CONSIDERING A DIFFERENT FUNDING MODEL?

Streetsblog contributor Sogand Karbalaieali thinks beyond the immediate problem of fare evasion on the subway.

[F]are evasion's estimated revenue loss of $40 million barely makes a dent in [Washington Metro's] total $4.8 billion budget. And in some ways, the money that’s lost when people ride for free could represent a significant public benefit: according to a 2012 report by the National Building Museum, cutting car ownership in Washington D.C. by 15,000 vehicles would save the local economy $127 million.

One potential avenue lies in creative solutions for generating revenue through underutilized parking spaces. The [Metro] parking fee is about five dollars per day, and if you leave after midnight, there's no charge. Back in 2015, [Metro] parking lots were utilized at 75 percent capacity, but by 2019, that figure had dropped to 55 percent — and in most MD and VA stations, parking usage plummeted to as low as 20 percent. As people opt to live and work nearer to metro stations, the demand for parking declined and demand for housing near bus and train lines has skyrocketed with little inventory available to meet it. The pandemic further accelerated this trend, which was driven by remote work, especially among white-collar employees.

To its credit, [Metro's] 10-year strategic plan does envision transforming many of these expanses of asphalt into mixed-used developments — but the response hasn't been swift enough. Since 1975, Metro has completed just 55 joint development projects — a pace of less than two projects a year.

Cars are for closers, and that makes me doubtful those fare-evaders are leaving their cars at home.  Five years ago, though, I had thoughts about the sort of "joint development" she's contemplating.

A Florida transit planner takes a ride on Brightline. "While I loved my travel experience, as a planner, I'm keenly aware that Brightline’s service model cannot be easily copied by public transportation agencies."  Perhaps the place to start, dear reader, is by reworking the public agency model.  Let's start with Ms Whitton's contrasts.  "Brightline cost billions to build, and it was built without direct public funding. That being said, several things give it an advantage that public transportation agencies do not have."

First, "[Florida East Coast] has owned or had exclusive access to right-of-way for the railroad tracks for more than a century."  Unlike the legacy commuter train operators of the big cities, who sought public assistance with the operating deficits, leading to a situation in which the subsidy-paying agency might be at odds with the freight railroad that owns the tracks, Florida East Coast are starting this service, and adding capacity, ab initio.

Second, "All Aboard Florida’s business model includes revenues from nearby real estate developments."  I've called that the "Sim Trump" approach to railroad construction, and it seems to work in Japan.  But such "value capture" isn't so easily done by Commuter Rail operators (the prospect of Chicago's Metra getting too close to well-connected Pritzkers or McCaskeys isn't just a theoretical worry.)

Third, "During my ride, I noticed several 'official partners' of Brightline."  In plain language, naming rights (and well-patronized trains won't be white elephants.)  But again, where you have a government agency, with a monopoly on generating rents, you have the risk of corruption.  "While some larger transit agencies such a RTD in Denver and CTA in Chicago have corporate partnerships, the procurement rules or politics within most local governments would prohibit this revenue source."

That post noted the constraints imposed by public ownership, although it doesn't preclude transit authorities making more productive use of the space they own, such as the peripheral parking lots, and, oh, the clear space above many of the Metro stations. I expressed hope that Brightline might inspire the public transportation authorities. "Put another way, rather than having the public money provide 'demonstration projects,' here is an entrepreneurial demonstration project that the Commuter Rail authorities might emulate."

NOTHING TO EXCESS.

That includes eating hot peppers on a dare.

The death of a Massachusetts teenager after his family said he ate an extremely spicy tortilla chip has led to an outpouring of concern about the social media challenge and prompted retailers to pull the product from their shelves at the manufacturer’s request.

The family of Harris Wolobah held a vigil Friday, a week after his death on Sept. 1, to remember the basketball-loving 10th grader while they await the results of an autopsy to determine what killed him.

Wolobah’s family has blamed the One Chip Challege for the teen’s death.

The challenge calls for participants to eat an eponymously named chip and then see how long they can go without consuming other food and water. The family has declined interview requests.

Police said they were called to the home on Sept. 1 and found Wolobah “unresponsive and not breathing.” He was transported to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

The state medical examiner’s office said it will likely take weeks before Wolobah’s cause of death is determined. But the chip’s manufacturer, Paqui, asked retailers to stop selling the product.

