Mondays 159: It's All Connected with Wes Marshall

Mondays 159: It’s All Connected with Wes Marshall

September 24, 2024

Topics: 15 Minute Cities, Car Loans, Mondays at The Overhead Wire, Passenger Rail, Social Housing

This week on Mondays we’re joined by Professor Wes Marshall of the University of Colorado Denver to go through this week’s news. We talk 15 Minute Cities, increasing car loans, social housing, and whether a new train to Boulder makes sense. We’re also sharing this one on YouTube in a few days. Listen in on audio below.

As always we have all the item links below in the show notes and below everything a transcript:

Main Items

The 15 Minute City – Guardian Cities (Research Paper linked inside article)

15 minute city interactive website

Car loans pass student loans – Jalopnik

The Home Act – New York Times

An affordable housing experiment – Vox

Boulder train coming? – Colorado Public Radio

Future of Lyft bikes – Lyft

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Jeff Wood: You’re listening to the talking headways podcast network. Happy Monday. This is Mondays at the overhead wire sponsored by our super generous patron supporters.

[00:00:05] I’m Jeff Wood, your host and joined by. Wes Marshall. Hey Wes, how you doing? I’m doing well. How are you doing? I’m doing great. You’re it’s midday in Denver. It looks nice outside. How’s everything going over there?

[00:00:19] Wes Marshall: Things are pretty well. Things are busy, but good, and it was fun kind of digging into some of this to have a little bit of a different Monday, so I’m looking forward to chatting about this stuff and hearing some of your thoughts.

[00:00:28] Jeff Wood: Yeah, yours too. First off though, I want to hear how the book tour and talks and all that stuff is going.

[00:00:34] Wes Marshall: Is going, I think, better than I could have hoped. People are paying attention to the book. On one hand, I feel like I’m spending two or three hours every day responding to emails and doing podcasts or interviews or that sort of stuff.

[00:00:46] It’s been hard to do my real job. At some level at the same time, that’s obviously better than nobody paying attention to the book. So that’s good too. And it’s been the number one seller and all these really weird Amazon categories files. I’m not sure, one of them is automotive engineering.

[00:01:02] I’m not sure why my book fits into the automotive engineering space, but it was number one in that for a bit. Anyways, I guess the

[00:01:08] Jeff Wood: book

[00:01:10] Wes Marshall: is called killed by traffic engineer. And I was on with you a few months ago talking about it.

[00:01:14] Jeff Wood: Yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome. Like what’s the most interesting place you’ve been to talk about the book?

[00:01:19] Wes Marshall: No, I’ve been on like a college radio station at Wesleyan. They had me on and it’s cool at the end. They ask you a question like, Oh, if you had one song that kind of fits what you think the book is about so on the spot, you’re trying to come up with a song or, random questions like that, or sometimes more fun to hit on then, some of the ones that get repetitive from.

[00:01:38] Yeah.

[00:01:40] Jeff Wood: That’s another thing I was wondering is you get a lot of questions all the time. I’m wondering if there’s one that you’re so tired of, you don’t want to talk about it anymore.

[00:01:46] Wes Marshall: Now it’s been good. The book is, to be honest, it’s 400 pages and people seem to be taking different things out of it.

[00:01:54] So it’s, I try to go in an opposite direction of, I love Malcolm Gladwell’s books, but he hits on one topic and he just gives you 10 examples of it.

[00:02:02] Speaker 3: Yeah.

[00:02:02] Wes Marshall: I’m trying to hit on different themes throughout the book. So for whatever reason, like when I talk to a bike advocacy type folks, I get a whole different set of questions.

[00:02:11] Then when I talk with like the local government. type podcast, which was asked, really interested in the parks and rec quotes I use and stuff like that. It’s been better than I hoped. I have not gotten too much in terms of just repetitiveness.

[00:02:25] Jeff Wood: Yeah. Yeah. Can you hear that? Like the music downstairs, they’re playing music.

[00:02:29] I don’t know. Let me turn my, I’m going to turn my game down just a little bit more. Cause I’m always nervous about the audio and what’s going on and people watching this will be like, what are you talking about? But I, it gets me for some reason, I don’t know.

[00:02:43] Wes Marshall: Mentioned the fact that people might be able to watch this time.

[00:02:45] Jeff Wood: Yeah. Yeah. We’re going to put this up on YouTube. So people should be able to watch this and check it out. And hopefully in the future, I’ll be doing more types of these things. Wes has been like you should do YouTube. And I was like, oh I don’t know. Cause I edit the podcast and the shows and I take out all the ums and stuff, it’s more natural, to have everything in there, as long as we’re continuous about it and making sure to keep moving forward.

[00:03:05] I also have a, a podcast. One of those things where my hair is a mess too, and I just sitting in my house. It’ll get better over time. I’m sure maybe I’ll dress in a suit in the future. I don’t know who knows. I just like

[00:03:15] Wes Marshall: to work and I had a helmet on, so I’m not,

[00:03:18] Jeff Wood: we don’t have to look pretty,

[00:03:19] Wes Marshall: but I think when I listen to your Monday shows, it has always felt to me just like a conversation.

[00:03:24] And I think people, okay. Listening to conversations, even if I say a couple of times here and there and yeah.

[00:03:31] Jeff Wood: Yeah, it’s, it, it’s funny cause I tell people this, like it taking it out. It actually is a, it’s just a pause word. It’s a filler. And if you take it out, it actually makes sense to, to, the language continues and you don’t really notice, but it is something that we’re used to, as long as it’s not too much.

[00:03:46] Unfortunately, a number of years ago, we had a number of folks who either were reading off paper or doing things where they said every other word, which is tough to listen to as well. So just that happy medium between, I think it was really good.

[00:03:57] Wes Marshall: I would guess if they were reading off a paper, you’d have fewer ums and ahs.

[00:04:00] No,

[00:04:01] Jeff Wood: you’d think so, but it doesn’t work that way sometimes for some odd reason. I don’t know. Fair enough. Yeah. Thanks everybody. If who’s ordered the bus and bike scarves, really appreciate it. Head on over to the overhead wire. com or email me at the overhead wire at gmail. com. If you want a discount on group rates as also, we always want to note that Patreon supporters keep this thing going.

[00:04:20] So patreon. com slash the overhead wire as well. And then also bookshop. org slash shop slash the overhead wire. My brother in law told me that my repetitive saying of the, of these things every single time has got in his brain. And so that’s a good thing. I think. So people know exactly where to go to get the stuff that they need.

[00:04:35] Right now, at the top of the list is the new future of public transportation with Paul comfort and his crew. So that’s good. There’s a lot of folks ordering that book. So that’s really good to, to check that out. If you, if folks get a chance and then also finally, we’ve got our cars or cholesterol T shirts bit dot L Y slash cars or cholesterol.

[00:04:49] Check those out. If you get a chance, Richard was then ski design those and you can find him on Instagram at Dick David sketches when you get a chance. So where, this is episode 1 59, we’re live in session and on video, so check us out if you get a chance on YouTube when this hits up. And then before we get to the show, I wanna let everybody know that they can get this podcast on iHeartRadio, Spotify, overcast Pocket Cast, apple Podcast, et cetera.

[00:05:10] And feel free to leave us a review on iTunes or make a comment in this YouTube video when it comes out. We appreciate that. So let’s get to the news. This is what people are here for. This is what people come to listen to us for hear a few stories that piqued our interest from the newsletter over the last few weeks.

[00:05:24] Also, if you want to sign up for the newsletter, go to the overhead wire. com and get it free two week trial and check that out. We also have revamped our website. So the search is better now. I’m hoping that is something that people are interested in. And we’re also going to roll out some new features to coming up soon in the newsletter that allows people to click on topic tags underneath each article.

[00:05:42] So they can go and see the menagerie of things that we’ve collected for all the hundred thousand plus items we have in the archive. Check that out if you get a chance, so we should start with 15 minute cities. I think can everywhere be a 15 minute city, a universal framework for 15 minute cities, a new study in the journal nature cities takes a look at how much it would take for neighborhoods to redistribute amenities to become 15 minute neighborhoods.

[00:06:04] They found that some cities like Zurich and Switzerland were already well situated while car dependent cities like Atlanta would have a hard time moving the needle without drastic interventions. This was a jet neuron. John in the guardian. And then also this also is interesting to me. I mentioned this in the newsletter as well, that there were like several different articles based on this item specifically.

[00:06:24] And I’m always interested in the framing of everybody’s like titles and stuff. So the title for one is time isn’t everything in science blog, Europe beats us for walkable livable cities and the guardian and where in the world. Is closest to becoming a 15 minute cities in RFI, which is a wire service in Europe.

[00:06:39] So lots of different frames for different people for this piece, but I’m curious what you thought about this was.

[00:06:45] Wes Marshall: So this is interesting too. And this is one that I dug into and actually read the paper underlying all these articles. And for me, this relates to a lot of my research. And I gave it in the book.

[00:06:55] I don’t actually use the phrase 15 minute cities. But towards the end, I’m talking about how that’s one way to improve safety. But, right now, thanks to Penelope’s book, 15 minute cities and measuring them. It’s all the rage. There’s a lot of similar papers like this. And, basically all they’re doing is they’re measuring local accessibility.

[00:07:13] But almost every time they do so without and this is the case in this paper, they don’t look at sidewalks whatsoever, right? In the end, what they’re doing is not that different than what Walk Score has always done. Walk Score isn’t based on sidewalks. They’ve added network distance to it, but before it was just based on if you have restaurants and libraries, like all within a one mile zone, which is more like 20 minutes than 15 minutes.

[00:07:39] Pretty similar. And it’s funny I looked, I tried to find the one, the papers that actually did account for sidewalks, and there was one, it was looking at Barcelona. In Barcelona, you would think is a very walkable city, right? It’s should be considered among the 15 minute cities. But when you account for sidewalks and if people need sidewalks or curb ramps, it doesn’t hold up at all as a 15 minute city.

