Matt Yglesias

Life is Sweet in Arlington

Obviously, it’s crucial that we not build anymore walkable, transit-oriented communities:

While many metropolitan markets around the country are enduring steep increases in vacancies in their office and retail sectors, the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington is an oasis of stability — and even of prosperity.

ved by five Metro subway stops within four miles, the corridor continues to attract new tenants, buyers and developers in the face of the deepest recession since the Great Depression. “It’s really an anomaly, considering the tough economy we’ve been in since December 2007,” said Sigrid G. Zialcita, managing research director for Cushman & Wakefield, a global real estate services firm. [...]

While Wilson Boulevard, a main artery, helps define the corridor, the key element in its success has been the subway. Planners had wanted to place it in the median of Interstate 66, on a more northerly alignment. But Arlington officials fought to have it run underground in the corridor to spur development.

It costs money to build a proper grade-separated heavy rail line with closely-packed stations. A lot of money. And consequently, it takes time for the benefits to be fully reaped. But the benefits are large. Nobody walks around London or Paris or New York and says “it’s too bad they wasted all this money building subways.” And nobody walks the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor and says it’s too bad they didn’t build park-and-ride stations and surface tracks in a highway median.

Planning for the Future

Yesterday I found myself reading with interests about the Chinese government’s plans for expansion of the Shanghai Metro. Very sensibly, there’s not only an ongoing expansion plan designed to last through 2020, but there’s also an even longer-range plan looking forward to 2050. This seems like the right way to do it—everyone expects Shanghai to continue growing throughout this period, so it’s only sensible to operate with a long-run plan in mind. A plan that’s subject to revision, to be sure, but that can guide current decision-making and ensure that there’s always some more projects ready to come online if the resources become available.

What’s striking is the extent to which we don’t operate like that here in the United States. I think everyone believes that over the next couple of decades the Washington, DC metro area will continue to add population. And people likewise clearly envision there being additional square feet of office space in the District and they’re also envision an increase in the District’s population. On top of that, we’re also trying to envision a less carbon-intensive future. All this pretty clearly implies that there ought to be some sort of plan in place for building additional Metro capacity through the central city. After all, the system is currently near its capacity for moving people, and the lack of any redundancy is already hurting us badly whenever any kind of problems arise.

Of course with plans in place the question would still arise of whether or not it’s possible to find the funds necessary to execute the construction of a new core-serving line. But my point would be that first things should come first, and you should always have plans in place so that you can be prepared to make the case for funding and think logically about the design of the metro area and the role transit can play. Instead, though, when we finish building something we tend to just . . . finish . . . as if further population growth somehow took us by surprise.

Rising Oil Prices Threaten Recovery

Pat Garofalo rounds up some of the latest data points suggesting that rising oil prices are a major threat to economic recovery. People are constrained in their short-term ability to reduce gasoline consumption when faced with higher prices. Thus, a price spike reveals itself partially in short-term reductions in gas consumption, but largely in short-term reductions in other kinds of consumption. And that can hammer the economy.

This problem of the short-term probably only has a good solution in the long-term. If we want to get out of the trap of oil price shocks, we need to transform our economy and transportation system to less reliance on cheap oil. But there are also things we can do in the short term. The mass transit operating expensive provision added to the war supplemental is good, and congress could do more in this regard.

Class Warfare and the Bus

On the issue of “do only poor people ride the bus” I’m basically in agreement with Atrios.

The key point to start with, though, as with everything else regarding transit and class is the simple reality that buying a car is expensive. And in most crowded urban areas, parking a car downtown at work is also expensive. This leads immediately to the conclusion that a cheaper alternative, like riding the bus, will be disproportionately appealing to people of lesser means.

But beyond that, you’re left with a big question of where’s the intersection point. What happens in most cities is that most bus lines are really bad. They arrive infrequently, and they move slowly. Consequently, even though taking the bus might be cheaper than driving, it’s a much lower-quality experience. Well, what kind of people are interested in sacrificing a huge amount of quality and time in order to save money? That’d be poor people, primarily. But it’s not a law of nature that bus service needs to be really terrible. The 42 line that I used to take to work pretty regularly came frequently, as did the S1/S2/S4 line that I sometimes used. And you had a pretty diverse class mix on the lines. Not coincidentally, however, these were lines that served some relatively prosperous parts of town. Wealthier people have more political clout and get better public services; meanwhile, better public services are more appealing to wealthier people. I imagine that with the inauguration of the new S-9 express bus service on the same basic 16th Street route used by the other Ses, that a more and more bourgeois crowd will be drawn to the line.

