Magic Spot Flowing

As a citizen advocate, I spend a lot of time telling my local governments and government agencies what I think. I’m familiar with the various stages and forms of public involvement processes — sitting on committees, going to project meetings, asking questions, raising concerns, writing comments, addressing decisionmakers. So originally I was a big fan of Metro’s Opt In concept — hey, Metro is asking for our opinion! They’re sending us emails with quick surveys, making it easier than hunting down comment forms on each project webpage (if the project even has one), or searching for the right physical address or phone number to contact. I joined Opt-In with such rosy thoughts at first, but I lost them relatively quickly as I saw that the demographics of the survey were clearly out of whack with the region (involving the most involved, like me, further, rather than engaging new populations) and the surveys were often poorly designed. The final straw for me was the recent poll on regional transportation priorities, which BikePortland covered, especially the fact that the survey writers defended the survey setup:

Jim Middaugh, communications director for Metro, defends the survey. “We’re attempting to provoke a bit and help decision makers get a sense of where different segments of the population are on these things.” On Twitter, he responded directly to criticisms by saying that the “Forced choice” the survey presents is a “technique to get at underlying values.” And he added that, “Metro gets that things aren’t black and white.”

“We’re trying to see how people are leaning… If you put a grey zone in there, it’s not as informative.”

I’ve been through enough public involvement processes to have seen that some of them are shams, sometimes even when the people involved are well-intentioned. And forced-choice, or its cousin “limiting project scope”, is the most common type of sham. It disallows certain types of input from the start, and the result can be used to suggest things that are not reflective of people’s real opinions. That’s exactly what Metro seems to be up to with Opt-In. They choose the topics, they design the surveys with the possible questions, and in many cases, they are, apparently deliberately, pushing people away from common ground and reasonable middle views. They’re push-polling, not gathering public input.

I opted not to complete the recent TriMet budget survey for the same reason. Same deal: at first, I was excited. Online budget survey — new and shiny! Engages people who wouldn’t otherwise! Maybe, but it’s clearly designed to get the answers they want. They start out by claiming poverty and the best of intentions, and follow that with union-bashing (and I say this as someone who is frustrated with the union negotiation situation right now; I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the union’s position, but it’s not exactly classy of TriMet to present it the way they do). Only then do they proceed to the survey options. Raising parking revenue is given one option of a “nominal” fee at crowded lots, for $100,000. No market-rate parking, not even a non-nominal parking charge. But they have no hesitation suggesting that we raise fares by $0.25 or more and/or force anyone transferring to buy a $4.20 day pass, discouraging trip-chaining and multimodal travel. Let’s definitely impact low-income and multi-modal inner-city users, not the suburban users who drive in to the big MAX lots! Let’s definitely not talk about increasing the taxes that bring in the majority of Trimet’s budget! Sorry, I’m not going to buy into that at any level, not even to legitimize the idea by participating.

For anyone who’s willing to stick around, hit “no/neither/disagree”, and write your comments in, I salute you. But I’m opting out of these particular shams.

Last month I finally completed a long-planned project: switching webhosts and updating my website to use a modern version of WordPress, to resolve the issues I was having with my old webhost not providing the features I need or any useful support to help me get those features. (For those who are curious, I switched to Dreamhost, which is also hosting my new business site. They are great. Do not use eBoundHost. They are not great.)

But apparently I didn’t then start blogging again, until today when I got a fascinating email from one of my nerdy transportation mailing lists and thought “This topic is transportation-related, but really doesn’t fit my business site. Oh! I have this other blog available again…”

The person emailing wanted to know whether there were any programs to reduce parking fees for people who usually bike or take transit, but occasionally need to drive, and if so, how they’re set up and administered. Such a system had never occurred to me as something that might be part of a program for transportation demand management (the official term for programs that encourage people not to drive alone for their trips). I think it’s an interesting idea. On the one hand, it makes sense — these people normally don’t pose much of a burden on parking supply, and should be rewarded for that. On the other hand, the whole point of parking fees is to manage parking demand, and if people who normally bike or take transit get reduced fees, they might actually drive more — because doing so doesn’t incur as high a penalty, so they don’t have to reserve it for times when they absolutely have to. On the first hand again, people who currently always drive, and think that they would probably need to sometimes even if they didn’t always, might be encouraged to do so by having reduced fees on the days they didn’t drive — they get a benefit that extends across all days, even if they can only bike on some days.

