A Jumbled Little World – Page 6 – A blog by Michael Zenz

What is the real purpose of a transit system?

Don’t take advantage of transit riders who have no other choice

Some might answer the above question like an evolutionary biologist; the purpose of a transit system is to maintain its strength and grow. This at least seems to be the sort of perspective that is creeping into the debate about how to close a budget gap for the DC metro. Although it is very refreshing to see fare increases be the main strategy, many of the proposals from transit advocates in the area are centered around methods that take advantage of captive customers who are very unlikely to leave the system even with substantial fare increases.

The two main proposals that exhibit this property affect commuters to the city center (up to $0.50 surcharge during peak commuting time) and tourists, along with those who must pay with cash, (with surcharges for paper fare cards – frequent riders typically have a permanent credit card type fare card that would not be affected). The thinking behind these disproportional increases is quite simple; these sorts of people are very unlikely to change behaviors after fare increases and therefore metro can charge them more without losing ridership.

Is it wrong to charge disproportionate fees? Not exactly. The problem here is not the disproportionate fares themselves; this is done all the time in an effort to change people’s behaviors to more pro-social options. For instance, you might increase parking fees in an area with the hopes that people will take public transit instead (this might make sense if cars often clog the city center); however, the intent in such a case is totally different from the current case. It is hoped in the current case with metro that people won’t change their behaviors. Otherwise these extra fees would not raise the needed funds.

I’m not against most of the proposals that include fee increases but it is important to maintain a just (an ethically justifiable) distribution of burden. Something radical needs to be done but many transit advocates seem to have lost sight of the actual purpose of any mass transit system, building a just city. We can take advantage of the circumstances of some so that they carry a disproportionate burden but this sort of strategy is certainly wrong. After all, models of consumer elasticity can’t tell us what sort of values we should have.

Saving the DC Metro

It is hard to take the Metro out of DC.

The DC area rapid transit rail system (called ‘the Metro’) is facing something of a budget crisis this year. They need to close about a $180 million budget gap for the next fiscal year; the gap itself has many causes but a major one is the reduced travel due to the recession. Last week, the interim GM of WMATA (the agency in charge of Metro) presented a solution to the problem that features widespread fare increases but minimal service cuts. I don’t want to go into specifics because other sources have done a great job at analyzing the various options open to Metro but I do want to comment on how open people have been to fare increases.

The worry seems to be the similar for many who speak up against service reductions in place of fare increases; to reduce service to a level such that metro does not fulfill almost all of people’s transportation needs would in fact destroy the entire system. Many people (including myself) depend on Metro as a main source of transportation. For many it is not simply a supplementary method but something that is a requirement of normal living and to curtail it would be to breach a certain trust. People have modeled their lives around the persistence of a robust Metro, therefore limiting that system would also limit their ability to live normal lives.

People are willing to pay a lot to keep Metro healthy because it is, in many ways, a primary method of transportation for much of DC. I find it unlikely that this aversion in service cuts would take place in many metropolitan areas in the US outside of New York. Unlike most rail systems in the US, Metro is far more than a commuter system; rather, it is a legitimate transportation system by itself. Just as with highways, once this is the case it is very difficult to take such a system away from people.

A Psychological Interpretation of Hume’s Standard of Taste

We should treat aesthetic evaluations in the fashion of psychological phenomena.

In Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste”¹, we are presented with a sometimes confusing picture of the aesthetic world. On one hand, Hume is quite explicit in saying that aesthetic properties are dependent upon beliefs of aesthetic agents; they are parasitic on sentiment. However, Hume argues that there are nevertheless clear standards of taste, which dictate the correctness of our various aesthetic judgments. Here I wish to present a loose interpretation of Hume that takes the psychological nature of aesthetic judgments seriously. Following work by Jerrold Levinson, I claim that aesthetic standards can only be understood from the perspective of prediction; we want to have an aesthetic standard of taste so that we can predict which works will bring us the most aesthetic pleasure. Furthermore, if we consider this issue from such a perspective, the more troubling issues of Hume’s view fall away. Continue reading “A Psychological Interpretation of Hume’s Standard of Taste”

Social Justice and Transit Oriented Developments

An argument for transit oriented development using the general acceptance of the Americans with Disabilities Act in America.