If the city were to go further and carve out more space for dedicated bus lanes (or properly enforce the existing lanes on 7th Street and 9th Street downtown) then bus travel could be more rapid and more frequent and more people would want to do it.

Mass Transit Stimulus

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One of the most effective possible uses of stimulus funds would be to cover gaps in the operating budgets of mass transit systems. The downfall in state and local tax revenue is forcing transit cutbacks across the country that have both a direct contractionary impact and also make it harder for people to live their lives and conduct their business. But currently stimulus funds can be used only for new capital projects rather than for operating costs. So you can have bus drivers being laid off even as new construction workers are hired.

Friday, Pete DeFazio (D-OR) and 26 other House members launched an initiative to try to change that:

Passenger rail and bus advocates are pressing conferees on the war supplemental bill to include a Senate-passed provision that would allow public transit agencies to spend some of their stimulus dollars on operating expenses, instead of capital improvements. The language in the Senate version of the bill (HR 2346) would let transit agencies use as much as 10 percent of their funding from the economic recovery law (PL 111-5) to fend off personnel and service cuts. Transit received $8.4 billion total in the stimulus.

Pat Garofalo argues at the Wonk Room:

Since one of the goals of the stimulus was to preserve jobs, it makes little sense to prevent cities from saving the jobs of transit employees, particularly as more and more people are turning towards public transportation. Hopefully, Congress makes a better decision this time around.

Summer’s coming and gasoline taxes are rising. One of the simplest things the government can do to push back on that situation is expand transit offerings. Really fundamental expansion requires capital expenditures and takes time. But increasing the number of bus routes, and the frequency of service on existing bus and rail routes, can be done fairly easily. It just takes money. But it’s a good use of stimulus funds.

TOD Pays

The biggest obstacle to doing mass transit right is the cost. And the cost is high. There’s just no way around it. A well-done mass transit line is expensive. But it really is worth underscoring the point that these are the kind of expenditures that pay off. They’re not worth doing because they’re cheap, they’re worth doing because they’re really valuable. In the DC area, we have a great example of the difference as the Orange Line goes out in Virginia. In distant Fairfax County they built Metro on the cheap, in the I-66 median, and wound up with what amount to park-and-ride venues for a commuter rail network. That’s a useful asset for the county, but it’s nothing compared to what they got in Arlington County where they buried Metro beneath Wilson Boulevard and built a series of relatively close-packed stations, creating an extended corridor of walkable neighborhoods.

Dave Alpert explains that “Arlington’s Rosslyn-Ballston corridor covers only 7.6% of the county’s land area, but generated 33% of its tax revenue.” Impressive. And note that nobody who’s not insane ever walks around New York City and says it’s too bad that they wasted all this money building the Subway.

Public Transit in Russia

Elana Schor writes up a new More »« Less:

Sadly, only one nation can boast that a majority of its population rides transit at least once a day… the surprising answer comes after the jump.

Russia ranked the highest on the Greendex scale, with 52 percent of respondents reporting daily or near-daily use of transit. Hot on its heels was China, where 43 percent reported very frequent transit rides. More than four out of five Chinese surveyed ride transit at least once a month, according to the Greendex.

I wasn’t surprised by this, Russia has excellent public transportation and a highly urbanized population. The Moscow Metro is absolutely lovely, and the Nizhny Novgorod Metro is pretty good, too, and at least when I was there Nizhny also had a good system of streetcars and trolleybuses.

And when you think about it, none of this should be that surprising. Without real market prices, the Soviet Union was horrible at producing mass market consumer goods. But when it comes to things for which there is no real free market, Soviet production was fine. Soviet nuclear missiles, fighter planes, etc. were just fine. That’s why the USSR wound up falling apart over popular discontent rather than an inability to militarily deter the west. Cars, of course, are a consumer good. But there’s no free market in subway systems. So the Soviet Union had crappy cars but great subways, which led to transit-oriented lifestyles, and that legacy continues today.

