(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 422: The Messiness of Family Travel

This week we’re joined by Dr. Jennifer Kent, Senior Research Fellow in Urbanism at the University of Sydney, to talk about her work on family transportation, the messiness of travel for parents, and loneliness and the built environment. She also shares what parents might need to travel more sustainably.

To listen to this episode, head to Streetsblog USA, or visit our hosting archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript.

Jeff Wood (1m 26s):
Well, Jennifer Kent, welcome back to the Talking Headways podcast.

Jennifer Kent (2m 7s):
Thanks, Jeff, it’s great to be back.

Jeff Wood (2m 9s):
Thanks so much for being here. I’m wondering if you can tell folks who hadn’t listened to the previous episode you were on, if you could tell us a little bit about yourself.

Jennifer Kent (2m 16s):
Yeah, sure. So I’m Jennifer Kent. I’m from the University of Sydney, which is in Australia, currently sitting here and it’s 30 degrees Celsius in the middle of summer. So it’s nice. My research interests are all about the links between urban planning, transport and human health. And I’m really driven by a desire to understand how we can challenge private car use in a way that is equitable and you know, doesn’t detract from people’s quality of life. I’m an urban planner by trade. I’ve worked in private practice as an urban planner, which was pretty much what drove me to get into academia because I found it really frustrating.

Jennifer Kent (2m 58s):
And yeah, aside from that, personally speaking, I’m pretty obsessed with dash hounds. Is that means anything to anybody? They’re sausage dogs. Yeah, that’s me.

Jeff Wood (3m 10s):
Nice. I’m curious, how did you get to be interested in, you call ’em Dash Hounds?

Jennifer Kent (3m 14s):
Yeah.

Jeff Wood (3m 15s):
Okay. Dash, I mean, I don’t know, I’ve heard Dachsund, so I know exactly what you’re talking about, the little wiener dogs, but Yes, yes. I’m curious how, how you get into dund or or or dash hounds.

Jennifer Kent (3m 26s):
Hey, great question. I dunno how anybody gets into them, but whoever is into them, it always seems to become a bit of an obsession because they’re breed of their own. They’re just so sassy and so, so much personality in such a little dog. I think I first became interested in them because one of my really good friends said to me, if I was gonna be an animal, I would definitely be a dash out. And she’s a really good friend and I really like her. And that made me think, well, if she wants to be a dash out, then I suppose they must be a good breed. So that’s what got used to them and once you’re into them, you can’t get outta them. It’s just, it becomes an obsession.

Jeff Wood (4m 5s):
I totally understand. At some point I think we’ll get a dog, but not the moment. The kiddo is too young. But at some point,

Jennifer Kent (4m 11s):
Yeah, I dash do not have the ability to conceptualize the fact that they’re anything less than a human. And I think that welcoming of my son who’s now three years old, I think my dash hand is still kind of getting over that, that there is another sort of child in the house. So yeah, as

Jeff Wood (4m 32s):
A head, another important being, another

Jennifer Kent (4m 34s):
Being she’s, she just doesn’t realize that she’s anything less. It’s amazing.

Jeff Wood (4m 38s):
Well, that’s actually related to what we chatted about on episode 3 42 and we talked about pets and transportation and all those things and how they impact travel behavior, specifically dogs. I’m also wondering how you’ve been over the last two years since we’ve chatted. I mean we chatted in the kind of in the middle of the pandemic, it was 2021 or so. I’m guessing a little bit’s happened since then in terms of your research and what you’ve been working on.

Jennifer Kent (4m 59s):
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I’ve sort of shifted from dogs to looking to looking at the way families travel, kind of taking all the themes that I was sort of working through with the dogs on transport and applying that to, I guess a more universal experience, looking at the way that parents travel with their children, the way that parents use transport to facilitate the parenting task. And I think the main thing that I’ve transposed is this idea of that transport is really messy. And I think that parenting conceptualizes that kind of mess. And my theory of looking at parents is that, look, if we can get parents out of private cars, that is gonna be one of the key groups to be able to accommodate with alternative transport.

Jennifer Kent (5m 51s):
And so they’re kind of like the canary in the coal mine in that they represent the kind of mess and complexity that characterizes modern life for so many of us. So that’s my sort of rationale for focusing on parents. And in doing that, I’ve become really interested in the idea of, it was sort of brought up by your previous episode with Greg, she and Jonathan Levine, how they were talking about this idea of accessibility that we should be looking at transport as facilitating access rather than transport as a practice in itself. And I’ve been taking that one step further and thinking, well, we should be looking at transport as facilitating practices.

Jennifer Kent (6m 36s):
So when we’re driving a car, we’re not for example driving a car to access a destination. We’re actually driving a car to perform a practice. Whether that practice is the practice of shopping, dropping a child to school, so the practice of educating your child, going to visit family and friends. If we look at it like that, if we take it sort of a level deeper even than the access conceptualization, we start to realize that it’s not just a matter of providing people with access to specific destinations, it’s about providing people with access to the practices that they want to perform. And I think that really brings to the fore this idea that people do want choice.

Jennifer Kent (7m 21s):
They don’t want to just have a supermarket within walking distance. They wanna have the supermarket that they want to go to within walking distance. And even though providing access is a big part of it, if we undermine that sort of choice component, we’re really underestimating the complexity of the transport task that we’re trying to facilitate. So that’s what I’m exploring at the moment, I suppose in a nutshell,

Jeff Wood (7m 47s):
I think it’s just so fascinating and especially since I have almost eight month old now, and so there’s new things that are happening that I have to focus on as a car-free household, right? Yeah. Trying to get her to get vaccinated, for example, and all those things. So there’s all of these new layers to my travel. Yep. When I go places, when we go to my parents’ house and, and on the other side of the bay, those types of things. So it’s interesting to kind of layer my previous experience as a car-free household with my wife and then now an experience with a little person in the household. Right. And all those trips. And so, you know, I, I contacted you because I was really fascinated with your discussion about loneliness and the peace and the conversation that you had.

