Reconnections’ Miscellany: Transport Laws – July 2021

Roger Ford’s Informed Sources Laws

1. First Law – Never assume railways are rational organisations.
2. Second Law = You can’t have too many spanners.
3. Third Law = Always distrust schedules based on the seasons.
4. Fourth Law – When in doubt – build a demonstrator.
5. Fifth Law – Any change to a prototype will be for the worst.
6. Sixth Law – Don’t engage in joint ventures with the French.
7. Seventh Law – The attractiveness of a technology is directly proportional to the square of the distance of its factory of origin from London.
8. Eighth Law = Nothing works out of the box.
9. Ninth Law – Do not try to solve physical design shortcomings with software.
10. Tenth Law – If something has to be claimed as declared “world-beating” it almost certainly isn’t.
11. Eleventh Law claim that “safety is our first priority” or “safety is paramount” usually follows an event that proves it isn’t.
12. The ‘Informed Sources’ legal department is currently codifying a new Law along the lines that if you have to tell people you are a world leader, you probably aren’t.

Corollary: Safety critical communications should be Accurate, Brief, and Clear (ABC).

David Levinson’s Laws of Transport

1. First Law – Everyone complains about transport, independent of the quality of travel experienced.
2. Second Law – Everyone is a transport expert.

Jarrett Walker’s Laws of Transit

1. First Law: Inefficiency is Inequality – Only an efficient solution (in terms of both space and money) can be made available to everyone.
2. Second Law: If transit doesn’t scale, it doesn’t matter – for a city that’s equitable and sustainable.

Hill’s Law of Contracting

The contractor who leaves most out of his tender gets the job.

Eponymous Laws

• Amara’s Law – the tendency to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate its effect in the long run.
• Benford’s Law – the number ‘1’ occurs much more often than any other numeral.
• Brook’s Law – adding resources to a software project only slows it down.
• Hitch’s Law – a new enterprise always costs from two to twenty ties as uch as the ost careful official estimate.
• McNamara Fallacy – named for Robert McNamara, US Secretary of Defence from 1961 to 1968, whose decision making was based solely on quantitative observations or metrics, ignoring all other factors, leading skewed and unsuccessful results. Such as losing the Vietnam War.
• Moore’s Law – computer chip power doubles every 18 months.
• Moravec’s Paradox – Machines and humans often have opposite strengths and weaknesses.
• Nixon in China Phenomenon – where the person or political party least expected to be an agent of change is the only one that can actually pull it off.
• Pareto Principle – Also known as the 80/20 Rule, it states that 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people. Related to the Golden Rule. Named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto who observed that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population, and that 20% of the pea pods in his garden contained 80% of the peas. The principle is now a common rule of thumb in business, such as ‘80% of sales come from 20% of the clients’. Mathematically, the 80–20 rule is approximately a power law distribution (also known as a Pareto distribution), and many natural phenomena have been shown empirically to exhibit such a distribution.
• Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than expected, even when Hofstadter’s Law has been taken into account (recursion). See Crossrail schedules.
• Peak-End Rule – people judge experiences mostly on how they felt at the most intense point and how they felt at the end. The rest of it doesn’t seem to factor into the way we feel about it afterwards. Neither does how long the experience lasted.

Eponymous Network Laws

• Beckstrom’s Law of Economics – the value of a network equals the net value added to each user’s transactions conducted through that network, summed over all users.
• Metcalfe’s Law – the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n²). First stated for telecommunications but applies to other networks as well.
• Reed’s Law – the utility of large networks scales exponentially with the size of the network, a version of Metcalfe’s Law.

Moore’s Law Corrollaries

1. Nothing is as easy as it looks.
2. Everything takes longer than you think.
3. If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong.
4. If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which a procedure can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way will promptly develop.
5. Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.
6. Whenever you set out to do something, something else must be done first.
7. Every solution breeds a new problem.
8. It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
9. Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.
10. Mother nature is a bitch.

By Arthur Bloch.

Parkinson’s Laws

• Work will expand to require all available time.
• Law of Data – data will expand to fill all available storage. See also Red Queen’s Race.
• Law of Triviality – Members of an organisation give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. In 1957 naval historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson argued that a committee planning a nuclear power plant will spend most of their time fretting over trivial matters like the staff bike shed. The Law has since become a common term in software development and IT industry.

Douglas Adams’ rules of reactions to technology

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things.

Crichel Down Rules

The Crichel Down Rules apply where land is acquired by, or under threat of, compulsory purchase, but subsequently transpires to be surplus to the acquiring authority’s requirements. Prior to making a disposal of the surplus land, the acquiring authority must offer it back to its former owners, their successors, or sitting tenants, at current market value, provided that the character of the land has not materially changed.

The Crichel Down Rules are non-statutory arrangements. However, compliance is mandatory for government departments and recommended for local authorities and other statutory bodies. The courts have further emphasised the importance of adherence to the Rules, finding that former landowners have a legitimate expectation that they will apply. This came up in the Court of Appeal case Charlesworth v Crossrail Ltd [2019].

The Crichel Down rules prevent the state purchasing land and property ostensibly for one purpose, then “changing it’s mind” and using it for something else. For example, buying up a load of fields to turn into a forest, then flogging it off to it’s mates who are property developers.

Law of Geography

Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things. – Waldo R. Tobler (not the hidden chocolate guy).

Availability Heuristic

First coined in 1973 by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Khaneman, it describes the unconscious human tendency to place more importance on the things that it can easily conceive, falling into the mental trap of “If you can think of it, it must be important.” After seeing articles about child abductions, parents often begin to believe such tragedies are far more likely than they actually are. The net effect has been seen on the media’s obsession with ‘it bleeds it leads’ and sensationalism, which does not help us identify realistic potential dangers, but rather adds to irrational paranoia.

Hawthorne Effect

Also known as the Observer Effect, is a type of reactive behaviour in which individuals modify their actions based on being observed, which undermines research integrity. Basically, if a study subject knows they are being observed they may give the observer false or misleading information in order to “save face”, as they may fear being judged by the observer.