Transcript exported from the original video recording - Note that it has not been proof edited.

00:00:00:01 - 00:00:17:02
John Simmerman
Love it, too, that you have the ability to take, you know, a video like this, which is, you know, about this, this protected to a cycle track along a railway and explain get to it very, very quickly why this is so important.

00:00:18:17 - 00:00:37:07
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Mr. Barricade here. So it is pretty cool to a facility I found in Richmond, California. This one's a great location of it because it's next to a railroad. Let me show you why. Because it's next to a railroad. There's very minimal intersections and crossing. So the bikeway can be continuous and we can keep it a two way on one side of the street, the city alternator, the zecler in the case, every one.

00:00:37:07 - 00:00:48:17
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
So the vehicles can feel the Zika and the case. Heavy ones can be seen at night and nobody's really trying to park near a railroad. So this is a great location for the two way facility. If it's a great location, it has minimal impacts. Why not.

00:00:50:12 - 00:01:16:07
John Simmerman
For real? Why not? Hey, everyone, welcome to the Active Sounds Journal. I'm John Zimmerman and that was big Nate Swaminathan. Also known as Mr. Barricade. I asked that Mr. Barricade to join me to talk a little bit about that whole concept of bringing active transportation and transportation dialog and concepts out to the world of Ticktalk. I think it's a fascinating discussion.

00:01:16:07 - 00:01:27:18
John Simmerman
I hope you enjoy it too. So let's get right to it. Big news. Thank you so much for joining me on the Active Sounds podcast. Welcome.

00:01:28:17 - 00:01:30:06
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Thank you for having me. John. Excited to be here.

00:01:31:18 - 00:01:38:10
John Simmerman
One of the things I love to have my guest do is just kind of take a moment to introduce yourself. So tell us who you are.

00:01:38:29 - 00:02:02:08
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Sure. So my name is Vinay Swami and I'm the CEO and president of Crossroad Lab, where I work as principal. I also do a lot of drafting. I I'll just sit as a few political roles. And Cupertino, I'm the chair of the Sustainability Commission and just now on the economic development committee and it would VTA which is the transit and congestion management agency for the whole county.

00:02:02:16 - 00:02:25:28
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
I sit as a chair of their advisory committee my crossroad lab, the firm that I run as a civil engineering firm. We've been branching into more planning and outreach and environmental and traffic, but we mainly are still leading from designing and developing safer streets and safer off ramps. A lot of our work revolves around protected intersections or protected bike lanes, which I've been spearheading for many years now.

00:02:26:19 - 00:02:41:27
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And many of you may know me as a mr. Barricade on mine, where I use short form video to communicate to folks many different elements of transportation. So they're kind of prep to the communities prepped as to how to deal with these decisions when they when they're faced with them.

00:02:42:19 - 00:03:00:28
John Simmerman
I love it. I love it. It's great stuff. And let's pull up your your website, which is right here. And I was poking around here a little bit earlier and and taking a look at the some of the projects that you're doing, the design that you were doing. And you're right. I mean, pretty, pretty standard, hard core civil engineering stuff.

00:03:00:28 - 00:03:19:21
John Simmerman
And you mentioned, you know, before we hit the record button that you're kind of a classically trained engineer, you know, sort of in the highway standards and and movement on that. And you also mentioned that you were like getting into the nitty gritty of stuff you don't like the details of of, you know, the two down to the decimal points of of curb ramps and all that kind of stuff.

00:03:20:02 - 00:03:34:03
John Simmerman
So you really come at this from an active transportation perspective and then a transportation or an engineering perspective with that context of like getting down to the details of getting the details right. Is that about correct?

00:03:35:07 - 00:03:53:27
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Yes. Yes. I started as a parking engineer that the parking was the most important thing when I was in my youth. I wanted to work on that and see how we can kind of make them walk more and make it more efficient than I learned. There was a whole world of parking where I actually managed marathons, concerts and festivals.

00:03:53:27 - 00:04:16:28
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
So I was the person who would coordinate through the marathon where the barricades and cones would go. And I got the nickname Mr. Barricade back then, and it was in the end that to coordinate with many, many different types of people, with police, with volunteers and security. And it was different from engineering immediately. It wasn't just talking to straight engineers and working through red lines.

00:04:16:28 - 00:04:39:15
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
It was working with folks and creating diagrams that are really easy to understand. So I'll volunteer to learn to shut down the street and from there I learned that you can really change the culture of a street within a few minutes, within a within a few hours, suddenly the robot from a busy roadway, five lanes to something, a marathon where there's music and there's a concert and even little beer garden.

00:04:39:25 - 00:05:01:12
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And that really opened my eyes to kind of how we could quickly change roads. And then I went to work for a highway consulting firm, designing freeway interchanges for a while, did a lot of widening, widening of freeway interchanges, and I saw some of the ills of that. I remember taking a lot of property for some projects. I was always a little I kind of started getting annoyed that only got all these properties.

00:05:01:12 - 00:05:21:00
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
The names are from one cultural group word. I just started seeing a lot of ills in that. And then I also started that the company started to work on more complete streets projects because the highway project started to dry up and at the time I was one of the main highway designers kind of modifying highways for active transportation.

00:05:21:00 - 00:05:43:14
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
So creating 88 facilities and bike lanes and even some protected bike lanes to cross freeway interchanges, bike paths to be next to freeway interchanges. And I learned a lot about grading drainage, utilities, wells and a lot of environmental from that. But then I when the company started to work on complete streets projects, I started to feel that those projects were not going to get delivered.

00:05:43:14 - 00:06:07:15
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
The way they approached the project was from a very highway perspective, where they were they were riding the road or putting a new trees swales and doing a lot of additional stuff, additional disciplines and just keeping the roads safe. And I worked on a few major projects, huge of projects, and I realized that we're kind of bankrupting these cities we're with to deep this huge bill of the consulting fee that was going on for many years.

00:06:07:25 - 00:06:31:00
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And the design is very detailed and the city doesn't have money to deliver that actual project. And that project ends up getting phased into multiple city projects or they never giving it to a developer to build because the city does not have money. And so I was very inspired by my combination of barricades, cones, experienced traffic control and and these streets.

00:06:31:00 - 00:06:52:03
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And I felt I could kind of innovate in the quick build space. I saw a few folks doing that, like I saw that TED tackle Urban Urbanist plan that was showing how to close down streets for block parties and as a civil engineer doing freeway ramps, traffic control. I thought I could use the same elements and protected bike lanes in particular intersections.

00:06:52:11 - 00:06:54:19
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And that's what started cross with my dad.

00:06:54:19 - 00:07:21:14
John Simmerman
It go to I love that that background. That's so fascinating. My good friend Chuck Maron likes to talk about the fact that at those big events, you know, it's where you have this massive, oftentimes massive mixing to of of pedestrians, people coming out of the event, you know, sort of this pop up sort of parking environment and how people kind of, you know, are intermixing and mingling.

00:07:21:14 - 00:07:43:07
John Simmerman
And there's there's an interesting lesson that is is there that can be learned in terms of even shared space and how, you know, you get this kind of dynamic that just sort of happens. And so that's kind of cool. And then also, speaking of parking, you know, again, before we hit the record button, we I mentioned, you know, that I had Donald Trump on as well.

00:07:43:07 - 00:08:13:11
John Simmerman
And so that was a fascinating, you know, discussion, really diving deep into, you know, the intricacies of, you know, our relationship to parking, because parking is a very, very interesting dynamic. It's it triggers emotional responses in people when we get there. And and I realized that isn't exactly the same as is kind of the big event parking although there might be this expectation that there better be parking for us.

00:08:13:11 - 00:08:35:28
John Simmerman
Right So that's good. But the other interesting thing that that that kind of you know piqued there was was also kind of this revelation that you were having, which also speaks to Chuck Morone and his most recent book, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer. Have you had a chance to read that book yet?

00:08:36:23 - 00:08:55:11
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
I did. I did read the book. It's a great read, and it's really aligned with a lot of the same things that I realized through my career. Kind of talking about those both of those points is as a parking engineer, I learned a lot of that, the mentality of other of the city and other parking engineers there. I was a very small group.

