Half the story has never been told

Focus on coinage, not carbon (image from size8jeans on Flickr)

If  you’re trying to convince the public of anything, the face you put on your efforts is fairly important. This is especially true for a movement livable streets and urbanism, which seeks to do unpopular things like remove highway lanes and charge money for parking. Unfortunately, the movement is terrible at this. Despite pushing policies that disproportionately help the working class (good transit, jobs in downtowns, etc.), urbanists manage to be viewed as a bunch of white cycling-crazy technocrats, while people pushing for more lanes and parking and cars get to claim the populist mantle. It’s bloody tragic. And Streetsblog – and I don’t mean to pick on them, because they do great work – provided a pretty good example of why this week with this post talking with some degree of fascination about the fact that a lot of people bike not by choice, but out of necessity.

So what to do about this? How can people who love cities and transit claim the social justice mantle? I’m not ready to do the heavy lifting here, but I’ve got a few ideas about how to start:

1. Dial down the climate-change rhetoric: I hear a lot on the blogs about how transit is great for the environment, but fair or not, environmentalism is frequently viewed as a luxury concern of the upper-middle class. Hitching our star to the climate change bandwagon just confirms people’s suspicions that livable streets advocates are part of the nanny state that wants to tell them how to live and judge them for using cars. It certainly doesn’t broaden the appeal, even if it helps get the message out there a bit more.

2. Talk about jobs: Why is transit great? Why do we love walkability? For me, a big part of it is that transit helps everyone get to work more cheaply, and walkability can allow for more vibrant and healthy downtowns that create more jobs. I know that this gets a lot of play in a broad way, but there’s not that much focus on the impact on the working class. Yes, a walkable and accessible downtown is a delight for middle class families, but it’s a lifeline for a working class person looking for and commuting to a service industry job. This should be a bigger deal.

3. Talk about suburbanites too: Suburbs continue to grow, and grow faster than the cities they surround. But their faces are changing – inner ring suburbs in particular are becoming more diverse, and poverty is on the rise. These towns are going to look more like cities in some ways, and while I don’t expect a subway in every suburb, I do think that tweaking our solutions to appeal to different settlement models will provide an opportunity to widen the constituency.

4. Faces matter: Let’s be honest – it’s pretty rare to see a minority face or voice on Streetsblog. When it is, it’s usually a child or an elderly person. This is a serious problem. Streetsblog NY likes to get annoyed with NYC pols who avoid making hard decisions about transit funding, but then turn around and stage rallies with a bunch of “regular folks” about how awful all the subway cuts are, but it works. It’s time to play that game and make the movement look as diverse and grassroots as it is, or at least as it should be.

The fact is that livable streets are a huge boon for the middle and working class. Lower transportation costs, more jobs, and greater variety of affordable housing are all goals that have every right to be popular, but are currently painted as “elitist”. It’s time to think about how to turn that around. Recognizing that we’re not our own target audience is the first step.

That good hair

A lot’s been written about the differences between the experiences of black Americans and West Indians, and I’m no Ta-Nehisi Coates, so I’m not going to take on that challenge. But, being a West Indian who’s lived in the cold for a while, I sometimes notice ways in which my view of race has changed. I had one of those moments today when I saw this picture:

After looking at the picture for a few seconds, I had a visceral reaction: this is creepy! Why is a table of white women curiously touching the hair of a black woman? I am disturbed! But here’s the thing – that was a purely American reaction. There’s not much remarkable about the picture from a West Indian perspective. It’s a bunch of rich ladies at an event shilling overpriced hair gunk sampling the goods. The weird racial undertones that would accompany something like this in the States just aren’t there in Trinidad (though there are shadows of class undertones for sure).

There’s nothing terribly profound to say, but it is a reminder of how having lived here for a while has changed me in certain subtle ways.

