Here's another solution (though the urbanist set won't like it):
If you like walking and "vibrant" street life, live in Amsterdam or Quito. If you're really prefer to live in a city like LA, get in the driver's seat and cue up the Beach Boys. The best mom-and-pop eateries are in those despised strip malls. Don't waste another moment waiting for a bus.
There's a time and a place for everything. Every place doesn't need to be an urbanist theme park, but -- while every place doesn't need to exude car culture -- let LA be LA.
I really tried to think like this to justify still living in America but driving really is an atomizing experience. I feel much more isolated from other people than when I was using the public transit in other places. what frustrates me the most is knowing that we're rich enough to have good public transit and actually enforce rules and that we just choose not to.
“Germany, and much of northern Europe, is an example of a high-regulation high-trust society (compared to the US), where nice fully functional things can be built, without fear of misuse.”
Used to be high-trust. Just like Sweden. But then somehow, about 11 or 12 years ago, it began to get low-trust real quick.
Import the third world and become the third world. These nice things in Northern Europe will go away if the Muslim and African population in the region continues to grow. Sweden used to be one of the safest countries in Europe, and now it has a gang and crime problem that is one of the worst in Europe.
Chris noticed in his travels that even relatively poor countries in Eastern Europe are nicer than the US in many ways, but he never noticed the obvious cause, which is differences in demographics.
The major issue in homelessness is not the lack of housing. It’s the refusal of society to say no. No, you can’t camp in this city. No, you can’t shit in the streets. No, you can’t panhandle aggressively. No, you can’t shoot up publicly and leave your used needles lying around. The fact that we are not going to allow you to destroy our city by doing these things is not our problem. It’s your problem. You can solve your problem by not doing drugs, getting help for your mental problems, getting a job, and sharing rent with others so inclined until you can afford a place of your own, probably in a lower cost community. This is not going to happen because the people we have elected allow the homeless to wallow in their victimhood rather than accept personal responsibility for their self destructiveness.
More rants like this, please. Enjoyed the Quito creativity coverage and saw similar things with my own eyes, including the clever, committed vendors who hop on, sell their sundries for a mile or two, and hop off to do it again on the next bus. Boo to bureaucrats who shut down fun, safe, and friendly entrepreneurial ideas that crop up around bus stops and public transportation (and everywhere else). Please minimize your burdensome, nitpicky rules, and instead foster more warmth and friendliness in our cities.
I still don’t understand why people live in and tolerate such places. In a sane society, they’d either take it over from the inhuman lizards or abandon the abominations our large cities have become.
We were impressed with the bus system in SA when we visited a few years ago. We took a bus from our campground at the very edge of the city into the central city and the whole experience was very pleasant.
I agree with “high regulation”, but I’m not sure “low trust” is the right way to frame this. The Soviet Union was high reg / low trust and their bus stops were probably fine? I’m not sure I’d call china high trust either. Those countries just have high regulation / strong government models.
I think the the US has high reg / low govt power. Regulation means all sorts of requirements, but low govt power means it’s really hard for govt to build stuff while meeting those regulations.
If the US was high reg / low trust but had a government system that empowered it to a) act without endless community input, b) worry much less about litigation, and c) use coercion to control citizen behavior, we’d have much better bus stops. The problem is that neither the America left or right aren’t aligned in that direction.
The thing is, endless community input and ruinously expensive litigation are forms of regulation, but they were supposed to be organic community regulations, as opposed to regulation coming from the evil detached bureaucrat. The irony is that the US would be much better off with a large and competent bureaucracy, like Japan has, that could just in a reasonable time evaluate a project and approve or disapprove it, instead of this eternal process of getting permission from the community and courts. I know Chris has a bad example of a bureaucrat in his rant, but overall, the dysfunction the US has in building is not about bureaucrats, but about all these slow, diffuse and expensive processes that are supposed to empower individuals.
So I think there is something to your point. In a very bizarre way the US is trying to give maximum freedom to everyone, from the homeless destroying public spaces to any bothered neighbor who needs time to give their opinion and who needs the ability to take an infrastructure project they don't like to court. The problem is that this results in dysfunctionality and worse outcomes for the majority. The homeless person would be better off in a clinic being treated for drug addiction or mental health issues, and society as a whole would be better off not letting any bothered neighbor destroy new housing and factory construction. Lack of construction is freedom destruction, when you think about it, because it causes the price of housing to explode and restricts people's effective freedom to move to where they want.
