Note: This transcript was exported from the video version of this episode, and it has not been copyedited

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:36:09
Beth Osborne
Going back to what is typical like the purpose of the transportation system is to connect people to jobs and essential services. It's helping young Beth Osborne in law school reach that job. And without me having to pay a cover charge to enter into the economy. And if you look at the measures we use there, 1950s measures and even in the 1950s, if you read academic studies on what we should be measuring, it was whether or not people can get to things, which is not just speed at speed and distance.

00:00:36:11 - 00:01:00:11
Beth Osborne
But we didn't have the capacity to run those numbers for millions of potential trips between, you know, nearly unlimited set of origins and destinations. So what we did, which was smart, is we said we're adding an amenity that is this highway system and we're going to speed up traffic. Does increasing that speed with everything else remaining the same, save time?

00:01:00:13 - 00:01:17:26
Beth Osborne
Can we use that as a proxy? Sure. The problem is the way we increase speeds was we cut off other travel, and we made those trips impossible or longer by a long shot. And we took away. While we are giving new ways to travel, we swept away other ways of travel.

00:01:18:00 - 00:01:42:21
John Simmerman
Hey everyone, welcome to the Active Towns Channel. My name is John Simmerman and that is the one and only Beth Osborne, director of transportation for America, a program of smart growth America. And we're going to be diving into the initiatives and programs that they provide to help understand and promote for a better use of our transportation dollars so that we have a system that is safer and more effective.

00:01:42:21 - 00:02:02:11
John Simmerman
And before we dive into all that, I did want to say, if you're enjoying this content here on the Active Towns Channel, please consider supporting my efforts by becoming an Active Towns Ambassador. Super easy to do and very much appreciated. Just click on the join button right here on YouTube or navigate over to Active towns.org. Click on the support tab at the top of the page and there's several different options.

00:02:02:13 - 00:02:08:23
John Simmerman
Okay, let's get right to it. With the.

00:02:08:25 - 00:02:13:27
John Simmerman
Beth Osborns, thank you so much for joining me on the Active Towns podcast. This has been a long time coming.

00:02:14:00 - 00:02:17:13
Beth Osborne
It has. Thank you so much for inviting me.

00:02:17:15 - 00:02:35:15
John Simmerman
You are quite welcome. And yes, I joke about this that it's been a long time coming. You and I have been sending messages kind of back and forth over the last couple of years trying to get you here on the pod. I definitely wanted to get you on the pod because so much is happening at the federal level right now.

00:02:35:17 - 00:02:48:12
John Simmerman
But what I would love for you to do for those people who are not super, super familiar with who you are, please, just take a moment to introduce yourself. So who the heck is Beth Osborne?

00:02:48:15 - 00:03:26:11
Beth Osborne
It's a question for the ages. Right now, I am the vice president for transportation and thriving communities at Smart Growth America. We're a national nonprofit that focuses on the role the built environment plays in creating communities that are healthy, prosperous, and resilient. My team, the transportation team, is made up of organizations people might know of as the National Complete Streets Coalition, which is a project of Smart Growth America and Transportation for America and as a transportation team, what we're trying to accomplish is a transportation system that connects people to jobs and essential services.

00:03:26:13 - 00:03:44:23
Beth Osborne
C is pretty baseline, but we want to make sure that that works as well for people in and out of a car, no matter how much money they earn and no matter their physical abilities. And, right now it doesn't work particularly well for people in a car with a lot of money and, and, you know, a fully mobile.

00:03:44:23 - 00:04:09:16
Beth Osborne
So, we have a long way to go. I'm happy to talk about my past, but just kind of a quick, review. Before I was at Smart Growth America. I worked at the U.S. Department of Transportation under, President Obama. And before that, worked on Capitol Hill for Senator Tom Carper, from Delaware.

00:04:09:18 - 00:04:27:02
Beth Osborne
And, bounced around DC, worked for different non-profits and, House members. But so I've been I've been here and, working in this space for quite some time. The next transportation authorization bill will be my sixth.

00:04:27:04 - 00:04:46:10
John Simmerman
Wow. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. So I and I don't know if you know this, but I'm based in in Austin, Texas. And that's where I've been for the last decade. Prior to that, I lived, on the Big Island in Hawaii. So I was in Hawaii Island for, for about a decade, prior to moving here.

00:04:46:13 - 00:05:10:27
John Simmerman
And, and I could do after towns anywhere. So it doesn't matter where I'm located. I've been doing this off and on or really pretty much on ever since about 2011, and really honing in on the content creation over the last, six, seven, eight years, etc.. But yeah, you're originally from a little bit down south here in my neck of the woods.

00:05:10:27 - 00:05:13:11
John Simmerman
Sort of. Yeah, just across the way.

00:05:13:14 - 00:05:36:06
Beth Osborne
Yeah. I'm a native New Orleanian, with, the New Orleans, went to, Ben Franklin High School. And then I went to LSU for undergrad and law school. I don't tend to admit to the law degree very often. But I utilize it to talk innocent young folks out of making the same mistake I did.

00:05:36:09 - 00:05:45:24
Beth Osborne
And I have about, like an 80%, record and talking people out of law school. So I, I.

00:05:45:26 - 00:06:06:16
John Simmerman
Oh, that's fantastic. Well, I'm going to pop on over here to your LinkedIn page again. You've got to splash page here. Transformation, or transportation for America, a program of smart growth America. You had mentioned that your official title, as is, vice president for smart Growth Growth America. And you were really a director of the Transportation for America.

00:06:06:18 - 00:06:18:06
John Simmerman
What's what's the history of the the that sort of entity that is transportation for America? Has it always been part of Smart Growth America or is it it's got it.

00:06:18:07 - 00:06:54:03
Beth Osborne
Was originally created as an independent organization, as was the Complete Streets Coalition. And they were brought under the Smart Growth umbrella. You know, just from a, a programmatic perspective, it's hard to talk about effective city building and community building without transportation. Since it, unfortunately, wrecks the best, plans, so getting it under control and making it, something that is coordinated with development housing, land use policy is essential for having high quality of life and a effective transportation system.

00:06:54:05 - 00:07:11:26
Beth Osborne
But also, frankly, from the perspective of running a nonprofit, it it's easier to run a slightly large nonprofit where people share a lot of the administration than have a lot of little bitty small nonprofits that are kind of next to each other, but not full coordinated.

00:07:11:29 - 00:07:40:11
John Simmerman
Great. Yeah, yeah. No, I hear you. And if we head on over to the website, for transportation for America here, we see this. And so T for america.org is the actual URL. And, you're here. And so, it does have its own identity and, and visual, but I'm assuming that if we were going to the landing page for Smart Growth America, we could easily click on a link that would get us to here.

00:07:40:11 - 00:07:41:18
John Simmerman
Is that correct?

00:07:41:21 - 00:08:09:28
Beth Osborne
That's correct. And I really appreciate you bringing up the website. This is brand spanking new. It's really, a beta test phase right now. We are inviting anybody to play with it to, let us know if they find things that aren't working so that we can make tweaks and updates. And then I would love feedback on where we can take things from here.

00:08:10:06 - 00:08:35:20
Beth Osborne
The big innovation on the website is this, state of the system data hub, which is set up to allow people to figure out what we are currently getting for our transportation investment, and particularly on a state by state basis. We have it organized around our top three priorities right there, which is we believe in a fix it first, approach to transportation.

00:08:35:20 - 00:09:05:23
Beth Osborne
We should not be building things while other things are falling into disrepair. And when we build highways, and transit and all all such transportation investments, we should have a plan to maintain it throughout its useful life while maintaining the overall system. This is controversial, and the transportation field, which is insane because it is basic responsibility and something that, frankly, a lot of the folks who are running the transportation program think that people should do in their personal lives.

