Archive | 2015

Seattle: Before the Live Debate, the Written One (and an Imptertinent Question)

Posted on October 26, 2015 in Philosophy, Seattle

Setting up for our panel discussion this Thursday night, the Seattle Times asked each of their panelists to answer some canned questions about the future of transportation. The result is here. I hope the contrasts will motivate you to come!

Bravo to Bryan Mistele of INRIX (the traffic consultants to the notorious TTI Urban Mobility Report) for being willing to come into the densest part of Seattle and announce that (a) cars are our future and (b) light rail is a bad investment because of its ridership in the early years. (Both claims presume the linearity of past trends and the irrelevance of land use changes in response to transit.) But the courage is admirable: To say these things in the middle of Seattle would be like me pitching high-intensity transit networks at the Elks Hall of a small town in Nebraska.

Which raises a key point:

Notice, as you read this, how all high-level discussions, at regional levels or above, tend to presume that there is some answer to the "transit vs cars" question that is the same everywhere.

In fact, the answer is radically different in different places, based on known built-environment factors and local politics that tend to track closely with those factors. Some places are suited to cars and therefore defensive about cars. Some places function only with transit, so they view transit as an existential issue. All urban regions — and most states, provinces or countries — are going to have both kinds of places and everything in between.

So my question going in is this: Why can't we let Seattle have the kind of transportation system it needs, and let low density and rural areas have the kind that they need? Why do the differing needs of different communities require that we have a war between those communities, at all levels of government?

Reykjavík: Adventures in Sub-arctic Urbanism (Part 2: The Words)

Posted on October 13, 2015 in Postcards, Reykjavík

Part 1 of this post gave an urbanist tour of Reykjavík, with photos.

Iceland has no rail infrastructure. Public transit is buses, but they’re nice buses, as is usual in Europe. They blanket most of the city at a 30-minute frequency (blue below) but only two lines – linking the historic town centers, rise to 15-minute all-day frequency (red). These are the only places where the next bus is “always coming soon.” Here’s the frequency map we drew for them (full PDF here: Download Frequency Map):

Given the density, that’s not much frequency. There are probably more opportunities to build high-frequency corridors that dramatically expand transit’s usefulness.

My main tasks were to run a two-day transit planning workshop for municipal and national planning staff, to give a public lecture, and also to do a briefing for elected officials. In all, I said some of the things I say anywhere: Don’t get distracted by the merchants of any transit technology, or their appeals to your supposed envy of other cities and countries. Instead, think about human beings, their liberty and opportunity, and build a transportation system that fosters that.

Iceland’s most interesting challenge is that it’s a small country at a time when we’re all supposed to worship bigness, so it probably takes some effort for Icelanders to stay focused on solutions that suit their scale. Iceland’s population is only about 330,000, of which 2/3 are in greater Reykjavik. If it were in the EU, Iceland would be the smallest member by population, smaller than Malta and certainly smaller than giant Luxembourg.

What’s more, Iceland’s population is small for good reasons, mostly limitations of land, sunlight, and climate. For most of Icelandic history, fish has been the only abundant food resource, but today even that is in need of management. Agriculture so close to the Arctic Circle will always face limits even if much of the soil hadn’t washed away — the result of medieval Norse colonists cutting the ancient birch forests faster than they could regenerate. Today, Iceland is a world leader in the sustainable management and restoration of natural resources, but in such a remote and challenging location there’s not much point in growing beyond what the bare land and low-angle sunlight can support.

So one basic challenge for Icelanders is how to listen to all the roving “experts” whose message is just an appeal to presumed feelings of international envy. “You’re a European capital!,” they say. “How can you not have streetcars and subways and a ‘high-speed train’ to the airport?” This peer-pressure is supposed to overrule all the facts of Iceland’s own geography and situation. You might as well tell Reykjavík that “real European capitals” need medieval and Renaissance buildings, even though there wasn’t a town here until the 1700s.

One expert was quoted to me as saying: “You won’t get business if your downtown isn’t 20 minutes from the airport by rail.” This rule is apparently indifferent to how far away the airport is (50 km!), or how small the metro area is (220,000). The rule’s reference to in-train travel time but not frequency also reveals that it’s addressed to people who don’t understand public transit very well yet. Those who do need to know the frequency, not just the in-train travel time, before they know how useful a service will be.

