Live your values

Ride the train, send your kids to public school. It’s the only way we get public services that work for everyone.

Students on a playground court. Public schools work best if educated, affluent parents participate instead of opting out. (Photo by Xavier Arnau)

I was a little disappointed that so many reactions to last week’s post about crime and mass transit ridership took the form of people saying I’d feel differently if it was my family riding transit.

I don’t take transit quite as often as I once did, because I live within walking distance of both my office and my kid’s school. But when I was growing up in New York, I took the subway every day to high school and all around town to meet up with friends. When I was in college, I was a bit lazy and often stayed near campus, but I absolutely rode the T into downtown Boston or to the North End or out to the movie theater in Alewife or to Jasper White’s Summer Shack. When I moved to D.C., I first commuted to work on the bus and later on the metro. I’ve always lived in transit-oriented neighborhoods. When my son was in a stroller, I learned to navigate the labyrinthine metro elevator system. And just last week, I took advantage of the newly redesigned bus network to hop on the D32 near my office and ride it out to Alamo Drafthouse Cinema to see “One Battle After Another.”

I take mass transit all the time. I care deeply about it, and I’ve taken a lot of time to learn factual information about transit and transit ridership.

Obviously, I do not want to be murdered on the train. I don’t want my friends and family to be murdered on the train. I don’t want total strangers to be murdered on the train. I am entirely, thoroughly, 100 percent against train murder. But, again, precisely because Washington, D.C. is a high-violence city overall, I also don’t want public authorities to lose perspective and misallocate law enforcement resources. I think there’s good reason to believe that the city suffers from significant spatial misallocation of officers, and that lives could be saved and bad people put behind bars if the district sent cops where they are most needed.

And conversely, precisely because I do rely on mass transit to get around, I want to see the Washington Metro allocate its own resources effectively.

The agency’s head, Randy Clarke, has done a generally excellent job since taking over. That’s involved a fare enforcement push with significant safety and revenue benefits. But Clarke has also invested a lot of resources in simply improving service levels. Safer is always better, but when it comes to transit ridership, the primary issue is utility. If I need to go to The Wharf, I’ll probably ride the bus, because there’s a direct route from my house and parking down there is expensive. If I’m going to my friend Jonah’s house, I’ll probably drive because the transit route between my place and his is slow, and it’s easy to park for free in his neighborhood.

Since I use these services, I want them to be managed rationally. I think it’s people who don’t actually ride mass transit who have their judgement unduly clouded by viral videos of rare events, while basically never thinking about boring stuff like bus bunching or long waits for subway transfers on the weekend because frequency is low.

Personal annoyance aside, though, I do understand why some people level the accusation. It is, in fact, an all-too-common and annoying phenomenon to see elite progressives talk a good game about their commitments but largely opt out of participating in public services or living in diverse neighborhoods. I myself have frequently been annoyed by the number of high-level Democrats I meet who send their kids to private school or who live in Greater Washington’s most exclusionary neighborhoods.¹

Aligning lifestyle and values

When we talked about this piece, Kate (who is both my editor and my wife) and I disagreed a bit about the framing. I think she wanted to exhort liberals to “live their values” by sending their kids to public school and riding the metro. [Editor’s note: At least I got the headline.]

I, a bit more cynical and more of a jerk, was of the view that a lot of the people we’re talking about are living their values and their values are just bad.