Mother jones february 2016

And when people don’t pay to park at the curb only a tiny fraction of curbside spots in the United States are metered, it’s the city that pays to build and maintain that spot.. After all

GOP CLONES

It’s not just tuna It’s a choice to

stand for human rights and the preservation of our oceans

Take action at tuna.greenpeace.org

How robocars and millennials are

about to make your city cleaner,

greener, and cheaper

Clone armies, super-PAC spawns, and

Potemkin headquarters Welcome to the

Age of the Uncampaign

B Y C L A I R E P R O V O S T A N D M A T T K E N N A R D

The World Bank is supposed to help

the poor So why do so many of its

investments underwrite oligarchs?

B Y C O R E Y J O H N S O N A N D K E N A R M S T R O N G

At 16, Taurus Buchanan threw one

deadly punch—and was sent away for life

Will the Supreme Court give him, and

hundreds like him, a chance at freedom?

Comedian Kumail Nanjiani

on being the ultimate fanboy

January  February 2016 volume 41, number 1

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ROAD WARRIOR

Is Uber ripping off its drivers? The woman who beat

Starbucks and FedEx in court says yes.

In early 2012, on a visit to San Francisco, Shannon

Liss-Riordan went to a restaurant with some friends Over

dinner, one of her companions began to describe a new

car-hailing app that had taken Silicon Valley by storm

“Have you seen this?” he asked, tapping Uber on his

phone “It’s changed my life.”

Liss-Riordan glanced at the little black cars snaking

around on his screen “He looked up at me and he knew

what I was thinking,” she remembers After all, four years

earlier she had been christened “an avenging angel for

work-ers” by the Boston Globe “He said, ‘Don’t you dare Do not

put them out of business.’” But Liss-Riordan, a labor lawyer who has spent her career successfully fighting behemoths such as FedEx, American Airlines, and Starbucks on behalf

of their workers, was way ahead of him When she saw cars, she thought of drivers And a lawsuit waiting to happen

Four years later, Liss-Riordan is spearheading action lawsuits against Uber, Lyft, and nine other apps

D I S R U P T I O N , D I S R U P T E D

com-In August 2013, Liss-Riordan filed a class-action lawsuit in a federal court

in San Francisco, where Uber is based Her argument hinged on California law, which classifies workers as employees if their tasks are central to a business and are substantially controlled by their em-ployer Under that principle, the lawsuit says, Uber drivers are clearly employees, not contractors “Uber is in the business

of providing car service to customers,” notes the complaint “Without the driv-ers, Uber’s business would not exist.” The suit also alleges that Uber manipulates the prices of rides by telling customers that tips are included—but then keeps a chunk

of the built-in tips rather than remitting them fully to drivers The case calls for Uber to pay back its drivers for their lost tips and expenses, plus interest

Uber jumped into gear, bringing on yer Ted Boutrous, who had successfully represented Walmart before the Supreme Court in the largest employment class action in US history Uber tried to get the case thrown out, arguing that its business is technology, not transportation The drivers, the company contended, were independent businesses, and the Uber app was simply a

law-“lead generation platform” for connecting them with customers

Techspeak aside, Liss-Riordan has heard all this before When she litigated similar cases on behalf of cleaning workers, the cleaning companies claimed they were simply connecting broom-pushing “inde-pendent franchises” with customers When she won several landmark cases brought by exotic dancers who had been misclassified

as contractors, the strip clubs argued that they were “bars where you happen to have naked women dancing,” Liss-Riordan re-counts with a wry smile “The court said,

‘No People come to your bar because of

that entertainment Adult entertainment That’s your business.’”

was later overturned on appeal.) In a series

of cases that began in 2005, she has won multi million-dollar settlements for FedEx drivers who had been improperly treated

as contractors and were expected to buy or lease their delivery trucks, as well as pay for their own gas

Her Uber offensive began in late 2012, when several Boston drivers approached her, alleging that the company was keeping

as much as half of their tips, which is gal under Massachusetts law Liss-Riordan sued and won a settlement in their favor

ille-that provide on-demand services, shaking

the pillars of Silicon Valley’s much-hyped

sharing economy In particular, she is

chal-lenging how these companies classify their

workers If she can convince judges that

these so-called micro-entrepreneurs are in

fact employees and not independent

con-tractors, she could do serious damage to a

business model that relies on cheap labor

and a creative reading of labor laws Uber

alone was recently valued at $51 billion

“These companies save massively by

shifting many costs of running a business to

the workers, profiting off the backs of their

workers,” Liss-Riordan says with calm

inten-sity as she sits in her Boston office, which is

peppered with framed posters of

Massachu-setts Sen Elizabeth Warren The bustling

block below is home to two coffee chains

that Liss-Riordan has sued If the Uber case

succeeds, she tells me, “maybe that will

make companies think twice about

steam-rolling over laws.”

After graduating from Harvard Law

School in 1996, Liss-Riordan was

work-ing at a boutique labor law firm when she

got a call from a waiter at a fancy Boston

restaurant He complained that his

man-ager was keeping a portion of his tips and

wondered if that was legal Armed with a

decades-old Massachusetts labor statute

she had unearthed, Liss-Riordan helped

him take his employer to court—and won

“This whole industry was ignoring this

law,” Liss-Riordan recalls Pretty quickly,

she became the go-to expert for

employ-ees seeking to recover skimmed tips And

before she knew it, her “whole practice was

representing waitstaff.”

In November 2012, she won a $14.1

million judgment for Starbucks baristas in

Massachusetts After a federal jury ordered

American Airlines to pay $325,000 in lost

tips to skycaps at Boston’s airport, one of

the plaintiffs dubbed her “Sledgehammer

Shannon.” When one of her suits caused a

local pizzeria to go bankrupt, she bought it,

raised wages, and renamed it The Just Crust

Liss-Riordan estimates that she’s won or

settled several hundred labor cases for

bar-tenders, cashiers, truck drivers, and other

workers in the rapidly expanding service

economy Lawyers around the country

have sought her input in their labor

law-suits, including one that resulted in a $100

million payout to more than 120,000

Star-bucks baristas in California (The ruling

CONTRACTS WITH AMERICA

21 MILLION

Americans work as independent

contractors.

29%

of the jobs added between 2010 and

2014 were for independent contractors.

Ride-app drivers working more than 40 hours a week report earning

a yearly average of

$36,580before expenses like gas.

Uber has spent more than

$1 MILLIONlobbying against regulations in

California since 2013 It is said to have set aside at least $1 billion for future regulatory fights as it expands abroad.

The company has been valued at

$51 BILLION.

Uber’s argument is pretty similar to that

of the strip clubs “Uber is obviously a car

service,” she says, and to insist otherwise is

“to deny the obvious.” An Uber

spokesper-son wouldn’t address that characterization,

but said that drivers “love being their own

boss” and “use Uber on their own terms:

they control their use of the app, choosing

when, how and where they drive.”

Some observers have suggested

creat-ing a new job category between employee

and contractor But Liss-Riordan is tired

of hearing that labor laws should adapt to

accommodate upstart tech companies, not

the other way around: “Why should we tear

apart laws that have been put in place over

decades to help a $50 billion company like

Uber at the expense of workers who are

try-ing to pay their rent and feed their families?”

For the most part, courts have sided with her Last March, a federal court in San Francisco denied Uber’s attempt to quash the lawsuit, calling the company’s reasoning “fatally flawed” (and even citing French philosopher Michel Foucault to make its point) In September, the same court handed Liss-Riordan and her cli-ents a major victory by allowing the case

to go forward as a class action The judge

in the Lyft case has called the company’s argument—nearly identical to Uber’s—

“obviously wrong.” Last July, the cleaning startup HomeJoy shut down, implying that a worker classification lawsuit filed by Liss-Riordan was a key reason

Meanwhile, other sharing-economy ups are changing the way they do business

start-The grocery app Instacart and the shipping

app Shyp—Liss-Riordan has cases pending against both—have announced they will start converting contractors to full employees Liss-Riordan says that’s her ultimate goal: to protect workers in the new economy, not to kill the innovation behind their jobs “This

is not going to put the Ubers of the world out of business,” she says

One of her opponents has played

a more creative offense Last fall, the laundry-delivery app Washio convinced

a judge that Liss-Riordan had no right to practice law in California Liss-Riordan easily could have relied on a local lawyer

to head the case, but instead she signed

up to take the California bar exam in ruary “Their plan kind of backfired,” she says “I expect they’ll be seeing more of

Feb-me, rather than less.”—Hannah Levintova

CRASHING THE ELECTION

THE ELECTORAL NIGHTMARE of hanging chads, butterfly ballots,

and Bush v Gore in 2000 spurred states and counties around the

country to ditch their old voting machines for shiny new digital

ones Fifteen years later, those machines, which were designed

well before the first iPod, are quickly becoming obsolete—just in

43 states have machines that are

10 or more years old Almost all

of those machines are no longer manufactured.

Almost all of California’s voting machines run on Windows XP (released in 2001) or earlier oper- ating systems.

Some old voting machines’ memory cards can hold only 512 kilobytes (That’s 0.07 percent of

a typical cd-rom.) Machines in one Ohio county require Zip disks, which became outdated in the early 2000s The estimated cost of replacing outdated voting machines is more than $1 billion Election officials in 22 states say they don’t know where they’ll find the money.