People have been weighing in about their own experiences with the chip, which costs roughly $10 and comes individually wrapped in foil in a coffin-shaped box that warns, among other things, that it is made for the “vengeful pleasure of intense heat and pain,” is intended for adults and should be kept out of the reach of children.

I'm going to throw a penalty flag on that sort of promotion.  Years ago, when jalapeno bean dip was pretty edgy, and the jalapeno was the hottest pepper commonly available in these United States, there was a beer commercial involving some baseball players that featured one of them trying a jalapeno at the urging of another and then endorsing the beer because it was cold.  (Somebody with a better memory of beer commercials and better navigation of the internet archives might be able to find that.)

WATCH THIS SPACE.

The train room at Cold Spring Shops headquarters includes a powered display track orbiting the basement up high.  It's reliable enough with properly tuned rolling stock to turn it on and let a train run while I'm working on the main level, or perhaps catching up on my reading.

The video features a number of trains going through their paces up high.  A few test runs up there or on the State of Maine Northern are sprinkled in.

The video description includes the new You Tube indexing feature, pick whatever train suits your fancy.  Enjoy all 21 minutes if you wish.  Yes, there are two scales (British Gauge O and North American O Scale) and three countries (United States, United Kingdom, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) showing off.

A PROMOTION BASED ON SPITE MIGHT NOT BE A WISE BUSINESS STRATEGY.

During the off-season, the Packers dealt Aaron Rodgers and a number of other older players to the New York Jets.  Note, dear reader, that I was in the Time to Move On camp.

The Green Bay Packers had a chance of making the playoffs, but two loss-of-composure penalties on defensive players in scoring situations helped the Lions put up points, and two ill-timed turnovers, the final an interception airmailed by Aaron Rodgers at the end of the game, put an end to those hopes, which, all the same, were stronger than I had anticipated.  "Best case scenario, the new quarterback continues to develop, the young receivers gain experience, and the transition to another quality quarterback occurs. First, though, let's see what the remaining four games bring."

The transition, though, will not go away.  "It’s a period of contemplation in the world of Green Bay Packers star Aaron Rodgers, who at age 39, is mulling retirement more seriously than ever before."  If popular sentiment mattered, the sense I'm getting is that he and Harry Sussex going on a Magical Mystery Tour would be just fine.  Perhaps he gets full range of motion back in his thumb, and his ribs heal, but I keep having those memories of a battered Bart Starr hoping to find the magic again.

Let's say that Popular Sentiment in Packer Nation was that Mr Rodgers had behaved badly.

If you needed a reason to watch a Jets game this season, here's a good one.

Jack's American Pub on Brady Street is hosting an NFL season-long promotion.

Anytime the Jets play a game and lose, the pub will pay everyone's drink tab.

"We created something to get people in the door to watch a lot of our old Packer alums," said Emily Ho-Abegglen, marketing director at Jack's American Pub.

It's a deal that sounds almost too good to be true.

"I just think it's a great publicity stunt," said customer Matt Mikulak.

"Great idea. I think it'll draw some people in," said Milwaukee resident Peter Kessel.

There are a few rules. You must start a tab 15 minutes before the game starts.

Then you have to stay for the whole game, and Rodgers must be in the starting lineup.

This deal does not include food or top-shelf liquor. And if there's a Packers game at the same time, the deal is off.

"We like to, you know, be a little risky, and I think it's a fun way to communicate and interact with our customers," Ho-Abegglen said.

With the promotion gaining nationwide attention, the bar is expected to be busy.

The poobahs of pro football scheduling put both New York teams in the Meadowlands for September 10 and 11, with the Giants hosting the Cowboys on Sunday, and Jets hosting the Bills to open Monday Night Football.

REGRETS? THEY'VE HAD A FEW.

National Review have set up a new article aggregator, "The Detransitioners," with links to the stories they have run about various young people who underwent sex-change, er, gender-affirming, treatments they later regretted.  I can't rule out the possibility that the aggregator is set up for clicks and subscriptions, as many of the individual tales of woe are behind the paywall.

Unfortunately, the academic understanding of the phenomenon is not much better.  No less than Richard Dawkins has recently taken stick for maintaining that sex is binary whilst race, and I contend, personality, are better understood as existing on a spectrum (his word) or in a continuum in n-space.

