When I was going to college in hopes of becoming an urban planner, I was living in Solano County, California. Many of my classes involved doing some analysis or some kind of work on some real world problem.
You would get a class assignment pertinent to whatever that class was teaching and they would instruct you to apply your lessons to some real world thing of some sort. So I began consistently using the Solano County rail plan as the thing I would analyze in different classes.
It's been a lot of years, so no doubt a lot of the details have been lost to the mists of time, but I know I had a class on running the numbers to show the economic value of natural resources and in that class I did analysis of the value of the marshlands that are being threatened by the existing rail plan in the county. I also used the Solano County rail plan for a GIS assignment when I was in GIS school and those things all got put into my Solano rail plan.
So my Solano rail plan was not really a student project per se. It was an independent project of mine, though I was a student at the time and I used class assignments in multiple different classes to work on parts of it and when I was active on Cyburbia some of the professional planners there gave me some feedback of some sort as well.
One of the things that I learned in researching the Solano County rail plan was that the way the locations were chosen was via a broken political process. In short, the cities of Solano County got together and divided up the political pie and decided which cities would get a rail station and AFTER that was decided they hired a consultant to pick sites for the stations.
So the consultant more or less had their hands tied. They were not instructed nor paid to analyze what the best locations overall were for the rail stations in the county as a whole. They were asked to pick the best locations for various cities that had already "won" politically.
In contrast to what their consultant was paid to do, I did research into what factors most strongly impact ridership. This includes density of population and demographics, among other things.
From there, I chose the best locations for the county as a whole.
My recommendations were different from the existing rail plan. One of the reasons my recommendations were different is because I was a military wife and I was living in Solano County because my husband was assigned to Travis Air Base in Solano County.
No representative from the base was at the meeting where the incorporated cities divided up the political pie. The military base had no input into this process, neither to advocate for what they wanted nor to criticize decisions to place rail stations overly near the base.
Encroachment on military bases is a factor in military security and it's often a factor in deciding to close a base. Travis Air Base is (or was at the time) the largest employer in the county and brought a billion dollars into the county economy annually.
It is (or was) also a listed Superfund site. In this case, it has toxic waste there that would be hard to clean up if they left because of factors like jet fuel spills.
Travis is the launch point for planes going out over the Pacific. For what it does, it would be okay if it were anywhere on the West Coast. It isn't important that it be right there in Solano County and it's expensive to keep it in the San Francisco Bay Area. The federal government has made noises for years about moving it elsewhere to cut costs.
So if you start building rail stations practically up against the fence on its backside, the odds are good that some high ranking military official is going to get very cranky about that. He has no power to stop your rail station being built, but he does have the power to say "I want this base moved someplace more secure" and to get people to take his concerns in that regard seriously who have the power to make that happen.
So they didn't ask anyone from the military "What is your opinion of our rail plan?" and they likely won't and what will most likely happen is they build their rail stations, encroach on the base and then the base will eventually get relocated elsewhere and the folks in Solano County will likely be mystified by why that happened and not understand the role they played in driving the base away and forcing it to go elsewhere.
My personal background is that I was a homemaker for a lot of years and I was sometimes able to do nice things for folks because I was a homemaker and that tended to come back to me. I did nice things for people, they gave me hand-me-down furniture or bought me stuff for Christmas that I couldn't have afforded or whatever and it was not direct payment but I gave, I got and I usually did not feel shafted for being good to people.
My expectation that if I do good things for people that will come back to me has not worked out in recent years. It's been a source of frustration and I'm not convinced I am just doing something "wrong." When men are "nice" to other men, that seems to be understood as "I scratch your back, you scratch mine." but I do the same thing it seems to more typically be interpreted as "She's just nice and she did that out of the goodness of her heart and I don't owe her nothing" or, worse, men misinterpret it as I'd make a fine girlfriend, I guess.
