Mini Exasperation #3
What a week to be literate and conscious. Three ideas to stick it to these morons.
In a fit of somewhere between rage, apathy, and exasperation, we’re through A SINGLE WEEK of 47’s Ragnarok. This deep discount dude and his band of leitgestapo truly believe government (and water?) turns on and off like a faucet. At best, his office (he can’t read) is issuing a maelstrom of Executive Orders to test the limits of our democracy, and at worst, he’s actively trying to dismantle the Federal government in a week that millions of people have spent their lives building to serve its people.
Important to name and shame these stupid things so here are two of the dumbest things I’ve ever read and I’ve had the opportunity to engage with some of the dumbest takes of all time during my five years of publishing:
The reason why these are so dumb is infinity-fold, but two main reasons: they direct people to stop doing things no one was doing in the first place and here’s the important part. They are trojan horses. The stated purpose is one thing, but the idea is to fuzzy up the rulemaking to sneak programs and authoritarian ideology through the back. Calling something “woke” and “Green New Deal” is an excuse to name something they don’t like “woke,” blame everyone for ruining the economy, and refill the policy bucket with regressive directives. Watch out for this. Literally everywhere.
In a continued fit of stupidity, this government never actually froze the funds via this specific “order,” but said they did, and now facing massive backlash, are rescinding the order they never issued. So …literally nothing?2
If you thought we had a few, uh, weeks to put together a plan to fight back, you’re wrong and will continue to be wrong. These people will never tell the truth and will never follow through on anything that helps you or me. It’s lies and obfuscation all the way down. It’s time to fight, but considering this is a ~*transportation and infrastructure*~ blog, we’ll stick to how we can actually fight the government clawing back dollars and sending us back to when America was Great3
We can thank these braindead losers inside the vaunted Federal government for forcing the conversation we’ve needed to have. It’s time to rethink how we build projects in the US. Transportation and infrastructure are almost always welfare activities: very rarely do projects capture the value in direct revenue to make profit enough to operate as a going concern. These projects are not supposed to do that. We don’t run transportation at a loss, we run transportation at a reasonable cost.
Our collective efforts have built hundreds of thousands of miles of road and rail.4 The Interstate Rail network and the Interstate Highway System were and are a product of many different strains of thought that came together at the Federal level; much of which was and is based in national defense principles: the military needed to move and the dirt roads weren’t cutting it. The North needed to win and the rail system was a major factor.
Idea #1: Turn over much of the construction oversight to the Department of Defense and staff the Army Corps of Engineers with (more than just engineers) the capacity to build hard things and to ensure interstate preemption when necessary. This includes rail and road.5 You know what, let’s explore partnerships across the board and piecemeal this out to agencies that want it. Commerce? Let’s go. HUD? Sure why not. Energy? Oh yeah.
Does this neuter the Department of Transportation? Not if we have smart legislation that rethinks USDOT’s purpose and correctly communicates these ideas to a mostly skeptical public.6 Does it become more of a national clearinghouse of good ideas and a passthrough for competitive grantmaking—either by formula or discretion? Does it maintain its role as a rulemaking authority to ensure the absolute value of best practice? Does it become the prime/sub agency to our other agencies—and lead us into the future of federal de-siloing?
Idea #2: Rethink the role of the US Department of Transportation. What do we need from our Federal government? Should we rebrand as a Department of Mobility?7
Here’s how I don’t want this interpreted: We’re not going to cut the popular and practiced programs like the FTA’s “Capital Investment Grants” (CIG) or FHWA’s “Safe Streets for All” (SS4A) programs but we are going to rethink how we allocate dollars. Who needs direct receipt? When does it make sense for state DOTs to control capital and operating budgets versus local and regional governments?
Does it even make sense to think of transportation by mode, first, anymore? Wouldn’t we be better served by thinking of how an individual moves throughout the world and then find a collective solution, mode agnostic, to get people to their destinations from anywhere by the means that make sense? Isn’t that the point of a resilient system? Maybe today we’re taking an AV/EV and tomorrow, a bike, and over the weekend a system of fantastic modern trains to get to our destination?
Idea #3: Is it time to give a gigantic middle finger to the Fed by doing what they say and devolving the spending to the states prophylactically ?
