The Dangers of Elite Projection (2017)

https://humantransit.org/2017/07/the-dangers-of-elite-projection.html

by williamsmj • 8 years ago

52 63 8 years ago

tivert• 8 years ago

I'm getting a:

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Here's an archive link that works:

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devwastaken• 8 years ago

humantransit.org Resource limit reached

Now this is real life immersion.

Cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0sKpw3...

martythemaniak4• 8 years ago

The article's idea of a "elite" is a person who relies on a car to get around. I find it unintentionally funny, as people who rely on transit in the US are either big city urban elites, or the poor stuck in crappy burbs with shitty mobility. Thus, "more transit" is itself the elite projection, as it supposes that what's good for the urban elite, must be good for everyone else.

It would help if you thought of transit as a continuum:

- the private single-occupancy car

- shared car

- shared mini bus

- bus

- tram (ie, n linked busses)

- subway (ie n linked trams, underground)

This is hard to see today, but autonomous cars will essentially bring this about. Everybody will be riding in autonomous vehicles. If you're well-off, you'll pay for more privacy and space and time (vehicle comes to you, goes to your destination), if you're not so well off, you'll share the vehicle with other people and will have to spend more time as the vehicles makes more stops (and each stop will be further from your desired source/destination). Busses as we know them today will become obsolete, as they are functionally equivalent to a heterogenous mix of autonomous vehicles driving in the same direction. Trams will become obsolete, as they are functionally equivalent to the heterogeneous-autonomous-vehicle-chain paying a premium to use a dedicated lane.

Basically, everything should be a battery skateboard riding on asphalt by way of rubber. The more you pay, the more privacy you have, the more the mobile battery goes towards your personal destinations.

miker64• 8 years ago

The article uses transit as an example, as that is the area of expertise of the author. It is tangential at best to the idea of 'elite projection,' and yet it is far easier to make arguments about transit than to consider whether we are looking at problems from an 'elitist' POV.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

hammock3• 8 years ago

I don't understand why you are suggesting that autonomous cars will make buses and trams obsolete. They are the closest to autonomous vehicles out of everything on your list (they run around on meta-organized and efficient routes, you don't drive them yourself, etc).

martythemaniak4• 8 years ago

They are, which is why I'm suggesting that instead of thinking of "transit vs private cars" everything will essentially melt together. IE, if you take a bus with 30 riders today and replace it with 5 AV-minivans each with 6 occupants driving behind each other, is it any different? What if instead of the city, I own one of these minivans? What if I pay 6 fares and have the minivan take my family to somewhere? What if 6 passengers split a minivan, but pay extra to use a dedicated lane?

nostrademons5• 8 years ago

They have the huge disadvantage of not always taking you to your exact destination and not doing so on your schedule. Neither is really necessary in the world of computerized autonomous transport and small electric motors, since computerized transport could easily get you from your destination to a moving transporter without it having to slow down.

cafard2• 8 years ago

> as people who rely on transit in the US are either big city urban elites, or the poor stuck in crappy burbs with shitty mobility.

Clearly we don't ride the same bus. A lot of the urban elites on my bus route are heading down to service jobs in hotels, restaurants, and perhaps day-care centers.

rtkwe2• 8 years ago

There are a lot of places where trains (above or below ground) and trams will still make sense. It's going to be nearly impossible to automate past the fundamental limits of street space in cities like New York for automated cars to surpass the sheer volume of people serviced by the subway.

martythemaniak4• 8 years ago

Well, you always have to take in account sunk costs. Places like NY already have tunnels and trans and tracks, so it will likely never make economic sense to replace those with something new.

But think about what a tram is - typically, several linked cars attached to a wire running on tracks. Why are they linked? Because you need a driver to keep costs low, otherwise you'd unlink those cars and have more frequent service. Why are they attached to a wire? Because batteries are expensive. Why are they on a track? A bit cheaper, but in many places (Lyon, Montreal) they are not.

What is changing is the price of battery and soon, the price of driver. Trams are built on assumptions that are changing, so would they not as well?

NoGravitas• 8 years ago

Autonomous vehicles don't solve the problem of there not actually being enough space on the road (a bus takes up less space than a fleet of cars with the same number of passengers). See another article by the same author: https://humantransit.org/2016/07/elon-musk-doesnt-understand...

petermcneeley2• 8 years ago

"Basically, everything should be a battery skateboard riding on asphalt by way of rubber." What a wildly narrow view on transportation.

Latency and efficiency matter. Take two extremes. Air vs rail. Air (chopper) is wildly inefficient (maintenance and energy). Rail has twice the efficiency of a hybrid car.

If you make everything a "car" you end up with a world where the ambulance and the big rig are both stuck in rush hour traffic.

skybrian2• 8 years ago

Dedicated lanes help for some things (such as buses) for considerably cheaper than rail.

cafard2• 8 years ago

> as people who rely on transit in the US are either big city urban elites, or the poor stuck in crappy burbs with shitty mobility.

