‘Uncivil Warriors’ Review: Lawyers at Civil War - Note for a discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

Harold Holzer, Wall Street Journal; original article contains an additional illustration

Image from article, with caption: UNCIVIL WARRIORS By Peter Charles Hoffer Oxford, 228 pages, $27.95

Toward the end of the Civil War, a recently liberated former slave from Union-occupied New Orleans demanded that her onetime owner be held accountable for dividing [JB emphasis] her family. Rose Herera’s “mistress,” Mary DeHart, had shipped three of Herera’s young children to Cuba before slavery was outlawed in Louisiana. Civil authorities could find no grounds to prosecute DeHart or order a 19th-century version of family reunification. In stepped Union Gen. Nathaniel Banks, a former attorney who commanded Union forces in the Crescent City. In a stroke of interpretive genius, Banks discovered grounds for a different ruling by citing recently overturned slave laws, which had forbidden owners from selling away children under 10. The general ordered DeHart to Cuba to retrieve Herera’s children.

That the Civil War transformed American jurisprudence in both small and large ways is neither a novel nor disputed claim. At its most fundamental level, Union victory meant that African-Americans would no longer be treated as property. Eight months after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, involuntary servitude became unconstitutional. Within a few years, amendments guaranteeing people of color citizenship, civil rights and voting rights were ratified. But if the law changed, lawyers did not. They still thirsted for the combat of interpretation and argumentation.

In “Uncivil Warriors: The Lawyers’ Civil War,” a startlingly original work of history, Peter Charles Hoffer traces how the war turned the legal worlds of the Union and the Confederacy upside down. He closes his analysis with a provocative chapter on the Reconstruction era, in which he suggests that both Northern and Southern lawyers deserve enormous credit for hashing out the details of dramatically altered statutes—earning big fees in the bargain.

Earlier legal histories have understandably focused on the statutes. Mr. Hoffer, a professor of history at the University of Georgia, concentrates instead on the players who worked to change the law and the settings in which they did so, from secession conventions to courtrooms to military installations. War made it possible for old lawyers to make new law, as when Union Gen. Benjamin Butler —a former attorney later known as “Beast” to his Southern detractors—in 1861 found a novel and ingenious legal argument for sheltering the runaway slaves who flocked to his headquarters at Fort Monroe, Va. He declared them “contrabands of war,” or as they became known in the vernacular, “contrabands.” Butler single-handedly overturned the federal Fugitive Slave Act without even consulting his commander in chief, Mr. Hoffer writes, and “almost by accident” became “one of the first of the lawyer/politicians to formulate a policy” on slavery.

The principal wartime forum for hashing out new legal precedents was Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet—more a team of attorneys, Mr. Hoffer argues, than Doris Kearns Goodwin’s team of rivals. “Overall, one could not find a more able or imposing team of lawyers than this,” Mr. Hoffer asserts, “though like many law partnerships, there was rivalry and contention among themselves and with senior partner Lincoln.” During four years of military conflict, savvy lawyer-politicians like William Seward, Salmon Chase, Edwin Stanton and Edward Bates haggled over such cornerstone policies as the legality of the Union blockade of Confederate ports, emancipation by executive order, the first military draft, and the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, along with the use of military tribunals even where civil courts continued to operate. Cabinet members helped Lincoln maneuver around the Constitution and elude oversight by a Supreme Court over which ancient, pro-slavery Chief Justice Roger B. Taney presided until only months before the Confederacy was defeated. In 1864, Lincoln would appoint Chase to succeed Taney as chief justice.

Mr. Hoffer may occasionally treat the obvious as revelatory: It should be no surprise that many politicians of the Lincoln era—like politicians in most periods before and since—had trained in the law and practiced at the bar before launching careers in government. But the author treads new ground when he explores the decisions made by lawyer-generals like Butler, Joseph Holt and William T. Sherman, who regarded all Rebels as “unregenerate law breakers.” Sherman, he writes, “was always providing legalistic explanations” for his aggressive way of making war.

Readers will be studying, and debating, Mr. Hoffer’s unique scholarship for years—and profiting handsomely. In his last chapters, however, he strives a bit too hard to stake out distinctive territory. At one point he derides Lincoln’s final Annual Message to Congress, in December 1864, for lacking “the sharp legal acumen of his First Inaugural, or the solemn gravity of his Emancipation Proclamation. He was factual, but did not rehearse the facts in an argumentative way.” Perhaps, Mr. Hoffer suggests, Lincoln had already “passed the mantle of liberator to Chase and was simply relieved to have done so.” In fact, Lincoln had hardly surrendered that role, telling a visitor that same year that he believed history would honor him for it.

Mr. Hoffer alternatively posits that, by late 1864, Lincoln’s sharpest writing was behind him: Reading that annual message, he says, “one senses that he was mentally and physically near the end of his tether.” If so, Lincoln miraculously recovered in time to craft his majestic Second Inaugural Address three months later, when he was arguably more exhausted than ever. The president and others considered this his greatest speech. Yet here, too, Mr. Hoffer breaks with traditional judgment: He declares the masterpiece a failure because it departed from legal argumentation to stress God’s will over man’s law. Left unmentioned is the fact that Lincoln’s First Inaugural, however artful legally, had left seceding states unpersuaded and unreconciled. At least the Second Inaugural promised “peace among ourselves”—a path to reunification “with malice toward none.” Sometimes moral arguments trump legal ones.

Mr. Holzer, director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, won the 2015 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize.

Appeared in the July 30, 2018, print edition as 'Lawyers At Civil War.'

The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period - Note for a discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

James Hamblin, The Atlantic, May 11, 2018; original article contains links.

A new study proves that half of people are correct. The other is also correct.

Image from article, with caption: A typewriter

This is a time of much division. Families and communities are splintered by polarizing narratives. Outrage surrounds geopolitical discourse—so much so that anxiety often becomes a sort of white noise, making it increasingly difficult to trigger intense, acute anger. The effect can be desensitizing, like driving 60 miles per hour and losing hold of the reality that a minor error could result in instant death.

One thing that apparently still has the power to infuriate people, though, is how many spaces should be used after a period at the end of an English sentence.

