The Internaut

I’ve made the move, more or less to tumblr for what needs I have to air my errant thoughts.

So if you’re looking for Ben Woosley, or the thoughts thereof, you’ll find him here, in smaller but more frequent doses.

Cross-posted to the Seattle Transit Blog.

A few months back, Erica C. Barnett of Slog and our own Andrew called for parking maximum mandates for new construction in Seattle. Now, I can understand the appeal of parking maximums. After all, parking-induced sprawl ranks with pollution, gridlock and a more lethargic society as the worst effects of cars. However I’m more than skeptical of such maximums - not only does the evidence show we’re making good progress without them, I suspect they’re downright counterproductive to the mass transit cause. Surprised? Read on…

Big Bad Brix?

Erica gives the example of Brix condos’ 1.2 parking spaces per residential unit as an example of development gone awry, being inconsistent with the supposed will of Seattle’s people, who removed minimums downtown in 2006, and the lifestyle the surrounding urban landscape supports.

But it’s unfair and misleading to single out Brix’s parking ratio when it’s significantly lower than, for instance, Belltown’s average of 1.5; and Brix was already under development in 2006, when the minimums were dropped downtown. Do we really expect them to redesign their building on short notice to serve an unknown market? Developers and their creditors are understandably somewhat conservative when putting millions of dollars on the line, but this naturally changes with time, as developers experiment and discover parking-free housing to be viable.

And sure enough, if we look at more recent developments, we’re seeing evidence of that change, with planned parking ratios as low as 0.9 in high-rise housing, and as low as 0.67 at “medium-rise” fare such as Moda.

Selling to Whom?

Erica goes on to say:

The problem with simply eliminating minimum parking requirements is that developers can still build as much parking as they want—and that extra $20,000-$30,000 gives them a strong incentive to do just that.

The idea that the extra expense of a parking space is somehow an incentive to build it only makes sense if people are willing to pay for that substantial extra expense. If not it’s just dead weight, and the extra expense will make those units less marketable and reduce the demand for that unit. It all hinges on how many buyers are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a cement box to put their car in.

It’s not hard to find evidence of developers looking to earn the housing dollars of car-free urban buyers such as myself: Moda here and The Civic in Portland, for example, build units with the express purpose of offering them at lower cost, without parking attached. Other developers, wondering where this sort of development can fly, are putting the question to the public.

So again, added expense is not some irrepressible incentive. It’s an incentive only to the extent that people are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars to have a place to store their cars. This willingness is dependent on the real needs and desires of people, including ourselves. The corollary being: the better car-free parking sells, the more examples of it we’ll see in the future, and the lower parking ratios will go. As such, it’s incumbent upon us to consider our own options when we make a move. Might you be able to find a better deal by also taking care to support your ideals?

Unintended Consequences

But Andrew here focuses on the areas around light rail stations. Isn’t it reasonable that we should have less parking there? The answer, of course, is a resounding yes, and it’s easy to predict that they will typically have lower parking ratios than buildings elsewhere, even without intervention, because transit serves them better so the buyers see less value in a parking space and aren’t as likely to be willing to pay a premium for one.

But even in this situation we should hesitate from putting maximums in place, because maximums can absolutely do more harm than good. If a maximum actually reduces the number of spaces that are built, it must also reduce the value of the properties that could be built there. If not, entrepreneurial builders themselves would build at those rates, once they understood the demand was there. But push maximums below their natural equilibrium and the value of development in the restricted area will be less because many people aren’t willing to live the transit & car sharing lifestyle just yet, so those units will have more supply than demand. When you reduce the demand to live in a certain area by imposing restrictions on the ways those people can live there, you naturally reduce the builder’s incentive to build housing in that region. So while you’re “saving” space by not building parking, at the same time you’re taking potential housing space away, because the builders won’t build as high, or as quickly.

When you reduce the amount of housing around these stations, you reduce the most obvious, frequent source of ridership. When you reduce ridership, you reduce the real value of the entire transit network. Fewer people ride, so fewer business pop up to serve the ridership. Fewer employees can easily use transit to commute to these businesses, and fewer employers settle along the line, because it connects them to fewer employees and customers. At the same time, it makes areas with unrestricted parking relatively more attractive, encouraging development there. It’s a policy which encourages the city to migrate away from transit, not towards it. All because fewer housing units were built, because we were too eager to realize a future which will come on its own, in time.[1]

The Real Problems

So I’d say the problem is not that we need to force the evil developers to do what “the people” want them to. Nor do we need to discourage people from living around transit with inflexible limits. Parking maximums are unnecessary and counter-productive. But there are other great ways to help push the ball in the right direction.

