Transcript exported from the video version of this episode - Note that it has not been copyedited

00:00:00:01 - 00:00:23:22
Avi Stopper
In Denver. Shared streets, broadly speaking, were wildly popular, and the city's research suggests that 93%, 93% of respondents, people who responded to a bunch of surveys that they advertised about shared streets after the fact said they loved them. They wanted them in their neighborhood, they wanted them on their streets. And so we can create that in a short period of time.

00:00:23:22 - 00:00:47:02
Avi Stopper
Within a year, we can have this complete network, at least the foundation of it, and do it in a way that gives people the opportunity to provide meaningful feedback. And and that feedback isn't just a perfunctory exercise. If we're honest about our objectives here, that feedback is about actually listening and learning to what's working and what's not and making adjustments accordingly.

00:00:47:11 - 00:01:08:21
John Simmerman
Hey everyone, welcome to the Active Towns Channel. I'm John Simmerman. And that is Avi Stopper from BikeStreets.com and the Vamos initiative in Denver, Colorado to try to build out a high comfort network of shared street to get more people writing more often. This is a fabulous conversation and it is a long one, so let's get right to it.

00:01:08:26 - 00:01:18:04
John Simmerman
Avi Thank you so much for joining me on the Active Towns podcast. Welcome!

00:01:18:04 - 00:01:21:00
Avi Stopper
It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. John.

00:01:21:14 - 00:01:27:16
John Simmerman
So Avi, I love to have my guests just give a real quick introduction to themselves. So who is Avi?

00:01:28:02 - 00:01:47:23
Avi Stopper
I lead the bike Streets Project in Denver, which is a campaign to turn Denver into the best bike city in America. We think that we have the right ingredients here to do it. We think that we can do it quickly. We think that we can do it inexpensively and in a way that makes biking, rolling, moving around town.

00:01:48:08 - 00:02:09:05
Avi Stopper
However, you so choose, without a car sometimes possible for everyone. And so that is codified into a campaign that we're running currently called Vamos. And Vamos is basically a step by step implementation plan for how Denver can create the best complete, totally interconnected, high comfort bike network in the country.

00:02:09:05 - 00:02:18:09
John Simmerman
Fantastic. So I have to ask because I'm curious, what got you interested in this project and this type of work?

00:02:18:09 - 00:02:43:18
Avi Stopper
Well, I have been a bike commuter since the dawn of time, or at least the dawn of time for for for me. I rode my bike. I was kind of the classic vehicular cyclist type in Chicago for a long time, well before Chicago developed all the amazing infrastructure that's there now. It was just, you know, riding your bike on Michigan Avenue, Randolph and all sorts of crazy places that I probably wouldn't do now.

00:02:44:01 - 00:03:18:22
Avi Stopper
I have loved riding a bike for a long time. I led a tech company for many years, and I found that when I commuted, the sort of the ride into work was really a wonderful way for me to get ready for the day. And then the ride home also importantly, allowed me to decompress and be present for my family when I got home and I've just been really into bikes since I can since I can remember as a kid growing up in college and in my early professional career as well.

00:03:19:12 - 00:04:01:10
Avi Stopper
I loved when I lived in Chicago riding along the lakefront from where I lived in the South Loop down to Hyde Park, where I went to graduate school. And yeah, bikes are, as I would imagine, for many folks who watch and listen to your work. Bikes are a happy place for me and what I came to realize and appreciate in my in my experience riding to and from my job in Denver, was that the way that infrastructure is currently built is, at least in the conventional sense, is often very exclusionary, makes it almost impossible for the vast majority of people to get out there and actually participate in this activity that, as we know, many

00:04:01:10 - 00:04:29:10
Avi Stopper
people say that they want to do. And by the same token, it's also even for someone like me who's pretty confident out there, it can be stressful. And so the way that Bike streets originated was I would historic ride my bike in this bike lane near my house. And one day I just got kind of sick of riding, you know, two, three feet away from a big pickup trucks that were kind of buzzing my handlebars.

00:04:29:10 - 00:04:49:22
Avi Stopper
And so I started writing one street over. And if there is any slogan for the Bike Streets project that kind of encapsulates it in in one word, it is it is one street over. And the reality is often, especially in a grid based city, that one street over often is a really delightful place to get out and ride a bike.

00:04:49:27 - 00:05:21:15
Avi Stopper
So as I needed to get around town, I would incrementally look for these streets that had similar characteristics to the one street over street. That was the first one on which I tried this, and I found that there were these streets all over the place. And moreover, even as I started to converse with folks in and around Denver, both grizzled old biking veterans and people who were not especially confident on bikes, What I found was that there were all of these routes that existed in people's minds as this sort of folk knowledge.

00:05:22:06 - 00:05:36:03
Avi Stopper
That was how they actually liked to get around. And so that was kind of the origin, the spark of this idea that maybe we can create a complete network, maybe there's this complete network that already exists of these types of streets hiding in plain sight.

00:05:36:19 - 00:05:50:13
John Simmerman
Yeah, Yeah. So a, I've got a common history of having started my life as a utilitarian cyclist in Chicago as well. So it was, oh, I.

00:05:50:13 - 00:05:51:26
Avi Stopper
Didn't know that basically.

00:05:51:26 - 00:06:20:23
John Simmerman
Basically one of my, my first main jobs outside of California was, was actually in Chicago. And so I lived on the lakefront and I did the reverse commute out to Motorola's world headquarters in Schomberg. And so I would ride a little $15 bike from the apartment to the train station. And then I had the reverse commute. I'd get on a on the train, the metro train, and go out to Arlington Heights.

00:06:20:23 - 00:06:48:11
John Simmerman
And I had my pickup truck stashed there in Arlington Heights to make the short drive from Arlington Heights over to Schaumburg. And then I do the reverse, because I had absolutely no desire to drive that commute from the lakefront out to Schaumburg every day. And so I would do the planes, trains and automobiles as version with my little rickety bike riding through the snow.

00:06:48:27 - 00:07:11:15
John Simmerman
And I was, you know, confident that it would still be there at the train station because it was just a little tiny, you know, post bike. But it did the job. So that's that's where I got my my, my utilitarian commuter chops as well. And this was in the early to mid nineties. And so it was it was very much there.

00:07:11:25 - 00:07:37:28
John Simmerman
There wasn't much in terms of bicycle infrastructure, but honestly, it really didn't matter because of the exact reason that you're talking about. I learned those quiet neighborhoods, side streets and and then I just had to be very, very careful about navigating over. Now, one of the key things that we'll end up talking about, obviously, is the fact that I also happen to be a Ironman distance triathlon triathlete at the time.

00:07:38:06 - 00:08:04:21
John Simmerman
And so I was a confident cyclist, you know, with the scare quotes and racer at the time. And so, you know, that was a different type of situation. So we'll talk a little bit about those people like, you know, who are just not as confident as you and I might be out on the road, because I think that also then points to where this ends up going, too.

00:08:04:25 - 00:08:29:00
John Simmerman
But I want to get to over to your your website here in the landing page. And, you know, Vamos is relatively new as a as a naming because when you and I met a first time in September of last year, I don't think Vamos had been established here. But take us back a few years because you've been working on this for a little bit of time.

00:08:29:05 - 00:08:39:21
John Simmerman
Take us back to the early days of of bike streets. What what did you actually do before you started honing in on this campaign, the Vamos campaign?

00:08:40:27 - 00:09:16:29
Avi Stopper
Bike streets started in 2018, and the gist at that time was really this kind of overarching hypothesis that we wanted to explore. And the question was, can we create a complete prototype for a high comfort network in Denver based on what is on the ground already having having realized and acknowledged that there are all of these amazing, quiet residential streets that do interconnect because Denver has such a good grid, is it possible to create a complete map such that anyone can go anywhere?

00:09:16:29 - 00:09:48:20
Avi Stopper
Now, those are kind of the constraints. Can we create this complete map so that if I'm with my kids and I'm starting in point A, I can go to point B today and where point B can be any destination. So so really the origins were this cartography project, a crowdsourcing cartography project in which a bunch of people got together and shared their favorite neighborhood residential routes, the the streets that they already ride on.

00:09:48:20 - 00:10:14:07
Avi Stopper
Again, folk knowledge, as I described before, the streets that people already use today to go to various places in their neighborhoods. And what we wanted to see is, is there a way to take these existing favorite quiet routes to stitch them all together into one complete map? So that was kind of the originating question. And we did. And tens of thousands of people have used it.

00:10:14:07 - 00:10:37:11
Avi Stopper
The map online has been used almost three quarters of a million times. The map that you're showing right now, we Kickstarter added a printed copy. We gave away 20,000 copies in about six weeks. So the map has been used a lot. Personally, I've written 10 to 12000 miles on it in the last five years or so, and I've taken it's not just me.