Altogether, it’s not exactly clear to me that this is a good idea, or what the effect would be. Mostly I was fascinated (as I have often been since joining this mailing list) by the variety of things people working professionally in TDM consider as possible programs and incentives. I’m learning a lot about how the whole thing works — which is super, since I am working to get employed in the field and this learning will benefit not just my own brain and curiosity, but my professional advancement and my future employers. :-)

I went running this morning, repeating C25K Week 2, Day 1, after a three week break. I was having a lot of pain in my feet and ankles after completing Week 3, and decided to take a week off — which turned into two and then three weeks before my feet stopped hurting.

I made some mistakes in my first attempt at C25K in my FiveFingers that I think I’ll be able to avoid the second time around.

The biggest one was just plain overdoing things. I’m new to running, so I was training feet, legs, and lungs all pretty strongly. I got all excited about exercise and activity and went on a 6.5 mile hike in FiveFingers after a week of running during which I’d begun to get sore. That pushed things over the edge, and in retrospect, reminds me of one of the early weeks of Waves to Wine training in 2008. I went farther than the schedule said (because it felt fine at the time) and then felt exhausted and sore for three days.

During the time off, I realized I was using my feet to absorb most of the shock of landing. I was walking downstairs one day and noticed a huge difference in the amount of force on my feet if I absorbed the jolting with my leg muscles instead of my feet. Apparently, I can get away with this while walking in FiveFingers, but not while running in them. My leg muscles, it turns out, are not thrilled about this change.

I also became very aware while running today that I’m still pronating my feet, which tends to direct pain to the outsides of my ankles in a funny way. I’ve been aware of this tendency since I had a bout of foot pain in 2004, and have been trying to counteract it, but I found that it was particularly difficult to do when I got tired and when the ground was very soft. Feeling too tired for good form should have been a big clue to mistake #1.

I haven’t always taking time to stretch and do muscle maintenance after running. My calves got overworked and tight, which certainly exacerbated, and may have caused, the foot and ankle pain.

Finally, it turns out that I feel a lot better running in my Sprints than I do in the KSOs. I started out in the KSOs because it was cold and wet outside and the Sprints tend not to keep my feet warm. But the Sprints seem to be more comfortable for running, at least right now. Not surprising, since that’s what they are supposed to be for.

Today’s run, on much firmer, drier ground using Sprints, was definitely much more comfortable than the first iteration of W2D1, which took place on a cold, rainy, windy morning, on sploshy ground, in KSOs. I’m hoping that can continue, although it doesn’t look like the weather is planning to cooperate on the “firmer, drier” point!

The Urbanophile reprinted a post from the Where Blog (which looks like a neat blog) that caught my attention, since it drew a comparison between language and urban development.

I don’t know that much about urban development yet, but it fascinates me, and I do know something about language. The problem is that the something that I know suggests that this may be a poor analogy.

Drew writes:

Hence DFW’s conclusion. We can’t assume those planning our cities are credible just because they’re making the plans. But we need rules and guidance—an entirely hands-off approach will create interesting cities with multitudes of serious problems.

Here he’s analogizing between urban planners and prescriptive linguists. But David Foster Wallace’s essay (and further works), wherein he arrives at the conclusion that prescriptivism is needed, has been taken apart by better linguists and bloggers than I, Language Log and Language Hat. Language Log has a whole category called Prescriptivist Poppycock.

This all suggests a rather different analogy between urban planners and prescriptivists, namely that they are talking nonsense well over half the time and for the most part we’d be better off without them, because the object of their concern is perfectly capable of developing organically and effectively, entirely on its own, in ways that serve its function.

For what it’s worth, that doesn’t strike me as particularly valid either. But since it’s an equally good, or maybe better, description of the relationship of prescriptivists to language, I’d recommend that urbanists be careful taking prescriptivists as their model!

Nevertheless, I think Drew makes a valid point in the final paragraph:

Maybe this is why urbanists keep returning to Jane Jacobs. She reconciles these approaches in The Death and Life of Great American Cities by merging a Descriptivist’s eye for the way cities actually are (not how they should be) with a Prescriptivist’s desire to make cities better—by nurturing what’s already good in those cities rather than trying to recreate them.

