I’m having trouble writing about Los Angeles’ “Neighborhood Integrity Initiative”

Because I haaaaaaaaaaate so much.

Here is the LA Times story on it.

When I write about something, I try to force myself to understand what is going on before I formulate conclusions. Now, that’s a pretty lofty idea, and I fail all the time. I often write normative theory, and normative theory is…normative. People should get excited and passionate about things like justice and equity.

But this time out, I’m having the same trouble as I had with Chapter 6 and Stand Your Ground. I haaaaaate. Haaaaaaate so hard.

Somebody tell me to straighten up and put my big-girl social science pants on.

The revolution will not be on PLANET

I said my own piece a fair bit ago about why I left PLANET, which came down to: I got tired of getting yelled at via email for disagreeing with people. Disagreeing with people is this thing I do when, you know, people are wrong. People tell me I’m wrong all the time, and I have yet to die from it, but apparently others are more delicate.

Our latest blow-up on PLANET seems likely to be the death of the thing, if what people are forwarding me is any indicator of what’s going on.

This particular go around seems to be: A sexist joke gets posted (why? o why?), somebody says, hey, why is this on a professional, scholarly listserv, it bugs me that this stuff gets posted, and then the full-blown entitled-punish-the-woman internets: wuuuuuuuuh if you don’t like jokes about your gender on a professional listserv whynn’t ya jes leave then, ya party pooper meanies/oversensitive politically correct ninnies/feminazis. Because LIBERTY.

Habermas would be so proud.

WTH, people? Did I miss something about the American planning academy deciding to turn itself into 4chan while I was off reading a book or something? Huh? YOU KIDS DON’T MAKE ME TURN THIS CAR AROUND.

Rulez

There have been many public goodbyes to the list, including good citizens who are much less likely than I am to use their middle finger to explain things. I regret my public exit–I should have just left rather than upsetting people–but this time, it’s good for the “it’s our party, you shaddup” crowd to come face-to-face with the reality of the Thing, and the Thing is: it’s not your party anymore. You don’t get to set the terms of the discussion if you aren’t going to treat other scholars with respect. The rest of us really, truly, would rather respect each other, and you know, talk about planning research. And there are a lot of the rest of us.

A big bunch of us were not happy with the way the PAB tried to back-door dismantle the language around diversity in planning education standards because wow, apparently, diversity is controversial instead of what it is (aka, the very least planning should do in the justice realm). And now a big bunch of people seem to be saying that we’re done with the Old Skool term-setting on PLANET.

Haterz

Virtually all moderated listservs are boring, but I’m ready for content-oriented boring. The planning academy has, for too long, allowed itself to be an ad hoc field more centered on maintaining status hierarchies in the academy (and out) than helping young scholars–all of them, every single one of them, not just your little favorites who look just like you and talk just like you and defer to you, but all of ’em, even the ones that think you are wrong sometimes. We’re also supposed to be here for students to help them form and act on their visions to make cities better.

Being unwilling or unable to do those things in favor of status quo maintenance? That’s a sign of an intellectually moribund field.

Planners have got real work to do. The real problems in US cities are almost too terrifying for me to think about: our mass incarceration/public execution system that is killing Black Americans would be a good place to start any list of “things we should think about and work on” together. We got people trying to pass “no infill/no bike lanes” legislation. We don’t solve these problems by telling jokes that degrade each other or by bullying people when they try to tell you what’s wrong.

We solve them, I think, by creating a big, inclusive, powerful coalition of people who listen to each other, treat each other well, and who use our energies to do some good, at least, in a rotten world.

Aristotle on whether Black voters should vote for Bernie or Hill

Charles Blow breaks it down in his column Stop Bernie-Splaining to Black Voters. Just read it.

But here:

Tucked among all this Bernie-splaining by some supporters, it appears to me, is a not-so-subtle, not-so-innocuous savior syndrome and paternalistic patronage that I find so grossly offensive that it boggles the mind that such language should emanate from the mouths — or keyboards — of supposed progressives.

I wish I could write like that. Oh, and just shut your gobbyhole or keep your fingers quiet unless you are pointing out resources to read, ideas, data, or otherwise being useful. Deliberating a candidate’s position is quite different than telling somebody what their interests are or should be, particularly when a group of people, say, Black folks, have been telling us what their interests are for a long damn time and decidedly few mainstream political candidates have done much to listen or act on those interests. Some Black people continue to tell us about their interests with Black Lives Matter: how’s about we clean up the justice shitshow that are the innumerable police departments and practices that kill off Black people and let their killers go free?

