The Steady March of Progress

Today’s wonderful enshrining of equality in Washington State is another step forward in the Unite State’s steady march of progress. Yeah, we started with high ideals and some rotten application, but over the last 236 years, we’ve made progress. Adult male suffrage, the end of slavery, woman’s votes, true religious freedom, and now gay rights, the arc of American history is crystal clear. It’s not been all roses, but those setbacks have been temporary and eventually recognized for the moral failures they were. Our country is stronger when we protect our vulnerable citizens, strongest when the worlds of the 14^th Amendment are respected.

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

E pluribus unum

Everything in its Right Place

Seattle’s been fighting over its future recently. Which is good, it needs to happen. Americans need to understand that in the new normal of the Great Recession, Long Slump, and Climate Change, a car dependant life style is a luxury few can truly afford and none should be forced into. We need to encourage growth in dense nodes around the region allowing people to choose lifestyles that minimize automobile use and enable high capacity transit. This land use pattern will simultaneously reduce the price of housing, enable more low-income housing, and decrease the pressure on single family home zoning to be up zoned.

Northgate is the prime candidate for this density. It’s already a regional commercial and transpiration hub, will have a train line in ten years, and with acres of parking lots is ripe for redevelopment. So it’s distressing to hear Metro and Sound Transit barreling headlong down the path towards building another $20 million dollar parking garage at Northgate. A recent Metro study shows that the highest majority of Park & Ride users live within Seattle and the concentrations of users within walking and cycling range. This belies the general assumption that Northgate transit users are coming down from Snohomish, and this makes intuitive sense. If your commute is 15 or 20 miles, once you’re in the car, transferring to a bus just isn’t worth the time. I’ve done the same calculation in reverse – Seattle to Boeing Everett – for five years. But if you can hope in your car for a quick two or ten minute drive to fast reliable service to the expensive parking areas of Downtown, First Hill, and the U-District, the transfer makes sense.

Where Northgate P&R Cars Live

Metro’s data illuminates a huge public policy opportunity. Instead of spending $20 million dollars subsidizing expensive and unhealthy lifestyle choices, Metro and Sound Transit could spend that same money on a variety of mitigation measures to enable non-car choices and develop their current and future ridership.

• Building sidewalks and installing signage in adjacent Maple Leaf to encourage walking trips less than a mile
• Frequent commuter-oriented circulator routes in Haller Lake, Licton Springs, and Pinehurst
• Increasing and advertising peak-hour service on current routes
• Directly funding the Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plans to speed construction of relevant improvements

Northgate is destined to be a center of Seattle life in the next century. But we’ll handicap it and punish future residents if we enable current residents to keep subsiding neighbors to driving their cars incredible short distances and letting them park for free on public lands. There are higher and better uses for Northgate than asphalt and concrete.

Update – 12/21/2011
As Bruce points out, Sound Transit is legally obligated to replace parking lost to Link construction, which I discovered after authoring the original post. And while there are options to mitigate another large parking garage at Northgate, any newly constructed parking should not be free to commuters, shoppers, or residents. San Francisco has proven people are flexible when it comes to the cost of parking and paid parking will limit demand and could generate revenue for the transit agencies.

The Head and the Heart

If it wasn’t clear before, Obama and Netanyahu don’t get along. And since all politics are intensely personal, this rift between two men who just happen to be the leaders of the United States and Israel, could cause real damage to both countries, especially in regard to Iran’s nuclear program. But what it doesn’t prove is that Obama is hostile Israel, nor that the “United States” is hostile to that country as a whole.

Recent history is ripe with examples of counties, especially the US, who are hostile to a current government or a specific leader. Take Clinton’s, Bush’s, and Obama’s approaches to North Korea, which combined targeted sanctions on the assets and international movements of North Korean leaders with food and oil programs for its people. The British defense of the Falkland Islands involved a limited response on the Argentine military without the actual or implied threat to the nation as a whole. NATO supported the Libyan Rebels to remove Qaddafi and focused its power on his forces, not the population, most institutions, or the civil and industrial infrastructure. Bush didn’t lead the United States to destroy, partition, loot, or cleanse Afghanistan or Iraq, but merely to remove their government and leaders. All this is in clear contrast to the United States’ behavior from the Civil War through Vietnam in which campaigns of near Total War were the norm. For the last 40 years, western nations and the United States in particular have clearly distinguished between a nation’s government and its people and sovereignty.

If the Obama administration is hostile to the Netanyahu administration, it is because Netanyahu has prioritized Judea and Samaria over the Jewish and Democratic identities of Israel.

I Have Foreseen It

The Keystone Pipeline, like the oil it is designed to carry, is a terrible deal. For a few thousand temporary construction jobs, we enable Canada to rape the landscape, pollute their water, and further dig our Climate Change hole. And yet someday, this pipeline or one with an identical purpose will be built.

