I was part of the Gen X world who experienced that brief moment in time when the US educational system decided it was going to become like a normal country and start using metric. I absolutely loved it. It made so much sense, and to this day, I can move readily between volume, distance, and weight measures quite readily.

The problem has *always* been Celsius. It means nothing to me. I don’t mean doing the conversion. I can do that. It’s just in reading or conversation, I just don’t have a sense of whether a measurement in Celsius is relatively hot or relatively cold. I have always felt very bad about this, and always assumed someday I’d have a better grasp of it. But it hasn’t come.

One of my most wonderful students Dustin Wong who has traveled at lot but is I believe originally from Singapore overhead me describe this problem, and he said to me “Fahrenheit means nothing to me.” Since I’m pretty sure Dustin is 40 times smarter than me (Dustin actually has a legit shot at TRULY being the Smartest urbanist in the room), his comment made me feel much better.

I was stuck at the cancer center waiting and waiting and waiting for my imaging appointment and I decided to take myself in hand and try to learn what Celsius means relative to my own understanding of temperature (what I call “the Lisadex”) and Fahrenheit. Also, I decided to do a silly font because waiting at the cancer center is depressing and blows.

The result follows:

I couldn’t really find a dataset I wanted to fiddle with this week, and I’m feeling rotten, so I just did a little drawing of some empires. Now, I just Googled around for some general timelines, and I think one reason why the Mayan Empire is so long is the way people have constructed the definition of the Mayan Empire, but it’s still old. It might be that it is more like 3,000 (like Egyptian) but…I did what I did.

Mostly, I got kind of interested in the over-emphasis that the Roman Emperors get. If you include Byzantium, yes, the time period is long, but I guess I still don’t see Byzantine leaders studied and storied as much the emperors of the western empire. The Republic by this accounting actually held out at little bit longer. The Emperor period seems longer I think just because there are so many Emperors, largely because they murdered each other left and right.

Anyhoodily I’m sure there empire in SE Asia and throughout Africa that deserve a bar here, these are just the ones that popped into my head when I was drawing this morning. (Keep in mind, these are compared for no reason other than I am stuck in bed feeling like garbage today.

If you have one you want to me do, feel free to email me.

LA Metro is just finishing up a project that is very dear to my heart because I think it’s pretty important. Transit advocates sometimes fall into a trap sometimes–some transit lovers are uncritical and they will advocate for projects that really maybe never need to be built. Bad projects do exist, and the suck resources away from the agency. As a result transit skeptics find it easy to write off advocates.

Another problem advocates face, particularly in Los Angeles where transit riders are such a minority, is helping people understand why some projects really are damn good projects. I’ve found that to be the case with the Regional Connector: often, when somebody asks me why it’s such a nice new part of the network, I find myself describing how different trips will be possible with no or fewer transfers. Unfortunately, stated that way, the regional connector sounds like it’s solving a “me” problem–that is a problem that irritates me and the few people who are like me, but isn’t really objectively an improvement.

One nice way of characterizing the improvement is simply that kids in East LA will be able to take a one-seat ride to the ocean. That should matter to people–it does to me.

Nonetheless I’ve dipped in out of graph theory attempts to characterize why the regional connector is so nice from a *network possiblity* perspective. In transit, we have tons and tons of ways of measuring outputs (passengers, etc) and some inputs (usually monetary, but operator-hours, etc). But advocates have few ways of discussing the physicality of the network in short, summary measures. And I’m not suggesting that we should always just look at one metric to understanding a network–we should use a bunch, but I do think there are some key calculations that help me show just how nice the regional connector is for the network.

I first encountered some measures in Vulcan Vuchic’s 2005 textbook. He’s got a *boatland* of cool network characterization and performance measures in there. I set my class on working with some of them–I used the Madrid network for a class project because I had some students in there who would insist on just counting nodes and lines in the toy networks I gave them instead of using the equations, and Madrid has a very complex network that would cross your eyeballs if you tried brute force the count.

