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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. This is Abby and you are listening to Upzoned. Hello everyone. Thanks for listening to another episode of Upzone to show where we take a big story from the news that touches the Strong town's conversation each week. And we upzone it, we talk about it in depth. I'm Abby Newsham, a planner in Kansas City. And I'm joined today with our friend Edward Erfert, who is the director of Community Action. Edward, is this your first time on Upzoned? I'm trying to remember if you've done.
- [00:45]
B
This before, this is the first time you and I have been on it. I bumped in a couple of times, I think, when you and Chuck were on it. So, kind of excited to have the space with just us today.
- [00:58]
A
Yeah, totally. Well, it might be since it's been a while since you have been on Upzoned, it might be good to just talk a little bit about who you are and what your role is and do that introduction, if that's okay with you.
- [01:11]
B
Yeah, that'd be great. Yeah. So I have a really interesting job that is even more complex than what I typically would be doing. My background is in architecture. I went to architecture school and in the midst of architecture school, I got introduced to this crazy thing called urbanism and urban design. And I described to my friends that I got kind of corrupted into working and thinking about cities and even to my parents, I still quite don't understand why I'm not doing buildings. Like what is this urbanism, city building stuff? For 20 years I did that, 15 of that in local government. So in the trenches, working every day behind the desk, working, applying a lot of the things that we share at Strong Towns. And I had the opportunity to leave the public sector and come work at Strong Towns as director of Community Action, where I get the opportunity to work with our members and elected leaders and municipal staff all across North America and help them apply on the ground all of the things we talk about as Strong Towns. So going beyond the theory and ask, actually taking that step forward and taking that first action. So really working through that with them. So for me it's been really exciting. I've been able to do a couple of different of our programs, things that we're doing in our academy with teaching. I get to hang out with our members and our local conversation leaders for our office hours and then through our Community Action labs and through our crash Analysis studios, get to apply real world stuff on the ground.
- [02:57]
A
Yeah. And you've worked with a lot of communities now on applying Strong Towns perspectives and Ideas, which I think is really cool. You really wear a lot of different hats, which is fascinating and fun to hear about.
- [03:12]
B
Yeah, you know, it's fun to work in one community, but it's really exciting to work in a lot of different places. And what I'm finding is as folks begin to look at their community differently, the conversation starts to shift and they have a lot of. Lot of really deep questions. And it's always, it's really an honor to be able to be invited to the communities and to talk through. We're not at strongtowns. We're not consultants. We're not there to tell you what to do. We're really there to advocate for something different, to really help you think differently. And, you know, we've done a lot of crazy things in the last eight decades that aren't as prosperous and as beneficial for us. So this opportunity to really get into places and having them think differently and try something out, going back to some of our traditional patterns, it's really amazing. After I leave a place to talk to folks where they. They tried something different, we may call it weird, but they do it. And the. All the things, things start to happen. People start to emerge that they just never thought they could get past. So it's always. It really is an honor to be able to be out on the road talking to folks across North America.