00:09:05:25 - 00:09:40:24
Beth Osborne
So I think the taxpayers should expect the same out of them. The second area is safety, and we particularly view safety through the concept of prioritizing safety over speed. Right now we do the reverse. The goal is to let cars go fast, and we will make that as safe as possible. Even though high speed auto traffic in complex environments, whether you're talking about a rural town, Main Street or town center or an urban area is inherently unsafe because there are so many potential points of conflict that you cannot see and avoid at speed.

00:09:40:28 - 00:10:15:18
Beth Osborne
We want to see that reverse. We want safety first and speed second. And then the last is we spent 100 years building out a highway system, and, we think we now need an equal level of investment in the rest of the transportation system. We call it invest in the rest. So we would like to see the same focused, committed approach to building transit, intercity passenger rail and, active transportation, as we have seen, on the highway side.

00:10:15:20 - 00:10:16:09
Beth Osborne
Yeah.

00:10:16:11 - 00:10:53:06
John Simmerman
You know, and what's really, really interesting, when you look at these three focus areas and the buckets that they represent and the energy that they represent, it really is sort of mind boggling that we found ourselves. The system sort of evolved into, you know, focusing in on the things that it focused in on, you know, focus in, on just building new stuff instead of like figuring out, oh, by the way, make sure that, you know, you are budgeting to be able to maintain these things.

00:10:53:09 - 00:11:27:19
John Simmerman
Oh, by the way, probably not the best idea to to just focus in on motor vehicle speed because then you get the expected result of, you know, 40,000 plus people, you know, perishing on our roads, not to mention the millions of, of serious injuries that happen. And, and then and then from an investment, side is, you know, this focus in on because of the focus in on speed, we end up seeing highway design standards applied to environments that that's totally inappropriate.

00:11:27:21 - 00:12:01:22
John Simmerman
We're basically taking what we learned from building out the interstate network and saying, oh, wow, 14ft lanes and high speeds. Let's apply that, which is great for getting, you know, through, you know, massively rural environments, you know, along an interstate connecting cities, you know, it's it's just you know, asinine that we then took that technology, that knowledge of highway building and applied it to environments where there's lots of squishy people, you know, walking and biking and rolling around on wheelchairs.

00:12:01:22 - 00:12:02:17
John Simmerman
It's just insane.

00:12:02:24 - 00:12:39:17
Beth Osborne
There's an extra irony there. The whole point of the interstate system was there was an acknowledgment that it was patently insane to accommodate this kind of speed in in the built environment. You know, at this, in the surface roads, nobody would do something that stupid. What you do when you want to accommodate speed is you separate all the development from it and you control when, where and how people come into that environment and go out of it.

00:12:39:17 - 00:13:04:26
Beth Osborne
It's called a controlled access road. And, you don't let bicyclists and pedestrians near it. You don't have on street parking, you don't have cross roads, and you don't have, traffic directly on coming. You have a separation from a median or as those of us from New Orleans would call it, a neutral ground. And that is how you make speed safe.

00:13:04:28 - 00:13:36:13
Beth Osborne
There is no other way for speed to be safe. So the very moment you allow high traffic or a high speed traffic without those, features, you are saying safety isn't a priority, full stop. And like you said, so. Well, we've taken those standards and we are applying it in a one, you know, a one size fits all approach to every kind of roadway and street.

00:13:36:16 - 00:13:59:28
Beth Osborne
And ironically, when we raise the changes that are needed, we are told, you know, pump the brakes there. We can't make changes in a one size fits all way, which is not what we're asking for. We are asking for there to be more of a contact sensitive approach. Set speeds as is appropriate for the design and the purpose of the road and where it is in the community.

00:14:00:05 - 00:14:08:15
Beth Osborne
And the people saying we're asking for a one size fits all approach are the ones that have mandated a one size fits all approach.

00:14:08:18 - 00:14:35:12
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. You've probably noticed my, my coffee mug with the streets are for people. And really, it's it's kind of a a disconnect between a highway, a roadway that is designed to connect to people, you know, two places from A to B as quickly and safely as possible versus a, a street environment where, we have a richness of activities.

00:14:35:12 - 00:14:53:08
John Simmerman
A you know, the, the decorative statement of streets are for people, you know, takes us back to what streets are for. And to paraphrase, you know, Chuck Marone from Strong Towns, it's like, this is the platform for building wealth and vitality and connecting people. It shouldn't be a traffic sewer.

00:14:53:11 - 00:15:00:06
Beth Osborne
Exactly. Well, and and not only do I paraphrase, Chuck all the time, I just out an out steal from him nonstop.

00:15:00:07 - 00:15:03:03
John Simmerman
And, you know, he he likes that.

00:15:03:05 - 00:15:32:25
Beth Osborne
And he puts it. You know what? No, you're not reading Chuck's, books and web page. You're missing out. And what's interesting, if you if you click on the data here under safety. So the dark red are the places that are less safe. They're the what this is particularly for pedestrians and the pedestrian is the, the folks who demonstrate sadly by the giving of their own lives, the danger on the roadways first.

00:15:32:28 - 00:16:03:14
Beth Osborne
And they're the ones that really show that with that high speed traffic crashes are more likely to be deadly. What you will notice in that map. Oh, and here. So every web page or every state has a factsheet on their performance in all of these areas. But we are looking, adding to this. So people should look at it and get a sense of what they might like to see added and improve, because this is our starting point, not our ending point.

00:16:03:17 - 00:16:30:16
Beth Osborne
But here, if you look, you'll notice that the states that are the least safe are the the states that saw, most of their development happen in the 1950s and after when we started building in the interstate era, for people to, to be far apart from each other and far apart from everything they need. And through those development patterns, we knew we were creating a very inconvenient system for people.

00:16:30:22 - 00:16:42:11
Beth Osborne
So we said, well, it will be inconvenient, but we'll let you drive fast between them. And then we all pretend to be shocked when that creates massive, massive congestion, which is the only thing it could create.

00:16:42:13 - 00:16:51:02
John Simmerman
Right? I'm looking at this one stand out here on the on the eastern seaboard that is in the dark red. What? What is this?

00:16:51:04 - 00:16:52:23
Beth Osborne
Well, a lot of Delaware.

00:16:52:23 - 00:16:55:26
John Simmerman
Was declared Delaware. Yeah.

00:16:55:28 - 00:16:56:07
Beth Osborne
Yeah.

00:16:56:12 - 00:16:59:24
John Simmerman
You you have a bit of a connection to, I would assume. Yeah.

00:16:59:27 - 00:17:24:14
Beth Osborne
I do have big, yes. I'm, a long time and and permanent resident of Carper Town, which is what the alumnae are called. And, yeah, if you get outside of Wilmington, everything downstate is new development, and it's built so that people can drive through communities quickly. But it is very hard to move around out of a car.

00:17:24:16 - 00:17:54:01
John Simmerman
And I think that that's a it's an interesting and tragic reality, too. I grew up in a rural town in Northern California. At the time we only had about 4000, people living in the actual village. The the town itself. It's it has since, grown to, I think, 50,000. So it's it's grown quite a bit, in the past few decades, but it was primarily like, an agricultural type of town.

00:17:54:01 - 00:18:17:04
John Simmerman
I grew up on a small ranch a couple miles outside of the village, and, it was easy to to, you know, to get into town and all of that. But one of the features that we had was a state highway running through it. And so many of our, especially our western states and the Midwest, cities, we we did that.

00:18:17:04 - 00:19:02:26
John Simmerman
We took these wonderful, delightful, walkable villages and cities and we rammed, you know, state highways through them. And and oftentimes they were like the historic Main Street. And we converted what was a, a wonderful shopping street, a high street, you know, a street for people and, and turned them into these traffic sewers. And so when we look at, you know, that map and we look at the realities, from a political perspective of, you know, red versus blue and right versus left, and we see the realities of many of, of our states, you know, across, a map that sort of looks like this.

