Head, meet wall: "Zurich shows that effective transportation requires that we widen our focus to see beyond cars."

CityLab is completely free. There's nothing stopping you from following this link and achieving a greater understanding of places where sensible solutions are allowed to exist.

What Does This Street In Zürich Mean?, by Norman Garrick (CityLab)

If you see how cars, streetcars, bikes, and pedestrians use this Swiss street, you can better understand what’s wrong with so many other urban thoroughfares.

Above is a picture of a pretty typical city street in Zürich, Switzerland.

What do you see?

In some ways, this scene represents a kind of Rorschach Test for transportation and urban planning. If you are a passenger on a tram riding on one of the two sets of rails that take up most of the street, this scene represents freedom of movement and a sense that transit is privileged in Zürich. If you’re a pedestrian, this is a relatively comfortable street to be on, with useful services, restaurants, and a few interesting stores (check out the model train store at the corner with Haldenbachstrasse). If you’re on a bike, this, like most other streets in Zürich, is OK, but not great.

But if you’re an American tourist, your first thought might be that these Europeans are real strange: Look at that long line of car traffic on the right, and look at all that road space going to waste. And an engineer or planner trained in the conventional mode will probably agree with you, and see a picture of abject failure. In the parlance of the traffic planner, this is a street operating at Level of Service F.

snip

Let us first deal with the American tourist who sees inefficiency. During the peak hour, the vehicle lanes carry about 400 cars and perhaps 500 people. (I counted!) The two tramlines carry about 3,500 people per hour. So, notwithstanding the fact that at first glance the tram lanes seem empty and remarkably inefficient, the numbers tell a different story—the tram lanes are doing yeoman’s work, carrying 7 times more people than the car lanes, and they could easily carry many more. And this is before we even start to consider the environmental and economic advantages of transit over cars. (People in Zürich have unlimited access to all transit in the city for just $1,000 per year, yet the subsidy from the city, state and the nation is modest, since the fare box returns, and other revenues, pay about two-thirds of the cost of operating the system.)

I'll stop there. I'm too depressed to keep snipping.

Marohn lacerates Hilton Hotels in pursuit of a larger point about efficiency.

Charles Marohn had a bad experience at a Hilton.

I’m just not going to stay at Hilton hotels anymore. I would encourage others not to as well.

This bad experience is the launching point for a consideration of efficiency. It turns out Marohn also was in the middle of the 2017 Delta Airlines "meltdown."

As Nassim Taleb, the Patron Saint of Strong Towns Thinking, has taught us, the operational opposite of efficiency is not inefficiency, it’s redundancy. It’s spare parts. It’s slack in the system. For example, the human body is not very efficient. We have two kidneys when we only need one. We have more brain power and lung capacity than we routinely use. If economists – or Delta efficiency experts – designed the human body, they’d get rid of all that redundancy. It keeps us from operating at peak efficiency.

As we all understand, however, that redundancy also keeps us alive. When we look at natural systems – systems that are complex as opposed to merely complicated like Delta airlines – what we find is that redundancy is a critical survival strategy. The ability to take reserve capacity and utilize it for adaptation during times of stress is essential.

Marohn's conclusion might surprise you.

Hilton Hotels' Efficiency Tradeoff, by Charles Marohn (Strong Towns)

 ... Local governments should prudently act to improve what they do, but they should never seek added efficiency at the expense of their own stability. Hilton will someday go bankrupt; their leadership is going to continue to push the efficiency mantra so tight that they will squeeze all the slack out of their system, making them fatally vulnerable to a shock of some type. That’s the ultimate fate of every efficient system, whether that failure happens tomorrow or in some distant future.

Cities can’t operate that way. If we don’t want them to fail, we must stop demanding that they do.