Q All voting machines bought in 2006 or earlier

Q  Majority of jurisdictions bought machines in 2006 or before

Q Minority of jurisdictions bought machines in 2006 or before

Q All voting machines bought since 2006

*Insufficient data for Idaho

time for another presidential election As the vice chair of the federal Election Assistance Commission told the Brennan Center for Justice, which has documented these glitches, “We’re getting

by with Band-Aids, but I worry about a crisis with some of the older machines.” —Dave Gilson

America’s aging voting machines

While working part time

as a janitor and landscaper

at a Border Patrol facility

in Arizona, Tom Kiefer arranged and photographed the belongings seized from migrants who had been caught while crossing into the United States To see more of these collected objects, from water bottles to headphones,

visit motherjones.com/border.

E X P O S U R E

Found and Lost

Here’s what happened when

politicians started treating

women’s bodies like meth

labs Literally.

Casey Shehi’s son James was born in August

2014, remarkably robust even though he

was four weeks premature But as the

ma-ternity nurse took the baby from his

ex-hausted mother’s arms, Shehi felt a prick

of dread “She said they were going to have

to take him back to the nursery to produce

some urine, because I had a positive drug

screen for benzodiazepines,” recalls Shehi,

a 37-year-old nursing-home employee

from Gadsden, a small Alabama city about

60 miles northeast of Birmingham “I said,

‘That can’t be true Can you please check

it again? Run the screen again.’”

The nurse asked if she had a

prescrip-tion for any form of benzo—Xanax or

Klonopin or Ativan? No, Shehi insisted,

there must be a mistake Then she

remem-bered: the Valium One night a few weeks

earlier, Shehi and her ex-husband had

got-ten into a huge argument on the phone

and she had swallowed half of one of her

boyfriend’s Valiums to calm herself down

She popped the other half during a

sleep-less night on a family vacation

Occasional, small doses of diazepam

(the generic name for Valium) are

consid-ered safe for treating anxiety and

hyperten-sion during pregnancy According to the

lab report, James had nothing in his

sys-tem Shehi said the pediatrician reassured

her, “Everything’s cool.”

But a few weeks after Shehi returned

home, investigators from the Etowah

County Sheriff ’s Office showed up at

her workplace with an arrest warrant She

had been charged with “knowingly,

reck-lessly, or intentionally” causing James to

be exposed to controlled substances in the

womb—a felony punishable, in her case, by

up to 10 years in prison The investigators

led her to an unmarked car, handcuffed

her, and took her to jail Her booking

pho-to—her eyes puffy from crying, her mouth a

thin grimace of disbelief—appeared in local

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Conquer Your Bad

Thoughts and Habits

Why is it so hard to lose weight, stop smoking, or establish healthy

habits? Why do couples argue about the same issues over and over? Why

do so many people lie awake at night, stricken with worry and anxiety?

The answers to these questions—and the path to lasting change in

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Shehi is one of at least 31 women

ar-rested in Etowah County since 2013 for

running afoul of Alabama’s “chemical

en-dangerment of a child” statute, the

coun-try’s toughest criminal law on prenatal

drug use Passed in 2006 as meth ravaged

the state, the law targeted parents who ran

drug labs in their homes, putting their kids

in danger Yet within months,

prosecu-tors and courts began applying the law to

women who had exposed their embryos or

fetuses to controlled substances in utero

The law treats prenatal drug exposure

as a form of child abuse, and the penalties

are exceptionally stiff: A woman accused

of using drugs during pregnancy can face

1 to 10 years in prison if the baby suffers

no ill effects, 10 to 20 years if the baby

shows signs of exposure or harm, and 10

to 99 years if the baby dies She also risks

losing custody of all her children, not just

her newborn An examination of

thou-sands of pages of police and court records

reveals that at least 479 new and expecting

mothers in Alabama have been prosecuted

for chemical endangerment since 2006

Ninety percent could not afford their own

lawyers; the vast majority pleaded guilty

Scores have ended up in prison

Prosecutors contend their goal isn’t to

throw mothers in jail but to force them

into drug treatment and help them restart

their lives Yet the statute invites overreach

and even abuse It does not distinguish

be-tween an addict and a stressed-out single

mom who takes a harmless dose of an

anti-anxiety medication There are no standards

for law enforcement officials or judges to

follow, giving local prosecutors and courts

wide discretion in pursuing charges “We

have clearly used [the statute] a little bit

different than it was designed,” says Steve

Marshall, the district attorney of Marshall

County, Alabama “That, in and of itself,

doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”

While the law’s proponents talk about

“mamas smoking meth on the way to the hospital” and drug-exposed new-borns fighting for their lives, a review of Alabama’s chemical-endangerment pros-ecutions blasts holes in those stereotypes

The most common drug identified in court records wasn’t meth but marijuana, followed by cocaine and opioid painkill-ers Meth was No 4, benzodiazepines

No 6 About 20 percent of the cases volved only pot

in-Since the “crack baby” panic of the 1980s, authorities in at least 44 other states have sought to hold women criminally accountable for abusing drugs while preg-nant, often by repurposing laws against child abuse and drug distribution and traf-ficking More recently, the personhood movement, which seeks to establish the embryo or fetus as fully human in as many legal and medical contexts as possible, has transformed the debate Treating drug use

in pregnancy as a crime against the fetus has emerged as an important part of the

strategy to dismantle Roe v Wade, and the

Alabama Supreme Court, possibly the most conservative high court in the coun-try, has proved especially receptive

In decisions in 2013 and 2014, the court ruled that the meth lab statute could indeed

be used to prosecute mothers—not just from the time the fetus is viable (around

22 weeks) but from the earliest stages of pregnancy Under the statute’s flexible language, the justices concluded, “a child”

could be a fetus, and “an environment in which controlled substances are produced

or distributed” could be a womb The high court asserted that its decision “is in keep-ing with the widespread legal recognition that unborn children are persons with rights that should be protected by law.”

As a new drug panic over opiates and

“oxytots” spreads through the South and Midwest, lawmakers in other states have been contemplating their own chemical-endangerment-type statutes Tennessee passed one in 2014; early last year, seven leg-islatures introduced similar bills Alabama’s experience holds lessons about the kinds of overreach that can result even from laws that may seem to be narrowly focused, says Sara Ainsworth, a lawyer for National Advocates for Pregnant Women “Alabama isn’t an ab-erration,” she says “It’s a bellwether.”

In Etowah County, where Shehi lives, law enforcement officials have drawn “a line in the sand,” vowing to aggressively pursue all chemical-endangerment cases Sheriff Todd Entrekin has emerged as the policy’s most forceful advocate Pregnant women who take controlled substances under a doctor’s care won’t face arrest,

he says, but those who use even a small amount of an unprescribed drug will “If [an] offense is ignored,” he asserts, “sher-iff ’s deputies have failed to uphold their sworn oath of office.”

By punishing mothers harshly even when their children have not been hurt,

TREATING PRENATAL DRUG

USE AS A CRIME AGAINST

THE FETUS HAS EMERGED

AS AN IMPORTANT PART

OF THE STRATEGY TO

DISMANTLE ROE V WADE.

Casey Shehi and her son James

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chemical-endangerment charges can

up-end entire families In Shehi’s case, social

workers had determined that James was

fi ne and could remain in her care But she

and her ex-husband had an open custody

case involving their preschool-age son

After the arrest, the judge overseeing those

arrangements issued an emergency order

granting her ex-husband sole custody

There wasn’t even a hearing Meanwhile,

James’ father—who had the Valium

pre-scripton—wasn’t charged After her

ar-rest, Shehi left her boyfriend, accusing him of abuse; he was later arrested and charged with violating a protective order and carrying a concealed gun His bail on the weapon charge was $1,000, one-tenth

of Shehi’s bail for swallowing two halves

of a Valium

After nine months in limbo and sands of dollars in attorneys’ fees she could not afford, Shehi learned in June that her chemical-endangerment case had been dismissed She has since regained full

thou-custody of James, but her legal fi ght for her older son has been put on hold She also has been taking her clearance letter around town, trying to make things right One of her first stops was the Etowah County Sheriff ’s Offi ce, where she asked

to have her mug shot removed f rom its website They took it down immediately

How armchair intelligence

analysts are debunking

propaganda and uncovering war

crimes without leaving home

It was late 2014. Pro-Moscow separatists

in eastern Ukraine had been attacking

government forces, and the Russian

mil-itary was massing along the border And

though the Kremlin was insisting that it

wasn’t operating inside Ukraine, Eliot

Higgins was uncovering strong evidence

to the contrary—from the comfort of his desk

As Higgins, an independent intelligence analyst in Leicester,

Eng-land, noticed that Russian soldiers were posting selfi es and candids

to social-media sites like VKontakte, Russia’s version of Facebook,

he came to realize the images could blow apart the offi cial story

Higgins scoured the soldiers’ images and videos for hints of

where they had been shot: road signs, landmarks, numbers on

military vehicles, the angles of shadows He started to uncover

proof of cross-border artillery strikes and Russian tanks trekking

into eastern Ukraine’s war zone One photo showed a mound of

rubble in front of a row of houses with green fences Using images

from Google Earth and the photo-sharing site Panoramio, Higgins

was able to determine exactly where and when the photo had been

taken The mound was a Ukrainian checkpoint The houses were in

the Ukrainian town of Vuhlehirsk, less than 10 miles from a major

battle between government forces, separatists, and Russian troops

The 36-year-old Higgins runs the investigative website

Belling-cat.com, whose name comes from “belling the cat,” an expression

for a seemingly impossible task It’s the online home of a dozen

citizen journalists who trawl the internet’s vast reservoir of

pub-licly accessible material to investigate confl icts thousands of miles

away Using YouTube, Facebook, and Google Earth, they can

pin-point the locations of everything from artillery strikes to tions, or verify the timing of a missile launch caught on camera by analyzing the angles of shadows cast on buildings as if they were sundials Last May, the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank, teamed up with Bellingcat to publish a report called

execu-“Hiding in Plain Sight.” It revealed that, despite the Kremlin’s claims, the Russian military had been operating in Ukraine