The disciplines of psychology and psychiatry, unfortunately, aren't yet well-enough developed to be able to assess such claims in a systematic way.  We're a century or so away from eugenics and sterilization, three score and ten years or so away from frontal lobotomies, and forty years ago Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union had regime psychiatrists diagnosing dissidents as schizophrenic, in order to make the dissenters go away whilst claiming the corrective labor camps were for more conventional criminals alone.  There is a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for neuroses and psychoses, but the committee that revises it responds to Popular Sentiment.  That is not the behavior of scholars confident in their paradigm.

Current academic thinking is complicit in some sort of experiment against reality, but I'm not sure which experiment that is.  Unfortunately, that will be small solace for the discontented detransitioners who discover that their lives still suck, only now their lives suck in different ways than they previously did.

THE MYTHS PERSIST AFTER FIFTY YEARS.

September 11 was a major day for Chileans back in 1973, when the military ended yet another example of This Time We're Going To Get Socialism Right.  It didn't work, but Chileans seem bent on one more try.  This time, it's lithium that's going to be the key, rather than copper, and there have been developments since that post that maybe I'll return to anon.

SIX DEGREES OF EMERGENCE.

Why does the six degrees of separation hypothesis hold up?

A recent paper published in Physical Review X by researchers from Israel, Spain, Italy, Russia, Slovenia, and Chile sheds light on the mechanism behind this phenomenon. It all comes down to human behavior and the constant balance between the costs and benefits of establishing new social ties.

If we might be able to understand all of the universe as a mathematical expression, should it come as any surprise that there isn't a mathematical economics of the universe?

People naturally seek prominence in social networks, strategically choosing connections that place them in central positions. However, forging new friendships requires effort and maintenance, which comes with a cost. So, individuals in social networks constantly play the cost-benefit game, breaking old ties and forming new ones to achieve an equilibrium that balances their desire for prominence and their limited social budget.

“When we did the math, we discovered an amazing result: this process always ends with social paths centered around the number six. Each individual acts independently without knowing the network as a whole, yet this self-driven game shapes the structure of the entire network, leading to the small world phenomenon and the recurring pattern of six degrees,” lead author Baruch Barzel, a professor at Bar-Ilan University, explains in a statement.

I bet when you look more carefully at the network, you're going to see a power rule in the links to some nodes.

Betweenness centrality essentially gauges how essential a node (or person) is in facilitating connections between other nodes. Imagine you’re friends with both a filmmaker and a film critic you’re central in the connection between these two people. The study adds an innovative twist to this measure by considering the “length” of the path through which an individual connects others, thereby giving a weighted importance to more direct connections.

‘Within this game, every agent continually evaluates whether forming new connections will improve their network influence or if maintaining existing connections is more beneficial. They make these decisions based on a balance between the associated costs and the projected benefits, aiming to maximize their influence within the network.

There might be strategies to add or remove people from your Rolodex, er, network, and yet, there is logic to the emergence of those six degrees.

When the game reaches a point where no individual has anything to gain by changing their existing connections—a situation known as Nash equilibrium—the resulting network naturally exhibits the characteristic of six degrees of separation. This means that any two people in the network could be connected through six or fewer intermediaries, offering a solid explanation for the phenomenon that has intrigued social scientists and the general public alike.

A Nash equilibrium is not necessarily a Pareto optimum, and yet, interacting agents are being led as if by an invisible hand into a network with those six degrees of separation.

ANOTHER WAY TO CHASE PRODUCTIVE PEOPLE OUT.

A lament from earlier this summer for the end of Midwestern common sense included, "I used to think of Illinois as having sensible, non-Trumpian Republicans, and enough Adlai Stevenson type Democrats to keep the place from going nuts. Both [Illinois and Minnesota] have become sanctuary states for abortion seekers, which might make sense, as neither strike me as worth considering as a place to raise children, particularly Normal children."  That "particularly Normal children" takes on additional salience.  "Illinois becomes magnet for transgender students seeking protections in school, health care."

I don't see that ending well.  Here are thoughts from evolutionary biologist Colin Wright that are on point.

