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

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:44:21
Jarrett Walker
My role is to emphasize why there is a problem that only public transit conventionally understood, can solve, and that is the problem of liberating large numbers of people in a relatively dense city where there isn't room for them all to be in separate cars or pods of whatever kind. And that, in fact, the extraordinary success we see of transit systems that are useful and the degree to which the ridership of transit systems clearly correlates with how useful those systems are, gives me every reason to believe that there is not, in fact, a vast unmet need for people to move around in private parts.

00:00:44:21 - 00:00:48:04
Jarrett Walker
In fact, I think there's a vast unmet need for public transit.

00:00:48:07 - 00:01:09:03
John Simmerman
Hey everyone, and welcome to the Active Towns Channel. My name is John Simmerman and that is Jarrett Walker, author of the revised edition of the book Human Transit, which just came out. We are going to be talking about what's new in the book. Since it was originally published in 2011. And, it's a good one. So let's get right to it.

00:01:09:10 - 00:01:14:23
John Simmerman
What's your.

00:01:14:25 - 00:01:18:23
John Simmerman
Jarrett Walker, thank you so much for joining me on the Active Channels podcast. Welcome.

00:01:18:26 - 00:01:21:13
Jarrett Walker
Thank you very much, John. It's good to be here.

00:01:21:16 - 00:01:30:04
John Simmerman
Jared, I love giving my guests just an opportunity to introduce themselves so really quickly, like a 32nd introduction. Who the heck is Jared Walker?

00:01:30:07 - 00:02:09:00
Jarrett Walker
Oh, I have been for the last 30 years, a consultant specializing in planning of public transit systems, public transport systems. You would call them in Europe? Mostly what we do is design and redesign the bus layer of public transit networks. But I've also done a great deal of writing and thinking about, public transit networks more generally and about how good public transit planning relates to good urbanism that has shown up in the form of a book called Human Transit and also a blog called Human transit.org.

00:02:09:02 - 00:02:35:07
Jarrett Walker
My work there. My writing is really all about trying to give everyone the tools they need to wade into their own local public transport debates and, understand the consequences of various things you might do. The book has just came out in a second edition in 2020. For the first edition came out in 2011. So it's, it's something that, lots of people in the public transport world have, have found really useful.

00:02:35:07 - 00:02:37:09
Jarrett Walker
And I hope you'll find it useful as well. Yeah.

00:02:37:11 - 00:02:58:12
John Simmerman
Thank you, I appreciate it. And, Yep. We've we've got it right here. Thank you. Fabulous. Revision to the book. And and it's really known, I think in the transit world, public transit world is one of the go to Bibles of public transit. And, we'll talk a little bit about some of the history and of the type of work that you're doing.

00:02:58:17 - 00:03:12:24
John Simmerman
But I'm just super curious as to, a where you're located, where you guys are physically located and, and how you got interested in this line of work. What was sort of that origin story?

00:03:12:27 - 00:03:35:14
Jarrett Walker
We're located in our home offices in Portland, Oregon, which happens to be where I grew up. But I moved back here after living in several other places. But I moved back here in 2011 when I decided to start the firm. And, but we have an office in Arlington, Virginia, and we have one person based in Portugal who manages our European practice.

00:03:35:16 - 00:04:03:09
Jarrett Walker
And so we're just about 20 people now, I think at this point how I got into this, I would have to say that, it's wonderful that there are so many paths into this profession because you're probably not going to follow mine. I, grew up in a, an artistic household with lots of encouragement to be interested in, lots of different things.

00:04:03:09 - 00:04:32:21
Jarrett Walker
And I was interested in lots of different things. And that led by the time I was an undergraduate to spending a lot of time in the theater department, which led to going to graduate school in a theater arts. And so I have a PhD in theater arts and humanities from Stanford. But at the same time, I also, as I was growing up, was somebody who had a really, really weirdly good memory for geography.

00:04:32:26 - 00:05:15:21
Jarrett Walker
And I was always drawing maps of imaginary cities. And, I remember my parents paper at the wall of my room with the, free, maps of states and cities that you could get at a, at a gas station or petrol station in those days. Because they knew that I was just obsessed with maps. So, along about my 30s, when I realized I didn't want to go on into theater, I found my way back into this and and frankly, I think my my foot in the door was just a really weird ability to to work with the geographic dimension of, of of the, of the, you know, of the,

00:05:15:22 - 00:05:32:24
Jarrett Walker
of the topic, you know, back in those days, this is the early 1990s, you know, we didn't have Google Maps or anything like that. I would go to a client city and drive around for a while, and then I would go into an interview with the client and sketch a map of their city from memory on the whiteboard.

00:05:32:24 - 00:05:46:24
Jarrett Walker
And that was the thing that always really sort of sort of dazzled them and made them say, gosh, you must have been studying this for a long time. No, I just have a really weird memory for it. I forget other things. I can't remember faces. I am, I have a little cheat here to remind me who you are, John.

00:05:46:24 - 00:06:09:06
Jarrett Walker
So I'll try to keep your name in my mind now, but I'll forget it after that. Yeah. So, you know, all weird skills come with weird weaknesses, but, where that went then, is that I hooked up with, a couple of women by the name of Fanny Nelson and Diane Nygaard when they were founding their firm, which still exists.

00:06:09:09 - 00:06:40:01
Jarrett Walker
And, just got started with them, and we were doing small scale transit planning. We were doing small cities around California. It's based in San Francisco at that time. And, so that led to a gradually growing practice of working on the designs of larger and larger systems. And then I broke up with Nelson Nygaard in 2005, went and lived in Australia for five years, and worked there, which was a very interesting experience in terms of, you know, get it, of working in something much more like the the British influence system.

00:06:40:01 - 00:06:50:24
Jarrett Walker
It's made me it's made me very comfortable working in the UK and then came back in 2011 and and founded the firm here.

00:06:50:27 - 00:07:13:12
John Simmerman
Fantastic. Wow. That's that's fascinating, too, that you have that experience, over there in it down under in Australia. And you mentioned Europe too. You've got your, your Portugal office. And I saw that you've done some work, even like in Dublin or in Ireland. And so you're definitely, you know, an international firm that's really, you know, working on this.

00:07:13:15 - 00:07:38:16
John Simmerman
And I want to pop over to your website here. So we've got your landing page for, for your website, and we've got a little, little snapshot there of your team and all the folks there and, and folks you can, can click, you know, just head on over to the website here. It's Jarrett walker.com Jarrett Walker and Associates and you can you know take a look at where they're doing their work and all of that.

00:07:38:19 - 00:07:59:10
John Simmerman
I had Jeff spec on not too terribly long ago to talk about his, you know, revision of his book and, and, you know, doing the there was the 10th anniversary to, walkable City. And he wanted to to take a look at that for your book here for Human Transit and the revised edition. What really prompted that?

