Because I am a massive nerd, I love Wired. But the cover story in the latest issue left me pretty frustrated. Don't get me wrong; it's super interesting. The writer, Tom Vanderbilt, looks at the various ways that Google and car companies are closing in on cars that will drive themselves, using robotics technology that can basically learn how to operate a car like a person. Besides describing the technology, Vanderbilt examined the question of whether people would even want that. After all, Americans love the freedom and control that a car represents. But as one Google researcher pointed out, that's not really how the daily experience of a car is for most people:
“Most of driving is not a car commercial,” he says. “The average American commutes 52 minutes a day, with the purpose of getting from point A to point B, not with the purpose of winding through the mountains and enjoying The Sound of Music.”
I agree with this sentiment. Owning a self-driving car doesn't mean that it always has to be on autopilot; on those occasions when you're driving through the mountains, car commercial-style, you can turn it off. But most time spent in the car is a drag: going to work, going to store, trying to find a parking space, boring crap like that. I bet a lot of people would love to pass the responsibility on to a robot, so they can then, as Vanderbilt admits, use the time for texting or looking at Facebook on their phones.
Which brings me to why I was frustrated. These companies are spending a lot of money on researching self-driving cars to address the desire of people to be able to commute without having to drive. But there's already a superior solution to that problem, one that addresses both the desire to not drive and it's better for the environment: public transportation. People don't need self-driving cars! They need better trains and buses, and more accessible trains and buses. Imagine if the resources being devoted to self-driving cars were instead aimed at expanding the public transportation infrastructure and making in more comfortable. For instance, Vanderbilt is right that people's desire to surf the net instead of watch the road could incline them to want to avoid driving to work, if that were an option. Well, why not put high-speed wi-fi internet on all public transportation, and then advertise the shit out of it? Instead of spending money on developing self-driving cars, what about high-speed trains? What about more subway systems? There's a serious "reinventing the wheel" problem here.
But Vanderbilt addresses none of that, even though that question hangs in the mind of any halfway intelligent reader. I did a Ctrl-F search for the word "train", to make sure I didn't accidentally miss mention of the competition. The first time the word appears on the page, it's in the comment section. Actually, the first comment:
I'd love to live in a city where I could walk or bike safely to nearly all of my regular destinations and take a train or bus to the other ones.
Self-driving cars are a bad solution to a problem caused by automobile-centric urban planning and design that demands the need for cars.
Exactly. For all I know, the price of getting access to the prototypes was to not mention the obvious---that self-driving cars are a distraction from the real transportation needs of our country---but it's a weird oversight. If Google really is interested in not being evil, they should redirect their brain trust away from self-driving cars and more towards better and more extensive public transportation. Even something as simple as making Amtrak more comfortable and appealing would be an interesting and more useful project.
Via Atrios comes this story about how the Spanish city of Murcia has decided to approach their traffic congestion problem by offering free lifetime passes on public transit if you turn in your car. (I'm unclear on how it works, but I'm going to assume that you actually can sell your car at market value, because otherwise people are going to balk.) But one of the things I love that supports this campaign is advertising and public stunts to emphasize how shitty it is to actually drive a car around a city. Things like this video:
And this adorable public art project that draws attention to how hard it is to park in the city:
I like this campaign because it addresses one of the biggest obstacles to overcome when tackling the overuse of cars, which is that people are acclimated to the hassle and don't really stop to think about alternatives. When my family was up visiting and I was taking them around on the subway, there were a couple jokes made about how I never liked driving, which is treated by Texans as an eccentricity on par with not liking tacos or Patsy Cline. Like it's not the end of the world, but what kind of weirdo are you?
