(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 419: We Travel to Reach Destinations

This week we’re joined by Greg Shill, Professor of Law at the University of Iowa, and Jonathan Levine, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Michigan to talk about their paper, First Principals in Transportation Law and Policy. We talk about how to rethink transportation metrics towards accessibility, how the law has embedded mobility in transportation, and why we really travel.

If you wish to listen to this episode, you can find it at Streetsblog USA or the hosting archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:

Jeff Wood (1m 35s):
Well, Greg Schill and Jonathan Levine, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast. Thanks.

Jonathan Levine (1m 54s):
Great to be here. Thanks for the invitation.

Jeff Wood (1m 55s):
Well, thanks for being here. Before we get started, can you tell the listeners a little bit about yourselves? We’ll start with Greg and go with Jonathan.

Greg Shill (2m 1s):
Thanks Jeff. Great to be back with you. I’m a law professor at the University of Iowa where I study transportation law and policy as well as business law.

Jonathan Levine (2m 10s):
And I am on the faculty of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Michigan that’s in the Toman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. And I studied transportation and land use planning. Greg and I met at a conference in Ann Arbor and we realized that we have a lot of shared interests.

Jeff Wood (2m 27s):
I can tell from your writing and your books and listening to your, your episodes of Densely Speaking as well. And Greg, we had you on the show literally right before Lockdowns. We were at Manny’s in the mission with the Urban Environmentalist Group for Ybi action and I interviewed you on stage and we were surrounded by people and before that we were all kind of pinned into this room, you know, close to each other. And I remember feeling a little bit nervous about that cuz we had heard about all the stuff going on and then we sat outside for a burrito afterwards, which was really fun too. But that was interesting that you were the last person I talked to live before we went, before we went into lockdown and and disappeared from the earth almost. That

Greg Shill (3m 3s):
Was, that was a fun moment. Well it was a fun event and fascinating in retrospect, but it was all safe cuz we used a lot of Purell at

Jeff Wood (3m 11s):
The time. That’s right. It was all safe and we had no idea that was airborne.

Greg Shill (3m 14s):
Exactly.

Jeff Wood (3m 15s):
And Jonathan, we haven’t had you on to chat with us yet, but you were featured as part of a, a crossover with a Densely Speaking podcast on episode 310. But I just wanna say Jonathan, that zoned out actually is one of my first blow my mind books. I just really appreciated reading that back in 2005 or so. And we actually mentioned it in passing as well when we had Nolan Gray on the show a couple weeks ago or a couple months ago. So I, I hope folks read it if they get a chance cuz it’s really one of those books that when you read it you’re like, oh, that makes so much sense in thinking about how places like San Jose do things versus Greece, et cetera. Those things stick in my mind. So I really appreciate

Jonathan Levine (3m 48s):
That. I appreciate that. I appreciate the plug. And I wanna note how, how much the world has changed since I wrote Zoned Out. When I wrote Zoned Out, I was essentially writing against a mindset that equated policy reform with intervention into markets. So anytime anybody said, well, we need more compact cities, the question became, oh, you want to intervene into markets? What’s the justification? And people didn’t understand at the time that markets in so many ways want to produce denser development, want to produce more mixed use development and are thwarted by land use regulations.

Jonathan Levine (4m 30s):
That really has shifted quite remarkably in the intervening years,

Jeff Wood (4m 34s):
The amount that people understand it now, I imagine

Jonathan Levine (4m 36s):
Understand that, yeah. Yes. And understand the extent to which land use regulation is an impediment on choice, is an impediment on affordability and is even an impediment on sustainability.

Jeff Wood (4m 48s):
So in episode 2 81, Greg was on the show, we asked you how you got into planning and Jonathan, I wanted to ask you how you got into cities and urban planning?

Jonathan Levine (4m 55s):
Well, public transportation changed my life. I was a kid growing up in suburban San Francisco, Castro Valley, the East Bay when Bart hit. So I was in high school, I had been spending hours and hours taking buses through clog city streets to visit my buddies who tended to live in Berkeley and San Francisco. And suddenly there was public transportation that actually provided a reasonable level of service. And I realized as a suburban kid that this is awesome and it gives me a lot of choices that I didn’t have before and makes my life a whole lot more convenient. I think that was a big part of why I ended up in transportation, why I ended up in planning, I realized that I was interested in, in environmental issues, started out, actually did an undergrad in the College of Natural Sources at uc, Berkeley, but came to realize that where the action is is not with the birds and the beads, but how humans interact with the natural environment and how the built environment and the natural environment

Jeff Wood (5m 56s):
Interact Castro Valley. That’s really interesting. You know what popped in my head when I, you’re

