Thanks so much to everyone who came to Henry Grabar’s book launch a few weeks ago! I had a great time and enjoyed chatting to all of you. Always good to be amongst the urbanist nerd people.
Speaking of urbanist nerdery, I’ve been picking on Los Angeles lately, first for “La Sombrita,” the bus stop pole attachment that set urbanist Twitter aflame, and then for remarks an LA Metro official and influential voice in national transportation circles made comparing building bike and bus lanes to bulldozing neighborhoods for freeways. I thought Harvard PhD candidate Jake Anbinder put it perfectly:
(For those unfamiliar with the “hire more women prison guards” reference, it is to this.)
It’s striking how often in the U.S. even the people working for bus riders are compromising with and apologizing for the institutional forces that prevent improvements. LA is hardly alone in this regard. It’s especially pernicious at transit agencies where boards and senior staff are dominated by suburban business leaders and/or people who drive everywhere. Too often, transit officials in this country view themselves as trying to run a business which is more reliant on getting in the good graces of suburban political leadership that sign off on subsidies than running a good transit service. Those goals can but often don’t overlap. I always thought this was one of the most effective aspects of Andy Byford’s leadership in New York City. He brought a clarity of purpose and unapologetic advocacy for transit service few others have.
To me, there are several common threads between La Sombrita and the highways/bus lanes remark that reveal just how fucked American transit priorities are. But the most important one is the over-complication, both intellectually and procedurally, of making transit better by the people tasked with doing so.
La Sombrita quite obviously sucks because it is insufficient to solve a basic problem, something even its defenders acknowledge. No one, so far as I can tell, is arguing La Sombrita doesn’t suck. They’re just arguing it is the least sucky option amongst a bunch of suckier alternatives. Building a bus shelter in LA has become too expensive and complex, so LADOT commissioned a non-profit to design and fund La Sombrita instead of being laser-focused on doing everything they can to eliminate those obscene bureaucratic hurdles. We can all agree—hopefully—it should not cost $50,000 and require a 16-step process with eight agencies to build a bus shelter. So why does it? And why are we arguing about the relative merits of the complicated non-solution rather than fixing the problem?
Likewise, the entire community feedback process for every bike and bus lane installed in this country feels like a willful attempt to over-complicate the construction of something that isn’t complicated. Installing two bus lanes on roads with six or more lanes to make buses go faster is simply not complicated. It’s easy, cheap, simple, and it works.
But it is complicated if you allow it to be, if you saddle such efforts with decades of historical baggage, if you decide every bus lane has to also be a referendum on neighborhood and racial segregation, redlining, freeway construction, and any other societal ills you wish to pile on. I am a huge believer—and practitioner—of allowing history to guide our decisions. The problem right now is we’re not doing that. Instead, we’re letting a mythical, reductionist version of our transportation history guide our decisions.
One of those key myths is the idea that there was no community feedback process in the construction of urban highways or that it was flaws in that process which resulted in the highways getting built. I cannot emphasize enough that is false. There was community feedback before building the highways. When I did a deep dive into the construction of I-81 through Syracuse, which helped destroy a vibrant black neighborhood, I was surprised to find out about the large number of community meetings that took place with local and state officials before the homes were torn down. The community feedback process existed then. The people whose homes were slated to be torn down said please don’t. The people who stood to benefit from the highway with faster travel times said please do. It wasn’t complicated.
The lesson from the urban highway construction era isn’t to worship at the altar of community feedback. The lesson is to not tear down people’s homes.
The lesson from the La Sombrita debacle isn’t to find a better public-private partnership design model to roll out a better bus shade with a more sophisticated PR campaign. The lesson is to build bus shelters. And if you can’t, change that.
The process for making bus shelters easier to build may be complicated. But the first principles by which transit agencies and local governments should be operating under aren’t. This shit isn’t complicated. Buses need to go faster. Biking needs to be safer. It only becomes complicated when the people tasked with making buses go faster or to build more bus shelters or to make biking safer lose focus on what their job is. And right now, a lot of American transportation officials seem to think their job is to make excuses for why they shouldn’t do it.
Some Books I Liked
I haven’t read as much this year because I taught an undergrad journalism course at NYU last semester which took up most of my free time. But I’m catching up and here are some books I liked:
American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy's Forgotten Crisis, Adam Hochschild. Remember learning about the period from 1919-1921 in school? No? Of course you don’t. The textbooks go from World War I to the Roaring 20s. There’s a reason. We’ve gone fascist before.
