Cara Seiderman - Episode #93

Beginning at [00:02:56]

John: Cara, it's so wonderful to reconnect with you here today. Welcome to the active towns podcast.

Cara: Thank you, John.
I'm so excited to be here.

John: To get us started, I'm going to ask you the hardest question first. Just tell us a little bit about yourself.

Cara: I am currently transportation program manager with the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I run the bicycle and pedestrian mobility program.
When I started doing that some number of years ago, it was me, myself and I, and now we have a much more integrated program where a lot of people work in a lot of different ways on trying to make the city more walking and biking friendly. And so it's much more of a collaborative effort with my peers here and yeah, I've been here for quite a number of years now. I didn't quite expect to do that, but there's always more to do. And it's a place where we actually can make things happen. So there's always exciting stuff that is on the horizon.

John: Right now. So the city is right around what, 120,000 people?

Cara: That's right. Yep. And we actually have even more people who work here. And what's also pretty interesting is that the city, is almost at its peak population. And the peak population actually was like back in the 1950s, this used to be a big manufacturing city, which a lot of people aren't aware of, but there are things, everything.

Necco wafers to Nabisco cookies, to, Devonport sofas. And there's was a lot of manufacturing here and it was a very dense city. and then manufacturing started to leave and the population went down and now we have manufacturing in a different way in the past. Oh, 20 or so years, the biotech industry has just really expanded.

And this is one of the centers internationally for biotech the working population has actually increased as well as high-tech. which has been great for the vibrancy of the city. And I think one of the things that has been both a challenge and an opportunity is to figure out how can we have more and more people working here without increasing the amount of traffic.

And so at the same time we've been increasing the number of people who've worked here. We've been reducing the amount of space available for people to drive and really promoting and forcing people to take more sustainable modes of transportation. That's obviously in transit as well as biking and walking, the city has always had a high percentage of people walking.
We have people who live here and work here. Connected to the universities. We have MIT and Harvard and Leslie and some other smaller institutions. And so that has actually been one of the highest walk to work, the things that we measure, but just as a pedestrian oriented city it's an old city we've been around for some hundreds of years. And so the bones of the city are much more dense and compact than a lot of American cities, which is

John: Really fabulous. To hear that. So getting back to that peak population from the 1950s, and again, the character was much different in terms of the manufacturing nature.
I remember riding my bike around some of the old factory areas and of course those are being converted into other uses now most of them, yeah. Density. Wow. I just looked up your density. It's estimated it's probably what, around 19 or 20,000 per square mile.

That's a really dense city from a north American standpoint.

Cara: Yeah, it is. And we're a small city. It's only about six plus square miles. But we are. bigger in our influence at an era, the way we perceive ourselves and being part of the Metro Boston area is both makes it interesting.

It also makes it a little bit challenging and we don't do anything alone. We have to be thinking about ourselves is what does it mean to be in the greater Boston metropolitan region? And so I think we've been doing a great job particularly recently working with our neighboring cities and towns.

One of the things that I've really enjoyed is working on the bike share system, which I think is one of the most. Popular things that we've ever done. And it's also one of the most successful bikes, your systems, I would say, even internationally. And that's only worked because we've been able to do it in cooperation with all of the different cities and towns.

And it also means that some things we are unable to do on our own. So even though we may say no more cars, if the outer cities and towns are not making any changes and there's not more public transportation, we can't really have influence and that way,

John: Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that too. And I guess I didn't realize, but yeah, So the bike share program, it's the blue bikes, right? How many cities are participating in that?

Cara: So we are right now we're up to 11 communities and it started out with just four Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, and Brookline.

And it was that way for a number of years and then Everett joined in. And then this last year we've expanded to include Arlington Watertown, Chelsea Revere Newton, and as a satellite it's Salem, Massachusetts, which is much further away, that'd be quite a ride, but they're off on their own, but they really wanted to join in because of the fact that we've been so successful.

Other. Share systems have been tried. They tried a dockless bike share system, some of the communities and just was not viable, but the bike share has I'm getting into the weeds right away, but it's been one of the most enjoyable things for me to see how much of a difference it's made for people who want to bike sometimes, or may not be able to either have their own bikes or may not have it near their work or their own.

