Bureaucrats as a special interest

If you're a transportation geek you're very familiar with AASHTO, which was originally the American Association of State Highway Officials, and only recently included "transportation" in their name. If you've been watching the news recently you may have also noticed the Governors Highway Safety Association (not to be confused with the other GHSA) and the New York State Association of Counties (not to be confused with the other NYSAC).

These organizations have a contradictory and misleading status. They are composed of appointed or elected officials, which may lead some to believe that they represent the public or are fighting for the public interest. In fact, they are private nonprofit organizations, and their agendas often differ from that of the public at large.

The biggest problem is the "Senate" problem: AASHTO and the GHSA give the same representation to Wyoming with its tiny population and tinier transit riding community as it does to Illinois, just like the United States Senate does. The 5,379 people in Hamilton County get the same representation in NYSAC as the 2,465,326 people in Kings County.

These organizations suffer from another "Senate" problem: who gets chosen to represent each state or county. What is the likelihood that Missouri will be represented in AASHTO or the GHSA by a pedestrian advocate from Saint Louis or Kansas City? State and county bureaucracies are often dominated by middle-class suburbanites, often wildly out of proportion to their populations.

When AASHTO argues against cycle tracks, or the GHSA blames the victim for walking, or NYSAC comes out against complete streets, it's important to point out that these are not representative government entities that follow the principle of one person, one vote. They are Senate-type nonprofits that are heavily skewed towards rural and suburban - and thus car-oriented - jurisdictions, and they represent middle-class suburban bureaucrats, not the population at large. They are special interest groups lobbying for money to be spent on their own agencies, and any recommendations they make should be taken with a grain of salt, considering the source.

The limitations of the David and Goliath script

Last week I called Greg Mocker out about focusing on drivers' problems without addressing pedestrian issues. He had already filed one story about sidewalks, and he followed it up with another one tonight. He's also got a great story about express bus riders on 34th Street, which is something I'm interested in. He's clearly a very good sport and didn't take my criticism personally.

Mocker is very good at confronting bureaucrats who aren't doing their jobs, and that's a very valuable public service. But as we saw with the snowstorm, things get very sticky very quickly when you get beyond simple incompetence and corruption, and into the area of priorities.

In the snow cleanup, there were a number of priorities that had to be set by bureaucrats, ultimately accountable to the elected officials who appointed them. After emergency routes, what should be cleared next, side streets or sidewalks? Streets or park walkways? Roads or bike lanes?

Similarly, the 34th Street busway is part of a deliberate plan by Transportation Commissioner Sadik-Khan to raise the priority of bus riders and pedestrians relative to drivers, taxi passengers and local residents who are getting deliveries. The Prospect Park West bike lane is an effort by Sadik-Khan to raise the priority of cyclists and pedestrians relative to drivers. These priorities are all set with the approval of Sadik-Khan's boss, Mayor Bloomberg.

The congestion pricing and Ravitch bridge toll battles were also efforts by Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Paterson to collect more money from motorists, but it was largely spun as the Out-of-touch Billionaire Mayor and the Out-of-touch Bumbling Governor versus the Hard-Working Outer Borough Drivers.

Sometimes the news people manage to get the right frame of two groups competing for street space or budget dollars or lower taxes, but they often seem to be incapable of getting out of the David and Goliath frame. The irony of this is apparent when you have two reporters from the same television channel (WPIX 11) covering both sides of the same story: Debra Alfarone interviews wealthy white Manhattanites fighting the DOT to stop them from providing better bus service, while Greg Mocker interviews a middle-class Black woman from Queens fighting the MTA for better bus service. In reality it's the wealthy white Manhattanites fighting the middle-class Black woman from Queens, but that's not the kind of David vs. Goliath story that sells television advertising.

That's the heart of the issue, really: that behind an apparent David and Goliath story of Outraged Residents confronting the Heartless Bureaucrats may be a much uglier story. The Outraged Residents may actually be a few wealthy or upper-middle-class people protecting their privilege and convenience at the expense of the convenience - or often the safety and well-being - of much larger numbers of less fortunate people, and the Heartless Bureaucrats may actually be engaged in an emotionally draining struggle to protect these less fortunate people.

