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

00:00:05:03 - 00:00:07:00
Speaker 1
Chuck, great to see you again.

00:00:07:03 - 00:00:24:04
Speaker 2
Nice to see you. I, I know I'm coming in Hot here today, but that may make it all the more interesting. So, yes, you're such a good friend and have been for a long time. And I'm just grateful for everything that you're doing at Active Town. So this is just cool. I've been looking forward to this.

00:00:24:08 - 00:00:42:21
Speaker 1
Chuck, why don't we do this? Why don't we kicked us off by giving you an opportunity to introduce yourself to the audience? My audience is a little bit different than maybe your Strong Towns podcast audience. And yeah, so let me just turn the floor over to you for a real quick 32nd introduction as to as to who is Chuck.

00:00:42:23 - 00:01:08:25
Speaker 2
My name is Chuck Maroon. I'm a civil engineer, I'm a land use planner, and I'm one of the founders of an organization called Strong Towns and Strong Towns. We do primarily through media building a Movement for Change about how we build our cities. Our core insight is that cities have grown financially constrained, financially weak, financially fragile, and that is largely because of our development pattern.

00:01:08:25 - 00:01:34:10
Speaker 2
The way we actually build our cities creates more long term liabilities than it creates in wealth and prosperity. And that insight aligns with so many other things. One of the things that aligns really well with is active living. What we have found is that when we have neighborhoods where people bike and walk, those are also neighborhoods that are financially really successful for the people that live there, for the community at large.

00:01:34:13 - 00:01:51:13
Speaker 2
And so I think that's how you and I got intertwined. And yeah, you can find all of our stuff at Strong Towns dot org. We publish articles every day. We've got many podcasts, a little bit of video. We don't do stuff as fancy as John's doing here, but we do our best.

00:01:51:16 - 00:02:13:09
Speaker 1
Yeah, we, we do go back quite a few years now. I'm trying to remember if it was. I think it must have been 2011. I know for sure we were at the same seen you in 2012. And then of course I did my great upper Midwest Active Towns tour in 2013. So I got to visit you in in Brainerd.

00:02:13:09 - 00:02:23:13
Speaker 1
And that was the first time that you and I were on a podcast together. I got to sit down in your your old studio when you were in the other building over by the train tracks. So, yeah, it's been a while.

00:02:23:13 - 00:02:39:04
Speaker 2
And you have you are you're one of the few people who remember my old house and you were there. You've met my wife, you've met my kids. So, yeah, you know, we go way back and know each other very well. Yeah, so.

00:02:39:09 - 00:03:03:03
Speaker 1
We sure do. And let me pop on over to the website here. Yes. Strong towns dot org and I highly recommend that if you're not already a member of this organization, please consider doing so. You know, it's, you know, hey, five bucks a month, whatever you can afford, it's well worth it. You gain access to just a plethora of content.

00:03:03:06 - 00:03:12:24
Speaker 1
Why don't you give your 32nd, you know, stump pitches to, you know, what makes strong towns different than maybe any other organization that might be out there?

00:03:12:26 - 00:03:34:04
Speaker 2
I appreciate that. From a from an advocacy standpoint, we do focus on changing the culture. I was I was at a conference last week and they were everybody got up and said, you know, we're trying to do this, but the culture won't last. We're trying to do this. But people get upset. We're trying to do and we are focused really on changing the broad culture around growth and development.

00:03:34:04 - 00:04:16:16
Speaker 2
We've got five priority campaigns incremental housing, safe streets, ending highway expansions, transparent local accounting and reducing parking subsidies and require mandates. And all of these speak to things that we can all do in communities to make them a better places to live, to make them stronger, to make them financially more successful. And so we focus on that, getting people in, getting this kind of broad message that 70% of we reached 2 million people in the last 12 months and 70% of them are non-technical non elected officials, non decision makers.

00:04:16:16 - 00:04:26:24
Speaker 2
They're just I just say just they are people who care deeply about their place. And that's kind of our core audience. And that's those are the heroes of our story as awesome.

00:04:26:24 - 00:04:33:20
Speaker 1
That's fantastic. I appreciate you doing that. And you had mentioned that you've been on the road quite a bit.

00:04:33:22 - 00:05:00:07
Speaker 2
It's like it's been like this since, right? Yeah. Now it's been three weeks straight. I've actually last night I slept in my own bed in my own home for the like I think the third time in October and it's what, today, the 27th of October. So yeah, fall is always a busy travel season for us because there's conferences and there's other things and we, we go where people are gathered and try to share our message and we get invited to speak in a lot of different places.

00:05:00:07 - 00:05:25:16
Speaker 2
I was in the UK a couple of weeks ago. That was a crazy, crazy experience. Delightful, wonderful. But like blew my mind. I spent some time in California Wisconsin. So yeah, it's been is a hectic travel season and really, John, I've got a trip every week now between now and my wedding anniversary, which December 16th. I get back on the 15th in the last trip.

00:05:25:23 - 00:05:37:03
Speaker 1
And you had to take time off. You know, probably after December 16th, you're going to take a fair amount of time off because you like to kind of nestle in and and get into the holidays.

00:05:37:06 - 00:06:02:00
Speaker 2
I always feel like you you you're in this marathon of 12 months and if you can take the last couple of weeks of the year, I have been fortunate enough to build an organization that covers my rhythm of life. And so we shut down the last couple of weeks of the year like nobody's reading anyway, and we kind of decelerate a little bit and take that as a reflection time.

00:06:02:03 - 00:06:10:05
Speaker 2
So yeah, yeah, that's, that's what I do. I'm looking, I'm looking forward to it. But it's a sprint between now and then, right? We're in the homestretch. Yeah. Yeah.

00:06:10:07 - 00:06:29:21
Speaker 1
Well, and I do want to emphasize to the folks, if you notice, I'm sort of looking off screen from time to time. I'm monitoring your chats coming in and again and again, shout out to everybody who's joining us here today. I want to start this off with a little bit of humor just to, you know, have some fun a little bit before we get into the serious stuff.

00:06:29:23 - 00:06:54:11
Speaker 1
And our good friend Andy Beno just posted this out on Twitter, just not not too terribly long ago. I'm going to zoom in on this so everyone can see it. And it basically it says that, yeah, every time the planning department asks for a traffic study, it gets worse and we end up with yet again another craziest road.

00:06:54:13 - 00:06:57:11
Speaker 2
But that's exactly that's exactly right. Unfortunately.

00:06:57:11 - 00:07:24:04
Speaker 1
Yeah. Unfortunate. And fortunately then the second little bit of of sort of uplifting humor is talking about a a very important topic that you just learned about recently. And that's the concept of a road taco. And so, yeah, there you go. We we had a tweet recently, and I want you to talk a little bit about why that's hilarious.

00:07:24:07 - 00:07:47:09
Speaker 2
Well, I, I just love and my comment was that, you know, young people always see so clearly, right. They always state the things. And it is a you know, we invented the word strode here at strong towns. I never thought that I would have a word in the dictionary. The strode is this combination of a street and a road that that performs neither function very well.

00:07:47:12 - 00:08:07:00
Speaker 2
And it's a it's beautiful to see it escaping into the wild, Right? It's not a it's not a technical term. It's not a term that we own. It's now general use and it's it's broadly used. I did a search for Strode the other day on Google and had millions and millions of uses of it. You know, very few of those were us.

00:08:07:04 - 00:08:32:12
Speaker 2
It was, you know, this word that, like I said, has escaped into the wild. The idea that a child would not would have this word as part of their lexicon and then apply it. So cross brilliantly into another like genre like food critic. Yeah. To me it was it was like the ultimate compliment, right? It was the ultimate compliment because yeah, kids are so beautiful.

00:08:32:12 - 00:08:33:25
Speaker 1
Yeah, they really are. They really.

00:08:33:25 - 00:08:34:15
Speaker 2
Are.

00:08:34:17 - 00:08:57:28
Speaker 1
And I mean, a pop up, a photo that's well known to you because it's from your website and this is kind of what we're talking about. We've got all of these streets that are out there that have been built to essentially highway standards. You know, they're incredibly wide, encouraging fast speeds. And you have a little tagline that goes along with this.

00:08:57:28 - 00:08:59:11
Speaker 1
And what is that?

00:08:59:11 - 00:09:27:17
Speaker 2
Yeah, well, if you need a sign to tell people to slow down, you designed your street wrong, right? Interestingly about this shop, John. So right where the sign is one block to what would be the right looking at this to the north as you're standing there is my grandmother's house. My grandmother just passed away in 1991, but that is the house where my mom grew up and where my grandma lived the entire, you know, mine the entire time I knew her.

00:09:27:19 - 00:09:48:09
Speaker 2
If you go up two blocks from this sign, on the left is the elementary school where I went to. That's local elementary school. I went there, incidentally, when I finished going there, I mean, my mom went there before me as well. When I finished going there, my dad was a teacher there. My dad retired and then my daughters went there.

