(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 472: Streets for Skateboards

This week we’re joined by skateboard advocate Aaron Breetwor, brand manager for Comet Skateboards. Aaron chats about using skateboards for transportation, designing streets for safer skateboarding, and this last years incident at the Dolores Street hill bomb.

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

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:

Jeff Wood (0s):
You’re listening to the Talking Headways podcast Network. This is Talking Headways, a weekly podcast about sustainable transportation and urban design. I’m Jeff Wood. This week we’re joined by skateboard advocate, Aaron Prewar, brand manager for common Skateboards Aaron chats about using skateboards for transportation, designing Streets for safer skateboarding, and this last year’s incident at the Dolores Hill bomb Stay. with us Today’s podcast is brought to you by our super generous Patreon supporters Happy New year. and thanks infinitely to all the transit planners, bus drivers, advocates, and friends that support the show. To Join, this me gang of zoning, misfits and transit lovers.

Jeff Wood (41s):
go to Patreon dot com slash The overhead wire, $2 a month. We’ll get you some stickers and a handwritten note, $10 a month will get you one of our transportation scarves. We appreciate everyone’s support over the last year and look forward to sharing more episodes in 2024. That’s Patreon dot com slash The Overhead Wire. Also, if you wanna support the show in other ways, check out the show notes in your pod catcher or go to The Overhead Wire dot com to find links to our cars or Cholesterol merch, our Talking Headways book club shop at Bookshop dot org or sign up for a two week free trial of our 18 year old daily newsletter and archive Thanks for supporting in this year. Make sure to listen to this space for opportunities for happy hours, live performances and updated information on coming attractions. Hope everyone starts 2024 outright. And now let’s get back to the show.

Jeff Wood (1m 21s):
Aaron Breetwor, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast.

Aaron Breetwor (1m 24s):
Thanks so much for having me. I’ve been listening for a long time. Really glad to be here.

Jeff Wood (1m 27s):
Yeah, thanks for getting in touch too. I mean, we’ve been hanging out and and going on walks on Sanchez for a while now and I’ve appreciated each of those and chatting with you about the subject and so let’s make it official and put it into the lexicon. But before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Aaron Breetwor (1m 42s):
Sure. I’m a skateboarder. I’ve been skateboarding for transportation since I was 13. I wanted to skateboard from pretty much as long as I knew about skateboarding when I was five years old. I had friends who skated and I played Tony Ox Pro skater on PlayStation, but it took a little while for skating to find a way into my life that was really applicable. The key distinction really just being Transportation instead of kick flips and focusing a lot more on just using a skateboard to get where I wanted to go. I grew up skating to school and shortly outta high school became the editor of a downhill skateboarding magazine. I was a part of that community that sort of emerged with YouTube in 2004. There was a global community of people who liked to go downhills fast and becoming a part of that community sort of got me the connections I needed.

Aaron Breetwor (2m 30s):
So I’ve been skating for transportation for my whole life and today I’m the brand manager of Comet Skateboards, which is a skateboard company that makes tools for Transportation and tools for space travel. The idea being that we focus on skateboarding as motor transportation first and then serve all sorts of other recreational modes of skateboarding. On top of that, my background is in journalism, photography, graphic design. I do a lot of work just trying to make complicated ideas legible and have worked largely within skateboarding for the majority of my career. Occasional detours through other areas, but largely focused on making skateboarding make sense to the general public.

Jeff Wood (3m 12s):
So what was it that when you were a little kid that was like, I need a skateboard, I need to get on, I need to ride, I need to be a part of this community. What is it? What was that thing?

Aaron Breetwor (3m 20s):
I would say skateboarding for me was attractive at first because it was so visually interesting. You see things like Tony Hawk doing the 900 or any of the wild things you can do with cheat codes on on Tony Hawk’s pro skater, and that’s really exciting just to see bodies moving in fancy ways. But what ultimately made skateboarding useful for me was as an alternative to riding a bike. I lived a couple miles from my school and I remember when I started biking to school, my mom got me a cell phone and she would have me call her when I got to the end of the block and then I’d bike the rest of the way, call her when I got there. But then after school, as I started getting older, you go over to your friend’s house or you go get ice cream with your friends after school and then you go home and a bicycle was just really cumbersome, If, you go over to a friend’s house, you either need to store it in their garage or lock it up somewhere and it just ended up being really preventative for fluid movement from space to space and a skateboard designed the right way and built the right way with wheels that are sort of accommodating of like the textures and turbulence of the real world is a great alternative.