The dilemma for Channel Eleven is that both groups may be viewers who will stop watching the Ten o'Clock News if they come out looking like selfish jerks. Some may even be advertisers who will pull ads if they come out looking like selfish jerks. So it's quite understandable that they would avoid showing the Outraged Residents as selfish jerks, even if they pretty clearly are.

I'm glad that Greg Mocker is actually standing up for the little guy, but it may get him into trouble if he takes it too far. If he does get into trouble, he may jump ship and go with another outlet that supports serious muckraking. If he stays, I would ask that he try to keep to issues of clear bureaucratic incompetence, rather than blaming the bureaucrats for setting priorities that help the little guys.

Addendum: Jarrett has a nice post giving me "Quote of the Week" - but also pointing out that he said much the same thing a month ago. I'm sure that Jarrett's post put the idea in my head, so I'm sorry I didn't remember it in time to give him credit! He's got a great take on the issue, and I will tweet it to Greg Mocker forthwith!

The "two New Yorks" frame is now officially a menace

Earlier today I pointed out how in the "satisfactory" snow removal after the latest storm, there are many crosswalks that were not completely shoveled. I've observed it today, four days after the snow stopped: the snowbanks blocking the crosswalk nearest to me are now frozen solid. Others have reported similar situations around the city. The response from Kvetch Greenfield? One tweet.

Now Streetsblog did find a News story that Jimmy Vacca and Dom Recchia are looking into the possibility that Cemusa may have shirked on their obligations to keep the bus stops clean. Anything to avoid openly questioning the results of their colleagues' actions and statements, I guess!

There have been a few other stories about the effect of the storm on pedestrians and transit riders: one from Manny Fernandez in the Times and one from Greg Mocker on Channel 11. Frustratingly, both of them fall back on the tired "two New Yorks" frame. (Tonight Mocker filed another report about snow on sidewalks and crosswalks that didn't use the "two New Yorks" frame - but he didn't connect it to the demands from drivers for clear side streets either.)

I'm convinced that in order to believe that there are only two New Yorks, divided along borough boundaries, you have to be either creepily dishonest, spectacularly uninformed or blissfully unobservant - any of which should disqualify you as a reporter. Applying the idea to this snow situation is even a stretch beyond that.

In order to write these moronic stories, Fernandez and Mocker had to forget the stories that they had filed in December (Fernandez, Mocker) featuring local politicians demanding that secondary streets be plowed. Mocker had to forget how he reported that Dan Halloran was satisfied with the cleanup of the January 6 snowfall.

A lot of the stories in Fernandez's piece are kind of bizarre WTF stories, anyway. Let's see: Joseph McDermott couldn't pick up a used car he had bought. Okay... Linda DelGaudio "spent the day" digging out her brother's car. Ummm... Frank Inzirillo had to take the day off because he couldn't dig out all three of his cars? My heart bleeds! Two men on Flatbush Avenue were forced to listen to Celine Dion while digging out a van? I mean seriously, this is some of the shittiest John Dos Passos-wannabe prose I've read. Hey, you effete Upper East Sider, listen to me, the guy with the Hispanic last name, while I give you the local color and show you how the other half dig their three cars out of the snow!

There are a couple of car-related vignettes in Fernandez's report that might have earned my sympathy if they too hadn't been so WTF? Leo Martinez's baby needs to go to the doctor, but god forbid they have a doctor in walking distance or take a taxi, no, Leo suffers because he's spending forty minutes and paying two other guys a total of $20. Peter Hristodoulias dug out his wife's car because the bus wasn't running ... but she had already walked to catch the express bus?

The fact that Hristodoulias's wife had to walk forty minutes to the bus is a problem, and so is the fact that Margie Perez walked to wait for an express bus that never showed up. But Fernandez doesn't connect that to the fact that many more side streets were plowed in that snowstorm. If the city had focused on the bus routes, it might have been able to plow them better. But no, thanks to David Greenfield, Tony Avella and the Times editorial board, the city made every side street drivable by cars before putting any further effort into bus routes.

Fernandez contrasted his Everyman commutes with Bloomberg's statement that he had to wait "a minute and a half" for the subway. Mocker also had a field day with that one. But Bloomberg also said that "everybody on the train seemed in a good mood." Who rides the number 6 train with Bloomberg, Manny Ferndandez, you man of the people? That's right, poor Black and Mexican people from the Bronx. But because they happened to be in Manhattan at the time, they were counted as "New Yorkers in Manhattan," not "New Yorkers elsewhere."

