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Foreign.
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Got my bus pass been a ride first class streetcar downtown with a fine ladies in the peeps.
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C
Hi everyone, this is Carly and welcome to Upzoned, a podcast from Strong Towns where we take a current news story about cities and we use it to explore deeper concepts about how our cities work and what we can do to make them work better. With me today, I have frequent guest and Strong Town's chief technical advisor, Edward Erfert, as well as Melissa McCready from Ann Arbor, Michigan. And you guys are probably familiar with Edward, but I'd like to briefly introduce Melissa. We're so excited to have her today. She is the transportation Manager for the city of Ann Arbor and she brings more than 20 years of leadership experience in public sector transportation, mobility systems and community focused planning. Before she was in Ann Arbor, she was the Director of Transportation and Mobility for the city of Gainesville, Florida where she led a consolidated department overseeing multimodal planning, transit parking and smart mobility initiatives. Her experience also includes significant roles in Portland, Charlotte and Orlando. So she's got a ton of experience to talk to us about transportation and transportation management. Melissa, welcome. And Edward, glad to have you back.
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A
Thank you.
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B
Great, thanks, Carly.
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C
I came across this week, I guess, an article from Bloomberg City Lab from one of my favorite transportation authors to read, David Zipper, who interviewed a professor from the University of New Mexico looking at what's really driving the continued rise in pedestrian deaths in the United States. I know this is something both of you are working on, so I'm excited to talk to you today. At the most basic level, the story continues to point to a mix of factors. Larger vehicles, road design, driver, driver, behavior, changes in how people are moving around our communities framed as a safety issue and that people are driving more dangerously, vehicles are getting bigger. But Edward and I are frequently, you know, frequently talk about moving beyond this blame idea. And so we wanted to talk to you guys today about what our transportation system is designed to prioritize, what this article, you know, really highlights about that and really what, what does our continued rise in pedestrian deaths real reveal about the underlying incentives of our transportation system. So really excited to join two experts in this conversation to have, you know, a really, really good conversation about how we can make our city streets safer and the work you guys are doing and what this article highlights for us. So Edward, I'll start with you. What did you think about this story when you read it and what did the headlines say to you and what do you think it gets right?
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I think this is the question that every city, every elected Official Every citizen is asking me because I think people are fed up about the amount of fatalities and carnage that's happening in our streets and that that's streets, roads, highways. We have an epidemic. Everybody's talking about it, and we're all chasing that one thing that if we just did this one thing, if we drove a little bit better, if we all had the device on our vehicles, our car, cars drove automatically. If only we had a little bit better design or we lowered all of our speeds, if we just did that one thing, all of a sudden, that is the smoking gun. And we'll go and save hundreds of thousands of lives with that. And I think anybody in this work, anybody that takes a minute to really look at street deaths, we find out that as it identifies in this article, there is no one smoking gun in this struggle. Our cities are highly complex places. They're overlaid with lots of complicated systems. It takes more than one program, one person, one thing to address this struggle that all of our cities across North America are facing.
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C
100%. Melissa, what stood out to you in the article?
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Well, I completely agree with everything Edward just said. It isn't one, just one thing. But I like how the article talked about the different things, but then focused on or highlighted the fact that speed is one of the biggest issues and how do we address speed, manage speed. And that is a combination of factors. Road design is one of the biggest key factors of that. But I did like how the article really talked about the top things that we can point at and say, these are the things we need to focus on. And then it challenges, of course, focusing on all the things all at once, which is not something that is easily done.
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C
Right? No, I thought it was interesting. And, and you guys, you know, you guys work in cities on this very topic. And I know, Melissa, you're now in Ann Arbor on, on the team, but you've been in a variety of cities. How do you feel like you can focus the conversation on speed? And is that, you know, is that something that is helpful to the conversation? Or do you find that when you talk to officials in your role that you're juggling so many potential causes that it's really hard to kind of drive to the root of the problem?
