I’m almost willing to write this Strib editorial off to post-election let-down; perhaps the editoral writers are still hung-over from the election they and their paper worked so hard to engineer.

But the piece – which sniffs and phumphers about ad space being sold on the outside of trains – frankly, makes absolutely no sense.

Trusting the stranger is a basic precept of the successful city. An urban place cannot thrive if public sidewalks, parks and transit are overtaken by the fear of unpredictable or threatening behavior. Happily, those tensions can be eased by good architecture. Unobstructed windows are especially important because they provide transparency between, say, a sidewalk and street-level business. As the urbanist prophet Jane Jacobs observed, the more eyes looking in and out, the greater the confidence in the urban experience.

That’s why it’s so ironic that the Twin Cities’ latest and most celebrated venture into the urban experience — light-rail transit — so eagerly violates Jacobs’ dictum.

For starters, Jacobs’ “dictum” has been pretty well debunked – not by free-market conservatives, mind you, but by the people who’ve actually spent the last fifty years trying to make it work. “Eyes on the Street” doesn’t prevent crime, and a city is built on distrusting people enough so that the honest people stay honest. (Read the linked article; it doesn’t debunk “new urbanism”, merely guts out the very myth that the Strib is peddling in this editorial).

Metro Transit has shrouded most of its light-rail cars in advertising. Whole trains — windows and all — have become gliding billboards for supermarkets, sports teams, discount stores, you name it. Commuters on platforms can’t see into the cars; riders inside can see out, sort of, but only into what appears to be a murky, depressing city.

Thus, the transit agency trades the confidence and pleasure of customers for the revenue that advertising brings. It’s willing even to obscure its own brand identity in a desperate dash for cash. These “wraps” account for one-third of Metro Transit’s $2.7 million annual ad sales (but far less than 1 percent of its total budget).

One wonders what the Strib is thinking:

1. A city that is “murky, depressing” through a thin layer of translucent paint will spring to vibrant life through a clear window?
2. “Brand identity?” The train is a government venture! Branding only matters if there is competition! There is only one train! Oh, sure – the train is competing against cars. But does the Strib board think that the very Metro Transit “brand” that Twin Cities’ commuters shun by a 95-5 margin is going to actually draw people in? That the dismal off-white cattle pens on rails are going to be any more inviting, in and of themselves, than the dismal off-white cattle pens on wheels?

Back to the Strib:

We do not disparage advertising.

But it’d be perhaps useful to note that the Strib competes for the same ad dollar that the trains are eating up.

Perhaps some of that money should go to teaching the Strib some elementary logic. Or maybe just how to control one’s hysteria:

…transit is a public product, and allowing whole trains to be tarted up with images of toothpaste and laundry soap demeans the public’s pride in its investment.

It’s a train! An ugly steel trolley shuttling back and forth on ugly steel tracks over ugly cement overpasses! The only “pride in investment” in having a train in the first place is the efficiency it (supposedly) brings to the city’s life. Trains can be aesthetic – but that’s not the point of the public’s investment.

Imagine the outcry if Lake Harriet were “sponsored” by a hamburger chain on condition that lighted golden arches were placed at the lake’s center.

I sat, stunned, the first time or two I read this.

The Strib editorial board can’t tell the difference – conceptual as well as literal – between a natural wonder in the middle of our city, and a train?

Or if the 2006 election had been “brought to you by” a TV newscast, which placed ads on every ballot. At some point a line is crossed. Metro Transit has crossed it.

The Strib also notes that the MTC has begun rolling back the amount of window surface to be covered. so why write the editorial in the first place?

It’s unfortunate that Metro Transit hasn’t been provided the money to build and operate a fully modern system.

No, Strib editors. It is, in fact, too bad that metro taxpayers have been saddled with a “transit” system that is structurally unable to pay its own way – a billion-dollar “train to nowhere from nowhere”, linking the airport and the Mall to a downtown full of people who don’t, as a general rule, take the train to the airport or the Mall! A train whose main function is to take the (few) commuters in South Minneapolis who neither drive to jobs in the ‘burbs nor downtown, to the relatively few jobs remaining downtown, or to take revelers on the now-ritual Friday/Saturday night trolley pub crawls.

A train could have been built to haul people from the inner city, where people actually are, out to Burnsville and Bloomington and Eden Prairie, places to which people actually need affordable transit, that had a better (though still dismal) chance of paying for itself. But a work-a-daddy, hug-a-mommy trolleythat hauls working people about isn’t quite as posh a monument to the wisdom of its creators as a gleaming train connecting the crown jewels of a city – its downtown(s), airport, and “destination”.

Or to put it in the business terms that the Strib’s editors so poorly understand, “get a sound business case before you worry about branding”.

(Oh, and Strib? Weren’t you guys just raving about what a “success” the Hiawatha line has been?)

It’s too bad that it feels the need to become so thoroughly “wrapped up” in the pursuit of extra cash. It’s regrettable that it has violated the see-through principles of safe, responsible urbanism [hah!]. Advertising truly has its place on public transit — just not every place.

The Strib’s version of “new urbanism” is unsafe, irresponsible, and obsolete; their concern for the “branding” of a train that should never have been built (or at least built where it is) qualifies as “turd-polishing”.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Monday, November 13th, 2006 at 6:44 am and is filed under Media, Minneapolis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.