But the thing is, I do like driving.....long distances at high speeds. Driving and puttering around a crowded city in a vehicle that is fifteen times the size of your body is what I hate. I especially hate how driving has turned walking even short distances into an unimaginable taboo. In fact, the thing that raised my consciousness about how silly driving culture gets is the unquestioned tradition of circling around and around a parking lot, trying to find the closest space, ignoring spaces that are literally only a minute further by foot away, because you need to conserve your steps like they're fucking gold-plated diamonds. I've seen people spend 5 and even 10 minutes circling around trying to avoid walking an extra 60 seconds. Once you see the stupidity in that, other things stop making sense: people insisting on dropping you off at your door instead of on a convenient corner, even in cases where dropping someone off at their door requires you to turn the car around in traffic, driving up both your blood pressure and wasting time that could be spent doing something more productive, like picking your nose or playing a round of Angry Birds. And once I realized while living in Austin that I could walk, take the bus, or ride my bike instead of parallel park downtown, there was no going back. I never really learned how to do that well, probably for the same reason that I bark my limbs on immoveable objects more than the average person.
People are naturally conservative. I mean small-c conservative, of course---we do things because that's how we've always done them. People who are constantly wondering if there's a better way to do something are a distinct minority in our culture. Crafting public policy requires an understanding of this. In the U.S., I think, there's a tendency to assume that people are rational actors and if you give them two options, they'll just gravitate towards the superior one. And that's true, if the options are on a level playing field. If people perceive something as a problem, they will move to problem-solve. But people don't perceive the time they waste in the car as a problem. Suggesting that they have a better use of their time than sitting in traffic and circling around looking for parking reads to many people as suggesting that it's a waste of time to sleep at night. So you have to really work hard at getting people to actually look at what's right under their noses.
Okay, I’m way late on this, but this article in New York magazine about the battle over bike lanes is well worth reading in its entirety. The whole fight in infernally stupid. The arguments for bike lanes are safety, money savings, and the environment. The argument against them really amounts to, “Wah! No one told me that driving a car in New York-fucking-city would be a slow, frustrating way to get around! Kick punch!” Though the writer Matthew Shaer is much nicer to the anti-bike assholes than I am.
Besides linking it, I wanted to point to this paragraph and comment on it:
In the prevailing spin, the bike-lane fight has two sides: the blue-collar New Yorkers who have to drive to work and the coddled creative-class types who live close enough to commute on their Bianchis. But the class dynamics are actually far more complicated, and the allegiances often defy expectations. The bike-lane opponent, for instance, is just as likely to be a well-to-do Manhattanite, and his main gripe the deliveryman who just pedaled the wrong way down a freshly laid bike lane, in a rush to unload a wood-oven pizza (which, on another day, that Manhattanite himself might have ordered). Simple nimbyism can’t entirely account for the feud in Park Slope, home to Paul Steely White, executive director of the cycling and mass-transit advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, as well as pro-bikers like Naparstek and his Park Slope Neighbors co-founder Eric McClure. Meanwhile, Hainline, a Brown and Harvard grad worried about global warming, considers herself a progressive. The battle lines blur until it becomes almost impossible to guess which side someone’s going to come down on. “[The cyclists] think that we’re a bunch of old, crotchety rich people that don’t understand that they deserve to have a bike lane on our street,” says Hainline. “That’s not it at all.”
What’s funny about that quote is that Hainline is Louis Hainline, and she comes across as a crotchety old rich person who characterizes bicyclists as undeserving, and makes fun of them for trying, in their small way, to take responsibility for reducing pollution. She’s pretty much nuts by any measure when it comes to this issue, since she has set up cameras and is trying to “prove” that people don’t use the bike lane. She even tries to use the fact that only one bicyclist is out right after it snowed as some sort of proof that people don’t use the bike lane next to Prospect Park.
Anyway, I just want to say that there’s nothing surprising about this at all to me. I’m intimately familiar with the issue at hand here, which is a lot of people think of themselves as liberal and progressive, but can turn into screaming reactionaries the second that something inconveniences them or causes them to have to make small changes to their lives. And this is doubly true when it comes to local politics, which is why is was so funny this likely hoax/satire petition came out after a contentious and stupid battle over a black-owned nightclub/restaurant on the Park Slope side of Flatbush Avenue took place. Internet threads abound over food, green living, religion, and urban planning that make this principle abundantly clear. And that’s all that’s going on with these stupid bike lane wars. Most New Yorkers support the bike lanes, and it’s probably for the very simple reason that most New Yorkers aren’t obsessed with getting around the city in a way that minimizes their contact with the hoi polloi. It takes a significant sized ego to feel entitled, in a city this large and this dense, to be able to fly around in your car without having to accommodate people that are choosing cheaper, greener, but more populist forms of transportation. I’m usually not a hard ass about these sort of things, but some times I have to say that I expect more than lip service out of my fellow liberals, even the rich ones.
