
The Dangers of Elite Projection (2017) - williamsmj
https://humantransit.org/2017/07/the-dangers-of-elite-projection.html
======
martythemaniak
The article's idea of a "elite" is a person who relies on a car to get around.
I find it unintentionally funny, as people who rely on transit in the US are
either big city urban elites, or the poor stuck in crappy burbs with shitty
mobility. Thus, "more transit" is itself the elite projection, as it supposes
that what's good for the urban elite, must be good for everyone else.

It would help if you thought of transit as a continuum:

\- the private single-occupancy car

\- shared car

\- shared mini bus

\- bus

\- tram (ie, n linked busses)

\- subway (ie n linked trams, underground)

This is hard to see today, but autonomous cars will essentially bring this
about. Everybody will be riding in autonomous vehicles. If you're well-off,
you'll pay for more privacy and space and time (vehicle comes to you, goes to
your destination), if you're not so well off, you'll share the vehicle with
other people and will have to spend more time as the vehicles makes more stops
(and each stop will be further from your desired source/destination). Busses
as we know them today will become obsolete, as they are functionally
equivalent to a heterogenous mix of autonomous vehicles driving in the same
direction. Trams will become obsolete, as they are functionally equivalent to
the heterogeneous-autonomous-vehicle-chain paying a premium to use a dedicated
lane.

Basically, everything should be a battery skateboard riding on asphalt by way
of rubber. The more you pay, the more privacy you have, the more the mobile
battery goes towards your personal destinations.

~~~
hammock
I don't understand why you are suggesting that autonomous cars will make buses
and trams obsolete. They are the closest to autonomous vehicles out of
everything on your list (they run around on meta-organized and efficient
routes, you don't drive them yourself, etc).

~~~
martythemaniak
They are, which is why I'm suggesting that instead of thinking of "transit vs
private cars" everything will essentially melt together. IE, if you take a bus
with 30 riders today and replace it with 5 AV-minivans each with 6 occupants
driving behind each other, is it any different? What if instead of the city, I
own one of these minivans? What if I pay 6 fares and have the minivan take my
family to somewhere? What if 6 passengers split a minivan, but pay extra to
use a dedicated lane?

~~~
hammock
>IE, if you take a bus with 30 riders today and replace it with 5 AV-minivans
each with 6 occupants driving behind each other, is it any different?

Yeah, it is different. You have five engines instead of one, and 20 tires
instead of four, meaning maintenance and fuel costs are some multiple higher,
and wear-and-tear on the road surface is higher, noise and air pollution are
higher. Among other things.

>What if instead of the city, I own one of these minivans?

Then you have to go through an additional middleman, the city, to find parking
for your 1/5-of-a-bus and permission to drive on certain roads, in certain
lanes, etc. Among other things.

~~~
jungler
When I last did some armchair thinking about transport modes my conclusion was
only a little bit removed from parent's basic hypothesis, just with one
critical detail: It's not that one mode will rule them all, it's that the
friction of switching modes is likely to go further and further down until we
have successfully "containerized" or "packet switched" transit.

So, instead of envisioning it as "5 minivans vs 1 bus", it's a system that
smoothly transfers you from street to car to bus to train to plane and back.
You get the "now" of low latency, and then you transfer up a step to get speed
and efficiency.

Right now we have very primitive notions of multi-mode: every transfer is time
consuming and difficult on the psyche, often involving new fare systems,
security checks, navigating transfer points, delays, tolls, parking, and so
on. This is a big factor in our tendency to bias towards a single mode and
overbuild infrastructure for that mode.

Portable electrics are a big step forward in moving up the baseline: they're
roughly person-sized without too much additional weight. An imagined standard
for docking them in a larger vehicle or running them in a convoy is not too
far-fetched, but will probably still take a lifetime to be realized with all
the involved political factors.

~~~
dragonwriter
But while ganging or docking is nice, you don't really need it to get most of
the benefits; low-friction transfers by eliminating the huge parking lots that
you half to walk from at the interface of small personal last-mile (or last-
few-miles) transport with larger long-distance transport gets you much of the
way to the kind of network you seem to want, and only really takes autonomous
on-demand vehicles and integrated payment and reservation systems, not
ganging/docking. You've got some buffering at transfer points still, but much
less friction than in the status quo.