00:07:59:17 - 00:08:11:25
John Simmerman
Were there some significant changes that you wanted to address and be able to update the book, or what was a really the origin of of revisiting this particular book for a revised edition?

00:08:11:28 - 00:08:36:12
Jarrett Walker
What I was really trying to do in the book is help people who are coming to this field with so many different backgrounds, people get interested in transit from so many points of view architecture, urban design, economics, but also civil rights and all kinds of other, all kinds of perspectives. And so a transit conversation is full of a whole bunch of different kinds of expertise.

00:08:36:15 - 00:09:11:18
Jarrett Walker
And the problem I was trying to address in the book is, how do I gather all these people and give them the basic sort of geometric facts that you need about how transit works, so that you can make decisions about it and understand the consequences of those decisions. And that's what I was doing in the book. And the core of that argument, the reason it is still the same book, is that the core of that argument is taking people through the physical and geometric facts of the matter, which are not going to change and are not going to be changed by any invention or any transformation or any pandemic.

00:09:11:21 - 00:09:43:06
Jarrett Walker
Nevertheless, by 2024, a book on this topic dated 2011 was going to be assumed to be out of date. And I felt like so many things had happened, not just the pandemic, but also the and the and the rise of working from home. But also the profound, investments that venture capital had made in pushing a series of narratives about how public transport is supposedly obsolete.

00:09:43:06 - 00:10:07:03
Jarrett Walker
We're supposedly going to be replaced by some cool new invention I felt, and I had discovered in my regular work that I had to spend more and more time at the beginning of every presentation, clearing away the debris of all of the confusion that those, that those, that those various, organizations and inventors and so on were promoting.

00:10:07:06 - 00:10:08:00
Jarrett Walker
So I.

00:10:08:02 - 00:10:15:26
John Simmerman
I was gonna say, I was gonna say, let's put this in a context. So to you said it was, the first book was in 2011, sector 11.

00:10:15:26 - 00:10:16:04
Jarrett Walker
Right.

00:10:16:10 - 00:10:39:26
John Simmerman
Okay. 2011 along comes the the whole Micro-mobility revolution, circa 2016, 2017, 2018, all that's happening. And then the the next big event that happens is, of course, the pandemic in 2020. So yeah, there's there's quite a bit of little niggles that to address in the book in this new version.

00:10:39:28 - 00:10:49:01
Jarrett Walker
Right. And that word micromobility gets used a bunch of ways. And I try to, I try to we have to really start by sorting through and figuring out what someone's talking about when they say.

00:10:49:02 - 00:10:50:11
John Simmerman
Exactly.

00:10:50:13 - 00:11:22:02
Jarrett Walker
The, I try to use micromobility for person sized vehicles like scooters and bicycles, but the there has been, of course, the so-called invention of so-called micro transit or on demand transit. But there's also been an enormous amount of money going into, more imaginary things which will supposedly replace public transit, like Elon Musk's, Teslas and tunnels under Las Vegas.

00:11:22:05 - 00:11:52:02
Jarrett Walker
I'll be looking at a pitch tomorrow from yet another company that thinks it's going to transform our cities with vast networks of aerial gondolas similar to Tel Fabregas. And what those all have in common is the belief that what's wrong with big busses and big trains is all the intermediate stops they make. And all of the, strangers, frankly, that they introduce you to.

00:11:52:05 - 00:11:52:25
John Simmerman
Right.

00:11:52:27 - 00:12:29:22
Jarrett Walker
And what's going on in a lot of those visions is an attempt to replicate the privacy of the private car in something that does not have the congestion problems of the private car. It's a fascinating moment, but my role is to emphasize why there is a problem that only public transit conventionally understood, can solve, and that is the problem of liberating large numbers of people in a relatively dense city where there isn't room for them all to be in separate cars or pods of whatever kind.

00:12:29:24 - 00:12:57:20
Jarrett Walker
And that, in fact, the extraordinary success we see of transit systems that are useful, and the degree to which the ridership of transit systems clearly correlates with how useful those systems are, gives me every reason to believe that there is not, in fact, a vast unmet need for people to move around in private parts. In fact, I think there's a vast unmet need for public transit in many places.

00:12:57:20 - 00:12:59:20
Jarrett Walker
Certainly in North America.

00:12:59:22 - 00:13:35:03
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. Peter Norton and I had this discussion when, his most recent book, A Ton of Rama, came out. And, you know, he talks as a historian. He talks about this whole fact that we have this infatuation, you know, as society and motor dumbs has is just stoking it and pushing it out there is that there's always that technology push and that, you know, that belief that, you know, someday we're going to have our little, you know, little tubes in our little private little pods that'll, you know, be able to vacuum, seal and be able to get there.

00:13:35:10 - 00:13:49:21
John Simmerman
Or as Todd Litman mentioned, you know, where's my jetpack? Or maybe I've got a jetpack, you know, it's like, and and it's always and it's always just beyond our reach in terms of whether it's, you know, it's ever possible.

00:13:49:23 - 00:14:13:04
Jarrett Walker
Peter Norton is such a careful historian that he won't say this, but it's really obvious in his book, Katana Rama, if you look at it, why are there these 30 year cycles? There's this cycle of roughly every 30 years. We get a new blast of this stuff. And one of the things he does in the book, Katana Rama is, is help us see how old this high tech future is.

00:14:13:04 - 00:14:37:10
Jarrett Walker
It takes us back to the Jetsons. He's takes us back to the past version of the future. And he also observes, though, that in the vision of autonomous vehicles, there's been these there have been now three, 30 year cycles of hype and retrenchment. And he doesn't say this, but it's obvious enough to me why 30 years? Because that's how long it takes to grow up.

00:14:37:10 - 00:14:40:26
Jarrett Walker
A generation of 20 somethings who don't remember that we did this before.

00:14:40:28 - 00:14:43:03
John Simmerman
Right? Right. Exactly.

00:14:43:06 - 00:15:06:24
Jarrett Walker
That's so long it takes. So that's how long it takes. So you and and it is those 20 somethings who have that incredible certainty about about things that only comes from not having watched very much history. God bless them. I mean, that's, that's it's it's where the energy comes from. But, but I thought that I thought that was one of the great things about Peter's work was that observation that this is just going to keep coming around.

00:15:07:01 - 00:15:37:27
John Simmerman
Yeah, exactly. And and brace yourself and try to remember, so I, I do have, we're paused here on, the cover of the book again, human transit, the revised, addition and how clear thinking about public transit can enrich our communities and our lives. And the whole quote here of it's sort of like your mission statement, here is my job with this book is not to share my values, but to give you the tools to clarify and advocate yours.

