Magic Spot Flowing

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.

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?

I was very impressed by The Urbanophile’s post on what’s killing California. He takes a look at the general issues behind the current problems, with a level of analysis that pushes it far above most of the reading (and all of the talking) I’ve done on the topic.

Hat tip: Jeff, for sharing items in Google Reader!

Last night I went to Plan B (SE 8th and Main) for “An Evening with Roger Geller”, an interview of Roger Geller, PBOT’s Bicycle Coordinator, by Jonathan Maus of BikePortland. The main subject was the draft 2030 Bike Plan, which is likely to be adopted by City Council in January. It was a good conversation — by turns personal, wonky, political, and funny. My two favorite quotes, which I posted on Twitter during the evening, were:

You build for the future you want.

and

We’re talking to the choir a bit here, but it’s still important for the choir to show up to church.

The second one perhaps needs a little more context if you weren’t there. He was speaking in response to the concern that the conversation about the Bike Plan and cycling in general is not happening enough outside the ‘bike bubble’ of interested, active cyclists. Since despite my newcomer status in Portland, I’m certainly already inside the bike bubble, I don’t really have any idea, but I liked his point here and the analogy is fun.

You build for the future you want. Let’s build it out. Let’s get 5000 (clothed) cyclists to rally at City Hall. Let’s get more funding, so it’s not bikes or streetcar; or sharrows or bike boulevards, but both/and. Bike everything, all the time. Okay, maybe not, but I’m wholly enthusiastic, and particularly happy to know that they are planning to use all available traffic tools to manage the newer bike boulevards they will be building. Portland’s bike boulevards are sometimes more notional than actual, and still get crazy traffic. Put Ellen Fletcher Bike Boulevard-style diverters on them, take away the superfluous stop signs, and you’ve really got something great.

I found it interesting also to watch Roger’s deflection of fundamentally political questions. I don’t fault him for this, as it is really up to us, as citizens, to get politics and political will and funding stuff going, but it was interesting to see. At one point he commented rather simply “no” when asked if there was tension between being a cyclist personally, and believing in cycling, and building out infrastructure with all its many challenges and compromises. I saw in that an admirable passion for doing concrete things to advance cycling, even if it’s sometimes unclear which concrete things will be the best in the long run.

Tonight was a view from a different level: Gordon Price presenting at the Portland building, as part of my PSU/PBOT Traffic and Transportation class. Our coordinator had promised us a really great presentation, really great, but I have to admit I was skeptical. We’ve sat through a lot of presentations, many of them interesting, in the eight sessions we’ve had.

But this one was really fantastic. I was incredibly impressed by Mr. Price, in both style and substance. It probably helps that he totally reminds me of my dad (who is also a balding, sixtyish Canadian professor, albeit one who has mostly lost his Canadian accent over the years).

He had a comprehensive presentation about the development and state of the auto-dependent society, and not one that totally relied on numbers and text but which effectively used images of all kinds — photographs, maps, 3D maps, charts — to tell the story of the auto-dependent landscape vs. the human-scale landscape. He took examples from all over the US and Canada (even San Mateo, CA, where I used to live).

What I was most impressed with was the way his presentation explained what the auto-dependent society gives us that we want. We want privacy, space, autonomy. Obvious, right? But it’s overlooked so often in discussions about transportation and land use; it’s seen as obvious that we in fact don’t want suburban sprawl. Or if we do, we shouldn’t because we are bad people to want something that is so clearly bad in its end-stages. But it comes out of human impulses, human desires. No, it doesn’t work, but it’s important to respect the point. Even in high-density areas, he pointed out, household sizes are tiny. People occupy a ton of space per person compared to what they used to, so in order to fit enough people in, we have to go up, up, or otherwise be clever about space usage.

Some favorite quotes:
“Motordom never really worked on its own terms.”
“…an urban region designed for the car.” (a perfect description of 95% of the Bay Area)
“They laid out a continent that way…we walk in chains.”
“Congestion is our frind. You’re going to have it. Where do you want it?”
“If they can do it in Detroit, there’s gotta be hope.”

