Posts about Language
Bicycling
Can you find a better bike sharing system name?
Last week, DC and Arlington announced a massive new regional bike-sharing system to replace SmartBike and be implemented later this year. But what will it be named?
Minneapolis is going with "Nice Ride."
DDOT has a survey at which you can vote for up to three of their 17 ideas, but the "other" box at the bottom of their survey implies that nobody is too enamored with any of the suggestions so far.
Can we do better?
For the record, here are the 17 candidate names put forth by DC and Arlington: Bike2Go, BikeAround, Bikington, CAB (Capital Area Bixi), Capital Bikeshare, George, GoBike, Capital Bixi, PopCycle, ShareCycle, Spin, Velo2Go, Ucycle, WeBike, WeCycle, YouCycle, and ZoomBike.
Several of those names follow the SmartBike model of a compound word. That seems suggestive, so here are some ideas along those lines:
| City Wash Smart Best Metro We Our Flex Share Skip Hop Zip Web Net | Bike Cycle Ride Velo |
There are 112 unique combinations using that table. Some of them duplicate DDOT ideas, like WeBike and WeCycle, while others invoke familiar brands, like MetroCycle and ZipBike. While WMATA and ZipCar might object to names that imply a connection, would anyone care if we took advantage of an old car-sharing brand and named our system FlexBike?
What about something like BikeWeb, which could open up all sorts of fun logo concepts, or something like CityCycle, which might be a little generic, but hey, alliterative. VeloFlex sounds cool, but will Americans accept such a European-sounding name?
Of course, the name doesn't have to be a compound. Maybe Hop works better on its own. Or maybe there's a good acronym out there, following the CAB model. Or we could deviate from the word Bixi itself. Replace the B with D for DC and you get Dixi, with all its political connotations, but W for Washington results in Wixi, which could catch on. Or maybe we invent a new word altogether; Bixi is a combination of bicycle and taxi, so how about we combine bicycle and Metro to form Bitro?
There are thousands of ideas out there. What do you think? Like one of the 17 DDOT suggestions? Like one of mine? Got your own? Let's hear it.
Bicycling
Medical Examiner "accident" finding causes confusion
WTOP created some consternation among cyclists last night with its brief news item entitled, "Cyclist death officially ruled an accident."
Photo by drewsaunders.
The article says that the Medical Examiner's office "has ruled the death of bicyclist Constance Holden an accident." At first blush, it looks like the city's investigatory apparatus has again dismissed a cyclist's death, and so quickly. However, this is not the conclusion of the crash investigation, which will take more time. This is just the medical examiner's classification.
Medical examiners assign a "manner of death" to each fatality, and it falls into a small number of fixed categories. In DC, those are "natural, accident, suicide, homicide, undetermined, and pending."
In short, when the Medical Examiner says "accident" here, they don't mean "accidental" as in "unpreventable," but "accidental" as in "not deliberate." There's no way for the M.E. to determine the circumstances that led to the victim being hit with "multiple blunt impact injuries." They are basically just concluding that, for example, Ms. Holden didn't also suffer a heart attack just before the crash, or that after the crash someone didn't also shoot her while she was still alive.
This is a particularly clear example of the problems with using the word "accident" to talk about traffic crashes. All the Medical Examiner determined was that the crash was the cause of Ms. Holden's death. Yet using the term "accident" as the manner of death implies that the M.E. has determined more than that; that they've also determined nobody was at fault. That's not what they are saying, but many people could and did jump to that conclusion upon reading a fairly non-insightful news article.
The problems with this medical examiner's classification scheme go beyond just traffic incidents. Last year, I sat on a jury in a murder trial. The decedent had died from falling and hitting his head on a step. The prosecution argued another man had hit him with an unknown object first, causing him to pass out and fall; the defense argued he was drunk and fell on his own.
The DC Medical Examiner classified the death a homicide. However, the defense argued that they had done so in part because they had seen the police report which talked about this other man. If there had been nobody else there, said the defense, would they still have ruled it a homicide? How did they really know? It was difficult to separate out how much of the M.E.'s conclusion came from scientific evidence and how much came from outside information.
The Public Defender Service brought in Delaware's Chief Medical Examiner, who said he would have ruled it an accident. Putting these classifications on seems to only serve to try to prejudice juries one way or the other. The scientific expert thinks it's a homicide, so it must be a homicide, some might think, even though that scientific expert is really just coming to that conclusion because that's what the police already think.
