The power of consensus

My recent post about sunsets has attracted a number of comments, mostly relating to my argument that park-and-rides are not the answer. When I wrote that post, though, I was thinking more generally and just used the park-and-ride issue as a convenient example. I had a couple of other necessary evils and unsustainable goods in mind.

One idea that's been coming up again and again is consensus. The most striking recent example comes from Barbara McCann of the National Complete Streets Coalition, who visited Copenhagen for the Velo-City conference, and observed that "what is most remarkable in Europe is not a single engineering technique, but the political consensus that Complete Streets are a fundamental tenet of transportation system design, construction, and operation. From this consensus spring a whole host of facilities, policies, and attention to detail that results in a system geared to travel by people, rather than vehicles."

It's not just complete streets: Yonah Freemark observed a pro-transit consensus at work in Paris, and Dave Olsen found one in favor of both transit and complete streets in Hasselt. Certainly if we had a consensus in favor of moving away from cars and towards transit, cycling and walking we would be able to get a lot done.

I get the feeling that Jarrett Walker has been dancing around this issue as well when he talks about railways vs. democracy in India, or funding transit in Chicago.

It also comes up when people talk about Mike Bloomberg, Janette Sadik-Khan and Marty Markowitz, and in the past about Bob Moses and Jane Jacobs. The authoritarian Chinese and the military dictatorship backing Jaime Lerner in Curitiba have both acted to boost transit. How much consensus did any of these people have, and how has it affected their achievements?

It has also come up in this excellent episode of This American Life where Ira Glass and Alex Blumberg compare New York, Jamaica and Barbados. I think this should be required listening for anyone interested in financing government services in a tough economy. What I took away from it is that at one point Jamaica and Barbados were both at the place where New York is now. The Barbadian political, labor and business leaders worked together to forge a consensus, and their economy is prospering. The Jamaican leaders continued to attack and point fingers, and their economy got worse.

There's no question that consensus is a big help in accomplishing your goals. But is it the only way? The only sustainable way?

The value of glamour

I just discovered that a couple weeks ago Cyclelicious ran a summary of my series on glamour and transit. But Engineer Scotty's discussion of glamour made it clear that my original definition ("Everything non-tangible that affects mode choice: status markers, fantasies, the presence of attractive people (or conversely, their absence)") was not an accurate description of this concept as I use it.

Scotty's inclusion of things like aesthetic, status and self-actualization under the category of "glamour" are consistent with my previous definition. They're not wrong, but they don't fit the category as I actually use it. In fact, I'm using glamour in a very technical sense. I'm building on the concept as it's been developed by Virginia Postrel. Her best explanation to date is probably her Weekly Standard article "A Power to Persuade," and her best discussion of glamour in transportation is "Up, Up and Away" in the Atlantic Monthly. You can read more in Postrel's article archive, and at her Deep Glamour blog, which has frequent guest posts.

The understanding that I've gotten from Postrel's writing is that glamour is an illusion, and therefore it is unobtainable. It vanishes if you try to grasp it. Despite the multiple attempts by Postrel and her guest bloggers to pin down what's glamorous and what's not, I've come to the conclusion that it's an incredibly personal thing. Like anything personal, it may be shared by millions, but it may not.

Most critically, and I'm not sure that Postrel has come to this conclusion yet, I'm convinced that glamour is an escape fantasy. Her review of a book called Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House makes it clear how glamour's effect on people is proportional to their yearning for a different life.

Another important aspect that doesn't always come through in Postrel's writings is the distinction between having glamour and being dazzled by glamour. Glamour is a tool for marketing and advertising, whether you're selling computers, houses, cars, bus rides, government subsidies, politicians - or yourself, as a potential friend, mate or sex partner. By tapping into people's escape fantasies, you can harness that longing they feel inside and attach it to your product.