And the most interesting for me personally:
“As a cyclist I am not a big fan of rail in the street.”

Last, a relayed Tom Robbins, that I liked because of my interest in systems:

A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed.

Later, when I seriously turned by attention to the whole question of manipulation, I began to understand that one should not use either a person’s strength or his weakness against him. As I see it now, the only course that is ethically justified is an appeal to strength — not in order to throw one’s opponent by means of his own strength, but on the grounds that reliance on strength will only work for the good….
I do not advocate a philosophy of blind and naive trust. Occasionally it is clear that a person in a position of power will, if he can, block or destroy something of great value. In such circumstances it is necessary to be politic; this means, essentially, using the strengths and weaknesses of other persons or groups for one’s own ends. In the same way, in wartime, a nation plays on the weaknesses — and even on the strengths — of the enemy. But there is always a price to pay later, an erosion of the capacity for trust, a kind of damage that persists after the war and makes the reestablishment of working relationships much more difficult. –Margaret Mead, Blackberry Winter pp. 130-131

This quotation jumped out at me as I was reading tonight because it resonated with something I’ve been thinking about in general, which is how people work together in groups, and also with something I was thinking about today. For various reasons I don’t want to identify the particular situation, but I found myself in this situation behaving ‘politically’, using the influence of someone higher up than I because I knew from past experience, I could get that person on ‘my side’, and it struck me how far that was from straightforward and communication. I wasn’t being dishonest, but I was using my honesty in a calculated — manipulative — way.

I had a discussion with a friend recently about subtle types of dishonest communication, including ‘faux surprise’, when you act as if it has only just occurred to you that a person isn’t doing something you think they should be, when in fact you have been thinking about mentioning it to them for some time and your approach is deliberate rather than spontaneous. It occurs to me that that’s also a type of manipulation — your goal is to get them to do what you want, but you aren’t straightforwardly admitting that. You pretend to be innocent when you’re really being politic.

I particularly appreciate the way she talks about the “erosion of the capacity for trust” that results from this kind of interaction. My actions today were effective, but trying to imagine being on the receiving end of them, I find that I am annoyed with myself, and assign to myself — as I did at the time to some the others in the interaction — a motive other than finding the most effective way to solve what is clearly, based on its recurring nature, a genuine problem. Doing what I did wasn’t my first action, but I really wish that my second action had been to think of something different to do, instead of following the pattern that over time has been established over this issue.

I don’t do a lot of writing about my advocacy stuff on this blog. If you think the bike-riding stuff is boring, imagine what you would think about stuff that doesn’t even involve riding a bike, but instead involves a lot of meetings and emails and often-tedious government agencies and regulations about bikes, and you’ll see why.

But today, I’m getting a lot of warm advocacy fuzzies for once, and I want to share that joy with the world.

For the last two months I’ve been chairing an SVBC “workgroup” (a small committee of members) on the issue of Caltrain bike accommodation. Basically, there are a limited number of spaces for people to take their bikes on the train to do a multi-modal trip with train+bike, and the spaces are running out. And many people who do this really like doing it, and don’t have other good options, and they were being delayed by 10 minutes to an hour or more, unpredictably, by having to wait for the next train with an available slot. For a long time, Caltrain was resistant to adding more spaces, and cyclists were getting angry and frustrated. A cyclist was arrested due to poor management of a conflict over bumping.

Late last fall, everything came to a head and, as a result of pressure from the community and both bike coalitions (SVBC and SFBC), the Caltrain Joint Powers Board asked Caltrain staff to investigate the possibilities for increases in onboard capacity.

Since then, the workgroup has been brainstorming on ways to improve the system and the amount of capacity, taking input from SVBC members and other cyclists, and meeting with Caltrain staff to express our ideas and concerns. The people on the workgroup have been fantastic to work with — thoughtful, concerned, energetic, and determined to make progress in coming up with feasible ideas for near-term improvements to the situation.

