When I started my project tracking every bus in Birmingham I was careful. Over the course of 3 years (sic) I talked with lots of people, academics, local government, central government, bus industry, because I didn't believe that just me, an API and some code could be useful.
I had about half a dozen people assure me that they were already tracking all the buses, they already understood congestion, that my techniques were simplistic and not fit for purpose. And another half a dozen who said it was useless anyway and their models were much better.
I got lucky. A few good people in Birmingham quietly told me that what I wanted to do was new and useful and that I should carry on and if it needed a bit of money they could help find that. So eventually after three years I started building the thing,
This was the result. It had a really big impact. Featured in a big Bank of England speech, I got calls and emails from many departments and cities, all desperate to do the same work for all cities. It was exactly what they needed and didn't have. citymetric.com/transport/birm…
And almost without exception those departments and those cities were the very same ones who'd mocked me as an amateur, who'd assured me they were already doing what I was doing, and their tool was much better anyway, they'd slug acronyms and jargon at me, the same departments,...
And it all sounds similar to the people criticising Mr. Cummings' plans and his blog post. And of course the challenge when dealing with such confidence is knowing when it has a foundation you should respect (as I did, in error, for 3 years on my bus project) and when it doesn't.
I still can't reliably tell whether someone else's confidence is justified or not. It scares me most days. Because if you listen to and trust everyone, you'll pretty much never do anything. But when you ignore people, soon enough you'll make a mistake one of them warned you of.
Just remembered how scared we were that what we'd done wasn't new or useful,... we paid quite a lot of money to go to a conference in Oxford (yes, me, Oxford) and present our work, with the significant expectation that people there would tell us it wasn't new, and was useless. 🤣
