Posts about Bureaucracy

Public Spaces

HSEMA rule prevents K Street Feet in the Street

by David Alpert   •   June 24, 2010 1:25 pm

DDOT will not be holding a Feet in the Street walking and cycling event on K Street because DC's Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency won't allow a special event with any cross traffic.

Cities around the world, from Bogotá to Paris, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Baltimore, Miami, Portland, Chicago, Kansas City and Las Cruces, New Mexico, have held similar events, variously called Ciclovia, Summer Streets, Sunday Streets, Sunday Parkways, and more.

All involve closing a lengthy segment of a street to traffic, except at major intersections, for walkers, runners, rollerbladers, cyclists and more to enjoy the outdoors, get exercise, and have fun in a way that's often not possible in cities where most public space is dedicated to motor vehicles most of the time. Often "stations" along the way provide exercise classes, bicycle seminars, health information, and more.

Last year, DDOT tried one in Fort Dupont Park to great acclaim from surrounding neighborhoods, but the true spirit of the event involves closing a street through numerous neighborhoods as opposed to using a park drive. In April, DDOT decided to try hosting the event on K Street from 7th Street to Georgetown and the Capital Crescent Trail. 7th, 14th and 17th Streets would have remained open so that cars, trucks and buses could travel between the areas north and south of the route, and the route would have run under Washington Circle allowing traffic to cross there as well.

Unfortunately, they ran into a virtual concrete bollard in the form of DC's Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency (HSEMA). According to DDOT's Anna McLaughlin, HSEMA does not allow any areas open to traffic inside an area closed off for a special event, and DDOT did not want to create an enormous barrier across the entire city. MPD and FEMS, which participate in planning for special events through a special task force, were unwilling to budge. It's not clear if this is an official written policy or just general practice at the agency.

Parking

"Emergency no parking" permits now online

by David Alpert   •   February 25, 2010 8:45 am

DDOT is replacing the system of getting "emergency no parking" signs at police stations with a formal, online permit system.

The permit system lets people apply for permits, such as those to reserve curbside space for moving trucks or mobile storage units. Those performing construction can also get permits for construction areas or manhole access.

Formerly, there were two conflicting ways to receive permits. Officially, residents had to go to the permit center on North Capitol Street with a formal application. That process was time-consuming, complex, and carried many restrictions along with some fees. If you needed to reserve metered spaces instead of just residential spaces, you needed several days to get in touch with the right people at DDOT.

Instead, most people simply went to the local police station. They would issue signs that you could hand-write. These signs were convenient, but carried plenty of problems for parkers. It wasn't clear where they specifically applied, or sometimes over which dates, and have no contact information or even evidence they're real. In fact, some people were buying signs at the local hardware store.

Budget

Innovation resistance at Metro, part 3: Missing the forest for the trees

by David Alpert   •   September 30, 2009 1:53 pm

Unlike many other transit agencies, Metro has resisted encouraging third party applications that help riders, partly because they perceive technology from a top-down point of view, and from unrealistic expectations because Google is big and rich. But this obsession with control and getting revenue is causing Metro staff to lose sight of the bigger picture.

Greater Greater Father-In-Law told me a story about his days consulting for health care companies. One large nonprofit hospital with a budget around a billion dollars a year decided to make some forays into establishing a for-profit arm. They created a pharmacy where patients could buy medicines and supplies. This pharmacy did pretty well, and started turning a profit. Executives spent a very large percentage of their time reviewing the performance and exploring ways to improve it.

However, the pharmacy only netted about $60,000 a year. That was less than the cost of one employee. Yet this project was eating up much more of the executives' time than monitoring the operations of the actual hospital. If they could have found a way to serve the same patients with even one fewer staff member, they would have netted as much money for the hospital as the entire pharmacy project. That doesn't mean that it was a bad project, but context is more important.

There's nothing wrong with Metro looking into the possibility of getting some money. But they want to spend $500,000 to investigate this. And we have some strong evidence that $0 is the most they'll get. Even if that's not true, there's no way it's anywhere near $500,000. If Google had offered, say, $50,000 a year for 10 years, would Metro have jumped with joy? But they could make that much just by not spending $500,000 in the first place.