00:19:02:29 - 00:19:41:01
John Simmerman
And, and we realize that an awful lot of these places have these small town cities, rural environments that have basically highway standards applied to their villages, their village streets, their city streets. And there's an awful lot of tension between, you know, how do you how you handle that? Because it took what was probably pre-World War Two a wonderful, delightful little place and turned it into, I wouldn't allow my kids to walk there, even though future generations walked in bike to school.

00:19:41:03 - 00:20:08:08
Beth Osborne
That's exactly right. What's interesting in that map is you will see California's pretty blue, except for it's incredibly unsafe in terms of pedestrian safety. New Mexico is very blue. Arizona's purple. You know, North Carolina is and Delaware are blue. So and then you go, to the areas doing better and you've got very, very red areas that are in much lighter coloring.

00:20:08:11 - 00:20:35:05
Beth Osborne
And a lot of that it there's several factors. One is a bunch of the Midwest and Northeast were built before the highways. And frankly, I think if and we're looking to do this, you do a study of the the cities versus their suburbs. You'll find, that their suburbs look as bad as anything. It's those older areas that are doing better in terms of pedestrian safety and overall safety, for that matter.

00:20:35:07 - 00:20:57:11
Beth Osborne
But you also will find that areas that were too poor to spend the money to blow out all of those main streets are safer. And so there are a lot of areas where the rural Main Street remains due to lack of funds, but that has saved it from the danger that comes with turning a main street into, a highway.

00:20:57:18 - 00:21:23:26
Beth Osborne
When I was a kid, we left New Orleans for a little while, and moved to a little town in West Virginia called Ravenswood, West Virginia. And when I went there from when I was 7 to 10. And I could walk everywhere in Ravenswood. But it's a teeny tiny town. I think at its height, it was 5000 people when Kaiser Aluminum would own the main bauxite plant there and was operating.

00:21:23:29 - 00:22:01:26
Beth Osborne
Now, I think it's it's half that much. But I went back with my best friend from when I grew up there, last summer, and the main street has been blown out. It's a wider road. It has resulted in a lot of the old buildings being being converted into more sprawl type development, with them backed up behind parking lots, more, fast food restaurants that you with drive thrus than the old, buildings and businesses and even where the old businesses exist, they're they're closed.

00:22:01:26 - 00:22:26:11
Beth Osborne
I mean, there's empty. And I'm sure since I was there, all that was done for the economic good of the community. But there's not a lot of community wealth being built there. It's just places for people to stop when they get through this town that the state has pretty much indicated to people that they shouldn't worry themselves with, because they don't need to slow down as they blast through there.

00:22:26:13 - 00:22:40:10
Beth Osborne
And I would doubt I was not comfortable walking. I was comfortable walking through the community without sidewalks in many places when I was seven. But now, even with a sidewalk, I was not very comfortable.

00:22:40:13 - 00:23:00:27
John Simmerman
Yeah. And that brings us really, you know, to, to this particular, slide deck that we have here, you know, on this, state of the system and then looking at safety is that we should be designing for safety, overspeed when we say this, this makes intuitive sense. Why wouldn't we be doing this? But you had said it earlier.

00:23:00:27 - 00:23:36:29
John Simmerman
We haven't been doing this. We've been sort of prioritizing and bowing down to the God of loss level of service, of trying to push as many motor vehicles through these areas as possible. And I'm not talking about the interstate system. I'm not talking about highways, but I am talking about these more complicated and complex environments of our where we have destinations nearby and we've again applied these highway standards to what should be streets.

00:23:37:01 - 00:24:05:10
John Simmerman
You know, they have a richness of destinations. And we've been prioritizing, you know, speed and through that prioritization, as we mentioned earlier, of treating and applying highway standards, we've created what, you know, Chuck has has coined a road. We've created a street road hybrid. And it's been designed for speed, not safety. How do we flip that script? How do we do this design for safety, overspeed.

00:24:05:12 - 00:24:32:16
Beth Osborne
Yeah. And and Chuck talks about it beautifully. But you know you do have to pick. Is this a locally serving street or is this, a thruway a road. And if it's a Thruway, if it's a road just like the the brilliant people back in the 40s and 50s that wanted to build the limited access highways that controlled access highways the way you do speed is you reduce all of your conflict points.

00:24:32:19 - 00:25:06:01
Beth Osborne
So you have driveways and cross streets and, street parking and all the places that create a potential conflict. If you're going to have a lots of points of conflict, because you do have cross streets and driveways and pedestrian crossings and businesses and things like that, then the speeds just have to come way down and that's it. There's no link between the in between is where everything stops working, the traffic doesn't flow well and the safety is a disaster.

00:25:06:03 - 00:25:34:29
Beth Osborne
And that's what we've done in these states that well, in every community that's been built since the highway era, we're trying to bring highway designs into complex environments, which is exactly the reason we built the interstate, is we knew we couldn't do that safely. We knew it. We just chose to forget that. And some of it is we create highway programs and highway agencies to build the interstate.

00:25:34:29 - 00:25:59:10
Beth Osborne
And then we added to their purview. But we didn't give them strict direction on how to handle to handle those additions. So they just applied what they knew to everything we gave them. We even apply it to transit. So we look at the speed of travel from the beginning of a transit route to the end of a transit route.

00:25:59:12 - 00:26:19:20
Beth Osborne
Almost nobody goes from the beginning to the end of a transit route, and the speed is not the point. It's kind of in the point. But the real point is that the service is reliable and it goes where you need it to go. And so long as it's not bogged down to almost, you know, no speed, that's almost incidental.

00:26:19:22 - 00:26:44:07
Beth Osborne
But we're taking those highway standards and we're applying it here because it's all we know and what we need for safety. We need to recognize that a driver loses their field of vision the faster they go. So the faster they're going, the narrower their field of vision. With a narrow field of vision, it means you're not going to spot those points of potential conflict.

00:26:44:10 - 00:27:11:12
Beth Osborne
And then when you do, it's too late to stop or avoid it. So that leads to more crashes, more high injury crashes and more deadly crashes. And that is. And then what happens if you look at the, the forms that police have to fill out? They have to assign blame. And no place in that blame is the designer of the roadway who set the driver up to fail.

00:27:11:17 - 00:27:39:06
Beth Osborne
And even worse, it is policymakers who took that driver's money, that driver's hard earned money in the form of gas taxes. And these days, the gas tax doesn't pay for the program anymore because it the program has grown beyond the gas taxes. We take their income taxes and all kinds of other fees as well, and debt, and we use it to build something that, when it predictably fails, we blame the people paying for the system.

00:27:39:09 - 00:27:42:11
Beth Osborne
Right. It's really horrifying.

00:27:42:13 - 00:28:00:22
John Simmerman
Yeah, you put a lot in there. I don't think we can unpack all the little niggles that you put in there, but I did want to emphasize the fact that the graph that we've been looking at, the map that we've been looking at, really hones in on, the pedestrian experience. So this is the pedestrian deaths, that we're looking at here.

00:28:00:25 - 00:28:25:23
John Simmerman
If we looked at, you know, a similarly colored graph that looked at overall crash statistics and injuries and fatalities and crashes that have happened with people on bikes, it would probably be very, very similar. But I did just I just want to emphasize that this particular data that we have been looking at has been the pedestrian experience.

00:28:25:25 - 00:28:53:17
John Simmerman
We mentioned it earlier in terms of we have to start fixing things first. We can't just keep, you know, pushing out these federal dollars, that go out to then filter down to the state level and the MPOs and everything else to then just keep building new stuff. What else do we need to talk about by fixing it first and what we mean by fixing it.

