Taxicab Journalism

It's the biggest hack trick in the book, but my cab driver remarked as we cruised toward LAX that there'd been less congestion in Orange County recently. He attributed this to the high price of gasoline, and said that people were car pooling more on the way to work, having one friend pick up another en route to socializing rather than everyone taking separate vehicles, and even taking the bus (though he limited this option to "poor Latinos") in order to save money.

They say you should remember that "data" is not the plural of "anecdotes" but in journalism school you learn that there's a cab driver exception to this rule. This is especially the case when cab-based anecdotes fit the writer's preconceived political views. Ergo, people actually have somewhat more flexibility in terms of how much they drive than is often realized. So let's hear it for higher gas taxes, and for Orange County to spend money building bike lanes and providing more frequent bus service.

Comments

They say you should remember that "data" is not the plural of "anecdotes"

You're right. "Anecdotes" is itself plural.

Posted by ryan | May 8, 2008 3:03 PM

Hmm, maybe what we need is a bunch of lefties to infiltrate the ranks of cabdrivers in NYC & DC, do nothing but sit outside the buildings of our major media establishments, and casually mention how many passengers make comments about hating Bush & the Republicans, and our media's kid-gloves treatment of them.

Perhaps this, more than any number of Media Matters or Atrios posts cataloging the sins of the MSM, would effect change?

Posted by Reader | May 8, 2008 3:04 PM

you shoud write a book about it, perhaps something about lexuses (lexusi?) and olive trees. in sand.

oh, and while I'm here- THIS IS EXCELLENT NEWS!! FOR HILLARY!!!

Posted by idiotic | May 8, 2008 3:07 PM

Reader wins. Unless the Friedmans of the world would then find the cabdrivers discourse as saying the wrong things, and then they'd have to casually encounter their cheap anecdotes elsewhere.

Posted by El Cid | May 8, 2008 3:08 PM

Anecdoteses?

Posted by jhupp | May 8, 2008 3:14 PM

I have three more anecdotes to confirm the absolulte factual truth of this story. I live in L.A. and commute from the Valley to the West Side. So does my dad. I have a friend who commutes from the Valley to Pasadena. All THREE of us - count 'em, three! - have noticed somewhat less traffic lately. My anywhere from 45 to 75 min. commute has been consistently at 45. We were speculatatin' that it was carpooling, other forms of transportation, and also higher unemployment. Or maybe it's just the lovely spring weather.

Posted by bobbo | May 8, 2008 3:20 PM

It's the biggest hack trick in the book, but my cab driver remarked

If that double-entendre of "hack" as in "hack journalist" and "hack" as in "cabdriver" was intentional, then I applaud it. If not--lucky shot.

Posted by James Gary | May 8, 2008 3:24 PM

MattY went on a 40 mile cab ride? Surely, he must have taken public transportation part of the way, right? Perhaps one of those communal vans or something, right?

Posted by TLB | May 8, 2008 3:29 PM

Aw, James Gary beat me to it.

Posted by Matt Weiner | May 8, 2008 3:37 PM

Actually, there is a working paper on this using the data from the last few years of gas price peaks. they found that not only did congestion in LA decrease as prices rose, but that on net there was a slight gain in social welfare,i.e. the value of the time savings > the increased spending on gas.

Posted by CalDem | May 8, 2008 3:49 PM

The NYTimes had a story last week which said that gasoline consumption in California is *down* 4% compared to last year. They focused mostly on the changes in new car sales - fewer SUVs and minivans, a lot more compact cars. But the turnover of cars is too slow to have caused that big a drop that quickly: people's behavior must have changed, reducing the number of vehicle-miles driven.

Posted by Richard Cownie | May 8, 2008 4:08 PM

I suspect that Mickey Kaus would attribute at least part of this to illegal immigrants having left the OC and gone home. Don't know if this could be true -- do enough illegals make enough money to own cars and drive at rush hour? -- but it would be consistent with decling school enrollments. I guess one comparison would be to compare LA/OC commute times with commute times in areas that don't have such a illegal immigrant community.