And it's just continually grown over the course of the 10 years now that has been in place. I'll attest to the fact that they're fun too, because when I was there visiting with you in 2019 I basically paid for. A month membership for the multiple days that I was there that actually made a better deal.

John: And I just needed to make sure that I canceled my membership at the end of the month, because it was like, you're signing up for this subscription. And then it was like, yeah. Cause I spent multiple days there and I was on the bike all the time. Yeah. Cause you know, me I'm riding and I'm filming, I'm riding and I'm filming.

So that's what I was doing. And yeah, it was a kick in the pants now on the system because I'm seeing nationally and even internationally, a lot of the bike share systems are trying to get upgraded into electric assist. Is that happening with the blue bikes as well?

Cara: It's something that we've been talking about.

It's been a challenge here in Massachusetts because the legislature has not passed a law that actually states where he bikes fit in the Road system

John: even just electric assist. Wow.

Cara: No, it's been lingering in the legislature for years now, so you'll have to go talk to them about why they haven't moved on it.

It's not like people are protesting it. It's just been, it hasn't been in the meantime, I would say that our biggest challenge is just being able to get enough stations out there because the demand is it's insane. People are insatiable. We just, we cannot create enough docs and stations for the demand that's out there.

And we were seeing it. Exponentially. And then during the pandemic people continue to use it. They seem to use it for different kinds of trips because people were not going in for their jobs, but people were using it for the more local trips. Maybe they'd go to the grocery store get out of the house, but also more recreational trips because recreational trips weren't really a high percentage of the use for those bikes was much more transportation practical trips.

But the reason that we think that they were recreational is because they were, you can watch bikes be where they are docked from and to, and they were people who were taking round trips. So we were inferring that and just the number of trips continues to be very high. And we did a number of other things during the pandemic we had free memberships for healthcare workers during the height of the early pandemic in 2020. And then we expanded to other essential workers. And in addition to just making bikes available to everybody, I think that one of the things that is most valuable about the bike share is that we can in fact provide extremely affordable, low cost transportation to anybody.

We have an income eligible program where people can have extremely low cost access to the system. And there is no less expensive form of transportation. And it really meets one of our goals of reducing barriers to people for enabling them to bike. But in general, giving them transportation that is needed.

John: Yeah. So incredibly effective, efficient and affordable, as you mentioned, probably the least expensive form of transportation is, our own two feet. But then the bike is there to really compete. And that's absolutely true. So let's dive in a little bit about the structure of your department and where you're at.

So are, are you part of a department of transportation or is the city big enough to have a department of transportation or what's the structure like?

Cara: Yeah, so I said in the planning department, which is called the community development department and I'm in a division called environmental and transportation planning, which was specifically created in acknowledgement of the connection between environmental planning and transportation planning.

And we want to promote more sustainable transportation. It, those two things go together and there is a separate department that's called traffic parking and transportation, and they are more of the traditional, like transportation. They are, the traffic engineers and they do street design and manage the signals and do all the markings of paintings.

Then we separately have a department of public works. That does what a DPW normally does. I would say that one of the things that got put in place very early on in when I was working here, like almost 30 years ago was. Much more inter departmental collaboration so that we could talk amongst ourselves and together work to achieve the policies and goals of the city.

So we have regular coordination meetings. Some of them even have additional other departments. The water department might come in or the health department and some of them are much more technical, and then there's another one, but we meet with this zoning and development team and transportation.

So there's a lot of coordination that goes on and because we're a smaller city, everybody knows who everybody else is and we can do this. So even though we are technically in these different departments, we've tried to avoid siloing to the greatest extent possible. I would say that's this sort of integration and coordination is one of the reasons why we have been able to achieve some of the successes so that we take opportunities to do things together. For example if there's a development project we look at an opportunity to redo a streetscape or if there's a water main that gets broken. We also look at that opportunity and we're also looking at other opportunities to fix the sidewalk or add bicycle facilities or plant trees and to try to do this and it's, it makes it more efficient.
And it also the opportunistic grabbing these opportunities means that we don't have to just wait for. A bigger project all the time that we were just like, oh, this is happening. Let's do it right. Sometimes it can get people a little bit like, oh, you're doing a little piecemeal, you're doing a little bit here and a little bit there.

It's yeah. But if we didn't do that, then it would take even longer to get things done. So at the beginning, when we were really trying to do much more of say the bike network, it did look a little like haphazard. Now we're starting to see things be connected.

