(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 467: Are We Taking Less Trips?

This week we’re joined by Angie Schmitt, Owner and Principal at 3MPH Planning and Consulting. We chat about changing travel behavior in cities, the impact of recent social isolation on social trust, and polarization in policy solutions.

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

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:

Jeff Wood (1m 24s):
Angie Schmitt, welcome back to the Talking Headways podcast.

Angie Schmitt (1m 38s):
Hi. Yeah, thanks for having me.

Jeff Wood (1m 39s):
Well thanks for being here back again. I guess it’s really exciting to have you back for, I think the third time we had you on when Tanya was still hosting with me, and then also back in 2020 when you finished your book and September, 2020, which was I guess in the middle of the madness. And so I’m wondering how you’re doing since then.

Angie Schmitt (1m 56s):
Good. I know it’s exciting to be back. I love the podcast and we’re like growing old together.

Jeff Wood (2m 1s):
I know, right?

Angie Schmitt (2m 2s):
It’s been a long time, a long run.

Jeff Wood (2m 4s):
It’s pretty awesome. So how has it been since 2020? I mean like basically you wrote the book, you’ve started a Consulting firm, you’ve done all kinds of really cool, interesting work. I’m wondering what’s been going on in your world?

Angie Schmitt (2m 15s):
Yeah, yeah, it’s been sort of a wild ride because my book came out right during the middle of the pandemic. Like I finished it in February of 2020 and then it was like, okay, I’m gonna start a business like cool. And then all of a sudden it was like, whoa, like the world is imploding. And then my kids were like down in school then for a really long time. So I wasn’t even really able to like return to work quite the same way I would’ve otherwise. But really almost like a year. I had a kindergartner who missed I, a lot of people heard me complain about it came a full year of school. So that really impacted my ability to work for a little while. I also had a three-year-old at the time, but at the time I did a lot of speaking about the book.

Angie Schmitt (2m 56s):
I’ve sort of been on like an extended speaking tour about this book for quite a while. There was people that had me out to the west coast to talk about it a year before it came out. So I was, I trapped around a little bit talking about it like way before it came out. And when the book came out I really worried like, how relevant is this gonna be? And that seems, it is like a selfish concern like in in light of everything that was going on and how serious that problem is. But I like even put this little forward on the book that was like, you know, I don’t know what’s gonna happen now. It could be that pedestrian deaths will decline. That was sort of my guess based on what we figured. People are driving less, that’s usually what happens. Traffic deaths decline. But what actually happened was I got way, way, way, way worse.

Angie Schmitt (3m 36s):
So there’s been a lot of opportunities to talk about it as a result of that. So I’ve traveled around speaking about it quite a bit, which has been fun. Especially like last year I went to Florida three times or they’ve got a really serious problem. Yeah, yeah. I’ve done a lot of media interviews, but one thing that’s really cool is I think a lot of people just saw the New York Times did a big expose about the problem and the, the way issue is discussed has come so far in the last three or four years when that New York Times expose came out, someone posted this thing I had written, I had been writing about it way back in 2017. So it, it is encouraging to see like sort of the discussion moving in the right direction.

Angie Schmitt (4m 19s):
I thought back at the time when I set out to write the book, if we can get sort of a news round about this problem, it will be really helpful to us in solving the problem. So here we are. The problem’s gotten way worse, but there’s been a big consciousness raising sort of about the subject, which is cool.

Jeff Wood (4m 35s):
I’m wondering how you feel about all of the news that’s been coming out about it. I actually, I, I talked to Beth Osborne like last week and she was really excited about the media coverage of all the things that we talk about and all the things we care about getting much better. And I think that New York Times magazine article that just came out is really kind of an indication of people are actually starting to look more seriously at the problem. And that deep dive was like I, I learned stuff from that because I was, I was like, oh yeah, the agitation, the peer pressure, those things I’ve, I’ve felt before when I’m driving. I just didn’t even think about it. And so I think it’s actually good that we’re getting this new kind of group of reporters and folks focused on those types of issues. And I, I’m wondering what your thoughts are on that.

Angie Schmitt (5m 14s):
Yeah, I thought that was really great too, that New York Times magazine article and I, I agree with the writer almost everything he said, the way he framed it, I thought he hit a lot of that important points. I mean a lot of us have sort of been arriving at the same place a little bit at the same time or a little bit different times. So I think like we’ve sort of converted, I think we’ve converted a lot of people including like, this is probably like a little bit right coded, but like the prestige media sort of has gotten the message I think. And actually I think a lot of important people within the industry have also gotten the message, including a lot of engineers, especially younger engineers. But I think we’re farther behind in sort of reaching just kind of like the general public and also, you know, I use like prestige media, you know, the sort of local television news stations, you know, the police departments that are doing like the day in and day out sort of communications about this topic.

Angie Schmitt (6m 9s):
Sort of less so I would say.