Jeff Wood (8m 27s):
But then you sent me the paper where you talked about parenting and I just immediately got immersed in, in the parental transportation because I feel like it’s something that if you’re not a parent, you probably didn’t think much about it before you saw other people doing these things. Or you might have had friends who were taking care of kids, but once they’re outside of your vision, you’re worried about your situation and and your world. And so I think it’s interesting when you start to introduce that factor of, of children, it starts to kind of change the calculus overall, which I, I think you’ve probably experienced as well since you, you mentioned that you have your three-year-old.

Jennifer Kent (9m 2s):
Yeah, absolutely. Congratulations by the way. Thanks. But I mean, it’s great that you’ve had that experience to sort of go from having what may not have seemed at the time but now probably seems quite a clean sort of predictable lifestyle into that just mess of, you know, having to get vaccinations, having to pack all sorts of things to be able to go anywhere. It really brings to the fore

Jeff Wood (9m 29s):
How it’s like a traveling circus. Yeah,

Jennifer Kent (9m 32s):
Absolutely. And you know what, like it, it only gets more and more complex and that’s something that I’m really interested in in exploring is the way that our transport demands change through the parenting journey. So parenthood for a lot of people is just experienced as this 18 year, you know, period of transition as the child goes through ages and stages, the transport needs associated with that change. And I think too often in research we focus on one particular point in time in the parenting journey as a point of intervention to be able to get parents out of cars. So often we focus on car free households that have a child.

Jennifer Kent (10m 14s):
And unlike you then purchase a car to be able to facilitate what they need for that. But it’s actually, there’s a lot of points of intervention where a car-free household might be likely to go, oh look, we’re really going to need to have a car to do this. So one of those points is when kids start primary school, elementary school in the US and they start to do all these extracurricular after school activities, which is really hard to facilitate that if you don’t have a car, unless you’re living in a really transit rich, you know, dense neighborhood where those activities are not dispersed all over the city. So there’s all these sorts of different stages where your transport needs are are chopping and and changing.

Jennifer Kent (10m 58s):
And I think what I’ve found is that in so many ways the private car really orders that mess for parents. So as you know, the entry into parenthood is a really daunting experience and so many people, I think that’s when they’re really craving this sort of sense of security and privacy and autonomy and flexibility and safety that a private park can bring. So it really is a sticky space when we’re talking about trying to get parents outta powers. I think

Jeff Wood (11m 29s):
You had a quote in here that I think was really fascinating in the paper. In essence, families are messy. They have messy conversations, messy interactions and messy ways of using time and space in so many ways. The private car orders this mess such that it does not spill into the public realm of a trained carriage footpath or vehicle shared with other families. And I was thinking about that because I think, you know, when you go places with a kid or if you’ve even been on like an airplane and, and you’re sitting next to someone with a kid, if you’re a parent already, you probably have the sympathy. If you’re not a parent already, you have this big grudging, oh my gosh, I have to sit next to this kid. Yeah. And the same with restaurants and things like that. There’s people who don’t want, you know, children to be allowed in restaurants and stuff like that.

Jeff Wood (12m 9s):
So you kind of get shamed almost into trying to keep all that internal right, yeah. All that messiness internal so that you’re not bothering other people. I mean I don’t like bothering other people. I’m sure you don’t like bothering other people. Yeah. But sometimes a young child or a toddler, they don’t care. They don’t have that sense of shame yet. And so focusing on thinking about transport from that perspective I think is really fascinating from that messiness, but also kind of the, I’m using the word shame, but I, I hope that kind of conveys what I’m trying to get across.

Jennifer Kent (12m 39s):
No, I think it does. I mean if it’s not shame then maybe it’s just a desire not to impinge on other people. You know, we, we live in a very individualized and private society and overstepping that unsaid line does bring bad feelings upon yourself. I mean, I think another piece that I’m working on at the moment is the idea that the car kind of facilitates, if not actually becomes what used to be the village that surrounds the mother when he starts to raise a child. So I think you would’ve heard that expression, it takes a village to raise a child and we don’t have that village anymore. We are very individualized and private in society and I’m wondering how much covid has actually augmented that idea that we are in our private realm so much and less reaching out to society for help.

Jennifer Kent (13m 32s):
And so I think the private car in so many ways creates that village for the parent as they enter into parenthood because it firstly allows for you to get out there and connect in a very easy way. And secondly, it provides you with that space to just retreat and, and be in your private realm. I mean, I’m not sure how many people have actually done this, but just anecdotally it seems to be quite common the amount of parents who will put the kid in the car and get in the car and put the radio on just to get a little bit of peace. Your eight months old may not be all that mobile at the moment, but once they start walking around and talking, it’s like how do I actually constrain this child in some way?

Jennifer Kent (14m 16s):
And I know that people use the car for that purpose. So Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s a really interesting point.

Jeff Wood (14m 23s):
Well, so I wanna talk about the areas of familial travel. Well first I wanna say, I think this is really interesting. A research paper that you cited said the presence of children is a bigger determining factor of car ownership than socioeconomic status density. Yeah. Are other factors which I didn’t had no idea that that was something that, but it makes sense, right? Because it seems to be that a person with a child equals a person with a car because of all of these obligations that they have and they feel like they can’t be car free or tackle transport that way. But I wanna wanna talk about these four areas of familial travel that you bring up in the paper. Cause I think these are really kind of stick to the reasons why people make that choice of a car over maybe active transportation, bike walk, or even now micro mobility, those types of things.

