I haven’t felt much like blogging recently. It has felt like the wrong time to be writing about the topics that usually interest me.
Whatever you do, don’t believe the experts talking about what happens next. They’re usually completely wrong. They are in the business of being interesting not of being correct. I’m looking at you Stephen A. Smith.
But there are some discussions worth having right now. There are some interesting and awkward connections I can make, as per usual. I can’t resist.
Let’s start with the fact that there is a lot of uncertainty right now, about public health but also about the future of transportation. There was also uncertainty 50 years ago. We were in the middle of a vast, engineer-led upgrade of our transportation systems. The Highway Revolts, the 1973 Oil Crisis, and the environmental movement flipped the script. The mathematically sound analyses that showed us precisely which minority neighborhoods to acquire and bulldoze suddenly became less impressive. We lost faith with central planning and over-complicated models that, frankly, were often plain wrong.
The present and near future are again revealing the frailty of our now even more complex models. However this time it is Covid-19 and our economic downturn that will devastate communities not overzealous urban planners. Modelers must make sure their work does no harm and that modeling doesn’t get another black eye. It’s early days yet, but so far in this pandemic mathematical modeling and technological solutioneering have actually been in vogue.
Naomi Klein is not happy. She calls out the “Screen New Deal” which, to her, is another application of the shock doctrine, the way in which capitalism advances in modern times “through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people.”Klein believes Eric Schmidt is cynically taking advantage of the pandemic to sell the State of New York on policy that he’s been pushing for years. I don’t agree. It’s kind of ludicrous. But it’s also a very interesting thesis.
Did you know that there is not one “single traditional public school” in the city of New Orleans? All schools are private or charter schools. This is because the state took over the local school district in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and instituted drastic policy changes. These policy changes had been proposed long before Katrina but were not politically feasible.
I learned about the New Orleans experiment while visiting a few years ago. Klein focuses instead on the Iraq War when talking about the shock doctrine. That’s a little harder to work into a light (?) blog piece about transportation. I tried. (Did you know that Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz reportedly began advocating for separate attacks on both Al Qaeda and Iraq just hours after the 9/11 attacks?)
I’ll make a ridiculous connection here. Planners are restricting vehicle traffic. Some are proposing large investments in bike lanes. Let’s be honest, some have been pushing for policies like these for years. The claim is that now we have an opportunity to reshape our cities. Let’s rip out our roads and build protected bike lanes while the roads are empty. People are (finally) walking and biking more. Let’s encourage them to keep doing this! With public transport reeling, we’ll need to find new ways to move people to and around downtown areas.
I don’t take issue with any of the policy changes make so far. I do worry about larger changes. I wonder if people ideologically opposed to these changes will think planners are taking advantage of the current crisis. We should be wary of conflicts of interest. We should doubt any quantitative forecasts. Modelers should, now more than ever, explain and discuss modeling assumptions and uncertainty. Recognize the long life of infrastructure. Try to avoid decisions that lead to regret later. But absolutely keep working to make the world better.
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