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

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:24:06
David Prytherch
In our roadway hierarchies, we continue to maintain. They're not always narrower, but they're typically lower speed and lower volume. And and people cherish living on a low speed, low volume street. And and so I think that even though that that model of street was forced kind of downward in the hierarchy to the, to the margins, that impulse is still really strong.

00:00:24:06 - 00:00:52:26
David Prytherch
And this is one I think is really interesting, what some of the transportation planners, like, I talked to Jason Patent, who works for Odot in Oakland, who was really kind of, instrumental in their slow streets. Is that, there is a kind of a what he calls like a NIMBYism, which is like, I think it's right to not want fast vehicular traffic in your backyard, like it's of course, you know, the local streets are front yard, know your front yard and your local, you know, the streets that we live on.

00:00:52:26 - 00:00:56:11
David Prytherch
We many of us would like them to not be thoroughfares.

00:00:56:13 - 00:01:19:26
John Simmerman
Hey everyone, welcome to the Active Towns Channel. My name is John Simmerman and that is Professor David Prytherch from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and author of the new book, Reclaiming the Road Mobility Justice Beyond Complete Streets. We're going to dive into this episode in just a moment. But I did want to say, if you're enjoying this content here on the Active Towns Channel, please consider supporting my efforts by becoming an Active Towns Ambassador.

00:01:19:26 - 00:01:37:23
John Simmerman
Super easy to do. Just click on the join button right here in YouTube down below, or navigate over to Active towns.org. Click on the support tab at the top of the page, and there's several different options. Okay, let's get right to it with David.

00:01:37:25 - 00:01:41:29
John Simmerman
David Prytherch, thank you so much for joining me on the Active Towns podcast.

00:01:42:01 - 00:01:45:27
David Prytherch
It's such a pleasure to be here. Thank you for your really great work, John.

00:01:46:00 - 00:01:51:09
John Simmerman
David, I love giving my guests just an opportunity to introduce themselves. So who the heck is David?

00:01:51:12 - 00:02:14:13
David Prytherch
Okay. Well, so David Prather, I'm. I'm a professor of geography by profession, but I am a geographer, kind of, by, temperament in nature. I'm a person who's always been fascinated with why places are the way they are. And I discovered geography in college. It's kind of my passion to understand places. And, and also then with geography, to think critically about places and why they are the way they are.

00:02:14:13 - 00:02:40:04
David Prytherch
And if they could be better. A particular theme for me is transportation. I've always been a person who prefers to walk or bike or use transit anywhere. I've been really fortunate to, to to not have to commute by car to a job, probably since I was 21. But I guess as a geographer, if you spend any time as a pedestrian or cyclist on the American street, you start to wonder why things aren't better out there for us.

00:02:40:06 - 00:03:04:07
David Prytherch
And so as a planner, I teach planning at Miami University. I'm a city counselor. I'm, a long standing member of our planning commission who's trying to make my community more walkable and bikeable place. But I'm also a scholar who's tried to understand these things from a scholarly point of view. So we can talk more about my my deep dive rabbit holes into the worlds of traffic engineering and and topics like, mobility, justice.

00:03:04:07 - 00:03:11:22
David Prytherch
So. So, yeah, I'm a person who by walked here I will walk home and I'll be thinking about streets the whole way. Yeah.

00:03:11:24 - 00:03:26:29
John Simmerman
That's fantastic. And yeah, let's pull up your, your page here at Miami University. There in Oxford, Ohio. How how large is the city of Oxford, Ohio? What's the population?

00:03:27:01 - 00:03:53:27
David Prytherch
Well, it's a really hard question to answer. College towns are notoriously difficult. We estimate maybe 25,000 people, but nearly 20,000 of them are. Our students are undergraduate and graduate students. So we are a small Midwestern college town, prototypical beautiful college town, very walkable college town. What's fun about a small town is you can you can almost think, you can comprehend the whole thing and how it works, which I kind of like.

00:03:53:27 - 00:03:57:19
David Prytherch
And and you might be able to shape it if you work hard at it.

00:03:57:22 - 00:04:22:08
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I see that you did your undergraduate there at Penn State and then, your, your, your masters and your PhD there in Tucson. And so you definitely have a, you know, you've got that Midwest sort of appreciation. You've got the, the desert, the Sonoran Desert appreciation. You also spent some time in Spain in Valencia.

00:04:22:10 - 00:04:52:21
John Simmerman
And so you're coming at this from an interesting perspective. You mentioned before we hit the record button that you spent a year in Tucson car free. And I think that really kind of changes one's appreciation for their geography. And the environment is when you are getting around, by means other than an automobile, when we are, you know, immersed in a culture and a setting that is all about the automobile.

00:04:52:24 - 00:05:10:01
David Prytherch
Well, I have to tell you, just kind of my personal story, which is I grew up in eastern Pennsylvania and what a beautiful place, a new Hope, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, exurban probably is what we would call it. And, in which you really can't get anywhere without an automobile. I did, you know, is the time when there wasn't so much traffic then I could walk.

00:05:10:01 - 00:05:34:19
David Prytherch
And a bicycle was my first mode of experiencing the freedom of just exploring. But pretty soon, you know, like many American young people, I got my driver's license at 16 because it was the ticket to freedom. I would also say, however, that what it was almost immediately when I look back on it, I had to start working at 15 to earn the money to pay for the car insurance, to have the freedom.

00:05:34:21 - 00:05:55:23
David Prytherch
And lo and behold, what did I deal with most of my Friday and Saturday nights? I spent them working to pay off the car, and and so, but but but like most Americans, you couldn't imagine there was anything different. How were you possibly going to get around and and even in college, I don't think it dawned on me that one could live car free until I moved to Pittsburgh.

00:05:55:26 - 00:06:14:03
David Prytherch
And I quickly after college, I moved to Pittsburgh, and I quickly felt my car was becoming more of a liability than an asset. You know, I was worried about it being broken into. I couldn't afford the car insurance and the maintenance. And so I gave it up and and then I started relying on, public transit in, in Pittsburgh.

00:06:14:03 - 00:06:34:18
David Prytherch
Pittsburgh is a wonderful, walkable city, incredible urban fabric. Great public transit. I gave up my bike there because it's pretty hilly and they didn't have a lot of bike infrastructure, but I just walked everywhere. And yeah, man, it changes your perspective on the world where you come to rely on one thing versus another thing, and I think it was fine until Pittsburgh.

00:06:34:18 - 00:07:01:00
David Prytherch
But then we continued to try to live that Pittsburgh way when we moved to Tucson. And if you've ever been to Tucson, it's, you know, it's it's one of our Sunbelt cities are just about as auto dependent as it gets, built for the automobile from the get go. And so it was really, really hard. But it those experiences kind of sharpened your, I was saying before we got on mic that I had a bad case of pedestrian rage in Tucson.

00:07:01:00 - 00:07:19:05
David Prytherch
I just like it. It's just the system is just. It didn't make sense to me, and it made me angry. And ultimately, like. And then when we got a car, people were like, you gotta have a car, you gotta have a car. And we did. All of a sudden, I, I dislike Tucson last because I was part of the problem and everything flowed so smoothly for me.

00:07:19:08 - 00:07:25:10
David Prytherch
But God forbid you try to walk to the movies in Tucson. Yeah. It's time.

00:07:25:12 - 00:07:52:27
John Simmerman
Well, and what's interesting, and we mentioned this before we hit the record button. I was just in Tucson, earlier this summer as part of my, my summer of Amtrak explorations around North America. So. And, yeah, it's it's what prompted me to do this was the fact that last year I was able to get around Europe for 60 days, via Brompton bicycle and, and train.

00:07:53:00 - 00:08:21:22
John Simmerman
And it's such a great combination of that train and bicycle combination where you can, you know, you can really open a lot of things up when you have an environment that is truly safe and inviting to, to ride a bike, when you, you know, you get off the train and you'll be at a new destination, you just take off and you go, and so, yeah, Tucson was the first test trip for this summer, of of traveling around.

00:08:21:29 - 00:08:50:20
John Simmerman
And I was really impressed with the amount of bike infrastructure that the city has been, committed to, to building out. I've been following the story of Tucson since 2017. So pretty much predates your time there by quite a bit. But at the same time, the bike is especially now with electric assist, both of those cities that you have experience with in Pittsburgh and also Tucson.

00:08:50:22 - 00:09:12:27
John Simmerman
I really considered that a little bit of electric assist to be magical for the heat and magical for the hills. I would imagine it would have been, you know, a delight to have that as an option. You know, rather than just being pedestrian, you know, oriented in Pittsburgh or Tucson because your range just increases ninefold.

00:09:13:00 - 00:09:35:19
David Prytherch
Now it's really true. And and, you know, we arrived in Pittsburgh as pedestrians and became very, very frustrated, but we became, cyclists and and it was a wonderful city. Even in the late 90s, they had bicycle boulevards, which I think really put them at the very cutting edge of of that incredible network of trails. And I'm a road rider, so you could ride up to Mount Lemmon and stuff.