00:28:53:20 - 00:29:16:29
Beth Osborne
Yeah. And so it's a really good question. There are a bunch of things that can make this a little bit more complex, but let's start with what's easy. We have a very built out system. It's a robust system, and it costs a lot of money to maintain. According to federal Highways, it's about $24,000 per lane mile of, highway.

00:29:17:02 - 00:29:44:04
Beth Osborne
And we have, you know, billions of lane miles. So it's a lot of money. And right now we see states, bill spending about a third of their federal dollars. And we have not been able to dive into all the state spending, but we hope to on building more new things. So either expanding a roadway or creating, a new stretch of roadway.

00:29:44:06 - 00:30:13:22
Beth Osborne
And all of that is happening while they have other roads or bridges that are in disrepair. The bridges might be, you know, either closed or up for repair or, weight restricted. The roads are full of of, you know, bumps that shouldn't be there. And they're saying, we need you to give us more money to repair our roads, but then we give them that money they don't necessarily spend it on that.

00:30:13:24 - 00:30:43:10
Beth Osborne
They spend it on new assets that become liabilities. And they never look at it as a liability, and they don't plan for it. And quite frankly, just in terms of the way society works, if you build something new, it doesn't tend to interfere with existing roadways and existing commerce. And it is less inconvenient than maintenance. Maintenance drives people nuts.

00:30:43:10 - 00:31:03:07
Beth Osborne
It slows them down. It's a hassle. It creates detours, all those sorts of things. And so you can deliver something brand new and you get praise. The press praises you. You get to have a big event, you get to have multiple events. You get to have an event. When you start your construction, you get to have an event when you open it.

00:31:03:09 - 00:31:28:22
Beth Osborne
But when you do maintenance. My friends at taxpayers for Common Sense say it's like, it's like flossing. It's this thing you got to do, but no one's excited about doing. But if you don't do it, your teeth fall out. So it is something we must do. But it's incredibly unpopular because it is inconvenient. And you get the politicians get beaten up during the whole thing because of the traffic backups.

00:31:28:24 - 00:31:51:27
Beth Osborne
And then when you open, you're just giving people what they had before. And so we really need to build our programs in a way that strengthens the backbones of the agencies that are going, that we want to make the hard choice to maintain what they have and not reward them for failing to do so. Which right now we practically do that.

00:31:51:27 - 00:31:56:13
Beth Osborne
Your failure to maintain your system is the reason why you should get more money.

00:31:56:15 - 00:32:28:02
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. It's insidious. The this particular graph here is honing in on an overview of the country and the states that have, better or worse conditions. And when it comes to pavement conditions and the percentage of, bridges in, poor condition, interestingly enough, North Dakota is in the number two spot nationally. What state is number one in terms of best conditions?

00:32:28:05 - 00:32:29:26
Beth Osborne
I'm not actually sure.

00:32:29:27 - 00:32:46:07
John Simmerman
Well, it's obviously one of the very, very light colored ones. So maybe it's Nevada which looks pretty, pretty light. Don't be confused, folks. By the darkness of the color of of planting, it's because it's selected. It's not because it's it's the worst. Yeah. I just want to make sure that people.

00:32:46:07 - 00:33:12:27
Beth Osborne
Know North Dakota is number two. I've actually spent time, in Bismarck. And, you know, they just have a culture, that backs them up that says we can't build things we can't afford to maintain. So they really focus more naturally on maintenance of their system. We found some of the same thing in in the past in Tennessee, but I think that they may not be quite as committed to it as they have been in the past.

00:33:12:27 - 00:33:33:00
Beth Osborne
I it's not clear to me. It also Tennessee is is older. So they've got Memphis older, you know, and they're going to have more of a, older system that is harder to maintain. So that can be a challenge. But my home state of Louisiana, amongst the worst,

00:33:33:02 - 00:34:11:07
John Simmerman
In many ways, unfortunately. And so number three here, we're really we're talking about this concept of we need to be investing in the rest. We need to be bold enough to take time to invest in the stuff that has been pushed to the side. And you've been very public and open about the fact that transit and walking and biking should not be in the advocates that are, you know, clamoring to improve those conditions and investing in those conditions and and making it more feasible for people to walk and bike and use transit.

00:34:11:10 - 00:34:29:16
John Simmerman
We should not be settling for tiny little kernels of this. I mean, you've been very, very, public about the fact that we should not be just celebrating the fact that we got a fraction of a fraction of a fraction in the next reauthorization bill. Talk a little bit about that.

00:34:29:19 - 00:34:59:19
Beth Osborne
Yeah. There's a few things here. One is when the the last the bipartisan infrastructure law was passed, the Biden administration celebrated that, a historic amount of funding went into transit. What they didn't like today is a historic amount of money went into everything, and transit was still pegged at the 20% of, what highways got. That difference between transit and highways was a bargain.

00:34:59:19 - 00:35:24:12
Beth Osborne
Meant that was, made during the Reagan administration. That was the last time urban members of, of, particularly the House of Representatives made any demands for improvements to the program. They said, we're not going to agree to a gas tax increase unless some of that money goes to transit. And then I think at the note, that idea, the notion was that was a flaw.

00:35:24:18 - 00:35:55:24
Beth Osborne
As is so often the case, it becomes a ceiling and it is pegged to 20% that of highways. So for transit to get one more federal dollar, you need to come up with for highway dollars. And that is that's the cost of admission. And I don't like the notion that transit advocates feel like they must support a program that creates danger for people trying to get to transit and makes transit work inefficiently in order to get their transit.

00:35:55:24 - 00:36:25:17
Beth Osborne
And I hope that I can convince people that it's time to start making that deal in safety. We do that too. We say, okay, if you spend, you know, 6% of the funds on highway safety, we'll let you spend the rest on highway. Maybe safety probably not. And that is that is a terrible deal. It'd be better to have none of it than have that, situation.

00:36:25:18 - 00:36:47:22
Beth Osborne
And so I'm hoping to push people in that direction. And then I also just want to say my personal experience in this space is, you know, growing up in a first string suburb of New Orleans, and I went to the best public school in the city and frankly, one of the best schools, period, in the city. But it was a magnet school.

00:36:47:24 - 00:37:11:02
Beth Osborne
And it was I lived on the West Bank. It was across the river, and I relied on a, city, school bus to get there. But the state cut school bus funding for public schools and high school went first, and a bunch of folks were able to put together a bus through a charter, basically a charter system to get the kids from the West Bank across the river.

00:37:11:04 - 00:37:34:24
Beth Osborne
But several parents couldn't because they couldn't afford to do that. And I saw a bunch of my friends who had been freshmen with me, have to drop out of this fantastic school because they couldn't get there, and they didn't have a mom or dad who could take time off to drive them in and go pick them up. The upperclassmen, their parents didn't have enough money to buy them a car to go to high school.

00:37:34:26 - 00:37:54:28
Beth Osborne
And that was really impactful to me. And then when I went to LSU and I was in law school, I needed money to pay my way. So I wanted to get a job because I didn't have enough money to make ends meet. But I couldn't get a job that I could get to without a car. But I couldn't afford to go buy a car.

00:37:54:28 - 00:38:15:04
Beth Osborne
I already couldn't make my ends meet without a job. So no job without a car? No car without a job was, really, eye opening experience to me. And Baton Rouge just did not have decent transit. The transit didn't go many places. It didn't operate at all times a day. It didn't operate frequently. I think that you could say, fairly.

00:38:15:04 - 00:38:35:15
Beth Osborne
That is still the case. And walking or biking. I did try biking that. I tried that once. Almost died several times on one trip and decided that wasn't a good plan. And so when I moved to DC, my parents did eventually get me a used car. They could buy me out of the situation. An incredibly efficient way for our economy to operate.