These abstract, envy-based rules are always the death of public transit. They also imply that no other feature of a place could possibly compensate for the failure to satisfy – that nobody would come to Iceland because they want what only Iceland has to offer.

The Icelanders I met, for the most part, seem wise to this, perhaps partly because Iceland is doing well. By most standards the country is wealthy, stable, educated, safe, and (apart from some former bankers) well-liked on the global stage. So I expect Icelanders are capable of looking overseas with curiosity but not with envy or fear, and of making their own decisions about what kind of major city they want, and what they want to offer the world.

Reykjavík: Adventures in Subarctic Urbanism (Part 1: the Photos)

Posted on October 13, 2015 in Architecture, Postcards, Reykjavík, Urban Structure

I recently returned from a week in Reykjavík, Iceland, working with staff of the regional association of municipalities on the frame of a future public transport plan. It was an opportunity to meet with key elected leaders – including Reykjavík Mayor Dagur Eggertsson and public transit authority chair Bryndís Haraldsdóttir – for a conversation about what they want public transit to be, and what choices might follow from those goals. I also ran a two-day workshop for municipal and national transport staffs, to help them explore their options for their transit future. (There was also some time off to ruminate on the landscape; those musings are on the personal blog, here.)

Part 1 of this post is a photo-rich tour. Part 2 talks through some interesting transport issues.

Greater Reykjavík is dramatic urban landscape, all perched on ridges or gathered around fjords. As in any European city, there’s a walkable historic core, attractive to tourists but still intensively lived-in by the locals, and with plenty of cranes on the edges signaling even greater density in the future.

But despite the European forms, urban history is on a more North American scale. Although the very first Norse settlement was on this spot, in 870, it was another 900 years before anything urban began to emerge. So the inner city urban structure is mostly 18th-19th century, and the buildings are mostly from a range of 20th century styles. (The hilltop church, too, is 20th century.)

It can seem a little austere sometimes, partly because so much of the greenspace is hidden behind buildings, along laneways.

And here are some classic waterfront photos reminiscent of Vancouver.

Note the cyclist’s shadow; at 64 degrees latitude, the beautiful qualities of evening side-light last for much of the day.

That giant tennis ball floating in the harbor seemed a perfect bit of whimsy. It’s a park, with a military history.

Further out, much of the city is high-density but car-oriented: Residential towers grouped at some distance shops and services, so that even though you live on in a tall building, you need to get in your car to buy a liter of milk. This is the view from the 20th story conference room where we held our staff workshops. This particular office tower has a freeway offramp directly into its parking lot, but the area is so riven with high-speed roads that it’s difficult for transit to navigate without lots of awkward backtracking – the “be on the way” problem.

The white tower in the distance in the upper right of that photo is that modern hilltop church in the old city. You’re looking across most of the urban area in this image, so you can sense its compactness, its topographical complexity, its extensive greenspace, but above all, its density.

In Part 2 (the Words) I’ll talk more about the transport issues.

Portland: New Transit Map Underscores Frequent Network

Posted on October 1, 2015 in Frequent Networks, Maps, Portland

By Evan Landman

Evan Landman is an associate at my firm, Jarrett Walker & Associates, and serves as a research assistant and ghostwriter on this blog. He tweets on transit and other Portland topics at @evanlandman.

For years on this blog and in our projects, we've stressed the importance of highlighting and emphasizing transit agencies' Frequent Networks on customer information of all kinds. Portland's agency TriMet has traditionally been a best practice example here, given their extensive Frequent Network branding down to the individual stop level, but curiously, their system map has not embraced this idea so wholeheartedly. Today, TriMet's new system map changes that, introducing a cleaner, more readable map, which does a much better job of highlighting the agency's premier bus services.

Let's compare the two, starting with the old map that has just been retired:

Portland Central Eastside, TriMet map (early 2015)

This Southeast Portland shows the core of the city's Frequent Network. The Frequent Network is symbolized with a thicker line weight, but every line still has its own individual color, presumably to make it easier to trace each individual line across the network. However, the effect of this choice distracts from the important information contained in the line weight property, because the wide diversity of bright colors climbs to the top of the visual hierarchy, though the colors communicate nothing about the nature of the service on each line.