00:15:37:29 - 00:15:48:26
John Simmerman
Dive a little deeper into that. What do you really mean by that? Because values is one of those those words that can sometimes, you know, Hackel people, you know, here in the back of their night and say, what do you mean.

00:15:48:28 - 00:16:15:03
Jarrett Walker
Values? I mean, what is important to you? What is so important to you that you will sacrifice something else that's important to you in return for it? So I was trying to address just a fundamental problem in the transport conversation, which is that in the transport conversation, we spent lots of time listening to experts. And what those experts give us is often facts mixed with values.

00:16:15:05 - 00:16:42:14
Jarrett Walker
Right. So an expert may say the traffic projection and say that we need to widen the highway. And I will and I will say, no, wait a minute. Now, the traffic projections say that if nothing else happens, there will be more traffic. But widening the highway is a value judgment about that. It's a it says, do you want there to be more traffic?

00:16:42:14 - 00:17:04:06
Jarrett Walker
If so, why don't the highway that will make room for the more traffic. If you don't widen the highway, there will not be that much traffic because there won't be room for it. So it's insisting that the right course of action is never suggest is never, simply given to us by the data. Data never tell us what to do.

00:17:04:08 - 00:17:32:16
Jarrett Walker
Data present us with our choices, however, and data present us with the consequences of our options. And so my whole practice, and this is how we run a bus network redesign, for example, is to put before the public some contrasting alternatives that illustrate how the network could look different if different values were prioritized, so that the community can have a conversation about which of those about how they want to balance those tradeoffs.

00:17:32:19 - 00:18:01:05
Jarrett Walker
And it's precisely about keeping my values out of the picture. As a consultant, I'm working in a community that I don't live in. I don't have a vote as a citizen there, I shouldn't. I'm there to help them reach their decision and to understand the consequences of their choices. And if, if, if a, when a local community community leader is a board of directors or whatever reaches a decision, you know, my definition of success is not do I like the decision?

00:18:01:05 - 00:18:11:18
Jarrett Walker
My definition of success is do they understand the consequences of their decisions? And if and I feel like if they do, I've done my job. Yeah.

00:18:11:21 - 00:18:48:15
John Simmerman
What would you say is, you know, between that period of when the first book to the second book, given the context of the changes that, you know, have taken place, what's what would you say is the most encouraging thing that you have seen, in North America and also globally in terms of, you know, that approach, in that belief, in that acceptance of what public transit is for and kind of aligning to what we were just talking about the values of, of, of, of this as a mode of, of mobility and getting around.

00:18:48:18 - 00:19:23:11
Jarrett Walker
I think we've seen a number of things that are very important. I think that in, there's a particular conversation in North America that is. And to a degree in or around the edges of Europe, certainly in the UK, where you have a problem that decision makers in the society are overwhelmingly motorists, are looking in the situation from a motorist point of view and therefore just not understanding certain things about how urban transportation works that you will not understand as long as you insist on the motorist point of view.

00:19:23:13 - 00:20:02:00
Jarrett Walker
And what I've seen in North America in the course of the decade of the teens, what you'd have to say in general has been a very challenging decade for transit is, first of all, our firm has just had enormous success with this methodology that I just described, doing large scale reimaginings of public transit networks using this methodology, where we are very clear that we are putting difficult choices before the community and inviting them to and inviting people to wrestle with them and to tell us what they would do if they were in the transit agencies place.

00:20:02:03 - 00:20:32:03
Jarrett Walker
And there's just been an an enormous amount of appreciation for that in all of the work we've done, across North America. What we found, interestingly enough, in, but but and then, too, as we've moved out beyond North America, the work we've done in Ireland is very important. The National Transport Authority of Ireland retained us not just to lead the redesign of Dublin, but to lead the redesign of all the major Irish cities.

00:20:32:08 - 00:21:15:09
Jarrett Walker
So, Cork, Waterford, Galway and Limerick as well. And so we've had the opportunity to, work really deeply in that context, in that political environment and managing, and, and figuring out how to adjust the conversation to Ireland's particular circumstances, which include, ironically, some rather, impress massive resources to put into public transport. One of the interesting conversations that's happening in the UK right now is that this is we are at a moment where, the Irish Republic has sent significantly more money to pour into public transport than the UK does.

00:21:15:09 - 00:21:39:04
Jarrett Walker
And that's not the experience. That's not the relationship between England and Ireland that they're used to. It has been an interesting time in that respect. Now, the other thing that's been interesting has been the impact of the pandemic in North America, especially to a lesser degree in other countries, but certainly in the US and Canada, a large part of the more elite workforce, the white collar workforce is, is more or less permanently at home.

00:21:39:07 - 00:22:02:12
Jarrett Walker
We saw a piece in the Washington Post just yesterday analyzing return to office mandates and showing that they correlate with lower productivity and lower retention. There's a there's it has it has become a settled fact, I think, in the US and Canada that lots of people can be productive from home and we can get rid of a lot of commuting and that people don't.

00:22:02:13 - 00:22:23:29
Jarrett Walker
People are valuing the other things they're doing in their lives when they're not commuting. So what does that mean? Well, that means that an elite audience that used to be very demanding of public transit agencies for the rush hour express service in to the big forest of towers at 8 a.m. and back at 5 p.m. is mostly gone.

00:22:24:01 - 00:22:24:26
John Simmerman
Right.

00:22:24:28 - 00:22:58:04
Jarrett Walker
There. Ridership is gone, which is a problem for the big government agencies, but their political demands are also gone. And that's actually kind of a plus, because their political demands were for services that were extremely inefficient to provide. You know, I look at Marin County North of San Francisco, the wealthiest of the San Francisco suburban areas. And I remember looking at the network from before the pandemic and just this absolute ocean of busses making one way trips into the city from practically every corner of the county.

00:22:58:09 - 00:23:16:18
Jarrett Walker
Practically every corner of the county could walk. You could walk down to the end of the street and catch a bus that would take you all the way to the San Fernando, San Francisco financial district. Monstrously inefficient. One way flows. All those busses drive back empty in the other direction and do the whole thing again in the afternoon.

00:23:16:21 - 00:23:40:24
Jarrett Walker
Well, what's happening now? Most of that service is gone. And what's happening now is the transit agencies are actually allowed to focus on the all day, all the time, all direction kind of travel, which in many cases they're able to serve much more efficiently because it means you have a bus or a train that's out all day doing good work all day.

00:23:40:26 - 00:24:23:25
Jarrett Walker
You don't have all the inefficiencies of very short shifts that being required. And what we're finding now is that the the U.S. transit agencies that are reporting ridership, higher than 2019, they're reporting that on weekends, and they're reporting that in on lines that don't go downtown, on lines that connect neighborhoods to each others, that connect you to the hospitals, the shopping, the medical destinations and the education destinations, the community college, all those things that people still do have to do in person and what we're finding is that without that huge peak, it's easier politically now.