So no, Manny and Greg, there are not two New Yorks. In this story there were at least four: the elite Manhattanites in taxis, the middle-class apartment-dwelling transit riders of all races, the poor Black and Hispanic bus and subway riders, and the entitled outer borough drivers. In order to shoehorn it into your crappy frame, you lumped us outer-borough apartment-dwellers in with the elite Manhattanites, and the entitled drivers in with the poor bus and subway riders. In the process, you obscured several issues, and the most important one is that the entitled drivers overpowered the elite Manhattanites in order to screw over both us middle-class transit riders and the poor Blacks and Hispanics. Way to stand up for the little guy!

Snow, kvetching and the many New Yorks

In my last post I observed that the city has changed the way it does snow removal, and that the politicians and the media have proclaimed themselves to be largely satisfied with the results. Well, I'm not satisfied, and I'm not annoyed any longer, I'm pissed. The city may have implemented its recommendations, and even "gone overboard," but that's not all they did. They changed their priorities as well.

The Prospect Park West bike lane, which has been the target of some politicians' rage, was left half-plowed for several days after the December snowstorm, and since the January 20th snowfall it still hasn't been completely plowed. Of course, this affects pedestrians who want to cross the bike lane too. The Second Avenue bike lane was not plowed quickly after last week's storm. Entitled motorists are still hampering snow removal.

The worst part, I first heard from a retweet by Stu Loeser, the Mayor's press secretary, of all places. "The worst part of the snow? You can't jaywalk," wrote Stephen Kamsler on Friday morning. I thought he was exaggerating and tweeted back, "You just don't have the right boots!"

When I went outside I discovered that Kamsler was actually understating things. Not only was it hard to jaywalk, but it was hard to just plain walk. At the corners, there is usually one path shoveled to cross the street east-west and one north-south. At my corner there are only east-west crosswalk paths, and no north-south ones - and it's still that way, on Sunday night.

That's the pattern all across the city. I've seen it all over Queens. Ben Kabak and BrooklynSpoke have noticed it in Brooklyn. Some guy in Astoria has pictures.

This is not a new pattern; it happens in Boston, Providence, Rye and Philadelphia, and our commenter Helen Bushnell reports a similar situation in Colorado.

The difference is that until last week, New York never had this problem. I honestly don't know how we did it. The sidewalks, as Alon points out, are the responsibility of the property owners, and the Sanitation website says the crosswalks are too. But how is it that they used to be pretty clear, and now they're not? It's just too much of a coincidence that this should be happening all over the city.

So what do the politicians have to say? Well, we got a tweet from Greenfield. One tweet, among lots of tweets about various streets in his district that were blocked for cars. What do the media say? Well, we have a story in the Queens Courier.

By and large, the difficulty we've had walking around been ignored, with a couple of exceptions that I'll explore in a future post. As you can see from the links I've posted, there have been more stories about blocked crosswalks in other cities.

Let me be clear about this: this issue is not particularly about me. I've got good boots, as you've probably heard, and I can walk right over those snowbanks. It's not a matter of life and death. It's about convenience, but more than that, it's about fairness, and about who counts.

Until December 28, we had a system where major routes were plowed first, and then more minor through routes, and then side routes. It didn't really matter whether they were for cars, bikes or pedestrians; the ones used by the more people were done before the ones used by less people.

Clearly, David Greenfield didn't like that, and neither did Steve Cuozzo or Marty Markowitz. In their view, drivers come first, and they wanted every street plowed before any bike lanes were plowed. People like Greg Mocker and Jimmy Van Bramer echoed that demand, although it's not entirely clear that they understood what they were asking for. Regardless, the city has gone along with it, and more. Now the streets are plowed long before the crosswalks are shoveled. Was that a suggestion from Greenfield? Will we ever know?

In the end, it doesn't really matter. Whether bikes come before cars or not, the important thing is that almost all New Yorkers are either pedestrians, wheelchair users, or stroller passengers. Pedestrians should come before bicycles or cars. Greenfield, Cuozzo and the rest need to hear it. They should clarify that they want the crosswalks clear as soon as the roads are. If they won't, then they are not speaking for all New Yorkers.