The legibility of the map is not aided by the large number of points of interest shown, with both text and symbols frequent overlapping the most important features (the transit routes). TriMet's old map was certainly not a bad transit map by any means, and deserves enormous credit for being one of the first to explicitly show frequency at all, but in the years since, many of TriMet's peer agencies around the country have focused even more heavily on frequency to produce truly useful and innovative maps.

Now compare the image above with the same area of the new map:

Portland Central Eastside, TriMet map (late 2015)

This is a map that truly focuses on communicating the usefulness of the transit routes. The most important factor for usefulness is frequency, which is obscured when every line on the map is the same color, or a different color, or colored by a less important attribute, like which corner of the city it serves.

Here, weight and color are both deployed to differentiate the Frequent Network (heavy, dark blue) from other less frequent routes, but without the riot of color of the older map. When we compare the legends of each, the difference is subtle, but the when deployed on the map, the difference is dramatic.

This new map makes one thing very apparent: anywhere near a thick, dark blue line, a bus is always coming soon.

It is also a clearer, more traceable map! Where the old version employed the common convention of using color to distinguish routes and make it easy to tell where they travel across the city, the new map uses line displacement and simplification in a much more sophisticated manner to accomplish the same task.

For example, examine the path of the 10-Harold: on the old map, its line appears to end at Hawthorne and 12th, where it joins the 14-Hawthorne to head into downtown (it's actually beneath the 14's line, if you look closely). With the new map, it is much clearer that this route overlaps with the 14 in this segment, just by the way in which the two lines have been separated from one another. Now that color is now longer necessary to distinguish each route, it can be used for a more important purpose: showing frequency.

Apart from the increased focus on frequency, this map also succeeds by reducing the amount of non-transit information, with fewer points of interest labeled. Those that are present have symbols and labels drawn with a brown color much closer to that of the map's background, reducing the effect of collisions with transit features, and diminishing the level of visual "noise" competing with the transit network structure for the reader's attention.

It's fantastic to see an agency like TriMet continuing to work to improve its customer information. Even in the age of real-time data and mobile trip planning, a transit agency's map is often the only place where the entire system is documented in a way that an average person can understand. City transit networks are complex, and the best maps, like TriMet's, are designed to reduce that complexity, focusing on the most important aspects of the service for the people who ride it.

Can Design Learn from the New Zealand Flag Debate?

Posted on September 6, 2015 in Auckland, Language, Maps, Values

If you care at all about visual communication — and if you aren't blind from birth, then you do — you should be following the remarkable debate about the New Zealand flag. National flags are so enduring that it is hard to imagine a graphic design task with higher stakes. Revising one triggers a profound argument about national identity, which ultimately comes down to a couple of questions:

One or many ideas? Can the nation come together around one image or idea, or must there me a mash-up of several to satisfy different groups or points of view?
Fashionable or enduring? Graphic design is so much about fashion and fun that identifying an image that will make sense for decades is harder than it sounds. Yet that's what a flag must be – and the greatest company logos have mastered this challenge as well.

To review, the current New Zealand flag looks like this:

The Union Jack and the Southern Cross, the latter a distinctive constellation that is also on Australia's flag. (With all due respect to defenders of this flag, both images are about New Zealand's tie to other countries, countries that the nation's identity has lately been separating from. I also understand the view that flags should never change on principle; that is a different debate.)

The New Zealand flag seems disconnected from the evolving palette of national identity. National imagery rarely uses the flag's colors. Sometimes it uses blue-green colors that echo the textures of the landscape; you will find these in the customs hall at Auckland Airport for example. Increasingly, though, the government uses black. The association of black with New Zealand comes from another image that is so universal that some visitors probably think it's the flag already:

This image is most common in sports, as it's the logo of most national teams including the famous All Blacks of rugby, but it long ago spilled over into the general consciousness as an unofficial symbol of the country.

If I may reveal botanical interests more suited to my other blog, this is not just any random leaf or frond. It's based on the underside of the spectacular Silver Fern, Cyathea dealbata, one of the tree ferns that define so many New Zealand rainforests (top on left, underside on right).

Sports and tree-hugging in one image! This would seem to make the silver fern a winner across the cultural spectrum. It might also remind you of another former British colony that tired of its Union Jack, and forged a new identity out of botany:

The Canadian flag was adopted in February 1965, so it just turned 50. Like the Silver Fern in New Zealand, the maple leaf had been hanging around in Canadian imagery for a while. So it's not surprising to see the fern so prominent in New Zealand flag ideas.

