Those who know me will tell you that I tend to get easily sucked into interesting web gadgets. In high school, I was obsessed for several years with Dave’s Redistricting App, and before that I was fascinated by tools which could model historical sound changes; I’m probably obsessed with both to an extent. But my latest craze is the transit modeling tool enmodal.

Enmodal is a service which lets you make your own subway lines. You can place your own stations and the app will calculate data like ridership. The app also includes information about population and employment to help drawers make lines which are more informed.

When I first started using enmodal, I relished in making myself a Chapel Hill subway. Because I remembered the first-year schlep from South Campus, I made a gift to my past self: a subway line starting at Carolina Coffee and running by the Pit, then down to Rams Head, SASB, and finally the Dean Dome. Then I added a line going out to Whole Foods, where I used to work–no more late night buses! And then I realized that all this was a bit silly and impractical–who’d take a train to the Dean Dome 350 days out of the year??

In his book Seeing Like A State, the historian James C. Scott lays a out an important and potentially controversial thesis: the major government failures of the recent past, from the neat lines of German foresters (which led to major issues) to forced villagization in Tanzania share a common flaw. Scott claims that this flaw stems from the attempts of modern states to, in his words ‘render the populous legible’--that is to say, make them easily assimilable and governable within state-proscribed boundaries. Thus you have censuses in the United States, the adoption of last names in the Spanish Philippines and Turkey and centralized urban planning rather than warren-like ad hoc development. The state planners who encouraged this were encouraged by a belief in progress--a concept which, it is important to note, is relatively new. And these apostles of progress and legibility, in their most extreme and undemocratic iteration, formed an ideology which Seeing Like A State calls ‘Authoritarian High Modernism.’ Whether they were Soviet planners or Robert Moses, these powerful people attempted to lay out a state which was organized on ‘rational’ lines and easily governable. But here’s where the flaw comes: these people in power were, by nature of their position, inherently removed from the local conditions. The results were humongous policy failures, inflicting unnecessary harm, especially on those in positions removed from power.

The information asymmetries in this are a huge problem to anyone with an interest in policy, regardless of political views (unless you’re an anarchist). It’s a problem I’ve struggled with myself; I ended up writing a big paper for one of my classes on this issue, and for a while I wasn’t sure if reform in the context of the state was tenable at all.

So in light of this problem, tools like enmodal become a little more than just a cool gadget. Sure yeah, maybe people aren’t going to the Dean Dome if there isn’t a game, but I’m sure a lot of business students would love a direct route south. And lots of UNC students would be really happy that a train could take them somewhere they could get groceries–at least in those days before Target. In the aggregate, everybody’s preferences could be taken into account. In this way a tool like this could be the start to solving the problem which Scott lays out: if the people making decisions are directly informed by the public’s own choices, that could make for better planning. Obviously there are problems with this, and it would require more refining, but hopefully the development of tools like this can help us make better policy.