It’s simply a matter of supply and demand. We’ve probably hit peak oil, at least with the light sweet crude that made the modern Middle East and Alaska. When this easily accessible oil was plentiful, the price of oil stayed low. But as it disappears and the price increases, the difficult, dirty, petrol – thus far too expensive to extract on an industrial scale – will become viable. The Canadian oil mixed with sand, Gulf oil a mile underwater, Coloradan oil shale all become profitable when oil is stays around $95 a barrel. And that is only a matter of time.

This reframes the question from “Yes or No”, to “When”? The answer, from an environmental and sustainable economic answer is, after we’ve moved away from oil as our primary fuel source. Petrol is an amazing substance, which enables us to create a rainbow of plastics that underpin our advancing – for now – society. And yet we insist that the best and highest use for this amazing organic compound is torching it.

The Keystone should be allowed only after a multiyear international commitment to address Climate Change is ratified by the Senate. It will be a step backward, but only after two steps forward, and that is more progress than our nation is making now.

On Statistical Significance

Dear Max,

Please review your lessons on statistical significance and blocking your experiments. Your data set can skew your analysis, and frankly, this kind of error casts doubt on the rest of your work.

The Ace of Spades

It’s good news for the country the Supreme Court will be hearing the case testing the validity of the Affordable Care Act. We need a clear answer from them so the country can move forward and focus on the policy instead of the constitutionality. But the politics and drama of this hearing and of the ruling are going to blockbusters.

First off, I’ve been confident that President Obama will win reelection. It will require some hard work and a lot of money, but at the end of the day, it’s going to come down to a choice between Mitt Romney and the “Just Say No” Republicans or Barak “I had Osama shot in the face” Obama and the “National Health Care” Democrats, the choice will be clear.

But.

And OMG, but now the US Supreme Court will hear arguments and rule on the Affordable Care Act in the middle of the Presidential election. This can only come out as a win for the President. If it’s struck down in whole or in part (they could split the insurance mandate and uphold the rest of the law), the country that mostly approves of the law’s contents – if not the controversial mandate – will react punish the GOP for getting it struck down. And if the law is upheld, the President’s historic legislation is enshrined.

This is drama, but the long term results that matter will be the improvement in people’s lives though access to healthcare and strengthening the country with a stronger safety net that allows more people to take career and business risks.

Still Winning the War

We’ve lost some high profile battles in the last few months, but we haven’t lost the war. The Tunnel’s victory and Prop 1’s defeat are setback for those of us who recognize the cost 80 years of car subsidies have wrought on America’s health. The roads built for cars, the cities built around the roads, and freeways built with the vision that people could bypass those messy, dense, crowded cities below. We’ve three generations of Americans on the idea that everything should be an easy drive away, so inoculating ourselves to this outlying period of history that even “progressive” Seattle is voting to build more highways.

That’s okay. It sucks but it’s okay.

It’s okay because this backlash to pervious victories shall pass. The 20^th Century saw America dominate the last stretch of the Industrial Revolution and initiate the Information and Biological Revolutions. We didn’t realize the party was ending, and for 30 years, America and much of the Industrialized world keep putting drinks on the tab. The party ended. We’re moving into a new normal, and it’s going to be very different. Most people, most of society, and most voters don’t get it yet. They well.

As multigenerational housing becomes common again, as owning a car becomes onerous, a unemployment slowly comes down from 9%, more people will realize that we need to change our policies to match our new reality. People will want choices and options for transportation, and public dollars will follow.

Initiative 1125’s defeat offers a glimpse of that. Washingtonians didn’t want to lock their transportation funding options down nor did they want to kill mass transit. The people in Seattle feel the same way. The Tunnel won because people just wanted to move forward with whatever was on the books. Prop 1 lost because people thought it want clear enough and it didn’t address fundamental road maintenance. These are the temporary backlash to the first No-No vote to replace the Viaduct, the Roads and Transit defeat, the ST2 victory, and Mayor McGinn’s victory.

But the world has shifted. We’ll see rail to the west side of Seattle, more bike lanes, more sidewalks, and more choices. It will just take a little longer than we hoped it would take.

Why I’m a Democrat

In principle, I agree with Frum that less government is better for society. But I also believe that the environmental decisions should be prioritized and that businesses should not commit fraud. That roads are maintained and open to all. That gas stations  pump a gallon of gas for every gallon sold, and that buildings are built to codes that meet local requirements. Effective government regulation and government employees make these possible.

I’d be thrilled if corporations seriously considered the environmental costs of each decision. Wouldn’t it be nice if banks kept enough money to cover their debts out of principle and not legal requirement. But we don’t. We live in a world where 90% of the population saves their money, only to see it expand in a bubble and evaporate in greed and stupidity.

