(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 535: Bike Guides to Build Your City
May 28, 2025
This week we’re joined by Bill Schultheiss of Toole Design to talk about bike facility design guides. We look at the benefits of both AASHTO and NACTO guides and discuss the importance of history, political will, and the stress of being an expert witness in a trial.
Listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or find it in our hosting archive.
Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:
Jeff Wood: Bill Schultheiss, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast.
Bill Schultheiss: Really pumped to be here. Thanks for having me.
Jeff Wood: Yeah, thanks for being here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Bill Schultheiss: Sure. I’m our Director of Design and Engineering at Tool Design Group.
I’m a partner at Tool Design and I’ve been with Tool for 23 years. I’m a civil engineer. I went to school in Boston at Northeastern University, grew up in Vermont in a pretty small rural city. We called it a city, 5,000 people. It felt big growing up there until I moved to Boston, realized what big really was.
So yeah, I’ve been involved in this space for quite a while and I’ve seen a lot of changes and I think it’s been really fun to be part of a profession that’s been changing, I think for the better. It’s been pretty rewarding.
Jeff Wood: What’s the [00:03:00] thing that got you interested in transportation? Was it something that happened when you were a little kid or was it something that happened when you were in college?
Like where was that kind of genesis?
Bill Schultheiss: I feel like I might be that classic little kid that watched him repave the street and was just watching the paving trucks and thought that was super cool. And I distinctly remember that actually. And then when they came in and out the sidewalk to the street and then they upgraded the storm water pipe adjacent to our property and they were big, impactful moments as a kid that you don’t realize, but they stick with you.
But then you.
Remembering what it was like for me and how hard that is. Like how do you imagine what you wanna do the rest of your life? You can’t know because you need to try things and like until you do it, you’re really not sure. So anyways, in high school then a shop teacher was awesome and I was like, Hey, I think I love wood work.
He’s, that’s great. It’s a great field, but you might rather do what my brother’s doing and. A [00:04:00] lot more stable. A lot more stability financially than just with your career. And so I took his advice and I applied to engineering school and got accepted. But even then, my first year in college, I didn’t know I was a mechanical engineer, industrial, civil, it’s all over the place.
And I think it’s a reason I chose Northeastern as a co-op school. So you got to work, so your freshman year you go full-time and then you get a summer off. And then after that, the next four years is alternates full-time school, full-time work? The full-time work gig was great because I got to work for a contractor.
I got to work for a public works agency. I worked for consultants, so I got to try different things. And it was through that process I realized that I. Then I got graduated, got a job as a consultant, so I’ve been a consultant ever since. So I think it’s, it worked out. I feel very fortunate that it worked out.
I’ve seen a lot of people [00:05:00] change careers as they get older, but I’ve really enjoyed this work.
Jeff Wood: It’s interesting about the co-op thing. I had a friend who went to Georgia Tech and then ended up going to Austin every summer and living with me because he was working at Dell Computer for that summer. And I wish we’d had that more for like planning and things like that where we had to, and I did some internships and stuff, but I think the co-op system is a little bit different in that way, where you actually get in the weeds, learning what the company’s doing and actually, having some experience when you get outta school.
Oh, way more.
Bill Schultheiss: Yeah, you can work in the summer for eight weeks or whatever it is, but I worked full-time for six months straight and you really got into things at that scale in a way that you can’t in eight weeks and then the repetitive nature that every year you were in the cycle of it. Yeah, I kept advancing.
So by the time I came out, I’d already worked two years full-time and did a lot of things where I watched some entry level kids come in now without that experience, and they’re quite a bit further behind than I was coming outta college. So it’s super valuable, but it’s also not common. Adds time to the schedule and there’s not very [00:06:00] many co-op schools in the us.
Jeff Wood: So then how do you get into active transportation? What is the point when you start thinking about bikes and everything else that goes along with that?
Bill Schultheiss: Again, I think as a kid you have these moments. Again, I grew up in St. Alban’s, Vermont, this big city, but then I got a job. I always tell this story when I do trainings, but I got a job so I could buy a car, so I could get around because as any car dependent community, we could bike and walk in the city, but then it was hard to get around.
So the ironies, I had to get a job to buy the car to do things, and then all my free time was working. At the job to pay for the car and I was making $3 an hour, like minimum wage, then it took forever to make enough money to pay for that car. It’s a shame. And that was a moment that really hurt me.
Like my friends are going out and doing fun things as a senior year in high school, and I was like, I was working. It’s fine to work and do that, but you start to really know what car culture is and the cost of it, but you don’t know it in the moment. But now I have all this, these eyes, [00:07:00] looking back, I gave up a lot of time that I can’t get back at a unique moment in your life where you get to really experience things in a different way, right?
Because you don’t have a job, you don’t have full-time school. So I think that was a taste of it, but I still didn’t know, right? So I go to college and I try the co-op thing and I get out, I end up getting into wastewater. So I was doing sewer work, storm repair. I did that for four years. That wasn’t as rewarding as doing what I’m doing now, surface transportation.
And it was because it’s invisible, right? It’s important, but people don’t see it. And I remember like working late one night to get this report in for the client. I get it to them, and the client didn’t read it. There was no public feedback, no one cared. The work mattered, but it was in its own thing.
So I was getting a little discouraged that maybe this wasn’t a fulfilling career. And that’s when I met Jennifer and. Got into transportation, and then the rewards that our professions get frustrated by it. [00:08:00] But working with the public, but honestly working in a profession where there’s no feedback, and that’s not rewarding either.
So I’ll take the criticism and the negative feedback in a public meeting because it’s great to be engaged with a community to advance it. People don’t always agree on how to do it, but it’s super rewarding to be able to do something that impacts everybody, that people care about. That was really the big thing, I think, for me, transitioning and realizing that this is really the space I wanted to be in this transportation.
Jeff Wood: It’s so interesting because people do depend on water infrastructure and the pipes and everything else, but it’s mostly, like you said, it’s not seen as opposed to transportation where everybody experiences it every day. The invisibility of the water infrastructure, everybody experiences, but they’re not like traveling with other people in buses or bikes or in cars on the road or anything like that.
And so it’s interesting to think about how nobody probably has that much of an opinion about water infrastructure, but everybody has an opinion about transportation infrastructure, right?
Bill Schultheiss: Everybody you know. And like [00:09:00] of course you have an opinion about water when it breaks and it doesn’t work or it’s dirty.
