The heart of marketing is getting the right message to the right audience in the right format. It sounds elementary, but it's constantly overlooked in business. Same applies to planning & engineering. One neighborhoods "traffic calming" project is another's "sustainable mobility" project. A roundabout is "the highest ROI" and "green infrastructure."
Thank you for acknowledging that the pushback is mostly coming from a place of distrust. We are going to need to get used to good ideas getting rejected because the discredited expert class keeps pushing them (and the experts have no one but themselves to blame). The other aspect that I think is getting overlooked is that people don't reject the underlying concept - who wouldn't want to live closer to shops, schools, etc.? - but the coercive nature of the project. When, for example, Oxford County Council wants to fine anyone who drives outside of their assigned zone more than X times per year, that's where it feels oppressive. Combine that with this coming from the same people who promised us it was "only two weeks to flatten the curve" and then turned around and locked cities down for months, closed parks (!!!) and shuttered schools for years, the general public is going to fight back. Finally, if 15 minutes cities were such a great idea, they wouldn't need the hard sell that we're getting right now.
So I've been observing this with regards to questions of driving in general. Like, objectively, the existing gas tax system is broken and getting worse going forward, since it's original design goal of "serve as proxy for actual impact on the roads" has been dramatically disrupted by technological changes and the refusal to account for inflation.
So you'd *think* that the right-leaning "we should pay for what we use!" folks would be *all about* reforming it to something akin to a Vehicle Miles Traveled tax, adjusted for weight, right? But at least several of the people I know who most stand for the libertarian-adjacent small-government stuff are *adamantly* against anything that reforms how road usage is paid for, and if anything want it further socialized. Typically, the arguments deployed are so far-reaching they're effectively arguing in favor of complete subsidies of all travel expenses because it's "universal benefit" which is....a really weird way to interpret public good?
And while, to their credit they say they oppose abuse of imminent domain the idea of attempting to redress any of the damages that have been done to bring about the current infrastructure is beyond the pale, and there's little to no hesitance to expanding what we've got even if it continues to impose additional damages on those directly implicated?
I've found some limited success in trying to frame the typical urbanist view as a form of pluralism, namely housing and transportation pluralism, and sometimes I'll see a spark of life in framing zoning reform as being about freedom and property rights, but so many people have already entrenched their views so that's often not a viable path, either.
The heart of marketing is getting the right message to the right audience in the right format. It sounds elementary, but it's constantly overlooked in business. Same applies to planning & engineering. One neighborhoods "traffic calming" project is another's "sustainable mobility" project. A roundabout is "the highest ROI" and "green infrastructure."
Thank you for acknowledging that the pushback is mostly coming from a place of distrust. We are going to need to get used to good ideas getting rejected because the discredited expert class keeps pushing them (and the experts have no one but themselves to blame). The other aspect that I think is getting overlooked is that people don't reject the underlying concept - who wouldn't want to live closer to shops, schools, etc.? - but the coercive nature of the project. When, for example, Oxford County Council wants to fine anyone who drives outside of their assigned zone more than X times per year, that's where it feels oppressive. Combine that with this coming from the same people who promised us it was "only two weeks to flatten the curve" and then turned around and locked cities down for months, closed parks (!!!) and shuttered schools for years, the general public is going to fight back. Finally, if 15 minutes cities were such a great idea, they wouldn't need the hard sell that we're getting right now.
This is a good article, Addison.
So I've been observing this with regards to questions of driving in general. Like, objectively, the existing gas tax system is broken and getting worse going forward, since it's original design goal of "serve as proxy for actual impact on the roads" has been dramatically disrupted by technological changes and the refusal to account for inflation.
So you'd *think* that the right-leaning "we should pay for what we use!" folks would be *all about* reforming it to something akin to a Vehicle Miles Traveled tax, adjusted for weight, right? But at least several of the people I know who most stand for the libertarian-adjacent small-government stuff are *adamantly* against anything that reforms how road usage is paid for, and if anything want it further socialized. Typically, the arguments deployed are so far-reaching they're effectively arguing in favor of complete subsidies of all travel expenses because it's "universal benefit" which is....a really weird way to interpret public good?
And while, to their credit they say they oppose abuse of imminent domain the idea of attempting to redress any of the damages that have been done to bring about the current infrastructure is beyond the pale, and there's little to no hesitance to expanding what we've got even if it continues to impose additional damages on those directly implicated?
I've found some limited success in trying to frame the typical urbanist view as a form of pluralism, namely housing and transportation pluralism, and sometimes I'll see a spark of life in framing zoning reform as being about freedom and property rights, but so many people have already entrenched their views so that's often not a viable path, either.