00:09:35:24 - 00:10:02:28
David Prytherch
Yeah. No, I think that, the, the e-bike thing is a really interesting one. I mean, that's a whole conversation that some of us, if you're a purist, is on a bicycle. If it's. But I think when you when you compare it to an automobile, you start to see that how many people it opens up the freedom and, and and I honestly think if cars are like you want to run with the big dogs, you need to be able to keep pace with them, at least in an urban framework.

00:10:02:28 - 00:10:18:11
David Prytherch
And so having a little bit of speed. Yeah. No. Tucson. I would love to get back to Tucson. And I want to hear more about your journey, because I think living to try to live car free. Yeah. In Europe, I think you can I've, I've lived, gone for six months in Europe without driving a car and you barely back.

00:10:18:13 - 00:10:52:17
David Prytherch
I, the United States, the friction of distance a little bit different. And I think so many people go to Europe and they wonder. I mean, it's so seamless. You almost don't even notice how good the infrastructure is. And, and we tend to fly home and maybe we wonder whether things are possible. But yeah, I become increasingly trying to import those lessons, which for me, in the most recent book, kind of not only just bicycle infrastructure, which even Europe is still trying to figure out how to, to do.

00:10:52:19 - 00:11:12:17
David Prytherch
But the Plaza is a really interesting, wonderful thing that we experience in Europe. And then we come home and we we have trouble, imagine like, oh, that's a European thing. But I think many of those places in, in Europe were parking lots not very long ago, you know. So they've been wrestling with how to tame the automobile. And they are just a bit further ahead of us.

00:11:12:19 - 00:11:13:22
David Prytherch
But yeah.

00:11:13:24 - 00:11:35:21
John Simmerman
I like to say that we're we're about 50 years behind, many of these places because they, they sort of had it a little bit of their epiphany with the falling out of the love affair with the automobile back in the 70s, and at least from the context of of the Netherlands. Anyways, that's when a lot of the strife sort of started coming up and bubbling up.

00:11:35:23 - 00:11:58:23
John Simmerman
I want to go back to, Oxford just for a little second, because I was like, realizing I don't even know where Oxford is. And so there you go. I wanted to to figure this out, and so. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, you are a hop, skip and a jump away from, from, Cincinnati and very close to the state line, with Indiana.

00:11:58:25 - 00:12:23:00
John Simmerman
Whereas, you know, I just skirted past the Amtrak line up on the, the lakefront line or whatever they call that. So I just went through Cleveland on my way over to to Chicago, as I was making my way to, to, to, Denver. So not too, too long ago, just earlier, in the month, in in June, I was doing that.

00:12:23:02 - 00:13:00:29
John Simmerman
So. Yeah, you're pretty far south in the state of Ohio. Not as far as, is as Cincinnati. But, that's that's very interesting. So college town, a bit of that feel of being really, really close to Indianapolis. If you were to, to describe Oxford and as a city council member as well, and a member of the the planning Commission there, how would you describe it from the standpoint of, you know, from an urbanism perspective and from a mobility perspective?

00:13:01:01 - 00:13:03:22
John Simmerman
How would you describe, Oxford right now?

00:13:03:24 - 00:13:29:17
David Prytherch
Well, I, you know, I think it's it's that one adjective that means so many things, which is it's really a walkable community. And that was one of those things, a small town is, is, my wife is from a small town. She probably wouldn't have loved to move back to. I came from a small town. We had been living in fairly large cities, but after Tucson, it was a small town that felt urban in the best ways.

00:13:29:19 - 00:13:54:05
David Prytherch
It's walkable, mixed use, great pedestrian infrastructure. We have an, a public park in the heart of our town that functions like a plaza. When we first came here, I had small children, and it was the music and and and little kids playing in the fountain and teenagers and trucks, you know, cruising the house and and older people sitting on park benches.

00:13:54:07 - 00:14:13:08
David Prytherch
So it has all of what I would say, the, the great qualities of a great urban neighborhood. It just happens to be that when you walk a mile from the center of town, it becomes rural instantaneously, right? A which which for me is a contrast that I love. And this is what I typically love about, European places.

00:14:13:08 - 00:14:35:10
David Prytherch
Is that really clear delineation between the urban and the rural? We have our low density suburban neighborhoods also. But you can enjoy the best of both worlds, like I from my house, if I walk a half a mile in one direction, I have hand-cut ramen noodles and and and get, bubble tea and and I can, I can stroll with an ice cream crime and really dynamic urban environment.

00:14:35:10 - 00:15:08:29
David Prytherch
But I literally walk a, half mile in the other direction. And I'm in corn and soybean fields. And so or forests. So yeah, I think that but what's so wonderful about a college town is that it's the product of generations of people, thoughtful people, trying really hard to create an environment that supports college life. And so I it's been a privilege to live and work and, and try to improve my community, with things like bicycle infrastructure, Amtrak, walkability, density, all those things that make a city great.

00:15:08:29 - 00:15:27:27
David Prytherch
But at the scale of the town, this scale, you can actually get your hands around it and make progress. I can point to the bicycle lanes that we advocated for, and I can't wait to ride the Amtrak that week. But my my challenge is now is street closures, you know, and the theme of the book, you know, but it's not for me now.

00:15:27:27 - 00:15:49:11
David Prytherch
It's not just about creating ways for us to share the street on the margins as cyclists and pedestrians, but the street is a public space that that that we in Oxford, you know, Covid helped us experiment with some of that stuff. Some of the street closures. But it's hard. It's hard work, politically to change such a dominant system.

00:15:49:13 - 00:15:55:03
David Prytherch
So, yeah, it's but it's a great laboratory and it's fun. Nice place to live, even if it is a little small.

00:15:55:05 - 00:16:11:19
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. Well, and I love that you described it that way in terms of being able to, you know, walk a certain distance, bike a certain distance, and then be on the, the urban rural fringe. That's very much what it was like. For me, growing up.

00:16:11:23 - 00:16:13:05
David Prytherch
So where are you from?

00:16:13:07 - 00:16:51:13
John Simmerman
I grew up in a little town called Lincoln in Northern California. And so, you know, I, I actually grew up on a ranch, so I was outside of town. And so, but it wasn't it wasn't a very big town. It was only about at the time, it was only about 4000 people. But yeah, having that really clear delineation between the urban environment and then the, you know, the ranchland, the urban environment or the rural environment and, and the preserving of agriculture in, in I appreciate what you said about, you know, like in Europe, you know, you really see these clear delineations and you can, you know, really appreciate that.

00:16:51:19 - 00:17:25:00
John Simmerman
Oh it doesn't take long. And then boom, you're in agricultural land or wild land etc.. What's really, really interesting, and I thought a little bit about when I was reading your book, is that, there's also a great appreciation for in a lot of these places where you can get from village to village, through mobility choice. And so you're sort of alluding to this by saying that, you know, you're working hard to get an Amtrak stop in Oxford so that you can have that reconnection, to other major, cities.

00:17:25:03 - 00:17:29:02
John Simmerman
Cincinnati is how far away for you? I'm assuming that's your closest city.

00:17:29:04 - 00:17:55:07
David Prytherch
Yeah, it's about 35 miles. There's no public transit connection. It would be a long and dangerous bicycle ride. So. Yeah. So it's so close, but yet so far. And this is. And this is why our college students and I think transportation planning and geography are so, so fascinating because for a system to really support a car free lifestyle, you have to do so many pieces have to come together.

00:17:55:07 - 00:18:22:12
David Prytherch
You have to be able to get people from from Chicago to Oxford, and then you need some like long distance transportation. You need good walkability, bikeable. You need short distance trips to to connect with your regional, centers. But you also do need, for example, things like car sharing for those things that are not accessible by and, and this is why people use cars because it's the, it's the, Swiss Army knife of transportation.

00:18:22:12 - 00:18:47:00
David Prytherch
You can do absolutely everything with this one tool. And and so it to replace that that that you have to have a really complicated system that that hooks all of those different pieces together. The density, the walkability. That's why I say walkability is such a complicated framework to think about, because it's about land use, density and mix and transport, pedestrian infrastructure, bicycle infrastructure, regional.

00:18:47:03 - 00:19:05:07
David Prytherch
And it's like so to try to keep all of that in mind. But yeah, that would be that's our goal. That's the goal is I hope that Oxford can become a college town, that people can arrive at car free, live here, car free. But that's a big project in the United States.

00:19:05:10 - 00:19:31:00
John Simmerman
So the cardinal line for Amtrak will linger on this just a little bit longer, since I'm in the middle of my, my Amtrak, journeys. And so I'm taking a week long break from my Amtrak tours around North America. I had some dental work done yesterday. So that's why I'm I'm back in my studio and, and having this opportunity to, to, discuss this, wonderful book that we're going to dive into in just a moment.

00:19:31:02 - 00:19:40:09
John Simmerman
So that particular line, for Amtrak that, I am assuming, stops off in Cincinnati and then we go through.