Jeff Wood (15m 4s):
But I wanna talk through each of these cause I think it’s really fascinating to kind of go through the details. The first one is the amount of travel needed for care work. And now in the United States there’s been a lot of discussion about care infrastructure, especially around the most recent infrastructure bill and the inflation reduction Act. And there was a whole discussion about what care actually means here. But I’m wondering what this means to you in particular, the care work and, and the amount of care that travel entails.

Jennifer Kent (15m 28s):
Yeah, well I mean I think I was raising that point because one of the things that really bothers me with transport research is that, and it comes back a little bit to what Greg and Jonathan were sort of saying about the different metrics that we use are really flawed. I think because we are so obsessed with, you know, the journey to work and those really predictable trips, we don’t even have ways for counting or, or, or having any kind of quantification of the kind of travel that goes on with families. I mean, there’s different travel surveys out there, but I don’t think we’ve found a really good way to conceptualize and quantify that complexity.

Jennifer Kent (16m 10s):
So that was the first reason I was sort of focusing on that idea of care as a determinant of travel. But there’s something even deeper, I think about the way that the moral sort of obligation to care for your child or to care for significant others determines our travel choices. And there’s this idea in philosophy and in ethics about the partiality of care. And that’s just basically that idea that it’s totally morally and ethically sanctioned in our society to prioritize the care of your kin over those of others. And I find it interesting the way that parents very definitely do that.

Jennifer Kent (16m 54s):
I mean there’s that old story, I can’t remember the exact philosopher that first brought it up, that if there’s two children drowning in a lake, you are totally ethically sanctioned to save your own child over the other child. And when we think about that in the context of private car use, you may have very strong values and beliefs around contributing to the greater good of society, having, you know, a lot of care about mitigating climate change and so forth and increasing equity of access across the city. But when it comes to caring for your child, those things seem to go out the window or you’re interested in, or what you become interested in is providing a safe, comfortable, convivial space for your child and providing your child with access to the opportunities that all the other children have.

Jennifer Kent (17m 45s):
And if that means be having a car, then, then that’s what you’ll do. So that was the other reason I was really interested in care as a determinant of travel. You know, there’s the complexity, but there’s all that also that moral ethical kinda obligation that parenting brings with it.

Jeff Wood (18m 1s):
The second one is messy trips of modern life and craving predictability. And so I’m thinking, you know, we talked about the messiness, but why is predictability so important?

Jennifer Kent (18m 11s):
I mean, maybe it’s a good space probably for me to acknowledge my own position and my own bias that comes from being a, a parent and being a mother and having the experience of just the chaos that that is raising a tiny human and also the bias that I have him being a person who craves order and predictability. So obviously that is a personal thing, but I think it is a fairly universal experience in the, the vulnerability of parenthood. And I think I used the term exquisite vulnerability because it is a, a very vulnerable time in your life, albeit a really precious time when you just need to cling on to any kind of order that you can.

Jennifer Kent (18m 55s):
I think that although it’s a personal experience, I think it’s a common experience in parenting. The other thing is that we know from the research that children thrive with routine and with predictability as well. So we are taught that as parents that we need to provide that predictable environment for our children. I mean, it starts from the very beginning when you are faced with this baby who doesn’t sleep and you were taught that the best way to get them to sleep is to establish a good routine and a predictable routine. And you know, when you’re a sleep deprived parent, you will do absolutely anything to get that to happen.

Jennifer Kent (19m 36s):
So I think that’s what I’m talking about, that predictability is just such an important component of the parenting task.

Jeff Wood (19m 44s):
Yeah. Especially from a transport perspective, right. You wanna know exactly, you know, when you’re going somewhere, you know how much time it takes. If you have a schedule to keep the kid on like a sleep schedule or a feeding schedule or anything like that, any deviation from that norm that you’ve created makes it harder. And so in the way that we’ve built our built environment, oftentimes if you don’t live in a transit oriented neighborhood or a walkable neighborhood, that predictability goes out the window. If there’s a 30 minute bus line near your house and it ends up being 45 minutes because of some scheduling thing or something happens to the, you know, the bus bunching or something along those lines. And so that predictability is, I think it’s a, it’s not just a a familial thing, it’s generally why people are, you know, they’ll take the car because we’ve created a, a situation where the car is more predictable versus public transport or other modes that might be more friendly to the environment or society as a whole.

Jennifer Kent (20m 36s):
Yeah, absolutely. I mean when we about it some earlier work that I did, the concept of security. So that’s basically just this idea that we have this desperate need to feel secure in our lives and autonomy is a big component of that. And you know, you can go back to more psychological conceptualizations like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs where self actualization and autonomy are actually a really in innate human need. And I think that predictability is a big part of that because it’s very difficult to be autonomous in any way if you dunno what’s going on. And regardless of whether that dunno what’s going on is, you know, from the desperate side of not knowing where your next meal is going to come to the more subtle kind of not being able to schedule your time in an autonomous way in so many places and in so many ways the private car gives that kind of power to people.

Jennifer Kent (21m 37s):
And it’s very easy I think for transport planners to think, well no, no, that’s just sort of fuzzy psychological stuff. We should be able to override that with structural provision or, or people should be able to sort of deal with that in some way with these aspirations for the greater good. But when it comes to actually challenging that, it’s actually challenging something that’s quite deep within us that we need to start to engage with as transport planners if we’re going to be serious about challenging the private car. I think

Jeff Wood (22m 7s):
Yeah, for sure. The third thing is the spatial attributes of familial trips are not linear. And I think, you know, if you’ve ever tried to do some trip chaining or anything like that and you’ve found that the place that you want to go to is more of a triangle than a straight line in terms of going multiple places, you realize that it might be easier if you can take a vehicle that is not on the one route that you’re trying to trying to get all your trips in. So I think that’s fascinating as well. You know, transit lines are linear quarters or linear trip training often isn’t. So why are these spatial considerations important in this conversation specifically?