So how has the debate gone? Well, the government's earnest committee canvassed the country and came up with these semi-finalists:

It's remarkable how much consensus there was on which images matter: the Southern Cross, a gesture toward the old flag, plus two main expressions of the fern: the frond and the spiral form called the koru. (The latter, common in Maori imagery, is based on the shape of a frond as it just unfurls.)

When you look at that field of contenders, does your eye go to the busier ones or the simpler ones? Mine went to the simplest, the ones with a single idea, not a collision of several, and the ones that looked enduring by virtue of not trying to be sexy. For that reason, the original silver-fern-on-black still looked right to me.

But the people who chose the four finalists felt differently:

… at which point, all hell broke loose. There are many complaints, including that three of the four are too similar to represent a choice, and that #2 is already selling plastic plates:

Yeah, something isn't right. Found this the other day. #NZflag pic.twitter.com/3Z9twOe9at
— Thomas Le Bas (@thomaslebas) September 1, 2015

But the real problems are these:

#2 and #4 are both mash-ups, obviously collisions of multiple unresolved ideas. A mash-up suggests that the country is too divided to revere any single image. If Canada — a far more diverse country in terms of landscapes and identities — could avoid this mistake, New Zealand certainly can. (British Columbia is another matter …)
Except for #3, they are all over-designed, with an attention to today's graphical fashions instead of any thought about what might stand the test of time. This is equivalent to saying that they call attention to the designer.

What do you gain, designer of finalist #1, by flipping half of the silver fern image into negative, and making the frond leaflets more rounded so that they no longer resemble the plant? How is this better than the simple silver fern on black? Only that a graphic designer obviously designed it, in a way that is supposed to look cool.

But a flag is supposed to outlast its designer, and the design fashions of the moment. Remember, the Canadian flag was designed in the 1960s. If their design competition had been seeking something as "contemporary" and "designed" as New Zealand's final four, they might have found inspiration in one of these:

Fortunately, they didn't. You can't tell, looking at the Canadian flag, that it's an artefact of the 1960s, and that's the whole point. A flag has to have a sense of timelessness and simplicity, which is why you must reject any design that calls attention to the cleverness of the designer or relies on design fashions of the moment. The creativity it requires begins with the willingness to disappear as the creator. None of the finalists displays this.

How is this debate relevant to this blog's concerns in public transit? If you really want to sell public transit, teach people to count on it. Make it seem solid and enduring, not just sexy and ephemeral. Go for the simple, solid idea that will still make sense — practically and aesthetically — decades from now.

And this principle extends even beyond graphic design, to debates about whether transit technologies should be chosen for "fun" or reliability.

Do you notice how insecure companies change their logos and liveries more often than confident ones do? Do you notice how they use flashy look-at-me images instead of clean and enduring ones?

Flashiness, fun, and novelty may attract customers, but only simplicity and reliability retains them. Which message do you want to put forth about your transit system, or your country?

Major Think Tank Implies You Don’t Exist

Posted on August 31, 2015 in Language, Words, Unhelpful

Every year, the Texas Transportation Institute’s Urban Mobility Scorecard describes the nation’s most transit-intensive and walkable metro areas as having terrible “urban mobility”. And every year, academic experts and smart journalists attack its indefensible methods and assumptions. And yet, every year, careless journalists describe the report as though it were news about the state of "mobility" or “commuting” in America.

But you don’t need to study the analysis to understand what’s wrong with TTI's claims. All you need to do is look at their press release or summary, and notice that they want you to think of car congestion as equivalent to poor urban mobility.

When you use words with different meanings as though they were interchangeable, you are denying the existence or relevance of people who are included in one meaning but not the other.

Political rhetoric plays this trick all the time. When scientific or academic rhetoric uses it, you should be suspicious. It's one of several types of rhetorical annihilation.

In this case, the people being erased are anyone who moves about in cities (urban mobility) but does not experience congestion. These include anyone who organized their lives so that they can walk to work, and of course anyone who cycles or uses public transit– at least those transit services that are protected from congestion such as most heavy rail, light rail, and busway services. (And in fact, the report itself is interested only in the travel time of “auto commuters,” so all transit riders are excluded.)