But yeah, it’s invisible. And I think that’s why things like in Flint, Michigan can persist for decades of pollution and the problems of that where a surface transportation issue gets elevated to the governor’s desk and it’s dealt with generally, right? So I think it’s a great space to be in, to have a big impact on society.
And I think. It can be for good, it can also be for bad, but I think by and large at Tool, we have a really good impact on the communities we’re working in.
Jeff Wood: So I wanna dive into kind of, before we get talking about the guides and all the stuff that we’re gonna chat about I do wanna go back in time and think about cycling as a mode of transportation and this idea of creating space for cyclists from when it started up until now.
And so what was the switch that led to like more advocacy towards, creating spaces for people to bike and maybe walk around their neighborhoods?
Bill Schultheiss: I’ve gotten big into the history of bikeway design. I got into that through this process, [00:10:00] but. I even thought about it on my own experience of evolving as like the little kid in town St.
Alban’s biked around was huge, right? Just to be able to, the freedom you get from that, but then how that freedom was limited because I didn’t have space on the busy road, so there were places I couldn’t go, wasn’t allowed to go. And then I go to college and I’m biking to class and biking around Boston.
Real intense traffic. And that was a point in my life where I was a teenage male, really confident and overconfident really. But I was in there racing cars and. Feeling the thrill of being in traffic and that was a unique experience. Then I got into bike racing out of that and that was super fun.
And then I come to work and I realized yeah, that’s a perspective, but also think back to when you’re a kid, you couldn’t go to these places. That’s what I’ve watched occur over my 23 years at Tool is how the industry itself has recognized like we should be really thinking about children and they need space on the road.
Should be [00:11:00] thinking about the people who aren’t really excited to be racing cars and be in with cars and they need separate space. So that’s just been a fascinating conversation to be part of the last 23 years. What I learned on the Astro Bike Guide project was that, it’s new conversation for me.
I just came into this, but like this is actually conversations that’s been going on since the late sixties. So there’s other generations and other moments of this sort of argument of how do we organize our street space goes back to the mid sixties when it comes to bike infrastructure.
Jeff Wood: And what was that conversation like at the time and at that time and a little bit later was this huge discussion about vehicular cycling and the somewhat of a schism between what that is versus what we were talking about now.
Bill Schultheiss: Yeah, it’s, I’ve always been interested in history, so I’ve been working in the field long enough to know that there’s this, there’s a tension between a part of the advocacy community that felt any bikeway was unsafe and eliminating the right to the road and versus huge segment of the [00:12:00] population that just felt like they’d been ignored and marginalized and wanted some space on the roads.
So I looked into that history, and it goes back to the sixties. It goes back to the first bike lane in Davis, California where Professor Davis said, Hey, we should be a bike friendly campus. Went to. Europe, I can’t remember which country. Might have been the Netherlands or Copenhagen, either way, but said, Hey, there’s a different way to do this and it’s creating separate space for vulnerable users that’s more comfortable and it’s safer.
And so they piloted a network of bike lanes in the city of Davis in the late sixties into the early seventies. They had supported the federal government, it supported the California D. They did it. They studied it, and they found that, yeah, true. Safer, better people like them. It was fascinating. And so then you now have this pilot community that did this.
The results were positive and then the next step is okay, let’s scale it up. And that’s when the schism started and [00:13:00] that’s when a new form of bike advocacy started that said no, hold on a minute. We don’t wanna do that. That’s dangerous. It’s not safe. You’re restricting my rights to the road.
And it started this vehicular cycling movement. And I think movement’s a good word for it because it, they were quite successful and it launched in the mid seventies and really held sway up until the mid 2000 to 2010. Timeline. Quite a long period of dominance, I think, in the professional and advocacy space.
Jeff Wood: That’s really interesting. Something just popped in my head, just listening to you talk. I’ve been thinking a lot about the oil crisis in the seventies and how that put Europe and the United States on somewhat different trajectories when it comes to transportation planning, thinking about, obviously there’s kinder Mort and the stuff that happened with children fighting back for their rights in Europe.
But there’s, also this kind of discussion about when, we split, which was the oil crisis, the embargo, and things like that. And I’m wondering if this vehicular cycling movement, and if you’ve thought about this as one of the things that kind [00:14:00] of, in addition to the oil embargo, in addition to some of these different decisions that we made, that time period seems like a place in time, which the split was very noticeable.
And it happened. And then we went our separate directions. And now here we are today in 2025.
Bill Schultheiss: I’ve thought about it a lot because you realize over the, we’re approaching 60 years now country we’d be living in if we made different decisions then. So I don’t wanna give too much credit to the vehicular cycling movement of opposing this change.
I think there’s moments they get beat up oh they eliminated all progress in the us I think it was a confluence of a few things. Yeah. We had the oil crisis and the government was on board. The federal government was on board. The states. There was this push to creating multimodal system. And then we had this kind of stagflation issues in the late seventies where we were limited on money.
And then Reagan came into power. We had this total shift of the political dynamic of cheap oil, and that stuff’s communism if you’re doing [00:15:00] it. We’re about being individuals and less about working together as a society to solve problems and more about the individual doing things. I think it was all that together that caused the outcome we’re in today of dealing with some of these problems from them of a very car dependent culture where in the seventies they had the child safety crisis and then it was like, no, we need to solve this.
So they came together as a culture, like that’s a terrible thing, like kids should die. Let’s do something about it. And they did. It wasn’t that they didn’t have conflicts about it or disagreements about it, but they, by enlarged as a group, say, Hey, we’re gonna solve it. And they did. They solved it. Where we just have not shown the capability thus far to say that transportation safety crisis is something we wanna solve.
It’s, we’re reaching still of all time highs today, which is just astonishing to me. And it’s heartbreaking. But there’s changing voices that. We’re still not in a place where there’s an all in. We’re [00:16:00] all in as a society to do the things we need to do to improve and address the safety crisis and the climate crisis.
Clearly. It’s been, I think, really helpful to have those words, all ages and abilities. I think did a great job, I think of the whole transportation profession to shift in that direction because it’s a little easier to understand. You can wrap your head around it. It’s a little hard to debate it as like a bad idea.