00:19:40:11 - 00:20:05:14
David Prytherch
Yeah. So that the Cardinal is our, it will be our our train. It's a long distance train that runs from New York City via Washington, DC, West Virginia, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Chicago. And so it currently stops in Cincinnati and then a small town called Connersville. So it's been a long process to secure. You have to secure a stop first from the Amtrak and, prove that there's a market viability to it.

00:20:05:14 - 00:20:21:26
David Prytherch
And then you need to build the station. And it's been a like, as I was telling you before, I retorting, it's been a it's it's coming up at like 18 years of work, before this is done. But we wrote The Cardinal just recently out, so it's so interesting. We, we, we rode it to Albuquerque. We rode the Cardinal to Chicago.

00:20:21:26 - 00:20:28:24
David Prytherch
And then from Chicago, you can just go everywhere. Amtrak. We rode to Albuquerque, and it was really an epic journey.

00:20:28:26 - 00:20:41:03
John Simmerman
Right? Yeah, yeah, that's that's interesting. So the history for Oxford, I'm assuming it used to be a whistle stop at some point time. When did it lose its its train service?

00:20:41:05 - 00:21:04:21
David Prytherch
I think it lost regular train service. Maybe in the 1950s. Yeah. The the geography of most of the United States is hard to understand where the urban places are, apart from where the rail lines were, the rail line I 120 years ago, it was it could rival Europe in the fluidity of car free transportation. And we just don't spaniel battle.

00:21:04:23 - 00:21:25:02
David Prytherch
I mean, 110 years ago, our streets were walkable and we had incredible interurban electric service. And and you could just live car free. And the vast majority people, you know, walked and, and so it's going to take it took us a while to dismantle that, and it's going to take us a little while to build back up again.

00:21:25:05 - 00:21:50:11
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. It's amazing how quickly it got dismantled though, right? When you think of it, I have you because I was just in Boulder, Colorado, and they the same thing their last, train stop there. You know, the train service was, discontinued, I think in 1952 or 1954. And, you know, it's like they're struggling to try to get train service, into to Boulder again.

00:21:50:13 - 00:22:09:06
John Simmerman
But, yeah, back in the day, they basically had hourly service between, Denver, you know, Union Station area downtown Denver and, and Boulder. And so, yeah, we we dismantled what was at one point in time, just an amazing, impressive, you know, train network.

00:22:09:09 - 00:22:30:15
David Prytherch
Well, we we will we will not talk about national politics, but it turns out it's easier to break stuff than it is to build it. And and and, and we managed to break the pedestrianized street 100 years ago, we broke our public transit systems, and they are way more costly to reconstruct than they would have been to just maintain.

00:22:30:15 - 00:22:33:12
David Prytherch
But that's what the decisions were made.

00:22:33:13 - 00:22:55:27
John Simmerman
And here's a little bit of the theme that comes out in your book. So I mean, the book is Reclaiming the Road mobility justice Beyond Complete Streets. And you go through a wonderful job of going through the history of of roads and streets and, you know, I'm sure you've noticed by now my, my little coffee mug streets are for people.

00:22:56:00 - 00:23:31:05
John Simmerman
Is that you did a beautiful job of really kind of walking us through the reader, through the history of what is the street. And you pay homage to my good friend, Peter Norton and, the wonderful book work that he has done for as a historian of telling the story of the battles that have happened out on our streets, take us back to the beginning in, in, in the gur and the kernel of, of that thought that, you know, really kind of got you going and planted the seed and said, you know what?

00:23:31:08 - 00:23:49:05
John Simmerman
I need to write this book because you've written other books, scholarly books, and you've you're coauthor is an author, lead author on on other, works, you know, as a professor. But what what prompted you to want to write Reclaiming the Road?

00:23:49:08 - 00:24:06:28
David Prytherch
Well, that's a it's a great question. And and I will, you know, so I what's really interesting so I mentioned that I've been trying to make sense of how the street came to be the way it is. And, and partly for me, as with all things, it's historical, like how did this, this product that exists today become dominated by cars?

00:24:06:28 - 00:24:25:28
David Prytherch
And that's where Peter Norton has just been so profoundly helpful to all of us to understand that there was a battle from before we were born, that was waged. And, and we're living in the aftermath of that battle. So that kind of work helped me a lot. And, so there were a couple different things that I've been trying to make sense of is how did the street come to be the way it is?

00:24:25:28 - 00:24:51:29
David Prytherch
And in historians like Peter Norton help a lot. But then if you enter the space of the street, you realize that it's a geographical space. It has a geography, but that geography is very much an infrastructural geography. It's a very particular kind of space you've entered. It's it's it's technically a public space. But for the last 100 years, it's been legislated and, and engineered, for, for vehicular flow.

00:24:51:29 - 00:25:07:23
David Prytherch
And, and that's where trying to build on what what Peter Norton showed is, is I'm interested as kind of the planner, which is how do our ideas of, of something like the street like what do we think the street is for? And Peter does a great job of talking about how people used to think it was for people.

00:25:07:26 - 00:25:28:10
David Prytherch
And then in the 1920s, there was this epic, violent battle, which at the end, people not only the cars took over the street, but they took over. Our idea of the street, which was the street was for cars and and for most of us, it's so naturalized that we scurry across the crosswalk because, you know, we just think we are an interloper.

00:25:28:12 - 00:25:56:14
David Prytherch
But for me, it's understanding that justice historically. But but to understand how that takes physical shape and that's how even though I'm a geographer and a planner, had to do a deep dive into the world of transportation law and engineering, because the street as, as we see it, is the product of a legislation like a you go back to your your state statutes that define what a street is for the purposes of vehicular travel, like, boom.

00:25:56:16 - 00:26:26:15
David Prytherch
Like why? Like the law is really clear and and and and so trying to make sense of that geography like who has a right away in the crosswalk was just a basic question for me. And it turns out that was a rabbit hole that I think I'm still burrowing in. Because it's really complicated. It gets to some, some, some concepts that are at one level really practical, like right of way, like who has to yield to whom, but then they open up some really big philosophical questions like who?

00:26:26:17 - 00:26:44:17
David Prytherch
Who has the right to proceed versus another person who has a power to roll down the road, and the other people have to get out of the way. And so there were two trains that had been going on in my thinking, which is one the practical one, which is to understand those practical things, the, the, the statutes, the case, the law.

00:26:44:17 - 00:27:20:03
David Prytherch
If you get hit by a car, who, who bears responsibility, the traffic engineering, the design, the markings, all that stuff that makes the geography and seeing it and thinking about it, but then thinking about it all was I always saw in my gut, like it just not right. Like it's just not right. Like, but but for me then to develop as, as many other people have been doing, developing a vocabulary to think about the street, as a space that we can apply philosophical questions to.

00:27:20:05 - 00:27:39:00
David Prytherch
And, and this is where I, you know, tip my hat to another really great scholars, Mimi Scheller, who with John Drury, sociologists who who kind of create this new mobility movement. When I first went to graduate school, I was really interested in thinking about the street and when I took a class in transportation engineering, it was about transportation geography.

00:27:39:03 - 00:28:14:15
David Prytherch
It was basically gravity modeling. You know, we've so come to think about the street as a as an engineered infrastructure that it's only best analyzed through statistics. And, and it was not a space literally or figuratively in which you could think critically about those relationships. And that's where two things were happening for me. One is like trying to make sense of the practicality of the geography on the street, but also to think about the framework of how we might think about how we might think critically about a street and, and, and, so, so that was my last book in 2018, Law Engineering in the American right away, which was really trying to understand that

00:28:14:16 - 00:28:42:04
David Prytherch
the policy geography of streets, which ultimately became a really deep indictment of how unbelievably auto buyers, auto centric they are, you know, I mean, that that, that then manifest itself in, in, in, in concrete and, and asphalt and it's a, it's a really powerful system that literally kills 7500 pedestrians a year. Like, it's, it's a machine designed to facilitate the flow of cars at the expense of everybody else.

00:28:42:07 - 00:28:59:17
David Prytherch
So anyway, that was the critique. But as the planner in me, it's like, well, like all urban spaces, it could be better, right? Like, like, how do we make it better? It's not just about critique. And, and, when I was doing my last book in the late 20 teens, I was seeing a couple different things happening.

00:28:59:17 - 00:29:23:11
David Prytherch
One is that on the street, people were starting to look beyond simply accommodating non motorists. They were starting to experiment with like, well, it's a public space, why don't we use it like that? So incipient efforts like parklets, periodic street closures for things like summer streets where they were, they were pushing past just, you know, they were they were questioning the basic, fundamental idea.

00:29:23:11 - 00:29:55:07
David Prytherch
Well, maybe it's not just transportation infrastructure at all. Maybe it's a it's a public space. Those efforts were really very nascent, though. You know, there were some big examples like Times Square in New York City, but for the most part very, very limited. But by profound. Also what was happening is that as a person who's been trying to articulate what transportation equity is and mobility justice is, a lot of those debates were also pushing past into new boundaries where, you know, I'd always been like, what we need is a street, a fairly serves all users.

