Despite my roles
of civic participant, consultant, and blogger, I don’t spend a lot of time
chatting with public officials. However,
occasional opportunities come my way. I
had a couple of recent conversations that are worth sharing.
One conversation
was explicitly off-record. The same
restriction wasn’t placed on the other conversation, but I understood an implicit
expectation that I wouldn’t share the information with too much
specificity. Luckily, I needn’t offer names
or quote exact words to highlight the key observation.
In the first
conversation, a public official expressed frustration that some of his
colleagues aren’t more willing to accept the environmental tradeoffs that come
with more dense, urban-type development.
In the second
conversation, a different public official acknowledged that he believed in
induced traffic (the theory that traffic will expand to fill new roads, making
traffic relief an impossible goal) and that the only fair and reasonable
response to induced traffic was to offer development incentives for walkable
settings. The public official also cautioned
that the general public would neither accept the first point nor acquiesce to
the logic of the second.
Both
positions, of course, are straight from the urbanist playbook and were welcome
to my ears.
Knowing only
what I’ve written above, one might assume that the two public officials are
closely aligned in their political positions.
But that assumption would be wrong.
When there is a split vote, the two are often on opposing sides. And there is a rumor of antipathy between the
two. They’re not political allies.
And that’s
the point that opened my eyes. Public
officials from across the political spectrum are coming around to urbanism. The game is far from won, but movement toward
the goal line is a good sign.
There isn’t
always a good feedback loop for bloggers.
I can see readership tallies, but I don’t know to what extent readers
are agreeing with what I’ve written. It’s
exciting to have a couple of public officials indicate that they’re listening
to the arguments and coming around to an urbanist way of thinking.
I’m not
claiming that I’m personally responsible for their evolving attitudes. There are many who write about urbanism with
more clarity and élan. I’m just happy to be on the team that is
gradually gaining ground.
Before closing,
I should comment on what the second public official said about the public not
being ready to accept urbanism realities.
When I repeated the words to my wife, she was distressed, asking “So nothing
is going to change?”
I appreciate
her concern, but I also understand the position of the public official. Grasping an emerging truth is difficult for
public officials. They can publicly
espouse their new beliefs and risk not being re-elected, relegating their new
convictions to the sidelines, or they can keep their comments off-record and work
for small incremental changes in their public actions. I understand the logic of the latter and
intellectually concur with it, but it’s an approach I’d struggle to
follow. (It’s a good thing that I’m not
a public official.)
The
underlying problem is that we elect public officials who we expect to act in
lockstep with our under-informed but firmly held opinions. I’ve argued that we should elect public
officials whose thought processes we respect and that we should value their decisions
when they use the depth of information available to them to move in new and
unexpected directions. But my opinion on
this point is underrepresented within the electorate.
Which isn’t
to say that I don’t support democracy. It
has its shortcomings, most of which are the result of our own shortcomings, but
it’s still the best option we have. As
Winston Churchill said, “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of
government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” (Just to make sure that everyone understood
his perspective, Churchill also said “The best argument against democracy is a
five-minute conversation with the average voter.”)
And so we
muddle along in our democracy, moving slowly toward urbanism. And being heartened when public officials
with disparate belief systems find common ground in urbanist logic.
As always, your questions or comments will be
appreciated. Please comment below or
email me. And thanks for reading. - Dave
Alden (davealden53@comcast.net
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