Yesterday my 11-year-old son made four trips by bike.

He biked himself to school and back. Just under a mile each way. Then later in the day, he had a soccer practice (again under a mile). He biked there and back too.

I didn’t even really have to think about it. He knows when to leave (basically). And when he gets home, he just lets himself in and starts watching TV.

Part of this is just his age. Being 11, he’s getting more independent (and I’m getting more smug daily about how top tier a stage of parenting I’m in.)

I was thinking this over, that night,and I was sorta tempted to brag about this on Substack notes. Because it’s awesome. What a life hack! Your kid biking himself places! If this were like a service other people provided, I probably couldn’t afford it, something that improved my life and reduced my workload so dramatically.

What’s crazy is it honestly it should not even be that remarkable. He’s 11! Eleven year old boys SHOULD do 4 short bike trips a day. When I was young, that would have been par for the course. I biked to school every day growing up. And to the pool in the summer. And my friend’s houses. Almost everywhere I went.

It’s not normal anymore though. Everything is so much more difficult and stupid now, with regards to kids’ and parents’ lives, it seems like. The simplest things, little minor logistical challenges, become grinding and overwhelming.

I follow this comedian on Instagram named Dustin Knickerson. He’s basically like a normie dad. He was saying he has three children, three different schools. One’s in elementary school. One’s in middle and one’s in high.

He and his wife drive their kids to and from each school every day, he was explaining. That’s 12 individual car trips a day 😱. Not just that! He said they each have extracurriculars that require each child to be individually chauffeured every day after school as well.

I don’t know how they’re managing. They are both professional influencer types, so I guess that gives them a lot of flexibility? This whole thing is crazy.

But that is normal now and my kid biking to soccer practice and school — that is the weird exception these days. Only 1 percent of U.S. kids bikes to school anymore.

I’m really proud of my son for doing it. I biked him the first day, and it was so pleasant and so quick, I was feeling STUNNED every kid at the school wasn’t doing it. (He recently switched schools and a good number of kids do bike to this school, but presumably many live too far also, etc.)

And at first he was a little resistant, but then I think he realized it really is the easiest thing. And it gives him the most flexibility. There’s a smoothie shop across from his school and his friends were saying they’d never been there. I said, if you walked or biked, I don’t think that’d be the case. You could GO SOMEWHERE afterschool. I honestly don’t think they’d ever considered that. But that certainly never would have escaped me at his age.

I didn’t live by any retail (traditional suburban single-land use zoning). And I remember when I entered sixth grade there was a DAIRY QUEEN across the street. We used to hang out there sometimes after school and I felt very adult. I have core memories of that that involve boys I thought were cute. Ha.

Anyway, I tried to refrain from bragging about my own family’s situation, even though I’m sorta doing it right now (sorry!), because I am genuinely sympathetic to other parents and what they’re dealing with. If I was them, I’d want to punch me in the face!

The thing about me that I recognize is, I’m a TOTAL weirdo. I purposely moved to a walkable neighborhood (Cleveland) and then dealt with all this other crazy bullshit, crime, schools dysfunction, because that was so important to me, being able to walk places. Other normal people aren’t going to make major life decisions that way and I understand that.

This is frankly so far out of reach for so many average parents, thanks to a million overlapping problems like the way we designed all these local roads like highways, and gave up enforcing traffic laws six years ago, and allowed pickup trucks to morph into gladiator assault weapons.

Last week, I was on the Strong Towns podcast talking about how parents are literally arrested for letting their kids take a short walk now with semi regularity. In the example we were discussing, it was to a park, which led to an arrest, which was held up for public outrage by the Washington Post (mission accomplished, btw). Everyone is shocked and appalled by how bad and dystopian all this has gotten.

And it used to be we didn’t need to do any of this because we simply built (many) neighborhoods to be walkable and navigable to children. And we didn’t separate land uses: all the retail on the big arterial road four miles away, the school out on the periphery of the developable land, far from the central part of its catchment area. Traditional town planning made things broadly walkable and put kids’ needs close to home. And that made everything easier and better.

To make matters worse, more recently, we let rec-level sports and other staples of a healthy normal childhoodwither on the vine. And that turned access to team sports into yet another Hunger Games-type resource face-off for only the richest and most motivated parents. This isn’t working.

Parents are miserable. Kids are miserable. They have lost all their independence, their networks, their free time. They are depressed and overweight and their parents are stressed and overwhelmed.

There aren’t enough neighborhoods like mine, there aren’t enough schools like the one my kid attends (high quality, neighborhood-scaled ones).

But we could build them again. And we could modify them, improve intersections, conduct traffic calming, to help restore some of that old normalcy, if we were motivated enough. I feel like something’s gotta give.

This is what Cleveland’s downtown grocery store looked like, I shit you not.

In a recent public hearing about grocery store availability in downtown Cleveland, City employees and some consultant they hired faced a firing squad of pissed off residents. Downtown residents, of which there are more than 10,000 now, are mad that Heinens, a high-end grocery store that had operated in a beautiful historic building, announced it was closing shop after 10 years last month. It was the only full service grocery store for miles.

Since I’m an urban planner, I was a little bit reflexively sympathetic to the city employees and consultants taking a beating over it. Groceries operate on like 2 percent margins! A lot of people saw this closure coming. But I can certainly relate to the downtown residents’ sense of loss and frustration.

Over a decade ago, when I was a local political reporter, I remember these same kinds of complaints in semi-rural areas. People would have to drive 10 miles to a grocery store. Why couldn’t they have one for their little town, they would ask?

At the time, the minimum size grocers were operating at was like 40,000 square feet. Pretty big! That is the current American retail model. Build a big store, with a toothpaste aisle that contains 65 different varieties, with a big parking lot, and make people drive to you, that is the current retail model.

That has always bummed me out because smaller stores are better, imo. Get in, get out. Who needs 19 kinds of peanut butter? We need small scale, walkable, close-to-home stores more imo.

For many years, I didn’t own my own car. It worked out pretty well actually, sharing a family car, because my neighborhood is very walkable and has decent transit too. My doctor’s office, for example, is two blocks away. My kids’ daycare was a half mile.

But accessing retail has always been an issue where I live. Often times, I don’t do any car trips in a day. I bike here and there and do some walking and that’s it. I love this and think it’s a superior and healthier way to live.

But it gets tricky sometimes, especially because I don’t live in a subway kind of city with too many actual rich people who ride transit.

Anyway, recently, I wanted to buy a tube of lipstick. I was trying to think of where around me I could get some lipstick. (Lipstick makes me look less hungover on Zoom meetings, so I consider it a necessity. I’m not actually hungover, fwiw I don’t really even drink, but I just think it’s an easy trick for really improving my appearance on camera, which kinda matters when you’re a 44 year old woman.)

Anyway, there are a few boutique like places by me. You know the type. That sell like jewelry and greeting cards. Not super practical stuff. So I stopped in one of those. From time to time, they have carried lipstick, but I struck out.

It used to be there was a Rite Aid pharmacy right on my block. But they closed every store in the state after they got hit with an enormous legal penalty for selling opioids in a shady way to addicts. So I think their overpriced cosmetics were never really profitable for them and the whole chain was kinda underwriting that kind of thing with drug dealing. 😬

Since then, I haven’t had a good nearby option for cosmetics and beauty stuff. I couldn’t think of a place to get lipstick and it was driving me nuts. (Later in the week I made a car trip to the suburbs to visit my MIL and stopped at a drug store and got it.)

That’s the kind of thing that has always happened to me in Cleveland. Everyone has to drive out to the suburbs to access retail. We have all these underutilized retail sites. They’re walkable storefronts, built in the streetcar era. But that is not the model anymore. A lot of them are empty. (Not enough parking! Too small a footprint!)

My husband does the grocery shopping in our family and he drives to a big box store kinda shopping center at the outskirts of the city to do that. He has always HATED to buy anything at corner stores and that kind of thing. He feels like it’s a ripoff and will bankrupt him or something. But I have a different philosophy about this.

It’s worth it to me to spend an extra buck or two on a random item to save me a trip to some Costco 10 miles away. This whole routine where we all buy and finance these huge SUVs and go to these megastores and buy enormous quantities of food we store in expensive houses and second fridges, I feel like we overestimate the savings from this.

There are all kinds of weird downstream costs. Our built environment SUCKS because of this. No one can walk anywhere. Have you ever tried walking to like a Target? It’s humiliating and dangerous. Big box stores and drive through restaurants are reliable predictors of pedestrian crashes, according to research I have seen and cited in the first book I wrote.

Children can’t access them independently either, for this reason, which is something that I think has real costs for them and something I’m gonna talk about in my second book, which I’m finishing right now.

Anyway, in planning we’re very interested in physical infrastructure, when we talk about walkability. Sidewalk investment ect. Don’t get me wrong, I love all that. But without SMALLER STORES I really think that will only get us so far.

I don’t have the answer here but I try to put my money where my mouth is. When I walk around my community, I try to “be the change I wish to see” with where I spend my money.

It’s honestly, pretty gratifying to support local businesses and interact with the proprietors anyway. Generally it’s not much more expensive to shop small either I don’t think. Especially once you calculate how much you save on not driving a new car into the ground on multiple interstate highway trips at day, which is kinda the alternative.

I don’t even know exactly when I began it to be honest. It was before Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation came out and that was over two years ago.

I know because when I heard about that book, I was like “fuck, he wrote the same book as I did” — that kids are messed up today for a lot of good reasons. And then I was like “wait, actually this is a little different and my book builds nicely on what he said” — because Haidt’s book was pretty tech focused, which I agree largely agree with his critique there. But my book, being that I’m an urban planner, looks at how the outside world has been designed to exclude kids. Sort of the flip side of the problem.

It turns out literary types agreed with that because I succeeded in getting a literary agent and a book deal. So the book is going to be published by North Point Press (under MacMillan), hopefully in 2028.

That seems like an agonizingly long time off. And I don’t know how I am going to keep my cool because I’m very impatient for it to be published — I feel like it’s a very timely subject.

I sent my editor an 80,000 word draft last weekend. And there’s a lot of good stuff in it. That might not mean much, coming from me, the author, after all, but I just know I when I have something good. The few people who have read it (my agent and my publisher) are excited about it too, which is encouraging.

If you want more background on the subject and the way I see it, I talked about it in this interview with Pantsuit Politics.

One thing that was kind of eerie about writing this book at the end, this is going to sound nuts, but the Linkedin algorithm at the end was like divinely inspired, delivering the EXACT article I needed at the exact moment into my feed. It was kind of crazy.

Here’s another eyerolling thing to say but I read Rick Rubin’s “The Creative Act,” at least part of it, not that long ago. And what he said was that when an idea’s time has come, the person who produces it is just the vessel. If they don’t do it someone else will. I think he sorta had a point. There was just SO MUCH good stuff out there on this subject. And I just pulled it together.