00:09:48:11 - 00:10:17:25
Speaker 2
So this this particular street is one I'm very familiar with because I used to once a week walk over to my grandma's for for lunch. And, you know, there's no traffic, there's no volume of traffic. But the road is designed like a highway. And the traffic, little traffic there is drives really, really, really fast. So yeah, it's this is a this is a picture that I show because it's I think everybody can relate to it to one degree or another.

00:10:17:25 - 00:10:29:20
Speaker 2
Everybody has this in their community somewhere. But this one is actually deeply intimate to me because I, I mean, it's it's eight blocks that way from where I'm sitting. I know that, like, this is my home.

00:10:29:22 - 00:11:12:18
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And Nick, you know, basically says, Yeah, like my city's solution to speeders is new signs posted five miles lower than the one before. And again, signs, signs and more signs. And in fact, you know, this is something that that I anticipated we might have a a conversation that kind of heads in this direction. And this is a photo of Hans Manderson as he's, you know, out there removing signs for those who may not know about Hans Bonderman once, you know, kind of introduced us all to this brilliant person who is no longer with us, he has since passed.

00:11:12:20 - 00:11:40:11
Speaker 2
Yes. I never got to meet him. I just was a super fan and absolutely loved his work. So Hans Monument to me is is most famous for saying when you treat people like idiots, they act like idiots. And when you when you recognize the truism of that quote and then you step back and look at the transportation system that we built, we're all familiar with the dumb warning labels on everything.

00:11:40:17 - 00:12:02:12
Speaker 2
You know, we're Americans. So, you know, lots of attorneys, lots of legalese. You get a commercial on TV in the last 5 seconds. So someone's talking really fast. They're all they're all like that. And we're used to that stupidity. Right? But we have become passive, I think We don't recognize around us how our transportation system literally treats us like idiots.

00:12:02:12 - 00:12:39:02
Speaker 2
I mean, the sign pollution is one thing, but just everything about how we build assumes that humans are absolute morons who are completely incapable of making logical, basic decisions about life enhancement. Our man, who was a Dutch engineer, recognized that humans are thoughtful, rational people and that if we build environments that complement and in a sense play to our intelligence and our thoughtfulness, that almost everybody in the system acts thoughtfully and intelligently.

00:12:39:04 - 00:13:04:15
Speaker 2
And so he was all about removing signs. He was all about removing kind of the standard dumbing things that we do, but replacing them with really thoughtful, good design that allowed people to do it in an automobile, on a bike, walking, things that were very natural but also very safe, because the reality is like, no human wants to get in a car crash.

00:13:04:15 - 00:13:29:10
Speaker 2
No human is like angling to kill somebody, you know. Yes, there are psychopaths among us, but they generally use other means. You know, the idea that is emblematic of Hans Bonderman is the idea that the human is a thoughtful species that will actually given the opportunity, you know, perform very well. Yeah.

00:13:29:16 - 00:13:47:12
Speaker 1
Yeah. And I can't bring up Hans without bringing him on a little bit. Yeah. So he has from London, the U.K., and he really picked up where Hans Bonderman left off when it came to shared space and trying to reorient our brains to the fact that design matters.

00:13:47:14 - 00:13:56:23
Speaker 2
Yeah. Another app I did get to know Ben, and Ben was like one degree of separation. Him and Hans moneymen were friends.

00:13:56:25 - 00:14:06:15
Speaker 1
And so the way this photo, by the way, I believe is from episode 196 of the Strong Towns podcast. So you did have him on the podcast?

00:14:06:18 - 00:14:45:25
Speaker 2
Oh, yeah, I had him on a couple of times. And we we had we had such beautiful conversations. The conversations were more beautiful even when we turned off the microphone and the cameras and everything and just talked. He he was such a gentleman. He has also passed away, such a gentle man, such a generous person. But I think the thing about him that was so stunning was that for him, a safe street design and he focused a lot on intersections and how we handle in England, they would call them junctions, how we handle junctions, how we handle intersections, he said.

00:14:45:25 - 00:15:07:27
Speaker 2
It would only be safe if you could blindfold yourself and walk backwards into the intersection and feel completely safe doing it. And he practiced what he preached. He actually did that he would blindfold himself and then walk slowly backwards through a block, you know, an intersection completely blind to the world. And he said, this is what safety looks like.

00:15:08:00 - 00:15:22:20
Speaker 2
It's a place where everybody is so aware and comfortable and understands what's going on that no one is going to hit you, no one's going to injure you. And the designs he did were genius. I mean, they were brilliant. Yeah.

00:15:22:23 - 00:15:33:16
Speaker 1
And I can't remember if it was if it was Ben Hamilton Bailey or Hans Mondrian that channeled this meme idea to like Spike and oh.

00:15:33:18 - 00:15:55:26
Speaker 2
No, it was Ben. Well, it was Ben that handed it to me. Right. This is interesting because he was a little he was not sheepish about it because he was very firm in what he knew to be the right way. He knew it to be right. But he was he did recognize that this was going to be a discomforting thought.

00:15:55:28 - 00:16:32:10
Speaker 2
But he said, you know, we do all this padding and armor for people within a motor vehicle. And he said the reality is that that works great on the highway, that works great on the open road. But when people get into a city, what should happen is that their seatbelt should like automatically disconnect and come off and a knife should come out of the center console, because then that would create and a cement recall situation between people inside a vehicle and people outside of a vehicle because, of course, you know, if you get hit by a car, if you're walking, if you're biking, then you're hit by a car.

00:16:32:12 - 00:17:05:20
Speaker 2
If that car's going over five miles an hour, you're, you know, even over like three miles an hour, you're going to suffer an injury of some sort if it's over 15 miles an hour, that injury is likely to be traumatic, was over 22 miles an hour. That injury is likely to be fatal. And so what this signifies is, in a sense like a symmetry, because what we want is we want the driver to be aware of, in a sense, the mortality that they contain and likewise the mortality that other people contain.

00:17:05:22 - 00:17:28:24
Speaker 2
Let me say that in a different way, because this wasn't a thing to say, Oh, you know, like start seeing motorcycles, start seeing bicyclists, start being respectful. It was one of these things where if you get in a collision, it is going to have dramatic impacts for you. And this kind of goes to Adam Smith and some of his insights in the Theory of Moral Sentiments.

00:17:28:24 - 00:17:53:29
Speaker 2
You know, he famously said, if you know, a million people in China die tomorrow in a horrific earthquake or whatever, he said that that will be a note that I will, you know, take note of and maybe feel some sadness about. But but quickly move on from it is a statistic. But if you told me that you were going to cut off part of my pinkie tomorrow morning, I would not be able to sleep at night.

00:17:53:29 - 00:18:13:18
Speaker 2
I would be at a complete loss, even though, like me losing my pinky is a tiny, tiny, tiny thing compared to a million people dying. It's very close to you. And so what that picture is meant to say is let's make this very close and intimate to the driver and then we'll get different behaviors from the driver. I thought it was a brilliant insight.

00:18:13:18 - 00:18:35:11
Speaker 1
Yeah, it really is, because it kind of it shakes us up. No, I don't want this in our automobiles, but it does speak to the risk homeostasis, you know, that, you know, as our driving systems, as are our cars, you know, get safer and safer and safer, we feel as drivers more comfortable going faster and faster and faster.

00:18:35:11 - 00:18:55:18
Speaker 1
We feel as if there's not much vulnerability to us as drivers and therefore we become more aggressive as drivers. And this is going to be a little bit of a theme that kind of flows through some of the rest of what we're going to be talking about today is kind of a follow up to a little activity that happened over on Twitter.

00:18:55:21 - 00:19:28:04
Speaker 1
You know, I mean, it was good because there's conversations that have to happen. And one of them one of the one of the conversations was around speed cameras. One of them was around a vilified motorists and a I think a a query or a survey that you had posted. And then just in general, what has kind of popped up this month on Twitter for sure is a whole stream of pedestrian education, safety, education that comes off as victim blaming.

00:19:28:09 - 00:19:56:20
Speaker 1
And so those are the three main buckets that I'd like to try to, you know, cover here today. And we'll start off with what I'm labeling as the the speed camera dustup. And that's fair. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I'll put this this this tweet up here and I'll let you kind of give a little bit of background and premise since there's a lot of people, you know, tuning in from the Netherlands and and other locations.

00:19:56:22 - 00:20:08:19
Speaker 1
But this was one of the in the context of it, you're just sort of replying to this belief that we need speed cameras to try to do all of this. So.

00:20:08:21 - 00:20:36:20
Speaker 2
Yeah, well, let's start with and I do think that this is a little bit of the Ben Hamilton Bailey the knife in the thing. Yeah. You're recognizing that humans are human rights that that I, I always feel like advocates sometimes believe that humans are not you know somehow human like they don't have human characteristics and that we should either build better humans or get rid of bad humans.

00:20:36:20 - 00:21:07:15
Speaker 2
I, I think that this thinking goes in all kinds of horrible places. But if you look at this comment that the person said drivers should be single mindedly focused on driving and like, Oh, wouldn't that be delightful? Like I when I give public talks, I will ask people how many of you in the audience and this is hundreds of people, often sometimes thousands of people, I'll say, how many of you, when you're driving, feel comfortable listening to the radio and like everybody in the audience does, because everybody listens to the radio.