“These guys, who often aren’t even getting paid to do this, sit

at their laptops wherever they are, and they fl at-out proved the Russians were lying,” says Patrick Skinner, a former CIA case offi cer who now works at the Soufan Group, a security consulting fi rm

“They debunked the Kremlin’s propaganda That’s amazing.”Higgins is part of a small army of armchair analysts who are venturing into territory occupied by government intelligence agencies by virtually investigating confl ict zones where access is nearly impossible In Albania, Gjergj Thanasi tracks the fl ow of black-market weapons through Balkan ports to Middle Eastern war zones and countries under arms embargoes From his fam-ily’s home in Amsterdam, 19-year-old Thomas van Linge creates detailed, highly accurate maps of the positions of ISIS and other rebel groups in Syria and Iraq (He also keeps an eye on Hezbollah

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and Nigeria’s Boko Haram militants.) Using geolocated

social-media posts, Russian blogger Ruslan Leviev revealed that

his country’s “selfie soldiers” were inside Syria well before the

Kremlin announced it was sending troops to help the Assad

re-gime Christoph Koetll, who investigates conflict zones for

Am-nesty International, recently traced a rifle that had appeared for

a split second in a video, using it to expose the aftermath of 600

extrajudicial executions apparently conducted by the Nigerian

military and its state-sponsored militia

Higgins is self-taught, and he attributes his skill at open-source

investigation to his obsessive and compulsive mind—and hours

playing online games He started analyzing the weapons used in

the Syrian conflict as a hobby, but soon started to break major

stories He was among the first to expose the Assad regime’s use

of barrel bombs and chemical weapons, and he uncovered a

se-cret arms trail that brought weapons from Croatia to Syrian

jihad-ist rebels He reported on civilian casualties caused by US missile

attacks on Al Qaeda’s Khorasan group (The Pentagon issued a

denial.) After Higgins identified where ISIS beheaded American

journalist James Foley in 2014, “you had all these online jihadists

telling each other not to film stuff and to be careful about what

you have in the background,” he recalls “It was the first time I’d

seen the Islamic State react that way.”

Most recently, his revelations have fed the international criminal

investigation into the downing of MH17, the Malaysia Airlines

flight shot down over eastern Ukraine in the summer of 2014,

kill-ing all 298 people on board The Kremlin had placed the blame on

Ukraine, supplying a satellite image of what it alleged was a fighter jet approaching the airliner Bellingcat exposed the photo as a slop-

py collage As more details emerged, Bellingcat systematically credited Moscow’s version of events, showing not only that Russia had supplied the missile that took down the airliner, but also that the missile launcher in question was issued to Russia’s 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade Bellingcat turned over more information

dis-to Dutch investigadis-tors, including social-media profiles of members

of the Russian missile unit who, Higgins notes, “mysteriously leted all their posts.” In October, the Dutch Safety Board released

de-a report de-alleging thde-at the de-airliner hde-ad been hit by de-a Russide-an-mde-ade Buk missile that only could have been launched from an area held

by pro-Russian separatists—just as Bellingcat had reported Dutch police are thought to be preparing criminal charges against the mis-sile attack’s suspected perpetrators

Even as Higgins and his peers have proved the power of nology to expose war crimes, social media has made it easier to spread falsified information With this in mind, there’s talk of a team of analysts, journalists, human rights activists, and perhaps some Silicon Valley titans working on what one source describes

tech-as “an open-source version of the Associated Press that focuses on decrypting lies.”

Will it work? “Some nations might think twice about trying to get away with something when they know it’s going to be blown out of the water,” Skinner says And as Higgins has shown, when conflicts can be investigated from half a world away, the fog of war may be lifting. —Bryan Schatz

Source: Cooperative Congressional Election Study

THE DENIAL

DONORS

RECENT SURVEYS have found that a

solid majority of Republicans accept

that climate change is happening So

why does their party stand so firmly

against even market-friendly policies

to do something about it? One reason

could be the influence of big donors

Data from the 2012 Cooperative

Con-gressional Election Study reveals a

significant gap in attitudes toward

climate change between the gop’s rank

and file and supporters who dropped

$1,000 or more on campaign donations:

While nearly one-third of Republican

voters say they believe climate change

requires action, just 11 percent of big

donors do Meanwhile, there is no such

split among Democrats, whose

deep-pocketed donors are eager to see

im-mediate action to stop climate change

—Sean McElwee

Sources: 2012 Cooperative Congressional Election Study; Brian Schaffner

Q  Nonvoters QVoters

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You’ve heard about how robocars are going to upend the economy But have you thought about what they’ll do to urban space?

NO PARKING HERE

ILLUSTRATIONS BY EEVOLVER

BY CLIVE THOMPSON

and dropping them off, working with sleek, robotic efficiency With perfect computerized knowledge of where po-tential riders were, they could pick up several people heading the same way, optimizing ride-sharing on the fly One study suggests a single self-driving car could replace up to 12 regular vehicles Indeed, many urbanists predict that fleets

of robocars could become so reliable that many, many people would choose not to own automobiles, causing the amount of parking needed to drop through the floor

“Parking has been this sacred cow that

we couldn’t touch—and now we can touch

it,” says Gabe Klein, who has headed the transportation departments in Chicago and Washington, DC He sees enormous potential—all that paved-over space sud-denly freed up for houses and schools, plazas and playgrounds, or just about any-thing “All that parking could go away, and then what happens?” he asks “You unlock

a tremendous amount of value.”

AMERICA BEGAN ITS love affair with

park-ing in the 1940s and ’50s, when car use ploded Panicked cities realized they would soon run out of curb space, but they didn’t want to discourage car ownership or build enough public transit So instead they passed minimum parking requirements: If

ex-a developer wex-anted to erect ex-a new office or apartment building, it had to build park-ing For residences, typically two spots per household are required And in general, cities calculated the highest peak amount

of parking a location might need and manded that developers build it

de-Way back in the 1960s, UCLA’s Shoup became alarmed by the massive growth of parking As he saw it, the problem was that

in most people’s minds, the spaces seemed

to be “free.” When developers are forced

to build parking, the cost is folded into the purchase price, be it a home, an office, or

a restaurant And when people don’t pay

to park at the curb (only a tiny fraction

of curbside spots in the United States are metered), it’s the city that pays to build and maintain that spot These costs are passed down to consumers and taxpayers, but since they’re never itemized, they’re easy to ignore In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, for example, housing prices are sky-high, but the city doesn’t charge me

that anywhere from about 30 to 60 cent of the cars you see driving around a downtown core are just circling, looking for an open space to claim (An IBM survey

per-found that worldwide, urban drivers spend

an average of 20 minutes per trip ing for parking.) When Donald Shoup,

look-an urblook-an-pllook-anning professor at the versity of California-Los Angeles, exam-ined just one small business area near his university—Westwood Village—he found that “cruising” for parking, as he dubs it, burns 47,000 gallons of gas and generates

Uni-730 tons of carbon dioxide a year What’s more, all that asphalt traps heat and raises the temperature of cities during the sum-mer Environmentally, aesthetically, and economically, parking is a mess

But for the first time in history, urban experts are excited about parking—because they can see the end in sight

We are, they say, on the cusp of a new era, when cities can begin dramatically re-ducing the amount of parking spaces they offer This shift is being driven by a one-two punch of social and technological change

On the social side, people are increasingly opting to live in urban centers, where they don’t need—or want—to own a car They’re ride-sharing or using public transit instead

And technologically, we’re seeing the rapid emergence of self-driving cars

Google’s models have traveled more than

a million miles with almost no accidents, and experts expect that fully autonomous vehicles will hit the consumer market as early as a decade from now Indeed, car technology is advancing so rapidly that it’s causing legitimate economic con-cerns Already, companies like Uber and Lyft are under fire for treating drivers as independent contractors, with far fewer rights and benefits than employees (see

“Road Warrior,” page 5) And that tion is nothing compared with what will happen once cars can drive themselves;

disrup-millions of taxi, delivery, and long-haul trucking jobs that traditionally have gone

to new immigrants and low-education workers could vanish in a few years Labor activists and economists are understand-ably alarmed at the prospect

But at the level of urban design and the environment, self-driving cars could produce huge benefits After all, if cars can drive themselves, fleets of them could scurry around picking people up