I think people can agree regardless of their politics or where they’re coming from, that people should be able to get around, should be safe, should be accessible to everybody. So it’s very inclusive and I think that’s been helpful in getting the shift, which we see now of like people saying, recognize your protected bike lanes are better than shares, or things like that, that we recognize now that there’s a difference in performance of different types of facilities to get the outcomes we want.
It’s been nice to have to change the language that matches where we’re at as an industry [00:17:00] with what are the right things to do to achieve the goals we want.
Jeff Wood: We were just talking about kind of the change over time and thinking. I’m wondering how your thinking has changed over time. You’ve been working on Astro Bike Guide for 10 years.
It’s been 10 years. Yeah, it’s
Bill Schultheiss: a long process. This is longer maybe than any of us wanted it to be, and there’s a bunch of reasons for that and we’ve maybe come back to that. But I think my evolution in this has changed throughout my career. When I came to Tool, I didn’t know anything about transportation.
I always laugh because one of the first books I bought when I came to Tool, I was like there’s, I gotta learn about Bikeway design. And I bought John Forrester’s book on Bikeway, not really design, but vehicular cycling because it was the only thing available really in early two thousands because the internet wasn’t as big as it was and what, what’s printed.
And so I think I. I’ve changed in how I’ve approached things because I was that [00:18:00] confident young man who could bike down the busy street and deal with it, and I was bike racing and you don’t have the same perspective when you’re have that kind of bias of it’s fine for me unless you’re a deeply empathetic person thinking about everything else, which I try to be, but still, you can get in your box of what you’re familiar with.
Your recommendations. And I see that with traffic engineers that like, oh, all I do is drive around in my car all the time, and every solution they have is something to make driving around easier. And they don’t understand what it’s like to be a pedestrian on the road or to bike or to take transit. It really is critical to be a user of these things, to understand them.
And I think that’s my biggest personal journey is evolving from a bike racer to a bike just for transportation, user biking with my family, but really thinking about it from all the different perspectives and not your narrow might be your own bias perspective has been really impactful. [00:19:00] And I’ve watched our industry get better at that.
It was a very biased industry when I came into it, in my opinion, based on my experiences where a lot of engineers weren’t really interested being. Helpful in making streets safer for Bicon because they personally didn’t understand it. They didn’t see the value in it. That’s completely changed I think over the last 20 years.
It’s, which is wonderful.
Jeff Wood: How has that change reflected in the work that you’re doing for the bike guide? Whenever I see Ash O for example, I’m just a little wary and I think that there’s a lot of us in active transportation field who are, it might be from the ways in the past that they’ve clashed against us in transportation, bill write-ups.
It might be the sparring that I got into with at Aashto speaks on Twitter many years ago. But I’m curious like how the evolution is going to the point where you can get a guide where you can personally feel like it’s going in the right direction. I.
Bill Schultheiss: Again, moments in time, right? So I always, I think [00:20:00] about evolutions of processes now and how important design guidance is.
So imagine you’re an engineer getting outta school and it’s 1970, okay? It’s great. Who are you learning from? You are learning from all the greatest, smartest thinkers on highway design that ripped through cities and just did lots of damage because that was what society said we needed to do. Those were the best and brightest were put on those projects.
So those are your mentors. Okay? Fast forward 30 years, and then you’re gonna be working in that environment for the first 10, 15 years of your career. Now, 30 years later, what year is it? It’s hard to believe, but you know that young engineer in 1970, now 2000 running an agency is in charge, is the director of the dod.
You know what? City state doesn’t matter. Even consulting firm, you are now the person in charge, but you might still be bringing values from 30 years [00:21:00] prior to your job. Lots of people evolve. Lots of us do You, you learn on the job, but I think it’s hard to overstate how important those first decade of your career is and what it will lead you in doing the rest of your career.
So I think what I saw was a lot of resistance in the 2000 to changing design guidance because those people were from an era where this stuff was devalued. You end up book. You might wanna consider sidewalks on an arterial street in an urban area. It’s a city. Is it? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?
The sidewalks should be mandatory in an urban area. Let’s considered how many lanes of traffic we need. Like this kind of was all backwards. It’s because those were the values from the sixties that carried into the two thousands. So what I’ve seen is with the retirement of that generation, a huge sea change in perspective, everyone’s a lot more multimodal.
Now, they’ve lived in [00:22:00] environments where they saw the value of the multimodal system, but you had federal programs like ice tea in 1990 that created money for bike infrastructure, for transit, for sidewalks. So the 1990s was that pivotal moment where for 10 years. Simple things like putting sidewalks in and like regular stripe bike lanes were a big deal, which is the five foot bike lane on a street, and all you were doing was narrowing lanes and adding a bike lane, which led into the two thousands and 2010s, where now we’re talking about road diets, like removing a lane of traffic.
Those, it was very rare for lanes of traffic to remove from any streets to be used for people biking or walking until 20. To believe sometimes, but that’s really what the environment was that we’re in now, 2025, we’re ripping lanes of traffic out all over the [00:23:00] place and adding bus lanes, protected bike lanes, and it’s really, that’s the part that’s really incredible to watch.
Aashto is a volunteer organization. It’s a membership driven group. Just like the Association of Pedestrian Bike Professionals. They have to represent every state, DOT, and they all have their unique priorities, concerns, and interests, and I think asto. Their job is to represent all those perspectives. So I think they’ve always been in a spot where their concern might be unique, an individual state, DOT.
But Asto has pulled into that conversation as well. You are that group when they’re not the same. I’ve had many challenges, city agencies, dots where they won’t do things and I see the advocates up in our arms about what the city won’t do or the mayor won’t do. Really no different in that case between the different groups.
You just get, they have different purposes,
Jeff Wood: yeah. I just find it’s interesting at this very moment in time where you see, a [00:24:00] backlash. A backlash at the state legislatures we’re seeing a lot of preemption, state preemption. Places like Texas and others, and I’ve been following this pretty closely.
There’s states that are starting to try to outlaw the limiting of lane reductions and complete streets and all these things that we’ve been talking about and that have been accelerating. And so I’m wondering if we’ve been so successful that now they’re getting, a little bit scared about what the future might look like.
I think
Bill Schultheiss: like anything change is scary. I don’t care who you are. I think there’s a small subset of the population like loves change, like ready to go. And I think as a guy that was big on change. When I’m watching what’s happening, I’m not liking the pace of change that I’m seeing right now from the federal government.