[00:08:02] Anyways, in terms of this article I think people will look at some of those graphics where they just compare the different cities and you’ll, I think the takeaway is like, oh, Europe is way better than us. That was the headline or Zurich Is way better than Atlanta. One of the good things, I think, about the actual papers, they do a good job of just saying that things are by no means the same across those cities and the paper has some great maps.

[00:08:28] I don’t know if you saw those ones where they show all the different cities that they looked at or eight of them, I think, out of the 50. Yeah. And you can see, Yeah. Just the heterogeneity of the 15 minute city. So places like Atlanta have a 15 minute city downtown, but once you get right outside of there, it dissipates and you don’t really have a 15 minute city.

[00:08:48] You don’t have the same amenities or accessibility. But even like in Bogota, I’m heading there next week for something and they seemingly have a good 15 minute city. But again, once you get outside of downtown, like their downtown area, 15 minute city area is bigger. But once you get outside, it doesn’t hold up either.

[00:09:03] So I don’t know, what do you think about it?

[00:09:07] Jeff Wood: I think it’s really interesting to think about how, what it would take to get a 15 minute city. Framework to be everywhere or to actually implement it in every city. And I think you’re right about the suburban context of it all. I think it’s interesting to compare all these cities.

[00:09:20] And then if you go to the website, it’s a, what if dot Sony CSL dot it slash backslash 15 minute city, I think is the URL. And again, I apologize. For any noise in the background. And it does drive me nuts. I can hear sawing.

[00:09:35] Wes Marshall: I hear nothing. Good. Your audio is amazing.

[00:09:41] Jeff Wood: So anyways, there’s this there’s a website and you can go and basically go and check out your city and see what the places are that are very, walkable and things like that.

[00:09:48] And so I. Drilled down to San Francisco, you can see that all along the Caltrain line all along in the city of San Francisco in Oakland, the core parts of Oakland, it all looks pretty good. But then when you get on the outside, it it it goes, a different direction, but, thinking about redistributing all the all the stores and everything that you’d need to redistribute to get.

[00:10:06] Atlanta, for example, to be a 15 minute city. It seems impossible, right? But I think that kind of misses the whole idea of this concept that Carlos Moreno brought forward. And it’s been talked about many times. This can be the walkable city. It can be the pedestrian pocket. It can be. All these things that we talked about for years and years, street, streetcar suburbs, et cetera.

[00:10:25] But I think that it misses the point of we can try to improve things to make them better in these little tiny ways to make it make everything more accessible. And I think that’s the key, right? Like mobility versus accessibility, the accessibility of places. Is helpful for folks to get to where they want to go without having to be super dependent on the car.

[00:10:42] So if you can make these little tweaks over time, I think that really helpful. But I don’t think that you’re ever going to turn it, let the suburbs of Atlanta into a 15 minute cities. It’s just not going to happen, but they seem to have this kind of dour prescription of it’s not, the time based thing isn’t really a good idea.

[00:10:56] We should be focused on other things like cultural amenities and equity and things like that, which is great. But at the same time, I think like the overall idea of the 15 minute city, like always gets watered down this way where people like maybe we can’t do it. Oh, there’s a conspiracy theory.

[00:11:08] Oh, there’s, this is the idea of it. The general idea of it, I think is what should, we should focus on not necessarily this silly details.

[00:11:16] Wes Marshall: And so this paper even does that analysis where they try to relocate what they call the points of interest or the in an attempt to optimize them.

[00:11:24] So they’re saying if you had the exact same Amenities, you just redistributed them. You can improve your 15 minute city, but like you’re saying, it doesn’t feel fair. And I think another thing to think about is a lot just because you have so called amenities nearby. You doesn’t mean that you value those.

[00:11:41] And we learned this back, we did a livable street study a while ago that included a big survey. And the idea was to look at the Donald Appleyard study low, medium, and high traffic residential streets, where we were trying to take a network perspective to see if they were near a good or bad arterial.

[00:11:58] And we were focused on commercial arterials. And what we heard from folks is some strip malls that maybe I don’t value the services being provided there, other people do. And vice versa. The ones that I like, other people don’t. So that’s when you can dig into inequities and, there’s so much in that it’s not as simple as just having the thing it’s not as simple as just what they’re trying to suggest in this paper.

[00:12:22] You can’t really optimize it the way they’re doing it.

[00:12:26] Jeff Wood: I think that’s an important point because we had, we actually had Alex Hoffman on episode 338 and what, one of the things that he was talking about was like, We can try to, use replica and figure out like where amenities are and where we should put things and where people are actually going.

[00:12:38] But what they found out from the data was that, maybe somebody is, has a certain cultural like affinity for Mexican food. And so they want to go to the Mexican market instead of the whole foods. And so if there’s a whole foods in their neighborhood, it’s going to get marked as you have access to a supermarket, but really what you want to do is go to the Mexican food market.

[00:12:55] And so you’re going to. Travel across town to go and do that. So like you’re saying, like the accessibility thing is different in different cultural contexts. It’s different when people have different affinities for things, they’re going to choose where they want to live based on access to the things that they care about, but at the same time, like they might not have the access that we say they are when we’re looking up at an aerial thing.

[00:13:14] Photo or data from an aerial photo from a thousand, 30,000 feet. It’s a totally different context. So I think that’s important to take into account too, is we can look at all this data and we can connect all these dots, but at the same time, in, in the real world, people have their affinities and they have the places where they want to go to get their specialty foods or where, see all their friends.

[00:13:32] There was a, there’s another piece recently that talked about kind of retail gentrification where I can’t remember if it was in, I think it was in brown University study or something like that, where they’re looking at. People were separated by their neighborhoods, but they were also separated where by where they congregated and retail spaces, too.

[00:13:49] And so people are going to have an affinity for where they’re going. And I think that’s really interesting to think about in this context of a 15 minute city, especially as it pertains to the redistribution of resources.

[00:13:59] Wes Marshall: So when you said there was like episode 338, do you have all these memorized?

[00:14:04] Like what’s going on there?

[00:14:07] Jeff Wood: I, when I was taking notes earlier, before we started, I remembered that point and then I looked it up. So

[00:14:13] Speaker 3: it’s not

[00:14:14] Jeff Wood: all in my mind. I promise it’s on my, it’s on my notes on my desktop that I’m looking at right now.

[00:14:20] Wes Marshall: That’s what I was hoping for, but you never know, like you could be sometimes

[00:14:23] Jeff Wood: I can remember stuff.

[00:14:24] Sometimes I can be a savant, but most of the time, not I try, it’ll come to my mind, right? I remembered I talked with Alex about that on that episode. So it, but I couldn’t tell you the episode. We’ve done 500 of these, I, and 160 of these. So I don’t know how many where the numbers are, but I try to find them and write them down.

[00:14:40] So if people want to go listen to them, they can. Yeah. All right. Fair enough.

[00:14:49] Yeah. I think that’s interesting. The whole idea is interesting. And Carlos Marino’s piece has gotten obviously a ton of a ton of attention from the conspiracy theorists and everybody else. But honestly, I think it’s just a way to get people to get closer to the things they need.

[00:15:01] Wes Marshall: Yeah, that’s a whole nother can of worms.

[00:15:03] And, I, it’s hard to imagine that, even when I talk about safety, I think The idea that going to your dentist, if it’s five minutes away versus 20, there’s like a safety benefit to it, but bigger picture, there’s a benefits to just having stuff closer to you, like having to spend a lot of time getting places even if you still have to drive it’s still beneficial to have it somewhere closer to you.

[00:15:25] A lot of those destinations that you go to. So I’m going to be on Carlos Moreno’s webinar series. I think in late November to like, he has a 15 minute city webinar series. So that I guess it’s pretty popular. So that’ll be good.

[00:15:38] Jeff Wood: That’s awesome. Yeah. It was interesting. So the other day I went to a birthday party and my wife was gone out of town.

[00:15:44] So I can’t just leave the two year old at the house by herself when I go pick up a car. So I had to take her and her car seat with me. Cause I can’t just go pick her up with the car and then Yeah. Bring it back with her and just sitting in the seat. I have to bring the car seat with me. So I actually had to take, I have a wagon that I take to the grocery store now.

[00:16:02] Cause that’s just what I do. I walked a quarter mile. And so what I had to do is I had to put the car seat in the wagon with all the stuff we were bringing and then card it to the car so I could drive to this birthday party in on the peninsula. And so it was just this comic, connection.

[00:16:17] To this as well as I have 50, I can walk 15 minutes to a car, but I have to also bring all the things that I need with it. And so it just makes it like, just makes that connectivity and the accessibility of my street more benefit. It makes me feel a bit better about where I live because I don’t need to have the car to go everywhere, but I do need a wagon to bring the car seat to a car so I can use a car when my wife has gone, it’s funny that how those things are all, interconnected.

[00:16:40] Wes Marshall: That’s hilarious. That’s awesome.

[00:16:44] Jeff Wood: All right, next up, car loans surpass student loans. Car loans have surpassed student loans as America’s second largest debt behind mortgages. After people paid pandemic level prices for their new cars, those high interest bills are coming due and the cars can’t be offloaded without taking a loss on underwater loans.

[00:16:58] Many Americans have little choice in transportation because of the country’s dependence on cars. This is by Colin Woodward in New York. Or Woodard, I should say in jalopnik. So I’m curious what you think about this too, because I feel like I have a ton to say about the costs of things, but I’m interested in your thoughts about loans and student loans connected to this as well, as well as mortgages are obviously the highest one, but cars are taken off in terms of how much they’re costing people.

[00:17:23] Would you say this is surprising? No, I was actually surprised that it wasn’t that already, right? I thought that maybe that would be the case because, cars are expensive, but I guess it just passed compare on this in this specific instance of the data that they were collecting. But

[00:17:37] Wes Marshall: yeah, that was my first thinking about it too.