The war is alive again of late because a study that came out this month from Skidmore College. The study is, somehow, the first to look specifically at this question. It is titled: “Are Two Spaces Better Than One? The Effect of Spacing Following Periods and Commas During Reading.”

It appears in the current issue of the journal Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics. As best I can tell, psychophysics is a word; the Rochester Institute of Technology defines it as the “study of the relationship between stimuli (specified in physical terms) and the sensations and perceptions evoked by these stimuli.” The researchers are also real. Rebecca Johnson, an associate professor in Skidmore’s department of psychology, led the team. Her expertise is in the cognitive processes underlying reading. As Johnson told me, “Our data suggest that all readers benefit from having two spaces after periods.”

“Increased spacing has been shown to help facilitate processing in a number of other reading studies,” Johnson explained to me by email, using two spaces after each period. “Removing the spaces between words altogether drastically hurts our ability to read fluently, and increasing the amount of space between words helps us process the text.”

In the Skidmore study, among people who write with two spaces after periods—“two-spacers”—there was an increase in reading speed of 3 percent when reading text with two spaces following periods, as compared to one. This is, Johnson points out, an average of nine additional words per minute above their performance “under the one-space conditions.”

This is a small difference, though if a change like this saved even a tiny amount of time, or prevented a tiny amount of miscommunication, the net benefit across billions of people could be enormous. Entire economies could be made or broken, wars won or lost.

Or so it would seem. The conclusions she drew from that data pushed people into their corners on social media, where they dealt with it in variously intense ways.

Justin Wolfers, a professor of economics and public policy at University of Michigan, tweeted in reference to the study: “Science can blow your mind sometimes, and this time it has come down on the side of two spaces after a period.”

Nicholas Christakis, a professor at Yale University, wrote: “Hurray! Science vindicates my longstanding practice, learned at age 12, of using TWO SPACES after periods in text. NOT ONE SPACE. Text is easier to read that way. Of course, on Twitter, I use one space, given 280 characters.”

There’s a lot going on in that tweet, but you get the idea.

Others were less ecstatic. Robert VerBruggen, the deputy managing editor at National Review, shared the study with the comment: “New facts forced me to change my mind about drug legalization but I just don’t think I can do this.”

My colleague Ian Bogost tweeted simply, “This is terrorism.”

Full disclosure: I also shared a screenshot of the study’s conclusion that “the eye-movement record suggested that initial processing of the text was facilitated when periods were followed by two spaces.” I said about this only, “Oh no.”

I find two spaces after a period unsettling, like seeing a person who never blinks or still has their phone’s keyboard sound effects on. I plan to teach my kids never to reply to messages from people who put two spaces after a period. I want this study’s conclusion to be untrue—to uncover some error in the methodology, or some scandal that discredits the researchers or the university or the entire field of psychophysics.

So let’s look for that. Because this really does matter: In a time of greater and greater screen time, and more and more consumption of media, how do we optimize the information-delivery process?

In much the same way that we’re taught to write in straight lines from left to right, most of us have been taught that one way of spacing is simply right, and the other is wrong. Less often are we taught to question the standard—whether it makes sense, or whether it should change. But what is the value of education if not to teach children to question the status quo, and to act in deliberate ways that they can justify with sound, rational arguments?

Such an argument is extremely difficult to make when it comes to sentence spacing, because the evidence is not there for either case. The fact that the scientifically optimal number of spaces hasn’t been well studied was odd to Johnson, given the strength of people’s feelings on the subject. The new American Psychological Association style guidelines came out recently, and they had changed from one space to two spaces following periods because they claimed it “increased the readability of the text.” This galled Johnson: “Here we had a manual written to teach us how to write scientifically that was making claims that were not backed with empirical evidence!”

She was intrigued and designed the new study “to add some scientific data to the conversation.”

Her rationale for two spaces gets complex—verging into the domain of rather high-level psychophysical theory (email me). As the researchers explain it, it’s all about mechanics of the eye, and what causes us to trip up or pause, even for a split second. In the current study, when text was presented with two spaces after periods, some readers’ eyes were more likely to jump over the “punctuation region” and spend less unnecessary time fixated on it. The extra space seemed to make it easier for readers to “extract the lines and curves from the text.” The space also comes into the periphery of one’s vision before it arrives, and that helps to signal that the sentence is wrapping up.

The Skidmore study was small and less than definitive—essentially dipping a toe into a long-unquestioned practice. There were only 60 subjects, and they were all college students—meaning they were probably more interested in “hooking up” and “Snapchat” than actually reading. (Ed.: This is too much editorializing, apologies.)

Most importantly, the effects appeared early in processing, and spacing did not affect overall comprehension. And that’s what reading is all about, no? The fact that our eyes may move a little faster is less important than whether the concepts make it into our brains.

“It’s not like people COULDN’T understand the text when only one space was used after the periods,” said Johnson. “The [human] reading system is pretty flexible, and we can comprehend written material regardless of whether it is narrowly or widely spaced.”

Angela Chen at The Verge also gave a pointed critique of the methodology:

The two-space convention is left over from the days of typewriters. Typewriters allot the same amount of space for every character, so a narrow character like i gets as much as a wider character like w. (This is called a mono-spaced font.) With a typewriter, it makes sense to add an extra space to make it clear that the sentence has ended. Today’s word-processing software makes fonts proportional, though, which is why we only need one space. Also, it looks better. The Chicago Manual of Style and the Modern Language Association Style Manual also take this stance.

“I’ve gotten a lot of flak for using a mono-spaced font (Courier New) in the study,” said Johnson. Her defense is that most eye-tracking studies use monospaced fonts, and that many word-processing systems still, in practice, act like typewriters (in that they don’t add additional space between sentences even when using proportional fonts; to increase the amount of space between sentences relative to the amount of space between any two words within the sentence, two physical spaces are still needed following the period). “Although I agree that future research should look at these effects using other types of fonts, research in this area suggests that font differences in general are small or nonexistent.”

Even in the studies where researchers have removed interword spaces altogether, reading comprehension is still very high. For example, Thai and Chinese are typically written without spaces between words, even though studies have found that when space is added between words, reading speed increases. The standard comes down to aesthetics, tradition, conservation of paper and space—basically, the fact that reading is an act of much more than information delivery.