- [04:32]
A
You know, as you describe your role and how you engage with communities, it really does make me think that what we're going to talk about today is kind of the antithesis of the approach that you've taken through the work that you do with strong towns. So maybe we can jump right into it. So the article that we are talking about today is published in Bloomberg City Lab by Maria Clara Cabo and Folo Ikenibi. I think I pronounced that correctly, and I apologize if I didn't. And the title of this is the Moonshot Plan to Eliminate Deaths on America's roads. So the U.S. department of Transportation is proposing a new technology called Vehicle to Everything, which is called, it's V2X for short, to cut down on traffic fatalities. This is basically a wireless communication tool that allows vehicles to transmit speed, location, road condition and other basic information data. And it's actually existed for a really long time, but has just not been widely adopted. It's existed for decades. And now the US Department of Transportation has announced a national deployment plan of this technology to apply it to 75% of the nation's intersections over the next decade or so. And the cost of this has yet to be provided, according to the article. So the way that this works is that it's basically supplementary to the cameras and sensors that many new vehicles already have. And it communicates with traffic infrastructure and other V2X equipped vehicles. And it helps you be able to sense pedestrians, incoming traffic, bikes, other road users. It can alert drivers of someone who's about to run a red light, for example, or drivers of blind spots, or incoming bicycles that can't yet be observed because maybe they're behind a building or behind a car. It can also give certain vehicles priority, according to the article, such as heavy trucks. So an example of that would be to allow trucks to move more freely within city centers, to cut down on air pollution and reduce idling. So there's a really big hurdle to overcome in order to actually implement this technology, and that's that most cars are not equipped with it, and infrastructure is also not equipped with it. It's a chicken or egg kind of issue where manufacturers have no incentive to really incorporate it into their new vehicles that they are creating if there is no infrastructure to communicate with. So what the Fed is doing is trying to invest and integrate all of this technology into the public realm, into public infrastructure, in hopes that the public sector will follow. So indeed, it is a moonshot. Again, numbers haven't really been put to it, but I would imagine it's quite expensive. And Edward, I'm really curious about what your perspective of this is. I know that traffic safety and especially the vulnerability of pedestrians and bicycles is something that strong towns is really focused on. Do you see this as a strong towns approach? An approach that we should be investing lots of money in to address this problem?
- [07:59]
B
Yeah, I mean, this is an approach, and it's great that we've got scientists and engineers working on something like this, but I remember going out when backup cameras were kind of the first thing in vehicles, and it wasn't that long ago, and talking to a community group where we were proposing in a community to do parallel parking on a walkable main street. Now, as we started as a redevelopment area, when we said walkable, we had have a little bit of imagination because this is one of those roadways that needed to transform. And you know, if you have been out in the field and you've talked to the public about a new type of road condition and something as difficult as parallel parking, you know, that's something that is a block for people's minds. The engineer consultant, one of my dear friends, said, well, you know, no worries, we now have these cameras in our car, we'll be able to use that, it'll be easier to back in, to do parallel parking. And the entire room erupted and all of a sudden you started hearing the mumbling, well, are you going to buy me a camera? Who's going to buy my car a camera? You mean I have to buy a new car now so I can park on this street? And so these high level technologies, it really, it's great we're doing that. But this is something that is highly sophisticated. It is something that will be coming into new cars. We all have technology around us. You know, every 18 months there's a new phone that comes out, new software every six months. Right now when I look at this, the V2X, there are different versions of this. So it's when we think about how many just in my own neighborhood, how many intersections there are and think that we're going to have 75% of them, to think that somehow all of these will have that technology. And then all of the cars that we have are also going to run up to that. And then all of this equipment will be running off of either some sort of wireless radio communication or off of our 5G networks or whatever technology. This is clearly like mission to the moon type exercise, figure out how to cross the street. And when I look at this, like I said, yes, it's great we're doing this technology. But in the article they're talking about three cities that are getting grants to figure out how to use this. It's over $200 million. It's going out to three cities to figure out three very small applications of this technology. So figuring out in Utah they're doing a highway corridor. In Phoenix I think they're doing when construction zones. And Houston they're trying to figure out faster pace of speed on a road. That's a lot of money to beta test a technology in a very limited amount of vehicles. So that's a very top down approach that doesn't really align with what we would be advocating for as the first thing we would do to help prevent crashes and save lives.
- [11:41]
A
Yeah, and one of the things that the article talks about is that they throw out this statistic that 70% of vehicles on the roads need to be equipped with V2X to have a 50% chance of effectively communicating with other equipped vehicles and infrastructure. So even for a pilot project in a, in a small area, that is a lot of cars that need to be equipped with this technology in order for this to work properly. And you know, when thinking about how effective the technology is. Does that just mean that it doesn't work that well and people need to pay better attention, or could there be implications that crashes could be caused if it's not working properly? I don't want to speak out of term because I don't know a lot about this technology, but that those are kinds of the questions that I have myself. And, you know, cities don't operate in bubbles. Cars move around from one place to the other. It's not like you can say, well, this city has 80% of vehicles that are equipped with this. People go in and out of cities. And so I'm kind of. I don't know if skeptical is the right word, but I definitely am curious about how this is feasibly implemented in this kind of pilot approach because of the need for so many of the vehicles to actually have this in order for it to work.