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A
I think when you focus on speed management, you're able to talk about all of the other variables. So it's. In order to reduce the speeds. It has a lot to do with road design. It has a lot to do with driver behav. It has a lot to do with pedestrian behavior. And where are we expecting pedestrians to walk? Where you're, you know, you can talk about the vehicles themselves, you know, a lot of focus I've been involved in, you know, autonomous vehicle pilots and connected vehicle pilots and, you know, how cars are, you know, technology is going to save us. Well, technology might be a piece of it, but I really think at the end of the day it comes down to people and interacting with one another and how that happens and so creating the spaces where people interact and slowing down speeds. In the article, it even references how European roads are set up differently. The speeds are slower. I think that while we're not Europe, and I get that, and we have a different culture here and especially in different places, I've worked, but I like the combination of factors. But focusing on speed management helps tell the story better, I think.
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C
Yeah, that's really interesting, Edward. Do you have anything to add to that? Do you find it difficult when you're working in communities to orient the conversation around speed management and like. Any thoughts you had while reading this piece?
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B
Yeah, when I go to places and I talk about speed management, and this is even before strong towns like working in cities, there are two voices that always come up in the public realm. The first are the folks that understand that lower speeds result in lower fatalities when vehicles contact people. So when we look at all the speed studies, we know that the percentile of fatality occurring is far lower at 20 miles an hour. And it exponentially goes up when you go up to 30, 35 miles an hour. It's a big curve. So the folks that know that data immediately say, okay, we should have in our city all of our streets posted at 20 miles an hour. And if we do that, then when we collide into folks, the number of fatalities will be lower. That, that is an action. That is an action people can take. But I think all of us know as, as humans, we will drive the speeds that we are comfortable. So even if you go to some of the European cities, I mean, my God, I've ridden in cars with my friends that are Romans in Rome and it's like a Fellini movie. I mean, they're zipping around in little tiny cars as fast as they can because they are comfortable at that level of speed. So just posting signs is the first piece. The other, which is the knee jerk reaction anytime this comes up is, is enforcement. If only we had more police officers out there because we've posted the speed slower. If we put more police officers out there or speed cameras up, we will go and use enforcement to crack this down and teach a lesson for people to drive slower in the places that we've done for that in the studies we've seen, and we've written about this in strong towns, as soon as the enforcement leaves, the speeds return, right? And again, this comes into that idea that people are going to drive the speeds in which we're comfortable. When as designers in cities, we bring all of the knowledge we have from all of the standards, we try to create places that are comfortable for people to go a little bit faster, to fit a little bit more stuff in. And not just vehicles. We also overlay bike lanes, we overlay crosswalks and sidewalks. Into all of this design work, what I found is that it's admirable that we would go and lower the speeds with signs. It's quick if we can go out and do enforcement. But if we really want to tackle speeds, which in fact, is that one of the top contributing factors we've seen in all of our crash analysis studios, we have to create an environment that speaks to all of the users so that they know intrinsically, without reading the sign, a speed that they would travel that is appropriate for the surrounding uses and context. We have eight decades of building really big, wide, fast things that push through throughput. So, as shared in the article, I would kind of push back a little bit on what Professor Ferenchuk says in here about we need to switch modes. I think we really need to switch the way we design this stuff. I think we get the engineers off the hook. If we just say we want to get 20% of people out of cars. I think we skip over the fact that in our built environment, we built something that tells people to go faster. I come from an architecture background, so when I think about this from my architecture background, we are trained in the architecture profession to observe how people use spaces, and we respond to that through our designs. We can see that in the built environment. So this is why when you're in a building, you. Well, if it's good architecture, you would know where the front doors of a building, you would know places that you would be permitted to sit on. Like, these are the things through architectural design that we observe and see when we go out to the street. There's this misconnection of observing how people use the space that I think is actually the bigger problem out there, not just modes. And it's more than just design, because sometimes when I talk to engineers, bless their hearts, they love all the standards, or what standard is it? How wide should the lane width Be right. And I think that is such a variable. Like we want to have that warm comfort standard, but we need to actually observe and some of the things that they would call me crazy on, on street lane widths, what we find is we, when we break away from the standards and follow some of the way people use space 10, 9. These dimensional lane widths may not actually be the right response. There may be something different that needs to be used that could modify block by block.