I’ve written before about the effect of color gradients on reading, and how it goes against the findings of science that our words should be in a single color, usually black and usually on a near-white background, and usually presented in lines of a certain length. This is all a matter of tradition and style, not optimal information transfer. This standard does not work well for everyone. It’s why I thought, for a long time, that I didn’t like books. I wasn’t good at the mechanics of reading. When I found text-to-speech programs and actual audiobooks, it was like finally seeing the turtle in one of those Magic Eye posters that everyone else at the party saw hours ago.

All of this is to say that if we really wanted to do evidence-based delivery of text for maximum comprehension, it wouldn’t be like debating one space or two. It would look totally different: words spewing into your face by some sort of torrent that syncs with feedback about your perception, and slows or pauses when you are distracted, and speeds up when you are bored.

Still, this has been a good exercise in challenging beliefs, at least for me. What is important is that this question not be what breaks us—that Americans remember that we are united by the ideals of democracy, freedom, liberty, and justice that we still hold dear, and which demand our allegiance above any person or party or spacing issue.

We want to hear what you think. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

JAMES HAMBLIN, MD, is a senior editor at The Atlantic. He hosts the video series If Our Bodies Could Talk and is the author of a book by the same title. 
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City vs. Country Is Not Our Deep Political Fault Line - Note for a discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

Colin Woodard, New York Times, July 30, 2018

Mr. Woodard is the author of “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America.”

The key difference is among regional cultures tracing back to the nation’s colonization.

Image from article, with caption: North America at the time of the Declaration of Independence.

FREEPORT, Maine — Contrary to conventional wisdom, the most significant and abiding divide in American politics isn’t between city and countryside, but rather among regional cultures. Rural and urban places certainly have distinct interests and priorities, but in our awkward federation their differences have taken a back seat to the broader struggle between our constituent regions.

Sectionalism isn’t, and never has been, as simple as North versus South or an effete and domineering East against a rugged, freedom-minded West. Rather, our true regional fissures can be traced back to the contrasting ideals of the distinct European colonial cultures that first took root on the eastern and southern rims of what is now the United States, and then spread across much of the continent in mutually exclusive settlement bands, laying down the institutions, symbols and cultural norms later arrivals would encounter and, by and large, assimilate into.

Understanding this is essential to comprehending our political reality or developing strategies to change it — especially as we approach a momentously consequential midterm election.

Tracing our history, I’ve identified 11 nations, most corresponding to one of the rival European colonial projects and their respective settlement zones. I call them Yankeedom; New Netherland; the Midlands; Tidewater; Greater Appalachia; Deep South; El Norte; the Left Coast; the Far West; New France; and First Nation. These were the dominant cultures that Native Americans, African-Americans, immigrants and other vital actors in our national story confronted; each had its own ideals, assumptions and intents.

11 Regions Underlying the 50 States

How rival colonizers spread across the continent and set patterns that influence modern politics and culture.

Midlands

Culturally pluralistic, founded by English Quakers. Ethnic and religious purity were never priorities; community-oriented and distrustful of government intervention.

Yankeedom

Puritan legacy; perfect earthly society with social engineering, individual denial for common good; assimilate outsiders; vigorous government to thwart would-be tyrants.

Left Coast

New Englanders (by ship) and farmers, prospectors and fur traders from Appalachian Midwest (by wagon). Yankee utopianism meets individual self-expression and exploration.

New Netherland

Dutch-founded; retains traits of 17th-century Amsterdam: a global trading culture; materialistic; multicultural; committed to tolerance and freedom of inquiry and conscience.

Far West

Settlement largely controlled by corporations or government via deployment of railroads, dams, irrigation, mines; exploited as an internal colony, to the lasting resentment of its people.

Tidewater

17th-century gentry recreated semi-feudal manorial society of English countryside. Conservative; respect for authority and tradition, not equality or political participation.

LEFT

COAST

YANKEEDOM

NEW

NETHER-

LAND

FAR WEST

Chicago*

Philadelphia

Pittsburgh

MIDLANDS

TIDEWATER

St. Louis

GREATER APPALACHIA

Los Angeles

Atlanta

Oklahoma City

DEEP SOUTH

Dallas

EL NORTE

Houston

New Orleans*

San Antonio

SPANISH

CARIBBEAN

NEW FRANCE

El Norte

Borderlands of Spanish-American empire, far enough from Mexico City and Madrid to develop own characteristics: independent, self-sufficient, adaptable and work-centered.

Deep South

Established by slave lords from English Barbados as a West Indies-style slave society. Modeled on slave states of the ancient world — democracy was the privilege of the few. Fights for rollbacks of federal power, taxes on capital and the wealthy, and environmental, labor and consumer protections.

Greater Appalachia

Settlers from war-ravaged Ulster, northern England, lowland Scotland. Deep commitment to personal sovereignty and individual liberty; intense suspicion of external authority.

New France

Folkways of French peasantry blended with traditions of Algonquin-speaking people they encountered in what is now Eastern Canada. Down-to-earth, egalitarian, consensus-driven.

Spanish Caribbean

Legacy of the maritime component of Spain’s New World empire with hub in Havana. Includes Puerto Rico and other territories in Caribbean basin.

*Two counties are shared between two cultures: Cook County, Ill. (Yankeedom/Midlands) and Orleans Parish, La. (New France/Deep South). Alaska is divided among Left Coast, Far West and First Nation, a vast region of Arctic and sub-Arctic North America where indigenous peoples remained in effective control. Hawaii is part of Greater Polynesia.

By The New York Times | Source: Colin Woodard

Look at county-level maps of almost any closely contested presidential race in our history, and you see much the same fault lines: the swaths of the country first colonized by the early Puritans and their descendants — Yankeedom — tend to vote as one, and against the party in favor in the sections first colonized by the culture laid down by the Barbados slave lords who founded Charleston, S.C., or the Scots-Irish frontiersmen who swept down the Appalachian highlands and on into the Hill Country of Texas, Oklahoma and the southern tiers of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri.