F YOU DRIVE OUT to visit

Disney’s Epcot center in

Or-lando, Florida, you will arrive

at one of the biggest parking

lots in America With room

for 12,000 cars, it sprawls out

over 7 million square feet—

about the size of 122 football

fields If you look at the lot

on Google Maps, you

real-ize that it’s nearly the sreal-ize of

Epcot center itself Disney

built one Epcot to hold the

visitors Then it built another

to hold the cars

Disney isn’t alone in its

expansive approach to

park-ing Parking is, after all,

what cars do most of the

time: The average

automo-bile spends 95 percent of

its time sitting in place People buy cars

because they need to move around, but

the amount of time they actually do move

around is tiny So the cars are parked, and

in multiple spaces: A car owner needs a

spot near home, but also spots near other

places he or she might go—the office, a

shopping mall, Epcot A 2011 study at

the University of California-Berkeley

found that the United States has

some-where close to a billion parking spots

Since there are only 253 million

passen-ger cars and light trucks in the country,

that means we have roughly four times

more parking spaces than vehicles If you

totaled up all the area devoted to parking,

it’d be roughly 6,500 square miles, bigger

than Connecticut

Social critics often complain that the

interstate highway system deformed the

United States by encouraging sprawl

But the metastasizing of parking has

had equally profound effects On an

aes-thetic level, it makes cities grimly ugly

Economically, it is expensive to build

A study by the Sightline Institute found

that at least 15 percent of the price of

rent in Seattle stemmed from developers’

cost of building parking Those costs are

passed on to tenants whether they own

a car or not (on top of any per space fee

the landlord charges)—padding rent by an

average of $246 a month in Seattle and

$225 nationwide

And worst of all may be the emissions

that parking causes Studies have found

18

cent of US workers who lived in the same city where they worked commuted to their jobs in a car, by themselves Only 7.8 per-cent of them commuted by public transit Parking, urban reformers fretted, seemed like an intractable problem

AT LEAST , THAT ’ S how the picture looked

10 years ago But then something strange happened to our relationship with cars.Jeff Kenworthy is a professor of sustain-ability at Curtin University in Australia, and for decades he has been collecting data on how people travel in major in-dustrialized cities around the world He’s found that the pace at which people in-crease their use of cars has been slowing

In the ’60s, car use grew by 42 percent In the ’80s, it grew by less—only 23 percent Then from 1995 to 2005, it went up by only 5 percent In some cities car use ac-tually declined, including London (down 1.2 percent), Atlanta (10.1 percent), and Houston (15.2 percent) Kenworthy says many cities are reaching “peak car use,” and it’s all downhill from here

“The dominance of the car,” he says, “is

on the wane in many places.”

Why? It’s partly the price of gas, which rose dramatically in the early 2000s and has

in many parts of the world stayed high since then (Car insurance is historically high too.) But Kenworthy suspects it is also related to

just force them to build the right number

of bedrooms for cars,” says Jeffrey Tumlin, the principal and director of strategy for Nelson Nygaard, a parking consultancy

To be fair to politicians, there’s a long history of people freaking out if parking isn’t plentiful “Thinking about parking seems to take place in the reptilian cor-tex, the most primitive part of the brain responsible for making snap decisions about urgent fight-or-flight choices, such

as how to avoid being eaten,” as Shoup

dryly wrote in his 2005 book, The High

Cost of Free Parking.

Ultimately, he notes, parking is a reinforcing problem Cities trained people

self-to expect that parking would be plentiful and free, which encouraged them to drive everywhere—which made them demand more parking Decades of perverse incen-tives cemented the automobile as the main way people get around As the Census Bureau reported in 2005, fully 76.4 per-

to park on the street When I tell this to

Shoup, he points out that if they did charge

me, the odds are high that I’d never have

bought my car When a city provides free

parking, it’s also economically unfair, since

it’s a subsidy available only to those who

are wealthy enough to own cars

“Parking is wildly mismanaged—it’s

probably our most inefficient use of

re-sources in many ways,” Shoup tells me

Indeed, minimum parking requirements

usually force developers to build more

parking than the market actually calls for

Sightline found that in greater Seattle, 37

percent of residential lots are empty at

night—precisely when you’d expect

resi-dential parking spaces to be most used.

The deep irony is that cities rarely require

developers to construct enough affordable

housing, but they pass strict laws making

sure vehicles can be adequately housed

“We don’t force [developers] to build the

right number of bedrooms for people! We

The average automobile spends

of its time sitting in place.

95%

1983, some 87.3 percent of 19-year-olds nationwide had a driver’s license By

2010, only 69.5 percent of them did And while you might suspect that the re-cession was at play, rates of driving are down even among young adults with high-paying jobs

When millennials are polled, they’re much more likely than their elders to say they try to actively minimize driving to avoid causing environmental damage They’re buying far fewer cars than their forebears did, which wor-ries carmakers Toyota USA President Jim Lentz said

in a speech last year, “We have to face the growing reality that today young people don’t seem to be as interested in cars as previ-ous generations.”

United States has since gone down, and “when the price is cheap, people are going to drive more.”

But many experts argue that the urbanizing trend is likely to accelerate because millennials are a Marchetti generation—they’re increas-ingly turning against the car Research by the Fron-tier Group, a think tank that often publishes work

on energy and tion, found that the aver-age annual number of miles driven by American 16- to 34-year-olds dropped

transporta-23 percent between 2001 and 2009, a pretty stunning fall Meanwhile, millenni-als took 24 percent more bike rides and used more public transit Indeed, they’re much less likely than previous generations

to even be able to drive: In

a concept known as the “Marchetti Wall.”

Back in 1994, the Italian physicist Cesare

Marchetti observed that throughout

his-tory—going back to ancient Rome—the

ma-jority of people disliked commuting more

than one hour to work If you’re faced with

a longer commute, you hit the Wall and

re-arrange your life, finding a new, more local

job or moving closer to the office In the

1990s and early 2000s, not only did use of

public transit grow, but Kenworthy found

that cities worldwide were becoming denser,

in part because millennials weren’t

decamp-ing for the suburbs (like their boomer

par-ents did), and because seniors were moving

back to urban cores, to enjoy the walkable

life As a society, we slammed into the

Mar-chetti Wall and backed away

True, this trend isn’t necessarily set in

stone While the number of vehicle miles

traveled per capita in the United States

be-gan declining in 2005, it bebe-gan rising again

in 2014 The dip might have been a result

of the Great Recession and $4-per-gallon

gas, says Constantine Samaras, a civil and

environmental engineer at Carnegie

Mel-lon University The price of gas in the

of our downtown commercial cores are devoted to parking

can Another engineer riding shotgun held

a laptop showing how our car “saw” the road with its laser, radar, and camera vi-sion: The screen looked like the wireframe

of a video game, with yellow boxes for destrians, red boxes for cyclists, and purple and green ones for other vehicles The car could see not just what was ahead of us, but far off to the sides and behind us too

pe-“That’s what makes computers more fun, that they can detect a million things

at one time, whereas your average driver is probably only focused on that one thing,” the engineer said with a grin As if to prove the point, the car abruptly slowed down:

It had detected a woman to our right ing slightly into our lane

drift-Ten years ago, self-driving car types could barely drive 10 miles across a relatively uncluttered desert Now they’re expertly weaving through traffic in Silicon Valley, Austin, and Pittsburgh “The rate of progress,” marveled the engineer, “is mind-blowing.” They dropped me off at Google’s headquarters, where I wandered up to a rooftop parking lot There, Google’s latest prototype—so new that journalists aren’t al-lowed to ride in it—was tooling around: a cute, egg-shaped little pod that was about

proto-as big proto-as a Smart Car, except it didn’t even have a steering wheel

How will self-driving cars change the way we get around? Many urban experts think the future of those egg-shaped cars isn’t in private ownership It’s in fleet de-ployment Certainly, that’s what Uber believes; last year it set up a research lab

in Pittsburgh specifically to develop its own self-driving cars In the not-too-far-off future, CEO Travis Kalanick predicts, you could call for an Uber car and a self-driving robocar could zip up to whisk you away.Unlike human drivers, robot cars wouldn’t need to look up the route or the location of the nearest passenger, so they wouldn’t waste time dithering, as humans

do Robot cars could also drive much more closely to one another, packing far more vehicles onto a street (Computer scien-tist Peter Stone even created software that would let robot cars do away with traffic lights; instead of stopping at an intersec-tion, they would simply weave around one another, navigating street corners nearly 10 times faster than cars do today.)

What’s more, they’d never need to park At the University of Texas-Austin,

perfectly reasonable individually, but that together created a massive environmental and urban land use problem—with many

of us heading off to work in the same tion and with cars that contained, statisti-cally, only 1.13 people each

direc-That information problem is now gone

The smartphone has solved it Equipped with GPS and mobile data, the mobile

phone may ruin our concentration and erode our privacy at every turn, but it’s re-markably good at one task: on-the-fly co-ordination If the trend toward ride-sharing keeps accelerating, how might that change traffic and parking? When a group of MIT scientists crunched data on Boston-area commuting patterns, they found that if

50 percent of drivers shifted over to sharing, it would reduce traffic congestion

ride-by 37 percent and decrease the number of vehicles on the road by 19 percent

Tumlin, the parking consultant, is struck

by the shift in the zeitgeist He’s 46 and says that “my generation was the last generation

to believe that owning our own car would bring us freedom, autonomy, social status, sex.” For today’s young people, the mobile phone is a much more potent technology

of autonomy and social status—and, in a neat twist, you can’t use your phone while you’re driving They are rival activities, and the phone is winning People want access to

a car, but don’t feel a need to own one, just

as they’ve increasingly adopted streaming services instead of vinyl, CDs, or even MP3s

“This conflation of auto ownership and personal identity,” Tumlin concludes, “is permanently broken.”