Sex IS binary, and these kids seeking to transition are unambiguously male or female. These kids are just incredibly confused because they've been fed ideological lies that their nonconformity to rigid sex stereotypes means they are or should be either the opposite sex or neither male nor female. This is the regressive pseudoscience at the foundation of gender ideology.

Instead, we should be telling these children that their sex-atypical preferences and behavior are 100% compatible with being male or female, and that there's nothing wrong with them. They don't have to transition to be made whole. They are whole.

That supposedly "most progressive state" is becoming a safe haven for people who might either have succumbed to the "regressive pseudoscience" or who might be dealing with more severe challenges. "For many families looking to protect their trans children in school and to preserve control over their medical decisions, moving seems like the only option — and Illinois a safe landing spot."

FINDING THOSE PRODUCTIVE ASSETS.

Ordinarily, I could flag Reason's Christian Britschgi on California corona tyrant Gavin "French Laundry" Newsom for a Friday short take.  "Newsom's unwillingness to offer a full-throated defense of his COVID record shows he recognizes how unpopular a lot of his decisions were. His blame-shifting and revisionist history make clear he's less than fully contrite."  Contrite politicians are soon out of office, dontcha know?

The article, which covers assorted topics in the ongoing and never-ending coronavirus panic, also includes a discussion of the effect those business closures had on street use.  Put outdoor dining in what used to be a street, and motorists grouse.  Fine.  Let the owner of the street put it to a market test.  "A better option would be for cities to sell the space that's already been effectively privatized. The new owners could use it for outdoor dining, parking, or whatever activities suit them best."

HE'S GONE.

Thus did Dilbert creator Scott Adams sum up Dementia Joe's latest press appearance, in Vietnam.  Power Line's Scott Johnson says "He asymptotically approaches mentality zero."

The White House press team couldn't clean up this mess.  Reality sometimes manifests itself in odd ways, including the United States, once waging a war in Vietnam in part to contain Communism, now enters into a diplomatic accord with the notionally Communist government of Vietnam to help contain China.

We’ve elevated our cooperation directly to the Vietnamese’s highest tier of partnership, referred to as the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. That means the United States has strengthened our ties with another critical Indo-Pacific partner.

Our progress today builds on the Camp David trilateral with Japan and — and the Republic of Korea and the United States; the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership the United States launched with — with ASEAN last year; and the engagement with Pacific Islands — with the Pacific Islands Forum; our strengthened alliances with the Philippines; and AUKUS partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom; our elevated Quad engagement with India, Australia, and Japan; and the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity; and all the effort we’ve advanced from day one of my administration to demonstrate to our Indo-Pacific partners and to the world that the United States is a Pacific nation, and we’re not going anywhere.

Then things went off the rails. "And now, I will take your questions. Let me see. They told me — they gave me five people here. Nandita of — of Reuters."  I don't know, nor will I speculate, on what sort of horse-trading goes on to ensure that correspondents get called on, and I bet past presidents had ideas of their own on who they would recognize first.  It looks weak enough, though, that Nikki Schwab of Britain's Daily Mail bundles it with the more obvious manifestations of that asymptotic brain decay to follow.  "Biden whispered, he walked about the stage and he used that now-famous phrase 'lying dog faced pony soldier' during the 26-minute engagement with the press, using a set list of reporters to call on."

TODAY'S RAILROAD READING.

Traveling with a Chair reports on the challenges, and the rewards, of getting about whilst using a mobility scooter.  Recently the author took a ride on Florida's Brightline as a way of getting quayside for a cruise.  The parking structures Brightline built at their stations offer a good start to the journey.

Navigating the neatly organized multi-tiered parking structure was a breeze. With dedicated spaces for Brightline passengers and impressive handicapped spots and charging stations for electric vehicles, we felt catered to. However, a note for solo wheelchair users: the stiff door closer might be challenging. Thankfully, crossing the street was seamless, leading us to the station's inviting automatic doors.

I'm not a fan of their station design, which involves more going up to go back down to trackside than I would like, and the airline touches at baggage checking and security screening bring "delayed while boarding" to mind. The amenities in the stations are great.  The travellers endorse the experience.  "Our Brightline experience profoundly impacted us. As advocates for accessibility, we found Brightline to be a top-tier travel choice in South Florida. We eagerly await their future expansions."