I got to thinking that one way to help us understand how the Regional Connector serves as a nice additional is to simply look at the new trips it makes possible. This would just be a matter of looking at the transit lines, the stations, and their connections–but if you know the proper number of stations, you know the possible origins and destinations. To get the proper number of stations, you count them all up and remove the duplicates:

Then, to sort the O-D possibilities, you just use that N and N-1:

Here’s what you get when you do this for three LA rail network states: Current potential trips (O-D pairs), when the Regional Connector comes online, and after Metro finishes all the new bits of the Purple Line and Crenshaw (All). (Note the base network includes the Orange Line, and that I set up the Regional Connector lines based on the promised new stations, Chinatown station being open, and Metro’s planned goals for interlining the Gold Line (I’m sorry, I never remember their letter names) and the Expo line for that East LA to Santa Monica Ride and Blue line to Gold line headed north).

Now these network measures are obviously partial. It might be cool, for example to weight all these O-D possibilities by existing and projected ridership by station (I don’t have those data because Metro thinks I’m a gangster or because I don’t know where to find them, one or the other.)

And, just by way of illustrating that, there’s another idea that Vuchic suggests–the notion of directness. you can figure out how many O-D pairs are possible without a transfer with:

In each network state, delta goes down–let’s interpret that. In theory, it would be nice for delta to be a relatively large number (between 0 and 1). The larger the number, the more one-seat trips you are offering. In our case, the amount of OD pairs just jumps so much that the delta goes down: in the order given above, from 0.18 now to 0.15 with the regional connector to 0.10 with all the new line openings in the next few years. Delta becomes much less an issue with greater frequencies. Again…this is just one measure it’s not meant to say the network on the whole is worse off–it’s that this one measure, directness, declines with the new lines. It makes sense.

Sorry my equations are wonky but I am no mood to futz with making everything perfect-looking.

So good-O to whoever thought up the Regional Connector. It’s a goodie. I raise my glass to y’all.

I can’t guarantee this is all 100 percent perfect because I’ve had kind of a bad week, but it is interesting enough to share. Hope you enjoyed.

All good things,
L

There’s been some conjecture that Covid lockdowns were the death blows that finally killed off American transit, which is, as David Levinson pointed out, always in a state of permanent financial crisis.

I had my students do some digging around to look at the ridership figures from various agencies, and one of my brilliants students, Christopher Winkels, dug up a spreadsheet from APTA.

I struggled a bit with this simply because everything these days is struggles but also because I don’t want to overstate or understate what is going on. By way of explanation, all of these data are December ridership figures. Things started opening up in 2021, and so the best comparison of the come-back I had in the data I felt would be December 2020—middle of the pandemic—to December 2021.

The pre-pandemic by way of comparison is an average of the past three Decembers (2016 to 2019).

What agencies are selected? The ones Lisa was interested, which means all of the big ones, some decent-sized southern systems, and Utah. Why Utah? Dunno. Thought it might be interesting.

Sorry about the over-plotting, but honestly, this was as good as it got.

What is this showing? Well this was my first at the data, what we see here are two points–Dec 2020, and December 2021. They are not compared to each other. Instead ridership in both years is displayed as a percent of the pre-Covid (2019) ridership. I think of this as how well each agency’s ridership has recovered. As we’d expect, 2020 values are smaller, and most agencies seem to be bouncing back decently, so that it’s possible that by next year they could be pretty close to their pre-COVID levels. (They might be there now for all I know; I diddled around so damn long with these data, we might have new data by now.)

What is going on with BART? Did I screw up those data points?

I think the above graphic is really the way to be thinking about where ridership is at and where it is going, but I also data going back 2002 and I felt like I had to use it. Be patient about this one loading: I slowed it down so that I could read it.

These kinds of post usually bring out the mansplainers in droves about how I should have all these differently, what the right way to do them is, and for any dude who feels the need to bug me with those comments…absolutely nothing is keeping you from making your own graphics the right way, the “you” way, Chief. I did these to see if I could learn from them and just decided to share them for sheets and giggles. I think I have a better handle on what’s up, YMMV. Go get ’em.

I read something recently about being unreliable:

The reason why you are unreliable is that you don’t comprehend the sanctity of a promise and keeping your word. Your lack of prioritization is another factor that affects your ability to be reliable and dependable.

That sentence was a slap in the face and then I checked on the author and found they are in their mid-20s. That explains a lot.

I am retiring from the university and moving back where I grew up for many reasons, the top two being 1) my mother has nobody else to help her out and 2) I have become unreliable.