We can start by fighting to get Seattle to drop it’s remaining minimum parking requirements. There’s no good reason people should be forced to buy a cement car-box along with their house just because they don’t live downtown. That’s the ridiculous part, that’s the part against the will of the people. It also happens to be the cause of a number of other problems, such as a higher cost of housing and the unimpressive architecture of townhomes.[2]

Likewise, Erica mentions so-called “unbundling” regulations which require parking to be sold separately from housing. I think these are a great way to help transit users opt out of parking, while ensuring buyers are explicitly confronted with this car expense.

Finally, we can keep fighting and voting for better, more responsive transit system. Rather than attempt to drag drivers out of their cars, why not entice them with a fast, frequent, reliable system which they want to use? IMO it’s a much friendlier way to build a city, and the challenge forces us to create better answers.

Read more »

For all you people looking to wed eventually, a great article on the future of man-made diamonds, which makes some interesting points worth repeating:

1. Diamonds are not actually that rare, except that most diamond production is owned by a single cartel (De Beers) which constrains the output to prop up prices and create the appearance of scarcity:

   Natural diamonds aren’t particularly rare. In 2006, more than 75,000 pounds were produced worldwide. A diamond is a precious commodity because everyone thinks it’s a precious commodity, the geological equivalent of a bouquet of red roses, elegant and alluring, a symbol of romance, but ultimately pretty ordinary.

   Credit for the modern cult of the diamond goes primarily to South Africa-based De Beers, the world’s largest diamond producer. Before the 1940s, diamond rings were rarely given as engagement gifts. But De Beers’ marketing campaigns established the idea that the gems are the supreme token of love and affection. Their “A Diamond Is Forever” slogan, first deployed in 1948, is considered one of the most successful advertising campaigns of all time. Through a near total control of supply, De Beers held almost complete power over the diamond market for decades, carefully hoarding the gemstones to keep prices—and profits—high. While the company has lost some of its power to competitors in Canada and Australia over the past few years, it still controls almost two-thirds of the world’s rough diamonds.

2. Diamonds will soon be easily producible in a lab, which will be excellent for industry

   With a cheap, ready supply of diamonds, engineers hope to make everything from higher-powered lasers to more durable power grids. They foresee razor-thin computers, wristwatch-size cellphones and digital recording devices that would let you hold thousands of movies in the palm of your hand. “People associate the word diamond with something singular, a stone or a gem,” says Jim Davidson, an electrical engineering professor at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. “But the real utility is going to be the fact that you can deposit diamond as a layer, making possible mass production and having implications for every technology in electronics.

3. Unlike diamonds that come from the dirt, man-made diamonds aren’t socially nor environmentally destructive
   

   Like most open-pit mines, diamond mines cause erosion, water pollution and habitat loss for wildlife. Even more troubling, African warlords have used diamond caches to buy arms and fund rebel movements, as dramatized in the 2006 movie Blood Diamond. Actor Terrence Howard wears a diamond lapel pin with Apollo stones. He told reporters, “Nobody was harmed in the process of making it.”

The ultimate point is, when real diamonds are cheaply producible in a lab, they won’t likely have the luster which comes with scarcity. So ladies, please don’t expect your man to spend thousands on a ring because it has a shiny rock on it. Or at least, don’t expect that rock to be quite as shiny for much longer.

Cross-posted from Seattle Transit Blog.

Ben W. here, back from a long summer, now under the name Empact, which is a handle I use elsewhere online, and which is hopefully less confusing in light of the esteemed Ben Schiendelman.

So, I was reviewing the new Sound Transit site Andrew alluded to, and it reminded me of a thought I had earlier, which is loosely, and with tongue in cheek, that “everything bad is good.” Specifically, the transit life includes a few attendant concerns, which some would scoff at, but which I revel in. For example, rarely, I’m on a schedule or on the edge of a knife, and it’s necessary for me to run to catch the bus. Some would say, “what trouble,” but I know I don’t run nearly enough, and every bit helps. Then, and at the vast majority of times when I don’t have to run, I, like Sumit, very much appreciate my walks.

