“People may describe the probability of a given event with the same verbal label and conclude on that basis that they agree; however, since each person may implicitly attach different probability ranges to the verbal label, their agreement may be illusory.” (p. 117)

The sense of outrage voiced above seems consistently absent from A2′s public discourse, causing me to experience distressing cognitive dissonance. (And perhaps perpetuating government that is not very efficient, accountable or responsive.)

Given the available information provided so voluminously, literately and with illustrations of the embarrassing mismanagement of our highly compensated and pensioned government leaders, yes heads should roll. People should be held accountable.

That is what the founding fathers envisioned when they said an informed citizenry is essential to the working of a democracy… that upon hearing of these boondoggles the citizenry would logically take action demanding better of those responsible, or replacing them at the voting booth.

This element of the electorate that seeks performance from its officials and value for its tax dollar seems oddly absent in Ann Arbor, hence the cognitive dissonance.

I usually use plain old small words but am trying to tailor my comment to the tastes of the big word gang that hangs here. I was once mistaken for a Fox news aficionado.

Also coincidentally, The Automatic Earth just posted this piece on it: [link].

I don’t believe that the complex arguments in interpreting the 97-page survey report (which actually did quite a bit of analysis) can be made in a brief comment. So there could be quite a lot of discussion and analysis, but not here. However, I also don’t believe that this is resolvable by the simple parametric analysis you have provided, and I reject your conclusions. I’ll leave it to others to argue that. The main point I will make is that to consider the local effect (at the township level), which is where the opt-out decisions were being made, it is necessary to look at the data in a more granular way.

The overall supportive percentage you quote is with Ann Arbor included. But because Ann Arbor was generally much more supportive, those numbers swamped the lesser population from “out-county”. Yet the failure of the scheme was because of not taking township local concerns into account, since that is what the opt-out decision relied on. As I have mentioned in several posts, township residents and their representatives see even a 0.5 mill as a big tax decision. There is a different behavioral set in considerations for a township board than a countywide vote.

To quote from the survey (p. 41), “The relationship between the location of the respondent’s residence and a transit issue vote shows clearly that the primary support for a transit service expansion issue is urban, and the primary opposition, rural and small city. For example, of the Ann Arbor respondents 24% say they would “definitely vote for” the issue but in Chelsea and the western townships only half as many, 12%, said they definitely support it. Other areas fall in between those extremes.”

Separately, as the proponents of the countywide transit plan point out, most of the county’s population resides in the urban core. That area is already served by AATA. Receiving only 54% support when 2/3 of the County population already receives transit service is pretty dismal.

More important than the slight majority support in early polls about a millage is the failure to inquire into the scope of disinterest by the governing bodies who would have first crack at rejecting the plan.