00:10:37:11 - 00:10:57:09
Avi Stopper
I've taken people of all ages, abilities and backgrounds on group rides around town. So our organization, Bike Streets, leads. One of the things that we do is we lead group rides to show people that this exists and that you can use it already today. So. So the proof is in the pudding. The map exists, people use it, people can use it.

00:10:57:09 - 00:11:35:16
Avi Stopper
And we have demonstrated that at least the foundational components for this complete excellent high comfort network exist. So that was that was kind of the first step in this. During the early days of the pandemic, the city of Denver created this really amazing program that they called Shared Streets. And shared streets. We're basically a very small subset of residential streets, primarily where they did little more than put some type three barricades in place at intersections to discourage cut through traffic on these neighborhood streets.

00:11:35:16 - 00:12:00:11
Avi Stopper
So basically, they were saying if you live on a street, you can drive to your house, you can park in front of your house. But we're going to discourage high speed cut through traffic from using these types of neighborhoods, streets and instead encourage drivers to use the arterial or the collector. That's one street over. Right. So they created these shared streets and they were, in most cases, wildly popular.

00:12:00:11 - 00:12:35:20
Avi Stopper
And as you can see here, they use little more than type three barricades. And this created a transformation in the built environment. You had people out there walking, pushing strollers, riding skateboards, riding bikes. They were used in most places. They were used a tremendous amount. It wasn't perfect and a lot of lessons, important lessons were learned. But in some locations, they really created something that was very meaningful and meaningful, not just in sort of like the abstract, but meaningful in that tons of people were actually out there using them.

00:12:35:20 - 00:13:05:03
Avi Stopper
And one of the things just in the side real quickly for bike streets in Vamos is that we believe that the creation of infrastructure needs to be rooted in empiricism, which is to say that demonstrable outcomes, human outcomes are what matter, meaning there need to be tons and tons of people using these things, not just about creating the empty parking lot type of infrastructure that we often see where, you know, you have a bike lane or something and there are very few people using it.

00:13:05:12 - 00:13:14:11
Avi Stopper
These shared streets were just wildly popular in most cases and wildly popular and that tons of people were using them.

00:13:14:24 - 00:13:41:12
John Simmerman
Yeah, and I'll have oh, I'll have you pause for just a second to take a breath. And that was something that we saw globally that happened, you know, because of the pandemic and because of the lockdown there was this pent up need and and the ability to try to get out and occupy street space because we just didn't know enough about the virus at the time.

00:13:41:12 - 00:14:16:14
John Simmerman
And as you recall, it was like, okay, well, we don't necessarily want to be out on crowded sidewalks and crowded trails. And so opening up space and street space. And that was kind of interesting because it did a couple of very, very, I think, fantastic and phenomenal things in terms of reframing the public's mindset, not just in Denver, not just in Austin, but, you know, really globally in terms of what streets are for.

00:14:16:26 - 00:14:51:22
John Simmerman
So I'm going to go back a little bit to some of the the origins of of of Vamos and you starting to to really like hone in and say, ooh, okay we just had a sneak peek from the pandemic and and with the shared space and so a Y vamos y the name and then, and then we'll sort of build from there because I think you've got some you've got some images here that I think will really help bring the audience along on this narrative that you've put together.

00:14:52:00 - 00:14:54:09
John Simmerman
But but talk a little bit about the name.

00:14:57:27 - 00:15:27:29
Avi Stopper
Vamos is just a encapsulates the spirit of what we're trying to accomplish. This exciting, inclusive, complete network where people can say, Let's go, let's do this. What does it mean? Vamos means let's go in Spanish and very good. So it's all about creating this energy, this enthusiasm and excitement to get up and move. Yeah.

00:15:28:18 - 00:15:41:07
John Simmerman
Love it. But so so walk us through these images here. So we've got this. Okay, let's get up. Let's move.

00:15:41:07 - 00:16:12:16
Avi Stopper
But yeah, so this is actually an image that that I think in one picture explains why Vamos is so important, because this is, of course, conventional infrastructure. This happens to be that bike land that I described before in my neighborhood. And the way to read and interpret this photo is from the perspective of access. So for people who are more confident on a bike, this is probably a little bit offensive, a little bit scary.

00:16:12:26 - 00:16:42:17
Avi Stopper
But from the perspective of people who are less confident, children, you know, demographics that we often don't see represented out on our streets, women, you know, less confident people who just who don't have as much experience. You see this and it's just a terrible advertisement for moving around a community without a car. And so in a nutshell, this explains why spaces that are shared as opposed to not shared are so important.

00:16:42:17 - 00:16:58:16
Avi Stopper
And this is really the sort of foundational image of all of our work in many regards, because it demonstrate it's why the conventional approach, why the status quo is not working. This is not creating access for the vast majority of people.

00:16:58:27 - 00:17:13:27
John Simmerman
Right? Yeah. And then and this is another example of of, you know, that old style, just like this one is the old style of a bike lane of just a painted bike lane. This is the other old style of sharing.

00:17:13:29 - 00:17:37:26
Avi Stopper
This is even old. And just personalize this a little bit. This is this is the nominal bike facility near my daughter's school. Right. And from our perspective as parents, this is why she can't ride her bike to school because this is just not an acceptable environment in which in which, you know, a child would be moving around a community.

00:17:38:07 - 00:18:07:13
Avi Stopper
So so from an access standpoint, the outcome is that while nominally and we can look at some maps of Denver's theoretical bike map in a in a moment but you know you can put this on a map and say, look, we have a bike facility here, but realistically, if you have high traffic volumes, as this particular street does, and it's in a totally shared or not even really a shared but a shero type of environment, then you end up precluding use by the vast majority of people.

00:18:07:24 - 00:18:18:19
John Simmerman
Yeah, and that's a good I'm glad you kind of highlighted the fact that there's a difference between shared space and just slapping a share down right.

00:18:18:19 - 00:18:42:29
Avi Stopper
Yeah. This is another example. This is one of the real theoretical arterial bike corridors in Denver on a street called Mont View. And to be fair, those people who do ride bikes use this a fair bit. However, you're in an environment in which you're being passed by, you know, two three ton vehicles at high speeds and there is no protection whatsoever.

00:18:43:08 - 00:18:49:04
John Simmerman
I'm confused by this too. Is is the are the vehicles on the left are those parked vehicles.

00:18:49:04 - 00:18:50:17
Avi Stopper
And so, yes, the.

00:18:50:17 - 00:18:52:21
John Simmerman
Traveling motor vehicles will be traveling to the right.

00:18:53:05 - 00:19:02:24
Avi Stopper
So the right lane here that looks empty at the moment is the parking lane. Then you get a bike lane and then you've got the travel lane, a couple left.

00:19:03:18 - 00:19:13:06
John Simmerman
So I was confused. So this brings us to this origins photo. What are we looking at in this particular map?

00:19:13:06 - 00:19:35:12
Avi Stopper
Image Yeah, So often I think a lot of people will be familiar with this reality that when you zoom out to 10,000 feet, things look pretty different than when you're on the ground. So this is the the Denver bike map as it currently exists. And when you look at this, you say, wow, Denver has an incredible bike network.

00:19:35:12 - 00:19:57:09
Avi Stopper
You can right everywhere it would seem. You can even ride in the far northeast. You can ride to the to the airport in Denver. When you start to evaluate the actual on the ground reality, it's radically different. And and there's a photo in there of Panya Boulevard. This is the one. Right. And Panya Boulevard is basically tantamount to an interstate.

00:19:57:16 - 00:20:34:29
Avi Stopper
You know, speeds are 75 miles an hour out here. And you can see on the right hand side, there's this bike on the shoulder. So so the reality what we've tried to call attention to is that the reality of the existing bike network is quite different from a reality in which access is created, in which the vast majority of people who might like to ride a bike, you know, we all talk about the the interested but concerned group of of two thirds of the population that theoretically is interested in being out and and using active transportation.

00:20:34:29 - 00:20:56:25
Avi Stopper
Well, you know, the reality is that when you look at these types of scenes, it's it's clearer and this one's a little bit exaggerated because this is one in the extreme. But but it's not that different All around town. You are really engaged, heavily engaged in heavy traffic in the majority of Denver's existing bike infrastructure.

00:20:57:05 - 00:21:19:15
John Simmerman
Yeah, Well, and to be clear, too, this is an example of, you know, sort of legacy approach of bike network stuff. You know, you've got your your bike on shoulder. Again, this is Pennie Boulevard. So these vehicles are traveling in upwards of 65 miles per hour or more, really, and the distances are quite great. This is quite a far trek.