00:24:24:00 - 00:24:43:12
Jarrett Walker
And it helps also, by the way, that we've had a whole conversation about racial and social justice in the United States in the last few years, that's helped too. But even without that, we're just allowed now to focus on really our best market. And our best market is a much more diffuse market. It's all kinds of different people doing all kinds of different things.

00:24:43:12 - 00:25:00:07
Jarrett Walker
That requires us to let go of our desire to understand who our writers are in a lot of detail, because they're just so diverse. But that diversity is our strength. And that's where where transit is really succeeding. Certainly in North America. Yeah.

00:25:00:09 - 00:25:23:18
John Simmerman
And I pulled up, the main topics of the book and you had mentioned, they're earlier about some of the choices that need to be made. And, and they're significant choices in terms of, you know, who we're trying to serve, what we're trying to serve, how you're going to be able to do that. You know, everything from frequency to, a number of stops and all those sorts of things.

00:25:23:24 - 00:26:02:28
John Simmerman
The other aspect of of this and again, the what we were talking about earlier is the new material and that push back on that technology hype that we had talked about earlier. But also at the bottom of this, the final point of focus on freedom and, and really understanding how this could be part of the narrative, because I think one of the assumptions when we compare public transit to get in my car and drive wherever I need to go, is that there's one system that quote unquote, provides freedom and one that doesn't.

00:26:03:00 - 00:26:10:10
John Simmerman
And you argue, and I would argue that it's not the one you think it is.

00:26:10:13 - 00:26:32:01
Jarrett Walker
Right, right. And, you know, if you've had the experience of walking out on a street in a major city, you may you may see a, a successful looking person driving their expensive car, completely stuck in traffic, not able to go anywhere, even as busses are going past him on the bus lane and and subway trains are going beneath him.

00:26:32:03 - 00:26:33:02
Jarrett Walker
Yeah, I.

00:26:33:04 - 00:26:38:22
John Simmerman
I wait I have wave as I as I I on my on my Brompton so.

00:26:38:22 - 00:27:09:19
Jarrett Walker
No I mean in dense cities, the intense cities, the car is such an encumbrance and you can achieve so much more freedom if you've really, invested in public transit and every density in the world practically outside the United States has shown this, and, even even a few in the US, but the so, so, so that but the key thing that I was going with, there was not just freedom as a kind of feel good word, but freedom is now something we can measure and talk about.

00:27:09:21 - 00:27:41:06
Jarrett Walker
And so when and I'm putting forward a new methodology for talking about what a public transit network is achieving, and in particular, why you might want to go through the wrenching dislocation of actually revising your public transport network in a way that will make some people angry, because it will change patterns of other people are used to. That's the hard thing that I do, is take communities through that revision process, which inevitably changes things people are used to in ways that make them mad.

00:27:41:08 - 00:28:04:27
Jarrett Walker
And so we have to have a story for why it's worth doing that. We have to have a story for why things will be so much better. And for most of my career, we didn't have that story very clearly. We had to say, trust us, where the experts we had to say, we predict that the ridership will be thus and so that this many more people will use the service.

00:28:05:03 - 00:28:47:22
Jarrett Walker
The existing rider doesn't care about that. But what I finally figured out is that we need what we need to be saying is you and people in general in the community will have more access to opportunity. And so the, the images, the standard explanatory image that I use here is you just visualize a person, wherever they are and wherever they are in a city, there's a blob around them that represents where they could get to in an amount of time that they're likely to have in their day, to get to a job or any other kind of opportunity.

00:28:48:00 - 00:29:08:15
Jarrett Walker
And if it's a trip you're going to make once a day, like a job or going to school, that might be something like 45 minutes. But you draw that, that blob. And what I want you to visualize there is I call that the technical term for that blob is ice or crown. But I call that blob the wall around your life.

00:29:08:17 - 00:29:28:12
Jarrett Walker
Because although there isn't a wall at an exact travel time, we all do have the experience that beyond a certain travel time, it just isn't going to be possible to do that thing. Different travel times for different things. But if you're going to go somewhere every day, it's a real problem. If that's much more than 60 minutes travel time away.

00:29:28:12 - 00:29:49:03
Jarrett Walker
And, of course we have the inside of machetes constant that across all of history, people have tended to travel to tolerate a travel time of about 30 minutes one way, which is really the ideal, but there's a limit. And beyond that limit, that job with that, that, college, whatever. It's just not really available to you.

00:29:49:06 - 00:30:07:27
Jarrett Walker
And that's what I want people to experience when we're talking about a shopping trip, we're talking about a shorter distance. If we're talking about, you know, something you do once a week, like a house of worship, you might tolerate a longer travel time, but the point is, there's a limit beyond which we're just not going to be able to do that thing.

00:30:07:29 - 00:30:39:00
Jarrett Walker
So we calculate that and we say, okay, how many jobs or educational opportunities or whatever else are in that blob. And then we talk about how a particular network plan, changes that blob and how that changes access to opportunity. So I think I cued up the images here from Dublin where we talked about so so oh yeah, quickly, the travel time calculation that's important to remember is the some of walking weighting and writing.

00:30:39:00 - 00:30:59:13
Jarrett Walker
So it's very important to remember that that when you put your your pointer on the map, we're going to figure the total travel time from there. From the time you leave your door, how long you're going to walk, and as well as how long you're going to ride, as well as how far from your desired travel time at time of traveling, will you actually be traveling because of the weight?

00:30:59:15 - 00:31:15:05
Jarrett Walker
And so we calculate the weight very carefully. Even if you don't actually experience the weight standing at a bus stop, you may look at your app and no, not know that you don't need to go to the bus stop until a certain time, but we still count that weight as the difference between when you really want it to go and when you can go.

00:31:15:08 - 00:31:33:14
Jarrett Walker
And so we sum those things up to produce this calculation. So for example, when we did the Dublin network redesign we'd have a person in a particular location. This happens to be Dundrum in the South of Dublin. But of course we did this for locations all over the city. And she's and imagine her asking where can I go in 45 minutes?

00:31:33:14 - 00:31:54:00
Jarrett Walker
Which is essentially asking where could I work? Or where could I go to school? Right? A whole bunch of basic life opportunities require that kind of travel time because you're going to commute. Done. So in the old network, we had a very complicated network that was overwhelmingly oriented toward the inner city. Read on our maps always means high frequency.

00:31:54:00 - 00:32:13:22
Jarrett Walker
So you can see this map was lots of routes going into the city, but not a lot of routes moving orbital in other directions. And the proposed network on the next slide replaced that with a more of a gridded pattern with frequent services both into the city and, orbital. I want to emphasize this is not the final plan.