I know this is an alt-Right-coded idea, but the best offense against this government of fools is to simply be their jester, no? I worry about this because a lot of people will get hurt, but at least we can demonstrate how important a federal government for infrastructure projects is by temporarily saying, “Okay, you win.” Maybe our genious electorate should experience a starved road system and no transit at all for us to finally have the national conversation that the anti-transit and anti-government people are simply wrong and driven by something other than “freedom.” Maybe Californians shouldn’t be funding road expansions in deep-red states.
Maybe half-measures are more appropriate: no more California dollars can be spent on road projects outside California; in this way, transit becomes an attractive investment because it’s either transit or nothing at all.8 Every citizen/taxpayer in a certain state can see how USDOM spends their dollars nationwide, built by the Army Corps, for the sake of national defense. Transit is national defense. The freedom to move is what we’re looking for here.
Because what could be Greater than a country whose citizens ride the train to work and bike for fun on safe streets with their kids and knowing that each citizen’s hard work made that happen?
Short List of Things I Like This Week
CMAP’s Safety Newsletter by CMAP staff (brought to EI friend Victoria Barrett from CMAP)
This brief continues a good trend of our MPOs (regional planning organizations, among other things) communicating important data evaluation techniques, more appropriate language for everyone to use to convey information about traffic safety, and a general state of affairs.
Exasperated: The media landscape, overall, makes it very hard for this good piece of work to get into the eyeballs of the people who need it. I continue to be unsure about how to reduce the friction between government services and government communications and the people who need them. At some point about 15 years ago, social media was once the answer; but it was and still is opt-in to plug into social media channels. I don’t love the idea of forced communications—an uninstallable app on a smartphone, say—and the post office, while great in the 1950s is simply too slow.
Any thoughts, team?
Why Is Ontario Ripping Out Toronto’s Hard-Fought Bike Lanes? It’s Not About Traffic. by Michael Koy for Next City
The Toronto core and its suburbs are a North American battleground for more and better bike lanes. Ontario’s Premier, Doug Ford, and Ontario’s Minister for Transport, Prabmeet Sarkaria, insist, with the confidence of someone wrong, that the bike lanes cause Toronto’s “traffic problems.” Instead, the better and correct solution is to build more highways to funnel suburban drivers into downtown. Koy’s article does a great job stating the problem, fact-checking it with evidence, and calling out where the narrative-pushers are intentionally or, more than likely, unintentionally, using bad numbers to draw incorrect conclusions. Read on.
Exasperated: This narrative is never about the numbers or the outcomes. It’s about control of the public space. Somehow, and continuously, drivers demand that the rest of the world cater to their every need and that traffic, and sitting in it, is a cardinal sin. Koy brings up an incorrectly defined and outdated statistic cited in the case against a bike lane network and more safety infrastructure: only 1.2% of people commute by bike to work in the Toronto region. Do you see the problem with using this number in this context?
Trump Administration Considers Halting Congestion Pricing by the very neutral, not totally biased, well-sourced Times staff et al.
Nope. We’re not doing this.
Exasperated: Seriously. Nope.
Comment below or always email me at samuel [dot] b [dot] sklar [at] gmail [dot] com.
Thanks again to Jeff Wood at The Overhead Wire for news inspiration. And to Katie Economou and Corrigan Salerno for feedback on the Mini-E. Make sure you’re following Katie’s work at AMPO and Corrigan’s work at Transportation for America.
You can ALWAYS tell a stupid right-wing take through the adjectives they use. I’m surprised these single-cell paramecia can even find the one brain cell they share between themselves to write a sentence.
The story is evolving. I wouldn’t be surprised if this somehow got stupider.
ly bad. This country has never been Great. It’s been productive; it’s been imperialistic; it’s been lots of things. But it can never be great until everyone’s free from oppression and free to pursue the human condition free from bondage.
Not enough sidewalks.
Hello, New York <> Chicago HSR in 4 hours without the whims of *Ohio*’s garbage politicians in the way.
We’ve never had this and never will.
Before you get at me with how hard this will be, I’d like to make it known that before our DOTs were Departments of Transportation, they were Departments of Highways or nothing at all. They changed when the needs changed and now they need to change again.
As I wrote this, I came to the conclusion that “nothing at all” is more attractive to lots of “leaders” in most states.
I feel like a lot of folks skipped class whenever "don't throw out the baby with the bathwater" was taught. Exasperating indeed!