Yesterday at the February 5 Joint Powers Board meeting, staff presented their plan and members and representatives of SVBC and SFBC and the community at large spoke in support of capacity and other system improvements. After staff presentation and lively discussion, the result is that Caltrain is going to increase capacity on its newer, more limited 16-space cars by 50%, and on the older cars (which had 32 spaces) by 25% to 40, a total increase over the day from around 4,000 slots to a little over 5,000. They’re also going to take other measures such as gathering more statistics and formalizing bike input to the agency through a Bicycle Advisory Committee. The JPB also asked Caltrain to try to direct extra bike cars (each train is guaranteed to have 1, but some have 2) to the high-demand trains during the commute hours.

This isn’t everything we hoped for (the workgroup’s position includes a number of other items and a slightly greater increase in capacity), but it is branded as an “interim” solution, and will be revisited. The workgroup will continue to meet with Caltrain staff, and to discuss more ideas for improving the system. It’s a lot more than we had the day before yesterday.

The best thing for me has been seeing the results of our work in print and online (Mercury News, San Mateo Daily Journal, SFGate, SF Examiner), and through emails flying back and forth, commending me, the workgroup, and SVBC for our efforts. I’m but a small cog in this big movement, but it’s very nice to get a few warm fuzzies recognizing the time and effort (and many, many emails) that I’ve committed to the project. And equally nice to throw them back to the workgroup, Caltrain staff, SVBC board and staff, and everyone who cared enough to tell Caltrain that they wanted more.

Caltrain and cycling are my main transportation options, and being able to combine them when I need to is personally very important to me. I’m ecstatic that that’s about to get a little easier.

But the great thing he brought us is the reminder that he doesn’t have to do everything. We the people have reserves of extraordinary that we can and should spend freely. –Sars

I got some offline feedback on my last entry, with the effect that I rethought a few things. Here are some of the new thoughts:

Anonymity. The way I defined this previously was “being out in public without being notable”. This isn’t a very good definition, because, as Gavin pointed out, anonymity actually has a more technical definition that’s important to preserve, namely: being in public without being known. So works of art can be anonymous, in that they are well-known but no one knows who made them (they are completely unsigned). Or a person can be anonymous by being in disguise or otherwise completely unrecognized. Or information can be made anonymous, “unconnected to an identity”, by purging it of identifying information, like aggregated web search data unconnected to IP address or other similar identifiers.

Gavin suggested that the concept I defined previously could be described as being “unnotable” or “unnoticed”. Perhaps a better word is needed, but having both concepts is certainly more useful.

Another concept that I didn’t define explicitly, but left under the umbrella of privacy, is pseudonymity. This is a very important concept in modern web communications since so much information these days is attached to usernames. When is a pseudonym truly unconnected to a person’s “real identity”? This can be a challenge to determine, and a lot of pseudonymous information is poorly protected because of subtle identifiers in the information or interconnection between pseudonymous information and information filed under a “real name”; it can also become an issue when pseudonym or username is used for multiple sites, services, or types of works. It’s often easier to find a person’s data on the web once you know one of their common usernames than it is when you know their name. Usernames are, by their nature as keys to a specific record, more unique than names.

I also am not that fond of my definition of notability. It doesn’t seem to me to require numbers, but only a certain level of significant interest. However, that’s pretty hard to describe and define.

Finally, Dave wrote me an extensive discussion of yet another concept relating to accessibility: risk.
Risk is what you have when information is accessible to some people, but not others, because there’s a risk of failure of the safeguards that prevent it from being accessible to everyone (loss or deliberate breakage), as well as a risk of legal decision that the safeguards must be removed (search warrants, subpoenas).

Dave sums his discussion up thus: “Heightened accessibility, even if it is well-understood under normal conditions, still creates the prospect of lowered privacy.”

This is, I think, one of the big deals about accessibility that makes people pitch a fit about sudden increases in it.