So I currently run Eclogiselle and it is intended to be private sector planning services for small communities, but I don't yet have a solid monetization strategy. To my mind, it makes sense that if I am providing something of value for you, you should be happy to leave tips or support my Patreon so I can keep doing that if you value it but that isn't exactly paying my bills yet.
And I know that approach by me is rooted in my past experience that I lived a very private life and I did things for people and that usually came back to me. They honored that social contract. They didn't bite the hand that fed them. They wanted to stay on good terms with me. They wanted me to be both willing and able to keep being good to them, so they were good to me and helped make my life work.
But my difficulties in developing specific products or services to sell is also rooted in having written the Solano Rail plan and having seen how Solano County's current rail plan is a bad plan because of the process that created it. The planning consultant they hired to choose sites was not paid to do things right.
That's not the kind of work I want to be doing. I do not want to be paid to pick bad rail plan locations after some broken political process divides up the pie and, critically, doesn't even have input from a local major player in the area due to the detail that the Air Base isn't technically a city. So they got no say in it at all.
This is not a problem unique to community development work. There are lots of stories out there of historical incidents where badly designed incentives were leading to undesirable outcomes. Here are a few that come to mind off the top of my head:
Anyway, this is here on this site for two reasons:
The Nobel Prize exists to pay someone after the fact for their contributions and it kind of recognizes this problem space that doing things RIGHT sometimes conflicts with doing things for PAY. So I am not the only person on the planet who has this idea that first you do the thing and do it right and then you deserve to get something in return for that.
I don't know how we turn that into making the world a better place by rewarding people for making things genuinely better. But I certainly see opportunity for doing more of that sort of thing rather than continuing to pay people to be part of the problem and then wondering why our problems refuse to die.
You would get a class assignment pertinent to whatever that class was teaching and they would instruct you to apply your lessons to some real world thing of some sort. So I began consistently using the Solano County rail plan as the thing I would analyze in different classes.
It's been a lot of years, so no doubt a lot of the details have been lost to the mists of time, but I know I had a class on running the numbers to show the economic value of natural resources and in that class I did analysis of the value of the marshlands that are being threatened by the existing rail plan in the county. I also used the Solano County rail plan for a GIS assignment when I was in GIS school and those things all got put into my Solano rail plan.
So my Solano rail plan was not really a student project per se. It was an independent project of mine, though I was a student at the time and I used class assignments in multiple different classes to work on parts of it and when I was active on Cyburbia some of the professional planners there gave me some feedback of some sort as well.
One of the things that I learned in researching the Solano County rail plan was that the way the locations were chosen was via a broken political process. In short, the cities of Solano County got together and divided up the political pie and decided which cities would get a rail station and AFTER that was decided they hired a consultant to pick sites for the stations.
So the consultant more or less had their hands tied. They were not instructed nor paid to analyze what the best locations overall were for the rail stations in the county as a whole. They were asked to pick the best locations for various cities that had already "won" politically.
In contrast to what their consultant was paid to do, I did research into what factors most strongly impact ridership. This includes density of population and demographics, among other things.
From there, I chose the best locations for the county as a whole.
My recommendations were different from the existing rail plan. One of the reasons my recommendations were different is because I was a military wife and I was living in Solano County because my husband was assigned to Travis Air Base in Solano County.
No representative from the base was at the meeting where the incorporated cities divided up the political pie. The military base had no input into this process, neither to advocate for what they wanted nor to criticize decisions to place rail stations overly near the base.
Encroachment on military bases is a factor in military security and it's often a factor in deciding to close a base. Travis Air Base is (or was at the time) the largest employer in the county and brought a billion dollars into the county economy annually.
It is (or was) also a listed Superfund site. In this case, it has toxic waste there that would be hard to clean up if they left because of factors like jet fuel spills.
Travis is the launch point for planes going out over the Pacific. For what it does, it would be okay if it were anywhere on the West Coast. It isn't important that it be right there in Solano County and it's expensive to keep it in the San Francisco Bay Area. The federal government has made noises for years about moving it elsewhere to cut costs.
