The Meadowlands Hilton...

...and the Ruination of My Notifications

It all started with a simple picture. A sign in a unnamed hotel’s lobby placed there by the New Jersey State Police. It warned guests to not try to walk across the elevated eight-lane highway to get to the Taylor Swift concert.

Now, that isn’t the kind of thing that should require a sign in my opinion; but in a country where people need to be warned that hot coffee is, in fact, hot, and Tide Pods are not a snack food, well, I suppose it does.

The person who posted it included a comment reading “lol imagine designing an enormous public destination so it is illegal and dangerous to walk to.”

Now, it is at this point that I should disclose that I have a personal pet peeve which very much shaped the rest of how this story played out and continues to play out in my mentions over on Twitter.

I find Transit Twitter to be tedious AF.

Yes, Transit Twitter is actually a thing. There is a whole population on Twitter which posts specifically about transit issues and specifically, the ways in which our entire transportation infrastructure sucks and should be pretty close to wholly different. Some of the accounts are urban or transportation planners. Some work in related fields or are people who just have a personal passion for the topic - often due to its relation to other issues like walkability, sustainability, the green movement, etc..

Now, let me state unequivocally right up front: they are right. Their complaint, they are very much right about it. They are absolutely correct in their overall indictment of our long-running national disposition toward transportation which prioritizes car travel over every other option.

They are also right about the problems caused by the infrastructure built, neglected, or not built as a result.

And they are entirely correct that we, as a country, maintain so myopic and so complete a preference for point-to-point driving, we have built a transportation grid which often makes it impossible to travel any other way.

So, Transit Twitter and I… we are entirely aligned on the problems.

Where things go off the rails (ugh, I’m sorry. That was terrible.) is in the discussion about those problems and the potential solutions.

Take the post at the root of this: it contained no details. It just showed a sign saying people shouldn’t walk across a highway and concluded that the culprit was the planners who designed the venue. Clearly they failed to accommodate alternatives to car travel like pedestrian walkways and bicycle lanes! That would never happen in Europe!

If the poster wasn’t on Twitter and was just having a regular conversation, that leap from picture to conclusion might just be a case of “jumping to conclusions.”

On social media though – whether it was intentional or not - it has an effect called ‘preemptive framing’.

By telling readers what something means before they consider it, the poster prepares them to interpret what comes next in the way the author has or wants them to – whether that is an accurate interpretation or not.

Separately, as we all know, confirmation bias is a thing that exists. People see what they expect to see… and what they expect to see are things that line up with their preexisting opinions and views. People expect to see things that prove them right.

Combine that technique – preemptive framing – with that bias - confirmation bias - and you have a really effective way to mine outrage.

1. Serve up a prompt - an image, a video, a quote

2. Introduce it as an example of [something the reader already hates]

Voila! The reader will be halfway to hating [whatever you showed them] before they even know what it is.

It’s a super effective little one-two punch for ginning up outrage and therefore engagement. It works. It often works on me. It probably works on you too. It works.

It isn’t always intentional. It’s always effective. And that is why Twitter is practically built on preemptive framing at this point. The great majority of quote-tweets, regardless of topic are, to some degree, acts of preemptive framing. That includes mine. And, in my case, that isn’t an accident. I have a point to make. I’m not trying to serve up unframed prompts in the hopes people will independently arrive at my point all on their own without me making it. I’m posting my thought right upfront coupled with the prompt that spurred it.

That’s pretty much how all conveyance of opinion works on Twitter. The opinion appears above the stimulus… and thus frames it before it has been read.

Transit Twitter, for whatever reason, seems to run on that little preemptive framing-confirmation bias couplet more than most niche subject matters that cross my feed.

I say “for whatever reason” as if I don’t know what it is. I do. Some of the accounts in that space use it as their stock and trade. Not many. Not most. But because of how effective it is at mining for engagement, the ones that do just so happen to be the ones I see most. I don’t see the wonky, cerebral subject matter expert weighing in on light rail cost-benefits as an alternative to commuter buses in dense metros. I get the guy who posts a side-by-side of a crowded café in the chic Left Bank of Paris vs. a drive-thru stripmall Starbucks in rural Ohio with a caption about how the rest of the world has walkable cities.

And those tweets… the ones with totally nonsensical comparisons or harebrained, cherrypicked “examples” that are supposed to be representative of legitimate grievances… they do GREAT!

Clicks. Likes. Retweets. They just kill it on the engagement front.

And they don’t just get people to like and share; they mobilize people to defend them and fight all comers. People jump right on the confirmation bias bus and will then fight to the death over why that post is, in fact, entirely representative of how [something here] differs from [some unrelated and not remotely analogous thing somewhere else] or proves the author’s point.

That rankles the crap out of me. It shouldn’t. It does.