The Quaker-founded Midlands, the swing region of American politics that makes up a great swath of the heartland, has often been the physical and political buffer between rival regional coalitions, its pluralistic, community-oriented culture at peace neither with the Yankee’s utopian drive to engineer social improvements nor Southern culture’s emphasis on individual freedom above all else. It played the kingmaker’s role again in 2016.

Pundits speak of the “solid South,” but Yankeedom has had stalwart allies as well. The people of the slender Pacific coastal plain from San Francisco to Juneau, Alaska, have backed the same horse as the Yankees in virtually every contest since their states joined the union, and in opposition to the candidate favored by the majority of people in the interiors of their own states. Yankees have long found partners in the Dutch-founded zone in and around New York City and, in recent decades, the sections of the Southwest that were effectively colonized by Spain in the 16th to 19th centuries.

The cultural differences between these regional cultures have a greater effect on our politics than the size and density of our communities. I ran the numbers for the past three presidential elections, comparing the voting behaviors of rural and urban counties within each “nation.” In five regional cultures that together constitute about 51 percent of the United States population, rural and urban counties voted for the same presidential candidate, be it the “blue wave” election of 2008, the Trumpist upheaval of 2016 or the more ambiguous contest in between. In the Deep South, Greater Appalachia, New France and the Far West, rural and urban majorities supported Republican candidates in all three elections, whether voters lived in central cities, wealthy suburbs, mountain hollers or the ranches of the high plains. In El Norte, the Spanish-colonized parts of the Southwest, both types of counties — empty desert or booming cityscapes — voted Democratic.

In two more regional cultures — Yankeedom and the Left Coast — rural counties only recently opposed their urban, Democrat-supporting neighbors. Rural Yankee counties went for Barack Obama by 5.9 percent in 2008 and were split in 2012, with Mitt Romney winning by a razor thin 0.02 percent. The Left Coast’s rural counties went for Mr. Obama in both elections, by 10.5 and 5.6 percent. Donald Trump — who had some of the most communitarian campaign promises of any Republican nominee in decades — flipped many rural Yankee and Left Coast counties in 2016 — he won the Yankee ones by 18.3 points, the Left Coast ones by 2.7 — tipping Wisconsin and Michigan into his camp.
.
The Partisan Landscape

2016 presidential vote by region.

+5

+15

+25

Winning margins

in percentage points:

TRUMP

LEFT

COAST

CLINTON

YANKEEDOM

FAR WEST

NEW

NETHER-

LAND

MIDLANDS

TIDEWATER

GREATER APPALACHIA

DEEP SOUTH

EL NORTE

SPANISH

CARIBBEAN

NEW FRANCE

Greater Appalachia

25

The regions ranked by partisan vote margins in the 2016 presidential election:

New France

22

Deep South

9

Far West

9

0.4

Midlands

8

Yankeedom

14

Tidewater

14

Spanish Caribbean

19

El Norte

25

New Netherland

34

Left Coast

By The New York Times | Source: Colin Woodard

In fact, only two regional cultures consistently exhibit urban-rural vote splitting, and together they account for just 15 percent of the population. Only in the Midlands has the split been a stark one. While urban Midlanders preferred Democrats by between six and 18 points in the three elections, their rural counterparts voted Republican by 15.2, then 22.6 and finally a blistering 40.8 in 2016. As in Yankeedom, this dramatic Trump surge among rural voters had an outsize effect on the Electoral College outcome.

Nor should cities be assumed to be reliable bastions of Democratic support. The core counties of major metropolitan areas, including Phoenix, Jacksonville, Fla., and Virginia Beach — and lots of smaller ones, like Boise, Idaho; Colorado Springs; Mobile, Ala.; Knoxville, Tenn.; Tulsa, Okla.; and Wichita, Kan. — went Republican in all of these presidential elections. Notably, not one of them is in Yankeedom, the Left Coast or New Netherland, even though those nations account for nearly 30 percent of the United States population.

Look at counties within medium-size metros — those with a population of between 250,000 and one million. Instead of being blue strongholds, such counties in four of the “nations” — Deep South, Greater Appalachia, Far West and New France — voted for Republicans in all three contests, and those in the Midlands did the same in the latter two. Yet in the reliably “blue” nations, this same county type supported Democrats. Collectively, the very biggest core metro counties do vote Democratic in every nation, but by margins that vary enormously, from nine to 20 points in most “red” regions to 40- and 60-point landslides in “blue” ones.

Why the differences? I’ve long argued that United States politics resolves around the tension between advancing individual liberty and promoting the common good. The regional cultures we think of as “blue” today have traditions championing the building and maintenance of free communities, today’s “red” ones on maximizing individual freedom of action. Our presidential contests almost always present a clear choice between the two, and the regions act accordingly.

The 2016 election was an exception, largely because Mr. Trump did not campaign as a traditional laissez faire Republican. Rather, he promised government would rebuild infrastructure and the manufacturing sector, shield workers from imports and migrant workers, replace the Affordable Care Act with “something terrific” and protect Social Security and Medicare. This delivered critical dividends in rural parts of the communitarian-minded Midlands and Yankeedom, flipping scores of counties that had voted for Mr. Obama twice, most of them in the Upper Mississippi Valley, northern New England and upstate New York.

In the midterms, this presents a challenge for Mr. Trump and his Republican allies because the president has failed to deliver on most of those communitarian promises. Statewide polling has the president underwater across the Midlands and Yankeedom, even as he remains popular in states dominated by the Deep South and Greater Appalachia.

Political handicappers reckon a half-dozen Republican House districts representing these rural areas are within reach for Democrats in November. That southwestern Wisconsin went for the Democrat in April’s state Supreme Court justice election suggests the 2016 tsunami is rolling back toward the deep blue sea.

There are many factors that influence political behavior — race, class, gender and occupation, just to name a few — and good analysis incorporates several. But ignoring regionalism — with boundaries more properly defined — is to miss perhaps the most powerful variable of all.

Colin Woodard (@WoodardColin), a staff writer at the Portland Press Herald in Maine, is the author of “American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America” and, most recently, “American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good.”