Jeff Wood (6m 11s):
Yeah. Who is it that somebody did something recently about kind of figuring out who, was it Kelsey Ralph or is it Tara? I can’t remember exactly who it was, but somebody was doing something recently about how the police should be reporting traffic deaths or collisions and kind of a training system that that might be implemented for that. So I think that’s interesting too. Well, so that’s your book right away. And we actually talked with you on in September, 2020 on episode 3 0 2. But I’m, I imagine that like, you know, since you’ve written that book, you’ve obviously been talking about it continuously since then. That’s three, four years ago and so that’s pretty impressive that it has had this staying power.

Angie Schmitt (6m 45s):
Yeah, I think it’s like sort of a little bit fading now, honestly. You know, there’s a lot of new new books that have come out that Yeah. Are pretty excited about and that are cool. But yeah, I don’t think if I would’ve gone out on my own, I would’ve had the opportunity to sort of speak about it as much as I have. Yeah. And that was actually one of my goals with writing the book was just to kind of do a lot of press because only so many people are gonna read a nonfiction book like that. But you know, If, you can do NVR or whatever. You can really sort of expand sort of your scope. So that’s been fun. It’s been fun to travel around talking about it.

Jeff Wood (7m 15s):
Yeah. Well I, I wanted to shoot the breeze with you a bit about a piece of data that you came across and wrote about on your substack unpopular opinions. The national household travel survey data from the 2022 survey came out and said that people are reporting their taking over one trip less per day than they had back in 2017. Now I wanna make a little disclaimer before we go into the vibes and anecdotes, which I’d mostly like to do. But I wanna note ahead of time that we know that the data collection methods have changed from 27 to 22 from the NHTS. They don’t do the travel diary anymore, they collect the data online instead of doing in-person interviews. And actually the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which conducts the surveys, has noted that just going off memories instead of the diaries has actually led to 20% less Trips reporting.

Jeff Wood (7m 58s):
So I saw this all noted in a blog that Joe Courtright wrote in City of Observatory showed up on Streetsblog Gae. Other folks have noted this on social media. So I just want to get that outta the way ahead of time before we start talking about this from a, like a feelings perspective because I have feelings about this. But now that the disclaimer is outta the way, I, I still think and feel in my heart that we really are taking less Trips. And I’m wondering what your initial reaction was to seeing that graphic. ’cause I know it’s not apples to apples what they put out there, but it feels maybe approximately right.

Angie Schmitt (8m 29s):
Yeah. So they said prior to the pandemic, like around 20 17, 20 19, people were taking an average, or maybe it was median 3.5 chips a day. Yeah. And now that is down to only about two. So I, that’s something I’ve written about a tiny bit and actually only a little bit like over the course of my whole career at Streetsblog, thinking about trip making, who’s making Trips, what does it mean sort of to the quality of their life. So I think it hasn’t been a big part of like sort of the urbanist discussion, but it is really important to people. This is like about people’s mobility and that’s changed a lot in the last couple years. So I, I wasn’t trying to say If, you read the, the blog posts, I didn’t necessarily say this is completely a horrible thing, but it does concern me a little bit.

Jeff Wood (9m 19s):
Yeah. And you know, when we were talking about things like street cars for example, back in the mid two thousands, early two thousands we were talking about, and the Portland folks were talking about the trip not taken, right? The trip you could avoid If, you lived in a walkable neighborhood or the the car trip you could avoid. And I feel like that was good from that perspective. But If, you also think about it from the Trips that people can’t afford to take but want to take. There’s that, you know, distinction as well where you have people living maybe in rural areas that don’t get to take as many Trips that they want to take. You have people who are, you know, maybe not making a trip because they can’t afford it, that might be beneficial for like their mental health or for seeing friends or going grocery shopping and getting their medicine, whatever that might be.

Jeff Wood (10m 1s):
There are Trips that people need to take that maybe they’re not taking because they can’t afford it. And so I think there’s a distinction there between avoiding a trip, a car trip versus like not having a trip that’s possible because you can’t afford it or because you, you know, don’t have a means of transportation to get to where you’re going.

Angie Schmitt (10m 18s):
Yes, there’s a total spectrum and it’s also who’s taking the Trips, right? So let’s say you’re a low-income person who’s disabled and you are limited sort of in your ability to take a healthcare related trip. That’s obviously terrible. But let’s say you are a wealthy person who’s already making a lot of Trips every day and you skip a trip that’s kind of frivolous sort of and you, you really not made too much worse off by it there. There’s a big difference sort of there. And they’re all being counted as one trip. So I’m not so concerned about the, the rich person and the frivolous trip, but I am sort of concerned about the lower income person who’s was making less Trips in the first place, maybe who has some barriers, like you mentioned, cost ability that could, you know, really damage people’s quality of life.

Jeff Wood (11m 7s):
The healthcare thing is really interesting to me too. We’ve had folks on the show talking about how, you know, healthcare providers are starting to think about providing transportation to people so they can get to their appointments because it actually costs them more money if they miss an appointment than it does if they can actually pay for their trip to get to a place. So I think that’s an important part of it too, is thinking about some of those healthcare Trips from a public health standpoint, which is really an interesting kind of side note to it as well.

