http://www.arounddesmoines.com/the-presidential-straw-poll/ Blogging Des Moines Iowa Mon, 24 Jan 2011 04:41:36 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.4 http://www.arounddesmoines.com/the-presidential-straw-poll/comment-page-1/#comment-220 M.R. Field Wed, 15 Aug 2007 23:56:18 +0000 http://www.arounddesmoines.com/the-presidential-straw-poll/#comment-220 The bus that was chartered to take Des Moines-area residents to Ames for the straw poll returned us to the Windsor Heights Hy-Vee at a perfect time to catch the local bus home. Normally, I would have taken the local bus half-way home and walked the rest of the way. However, due to a high heat index and lungs that were not fully recovered from a recent cold, I opted to ride the bus to a transfer point and catch the bus on another route that would let me off half a block from my apartment. My choices were to go to Valley West Mall or to downtown. All of my options, including walking, would get me home within about 15 minutes of each other. The downtown transfer option was the best by a slight margin. During the trip I started calculating how many extra blocks I traveled because of the route map of the local bus system. The total was 74 blocks. That includes going all the way downtown, going a few north-south blocks beyond my street, and then going back to the western side of the city. Now here’s the real kicker: if an observer had been on the bus tracking passenger flow as part of a bus study, my trips would have been counted as downtown-related. The fact that I went 74 blocks out of my way because I could transfer only in downtown would not have mattered. Consequently, my 74-block detour would be one of the datum points proving that more buses going to and from downtown Des Moines are needed. This type of logic is present in several other areas of life and politics. As you listen to candidates for president, the state legislature, city council, and school board, ask yourself if their solutions to problems are perpetuating current problems or are addressing needs not captured by existing formal measurements. The bus that was chartered to take Des Moines-area residents to Ames for the straw poll returned us to the Windsor Heights Hy-Vee at a perfect time to catch the local bus home. Normally, I would have taken the local bus half-way home and walked the rest of the way. However, due to a high heat index and lungs that were not fully recovered from a recent cold, I opted to ride the bus to a transfer point and catch the bus on another route that would let me off half a block from my apartment. My choices were to go to Valley West Mall or to downtown. All of my options, including walking, would get me home within about 15 minutes of each other. The downtown transfer option was the best by a slight margin. During the trip I started calculating how many extra blocks I traveled because of the route map of the local bus system. The total was 74 blocks. That includes going all the way downtown, going a few north-south blocks beyond my street, and then going back to the western side of the city. Now here’s the real kicker: if an observer had been on the bus tracking passenger flow as part of a bus study, my trips would have been counted as downtown-related. The fact that I went 74 blocks out of my way because I could transfer only in downtown would not have mattered. Consequently, my 74-block detour would be one of the datum points proving that more buses going to and from downtown Des Moines are needed. This type of logic is present in several other areas of life and politics. As you listen to candidates for president, the state legislature, city council, and school board, ask yourself if their solutions to problems are perpetuating current problems or are addressing needs not captured by existing formal measurements.

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