~~~
hammock
>eliminating the huge parking lots that you half to walk from at the interface
of small personal last-mile

We don't need autonomous vehicles to do that. Valet parking exists.

~~~
dragonwriter
> We don't need autonomous vehicles to do that.

Yes, we do.

> Valet parking exists.

Valet parking is labor intensive, doesn't scale on-demand easily, (because it
is labor intensive), ands a lot more latency on both ends than autonomous (or
chauffered, but that's also labor intensive) drop off/pickup even if the labor
is provisioned optimally (and gets worse very fast with slightly
underprovisioned labor.)

It's decent for providing an up-charged lower-latency option for an elite,
higher paying subset of customers, or optimizing parking density with less
concern for latency for a larger customer base, but it's not nearly as good as
on-demand last-mile transport for reducing endpoint transfer latency.

------
devwastaken
>humantransit.org >Resource limit reached

Now this is real life immersion.

Cached version:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0sKpw3...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0sKpw3K785IJ:https://humantransit.org/2017/07/the-
dangers-of-elite-projection.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

------
tivert
I'm getting a:

> Resource Limit Is Reached

> The website is temporarily unable to service your request as it exceeded
> resource limit. Please try again later.

Here's an archive link that works:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20190102183318/https://humantran...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190102183318/https://humantransit.org/2017/07/the-
dangers-of-elite-projection.html)

------
clairity
this elite projection describes the common phenomenon of outsiders (and even
local elites) disparaging LA for having no/crappy public transportation, which
is odd to me as an multimodal angeleno who gave up my car years ago.

this admission was refreshing and identifiable:

> "And since I’m one of these elites — not at all in wealth but certainly in
> education and other kinds of good fortune — it’s sometimes my work as well."

but this is probably of most interest here, with all the talk of autonomous
vehicles:

> "Now, the same mistake powers the endless vague promises of tech disruption
> in transit, especially the mathematically absurd notion that transit that
> comes to your door when you call it will scale to the entire population of a
> dense city."

basically he says we don't have enough (road) space for every person to be
taken directly from point to point in a vehicle. currently this is (partially)
solved by having people walk the last mile.

let's have electric scooters/bikes at every train and bus stop--they can solve
the point-to-point first/last mile problem while being relatively dense. not
everyone will use them, but with critical mass, it will reduce overall
congestion.

~~~
TulliusCicero
> this elite projection describes the common phenomenon of outsiders (and even
> local elites) disparaging LA for having no/crappy public transportation,
> which is odd to me as an multimodal angeleno who gave up my car years ago.

Los Angeles has a transit mode share of only 5%, which is extremely low for a
principal city with a metro population of 13 million. This is a good indicator
that its public transportation is indeed very weak.

To be sure, though, they've been steadily improving it.

~~~
clairity
interesting, how is that transit share calculated? ridership / regional
population?

i’m certainly not trying to say LA is a beacon of transit, but it’s not all
cars here. it’s quite possible to get around without driving.

------
helen___keller
Reminds me of the constant inclusion of stock market values in political
discourse. Stock market up in 2017? Trump takes credit. Stock market
correction in December 2018? Everyone blame Trump for your investments taking
a hit.

Thing is, there's a whole lot of people out there with no money in the stock
market at all (or only in a 401k, not in an account that can be liquid in the
short term). It seems fair that the fixation with the stock market is another
example of elite projection.

Sure, the market matters and market trends are correlated with more concrete
figures like employment rates and wage growth, but it's just that, a
correlation.

~~~
esotericn
Average wage growth and employment rates across a country are irrelevant for,
well, almost anyone that's not specifically studying them.

Even on a more local level - the median income in London, say, is not
interesting to a shop worker, and neither is it to a lawyer. It's just another
Statistic(tm).

I don't know of anyone else (in real life) who even knows what the median
income is, and about the only thing I've ever used median incomes for is to
determine that the median person in my city is a serf (you'd require about
double that to buy a small apartment).

By contrast, the stock market is at least interesting to anyone who has any
savings (because market return is your baseline expectation for an
investment). It should also be interesting to those who aspire to have savings
(which, at least rationally, should be most people).

That latter point specifically is important because most people believe in, or
at least desire, upward mobility. I (a person below the retirement age) expect
that in ten years' time I'll have more than I do now. It would be odd for me
to expect otherwise; that would imply that I should just sack off working and
enjoy myself whilst I can.