Creative Bus Stops

Lots of examples of interesting bus shelters from around the world.

Public Services and Equality

Lane Kenworthy makes a point that’s simultaneously a bit obvious and also widely overlooked—high-quality public services are a highly egalitarian measure even when they’re not at all “targeted” or explicitly designed to curb inequality. The reason is that even in a pretty flat tax system, the bulk of the tax money comes from rich people (since they have the bulk of the money) whereas the value of the services is distributed more equally:

Imagine an America in which high-quality public services raise the consumption floor to a high level: most citizens can put their kids in high-quality child care followed by good public schooling and affordable access to a good college; they have access to good health care throughout life; they can get to or near work on clean and efficient public transportation or roads with limited congestion; they enjoy clean and safe neighborhoods, parks, roads, museums, libraries, and other public spaces; they have low-cost access to information, communication, and entertainment via reliable high-speed broadband; they have four weeks of paid vacation each year, an additional week or so of paid sickness leave, and a year of paid family leave to care for a child or other needy relative. Even if the degree of income inequality were no less than today and we still had CEOs, financiers, and entertainers raking in tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in a single year, that society would be markedly less unequal than our current one.

Something missing from this list that I would add is public safety. The prevailing high levels of violent crime in the United States have an impact that’s very strongly borne by people in the bottom half of the income spectrum. That the poorest people would live in the less-safe part of town is more-or-less built into the structure of income inequality, but it’s very possible to have a country where the “less-safe” part of town is still dramatically safer than are the unsafe parts of the contemporary United States.

But this entire phenomenon tends to get discussed pretty exclusively in the field of education. And, obviously, the uneven quality of America’s public schools is an important topic. But it’s only one aspect of the broader situation. Public transit is another. In DC, the Metro stops running at midnight on weekdays and bus service that late tends to be extremely sporadic. So when I’m out after midnight and want to go home, I’ll often hail a cab. That’s not the most expensive thing in the world, but it’s a good deal more expensive than a Metro fare. I can afford it easily enough, but many people can’t. A higher level of tax subsidy to WMATA in order to finance later Metro hours or more frequent bus service would be, in effect, an egalitarian measure.

A BRT Plan for DC

Dave Alpert reports that “A committee of the Transportation Planning Board has developed a Bus Rapid Transit network proposal spanning the entire region, from Laurel to Lorton.” I’d like to see this eventually become the map of a streetcar system for the Washington, DC area but you couldn’t complete such a project in time to qualify for an American Recovery and Reinvestment Act grant. And a good BRT system could lay the groundwork for a future upgrade to rail. Besides which, this system would be a very useful thing to have on its own terms, so I hope other leaders in the region will get behind it:

The “rapid transit” elements in this “bus rapid transit” plan are “signal priority, some exclusive lanes or queue jumpers in congested areas, bus stops with fare prepayment and electronic real-time bus information, and low-floor buses” which could be done for about $200 million.

My only concern about this is that I don’t understand why the Orange Line of this network stops in Foggy Bottom when it seems like you could add a lot of value by extending the line slightly to Georgetown.

The Oil Problem

As you may recall, right before the world economy collapsed oil was becoming incredibly expensive. Now, courtesy of global economic collapse, it’s cheap again. But it’s not actually all that cheap in historical terms. And it’s showing a notable tendency to leap upwards at the slightest sign of recovery. This suggests that any recovery might entail immediate large increases in gasoline prices and so forth in a way that could, in turn, cripple the recovery. As Ryan Avent says:

As the global economy recovers, so too will oil prices, and fast. That increase is going to cut the legs out from under a recovery; a rise in oil prices is like a tax increase, which is contractionary. And if we nonetheless manage to grow through the rise, the increase in prices and oil demand will expand the trade deficit once more.

I don’t think it’s that hard to work around these issues. We could pass a substantial gas tax increase now to take effect in two or three years. In expectation of the increase, consumers would purchase more fuel efficient automobiles, potentially boosting auto sales and reducing vulnerability to high oil prices. And I’m sure I don’t even need to say that a program of rapid expansion of transit and passenger and freight rail capacity, funded immediately by deficit spending and after recovery by gas and congestion taxes, would kill multiple birds with one stone — providing stimulus, facilitating structural shifts, and reducing exposure to rising oil prices.

