Blame the Victim and Privatize the Grief

If You're Wrong, Go with the Big Lie

June 3, 2018. I got my t-shirt at 22nd and Spruce.

There's a well-worn playbook that's been used by the tobacco and asbestos industries and now seems to be an integral part of virtually any reactionary movement that deals with ideas. The basic principle is quite simple: Deny the premise. If scientists are saying that tobacco causes cancer, find some scientists who are willing to disagree. If argument doesn't work, go buy some scientific research that backs your side. If the war goes on long enough, found think tanks and give your best propagandists fancy, academic-sounding titles. (For background on this topic, see Wendell Potter, Deadly Spin, 2010, chapters 2 and 3. See also Jill Lepore, "The Lie Factory," The New Yorker, September 24, 2012.)

There's another template that came to my mind recently, after the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

Back in the 1920s, a new-fangled contraption called the automobile was busy slaughtering children in the streets of our nation's cities. And many people were unhappy about that, and they protested - there were marches, all kinds of things. (See Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic, 2011.)

The auto industry and its allies were taken aback by this uproar, and so they organized on a number of fronts. In particular they got state legislatures to change the traffic laws to make it illegal for pedestrians to cross in the middle of the street. This was a novel idea, and so "motordom," as it was called, didn't just sell it to the lawmakers. It also mounted a huge public relations campaign, even inventing the term "jaywalking."

With the law on their side, the auto lobby could then blame the victim. Little Johnny shouldn't have chased that ball out into the street. Or, what was he doing wearing dark clothes at dusk? On it goes, and it still goes on today. When a Duck boat driver killed a pedestrian down by the Reading Terminal Market, here in Philly, there was much tsk-tsking about how the pedestrian lacked sufficient situational awareness.

I wish I could say that the media have not been complicit in all this, but they are. Let's face it: Car ads are a huge category for print, television, and online media. Last year, for instance, a local television station did its best to blame a 14-year-old girl who was hit by a car while walking in a crosswalk in suburban Abington. (For a story on this, click here.)

In the end that driver was charged. In the Philadelphia Duck case, it was the insurance companies that finally shut the company down.

Okay, so blaming the victim is the setup punch. And here's the money punch. Motordom can say, with a straight face, that death on our roads is a private matter, not a concern of public policy. Mothers just need to do a better job keeping their children inside, playing violent video games and getting fat. The government doesn't need to do anything. Shouldn't do anything.

And by the way, speed limits are an un-American infringement of citizens' God-given rights. So our political class needs to balance freedom and death.

And the same thing happens with guns. Here the NRA has the advantage of the Second Amendment, which the Supreme Court has obligingly interpreted in a profoundly screwy way. So they've got the law.

But I don't think they're doing very well on blaming the victim, and we need to make sure that that continues to be the case. Because if they ever do get traction on that, then I think they'll have a good shot at privatizing the grief and removing the issue from the public agenda.

Fortunately, I think the NRA is playing a weak hand. Wayne LaPierre's famous statement that "The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun" is problematic on a number of levels. First, we now have many instances where a good guy with a gun was present and failed to prevent mayhem. Second, there are alternatives, like seeing that the bad guy doesn't have a gun. In a school setting, LaPierre's dictum also conjures the image of giving guns to kindergartners. Even the idea of arming teachers takes many people to a place they don't want to go.

At its core, the NRA's vision is profoundly dystopian, and their argument for irresponsible freedom only appeals to certain people.

That leaves them with raw power. But power in America almost always comes cloaked with virtue. Naked, it's a tough sell.

I think that leaves a very large gap for the kids from Marjory Stoneman Douglas to rush through, and I think the rest of us should follow. Call us the Utopians, or maybe the Shining City on a Hill Mob.

See also Cars and Bikes - the Back Story, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Guns Without Responsibility

Finding Our Way to a Parking Policy

Boardwalk, Ocean Grove.

I prepared this crib sheet for a meeting on parking in Philadelphia. I thought I would share it here. - wkw

PARKING PRIMER

2 Books

- Donald Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking (2011).

Shoup, who holds a Ph.D. in economics from Yale, has a very simple idea. He wants to replace our current, largely administrative, parking system with a market. The price of a parking spot will go up or down depending on demand for the spot. This is called "dynamic pricing."

The goal will be to maintain a peak occupancy rate of 85%, so people will be able to find a parking spot when they want one. The buzz word here is "access."

- Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic (2008).

Professor Norton looks at the question of why we have so many cars in our cities. It turns out that key decisions were made in the 1920s to build a monomodal ground transportation system focused on the private car, rather than a multimodal system that employed different types of vehicles as appropriate. Basic shortcomings of over-concentration on cars - such as congestion and crashes - were well known at the time and continue to be intractable.


3 Kinds of Parking

- At the curb. Cars are big and parking them on the street quickly swamps the street. Large garages are more efficient and effective.

Example: All the cars parked between Broad Street and the Schuylkill River on Spruce (11 blocks, 186 spots) and Pine (13 blocks, 215 spots) would fit comfortably in the nearby garage at 17th and South (546 spots).

- Large garages. Many urbanists don't like large garages because their blank walls are "street killers." Maybe they shouldn't have blank walls.

- Small garages. The classic example is the garage placed in a rowhouse where the living room should be. If the required curb cut eliminates a parking space, there is no net gain in parking spaces.

Some argue that there is a decline in net parking space, because the in-house garage is likely empty much of the time as the car gets used. An empty space at the curb or in a large garage can be occupied by another car.

Parking minimums for residential construction, in addition to being spatially inefficient, also drive up the cost of construction and make it that much harder for regular people to afford city living.


Shoup's 3 Recommendations

- Set the right price for curb parking. Numerous communities, most notably San Francisco, have successfully adopted dynamic pricing.

- Return parking revenue to pay for local public services. Shoup points to Old Pasadena: "Spending more than $1 million a year of meter money on new public services helped convert what had been a commercial skid row into one of the most popular tourist destinations in Southern California." (Shoup, p. xxviii.)

- Remove minimum parking requirements. "Like alcohol prohibition in the 1920s, minimum parking requirements do more harm than good and should be repealed." (P. xxxi.)

See also Measuring the Health of a Parking System and The Supreme Court and Parking.