Likewise, someone with limited interests might be frustrated with 30 minutes or an hour of transit time, which would otherwise be consumed with focus on the bumper ahead of you, but I, like Pat and her “golden hours,” revel in it. I haven’t come close to exhausting the different concerns I’d like to investigate. For example, aside from reading I’ve been know to watch feature films in 20-30 minute increments, and to me this is a treat, something which calls back to the days of the serial radio broadcasts, where instead of hearing “listen next week to find out…,” I get to wonder throughout the day what’s in store, until I return.

I definitely detected this seemingly optimistic attitude, in the videos I saw, in Sumit’s walk, and in Pat’s “me time.” Does this mean that transit is particularly fit for the optimists? Or rather that, as Esther says, “We can make our lives as easy or as difficult as we want,” with us on the easy side (given our circumstances)? For what it’s worth, the other Pat’s initial, temporary reticence, his concern before he knew enough to be won over, seems to support the latter.

I’ve remarked privately from time to time how I couldn’t possibly achieve the things I’ve been working on without a million bits of work put forth by others. The list is massive, everything from the OS I live in to the web framework I build on and the language it’s written in, to my source-control management program & IDE, my browser, and a million smaller pieces. Not to mention the many web services, both commercial and not-for-profit, and various tools disguised as websites.

Most important of these, lately, seems to have been the git & github team. I’d never done much open-source development in my days, before picking up git. Even if I made changes to an existing project, it was too much a fuss to publish changes, and I was busy with other things. Busy enough that what changes I made, I kept for myself. But now it seems that git(hub) has changed that. Over the past few months I’ve made a number of contributions, of minor significance, but am graduating into more interesting territory, which is this, ROXML 2.0.

ROXML is short for “Ruby Object to XML Mapping Library.” XML goes in, Ruby objects come out. In these days, with web-services flying so freely across the web, and XML being one of the common languages thereof, it seems useful that one might be able to declare a mapping in the form of a collection of objects, then extend those objects with functionality, and interact with them cleanly, as objects, not as structured text.

I had just this need, and came across ROXML and a number of other similar options. I picked ROXML because it was relatively clean, simple and to the point. I’ve been hacking away at in in the spare parts of my nights and weekends and by now there’s very little recognizable from the original library, so I figure it’s time to release :-).

For an initial look at ROXML, you can see John Nunnemaker’s recent post, or the old site & the docs therein. I’ll be using those as a baseline.

A syntax makeover

Now, I can be a stickler for syntax. As I’ve said before, syntax matters. It changes the way we interact with the system, it changes what is done, how it is done, and what can be done.

Take, for example, the old syntax:

class Posts
  include ROXML

  xml_attribute :user
  xml_attribute :tag
  xml_object :post, Post, ROXML::TAG_ARRAY
end

Read-only-ability

There’s something important missing in those definitions above. Quick, is :user modifiable, or no? What about :tag and :post? Surely it’s one or the other, but which?

It turns out that the attributes above are writable, which is the default. To override this you’d have to write the following:

xml_attribute :user, ROXML::TAG_READONLY

As syntaxes go, this is a pretty obtuse barrier to const-correctness, and will likely lead to most developers simply leaving their attributes writable, even when more restrictive setting would be correct. The Ruby community may have cast aside strict typing, but const-correctness is still a very important part of object-oriented programming, what with factoring being all about minimum exposure and minimum coupling, and it ought to be treated as such.

The solution is to treat writability the same way the standard attr methods do, by making it a key part of the declaration name. The type name is relegated to a parameter, which gives us flexibility we’ll exploit later. In short, you end up with this:

# read-only:
xml_reader :user, :attr

# writable:
xml_accessor :user, :attr

Object-tivity

Now you may notice above that :attr declares the referenced type as the second argument. This is consistent throughout and there are several more types. They are:

• :attr: an xml attribute on the current node, returned as text
• :text: the contents of a named sub-node, returned as text
• :content: the contents of the current node, returned as text
• Object: Any ROXML object can be provided to declare sub-types, including recursive types (provided recursion terminates)
• [Object], [:text]: Put the type in an Array to declare that there are multiple instances of this type which should be provided in a collection
• {}: A hash type can be populated with sub-nodes and attributes, in various ways

:text is the default, if no type is declared,

Named args & TAG_what?