Angie Schmitt (11m 31s):
Yeah, that’s a huge issue. And I’m on this little advisory committee in Cuyahoga County where I live in Cleveland and have been sitting around with a lot of service providers for older adults and they’re all talking about what a huge problem this is. And, and in a lot of cases, and I have someone like this in my family, people who are very isolated, people who are basically shut in having trouble doing a healthcare trip that may be like one of their only Trips they make during the week. So yeah, that’s very concerning from like a social wellbeing standpoint, those kind of situations.

Jeff Wood (12m 6s):
How do you feel about your Trips? Have you changed your trip making at all? Have you seen a difference between maybe even 20 15, 20 16 and now, not even just before the pandemic?

Angie Schmitt (12m 18s):
So I’m sort of a bad weird example because I always telecommuted, like I, I spent nine years at Streets squad and the whole time I was telecommuting and also I have children who are now six and eight. So when they were like young infants, that was really affecting my trip making a lot. There was some, you know, I was parked on the couch for months nursing at one point, but I do think like the pandemic obviously that was so weird. You know, like we kind of like self isolated for a long time. My husband and I, it wasn’t just, we didn’t just do three months, right? It was like pretty much almost till we were vaccinated, which was like a full year. We weren’t doing things like restaurant Trips and you know, we weren’t doing any afterschool activities with our kids.

Angie Schmitt (13m 1s):
My kids weren’t in school for a lot of the times. So that was very weird. And I, I think everyone sort of, well not everyone, you know, there was essential workers that were still reporting to the job every day. So people had different, very different experiences of the pandemic. But that was a big change for a lot of people. I think there were some aspects of it that for some people, especially more privileged people at first seemed kind of nice, like moving at a little slower pace. I don’t think things have ever, we haven’t gone back to normal. I, I would argue, I mean I, I think there was some resistance to sort of the way Nitsa or whoever it was had framed their trip making data. And I understand the methodological sort of changes.

Angie Schmitt (13m 43s):
But yeah, I, I sort of, you alluded to and I sort of agree with you that I have a hard time understanding why anyone would be surprised. Yeah. That travel behaviors changed a lot. And it’s not just one thing that people who were a little bit critical pointed out was, okay, well there’s just a nitsa and the, you know, the way they are doing this travel reporting is a little bit outdated, they said, but I also cited some data from streetlight data, which is actual cell phone records that was sort of in alignment with it. We’ve seen transit ridership fall off a cliff and never recover or never fully recover. So it’s still only about 70% of what it was. Yeah.

Jeff Wood (14m 19s):
70, 75, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a

Angie Schmitt (14m 21s):
Big change in travel behavior. I’ve seen other data sources that showed like our downtown foot traffic has never recovered in our downtown. It is, you know, I think they’re excited that it’s up to about 85%. And I even saw another source of data that showed since the pandemic. There’s so many examples. I mean everything has shifted so much. School attendance is way down. There’s like all over the country there’s a chronic absenteeism problem. So people are even, even things like that that were sort of standby reliable, this is the place you go, people are going to less. So there, there’s been big shifts I think in our society and I absolutely think with all these new technologies that have made it easier to meet like we’re doing right now, on some level it makes sense and may not be so terrible that people are having to make fewer Trips for example, for meetings, for business related meetings.

Jeff Wood (15m 13s):
Yeah, I mean I’ve worked from home since 2014 as as well and so I have like a, a little bit of a pre kind of experience from not having to go to work every day in Oakland. But I also, you know, feel like even then I was taking some Trips to go to like the first Thursday of every month I went to a happy hour geo beers happy hour. And I always did, you know, these certain things every week and, and my wife and I went out to eat, you know, ever so much. And now, you know, we mostly, you know, go and take it out or I’ll make a trip, but it’s like not, you know, I’ll go to the hospital if I need to or things like that. But those discretionary Trips that we used to take are just not, we’re just not taking as much Now I have a 19 month old, you know, so there’s that issue as well where you’re not going out as much anyways ’cause you have a, a little kid.

Jeff Wood (15m 56s):
Yeah. But at the same time, like I feel like some of those Trips, even Trips around the country, I haven’t been taking like Trips to conferences and things as much as I did. And then 2019 I felt like I probably went to five or six or so conferences. And then this year I’ve been in the year before I only went to like one. So there’s those Trips too that are like long, long, big Trips that are missing as well because I feel like there’s a little bit of fear on our end, a little bit of, you know, worried about exposing yourself to potential harm at some point. I actually got Covid in in October from just going on a trip to Zion. I think I got it in the airport. And so, you know, even that little tiny amount of exposure got me. So I think people are really worried about, you know, possibly getting covid in.

Jeff Wood (16m 36s):
There’s folks that are out there and they’re just like not worried about it all and they’re like, okay, if I get it, I get it. No big deal. But then there’s also a subset of folks I think that are really reducing their travel ’cause they’re worried about it so much.