Jonathan Levine (5m 60s):
Actually the first person who said that it is, but okay,

Jeff Wood (6m 3s):
Well the first thing that popped in my head is a man in Full by Tom Wolf. I don’t know if you’ve ever read that novel, but there’s,

Jonathan Levine (6m 8s):
I did, I don’t, I don’t remember Castro Valley in

Jeff Wood (6m 10s):
There. Yeah, so there’s one section of the book that talks about Castro Valley in the other section of the book talks about Atlanta and they kind of come together in the end. But there’s a guy that works at a plant and he lives in Castro Valley and it talks about, you know, Tom Wolf’s, the book is basically about growth machines. Yes. And it’s really interesting, but Castro Valley is one of the main characters in terms of the place.

Jonathan Levine (6m 28s):
The other thing we’re famous for is Rachel Maddow grew up in Castro Valley.

Jeff Wood (6m 32s):
Lots of famous things from the Bay Area specifically I’m sure. So let’s talk about the paper first Principles in Transportation Law and Policy. What brought you all together to write this piece?

Greg Shill (6m 44s):
So yeah, I was excited to collaborate with Jonathan on this. We’d had some conversations about how to fuse our interests and background in law and policy. And I, I think it’s really critical to lay the groundwork on some of the questions that are freely debated in the transportation space, but often in a, in my view, somewhat unmoored fashion unmoored from some of the underlying purposes of transportation. And I think when we articulate what those purposes are and differentiate the purposes of transportation from the side effects or externalities of transportation, some of which are good, some of which are bad, it’s just easier to then think about how to prioritize these things, which isn’t to suggest that we have a, an off the shelf, you know, solution that’s gonna work for people with every type of normative perspective.

Greg Shill (7m 32s):
But we try to, you know, organize that debate a little bit more in my view rigorously so that we can have more productive debates about these contested issues.

Jonathan Levine (7m 43s):
And let me tell you what I saw in Greg. Greg is really a pioneer in creating a field of transportation law that goes beyond traditional issues of the law of trucking and the law of railroads, but transfuse urbanism and transportation law. So much of the obstacles that we face in transportation policy don’t have to do with knowledge. They have to do with institutions and legal first and foremost of those institutions. So I think bringing together institutional legal knowledge together with substance of planning expertise is really what drew me to this partnership.

Jeff Wood (8m 24s):
So one of the things we talk about on the show a lot is access to destinations and how a lot of transportation policy is based on getting people through places rather than two places. Why is access so important to call out from the start? Because you call this out as Kenneth, the main theme actually is getting people to places where they want to go.

Jonathan Levine (8m 41s):
It’s about avoiding perverse outcomes. When we judge success with metrics of mobility, things like highway level of service or percent of time spent in congestion, we end up ironically viewing a situation where people spend more time and more money in transportation as a success, as long as that travel is fast. Now that’s really counter to the people’s experience. When you and I think about why we travel, it’s very rarely for the pleasure of movement. It’s almost always to reach a destination. So destinations are right there at the center and the idea of accessibility based planning is aligning the procedures and perspectives and metrics of planning with what you and I and even the average person in the street knows to be the fundamental purpose of transportation.

Greg Shill (9m 38s):
I agree with that. Jonathan has a, another book called Probability to Accessibility and that was being published around the time that we met and that really opened my eyes to this concept of accessibility, which I think is worth just disambiguating briefly for the audience. This is not accessibility in the kind of a d a sense. I mean I think it has a, a familial relationship to that concept in that they’re both about ensuring universal access, but accessibility the way that urban planners talk about it and the way that Jonathan and his co-authors in that book talk about it is about ensuring access to destinations. And you know, the last high speed train I was on, you know, I think a topped out of 300 kilometers an hour and that was on an l e d sign on the train.

Greg Shill (10m 21s):
And you know, I took a selfie of myself with that and, and you know, I had a big grin on my face. I, it’s certainly fun to go fast, but I think it’s important to differentiate that really from the core purpose. I wasn’t on the train for the purpose of going 300 kilometers an hour. If we’re talking about isolated cases like drag racing or you know, time trial, some sort, then then fine. But for, you know, the overwhelming majority of trips, even a Sunday drive is an uncommon phenomenon proportionally to the amount of trips and the distances that are traveled. So it makes sense I think to anchor the conversation in this concept of accessibility,

Jonathan Levine (10m 58s):
What accessibility does is it brings proximity into the equation. So mobility based planning gauges the quality of transportation strictly on how easily one can move. But the problem is that’s a poor metric for indicating how well one can reach one’s destinations because you can have high accessibility even if you can’t move very fast, if your proximity is high, if your destinations are close or alternatively your destinations can be far away and you can move fast, but you still have low accessibility. So it’s really only accessibility that gauges the value of the transportation and land use system to people.