The old ROXML uses only positional arguments and these TAG_ constants to declare aspects of the declaration. But the ROXML::TAG_ stuff is unnecessarily heavyweight, so the new ROXML uses symbols instead, e.g. :cdata rather than ROXML::TAG_CDATA.

Likewise, many optional arguments are now named, rather than positional. So rather than have to put in the default values for these parameters, or nil, you can simply omit them. So these:

xml_text :name, 'NAME', ROXML::TAG_CDATA & ROXML::TAG_READONLY, 'USER'
xml_text :name, nil, ROXML::TAG_READONLY, 'USER'

Become:

xml_reader :name, :from => 'NAME', :in => 'USER', :as => :cdata
xml_reader :name, :in => 'USER'

The options map as follows:

• :in: Previously ‘wrapper’
• :from: Previously ‘name’
• :else: Used to declare a default value in case the entity is missing; previously unavailable
• :as: Previously ‘options’. Can be passed as a singly symbol, or multiple in an array

Hash attack!

One of the more important additions is the Hash base type mapping. Hash declarations have a syntax of their own which enable you to pull from attributes, contents, names and sub-nodes of a series of entries. This can be super-useful for web-services which provide collections of named attributes, which fit naturally in this type. The ROXML documentation covers these cases well.

Here’s a few example of the syntax:

xml_reader :definitions, {:attrs => ['dt', 'dd']}

xml_reader :definitions, {:key => {:attr => 'word'},
                                   :value => :content}, :in => 'definitions'

Blocks, yo

As xml is by its very nature textual, it may be necessary to coerce it into a certain type or otherwise modify the data before it makes proper sense in the context of an object. As such you can supply a block which enables you to modify the incoming text, for example:

xml_reader :count, :attr do |val|
  Integer(val)
end

Under the hood

Finally, an invisible improvement is that I’ve moved it over to libxml-ruby rather than REXML, for the sake of performance. So it should be significantly zippier on large sets of data, though to be honest I’ve done no profiling to confirm this.

Wrapping up…

So there you have it. You can get the gem from my github. You can see the docs here. I’ll see if I can get this onto the official rubyforge site as well.

The code is fresh, and while I’ve increased testing on it significantly (up to 131 assertions from the initial 25), there’s plenty of possibility for bugs therein. Please just send me a message or pull request on github if you run into anything.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank Anders Engstrom, Zak Mandhro and Russ Olsen for their prior work on ROXML, which made this all a lot easier to get going. Thanks guys.

I received notice earlier today that a photo I’d taken was to be used in an editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. I’m glad to see my work (loosely speaking) get out there, but I had some issues with the editorial itself, and posted the following response:

As the taker of the photo (seriously), I have other thoughts on the subject.

I don’t agree that governmental health care reform is the way to go, without knowing more about the specific legislation. I looked up the one you mention, and found not a lot to like. Specifically, this is a big problem:

In exchange for all of this consumer support, the Wyden-Bennett plan would require individuals to have health insurance (an individual mandate), which must be purchased from a state-run purchasing pool that would require health policies to have substantial benefits (rich benefit mandates) and offer a choice of private policies. - source

This is a problem because health insurance itself is largely the culprit in our broken system. To make a Massachusetts-style health insurance mandate would only reward those who screwed things up in the first place, while perpetuating an inefficient system.

My point in taking the picture was that insurance itself has got way out of hand, because it complicates the whole process. The key problem here is that health insurance isn’t used as “insurance” per se. Proper insurance (fire, flood, car, &c) covers unlikely but potentially devastating expenses. But regular health insurance covers far more, and inserts itself into almost every health transaction, to our detriment:

“Insuring primary care is like insuring lunch. You know you’re going to need it. You know you can afford it. Why on earth would you pay a third party to pay the restaurant on your behalf, adding overhead and taking a big chunk out of the money you pay—and because of the process, have to wait a week to get a table and then have only 10 minutes to eat?” - source

