We always try our best to optimise things and make things more efficient. Even in finance, to optimise is to eliminate waste and to streamline all the financial process to produce the least waste and maximise the most returns.
But we don't always have to be like that. Inefficiency creates redundancies. It creates a space where there are excess capacities that can be tapped when the norm is changed, sometimes drastically so.
Take for example our local MRT transportation system. Before the NEL is up, I fondly remembered that there are buses ferrying passengers from the north-eastern part of Singapore to the central region. For a long while, that was the only way in which northeasterners can get to central regions. The MRT network is much simpler in the past and there is always the reliable bus system to fill the transportational 'needs gap' that the MRT couldn't fill by ......