this from Lerner pretty much sums up why change is almost impossible here:
people are willing to put up with the delays and costs of widening the roads to accommodate more cars because they can see themselves benefiting from that even though it just means more people saying "hmmm traffic capacity was increased i think i'll get a car or move further out because the commute will be more tolerable." and everyone is back to square one stuck in traffic. but you say those delays and costs are for dedicated bus lanes and they say "how does that help me? i have a car, i don't want to ride the bus."
same thing with healthcare, once you have a system (however shytty) people want money spent to improve it. no spending on a new system because that's too abstract. that's how you end up with a system that costs so much and delivers so little. same for american public schools, can't start over and do it better so just spend more than every other country for worse results.
“Every time, you always have a big resistance,” Lerner says. “When we first proposed the project, we tried to convince the merchants. We showed them designs, information ... it was a big discussion. Then we realised we had to have a demonstration effect.”
So Lerner took the plan to his director of public works, saying: “I need this [built] in 48 hours ... He looked at me and asked, ‘Are you crazy? It will take at least four months.’”
Regardless, Lerner and his team – impatient, wily or both – prepared to begin work at sundown that very Friday, waiting only until after the city’s courthouse had closed so that shopkeepers could no longer file their injunction.
“If I’d received a juridical demand to stop the project, we would never have made it,” Lerner recalls. “So we finished in 72 hours – Friday night to Monday night. And at the end, one of the merchants who wrote the petition to stop the work told me: ‘Keep this petition as a souvenir, because now we want the whole street, the whole sector pedestrianised!’”
The project encapsulates Lerner’s planning philosophy: act now, adjust later. “We had to work fast to avoid our own bureaucracy, and to avoid our own insecurity, because sometimes we start to think: ‘That’s a good idea but I cannot make it happen.’ So the key issue in Curitiba was to start – we had the courage to start.”
When I press Lerner on the political implications of this kind of strong-arming – which some have described as a “technocratic approach without participation” – he has a ready response: “Democracy is not consensus. Democracy is a conflict that is well managed. It’s about how you manage that conflict – sometimes for the minority, sometimes for the majority. But it has to happen.”
people are willing to put up with the delays and costs of widening the roads to accommodate more cars because they can see themselves benefiting from that even though it just means more people saying "hmmm traffic capacity was increased i think i'll get a car or move further out because the commute will be more tolerable." and everyone is back to square one stuck in traffic. but you say those delays and costs are for dedicated bus lanes and they say "how does that help me? i have a car, i don't want to ride the bus."
same thing with healthcare, once you have a system (however shytty) people want money spent to improve it. no spending on a new system because that's too abstract. that's how you end up with a system that costs so much and delivers so little. same for american public schools, can't start over and do it better so just spend more than every other country for worse results.
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