Anyway, the bad news is, my editor said it will take about 4 months to edit. (Editing, I find, sometimes excruciating, even though I know it’s important.) And THEN it’s going to take A FULL YEAR to go to print. 😢

My last book, it took six months to go to print and that seemed like forever. But now apparently, since the pandemic, this takes a year which is NUTS considering how information is spread these days online like instantaneously.

I wrote a few months ago about what a hard time I was having writing the book. But at the end, it was easy and fun. I sort of don’t know what to do with myself now. (Work at my fun and rewarding higher-paying real job is the answer, but still!)

I am reading this book right now called a Marriage at Sea. It’s about this couple in the 1970s, that were sailing around the world, when their boat was randomly sunk by a whale. And they survive for months on an inflatable raft.

I am loving this book. I love nonfiction. But this book talks about people’s survival and how important it is to have hope and to have an occupation to keep you busy.

The book’s author, Sophie Elmhurst, writes:

Doubt grows in emptiness.

Some years ago a pilot crashed his small plane over the empty mountains of the High Sierra. He left behind his two passengers and hiked alone for nine days over mountains and through forests, eating snow, until he came to a road and found help. The trek had been arduous; the pilot arrived in a cafe hurt and bedraggled and hungry. But the journey had given him purpose and something to do. When the pilot returned to the plane, he found his passengers dead, one trapped in the wreckage the other a little distance away. Able to sit and wait, what could they do but die?

Okay sorry that was extremely melodramatic and I’m not going to DIE now that my book is (almost) done. I have to promote it and that is intense. I have already started that a little.

Still though, as I was getting to the end of it, I started to become less impatient to be finished and frustrated with how difficult it was and tried to remind myself that writing can really be very fun, at it’s best. Really gratifying. That’s why I guess everyone really wants to write a book, even though in some ways it’s objectively a bad deal.

I don’t know how I got so lucky in life. I think this book is the best thing I have ever done, except for (hopefully) the job I hope to do with my kids and family. I don’t think there are too many people following this process with bated breath so hopefully this doesn’t seem too grandiose.

I just wanted to share this little milestone with you guys. And I appreciate your support and I hope I don’t annoy TF out of you whenever promotion phase begins in earnest. But I think it will be worth the wait!

All the mom bloggers — I know we don’t call them that anymore, but you know what I mean — are obsessed with the Lindsay Clancy case. And I’m no different.

Clancy, a married nurse, murdered her three children in what her defense argues was a state of psychosis. Her ex-husband, who did an interview with the New Yorker, said she was a normal, devoted mom prior to this episode. She sounds EXCEEDINGLY normal. She was a nurse, a former cheerleader and the family lived in suburban Connecticut.

During the night in question, Clancy also jumped from a second story window in an unsuccessful suicide attempt and is now paraplegic while she undergoes trial for murder.

I hate to even use a normal person’s experience as a jumping off point for discussing a bigger issue in the aftermath of the Jason Arday fiasco. But I’m sympathetic to Clancy, as are most of the other moms I know.

I found reading about her case really haunting. Because some of the stressors on her, I experienced. Fortunately, it never tipped into that sort of scary category that Clancy’s did, postpartum psychosis. I can’t imagine how terrifying that would be.

But some of the milder precursors her ex-husband described about her experience were so familiar.

Clancy, it seems, was fine after the birth of her first and second children, and continued working as a nurse (a hard and stressful job.) She seemed to be overwhelmed, however, with the addition of the third child. Would she have been a fine and leading a normal life had she never had her third, I wonder.

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I read a lot and a lot of times I’m disappointed with it. I read two of the three big best-sellers from the last year and thought they were both sort of meh, I thought. (The Correspondant, Strangers.) Writers, I know a lot of people discourage you, but I would say shoot your shot, because if those books are turning their authors into literary superstars, there’s hope for just about anyone.

It’s hard to find the good stuff, but when you do, life is SO MUCH BETTER I think. We all need that. So it’s in that spirit, I wanted to offer some recommendations. I’m always dying for recommendations myself.

First, I actually saw a couple movies I like lately. I hardly have time to watch movies.

The Invite

I saw this movie on a split-second whim. My kids were seeing Minions and Monsters and I did not want to sit through that. The theater was also showing this, which I had never heard of and knew nothing about. But I like Seth Rogan. So I took a chance and paid their ungodly Movie Theater price.

I am so glad I did because this was such a wild ride and so surprising. It was basically about married sex, which everyone (including myself, a married person) thinks is gross. Too much emotional baggage! No one wants to think about that!

But this movie kind of turned it into a joke? AND it was very funny. I saw it live in the theater and I can verify that other people were kind of snorting and gasping. The acting was top notch. The cast is amazing. The dialogue was so wild. The whole movie takes place over a single night. A lot of the humor is derived from awkwardness that can come up in everyday social encounters.

I have never seen a movie like this.

One qualification, I missed the end. Because Minions and Monsters ended first and I had to get my kids. Still, would recommend, especially for middle aged types. It’s definitely NSFW though.

Hamnet

I watched this on Netflix or something recently. Again without much clue what it was about. Since then I’ve been dying to talk about it with someone.

First of all, it was a very beautiful movie. It’s a period piece in medieval England, mostly in the countryside. The cast, Paul Mescal, is very uh photogenic also, if you get my drift.

What was kind of mind blowing about this movie, though, was the way an ordinary mom was the undisputed hero/protagonist.

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There’s a whole mythology about the German Autobahn. This was built and maintained by men and men who like to drive.

I want to start off by saying, I am sympathetic to this group. I like cars too. I almost feel more affection for these guys — who are excited about cars and driving — than the other class of drivers on the road, who just wants the cheapest most reliable car they can find for whom driving is a big chore (although I fully get that too).

The journey can be fun! That’s something, as a road cyclist, I share with car guys. People who have boats or motorcycles too — it’s the same deal. A journey can be an adventure. I have nothing against this whole spirit.

The mythology of the Autobahn it fits squarely in this category. It’s the Shangri-La for car guys. I have to admit, I’ve never visited Germany or driven on the Autobahn. But I’m constantly being told about it, because I write about transportation and traffic safety.

In these discussions, the Autobahn serves a specific purpose. It becomes this anecdote that PROVES what this guy DEEPLY KNOWS. Which is that the government trying to tell him how to drive is the REAL PROBLEM. Speed limits are just nanny state overreach, and maybe even WORSE for safety.

This is a complete macho fantasy, but a very powerful and seductive one. In this fantasy — and this is what we’re up against in traffic safety — the competent man driver is in full control of his powerful machine. It’s a little bit analogous to the “Good Guy With a Gun” thing, which is also a male fantasy, or at minimum an oversimplification that puts a romantic spin on activities in which there are absolutely enormous potential harms.

Both of these fantasies are fueled by extraordinarily powerful narratives. There’s a whole genre of cowboy movies generations of American boys were literally brought up on reinforcing the “Good Guy With a Gun” one. Same for car chase movies. There are 1,000 Fast and Furious Movies that are just hours of driving stunts, where young men drive fast cars like sociopaths, including through urban areas, and no innocent bystanders get hurt, which is just not the reality of how street racing plays out in the U.S. AT ALL. Police chases alone — to say nothing of unsanctioned street racing — kill thousands of people, hundreds of which are innocent bystanders.

Don’t even get me started on video games where little boys are invited to mow down pedestrians. How could that not desensitize them to that?

NOW, I’m not saying every guy who subscribes to the Autobahn fantasy is a terrible reckless driver. A lot of them are probably fine, real adults who understand the stakes. As long as they’re middle aged and have a family — those aren’t the kind of folks I worry about too much.

But here’s the thing, men are more dangerous drivers than women. They don’t charge you guys extra on insurance for no reason. They do that because men take more risks and are more likely to kill themselves or other people.

Again, it’s not the middle aged ones that really worry me. It’s teenage boys, and young men in their early 20s, who have really, really grim traffic statistics. For these groups, full scale embrace of this macho fantasy can be deadly and is a major threat to their well being. If they fit this description (young men) and they drive a motorcycle — even more so. The risk is astronomical that they will be seriously injured or killed.

The thing about the Autobahn is if you get past the male fantasy, the actual safety outcomes are more mixed. There’s a good, pretty nuanced discussion about it here.

To start off, large portions of the Autobahn — 30 percent — DO have a speed limit.

Germany has a great traffic safety record, much better than the U.S. But it’s pretty serious about controlling speeds in urban areas. It imposes 30km/h speed limits in many urban and residential areas. That’s the equivalent to 18.5 miles per hour, roughly.

One thing about Germany though, it has a major domestic auto industry, like the U.S. Countries that do tend to have worse safety outcomes. In this Pro-Con article about the Autobahn, it’s an auto industry person that takes the pro side and defends the arrangement. And that makes sense because this male fantasy of the open road and vroom vroom sells a lot of cars, and the auto industry is enormous.

For ordinary folks, driving on the autobahn can be kinda scary. Two-thirds of Germans think there should be a speed limit. Also, people waste a lot of fuel and don’t save very much time thanks to the “no speed limits” thing. The lack of speed regulation also creates “phantom traffic jams” when someone who is driving fast is forced to brake hard and creates conditions that simulate congestion. It’s not all car commercial/fantasy utopia.

The additional costs to the public of not imposing a 130km/h speed limit on the German Autobahn, amount to about $1 billion in reduced air quality, increased crashes and other costs. This amounts to, the Swedish business professor Stefan Gossling who generated that figure, a giant subsidy for fast drivers.

This is why traffic safety discussions become sort of a gendered “identity politics” discussion, a tiny bit, I think at heart.

Anyway, the reality of driving on the Autobahn for ordinary Germans, none of that really matters. The Autobahn’s purpose in discussions in the U.S. is to convince men that speeding is really okay when they do it. And that’s just not true. This is a basic physics thing. Faster drivers take longer to brake and have a harder time avoiding crashes in the first place. In addition, they exert exponentially higher forces when they do crash. Just because you speed doesn’t mean you will wreck and get hurt or hurt someone, but it does increase the odds you will. And when enough people do that, inevitably people get hurt and killed.

This applies not just to individual behavior but speed limits and the way we regulate our roads also. Evidence is quite clear that raising speed limits on U.S. highways, which has been the trend in the U.S. (thanks to the macho-fantasy-subscribing overgrown teenagers that largely populate our state legislatures) gets more people killed.

According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, speed limits increases on highways over the last 25 years have cost 37,000 Americans their lives. Each 5 mph increase in speed limits leads to an 8% increase in fatalities.

I always thought it was sorta ironic, for example, that Paul Walker, the star of the Fast and Furious movies (and a childhood crush of mine) was killed in a car wreck. He was 40 and driving more than 100 mph when he was killed.

There was a traffic-related study out last week that did the rounds on mainstream media. It was a little buzzy because it found that average drivers who speed save practically no time.