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A
Well, I would like to give a real world example that we have in Ann Arbor. We just redesigned State street, which is in the heart of where students are for the University of Michigan. We put in a bus only lane. There's a protected cycle track that's raised and there's raised crosswalks. And now when you try to drive down that street, you really understand there's going to be pedestrians, there's going to be buses, there's going to be bikes. You understand how the space is defined. And Edward, I really liked your point about that is really defining what the road is telling you without having to have signs tell you, which I completely agree with 100%.
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C
Right. Well, and I think that when, Edward, you were saying the article cites kind of this mode shift. I think that that that mode shift to be successful needs to be driven by the design. Meaning like it has to become more desirable or more comfortable or easier to take those different modes of transportation. It can't be. That doesn't always work as like a just a cheerleading into different ways of doing things.
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A
No. The space needs to be inviting and comfortable.
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C
Yep, yep. And it needs to be, I mean it needs to be easier to do it that way. Right. It needs to be easy. Yeah, go ahead, Edward.
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B
Or in the other spectrum, there are places that we just have to acknowledge people on bikes don't exist.
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A
Correct.
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So when we talk about State street in Ann Arbor, that's a highly pedestrian environment. You've got a major university there, you have lots of flow of traffic and then you go overlay football and you invite all these people to your community. That's an area that is high pedestrian traffic in those areas. But if we go outside of Ann Arbor, we go out to some other rural areas. This, there are folks that are advocating for crosswalks on super wide roads that are intended to carry lots of traffic.
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Correct.
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And our roadway classifications, we get everything all blurry at strong downs. When I go out in the community, we identify two types of transportation systems. So when you go and you identify break all this down, we simplify it as streets and roads. When we talk about roads, those are the things that, yes, let's communicate that as automobile centric. Let's talk about that from destination to destination. The way we would accommodate other users on that. It's not going to be crosswalks and sidewalks and bike lanes overlaid on roads. There's a different operating system there. When we talk about streets, that's where we're prioritizing safety. That's where we have a mix of uses. So a lot of times when we get in these conversations, somebody will email me after a podcast like this and they'll say, oh my gosh, Edward. And Strong Towns only wants to have walking everywhere we go. Now, there is a lot of context in all of our built environment.
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If, absolutely.
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If we're in that urban area, we're talking streets. When we're talking in rural suburban areas, those are roads. Streets are about commerce, they're about interaction, about people and safety. Roads are about moving high volumes of traffic at speed between destinations. And we just need to delineate those. And when we have these conversations, we've done lots, as the engineering profession has done lots of safety advancements on our federal highway systems where we can go at speed. The signs are big, the language and communication there has made it so that we can go faster on roads with more people and we have seen lower fatalities there. It's when we blend the two is where we're having these problems.
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A
Absolutely. That's sad, Edward.
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C
I think that's a great. I was going to ask Melissa that. You know, we talk a lot about competing values and you know, when you are trying to build a road that is all things to all people, it. And that's kind of what Edward was talking about. He's, he's trying to explicitly help communities understand. I'm not asking this street to be all things to all people. I'm asking the street to do these functions. Do you find when you're working in communities because you've been in Ann Arbor, but you've worked in a lot of communities on this issue, do you find it easy to talk in terms of the values or is that a challenge? Are you a listener who thinks I want to bring strong towns to my community? Visit strongtowns.orgevents to set up face to face conversations about the future of our cities. When you host a Strong Towns event, you're bringing together residents, that local leaders and professionals to build a shared understanding and real momentum in your community. If you're ready for bottom up momentum and making places people truly love. Visit strongtowns.orgevents to learn more.