As the automobile became the preferred method of travel in the United States during the 20^th century, car oriented development became the dominant pattern of city design. Today it is extremely difficult or simply impossible to go about ones daily life without some reliance upon an automobile. Furthermore, in most areas of the country, the lack of one makes a person a second class citizen. For a variety of reasons, there has been a resurgence in the interest for mass-transit oriented developments (TODs). Proponents of this alternative method of city organization argue for its superiority over car oriented developments in efficiency, aesthetics, and livability (to name a few).^¹ Although there is something to be said for all of these reasons, here I will concentrate on an argument for TODs from the perspective of social justice. Typically arguments from social justice have been among the more controversial because they often involved some sort of redistribution of resources; in American politics it is often unclear how much the rich should be forced to give up in order to help the poor. I hope to bypass this issue by looking at a current public policy that seems to have wide-spread public approval, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and derive from it an argument for government sanctioned support of TODs. In section 1, I describe a number of public policies, including zoning, highway, and accessibility standards for the disabled and from these derive the moral basis for the government support of TODs. In section 2, I explain my argument in detail and address a number of initial concerns. Finally, in section 3, I address the most plausible objection to widespread TOD development – that gentrification could cause the poor to lose their homes. Continue reading “Social Justice and Transit Oriented Developments”

Activism and truth

You shouldn’t trust an activist with truth.

I simply don’t trust activists. The reason for this is probably quite clear; activists have stopped searching for truth (whatever sort of thing that might be) and simply focus on how they can argue for some given view. Philosophers who deal with topics that interface directly with the world have the difficult task of straddling the line between simple neutrality and activism. Rhetorical skills are extremely important when dealing with those not familiar with a topic; too often clear, valid but dull arguments fall flat when posed to the general public, and this makes such illuminations of truth completely useless if one wants to make a difference. Some topics are simply too complicated to be comprehensible (all at once and quickly) and therefore need to be distilled down to more simplistic elements that might appeal to a general audience. I don’t want to make any big claim here about any of this, but I do want to elucidate the problem for the philosopher of practical problems.

So how do we stay neutral and yet be effective? It certainly requires good faith; we need to approach these issues with as much neutrality as possible and with truth as our goal. But I think this is often ignored. If we decide for some pre-reflective reason (or after some sort of preliminary reflection) that something is true then it is far to common for us to find cleaver ways to argue for that given view. We can simply feel that healthcare is a right or that urbanity is good without any deep understanding of why. Then it is quite easy to practice a little sophistry and make plausible arguments even though we might ignore a good deal of facts. Or we take facts that exist within some sort of complex context as simple (or straight forward) facts without qualification, even though most facts require a great deal of contextualization. I fear that most of the information you hear from activists is of this simplified sort and it seems obvious that this strategy likely leads to a great deal of deception and confusion.

But I (like most people) have social views that are not totally elucidate and vetted. Does such a high mandate for truth-seeking require me to sit on the sidelines until I am very sure that my views at least approach truth in some meaningful way? (of course I don’t require that we are absolutely sure of the truth, just reasonably so) I hope not; however, it seems as though the unthinking mode of politics (in which we never question our lower level assumptions about how to bring about good) would be in direct conflict with the truth-seeking (or modeling of regularities, if one is going to be difficult) of philosophers, scientists, and any other serious theorists.