This is exactly right. I find it very disappointing that there doesn’t seem to be legislative work on this happening. It’s clear today that economic conditions are worse than they were in February when the first stimulus package was being outlined, and the headline number on that package was too small given even the macroeconomic projections we had back then. What’s more, there’s near-universal agreement that even if optimists are right and growth returns in Q3 or Q4 of 2009 that it would still take years to re-achieve full employment. Under the circumstances, I think there’s a strong case for investment in rail infrastructure (both freight, intercity passenger, and commuter) projects beyond the merely “shovel ready.”

Beyond that, there remains a very strong case for a federal role in funding mass transit operating costs. All across America, transit systems are hiking fares and cutting back on service. That’s directly contractionary. It’s taking a lot of money out of the pockets of people with high marginal propensities to consume, and it’s also create a perverse situation where we’re laying-off or furloughing bus drivers with one hand, even as we’re trying to employ people in new transit starts. Meanwhile, once the service is cut back, there will be difficulty ramping it back up to speed when growth returns. Which means a lot of people could end up caught in the oil price hike trap. We ought to be doing the reverse. Cutting fares and expanding service. That would work as short-term stimulus, and it would also create a situation where we’re better-prepared for the next oil price spike.

Gas After the Crash

Remember high gasoline prices? It all seems so six months ago. Then came the crash, the collapse of the economy, and with it down went the price of oil. But Ryan Avent observes that in some ways oil hasn’t gotten especially cheap, “It’s worth pointing out that the most significant collapse in global economic activity since World War II barely managed to push oil into the $30 per barrel range. Even now, as economic outlooks remain dim, prices have edged back up into the neighborhood of $50 per barrel.” Meanwhile, the crash has brought investment in new exploration and refining capacity to a grinding halt. And even in a crash year, we take a fair amount of oil out of the ground. All of which is to say that the demand curve for oil seems, at this point, to have a pretty steep slope. In other words, an economic recovery could cause prices to skyrocket.

In most of the world, and in some of the United States, that will lead people to resume their 2008 trend of less driving and more transit. But as is well known, many Americans live and/or work in places with no reasonable access to mass transit. Meanwhile, the market for—and therefore price of—oil is global. Which means that a global recovery could spark a rise in oil prices that hits America specifically very hard and in effect strangles our recovery in the crib. At that point it becomes an open question as to whether we drag the world down with us, in which case the cycle repeats, or if we just get left behind as continued global growth keeps pushing the price up and pinching American consumers harder-and-harder.

The answer, of course, is to take advantage of this period of “output gap” and low Treasury rates to invest in expanded mass transit capacities. But while the stimulus bill does do some good stuff for transit, it’s not even enough to make up for the rate at which state and local governments are curtailing transit services, much less to really leave Americans in a position to ride the bus to the new jobs we’re hoping to see created in 2010.

Where’s My Fast Broadband?

For the life of me, I’ve never understood the argument that America’s low population density explains why our broadband is so slow. If it were the case that American broadband was slow on average this might be the explanation. But New York City is really dense! Much denser than Stockholm. And yet the broadband is faster in Stockholm. South Korea is about as dense as New Jersey, but the broadband’s way faster in South Korea. Perhaps it’s not feasible, at this point, to deploy ultra-fast broadband across the entire United States. But this doesn’t explain why the densely populated parts of the United States don’t have state-of-the-art broadbrand. The reason we don’t have state-of-the-art broadband is that we haven’t made the regulatory policies and public investments that would bring it about. In part, perhaps, because the consumer surplus of quality internet connections outpaces the available private profits.

Note that this is precisely analogous to certain tired arguments over mass transit. It’s true that given the U.S.’s low average population density compared to the Netherlands, that it’s not realistic for us to have as much mass transit as they have. But this doesn’t do anything to explain why a fairly dense city like Los Angeles should have third-rate mass transit. LA doesn’t have modern streetcar lines because instead of upgrading the old ones to modern technology over time, they tore them up! Everyone understands why there’s no subway in Montana—that’s not the issue.

The Case for Free Transit

A reader asks what I think about Irwin Kellner’s argument that mass transit ought to be free. Broadly speaking, I agree.