As an aside – the reason I came across the picture was that I saw the teaser for this execrable article, and had to click through to determine whether it was as embarrassingly shill-y as it seemed. It was. The Guardian should be ashamed. I assume we’ll soon find out that the product is being distributed by Ansa McAl…

Death by a thousand curb cuts

From ehoyer on Flickr

Spend any time driving in San Francisco, and you’ll notice that there isn’t a lot of parking. Then, just before you give up and put the car in a garage, it dawns on you that while there aren’t that many spaces, there also aren’t that many parked cars. Instead, driveway after driveway chops up the curb, leaving the street space unusable. Curb cuts are everywhere, of course, but San Francisco buildings seem particularly fond of them.

The effective transfer of public property to private hands is bad enough, but there are a lot of other reasons to dislike curb cuts. They increase conflicts between pedestrians and vehicles, they set up hazardous situations as cars back out onto busy streets, they encourage sidewalk parking (an epidemic on some blocks of the Mission), and, when you’re talking about a commercial street, garages aren’t nearly as good for walkability and economics as storefronts.

You’d think that with all these externalities, you’d have to pay. Well, not yet, but the city is finally going to start charging $100 per year for the privilege. A pittance considering that off street spaces go for $200 per month in some neighbourhoods, but at least it’s a start. Perhaps as the city’s finances continue to deteriorate, owners of curb cuts will be made to pay a fairer share.

And, full disclosure: we currently lease a parking space in our building, and a curb cut is involved. I think that the owner (and us, by extension) should be taxed heavily for it.

Slashing our way to uselessness

Whenever I read about service cuts, I think about the B71 (PDF). See, getting around Brooklyn can be a bit tricky; if your destination is on your subway line, it’s quite easy, but otherwise your trip is nigh on impossible unless you want to pay for a cab or take the bus. When I lived in Brooklyn, I lived in Prospect Heights, but sometimes wanted to try out the restaurants on Smith St. This was one of the neighbourhood pairs that the subway just didn’t work for. But! The B71 offered a solution – a bus that went from my block straight to the heart of Smith St! I’d have taken it all the time, except that it (1) stopped running at the insanely early hour of 9:30pm, and (2) it only came every 20-30 minutes, which, given how unreliable a bus schedule is, made it pretty much worthless.

The B71 is a good example of a phenomenon that I think is under-appreciated by transit agencies – sometimes low ridership doesn’t mean that you are providing too much service – it means that you are providing too little. There’s a threshold below which you make your system so inconvenient to use that you force people to mode shift, or to avoid certain trips entirely. SF Muni seems to be headed right in that direction – 10% service cuts on a system that is frankly already decidedly inadequate (ever ride Muni Metro during the morning rush)? And over what is ultimately a relatively small amount of money as well – the Muni deficit is just $17 million, compared with the $440 million that BART is spending on the silly Oakland Airport Connector, or the $1 BILLION being spent to widen the 405 in LA. Muni carries 700,000 trips a day. It’s the transportation backbone of the city, even if Mayor Newsom never uses it. Commerce would absolutely plunge without it. Why are we letting it shrivel? It’s insanity, and it’s depressing to watch.

Leader before Party before Country

So the UNC is apparently about to have an election, and we’re meant to pretend that the result will matter, despite the fact that KBP has been a Panday lackey for years. Whatever – let’s pretend. The fun part is that the illusion of a competitive election process has led to a lot of people registering to vote:

Over the past month, there have been 10,000 new applications for membership in the United National Congress, says party vice-chairman Vasant Bharath.

But it’s not all good news! You see, these new voters might just be part of a dastardly conspiracy!

He added that the recent NACTA poll, from his understanding, predicted that Siparia MP Kamla Persad-Bissessar would win the UNC leadership by a landslide because of the support from former COP members.

So, to summarize, the reaction to thousands of people deciding to come back to the UNC fold is not, “This is excellent! The party is growing,” but instead, “OMG! This means Panday might not win!!!!” It’s pretty revealing of the mindset of people who run politics in Trinidad – party before country isn’t craven enough for them, they even put the cult of personality of their “leader” before the good of their party.

In the family

Via the N-Judah Chronicles, I came across this chart purporting to show the impact of shopping at a local business rather than a chain.