Clearly we don't ride the same bus. A lot of the urban elites on my bus route are heading downtown to service jobs in hotels, restaurants, and perhaps day-care centers.

sudosteph2• 8 years ago

More likely you two just don't live in the same city.

FWIW, my home city's bus service (Charlotte NC) is exactly like the commenter above describes. There is a city-wide bus service that runs about every hour or half-hour if you're lucky, but it's terrible (unreliable, slow, poorly maintained) and mostly used by people too poor to own a car or those who can't drive due to disability or DUI.

Then there's the nice "commuter" bus for a buck more, which only runs during peak commute times, only picks up from park-and-rides in the suburbs, and is mostly occupied by people who work nice office jobs in the big high-rises downtown.

The middle-of-the road workers all pretty much have to drive everywhere.

didibus4• 8 years ago

I find it unintentionally funny, as people who rely on transit in the US are either big city urban elites, or the poor stuck in crappy burbs with shitty mobility

So everyone not living in a big city center in the US are now considered the poor. And everyone living in a big city center with a car is now the Elite?

nostrademons5• 8 years ago

I'd love to see autonomous "pods" with docking behavior. You'd take one of the appropriate size, i.e. there could be scooter-sized pods for the solo commuter, cart-sized pods for when you've got luggage or groceries, family pods, sleeper pods for long trips. They would drive autonomously for the last mile (perhaps even being able to dock into elevators and take you directly to your destination), but could also merge onto arterials and dock with larger pod-carriers, the modern equivalent of buses. Thus, you'd maintain your privacy and last-mile flexibility, but still get the economies of scale of better aerodynamics and powerful engines for longer trips. You could even dock onto airplanes, i.e. instead of needing to drive an hour to the airport and wait 2 hours at the gate, your pods arrives at your apartment door an hour beforehand, whizzes you through town, docks into a bus for the trip to the airport, and rolls you onto the tarmac and into the plane. No need to manage baggage (it all comes with you), the pod scans you for security during the commute, and you maintain your privacy on the plane.

niftich• 8 years ago

My reading was different, in that the article uses "elite" for the kinds of decision-makers in positions of power whose exceptional attainment and status makes them some of the least likely to be consumers of the transit anyway.

I think both you and the author would agree that in the absence of a reliable, versatile mass transit network, many people with access to cars will use cars instead. But you and the author appear to disagree on the viability and transformative power of self-driving cars and whether they serve as a meaningful instrument of mobility for all with the kind and amount of transport infrastructure available to us now.

I believe that the form factor of a 2-to-7 person car common today isn't sufficiently dense to provide appropriate amounts of throughput to high traffic routes to completely replace something like a subway, commuter rail, or the like. Although the experience of the (figurative) first and last mile would be superior, the sheer number of such vehicles would clog the arterial roads and freeways where the point-to-point routing converges, the same way this happens with cars today.

nostrademons5• 8 years ago

But the form factor of the 2-to-7 person car changes significantly with the shift to autonomous electric vehicles.

With computer control, you eliminate the gap needed between cars - just hook it directly to the car in front, let them draft for better aerodynamics, and detach when you need to make a turn, saving 70-100 feet of road space. With electric motors, you eliminate the hood, engine, and transmission, saving another 5 feet or so - independent electric motors can go directly onto the wheels. In an urban environment, electrify the streets (as with trolleys) and eliminate the battery pack - that's another 4 feet and 1200 pounds or so. Once everything moves to car services and people don't own their own cars, you can eliminate the trunk, saving another 4-5 feet - in the majority of trips you aren't carrying anything big, and you can hail a different model pod for those road trips or grocery runs where you need the cargo space (or just summon the groceries and forget about driving it yourself). For trips without the kids, eliminate the other seats as well - you can just summon a different vehicle when you need to take a family trip.

Pretty soon the vehicle is just a thin shell around its occupant, taking up no more room than the personal space they would've taken up on a bus.

acchow• 8 years ago

as people who rely on transit in the US are either big city urban elites, or the poor stuck in crappy burbs with shitty mobility

What city are you talking about?

maxxxxx• 8 years ago

Los Angeles?

oftenwrong2• 8 years ago

The article's idea of a "elite" is a person who relies on a car to get around. I find it unintentionally funny, as people who rely on transit in the US are either big city urban elites, or the poor stuck in crappy burbs with shitty mobility.

Well, if we look at an example, like the NYC metro area, we see that car-owners have a higher annual income on average than non-car-owners, regardless of whether they live in Manhattan, the outer boroughs, or the suburbs:

http://www.tstc.org/reports/cpfactsheets.php

joe_the_user2• 8 years ago

I find it unintentionally funny, as people who rely on transit in the US are either big city urban elites, or the poor stuck in crappy burbs with shitty mobility. Thus, "more transit" is itself the elite projection, as it supposes that what's good for the urban elite, must be good for everyone else.