00:29:55:07 - 00:30:19:11
David Prytherch
That's equity. And other people are saying, what if it's not just about transportation? What about all these other social dimensions of the streets? What about the neighborhoods? And that too was kind of a conversation was building. And then what led me to the book is then and then the summer of 2020 happened, in which these two conversations a exploded, in relevance because of the pandemic.

00:30:19:13 - 00:30:43:27
David Prytherch
And and they also collided with each other. So at one level it was about that when the pandemic happened, all of a sudden in our cities, we saw for reasons that we can talk about, cities converting suddenly empty streets into slow streets for people to walk and bike down the middle of, or open streets where they put up barricades and prohibit through traffic or even permit a cafe table or the parklet thing exploded.

00:30:43:27 - 00:31:06:04
David Prytherch
You know, being in New York City in the summer of 2021 and, and then restaurant chefs that were like structures with roofs and Hvac systems on the public right away, like what's going on here? And so that was really like something really profound had happened at the very same time that our conversations about equity, which had been brewing, you know, what it would mean by a melody?

00:31:06:04 - 00:31:28:03
David Prytherch
Just it's it's not just about transportation. All of a sudden the equity conversation kind of exploded. And, and those two things really kind of collided. And they were really complicated questions for me. Like, you know, what does this mean? That if we start converting streets not just into equitably shared transportation infrastructure, but what if we share them as public spaces?

00:31:28:03 - 00:31:51:24
David Prytherch
What does that mean? But also that the transportation equity thing is really complicated, where I, as a bicycle advocate, that who's fought tooth and nail for every block of bike lane in my community to read about the the critiques of bicycle lanes and and incomplete streets and critiques about, you know, are these they just kind of facilitate gentrification, bike lanes or white lanes.

00:31:51:24 - 00:32:18:09
David Prytherch
And there was a lot of complicated stuff to sort through. And so, yeah, the book is my attempt to sort through what was happening through the pandemic and beyond. But also through try to be really, you know, try to dive down into what would a street look like that would, that would acknowledge and somehow reconcile these all these different debates about equity that were swirling on for the place.

00:32:18:11 - 00:32:22:17
John Simmerman
Yeah. Had you started the book before the pandemic?

00:32:22:19 - 00:32:34:22
David Prytherch
No. You know, to be honest, it's one of those things like having done the my Book in 2018, I was kind of like, you know what? I think I've done enough with transportation. I'm going to move on to something else. And then and then 2020 happened and I was like,

00:32:34:25 - 00:32:36:08
John Simmerman
I'm not done with this.

00:32:36:11 - 00:33:09:07
David Prytherch
Yeah, I don't want this. Yeah. And and I'm really glad that I'm not because it was super interesting a to, to push forward theoretically. And what do we mean by mobility justice, but also to talk to planners and transportation advocates the kind of work that you do. It's it's really, you know, I kind of fangirl over when I get to talk to the planners who and the advocates who are trying so hard to make their community better and and how complicated it is and how thoughtful people are and how difficult it is to get it right.

00:33:09:10 - 00:33:13:01
David Prytherch
So I really, was a pleasure to talk to so many people.

00:33:13:03 - 00:33:36:16
John Simmerman
Well, one of the things that I, you know, absolutely loved about the book, too, is that as you went through each of the different chapters, you you had case studies in there of where you teased out, examples from the cities and, and, and again, pointing towards, you know, some of those pivotal moments, especially in, the lessons learned, from the pandemic.

00:33:36:16 - 00:34:03:00
John Simmerman
And so, I thought that was very a nice construct, to the, the book itself. Now on screen, we do have, some of the, the various figures. So I'm going to, I'm going to cycle through some of these and, and I'll just give you an opportunity to really quickly just reflect on each of these images. And for the listening only audience, if you wouldn't mind, just kind of describing what it is that we're looking at to put it in the context.

00:34:03:00 - 00:34:05:09
John Simmerman
So let's start off with this very first image.

00:34:05:11 - 00:34:38:11
David Prytherch
All right. And so this is, this is a picture of, of a street in Pittsburgh. And, and I'm called the Coral Comrie, my neighbor way. It's basically Bicycle Boulevard. And walking down the middle of it is is my dear friend Julie Albright and her daughter Andre. They live in that neighborhood, and and the street has been slowed through traffic calming and and speed humps and signage, as a as an alternative to really busy thoroughfare adjacent which is too busy and too much parking to be a bicycle lane.

00:34:38:11 - 00:35:10:16
David Prytherch
So they've created this bicycle boulevard. But in the process, they created a place, you know, a place where you're you're tempted to want to actually plant plants or stroll down it with your six year old child. And Julie actually interviewed her in the book, and she talked about a neighborhood cafe that she used to worry about. But that neighborhood cat can be safe in its own neighborhood because something so simple as slowing the speed of the vehicles, it's it's the cars haven't been banned.

00:35:10:23 - 00:35:27:18
David Prytherch
This doesn't involve some massive investment of infrastructure, some subtle design things. And through a process of engineering, public engagement have just transformed not only the street, but the neighborhood. The neighborhood's more livable as a result. So it's really kind of empowering, to, to see.

00:35:27:21 - 00:35:33:28
John Simmerman
Yeah. Hat tip to, the name to neighbor ways. Do you know the history on that?

00:35:34:01 - 00:35:36:06
David Prytherch
I do not, you know, I think this.

00:35:36:06 - 00:35:59:16
John Simmerman
Is a, it's a, it's a nod towards, Mister Rogers, I don't know, way. Yeah. That that's how they came up with it rather than, you know, because they, you know, these shared streets, these, you know, bicycle priority, you know, streets, bicycle boulevards, all these different names. And you discussed this in the book is that they all come with these different names and, and some are calling them green streets and greenways and whatever.

00:35:59:16 - 00:36:00:20
John Simmerman
Yeah. Neighbor ways or.

00:36:00:25 - 00:36:22:03
David Prytherch
What Pittsburgh is like in Rogers Leisure. Everyone's pumping it down. You know, we went to the same movie theater in Squirrel Hill and I saw Mr. Rogers. So there you go. Yeah. So, yeah, this is, And then the next image here is, a, an open street, which I think, speaking of kind of misnomers and open street is really a closed street, but not really close.

00:36:22:03 - 00:36:51:23
David Prytherch
So this is the third 34th Avenue, in Queens and in New York, which is now I was in New York City. I did nine case studies across the United States. So I didn't actually. And mostly the remote, the research was remote. And so I didn't get to visit all the cities, but I got to visit this neighborhood in Jackson Heights and what we found on this beautiful fall day was a a small craft artisans market lined up along the street.

00:36:51:25 - 00:37:17:10
David Prytherch
The cars are not prohibited. You know, they're still parking. Cars would come down the street, but so slowly that they they they could be balanced against small vendors who, you know, and while I'm taking the picture, people are just impromptu, starting to dance on the asphalt. I just and and again, it's the power of. Yes, they've closed some of the streets, there's some barricades and stuff.

00:37:17:10 - 00:37:49:12
David Prytherch
But it was, it was, it was the powerful shifting of the idea that a street could be something for vending, for conversation, for dance. And it didn't take a ton of design cues to shift that. And, and again, you know, for me, thinking about the equity piece, which is that, wow, like New York City, for example, and that that street vending was something that was once very, very common and was literally pushed off the streets, the push cart menace and made it illegal.

00:37:49:14 - 00:38:13:08
David Prytherch
In our society, in our economy, small vending is a pathway to to wealth building. Like it's it's and it it doesn't take a bricks and mortar. And so New York City by enabling small crafts people to sell stuff on the street again this is where a street can do, you know the by opening up your mind about the street, not just being about infrastructure and not just to be about how do we better shared among pedestrians and cars?

00:38:13:08 - 00:38:32:19
David Prytherch
Like if it's a public space, what what work can it do? And one of those works, A forms of work, is economic development and an uplifting people. So yeah, it's a it's a really great neighborhood. And this is I could go on and on about, this open street because what happened is that this was the the neighbors took, took charge of this.

00:38:32:19 - 00:39:00:04
David Prytherch
And there's now a whole a 34th Avenue open street coalition of people who have a form of like a quasi governmental group, the advocacy group that the came together because of the pandemic and the idea that, hey, we're going to close the street. Someone needs to put up the barricades. And now there's a group of people who are managing and activating and, advocating, before the, the New York Department transportation to reclaim their street.

00:39:00:04 - 00:39:12:13
David Prytherch
And so there's a whole layer that I only begin to scratch the surface on here is the democracy behind this, which is like, wait a second, like, what if a neighbor's neighborhood could actually have a say over the the future of its streets?

00:39:12:15 - 00:39:44:25
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. Again, it's it's sort of reframing, you know, that perception of what is a street for, you know, is a you bring this up, you know, brilliantly in the first chapter of, of when you're talking about the, the history of what a street is and what it is for, and, and you make the, the comment or the statement that, you know, it was, you know, previously a public realm and for the public and where people would gather and things would happen, you know, Chuck Marone was strong.