And we have a winner…I guess

Perigrine Espresso is the place to go for cappuccinos in the DC area

So, I have been in DC for a few months and after a good amount of research (both on the webs and in person) I feel confident that I know the best place for espresso (and more specifically a cappuccino). If you want something good, go to Perigrine Espresso near eastern market; trust me. After several samples of both their cappuccino and that of their only real competitor Chinatown Coffee Co. (along with a bunch of other places around the area that simply don’t stack up) it became rather obvious that they are the best around. However, I have to say that they still don’t match Bradbury’s in Madison, WI; now maybe if they start serving crepes….. (though there is a crepe cart at eastern market, so a start)

Oh and a side note, Eastern market is a pretty sweet place to be; I want to live there. Now if only I made that sort of money…

And we will miss you Nick Cho! Seriously. When you get all those taxes payed please come back and save DC from its (good) coffee drought. Maybe open something up in Takoma Park too.

How do we deny someone a good?

David Chalmers has coined the term “hard problem” to describe the issue of consciousness; science has had great success solving “easy” problems related to the functional roles of mental states but has had little (and perhaps no) success solving the deeper questions regarding consciousness itself. Although, the existence of some consciousness problem beyond the functional (and scientifically testable) issues of mind is extremely controversial, I think a similar language might be useful when talking about ethics.

We can imagine a case in which someone desires some good (something that they desire to do, that gives them pleasure); perhaps they want to witness animals fight each other to the death. Society, however, might prohibit this; if a person does do this sort of thing they will be put in jail. That would certainly leave the person worse off as far as experiencing goods. So, simply put, society has decided to deprive this person of some good.

There could be an “easy” solution to this problem. If the person reasons morally within a similar moral context as the rest of society then we can show them that setting up animal fights is inconsistent with other moral views that they have. Notice that if this works we are guaranteed a solution that is satisfactory for both society and the thwarted animal killer. It is a matter of logic whether a given moral belief follows from others. Of course, making our moral outlook internally consistent is a lengthy process, but at least we know the process by which this can be achieved.

However, there is another possibility that seems to be “hard”. Imagine the person who wants the spectacle of animal slaughter simply says that they consider animals to have no moral rights whatsoever. They may have metaphysical (or similarly, religious) views that allow them to do anything they want to animals just as we do with machines. As Descartes believed, this person might think that animals are simply automatons; therefore, under their view, to protect animals from needless pain and death is as pointless as protecting robots from a similar threat (and we do watch robots destroy each other without feeling guilty).

This is a “hard” problem because we can not reason this person out of the wish to watch animals suffer. Their view is, at some basic level, incompatible with our own and there is no reason for anyone to choose one view over the other unless they refer to their pre-existing moral views. We can try to find some moral common ground with the person so that they will come around to our point of view, but this attempt may very well fail. So, we must simply deny the person the pleasure they seek. What gives us the right to do this? At this point the process completely falls apart; we must reference yet more moral beliefs of ours (perhaps about how we have the right to protect creatures from harm) in order to justify any action we take. For these cases there can not be any more moral argumentation, only conflict. This makes the problem quite “hard” indeed.

The difference between trains and buses

Some people feel buses are the answer to all our mass transit needs. They will, of course, admit that big expensive commuter rail systems are more pleasant than a fleet of buses (anyone who has ridden on both can attest to this), but they will simply point to the price tag as the major issue at hand. How can we afford such large transit systems?

In fact, if you look at the issue from a certain perspective rail systems seem simply fascist. Whereas bus networks can be easily adapted to meet the ever changing demands of the customers (we must keep them happy!) , rail systems dictate what the customer behavior should be. It is very easy to change a bus route to accommodate a new population distribution (for example, the construction of a new subdivision); it is extremely difficult to change a rail system.

A rail system has the remarkable effect of change the area around it. Transit stops usually become hubs of development; property values go up around them and people try to move as close by as possible. In the Washington DC area, for example, real estate prices are largely a function of distance to a metro stop; people want to use the metro and thus want to be near a stop. But it is not clear how we should feel about this trend. On the one hand, a rail system can have an incredible stabilizing effect on a community. It supports clear neighborhood centers and a maximization of space (i.e. higher density) around the stops of the metro. This in turn greatly decreases the dependence of residents on cars and thus decreases energy consumption; if you live near a metro station/neighborhood center, you have all your basic needs met within walking distance and you can take the train to anywhere else you need to go.

