Note: The following is something I typed in a long time ago. I was certain I had posted it on-line, but several exhaustive searches have failed to uncover it. So here it is, hopefully for the first time.
He’s the darling of the anti-transit, pro-sprawl crowd. (His website is here, by the way.) He likes to portray himself as the voice of true public preference and reasonable policies to achieve same.
It doesn’t take that much looking at his web site, however, to see how much he falls short of the standards set by those whom he criticizes. Like his adversaries, he throws rocks at other’s policies. Fair enough; part of politics is explaining why the other side’s ideas stink.
But his adversaries actually advocate positive visions of what they’d like to see. Cox, he just lobs more rhetorical missiles at his opponents. Unlike, say, this site which starts its “about new urbanism” section with a presentation of a positive vision, Cox is almost totally silent about what he actually wants.
After twenty minutes of digging, I finally located this. Despite its title, it consists of (you guessed it) mostly rock-throwing. But there’s actually a little meat near the end:
Indeed, we stand on the threshold of a synthesis of personal mobility and mass transit — a world in which automobiles are used far more efficiently and safely through technological advances.Automated Highway Systems (AHS) will increase the capacity of current freeways by 100 to 200 percent, with greatly improved safety. Automobiles will be operated automatically in “platoons” as the highway controls steering, braking and collision avoidance. An early test will be conducted in San Diego starting in August. Japan expects to have a fully functional roadway in day to day operation by 2005.
Navigation systems relying on satellites and other technology will provide drivers with improved information on routing, improving the efficiency of the entire roadway system, not just freeways.
In the more distant future “autonomous automobiles” would combine the features of both the automated highway and navigation systems. Autonomous automobiles would rely on geo-positioning systems capable of guiding automobiles within tolerances measured in inches. The autonomous automobile will be capable of quickly transporting its passengers to virtually any destination on the road network, improving roadway capacity, average speeds and safety.
Other technological advances are likely to provide relief as well. Improved traffic signalization is already improving travel times in some corridors. Telecommuting is increasing, and it is likely to increase even more in the future.
Perhaps an irony is that technological advances in highways could result in less, not more urban sprawl. Critics of urban sprawl, who bring a religious fervor to their cause no less intense than Crusaders exhibited against Muslims, have embraced strategies of the “new urbanism” as an alternative. The problem with these strategies (particularly evident in the Portland Metro 2040 Plan) is that they seek to impose the preferences of planners on people. In the long run, this is not likely to be successful. On the other hand, creating new street and highway capacity through technology will make our central cities and older suburbs more accessible, which could make them more desirable places to live and locate businesses.
Finally, there will continue to be a need to expand the highway system, especially in response to growth and removal of traffic “bottlenecks.” [Emphasis added.]
Suddenly, the reason for his reluctance becomes clear.
First, most of the words in that vision are expended on discussing technologies that don’t completely exist yet and which never have been practically implemented, anywhere. Sure, maybe someday they will, but maybe not.
Contrast with the walkable neighborhoods and mass transit the New Urbanists propose — we know such things can be built, because they already have been. In fact, one of the rocks others (not Cox) lob at the New Urbanists is the “old urbanist” moniker, because so much of New Urbanist proposals involves rediscovering older ways of constructing urban areas.
Second, we have the little paragraph at the end, a sentence by its lonesome self tucked into a lengthy essay in a site of lengthy essays. Cox spends plenty of time talking about how market preferences for cars and detached single-family housing represent the will of the populace. And how, by implication, those who question them are thus elitist social engineers with no respect for the people’s wishes.
Sauce, goose, gander.
Sprawl is hardly the result of the free market. It is the child of government policy: zoning to create separate residential and commercial areas and minimum densities, and governments using eminent domain to confiscate private land for the purpose of constructing freeways.. The years of sprawl — basically, the years since the end of World War II — have been the years of Big Government.
And while there is a demonstrated preference to live in low-density neighborhoods and drive, there is also a demonstrated public preference against new freeways being built in one’s own neighborhood. Furthermore, there’s a demonstrated preference for closeness to open, undeveloped land: part of the appeal of suburbia has always been its quieter, more bucolic image.
What to make of it? Simple. When it comes to urban land-use and transportation, people’s preferences tend to be self-contradictory. The average person wants to live in a detached single-family house on a quiet street adjoining some open space, a short drive to a free-flowing freeway that’s conveniently out of sight, smell, and earshot. He doesn’t want to ride the bus, doesn’t want more density in his neighborhood, doesn’t want that open space developed, and certainly doesn’t want a new freeway through his neighborhood. And he wants his house to be affordable, and reasonably close to work. If not everyone can live like that, well, then someone else should make the sacrifice (carpool, ride a bus, live next to a freeway, etc.) so he can continue living his idyllic existence.
In advocating that people simply get used to more freeways and less open space, Cox is every bit as much the social engineer as he accuses his adversaries of being. And he’s much less honest about it, too — remember, the New Urbanists came out at the start and said what they wanted; Cox buried and hid what he wants and chose to beg questions.
Third, and perhaps most tellingly, even this rare excerpt showing a positive vision spends more time throwing rocks at New Urbanists than it does exploring the only significant infrastructure work Cox proposes.
So the only conclusion that can be drawn is that he’s purely a propaganda machine, devoid of any serious overall meaningful content.