And don’t bellyache about disabled people. People who are car dependent for real and not by choice are the first to benefit from fewer cars on the road, which makes those who absolutely must take a car safer and makes their commutes faster. Invoking people without privilege to defend those who have it and are just being assholes is a low move.
I swear to god, half my blogging (if not more) from here on out is going to have to be dedicated, once again, to examples of how Republicans claim they’re motivated by strong principles, but in fact they’re just straight up culture warriors who never take a pass at a pot shot. Here’s the latest example:
In some post-election hardball between the Obama administration and newly-elected Republicans, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood is threatening to take back stimulus funds from states if they do not follow through on proposed rail projects.
CNN obtained copies of letters LaHood sent to incoming Republican governors in Ohio and Wisconsin who have stated their opposition to rail projects already underway in their states. In the letters, LaHood said a rail link between Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton and Cincinnati in Ohio, and a high-speed rail connection between Chicago, Illinois, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, are vital to economic growth in both regions.
Lahood wrote that he respects the power of governors to make decisions for their states, but, “There seems to be some confusion about how these high-speed rail dollars can be spent.”
To Wisconsin’s Gov.-elect Scott Walker, LaHood said that none of the funds can be used for roads or any other projects. He went on to say, “Consequently, unless you change your position, we plan to engage in an orderly transition to wind down Wisconsin’s project so that we do not waste taxpayer’s money.” That letter was delivered on Monday.
To make this very clear, the Republicans—-who generally like to carry on about how they’re just against the stimulus, full stop—-are happy to take the stimulus funds. They want the funds they claim are evil. They just don’t want to spend them on trains.
These Republican governors are engaged in a little game. They want to decry “wasteful spending” without reducing that spending one bit. They just want to move the high speed rail money into fixing roads and bridges. I imagine this is because that will be completed faster and with a higher profile than the longer-term HSR projects.
Maybe that’s part of it. But I wouldn’t discount the straight up Republican hostility towards trains, especially compared to cars. When Republicans are pandering to their base, one of their most important pitches is to imply that evil liberals are trying to make you share breathing space with undesirables. As I noted earlier, one of the biggest selling points on creating hostility to health care reform was to provoke anxieties in the base of having to share public spaces with (fill the group that any particular wingnut hates). The RNC’s anti-health care website had a picture on it of a multi-racial line in an E.R. They weren’t overly subtle about this. This is political pandering to people who go into a red-eyed rage at having to dial “1” for English.
The symbol of modern conservatism is the SUV that pulls in and out of the garage of the front yard-free McMansion placed inside a gated community, a perfect little system that allows the conservative base voter to leave their home and run errands with an absolute minimum of contact with the outside world. Trains are basically the opposite of that—-everyone buys a ticket (which may involve pressing “1” for English), and you sit down basically wherever, and anyone can sit in your car or even your aisle. If SUVs are the symbols of everything wrong with conservative America to liberals, then trains are definitely a symbol of everything wrong with liberal America to conservatives—-the egalitarian nature of them, the prioritizing of fuel efficiency over living like a little pretend king in a little pretend castle, the lack of airs that are associated with train travel. Once the trains come in, it becomes easier not to own a car, and next thing you know, people are walking more, which means even more shoulder-rubbing with the hoi polloi. It’s all very disconcerting. No wonder Republican politicians want nothing to do with it.