00:39:44:25 - 00:40:31:20
John Simmerman
Towns talks about a street as being the platform for building wealth and prosperity for society. Then it transformed into pipes for cars. I frequently call it, you know, a traffic sewer disparagingly. But now it's is it is starting to it's the through a whole series of events and movements that have been going on, you know, dating probably all the way back to, you know, some of the first reclaiming of the streets and the cycle of, you know, the took place in, in Bogota, you know, many, many years ago and, and, and the open streets events, the, the, you know, have, have come in the aftermath of that, and then really

00:40:31:20 - 00:41:01:12
John Simmerman
got, you know, really jumpstarted in and, you know, the fire was thrown or the fuel was thrown onto the fire during the pandemic, to really accelerate that. And I love calling them open streets versus closed streets, just because it's a more positive name, because we're opening the street up once again to people and yeah, you may or you may not be able to drive your car into or through this new open street.

00:41:01:14 - 00:41:22:08
John Simmerman
But if you're going to actually venture into this space, you're going to do so quite, quite carefully and cautiously. And it brings up a point that you bring up in the book, about the Netherlands. And, the Netherlands is an area that I'm very familiar with because I keep going back there studying it and looking at it and documenting it.

00:41:22:10 - 00:41:54:23
John Simmerman
And about people are shocked when they learned that the cycle network in the Netherlands, 60 to 70% of it, is actually forms of shared space, shared streets. And so, the street is just one of many different typologies of, of shared street that the Dutch have, their local access streets or, may not have any signs at all on them, but they're paved in bricks, red bricks or red asphalt that sends a message to the drivers that, oh, this is a shared street environment.

00:41:54:26 - 00:42:31:03
John Simmerman
I'm no longer in, automobile zone, you know, car area. And so it sends that that the design itself of the street, the narrowness of it and the color of the paving really sends a, a reinforced message that, oh, that's right. I'm not in go fast. You know, realm. I am in 30km/h or lower, you know, zone and including the, the home streets where you're looking at more like 15km/h, 6 or 7mph.

00:42:31:06 - 00:42:49:01
John Simmerman
And, and so, you know, these streets just kind of reinforce I think what I had mentioned earlier is that we're about 50 years behind, that that revolution that took place in the 1970s, you know, in, in the Netherlands and in other locations there in Europe.

00:42:49:03 - 00:43:11:23
David Prytherch
Well, I think that's, you know, one level and this is a great image here because it's an image of, of of a street in the Lower East Side in, in Manhattan, probably around 1903 or something. But I think what you've, you've hit on is something that to me is just so kind of intellectually fascinating is that the street is both a mental construct and a physical space.

00:43:11:25 - 00:43:31:20
David Prytherch
And as a geographer and a planner, those kind of things, that dialectic between what we think a street is and who it should serve and what it should do, that we articulate verbally when we talk to each other and we write down and things like laws. But then those things become manifest and materialize in the way that we design streets.

00:43:31:26 - 00:43:59:09
David Prytherch
And and then that reinforces the mental conception of what the street is for. And so that's what I've been trying to tease. But yeah, this image here is of a super crowded street with the pushcart vendors on the margins and pedestrians and I, you know, the horse carts. And it was a transportation space. I mean, I think people always understood the street to be a transportation space, but they didn't believe it was exclusively for transportation, and they understood it to be a shared space.

00:43:59:09 - 00:44:17:00
David Prytherch
I just had a great, I hosted a podcast with Peter Norton, I mean, Michel there, and he was talking about how, you know, they just apply basic standards of understanding that the street was to be shared with transportation, but nobody had a right to to impinge on someone else's experience. You couldn't become a nuisance and dominate it.

00:44:17:00 - 00:44:42:04
David Prytherch
Yeah. And so, and so that, that that's what the street had been like for millennia. But he also points out that that the auto industry, what he calls motor dumb in his book, you know, they, they, they realized that what was necessary for the car to be able to operate freely was not just to engineer the street, but what you first needed was a radical reconceptualize ation of what the street is.

00:44:42:07 - 00:45:09:03
David Prytherch
And that's what they actuated in the 1920s was, discursive in, in public discourse, in public relations, there was a whole they shifted the terms of the conversation about who was the interloper, who was the rightful person, and, and what was the proper way to behave in public space. And so it went from, you know, something where, I, you know, I was I was going back and reading A child of the wind in the Willows, I think.

00:45:09:03 - 00:45:46:04
David Prytherch
And, you know, The Wind in the Willows has a I think it's the frog or something. Gets a car and he's like a, he's a mad man. Like he's nearly killing people. And society is like, you're a mad man for driving so quickly. But but so quickly. By the end of the 1930s, the script had been flipped, and and it was a pedestrian who was the interloper in the car and speed where the rightful use of the street and in the next image, I think if you have in their books is is how quickly within a matter of a few decades, not even we went from a vibrant public space devoted primarily to transportation,

00:45:46:04 - 00:46:09:11
David Prytherch
but exclusively to a sewer for automobiles. And and how that was Effectuated is is itself a really super interesting story. And, you know, I think but what's interesting to me and Peter points out is that Butler's as dominant as that. Now that discourse is that, that most of us have trouble conceiving of the road as being anything different.

00:46:09:11 - 00:46:37:11
David Prytherch
We we can't imagine sitting down on, you know, and, and and lest we forget, if you were to step out onto the street and sit down, if you got run over and you damage the bumper in the process of being run over, you could be held liable for, you know, our system is so now imbued with the assumptions, that that it just is self reinforcing and but what then needs to happen and this is to take this idea from the 1920s is what we need.

00:46:37:11 - 00:47:01:22
David Prytherch
And this is where places like the Netherlands have been decades into. This is a radical reconceptualize of what the radical reconceptualize of what the street is for, that it's not a vehicular space exclusively and primarily. And those things then can be conveyed through subtle design cues that say like, I love. This is why I love. The University of Minnesota Press was a great publisher to work with.

00:47:01:22 - 00:47:26:06
David Prytherch
And and their designer who put the the shared street, you know, lunar off street signage on the cover, which is so powerful because the cars smaller and behind the child, it's such a it just conveys that that there's something about the order of the street. So, but it, you know, it takes a while to change a dominant order.

00:47:26:08 - 00:48:03:29
John Simmerman
Yeah. So if we go back to, to, to this image here of, of what our streets were like, you know, prior to the domination of, of the automobile, it it helps us, you know, reconnect with the fact that the streets that we now look at and, and interact with, most frequently are, are really strobes. They're really this, you know, this mashup between a street and a road with a road being a convenient, you know, a conveyance, bit of infrastructure that gets you from point A to point B as quickly as possible.

00:48:04:07 - 00:48:34:15
John Simmerman
In the case of a railroad, you're literally on rails, and you're able to get from one point to the next, you know, seamlessly, quickly, smoothly, hopefully. And so what we see mostly in our modern, you know, North American, cities is most least roads that we interact with, unless we are, you know, blessed with and have the the grace of some of these quieter residential streets.

00:48:34:18 - 00:49:14:17
John Simmerman
You know, in our midst and in many places. Do you know many older cities that, existed prior to, World War two probably have narrower, quieter, low volume, low speed streets that can be, you know, the basis of, you know, reconnecting us to what, you know, streets really are for without having to, to to break our mind because, you know, the so much of what we have has been, you know, is is a road is basically a high speed multi-lane, corridor.

00:49:14:17 - 00:49:40:02
John Simmerman
Now, the real sad part about what we're looking at here on image and for the listening only audience, this is multi multi lanes. But it's basically space that has been carved out in an older historical context. And of course the the space that has been minimized is the space for pedestrians because they've been pushed off to the side and, and their space has really been reduced dramatically.

00:49:40:04 - 00:49:58:14
David Prytherch
But it's interesting, like one of the things that kind of something that dawned on me in the writing of the book, which is that even though the the dominant idea was we did shift all of our streets into strobes, and you can turn any boulevard into making an A roadway if you raise the speeds and reduce the pedestrian infrastructure.

00:49:58:17 - 00:50:21:02
David Prytherch
But interestingly, in the United States, we held on to the idea of the shared street in something that's actually quite cherished in our urban tradition, which is called the SAC. And and we in the United States, as planners, progressive planners, there are a lot of reasons why the cul de sac is, is there are problems with the cul de sac in terms of connectivity and exclusivity and, and, and and so forth.

00:50:21:05 - 00:50:43:07
David Prytherch
But what it represents is that Americans, even as their transportation system was, became increasingly dominated by cars they reserved for themselves, at least on their local streets, a place where you might play pickup street hockey and and which is really interesting. And so like, I think that the when we when I, you know, I think your point is a really good one about that.

00:50:43:07 - 00:51:07:29
David Prytherch
It's it's worth reminding ourselves that these are not new ideas that for pedestrians we are we are reclaiming the street because it was for 99.9% of history the pedestrians to give up. But and it's also the traditions were never completely lost. And in our roadway hierarchies we continue to maintain they're not always narrower, but they're typically lower speed.

