Posts about Rich Parsons

Parsons was a co-author of the transportation priority study I criticized and has started a new organization to lobby on transportation. He and Bob Chase touted the study on TBD last week, so Bruce DePuyt had Stewart and me on to discuss the issue further.

Which arguments did you find most persuasive, on either side of the issue?

Also, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton appeared in the second half of the hour to discuss the recent Walmart ruling, Congressional budget riders that affect DC, and rallies at the White House.

If someone has been building these elements of infrastructure for 30 years, we could call them an "expert" on building that stuff. But should they alone decide what kind of towns we should build?

People are overwhelmingly saying, wait a minute, this isn't what we want. Housing prices in walkable areas like Logan Circle, Ballston, or Silver Spring are high and still rising because a lot of people want to live there but there isn't enough supply. We have lots of single-family, detached, suburban homes but not enough apartments and townhouses a short walk from shops, parks, and transit.

People are sending clear signals through their housing choices that they want walkable urbanism. Yet most (but not all) professionals working in the field are locked in to the ways they've been trained and the way they do things. That's where we get the crazy traffic engineer adherence to "standards" even when they make little sense, as this Strong Towns video so effectively parodied.

There's an important role for experts in identifying specific steps to implement a policy. Parochial political concerns become dangerous when making small-scale choices that can enrich indviduals, where the danger of corruption becomes strong. But when it comes to deciding the big picture, overarching directions, we need officials who listen to residents, not just make decisions based on how they've always done things.

The Washingtonian analogues of those experts are the ones Bob Chase and Rich Parsons consulted on their study that aimed to tell leaders what the regional transportation priorities should be (and coincidentally mirrored those priorities they were already pushing for). I spoke with Chase and Parsons last week, and they were adamant that they were just trying to find out the views of experts, devoid of politics.

They said they wanted "a pretty balanced, professional objective study about what works and what's not working well," to "take the local jurisdiction and state perspective out of it." In selecting their anonymous experts, they said they were "looking for people who take the politics out of it, and "intentionally selected people very senior, with 20 years of experience."

That doesn't change the fact that the questions guided people toward megaprojects, and that there's plenty of evidence the list had an exurban bias. Besides having a small number of people from DC, Chase and Parsons refused to tell me which counties the "experts" lived in.

But even had their sample been broader, there's a problem with saying that senior engineers should set transportation priorities. I'd definitely prefer an engineer with 20 years of experience to design a new road or transit line over someone who lacks a professional degree. I'd also prefer to have them tell me how much it will cost and what hydrological problems might arise.

I'd even welcome their input on where to put a line, but we shouldn't be setting priorities just on that basis. A transportation engineer is not responsible for thinking about the merits of different growth patterns, or their effect on people's health and happiness, or on the environmental costs.

Remember, Jane Jacobs got regular people to step up to stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway when the "experts" were saying it was necessary. All of the conventional wisdom in the urban planning field at the time held that the road was the only way to make New York work in the modern age.

Should decisionmakers disregard input from the 23-year-old college grad who has a job at PriceWaterhouseCoopers but doesn't want to live in Fairfax County because there aren't walkable places with an urban vibe? What about the 75-year-old in Aspen Hill who's finding it harder to drive, hates that she has to travel 30 minutes to the Pike just to get to most kinds of retail, and wishes she could live in Bethesda but prohibited by expensive housing?

The Board of Trade has been pushing WMATA and local jurisdictions to excise elected officials from any decisionmaking authority on the WMATA Board. Sure, it's the experts and not the elected officials who should decide which contractor is best suited to replacing the broken track circuits. But I want officials who listen to riders to decide whether to cut weekend service. By a strictly performance-based metric, that service is relatively poor at cost recovery, but its benefits to the region go far beyond WMATA itself.

Now, with their survey of anonymous "experts," Chase and Parsons are going to be pressuring groups like the Transportation Planning Board to abdicate their traditional role in setting priorities and instead choose the megaprojects their "experts" picked, which happen to be the same ones they were already pushing for.

They'll say, as they told me, that local officials are too preoccupied with the immediate interests of their local jurisdiction to think "regionally." Instead, decisions about how to spend billions in transportation dollars over decades should go to the professionals, who won't think about the big picture of regional growth but rather just move as many cars or trains as fast as possible as far as possible.