Like a good little liberal, I actually really love traveling by train, and access to nearby cities with a short trip on Amtrak is one of my favorite things about living out East. I did like driving on long distance trips when I had a car—-at least, a 3 or 4 hour one, not the 6 or 7 or 10 hour ones I often had to make—-but trains are more comfortable, plus you can plug in your laptop and watch videos if you want. Or, gasp, read a book. And they’re safer. I’m sure all of this is just making the culture war aspects of it worse, but I thought I’d just say.
Matt Y. and Atrios both commented today on one of the most ludicrous examples of how car-centric culture and laws are out of control—-mandatory bar-parking. For instance, Long Beach, CA requires 20 parking spaces for every 1,000 sq. ft. of tavern floor. Unless you’re a complete Pollyanna, there is no doubt that the more that people use cars to get to and from bars, the more drunk driving there will be.
Atrios:
[A]nyone who drives and drinks, no matter how well-intentioned, is at least occasionally going to drive after drinking more than they should.
Matt:
Obviously it’s possible to go to a tavern, not consume alcohol, and drive home safely. I’ve even served as a designated driver in my day. But in general, public safety demands a very low ratio of “people driving home from the bar” to “customers drinking at the bar” so there’s clearly something absurd about the idea of regulating bar-related land use so as to encourage and facilitate extra driving.
And of course beyond the specific case of mandatory bar-parking, it’s always worth emphasizing that part of the cost of an auto-dependent built environment is to massively increase the number of people on the road who’ve got at least a drink or two under their belt.
The fetish for “personal responsibility” that supersedes any attempt to write policies that actually encourage better choice-making is particularly irritating when it comes to straight up public safety considerations like reducing drunk driving. It’s just not enough to tell people not to drink and drive, and then make it difficult for them to drink without driving. Wagging your finger and telling people not to drink will, like Atrios noted, get you to a certain point, but after that, good luck. There will always be a whole bunch of people on any given night and especially on the weekends who have their reasons to be at the bar drinking. And while a lot of them are too overconfident, belligerent, or wingnutty (or all three) to take seriously the dangers of drinking and driving, a lot of people drink and drive when they’d take the drink and use public transportation option if it was available to them. I’ve always thought that reducing drinking and driving should be a centerpiece in trying to find ways to make cities less car-centric.
The project of reducing how much I drove in Austin, coupled with my now living completely car free in New York, has really caused me to think about the various things that encourage driving over walking and using public transportation. Obviously, most of it is that there’s no infrastructure to make going car-free or at least not driving possible—-stuff really is too far away. But I also noticed a lot how the culture of driving everywhere causes people to hop in their car mindlessly and drive to places that are totally walkable. Things like mandatory bar parking just reinforce this notion. Even just a few places in a neighborhood that don’t have parking and subsist on foot traffic can help create a culture where people think of doing things like walking to the bar. I’ve noticed that once people start walking here and there a few times, the habit kicks in and they start doing it more and more. Certainly, the commitment we made in Austin to walk to places if at all possible made the transition to New York a whole lot easier.
Now, this only works in terms of stuff that really is walkable, and in most places in the U.S., that’s not much. But a lot of bars exist strictly to be neighborhood bars, and I’ll bet in many of these cases, 80% of their customers live within a mile. In fact, I think a lot of people drink close to home to minimize the amount of time they spend behind the wheel. They could easily be nudged into reducing that time to zero minutes, if they start to think of bars as places you walk to instead of drive to.
Considering the horrible experiences I’ve had recently on American Airlines (multiple cancelled flights with sucktastic customer communication about them), it was fortuitous to run into Ray Balis, an active flight Attendant, at Netroots Nation 2009.
Ray was elected by the American Airlines Flight Attendants to represent them during the negotiation process with American Airlines. He reveals some onerous corporate practices that may (not) surprise you. Flight attendants feel your pain in many ways, as much as you are as a consumer—they are getting jerked around by the financial woes of the airlines—and the decisions made up the food chain. When flights are cancelled, flight attendants aren’t paid; they are often stranded with all the same inconveniences we are, and they don’t receive a paid-for lunch (I’ve spoken to others who have to brown bag it), except on international long flights. That was one benefit negotiated away when the airlines played hardball.