- [13:10]
B
Yeah, it is a highly complicated response to our complexities. So when we think about this, all this technology is going to say is that it can talk to the other devices that are on the road so it can acknowledge all of these pieces. Where this does, like, where this starts to get kind of strange is that, like, would you have a vehicle that doesn't have that technology? I love watching all the YouTubes and shorts of the folks that are playing jokes on the autonomous vehicles. And I don't know if you've seen that. There's a couple comedians that have stop sign T shirts.
- [13:53]
A
No.
- [13:54]
B
So they walk down the sidewalk in Vegas and places where we have the autonomous vehicle, and they flash the car like they pull open the raincoat, and underneath is a T shirt with a stop sign on it. And the autonomous vehicle recognizes the stop sign and immediately stops. So the technology is working, but somebody has figured out how to hack it in a funny way.
- [14:17]
A
Interesting.
- [14:19]
B
So, yeah, when we look about all of this, this type of giant moonshot, we're asking for all of this investment and time in a technology that is emerging. Like, yes, we should continue to look at that. But when I look at these things, what could we do in our cities with $200 million today, what could we do right now to address these issues? The other thing in this article that they're talking about is when we talk about vehicles and trucks and prioritization of vehicles through a city, some of this might be really good. But for, like, emergency vehicles, like, if an emergency vehicle is coming down the road, we have some technologies now that allow traffic lights to turn green to allow emergency vehicles better flow through the city. But also, you can prioritize this for trucking. And in the idling, if we feel that we can get the road safe, meaning we removed all the impediments of movement. So we push all the cars out of the way, we turn all the lights green. A great way to get a truck out of the city is to get it out faster. So thinking through this, what we have found in many crashes that we've studied at strong towns is speed is the top contributing factor. So if we look at this type of technology and we apply. Apply it in a way that is going to result in faster moving vehicles, that results in riskier behavior of all users on the road. And we know the impact of a vehicle at a higher speed results in a higher percentage of the possibility of a fatality or serious injury.
- [16:19]
A
Yeah, yeah. And another layer to that that I've been thinking about is what does this mean for people on the ground, I. E. Pedestrians, people walking? Because this technology, it seems to imply that. This article seems to imply that almost all intersections would need to be equipped with this technology in order for it to work. In the world of urbanism, urban planning, intersection density is really an indicator for walkability. The more intersections you have, the smaller blocks you have. And that makes for one of the primary components of having a walkable city is having lots of intersections. And so by saying that many intersections need to have this technology applied to it, I mean, there's so much. There's costs now associated with having greater walkability. I would worry that this would lead to land use manuals that recommend having less intersections because of the cost. You know, that's why we use stop signs, for example, instead of red lights at every intersection. It's very expensive to apply technology to lots and lots of intersections. So that is something that I have a lot of questions about because we want to have lots of intersections and we also want to have lots of slow speeds. And if that means that we need to spend a lot of money now applying this technology in order to reduce pedestrian fatalities, I'm skeptical that that is a very good use of money compared to other things that could be done for probably a lot less money.