John: Yeah. So with that in mind I reached out to you a month or so ago to congratulate you all on revamping the bicycle plan.
Talk a little bit about that process and what this document really is for you.

Cara: we had a bike plan that we Published in 2015, but I would say I would actually back it up a little bit. The bicycle program has been in place since the early 1990s that long.
And there has been a plan of sorts. That was an internal plan that was documenting what we were doing for a long time. It didn't actually. Get published in a formal way. And I remember somebody, I don't even remember who it was, but they were laughing at us saying other people have these beautiful plans that sit on the shelves, but they don't actually implement anything, but you're the opposite.

Like you do a lot of implementation, but you don't really have a plan. But then we decided, okay, we really need to pull everything together. some of it was much more like technical specifications and things that, we knew that we were doing, but other things were related to us, really wanting to open it up and get feedback from the broader population and to also have a vision so that we could say, okay, we are going to connect all of these things, and this is how we're going to make the entire city be available and accessible to anybody who wants to bike.

At the time that we did that, We were making a little bit of assumptions and we said to ourselves, okay, we're going to try this out. And we will update the plans. We'll see how it goes. And we're going to update the plan. And of course, five years goes by like this. And all of a sudden we're like, okay, we're going to update the plan.

And then anytime a whole slew of things also happened between 2015 and 2020 for us, which included the more formal adoption of complete streets, policy, vision, zero policy, and then something called the cycling safety ordinance, which basically codified into the local legislative body that we were going to implement separated bike lanes, following the bike plan, which hadn't been the original intent of the plan that laid out vision of what the network was going to be.
And this was like, okay, now we're going to make you do what you said you were going to do. So then we thought, okay well, in that context, we have to really think did we fully understand what the ramifications are going to be? And have we fully met the goals of what it would be to be a fully bikeable city?

John: Well, And that's, it's interesting because that change or that development, that evolution that took place from 2015 through 2020 is similar to what we've seen across north America, because really. And it's right here in, in sort of an outline of what this bike plan says, and I'll read it here.
It says it lays out a vision for where we, the city want to be with a guiding principles to enable people of all ages, abilities, and identities to bike safely and comfortably throughout Cambridge. The thing that really changed so much over the past five years over the past 10 years, for sure is this concept of protected and separated facilities in all ages and abilities approach to doing these things.
So on those streets where motor vehicle speeds are higher. In other words, they are at levels that would be considered fatal lethal. Then you should have separated and protected facilities. So it really changed the game a lot. And a good friend of mine, I think you know, him as well Preston, Tyree used to be with the league of American bicyclists as one of the.
The coach trainers and the key guys that did the league certified instructor training talk about this evolution of shifting from the mindset of, yeah just a bike lane is fine, or just take a lane the vehicular cycle kind of movement versus where we are today, which is, yeah.
If we really want to make big change, if we really want to get the huge numbers of people feeling comfortable riding, then we have to be able to embrace facilities that are appropriate networks that are appropriate for all ages and abilities.

Cara: That's great. And thank you for quoting the plan.
I want to go in two directions following up on that maybe we can go in one and then we can go back to the other which is I do want to hit on this thing about. Edition of this terminology of identities to add onto all ages and abilities. So maybe we can get back to that, but what I was going to say about the physical network and how you really need to create an infrastructure and a system that, works, it's definitely a necessary condition to really enabling anybody who wants to bike.

So I had lived and worked in Denmark before I came here and I knew that was what was necessary. And when I came here and we were starting to look at street design and I was like why don't we do this? And everybody looked at me like I had three heads. Some people were like, that sounds like a good idea, but the world was not yet ready for it.

And that includes the advocacy world, right? it was hard for me because I knew that was the right thing to do, but I had to accept that if we push the envelope too far, too fast, that it might actually end up being worse. So it took a while for us to actually implement what we really, what is really needed and what now is much more recognized as really needed this separation.

John: And now it's known as best

Cara: practice of course, that it was best practice then to, but nobody recognized it, but I will give credit and brag that we actually had the first true cycle tracks, fully designed correctly designed separated bike facility in the country on Vassar street, which I think we wrote on.