The TPB and other officials should reject this idea. The input of professionals is useful, but far more so when those professionals can attach their names to their recommendations and everyone can weigh them knowing the biases and interests each person brings with them. The input of other people is important too, and our elected representatives, even if imperfect, are the ones best situated to make those choices.

The 2030 Group's high-powered PR firm, Dewey Square, touted the report yesterday in a press release that this would be "a first-ever comprehensive study of the most critical transportation priorities." But the survey does not actually study the transportation priorities. Instead, it only takes a poll of some anonymous people and then advocates for setting priorities on that basis.

In other news, a groundbreaking poll of "transportation experts" I just polled via Gmail Chat overwhelmingly agreed that a different set of priorities is more appropriate.

Chase and Parsons call for "performance-based measures" for transportation projects over "parochialism and politics." Absolutely. But as we've seen with the debates in Congress, the devil is in choosing the right measures.

Developers who own land far from people's jobs have been long promoting a "congestion" metric, which measures only the speed of automotive traffic, not the length of people's commutes. The Obama administration, meanwhile, has been working on more comprehensive "livability" standards which look at the actual quality of life that results from transportation investment, not just the net increase in paved miles.

Far better studies of regional priorities include those from the Council of Governments, whose scenario studies looked not only at vehicle speeds but overall land use and found that the biggest gains in improving commutes came from responsible land use, like developing underutilized Metro stations, addressing the east-west job divide in the region, and revitalizing existing, aging commercial corridors.

The COG Region Forward report, which all 22 area jurisdictions endorsed, shows that addressing land use and the imbalance between jobs and housing, along with supportive transit and transit-oriented development, are the top priorities. COG's scenario studies demonstrated that better land use planning offers the biggest bang for the buck in reducing the amount we have to drive.

These initiatives, as it happens, also involved many people who haven't already placed themselves at one extreme end of the spectrum on our region's transportation debate.

It's laughably easy to find ridiculous methodological holes in the survey. For example, only 9% of the experts are from DC despite there being a far greater share of commuting activity to, from, and within DC.

The anonymous so-called-experts first list of priorities put transit first. But then, Chase and Parsons asked them to pick "the single most important" project. That wording inherently steers people's thinking to "megaprojects," single large facilities like roads or whole new transit lines instead of the real places that can have the most bang for the buck, like local streetcar lines, roundabouts to smooth traffic, infill rail stations, bus priority, ped/bike investments and more.

But there should be no need to even enumerate the transparent lengths to which the authors go to steer conclusions toward their own preconceived ends. Regional leaders should laugh at this report simply because it pawns off an survey of 45 anonymous people handpicked by Chase and Parsons as the "First Ever Comprehensive Regional Transportation Study."

One useful nugget in the report is a list of current regional priorities, as some of the respondents saw it. For those of us who have monitored transportation planning in the region, these are indeed the projects state and local officials mention most often.

1. Corridor Cities Transitway
   
2. Purple Line
   
3. BRT or express bus network
   
4. I-270 HOT lanes
   
5. I-495 HOT lanes
   
6. MARC service expansion
   
7. Metro core capacity expansion
   
8. Metro system maintenance
   
9. DC streetcars
   
10. Silver Line

This list is Maryland-heavy, and Chase and Parsons note that more of their Maryland participants could identify clear priorities. (DC also has clear priorities, but they had relatively few DC participants, pushing its projects low on the overall list).

Chase and Parsons say this means the region lacks a clear set of priorities, and therefore everyone should adopt their priorities. But elected officials and staffs spend considerable time every year developing detailed priority lists to go into the region's Constrained Long-Range Plan. Virginia created the Transaction 2030 plan a few years ago and is working on an update, Transaction 2040.

That report lists far more than 3 or 4 megaprojects, because a few huge projects don't do much to really address transportation. Northern Virginia is a big place, and really improving mobility involves many smaller projects, addressing individual road bottlenecks, adding options like transit, carpooling, walking and bicycling, and maintaining our existing roads and transit so maintenance breakdowns don't happen and cause delays.

Virginia's priorities also feel more muddled today because local governments and current Secretary of Transportation don't agree on what the priorities should be. They should continue to debate the issues and work toward consensus. Chase, Parsons and their deep-pocketed funders, who would personally benefit from more sprawling development in outer areas, are just frustrated that this process of discussion isn't coalescing around the agenda they happen to have.