I can say that. And I think it’s super unsettling and I even this administration’s given me a new perspective on the pace of change of what it can cause you to feel at an individual level. So I there is a backlash going on, and I think it is a response to the fact that in every single state in this country, now you can find a protective bike claim.[00:25:00]
That’s amazing. That’s just in the last 10 years. 15 years ago, nata, we were like people for bikes and the league were like counting them on single digits of like where they are, and that was a big deal. And now they’re in every state, and now you’ve got urban cities in every state and have bike networks.
That’s all occurred, and I think it’s that the totality of that change has led to some backlash of some sort of reactionary voices, and now you’re seeing it in some of these preemption. Outlawing road diets, outlawing bike lanes. We can’t spend transportation money on sidewalks or bike lanes. And I think some of that is a reaction to some of this for sure.
Some of it’s this ongoing tension of what do we wanna pay for? But I think a lot of it is rooted in this challenge. We face that we constructed a car culture starting in the 1940s, and we went all in and spent a lot of money on that, and we did that for 80 years. [00:26:00] And there’s a lot of myth out there. You talk to average citizen, they think the gas tax pays for all this.
They don’t. That’s not the truth that, so you have misinformation now that where simple soundbites can be compelling to people. Yeah. Why should the federal government pay for a bike lane in Austin? The federal government’s paying for all sorts of stuff on the transportation system in. I think that’s the realities we’re now having to have that conversation of what do our taxes pay for?
What is a subsidy? What’s that mean? I think that’s what we’re seeing. So I know engineers aren’t happy with these branch and bills because what we wanna be able to do is solve problems. And that takes away your ability to solve problems. Even in those states where these things are happening, there’s unhappiness, they know there’s a safety problem, and that in some cases, in a lot of cases, these roads are overbuilt and they’re unsafe as designed, and they need to be road guided to improve safety.
And if that tool’s taken away from you, all we’re gonna do is just keep the death toll on. And that’s, it’s really sad. So I [00:27:00] think this will be a moment that will change is my hope.
Jeff Wood: So you’ve seen changes between, you’ve made changes actually between the 2012 Guide and the current guide. There’s been an evolution in that time period, obviously because of what’s come out.
But what’s the difference between 2012 and now, or the time period before 2012 when that guide was created and the time period that this guide was created in?
Bill Schultheiss: It’s a great question.
Atos pretty conservative and they’re not supportive of these things and they have a vehicular cycling take on things where NATO is embracing all ages and abilities. And I think a lot of the source of that goes back to the 2012 guide where there was a timing issue. It was also this endpoint of the maybe maximum influence of the sort of vehicular cycling perspective.
Within the DOT [00:28:00] perspective, I worked on the last guide and there was an inordinate perspective of vehicular cycling involved. Not from the consulting team, but I think the people that oversaw the development of the guy that had
brought a perspective that was. We’re okay with bike lanes, the unprotected bike lanes, but these protected bike lanes are too new. They’re untested. They won’t work in the United States, that there’s very few of them. It’s they’re not ready for crime time astro. And so they wouldn’t let them be put into guide, even though we actually wrote guidance for that guide for those subjects.
But we were told to take them out. And again, I think that was this moment in time where that was the way the industry was focused. The traditional industry of, if it’s not out there unproven in the US, then it can’t be put in a manual. So you’d see that in the ME TC D, it’d see in nto. You’d see it even in local government documents.
So it was a good, it was a great [00:29:00] update. I’m really proud of the work we did. Like of the content we did. It was great, but we, everything we wanted to. Just as that was published, NATO came out with their first edition of the Bikeway Guide, and that was embracing the forward looking treatments. And it was saying, look, sure we don’t have US-based things, but like these things have been built in the world and they work.
And New York City was a real leader. Portland had started it, but New York City really took the first steps of implementing some of these Lane City and Portland.
That guide went a lot further and because they came out about the same time, then NATO became like the guide for Progressive Bikeway design and Aashto remained this sort of conservative, play it Safe stick with the traditional approaches guide. And then that persistent really until this publication of the new guide this year.
So I think it, that was a big [00:30:00] 15 year period where we were really gapped out and Astro was quite far behind where the industry was at and fell further behind each year. It wasn’t updated. So now they’re both out and I think what’s great is the new bike guide is right there. It’s a very robust research base, best practice document that is appeared in ACTO and actually goes deeper than Acto on many subjects.
But they compliment each other. They’re very much in alignment, which is wonderful.
Jeff Wood: I don’t have a copy, but 600 pages seems like a pretty robust tome. Yeah.
Bill Schultheiss: There’s a lot there. And again, we cover some subject that NATO doesn’t. It’s very comprehensive. And also NATO is always been geared as more of an urban, and again, the title, even Urban Bikeway Design Guide for Cities, and I think it’s viewed as maybe larger cities, but I think it can be applied to any urban context, including my small town in sts, Vermont.
But it is for rural areas, it’s for [00:31:00] suburban areas, it’s for the small towns. So it’s a lot wider. It’s comprehensive in what it covers. We do a lot more with highway interchanges because. Build highways and they own ’em. So there’s a lot more content on dealing with getting through some of those gnarly interchanges that, for good or ill, they exist and we gotta get through ’em.
So we provide a lot of great guidance on navigating those safer, which is gonna be really crucial to improving biking in suburban areas. And even some cities since, frankly, interstates exist in almost every city in the United States, where NATO doesn’t cover some of those subjects. But on the basics, the two documents are very much in alignment, which is great in urban areas.
Jeff Wood: I’d love to hear your perspective on the NTO Guide release too, because I know that folks from Tool worked on that as well as the Aashto guide, and so I’m wondering, some of the places where they mesh and you just talked about a couple places where they diverge. I noticed myself that I don’t think the NTO Guide actually has bridge [00:32:00] design in it for crossing rivers and stuff like that, so they’re obviously coming from different places, but they’re also, like you say, many times in a number of the literature that I’ve read, is very complimentary in a way that people should have both on their desk.
Bill Schultheiss: That’s what I say. People should have both. I think they’re well developed. They have different styles. I think they can be very useful because between them you get a lot of great information, a lot of great idea generation, but it really, as a designer can help you implement really well done safe bikeways.
Even if you’re lacking experience in doing the design, which honestly you wanna write design guidance that’s accessible to those people because you’ll have a bigger impact. As much as I wish tool could design every bikeway in America, it’s not gonna happen. So you want to have an industry where everyone’s doing the right thing and as the tools at their disposal so that you get better outcomes for everybody.
