I spend quite a lot of time attacking what I call ‘motorway service station’ path design. More attentive readers of The Spectator may remember this from 2019:
‘You are tooling down a motorway at 75mph and decide to stop for a break… Once off the slip road you face a barrage of signs: Food Court/Fuel/Lorries/Caravans/Coaches/Travelodge/Costa Drive-Thru, each pointing to a different fork. If your attention briefly wavers and you miss one of these bifurcations, you will find yourself hopelessly trapped in the lorry park with no means of return. This is probably what happened to Lord Lucan.’
Evolutionary processes create many answers to the same question, whereas top-down design provides only one
For any parking option in a motorway service station, there is only one correct path to your destination. Make one mistake and you’re doomed. Moreover, the system is riddled with potential bottlenecks: if a van breaks down at the entrance to the food court carpark, the system fails spectacularly.
The reason this happens is that the designers of motorway service stations aim to create a system which works in one theoretically perfect state with the minimum provision of roads. Hence they create a system which works very well in theory but is catastrophically bad under many real-world conditions.
In technology this happens every-where. A friend of mine was once shown a fabulous plan for automating mortgage applications online. If everything went well (i.e. the survey arrived on time, the vendor’s solicitors complied with all requests, etc) it would have worked like a charm. ‘And what percentage of sales go to plan in the way your system assumes?’ he asked. The answer was 14 per cent. For the 86 per cent who encounter a glitch, this would have created a world of pain.
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