Jeff Wood (11m 40s):
How much has this discussion of accessibility changed over the last maybe 10, 15 years? Because it seems like there’s more discussion about it now than maybe there was before.

Jonathan Levine (11m 48s):
Accessibility has been around for, for actually a century plus and it’s gone through a number of metamorphosis. I talk about the transformations from positive accessibility to normative accessibility. What I mean by that is many people who use accessibility use it to describe and analyze the world, which of course is a terrific role for accessibility. It’s a good predictor of travel behavior, it’s a good predictor of land value, but that’s not the only value of accessibility. Accessibility has a normative dimension as well. And that is, it is or ought to be the substantive goal of transportation planning and the transportation aspects of land use planning.

Jonathan Levine (12m 33s):
I think that normative aspect has grown in recent years. So if you look at, at research from let’s say the fifties and sixties and seventies, you’ll find lots and lots of accessibility research, but it tends to focus on accessibility as a way of describing or analyzing the world rather than accessibility as a goal for transportation planning.

Jeff Wood (12m 57s):
And Greg, you mentioned speed. I mean there’s a whole discussion now about 15 minute cities, 20 minute cities, there’s a discussion about getting between here and there in a certain amount of time. Why is that not equated with accessibility? Why is that, you know, being able to get somewhere in a certain amount of time? Not necessarily what you mean by accessibility.

Greg Shill (13m 15s):
Yeah, so accessibility really is about people being able to access destinations that they value in, you know, with convenience. Whether that means at a high rate of speed or in terms of travel speed or just in a small amount of time. Either way really the measurement is time and to some extent convenience. And then we can think about other dimensions like cost and safety. And so I, I think the 15 minute city concept gets at that very well. There’s been different articulations of that concept. So you know, there are lots of threads to pull on, can’t really get a big diversified, robust job market and all the other amenities people want, you know, in a 15 minute city.

Greg Shill (13m 58s):
But a 15 minute neighborhood where you can walk your child to school, pick up a cup of coffee, maybe grab some groceries on the way home, drop off your dry cleaning, et cetera, and maybe even walk to your office depending on the type of work you have, you know, that that’s more achievable. So I think, you know, Jonathan can probably speak to this at higher level of sophistication, but I’m certainly interested in taking, you know, a look at some of the institutional legal barriers to enhancing, especially in this new world where we brought 40 years of trends towards remote work forward in a period of about two years. You know, thinking about how to merge these concepts.

Jonathan Levine (14m 38s):
The 15 minute city is a pretty good encapsulation of the idea of local accessibility or walking accessibility or maybe cycling accessibility. But what also matters is regional accessibility. Let me give you an example. Let’s imagine a job center that’s 40 miles away and accessible only by car and in your mind pick up that major job center and move it to 20 miles away and still only accessible by car. That move wouldn’t register within the 15 minute city. It’s not a 15 minute job center, but that is a huge accessibility gain that that center is not 40 miles away but 20 miles away.

Jonathan Levine (15m 25s):
So we have to, to think both of the dimension of what we can walk to and accessibility even for longer distances and even accessibility for destinations that we drive to. One of our philosophies is there is an accessibility and a mobility method for planning for any transportation mode, including walking. And you might say, what would a mobility method for planning for walking be? And I would say, well read the highway capacity manual because their definition of walking level of service has everything to do with the ability of the pedestrian to move, to move safely, to move comfortably.

Jonathan Levine (16m 6s):
Sure. But has nothing to do with the question of is there anything you can actually walk to. So that actually is a mobility approach to pedestrianism.

Greg Shill (16m 17s):
I think sometimes for a given person in a given case they might prioritize one over the other and, and that’s fine. The question is what, you know, key performance indicators or what, you know, metrics do we use generally to try to plan for greater accessibility rather than just planning for high speed movement. And one reason for that is, you know, along another dimension, which is the temporal dimension. So Jonathan is a professor at the University of Michigan. I grew up in Ann Arbor where the University of Michigan is based when I was a kid and now I guess I’m gonna date myself, but back in the eighties and nineties there wasn’t really rush hour in the conventional sense.

Greg Shill (16m 59s):
There was more traffic around eight or nine and and around, you know, four or five o’clock, but it wasn’t like a big metro area rush hour today, my family who still live there, if they at all, can they avoid getting on the road at rush hour? I’m certainly on the major roads because the traffic backups are just unbelievable. And the reason for that is that the city itself has had relatively static population in the 30 plus years since that time. It’s grown a little bit, but much less than national population for example. But the number of jobs in Ann Arbor has exploded. It’s one of these meds and ed, you know, capitals that have created a lot of economic activity and those people have to live somewhere.