I think one thing that we were able to help naco with is make sure that they had a stronger research basis for what they did because we did [00:33:00] so much work in Asto to make sure there was research behind as much of the recommendations as we could. That was valuable. It was super valuable, and we had this huge database of studies that were able to share with them and help ’em make sure that they were equally sourced.
So that’s great because when you run up against a critic, you wanna make sure you’ve got your rationale behind it. And also you want a mistake made in guidance, written in the, really going back from the beginning, the 1920s, all the way up to, I’d say the two thousands. There was a lot of biased made up guidance because there wasn’t research.
So when you don’t have research, now you’re relying on what? 10 people think or what did we do over there? Did that work? Okay, we tried it. It’s really group think of what we consider best practices, but it’s not necessarily all great ideas because they’re not based on research or based on our opinions.
So our whole profession was oriented from that. So now we are really with TRB and the funding behind research. [00:34:00] It’s so important ’cause it’s allowed us to make sure the recommendations you’re putting are really solid. And then when you want to make a change, you know why you’re changing. The research in 1990 said this, now 10 years later it’s changed and now you know what we can update.
So I think that’s really huge. I think what’s different again, like we. NATOs is much more urban is really entirely urban focused. We got a lot of content on bike parking on the bike guide, which is great as a support system way finding not a kid on bike route through states. And I think that you’d be shocked at how proud states are when I talk to them.
There’s a huge source of pride for them in having a statewide bike group that I think would surprise people that they put a lot of pride in that and care, and that designation actually supercharges those roots as being targeted places for improvement. They want them to be safe. They know they’re tourist generators, so there’s things like that are covered [00:35:00] that are really not relevant for Anto Guide that are covered at a deeper level in the ash.
Jeff Wood: One of the things that I really appreciated about things like Wes Marshall’s book was just looking at some of those old research papers, or at least, hearsay of what the best practice was at the time and then debunking it. And the fact that you all did that for this guide and helped NTO do the same is really good.
’cause I think we need to go back and look at some of those things that don’t make any sense now. Or they were made up by some guy who was a car company who wanted to sell more cars. Like a lot of that stuff popped into the literature and it never should have been there in the first place, but it has persisted.
And in Wes’ book he talks about how there’s some parts where nobody knows exactly where it came from, but it just came out sometime and then it just was accepted as practice. And upending those previous norms is really important.
Bill Schultheiss: I think it’s, and I’ve learned this as an engineer and I think it was helpful for me to come to tool, not having really been trained in transportation, having to learn it here.
In working with my colleague, Bob Schneider, who’s a professor now at University of Wisconsin and Milwaukee, [00:36:00] he really gave me the values to really care about research and to be interested in it and to want to learn so that your fact base, there’s a study that still bothers me, but it’s kicked around a lot, that a crosswalk can create a false sense of security for a pedestrian law.
I’m like, where did this come from? I found out where it came from. It came from the first pedestrian crosswalk study in the early 1970s outta San Diego, and when I read the study with the eyes of a person in 2020 with all these decades of learned experience, what I realized reading that study is that engineer in 1970 didn’t understand what a multiple threat crash was.
How critical that is and how foundational that is to like pedestrian safety. And so his analysis was really flawed. And so he said more pedestrians were getting hit in marked crosswalks. They must have had a false sense of security because more pedestrians got hit in marked crosswalks than unmarked crosswalks.
In San Diego, they only [00:37:00] marked one leg of a crosswalk. Of an arterial, not both at a four Legg intersection. So of course, if you’re a pedestrian, you’re gonna of course I go to the marked one because that must be they want me to cross. And then when I looked at the data, like something like 80 or 90% of the pedestrians were hit in the last lane of the road they were crossing, and these were all four and six lane roads.
You don’t get all the way across the road without there being a gap in traffic. Now they’re in the crosswalk and they’re getting hit because. It didn’t cause a false sense of security. It was bad design, bad road design and traffic engineering supports, but still, I still see it. Now, I still hear it from engineers today that we want to, we don’t want to do things to improve pedestrian safety ’cause it’ll create a false sense of security for them.
I’m like, no pedestrian in San Diego had a false sense of security because of the crosswalk in 1970. They had a situation where they were not being safely [00:38:00] accommodated on the roads and yet a cultural problem where drivers weren’t yielding. But that persists. And I see that still in design guidance in local city standards.
But that’s an example of how a myth that was research based. But the guy put his conclusion and it was bad conclusion, but it was cited and then it gets put in. Then it lives on for 50. Now engineering passed knowledge that people. And I ask people, where’d it come from? No one knows, but they just heard it.
It’s been passed down, so now it’s just believed as truth and it’s really hard. What that’s all taught me is how hard it is to unwind a myth that can get really baked into an industry and try to correct it. It’s one that remains, actually, it’s a huge challenge.
Jeff Wood: Yeah. I know you’re steeped in the discussions about updates to the M-U-T-C-D as well.
I’m wondering how these guides react to that as well as some of the consternation that maybe advocates have for that process.
Bill Schultheiss: Yeah, the ME TCD is an important document. I served in that committee for 15 [00:39:00] years. It’s important because it’s the only document mandated in law to be used, so it creates a federal standard.
And the dilemma in that is it heightens a liability standard for agencies because it’s mandated in law. So if you don’t follow it, all the attorneys in America, if there’s a question you didn’t follow that thing that’s mandated law, you did it wrong, I’m gonna sue, you’re at fault. It creates a real challenge when that book is not meeting best practices, that your hands can be tied.
So we had a large period of time where the MET city was not updated with best practices following current research where engineers are like I can’t do the thing I wanna do because it’s not in that book. And if I do that thing that I know is safer, then they would tell me that I’m at more of a risk of being in trouble if something happens in court.
Now that’s oversimplifying because any good engineer can document, go through a process and d defend it. But the real practical manner I’ve learned to do an expert [00:40:00] witness work is people don’t wanna, they don’t wanna be in the situation of being in court and have to testify. It’s really stressful. So if their choice is.
I take the conservative way out and just follow what’s in that book of the tcd and I’m, and I minimize my risk of being in court or go beyond it. But then I gotta document, justify it. It’s all why it’s, I’m doing what I’m doing, even though it might be the right thing. And then I’m gonna have to potentially be on a witness stand defending that.