As it is, some 40-50 cents on the dollar goes to wrangling with insurers about payment, this is wasted value which the consumer never sees, and which drives up medical costs. The alternative I favor is the system put forth by Dr. Garrison Bliss, which has 3 parts:

1. A High-deductible health plan, i.e., insurance which only kicks in for catastrophic problems, such as cancer or a bad car accident. The premiums are much lower because the deductible is much higher (on the order of $1.5k).
2. A Health Savings Account, which you and your employer contribute to tax-exempt, and from which you pay most of your medical expenses. You can afford to have money here because your premiums are so much lower.
3. An enrollment with a Direct Primary Care provider, such as Dr. Garrison’s Qliance, where you pay a fixed rate (in this case ~$50/month, though it could go lower), and in return get real relationship with, and 24hr access to, a primary care physician, and other services (x-rays, labwork, at-cost pharmacy) which makes your primary care physician much more than just someone who refers you to a specialist after 10 minutes.

In this system, your Direct Primary Care provider (DPCp) can work unencumbered by insurance paperwork, and has a strong financial incentive both to keep you happy (and thus enrolled), and healthy (and thus safe at home, rather than in their office). In those cases where you need to go to a specialist (much less often than the status quo), your DPCp would act as an independent, knowledgeable advocate on your behalf, advising you on the necessity of procedures, and the reasonable costs of them. Here again, the DPCp does so because they want your continued business, not because they’re hoping to wring out another unnecessary procedure. Meanwhile, different DPC providers can directly compete, on costs and amenities, for the business of available patients.

Such a system would dramatically shift the balance of power back to the consumer and their doctor, rather than putting it in the hands of insurer overlords who get to decide your every medical transaction. People would have a real relationship with their primary care provider, who has a strong incentive to support them with ongoing preventative care. While competition and consumer choice work to push inefficiency out of the system, from top to bottom.

To me, this sounds a good deal better than the status quo, and other options I’ve heard.

Just to be clear, in the above system, the cost-savings and added benefits work out as follows:

• By removing multiple rounds of insurer paperwork from each transaction you save a large portion of the 40-50% currently spent on administrative costs.
• By maintaining a close relationship with a primary care doctor, on an enrollment basis, you greatly reinforce incentives to engage in preventative care, thus in many cases avoiding major health expenses by nipping them in the bud.
• Many lower-level emergencies which might otherwise send you to the (expensive) emergency room can instead be handled by your DPCp.
• As your DPCp is paid on a monthly basis, rather than per-procedure, they have no incentive to cajole you into unnecessary tests or procedures. This cuts down on medical expenses in general, by reducing unnecessary ones.

The net effect is the patient and primary care provider at the center of health care decisions, while potentially providing a significantly higher level of care for the same cost.

For completeness, this is a post of mine to Seattle Transit Blog from a few weeks back:

A few follow-ups to points raised in the comments to the previous post:

K said…

You’ve heard of these groups of more than 2 people called “families”, yes?

Yes of course! I was one of 7 myself. First of all, as you might expect, Amtrak maintains discounts for children 15 and younger, fully 1/2 off:

Child	2 - 15	50%	Up to two children per paying adult. Children must travel with adult. 1, 2
Infant	Under 2	Free	One infant per paying adult. Infants must ride on adult’s lap.

Also, as Steve points out in the comments, Amtrak maintains an off-season discount program from November to May which offers free companion travel (2 for the price of one) for trips from Seattle to Portland. Fully half the year! This ends on the May 23rd, but is something to keep in mind for your spring travel next year.

But my point extends to any number of people, discounts or no. It all comes down to how much your time, the environment, &c., are worth to you. Some are better off driving and some not, but in order to know who is which, it’s necessary to look at the numbers, to help overcome our natural biases.

I’ve extended the calculator to take these options into account here. Simply adjust the size of your party, the cost of tickets, or the MPG of your car, to get personalized information of what the costs are.

bellevue said…

I wish they would offer a multi person ticket rate, I like taking public transit but I’m never alone so the cost just does not work out.

See the above points about discounts and such.
Again, I’m not saying rail makes sense for everyone everywhere. I do think that people (even transit-savvy people) underestimate their options when it comes to Amtrak, though.

So even if you’re skeptical, please do check out the updated calculator and fill in your info, to get a real sense of the costs and how it compares to driving.

