When this article came out in the L.A. Times on January 27, I expected to read references to it up here – at least in some comment threads. Maybe I missed it, but the piece and its decline-of-transit-use implication wasn’t in the States.
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Especially by Randal O’Toole (characterized by transit consultant Jarrett Walker as “America’s leading anti-planning planning expert, and especially its leading anti-transit transit expert.) You can read O’Toole’s blog post here – “Approaching Peak Transit” – at the Cato Institute.
This, however, is more important: Jarrett Walker’s analysis on his Human Transit blog of both O’Toole’s post and the L.A. Times article as part of a larger overview:
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What makes Walker’s piece especially valuable is his acknowledgement that O’Toole sometimes gets it right – a balance in approach that’s one of the reasons Walker is such an influential writer and consultant. Which means you should read his whole post for detailed discussion on issues like data collection and presentation, the right and wrong uses of transit technologies, the challenges of government decision-making, driverless cars and other contentious issues.
Then, as you get closer to the end, you get to the real impact of what Walker is critiquing here: the very nature of the conservative anti-planning worldview itself when it comes to making long-term decisions that may not have immediate payback – but require an upfront payment.
The Heart of the Matter
Sometimes I want to get some of these folks (especially older ones) into a room and just ask this: “Close your eyes and visualize your grandchildren, or whatever children are in your family. Are there any sacrifices you’d be willing to make so that they would have better lives, more opportunities, and generally a better world, even after you’re gone, even after you are no longer there to enjoy their gratitude?”
Most writers who self-describe as “conservative” these days, including O’Toole, seem to be starting from a clear no on this question, and presuming the same in their readers. If it doesn’t pay off now, it doesn’t matter. If you think about it, is the world view of the average thrill-seeking teenager, something most of us hope to grow out of as adults.
Transit investments will make no sense to anyone who thinks this way, so the best answer, I think, is to ask my question about grandchildren. If the answer is no, there’s no point arguing.
And then this:
Because most Americans don’t ride transit, O’Toole says, transit isn’t relevant to anyone. …
… you aren’t just evil or invisible or unimportant: You actually don’t exist. These are the moments, increasingly common in arguments in our polarized age, when O’Toole reveals that he has no desire to convince anyone who is not already in his cultural camp. …
O’Toole sends constant signals that he does not want to be taken seriously by anyone who lives in, works in, or cares about big, dense cities. He ascribes to government stupidity anything that smacks of the kind of long-range planning that functional and civilized cities have always required, and he also has little time for the public consultation and consensus-building that governments spend so much time on, and which are a key reason they move so much more slowly than the private sector.
In the end, O’Toole sounds like almost everyone who lives inside of echo chambers today, anywhere on the many political spectra, saying this:
I, and the people choose to I listen to, all share the same tastes and experience and goals, so the fact that we’re right is just obvious! So, when government disagrees with us it must be stupid and incompetent. The only other explanation would be that there are actual citizens who disagree with us, because they have a different experience or goals, and that these people are asserting their democratic right to influence the government too. No, it can’t be! People who don’t fit my story aren’t “anyone.” They simply do not exist!
Yes, Walker’s warning applies to this blog too; it can be part of an echo chamber that, while it welcomes a range of views, will delete trolling and excessive repetition. But it’s also the reason why I don’t block the commenters who don’t share my worldview; it’s the reason why I invite a commenter like Thomas to be a guest editor for a week.
In the polarizing world of social media, the first rule should be that, regardless of whether we disagree, we do exist – and should treat each other with mutual respect if we have any hope for a civil conversation, and hence a civil society.
Then we can get on with debating the fallacies of each other’s use of the facts.
In the polarizing world of social media, the first rule should be that, regardless of whether we disagree, we do exist – and should treat each other with mutual respect if we have any hope for a civil conversation, and hence a civil society.
Then we can get on with debating the fallacies of each other’s use of the facts.
Well said Gordon!
+1
Well said, but if you are anti planning or have very short term thinking would you not also be against highway and bridge investments as they also have long term benefits and not short term.
I’ve always appreciated Jarrett’s clarity of thought and good writing. In reading him disassemble an opposing point of view, I think the two are related and it’s not a big surprise that his background includes literature and creative writing that clearly complement his technical analysis.
Kudos to him on another sound rebuttal of an anti-planning road lobby prophet.
But not all things that pay off in the future are necessarily sound investments. We don’t even know if self driving cars will make all these investments useless.
http://www.cp24.com/news/revised-plan-for-scarborough-subway-would-scrap-two-stations-1.2745355
Toronto is extending their subway one stop into Scarborough for 2.5 billion dollars.
The population of Scarborough is 626,000.
Let’s do a back of the envelope calculation.
Suppose 1/4 of the entire population of Scarborough will benefit from the existence of this stop. I think that’s pretty generous.
Then they could pay those people $16,000 each instead of building this stop.
To me it’s clear we could improve lives more with 2.5 billion dollars elsewhere.
For god’s sake… a Malaria Bed-net is 14 dollars. We could buy 178 million malaria bed-nets for that price and literally save millions of lives a year.
Transit is a religion. Move closer to the city if you want a shorter commute.
I am far from an O’Toole supporter. He selectively uses facts and equivocates to argue for his own beliefs, but I do think that this line misrepresents O’Toole:
“If it doesn’t pay off now, it doesn’t matter. If you think about it, is the world view of the average thrill-seeking teenager, something most of us hope to grow out of as adults.”
He would argue that since we can’t predict the future planning for 50 years out is worse than a crap-shoot. We are more likely to build something that will be irrelevant, or worse, detrimental in 50 years than something that will still be built. He would point to many of our past, failed urban experiments such as tearing down established, poor neighbourhoods to build projects that turned out to be worse for the people who live there. These projects were originally built with the best of intentions, but turned out to be horrible places for poor families to live.
50 years ago, who would have predicted that technology would make it possible to live 5000 km from your job, but still be able to work in a virtual office? How could we plan for that?
His argument is that since no one can predict the future, why should we waste resources planning for it? Why should we trust politicians who say that they can? This is particularly problematic in the US (and to a lesser extent here) where elections are bought and sold for extreme amounts of money.
To be clear, I don’t personally believe this, and this is a very generous interpretation of O’Toole, but there is a kernel of truth here. We need to be sure that whatever we build is flexible since the future is uncertain, we need to be sure that there are checks and balances against politicians being bought by the people with the most money, and we always need to be skeptical of anyone who thinks there is a single correct way of doing things.
Author
Has everything written about Motordom on this site not registered at all? What is O’Toole’s position on the Big M and suburbia. Just market forces?