And it was it was MIT who came to us and said, we want to construct this. And I think that the fact that it was going through their campus as opposed to some other parts of the city the fact that they wanted to pay for it. And the fact that they were like, willing to get some.
traffic engineers on board made it feasible for it to happen. And we have actually had to go back and fix like one of the intersections because the intersection was not properly designed, which is a whole other story. But once that was in place, people like, oh yeah, that's a great idea. I'm like, oh yeah, that's a great idea.

John: Proof of concept.

Cara: Exactly. And of course, so now we've been trying to implement that more and more. The other thing that happened is that for a long time we thought that we had to fully reconstruct these streets. So we have some excellent examples. We have Vasser street, we have Western avenue, which you also rode on there's some additional streets that are full build.

And what I mean full build, this is their grade separated. They have nice landscaping on the side. they're curbed but they require more resources and time to, implement and. We started to explore and now are really fully invested in doing the more quick build projects.

And when we mean quick builds, we mean that we're just going to put some posts up we're going to, or we do protection using parked cars and we use paint and we use signs. But we don't necessarily use construction. And we started a little slowly with that, but now there was an amendment or a cycling safety ordinance that said, okay, we want you to do this really fast so that you actually have, like within five years, like most of the city is built out.

It's definitely ambitious. I think that it's easier said than done too. Even if it's quick build, it can't happen as quickly as some people would like it to happen. But it does mean that we're getting many more. Street's done then if we were just waiting for construction to implement all of the separated facilities.

John: Yeah. and just getting something on the ground that feels authentically safer than what it was before helps do what that MIT facility did. It was a proof of concept. It wasn't that it was, it blue too?.

Cara: Yeah well, the where we now use green, we used blue

John: yeah.
So, That's like Copenhagen, it's blue,

Cara: right? That's where it came from. And I have somewhere in my office, which I can pull out is I actually have a piece of blue asphalt because we ended up using thermoplastic. But in, in Copenhagen where I have another home, I'm there all the time and I'm always asking them what they did.

And they said we actually. Embedded blue into the asphalt. And I tried to have that done here. I called up some manufacturers and they were like we could do it, but like we wouldn't do it for that small amount. then of course, then ASHTO said no, you can't do blue green.
So I was just as well.

John: here in Austin, Texas we don't even follow that. So we are using the inspiration of the Dutch. And so our cycle tracks and our bike lanes are frequently in the red asphalt, similar to the Dutch model.

And then they'll use, green at the conflict zones across the intersections to get you through there. But then the actual cycle tracks are frequently when possible, when it's a big build. When it's, when you're not talking about quick build stuff, when it's a, big build, they'll actually have the pigment embedded into the concrete or the asphalt.
And that's exactly what the Dutch do.

Cara: That's right. I should just clarify. We always, we didn't have the full blue. We just had that blue with it at the conflict zone. So now we are using green. Yeah, but you still see photos of that, the blue. So that's like in people's minds, they're like, oh, use blue.
It's yeah. Ambassador street, which is there's there's a photo that has been reproduced. Like I say, I still see it in some places. That's actually a picture of my husband. My son he's like pushing the stroller cause it's a picture I took.

John: I think there was a little bit left in 2019 because that showed up on the videos.
So the video, I keep re referencing folks that are listening to this be sure to head over to the active towns, YouTube channel. There's a really sweet little video that I did. Where I actually had the opportunity to tag along with the NACTO leadership cohort group and a few members of the city staff from I think the parking and transportation group were leading us on a tour.
So it's a lot of fun. You had a chance to see that just recently, what were your thoughts of looking back to 2019?

Cara: It was really enjoyable to watch that because the way that you filmed that it made it look like every street had a separate bike facility we're working on it. We really are.

I think one of the things you asked me is what have you done since? And so it is really pretty exciting. So some of our sort of vision and plans that we had been working on for so long are starting to really come to fruition. Particularly the streets that are part of the.

Implementation related to the larger development projects. And it is one of the things that I think we've been very fortunate and fortunate to have development projects that can implement these things and successful at getting it to happen. And this is a lot in areas that are not the core when people think of like Harvard square necessarily it's the older manufacturing areas that are now all this high tech and biotech or parts of the city that are like new developments.