[00:17:41] Of course, I why I thought this was the case already, but also entirely relates to what, we’re talking in terms of engineers and planners, putting people in places where, for most people, they live in a location where driving is the most rational decision they can make and oftentimes driving long distances.

[00:17:59] So this is. Most people live in the antithesis of a 15 minute city. This is almost a requirement to live there. Of course, we know that 30 plus percent of people can’t or don’t drive, but at the same time, 70 percent of people do or need to. And a lot of those people live in places that, don’t have the access, Two destinations that you or I have.

[00:18:20] So it’s tough because for most people, this obviously you don’t need to spend 100, 000 on a car, right? But even what people

[00:18:32] Jeff Wood: do,

[00:18:34] Wes Marshall: people still do when you see some of the stuff on Twitter, but like 1, 400 car payments Oh my God what are people doing? That feels more like it should be a mortgage payment.

[00:18:43] There’s extremes of that, but at the same time just getting into the car market is expensive. And I think people underestimate just the cost beyond just the car payment, right? Talking about the insurance and the registration, and even when you buy it from the get go, the sales tax in a lot of states, and then you might have gas or electricity.

[00:19:03] People have a hard time putting all that stuff in context. Actually, I was just talking to one of the professors here, and she was thinking of buying a house, and she’s car free now, but when she thinks about that new location, she’d have a harder time getting here to work, and she was doing the math in terms of if she comes here three days a week, let’s say she could do Uber Kind of each way, so 50 a day, or buy a car.

[00:19:29] And when she did the math, like when you think 25 it seems like a lot, it was way cheaper. To do the Uber and Lyft to get here if she can walk and take transit and do that in the rest of her life. That’s H plus T,

[00:19:42] Jeff Wood: H plus T, that’s crazy. That’s, it actually does make sense because then you’re not paying for all the extra stuff, the storage of the vehicle, the paying for all the extraneous stuff that comes with that, but it’s still breaks your brain a little bit thinking about why that might be cheaper to pay for something that’s already an expensive, Kind of luxury every day of the, every day of the week, but it’s still cheaper than the actual luxury that we internalize as much cheaper.

[00:20:06] Wes Marshall: And for me, the biggest thing is, sometimes not even the money, but just the time and the thought that needs to go into cars. So you’re, rotating your tires or you need to get the tires replaced or doing oil changes. And I even do those myself, but it’s still just time and effort and it’s a pain in the neck.

[00:20:22] And I prefer things I don’t have to think about, right? And when you have a car, you have to think about it. You need to think about, somebody breaks into it or all that sort of stuff is just mental. Capacity that’s being drawn from me and we all only have so much and I feel and that’s 1 of the aspects of cars.

[00:20:41] I have a hard time with that always drains me.

[00:20:44] Jeff Wood: Oh I sold my car because I was getting parking tickets because of not parking but because of the street sweeping. And so every month, every 2nd and 4th Monday, you had to remember to move the car and or else you get a 75 ticket. Maybe at the time it was like 65, but now it’s 75 or 85 and, that.

[00:21:00] For somebody who’s not an early riser and it’s hard to get up at eight o’clock on the dot to get out there and get the car moved, that was real stress. And basically a a money penalty for not moving your car is a very big incentive for me to get rid of it altogether, because I was only driving it once a week, maybe at tops.

[00:21:16] And and the clutch was dead already, they can only, start it from second gear. So I was like maybe I should just, bite the bullet. And at the same time, it was like the time when Uber and Lyft were taking off. And obviously I had zip car opportunities and stuff in the city.

[00:21:27] So I was like, Muni’s great. I got my, I actually sold my car and bought a bike. I bought a bike with the proceeds. That, that really worked out, but it was that mental thing about the parking ticket that got me in the end, because it was just too much.

[00:21:38] Wes Marshall: Yeah, we didn’t even really hit on parking.

[00:21:40] And when you go places, you got to pay for parking or look for parking or when you go to a city like, San Francisco or Denver, oftentimes you’re parking and have to still walk 10 minutes. And oftentimes we don’t even include that time in our calculation of getting to a place. I’d say, when I come into my office in downtown Denver, it’s actually quicker for me to bike here, even though it’s 7.

[00:21:58] 5 miles, because if I drove, I still have to park 10 minutes away. Look for a parking space, pay for that, and then walk 10 minutes to my office. And biking is faster and we don’t usually think about that.

[00:22:11] Jeff Wood: And, I was talking about my wagon earlier that I take to the grocery store. I just go and park it on the bike rack right in front of the door.

[00:22:16] It’s the best thing ever to just pull it up, fold it up, put it like, lock it up, like your bike. And you’re there. And then everybody else is circling the parking lot or waiting outside for a spot or something. Although there have been times lately where the bike park is.

[00:22:28] But the bike rack is getting too full. There’s a bunch of e bikes and stuff on there and it can be hard to find a spot, which is fine. That’s maybe that in the future, they need to put in more bike racks or just take one space out of the lot and make it into that. But the other thing that’s interesting about this piece, going back to the piece, like I feel like the, there’s this kind of.

[00:22:47] And I don’t, I think I’ve mentioned it said, is it like a doom loop, but I don’t know if it’s a doom loop yet, but there’s these like kind of escalating conditions in how we are building cities and in the U S at the moment where we continue to build these sprawling places where people have to drive.

[00:23:00] People have to drive, so they have to buy a car. The cars are getting more expensive because of the insurance rates are going up. But part of the reason why the insurance rates are going up is because cars are getting more expensive. And so that’s a little, its own mini loop in itself. But also the car companies don’t want to build smaller cars that are cheaper as well.

[00:23:14] So there’s that problem as well. So we have all these things that are continually making cars more expensive and owning a car more expensive and operating a vehicle more expensive. And so it’s actually like stress, stressing people out. And I feel like. This little inflection point of inflation that we had during the pandemic and it’s meant, they mentioned the pandemic as one of the reasons why car costs went, buying a new car got out of control, but that actually seems to be, unveiled like this whole world of increasing costs that are just hitting people.

[00:23:41] And, when they say inflation’s low, it might seem like it, but then the prices of things are just continuing to go up. Even if it’s not counted in the actual official numbers, people can feel that.

[00:23:53] Wes Marshall: It feels, not all that different from a monopoly, like when there’s one company that like owns all the grocery stores in an area, they can set the prices, whatever they want, because people need certain things.

[00:24:02] And we’ve all been, a lot of us have been put in a situation where we have to drive. And then we’re all incentivized, car companies, us, like to drive bigger cars too. Like the whole system is set up for that and those are going to be more expensive. And, for the car companies, they make more money on them.

[00:24:18] So it’s all pushing in that same direction. Direction, like in the article, there’s that picture of the Carvana vending machine for cars. Yeah,

[00:24:26] Jeff Wood: right.

[00:24:27] Wes Marshall: Do you have any of those near you? We do,

[00:24:28] Jeff Wood: yeah. There’s one just like south of actually by the Daly City BART station.

[00:24:32] Wes Marshall: Is yours active?

[00:24:36] Because for a while, ours was just empty. It was just this giant empty Carvana thing. I think there’s cars in it now, but for the longest time it just sat there as an ode to lack of

[00:24:47] Jeff Wood: supply.

[00:24:49] Wes Marshall: I guess.

[00:24:50] Jeff Wood: I don’t know. I haven’t looked at it. I know it’s there, but when I passed by, if I passed by, I think I passed it on when I drove down to the, to the peninsula this weekend, but I didn’t look up to see what was going on there.

[00:25:01] I guess I should check next time. But yeah, for the most part, I just, those things, it’s interesting. I remember those being for smart cars to start with. I feel like that’s the first place I star saw like a car stacking machine like that. Was for smart cars when they first came out, they stacked them and I guess to show that they’re tiny, but now they made them for the large cars.

[00:25:18] So now they stack large cars, I think it’s like a function of our Hot Wheels fascination maybe when we were kids and you had those places where you put them, maybe like the same as the Star Wars characters, you brought your Darth Vader and you had the carrier same kind of feeling I got from those.

[00:25:32] Can you actually go up to it? Buy a car there? Is that how it works? Can I, I think so. I think so. What would be the point of just like displaying car, I guess it’s like an advertisement.

[00:25:41] Wes Marshall: Yeah. I feel like it’s advertising. Like they got a lot of, when those things first came out, they got a lot of articles about, oh, Carvana blah, blah, blah.

[00:25:48] So I think it paid for itself from that aspect. But at the same time, I’m just curious because I don’t think I know anyone that’s. Tried to or bought a car at one of these locations. So

[00:25:58] Jeff Wood: I haven’t seen it either. I think it’s partially it’s probably it’s partially probably because of like dealership laws and stuff I know a lot of states have these issues where dealers Have to you know that you have to go through a dealership to sell a vehicle and it’s restricted I know there’s a whole thing at Tesla whether you care about Tesla or not is another Matter, but, they were trying to sell vehicles remotely and they couldn’t do it because the dealership laws and states, which, that’s a whole other political thing, but they’re very big conservative donors.

[00:26:25] And so there’s this middleman effect that there’s been a lot of discussion about from a political aspect. But but yeah I’m also curious. I’m also curious about your thoughts about the social status part of it. Because if you buy a car, You have this vehicle and it’s like a status symbol.

[00:26:40] If you were talking about the a hundred thousand dollar car and the huge car payments, that’s what people are buying that for to give themselves something shiny or nice that they purchased that they can show off, but it doesn’t like it depreciates. It is like a depreciating asset that you’re showing off.

[00:26:52] Which I think is really interesting from a society standpoint, like when you live in New York city and you, I feel like people there dress nicer because they’re walking around. So their status symbols are like their coats that they were in the winter or the clothes that they wear. Those things, though, I feel aren’t depreciating assets like a car is.

[00:27:07] And so it’s like a totally different way to show your wealth at the same time as this 1 thing is really a drag on your finances.