The solution is not totalitarianism, the solution is to just let people build things, use competent bureaucracy instead of litigation, and not leave homeless people on the streets. The US used to have mental hospitals, and yes, they had problems, and they would have to be better today, but the US could build mental hospitals for people on the street who can't take care of themselves.
If we want order, at the expense of freedom, there are certainly many examples of that out there. What we are trying to understand is how we maintain freedom and order, together, which does require everyone to enter into the social contract and abide by norms. Simply put, a declining number of Americans are opting out of the social contract, which reduces trust, and forces government to fill the gap. Perhaps, at some point, we will abandon the concept of the social contract entirely, and we will follow the more totalitarian models that you outlined. Hopefully not, and we all need to do our part, model civic engagement in all its forms, take responsibility for ourselves and then we will have the bandwidth to help others more constructively.
BTW, I live in LA, and those bus stops are ridiculous!!
Yeah, I'm not exactly suggesting we move in the direction of the Soviet Union, just arguing against the high reg/low trust framework as the core issue.
Overall, "high trust" is the important thing, since it allows you to have a nice society if you're high regulation (I dunno, Sweden?) or low regulation (Japan?) If you don't have high trust, you have to choose between high order / low freedom or low order / high freedom.
I'm assuming we're not really going to solve the US declining trust issue - I certainly don't know of any policy solutions -- so we probably have to get more deliberate about making the right order/freedom tradeoffs.
Really interesting piece, thank you for sharing! Found the trust/regulation slant very thought-provoking. We recently visited Washington DC for the first time and commented upon the number of places in the city we came across benches, seating and tables which would be undoubtedly have been pinched, broken or graffitied here in the UK immediately. So your words ring true here too.
Thanks for showing the real LA, not the Beverly Hills version people see on TV. And, yes, we can't have nice things in the U.S., as my Danish husband noticed.
When I was working on my book on walking (published in 2019), the state of bus systems and what they say about societal values in the U.S. became depressingly apparent. There are so many situations that stick in my mind, but the big one is seemingly minor: the difference between the Twin Cities' bus system (hard to find information, difficult to navigate, unreliable, poor maintenance) and its bike share program (shiny, well-maintained, comprehensive maps at every bike station). I think the bike share was a public-private partnership, but it should NOT have to be this way!
Such an interesting framework on trust versus regulation, and high versus low. A classic 2x2.
I'm seeing this in my own upstate New York village, where there was a big fight over whether to build a dog park. The bottom up solution was owners letting their dogs run loose in an isolated corner of the park early in the morning. Lots of socializing, nobody was bothered, and people and dogs had fun.
The top down solution was building a fenced dog park. But county regulations required that the dog park be a certain size, which meant that it had to impinge on other uses, namely soccer fields. This set up a confrontation between soccer parents and dog owners.
After much acrimony, the dog park got built, but it is heavily regulated, locked up, and it's required that dog owners pay a fee and get a dog-park license or face high fines. Out-of-towners are barred. Posted on the gate is a list of 24 verbose rules written by lawyers.
Unsurprisingly, nobody's using the dog park. It's a double negative: It takes up space that could be used by soccer players, and it is deserted. Dog owners are returning to the ad hoc bottom up arrangement.
We had low trust and high regulation. Now there's even less trust and more regulation. Neighbors are at each other's throats and we have a white elephant sitting in the park.
Thank you, Chris, for giving me a framework through which to see sad events in my own hometown.
I just saw this play out in my daughter’s Sacramento neighborhood. Dog owners had free rein in a public park at a couple defined times each day, lots of dog play and butt-sniffing and neighbors meeting neighbors (rare enough these days). It was a very nice and peaceful social scene. Somebody must have complained; now a small portion has been fenced off for the dogs, leaving the rest of the park to be used as a soccer field. Result: yards and yards of ugly cyclone fencing that now looks like a sad doggy jail, while I have never seen anyone use the field for soccer. I realize I may not have the whole story, but it’s sad.
