Mini Exasperation #3

You can just do stuff

I’ve been writing this newsletter since April 2020, starting with a series of posts about books about planning, engineering, and urbanism that I’ve loved and how you can read them, too, to think about things the way I do. Some of you did this (I know), and some are wondering how you see these long lists. I think it’s time to republish them and update them with 6 more years of knowledge, and 6 more years of incredible partnership with Island Press, which has now been folded into Princeton University Press but will remain as a standalone imprint.

Expect something from me in this regard in the next few weeks.

But today’s thought is: you can just do stuff. The same way I started this newsletter on a calculated whim and have kept at it for half a decade. The same way the Mamdani administration filled in a bike pothole within a week of being sworn in, or simply hiring the best people (shout out Midori Valdivia and Mike Flynn!) to go do stuff. There’s a lot of uncertainty from the old guard in this vein: how do you build a weeks-long messaging campaign to combat a half-day activity that will be done and dusted and have captured a handful of media cycles that all say the same thing?

It’s time to start that blog. Or email that contact. Fill in a bike lane bump. Or learn that new skill or hit that happy hour. Go do it. Be like Zohran. Hope to see you there.

---

Articles I’ve Been Reading

The Reauthorization of Federal Transportation Programs Offers Policymakers an Opportunity to Improve Effectiveness, Environmental Sustainability, and Access

by Yonah Freemark et al. for the Urban Institute

In advance of the Reauthorization piece that’s coming shortly, I wanted to highlight this data-backed exercise from Yonah Freemark et al. for the Urban Institute. The essay outlines three pathways to success to build on the outputs from the IIJA/IRA:

1. Guarantee Effective Grant Use

2. Increase Environmental Sustainability

3. Leverage Transportation Investments to Fund Communities that Need Them the Most

All good ideas. All just vague enough and progressive enough to never happen. Still a good place to start.

Why New Jersey Has New Comprehensive E-Bike Regulations

by Ximena Conde for the Philadelphia Inquirer b/w GovTech

The classic case of the politically expedient solution in search of an honest-to-god problem, and the perfect metaphor for the Murphy Administration throughout his tenure. It’s also a parable for transportation policy administration in practice: counter-intuitiveness. On its face, a policy to register a motor vehicle—even an e-bike or pedal-assisted one—makes sense. Let’s follow the logic, or at least the triggering event: a e-bike user hits a pedestrian on a delivery. The magical logic of due process follows. All e-bikes are now the problem and must be registered in case a future incident causes the same problem; then the MVC¹ can link the incident to the particular cyclist, and an inquiry can begin.

Except, of course, it’s not that simple. Any number of problems arise here. These issues fall into two buckets: administrative and problem ID.

Administrative: The most salient problem here is jurisdiction. The State of New Jersey is responsible for the maintenance of registration records; whoever is responsible for the road² would likely issue a traffic infraction; whichever court would try a case in (hopefully) the same jurisdiction as where the infraction was issued; the insurance company would need to be involved. The problem here isn’t that we don’t know how to do this, generally. We do it for incidents involving motor vehicles—cars, trucks, motorcycles—all the time.

We simply don’t have a system for bikes, and onboarding all current bike riders in the state will be a long and expensive endeavor. There’s inbound and outbound outreach, internal training. Then there’s the data. These systems are already antiquated, and I fear the cost to update them to whatever modern standard is deemed necessary³ will far outstrip any material benefit…until it doesn’t. At that time, we may have an entirely new tech and governance regime for bikes, cars, trams, buses, trains, and the public realm.

It continues to astound me that our policymakers are simply making this all up on my dime.

Problem ID: Longtime Exasperated readers know I will continue to pull on this thread until there’s nothing left. An essential question that policymakers continue to ignore(?)⁴ is “What problem does my solution actually solve?” I’m not naive. I know there are big-money interests shaping outcomes that are, quite simply, unrelated to bicycle safety, insurance schema, and process. But it’s curious here since the principal in this equation, Governor Phil Murphy, was already a lame duck, and the agents here—who is this for?

Is there any evidence that tying e-bike registrations to MVC operations increases road safety? This feels more like a capitulation to anti-bike road warriors who have feelings about cyclists and e-bikes, generally, rather than a meaningful policy geared toward safety.

Unwilling to make ‘a bad deal even worse,’ Mayor Johnson drops out of competition to buy back parking meters

by Fran Spielman for the Chicago Sun Times

Long story short, right there in the headline. The City of Chicago sold the rights to many of its parking meters for 75 years to a private operator in 2008. Seventeen years into this deal, the City has lost so much on this deal that its finances are laughable. For example, if the city wants to shut down a street for a parade or a block party…it also has to buy out the parking meters, making this deal somehow doubly bad.

Ever since Mayor Daley (the Younger) sold these rights, trading a short-term fiscal crisis for a long-long-term one, public finance economists have sought to find a way out of the deal.⁵ Unfortunately, the terms are air-tight and the new Mayor, Brandon Johnson, has ruled out an insane leveraged buyout that would, triply bad, saddle the city with debt, whose service would require raising parking rates to a level that would quash demand.

I guess more people would take transit. That’s a win.

A Writer for You to Follow

I’m a big fan of her publication, the “New Urban Order” Substack; she writes more frequently and often more relevantly than I. Give her a follow! Me too, though.

1. This is Jersey’s “DMV” or “RMV”—it stands for Motor Vehicle Commission.

2. This may seem semantic, but sometimes the owner of the road has traded its operations and maintenance to a different owner. See: county vs. city vs. state, etc. It’s important to be correct with the verbiage here, as a simple slip-up could cause administrative chaos.

3. By who?

4. ???????????????????

5. I bet you couldn’t guess that in 17 years this deal has long paid for itself and has been generating pure profit and will continue to do so.