Jennifer Kent (22m 45s):
Yeah, well I think it comes back to this idea of mess and complexity. I mean it’s, it’s really rare that you do have those linear sort of journeys when you’re a family basically. Because you are not just accommodating one person’s linear, you know, drive or linear what they’re trying to accomplish. You’re accommodating three people. If you’ve got one child and you’re living in a, in a partnership for with the more children that you have, the more complex that becomes. So we’ve gotta think of these sort of constellations of transport and, and demands and timetables and routines that needs to be accommodated.

Jennifer Kent (23m 26s):
And that’s where it starts to get really complex. I’m actually just working on a paper at the moment with from Monash University about the way that working from home ti up some of this mess for families. And we start out by just articulating the sheer complexity of familial routines and familial transport demands. And we did interviews with 30 families. What we’re trying to demonstrate is the way that that complexity gets dealt with and gets negotiated on a really, you know, daily, sometimes hourly level for families determines the way that they will travel, the way that working from home will be appreciated and so forth.

Jennifer Kent (24m 11s):
So I think that if we can start to think about trips as less linear, we can start to sort of put some of those challenges in place. I think though it also comes back to the idea that in transport research we’ve been so obsessed with wanting to model things with wanting to place some kind of order over what is a really messy realm, that we’ve simplified the trips rather than complicating the way that we look at them. And it’s very sort of alluring and seductive to kind of think about the traveling public as being, you know, quite simple in their lifestyles, but it’s obviously not working in the way that we want people to transition.

Jennifer Kent (24m 57s):
And I think we’ve really gotta really knock ourselves out of that way of thinking. We’re getting there. I think I’m in that whole push towards conceptualizing accessibility is a big component of it, but we need to go deeper still I think in the long term if we’re gonna do the change that needs to happen.

Jeff Wood (25m 15s):
And the fourth one is the transitory nature of childhood children growing up and getting more abilities, which may or may not mean less or more travel for them or independent travel for them, that changing grades, you know, going to different schools, those types of things. And so, you know, through the, the 18 year journey that you described earlier, there’s sub journeys Yeah. In the 18 years. Right. And so those sub journeys have different transport needs as you move through the life of a of a child.

Jennifer Kent (25m 42s):
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s a really interesting thing to dig deeper into because often we, I mean there’s, there’s research on mobility biographies and so forth, but that’s always really long term stuff and, and we like to think that once a person has made a decision about the way they will travel, that that will be ingrained in trenched. But with families that changes from, you know, year to year, week to week, day to day, like I said before, hour to hour sometimes. And so at every stage of that we need to be pushing for the sustainable transport option over the private car. And that again just is such a complex task to be able to do that.

Jennifer Kent (26m 24s):
One thing I’m really interested in is the way that the car sort of becomes entrenched in family life because it was relevant for one particular aspect. So, you know, a family might have been able to be car free like I was saying before, up until the child hits that period of time when they’re, they’re interested in extracurricular activities, they’ve got family, they’ve got friends all over the place that they want to visit. So the car becomes more important. And what I think happens is because the car is such a useful tool, it becomes entrenched in the family’s routine even after that period where the child is dependent on the car for mobility.

Jennifer Kent (27m 4s):
So the child may become more independent but the car stays in the family because it’s become such an important tool in the way that that family works. And then even when the child may move out at home, the couple finds themselves more car dependent than what they were before parenthood because they’ve got used to the autonomy and the flexibility and so forth that the car can bring them. So again, there’s all these sort of intervention points that I don’t think we really take account of when we’re thinking about the way that people might travel throughout their entire, you know, lives.

Jeff Wood (27m 39s):
That’s so interesting because as you’re talking about that, I’m just thinking about the sunk cost of a car, right? You, you purchase a vehicle, whether it’s a used one or or a new one, it’s a significant investment, 10 to 20 to $30,000 and maybe even more depending, you know, on your station in life and how much you feel like you can afford it. And then as you go through those stages where you actually did need it, you actually find yourself maybe using it for other things that it just, it’s there so you use it for it. But maybe you didn’t do that before, like you said. I I just think that’s interesting as, as an inflection point for determining whether, you know, you can use sustainable transportation or not or whether you will or your choice to, if you have a car sitting on the street and it’s just sitting there and you feel like you need to use it, maybe it’s like, oh well I need to make sure that I, I run the engine once a week so let’s go to get dinner or something like that, right?

Jeff Wood (28m 31s):
Yeah. One of the reasons I got rid of my car was because I kept on leaving it and getting parking tickets and the clutch was going bad and so it was like, well, you know, the dawn of Zipcar and, and Uber and all those other things and I was like, well I think I could do this as a single person living my own life, but I can imagine if you decided another way to to get another car cause you needed it cuz you had a kid or something along those lines, that car stays with you for 10, 15 years and so it’s that purchase. And, and this is part of the problem with the climate change transition too, is you know, the gas powered vehicle that people are buying now instead of maybe an electric vehicle that’s a 10 year time period that that vehicle is gonna be a gas powered vehicle rather than a transition to a a cleaner vehicle. So it’s interesting those decision points that you’re talking about.

Jennifer Kent (29m 13s):
Yeah, absolutely. I mean a couple of things sort of come up for me as you were talking I think where the car sits there and so you feel like you need to use it or the car sits there and, and you get really accustomed to the autonomy that it can bring and you kind of lose your skills of being able to plan a little bit ahead that you know, more sustainable transport might require. I think that’s why car sharing schemes work so well is because it makes every single trip a real decision point, not just something that becomes automated or out of habit. And that’s a lot to do with the success in car sharing and reducing vkt or vmt and reducing car ownership.

