Post by admin

The Piano Staircase in Stockholm Sweden.

A couple of years back, Volkswagen came up with a brilliant viral marketing campaign known as The Fun Theory. The basic idea being that “fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better” (their words, not mine).

The shorthand for the theory was the very public transformation of a subway stairwell into a piano as a means to coax people from using the escalator to using the stairs (or piano?). The resulting video became a viral sensation, and has been viewed over 16 million times on youtube.

If you haven’t already seen it, take a look:

The video claims that the piano staircase resulted in 66% more people using the stairs than using the escalator. No doubt and great. Of course, that number has to be taken with a grain of salt. We don’t know how that number was calculated, over what period of time it was measured and if people slowly gravitated back to the escalator after the novelty of the piano wore off.

Nevertheless, there’s something here.

Let’s be frank: Public transit planning and policy are pretty much the antitheses of fun. They’re science without the coffee. And while most of us would agree that increased public transit usage is an incredibly worthwhile and noble goal, there’s been few successes throughout the last 50 years to create a long-lasting trend towards increased ridership within western, developed nations (Europe, possibly, notwithstanding).

Now I’m not suggesting that ridership is dependent solely on a “fun factor,” but I am suggesting that fun is certainly one way to stimulate ridership.

The last 10 years have been a bonanza of learning about the human condition. Fields such as cognitive psychology, behavioral economics and change management have taught us – if nothing else – that humans respond to their environment in irrational, emotional ways.

Change is not a state that occurs out of hard examination of facts and details, it is a state that is achieved when people are emotionally driven to do something that makes them feel better than they did before. That may frustrate numbers-oriented professions and people but it is also an enormous opportunity.

It’s all fine and well for planners and policy-makers to obsess about facts and details – that’s important, don’t get me wrong. But when it comes to implementing the desired change the facts and details point to, the traditional tools used by the planning and policy-making establishment are utterly ineffective.

(Note: For a longer discussion of the fun versus detail argument, please see our single most viewed post Form vs. Function.)

When it comes time to implement, the facts and details need to be thrown out the window because the target audience doesn’t care about them. Consider the typical “pro-transit” arguments:

It saves you money. People don’t care that taking transit saves money. If they cared about saving money, they wouldn’t spend $4.00 for pre-cut carrots and celery at their local grocery store. People will pay for convenience.

It’s safer than driving. People don’t care that taking transit is safer than driving a car. If they cared about safety, no one would ever ski, sky-dive or smoke. Furthermore, you wouldn’t have people irrationally devoted to their car yet completely unwilling to fly (the safest form of mass transit there is).

It reduces traffic. People don’t care that taking transit reduces traffic. Why? Because the benefit of using traffic goes to someone else. If I take transit, I inconvenience myself so that other people may benefit from clearer roads. That’s implicit in the argument and the reason it fails.

That’s where fun comes in. We can change people’s behavior not by advertising to them, educating them or forcing them. We change people’s behavior by stimulating an emotional state that makes them susceptible to change their behavior of their own choice and accord.

Fun is one such tactic for the simple reason that people like fun. You like fun, don’t you?

Problem is there’s no room for fun in our planning and policy-making. These are not realms where fun is allowed to intercede as fun is viewed as unprofessional, naive and strange. Our planning and policy-making fundamentally misunderstands the fact that people are not mere numbers in a model but are wonderfully emotional, fun-loving and irrational. To assume otherwise is to create a model completely out-of-touch with reality.

If there is one thing I wish we could change about our (transit) planning methods it’s that. I want us to start from the simple and uncontroversial assumption that people are irrational, emotional and motivated by things other than time and money. We go from there.

So how does this relate to Urban Gondolas? Simple.

Gondolas are fun.

(Big thanks to Jason for calling my attention to The Fun Theory. Like everyone else, I’d seen the video a couple years back, but I’d never taken the time to apply it.)