Drive

Drive by the Cars, one of my all time favorite bands. Poignant is the word I would use to describe it.

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Many cities are trying to make themselves more bicycle friendly (e.g., see this for Denver’s new effort to institute bike sharing), and I think some of the arguments put forth for this policy choice are good. Bikes are better for the environment, require less infrastructure, and can’t be used to do much damage when driven drunkenly.

There are those who go beyond policy though in pointing out that biking is a type of political statement that strikes against Americans’ excessive individualism and oil-use. Biking is put forward as a civic social alternative to cars which are destructive smog-machines that have driven suburbanization and highway building. Even further, some people make the point that biking is a type of MORALLY EXPANSIVE activity that puts is in a closer relationship to the earth and our cities. For lack of a better word, some people say that biking is better for your SOUL.

I’m very sympathetic to these points and I think that for me, biking is like vegetarianism. I’ve tried to be vegetarian for a while and I’ve just recently tried to make it official. I’ve long thought that trying not to kill animals to eat is a good idea, but I didn’t give it much urgency. I thought I would put in a good faith effort to get around to it, and if I didn’t, o well.

Biking is the same way. If I were a stronger person, I would probably try to bike more often and maybe even get rid of my car.

Today though I realized that this stronger claim — that biking is a necessary component to a more responsible expansive life-style, is wrong, and I feel like I’m positioned to defend the automobile, because being from Dallas, I’m familiar with a driving culture.

There the practical points to note, which is that cars are pretty key in a place like Dallas where things are spaced far apart. Also, things being spaced far apart make land cheap, which is good, if you can capitalize on the sprawl with the proper infrastructure and perhaps not excessive environmental damage (urban footprint is, as I understand it, one of the biggest ways humans impact the environment and a smaller footprint is really good for lots of reason).

But besides this, I think driving a car is itself a type of morally expansive transportation. What I mean is that cars — and this fact is often overlooked, so don’t laugh at its obviousness — allow the owner to transport OTHERS. Even for a single person like me, this has enormous benefits. I can meet friends easily across all parts of the city (well not really easily since Boston has terrible roads, but yea, you get the point), which lets me sustain a more diffuse social network. It also lets me help people out in various ways. I drove my friends home from the liquor store after we had dinner, and let me pick up another friend from the airport as well as dropping him off after he had to leave back to Dallas.

I also use my car to give rides to strangers, though this is taboo and is often greeted with shock, though I don’t know why. Why don’t more people ask for rides? I guess there’s the danger factor, but that doesn’t seem like a very good reason, since I think its usually pretty transparent who could use a ride and who should be ignored. For example, coming back from the shopping center I see people carrying a lot of stuff to the train station, which is a good 15 minute walk a way. Not crushing, but I notice, and I’ve thought about asking people to just get in my car (since I go right by). One day, an elderly Asian man just came up to me and asked for a ride. There was no risk of danger, and since I had been thinking about that same thing, I told him sure.

It was completely unremarkable. I dropped him off at the train station and he left.

What this shows me is that cars are pretty key. They are not, as some have suggested, bubbles of solipsism where anonymous commuters go to amplify American’s misguided obsession with individualism (though for the record, I think individualism, understood properly, is very defensible). Rather they are mobile social platforms where you can talk with your friends, help them get places, or meet them at distant places.

The fact that cars are seen as a symbol of solitude is due more to our conventions about what is acceptable to do with a car (offering rides) than anything about a psychoanalysis of our country’s love of individualism.

My theory about Boston

I complain a lot about Boston on this site, and a lot of that complaining is about the road system (here, here, and here).

Today though, driving back from some time I spent with my little brother (from the big brothers big sisters program, not my biological brother who lives in Austin), and I was looking at all the snow and the lack of parking spaces and the really decayed store fronts and everything else, and my overarching theory about the reason for Boston’s failings as a city struck me.

Sure, Boston has good points, I can admit that. I can even admit that it may have good points that many people my age appreciate. Still, I think Boston has a lot of problems, and what is the source of these problems; the major cause of its suckiness in my eyes?

The answer goes back to the mobility problem that Boston is inadequately poised to deal with. Put in economics terms, it is very costly to move around in Boston. Some of this cannot be blamed on the city as a human institution. In other words, the climate makes things cold and creates a lot of snow and that makes it unpleasant and messy to be outdoors, not to mention filling up the streets and parking spaces with snow. The constant freezing during winter also rips up the streets. Ok, fair enough. Boston starts from behind because of its terrible location.

But Boston does nothing to remedy this state of affairs by refusing to improve roads or speed up the T, or make it run to where people want to go.

This has a wide-ranging group of consequences. One is that people just don’t travel. The cost of movement is high, so people stay in. This a verified consequence as I have seen graffiti and craigslist personals (yes, I was looking at craigslist personals as a joke, I realize that sounds like the exact sort of thing that a loser looking at craigslist personals would say, so you’re entitled to disbelieve. Still though, the truth is that I was glancing through it with some friends). A surprising number of the personals just say “I don’t meet people because its so cold that I just don’t want to go out.” Besides speaking to the lonely nature of our society, these people are explaining a profound truth about Boston: that it encourages people to just give up on movement throughout the city.