It does a disservice to Constance Holden to say that her death was "officially ruled an accident." Her death was officially determined to have occurred as a consequence of the injuries she sustained from her encounter with a large military truck. How that truck came to be in contact with her body, and whether that was blamelessly accidental, negligence, involuntary manslaughter (a form of homicide) or something else is for the police investigators to determine, not the Medical Examiner.
All three areas are designed primarily for vehicle throughput, creating dangerous conditions for pedestrians. Also, Matt Zapotosky almost entirely avoids the word "accident" in his story. (Comment)
Roads
Safety is no accident, says Carr
Maryland Delegates Al Carr (D-Kensington) and Bill Bronrott (D-Bethesda) have introduced a bill to replace the word "accident" with "crash" in the state's laws. The House will hold a hearing on the bill this afternoon.
Accident, Maryland. Photo by oh_candy.
The bill would use the word "crash" instead of "accident" where it occurs in the laws of the State of Maryland, such as in the sections requiring police reports after certain types of crashes, requiring drivers to provide insurance information after a crash, etc.
This may seem like a triviality, but it matters. While "accident" has become a common term for these types of vehicular incidents, it also carries a connotation of being beyond the reasonable control of any person.
We have the phrase, "it was just an accident," where "just" in that case implies blamelessness. Some uses of the word "accident" imply a complete lack of agency by the parties as well, such as "chance; fortune; luck: I was there by accident." There's also the phrase "an accident of birth," over which the individual involved has no control.
Merriam-Webster defines "accident" as "an unforeseen and unplanned event or circumstance." While certainly crashes are unplanned and even unforeseen by the parties involved, they are often not unforeseeable; many so-called "accidents" stem from drunk driving, speeding, and poor road design. There are many specific locations and times of day where crashes occur frequently, and while we don't foresee the specifics, we absolutely foresee the general occurrences.
In fact, crash reporting sometimes even uses the term "accident" when there is a clear intention, and the incident is neither unplanned nor unforeseen, such as in those tragic cases where a driver has purposefully run down a cyclist or pedestrian. Those are certainly no accident.
The bill proposes the word "crash." Unlike "accident," "crash" implies nothing about the humans involved. It doesn't suggest that they had no control, but neither does it insinuate that they did. It says nothing about whether the incident was foreseen or not, or foreseeable or not. Vehicles collided; the technical term for this is a "crash." Crashes can be major or minor; they can be entirely happenstance with no blame or they can even be intentional.
"Crash" speaks to the physical event that took place, whereas "accident" speaks to the circumstances. Since exchanging of insurance information, police reports, and the other subjects with which Maryland law concerns itself take place before most facts have been established, using a neutral term like "crash" is the appropriate course of action.
Other jurisdictions have established "neutral language policies" that go beyond this bill. In addition to using neutral terms in laws, some policies ask police to use "crash" in place of "accident" in incident reports and public statements, for example. That would be a good step to take as well, though this bill is a good start. Kudos to Carr and Bronrott for sponsoring this legislation.
Bicycling
Do we need a name for anti-bike-ism?
Bicycle advocates were surprised and disappointed that Virginia legislators, particularly Republicans, defeated a seemingly innocuous measure to change Virginia's standard for drivers passing cyclists from 2 to 3 feet, to match the practice in most states.
Photo by velobry.
Based on their summary, the bill mainly didn't go down to defeat because legislators thought 2 feet was better. Rather, they perceived cyclists as a group not deserving of any added protections from the law.
Here are some arguments the Virginia Bicycling Federation reported hearing from legislators at the hearing:
- "Bicyclists are often law breakers, unworthy of any added protection under the law."
- "Bicyclists are inconsiderate when they delay drivers from getting to their destinations, especially in narrow lanes or roads."
- "Bicyclists should police themselves before coming in asking for added legal protections."
- "A 3 ft. passing rule would inconvenience and hazard motorists by requiring them to move into the adjacent or oncoming travel lanes."
Only the last item is actually about the passing distance itself. But even with a 2-foot rule, drivers still have to either get into the adjacent lane, or at least move substantially enough into that lane that they might as well move in entirely.
Many drivers think they can or should pass cyclists by squeezing through in the same lane. That's dangerous and illegal in most places. To pass safely, a driver needs enough room to move over to the adjacent lane, at least temporarily.
More worrisome is the attitude which we hear all the time from letter writers to local newspapers, talking heads, blog commenters, and even legislators, that bicyclists are lawless hoodlums not deserving of any protection from the law.