WHEN THE GOOGLE self-driving car first

pulled out into a busy intersection, with convertibles racing past us, I stole a look over at the driving wheel It was turning

by itself, as if a ghost were piloting the hicle It was an unnerving sight, though the Google engineers riding along with

ve-me were by now quite blasé: These cars have already driven a total of 1.2 million miles and have only been in a tiny num-ber of accidents The computer guidance system, said the engineer sitting in the driver’s seat—his hands folded in his lap—

is a very cautious driver

“Almost like a new person who’s driving for the first month or so,” he added These cars can also sense far more than humans

THERE IS ONE trend of mobility that young

people have embraced, though:

On-demand car services like Uber and Lyft

A year ago, Uber reported that its

driv-ers were making 1 million trips per day;

this past summer, the company told

pro-spective investors that it was growing 300

percent year over year Fully 70 percent of

Uber’s customers are under the age of 34,

and 56 percent of them live in cities, as a

survey by the market research firm Global

Web Index found Ride-hailing has big

im-plications for weaning cities off their

addic-tion to parking The millennial generaaddic-tion

is learning that it can have a car without

needing to own or ever park one

What’s more, Uber is seeing especially

rapid growth in its ride-sharing offering,

Uber Pool, which matches travelers

head-ing to roughly the same destination In

ex-change for sharing a ride, the fare is at least

25 percent cheaper than a regular Uber fare

The company introduced the service in San

Francisco a year ago, and already nearly 50

percent of all Uber rides in the city are pooled.

This fact stuns even Uber itself “The

adoption of ride-sharing is larger than

any-body anticipated The market is massive,”

says David Plouffe, the former Obama

campaign manager who is now Uber’s

chief adviser and a board member,

dur-ing an interview at the company’s shiny

headquarters in downtown San Francisco

“I don’t think anyone who was around in

the beginning suggested that the market

would be this big I mean, we have a good

service, but clearly this is married up with

how people want to live.”

Uber, he says, is now launching a service

aimed at ride-sharing for daily commutes

“So, I’m getting ready to go to work I put

my coffee mug in the sink I turn on the

app I pick up my keys Somebody three

blocks away says, ‘I’m going the same

way,’” he says

Carpooling, of course, has been touted

for decades as a way to use cars more

ef-ficiently But it never took off because it

suffered from an information problem:

There was no way to coordinate rides on

the fly, no way to know whether someone

four blocks away was heading in the same

direction as you, right this instant Safer just

to drive yourself, right? And this gave birth

to a welter of personal choices that seemed

Kara Kockelman—a professor of

transpor-tation engineering—modeled the impact

of autonomous ride-sharing vehicles and

found that each one could replace up to

a dozen regular cars The robocars could

drive all day long, stopping only to refuel

or for maintenance; at night, when there

was less demand, they could drive out to

a remote parking spot on the outskirts of

town The upshot, Kockelman figures, is

that if you shifted the entire city to

au-tonomous cars, it would need a staggering

90 percent less parking than it needs

to-day It’d be speedy travel: In Kockelman’s

model, when people called for a car, one

typically came along in about 20 seconds

It’d be profitable: When she spec’d out the

cost of running an Uber-like fleet of robot

cars, she calculated it would cost $70,000

to buy and deploy each vehicle, but that

each would earn a 19 percent profit on

in-vestment every year And rides would only

be about $1 per mile, even if just a single

passenger rode at a time—half as cheap as

today’s typical Austin cab fare

“You could make the fleet smaller,”

she says, “and you can reduce parking

in downtown.” The streets would still be

busy—crowded, even—with vehicles

whiz-zing to and fro It’s just that they wouldn’t need to park It would be the taxi-ization of nearly all human mobility

A city run on shared autonomous cars would likely have a dramatically lower envi-ronmental footprint That’s partly because you’d get rid of the “circling” that plagues urban traffic But it’s also because high-tech cars would be new—and, given that they’ll probably emerge en masse about 10 years from now, they’d be electric A model of

city traffic published in Nature last July by

Berkeley Lab scientist Jeffrey Greenblatt duced that emissions would be 90 percent lower if cars were all autonomous and elec-tric And the truth is, it’s easier for a fleet of robot cars to go electric than it is for individ-ual car owners to do so If I owned an elec-tric car, I’d constantly be at risk for “range anxiety”: the fear that my battery might die when I’m far from a charging station But

de-a robot fleet could optimize repowering, sending a car to pick up a traveler only when the car had enough juice to get to the travel-er’s destination, and taking low-battery cars out of service to recharge as needed

“You could conceivably imagine a world

in which you don’t need to pave as much

of the roadway,” says James Anderson,

a behavioral scientist at RAND who authored a report on autonomous cars in

co-2014 “If they’re driving themselves, cars could precisely put themselves on four-meter-wide bits of pavement,” leaving the rest of the road to some other purpose or surface, maybe grass “You can imagine fairly utopian, far-off visions.”

We won’t know what’s truly possible until there are lots of autonomous vehicles on the road For all the success that Google, Stan-ford, and Carnegie Mellon University have had with their robot cars, they’ve mostly been driven in mild climates Nobody has figured out how to tackle snow, which tends

to confuse today’s computer vision systems It’s probably solvable, but precisely when—or when governments will be satisfied enough

of self-driving cars’ safety to approve them for sale—is anybody’s guess

But you don’t need fully autonomous cars to get big reductions in parking Already some cars can parallel park themselves Car-makers could soon produce vehicles that you drive yourself but that, once you’re at

a parking lot, you send off to find a space

by themselves Since nobody would need

to get in or out of them after they parked, they could position themselves as snugly

WASTED

SPACE

How much space do we

de-vote to cars vs living? A study

by the Seattle-based Sightline

Institute of policies across

the Pacific Northwest found

that developers are required

to build an average of 1.5

parking spaces for every

two-bedroom unit—more than

half the size of the average

apartment itself Or consider

that the average church in

America seats 400 According

to a survey of requirements

across the country, a church

that size is typically required

to have a parking lot almost

five times larger than the

church itself—and the lot sits

empty most of the week See

488 FT2

together as Tetris bricks, fitting far more cars

into our existing parking lots and garages

Achieve even this small feat of self-driving,

and it could be possible to never build

an-other piece of parking, says Samaras, the

Carnegie Mellon engineer

Some urban thinkers told me that 15

years from now, autonomous vehicles will

have erased the need for up to 90 percent

of our current lots “There is more

park-ing today in American cities than they will

ever, ever need,” Tumlin says It’ll vanish as

human driving vanishes

“Who will be the last human driver?”

asks Samaras “It’ll probably be our

grandkids.”

WHAT WOULD A city look like if it

sudden-ly needed 90 percent less parking?

A few cities have experimented with

reclaiming road space One of the biggest

such projects was in Seoul, South Korea, in

the early 2000s, when the municipal

gov-ernment tore up a 3.5-mile elevated

high-way that had covered the Cheonggyecheon

River and transformed it into a public park

The effects on the city were immediate: In

addition to encouraging a surge in tourism,

the park cooled the surrounding area by 9 degrees Fahrenheit during the summer

“Now they have this incredible green ridor with tons of space and hundreds of thousands of people using it,” says Kenwor-thy There had been 120,000 cars a day flow-ing through the area, and opponents of the project had claimed that all these cars would cram onto side streets instead But car use went down We often believe traffic is like a liquid; prevent it from going down one road, and it’ll just flow down a nearby one But in reality, Kenworthy says, traffic is more like a gas: “A gas compresses or expands based on how much space you give it.”

cor-New York City has seen similar ments Ex-Mayor Mike Bloomberg closed down several blocks of Times Square, turn-ing them into well-trafficked pedestrian hangouts The most famous reclaimed space is Manhattan’s High Line, once a dilapidated elevated railway and now a ver-dant park that drew 6.2 million visitors in

experi-2014 (2 million of whom were locals) and hosts live events “It’s a park, it’s a cultural institution, it’s a plaza, all put together,”

says Robert Hammond, who spearheaded the restoration project and now runs the nonprofit that tends it He suspects the fu-

ture of public parks is these sorts of “hybrid” spaces, built on reclaimed urban space.When land in a city suddenly becomes freed up for new uses, it’s called “infill.” The downside of our love affair with cars

is that on average we’ve asphalted over

31 percent of our commercial downtown cores with parking But the upside, Shoup tells me, is massive potential infill If we wean ourselves off the need to store cars, spots and lots could be converted into parks, schools, hospitals, housing Better yet, it’s property that is precisely where you’d want new development: downtown, inherently walkable “The upside of the mess we’ve made,” Shoup says, “is that we have a lot of land.”

Take New York City, where there are roughly 102,000 public parking spaces below 60th Street—taking up roughly 18.4 million square feet, a space equal to about half of Central Park

“San Francisco is going bananas for new housing, and Manhattan is always looking for space, and here we have this sitting in front of us,” Samaras says “That’s what au-tonomous vehicles can do.”