Greg Shill (17m 43s):
So they’re living in bedroom communities that have that former farming towns that have become, and in some cases like Ypsilanti industrial towns that have become de facto suburbs of Van Arbor and the de facto affordable housing providers of Van Arbor. And you might say, well what’s the matter with that? It’s, it’s a good thing that land use evolves to accommodate changing preferences and so forth. And I’m all for that. But the particular challenge here, I mean, and there’s some downsides I think on the sustainability side and and other sides, but, but generally speaking, you know, adaptation is fine and and swell, but it’s produced just an extraordinary boom in carbon emissions and traffic and a decrease in accessibility.

Greg Shill (18m 24s):
And so that’s the kind of thing that frankly if you’re sitting there in 1990 and looking at these plans and these trends, you could probably project out in the absence of building up in the Ann Arbor and adding mass transit options, which is what happened in recent years. They have built a small number of taller buildings, but it’s a little bit too late and it’s certainly too little in my opinion.

Jeff Wood (18m 45s):
You mentioned three ways indicators are used to measure transportation today in the paper. And I’m curious, how do we measure transportation today and how is that different from say, changing that to an accessibility focus rather than mobility focus?

Jonathan Levine (18m 59s):
The primary metric is level of service. So level of service is a A through F grade of transportation facilities that gauges their relative freedom from congestion with the A being completely free and f being gridlocked that rules the roost in so much transportation planning. It also rules the roost in a lot of land use planning because a lot of land use planning is geared at an attempt, often a futile attempt at maintaining intersection highway level of service. What would need to change is we don’t throw that information away, we still need information about how the transportation system is performing in terms of movement, but we need to integrate that information with knowledge about proximity because it’s mobility and proximity together in various combinations that form the concept of accessibility.

Jonathan Levine (19m 56s):
Give you an example. So let’s say you’re a developer and you’re proposing a, an apartment building nearest the center of town, or maybe it’s an apartment building near a transit station. And if you are listening to this podcast, you might say, oh gosh, my apartment building is gonna be accessibility increasing. It gives people the ability to live close to their destinations or to live close to transit. The problem is you are gonna be assessed by your city for your impact on car traffic. In other words, they’re gonna gauge, or actually they’re gonna make you pay for a consultant who’s gonna tell you how much your development is gonna slow the traffic in the various intersections around the location.

Jonathan Levine (20m 44s):
All that is important information, but it throws away the additional proximity that you’re gonna be bringing. So the recipe has to be keep the mobility information, keep level of service indicators, but analyze them in conjunction with metrics of proximity in order to gauge accessibility, not merely mobility.

Greg Shill (21m 8s):
I think that conjunction is really the key. And Jeff, you mentioned how KPIs make you think of Silicon Valley industries. To me they brought to mind when I learned about them Moneyball. Hmm. The central kind of thesis of which is that it’s possible to look at a higher number of statistics and baseball of course is a sport where there are just, there’s a huge number of statistics and people who are fans, you know, really follow them and so forth, which is, it’s not really necessarily the case other sports to the same extent. So there’s just a lot of data and when you pair that with quantitative methods, you know, you can gain some insights into who is adding the most value for the team, for example, even if they’re not scoring a lot of runs, but it’s not like the a’s who are the subject to that book went out and tried to get people who were just really good only at one thing.

Greg Shill (22m 1s):
I mean they would emphasize different things for different positions and so forth. But the idea is that this is part of a team production process that yields wins and that’s the outcome variable that they want. And so the KPIs that they looked at are richer and they are inputs, right? Like stealing bases is an input that’s not really an output, that’s not the goal of the game is not to steal a lot of bases, but it’s a really important input and movement at speed mobility is could be an important input. It just all depends, right? And when you place that above all else, you really lose the forest for the trees.

Greg Shill (22m 42s):
So that’s what the accessibility focused critique of orthodox KPIs is coming from.

Jeff Wood (22m 48s):
I love the Moneyball analogy, especially with the a’s it’s funny, a lot of folks, and this is, this is a tangent almost, but a lot of folks talk about, you know, all the players that they had at that year and and not much mention of the amazing pitching that they had with Barry Zeto and some other folks. But you know, you all mentioned basically the three ways that the indicators can influence process, which is I think is really interesting too, you know, during the planning process, you know, after the fact to legally defend decisions and then as benchmarks of understanding a problem such as congestion. So because they’re so embedded in these processes and law, which is I think one of your kind of main focuses, how hard would it be to change them from mobility to access if in these three places where you can input they are so embedded into the system?