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A
It's a challenge. It also because a lot of influences, you know, the elected officials and the priorities of the city or the agenda of the council. I've been lucky to work in places that have prioritized biking and walking and transit use. I've also worked in those same communities when administrations changed and the priorities change, but you still want to do the work. So I think in a lot of places that I've been able to work, like Orlando or Charlotte, North Carolina, where they were growing very fast when I was working there. And they're still growing, but at the time it was exponential growth. And so in like in Florida, there's a lot of state roads that you're dealing with that just get wider and wider and they're meant to carry traffic, but they also have lots of residential uses around it. And what to Edward's point, the land use context is huge. And so the state of Florida Department of Transportation actually, actually created context sensitive design that is wonderful because it helps the conversation when you're talking to the dots about state roads. In Charlotte, it was explosive growth and we had farm to market roads Edward was just talking about with rural roads.
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C
Yep.
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A
So we had two lane roads with ditches that had no sidewalks that were getting redeveloped quicker than we could even think of keeping up with. Trying to help with sidewalks or anything else for people to move around. But then they were starting to get served by transit because there was the demand for it. And so it's, it's a, it's a very hard space to work in when you've got that transition going on and it's hard for the infrastructure to keep up, which is one of the key tenets of strong towns. Right. So when you're dealing with the city that's the size of the county, several hundred square miles. It's, it is a very hard conversation and values while people are all supportive of safety, you know, if you couch it under that safety umbrella, it's what safety means to different people is different things. And so balancing all those demands is definitely challenging. So focusing on breaking it down to just the streets or the roads I think is a great way to help the conversation.
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C
Yeah.
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B
And I think some of that conversation as outlined in the article, there are these data gaps. Right. Whenever we talk about roads, whenever we talk about the built environment, there's all this data we have to collect how many vehicles traveled there. What was the speed study? What were people's opinions? One of the gaps is understanding how Many people are riding and biking, working with Ann Arbor the last couple of months. They have access to an enormous amount of data sets that help to fill in those gaps. So when I go to cities, the first thing I kind of ask them to do is do like a walk audit, go out and look at places. Just as we do a speed study, we can observe where people are walking. We can find what the desire paths are. These are things that we can observe in the field. As professionals, we can make that into a study. Right? We observe something, we write it up. But Melissa, I know you have access to some incredible data sets and tools that are out there. There's also an app that my family uses called Bike Streets, which is that people can download and you can map your bike rides. That goes to a map places. There's several cities across the country, like in Flagstaff, Arizona, they're using that to help evaluate their priority spots of where they're going to do bicycle connections. And their data sets are showing things that wouldn't show up any other way except for that type of input.
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C
That's actually a great transition to my next question because I noticed that the author interviewed a gentleman who's running the center for Pedestrian and Cycling and indicates it's the first of its kind, a transportation center focused exclusively on non, you know, car mobility. And you know, it occurs to me, Melissa, the last two communities you've worked in Ann Arbor, Gainesville, are university towns. You know, if, if you all had a direct line to the research that this center was doing in New Mexico, what, what would be helpful to you in the conversation of making our community streets safer? Like what, what do you, what would you love to see them be digging into right now?
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A
Well, actually, in both communities where I've had a major university, I've worked closely with the universities on research. Yeah, in Gainesville, it was more focused on smart, smart cities technology we had. But we also were very focused on non motorized users. We were doing things with our buses, we were doing near miss, we were doing some pedestrian and bike focused as well as working with the user interface with the autonomous vehicle. We worked with one of the colleges in the public health side of the University of Florida. So in every case, I've been able to work with researchers. Now in Ann Arbor, we're working with researchers with the, um, Transportation Research Institute, umtree. We have a couple projects with them also, one of which is near miss analytics for focused on the pedestrian bike as well as. So it's more been traffic signal focused, but also in Gainesville we did a whole bunch, like I said, a wide range of things that were focused. So getting to your question about what we would ask for, unfortunately, when you work in these places where you have major universities that are interested in this research, you know, just speaking with them. In Gainesville, I worked closely with the School of Planning as well. We, you know, they were always looking for projects for their students to do. So we had grad students doing projects for us as well. So collecting data, being out, helping us. When I was in Orlando, we used University of Central Florida students to help us do a walking audit of the entire downtown. And we gave them some training, we sent them out with clipboards and we had them doing qualitative as well as quantitative. You know, are the speed limits, how wide are the sidewalks, how many trees are there, how comfortable do you feel? You know, that sort of thing. So I've been very lucky in the research side of it. And even in Charlotte, I worked with a student on his doctoral research doing pre and post public health study on one of our road diets, actually.
