The Wiki Man When the rules change, government targets stay the same

30 July 2011

I recently stumbled on a Wikipedia page on American diner lingo: ‘sunny side up’, ‘pigs in a blanket’, ‘peel it off the wall’ and so on.

In the same way, all people once cared about with hi-fi equipment was sound quality. Yet, when the iPod arrived, people discovered that what they once thought all-important no longer was. We now happily forgo perfect sound quality for the freedom to carry a music library in our pocket.

These shifting measures hint at the problem of trying to improve public services by establishing metrics and targets. The risk is that you spend too much time fixated on outdated measures of success.

In the past six weeks, I’ve travelled to Coventry, Sheffield, Manchester and Edinburgh. In every case the actual train journey was great. I drank tea, read, wrote emails and looked out of the window — pretty much what I would have been doing had I not been on a train. Getting to the station, however, was a nightmare. Just dragging luggage from the stygian taxi rank beneath Euston to platform six was a far worse experience than the later two hours on the train.

So why are we spending £24 billion reducing the duration of the only part of my journey that wasn’t crap? Surely, like megapixels, speed is a measure we should only pursue so far? What we should target in travel is not time, but the pain incurred shifting from one mode of transport to another.

I sometimes wonder whether it’s time for government to try a paradigm shift. If, instead of devoting all its energies towards huge, intractable problems such as wholesale NHS reform, our government were to establish a Ministry for Eradicating Trivial Irritations, some degree of success would be assured. First actions: a law requiring the standardisation of mobile phone chargers, and the staggering of school opening hours to reduce congestion.