To understand how to think about this, it’s easier to start by thinking about roads. Say there’s no road between Washington, DC and Frederick, Maryland. You can go from the one place to the other, but it involves going way out of your way even though it could be a pretty quick trip on a direct road. What you need to ask yourself about building such a road is what would it cost and would it be worth it? You don’t build the road expecting to turn a profit. And you shouldn’t really build it expecting tolls to finance it. You should build it because you want to encourage people to drive from DC to Frederick. But if you build the road and it comes to pass that it’s choked with traffic during certain periods of time you don’t respond by making the road wider. Just like with building the road in the first place, you make it wider if you want to increase the number of people driving. If you want to eliminate the congestion problem, then you charge people to drive on the road during the peak times. The transit situation is similar. If you don’t want people to take the Metro from Bethesda to Gallery Place, then you shouldn’t build the Metro. But if you do want people to take the Metro from Betheday to Gallery Place then you shouldn’t charge them to ride. But if it turns out that your route is too popular at certain times of day, then you want to charge them in order to prevent overcrowding.

That’s how things should be in principle. In practice, politics is much messier than that, and budget politics is especially messy. There are all kinds of dedicated revenue stream issues and various other factors that mean that reliance on fares is typically a second-best option in a world where the realistic alternative isn’t free transit, it’s no transit. In theory, however, transit and roads should both be free most of the time but perhaps quite expensive at particular times when otherwise there’d be dramatic crowding.

The Future of the Suburbs

Very interesting interview with Christopher Leinberger about the future of the suburbs. The point he’s making is perhaps helpfully illustrated by this photo of the Ballston area in Arlington County, VA — one of DC’s extremely successful semi-urban suburbs:

Interesting. So what can DC teach us as an example?
What we’re learning about the DC area is that there are 30 of these walkable communities here. I’m only talking about regionally significant places, not individual neighborhoods. So, for instance, downtown DC, Reston, Bethesda and so on. Of these places, 90 percent are on the metro system and most of the rest will be linked into it in the next five years. So that’s a pretty obvious correlation right there. But most of these walkable places are in the suburbs.

What’s the lesson?
This structural trend is about the transformation of the suburbs into something else. I’ve been doing some research looking at the price premiums on a per-square-foot basis for walkable communities. They get a price premium between 40 and 200 percent. I’ve also been looking at what I call the “penumbra.” A walkable place is typically 50 to 500 acres in size. The penumbra, that area around it, can be even bigger.

Almost like micro suburbs.
Yes. These places are still suburban but they are within walking distance of the walkable places. This “penumbra” is seeing premiums of 20 to 80 percent over the rest of the market.

The future of a well-done metro area wouldn’t be everything looking like this particular block. Rather, what they have in Arlington is a long high-density, highly-walkable corridor stretched out along a metro line. That then creates lots of more traditionally “suburban” space that’s still within walking distance of the corridor. A metro area should, ideally, have a whole bunch of corridors like that which then converge to create a downtown. Then the wedges between the corridors serve the way traditional suburbs do today. The result is a real mix of housing options and neighborhood types.

Transit Cuts Map

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times, but one of the most fast-acting and effective things the stimulus bill could be doing but isn’t is directing funds to local transit agencies to allow them to forestall contractionary service cuts and fare hikes. Transportation for America has a nice map showing the cuts currently taking place around the country.

How Low Can We Go

Yes, public transit got shortchanged in the House draft of the stimulus bill, but Elana Schor reports that it’s getting even more shortchanged in the Senate version. This would be a good opportunity for Senator Gillibrand to show that despite hailing from upstate she understands the particular needs and interests of her new constituents in the city and its suburbs.

Second Avenue Subway

Petey’s asked me a couple of times if the Second Avenue Subway project in New York shouldn’t qualify as a stimulus-eligible shovel-ready project. I think the issue here is that the project is too shovel-ready and the funding and work is already in place. And I think you can’t just do it faster because of the limited supply of tunneling machines—they’re trying to minimize “cut and cover” construction since this is a very built-up area, and the equipment for this kind of boring isn’t something you can pick up at a hardware store. But if that’s wrong, then, yes, this is definitely the kind of thing that deserves to be in line ahead of new highway construction in terms of infrastructure money.

