Yesterday I spent well over two hours in my car, driving a total of only 30 miles. Why? The car was loaded up with belongings for someone to move into an apartment in central London, so a round trip into central London, and in fact my first time ever driving a car into the congestion charge zone there.
Whilst the “use case” here was solid (a fully loaded estate car, cost of trip £10 for parking, £15 for congestion charge etc), I hadn’t been in a car in traffic like that since, well, living in Cayman where there is no public transport and everyone drives everywhere for everything.
It struck me, as I observed car after car with only one or two occupants, that I lived in central London for several years and never saw the need for a car, given the public transport system is so efficient there, plus active travel (cycling, walking) is often the best option.
I could certainly have got out of the first 2-3 miles of central London past the Elephant and Castle roundabout (see picture above) far quicker on a bike than in the car!
How many things in our lives (and businesses) do we do because they are how we have always done them (like driving a car around) rather than because they are the most efficient and effective way to do it? In business, I often say the six most dangerous words in business are “we’ve always done it this way“,
I think back for a moment to the early 90s when I was in the airline business. By that stage, the entire industry had become completely bloated behind the scenes, from archaic but oligopolistic global reservations and ticketing systems to the many “add-ons” that airlines had to pay for within their ticket cost that the customers never even knew about (eg use of “skycaps” at curbside at US airports, a service that by the 1990s was rarely used by passengers but that airlines had to pay a “per passenger” fee for.
This then led to a revolution in airlines as new carriers (eg RyanAir and EasyJet in Europe) came in and offered services unburdened by legacy systems, agreements, and protocols. Whilst it took the “legacy” air carriers a decade or more to follow their lead, we now live in a world where you buy the basic ticket, then add on what you want and only what you want, from assigned seating to luggage in the cabin and in the hold etc.
Going back to cars, I didn’t own a car when living in central London, as I would very rarely have the need for one. Instead, I was a car club member and used “pay as you go” for the odd occasion a car was the best choice.
Every business I have ever worked in or with has had inefficiencies that existed because “we’ve always done it this way” and were then able to eliminate by simply asking, in an open and safe environment, why they do things in that inefficient way.
In closing, I hope more and more car drivers get out of their cars and walk cycle, or take the bus, subway, or train, shifting from the use of a car as the default to a car as the last choice backup plan.