I would argue that it's a rare person who doesn't have some escape fantasies, so you shouldn't feel guilty about being susceptible to glamour. You should also keep in mind that eventually glamour wears off and reality sets in, and if you don't have some underlying value you're going to be facing some problems.

It seems to me that there are four ways that people can interact with glamour:
attraction, fascination, emulation and creation. If it helps, you can think about people being attracted by the glamour of Lady Gaga, fascinated by what makes people pay attention to her, trying to emulate her, and then Gaga herself creating the glamour. If you don't get Lady Gaga, pick your own glamorous woman: Marilyn Monroe? Marlene Dietrich? Danica Patrick?

In terms of transportation, let's take vintage streetcars. There's the attraction that many people feel to streetcars, and the fascination that some people have for streetcars. Just as with a glamorous icon like Marilyn Monroe, people have varying degrees of success when trying to emulate vintage streetcars, from heritage systems to modern streetcars to the tourist "trolleys" sometimes described as "transvestite buses." And just as Madonna created her own, new glamorous image while incorporating elements of Marilyn Monroe's image, the Portland Streetcar has built on elements of the old trolleys to create its own glamour.

In terms of the clusters of factors that influence people's choice of transit over cars, Glamour only refers to the attraction that people feel. The fascination that people feel for trolleys is only relevant to mode choice if it makes them feel attracted. We can emulate the glamour of other forms of travel, or create new glamour, in order to attract more riders and subsidies.

The effect of travel modes on people's personal glamour is actually not a Glamour factor, but a Value factor. It's fairly well-known that customers, friends and dates tend to be attracted to different degrees if they see someone on foot, on a bicycle, in a beat-up car, in a fancy car, on the subway, or on a bus. Who gets attracted to what is, again, personal and context-dependent.

The key is that the people who choose their travel mode in order to impress others are doing it not because they're attracted to the glamour (they may or may not be), but because they find value in it. Saying "I'll be so cute riding this bike" is about Glamour; saying "Guys will think I'm so cute riding this bike" is about Value. The Value of Glamour.

The Republican strategy

Back in March, Streetsblog reported that of the $143 million that the State Legislature cut from the MTA budget last year, $118 million was actually from taxes that are "dedicated" to the MTA. The legislature engaged in some "creative accounting" and managed to un-dedicate them. You would think that this would be gravy for anyone who wanted to challenge an incumbent this fall, but many of the challengers are staying away from it. In large part this is because Democrats running in primary elections are often seeking endorsements from other incumbent state legislators who voted for this deal.

Republicans are under no such constraints, and one of them has finally taken advantage of this. Staten Island express bus rider Nicole Malliotakis is challenging incumbent Janele Hyer-Spencer to represent the 60th Assembly district (PDF) that covers a chunk of Bay Ridge and the South Shore of Staten Island. Staten Island is in an interesting position with respect to congestion pricing: they already pay a bridge toll, so the 5.9% of District 60 residents who drive to Manhattan on weekdays would not have had to pay any more under Bloomberg's plan. Despite that, as Ben Kabak writes, she campaigned against congestion pricing, the Ravitch plan and bus lane enforcement cameras, and still had the gall to organize a "rally" against the MTA.

A month ago, while announcing her candidacy at a B37 bus stop, Malliotakis and Senator Marty Golden slammed Hyer-Spencer for her actions. Two weeks ago, Malliotakis reiterated the argument in an interview with the Staten Island Advance.

Malliotakis got Hyer-Spencer to embarrass herself with the absurd claim that "You have to be able to understand the technical nuances of these agencies," which the Advance mocked in an editorial the following day. She followed this up with a letter to the editor that appeared on Saturday. Yesterday the Advance's Tom Wrobleski pointed out the central failing of democracy in the Albany system: nobody knew what they were voting for; they just trusted Shelly Silver that it would work out for them.

