Death by Committee
Let’s say you want to build something. A park, a house, a restaurant, or just a small modification to something that already exists. It feels pretty intuitive that you’d likely need to get approval from some local authority. After all, it is within the local government’s purview to regulate the quality and location of certain infrastructure and development projects. Now, what if every time you wanted to update your kitchen or remodel your bathroom you needed to get approval from every neighbor in the city—and if even one says something vaguely negative about it, then no new kitchen for you!
That’s what it’s like trying to improve street safety and livability in much of America. Take this article from Greater Greater Washington, a local DC news site. Far too many car crashes have ended up inside a neighborhood park (thankfully without any bystander injuries—yet) due to speeding. The local DC Department of Transportation (DDOT) does nothing about this for years, knowing that the problem persists and isn’t likely to resolve itself. A resident reaches out and suggests the most modest of stopgap measures: maybe put in a couple speed humps to slow drivers down a bit. After six months of no response DDOT finally agreed, initially, but asked for public comment before doing anything.
Two residents—two—sent DDOT emails saying they were concerned about future road maintenance delays and a lack of available parking due to the proposed speed humps. DDOT knew that neither of these would actually be an issue, they were only planning on implementing two humps and neither parking nor road maintenance would be affected. Nevertheless, DDOT cited these two emails as proof of “uncertainty” regarding community support over the proposed speed humps. They scrapped the project immediately.
That’s all it took. Just two emails during the public comment period that didn’t actually include any real objections. This is the problem with public comment periods—Departments of Transportation will fold instantly after receiving even erroneous complaints. After this, DDOT undertook a speed study and found that a full 40% of vehicles on the block drove over the speed limit; 22 cars sped by more than 10 mph over the limit; and one car drove 45 mph on the one block of 20 mph residential road. All in the course of two days. Yet that wasn’t enough hard data to say that some modest speed humps were necessary.
It didn’t matter that speeding on this street is what caused so many crashes to happen in the park where children play. It didn’t matter that almost half of people didn’t care about the speed limit. It didn’t matter that actual safety was being jeopardized. Just that some people were kind of iffy on the proposed speed humps, that’s what really mattered. Apparently DDOT—and local and state DOTs around the country—aren’t actually in the business of creating safe, livable streets and roads, but rather they are in the business of community outreach and unanimous consent.
This is an untenable situation to be in. Departments of Transportation are not meant to only do what 100% of residents want them to do. They are meant to be prudent, responsible, and professionally trained people that actually create better places to live. What other government office runs purely off of unanimous consent? What if we just simply shut down our water treatment facilities because one person sent a nasty email about how they don’t like the idea of treating water at all? That’d be ridiculous, and doing so would endanger all the other residents. What if we shut down our garbage collection because one resident didn’t like the time of day that garbage pick up came or thought that the color of the garbage truck didn’t fit in with the neighborhood character? Also ridiculous, and piling up trash would have disasterous effects on the city. If people complained to the city about these things they’d be laughed at—and rightfully so!
There are some actions that simply must be made with confidence, not timidity. I know we pride ourselves on political representation and freedom, but someone has to be responsible for actually doing things! If everything were left up to public comment, you would see an entire city frozen, like a city-wide bystander effect, just waiting for someone else to actually do something. We must choose between direct democracy, where everything is voted on and the majority wins the day, or a representative democracy, where we elect qualified individuals to make decisions on our behalf. We can’t have both and still be functioning, and you certainly can’t have a direct democracy with a 100% consent threshold!
In the end DDOT did resolve to put in the speed humps. It took a concerned citizen getting elected to a local office, noticing the speed hump plan had been quietly scrapped, and gathering enough public support alongside a statement from a local Advisory Neighborhood Commission to pressure DDOT into doing what they had already promised to do—protect the people who they work for. It shouldn’t take this much effort, time, or organization to do something so obviously beneficial.
Public comment periods are being abused nationwide as a de facto form of denying any new developments or construction projects. It’s not a serious form of civic engagement. There ought to be a much higher threshold for a project to warrant public comment than the simple action of bolting down two speed humps.