00:32:13:22 - 00:32:36:23
Jarrett Walker
This was the first proposal. It's gone through several further iterations, but this basic idea is still there. So the point on the next slide then, is that the there was a blob of where she could get to in the existing network, and then there's a different blob of where she could get to in the proposed network. And then we can calculate the differential between those things, which was on the next slide.

00:32:36:26 - 00:32:39:06
Jarrett Walker
And so now we can say I mean this area.

00:32:39:09 - 00:32:44:16
John Simmerman
Yeah this is amazing. So 25% more accessibility.

00:32:44:23 - 00:33:07:16
Jarrett Walker
Wow. Right. And but not only do we know that in the abstract, but a particular person living at this location can look at these blobs and know whether the area we have gained or lost matters to them. So one of the things we did when we put the Dublin Plan out for public comment is we put on the web a tool where everyone could click wherever and see how the blob from that particular place changed.

00:33:07:18 - 00:33:29:25
Jarrett Walker
They could also change the travel time budget so that they could explore what this would mean for themselves. This was transformative because in the absence of that, the conversation that happens around a service change is overwhelmingly this person has been riding this bus for 23 years, and now these big bad bureaucrats are changing it, right? That's the narrative.

00:33:29:28 - 00:33:53:22
Jarrett Walker
And so but this narrative is that this narrative, that yes, the big bad bureaucrats are changing it for a reason because they want you to be more free. They want you to have more access to opportunity. And that this is ultimately how in a city as dense as Dublin, where there just isn't room for everyone's car, we're going to get more people using public transport, not because we'll force them to, but because it will be liberating to them to do so.

00:33:53:24 - 00:34:17:15
Jarrett Walker
And, and that's what we're doing here. But the thing that's new is that we're quantifying this. We can measure it. We're not we know exactly. And so this becomes a thing we can talk about where in the past, all we had to talk about were, say, ridership projections, which came out of some model that nobody could explain and didn't necessarily speak to what everyday people cared about anyway.

00:34:17:17 - 00:34:37:07
Jarrett Walker
And so but and then we would aggregate this. Of course, if you look at the next slide, we would, we would then for every location in the city, we would color it according to whether its access got better or worse. We'd average over the whole population. And that got us to the winning soundbite. The average Dubliner can get to 16% more destinations in 45 minutes.

00:34:37:09 - 00:35:01:10
Jarrett Walker
20% more destinations in 30 minutes. We said that over and over and over again. And so that everyone who was angry about some detail of the plan needed to interact with the fact that the plan wasn't just some bureaucrats who thinks that this is good for you. This was this was a plan to liberate the city, and to liberate the people of Dublin in a really measurable way.

00:35:01:13 - 00:35:06:05
Jarrett Walker
And. Yeah. And so it made it a little bit harder to just be against the whole thing.

00:35:06:08 - 00:35:56:07
John Simmerman
Yeah. And, and I noticed the, the notations here, of, you know, 16% more destinations in the 45 minutes and, and 25% and more in jobs. Given what you had mentioned earlier of that transition of, that pressure of the the work commute being, you know, the critical thing, I would think that we need to be like, really understanding, well, how well does our transit system serve all of these other destination, all of these other trips is something that we talk about a lot here on the Active Towns podcast, is that we know that of the vast, not the vast majority, we know that a significant number of trips are inherently walkable and bikeable.

00:35:56:07 - 00:36:43:27
John Simmerman
The combination thereof, because there a significant number of trips, sometimes 30 or 40, sometimes even 50% of trips within a city, any given city are five miles or less. And so clearly too far to be able to walk that whole distance. But very doable. The e-bike, but at the same time, you start really increasing your, your reach to of, you know, with a good transit system that might be serving longer distances of, you know, how can we, you know, you know, increase the number of those other trips, those other destinations that we're looking at, if more people are not necessarily, you know, doing that main commute into work, right.

00:36:43:29 - 00:37:09:18
Jarrett Walker
And there's so much there, there's so much opportunity, you know, so much of the opportunity is in a trip of like 3 to 7 miles, that kind of range just a little too far to walk and farther than a lot of people are going to want to cycle. And of course, on transit, we have a huge proportion of the audience that, for whatever reason, just are not going to see cycling as appropriate for their situation either, because their city isn't there.

00:37:09:20 - 00:37:37:24
Jarrett Walker
You know, because the city isn't built for a 60 year old woman with two bags of groceries to feel comfortable on a bicycle the way the Netherlands is, for example. But in any case, that's, that is is that's the sort of thing that we can serve with a really dense grid of high frequency services across a dense city that, that and we can create patterns that huge, diverse numbers of people all find useful to get to where they're going.

00:37:37:26 - 00:38:12:21
Jarrett Walker
So, you know, I'm often promoting the idea of the high frequency grid. It's very obvious if you're looking at a gridded city like Los Angeles or Chicago. But in my book, I talk to you through the example of how it looks in San Francisco or how it even looks in Dublin. There's nothing remotely gridded about Dublin, but nevertheless, we laid out a spiderweb grid pattern and found that that that the power of those frequent lines intersecting each other so that it's so easy to connect anywhere those lines cross was so powerful that it was worth doing, even though we were fighting against the street.

00:38:12:21 - 00:38:18:11
Jarrett Walker
Networks sometimes do, to layout the network in the, in that way.

00:38:18:13 - 00:38:44:03
John Simmerman
Right, right. You just mentioned Chicago, you just mentioned Chicago. Chicago. And, I used to live right on the lakefront there, and I used to joke and, and say that my, my morning commute, because I was doing a commute, my morning and afternoon commute was, was sort of like a rehash of my version of the planes, trains and automobile, movie with John Candy and Steve Martin.

00:38:44:05 - 00:39:13:06
John Simmerman
And, I would I would ride my little rickety bike, to the train station, get on, the train and do a reverse commute, on the heavy, heavy rail train, metro train out to, Arlington Heights, where I had my, my pickup truck stash, near the train station there in Arlington Heights. And then I would drive the unserved public transit location of the Motorola Motorola world headquarters.

00:39:13:08 - 00:39:43:06
John Simmerman
And I was building out their wellness program and, and health care cost containment strategies for their 300 acre corporate campus there. And and that's how I did every single day. I would do that because and I've mentioned this recently on a recent podcast, is that I did that because of what I call the Pita factor, the pain in the ass factor of if I actually drove every day in my little pickup truck into the city and out of the city, I'd be just miserable.

