The Data Confesses

The only science going on is political

*note this post is in response to the city’s recommendation to no longer convert Locust and Grand to two-way streets in a 10 block stretch of the core of downtown Des Moines*

I had the opportunity to be interviewed for an upcoming article on 15 minute cities from the University of Iowa, during which the interviewer at one point made a comment something along the lines of “It’s great that you’re out there as a positive voice for these changes”. Yeah….

Look I’m trying to be a positive voice, I really am. I tell myself every day that I need to be shouting the benefits of the things we’re doing right rather than criticizing the the things we’re doing wrong. Hell, I heaped praise on the city engineering department for their defense of the Euclid Ave road diet just a month ago.

Today is not that day.

For what its worth, I do have an engineering degree (the chemically kind not the civilly kind), so I’ll preface this with the fact that I have taken a lot of science and statistics classes in my life, even though this has nothing to actually do with science.

But in the world of science and statistics we have a saying: if you torture it enough, the data will confess to anything.

Well ladies and gentlemen, I want to applaud our engineering department because they have managed to manipulate and torture the data and facts so acutely that now multi-lane one way streets are better and safer than two way streets. Stop building two way streets. Period. They are dangerous, emergency vehicles can’t travel on them, and local communities don’t want them!

I’m not gonna dissect every element of their argument and reasoning, but suffice it to say that it had nothing to do with engineering and science and everything to do with politics. When people say that traffic engineering is a broken profession in the United States this is what they mean.

The fact that the city put the above slide into an older presentation, with their official emblem on it for me to conveniently screenshot, is hopefully something I’ll make them live to regret.

Just look at this bullshit.

The only two things they could think of and remember from the “stakeholder feedback” about the benefits of two way streets were that its slightly better for bus routes and street closures flexibility. That’s it! No one ever once said anything about traffic calming and safety. No businesses or local restaurateurs said it would be good for business. All of the stakeholder input and work that went into Connect Downtown to recommend converting to two way streets never happened. The only possible benefit for having a two way street downtown is a little more flexibility for the god damn bus.

The data will confess to anything.

ok.

Now to the positive. I guarantee this conversion will happen in my lifetime. We’re already doing it on the east and west ends of downtown, making the decision to keep this segment one way even stupider. The right way of doing things will win out over time.

As an urbanist I am indeed optimistic. We are slowly figuring out how to build communities for people and not cars again. Positive change will happen, it’s gonna take my generation and the ones coming after to do it, but we will get there.

But in the mean time we still go and do stupid things all too often.

The future of downtown is as a neighborhood, as a place for people. We are now locking in another decade or more of wide, dangerous multilane one way roads that encourage speeding, wrong way driving, racing and loop scooping. They confuse out of town visitors, and cause residents to think of downtown as a place to drive through rather that be in.

In the end the fact that we’re being this stupid comes down town one simple thing: people don’t like change. Downtown employers worry their workers won’t want to come back to the office if the roads look slightly different, they applied the pressure, and suddenly all the data looks different.

Confessions.

I’ll be positive tomorrow I promise.