If you are one of these people, you do not count as part of your city when the TTI tallies your city’s “urban mobility." Any subsequent commentary about the economic impact of “urban mobility” problems refers to an economy in which you do not exist.

This has been pointed out to TTI many times, including four years ago at a CNU conference workshop I attended. Many of us said then that if TTI wanted to write reports about car congestion, an appropriate name would be Urban Car Congestion Scorecard, not Urban Mobility Scorecard. They have had ample opportunity to rename their report to describe what it really is, the, so we can only assume that the confusion they are sowing is intentional.

Meanwhile, when you hear two different terms being used interchangeably, stop and ask: “Who is in one of these categories but not the other?” Because those are the people the writer doesn’t want you to notice, even if you’re one of them.

(Yet another reason to hire literature students!)

Does the Ridership-Coverage Question Apply to Bikes?

Posted on August 21, 2015 in Cycling, Journalism

For over a decade, I've been encouraging transit agencies to be clear about how they balance the contradictory goals of ridership (as many customers as possible for the fixed operating budget) or coverage (some transit service everywhere, responding to needs rather than to demand). I lay out the tradeoff in the opening part of this explainer.

Michael Anderson, the editor of the excellent blog Bike Portland, has a very thoughtful article exploring how, and whether, this paradigm applies to cycling infrastructure. Disclosure: It would be fascinating even if they hadn't interviewed Michelle Poyourow, a bike-and-transit planner who's also a Senior Associate at our firm. (Did you know, btw, that we're hiring?)

Really, if you care about cycling, read Michael's piece. It's a great piece of writing, one that I'm still thinking about.

Houston: Welcome to Your New Network

Posted on August 15, 2015 in Houston

Tonight — in the wee hours of August 16, 2015, it all happens. The complete redesign of Houston's bus network, the result of a design process that I led and of extraordinary Board and staff effort, goes into effect overnight tonight. Over a year of planning, months of difficult public debate and revision, and finally months of intense work at implementation, all bears fruit on Sunday, August 16, when practically every bus line in Houston changes. For the better.

My favorite tweet exchange of this excited Saturday:

sort of surreal that one day it just… changes. Reminds me of https://t.co/5iH2FHZtnr
— Andrew Owen (@owenam) August 15, 2015

Frustrating and obsolete transit networks seem eternal, unchangeable, until one night they change. Andrew's link is to Dagen-H, the strange day in 1967 when Sweden switched from driving on the left to driving on the right. Swedes had long been driving on the left with left-hand drive cars, putting the driver at the side of the road, and all their neighbors drove on the right. And yet still, opposition to such an obvious move took decades to overcome. Houston's new network was equally obviously needed, equally fiercely debated, and it's a credit to many that we aren't waiting any more decades for it.

No, not everyone is happy. Yesterday's Houston Chronicle article led with a photo essay about an unhappy-looking man whose stop is disappearing. You'd think we'd abandoned him, but in fact his vanishing stop is three blocks from a new light rail station, and within blocks of high-frequency transit in all directions. As often in ridership-increasing redesigns, he'll have to walk further to better service that will take him many places faster.

Is this really too high a price to pay for a network that provides seven-day-a-week all-day frequent service linking 1 million people to 1 million jobs, up from less than 1/2 million today? Fortunately, if you get past the photos, Dug Begley's article is fair; I appreciate the good job Dug has done throughout this long process. The quality of local reporting makes a huge difference.

There's a happy irony in starting the new network on a Sunday. The idea behind this routine practice is to start the change on a day when things are quiet, before facing a busy day. But in Houston, we don't want Sunday to be quiet. This network's big move is not just a liberating frequent grid over most of the city — designed for everywhere to everywhere travel over this vast and decentralized place — but also a historic gamble on weekend service. Weekend daytime service will be largely the same as weekday — every bit as frequent and functional, except of course that it won't have peak-only services. It's a huge expansion into the weekend, and also into the evening.

Why move into these stereotypically low demand times? Because ridership on poor service is no indication of demand. You have to look at the life of the city, and especially at the lives of all the people most likely to find transit useful. Houston is bustling on weekends, and all kinds of people benefit from access then. Low-wage workers in particular almost all work a weekend day, because the sectors that employ them (entertainment, restaurants, shopping, port-related industry, etc) don't sleep on weekends, and often have their peak demand then. But it's not just for them. A seven-day pattern means that anyone can get anywhere on any day, and probably by pretty much the same path.