[00:27:14] Wes Marshall: It feels like it’s not only that, but people’s identity is tied to their car. I still have a 2000 Jeep Wrangler. That I bought new 24 years ago, right?

[00:27:26] And, at that time, I just got out of college and, but I felt like my identity was that kind of car. You feel in some way connected to that. That’s the kind of person I am or something. And people Yeah, it’s weird, isn’t it, that has become over time, especially in our country, a part of our culture.

[00:27:44] It’s not just showing off your wealth. It’s not just transportation and the utilitarian ness of it. It becomes part of ourselves. Yeah, it’s weird.

[00:27:55] Jeff Wood: It’s a signifier of something like it’s it’s it’s almost the feathers on a bird or on a peacock or something, I had a 1999 green Volkswagen Jetta.

[00:28:02] That was what I standard. And that was I felt like that was me, that was what I was giving off to the world. I don’t know.

[00:28:09] Wes Marshall: Yeah. Maybe it goes two ways on that front, but I’m not sure. Like it, it’s yeah, I think it’s hard for like other countries. Like we talk about like developing.

[00:28:18] Countries in terms of like auto developing countries and like for us to say, hey, don’t do what we did you should learn from where we made our mistakes. But at the same time, these countries look at places like L. A. as like the Mecca, like they want the highways, they want the cars. And you can understand why, given the situation that they’re in.

[00:28:39] So they they want that identity. They want that car culture. And it feels hard for us to be like, oh no, don’t do this. I know it’s a tricky situation that we’re in, I feel like it’s a double edged sword with a lot of that stuff, but you can totally understand why they feel that way and why they might want what we currently have and are trying to get rid of.

[00:28:57] Jeff Wood: Do as I say, not as I do, right? Exactly. I also remember seeing stuff in China when they were first building all motorways where if you wanted to meet people of a similar status, you would go to these gas stations on the side of the road, because that’s where the people with cars were, right.

[00:29:14] Would they had access to you. And so you could actually figure out social status by that. I think it’s probably changed by now to a certain extent, but I think that’s an interesting signifier of what certain folks are seeking or what they’re looking for or what the impacts are as well.

[00:29:27] Wes Marshall: Maybe that’s what Tesla drivers do when they sit for two hours. 30, 45 minutes waiting for the cars to charge.

[00:29:33] Jeff Wood: Maybe yeah, that’s a whole other, that’s a whole other ball of wax. Let’s talk about housing which is all this stuff’s connected. As we say a social housing bill, Minnesota Senator Tina Smith and New York representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez have introduced a new social housing bill that would put 30 billion towards establishing a new federally backed development authority that would fund and build homes and then turn them over to managing entities.

[00:29:54] Research suggests this bill could. Build 1. 2 million social housing units in the United States, New York times. They actually wrote an op ed in the New York times. Both of those folks Tina Smith and Alexandria AOC. So it’s called the homes act. They want to put 30 billion towards building social housing and allow for more construction of public housing because the fair cloth amendment doesn’t allow that for at the moment.

[00:30:17] And so I think it’s interesting because we’ve been talking about this stuff a lot. There’s been a million articles about Vienna. In the news, and so I’m curious what you think about this.

[00:30:26] Wes Marshall: The underlying intent makes sense, right? Is to treat housing more as a right, as opposed to a commodity.

[00:30:31] And I like the idea of trying things, and if this has run well, you can imagine it being awesome in so many different ways. At the same time, we, Have had experiences and what happens when social housing isn’t run well, in terms of being well built or well maintained. In this case, you could also worry about let’s say we push these locations, like, where we build these off the cheaper land, where driving is the only viable option for folks it would be a lot more effective if we did this near transit or in areas where people can walk or bike to use for destinations.

[00:31:00] And again, that’s what ties us into everything we’ve talked about so far. It’d be great if it went, Okay. One direction in terms of getting the most bang for her buck, but it’s hard to imagine it would right?

[00:31:14] Jeff Wood: Yeah, I do. I do believe that. And that’s something that came up when I thought about this initially, too, is that, if we do build these, they’re going to try to find places where they can maximize the value to the builders, not necessarily the value to society.

[00:31:25] And so I think that’s pretty much it. Probably gonna be the case where they’re going to find, they’re already talking about trying to figure out what the, public lands that are available. So that, in Nevada and stuff like that, where they can build more housing, but then those places that are publicly owned land are probably on the outskirts of the city and probably these places where people have to drive a lot more.

[00:31:42] And so you’re actually, Tying people, you might give them affordable housing, but then they have unaffordable transportation. And so you have to tie those two things together. H plus T, as I mentioned before, worked on that with CNT and the folks there. But it’s something that we should consider all these things.

[00:31:55] And it’s not just, and it, going back to the original 15 minute cities, piece, we have to think about the accessibility to all things, like whether that’s healthcare, Or childcare or, thinking about how you get to your grocery stores or whatever that might be. So you can put these houses somewhere and you can make that, build them cheap somewhere, but is it going to be cheap?

[00:32:12] Overall, in terms of accessibility, are you going to actually create value by allowing people to save money? That’s the big question. And I don’t think that’s something that they’re thinking about.

[00:32:23] Wes Marshall: I don’t want to jump the gun here, but this relates to the affordable home experiment article that is on the list of things to talk about where, there are.

[00:32:31] Where they’re doing the modular housing, they’re doing ADUs, they’re doing this community land trust to try to keep it affordable. And again, I love the fact of trying something and not just one thing, but several, but where are they doing it and San Bernardino and Palm Springs and those I looked up on the H plus T fact sheets for those places and the location efficiency metric like 1 percent of houses in the.

[00:32:52] In the San Bernardino one or location efficient, 0 percent in Palm Springs. So we’re putting our affordable housing resources in, what could be argued as one of the, some of the worst places to do

[00:33:03] Jeff Wood: I’m interested in what you think. So we want transiting communities. Obviously we want places that are near accessible transit and have good walk scores and things like that.

[00:33:11] But. That’s where the land is most valuable, right? So how would you think about if you have this 30 billion dollars, what is the best way to go about it to where you could actually create value for people? That’s not just a housing value, but just life value.

[00:33:25] Wes Marshall: No, it’s funny when I, first got here, obviously, transit in Denver was a big thing.

[00:33:29] I got here in 2009. So FastTracks was Getting going, they’re doing so much stuff and all the TOCs or TODs, they call them at the time, mostly park and rise, right? But even the ones that were better, they were being filled with wealthier people. And at the time, I feel like we were being told like, Oh, no, this is just who wants it.

[00:33:48] Like the other folks don’t want to even live here. And we did this big survey and we asked people that question and lower income people. Wanted to live there just as much, if not more, than the wealthier folks, but they just couldn’t afford to, right? And then when you look at the outcomes, I think some people would argue that some of these places are failing because all these people still own cars that live there and they treat transit as an amenity, like they use it to go downtown to a show or a game, like they’re not using day to day lives, but We would get more bang for our buck if people that would use the transit more in their day to day lives.

[00:34:25] So I don’t know, it gets, you can see the trade offs, right? We want to get the most bang for our buck from this billion dollar investment in, multi billion dollar investment in transit, but at the same time, the market suggests we want to sell this land for as much as possible but it’s hard.

[00:34:42] It would make much more sense to have as much affordable housing around those locations as possible. And it’s not that easy to do, though,

[00:34:51] Jeff Wood: which I think is right. Why? This is a really important thing to discuss the bill in general, but also discussing it as it pertains to some of the other experiments that have been happening around the country already.

[00:35:01] So the Montgomery County example that I mentioned in the newsletter the other day. When I noted this article by Smith and Ocasio Cortez they actually are, basically the social housing itself, basically they help a developer build, they put up money, they help the developer build the building, but at the same time, they are actually operating as the, the shareholder to a certain extent.

[00:35:24] And so they get the value, not some other, person that’s giving it out. And so they actually lower can lower the rents. They don’t take the profits. They just lower the rents and are allowed to do that. And if you can, find the locations where you can do this and buy land and then make it so that’s affordable, make the social housing contract with the developers, they can have a couple of for profit units, but for the most part, if you’re put in 75 percent of the value of the construction, then you get the profits, you can keep it.

[00:35:49] And I think it’s actually, now that I think about it in Colorado, they’re doing something similar or are interesting where they op they operate as the builder and then the folks who are renting actually get A a dividend from just paying on time where they can actually, make money off of this or, build value, I should say, not make money, but just build value off of this because the state is actually the ones that are building the housing rather than a for profit developer who needs a 10, 20 percent profit.

[00:36:15] If you take that 10, 20 percent profit off the top, you can actually probably do a lot in these areas, but you just have to find that property where you can do that.

[00:36:23] Wes Marshall: Yeah. When you describe like all those examples that are working, that’s, it feels like a solvable problem, right? This feels like something we should be able to fix and where we’re just gonna have our hangups.

[00:36:34] If we’re trying to solve the affordable housing and the transportation problems separately, right? We just have to treat those the same thing. We can’t just put affordable housing in Palm Springs. It needs to be thought of, In, just a more comprehensive way. We’re just thinking about transportation costs as a part of it.

[00:36:52] That’s what’s going to lead to real affordability. Not just having a place to live. That’s not the only piece that we need to worry about. With this HOMES Act, I think we just need to make sure that transportation is part of the equation. We’re trying to figure out how to do this right.

[00:37:07] And, yeah, again, it feels like something we can solve. We just haven’t been able to do it out of home. Whole scale is all piecemeal.

[00:37:14] Jeff Wood: And I do think there’s, I think that places in Palm Springs do need, there’s probably people that need affordable housing that work and live in Palm Springs, but it’s something where if you built more in the core of the region in Los Angeles, you’re actually going to make those outside places easier to build and cheaper as well.

[00:37:28] So there it’s all connected. Los Angeles is connected to Palm Springs is connected to San Bernardino is connected to all of the places around it. But you need to focus on that courier to get people. So they don’t. Don’t have to keep on moving away to find that housing. And then it makes it affordable for the people that do need to be afforded, need affordable housing in Palm Springs as well.