Good.  I suspect they had to arrange transportation from the Miami station to quayside, perhaps a little more organized than mine (city bus from hotel to station and return, and I would have walked from the hotel to quayside had security allowed it.)

That Brightline appeals to casual travellers, including travelers with mobility scooters, and makes a good impression on travellers with little or no previous rail experience, pleases me.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Democracy, good and hard.  "In America, you get the 'luxury' of freedom, liberty, and self-governance, but with it comes the responsibility to make informed decisions. If you want to blame someone, look in the mirror."  And at the Conservative Establishment.  "They inherited Ronald Reagan’s 'shining city on a hill' and have bequeathed to us the Rise of China, Big Tech, and Woke Totalitarianism."

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

TIGHT PRIORS CAN LEAD YOU DOWN RABBIT HOLES.

Two days ago, I wrote a long post suggesting that right-populist polemicists might have read too much into a climate scientist's response to Nature editors suggesting he and his colleagues narrow the focus of the paper.  That's the way the research enterprise works.

A simple confirmation of existing research with more recent data strikes me as a Minimal Publishable Unit for an archival journal, not necessarily the best use of space in Nature; whilst adding additional explanatory variables to capture those other effects might take more time off the tenure clock, and be hard to impound in ceteris paribus in any event.  Those considerations might be on the minds of the editors and the referees.

That post concluded,

I remind you, dear reader, that a paper challenging an existing paradigm has to be tightly argued, and it might have to be more convincing than the average Minimal Publishable Unit.

The simpler explanation might be that the accepted Nature article was more tightly framed than the more ambitious paper Nature turned down whilst in PLOS One accepted it.

Let me also reiterate an economics lesson. Journal space is a scarce resource, and, while journal editors might decry the lack of good submissions, the fact that rejection rates, particularly at the journals that get read, are high, suggests that shorter, tightly focussed papers are what get in.  And nothing concentrates the mind quite like that letter from The Review of Economics and Statistics that reads "If you can address these comments and shorten the manuscript, we will be happy to reconsider."

MEDICINE MAN SAY MASKING UP PLEASE GREAT SPIRIT.

I am not a fan of the academic fad of identifying "alternative ways of knowing."  There is experience, and experience is a powerful tool.  "It's possible that those 'western, educated, individualistic, rich, democratic' values are evolutionarily stable in ways that those 'alternative ways of knowing' are not."

Now, though, comes a report that the academic fad has made its way into public policy.  "The White House urges federal agencies to consider tribal religion alongside scientific studies."  That could be a manifestation of the misguided "greater good" thinking that is West Virginia University's undoing.  Or, it could be a reminder that policy-makers be sensitive to the preferences of the population they are doing policy on.

On Nov. 30, 2022, that office did something rather unscientific: It issued a memo directing more than two dozen federal agencies to apply "Indigenous Knowledge" to "research, policies, and decision making." The 42-page document encourages the agencies to speak with "spiritual leaders" and reject "methodological dogma" when crafting policy as a way to remedy injustices against Native peoples.

Federal regulators are to consider the folk wisdom of the Comanche Nation, for instance, just as they consider lab results when trying to determine the pH level of rain. Long relegated to university campuses and fringe activist groups, the idea that Native people have a privileged understanding of the physical and metaphysical world is now the official view of the United States government.

With nearly 600 federally recognized Native tribes in the United States alone, there is no single definition of Indigenous Knowledge. Defenders and critics of the idea agree that, broadly speaking, it constitutes the traditions, stories, and religious rituals passed down orally through generations of Native Americans and aborigines in places like Australia.

This investigation is based on a Washington Free Beacon review of previously unreported federal documents, hours of recorded lectures by federal officials, and interviews with nearly a dozen experts, many of whom declined to speak publicly due to fear of reprisal. Together, the materials show how a once-fringe theory made its way to the heart of the federal government and shine a light on the Democratic Party’s struggle to balance its commitment to "the science" with its commitment to "inclusivity."

Are we at a pass where federal officials ask the shaman whether a rain dance is necessary before issuing a drought alert, or consult an astrologer before issuing a proclamation celebrating a solstice?  Not quite, although there are troubling developments.

