As the Crow Flies

It takes 1 hour and 45 minutes to travel the 75 mile route from Boulder to Winter Park, CO.  In a typical car this trip equates to about 3 gallons of gasoline and about 13 lbs of newly released exhaust pollutants.  This is a shame, particularly since Boulder and Winter Park are in fact only 27 miles apart, nearly 1/3 the distance of the highway route!  Also shameful is the fact that a more direct path from the Front Range to Middle Park has existed since the mid 1860’s, first in the form of wagon passes, later upgraded to Rollins Pass.  Rollins Pass was once accessible in a family sedan, but was closed to all traffic in the mid-1960’s because no money was allocated to maintain or improve the route.  Even now, residents of Boulder County continue to fight the potential re-opening of Rollins Pass, citing environmental protection in an area where a railroad and highway had existed for 100 years.

Why does this matter?  It matters because the Boulder/Winter Park example is one of a great many modern highway routes through Colorado that force us to take the long road to get over short distances.  Instead of taking the best route, we widen, improve, and maintain much longer stretches of highway.  This wastes time, maintenance costs, resources, and most importantly a great deal of fuel over the life of the highway.  In Colorado, we tend to think we are protecting the mountain by not crossing over it.  Instead, we travel all the way around the mountain and pollute the entire range with exhaust. 

You may assume that the routes we currently take were chosen due to their overall superiority.  Perhaps the scenery was better, more people tended to travel that way, or it was a less expensive route to maintain.  Although each particular highway has a unique history, this is generally not true.   Let’s explore the possibility that currently popular solutions are not necessarily the better ones: 

It is a little known fact that the QWERTY typing keyboard is NOT the most efficient typing layout.  During the invention and development of mechanical typewriters, the keys might have been laid out to place the most important keys in the home row, but this increased the likelihood that the hammers would tangle with each other as they made their way to and from the paper.  The most used keys were actually placed away from home row to slow the typist and give the mechanical arms a greater chance to recoil.  The positioning of the QWERTY keys was therefore based on an inefficient mechanical principal that no longer exists, but we are not likely to improve it because this is how we have learned to type.

The English dictionary and alphabet is a conglomeration of several languages and several rules of spelling, thus making it arguably the least efficient language in the world.  The spelling of each word in the English language must be memorized.  By comparison, Korean is so efficient that there is no such thing as a spelling bee in Korea.  Their writing system is perfectly phonetic.   This is unfortunate because English is the dominant world language, spoken in more countries than any other, and sapping an unnecessary amount of brain power.  The spelling issues could be corrected by creating a phonetic alphabet, but it is fair to guess we will not improve the alphabet either.

This is green.

This blog post is intended to illustrate two points: 1) We do not make the most efficient choices, so there is no logic in assuming that the dominant choice is the best choice, and 2) In an attempt to protect our environment, we create scenarios that are even worse.  In his book "The Conundrum", David Owen presents a wide variety of examples where we truly misunderstand the notion of efficiency, sustainability, and being "green".  He argues, quite convincingly, that a dense high-rise city is far more efficient than a spacious tree lined suburb.  In one of his most compelling arguments, he states that the greatest problem with environmental efficiency is the environmentalists themselves.  This is what stands in the way of wind power, hydro power, and solar power as we attempt to protect our views and pristine habitats.  If we are to get any cleaner, greener, or more responsible toward our environment we need to stop taking the long road in the name of environmental protection.  The most efficient way to get there is as the crow flies.

Tony F.  2013