with bumper to bumper cars, to even come close to what the buses can carry!

If two lanes of cars can only carry a fourth of one lane of buses, the cars will have to move at 4 times the speed of the buses to transport as many people. And that's under perfect (read: unreal) conditions -where the cars drive almost bumper to bumper and traffic flows smoothly.

Which is why the logic of counting the number of vehicles that move on a road (traffic flow), instead of counting the number of people you can transport (people flow) to measure performance only leads to more congestion.

To increase carrying capacity, you will try to try to speed up traffic. You will be forced to widen the road (and eat up sidewalks) to add more lanes and increase throughput. You will think of building flyovers and underpasses and overhead highways to keep traffic flowing.

Then there's the emissions equation. Eight lanes of EDSA will carry 36,360 cars. Two lanes of EDSA will carry 2,424 buses. Even if you assume that each bus generates 10 times more GHGs than each car, two lanes of buses will still generate 30% less GHGs than 8 lanes of cars. (And it's way easier to equip buses with CNG engines, which can theoretically produce just 7% of the emissions that the 8 lanes of cars will produce.)

The logic is clear. You want to move people more efficiently? Move more buses.*

You want to clean up the air and take care of our environment? (Not to mention, contribute to GHG reduction)? Reduce car use, increase bus use.

What about bad driving?

This all looks good on paper, you say. But with the way metro manila's bus drivers drive, we can throw all those efficiency gains out the window.

If you've kept up with this blog long enough, you'll know that I'm convinced we won't solve bad (PUV) driver behavior with increased traffic enforcement, we have to change the economic model of our public transportation system.


p.s. -taking the train to Ottawa later today - will use the time (and the onboard wifi) to answer all the great comments I've been neglecting.

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* Don't we have the OBR, you ask. Isn't that a bus priority lane? I though it would be a precursor to a BRT system, but it sadly, the OBR seems to be more about driver discipline rather than transit efficiency. It's a traffic management solution, not a public transportation solution.


(So what if you used FXs instead of cars? You can assume 10 passengers, including the driver, and assume the chassis length. Two lanes of FXs will only carry 60% vs. two lanes of buses. And, of course, you'll still be generating more GHGs with the FXs than the buses.)

rethinking public transport

So, had enough of the Erap verdict? If you haven't, go visit Roby Alampay's op-ed piece in The Guardian UK (which I consider to be the last word on the matter), then come back here so we can talk about more immediate matters, like the quality of daily life in our megacity.

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Question: If you were running a company and you knew that 78% of your assets traveled through a single channel, wouldn't it be in your strategic interest to that make sure that channel operated as efficiently as possible?

Well, then, what should we do about public transportation in Metro Manila?

Everyday, nearly 8 out of every 10 person trips (that's 1 person, taking one trip, in one vehicle, from one point to another) in our megacity is taken via public transportation.

In 2002, that meant 20M out of 25.7M person trips per day. That's twenty million individual movements. That's the production base of the your megacity's economy going from home, to work, or to school, or to get their daily needs. -That's 78% of the person trips that generates 1/5 (or more) of the national GDP.

It's obvious isn't it? It's management 101 - to become more productive, make your major channels as efficient as possible (more efficient than your minor channels).

So, what have we done to make public transportation more efficient?

We've invested heavily and are planning to expand our investments in an expensive, but still fragmented, light rail network. We're buying back the MRT to the tune of $865-million and throwing in another P6.57-billion to finally connect the northern end of the MRT to the LRT. (And yet, have we thought about connecting one of these lines to the airport?)

We're putting in more monies into the LRT-7 (a private initiative that smells more like a real estate deal), the Northrail, the extension of LRT-1 (LRT-6) to Zapote and are upgrading the PNR service to Laguna. -All these investments in rail infra takes us decades to build. Meanwhile, Jakarta has rolled out 159 kilometers of bus rapid transit in just the last 3 years.

We've put in an Organized Bus Route system (basically just a traffic management tool) to control bus flow on EDSA. We're even flirting with using electric jeepneys (a move I'm personally not too excited about).

All of which will make some dents on demand but will probably still miss by a wide margin in fulfilling the crying needs in public transport.

The MRT barely moves 500,000 people a day, they need to invest more money to up the service to 650K/day. The LRT/Megatren combined barely scratch 400,000 passengers a day. -So those three existing rail systems carry at most, 1M people. If you assume those are roundtrip passengers, then that's 2M person trips per day - less than 10% of the share of public transport. (And you wonder why there are still jeepneys on our roads.)

The coming investments in light rail and high speed commuter rail are all primary trunk transport routes, if we hope to make the megacity more productive, then we have to seriously reconsider reforming and re-investing in the secondary and tertiary transport systems.

I don't have the answers, but I hope seeing those numbers should change your perspective.

As difficult as it is to drive through Metro Manila to get from one point to another in your private car, our most important investments (investments that will bring the most direct returns in quality of life and competitiveness of the metro) don't lie in widening our roads or speeding up automobile traffic -so you can drive faster. It lies in rethinking our tricycles, our jeepneys and buses and the routes they serve.