00:21:07:22 - 00:21:28:15
Speaker 2
We don't, in general practice, consider listening to the radio to be distracting or being reckless. As a driver, how many of you feel comfortable singing along to the song? Well, John, I'm telling you that right now, I could not have this conversation with you and sing along to a song because the human brain doesn't work that way. I'm engaged in our conversation.

00:21:28:17 - 00:21:51:21
Speaker 2
I'm incapable of listening to music and singing the song because I'm talking to you. If you're single mindedly focused on something, you cannot listen to the song, you cannot sing along. You cannot talk to someone in the passenger seat. You quite frankly, cannot read a billboard or a sign or a bumper sticker or, you know, anything else if you're single mindedly focused.

00:21:51:24 - 00:22:26:17
Speaker 2
And I think we could say as an ideal or yeah, I mean, it would be great if humans were single mindedly focused in their car. I think there's reasons why that's physically not possible. We can get into that, but let's just look at the practical reality. There is 0% of drivers who are single mindedly focused. And so if your standard is if you're not single mindedly focused, you are a reckless social deviant who's going to kill people, That's a nonstarter that doesn't recognize the reality of what driving is and what humans are.

00:22:26:18 - 00:22:54:22
Speaker 1
Right. Yeah. Yeah. And your your retort to to this particular comment here is that yeah, no, just slapping a municipal speed cameras and seeing and a sign that's hey, speed cameras in use, that's lazy. It's predatory, it's ineffective at actually changing the behavior. Because getting back to what we were talking about earlier, brilliantly, you know, positioned in terms of talking about street design, we've done nothing to change the street design.

00:22:54:27 - 00:22:58:01
Speaker 1
That's the most important thing that we need to start addressing.

00:22:58:04 - 00:23:24:28
Speaker 2
I think famous famously, there is a highway in Iowa and I can't think of the exact one, but I mean, this was a decade ago they put in. There was a speeding problem through this area. And I say problem. The people were speeding through this area and they put up a speed camera and it basically changed the cash flow of this community because all of a sudden it was basically it was a highway where a lot of out-of-town people were driving through.

00:23:25:06 - 00:24:01:19
Speaker 2
It wasn't primarily locals. It was primarily like out of town, people who were passing through and, you know, commuting or what have you and driving too fast. And they put up a speed camera and just became a cash cow because it didn't nothing about it. Address driver behavior is essentially like a speed, a classic speed trap. And, you know, you had the satisfaction of having a lot of money from it, but you did not actually address the safety problem inherent with people speeding through that.

00:24:01:22 - 00:24:26:03
Speaker 2
And it was almost like there became this disincentive to deal with the safety problem because it would have impacted the revenue problem. And I'm I'm not suggesting that as emblematic of all speed cameras. I don't think it is. But as an outlier, as like the far edge, I feel like if you put that stake in the ground and you go, that is that is not an appropriate use of speed cameras.

00:24:26:05 - 00:24:35:28
Speaker 2
There's lots of ways that you can use speed cameras appropriately. But if we can all agree that like that is an ineffective use of one. Right, I think we can have a really good conversation about speed cameras.

00:24:35:28 - 00:25:09:18
Speaker 1
And we're going to get to what you're describing as the incredible speed camera program in just a second here. But really, when I saw this dustup happening and everything, I'm kind of thinking, you know, I can totally see that if we have a situation, let's use a school as an example in elementary schools, an example, if we have gone through and created the design changes necessarily and even, you know, done major traffic calming in that area, called it a school zone with limited access even to the area.

00:25:09:20 - 00:25:32:17
Speaker 1
And and then we're still seeing deviant behavior as you phrase it, truly deviant behavior. Then that's when we actually do this. And that's exactly what you said on the credible speed camera program is it's not that you hate speed cameras and think they're all a money grab. It's that we need to deploy them intelligently.

00:25:32:20 - 00:25:54:12
Speaker 2
Yeah, there's a certain like libertarian argument against speed cameras and I think people like mesh me they put me in that they try to put me in that box and say that's more I don't that's not my view at all. I love this approach and I think this is my top tweet right now. So I just leave it there because I think it defined, Can we talk about this idea of deviant behavior?

00:25:54:12 - 00:25:56:10
Speaker 2
Because I feel like this is really important.

00:25:56:14 - 00:26:12:04
Speaker 1
Well, I think it's also crucial to some of the other things that we that ended up popping up, which is let's punish the driver because we have this impression that it's an us versus them and there and that all drivers are therefore monsters.

00:26:12:07 - 00:26:34:01
Speaker 2
Yes. Yes. And that is that's a very strong set of beliefs among a certain group. And I think it also takes us in a wrong direction. So we've been doing these crash analysis studios at strong towns now all year. So we've done ten of them and for every single one we send out, these are places where there's been fatal crashes, traumatic injuries.

00:26:34:04 - 00:26:59:21
Speaker 2
We send the local group a speed camera and we have them go out and do a speed study. They actually we train them how to do this. They go out, they take the readings and they come back and say, here's what the the flow looks like in traffic. And every single one, I think the lowest amount has been like 60% of people were speeding and the highest one has been like 85 or 90% of people are going over the posted speed limit.

00:26:59:23 - 00:27:28:02
Speaker 2
And in almost all of these instances, the posted speed limit is actually too fast for safety. Right? So we have a speed limit that is too high and then people are exceeding that speed limit in over half in every single instance in that kind of a situation. The the deviant behavior is not speeding. The the average behavior is speeding like the normal human being in that situation is actually speeding.

00:27:28:05 - 00:27:56:08
Speaker 2
And what that tells you is not that humans are all reckless and horrible and deviant and we should find them all or throw them in jail or take away their keys. What it tells you is that you've done something wrong here with the design of this roadway when you're getting the opposite outcome of what you want. You describe a school situation where we've gone and done all the things I, I would use as my mind a metric where nine out of ten cars are driving at a safe speed, right?

00:27:56:11 - 00:28:28:22
Speaker 2
When you have a situation where nine out of ten cars are driving at a safe speed, the 10% that aren't are deviating from the norm. They are people who are overly aggressive. And those are instances and places where I think speed cameras and the awareness of speed cameras and the idea that I will get a speeding ticket if I drive too fast through this area can be successfully deployed and used in a way that will change behavior outside of that, you're in a situation where I do.

00:28:28:24 - 00:29:01:22
Speaker 2
Let me be careful about my words here because I think people got really upset. I don't think that we will have the safety outcomes we want. We may change some behavior on the margins. I think it was questionable about how that behavior will change. How will people just avoid the cameras go faster before and faster after? I think there's a lot of different ways people respond to speed cameras, but if you don't actually deal with the aggression in the environment that's been designed, speed cameras aren't, they're not going to get you to the outcome that you want.

00:29:01:22 - 00:29:09:20
Speaker 2
If the outcome you want is a safer place, right? If the outcome you want is punishing drivers, I mean, yes, cameras will get you that. Yeah, I don't find that to be.

00:29:09:20 - 00:29:34:25
Speaker 1
Very punishing drivers is sort of what came came about after you did your little survey and I can't even remember the exact wording of the survey, but essentially it was like you were sort of blown away by the willingness or that level of antipathy towards the the the the motorists and and the punitive enforcement thing sort of came out of like, okay, we've got to punish these people.

00:29:34:25 - 00:29:36:11
Speaker 1
And and so I did too.

00:29:36:11 - 00:29:38:14
Speaker 2
I didn't use surveys. Yeah. I don't know if you saw I.

00:29:38:14 - 00:29:44:29
Speaker 1
Might have missed one. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I'm sorry I don't have I haven't, I might not have been able to follow everyone.

00:29:45:01 - 00:30:05:03
Speaker 2
No, no, it's good if they came in, they came in subsequent one was first and then the other one second. Yeah. And the first one was basically like, What should we do to drivers? And it was, you know, or is this a reckless thing? Is getting that like, is this, you know, reckless behavior? And it was like three out of four people were like, kill this person.

00:30:05:03 - 00:30:23:26
Speaker 2
Like, you know, it was like, not that bad. But like it was there was a percentage that was like, throw away the keys. Like, this is horrible. The second survey was when you are driving and you're in free flow conditions and you see a police officer on the side of the road, what do you do? What's the first thing that you do?

00:30:24:01 - 00:30:41:21
Speaker 2
And the answer was, you know, look at my speedometer, press the brake, nothing. And then, you know, like other and it was like three out of four people said either look at the speed limit, I'm speed, I'm going, or I press the brake. And when you look at these two surveys together, you have a huge number of people.

00:30:41:21 - 00:30:58:06
Speaker 2
And this is Twitter, right? But a huge number of people saying if you are speeding at all, you are a reckless deviant, you should be fined and, you know, throw away the key. And then three out of four people saying, if I see a cop on the side of the road, I hear they're hit the brakes or look at my speedometer because I'm worried that I'm speeding.

