Traffic Report
The big story yesterday was congestion: the Texas Transportation Institute released its annual Urban Mobility Study to the typical fanfare. See, e.g., stories here, here, here, here, here, and here.
The headlines, as always, are gloomy: congestion's on the rise just about everywhere, and is wasting our time, gas, and money. The word from the researchers isn't particularly hopeful either. Sure, there are things that can be done to slow the increase in congestion. But they can be expensive -- and, worse, there's no guarantee that they'll actually work.
I dipped into the numbers a bit today. And to the extent that the TTI estimates are actually accurate (which, as we've written about before, and as this LA Times story mentions, is a big question), it seems to me that there could be a silver lining in all of the wailing. You see, depending on how you look at things, congestion may not be as big a deal as the headlines make it out to be.
Condos Do Not Have Agency
One of the curiosities of language is that our usage can sometimes inadvertently reveal our underlying beliefs. Consider how condos are often described as if they are conscious actors who perform actions, such as "packing people together."
One example comes from today's Seattle P-I: "Now, condominiums are building upward, packing people into to what used to be inexpensive property." According to this way of writing, it's the condos, not the owners, that have what we philosophy majors call "agency."
This is just weird. Admittedly, I don't get out a lot, but I've never seen condos roaming the streets, rounding up suburban residents, and stuffing the poor saps into boxes. I've always been under the impression that developers build condos in urban neighborhoods because there are lots of people who want to live in them.
Single family homes, by the way, aren't given the same treatment in our usage.