As the change happens, there will be confusion, and the first post-implementation feedback may well be negative. That's normal; people who are negatively affected respond at once, while those who benefit discover the service gradually, even though Houston METRO has done everything you could hope for to get out the word. (I especially loved this tool for looking up any trip to see how it's routed in the old network vs the new.)

Finally, amid all the short-term excitement and frustration, and all the demands that we be able to pass judgment on the outcomes by next Tuesday, let's remember that this is a long term play about prosperity, sustainability, and affordability by empowering people to choose transit when they choose their location. A big frequent network means more places where people can choose to locate if they value good public transit — so many places, in fact, that many of them will remain affordable. That sets off a positive feedback loop that leads to much higher ridership, more affordable lives, and more support for urban redevelopment, and that makes those things more permanent.

This was my baby once, but it's been over a year since I let go of it, and I can't take all that much credit anymore. The plan itself was the work of a team of consultants, facilitated and sometimes led by me but ultimately managed by the excellent Geoff Carleton of TEI. The real transformation, though, was the work of a courageous Board, a hard-working and resourceful METRO staff, diligent reporters, and above all many thousands of citizens who cared enough to engage with the plan, understand the tradeoffs, and help to make it better.

Welcome, Houston, to a totally new transit system. And for everyone else, remember: If your bus network is obsolete, you can reimagine it to be more liberating and useful, and also to be more relevant to building the city you want. My hometown, Portland, did it in 1982, and the starter line of our famous light rail system would have failed without it. Auckland, New Zealand is doing it now. Ask us how! And many other cities, like Los Angeles and Portland again, have networks that are already well-designed but badly underfunded given their potential.

Almost everywhere in the world, buses are most of the transit system, and they are the the only tool that can radically liberate vast numbers of lives, at a manageable cost, while also treating workers well. Unlike most major infrastructure, bus improvements can also happen soon, and can be spread over most of a city. It's a crime not to make the most of them.

The Flexibility Industry Discovers the Virtues of Rigidity

Posted on August 11, 2015 in Automation, Privatization

An important belated update from the world of ridesharing – Uber is now testing a feature they are calling "Suggested Pickup Points", which directs customers to walk to nearby locations that are easier for their drivers to reach, saving time for both the driver and (in the case of UberPool) for other passengers on board. Lyft takes this even further, offering discounted rides on its Lyft Line service for people who come to meet it.

You may be familiar with an identical concept in the public transit industry, called a "stop" or "station" — a location near to destinations, but maybe not at their front door, that is cost-effective for a transit vehicle to reach. This saves the driver the time it takes to drive to the precise preferred location of each passenger, which is especially crucial if there are other passengers on board whose travel time is also valuable. (It also encourages a bit of walking where that's easy to do, which is good for you!)

This new feature illustrates how a demand-responsive service like UberPool can evolve to resemble the very fixed route bus that it often pretends to be supplanting, particularly when serving high-volume markets. Discounts for walking to a pickup point make perfect sense, for the same reason that fixed route transit should be even cheaper; the customer is taking on inconvenience in return for a more efficient transit service.

These moves show these companies recognizing the geometric logic of rigid, fixed transit: that when you connect places where many people want to go together, along a fast, direct path, the resulting service is both efficient to provide and useful to vast numbers of people.

Flexible transit sounds like it's more responsive to our needs as customers, but if you want it to be affordable it has to be efficient. The vehicle that comes to your door is intrinsically a low-efficiency concept when efficiency means "passengers/driver hour", as it will so long as the cost of service is mostly labor cost.

That's why, for decades, transit agencies have sometimes deployed flexible services in low-demand but growing markets but then replaced them with fixed routes as demand grew beyond what the low capacity of flexible services could handle. Transit agencies also know about "fixed stop Dial-a-Ride", which is the specific phase of this inevitable evolution that Uber and Lyft are exploring now.

The cool kids at Uber and Lyft are showing that for all their pretense of having invented something new, they live in the same geometric and economic space as their ancestors, and will evolve the same solutions that worked in the past. Data is cool, and technology is cool, and enraptured high-paying customers are very cool, but none of that changes the facts of space, biology and economics, ever.