- [18:10]
B
Yeah, that for the last 18 months, we at strong towns have been pursuing an effort to figure out how to look at crashes differently. This is an effort we've been doing through our crash analysis studio. We've looked at 22 crashes. Out of 22 crashes, 19 of those involved fatalities. It's in 14 states and two providences. So these are urban, rural and suburban areas. We've Looked at all of these crashes and we found that there are many, many contributing factors that result in these crashes. The design of these places is continually, the repeating factor that is contributing significantly to these crashes, the character of the place. If you were, if you were to look at this technology that we're talking about, this works, may work really well on a road or a highway. So you get people on that. They only have a forward facing decision making. They have the same type of vehicles. You'd expect to go fast. You know, maybe, maybe that'll allow us to go on a highway an extra 5-10 mph and save a couple of minutes on a trip, maybe an hour on a day's trip across state lines. But in downtown urban area, this is another layer of decision making that a driver and a pedestrian and cyclist have to make and their relationships using our streets. And every time we add those pieces to it, like in the article, it says, this would be great because you would be able to see a bicyclist around, around the corner that would be blocked by a building. Well, we had those crashes in our crash analysis studio. You can see these things. You could see them when you come to a full stop at an intersection. You can see them when you're in an urban area, on a street, when you're driving slowly as a pedestrian or cyclist, you're in a position, you can see people and pay attention to what's going on. And when you can't, when you are distracted. Where we've had some crashes where the placement of lights or the overhead lighting of an intersection or where signals are signage is that there's conflicting messages that distracts drivers and there's too many decision points they have to make. Now we have this extra thing we're adding onto it and not really getting to the root cause of the crash. We're just kind of adding. It's like adding an extra seat belt or airbag to the car. It adds a level of safety. But it, you know, a seatbelt doesn't prevent a crash only. It only helps with survivability of the person in the vehicle.
- [21:17]
A
I think the way that they have been kind of pitching this technology is that it would prevent crashes from happening. And I do wonder if that's kind of a big promise to make without, I think, piloting it and actually applying it in a place, which I know is what they're trying to do now. But again, it just seems like there's other ways to address these fundamental issues and the causes of collisions between cars, between pedestrians, and cars, bicyclists, which I think is to for vehicles to move slowly, especially in cities.
- [22:00]
B
In the crash analysis studios, when we've done all of these, we have found that when we understand what the contributing factors are, the contributing factors didn't relate to a missing technology in the vehicles. Many of the contributing factors we identified could be addressed by local cities in a matter of days or weeks for a minimal amount of money. And we're going to have a report that's coming out, we're doing a press conference out of our community action labs showing what we have found in this work. Through this process. As we have looked at this, we have found that cities can actually be empowered today without waiting for a technology to come forward. A lot of this can be done with paint and cones. A lot of it can be done by not relying on the technology, but actually going out and walking an intersection. Because what we find on the ground in these intersections is this, that there are things that are occurring there and they're driver behaviors that are not rational. And even though we have this technology, you're still going to have drivers and pedestrians and cyclists that are going to do things that are not going to match what the software thinks it's going to do. So the crazy guy with the T shirt stop sign, the person that is taking a turn or not stopping at an intersection properly, this, this technology may not be fully aware of it and may take years. So, so if we look at this article, a year ago there was this desire to go out and get this technology and it took a year just to get the messaging out to say we want a federal program to go and award money. It's going to take another year for that money to go out to test this, these things out. We have things we could do today before trying to moonshot around the universe to solve this in a very complicated way. We have lots of tools we could do tomorrow that cost way less than this to accomplish the true goal of safety on our streets.
- [24:24]
A
Yeah, absolutely. To me, from a public spending perspective perspective, this, this really doesn't feel that different than throwing a ton of money at highways. It seems like it's kind of yet another top down moonshot project that is signaling a long term commitment to car infrastructure rather than investing in walkable cities or public transportation or alternative modes of transportation of all types. So that's kind of the way that I'm seeing this. It may not be another lane on a highway, but it's another big moonshot investment that isn't getting to the root of what is causing these crashes.
- [25:12]
B
Yeah. And the work we've done through our crash analysis studio, the press conference we have, the report that's going to come out is all about going beyond blame and really looking at how cities can learn from crashes to create straight, safer streets. Today, when we, when we think about this technology, this technology just layers in more blame. It adds in another excuse of why a crash occurred. What a crash because we didn't have 5G. The crash occurred because one of the vehicles or pedestrian didn't have the proper censoring device crash occurred. We can blame all of these different things in this technology we spent millions of dollars on. But in fact, we now have another reason not to actually look at contributing factors at an intersection. This technology doesn't narrow lane widths to proper size. This type of technology doesn't shorten pedestrian crossings. This type of technology doesn't end up going in an intersection and making it so cars have to stay in their lane and drivers have to pay attention. It just provides another tool to lose our focus as we're operating vehicles, even as a pedestrian. We would have an expectation, like if we go forward in the future to the Jetsons, that we've all got this technology. You know, one of the things is we would be complacent, that we would expect something to occur because the technology is there. And I'm sure the cities that put this in will have all the signage up at intersections. Like, you know how there are speed cameras and red light cameras and there's all the signage in the intersection. It's that same sort of thing. And that type of technology is not as effective as we think it is.