Kvetching about snow

So there was a big brouhaha over the city's response to the blizzard - and to some extent, the MTA's as well. Both organizations did make serious mistakes, and some people died needlessly, but for someone who can walk to shopping and take transit to work, and who can take a day or two off or work from home, it was not a big deal.

Even for someone who normally drives to Costco to shop, it wasn't that big a deal. If you drive to Costco, you buy in bulk and keep weeks' worth of food in your basement, right? And everyone knew there was a storm coming and had to stock up. But if you ran out of milk, even in the most Godforsaken part of Staten Island there are still delis within walking distance. And yet...

And yet, it was somehow a big deal to a lot of people. Whether it was the Times editorial board or that master of high dudgeon, Greg Mocker, the media angle was that this was not just an unparalleled disaster, but an injustice of the highest order.

City Council members thundered about the iniquity, and the loudest of them all was freshman David Greenfield, nicknamed "Kvetch" by Aaron Naparstek because of his ability to turn a stubbed toe into the Ultimate Showdown. I'm sure this guy is loving it: a few more Weather Emergencies and he'll be grandtweeting his way into Borough Hall in 2015.

I was mildly amused at first, but this kind of stuff has consequences. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, but sometimes it's not actually the squeaky wheel that's the problem. You can look at making things more efficient, but beyond a certain point if you're demanding more in city services, you need to either raise revenue to pay for them, or cut something else. The snow response was slow in part because the city had cut the sanitation budget, and that was in part because tax revenues are down and expenses are up. But one thing you hardly ever hear people like Greenfield say is that they'd be willing to pay more taxes to have adequate services. The money should come from "eliminating waste, fraud and abuse." Or else it should come from cutting someone else's city services. And that's where I started to get annoyed.

First, Greenfield made a speech about the Ocean Parkway bike lane being cleared before - what? Clearly the car lanes on Ocean Parkway had been plowed, but some side streets had not. Then the Post's anti-bike-lane crusader Steve Cuozzo got in on the act, filing a column about the Broadway bike lanes in Manhattan. Other media piled on, until it became clear that this was about priorities.

Okay, so all that was back in December, a little more than a month ago. In that month, the City Council has held hearings, and the Mayor's office released a set of recommendations for improved snow response (PDF). There have been two significant snowfalls, Not only has no one died, but the wags at New York Magazine point out that the snow may actually have saved a man's life. The politicians and the media have largely proclaimed themselves satisfied with the results.

What about me: am I satisfied? Turns out I have a lot more to say on this topic than I planned. Stay tuned for the next installment. In the meantime, though, are your crosswalks clear? Please let me know in the comments.

Crappy snow removal does not a snowpocalypse make

When I said in my last post that the December 26-27 snowstorm wasn't all that bad, I didn't mean to suggest that it couldn't have been handled better. As I mentioned, some people died because emergency vehicles weren't able to get them to hospitals in time, and there were people stranded on trains for hours. From what I can tell, the city made two major mistakes, and the MTA made two major mistakes.

The first MTA mistake was not being adequately prepared far enough in advance, for example by suspending express service on underground lines so that trains could be stored on those tracks. The second was sending too many buses out without making sure that they would be able to move people around without getting stuck in the snow.

The first city mistake was not doing enough to prevent private drivers from blocking the roads. While I heard reports of streets blocked by buses and even the city's own cleanup vehicles, it sounds like there were many instances that happened like this: a private citizen decides to drive somewhere instead of walking or just staying home. Their car doesn't have snow tires, chains or four-wheel drive. They get it stuck in the snow in the middle of the street. They abandon the car and come back for it some time later. Meanwhile, the disabled car is blocking the street, sometimes for hours.

The city could have made it clear that there are harsh penalties for abandoning vehicles in the middle of the street, even in a snowstorm. Then they could have enforced those penalties. Instead, apparently, they allowed people to abandon their vehicles without any penalty, and sometimes even did them the favor of digging the cars out.

The second city mistake was described by Billy Wharton in the Bronx Examiner: "[Bloomberg] stated that the reason for the slow plow response was that the private plow owners were unresponsive to requests by the City. This point should not be cast aside as a mere attempt by Bloomberg to deflect blame. Whether we know it or not New Yorkers are now dependent on private companies in order to ensure clean streets. And for this Bloomberg is to blame."