THERE ARE SOME big speed bumps on

the road to a low-parking future, though That’s because most of these rosy projec-tions assume self-driving cars are likely to

be deployed en masse by ride-sharing firms that would use them with deep efficiency, offering such convenience and cheapness that we’d all ditch our personal vehicles.But there’s another route the future might take Shannon McDonald, an ar-chitect and historian of American parking, recently got a glimpse of it She flew to Baltimore to visit her brother, who picked her up in his new car It included several self-piloting features; he showed her how

it wouldn’t let him steer accidentally into

a neighboring lane on the highway, and when he got home, the car parallel parked itself Such features might make self-driving cars so alluring that everyone wants one

“What if they’re all privately owned? You’ve got a driverless vehicle, and maybe you don’t share it,” McDonald tells me

If her brother and sister-in-law had a fully self-driving car, maybe they’d decide to go

to New York to see theater It’s a crazy-long five-hour drive, but who cares? They could kick back They would “ride all the way in

6,000 FT2 CHURCH

4,000 FT2 SANCTUARY

and sleep in it all the way back,” she says

If you can read, watch TV, work and do

email, or catch up on sleep while your car

steers, the sting goes out of commuting

In this version of the future, self-driving

cars could smash through the Marchetti

Wall They would unlock what’s known

as “induced demand”—prompting

com-mutes of such lengths that they’d have

been previously unfathomable Or we

might find people deciding they never

need to park their cars because, hey, cars

can circle on their own

McDonald imagines a commuter going

to work in his self-driving car: “Let’s say he

gets to the office, he gets dropped off at

the front door And he tells the car to go

find its cheapest parking.” Maybe it drives

out to the far suburbs, to park for free on

a side street “He says, ‘Okay, just go have

fun today! Go drive around! Come back

and get me at five Why not? It’s cheaper!’”

The problem of cruising could morph into

a Monty Pythonesque parody of modern

life: a street clogged with traffic, but all the

cars are empty In economic terms, this

is called a “rebound effect”: If you make

something suddenly more efficient to do,

people will do more of it

Urban and traffic thinkers are divided

about how serious these negative impacts

could be Many suspect the Marchetti Wall

will remain in place “We’re unmoved by

these arguments,” says Berkeley Lab’s

Greenblatt “Because seriously, most people

are not going to sit in a car for hours a day.”

Others agree, pointing out that the tional shift away from owning a personal car isn’t likely to dim Most experts I spoke to said governments should set policies that make fleet-based ride-sharing more appeal-ing than individual car ownership The main lever here is “congestion pricing”: A city could—as London already does—require drivers to pay extra fees to travel in the con-gested downtown areas unless they’re in ride-shared vehicles Nearly every expert I spoke to advocated some version of conges-tion pricing to prevent a rebound effect

genera-Others pointed out that personal ship might well blur with fleet ownership

owner-If someone owned a self-driving car, she might opt to make money off it by having

it drive off to work for a fleet when she’s at the office Cities could also offer incentives

to ride-sharing services that augment lic transit, feeding people to major subway and rail lines (This is already a trend: Uber reports that in some cities, one-third of its trips begin or end at a public-transit station.)The bottom line is, if urban officials want to make sure these technologies ben-efit civic life, they need to start talking about them now “If we want it to be sus-tainable, the city has to get involved in these services,” says Tom Radulovich, ex-ecutive director of Livable City, a non-profit transit group Cities could deploy their own fleets of subsidized self-driving cars—the next generation of public tran-sit—aiming them particularly at the mobili-

pub-ty disabled and underserved and low-income areas, where residents often lack the credit

cards required by ride-sharing apps

They could mission vans that could pool more people than a car, providing a nice midpoint between personal vehicle ownership and a bus

com-If cities leave self-driving cars entirely

to the private sector, they court risk When the usage of public transit grows or shrinks, the city knows immediately, and can adapt to what the public is demand-ing But companies like Lyft and Uber are opaque, releasing very little information about their usage This is already making

it hard for San Francisco to plan for the future: Figuring out where to develop pub-lic transit hinges on understanding how people are moving themselves around us-ing private-sector means “We don’t have the data to understand the market size and what’s happening to it,” says Timothy Papandreou, the city’s director of strategic planning and policy for SFMTA

As Radulovich points out, there’s ical precedent for the government getting more deeply involved in regulating private ride-sharing After all, today’s public tran-sit started out as a hodgepodge of private systems—a bus line here, a streetcar there—that slowly merged into one large system

histor-“Public transit went through this—it was venture funded, but then it became pub-lic.” That reverse privatization is unlikely

to happen again, but cities could ensure

There are

times

as many parking spaces as cars in America.

the system serves civic needs by using

car-rots and sticks: incentivize people to use

ride-sharing but require that ride-sharing

firms share their data

Gabe Klein argues that good deals can

serve both the city and the private sector

When he ran the transportation system

in Washington, DC, Klein—who’d

previ-ously worked for Zipcar—created a new

policy: Zipcar would be allowed to park its

cars for free in some curbside city spots

It was controversial: giving away a public

resource to a private firm? But Klein

ar-gued that because a single Zipcar is used

by many people and driven far more often

than a regular single-owner car, each would

take cars off the road Klein also got DC

to charge more for on-street parking, again

nudging people away from owning private

cars In the ensuing years (which also saw

the rise of the ride-sharing apps), DC saw

6 percent fewer registrations for cars, even

as the population increased by 3 percent

OBVIOUSLY , CITIES SHOULD get cracking

on their plans for the self-driving future But

are there things they can do right now to

reduce the amount of parking and driving?

Shoup recommends that cities apply

something like Uber’s infamous surge

pric-ing to parkpric-ing: If a block tends to be full

of parked cars at a particular time of day,

the city should charge more, and if the

de-mand is lower, it should charge less The

goal, Shoup says, is to price parking so that

there are always one or two spots open on

a block Achieve that, and presto: A city

could get rid of circling, since drivers could

always quickly find a spot Emissions and

traffic would go down, while higher meter

fees would encourage use of public transit

Would dynamic pricing actually work?

In 2011, San Francisco decided to find

out In several areas of downtown, it set up

new high-tech meters and sensors in the

ground that told the city how busy these

blocks and city parking lots were from

morn-ing to noon, from noon to 3 p.m., and from

3 p.m to the evening Every few months,

the city examined the data and adjusted the

price for each time segment of each block

or lot up or down Over the next two years,

the city shifted parking costs upward on 37

percent of the time segments per blocks or

lots, while at another 37 percent, the prices

dropped (The price of the others

fluctu-ated.) It turned out that the hottest demand for parking was between noon and 3 p.m

The new pricing scheme had precisely the effect the city hoped it would Blocks that were previously jammed all day now typically had one spot open Overall, driv-ing in the pilot areas went down by about 2,400 miles per day—and circling plum-meted by 50 percent That helped reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent (In comparison, areas in the city that weren’t

in this pilot study saw their emissions go down by only 6 percent.) Meanwhile, driv-ers reported that it took them 43 percent less time to find parking And the program was even profitable: The city took in $3.3 million more at the meters, even as it lost

$500,000 as parking citations decreased

“Seeing the circling go down was one of the nicest findings,” said Tom Maguire, di-rector of Sustainable Streets for the city’s Municipal Transportation Agency, when

I visited him in his downtown office

“The circling hurts everybody: air ity, greenhouse gas, collisions, making the streets much less pleasant.” He was also happy to put some meat on Shoup’s argu-ments against free parking “If there’s one takeaway, it’s that the theory is true: If you raise the price, you have a little less park-ing demand Until we did something on the scale of almost the entire downtown of San Francisco plus seven other neighbor-hoods, I don’t think it had been proven that the theory was true.”

qual-So far, alas, few cities are following San Francisco’s lead People—especially mer-chants—tend to holler when a city starts charging for parking Three years ago, Elli-cott City, a historic town in Maryland, in-stalled smart meters on its main drag, only

to have so many merchants complain that the city soon tore them out

Shoup thinks cities need to be politically savvy to get citizens on board One way, he says, is to engineer the meters to provide a hyperlocal benefit—plow some of the profits

a meter generates back into sprucing up the very street on which the meter sits Ventura County in California installed smart meters that were connected by wifi to the city, and then used those meters to broadcast free wifi to locals It was an immediate hit

But the central policy that can discourage the growth of parking is to eliminate mini-mum parking requirements Take Los Ange-les, which used to force developers to build

two parking spots for every new unit of housing, hampering redevelopment in the downtown core In 1999, the city eased the rules, and in a short time, developers started renovating the old buildings, providing an average of only 1.3 parking spots per unit Buyers didn’t care: They still bought the housing The market, as Shoup observes,

is willing to cope Build less parking, and people will find other ways to get around

A LOWER - PARKING future could be

down-right lovely, judging by a glimpse I recently got of it I was walking through the Mission District of San Francisco when I came across a curious sight: two curbside parking spots that had been transformed into a tiny public “parklet.” Built out of huge, curved pieces of wood, it looked like a ship beached

on the side of the road Two young men sat

on the benches having a business meeting Across the street was another parklet, where thick desert vegetation—some clipped to re-semble a triceratops—spilled out in front of

a private residence

Founded five years ago—and since lated by cities ranging from London to Ames, Iowa—San Francisco’s parklet pro-gram allows a property owner or business to apply to transform their storefront parking spots into a wee little plaza There are now scores of parklets throughout San Francisco, including a particularly fascinating cluster

emu-of nine between 20th and 24th streets on lencia Street As I toured the strip, it gave

Va-me a vision of how remarkably a city could evolve: Imagine if 90 percent of all curbside parking spots were turned into strips of pub-lic parks, filled with greenery, urban garden-ing, and people relaxing

They are oddly peaceful places A few blocks down the strip at another parklet with a rainwater catchment exhibit, I found Nicole Hubman, a 30-year-old who was sitting and reading, waiting for her yoga class across the street It turns out that Hubman’s life is a study in the massive changes already underway in our relation-ship to driving She used to live in Boston, where her commute was an hour and a half each day She hit her own Marchetti Wall, and it made her miserable So when she moved to San Francisco, she decided to get around on public transit

