Canals and waterwaysPosted by: "Adrian Stott" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sun Dec 30, 2007 4:48 am (PST) "sean neill" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Hardin's point was that where there was a 'Common' - a good which all >benefited >from but no-one owned - without some regulation for the common good, >the >market would ensure that the resource was destroyed. I haven't read Hardin since my university days, but IIRC his book leads to at least two conclusions. One certainly is that without regulation the common will evenaully be destroyed, and there are too many examples of this having happened. But the second is that regulation effective enough to prevent this is unlikely ever to occur, given the vested interests involved. * I disagree, as strated below. Because of the latter,IMHO the rational approach is to end the over-consumed commons, by creating ownership of the resources that are now common. The owner of each previously-common resource will now have a financial interest in its conservation at its optimally productive level (to ensure the continuation of the owner's long-term revenue stream from it, and to maximise the net revenue from that stream). Consumption of the resource would no longer be a free good (that you can have simply by taking it), but be allowed only if you make a volume-based payment to the owner. * A more recent paper (I forget the reference) looked at 'commons' in traditional societies, and as Adrian says, one solution to maintaining the resource was to have an agreed division of ownership - this worked effectively for lobster-fishing (in Maine, IIRC) where each fisherman 'owned' a section of sea-bed. Similarly, forest peoples could manage trees used for canoes effectively by each man being able to mark a chosen tree and this mark being respected, but they were unable to manage game animals in the same way, as there was no way of an individual 'marking' an animal to reserve it for future use. A different solution was to have an agreed authority with sanctions; in Switzerland (and, I think, the New Forest) this is a common council with powers to confiscate the property (animals) of those who transgress; in the Far East, the Buddhist priest had to be consulted by any farmer who wanted to irrigate his paddyfields and his ruling was accepted. Both these examples are small-scale and traditional, but modern electronic record-keeping permits surveillence on a larger scale. <snip> >Two current spectacular failures in national transport >policy are air travel (where the market ensures fares do not reflect >their environmental cost) and rail travel (where the market ensures >that >fares are pitched so high that car travel is a cheaper choice despite >its environmental costs). In the first case, the problem is the absence of appropriate exhaust emission charges, which allows airlines to operate at unreasonably low cost levels and thus charge ridiculously low fares. * I agree, and it is crazy that air travel is considered (by Kyoto etc.) not to 'belong' to individual countries because it is transnational, when the profits come back to the country where the airline is based. In the second case, the problem is not the rail fares. It is the absence of the equivalent charges for car travel, i.e. road pricing. * This would have to be set at a level which supported rural communities (a point I return to below) but I agree with many of the other points <snipped>. >The difference is that the demand for holiday >travel is 'elastic' (people will travel more if they can afford it) but >the demand for travel to work is 'inelastic' (people have to get to >work). Travel to work is not inelastic. It is just that the commuter takes longer to respond to travel pricing changes. * I should have said 'relatively inelastic'. England green belt. But (surprise!) the decision on the control of commuter rail fares and road pricing is set by a government based in (you guessed it) London, supported by those who do not want to see London house prices go down.. *I agree. >The issue for the waterways is whether they are seen as a 'Common', >i.e. >whether all benefit from access to them and their history, or whether >the destruction of a system, which could have benefited all, by the >market should be accepted, in the way which has occurred for fisheries, >climate and transport. That's a faulty description. It is not the market that would destroy the system. It is the failure to let the market work (by retaining the common) that is destroying the system. We are now trying to consume the waterway resource at an unsustainable level. If everyone pays the market price for what he consumes, then in almost all cases the resource is conserved, and wasteful behaviour is discouraged. If no-one does, or does so at a below-market price (as in a common, and as on the waterways) the resource tends to be destroyed. * Here I disagree that all usage can be charged by the market - as Adrian has already mentioned, it is uneconomic to charge boat-owners a unit cost by usage. I would feel it is more appropriate to compare the waterways to National Parks such as the Lake District. Here potential 'users' could be crudely classified into four groups:- 1) Incomers who buy property (houses, or in the canal case, new narrowboats) at market rates; 2) Short-term