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C
Oh, wow.
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A
For how comfortable people felt if they used the biking, walking more before and after we went in and put bike lanes and sidewalks. So I've been very lucky on that. So whenever I have questions, I've been able to have that research side of it. Eat our work. Yeah, pretty much. And even in Portland, I worked with Portland State on some stuff. So we've. Yeah, I've been lucky that I've worked in cities that had universities that were interested in the work that we were doing.
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C
That's great. Edward. Anything that you would add to the research of these folks?
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B
Yeah, on top of that, the other piece is as citizens, in addition to some of the apps, you can go and track these things every time your community goes and does a transportation study. Every time they go and they do one of these things and they ask for public input, sharing where you walk, how you walk is really important. That creates a data set that has huge influences on these big regional plans. It's not fast work. Those plans take years to go in. But. But I can tell you from my own personal experience, when we have some sort of mpo, regional plan, transportation plan, bike PED update, I make sure that I put lots of pins on the map and I have all of my friends put lots of pins on the map of all the things of where we walk and, and ride and where we wish we had things, because they're asking for that input. And I'm amazed how all of that builds up a crescendo and influences decision making. There are many places in my own community that people didn't expect people to be walking that are because there's no data set to show that until there's that public process. So there's some really high tech stuff we can do with apps and our phones and there's some really low tech stuff, old school public engagement. And I just encourage folks to do the all of the above approach. It may not seem like that is contributing and making movement, but I assure you it is.
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A
I totally agree, Edward. One of my most favorite things to do when we're looking at biking and walking for around schools in our connectivity is asking the students to draw maps of how they get to school, if they walk or bike. And that is one of the most interesting ways to get information because you learn about, well, I won't walk by that house because there's a mean dog there that barks at me. Or you know, I won't walk down that street because when I try to cross I can't see around the bush. Or you know, that sort of thing is always interesting when you actually, when you talk to the people who are, the children who are actually trying to get to school. It's, it's always a great way to. A very low tech way to get information.
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C
That's great. I'm gonna switch gears a little bit. The, the article does point out the, the challenges that we've seen across the country as Vision Zero has come, I guess across the, the Atlantic and has been implemented in many cities. We often work with Vision Zero, connect with them on a variety of things. But I think that the article points out it has been a different challenge in the states to implement and see the successes that have been seen, you know, across the, across the pond, as they say. And you know, the article cites the kind of the inherent maybe design, design systems that are different. But I'm curious how you guys think about like Vision Zero and, and how we continue to build on that so that we can take some of the, you know, some of the good, but make sure that we're ultimately achieving the goals and maybe. Melissa, I'll start with you because I know that you've, you know, part of the work reason that you're working with, working with us at Strong Towns is to continue to make things better and safer in your community.
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A
Absolutely. Achieving the goals is, is challenging and it takes commitment. And fortunately the city of Ann Arbor is extremely committed to achieving those goals. In Gainesville, we had Vision Zero and in Portland we also had Vision Zero plans. I think a lot of cities have a lot of folks working there that really want to take this program and implement this program and make, you know, obviously we're all looking to reduce deaths and serious deaths and serious injuries. I, I think it's really hard to make those changes without the commitment that we have in Ann Arbor. So it is very focused on how are we slowing speeds, how are we changing our built environment, how are we making it easier for people to bike and walk, how are we making it safer for everyone to interact on our streets? And I think that there's a lot of funding that we have that is dedicated to that. We have embedded vision priorities in every single project. So regardless of what project is going on in the city, if it's a utility project or road resurfacing, a capital improvement project, our planners and engineers and transportation are on every single one of those projects, making sure that we're looking at opportunities for crosswalks or for. There's some signal upgrades we could do, or if there's bike lanes we can add, or if there's anything we can do to make the environment more comfortable and safe for all the different interactions for biking and walking and transit users as well. So we're, you know, those are, that is, it's council directed. So it's very nice to have that. And I think a lot of cities aren't able to do all of those different pieces that help move Vision Zero goal forward. You might be able to do like a signature project or under safe streets and roads for all. You might be able to do some really good planning or demonstration. But having that commitment across the board and having it embedded in everything that is done is, is. Is definitely not something you see everywhere.