Posted by Gene | May 8, 2008 4:21 PM

I saw the sarcophagus of Anecdoteses II at the Smithsonian. I could tell you a story (or two) about it but the stories wouldn't be representitive of the exhibit as a whole.

Posted by joejoejoe | May 8, 2008 4:22 PM

the other day I read in the Boston Globe how public transport use was up sharply in recent months.

But that very day I was going into Boston for lunch and as I usually do I parked at the parking garage at alewife, one end of the subway route. To my surprise there was no waiting line to enter the garage -- as there has been for years at this time of morning -- and when I got to the top floor of the garage there were numerous empty parking slots.

Does this mean that so many people have lost their jobs in Boston and are not commuting into the city?

Going into the 1990 recession observing that there were many empty parking spaces at Alewife turned out to be a great bond market buy signal.

Posted by spencer | May 8, 2008 4:28 PM

joejoejoe wins the thread against good competition.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | May 8, 2008 4:29 PM

Were you sharing a cab with Friedman?

Posted by McKingford | May 8, 2008 4:54 PM

Having grown up in Orange County I must say you've buried the lede in that post. There are cabs in Orange County?! And buses?!!

Posted by Conor Friedersdorf | May 8, 2008 5:09 PM

Building bike lanes is a fine idea in new housing developments on flat land, but there is practically no empty flat land zoned to be developed within 50 miles of LAX. A few of the luxury developments in the exurbs may have luxuriously wide streets that could have a bike lane added with a stripe of paint, but that's infrequent. The only way to find room to retrofit a bike lane onto most existing LA street is to ban parking, and even that doesn't work because people still park illegally and thus bike riders have to swerve dangerously out into traffic. Or you could put the bike riders up on the sidewalk, which is kind of tough on moms pushing baby carriages.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 8, 2008 5:33 PM

Anecdote #4: I live in LA, commute from Mt. Washington to downtown, take the Gold Line, catch a train at 8:12 am. Mt. Washington is one of the last "pick-up" commuters station until folks start disembarking in Chinatown. One year ago I could almost always find at least one seat open. Over the past few weeks, I think I've stood the entire way to downtown.

Posted by Shine | May 8, 2008 5:36 PM

Traffic in SoCal improved significantly in the mid-1990s as people left due to economic downturn. The LA economy in recent years has been driven mostly by homeowners refinancing, but as that becomes unfeasible, look for an outflow.

On the other hand, the big California baby boom of 1988-1994 that was set off by the 1986 illegal immigrant amnesty act is just coming into their car-owning years.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 8, 2008 5:57 PM

Traffic in SoCal improved significantly in the mid-1990s as people left due to economic downturn. The LA economy in recent years has been driven mostly by homeowners refinancing, but as that becomes unfeasible, look for an outflow.

On the other hand, the big California baby boom of 1988-1994 that was set off by the 1986 illegal immigrant amnesty act is just coming into their car-owning years.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 8, 2008 6:00 PM

Matt really needs to sit down and think about how modern liberalism makes the vast infrastructure projects he fantasizes about extremely hard to accomplish. Before the late 1960s, the powers that be could push through huge construction projects without worrying about environmental and other public interest lawsuits and regulations. Today in California, however, it takes about 15 years to get all the approvals to build a golf course, much less a rail line. And the number of "community groups" you have to payoff to build anything without protests and lawsuits is staggering. For example, to finish the Century Freeway connecting to LAX in 1988, Cal Trans was paying off, among countless others, an AIDS group in West Hollywood, ten miles north of the freeway.

Two decades ago, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) blocked the LA subway from it's natural path continuing down Wilshire Blvd. to the Pacific with some specious worries about underground gas deposits. (Mostly, he didn't want poor people to have an easy way to get to Beverly Hills.) Now he's changed his mind, but we still don't even have an agreed upon route for a subway extension, much less all the environmental impact reports, much less the funding, much less the construction.

