Cavan Wilk posts a DC area transit wish-list for both the near- and the short-term. But he leaves off what I think is one of the very most promising things a city like ours can do — improve bus service. Unlike rail projects, bus improvements can be feasibly undertaken in piecemeal ways rather than in quantum leaps. You can buy a few more vehicles and increase service frequency. You can add bus lanes just on parts of routes. You can build a handful of bulb-outs to speed boarding. Nothing needs to be done in gigantic, multibillion dollar leaps. And relative to rail, buses are disproportionately likely to be used by full-time residents (as opposed to tourists) and by poor people both of which are appropriate targets for our disproportionate concern.

One particular low cost thing that would improve DC’s bus service would be to redesign the little schedule cards that are posted at most bus stops. The way this information is currently displayed in DC does not reflect state-of-the-art thinking and should be changed. They should probably also consider eliminating stops on many lines so as to allow buses to run the route more quickly and therefore also arrive more often. Rather than walking two blocks and waiting five minutes for the bus which then moves slowly to your destination I think most people would rather walk five blocks, wait one minute for the bus, and then get where you’re going quickly. Beyond that — bus lanes, bulb-outs, more buses, better shelters — it’s all pretty obvious what would make for better bus service. It’s mostly an issue of financial and political commitment, but it can do a lot to improve quality of life in the area.

I liked NS’s other question too:

Why is “finding better teachers” such a preoccupation among self-described education reformers? Of course, we’d have a better education system if our teachers were better. We’d also have a better military if our soldiers were better and a better health care system if our doctors and nurses were better. Why is education the only policy area where “find better people” is treated as a workable solution?

With regard to soldiers, I would reject the premise. In the aftermath of the Vietnam War there was a very low level of interest in joining the United States military and consequently in order to maintain the required overall force size it was necessary to make recruiting standards quite low and to be pretty lax about who you would keep on. The rebuilding of the quality of the personnel employed by the military over the course of the 1980s and 1990s is one of the great prides of the officers who were involved. And when the Iraq War was leading to a personnel crunch and moves toward diluting recruiting standards there was, rightly, a great deal of hand-wringing over it. Concern about personnel quality is also one of, if not the, main reason why the military brass is generally very hostile to the idea of conscription and this is also why we’ve encouraged our NATO allies to abolish conscript and build smaller, higher-quality, more professionalized forces.

Quality of personnel should always be a concern across public services. Some cities, for example, have trouble offering police officers salaries that are as high as what’s offered in neighboring suburbs. This tends to lead to problems with the quality of the staff available to urban police departments which, in turn, makes it more difficult to keep crime under control.

With regard to teachers, though, it’s worth trying to be more specific since the debate has focused on a couple of particular points. In the United States, we tend to require teachers to do a lot of preemptive qualifying in terms of getting themselves certified. And then after a few years of teaching, they become eligible for tenure status. But we do have some fairly extensive experience with teachers going into the classroom without traditional certification. And the evidence suggests that such teachers are basically just as effective as the teachers who do have the traditional certification. The evidence also suggests that while teachers tend to get a lot more effective after their first couple of years of experience, they don’t get more and more and more effective as further time passes. Thus, the general shape of the teacher quality reform proposals is to (a) relax the preemptive screening so as to make it easier for anyone with a college degree to get into the classroom, (b) make the tenure decision more strictly tied to student achievement, and then (c) take advantage whatever increase in your potential labor force step (a) has given you to make it possible to in step (b) dump the bottom X% of the worst-performing teachers. To all of this I would be strongly inclined to add (d) start paying people more to further increase the size of the labor pool and make step (c) all the more effective.

But the need to have good people doing important public services is by no means unique to teaching and it certainly applies to the military.

NS asks:

How do you feel about the negative aspects of urban gentrification? You write a good deal about urban planning, but I haven’t read your take on this phenomenon.

I try not to use the word “gentrification” because I think the term obscures more than it clarifies, and tends to cover a widely disparate array of situations. But I do have a lot of thoughts on the matter.

One set of complaints about gentrification are the complaints we should dismiss out of hand from what amount to first-wave gentrifiers. I’ve been known to indulge in such complaining myself, and it’s mostly an inevitable brand of nostalgia, but it shouldn’t be taken seriously. The way this works is that you might move to, say, the U Street area when you’re 23 just as businesses were first starting to open. And then you wake your eyes up a few years later and realize that the cat is out of the bag, so to speak. That more stuff has opened, including some distinctly non-cool new big residential developments, and that the bars are crowded and in general you no longer count as edgy or distinctive for living there. Folks are always going to make these kind of noises, but it shouldn’t be taken seriously.

