Transportation Problems and Policy (2020)

When contemplating what I wanted to do for my creative blog post, I kept revisiting the idea of writing a personal essay in the style of my gal Joan Didion. While I have long been a devoted fan of hers, her essay that we read early in the quarter, “Bureaucrats” made me realize how much we as planners can extract about the community’s relationship with their local transportation system (or built environment more generally) through personal reflections. But in a less academic sense, I also just saw myself in her writing. As a native of Los Angeles County, there is a comfort in concrete and freeways and traffic that many outsiders won’t understand. Yet as I set out to start writing with a Didionesque lens, I felt conflicted. Is it a privilege for me to be able to romanticize the highways of my childhood, even though I now know as a planner how destructive those roads are to communities? I myself grew up in a low-income neighborhood off of the 710, a corridor notorious for pollution and po...