Jennifer Kent (29m 54s):
The other thing that came to mind though, there’s this sociologist Margaret Archer who thinks that this concept of transitions to sustainability through that temporal sort of the lens and she’s got this great quote and I can’t sort of roll it off off the top of my head, but it’s, it’s sort of saying that we can sit here planning for an outcome that we’re after well all the way putting in policies that are actually doing the exact opposite thing and it just draws out that idea that there’s this temporal lag, I think of the way that we think about climate change, the way that we think about other aspects of sustainability and the policies that we’re actually putting in place or the practices on a personal level that we’re actually doing.

Jennifer Kent (30m 41s):
And I worry about that because we’re running outta time, you know, we need to start getting things happening, stu know, but this nature of the temple lag, these investments that are, you know, 15 years like you say are of cementing you into a certain way of traveling become really costly when you think about it in that way.

Jeff Wood (31m 3s):
Yeah. Over time it adds up, especially if it’s a decade time period. That’s such a long time. It’s not a year or two years.

Jennifer Kent (31m 11s):
No. It becomes really, the thing that we haven’t really talked about is this idea of travel socialization with children as well. That the investment of a car isn’t just for 10 years. You’re actually socializing the child into that expectation of the autonomy that comes with the car and de-skilling them with taking public transport, using bikes and, and walking and so forth. So the temporal implications of that is augmented, you know, generation after generation. That’s how we’ve ended up where we are. I think

Jeff Wood (31m 41s):
There’s been studies on that, right? Like about how kids who are driven to school versus kids who walk to school are not as good at figuring out where they are. Location, using maps. Yep. That type of thing. Yeah. Because of it. I remember, you know, when I was a kid I, I walked to school every day and then when I moved to Houston outside of Houston, I biked to school every day. And so yeah, a lot of the neighborhoods that I was in and in running too, we talked about this last time, but I ran cross country and track in high school and college and that actually gave me a spacial awareness of the cities that I lived in and the places that I was on a street by street basis. And I feel like if you’re just driving around you miss it. You know, you know the roads you’re supposed to go on but you don’t have an intimate feel for the neighborhoods and the areas that you’re in.

Jennifer Kent (32m 20s):
Yeah. There has been a lot of really interesting research on that done with with children. There was this one particular study that’s coming to mind where they got children who were driven to school and children who walked to school to do a, a diary of their journey and the depth of of color that the children who walked to school could describe their walk to school in was just so much different to those who were driven, who sort of talked more about the fast pace and the idea of things flashing past the window, whereas the children who walked to school spoke about little bugs that they found on the way or even avoiding the cracks in the footpath.

Jennifer Kent (33m 1s):
It was just such a more grounded experience. I mean I do wanna preface that by saying to be able to walk to school in many areas is actually a real privilege. You know, it’s, it’s not something that, you know, I don’t think people drive their kids to school necessarily by choice. I think often it’s just necessity. But I think that children’s mobility to school is such a great place to start in terms of embedding those skills and appreciations of ways of traveling that are a little bit slower and a little bit more grounded.

Jeff Wood (33m 34s):
So these four areas of familial travel get you also into ways that you can explore the ways that people can change their behaviors. And you talk about it in the book and ways that people can become less car dependent and that’s by a, using other modes of transportation and then B maybe traveling less. And I’m interested in the ways that this takes you in your research and thinking about how people travel, but then how you can use that to think about the ways to travel without cars.

Jennifer Kent (34m 2s):
Yeah, I mean I think that was, I dunno whether it’s revolutionary for anybody else, but it was quite revolutionary for me to sort of go, ok so the way that we’re gonna challenge the private car, we either need to get people traveling differently or we just need to get them to travel less. And when you boil it down to that kind of simplicity, it opens up all sorts of space for complexity I think. So in transport research we’ve concentrated very much on facilitating the existing journeys that people do by other modes. So trying to get people out of cars, onto bikes, onto public transit and so forth. And so we haven’t thought as much, nearly as much about how we can actually call into question the need for people to travel.

Jennifer Kent (34m 47s):
So if you start to look at that, that’s where the idea of concentrating on people’s practices and the outcomes that they’re actually after when it comes to travel can be so powerful in challenging private car use. And I go through a series in the paper of different ways that we might do this and you know, the most obvious one is densification where we have critical mass of people to justify investment in transit and bike infrastructure and better footpaths and so forth. We bring uses closer together and that basically negates a lot of the need to travel long distances. But there’s also a lot of other ways that I think we can call into question this need to travel.

Jennifer Kent (35m 29s):
And one of the more interesting ones that I really want to explore into the future is this idea of the overscheduled child. So we have this very deep seated coming back to that ethical sort of sanctioning of the partiality of care, this deep seated need to provide every opportunity possible for our child. And I think that’s been really augmented by the kind of economic rationalist, competitive site society that we’ve become. We definitely wanna make sure our child has access to the best thoughts that we can provide, the best math coaching that we can provide and that really generates a whole lot of travel.

Jennifer Kent (36m 10s):
If we can start to call into question that need for our child to be scheduled for every second of their lives to be scheduled, we could start to provide more space for children to have more free play and more free opportunities that don’t necessarily involve getting in a car to get there. There are other ways that I think are really underexplored that we could do this. So for example, instead of a child driving to mass coaching, they might be able to do online mass coaching via Zoom and and so forth. And I’m very interested in conceptualizing that as a different form of children’s independent mobility because it gives the child the independence from the transport of the parent to get them there.