Greg Shill (23m 32s):
It’s a big question and frankly not one that we answer in a satisfying way in this project. We actually have another project that is more focused on that question, which was, is still in the works, but the short answer is, I, I think, think, you know, they can be changed to take the California context one more time, right? So squa has been a barrier to, to lots of reform at the transportation and land use interface and the possibility of a new development causing local congestion, right around that development HA was a sword that was used by opponents to stop projects and, and that kind of converted S Q A to being a, a statute that was more helpful for preventing environmental reforms than for actually fostering them.

Greg Shill (24m 19s):
So the legislature went and reformed that and took away congestion as a sword for newby plaintiffs to Lance projects. But we’ve found that courts have still been willing to indulge basically substitute concepts of congestion like crowding or a large number of people in a defined area, things that basically mean congestion. And so, you know, there is a zombie property to these things, but I think if we can, you know, try to talk about what KPIs are for what they currently do, you folks were talking about the evolution of accessibility in the planning context, but these KPIs primarily don’t come from planning really originally.

Greg Shill (25m 2s):
They come from engineering where knowing how fast the water is flowing through a pipe, yes that’s an input which you wanna know maybe is how fast is it coming out of the faucet or is the homeowner satisfied with the water pressure or something like that. That’s really the output, but the one is a reasonably good proxy for the other. And so engineers traditionally focus on inputs for this reason very quantifiable, more objective, more standardizable. And you know, we just don’t think that speed in traffic in isolation is so valuable that it should be at the center of transportation and urban planning.

Jonathan Levine (25m 39s):
It’s kind of a good news, bad news story. I’ll start with the good news. Transportation planning and the transportation aspects of land use planning know very well how to incorporate methods, metrics, KPIs into their processes. So in a sense, every time you have a mobility metric, there is an accessibility analog. And from a technical standpoint, all it means is substituting in one metric or one objective function for another. So there’s no real technical obstacle to that. The bad news is it’s embedded in our system mobility planning in so many different ways.

Jonathan Levine (26m 21s):
So in some cases reform would be a matter of changing a municipal ordinance or changing state law, political obstacle, but not particularly sticky wicked. But in other cases, mobility planning is built into the assumptions of our system. So for example, city transportation directors will tend to follow engineering standards even if those engineering standards are flawed and dangerous, frankly because they’re the best protection against getting sued or if they are getting sued, that’s the best chance of winning.

Jonathan Levine (27m 4s):
That’s something that’s not as easily remedied by a, a stroke of the legislative pen. So there are a number of these ways that mobility planning is, has insinuated itself into the system that is gonna be harder to uproot.

Jeff Wood (27m 20s):
I’ve often wondered that why things like the Asto Green book are so embedded and not challengable and used as just a way for, you know, the status quo to continue versus say adoptions from the natto guide and others.

Greg Shill (27m 35s):
I think there’s a very clean institutional story for that that frankly has a lot of justification and that is that you have courts that are, for example, adjudicating a tort lawsuit by somebody who’s injured on a road that’s designed in a way that the three of us know maybe is dangerous, but that meets certain design criteria as articulated by the accepted organizations, professional organizations, right? Courts are very nervous to get into the business of second guessing experts in other domains. And so just across doctrines, way beyond transportation, think about medical malpractice or legal malpractice.

Greg Shill (28m 22s):
You know, the two high profile professional examples really in many other areas as well, courts really care about what is the standard, right? What, what is the norm here? Did they follow that? If they deviated, was that deviation the source of the harm here or was it unrelated to the harm? And so showing that you met a standard is just, is very good protection from that kind of a lawsuit. And that’s for good reason, which is that courts are generalists and they, you know, when, especially where there is a well established professional organization that has some kind of authority in these cases, you have government agencies that are using these guides in some cases have guides of their own, like the M U T C D that also prescribe certain standards.

Greg Shill (29m 15s):
And so it makes sense to have standards that provide liability protection. I think the question then is what is the content of those standards? It just did The fact that we need those standards makes the content of the standards very important and that’s where the law and policy meet

Jonathan Levine (29m 32s):
Another dimension is funding. So, so many of our transportation projects at local levels have, have funding from state or federal levels and, and often the state and federal funders will insist on designs according to the engineering standards. So this is another way in which the standards are locked in regardless of their quality.