00:21:20:22 - 00:21:47:18
John Simmerman
Yeah, pretty much this network, this bike network, the lines on the map that are represented by these facilities. And again, for us, who are the confidence riders and experienced riders and not deterred by this a distance, we're like we're glad that we've got a, you know, at least something. But this is not appropriate. This is only 1.5% of, you know, the Denver population.

00:21:47:23 - 00:21:59:19
John Simmerman
If that you know, the other you know, the vast majority of people who would ride wouldn't even consider this. So then we compare that to that.

00:21:59:19 - 00:22:18:04
Avi Stopper
Yeah. So so that's a good contrast that you draw there. And so this is the one street over approach. So rather than riding in that conventional bike lane that had the F150 in it, I started riding on this street one street over and, and you can just see looking at this, it's almost like you can breathe deeply and just exhale.

00:22:18:14 - 00:22:55:05
Avi Stopper
This is a qualitatively different experience on a radical scale. And I think that one of the things that's most important to acknowledge here is that while these routes and the Bike streets map are in their current state, not perfect, the level of intervention that's necessary to to make these closer to perfect is so much less challenging from an engineering and cost perspective, from a time perspective than what is typically the case on big Arterial and collector types of streets that really do.

00:22:55:05 - 00:23:22:22
Avi Stopper
I mean, we're not against by any stretch of the imagination, high comfort bike facilities on collectors and arterials. What we acknowledge, however, is that the creation of a complete high comfort network has to be paramount and protected. Bike lanes and high comfort bike infrastructure on collectors and arterials have a significant scale problem, which is that they're expensive. It takes a long time to build them.

00:23:22:22 - 00:23:47:24
Avi Stopper
It takes a ton of engineering and they're politically volatile often. And so while we're not by any stretch not in favor of those, there is a scale problem that often makes it very difficult for cities to build protected infrastructure while simultaneously producing a complete network and so Denver has some awesome protected bike lanes, but we don't have a complete network of protected bike lanes.

00:23:48:01 - 00:24:03:18
Avi Stopper
And if you don't have a complete network, you might as well not even contend, right, Because it's like saying, you know, drive from this part of Denver to another part of Denver that includes crossing a river, you know, And there are no bridges there, right?

00:24:03:27 - 00:24:04:06
John Simmerman
Yeah.

00:24:04:24 - 00:24:26:10
Avi Stopper
If you have one mile of protected bike lanes here, one mile of protected bike lanes here, you produced this archipelago that's disconnected. And so everything that we do is oriented around a set of design constraints. And and chief among those is how do you create a complete network so that everyone can get to all the places they need to go.

00:24:26:25 - 00:24:28:15
John Simmerman
And that brings us to this illustration.

00:24:29:27 - 00:25:02:03
Avi Stopper
Yeah. So this is this is actually pulled from the city of Denver's website, from from the bike plan section of the website. And just one quick note, The the red line there is ours editorializing, actually not editorializing. This is the way the city basically draws a distinction between low comfort and high comfort bike infrastructure. And they draw that line, which we drew just to illustrate it here between buffered bike lanes and protected bike lanes.

00:25:02:03 - 00:25:12:20
Avi Stopper
So all that to say that, you know, conventional zero routes, bike lanes, conventional painted doors on bike lanes and buffered bike lanes even are not considered high comfort.

00:25:13:04 - 00:25:13:12
John Simmerman
Right.

00:25:14:10 - 00:25:30:27
Avi Stopper
On the other side of the line and moving in a sort of hierarchical direction. Protected bike lanes are considered high comfort neighborhood bikeways, which are these residential streets that are maybe even more comfortable and quiet, are considered high comfort. And then.

00:25:31:09 - 00:25:31:25
John Simmerman
Yes.

00:25:32:09 - 00:25:38:00
Avi Stopper
Yeah, exactly. There you go. So that is a street that is not currently a neighborhood bikeway, but that is a while.

00:25:38:00 - 00:25:48:23
John Simmerman
But this is a this is a visual illustration of what we imagine as being a high comfort neighborhood bike way where a family feels comfortable being able to occupy this space.

00:25:48:23 - 00:26:18:09
Avi Stopper
Precisely. And a great heuristic here that I love on that last picture, actually, if you'll just go back to that one real quick, it's the kid on the 12 inch bike on the right is wearing a an R2-D2 Star Wars helmet. And and so you can draw inspiration from that and say that if a route is comfortable enough for a kid wearing an R2-D2 helmet on a 12 inch bike, then you've probably you've probably gotten a ride.

00:26:18:09 - 00:26:40:19
Avi Stopper
This picture actually is really important, though, because this is on a street. This is on 22nd AV in Denver. And to your right, one street south is Mont Vue, which is that bike lane that we saw a moment ago. And to the north one street is 23rd AV, which is alternating a bike lane and a narrow type of route.

00:26:41:00 - 00:26:54:01
Avi Stopper
And yet people in this neighborhood, they don't ride on. That's on either of those. They ride on this street and this street in its current state is is unmarked from or un designated from a bike bike infrastructure standpoint.

00:26:54:15 - 00:27:23:21
John Simmerman
Yeah yeah. And you know to be clear too, I mean some people may have take umbrage with, you know, the positioning of the neighborhood bike as being higher comfort than the protected bike lane. And don't try to split hairs, folks, on this. I mean, yeah, sure, you could have a protected bike way that is bike lane that is much more comfortable than your typical North American neighborhood bike way.

00:27:23:21 - 00:27:57:12
John Simmerman
Don't don't get out of, you know, whack on that. The point is, is that oftentimes where we see protected bike lanes installed not only here in North America but around the world, globally, it's because there's a reason to have separation and protection from the traveling motor vehicle speed in the Netherlands. That dividing line is when you are next to motor vehicle traffic that is traveling 30 kilometers per hour or more.

00:27:57:12 - 00:28:09:26
John Simmerman
So essentially, if you're mixing it up with traffic that's traveling in excess of 17 miles per hour or more, then you get a protected and or separated facility. So I just wanted to.

00:28:09:26 - 00:28:30:07
Avi Stopper
Point and one thing, John, that I just add to that is that people do often, I think, get wrapped up in sort of what topology is out there. And ultimately it's more about design, right? It's more about is volume being adequately reduced on a neighborhood bike way, is the protected bike lane indeed. Providing protection.

00:28:30:14 - 00:28:36:14
John Simmerman
Yeah. So we've got a gift running on on this particular slide. What are what are we looking at here Right.

00:28:36:14 - 00:29:07:11
Avi Stopper
So when you see the complete network, that's the image that we showed before of Denver's complete bike network. So this includes facilities of all types. So this includes sharing routes, it includes bike lanes, it includes buffered bike lanes and so on up the hierarchy. And so this is analysis and analysis that we performed in which we removed all of those routes that do not actually achieve the high comfort standard that the city is going for.

00:29:08:03 - 00:29:40:04
Avi Stopper
The city has promised to its its citizens a complete high comfort bike network. And so this is really an analysis of where are we at this point? Because again, the thousand foot level, wow, Denver has this incredible complete bike network. What is it actually look like from an access standpoint for people who are less comfortable? And if anything, this gif shows the striking difference between what the bike network theoretic is and what it actually is for the vast majority of people, right?

00:29:40:24 - 00:29:46:19
John Simmerman
Yeah. You know, that's that's phenomenal. And and then we have it in red here. So what do we have here in red?

00:29:47:09 - 00:30:04:26
Avi Stopper
Yeah. So this is, this is contemplated new infrastructure. So this is, these are projects that are in some way, shape or form in the works. And the more complete version of this includes all of those facilities that.

00:30:05:12 - 00:30:05:28
John Simmerman
Are.

00:30:07:07 - 00:30:31:20
Avi Stopper
Excuse me, it includes all of the facilities. And then we remove again those that are not considered high comfort. And so it begs the question, if our if our attempt here is to create a complete high comfort network that everyone can use, and we acknowledge that a lot of the infrastructure typologies are not actually high comfort, why are we building those that are not high comfort?

00:30:31:20 - 00:30:50:03
Avi Stopper
Because clearly, you know, we're going to go spend a tremendous amount of time, energy, taxpayer money on creating these things. Why are we creating facilities, continuing to create facilities that do not achieve our own thresholds on what is going to produce access?

00:30:50:12 - 00:31:07:11
John Simmerman
Right. So when you when you kind of tease out those lanes that aren't considered high comfort, what on earth are they still building? That's considered not high comfort, Are they still doing just painted bike lanes and sheroes?

00:31:08:00 - 00:31:42:27
Avi Stopper
Yeah, they're painted bike lanes going in their sheroes. They're buffered bike lanes. A lot of you know, it's it's all three. This image here is basically the current state of high comfort and the potential future state of high comfort. And what you can see quite evidently, is that there are huge swaths that don't have coverage. There are massive gaps such that this, again, this design constraint that we have set for ourselves, which is that, you know, anyone should be able to ride a bike, use active transportation to get to any destination.

