Now an effort is being launched to see whether “Big Data” might be able to reduce California’s often-awful urban gridlock. Fortune magazine has the details:

Los Angeles’ snarled, rage-inducing roads have been infamous for decades. And now, thanks to a tech industry-fueled population explosion, San Francisco is right behind L.A. in the title race for Worst Traffic in America.

 

AT&T, UC Berkeley and California’s state transportation authority are testing a new way to get a grip on the situation — by collecting and analyzing drivers’ cellphone location data. The study leads insist that users’ privacy is protected, and the information could revolutionize how we plan and manage highways and transit.

 

“The idea of using cellular data for mobility is not very new,” admits Alexei Pozdnukhov, assistant professor in UC Berkeley’s Smart Cities program. “What is new … is that our approach is much more detailed modeling. We can simulate very detailed scenarios, and answer questions.”

L.A. and Bay Area the initial focus

Traffic can be horrible in other parts of the state — San Diego and Sacramento freeways are often brutally clogged in the morning and evening rush hours, and the 75-mile section of the Interstate 15 corridor from Lake Elsinore to Hesperia is a common target of Sigalerts during daylight hours because of heavy commercial traffic. But the initial focus will be on the biggest population centers:

The new California projects — Connected Corridors in Los Angeles, and SmartBay in San Francisco — are something like Google Maps on steroids. They compile region-wide cell data into big portraits, not just of where traffic is most congested, but of overall daily patterns.

 

“[It shows] where people … work, where they go for shopping, where they go for leisure, and how they choose to get there,” says Pozdnukhov. Dr. Compin says that’s “the holy grail” of transit planning.

 

The data will help planners develop detailed responses to congestion events — Compin says there are a stunning 5,000 to 6,000 events per year on the I-210 corridor, making up about 50 percent of traffic delays. By working closely with local authorities and public transit providers, Caltrans hopes to make better decisions about how to re-route traffic onto parallel corridors and local roads, and communicate changes to commuters more smoothly. The San Francisco pilot is centered on Interstate 80, and among other things, says Pozdnukhov, hopes to determine the potential impact of increased development on the Treasure Island neighborhood the highway passes through.

Research can be basis of driverless-car grid

The effort depicted by the Fortune article could end up being as tantamount to a crucial first step toward establishing a grid for driverless cars. Such a grid could steer traffic in certain directions based on algorithms anticipating optimal vehicle flow. The theory is this could be done in a way that would dramatically reduce gridlock.

Studies also emphasize how an orderly computer-run traffic grid of autonomous cars could sharply reduce pollution, especially if the cars were hybrids or otherwise didn’t have internal combustion engines.

But beginning in fall 2012, the bureau finally began providing such analysis in what it called a “supplemental” poverty analysis. In that report, the one that came out in 2013 and the one that came out last week, California had by a wide margin the highest poverty rate of any state. Here’s part of Dan Walters’ short take on it:

California continues to have – by far – the nation’s highest level of poverty under an alternative method devised by the Census Bureau that takes into account both broader measures of income and the cost of living.

Nearly a quarter of the state’s 38 million residents (8.9 million) live in poverty, a new Census Bureau report says, a level virtually unchanged since the agency first began reporting on the method’s effects.

Under the traditional method of gauging poverty, adopted a half-century ago, California’s rate is 16 percent (6.1 million residents), somewhat above the national rate of 14.9 percent but by no means the highest. That dubious honor goes to New Mexico at 21.5 percent.

But under the alternative method, California rises to the top at 23.4 percent while New Mexico drops to 16 percent and other states decline to as low as 8.7 percent in Iowa.

The supplemental poverty calculations put Mississippi’s poverty rate at 15.3 percent. So someone who lives in California is 35 percent more likely to be impoverished than someone who lives in Mississippi.

Mississippi spurs deep concern — CA, not so much

Will the California media ever forcefully point this out — like, yunno, the folks who have written about Mississippi? Here’s an example of the oh-my-god-it’s-awful treatment that Mississippi gets for its poverty, which is small compared to California’s:

Many families in Mississippi, one of the states where ChildFund works, live below the poverty line, presenting obstacles to children achieving happy and fulfilling lives. In 2013, the federal poverty level for a family of five is a yearly income of $27,570. As of January 2011, about 31 percent of the children living in Mississippi were considered poor, and included in that number were 14 percent living in extreme poverty, according to the Children’s Defense Fund. This means Mississippi has the highest child poverty rate in the nation.

Although there are many factors that can contribute to child abuse and neglect, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services notes that many researchers feel there is a correlation between poverty and child mistreatment.Mississippi has historically seen both high poverty and child abuse rates.