Angie Schmitt (16m 46s):
See, okay, I disagree a little bit. Sure. So I think like you’re in the Bay Area and maybe that’s sort of a concentration of people who were on high alert and you know, for political reasons, very cautious about Covid. But I think for the most part, I don’t know, it’s a, it’s a good question. Why is there this hangover sort of in resistance to going out quite as quite as much? Do people just enjoy sort of having a little bit more relaxed schedule? Do, are people afraid, you know, of the virus? I mean I’ve thought the virus three times and I’m vaccinated. So after I had it and I was vaccinated, I just thought, you know, at that point for me, you know, I wasn’t going too far out of my way to avoid it.

Angie Schmitt (17m 30s):
Yeah. And that, you know, the whole state of Ohio, how many people are, you know, there’s probably a few, but I think one thing that’s having a big impact, and it’s something that came up in that New York Times magazine article we referenced, is just sort of like, there’s been some sort of like damage done to sort of our social fabric I guess I would say. I think people are a little bit out of practice with socializing and maybe some people are even to the point where they’re anxious about it and maybe, you know, there are real concerns about contracting COVD, but also maybe there is some, you know, anxiety sort of in the mix there too.

Angie Schmitt (18m 12s):
A lot of people are a little bit traumatized sort of by what, what we went through. I think it’s kind sort of comes through like there’s been some damage done to, like I I mentioned the social fabrics. So some of our institutions that were important, like social conveners may not have survived the pandemic necessarily. Like where, where I lived. And this was something I tried to bring up during the pandemic and people just kind of got angry at me about it. But like children’s activities in particular were often sort of curtailed and there was much sort of stricter rules about chil children’s activities than adult activities for whatever. Like in my city, casinos were open, nail salons are open, but schools are so closed.

Angie Schmitt (18m 53s):
And like the last thing that I saw restricted was that children’s area at the library sort of where we live like way after, you know, a past a year past vaccines, they still, the one thing that seemed to be restricted was children’s stuff. And so I think it was difficult for some of those little groups to bounce back. Like I used to be member of this nonprofit group and it was volunteer run. All we did was little activities for families with kids and we were completely inactive during the pandemic ’cause it was just, you know, we couldn’t really do events. People weren’t, but, but then it was like our whole board quit and then everyone was like, are we gonna keep doing this? Isn’t I? And I was like, okay, I’ll, I’ll try to take over and try to like keep this thing going just because I felt like kids have really made a lot of sacrifices.

Angie Schmitt (19m 37s):
There really is a need for things for kids to do in Cleveland. I, I just thought it was important. So anyway, that was sort of long-winded, but I think, you know, some little children’s theaters or something that were hanging on by thread before that weren’t able to weather. So that sort of thing I think has had an impact too.

Jeff Wood (19m 54s):
That’s interesting because I feel like there was this discussion before the pandemic about kids and parents even being oversubscribed even. And so do you think that that’s part of it too is like, they’re like, oh this is how life could be if we kind of, you know, just chilled out a little bit. I mean your point about, you know, institutions dying over that time period because they couldn’t make it is a very good one and I think that’s really important. But also there’s this kind of like oversubscription to doing everything and going everywhere and maybe people were like, okay, well now we’re going to think about it a little bit differently on the other side.

Angie Schmitt (20m 25s):
Well sure. But like, I think that’s like a conversation that’s happening among like very privileged parents, right? It’s like your kid’s doing lacrosse and hockey, you know, that’s like a one percenter sort of problem, you know, like the New York Times subscriber base, it’s like the assumption that that’s who’s reading it. But like If, you look at a place like Cleveland’s, well in Cleveland, you know, near majority of the kids who live in Cleveland live in poverty. Okay. It’s a very poor city. Schools were closed for a year. We closed basketball courts, we closed, we took swings off their hooks for a full year in Cleveland. Like playgrounds were officially closed. I mean, people were still using ’em, but they just, every, every almost every positive activity for children was just taken away. And then it was like, oh, the murder rate tripled.

Angie Schmitt (21m 7s):
And I, I’m not saying like those that are the exact, you know, that’s the exact cause. But you know, it’s taken years. One thing I’ve been on my soapbox complaining about again, ticking people off is, is like we can’t get our pools open and on a regular schedule, even now it’s been like almost five years. I’m like, my kids are gonna grow up and still not, you know, be able to trust that we can go to the pool during the summer and have it be open. So I think yes, there were certainly kids that, you know, are oversubscribed and it’s not a big deal, but those aren’t the kids kids I’m concerned about. Okay, sure. You know, it’s really the kids that were kind of like, okay, now you’re gonna play Nintendo Switch for a year. And it’s been hard for kids like that to get back in the classroom and we see, you know, we see some fallout happening there.

Jeff Wood (21m 55s):
Yeah. One of the interesting things about your article that I kind of referenced too when I was thinking about this was your discussion about going to the bank, right? And thinking about how, you know, we’re not really used to maybe waiting in lines and going out to do certain things because you can do it online now. And so I’m interested in that story as well.

