Suburban thinking

It's everywhere. I'm reading through the 2008 American National Election Study codebook for a project I'm working on. For those who don't know, the ANES is a fantastic survey that looks in to Americans' political views and vote behavior. It's conducted every election year by interviewers who physically go to people's homes, and one of the things the interviewers are supposed to note is the condition of both home and neighborhood.

So, as part of the survey, interviewers are asked to code any of the following "within sight of the housing unit," presumably as an indication of neighborhood decay:*

• Boarded houses or abandoned building 
• Graffiti 
• Abandoned cars 
• Demolished houses 
• Trash/Litter/junk in street/road 
• Trash/litter/junk around buildings in neighborhood 
• Factories or warehouses 
• Stores or other retail outlets

The variable is a simple count of the number of things observed by the interviewer, so each item on the list is equivalent in the data set. If you read my blog, you're probably already aware where I'm going with this.

That's right- living in a mixed-use neighborhood, one that contains a factory and a store, is a sign of neighborhood decay in this dataset. It's treated equivalently to living somewhere with graffiti and abandoned buildings. Now, I'm not going to say that there aren't gritty, impoverished places with mixed uses, but there are also some very nice places-- most of the Upper East Side of Manhattan would get a point against it for having stores within sight of a subject's home. Similarly, there are some very depressed single-use neighborhoods in this country, which might have all 7 of the other factors present-- but the most-decayed neighborhood in the study must, by definition, be mixed-use.

This is yet another example of how ingrained suburban thinking is in our conversations about poverty and affluence. In our culture, we link green lawns and row upon row of detached single-family homes with suburbia, and hence prosperity, and small apartments above the corner store with the city, and hence with poverty. See similarly what the phrase "inner city" means in our political dialogue- it's generally a code word used by conservatives to mean low-income and African-American (and, in doing so, generally incite the racial fears and prejudices of their voting base). Set aside the finding of the most recent Census-- that poverty is more prevalent in the suburbs than either rural or urban areas, and poverty is rising faster there as well. There's something wrong here.

I also urge scholars investigating the link between neighborhood conditions and politics to build their own metric based on only the first 7 items in this list (which are coded individually in the dataset), rather than utilizing this variable.

 
*V084029, 2008 ANES Panel Data Study, for those who are curious.

Bus Watch!

No, not that Bus Watch. An anonymous commenter on this post claims that RTA #2110, the bus involved in that nasty crash downtown a few months back, has been restored and put into service with a Trilogy three-position bicycle rack. If anyone sees this particular bus, a photo would be appreciated.

I want to also note, though, that the new cutaways that run the 51 and commuter routes have only two-position racks, and their purchase dates from around the same time. So maybe RTA thinks that only the full-size buses need three-position racks, but I've personally found the commuter express routes among the most useful for bike/bus combinations. I can't count the times I've taken 216 to Orange and biked to Fry's Electronics. I don't know what the economics are on two- vs. three-position racks, but I strongly encourage RTA to accommodate as many cyclists as possible.

Have we learned nothing?

If you spend a lot of time in the livable-streets blogosphere, as I admittedly do, you end up reading a lot of success stories: highways stopped, or torn down, or planned to gracefully transition into urban boulevards; rail projects moving forward; bike lanes painted or (better yet) buffered. Living in the suburbs, and having roots in the hinterlands, makes staying in this happy bubble of burgeoning urbanism ever more difficult. It is thus, with a heavy heart, that I report on the continued progress of the High Desert Connector.

As you might guess, this Connector is rather unlike the Regional one in downtown Los Angeles. It's a brand-new, 63-mile freeway being run from the desert outpost of Adelanto to the desert outpost of Palmdale, through greenfield desert. The justification is truck traffic, but you can bet that there will be some sprawl-enabling going on here.

If you want to try and stop this monstrosity, there are public meetings noted in the article. However, at this point, I think that lying in front of the bulldozer will be your best bet.

We're waiting, Sunline!

