27- RUPCO's Guy Kempe A'salts Me

Guy Kempe, RUPCO's director of community development, told the Woodstock Times this week that he would take "anything that Robin has put her name to with a little grain of salt." Then he asks: "according what standard is she qualified to make an assessment?" (an assessment of Creighton Manning's traffic study.)

For such a glaring and basic error of omission by supposedly qualified traffic engineers, there are so many standards by which I could be called qualified to make an assessment. Let us look at some of them! And to make it more fun, I think I'll make all the standards by which I am qualified to make an assessment different colors. What fun is a personal blog without a little color...

The short answer is that I took the study, and compared it to the actual intersection, by putting on my boots and going down there, and I found that the study misrepresented reality. So, I guess the standard by which I am qualified to make an assessment is that I know the difference between fact and fiction. I know the difference between a schematic that represents reality, and reality itself.

I know how to use my eyes.

I know how to take hundreds of pages of data, and isolate the incongruities.

I know how to follow the scent of such incongruities to discover what might have motivated them.

In any public policy movement, such as this RUPCO project, there are stakeholders. There are costs and benefits. Every interested party wants to highlight some facts and downplay others. That's fine, and that's the way the process works. But when one party actually misrepresents reality, which Creighton Manning did, and which Guy Kempe has tried to defend, we have a very big problem.

Guy Kempe has stated that I have an outcome in mind, for this project. I think it is safe to assume that he means that I do not want the project built. But I remind him and everybody else, that I DO have an outcome in mind, which is the purpose of this blog, and that is to keep the town safe, whatever that means for the project. That means that the standard by which I judge the facts is safety, and that I maintain that safety CAN be defined, and measured, and MUST be present in any plan that breaks ground in this town.

Here is my interest as a neighbor: As its application stands in its current form, RUPCO's increased traffic will make the intersection less safe than it already is. I do not want to live near a dangerous intersection. I rarely drive, and I do not have children who will be at risk, but my neighbors drive. Some are elderly, some have children, and personally, no, I do not want any of my neighbors to be in an accident around the corner from my house. If that is selfish of me, so be it, I can live with that.

Onward, though, to defend my honor and qualifications.

This RUPCO project is not simple. It involves all kinds of disciplines. All kinds of interests have to negotiate with one another. It is as important to know the motivations of each participant as it is to look at the facts they present, since it is extremely naive and dangerous to assume that ANY information, quantitative or otherwise, can be presented free of bias. I have experience working in public policy, on large projects with many stakeholders.

I have worked on public policy efforts much larger and more complicated than this one. I have worked for the national governments on four continents, for the US Department of Energy Policy Office, the EPA, and the United Nations. At the United Nations, I managed a program that sought to reduce pollution from transportation sources in cities, using private investment AND city resources. This meant that I had to understand how and why it is difficult to limit car use, to build a subway system, to make a dedicated bus lane, to limit driving or parking. All of these policies have technical and political and economic consequences. Reading documents with all of these things in mind simultaneously is key to not being fooled by some engineering study that purports to be "simply" a traffic study, and I know how to do that. That's why I found the discrepancy in the Creighton Manning study.

No, Guy Kempe, I have not spent my career measuring rural intersections and counting cars, but when that is what is called for, I know how to do that. When you stand at this intersection and look, you feel that this is a hazardous intersection. The Woodstock Times article makes that clear. It's not just my opinion. But what I am qualified to do, as a policy analyst with a brain trained to pinpoint key metrics, is that I can search until I find the documents that DEFINE safety, and compare the metrics to the project plans. And so that is what I did. I learned how to define safety. And I defined it. And I compared it to RUPCO's plans. And I discovered that in fact RUPCO has ignored key elements of safety in its plan.

There are no secrets here. Anybody can do what I did in this blog. Most people are overwhelmed by the amount of information there is, however, and they don't think they can. The beautiful thing about research and analysis is that you learn as you go. Even if you are unqualified when you set out to get to the bottom of something, if you stick to what is logical and true, to what is legal and able to be proved and confirmed along the way, then by the end, you have learned, and that is why you ARE qualified, by the time you have your answer. So pour a whole shaker of salt on my findings. Go back to square one and do all the research again. That's fine with me. I will defend what I have learned and written, because it is sound.

I am not the one who "can't account for" omissions, and who needs some abstract standard by which to measure the logic of somebody else's statement. That's Guy Kempe. He is the director of community development for RUPCO, and he is not going to misdirect THIS community.