Angie Schmitt (22m 12s):
Yeah, yeah. So one thing I said, I was like sort of a tangent, but in my post, yeah I had, I had to go to the bank a few weeks ago and actually I probably, maybe I could have avoided this trip to the bank, but I went to the bank, it was close to my house and I, I remember just getting so impatient with the people in front of me in line and they’re being totally pleasant. They’re just having this pleasant chat with the cashier and I’m like, ah, you know, quit like renting around. Like, but I think it is like, my husband does a lot of the shopping, so maybe that’s part of it. But it is kind of rare that I go out now and physically stand in line behind other people the way we used to. And one of my sort of theories about that was one of the reasons, like we’ve seen this big increase in dangerous driving.

Angie Schmitt (22m 55s):
So I feel like in other aspects of our lives, certain things have become so seamless. It’s like you order a T-shirt or something from some random site and it’s shipped from China and you know it’s on your porch in two days or something. It’s just the click of a button, right? You don’t have to even swipe your card anymore, you just tap it. But we haven’t, like, transportation has not come very far since the 1990s. We’re still just, maybe it’s better in the Bay Area, it’s very, you know, we, we were pretty hands off with it in Cleveland and you’re still just like sitting at these traffic lights just like it’s 1990, you know, there we, that’s the sort of smart sort of movement really hasn’t happened.

Angie Schmitt (23m 38s):
So I, I think there is a little bit of a lag that’s happened there that frustrates people. ’cause they’re not, they’re not used to dealing with that kind of thing quite as much, much in their day-to-day life.

Jeff Wood (23m 47s):
And I feel like after I read your item and then I read the New York Times magazine item and they felt very connected. They felt like they were talking to each other because the discussion about peer pressure in the article kind of got that across to me too, where, you know, you, you’re lined up and then somebody’s waiting behind you and waiting behind you and waiting behind you and you’re trying to make a dangerous crossing. And so you have this pressure to like take that left. And I feel like I’ve taken that left many times in Texas where I was waiting on a farm to market road and the cars just kept coming and there’s no overpass, there’s no way to get through, there’s no light. You just kinda have to wait and then people are sitting behind you and you’re like, crap, I gotta go because all these people are sitting behind me. And it’s like a lot of pressure to like move.

Jeff Wood (24m 27s):
And I feel like there’s something to be said about that too is like not just like the trauma and the the stress that, that we are feeling in our lives, but also the pressure that comes from traveling in groups around other people.

Angie Schmitt (24m 38s):
Yeah. And I, I, I quote another article on this substack that I’ve been writing where I sort of complained about like the violent culture on the roadways and how it’s gotten worse. We saw that before the pandemic, I would say ramping up a little bit some of our like political, you know, crises and the increased partisanship. You know, we saw that kind of come through with the Black Lives Matter protests and you had governors in southern states kind of toying with the idea legally that it should be okay to run someone over if they’re in the street. And we saw cars become, which is something I wrote about in my book, become very aggressive looking, sort of violent looking and they’re being sort of a little bit of a tie to certain cultural or political groups.

Angie Schmitt (25m 27s):
So that’s been sort of happening for a while. But yeah, I, I agree it’s gotten really scary and bad out there. And one thing I, I think I’ve sort of learned since writing the book and going through the pandemic and thinking about all of this is I think like we tend to be like in this field very technocratic, right? So we wanna talk about like curbs, you know, or you know, and not like children’s groups are they functioning, you know? But I do think there’s like an element of sort of social trust that’s really important in all this that’s been really damaged. And I think like, sort of the way the pandemic was sort of conceptualized in our country, it was very like corrosive.

Angie Schmitt (26m 11s):
It was very like us versus them. Like these other people have caused the problem because they’re selfish or something, you know, like they are murderers ’cause they wanna go to, I don’t know, the things people were saying were so crazy. But I do think that that that was very sort of corrosive to just the fabric of our society and like I said to social trust. And another thing that we should probably mention is that enforcement is down a lot, which I think is a factor also. And obviously there’s legitimate reasons why police are doing less enforcement. Obviously a lot of the problems with the way it’s being done were brought to the forefront in the last few years.

Angie Schmitt (26m 52s):
But I do think, and there’s some people in the industry that would say enforcement has no impact, but I don’t agree with that. I’ve seen studies where they, they show that it does have, you know, and, and I don’t know if those people would argue like we shouldn’t have highway patrol out on interstate highways like outside of Texas. That would be too extreme sort of for me. So yeah, but without sort of social trust, all of this is dead on arrival. We can’t, we can’t patrol our highways if there’s no social trust, if there’s no trust that police are gonna do their job fairly. And then if there’s no social trust, we can’t redesign Streets either. People don’t trust that the government has their best interests at heart. We can’t talk to each other and debate it in a rational way to kind of make progress on some of our problems.

