Government Executive - Authors - Emily Badger

This Map Wants to Change How You Think About Your Commute

Emily Badger, CityLab — Tue, 28 Jan 2014 10:52:55 -0500

Every year, the Texas A&M Transportation Institute releases an oft-cited (and oft-critiqued ) Urban Mobility Report that measures congestion on American roads, famously ranking the metros with the most heinous traffic . The report homes in on a central cost of mobility: the price we pay to sit in gridlock.

It does not, however, look much at the value we get for paying that cost: access to wherever we're trying to go.

"When we think about this as economists, we know that every trip that is made is worth it – the value outweighs the cost of taking it – or it wouldn't have happened," says Andrew Owen, the director of the recently created Accessibility Observatory at the University of Minnesota. "It's a little bit disingenuous to use metrics that only talk about the cost of travel."

Consider a metric – or a map – that captures value instead. Not: How long will it take me to reach my office? But: How many jobs can I reach in half an hour? How many grocery stores are accessible by car within five minutes? Which neighborhoods in town enable the greatest accessibility, by public transit, to really good restaurants?

"We’re interested in looking at how well transportation systems connect people to the things they want to reach," Owen says, "not just how well they let people move around in space."

What would that look like? For starters, this map of the Minneapolis/St. Paul region, created by the Accessibility Observatory:

The Unsteady Rise of Minority Civil Servants

Emily Badger, CityLab — Mon, 19 Aug 2013 10:31:06 -0400

Photographs from the riots that spread across American cities in the 1960s capture a telling detail about the era. The incensed communities, as history well remembers, were black. And, invariably, the police officers were white.

The Kerner Commission appointed by Lyndon Johnson to study the causes of these "civil disorders" later cited this disconnect as one piece of the underlying problem. Blacks, twice as likely at the time to be unemployed as whites, had been systematically shut out from good public-sector jobs. And their exclusion from the most visible civil servant ranks of all – on urban police forces – made the tension between the powerful and the powerless in cities like Chicago and Detroit all the worse.

Two generations later, historic census data suggest that major metropolitan police forces now reflect the black populations embedded in the communities they serve. But across the entire spectrum of municipal jobs – including janitors, secretaries, lawyers, school teachers, fire fighters and detectives – the story is decidedly more mixed.

Todd Gardner, a survey statistician with the Census Bureau's Center for Economic Studies, has built with the Urban Institute a fascinating database dating back to 1960 that compares who held (and still holds) local government jobs with the racial makeup of the general population in America's 100 largest metros. The tool is built on census data that's not publicly available.

Read more at The Atlantic Cities.

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How the Rise of Telework Is Changing Our Cities

Emily Badger, CityLab — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 11:58:00 -0400

Technology has blurred the walls of the workplace in at least two dramatic ways. People who once worked inside the clear confines of a cubicle, inside an office, within an office tower in a commercial district, can now work from nearly anywhere. And because the spatial distinction has been disappearing between work and home (and everywhere in between), neat divisions in time are now eroding, too.

Even if you do still have an actual office where you commute every day, you have probably experienced how these lines have softened simultaneously: You've walked out of your building and into the subway, pulled out your phone, and gone right back to triaging email.

These sweeping shifts in where and when work takes place have been brought about by much more than just the Internet. Credit the portable laptop and the smartphone, WiFi and fiber optic infrastructure, computer security from VPNs, high-quality teleconferencing and the cloud. As for your computer itself? "It’s just a shell," says Adam Stoltz, a real estate workplace strategist based in Washington. "It’s the thing that enables me to get to the data."

We normally talk about all of this as a revolution in technology, or in the nature of work itself. But something else also happens when technology enables people to change where they work and how they use time: The environment around us needs to respond, too.

For decades, cities have reflected the neat separation of work and home, with residences in one part of town, offices and industry in another, and infrastructure (highways, parking garages, hub-and-spoke transit systems) built to help connect us between the two around what has been for many people a 9-to-5 work day. But what happens when more people start to work outside of offices, or really anywhere – at all times?

Suddenly, we need WiFi in parks, and certainly in underground subway systems. We need more physical spaces that serve this new lifestyle: co-working offices and live/work apartments. People who once drove to work may now find that they want more productive commutes; now it makes more sense to ride a commuter rail car that enables the work day to start an hour earlier. Whole private networks of transportation have arisen around this idea in San Francisco. Coach buses there now collect workers to take them to Silicon Valley offices, but they're outfitted like mobile offices in the expectation that employees will start working en route.

Some cities like New York have even begun to change how they think about intersections and roadways in a world where pedestrians are more likely to be looking down at smartphones than up at the environment around them.