“I hate driving,” she says “I’m allergic

to it.” Q

Every story has a beginning This one starts

in late 2001, when my father-in-law fractured three of his ribs Harry was a retired physician, and after a thorough workup that he insisted

on, it turned out that his bone density was severely compromised for no immediately apparent reason Further tests eventually re-vealed the cause: He had multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow

Harry’s cancer was caught early, and it progressed slowly By 2007, however, it had taken over his body When my wife saw him

in early 2008, she remarked that he looked like someone in a lot of pain but trying not

to show it—despite the fact that he was taking oxycodone, a powerful opiate

During a career that lasted more than three decades, he had watched all too many of his patients struggle with their final months, and this experience had persuaded him that he would take his own life if he found himself dy-ing of an agonizing and clearly terminal illness Now he was Finally, on the evening of January

29, he stumbled and fell during the night, and decided his time had come: He was afraid if

he delayed any longer he’d become physically unable to remain in control of his own destiny.This was important Since Harry lived in California, where assisted suicide was ille-gal, he had to be able to take his life without help Because of this, he initially intended not to tell either of his daughters about his decision He wanted to run absolutely no risk that merely by being with him in his fi-nal moments, or even knowing of his plans, they’d be held responsible for his death.Luckily, neither my wife nor her sister had

Assisted suicide,

my family, and me

My Life

to Leave

BY KEVIN DRUM PHOTOGRAPHS BY KENDRICK BRINSON

court to have her respirator removed, and in 1976 the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in their favor That year California became the first state to recognize living wills as legally binding documents that authorize the removal of life-sustaining treatment in the face

of imminent death Other states followed, and end-of-life directives became an increasingly common part of the medical landscape Today, there’s hardly a medical show on television that hasn’t dealt with the now-famousDNR—Do Not Resuscitate—order.

Active euthanasia remained illegal everywhere, but the door had been opened a crack—and supporters of assisted suicide started push-ing to open it further Founded in the aftermath of the Quinlan fight, the Santa Monica-based Hemlock Society soon became one of the most aggressive backers of abolishing legal bans on physician-assist-

ed suicide By the end of the 1980s, national support had gained another 12 polling points, and success seemed within grasp In 1988, supporters of assisted suicide tried but failed to get a measure on the California ballot In 1991, a similar measure made it on the ballot in Washington state but failed to gain passage In 1992, Californians got a measure on the ballot, and polls showed the public widely in favor But a well-funded opposition campaign, led by the Catholic Church, took its toll, and in the end the initiative failed, 54 to 46 percent Finally, in 1994, backers succeeded in Oregon Three years later, following a court fight and a second ballot measure, Oregon became the first state to legalize physician-aided suicide

Ever since Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act took effect in 1997, the state health authority has published annual reports about the numbers and types of patients who have gotten a prescription for

DWDA drugs Probably the main takeaway is the simplest one: If

Oregon is any indication, assisted suicide will never be a popular option In 1998, only 24 people received DWDA prescriptions, and

16 used them By 2014, after 16 years in which Oregonians could get used to the idea, 155 people requested prescriptions, and 105 used them That’s 105 out of about 34,000 total deaths statewide,

or roughly one-third of 1 percent

Part of this is due to the stringency of Oregon’s law Requests for DWDA drugs must be confirmed by two witnesses and approved

by two doctors The patient must not be mentally ill And most important of all, both doctors have to agree that the patient has

no more than six months to live Because of this, about two-thirds

of all patients who requested drugs had cancer, an illness that quently has a definite timeline Only about one-sixth have degen-erative diseases with indeterminate timelines, like Alzheimer’s or

fre-ALS—Lou Gehrig’s disease.

In the decade after Oregon’s law took effect, the assisted-suicide movement gained little ground On a national level approval rates remained steady, with about two-thirds of Americans telling Gallup they supported the concept, but that seemingly strong support didn’t translate into legislative success.Some of the reasons for this failure are obvious, but among the

physician-to learn of their father’s death via a call from the morgue A friend

persuaded him to call both of them, and on January 30 we all

drove out to Palm Springs to say our last goodbyes After that,

Harry wrote a note explaining that he was about to take his own

life and that no one else had provided any assistance It was time

He categorically forbade any of us from so much as taking his arm

He walked into his bedroom, put a plastic bag over his head, and

opened up a tank of helium A few minutes later he was dead

Why helium? Why the note?

Harry was a methodical man, and when he decided he would

eventually take his own life, he naturally looked for advice The

place he turned to was the Hemlock Society, founded in 1980

with a mission of fighting to legalize physician-assisted suicide for

terminally ill adults

When we went through Harry’s files after his death, we found a

slim manila folder with several pages copied from various Hemlock

publications, nestled between a bunch of fat folders containing

fi-nancial information, his will, and his medical records One of the

pages recommended that you write a note making it clear that you

had taken your own life, unassisted by anyone else This was meant

for the sheriff or the coroner, and was designed to protect anyone

who might be suspected of illegally aiding you

There were also several pages with instructions on how to take

your life using an “inert gas hood kit.” This is a fairly simple and

painless way to die, since your body reflexively wants to breathe,

but doesn’t really care what it breathes If you breathe pure helium,

or any other inert gas, you won’t feel any sensation of suffocation

at all You simply fall unconscious after a minute or so, and within

a few more minutes, you die

At the time of Harry’s death, the Hemlock Society—known today

as Compassion & Choices—was one of the oldest and best-known

organizations working to legalize physician-assisted suicide But it

was hardly the first During the 19th century, as opioid painkillers

became widespread, euthanasia became a lively topic of discussion

By the turn of the century it had been banned in nearly every state

Public opinion finally started to shift in the 1930s, and by 1949 it

had progressed enough that the Euthanasia Society of America was

able to recruit several hundred Protestant and Jewish clergymen in an

effort to challenge New York’s law prohibiting physician-assisted

sui-cide Thanks partly to fresh memories of the infamous Nazi “forced

euthanasia” programs that killed thousands of the disabled and

men-tally ill, and partly to the Catholic Church’s opposition to any form

of suicide, their effort failed

Still, support for physician-assisted suicide continued to tick

slowly upward, from 37 percent in 1947 to 53 percent by the early

’70s, when the birth of the patients’ rights movement helped shine

a new spotlight on issues of death and dying Karen Ann Quinlan

provided the spark when she fell into a coma and was declared by

doctors to be in a “persistent vegetative state.” Her parents went to

If assisted suicide becomes commonplace,

could the right to die evolve into a duty to die?

obscure ones is this: Assisted suicide has long been a West Coast

movement During the late 1980s and early 1990s, California,

Or-egon, and Washington all had active legislative legalization

cam-paigns—even if only Oregon’s succeeded—and according to a 1996

survey, West Coast doctors received many more requests for assisted

suicide than doctors in other parts of the country No one is quite

sure why, but outside of the West Coast, it was simply not a very

prominent issue

Another reason legalization failed to gain ground is rooted in

semantics Miles Zaremski, an attorney who has argued on behalf of

such bills for years, is typical of assisted-suicide supporters when he

maintains that in the case of terminal patients, “we’re not dealing

with the concept or notion of suicide at all.” Rather, it’s nothing

more than aiding the natural dying process Opponents call this

Orwellian and worse Public sensitivities reflect this linguistic

di-vide Although that longitudinal Gallup poll has long reported

two-thirds support for legally allowing doctors to “end the patient’s life

by some painless means,” support historically drops by 10 points

or more when they ask if doctors should be allowed to “assist the

patient to commit suicide.” So when legislation is under

consid-eration, opponents fill the airwaves with the word “suicide,” and

public support ebbs

A third reason is demographic: The assisted-suicide movement

has long been dominated by well-off, educated whites As early

as 1993, Dick Lehr reported in a Boston Globe series titled “Death

and the Doctor’s Hand” that every doctor he talked to said that

patients who asked about assistance in dying were typically middle

to upper class and accustomed to being in charge As one

oncolo-gist put it, “These are usually very intelligent people, in control of

their life—white, executive, rich, always leaders of the pack, can’t

be dependent on people a lot.”

In fact, one of the reasons Oregon was first to pass an

assisted-suicide bill is likely because it’s a very white state—and so are the

patients who take advantage of the Death With Dignity Act The

2014 report from the Oregon Health Authority says that the

me-dian age of DWDA patients is 72 years old; 95 percent are white, and

three-quarters have at least some college education

Aid-in-dying bills are a tougher lift in more-diverse states

Minori-ty patients have historically been wary of the medical establishment,

and not without reason There’s abundant evidence that people of

color have less access to health care than whites and receive less

treatment even when they do have access If the health care system

already shortchanges them during the prime of their lives, would it

also shortchange them at the end, pressing them to forgo expensive

end-of-life care and just take a pill instead? This fear makes the

doc-tors who serve them cautious about discussing assisted suicide “My

concern is for Latinos and other minority groups that might get

disproportionately counseled to opt for physician-assisted suicide,”

one doctor told Lehr More recently, Dr Aaron Kheriaty, director

of the medical ethics program at the University of California-Irvine

School of Medicine, explained to the New York Times, “You’re seeing

the push for assisted suicide from generally white,

upper-middle-class people, who are least likely to be pressured You’re not seeing

support from the underinsured and economically marginalized

Those people want access to better health care.”