So if you start building rail stations practically up against the fence on its backside, the odds are good that some high ranking military official is going to get very cranky about that. He has no power to stop your rail station being built, but he does have the power to say "I want this base moved someplace more secure" and to get people to take his concerns in that regard seriously who have the power to make that happen.
So they didn't ask anyone from the military "What is your opinion of our rail plan?" and they likely won't and what will most likely happen is they build their rail stations, encroach on the base and then the base will eventually get relocated elsewhere and the folks in Solano County will likely be mystified by why that happened and not understand the role they played in driving the base away and forcing it to go elsewhere.
My personal background is that I was a homemaker for a lot of years and I was sometimes able to do nice things for folks because I was a homemaker and that tended to come back to me. I did nice things for people, they gave me hand-me-down furniture or bought me stuff for Christmas that I couldn't have afforded or whatever and it was not direct payment but I gave, I got and I usually did not feel shafted for being good to people.
My expectation that if I do good things for people that will come back to me has not worked out in recent years. It's been a source of frustration and I'm not convinced I am just doing something "wrong." When men are "nice" to other men, that seems to be understood as "I scratch your back, you scratch mine." but I do the same thing it seems to more typically be interpreted as "She's just nice and she did that out of the goodness of her heart and I don't owe her nothing" or, worse, men misinterpret it as I'd make a fine girlfriend, I guess.
So I currently run Eclogiselle and it is intended to be private sector planning services for small communities, but I don't yet have a solid monetization strategy. To my mind, it makes sense that if I am providing something of value for you, you should be happy to leave tips or support my Patreon so I can keep doing that if you value it but that isn't exactly paying my bills yet.
And I know that approach by me is rooted in my past experience that I lived a very private life and I did things for people and that usually came back to me. They honored that social contract. They didn't bite the hand that fed them. They wanted to stay on good terms with me. They wanted me to be both willing and able to keep being good to them, so they were good to me and helped make my life work.
But my difficulties in developing specific products or services to sell is also rooted in having written the Solano Rail plan and having seen how Solano County's current rail plan is a bad plan because of the process that created it. The planning consultant they hired to choose sites was not paid to do things right.
That's not the kind of work I want to be doing. I do not want to be paid to pick bad rail plan locations after some broken political process divides up the pie and, critically, doesn't even have input from a local major player in the area due to the detail that the Air Base isn't technically a city. So they got no say in it at all.
This is not a problem unique to community development work. There are lots of stories out there of historical incidents where badly designed incentives were leading to undesirable outcomes. Here are a few that come to mind off the top of my head:
- They wanted to get rid of snakes or rats or something somewhere, so they were paying people for them and this led to people breeding more of them to make more money.
- Archaeologists or something were paying local tribespeople 10 cents per bone fragment found and they later learned that the locals had been enthusiastically breaking bones up into smaller pieces to make more money because they were paid by the piece. The researchers would have preferred to get the larger bones intact and just didn't think about how their payment structure would impact the behavior of locals.
- Prisoners being shipped to the penal colony of Australia were dying at high rates because it was more profitable to the shipping companies to let them die. This was resolved by switching to paying shipping companies only for the number of prisoners that actually arrived alive.
Anyway, this is here on this site for two reasons:
- I need to think this through and come up with solutions. Writing is part of how I do that.
- I see the Butterfly Economy as a potential solution generally for such things.
The Nobel Prize exists to pay someone after the fact for their contributions and it kind of recognizes this problem space that doing things RIGHT sometimes conflicts with doing things for PAY. So I am not the only person on the planet who has this idea that first you do the thing and do it right and then you deserve to get something in return for that.
I don't know how we turn that into making the world a better place by rewarding people for making things genuinely better. But I certainly see opportunity for doing more of that sort of thing rather than continuing to pay people to be part of the problem and then wondering why our problems refuse to die.