We have Enron’s and WorldCom’s with fraud. We have Washington Mutuals who prioritize their current shareholders over their customers and future shareholders. We have the Seattle Police Department who can murder citizens without legal penalty. More or less government isn’t the issue. We need the minimum amount of government to ensure that people play fairly, that liberty can flourish, and that government at all levels is just.

I am a Democrat because we need a serious government, and the current GOP is not serious about governing.

Ten Years Gone

Ten years ago this morning, I walked out of my new apartment and hopped a short bus ride down the Ave to the transfer point at 45^th. Waiting for the 44, I bumped into my co-worker, who asked me if I had heard the news this morning. Something about a bombing in New York or bombing falling in DC and all the airplanes being grounded. I looked at the blue sky. I look bank across the street. I looked at the seeming oblivious people waiting for their buses or driving their cars.

If true, why weren’t people reacting? Why was everyone still going about their daily business? A man joins our conversation and says it’s a foreign attack. That New York is being bombed. My co-worked catches a different bus, this man and I catch the 44 moments later. He tells me only a sovereign state has the resources to train pilots and buy strategic bombing aircraft. I ask who, ask how? He mentions the Saudis. I don’t buy it, but I’ve got nothing else.

He exits the bus after a few minutes and I’m alone. I ride the bus wondering what is happening. No smartphone, no cell phone, no portable radio. We hadn’t even hooked up the phone line at the apartment yet. The day is beautiful, traffic smooth, and my fellow passengers seem content with their commutes.

I exit the bus, overhearing two old men talking about war and I practically run to the apartment building where I work. My boss and co-worker aren’t in. I call a tenant who’s out of work and helping us maintain the building. He comes downstairs as my teammates arrive. No one can explain what’s happening, so we go upstairs to watch his television. Perhaps it was 8:30 Pacific Time, maybe a little later, but by then, the airplanes have all crashed and the towers collapsed. He’d been taping the news all morning. We watched tape of the towers falling, of airplanes striking still-standing towers, of live analysis, of dust clouds rising over Manhattan, of crowds walking across bridges, and of more towers falling. The Pentagon is burning, but the hole looks so small in that giant building. We rewind the tapes to see people leaping from towers. And I remember that my uncle worked in the Twin Towers, but I don’t have his number.

We watch video and live footage all morning. No apartments are painted, no sidewalks swept. I call my girlfriend, a New York-ophile and Woody Allen fan. Kate doesn’t pick up the phone. When I get ahold of her later that morning, she’s a wreck. She makes her way to Hillel to be with others.

Though no one feels like eating, my team breaks for lunch, and returns to the get some work done in the afternoon. We avoid NPR and pretend to listen to music. We wrap up after a few hours; no one can focus. I catch the bus back to my apartment get my uncle’s number and return to my old house, still rented by close friends. I don’t want to be alone and I need to make a phone call. I reach my uncle. He’d been downsized in August and watched the towers burn from a golf course outside the city. The death toll estimates are staggering.

Boldly Going Backwards

As every city resident who’s paying attention knows, the Tunnel was overwhelming approved two weeks ago. What the percentage of victory belies, is its fragility and hollowness. This vote wasn’t about transportation policy or moving forward. It was just politics.

On the scale of things, Seattle is a small city in a country with plenty of space. The American auto-centric century, with its ease and low cost of individual vehicular travel, is an outlier of history and coming to a close. It never took primacy in Europe or Japan, places too developed or too dense to waste space on asphalt that is empty 99% of the time. Costs will rise, alternatives will be demanded, and identities are already shifting. The 21^st Century won’t let us be as wasteful as the last. But it will take hard, precision work to move past the solutions that worked in the last century.

Unfortunately, Sandeep is right, we didn’t provide an alternative to the tunnel and campaigned on data and fear. It wasn’t enough. Our neighbors who could be convinced with data, had been convinced. The political, business, and labor elite followed the governor’s backroom deal and falsely campaigned against the “Seattle Process” and against data-driven analysis.

While the win is a huge symbol, it is a small victory. A victory where 12.9% of the city outvoted 9.2% of the city in approving a mega-project that is likely to see cost overruns. The tunnel supporters didn’t have facts on their side, so they played on the people’s frustration with politics and desire to do something, do anything, even if it’s the wrong thing. That decision might come back to haunt its supporters. Seattle has started and killed highways before. If the tunnel goes over budget, if downtown businesses realize people will have an easier time going elsewhere, if people realize what they’ve been sold, the other 78% of the city might be willing to pull the plug.

I’m not heartbroken that the tunnel is moving ahead. It will be bad for Pioneer Square and downtown business and the ideas in ST5 will eventually be implemented out of necessity. It’s just going to cost the state a few extra billion dollars, dollars which could have been spent on schools, repairing bridges, or cutting taxes. But that’s how the democratic cookie crumbles.