For completeness, this is a post of mine to Seattle Transit Blog from a few weeks back:

Your local ex-motorist (Ben W.) finally had his first rail trip last weekend, down to Portland and back, and I’ve some thoughts on the process, which I’ll be sharing over my next few posts.

The first question, for the many who have never taken regional rail or thought much about it, is why take rail? What does Amtrak have to offer, compared to the other options: the road-trip or the short distance flight?

I’ll skip over flights here because they’re easy to dismiss, particularly if you’re paying for them. They’re almost 3x the cost ($159 vs. $56), and while they’re faster in flight, when you count travel to and from the airport and security clearance time, the advantage wears down.

Cars on the other hand, you may see as your old, trusted companion for these trips, when perhaps they shouldn’t be. It may seem obvious to you that the $60 round trip cost of a train ticket is more expensive than driving yourself, but it’s as often false as true. One of our natural human biases is that we often ignore costs which accrue over time, if we’re not confronted with them directly. For example, as I mentioned in an earlier post, depreciation costs thousands a year, but you think more about this cost if you’re confronted with it each year than if you buy the car outright. This is despite the fact that the salable price for your car continually declines, so the economic cost is the same. Likewise, a roadtrip may feel like a liberating, low-cost experience, while the cost of the Amtrak ticket may seem high, when in fact the out-of-pocket costs are the same (for a single traveller, with the fuel efficiency below). You might think differently because paying the cost of fuel isn’t a precondition to starting your voyage, the costs come up after you’ve committed to the trip, and are thus easier to dismiss.

I put together this calculator to quantify this point. Note that you can edit the calculator values to put in your own car’s fuel efficiency, for example.

Now, this shows Amtrak and driving costs (for the single traveler) are essentially equal, on average, but there are qualifiers on both sides of this comparison. First of all, fuel costs are by no means the full cost of the car trip. Other costs include depreciation from the mileage you’re putting on your car, the potential cost of an accident, and the cost of your time in the car. Just like busing it to work, in the train you can work, read, or watch a film, while you can’t do the same in a car, and this has real value, as we’ll see.

Finally, the train is much more fuel-efficient than your car. While it’s difficult to say exactly how much more, wikipedia puts the figure somewhere between 1.25x and a whopping 20x the efficiency in the train. Note too, that the unimpressive lower figure is dubious, and more likely to be in-line with other rails systems, at 6x or better. Naturally, a train which uses less fuel also emits less pollution, to a similar extent. Adding to this effect is that rail, as point to point transport, encourages walkable, dense cities, rather than the highway system’s sprawl, so your use has long-term effects even beyond the benefits of the ride.

On the other hand, to be fair, cars do offer you greater flexibility, in timing, destination and route, and, importantly, the fuel and depreciation costs are fixed, while the rail costs are per-person. So you can pile 5 people into a car and travel at a fraction of the cost of the multiple rail tickets you’d need to buy. So there are legitimate reasons that it may be reasonable or necessary to take a car.

But even these points may not be as clear as they seem. While 5 people splitting the costs may be a clear win, 2 people is much more common scenario, and isn’t necessarily clear-cut. Even though the rail costs are now twice as much, this extra $60 over the cost of fuel has to then be weighed against the value of your free time. That $60 works out to just $5/hr of time ($60/(2 people * 6hrs round trip)), and as I mentioned, rail time is computer/book/movie time, while car time is often just that. Now, I’m not saying one is always and everywhere a clear win over the other, but along with the environmental and city benefits, one might think that paying $5/hr to be free to work or to write may be well worth it. Put another way, even at minimum wage, it takes fewer hours of work to earn those costs than the time over which you enjoy the benefits. At a standard wage (WA median household income / (52 wks * 40hrs) = roughly $30/hr), you’re each working for an hour to liberate yourself for 6.

So there you have it, for 1 person it’s a clear win, and for 2 or more, or for last-minute, higher-cost purchases, you should weigh the time and environment you save against the costs you pay. The point here is not to say that we should never need or use a car, but to give these things their appropriate measure, and have them coexist. So for your next trip to Portland or Vancouver, consider leaving the car at home and checking out Amtrak.

Update: I’ve got a follow-up post on Families and Discounts, in response to some questions in the comments.