visitors who use hotels, restaurants, shops etc., thus supporting the local market economy; 3) Short-term visitors who do not purchase in the local market (e.g. walkers who bring what they need with them); 4) 'Residents' who maintain the area (e.g. agriculture-related in a National Park, maintaining historic boats or canal-related businesses in the canal case). * It is arguable (I don't have the figures, and would be prepared to have this hypothesis disproved) that group 2 contribute more economically *per day* than group 1, i.e., in the canal context, that BW's pub-and-honeypot-site strategy is a good one. Group 4 don't pay their way at market rates, but maintain the scene which attracts groups (1) and (2); IIRC National Parks now control housing sales so that, for example, the sheep farming which gives the landscape its traditional look can remain. It is of course quite possible that a proportion of groups (1) and (2) would be indifferent if Herwick sheep disappeared from the Lake District and were replaced by scrubland and ponies or if historic boats disappeared from the canal system. Group (3) may also be indifferent, but if they cause costs (e.g. in path mantenance, wardening etc.) which cannot be reclaimed directly, these can only be met from taxation of some type. * Economic utility is only a proxy for what, for want of a better term, I will call 'emotional utility'. In many cases economic utility translates fairly directly into emotional utility but not always - to take an extreme example, objectively animal and human carcases differ little, but all societies I know of use, not their cheap and efficient systems for disposing of animal carcases, but expensive and elaborate ceremonies for disposing of human carcases. I doubt even economists bargain with the local cat-food factory to get a good price for Grandma. More seriously, recently reported surveys suggest that people are less happy now than in the 1950s despite inceased economic prosperity (this is the familiar economic point of marginal utility in economics, here being realised in gains to emotional utility ceasing even though gains in economic untility persist). I return to this point below. > Specifically, I do not feel that Adrian, as a >Canadian, should be speaking for the interests of market forces in the >UK waterways. I don't see what my nationality has to do with it. * I don't know enough about Canada to know what is fundamental to Canadian 'felt identity' but I have some awareness of the 'felt identity' of another boreal nation, Finland. Though reserved, Finns tend to conform strongly to social pressures, and Midsummer and the National Day are big celebrations where the whole country closes down. When you realise that Finland only became independent from Russia after the Great War (and had to fight Russia again in the Winter War) and that they have never been able to become independent of the weather, you begin to realise how Finns see things (even young Finns can't stand the Russians). * Overseas colleagues who have visited Britain have been struck by the layers of history - as a child I crossed the Pilgrims' Way to go to school and now my route to work takes me across the Fosse Way: Chaucer and Caesar are part of everyday life. More specifically, the canal system preserves, because it has never been effectively modernised, layers of Industrial Revolution history, from the 1770s to the 1930s. I fully agree with Adrian that the system would have been much more effective as a transport network, and arguably would be better as a leisure network, if pinch-points such as Crick has been rebuilt; but they weren't, and to rebuild them now would be to destroy the layers of history which make Britain what it is. (On the other hand, I feel the missed opportunity to build a state-of-the-art boat-lift when the Warwick Light site was redeveloped to link to a new Upper Avon navigation is a failure to add our own new layer to history). Basically the narrow canal system, specifically as constrained by Harecastle (like the British railway loading gauge) was a failure of imagination by the pioneers, which has accidentally bequeathed us a virtually intact Industrial Revolution transport system - and as the Industrial Revolution is arguably the biggest single contribution to world history, one which ought to be preserved as a national park. * I should make clear that in my view Dutch barges are among the most handsome inland waterways craft, excelling almost all British types in looks, but it would be a mistake to change the historic British system to accommodate them. They have, after all, their own historic system, one of the many glories of Dutch culture. *There may be a market value to national sentiment and identity. The Finns have realised, like other small threatened nations, that salvation lies in (intellectual) quality. Their education system comes out at or near the top of successive international comparisons, and is especially good at minimising the difference between high and low achievers. This allows them to export high-value goods and services, of which Nokia is paradigmatic (I have been to the original Nokia rubber-boot factory, which stands on a now unnavigable river, at the site of a famous victory where the Finns beat off Viking invaders!) <snip> >The history of whaling shows