And Southern California is so multi-centric that another subway line really won't make difference.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 8, 2008 6:12 PM

So, clearly, we aren't going to have any significant solutions to our transportation problems in my lifetime. Even if it made sense to retrofit Matt's beloved Manhattan transportation system onto other urban areas (which it doesn't), it would take to 50-100 years to build it.

The most sensible thing we can do in the meantime is to slow the rate of American population growth. When you find yourself in a whole, the first thing to do is to stop digging.

And what's driving American population growth? Immigration and the children of immigrants, especially the large families of illegal immigrants. In California, according to demographer Hans Johnson of the Public Policy Institute of California, immigrant Latinas are averaging 3.7 babies each, way over the 2.1 replacement rate. See Figure 3 in

http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/cacounts/CC_1107HJCC.pdf

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 8, 2008 6:34 PM

efore the late 1960s, the powers that be could push through huge construction projects without worrying about environmental and other public interest lawsuits and regulations. Today in California, however, it takes about 15 years to get all the approvals to build a golf course, much less a rail line.

I guess I agree with Steve Sailer about once every couple of months. But he's right here. There is a definite tension between the bureaucratic hoops that are imposed by the California Environmental Quality Act and other similar statutes and the need to build big infrastructure and transit projects that have significant NIMBY opposition.

Personally, I would tend to favor eliminating environmental reviews for mass transit projects. After all, they are good for the environment overall.

Posted by Dilan Esper | May 8, 2008 10:50 PM

I was reading through SS' comment with bated breath, waiting for the cork to pop. But he was being so rational! And then the rumblings started...

Matt really needs to sit down and think about how modern liberalism makes the vast infrastructure projects he fantasizes about extremely hard to accomplish.

Possibly a fair point.

Before the late 1960s, the powers that be could push through huge construction projects without worrying about environmental and other public interest lawsuits and regulations.

A little mutter of discontent about the hippies here? No, let's give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, it's been two sentences and he hasn't mentioned mentally-inferior "urban youth" yet. Maybe he's changed!

Today in California, however, it takes about 15 years to get all the approvals to build a golf course, much less a rail line.

He's still sounding pretty sane here...

And the number of "community groups" you have to payoff to build anything without protests and lawsuits is staggering.

Hmm. Like the "late 60s" comment, "community groups" could almost be a buzzword - but again, let's give him the benefit of the doubt.

For example, to finish the Century Freeway connecting to LAX in 1988, Cal Trans was paying off, among countless others, an AIDS group in West Hollywood, ten miles north of the freeway.

TEH GAYS ARE DESTROYING THE ENVIRONMENT!!!!111!!

Oh, well, I knew he couldn't hold out for long. Too bad, Stevo.

Posted by ajay | May 9, 2008 5:21 AM

CalTrans payoff to the West Hollywood AIDS "community activist group" for not protesting the finishing of the Century Freeway to LAX was cited in an LA Times article as especially exemplifying the cost of building anything big in LA, because as everybody knows, West Hollywood isn't anywhere near the community affected by the Century Freeway, an east-west freeway that connects to LAX. West Hollywood is even north of the Santa Monica freeway. But the payoffs to activist groups to get them to not lead Not In My Back Yard lawsuits had to be ladled out even ten miles away from the construction project.

Most such groups with their hands-out have some progressive-sounding title. Instead of "Rich Homeowners of Beverly Hills Against a Subway that Would Make It Easier for Car-Less Criminals to Infest Our Neighborhood," they have titles like "Environmental Preservation League" or whatever.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 9, 2008 1:33 PM

Just some more anecdotal evidence. My hubbie works in downtown LA and usually takes the commuter train from where we live in the far eastern suburbs. Yesterday, there was a problem with the train and he drove to work instead. As usual, he was dreading the trek home, the usual horrific traffic congestion and all. He made it home in record time though; he'd never seen such (relatively) little congestion on the freeways.

Posted by tontocal | May 9, 2008 3:06 PM