Still, I mostly don’t have a problem with there not being huge new transit construction in a stimulus bill. New need to reform the overall infrastructure policy for the long run, not just for an economic emergency. But what really does deserve hefty stimulus funding is transit operating expenses which would be both fast-acting, progressive in distributional impact, environmentally sound, and high-multiplier. What’s more, unlike new construction it’s the kind of thing you could phase out relatively easily when it becomes unnecessary.

Transit in St. Louis

Nicholas Beaudrot asks:

Without citing Portland, OR as a model, what is a reasonable goal for transit adoption and transit-oriented development in cities who haven’t had serious rail or streetcar investment in 50 years? Clearly we’re not going to turn St. Louis (popn density ~5500 people/sq.mi.) into Manhattan (60,000), but can we even turn it into DC (10,000) or Baltimore (8,000) within fifteen years?

I’m not really sure why I should be prohibited from citing Portland as a model. We have a somewhat unfortunate situation in this country where the main example people are familiar with of a transit-oriented city is New York, which is one of the very biggest in the world, while obviously most of our cities are much smaller than that. So it’s worth saying that the developed world is full of examples that are neither New York nor sprawl. That’s not just Portland, Europe is full of decently walkable medium-sized cities.

On to St Louis. It’s hard to talk in too much detail about places I’m not very familiar with. But the pace at which things can change is going to be dictated, in part, but the extent to which there’s actual interest in building anything in the metro area. At the moment, clearly, nobody is going to undertake large new building projects—dense or otherwise—in St. Louis or anywhere else. And a small city in the midwest is under no particular obligation to turn itself into a particularly dense metropolis. But what you want is to avoid a situation where you’re preventing density. St Louis has a couple of decent rail transit lines and it’s important to allow dense projects to be built near those stations and along the corridors that are served by rail. These things are expensive to build, and once they’re there it’s important to utilize the served areas in the most efficient way possible. That doesn’t mean forcing people to build extremely tall projects near them, but it does mean letting such projects go through without demanding vast fields of parking to be placed around everything.

In general, I would also just note that it can get misleading to look at citywide density averages. The relevant issue for a city that (like St. Louis) has some transit is whether or not you’re achieving density at your transit nodes. Additional consideration that are important is that ideally the stations will be close enough together to create not just pockets of density but whole corridors of density, even if the corridors are surrounded by pretty traditional suburbs. The stretch of Arlington County running from Rosslyn to the Metro stations at Court House, Clarendon, Virginia Square, and Ballston are a great example of how this can look.

Rep. Oberstar: Rail Had to Take a Back Seat to Tax Cuts

Elana Schor’s got the quotes from Representative Jim Oberstar (D-MN) that indicate that the reason rail got so little funding in the stimulus proposal is that they were cut to make room for more tax cuts:

The reason for the reduction in overall funding — we took money out of Amtrak and out of aviation; we took money out of the Corps of Engineers, reduced the water infrastructure program, the drinking water and the wastewater treatment facilities and sewer lines, reduced that from $14 billion to roughly $9 billion — was the tax cut initiative that had to be paid for in some way by keeping the entire package in the range of $850 billion.

Not good. I would also note that there are plenty of ways to do mass transit stimulus funding that have nothing to do with breaking new ground on projects and thus get around the “lag” concerns or some alleged lack of new projects. All around the country, after all, we have people paying fares to go ride on buses, commuter rail lines, light rail, and heavy rail systems. In many jurisdictions, those fares are currently rising even as service is cut back because state and local funding streams for operating costs are drying up amidst the recession. The federal government could make funds available to transit agencies—a certain amount per passenger carried in 2007—that can be used to finance fare cuts or service expansions. That’s the kind of stimulus that would be very fast acting since even though it might take some months for the money to start flowing, agencies could start planning to receive the funds right away. It would have some direct employment effect through the agencies, and would also in effect put extra money into the pockets of transit users. And since in most cities, transit is primarily used by the poor it would be a highly efficient stimulus. And also environmentally friendly.

I see no sign that this kind of thing has gotten serious consideration from the administration or from congress, which is odd considering that they claim to be searching far and wide for reasonably efficient uses of stimulus funds.