00:39:43:08 - 00:40:06:08
John Simmerman
And I it was so much more delightful to ride my little bike to the train station, lock that bike up at the train station and and do the ride and and and vice versa. So a multimodal trip, which oftentimes I think just doesn't get talked about much in terms of like the opportunity, oftentimes people are thinking, oh, it's just one mode.

00:40:06:08 - 00:40:18:14
John Simmerman
You're just writing transit. Well, no, there's a, a walking or biking or, or some sort of active mobility trip typically before that transit ride, you know. So anyways.

00:40:18:17 - 00:40:36:11
Jarrett Walker
All kinds of ways to do it, all kinds of ways to do it. Yeah. And, you know, Chicago was fascinating. We're actually working right now on a network redesign for Pace, which is the public transit agency that provides all the bus services in the Chicago suburbs, almost all of them. So we're dealing with the very landscape you're talking about.

00:40:36:11 - 00:40:57:02
Jarrett Walker
And, you know, much of the much of the, difficulty of access to those suburban employers is very much a land use problem, and I do I put a lot of work. I put a lot of work, actually, what this map is about, we put a lot of work into helping people understand when how to recognize when their transportation problem is actually a land use problem.

00:40:57:09 - 00:41:28:27
Jarrett Walker
Right? So this map of Chicago is, is colored according to how many jobs are within two miles of each location. And the point of this was to capture the degree to which, access to opportunity is on the in the design of the city. Already very unfairly distributed, Chicago is the most centralized major city in the United States in terms of the massiveness of a single downtown compared to satellite downtowns.

00:41:28:27 - 00:41:52:00
Jarrett Walker
It's extraordinary. And that is combined with a very problematic racial geography in which, black and brown folks are particularly likely to be living further from that center. And black folks are particularly likely to be living all the way down in the South and the southern third of the city, which is just furthest from everything, is almost entirely black.

00:41:52:02 - 00:42:14:21
Jarrett Walker
And this creates a problem. Then the reason I but we did this map is that what we were trying to explain, I was trying to explain access to opportunity calculations, which show that the average black person in Chicago had worse access to opportunity than the average, than the whole population, and certainly than the average white person. And I needed to explain why that is not the transit agency being racist.

00:42:14:23 - 00:42:36:24
Jarrett Walker
That is the transit agency doing everything it can to compensate for a racist land use pattern. Right? But but the sheer fact of because we have this huge black population that is furthest from everything they need, that means they need more transit in order to get to the same amount of access, to get to the same amount of opportunity.

00:42:36:27 - 00:43:00:19
Jarrett Walker
And that is inevitably going to look like worse access to opportunity for black people. So I did this in order to this was I did this for a presentation for the Chicago Transit Authority board, because I needed them to all be able to explain clearly why we were turning up these racial disparities in the access numbers, and why that was not actually evidence of CTA doing something wrong.

00:43:00:21 - 00:43:08:22
Jarrett Walker
It was evidence which they all know that the land use that, that the racial geography of Chicago is just really, really problematic.

00:43:08:24 - 00:43:30:29
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. And of course, you know, part of the legacy too, of that in South Chicago is there used to be a lot of jobs down in that area, but they were jobs from yesteryear, I think lots of rendering plants and lots of other, heavy industrial that simply does not exist in that location as much as it did before.

00:43:31:01 - 00:43:41:27
John Simmerman
So previous jobs might have been very walkable, in fact, or being able to access through a streetcar line or a tram of some sort. So in, in yesteryear. Yeah.

00:43:42:00 - 00:43:43:29
Jarrett Walker
Yeah. Exactly.

00:43:44:02 - 00:44:18:00
John Simmerman
Speaking of which, I know that you have done a lot of work in, you know, in places like, you know, Houston and others of really fine tuning and redoing that bus network, really leaning in and optimizing that. Talk a little bit about that, that as a challenge, when things change, like this dynamic of, oh, all of a sudden with one little pandemic and one, 3 to 4 year period.

00:44:18:00 - 00:44:19:02
Jarrett Walker

00:44:19:02 - 00:44:23:11
John Simmerman
Yeah. Hey, guys, we might want to retool that.

00:44:23:13 - 00:44:41:22
Jarrett Walker
You know, like, like a lot of pundits, I found myself in 2021 and I was reading lots of pundits in other fields who were doing the same thing, who were all finding that they could basically say, the pandemic proves that I was right all along about this or that thing that I've always been saying, and and that was true of me too.

00:44:41:24 - 00:45:16:25
Jarrett Walker
I had always felt that we were in North America in particular, over serving that, 9 to 5 briefcase commute into the forest of towers with a level of luxury that was not really an equitable investment. And and I had seen enough of the, I had looked inside the accounting of enough transit agencies to understand just how wildly expensive these long runway services were.

00:45:16:27 - 00:45:50:21
Jarrett Walker
Every one of those busses and trains going back empty in the other direction to serve these huge one way commutes. So related to that. But, I also understood the kinds of political pressure the transit agencies received to take care of those commuters, even when they were not getting particularly good ridership out of them. Marin County is the great example that that that wealthy county north of San Francisco, the incredible levels of service from every street corner in the county to San Francisco, lots and lots of half empty, quarter empty busses even at the peak of the peak.

00:45:50:27 - 00:46:28:17
Jarrett Walker
But carrying people who knew how to get their needs met politically as more fortunate people tend to do. And the other thing that I had, I had seen happening that I, that I thought needed to be confronted, was that the industry had for a long time been telling itself a very harmful story about, who rides transit. And the story they were telling themselves was the transit riders can be divided into two groups, a choice rider, for whom we are to imagine somebody who has a car at home and were to make them leave their car in their driveway, or a dependent or captive rider.

00:46:28:17 - 00:46:53:15
Jarrett Walker
And now we're visualizing, visualize maybe someone dressed for a factory job. Someone, someone dressed for a nursing job, someone dressed to work at McDonald's. Someone or, you know, someone going to the community college. Someone who probably doesn't have a car and is therefore dependent on the transit system. And, you know, I had to I have to say that when certain transportation planners get together and they think no one else is listening, they use an even worse word.

00:46:53:15 - 00:47:27:22
Jarrett Walker
They call these people captive riders like we have them in the dungeon. Well, the whole lesson of the late teens in the United States is that if cars get cheap enough and driving got very cheap, if cars get cheap enough, those captive riders won't. They won't be your captives anymore. They'll buy cars. And at the same time, the experience of something like, you know, that wild express network that used to exist from Marin County into San Francisco, you would look at that and say, yes, these are all people making six figure salaries.

00:47:27:22 - 00:47:48:24
Jarrett Walker
And they know how they they know how to get their city council, and they know how to get their board member on the phone, and they know what to say to them to make something happen, which is why they have all these nice services. But they are not completely choice riders either, because their job is in the San Francisco Financial district and driving into San Francisco is horrible.