In the Advance article, Hyer-Spencer pointed out a flaw in Malliotakis's logic: her mentor, Marty Golden, voted for the same budget. I'll go Hyer-Spencer one further and observe that during the negotiations on the Ravitch plan, Golden could have worked with progressive Democrats to establish a grand coalition in favor of rational pricing to balance out the massive driving subsidies that put bus riders at a disadvantage. That would have neutralized the power held by the Fare Hike Four as the most conservative and power-hungry members of the Democrats' slim majority. Instead, Golden decided to sit on his hands and let the Senate defund the MTA, betting that the Democrats' foolishness would bring his party back to power next year.

We can go even further than that. Malliotakis's big qualification is that she worked as the constituent liaison to the area for Governor Pataki, but of course Pataki was responsible for some of the worst cuts to the MTA budget - with the help of the Assembly Democrats and Senate Republicans, of course. It's kind of hard to portray yourself as a Pataki protege and a transit supporter at the same time.

Of course, that's the problem with big-party politics in New York State: it really helps to have endorsements, but some of the most powerful politicians on both sides are so anti-transit that it's hard not to kiss up to at least one troglodyte. If Malliotakis had decided to run as a Democrat and challenge Hyer-Spencer in the primary, who could she have gone to for an endorsement? Vincent Gentile? Lew Fidler? Carl Kruger?

So Malliotakis takes who's available and goes with it. She didn't have to choose this issue to attack Hyer-Spencer on, but she did. Hyer-Spencer voted for same-sex marriage and GENDA, and replacing her with a typical Republican would be a setback for those issues, but Malliotakis probably wouldn't be a typical Republican in the Assembly. In 2002 she interviewed Chazz Bono, the child of Sonny and Cher, who was then out as a lesbian and has since transitioned to life as a man, and was very sympathetic about Bono's relationships with women. She seems like much more of a libertarian. I wouldn't be surprised if her outrage about the Assembly's thievery is genuine.

For the Republicans, though, it looks like their strategy of letting the Democrats embarrass themselves and then moving in to take over is backfiring. The Capitol is reporting that their campaigns are having a much worse time than expected.

I am not a Republican, but let me suggest an alternative strategy for Golden and other Republicans who want to regain power in the state. How about actually leading? How about thinking of the interests of the entire state, not just your own party and its members?

If Marty Golden, or Brian Kolb, want to help New Yorkers get to work, they can reach across the aisle to Tom Duane and Dick Gottfried and find a way to toll the bridges. They could even appease their Republican base by bringing in some private companies to run transit, as long as they do it right. People remember that Pedro Espada came up with a crappy plan that fell apart a few months later. If Golden came up with a good plan that stuck, I think people would remember that too.

Maybe Golden will pass up the chance to be a grownup on this issue, preferring to play power politics. Maybe Malliotakis will wind up being the adult.

Values are personal, and also communal

A couple weeks ago, Engineer Scotty reworked his list of transit values, taking into account the four clusters I suggested: Availability, Value, Amenities and Glamour. In general I like his classification, but I have to disagree with him in a couple of areas.

In this post I'll deal with the notion of amenity as opposed to value. As I wrote in my original post, "This is where most of the individual variation comes in: one person's value is often another's amenity." Scotty takes the opposite position: "Value includes factors that any reasonable user might take into account, and aren't dependent on personal taste or preference. Important value-based factors include cost, timeliness, and safety."

Any salesperson will tell you that some factors matter a lot to some customers, and not at all to other customers. Wealthier people tend to be less sensitive to small variations in price (but they're not always). People who are retired, lazy or just generally more relaxed will care less about timeliness. Tough guys and tough women will care less about safety. To many of these people, low price, timeliness and safety may be amenities, not values. On the other hand, they may really care about onboard wifi, the daily bridge game, or whether they have to stand in the rain.

So why bother distinguishing between amenities and values? The distinction matters on the individual level, but also on the aggregate level, since different communities will value the same factor differently. It's commonly thought that people who live in small towns tend to hurry less than people in big cities.

