Recently I downloaded an environmental report by a city planning agency and was appalled to find that the table of contents alone was 20 megabytes. The entire report totaled 170 megabytes. The city’s web site didn’t even have the decency to warn users how big each file would be.
Anyone who has made PDFs should know that they are quite easy to shrink by reducing the resolution of photos and other graphics. Commercial sites tend to keep files as small as possible or to provide multiple resolutions so that they are accessible to as many potential customers as possible. For example, the trailers pages for web sites advertising most movies offer “small,” “medium,” and “large” formats.
Almost anyone with a dial-up connection would lack the time or patience to download 170 megabytes of documents. I have a moderately fast DSL connection, so the time was less of an issue than the number of downloads: the city split the document into 34 different files. Web browsers typically allow users to download only four or five files at a time, so if you have to download more you have to monitor it so you can start a new one each time its done with a previous one. Commercial sites solve this problem by offering people a choice between downloading individual chapters or the whole document in one file.
The city added insult to injury by gratuitously offering to let people go to the nearest Kinkos and print out the documents. Volume 1 (about a third of the total), will cost you only $80, the web site notes. Thanks a lot.
I often encounter city planning web sites that only provide one resolution of files (huge) and/or require users to download multiple files. Why don’t city planners offer users the same convenience that people routinely get from commercial sites?
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Conspiracy theorists might argue that planners are trying to put up barriers to public involvement. I think the answer is more prosaic: they don’t care. You want to go to the library to review our 1,500 pages of documents? Go ahead. You want to pay Kinkos $240 to print out all three volumes? Help yourself. You want to take the time to download the files and review them on your screen? Have at it. You want to make some comments on the plan? Whatever. Do you expect your comments to make a difference? Well, we all have our fantasies.
Commercial web sites are judged by their success in selling products or services. Many non-profit groups love to report to their funders how many hits their web sites get. (Not the Antiplanner; I’m happy if just one person finds a post useful.)
Cities are different. I suspect many planning agencies rarely report their hit counts to their city councils. Certainly, the cities have no reason to reward planners for increasing the number of downloads from their sites. So planners have no incentive to even find out if they can reduce the size (or number) of files of the reports they offer for download.
This particular environmental report was paid for by the hopeful developers who want to build homes and other buildings in the area. As of a year ago, they had already spent $13 million on this report; I imagine about 90 percent of it was necessary only to meet bureaucratic legal requirements.
It is possible that the files were provided to the city by the developers or their consultants, and the city just posted them. Still, the city could have compressed and combined the documents or asked the developers to do it. If democracy worked the way they teach it in high school civics classes, they would have done so. But that is just another fantasy.
Haha…170 MBs without even a warning…that is just cruel. It is not just that they don’t care if people can access the info or not, it is also that many planners don’t even attempt to learn even the simplest forms of new technology, which to me is the bigger problem here.
I think it’s deliberate…. transit agencies will fill their reports with bland verbiage in an attempt to overwhelm opponents. People who try to find out about the system will figure “they have to be right, look at how much they wrote on it”. 😉
it is also that many planners don’t even attempt to learn even the simplest forms of new technology,
Evidence please.
Thank you in advance from an ArcView, InDesign, Photoshop, SQL, FrontPage, Access, HTML user.
DS
Conspiracy theorists might argue that planners are trying to put up barriers to public involvement. I think the answer is more prosaic: they don’t care. You want to go to the library to review our 1,500 pages of documents? Go ahead. You want to pay Kinkos $240 to print out all three volumes? Help yourself. You want to take the time to download the files and review them on your screen? Have at it. You want to make some comments on the plan? Whatever. Do you expect your comments to make a difference? Well, we all have our fantasies.
Randal, you don’t offer solutions. One solution could be that the city can provide the documents to anyone who asks for them. Maybe you can suggest that to the municipality. Maybe you can suggest a tax-raising referendum to make your great ideas happen.
Here’s a real idea you can make happen: call up the Planning Director and ask them to tell their staff to compress their .jpgs and hyperlinks in Wurd before they convert to .pdf . Offer your expertise.
That would actually be doing something other than complaining and finding something to conflate.
DS
I think Randal is on to something when he says it is a lack of caring, except I would characterize it as being both beaten down. As an employee of the federal government – the Forest Service (gasp) – I can tell you that it takes a herculean effort to keep up the “caring”. Some documents become large as a defensive tactic against appeals and complaints. Another reason for the size could be that perhaps only 1 person in the organization has access to post a document, and that person is obstinate, not open to suggestions and also impossible to fire. Government employees also become embedded in their own world and neglect to get a reality check outside of it. In some cases we are not “allowed” to preview a document with those outside of the system for fear of… what, I am not certain.
The politicization of the FS and the f*cked-upedness has been well documented in two** excellent books. Politicians have ruined the FS. I know a couple of combat biologists in the FS and they almost do it out of spite. Your work matters even if your boss is a political appointee with an IQ of 92. Fuggem.
DS
** http://tinyurl.com/2ql3u8