I live in SF, in a vibrant neighborhood. Two weeks ago someone set up his tent across the street and his piles are growing, although he attempts to keep it orderly to a degree. Am I to be thankful that when he talks nonsense to himself, at least he’s not screaming? The city gives us no recourse. We can’t kick him out, and they send folks out to check on his health (I guess), offer him bottled water and energy bars and then disappear. Public toilets are being guarded throughout the day to keep them from being trashed, and a small army of folks are hired to pick up refuse left behind by the “unhoused”, drug-addled and mentally I’ll, and barely able to keep up. You’re correct, Chris, we can’t have anything nice anymore, as we cannot be trusted with it.
This is such a great example, and so maddening. And as you point out, when the state gets involved in what should be a community solution, it often splinters the community, further
Hi Chris, I just want to add: this new bus “shelter” is from LADOT, which is different from Metro. I didn’t learn the difference between these two agencies until recently, and I noticed (from a glance) that this wasn’t mentioned in Twitter threads.
This nuance doesn’t negate your rant (a bus stop in LA is a bus stop in LA), and I’m still thinking about your points. I especially liked how you paired “regulation” and “trust”.
However, as a resident of LA, I believe knowing the difference is important for the sake of a constructive and better future. It helps to know who to complain to. :-)
My takeaway from La Sombrita is that it’s sad and lame that one of the highlights of this project was avoiding “costly new infrastructure or permitting.”
Here's another solution (though the urbanist set won't like it):
If you like walking and "vibrant" street life, live in Amsterdam or Quito. If you're really prefer to live in a city like LA, get in the driver's seat and cue up the Beach Boys. The best mom-and-pop eateries are in those despised strip malls. Don't waste another moment waiting for a bus.
There's a time and a place for everything. Every place doesn't need to be an urbanist theme park, but -- while every place doesn't need to exude car culture -- let LA be LA.
A(n electric) car in every garage!
I really tried to think like this to justify still living in America but driving really is an atomizing experience. I feel much more isolated from other people than when I was using the public transit in other places. what frustrates me the most is knowing that we're rich enough to have good public transit and actually enforce rules and that we just choose not to.
As I've already indicated, I never expected "the urbanist set" to agree with my perspective.
FWIW, I don't look to the subway for my social life. To each their own, I guess.
Meanwhile, let LA be LA:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDHErN3dOkc
If you don't like car culture, there's always Amsterdam -- or Boston, Brooklyn, or The Bronx.
Curious if you’ve read The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacob’s?
“Germany, and much of northern Europe, is an example of a high-regulation high-trust society (compared to the US), where nice fully functional things can be built, without fear of misuse.”
Used to be high-trust. Just like Sweden. But then somehow, about 11 or 12 years ago, it began to get low-trust real quick.
Import the third world and become the third world. These nice things in Northern Europe will go away if the Muslim and African population in the region continues to grow. Sweden used to be one of the safest countries in Europe, and now it has a gang and crime problem that is one of the worst in Europe.
Chris noticed in his travels that even relatively poor countries in Eastern Europe are nicer than the US in many ways, but he never noticed the obvious cause, which is differences in demographics.
Santa Fe NM has beautiful bus stops but almost no busses!
Hey, Chris. This is a policy blog, whether you mean it to be or not.
The major issue in homelessness is not the lack of housing. It’s the refusal of society to say no. No, you can’t camp in this city. No, you can’t shit in the streets. No, you can’t panhandle aggressively. No, you can’t shoot up publicly and leave your used needles lying around. The fact that we are not going to allow you to destroy our city by doing these things is not our problem. It’s your problem. You can solve your problem by not doing drugs, getting help for your mental problems, getting a job, and sharing rent with others so inclined until you can afford a place of your own, probably in a lower cost community. This is not going to happen because the people we have elected allow the homeless to wallow in their victimhood rather than accept personal responsibility for their self destructiveness.
The biggest problem is we have a FED that prints money causing income disparity.
More rants like this, please. Enjoyed the Quito creativity coverage and saw similar things with my own eyes, including the clever, committed vendors who hop on, sell their sundries for a mile or two, and hop off to do it again on the next bus. Boo to bureaucrats who shut down fun, safe, and friendly entrepreneurial ideas that crop up around bus stops and public transportation (and everywhere else). Please minimize your burdensome, nitpicky rules, and instead foster more warmth and friendliness in our cities.