A March 2022 Environmental Protection Agency webinar entitled "Advancing Considerations of Traditional Knowledge into Federal Decision Making" featured an Indigenous Knowledge expert who explained that the "Native Worldview" does not consider time as "sequential" but rather "cyclical." Another participant, Natalie Solares, who works for a tribal consortium, suggested paying tribal elders $100 an hour to assist in federal rulemaking.

Gretchen Goldman, a senior official in the Office for Science and Technology Policy, lamented during the seminar that federal processes can be biased against "something that's not a peer-reviewed academic document."

"There are places we can, you know, just remove any barriers to fully incorporate Indigenous Knowledge into the process the same way that we would for academic science," she said.

The U.S. Geological Survey drew on Native religious traditions in an April webinar called "Incorporating Indigenous Knowledges into Federal Research and Management: What are Indigenous Knowledges?" Federal regulators and scientists were told to consider whether various food cultivation methods were considered sacred by a Native tribe. Failing to do so would "disrespect the spirits," said Melonee Montano, a traditional ecological knowledge outreach specialist for a consortium of native tribes.

I see rent-seekers, in the form of those consultancies for the elders; and it might be bad manners to disparage any sacred custom gratuitously.  On the other hand, it's easy enough to cross the line from the respectful to the ridiculous.

City University professor Massimo Pigliucci, a biologist and philosopher of science, told the Free Beacon: "When I start hearing things about how there’s this other dimension where, you know, the animals interact with humans at a different level of reality, that’s just not a thing. It’s not a scientific thing. You can believe that and you have the right to believe it, but it’s not empirical evidence."

Perhaps not, and perhaps too unthinking a respect for that principle can produce bad policy.  Moreover, knowledge, whether it originates with the First Nations or in the Harvard common room, is of no value unless it is shared with others.  "Indigenous Knowledge consultants who participated in webinars with federal officials were often cautious about offering any concrete examples of how they could improve upon ways to tackle issues such as air quality."

We introduce intellectual fads into the curriculum, or into public policy, at our own risk.

TRAINS DON'T WANDER ALL OVER THE MAP.

A Burma-Shave jingle continued, "Because nobody sits on the engineer's lap."

In Ann Arbor, though, an editorial asserts, "Cars should not crash into buildings."  There's nothing in the article about lap-sitting.

This year, the Ann Arbor area has seen a slew of cars crash into buildings, including a Subway, a pub, an optometrist’s office, a supermarket and even someone’s house, despite the fact that businesses, homeowners, pedestrians and society as a whole seem to prefer cars not collide with their buildings. Per one estimate, at least 100 cars crash into buildings every day, and research suggests the death and injury toll of vehicle-in-building crashes is in the thousands.

This is not a stand-alone phenomenon — it’s a symbol of our increasingly dangerous roadways that injure and kill drivers and pedestrians, whether there’s a building involved or not. Traffic fatality rates, despite declining last year, remain among the highest they’ve been in the past decade. In the first six months of 2023, 21,130 people died in motor vehicle crashes. Roads ought to be designed to protect human life first, not to misguidedly focus on rapidly pushing cars from one destination to the next through residential areas.

In most of the United States, roads are measured using a metric called “level of service.” Transportation departments grade roads from A through F based on the speed at which vehicles can pass through an area. Of the five Ann Arbor-area crashes referred to prior, four occurred on wide, fast-moving roads. The fifth was on a neighborhood street.

The article continues with instructive material on the way road design provides visual cues to drive faster than the speed limit.  Those cars into buildings?  Operator error.

One-fifth of car-building crashes are caused by “pedal error.” This occurs when a driver presses the accelerator instead of the brake pedal, resulting in a crash. Technological improvements in forward-collision mitigation can help reduce this share of car-building crashes, and speed limits can be lowered to reduce the severity of collisions. Humans, not cars, should be put first in the design of our transportation.

That might be so, and yet, operator error combined with a lack of situational awareness contributes to those broken buildings.    Consider one house in Chicago.

Things like that have been happening to the house at North Cicero Avenue and West Ainslie Street for decades.

The crashes have left the northeast corner of the house looking like a T. rex took a gigantic bite out of it. His wrought-iron fence is buckled, entire sections of it flattened. Splintered wood and chunks of concrete litter the sidewalk.

A neighbor who has lived in the same block for decades estimates that the house has been crashed into “at least a couple of hundred times” over the past 10 years.