00:08:55:14 - 00:09:12:22
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
We were in downtown operations for the city of San Jose, and it was about making sure that downtown had economic growth. And we were at a time it was about do we thought that parking is the only wallet delivery system is the only way that to bring money into the city. And then we just that wasn't doing very well.

00:09:12:22 - 00:09:30:25
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
So that walked downtown and people weren't really walking, but we were focusing on all the street parking and the garage parking. And then when we started doing more of these events, we were like, Oh, parking is the driving force because some people come to the event, it park at the concert and they start going in and then the rest of the time the city was kind of dead.

00:09:31:18 - 00:09:58:06
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And then the mentality started to be, Let's make more people live in this. Let's make the city a more of a place to thrive. And so figuring out how to move people on bikes, having bike parking, figuring and secure bike parking with a bike valet, figuring out how to coordinate people and put signs near the different bus stops before you had to get to the event and and including parking was really bringing in the bringing in activity in the city.

00:09:58:06 - 00:10:21:26
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And then after we started doing that, more developers started to build buildings in in the city. But there was a time when I started back in 2000, 910 that there wasn't a lot of economic growth in the downtown. The economy had just tanked and developers had cranes up but were in building projects. And I felt that as working on our Building Pro was a big driving force in the growth of San Jose.

00:10:22:13 - 00:10:45:28
John Simmerman
Yeah, Yeah. All right, enough of all this boring talk about parking and stuff like that. Let's let's, let's get to the real fun stuff like Mr. Barricade as I start to prepare to play one of your your videos, I want you to give us the background. How did you get the idea to start putting some of your content out on TikTok?

00:10:47:23 - 00:11:02:08
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Well, I to be honest, I haven't really been a social media person. Most of my life. I actually didn't have a Facebook for most of my youth. I use it when I was in high school, but then I didn't use it through college and I didn't really all my friends would have to text me if there was a party or something for us to do.

00:11:02:08 - 00:11:24:16
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
I wasn't really all on those platforms. I was on Reddit when I was when I was a young, younger engineer and before I started and I was starting the post on white protective bike lanes on Reddit. And people were really intrigued because they haven't seen that kind of stuff before. And I was like, Hey, what we do is we angle this this way and I realized at that point that I was working on one of the most advanced intersections in the country.

00:11:24:16 - 00:11:44:03
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
I was working on one of the first protected intersections that had a bus lane down the middle. And it was a really, really advanced intersection. And then I realized that a lot of people had never even seen that before and never worked on before. And the Internet was very intrigued. I started this small website where I was designing bike lanes for people on the Internet.

00:11:44:24 - 00:12:04:23
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
It was an activist who wanted it from Reddit. They could reach out to me. Web site was called Walk Access Bike Way, and I knew it was a huge call, a need for that on the Internet. And so then that's the fire way to start my company. And then after working on my company for a few years and designing a lot of these protected intersections on our own, we built the San Jose project and more.

00:12:06:03 - 00:12:25:10
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
I helped write the Don't Give Up at the Intersection document and that kind of blew up the space for a lot of other cities and agencies to start incorporating this kind of stuff. And then some of the bigger firms started to do this kind of work and then I started getting cut out of that space, actually because of these bigger firms were dominating the space.

00:12:25:10 - 00:12:45:03
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
As a small consultant, boutique consultant, we got kind of a little difficult, but we grew in terms of doing community outreach in a unique way. So we would have pop up parties on the block to talk about the actual street. We did a quick build where we had many, many people come in, walk the walk the bike lane and collect outreach.

00:12:45:14 - 00:13:14:15
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And then the pandemic hit. And so we couldn't have any of these block parties with the kids doing chalk on the ground and stuff like that. These are kind of local outreach to the big companies couldn't do. And I felt that how can I communicate to people if I can't bring people out to the project site? So then I was inspired by my no knowledge that a lot of who are interested in this online and I started filming these P.O.V. videos because at the end of the day, when you do in a community outreach plan, you show an injury plan set.

00:13:14:26 - 00:13:36:03
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Not everybody knows how to read that. And if you go through a point of view of this is how you interact with the facility, these are the hard things. You do it, you're walking, This is what you see. You walk past this tree, you cross crosswalk, you're driving, you make these turns and that P.O.V. perspective, I think is is is super invaluable for our how people use our infrastructure.

00:13:36:03 - 00:13:45:21
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And so I started filming the kind of videos about our project to kind of show, hey, we work on these innovative projects and this is how you use them. And it really, it really grew from there.

00:13:46:06 - 00:13:57:23
John Simmerman
Yeah, I love it. And I've got this one queued up because this will also keep us up for popping over to the don't give up at the intersection. So let's, let's play this and talk about it when it's done.

00:13:57:23 - 00:14:18:26
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Hey, Mr. Barricade here on the Santa marta keno trail in Santa Clara, this trail is about average. It's skinny, There's a lot of noise and you're really close to cars. But it's even more below average because it ends at every single intersection that tells you to yield to pets because they needed to prioritize the free right turns. They needed to have a 1618 foot right turn pocket.

00:14:19:09 - 00:14:31:18
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And so they couldn't get the trails actually work its way all the way to the signal it designed the intersection. This is why I wrote the book would not go called Don't Give Up at the Intersection because engineers like to give up at the intersection.

00:14:33:07 - 00:14:58:21
John Simmerman
I love it. So it's fun and and thank you the thank you for for for doing that. I've done a lot of work with Nacho as well. I try to help film and document some of their workshops during the the annual gathering. So I hope to, you know, to be there in Denver this coming year. I hope keeping my fingers crossed that we don't have any, you know, conflicts that might pop up.

00:14:59:03 - 00:15:06:20
John Simmerman
But yeah, so talk a little bit about how you got engaged with working on on that particular document with Nacho.

00:15:06:20 - 00:15:23:19
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Sure. So as you know, a lot of the engineers with their standard details, they like to leave the intersection blank because they want to put the liability kind of on the users. So that's why a lot of bike lanes go dashed at the intersection because then they don't have to worry about the being liable for the conflict. It's on to the actual user.

00:15:24:02 - 00:15:51:18
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And so I was hired by a mercado in San Jose to actually do the entire San Jose project. It was funded by the Knight Foundation, and we did that because it was an accelerated route, because it sees procurement process will take two or three years to even start a project. San Jose is very slow at that and, and just to circumvent that and deliver a huge project, the Knight Foundation really wanted to do this accelerated work and we were a small company and we've been doing this.

00:15:51:18 - 00:16:13:03
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
We have more expertise than most. And so we did a lot of the downtown, the whole downtown network would protect the intersections. And through that I learned some a lot of the the conflicts I had with the engineers there about not wanting to do this and leaving it blank. And with all the research that we did from that project and all the documentation of trial and error and working with the community, we developed this document.

00:16:13:03 - 00:16:35:27
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Don't give up at the intersection and use a lot of best practices that we learned in the in the downtown project that include a lot of these posts that paint quick builds and how to make them bright and to talked a lot of engineers about the different conflict points and the radii that we used it. It just was a lot of documentation of an actual real world project and you'll see a lot of the images are from our projects in San Jose.

00:16:36:25 - 00:17:12:10
John Simmerman
Yeah, I love it. It's good stuff. And yeah, you scroll down, you get to the group here, of course. Jeanette Sarukhan is on the executive board there. And then there you guys are right there with Joe and with Alta and you guys great stuff. So I love this too, because, you know, a big part of what I've been trying to do with active towns over the years is, is is part of the struggle of doing some storytelling to better explain and engage a broader population.

00:17:12:10 - 00:17:44:16
John Simmerman
And I have to say that, you know, I haven't yet dipped my toe into the to talk world, although I will admit that I actually did sign up today so that I could access your your your account out there. And so but but talk a little bit about that because you went from zero social media, you know, to jumping, you know, two feet into the world of Tik Tok.

00:17:45:00 - 00:17:45:25
John Simmerman
What was that like?

00:17:46:15 - 00:18:07:10
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
It was it was a it was actually it went through phases. It was quite scary. So where I felt it is if we can reach people in outreach meetings and we can have people don't like to go to websites, you put a if I put a QR code on a project sign, more people access that than any of our outreach efforts.

