We have to build useful stuff
Every six months or so it seems I write a column about how Andrew Cuomo has done yet another bad transportation thing. In January it was the Moynihan Train Hall. Last week, it was the LaGuardia AirTrain, which received final federal approval thanks to the environmental review process being rigged in its favor. What is the point of the environmental review process if it doesn’t block a train to a parking lot to make it easier to drive to the airport?
Cuomo likes to defend these projects by saying he is good at building things. In a country where building infrastructure—from wind farms to fast electric vehicle chargers to bus shelters and virtually everything in between—is marred in red tape, it can feel like a victory to build anything at all, even if that thing is not very useful.
This perspective was crystalized for me when I went on the Brian Lehrer Show to talk about the AirTrain. Brian said once or twice something to the effect of, “Assuming you can’t extend the N Train because of NIMBYs…” (Extending the N train is the obviously best transportation option to provide a one-seat ride from three boroughs and new stops in Queens to LaGuardia.) I pushed back. I’m not going to transcribe what I said because I don’t want to listen to my own voice any more than I already have to, but it was something to the effect of: I don’t accept that premise. We can’t just concede every infrastructure fight in anticipation of NIMBY opposition. We need to build stuff.
I wish I had said that last part slightly differently. We need to build useful stuff.
This obsession with listening to “the community” is killing this country. It sounds like a staple of a healthy democracy, but it is in fact a perversion of it. We can’t build anything useful thanks to the insertion of dozens of veto points. And it’s an obvious logical fallacy, that listening to “the community” is a virtuous process, because communities do not have singular perspectives. Communities, especially in New York City, are comprised of diverse groups of people with differing perspectives on life. To many of us who live here and in other diverse cities, this is why we live here, to be ensoncsed in a fascinating and lively community. Boiling all that beautiful and terrible complexity down to a single perspective represented by the loudest voices who often comprise an ideological minority not only makes no sense, but does a disservice to the very communities people say they want to protect. It is even worse if we don’t even try to build useful things in anticipation of that opposition.
The scary thing about de-emphasizing community input is it would become even clearer that politicians and unelected bureaucrats get to decide what gets built and where. The great power of NIMBYs is not that they can successfully block projects—in the vast majority of cases, they cannot—but they can make them difficult or expensive enough to push politicians and builders towards paths of lesser resistance. This power has been so widely successul for decades that there are few if any places left to build. It is simply assumed NIMBYs lurk in every community. So we build nothing, except for the things politicians and developers really want, the exact situation NIMBYism is supposed to prevent to begin with.
It’s not like the LaGuardia AirTrain is a popular project. Transportation experts hate it. NIMBY-esque groups do not like it, for both legitimate and questionable reasons. But it doesn’t matter, because Cuomo wants it. The powers that be only listen to “the community” when they can pick and choose who the community is and what they say. If we’re ever going to build anything useful, we need to figure out how to get out of this quagmire. If you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them.
Stuff I’ve Written
If Elon Musk actually follows through on opening up Superchargers to non-Teslas it would likely do more to expand the fast-charging network than anything Joe Biden or Congress will do.
This article on how American cars are now almost as big as the tanks that won World War II sure did a doozy on my Twitter mentions. Truck guys and tank nerds in point-blank melees with urbanists! As usual, the lesson is never argue with anyone on Twitter. Better yet, don’t go on Twitter.
I did a couple of non-transportation articles based on random Freedom of Information Act requests I filed. Here’s one on how Texas IT folks were scrambling to get a payment system up so people could donate to fund a border wall on short notice. And, near and dear to my own heart, the Department of Energy redacted nearly all of the documents about a Simpsons blog they published. I oughta club them and eat their bones.
The number of hucksters in the “mobility” space is astounding. Here’s one who actually got indicted. If you know of any other transportation hucksters, drop me a line. Confidential tips welcome.
Some Books I’m Reading
I’m going to publish an American transportation history reading list soon, and Peter Norton’s Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City will definitely be on it. New World Coming: The 1920s and the Making of Modern America by Nathan Miller will not, because it is not a transportation book, but it’s a delightful one, in particular the sections on the Harding Adminsitration. They all kept dying! Why did they keep dying? Who killed them? I’m a Harding Administration truther.
A Cat I Saw
The Camperdown Elm cat Maurice is BACK. And not only that, but there are THREE KITTENS who now live in the tree too! They are so tiny they must have been born there recently. Here is a not-great photo of one:
We must protect the Camperdown Kitties at all costs.
Until next time,
Aaron