I’ve never been one for chain-hating, and I can’t say that I find this chart all that compelling. Perhaps it’s fairly accurate in Grand Rapids, where the chart’s creators are based, but in a large metro area like San Francisco or New York, many of the ways in which money “leaves” seem wrong to me. For example, why do business services necessarily need to be sourced outside your community? And why is it that only the local business uses local supplies, while the chain apparently resorts to “factory farms” – compare Whole Foods to your local corner store on that last point, and you’ll see how silly it is.

Small local business have plenty of advantages over chains – they are often easier to get to, they generally have better service for regulars, they generally have some charm, and they don’t generally come accompanied with giant surface parking lots like the big boxes. And chains often behave badly, particularly in an urban context. That said, this sort of broad brush analysis helps no-one – sure, you can hate Wal-Mart, but that Subway down the street is probably a franchise run by a local entrepreneur who has just as much interest in your community as the guy who runs the saffron shop. Frankly, the way you get to the store and the products you buy there probably have more of an impact on your city than what’s on the storefront.

Squeezing a handful of sand

I don’t remember who said it, but it’s looking more and more like that’s how you could describe our counter-terrorism efforts (at least those that don’t involve covert and overt ops in countries near large oil and gas deposits). The debacle in Detroit involving the underpants gnome of terrorists (Step 1: cover detonator with blanket) gives us a nice illustration:

Mr. Abdulmutallab, who has been linked to the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda, came to the attention of the American authorities when his father went to the embassy last month to report that his son had expressed radical views before disappearing.

…

The embassy sent a cable to Washington, which resulted in Mr. Abdulmutallab’s name being entered in a database of 550,000 people with possible ties to terrorism.

I don’t get why we are even keeping a list with 550,000 names. How is that at all helpful? You simply cannot track such a large number of people. And this is part of the larger problem of too much information collection, too little actual analysis. Customs and Border Control alone must collect millions of fingerprints a year since the US started fingerprinting all us scary furrners at the border… who wants to try to argue that that database will ever be used? Let’s not even get into all the idiotic forms you have to complete to apply for a visa. Too little information is a problem, but so is too much – it clouds your view of facts that are actually valuable.

But of course, collecting as much information as we can is the order of the day, all in the name of “being safe”. That’s why we’ve got TSA agents spending inordinate amounts of time sifting through freedom baggies to make sure that bottle of shaving cream is less than 3 ounces, or telling you to take off your shoes, or swabbing your laptop because you forgot to take it out of your bag, instead of spending that time and attention and energy looking for things that are actually a threat. When “better safe than sorry” is your only mantra you only end up being the latter.

And of course, there are the racist conservatives who think the answer is to collect even more swathes of useless data by using racial profiling. First off, I don’t get this conservative nonsense about how we don’t profile. Has Newt Gingrich never been to an airport? Is he unaware of NSEERS and special registration? Racial profiling is both common and blatant in American security procedures. But that aside – it’s a terrible idea to use such a broad brush. Even if you ignore the obvious ethical concerns, it’s just way too much information about way too many people; that’s how you end up with a list with 500,000 names in which the name of a Nigerian kid with a lot of red flags can get lost.

But who cares about actually protecting America? The DHS has an ass to cover, and Republicans have political points to score on the backs of brown people (same as it ever was).

Blind to irony

Just saw on TPM that, like any decent political movement, the teabaggers now have their own documentary. Congrats, guys! Oh, but, while you attend the premiere in DC, you might want to have a big think about what made the venue possible:

At the time it was built, the Ronald Reagan Building was the most expensive federal building ever constructed, at a cost of $768 million. As a federal office building, it is second in size only to the Pentagon. Its naming was controversial, because Ronald Reagan was considered to be a champion of small government and the building was seen by some as an example of "big government" and government waste.

On our latest white elephant

One thing that seems to me to distinguish good governance from bad is an understanding that cities and countries are built on communities, not on buildings. Infrastructure is essential, of course, but investments need to serve people, not egos, and therein lies the trap for a poorly governed and generally insecure nation – providing people with water and electricity and telecommunications and efficient transportation and public spaces that invite rather than exclude isn’t sexy business, and rarely produces spectacular results that you can easily point to. And that’s how you end up with Sydney Opera House look-alikes in a country where 600 people are killed every year, and where only a lucky (and rich) few have a 24-hour water supply. Because opera houses are sexy, even if only a tiny portion of the population will even get to see the inside of this monstrosity.

