A mass transit budget battle is about rural fear of urban power

It could be serendipity, or it could be the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, but the issue of mass transit has come across my radar three times in the past two days. The biggest, of course, is Motherboard's article The Immoble Masses: Why Traffic Is Awful and Public Transit Is Worse. The second is a case of serious pushback from conservative forces in the greater Seattle metropolitan area against a proposed collection of tax increases that would allow our highly successful light rail system to extend from a basic downtown-to-the-airport route to a full mass-transit system linking all of Seattle's major districts and burbs. And the third was an article (which I can't now find, dammit) about Wisconsin's urban/rural divide, and how it's now gotten to the point where the rural legislators view their urban counterparts not only as illegitimate, but actually dangerous to the culture, morals, and financial well-being of the rest of the state.

Rural districts see the success of the non-white, non-Christian, non-straight city as a dangerous state of affairs. It gives a city a significant amount of moral capital and financial power in the legislature. Control of the transit budget lets rural districts keep their cities on a short leash.

I can't talk to the financial status of Milwaukee or Wisconsin, but I do know a little about my own home state, and the greater metropolitan region known as the Puget Sound, which includes the cities of Tacoma, Seattle, and Everett in a three-county mass-transit administrative region. My wife is a politician, and I frequently find myself in a room with congressmen, senators, and state legislators. At one event last year, I asked a former state legislator about Seattle's mass-transit battles, and she laid it out clearly.

The Puget Sound Management Region has several different mass-transit authorities, including King County Metro, Snohomish County Community Transit, Pierce County Transit, and Sound Transit. Sound Transit has a mixed allocation scheme in that it has the authority to raise money in the three counties in which it operates; it's job is to get people moving between the major cities. But the other three (King Metro, Snohomish, and Pierce), which are each centered on an anchor city, are funded strictly by a state-level allocation, and there are laws on the books that prevent counties from funding their own transit systems.

The reason for this, my legislator avowed, is because it lets the rural districts "keep Seattle on a leash." Seattle is a net-positive-revenue region: we generate more money for the state coffers than we cost the state to administer. Far-flung rural counties with good roads and clean water have Seattle to thank for making up the annual revenue shortfalls that would allow those facilities to fall into disrepair. The rural districts see this as a dangerous state of affairs, in that it gives Seattle a significant amount of moral capital and financial power in the legislature.

But legislatural seats are allocated not only on population, but on a mix of population density and territory size; as such, rural districts often have a majority number of votes in the state legislature compared to urban districts. Rural districts are deeply suspicious of urban districts, with their multi-colored, multi-cultural take on things, their embrace of many different ways to live, their ability to give people niches small enough to hide in and big enough to live in. "Urban" is a code for non-Christian, non-straight, non-white. Those people can't be allowed to have too much power. They can't even be allowed to have more power.

How do you remind a city that it's the rural districts' servant, and not their master?

If you cut off a city's water supply, people die. If you cut off electricity, people die. Cut off garbage, people get sick and die. But if you cut off mass-transit: "Eh." People will get around by cars. Traffic will be horrible, but so what? You live in the city, you get what's coming to you. The goal of legislative control of city mass transit is to provide just enough so that cleaners, cooks, clerks, delivery people, and so on can barely make it to their jobs, and to remind the city on an annual basis that the basic labor infrastructure of the city could be snarled and wrecked at the whim of the legislature. A transit budget battle doesn't sound like a life-or-death issue, so it can be sold as "just another budget issue."

When you hear about a transit budget battle and the region is a net-positive-revenue source for the state, consider what's really going on behind the scenes: rural districts are trying to figure out how much they can tighten the leash on their urban population before their annual budget starts to suffer.

Not even elegance matters to most software devs...

Akin’s Laws of Engineering apply strictly to physical systems. Dave Akin was an engineer at NASA who specialized in designing launch vehicles, and his laws apply to build things that go into space. Many of his laws he attributes to other people, but one that is his own is

Any run-of-the-mill engineer can design something which is elegant. A good engineer designs systems to be efficient. A great engineer designs them to be effective.

His example is: an ordinary city has an elegant water system; New York City has an efficient water system; Rome has an effective water system (parts of it date back to Julius Caesar and are still in use!).

I’m quite certain that the designers of the Roman and New York water systems wanted a system that worked and engineered their way into elegance along the way.

The thing that gets me about Akin’s Law of Elegance is that it seems to me to be exactly backward, on the one hand, and to be an example of why Go is popular and Haskell is still struggling on the other. Javascript’s map/reduce/filter are examples of things that are both elegant and effective: they reduce the messy and chronically off-by-one for loop filled with expressions and allocators into something much more readable: (expression, and things to express on). They trade those for efficiency, but software has a lot more ‘give’ than launch vehicles, even in something as small as a watch. If you want all three, then I have to suggest Lisp or Scheme: you can extract the sequencing and allocation out of the passes into a single, transduced pass without function calls, saving yourself a lot of memory and CPU.

Given that fact that so few developers care about elegance, I really wonder if we even have systems that are efficient and effective. Go is “effective” in that it trades developer cycles for CPU cycles, but the things written in it have no long-term guarantees of maintainability; Go creates the illusion of this with a hard style guide, but style and elegance are still too different things: you can hire someone to buy you stylish clothes, but if you don’t walk in them well elegance will be beyond you.

Then again, most developers I know still wear a t-shirt and jeans to work, so I don’t expect elegance to be a trend anytime soon.