New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented...Bureaucrats?

Millennials trying to fix transportation become mired in the same red tape transit agencies struggle with

Dorasan Station: Not the last station from the South, but the last station NUMTOTs are allowed to discuss on Facebook (Photo courtesy of My Travel Journal-Blog) 

The New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens (NUMTOT) Facebook group has received excellent publicity recently, including profiles in The Guardian and CityLab. Thrilled to learn that so many others around the world share my passion for multimodal transportation, striving for the same vision of people-oriented "peak transit," I was one of the thousands of excited advocates who joined the group in the wake of this publicity. Since then, I've been entertained daily by the transit-related stories, pictures, and memes that have come to dominate my news feed.

I'd been hesitant to post any of my own transportation writing (either for this blog or Mobility Lab) to the NUMTOT group. Given the role social media has played in dividing our country, I did not want to risk becoming trapped in an "echo chamber" that would incentivize me to unleash my most radical side and forget that good transportation systems must effectively move everyone – not just urbanists like me.

But a couple weeks ago, I wrote a Mobility Lab article that I thought would be a perfect fit for the group and its members. The article, which laid out how a reformed, opened North Korea could essentially skip the automobile age, posited (through the lens of well-known current events) that, with proper planning and support, obstacles to better multimodal transportation can be overcome. In essence, my goal was to show that "peak transit" is a truly achievable goal, rather than just something to dream about in cyberspace. 

Thus, I decided to make the North Korea piece the subject of my NUMTOT debut, submitting the post as soon as I got home from work on the day the article ran.

But a few hours later, I noticed that the post had yet to go live. Out of curiosity, I decided to take a look at the rules governing NUMTOT, which group admin Juliet Eldred had recently re-posted for all the new members. As I expected, my post – which was original, unique, and urbanism-focused – met the group's basic standards. 

However, a small bit of wording situated near the end of Ground Rule #6 caught my eye. Specifically, Eldred wrote, "[NUMTOT] is not the group to debate the merits of broad economic systems, litigate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or defend North Korea."

I still figured my post would be fine, given that the article certainly does not defend Kim Jong-un's regime. The ground rules also implied that due to the group's large size, it can take some time for moderators to approve posts, so I expected it to be live no more than a day or two later.

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The post never made it through moderation. My editor at Mobility Lab, Jenna Fortunati, also attempted to post the article in the NUMTOT group, without any luck. 

This decision seems to have been made by an overwhelmed moderator, who probably rejected the article as soon as they saw the words "North Korea" and didn't bother reviewing the actual content of the post. Who knows, perhaps they were jaded following the efforts of the regime's troll army to spread pro-Kim propaganda online. 

As could be expected, I was quite disappointed, especially since Eldred's ground rules also don't permit members to inquire regarding reasons posts were rejected, or even regarding a pending post's status. I wondered whether the powerful Washington Post article on Palestinians' cross-border commutes into Israel (a must-read for anyone interested in transportation) also had been NUMTOT-banned, as well as whether the group would have permitted discussion of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott had Facebook existed in the 1950s.  

But the more I've thought about this snafu, I've come to realize that the NUMTOT moderator's error reflects the same challenges U.S. transit agencies face in their efforts to improve their systems and provide good customer service. With insufficient resources to account for every important operational detail, oppressive red tape and harmful bureaucratic oversights are inevitable. Some notable results:

• The inability of large American rapid transit systems, like the New York Subway and DC Metro, to both provide good service seven days per week and complete all necessary maintenance (as large systems abroad do)
• The high costs of transit infrastructure improvements, which dwarf those of comparable projects in other countries and appear, at least in part, to be related to bureaucratic inefficiency 
• A lack of big-picture thinking, as the continued closure of the new Point Definance Bypass rail line in Washington state demonstrates (imagine the public fury that would result if a major freeway remained closed for six months after a car crash)   

My inability to even obtain an explanation from the NUMTOT admins regarding my post's deletion also echoes transit providers' often-poor customer service. Though unexpected issues inevitably affect transit service sometimes, riders should be able to obtain an accurate, complete explanation when things go wrong. When people are left in the dark, the odds increase that they'll give up on transit altogether, leading to reduced revenue for the system and a lower quality of life for everyone.

Going forward, the role of social media-based discussion groups like NUMTOT will only become more prominent. Thus, leaders of such groups should be seeking solutions to transit's bureaucratic problems, rather than perpetuating them. The work needed to discover and implement these solutions won't be easy and will likely involve tense, uncomfortable discourse at times. Conducting case-by-case reviews of members' posts, rather than just implementing blanket bans on anything related to hot-button topics such as North Korea, would be a strong start to this effort.  

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As soon as this blog post is live, I'm going to try re-posting my North Korea article in the NUMTOT group. Hopefully this time, the results will be more fruitful.