Jeff Wood (29m 52s):
Yeah, I just find that so interesting and it’s one of the things that struck me about the paper was this kind of zombie methods for keeping these systems alive that we know now are dangerous. So, you know, road deaths, as you mentioned in the paper and as we mentioned all the time of the show are at 40,000 people a year and you know, that’s just an unacceptable number. But, but even though we know all the reasons why, many of the reasons why, not all of them, but many of the reasons why larger cars, traffic, street design, things like that, we still can’t seem to get anybody to pay attention to it. So, you know, how is it that we can change that and make it so that, you know, the Green book or M U T C D, which is prescribing 85 percentile rules is said to be wrong instead of the standard of the industry.

Jonathan Levine (30m 38s):
Ultimately it’s a hearts and minds game, Meaning people have to become convinced that people and voters have to become convinced that this actually matters and matters to their lives. So the status quo is voters will tend to vote and support politicians who favor automobile movement. That’s one of the ways in which efforts, for example, in California where they eliminated congestion from the California Environmental Quality Act as a metric of environmental harm. It nonetheless comes back at the local level, municipal level because municipal constituencies continue to insist on level of service metrics.

Jonathan Levine (31m 27s):
So it’s a matter of changing views. There’s, there’s no big bad other, it really is us that is leading this,

Jeff Wood (31m 36s):
It’s also being sold to us, right? I I think a quote in the book struck me, the Sunday Drive, which Greg mentioned earlier, the Sunday drive, but the Sunday drive accounts for a trivial share of transportation trips compared with the daily commute, school run shopping era and care trip and social call. And the first thing that popped in my head was car commercials where all they’re showing you is the Sunday drive. They don’t show you any of the other trips and maybe one or two do, but for the most part they’re selling you that Sunday drive rather than the trips that you take every day. That accessibility would be important

Jonathan Levine (32m 2s):
For on wonderfully open roads. Of course

Jeff Wood (32m 5s):
In cities

Greg Shill (32m 6s):
That’s, that’s marketing, you know, the cigarette companies aren’t selling you lung cancer and m and ms isn’t selling you the consequences of eating a lot of m and ms and that’s, that is what it is. And, and probably plausibly drives a higher level of consumption than it otherwise would otherwise why would they be doing it? But also, you know, I think consumers know that they’re primarily not gonna be buying a car for Sunday drives. And I, I guess I’m a little skeptical of that sort of lever for moving hearts and minds. I think I, I agree ultimately it’s, it it is a hearts and minds game, but that’s true for any kind of reform agenda. And here I think there are two, you know, beyond the paper itself, there are two thoughts I have on that question.

Greg Shill (32m 50s):
One is that, you know, we should be thinking about how to make reform proposals more like round pegs. So there it is just easier for municipalities and state agencies to use them from a liability protection standpoint. If they’re just as good insulation from liability, then why not daylight that intersection? In fact, maybe you’ll have fewer collisions and lawsuits, et cetera to begin with. And you knows worth noting that the, I think it was Federal Highway we’re one of the modal agencies in the Obama, d o t really kicked that off by, they published some guidance saying that the NATO city design guide was perfectly adequate.

Greg Shill (33m 30s):
There was some debate, this is like 10 years ago, a little bit of inside baseball. But you know, there was some debate I think about whether cities could diverge from the N E T CD in the Green Book and so forth and use these NATO guides. And so I think it was Federal Highway said, yes you can, it would be appropriate. And so I’m not best positioned to know how big of an impact that specific reform had, but that type of thing, you know, were reforms that favor accessibility become safe for planners to choose, you know, that’s helpful. And then the other thought is, you know, where can we get reform that has a high expected value? So actually not systemic change, but more targeted changes that sidestep this political morass.

Greg Shill (34m 13s):
And I have a, a recent separate thing that kind of focuses on that and I, I think that concept is something that is worth thinking about. We’ve been in this systemic change, complete streets safe systems mode for a long time now and it’s super important, but what else can we do that’s actionable, you know, in the next couple of years? And that I think is worth talking about.

Jonathan Levine (34m 34s):
I do think that change is possible. I’ve, I’ve observed it myself, for example, I’ve observed city transportation engineers now talking about the goal of slowing traffic. And when I started hearing that, I said, wow, you, this isn’t your father’s city transportation engineer actually treating, slowing traffic as a goal and, and people accepting that as a urban planner and a and researcher, I can’t do too much about the advertisers. I might be able to do a little bit more about the planners and the engineers and the kind of language they supply to public debate.

Jonathan Levine (35m 17s):
So currently they’re supplying the language and the, the, the technical metrics that justify an autocentric view of the world or historically, can we change that via the norms of planning and engineering practice? I think we can a little bit.