00:47:48:27 - 00:47:56:07
Jarrett Walker
And even if you have a nice car, even if you have a luxurious car, it is still a dreadful use of your time.

00:47:56:10 - 00:48:00:27
John Simmerman
Well, it's like what I was saying about my my commute in Chicago is the pain in the US.

00:48:00:29 - 00:48:35:24
Jarrett Walker
Yeah. And but on top of that, the enormous parking costs you pay, you quite properly will pay once you if you're commuting into a dense center like San Francisco. So they weren't not only were those captive riders not completely captive, but the choice riders aren't completely choice. We needed to break. We needed to blow up this whole distinction and recognize that what really happens is that everybody's on a spectrum with different kinds of motives and different kinds of preferences, and different sets of options.

00:48:35:27 - 00:49:13:15
Jarrett Walker
And it is only because everyone is scattered along a spectrum that we can explain the fact that if I improve access, I almost always improve ridership because so so the choice captive thing is not just about those rush hour express, as you know, but it's also very much connected to why, in the 90s and aughts, we had this big movement in the U.S. that we needed to build streetcar or or tramlines everywhere in order to make transit something that that, the cool people would ride and that and thus generate neighborhoods that the cool people would invest in.

00:49:13:23 - 00:49:47:24
Jarrett Walker
It's basically the same mistake. It's a bunch of very fortunate people telling themselves that, you know, they are that they are, a typical design customer whose tastes ought to, ought to govern. And and it again, it reflects, this, exaggerated obsession with the choice. Right. Or is the only person who matters? Once you let go of this distinction, you have to face the fact that every single person who gets on your bus or train made a choice.

00:49:47:27 - 00:50:06:09
Jarrett Walker
However, a few choices they may have. They may not own a car, but they have. But they may have a relative who will give them a ride. They may. They could buy it might the we could force them to buy a car or a motorcycle, or they could just not go to this place they're going and therefore and not achieve whatever they're achieving for themselves by going there.

00:50:06:16 - 00:50:33:04
Jarrett Walker
All those things are possible. And we have to reflect the fact that everybody is making a choice and needs to be treated as though as though they are, you know, as though they're as though their choice has been has been justified by the service that's being provided. So I really was growing, growing depressed by the extent to which American transit agencies particularly were often evolving.

00:50:33:04 - 00:50:55:06
Jarrett Walker
These two tier class segregated systems of, you know, these nice busses for the nice people and some and some not so nice busses for everyone else. And that's one thing that I think we have largely blown away as a result of the pandemic. And it's great because we have a much clearer conversation now about why everybody matters. Yeah.

00:50:55:08 - 00:51:23:13
John Simmerman
You mentioned something there that that piqued a little bit of a memory for me in terms of, you know, just how I tend to get around, when I am in a, when I travel, I frequently go to, to Denver, Colorado. And, one of the things that I notice when I'm, you know, traveling to Denver or fly into Dia, I get on the bus, I'm heading over to Boulder.

00:51:23:15 - 00:51:45:21
John Simmerman
I've got good friends in Boulder, so I try to spend a couple of months there every year, and the two things that that, you know, come up that a really can resonate for me based on what you were just saying, is that I would never even think of doing anything other than getting on the airport bus. I mean, I can't even remember the last time I ever rented a car.

00:51:45:24 - 00:52:11:27
John Simmerman
And and so I, I land at Dia, I get on the airport bus, to Boulder. It's really quite affordable. Get you there in, like, 45 minutes and boom, you're in Boulder once I'm in Boulder, I've always got my Brompton, you know, folding bike with me. I jump on, you know, pull my bike out from underneath the bus and strap my luggage onto it and off I go.

00:52:12:00 - 00:52:35:17
John Simmerman
And the other thing that it it's just it's pragmatic. It's it's simple. It's convenient. It's you know, it's like, you know, you look at the high ridership as a diverse ridership. And I see this on that bus, you know, going out to this, this kind of place. But that's a special situation because this is a special destination, you know, to and from the airport.

00:52:35:20 - 00:53:01:27
John Simmerman
And so, you know, I understand that that's a little different than necessarily all these other trips. But then every once in a while I'll get on the bus. I don't have to do it very frequently in Boulder, but I always get on the bus when I go to downtown Denver from Boulder. And so same thing. It's an express bus type of situation that gets you down to the slide iron.

00:53:01:29 - 00:53:24:28
John Simmerman
Flier is the name of it, and it gets you down to the newly remodeled and reconfigured Union Station. Now, I used to work in downtown, Denver, so I used to do the bus commute every single day from Boulder to Denver to reach my 38th floor of, of my office when I was the national wellness program manager for, this this would be fun for you.

00:53:24:28 - 00:54:03:25
John Simmerman
The old MCI telecommunications, MCI, long distance, I remember that, I remember I remember a long distance, but we had long distance service for our phones and I would do that daily commute. But it's it's just amazing to me how we see in that network. The RTD network of this, the success of a diversity of ridership there. And what I was about to say earlier too, is occasionally I'll jump on one of the local circulators there in Boulder, and I'm blown away by the number of kids that are on it.

00:54:03:27 - 00:54:25:16
John Simmerman
The middle aged and high school kids and some of the the middle school and high school kids for sure. And sometimes some of the younger kids are just using it in droves. The kids, the teens and tweens will do it, in part because it's kind of seen as what we were talking about earlier, a sense of freedom. They have freedom of movement.

00:54:25:16 - 00:54:52:21
John Simmerman
They can do it. It's very I think it might be free for them. With the student ID, but it's just fabulous. And it brings up a conversation I had with Dan Hendrie, who is working up in Kingston, Ontario, on making riding the bike or riding the bus a cool thing to do for the teens. Talk a little bit about that because I think you touched on it about, you know, that perception of who actually rides the bus.

00:54:52:24 - 00:55:17:11
Jarrett Walker
Well, you know, car dependance is something that lots of people have to learn from circumstances. Many, you know, people like me, I mean, people are sometimes horrified when I say that my parents put me on the bus, on the city bus, to go across the city to school and change busses downtown, starting when I was ten years old and yes, my parents were a little more free range in philosophy than some parents may.

00:55:17:11 - 00:55:46:10
Jarrett Walker
And I would understand if you want to wait a few more years. But at some point, yes, teenagers really want their freedom. And if they, you know, especially if they don't have cars that they really figure out how to do things with a transit system, if it's there, if they're in a city. And so we see that, well, I see that all the time here in Portland, where I live and in other big cities, you know, lots and lots of teenagers and, and, you know, people as young as ten, which is when I started writing.

00:55:46:12 - 00:55:51:09
John Simmerman
Yeah. And how empowering that is for, for for a kid. Right. I mean.