And they have to rebuild the streets anyway. So we're like, okay, you're going to put in these streets with separated bike facilities are going to be designed. Well, You're going to put in an addition where we have other things like green infrastructure and landscaping and trees and things like that as well.
And. A lot of the developers are seeing that it's not really an onus to do it because they are seeing they have these beautiful streetscapes right in front of their buildings. And it helps to to draw in talent, so to speak this is a place where they want the sort of the most the best workers that they can possibly get

John: attracting and retaining the best and brightest.

Cara: exactly. And that's what they want. They're like, oh, this is great. I can actually bike to work or I can have a I can get to blue bikes and It's just been a win-win and now we're starting to see some of these larger projects actually the build out is starting to happen so that things are starting to connect.

And so all like all around the Eastern part of the city, you can do some of your trips on full separation. That might be a piece that's like a a more of a quick build and they might be a little piece. That's actually a path. But if you come back here, I can take you on a little trip where we actually almost never hit any street.

That's not comfortable. I hasten to say, we have not hit the entire city. People who live here oh, but you haven't done this street that street. That's true, but yeah we're working on it. We're getting there. I will also say that going back to this whole thing about partnerships, so for the developers, that's a little bit of a forced partnership, but it's a win-win so it's not really a difficult discussion to have, we have MIT also implementing things of their own volition.

And then recently Harvard implemented a quick build, but with also some bits of construction to improve a connection from the river to the main part of their campus, because they just opened up a new engineering school. That's on the other side of the river, technically in Boston, but they wanted to have a really good connection for people.

For their students and faculty and staff. And so they came to us and said, Hey, we have this idea. Can we do it? And we're like, oh, twist their arms. And now it's in place. And it's amazing how many people are using it. So I would say again, we're really fortunate that we have partners who are interested in doing that and helping to make things happen in the city.

John: Yeah. And you had mentioned earlier some of the other neighboring communities that are there obviously Boston across the other side of the river, but then you have a cluster of other communities that it seemed like to me back in 2019 this vibe was starting to spread to some of the others.

Cara: Oh, for sure. Yeah. Particularly Somerville, I would say now has like as high percentage of bike commuters as we do that, we're kind of like rivaling, who's got the highest. And a lot of the people who come through our streets are coming from Somerville either to work in Cambridge or in Boston.
And I would say we're definitely working with them. And they've done a fabulous job of catching up. They were a little later to start things, but now they've been just implementing things in a very fast pace and they also lobbied very hard to help to make a connection for the Somerville community path, but it connects Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, and out to the Minute Man bikeway, which then goes out further west.

And there's an extension of our green line the train system, the MBTA system, there's a green line extension and they really worked hard to make sure that the bike path that was implemented alongside this. So if you come next year in 2022, I think we'll actually be able to travel on it. And it is amazing connection and it is really going to be a game changer and enabling people to.
Bike fully on an off-road path from all the way from Bedford Lexington, Arlington Somerville, Cambridge, Boston.

John: Wow, fantastic. Yeah. And you mentioned several times people riding for commuting purposes and that sort of work related trip. One of the things that I loved about my time there and I went to a gathering I think.

Professor Peter Furth was speaking in Somerville and what I loved about that experience was just the number of people that I saw and witnessed that were just riding bikes for utilitarian purposes. It's like going to the grocery store in that case we all met at this wonderful brew pub.

And so it's, yeah, I think it was that. And what was great about it is there were obviously Peter was talking, but there were probably 25 30 bikes parked there, including cargo bikes and entire families showing up on bikes. So you mentioned it earlier.

And it's this identity of being able to get out on the bike and live a healthy, active lifestyle, a quality of life and the culture word. I use it all the time and talking about active towns or places that really have activity as part of their DNA. It's a culture of activity, a culture of health that is there.
And so it's really, it was wonderful to like, see that and feel that, and you're absolutely right. Not all the streets are perfect and there's plenty of work to be done probably as long as you want to stick with it and with your career. But there's also some of these other environments.

So what I want to talk about now what do you do on those streets where it's just, you're not going to get a separated facility you know what I'm talking about? It's the Dutch have it the Danes have it in Copenhagen. It's where you have these quote unquote bicycle priority streets where people priority streets, but cars are allowed.

But you need traffic calming. You need to bring the motor vehicle speeds down to non-lethal levels so that they can still fit in that category that we're talking about of all ages and abilities. What's the approach there in Cambridge of dealing with those, because you can't put separated facilities everywhere.