Jennifer Kent (36m 55s):
And I think there’s other ways in terms of trying to make children’s lives more localized. I think that the school as a hub is very important in that and that brings up the whole realm of of school choice that I’m not sure about in the US but in Australia we’ve seen this massive increase in people wanting to choose the schools that they send their child to rather than just relying on the local school. And that just really has a huge capacity to add to the transport task of the child, not only by the journey to school, but when you think about it, the child’s friendship circles are all going to be located around that school. So you are really locking the child into a lot of travel in their day to day lives.

Jennifer Kent (37m 39s):
So there’s lots of different, I think, intervention points that become open when we start to really call in to question the need to travel. And I think for lots of different reasons, transport planners and transport researchers have been a bit scared around that, that idea of sort of questioning, well do you really need to do this trip? Because it starts to impinge on that sort of individual, right? That I think that we’re very scared to question from the perspective of you know, a new transport planner. But I think we need to start to do that. I mean that’s kind of what’s required if we’re going to start to face some of the challenges that are ahead of us.

Jeff Wood (38m 18s):
Two thoughts on that specifically. The first one I have is, you know, I was challenged on this maybe a couple weeks ago, maybe a couple months ago on, if you think about your trips and the ones that you’re not taking, does that mean that somebody else has to take a trip, like an Amazon trip or something along those lines? Yeah. Is that trip still exist even if you’re not taking it? And the second one is, you know, kind of what Greg and Jonathan were talking about in the sense that maybe there are some things that we’ve learned from the pandemic and and from the work from home for white collar workers mostly that it’s something that could be possible that people could take less trips. Because before everybody talked about work from home or telework or whatever else and they said, oh well this could be the future. But until there was kind of this force change, nobody really, you know, took it seriously.

Jennifer Kent (39m 2s):
Yeah, I mean I, I really loved, I can’t remember whether it was Greg or Jonathan who said we got pushed forward 40 years or something like that by the pandemic in our embrace of working from home. I think that it definitely has a lot of possibilities and there’s definitely this idea that, you know, these things become more realistic. What worries me though is that, you know, for goodness sake it took a global pandemic to get, I know and somebody said to me the other day, you know, what’s it gonna take to get a sustainable transport transition? And the first thing that came to mind was, oh my gosh, like nine more pandemics and we might actually get there. We need to start being a little bit more proactive than reactive if we’re going to really get to where we need to go if we’re going to combat things like climate change.

Jennifer Kent (39m 50s):
I think it’s just, it’s so interesting that that is what it took to just get what should have been a really incremental sort of smaller change. Like you said, we’ve been talking about it for years. It took that to get us to actually do it. It just, it amazes me.

Jeff Wood (40m 7s):
I remember my geography professor in, in college in undergrad and in the late nineties, early two thousands talking about the death of distance, right. The, the telework revolution and all that stuff. And that was 20 plus years ago. Yeah. And it’s been going on longer than that. You mentioned the overscheduled child as well and I, I I personally hate being an overscheduled adult, so I can’t imagine how the kids feel. Yeah. As someone who was more than happy as a kid to be at home and playing with Legos versus, you know, going out and doing other things. So that speaks to me as well as a, as an adult. Cause I feel like if I have stuff that’s scheduled, it’s almost anxiety inducing versus doing things on a day because I feel like I wanna do it.

Jennifer Kent (40m 46s):
Yeah. I mean we think about it the last time that children with this scheduled, you know, when you think about a child who perhaps is starting their day at seven o’clock with a music lesson, then going to school and then having mass coaching and then perhaps a birthday party or something after that, children have not been this se this scheduled since the 18th century where we were sending them into sweatshops and and getting them to work. That was when they had 12 hour days and now they’ve got 12 hour days. Again we don’t think that that could actually be harming the trial, this kind of drive that we have to ensure that they’re competitive in the workplace and you know, they get into the best colleges or or whatever.

Jennifer Kent (41m 25s):
We don’t think that that could actually be really harming them. I mean the step beyond that is we definitely don’t think that that is a transport problem. Yeah. But it really is like it’s, it’s just so interesting to think about the policy areas and the cultural areas that are relevant to transport are just so much more than the way we provide a road or a train line or, or whatever.

Jeff Wood (41m 47s):
Well so then let’s talk about another aspect of relationship and the lack of them and and that’s the idea of loneliness. Yeah. The first thing I think of when I think of loneliness is how social humans are and how we are all social animals. No matter how introverted I am, I still do need to have human contact. I still need to see my friends

Jennifer Kent (42m 7s):
Begrudgingly,

Jeff Wood (42m 9s):
Not so begrudgingly just it’s the scheduled thing. I wish to choose the times when I can do it rather than being chosen for I guess is the difference. Right. So as social animals, I think that there’s something to be said about the loneliness epidemic and the drivers of it as well. But it’s also seen as you mentioned in the conversation article, it’s also seen as an individual problem. And I’m wondering why it’s focused on as an individual problem versus about society, about the built environment. About more than just a personal thing.

Jennifer Kent (42m 37s):
Yeah, I mean I suppose it speaks to the way we treat a lot of health issues, right? So loneliness, like you said, it is described as an epidemic by a lot of psychologists and a lot of other professionals working in that space because it’s becoming such a commonly diagnosed experience for people. It can be diagnosed using diagnostic criteria that is similarly used to diagnose depression, anxiety and so forth. I mean there’s so many of health issues that we treat at the problem rather than the source. And we’re treating loneliness once it’s actually being diagnosed rather than treating the things that determine loneliness.

Jennifer Kent (43m 18s):
So people will present with loneliness to a psychologist or a psychiatrist and they’ll be treated as an individual. Whereas the things that actually cause loneliness are a lack of social interaction, a lack of social connection, a lack of belonging in a space where you live. We don’t think that that is actually what we need to tackle when we’re tackling loneliness. So it’s kinda characteristic of our health systems all around the world where we should actually be calling them sick care systems because we’re only interested in looking after people once they’re sick. We’re not interested in preventing them from getting ill in the first place. And loneliness I think has been exactly the same.