However, the flip side of stability is restrictiveness. The rail will stay where it is for a great while and therefore people are forced to live where that system exists if they want the high quality mass transit that their tax dollars helped build. People must, in effect, react to what the government has provided and are not as free when choosing where to live. The government can, in effect, coerce people to live in a specified pattern. The ethical implications of all this are rather interesting, and when I have time I’ll post about my take on it. However, for now this is an issue about which I am still starting to form a view.

Cappuccino Review #14 – Escape Java Joint

Escape Java Joint

*UPDATE* – NOW CLOSED

: You really have to search for the part with the coffee.

942 Williamson Street.

Madison

website

For an intro about how and why I am trying the cappuccinos of Madison, go here.

The Willy (for Williamson ) St. area is Madison’s most eclectic. It is full of students and hippies. They have their own currency and the towns largest coop. So, it isn’t all that surprising that the coffee shops in this area are a bit odd. Mother Fool’s (which I reviewed earlier and has some of the best cappuccinos in town) is also there, but Escape Java Joint certainly takes the cake in the ‘strange’ department. Trust me, just go there.

I wonder if someone tried to take these awesome chairs....

The place consists of several areas that are completely different (a couple separate buildings really). When we went we sat in the huge outdoor area; they even have their names imprinted on the chairs. There is no menu, but just have a chat with the guy behind the counter and he’ll try to figure out what you might like. And he will check up on you several times to make sure your drink is good; it shows that they at least care!

Anyway, the cappuccino was decent. Their smallest was a 12oz, so I ordered it dry. It actually reminded me a lot of the cappuccino from Michelangelo’s on

State st. Their scores turned out to be the same (in all regards). I enjoyed the drink, and the strange environment added to the entire experience. So I’m a happy camper. Here are the numbers, all copied and pasted (out of 5):

Presentation: 3

Smoothness: 4

Strength: 3

Complexity: 3

Foam: 4

Correctness: 3

Mean: 3.33/5

SD: .52

So….go there. It is cool and you will have fun. Oh and they have music there a lot; one of their giant rooms has a stage.

Cappuccino Review # 13 – Froth House

Froth House

11 N Allen St.

Madison

website

For an intro about how and why I am trying the cappuccinos of Madison, go here.

Some coffee shops I really want to be great; they have a certain feel that makes you really like them right when you walk in. Froth House is just that sort of place. It is the perfect neighborhood hangout where you expect to run into someone you know if you live in the area. It also helps that it is my neighborhood coffee shop, located by the corner of Allen and Regent next to the Regent street coop, a wine and beer store, a book store, and a number of other small businesses. Basically it is a little town center on Madison’s near west side, which is pretty cool.

The Froth House also has one of the better patio areas I have seen, and they serve food and drinks directly back there through a back window of the store. Throw in the frequent musical acts and it makes their implementation of the patio one of the best in town.

But how is the cappuccino? Sadly not so great. Because the 12 oz is the

smallest size they serve, I ordered a dry cappuccino. I got a drink that was filled to the brim of the cup, not a good sign. The foam was of an ok quality, though there was way too much of it. However, the drink itself was actually quite bad; on my first sip I tasted some coffee, but soon it degenerated into mostly milk (or rather, bitter milk). It was essentially a latte, and a weak one at that. Ok, the numbers: (all out of 5, as usual).

Presentation: 3

Smoothness: 3

Strength: 1

Complexity: 1

Foam: 3

Correctness: 1

Mean 2/5

SD: 1.1

On a more positive note, their Nutella latte is delicious, and their breakfasts are great too. Just don’t get the cappuccino.