According to Wharton, this was the result of a botched attempt to privatize the city's sanitation services. "Sanitation Commissioner John Doherty danced around this issue claiming, at first, that his Department had been too slow to reach out to private contractors. He later admitted that the pool of private companies willing to do business with the City had shrunk. There is just no money in it."

Hm, services cut and then replaced with a poorly structured privatization plan that doesn't provide enough compensation to the private service providers? Where have I heard that before? Oh yes, the livery van program.

Wharton is oversimplifying things by saying "privatization kills." It would be more accurate to say "incompetent privatization kills." A few days ago, Stephen Smith introduced us to the concept of cargo-cult urbanism, where people believe that by mimicking the superficial trappings of prosperous, efficient cities they can achieve that prosperity and efficiency themselves. Well, the livery van program and the sanitation program are some kind of faith-healing privatization. Like Christian Scientists who reject medical care and pray to their god for healing, the City stopped paying for transportation and sanitation services, and expected the private sector to step in. It doesn't work that way.

While Bloomberg is the Mayor and the buck stops with him, there's also a guy who's supposed to be a genius of privatization and efficiency, who has built his career on helping government to run leaner. His name is Stephen Goldsmith, and last year Bloomberg hired him as Deputy Mayor for Operations, overseeing the Department of Transportation, the Taxi and Limousine Commission, and yes, the Department of Sanitation. These privatization initiatives are what he was hired to do.

I was intrigued when Goldsmith came on board, and I would like to believe that he really does know a thing or two about privatization. I have to say I'm a little skeptical at this point, because it seems like faith healing to me. I hope Bloomberg is skeptical too.

But that's not why I'm seriously pissed about the political response to the storm. After all, the inconvenience was relatively minor. In the last post I told you that I would say why I'm pissed. I'm sorry, I just had to get this off my chest first. I'll get to that soon, but some of you have already figured it out.

Snow, politics and the media

So there's been a lot of snow lately. There was one big blizzard that started on Boxing Day and dumped more than a foot of snow on the city. From what I heard on the news and read in the papers, it was a complete disaster. Some streets were unplowed for days, nobody could get anywhere, and several people died. Then there was another storm last week, but that was smaller and the city cleared it up much quicker. This past Wednesday night there was another foot of snow, and so far everyone seems pretty happy with it.

Reading this kind of bullshit makes me feel like I'm living in an alternate universe. I had no real trouble with the first snowfall, because I didn't really go out much. It was the week after Christmas, I was on vacation! Where did I need to go? I went to the supermarket around the corner, and they had plenty of food. I went to the cafe a few blocks away and had a nice panini.

Sure there were huge mounds of snow everywhere, but I've got good boots. There was a dump truck stuck in the middle of my street for several hours, and it took three front-end loaders to pull it free, but people drove on the other streets. The street next to my kid's school was completely blocked with a big snowbank, but that made it a lot safer for the kids to cross. After a day or two, the sidewalks and crosswalks were shoveled, the trains and buses were running, and we could all get around the city.

Okay, so I was on vacation, but a guy I know in the neighborhood had no trouble either. He had one customer across the street, another two blocks away, and a third around the corner. That's the value of working locally. Some other neighbors worked from home via the internet, and others just got the day off. Nobody had to go into Manhattan, or anywhere else, on December 27, and not too many people really had to go in on the 28th either.

Now obviously some people needed to go to the hospital, couldn't get help and died. That's a real shame and a problem, and we shouldn't minimize it. People were stranded for hours on subway trains, really locked in without a chance to get off and walk somewhere, and that's not good at all. As far as I'm concerned, those were the only two serious problems that resulted from the government's handling of the snow situation, and what we needed to do was focus on how to avoid those problems in the future. But that wasn't the focus in the City Council or in the media.

I was mildly amused at first to see reporters like Greg Mocker wailing about the streets that weren't plowed, and it was kind of fun to listen to that amateur cameraman hyperventilating as he watched a City tractor demolish a City-owned SUV that some bureaucrat had unnecessarily left parked on a Brooklyn Heights side street. But all that got old really quick, and I started feeling pretty annoyed hearing City Council members like David "Kvetch" Greenfield working themselves into a lather over which side street got plowed when.

Still, I was only annoyed. But then I started to get angry, and now I'm seriously pissed. I'll tell you why in my next post, but some of you may already know, because you're feeling the same way.