00:51:07:29 - 00:51:48:11
David Prytherch
And lower volume. And and people cherish living on a low speed, low volume street. And and so I think that even though that that model of street was forced kind of downward in the hierarchy to the, to the margins, that impulse is still really strong. And this is one I think is really interesting, what some of the transportation planners, like, I talked to Jason Payton, who works for Odot in Oakland, who was really kind of, instrumental in their slow streets is that, there is a kind of a what he called like a NIMBYism, which is like, I think it's right to not want fast vehicular traffic in your backyard, like it's,

00:51:48:11 - 00:51:58:25
David Prytherch
of course, you know, a local street or front yard. You know, your front yard and your local, you know, the streets that we live on, we many of us would like them to not be thoroughfares. Right. Which.

00:51:58:25 - 00:52:27:18
John Simmerman
Is which is an interesting thing for us to grasp as a society is that for us, we value not having high speed traffic outside our front door. And yet we are sometimes blind to the fact that, you know, when it comes to getting from A to B efficiently and quickly in our motor vehicle will impose that negativity on other people.

00:52:27:23 - 00:52:54:10
John Simmerman
So we value our cul de sac, we value the fact that, you know, you know, we were lucky in us at bluff, we were lucky enough and privileged enough to purchase a home on a cul de sac. And our kids are able to, you know, shoot hoop out in the, in the street, you know, because we put a basketball hoop out there and they can play Frisbee and whatever, because we're in a cul de sac.

00:52:54:12 - 00:53:21:09
John Simmerman
And that's a value to us from an urbanist perspective and from a transportation perspective. We hate cul de sacs because we we know that that's just putting more pressure and more, you know, more traffic downstream. You know, on the collectors and then on the arterials and, and yet I'm like, oh, hey, there's some there's some kernels that we can work with here.

00:53:21:16 - 00:53:50:25
John Simmerman
Is that you know, if, if we value this concept of low volume and low speed, we can work with that. And, and I like to also point out that not all cul de sacs are created equal. And many of them could be absolutely delightful if and there's a big if, if each cul de sac is, is penetrated and connected via an active mobility network.

00:53:50:27 - 00:54:18:19
John Simmerman
And, and that's the beauty of, of Oulu, Finland, where you have, a cul de sac type of suburban sort of model, but then you have a cohesive network of off street pathways that deliver people to their meaningful destinations by walking and biking, even up in the Arctic Circle, where, you know, kids are riding 60 to 70% to, you know, the school on bikes through the snow and the darkness.

00:54:18:22 - 00:54:21:29
John Simmerman
Why? Because there's this safe, you know, network there.

00:54:21:29 - 00:54:47:22
David Prytherch
So yeah, Davis, California, you know, but perhaps the the most bicycle friendly. But yeah, I think that what, what you've raised and this is something that I don't have great images of, but you have an image here of a complete street. Is that what we're talking about? Whenever we get into transportation and streets, we're talking about a, like we're talking about a public set of public goods, but also a set of public ads, you know, and, and access and space.

00:54:47:22 - 00:55:06:25
David Prytherch
And that's why it's impossible to think about apart from equity. Because what we're talking about is how we're sharing something, and, and who gets the privilege to be mobile at high speed, who has to put up with the with the risks to them and their family? Who has to put up with the noise and the traffic?

00:55:07:00 - 00:55:28:12
David Prytherch
We, you know, and so it's a very, very complicated topic to think about. And that's why the Complete Streets idea is so wonderful, because it even even when they weren't saying explicitly that it was a language of equity, was all, you know, complete streets are streets designed for all users of all ages and abilities. It's very much an equity framework.

00:55:28:12 - 00:55:55:08
David Prytherch
And and so at the level of the street that's we've been making a ton of progress in terms of rethinking streets. So they're better balanced to my different users. And all streets, you know, even their engineers, even though they don't think about equity. There are if you think about a street typology and you look back into, you know, some of the major kind of like capacity design manuals, they're trying to juggle throughput versus local access.

00:55:55:08 - 00:56:20:06
David Prytherch
And so this is why we ended up with this hierarchy of streets, which is your second on a on an arterial. You're you're sacrificing access to land and livability for speed and throughput on a local street, your prioritizing local access and sacrificing speed. But it's, it's, there's there's so many different ways that we can combat what makes a street fair or not.

00:56:20:07 - 00:56:43:19
David Prytherch
And I think for many of us who are transportation advocates, you know, in our country, in the United States, just to have the transportation space be equitable, you know, from curb to curb is hard enough. But then what, you know, you're kind of alluding to is that there is a, you know, so in my in the book, I'm trying to make sense of all the different ways we can combat equity.

00:56:43:22 - 00:57:02:05
David Prytherch
One is, of course, the kind of multimodal that everyone, based on their mode, should have safety and access. But those of us who are geographers or planners who take a big picture of you. Yeah, like we need to think about the system and how it distributes the traffic and, and, and who's getting carbon monoxide pushed at them and who gets a cop quiet cul de sac.

00:57:02:05 - 00:57:19:26
David Prytherch
And, you know, you rent. You mentioned the cul de sac like the suburbanites got the cul de sac and whose roads got widened, the people who remained behind in the city so that the suburbanite could get, you know, to the I mean, I looked at the city of, Cincinnati, which had one of the first general plants in the United States in 1925.

00:57:19:26 - 00:57:47:06
David Prytherch
And they said it's sometimes, you know, advisable to sacrifice sidewalk space to, you know, ensure vehicular flow. And so there have always been these trade offs, but because they've been obscured behind the language of engineering, which is is which seeks to be very value neutral, I mean, the obfuscates the value judgments behind behind are, you know, in numbers.

00:57:47:12 - 00:58:00:29
David Prytherch
And so you can't you know, you're not you want to have a political conversation. They're like, no, this is just the standard. So the first thing is to say, you know and understand that. But but we could just come back so many different things. You know, once you're just start talking about the use of public space and who's using it.

00:58:00:29 - 00:58:33:05
David Prytherch
We're talking about people and then we're talking about social justice, that there's a, a racial and a and a class and a gender component to who in the United States, if you look at the Dangerous by design, The Complete Streets, the reports on who dies on American streets in the United States, very young people like children, older people, people of color, people who live in low income neighborhoods, indigenous people, you know, so traffic violence maps directly on to racial violence in the United States.

00:58:33:08 - 00:59:07:02
David Prytherch
And so but but then and then so that's one access. But access you can think about. But then it gets messy like this beautiful image of a complete streets, which I find so appealing, other people who worry about neighborhood stability and gentrification, because all of this has been happening in tandem with the gentrification of many of our cities and skyrocketing prices and displacement and and these public improvements are sometimes coincidental and perhaps a causal agent in urban change.

00:59:07:02 - 00:59:28:09
David Prytherch
And displacement. So so that's where you get the critique. And so you can worry about the, you know, great. Now we have a bike lane. But, all the people of color have been displaced. But then there are other forms that we can think about this. I think a lot of the The Complete Streets is, is, is rooted in worries about sustainability.

00:59:28:11 - 00:59:51:18
David Prytherch
You know, in the United States, transportation is still the single greatest, source of carbon emissions, 29%. And so there's an intergenerational equity thing. So, like, maybe out of fear of gentrification, we don't build a bike lane because we worry about green gentrification. But then what if we missed an opportunity to reduce some carbon emissions, and our grandchildren will have to pay the price?

00:59:51:21 - 01:00:09:08
David Prytherch
And then you throw into the procedure, like, what if how streets are designed and in the processes and anyway, it's it's complicated. And so my goal is to try to. But what I love about planning is that planners have to try to reconcile competing values to make the best decision possible, if that's what they're trying to do.

01:00:09:16 - 01:00:34:28
David Prytherch
So yeah, this is an image here of a shared street from the National Association of, of, Urban Transportation affect NASA. I'm trying to Nadeau National Association for transportation. So, I, I should be remembered the acronym. But it it's a this is an image of a shared street, which is again, it's a, it's an idea of a street that shared.

01:00:35:01 - 01:00:58:01
David Prytherch
I think, though, like the Complete Streets movement is imbued with a sense of, of of equity. And they try to design equity into the street and, and, and and it's just so this is kind of an urban like the lunar but in an urban context. So this is what's been so interesting is that these, these movements have been developing and percolating from advocates and, and resulting.

01:00:58:01 - 01:01:18:29
David Prytherch
Here's an image from the acto, urban streets design guidelines, or maybe from the bike bikeways, guidance of, of, of a neighbor away or a bicycle boulevard. And there's just kind of a continuum. And sometimes you're trying to exclude the cars, and sometimes you're trying to slow them. Sometimes you're trying to prioritize the the cyclists, but you're not really trying to create a public space that's 100% shared.

01:01:18:29 - 01:01:39:07
David Prytherch
And there's just a whole set of typologies that the that the designers are trying to come up with. While they themselves, I think, have been wrestling with questions of equity that I think planners themselves probably were blindsided with a little bit. You know, I mean, I think the planners have always been.