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C
Right. There were two key things that you said that I feel like I see and kind of a systems approach, right?
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A
Like, absolutely.
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C
We have to, we have to be looking at this from every kind of angle and contributing piece. And then also the leadership support, you know, having that from the, whether it's the council or the elected executive, like having the, the people in charge continue to make these things a priority really helps the teams kind of on the implementation side. Edward, anything that you would add to Melissa and the kind of like how we can, where we see, you know, Vision Zero, like needing a little bit more help so that we can actually start to start to see more and more cities succeed in these efforts.
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B
Yeah. What I see in the city, and we're working with multiple cities and we've been sharing with the crash Analysis studios with lots of places. What I'm seeing is that our professionals, the folks that really know these things, the built environment, they know transportation engineering, they're very, very afraid to talk about safety. The cities where vision zero is floundering, they. What I'm seeing is a pattern, is that they're afraid to talk about safety because we talk about safety. We have to take accountability and responsibility of that built environment and think about what that means. What we hear in the crash studios is that we identify a dangerous intersection when that is identified, and we point out all the things observationally that were contributing factors for crash, which are many, many contributing factors to all these crashes. What we find is that intersection is following the same standards of 80 other intersections in the city. And if the city would acknowledge that something was unsafe if they were to take on the responsibility of the contributing factors of that crash, the pushback I get is that all of a sudden that is overwhelming for the city because now we have 80 to 90 intersections that we now have to all fix at once. So they fall back to that. This is that we also, you know, part of our city cycle is this idea of blame. If you, if you break the rules, there's a penalty to that. There is a legal action occurring to it. So cities are afraid to talk about safety in a timely manner. They're waiting to. They get all the facts. They're waiting to the black box has been downloaded. They're waiting until all the criminal actions have occurred. They're not looking at the things that we know of today immediately, because we funded all of the crashes studios that we've done. We've done 27 of them now. There's at least half a dozen things that cities could go out and do tomorrow quickly and cheaply that would address some of those contributing factors. But some Vision zero cities I've worked with, they won't sit and look at the crashes and analyze it until a year after the crash because they don't want to interfere with any of those proceedings that may be legal in nature with the insurance companies or criminal action. The other key element is that many of the cities that we've talked to are stuck behind their plans. If it's not in the plan, they don't want to work out from that. This is, I understand where this is coming from, and this is not something that is a fault. This is a reaction. When we go out in the public and we take on responsibility, we now become the spokesperson. We become the face of that as technical professionals in city hall, you don't have to spend very much time reading the newspaper, attending a public meeting or watching the news to see how this friction between the public and local government. Everywhere I go, all of these local government folks, these people that are public servants that truly love the cities they work in, have been abused, they have scars, they've stumbled in the public, and that is a memory that they never want to repeat again. So when we talk about these types of things, because we're afraid to talk about safety, because we're afraid to acknowledge responsibility, we develop these super elaborate plans. And if it's not in the plan, we're not taking action on it. Or if it's in the plan, we're going to take action on it. And it goes through the typical kind of bureaucratic process of over engagement too large of a project, things that require lots of funding and lots of time to put in. The work we've been trying to do with the Crash Studio is just to be more responsive, to help provide that ability for our professionals, for our cities to talk differently about these crashes, to talk differently about the contributing factors. So we can talk very openly about it. We can acknowledge all the contributing factors to it. That really is the thing that we're were missing as a profession in the architecture world. If a building collapses, my God, it's on every newspaper. Every architect talks about it, even the architects working on it. As long as the City Court Building in New York is something that we study in architecture school all the time, that was a misunderstanding of the calculation of the engineering where the building almost fell over. The architecture profession will look at that, those buildings and try to build a better code, teach more things in school so we don't repeat those sorts of things. We don't provide that grace or that openness when we talk about roadways. And it's even worse when a bad roadway design comes up. Even though it's rooted in all of the pieces, for some reason, it's always the engineer that worked on it or the firm that worked on it. It's their first fault. And we've got to break that so that we can really talk about safety in a much broader sense in a way that we can then work as a community to start to address the things that would make our streets safer.