- [27:13]
A
Hmm. Yeah. And it's certainly, again, going back to those numbers that they're sharing in this article, that 70% of vehicles need to be equipped with it for it to have a 50% chance of effectively communicating with other vehicles that, I mean, basically all vehicles need to have it in order for it to work. And it sounds like there's still a question about how effective it is when it's actually applied. And yeah, just as when you're driving on a highway, the lanes are really wide, you can drive very fast. There's a lot of forgiveness in the design of that environment. Applying this technology to cities where it's less forgiving and it's designed, there's more opportunities for users to collide. It seems like it is providing something for drivers to lean on so that drivers don't need to stay alert. It's another opportunity for drivers to kind of zone out and lean on technology to keep them safe, to keep other road users safe. And I certainly hope that our complacency doesn't result in more serious accidents, for example.
- [28:32]
B
It really is being touted as a silver bullet and there's lots of questions that we still continue to have with this. It'll still continue to have to get explored. At strong towns, when I go out, I talk to communities about shifting conversations and shifting your mindset and looking at things differently. It's really easy as a consultant to come to town and identify all the problems and suggest a whole bunch of solutions. This feels a lot like a problem solution. We have a problem in our cities where cars and trucks aren't moving through efficiently. We're going to make it more efficient. A byproduct of that is that we're going to have a space between objects on the roadway with this technology. So if we have a bubble around everything, nothing will touch. Therefore we won't have crashes. We'll provide that solution. When we do those giant solutions, when we make these big, bold investments, we lose sight of all of the things along the way. We lose sight, and it's not until we get to the end do we realize all of the unintended consequences. So when we go to places and I talk to communities, the strong towns approach is more like diet and exercise than the quick fix silver bullet. If we want safer roads in our communities, we've got to do the hard work. We've got to go out and we've got to, you know, eat the right foods. We've got to go and do a little bit of exercise. You know, sometimes we're not going to want to get up and do it. Sometimes we're going to stop by the donut shop and have an extra donut we shouldn't have. But this type of diet and exercise approach is something that we can all participate in. It's something we could do right now. It's something we can do. You could do diet and exercise without spending money. You can do these things right away. And as you do that, unlike a technology, which you're relying on a far off thinking on this, this idea of diet and exercise, when you're at a community level, people start saying, we want safer streets. We want to think about that differently in our community. And they start talking about that. It amazes me at the most local level, where we have the highest level of collaboration, how much work can be done just by people sharing an idea versus waiting for a technology or waiting for somebody else. To come in to do something for them. And we have lots and lots of examples of folks doing incredible things on their community streets, raising awareness of safety, pushing back on some of the over engineered approaches, moving the overly complicated systems that confuse drivers and pedestrians and cyclists. And again, as a diet and exercise approach, we could all start that tomorrow. And it's not going to take $200 million worth of testing. That will only be in three cities. It's not going to require 75% of all the vehicles and 50% of the intersections to do that. And this is stuff we can do in rural America and also in big cities. We don't have to wait for the city with all the traffic lights for this to occur. Do this tomorrow.
- [32:06]
A
Yeah, that's totally right. And it really gets to, I think, this idea of like experimentation within our public realm. So many cities, I think, get nervous about experimenting with things like narrow, narrow lanes or street trees or tactical approaches that could be done pretty quickly. And maybe that's just because there aren't as many like lobbyists behind tactical and nuanced approaches. But yeah, applying this technology is, it's a, that's a pretty big experiment to do within your public realm. And I think I would say to the cities that are open to taking on that kind of experiment, why not, why not trying these more tactical approaches, you know, as well or before you do that, especially because it doesn't cost a lot of money to do. And if you're open to the experimentation, I certainly think it's worth doing.
