It is no secret that I like the night. I love her dearer than the day by half, in fact, and sleep is an annoyance in my life habitually tossed aside. A night many months ago I pulled myself away from the screen and I ventured outside. The city was a thing of beauty, completely transformed from its daytime prosaicness. The streets were a glistening black from a rain recently fallen, the lamps lined them like torches banishing the dark, and a gentle reflection of the glow rose up to meet its source from the wet pavement. The air had a peculiar taste in my nostrils, bringing back memories of other evenings well spent, of rains that had fallen, and of friends I loved, so that for a moment I shut my eyes and simply savoured it, needing nothing else. But, most of all, where the sidewalk at any other time was crowded with people, and the roads jammed with cars, now there was no one and nothing. I stood on the street alone and felt like the city belonged only to me.
That preamble aside, the point is simple enough. Having everyone sleep at night is grossly inefficient and probably the biggest single waste of resources ever perpetrated. Bigger than all wars, bigger than every boom, bust, and recession, just unimaginably big.
Consider for a moment a world in which not a person cares when she sleeps. Three eight-hour shifts replace just one. Now, every manufacturing plant runs around the clock, every day (I realise a few do so anyway at times, but I believe this is a tiny minority – please correct me if I am in error). Each machine is used three times as much, and one plant can do the work of three. The situation is a little more difficult with the case of an office building, where personal space allotments are greater, but I'm sure a way can be found to accommodate three people. Office space prices drop to a third as three groups of people replace one.
But those are merely the direct benefits – the indirect ones are far greater. With workers arriving in three shifts (or even better, on a loose continuous schedule), traffic on the road at the peak time drops to a third of its present amount. With lower traffic, we need smaller, and fewer, roads, cutting spending on road construction by half or more. But more than that, more condensed offices and other buildings mean that we only need half as many of them (I'm making allotments for grocery stores, etc, which are already open most of the day). If we only need half as many, many areas of the city can be half the size. With space thus compressed, commuting distances shrink considerably, and if you care about greenhouse gas emissions, even this alone may have a greater impact than any other measure out there.
More generally, with people awake at all hours, utility companies get what I can only assume is a dream for them – a fairly steady consumption of their services around the clock. With much less of a gap between the peak and the lowest daily consumption, much less spare capacity has to be built into the system (the same way we only need narrower roads even though the same number of people drive). With that, without reducing consumption of electricity (or internet) the generation needs can be cut significantly. The same unfortunately would not be quite true for water, gas, etc, as these can be stored effectively, however the storage capacity necessary at any one time would be reduced.
Even the level of crime would decrease, at least slightly, as there would be fewer times when one can avoid being seen.
The one major aspect of city-dwelling that would not see an improvement is residential housing. People want their own space, and there's no way around that, and ways around large houses as status symbols also seem to be progressing rather slowly.
So what's stopping us from embracing this plan I'm making out to be a panacea? Well, a number of things. First, I won't deny that there are some costs. All streets need to be better lit; windows need to be sound-proofed, and probably tinted to filter yellow light; residential housing really does take a lot of space; cities are already there, so remaking them would take some magic, or patience (for the population to triple). All this, however, still pales in comparison with the savings, and if it's so hard to change a current city, why don't the Arabs splurge their oil money on making a model one, since it would be the most efficient place in the world, right? Well, the two biggest obstacles are undoubtedly social inertia and the human genome. The first is obvious enough – "this is how it is, and we don't wanna change" is a common sentiment that meets most ideas for change. The genome is more insidious, however. It's managed to infiltrate each of us, and convince us that we're diurnal and that the sun shining means our eyes should be open. Technologically, overcoming it isn't too difficult – it can be countered by filtering out the yellow light to which our brain responds when we need to sleep, as alluded to above, and by producing it artificially when we need to wake up. The challenge is that our instinct is to do everything during the day. Every time someone is born even into the social structure I envision, she will want to stick with the daytime, and the case for removing discrimination from the sleep cycle will have to be made again and again, an effort of reason to defeat instinct.
Sadly, this is always an uphill battle.