(updated 08/22 & 08/23 & 08/28) Washington, D.C, Bike/Scooter litter/narcissism ... -- An observation

For 08/22 & 08/23 updates & 08/28 updates, pls see below

Am a devoted pedestrian/jogger, and have spoken out about the evidently unregulated bike/scooter invasion on DC sidewalks/parks.

(If it is indeed unregulated, I -- no lawyer -- plead ignorance, and would appreciate additional information).

image from

I do hope another "option" for "public" transportation will be found that goes beyond me-me-me and my/my/my bike/scooter/leave it wherever I want will be found.

How about gov-approved organized racks for bikes/scooters in designated areas?

Am especially concerned, as an individual of a certain age, about handicapped persons on sidewalks helpless before reckless (rackless?) me-me-me-get-the f..k-out-of-my-way bikers/scooterers.

Not to speak of how our public parks have become ecologically violated by the use of "parking" places (untaxed?) for me-me-me bikers/scooterers evidently off the regulatory/tax hook.

Some of these venerable, I presume non-air-polluting citizens, leave their "me-me-me thing" wherever they choose in a public park; e.g., Rock Creek Park, where I (granted, selfishly) have the privilege as a taxpayer to stretch my legs on a near-daily basis so as to enjoy the refreshing beauty and inspiration of nature.

***

By the way (BTW): On my "jogging" (my neighbors, when they bear to see me in an "athletic" gear, diplomatically say "enjoy your walk") on the way to Rock Creek Park, I pick up trash (plastic/glass bottles, aluminum cans, used sticky condoms, you name your favorite litter; "abandoned" bicycles are too bulky for me to dispose of) ...

Meanwhile, as I dutifully seek to diminish our 21st century detritus on a "local" basis, I keep on venturing on my two-legged non-pedaled slow-go, inspired by the verse of Walt Whitman: "Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road."

After such a "keep-us-litter-free" exercise, I place the litter (contained in a  "Giant" grocery store bag that costs me ten cents) in a Rock Creek Park public receptacle near where I live (Porter Street/Connecticut Avenue).

Thus far have not been arrested ... :)

***

(08/14).  On negative reactions in California to the scooters, see.

***

(08/22)LA to send cease and desist letters to scooter companies ‘as soon as next week’

la.curbed.com

But will companies actually remove the vehicles?

By Elijah Chiland  Aug 22, 2018, 3:14pm PDT 

People ride Bird scooters along Venice Beach earlier this month.

 Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images

A city official says the transportation department will start issuing cease and desist letters to companies placing dockless scooters in areas where they haven’t been given explicit permission to operate.

“We can do that as soon as next week,” Marcel Porras, chief sustainability officer with the city’s transportation department, told the Los Angeles City Council’s public safety committee on Wednesday.

Porras committed to sending the letters after getting grilled by committee chair Mitchell Englander about why the department has only issued a single cease and desist letter to Bird—in spite of a motion calling for a citywide moratorium on the vehicles that the council approved earlier this year.

“We’ve asked the department to do this for months,” Englander said Wednesday. “I don’t know why we have to go back and forth.”

That motion effectively bans dockless bikes and scooters—which have proliferated on city streets and sidewalks in the past year—in areas that haven’t been approved for pilot programs testing the technology.

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But enforcement of those rules has been almost nonexistent. As the Los Angeles Times has reported, there’s even been confusion about whether the moratorium applied to scooters—or just dockless bikes.

In June, the transportation department sent a cease and desist letter to Bird after the electric scooter company began putting scooters in Downtown LA. Bird quickly removed the vehicles, but its scooters can still be found in neighborhoods throughout the city, including Venice, Fairfax, and Hollywood.

Porras told the committee that enforcing the policy has been difficult, because transportation staffers cannot impound vehicles; that task is the responsibility of the city’s sanitation department. He asked for further guidance from the City Council on how to enforce the city’s dockless rules as officials consider new regulations governing the vehicles.

It seems unlikely that the bikes and scooters will disappear from city streets and sidewalks entirely. The committee also unanimously rejected a stricter ban on electric scooters Wednesday.

Proposed last month by Councilmember Paul Koretz, the ban would have fined companies for leaving scooters on city sidewalks and empowered police to ticket riders violating state safety rules.

“I want to be known as a city that invites and embraces new technology, not bans it,” said Councilmember Joe Buscaino.

At the same time, the City Council is also considering regulations on dockless bikes and scooters. The rules, as drafted, would impose safety requirements on the vehicles, including speed limits and tail light requirements. The rules could be approved before the end of the month, but it would take time for them to go into effect.

In the meantime, under conditions approved earlier this month by the council’s transportation committee, scooter companies would have to apply for temporary permits from the transportation department.

Committee members say the regulations would address many of the concerns that residents have raised about the safety of scooters and the tendency of riders to leave them in places where pedestrians can easily trip over the vehicles.

Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell even offered to take on enforcement responsibilities himself.

“If I see one blocking the sidewalk or street, it’s going to end up in the trunk of my car,” he said.

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Courtesy MK -- Many thanks!

Peter’s Take: More Thoughts on Arlington’s Dockless Vehicle Pilot

by Peter Rousselot  August 23, 2018 at 2:45 pm arlnow.com 19 Comments

Peter’s Take is a weekly opinion column. The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ARLnow.com.

In my 40 Comments last month, I noted that Arlington County Transportation spokesperson Eric Baillet had told ARLnow that “county government plans a [dockless vehicle pilot] framework for County Board review in September.” Board member John Vihstadt stated he’d be “broadly receptive to clearing the way for more dockless vehicles to become available around Arlington.”

I then suggested that Arlington familiarize itself with the details of the dockless vehicle pilot programs already begun or completed in other localities, citing Washington D.C., and Denver as examples.

Although I don’t agree with all its features, the Denver dockless vehicle pilot program has addressed many of the issues that Arlington is likely to face. Arlington should focus particularly on how Denver has handled those issues.

Arlington’s dockless vehicle pilot program should adopt these features

Each dockless vehicle permit holder should be required to:

• provide indemnification, liability, and insurance coverages similar to Denver’s
• provide a unique vehicle identifier on each vehicle
• adopt an equity program, as in Denver, by submitting a plan outlining how its services will be available to those without smart phones
• have each user sign a form providing critical information (e.g., “rules of the road”, including “do’s and don’ts” regarding where and where not to operate the dockless vehicle, and where and where not to leave the dockless vehicle after the user finishes)

Note that the Denver rules of the road prohibit the use of E-scooters in bike lanes. I believe that all dockless vehicles, including E-scooters, should be permitted to use bike lanes.