00:30:58:08 - 00:31:37:21
Speaker 2
I found those two like answers completely incoherent because my guess is that all the people who said go after the speeder are also like, That's not me. And then in the next question, they're like, Oh, yeah, that's that, that's me. You know, there's this lack of recognition that it here's where the lack of recognition is. I feel like the lack of recognition is that every time there is a fatal or traumatic crash, we take comfort in the idea that it was someone doing something reckless, Right.

00:31:37:24 - 00:32:01:10
Speaker 2
When the reality is if someone doing something almost all times it's someone doing something very normal who is unlucky. And the reality is, is that all of us, by the definition that we apply to that crash, all of us are reckless almost all the time. We're just lucky. And I think it's that lucky difference that really gets it.

00:32:01:13 - 00:32:21:25
Speaker 2
That really bothers me because we ascribe that that difference in luck and really it's unlock because it's a one in 10,000 shot that you're going to get in that crash. The odds are always in your favor that when you act reckless, you don't get in a crash. It's the rare it's the rare instance. But it's like rolling the dice over and over and over.

00:32:21:27 - 00:32:51:20
Speaker 2
And every day it comes up poorly for some people, and we label them as reckless. We find out the one or two things that, you know, you were going over the speed limit. You didn't do this. You didn't do that. When the reality is this, that happens millions and millions and millions of times every day by people who don't consider themselves reckless, You know, But that behavior happens over and over and over again because the system, in a sense, licenses, it forgives, it allows it to happen and says it's okay, except if you're the one lucky one that comes up.

00:32:51:20 - 00:32:53:03
Speaker 2
Snake eyes on the roll, the dice.

00:32:53:03 - 00:33:13:08
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And the one part of your comment and reply in that when you're talking about the these punitive damages and enforcement on that is we're not addressing the root cause. And so that's the whole point that we're we're talking about here is, is we have to go upstream and figure out, okay, well what's what's the scenario?

00:33:13:08 - 00:33:39:11
Speaker 1
What's the setting? Oh, yeah, dumb. It's it's you know, it's putting up a warning sign. Slow down on a road through, you know, your your, your grandmother's, you know, old neighborhood. It's like, yeah, no, that doesn't work. Now you were just in the UK. Okay. Was and, and we also had a little bit of a dustup, so to speak, in the UK that kind of came up.

00:33:39:13 - 00:34:00:03
Speaker 1
Yeah. In terms of the Prime Minister and some of the things that he had said and really kind of framing this as this war on motorists and you know, basically said, Hey, I'm going to roll back these slow street initiatives and roll back the bike lanes. This there's no more there's going to be no more of a war on cars.

00:34:00:06 - 00:34:28:18
Speaker 1
And so one of the things that that that I think is really important is understanding just how much this us versus them really harms our ability to stay focused on the root cause of changing our environment. Talk a little bit about this Twitter exchange that happened late, basically on the first day of of October.

00:34:28:20 - 00:35:02:24
Speaker 2
Yeah, Nicholas is amazing and that what I wrote there is a quote from his column which was spot on. It was really good. So the prime minister of of of the UK and of England and I'm going to get his name wrong Rishi I, I the economist every day and I'm, I'm pretty good on these things but I was struck by the names I'm a horrible with names John he as part of their they had their basically conservative week so we have our political conventions here every four years they had their equivalent of that.

00:35:02:26 - 00:35:31:26
Speaker 2
And in their conservative week, he came out with a whole series of proposals that basically embraced the idea that there's a war on cars and that he was on the opposite side of the people who want safer streets. And and let's use let's use his terminology. There's a war on cars. There's a war on modernity, on our culture, on who we are as people, on commuters, on suburbs.

00:35:32:03 - 00:36:20:12
Speaker 2
And I am on the side of those those two people. We should not be taking away their freedoms, their liberties. And I think if we don't if we don't step back and recognize that by placing safe streets and by placing really block level human prosperity, by by placing that in the context of a war on cars, a national campaign to, you know, attack motorists or automobiles, if that's the route we go, we should never be surprised when national political parties pick up the opposite approach, because especially in our American system, where everything is binary, right, there is a for and against.

00:36:20:12 - 00:36:42:22
Speaker 2
There is a conservative and a liberal. There is the yes and a no to everything. And the strategy of of political power is to get 50% plus one. What you do is you create coalitions around these big major issues. And if there's going to be a pro car party, there's going to be an anti car party. If there's going to be a pro bike lane party, there's going to be an anti bike lane party.

00:36:42:25 - 00:37:15:18
Speaker 2
The more we play that game, the more we allow our bottom up local block level, city level, neighborhood level conversations to be subsumed by these national political talking points. This kind of rhetoric, this kind of us versus them framing the more is going to empower the forces that are going to just reflects heavily oppose what you're doing. I always tell people the the guy who drives the Hummer on the edge of town is of no material interest.

00:37:15:18 - 00:37:38:00
Speaker 2
Like, the thing you should be doing is not to try to get him to get rid of his Hummer and ride up, bike and move to the middle of the city like that's not who cares? Like, just let him do that. What you want in that case is for that person to just completely ignore you and not want to fight you and not want to get in your way and not want to be.

00:37:38:03 - 00:38:15:13
Speaker 2
And what you want to do is get to work on fixing your block and your neighborhood and your city. And that person will either adapt to that or not. But what you don't want to do is you don't want to give that person a platform at their level to oppose what you're doing, because then you're just going to empower a whole bunch of reactionary, reflexive, non thoughtful forces and a lot of them which are manipulating in the process to, you know, like a lot of people who are anti bike lane at the federal level or anti safe streets at the federal level are not at their own community anti safe streets they are because it's

00:38:15:13 - 00:38:48:18
Speaker 2
like a winning political issue to be I'm I'm pro liberty and freedom in car I think that let me say this and I I know I'm going to I'm going to ask people listening to be a little bit generous with me because we work a lot as an organization about how we frame and these issues. A lot of advocacy from the political left side tends to default to large top down initiatives and projects and campaigns.

00:38:48:20 - 00:39:12:11
Speaker 2
And, you know, I'm not going to suggest that that is always wrong, but I am going to say that when it comes to safe streets, you are fighting a huge, huge machine using their language in their tactics. And I don't think we'll make that much progress doing it. Look at the biggest win of the last two decades, which I would say would be complete streets.

00:39:12:13 - 00:39:39:06
Speaker 2
And we are documented over and over and over again how the engineering professions and the design professions and basically, like automobile advocates, have co-opted complete streets to build some of the worst environments in the country. Complete streets, as it has come into effect is essentially we're going to build an auto dominated environment that will marginally accommodate people who are not in automobiles.

00:39:39:09 - 00:40:09:23
Speaker 2
And that's not a win in my framework, in my view. But it is a win in this top down system, right, because it marginally moves what is happening here, the energy around fixing streets and the places that are having the most momentum, the most result, the most I mean, we just interviewed someone yesterday, strong towns from Jersey City, New Jersey, and they're down to zero deaths in a city of almost 300,000.

00:40:09:26 - 00:40:34:00
Speaker 2
And they've done it almost exclude the through small bottom up block level action. And I think the shocking thing, the the amazing thing is that by spending small amounts of money doing block level stuff, they've actually built this massive culture around biking and walking. And their biggest struggle right now is they can't keep up with the demand to fix their local streets, Right?

00:40:34:02 - 00:41:16:03
Speaker 1
Yeah. Yeah. And I'm glad you brought that up as an example, because we do now have an actual in the US of a example in both Jersey City and also Hoboken. So two of, of cities that are making dramatic progress on Vision Zero, which again, for those not familiar with the term Vision Zero, it's a program, an initiative, a way of thinking that basically doesn't accept the, you know, the the carnage that we have out on our streets is something that we should accept, that we should be able to get to zero fatalities on our streets and roads as well as reducing or eliminating the number of serious injury injuries as well.

00:41:16:10 - 00:41:36:08
Speaker 1
And so that's that's something I'm going to shift gears just a little bit to give you a couple of things that hit my radar screen. But one is we're going to shift gears to talking about October being Pedestrian Safety Awareness Month, and we'll talk a little bit about some of that. But I do want to address some of the things that are popping up in the chat right now.

00:41:36:08 - 00:41:50:15
Speaker 1
One of them was was asking when Stephon was asking when when you're going to be able to make it to the Netherlands. Yeah, that's a good one. I want to know too, that I would love to have you happy that maybe we could I could take you on a tour of some of my favorite cities there.

00:41:50:17 - 00:42:15:02
Speaker 2
I would love that. I would love that. I'm I'm. I'm always humbled when I get invited places. I was invited to the UK and I was able to go for a conference, and then we set up a couple speaking engagements. And John, quite frankly, I didn't expect anybody to show up like what I would do. I have to say that anyone in in the UK and we packed, you know, we, we packed some places and they were engaged.

00:42:15:02 - 00:42:36:02
Speaker 2
They were interested. And I'm like, wow, I can't it seems so much better here. Like they're like the the worst the best parts of the US are like the worst parts of the UK. And but still there's a hunger for bottom up action. There's a hunger for people to do things to make places better. I've been to the Netherlands and I've been blown away.