Cross-posted to the Seattle Transit Blog.

Regarding my previous post, nickb asks:

My question is how did the transition happen. Was it more just a matter of you stopped using the car and started using just public transportation?

In a sense, yes, it was as simple as using transit instead of a car. However, it takes some actual effort to discover that it is possible to get where you want without that car you’re used to. For me, it was a process of migration and discovery, each step intentional, encouraged by the reasons I described earlier, but also testing the waters to ensure that I wasn’t choosing the path of martyrs. Happily, I can attest I was not.

The important benchmarks in my transition, which may be helpful in making yours, were:

1) Using Transit as a Commuter
As I wrote, busing it to work was a given, and it served the important role of introducing me to transit here. This was a significant step for someone whose transit use was previously non-existent as a child of the suburbs, and in Austin limited to my weekend use of the E-Bus (aka Drunk Bus) which runs between the University of Texas Campus and 6th Street (infamous for its numerous bars & venues).

2) The arrival of Google Transit
Don’t get me wrong, the King County Trip Planner is pretty good. But Google Transit (previously mentioned) does it much better, because it allows you to interact visually with your options on Google’s draggable, zoomable maps. This is a matter of night and day for anyone as visually-driven or memory-challenged (where was that street again?) as I.

Better still, it recognizes and accepts far more place names and address formats, so you need not hunt around for the address or answer questions about whether you really meant PL instead of Place. It’s free and highly recommended. To use it, you can either use the link above, or from any Google Maps directions page, click the “Take Public Transit” link in the upper left, once you have your destination plotted.

3) Taking the One-Less-Car challenge
The one-less-car challenge (also mentioned previously) offers incentives for those who commit to not using their vehicle for a set amount of time. The program isn’t active yet for 2008 (we’ll update you when it is), but you don’t need the program to get its most powerful benefit, which is the commitment itself.

Like others who have used this program, it was taking this challenge that pushed me to go out and try the other ways of getting around which I wasn’t used to; to rent a Flexcar even though I had my own car out on the street, or to take a bus to a seemingly out-of-the-way place. Only to find that the experiences where painless.

So look for the return of the challenge, or, if you’re able and willing, simply challenge yourself to go without your own car for a while. You may find it easier and more liberating than expected.

4) Renting my first Flexcar (now ZipCar)
For the foreseeable future, there will be parts of Seattle that aren’t well-traveled by transit, where either there is no route when you need it, or there is no direct route. Sometimes, those place happen also to be your destination for the night. My first Flexcar rental was also my first trip out to the (AFAIK) sleepy and suburban Mercer Island.

It was a pleasant trip, and easy to manage, in the time of computers (to find & reserve the car) and cell-phones (to extend the reservation if necessary).

I’ve since taken out a ZipCar, and the experience was the same, but a bit friendlier. For example, I find their web experience more intuitive, and there’s never a need to carry around the car’s key, because your card always does the locking.

5) Taking a bus out into the Unknown
Or in this case, Greenlake. All my time here, I’d traveled to and from my friends’ place in Greenlake via auto. But finally the aforementioned commitment pushed me to check out the other options (found via Google Transit), and I found them quite pleasant. The point being, just because you’ve never taken a bus over that way, doesn’t mean it’s inconvenient to do so. I’ve since traveled as far as Everett without incident.

A Step Not Yet Taken: Put the Internet in my pocket
The next big enabler I see in my future, which I’ll suggest to you all as an option, is the extra ease which will come once I have the internet in my pocket, via a web-enabled phone. Both for transit and ZipCar, a certain small amount of planning is necessary, to minimize waiting time and to know the route, or to find and reserve the car. Having the internet available from the street means that no matter where I am, or what I’ve been doing that day, if it comes up that I need to get somewhere unexpected, I can pull up these sites and find my way. Thus I’m a little more free, which of course is the goal.

Conclusion
So after all of these, I’ve made a successful transition. Everyone’s needs are different of course, or as they say, your mileage may vary, but I’ve found these steps are a sensible way to try things out.

Cross-posted to the Seattle Transit Blog.

Thoreau said that freedom was not only a situation apart from ourselves, from which a person could be plucked or into which one could be thrust, but also could be a consequence of our choices, the things we volunteer ourselves into, for our own reasons or on behalf of society.

