Comment by robalni | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robalni | Hacker News Reader

> So the order was reversed. Municipalities faced no additional cost for clearing pedestrian paths first. And it reduced injuries, in addition to being objectively fairer.

How can it be fairer? If you clear surface A before surface B, the people using surface A will always benefit from that, it doesn't matter who those people are. If you reverse it, the other people will benefit instead.

So, let's say you want to divide the population into two groups, X and Y, so that if you treat group X better than Y it doesn't matter since the division was fair so the treatment is fair. What is the best way to divide? I don't think there is any way of dividing that is more fair than any other, because there will always be the losing half, and the losing half will always be able to call themselves a name and say that they are discriminated against. As long as you are not intentionally selecting people with some traits differently than others, I don't think you can do any better.

Example. There are four persons, A, B, C and D. Which way of dividing them is more fair? AB/CD or AC/BD? There is no way to answer this because the fairness is not in how they are divided, it's in why they are divided the way they are. It's like asking: which is the most random number, 34 or 92? Randomness is not in the number, it's in how it was selected.

See it like this. A = Pedestrians, B = Cars. A has no protection and no engine help to get forward. They have to go in deep snow that resists every step. Try walking on those 30 cm high gymnastics carpets that feathers the fall. It's like that. They won't stay on the unplowed bike roads. Bicycles can't travel in 10 cm snow. They will be on whatever surface have been cleared already. If that is the highway, that's where they will be.

Category B on the other hand have a clear advantage. They have the engine and the antispin which makes them able to go through 15-30 cm snow without much problem as long as there aren't too many snow drifts, wet snow or packed areas. They are not allowed on the bicycle roads anyway and would not fit there.

Besides, the main roads are taken care of a completely different entity so they already have their roads plowed anyway. They just have to get the first few hundred meters out on the main road and they are fine. Bonus if you have a buss road close by because they are priority -1, if anything is plowed, you can be certain it's the buss roads.

Yes, I bicycle all year round but I also drive a car. Trust me, it's fair to do the walkways first, my car can handle the snow just fine most of the time. If not I'm not supposed to be out anyway. :-)

> How can it be fairer? If you clear surface A before surface B, the people using surface A will always benefit from that, it doesn't matter who those people are. If you reverse it, the other people will benefit instead.

This assumes that people using "surface A" and "surface B" are equally prone to accidents, that accidents are equally dangerous independent of the surface and in general that the inconvenience is equal, which is not the case for icy roads and icy sidewalks.

Assume that each surface has an "ice cost" to its users that we want to minimize. Icy surface A has a cost of 1 and icy surface B has a cost of 3. When a surface is cleared of ice, its ice cost is zero.

Consider then that there are two demographics X and Y. X always uses surface A. Y always uses surface B.

* Uncleared, demographic Y pays a higher price.

* If you clear surface A but not surface B, X will pay nothing, and Y will still pay the same price; the cost disparity has grown.

* If you clear surface B, the cost disparity will shrink. The opportunities of demographics X and Y are more equal than before. If demographic X and Y are roughly equal in size, you have also minimized the total ice cost to society.

I was assuming that the "fair" part was about the gender of people because that seems to be what most of the article is about. The rest of the reasons for doing this make sense so my question was mostly, what does this have to do with people's gender? It seems like they imply that this is a bigger problem because of the distribution of people's gender, than it would have been with another distribution.

> How can it be fairer?

Because the two groups are not necessarily of exactly the same size?

And also because it's not the only variable at play. Considering the variable "protection against the elements", one of the groups have cars as protection, while other have mere shoes or bikes. So different variables can be combined to try to balance things out.

Nice point. Made me think about people who have a choice to drive or walk. If the sidewalks aren't cleared they may choose to drive. This could lead to congestion for drivers. It could even be that people who can only drive benefit more when the sidewalks are cleared first.

Proving that ...

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