00:18:07:10 - 00:18:28:22
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And so I knew there was a need for us to use a phone. And if people are already scrolling and watching games, videos or whatever videos on TikTok, then if I can put educational videos in their feed, then they just learn something. And the Tik tok. My goal of that is not necessarily to reach activists and professionals like like most other social media platforms, you would think, right.

00:18:28:23 - 00:18:49:05
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
My my goal is to actually reach the average citizen. Just anybody who actually has no connection to a roadway, who just uses the road but actually doesn't really care or know to care about the roadway system. My goal with the Tik tok is is for that. I use LinkedIn to reach out to my other professionals and I'm using Mastodon at Twitter to reach out to more activist groups.

00:18:49:13 - 00:19:09:23
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
But a Tik Tok is really to just reach out to just anybody. And what happened to me is in between Zoom calls like like this, I was waiting and I would maybe film some video dancing at my desk to music that I liked from my youth and some of the some of the people on Tik Tok have never heard that music because it's from early 2000s or so.

00:19:10:05 - 00:19:21:19
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And once I grew, it was all ages from making dance videos just at my desk. I got a 200,000 followers that from just doing that. And then I realized.

00:19:21:29 - 00:19:36:00
John Simmerman
I had up to you for a second here because I'm scrolling through your list here and I'm like, okay, you know, yeah, we've got like, you know, 100,000, 80,000, and then boom, 1.2 million views. You got to be kidding me.

00:19:36:12 - 00:19:55:18
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Yeah, No, we average about 10 million views a week on our to tell channel. And that's because of these combination of these dance videos and also my engineering content. And I have a following. People may follow me for the dance video and then they get some of the engineering content and that's my that's my, my intent with this.

00:19:56:07 - 00:20:27:13
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
The reason my videos do well is because I am I am I kind of reach both types. Two types of content. I actually am. There's a meme about me in almost all my comment sections. People write the same comment saying I don't know how he does it, but he perfectly balances industry, niche content and trending content. And because that's kind of what I have been doing and people see that they joke about that in my comment section.

00:20:28:07 - 00:20:50:14
John Simmerman
Yeah, I think that's it's brilliant and a kudos on you for, for you know, just jumping in and doing this. And like you said, it was probably a little scary there at times. And, you know, trying to do that. And I, I want to get to this what a see what what the first you know, 1.2 million was all about.

00:20:50:14 - 00:20:52:02
John Simmerman
So this is like a crosswalk.

00:20:52:13 - 00:20:56:03
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Yeah. Yeah. You know, that's a very video barricade here.

00:20:56:03 - 00:21:08:19
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And I'm really excited to show you this new school crossing we installed in front of Gilroy High School with curb extensions and with the flashing yellow lights. And we didn't trigger any environmental review. Let's check it out.

00:21:08:19 - 00:21:12:05
John Simmerman
Who's that young guy?

00:21:12:05 - 00:21:15:12
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
My, my fade. My facial hair goes up and down and throughout the, you.

00:21:16:24 - 00:21:39:26
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Know, worse, we added all the right warning signs, the flashy bumps, the posts and the city's first buffered and green bike lane. The school drop off circulation wants to be a one way. So we added this curb extension here to make it unappealing to exit and also to give directional ramps. This curb was added on top of the existing pavement and we kept the drainage where it was and we put in these new ramps to make it all flat and ADA compliant.

00:21:40:12 - 00:21:55:16
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
So now when I press this button, I'm able to cross the street with ease and cars are already yielding to me. This is a very rural town and we only scope to do this one intersection. So we neck a 26 foot lane down to an 11 foot lane with a taper and we enter the bike lane with a dashed green.

00:21:55:23 - 00:22:00:14
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
We also added this little curve with the crosswalk right here so any bikes can cross and go.

00:22:00:18 - 00:22:05:20
John Simmerman
I love it. It's And Gilroy, of course, famous for garlic.

00:22:06:07 - 00:22:07:13
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Hmm. Yes, yes.

00:22:07:27 - 00:22:10:17
John Simmerman
And then I know we go for it.

00:22:10:17 - 00:22:30:15
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Yeah. It's so it's a fairly it's a farm town. It's becoming more urban right now. And this was one of their first bike lanes and crosswalks and you can like I pointed out that that lane is 26 feet wide and we reduce the lane to a normal lane with 11 feet wide, but that's new to them. Oh, my God, Yeah.

00:22:30:22 - 00:22:53:16
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
We're using our language from 26. How could you do that? But using a short form video and using kind of simple words, you notice I didn't use pedestrian hybrid flashing beacon. I use it flashing yellow lights. Right? I use props. Right. I'm not and I'm not necessarily trying to confuse or flex my terminology to the average person. Right.

00:22:53:16 - 00:23:11:29
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And I felt that when I did community outreach meetings, that was a lot of what the planners and engineers were doing is, hey, we're going to spend a lot of time to talk about all these terms and we're going to talk about all the goals and needs of the project and all the volumes and how we're using the funding and the questions people would ask in the community average meeting.

00:23:11:29 - 00:23:30:15
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
We're very disconnected from that. I remember one of things that really spoke out to me is I remember showing a plan set and talking about all the goals and the volumes and having the plan sit in front of people and talking about how we're going to adjust U-turns if we block off certain movements and stuff. And this lady was staring at me and you super engage and just listening.

00:23:30:16 - 00:23:32:27
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Then she asked me, So where's the.

00:23:32:27 - 00:23:38:05
John Simmerman
Big oak tree? And I was like, Oh, it's over here. And she turned around, said, Oh, now I know where.

00:23:38:05 - 00:23:39:25
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
We're at right now.

00:23:39:27 - 00:23:41:14
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
I didn't talk about all this stuff.

00:23:41:28 - 00:24:03:23
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And she doesn't even know where we're at, you know? And so there's a huge disconnect in how we communicate to the community. And I felt that using these videos in a short way, if you can watch it on mute, it makes sense. If you can extend them to 60 seconds, it makes sense. And I try to have fun with it.

00:24:03:23 - 00:24:25:04
John Simmerman
That's great. And again, you're you're you've got 1.6 million followers at this point, which is just fantastic and is the is the absence I'm not super super familiar with the platform is or is it pretty much all short video? Is it is there a limit to the amount of time.

00:24:26:07 - 00:24:43:29
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
So you can go up to 10 minutes? But I haven't really experimented with that yet. Most of my videos I try to keep under a minute or 45 seconds even. I just did the video first. We we show the Don't give up at the intersection document. I was just biking home from work and I just saw it and was like, I'm going to film this real quick.

00:24:44:06 - 00:25:00:23
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Filmed it in one shot and just kept on biking. And I think that kind of authenticity is what a lot of people on Tik Tok does really well on TikTok. There's sometimes videos that are really edited with with a bunch of text and stuff, and some of it doesn't do as well, but people want to be able to be informed in a really short way.

00:25:01:03 - 00:25:21:01
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And I think just the attention span of of of of folks on TikTok is is pretty short. But I'm experimenting with a longer form video on my LinkedIn and to professionals if I do like a talk like this or if I'm giving a presentation, I experiment with that on different platforms. But a Tik Tok platform especially, there's a lot of youth on that platform.

00:25:21:08 - 00:25:44:27
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
It's just very, very short form and using the different sounds or different audios, I tried different things. I had a there was a there's a group that I you might see that come a lot of my page, but as a group that I listen to called Drain Gang, I listen to their type of music for a long time, the last ten, 12 years, and now they've got some new popular and I use their music to teach people about drainage.

00:25:45:06 - 00:26:01:29
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And it just cause I think I think it's drainage is so important for infrastructure it's it's everything a lot of the times are probably are held up because it drains concerns and environmental concerns. And so I try to use different sounds and different jokes and and trends to teach people about infrastructure.

00:26:03:01 - 00:26:20:09
John Simmerman
I love it, too, that you have the ability to take, you know, a video like this, which is, you know, about this this protected to a cycle track along a railway and and explain get to it very, very quickly why this is so important.