- [33:03]
B
And I don't, you know, Abby, I've done a bunch of federal grants. It takes a lot of work. Like there's a lot of behind the scenes, a lot of expense, filling paperwork out, getting a lobbyist and talking to your senator and your congress representatives and getting, you know, playing the game to get this money. And then you're blessed with this big amount of money. All these federal grants have strings attached to them. So you have all of this other reporting. So just because you get a $50 million grant, that's not $50 million cash. There's a lot of reporting to it. When I think about the effort that a community would go through to get this grant, like we can celebrate that. But frankly, that energy could have been used to actually address a struggle in a community. When we talk about an intersection, that is a problem. We could go and spend a lot of money to do a flyer to get everybody to City hall on a Tuesday night at 7pm and we could look at drawings that nobody could Read. And we could ask everybody's opinion what it takes to get the flyers out in the neighborhood to mail the postcards to residents. For the 2% that will show up. You actually could have just gone out with cones and straw bales and paint, done the thing in the intersection, whatever you needed to do as an experiment, as a pilot project. And guess what? The next morning when everybody drives to work or takes their kids to school, they will experience that intervention. It's not a set of plans or actually experiencing. And you're getting real time feedback and cones and straw bales. We can move a lot of different times till we get it dialed in to the end result and we can shorten that feedback loop up. I can't imagine what the feedback loop like. Yes, the software and this technology is going to make decisions in split second timing, but it'll be lost within all of the data. It actually won't change the intersection or the physical built world at all. It'll just change the behavior of how the car acts. So we're going to spend all of this money so that one of our operating systems functions a little bit more efficiently in a city. It doesn't actually get us a more beautiful place. It doesn't actually get us a place that more people want to hang out in. When you talk about trucks, it's great. The trucks don't have to idle, so you don't have to hit the pollution and the noise. But the fact is, when the trucks drive faster in a town or they hit their brakes, that is an unsettling sound. That is a great way to eliminate any desire for people to be on your sidewalks or out of cafes. Yeah. So this is, it's really interesting. Somebody has figured out this technology and they will continue to explore that. But at the end of the day, this doesn't actually make better communities. It doesn't bring us together as humans in an urban habitat at all. It just makes it more convenient for our vehicles to move through and about our built environment.
- [36:26]
A
Yeah. And not bump into each other. And it is one of those things where like, we need to be very mindful about what the big picture is here and what we're really intending to do. Because I think building better places, that is the intent here. That's what I think a lot of people are trying to do, is build a better society, build better places. And I would hate to see this technology applied in a way that then has, I, I suppose other ripple effects where like, hey, we need to remove all the street trees because it's confusing the technology, or, hey, we need to widen the lanes because it'll help make this work better and provide clearance on the sides of all streets. And we, you know, need to lessen the number of intersections that we have and have bigger blocks. So I think there's a lot of other implications where we do need to have a bigger picture when we're thinking about how we are applying technology. And in all different instances, not just this one kind of technology, but there's lots of city technology, and some of it can have urban design implications that I think we all need to be very mindful about.
- [37:46]
B
We could just as easily, if technology was the thing that needed to be done. It'd be way easier for us just to say, in an urban area, we're going to put a governor on every vehicle so it can't go over 17 miles per hour.
- [37:59]
A
Yeah, right.
