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.

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.

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.

Your Vision

I had a hard time finding this and ultimately got the link from a friend, so I figured I would share in case anyone else is as lazy as I am but still wants to take the time to tell Obama their thoughts.

This week is the Towards Carfree Cities conference in Portland, and Kent & Christine and Beth both have lovely things to say about life without a car. So many lovely things to say that they’ve said everything I could imagine saying!

My favorite line:

As Peter once told Kent, “I don’t ride my bike because I’m a damn hippie like you, Dad. I ride my bike because I am a FISCAL CONSERVATIVE.”

On my birthday, I drove to the VA in Palo Alto (for the Sequoia ride), to the Farmer’s Market, home, and then to Berkeley, in a friend’s car. While I was on 880-N, driving 65-70mph (and being passed regularly, since this is California), I kept thinking “This is just insane. Why am I going so fast? Where is everyone going?”

Practically speaking, that day was very unusual for me. I had too much to do and too much to carry (a full trunk and back seat) to take my bike or transit. I needed to be able to get to Berkeley in an hour with a whole load of crap, more (I think) than would even fit on an Xtracycle. (You also can’t take Xtracycles on Caltrain.)

What it ended up doing was reinforcing for me how utterly weird it is in my life for me to want or need to be somewhere 50+ miles away in an hour, and how much I no longer enjoy doing that. Slowly, through habit, my life has been reshaped for a more human scale, where ten miles in an hour seems like plenty and trying to locate appropriate places to put a 2000-lb vehicle for 30 minutes to several hours seems bizarre. It also reminded me that I could have made other choices, that it was my own choices that put me in that situation to begin with. Had I made a greater head start on the prep, I could have sent a lot of the stuff back with the other party host, and I would have needed less time for last-minute prep and thus had more time for travel. I’m not unhappy with the choices I made, but I might make different ones next time.

Life without a car is just like any other life: full of evolving choices about how I most want to spend my time.

So Thursday was Bike to Work Day, for which I was determined to do something more than just biking to work. After all, every day is already bike to work day in that sense. So I decided to volunteer to help out as an Outreach Host for SVBC at an Energizer Station, to provide information and make contact with potential members, as well as to help manage the station.

My first stop was Outreach Training, where I learned what the goal of being an Outreach Host is and how to talk to people about SVBC. It was a fun night with some pizza and meeting other members of SVBC interested in volunteering.

The day of, I had to be at the Energizer Station by 7 at the latest, so I got up at 6:15, hurried through my prep, and made it to Cal Ave with five minutes to spare. The day was scheduled to be almost 100 degrees, so I brought a hat, sunscreen, sandals to change into, and plenty of water. We were between busy and inundated almost the entire time I was there, from 7 to 9:15 or so (after that we were mostly packed up). We gave away all our new VTA maps and many old ones, all our bags, all the bananas, and most of the bagels and coffeecake, along with lots of coupons, goodies, smiles, and support.

I really enjoyed the experience, even more than the Amgen Tour of California bike parking volunteering, which I didn’t count for this goal’s purpose because the Tour isn’t a bike advocacy event, it’s a competitive event. This was all about supporting utility cycling and traveling by public or self-propelled transit (walkers, skateboarders, scooters, and others are, of course, also welcome at Energizer stations). It was nice to connect with other people who have high bike-to-person ratios in their households and commute or do errands with their bike setups. My bike and pannier setup got some appreciation. I saw the full gamut from kids (in bike seats and trailers, or on their own bikes or trail-a-bikes) to roadies (there was a Webcor Alto Velo photo op at the station around 8, a good follow-on from last week’s BTWW kickoff event at Webcor).

It started to get pretty hot around 8:00, and by 9:25 when I headed out to work it was very hot. I had to stop several times on my ride to cool down and guzzle water, and I was not appreciating the conductivity of my metal water bottle. Every time I had to stop for a stoplight in the sun, my self-created breeze disappeared and I felt like I was melting. But I made it to work all right, even with a bagel stop. The bagel shop employees kindly let me bring in my bike and gave me some tape to make sure the bagel bag stayed shut and attached to my bike.

One of the most encouraging things for me is that this year I got a lot more positive response from my coworkers. Two of them already bike to work either regularly or occasionally, and did on Thursday. Another rides a lot but doesn’t normally commute that way, but decided to map it out and ride in for Bike to Work Day. Three more are considering it, and our CEO said he will ride someday when he doesn’t have meetings. I am hoping for a company BTWD later this summer, maybe when it isn’t 99 degrees outside! If we really get everyone who’s considering it we will have 8 out of the 25 people in the office riding — 30 percent. And everyone else at least appreciates the bagels. :-)

The day ended with a trip down to San Jose for the Bike Away From Work Bash at Gordon Biersch. I wanted to bike down, but work called, so I grabbed a Caltrain and enjoyed more conversation with fellow cyclists. I missed the food at the party, but got drinks and good company, and missing the food only provided an excuse to go to Ben’s later, so it wasn’t so bad. I finally got home, tired and happy, around 10:30.

I’m sure this is only the first of many SVBC volunteering events I’ll be doing, and it was a great start.

Not sure there’s anything to say about this except, what the fucking fuck? This is worse than the Orange County Register article where an SFPD officer described letting other officers (and any other confidential plate holders, some of whom are things like museum staff) run red lights without penalty as a “professional courtesy” — and that one was bad enough to cause me to write a letter to my State Senator (Joe Simitian, totally a “there oughta be a law” guy — my tag on the letter was “There ought not to be a law”).

I’m loving the Dear Prudence column in Slate, which I discovered by accident. She’s got at least as much sense as Sars and a good dose of snark too, but with a bit more “Miss Manners” style and a touch of the “old-fashioned politeness” Ann Landers/Dear Abby tone.

I find it funny and realistic that she so often tells people to get therapy. Most advice columnists shy away from that except when it’s obviously needed, but usually if you have enough problems that you’re writing to an advice column, you either know the answer to the question and just wish someone would tell you it’s okay, or you need therapy. :-)

Not so much loving: spending two hours at the Sunnyvale BPAC meeting before getting to do public comment. I appreciate the people there are very dedicated and they have certain rules they have to follow about procedure. And I also appreciate that warm bodies are respected more than cold emails, and that sometimes to give input on things I care about, I have to suck it up and wait.

But it didn’t leave me wanting to try any more forays into personal public comment. The City Council meeting may be the more important one, but it’ll go on for hours and half the people there will just infuriate me with what they’re saying. Waiting for two hours without dinner while some wonderful and dedicated citizens (and I mean that, but oy, two hours?) discuss wording points is time-consuming enough for me for now.