00:42:36:04 - 00:42:55:06
Speaker 2
I really feel like I have little to teach people or to share with people there that would be beneficial to them. That being said, I would probably be shocked by some of the conversations and maybe I could. I would love it if no, if only for my own selfish enjoyment. I would love it. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe we need to make it happen.

00:42:55:06 - 00:43:21:02
Speaker 1
Yeah. There you go. So again, some the things that popped up here in in this month of pedestrian safety awareness. One of them was Pennsylvania dot had put out, you know, an entire scree of of pedestrian safety. And I noticed this morning that it has been removed. They actually did remove their post that they had put out there.

00:43:21:02 - 00:43:57:03
Speaker 1
And Beth Osborne, who you know quite well with transport, transportation for America, kind of laid into them a little bit and again, these awareness months are, as she says, they're useless and even harmful. And we need to take time. You know, it's time for action. And, you know, she's talking about time for action that we need to start addressing what you were just talking about, which is we need to, you know, stop focusing on the atomization of people, blaming individuals and trying to change individual behavior.

00:43:57:05 - 00:44:23:12
Speaker 1
We need to start addressing two things. I think from a strong towns perspective, a bottom up revolution perspective, it's like funding some of these little things. And then the second thing I would say, we need to address the root cause further up the chain, up the stream. That is these systems that are inherently built in subsidize that undermine anything that's happening locally.

00:44:23:14 - 00:44:38:28
Speaker 2
Yes, I, I feel like it's to understand that the people running these campaigns, because they're so tone deaf and they're so horrible, I mean, they're just they are so bad. Well, I.

00:44:38:28 - 00:44:42:12
Speaker 1
Mean, and not the people are bad. The people are actually the you.

00:44:42:12 - 00:44:43:12
Speaker 2
Know, the campaigns are.

00:44:43:12 - 00:44:52:27
Speaker 1
The big campaigns are horrible. The campaigns. But the people are actually thinking they're doing good things. They're coming from a good part in their heart. I just want to clarify that.

00:44:52:29 - 00:45:25:08
Speaker 2
Thank you. It is coming from a good part of the heart, and that's why I feel like we need to understand them, because what they have at their core is just a misunderstanding of what creates safety. Right? There is a belief and it's backed up by reports and official data and stats and all of this. There is a belief and it is a wrong, incorrect belief that driver that crashes and particularly fatalities are caused primarily by driver error or by pedestrian error or bicyclist error.

00:45:25:08 - 00:45:57:15
Speaker 2
There's someone makes a mistake in the system that let's let's let's put a pin in that and just say identify another branch of design of anything where we accept user mistake as like the problem, you know like a baby sleeping crib. You know, we got to my kids are now old but I remember we got a crib. It was all this like, oh, you know, this safety thing and that safety thing and, oh, you got to throw your crib out because it's more than two years old.

00:45:57:15 - 00:46:19:29
Speaker 2
And the safety things have been updated. If if if five infants die in year because, you know, the thing didn't click quite right, we never say like that's the mom's fault. We never say like, that's the dad's fault. Like, they didn't do that. We say we need to design a better crib so that humans who make mistakes don't make that mistake again.

00:46:20:06 - 00:46:52:02
Speaker 2
Right? Right. That's that's what we do. Only in street design do we say we need to, you know, screw this design. Like the design is what it is, is the people who have screwed up here and they're the ones to blame it. The analogy that I've started to use to explain this to people who are doing this kind of work is imagine that you were very concerned about public health and you recognize that we have an obesity problem in this country and we need to try to reduce that.

00:46:52:05 - 00:47:11:12
Speaker 2
We need to get people eating healthier. And so as part of an eating healthy campaign, let's say we just start around your office. What we do is we first go out and buy a bunch of donuts and cookies and salty snacks, and we fill the breakroom up with that stuff and we make it freely available to everybody so you can consume.

00:47:11:16 - 00:47:39:24
Speaker 2
It's all there. And then we go to the bathroom and on the back of the stall in the bathroom, we put a little sign that, you know, has an overweight person who is in some tragic situation and say, don't end up like this, avoid salty snacks. What are people going to do? And I think we can all see clearly, like in a you know, even if you have even if you read the back of the stall and you're like, yes, I'm committed to eating healthy.

00:47:39:29 - 00:48:13:29
Speaker 2
And then you go sit down in the breakroom in your stomach scrolling and you feel a little hungry and, oh, my gosh, that donut looks good. Everybody else is eating it. Pretty soon you're just a human response into the environment around you and you're consuming donuts and salty snacks regardless of what whatever PSA you got in the bathroom, these public information campaigns are dumb, ineffective, insulting, and they come from an incorrect understanding of what motivates humans to change their behavior.

00:48:14:02 - 00:48:35:20
Speaker 2
I think that's like the me like it. It comes from an incorrect understanding of what motivates a person to do something differently. And let me let me put a button on this by saying I think a lot of the people who had consumed the donuts in the salty snacks would in a different moment in their life, say, I'm going to avoid donuts and salty snacks.

00:48:35:24 - 00:48:56:06
Speaker 2
Right? But then they get into that environment and the rational side, the thoughtful side of their brain slips away. And the system one kind of, oh, that donut looks good. I can rationalize that. I'll work out tonight. I I'll go I'll eat less for dinner. You know, you start to, like, rationalize things in the moment because we are human.

00:48:56:09 - 00:49:05:12
Speaker 2
This is the same thing we do when we're driving and when we don't understand that we make all kinds of really dumb things like this. AD Right. It just doesn't.

00:49:05:14 - 00:49:08:21
Speaker 1
I'm going to play this. Yeah, I play it so literally.

00:49:08:21 - 00:49:10:06
Speaker 2
This this one is horrible.

00:49:10:06 - 00:50:22:18
Speaker 1
This one's really bad. And this one literally came out in the aftermath, you know, in the in the wake of the Pennsylvania D.O.T. version of it. This one came up from the Richmond RCMP. So so for folks who haven't seen this yet, hang on tight, because this is this is amazing. So in 41 seconds, the RCMP, the Richmond RCMP, managed to like, kick the hornet's nest of of folks, you know, say, yeah, WTF, what the heck are you doing?

00:50:22:20 - 00:50:26:24
Speaker 1
I'm in a play. Tom Flood's remix to this just to to.

00:50:26:27 - 00:50:28:04
Speaker 2
Oh, really? I haven't seen this.

00:50:28:04 - 00:50:59:14
Speaker 1
Oh yeah. So Tom actually did a remix to this and so this this is a good one to see.

00:50:59:16 - 00:51:10:27
Speaker 2
Yeah.

00:51:11:00 - 00:51:52:07
Speaker 1
And of course the the you know we choose not to to his point there and it's not it's, it's really we choose not to it's not like we need to be shifting that blame over to the driver because that's kind of what Richmond RCMP is doing anyways is is saying it's equal. We have equal responsibility. It's the fact that these are still atomization, these are still focusing on individual actions and not looking at the fact that we've designed a system that in the United States routinely kills, you know, 43,000 people year and causes, you know, a million plus serious debilitating injuries.

00:51:52:09 - 00:52:20:28
Speaker 1
And we still are, you know, at that higher level, you know, because so much of who we are as a society and our economy is built upon this, this thing that we keep this thing rolling. And it's and it's more than just cars and motability. I mean, this gets to the entire strong towns, you know, Ponzi scheme of, you know, the experiment, what is the suburban experiment?

00:52:20:28 - 00:52:38:04
Speaker 1
So it's all interrelated, inter interlaced and the policies, it's not just as simple as saying, okay, let's, let's pass a a speed limit of 20 is plenty in our city. It's so much deeper and so much more insidious in terms of the challenges ahead.

00:52:38:06 - 00:52:47:08
Speaker 2
Right. But why did the driver in that video feel like it was okay to look at their phone?

00:52:47:12 - 00:52:59:13
Speaker 1
Yeah. And when you say anyone, you mean okay, literally, you're saying stretching, you know, switching from that level, level one to level two or whatever that is. Yeah.

00:52:59:15 - 00:53:19:27
Speaker 2
System one system just as well. Why did they feel so let's assume that the driver is not a psychopath. Let's assume that the driver actually cares about their fellow human beings. Let's assume that the driver does not is not indifferent to whether they hit someone or something. And I feel like those are all safe assumptions for 99 plus percent of people.

00:53:19:29 - 00:53:46:19
Speaker 2
Why did a driver who's a normal human being feel like it was okay for them to look at their phone? And I think there's one answer that says, well, because they're they're they're reckless person. They don't care. They're they're not compassionate, they are selfish. They're and that that that leads you nowhere. That that set of insight leads you nowhere because we can tell people don't look at your phone.

00:53:46:19 - 00:54:17:06
Speaker 2
Don't look at your phone, don't look at your phone. And people still look at their phone. I wrote an article called Texting in Your Risk App to try to get at that. Why do people look at their phone? And the reason they look at their phone is because we have designed the environment to signal to drivers, We've got your back, we've got all this covered, we've given you wide lanes, we've given you wide recovery zones, we've given you clear areas, we've given you lots of margin for error.

