You're painting me into a corner and I'm not gonna let you get away with that. It's a basic disagreement when you ignore half my arguments and assume I'm an idiot, yes.

What I'm apparently failing to explain is that I want more consideration, not less. I don't want to paradigm shift my way to glory, I want people to stop and think about the values and methods they pick. I want them to think about how they are used in policy and what that means for the people that are actually affected.

I.

Don't.

Want.

To.

Overthrow.

The.

Numbers.

I want them to be better. I want the underlying assumptions, biases and structural issues unearthed and discussed. I want to know in which context they work and in which context they don't. I tried to tell you that in half a dozen ways but you talk to me like it didn't even register.

And no, I'm not saying that we must hold people's hands and talk about their feelings instead. I don't know where I implied that. There is a middle ground, there are interesting things to learn from subjective and context-specific research.

I tried to make people think about the relation between data and the capital-T Truth in geography.

With the stakes so high, we need to keep asking critical questions

I don't see it as a relational vs absolute cartographic battle. Instead I think it's more about capturing our relational, contextual meanings.

representing how the affected people actually experience the problem and what kind of solution they want (i.e. less of it). Isn't that the purpose of those measures in the first place?

That process I supposedly don't know shit about?

We use the measurements we use because they are the best the experts in the field have been able to come up with, to defend, to implement, to legislate and to otherwise put into practice.

It is not perfect. That's not my luminary genius insight but professor after professor after professor has taught me. The point of doing research in this field is to analyse, explain and improve this process, not to blindly trust it because there's been a lot of work that has gone into calculating travel time savings in intermodal activity based models so let's blindly trust the guys that have been pushing buttons in VISSIM for the last few years.

And jesus fucking christ of course I know qualitative measures change. That's the fucking point. People change, and some of those changes we need to do something about and some of those we don't. It is too easy to dismiss anything qualitative out of hand, simply because you can't jam it in a database or show it on a map. I don't disdain quantitative analysis. But they are not the be-all-end-all in the above process, especially where people are involved. They are not the only thing that matters, and yes, you are an arrogant engineer if you ignore complexity, context and subjectivity, and want to stick to your ever-lasting quantitative measures.

Thanks for getting me all worked up this Sunday morning. Really needed that.