[00:37:44] So it’s all this huge connect connection and the transportation part is a huge part of that as well. Yeah. But I don’t mean, am I trying to say we shouldn’t be building affordable housing in Palm Springs? No, I wasn’t saying that. I was just like adding on to what you were saying.

[00:37:57] Wes Marshall: Yeah, no, but you’re right though.

[00:37:58] Like it needs, it’s a system, right? It’s all of it, like these regions, the way housing and affordability works it’s just one place can solve the problem. It needs to be thought of as a whole.

[00:38:09] Jeff Wood: I’m going to read the next 1 to bring it in, because I think it’s just continuing the discussion, but an affordable home experiment and affordable housing group set up a community land trust in San Bernardino county, and is using prefabricated manufactured housing and accessory dwelling units to increase affordability and the number of units per parcel using manufactured homes.

[00:38:24] They can build new homes for 45 percent less per square foot. U. S. Department of housing and urban development recently announced that they’re going to That more housing types will soon be available under national building codes. This was by our friend, Rachel Cohen in Vox. I think this is interesting too, because they’re, HUD actually is the one who controls the building code standards for manufactured housing.

[00:38:44] And so you can make the same house everywhere in the country, which I think is a huge advantage. Savings as you as they note the 45 percent savings. But coupling that with a to use with California’s laws about being able to split land in subdivide properties to get 4 units on a parcel.

[00:38:58] Now, you also. Have the ability to to have housing trusts to have community land trusts to have any number of social housing organizational structures that can keep the housing affordable. And you end up with these 170, 000 to 200, 000 unit houses which is a huge difference from what the averages are these days, like 000 is what we’re getting up to.

[00:39:20] And that can make a meaningful difference. But like we were talking about earlier with the earlier article,

[00:39:23] Wes Marshall: so this ties all the things we talked about together. It ties together, the 15 minute cities ties together the car loans ties together. Housing and the affordability, social housing type things, but, it feels.

[00:39:38] I like that they’re testing it. This is a great experiment and it feels like it’s going to be useful and to see how this works. And there’s a lot of people that are going to want to live there and maybe don’t need to come into Los Angeles or something. So there are going to be benefits. I’m curious to see how well it’s working.

[00:39:54] Is it the ADUs? Is it the land trust? Is the module like what combination of things work well? Part of the difficulty is it takes time to see the benefits of. Things like ADUs, like it doesn’t happen in a year or two. Sometimes it takes five or 10 to start seeing the changes. So I’m curious to see how this one goes, but it seems great that they’re trying all of these things combined.

[00:40:16] Jeff Wood: I like it. I think that we should try more experiments. The social housing experiment, public housing experiment, all, these types of structures build more, for profit housing, build more this, that, and the other thing I’ve always said, build more housing, just, and however you can get it going.

[00:40:30] Let’s do it. But I like all these new structures that they’re coming up with and the new ideas because obviously we need it is the housing is getting too expensive and it’s getting too expensive everywhere

[00:40:38] Wes Marshall: in most places. You just can’t do this. There’s too much red tape. They don’t allow it.

[00:40:42] That’s the problem. It is hard to just build more housing given the way we’ve set up society in terms of, where I lived in Connecticut before, some of those towns had one acre zoning. Crazy, right? Like

[00:40:53] Jeff Wood: that is crazy when acres, a lot of land. I don’t think people understand how big an acre is actually.

[00:40:59] Until they see one of these houses on an acre. And then you’re like, Whoa, you have to get a riding lawnmower.

[00:41:06] Wes Marshall: There’s other

[00:41:06] Jeff Wood: transportation costs,

[00:41:08] Wes Marshall: multiple cars. And it just makes walking and biking or transit just. impossible. It’s impossible to retrofit those kind of places with that, and that’s when you end up with people with these big car loans.

[00:41:20] That’s when you end up it all ties together. That’s when you end up with housing that’s not affordable because there’s so few houses because they’re all in one acre lots.

[00:41:26] Jeff Wood: Yeah, I’m now just thinking back to when I was a kid mowing the lawn three times a day and we didn’t have an acre but the Bermuda grass in Texas grew fast.

[00:41:34] And so I would have to mow the lawn three times a week to make sure it was saying it was hot and I just never, and it’s funny. Cause my dad, like he bought, I was like, I asked him, I was like, Hey, can we get like a mulching mower or something? So I don’t have to bag all this stuff. And he was like no, you don’t need that.

[00:41:47] And then when I went to college and was gone and he had to do it himself, he bought one. Cause he was like, oh, This is hard.

[00:41:53] Wes Marshall: Oh, when I first house I bought, like we, it wasn’t an acre, but it was a lot of mowing to do. And, All my neighbors, at least this is what I thought at the time, they all seemed retired.

[00:42:04] And I felt like they were mowing their lawn three times a day. I was like, I don’t want to do that. I can’t do that. So I would mow, maybe once a week, once every two weeks. I would mow it so the grass would die. I’d mow it so short that the grass kind of fries and wouldn’t grow quite as quickly.

[00:42:18] So I wouldn’t have to mow it as much to keep up with all my crazy neighbors that were mowing. Multiple times a day. It drove me crazy. That’s also the place where first time I lived in a place where I couldn’t leave my street without a car and that drove me insane. And that’s what led to my career is that combination of insanity is that became thieves that drove my career aspirations.

[00:42:39] Jeff Wood: Let’s talk about the region where you live now. Boulder train, a new RTD study shows that a bare bones Denver to Boulder Longmont route. Rail line would be expensive and would garner a few writers. But if paired with a French front range rail line, there could be some synergies that can make service happen faster for both.

[00:42:54] This was by Nathaniel minor in Colorado public radio. He’s been doing great work, Nathaniel. I feel like he’s been really on top of things. At least I see his name a lot.

[00:43:03] Wes Marshall: Oh yeah. I love Nate minor and his work. Have you listened to his podcast called ghost train?

[00:43:07] Jeff Wood: No, I have not.

[00:43:08] Wes Marshall: It is, I should

[00:43:09] Jeff Wood: check that out.

[00:43:10] Wes Marshall: It’s not a ever long running podcast. I think he did five episodes, but it’s about this particular line. Actually he says it’s about this particular line, but it ends up being about the history of like rail and transit in Denver. So it’s a really good context for a lot of these things. Let me just step back.

[00:43:26] This is obviously one that’s being talked about a lot in these parts and maybe to give a little bit of context. I’m sure a lot of your listeners know this, but the Denver region had that sales. Tax vote back in 2004 that pass, I think it’s a 0. 4 percent sales tax and the intent was to build this whole system out, including the rail to boulder.

[00:43:45] But instead of starting with the train to boulder, which would be in the Northwest direction from Denver we started with the lines that had Southwest and Southeast from Denver that. Had to like a little pin in the southwest in Douglas County, South Aurora in the southeast. We then built the A line from Union Station to the airport, then the W line to Golden, and then some other smaller ones.

[00:44:06] But originally the project was estimated to be like four Billion, and it’s supposed to be completed by 2017, but the budget grew, I think in 2010, it was like 6. 5 billion, and then it’s been growing and growing, and now we’re not even expected to finish the whole thing until 2050. So you have.

[00:44:27] Some folks saying these costs are crazy. So let’s just build like BRT to Boulder.

[00:44:31] Speaker 3: And

[00:44:31] Wes Marshall: as much as I’d like to be agnostic about train versus bus like Jared Walker, it’s hard because a lot of other folks are saying that they were promised a train, right? So this article, like RTD, so that’s our regional transit provider, they commissioned this study to see if they can afford a half assed train service to Boulder.

[00:44:49] Yeah,

[00:44:49] Jeff Wood: that’s what I saw, a half assed train.

[00:44:52] Wes Marshall: And guess what? It’s still expensive. Even the half assed train is expensive, so it’s tough.

[00:44:56] Jeff Wood: Yeah, that’s something that I feel I’ve been frustrated by lately is a lot of planning for half assed trains because it’s so expensive But if you’re gonna do it, then why don’t you just do the whole thing, right?

[00:45:06] Like three trains a day each direction in the morning and evening seems silly like what’s the point and that’s the point that they make It’s only gonna get 1100 riders, but it’s just, that’s something that frustrates me ever since when I was in Austin too. We decided to build, they’re going to build a lineup Guadalupe now, but they decided to go on the freight rail right of way.

[00:45:24] And they only got, 2000 riders instead of 40, 000 riders. And it’s like, why don’t you just spend a little bit of extra money and get more value and build it where people are instead of trying to save tons of money by building this train that less people, a lot less people are going to ride. And I feel like this goes back to the initial stages of this of this the discussion about building fast tracks, which, is probably happening in 2002, 2003, before the election and before it got voted on. And I think that there, if you went back 20 years, if you’re a came from the future and went back, you’d probably do it a lot differently than they did back then.

[00:45:54] But at the time they were trying to build, Build consensus and get votes and try to pass things. And so they’re like you get this line and you get this line and they’re all freight rail lines and they don’t actually go I’m always frustrated by like, why didn’t the line go underneath the tech center?

[00:46:07] Like, why didn’t you go under the highway to get into the center of that? Why do you have to cross? It’s cheaper to build it on the other side when you’re building the T Rex highway project. So we’ll do it, we can combine these and do this like this. So there’s all these little things you can go back in time and think about, there’s people that are gonna be like I never got the thing I paid for.

[00:46:21] And the same thing with Bart, it happens all the time. People are in the East Valley. In the Eastern parts of the region are like I paid for Bart. Why can’t I have it? And it’s it’s super expensive. So we’re going to build this little tiny train for you to go to Brentwood.