That is an interest. And it’s being stated clear enough.

This kind of talking down happens frequently to voters; rural voters are dumb, and they don’t vote their interests, yada yada. It’s just exceptionally bad when Bernie supporters do it to Black voters because progressives should know better.

Lots of people seem to vote their values rather than their interests, or their pocketbook. And people’s interests and values change over time.

Even if you are voting your interests, Blow is also correct that many other judgements also influence how individuals evaluate leadership. It’s not just who has your interests in his or her heart: it’s also who might be able and willing to deliver. Good leadership is difficult, and thus evaluating good leadership is also difficult. And the future is a place and time we don’t know as much about as we’d like to.

There is so much good political theory on interests and representation that I don’t even know where to begin to list. One nice paper from Theodore Banditt (that I unfortunately can’t find a free pdf of) systematically lays out the various ways that political philosophers have described interest, and that one gets us a good reading list.

On to Aristotle and interests: In the Politics he notes that people are not good judges of interests when their own interests are in question, and it’s a good insight. I’m using the Rackham translation:

For instance, it is thought that justice is equality, and so it is, though not for everybody but only for those who are equals; and it is thought that inequality is just, for so indeed it is, though not for everybody, but for those who are unequal; but these partisans strip away the qualification of the persons concerned, and judge badly. And the cause of this is that they are themselves concerned in the decision, and perhaps most men are bad judges when their own interests are in question.

That last bit gets me–καὶ κρίνουσι κακῶς–“and judge badly.” Aristotle is a bit of a grind to read in Greek, at least for me, but this little addition makes me smile even in the original. You could also translate κακῶς as “wrongly”, but “badly” adds more punch to the English translation. κακῶς is a problem for me here, as it appears often in Greek, in both ancient text and New Testament, and like the English word “Bad”, it can mean quite a bit, ranging from evil to incompetence. Those, and just about everything in the range between them, are “bad” in English or get described as κακῶς in Greek. The context here suggests that κακῶς means incompetently.

He goes on to discuss what he has said in the EN before:

because men are bad judges where they themselves are concerned, but also, inasmuch as both parties put forward a plea that is just up to a certain point, they think that what they say is absolutely just.

People go wrong in their judgements of what just and what is equal because their interests blind them to other factors that matter in the adjudication of who is “equal” and what is “just.”

Bernie supporters want the Black vote, and thus the Black vote should vote with Bernie supporters.

Dear My Writing Today: I hate you

Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate Hate

Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate. You.

USC Transport Faculty respond to the LA Times Metro Ridership story

Metrans Transportation Institute asked a group of us to respond to the LA Times Ridership story, which you can find here.

Genevieve Giuliano is the Ferraro Chair in Effective Government at the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California, and Director of the METRANS Transportation Center writes about Placing the Numbers in Context:

While the Los Angeles Time’s interpretation of the study wasn’t incorrect, it targets LA Metro without providing context on what is happening in in other metropolitan regions. To really understand the study, we should first take a look at what was presented. Over the past few years, transit ridership has declined across the Southern California region. Some places have lost more ridership than others (Orange County, Santa Monica). It looks like LA Metro is in the middle of the pack, as we would expect for the largest agency in the region. If ridership is declining everywhere, there are systemic factors at work that are independent of any single transit agency’s policies. These factors may include changes in: 1) economic conditions, 2) work patterns; 3) population characteristics; 4) substitutes for transit.

Sandip Chakrabarti, Ph.D. is a Research Associate at the USC METRANS Transportation Center. His research focuses on the analysis of land use-transportation interactions, travel behavior, public transit planning and operations, multi-modal system performance measurement and monitoring, and impact analysis of new transportation investments. His entry is found here.

I did some quick number crunching, and it seems to me that Metro, the transit powerhouse of the Southern California region, has not made great decisions over the 2006-2014 period. See Figure 1 (top panel). Over the period, and in the group of the largest U.S. transit agencies in terms of their 2014 ridership (unlinked passenger trips or UPT), Metro has had one of the lowest increases in both UPT (as % – in fact a decrease) and in the number of boardings added (again, a decrease) per dollar spent in capital expenses. One can argue that Los Angeles is different and that it is far more challenging to plan for transit, and to attract and retain riders here. But the public can question, and Metro needs to have a good explanation. The 1995-2005 period, however, was different. See Figure 1 (bottom panel). In this period, just after most of the Metro rail network was built, Metro experienced a substantial increase in ridership and yield compared to its peers. Does that mean Metro is doing the right thing by building more rail in the region? I don’t think the answer is an easy “yes.” It’s all about building the right service in the right place at the right time.