The second consequences of this is less social and more classically economic. Because the cost of moving out of one’s neighborhood is high, each little store is granted a de facto monopoly. This is why there are WAY more dunkin donuts per sq ft. than you could think was possible as well as why there are WAY more very low quality, fatty, greasy, take out place than you would have ever thought possible. The reason is that low quality stores of all types can subsist merely by being 8 blocks closer than their competitor. In Dallas, you would just travel those extra 8 blocks for the better prices/product/service because doing so costs almost nothing. In Boston though, it can take a broken axle and thirty extra minutes to travel those 8 blocks. So, you get an inability to capitalize to returns to scale which leads to inferior and higher priced products than could otherwise be the case.

I think every road in Boston was broken

I drove to the airport to pick up my friend. There was one lane traffic, and I unsurprised that part of the road was shut down. That’s normal. But then, as I got closer to downtown, I found out that the exit to the AIRPORT was shut down. Really? The detour took me around most of the financial district of Boston before I got there. When I did, I found out that terminal B, where my friend was flying into, was completely shut down for repairs. So, me and the other people who were picking up trickled through a parking lot in the middle of the terminal which served as an ad hoc pick up line. There was no loitering anyway, and so, since my friend got outside 5 minutes after I passed through, I had to do the whole thing over again.

Then, I left the airport and found that the pavement on the sumner bridge part had been pulled out. So much for my tires and axles. Then I tried to get on 93, and found out that IT TOO was closed. The airport exit and 93? Without those two roads, there are no roads in Boston.

Finally I dropped my friends off at MIT, and found, as usual, that storrow drive was randomly closed off at several arbitrary points.

Now, in the grand scheme of things, I don’t take my complaints very seriously. I’m lucky to live in a country with roads at all, and most (all) of my bitching is hyperbole. But these little posts are cathartic for me because in all seriousness, Boston is a very badly kept up American city. That much is fact, and one which I hope might spur action at some point.

Downtown, Inc.

I’m pretty much done with Downtown, Inc., and all in all, I have to say that it’s pretty great (though of my summer books, ecology of fear is still #1).

In this book, there are really a lot of great insights, and definitely too many to get into in just one post.

But anyway, the book starts out with a brief history of urban development, starting after WWII. The story is unsurprising in some ways: a bunch of people wanted houses and so they moved to the suburbs to get them. This left the cities to rot, especially since manufacturing was already starting to show signs of strain as compact city locations could not efficiently hold assembly line factories that were cropping up all over the place. Also, racism was rampant and for many people, the city was just too black of a place to live.

Enter the urban renewal projects of the 50s and 60s. Basically, the (federal) government was giving out a bunch of money for cities to build stuff: anything they wanted. So, they bulldozed the houses of a lot of black people and built really elitist city furnishings such as opera houses and theaters and also a lot of architecturally highbrow buildings that were intimidating to the average person. Cities were transformed into the playgrounds of the elite on the back of various minorities and politically powerless groups.

The side-story about highways is especially good, since apparently, Eisenhower never really intended for a lot of highway mileage to go through the big cities, but when everything was said and done, highway mileage in the cities, though it was something like 20% of total mileage, was something like 50% of the total cost. Anyway, city planners used highways to bulldoze through various parts of the cities, again mostly black neighborhoods.

Unfortunately, even after all this, cities still sucked. The federal government took away its money and so cities were now on their own. What could they do?

The answer, as Frieden and Sagalyn, exposit, is that they learned to be a little more capitalistic, and that this was for the better. First, cities let private developers call some of the shots about what downtown improvements would look like and where things would be built. Then, they subsidized the hell out of things so that people would actually consider building in cities. (I don’t know how you could pay someone enough to build in say, Boston). Then there are a bunch of case studies about various cities, and the focus is on malls. As the authors point out, malls in the middle of the city did some really good things. They helped whole areas develop, reduced crime, and created, in quite a few cases, a more architecturally inviting, liveable and beautiful city. As a side note, Boston’s Faneuil market is one of the most successful city development projects ever. This place was expected to make no money, but in the end, I think the city actually made money it, which is almost unheard of. Score one Boston and mayor Kevin White.

How did they do it? Basically, city councils found a bunch of interesting ways of paying for things that were off budge. They pledged future taxes and rents and all sorts of stuff to get loans, but the public never had to feel their pockets being pinched.

There’s also the human side of things. Basically, James Rouse was a complete badass. This guy was building stuff left and right and all of it was great. Even when incompetent legislators and obstreperous private negotiators tried to stall projects, he just barreled right through. His problem solving was instrumental in making things happen.