In 2011, the Children’s Defense Fund reported that 7,883 Mississippi children were victims of abuse or neglect, which works out to a case of abuse or neglect every hour. Some children in Mississippi are unable to live with their biological parents for a variety of reasons. In 2011, about 3,320 children were in foster care, and about 50,130 grandparents across the state raised their grandchildren.

Children who are raised in poverty are also statistically less likely to finish high school than their peers, frequently because they are forced to get a full-time job, or they lack crucial support from their families. In Mississippi, about 64 percent of freshmen in high school will graduate, according to the Children’s Defense Fund.

And even students who graduate may not attain the skills they need to succeed in college or the work force. In the fourth grade, 78 percent of students in the state are unable to read or do math at grade level. By the eighth grade, 81 percent of students cannot read at grade level, while 85 percent lack the appropriate math skills, the Children’s Defense Fund reports.

Haven’t seen much downbeat stuff like this about life in Cali, have ya?

Just like the knuckleheads who cover baseball and mock Moneyball, news journalists resist new stats, even if they’re more insightful.

Great, just great.

6 p.m. update: fixed error spotted by reader JL. Thanks.

The California Center for Jobs & the Economy noted these stats on Monday. The first:

“California’s Labor Force Participation Rate (not seasonally adjusted) in April 2014 was 61.8%, the lowest rate since April 1976.  While the significant drop from March 2014 suggests there are also statistical or sampling issues in play, this milestone is a stark reminder that California’s participation rate remains below the US average (62.6%), and like the US rate is currently on a decline.

“This sustained decline in the labor force participation rate has been a statistical factor behind the improving unemployment numbers, but also reflects the perception of many potential job seekers on the opportunities available through the current economic mix.”

20.6% of those classified as CA employed work part-time

If less people seek work, that may help the unemployment rate improve, but it hardly bolsters the narrative of a state on the economic rebound. The Bay Area, Silicon Valley and the tech centers in Orange County, L.A. suburbs and San Diego are doing from pretty well to great, but the rest of the state never left the Great Recession.

The second stat cited by the jobs center also reflects the state’s overall economic weakness:

“While the US percentage of employed who work part-time has continued to slowly decline to 18.0% in April 2014 (12-month moving average), the comparable number for California has remained at 20.6% for the past quarter, reflecting the fact that this factor remained level at a somewhat higher rate throughout 2013 as well.  The number of workers employed part-time for economic reasons also remains higher in California —7.2% for California vs. 5.2% for the US in April 2014.”

And this stat explains why California does badly in most revealing of official federal unemployment stats. It’s the U-6 category, which reflects how many people want to work full-time but can’t find such jobs.

The latest unemployment report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics came out in late April. It shows California to have the second-worst U-6 rate in the nation at 16.7 percent. Only Nevada is worse.

The newsroom version of sportswriters’ resistance to ‘Moneyball’

The L.A. Times’ coverage did note that by the conventional measure of unemployment, California had the fourth-worst rate. But it and most other newspapers rarely talk about the state’s even worse U-6 rate. Dan Walters deserves credit for breaking with the crowd by doing so.

And few journos outside of the Sacramento Bee and U-T San Diego cite how poorly California does in the alternative federal measure of poverty that is adjusted for cost of living.

When that is factored in, the Golden State has by far the highest poverty rate in the U.S. at around 23 percent. When we pretend the cost of housing is the same in California as it is in Indiana, CA’s poverty rate is about 16 percent, only 1 percent higher than the national average. So why is the former, misleading rate the one that’s most reported?

Inertia is the likely answer, not bias. But it’s not a good answer.

Hey, journalists of California: In covering the economy, why would you rely on the equivalent of batting average and ignore the equivalent of OPS and Wins Above Replacement?

When better statistical measurements come along, are veteran news reporters going to be like veteran sports reporters and resist them for no good reason?

When it comes to California’s poverty and unemployment rates, it sure seems that way.

Founded in 1985 by strategist Al From, the DLC thought the bad image of liberalism in the 1980s was well-earned. From’s goal was results-based government activism that understood incentives drove behavior.

Rule No. 1 was that throwing money at problems didn’t have a great history after a quarter-century of Great Society domestic liberalism. If this wasn’t working to solve a problem, try another approach.

Rule No. 2 was to accept the idea that government-centric efforts to address societal issues were not always best — that even Americans who weren’t Reaganites had a skepticism about what government could accomplish, and for good reason.

The DLC approach — touted by such folks as Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke, Massachusetts Sen. Paul Tsongas, Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn and the then-very-powerful New Republic magazine — eventually got a tryout when Clinton was elected president in 1992 after an amazing Democratic primary without a single serious liberal candidate.