Jeff Wood (27m 37s):
Is it hard to come to a consensus on certain things because of just the way that we’re talking with each other? I mean, not us personally, but I’m just meaning general in the general public. I mean, I’m thinking about like the way we talk about like traffic cameras or the way we talk, we’re talking about right now about congestion, pricing, those types of things where their enforcement, they’re technocratic, they’re very, you know, focused on the problem, but they’re also very polarizing when people start to talk about these things. Today I think the governor of New Jersey sued the state of New York and the MTA for, you know, violating the commerce clause, he says so in the Constitution. Yeah. So we’re, we’re getting like really kind of combative about these potential solutions to some of the issues and it, it seems to be getting worse and worse.

Angie Schmitt (28m 20s):
Yeah, I think there is like, and I sort of blame social media, like there’s this rhetorical escalation like Twitter, you know, is, there’s not any reward for like moderating your views, right? Like you are sort of preaching to the choir, that’s who your audience is, you know, you’re gonna have a like, big fight. That’s what’s gonna improve engagement or something, you know, sort of bringing out the worst in us. So I I, I do think that’s sort of a problem in like obviously I’ve been engaged in these kind of battles for years, but I do think I try to write something again on my substack that’s just like, why can’t we just acknowledge like that driving in the city sucks, city driving sucks and people are really frustrated and you know, it, it doesn’t necessarily have to be sort of zero sum.

Angie Schmitt (29m 10s):
I know that it is like in a lot of places like Manhattan, but there’s no reason we can’t like sort of improve safety for pedestrians on certain roads in Cleveland, but also be trying to like sort of minimize some of the needless hassles that drivers face and sort of just acknowledge like, we understand that you have to get to work, you’re not like a bad person because of the circumstances of where your house is and where your, your workplace is. We sort of get that and you are an important user here too. We’re not against you because those are your circumstances.

Jeff Wood (29m 44s):
Yeah. You know, I, I don’t talk about this too much in the show or otherwise, but I feel like you’re correct on the engagement in social media thing. I have a lot of followers on social media, built them over, over a period of time and I’ve seen the engagement dropping like a rock. It was just even pre pandemic and pre Elon, I mean basically me who post articles every day, like three articles a day. And I post a couple of things here and a couple of things there. I’m not combative. I, I try not to be anyways, but the times I am combative I get, you know, engagement, which is unfortunate and, and then unsettling. But for the most part I just kind of post stuff and that’s not threatening, it’s not, you know, it’s interest Yeah. Of public interest. It’s just like kind of stuff. But I’ve seen like my views and nowadays I think it’s because a lot of people have left the platform, but even before it went, you know, from a post that was just a news item getting like 5,000 looks to now getting like 200, right?

Jeff Wood (30m 34s):
Right. It’s like a crazy drop. But then you see all these folks that are just like engaged and engaging engaging and, and fight and fight and fight and they’re the ones whose like numbers are going up, up, up. Right. And so I feel like the social media definitely like trains us to, if we’re trying to get attention, if we’re trying to get our points across, it kind of trains us to be that angry or combative or just like that way Yes. About how to engage people online when I feel like the whole point of me and my ideas is just education and interest. Yeah. You’re trying

Angie Schmitt (31m 5s):
To do something more pro-social,

Jeff Wood (31m 8s):
I’m interested in stuff. Right. I think it’s cool, you know? Yeah. But that’s frustrating in, in that way and that’s the way that the discussion happens online when it comes to anything. Whether that’s bus network redesigns or, or talking about traffic cameras or in California specifically the NIMBY mby arguments housing Twitter is like a mess. So it’s interesting how that might bleed over into all these other aspects of life, whether it’s driving or trying to figure out how you’re gonna take the bus and whether you’re gonna sit next to a certain person or whatever it is. Right. There’s like a whole thing that comes from this training that has been embedded for the last, right. What, 10 years or so, right?

Angie Schmitt (31m 44s):
Yeah, it’s very weird. And I also think there’s like a little bit of delusion that comes into it too because it, people are sort of telling people what they wanna hear, you know, like I’ll also go back and forth with folks who’ll say we don’t need electric cars. And I’m just like, what? How are people in suburban Atlanta? How are they supposed to get to work? Like it’s not safe for them to just hop on a, I mean it’s just like a little bit, I don’t know. I mean, and they’ll be like angry at me for saying that. So anything that’s like, I don’t know, a little bit more moderate becomes like something rage against, even though I think we could end up being a little bit, like I said, a little bit diluted if we spend too much time online and not enough time sort of interacting with people in person.

Jeff Wood (32m 33s):
It feels like though that because of social media to a certain extent, there’s no other like forum to have these discussions and I think that’s unfortunate too. Yeah. There’s no other place really where you can, and you know, obviously there’s a benefit to it that you can reach a lot of people, but there’s a negative to it that you can reach a lot of people as well. Right. In our previous lives when, you know, when you’re at Streetsblog and I was blogging at The, Overhead Wire, there was this RSS feeds and you could read and you could find articles and items that you liked and you got information that you’re interested in and you could interact with the people in the forums there that were maybe, you know, you disagreed with them but you didn’t have like get it shoved in your face all the time. Right. And so I feel like that there was an evolution to this kind of saccharin discussion where you just got all this really great information but then you also got all of like the, the bad stuff that came with it.