- [38:01]
B
That's something we could do tomorrow, like, in probably 85% of the vehicles on the road, we, you know, we go plug in the computer chip. And now when you're in this bubble of a downtown at 17 miles per hour, if you and I check, I choose that number because that's what, in a roundabout is, that speed. So at 70 miles per hour, we're under the percentile of a fatality. In a crash, if you bump into somebody, the bumpers work. We could do that tomorrow if technology was the solution for this. When I talk about unintended consequences in our crash in Madison, Wisconsin, they did a lot of really important stuff at an intersection and make it safer for pedestrians to get around the intersection. They did the big crosswalks. They upgraded the signals so they're better signals and easier push buttons and all of the. All the things that really, like, would improve that intersection. But the unintended consequence that occurred out of that is that the switchbox, the pedestal needed to operate that intersection, was put in a location that made it impossible for a driver to see a pedestrian stopped at the corner. And this was like, all the right things were there, and there was something that was missed in the design that was a contributing factor to this crash. And you could see, like, at that intersection, when people were standing, waiting to walk, or if they were failed to yield a walk, riding their bike, they just were not. They could not see the car, and the car could not see them. And when we talk about this technology, these are the things that it's really where the rubber meets the road. When you start to apply this stuff and you start adding stuff to poles and adding electricity to intersections, this is the stuff that gets overlooked. And again, with this type of money coming in, these type of big lofty pieces, we make these giant leaps and we're unable to see these unintended consequences until it's too late.
- [40:16]
A
Absolutely. Yeah. It really sounds like we all need to get like a little bit more down to earth when it comes to these things. Actually looking at the intersection, not just drawing a plan on a computer, but experiencing what is being designed and gaining wisdom from those real life experiences and understanding of how things work within the physical world. Right, yeah.
- [40:45]
B
And doing things that are actually attainable today.
- [40:49]
A
Yeah.
- [40:50]
B
I'm sure there's another technology that would, you know that to kind of be funny about it. Like the technology, they now have pants for motorcyclists that inflate on impact. They have pedestrian suits that like blow up the big bubble and it's, you know, they're kind of funny. Like, yeah, there is a technology out there. There's probably a future technology that will create an imaginary bubble around us, like a force field to do this. Like when that technology comes, great, we should all use that. But to make these types of giant inventions investments to go and try to figure this out as. And this technology, when we think about it, this is a technology that is coming from the top down. This is a standard that will be nationalized. It'll have to actually be almost international because like if you drive across one of the borders, so I'm speaking from being in the United States, if I drive into Canada or driving to Mexico, are they going to have the same technology? Now my driver behavior has to change. So like, I just can't see a one size fits all with this type of technology. Even today, there's three or four different versions of this vehicle to everything. You know, there's different types of versions, how they're communicating with each other and the type of information they're collecting. So it is a long way out. It's a very lofty thing. And the amount of money we're spending on it just we could do a lot of things tomorrow with that cash. That would actually result in saving lives today.
- [42:43]
A
Yeah, absolutely. Especially thinking that the public sector is spending this money to apply it and integrate it into infrastructure over the next decade in the hopes that the private sector will follow suit and apply the technology to cars that are being created. So if the infrastructure takes, let's say it takes 15 years to actually integrate into these places, and then the private sector starts rolling out cars that has this technology, technology integrated into it, it takes Decades for everybody to get a new car. So this just seems like a very long timeline to me.
- [43:24]
B
Another two decades for every intersection to get new traffic lights.
- [43:28]
A
Right? Yeah.
- [43:29]
B
What we're talking about here is a technology that is just a better traffic light. Like, that's really what this is. And it's a new microchip within a vehicle. When I think about that, like, who does that impact? Well, it's going to benefit the auto manufacturers because they now have an incentive to go and add somebody to a vehicle that upset cost. The financiers for automobiles are going to love it because that goes, you know, we've added that extra cost. Trust me, every street traffic signal company across America, they're going to be scrambling to figure out who can do the best technology and trying to sell that. At the end of the day, we're going to look at a traffic light that's going to have a little monitoring device on it and an antenna and some wires in the ground. When I think about urbanism, because coming from architecture and building those types of technologies in the world of history just disappear. It doesn't actually contribute to civilization.
- [44:35]
A
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And not to mention, I mean, this is. This would be collecting an immense amount of data. So advertisers are going to be very happy. Insurance companies will be very happy.
- [44:49]
B
Server farms. Imagine how many server buildings to keep the data. Like I know how much I have on my phone with pictures and videos.