Communities can also change their values over time. For example, a big selling point of cars used to be that you didn't have to walk as much. But now that people are getting obese, they're starting to reconsider. Weight Watchers dietitians recommend that car drivers who want to lose weight park far from their destinations, and transit riders get off the subway a stop early, to get in extra walking.

Being aware of these community values and how they vary and change helps us to better understand what will get people out of their cars. Of course, there are universal tendencies that lead people to place a lot of value on time and money, but they are not exceptionless. The answer is not to retreat into facile assumptions like "Atlantans really love driving," but to understand what it is they love about driving, and whether it's possible to provide that with transit. Assuming that everyone cares equally about timeliness, price and safety can lead to one-size-fits-all solutions that will not always work.

Appreciating sunsets

Photo: Mhilsenrad / Flickr
There's a particular theme I've been noticing more and more lately: strategies that are either praised as universally good or condemned as universally bad, but that are in fact neither. Some are quite good in the short term but unsustainable; others are generally bad but tolerated as necessary evils.

Borrowing money at interest is the ultimate unsustainable good. It's nice to have the cash flow, but in addition to the expense of debt service you sacrifice some long-term autonomy.

Park-and-ride lots are a good example of a necessary evil. Long term, they are not the answer, but in the short term they may be necessary to build a constituency for transit.

What these unsustainable goods and necessary evils have in common is their term limits. In the long term we want to see them go away.

There are two dangers here. The first is that we may not realize that something good is unsustainable, or that a necessary thing is actually evil. Then we might keep borrowing after the need is gone, or keep building park-and-rides that aren't necessary. The person who started the borrowing or the park-and-ride may know that it's not sustainable, but fail to pass that information on to those who are in charge later.

The second danger is that many short-term solutions have a way of sticking around. Someone can divert the borrowed money into something that doesn't actually help increase income. Or the park-and-ride can develop its own entrenched constituency that resists any attempt to remove it.

Here's what we can do about this: first, be mindful and recognize when strategies are unsustainable. Second, make sure that everyone else knows it. Third, when implementing an unsustainable strategy, develop a complementary sunset strategy. Take out a loan with a fixed term, and dedicate part of the income to repaying the loan. Rent the land for the park-and-ride from someone who will have an incentive to redevelop it with transit-oriented businesses or residences.

In future posts, I'll talk more about unsustainable goods, necessary evils, and ways to sunset them.

Transit riders' priorities and transit agencies' priorities

If it's good for transit to have information available, then why do we have information black holes like in Northern New Jersey? Competing priorities, that's why. Maybe some complacency, too.

The City of New York is interested in development of the City. It recognizes that suburban commuters contribute to that development, but until recently has seen its role primarily as a facilitator of car commutes through its free bridges. Only recently has anyone in city government shown an awareness of the value of getting those suburbanites to take transit.

The State of New York is interested in the economic development of the State. Its agencies, including the MTA, have no incentive to make it easier for people to go to New Jersey. The MTA also runs subways and buses, and sees private bus lines as competition for its services.

New Jersey Transit sees part of its mission as getting commuters to Manhattan, but has no interest in anything that doesn't cross the river. It runs trains and buses, and is barred by law from destructive competition against private operators, but it doesn't want to give them free publicity, either.

The Port Authority is concerned with movement across the Hudson and economic development on both sides, but doesn't care about anything that happens too far from the river, except for the airports it runs. It produces maps for its PATH train service, but not for other organizations.

Small operators don't have the time or money to produce and distribute information about other services, but if they did, what would they get out of it?

It's a bit more of a mystery why medium-sized consolidated operators like Coachusa don't bother even printing a map of their routes on their websites. Of course, as commenter Busplanner points out, transit mapmaking "is a very slow and costly process."

Mapmaking certainly was a very slow and costly process, and I think a lot of transit operators are still thinking along those lines. But I don't think that's true any more, in this age of global positioning systems, geographic information systems and Google Transit.