00:54:17:08 - 00:54:45:13
Speaker 2
And so as a human, you're sitting in this very, very safe environment, this environment that feels deceptively safe. Right? It's not as safe as we make it feel to the driver. Right. This is the knife sticking out of the thing, Right? We have this illusion of safety that we have created. And because of that, the driver as a human feels comfortable doing other things with their brain, then focusing on driving.

00:54:45:16 - 00:54:53:16
Speaker 2
And if we don't recognize as that as a human reaction to our design, we're missing something very, very deep. Yeah.

00:54:53:19 - 00:55:23:28
Speaker 1
And Martin this morning posted this and saying no amount of pedestrian reflectors or awareness campaigns are going to help with this. This is safety hashtag safety Theater. It's and to his point, the the you know, the system has been designed and optimized for vehicle throughput. And this brings us back to, you know, the example in Massachusetts That was a running theme through your book, Confessions of the fact that that's what they were prioritizing.

00:55:23:28 - 00:55:50:25
Speaker 1
They were prioritizing, you know, throughput of motor vehicles over the lives of people outside of motor vehicles. But also not to forget, too, that a very high number of people of those 43,000 lives lost each year are in the vehicles, too. So there is that false sense of security that it's safe to be driving at these incredibly dangerous and fatal speeds.

00:55:50:28 - 00:56:18:05
Speaker 1
So, I mean, because the carnage that you see when you see two two vehicles traveling at, say, a modest speed of like, you know, the suspect speed, 30, 35 miles per hour, it is a head on collision. That's a collision to 70 miles per hour. I mean, it's it's the carnage is really, truly astounding. But anyways, I wanted to just kind of, you know, reemphasize this, but I also wanted to pull something out of this little quote that he had there, which was and this came up in the chat.

00:56:18:05 - 00:56:44:16
Speaker 1
Thank you very much, folks. I am keeping an eye on on your running dialog there. And the comments about oversize vehicles and the concern that we now have with the fact that we have SUV and pickup truck bloat. Now, you and I both grew up on ranches and farms. And so, you know, I had I had access to two or three pickup trucks the entire my entire childhood of where I grew up.

00:56:44:18 - 00:56:47:15
Speaker 1
But those were those were actual tools.

00:56:47:15 - 00:56:48:18
Speaker 2
Farm vehicles, riding.

00:56:48:18 - 00:57:12:25
Speaker 1
Vehicles. And this is actually what we are doing with them. Talk a little bit about this, that we have this rather interesting and challenging situation where you and I are talking about, hey, we need to build safe systems, we need to work on our design here. We need to change our built environment. But then at the same time, we've got like, you know, massive tanks rolling down our streets now.

00:57:12:28 - 00:57:36:28
Speaker 2
Yeah, there's a there's a cause effect here. And I feel like my hackles get up a little bit when people start focusing on the the vehicle bloat and again, try to tie it to like this is a disordered personality trait that is doing this. And trust me, I you know, my daughter is in high school, my youngest is still in high school.

00:57:37:04 - 00:58:04:20
Speaker 2
And we could go six blocks over that way to the high school and the high school just tore down a huge, beautiful historic building to expand their parking lot. And if we went to that parking lot, it would be full of big pickup trucks driven by students who don't work on farms and who don't haul things. And, you know, there's I do think that there is a cultural milieu that all this and that is in many ways kind of messed up.

00:58:04:23 - 00:58:31:26
Speaker 2
But I think there's a cause effect here, right? We have made it very easy. We've made our design standard, in a sense, the big Hummer, or quite frankly, we've made the design standard a huge semi-tractor trailer to be able to drive through every neighborhood in the city. You know, the one time that you have the U-Haul pull up and load and unload the house every you know, how many years.

00:58:31:28 - 00:58:52:09
Speaker 2
We want to make sure that that is easy and simple to do as opposed to like the one off weird thing where traffic would have to get out of the way and all that. And so we over engineer and over design all of our streets for this stuff. And then we're somehow shocked when people utilize all that capacity with this like status symbol of a large vehicle.

00:58:52:15 - 00:59:14:13
Speaker 2
I'm insensitive to the complaints of people who say when you narrow the street, it makes it harder for me to drive through. I mean, I'm insensitive to that because I think cities should largely be insensitive to that because quite frankly, if you're a suburban commuter, can't drive quickly through your neighborhood, who who gives a damn? Like, who cares?

00:59:14:13 - 00:59:35:21
Speaker 2
I look, I don't care. But for some reason, cities get really, really sensitive to that critique. I feel like if we were less sensitive to that critique, what you would find is that a lot of these trucks would just like become passé. Like, I can't drive this truck because I'm going into the city and I'm not going to be able to get around when this truck.

00:59:35:21 - 00:59:43:16
Speaker 2
So we're going to have to take the car or we're going to have to take some other vehicle because like, I can't drive this big ass pickup truck through here, you know?

00:59:43:22 - 01:00:27:20
Speaker 1
Well, if I can if I can jump into a truck to to say something, is that part of of what makes the those bigger vehicles more attractive is the fact that we have so subsidized making it possible and and financially viable for that to happen. I mean, we have never paid the full price of our, you know, car brained lifestyle or motor normativity to use Ian Walker's, you know, actual term and so yeah, it's it's not like, you know, you're talking about, you know, the pain, the friction of being able to maneuver, maneuvered through a redesigned space.

01:00:27:22 - 01:00:41:11
Speaker 1
But we've also had a situation where we've been, you know, artificially depressing, you know, the price, the cost of being able to drive around, you know, Abrams tanks in our neighborhoods.

01:00:41:13 - 01:01:03:02
Speaker 2
Yes. This is so there's a whole group of people who I've worked on the other subsidies that like if you design your big pick up this way, it falls under this category and then you get like low lower taxes. And if you I don't understand all that and I don't get into it and quite frankly, I don't care because it's, again, top down stuff.

01:01:03:04 - 01:01:25:01
Speaker 2
But from a bottom up standpoint, I you know, I walk around and I just look at these environments that are designed. John, I was in the Army and in the Army, I was a truck driver. I drove a deuce and a half. I drove a I drove a five ton. I drove big, huge trucks right in my city.

01:01:25:01 - 01:01:45:05
Speaker 2
Someone has and I don't even know how this occurs, but someone owns a deuce and a half, a two and a half ton big army cargo truck, the kind that you would have troops in the back and all that. Yeah. And drives it around my neighborhood. I, I look at this and we all laugh like it's funny, like, ha ha.

01:01:45:05 - 01:02:08:17
Speaker 2
But he's driving like the truck I drove in the army. It's not designed for city streets, but it works. There's no friction. It's funny. Not funny. He can drive it everywhere in my community with no friction because the streets are all designed to accommodate that truck. Yeah, and not just accommodate it. Like I can fit through, but accommodate it at speed.

01:02:08:20 - 01:02:46:27
Speaker 2
Right. Like and that. I think if we recognized let me let me very strong towns this if we recognized how much we in my neighborhood are spending on wider streets to accommodate that versus how much we would how much less we would spend if we had streets that were sized not for the through traffic of commuters and other people, but just sized for people walking, people biking and nice neighborhood speeds of travel, we would save dramatically on our cost and we'd have much better neighborhoods.

01:02:46:27 - 01:03:11:06
Speaker 1
Yeah, you know, how do we pivot from this us versus them narrative that is so pervasive to all of these discussions, whether it's specific to what we were talking about today in terms of road safety or whether it's even more broadly the urbanism challenge that we have and the strong towns challenge that we have, how how do we get past this, you know, us versus them narrative?

01:03:11:08 - 01:03:40:27
Speaker 2
Oh, I think we we have to work at the neighborhoods level. I mean, the bulk of our energies need to be spent in a bottom up way. I always tell people like, it's fine to be invested in politics and it's fine to care who the president is, and it's fine to care what is passing Congress. But if that's taking up like more than a fraction of your time and you're spending like many multiples of that of what you're spending on your city and your neighborhood and your place, I think you're going to find your life wasted in many ways.

01:03:40:27 - 01:04:04:07
Speaker 2
You know, you're going to find yourself looking back at your life going, well, I, I spent all this energy and I really affected nothing. When we work at the block level, a lot of these things melt away. And I think we start to see the nuances of people. We start to see that, you know, people of conservative mind are really valuable and people of progressive mind are really valuable.

01:04:04:07 - 01:04:27:11
Speaker 2
And in working together, they actually accomplish a lot of stuff and not in a bipartisan way, not in a way where they have to sacrifice it for each other, but in a way where it's like we need cities that have a certain amount of order and a certain amount of predictability and a certain amount of of continuity. And we also need cities where people care passionately about those left behind and people care passionately about each other.