Cara: Again if you look at our network vision we built a vision of trying to make the entire city. Bike-friendly as possible. And we assume that every street is a biking street, right? People should be able to bicycle on every single street. That's always been a premise. But we did prioritize which streets are the ones that are going to get the extra attention based on a system of origins destinations and focusing on streets that connect places of employment, shopping areas, schools, parks and so on our more major streets, we have this goal of greater separation, as you mentioned.

And then we do have something called bicycle priority streets, and we've had actually a traffic calming program for 25 years where we didn't necessarily call them like priority streets, but we try to really work to make the streets safer and more comfortable for everybody by using elements like.
Raised intersections and neck downs and things like that. And we are thinking about being more mindful about reaching more specific goals related to the speeds and the number of vehicles on these bike priority streets. And I would say that's something that we are continuing to work on. Some streets are working well, that way they just naturally have not that much traffic and the speeds are what we want them to be.

And other streets we still need. Do things that are a little bit more assertive we'd have had through the vision zero program and through some changes to the legislature, we reduced the city-wide speed limit to 25. And then we have, we were allowed to have these special speed zones, which is essentially most of the city is now 20 miles an hour.

And so the major streets that you were, we were talking about where we're, where we have the goal of having greater separation are 25, but most of the, more secondary or residential streets are 20 miles an hour. And for some of them, we need to do additional traffic calming or traffic calming if they haven't done that yet.

I think related to other cities, they think that's just impossible, but I just read, and you probably know this, that Paris just announced that their based scaling was going to be 30 kilometers an hour, which is something like around 20 or 19 or

John: 17 ... 17 and change whatever.

And that's a good point. Is that what you're really saying is that. On those faster streets with higher volumes, that's where we're looking at the protected and separated facilities there. And that fits right in line with what we see over in European countries and what they're striving to do because their guideline is that 30 kilometer per hour level.

And. Anything above 30 kilometers per hour, it needs to be protected and separated. So anything basically anything north of 20 miles per hour, they're saying that's where you need to have that. And then when you look at their version, the Dutch has a version of a bicycle priority street, they call it a Fiet Strat that's a 30 kilometer per hour zone.

And then if you also have pedestrians sharing the space more of a woonerf or a true shared street concept I'm looking at your backdrop, your visual that you have on your zoom screen here is a nice Fiet Strat kind of thing. Or probably a woonerf. There you go. Excellent.

Cara: But those are the it's. So woonerfs really for more residential and gågader's are more for more commercials. So this is in Cambridge, We have a couple of shared streets, which there's a couple in Harvard square. We have a few here and there in the city. This is actually, I think you'll see in the yellow sign, it's a recommended speed of 10 miles an hour.

Perfect. What's interesting is that this is actually turned, been turned into primarily a non auto street. It's true. Allows it's basically shut off during certain hours of the day. When we design this, we assume that the businesses would not want it to be shut off. But after it was built, they came to us and they said we really want to put out all these chairs and have more space for outdoor dining and can we just shut it off?

And we're like, okay. and again, a lot of those streets in Denmark than others, they have a delivery hours in the morning and then they'll shut it off. And what are the sort of win-wins for streets like this? And this is particularly helpful for older cities where you don't want.

Accessible or a good quality sidewalks is that you, and you can do it so that you have now have an accessible street. And that was something that happened in this particular street. This is Winthrop street, where we have these little two foot sidewalks that were clearly not accessible.
But that happens in some of our narrow residential streets as well, where we have trees that basically take up the entire sidewalk and there's no way to make an accessible path of travel unless you go into the street. And then if the street is really narrow enough and you have enough trees, okay, let's just make this all a shared street.
So we've done that in a few places and it naturally also tells the story that, okay this is like a pedestrian space not a through space. Yep.

John: It's a people place.

Cara: Yeah. That's the idea.

So I'm going to take this opportunity because I want to make sure I don't forget to say this.
Going back to what I was, going to say about the bike plan. We did a bit of a, I would say, not it wasn't exactly a pivot. It was just bringing some things to the fore and the 2020 plan where we're really focusing on the fact that what you're talking about are people. So there's a lot of discussion and you, and I just talked a lot about the facilities and what they look like and whatnot, which is like, why are you doing that?