It isn’t that [Robert] Christie, an auto mechanic, has enemies who’d purposely crash into his house. It’s that truck drivers seem not to be paying enough attention to the signs that warn of a low-clearance bridge at Cicero Avenue and Gunnison Street just south of his bungalow. When they get there and realize their trucks aren’t going to make it through the underpass, they start backing up — often into Christie’s house.

Even the truckers who take care not to back into a house create havoc getting out of there.

Even if the truckers backing up avoid hitting Christie’s house, they often take out the side mirrors of cars parked on Ainslie.

“There are cars down Ainslie that get destroyed,” said Eric Turunen, who has lived two houses away for 15 years and figures his vehicles have lost 10 wing mirrors in that time.

And traffic taming measures? We're dealing with Illinois drivers here, who might be more careless than their Michigan counterparts.

Christie and several neighbors have asked City Hall for help. Last year, the city’s Department of Transportation installed “bump outs” on Ainslie — raised rectangles of concrete that narrow the road at Cicero in hopes they will deter truck drivers from backing up on Christie’s street.

The agency also added and improved signs that warn truckers not to head south on Cicero if their trucks are taller than 13 feet, 2 inches, a spokeswoman said.

But none of that seems to have helped, according to neighbors. Truck drivers just back up straight over the bump outs and ignore the new signs, and cars run into each other now that the two-way street has been narrowed.

“The city does goofy things from time to time, and that was one of them,” one neighbor, who didn’t want his name published, said of the bump outs that narrowed the street, giving truckers less room to maneuver.

After cities have tried everything else, will they consider special movement permits for any truck larger than a medium pickup?

FREQUENCY AND CONNECTIVITY ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN SPEED.

John Phelan of the Center of the American Experiment takes a train ride, but finds the ride unimpressive.

Last week I took the train from the Twin Cities to Chicago for a work trip. I enjoyed it, and it set me wondering whether we ought to expand rail travel in the United States. Would this journey be a viable alternative to driving or flying for my family of four?

To answer that, I thought it would be interesting to compare journeys. Take three ways of traveling between the Twin Cities and Chicago – plane, train, and automobile – and compare the practicalities and costs of each.

It transpires that one of his Minnesota sparring partners, Laura Mitchell, was thinking about the same thing.  "A ‘progressive’ discovers that rail isn’t a viable option for the United States."  Why?  She wanted to take her family to Chicago and discovered all sorts of troubles.  Mr Phelan has some fun with her discomfiture.

That is the sound of Ms. Mitchell’s train of “public health and climate, racial & economic justice for all” smashing into the buffers of reality like the Silver Streak.

What she is painfully, publicly, and belatedly discovering, is that a train journey between one station and another is only part of the story. Unless you live right next to the station and are traveling to a destination right next to the other station, you have to consider the journey at either end; to the station and from the station to your ultimate destination.

He then invokes an earlier column dealing with the difficulties, in the States, of getting to the originating station.

You can, in fact, go pretty much directly from Buckingham Palace to Edinburgh Castle by train. You walk 10 minutes to Green Park tube station, then travel on the tube for six minutes to King’s Cross St. Pancras, where you board a train to Edinburgh Waverly. Once you arrive there, its a 10 minute walk up Market Street to the Castle. From Buckingham Palace door to Edinburgh Castle door you’ve travelled about 400 miles in a little over five hours and you’ve walked for just 20 minutes. I’ve made a very similar journey from London to Edinburgh many times.

Let us return to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when Nigel Gresley and K. F. Nystrom vied to run the world's fastest trains.  Yes, the current East Coast Main Line service is faster than the old Flying Scotsman, while the Empire Builder is slower than the Morning Hiawatha was, plus it's a crapshoot whether the Builder, particularly eastbound, will be close to time.  That "potential for delay" in Ms Mitchell's considerations is real.

THE TIGHTEST PRIORS DESERVE THE STRICTEST SCRUTINY.

In yesterday's bill of particulars against West Virginia University, I saved their greatest failure for last.

West Virginia, by attaching that loyalty oath to its appointment letters, has forfeited its claim to be a university, whether there is a doctoral program in mathematics or a chance to read War and Peace in the original Russian, or not.

Let me conclude by noting that the forfeiture of that claim is not a theoretical concern alone.