01:04:27:11 - 01:05:12:10
Speaker 2
And we're very sensitive to the harms that are being done. And it's the merging of those things that actually make a beautiful place. So I think we pivot and we get past it when we stop allowing ourselves. I mean, I use a very strong word, but when we stop allowing ourselves to be pawns and hostages of the national talking points in the national dialog, the national political parties have become really, really, really good at motivating people to get out to vote by keeping them in a state of frenzy, by keeping them in a state of anger and hatred at the other, by tapping into that part of our brain stem that is almost fight or

01:05:12:10 - 01:05:36:10
Speaker 2
flight. You know, like that. That's not my group. That's the other group. Therefore, I'm going to fight them. And I think when we recognize that, you know, the same that are used to sell us cars and prescription drugs and, you know, whatever other product you want on TV are the same techniques that are used to sell us a political ideology.

01:05:36:12 - 01:06:06:19
Speaker 2
We may like that car, We may value that prescription drug. We may identify with that political ideology. But that doesn't mean that we're beyond being kind of suckered and motivated and, you know, having our soul kind of shifted by it. I think when we recognize that we can dial that part of us down and dial up the part of us that really cares about our neighbor, cares about our block, cares about our place, and finds more productive things to do locally.

01:06:06:21 - 01:06:10:19
Speaker 2
Yeah. And when we do that, we make great progress, right? Yeah.

01:06:10:21 - 01:06:35:10
Speaker 1
And I pulled the on your website here, the community movement page, local coverage. Yeah, local conversations. And that's exactly what you're saying here is we need to start having these local conversations. And so talk a little bit about this particular initiative and how you are sort of formalizing and helping people along this way. The question here is, are you ready to lead?

01:06:35:10 - 01:06:46:08
Speaker 1
That might be intimidating to some people. Maybe they're not ready to lead, but they would be definitely ready to participate. Kate, talk a little bit about this, the local conversations.

01:06:46:10 - 01:07:14:14
Speaker 2
So what I just said, I think to some people will sound very naive. Chuck Oh, you know, you've got a a naive view of humanity that we should work bottom up. That's not how the systems work, that's how things get done. I, I think the opposite. I think that I've been too naive in the other direction When, when this program was started, what we what we noticed was that there were people around the country meeting in our name.

01:07:14:16 - 01:07:39:24
Speaker 2
They were calling themselves Strong towns, you know, Sioux Falls, strong towns, Tulsa, strong towns, Dallas and we didn't know who these groups were. And so we started to study them and we recognized that the best ones, the ones that were the most effective, had a few things in common. They they had more than one leader. They were meeting regularly and they were talking about strong town stuff and then going out and taking action.

01:07:39:24 - 01:08:05:23
Speaker 2
They were they were influencing the local conversation in their community. And so we we formalized this program and we kicked it off. And the idea was that we would try to get 25 of these by the end of the year. There's 186 of them. I think at last count we have over 900 requests to start New ones. The ones that are in place are not have two people or five people.

01:08:05:25 - 01:08:26:21
Speaker 2
There's ones with like dozens and dozens of people that are meeting regularly, talking about strong towns ideas. And then I think even more importantly, talking about how they take the insights and the shared values and the shared things are trying to accomplish and go do the next smallest thing, like how do we get some momentum around this? What is the next smallest thing?

01:08:26:23 - 01:08:57:09
Speaker 2
How do we do that? I've been blown away and I think my naivete was that I thought this would be a process where we would have to convince people that this was a thing that they should do. And the reality is, is that there's so much hunger for meaningful things. That's how I'm going to describe it, a meaningful way to exercise your passion for society, your passion for civics and life in your community and your place.

01:08:57:11 - 01:09:24:20
Speaker 2
It's one thing to go on Twitter and bitch. It's another thing to, you know, go vote once every other year, every four years and get riled up. It's one thing to, you know, watch a cable news network, your choice and foam at the mouth. It's quite another thing to meet with people in your place and then go out and do something strategic to create a bottom up revolution that's going to change your community.

01:09:24:20 - 01:09:36:27
Speaker 2
It's really empowering for people in a way that is obvious when. I say it, but but I think I was underselling it even in my mind how much passion there was for this. Yeah, Yeah.

01:09:36:29 - 01:10:01:17
Speaker 1
So Josh actually has a question for us and that is what books should he be reading currently? I asked him if he had already read your two books. I haven't had an answer back yet, so maybe I'm assuming that he has read both of your books. Josh If you haven't, that's my cue to endorse both books. The Strong Towns bottom up, Revolution, and also Confessions of a Recovering Engineer.

01:10:01:19 - 01:10:13:24
Speaker 1
Other than those two books, what what books or, you know, should Josh and anybody else in the audience be considering right now, given the state of what our challenges are in front of us?

01:10:13:26 - 01:10:14:18
Speaker 2
Yeah.

01:10:14:21 - 01:10:17:21
Speaker 1
If Josh just popped in and said, yes, he sure did read, but read them both.

01:10:17:21 - 01:10:31:24
Speaker 2
Oh, well, thank you. It's a it's a really good question. I may be the wrong person to ask because I'm an obsessive reader. Ah, so I do, I do. 50, 60. I only like a book a week. Yeah. So I do like 50, 60 books a year and I can't get enough.

01:10:31:24 - 01:10:36:19
Speaker 1
And can I jump in and say that usually each year you have like an entire list of books?

01:10:36:19 - 01:10:57:24
Speaker 2
Well, that's what I was going to say. I am. Yeah, I do about half an audio book and half, you know, reading every year I publish a list. If you just go best books of the year strong towns on Google, you will get all my list going back to, I think 2013 or 2014. And then it always links to Pinterest where I post every book that I read for the year.

01:10:57:24 - 01:11:21:22
Speaker 2
I do like a top five, so I also have to say I don't read as a general rule and this frustrates a lot of my friends and colleagues who do do this kind of stuff. But I, I don't read books about planning to read books about, transportation. I don't read books. Like, I'm just not I don't I'm always like looking for like the best book I read this year.

01:11:21:22 - 01:11:43:21
Speaker 2
I was thinking, because I've got I'm going to start writing my my end of the year piece was a book about physics, and I don't know, I, I kind of feel like all of this stuff is human based and system based and kind of the broader palette of understanding you can have, the better off you're going to be.

01:11:43:24 - 01:12:09:24
Speaker 2
So let me let me answer it this way. I feel like if I had to give you like three, let's say three critical books, anything by Nassim Taleb, but I would focus on The Black Swan or Antifragile as being these are not easy reads he's he's an editor badly he refuses to have one you know he you will read a little bit and then take a long walk but these are these are really, really, really insightful books.

01:12:09:27 - 01:12:28:28
Speaker 2
Daniel Kahneman Thinking fast and slow, I can summarize it for you in a tweet. You are a slightly evolved chimpanzee. That's the tweet. But the reality is, is that when you go through that book at the beginning, you will believe you are a thoughtful rational person and at the end of it you will recognize you're a slightly evolved chimpanzee and so is everybody else.

01:12:28:28 - 01:12:51:20
Speaker 2
And we need to think about humans differently. And then I would say the original green, which is funny because it's such a niche book, we are sending that out to all of our friends as strong towns. We have a group of donors, highly committed people that we have a book club with, and we send them two books a year and the one way we're sending them now is the original green.

01:12:51:22 - 01:13:08:04
Speaker 2
It's by Steve Rosen. It's never been on a bestseller list. It's never sold thousands of copies. But if you want to get like really practical insights on how to build places, this is a genius set of insights. It's a genius book. I love it and adore it.

01:13:08:07 - 01:13:09:08
Speaker 1
Yeah, and.

01:13:09:11 - 01:13:10:02
Speaker 2
I love and adore.

01:13:10:07 - 01:13:36:29
Speaker 1
You brought you love and adore Steve, and so do I. So I had a tweet from him queued up and ready to go, and and so I just had to put this out there because I was slipping from my strong towns. National gathering mug here. Oh, beautiful. Thank you And thank you very much for to the organization for sending that my way I was able had the honor of serving on a panel there integrating integrate into Steve's point.

01:13:37:01 - 01:14:09:25
Speaker 1
We had that opportunity for both of us or for both organizations to co-locate during this year's Congress for the New Urbanism and the Strong Towns National Gathering took place. And I want to echo what Steve says here is, that I was just so encouraged to see the new fresh energy and the young, vibrant, as you know of. There I sat around a table of I want to say they were all in their twenties and yeah, they were just so stoked to be there to be engaging in all these discussions.

01:14:09:28 - 01:14:28:13
Speaker 1
My panel that I was in was standing room only. We were talking about social media and content creation and I was just blown away by the energy. Talk a little bit about that experience from your perspective. You and I didn't even get a chance to talk too much because you had a family obligation you had to get to.

01:14:28:13 - 01:14:30:23
Speaker 1
You couldn't even attend the Congress.

01:14:30:26 - 01:14:49:29
Speaker 2
No, I my daughter, my oldest, graduated from high school. And so I did the I did that and then like flew out at some ungodly hour in the morning to. Get home for that, John. That was it was beautiful. And I really was blown away. I, I have the good fortune to be able to travel around and speak to people a lot.

01:14:49:29 - 01:15:11:24
Speaker 2
I spent a lot of time on the road. I get to meet a lot of people and I've watched the enthusiasm of this movement grow and grow and grow from very, very modest roots. You know, back in the 2009, 2010 range to this insane thing now where we can just put out a flag and hundreds of people show up.