00:26:21:23 - 00:26:46:01
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Mr. Barricade here. So it is pretty cool to a facility I found in Richmond, California. This one's a great location of it because it's next to a railroad. Let me show you why. Because it's next to a railroad. There's very minimal intersections and crossing. So the bikeway can be continuous and we can keep it a two way on one side of the street, the city alternating the zecler in the case only one so the vehicles can feel the Ziegler and the K 70 ones can be seen at night and nobody's really trying to park near a railroad.

00:26:46:09 - 00:26:51:24
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
So this is a great location for the two way facility. If it's a great location, it has minimal impacts. Why not.

00:26:53:18 - 00:27:15:13
John Simmerman
For real? Why not? So I love that. And like you said, you because of your engineering training, you're into this level of detail. Another video that really gets into to some of the detail, one of my favorites of yours is is the access ramps with the protected bikeway. So let's take a look at that. Hey.

00:27:15:22 - 00:27:35:09
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Mr. Barricade here in downtown San Jose is one of the protected bike lanes that I designed. Where do equitable protected bike lanes? It's really essential to think about access management. Right here we have a free zone and when you afraid loading zone and you drop off people, especially the elderly, people in wheelchairs or even somebody just dropping off goods, it's really, really essential to install a curb ramp.

00:27:35:09 - 00:27:57:13
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
A curb can be a barrier of entry for people to access buildings or even just get up on the sidewalk. And so adding a ramp makes all the difference in this location. Having a curb next to a senior home provides access for the community to use paratransit, Uber, and the folks that drop off whatever they may need. Relying on driveways is not enough because driveways can be steep and not ADA compliant.

00:27:58:00 - 00:28:05:18
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
It is essential to not design for the majority but to design for the most vulnerable. That way we can provide access to all and more people.

00:28:07:12 - 00:28:25:21
John Simmerman
Again, these are not like super, super complicated things, but it's that level of detail that many don't think about. And since you are speaking to a broad audience in the in the community, it's like the light bulb goes off. They go, Oh yeah, brilliant.

00:28:26:22 - 00:28:48:15
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Thank you to a lot of engineers. They might not even think to put a curb ramp next to the loading zone. Still, actually, in most cities they probably won't even think about that. And so I do my experience, I've learned that these are kind of important things to care about. Do my community outreach as an engineer, I've learned all the different values of, of of of of the people's needs.

00:28:48:22 - 00:29:06:17
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And these sorts of videos actually also help for me to practice explaining things in in a short way. When we did this quick build project. It comes with a lot of pros and cons and a lot of cities. They execute these critical projects fairly poorly. They usually hire more of a highway consulting firm and you don't think about all these details.

00:29:06:17 - 00:29:36:23
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And when we worked on San Jose, we approached it very differently than I think any other project was approached in San Jose. We instead of doing cross-sections and showing all these street mixed cross-sections and telling people about why what the particular basically was going to look like. I actually first drew the entire project at a 10% level of detail and it was just a little CAD lines and I zoomed in on every single block and we went to every single business owner and we're like, This is what we're doing to your street, your front frontage.

00:29:37:05 - 00:29:51:19
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And that was very different than most consultants would do it. Most consults will show a cross-section of why this is happening. What do you think about it? But we drew exactly what we're doing in front of every single block with the metered parking space, and we talked to them about that and the level of detail in the first.

00:29:51:19 - 00:30:09:23
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Right. And that just because I'm a CAD person, I can do CAD fairly fast. My team is all CAD folks. We don't really mess with Illustrator and a lot of these other tools that other planners use. I think a lot of that is, in my opinion, a waste of time. It's good you to communicate something to make it look pretty, but at the end of the day it's not always feasible.

00:30:10:12 - 00:30:29:01
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And making sure that you show what's feasible, what you're interacting, what's a tripping hazard is really what people care about. And whenever I do one of these projects and I'm able to communicate that to the business owner or the person who is able to be like, Yes, that's my bench, that's my as I decide what I cross every single day.

00:30:29:01 - 00:31:02:16
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
But if you talk about these big ideas, a lot of times it just goes over their heads and it only aligns with the activists. And the activists are always going to be the same, the same thing. When I think about my videos, I think about four categories of people, and I know it's not good to generalize, but if I could generalize for a second to just think about my audience, I think about the NIMBYs people who are just against a project because it's next to don't know if they have their own business, they have their own life, and whatever you're doing is a change from that is is scary, right?

00:31:02:17 - 00:31:20:18
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And so talking about what the changes are and how the people will be impacted of all types of people, including drivers, then I think about my single disciplinary activists seeing this very activist who are just focused on one thing I care about the same things as them. I care about the trees, I care about the bike, I care about the access, I care about equity.

00:31:20:18 - 00:31:38:24
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
I care about the same things. We're trying to bring that up. But there's a lot more disciplines involved in in delivering a roadway project. And then I think about the incident concerned people, young families, people who want to do the right thing. They want to teach their kids the right thing. They want to make sure that that the community is not gentrified too much.

00:31:38:24 - 00:31:56:13
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
They want to make sure that it still looks nice. They don't they just don't know the right terminology. They do know who to align with and what they want to participate. And then I also think about, like your marginalized community, people who are this connected, maybe there's a language barrier, maybe they're undocumented and they don't feel comfortable talking about the project.

00:31:56:21 - 00:32:16:13
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Maybe there is some sort of other adverse thing that's happened between them in the city that I just don't feel comfortable talking to the city about that. And maybe there's a visual impairment or like I said, language barrier. I think about these different that that fourth group. And when I make one of these videos, I'm trying to address all four in one of those videos.

00:32:16:23 - 00:32:33:17
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
I'm not I could make a video just for one group, but then it doesn't hit home with everybody. And I think that's what my videos do very well. Because if you only headed with one group, if I only talked to the activist community, if I only talked to the professionals, people will see that for a few seconds and they'll scroll like, This is not ready for me.

00:32:33:21 - 00:32:40:07
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Right. But if I talk to all four groups, then it kind of resonates with everybody.

00:32:40:07 - 00:33:03:24
John Simmerman
Yeah. And and you mentioned it earlier too, is that, you know, having the point of view of, you know, a person on a bike or a person walking or a person on a scooter also, you know, helps invite people to come along with you. And some of my most, you know, popular videos that are in the podcast realm are, in fact, those point of view of of, you know, me on my bike.

00:33:03:24 - 00:33:24:16
John Simmerman
You know, the video you know, basically posted yesterday and this was recorded on December 15th this on December 14th was me riding around Delft, you know, in the Netherlands. And so, you know, it was just like, hey, come along with me. I'm going to shake off my jet lag and go for a ride and I'm inviting you. Come on with me.

00:33:24:24 - 00:33:54:14
John Simmerman
So one of the things I love to about the the videos that you're producing is, is you are kind of blending these these explaining of, you know, hey, what is a protected intersection as well as kind of highlighting this lighter, quicker, cheaper ethic of let's get stuff done, let's you know, let's get it going. So let's play this one and then I'm going to follow this one up with a another type of video, which is a point of view of how to do something.

00:33:54:14 - 00:33:56:01
John Simmerman
So let's give this a shot.

00:33:57:01 - 00:34:15:16
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
The barricade here to show you a fully protected intersection with all four corners protected in San Jose, California. This is Almaden Road and San Fernando right here. And it's designed by yours truly. Let's check it out. The vehicle stop bar is placed right here as we go 20 to 30 feet from where the bicycles wait in this forward bicycle box.

00:34:15:24 - 00:34:28:03
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And so when a bike approaches the interstate, they come way to this bike box while the vehicles are waiting back here. And when a green light goes, the bike gets a head start in front of the vehicle to reduce the risk of any sort of crash on a green.

00:34:29:04 - 00:34:41:01
John Simmerman
All right. I'm going to pause just for a second because I want to ask you a question about the response from your audience When you get into that level of detail.

00:34:41:01 - 00:34:57:02
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
People just they just get it. It's physically there. You know, I don't need to explain it saying this is a a forward stop or is that a leading pedestrian or I don't need to explain it. I just get it. The bikes all the way over there, the cars over here on a green, like the bikes gone and the car goes.