01:01:39:09 - 01:02:01:10
David Prytherch
You know what I say about planning as a perpetual motion machine whenever called upon to solve a problem, they often create a new problem. I mean, planners were were essential to the building of our highway system and to urban renewal, and now they're trying to repair the damage of that. And, they, they're they helped people rediscover the city, and now they need to solve the urban affordability problem.

01:02:01:12 - 01:02:23:29
David Prytherch
So anyway, having set up that big framework, what we're looking at now are some images of the my book, basically focuses and tries to create kind of a typology, all these things that are very messy in terms of what they're called. But but I put them into three buckets. One is efforts that are just designed to slow streets, and they're often called slow streets or bicycle boulevards or traffic calming.

01:02:23:29 - 01:02:55:23
David Prytherch
There's a long tradition in the United States. I mean, again, as you mentioned, with lots of lessons from places like Western Europe to slow streets. So this is an image that in my the chapter, I look at cities like Boston, which, have have been trying to evolve. They had a really great Slow Streets program that preceded the pandemic and wasn't really a pandemic program and in which they went neighborhood to neighborhood, to try to calm traffic, realizing that, you know, a neighborhood street shouldn't be a major thoroughfare.

01:02:55:25 - 01:03:21:29
David Prytherch
So this is an image of they would go very, very methodical planning process to to go in and talk to people and identify the issues and look at the design, the the, the toolkit of different design techniques of. So this image shows, a map of a neighborhood, west of Washington where they, you know, whether it's a speed hump or it's, changing the direction of a street or, daylighting an intersection.

01:03:21:29 - 01:03:46:16
David Prytherch
And they went through neighborhood by neighborhood to try to rebalance these local streets, realizing that, you know what local streets should never have been for fast vehicular traffic. They should be slowed. But interesting. And the next image that you have there is that this is an image of, of of their speed humps. Owens. And this is an interesting thing I learned along the way, which is that planners would like to do things methodically and engage people.

01:03:46:16 - 01:04:08:07
David Prytherch
And but it turns out that's really time and resource intensive. And you know what I found? And so what cities like Boston have done is in that toolkit of all these wonderful tools and the procedural tools of talking to people and doing charrette to not stuff Boston's like, we've only got X number of dollars, why don't we just put them all into speed humps?

01:04:08:09 - 01:04:30:04
David Prytherch
Not all of them, but they've really designed the like of all the tool in the toolkit. The speed hump is accomplishes so many of their goals. So cost effectively that that what they did is they where we're not very long ago, ten years ago in Boston, if they would have said to their, you know, transportation department, hey, we want to do speed humps.

01:04:30:11 - 01:05:00:22
David Prytherch
Like a lot of agencies, the Public Works Department would have said, no, we can't do that. Engineering doesn't permit that. The speed hump. And what about the fire trucks and all that stuff? They basically made the speed hump, the standard on local streets. And so they know that people say, if you live on a local street, expect to speed hump at some point on your street, which is complicated because not only it's like they also have realized that, you know, some of these traffic calming things are really complicated.

01:05:00:22 - 01:05:24:01
David Prytherch
Neighborhood political. They're messy. And so so at one level, they're leaning into the engineering black box, which is this is just standard policy. We're going to install it, and we're not going to have a charrette about the the speed up. We're just going to install it just like we install a traffic sign. So so it's really interesting. And and so that Boston's really basic with that.

01:05:24:01 - 01:05:44:18
David Prytherch
They're just doing the speed hump. This is an image of Oakland slow streets, which was really a lot of people paid attention to Oakland. Oakland. You know, when pandemic happened and they went and a whole other theme behind here. So a lot of these transportation agencies, our streets traditionally have been designed by Public Works departments that were very vehicular.

01:05:44:20 - 01:06:13:07
David Prytherch
But organizationally, a lot of cities have reorganized the transportation departments into mobility and transportation. Department of transportation or so. Oak Dot has Department of Transportation, but by the time the Covid happened, it was directed by a a bicycle infrastructure planner. It's a pretty big shift in the United States. So Oakland, when the pandemic happened, they closed something like 70 miles of streets, closed them.

01:06:13:07 - 01:06:29:25
David Prytherch
I mean, it was a barricade and a sign that says road closed to through traffic meant to slow streets. And and it got a it was a big splash. A lot of people paid attention to Oakland in terms of policy. A lot of people like I think people are talking in Pittsburgh. We saw what Oakland was doing.

01:06:29:25 - 01:06:48:20
David Prytherch
And so Oakland led the way with this, and it was hugely popular. In some neighborhoods. And the and the planner I was talking to, I was mentioned before, Jason Patent, who's a Portland transportation planner for. Okay. You know, he said to planners like me, we were we were working from home. We were looking at our windows.

01:06:48:20 - 01:07:05:25
David Prytherch
We saw that people were using the street and but, but but they were a little bit they had a blind spot to the idea that in, in, in the East Bay and other parts of their city where, you know, people were still commuting to work because they were essential workers. They weren't working from home to professional jobs.

01:07:05:25 - 01:07:30:09
David Prytherch
They were needing to get to work. And these barricades were in the way. And the city had not asked them. And these neighborhoods had long traditions of not feeling consulted. And so no sooner than had Oakland had rallied, you know, closed all these streets, but they were getting pushback from certain neighborhoods about the program. And again, I credit the planners were being very thoughtful.

01:07:30:09 - 01:07:55:28
David Prytherch
They kind of stopped new installations in the summer of 2020. And even by September 2021, they were grappling with what just happened. And what does it mean? And and trying again, because in 2020, George Floyd, you know, the equity piece had a particular salience that it maybe had not. I mean, I think he said he'd been thinking about equity for a really long time.

01:07:56:01 - 01:08:13:27
David Prytherch
But it just had a particular salience in 2020 that forced people to really ask hard questions. So Oakland, even though they did this wonderful program, was super popular, imitated all over the country. They're working backwards towards, an, an enhanced bike boulevard program.

01:08:13:29 - 01:08:35:25
John Simmerman
Okay. Yeah. So, you know, we were talking a little bit about the fact that, you know, the kind of the main areas that you discussed in the book include, you know, the Slow Streets. And so we were talking about that. And then, of course, as we mentioned earlier, because of the pandemic, we ended up having all of these other, you know, quick build installations that took place.

01:08:35:25 - 01:09:10:06
John Simmerman
And of course, the Oakland story was it was a very interesting story. I had Warren Logan on the channel, in the aftermath of everything that went down in Oakland. But yeah, let's, let's accelerate through a couple more. We'll kind of go in a little bit faster format. Some of these other lessons that that we, you know, really learned from as a part of this, you know, this quest to try to create more space for people in response to the pandemic and some of the things.

01:09:10:06 - 01:09:16:19
John Simmerman
And we'll we'll sort of wrap up at the end with, where we're at now five years later.

01:09:16:21 - 01:09:41:25
David Prytherch
Sure. And just to pick up on a big, theme that cut across all the case studies, which was the transportation system is a very durable system full of lots of rules and regulations and norms that makes change really hard. And so what was really unique was for a really brief moment, the red tape was just cut, and planners and others rushed into that void to experiment really, really, really quickly.

01:09:41:25 - 01:10:00:11
David Prytherch
They had a mandate to just try anything that would work and they were so excited to do that. And, and what happens when you move really fast is sometimes you get it right and sometimes you learn some lessons along the way. But what was happening is I was talking to people more in maybe 22 and 20, 23.

01:10:00:14 - 01:10:26:25
David Prytherch
Is, is that those initial experiments were becoming kind of baked into a new set of rules. And so, you know, so I you had the image there that was of like barricades that they threw up really fast and that that Oakland was then in the process of creating a permanent program. And so, that was the same, you know, I that the last case study there of the slow streets was of the city of Pittsburgh, which looked at Oakland and said, hey, we should try that.

01:10:26:27 - 01:10:52:19
David Prytherch
They learned some things along the way, but they're kind of baking some of those ideas into their capital budgets and their roadway design manuals, so that a lot of learning accelerated really quickly. And they learned some things sometimes the hard way, but they learned a lot of really good lessons that they can bake into those permanent programs. So so that was the kind of the slowing the streets.

01:10:52:19 - 01:11:13:28
David Prytherch
And then, some of the things that we talked about on a spectrum is where you get a little more aggressive to more like, excluding car, some streets. So we were talking about open streets, and, and looking at case studies. You know, the most famous case study with that is New York City, with its 83 miles of, of open streets at the height of the pandemic.

01:11:14:00 - 01:11:37:14
David Prytherch
Some of them were, were, fully closed. Yeah. So, you know, this idea of play streets that had been percolating already a little bit, and there's a really cool interplay between what cities are doing and what the Nadeau manuals are saying. So I think if you move forward, New York created this program, and at one level it was kind of like the slow streets where there were some barricades you could access.

01:11:37:14 - 01:12:01:03
David Prytherch
The street with your car, you had to go slow, you know, five mile an hour. That's already pretty radical change. But then in the next slide, to me, this is just kind of encapsulates it, which is you could put up a cafe table in the middle of the street, and that is such a profoundly different use of a public street that just pushes beyond mere accommodation or slowing.