Apropos this, the sucky thing about Perl is that the suckiness of the language design seems to be contagious. Programmers with excessive amounts of occupational Perl exposure tend to produce poorly-designed code, more focused on cuteness and creeping featurism than orthogonality and usability. No small amount of the stuff in CPAN bears this out.
When I started working with Perl professionally, it shocked me how sloppy the documentation for the standard SOAP library was. Very little is explicitly stated; it’s mostly “for example, this” and “for example, that”, and lots of “oh, see how cute I made this feature.” Figuring out the general rules of the game is left as an exercise to the reader. To make life even more interesting, it turns out that some things simply can’t be done unless one calls undocumented functions.
Did I mention that the source code for the library is a mass of uncommented dense gibberish that gives TECO some serious competition in the unreadability department?
The first time I used it, it took me a month of tinkering before I managed to bend it to my will. The second time, it took three weeks.
I groaned when I looked at the strange XML constructs in the latest SOAP interface I was supposed to code. It looked good for at least another month of beating my head against the SOAP::Lite brick wall.
In desperation, I realized: It’s just XML. XML is very easy to generate, and not that hard to parse (and there’s plenty of libraries to help with the latter). So I wrote my SOAP interface using a standard XML parser and a roll-your-own XML generator.1
And made about three weeks’ progress (by past standards) in the past week, and expect to be done with the initial phase of the project tomorrow morning. That’s right: I saved time and effort by “re-inventing the wheel.”
Sigh, I miss Python.
1 Well, I could have used the parsing library to generate the XML, but Perl Programmer’s Disease had infected those parts of the library, making that needlessly painful. I saved time by “re-inventing the wheel” there, too.
As much as I dislike her, and as much as it pains me to say it, I will have to hold my nose and vote for Dragon Lady if she ends up running against Keating’s Pet Senator in November. That is because the Pet’s statements on Latin America send cold shivers down my spine.
Just take a look at his mischaracterization of Venezuela as a “one-party dictatorship,” for openers. What possible purpose could that serve other than a pretext for Chávez’ forced removal from office?
Look, Chávez has a creepy authoritarian streak. But, he has also been spanked by the Venezuelan voters for it. Moreover, much if his bluster is, well, just bluster. And, despite it all, he has made a positive impact on the lives of the less fortunate there.
Compare Chávez’ worst to the barbaric excesses of the various right-wing dictatorships various US administrations have installed, and it’s not even close. And that is without even yet considering the bloodshed a Contra-style insurgency in Venezuela would create.
His staffers are even worse, expressing outright praise for the sort of thuggery Reagan subjected uncooperative former satellite states to.
That is not a surprise once you realize that his Latin American policy advisors are drawn from the creepy right-wing element of the Cuban exile community. Let’s take a look at a few of the characters mentioned in that Orlando Sentinel piece:
Charming, simply charming. And, of course, they lump Evo Morales’ (one of the few heads of state I actually admire) government and the not-very-authoritarian-at-all broad-based social movements in Bolivia right in there with the Bad Guys. If this gang gets into the white house, another long night is going to descend on Latin America.
Which would be a terrible tragedy. Many leftists are not happy with the Clinton Administration’s Latin American policies. Well, no, they were not ideal by any means. But (and this is important) compare it to the historical norm. While Clinton used diplomacy to push elite rule on Latin America, he basically stopped at diplomacy, and he pushed that the elite rule be achieved through constitutional and democratic means, by propagandizing and cajoling the masses to vote in certain ways.
If the people didn’t vote the way Clinton wanted, he’d grumble about it but still respect the result. That is simply a huge difference from an absolutely dismal historical norm, which has seen US-backed violence used to overthrow leftist administrations multiple times. There has not been a successful coup in Latin America since Alberto Fujimori’s “self-coup” in the early 1990’s (which, tellingly, Fujimori is now on trial for).
In contrast, Obama has actually said he would be willing to talk with leaders like Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez (a welcome change, especially with regard to Castro). Beyond that, he would probably be pretty Clintonesque. Hillary has not said much and would probably adopt a policy very similar to her husband’s. Both would be far better than the alternative.
Clinton’s principles (and Bush’s subsequent distraction in Iraq) have enabled more genuine hope for real change in some historically very unjust societies than probably any other time in history. And McCain apparently wants to go back to the bad old days of dirty wars.
No way. No way in hell.
That’s the sound of a full-blown (both gong and klaxon) new-age bullshit alarm going off in my head. It was triggered when an acquaintance called all enthusiastic about something called the Landmark Forum. I smelled the whiff of a rat from that home page, so I decided to see what Wikipedia had to say about it. It was then I realized that’s what they’re calling the direct descendent of “est” these days. Which made my B.S. alarm go off.
I won’t go into great detail here about just why I find it distasteful. Those curious to read a first-person account from a (mostly) disinterested participant-observer can go here. Suffice it to say it is precisely the sort of new-agey, authoritarian, psychologically-exploitative, capitalistic brainwashing crap I want to see the world rid of.
In general, I learn best via individual effort and bouncing questions off friends. If I ever were interested in pursuing life-change courses, however, I’d be much more inclined to go somewhere like Esalen. Just from reading their splash page and the Wikipedia article about them, it’s obvious that they’re everything the hucksters at Landmark are not.
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