Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Tradeoffs involve decisions. You choose that one thing is more important than another. This is not popular, especially in public projects.

Last week I saw a post about people wanting to build high-speed train lines between cities. This would reduce automobile traffic between the cities, provide construction jobs, provide operations and maintenance jobs, and so on.

Great! Let’s do it. Let’s do it right now.

I doubt that will happen. There are a few (million) government regulations standing in the way of the project. Time, money, and commitment can work their way through all these regulations, but those qualities are rare. Here’s an idea:

Congress passes a law (signed by the President) that erases all those regulations for this project.

Hmm. That would mean that all these elected representatives would decide that rail projects were more important than all these other regulations.

In the systems engineering world this is called a tradeoff. One alternative – with all its faults and with all the good aspects of the other alternatives – is chosen. The other alternatives are not used.

Tradeoffs mean (among other things):

• life is tough
• nothing is perfect
• everything has its flaws
• adults decide what is more important to them

Most of us don’t like tradeoffs; we want everything.

Yes, there are alternatives to tradeoffs. It is better to find ways to combine several alternatives, keep the best of everything, and keep none of the worst of anything. There are, however, occasions when the world is too complex, complicated, and involves too many people to combine the alternatives. The way to proceed is to make the tradeoff, decide, and go with it.

I fear this high-speed rail is one such occasion. That is why I doubt that anything productive will happen. I fear that billions of dollars will be spent studying regulations, creating documents, assessing impact to the environment, and so on. Someone will be employed to do all these things, and there is some value in that. I think there is much more value in building a train line.

That, however, would require a tradeoff.