Clinton had his hard-left moments. But after 1994, he “triangulated” against liberal lawmakers over and over again, including going along with sweeping GOP welfare reform in 1996. And Clinton never gets nearly enough credit from non-wonks for how he successfully tinkered with the Earned Income Tax Credit in a way that helped the working poor without disincentivizing work.

The DLC way never made it to California

But in California, the pragmatic DLC approach has no such substantive record. Its principles won lip service from Gov. Gray Davis briefly after his 1998 election when he fought for education reforms. But then Davis lost his spine and sold his soul with a series of concessions to public employee unions, and since then the DLC theories that results matter most and that throwing money at problems isn’t always smart have been abandoned by nearly all elected California Democrats.

If we have parsimonious budgets, it’s because state legislators don’t have money to spare; it’s not because they don’t still want to throw money at problems and ignore history.

This dynamic has played out in education, where Clintonian programs to force teachers to meet standards have gone nowhere.

It’s also evident on welfare reform. As Chuck Devore has chronicled, California never got around to implementing the sort of tough, mandatory welfare changes that in most of America proved to be the greatest anti-poverty program in U.S. history.

And as we’re seeing now in San Diego, the DLC approach on affordable housing — which would value results first and foremost — is considered bizarre and exotic.

Failed policy? Let’s pump it full of new funds

I dealt with the insanity of what the San Diego City Council’s Democratic majority is doing in an editorial Sunday on the six months that Council President Todd Gloria served as interim mayor:

“During his time as mayor, he provided the fifth vote on the City Council for a gigantic public policy mistake.

“That mistake was to sharply increase the ‘linkage’ fees on commercial and industrial development projects in the name of promoting affordable housing. If the program that council Democrats were funding had a history of working well, that’s one thing. But it doesn’t. It has a 24-year history of minimal results at high cost.

“Doubling-down on an approach that isn’t working is in keeping with the Golden State’s obtuse history on affordable housing. As the Public Policy Institute of California noted in 2003, local governments have a history of focusing on process — adopting programs that show their good intentions — instead of results.”

This is insane. In this “Moneyball” era — in which statistical analysis is able to readily quantify what works and what doesn’t work — the second-largest city in California and the eighth-largest city in America has embraced a failed policy in a way that will hurt the city’s economy in direct and obvious ways.

Is Ron Burgundy running City Hall? Stay stupid, San Diego.

On the Zocalo Public Square website, Pepperdine academic Pete Peterson takes a look at how this sort of thinking could help California — at least if its citizens were able to receive more sophisticated information about how their local governments were performing:

“For Californians, Detroit was not our first warning about the costs of limited and self-interested civic participation. We have our own examples — like the bankrupt cities of San Bernardino, Stockton, and Vallejo, and the municipal corruption of Bell. …

“The use of perfor- mance 'dashboards' — online platforms that visualize spend- ing and program performance — by forward-thinking municipal and state governments shows how we can much better evaluate and communicate government programs. The challenge comes …  finding the courage to shut down programs that simply don’t work. …

“The field of data visualization has made presenting complex information — from budgets to program performance — almost easy. Take a look at Salinas, California’s 'Open Budget Platform' (full disclosure: I’m an advisor to this company) or Michigan’s 'Mi Dashboard,' and you’ll see the days of budgets in three-ring binders are numbered.”

The second piece — “Can Government Play Moneyball?” in The Atlantic by former budget officials for both the Bush 43 and Obama administrations — is maddening in that it shows efforts to actually evaluate federal programs for their efficacy date back to the early years of the Clinton administration.  The results, alas, are rarely followed through on.

Coming to the rescue of a counterproductive program

The authors are ultimately upbeat that such evaluations will someday help hack down federal spending. But they also provide an amusing/depressing anecdote about the circumstances that led Congress to keep going with a failed program, starring then-future Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“The federal government’s long-running after-school program, 21st Century Community Learning Centers, has shown no effect on academic outcomes on elementary-school students—and significant increases in school suspensions and incidents requiring other forms of discipline. The Bush administration attempted to reduce funding for the program. But following impassioned testimony on behalf of the program by Arnold Schwarzenegger, then a potential candidate for governor of California, congressional appropriators agreed to restore all funding. Today the program still gets more than $1 billion a year in federal funds.”

It's been 11 years since Arnold was an ardent campaigner for afterschool programs, including his own California initiative. But the federal version doesn't work, and yet we've poured more than $10 billion into it over the last decade — because Arnold got in the way when reasonable and rational people tried to pull the plug.

One more example that Arnold only pretended to be a Milton Friedman acolyte all those years before he got into politics and ended all doubts.

By Laer Pearce

Gov. Jerry Brown is no Billy Beane.