All transport data from MMUTIS and LTO, c. 2002
via a presentation on BRT in Metro Manila by Dr. Ricardo Sigua NCTS
(ppt file, 1.8mb)

Image credit: toda by aileron

nice map

Found this Time population map via the Signal v. Noise blog on 37Signals.



It warms my map geek and data visualization heart. (See the original -and bigger version here.)

TIME Graphic by Joe Lertola
From US Census Data

new cities in new valleys

I've talked about Ayala Land's vast land holdings in Canlubang before and how that will definitely figure into the future of our megacity. Apparently they've laid out the vision of the shape of that new development. (Ah, the tribulations of unrequited and long distance love - when you live and work away from the city you call home. News gets by without you.)

Jo, the ManilaRat, keyed me in on the developments in Nuvali in her latest post.

Heard about AyalaLand's new project in Canlubang, called Nuvali (from the Latin nuvo meaning "birth of a star"). Literally a "new valley" in the Sta. Rosa-Tagaytay area, it's a 1,600-hectare megatownship development set for full bloom over the next 40 to 50 years. Eyed as the next Makati, its main thrust is 21st century technology meets back-to-basics harmony with nature. Think eco-friendly, ultra-modern sustainable living: clean lines, fluid designs, integrated zones (residential, business, services), and green green green everywhere.

So I hied off to the Ayala Land site (and noticed how it seems to be so geared towards the OFW -or Pinoy Expats, as Dave Llorito prefers -market) and jumped off to Nuvali site. (Warning: bad UI flash-based website.)

I was eager to look for broad sketch masterplans but all the site had was spiffy marketing marterial. You can download pdf copies of an ad series about Nuvali that they ran in the Philippine Star. (Another warning: they make you pass through a copyright agreement. -duh!)

The content is worth it, if you can stand the marketing speak ("evoliving" -? really???) and the weird commitment to pseudo-italian placenames ("Abrio" -?!?). The sidebar on "design and planning initiatives" (see below) were significant.



I'll definitely cheer for de-emphasizing cars and multi-use (read: mixed-use) neighborhoods. Kudos also to a "future that veers away from the severe sprawl of conventional urban development."

To that end, Joel Luna, Chief Architect of the Ayala Land Innovation and Design Group, says they are building wider sidewalks:

"...to encourage more people to walk rather than take their car. This is also safer and more pedestrian friendly. We are also building narrower pavements...so there's more room for natural landscaping. There will be double-rows of trees instead of the typical single row."

So their are paying attention to pedestrian mobility and comfort -and the micro-climate.

Then there's this sidebar:


Can Ayala accomplish all this? Despite the marketing gloss, I have no doubt that they will. They are patient enough and forward looking enough (remember it took them 50 years to fully develop the Ayala CBD, and they waited close to decade for Metro Pacific to go belly up on Fort Bonifacio -and now it's in their control) and have the deep pockets to see this through.

The one aspect I will be looking closely at: whether they can escape their elitist past and be willing to mix incomes and avoid the segrated, gated, high-walled enclaves that I suspect add to the (spatial) roots of our discontent.

It'll probably take about 5-10 years to get the full expanse of the project - another 10 to fully build out the infra, but this will definitely be another mega-project that will shape the future of our megacity.

Image credit: swiped from ALI's website
doesn't this cover fair-use?

(p.s. -er, nuvali? can we change the name? to something a little more asian? spanish even?)

brand and neurwith on cities

This one's short but sweet: from the TED Talks, a 3 minute version of Stewart Brand's talk on cities.




And if you have more time (14 minutes) here's Neurwith on Squatter Cities.

"A Boy with Mickey Mouse Hands"

The Los Angeles Asian Journal featured Jack in the pages of its Sept. 5-7, 2007 issue.

Cynthia de Castro's article on Jack starts below the fold on the front page (all links to pdf copies), and continues on page 4, page 5, and page 11.

jack

Please keep praying for Jack.

(Doodle is Jack's latest -while he is confined at the Children's Hospital of L.A.)

It reads:

Thorn
Cross
Prayer for Jack: Lord help Jack live long. Amen.
Prayer for healing: Heal Jack Lord. Amen.

connection, connection, connection

This was my reply to Carlos Celdran's latest post about Manila reopening restaurants in Intramuros as a trade-off to closing down the establishments on the Baywalk:

I'd welcome the re-establishment of restaurants in Intramuros with, as you say, clear building guidelines and oversight.

What is clearly missing though is a convenient physical link between Intramuros and the rest of the city.

Was it Alcazaren or Villalon that proposed a tram line between the bay and the walled city?

The baywalk (and a redeveloped CCP complex) could work well with Intramuros if there was either a BRT stretching from the airport to intramuros, or a slow surface tram between the CCP and the old city.

It would solve your parking problem -people could park somewhere along the route and catch the tram in either direction.

They could watch an event in the CCP or Folk Arts or PICC, catch the tram to intramuros for dinner, then catch it back to bay walk for a promemade.

If there's a strong pedestrian connection between the baywalk, ccp and malate -they could also walk to the bars for after dinner drinks.

There is, though, one thing about the baywalk that new restaurants in intramuros won't replace: democratic access.

UDC

This is, of course, one of my repeating themes.

Image credit: The Strasbourg Tram from Wikimedia Commons
photo by by C. Horwitz, 2004