00:38:35:18 - 00:39:02:10
Beth Osborne
And, when I moved to DC, I got rid of that car and that paid my way to to be able to get started here. And I didn't have to buy a car for many, many years. And instead I invested my money in savings in travel and buying a home and was able to be building wealth before my husband, who works for the FBI.

00:39:02:12 - 00:39:27:03
Beth Osborne
In in their infinite wisdom, they moved their their counterterrorism operations out to a place that was not served by transit, which we dealt with until we had kids. And he would need to get to the kids if I was out of town. And it just wasn't reliable. So we finally purchased a car 11 years later, and I viewed that to this day as a pay cut.

00:39:27:05 - 00:39:28:27
Beth Osborne
Courtesy of the FBI.

00:39:29:00 - 00:39:56:14
John Simmerman
Yeah. You know, we've been lingering on this version of the map, which is titled in Vest in Options. And I went at first glance on this, I'm like, oh, interesting. Utah doing quite well here. But then I also realized that, really, this is an indictment of the entire country, of how low the investment in other mobility options really is.

00:39:56:16 - 00:40:01:01
John Simmerman
What what would you like to say additionally about this particular map?

00:40:01:04 - 00:40:30:26
Beth Osborne
You hit the nail on the head. There are three things we're measuring here. Spending per capita on transit, a comparison of, road expansion versus transit. Just to give you a sense of the focus of dollars and, spending on, like, Penn infrastructure. And Utah is doing comparatively well on bike ped and on transit, but they're spending way, way more on, on highways.

00:40:30:28 - 00:40:58:29
Beth Osborne
So it's a really interesting state. The state is heavily involved, I believe it's a state agency that handles transit. They have a really strong commitment to transit from their legislature to and, as a result, they've made some amazing investments over the last 25 years. And Utah often surprises people. But this is a state, particularly in the Salt Lake area, really across the state.

00:40:59:05 - 00:41:32:03
Beth Osborne
People move there because they want to be outdoors and they want to be active. And so they have they not only focus on bike ped infrastructure, but really trails so that people can go out and bike and run and and be active and hike. But you're right, nationwide, even the the communities in the states that are doing well in this space are not doing well compared to even our neighbors to the north and across the country and much poorer countries.

00:41:32:05 - 00:41:58:27
Beth Osborne
And another thing I find very interesting is one of the biggest excuses for that is the excuse is shortened to be oh, but rural. That's the oh, but rural, which means I don't like what you're talking about. And I don't think rural America probably does either, so I'm not going to engage any further. In reality, really in the United States, we don't think much of rural areas, or at least our elected representatives don't.

00:41:59:00 - 00:42:19:15
Beth Osborne
And what I find as elected representatives from rural areas think the least of those rural areas when they say rural areas don't need this, what they're really saying, whether they know it or not, is American. Rural areas don't deserve this. Only city deserve amenities. Rural areas. You're not going to give that to them. They're not going to have their own medical clinics.

00:42:19:23 - 00:42:51:21
Beth Osborne
They're not going to have their own groceries. And they're certainly not going to have transit. That gets them to the places where those things exist. And if you go, to other countries, their rural areas do have transit and some have rail transit and so it really shows the difference between countries that care about having thriving rural areas versus the United States that loves to to laud rural areas, but then give them nothing.

00:42:51:23 - 00:43:32:17
John Simmerman
Right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's funny you mentioned, you know, that a lot of rural areas and smaller villages and cities, in, in other countries, I spend a lot of time over in Europe and a lot of time in the Netherlands. And I'm just always, blown away by the empowerment of mobility choices that I have. If I want to go to a village or a city that is, you know, 10 or 20km away, I can either choose to jump on the train and, you know, make my way there, jump on a bus and make my way there or jump on my bike, which is what I usually do, and ride there, because I know

00:43:32:17 - 00:44:03:26
John Simmerman
that there is a safe and inviting, separated, you know, feet straight, feet straw, which is a bicycle priority street or feets pod, which is a bicycle path that can get me there easily, comfortably, safely, all ages and abilities, facilities. And then finally, yes, the mobility choice of if I were to get in a automobile. I really haven't ever rented a car there, so I've never had the need to drive a car there.

00:44:03:28 - 00:44:28:21
John Simmerman
But if I so chose to do that, or if I was catching a ride with a friend who happened to have a car, there's that option there. So really, what we're talking about is the, a plethora of, you know, of mobility options. And that, I think, is part of what we should be expecting when we as voters are like realizing what our tax dollars are going towards.

00:44:28:24 - 00:44:52:12
John Simmerman
From a transportation perspective, we should be, like, really excited and demand that we get those mobility options there because there's to in my mind, there's nothing that really resonates more with our values of freedom and independence than having mobility choice, the ability to choose how I want to get to my my destination.

00:44:52:15 - 00:45:31:01
Beth Osborne
Now, it's while there's been, quite a, a trick played on us to get us to talk ourselves into a deprivation mindset, we will give up more of our money to get less, and we'll just. Oh, please, please, please, just, maybe two more lanes in my life might be slightly less miserable in terms of travel, but, you know, I wouldn't dream of asking for my community to have safe roads that I could let my kids, you know, walk to school in, and, and, yes, maybe, maybe some big old cities have that, but could never happen here.

00:45:31:08 - 00:46:06:01
Beth Osborne
And, you know, just people should think about whether or not they should allow their tax dollars to go to a program that is constantly telling you that you don't deserve to have everything that, you know, the most wonderful communities have. And I, I also find it just an incredibly cruel trick to say that, the way will define freedom is restricting you to getting around in an extraordinarily expensive machine that loses value the second you sign on the dotted line to buy it.

00:46:06:03 - 00:46:12:12
Beth Osborne
That is not freedom. That is the opposite of freedom. But we've taught you that the that being jailed is freedom.

00:46:12:15 - 00:46:54:20
John Simmerman
Yeah, well, well, there's a lot of money to be made and there was a lot of framing in the early, in the early days. You know, Peter Norton has done a great job of, as a historian of going back and looking at, motor dumb in the early stages. And then Grant in has done a great job of exposing the way that the, very powerful PR interests have reframed that that message in his book, dark PR and so, yeah, we've been sold a bill of goods and we and now it's like freedom in some weird way, as you mentioned, equates being dependent on a is one mode of transport, which

00:46:54:20 - 00:47:07:06
John Simmerman
is just bizarre. I've got the a couple of pie charts, pulled up here. So speaking of our tax dollars and speaking of how that all gets divvied up, walk us through the idea here and what this really represents.

00:47:07:08 - 00:47:41:25
Beth Osborne
Yeah. So this is the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed in the fall of 2021, also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. So you'll see that the service transportation portion makes up just over half of that pie chart. And it breaks down into the overwhelming majority going to highways transit pegged to about 20% of the highway spending. What's really, shocking what the big change was, was the 20% or the an equal amount of funding that goes to transit going to intercity passenger rail.

00:47:41:28 - 00:48:06:20
Beth Osborne
That is gobsmacking. Now, you don't you don't make things happen just by pouring money in. And a lot of the rail funding has been bottled up due to the fact that we don't have the infrastructure and the skill sets to really do this yet, and we're dealing with a network that is partially public and partially privately owned by the class one rails within the highway program.

00:48:06:22 - 00:48:34:12
Beth Osborne
I don't think a lot of people understand how it's broken up, because they hear about the programs that the USDA, Dot and Secretary Buttigieg bragged about, which is things like the carbon reduction program. Now, I will give your viewers a moment to try and find that slice of the pie, because it's not easy to find, but it is a little bitty light orange slice up at the top and it makes up 2% of the spending.