Jeff Wood (43m 56s):
It reminds me of a discussion I had with Dr. Mindy full of where she was talking about, she wrote a book called Root Shock, which is basically about people who leave communities and they totally kind of lose their footing because the community was the place where they were the most centered, where they were themselves, where they had the connections to the neighborhood, to the family. Her discussion about that is based on not a a clinical model of social interaction but more, and I’m, I’m probably butchering this a little bit, but thinking about it from the social determinants of health aspect that you’re talking about, which is the overall impact of the neighborhood and the place where you live and how that impacts your health outcome versus just like going to the hospital and the doctor tells you, oh well you have this, we need to treat it with this going deeper.

Jeff Wood (44m 39s):
Thanks for joining us Neighborhood level project overhead wire, good way to think about it. Our wonderful pat sponsoring one of those level patt com deeper and you can sign up for our 16 year old newsletter com.

Jennifer Kent (44m 56s):
I mean one of the things that really Spotify,

Jeff Wood (44m 59s):
IHeart,

Jennifer Kent (44m 59s):
Apple Podcasts, different ways of thinking, social interactions. So you have interactions, Interactions, there’s things called incidental social interactions, which are the tiny little things that just occur, occur when you’re out and about in your neighborhood. You know, you might walk past the same person every now and again and you give them a little wave or a nod, you might be down in your local park and you have a smile, a moment of eye contact. Those incidental social interactions are actually just important as important for combating loneliness cause they make you feel like you belong in the place where you live. They make you feel like you have a sense of connection to that place and a sense of support in that place.

Jennifer Kent (45m 44s):
And what we’ve found that as our neighborhoods have become more private, as you know we’re all running around in our private cars, traveling straight through our suburbs and our neighborhoods rather than actually engaging with them. Those incidental social interactions are really starting to erode. And that’s one of the reasons that we’re having this epidemic I think of loneliness. I think the other thing is that people are feeling quite disconnected from having a say over what is happening in their neighborhoods. So a big component of a sense of belonging is having that sense of control of what goes on and if you feel like your neighborhood is just being planned top down. So it’s being planned for rather than with the community, that sense of belonging again gets really eroded.

Jennifer Kent (46m 30s):
And I think talking of the shop of Covid, I think that just really brought it out to us that we are really feeling quite disconnected from the place where we live because we were forced to spend a lot of time in that place during Covid. So I think again, we’ve just kind of had that shock brought out and that’s why we’re seeing this massive increase in loneliness now.

Jeff Wood (46m 52s):
So what made you all, I mean basically it looks like you all did like this really intensive literature review of what has been said before about holiness and the built environment. But I, I’m curious, how much did you have to dig through and did it come out to be what you expected versus maybe something that was surprising in the results?

Jennifer Kent (47m 9s):
Yeah, it’s really interesting cause that for me that was a really intense experience of working in an interdisciplinary team. So the paper itself was initiated by the psychology department at the University of Sydney who were working in a center for mental health called the Matilda Center. And they were very interested in the social determinants of health model and that’s where they got in contact with me as an urban planner and a transport planner to sort of look at the way that urban planning might impact mental health with a specific focus on loneliness. So I mean, I say it was such an intensely interdisciplinary experience of working as a team because we came to the table and found that we had totally different definitions of really basic things like you mentioned the definition of the built environment that we used in the paper that took days and days and days of working well months definition.

Jennifer Kent (48m 5s):
And a lot of just going back to basics and me explaining what I felt as a planner and as an urban designer was the built environment. What psychologists felt was the environment that surrounded their patients and the people that they work with. And it was a really deep experience of trying to unpick some of that complexity and some of the misunderstandings that I think so often characterize our research. And it was only when we really sat down and started to work through that, that those things came out. I think that the psychologists, for them, the results were actually really surprising because what they wanted, and this so often happens with research on health in the built environment or health and transport, they’ve wanted something really clean cut.

Jennifer Kent (48m 56s):
Cause they’re used to working with randomized controlled trials as being the the gold standard of evidence, right? Whereas them and planners we’re used to sort of saying, oh yeah, well this kind of will work and then we’ve gotta take into account politics and regulation and engineering and so forth. So we’re a lot more accustomed to working with something a little bit messier. So they were surprised because they didn’t find this clear cut definition of what kind of built environment is going to discourage people from experiencing loneliness. They wanted something really standard. They almost wanted sort of design guidelines as to a built environment that prevents loneliness. But what we found is that it’s just so contextual and we use this theory of affordance to be able to explain that in that the built environment affords people opportunities for social interactions, but it doesn’t necessarily produce those opportunities.

Jennifer Kent (49m 49s):
There’s so much that needs to go on between the structure and the agency of the individual who is within that environment to bring forward those social interactions. So for me it was just confirming the way that I’d always really thought about the links stream built environment and health, that it’s contextual and it’s very difficult to pin down and that all the best way that we’re going to be able to work in that space is just to jump into that mess. But for the psychologist, I think it was a bit of a surprise, which was just, I mean another layer to the complexity of interdisciplinary working. That whole paper by the way took, it’s been about three and a half years in the making and I think there’s been three children born in that period.

Jennifer Kent (50m 34s):
It’s been a global pandemic. Like it was just this juggernaut and we finally got across the line. We’re all so happy.