00:34:57:08 - 00:35:14:17
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And what you'll see right here is I'm actually walking in the car lane and to show people what the cars experiences and we know 10,000 people per lane per day and most car traffic, most most lanes. And so a lot of the users who we talk to are drivers. And so they just when they see this stuff and they like, Oh, what is this?

00:35:14:17 - 00:35:23:07
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
This is freaky. I don't get it by showing it from their perspective in explaining what the car is dealing with is super valuable to to making sure these are successes.

00:35:24:03 - 00:35:25:08
John Simmerman
Nice. Continue.

00:35:25:08 - 00:35:49:29
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
We put a very tight radius here so vehicles forces slow down when making this turn and they view the bike at a better angle and not in their blind spot. And so when a bicycle wants to make a left turn, they cross on a green phase and it come right to this box and they wait here for the next phase, which comes right after this helps inexperienced cyclists, people in scooters and folks in mobility scooters.

00:35:50:08 - 00:35:52:00
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
So come check it out in San Jose, California.

00:35:53:04 - 00:36:08:02
John Simmerman
Yeah. And that next video, in fact, takes takes the viewer along on a ride to figure out, okay, how do you do a two stage left turn or a Dutch style turn. And so that's what this one is.

00:36:10:03 - 00:36:44:05
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
A missed barricade here. And I'm going to show you how easy it is to make a left turn at a protected intersection. Let's check it out. On a red phase, you approach the intersection you wait at this forward stop bar in front of the cars. When the pedestrian sign turns white and the green light goes, you get a forward start before the cars get to make right turns and they come Wait right here and I'm on a bike, but I'll still go when the pedestrian signal is up, I make a left turn very easily and that is how you make it to stage turn.

00:36:46:02 - 00:36:49:23
John Simmerman
Brilliant.

00:36:49:23 - 00:37:08:25
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And you got to think that that even when I was installing that, if we City didn't do a lot of outreach, maybe the outreach there for a little bit of time, maybe there was a few signs there but you should do one of these videos said these vehicles get millions of millions of views and I think that first one is one point something views and that for a lot of people, even cities are right.

00:37:08:26 - 00:37:32:21
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Oh, I get it now, I didn't understand that. And we have a lot of hardcore cyclists out here that ride with cars. That's their as their passion. I know that's what's taught from the American League of Touring cyclists and stuff like that. And and so they ride with traffic. But for a them knowing how to cross just two stages is still for it and so showing it from that point of view is is just invaluable.

00:37:33:03 - 00:37:52:11
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
San Jose is I think is the only city that never banned any of the scooters and that is because when the scooters started to come out in the Silicon Valley back in 2017 January, we were already started on the project. You know, we were already just we were going to build this entire network of bike lanes in the downtown.

00:37:52:19 - 00:38:15:18
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And Santelli said, if we're building a network of bike lanes, it's not banda scooters, it's build this. And I'm proud to say that all of our projects have been started. They completed in less than ten months knowing that our products have been over a year in most of most engineering firms. And cities aren't able to say that because they get hung up on a lot of the environmental review and a lot of design changes and stuff like that.

00:38:15:29 - 00:38:38:08
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
But the way we got around that is we went straight to CAD and we made sure to not modify any drainage facilities. And so that way we didn't trigger sequel for a lot of our work. We didn't, we didn't modify any of the turn pockets. We made everything work with the existing turf pockets and me knowing how to navigate Sequoia, I didn't want to be one of these consultants that was going to make money off of delays and sequel, which most consultants do.

00:38:38:08 - 00:38:54:15
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
That's actually what most consultants make money off of delays in environmental review and changes in working with a different regulatory agencies and they build for that. But I usually want to get projects done. And so we build projects for a lot of the tech campuses around here. So we built the inside of their campuses and the outside of their campuses.

00:38:54:15 - 00:39:19:10
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
We work with developers and we work a lot of cities on designing things quickly. And now we've actually got to the point where we're designing embedded curves and raised protected intersections with drainage in less than ten months. And that's just from my accelerated review and accelerated communication and and just educate university staff and decision makers through social media or other presentations.

00:39:19:10 - 00:39:33:03
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And I've just learned that communication is the main thing that we have to do. Do we just drawing the plans have been submitting it for review and just going to the red lining and charging ours is not the right way that I want to operate my business and not right the right way that I think cities can afford.

00:39:34:13 - 00:39:46:13
John Simmerman
Or city starting to tap into your expertise and your your plethora of videos and like linking saying, oh, you know, this is a protected intersection.

00:39:47:15 - 00:40:10:25
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Yeah. Just because you I think wouldn't go negative is a great organization because it brings a cross-pollination of many people from all over. People from Denver and New York and New Orleans can come to a new city and see what those cities be working on. And if you were a city staff and let's say you're a young city staff and you learn only from your supervisor, and that supervisor has never left the city for 30, 40 years.

00:40:11:07 - 00:40:28:03
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And they learned from their supervisor, whose only been there for another 30, 40 years. They've spent many generations of just saying no to stuff. Right. And they never learn anything new from a different city or what New York's doing. They might be like, that's what you do in urban areas, but that's not going to work in our small town and you don't get that cross-pollination.

00:40:28:03 - 00:40:49:26
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
But Makoto does a professional with tours, but video almost as good as a tour, and a lot of times city staff would go to Street View to go look it up and stuff. The Street view is not always updated. Aerial maps are not always updated for all the cool stuff everybody's working on. But these video is on social media explaining it very, very simply that it just works.

00:40:50:22 - 00:41:12:28
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Really, really hits home for a lot of folks. And my clients, we actually get hired by our clients to actually explain videos on projects. Some of the projects videos I do or someone's either hired videos or we sculpting and when we do the project and we actually will make videos with the city staff to talk about what the what this project is and how to use it.

00:41:13:11 - 00:41:38:20
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And that's really that's really what we need. If you noticed in the videos we just showed, we using a bike box, it's a green bike box, a two stage bike box is an empty city complaint box. We could have done a different kidney shaped island and made it a little bit more local to protect the intersection. But we reason to use the boxes because the city was trying to standardize that facility and we could use it as an education piece.

00:41:38:20 - 00:41:56:21
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And so it's all about slowly getting people to just understand these facilities, how to use them, how to regulate them, teaching the police officers how to how to take the people in the parking, the bike lanes, show people to use the bike lane using the quick build, working with the fire department so they can drive over these facilities.

00:41:56:27 - 00:42:21:29
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And whenever I talk to anybody, any stakeholder, any community person, I always try to put myself in their shoes. What are their objectives, constraints, priorities With the fire department, their priority is response time. Their budgets are actually based on response time, how fast they can get to the actual site. And if you put in protected bike lanes, they feel that's a hindrance to that because that's holding back their budgets and response time.

00:42:22:08 - 00:42:32:19
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
So talking to them about them getting a signal priority and they can drive over these posts in an emergency was really what hit home for them. And I do that with everybody that I work with.

00:42:33:21 - 00:43:20:07
John Simmerman
It's great. So you also mentioned the state, and I did have Deputy Deputy Secretary or deputy director can't remember her official title, Avital Barnea on and in recently there's been some good stuff happening at the state level there in California, loosening some of those requirements on the required triggering of evaluations and things of that nature. So it's wonderful to see that hopefully, you know, that will smooth out that pathway and really, you know, encourage more of of this type of work being done with less friction and less barriers to doing active transportation projects.

00:43:20:07 - 00:43:38:15
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
We're right there right now. There's been many, many elements have come together to to make it this way. We have a level of service to VMT, which is a big thing of just changing how we analyze traffic. And I'll explain it really briefly as a level of services. Is it is is that how we analyze traffic? It's a density function.

00:43:38:15 - 00:44:01:02
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
More cars, more delay, you keep widening, adding more lane more and to reduce use congestion. And if a new development was being built, they were required to pay fees to a city to widen the streets and improve the signals, or for them to actually widen their frontage and widen the lanes, add right turn pockets. But that has no end because you just keep widening and traffic keeps coming back.

00:44:01:13 - 00:44:25:04
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And so the cities change the VMT, which is how to tell the developer, how do you reduce vehicle trips. So now the projects the developer does is a perfect bike lane, maybe a bus stop, but that's a that the developer now puts in a protected bike lane or puts in a bus stop or maybe they put in showers so people could bike and shower, or maybe they provide scooters to all their employees, maybe they subsidize Uber.

