Bacon's Rebellion

OBLIVIOUSNESS IN WaPo

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by

James A. Bacon
in

The captions on two front page pictures in today’s WaPo tell a lot about the obliviousness of MainStream Media and of governance practitioners.

Under the picture of the New Wilson Bridge Span the caption reads:

“The new Woodrow Wilson Bridge, a project almost 20 years in the making, is opened to the media in advance of an official gala ceremony next Thursday. The 1.1. mile-long span will begin carrying traffic early next month and is expected eventually to ease some of the region’s worst congestion – at least for a while.”

First, credit where credit is due: The caption and the story correctly notes that this 2.44-billion (that is a “B”) dollar “solution” is only temporary. The story focus is on the upcoming “celebration” and self-congratulations by governance practitioners and their contractors. The caption (and the story) provides no clue about the overarching cause of the traffic congestion that makes this bridge only a temporary fix. See “Self Delusion and Fraud,” 7 June 2004 at db4.dev.baconsrebellion.com

Under the picture of a verdant yard the caption reads:

“Sean Kelley kisses his wife, Shannon (a Charles County Commissioner), goodbye before going off to work (in a car), while James P. Gates prepares to pump out the septic tank at their La Plata home.”

The Page 1 story is about unsuspecting home-owners (including County Commissioners) coming to the realization that at low density one cannot just flush and forget. It is also about citizen education concerning a major source of groundwater contamination. Unfortunately the story is laced with Core Confusing words. See three columns on vocabulary starting with “The Foundation of Babble,” 28 November 2005 at db4.dev.baconsrebellion.com

There is no indication anywhere in the story about the overarching connection between septic tanks, driving to work and subregional traffic congestion. The nexus is, of course, dysfunctional human settlement pattern.

Based on these front page stories it can be predicted that had WaPo been publishing in Florence during the spring of 1348 it would have run two stories during May. One about workers on a new bridge across the Arno becoming sick and dying in alarming numbers and another story (deemed to be unrelated to the first by the editors) about an infestation of rats on the docks at Pisa where dock workers had died earlier in the year.

In 1348 there was little knowledge about the cause of the disease that later would be known as “The Black Death.”

In “The Shape of the Future” it is noted that about as much is known in 2000 concerning the function of human settlement patterns as was known about maintaining human health 500 years earlier. See opening sections of Chapter 4. In 1348 the level of understaning about human health was not much different than it was in 1500. In 2006 the level of understanding about human settlement patterns is not much different that it was in 2000.

EMR

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6 responses to “OBLIVIOUSNESS IN WaPo”

  1. Charles Avatar
    Charles

    It does mention that the bridge overarches the Potomac River.

    I agree with your point, but frankly I don’t remember the last time a front-page story told the ‘overarching’ truth about anything. That requires a level of introspection and study that doesn’t fit well with the every-day-front-page mentality.

  2. E M Risse Avatar
    E M Risse

    Charles:

    Right on.

    “Every-day-front-page mentality” is why citizens need to evolve a way of communicatiing the important information necessary to understand human settlement patterns outside of advertising driven and what is good for business (aka,Business-As-Usual) MainStream Media.

    EMR

  3. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    Sometimes we agree, sometimes we disagree, and sometimes I just don’t get your point.

    Your starting point is that governance practitioners and WaPo are oblivious, but you don’t say to what, or how they are related, but you give a quote to open your argument.

    When I read the quote, the first thing that jumps to my mind is why does this project take 20 years? It’s a nice bridge, but it isn’t rocket science. I have argued previously that instead of one 12 lane bridge, we would have been better off with three fourlane bridges. A major problem withe the bridge is that it mixes local, regional and interstate traffic, and that is one reason it will reduce congestion only for a while.

    Additional bridges would have been the bridge equivalent of a grid road system, giving drivers other alternatives. The additional bridges would have separated some local traffic from the interstate traffic, and offered a powerful incentive for revitalizing Anacostia.

    Everyone recognizes the solution is only temporary, as far as congestion goes. But you imply that it is a waste because it won’t cure congestion. In fact the bridge will serve its purpose: carrying vehicles across the river for many years. Eventually people will have to wait in line to enjoy the benefit, but that is beside the point. If you are going to make the argument that anything that doesn’t permanently cure congestion is a waste, it won’t leave you with very many positive choices: for one thing you would eliminate Metro, which also hasn’t eliminated congestion. You could eliminate congestion by eliminating most of downtown washington and central Fairfax, Alexandria and Arlington, but that is hardly a positive choice.