An average person, driving about 28 miles per day, speeding saves just 54 seconds a day, or about six minutes a week. Meanwhile, the study pointed out while drivers are doing this, they’re burning all this extra fuel. It costs them a combined $24 million a day.

Regardless, people in the U.S. speed A LOT. Almost half of all trips in the U.S. in internal combustion engine vehicles involve at least one speeding incident. The average was 11.2 miles over the speed limit.

Speeding is dumb. ESPECIALLY in urban areas (vs. highway driving.) Even on a highway you have to drive for literally hours at a higher-than-you-should drive speed before it adds up to time savings that’s in any way even noticeable. It takes a surprisingly long time to save even a few minutes (we’re talking hundreds of miles.)

Meanwhile, the costs for speeding are quite high. The scientific study I referenced earlier focused a lot on gas, increased fuel costs. That just one cost. The safety costs are much bigger in my opinion. Every year in the U.S. we have 10,000+ deaths that are classified as being “speeding related,” meaning someone was speeding at the time.

We think of speeding as being sort of a victimless crime that everyone winks at but it very much is not that even though we have all been guilty of it, realistically speaking. The forces in a car crash rise exponentially. An increase of even 1 mile per hour increases the risk and severity of a crash by 3 percent. A few miles per hour can literally be the difference between life and death. Speeding also makes it harder to AVOID a crash in the first place, because braking takes longer at higher speeds.

Traffic deaths are still relatively rare, although all too common in the U.S. compared to peer nations (Americans have a 1 in 93 chance of being killed in a car crash over their lifetimes). But for every fatality, in the U.S., there are 8 serious injuries and literally hundreds of minor injuries and property damage type collisions. These incidents will not ruin your life, most of them (thank God) but they will ruin your day or your week. The time savings is frankly not worth it if this even happens to you once. You’ve made yourself poorer and less safe for nothing. (One in three Americans will be seriously injured in a car crash over the course of their lives.)

Still, people will mount a furious opposition campaign if government officials try to rein in speeding. It’s nuts. Speeding gets treated as an entitlement almost, especially going under 10 miles over the speed limit.

I am not sitting here saying (just so people don’t annoyingly argue with me) police should be out there radar-in-hand throwing the book at people going 4 mph over the speed limit, in most circumstances. BUT I do think we should radically shift our whole attitude about this kinda thing because it just doesn’t serve us well. People literally spend months sitting in hospital beds so other people can save 26 seconds on a 22 mile journey? What are we doing here? We’re all poorer and worse off because of this nonsense. Even if we avoid being hurt, and our family does too, we’re still paying out in insurance and disability etc.

Our approach to driving in the U.S. is very individualistic. It’s every man or woman for themselves out there on the roads. You can feel that energy. People feel like they need to be “strategic” and “beat” the guy next to you. And what is your prize? At the end of the day you arrive at a red light 6 seconds before them, having burned fuel and totally wasted your energy.

It’s kind of hard to accept, at the same time, we have to put all this time and energy into driving and we’re basically just brainless cogs, who have no control over anything, but that’s closer to reality. We DO have a good amount of control, however, over how safely we drive. Not only can that protect us getting killed, but more normal everyday headaches like having to ever visit a body shop but also more serious stuff like surgery and orthopedic medicine (another very scary thing imo.)

Again, we don’t have TOTAL control. If some guy in an 18-wheeler dozes off at the wrong time, you could end up in a hospital bed anyway. Traffic is a system and we’re all sort of at its whims. Nobody can totally avoid these kinds of risks. 9I think it would be better if we accepted stronger safety rules and enforcement to reduce this risk, but apparently — and this is annoying and stupid as hell — that’s not acceptable to many people and they’d rather take their changes with random wahoos maybe killing them. Or maybe they are the wahoos themselves.)

Regardless, do not kid yourself that you can “win” your journey somehow by splitting the lane, or passing someone on the right (🙄), or flooring it in a residential area for 45 feet. All of that is just plainly anti-social jerk behavior that doesn’t benefit you or anyone.

What’s really slowing everyone down is traffic lights, when it comes to city driving, or the amount of time we spend stopped. A better system, imo, would minimize driver frustrations by trying to minimize the time they spend uselessly idling at traffic lights, and maximize the time they spend steadily moving at a relatively slow pace.

At a systems level, we can make improvements here. We can time traffic signals to promote this kind of responsible driving. The “green wave” it’s called, and that’s a big win, when traffic signals are timed to serve a series of greens to people traveling the speed limit. We can also replace traffic lights with roundabouts to shorten stopped time plus improve safety (the biggest win-win in transportation planning. The fact that people STILL complain about these is proof positive that people just love to bellyache about new things.) I’m also hopeful, new tech — smart signals — could help reduce wait times at traffic lights, especially during slower periods, like late at night.

In the meantime, all you can do is let go any real sense of control or mastery over everyday car trips. They are painful. I get it. But be smart don’t forget, the real stakes (protecting yours and others’ safety and property) are high, and that’s one thing you actually have control over.

It’s something one of the neighboring streets by me does. In fact, I learned that in the past, almost every street in Cleveland would do this at least once during the summer. Think of the social capital and trust that built! The sense of community!! Gah.

My street, though, is/was sort of a “collector” street or whatever. Moderate traffic, some cut through. And so my neighbors were basically a little hesitant when I brought this up in the last. It took me YEARS to get the credibility I needed in my neighborhood where, finally, this year we were able to go ahead and attempt it.

Shout out to one of my neighbors who was just like, “we should go for it.”

My idea was to do a “Kids Bike Parade” on the Fourth of July. The Fourth of July is very fun in my neighborhood. It is basically an illegal fireworks extravaganza. Which can get aggravating but if you just go with it has its charms.

During the day though, we don’t have a parade or anything. It felt a tiny bit lonely some years. With my bike parade suggestion, I was basically copying a tradition from a cute street I knew about in Cleveland Heights. I am the “president” of a neighborhood based group whose whole mission is hosting free events for families, so I have some experiencing organizing small events.

Anyway, my city, Cleveland, recently updated its rules around this. It used to be to have a block party, you had to pay two cops overtime to stand around the whole time. A couple years ago, during police reform, they got rid of that rule. Now all you need is a $75 permit and your city councilperson’s permission.

It wasn’t the first time I’ve done this. Two times in prior years, my little organization hosted a “play street” on this weird side street that has almost no houses fronting it. Those were successful also.

Anyway, this year, it happened. I got permission to close my own street, just for two hours. We only closed a very short section. It was just as awesome as I hoped.

In my book I’m working on, about making more room for children in public space, Play Streets are a key strategy advanced by one of the main “heroes,” a British mom and activist. Her name is Alice Ferguson.

For this event, I followed her playbook. When Alice’s group, Playing Out, hosts these, and they’ve hosted LOTS of them, they simply have two volunteers posted near each end of the street closure. They politely help direct through traffic around the block. Residents that need to leave the block or enter it in a car, for work or whatever, can do so, they are just escorted at a slow speed. (We did that once and the person was very cool about it.)

Anyway, the event was a big success. One thing we did that was fun and critical, I think, was we added water. Neighbors were able to just stretch hoses from their house to hook up a sprinkler. Another neighbor just happened to have a hose attachment and key for a fire hydrant, so we made use of that as well. It was July after all. But we lucked out with very good weather and we’re blessed with a lot of tall shady trees.

We sat a kiddie pool full of water in the middle of the street. Which was good for the very young kids.

For people behind the paywall I’ll share a few more photos.

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Our politics is so crazy and perverse, I think it’s really hard to do an honest accounting of really anything anymore, or even really try to discuss important political problems.

I feel like we’ve lost sight of, the point of all this — politics — isn’t to “win” but to help people. How well popular political ideas work in practice, it becomes hard to discuss or beside the point.

There are people, right wing people, who will be pretty heavy handed, more heavy handed than I’m going to be here in calling police reform a failure. I don’t think that’s quite right. In some ways, I think, certain things have improved.

I was talking to someone in my neighborhood, a community leader. This person, I am being purposely vague, but she oversees some affordable housing. She told me that she’s seen a huge improvement with the Cleveland police department.

She was specifically talking about how they respond to mental health distress calls. This was a live issue in Cleveland, well before 2020. In 2014, a schizophrenic woman named Tanisha Anderson was killed by Cleveland police in a so-called “takedown move,” after her family called in a mental health emergency.

This woman, the Cleveland leader, told me she had to make a mental health emergency call recently and the response was totally different. Where before, the department might come in an immediately do something to escalate the situation, she said, they now handled these cases with supreme professionalism and care. Obviously, that is all anecdotal but still I was encouraged to hear it.

Here locally, our police department has been under consent decree — federal oversight — for quite some time. Some of the precipitating events were pretty bad. Shooting innocent bystanders. Police chases than ended in disasters. Huge settlements that fell on the backs of taxpayers. During the George Floyd protests, I was pretty sympathetic to the concerns that were raised. I participated in a few protests.

This isn’t my area of expertise at all. That being said, I do think there were some misjudgments and grand political pronouncements that, fortunately, in many cases have been walked back.

To me, one of the biggest mistakes of this era was legalizing open drug use. The big test case was Oregon. Now I want to say, I understand the reasons and arguments for doing this. Years ago, in college, I wrote this big thing about the injustice of jailing people for nonviolent drug offenses.

One thing that I think happened, that people maybe didn’t anticipate very well, was that just as political backlash was escalating against The War on Drugs, drugs got way worse. Open use of fentanyl is a very different animal than open use of marijuana, which was one of the more ridiculous aspects of the War on Drugs.

I don’t fully understand what’s going on or what happened in Oregon. I personally have been convinced by reports that drug arrests, and diversion to treatment, is an important and necessary tool to compel users who might otherwise die on the streets into treatment. The “disorder” that occurred in urban areas, especially on the West Coast, during that time was very real, imo and was exacerbated quite a big by a number of housing failures.

But I think there are certain policy aspects that just plainly failed, or didn’t work out the way advocates hoped. Voters in Oregon quickly reversed that measure, the one that made open drug use legal. Anyway, I think that was one of the bigger mistakes of the era.

There was major fallout to our public transit systems from these kinds of decisions as well imo. I think many agencies have managed to get a handle on some of the worse problems. But I don’t know about mine locally. The last few times I stepped on an RTA train, there was someone openly smoking even though there were very few people riding at all 😡.

During this era, there was a ruling by a judge that armed police could not enter buses and trains and demand proof of payment. And I understand the impetus for that, but the result has raised other problems, imo.

I was visiting Los Angeles in 2023, for example, and the Metro was truly bonkers. This was a brand, new very expensive transit system for Los Angeles. The result of decades of dedicated work and funding. But it was obvious at the time that there was a problem with respect to behavior.