I don’t wanna do that. I’d say 90 out of a hundred engineers would say, I’m not doing that, because we have a lot of personalities that are risk averse, but also shy, conflict averse. And I’ll tell you, a court setting is the most stressful, intense situation you can be in. And I don’t mind it. My personality is okay with it, but it takes a lot out of you to be in the courtroom setting.
And so a lot of people just will do things to avoid it or in the hope of avoiding it.
Jeff Wood: Do you have any wild stories you can share from the courtroom? Oh [00:41:00]
Bill Schultheiss: yeah. I was deposed once for six hours straight. I think the six hours. Yeah. And I got little five minute breaks once an hour. But the lawyers are trying to win a case.
They’re not trying to, I’m oversimplifying a little bit here too, but of course they want to do what’s right, but ultimately they’re trying to win. They’re not experts in the field, so they don’t care that you’re an expert in the field and they’re trying to trap you into saying something so they can discredit you.
And that’s the part where the stress goes up and that’s what makes these engineers say, I don’t wanna be in that situation where you misrepresent what I’m saying. And that’s actually what happened to me and hour one of my deposition this. Read some statement and wouldn’t tell me what the document was from that he was reading in an hour six of my deposition said, oh, that document I was reading from was from your staff.
He was trying to trap me into contradicting my own team or to say that we had a [00:42:00] bad quality control process that I’m responsible for, to then throw me out as a witness. But I was a little more wise to what he was up to. I didn’t know what he was reading from our document, but I just said, look, I can’t give you an opinion on something where you’re not telling me the source, but I’ve gotten, I’ve learned how to manage that process.
I know what they’re doing, but that’s the part that is very confrontational,
Jeff Wood: uhhuh
Bill Schultheiss: and nerve wracking, and that’s the part that a lot of engineers is, I want nothing to do with it because it’s distasteful at a certain level.
Jeff Wood: Yeah. Obviously you can’t write books for every situation or chapters for every situation that’s out there, but what’s missing from these guides in a perfect world that you wish there were space for?
Bill Schultheiss: The place people want the most help is the part where they need a lot of the decision making of my scenario’s constrained. You give great guidance on how to do this thing, whatever it is, let’s call it a protected intersection for the case of the story. But I don’t have enough space and I gotta make a compromise Decision.
[00:43:00] How? What do I compromise? What do I trade? And what’s the trade off? That’s a space that I think is continuing to evolve in our field of how to do that, and it just takes more space, more pages like to run outta the room, but it’s also getting more nuanced and our whole profession’s shifting in this way.This is what Safe systems about is. We’ve had a moment where 12 foot lane is safe, 11.9 foot wide lane, not safe, like this very black and white idea of what’s safe or not based on what meets a standard In a book where we know that’s not true. It isn’t like a hundred percent safe, 0% safe. There’s a continuum.
We’re shifting into more of a nuanced environment where we recognize the continuum is there. At the beginning of my career, one of my first bike lanes I did in Boston was this exact argument of, like I said, do you want a bike lane on Mass Ave? If you do, you need to use 10 foot travel lanes. If you’re not comfortable with that, then there won’t be a bike lane.
That’s where you’re at. You’re at the minimum, and you are at a moment [00:44:00] where you gotta choose. Lane or no bike lane, there isn’t an in between. And they were all super uncomfortable with it at that time because isn’t it 10 foot lane dangerous and this and that? And I had to really make the, wrote a 60 page memo to explain why it wasn’t such a black and white decision for them of safe, not safe.
And they ended up making the simple argument, carried the day of, do you want a bike lane or not? Yes or no? Because that is the actual question on the table. And it got ’em to yes. And then the backup memo gave them the comfort as engineers to sign off on it. And that was the highest crash corridor in the city.
They had a safety problem for bicyclists. And then when you go to the advocacy community today, I’d be beat up for putting that design in today because it’s a door zone bike lane. It’s a five foot bike lane. It’s a seven foot parking and a 10 foot travel lane on a busy arterial. You should lose your license bill for doing that.
My choice was no bike lane or this condition.
Jeff Wood: So one of the things that’s good about the [00:45:00] guides is that you provide a range, and you were talking about what you could do on Mass Avenue at the time, now you have a range of kind of space that you can actually deploy for these implementations.
So I think that’s an important part of this too, is like you’re giving people a range of options and there’s an optimal option, but then there’s the one you can do the least with, and then there’s like the best one as well.
Bill Schultheiss: I think that’s an area I’m really proud of. Asto and Astro’s really pumped about this too, is that this guide is their first guy that really digs into this concept of a range in a deeper way.
That the 12 foot lane is short a number, but 11 and a half is almost as good as 12. Like that there’s this continuum, like we really put that into the guide. So yeah, a door zone bike lane, not great. Like we all agree if I didn’t have to do that, I’d love it, but it’s better than not doing it. And now we’re able to communicate to the readers of the guide that nuance that difference so that it isn’t all or nothing and that you don’t throw your hands up I can’t do the protected [00:46:00] bike lane.
Guess I’ll do nothing. Because you have some personalities of people that think that way or they are fearful and if I can’t do the perfect, I’m not doing anything. And it becomes paralyzing and like we’re just not in that kind of a society. Like we’re a society that iteratively makes changes and.
You hope for the best in each outcome. You have each project, but you aren’t always able to get there. So you gotta do the best you can with whatever constraints you’re in. So this guide really directs the reader with that way of thinking about it, which is really powerful.
Jeff Wood: One thing I wrote down when I was looking through them yesterday was, the guides can do a lot of things, but one of the things that they really can’t do is political will.
They can’t create it and it’s can’t, it’s not something that they can just pull out of thin air. But what do you think about that idea of political will and how much it takes from people to make these decisions to actually go forward with designing bikeways or designing bike networks?
Bill Schultheiss: I’m glad you brought that up too, because before this guide was out, AASHTO and NATO are complimentary, but at the end of the day, if you’re spending [00:47:00] federal money and state money, aashto is a notch above NATO as far as what the resource we’re gonna hang our hat on for engineers in particular.
So now that the Aashto Guide is updated for bikeways, you no longer have the excuse. It’s not in the guide. I can’t do it. It’s everything you can imagine is in that guide, the ME tcd. It’s not perfect, but it’s updated. The design guidance today allows you to do just about anything you need to do to create a safer environment.