I like neither of these reasons, but the second is exceptionally hard for me. I don’t like it. To be honest, I was never particularly reliable in the first place: I was slapped into reliably by parents who didn’t understand that my unreliability was related to my cognition. Society demands women do everything for everybody, and nobody wants their doormat/maid to be unreliable. Capitalism requires a girl with no family support to fit a mold in order to make a living and support herself. I was just reading in an English novel the phrase “she has her living to earn.” Indeed.

I did all right, I guess, keeping it together over the years. I mostly relied on substances and other bad coping mechanisms to shove my functioning into an acceptable shape. And then I hit 50, and absolutely none of it worked anymore. All of my cognitive differences came thundering back, refusing to be covered up and put away. Things I had spent years and years standing up to and making work were no longer manageable. My dyslexia came back with a dreadful vengeance so that now, writing an email takes me a very long time, and has to be proofread by husband or a sympathetic student, or I sound like a lunatic.

I’m not sure what went haywire, but something did, and I just can’t do very much any more that involves making ideas into words.

Many days I am unable to read at all. Reading has been the greatest solace of my life, and to have it out of reach pains me more than I can communicate.

I very much do not enjoy being at a disadvantage with words.

My autism, too, has decided that it doesn’t like being denied, either. Brightness and noise that I was once able to withstand now paralyze me. Los Angeles is a beloved place. It is also bright and noisy. I can not manage being outside when the sun is up most of the time now, even with sunglasses. Walking from my house to the car is agony. Waiting for the bus feels like torture. Being jostled on public transit feels like a hard punch. Having young people whiz by me on a bike on campus—a delightful thing, by any account—causes my vision to blur and my head to ache.

I have my mother in my head telling me to stop being so dramatic, stop being so self-important, stop whining. That used to work for me; I could take the sensory beatings of the world and keep going. Now I can’t. I ran out of coping. Maybe my autism got worse? Hard to tell.

All of these things, along with aging and an illness, have made me very tired. I didn’t know such fatigue existed—I always thought that people who told me they needed to rest were a) more sensible than me and just taking care of themselves and/or b) not part of the hustle. I didn’t judge them particularly as lazy, but I didn’t understand that fatigue just lays you out and takes all you have so that standing up and taking a shower feels like running 10 miles.

Together, all these things have made me unreliable. I am trying to hold on long enough so that my PhD students I have can finish their studies and launch their careers. But it is hard to hold on, and I feel a great deal of shame about not being always to keep the appointments that I make, or taking longer than I said I would doing something. I used never to return reviews in late. Now I always late with everything. Saying yes to anything feels like self-abuse and lying to whoever made the request.

A few years ago, I began refusing speaking invitations because I knew that there was a big chance I would need to cancel and leave people hanging with an empty panel chair. I thought that would be enough to cover my decline. It wasn’t.

I do not like being unreliable. I judge it harshly. So does the world. People do not understand why I need to stop and slow down even more than I am because right now I seem to them to be barely moving. I wish I could help people understand that I did the best I could, and I am still doing the best I can. I realize, more than they do, that the best I can is not particularly good according to the standards I used to have.

Letting go of my profession has been agony, but it is what it is, as they say. My colleagues are mostly wonderful, and I shall miss them. Surprisingly, the person I thought was my closest friend and mentor withdrew from me entirely and now barely speaks to me—only when a student needs something. I am, no doubt, a terrible disappointment to him. He did a lot to help me understand the university and get my research done. I miss him and grieve for the relationship, but watching me decline must be hard, too, just as experiencing it is. He has younger colleagues he’s generally always preferred to me anyway, and, despite my sadness, I understand and wish them all the best. Doors close.

The very good news, I think, is that as I step away from professional life, I am seeing so many wonderful new young people step in. The 21st century does not need an old white lady teaching justice classes in it—there are too many bright people from all over and with all different backgrounds who want the role and will move the needle more than I ever could or will. It is wonderful to watch them become who they are as scholars and planners even as I let go. The future amazes me still.