Yes, some cyclists break laws, and some cyclists ride very recklessly. Of course, many motorists break laws too, like speeding, not stopping at stop signs, not yielding to pedestrians, driving in bike lanes, assaulting each other, pedestrians, and cyclists, yelling at police officers, and more.
That doesn't excuse cyclist misbehavior, but it's also totally unfair to blame all cyclists for the dangerous actions of a few or the mildly illegal actions of many when drivers do the same thing. Most drivers generally act respectfully but do break laws in small ways like speeding, and a few drivers are really bad. Same for cyclists.
When a majority builds up and expresses incorrect and biased attitudes about a minority group, we call that out. If white people say that black people don't deserve the same rights or respect, we call that racism. If men say that women don't deserve the same rights or respect, we call that sexism. If straight people say that gay people don't deserve the same rights or respect, we call that homophobia.
This anti-cyclist attitude needs a name, too. These Virginia legislators aren't just misinformed and pigheaded, they're also cyclist-ist. Or something. I haven't seen a good name for this prejudice. Have you? Any ideas?
Update: Racism, sexism, etc. are of course far worse than cyclist hatred, and I don't mean to mean that oppressed cyclists are being mistreated as badly as ethnic groups once were and often still are. However, that doesn't make this attitude not a form of prejudice, and one worthy of being named and criticized, even if it's lower on the scale of prejudices than some.
Roads
Rail implicated falsely by reporters’ use of active voice
Writers and commenters here at Greater Greater Washington frequently note the onset of the windshield perspective in reporters, columnists, and other bloggers. In news stories, drivers are frequently left out in favor of their car, which seems to have been the sole party in the accident. Recently, I've also noticed a frequent misleading use of verbs or the active voice to seemingly implicate the train in a rail-car or rail-pedestrian collision. David has written about the use of the passive voice in the media, and makes several good points.
Photo by the author.
The most egregious case of this I've seen appeared in the Chicago Tribune over the summer. In the wake of a tragic accident, their story's headline screamed: "Amtrak train rams car, killing Joliet husband and wife." Reading the article, however, one discovers that the couple made an illegal right turn in front of the northbound Texas Eagle, which was traveling about 60 mph. The Amtrak driver had no chance to stop, yet some reporter thinks he's guilty of "ramming." The Tribune article is no longer available. Here's a link to WGN Radio's article.
The Amtrak engineer was not at fault. Police report that the crossing gates and lights were working. In all likelihood, this was a tragic case of driver error. The road which the car was on is parallel to the tracks. At a signal, the sixty-four year old driver turned right onto a street crossing the tracks. She did so in violation of a sign which lights up when a train is approching prohibiting right turns. It is likely she was paying attention to the regular through-movement signal, which was green.
But the Tribune's headline was rather inflammatory. The train didn't ram the vehicle. It was just traveling along the tracks when a vehicle started to cross in front of it. Trains take time to stop. A more appropriate headline might have been "Driver turns in front of train, two killed." Consider the Sun-Times' article title, "At least one killed in train vs. car accident." Or that of WGN News, "Two people killed when Amtrak train hits car."
This is not, unfortunately, a first for the Tribune. In a search of their archives, I unearthed two other articles where a train "rammed" a vehicle which should not have been on the tracks. In one 1999 incident, a driver drove around the crossing gates to beat a commuter train, which "rammed" his car. Earlier, in 1988, a twenty year old driver, trying to beat the train in Morton Grove was "rammed" by an Amtrak train.
There is, of course, no mention in the article about the engineer. He or she will likely suffer greatly from knowing that he or she was behnind the throttle of a locomotive that killed two. The San Jose Mercury News recently delved into the topic of the trauma suffered by Caltrain engineers after collisions (h/t TOW).
Unfortunately, this is not isolated to the Chicago Tribune. Seattle recently opened their first light rail line. During construction, some vocal opponents decried the "dangerous" situation that Link would create in the city. So shortly after opening, I was disappointed to read this headline "Light-rail train hits, kills pedestrian." In this case, while all the verbs are correct, one of the nouns isn't. The struck person was not a pedestrian, but a person committing suicide-by-transit. Still the headline seems to place the blame on 'dangerous' Link.
The most common misleading use of grammar is to give the train the active voice in a headline. Despite the fact that many crashes are caused by impatient or imprudent drivers, trains often do the "striking" while autos and pedestrians are "struck". Technically this is correct, the train does often hit the person or vehicle on the track, but the use of passive voice for the auto or pedestrian alleviates the responsibility of the "object", placing it instead on the subject.