This is kind of bizarre reasoning. Suppose there's mass starvation in a nation and I were to say "I find it unintentionally funny to call for more food, as people who are able to eat regularly are the urban elites. Thus, 'more food' is itself the elite projection, as it supposes that what's good for the urban elite, must be good for everyone else."

Sure, suburban transit is terrible but that's argument for "transit only matters to people who already have."

Busses as we know them today will become obsolete, as they are functionally equivalent to a heterogenous mix of autonomous vehicles driving in the same direction.

"My imaginary solution is obviously better than something that's been tried and with proper planning and funding work now".

williamsmj2• 8 years ago

"Busses as we know them today will become obsolete, as they are functionally equivalent to a heterogenous mix of autonomous vehicles driving in the same direction."

This is not an opinion any experts on mass transit share (including those who are bullish on autonomous vehicles).

For an outline of just one of the arguments why this is a naive view (at best!), please read the author's "The Bus Is Still The Best" (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/bus-b...) and an interview with him in the Financial Times "A conversation about how public transport really works" (https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/01/26/2198114/a-conversatio..., free FT account required, but not paywalled).

Some relevant quotes from those articles:

“How many people’s doors can a driver get to in an hour, including the minute or two that the customer spends grabbing their things and boarding? The intuitively obvious answer is the right one: not very many. An Eno Foundation report promoting microtransit could not cite a case study doing better than four boardings an hour of service. John Urgo, the planner of demand-responsive service for AC Transit in Oakland, California, has said that seven boardings an hour is “the best we hope to achieve.” Few fixed-route buses perform that poorly. Across sprawling Silicon Valley, for example, fixed-route buses carried 12 to 45 people an hour in 2015. In a dense city such as Philadelphia, the number can exceed 80”

“No, of course, the driverless car people will say, no, cars will fit closer together and they’ll be smaller and so we’ll fit more of them over the bridge but that’s a linear solution to an exponential problem. The other dimension of this problem that you must keep in mind is the problem of what we, in the business, call induced demand. And induced demand is the very simply idea that when you make something easier, people are more likely to do it and this is why, for example, when you widen a motorway, the traffic gets worse or it fills up to the same level of congestion that you had before. It’s because when you actually create new capacity, people use the capacity and you end up back in the same point.”

Fnoord• 8 years ago

I find it unintentionally funny, as people who rely on transit in the US are either big city urban elites, or the poor stuck in crappy burbs with shitty mobility.

In cities such as Amsterdam, Utrecht, Aachen, and various others it is very difficult or expensive to park your car. Using your car in such cities is therefore elitist, but because most people just use bicycle and public transport it is of high quality (due to high demand, becoming a circular reasoning).

xte5• 8 years ago

Hum.

Few sparse thoughts: élites I may know have mostly a marginal interest in public transportation witch is making money through it. If it's not profitable is of no interest.

At least European élites, with the notable but marginal exception of very few politics or other VIPs move on private transport not public one.

Interest in public transport have political and military interest for both reduce/control ability of individual to move and possible vulnerabilities in case of war scenarios but again "efficient public transportation for the masses" is not really in any bullshit-free agenda's. The sole political/military push toward "personal car free" society, concentrated in megacities serve the purpose to easier control people:

- control a city require few manpower than a vast area, more in detail to control a city you need only a fraction of human inside on your side, to control a vast area you need more human on your side than the "target"/"enemy";

- control a city is easier simply because a city consume food, energy, water etc but do not produce most of it nor it can so cutting supply means cutting city off;

- a city is a nice and easy target: you can shoot and being sure to create significant damage;

- public transportation is nice: lock it (it's easier than lock many individual's vehicles, especially if they are not connected so not easy to disable en masse from remote) and anyone will be on foot.

I do not really see other interest. Maybe there are economical interest from the enterprises that can gain big money on creation and maintenance of public transport network...

Bizarro• 8 years ago

Yes, control is always a nice side-effect for the statists when they busy-body around looking for a crisis to fix and solve by limiting something or another that those evil humans (not enlightened like himself) are doing.

TulliusCicero6• 8 years ago

The sole political/military push toward "personal car free" society, concentrated in megacities serve the purpose to easier control people:

People being concentrated in larger cities is mostly an outcome that comes from the free market. Higher population levels helps bring about higher levels of economic productivity, and people go where there are jobs.

Having decent public transit -- and walk and bike options, for that matter -- in urban areas is just good policy. No conspiracies necessary, it's just good to have more options, especially more geometrically efficient ones when space is at a premium.