I stepped on to a Metro train in Downtown LA while I was there, relatively early in the morning, and I was the only person that wasn’t using it to sleep overnight, as far as I could gather. The open drug use was also catastrophic, imo. I wrote in Planetizen in 2023 about LA Metro. At the time, the LA Times had photographed someone smoking fenty openly in a station in broad daylight. I was honestly shocked not just by that but the fact that the man gave the paper his real name and they published it along with the photo. 🤯

People were using LA Metro as a place to consume drugs, according to the paper. To the point where 22 people fatally overdosed ON (!!) Metro vehicles in the early months of 2023. The LA Times talked about certain stations becoming big open-air drug markets.

Has enough time passed, I wonder, that was can uncontroversially say that some of that stuff was a mistake? That we’ve arrived at a healthier middle ground in at least some places, and it does include either police or some kind of security, especially aboard trains (which don’t have the calming presence, unlike a bus, of a present driver/authority.) Maybe we have, just quietly. It seems kind of odd, though.

For a while, saying that kind of thing — which was plainly true — could get you categorized, online anyway, as “conservative” or privileged 🙄. But some of the people raising the most alarm were actual bus operators. In Philadelphia, bus operators demanded more security on vehicles as part of union negotiations.

Another thing, and this is more germane to my expertise, is what occurred traffic and the roads in this era. I think what occurred between 2020 and 2023 — huge increases in traffic fatalities — ought to be treated as a symptom of the wider “urban disorder” discussion that happened (and has died down some as these issues have calmed down.)

But one thing that most normie traffic safety types — like the Governors Highway Safety Association — now say was that a major cause of the increase in traffic fatalities was less police enforcement of speeding, DUIs, red-light running. This is not something I talked or considered a lot in my book. But I basically agree with them about that.

It turns out, I think one lesson we can firmly take away, is that people will, in fact, not follow traffic laws out of the good of their hearts when they think no one is looking.

There are important tradeoffs that must be weighed in these kinds of discussions. Real harms can result from being to flippant about these kinds of concerns.

Obviously, many people are adversely impacted by racial profiling. But just stopping traffic stops, even reducing them dramatically, means that more people will die on the roads, I think this experiment has made pretty clear. And that is also a social justice concern (or whatever term you’d like to use, I know that one is kinda loaded.)

At the height of this era we saw the whole “Kia Boys” phenomenon across the country. This was very much present in my city where young kids, many under 16, were stealing cars and joy riding them around and crashing into things and people and generally terrorizing the community.

I spoke with a cop in Cleveland recently. He was a very nice guy.

Our mayor in Cleveland, he I think handled this issue in a very smart and pragmatic way. And he has made trying to hire more police a key goal. Our mayor is kind of progressive I would say. But he also was raised in Cleveland and his dad was a first responder, a firefighter. So he was never one of those “activists” 🙄 popping off about “ACAB” in a real showy way, which was appropriate.

He would say, fairness from police is an absolute necessity. But not that basically police were all bad. Which I think is the most reasonable, winning position, for serious left-of-center politicians to take.

Anyway, this cop I talked to, I was impressed with him. He was young and personable. And he was at a safety conference I attended and spoke at. Because apparently, his main job is enforcing traffic.

Now, for many years, Cleveland police did almost zero traffic enforcement. And let me tell you what: People took note. I myself was victim of a hit and run crash a few years back. Fortunately, I was not seriously injured. But they never caught the guy. Nor, probably, did they spend a single minute trying to. Nor did they respond to the call when I called them.

People in general, I would say, were aware they could just hit someone with their car in Cleveland and drive away, more or less, with impunity. And that’s how they behaved. Which honestly, sucks. It’s not pleasant to live in an environment like that. There are serious costs.

I think, had I lived in a wealthier community, the person who hit me would not have gotten away with it. At least not so easily.

Anyway, this cop I was taking to, he said to me it takes twice as long for Cleveland police to do a traffic stop now, because of the consent decree. There’s all this extra paperwork.

Now for the record, I’m not saying that means he shouldn’t have to do that. These are the kind of considerations, I think, that need to be openly weighed in the future in these discussions. And I’m wondering, are we getting to the point where we can discuss those kinds of tradeoffs in a serious way?

I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to dip my toe into discussing in this post.

Quebec is basically the same as Europe, right? I thought. Maybe Montreal? I had never been. But that was my vague impression. I have to admit I am guilty of the uniquely American habit of basically not thinking about other countries very much. Including Canada, which I don’t even live very far from, but it SEEMS far away because there’s a giant lake in the way.

Anyway, I figured, Quebec was basically a little medieval city like Edinburgh. One of my Schticks on this blog is negging visiting Europe, (probably just because I haven’t been in a while.) Anyway, I probably could have called the whole trip to Europe, with my whole family, a business expense. Since I am writing a book about child-friendly cities and Europe is basically better than anyone at it (at least in the context of too-wealthy-for-their-own-good places that kind of made automatic easy things like children’s play hard and now need a public policy to fix it.)

But anyway, I’m really happy with my decision because it turns out I was basically right. Quebec was EXTREMELY Europe-y. In fact, it could out-Europe a lot of Europe, on the factors that Americans like me like about Europe (walkable places, yummy pastries, a beautiful built environment, a humming public realm.) It was like being in France but cheaper, and different of course, but fully AWESOME. It left nothing to be desired. AND, hopefully I’m not screwing it all up by writing about it, but it didn’t feel real tourist-y and fake.

We started off in Toronto, which we’ve visited a lot before, but we really like. We needed to break up the trip because Montreal is like 11 hours from where we live by minivan and Quebec is like 13. I know there are people that will just like power through that, but I can’t.

This is one of my favorite spots in Toronto. A fake beach right in the middle of the city!

One thing that worried me about this vacation was… Would it be too much driving? It was kind of mind blowing that you can just get in your car in Ohio and drive to a place that is so different. I don’t know if I feel that way about Toronto, but Montreal, to a degree, and Quebec for certain. All the sudden everyone’s speaking French. 🤯

Here’s some shots of Montreal.

The part of Montreal that impressed me most was the old port area. Many of the streets were closed off here and pedestrianized. And they were filled with people. There were all these cute restaurants in these ancient stone buildings.

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I used to be grumpy all the time. One reason is, I’ve been a commuter cyclist for about 20 years. For 11 years I didn’t own my own car.

Anyway, every day I was always almost getting killed out there by some sociopath with a car. Then, quite unexpectedly, from my perspective anyway, my city build this amazing trail system. Well, really, it wasn’t a city initiative. It was sorta these two older guys, visionary types, who put the projects together over decades.

They just had this vision for a trail network, that would run along railroads and highways and rivers, parts of the city that had been sort of neglected and overlooked, where there weren’t too many roads, and thus intersections to deal with.

Anyway, the whole time they were doing this, these two guys, I was just living in Cleveland and riding my bike everywhere. And people kept talking about these trail projects, but they just seemed like they would NEVER happen, so I mostly ignored them. Then one day, my friend who is not even a big cyclist invited me to go for a bike ride and took me along the paths and my mind was blown.

Now I bike commute to my office on these trails almost every day. And it’s entirely changed my personality I feel like! Now I’m stupidly happy all the time. Because the whole time on my bike commute, all I see is wildflowers and little bunnies and pretty colorful birds and panoramic views of the city. It is truly nuts.

Anyway, it’s interesting. One thing I notice while riding this trail is, there is a whole ecosystem that has sprung up around it. Now keep in mind this is a trail that literally didn’t exist like 5 years ago. But apparently that doesn't matter. Because smart landscape architects (I love landscape architects) planted all these native wildflowers.

Anyway, I mentioned there’s all kinds of baby bunnies on this trail and cool birds. But there’s also neat insects. Little snails, with curly shells, I had never seen before. Butterflies. It’s a whole goddamn ecosystem.

Right up to this cool thing I saw the other day. I was biking and I saw something up ahead on the trail. Now, I am always scanning for wildlife. And I saw right away that this was something different: too big to be a groundhog, not the right shape to be a deer.

Sure enough, it’s a coyote. I know this coyote, I’ve seen him before, but never this close up. I think he stalks prey — the little bunnies! — right up and down the railroad tracks, which interestingly enough go right past an enormous working steel mill, views of which are one thing that I think makes this trail unique from a national perspective.

Anyway, he/she was pretty close to me and and I was able to get this picture, which immediately after I regretted taking like I was stealing his./her dignity or something by photographing him/her and putting it online. (Sometimes I hate myself and my tendency when I see something amazing to be like, “I gotta make sure Mark Zuckerberg profits from every moment of pure wonder I have in my life.” But regardless…)

Anyway, it blows my mind that we have this entire ecosystem along this trail now, it’s just this tiny green strip, but that’s all it takes apparently! The whole damn food chain just comes out of the woodwork, from the cool bugs and birds all the way up to mammalian predators. 🤯

We think of nature and city as being opposite in our culture. But I think it’s funny, how little it takes even in a city to carve out a space for nature. People and the natural world and co exist. It doesn’t even take that dramatic of a change.

My neighborhood for example, where I live, we have very, very mature trees. A great tree canopy. That’s really all it takes, imo, some mature trees, to again have a functional ecosystem that is so amazing to live around. Every once in a while, a wild Turkey will stroll down my street.

I grew up in a suburban neighborhood that had basically no mature trees. And I remember every year, we’d go stay in a state park cabin in the woods. And waking up to the sound of all these birds and just listening and being kind of wowed.

Well it’s the same feeling in my neighborhood. Just because of the huge trees. In fact, there’s some kind of hawk — a Coopers hawk? — that is nesting in the tree across the street. And look what I came across on the tree lawn.

Those are tufts of fur. I’m just guessing but I bet the hawk killed something there. Again, here we have a whole ecosystem that goes up to predator. I consider that a big success.

I give my neighbors a lot of credit. They are do gooders types. Big gardeners. And they make a point to plant native plants, especially wildflowers. A lot of them have added rain gardens to their front yards too (our sewer district gives you a discount on stormwater if you do that.)

(Roots over the sidewalk, matureass tree in my neighborhood. GAH I love that.)

Anyway, one thing you notice on summer nights now is lightening bugs. Another sign of a healthy ecosystem, and the most magical/loveable thing in the world.

An example of the kind of crazy gardens my neighbors have. That whole thing about taking out lawns and doing front yard gardens, it seems to really work! I’m as shocked as the next person!

It doesn’t take that much. The big thing is overcoming the sense of disbelief that it can happen. I myself, don’t know if I believed in this trail project. And now to see it come to life and just far surpass my expectations, it’s really inspiring.

Anyway, I got the opportunity to interview Iowa State researcher Biswa Das, who has been quantifying quality of life for young families living in different types of communities in Iowa. I thought it was an interesting discussion.

Here goes.

