Making it worse to make it better

June 8, 2025

On a Sunday afternoon, I was entering the city of Barcelona by car. We had traveled during the weekend and we were tired, hoping to arrive home.

I don’t usually drive a car (this was my in-laws’ car I was driving). That’s why, perhaps, I haven’t noticed it before. But it struck me this time: all the stoplights were out-of-sync. Sometimes, as soon as one stoplight went green, the next one would turn red.

This was the Meridiana, an important avenue and a main point of entry to the city. Being forced to wait every 100 meters (or on every corner) was adding significant time to the trip. It was also a very inefficient bottleneck.

Why would anyone not notice something so simple? How hard could it be to synchronize the stoplights?

It felt frustrating, and I complained out loud about it. But to my surprise, my father-in-law told me that it was intentional. Sundays are days with low traffic, and governments want to keep it that way. Barcelona, like most of Europe, is a city with high air pollution (it normally surpasses “safe” levels). They realized that if they add friction to drivers, less people would want to drive, and thus, that would result on fewer cars on the roads.

As a front-end developer, I spend most of my time thinking about making things easier to use, better (more performant, with less bottlenecks, more accessible, simpler). The idea of making an aspect of a thing worse on purpose, to improve some other aspect of the thing, is something that makes me slightly uncomfortable.

But however uncomfortable it might make me feel, the truth is that this might work. The logic makes sense:

• Make cities worse for cars
• Reduce cars on the streets
• Make cities better for pedestrians and neighbors

It’s unintuitive, but sometimes, we might need to make it worse to make it better.