The reason that you're doing that is because you want people to be able to have a livable city, healthy city to have choices. And that the focus of what we were trying to think about in the plan is what do people need in order to be able to make those choices in their own lives. And that was one of the things that we all ages and abilities, something.

Adopted a while ago, but the notion is that there are factors beyond just age or physical ability that influence how people perceive the world or how that influences their choices to, to walk or bicycle. And those have to do with cultural identity economic opportunities. And so a lot of what we were thinking about is what are all of the barriers that people might have and how, what can we do to overcome those barriers?

And certainly the physical infrastructure is, again, I'll just repeat it as a necessary condition. You have to have safe and comfortable places for people to be able to choose to bike. But then it's also thinking about, okay, what if you can't afford a bike? What can we do? I mentioned blue bikes, so we can make that easily readily accessible.

But if you don't know how to bike well, we can certainly offer free opportunities. We now have wildly expanded safe routes to school program. Every child in the public schools gets taught not only like the rules of the road, but how to bike on a real bike. And then when they get to middle school, how do you bike in the city?

And then when you get to high school a whole other level of support for biking. We have things that I think we're still learning about. What are the culturally related perceptions that people might have about? Is it acceptable in my culture to bike?

There's other kinds of things you don't think about? Is it cool to bike? We have to recognize this and then think about what can we do to help people make the choices? So it's some of the things other places are doing too. We have workshops for older adults.

And we have workshops for for people who are new to this country who may not speak the language. So all these kinds of things. It was a long story is thinking about more than just the physical infrastructure to enable people to have the full choices that they would like them to have.

John: Yeah. it's something that 2020 also brought into sharp focus not only did we have the pandemic, but then we also had the black lives matters and really bring into focus are all people being identities, all people, all backgrounds, cultural backgrounds, racial backgrounds are, is everybody experiencing the public realm in the same way.

And the truth of the matter is, not everybody does feel comfortable being in the public realm and are not treated necessarily the same way. So it's an imperative as advocates, as organizations, as cities that when we are striving to carry. An all ages and abilities facility and network and city itself.
You're also taking, look at the identities and those cultural backgrounds and racial backgrounds, ethnic backgrounds, all of those things do matter. It reminds me of the story too. In Amsterdam, there's a major program to really help the individuals who are new to the country, new to the city.
Cycling may not have been part of their culture. I don't know how to ride a bike. They may already be an adult. Culturally it may have been seen as something that they that's forbidden or is not I don't want to use the word cool, but it's not desirable to be seen on a bike and so working through and helping them really embracing them and being empathic with the fact that they're coming to this experience with a different context, a different background, and this particular program really focused on helping get women from cultures where it wasn't appropriate or allowed for them to ride a bike and then be able to help get them integrated into the Dutch society in, into Amsterdam.
Beautiful program. Yeah that's a really good sign to me of that

Cara: story. That's exactly right. And that's an excellent example. And the other thing is that we did through a outreach and is definitely an ongoing thing is to really listen. Don't make assumptions about what people need, but listen to them.

And it sounds so obvious, but a lot of times people make assumptions like this is what they need, or this is what needs, and we had started to do this, like in-person engagement. There was a. Researcher who got a grant to do much more community engagement and started doing focus groups and talking to people one-on-one and going to where people are rather than saying, you have to come to my meeting going into gatherings at the schools, for example Some people just like stopping people in the streets or we were doing street teams and then of course the pandemic hit. And so we were much more limited in what we were able to do, but we were able to gather some stories and hope to use that as an example, for continuing conversations to hear what it is and to let people talk about transportation or experiences, or their issues getting around.

And what was interesting is that there's a lot of people who they don't perceive themselves as bicyclists. I'm trying, I really try to think of there's people who happen to bike or people who happen to walk. But aside that they wouldn't consider it or that they don't even do it themselves. It do it sometimes.

It's just, you know what? I take this trip. I use that form of transportation when I do this. And first there's some of them. They might just be going out biking with their kids, but they might do feel fine doing that say on a weekend, but they don't feel comfortable biking at night because it's too dark so they're like, oh, I would never go out at night because it's too dark and that's something like, okay, so I've, so we need to hear that and say, okay, that's something we have to really think about. What does that is that you're afraid of the hitting a pothole or are you afraid of other people out there and really digging deep into what it means for people for their daily experiences and what can, and as our job to think, okay, what can we do to help address those barriers that people might have?