Greg Shill (35m 34s):
I’m also somewhat optimistic and 1, 1, 1 reason for optimism as I see it is the work from home revolution. It really is a general purpose technology that I think is going to have social as well as economic impacts for decades. And it’s risky to be in the business of predicting the future, but one thing it logically does, if you are even working from home a few days a week, which is now the majority situation for college graduates in the United States who are employed, that they are have a hybrid arrangement, suddenly your perspective becomes more local.

Greg Shill (36m 14s):
And if people are speeding on your street, that was important to you before, but it’s more important now. Conversely, the ability to go long distances quickly is probably a little bit less important than it was before. You have a smaller catchment area on a day-to-day basis for really the majority of the week taking into account the weekend. And it’s important to say this is a subgroup of the population of privileged subgroup. And on the one hand we don’t wanna organize our politics around a privileged subgroup of the population. At the same time, this is a group that has disproportionate electoral and economic power. And I think there’s reason, reason to believe that people fitting that mold are going to be more open to arguments about, for example, slowing traffic that is near them, understanding that there’s a trade off there that means that they can’t get where they’re going maybe as quickly as they would choose, but that there are gonna be a lot of benefits.

Greg Shill (37m 11s):
And so I think there, there may be a tailwind there that is really the flip side of the fact that cities and public transportation systems in big cities are in for a heap of trouble this decade because they serve commuters primarily.

Jeff Wood (37m 25s):
Yeah, because they made that bet 20, 30 years ago. And that bet is coming back to, to haunt them a little bit. It’s focusing on, on employment downtowns for the most part. I have a question for you all that I think you’ll find interesting. What do you all mean when you say a need for measuring the success of outputs rather than inputs?

Jonathan Levine (37m 42s):
It goes back to the fundamental purpose of transportation. If we think of an analogy, what is the purpose of farming? Well the purpose of farming is growing food or at least one of the purposes of farming. The purpose of farming is not consuming fertilizer, even though fertilizer is a necessary input to the ultimate purpose of farming, which is growing food. So we wouldn’t wanna confuse the amount of fertilizer a farmer uses for the farmer’s output. Similarly, we wouldn’t want to confuse the amount of mobility that there exists in a city or in a region for people’s ability to reach destinations.

Jonathan Levine (38m 26s):
Those two things are related, but they’re not the same thing.

Jeff Wood (38m 29s):
Sounds like a bigger discussion about G D P measurements as well.

Jonathan Levine (38m 32s):
It’s the same concept is it’s some things are really easy to measure, but they’re not necessarily what actually matters for people’s lives.

Greg Shill (38m 40s):
Yeah, I agree. I, I’m thinking back to when I was a law firm lawyer and, and there were people who were there, you know, seemingly 24 7 and then there were people who left earlier and you know, on the margins, I think demonstrating physical presence can be important sort of politically in an office setting. But ultimately the measured outputs are the quality of the work and the quantity which, you know, for a private sector lawyer is gonna be billable hours, but for other occupations it’ll be other things. And that that output is really the thing that one tries to maximize. And so focusing on, you know, demonstrating that you’re being productive farmer by having tons of fertilizer on your crops or leaving the light on in your office is again, it’s not that there’s no circumstance where that might help convey an impression that benefits somebody, but that’s just really no way to design an evaluation metric, especially when there are other metrics, right?

Greg Shill (39m 38s):
So I think it is a little harder to define objective accessibility metrics because it’s just more multifaceted than how far does this mode of travel move in this amount of time on this distance. But it’s not that difficult. Right? I mean maybe Jonathan can speak to some accessibility KPIs, but it’s, we’re not talking about even decentering the car for example. That’s not really, there’re accessibility based ways of planning for automobiles and like Jonathan said, mobility ways of planning for walking. So we think this is doable.

Jeff Wood (40m 11s):
So where does this work lead to you? You’ve laid down the accessibility gauntlet. What are some of those next steps? What are some things that you want to learn or want to know more about?

Jonathan Levine (40m 21s):
A lot of accessibility work in the academic literature focuses on refining and making yet more sophisticated, the accessibility metrics, the formulas grow ever bigger and ever more unwieldy for actual practitioners in the field. We don’t think that’s the limiting factor in accessibility, the quality of the metrics, it’s the ability of our institutions to incorporate those metrics and to transform their thinking in transportation and land use terms. So Greg and I are interested in the institutions including law that have embedded mobility and what is needed to transform that, those institutions to incorporate the concept of accessibility and to put it at the center of transportation planning and the transportation aspects of land use planning.

Greg Shill (41m 15s):
Yeah, so in a theme, how do we improve some of the standards that we’ve been talking about, right? So for example, professional protections, what would be at least an alternative, if not a substitute, at least a different option that planners could use different from say the green book or, or the m e two CD and NATO’s been a great resource there. I, I think also probably some change needs to happen internally at engineering bodies and I, I gather that that some of that is a foot, I don’t wanna speak to the speed or extent of that and I think it probably matters by organization. I, I have the impression that I t e for example is more out in front than some other organizations, but you know, so accepting that there need to be standards and specifically liability insulation, that’s just a practical risk management step.