[00:46:33] And it doesn’t make any sense because you’re not getting what you actually wanted and we’re just going to give you this thing. So I feel like this is on those same lines where it’s we’re going to keep studying this and studying this because people are complaining, but. Ultimately, like if the thing is the freight railroads causing, problems by asking for a lot of money, or the thing is we’re going to build this high speed rail line between Pueblo and and Wyoming why not come on the back of that, which I think was an interesting thing that was new to me as something that could happen.

[00:47:00] Cause I, I felt the governor’s want of this rail line was a little silly because it is such a low ridership Potential, and it’s silly to spend that much money just to make a couple of people happy that voted maybe back in 2004, which many of those people are probably unfortunately passed away.

[00:47:14] Wes Marshall: To build that coalition to get, a lot of the suburban areas of the region to vote for it. They sold it as what a way to solve traffic congestion, right? Yeah,

[00:47:23] Jeff Wood: never good.

[00:47:24] Wes Marshall: That is what led them to put it where right along the highways. So the Southeast and Southwest that I was mentioning go, are in the highway corridors, right?

[00:47:33] So it, when you look at those as TODs or TOCs, sometimes half what would be the walkable pedestrian zone around a TOD or transit oriented community is cut off by a highway. So Englewood has always been the poster child for like good TOD. And when I got here, it was still being sold nationally as this is what great TOD should look like.

[00:47:55] And when I went down there, Like it looks the part like it has, this little kind of town center rethink with shops and stuff. And then right behind it is just these giant parking garages and surface parking. There is a giant. Heavy rail corridor, so there’s an apartment complex that could probably throw a baseball and hit from the transit, from where the train is, but to walk there is like a mile because it is this roundabout way that’s cut off by these things.

[00:48:24] So it’s not functioning in the way it should. It’s also not solving the congestion problem. You look at the data, traffic congestion has gone up even immediately after the train went in. That’s not what transit is for though, so it doesn’t really mean it’s failing. And it’s tricky you have all these things, and now you have a governor who lives in Boulder that wants this thing built maybe not for the dead people from war, but for him himself.

[00:48:51] Yeah and one of the interesting things, too, is they always, funding was always hard to get for this. And then for whatever reason, they finally realized that boulders are different city than Denver. And that if you call it an inner city line, we’re eligible for whole different pots of funding from the feds.

[00:49:09] And they just realized this like last year oh, we just call this an interstate.

[00:49:15] Jeff Wood: It’s true, right? It is quite a distance to Boulder. I must say,

[00:49:18] Wes Marshall: it’s a different city. It should have been this from the get go. And it’s just the, it’s always funny to me how long it took them to realize that was the case.

[00:49:24] Jeff Wood: Yeah. There’s a lot of money now from Amtrak. We just had my Christianson on to talk about the plan there. Yeah. And we talked to Ken Pendergrast as well from Ohio. And so there’s this interesting thing happening with the inner city rail. And so that’s a really interesting point that, we should have thought of that before.

[00:49:38] I guess, when you think about a Metro region and the MPO and all that stuff, you start to consolidate all these things. things, but they are two different cities and they are pretty far away. I lived in Boulder for a summer when I was training. Some of my friends ran at Colorado.

[00:49:50] And so they were like, Hey, we have, one of my girlfriends is leaving for the summer. You can stay at her place. It was like 135 for a half a room or something like that. It was like super cheap, which is amazing. Now, I don’t think that would ever happen these days. This was in 2002 or something like that.

[00:50:03] But But yeah, it’s, it was super fun, but it’s also very far from Denver. I went a couple of times. I went to the blue bird and other things for concerts in the summer. But for the most part I was running up in the Hills, but yeah, it would have been great to just hop on the train or a bus or whatever, but.

[00:50:15] It’s just not, it’s so far away. And I think that inner city thing is super interesting.

[00:50:19] Wes Marshall: It’s not that far. I

[00:50:20] Jeff Wood: mean,

[00:50:20] Wes Marshall: it’s not

[00:50:21] Jeff Wood: that far, but it’s also not that close either. It’d be like

[00:50:23] Wes Marshall: half an hour with no traffic, but there’s never no traffic. And so I think when you’re up in Boulder, it feels like another world.

[00:50:30] It feels like you’re very far away. But like in the grand scheme of things a lot of people in parts of the country where I think their grocery store is half an hour away

[00:50:38] Jeff Wood: that’s true

[00:50:39] Wes Marshall: too. There’s pretty close and in that respect,

[00:50:42] Jeff Wood: Do you think they’re going to, do you, what do you think about this to the front range passenger rail?

[00:50:45] Do you think it’s going to happen? Do you think it’s like actually gonna get some legs and move forward?

[00:50:50] Wes Marshall: The governor really wants it. I think there’s enough people that do and it’s feels like there’s enough people, even within the transit agency that feel like they need to keep up their end of the bargain with this.

[00:51:02] Especially before they. It feels like they want to go back to the ballot at some point to get more money towards this. They’re not going to get the votes from the parts of the region that never got what they were promised in the first place. So you need to put something out there and it would be a shame if it was this half assed version.

[00:51:18] But. And it feels like that’s might be where it ends up. It’s hard to know. You should have Nate minor on at some point. He would talk about all that stuff. Yeah,

[00:51:27] Jeff Wood: that’d be good. Last one, let’s go into Denver proper, but actually around the country, so Lyft will no longer operate dockless bike scooters in Denver.

[00:51:35] Lyft has decided to stop operations of all dockless micromobility vehicles around the country and focused on docked vehicles only. They have partnered with bird and spin to have those vehicles available. On the Lyft app. So this was, this is actually on the Lyft website, but there’s been, there’s a number of articles that are out there about this specifically.

[00:51:51] But, it’s interesting to, there was this whole, on the day that this happened, I remember this there was a tech crunch article. That’s Lyft is taking the next step into like micro mobility. And then everybody else is they’re cutting like this and consolidating and it’s not going to be good overall, but I’m curious what your thoughts are.

[00:52:08] Wes Marshall: I think the bottom line is probably their bottom line. They’re probably not making money, right? I’m sure they’re not bankrupt,

[00:52:14] Jeff Wood: right? And they had to restructure and all that stuff, right?

[00:52:17] Wes Marshall: Which feels crazy. When you look at the data, I’ve seen it. The last date I saw there was like 56, 000 rides per day.

[00:52:24] in Denver. And that’s not just like Lyft. Lime is also here. So some of those are Lime, but I think Lyft is the bigger one. And the fact that they can’t make money on that is surprising, right?

[00:52:37] Jeff Wood: That’s all, 50 think about, yeah, 56, 000 times what, two bucks a ride or something, two, three dollars, right?

[00:52:42] Actually it’s more in some instances. It’s

[00:52:43] Wes Marshall: kind of expensive. I think it’s a dollar or two, just unlock it. And then it’s whatever for me. And I don’t use it very often, especially when I’m here. Cause I always have my bike or whatever. Yeah, and you see them, I remember, going home from work.

[00:52:56] I was here like late on a weekend. I left like at 2 a. m. or something. I was working on a proposal and this is soon after that they came to Denver. I remember going home like right through downtown Denver on my bike. And it was like a whole nother world because it was like no cars. It was all just scooters everywhere.

[00:53:14] With two or three people per scooter, I’m sure a lot of them had been drinking a little bit, and it just felt like this whole nother world that you don’t see in the daylight. So the fact that they haven’t been able to leverage that excitement and the fact that they’re fun, yes, there’s safety issues, I guess there’s other issues in terms of them littering the sidewalks and accessibility.

[00:53:35] At the same time, a lot of people love them, and it hasn’t generated enough money to keep this a viable business.

[00:53:43] Jeff Wood: I wonder often about this, whether the way that the companies operate, it’s just not good enough to run a profitable business where you can pay all the people that work for the company and stuff you’re trying to like, get this like super charged rocket ship amount of Earned revenue so that you can tell your shareholders that you’re making a ton of money.

[00:54:05] And so I feel like if it was just any business, they probably could figure out how to make it work. It just, it doesn’t, and it just doesn’t seem like it fits the VC backed. I want my huge gains over a short period of time activity. I just feel like that’s probably part of the problem.

[00:54:22] That’s just, is like something I just thought of when you were talking I, I haven’t thought through it that much, but it feels like there’s a lot of places where if the business isn’t going gangbusters, they’re like it’s not making enough money, but it might be just like a regular business where you’re not trying to gain, you’re just trying to pay your employees and you get a little tiny profit and that’s nice.

[00:54:40] Wes Marshall: I remember that original data came out of Louisville where they were just showing how many rides were being taken and also how long the scooters were lasting. That original generation of scooters lasted like three months and they weren’t even getting enough rides or money to pay for each scooter before it had to be thrown away or recycled or what have you.

[00:54:58] So I feel like They fixed that problem to some extent. The scooters here are much heavier duty. They seem like they last a while, but the days I bike in along the Cherry Creek or the Platt or the Sand Creek, scooters littered in the water, like, all over the place. They haven’t fixed that problem of them.

[00:55:17] There’s a shrinkage

[00:55:17] Jeff Wood: problem.

[00:55:18] Wes Marshall: There’s a huge shrinkage problem. And did you see that article in the New York Times last week where they talked about the people making money off the rebalancing of the shared bike system?

[00:55:27] Jeff Wood: Yeah, you get paid if you were part of that and people can make lots of money, right?

[00:55:31] Wes Marshall: Yeah. People were just gaming the system, making 5, 000 a month, just moving scooters from full stations to empty stations, then moving them right back just over and over again. Oh my gosh. Yeah, so I didn’t

[00:55:43] Jeff Wood: see something about that. Yeah.

[00:55:44] Wes Marshall: Yeah, but it feels like that’s what they’re doing in a lot of cities.

[00:55:47] I see the trucks going around rebalancing the system. So we’re not exactly just replacing car trips where they is we have these trucks that are doing, they have to do the batteries. And I know there’s some systems set up to pay people to do it. I think people are gaming the system that way.