00:44:25:11 - 00:44:49:05
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Right? But these are different ways to try and reduce vehicle trips. And so that's happening now. And we have we had the state had 89, which was a design bulletin on the highway design manual. It's kind of for a lot of folks you may not understand, but you have to change the highway standards to actually go, in effect, our roadway, because our roadway system came from a highways and into by putting out the 89.

00:44:49:05 - 00:45:09:25
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
If you look at that, it's got a picture of protecting is actually a diagram that I think was made in Microsoft Word. It's just a really crude diagram, but that diagram opened up the doors for engineers to start to innovate in this space, whether we we had already designed I think we already design around 20 protected intersection before that document came out.

00:45:10:09 - 00:45:33:00
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
But that document helps solidify a lot of the work that we've been doing. And and so the combination of changing how we analyze traffic is part of environmental, the combination of these standards starting to be seen, and also many professionals like myself interpreting those standards and actually implementing that kind of inspires both the state to set standards, the local cities to set standards and more.

00:45:33:22 - 00:45:48:12
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
We still have things that we're fighting at the city level of right turn pockets and right hand pockets next to bike lanes. And I might do it differently than some other cities have done it. Some professionals may disagree with the way that I've done some of these things, and I might disagree with the way that they've done some things.

00:45:48:12 - 00:46:15:16
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
But we're all professionals in where we're putting our licenses and insurance on line. And we are we're developing these facilities that are that are safe and I know that with the ways that we design our facilities, that you have to really try to to swing around a corner and be intrusive like that. It it's really I'm proud to say that on all of our facilities, we've had no fatalities or major crashes in any of the facilities that we've had in in San Jose.

00:46:15:16 - 00:46:31:23
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
But as soon as you get outside of the downtown, as our facilities end, that's when the crashes start. You know, even the San Jose mayor was hit by a right truck conflict, right. As soon as he got off of one of our bike lanes. So after he got on the bike lane and he went a few blocks down where there was no protection, that's where the crashes happened.

00:46:31:23 - 00:47:01:13
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And San Jose has one of the highest amount of fatalities this year. And I'd say a lot of that is because these facilities haven't spread out into the other areas. And so we're at the right time where everybody is realizing vision Zero secure VMT has changed. The developers are ready to build this kind of stuff. San Jose, just now, because of all of these regulations, changes, is approving 34,000 new units, housing units in North San Jose, which is a very underdeveloped area.

00:47:01:23 - 00:47:25:22
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And so right now all of those areas will have protected intersections and protected bike lanes because you want to start with people living near where they work. They have to be able to get there without a car. And so we're getting to this area where the planning, the land use, all of it is together. And I'm proud to be in there in the Bay Area where we've been progressive, that we've been innovating in this space, because now we can take a lot of lessons learned and go apply it to the rest of the country.

00:47:25:22 - 00:47:44:19
John Simmerman
Yeah, Yeah. Now, I'm glad you mentioned, you know, that particular change with the VMT and that impact of induced demand that we have with, you know, the expansion of of of Lane Miles, have you done a VMT and a in induced demand video yet.

00:47:45:17 - 00:48:18:08
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Yes. Yes we we can we do the analysis on some of our projects and a lot of our colleagues are I find it because of EMT. We work with a lot of these tech campuses that are trying to reduce their vehicle trips, part of their traffic demand measures. And we they have shuttle busses and scooters. We have some really innovative projects near some of these tech campuses, two way cycle tracks on both sides of the street going through stop signs, which is actually not even in the new national guidance that's we've been waiting for the ASTRO guidance for about five or six years now.

00:48:18:08 - 00:48:34:18
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
I reviewed it five, six years ago, but even in that the guidance, they don't even talk about stop signs. So we're still ahead of that. And all those intersections are working with big shuttle busses. So we have shuttle busses turning around to way cycle tracks because we're trying to reduce the amount of vehicle trips to these campuses.

00:48:35:10 - 00:48:37:01
John Simmerman
Yeah. Have you done a ticktock?

00:48:37:28 - 00:48:53:05
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Yeah, we didn't talk about that one. We have more connections coming to that. We're going through the last review process on another few roads around that's fully completed. But I've, I have me to take talk about that two way cycle track stop side.

00:48:53:05 - 00:48:57:10
John Simmerman
Okay. And how about a tick tock on induced amount? Have you done that one yet?

00:48:58:03 - 00:49:30:06
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
A little bit. I hinted that a few times and I've, I've made I made a video once. I just was I think I was driving and I have the idea about how to explain it. So I just I just did a quick little the short video just showing the car traffic and this is what's happening post-pandemic world everybody enjoy the north the low traffic before and but a lot of my videos aren't necessarily on a specific topic like that let's just something is in your in your driving you're going off the ramp you see the traffic and explain just this little tidbit about what's going on.

00:49:30:08 - 00:49:49:26
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
I'm I will I will eventually get to more content where I'll be like this is the topic and we're going to talk about everything about this topic for the day, for this video. But a lot of my video is just just making normalizing it in our day to day life. So where people go around the day to day life, they just if they think about it, when they see the sign and think about it, be like, oh, yellow means a warning sign.

00:49:49:26 - 00:50:08:22
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
I remember seeing a video about somebody talk about that. I didn't explain all the colors of the images, but they might have explained that one thing to them and that that's people for people's attention span. And just to sit in to learn they kind of learn, I think, a little slowly and somebody can take the time to just study all the material and do that.

00:50:08:22 - 00:50:32:13
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
But the average person's not going to do that. My goal with my TikTok is when we go to a community outreach meeting, I want people to already know what we're talking about and be ready to engage. You know, I, I felt very sad when we go to community outreach because you get the same people who come to the same every community outreach meeting and they come they might even not even know what the project's about or the bike project, which where we talking about today.

00:50:32:13 - 00:50:50:12
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Right. And there's a bunch of people who are living in that community who don't know anything about this, and they're coming. They're just trying to figure out what's happening. They're like, You're taking away my parking. Why is crack We need a crosswalk here, please. Right in. And for them, they don't know that. They don't know the words. They don't know how to talk about it.

00:50:50:12 - 00:51:12:00
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And a lot of times in outreach meetings, the first outreach meeting is just teaching people terms and terminology. But do we need to be doing that? You know, maybe the people should just get it and we can just teach people subconsciously. And so that's what I've been doing with these these videos. And I found that people even bring up my videos in community outreach meetings.

00:51:12:00 - 00:51:34:24
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
I've had other competitors be like, Hey, somebody sent me, showed me your video and said, do this in our in our at our project. And I was like, Yeah, well, that's what that's what they feel they do, they need. And my goal is just to, to to reach as many people that as possible. And the TED talk is so far as being a very much an extension of my own personality and my own music and stuff that I enjoy.

00:51:35:10 - 00:51:57:04
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
It's not all about engineering. A lot of it is just about me as well. I just just like a lot of social media pages, but I do procure the content for other platforms. So the LinkedIn, if folks want to get more of just a a straightforward engineering content, that is for educating professionals, that's where you can find it on my LinkedIn and now my Twitter is fantastic.

00:51:57:05 - 00:51:58:18
John Simmerman
That's pretty good stuff.

00:51:58:18 - 00:52:23:06
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
I appreciate you for seeing what we're doing and and and for for, for helping us just kind of how do I say, reach the reach the to reach different agencies and folks because I think a lot of people need a much more simpler way of breaking down these kind of projects. And we don't want to just keep going over people's heads with the new infrastructure bill.

00:52:23:16 - 00:52:43:04
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Most that bill is actually about outreach to equity, equity based outreach to different communities. And the big part of that bill and that is is actually just bringing in community based organizations to just figure out what the issues are. But a lot of them won't even be able to facilitate that conversation, honestly, because they don't even know what the issues are in their community.

00:52:43:08 - 00:53:00:07
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
They may have something that they are extend, but they don't realize, Oh, the reason our community is so aggressive is because we're all unprotected, laughs, for instance. Right. Or something like that. Right. And so just teaching people about the different qualities of life is is what I've been doing. And thanks for thanks for that. Thanks for bringing this on.