00:31:42:27 - 00:31:45:24
Avi Stopper
Denver is not accomplished by this future state.

00:31:46:11 - 00:31:50:18
John Simmerman
Right. And the blue lines, what are those represent?

00:31:51:25 - 00:32:01:15
Avi Stopper
The blue lines are the existing high comfort infrastructure. And most of those, if you just kind of hone in a little bit, are wiggly, which means that they're trails.

00:32:01:28 - 00:32:14:03
John Simmerman
Yeah. And I, I specifically wanted you to address that wiggly ness because yeah, those are actually following some of the repairing lines. So this is actually following the creek beds.

00:32:15:14 - 00:32:16:05
Avi Stopper
Exactly.

00:32:16:11 - 00:32:37:09
John Simmerman
Yeah. Yeah. So we pulled together. This is, this is obviously, you know, this is a it started out as RV, you know, what, five years ago. That's right. And then you started taking a whole bunch of people on bike rides. Now you have a whole platoon of volunteers. What are we doing here?

00:32:38:08 - 00:33:02:12
Avi Stopper
Yeah. So this is actually a photo from five years ago where we convened all these folks for rides, I think an occasional beer here and there. And we sat together and talked about the places where we already ride our bikes. And so this was part and parcel of the the initial crowdsourcing effort, which was we had a bunch of large scale maps that we printed out.

00:33:02:13 - 00:33:33:27
Avi Stopper
Lots of people were contributing, you know, all over town, were creating and contributing their favorite routes. And then what we tried to do was take all of these existing folk knowledge routes and connect them into one coherent into one coherent map. This is a ride that we took with some folks in Montebello, which is a neighborhood up by the airport, one that's very disconnected from the rest of Denver and one of the great challenges remains to this day.

00:33:33:27 - 00:33:45:24
Avi Stopper
How do you connect Montebello to the rest of Denver with active transportation? And it remains unsolved despite a tremendous amount of hard work, including by those folks who are pictured in this image.

00:33:46:03 - 00:34:18:04
John Simmerman
Yeah, and the thing that I want to point out to is that as weird gets out that you're doing these rides, you're starting to attract non cyclists types. In other words, you're starting to bring in people into the fold because honestly, quite frankly, you know, the confident, experienced riders, they don't they don't need RV, they don't need, you know, because they had figured this stuff out.

00:34:18:15 - 00:34:37:27
John Simmerman
They you know, they they sniff it out, they snoop it out, they do whatever. So this really ends up becoming a bottom up community, a, you know, sort of initiative. And you're starting to attract people who are interested, yet they're concerned and maybe just don't know kind of the way around. I think that's brilliant.

00:34:38:12 - 00:35:02:03
Avi Stopper
Yeah. I mean, everyone who is confident on a bike today has people in their lives who are not right and people in their lives who they want to empower, who they to feel confident and comfortable out there. And so what we have found is that, you know, the initial sort of points of contact are the people who already do this and care about it.

00:35:02:12 - 00:35:15:16
Avi Stopper
But the second degree that's so important is their friends and family. You know, it is the people in their lives who they want to see empowered to move around their community in the way that they want to. And so we just do.

00:35:15:16 - 00:35:36:12
John Simmerman
And things change, too, with our with our lives. I mean, like, you know, a we get older, you know, you know, somebody who's closing in on 60 years old, you know, I'm I'm I'm different than I was when I was, you know, riding as a racer at 30. And then, you know, life situations change. You know, suddenly you're a parent.

00:35:36:12 - 00:35:41:18
John Simmerman
And so things start to have different, different priorities. So that happens.

00:35:41:18 - 00:36:06:02
Avi Stopper
Yeah. And I think, you know, I think that that empathetic perspective for for people who already really care about active transportation, who use it, who are confident in the built environment, I think it's really important for for people like us to develop our sense of for those who do not have this, because a lot of folks look at those bike lanes and say, great, you know, we built a bike lane.

00:36:06:02 - 00:36:27:10
Avi Stopper
That's fantastic. But it's important to think about it. You know, in marketing, we often think about personas, the different types of people who might be the consumers of a given product. And and if you think about a bike facility from that perspective, is it appealing to a broad set of personas that, you know, the people who don't just look like us?

00:36:27:11 - 00:37:04:01
Avi Stopper
It's it's really it's eye opening because you start to say, well, wait a sec. Objectively, this is not a place that I would take my eight year olds or my my, my niece, who's eight or, you know, or my great aunt or whoever, you know, whoever the person who fills that space in your mind as the person who might like to do this, who could benefit from it, whose health would improve from it, who's over a health, physical and mental health would improve from it, who's who's pocketbook would not be so heavily affected by the cost of conventional transportation could benefit from it, but isn't doing it now.

00:37:04:02 - 00:37:16:24
Avi Stopper
You start to empathize with folks in that perspective, and it's quite dramatic when you start to apply that filter to existing facilities that you may be confident in.

00:37:17:03 - 00:37:25:05
John Simmerman
Yeah, and that's that's the reason why the terminology, all ages and abilities is so incredibly powerful and inclusive.

00:37:26:02 - 00:37:42:27
Avi Stopper
Incredibly. Yeah, it is. That is the be all end all. Because if we want to give people the wherewithal to empower folks to actually do this, we have to design from that perspective can't be designed from the perspective of the top 1% of folks.

00:37:43:00 - 00:37:58:15
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so that brings us back over to, you know, the the images here and getting into some of the other realities. So what are we looking at in this particular map?

00:37:58:15 - 00:38:27:09
Avi Stopper
So this is the complete bike streets map or the Vamos map, and it's basically the outcome of that process that we've described. And it's 400 miles of existing trails and quiet residential streets. And, you know, this map is is constantly evolving as our understanding of where to go improves. And we hear from folks, where routes are missing, where places are that they already go.

00:38:27:09 - 00:38:56:27
Avi Stopper
And so this is, you know, a constant work in progress. But it's really for a lot of folks and we hear this all the time, made it possible for them to get around town. Now, to be fair, the majority of the routes here are not designated, right. These are just quiet neighborhood streets. And so while we think this is a really strong foundation and the results seem to demonstrate that that's the case, there are many ways in which this could be massively upgraded.

00:38:56:27 - 00:39:24:24
Avi Stopper
And so that's really what Vamos is about. Vamos is about a specific implementation plan for how this map, the Cities urban plans, which call for a complete high comfort network. And the thing that we were discussing before our shared streets, those three ingredients really provide a formula for producing what we think would become the best complete, high comfort Mac and bike network in the country.

00:39:25:08 - 00:39:39:20
John Simmerman
Okay, so let me see if I can predict what these colors mean here. So I'm going to say that the color green is representing some of those off street network trails and pathways like the Cherry Creek path.

00:39:40:11 - 00:39:41:02
Avi Stopper
That's correct.

00:39:41:06 - 00:39:49:28
John Simmerman
Okay. So that's what that is. Now, what's this little purplish connector right here in in between? What is that little little guy there?

00:39:50:15 - 00:40:22:18
Avi Stopper
So that is a sidewalk that is designated as a shared use trail. That one happens to be on this viaduct over the train tracks. I wrote it yesterday, actually, and it is potentially the most protected piece of bike infrastructure. You you just have the radar going. This is possibly the most protected piece of infrastructure in the city because there are Jersey barricades or barriers that that are basically protecting this sidewalk from the two lanes of high speed traffic on on.

00:40:23:06 - 00:40:29:12
John Simmerman
Getting the past of massive barrier that is the interstate highway, either I-25 there.

00:40:29:14 - 00:40:33:11
Avi Stopper
Yeah, that section is actually under a 25 on the sidewalk.

00:40:33:12 - 00:40:47:09
John Simmerman
Got it. Got it. So it's under it. And then the blue I'm predicting are your bike streets, are your, you know, vamos style bike, street style, quieter neighborhood streets. Am I correct?

00:40:47:09 - 00:40:48:21
Avi Stopper
They're precise.

00:40:49:00 - 00:40:53:04
John Simmerman
Okay, great. And then what are some of the the red ones that we see occasionally?

00:40:54:00 - 00:41:18:18
Avi Stopper
Yeah. So the red ones are sidewalks that we suggest the city designate as shared use trails. Okay. Those are so they're said in the city's toolkit for creating active transportation infrastructure. As I described before, there is already this this method where you take a piece of sidewalk, a segment of sidewalk and you designated as a shared use trail.

00:41:18:27 - 00:41:46:28
Avi Stopper
So we're suggesting that those are the types of places, at least in the interim, that should be shared use trails longer term. And what Vamos includes is this methodology for upgrading those incrementally over time. So maybe they aren't a sidewalk in the long term or maybe there is a designated signal there, or maybe there is an upgraded street environment with with volume or traffic volume reduction methods in place.