[00:56:01] I see them being charged on my campus. So I think people are like stealing electricity from school to pay, to get paid by like Lime or something to charge these scooters. So I don’t know. It’s not been just figured out yet. Like it just feels like there is a better way. And yeah, it’s just interesting that they make it work and that they’re pulling out and maybe the dock system is what they’re going to try, but I guess we’ll see.

[00:56:26] Jeff Wood: We talked to folks from Portland about this recently and about, about micro mobility and the structure of the, the contracts that they put with the cities and they seem like they had it put together, but I don’t know how they would deal. I didn’t ask them how they deal with these types of problems, the shrinkage and all the, the messiness of it.

[00:56:40] I it’s interesting to think about trips too, because if you have, if somebody is just going back and forth and bringing, vehicles back and forth, that doesn’t make sense. But if you have one truck, just putting stuff around and you actually, those scooters created 10 trips, that’s like a pretty good trade off.

[00:56:52] I’d imagine if it was real, if they were being real about, Bouncing the system out.

[00:56:56] Wes Marshall: Yeah, but I’d imagine that mode substitution isn’t coming from driving a lot of times. These are people that would have walked or bike or taken transit. So I, yeah, because a lot of them are shorter trips downtown.

[00:57:07] They’re not trips that would make sense for cars in the first place.

[00:57:10] Jeff Wood: Yeah. This week and every week, I want to thank our generous Patreon supporters. You guys are awesome. Keep the show going by listening and supporting each month. This show and talking headways wouldn’t be here without it.

[00:57:17] So thank you very much. You can join by going to patreon. com slash the overhead wire 2 a month. We’ll get you some stickers and a handwritten note and 10 a month. We’ll get you one of our transportation scarves as well as that sticker package. We also did an audio book version of Raymond Unwin’s 1999 classic town planning and practice.

[00:57:33] Get your hands on one by going to Raymond unwin. com. So listen to your questions and comments. Ryan Wozniak says on the last episode, a discussion about, we had a discussion about school drop off with Sam Sklar and two pop topics that bubble up for that Ryan has ideas and gripes about opportunity costs for pickup management at schools.

[00:57:52] The teachers who have the walkie talkie full blown operations responsibilities, time, the teachers are taken away from their primary benefit to the education of children. Not sure how to quantify that, but the cost is certainly there given the intensity of time and operational preparation for making an efficient procedure for modern pickup practices.

[00:58:08] And the second one he says is breathing tailpipe emissions. I was getting choked by motorcycle fumes and the dude just revving in his engine. And he was doing it for cool sound effects and it was making me sick. So those are two things that he was worried about. In our, when we’re thinking bigger about our discussion that we had about all these school drop off problems.

[00:58:27] I don’t know if you read the article that Henry grab bar had on this topic as well as a number of other ones where folks have been complaining that they’re cutting school bus funding and a lot of the drop off and pick up is by car now. And so it’s making these huge mile long lines to get into middle school and high school every morning.

[00:58:45] Wes Marshall: Yeah, I’ve been thinking about these issues a lot the last few weeks. I’m doing one of the keynotes to the safe routes to school conference in Fort Collins next month. So trying to figure out what exactly I want to talk about has led me down some of those rabbit holes and thinking about these issues and just the fact that we’re placing a lot of our schools and locations where you have to do that, right?

[00:59:05] Yeah. The town I grew up in when I was a kid, there was nine elementary schools. So every kid in town walked or bike to school. It was just a given. There weren’t buses. They consolidated and expanded three schools and closed all the others, right? And the idea is they can save money on school administration, like that sort of stuff.

[00:59:27] But I don’t think anyone took into account the fact that they’re now busing most kids to these schools. And all the stuff that comes with what we know is better for kids to walk or bike versus being driven or being in a bus. It’s it feels like we’re heading in the wrong direction still. Did you walk to school?

[00:59:43] I did, yeah. Yeah. From kindergarten on, by myself.

[00:59:46] Jeff Wood: I remember 2nd grade, maybe I started 2nd or 3rd grade. I started walking to school in Bakersfield, California which is not necessarily known as a walkable city for the most part, but I, but the school was close by. And so I walked a few blocks to my myself.

[00:59:59] And I remember, I can remember vividly the route back yeah. I remember where my poor sister, she probably listened to this, where my sister crashed her car into the back of a pool at somebody’s house along the way. And you can see the fence posts were painted a little bit or a little bit different color.

[01:00:13] After that, we

[01:00:14] Wes Marshall: had a crossing guard on my road. I think I had to walk 3 or 4 blocks and. It was a crossing guard. It was not even a major street, but he was still there and he was like a friend of everyone’s family. We all knew him and talked to him every day. Yeah. And a lot of that stuff seems impossible now.

[01:00:31] It seems like I’m a thousand years old. I know.

[01:00:34] Jeff Wood: I know it’s crazy. I do feel like that sometimes where I’m like, I walked to school. I biked to school, middle school. I took the bus, my freshman and sophomore year of high school or freshman year of high school, I should say, got picked up sophomore.

[01:00:46] Cause we had to be there early for track practice. But before that we did Yeah. If you want to ask any questions or comments, feel free to email us at the overhead at gmail. com. We’re always here. And then finally puppies and butterflies as part of the show, where we talk about something fun, interesting, or maybe just in fit in the other sections.

[01:01:02] Wes, do you have a, do you have a puppies and butterflies or something happy that’s happened later, like any TV shows that you like in on the tube these days?

[01:01:09] Wes Marshall: So I want to congratulate you in 500 episodes. Oh, thank you. It’s amazing. I listened to the episode with your Star Wars buddies.

[01:01:17] Jeff Wood: Yeah. What did you think? What did you think? Did you like it?

[01:01:20] Wes Marshall: That was great to hear their perspective on a lot of that stuff. It was also, I loved hearing you and Tanya basically talk about your origin story for the podcast. So what I was curious about is your origin story just for your career, like going back even further did you plan to be doing this sort of stuff?

[01:01:37] Given, like, how did you end up like starting the podcast? You know starting to curate links for everybody like it’s such an interesting place You’ve ended up and the fact you can make a living off. This is fascinating. I’m Feel like i’m not the only one that would be curious How you got here a little bit to hear so not just the podcast origin story, but a little bit more about you in your story

[01:02:00] Jeff Wood: Yeah, in terms of creating a media company that I never expected to create.

[01:02:05] Yeah. So I actually did, I talked about this a little bit with Kia Wilson when she actually interviewed me for her show, The Break, which is also on Streetspog. And we talked about this a little bit but basically like when I was It, when I first got to Reconnecting America in 2005, I’m just like, I’m just like a learner.

[01:02:20] I like to learn stuff and I really like trying to putting everything out there and sharing it with my colleagues. And this is something that I think Reconnecting America is really good with. We built stuff for the FTA and HUD. We built stuff for the FTA and we’d, we’d build like a document about TOD and then we’d share it with everybody.

[01:02:35] We didn’t keep it in house. We didn’t try to protect it so that we could use it for consulting or anything like that. And so when I first got there, I was sending Shelly, Petitia, like I was First, like five emails a day, 10 emails a day, it got to be a ridiculous number of his emails. Cause they each had one article link in them.

[01:02:52] And I was like, Hey, did you see this? Or, Hey, did you see this? And then finally she got sick of it. And she was like, Jeff, I don’t want 15 emails from you. I don’t mind them, but I don’t want them. Can you just put the, if you’re going to collect news like this, just put it in one email a day and then just send it to me.

[01:03:06] And I was like, yeah, sure. I can do that. So I just collected articles every day. And then eventually. She was like, Hey can you send this to the board of reconnecting America? And I was like, yeah, sure. So I started sending the board and then they started sending it, forwarding it to their friends and all that stuff.

[01:03:19] And so basically, and then she’s just make it a thing and open it up to all comers. And so I did, and then it opened up and people really liked it. And to the extent that when I stopped doing it after reconnecting, America disappeared. In 2014, I stopped doing it a little while I was supposed to do it.

[01:03:36] Shelly had gone to the Obama administration and then she went to NRDC. After that, she’s still at NRDC now. And she was like, Hey, can you come do this with us? And I was like, yeah, sure. But NRDC didn’t like the idea of somebody doing something and posting something on their behalf that wasn’t checked every morning at, it goes out at 4 a.

[01:03:51] m. and I finish it at late at night. So there was no way for anybody to review it. So they’re like, no we don’t want this. We don’t want to do this. And so she kindly gave me all the email addresses that I’d collected at RA that she had owned intellectual property. They purchased it after RA disappeared.

[01:04:05] And so she’s here, Jeff, I know you want to keep doing this. And then I took a little bit of time off and I got emails from people like, where is my email every day? I miss my email every day. I need my email. And I was like, okay, so what if I ask you to pay for it? They’re like, yeah, sure.

[01:04:19] I’ll pay for it. No problem. So I started doing Patreon to start with. And then Patreon was a little tough because People are still getting it for free. And then, it’s hard to make people pay for stuff that’s free if it’s going to be free. And so I had to switch it to a subscription model where it’s like up behind the paywall, which is a little sad for me because I really do appreciate like open source, like being able to share stuff.

[01:04:39] And it’s other people’s work for the most part, right? They’re all writing these articles, but it is a lot of work to put it together. We do six to eight hours a day. And then in 2013, before. When Tanya and I were started talking they asked me to write a column and I said, I’ll just let’s just talk, let’s just do a podcast or something.

[01:04:54] And and so I started a podcast at the same time that this, that RA disappeared. And then I was like, oh these two things go together, this podcast and this newsletter, I get guests from the newsletter, right? Like I find out stuff happening and then I can talk about podcasts.

[01:05:08] Bring people on to talk about their work. So let’s do, put this together. And so the podcast is supported through Patreon and advertising that happens before and after the show and then also through the scarf sales and the bookshop sales and all that stuff. And then the newsletter is subscription based.