Jeff Wood (33m 19s):
It’s like eating all of your candy at Halloween and then feeling it the next day.

Angie Schmitt (33m 23s):
Yeah. I, you know, I’m sort of like nostalgic for like web two 1.02, which is like really dates me, I heard someone once say that like Twitter was like the methamphetamine of like social media, but you know, and I was like for a long time it’s like If, you wanna be a writer, it’s like, or you wanna do writing, it’s like you kind of have to be on Twitter too, even though I was like, I hate, this is ruin my mental health, you know?

Jeff Wood (33m 46s):
Yeah, yeah. Awful.

Angie Schmitt (33m 47s):
And then I was like, well you know, it’s still not worth it. But lately, like this little thing, I don’t know, I’m trying to figure out Substack. I think Substack sort of has some potential, a lot of writers have gone over there. There’s certain things I like about it. We’ll sort of see. But I, I do think people are a lot more reasonable. This is, again, it’s more long form writing, so there, there’s you know, more opportunity to sort of hedge what you’re saying and sort of forge, you know, more balance instead of just sort of going to war with the other side.

Jeff Wood (34m 19s):
Yeah. You can write a detailed post with all of the explanations rather than just a 240 whatever the character or character tweet is. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Even a thread gets lost when there’s a one tweet at the top sometimes. Yeah. How are you feeling about this year and transportation policy? Like what have you been thinking about lately in terms of the transportation sphere? I’m curious like kind of your feelings about going into 2024.

Angie Schmitt (34m 42s):
Well, in some ways I’m pretty bummed. Like I, you know, in 2019 I would not have been like, I hope we’re down 30% in transit ridership. I mean that’s a blow, that’s a huge blow. And some of those Trips might be Trips avoided that are people just telecommuting. That’s the only silver lining I can sort of see in it. Yeah. So that’s what’s gonna be a difficult problem to fix. I also, you know, I cited information in my articles showing that walking is down dramatically. They said this is streetlight data, maybe take it with a grain of salt. ’cause I know it’s not perfect either, but they were saying down 36% since the pandemic, which is astronomical and we were already hardly doing any walking, so that’s disappointing.

Jeff Wood (35m 27s):
I’m curious, like, I know nobody has an answer to this, but like how did we lose so much walking? Like is it all those work Trips in New York City or is it like, is it just people you know working from home, not walking to the bus every day? I mean, the trip level that they put was like 250 feet or something, like 250 meters or something like that. It was like a, it was like a quarter of a quarter of a mile, almost like a really small amount that they were measuring like to, to above. And so I’m wondering where that loss and drop came from. Is it everybody taking bikes in cities? Like, I’m just so curious because it feels like, I don’t know, I, I might not take as many Trips, but I feel like I still walk the same amount or a similar amount as I did before, but maybe not.

Angie Schmitt (36m 4s):
Yeah, that, that’s a good question. I don’t know. I mean maybe people are just less active. Like there’s some evidence that children are less active. I’ve been looking at sort of since the pandemic, it’s like, okay, all your sports are canceled for a year or something. Well, you know, it’s not, it’s so easy to just flip a switch and go back to normal. Like there’s habits and patterns Yeah. That develop. Yeah. I guess, I don’t know, I, and I’m not gonna sit here and go to the mat for this.

Jeff Wood (36m 30s):
No, no, no. Like

Angie Schmitt (36m 31s):
For this street, like data, it could be something weird with the data.

Jeff Wood (36m 35s):
Well that data might be disappearing soon too because at Impact Karen Chapel was talking about, you know, they did that big study at at, at the University of Toronto about downtown recoveries and they used cell phone data and she said that the cell phone data actually might be disappearing soon because Apple Yes. Might not be letting people use it as much or they might allow people to turn it off on their phones or it might already ship off. Yes. So that might be actually a loss of something that we have been interested in over the last few years that might disappear soon too. So I find that interesting too, just from a data standpoint.

Angie Schmitt (37m 5s):
Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up. Yeah, I heard, I’ve heard some people make this kind of arguments and there’s a bunch of different companies that do this now. One thing I’ll say about like transportation and planning in general is just, I was at a conference this year and it has all become so technical having that kind of data and the, the ability to sort of map it really easily and a lot of things that used to be really labor intensive are being sort of automated in the field. So that’s kind of interesting. I think the field’s gonna become, you know, much soft, well on one hand, a little bit softer, you know, you still need someone to do like community outreach and then maybe more technical Yeah. On the other end too. So I’m depressed about many things.

Angie Schmitt (37m 46s):
I’m depressed about like central cities. I don’t think the data there is very good either. Yeah. But one thing that was kind of exciting and encouraging this year, I was thinking about writing something about this because I write so much stuff, this depressing, sad, but I got to read The Bright Line in Florida this year. It’s pretty cool. I was down, I spoke in Orlando and then my sister lives in Fort Lauderdale, so I thought, you know, I’ll go visit her. I’ll take the bright line. And that was like kind of surreal. I mean it’s beautiful. It was just kind of surreal to be able to hop on a train like that in Florida and get where I needed to go with the kids. They were, it was great. They were really accommodating to children.