Likely other adjustments (large and small) will be needed as well. Our built environment has been designed to accommodate the ways that people worked (and lived) 20 or 50 years ago. So now what happens when our behavior changes, when the ways that people move through and need to use space across cities no longer matches some of the ways we've built them?

Stolz raised the question this week at an Intelligent Cities unconference in conjunction with the annual American Planning Association meeting in Chicago. As others pointed out, some of these evolving work patterns aren't really new; they're a return to the ways people worked before the Industrial Revolution, when shopkeepers for instance lived in apartments above their stores. We may look back on the 9-to-5 workplace not as the norm, but as a relic of the last century.

As we move away from it, it's interesting to think not just about the implications for how we use our time and how we define the idea of "work," but also for what all of this might mean for cities.

In the future, Stoltz asks, "If you’re planning a city, should there actually be places where there is no WiFi?"

Image via Anatoly Tiplyashin/Shutterstock.com

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5 ways the next U.S. Secretary of Transportation will be forced to follow Ray LaHood's lead

Emily Badger, CityLab — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 16:08:08 -0500

Ray LaHood is probably best known to the broader public as the bureaucrat who has spent the last four years railing against distracted driving. Under his tenure as U.S. Secretary of Transportation, his department launched a public service onslaught warning of the modern perils of texting while driving (our favorite detail: the federal government now runs a slick website called distraction.gov).

LaHood himself told Politico last year that he thought his biggest legacy would be his record on safety. But, in fact, to policy wonks, this unlikely crusader – formerly a Republican congressman from Central Illinois – will soon leave the job as the man who in many ways fundamentally shifted how Washington thinks about transportation and the federal government’s role in it. After much speculation, LaHood finally announced this morning that he will step down for Obama’s second term.

Whoever takes over the Department of Transportation next (and we’ve got some thoughts on that front) will inherit an agency in the midst of a number of seismic transitions. LaHood may well be remembered as the agency head who got many of these movements underway. And we suspect – and hope – that there will be no turning back from any of them.

1) Transportation is about more than just highways. The federal DOT grew up alongside the Interstate Highway System, and for decades roads have been its focus. Now that emphasis is shifting at the federal level, to include a broader menu of mobility options, from high-speed rail to local transit to biking and even walking.

Read more at The Atlantic Cities.

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Why mayors should run the Department of Transportation

Emily Badger, CityLab — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 11:45:56 -0500

The federal Department of Transportation has its roots in the post-World War II era of the American highway. It was formed, in 1966, just a decade after federal legislation created the Interstate Highway System that would change how Americans travel and where they live.

"And highway building has been the primary focus ever since," says David Goldberg, communications director for the advocacy group Transportation for America. Transportation policy, as with housing policy of that era, was designed to enable Americans to spread out from crumbling and crowded cities into new communities in the suburbs. "That’s still essentially how the game has been rigged," Goldberg says, "with some minor modifications."

Look at federal transportation safety programs – they have mostly focused on ensuring the safety of people in cars, not pedestrians or bikers who must share space with them. Or consider how we fund transit. The Highway Trust Fund was created to finance the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s; its mass transit account was an afterthought that came 25 years later.

Goldberg credits outgoing Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood – whose tenure includes the creation of thePartnership for Sustainable Communities – with pushing the federal focus away from highways and toward a more holistic view of transportation.

Read more at The Atlantic Cities.

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The growing rural isolation of veterans

Emily Badger, CityLab — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 15:15:15 -0500

America’s population of veterans has been shrinking for years. This means – as Pentagon leaders have begun to lament – that civilians have less contact today with the realities of military life (and afterlife for veterans) than at any point in memory. On this Veterans’ Day, you’re much less likely to know a vet than you would have been 30 years ago.

If you live in a city, your odds are even worse. Some new research about to be published in the journal Armed Forces & Society concludes that veterans haven’t just been disappearing as a share of the population; those who remain have also been segregating into a smaller and smaller slice of rural America, often near military installations in states like Florida, Texas and Alabama.

Jay Teachman, a sociologist at Western Washington University, looked at county-level census data from 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2010, covering the period of time when the military had transitioned to an all-volunteer force. In 1980, there were more than 28 million vets in America (and more than 2 million soldiers on active duty). By 2010, that number had fallen to 22 million (with 1.4 million on active duty). Over the same time span, the country’s population swelled by some 80 million people. This means the share of veterans among us dropped from 12 percent in 1980 to around 7 percent in the most recent census.

Read more at The Atlantic Cities.

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