I agree that linking it with things like presidencies is silly, though.

~~~
helen___keller
>Average wage growth and employment rates across a country are irrelevant for,
well, almost anyone that's not specifically studying them.

True, it doesn't directly address any single person's wallet but it paints a
picture that actually includes every single person with an income. I don't
know, maybe there's a better metric, but specifically the point I'm trying to
make is this:

>By contrast, the stock market is at least interesting to anyone who has any
savings (because market return is your baseline expectation for an
investment).

This is exactly the "elite projection" the article is talking about. For most
people, "savings" refers to a checking account or savings account that can be
withdrawn from on a rainy day. These will always have a negligible return
rate. I believe that around 13 percent of families own stocks directly, less
than that for other major types of non-retirement investments, and 53 percent
a retirement account ( see
[https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/scf17.pdf](https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/scf17.pdf)
table 3 on page 18 ).

I mean, the stock market IS interesting in it's own right, and I can see why
the news reports on a big correction and what not. But it's interesting in the
same way that currency conversion rates can be interesting - because it holds
some kind of macroeconomic significance. Not because a large percentage of
Americans regularly move a large amount of cash between countries.

~~~
esotericn
I don't disagree that most individuals aren't directly invested in the stock
market.

I'm specifically addressing your comment regarding median wage and
unemployment - these figures are completely useless for anyone who isn't an
economist (whether for professional reasons or otherwise).

It's vaguely useful to know that median wage hasn't doubled or that
unemployment isn't at 50%, that's about it.

There is no possible metric that would be useful to an average, because the
average person is in a bad situation, and any individual's best course of
action is to aim to get out of that situation.

------
xte
Hum.

Few sparse thoughts: élites I may know have mostly a marginal interest in
public transportation witch is making money through it. If it's not profitable
is of no interest.

At least European élites, with the notable but marginal exception of very few
politics or other VIPs move on _private_ transport not public one.

Interest in public transport have political and military interest for both
reduce/control ability of individual to move and possible vulnerabilities in
case of war scenarios but again "efficient public transportation for the
masses" is not really in any bullshit-free agenda's. The sole
political/military push toward "personal car free" society, concentrated in
megacities serve the purpose to easier control people:

\- control a city require few manpower than a vast area, more in detail to
control a city you need only a fraction of human inside on your side, to
control a vast area you need more human on your side than the
"target"/"enemy";

\- control a city is easier simply because a city consume food, energy, water
etc but do not produce most of it nor it can so cutting supply means cutting
city off;

\- a city is a nice and easy target: you can shoot and being sure to create
significant damage;

\- public transportation is nice: lock it (it's easier than lock many
individual's vehicles, especially if they are not connected so not easy to
disable en masse from remote) and anyone will be on foot.

I do not really see other interest. Maybe there are economical interest from
the enterprises that can gain big money on creation and maintenance of public
transport network...

~~~
TulliusCicero
> The sole political/military push toward "personal car free" society,
> concentrated in megacities serve the purpose to easier control people:

People being concentrated in larger cities is mostly an outcome that comes
from the free market. Higher population levels helps bring about higher levels
of economic productivity, and people go where there are jobs.

Having decent public transit -- and walk and bike options, for that matter --
in urban areas is just good policy. No conspiracies necessary, it's just good
to have more options, especially more geometrically efficient ones when space
is at a premium.

Trying to ignore transit just gets you to LA's position, where they built
mountains of freeways and got the worst traffic in the country in return, with
poor options to bypass that traffic for most of the local population.

~~~
xte
Without conspiracy can you tell the name of a sustainable _and evolvable_
magacity? I found exactly NO one, not only of existing one's but also
hypothetical in some architect's published ideas.

The first and most important reason is space: a city can't evolve because the
lack of space. While it might be possible in theory grow the city and after
have people moving from the old part to a new one to demolish and rebuild the
new one no city I know of have ever being able to do so in practice. I do not
know big not-crowded not polluted cities. I do not know any "safe" city in
terms of various kind of possible events from floods to earthquake to
terrorist attack to military attacks...

I do not want to say that's there are conspiracy-like factors to push towards
megacities but I only see a big prevalence of negative things than positive,
so no reason to push nor want to be in even small cities...

~~~
TulliusCicero
> Without conspiracy can you tell the name of a sustainable and evolvable
> magacity?

What does this even mean?

> so no reason to push nor want to be in even small cities...

Well it's easy, cities are way more economically productive than rural areas,
so they create more jobs. Creating effective businesses benefits from a larger
local market both in terms of hiring specialists of various sorts, and also in
terms of targeting customers (for local businesses like restaurants).

If this wasn't true, you'd see more companies like Google dumping their HQ's
into rural areas with cheap housing and cheap wages. They don't though,
because their workers don't want to live out there.