San Bernardino County, despite being a bit larger than Riverside, long ago became the first Inland Empire county to be completely covered by Google Transit. At the time, Sunline Transit Agency, the major transit provider in the Coachella Valley, was the only agency in Riverside County not to be covered by the transit trip planner. At the time, the agency's web site listed Google Transit as "coming soon," and had for several months. It's now been several years that that tantalizing graphic has sat upon Sunline's web site, and we still don't have Google Transit data for the agency. This is despite the fact that they have a Google Maps-based bus tracker, and have thus geo-coded every stop in the system.

Sunline, release your schedule data and join Google Transit already!

SOPA, PIPA and Internet Censorship

Several major web sites, including Reddit and Wikipedia, will be down from 8:00a to 8:00p today to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, two similar bills (one House, one Senate) which would implement an extrajudicial Internet censorship regime in the United States. I can't take this site down, but I can encourage you all to visit AmericanCensorship.org, learn about the threat to the openness of the Internet, and call your representatives to speak out against these bills.

Hey RTA!

I know you're currently going through the process of purchasing a new 40-foot fleet. Here's the thing. I don't really much care what sort of buses you buy (as long as they're partial-low-floor, CNG, and have those nice amber headsigns, but you've already got that much down, so...), but I really, intensely care about what you put on the front of them.

Specifically, the new buses need three-bike racks. More specifically, I'd prefer it if you installed the Sportworks DL-3 "trilogy" bike rack on every bus in the fleet. These seem to be the only three-bike racks out there that also support the bike's rear wheel, making it less likely that a bicycle will fall off the bus. (This is a serious consideration for those of us who ride with panniers and rear racks, especially when said racks are loaded.) They also don't seem to have the complicated problems of other three-position rack designs, which Seattle's King County Metro seems to be dealing with at the moment. (See the bottom of that post.)

So, RTA, do the right thing for those of us who choose the independence of the transit/bike combo. Buy three-position bike racks for the new fleet.

Why You Should Support California High-Speed Rail, Part Two

Jobs.

Jobs.

Let me say it again: JOBS.

Construction of the initial high-speed rail segment would create literally tens of thousands of jobs. Moreover, those jobs would be targeted at a particularly depressed area of the state (the Central Valley) and a particularly depressed sector of the economy (construction).

Here is the choice we are presented with: In this economic crisis, we are faced with millions of people who find themselves out of work, and who are spending their time chasing after such menial employment as fast-food and retail jobs-- and, even then, largely not finding them. As things sit today, we as a society are supporting them through unemployment insurance, food stamps, and (if they have children) a host of other social safety net programs. It is altogether proper for us to do so, and to try to reduce human misery among us.

However, at the same time, these programs do cost money, and while they do get that money flowing through the local economy, they produce little long-term social benefit. During the Depression, we understood this, and we chose to employ millions of people constructing things that would produce just such a lasting benefit. The Works Progress Administration built thousands of publicly useful projects around the nation, including roads, bridges, water systems, and the bulk of the South Carolina library system. You can still find WPA stamps on sidewalks and curbs in older parts of Riverside. Instead of paying people to look for scarce, menial work in the private sector, public works projects pay people to build something that will yield dividends for years to come.

So we find ourselves again in a massive economic crisis, even though the recession "officially ended" some years ago. We have mass unemployment, and our social programs cost more even as our tax base shrinks-- made worse in California, because we are so reliant on sales taxes, which hew very closely to economic conditions. How do we recover?

Well, the way we got out of the Depression was by building stuff: roads, bridges, sewer systems, parks, and eventually tanks and bombs. People get jobs, they can pay the people who provide them services, pay taxes, those people then hire more people, and so on and so forth. It's called a "multiplier effect" in economics, and public works projects have a huge multiplier effect.

Really, we could build damned near anything and have this effect on the economy. The Obama stimulus bill spent quite a lot of money on highway projects, and all indications say that it kept us from further economic decline. However, I'd much rather use this fantastic opportunity to gear up for the post-petroleum economy. Right now, people need jobs, companies need work, suppliers need customers, and prices are low. The time to invest in the infrastructure that will drive our economy for the next century is now. High-speed rail is one big, worthy project, and building it will help put our state on the road to employment and economic recovery.