To learn more about American Airlines flight attendants negotiations, visit the site Ray refers to in the video, http://APFAVirtualPicket.com.
Anyway, the column is fact-free and hateful, and Will’s arguments about the environment come exceedingly close to “I’m going to die before it gets really bad, so fuck you all,” but on top of all that, it’s an offense to language and writing as an occupation. Witness the first paragraph:
You might think the Department of Transportation would be a refuge from Washington’s inundation of painfully earnest and pitilessly incessant talk about “remaking” this (health care, Detroit) and “transforming” that (the energy sector, the planet’s temperature). Transportation, after all, is about concrete practicalities—planes, trains and automobiles, steel, asphalt and concrete.
Will needs to retire now, because he actually just argued that the sheer physicality and practicality of something precludes remaking and transforming it. This shows that he’s lost his grip on the nature of verbs. “Remaking” and “transforming” could be abstractions, but they are metaphorical if used abstractly. They stem from imagining physical, practical remakings and transformings. For instance, this morning, I physically transformed a pile of ground up coffee beans into liquid coffee that was more suitable for drinking. And I remade that cup of coffee by pouring half and half and sweetner in it. Doesn’t get more physical and practical than that.
In that same light, when people speak of remaking and transforming transit systems, they aren’t talking about holding hands and projecting thoughts of non-pollution at it. It’s all about physical objects, observable systems, real world experimentation, and practicalities. If anything, it’s a subject that people tire of easily because it’s so wonky and pragmatic, and the only reason it holds people’s attention is because the vast majority of transport ourselves from one place to another every day, usually multiple times a day. Reading this first paragraph, you get the impression that Will thinks “Planes, Trains, And Automobiles” was a film about philosophers and mathematicians kicking around completely abstract ideas.
I’ve been saying this for years, and I’m glad that it’s finally catching on as part of the argument for why the federal government should make a huge investment in making American cities more walkable—-they reduce drunk driving. Drinking is right up there with butt sex in topics that policy-oriented people don’t like to talk about, because talking about makes people think that maybe you do it, and god forbid people think that, because then you won’t be considered a serious person anymore. I don’t think the taboo that’s grown up around it is such a good thing, though, because it does create these situations where people hypocritically avoid talking about realistic ways to push for more responsible drinking, and teetotaler groups like MADD dominate the conversation. And since their solutions are all punishment oriented, I think there’s a limit to how much good they can do. Stiff fines for drunk driving work up until a point, but if you don’t offer people a realistic alternative, you’re still going to have a whole lot of people playing the odds that they won’t get caught, and thus a whole lot of drunk drivers who are risking accidents.
Austin on the whole isn’t a walkable city, but central Austin is pretty good, with lots of buses and cabs downtown, and so I’m never even remotely tempted to get behind a wheel if I go downtown and drink. Bus downtown, cab back, because sadly, unless you go home before 11 PM, you can’t take the bus back, at least to my neighborhood. They’re smart enough to have late night buses running from downtown to neighborhoods that have the highest concentration of college students. Which is smart, because a lot of college kids who don’t want to spring $10 for a cab back will drive downtown just so that they have a car to drive back with. Yes, yes, yes, yes, I’m aware that if they have money for booze, they should have money for a cab, but I suspect that grousing and scolding isn’t going to change this calculation any time soon, so it’s time for us to work with the kids that we’ve got instead of the ones that we want.
Okay, I’m way late on this, but 
I swear to god, half my blogging (if not more) from here on out is going to have to be dedicated, once again, to examples of how Republicans claim they’re motivated by strong principles, but in fact they’re just straight up culture warriors who never take a pass at a pot shot. 
Considering the horrible experiences I’ve had recently on American Airlines (multiple cancelled flights with sucktastic customer communication about them), it was fortuitous to run into Ray Balis, an active flight Attendant, at Netroots Nation 2009. 
I’ve been saying this for years, and I’m glad that it’s finally catching on as part of the argument for why the federal government should make a huge investment in making American cities more walkable—-