Consider these two headlines from different places. The first, from OregonLive.com, uses the active voice, "Train kills man in Woodburn as he tries to cross tracks." Here, the train does the action to the pedestrian, who according to witnesses, misjudged the speed of the train when he tried to beat it. Alternatively, the Chicago Sun-Times reports a "Man struck fatally by freight train on West Side." In the latter case, the implication of guilt is not put on either party.
Using the right verbiage in news articles is important because the way the press treats these stories affects the way the public views rail and transit projects. If communities look at trains as dangerous (and if they go around ramming cars at random, they probably are dangerous), they will be more likley to fight them. But also by taking responsibility away from the car driver, other motorists don't see the danger involved in trying to beat the train.
Roads
Economy, opposition make VDOT postpone I-95/395 HOT lanes
The Virginia DOT has decided to pause its plans to build High-Occupancy Toll (HOT) lanes along I-95 and I-395 from the Pentagon to Spotsylvania County. VDOT hasn't recognized the folly of its widening plans, but is bowing
Photo by Washington State DOT.
The opposition pressure comes mostly from Arlington County, which is planning a lawsuit against the Federal Highway Administration for the project. Alexandria is considering joining as well.
During the Bush Administration, FHWA gave the project a Categorical Exclusion which essentially says that the project will have no significant environmental effect at all. VDOT did the same for the I-66 widening, and that project wouldn't have created full through lanes, as the HOT lane project would.
Federal law is clear that "growth inducing effects and other effects related to induced changes in the pattern of land use, population density or growth rate," also known as induced demand, is indeed an environmental effect.
Arlington is most concerned with the project's effect on neighborhoods in and around Shirlington, where VDOT proposes changes to Shirlington Circle including more lanes and traffic lights. Residents of nearby neighborhoods worry that the project will add cut-through traffic and that construction will damage historic buildings. The Alexandria Gazette Packet writes,
The Virginia Department of Transportation says that it followed the approved rules to create a document known as an "interchange justification report" that led to federal approval the categorical exclusion. But officials in Alexandria and Arlington believe that the project did not receive an adequate review because roads near the interchanges were not studied.Like his previous statements, Chang seems blind to any possible downside of adding car lanes. This quote reveals the deeply entrenched traffic engineer mindset that "moving cars faster" equals an intersection "functioning better.""Where do you stop?" asked VDOT project manager Young Ho Chang. "The theory is that if the interchange functions better with the project then all the intersections around the interchange will also function better."
As the West Palm Beach, Florida Neutral Language Policy explains, that's false. Adding vehicular capacity may make the intersection better for some, but also may worsen it others. For example, widening a typical suburban intersection by adding turn lanes often creates a much more dangerous intersection for pedestrians. That's why West Palm Beach banned traffic lingo like calling an intersection widening an "upgrade."
Given that this project will inevitably spur more housing growth in Spotsylvania County for people commuting to DC, generating new traffic, the intersections may become more clogged with cars even with more lanes. Finally, even by traffic engineer standards Chang's statement makes no sense. If one intersection moves more cars at higher speed, nearby intersections may become more congested. Chang's statement belies a fundamental belief that any increase in vehicular capacity is an unmitigated good. He seems genuinely baffled as to why Arlington and Alexandria might not want all this goodness he's trying to bestow on them.
The HOT lane projects are also losing popularity and political support as more residents become aware of the onerous provisions in the Beltway contract, like the requirement that Virginia pay Fluor-Transurban if more than 24% of drivers carpool. Residents along the Beltway have also been surprised at the numbers of trees cut down and the extent of the construction impacts. Most of all, VDOT's rapidly shrinking budget and a tough credit market have shattered hopes of borrowing from the future to build the freeways today, as Maryland did with the ICC.
Homer insists his staff will continue working hard to sell the plan. We haven't heard the last of HOT lanes in Virginia.
Parking
Talk about choice and freedom for parking policy, not "jacking up" and controlling
Some people believe that performance parking is about "jacking up" parking prices to "discourage people from parking" in metered spaces and "make it even tougher" to find parking. That's totally incorrect. In fact, performance parking makes it easier to find parking by ensuring that the parking spaces aren't all filled up. That's a tough point to get across, and it becomes even tougher when the person in charge of running the performance parking pilot and speaking to the press and the community couches his explanations in bad frames.
Photo by mayhem.