As a result of some long-ago and more recent conversations with smart friends of mine, I came up with some interesting thoughts about privacy.

I don’t fully understand the legal umbrella of privacy, but it seems to me that there are a few distinct concepts that it would be useful to introduce into quasi-legal/common-sense discussions of privacy, and potentially to the legal arena too, in the long run.

First, a brief rundown of the concepts, before we get into their interactions and complications.

Privacy. Things that are private are things that you do on private property not visible from a public space, or public spaces where you have “a reasonable expectation of privacy”, and that you don’t speak or publish about in publicly-accessible forums — or if you do, those forums are specifically unconnected to your “real identity”. Also, things are private which are defined by law to be private, but that’s less important here than the nontechnical definition.

Accessibility (or Ease of Access). Things that are accessible are things that are easy for the average person or user to find. This is not a great term because “accessible” also has a technical binary definition related to privacy: if information is not at all accessible, it is private. But bear with me for a while, and suggest a better word if you have one.

Notability. Things that are notable are things that a substantial percentage of people (in the whole population or some subgroup) is interested in knowing about.

Anonymity. Being out in public without being notable.

The complexities of online “privacy” often come up when something besides privacy is involved, namely accessibility or notability. In my old journal, I wrote an entry about Google Street View (and Facebook News Feed, to some extent) in which I used the terms “theoretical privacy” and “actual privacy” rather than using the word “accessibility”, although I did notice, on re-reading the comments, that I start to talk about information being “(easily) accessible”.

GSV and FNF are iconic examples of things that “raised privacy concerns” without actually doing anything to change whether information was private or not. All the information on GSV and FNF was always available (to anyone who set foot in a place, in the case of GSV, and to anyone who previously had access to the info, in the case of FNF). What they did do was make it incredibly easy to find things out that previously had required a lot of effort to find out: what a place looks like at ground level, and what your friends are doing on Facebook. So the information became accessible (in the sense defined above) where before it had been inaccessible.

Notability is implicated in most problems where accessibility becomes an issue. If information is not notable (no one is really interested in knowing it), it doesn’t matter if it is easily accessible or not: no one cares, either way. Dave sent me a link today (which spawned this whole thought process on my part) about a guy whose information suddenly became notable. The guy didn’t mind, but it gave him pause for thought, as I’m sure it would most of us.

In the FNF and GSV cases, nothing became differently notable, just differently (more easily) accessible. This is closer to a form of privacy loss, because it makes something notable easier to find, and if something notable is found, you have much easier access to it. BoingBoing readers had many things to say about it, some of them wondering if we need new laws, or a new area of law, to deal with accessibility of information, since it isn’t covered by traditional privacy law.

Personal conduct in public, combined with YouTube and other video-upload services, illustrates a different set of circumstances. Most of us who live in largish urban areas, most of the time we’re in public, are anonymous: out in public without anyone particularly caring who we are. We feel restricted in our activities by our visibility, but don’t need to worry very much about anyone caring what we’re up to, even if we’re eating cookies when we’re supposed to be on a diet, or smoking when we said we quit. The situation isn’t the same in smaller communities, of course. In small communities, it’s hard to be out in public without being known.

Even in larger communities, recording and uploading a person’s behavior to a video site like YouTube makes it more accessible, but doesn’t necessarily make it more notable (consider all the incredibly boring YouTube videos that no one watches). Likewise, a person’s behavior becoming an object of attention/controversy would make it more notable but not more accessible: you’d still have to actually find the person to see what they were doing. When you get the simultaneous combination of accessibility and notability, you get something like the recent BART shooting video + controversy or the Caltrain cyclist arrest. But another worrying situation is when something goes up earlier, and then later becomes notable (like the guy’s photos as linked above, or like Facebook photos of undergrads drinking which get them in trouble).

How do we live our lives in a world that is increasingly a participatory panopticon? How do we act in public? What do we publicize and what do we keep private when things could become far more accessible or notable in the future than we ever imagined?