Angie Schmitt (38m 26s):
It was honestly like fancier and nicer than the trains. I’d like, I’ve a lot of the trains I’ve taken in Europe, I was just in Ireland last year. It was definitely a lot nicer than that, but I, Ireland isn’t known for having a nice rail system, but, but regardless,

Jeff Wood (38m 40s):
Yeah, I was in Miami for Impact back in 2022 and yeah, it, we rode the line and it was really, really impressive. And just from a like I feel like this is something that we might overlook sometimes, but it felt very clean. It felt the aesthetics of it were very nice. It didn’t go super fast. Like it’s not a high-speed train or anything like that, but it just felt comfortable and I think that that can go a long way to getting people to like be interested in taking a train. Yeah. I

Angie Schmitt (39m 8s):
Would go further and say it’s almost kind of like luxurious, which is kind of what my sister said too, is like, it’s kind of, and the tickets are like not I and the people in Florida complain about ’em. I don’t know, hopefully there’ll be large adoption. It was nice. And now we have, I wrote something for Bloomberg a few months ago and they actually, I wanted to put a stronger headline on it and they did. I was like, we should be excited about this new era we’re entering in passenger rail because Biden, the Democrats, God love ’em, did get through the spending and the infrastructure bill like a big increase in spending for inner city passenger rail. And it’s starting to get out there and it could have a big impact.

Angie Schmitt (39m 54s):
Yeah. It could be biggest in our lifetime increase. That’s something that people like me have been dreaming about for more than a decade. And there’s starting to be some progress. I mean, riding Bright Line was cool. You could see how maybe in a few years, Texas, maybe Los Angeles to Va Vegas, you know, someday Los Angeles to San Francisco Ella. Right, right. You know, there’s no guarantees about that,

Jeff Wood (40m 18s):
But like crossing my finger,

Angie Schmitt (40m 19s):
Pour big money into the Northeast corridor. So some of our most populated regions, you know, there’s movement on getting them connected by rail and the, the Amtrak’s wider plan would connect a lot of or less huge cities also as well. And improved service for people that live, you know, in smaller areas that have been underserved. So that’s exciting and cool.

Jeff Wood (40m 42s):
Yeah. There’s that happening. And then I feel like just generally the discussions that we’re having are more advanced and I appreciate that because we’re having this whole discussion about the M-U-T-C-D. I don’t think that would’ve ever gotten to any press before. Right. That would’ve never gotten into any newspapers or anything before this year. And we’re talking about all of these other, I mean this New York Times magazine article, just the discussion writ large about, you know, safety in Streets and transportation and policy and those types of things are getting better. Even if transit is down. I feel like at least we’re having this discussion about, oh, why is it down? Like what can we do to fix it? Maybe the work commute wasn’t the best thing to build a a, a system around and, and like those types of things.

Jeff Wood (41m 22s):
So the reporting’s getting better, reporters that are writing about these things are actually impacted by it. And so they’re writing more thoughtfully about it. And I just, I don’t know, I just appreciate that and, and I feel like positive about that going into this year.

Angie Schmitt (41m 34s):
Yeah. I’ll also say like the safe, I’m really excited about Safe Streets and Roads For All Too. The grant, there’s a new grant Pro, relatively new grant program from U-S-D-O-T. Again, it’s like these couple heroes somewhere in the mix in DC got this funding through and you know, finally there’s decent federal money to implement some of these Vision Zero policies that cities have been trying to like kind of piece together with Duct Tape. So I think there’s a lot of potential there. Like, you know, we’ve been running around like the crazy people being like, we don’t have to have, you know, traffic data look at Oslo, you know, and everyone’s like, okay, but if we could sort of show, and I think we’re starting to get there with some of these cities in New Jersey, like Hoboken and, but even there’s like some examples outside of there too now, like Madison, Wisconsin I heard has had a significant decrease and then that’s even prior to this money coming out.

Angie Schmitt (42m 29s):
So I’m hope, I’m really hopeful that we’ll see a good outcome. We’ll see like seriously improved safety outcomes as a result of those grants. And then hopefully after that it will be hard or politically inconvenient to remove all that funding. Although I do think that, that there’s a strong likelihood that could happen if the presidency changes hands, I guess. Yeah.

Jeff Wood (42m 54s):
Well I’m, I’m glad there’s some stuff on the horizon that’s really good. So you started Consulting firm, you’re doing talks. Where can folks find you if they wish to reach out to you? Yeah,

Angie Schmitt (43m 2s):
So my firm is three MPH Planning and Consulting. We have a website, three MPH planning.com. My email is just Angie at three MPH planning.com. I have the Substack people reach out to me all the time. I get a lot of it. I get a lot of those kind of inquiries. So yeah, that should be pretty easy to find on LinkedIn. Yeah. Awesome.

Jeff Wood (43m 21s):
Well, Angie, thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate your time and it’s good to catch up.

Angie Schmitt (43m 25s):
Yeah, thanks for having me. Take care