I still don’t understand why people live in and tolerate such places. In a sane society, they’d either take it over from the inhuman lizards or abandon the abominations our large cities have become.
San Antonio TX has some nice bus benches on my side of town.
We were impressed with the bus system in SA when we visited a few years ago. We took a bus from our campground at the very edge of the city into the central city and the whole experience was very pleasant.
I agree with “high regulation”, but I’m not sure “low trust” is the right way to frame this. The Soviet Union was high reg / low trust and their bus stops were probably fine? I’m not sure I’d call china high trust either. Those countries just have high regulation / strong government models.
I think the the US has high reg / low govt power. Regulation means all sorts of requirements, but low govt power means it’s really hard for govt to build stuff while meeting those regulations.
If the US was high reg / low trust but had a government system that empowered it to a) act without endless community input, b) worry much less about litigation, and c) use coercion to control citizen behavior, we’d have much better bus stops. The problem is that neither the America left or right aren’t aligned in that direction.
The thing is, endless community input and ruinously expensive litigation are forms of regulation, but they were supposed to be organic community regulations, as opposed to regulation coming from the evil detached bureaucrat. The irony is that the US would be much better off with a large and competent bureaucracy, like Japan has, that could just in a reasonable time evaluate a project and approve or disapprove it, instead of this eternal process of getting permission from the community and courts. I know Chris has a bad example of a bureaucrat in his rant, but overall, the dysfunction the US has in building is not about bureaucrats, but about all these slow, diffuse and expensive processes that are supposed to empower individuals.
So I think there is something to your point. In a very bizarre way the US is trying to give maximum freedom to everyone, from the homeless destroying public spaces to any bothered neighbor who needs time to give their opinion and who needs the ability to take an infrastructure project they don't like to court. The problem is that this results in dysfunctionality and worse outcomes for the majority. The homeless person would be better off in a clinic being treated for drug addiction or mental health issues, and society as a whole would be better off not letting any bothered neighbor destroy new housing and factory construction. Lack of construction is freedom destruction, when you think about it, because it causes the price of housing to explode and restricts people's effective freedom to move to where they want.
The solution is not totalitarianism, the solution is to just let people build things, use competent bureaucracy instead of litigation, and not leave homeless people on the streets. The US used to have mental hospitals, and yes, they had problems, and they would have to be better today, but the US could build mental hospitals for people on the street who can't take care of themselves.
If we want order, at the expense of freedom, there are certainly many examples of that out there. What we are trying to understand is how we maintain freedom and order, together, which does require everyone to enter into the social contract and abide by norms. Simply put, a declining number of Americans are opting out of the social contract, which reduces trust, and forces government to fill the gap. Perhaps, at some point, we will abandon the concept of the social contract entirely, and we will follow the more totalitarian models that you outlined. Hopefully not, and we all need to do our part, model civic engagement in all its forms, take responsibility for ourselves and then we will have the bandwidth to help others more constructively.
BTW, I live in LA, and those bus stops are ridiculous!!
It’s more like the current “social contract” abandoned us and this was made flamingly obvious in 2020.
Yeah, I'm not exactly suggesting we move in the direction of the Soviet Union, just arguing against the high reg/low trust framework as the core issue.
Overall, "high trust" is the important thing, since it allows you to have a nice society if you're high regulation (I dunno, Sweden?) or low regulation (Japan?) If you don't have high trust, you have to choose between high order / low freedom or low order / high freedom.
I'm assuming we're not really going to solve the US declining trust issue - I certainly don't know of any policy solutions -- so we probably have to get more deliberate about making the right order/freedom tradeoffs.
Really interesting piece, thank you for sharing! Found the trust/regulation slant very thought-provoking. We recently visited Washington DC for the first time and commented upon the number of places in the city we came across benches, seating and tables which would be undoubtedly have been pinched, broken or graffitied here in the UK immediately. So your words ring true here too.
Baby boomer here. It is real simple
We were gifted the best nation in the world by the greatest generation who ever lived
We have thrown it all into the toilet. Me Me Me Me Me Me. That is all it has ever been about. Greedy. Narcissistic Self Unaware.