00:53:01:00 - 00:53:27:20
John Simmerman
Yeah, you are quite welcome. And, and I love it too, because in this format it kind of feels like since they're really shores feels like it's like a little bit of a conversation, somebody can quickly digest it and then, you know, absorb it and then comment on it and and they're ready for that next little bit. So even though it's not truly a two way conversation in a dialog, you know, on video, it very much is in the platform.

00:53:27:20 - 00:53:51:24
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Yes. And it's helped me a lot. Learn how to respond, learn how to be concise. I get a decent rate online, too. And just learning about how what what what irks them, What can I do differently? You know, if somebody says somebody who keeps commenting about certain things regarding certain driveways or cars of design, I might even reach out to them and just kind of understand their perspective a little bit.

00:53:51:24 - 00:54:09:28
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
So I actually follow back all my haters, you know, and then they so they kind of get brought into this space. And it's I think I think that's really been a big value asset for me in my communication is just being on the same level as other people.

00:54:10:26 - 00:54:29:09
John Simmerman
Yeah, well, thank you so much for doing what you are doing. I'm inspired. All for the last word. I'll leave it to you. In any advice as to, you know, somebody like me who might, you know, is doing you know, producing videos for for YouTube, but may want to dip my toe into the tik-tok world.

00:54:30:15 - 00:54:51:22
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
I say having a big a good hook in the beginning is really important to take down. Algorithm is based on watch time. So if your if your video is, let's say 15 seconds and everybody's watching it, the average watch have 7 seconds. I mean, people are scrolling past. But if you video 15 seconds and the average watch time is 20 seconds with 70 seconds and people are rewatching it to learn something.

00:54:51:27 - 00:55:13:19
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Right. And that's what makes it when you do very well. So having a hope that can bring people back and putting as much as you can is maybe something even at the end of the video is really important. And I'd say you can also be meme ified. In a way I use that word because like if I sort of everybody like, Hey Mr. Hey y'all, Mr. Barricade, here is how I started off.

00:55:13:19 - 00:55:29:25
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And so people when they see that, it's like, Oh, he's about to explain something great. And they do that and so people can have different hook. So, so when people get used to that, be like, Oh, I like this. I want to keep more of this. Whenever I see that, I know what's going to happen, right? And you see that with people who joke or do other things.

00:55:29:25 - 00:55:51:23
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
But that's that's a that's a big, big part of of of the ticked off platform. And also just don't get afraid of all the trolls. There's a lot of trolls. I'm sure you see some of that on YouTube but it's way worse on Tik Tok. It's it's more I know what I kids I actually had a lot of a lot of racist Indian hate happen to me went from 200,000 followers up until six 600,000 followers.

00:55:51:23 - 00:56:07:15
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
It was it was pretty bad. I actually get I got to get some of the Internet hate crime division involved because of of doxing, of addresses and photoshopping of stuff. And but it got pretty bad. So you have to fight through that. I think most people, they go through a certain time that you deal with a lot of that hate.

00:56:07:15 - 00:56:33:00
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And what I've learned is if you're getting comments that are either hateful or people who just don't know or never seen, you can't afford them and you're doing well because you're reaching to a larger audience and you're used to reaching. You may be just talking to same people, same people, same people. And if you have a video that has really well, and it reached a new people, people are being offered and it goes a comment that you've never seen before that means you're actually reaching to new people and you're doing well.

00:56:33:00 - 00:56:48:20
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
You know, and for a lot of people on Twitter, they don't realize that until later. But you have a build a little bit of thick skin on the Internet and the kids can be mean sometimes, you know. And I remember like there was a lot of this high school, middle school bullying that I just was like, I never dealt with that.

00:56:48:20 - 00:57:01:16
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
I grew up in an Indian community here in the in the Bay Area where I never was singled out my whole life. And then I go on the Internet and I was singled out and I was just like, this is very odd. And then I realized that that's actually what a lot of people deal with in different parts of the country.

00:57:01:26 - 00:57:29:02
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And I didn't deal with that in my youth. And so it's just very, very new to me. And so I'd say just building a thick skin when you when you go on there and knowing that you don't you if you reach new people, you're doing well. And I will say there's also a lot of trends on TikTok that are funny, where people will have an audio and they'll everybody will use the same audio, whether it's a clip from a movie or a clip from music in their own niche.

00:57:29:02 - 00:57:51:24
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Somebody might talk about dating, somebody might talk about them losing something or a bag and they joke about it. But whatever, something relatable. And if you do that to your niche, you actually grow very well because you're reaching out to new people that way. So that's a big part of of that platform. But just keeping it sort of concise and kind of following different trends.

00:57:51:24 - 00:57:57:29
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And if you like something and you put a smile on your face, people can feel that energy through their days, through the camera.

00:57:58:28 - 00:58:07:21
John Simmerman
I love it. I love it. Well, here you go. Don't be don't be surprised if in 2023, Mr. Active Downs comes to the TikTok world.

00:58:08:20 - 00:58:27:17
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Yeah, I love it. I love it. That's it. I would help promote your your your content on the on that platform. If we have a good community of urbanists and active transportation and city folks, it's growing quite a bit on that platform because a lot of people see that point of view from people who go clean up rivers and clean up creeks.

00:58:27:17 - 00:58:48:25
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
We have two folks who slurry coconuts, tractors to people who are adjusting the signal heads on on the cranes. You know, there's a whole community, people who have cell phones in their pocket that are filming their day to day work and day to day life and going along with these music trends and and different and different types of content.

00:58:48:25 - 00:59:08:07
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And I think that's so unique about that platform. We'll see what happens when the Congress does what they do. But I think more than Instagram and other platforms, there's a very low barrier of entry to some video and putting it down. And I think there's a there's a there's a great community of like minded people who are forming our own little audience.

00:59:08:07 - 00:59:09:21
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
There.

00:59:09:21 - 00:59:41:22
John Simmerman
One of the things that you said there that is incredibly important and Jason Slaughter and I had this conversation. Jason runs the YouTube channel, not just bikes, is that, you know, once you do break out of the echo chamber, that bubble of, you know, the active transportation in urbanists and and you know, realm, it's it is kind of it's a little scary like you say and but it's that's the whole point is you're getting the message to where message really needs to go which is outside of our little echo chamber.

00:59:42:07 - 01:00:01:17
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And that's that's kind of new in our transportation realm. Sadly, I remember having community outreach meetings. A young engineer in the city would tell me, Hey, we want to have the meetings at 3 p.m. so we don't have to hire a translator. And I'd never be like, What? Okay, I guess I was a young engineer and I was like, Okay, I guess that's what we're doing, right, is having a meeting at 3 p.m..

01:00:01:17 - 01:00:19:10
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
So we just get a few people and we just talk to them and just to show face that we're doing the outreach, that's not good, you know, and we shouldn't be doing that. And now we have our meetings at 6 p.m.. We have daycare so single mothers can come, we have food raffle, we have food, we have a, we have multiple translators.

01:00:19:10 - 01:00:42:16
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
It's on Zoom. We even have a pop up facility. We bring out a different post. We have the kids right around the post and draw chalk, green bike lanes and stuff like that. And that's kind of the way we we have to go towards outreach and we have to constantly just reach new people. And now with the social media are reaching all these new people like trolls who maybe don't like us and just want to say something crude maybe about your appearance or about what you're talking about.

01:00:43:06 - 01:01:13:12
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
I have I make some moves I have to make friend only videos and I have to tell people who are my mutual say, Hey, I have a few videos that are getting popular right now. I'm getting a lot of weird 911 comments and stuff like that. Can you guys just kind of combat that in my conversations? I don't want that to get affect the engineering content you know and like I'm I'm a Hindu American too so just the wrong type of racism right And so it's but that's just what you get online and so just making sure you kind of tame that.

01:01:14:21 - 01:01:31:28
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
I had a funny thing, actually, I'll say this when I was dealing with a lot of hate in the beginning, and I was just transferring from doing a dance videos to the the engineering videos. I didn't know how to deal with the hate, and it was just coming at me from all angles, a lot of it, and just a lot of slurs and a lot of just weird comments and and stuff like that.

