Wednesday Walk: Traffic's Root Problem
Like most things in America, even traffic is a byproduct of racism. Plus "technology" that's really just outsourcing.
Welcome to Willoughby Hills!
Every Wednesday, I offer a few short ideas that I hope will inspire you to do some more reading, thinking, and exploring. Let’s take a little walk together and see where the path leads…
The Real Cause for Traffic
I was sitting in traffic at rush hour on the interstate the other day and looked at my GPS (yes, I still rock a standalone Garmin, mostly used in my RV. But that’s a story for another day).
All around me, I saw indicators showing where accidents were reported which were slowing traffic. There were maybe half a dozen accidents within a relatively small radius of me.
As I was stuck in traffic, I was hit by how the destruction of property (cars), serious injury, and possibly even death are considered a necessary sacrifice for the sake of driving. It’s not a system that we even willingly opted into; it’s a system that was designed by others to which we are the unfortunate heirs.
I’ve been reading two great books lately that have changed my thoughts on the root cause of our traffic. And this being America, it all seems to come back to the same thing: racism.
The books are Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America and his followup new book that he cowrote with his daughter Leah Rothstein: Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law.
Richard will be an upcoming guest on my podcast, and his work describes how policies of federal, state, and local governments led to segregation by design in nearly every U.S. city, even northern cities that had been fairly integrated prior to the twentieth century.
In 1917, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled racially based segregation unconstitutional in the Buchanan v Warley case.
To circumvent this ruling, many cities began to write zoning laws that separated cities by usage, rather than by race. Single family homes were separate from apartment buildings, which were separate from industrial and commercial uses.
When you think of older city blocks, it’s not uncommon to have a single family home next to a duplex next to an apartment building. But with the advent of use-based zoning, the character of cities and neighborhoods was forever changed.
At the time, single family homes were only available to affluent people, mostly white, whereas Black people in cities tended to live in apartments, so these local zoning laws encouraged segregation without explicitly stating it.
But there were also poor whites living in apartments, so in order to truly lead to segregated places, white people would need to be encouraged to purchase single family homes, and there would need to be new inventory for them to purchase.
The federal government explicitly encouraged white homeownership by offering FHA backed loans (which were almost uniformly only available to white people), and they would not guarantee loans in Black neighborhoods or even white neighborhoods adjacent to Black neighborhoods.
By midcentury, developments like Levittown were spreading across the country with explicit rules against Black ownership.
Whites were encouraged at every step to purchase single family homes through government programs and subsidies, which pulled white residents out of cities and led many inner urban areas to be considered “undesirable.”
A half century later, we now live with the effects of these racist policies: single family homes, surrounded by more single family homes. They are not walkable to anything, because a grocery store, a restaurant, or even an office building is not permitted to be built in an area zoned for single family housing.
We drive everywhere because of our built environment, we get in accidents, we cause traffic jams.
Because of racism.
Again, I’ll be speaking with this in more depth with Richard Rothstein in an upcoming podcast, so stay tuned for more of this conversation. And in the meantime, please read The Color of Law and Just Action.
A Quick Reminder
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Behind the Curtain
Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, I’m slowly learning that the things that we are presented with and the reality of a situation are quite different.
The latest example of this is a technology I’ve written a lot about in this newsletter- Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” concept. Supposedly, it used sensors and cameras to track purchases while in store, providing for an automated shopping experience where customers could simply leave the store and have a receipt emailed to them with their purchases- no checkout lanes required.
I first saw this tech back in 2018 in Seattle, where Amazon opened a small convenience store called Amazon Go. I most recently saw it deployed by an automated Hudson News location (“technology by Amazon”) at Logan Airport last month. Amazon has also been apparently using this technology in their Amazon Fresh grocery chains, although we have yet to have a store open in New England to my knowledge, so I have no firsthand experience with it.
Amazon announced that not only are they phasing out this technology, but it’s now being reported that the “technology” wasn’t even really technology at all. The Information seems to be the first to report on this, although their article is being a paywall.
“Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.”
In fact, 70% of transactions required human intervention to tabulate and verify. This is hardly automated, autonomous, or smart in any way. It’s simply outsourcing, with a high tech veneer.
It reminds me a bit of the news conference in 2021 when Elon Musk unveiled a “Tesla Bot” prototype that was in development. The goal was to create a robot that could replace repetitive or unsafe human tasks. But the demo was clearly a human dancer in a white leotard.
For many years, I was caught up in the promise of Silicon Valley delivering us solutions to our biggest problems. I believed the tech leaders that evangelized a new, improved world.
As time goes on and the truth behind these efforts becomes more clear, I firmly believe that some of the best technology that we have is that which humans have spent thousands of years developing and refining. Tech will not save us, simplicity and common sense might.
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Other Wednesday Walks
If you’ve missed past issues of this newsletter, they are available to read here.
You were generating traffic, not merely sitting in it.The first step towards treating / curing any problem is admitting that you have a problem and taking responsibility for your role in creating and perpetuating it.