Now, the issue’s a hundred percent political. Now it’s more clearly you’ve simplified in a way, taken some of the layers of, I can’t out of the equation. It’s more I won’t, or I can’t because the mayor won’t let me, or I can’t because the business owner or, but it is politics now. I think that and that, that’s good, because now the engineer’s hands are untied with design guidance.
What I say to them now is, you can’t ignore the [00:48:00] politics. You’ve gotta become an educator. You’ve gotta go out as an engineer and expert. Explain to people the choices before them so that they can make an informed decision to try to help with the political side of the equation. Don’t hide from it because everything in transportation’s political because it affects everybody and everyone, like we were saying at the beginning, everyone has an opinion about it because they all experience it.
So you can’t be a silent partner in that process. You’ve gotta come out and explain the facts. Bike lanes improve safety. The road diet is important because we have a crash problem, so your preemption bill saying, no more road diets in the state is harmful. More people are gonna be killed.
There’s gonna be more crashes as a result of that policy choice. We need to be out there defending our profession, and we need to help educate people about what we need to do in our design to get better outcomes. I think it’s incumbent upon us to do that.
Jeff Wood: I’ve got a couple more questions if you’ll indulge me.
[00:49:00] Sure. I feel like these guides are sub chapters in the larger discussion about sustainable planning and transportation. There’s like a lot of big discussions going on about the future of mobility on climate action, on other urban policies that color the way that we see these guides.I’m wondering how these fit into kind of that larger discussion. ’cause these are obviously guides for bike design, for doing this specific thing, but they’re part of the larger constellation of things that we want to have happen. How does this fit into that larger discussion about sustainability writ large?
Bill Schultheiss: It’s totally there. It’s always been there. Like we’ve always said, at Tool we see it and you see it in the results around the world. But like a bike friendly community is a safer community. It’s more sustainable. It doesn’t mean Joe 10 miles out of town is biking to work. It doesn’t mean I’m forcing you out of your car.
Doesn’t mean you’re gonna go to the grocery store 15 times a day to get the 15 bags of groceries you want. Those absurd edge cases that people bring up in a public meeting of like why biking doesn’t [00:50:00] work for them and a hundred percent of the trips they wanna make. What we’re really at, what we see in these bike networks is now in dc I’ve watched it personally as we densified added 150,000 residents that weren’t here when I moved here in 1999.
At the same time, we’ve reduced lanes of traffic all over the place, added bus lanes. We now got a connected bike network. We still have mobility like I, you can get around and it’s safer. We can provide a higher quality of life for not only the 500,000 people that lived here before, but the 150,000 new people, which allowed us to get all this new density and all the benefits that we love from that.
Like now we got cool restaurants to go to and more bars and sports stadiums and all that stuff that didn’t when I moved here because we didn’t population to sustain. Vacant parking lots, so it just didn’t make sense. So it is a huge component of sustainability [00:51:00] bucket, even if only 10% of your people are using the thing, which biking still is in the scheme.
We’re not the Netherlands. You don’t see 50% mode share, but 10, 15%. And then we have some neighborhoods in DC where you can get upwards of 20% of people biking. But we also have a lot more people in transit, a lot more people walking because it contributes to the overall climate of a safer, multimodal system.
It’s the indicator bird, like it’s that canary in a coal mine. A bike friendly community is a city that’s doing a lot of things well, is what we see.
Jeff Wood: You’ve talked about this guide a lot for 10 years, and you’ve probably discussed it in a lot of podcasts and things like that. Is there something that people don’t ask you that you wish they would?
Bill Schultheiss: Huh? The 10 years is a tricky one, right? It was really like four years of hard work, and then it was, it’s still 10 many years of waiting for the process to play out that we’d use, and then we had to pause it waiting for the TCD to be [00:52:00] updated. I really can’t think of anything. I love the history part that we brought into it.
I think it was something that people didn’t know. There was different places. It’s been discussed. It wasn’t like some secret, I didn’t discover it. It has been talked about in a couple books even. But what was really a fun moment for me was taking that paper, wew wrote on the history of bikeway design guidance and presenting at TRB.
And now I’ve weaved that into all my training. Actually I start out all our
understand a little history of why ours.
How we got here. So we can think about how we get out of this, but also so you can recognize where bias existed in past design guidance that you may not have been aware of that infiltrates your job. And I’d say that’s the one thing that’s a value add that came outta this, that was unexpected for me to do.[00:53:00]
That has been really impactful in a way that I didn’t expect. People love that little five minute. It depends on the venue I’m in. It could be five minutes or 20 minute overview on this, but it’s always one that I get a lot of like interesting feedback on that people are like, I, that was amazing.
Like I had no idea, and I find that there’s a division and planners who are taught about redlining and all the stuff that engineers did that was horrible, in the fifties and sixties of destroying cities and bulldozing neighborhoods with their highways. But the fact of the matter is the engineers are not taught that at all.
So there’s a huge gap in our profession where in planning school, that’s a component of the education system. But in engineering, the history of our profession is not discussed with the exception of the year of bribery, where like in our ethics class where they talk about the paving contract or paying off the engineer for the highway job, they’re doing the sixties, but that’s it.
And it’s a real I think that’s a [00:54:00] problem. I think it hurts our ability to educate the public in myth, when they were called social engineers, yeah, we are, we have been forever. My bike lane is not a social engineering project. Like everything we are out here is a social engineering project.
The legislature banning road diets as a social engineering exercise. So I think knowing some of that history that empowers us to be able to speak more comfortably in this space, that we’ve been a missing voice in politics that I think we need to start to learn about. I think it would help us know the safety crisis of our roads.
Like we’ve created a very dangerous system, and what I say is we gotta be a lot more transparent about it. So that then people can make more informed decisions. Okay fine, you don’t wanna do the right, they expect 10 more people to die next year, which could be your friends, your family, your neighbors, but that’s going to happen.
Or we could do this and I can tell you that we’re gonna save 20 or 30 people’s lives. Like some more facts. We’re very, because of the [00:55:00] liability thing, we’re very afraid to, I say, just tell the truth. Just tell people what the consequences are of these. That’s our job. They can be the participant in making that decision.
But right now people aren’t making informed choices ’cause they don’t have all the facts. Our job is to put all the facts in front of people to make smarter choices.