The warning signs of what we will contemplate today were there, if you knew where to look.  "The University of California system is committing intellectual suicide in the name of inclusion." To be specific, "Peer review isn't all it's cracked up to be.  If authors have to tweak their submissions so as to tick the boxes the politically reliable reviewers will insist on, it will only get worse."  That noted, researchers still have to do the work properly if they hope to get published.

IT'S A WEASEL WORD.

Los Angeles Times columnist Robin Abcarian offers the Trenchant Observation of the Day.  "The problematic use of ‘problematic’ to shut down people with whom we disagree."  She had a bad experience at a cocktail party.  "I’ve wondered how the word 'problematic,' so vague, had become such an effective insult and shorthand for someone’s (well, my) moral failure or insensitivity."  The short answer: because it's a cheap way of avoiding thought.  "Regular readers of Cold Spring Shops recall ''Problematic' is a favorite term of the Perpetually Aggrieved, who generally use it to mean 'I don't exactly agree with what you just said, but I don't want to do the work of rebutting it.'' Now comes Lionel Shriver, in Harper's, no less, saying effectively the same thing."

Even the brightest among you can benefit by a modicum of repetition.  Ms Abcarian's essay is helpful repetition, as she's calling out the people who use "problematic" a lot from the perspective of somebody inclined to agree with such people.

In a 2021 Atlantic essay, Oxford political theory professor Teresa M. Bejan offered a possible answer:

“Academics like me love to describe things as ‘problematic.’ But what do we mean? We’re not saying that the thing in question is unsolvable or even difficult. We’re saying — or implying — that it is objectionable in some way, that it rests uneasily with our prior moral or political commitments. ... It relies on a subtle sort of bullying in place of mutual justification. It excludes, rather than explains.”

Bingo.

I would suggest that the word “problematic” has evolved to its current charged usage because the phrase “politically incorrect,” once used ironically by smug leftists, was hijacked by smug conservatives to denote rigid left-wing ideological conformity. According to the Ngram Viewer, the use of “politically correct” and “politically incorrect” has fallen dramatically in the last several years after surging in the years between 1980 and 1997. (That kind of cancellation is pretty much what happened to the word “liberal,” when the late MAGA Republican Rush Limbaugh turned it into his favorite epithet.) Back in 2016, when former President Trump was first running, Slate published an essay about the trouble with “problematic” and its tendency to obscure what’s really being said.

“You don’t often hear people saying that Donald Trump’s latest rants about immigrants or women are problematic,” wrote Haley Swenson. “Instead, his words are called racist, sexist, and dangerous. But when it comes to conversations about culture and representation, we apparently feel the need to undercut, obscure, and distance ourselves from our own arguments.”

Several years before Trump began his political ascent, a high school student named Liat Kaplan started an anonymous Tumblr page called “Your Fave is Problematic,” a less direct way of highlighting the problem with “problematic.”

As Kaplan explained it years later in the New York Times, “The posts contained long lists of celebrities’ regrettable (racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ethnophobic, ableist and so on) statements and actions — the stuff that gets people canceled these days.”

With satisfaction, I’ve noticed at least the beginning of a backlash has been brewing against “problematic,” and its snotty little cousin “deeply problematic.”

If coastal cosmopolitans can't be snotty, can they ever win arguments?  On the other hand, the value of Rush Limbaugh in his way or Donald Trump in his way or Kurt Schlichter every day is in paying the snottiness back in kind.  Perhaps the coastal cosmopolitans can find a way out of the current grim strategy equilibrium by, oh, restoring bourgeois norms of discourse.

WORTH READING.

If Cafe Hayek isn't in your regular reading, I suggest you check it out.  Start with today's collection of links, some offered in short take form, some offering longer excerpts and a bit of commentary.

ENDURANCE.

The Cold Spring Shops opened 21 years ago today.  A few things have changed since then.

At our opening, that pizza package promotion had a few more weeks to run.  There has not been such a promotion since then, and there no longer is a Pizza Villa in Waterman.  The bag is still useful for picking up a carry-out pizza from the still-operating Pizza Villa in DeKalb, still taking carry-out or deliver orders at that number (you now have to dial 1-815 first) and still selling those beer nuggets with dipping sauce.