Government

Innovation resistance at Metro, part 1: The value of "bottom-up"

by David Alpert   •   September 29, 2009 12:58 pm

Yesterday, you saw the exchanges between Metro Directors Chris Zimmerman of Arlington and Gordon Linton of Maryland on open APIs and Google Transit. Linton wants to lock down all licensing issues before allowing new applications that use the bus position data (as NextBus does) or schedule data (like Google Transit), while Zimmerman advocated for "seeding" innovation and worrying about revenue later.

To recap, there are two issues here. First, should Metro release its data generally to developers? They've released schedule data but under an unnecessarily restrictive license, and haven't released the bus position data at all. Second, should Metro try harder to work out a deal with Google to include Washington area transit directions in Google Maps, as every other large U.S. transit agency has done?

The Zimmerman-Linton exchange very clearly illustrates the dichotomy between the "open-source" philosophy and one of centralized control, or a "bottom-up" verus "top-down" attitude toward innovation. Writer and computer scientist Tim Lee discusses this issue frequently on his blog, Bottom-up. He explains, "The last couple of decades have brought us the dominance of the open Internet, the increasing success of free software," largely in Silicon Valley, "a place with extremely low barriers to entry, a culture of liberal information sharing, and a respect for the power of individual entrepreneurs." Because anyone can just make a Web site, write software for Windows, or sell a neat electronic gizmo (unless you want to connect it to a mobile phone network), we've had enormous innovation in these areas. It's precisely the absence of a gatekeeper who approves everything ahead of time that has enabled innovation to flourish.

Bottom-up thinking upset the established order when it hit the software industry in the form of open source software, and it's even more revolutionary in an agency like Metro, which tends to approach issues from a top-down point of view. Need some new railcars? Bid out a contract. Want to create an online system to track bus locations? Bid out a contract. For railcar procurement, there's nothing wrong with this strategy. But for consumer information technology, where you don't need only one type of railcar, this approach fails to stimulate innovation.

Public Spaces

DDOT being narrow-minded, overcautious on Park(ing) Day

by David Alpert   •   September 14, 2009 12:43 pm

People and cars operate every day in relatively close proximity. People walk on sidewalks right next to moving traffic on streets without parking. People walk along crosswalks while cars wait to turn, and cars enter and exit parking garages or alleys across the sidewalk. Sometimes this proximity results in injuries or deaths, but we don't refuse to let pedestrians go in crosswalks. And as designers like Hans Monderman discovered, often the less governments try to enforce separation, the safer streets actually are.

But if DCRA DDOT were issuing permits for streets today, they'd never allow any of this. They'd require 22 foot gaps between people and cars, concrete jersey barriers along every block, and huge planters on every corner. Those resemble some of the restrictions they're trying to palce on the organizers of Park(ing) Day. Instead of saying, "great idea," DCRA DDOT officials keep telling Justin Young, Brandon Schmittling, and Chris Loos that it sounds awfully unsafe for people to sit on benches in a parking space, even buffered by cars on each side. And they're demanding ridiculous designs, including a 22-foot "buffer zone" on either end with no parked cars, concrete barriers, planters with flags, and more.

There's no need for these restrictions. Cars in a travel lane don't suddenly swerve to the right or left; if they did, they'd be jumping the curbs on many streets all the time. And, in fact, these buffer zones may make the impromptu parks less safe; with a large car on either side, if a car did veer out of its lane, it would probably hit the car in front.

The original Park(ing) Day in San Francisco, and many of its followers, didn't apply for permits at all. They just fed the meter, unrolled some turf, and put a bench down. In some cities, the laws don't specify what you can do with a parking space if you pay for it. Unfortunately, in DC, it says the spaces have to be for vehicles, unless you get a permit. That's why the organizers have asked for a permit. Instead of getting help from the government, DCRA DDOT officials responded by throwing up every roadblock — literally — that they could think of.

According to Young, they're meeting again this afternoon with DCRA DDOT to try to persuade them to allow a more sensible design, though one that still contains extra barriers for added safety:

If DCRA DDOT doesn't allow this, residents should consider just going ahead and setting up parks in spaces anyway. People take up public space without permits all the time. Sometimes, when regulators are just being far too narrow-minded, the only option is to push the envelope anyway.

Update: The officials responsible for the policy decisions are from DDOT, not DCRA. The organizers originally approached DDOT, who sent them to the DCRA permit center, which includes public space permits. However, DCRA only acts as a conduit to DDOT public space officials who actually make the policy.