Trying to ignore transit just gets you to LA's position, where they built mountains of freeways and got the worst traffic in the country in return, with poor options to bypass that traffic for most of the local population.

xte5• 8 years ago

Without conspiracy can you tell the name of a sustainable and evolvable magacity? I found exactly NO one, not only of existing one's but also hypothetical in some architect's published ideas.

The first and most important reason is space: a city can't evolve because the lack of space. While it might be possible in theory grow the city and after have people moving from the old part to a new one to demolish and rebuild the new one no city I know of have ever being able to do so in practice. I do not know big not-crowded not polluted cities. I do not know any "safe" city in terms of various kind of possible events from floods to earthquake to terrorist attack to military attacks...

I do not want to say that's there are conspiracy-like factors to push towards megacities but I only see a big prevalence of negative things than positive, so no reason to push nor want to be in even small cities...

helen___keller2• 8 years ago

Reminds me of the constant inclusion of stock market values in political discourse. Stock market up in 2017? Trump takes credit. Stock market correction in December 2018? Everyone blame Trump for your investments taking a hit.

Thing is, there's a whole lot of people out there with no money in the stock market at all (or only in a 401k, not in an account that can be liquid in the short term). It seems fair that the fixation with the stock market is another example of elite projection.

Sure, the market matters and market trends are correlated with more concrete figures like employment rates and wage growth, but it's just that, a correlation.

esotericn2• 8 years ago

Average wage growth and employment rates across a country are irrelevant for, well, almost anyone that's not specifically studying them.

Even on a more local level - the median income in London, say, is not interesting to a shop worker, and neither is it to a lawyer. It's just another Statistic(tm).

I don't know of anyone else (in real life) who even knows what the median income is, and about the only thing I've ever used median incomes for is to determine that the median person in my city is a serf (you'd require about double that to buy a small apartment).

By contrast, the stock market is at least interesting to anyone who has any savings (because market return is your baseline expectation for an investment). It should also be interesting to those who aspire to have savings (which, at least rationally, should be most people).

That latter point specifically is important because most people believe in, or at least desire, upward mobility. I (a person below the retirement age) expect that in ten years' time I'll have more than I do now. It would be odd for me to expect otherwise; that would imply that I should just sack off working and enjoy myself whilst I can.

I agree that linking it with things like presidencies is silly, though.

helen___keller2• 8 years ago

Average wage growth and employment rates across a country are irrelevant for, well, almost anyone that's not specifically studying them.

True, it doesn't directly address any single person's wallet but it paints a picture that actually includes every single person with an income. I don't know, maybe there's a better metric, but specifically the point I'm trying to make is this:

By contrast, the stock market is at least interesting to anyone who has any savings (because market return is your baseline expectation for an investment).

This is exactly the "elite projection" the article is talking about. For most people, "savings" refers to a checking account or savings account that can be withdrawn from on a rainy day. These will always have a negligible return rate. I believe that around 13 percent of families own stocks directly, less than that for other major types of non-retirement investments, and 53 percent a retirement account ( see https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/scf17.pdf table 3 on page 18 ).

I mean, the stock market IS interesting in it's own right, and I can see why the news reports on a big correction and what not. But it's interesting in the same way that currency conversion rates can be interesting - because it holds some kind of macroeconomic significance. Not because a large percentage of Americans regularly move a large amount of cash between countries.

clairity2• 8 years ago

this elite projection describes the common phenomenon of outsiders (and even local elites) disparaging LA for having no/crappy public transportation, which is odd to me as an multimodal angeleno who gave up my car years ago.

this admission was refreshing and identifiable:

"And since I’m one of these elites — not at all in wealth but certainly in education and other kinds of good fortune — it’s sometimes my work as well."

but this is probably of most interest here, with all the talk of autonomous vehicles:

"Now, the same mistake powers the endless vague promises of tech disruption in transit, especially the mathematically absurd notion that transit that comes to your door when you call it will scale to the entire population of a dense city."

basically he says we don't have enough (road) space for every person to be taken directly from point to point in a vehicle. currently this is (partially) solved by having people walk the last mile.

let's have electric scooters/bikes at every train and bus stop--they can solve the point-to-point first/last mile problem while being relatively dense. not everyone will use them, but with critical mass, it will reduce overall congestion.

TulliusCicero6• 8 years ago

this elite projection describes the common phenomenon of outsiders (and even local elites) disparaging LA for having no/crappy public transportation, which is odd to me as an multimodal angeleno who gave up my car years ago.

Los Angeles has a transit mode share of only 5%, which is extremely low for a principal city with a metro population of 13 million. This is a good indicator that its public transportation is indeed very weak.

To be sure, though, they've been steadily improving it.

clairity2• 8 years ago

interesting, how is that transit share calculated? ridership / regional population?

i’m certainly not trying to say LA is a beacon of transit, but it’s not all cars here. it’s quite possible to get around without driving.

The Dangers of Elite Projection (2017)

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