01:15:11:26 - 01:15:35:14
Speaker 2
The young people, I don't think strong Towns is a young movement. I think that it is a kind of multi age movement. We certainly had a lot of people of different ages, but when you look at an organization like CNN, you or you go to EPA or you go to any of the kind of like established planning, city design and city building things, they tend to be old, right?

01:15:35:14 - 01:16:00:06
Speaker 2
They tend to be white guys who older, who are doing professional things within silos and hierarchies with rules and standards, and they debate those things. The thing that I've always taken energy from, from our movement, and it was a little overwhelming for me in in Charlotte when we got together was just how young and how enthusiastic the Strong Hands movement is.

01:16:00:09 - 01:16:32:13
Speaker 2
And that energy, I'm I'm I'm more and more convinced every day that the people in society that our current system blocks and we see this manifest in macro politics in, you know, a far right and a far left and a really destructive conversation. I step back and I look and I see a lot of I mean, Donald Trump and Joe Biden are both like, what, 80 year old people whose time in leadership has come and gone?

01:16:32:13 - 01:16:57:25
Speaker 2
I mean, I don't want to polarize people, but like it, it really is the time, a new generation of leadership. And that's not to disrespect the boomers and people that age group. But there's a what what has happened in our is that we've created a lot of things that serve this very large demographic of baby boomers that have been at the forefront of change now for decades.

01:16:57:28 - 01:17:21:24
Speaker 2
My generation, Gen X is kind of this modest, like we got to figure out how to make our way through life, but this next generation of millennials is really been shut out in large way of decision making, of power, of being able to buy a home or being able to, you know, do a lot of things. And I think that that the next generation coming behind it is just like building up water behind this dam.

01:17:21:27 - 01:17:43:13
Speaker 2
And any time you give an outlet for that creativity, that energy, that passion that I'm going to use the word love to to manifest, they show up in huge numbers and they're very passionate and they make a huge difference. I take a lot of energy from it and a lot of humility from it, too, because these are people who have a lot to give.

01:17:43:16 - 01:17:57:13
Speaker 2
And I'm just I'm very I'm very grateful that we can help we can help put that to work for them in their place. Yeah. So, yeah, we're going to do it again this year. We're going to be in Cincy. Okay.

01:17:57:15 - 01:17:57:29
Speaker 1
Do it again.

01:17:57:29 - 01:18:09:00
Speaker 2
Okay. We haven't done like a formal announcement yet, but I'll announce it on. I think the last time I came on your deal, I made a formal announcement early, too, but, yeah, we're going to be moving here.

01:18:09:01 - 01:18:11:25
Speaker 1
You get in trouble whenever you're here with me. For sure.

01:18:11:27 - 01:18:33:08
Speaker 2
I do. So we'll be in Cincinnati and we'll be getting the band back together. The thing that I'm most nervous about this time around is that, you know, last time we had a size limit and we came close to that but didn't go over it. And I'm a little bit concerned this time because our our membership grows and grows and grows.

01:18:33:08 - 01:18:49:15
Speaker 2
I mean, we have a lot of we're going to cross 5000 in the next member drive, which is I'm, I'm nervous that, you know, we can only fit 800 or so people in a in a, in a thing like this that we're going to have more demand than that. That's my biggest fear right now. Yeah.

01:18:49:17 - 01:19:21:28
Speaker 1
All right. I want to get to this up here. Yes. In you got those titles, correct? Yeah. Black Swan, Antifragile Thinking Fast and Slow, The Original Green by Steven Mason. I would also throw into that mix the same book that I recommended to you. Dark PR from a grant in as he has been on the podcast. That's really for not really the community level, although he does talk about at the end of the book, he talks about community organizing and doing the same thing that you talk about is getting out, getting together with your neighbors and talking about that.

01:19:22:05 - 01:19:46:10
Speaker 1
But mostly that book is talking about the higher level stuff and the systems that are in place that are kind of stacked against us because of the the way that organizations and even governments, even professions like the engineering profession, have a vested interest in keeping the status quo going. So I would definitely recommend that book to.

01:19:46:12 - 01:19:56:03
Speaker 2
You know, we're all conservative resistant to change when we get into when it comes to how we get into places of power. I mean, it's it's is very true. Yeah.

01:19:56:05 - 01:20:07:23
Speaker 1
Chuck, before we wrap up here, because I know you need to you have a hard stop here. Any final comments that you would like to make that we didn't have the opportunity to chat about yet.

01:20:07:25 - 01:20:45:00
Speaker 2
I it it's, it's interesting because you and I have known each other for so long and I'm I've always felt very grateful for your project and what you've been doing. I feel like there is so many ties to what we're doing and this idea that an active life, an active lifestyle is not a niche thing or something that only people in spandex do or a recreational thing, but it's actually like a it is is the normal human existence.

01:20:45:00 - 01:20:45:12
Speaker 1
Yeah.

01:20:45:14 - 01:21:10:29
Speaker 2
I think it's something that is so underappreciated. I hear there's a there's a local group here that's trying to do active living. They're sponsored by the hospital and they're out doing stuff and they tend to wind up with two things. Either one, they're going to do big project somewhere that I think hardly moves the needle. Or two, they're out doing like, you know, get out and get moving campaigns.

01:21:11:02 - 01:21:35:01
Speaker 2
And I'm like, let's let's have walking lunch. Like, let's like there's so many like that. There's so many opportunities to live the kind of life that you talk about. And it's so core to what it means to actually live in a strong town and live prosperous, live in a strong town. So I'm I'm just grateful for you. I'm grateful for what you do.

01:21:35:04 - 01:21:57:19
Speaker 2
And I tune in and I, I feel like I still continue to learn things from you and be challenged. You. And I have to say, and this is not in a put anything on you in a guilt way, but when I have a day or two where I eat poorly and don't get any exercise or when I'm like, I'm not going to walk to work today, I'm going to drive, then I'm like, Oh, John would be disappointed in me.

01:21:57:19 - 01:22:13:14
Speaker 2
I'm going to get out. I'm going to I'm going to do this. You always need a buddy when you're pushing yourself, right? And you're my you're my sometimes virtual buddy. I know you don't hold me accountable, but I hold myself accountable to you sometimes in ways that you're not even aware of.

01:22:13:14 - 01:22:44:07
Speaker 1
John Well, I appreciate you saying that. And I also appreciate when I hear back from the audience and the community that we have built here at the Active Towns Channel. When I hear from you that some of these positive stories that I try to share from around the globe, you know, you gain some inspiration from that. And, you know, I'll never forget several years ago when Michelle or for, you know, you know, you know, reached out to me and said, hey, you really inspired me to start walking more in our neighborhood with our kids.

01:22:44:10 - 01:23:05:01
Speaker 1
And of course, now, you know, Michelle and Edward both work for strong towns and is part of the family. But yeah, that's that's part of what I do. I've been passionate about doing this for the past 33 years. And and I just I really cherish our friendship. And this ability to, you know, keep strong towns and active towns close together.

01:23:05:01 - 01:23:09:19
Speaker 1
As we talked about in our last live stream. You can't have one without the other.

01:23:09:21 - 01:23:28:28
Speaker 2
I agree. Agreed with you. You came to my city and you biked it and you said to me, Chuck, this is a very bikeable city. And I remember at the time I was really frustrated because I wasn't living in town yet. I was living way up in my my, my last mile was in the city and everything else was horrible.

01:23:29:00 - 01:23:39:19
Speaker 2
And I moved to town and I bike a lot and I'm like, John is totally right. And I didn't see it until I was here. And looking at it through your eyes, there's a very bikeable.

01:23:39:19 - 01:23:44:20
Speaker 1
City, and now you walk to work and you move around. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

01:23:44:20 - 01:23:52:00
Speaker 2
No, I see my car will sit and not be used when I'm when I'm home, I drive to the airport and back. That's pretty much it.

01:23:52:03 - 01:24:10:18
Speaker 1
That's right. Well, we need to bring this to a close. Hey, thank you all so very much for. For tuning in. And I really cherish the conversation that has been streaming in. Chuck, you'll have to go back and look at some of the comments that are in there. It's very entertaining and fantastic. And Chuck, thank you so much for all that you do with strong towns.

01:24:10:18 - 01:24:13:03
Speaker 1
I really appreciate you coming on again.

01:24:13:06 - 01:24:17:20
Speaker 2
Thank you. Thank you. And likewise. I'm I'm glad we're good friends.

01:24:17:22 - 01:24:38:13
Speaker 1
Fantastic day. And folks, please, if you have enjoyed this, please remember to hit that like button. And if you haven't done so already, please be sure to subscribe to the channel. Just click on the subscription button below, ring that notifications bell so that you get notified when we've got new content. And until next time this John signing off by wishing you much activity, health and happiness cheers.

01:24:38:15 - 01:24:59:18
Speaker 1
Yeah cheers And again sending a huge thank you to all my active town's 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 town store, every little bit adds up and it's much appreciated. Thank you all so much.