00:48:34:15 - 00:49:01:02
Beth Osborne
There is also a resilience program that is the red slice next to the carbon reduction program, the highway safety program, slightly more at about 6%. That's a light blue. But you can see that there's a bunch of programs that people are excited about, and they're itty bitty slices. And then there are two gigantic slices called the Surface Transportation Block Grant program, which can fund literally any kind of surface transportation project.

00:49:01:02 - 00:49:29:14
Beth Osborne
You can imagine. That's anything that's eligible anyplace else in the law. And the National Highway Performance Program, which is the program that the state Dot's jealously protect because that's where they fund their their big highway projects out of. And the deal that folks that would like to see a better performing transportation program produce is if you give me my tiny slice, I will let you have the rest to do whatever you want with.

00:49:29:16 - 00:49:55:18
Beth Osborne
And the results that we've gotten for that is horrifying. You know, we have laid out there's a bunch of different priorities we've talked about over the last 35 years, since our current program has meshed, that the four priorities are safety. We're going to improve safety. We're going to improve the condition of the roadways. We are going to reduce congestion, and we are going to reduce emissions.

00:49:55:21 - 00:50:24:13
Beth Osborne
Now that third one, we're going to reduce congestion. I want to point out that in the effort to make cars move fast and reduce congestion, that is the biggest excuse to not do any of the other things, because all those other things are seen as interfering with or taking away from the effort to move vehicles quickly. What's interesting is we are either doing barely as well or just kind of holding steady.

00:50:24:16 - 00:50:58:10
Beth Osborne
We're doing poorly or we're doing very, very poorly in those four areas. And so one of the questions I have for my my partners in the field and the public at large is if after 30 plus years of spending $1.5 trillion of investment, if we're going to do this badly across the board, why are we doing this? We're spending our money to get terrible, terrible results, and it would be better to do no harm at this point.

00:50:58:14 - 00:51:15:18
Beth Osborne
And I think that scares a lot of people to say it does not scare me, because I think we're getting the leftovers, we're getting the crumbs, and we're calling that a success. And so long as we're happy with crumbs, I mean, we kind of deserve what we get, which is nothing.

00:51:15:20 - 00:51:16:21
John Simmerman
Which is nothing.

00:51:16:24 - 00:51:41:20
Beth Osborne
This is safety. We've gotten dangerous roads. So, you know, you can see if you if you go back before 2010, you will see in general that things were getting marginally more safe, sort of it was looking more safe, mostly from the perspective of how many people were dying on our roadways when compared to how many miles were being driven on our roadways.

00:51:41:22 - 00:51:59:06
Beth Osborne
That is not a Vision Zero approach. That's saying, well, if people drive more, what can you do? People are just going to die, which is why would you give hundreds of billions of dollars to any agency that says, you know, what can you do? But that is a bipartisan approach. It's like, well, what can you do? Let's give them more money.

00:51:59:09 - 00:52:01:18
Beth Osborne
They can't do anything about it, but give them more money.

00:52:01:21 - 00:52:33:03
John Simmerman
Yeah. And to be fair to I mean, if we really go back in time, like 50 years, to the 1970s, I think is when it was peaking at over 40,000, which was the last time we were over 40,000. We did see a lot of safety improvements. We saw seatbelts being required. We saw anti-lock brakes. We saw a whole bunch of tweaks that made the actual tool the vehicle more, you know, incrementally safer and safer and safer.

00:52:33:06 - 00:52:56:08
John Simmerman
And, and then, yes, we saw that cascading of the, the number, the net number of deaths in, decreasing while at the same time, we also saw a lot of increase in overall speed as we saw the the 55 mile per hour speed limit that was set for, I want to say, when was that? Was that.

00:52:56:10 - 00:52:57:04
Beth Osborne
Several decades?

00:52:57:10 - 00:53:01:29
John Simmerman
Right? Yeah. Several decades ago was primarily to increase. Yes.

00:53:02:05 - 00:53:03:27
Beth Osborne
Late 90s rate.

00:53:03:29 - 00:53:25:01
John Simmerman
Yeah. Through the late 90s. And then we started driving faster and faster and faster out on the open roadways. But more importantly, we also as the decades continued and we continued to apply highway standards to our city streets and our residential streets, we started seeing more and more vehicles traveling faster and faster and faster. And so we we hit the trough.

00:53:25:01 - 00:53:57:14
John Simmerman
And then we started climbing in terms of the number of deaths again happening overall. But we also we also are seeing as we get into the, the the 2020s here, we also see the relative percentage of people who are perishing out on our roadways, increasing in our more vulnerable road users, which is one of the reasons why we were looking at the data of, you know, pedestrian fatalities and pedestrian injuries, injuries and crashes, etc. a lot of things have changed.

00:53:57:14 - 00:54:05:29
John Simmerman
There's a lot of moving parts here, including the bloat of vehicles and blah, blah, blah. So we can't obviously cover these all. Yeah.

00:54:06:02 - 00:54:32:22
Beth Osborne
Yeah. But but I think some of the things that are important, to really put a fine point on is what we do first with the crashes is we say, well, it was it was a person's fault. They they did something. They did something stupid. In a world of Vision Zero, the idea is humans will be humans and you design for them, recognizing they might make foolish decisions from time to time.

00:54:32:24 - 00:54:55:07
Beth Osborne
And you don't just say, oh, those stupid people deserve to die. But what happens in the US is once you've gone through all of that, blame the human side and you can't rely on that anymore. As you finally say, fine, make the vehicle manufacturers do it. And that's what we did in the 70s, in the 80s and the 90s when I was on Capitol Hill, we did another round of it.

00:54:55:09 - 00:55:20:25
Beth Osborne
I guess we started when I saw Capitol Hill and then when I was in at us Odot, we required backup cameras and, had roof crash standards and things like that to, to keep people even safer. But at the same time, we were making the outside of the vehicle less safe and doing exactly what I was saying, you know, making roads in complicated areas wider, straighter, faster, and so more mistakes were likely to be made.

00:55:20:28 - 00:55:46:04
Beth Osborne
And even though I had been told from the beginning of my actually jump back one more, even though I'd been told that if people drive more, traffic fatalities go up and when they drive less, they go down. Then Covid hit and traffic went way down and fatalities went way up. And that was because we exposed. What overengineered roads do they encourage high speed travel.

00:55:46:04 - 00:56:10:16
Beth Osborne
They encourage people to drive the design speed and the design speed of the road, the road speed that it is that the designers expected people to be able to go is not the same as the posted speed. And that's another trick we play on our on our taxpayers is we say, we're going to tell you from the design of the roadway that it's safe to go 50, but we're going to market 30.

00:56:10:22 - 00:56:40:04
Beth Osborne
And when you mess up, we're going to fine you and every American, even people that don't specialize in design or transport, know what that's called. And it's called a speed trap. And yet we allow transportation agencies to continue to do that. So we saw this massive increase of fatalities. And now you hear people celebrating that we've come down to still higher than anything we've seen for decades, because it's less than it was.

00:56:40:04 - 00:56:45:29
Beth Osborne
And that's all it takes is as long as it was less than last year, it doesn't matter if it's appalling.

00:56:46:01 - 00:57:14:00
John Simmerman
Yeah. Well, and you really touch upon a very, very important point that I want to emphasize here. And we talk about it a lot on the, on the channel is the fact that we've seen this, we've seen the fact that we've blamed the nut behind the wheel, we blame the people who are are the victims of these. We've fine tuned the equipment, and all the technology and the whiz bangs that we have been putting into our tool, our, our, our vehicle itself.

00:57:14:03 - 00:57:42:09
John Simmerman
But the one thing that we don't do that other countries do, that really, truly embrace a safe systems approach, a Vision Zero approach is we don't take a step back and say, maybe it's the actual roadway that needs to be addressed. Maybe that's what we need to be addressing. Is that built environment you so eloquently expressed it is that what's the design speed of this?