    Jump to the second story. You state that the point of the story is that some people are just learning that at low density sewage systems have to be maintained. Your implication is that at high density this isn’t true, which of course is nonsense.

    In LaPlata, Commissioner Kelley owns his septic system and it is part of the value of his lot, on which he pays taxes. If he lived in an area served by central sewage, he would pay taxes to maintain hundreds of miles of sewer mains, a central processing facility staffed by dozens of full time engineers and technicians, and at the end, the sludge he creates still has to be cleaned out of the tanks and hauled away.

    Some people claim that higher density will solve all our problems from congestion, to pollution, to access to every thing we could possibly want, to obesity. I don’t think anyone thinks it can make the sewage problem go away: as the T-shirt says, stuff happens. It merely changes how we pay for it, and probably makes it much more expensive.

    Apparently you think they are oblivious because WaPo does not make the connection between septic tanks, driving to work, and subregional traffic connection. From there you make the logical leap to what the stories might have been if they had been written someplace else, seven hundred years ago.

    I’m oblivious to what possible connection there could be, but you claim that the point is that, based on your own writing, we know about as much about settlement patterns as Florence officials and publishers might have known about the black death.

    Considering that the Gutenberg Bible wasn’t printed until a hundred years later, that is a remarkable speculation. I don’t get the connection to the black death at all, but I’ll agree we know next to nothing about how civilization actually works.

    That being the case, I don’t see how you can claim there is an overarching nexus between septic tanks and congestion.

    There are some people who are trying to make disaffected observations about settlement and make sense out of them: to actually measure things and try to make sense of them.

    In “Causes of Sprawl: A Portrait from Space,” by Birchfield, Overman, Puga and Turner, we can see an example. Using a disaffected (if somewhat arbitrary measure) and a massive amount of satellite photos they measured the percentage of undeveloped land in a one squre kilometer area around each developed parcel.

    As with many things the result depends on how you look at it. “In 1976, 42% of the land in the square kilometer surrounding residential develoment was open space. By 1992, this had grown to only 43%. By this measure the country is not tending toward sprawl substantially more than in the past. There is more land covered, to be sure, but much is infill or contiguous. Again, this varies by place.”

    The urbanization rate was 2.5% per year over the period (totalling 48% over 16 years). But at the end only 1.9% of the land surface is covered.

    The study doesn’t say anything about “good” growth or “bad” growth. I find that is one way you can sometimes identify good science: a lack of value judgements.

    But they do compare their data to some features of the sprawl hypothesis. They find that development tends to follow the aquifers: good groundwater causes development. They find that development tends to leapfrog out of areas of municipal authority, and they find that the density of roads does not matter with respect to sprawl.

    This last one is a surprising result, but their explanation is that roads lead to as much infill as they do to sprawl. The observation that people escape municipal authority when possible seems to support Jim Bacon’s contention that we need less control and not more: the planners are planning our cities to death.

    I look at it a little differently: if you push too hard in any one direction you don’t get what you want. Instead you simply create more resistance, disturbance, and backlash.

    In any case, it doesn’t appear that we are about to succumb to the black death of wild abandonment or disagregate scatteration any time soon.

    You can have current facts, presented without value judgements or rampant and inaccurate historical speculation.

    Take your pick.

  4. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    Sorry, data and quotes for the previous post was from

    http://planningresearch.blogspot.com/2006/02/meaning-and-measure-of-sprawl.html

  5. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Mr. Hyde:

    Why don’t you just admit you have never understood anything Risse has written and leave it at that?

  6. Ray Hyde Avatar
    Ray Hyde

    Actually, Ed and I agree on many premises, and some conclusions. Where we disagree is a matter of extent rather than substance, for the most part.

    I just think that speculating on what MSM might have said about the black plague and trying to connect that to modern septic systems and bridges was more than a little stretch. Ed has some valid ideas, but I believe he does more harm than good to the conservation movement and the process of building a workable civilization by virtue of the way he chooses to make his arguments.

    With respect to septic systems and disasters, consider what happened in Massachusetts this week when a flood wrecked the sewag treatment plant. Would the same damage have occurred if the treatment location was not concentrated all in one place?

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