Finally, there’s the fourth and most obvious reason for

legisla-tive failures: Assisted suicide has a lot of moral opposition

Q Physician-assisted suicide is legal

Q Legislation introduced or active in 2015

Source: Death With Dignity National Center

The Road to Dignity

More and more Americans support the right of the terminally ill to end their lives on their own terms

Support for legalized physician-assisted suicide has grown since 1947…

…and fewer of us now find

Source: Gallup

Morally wrong

Suicide has always been a sin to the Catholic Church, and in

1965 the Vatican reaffirmed this position, declaring that abortion,

euthanasia, and other forms of taking life “poison human society.”

In 1980, the church released its “Declaration on Euthanasia,” which

permitted the refusal of extraordinary measures when death was

im-minent but categorically opposed any kind of assisted suicide,

call-ing it a “violation of the divine law.” In 1995, Pope John Paul II

issued his Evangelium Vitae encyclical, which condemned the

grow-ing acceptance of euthanasia as a personal right

It was Evangelium Vitae that popularized the epithet “culture of

death,” which has since been adopted by born-again Christians to

condemn both abortion and assisted suicide This makes

assisted-suicide legislation especially difficult to pass in states with a large

Catholic or conservative Christian presence

Opposition also comes from many within the disability rights

movement, who have a long-standing wariness of the medical

com-munity “Doctors used to exercise near-total control over the lives of

people like me with significant disabilities,” writes Diane Coleman,

a disability rights activist, “sentencing us to institutions, and

impos-ing their own ideas about what medical procedures would improve

our lives.” That attitude has since improved, but not enough to allay

fears that doctors might care for the disabled differently if assisted

suicide becomes legal Will they treat depression in the disabled

with less than their usual vigor, giving in more easily to requests for

lethal drugs? Consciously or unconsciously, will they be more likely

than they should be to diagnose imminent death?

And it’s not just doctors The seriously disabled already live

with the reality that many people consider their lives barely worth

living in the first place They fear that if assisted suicide becomes

commonplace, the right to die could evolve into a “duty to die,”

and those with disabilities—along with minorities and the poor—

might face increased pressure to end their lives The pressure could

come from family members, exhausted from tending to disabled

children or parents It could come from insurance companies, for

which assisted suicide is a lot cheaper than six months of

expen-sive end-of-life care It could come from government “death

pan-els,” trying to control costs and keep taxes low Or it could come

from the disabled themselves, out of worry that they’re a burden

on friends and family, both emotionally and financially

More generally, opposition also comes from those who fear a

slippery slope In the Netherlands, where euthanasia is legal, 1 in

28 deaths now comes via doctor-assisted suicide That’s up 200

percent in the past decade, largely because the rules are so lenient

All you have to do is claim unbearable suffering, which in practice

can mean that you’re just tired of living

Opposition also comes from the medical profession itself This

has softened over the past few years, with a large 2010 survey

showing that more physicians supported assisted suicide (45

per-cent) than did not (40 perper-cent) Nonetheless, until last year both

the American Medical Association and every single state medical

group formally opposed physician-aided suicide

In California, all of these things—its large Latino population, its large Catholic population, the opposition of doctors, and real con-cerns about both slippery slopes and pressure on the poor—con-spired for years to keep assisted suicide from becoming legal In the past quarter century, advocates tried five times to pass legislation legalizing the practice—via ballot measures in 1988 and 1992 and legislation in 1995, 1999, and 2005 Five times they failed

Then Brittany Maynard happened

For California’s assisted-suicide movement, Brittany Maynard was perfect: young, attractive, articulate, dying of a brain tumor—and very much on their side Marcia Angell, a former editor of the

New England Journal of Medicine, called her “the new face of the

movement.”

Maynard’s cancer was diagnosed on the first day of 2014 She underwent surgery to remove the tumor, but in April it returned, worse than ever A few months later she moved from San Francisco

to Oregon and partnered with Compassion & Choices—the sor to the Hemlock Society—to create a six-minute video explaining why she wanted the right to control the time and manner of her death It has been viewed nearly 12 million times since then In

succes-October, she was featured on the cover of People On November 1,

she took the pills she had been prescribed and died

Maynard’s story galvanized the cause of assisted suicide in California Two months after her death yet another bill was in-troduced It passed the state Senate in June, but opposition from church leaders, disability rights activists, and others bottled it up

in the Assembly’s Health Committee in July Nationally, support for “assisted suicide” was up 17 points, and had finally hit the same two-thirds level in Gallup polls that “ending life painlessly” had long maintained State polls showed even stronger support: Californians approved it by a margin of 71 to 22 percent Nev-ertheless, for the sixth time, assisted suicide couldn’t quite find enough votes even to make it out of committee

Then supporters got a lucky—and totally unexpected—break: Gov Jerry Brown called for a special legislative session to address Medicaid funding issues Unsurprisingly for California, those funding issues haven’t yet been resolved But equally unsurpris-ingly, California legislators had no intention of letting a special session go to waste Dozens of measures were brought up, and one

of them was the assisted-suicide bill that had failed only a month earlier This time, though, things were different Special-session rules allowed supporters to exclude from the Health Committee five Democrats who had opposed it earlier in the year With that, the bill finally made it to a floor vote

It also helped that the bill had a list of safeguards even longer than Oregon’s Patients must be competent adults with no diagnosed mental disorders that would impair judgment Two doctors have to certify that patients have less than six months to live Doctors are

I suspect that taking your own life requires a certain

amount of courage, and I don’t know if I have it

cells were unfrozen and pumped back into my body That’s it All the rest was recovery My immune system died off completely within a few days, and then started rebounding After a couple of weeks I went home Two months after that I felt fine

Unfortunately, the procedure didn’t work My bone marrow was still 5 percent cancerous So now I’m on stage three, a different chemotherapy drug It’s working, but it’s not working all that well

My last lab test showed that my bone marrow is only 4 percent cancerous, which is the right direction but not the right magnitude There’s no known treatment that puts multiple myeloma in com-plete remission, but the goal is to get close enough to zero that the cancerous cells are undetectable I’m nowhere near that yet

I may still get there And if my current medication doesn’t do the job, there are other things to try Nonetheless, even though

I feel fine, the grim fact is that I’m responding to the therapy only modestly

chemo-So how long do I have to live? Five years? Ten years? Two? No one knows But I’m 57 years old, and death is no longer so far away that I never think about it The odds are slim that I’ll ever collect

a Social Security check

That makes this story a very personal one Sometime in the next few years the cancer will start to progress rapidly and there will be no more treatments to try My bones will become more brittle and may break or accumulate microfractures My immune system will dete-riorate, making me vulnerable to opportunistic outside infections

I may suffer from hemorrhages or renal failure My bones will stop retaining calcium, which will build up instead in my bloodstream I may be in great pain—or I may not Multiple myeloma can end in a lot of different ways But one thing is sure: Once any of these symp-toms start up, I’ll be dead within a few weeks or months

Like Harry, though, I’ve never intended to let that happen I have no interest in trying to tell other people what to do if they find themselves close to death, but my

required to meet privately with patients to ensure

they aren’t being coerced Two oral requests for

aid-in-dying drugs must be made 15 days apart, along

with a written request Only the attending

physi-cian can prescribe the medication The drugs must

be self-administered And the law expires

automati-cally in 10 years unless the Legislature reenacts it

On September 9, ABX2-15 was passed by the

Assembly On September 11, it was passed by the

state Senate On October 5, after a month of

si-lence about his intentions, Brown signed it into

law Sometime in 2016—90 days after the

Legisla-ture adjourns the special session—assisted suicide

will finally be legal in California

For more than a decade after Oregon passed

the nation’s first assisted-suicide law, no other

state followed Then, in 2008, Washington voters

passed a ballot measure legalizing the practice In

2009, it was legalized by court order in Montana

Vermont’s lawmakers followed in 2013 Now, the

addition of California has tripled the number of

Americans with the right to ask a physician for a

lethal prescription if they have a terminal disease

Does this mean that assisted suicide is the next

big civil rights battle? The fact that four states have approved

assisted suicide in just the past seven years suggests momentum

may finally be reaching critical mass What’s more, if Gallup’s

polling is to be believed, the word “suicide” has finally lost its

shock value Still, legislation continues to fail more often than it

passes, even in blue states like Massachusetts and Connecticut

Right now, it’s just too early to tell

Every story has an ending This one, it turns out, hasn’t quite ended

yet, but the beginning of the end came in 2014, when I too broke a

bone In my case, it was a bone in my back, and when I woke up on

the morning of October 18, I couldn’t move My wife called 911,

and a few minutes later a crew of burly firefighters loaded me onto a

stretcher and carried me downstairs to a waiting ambulance

In the ER, the first thing they did was take a set of X-rays A few

hours later a doctor delivered the news in matter-of-fact tones:

They had found lytic lesions on bones all over my body—on my

legs, my skull, my hips, and my arms Further tests were needed to

confirm the ER doctor’s diagnosis, but there was really only one

thing that could cause this Like Harry, I had multiple myeloma

That’s the bad news The good news is that Mother Jones

pro-vides excellent health care coverage for its employees I spent a

week in the hospital, where I got a kyphoplasty to repair the bone

and began the first stage of chemotherapy After 16 weeks, the

level of cancerous cells in my bone marrow had decreased from

about 50 percent to 5 percent, good enough that I qualified for

the second stage of treatment, an autologous stem cell transplant

In concept, this is a simple procedure First, I spent a couple of

days having bone marrow stem cells extracted from my blood and

then frozen A couple of weeks later I was given a huge dose of a

powerful chemotherapy drug that’s basically designed to kill

ev-erything in its path—including all my healthy bone marrow stem

cells This would kill me in short order, so the next day my stem [continued on page 60]