00:41:47:29 - 00:42:00:06
Avi Stopper
There are, I think the read sections more than anything embody the opportunity for upgrades and improvement over time. Once the city adopts Vamos and codifies it.

00:42:00:28 - 00:42:13:03
John Simmerman
And then I'm going to predict that the black is probably current city protected or high comfort facilities that are already in place. Is that correct?

00:42:13:14 - 00:42:39:19
Avi Stopper
So actually this is the one block is the one exception to the rule. So like there are a few buffered bike lanes that, we include a few bike lanes that we include and these tend to be the most popular existing bike corridors in town. These are the places where there is a huge amount of bike density and hopefully driver awareness as well.

00:42:40:01 - 00:42:50:14
Avi Stopper
So that one connecting City Park to downtown, that's 16th of that is the most popular bike corridor in town and it's a nearly.

00:42:50:17 - 00:42:51:17
John Simmerman
Buffered bike lane.

00:42:51:27 - 00:42:53:27
Avi Stopper
That has actually a painted bike lane.

00:42:53:28 - 00:42:55:18
John Simmerman
So that isn't in bike lane. Okay.

00:42:56:05 - 00:43:07:06
Avi Stopper
That that was incidentally, however, during the early days of the pandemic that was a shared streets environments and one that was much loved and will hopefully be returning in short order.

00:43:07:14 - 00:43:12:18
John Simmerman
Got it. All right. So we have a zoom in here. Why are we zooming in on this one that.

00:43:12:18 - 00:43:49:24
Avi Stopper
Looks like a GPS beacon? So our project has also done a bunch of open source software and hardware development. And we in 2019 released the very first primitive to be fair versions but powerful versions of open source mobile applications. And so this is just the first version that demonstrates that you can have the map. The bike streets are almost map superimposed on the Denver City map and understand where you are at any given moment using your using your mobile device.

00:43:50:24 - 00:44:01:11
Avi Stopper
There are lots of additional things that we're working on with that. Most importantly, perhaps is custom routing so that people can easily get a route from where they are to where they're going.

00:44:02:07 - 00:44:16:26
John Simmerman
Which, by the way, that is an option right on the website. You can actually just kind of click on custom routing DIY and in am I correct in that the person, you know, put some information in and then you guys get back to them.

00:44:17:18 - 00:44:36:11
Avi Stopper
That's right. Yeah. So, so routing as it currently exists is what we call returned in real time, meaning that you enter your starting point and your ending point and a volunteer then takes your request and designs a custom route for you and then emails it to you like this.

00:44:36:11 - 00:44:37:02
John Simmerman
This stuff might leave.

00:44:37:04 - 00:44:48:10
Avi Stopper
Something down the line will be done in real time, but assuming that you don't need it at that particular moment, it's a pretty good way to plan in advance. It's been it's been it's been quite a popular, popular feature.

00:44:48:16 - 00:44:55:09
John Simmerman
And here's the 2019 map, which was the year that you did the actual printing of it right?

00:44:55:09 - 00:44:58:20
Avi Stopper
Yeah. So this was it was really fun to have this in a tactile form.

00:44:59:13 - 00:45:10:12
John Simmerman
So again, we're back to an analysis here. So now we've got a much more comprehensive analysis flow of flopping through here. We've got three different phases. Walk us through this one.

00:45:11:06 - 00:45:48:20
Avi Stopper
Yeah. So this basically shows again in light blue, the existing high comfort network as it stands, right? Orange then layers on what is contemplated, high comfort infrastructure for the future. And then this mostly serves as a contrast between what the future state, as it's currently planned, appears to be and what it could be. So dark blue is the bike streets are vamos network superimposed on top and what you can see is that realistically to accomplish that design constraint, which is for people to be able to get anywhere, you have to have a lot more coverage.

00:45:49:00 - 00:46:12:26
John Simmerman
Right? Yeah. And really, I mean, when you look at this, this is incredibly powerful. And to your point, when you and I met last year, you pointed out, you know, it was going to take years and years and, you know, literally millions upon millions of dollars to build out the high comfort network that the city has planned here in red.

00:46:13:08 - 00:46:25:23
John Simmerman
And it's still not going to provide what you are saying and demonstrating can be done much quicker, much less costly as represented in the blue.

00:46:27:04 - 00:46:47:25
Avi Stopper
Yeah, and what's interesting about that, I think in the context of our city, our urban plan, those that we have agreed upon as a community is that we are describing in those an outcome that is divorced from the reality of what the proposed network actually makes.

00:46:47:27 - 00:46:54:27
John Simmerman
I like your strong words. Completely divorced, I added completely divorced from the reality.

00:46:54:27 - 00:47:00:19
Avi Stopper
Well, you know, just the question is, are we serious about what the plans say?

00:47:00:27 - 00:47:01:06
John Simmerman
Right.

00:47:01:22 - 00:47:10:16
Avi Stopper
And if we are serious about that, then we need to take a look at our methodology and see if indeed we are producing that sort of outcome.

00:47:10:24 - 00:47:38:23
John Simmerman
Yeah, And that's to your point with this graphic here is like, okay, let's take a typical route. We want to go from Congress Park and make our way up to Confluence Park. That's right. The river there. And and the reality is that when we when we zoom in on, you know, the current high comfort map is like, yeah, no, we can't get there from here because where we want to go is we want to go this direction.

00:47:38:23 - 00:48:09:12
John Simmerman
We want to get on up over there. And again, even looking at the future high comfort map, sorry you can't get there from there, but what you're saying is, you know, hey, we can get there by using Vamos. And with Vamos we're going to be using a combination of all the different types of facilities that we have access to, including some existing facilities such as, you know, the current high comfort route that is represented diagonally here.

00:48:09:23 - 00:48:41:19
John Simmerman
You're you know, you're just like you're really kind of taking a pragmatic and practical approach of saying we're going to use a combination of quiet city streets, existing bike lanes that are high comfort, existing off street network facilities and be able to do that. But the reality is, is that if we just rely upon what the city is trying to put forward in terms of future highway comfort map, you still won't be able to get there.

00:48:43:01 - 00:49:05:15
Avi Stopper
That's exactly the case. And just one piece of color commentary to add here is that we created this. This is an analysis that we did on eight on a ton of routes that are actual routes that people requested through that surface just describing. And so what we wanted to see is are the actual routes that people are riding, are they possible today?

00:49:05:15 - 00:49:34:26
Avi Stopper
And and I hope that just objectively all of us, you know, everyone engaged in this conversation from advocates to individuals, you know, who aren't particularly active to the city, can acknowledge that if we're trying to produce a given outcome, we can look at this and say objectively, it's not possible. And so therefore, we need to reevaluate our methodology.

00:49:35:06 - 00:49:52:04
Avi Stopper
And and you're exactly right that the existing high comfort infrastructure is critical. It's a critical backbone. And our exploration with our work on Vamos is just how can we do this at scale? So that you actually can make these trips. Yeah.

00:49:52:16 - 00:50:27:02
John Simmerman
Yeah. And testing and get and getting people out in number again becomes part of what you were talking about earlier is being able to activate said infrastructure because that's right the build it in they will come sort of approach to building out bicycle networks is is really only as good as a is it really truly all ages and abilities Is it really truly high comfort and does it meet you know, does it meet the needs of said population?

00:50:27:14 - 00:51:04:04
John Simmerman
And even then the the people who will jump right on it are the early adopters and the people who are sitting back in in, you know, in the wings who have been advocating for and wanting it all along. But what we don't necessarily see is mass adoption of and adaptation and behavior of the interested yet concerned. But then when you you layer on activation activities and events and programing, that's what I call the software activity assets.

00:51:04:09 - 00:51:30:01
John Simmerman
The hardware activity assets are building out your actual network. That's the that's something that we can map on your map, map on that bike maps, map, you know, map on on the cities maps those you can do you can put a pin on it and say this is where the networks exist. And I want to make sure that we put a pin on that thought, because I want to talk a little bit about bike maps later.

00:51:30:10 - 00:51:48:29
John Simmerman
But ultimately, that's the hardware, that's the physical stuff, the software, the activity assets that are considering the programing and the events and the engagement activities are so important when it comes to actually changing human behavior.

00:51:48:29 - 00:52:17:07
Avi Stopper
I couldn't have said it better. I you know, I think that we have to acknowledge that one of the most I'm so glad to use the B word behavior, because one of the most entrenched behaviors is that when we go places, we use our cars. Right. And so I think that we need to be very aware of the probability that simply creating the infrastructure is not going to produce the behavioral change that we seek.

00:52:17:15 - 00:52:18:10
Avi Stopper
And so this is.