And my dear husband, tirelessly cheerful, compliments the bad art I make because I have to express myself somehow, and I can’t trust words anymore. He talks about the things we shall do when I’m done with work: going out on a boat; puttering in the garden; making more bad art. I have been listening to a series of lectures and interviews by artists. Most of them became artists young. Now and then, one will come along who took their first art class at 50. They give me a great deal of hope that my ideas won’t all wilt on the tangled vines of a mind I no longer seem able to control. We’ll see how it goes.

On Monday I reported that I’ve been asked to join two editorial boards Planning Theory, and Planning Theory and Practice, and I went to send to send the invitation emails to my department chair because they like to brag about such things, but I Icould only find one invitation. In my mind, I *swear* there was another, but….I can’t find it. So…..

1. We now have evidentiary proof that I am really, truly incompetant at organizing my emails, and Outlook does f*ck-all to help by being sucky at this, too, and having bad search functions.
2. If anybody associated with Planning Theory and Practice is reading this and I have not been asked, my apologies, it was an honest mistake, and I am happy to keep reviewing just as a regular scholarly reviewer.
3. If I have been asked, how wonderful, I am honored to serve.
4. I still really miss Ed Soja.

I really have not kept up with this effort very well, and I do apologize. I just haven’t had all that much to say in the past six months, and my health has been uncooperative…which brings me to my major news: I am phasing into retirement over the next few years. I am going to do a few service things I think people are owed, and I have some students to support yet, but after that I am laying down my pen and going to go sit in a boat–assuming my health holds out.

I have a bunch of written materials that I don’t really have the energy to publish through normal channels, so I may throw that up here, with the full assent that it is not particularly well-vetted and you are getting what you pay for. I may just toss it. We will see.

My reflection today is short and in gratitude. This summer I was ask to join the editorial boards of both Planning Theory and Planning Theory and Practice, two leading English planning theory journals. It’s wonderful and I’m very happy, but it’s also funny because I was one of those students who grumbled and whined and complained (endlessly) about planning theory.

When I was young, I had all this ambition, and now that I’ve done the things I meant to, including a bunch of things I hadn’t ever thought I would ever do (planning theory contributor)…all I can think now is how much I wish Ed Soja were still here with us so I could tell him and he would laugh at me, after the rough time I gave him, with his big laugh, big smile, and big, adventurous mind.

Marty Wach left us a few week ago, and I hardly need to add my voice to the many, many students and colleagues who were much closer to him than I was. But I am going to.   He is a huge loss, and very unexpected. He has been so active in things here in California for so long, right up to the end, that I think everybody is walking around shocked as well as sad. I didn’t know Marty dreadfully well—we never overlapped anywhere, weirdly enough for all the time I’ve spent in CA—but he was warm and lovely. He was at Berkeley when I was at UCLA, and only returned to UCLA once I left.  I think one reason we seldom interacted was how similar we were—if a committee had Marty appointed to it, they didn’t usually reach out to me, too, and he was very generous with his time with public agencies, so we seldom saw each other. 

Marty genuinely believed in good policy, and you would think that should go without saying in a public affairs scholar, but it doesn’t. He was intellectually rigorous and extremely generous. Even though we didn’t know each other well, he always had time for me, and I suspect that many others can say the same thing.

When I was an arrogant punk grad student, I discounted the old dudes for the most part–and I had some pretty good reasons for doing so (so, so many old white guys telling me “justice is a fuzzy concept, nobody knows what it means, it’s a waste of time, etc”). Marty never did that (nobody at UCLA did that, bless them), and I remember the exact moment that I began to take Marty really, really seriously, not just as an established scholar and kindly man, but as a thinker about topics I cared about.

It was some Metro-sponsored meeting about their rail stuff, and Marty was on panel about futures, and he kept coming back to the past. He pointed out that Metro had made a lot of promises to south LA when they built the Blue Line decades earlier. (It is now the A Line.). At the time, Metro was a relatively newly merged agency seeking to establish its usefulness in managing a rail construction program, and South LA had just had the uprising following the Rodney King verdict. The Blue Line would brings job, opportunities, development….they said. Welp, the region and Metro got its rail line, which is an amenity, certainly, but not much of the other things that planners like to trot out to impoverished people as promises.

Marty said in that meeting, 18 years later:
“We need to deliver to south LA what we promised to south LA. We need to make good on that.”

