CorporateNature No 149
Congestion leads to inefficiency and failure but it takes systemic measures to unclog gridlocked streets.
1) CONGESTED FRIDGE
If you overfill your fridge, you would struggle to find inside it the food you are looking for. A congested fridge also means that every time you open it, you would have to keep the door open for longer and thus waste energy. And so it goes, until one day you start exploring the source of the bad smell and find a rotten head of broccoli at the back of the bottom shelf.
2) CONGESTED BODY
If you regularly overeat, excess fat builds up in your arteries, putting increasingly more stress on your cardio-vascular system. Soon something as simple as climbing up the stairs requires a strenuous effort. While the body is sturdy, congestion eventually catches up until one day the heart has had enough.
3) CONGESTED CITY
If you overfill a city, it becomes not only inefficient but also unwelcoming. Neighbourhoods become overpopulated and polluted, main roads become a time-consuming nightmare to navigate, parks become stressful instead of relaxing. Eventually, the city stagnates economically and degrades culturally until one day people decide to move elsewhere.
4) CAN EXTRA CAPACITY RESTORE CIRCULATION?
In each of these cases, congestion is clearly undesirable. To unclog the system, it often helps to increase circulation capacity:
A) Blood thinning drugs make the five litres of blood run more smoothly around your body.
B) Some 37% of the area of Manhattan is taken up by streets, while aisles take up 75% of the store area of Walmart supermarkets.
Yet, if the anti-congestion measures are not applied in a systemic way, stopgap patches may fail. Hence one of the favourite jokes of stuck-in-traffic Americans is that building more highway lanes to mitigate traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to fight obesity.
Traffic jam in Delhi (image source: Wikipedia)
