Failure to plan ahead on highway redesign.

St. Louis is still celebrating the December re-opening of its big highway construction project. "Highway 40" (now known as Federal Highway 64) was retooled with more than $500M in taxpayer money, much of it federal money. This highway runs along the heavily traveled "central corridor" of St. Louis, and it would have been a great place to leave room for a new light rail line (St. Louis has such a system that desperately lacks a line running down this central corridor). Or at least they could have thought of carving out a narrow biking route along the highway. None of these things were done, however. In St. Louis, many of us still think of private motor vehicles as our sole means of transportation. Highway 40 reopening - Photo by Erich Vieth Ironic, then, that officials opened the new highway to only pedestrians and bikes the Sunday before it opened the newly rehabbed highway to cars and trucks. I heard several people peddling on the highway exclaim that they could bicycle swiftly, in about 25 minutes, from the middle of St. Louis City all the way to Clayton on the new highway. Gad - it really didn't take that much longer than driving a car! But why wasn't accommodation made for light rail or even for a bicycling path? An official explanation showed up (at all places) at the St. Louis Science Center (it's no longer there). As you'll see, there is nothing scientific about this propaganda. On a big board offering the "FAQs" of the reconstruction, one could read the following "explanation." explanation I'll translate: We're short-sighted people. Notice how the "explanation" tries to lull you to sleep for the first few sentences before evading the question entirely? Here's another translation: "We're stupid." Here's another: "We lack a thoughtful set of priorities." Or this: "We'd rather give trillions of dollars to banks than fight for something sensible here at home."

Continue ReadingFailure to plan ahead on highway redesign.

Privacy inverted

I think we've almost reached the end of an extraordinary ten years or so. Immense amounts of information that should have been public has been kept private. Consider, for instance, eight years where the Bush administration classifying almost anything controversial to be "secret." More recently, we've seen the supposedly transparent health care debate become shaped by opaque dealings because, for instance, Big Pharma and the White House. We continue to see the Federal Reserve successfully prevent tax-payers from learning the inner-workings of an extremely power organization, the actions of which affect us all. But there's more to this decade than secret things that should be public. It's public things that should be secret, and I think this second phenomenon is well-illustrated by the following video: What should, for all intents, be a private moment, the marriage proposal by a pleasant-seeming fellow to his weather channel forecaster girlfriend, has been turned into a public spectacle. I'm sure that no one meant any harm, but as I watched this, it was as clear as can be that I didn't belong there. This should have been a private moment between the two lovebirds, but the decision to broadcast what appeared to be a surprise proposal (from her standpoint) just couldn't be resisted. The draw of the limelight was just too alluring. And proposing in public warped the situation in several major ways. She seemed to be willing, but was she really? Did she really want to make her lifetime commitment, and the tremble of her voice, a spectacle for numerous people who had actually tuned in only for the weather? And consider what this sort of thing does to the viewers. Watching this exchange turned me into a voyeur. Did you feel that way too? Here's more information on this TV proposal. Nor is this private-things-made-public situation unusual. Anyone turning on TV these days (TV is foisted upon us in waiting rooms, airports, stores, and even the courthouse where I served as a juror two weeks ago) sees numerous what-should-be private moments, including families airing out their dirty laundry on TV. We also see it on numerous blogs--I've read one where the woman advised the world that her husband is a drunken bum and that she's going to leave him--she wrote this to total strangers before telling him. You can also get a regular dose of what-should-be-private information just by browsing Facebook or, better yet, MySpace. And the mainstream media simply just can't get enough of what should be private family matters regarding politicians, actors, musicians and, of course, athletes. So there you have it. We are simultaneously seeing a continuing explosion of public private things and private public things. This just can't be healthy.

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Attenuating friendships

At the Chronicles of Higher Education, William Deresiewicz writes about our long-evolving idea of friendship, and it's not a good thing. The more friends we claim to have, the more we are diluting the idea of friendship. Deresiewicz makes many worthy observations along the way, including the suggestion that the classical idea of a committed friendship conflicts with the expanding notions of freedom and equality. When I commit in real-life ways to particular friends, I seem to be acting in an exclusionary way toward all of those people who didn't make the cut. In modern times (says Deresiewicz), deep and committed friendships make some of us uneasy. "At best, intense friendships are something we're expected to grow out of." The comments to the article divided rather evenly into those that found the article poetic and inspiring versus those that found the author to be verbose and "howling at the moon." Reading this piece, I repeatedly thought of Robin Dunbar's research regarding friendship. We are not physiologically capable of having more than 150 good friends at one time. But networking tools certainly seem to expand our contacts (if not our friendships) well beyond 150. How should we really describe those people to whom we are linked up, but not in a deep way or a flesh and blood way? Reading this article, I was also reminded of several friendships that I would absolutely positively claim to be deep meaning friendships, that were started and maintained through the Internet. None of these are mere Facebook "friends"; they each involved substantial amounts of private email and, eventually, some face-to-face discussions. I mention this to fend off any suggestion that "real" friendships should be limited to those relationships maintains primarily through flesh and blood encounters. Here's a bit more from Deresiewicz' thought-provoking article:

If we have 768 "friends," in what sense do we have any? Facebook isn't the whole of contemporary friendship, but it sure looks a lot like its future. Yet Facebook—and MySpace, and Twitter, and whatever we're stampeding for next—are just the latest stages of a long attenuation. They've accelerated the fragmentation of consciousness, but they didn't initiate it. They have reified the idea of universal friendship, but they didn't invent it. In retrospect, it seems inevitable that once we decided to become friends with everyone, we would forget how to be friends with anyone. We may pride ourselves today on our aptitude for friendship—friends, after all, are the only people we have left—but it's not clear that we still even know what it means.

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Lack of broadband competition continues

Free Press recently published a report on the state of national broadband indicating that a central failure of our communications policy is the lack of broadband competition.

For nearly a decade, the debate over broadband competition in Washington has been an increasingly tortured game of pretending we have broadband competition in America when almost any consumer can see that we clearly do not. We used to have competition: In the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Congress implemented a system that required telecommunications network owners to share their infrastructure with competitive providers. But in the years that followed, the powerful incumbent monopolists used the courts and the FCC to kill this regulatory system. As the rest of the world was successfully adopting this competitive model we invented, our leaders were abandoning it. Instead, they bet that competition between cable and telephone networks using different technologies would work out just as well. It didn’t.

Now the world’s leading broadband nations overseas are enjoying healthy broadband competition that has triggered higher speeds, lower prices, and wider deployment. In the United States, we’re 10 years behind, and we’re stuck with a market structure that is very difficult to steer back to where we were before we went off course. The facts on the ground are stark. Here in the United States, the duopoly phone and cable incumbents control 95 percent of the entire wired and wireless high-speed Internet access market. Prices are on the rise, and the incumbents have executed a deliberate strategy to slow innovation and deployment, hoping to squeeze every last dime out of yesterday’s technologies.

What the FCC should do: First and foremost, the FCC should make a clean break with the policies of the past eight years and declare that our broadband competition policy is a failure.

Continue ReadingLack of broadband competition continues