The reason is because they not only don’t move us toward progress; they move us farther from it.

When incurious simpletons get on their outrage ponies to rant about how [a disingenuous or false rage trigger] is representative of [a real world issue], they convince absolutely no one that they are right. They do, however, convince even a lot of reasonable people that they are immature lightweights incapable of grasping actual grownup issues… and that hurts their own cause and gets in the way of everyone else trying to make actual progress.

The hotel in the tweet this post is about?

It’s the Meadowlands Hilton. Before it was a Hilton, it was a Sheraton. It was built in the late ‘80s as part of one of the first – and last – commercial developments in that area of the Meadowlands.

It was one of the first because much of the area was literally a dump. A landfill. Seen as valueless land. It was one of the last because we eventually got our heads out of our asses and put an end to willfully destroying sensitive wetlands to make way for things like landfills and Hiltons.

The hotel sits on a little island of land smack in the middle of highway arteries serving over a million people a day. It is about the same distance away from MetLife Stadium (where Taylor Swift was playing this weekend) as Hoboken, New Jersey is from Midtown Manhattan.

The hotel runs a free shuttle to a nearby transfer station with a dedicated train running right to the stadium complex. Approximately 0% of the guests will be availing themselves of that shuttle because 1) again, the hotel is in the middle of a junction of highways isolated from everything and therefore serves guests who drove there; and 2) people who can fork over $350 a night for a hotel and another $400 per ticket for a concert probably aren’t going to mind the $25 Uber.

There are an endless array of area hotels more convenient to mass transit to the stadium. That hotel is literally the only one that is off in its own little private Idaho.

The premise of the tweet at the root of this was that developers had planned a stadium complex so poorly, it is illegal to walk there. Yeah, that’s not remotely close. The Meadowlands was built a decade before the Hilton. The Meadowlands opened in the mid-1970s. The Hilton went up in the late 1980s. The planners hadn’t built a skybridge to its eventual location because the only thing there at the time was a no-tell motel called the Peter Pan which charged by the hour and had a habit of getting itself regularly robbed at gunpoint.

The planners did, however, plan and build accessibility to the complex via bus, rail, shuttle, and car… and per the photo below, unless concertgoers sometimes travel to concerts via lengthy swims across wide river basins like that of the Hackensack River, those means of access seem fairly comprehensive.

The Meadowlands are in… meadowlands. It’s right there in the name. There ain’t no foot traffic.

So, the offending tweet… it was stupid. There was no planning failure in not building a dedicated pedestrian bridge for one remote hotel which came much later. There is no social flaw in expecting the Hilton – which will gross over $1 million this weekend on a sold-out hotel at $300+ per night – to run a shuttle for its guests.

A mature, rational adult could probably reasonably deduce that the Meadowlands Hilton telling guests to not walk across major highways is not actually an example of our vast national failure to solve big, expensive transit problems. Walking across highways is generally bad even in Europe… and a hotel running a shuttle to a nearby attraction is what they often do in Europe too. A mature, rational adult might be able to process all that.

Walking on highways: bad. Venues sometimes not walkable from hotels: normal.

Twitter is not a place for mature, rational adult thought though. It’s a place where people who enjoy servicing their feelings go fishing for outrage.

It’s a tidy little outrage factory where people post things specifically designed to manufacture outrage – because it works.

It works.

It gets shallow thinkers to click and like and share and reply.

It gets them to fill my notifications with an ennnnnnnndless volume of absolutely idiotic comments about The Freaking Meadowlands Hilton. And. A. Taylor. Swift. Concert.

And that absolutely automatic avalanche of dumb comments after debunking nonsense posts… it’s what happens when people are successfully manipulated using preemptive framing and confirmation bias. They buy the framing hook, line, and sinker… and then they mount up and rage about the terrible terribleness of [something they literally know nothing whatsoever about.]

I have to tell you, even as a guy who vehemently agrees on the issues at the heart of the original post, the insufferable people mobilized by outrage bait make it virtually impossible to come away thinking anything other than that they are tantruming children who cannot be reasonably engaged in adult topics.

Absolutely no progress results from things like faux outrage over the Meadowlands Hilton not having a a dedicated footbridge the width of the Hudson River to whisk people to Taylor Swift concerts.

That doesn’t help. It actually gets in the way.

And the people who mine that outrage… the ones who gin it up… capitalize on it… make money from it… they don’t care one little bit.

Because they aren’t in this to make progress.

They’re in it to benefit from people’s anger over there not being any.

And all the while, their outrage baiting makes sure that will continue to be the case.

And that is why dumb little posts which misrepresent dumb little things as examples of real problems irritate the shit out of me.

That post that led to this post?

It had almost 2 million views within 12 hours.

Rage farming works.

For you and I and everyone else who actually wants to accomplish things rather than just fap on Twitter, not so much.