Angie Schmitt: I’m working on a new book that’s going to be published by North Point Press, which is a division of Macmillan. Probably not till 2028, honestly. But it’s almost done. Anyway, I came across your work

.I’m a parent, I live in Cleveland, so we’re like… the kind of city that’s struggling to provide services, you know, at a level that can retain middle-class families. So I relate to what you were saying about a how families are important advocates for certain services and I that’s something that I guess I had considered but not seen spelled out so straightforwardly that if cities lose families, then they’re kind of, it could be like self-perpetuating cycle.

I don’t want to put words in your mouth.

Das, Biswa [UPD] 1:37
Sure, so let me just give a brief background of myself. That helps, if that helps you. Yeah, I’m not an urban, I’m not a planner. I’m an economist by training. So, but I have been with Iowa State for 14 years now. I work, my appointment is split between Iowa State Extension and Outreach, Community and Economic Development.

Angie Schmitt 2:10
Ohh, right. Nice. I love that. I love that.

Das, Biswa [UPD] 2:24
Which is the reason that I have an opportunity to engage with communities throughout the state. And then of course, I have my appointment with the department where I teach a course on public policy and public finance.

Das, Biswa [UPD] 2:49
So… The extension work that I do, and I also have an active research program. We just completed a five-year project funded through the National Science Foundation. It was called Rural Shrink Smart. It allowed us to work with small towns, small shrinking towns in Iowa, and how some of them managed to offer a good quality of life to the residents

We were piggy riding on another project which has been at Iowa State that quantifies quality of life, that defines and then quantifies quality of life, and within which childcare and children are a big part in how people actually perceive their lived experiences.

So those are some of the ways that I have kind of connected with this topic of, you know, how children matter to communities, how can communities better meet the needs of young kids and their families.

Because I work with public finance data, I pretty much have a good handle on how our city is investing or spending at the local level. And not just for day to day operations, but long term, you know, investing in infrastructure, investing in parks, investing in schools.

So that’s the direction from which I come. And then once I look at a particular city, I can look at the numbers and basically say how much of A priority that is.

Angie Schmitt 4:30
Oh, interesting. Interesting. Anecdotally, in Cleveland, education is not a priority. It just isn’t. Like, and I think programs for children also are not.

Das, Biswa [UPD] 4:31
So, yeah, I mean, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.

Angie Schmitt 4:45
But anyway, sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you.

Das, Biswa [UPD] 4:47
So, no, no, no worries. So, basically, the way that I, my understanding of this issue is, you know, you look at a state like Iowa, where we have a few urban centers where the population growth is happening, and then you have vast majority of the state where we have really small towns. There are 937 cities in Iowa, starting with the smallest city with 10 people and the largest one, Des Moines, with 220,000 people. So that gives you kind of an understanding of how many small cities there might be. And we are a state with 3.3 million people.

So, and so the vast majority of these small towns continue to shrink. And through the NSF project that I just referenced, we got a chance to work with many of them where they had managed to, so the poll that we do through Iowa State, I’m part of that as well, is to understand how people perceive their quality of life and childcare and youth programs and all of that are a big component of that.

So that gave us a way to reach out to these towns where the people’s perception about these were actually good. Why did some people continue to like the places they lived in spite of those places shrinking over a long period? So that’s kind of the rural side of things.

On the urban side of things, like I mentioned, we have a few population centers. So if you look at this particular issue that you’re working on, you know, you could look at large communities in our large cities having very formal approach to doing this, whereas the small towns, the rural places where population is shrinking, they have a more informal approach, you know, because they don’t have resources, the city is not able to invest much. So then you have volunteers, you have philanthropists coming in, getting together to see how we can make the lived experience of people better. So there are two different approaches that are at play here. You know, when you talk about a big city like Des Moines or Ames, which is where we are, the city does invest very strategically into areas that would draw young families to this place. That’s not so much the case in those rural areas.

Angie Schmitt 7:21
Can you give me an example? Like, what was the evidence that Des Moines was strategically investing in stuff for families?

Das, Biswa [UPD] 7:28
Yeah, I can give you the example of Ames, which is where we live. So the city is invested in childcare. The city does not itself have childcare services that they provide, but they actually support some of the childcare services in the city.

I’m part of a city board called Asset. So the Asset is funded by 4 partners, the city of Ames, Story County, which is where Ames is, the United Way of Story County, and then Iowa State University. So these four entities pull together about $6 million annually.
And this 6 million is what the asset budget looks like. So Asset in turn receives requests from various organizations, not for profits, to support some of the services they provide. So the top of the list is childcare.

In fact was tasked with going and spending half a day with a child care center to understand how they were doing, what were some of the key issues that were at play for them, because as much as we like child care centers, they deal with a lot of issues. You know, so we wanted to understand that the city actually subsidizes those families who can’t afford childcare through this Asset funding.

Das, Biswa [UPD] 8:52
So for example, think about Ames, we have a lot of students who have children pursuing PhD and what they want their kid to go to a childcare center. And given how expensive it sometimes is, they only pay a portion of it.

The rest of it is funded through this Asset initiative that the city has. The city, county and Iowa State have together. So partnerships. So when I meant formal, this is what I meant. It’s like the city is in a very formal way, year after year, able to invest.

Angie Schmitt 9:18
Okay.

Das, Biswa [UPD] 9:33
into something which is a great need for young families, childcare, and it also makes it a bit more affordable to those that might need. So that program has been in place for more than 30 years. I just got into the board for a three-year term last year, so I went through one year cycle, so I began to understand what exactly is going on.

Angie Schmitt 10:09
They have to qualify by income?

Das, Biswa [UPD] 10:12
Yes, they have to qualify by income, absolutely, and then of course.

Angie Schmitt 10:14
Yeah. Okay. Yeah, our county does that too. Our county does vouchers. I think there’s a health and human services levy that supports it.

Das, Biswa [UPD] 10:19
Okay.

Angie Schmitt 10:23
for people with certain incomes.

Das, Biswa [UPD] 10:26
Yeah. So, and then of course, there is as part of this entity, they do an impact assessment, meaning that they have a set of outcomes. They try to track year after year to see how well these investments are actually working. And so there have been a lot of positive outcomes. It’s not like it solved the problem forever, but it certainly made life better for some young families with kids, you know. So that’s one example.

The city here also has a very active recreation program. So twice a year they come out with a big booklet. So recreation and sports are a big part. part of Ames, you know, so it is. It doesn’t matter what your interest is. The city has a program for so they have a good amount of budget allocated to the recreation department and they run everything from basketball to yoga to you-name-it for children. I mean, as young as four to five year olds.

So that’s one area where I think the city has been doing a really impressive job. They also have, Ames has a significant investment in its park systems, so access to open space.

We are a town of 68,000 people. And if you take out the students, we have about 32,000 students. So that leaves you with around 36,000 residents who are not students. A lot of them affiliated to the university. But so for a town of this size, the city has about 42 parks.

Das, Biswa [UPD] 12:04
So the guiding principle is no matter where you live, you should be able to reach a park within walking distance, two to three blocks at the most.

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So, I wasn’t one of those people that just had everything kind of figured out at a young age at all. It’s been kind of funny and surprising though, how as I aged into my (mid, hate to admit) 40s, I’ve become a walking stereotype of Stuff Old People Like. Life comes at you fast, as they say.

For example, the thing I am really into right now is walking around my neighborhood — walking the dog — and admiring people’s landscaping. Like for real, I get a huge bang out of this. Walking around and looking at plants, I guess, is a lifelong thing I enjoyed to be honest. But now that I’m in my mid 40s, it is taking on whole new dimensions. The beauty of little moments. One of my theories is that is the meaning of life.

On a Friday night, taking a walk with my husband and then reading a World War II history books is my idea of a really good time. (I recommend this one I just finished.) If you’re still young, you’re probably barfing in your mouth right now. Which I 100 percent understand on some level.

But here’s the surprising thing: this rules. Appreciating the beauty of going for a walk in your beautiful neighborhood is actually pretty great? I’m as surprised as the next person, but some of these simple pleasures really start to hit home.

Maybe I could never appreciate that kind of thing before because I was in such a panic all the time. Like, “AAAHHHHHH how am I going to pay my bills?” “How am I going to deal with this crazy boss” or whatever. And now that has settled down some. Some of that stuff is sorted out.

Maybe it’s not that way for everyone in their 40s and I’m just lucky and happen to be peaking right now in some ways. I might be weird this way, but this is for sure the best my life has ever been. My kids are getting more independent, but they’re still fun and loving.

One thing that’s big for me about being in my 40s, that’s an improvement over previous decades, is I’m not poor anymore. My husband and I have some equity in our home. It’s not like we don’t have to worry about money at all, but it’s a lot different than when I was in my 20s and I was sweating every purchase I made.

In the same sort of vein, I just have a lot more figured out than I did back then. That’s one cool thing about getting older. You just figure out how to do things that you couldn’t figure out before.

I wasn’t very organized or neat for most of my life. I guess I’m still not. But I’ve gotten better. It’s manageable. I find that if I just devote every free minute I have to straightening my house, it’s passably clean — at least sometimes.

Even parenting. When I first had kids, I knew nothing. Now, I actually have a few tricks and pieces of advice I could offer other people, which feels weird. (Like if you want your kids to eat vegetables, just cut them up nicely and place them in front of them when they’re distracted or hungry with some dip, like when they’re watching TV.)

There’s some bad stuff about getting old also though, I have to admit. So that is kind of the counterbalancing thing you’re struggling against. The biggest one for me is just health wise, everything starts to go downhill. By the time you’re in your 40s, you will probably have a part of your body that you will know is defective and there’s not much you can do about it. For me, it’s my feet.

You have to take SUCH good care of yourself just to feel passably normal. Like yoga stretches in the morning, taking runs, almost cutting out alcohol and eating two salads a day, just to have a baseline feeling of not being slightly hungover. That is my norm now. I don’t know if it’s normal or if I have some undiagnosed health problem or what.

I was talking to a friend who’s about my age about this and we were laughing and saying we have to warn the young people of what is coming. Nobody warned us! Or did they try, complain about aches and pains, and we just rolled our eyes and ignored them? Anyway, this has given me a totally new appreciation for people who are in their 70s and older and are just soldiering on.

The other thing that is sometimes hard to cope with is staggering responsibility. There’s just so much of it. If I got cancer right now, everyone just expect me to stoically march through it. Being a real adult (ugh) means you gotta be the one comforting other people. The strong one. I don’t know that I always live up to all this to be fair.

I frankly don’t know if I have it in me. I’m less adult-ish than many other people my own age because I still have my parents. And my parents are relatively healthy. They sometimes help me! More than I help them, which is a huge blessing and sometimes I can’t believe my good luck about all this. I don’t think I will ever be adult-ish enough to carry on without them, fill their shoes.

But I guess that is what I’m gearing up for. Gotta get stronger, more selfless. More like a real adult, even though it’s so hard.