Then the book talks about the negatives. Malls represent the privatization of public spaces, they don’t bring anything but consumption to the city, and one problem which I though was particularly interesting, was that they don’t perform the same civic role as other public buildings, though they claim to operate in their stead. One example was that malls don’t operate under the strict protections of free speech that public buildings do so that campaign trips, petitions, rallies, and awareness raising can be (and invariably are) curtailed inside the mall. These downtown malls are usually part owned by the city, but they do not permit the wide range of democratic activities that other public spaces afford due to constitutional restrictions on government action that do not fall so heavily on private citizens.

EVEN FURTHER, there are all these little tidbits. For example, I learned about Albert Hirschman’s  principle of the hiding hand (or at least I got a taste of it), in which people underestimate their ability to deal with problems in complex projects, so that making a project seem easy at the start is really important. If all the problems were seen in advance, valuable projects would not be undertaken. Also, it’s apparently true that building new stadiums for sports team is a losing proposition, but Mayors build them anyway out of what seems to be pure ego considerations: that any worthwhile city has to have a sports teams. How much better would cities be if we let the NFL build all the enormous and ridiculous stadiums (Dallas, I blame you), and let cities build better subways, streets, sewage, and electricity? The answer is: a lot better.

Infrastructure

My dad was visiting Boston the other day, and we were talking about infrastructure, specifically, how bad Boston’s is, but how America’s infrastructure in general may be in trouble (see here for just a short argument to that effect).

This is worth further investigation in itself, but one thing I was thinking about is that it’s well known that late modernizers have an advantage. It’s much easier to build an electrical grid from scratch for a still evolving city rather than fix an aging one. For example, New York’s sewers are predominantly made of wood still and so fixing them is very expensive when they break. New cities on the other hand can start right with the good stuff.

It’s not that we couldn’t modernize in time with the benefits of infrastructure improvements, but often democratic politics makes its hard. People don’t really see the benefits of infrastructure improvements because they are dispersed, but the costs to provide them are very real.

The last thing that interests me is whether since now, in the age of technology, infrastructure is advancing rapidly, countries that modernize in 10 years might be MUCH better off than countries that modernized in 2000. The divide between countries might be enormous.

Boston infrastructure

Water boiling ordinance is in effect, I think for the second time since I’ve come to Medford. Apparently, the primary water main for Boston broke. I love this town.

Also, I drank a bunch of water before I heard about this. Yea.

Boston Marathon

I went downtown at the tail end of the Boston marathon, and it was pretty interesting and actually pretty awesome. However, the main reason I think that Boston impressed me this time around is that all the streets were shut down, which eliminated Boston’s pretense of having an automotive infrastructure. Stripped of this deception, Boston started to make a lot of sense; a really large concrete park with no cars allowed. This also fit the theme of the day, which was “go really long distances with your own two feet.”

Boston, the worst of both worlds

I thought I was about to make a little money during the year of 2009, but nope, Mass taxes finished me off. Good to know all those taxes are going to important social services and public works projects. O wait, the roads don’t work, public transportation is sub par, and they’ve been trying to fix the potholes next to my street for two years now. No success as of yet.

Boston never quite committed to a transportation system. They decided to invest too little in the roads so that they aren’t yet average, but they did invest enough in the roads to make the public transportation inadequate as well.

Also, I got another $100 bullshit ticket from Somerville so I’m just really upset.

the worst street in America

I haven’t visited every street in America, but I think Boston is a great place to begin the search for our country’s worst street.

And in fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve already found my answer. Dorchester Ave, the main street running through *duh* — Dorchester, is pretty terrible. It’s very similar to Main street in Everett, except worse. The street is just two lanes, and is used by every bus, commuter, and trash collection truck in the city. Of course, there are many, many lights, most of which come on and off, and they aren’t synchronized. I spent about 25 minutes, crawling through about 10 blocks.

Of course everything I’ve said so far is just to say that Dorchester Ave is a street in Boston, but there’s something about Dorchester Ave that makes it particularly ineffective. Maybe its the criss-crossing roads that splice into it at all sorts of angles, or the density of shops, but in any case, maneuvering is almost impossible. Google maps says that my route should have taken about 4 minutes, which was only off by about a factor of 5: the Boston destination multiplier.

Boston is awful, but let’s be balanced

Here is a long rant about why Boston is awful. I approve of many of the comments in this rant. For example, this angry person focuses on Boston’s lack of infrastructure. Right on.

My point is that just like in politics, criticism becomes warped and counterproductive when it becomes demonization. For example, this author says that people in Massachusetts are rude. This is the stereotype for sure, but many of the Boston people I have met are extremely friendly and have very large hearts. Also, these people are tough as nails. Like I said before, their city does nothing to help them, but they keep on living nonetheless. Now the accent, I do find annoying, but really, how can one, in good faith, complain about it? Everywhere has a stupid accent and its purely arbitrary which ones we find pleasing or gut-wrenching. The accent, as much as I dislike it, can’t be a matter of fair criticism.

Today though, my displeasure with Boston stems from the weather. The weather was great as I toiled away on papers and finals, and then on the very day that I want to go to a real city, Dallas, it snows out of control and basically paralyzes this region of the country. Boston is so bad that it even traps me here when it knows I would rather be somewhere else. Thanks Boston.