• share certain categories of data with Arlington

The Denver data-sharing requirements include but are not limited to: utilization rates; total downloads, active users & repeat user information; total trips by day of week, time of day; origin & destination information for all trips; trips per bike by day of week, time of day; average trip distance; incidents of bike theft and vandalism; complaints; accident/crash information.

• pay a dockless vehicle permit fee

The Denver dockless vehicle permit fee schedule seems fair and reasonable:

1. Bicycles/E-Bicycles: application fee: $150 per permit application; permit fee: $15,000; performance bond: $20 per vehicle deployed
2. E-scooters/Other Approved Dockless Vehicles: application fee: $150 per permit application; permit fee: $15,000; performance bond: $30 per vehicle deployed

In any event, the permit fee schedule that Arlington adopts for its pilot program should represent Arlington County’s best estimate of amounts sufficient fully to recapture all costs which the County might incur to retrieve dockless vehicles left in locations that are prohibited on the form that each user has to sign.

Conclusion

Quite a few of the other pilot programs include regulatory features that I believe Arlington should reject — at least when it comes to choosing the final regulatory framework after the pilot program ends.

For example, for that final regulatory framework, Arlington County staff should not be picking, choosing, or limiting to any arbitrary number:

• how many dockless vehicle permit holders there are
• how many bikes and/or scooters each dockless vehicle permit holder can operate
• how many total bikes and/or scooters all dockless vehicle permit holders can operate

The marketplace should sort that out over time.

Dockless vehicles have great potential, but also pose significant risks. Arlington should adopt a pilot program (and regulatory framework) that maximizes the potential and minimizes the risks.

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Local Perspective

The electric scooters swarming our city won’t solve our commuting calamity, The Washington Post (08/28)  

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By Petula Dvorak

Columnist

August 27 at 3:00 PM

What we really want are jet packs and flying cars, okay?

We need to George Jetson and Marty McFly our way out of our traffic and commuting calamity. Light rail, Mag-Lev, even a reliable Metro would work, too.

The electric scooters swarming our city this summer?

Not the answer.

They’re like what happens if my son’s fifth grade squad took over the city planning commission and PeeWee Herman was their board chairman.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve tried the scooters, and they’re totally fun, cheap and effective. They are perfect answer to what used to be a sweaty, five-block walk in between meetings in downtown D.C.

But many of the 65 or so U.S. cities — from Washington to San Francisco — are confounded by what to do with the traffic newcomer. Should the motorized scooters be regulated like cars? Bikes? Or pedestrians?

[More shared scooters are coming to D.C.’s streets]

Government folks, who love a good committee hearing, are miffed by the way the new economy goes about these things. The main scooter companies — born in the West Coast’s tech sector — soft open their product by dropping the scooters in cities, then negotiating with frazzled city councils later.

It’s the ethos borrowed from one of the tech world’s earliest disrupters, computer programmer and Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, who famously said “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.”

So here they are, thousands of whizzing electric scooters, dropped on cities with little planning. Drivers hate seeing them flit into streets, pedestrians get jangled when one whizzes by close enough to ruffle arm hairs.

They are various shades of legal just about everywhere.

New York City is trying to regulate them before the companies release them into the wild.

In Maryland, Montgomery County launched a preemptive bill to avoid the guerrilla launch that is the hallmark of the dockless ride industry.

In Virginia, Arlington County was forced to draft something last month when the scooters showed up without warning. D.C. has a pilot program allowing a certain number of the dockless scooters that ends this week.

[Electric scooters might revolutionize urban transport — if it wasn’t for stupid humans]

I’m not cheezed off they’re being left in the middle of sidewalks and streets, though Twitter is filled with photos of folks unhappy Washington suddenly looks like my living room. I have boys, so I’m constantly dodging flying objects and stepping over things.

And this isn’t another old-person rant about being buzzed by one on the sidewalk — though that did happen to me three times in one 10-minute trip last week, first by a scooter, then by a dude in a black helmet and a motorized skateboard, then by a guy on something that looked like a Robotic vacuum cleaner he rode like the cave man in the B.C. comic strip.

That’s not my beef with these things. Here’s my problem: the variety of devices on our streets — combined with the epic and enduring bikes-versus-pedestrians saga — will keep sucking the air out of a transportation conversation that has to become more urgent.

Scooters are a tiny solution for a tiny population.

The very first scooters I saw were flying manbuns.

The method of transportation is largely the arena of the hoodie and backpack crowd, though I have seen more tourists jumping on over the past few weeks.

A recent survey of 7,000 scooter riders in 10 cities showed the scooter crowd is growing a bit more diverse, with women renting scooters more than they used bike shares and low-income folks becoming more frequent users, according to transportation think tank Populus.

Maybe. But the way it looks from the road, they are primarily being used by mobile, agile young folks who can no longer be bothered with Metro or bus schedules or walking. They’re not taking a car off the road, they’re taking a rider out of public transportation.

And who could blame them? I’ve ditched Metro dozens of times because I needed to be on time. To make massive scooter use feasible, we need California weather 365 days a year and infrastructure — lanes — to safely support all those riders. Isn’t it more humane to work on bigger solutions instead?

The world of electric scooters does little for the construction workers, hospitality workers, janitors, maids and nurses who live in cheaper housing outside the city and have to crawl through pre-dawn gridlock to drop the kids at day care and get to work or take three buses each way to their jobs.

I don’t see secretaries from Germantown, teachers from Bowie or paralegals from Falls Church solving all their commuting woes by scootering to work.

Great fun and hoorah for a whole generation of young workers who will never know the experience of being groped or hounded on Metro, but the personal wheels are a zero for real change.

[Stop comparing D.C. to Disney]

This debate began years ago with Segways. Then people lost their minds over where to put BikeShare racks. Here we are, a decade later, bickering over scooters on sidewalks while Metro still struggles.