And I see it as my job to recognize the barriers and reduce them at every level and give people opportunities to make the choices that they might want to make. And people are doing that. I would say turning around. You mentioned about how you see more cargo bikes and family bikes that has been a big change that I've seen over the course of my time here is I used to bike with my son to school and even over the course of time for when he was like a kindergartner to when he was like in high school, there are more and more and more tag along his kids' bikes, like along with them and the bakfiets.

And and now it really there's a lot of them. So of course it's another challenge, which is where are they going to park the bikes? And I like to brag that we have, which I still think is true. Probably some of the best,bike parking zoning regulations that the entire country and we did put in there.
Okay. You've got to recognize that not all bikes are going to be the same, but in some places, apparently there's still not enough good parking for those numbers of bikes, because there's more than they were even thought this is a good problem. I am not complaining. It's really a joy to see. And it's such a joy to see when I go out and I see families biking to me, that is the measure of success because if people feel like they can comfortably bike with their kids that, to me says it all.

John: Yeah and to channel Preston Tyree, once again he is frequently riding a trike now and as his wife Ani rides a, an electric assist trike. And so again, just like the larger cargo bikes and bakfiets that adds an, another layer of complexity with making sure that your bike parking facilities can accommodate some of these larger, maybe wider cycles that people are using, especially those that are getting into their seventies and eighties.
They're still out there riding just like in Copenhagen. Yes, exactly. Hey, is there anything that we haven't talked about that you want to make sure that we mention for the audience

Cara: I guess there is something that I will share because I think that the audience I'm assuming there are people who are looking to try to make change and progress in their own communities. And so we didn't talk too much about how I got into all of this and we don't need to, but I went to Denmark after graduate school.

I had a Fullbrite to actually go and study pedestrian street design. But the reason I wanted to go there in addition to just, it was a great city and to go to Copenhagen, to be there. Is that what fascinated me was the fact that Denmark transformed itself. 60 years ago, or maybe even less than that, it was an agrarian.

Based economy, it was a little bit of a backwater. It was not a place that you would go for a great city urban life. And they started reinventing themselves and they had struggles. There was not a single bike facility like in 1960 there were no street cafes and they also have people saying, there's no room for bike lanes and we're not Italians.

People are never going to sit outdoors. And it was over the course of some period of time with some advocates, they was helped by the oil crisis. And I went and did some research with Yen Gale who was one of the leaders. I'm sure some people might know about him who in this movement and The thing that was most compelling is that the society really transformed themselves. And if you think about Copenhagen today, you think of course about bikes, but you think about it as being a vibrant, urban culture. And that is not the way it was. And so if they could do it, I thought so could we.
I think the point being is that it is possible to change. It is possible to make the world a better place. I think some of us can get quite overwhelmed at problems of like, how do you even start to address climate change? It just feels so overwhelming I think at the core, we have to be optimistic and also know what's feasible and whatever you do in the positive direction, it's better than doing nothing.
So I just encourage people to think positively. And even if you just get one success with these transform one street, or you do any one thing it's in the right direction, it's a good thing. And you'll make the world a better place.

John: That's wonderful. Hey, what's the best way for folks to follow along with the great work that's being done there in Cambridge?

Cara: We have a website, cambridgema.gov/bike. And you can find the information there. I think that's probably the best way there are other pages on the website where all the different projects are happening. I, you can just go to the main city website, which is cambridgema.gov and noodle around there, but there's a lot going on.

John: Yeah. And I did watch the video about the new bike plan. So I do recommend that I will actually make sure to include a link To that video in our show notes and on the lending page. And I'm gonna have you send me that photo that's behind you as part of your backdrop. So that'll be a photo that I'll have on our landing page, out on the website.

So folks can actually have a visual, they can go over to the landing page and see what we were talking about. A beautiful environment that is a shared space and really is a people oriented place. It really embraces people. It hugs people. I remember some of those streets when I was tooling around there and enjoying the environment in Cambridge.

And this has been such a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with you, Cara, thank you so much for joining me on the active towns podcast.

Cara: Thank you so much on it. You are always welcome to come and visit our fair city

John: next year. I apparently I have to. Cause we've got that long route to take.

Cara: Thank you.