The world slowed down a bit as I realized: everybody in the room thinks he is being quixotic–an academic. But he’s right. The idea that planning should be expected, as a matter of course, to deliver on what it promises even it takes a long time was important to me then, and it still is now. Marty wasn’t a fool; he later in the day said something about how one reason he loved to study technology is because, unlike like structures and institutions, technologies actually change (also insightful.) The idea that the guy would use his position–his basically untouchable position (because by then he was already a giant)–to say the inconvenient thing, instead of the thing that promoted himself, to remind people in the room of the harms done when those people thought the harms and broken promises where safely past–was exactly the point of becoming untouchable as an academic in the first place.

He was so loved–his wife and kids along with legions of devoted students and colleagues. That’s a life well-lived.

Marty has a huge cv of wonderful work, but my favorites are his work on LA sprawl and the streetcars and some work he did on air quality and governance (in part because it get right at the heart of the question about planning delivering on promises):

Wachs, M. (1984) Autos, Transit, and the Sprawl of Los Angeles: The 1920s, Journal of the American Planning Association, 50:3, 297-310, DOI: 10.1080/01944368408976597

Wach, M. and J. Dill. (1999) “Transportation and Air Quality: History, Interpretation, and Insights for Regional Governance in Transportation and Air Quality: History, Interpretation, and Insights for Regional Governance” in Transportation Research Board and National Research Council. 1999. Governance and Opportunity in Metropolitan America. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/6038 . pp. 296-323.

A selection of obituaries from around the web:

UCLA ITS Obituary

UCLA Luskin’ Memorium

If the clips I am seeing this morning are any indicator, kids and pets make the Globes way more interesting, just as they have made class more interesting for the past year.

Watching them, I finally figured out why op-eds from people preaching about how to “professionalize” your Zoom get on my nerves so much. Those people are pretending like our work lives matter more than our home lives, like kids and pets and occasional messes are the deviant and artificial part of our lives, compared the work-bots they want us to project, instead of the most worthy and wonderful parts of it.

I have read “the death of the office due to coronavirus” pieces, and I have no idea, but for all the pain and suffering the virus has wrought (over 2 million people globally dead now), I have been grateful for the chance to share my pets and places with students, and for the insight on the possibilities for capitalism and professional life that doesn’t act like it’s the end of the world if a kid interrupts a meeting to announce his sister as a loaded diaper. We have, if we have beening living right, extended each other a lot of grace for these things. Remember when having to bring your child to work because of a problem at daycare was embarrassing or a disaster—so unprofessional. Now it’s part of it–still embarrassing, still distracting, still tiring–but it’s real, it’s happened to us all—and it’s all fine.

Is there any chance we keep extending this grace to each other even as we go back with vaccines and the like? Working women need childcare; it’s dumb to romanticize it otherwise, like we can all just have kids around all the time. But I hope we take this time to critically examine the rank stupidity–and harm–of the capitalist office where emotions, “bringing your home problems to work” and other natural things aren’t treated like weaknesses or sins.

We are whole people who deserve to live our lives in all dimensions at all times.

One of my wonderful students, Jody Liu, is a part of an on-campus movement to get rid USC’s security as it exists today. I support student-led efforts for either reform or abolition, as our security needs to change. Students should lead in re-envisioning security because it’s their campus and honestly I feel like the old folks (this includes me) on campus have run out of ideas. Here is the intro from one of the zine’s makers:

We’ve spent the past couple of months putting together the zine “Abolish DPS: Envisioning a #PoliceFreeUSC”, which elucidates the connections between the University of Southern California (USC) and the prison industrial complex. In particular, we highlight violent incidents that have been inflicted on the surrounding South Central communities. We then outline our vision for prison abolition at USC.

In full disclosure, my own interactions as a person with a disability with on-campus security has fallen into two categories: a) great interactions with mostly women who get that they are part of a community and b) miserable, escalated confrontations with dudes who get off thinking they are commandos by shouting at me to move faster (I can’t) or to not be where I am (you can freaking ask instead of shout, dickhead). I’d like to see campus security protect the livelihoods of the people who have made the effort to be a part of the place and find other work for the dudes who use the job to recreate the power trips they took in high school sticking the small kid’s heads in toilets.