James Moore is director of the Transportation Engineering program in the USC Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Vice Dean for Academic Programs in the Viterbi School of Engineering. He writes Busways are a Better Alternative:

The LA Times article focuses some overdue media daylight on specious policy claims by MTA and others that rail lines are key to improving transportation services in Los Angeles. The MTA responded in the article with the standard agency smoke screen: Let us finish the system. They report that once they achieve a “complete buildout,” the rail system will perform. It won’t. We’ll spend billions more on rail at the expense of bus service, and continue to drive down transit ridership as we force riders off buses. No one currently with the agency will still be employed by the agency in the distant future the MTA is claiming to predict. None of the parties responsible for spending on rail transit will be standing before the public to be held accountable. They will be long retired, and not available to explain why the future they promised never materialized.

Marlon Boarnet is a renowned authority on urban economics, urban growth patterns, transportation, and regional science. He notes that the system management perspective gets us better planning:

But let’s not kid ourselves. Sales taxes are, if anything, an exercise in the politically practical and far from an effective transportation finance tool. We should be exploring mileage fees (ideally weighted based on fuel consumption or pollutants emitted from the vehicle) and congestion pricing. Seventy-five percent of all transportation funds spent in the greater L.A. area are from local (sub-state) tax sources. We need to aggressively move toward a transportation system that finances our investments fairly, by charging persons for the pollution and congestion that they create. While we are at it, let’s be sure to tax the new rideshare services, Uber, Lyft, and the like, based on mileage fees, with higher taxes for rideshare services that occur during congested time periods in congested locations. Use the revenues from well-crafted mileage fees to maintain and, as needed, expand our highways, fill potholes in the roads, expand bus service, and complete our rail system.

And then obviously I’m me. I write that Angelenos have to commit to the systems, and politicians have to show leadership: can read all of it here.

Metro also needs to do better in working with employers and with other institutions. For instance, Metro did absolutely nothing when USC discontinued its support for transit riders. Regardless of whether USC’s transit subsidy program attracted many riders, it was a signaling and leadership moment when USC axed its program. Metro’s leaders didn’t say “boo” in response. The LA DOT didn’t say “boo.” For all the prancing around our Mayor and other state Democrats do about alternative transportation, they did diddly to stand up to USC. When one of the region’s largest employers kicks transit support to the curb, agencies like Metro and the DOT, and our Mayor, need to show leadership, set the tone, and say “Hey, wait a minute. We know this program costs you money, but we’re trying to accomplish something here; we’re trying to build transit as a way of life in this city. Why are you bugging out on us?” That episode is so discouraging because it shows how much LA’s elected leadership wants to dig into taxpayers’ pockets at sales tax time to make sure the pretty trains get built, but how little real political capital our politicians wield in helping riders ride the pretty trains once they actually get built.

Sarah Manguos on writing from what is small, cheap, and false

We’ve been reading Isaiah Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty (pdf) in our class on justice. Our focus is on the first bits–the ideas about noninterference and coercion. This time reading it, I found myself much more interested in the second half material on self-mastery than I have ever been. Berlin and Aristotle have proved to be a fairly potent combination in playing about my mind throughout this week.

Philosophy in the latter part of the 20th century makes mastering the self more difficult because it becomes less clear, at a metaphysical level, what the self is, and it has gotten rather complicated, and mastering it even more so, but let’s just go with the idea that there is a self and you have some ability to discipline it for now. (There is less evidence of this in my case than I care to discuss, but…moving on.)

These ideas were floating around in my head this morning as I read this lovely essay from Sarah Manguso in the New York Times on writers and envy:

In 1818, Keats wrote to his publisher, “I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.” His poem “Endymion” had recently been savaged by critics, one of whom called it “imperturbable driveling idiocy.” Keats’s terminal tuberculosis didn’t take full hold for at least another year, but Byron wryly remarked that Keats was ultimately “snuff’d out” by a bad review. But Keats also wrote, to another of his publishers, “If Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.” As leaves to a tree. A tree does not leaf out of envy of other trees. It leafs out all by itself, within a system of life and light, matter and time. Writing out of envy will not produce a tree in bloom. It will produce an expression of envy, and envy’s voice is ugly, small, cheap and false.

So inspiring. Write on, friends, from life and light, matter and time. Stretch your branches into the sun.