00:52:18:11 - 00:52:36:04
John Simmerman
Back to this that brings us back to this series of photos, because that brings us back to the pandemic and the fact that we had something where, oh, suddenly there's changes to our street space, there's some expectation as drivers that are behavior needs to sort of adapt and change.

00:52:36:07 - 00:52:54:27
Avi Stopper
Yeah, yeah, I like that photo in particular because it is the last one, because it is the street view image and it shows that people are out there. And it's not to say that, you know, it's binary. Like if you build it, they will come works or doesn't work. There are certainly people who, when given these spaces, will activate them and use them.

00:52:55:04 - 00:53:26:21
John Simmerman
Yeah, but you zoom out on this one here because you've got success here. Yeah. And so what we're doing here is we're, we're giving some commentary to, you know, what's the purpose? Well, the purpose is to slow motor vehicles down and if possible, also decrease the number of motor vehicles in a said space. And so this is the success model and then this is the fail model.

00:53:26:21 - 00:53:53:01
Avi Stopper
Yeah, this is important because this this acknowledges this this second image here, this fail image. This is also on a shared street. And It acknowledges that in certain locations, shared streets in their implemented form were not as successful as they could have been. In this case. They put a shared street on a collector that was a really important thruway for drivers.

00:53:53:01 - 00:54:13:27
Avi Stopper
That's not to say that that collector could not be turned into a great bike facility. It's that this particular design, this particular treatment, you know, didn't work. I set out at this spot and counted for about an hour. I saw zero people walking, zero people rolling, zero people on bikes and any number of cars basically turning this into a slalom course.

00:54:13:27 - 00:54:41:21
Avi Stopper
You know, drivers were using this to to sort of slalom their way down the road. And and so this is one of the reasons that that empiricism is just so important because we go out we build that thing, we declare success. It may not actually be a success. Right. We need to observe human scale results. And, you know, in these facilities to to confirm or confirm and be honest with ourselves when we haven't hit the mark and refactor accordingly.

00:54:42:10 - 00:54:45:15
John Simmerman
So we're moving some big construction work here. What's going on.

00:54:45:18 - 00:55:10:19
Avi Stopper
Yeah. So this is on one of the city's neighborhood bikeways and this is an important photo. The neighborhood bike way actually is Purp and peculiar to the direction of travel here that that we're looking so Garfield the street that you can kind of see intersecting First off here is the neighborhood bikeway and this is just an important thing for us to keep in mind when we think about infrastructure at scale.

00:55:11:07 - 00:55:33:29
Avi Stopper
This is a massive project. It took months to build massive crews pouring tons of concrete. And so when you think about this at one intersection, it's, you know, it's center section is pretty darn good now. But when you think about this from the perspective, again, of that design constraint, that you have to have a complete network if you want people to realistically be able to go places.

00:55:34:05 - 00:56:03:04
Avi Stopper
You look at this and you say, well, this is an approach that that that will that will not scale especially well. And you can understand why projections related to a complete high comfort bike network in Denver are like, you know, running out to 2050 in the latest draft versions of the city's plans. So it's about finding the balance between producing the environment that you want at the ground level, while also acknowledging that that this just does not scale well.

00:56:03:04 - 00:56:04:12
John Simmerman
Right. Yeah.

00:56:06:02 - 00:56:27:25
Avi Stopper
And this is sort of the outcome of that type of process, which is this really well-designed, engineered, built in, diverter with poured concrete on site. And this is a fabulous feature on a bike way on 35th of in Northwest Denver. And this is sort of like the type case. This is the first one that the city produced and it's excellent.

00:56:27:25 - 00:56:52:13
Avi Stopper
It serves the purpose. And and yet it also illustrates and illuminates the scale problem. It's incredibly expensive. There were huge crews of folks out building this. And while bicyclists and you know, people walking and rolling on either side of this intersection get the benefit of this diversion for a few blocks. This is a three mile stretch of road that has one of these on it.

00:56:52:24 - 00:57:13:25
Avi Stopper
And our estimates are that you need something more like 11 of these features to actually produce the comfort level far away from this from this particular feature that that will make it accessible for all people. And this is just getting back to that point that you made before about, you know, is neighborhood bike way better than a than a bike than a protected bike lane?

00:57:14:05 - 00:57:29:04
Avi Stopper
I don't know. I don't care. It's really about the quality of the design. And the design here is exceptional. The problem is that when you zoom out, you see that this has not scaled and the protection that this produces is really ephemeral.

00:57:30:04 - 00:57:52:03
John Simmerman
And what's I think what I would even go for is to say is that this is the after picture and we've got things that we can do that are lighter, quicker, cheaper, that are the before pictures, you know, or write an interim picture, because the before picture is it's nothing is there. And you've got that big huge ram truck, you know, blowing through at high speeds.

00:57:52:18 - 00:58:16:29
John Simmerman
And then the interim is something that is lighter, quicker, cheaper. And then ultimately getting to something that when you can get to that point, you do that. Now, that's that's where this PDF comes in and I'll zoom out so that we can get a, a better visual on the entire PDF. Here is you've got a step by step plan here once you walk us through this.

00:58:17:23 - 00:58:47:18
Avi Stopper
Yeah. So the essence of Vamos is that it is the step by step implementation plan for the broader urban plans that the city says we're going to to do. Vamos acknowledges that there is this gap between plan and vision and actual execution and implementation. And so the way that we envision this taking place and unfolding is incrementally larger pilot programs that demonstrate atomic units of the Vamos plan.

00:58:47:29 - 00:59:16:21
Avi Stopper
So the first one is, as simple as taking one residential intersection and demonstrating that a diverter can be template sized on these more or less consistent 30 by 30 foot intersections, residential intersections in Denver. And we would literally do this for a couple of hours with some cones and chalk simply to demonstrate that a template approach, a templated approach, can work in the creation of these dividers.

00:59:16:21 - 00:59:48:17
Avi Stopper
And why is the template important? It's important for the scale reasons that we've discussed now ad nauseum, which is that if you spend a tremendous amount of time and money on engineering, every feature, you can't produce that many features. So we escalate incrementally from there. Okay? We create we demonstrate that that a template sized diverter work. Now let's demonstrate what some of those can look like in concert when you have a concentrated group of them rather than one in isolation.

00:59:48:17 - 01:00:19:14
Avi Stopper
And then let's do it on a stretch of street and then let's do it on a few stretches of street that interconnect. And these can be short term demonstration projects. And one thing that I want to emphasize that is so important about this is that community engagement can happen as it did with shared streets through an experience form where people get to actually see what these things are like in their neighborhoods and the impact and the improvements that they can produce before they become permanent.

01:00:20:03 - 01:00:47:20
Avi Stopper
So the feedback that you're getting from a community engagement standpoint is actually based on real lived experience rather than just like someone looking at some pictures and saying, I hate this, I like this, I hate this, I like this, I love this, I don't like this, which is such a challenging set of projection biases because people are trying to anticipate how they're going to behave at some indeterminate point in the future as opposed to actually going out and seeing what it's like and experiencing it.

01:00:47:20 - 01:01:11:22
Avi Stopper
Yeah, So fact that it gets into this complete network and we have only arrived at a complete network when we are quite that we're able to produce the types of outcomes that we seek, both from the infrastructure standpoint and as you described it, from the software standpoint, which is that our community activation work is really getting lots of new folks out.

01:01:12:25 - 01:01:30:10
John Simmerman
So to scroll back up to the top here and and so what we're really saying is we're we're going to in phase one, we're going to, you know, get this started. We're going to do some, you know, really super lighter, quicker, cheaper stuff. Then we're going to, you know, go through and this is like in off to the right hand side.

01:01:30:10 - 01:01:51:26
John Simmerman
We can see the timescales. We're at one month, then we're at three months as we're starting to go into phase three and then phase four. By the time we're in phase five, we're at about five months or four months in and we're already collecting data and getting feedback from the community. And I think this is really, really important.

01:01:51:26 - 01:02:26:20
John Simmerman
And one of the biggest challenges that cities had with the implementation of like shared streets and quiet streets and healthy streets around the globe was cities, rightfully so, felt like they needed to move quickly. And they did. And but at the same time, a lot of people it was hit or miss with with the streets that were chosen, the communities that were served and some communities were left like, well, what about us?

01:02:26:20 - 01:02:52:04
John Simmerman
Other communities were like, why is this here? This is, you know, hurting things for us, making it more difficult for us, and then the whole equity thing that, you know, kind of goes along in terms of where things happen, where things don't happen. So what's really, really encouraging about this type of approach is engagement with the community, getting feedback as you're as you're doing it.

