A Provincial Place

by CKR

So I said to Helmut over the tarte au citron, "Washington really is a provincial place, you know."

Let me count the ways.

1. No wireless generally available at Dulles Airport.

2. Prisoners allowed to wander all over the city. I'll admit that gray stripes on charcoal is cooler than blaze orange, and the tailoring is better than jumpsuits, but really!

3. Washingtonians are okay with intermittent electricity. (I almost said power, but that's not the right word!) The lights blink and dim irregularly on warm evenings. In many news reports on progress in Baghdad, this is felt to be undesirable.

4. The local customs include parking on the roads for long periods of time. The car's engine is not turned off, and some creeping forward is permitted. Then one drives for a while, then parks again. Agent modeling has shown that traffic assumes rarefaction and compression phases, like sound waves, and they can be regularly observed on the various red-white-and-blue-signed roads in multiple lanes. Washington's willingness to engage in experiments that verify agent modeling could be a sign of sophistication, I guess.

I mentioned this Washingtonian habit to Helmut, since it was a code red air quality day and my eyes were watering. The good side of code red days (not to be confused with code red terror days) is that the fare on Fairfax buses is free. Helmut said that it was generally held in DC (we were in Dupont Circle at the time) that it was all the fault of those people who foolishly chose to live outside the District. I suggested that a meeting at the ambassadorial level might be appropriate.

More seriously, the cost in people's time, wasted gasoline, and carbon dioxide emissions of the traffic jams around Washington every morning of every working day has to be enormous. Some lanes, and even parts of some highways are designated for cars carrying two or more people (High Occupancy Vehicles, HOV. Another provincialism: everything must have a stuffy name and corresponding acronym.) That helped us a bit on days when I drove in with my host.

Other days, I took the Fairfax bus and the Metro. I must admit that I have loved public transportation ever since I was ten years old and took the bus to the Y in the next town to learn to swim. With that farecard in hand, I can go anywhere, untethered to car and parking. I like looking at the scenery, even through the dark underground, while someone else does the work. I don't even mind hanging on in the sweaty rush hour crowd.

Maybe I would if I had to do it every day.

I can understand the pull of being able to set one's schedule when one is a workaholic or has an urgent project to complete. But I have the feeling I wouldn't like the traffic jams every day either.

They are, of course, an affront to everyone involved. Once upon a time, before too many voters bought the idea that the purpose of government was tax cuts, we had something called public policy. Is it good to waste all those people's time? To burn all that gasoline? To produce all that carbon dioxide? There is a balance to be struck that is larger than the calculation that individuals like tax cuts. How many people would use public transportation? Under what circumstances? How might the road system be made more efficient?

Isn't a nation's capital city supposed to set an example?

Comments

[Helmut]

It's the province's fault! Remember, DC has a population of about 580,000, while the greater metro area has over 5 million. A lot of the 5 million people drive into the district every day. I can hardly park on my own street because cars with plates from Virginia and Maryland line the street. Note that the biggest traffic jams are on routes in and out of the district. It's tough for a city to manage all this when it has limited control over its own budget (Congress administers it and plays politics with it), and many of the people who work in the city don't pay taxes to the city.

There's a part of DC worth defending. Congresscritters are transitory, as are many in other outfits such as the IMF, World Bank (neither of whose employees pay taxes to the city either), NGOs, the universities, etc. Downtown and the Mall have little personality. But there are people who call this place their hometown and there are little neighborhoods most visitors don't see (nor do most of the congresscritters, etc.). It's most noticeable at the holidays when the town empties like a college town, and you get to see the decent people who live here, who have sometimes been here for generations. That part of DC is really nice, and full of interesting people. But it's hard to see through the mess of the usual daily life here and the high-profile versions of DC.

[Helmut]

Oh, plus DC proper had the highest percentage of voters who did not vote for George W. Bush.

[CKR]

Ah, but to the rest of us, all that encompasses Washington!

Apparently one problem is a lack of cooperation among the various polities, compounded by the District's special status.

But the traffic problem won't be solved until that more basic assumption, that the function of government is to provide tax cuts, shifts. I'm sure that Washington isn't the only place suffering from traffic problems. Any solution will involve public expenditure of public funds. And at least some of those public funds will be taxes. A solution might well save more in time and wasted car expenses than it costs in taxes, but those calculations are dreary and complex. The promise of tax cuts is much more cheerful.