In particular, he contrasts the lifestyles of the native peoples, whose simple habitations were easily constructed, with the farmers who would spend decades of work to pay off the mortgages on their homes. The farmers may have seemed better off, but at the same time they were bound to this heavy burden, which drove them to work the land rather than write, as Thoreau did, or simply live more simply. I don’t mean to romanticize the state of the natives, but there’s a legitimate question to be asked here: how free were the farmers, really? Had they unknowingly chosen to punish themselves because that was “the right thing to do” in the society they lived?

This concept of the unacknowledged burden became quite real to me recently when I unloaded myself of a burden which had once been, and remains to many, a symbol of freedom: my car.

I’ve been living in Capitol hill for the past year and a half. My drift away from the car started immediately; first it was obvious that the bus was an easier commute than my car, because on the bus I had my time to myself, and it spread from there. I’ve since read books, watched films, learned a fair amount of French and even done a bit of work on the bus. In fact, I largely wrote this post on the bus.

Over time, I built up a pretty clear case for giving up the car, which I share here because some of the arguments can be subtle, and may have been missed. I’ll try not to cover the obvious reasons, (i.e., the inconvenience of parking and the cost of gas and insurance), just 3 oft-ignored costs.

The Inconvenience of Maintenance
One cold night, a friend and I went to take my car out. It’d been a few weeks since I’d used it, but it had always been dependable, so imagine my surprised when the engine refused to turn over. No problem, it had just been out for a while and the battery had discharged. A jump from a helpful friend later, and I’m on the road. Perhaps I only need to drive a little while and the batter will be charged back up and good to go.

Wrong. Only after a month and a hand-full of attempted jumps, including one from a re-neg-er who said “um, this is taking longer than I expected, I’m gonna go back to my house” (5 minutes in and half a block away from her house) did we make it back to be fixed. The battery had gone bad.

All told, this event required hours of time, $200 in the cost of jumper cables and a battery, and the priceless aid of friends and passers-by, to be fixed. Time, money, inconvenience.

But beyond that, upon checking the car for the battery problem, the mechanics came back with a laundry list of concerns, adding up to thousands of dollars in potential maintenance, of questionable necessity.

Driving home the point that I didn’t have time for maintenance, one of their suggestions was that I replace my wiper blades, which were in fact bad. Apparently, they had failed to notice that I had a fresh pair in the backseat, which had been there for months but I’d never had the time to put in place.

The Cost of Depreciation
Yes, depreciation: the difference between what you could sell your car for last month and this; the value that your car loses over time. In my case, I drove a distinguished but not flashy two-door coupe, bought it for $9000 and two years later could sell it for around $6000. $3000 dollars over 2 years, and this for a 10 year old car!

This is not the cost you see flowing out of your wallet, but it’s the true economic cost. It exists, it’s substantial, and it’s an amount you should account for when comparing alternatives.

The Goal of Density
I’ve an appreciation for density for one important reason: cultural diversity. A major part of what determines whether a certain obscure genre can be represented in an art gallery, music venue or bar is the quantity of patrons willing to make the trip out to support that establishment. Greater density means more people within a given radius and thus a greater likelihood that enough people will be willing and able to travel to and support this establishment, keeping it alive.

This is one reason rural and suburban areas are so often cultural wastelands. Institutions can’t muster the support they need when their potential patrons are so spread out. You can’t have a gay bar and a metal bar and a indie bar and so on when you have a handful of each.

And spread out why? For the sake of lawns and parking. If there’s one thing which prevents a place from effectively becoming more dense, it is the roads and parking lots needed to support the car-only lifestyle. A one-car-per-person society has a hard limit on how dense it can become, and thus typically a practical limit on how culturally diverse it may be. But if we make the choice to minimize our own footprint, we open the door to greater density and all the attendant benefits.

Conclusion
So, when I finally relieve myself of my car, I not only save money (by relying on public transit and zipcar), lessen my impact on the environment, clear my mind & schedule by offloading the concerns of maintenance to those I rely on, and give myself time to read and to write, but I also help support a society in which it is possible for minority ideas & establishments to flourish in the support of their nearby constituents.

This is the liberation I’m finding as an ex-motorist.