01:02:52:04 - 01:03:19:24
John Simmerman
And to your point, it's not a whole bunch of open house meetings looking at maps. It's very experiential. You're actually getting your hands on and feeling it and getting a sense as to, you know, is this the right street, is this the right intersection, Is this the right community, is this right neighborhood, etc.? And when I say right, yeah, it's it's like every neighborhood, every neighborhood should have access to safe routes to everything.

01:03:19:28 - 01:03:35:04
John Simmerman
A kid of this age should be able to get to their meaningful destinations as well as an elderly person or a person in a wheelchair, should be able to get to their destinations under their own steam. Every neighbor.

01:03:35:04 - 01:03:58:09
Avi Stopper
Yeah, it's the case. And, you know, I think the one thing I'll just add to the point about shared streets is that in Denver, shared streets broadly were wildly popular. And the city's research suggests that 93%, 93% of respondents, people who who responded to a bunch of surveys that they advertised about shared streets after the fact said they loved them.

01:03:58:16 - 01:04:18:27
Avi Stopper
They wanted them in their neighborhood. They wanted them on their streets. And so we can create that in a short period of time. Within a year, we can have this complete network, at least the foundation of it, and do it in a way that gives people the opportunity to provide meaningful feedback. And and that feedback isn't just a perfunctory exercise.

01:04:18:27 - 01:04:55:19
Avi Stopper
If we're honest about our objectives here, that feedback is about actually listening and learning to what's working and what's not and making adjustments accordingly. And if you set the incentives right, if you set the incentives to be about getting people of all ages, abilities and backgrounds out and about using active transportation, then you are so genuinely interested in and concerned with what people are telling you about what's working and what's not, and what your actual quantitative metrics are demonstrating empirically is working and what's not.

01:04:55:29 - 01:05:28:16
Avi Stopper
That all of this sort of like smoke and mirrors about about listening to people, that is so often volatile and doesn't work out is is converted into a much more genuinely motivated and incentive incentive driven scenario in which what we're trying to do is make something that people love and want to use. And so nothing is more important than their feedback based on actual lived experiences in those spaces.

01:05:29:05 - 01:05:38:20
John Simmerman
So let's take a look at what that interim phase implementation sort of looks like in your your perspective here. And so walk us through what we're looking at here.

01:05:39:17 - 01:06:07:23
Avi Stopper
So this is an engineering template for a median traffic diverter that basically allows drivers to get to their homes and park in front of their houses but prevents high speed illegal neighborhood cut through traffic from being possible. And this is in many ways an atomic unit of Vamos, which is to say there are a ton of intersections like this on the Vamos map.

01:06:08:04 - 01:06:38:19
Avi Stopper
There are a ton of intersections that have this these same dimensions. And we can create these types of features using a template. And and what's so important about it is that it's going to produce conditions that are not politically volatile because shared streets demonstrated that it creates an alignment that we have never seen before between different stakeholders, where neighbors want these things because no one wants people ripping through their neighborhoods at 40 miles an hour.

01:06:38:19 - 01:07:06:26
Avi Stopper
Right? Neighbors want these things and neighbors want them so they can use them to get around as well. So so this is just a demonstration that the idea of that that high cost awesome traffic diverter that we looked at before that that same that same outcome can be produced not from a custom engineered feature but from a template sized version of that.

01:07:07:12 - 01:07:51:04
John Simmerman
Yeah. And again, this is using some, you know, lighter, quicker, cheaper things. We've got your flex post that is in there. And so I like to say oftentimes when when we are using lighter, quicker, cheaper materials, it's a placeholder to demonstrate the efficacy of the implementation that you're doing. You can easily do slight little maneuvers and adjustments and tweak it just a little bit to make sure that you've got it dialed in and then it can be a placeholder there for a little while or a longer until such time as more robust materials can be deployed, whether that's concrete or whether the planter or who knows.

01:07:52:04 - 01:08:17:19
Avi Stopper
Yeah, And actually I actually mentioned there is a newer version of this template and the template uses rather than just flex posts, it uses precast concrete, which is a material that the city has used a lot to create protected bike lanes. And so our approach to this is actually a lot more hardened from the get go than the original was sort of bollards and or flex posts design suggests.

01:08:17:25 - 01:08:59:22
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. Okay. So you mentioned that this seems like it is a popular thing and it seems like politically this is something that people can get behind and we're living in a time and place in an era where everything gets politicized and everything sort of gets filtered through this, this lens of right versus left and us versus them and, and too often drivers versus quote unquote, non drivers, you know, whoever those people are, there's I know there's some I drive occasionally, you know, I do.

01:09:00:11 - 01:09:31:06
John Simmerman
But unfortunately it becomes this this fight of us versus them and othering so quickly and so often times what we're starting to see now globally is when something changes to the built environment, to our streetscape, to our neighborhoods, it starts to devolve into this name calling in a fight. And oh, you guys are just leftie communists trying to you know forces out of our cars.

01:09:31:06 - 01:09:57:04
John Simmerman
And it becomes this conspiracy theory. Just put this to rest. I mean, it it it seems like to me and from where I come from as a public health person, is that this is something that anybody can get behind. But at the same time, we have to be careful of how we frame things and not create that othering of other people.

01:09:57:04 - 01:10:10:28
John Simmerman
And not condemn people and not blame and shame people for their choices that they make or their circumstances that they find themselves in. Yeah, I throw a lot at you, but go ahead and address.

01:10:11:11 - 01:10:42:07
Avi Stopper
I mean, I think that there are two really relevant responses. The first off is that we have a demonstrated proof of concept that broad based political alignment is possible with shared streets because shared streets created a level of alignment around infrastructure that I don't think that we have ever seen. The vast, vast majority of people want to see these things happen and they want these things in their neighborhoods.

01:10:42:07 - 01:11:08:18
Avi Stopper
And yes, sometimes they do want sort of modified and improved designs, but generally speaking, everyone wants safe streets in their neighborhoods. And and that's not just me saying that there is empirical proof of that based on a series pilots in the form of shared streets that were run here. The second component is that Vamos has we have spent we have a mayoral election coming up in in the next month.

01:11:09:01 - 01:11:50:07
Avi Stopper
And we have spent a tremendous amount of time educating candidates about Denver's potential to produce this complete high comfort network and inviting them to ask challenging questions, but also to make it a centerpiece of their platform for transportation broadly and active transportation. More specifically, And what I'm perhaps most proud of is not just that we've gotten a huge amount of support we have at the latest count, something like 35 candidates, mayoral and city council candidates who have made Vamos part of their active transportation platform who support Vamos, is that we have politicians from a lot of different perspectives.

01:11:50:16 - 01:12:15:07
Avi Stopper
We have politicians who would broadly embrace this stuff no matter what. On one sort of end of spectrum and on the other end of the spectrum, we have some folks who have been very outspoken against conventional bike infrastructure and, you know, not everyone loves the fact that we have done that outreach to people who have who have opposed historical bike infrastructure projects.

01:12:15:18 - 01:12:39:03
Avi Stopper
But what is, I think, incredibly compelling is that those folks aren't against bikes. Those folks are looking for a way to find a balance, a balance that is not going to produce a political conflagration. And so I'm really encouraged that we have people really across the entire political spectrum who are backing this.

01:12:41:07 - 01:12:50:07
John Simmerman
Roughly through the political landscape of selecting a mayor and city council. And is it considered a strong mayor city?

01:12:50:09 - 01:12:52:07
Avi Stopper
It's a it is a strong mayor, yes.

01:12:52:08 - 01:13:05:02
John Simmerman
Okay. Interesting. And so, yeah, a huge number of candidates here for mayor. So When is the actual election ends and how does that how is it going to play out?

01:13:05:17 - 01:13:30:00
Avi Stopper
We have our ballots. Colorado is, of course, the possibly the best state when it comes to voting in the country. We have our ballots already and ballots are due. It's almost exclusively vote by mail. You can vote in person if you want, but ballots are due in early April. One thing I just want to say about the roles that we see the mayor and city council are playing.

01:13:30:00 - 01:13:53:16
Avi Stopper
So it being a strong mayor system, the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure, which is an executive branch department, is really ultimately going to be responsible for making this happen. And so having a mayor who's supportive of it and who has made a campaign pledge around it is really important. City Council also plays a tremendously important role in this in holding the executive branch accountable.

01:13:54:00 - 01:14:22:24
Avi Stopper
City Council has has approved these many plans over the years that say that Denver is going to have this complete bike network. There's complete high comfort, active transportation network that anyone can use. And so I think and what we have been talking to City council candidates about is that their opportunity is to really hold the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure accountable to that and to say, look, you a 2050 timeline is not going to work.