We have gotten the leadership we deserved and the results have been predictable and disgusting
Third World, and proud of it. Unredeemable in every way.
All true.
Thanks for showing the real LA, not the Beverly Hills version people see on TV. And, yes, we can't have nice things in the U.S., as my Danish husband noticed.
When I was working on my book on walking (published in 2019), the state of bus systems and what they say about societal values in the U.S. became depressingly apparent. There are so many situations that stick in my mind, but the big one is seemingly minor: the difference between the Twin Cities' bus system (hard to find information, difficult to navigate, unreliable, poor maintenance) and its bike share program (shiny, well-maintained, comprehensive maps at every bike station). I think the bike share was a public-private partnership, but it should NOT have to be this way!
Such an interesting framework on trust versus regulation, and high versus low. A classic 2x2.
I'm seeing this in my own upstate New York village, where there was a big fight over whether to build a dog park. The bottom up solution was owners letting their dogs run loose in an isolated corner of the park early in the morning. Lots of socializing, nobody was bothered, and people and dogs had fun.
The top down solution was building a fenced dog park. But county regulations required that the dog park be a certain size, which meant that it had to impinge on other uses, namely soccer fields. This set up a confrontation between soccer parents and dog owners.
After much acrimony, the dog park got built, but it is heavily regulated, locked up, and it's required that dog owners pay a fee and get a dog-park license or face high fines. Out-of-towners are barred. Posted on the gate is a list of 24 verbose rules written by lawyers.
Unsurprisingly, nobody's using the dog park. It's a double negative: It takes up space that could be used by soccer players, and it is deserted. Dog owners are returning to the ad hoc bottom up arrangement.
We had low trust and high regulation. Now there's even less trust and more regulation. Neighbors are at each other's throats and we have a white elephant sitting in the park.
Thank you, Chris, for giving me a framework through which to see sad events in my own hometown.
I just saw this play out in my daughter’s Sacramento neighborhood. Dog owners had free rein in a public park at a couple defined times each day, lots of dog play and butt-sniffing and neighbors meeting neighbors (rare enough these days). It was a very nice and peaceful social scene. Somebody must have complained; now a small portion has been fenced off for the dogs, leaving the rest of the park to be used as a soccer field. Result: yards and yards of ugly cyclone fencing that now looks like a sad doggy jail, while I have never seen anyone use the field for soccer. I realize I may not have the whole story, but it’s sad.
I live in SF, in a vibrant neighborhood. Two weeks ago someone set up his tent across the street and his piles are growing, although he attempts to keep it orderly to a degree. Am I to be thankful that when he talks nonsense to himself, at least he’s not screaming? The city gives us no recourse. We can’t kick him out, and they send folks out to check on his health (I guess), offer him bottled water and energy bars and then disappear. Public toilets are being guarded throughout the day to keep them from being trashed, and a small army of folks are hired to pick up refuse left behind by the “unhoused”, drug-addled and mentally I’ll, and barely able to keep up. You’re correct, Chris, we can’t have anything nice anymore, as we cannot be trusted with it.
This is such a great example, and so maddening. And as you point out, when the state gets involved in what should be a community solution, it often splinters the community, further
Hi Chris, I just want to add: this new bus “shelter” is from LADOT, which is different from Metro. I didn’t learn the difference between these two agencies until recently, and I noticed (from a glance) that this wasn’t mentioned in Twitter threads.
This nuance doesn’t negate your rant (a bus stop in LA is a bus stop in LA), and I’m still thinking about your points. I especially liked how you paired “regulation” and “trust”.
However, as a resident of LA, I believe knowing the difference is important for the sake of a constructive and better future. It helps to know who to complain to. :-)
My takeaway from La Sombrita is that it’s sad and lame that one of the highlights of this project was avoiding “costly new infrastructure or permitting.”
If they had planted big, shady trees, that would have been wonderful.
I wouldn’t be surprised though if planting each tree costs more than $10,000 in LA.
Yeah. So much of this was about avoiding red tape, which begs the question, why so much red tape?
So many other middle men can make business out of it? Let's make it unmanageable so we have the perfect excuse to outsource it and drag it for years.