Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World (Penguin Random House, 2020) is a much-needed guide for folks awash in numbers who are just trying to make informed decisions. Anyone working or advocating in transportation should read it.

The preface begins with a definition of bullshit and a discussion of its different types. The authors, Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin D. West, a biologist and a data scientist at the University of Washington, distinguish between old-school and new-school bullshit. Their book focusses on the new-school type which “uses the language of math and science and statistics to create the impression of rigor and accuracy,” and they introduce the concept of “mathiness,” their analog to comedian Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness.” Mathiness refers “to formulas and expressions that may look and feel like math—even as they disregard the logical coherence and formal rigor of actual mathematics.”

Each chapter guides the reader through topics like causality, selection bias, data visualization, and big data, with examples from contemporary news. The result is a topical, fast-paced and laugh-out-loud funny book.
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At an online meeting next week hosted by local activism group Bike Loud PDX you’ll get the chance to hear from a leading expert on the connection between America’s pervasive car culture and a startling rise in deaths of vulnerable road users.

Angie Schmitt’s new book, Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America (Island Press), is due to come out on August 27th and has already received an excellent review from Kirkus (a big deal in the publishing world).

In the book, Schmitt breaks down the policies and products that have contributed to a 50% rise in pedestrian deaths in the last decade.[Read more…]

Our reviewer hard at work.

This is a guest post by Kiel Johnson.

A specter is haunting our cities — the specter of street life!

Our streets make up the vast majority of our public space in cities. How these spaces are designed have profound impacts on how we think about communities and the policies we create. Janette Sadik-Khan’s “Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution” is a necessary chronicle and persuasive argument for giving street space back to people. She writes “streets are the social, political, and commercial arteries of cities … These are the spaces where life and history happen.”

Last week, I presented to a group of business leaders in the Lloyd District, most of whom commute by car from the suburbs. I was talking about the Better Broadway project that will open one auto lane of Broadway up for businesses and people for one week next month.

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If you’ve lived in Portland long enough you’ve probably caught site of someone on a bike hauling yard and home improvement tools around. We have organizations that plant trees by bike, businesses that do landscaping and carpentry by bike, and we even have farmers who’ve replaced the iconic work-truck with a work-bike.

One of those farmers, Kollibri terre Sonnenblume, has now written a book about it. Adventures in Urban Bike Farming from Macska Moksha Press is what Sonnenblume calls, “Equal parts historical document, confessional memoir and social critique.”

Don’t let the title of the book fool you, based on an excerpt made available by the publisher Sonnenblume has just as many insights to share about Portland’s cultural upheaval in the past decade as he does about how to increase potato yields. “If you’re looking for a message of ‘rah rah, look how sustainable we are!’,” he says, “you won’t find it here.”[Read more…]