The energy spent on micromanaging the street toys of the young needs to go into real infrastructure and development.

We used to be a nation of builders, of movement and innovation. Our decaying public transportation is becoming a joke while cowboy entrepreneurs — Uber and Lyft among them — come in with innovative solutions that fix a hole, but do little for an entire system.

“The change reflects deliberate choices in public policy. During the Obama years, Republicans fought fiercely against any increase in public investment in mass transit and advanced rail systems,” wrote Ronald A. Klain, a former Obama and Clinton White House adviser in a Washington Post opinion piece in June. “In 2016, decrying the crumbling state of our public infrastructure, President Trump promised that he would pass the largest infrastructure bill in U.S. history during his first 100 days in office. More than 500 days into his presidency, the bill still hasn’t even been drafted.”

Instead, we’re supposed to fix traffic with techbro scooters at 15 cents a minute.

Twitter: @petulad

*** 

via MS -- Many thanks!

Curbed

As scooters, bikes, and transit startups flood the streets, cities need to control the curb

4

With dockless scooters and other transit startups expanding, cities need to realize the value of the infrastructure they already control

By Patrick Sisson  Jun 13, 2018, 1:20pm EDT

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Bird and Spin scooters sit parked on a street corner on April 17, 2018 in San Francisco, California. Three weeks after three companies started placing electric scooters on the streets for rental, San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera issued cease-and-desist notice to electric scooter rental companies Bird, LimeBike and Spin. The notice comes as the San Francisco board of supervisors considers a proposed ordinance to regulate the scooters to keep people from riding them on sidewalks, parking them in the middle of sidewalks and requiring riders to wear helmets and have a drivers license. 

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Forget New York City’s crumbling subway system—the flood of dockless electric scooters is shaping up to be the key urban transportation story of 2018 as citizens in San Francisco and elsewhere become enraged over another example of tech companies barging in and begging for forgiveness instead of asking for permission (or simply waiting for regulations).

In just the past week, local leaders in both Santa Monica, California, the market where billion-dollar startup Bird first launched, and San Francisco, introduced ordinances to restrict and regulate scooter usage. Both initially proposed capping the number dockless vehicles these companies can place on the road, and have been met with pushback by the startups. A Bird spokesperson initially told Curbed the proposed regulations “will severely undercut our ability to serve all of the neighborhoods and residents of Santa Monica.”

The debate over restricting scooters may be a sign cities are finally beginning to catch up with transit startups, which often entered markets before any regulations were in place. But read the Santa Monica regulations, which were just approved, more closely, and signs of a more profound and important shift may be evident. Cities and planners are, more and more, seeing the immense value of controlling the curb.

With more options that ever for getting around cities, and finite space, the question of how we use this infrastructure, and who controls it, is more important than ever. By regulating how these new transportation options evolve, cities can potentially bring about a more sustainable, multimodal, and less car-centric transit future.

“The curb is an increasingly contested piece of urban real estate,” according to “The Shared-Use City: Managing the Curb,” a new report by the International Transport Forum. It’s where companies, citizens, and the government are jockeying for space for transportation, commerce, and delivery. Cities built and maintain the curb, and need to reassert ownership.

A visualization of a redesigned Wilshire Boulevard, proposed by Perkins + Will, Nelson\Nygaard and Lyft, would turn the 10-lane corridor into 0 lanes of vexing car traffic into a multi-transit space with wider sidewalks, benches, planters, bike lanes, dedicated bus lanes, and lanes for shared self-driving cars.

 Perkins + Will, Nelson\Nygaard & Lyft

The curb, an increasingly contested piece of urban real estate

Venture capitalists and startups see a convergence around different mobility options in cities. Scooters and dockless bikes have arrived just as this larger transportation transition, started by ridehailing, is beginning to pick up momentum. There’s value in providing simpler, cost-effective, and car-free ways to get around. The new flock of transit startups seems poised to make a lot of money, if all these rosy valuations and the ridership projections behind them add up.

The tech world certainly sees a lot of dollar signs when it comes to dockless mobility and bikeshare. After scooter startup Bird became a unicorn two  weeks ago, announcing a new round of funding that would give it a $1 billion valuation, it recently announced plans to seek a $2 billion valuation. Competitors Lime and Spin are also flush with cash, especially after Google Ventures just invested $250 million in Lime. After reports suggested Lyft wanted to acquire Motivate, the national bikeshare operator that runs New York’s CitiBike system, other stories suggested Uber, which already purchased the electric bikeshare company Jump, is also interested in Motivate.

What’s left out of these billion-dollar deals? Cities.

Most of these transit companies don’t have plans to pay for street maintenance, enforce safety rules, or share the ridership data that cities could use to plan better and more efficient transportation systems. Yet cities are paying for and providing the public infrastructure—roads, sidewalks, and curbs—underpinning this private gain. Last year, many of the country’s biggest cities passed measures worth hundreds of millions of dollars to update and fix streets and sidewalks.

But with the widespread adoption of mobile technology and GPS, the possibilities of a “self-adjusting curb” allow cities even more potential to shape and direct this rise in curbside traffic. Some cities have already had success with tests and trials that regulate access.

“Santa Monica is a multi-modal city focused on carbon reduction,” a Santa Monica city spokerperson told Curbed. “We’re supportive of...the concept of Bird. They just need to operate lawfully and safely.”

Washington, D.C., launched a successful trial in 2017 to regulate pick-up and drop-offs around the busy DuPont Circle area. San Francisco has used geo-fencing tools to “nudge” riders of Uber and Lyft to request pick-ups and drop-offs in designated zones to reduce congestion.

These concepts, referred to as “flex-zones” by the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) or Shared-Use Mobility Zones by the Eno Transportation Foundation, envision cities using rules and technology to give different transit options priority.

For example, Seattle has adopted proposed guidelines for design that follows a flex zone framework. First, designate transit stops, transit lanes, and bikeways. Then, find spaces for bike share stations, commercials loading, perhaps geo-fenced areas for dockless vehicles. Then, fill in the blanks with parklets and pick-up and drop-off spaces for ridehailing and private vehicles. Finally, include an array of short-term car storage options via parking regulations.