- [38:39]
C
Yeah, I think that the, the shift in trying, which it seems to me like Ann Arbor is a model of, but the shift in trying to talk about crashes as a more urgent matter to solve, and when leadership gets behind that, it really provides the support that cities need to actually go make changes. But, you know, I think for a while there was a bit of. There's not a lot that we can do. I actually think that some of the previous work by, by this author was exposed some of the. The, the author of the article, David Zipper, exposed some of the kind of COVID trends where driving was down where. And fatalities were up. And I actually think that that was a important data point that was added to the conversation that made people kind of more aware of how these different systems contribute. And like, wait a second. It's counterintuitive that if driving is going down, fatalities are going up. So, like, what's going on? You know? One final question. The author, the piece ends on autonomous vehicles. And it sounds like, Melissa, you've got some experience, a little bit at least in pilots and things like that. So I'd love to hear even just how you talk internally about the future of avs and how it interacts with your desire to keep the streets of Ann Arbor safe. And like, how complicated is this and what are you learning?
- [40:21]
A
I think emerging technology is a piece of the conversation, but at the end of the day, how our roads are designed is really dictating how people use them. And the autonomous vehicle and connected vehicle technology and connected to everything. Technology is an interesting space if you really want to see the way we can look at things and all the data we can get off the traffic signals and cars and behavior. But as far as autonomous vehicles go themselves, I think our streets are designed in such a way that it's very difficult for an autonomous vehicle to function. You know, it might function on a typical street segment, but every. The roads in our cities across the country are designed so differently. And we have such different intersections and we have different signals and we have different road uses. There's not one size fits all. And I think that's challenging from the technology space on how to adapt to that. And so I think staying focused on what we know can improve the built environment for people to move safely through. That built environment is money well spent to improve our cities and the quality of life that our residents experience.
- [41:49]
C
That's great. You know, Edward, you've cited your architecture background a couple of times in this interview, and I'm kind of reminded with what Melissa is saying of what is it the form follows function? You know, like it's.
- [42:02]
A
It is.
- [42:03]
C
I mean, that's kind of what we're saying with streets. You know, it's.
- [42:07]
A
It is.
- [42:08]
C
How we build our streets is a big determinant of, of how safe they are. And and that includes not just the street itself, but the things around the street. So, Edward, any last words before we go to the down zone?
- [42:22]
B
No. I really want to thank Melissa for joining us. From my own experience, I know it's sometimes difficult to ask folks working in the public sector to come and have these frank conversations and joining in on it, but I really appreciate it because she has an enormous amount of experience that she's bringing to the table on this. She's not somebody that's just done a whole bunch of studies. She's actually done this stuff on the ground. I know this because I've lived in the cities she's worked in. We also have similar and shared mentors in this space. She's walking the walk on this type of work, and I know Ann Arbor is really lucky to have her. If we look at Ann Arbor, what they're doing in transportation right now, from an organizational structure, when we look at how they're organizing their departments, the City Leadership and City Management have really identified a whole new department that is multidisciplinary soup to nuts when it comes to the public right of ways. And if I map any city, public right of ways are the largest land use of any city. It's anywhere from 60 to 80% of your overall land use is dedicated to streets and roads. So it is one of the most important pieces of your city that can make or break you on a whole different types of reasons. So for me, I'm learning a lot in our work within Arbor about what they're doing in their department and structure of the city and the conversations they're having.