[01:05:21] So we do that there. And then, so I created this weird media company for planning that I never expected, cause I, I studied as a geographer and in undergrad and then a city planning as I got my master’s at the university of Texas. So I never wanted, this is something I’d never had in mind, but I just like to learn stuff.

[01:05:37] So that’s where it all comes from.

[01:05:39] Wes Marshall: Your hatred of writing made me laugh. I hate

[01:05:43] Jeff Wood: writing. I don’t hate it as much now. Yes, I do. Actually, that’s not true. I do hate it now. But it’s hard and it’s hard for me and I don’t know why that is. I think it’s cause I. Maybe it’s because I think a certain way I’m more of a spatial person.

[01:05:56] So putting letters, moving letters around is in a spatial as like making maps, right? Which is what I did. I was a cartographer. I did a lot of data analysis and mapping and stuff. And I could find trends in the maps. And I did a lot of stuff with the LHD data and all that stuff. And I thought that was really fun.

[01:06:10] Words for some reason are still not my thing. I can talk but writing it down and having it be coherent or having it make sense. Doesn’t make sense to me a lot of times. So I’ll sit there for my intro for the newsletter. Like I’ve been trying to make myself write more. And sometimes it takes me like two hours just to get three or four paragraphs to make sense to me that to where I feel like other people will make sense that makes sense to them.

[01:06:32] Wes Marshall: It’s funny you say that. Cause I’m also a spatial person. Like I think about cities in terms of I hate like step by step directions. I think about them in terms of the map and that sort of stuff. But yeah,

[01:06:41] Speaker 3: yeah.

[01:06:42] Wes Marshall: I also love writing. I love like the logic of the argument, like trying to break it down into things.

[01:06:48] And I think you see that in my book, the way I wrote the chapters and the short chapters. And but I also think space, when I think about writing, I think about it spatially, if that makes sense. It’s not okay.

[01:06:57] Jeff Wood: Maybe I should follow your your example.

[01:07:00] Wes Marshall: Yeah. And I’m thinking about the arguments and how they link together and how it ties back in.

[01:07:05] So I’m thinking about it in that way when I’m writing And as a professor, I have to write a ton, like a lot of engineering professors hate that part of the job, but I’ve always loved it for some reason.

[01:07:16] Jeff Wood: Yeah. And I guess I, I guess that’s how I put stuff together too. I’m like I have these arguments I want to make, but how do they, fit on the page to call back to the first initial thing.

[01:07:25] So I probably do think very similar to you. In that way, but it’s like for some, because you, you write a lot, so maybe it’s easier for you to do it faster, but I haven’t. And I think the red ink comment that I had, like the red ink scared me, right? I got even my dad, like my dad’s a really good writer.

[01:07:40] And he checked my papers and stuff, and then I’d come back and it was totally revamped. And I was like, but that’s not my words. That’s your words. And they’re the. The blood, the ink is dripping off of this. And I think I got frustrated by that. And then also when I was at RA I would try to like, explain the maps and stuff on paper, but it was always easier when I told one of my colleagues what I was thinking, and then they put it into the words, because then it always made more sense, but I can always like connect things, make things like make sense to them.

[01:08:07] And then they would put it, they’d take that and put it in. Other people understood. So the red ink was there too. So I don’t know, there, there’s maybe like a writer’s bad experiences have added up over time. I don’t know.

[01:08:19] Wes Marshall: For some reason, I took a bunch of philosophy courses in my past, and I joke that I learned more about how to write from those than I did from my English courses yes, I learned grammar and all that sort of stuff from English courses, but.

[01:08:31] Reading Kant and Plato and Socrates learning the structure of their arguments that is where I felt like I learned how to write, is from thinking through the way that they presented their arguments and how they would rebut from that stuff like that. I think I originally said this half jokingly, but it’s true when I think about it.

[01:08:49] Jeff Wood: Yeah. So did you like Carol Martin’s book? Did you like that? That’s what comes to my mind when I was thinking about like the philosophy and all that stuff. I haven’t read that one yet. Oh my gosh. You should read it. Now you should listen to the podcast first.

[01:09:01] Wes Marshall: I’m still catching up.

[01:09:02] Cause I went into my own bubble and didn’t read any transportation. Yeah. Listen to any transportation podcasts during that four years, I was deep into the book and I’m, now that I’m out of that cave. I’ve been trying to catch up with a lot of books. I’m not.

[01:09:16] Jeff Wood: Yeah. The reason why I said you should listen to the podcast and not read the book, cause there’s one part of the show where I give him a hard time.

[01:09:22] Cause he made me read a chapter and then it’s a philosophy book, right? He talked about the philosophy of transit equity and stuff. And I got through the chapter and at the end of the chapter, it’s but this probably doesn’t matter. So don’t worry about it. Like I read the chapter and then it said and I was like, And I gave him a hard time.

[01:09:35] I was like, why are you making me read this chapter when I don’t need to read it? I get it. I get it. Why you put it in. Cause it’s a structure and you’re trying to understand like what you were talking about, like how did things go together, but at the same or what, to throw out in your ideas.

[01:09:47] But I was just like, you say that I probably shouldn’t have read this chapter, but yet you wrote this whole chapter. And so that’s what I was referring to when I was like maybe you shouldn’t read the book. Cause I read it. And then he said, you don’t need to read this part. Let’s just

[01:10:00] Wes Marshall: see. Back for a second.

[01:10:01] Thinking about your career now, like 20 years ago, this would be insane, right? The fact that you’re living, doing what you do, it it would be like a made out, it seemed so far fetched back then that nobody would believe it. But it’s amazing you’ve built this space and this world, this community it’s, so 500.

[01:10:21] Oh,

[01:10:21] Jeff Wood: thanks. Thanks. Yeah, people probably still don’t believe it. There’s when we started the show, I think Tanya told me there are some folks that, that she knew in the general space that were like, that guy, you’re going to do a podcast with that guy. So there’s probably a lot of people back then, and that didn’t believe it.

[01:10:37] And they might not believe it now. So I’m, I, but I’m very happy to be able to do this and talk with people like you and just learn from all the stuff that you’ve done. And. It’s, that’s one of the things that’s great about it is I’m just learning from all these other folks that are doing just such amazing work.

[01:10:49] And hopefully we can, help people, bring their work to more listeners and readers and all that stuff and get the word out. Cause that’s the contribution that I’m trying to make is just distributing. It’s not always original, but it’s it’s connective. And I think that’s important.

[01:11:02] Wes Marshall: Yeah. And everybody has a different role to play. And my role is very different than yours, but, and you are great at your role. So keep up. Good work, keep chugging along and

[01:11:11] Jeff Wood: thanks. I appreciate it. Yeah. 500. I can’t believe that. We’ll do 500 more and then, your next book we’ll talk about that one too.

[01:11:17] But we’ll also have you on next Monday for the next Monday show too. I have you scheduled. So we’re coming back. All right. This show is continuing on the road. So where can folks find you if you wish to be found?

[01:11:28] Wes Marshall: I don’t wish to be found. I’ve always

[01:11:32] Jeff Wood: wondered if people are like I really don’t want to be found.

[01:11:35] So I’m glad you asked me if I do or not.

[01:11:37] Wes Marshall: Yeah. And I’m not on social media. There is a Twitter account that just post whenever I’m on a podcast or a news article type stuff, like mostly related to the book. It’s not me. It’s actually a picture of the book. And My publisher sent me like a blue sky invite back when those were still, I don’t know if they’re still doing that.

[01:11:55] So I did sign up for that and I haven’t done anything with it, but I keep getting notifications that people are following me.

[01:12:00] Jeff Wood: I think it’s open now for anybody, all comers. So I don’t think it’s open to all comers, but I don’t

[01:12:04] Wes Marshall: use it or look at it.

[01:12:06] Jeff Wood: You just see the notifications come in.

[01:12:08] Wes Marshall: Yeah, notification comes in, I got a new followers.

[01:12:10] Oh, that’s interesting. I haven’t done anything. So maybe I will someday, but I don’t know I have a hard time doing my real job if I get too much on the Hampshire wheel of that kind of stuff. Yeah, I feel like if I’m thinking. Too much my research gets boring. I’m doing like just kind of stuff that everyone’s arguing about instead of the bigger stuff So I like doing the bigger stuff.

[01:12:27] Jeff Wood: Yeah. No, you should keep doing the bigger stuff and stay off the social media I find it. It’s helpful and unhelpful at the same time It’s helpful in the fact that there’s still people posting interesting articles and items and stuff But then you have to weed through all the bullshit to get there which is the hard part I have I think my feed is probably better than probably 99 percent of people’s and it’s still crap so because i’ve curated it Very intentionally to try to weed out some of the anger and the hate and all that stuff, but it’s still, it still bleeds through because that’s basically the the source of the value of it for a lot of people.

[01:12:58] So it’s just, it’s frustrating, but. I have to be on there to collect news. ’cause there’s some things that I can’t find anywhere else. And I

[01:13:05] Wes Marshall: think my book publisher would rather me be on there and active, but I’m also,

[01:13:09] Jeff Wood: I see stuff from you all over the place. Even if you’re not on social, I see it shared on social.

[01:13:13] So other people are doing your work for you, I think. Which is very

[01:13:15] Wes Marshall: well people like you. Yeah. Yeah. AWA is like that. I could post all day and it’s not gonna be as impactful as coming on your show and talking. Yeah. I appreciate that, .

[01:13:24] Jeff Wood: I hope that’s the case. You can find me on Twitter at the overhead wire or at the overhead wire.

[01:13:28] com. You can find me on mass it on, at the overhead wire, SFBA dot social Instagram and threads at the overhead wire. See, I got too many LinkedIn. You can find me on all those places. Thanks for joining us on Mondays at the overhead wire. Thanks for our generous patrons for sponsoring this podcast.

[01:13:41] Hopefully folks saw this on YouTube and Wes, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time. And we’ll see you next week, actually two weeks from now. Two weeks. All right. Very good.

Mondays 159: It’s All Connected with Wes Marshall

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