Light Rail in the Age of Coronavirus

Our Portlandia-types have long had all the answers: If only they could concentrate the population in densely packed areas and move people around on public transportation, they could save us all from some newly discovered blight or another. And then that black swan called the coronavirus came floating down the Missouri.

In the way of background, the ancients thought there was no such thing as a black swan. They reportedly used the black swan in story-telling they way we use the unicorn. Then someone found flocks of legit black swans in Australia, and those centuries-old stories scooted away.

Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb found the black swan to be a useful metaphor for the role that rare and hard-to-predict events play in history. In 2007, Taleb published The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, a book that cautioned many of us to keep our eyes open for a fateful swan. I am not sure that the coronavirus will itself be the black swan.

As I write this, 340 Americans have died because of it. Although more will die, the numbers will not begin to reach those of the influenza pandemic of 1918-1920. Popularly known as the Spanish Flu, that plague of a century ago might more accurately have been called the Kansas Flu, given its provenance at the military outpost of Fort Riley. By whatever name, it infected more than a quarter of the word’s people, killing perhaps 50 million of them, more than half a million in America alone.

Americans were a hardier people then. They did not run from death and disease as we do. As a consequence, the coronavirus could kill a mere fraction of the people the Spanish Flu did and yet still have a greater social and psychological impact. If, however, this anxiety forces city planners to rethink their paradigms, it may not be an altogether bad thing.

Having grown up in a densely packed city dependent on public transportation, I have long had a problem with those paradigms. Starting at age 13, I commuted to my high school in uptown Manhattan. On the bus to Penn Station Newark, I usually got a seat. On the train to the lower Manhattan, I sometimes did. On the subway uptown, I never did. Never.It was not in the realm of the possible.

Bigger and younger than most of the riders, I could at least back in to the already crowded car, compress those who boarded before me, and hope the doors didn’t slam on any useful body parts. There was a lot of intimate contact on those subway cars, almost all of it unwanted, especially the coughing and sneezing and occasional puking. I remember asking my mother why adults lived their lives that way. She had no good answer.

When my wife and I were finishing graduate school, we decided not even to look for work in metro New York, Chicago, Washington, or any such city. Kansas City proved to be a happy medium. We bought a house within an easy walk of my wife’s employer and settled in. In all my years here, I have taken a bus once. My car was in the shop. That was enough.

To me, space was Kansas City’s most valuable resource. It was space that kept housing prices in check, kept traffic flowing, and kept us “nice.” Life here was not a daily struggle. I did not have to yell at the noisy neighbor upstairs, har- angue the guy who took my parking space, or rush for the last seat on the bus. In fact, I have gone years without calling a stranger an “a**hole.” In New York, I’d be lucky to get through a day.

City planners do not understand our city’s charms. Their goal is to make us like everyone else. The folks at our major local planner, the Mid-America Regional Council, have displayed over the years an impressive talent for imitating others. MARC echoes every other urban planner everywhere in envisioning “a mobility landscape.” Cool term. I wonder who thought it up.

This landscape includes “efficient, high-ridership transit service linked by well-located mobility hubs where riders can trans-fer from one fixed route to another or connect with mobility services to get where they need to go.” This vision would not be complete without the foundational impulse, namely that “this plan also recognizes that efficient transit thrives on density.”

Disease thrives on density, as well. Nowhere does MARC’s literature hint at this correlation. “Healthy people thrive in clean and safe communities that support healthy eating and active lifestyles,” MARC blithely assures us, but crowded buses and streetcars are not necessarily clean or safe. I do not argue here against buses. They serve a useful function, especially for people without access to cars. I argue against the public-transportation mania that consumes an absurd proportion of our shared resources for frivolities like light rail.

If not aware of the particular metaphor, urban planners have long been trying to manufacture black swans, but only black swans that did their bidding, black swans that scared people out of their automobiles, into the cities, and onto public transportation. In the 1960s, the imminent depletion of the world’s energy reserves was the black swan of the decade. In the 1970s, the Arab oil boycott filled the bill. In the 1980s, the Exxon Valdez spill cautioned us against reliance on oil. In the 1990s, global warming tested its wings. In the 2000s, global warming morphed into the biggest, blackest, most mercurial, all-purpose swan in memory, climate change.

Along with war and famine, pestilence has haunted humankind from the beginning of time. In our own times, we have witnessed AIDS, Ebola, SARS, H1N1, and Swine Flu. In all the many urban planning sessions I have attended, however, not a single person questioned how an epidemic might influence a densely populated, public transportation-dependent population.