- [44:00]
C
That's great. Yeah, we are.
- [44:01]
A
Thanks, Edward.
- [44:02]
C
Yeah, we are very excited to be able to give a shout out to Ann Arbor and to your leadership, Melissa. So thank you for joining us because Edward is. Is a regular on upzone. I'm going to ask him to start with our down zone. What's one thing, Edward, that you're reading consuming right now? Listen. That you want to share with our listeners?
- [44:22]
B
Yeah. So the. The big thing, the thing that I can't let go here is that at certain towns, we are working with cities all across North America to help them accelerate their work they're doing on safer streets by working with them and sharing and learning about how cities can apply and activate a crash analysis studio. I'm super excited because I'm going to be in Ann Arbor later this week. They're hosting a workshop. They're laying everything out on the table for the public. They're going to host a Demonstration Crash Analysis Studio. So work they've been doing for the last several years. The reason they're doing cool projects like State street, the reason they're seeing lower crash numbers in their city is because of all of this dynamic work. I don't think people know about it. So this is an opportunity where Strong Towns gets to partner with Ann Arbor. We've been invited in to talk about the Crash Analysis Studio. And then they're sharing with the public this process. What happens after 911 is called, after the police report is filed? What are all the steps from the police department to the engineering department, to operations and public works to build out and address all these pieces? They're doing a lot of that work. I'm not going to say they've got it perfect. I think they would say that, too. But they're pretty far along in this work that I think other cities can learn from. So I'm super excited to be in Ann Arbor to work with that team and see how we can advance that. There's already things that I'm learning that we've brought back to the Crash Analysis Studio that Ann Arbor is doing. They have a lot of accountability through their Vision Zero and through their capital plans that we're encouraging other cities to follow. And I hope that I'm able to bring things from the other cities we're working with, such as Pittsburgh and Flint, to bring back to their city to help them advance the work again ultimately so that we can see safer streets in communities like Ann Arbor and across North America. So, yeah, a little, little adventure this week, but I'm super hyped up about it.
- [46:39]
C
That's awesome. So that was related. How about you, Melissa? What, what are you excited about? What are you reading? What are you learning that you want to share with the. With the group?
- [46:48]
A
Well, we are also excited Edward's coming and Strong Towns will be part of our Crash Analysis Studio that we'll be doing on Wednesday. Right now, I am currently in Detroit at the APA National Conference, the planning conference. And it's been a good couple of days. There's been some really great sessions and I've gotten some. It's interesting to see what other folks are doing, which is why I like coming to conferences. But one in particular is San Diego, doing some Quick Build guidelines and doing things with 3D printers for quick Build roundabouts. So that was kind of an interesting thing I hadn't heard about. So I'm going to be reaching out to San Diego and finding out more about that. But there were some great presentations about mobility hubs and just some really good sessions that I've been to that I found interesting. So that's been a, it's been a, it's been a good couple of days.
- [47:45]
C
That's, that's wonderful. Well, I, I was, you know, gonna share what I've been reading. I may do that. But then also I'll, I'll put a little work plug in there, too. I finally finished, you know, probably 30 years, 40 years too late. Great Expectations over the weekend. I had never read it, so it's very enjoyable. Trying to read some of the classics that I've never managed to read. And I really enjoyed it. But on the, on a professional down zone. For those of you that are regular listeners, you probably know we're a short time out from our national gathering and I actually really want to give a shout out to the folks in Fayetteville who have been so welcoming to us as we plan it. And so we'll be there, you know, in May and just really excited for a really great gathering. And, you know, if you're listening and you haven't got gotten your ticket yet and you still can, I highly recommend it because it's going to be a great, great few days. So thank you both. Edward, Melissa, it was great, great to have you. On today's update episode of Upzoned. That was a tongue twister. On behalf of all of us at Strong Towns, remember to take care of yourselves and take care of your places. Thanks so much.
- [49:01]
A
Thank you.
- [49:02]
B
Let me show you what I'm about to do. This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a strongtowns member@strongtowns.org membership.