00:57:42:09 - 00:58:27:19
John Simmerman
Is this a dangerous by design intersection? Do we need to take, you know, put a pause on this and know to to paraphrase, you know, Wes Marshall, you know, take a look at the transportation engineering that was involved. Where was this? Yeah. Was this caused by the engineering that we have applied to this? There's a real reluctance to doing that because there's a real I want to even say that there's almost a conspiracy of efforts that are in place to not question the design of the roadway, of the streets, of the intersections, because to admit to that, we built it wrong.

00:58:27:23 - 00:58:34:12
John Simmerman
We built it so that it would cause this carnage. Seems like we're admitting guilt.

00:58:34:15 - 00:58:49:02
Beth Osborne
Yes. And we may need to help them along by, by making that happen. It might involve lawsuits. Right now, there's more fear of being sued, for not following the standard than being sued because your design killed people.

00:58:49:05 - 00:59:02:08
John Simmerman
Exactly, exactly. And West did a great job in his book. Killed by a traffic engineer to really highlight the fact that those standards, when you really look into it, were pretty much just made up.

00:59:02:11 - 00:59:37:28
Beth Osborne
But of course they were. We had to start someplace. And the engineers that were a part of creating the system originally were just trying to start someplace. They didn't expect that it would become biblical. But it did. And so here you also see, I stole this from the, American Society of Civil Engineers who, I think do a great job of showing that our road condition, has really stayed almost the same over the last 25 years.

00:59:37:28 - 01:00:00:23
Beth Osborne
If you go back and look at their 2000, 2001 report, I think, the roads got a D. So they've elevated to a whole D plus, which is, is pitiful. And then if you go down a bridges and the, the bridges, they've just been a C nonstop. They haven't really improved at all. The, the poor condition is just almost the same.

01:00:00:23 - 01:00:24:09
Beth Osborne
And again, it's just, it's too much fun to build new stuff and it's a it's hard it's hard to, to replace things. And so this shows you where the money is going. And that big red slice is new stuff because that's fun. And that's all the new liabilities that we're going to have to pay for when we can't afford to pay for what we already have.

01:00:24:11 - 01:00:49:06
Beth Osborne
And again, that leads to emissions, because the more you build, the more people drive, the more there are emissions. And so we are looking at a massive increase in emissions, because the bipartisan infrastructure bill that was supposed to bring down emissions, kind of the old school traditional Democratic position is, well, we'll just change the drivetrain in cars and busses and things and trucks and it will fix it.

01:00:49:06 - 01:01:22:09
Beth Osborne
But that's not how it works. If you force people to keep driving and you keep taking away space from getting away in any other way, and making more space or driving, you're going to have a massive increase in emissions in the short term, and you're going to continue to have a big amount of pollutants that cause, damage to human health because the brakes and the tires and the pavement itself will, let off emissions that, you know, make kids sick.

01:01:22:11 - 01:01:45:21
Beth Osborne
And there's this attitude of, yes, and yes, we'll build our transit and you can build your highways. And that last graph that you just had shows why that doesn't work. Because, yes, you've got this, this much benefit, but it's overwhelmed by this much harm. And that's just the, the science of it. And so you end up with that gray slice of increases in emissions.

01:01:45:23 - 01:02:03:29
Beth Osborne
And all of this is done because we've got to deal with the traffic that we have created by building a transportation system where you can only get around by one means, and a land use system that puts everything you need in the least convenient place as possible. Couldn't possibly give you a grocery store anywhere near you. We've seen that.

01:02:03:29 - 01:02:32:03
Beth Osborne
Now we need to update this and we have that under works. But this was looking at 93 to 2017, and we looked at the most populous hundred cities in the country and overall freeway capacity grew 42%, population grew 32% and congestion grew 144% at first. So like math that out for me to show me where the congestion is and how much that will cost.

01:02:32:10 - 01:02:58:11
Beth Osborne
And what's interesting is we see this no matter what kind of community you're talking about. We saw traffic go up in all 100 areas and by a lot. So if if you jump to the next slide, we see, congestion. So you know, you've got a Nashville where you basically kept pace with population growth and 329% increase in traffic congestion.

01:02:58:14 - 01:03:34:02
Beth Osborne
You know, same thing in in San Diego, Pensacola. They got way ahead. They will way more, new capacity than their growth and population. Huge explosion in congestion. And worst you've got on the next slide, we have communities that have lost population or stayed about even. And they have massive increases in congestion. So the U.S. transportation approach has pioneered a way to move fewer people more slowly with more spending and more capacity.

01:03:34:09 - 01:03:34:19
John Simmerman
Right.

01:03:34:25 - 01:03:50:27
Beth Osborne
And that is the excuse for not making things safer, for not paying to maintain. What we already have is we've got to deploy this absolute failure of an approach to reduce congestion. And, and it is a failure.

01:03:51:00 - 01:04:26:19
John Simmerman
Yeah. And it's what's funny? It's not funny. Funny. Ha ha. Funny. Tragic in a sense is the laugh. Is that, you know, even this concept of, of focusing in, on and persevering over, congestion is, is kind of the wrong metric. Anyways, when the solution is the automobile and the solution of the automobile and the congestion is to try to build more capacity and more lanes, which be duty induced, demand just means more and more cars.

01:04:26:19 - 01:04:52:01
John Simmerman
And so it's it's just it's fundamentally even the wrong metric to be looking at, you know, if what we're trying to do is create vitality and prosperity and vibrancy and enhance quality of life, we want to rewind back to what we were talking about before of of mobility, freedom and independence and choice. That's what we really need to be focusing in on.

01:04:52:07 - 01:05:29:18
Beth Osborne
Well, and going back to what is typical like the purpose of the transportation system is to connect people to jobs and essential services. It's helping a young Beth Osborne in law school reach that job. And, without me having to pay a cover charge to enter into the economy. And if you look at the measures we use there, 1950s measures and even in the 1950s, if you read academic studies on what we should be measuring, it was whether or not people can get to things, which is not just speed, it speed and distance.

01:05:29:21 - 01:05:53:19
Beth Osborne
But we didn't have the capacity to run those numbers for millions of potential trips between, you know, nearly unlimited set of origins and destinations. So what we did, which was smart, is we said we're adding an amenity that is this highway system and we're going to speed up traffic. Does increasing that speed with everything else remaining the same, save time?

01:05:53:22 - 01:06:11:05
Beth Osborne
Can we use that as a proxy? Sure. The problem is the way we increase speeds was we cut off other travel and we made those trips impossible or longer by a long shot. And we took away while we were giving new ways of travel, we swept away other ways of travel.

01:06:11:06 - 01:06:35:20
John Simmerman
Like we also swept away ability to travel for for kids in particular, and for non drivers in particular. You know, so we for all ages and abilities, we took away that ability to be able to walk and bike to meaningful destinations, use transit, you know, throughout the community. And so yeah, we honed in on mobility options.

01:06:35:22 - 01:06:40:27
John Simmerman
If you're a driver. But for everybody else good luck.

01:06:40:29 - 01:06:59:20
Beth Osborne
But now we do know how to measure these things. I mean, in my my handy dandy little hand computer here, I can determine how to get to every potential destination. I can also do a search for like, what are all the restaurants around here and how far are they? And how can I travel to every one of them?

01:06:59:22 - 01:07:29:00
Beth Osborne
We could do that. The state of Virginia has actually been doing that as a way to measure how well their transportation system is working for ten years now, and they actually prioritize their investments based on whether or not the project increases access to the destination, not just whether it made the traffic go faster, because where traffic goes faster, sometimes it's connecting you to areas that don't have many destinations.