But a much more reasonable complaint concerns the problem of affordable housing. If there’s a crappy neighborhood somewhere — bad schools, high crime, few retail options, poor transportation links to job markets — you would like policy to improve the neighborhood. But in an ideal world, improving the neighborhood should actually improve the lives of many of the people who currently live in the neighborhood. The fear is that improving the neighborhood actually just means making it the case that the people who live there will no longer be able to afford to live there. This is a very real concern, but I hasten to add that a lot of the most commonly proposed countermeasures aren’t very effective or are at times counterproductive.

The main thing you need to do is recognize that this kind of bad gentrification is a relative scarcity issue. It’s very expensive to live in low-crime walkable transit-accessible neighborhoods featuring good public schools because housing in such neighborhoods is in short supply. To reduce the cost of housing in such neighborhoods there are a few things you need to do. One is that where you have neighborhoods with some of those characteristics you need to allow for denser construction of housing units. Another is that you need to work on the social policy problems of crime and school performance in existing walkable urban neighborhoods. And a third is that you need to build more transit lines and transit nodes and ensure that such nodes as exist have “smart” (i.e., dense, walkable, mixed use) development around them. And a fourth is to not waste the opportunities that we have — there’s a giant open-air parking lot right by the Rhode Island Avenue Metro Station in DC, which is just a dumbly low-intensity use of land adjacent to scarce Metro stations.

Long story short, the greatest villains of these kinds of stories aren’t the gentrifiers so much as the folks living in the already very nice areas who’ve tried to “pull up the ladder” and boost their own property values by choking development in the parts of the metro area where they live.

A gentrification phenomenon that sort of mixes the two kinds of concerns is that there’s a tendency for a neighborhood that gets far enough along the gentrification cycle to stop having “cool,” interesting stores, bars, and restaurants. This needs to be understood as a consequence of high retail rents. Simply put, it’s much easier to run an interesting retail business in places where rents are low. This is one of the main reasons why most of the best Asian food in the DC area is in random strip malls in Northern Virginia — both the central city retail space and the prime NoVa mall space are too expensive. Very high rents lead to homogenization, chains, mediocrity, high prices, etc. To some extent this is unavoidable, but it certainly counts as a reason why cities should try to ensure that there’s ample space zoned for retail and not stifle people with unduly burdensome business licensing rules. Your city will be more fun if you make it relatively cheap and easy to open stores.

Back during the Republican presidential primaries, there was a lot of sentiment that sure Rudy Giuliani was a baby-killer and didn’t hate gays, and sure he lacked relevant qualifications for the presidency, and sure he seemed to be involved in a bit of corruption and cronyism, but, hey, he pissed off a lot of liberals so he must be doing something right. I think that’s the spirit in which you have to understand the boost being given to RNC Chair candidate Chip Saltsman by the fact that he’s a bit racist:

The controversy surrounding a comedy CD distributed by Republican National Committee chair candidate Chip Saltsman has not torpedoed his bid and might have inadvertently helped it.

Four days after news broke that the former Tennessee GOP chairman had sent a CD that included a song titled “Barack the Magic Negro” to the RNC members he is courting, some of those officials are rallying around the embattled Saltsman, with a few questioning whether the national media and his opponents are piling on.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of modern American conservatism is that it believes in a curious concept of “color blindness.” In this view, racism is bad. But absent truly egregious behavior, it’s not something you’d really get all that upset about nor is it something you should be really attuned do. But so-called “political correctness” — meaning something like anti-racism that’s gone too far — is a really serious problem. Any hint of political correctness is worth getting upset about. And the views of actual members of racial minorities as to what is and isn’t racist should be completely discounted. Rather than saying that the prudent and decent white person will steer a mile clear of racist activity — sending out “Barack the Magic Negro” CDs, for example — the best course of action is to deliberately drive straight at the line and then get really upset at anyone who says you’ve crossed it.

I mostly support what Michelle Rhee is trying to do with the DC Public Schools, but the neglect of preschool programs as a vital element in improving student performance in the district is hard to forgive. A certain type of person isn’t interested in any education improvements that don’t involve picking fights with teacher’s unions, and this seems to me like perhaps an example of Rhee suffering from that affliction.