Coaching a bottom-dwelling state, Brown is continuing to dole out big money for policies that are past their prime and failing to perform. California remains at the bottom of the education, business-friendliness and government efficiency rankings — and at the top of taxation, regulation and fleeing residents rankings.

Beane, whose Oakland A’s are once again in the Major League playoffs, realized in 2002 he didn’t have enough money to put a team together the old fashioned way. So, as recounted in Michael Lewis’s best-seller, “Moneyball,” he signed undervalued players other teams overlooked. Each was smartly chosen for on-base percentage, scoring runs, or less measurable qualities like stepping up when the chips are down. Other managers thought Beane was either desperate, insane or both, but the rag-tag team of forgotten players he assembled became winners.

The book was made into a 2011 movie starring Brad Pitt.

Beane had the ability to see in baseball’s raft of statistics what other managers didn’t. Brown is surrounded by statistics on how California’s various players — agriculture, business, local government, state bureaucracies, pension funds — are performing compared to other states, but he can’t seem to read them. Instead of pursuing government policies that are the parallel of Beane’s brilliant recruiting, he’s doing the governmental counterpart of the Yankees shelling out $18.7 million (prorated down from a contracted $28 million) to get pitcher Roger Clemens back from the Houston Astros in 2007. Clemens made $1 million a start that year, and came to define “worst trade ever” to many baseball buffs by turning in a lackluster 6-6 season.

Proposition 30 is Brown’s Clemens, a high-cost, past-its-prime approach to government that he hopes will lift California out of the cellar. Like Clemens, it costs a lot, with sales and income tax increases of as much as $50 billion over the next seven years. Like Clemens, it too has a strong arm, in this case strong-arming Californians with its threat that if they don’t pay up, the teacher dies. And just like Clemens showed the Yankees, there’s no guarantee it will work as promised.

Moneyball for California

Should Prop 30 fail in November, Brown will have a chance to start playing Moneyball.  Here are some ideas for the manager of the major league Sacramento Spenders. 

Schools. Schools are the state’s single biggest expense, receiving 43 percent of the General Fund. Half of this largess goes to administrative overhead, because it takes a lot of administrators and $400 million a year to fulfill all the mandates, reports and busy work imposed on school districts by Sacramento.  In contrast, just 20 percent of Connecticut’s education budget goes to administrative overhead.  California ranks No. 46 in the most recent “best-educated state” rankings, while Connecticut comes in second.

Then there’s the problem that our teachers are the highest paid in the nation, despite California’s tragically poor education outcomes. The California Teachers Association, which gave almost $50 million to Brown’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign and has paid out $6.3 million to support Prop 30, does all it can to keep salaries high and performance-based pay a nonstarter.

Moneyball in education would see the elimination of most of state-imposed mandates on public schools, so we could stop paying for thousands of high-priced school administrators. Then, Brown could support a ballot initiative requiring performance-based pay for teachers, and rail against the devious CTA advertising that would attack it. Brown would never do this, of course, but a Governor Billy Beane would. 

Pensions. The real reason Brown needs Proposition 30 is to shovel money into the $250 billion to $500 billion hole of unfunded state employee pension liabilities. Brown needs to start managing this problem Moneyball-style. He will get nowhere as long as he dodges dealing with the contracts of existing employees, as he has to date.  That’s where the real liability is, so he has to force the rewriting of those contracts, especially when retroactive increases were given, or unions won increases that were completely out of the norm of private sector increases. Costly add-ons, like life-time health insurance for agency directors, need to be prohibited retroactively.

This won’t be easy, but in “Crazifornia,” I make the case that many public employee contracts can be voided because management negotiators were city administrative employees who would benefit from rank-and-file salary and benefit increases when their own contracts were renewed. Brown should seek to have thousands of these sorts of contracts across the state declared null and void by claiming they are the fruit of criminal racketeering under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corruption Act. Brown would never do this, of course, but a Gov. Billy Beane would. 

Taxes. William Voegeli of Claremont University found that California’s per-capita outlays increased 21.7 percent from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s, compared to an 18.2 percent average increase for the other 49 states. Just cutting back to average, which can hardly be categorized as heartless conservatism, would save California $10.6 billion a year, or enough to close most of the current budget gap — without new taxes. If California’s spending over those years had increased only with inflation and population growth, Voegeli writes in Failed State, “the resulting levels of per-capita government outlays … would have equaled neither Somalia’s nor Mississippi’s, but … Oregon’s, which is rarely considered a hellish paradigm of Social Darwinism.”

Brown would never attack spending in this way, nor would he do many other smart Moneyball approaches to fixing our lumbering disaster of a state. Which is why his governorship will ultimately fail.

Laer Pearce, a veteran of three decades of California public affairs, is the author of the new book, “Crazifornia: Tales from the Tarnished State.”