00:55:51:11 - 00:55:52:26
Jarrett Walker
And and.

00:55:52:28 - 00:56:30:05
John Simmerman
Yeah, I had Lenore Skenazy on, the mom's worst mom or America's worst mom, as is her nickname that she she earned when she let her was an eight year old or nine year old run ride. You know, the subway, you know, from the from the department store back to the apartment there in Manhattan. And we talk about that fact that, you know, having the ability for children to know how to navigate in their city and use public transit is incredibly empowering for kids and their self-confidence.

00:56:30:05 - 00:57:02:11
John Simmerman
And there's self-efficacy. What has to be layered in there is systems that are safe enough so that that journey to and from the transit is is also safe. And that's where we look at where I spend most of my time talking about is transforming our built environment away from just being car dependent to be more walkable and bikeable, so that we can feed transit with these meaningful destinations and and these diverse riders.

00:57:02:13 - 00:57:24:26
Jarrett Walker
Exactly, exactly. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. That's very important. And I don't focus on that as much in my own work, mostly because so many excellent people are working on the walk and bike dimension of it. And I, I've chosen to occupy this network design space because there are so many, because there are so few people who understand that.

00:57:24:26 - 00:57:28:19
Jarrett Walker
And it's a thing that I particularly think I need to help explain, which and.

00:57:28:19 - 00:57:42:22
John Simmerman
Then we benefit from that because that's, you know, as an active mobility person, first and foremost, you know, I, I'm able to ride my bike to that destination, jump on the bus and get to the airport or to whatever my destination is. Yeah.

00:57:42:25 - 00:57:53:18
Jarrett Walker
And everyone who's not using a car is helping everyone else who's not using the car, which is why all the alternative modes are allies. Really. And yes, now. Absolutely.

00:57:53:21 - 00:58:17:11
John Simmerman
I have a I have a belief that because of our land use pattern and because the distances are greater and greater than, I think a lot of people give it credit for. I mean, it's it's one of your things that you talk about here is in the book, I'm going to pull this, on here is the morality of location choice.

00:58:17:13 - 00:59:04:09
John Simmerman
And in this you talk about this concept that employers and other people who have that ability for location choice need to be thinking about this a little bit more intelligently, because that will like if we use the example of of an employer or your location choice is going to be a trip generator, right. And if you're not doing that location, not choosing that location intelligently on a transit line or being able to, in an area where people can easily walk or bike to then be able to get to transit, you're creating a system where you may be or a situation where you may be creating additional car trips, whether that's for employers or clients

00:59:04:09 - 00:59:07:18
John Simmerman
and customers to your business.

00:59:07:20 - 00:59:43:24
Jarrett Walker
And in and let me tell you, just a really extreme example of this, a city that I worked in that I won't name had a downtown or city center hospital, but there was also another hospital way out on the very outer edge of the city, where the transit system could barely get to it with any service because it was so remote and people started reporting that people who lived in the inner city and didn't have cars started reporting that they were being sent out to that hospital to go to, to see specialists, because they couldn't get specialists at the hospital in the inner city.

00:59:43:26 - 00:59:59:06
Jarrett Walker
And they poked around about that. And it turned out that that's because these specialists, who are, of course, the elite of the elite inside the medical system, prefer to be out at that hospital because it's closer to their horse farms or wherever. It's closer to their lifestyle.

00:59:59:06 - 01:00:02:15
John Simmerman
Blocked and easy for them to drive there.

01:00:02:17 - 01:00:25:03
Jarrett Walker
And the and, you know, the incredible selfishness of that just blew my mind, because it's not just that they were dumping this problem on their low income patients, but they were dumping this problem on the transit agency, which was also pretty, pretty impoverished and couldn't possibly, you know, run the kinds of service they needed to get to such a remote location.

01:00:25:06 - 01:00:47:25
Jarrett Walker
Well, this is happening all the time. You know, employers really do move from a tower downtown out to a business park somewhere. And then they call the transit agency and say, what happened to our transit service? That's how many people don't understand that this is a geographical topic, and the geography is going to rule. And you have to make good geographical choices.

01:00:47:27 - 01:01:07:28
Jarrett Walker
We could go on a long time about that. Social where social security offices are, where social services are, where Amazon distribution centers are lots of terrible location choices. And my point about that really is you can't blame the transit agency for that, but you can very much blame the organization that chose to locate that way. And you should.

01:01:08:00 - 01:01:25:19
John Simmerman
Yeah, and you're right. We could go on forever and ever and ever. And we. But we cannot do that. I need to read you lose to your day and get you back to it. Tara, thank you so very much. It's a pleasure meeting you. I've been wanting to to connect with you for some time. I'm so glad that we were able to do this again.

01:01:25:19 - 01:01:49:26
John Simmerman
Folks, be sure to pick up your copy of Human Transit the revised edition, and you can find out more about Jared Walker at his website. The firm is chair walker.com. He's got a blog, Human transit.org, where he highlights a lot of these issues out in blog format. And, I see that you have Twitter there, but I also know that you're on blue Sky.

01:01:50:03 - 01:02:00:17
John Simmerman
I've left Twitter. So, folks, head on over to blue Sky if you're, out there, you are posting. I saw that you posted earlier today out of blue.

01:02:00:17 - 01:02:07:13
Jarrett Walker
Sky am I am what am I there? Human transit dot BSkyB dot social is what I am I think I'm easy to find there.

01:02:07:15 - 01:02:14:20
John Simmerman
Yeah yeah. Super easy to find. Jared, thank you so very much for joining me on the Active Towns podcast. It's been an absolute joy and pleasure.

01:02:14:22 - 01:02:16:03
Jarrett Walker
Thanks, John. It's been fun.

01:02:16:06 - 01:02:30:19
John Simmerman
He thank you all so much for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed this episode with Jared Walker. And if you did, please hit to 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 subscribed to the channel. Just click on the subscription button down below and ring that notification bell.

01:02:30:19 - 01:02:52:02
John Simmerman
And if you're enjoying this content here on the Active Towns Channel, please consider supporting my efforts by becoming an Active Towns Ambassador. It's easy to do. Just navigate over to Active towns.org, click on the support tab at the top of the page, and there's several different options, including becoming a Patreon supporter. Patrons do get early and ad free access to all my video content.

01:02:52:02 - 01:03:12:07
John Simmerman
Every little bit helps and is very much appreciated. Well, until next time, this is John signing off by wishing you much activity, health and happiness. Cheers and a huge shout out to all my active towns ambassadors supporting the channel via YouTube. Super! Thanks! Buy me a coffee! Patreon. As well as making contributions to the nonprofit. I could not do this without you.

01:03:12:10 - 01:03:14:03
John Simmerman
Thank you all so very much.