My husband and I went to see Ben Folds, recently. We both love that artist. He has a really good song about this, parenting, getting older. I think it’s really beautiful and relatable.

He says:

Good morning, son
I am a bird
Wearing a brown polyester shirt
You want a coke?
Maybe some fries?
The roast beef combo’s only $9.95
It’s okay, you don’t have to pay
I’ve got all the change

Everybody knows
It hurts to grow up
And everybody does
It’s so weird to be back here
Let me tell you what
The years go on and
We’re still fighting it, we’re still fighting it
And you’re so much like me
I’m sorry

I’m doing some really great interviews for my book research. Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Ross Chapin, an architect who specializes in developing “pocket neighborhoods” around a shared greenspace.

Angie Schmitt 0:09
Where do you live?

Ross Chapin 0:11
I’m on Whidbey Island north of Seattle.

Angie Schmitt 0:15
That sounds awesome.

Ross Chapin 0:17
Yeah, it’s cool.
It’s cool.

Angie Schmitt 4:37
You’re an architect.

Ross Chapin 4:40
Yeah. I’m an architect and then I’ve been involved over the decades with development. So the best way to do this is to build it. And so I built a number of these.

Angie Schmitt 5:09
Right. Cottage courts type things or pocket neighborhoods.

Angie Schmitt 9:29
My sense that these pocket neighborhoods or courtyard style housing is one of the, other than affordability and the availability of three bedroom sort of apartments, is one thing that could help make urban areas more family friendly. It seems like there’s an opportunity there, not just to... facilitate children’s play, but also kind of social connections for parents that are really important as well. Is that, does that, is that part of your theory?

Ross Chapin 13:15
So, on pocket neighborhoods, the idea is that, where we gather, well, you’ll see a neighborhood might be several 100 neighbors, you know, it’s got a sense of a place. The gist of it is that it’s got some bounds. We know it generally. And you don’t know all your neighbors, but you, there are landmarks and you know a few.

A pocket neighborhood are the basically, the people right around you and you’re on a first name basis. And it’s great for parents.

You know, you might have a mom who got back from the shopping with the kids and they’re tucked in and they want something and it’s, “oh my God, I forgot my purse.” And you know, you’ve got somebody who’s right there who can either look after the kids or go, you know, pick up, probably look after the kids while you’re out. Or, you know, this person who I met was, you know, heading off on vacation. Well, the cat’s fine.

Or this elderly fellow who was, you know, looking to, you know, trim his hedge and his next door neighbor came over and said, you know, hey, I got you, don’t worry about it. And here’s the challenge of America, is that we have developed around the scale of economy and mass production to try to bring [housing] prices down. And we’ve created public spaces and private spaces.

And the world is tough, so you retreat to your backyard. But the front yard and the public street ends up to be a no man’s land. You’ve got garage doors, grand living rooms that nobody’s in, and porticos that are impressive from the curb, but nothing’s happening. It’s not a space where you overlook a lot of life.

So a pocket neighborhood is different. It’s got an intermediate zone between the front door and the public street. And it expands that out. That’s one of the key ideas. Conversations happen because you just are there. You get together, the chats, hanging out on the porch.

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June 12 was Loving Day, which celebrates the 1967 Supreme Court decision striking down state bans on interracial marriage.

It’s so perfect, one of those coincidences that makes me (almost) believe in God, that in that case, the couple was named “Loving.” I was curious about them, so I was doing a little reading. It’s a really beautiful story, but I was struck by one detail in their life stories, or big thing that is treated like a detail, is a sad fact of American life that we have never fixed.

Richard and Mildred Loving were both from Central Point, Virginia, a small town that was diverse and where there was a lot of interracial socializing that took place. Richard grew up with Mildred’s brothers. His ancestors had fought for the confederacy in the Civil War. Mildred was part Native American part Black.

The couple started dating when Mildred was in high school. They got married after she became pregnant by another man. They traveled to Washington, D.C. in 1958 to get married because it was illegal in Virginia. Mildred reported she did not know it was illegal at the time.

They attempted to return home and were awoken to a police officer standing over their bed. In 1959 they were convicted of “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth." They were sentenced to a year in prison. But the judge allowed them to leave the state rather than serve the time.

The couple returned to Washington, D.C. but Mildred didn’t like city life. In 1964, one of the couple’s sons was hit by a car playing in the street. They wanted to return to their hometown and their families, who they weren’t even allowed to visit. That year, they filed a suit to vacate their conviction.

Mildred wrote to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and he referred them to the ACLU, who agreed to take the case on. The case was brought before the Virginia Supreme Court, which upheld the guilty verdict that year on the grounds that it was “enforced equally” whether a white or black person violated the law.

ACLU appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously that anti-miscegenation laws violated the 14th (equal protection) amendment of the constitution. Richard and Mildred did not appear at the proceedings but Richard did write the judge. His statement was “tell the court that I love my wife and it is just wrong that I can’t live with her.”

Richard was a construction worker and Mildred was a stay-at-home mom. They led quiet lives and did not make many public statements after the decision. They raised three children, including one who had a different father.

Official accounts of their life note, however, that in 1975, they were hit by a drunk driver. Richard was killed. Mildred lost one of her eyes.

What a sad ending to such an important American love story. I was struck how in the official accounts of the case and their lives, this fact is treated as kind of an aside. They fought all those years to live together, and then some dumb drunk driver stole it away, just like that. That is the convention with how traffic deaths are handled in American narratives. Even though, it happens to so many people and has such a profound impact on people’s lives and life stories.

The lack of emphasis is understandable of course, given the historic precedence of what Richard (and Mildred) did. Still, what a tragedy.

So many American families have stories like this. Just BAM one day, someone they loved a lot (the childhood friend turned husband) snatched away suddenly in a car crash. You can’t replace that kind of figure in your life.

A fatal car crash, the way it is treated in these narratives, is just something that happens, almost like an act of God. People are just expected to rise above and move on from. It’s so common for us. Joe Biden lost his wife and kid this way. In my state, my Governor, Mike DeWine, he lost one of his kids on the road. Fatal crash.

After fighting to be with her husband, Mildred ended up raising kids alone. And that is not treated as an injustice necessarily.

We have, of course, made progress on drunk driving since that time. But we’ve failed American families in many ways on this. We still have about 10,000 deaths a year in the U.S. that are the result of drunk driving. Over the last decade, we’ve made practically no progress on reducing traffic fatalities, while our peer nations have seen remarkable declines.

I was reading this article by a traffic safety expert written in 2014. The author Leonard Evans says in 1991, the “US traffic safety was nearly the best in the world.” Now we are the worst in the developed world. Americans die in car crashes about twice as much as Canadians. Our traffic death rates are six times (!!) higher than world leaders like Sweden.

If U.S. traffic safety had continued to improve at the same rate as our peer nations between 2004 and 2014, 20,000 lives a year would be saved, Leonard wrote. (Keep in mind this was written in 2014:

Since the terrorist attacks that killed 3000 Americans on September 11, 2001, deaths on US airlines have been rare events, averaging less than 20 per year. Since that date, more than 450 000 Americans have been killed in traffic crashes, including more than 8000 children aged seven years or younger. When 20 children of similar age were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School, President Obama became prominently involved, as he did again on the one-year anniversary of the tragedy. Yet there is little governments can do to protect against deranged gunmen. They strike in many countries, the largest loss of life being a 2011 incident in Norway.

In sharp contrast, every aspect of traffic involves government. Governments design and build roads, regulate and inspect vehicles, pass and enforce traffic laws, and license and discipline drivers. It is government’s responsibility to take unremarkable steps that already apply in other countries to prevent the deaths of 20,000 Americans (including more than 300 children aged seven years or younger).

“US safety policy continues to be a public health catastrophe,” he wrote.

To make matters worse, looking back 2014 looks like a great moment in U.S. traffic safety. Since that time, our record has eroded even more compared with peer nations. My book about this was published in 2020, where again I was calling it a crisis, and again deaths jumped and got worse.

The kind of people we’re losing every day, their importance to their families, I think we forget that. What was it like for Mildred raising those kids without Richard? And with a disability to boot?

They deserved better. We deserve better. We keep treating this problem as a footnote in other more important stories instead of being something worth examining in itself.

Last night, my neighbors were finishing up work on a “float” we have been building for a local parade.

This is not just a regular parade, but is hosted by the Cleveland Museum of Art, and features all these cool artists and complex, beautiful puppetry. I don’t know exactly how to describe it, but it’s amazing. I think if this parade was in a different city (a New York or something, somewhere more fashionable, a national media center) it would be pretty famous.

Anyway, I have a neighbor who’s involved with it and he suggested we participate this year. He wanted to construct an ice cream truck out of wood. And his vision was all the children would dress up as different ice cream treats.

It is just about finished, so last night a couple dads jumped in the front. The ice cream truck is man powered, like a Flintstone car. And we took it for a test drive down the road.

The neighborhood girls were loaded up. And the giant 6-foot, spinning paper mache ice cream cone was mounted to the top. We were blasting “Genius of Love” by the Tom Tom Club (you’d DEFINITELY know it if you heard it.) And we paraded down the street.

EVERYONE stopped and smiled and pulled out their cameras. Drivers slowed down. Motorcyclists honked. It was the most disarming and silly and surprising thing to see a wooden ice cream truck with horns mounted on the hood and a bunch of little girls dancing inside, come up the road on a random Thursday night.

It was so fun and refreshing to do that. Sometimes I get a little annoyed when people discuss ART in a breathy, self-serious way. But that was a really beautiful example of how it can bring people together.

Anyway, the guy who pulled the whole thing together, I was just feeling a bit of admiration for him. He’s a pretty humble guy. I think certain people just have a gift for this though, bringing people together and giving them exactly what they need socially to feel human and accepted and at ease.

Because of everything that happened the last few years, how awful it all was, I have a new appreciation for people like this. If you look, if you’re lucky, they are everywhere.

I’m really lucky because my mom is one of those people. She came in town yesterday. (She lives about 100 miles away.) She’s retired now but she keeps very busy volunteering. She was late because she had organized a trip to a butterfly house with her high school class. She helps convene that group, women in their early ‘70s.

Anyway, she was brimming with enthusiasm about it when she arrived at our house. She kept pulling out her phone and showing us pictures of butterflies and telling us how they eat overripe fruit through their proboscis, which is like a nose. It was kind of annoying, because she’s my mom, but ultimately, also endearing. All those women are so lucky to have someone like her to pull them out of their dreary day to day lives and get them to tour a butterfly house.

I wanted to include a third person but I forget who it was. It’s really early. My point anyway, is all our communities that contain a person like this have been so blessed: The quietly pro-social convener, fun maker. The comforter and listener.

Sometimes these people get a lot of recognition, but sometimes they just kind of do their thing. People genuinely love them. And they hold up whole communities that are the basis for a good life. These people are everywhere and they are complete gems.