01:07:29:00 - 01:07:50:07
Beth Osborne
As a new development area or the way you're doing it is you're cutting off other trips. And also think about that roadway where you have no left turn signs all the way down the roadway. That is because make allowing people to take a left hand turn results in queuing, which results in congestion. And so you get rid of that.

01:07:50:07 - 01:08:07:09
Beth Osborne
And on that roadway it means that there's more free flowing trips. But it means when you have to take a left, do you now have to take at least three rights, in spite of the fact that that costs you time, we get to count it as a time savings because the speed went up and we just consider it.

01:08:07:12 - 01:08:51:15
Beth Osborne
The speed went up. Everyone save time. And that's not true. If we actually measure the way. Virginia's measuring the way we measure trips using our phones. When we schedule our own trips or map out our own trips, we could actually find out if we're saving people real time, and we could do it by all modes of travel, which means we could look and see if we're increasing people's access, whether they're children or seniors or maybe, lower income households that don't have access to one vehicle per person over 16 and have really meaningful, measures of actual mobility and actual transportation results, even if you don't want to get to the businesses around there,

01:08:51:15 - 01:08:52:26
Beth Osborne
which will also do better.

01:08:52:28 - 01:09:40:01
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. Again, your website is t the number for america.org. And I notice that we do have if we click over here, we've got, you know, insights and resources real quickly because I see some things that we have out here. We've got the blog and we've got other resources and, and, insights here. Please address really, really briefly as we, bring this to a close, the insanity that's happening right now, with regards to at the federal level in in the weeks leading up to our, our recording session here, just so much is changing and it's and it's changing literally on the every day, sometimes by the hour.

01:09:40:08 - 01:10:09:25
John Simmerman
So it's, it's too volatile to actually say anything meaningful that we know that this is going to happen for the future. But yeah, we see all sorts of really, really crazy stuff that is happening. Emphasis on the crazy, including something that I think came out yesterday, which is, you know, a platform position of resisting any travel lanes or parking lanes for cars being converted into any other mode of travel.

01:10:09:28 - 01:10:27:29
John Simmerman
So again, we don't need to be because even by the time this comes out in like a couple of weeks, some things are going to be changing. But any wisdom since you've been in DC for so long is how do we weather through the insanity, and the dynamic nature of what we're going through right now?

01:10:28:01 - 01:10:52:24
Beth Osborne
So I think chaos is right. A lot of, announcements have been made and then backed off of. So nothing is permanent. And there are many things that this administration has allowed to continue. Some to programs have continued for for localities. I have not seen big delays on new transit projects yet. The last Trump administration did. So we'll see.

01:10:52:26 - 01:10:58:29
Beth Osborne
They seem to have it out more folks than for transit, but we'll see on that. It early days.

01:10:59:02 - 01:11:01:06
John Simmerman
It seems evil bicyclists.

01:11:01:08 - 01:11:06:16
Beth Osborne
I know nothing worse than a kid on a bike going to school, I guess, I guess.

01:11:06:16 - 01:11:08:00
John Simmerman
Yeah.

01:11:08:03 - 01:11:28:20
Beth Osborne
But I think there are a couple things to keep in mind. One is, we should not take any announcement is permanent. This administration has shown themselves flexible in backing off of, things that they have put out, but also, it's super important that people are in constant touch with their congressional delegation when their projects are in jeopardy.

01:11:28:23 - 01:11:49:19
Beth Osborne
If you have, a Republican member of Congress, they are speaking up on your behalf. They might not be going straight to the presses, but they are reaching out and it is making a difference. I think the the last thing I want people to think about is we have a program. We talked about the spending, but we didn't talk as much about where the money comes from.

01:11:49:21 - 01:12:14:13
Beth Osborne
And it theoretically comes from the gas taxes you pay when you buy gasoline. 18.4 cents per gallon is charged as a federal gas tax. And if you buy diesel, then it's 24.4 cents, and then you pay some tire taxes and a handful of other taxes that come into this trust fund. And it means transportation agencies, when you have a user fee like that that pays for your program, you don't have to go through the annual appropriations process.

01:12:14:13 - 01:12:41:11
Beth Osborne
But annual fight to make sure your program gets the money it needs. And that gives some stability so you can plan these big projects. However, the user fee has not covered the cost of the program since 2009 because we haven't raised the user fees since, 1993. People love to claim it's fuel efficiency. That's not that's not really the issue because people have driven more to help cover the gap.

01:12:41:15 - 01:13:22:24
Beth Osborne
So we're just taking your time and energy away as opposed to having your your vehicle burn more gasoline. But the other thing is, all of this chaos you're talking about means that projects are being halted at random points. And, project sponsors are being asked to scope their project to get rid of undesirable elements. And so if we don't have the funding to justify the stability and we don't have the stability to justify the stability, it's isn't it time to walk away from the trust fund and just make this a program like education, housing, or any other program that has to fight for its funding annually.

01:13:23:00 - 01:13:46:19
Beth Osborne
And considering the fact that one of the reasons you do it annually is to have oversight over the administration to see what they're, what they're doing with the funding, when we want that to be annual, considering that they're digging into projects that were supposed to move forward months ago, I would argue, yes, I think it's probably time to move beyond that trust fund and treat transportation like, like any other program.

01:13:46:22 - 01:14:07:14
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. And let's face it, it's it's time to actually acknowledge that the, the interstate system is pretty much built out, and we don't need to be adding more lane miles. What we really need to be doing is investing in those options. As we talked about earlier, Beth Osborne, this has been so much fun. Thank you so much.

01:14:07:14 - 01:14:14:05
John Simmerman
I know we can continue for hours and hours and hours, but I need to turn your day. Exactly.

01:14:14:07 - 01:14:25:28
Beth Osborne
Now, this is fun, and I really do hope people go dig through the website. Please email me and tell me all the problems we find so that we can fix it. Let me know what works on your browser and what doesn't and tell me what we should do next.

01:14:26:01 - 01:14:26:10
John Simmerman
Yeah.

01:14:26:13 - 01:14:28:23
Beth Osborne
And again, thank you so much for coming.

01:14:28:25 - 01:14:35:13
John Simmerman
Yes, absolutely. Thank you, Beth. And, until next time, thank you so much for joining me on the Active Towns podcast.

01:14:35:15 - 01:14:36:13
Beth Osborne
Yes. Fun.

01:14:36:15 - 01:14:51:10
John Simmerman
Again. Thank you all so much for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed this episode with Beth Osborne. If you did, please hit give it a thumbs up. Leave a comment down below and share it with a friend. And if you haven't done so already, be honored to have you subscribe to the channel. Just click on the subscription button down below and be sure to turn on all notifications.

01:14:51:12 - 01:15:10:08
John Simmerman
And if you are enjoying this content here on the Active Towns Channel, again, please consider supporting my efforts by becoming an Active Towns Ambassador. Super easy to do. You can click on the join button here on YouTube or leave YouTube. Super! Thanks! Tip or if you would like, you can head on over to Active towns.org. Click on the support tab at the top of the page.

01:15:10:16 - 01:15:28:07
John Simmerman
There's several different options, including becoming a Patreon supporter. Patrons can get early, and they have free access to all of this video content, as well as making a donation to the nonprofit. Or buy me a coffee. Several different options. Again, head on over to Active Town Storage and click on that support tab at the top of the page.

01:15:28:07 - 01:15:48:27
John Simmerman
I can thank you all so much for tuning in. I really do appreciate it. And until next time, this is John signing off by wishing you much activity, health and happiness. Cheers! And again, just want to send a huge thank you to all my Active Towns Ambassadors supporting the channel financially via YouTube memberships YouTube super thanks. As well as making contributions to the nonprofit and join my Patreon.

01:15:49:04 - 01:15:53:16
John Simmerman
Every little bit adds up and is very much appreciated. Thank you all so much!