Will driverless cars change all this? Not if we also have driverless buses. In that case, the math and geometry, and the nature of efficiency, will be largely the same.

Rhetorical Annihilation in the Social Sciences

Posted on August 8, 2015 in Language, Meditations, Philosophy

[This post is periodically updated as helpful comments roll in.]

Have you ever picked up an academic paper and read, right there in the abstract, that you don't exist?

We're used to reading rhetoric that defines us as the enemy, which is different. Rhetoric about the "war on cars" or "war on coal" posits an in-group of good people, including the author and presumed reader, and an out-group that is threatening to them. This is exclusionary language in its obvious form, and it's hard to justify in academia.

But academics can slide unconsciously into a more subtle kind of exclusionary rhetoric, especially in the social sciences — what I'll call (melodramatically perhaps) the rhetoric of annihilation. Instead of defining a group of people as evil or threatening, this rhetoric just ignores their existence. In this rhetoric, there is no talk of war, because only one side is visible. The author's presumed expertise becomes a kind of campfire. Gather around the author's assumptions and you will be warm, safe, and included; if you don't, we can't see you out there in the dark anyway, so you basically don't exist.

This is remarkably easy to do even in an academic paper. Here are two vivid examples, one classically leftist, the other conservative.

From the left, a paper on "transit deserts". You can go to the link, but I'm not naming the authors here because I have no desire to embarrass them by attracting searches on their names. Their work has been peer-reviewed, which means that several arbiters of academic quality view it as an acceptable example of professional thinking today. My point is about how pervasive and accepted this rhetoric is even as academic thought.

The abstract begins:

The term “transit desert” is a new concept that looks at the gap between level of transit service (supply) and needs of a particular population (demand). These populations are often referred to as “transit dependent,” people that are too young, too old, or too poor or who are physically unable to drive. “Transit deserts” in this case are defined as areas that lack adequate public transit service given areas containing populations that are deemed transit-dependent.

In just a few words, the authors have denied the existence of three very large groups of people. These rhetorically annihilated groups are:

Anyone who analyzed the spatial relationship between transit service and needy populations before someone invented the "new concept" of doing this. This includes all professional transit planners over the age of 30, including past generations going back a century or more. (Of course, the rhetorical annihilation of elders is such a routine part of being young — kids, we did it too at your age! — that it's hardly worth being offended by.)
Anyone for whom demand does not mean mere need, but rather the meaning that is already routine in business and economics — something like a "buyer's willingness and ability to pay a price for a specific quantity of a good or service". The paper's use of the word demand annihilates anyone coming from the perspectives of business or basic economics..
Anyone who uses transit, wants transit to be useful to them, or wants the live in a city where even the rich ride transit, but who does not meet the specified qualifications to be called "transit dependent." As made clear in the first sentence, these people's desire to use transit, or to build a city around transit, does not count to the authors as demand, because they do not meet the authors' standard for need.

A paper could make arguments against the point of view of these groups, but tbat's not done here. Rather, the very possibility that such positions might exist is denied.

And of course, conservatives papers do this too. Let's turn to a conservative-sounding paper, featured in Atlantic Citylab, for which you can also follow the link for the citation. It's a little more careful but standard forms of annihilation appear soon enough. The paper opens like this:

This article asks why public transportation’s political support in the United States is so much larger than its ridership.

Upon reading this, I scratched my head trying to imagine what it would be like to find this an interesting problem statement. I don't mean to rhetorically annihilate the authors; I acknowledge their existence, but it it sounds like they don't talk with transit advocates or riders very much. Those people would tell you that the answer is too obvious to need studying, as indeed it turns out to be:

We … show that support for transit spending is correlated more with belief in its collective rather than private benefits—transit supporters are more likely to report broad concerns about traffic congestion and air pollution than to report wanting to use transit themselves.

Well, of course people vote for transit for reasons other than the narrowest kind of self-interest. People vote for transit because (a) it benefits people they care about, if not themselves, (b) it offers some solutions to real problems of urban mobility and (c) it helps foster cities that people want to live in, as demonstrated by the way land values are soaring in such places.

But why is this a problem? The authors conclude:

These findings suggest a collective action problem, since without riders transit cannot deliver collective benefits. But most transit spending supporters do not use transit, and demographics suggest they are unlikely to begin doing so; transit voters are wealthier and have more options than transit riders.