01:12:01:05 - 01:12:17:25
David Prytherch
We're now talking about the the street as a public space for dwelling, for sitting down, having a conversation that reminds us more of a of a plaza that we would become familiar with in Europe. And this is what they did in New York's New York City. And of course, the results were really uneven. In geographically, they were uneven.

01:12:17:25 - 01:12:40:04
David Prytherch
Not all neighborhoods did it because they were bottom up initiatives. Some, you know, most of the open streets, the maps of the open streets, if you look at them, they're concentrated in Manhattan, for example, or Brooklyn. But that's not universally the case, you know, again, in Queens, we have the 34th Avenue open street that this is a very diverse neighborhood, a lower income neighborhood.

01:12:40:07 - 01:13:01:14
David Prytherch
And they took charge of their street and, and, and so, yeah, you can buy a pair of earrings on the street. And, and I think a whole culture has developed around that sharing that didn't exist before. What's really cool for me then is that by opening up people's minds to the street as a public space, you can now redesign the infrastructure.

01:13:01:14 - 01:13:21:19
David Prytherch
So this is an image actually of of the city of Denver. Denver was another one of those streets that kind of move forward really quickly with slow and shared streets. Most of them have been pulled back, or almost all of them have, but there are certain streets that are now being fundamentally reconstructed as a plaza, just in the same way that Times Square was.

01:13:21:19 - 01:13:46:09
David Prytherch
And and it would not have been possible without all those quick build interim steps that were less about barricade than they. They were less about closing off the street than they were to. Maybe they should be called open streets because they open our minds to our streets and streets could be, you know, and, and and what I always talk about is the, the power that comes from being able to walk down the middle of a street or set a cafe table.

01:13:46:09 - 01:14:05:24
David Prytherch
It opens your mind in a way that sometimes the infrastructure follows from that. So yeah, cities all over, we're doing this stuff, you know, another slow street city was Los Angeles, which has been doing a lot with two completed streets. They they embarked on a Slow Streets program, slower. You know, people in the community were saying they would do it like Oakland.

01:14:05:26 - 01:14:27:11
David Prytherch
They weren't so sure they did it. The program, you know, they backed away from a lot of that stuff. But again, so the next image here is that Los Angeles is has it is a particular example of a city that's really doing the green alleys thing really, really well. And so this is the neighbor of Pacoima, which is in the San Fernando Valley, which is a neighborhood of color and low income.

01:14:27:13 - 01:14:50:19
David Prytherch
But these were local people. This great organization is women led, an organization called Pacoima Beautiful that reclaim the streets and, created a public plaza when they realized that it wasn't, you know, didn't have enough shade. They they worked to redesign the streets with shade. And and then this radical sense that they, you know, people now ask like, hey, can I hold the birthday party on the street?

01:14:50:19 - 01:15:18:01
David Prytherch
And it's like, yeah, it's a public space. There's no permits. If you see the the plants are getting thirsty because the irrigation system is broken, water them. And so it's just such a different understanding of streets. So the last set of images in the last chapter I had that really went in and it was the, the kind of the, the more full closing of streets and conversion is public space and and San Francisco this is an image of San Francisco in their shared spaces program.

01:15:18:03 - 01:15:41:20
David Prytherch
San Francisco of course as as as a leader in this in terms of going back to livable streets with, Donald Appleyard, but also, with the parklets, program, which then led into this idea of doing these shared spaces. And so San Francisco really, they wrestled with it, you know, so the shared spaces in San Francisco's a progressive city.

01:15:41:20 - 01:16:04:20
David Prytherch
Their their parklets had been public spaces. But it turns out that public spaces didn't have the advocates that that that during the pandemic, all the restaurants and bars wanted this space. And so they opened up the the parklets to to commercial uses and the program exploded. And then they had to wrestle with what does it mean to use these streets in a different way?

01:16:04:20 - 01:16:24:29
David Prytherch
And this is the politics that are me so interesting of like the strange alliances that formed between progressive planners and the Golden Gate Restaurant Association to help both together fight against the fire department and the fire departments. And all this public safety has not been super friendly to a lot of these things. You know, they want to for good reason.

01:16:24:29 - 01:16:43:27
David Prytherch
They want to be able to put up a ladder to a building. And so really strange bedfellows came out of this that I think changed the whole it used to be, for example, business would say, hey, don't do that. Parklets going to take away parking for my business. But now a lot of those businesses are saying, hey, I don't need the parking.

01:16:43:27 - 01:17:08:01
David Prytherch
I'd rather have that space outside for a cafe table. So looking at, you know, San Francisco did this really, really successfully. I looked at, Washington DC. Yeah. Portland, Oregon is a great example. Portland's always been a great multimodal city. But, you know, they had they had really hesitated like parklets had not taken off in downtown Portland because the business owners hated it.

01:17:08:01 - 01:17:31:24
David Prytherch
And there were big questions about who owns the street and the privatization of the street. And that's a whole layer that we could talk about. But but the pandemic just opened. There was just a sense of necessity. Is the mother of invention. And and so they broke through some things, and now they're trying to figure out what is a permanent program look like the convert streets into public plazas and and the so they have a whole public street plaza program in Portland.

01:17:31:26 - 01:18:01:12
David Prytherch
Again, they're equity issues about where they are. They're not you know, they tend to already coincide with the already gentrified, core of Portland. They don't lend themselves as easily to suburban areas, but my you know, one of the things that came through with this is that if you're one of the most radical things you can do with the street is really make it public, you know, to for things to be public, to open them to anybody is just knocks down a lot of those barriers to what makes our cities more livable and equitable.

01:18:01:14 - 01:18:22:13
David Prytherch
And it forces you to wrestle with what I think are like the questions that park departments have been dealing with forever, like, how do you deal with, you know, quality of life issues, what do you do? Lease out some public space for a cafe? Does that add something even? It takes away like things that we've not had. You know, the idea of leasing out street space.

01:18:22:16 - 01:18:39:03
David Prytherch
The Portland Department of Transportation has a like people like you can borrow a set of game boards, like board games from a Department of Transportation. They've got a collection of board games to help you activate the street space. Since when the Department of Transportation have collected support and,

01:18:39:05 - 01:18:40:19
John Simmerman
Since now.

01:18:40:21 - 01:19:03:18
David Prytherch
Since now. And I think those things are their little, and these what I come around to in the book is that these conversions were they happened all over the United States, these are just happened to be really big cities, but many small towns closed off alleys or created parklets. This was not limited to these big cities.

01:19:03:21 - 01:19:35:12
David Prytherch
But and but, you know, ultimately these were modest changes. Most of our streets remain auto dump. I mean, I never tried to do to quantify them, but the amount of these shared streets. But there fractions of percentages probably in the in terms of the overall roadways in the United States. But but it's a profound idea and and it gives me optimism if you open up your mind to what's possible and you hold on to that idea.

01:19:35:15 - 01:20:05:13
David Prytherch
Yeah. Just like it was a crazy idea 110 years ago to give over streets to cars. And it happened remarkably fast. I'm not saying that we're going to see that conversion, but it's it's possible to rethink our streets and remake them much more quickly. And and what I, one of the things I came away with is maybe this is the pragmatic planner in me is that, it's going to take advocates and, and one of the countervailing forces to the auto industry is the real estate.

01:20:05:13 - 01:20:28:22
David Prytherch
And, you know, like there are a lot of bars and restaurants and neighborhood associations. There's a lot of downtown business improvement district to have a if you look at the street, there's a lot of real estate there, and you have to worry about the gentrification issues. We have to worry about the privatization issues. But, you know, one of the reasons why these cities were able to do this stuff is because it made cities more livable.

01:20:28:24 - 01:20:53:16
David Prytherch
It made their businesses more vibrant and profitable. They enliven downtowns. And so I like to think that some there's, there's some alliances that were forged that may enable these to not just be passing phenomena that that these may last because there's some people who have a stake in the street not going back to just being, you know, fast traffic and parked cars.

01:20:53:18 - 01:21:03:25
John Simmerman
Love it. Yeah. Reclaiming the road mobility justice beyond complete streets. David, thank you so much for joining me on the Active Towns podcast. It's been so much fun.

01:21:03:27 - 01:21:24:23
David Prytherch
Well, thank you so much for the invitation, and thank you for all the work that you do. And we weren't talking too much about, activity and health, but I think that like the, the tie ins to, you know, the health of ourselves and our communities are, you know, pretty self-evident in taking these, reclaiming these streets from cars.

01:21:24:25 - 01:21:29:22
John Simmerman
Exactly, exactly. All right. Very good. Thank you.

01:21:29:24 - 01:21:30:26
David Prytherch
Thank you so much, John.

01:21:30:26 - 01:21:47:04
John Simmerman
Hey, thank you all so much for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Talking about the new book, Reclaiming the Road. 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, be honored to have you subscribe to the channel. Just click on the subscription button down below and ring that notification bell.

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John Simmerman
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John Simmerman
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John Simmerman
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