Starting a blog post with a picture of RMS Titanic is an unsubtle way of saying you’re going to discuss failure. That’s partly true in this case, although I want to talk about a specific type of failure, which is failure of foresight. Or perhaps failure of imagination.
I recently happened across a painting of the ship (copied below) and a specific detail caught my eye: the stretch of top-deck parapet without lifeboats. Here’s a close-up:
On a large modern passenger ship, the lifeboats run the entire length of (usually) the top deck. The reason Titanic did not have more life boats is not that it was in any way difficult to provide them, but rather no one saw a need. More boats were not required at that time by maritime regulations, and even though the ship’s designers and owners knew that “unsinkable” was an advertising gimmick rather than reality, they did not foresee circumstances where more boats would be needed. If the ship had to be evacuated, surely the boats could shuttle back and forth between it and a rescue vessel…
In other words, the failure of the life-boat technology was not a failure of them as objects but rather in the way they were perceived to be needed and in the way they were used. If someone high enough up at the White Star line or at the design and ship-building firm Harland & Wolff had made the decision to simply add more of the same boats, the death toll might have been greatly reduced or even eliminated. (Note that this is a roundabout way of me saying that the loss of the ship would have been unfortunate, but the sinking is a tragedy because of the loss of life.)
Interestingly, the painting distorts the upper-deck parapet, making it look much higher than it was:
In The Power Broker, Robert Caro describes at length a failed proposal to build rail down the median of the Van Wyck Expressway when the highway was first built. Since the Van Wyck is a major road connection to JFK (then Idlewild) Airport, it was destined to be crowded, and the proposed subway connection would have greatly reduced the number of cars needed. The rail connection was not built when the highway opened in 1950, leaving JFK unserved by subway or railroad; an elevated people-mover was finally opened in 2003, partially realizing the original proposal. The transportation engineer who first proposed the rail link saw the coming congestion before anyone else, and we’d all be better off if his vision had won the day. I mention this separate issue because I find it easy to believe that people in the near future will look at many decisions that have been made over the last fifty or sixty years and many more that are being made right now, and wonder how we missed the environmental outcomes that will result.
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