A collective action problem is a situation in which everyone would benefit if X were done, but nobody can justify doing X as a selfish cost/benefit calculation. One fable explaining the problem imagines a group of mice who would all benefit if a marauding cat wore a bell, but none of whom finds it rational to the huge risks of climbing the cat's back to put the bell on.

What does it mean to assert that the transit ridership is a problem of this kind? It implies …

… that transit users who do not vote do not exist. The most explicit rhetorical annihilation in the paper is the assumption that the set of people who vote in the US (rarely more than 40% of the population and often less in local elections) largely contains the set of potential transit riders. In reality, non-voters are so dominant in the population that their ridership may be a big contributor to transit's actual success, thus helping solve any "collective action problem". Nor do they consider that many of these non-voters are friends or relatives or employees of voters, who may then understandably, even in a sense selfishly, vote in the interests of those people.
... that people who don't think they'll use transit are right about that. In the biz, what people say they want to do, or would do, is called stated preference data, and it's known to be largely useless. Humans are terrible at guessing what they'd do, or want to do, in a hypothetical future based on a situation, and set of options, that they can't imagine now.

... that there is no gradual path to collective action, because demographic categories all have hard edges within which people are trapped. This is the big one. To posit a "collective action problem" the authors must assume that the level of wealth above which people are unlikely to use transit is rigid, even though it in reality it rises as transit grows more useful, and that it divides a population cleanly. Everyone who is near the boundaries between demographic categories, or who chooses transit for reasons not predictable by their income, is annihilated here.

No argument appears in the paper for any of the assumptions above. Limited discussion about ridership is based on what people tell the census about their commuting behavior; this casually annihilates all non-commute users of transit, including people who voted for it and love to use it on weekends, but have to drive to work because it's not useful for that purpose.

Finally, the collective action problem assumes that everyone is a bizarre character from classical economics known as homo economicus: someone who rationally computes and acts on self-interest that is defined only in the narrowest sense. Among the many absurdities that follow from this are that in exactly the same circumstances, everyone would do the same thing, because we do not have diverse values, attractions, or personalities.

But in the real world, one mouse sometimes does put the bell on the cat. Some of us will take ridiculous risks for the common good. Some of us choose to be firefighters or police or soldiers or artists or social workers, all high-risk jobs that require courage but that enrich society if they succeed against all the odds. Most of us don't take those risks, but we're all better off because some of us do. Likewise, some fortunate people ride transit because they like it. Some less fortunate ones prefer to spend their scarce income on a motorcycle.

Everyone who acts in ways not predictable by their assigned demographic category is being annihilated here. Human diversity, even human quirkiness is good for the collective, however hard it is for the social sciences to describe.

—

What do these two papers have in common? Between them, they annihilate almost everyone, including each other's in-groups.

You could say that all this annihilation is an occupational hazard of the social sciences — or indeed that it's an inevitable feature of them. The social sciences are in the business of talking about gigantic groups of people using reductive categories, and all categorization suppresses diversity.

But the hardness of category boundaries is one of the most fundamental and dangerous of human illusions, because it is coded deeply into common language and underlies all forms of prejudice. So the social sciences are always playing with fire, always at risk of giving aid and comfort to polarizing, exclusionary styles of thought.

This rhetoric of annihilation can lead to publication and approval, so long as an adequate ecosystem of reviewers and advisors has reasons (ideological or material) for sharing an assumption or at least not challenging it. But once past that bar, these assumptions become "the literature," bounced around in the echo chamber of "expert" discourse. Through the turning of generations, some of these assumptions do get overturned, if only as part of the inevitable process of the young annihilating their elders. But much harm is done in the meantime.

Great academic work also requires thinking about all of the forces that determine the situation being studied, not just the one's academic discipline or in-group values, and honoring descriptions of the issue from those points of view. If they intend to influence policy, they make sure they understand the diverse experience of practitioners in the field, not just academics. This is especially true if a paper intends to influence policy, rather than just participate in a discipline's private conversation.

But meanwhile: Do you see a new academic paper, thick with footnotes and citations, as an immediate signifier of authority and wisdom? Be careful. To be welcomed around the campfire, you may have to consent to annihilation.

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