~~~
xte
My English is poor so sometimes I write convoluted sentences since I do not
know how to construct them, sorry, I mean did you know ANY sustainable
reasonably big city? I do not know any.

Cities might seems to be more productive since our developed countries switch
from production to tertiary sector _but_ that's thanks to the rest of
productive world that's now in easter Europe, Asia, Africa, South America etc.
So in general cities are not more economically productive, it only offer more
options per land area since there is more concentration but with the exception
of tertiary sector you simply can't have industry, agriculture, breeding, ...
in cities and well... We all need to eat, we all use industry-made product
from bottom up.

The problem of "countryside" is the concentration of alternatives per land
area, you may have nearby a sole productive and attractive activity, if
something happen to it you might have to go far away to found another option.
In cities being concentrated you normally have more options nearby. However
this is most a matter of economic organization that's still do not understand
to much how to use territory than a mere thing from being in the countryside
itself. Perhaps the most sustainable model we actually have in place is the
Riviera one's with enough space to evolve and enough concentration of
opportunities.

Google HQ is a tertiary sector activity and require hi-speed connections so a
city is a nice place for it, however did you know where most data centers are?
Did you know where we produce electricity for them? Concrete, Steel, Plastic,
... that is needed for them? That's a _big_ point that many today forget but
in case of real crisis that's represent a _real_ and dangerous problem because
if producer are not anymore in your country and are not anymore willing to
work/commerce with you, you are TFU.

That's a thing USA and even more UK should have learned from China, we western
Europeans should have learned from Easter EU...

~~~
TulliusCicero
> I mean did you know ANY sustainable reasonably big city?

Big cities are more sustainable than suburban or rural areas, not less. Per
capita energy usage in those cities is lower.

> in general cities are not more economically productive

Yes, they are. You can't just handwave away that their economic output is
higher because you don't like the particular sectors that are more popular in
cities.

~~~
xte
> Per capita energy usage in those cities is lower.

Oh, sure and where in a city you _produce_ food? Industrial product? I know
for sure that an apartment consume less energy than a single house to be
heated/cooled. It consume more to being built and maintained though and more
important it can't be really used without non urban area... That's the real
problem.

On economic productivity it's the same: more money turn, but they turn because
suburb exists, without them it's like the ancient I think Sioux Chief that say
"when you finish fish what you count to do? Eat dollars?"...

This is the _real_ sustainability I talk about.

Without counting the amount of prime matter and energy needed to build big
architecture vs small distributed ones.

~~~
TulliusCicero
> It consume more to being built and maintained though

No, it doesn't. Not on a per capita basis.

> it can't be really used without non urban area... That's the real problem.

The number of people that have to be farmers and living on-site on a farm is
very small in a developed country. There are way more people living in rural
or exurban/low density areas than are necessary to make food.

> more money turn, but they turn because suburb exists

Not really, or at least you don't need American-style, super low density
suburbs. Medium density suburbs are popular in Europe and work fine.

~~~
xte
It's hard to compute but only try to estimate the cost of build a subway train
with it's relatives stations, depots etc and the energy it consume. If you
compute well enough you'll that it require _far_ more resources than private
vehicle in a countryside are. Even if you compute "CEP" (a french index that
means primary (non renewable) energy/resources consumption, I do not know
correspondent metric in English) of a a groups of single family's houses, with
micropoles foundations screwed on ground and the rest in wood, glass and
plastic/aluminum/... built with medium/high quality and proper insulation vs a
single tall building for the same number of people and similar construction
quality you still see that you consume more non-renewable/recyclable resources
to build the single tall building than the many individual houses and if those
are really well designed and built (so they can be heated and cooled with
little non-renewable energy) you'll see that even energy consumption is better
in individual houses. Simply because they have enough place for solar-thermal
panels, efficient double-flux VMC at today's tech and cost are far more
efficient, airtightness can cheaply be superior etc.

Many do not think that simply because do not know how modern houses are built
nor how modern tall building are built and do not even see the mass of steel
and foundation they have.