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power, Daniel Yergin. If this book was 1/3 the length and tried to be a Big Thought Mass Market book it would have been titled How Oil Explains the World but I’m glad it was 700 pages.
The Thing With Feathers: The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About Being Human, Noah Stryker. Birds are neat.
Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys, Joe Coulombe. An unintentionally (?) fascinating book about the erosion of a competent bureaucratic state. Consider:
'When I was young, all the institutions were staffed with these Depression-scarred men— banks, utilities, railroads, most government bureaus, even letter-carriers. In many cases, they were overqualified for the work they performed and as a result the institutions tended to perform well. This is an aspect of the Truman-Eisenhower years—years that now seem islands of calm—that is overlooked.'This is an utterly unprovable hypothesis that scans as plausible to me.
Main Lines: Rebirth of the North American Railroads, 1970-2002, Richard Saunders, Jr. This is a book for train nerds or industrial policy nerds but every 100 pages or so Saunders drops a paragraph that reads like a dagger in the American heart about how ideological political conflict has neutered our ability to solve non-ideological problems. It was published in 2003.
Forbidden Neighbors: A Story of Prejudice in Housing, Charles Abrams. Here is a quote from this book, I won’t spoil the fun by telling you when it was published.
"The housing problem is not enough housing and not the right kind; bad housing or no housing at all; houses too large or too small; the damp wall or vermin; the endless trek to and from work, school, or grocery; the four flights of stairs, or the desperate need to get one's mother-in-law a separate flat; the unbearable rent, or the exodus of an industry that leaves you jobless; the strange-looking neighbors or the hostile ones; inability to pay the tax bill or the case-hardened mortgagee; uncertainty of tenancy or the hazards of ownership; the company landlord who thinks you're a troublemaker, or your tenant downstairs to whom all landlords are anathema; absence of children your daughter's age, or the bad climate for your asthma; the quest for privacy, or the child that died on the highway; the tensions, weariness, monotony, boredom; the smoke, soot, smog; the traffic; crime and delinquency; the longing for trees, room, play space, or change of scene; the noise, smell, heat, or darkness.Housing, in fact, is one of America's biggest headaches and one of the underlying reasons behind many of its discontents."
And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline of the American Steel Industry, John Hoerr. This is a book for industrial policy nerds because of the subject matter but it’s written gracefully and at times beautifully. I especially loved this paragraph:
“We New York journalists who specialize in economic reporting can take the economic pulse of the nation without leaving our offices. We read the Dow-Jones ticker for the news on mergers, acquisitions, and bankruptcies, punch up the latest stock-market prices on a Bunker-Ramo, and scan the reports issued daily, weekly, and monthly by the U.S. Treasury, Federal Reserve, Commerce Department, and Bureau of Labor Statistics. A formidable array of data practically leaps at us from all sources—figures showing money supply, housing starts, ten-day auto sales, retail sales, consumer and producer price indexes, new claims for unemployment insurance, gold and commodity prices, raw steel production, crude-oil refinery runs, number of people employed and unemployed, bond yields, and so on. Some of my colleagues can immerse themselves in these numbers and produce images portraying the state of the American economy at any given moment. As I understand the process, the images unreel in their minds like a 16-millimeter negative, displaying shadowy integers cavorting in various patterns which are converted to hard print as economic forecasts. This approximation of macroeconomic reality sometimes even proves to be almost correct.”
Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, Henry Grabar. I agreed to moderate Henry’s book launch before having read the book. Fortunately I didn’t have to pretend the book was good, because it is.
Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017, Ian Black. Picked this one up at the Brooklyn library book sale and let’s just say the version of events I got from my conservative Rabbis growing up wasn’t quite right.
School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America’s Favorite Welfare Program, Susan Levine. Awesome topic for a book, well-executed, dense with insights about how the U.S. as a country has the uncanny ability to agree on a problem and then proceed to never solve it.
If you’re wondering why I’m sending such a long email over Memorial Day weekend it’s because I twisted my ankle playing tennis. But it shouldn’t prevent me from being out on the court and getting my ass kicked again before long.
Cheers,
Aaron