Presidents and Media Change

Here’s a fascinating point from Matt Compton that I’m going to steal. It’s about a speech FDR gave in 1929. During the speech, according to H.W. Brands’ new biography he argued that back in the day “Elections were won or lost, parties were driven out or swept into power entirely as the public speakers of one side or the other proved most able and convincing. It was the golden age of the silver tongue.” But then came the rise of the newspaper and the first great era of the sound bite. Compton’s paraphrase:

That tradition, however, had changed with the advent of mass media in the form of the newspapers. Then, as now, publishers seldom printed speeches in their entirety, and voters learned to take their cues from quotes that reporters and editors chose to excerpt.

FDR felt that in his time things were changing:

The pendulum is rapidly swinging back to the old condition of things. One can only guess at the figure, but I think it is a conservative estimate to say that whereas five years ago 99 out of 100 took their arguments from the editorials and the news columns of the daily press, today at least half the voters, sitting at their own fireside, listen to the actual words of the political leaders on both sides and make their decisions based on what they hear rather than what they read. I think it is almost safe to say that in reaching their decisions as to which party they will support, what is heard over the radio decides as many people as what is printed in the newspapers.

Famously, the radio proved to be a hugely effective communications medium for Obama. But then the pendulum swung back in the age of TV. And now in the internet age, it’s swinging back again in an interesting way. The internet is famous for the way it fragments attention, but one of the ways in which it does that is by making it possibly to narrowcast more content to interested parties than would ever be viable to push through the crowded pipes of cable television. Over here I just watched the incoming chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality talk for 85 seconds about high-speed rail and mass transit. 85 seconds isn’t a ton of seconds. But the fact remains that you could never get a television network to devote that much time to a public official just talking about a subject that, though important, isn’t all that interesting to most people.

It’s an interesting new kind of landscape.

Rich Lawyers Boosting Traffic Jams and Calling It Charity

One thing law firms do is take cases on a pro bono basis. You get some prestige for doing so, and it helps underscore the legal profession’s self-conception as serving the higher calling of the law. The general idea here, of course, is that you’re supposed to be helping out indigent clients or some kind of do-gooder causes.

Meanwhile, in DC’s Maryland suburbs we’re inching ever closer to actually starting work on the Purple Line light rail. This would connect several destinations that are already served by transit and walkable transit-oriented development, provide transit access to the University of Maryland’s main campus, and also create the possibility of new transit-oriented development at additional stops along the way. It’s a good idea that will help reduce congestion on the Beltway, reduce carbon emissions, and enhance the region’s ability to keep growing in a sustainable manner. Every environmental group in the city is for it. But a group of NIMBYs centered around the town of Chevy Chase, MD and the Columbia Country Club are trying to block it in order to keep the riffraff out and are offering some spurious environmental claims to try to block construction.

They’ve engaged the large DC firm of Sidley Austin to help them in their fight. And Sidley’s doing the work pro bono — for free — as charity. No doubt in part this is because Joseph Guerra is both a partner in the firm and the husband of the woman co-chairing the NIMBY effort. Perhaps some of the firms partners are members of the Country Club as well. Who knows? But this is certainly a strange definition of charitable work. They might want to ask some of the people working for the firm on the bottom rungs — the janitors and so forth — if they really appreciate these kind of “charitable” efforts to deny poor people any better commuting options than the bus?

Mass Transit and the Stimulus

Chris Hayes talks to a guy working at the Chicago Transit Authority about what America’s mass transit systems need and how it plays into the stimulus package.

WMATA Stimulus

The stimulus money coming down the pike is a great opportunity for local governments and transit agencies to try to make the case for funding important priorities. Unfortunately, when WMATA sat down to talk about what kind of projects they had that fit the criteria for economic stimulus, they only came up with $529 million worth of stuff. That’s better than being dishonest and trying to get their hands on billions of dollars worth of money to go waste.

But it also reflects a failure of vision, planning, and leadership. A well-run agency ought not become so cowed by the narrow horizons of conventional political wisdom that it’s left with this little to ask for when the situation changes.

Better Bus Info

Also on Rob Goodspeed’s blog is an old-but-good post on improving the visual presentation of bus schedule and route data. This isn’t the kind of local government reform that makes for stirring oratory or gets you on the cover of Time magazine but it makes a lot of difference in people’s lives. Better, more usable buses would be good for bus riders and drivers alike.