- [44:58]
A
Yeah.
- [44:58]
B
Imagine now my car doing the same thing thing. Like there's some data center somewhere with that.
- [45:03]
A
Completely. Yeah. It's. I mean, it seems like it, it's. It's creating a vision zero industrial complex. That's where we're headed. They've taken something happy and good. Now it's an industrial complex. Good job.
- [45:21]
B
Yeah. This giant warehouse facility out in Nevada. What? Well, what's that? Oh, that's. So that we can track everybody's car. Yeah, yeah, we laugh about it, but yeah, people are really invested in this.
- [45:34]
A
Oh, yeah.
- [45:35]
B
And it is. For me, it just. We're going to do all of that and one power outage, one blown fuse, the entire system collapse. When we think about how fragile something like this is, when frankly, we could go in and. And build something that physically alters the way that we react to it. My friend Steve Mazan talks about communities being lovable. We could take this type of energy and thought process and actually make lovable places by changing the physical built world that will, you know, while the microchip is going to be obsolete in a matter of years. Why that signal rots, you know, that the wires corrode and all that stuff, it's not going to mature and become any more beautiful. But if I was to take the energy and focus on getting the lanes the right size, prioritizing which user. So on all the highways we'll do the highway thing, but in our cities, we're going to prioritize the ability for walkability and bikeability and introduce vehicles to that. We could have places that our great grandchildren would enjoy and love. They're things that they could actually appreciate. Not to mention the accumulation of wealth that would be created with that that we could all enjoy versus just a antenna and some wires that will become obsolete by the time we figure out how this actually operates properly.
- [47:13]
A
Yeah, I mean, what you're describing is leaning into the complexity of how society works, how humans respond to the built environment and their surroundings, and in designing our world, rather than applying a technology to it, which, I mean, you talk about an outage. I do wonder from like a national security perspective, if there was a hack and suddenly our. All of our transportation infrastructure is now vulnerable. Again, I don't want to speak completely out of term because I don't understand this technology, but it is something that we should be asking ourselves, do we want to have like a vulnerable technology potentially putting us at risk?
- [48:00]
B
Look, a month and a half ago, we had a software update that collapsed. Our medical technologies, grounded all of our aircrafts. Delta, I think was that they're at $500 billion loss because of a software update. And again, there's nothing. When you go to a jury and you talk about like, what are the losses of this? And it's like a tangible. I mean, nobody as a human can relate to the code line that was in there, that was the error and how it got updated. This is stuff our minds can't comprehend. And it is a reality. And when we talk about all in for that, when we're all in on that technology, it is a highly fragile system on a lot of different levels versus looking at the next smallest thing, Looking at the physical built environment, addressing the real factors. One of the factors in the crash analysis studio report was, was that what was intended by the designer to be built at an intersection wasn't built like that. Like when it got installed, like something got placed differently, the sign got placed differently because the crew at the time, you know, hit a rock or thought it needed to go somewhere else or misunderstood the drawings or over time the corner had gotten eroded and the maintenance crews just kept in an asphalt. So now the radius is much bigger. When you take that at scale of this type of technology, that can never address those things, but we will see those misinstallations occur at scale with this type of technology. And yeah, when we're relying on our car telling us not to bump into something and somebody put the wrong diode or the wire sensor in the wrong place, or the camera is slightly off on the. On the intersection, that could lead to lots of issues.
- [50:08]
A
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, this has been fascinating, Edward. I really appreciate you taking the time to come on today and talk about this. Hopefully this won't be the last time you're on upzone. We should do this more often.
- [50:24]
B
Love it. I always love upzone. It's definitely for all the folks listening. For me, it's one of the best podcasts that we do at Strong Towns because they're real issues I think we can all relate to. And I always love your insight, Abby, on these topics.
- [50:37]
A
Well, I appreciate that. And let's. Let's plan to do this again sometime.
- [50:42]
B
Great.
- [50:43]
A
All right, thanks, everyone, for listening to another episode of Up Sound. Thanks, Edward. Down tonight.