There’s an idea for some folks, that a good life comes from striving and achievement. At the end, you receive recognition or rewards. Money and titles. But that is just one path, and maybe not even the most important way to contribute imo.

Often it’s people who don’t even get a lot of recognition or have a lot of prestige I find myself admiring so much. To have this kind of a role in your community, maybe just once in a while, in a little way, is something I think we can all aspire to. Or at least appreciate this kind fundamental human greatness when we witness it.

I really love kids, have them myself and would recommend the experience highly. I don’t really care that much if the population drops though, I guess. It isn’t a political project or issue for me at all. I think we’ll adjust. It seems inevitable that the world and national population will get older.

I’m also not bothered by people not wanting to have kids. To each his own.

I do feel bothered by “anti natal” discourse sometimes, because I do like kids and think parenting is a cool experience. So many times the anti-natal perspective is overly negative about parenting and children more generally. A lot of what they say, imo, is basically bullshit.

One of the anti-natal propaganda offensives that I think is most suspect is this claim that many women regret becoming mothers. I’m sure there are some people who do feel that way, especially people who have children under really bad circumstances. But what I see more often is someone, even someone who had kids under terrible circumstances, who says it was the best thing that ever happened to them.

Moms will say things to other moms in confidence that they wouldn’t say openly in a mixed crowd. I’ve never had a mom friend confide in me that she regrets having kids. (Regrets getting married to a specific man? Yes.) Anyway, it’s one of those things that’s impossible to disprove.

The opposite could be true as well of course. People could regret not having kids. And to be fair, many people who don’t have kids wanted to, and couldn’t for some reason, and that is a big source of pain and grieving for some people. I am really sympathetic toward them and this isn’t about casting judgement on them.

My concern is this, I think a lot of the online “discourse” about this undersells parenthood, and is written by maladjusted grifters. Everything on the internet is like that, to be fair. Anyway, I worry people who are too credulous about all this and are on the fence about having kids will be “influenced” into not doing it, when they might have really enjoyed it.

If you’re the kind of person who enjoys having a dog, like me, I think you’d enjoy having kids. There is something very gratifying about caring for something. (I would recommend getting a dog too, even though it’s a huge hassle.)

That relationship, the relationship a parent has with a kid, would be hard to replace. My daughter and son, the physical intimacy of that relationship, I just have never had with a friend. Putting aside the obvious fact that I carried them and then nursed them. Even now, their pre teens, my daughter will do things like goofily stick her finger up my nose. We sleep together sometimes. I suppose it’s possible to have this level of intimacy with a non relative, but I think it’s very rare. It’s not something, I think, would be easy for me to recreate in another relationship.

To be fair, that might be partly due to my own social limitations. I know there’s this idea of the chosen family, in progressive circles, borrowed from gay culture. And many LGBTQ people who are rejected from their families, might have additional barriers to having kids.

Honestly, it’s a nice idea. This way of living places more importance on close friends, less on family. I saw a TV show one time, about these people in their 20s in LA, and the guy, a straight male, would take baths with his best friend. (They’d wear swimming trunks.) And I was just like 🤯. So apparently there are people that are succeeding with friendships and intimacy in ways I can’t imagine and I don’t want to diminish how awesome and important that can be in life.

I am honestly jealous of people like this. I have friends I really love of course. But, for me anyway, close friends are always moving. I just lost another one to a cross country move. Something’s always changing, schools, relationships. Those relationships have never had the same kind of permanence for me that my family relationships, like my relationships with my parents did. I still keep in touch with childhood friends, but we don’t live in the same cities, etc. For me, I haven’t been able to rely on them to the degree I would a family member a lot of times. And that is probably partly my fault to be fair.

I’m in my mid 40s now. My kids are pre teens. We went to the amusement park last week. And my son and I rode on a rollercoaster. The picture was funny. I got suckered into buying it for the second year in a row.

I can’t imagine a timeline where I would be having more fun at this age. I’m getting too old for rollercoasters, I got kinda sick. Next time, we’ll have the kids bring friends so I can just watch the rides.

People are lonelier than ever right now. We don’t have strong community institutions now. People don’t even go into offices. It’s concerning how much time people spend alone.

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But something huge happened in traffic safety quietly a few years back. As part of the Infrastructure Bill, someone (a hero and a responsible adult: Laura Gillen (D-NY-04), Mike Lawler (R-NY-17) and Debbie Dingell (D-MI-06)) inserted language that would require “passive drunk driving detection” in all new cars. NHTSA was given five years to work out the details.

What is passive drunk driving detection? Well, vehicle tech is so advanced now that it can tell if the driver is smashed! Amazing, right? (Yes, yes it is.) Passive drunk driving detection, what it does is if a driver is inebriated, it basically picks up on it through a detection system mounted in the steering wheel that measures BAC using your breath. Or it detects BAC when you touch the start button. The car simply will not start if the driver is wasted.

We have the ability to do this now with tech: stop drunk drivers BEFORE they kill someone. There is a lot of stuff like this now! On-the-shelf tech that we don’t have to wait around for cars to become fully autonomous to take advantage of! But we keep doing this will-we-or-won’t-we routine, because at the end of the day, traffic safety isn’t a priority in the U.S.

Everyone kinda pretends that we solved drunk driving in the 1980s. I don’t want to diminish what MADD did back then, which was amazing. But broader structural reforms (like a subsidized cab service paid for by a tax on liquor sales) were quashed by the “spirits industry,” which is as evil as the firearms industry or any other industry in history.

We’re better than we used to be about drunk driving (which was REAL bad) but we’re FAR from having solved the issue. Drunk driving kills more 10,000 Americans every year! Massive, massive social harm. About one-in-three traffic deaths is alcohol related in a typical year and that’s just the ones we know about! (Hit and runs, I think, many people think, are VERY VERY often drunk driving cases. And there are a lot of hit-and-runs.)

Also, drunk (and high!) driving has gotten worse since the pandemic. It’s bad out there. In my city, Cleveland, just based on my read of the traffic data and what I hear from other people who look closely at it it’s maybe the top problem. A big share of our fatalities are people who crash into a fixed object, like a tree or a utility poll, late at night. 😬

Traffic calming and street redesign, the preferred corrective for dangerous driving in my niche field, only goes so far when someone is inebriated. Which is why I was excited AF that we were going to use this amazing new tech that is available to fight this social scourge.

Now, here’s the bad news! 😡 Some quack/hack/shock jock (probably some kind of front for the beverage industry, or a secret society of drunk driving politicians) invented some kind of dumb fake controversy where they called this measure a “kill switch.” “How dare the gub-er-ment get between me and my freedom to drive drunk!”

Ron DeSantis used Twitter recently to advance conspiracy that the “kill switch” would allow the government to remotely stop all cars. Kelly Blue Book has a good overview of the controversy here. House Republicans have swung into action to protect drunk drivers, I mean (cough cough) privacy!!!

Now a measure is picking up steam that would strip this requirement out of the latest transportation bill that is moving forward. I have been watching this with concern. MADD is now reporting that an amendment that would do this, block passive drunk driving detection from becoming standard in new vehicles, just passed the House Appropriations Committee. This cannot be allowed to continue.

This measure is sponsored by Rep. Michael Cloud, of Texas.

Cloud: Standing up for drunk drivers!

We cannot them get away with this.

I was told by some knowledgable people in Texas, which I just visited, that it’s sort of an open secret that drunk driving is winked at in Texas. I don’t think it’s just that state either!

This is a big opportunity to advance traffic safety and save lives. I just don’t want the pro safety side to not notice and miss this huge opportunity to actually do something.

Parents, the upshot is always, are hopelessly selfish, entitled and stupid. Sometimes ridiculous, the article will go to great lengths to point out.

Anya Kemenetz just produced a classic of the genre. The headline, in New York Magazine, is about “The grand tradition” of WEALTHY, WHITE parents “suing New York Public Schools.”

I’m paywalled from this article (but familiar with her work). Anyway, the NOT AT ALL SUBTLE suggestion is that parents of kids with disabilities in New York are big selfish liars (or something) for demanding disability accommodations for their kids in public schools. (Which is supposed to be an entitlement.)

It couldn’t be, for example, that the institution — New York Public Schools — is failing to live up to its obligations to kids with disabilities and only rich parents have the means to fight back. Parents, you see, are the villains in this story.

We are primed for this, I think a little. We’ve seen this movie before. Anya is one of the journalists who frequently dunks on wealthy “white parents” despite being a white (!) Brooklyn dweller herself (one of the good ones, see!) That is common to the genre.

Sometimes it’s ALL PARENTS who are stupid and horrible to be trusted. Freddie Deboer produced another gem of an example recently. The problems plaguing public schools right now, he says, are due to a “vicious” right wing anti public school propaganda cycle.” (Nothing to see here, you see!) And that’s why parents are pulling their kids out of public school. The institution can never be to blame, here. Only parents, who are ROTTEN TO THE CORE, objects of scorn.

Observe the way parents are treated in this article. Deboer says: “Parents, credulous towards this propaganda and often already looking for excuses to separate their children from poor kids and students of color…”

Parents are always white, always rich, which reflects more on the writer’s socioeconomic status than anything about the real position of “parents” in general right now. Notice how the construction of the sentence starts off with “parents", a category that includes people of all races, but as it continues, he is really only talking about white parents.

Can you imagine some reporter lecturing Jack and Norma Arnold about their concerns? They would have never!

We saw this flavor of reporting a little too, with a widely-shared Atlantic article about the share of kids at elite colleges who receive disability accommodations. The article quotes an unnamed “tenured professor” who attributes the whole trend — most of the accommodations are for ADHD, anxiety or depression — to “rich kids getting extra time on tests.”

I thought Laura McKenna’s response to this article was the best. Laura is a mom of a disabled kid herself, a kid with autism, who helps other parents fight for disability accommodations when they are denied them, which happens routinely.

She writes:

Why are so many kids crippled with mental health issues? Organized sports, COVID, and cellphones. We conducted a massive, unregulated experiment on young people. When they were young, we removed them from free interactions with peers and overregulated their lives with youth soccer and gymnastic leagues. Then we totally shut down their lives for a year and a half. We gave them devices to lobotomize them. Our schools became performative shams. We parents looked at our phones and didn’t interact with them.

We have totally fucked up a generation.

This to me is closer to the truth. Instead of indicting PARENTS, we’re indicting the wider economy of choices parents are operating in, society overall isn’t showing up for families and kids.

This DOES lead to some ridiculous outcomes — giant carlines and $10,000 youth travel sports — but it is the wider economy of choices, and how they have become “enshittified” and privatized for profits that is to blame, not parents imo.

Parents who try to help their kids, struggle to get them accommodated, are doing what is expected of them! They are putting these kids on their backs, when it’s the wider culture that is supposed to be doing that to some degree.