LimeBike’s Lime-S electric scooters in San Diego.

 Carly Mask

Why Santa Monica scooter regulations may be about more than scooters

By laying out criteria for dockless mobility partners, and introducing user fees for fleet operators, Santa Monica’s pilot program show that transportation planners there are thinking about the quid pro quo of this new transit world. The document detailing the arrangement repeatedly underscores that the city wants an “open and productive partnership,” recognizing that scooters and other dockless vehicles can help the city achieve sustainability goals and offer a highly desired option for shorter trips.

Companies vying for a spot in Santa Monica’s 16-month pilot program for shared mobility devices will be evaluated on a number of criteria, including safety, operations requirements, and data sharing. Each of the seven categories has minimum and recommended benchmarks.

Taken as a whole, the recommended benchmarks read like a model for the kind of partnership that could allow technology to evolve while giving public transit officials the ability to oversee, analyze, and regulate. Operators are encouraged to offer low-income and multilingual options, create a system that recognizes geo-fenced parking areas dedicated to decreasing vehicle clutter, and provide real-time fleet info to the city. After some debate, the city approved a dynamic model for capping scooters based on vehicle utilization; both Bird and Lime issued statements praising the new framework.

Other cities, looking to control traffic and fund the infrastructure used by these companies, have started to levy fees and rules on tech companies. A new fee Chicago officials added to Uber and Lyft rides will direct millions of dollars towards public transit investment, while designated drop-off spots are being tested in other cities to help avoid congestion.

An Uber and Lyft pickup spot outside the Indianapolis airport. A new proposal would create similar spots on San Francisco streets. 

Shutterstock

As these new mobility companies invest in larger fleets—and make private car ownership, a massive municipal revenue source, less attractive—cities will find more and more financial reasons to take control of the curb. The “Managing the Curb” report says cities need to prepare for the shift, and figure out how to price curb use to both control traffic and make up for any lost parking revenue (the top 25 U.S. cities made $2.8 billion on parking fines and fees in 2016).

“Curb use will resemble dynamic, highly flexible, self-solving puzzles,” says the report, as our urban areas move from what it calls “parking cities” to “pick-up and drop-off cities”.

Creating incentives creates a better system for all

Regulations that stifle and kill these mobility innovations would be tragic. But wise rules that recognize the potential and pitfalls of these new forms of transit, and how they can make existing systems better, would be a huge benefit.

Take two recent studies analyzing how ridehailing companies like Uber and Lyft impact urban traffic. The first report, released last October by University of California Davis transportation researcher Dr. Regina Clewlow, found that while widespread usage of these services may be decreasing the number of miles users drive themselves, it appears to increase the total miles driven in cities. The research found that 49 to 61 percent of ride-hailing trips “would not have been made at all, or made by walking, biking, or transit.”

Last month, a study by Masabi, a mobile ticketing service that works with transit systems as well as companies such as Uber and Lyft, found that more than one-third of respondents said they were combining ridesharing with public transit on an occasional basis.

Better coordination between public and private, and added incentives to steer riders towards this kind of shared system, can potentially work wonders when it comes to reducing congestion and decreasing car travel. When Chicago introduced its proposed tax increase on ridehailing companies, an Uber spokesperson said that the “future of urban transportation will be a mix of public transit and ride-sharing.”

Many cities are already subsidizing Uber and Lyft rides, testing to see if the service can function as a first/last mile connection to existing transit systems. And scores of new planning apps have made it easier to plot trips that bounce between different modes, including dockless bikes.

In addition, a shift in fees towards curb-access, as opposed to parking, can help cities monitor and control traffic. New York City and others havestruggled to introduce congestion pricing. Why not just update existing parking laws to account to all the new mobility options on the road right now?

To paraphrase the Santa Monica regulations, cities need to find good partners. In a healthy relationship, that usually means being upfront about boundaries and not being afraid to ask for what you need.

Two dockless LimeBikes share the sidewalk with Washington D.C.’s station-based Capital Bikeshare. Some transportation advocates are worried the new dockless operators will hurt the success of station-based bike share. 

AP

Cities need to own the curb

With so many new and developing transit options, it may seem like city streets are flooded with choices, as well as vehicles. There are extensive regulatory and safety issues at play to get all of these different ways of getting around to work together in a more cohesive manner. And while it may seem overwhelming, there is evidence that, if introduced with proper investment and oversight, these new options can work wonders.

Just look at the success of traditional bikesharing, which in five years, went from unknown to a backbone of the transit system in New York City. The system racked up impressive ridership and safety stats because, according to a recent NACTO report, “as these systems were implemented, they were accompanied by policy decisions from city leaders and transportation engineers to ensure that cycling infrastructure improved to match their investments.”

Dockless systems, for all the complaints that they’re unruly or disorderly, can work if properly regulated. According to an Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) report that analyzed both station-based and dockless bike systems, dockless bikeshare isn’t always the “disruptor” people make it out to be.

“The best transit innovations—especially those that are privately operated—offer riders convenient, affordable options for getting where they need to go,” the report reads. “Local governments that have viewed dockless bikeshare as an extension of their transit systems and introduced some form of regulation have seen ridership flourish as a result.”

Cities have a chance to do the same with the current influx of scooters and dockless systems and invest in more car-free travel lanes while regulating curb access.

Many companies seem at least willing to work with cities toward these goals. Uber, Lyft, and many dockless bike companies signed a Livable Cities Pledge, promising to support the shared and efficient use of “vehicles, lanes, curbed, and land,” as well as push for open data and fair user fees. Bird promoted a Save Our Sidewalks pledge that even suggested the companies should pay a per-vehicle fee to fund infrastructure improvements, and after the recent Santa Monica vote, Lime spokeswoman Mary Caroline Pruitt said the company remains “committed to partnering together to promote safe riding, proper parking etiquette, and accessible sidewalks.” A recent app redesign from Lyft seeks to promote shared rides, and the company’s new goal to have shared rides account for half of all trips on the platform by 2020.

These pledges and plans move in the right direction. But cities shouldn’t wait for transit companies. As urban mobility continues to rapidly evolve, it’s an asset that should be firmly in public hands, and used for the public good.