that, where a >resource grows slower than market interest rates, the market favours >destroying the resource and investing the profits elsewhere. No, it doesn't. It shows that if taking a resource is free of charge, then it pays the taker to continue to take until the last unit is taken and the resource is destroyed, as the taker has no financial interest in the long term existence of the resource. If he has to pay the market-clearing price for each unit of the resource he takes, he will stop taking well before the resource runs out. The Japanese are not paying per whale. The IWC is not receiving revenue per whale. Ergo, whales are in trouble. * On a purely market view I agree - but there are two non-market aspects to this:- * The first (which has canal parallels) is that whales are in themselves awe-inspiring creatures (the largest known animals to have ever lived, the longest-lived etc.) and should therefore, like Ayer's Rock or Pontwhatsit, be preserved because people enjoy knowing they are there; * The second (which is irrelevant to the canals) is that there is no humane way of killing them, and the market cannot be used to justify inflicting suffering. >BAA and BW executives will probably move on once they have taken their >profits and >destroyed the resource. Bad examples. Neither BAA (airport capacity) nor BW (waterway capacity) is destroying its resource. In fact, it appears that there are more boats on the waterways now than at any time in history. However, if BW is prevented from optimising its profit from them, and is not given other financial resources to make up the gap between the potential revenue from boating and the cost of maintaining and operating the network properly, then the resource will indeed be destroyed. The recent Welsh breach shows how. * In my view, the critical issue is 'is given other financial resources'. What I've argued above is that boaters correspond to groups (1) and (4) of national park 'users' - a minority group compared to all those who gain 'emotional utility' by visiting the canals. The value of boats may be more in attracting other visitors than any direct benefit, in the same way as agriculture in National Parks may lack economic utility but contribute to the emotional utility of visitors. There has been acceptance of agricultural subsidies to support aspects of the countryside which contribute to its emotional utility but not its economic utility (e.g. hedgerow management for biodiversity). Note that these systems assume limits on economic efficiency - land is being set aside from food production, accommodation is being set aside for agricultural workers, because emotional utility is being set above economic utility. But I'm encouraged. Although I've disagreed with a number of Sean's points, his posting is one of the few that has ever raised what I am sure are the real issues and the theoretical background concerning (e.g.) moorings, navigation charges, fuel prices (not to mention life, the universe, and everything). Now if only we can have a productive discussion as a result. i.e. *not* one that is based on the idea boating should be kept cheap through subsidies. * The history of the canal revival, stretching from the pioneer days of the IWA to the current activities of WRG (as I understand them) is that the canal system in the leisure era has been one which depended on voluntary effort and ethusiasm rather than people having a lot of money - the Thames and south coast, which already had professionally maintained facilities, catered for those who wanted to put in more cash than effort. For example, the brassware of traditional canal boats assumes the amount of maintenance effort which working boaters put in when they were waiting for cargoes or unloading, and the manual operation of locks reflects a working rather than a leisure waterway. Historic inland waterways boats are of a size which allows private individuals to maintain them, with very limited public subsidy, and this contrasts with the situation in the national waterways museums (most recently, the HLF has given a large sum to the Windermere Steamboat Museum to conserve and restore their collection, while boats of similar size and historic value such as Consuta are being maintained by voluntary associations). * I think the point I am trying to make is that the canal system is unique in having accidentally preserved a monument to the Industrial Revolution, freely accessible to all. The success of 'Narrowboat' magazine shows that this aspect is of interest to a reasonably large group of people, and the fact that canal images are, at least in the Midlands, selected as emblems for local news programmes, suggests canals are a salient part of 'felt identity'. My assessment is that much of this depends on a fairly limited group of people who, if prices go up too much, will take their effort for industrial archeology elsewhere. Speaking personally, I'm aware that the best market for narrowboat-sized machinery is France, where Adamant's boiler and Monarch's engine now are, and that it is cheaper per day to enjoy historic boats in Europe than to run one here: the more BW bang on to me about market forces, the more likely I am to take this option! How about that for a New Year's Resolution? Adrian OK - but it's taken up quite a bit of New Year's Day! Sean