01:14:22:24 - 01:14:50:07
Avi Stopper
We need to figure out a way to do this faster and and not just, you know, to say to declare victory when we create X number of miles of bike lanes, but to really only declare victory when we have demonstrated that lots and lots of people have been empowered to use this as their way of getting around town, they're not necessarily, by the way, they're exclusively like there are going to be lots of people who need to drive and that's okay.

01:14:50:26 - 01:14:58:07
Avi Stopper
What we want is to make this a realistic option. And at its essence at the moment, this is just not an option for people.

01:14:58:23 - 01:15:21:28
John Simmerman
Yeah, I have to applaud you on this. This is fantastic that you were able to get so many of these candidates to respond and declare whether they're a supporter or not. And some of them, as we are scrolling through, we're seeing that some of them recorded, you know, messages and, you know, and be able to, you know, articulate that.

01:15:22:12 - 01:15:52:23
John Simmerman
I happen to follow Tim Hoffman on Twitter. And so his name popped out and I'm like, oh, okay. I encourage everybody we want take the time to go through these videos. Right now. We just don't have that luxury of time. But you all do. And if you're interested. Obviously, if you are a city resident of Denver, dive into these videos and check them out and and get a sense as to what some of the the candidates are saying about the Bike Streets network, about the Vamos initiative.

01:15:53:13 - 01:16:25:07
John Simmerman
Incredibly important to bring this forward word because although we don't want to politicize everything, the reality is, is that if we're trying to change our city structure and reshape our streets into becoming healthier, more vibrant, more vibrant places, that's political in its nature because you have to be able to have the support of the city leaders to be able to help drive that message forward.

01:16:25:16 - 01:16:58:26
John Simmerman
And be able to send, you know, quote unquote, the marching orders to the city administration to adjust priorities and start to know do this. So to close this out, talk a little bit about your relationship then with the city administration and Dodie, the relatively newly formed department, to be able to try to, you know, implement safer, high comfort streets for everybody, all ages and abilities.

01:16:59:16 - 01:17:10:05
John Simmerman
I'm sure that initially the response was very defensive of not being who's this guy pushing this? Where are you at now? What's what's the status of the working relationship?

01:17:10:29 - 01:17:54:18
Avi Stopper
So die has not made Vamos their plan yet. However, they have been incredibly supportive in the construction of this plan. So We have had tens of meetings with various members of staff and the VAMOS plan is really predicated on that which we understand to be possible through actual conversations with the subject matter experts. In other words, while it hasn't been adopted and codified yet per se, it has been vetted very heavily by a lot of folks within Dottie who have given us very constructive feedback on what works and what doesn't.

01:17:54:28 - 01:18:17:10
Avi Stopper
And when we identify something that doesn't work, you know, based on historical precedents is really important and powerful because we learned that we need to refactor this particular element of the plan so well. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's shovel ready. It is ready for those initial all pilots to be done as demonstration projects.

01:18:17:10 - 01:18:51:20
Avi Stopper
And there are elements, as with any innovation, there are elements that are going to need to be determined as we learn more and more. So I have a lot of respect for and appreciation for the time that the Dottie staff has given to us. And I think that the I mean, having having sort of led the creation of this implementation plan, the way in which it has evolved over, you know, ten, 12, 15 drafts, I think is really, really powerful.

01:18:51:20 - 01:18:55:07
Avi Stopper
And it's just gotten better through those conversations. Yeah.

01:18:55:23 - 01:19:10:02
John Simmerman
And Dottie is an acronym, folks. That is Dottie and that stands for Department of Transportation and Infrastructure. It is a relatively new department that was formed in the last within the last five years, I believe.

01:19:10:14 - 01:19:26:01
Avi Stopper
That's right. It was we had a ballot initiative a few years back to try and transform I don't know the exact terminology or methodology, but to transform what was historically public works into the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure. Yeah.

01:19:26:28 - 01:19:51:27
John Simmerman
So final final word from you. Share any, you know, surprise using learnings that you have had, you know, over this five year period and any advice that you would have for other cities and other advocates that that, you know, are looking at the potential in their own city, I think.

01:19:51:27 - 01:20:33:21
Avi Stopper
That's perhaps one of the key insights that we have had, is that in our city, I can't speak for other cities, but in our city, precedents exist for all elements of the Vamos plan, which is to say that we are rarely, if ever, inventing anything out of whole cloth. Rather, we are looking around us in the built environment for the existing tools that the city has to, you know, to to create in concert this complete tool kit that when deployed at scale rather than just in spot locations, can actually produce this set of outcomes.

01:20:34:01 - 01:21:26:26
Avi Stopper
And the other thing is just that there is there are ways to create alignment among the different constituencies and the, you know, the sort of foundation assumption that's often the case, which is that we're going to have to go to political war over every incremental miles. Bike Lane does not necessarily have to be the case. So I think that, you know, challenge in some both challenge the dominant paradigm and the status quo, while also embracing it because inspiration exists in the built environment already to produce the types of facilities that were that we're describing and and yet at the same time, we need to acknowledge that just because things have been done historically in one

01:21:26:26 - 01:21:32:01
Avi Stopper
particular way doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to have to be done that way in the future.

01:21:32:17 - 01:22:14:22
John Simmerman
Yeah, and I'll sort of end by going back to the map here and pointing out that if your street isn't, you know, identified as a blue or a black or green or any of these other colors, it doesn't mean that you're your street might not be an absolutely delightful street to ride on. And I think that's one of the biggest challenges that that we end up having whenever cities produce maps such as this network maps such as this that ends up being static, I almost imagine that, you know, like, say, in this particular square, we're zooming in here in the middle.

01:22:15:01 - 01:23:09:10
John Simmerman
If every single one of those streets is a low traffic street with high comfort, every one of those might be considered like a or it could potentially be an entire region of delightful streets. And so sometimes it's we get trapped in believing that what gets printed on a map and going, oh, well that's the network. And like to your point is you discovered one block over absolutely delightful And I try to encourage you know that that philosophy frequently here in the Active Towns podcast in the active towns an initiative is that oftentimes when we get into the process of following routing programs, it will will default to an algorithm that might be time based, it

01:23:09:18 - 01:23:39:20
John Simmerman
might not be the safest nor the most enjoyable. And so there might be a situation where one block over or two blocks or maybe one block over is delightful, but two blocks over, you get to have, you know, access to blooming flowers that, you know, nobody knew were blooming at this time, you know, in March. So I guess my point is, is that is for us all, you know, don't don't get too caught up in in these maps.

01:23:40:02 - 01:24:21:28
John Simmerman
They're there for a reason and and for very good reasons. But also a little bit of that that sense of exploration of you that you had of going one block over and checking it out because that's that's how you end up discovering even better potential places to discover and and that connectivity. And the other thing I wanted to point out is that in this kind of came out with some of your earlier rides that you did, oftentimes they were loops and all ultimately those are loops because of of what you were trying to do in trying to illustrate.

01:24:22:11 - 01:24:47:09
John Simmerman
But you may not be if you are trying to start to ride more frequently as a utilitarian cyclist, you're probably not going to go out for a loop necessarily. But the point is, is you're able to discover some, you know, safer, high comfort routes to be able to to get to your meaningful destinations. And that's the whole point to be able to replace more car trips in the future.

01:24:48:27 - 01:24:49:14
Avi Stopper
You're here.

01:24:50:07 - 01:25:05:27
John Simmerman
Love it. Love it. Ivy, thank you so very much for joining on the Active Towns podcast. And and hey, best of luck to you and best of luck in the upcoming election. I'm keeping my fingers crossed from my position here in Austin, Texas.

01:25:07:04 - 01:25:18:23
Avi Stopper
All right. Well, thanks very much. And hopefully we will in a year or so from now be having the same conversation. But actually, maybe we'll be doing it on bikes in the very first foundational version of this network.

01:25:19:11 - 01:25:37:06
John Simmerman
I think that's a great idea. Is is will get out on bikes and maybe it's some of the first iterations, maybe it's some of these pilot projects and would get you might up and we'll get out on the bike and we'll actually some of these in person so considering we'll make it as.

01:25:37:07 - 01:25:38:16
Avi Stopper
Make it so no pressure.

01:25:38:25 - 01:25:43:13
John Simmerman
All right. All right. Take care. Thank you so much, sir.

01:25:43:13 - 01:25:44:00
Avi Stopper
You're welcome.

01:25:44:11 - 01:26:01:16
John Simmerman
He thank you all so much for tuning in. Hope you enjoyed this episode with RV Stopper. 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 so already, be honored to have you subscribe to the channel. Just hit that subscription button down below and ring the notifications bell so you can customize your notification preferences.

01:26:02:06 - 01:26:27:26
John Simmerman
Be back next week with another episode. So until then, this is John signing off by wishing you much activity, health and happiness. 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.

01:26:28:07 - 01:26:37:10
John Simmerman
Thank you all so much.