Jeff Wood: I just talked with Alexis Madrigal about his book, the Pacific Circuit. He wrote this book about the Pacific Circuit, which ties together the fortunes of West Oakland, which is where the port is.
And basically all of the wars that we had in Asia, all of the, sweatshops and microchip foundries that we set up over there. And then had the shipping lanes come back and it all came back to Oakland. But the wealth didn’t come back to West Oakland specifically. And it ties that into a discussion about this wonderful black leader in West Oakland who basically throughout her whole life, she was kicked out of her houses because of highways or because of port creation or because redlining or whatever it may be.
There were three different times that basically she moved somewhere and then, and she got kicked out of her house. Now she’s a leader in West [00:56:00] Oakland, in their environmental justice community. And reading that book and then seeing that juxtapose with the discussion about abundance and Ezra client and Derek Thompson’s book.
I appreciate their view, but I feel like Alexis’s book is almost more important than theirs because it talks about the history of where places like West Oakland got to where they are and why they’re there now. And it’s ’cause of our kind of industrialism, it’s because of the decisions we made in the past.
And it gives you a history so you can figure out a way to move forward, whereas just telling people to build stuff and it’s not working right, doesn’t seem to work for me for some reason. And so I, I think that’s an interesting connection to what you’re talking about, which is in order to understand what we need to do in the future, we need to look into the past.
And I’m always, I’ve always loved history. My dad was a history major, my sister was a history major in school. And so it’s always been something. And I didn’t go into history because I knew that they didn’t get jobs in history. And so I went to geography instead and started making maps and doing cartography and stuff before I went to planning school.
But I find that’s really an important part of this whole thing is like we all don’t [00:57:00] know. All this history because there’s so much of it. And so anytime we can get little pieces of it, people are appreciative of that. And I think that you going to meetings and telling people even a little bit of history is just the most beneficial thing because there’s a lot of folks that might not have heard it yet.
Bill Schultheiss: I think that’s it. And I’ve made, again, that standard practice to bring in resources. So like the most impactful book I read was The Color of Law, which really hit home for me of the impact of redlining in a way that it just, you could talk about it but not understand it. That book helped me really understand it, and then you start to see it, and then I was able to tie it into the highway expansion.
And why are all the streets one way in downtowns throughout the seventies, eighties, nineties? I was undoing some of those in early part of my career. But like this white flight by Kevin Cruz is another book that was amazingly powerful for me of Atlanta, Georgia, the White Flight. ’cause he tied it to one community and really made you understand it.
And I was able to like there like places I went to so I could really make it work. [00:58:00] So I’d bring those into trainings and then I would explain, this is what happened here in the state I was in. I happened to be Michigan and I remember this training I did. The city engineer came up and said your streets were one way so that people could come in.
And it wasn’t the people who fled the city and took their wealth out. And then they wanted the benefits and said, we you as a city traffic engineer, not you, but there was a culture of the city working for the people who left. Their constituents were not the residents but the people who left and abandoned them.
And you did everything in your power to try to entice them in any small way. You couldn’t get ’em back, catered them at the expense of everyone living there. You were in service to all this stuff, even if you didn’t understand it. And it was funny ’cause the city engineer came up to me after he said, I had no idea about any of that.
He said, honestly, when you started talking, I felt personally attacked. Like his instinct was to get super defensive. Because what I was saying is like when you’re optimizing the timing for the commuters and all this stuff, like you’re really favoring this other constituency over your re [00:59:00] He didn’t see his job that way ’cause he didn’t understand the history of that.
He’s my job’s to serve the business and the residents and all that, and it’s a balance. But at the end of it, he’s able to realize how outta balance it was. And how there was that full history that he hadn’t considered the impact of that. And like the safety crisis on those roads impacting his residents and not the out of town visitors.
He came around. But I think some of these preemption laws we’re seeing are this defensiveness from a source of not understanding where this comes from. Or for ones that do know resource hoarding. It’s just outright like I protect what my team has. I wanna hurt those people. Yeah, it’s good for me.
So I think that’s a tougher place, but I don’t think most people operate that way. I think a lot of people just don’t know.
Jeff Wood: Yeah, I think a lot of people don’t know. I don’t feel like I could talk with you for hours and hours about all this stuff, but I do want folks to take a look at the guides.
So where can folks find more information about the new Aashto Bike Guide? And for the NTO Guide, people can go to [01:00:00] Island Press, can get at their local bookstores, but Aashto might be a little bit harder to grasp. You gotta
Bill Schultheiss: go to Aashto. So they’re the publisher. They have the copyright. That’s why I can’t share it freely as much as I’d love to.
Transportation data work is the Astro website. They have a bookstore. It is expensive because it’s really written for the professional designers doing these projects. And for you and I paying, $500 or $300 per book would feel outrageous unless it’s like a historic one of a kind. But in a scheme of what it is, it’s a, a reasonable price for what it’s doing.
What it does do is it puts it outta reach for a lot of advocacy groups. My recommendation is, yeah. Pay the money, donate it once you bought it, you own it, donate it to a library, make it accessible for more people, go to your DOT, they donate one to you. I think ask and that you never, you don’t get what you don’t ask for something I like to say a lot.
Every DOT doesn’t have excuse. They have a budget that can afford buying these books. The [01:01:00] staff should have access to them. Local city should own.
It’s beyond their means to have access to, to be able to look at it. And I think that’s a reasonable request would be my recommendation.
Jeff Wood: I love that because I actually, I had Leah Rothstein on a couple weeks ago talking about the follow up to the color of law, which is called Just Action. And to do that, I actually rented from my library the color of law initially to listen to it.
So I’d listen to the audiobook through the library before so I could do that and then read just action after it. So yeah, the local library is a huge resource for all kinds of stuff. Huge. So that would be a great idea. I’d love it. And then you’re at Tool Design. Where can folks find you if you wish to be found?
Bill Schultheiss: Tool design.com. We’re on their website. We’ve got an amazing team. We’ve got offices throughout the United States. We’re really proud of our work. I’m really proud of our staff. They’re out there doing these projects every single day in communities that your listeners are living in, I’m sure.
You see our [01:02:00] work, you may not know it’s our work, but it is everywhere. It’s really been a fantastic place to work.
Jeff Wood: Awesome. Bill, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time.
Bill Schultheiss: Thanks for having me.
I.