Have you ever noticed a dirt path, cutting a beeline through the grass in a park, going someplace other than where the Administration wanted a sidewalk? For example: We have a lovely park rolling through the middle of our neighborhood, leading to our local rapid transit station. It’s a beautiful walk in the morning. As you approach the ramp to the station, however, the wide, luxurious sidewalk suddenly veers off to the right, climbs a small hill for twenty yards, then turns sharply left, going back downhill another twenty yards toward the station ramp. Meanwhile, at the bottom of that little hill, just before the sidewalk veers to the right, a dirt path angles left, away from the sidewalk, cutting twenty yards through the grass, directly toward the station ramp.
For decades, not surprisingly, thousands of commuters have cut that path through the grass, through slushy mud, a foot of snow or hardpacked ice, to save themselves the uphill detour and extra twenty yards. Then the City rebuilt and enlarged the sidewalk to make it friendlier for our 0.05 percent bicycle commuters (in a city with six-month winters). Some commuters (me) naively expected them to fix the layout. Yet, despite the evidence of the dirt path, the city crew reduplicated the original route. Either nobody noticed the dirt path, or nobody took the responsibility or had the initiative to modify the plan, putting the sidewalk where pedestrians actually need to use it. So the Path Abides.
Now, post-war Anglo-American political science was dominated by something called Rational Choice Theory. Public actors (i.e., people) were defined as self-interested calculators, intent on “maximizing their benefits.” Academics tied themselves into knots with all sorts of abstract problems, the foremost of which was the “Free Rider.” Why should I pay the bus fare, if I can sneak past the bus driver? If I’m the only one who skips, my missing shilling won’t bankrupt the system, and if nobody pays, my shilling won’t save it. So rationally, I should stiff the system, if that incurs no other costs. So the system inflicts new costs: fines or punishments.
Few undergraduates were drawn to Rational Choice Theory. They found irrational Neo-Marxism much easier, sexier and much easier. So, while the professors fiddled, the students burned. One wonders how their professors would have handled an argument in a biker bar.
Anyway, one popular variant of the Free Rider Problem was Corner Cutting. Walking down a sidewalk, bordering a lawn, I can save forty steps by cutting the corner. If I’m the only one who does that, I won’t damage the grass. If everybody does that, my sticking to the sidewalk won’t save the grass. So I should cut the corner.
Strangely, no one seems to have wondered whether the abstract ethics of the situation changes, if the lawn in question belongs to a private home owner, like me, or belongs to the public and therefore –ahem– to all of us. For another homeowner, I might expect “what goes around, comes around” and respect their lawn. If it’s a public park, however, we might expect the custodians of our public property would put a sidewalk where “all of us” need it. Nope. They put it where landscape architects want it to go, regardless of where all of us actually walk.
This war between planner and walker gets ridiculous. Our big downtown federal building has a second-floor entrance foyer, facing the river, with winding sidewalks and stairs, climbing the slope from street level. However, when pedestrians approach the building from the northwest corner, they must follow the street level sidewalk almost a full block east, in order to double-back on the picturesque sidewalk, up to the entrance. Or – or they can climb 10 feet through a flower bed, saving themselves 300 feet each way. Ten feet through a flower bed versus 600 feet on the sidewalk. Hmmm. Generations of Rational Choosers chose to cut through the mud, snow and petunias to minimize their travel costs.
Two years ago, the crumbling sidewalk needed renovation, and – call me naïve – I expected the federal property manager would add a discrete, ten-step staircase, cutting through the garden from the northwest, which his fellow citizens were cutting anyway. Instead, in the course of an expensive and protracted renovation, they added a fence to force those pedestrians into the 600-foot detour from west to east and west again.
My heart was cheered, however, when our Rational Choosers reinstated the same dirt path through the flower bed, and then turned right to climb ten more feet to the end of the fence, where they rejoined respectable society on the new sidewalk. The Path Abides.
However, a year later, management added a second, uglier fence, much more expensive, outside the first, reaching twenty feet farther up the flower bed. That has indeed reduced the traffic on the dirt path, but some citizens will still scale a three-foot fence, to save walking a wasted 600 feet.
This is the “Managerial” in the Homogenous, Universal and Managerial Administration. The HUMA has been erected supposedly to serve We-the-People. But it gets its definition of “service” and practical directions from its own Managers. The first priority of their Managers is not serving the public, but – understandably – advancing their own careers. More on this later.
Meanwhile: The Path Abides. Just 150 years ago, homesteader Ingalls family crossed the mighty Missouri on a mule-drawn ferry, while their British cousins dropped down from a Canadian Pacific Railway carriage onto the station platform at Medicine Hat, Alberta. They struck out across trackless prairie, seeking their promised land. Today, we strike out across the sidewalk-less lawn or stair-less flower bed, seeking the wicket of a government clerk.
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