Greg Shill (42m 4s):
But then thinking about how the content can better reflect the goals of transportation. There are a lot of very weedsy legal questions here. Like who has authority over determining whether a building gets built, even when you invoke something like C Q A, which you’re ultimately talking about as a court, that’s a statute that’s on the books from 50 years ago, but it ends up being invoked by private plaintiff and then applied by a court. So is that the right level at which to make that decision or do you want to have more as of right planning, which is a legislative decision to not delegate that to the courts and, and to private litigants, but to actually make that choice X anti at the legislative level.

Greg Shill (42m 48s):
The answer isn’t always gonna be just through as, right. You wanna avoid some of the mistakes that the EQ of the world were enacted in response to. But there are a lot of questions there. Levels of authority, you know, this is a question lawyers love talking about, at least law professors, you know, is it optimal for a transit agency, for example, to be run by a city versus a state or maybe a via interstate compact? And what are the pros and cons? I think there are some really interesting theoretical debates there, but, you know, not to get to current events here again, but, but we’re at a moment where these transit agencies, the big ones are all, they’re in that Wiley Coyote stage where they haven’t, I mean I think they do know that they’re falling but or about to, but, but they’re, they haven’t ha really felt the brunt of the impact of the loss of ridership because they’re still coasting on covid funds for another three or four years when they fall.

Greg Shill (43m 39s):
And it’s, unless there’s a real rearrangement of politics in the short term, it’s hard to imagine they won’t. Do you think they’re gonna be happier that they’re state funded or do you think they’re gonna wish they were city funded? I mean cities that are also burying the brunt of work from home and the decline in commercial real estate values and lunch receipts, things like that. You know, cities are gonna be in a, a really big mess fiscally in a few years. I, I think it’s maybe different now than, than a few years ago. People would say probably it’s better that that’s a state, largely a state funded enterprise as opposed to Citi. But there’s some just interesting levels of authority, fiscal and legal responsibility allocation questions there.

Jeff Wood (44m 22s):
I guess it depends on who’s in charge of the state. Here in California, Gavin Newsom has zeroed out a lot of transit funding because of the budget shortage, which, you know, we just gave people a bunch of money as a refund for a gas tax holiday type of thing to, you know, get, which is part of state law, et cetera. There’s a whole bunch of reasons why they did it, but you know, there was no rainy day kind of storage of, of funding and we’re still giving out electric vehicle rebates and things like that. So there’s a lot of decisions that come from like an executive, maybe not the state itself or you know, kind of those decisions. We’ll fight them in the legislature and I’m sure Scott Weiner will have something to say about it. And then the city of San Francisco is probably gonna be in a, a world of hurt as well because of the downtown situation. But interesting thoughts for sure.

Jonathan Levine (45m 3s):
A lot of the forward thinking is coming out of cities as opposed to state level cities are, are a different kind of creation. They understand the absolute need for reform of transportation policies in general and how vital transit is to their very existence. You simply can’t accommodate the number of people who need to move around if all those people are in cars. So I’m avoided by a lot of the thinking that’s coming out of cities and city transportation departments.

Jeff Wood (45m 34s):
Well, Wiley Coyote is holding up the sign at the moment. The Rock is not there anymore underneath him. We’ll see what happens. Whether he falls or not, the paper is First Principles in Transportation Law and Policy. It’s actually gonna be a book chapter as well. Where can folks find it if they wanna check it out and, and read it and peruse the pages?

Greg Shill (45m 51s):
Well I think it’ll be linked in the show notes available

Jeff Wood (45m 53s):
Will be, it will be linked in the show notes

Greg Shill (45m 54s):
For sure. There’s an undated free download on S S R N and you can, you can also just Google us or the title and navigate your way there, but it’ll be in the show notes. Hopefully

Jeff Wood (46m 5s):
It will be. Yes. Where can folks find you online if you wish to be found?

Jonathan Levine (46m 10s):
I’m happy to get an email jn tn lvn ish edu.

Greg Shill (46m 16s):
I am also happy to chat by email. I’m also on Twitter for better or worse at Greg underscore shill. That’s S h I L l. And I would love to connect with people.

Jeff Wood (46m 27s):
Well, Greg and Jonathan, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time.

Jonathan Levine (46m 30s):
It was a pleasure, Jeff.

Greg Shill (46m 31s):
Thanks Jeff.