On living: you automatically agree that cities are not sustainable by
themselves so we need to be low density and in nature, of course we can
discuss density and it's variation depending on natural resources place per
place but that's the point. We can automatize as we want but we need nature,
we can't live for now in isolated artificial environments nor cities nor
boats/submarine/starships. And that's probably will remain true for centuries
to came.

My personal opinion is that a low density Riviera model is the best for now,
where low density means low enough to been able to "survive" with local
natural resources but no more so we still need commerce and cooperation but we
can life in a not-so-comfortable and not-so-terrible way without. For my
actual place (French alps) it means something around 8-10 humans per square km
maximum in medium. Moderately concentrated like "USA dream" (single houses
with a bit of private garden around, like 5/10 time the ground occupation of
the house itself) in good place with place for nature around.

You may counter-arguments that a capillary, well maintained roads network is
not cheap however being Italian I see the difference on roads between few
countries and french's one are definitively cheaper than many other and even
cheaper than highways. We still need some kind of ground high speed network
but in a Riviera scenario with enough "local" economy that need is far less
important than inter-urban networks.

~~~
TulliusCicero
> It's hard to compute but only try to estimate the cost of build a subway
> train with it's relatives stations, depots etc and the energy it consume. If
> you compute well enough you'll that it require far more resources than
> private vehicle in a countryside are.

No, it won't. A subway train is obviously fairly resource intensive to build
and operate, no argument there, but compared to the resources to build rural
highways for an equivalent number of people? There's no comparison.

A single subway line somewhere like NYC may serve the daily needs of a couple
hundred thousand people. Enough highways to serve a couple hundred thousand
people scattered throughout, say, several different counties would be far more
resource intensive in the long run (building the subway might take more up
front since you're underground, but you don't need as much deep maintenance
and repair because there's fewer weather issues).

> you still see that you consume more non-renewable/recyclable resources to
> build the single tall building than the many individual houses and if those
> are really well designed and built (so they can be heated and cooled with
> little non-renewable energy) you'll see that even energy consumption is
> better in individual houses.

I doubt this. I mean, I could maybe see it for skyscrapers, because building
materials and standards for those are really intense. But if you compare
single family homes for 100 people to a 5 story apartment block for 100
people, the apartment block is going to massively win in efficiency. And most
major cities just don't need -- or have -- many skyscrapers. Even in NYC and
Tokyo, a very small % of land is actually occupied by skyscrapers. Take a look
on Google Maps 3D view if you don't believe me.

> you automatically agree that cities are not sustainable by themselves

Cities take less energy. Fact. Yes, a few people would need to live in more
rural areas, but a) the point is that 2% rural + 98% urban would be vastly
more energy efficient than whatever distribution we have now, and b) even many
people in rural areas _could_ live in denser forms. For example, small towns
in Germany have way more apartments and the like than small towns in the US,
and they're not as car dependent too.

> My personal opinion is that a low density Riviera model is the best for now,
> where low density means low enough to been able to "survive" with local
> natural resources but no more so we still need commerce and cooperation but
> we can life in a not-so-comfortable and not-so-terrible way without.

This is completely insane. Spreading people out that much from cities where
they currently live would absolutely devastate nature. You'd have to clear cut
giant swathes of forests and build on prairies all over the world to hit 8-10
people per sq km or even close to that.

If the global population was a few hundred million people, that level of
density could probably work, but it's not. We have far too many people to have
that level of impact on the planet per person.

Honestly, you just sound so dead set on loving super low density living that
you're completely unwilling to listen to any facts. It's a fact that living in
urban areas takes less energy than suburban or rural areas. It's a fact that
the impact on the environment is far less that way. It's a fact that only a
handful of people need to live somewhere to farm, and this number continues to
drop over time.

No, highways are not more efficient than subways(1). No, single family homes
are not more efficient than apartments. You're entitled to your own opinions,
but not your own facts, sorry.

(1) - "Heavy rail transit such as subways and metros produce on average 76%
lower greenhouse gas emissions per passenger mile than an average single-
occupancy vehicle (SOV). Light rail systems produce 62% less and bus transit
produces 33% less (Public Transportation’s Role in Responding to Climate
Change (PDF))." And this is in the US, which has transit that is, in the
large, kind of poorly designed (and has to adapt to a transit-hostile built
environment).

[https://www.transit.dot.gov/regulations-and-
guidance/environ...](https://www.transit.dot.gov/regulations-and-
guidance/environmental-programs/transit-environmental-sustainability/transit-
role)