In agreeing with the final idea, I might resurrect the analogy at a more sophisticated level: both urban planners and prescriptivists ostensibly want to make things better, and both can easily end up doing nothing of the sort, because the systems they are trying to manipulate are organic and complex and don’t necessarily respond the way you expect to manipulation.

Two things Google reader does wrong (in my opinion):

If two of your friends have shared the same post, it appears twice in your shared items.
If you follow a blog that one of your friends has shared a post from, you see both the blog post and the shared post.

I can see why there might be reasons for this, but on the face of it, this is just plain stupid, and even if it’s not plain stupid (e.g. if the comments are different on each post), there has to be a smarter way to handle this. I don’t want to read the same post twice. I have a hard enough time being patient enough to keep up with my feeds as it is.

What I come back to most whenever the subject of my class last fall comes up is how amazing it is that I was able to learn so much information and meet so many significant figures in the Portland transportation scene in just ten short weeks (Oct 1 – Dec 3).

Getting into the class was a bit of a rollercoaster — I learned about the class from BikePortland while I was in the Bay Area over Labor Day weekend, but by the time I got back and organized to apply for the scholarship from the city, the scholarship spaces were exhausted and I was put on the waiting list. Disappointed, I consoled myself by thinking, “No need to rush into things. I’m new here; I’m sure others need the learning more than I do.” But Gavin encouraged me not to give up, and later I learned that it’s not uncommon for a few people to drop out before the class starts. Sure enough, the week before the class started, Scott Cohen, the class liaison, contacted me and asked if I wanted a space that had opened up. Yes, of course!

The class lecture series included Portland’s senior planner, Steve Dotterer; the director of PBOT, Sue Kiehl; officials from Metro and Trimet; Roger Geller, city Bicycle Coordinator; April Bertelson, Pedestrian Coordinator; Marni Glick of Transportation Options (who I also knew from my Sunday Parkways volunteering); Rob Burchfield, city Traffic Engineer; Patrick Sweeney, who headed up the Streetcar System Plan effort; and lectures from our coordinator, Rick Gustafson, a former ED of Trimet and longtime transportation official and consultant in Portland; as well as a special presentation by Gordon Price, Director of the City Program at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC. (The presentations, except for Gordon Price’s, are all available on the class website.)

My favorite presentations were Gordon Price, Steve Dotterer, Patrick Sweeney, Roger Geller, and Marni Glick — possibly in that order — for, respectively, a deep and broad look at urban design and transportation, the historical perspective on Portland, a beautiful presentation with impressive evidence of project management and community outreach, bikey awesomeness, and sheer enthusiasm for the job.

Doing a project also turned out to be a really important part of the class. Hearing that it would involve giving a presentation and was optional, I almost backed out. I hate public speaking, and I wasn’t sure I had time for a project. But Rick encouraged us to participate because it would give us a practical grounding in what most of us really wanted to do with our class knowledge — getting transportation projects done in Portland.

I decided to do my project on the interaction between bikes and rails. It’s an issue of personal interest to me, because I live near the streetcar tracks (and the NW Industrial area which has a lot of disused/rarely used tracks) and riding near them makes me nervous. It’s also a well-known issue in Portland and is in the theme of my main area of interest in bike advocacy, bike/transit interactions.

My project ended up being selected for the second session, which would include an outside panel and any members of the public who wanted to attend. I was excited, but also nervous. It was fortunate timing in that the week of the first presentations was very busy for me, and the respite that I got allowed me to put together a much better presentation.

The process of doing the project was somewhat guided by our homework assignments. I started out by doing a lot of web research, and later moved on to documenting particular issues and investigating each proposed solution further, as well as taking pictures of nasty intersections. The part that took me personally the longest to do was to contact someone in the city or other government agency about the issue. There’s no shortage of people to talk to about the streetcar, but I was nervous about calling people. It’s a personal thing, and one that I badly need to get over before I can be serious about being an advocate. I was very impressed when I saw how many people some of my classmates had spoken with, when I didn’t even take advantage of all the leads I got until after class was over. Lesson learned!

