Public Comment

Nelson\Nygaard, the transportation consultancy hired by the city to study parking and customer access at the Monterey-Hopkins commercial hub in connection with the protected bike lane project, has added an academic consultant to its team: Justin de Benedictis-Kessner, an assistant professor of Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

His c.v. includes a white paper he co-authored that was presented to the city of Boston in August 2021, “What the Next Mayor Needs to Do About Boston’s Transportation Crisis.”

Its recommendations include:  

Properly Incentivize Transportation Modes to Reduce Single Occupancy Vehicle Usage within and into Boston. Use positive incentives to make public transportation a more viable alternative to driving. Use negative incentives to more appropriately reveal the negative costs imposed by driving.  

Accelerate investment in infrastructure that makes walking and cycling more attractive.  

Improve the Public Process to Build Support. Iteratively build support through the process of policy feedback by capitalizing on successful projects.  

The white paper goes on to elaborate on this recommendations. For example: 

Set the tone for what is possible in transportation policy and create a sense of inevitability that transformation is necessary and coming.  

Use negative incentives to more appropriately reveal the negative costs imposed by driving. When more people drive, this has near-term costs for everyone in Boston through both emissions and traffic, and long-term adverse health and climatological consequences. Negative incentives have the power to rebalance the scales and make these enormous societal costs more visible to us all. 

And then, these recommendations on public engagement: 

Conduct a proactive bi-directional public engagement process. Public engagement processes around transportation projects too often take the form of public meetings. But public engagement does not need to only be about listening to opposition from the groups of people who have the resources and time to show up to these meetings. People often see the visible costs of policies and have an immediate reaction to those costs. Getting people on board with specific policy changes despite those potential costs involves helping people reconcile their principles with the actual policy implementation of those principles. The mayor should use the public input process as a chance to help people understand the transportation needs of neighborhoods and the city as a whole, and why changes to the street will help accomplish those goals and improve on the status quo. Doing this will help put near-term costs in context of longer-term net benefits. 

Iteratively build public support based on evidence from pilot projects. The mayor should use successful projects in one neighborhood as evidence of the benefits of these projects when expanding improvements to new neighborhoods in Boston. A public process that harnesses incremental improvements can result in what political scientists call policy feedback to help to build future support. Policy feedback occurs when making policy changes builds a constituency that supports that policy — and extending that policy even further. A classic example of this is Social Security, which through its initial implementation and subsequent expansions built a constituency of people who would further support it, as well as gave them the information and the means to be able to mobilize in the political processes that could expand their desired policy options. This kind of process is likely to occur with transportation improvements that build the constituency of support. For instance, the research on the construction of protected bike lanes indicates that they will encourage new people to use bikes for both commute and non-commute trips. These people — new to the use of bike infrastructure — may then be mobilized to support expansion of needed transportation infrastructure. Moreover, this success can be used as evidence to convince other neighborhoods of the value of these policies through the public engagement process. Instead of narrow policies or policies that restrict their benefits to a certain demographic or geographic constituency, use policies that build a broader constituency to ensure future support. 

In short, Professor de Benedictis-Kessner comes to this project with strong biases. He’s against driving and for biking. He’s contemptuous of public engagement that brings out opponents of the kinds of projects that he supports—for example, “protected bike lanes.” The Harvard professor assumes that people who attend “public meetings” are “those who have the time and resources to show up at those meetings.” But in Berkeley, it’s the bike lobby, fat on grants from the city, and favored by City Hall, whose members show up and get their way. He proposes to manipulate a presumably credulous and inattentive public by suppressing information about failed projects. 

Given these biases, it’s impossible to see how Professor de Benedictis-Kessner can fairly assess the impact of parking removal on customer access to the Monterey-Hopkins shopping area. He should be removed from the consultant team.