Promising the impossible (and blaming city staff when that fails)
The City recently ran a survey of how city employees feel about their job. As residents of Cambridge, we're all better off with happy city employees; a bad workplace means we get worse services. Among other questions, they were asked how they felt about their management:
- 82% were very confident or moderately confident in their immediate manager.
- 67% in senior leadership (City Manager and Deputy/Assistant City Managers).
- 41% in the City Council. That's pretty bad!
On Monday's agenda we can see one the causes for this lack of confidence, a particularly egregious case of a maneuver the City Council loves to pull: shifting blame to city staff.
The starting point for this piece of scripted drama is residents who have a problem, and insist on a particular solution. The Councilors know this solution isn't going to happen... but Councilors also hate saying "no" to potential voters.
So the Councilors will say "sure, we'll write a policy order for you", and ask city staff to report back on the specific requested solution, as well as any other solutions staff can come up with. On a good day, staff come up with a different solution; on a bad day, staff explain there's nothing they can do. Either way, Councilors don't have to be the ones saying "no" to residents, and staff take the blame for being the bad guys.
I won't say I'm a fan of this particular interaction pattern, but it's very hard to get rid of given the incentive structure for elected officials. And at least most of the time the Councilors implicitly acknowledge that a different solution than the proposed one is worth considering.
On Monday's agenda we see a vastly worse version of this pattern: all the bad parts are amplified, and all the good parts left out. Instead of asking for solutions, Councilors Toner, Nolan, Zusy, and Wilson are asking staff to do a huge amount of work on a specific solution, on a probably impossible deadline, despite staff having told them publicly in advance that this solution won't help.
The story of Garden St (short version)
As part of the Cycling Safety Ordinance passed by the City Council, separated bike lanes were installed on Garden St. To design the new street layout, the City ran their usual process of multiple meetings and neighborhood outreach. In this case residents came up with a new proposal, turning Garden St into a one way street, which would keep 30-40 more parking spots than the City's original ideas. The City investigated the idea, ran some extra meetings to discuss it, and in the end that was what got installed. Sometimes public feedback actually works quite well!
Bike lanes are modern-day witches: everything bad that happens within a few miles is clearly their fault. In this case, traffic got worse on some close-by streets. Whether the bike lanes were actually to blame is hard to tell; some of it may have been related. However, this period also coincided with post-COVID changes in traffic, and the subway becoming almost unusable, both of which were shifting the way people got around. More recently there has been some construction in other roads that feed into the neighborhood.
In any case, City staff came up with some changes to try to deal with congestion and passthrough traffic and applied them. But some residents still weren't happy, so Councilors suggested turning Garden St back into a two-way street again. Staff looked into it, and concluded that it wasn't viable:
- It would increase traffic congestion, "causing additional delays and likely back-ups for all travelers at these intersections."
- It would remove 49 parking spots, and "community members and direct abutters expressed a strong desire to maintain as much parking as possible in the eastern end of the project where fewer homes have driveway."
Who cares what staff said?
Not the sponsors of Monday's policy order! They're demanding that Garden St be switched back to two-way, while keeping two-way separated bike lanes and as much parking as possible.
From the sponsoring Councilors' perspective, this policy order is a win-win situation:
- If staff say "we already explained this particular solution won't work", the Councilors can go back to the people who are complaining about traffic and say "Those mean city staff won't let us fix the problem! Vote for us and we'll yell at them even harder!"
- If staff do implement this plan and (as is quite likely) they are correct about this increasing or merely shifting congestion and removing lots of parking, both Garden St residents and the people impacted by traffic will be angry. But that's fine, the sponsors of the policy order can say "We told them to fix traffic and keep the parking, it's not our fault city staff are bad at their jobs. Vote for us and we'll yell at them even harder!"
- And of course in the unlikely case city staff do manage to figure out a solution with no downsides, despite the limits of physical space involved and all the time they've already spent on this, the sponsors will be heroes.
Public process for thee but not for me
It gets worse.
If the City installed a bike lane somewhere and removed 49 parking spots without having a long, extended public comment process, ideally asking every resident in the City twice in-person and perhaps even digging up some of the rich old dead patricians in Mt Auburn Cemetery to weigh in, the Councilors who sponsored this policy order would flip their shit.
And to be fair, there's a reason for public process on transportation projects, from tweaks in specific spots to larger scale improvements like the suggestion city staff adopted on Garden St. But in this case the Councilors are ensuring a public process doesn't happen: other solutions are not welcome.
- The policy order tells staff to "communicat[e] the changes to the affected neighborhood", a one-way notification rather than running the standard, more collaborative design process.
- The policy order sets a deadline of April 1st, a tight deadline to begin with, especially given the holidays, plus difficult and hard-to-plan-for winter construction. I'm guessing there's probably not enough time for city staff to just design and implement the changes, let alone have a public design process.
A terrible process all around
This policy order:
- Misleads residents, promising things that city staff believe to be impossible or mutually contradictory.
- Demoralizes city staff and wastes their time.
- Almost certainly won't solve the problems it claims it wants to solve.
This is a terrible way to run a city, and I would suggest not voting for Councilors who try this sort of maneuver.
A bit more
Take action: If you like the current one-way design of Garden St, write to the Council and tell them so.
Further reading: It's not surprising that magical thinking and impossible promises happen so often in the realm of traffic. As this classic essay from 1973 explains, "having promised everyone they would be able to go faster, the automobile industry ends up with the unrelentingly predictable result that everyone has to go as slowly as the very slowest."
Song of the day: Roadrunner, Modern Lovers (1972)