Alright. I don't think we disagree as much as you make it seem (but we do disagree). Sorry if I came off condescending, that was not my intent. I cut some corners and I shouldn't have. But then I'd also prefer you don't conflate my opinions with those of the author.

I did not mention European airports as if they're doing things better than US ones, I mentioned them because that's just what I know so you can relate your audio engineering knowledge to it. I didn't know if Lden /Leq was common over there. Here, most residential noise pollution policy is based on calculating peak dBA levels for building façades. I genuinely thought that was much more widespread because that's what I was told at some point and because I vaguely recall us discussing LAX decibel contours before. Lden and Leq are used less often, in part because they are more difficult to model.

So I brought it up as an example of a real world problem (noise pollution) that we have (relatively) easy to measure and understand numbers for. And even the simple decibel measure does a reasonably good job at 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?

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. You're acting as if someone pulled this shit out of his ass one day and we all just sort of went along because we're fucking idiots who don't know better and it's offensive.

That's a good way to summarize the process and I agree with this. But I also think that the planning practice is often a far cry from what experts think is best, or what the actual people affected think or want. With my consultancy gig, more than a few decisions boiled down to "just do whatever is cheapest that doesn't violate the norms / zoning laws". And thus the plan becomes to put a road somewhere because it's not disallowed, not necessarily because it is the best thing to do.

The purpose of precision data collection is to purge any future conflict of all the human contextual relativist bullshit that causes people to scalp each other over whose trees they are to pick.

Here's where I think we start to seriously disagree. The set of things that you might want to make policy about and the set of things that you can measure just don't overlap fully. So yes, you can totally measure the coordinates that make up your property with millimeter precision.

You can totally use numbers to capture aspects of a problem, but that doesn't mean you can always get the full picture with numbers. And it gets harder when those numbers are dumbed down because pragmatism and politics comes into play. My opinion is that complex urban issues, most notably the ones that involve people, usually can't be properly reduced to numbers.

Data is data. [...] Don't insist that absolutes need to be relatives because they hurt your feelings or some shit.

So you sound to me like yet another arrogant engineer who thinks their numbers are always a good enough substitute for the truth. 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. But throwing all qualitative methods in the bin because your quantitative approach is 'settled fucking shit' ignores all human aspects of urban planning.

There is a middle ground, there are interesting things to learn from subjective and context-specific research. In my case it is the realization that the function of roads is to get people to places they want to go in a reasonable amount of time. So I am exploring more subjective accessibility measures that can adapt to different contexts and needs based on consensus.

Do you think urban issues (and the data picked to represent them) are free from context, history, culture and subjectivity? Because that is what an empirical reduction implies. I think it's exactly that "contextual relativist bullshit" by people that makes urban planning human. Scientific rationalism in urban planning has been attempted extensively; it was exactly what Jane Jacobs was critiquing. If urban planning was an empirics-based science we would be so much closer to the perfect city by now. (Sam Altman should do some more reading if you ask me.)