The presentations were supposed to only take three minutes, because that’s how long you get to speak at public hearings. It turns out to be a lot harder to give a three-minute presentation than a ten-minute one. Not too many people made the time limit — I’m not sure whether I did, although I practiced hard and trimmed down my presentation until I could give it in that amount of time. My presentation got a very good reception, with particularly kind words from Rick, and is now available, with the rest, on Chris Smith’s Portland Transport blog.

I feel very lucky to have had the class so soon after my arrival in Portland. As I start to get more involved in the Portland transportation scene, having the background has already proven useful. And as Patrick and April, both themselves graduates of the class, reminded us, it’s not just what you know, it’s who you know, presenters and fellow students alike, that may help you get things done in the future.

I didn’t notice this at the time, but Chris Smith posted our presentations from the December 3rd Traffic and Transportation class session on his blog at Portland Transport.

If you’ve been waiting for me to get my act together, wait no longer — the PDF is available there. A few entries later is David Sweet’s NE Fremont project, which truly was the most impressive in how much he had already accomplished. It was inspiring to me to see how much time and effort he had put in, how many people he had spoken to, and the creativity he used in securing funding.

I’ve been working on a post about my experience in the class, but it needs some cleaning up. I’ll try to get there soon, as a complement to this post.

I noticed this morning that in a conversation yesterday I used the phrase “some ones that” when I could just as easily have some “some that” (or “ones that”):

I bought new gloves
some ones from REI that are lobster-claw

I was curious to see if this is common. It’s at least common enough that most of the top ten Google hits for “some ones that” are for this construction. It gets fewer hits than “some that”, which is clearly the more straightforward and official construction (all the “some ones that” hits are clearly from user-created content, compared to “some that” which brings up titles of articles, books, etc.

It may not really be produced intentionally — perhaps we are going to say “some [nouns] that” but realize that the referent is too close? I’m not always a fan of assuming people don’t intend to produce what they produced, but I don’t see otherwise why “some that” wouldn’t be produced instead.

BikePortland this morning pointed to another musing on the ‘cyclist’ label from Streetsblog, which itself links to one from BikeSnob NYC. I like BikeSnob NYC’s definition too: someone who rides a bike when they don’t have to, and owns a floor pump. Though as a commenter points out, if you own a Topeak Road Morph G you don’t really need a floor pump. Oops, did I just out myself as a cyclist?

There’s a meme developing in the transportation community (especially the cycling community) that suggests that instead of using labels like “cyclist”, “pedestrian”, and “motorist”, we should talk about people and what they do. People walking, people cycling, people driving. The theory is that the labels create the idea that there are three separate groups of people with very different needs, behaviors, and perspectives. The fact is of course that we are almost all pedestrians at least some of the time, and many of us accommodate all three labels: we drive, cycle, and walk at different times. The groups are flexible and overlapping, rather than the separate entities that the labels seem to create.

While I agree that describing groups of people taking actions may be more effective in developing transportation advocacy and policy conversations, I can’t agree that there is no such thing as a cyclist, pedestrian, or motorist beyond the mode choice of the moment.

Last night before falling asleep, I was thinking about how I know lots of people who cycle sometimes, but not all or most of the time, and was wondering why they do and don’t cycle at various times. The key seems to be that they cycle when it is the most convenient (fast, effective) or the most enjoyable way of getting somewhere. Short trips are easy and fast, and longer trips are fun when the conditions are good.

Common reasons for not cycling are that it’s too far (ineffective), or that it’s cold, rainy, windy, or dark (unenjoyable), or that there are no appropriate facilities so it takes too long or feels/is dangerous (ineffective and unenjoyable).

I also know people who ride practically everywhere. Why do they ride practically everywhere? Because they think that cycling is always, or nearly always, the most effective or enjoyable way of getting somewhere. To me, this is what a cyclist is: someone who thinks that cycling is always, or nearly always, the most effective or enjoyable way of getting somewhere. A pedestrian and a motorist are likewise people who feel that their mode is the most effective or enjoyable way of getting places. I definitely know both pedestrians and motorists as well as cyclists.

Since I prefer not to drive (it’s never enjoyable to me, even though I sometimes decide it is the most effective mode) I suppose I would have to call myself a cyclist-pedestrian. Or maybe I’m just a rather pedestrian cyclist.

Which one are you? Or are you a mode-agnostic, equally content with any effective method of getting places?