Jeff Wood (50m 42s):
Yeah, I can imagine. Yeah,

Jennifer Kent (50m 43s):
Good to have an opportunity to speak about it. Yeah,

Jeff Wood (50m 46s):
I mean it’s, it’s just so interesting because you know, you hear about things that happen and then I always like to bring them back to that discussion about the built environment or transportation or urban planning more generally. Yeah. And as you said, it isn’t like the engineers or like we might want sometimes where you can put a bunch of numbers into a black box and get an answer. It’s actually much messier than that. One of the things that was really interesting is thinking about the geography, right? That you’re talking about when you’re talking about the built environment and there’s no real relation between city or region or density as it pertains to loneliness, but it’s more of your home situation or your neighborhood and that that built environment discussion kind of comes into play. And so I think those types of things, I think it makes sense to us as planners who have dealt with these things for a really long time.

Jeff Wood (51m 31s):
Everything, the mess that you talk about is the mess that we deal within all the time. Yeah. But I think it’s really interesting also to start to think is there a connection between these things and, and whether it is an individual’s responsibility to take advantage of the built environment that it’s afforded to them. If you live in New York City and you’re lonely, there’s opportunities to go out or go to museums or whatever it is, but you can’t make people do something that they maybe don’t wanna do or they are not up for or there’s other circumstances. So I think that’s just a, a really interesting wrinkle. The other interesting wrinkle for me was thinking about the home and how some of the specific findings from the review.

Jeff Wood (52m 12s):
So if your home is too small and we have this real fascination now with tiny houses and, and micro apartments and those types of things, if your home is too small, you might not feel like you can invite people over to, you know, have a drink or to have dinner, large groups, those types of things. Also, if you’re a renter, you know, you may not be comfortable decorating your place. For me personally, I’ve decorated my rooms ever since I lived at home. I mean, I, I had no white space on my wall at home and drove my parents mad probably cuz of all the push pins that were in the wall. But, but even you can see behind me, I have maps and I have, you know, transit paraphernalia and I have other things. So decorating my space is really important. And so I think that’s interesting too in that if somebody feels like they can’t make a space their own, that makes them feel less connected and maybe a little bit more lonely.

Jeff Wood (52m 58s):
And so those types of things I think were interesting findings that came out of the report.

Jennifer Kent (53m 2s):
Yeah, I mean I think we probably don’t place enough emphasis in the, in the literature and the research on health and the built environment. We probably don’t place enough emphasis on the actual home environment. There are architects working in that space. But just that idea of being able to personalize your own space, again, it comes back to that sense of belonging and that sense of almost that sense of permanency that people I think need to feel like they are okay in a space. That idea of inviting people over for dinner, I think brings up a really interesting point where we’re constantly intention as people between having this desire for privacy, but also this overwhelming desire for connection.

Jennifer Kent (53m 48s):
And that in itself, I think that comes back to the private car as well, is we want to connect with people and we want to be in the public realm, but we also want those opportunities to be able to retreat and be within our own private realm. And if we’re living in a space that is so small or a space that is not very nice, not very well maintained, not comfortable, and we’re constantly forced to go out and about to live our lives, then we don’t have that opportunity to get that retreat and that privacy, which I think is the flip side of the social interactions. And you can’t have one without the other. You can’t be forced into constantly having to interact because you’re not comfortable at home.

Jennifer Kent (54m 28s):
Likewise, you can’t be forced into sort of living in your private domain. They both need each other for people to thrive. So I think that’s, it’s a really interesting concept looking at the intricacies of the built environment.

Jeff Wood (54m 42s):
So what’s next? What’s the next research focus for you? You have the loneliness research, the familial travel. I imagine they’ll come together as a force together at some point.

Jennifer Kent (54m 53s):
Well, I suppose because my research all looks at those three points of transport, health, guilt environment. So I’m constantly flipping between those three things. And I guess the health and built environment was what came out with the loneliness piece. I’m more concentrating on that family travel aspect and that’s what I’m gonna be taking into the future. This year. I’m doing this massive, I dunno how I’m going to get through it, of interviews with parents at all different stages of the parent and journey and with all different context just to try and unpick some of that complexity a little bit more. I’m also working with a researcher from Swan University on this concept of motor normativity.

Jennifer Kent (55m 36s):
He was on a podcast, the War on Cars podcast recently. And so we’re going to be looking at transposing, that concept of motivity, which is basically this idea that as a society we have a, a bias towards automobility, towards private car use. I’m gonna be transposing that onto parents, which I think will be really interesting. That’s definitely work in progress, but something I’m really excited about cause it’s just a bit of fun. Really.

Jeff Wood (56m 4s):
Well all your work sounds fun. That’s why we keep having you back on the show cause just, it’s so fascinating all the stuff that you’re doing.

Jennifer Kent (56m 10s):
Oh, thank you. That means a lot. Thanks.

Jeff Wood (56m 12s):
Where can folks find your work if they want to get copies of the papers or find out more about what you’re doing?

Jennifer Kent (56m 18s):
Good question, Jeff. I’m really hopeless with social media and I, I, I sort of a week before the whole Elon Musk Twitter thing happened, I made this resolution to become a lot better with Twitter and put in these plans. And then that happened and now I’m a bit lost. So I still have my Twitter account at Jennifer Lee Kent and I still do tweet things, but I also regularly try to publish whatever I do in scholarly papers. I always try to put a complimentary piece in the conversation. So that’s another way to keep track of what I’m doing. Or people can just email me. If you look up Jennifer Lee Can University of Sydney, you’ll definitely find my email address and I’m more than willing to hear from people who are interested in my work or are interested in similar topics.

Jennifer Kent (57m 5s):
So definitely open to hearing from folks.

Jeff Wood (57m 8s):
Awesome. Well Jennifer, thanks for joining us again. We really appreciate your

Jennifer Kent (57m 11s):
Time. Thanks a lot Jeff. It’s really enjoyable.