Last night, DDOT's Damon Harvey presented an update on the Columbia Heights performance parking zone to residents and business owners in that neighborhood. Already, the program has raised $14,293.96 for local improvements and paid back about a third of the cost of the multi-space meters. And that's without setting market rates at all. According to Harvey, the commercial streets in Columbia Heights have 95% parking occupancy, which means that most of the time, there aren't any spaces available for shoppers who'd like to park and quickly dash into a store, instead of going all the way into the DC USA garage.
Columbia Heights was supposed to be the easy case. There's no shortage of parking. There's a whole garage that's almost always practically empty. It's really cheap, too, and it's right in the center of the commercial district. Managing curbside rates to ensure availability only makes it easier for short-term parkers to use the on-street spaces, without really hurting longer-term parkers at all, who have such an easy and cheap alternative.
According to the performance parking legislation, it's time to set a rate to ensure that people can find a street space if, for whatever reason, they really want it. Maybe they have an injury that makes walking even a block or two difficult, or are in a particular hurry. Today, those folks are stuck, since there aren't spaces for them at all. Performance parking is supposed to help them, and help the businesses who want them to want to drive to Columbia Heights. It's about giving people more choices, not fewer: choices between parking for a higher price on the street, or at a lower price in the garage.
But if you listen to DDOT's Damon Harvey, adding choice isn't the point, it's removing choice. He told FOX 5, "we want to make sure that folks utilize the curb space in what we consider to be the correct way." That sounds awfully Big Brotherish for a program that's actually giving more choice. Of course, Harvey isn't entirely wrong; he was trying to explain that DDOT wants to reserve on-street spaces for shorter-term use. But it sounds punitive.
At the meeting, too, Harvey's language unwittingly reinforced the negative perceptions of the parking pilot. In talking about the 95% occupancy, he said that it might be time to "jack up" the price. Harvey kept using that term, "jack up." That carries an enormously negative connotation. When your corner bakery has to make a bagel a little pricier to account for higher wheat prices, they don't put up a sign saying they're "jacking up" the bagels.
In explaining why higher prices might be appropriate, Harvey cited "the literature" which suggests an 85% occupancy rate. However, he never explained to people why the literature recommends 85%. (Answer: 85% is about the rate where there's a space on each block, so most of the time, you can park on the block you want.) 95% doesn't mean much to people. But if you say that most of the time, there are no spaces at all on that block, that makes much more sense.
Harvey even said that he thought perhaps it wasn't a good time to adjust the rates, because the Columbia Heights streetscape is interfering with businesses, and they can't take any more. He probably meant that there's already significant political controversy in Columbia Heights, and maybe it's better to wait for a calmer time. But he didn't talk about it that way. Instead, he talked about how we have to be careful not to hurt businesses. A properly implemented program won't hurt businesses, it will help them. Plus, it's already taken forever to collect data. If DDOT moves slowly and waits until all stars align to do what's clearly the right policy, the pilot will expire before DC ever actually tries performance parking.
One attendee talked about how parking is a problem for the businesses. But when asked whether the bigger problem was too-expensive parking or not-available parking, he replied that availability was the main obstacle. A rate adjustment would fix the bigger problem, availability. It would allow a driver interested in stopping to buy food at one of the ethnic takeout establishments to do so, where today they cannot.
Part of the problem is that at the ballpark, the parking policy really is about discouraging driving. DC is being very up-front: we want people to take Metro. And they are. It's working. Making it hard for baseball fans to park isn't what's lowering attendance at Nationals games. But that's not performance parking at all, it's just anti-parking. The way officials frame that program leaks over into programs like Columbia Heights.
When Michael or I talk about performance parking, we never talk about "jacking up" rates or "forcing" people into garages. We talk about making parking easier. Because that's what it is. Parking is too hard in DC. Even the lede to the Fox 5 story says it. "It's tough enough to find parking in the streets of DC." But then, they add, "This may make it even tougher." That's a common reaction, but it's wrong. Performance parking would make on-street parking change from "virtually impossible to find" to "conveniently available, for a reasonable price." However, journalists and community members aren't going to see performance parking this way unless DDOT frames it this way. And right now, with the "jack it up" and "what we consider to be the correct way" language from Harvey, that's not going to happen, and performance parking isn't going to succeed.
@ggwash
- Successful speed cameras require fair speed limits
- Amid scandal, don't lose sight of Gray's policy achievements
- Bethesda gets new but terrible bike racks
- Montgomery plans 160-mile, "gold standard" BRT system
- DC's parks are 5th best in the nation, says "Park Score"
- DC's divide need not be black and white
- Live chat with Matt Yglesias
Greater Washington
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