Take your average college graduate and give them a one-month course in GIS. In another month, they could put out a very good county bus map, or a decent draft of a statewide map. Probably a lot less than a month, right? I don't know, but it seems likely to me.

Other reasons I can imagine are inertia and impatience. Coachusa is making millions off of its service. It's cheaper and faster than driving, so people keep taking it. It's pretty close to a guaranteed monopoly, so why bother putting in a lot of effort to get more? There's also no immediate reward for producing a map or any other kind of information product. You may get a bunch more single trips, and a number of investments, but it takes time for those to translate into habits. The value is not obvious, so it is often overlooked.

I'll talk about some possible solutions in a future post.

Information, social networks and the single trip

Adirondacker12800 has a lot to disagree with in my post about New Jersey, one of our local Transit Information Black Holes. There are basically two points that Adirondacker makes: that the bus networks in New Jersey are too complex to provide a useful map for, and that people get around just fine, so why make maps?

The reason is that, in order to achieve the goals listed above, we want to expand transit's reach past the current social networks. Even if it's true that only spatial navigators read maps, and only "foamers" try new transit routes on a whim, these map-reading transit buffs are one way that the use of a new transit system can spread from one social network to another.

But this is only one kind of mode decision, habit. As I wrote before, there are three others: single trips, investments and subsidies. Glamour has a much bigger effect on these decisions than on habits, and so does information.

Transit information can influence how people see themselves and their neighborhoods. Think of how ubiquitous subway bullets and maps are in media relating to New York, and Underground symbols in London. The "freeways" and boulevards of Los Angeles fill a similar role. People who live in a neighborhood without a subway station, like Maspeth, think of it as a neighborhood for cars, but people who live in Ridgewood think of it as a transit neighborhood.

A person who's heard about a particular destination and wants to visit will usually take transit if it's presented as a reliable way to get there, which is why restaurant reviews and entertainment listings should include basic transit information, especially in suburban areas where transit use is not assumed.

If someone's moving to, say, Fairview, where they can't see a train line on the map, they may assume that no one takes transit and buy a car. Once they've got the car they have an incentive to use it. People who don't want to drive may avoid Fairview altogether, depriving those buses of farebox revenue.

On the other hand, if people see that there is frequent bus and van service, they may choose to move there and not own a car, contributing to the critical mass of transit riders.

Information can also influence subsidies. If politicians don't see their districts on a transit map, they may conclude that all their constituents drive. As a result, they may cut transit funding or push for driving subsidies.

Adirondacker also mentions several attempts to map buses in New Jersey that failed to stem the exodus to cars. No examples of such maps were provided, but given that people have succeeded in producing relatively readable bus maps of Queens and the Paris suburbs, I think they can do it in New Jersey.

One strategy that Jarrett has mentioned several times is a frequent network map. While I think the concept has some limitations - if your goal is for every route to have frequent service, what happens to your map when you reach that goal? - it's a good start.

Today, Jarrett mentions the excitement he felt as a teenager, watching the buses in Portland's Fareless Square:

I remember that because it's the same excitement that many of us have felt in an airport, or a great European train station, when we see a departure board showing all the exotic places to which people are departing. In the entire passenger transport experience, this is the moment that offers the most visceral sensation of freedom -- look at all the places I could go, from right here! -- and as the car industry can tell you, creating a sensation of freedom is the key to success. Urbanists need to think more about this sensation, because it could help them describe transit mobility in a way that connects it to things that we all value. Things like freedom, and joy.

I would argue that maps have the same glamour effect on people - and not just spatial navigators. Don't discount the value of that sense of the possible in transit: whether it's a map, a timetable, a departure board, a view of a bustling transfer point, or an announcer's voice on the PA, we see transit as full of possibilities. We could go to Basingstoke or Reading! Massapequa, Massapequa Park! Anaheim, Azusa and Cucamonga!