Parents, I think, are smart. Parents have VERY, VERY GOOD insights about what is wrong with public schools, if you ask them. Parents, the lack of respect for their concerns, is one of the big problems with public education and why more and more of them are headed for the door, imo.

Here’s an example. I love this. Randi Weingarten, United Federation of Teachers, made a big statement against AI and screens in classrooms last week. She’s right. It’s bad!

But God, I love this woman.

You know who could have told you all this tech stuff was TERRIBLE three, four or five years ago?! Parents! We talk about it all the time! My public school district sent my PRE-SCHOOLER home with a laptop a few years ago I SHIT YOU NOT.

She couldn’t read!!! How is she supposed to use a laptop!? I was like, “NO THANK YOU!” “I don’t want this. Take it back!”

Parents like me who could have been a voice of reason just were not listened to. Parents KNEW this was nonsense from day 1. We were forced to go through the motions and pretend for a few years, until all the “serious people” caught up. And a lot of damage was done in the meantime.

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I want to start out by laying out my priors.

I am not a DSA type really. I am more in the technocratic camp I guess. My field is urban planning, which is practically a religion for technocrats. I’m also pragmatic. I just want to see problems get solved.

So, it makes most sense for me to align myself with the technocrats, who are having sort of a moment right now and I mostly do. Even so, the technocrats have been losing me lately. I’m concerned about the direction all this is heading, especially with respect to tech.

Here’s the thing: Technocrats, at least as they are aligning themselves right now, Ezra Klein types, have class interests. They are a class. We know who these people are. They are well educated. They live in major cities — fashionable neighborhoods within wealthy coastal cities. They are professional knowledge workers. Maybe, if they’re lucky, they got in before housing prices went really crazy. They are the winners of the current economy to a big degree.

Recently Jerusalem Demas for the Argument editorialized how the U.S. should accept cheap electric vehicles from China. I get it on some level. China is KILLING US on electric vehicle development. You can buy a super nice EV there for like $20,000 or less. (During the price wars just a few years ago, you could buy a new Tesla for around that price. I bought a used EV for $9k just a few years ago but I digress.)

Matt Yglesias followed up, even more painfully, imo with how he was sick of talking about affordability, the political issue of the moment and wanted instead to talk about growing the economy, which used to be a textbook Republican position.

Matt will present himself as some sort of neutral arbiter of good policy. That’s what technocrats do. They will argue passionately about zoning or transit frequencies. Boring stuff, to a lot of other people!

It’s not that that stuff doesn’t matter. I will get into a debate about it from time to time. But I also think it’s also a purposeful technique for keeping it in that kind of technical realm and away from their personal positions and interests. We want to argue about what is best from a purely technical standpoint without really getting into values or tradeoffs, our position vis a vis other people affected by these issues. And sometimes it gets really weird.

Cheap Chinese EVs would be good for consumers, Demas says. This is sort of a pro-market argument. I don’t even full disagree I guess. Protectionism, she basically argues, hurts everyone. It’s honestly sort of conservative but that’s not what bothers me about it. I’m willing to engage with conservative ideas.

Auto consumers, I have written, have a right to be pissed off about what has happened to the auto industry and car prices. Still, I thought the Argument was kind of obtuse about what this would mean for the American auto industry. And this is DAFT AF about class. (In fairness, Matt Yglesias did a follow up where he conceded it’s important for the US to have a manufacturing base.)

Politicians have to be more practical than this. There are whole regions of the country — Detroit for eg — that rise and fall based on the auto industry. Auto workers themselves are the tip of the iceberg. Parts suppliers, the whole supply chain, are enormous with the auto industry. Every auto industry job supports 10 others. This is why, at least in the past, politicians were very deferential to the auto industry. These guys are not just in the upper Midwest, they’re all over the South too, even foreign automakers have huge plants that support whole economies in the Carolinas and Deep South. This is the kind of thing politicians, who have to legitimate go out and talk to ordinary people, understand and our media class, which is now ensconced in these two or three major coastal cities which have had this tech gold rush, don’t seem to get.

Pretty much the only people who can afford to be flip about this are wealthy people in coastal cities who are insulated from these kinds of economic shocks (unless it starts coming for their sectors, like Trump did, such as tech, federal workers or academia).

I’m not one of those Matt Y mega haters. In fact, I think the constant takedowns are sort of annoying. Still! Matt makes more than $1 million a year writing a blog and went to Harvard and was raised in Manhattan. He just can’t relate to what normal people are dealing with right now, the primary thing is money issues, even though I’m sure he thinks about it on an intellectual level. It is a problem for Dem-aligned groups that so many of our prominent spokespeople are like this. We just had an affordability election where our party spent the whole time lecturing people imperiously about democracy. So many self owns.

To some extent, the big populist backlash happening in politics (Trump 2.0) is a direct response to the outsized influence people like Matt (well off, urban professionals) have over politics and institutions. This is a powerful group overall. And people don’t like them! And I think to some degree they earned it! I think they did the same kind of smoke and mirrors where they protected their own class interests while presenting it as “the science” during covid. And people noticed! The public is not dumb!

One qualification: I am also like this — SORTA! I have a college degree. A master’s too! (From Cleveland state fwiw). I don’t live in a major coastal city. But by the standards of the city I live in, Cleveland, I am well off for sure.

That being said, I might be rich compared to the average Clevelander, but I am a poor person compared the well off folks in cities like New York and SF, where tech money etc. has made a lot of people serious fortunes. My husband and I combined don’t make what Matt makes in a single year in 10 probably. Especially within the wealthier neighborhoods, many people in coastal cities are on a different planet entirely from the rest of the U.S., where people are struggling.

I’m a little sensitive about the U.S. auto industry, admittedly, because my family is from Toledo, Ohio, (little Detroit) which has been on a steady decline since the 1970s. The whole region of the country has been massively destabilized by changes in manufacturing etc. There’s a trauma from this that impacts people from generations. I grew up in Columbus with other families who had all fled places like Toledo and Cleveland. It’s the complete opposite of having been brought up in SF or New York and having your parents’ home appreciate 10 million times and make you wealthy.

One thing that frustrates me about technocrats — a critique Trump used to full advantage — is they just DO NOT care about is places that are not doing well. To just causally suggest letting Chinese automakers kind of decimate the American auto industry — that is an example of the kind of awesome economic power a lot of these important talking heads have. Biden would have never. His whole term he was trying to help these industries kind of retool and modernize.

I don’t think Trump is a legit friend to like rust belt cities or manufacturing to be clear. I don’t like him. But he at least gets the optics. Biden did to somewhat. Protectionism is the one issue that I feel like really plays well in Ohio, a state that Democrats have badly fumbled and that, if they don’t regain, probably prevents them from ever holding the Senate.

Now, emboldened apparently, our opinion leaders have cast off any pretense of concern about these issues it seems like. That is concerning.

Even though I live in Cleveland, and I guess I’m a weirdo for this but, I actually care about California. I want to see them get their crazy housing problems solved. I have followed all their problems, as anyone who reads the news a lot (me!) will do — because the national news is obsessively focused on a few coastal places.

It confuses me that these advocates in California don’t seem to care whether people live or die in the Midwest. The only solution they ever offer is to build more housing in California so everyone from Allentown, PA, or wherever can move there. Which is insulting and not a real solution.

Anyway, people see stuff like this and they get the not-inaccurate sense that these people are not on their side. This is one of my frustrations with technocrats, and the kinds of coastal nerds that constitute it now, even though I am aligned with them on many, many issues. They are sort of daft about all this.

When you are part of the economic winners, you might be tempted to view all progress as positive. After all, hasn’t your metro area been growing more prosperous every year. Haven’t you been getting richer? Your friends? What reason would you have to be suspicious of tech or progress?

While they do not care about the auto industry and manufacturing, technocrats can be curiously uncritical of the tech industry (which again, they may work in or near and benefit from). They may even be protective of the industry, having the impulse to swat down critiques of AVs, or data centers, or AI. This is another thing I’m struggling with.

I have been sort of shocked about the tenor of the reporting on self-driving cars and Waymo. I’ve already said I have mixed feelings about Waymo and I don’t support a full ban, just kind of a cautious and measured approach. Meanwhile journalists like Kelley Piper writing in the Argument has written like four articles lambasting critics of autonomous vehicles, taking an advocacy position that is almost identical to Waymo’s corporate talking points.

Even if you support Waymo and think on balance it will be good, that is taking things too far, imo and I have been reporting about traffic safety for 10 plus years. These techno-optimist takes skirt over about how much damage tech has done to our social fabric over the last decade plus. How self interested these companies can be. The way they have of out muscling any political opposition with pure money and power. Ordinary people have a right to be mad and suspicious!

The interests of Uber and Lyft drivers, lower and middle class, are almost completely sidestepped in these discussions, or treated with outright derision (like it’s corrupt somehow for Dem politicians to cater to them). And this is in an ostensibly left-leaning publication somehow?! It’s no wonder, I think when I see stuff like this, how the Dems/left lost the working class.

Technocrats need to look at themselves about stuff like this. The self interest of well-educated types on major cities is FOR SURE advanced by having cheap cabs everywhere. These people are major beneficiaries of the “gig economy.” A whole class of temporary workers was created overnight to serve mainly wealthy people in major coastal cities, provide them cheap cabs, served them through the pandemic maybe for example and they can be just as easily dismissed and forgotten about.

Now that doesn’t mean we should BAN WAYMO. Again, it might make sense to take an account of how drivers will be affected and say the benefits outweigh all that. Maybe there’s a technocratic fix, like UBI. Although I don’t know how serious that is. It seems more like a technique that’s used to brush off concerns than a real possibility.

This group, the technocrats, they are riding high off some wins in housing. The YIMBY movement, I have my critiques of some elements, as most online people do, but I think, has done some really good work. The housing crisis has gotten so bad it’s impossible to ignore. There is bipartisan support in some cases for reforms now. I just heard there is major legislation coming out of Washington advancing some important housing reforms.

This can’t happen soon enough. I was just in Austin, where they up zoned the entire city, and people told me rents have fallen so much it’s shocking. Legitimately major win. The kind of thing, Democrats might be able to legit hang their hat on electorally.

With the YIMBY movement though, DID include a class analysis. It was often led by people who, although they might be well educated, couldn’t afford to buy homes and were economically insecure as a result. And, crucially, it identified a richer enemy: Older homeowners who were hoarding their wealth and resources by refusing to permit new housing in fast-growing areas. That kind of class analysis was smart and defensible, even though it didn’t alleviate all class concerns.

In politics, the important thing isn’t just having the best ideas, especially right now. People need to see what side you are on.

Especially when the issue involves tech, the interests of ordinary folks cannot be glossed over. AI, data centers, self driving cars — all of these issues low and middle-income people have a lot at stake and plenty of reasons to be skeptical.

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