01:01:31:28 - 01:01:51:01
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And I decided to build like a little Internet cult love of friends. And I told all my fans, If you want to be my friend, change your profile picture to an MTV traffic control sign, and I show this chart and I go, Choose whatever side you want. And if you see if I see what the central ad is, my friend.

01:01:51:12 - 01:02:09:03
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And then I had all these people, young people change their profile pictures to these signs. They change from like to chains on a head to slippery when wet and all kinds of funny stuff, right? But then I made friend all the videos and be like, Hey, I want you guys to help me up, do a lot of harassment and bullying.

01:02:09:11 - 01:02:30:12
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Can you just help me with this? And if you see that it happened to anybody else combat that we want to be anti-racist. And if you see anything that's like that, just don't just combat that and that helped a lot because what happened is if somebody gave some really crude comment and people would see the video, we talking about engineering and know see something really obnoxious, they would like that obnoxious comment.

01:02:30:19 - 01:02:49:22
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And I'd come back after a day's work of I'm looking at my phone and be like, why do they get 10,000 likes on a racist comment? I want my engineering videos, right? And I would feel very sad about that. That was the America that's the world we live in, Right? And this was during 2020, during the crazy time of 20 2021.

01:02:50:01 - 01:03:10:08
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And I, I realize that if if one of my followers says, don't talk to Mr. Barricaded way or talks back to that person quickly, like as soon as they see it, then that comment doesn't go viral. Then the response goes viral, Right? So then I come back and I might see somebody make a 911 comment and I say somebody says, Don't talk to Mr. Barricade.

01:03:10:08 - 01:03:33:23
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Anyway, this is the engineering video. And then that gets more like than that comment. But if that if that response is out there, it's really easy to be like, Oh, ha, I just scroll on, right? And so I that's why I got rid of a lot of that hate. And I built a big community. And I think that's kind of what you need to do on this platform, is to build a community, supports you, and then you grow and you get to new places and you, you, you, you see new and you constant grow.

01:03:34:00 - 01:03:48:26
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And for me, I love I'm a CAD engineer, right? I don't do I didn't do social media and I didn't know any of this was going to happen to me. And it just it happened so accidentally. And now I'm using it as a is like my superpower for my company. And half our business comes from the social media now.

01:03:49:26 - 01:04:10:26
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
But for me, being an engineer and have most of my days in AutoCAD designing, approving redlining plans, doing calculations and stuff of that is pretty new. But I think it's helped me grow as a professional knowing that when I go to different communities, I may be judged, I maybe perceived differently. I have to explain things in a certain way to car centric people or truck drivers.

01:04:11:07 - 01:04:32:08
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And I I've seen that online. There was a time when my town was actually removed because I was dealing with so much hate. I just a tactile platform at that time was banning a lot of minority just because a lot of people were reporting their pages and they learned to combat that. They made an apology and it brought back a lot of people who actually got banned.

01:04:32:08 - 01:04:53:08
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And I was one of those people who got my kind of remove that 500,000 followers just for making engineering content and stuff for that and went, wow, I got to ban a rally to my community to say, hey, email Tik Tok and say, why did you get banned? And I remember this one video that made me laugh is this is a trucker and he's in his car, right?

01:04:53:10 - 01:04:58:04
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And he's like, why did they ban Mr. Barricade? He did all this engineering.

01:04:58:17 - 01:05:04:22
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
He taught me that we have to care about room for our feet on the road. We have to have space for our.

01:05:04:22 - 01:05:08:07
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Feet to work. I did not know that, you know, And I was just like.

01:05:09:10 - 01:05:09:28
John Simmerman
Yes, you.

01:05:09:28 - 01:05:11:24
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Know, like we we're reaching all these.

01:05:11:24 - 01:05:12:29
John Simmerman
People who did not.

01:05:12:29 - 01:05:30:28
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Ever know to care about bikes or crosswalks or sidewalks or iPads. And here is a trucker who probably would have hated bikes and hated pedestrians before and now is like I see the value in that. It makes sense. If they're out of my way, I can get where I need to go. And it's clear, right? And I'm explaining it that way.

01:05:30:28 - 01:05:55:19
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And I found that's really motivated me as I'm reaching all these new people. I see people respond to me in Spanish in many different countries. I make videos about all kinds of subjects related to engineering, and I think everybody's everybody's able to see that, hey, we're all related. And I'll give I I'll say one more thing is, is Gen Z is a is a very new generation than how you and I grew up.

01:05:55:19 - 01:06:16:17
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
You know, when we grew up, we probably got our car at 16 or 18. We went out with our friends. We painted a town, you know, and came back, came back and we had a very that was our upbringing and that's how we interacted with infrastructure, right? Is by driving or biking or going out with your friends, hanging out under bridges or whatever we used to do, going on hiking trails and stuff like that.

01:06:17:02 - 01:06:43:05
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
But this newer generation, they did not get that opportunity due to economic issues or the pandemic. They actually got their experience with infrastructure through GTA and video games, you know, and that's their first time that they drove a car. That's the first time that they interacted with a crosswalk was actually through a video game. And so there's a common joke in the in the in the in the gen-z community of something called an NPC.

01:06:43:24 - 01:07:06:27
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
I don't think I've heard this before, but an NPC is a non-player character. So you are the main character in this world or in the simulation and everybody else is crossing the street to you. Don't react with it. Are just computer generated non-player characters like in the GTA game. And so that's a very common joke on the internet, just part of their culture, right?

01:07:07:05 - 01:07:25:01
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And so they actually get paid. I want the user interface of the map of this video game to work well for me, right? I want to make sure the crosswalks work. This thing goes work and stuff so they can play the video game of life. And it is sad that that's how they relate to the world is through video games and simulations and videos.

01:07:25:11 - 01:07:43:09
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
But that's really how they grew up with the pandemic and more. And so a lot of young people were entering college. They went to college with the pandemic. They went to high school with the pandemic for two or three years. Right. And so their interaction with infrastructure actually has been some of them came through my video and they'd be like, Oh, I never knew I could.

01:07:43:14 - 01:08:01:22
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
That was a water channel until I saw that in GTA San Andreas. And now I'm seeing that in your video and I know I'm just in Santa monica, like, what are you talking about? Right? But I just haven't had those experiences like I have as a teenager, as a young adult exploring the world. And that's kind of the new generation mindset.

01:08:01:22 - 01:08:19:23
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And so resonating with that about caring about our user interface, resonating with that about this is how you cross Sims. I even joke about the NPCs that they're like, Look at all these people who across the cross or they just know what to do. Is it a program that they know what to do? Right? And that's really part of the newer generations life and humor.

01:08:19:23 - 01:08:31:13
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
And I think cities need to understand that if they're going to talk about our interface because a lot of this stuff will go over their head if they don't understand that. That's how people's humor and that's how people are raised in the pandemic.

01:08:31:13 - 01:08:49:15
John Simmerman
Good stuff. Well, Mr. Barricade, you're my superhero here and and hopefully will encourage more of that that generation to get out into the real world and experience some of the wonderful infrastructure that you're building. Again, thank you so much for joining me on the Acting Towns podcast.

01:08:49:15 - 01:08:50:03
Vignesh "Mr Barricade" Swaminathan
Oh, thank you.

01:08:51:14 - 01:09:08:27
John Simmerman
A thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Ignatius. I mean, often, Mr. Barricade. And if you did, please give it a thumbs up. Leave a comment down below and share it with a friend. And if you haven't done so already, again, I'd be honored to have you subscribe to the channel. That really helps out a lot.

01:09:08:27 - 01:09:38:12
John Simmerman
And if you are so inclined, please consider supporting me out on Patriot. Well, until next time. This is John signing off by wishing you much activity healthy and happiness. Cheers. And again sending a huge thank you to all my active towns Ambassadors supporting the channel on Patron Buy me a coffee YouTube super. Thanks. As well as making contributions to the nonprofit and purchasing things from the active towns store, every little bit adds up and it's much appreciated.

01:09:38:24 - 01:09:47:22
John Simmerman
Thank you all so much.