And the media coverage just makes me more depressed. Instead of calling out the corruption and labour abuses that were behind this building’s construction, we get fawning articles interviewing easily-fooled bystanders, like this from the Express:

Citizens from all walks of life flocked yesterday evening to the National Academy for the Performing Arts at the Princes Building grounds, Queen’s Park West, Port of Spain, where they looked on in awe at the massive structure.

Many of them milled around the compound with their families looking on at the ’dancing fountains’ which moved synchronously with the music that blasted from speakers outside the building.

There was an air of excitement all through the evening and generally people seemed pleased with what they saw. Some expressed the view that their tax dollars had been well spent.

Really? Tax dollars well spent when people still don’t have water, and the police still don’t have cars? Are these people mad? I hope they at least had the decency to cringe when they read the article the next day. And don’t tell me that this is about investing in the arts either:

[Manning] teased the ’doubting Thomases’ in the country who he said, never believed that they would live to see such a ’magnificent structure’ in Trinidad and Tobago.

Click through and read the article, and count the number of references to actual uses of the building, rather than boasts about the building itself. This is about egos, not art. And again, I don’t know whether the Express is full of sycophants or just plain ignoramuses, but this had me doing a spit take:

There was vindication over his strategy of using UDeCOTT, its executive chairman Calder Hart and Chinese contractors, such as Shanghai Construction Group, in pursuing Government’s massive construction programme; and pride over what this has accomplished thus far.

Vindicated by what? A pretty building? Fountains? Are they serious? I wonder if the indentured labourers living in 19th century conditions in Caroni who we forced to build this feel vindicated too?

On dining alone

Frequent travel builds up a lot of skills, and perhaps the one that I have honed the most over the last few years has been learning to dine alone. It’s not as easy as it seems – I have memories of wandering the streets of Barcelona or Paris feeling too self-conscious to take a meal at a proper café, and instead subjecting myself to terrible fast food options. It was a sad state of affairs, one that I suspect afflicts all too many people, especially the casual traveler on his or her first solo jaunt. The good news is that I’ve managed to get past all that. I now boldly eat wherever I please, and have learned to really appreciate those solo meals. So the next time you find yourself in a culinary capital needing a table for only one, here are some thoughts on how to beat that nagging feeling of being quietly judged.

• Confidence is essential. And really, there’s no reason for you not to have it – despite silly social judgments and conventions, there’s nothing _wrong_ with lone dining. So ask for your table for one with timber in your voice.
• Bring a book. My preference is something engaging, but also a little demanding. David Foster Wallace rather than Snowcrash. I also enjoy reading the local English-language daily to get some flavor for local controversies.
• A notebook is also a plus. Eating alone gives you time to think, what with being freed of the obligation to make conversation, and you should make the most of it. Where do you think this got written?
• I’d also suggest leaving the laptop in the hotel room safe. A laptop is just too attention-grabbing and makes it unlikely that you will spend any time making observations. Take your notes on paper. A nice bonus is that this makes you look more intellectual and less like a hipster.
• You obviously shouldn’t be drinking yourself into a stupor, but a glass or two is OK by me. There’s no reason to subject yourself to meal after meal with water and soda, and almost anywhere will have local wine or beer that’s worth checking out.
• Choose your spot wisely. You don’t want to be eating alone at the Cheesecake Factory. I suggest tapas and the like – places that will give you small portions (so you can sample a lot of things) and have some atmosphere.
• And finally, I’ve always found that a good way to forget about being silently judged is to spend time silently judging others! People smoking near their kids (harder to spot in the US, but easy elsewhere), fellow tourists ordering in boisterous English or demanding that their food arrive “rapido”, or just plain old ridiculous hipsters – the possibilities for looking down on others for fun are endless.

Now you can go forth and eat alone, and never worry about having to cower in shame in a McDonald’s in Shanghai.  You can thank me later.