Skip to main content

Unpredictability

  • Metadata
  • Cities and their planning seem to be unpredictable, when looking back in the past 40 years
  • Yet we feel like we can build models to make predictions about complex systems
  • In the past 75 years, science has moved from a stance where we believed in 'good' prediction to prediction is now 'difficult'
    • Coronavirus has proven that even short term events may no longer be predictable
  • Because of a model's uncertainty, to ensure models are useful one must use many models
  • Transportation modeling difficult because we continually invent and reinvent how cities operate by changing the conditions, and this creates numerous feedback loops that is impossible to model
  • It is often accepted that shorter term forecasting is more accurate than long term forecasting, ==as if the amount of change is dependent on time - it is not - it is dependent on the kind of change==
    • Change is never smooth, always volatile
    • ==Remove the illusion that cities can absorb the change easily with little disruption==
      • ==This is probably because the use of continuous values in models==