Aaron Breetwor (4m 24s):
It’s a a little bit slower but not so much slower that you really notice it and the conveniences of the skateboard just sort of, especially within sort of a point to point commuting sort of thing as a kid just made a lot more sense.

Jeff Wood (4m 37s):
Can you tell me a little bit about the difference between the two worlds, like the two sides of skateboarding, there’s the trick side and then there’s the transportation side. Have those always been together or are they kind of factions in the world of skateboarding, there’s

Aaron Breetwor (4m 50s):
A lot of different ways to differentiate the types of skateboarding. I think it sort of depends from what community or angle you’re speaking from within the community of trick skateboarding, the differentiation would probably be between real skateboarding and longboarding or real skateboarding and cruising. And I say real because often that sort of title capital R real pertains to a form of skateboarding that involves things like leaving the ground with maneuvers like the Ollie or or flipping the board of things like pop shes and kick flips or jumping downstairs or grinding on handrails or ledges. Those all exist within the sort of parent category of real skateboarding.

Aaron Breetwor (5m 33s):
Those skateboards typically have smaller, harder wheels. We measure the hardness of wheels on the shore scale, the whether or not that’s interesting of the durometer of those wheels is typically between say 99 and 101 A. The wheels typically are about 54 to 59 millimeters tall, pretty narrow. And the reason they’re so hard is because they will roll well in a skate park and the reason they’re so small is because they can help the board flip really easily. It keeps the board lightweight and allows it to leave the ground. So that’s a lot of sort of technical jargon. But basically those skateboards are, are meant for flying through the air and every aspect of the design of the skateboard from the wheels to the nose and the tail, which are both kicked up boards, those are called kick tails.

Aaron Breetwor (6m 22s):
They’re rather close at hand to make the board easy to flip and catch in all kinds of ways. Those skateboards are great for that type of maneuver. They’re not as good for commuting. A board that’s good for commuting has larger wheels, say minimum of 60 millimeters a maximum. And they, some of them go really big upwards of 105 millimeters past a certain point. The skateboard stops being good for much else. It’s only good for pushing. So there’s sort of a sweet spot, I would say between 65 and 75 millimeters where the wheel is large enough to get over small textures, but small enough to not force the form factor to be something particularly strange looking.

Aaron Breetwor (7m 4s):
So the size of the wheel and the hardness of the wheel is also very important. And so moving from say a hundred a down to 75 a 80 a 85 a just squishy If, you held it in your hand, you would feel it, it would bounce off the table in in a different sort of way. And a, a larger softer wheel is just built for the real world and allows you to get places more quickly without having to worry as much about small textures on the ground. It’s not as cushy as say a pneumatic tire on a bicycle and it doesn’t have as much rolling power as one of those does, but you can also take a skateboard with you on the bus.

Jeff Wood (7m 40s):
I find that interesting, the quote unquote real world versus the real skateboarding, the two using real as a moniker. I know that there isn’t really a, a fight between the two, but I do know that skateboarding is seen as something that’s a little bit counterculture and I’m wondering what that goes back to. Also, I’m thinking about kind of the origins of skateboarding, how skateboarding is perceived among the general public, and then also kind of how it’s legislated in cities and stuff like that.

Aaron Breetwor (8m 6s):
So skateboards are called skateboards because of the skate from which they’re made. Originally you took a roller skate and you would break it in half and you would take the front two wheels and put it at one end of a two by four and the other two wheels and put it at the other end of the two by four, and you had a skate on a board. So it’s always had this sort of even built into the name, it has a character of appropriation. You use the tools that make up the vehicle and you use the tool in the world to sort of do things a little differently. The countercultural aspect of skating, I think has to do with it not being recognized ubiquitously as a mode of transportation. It’s often called a toy.

Aaron Breetwor (8m 46s):
It has in many states a legal status as a toy. You can get tickets for using a toy in the roadway. And skateboarding is often legislated against in spaces of private property, lumped in alongside loud music and graffiti as a sort of collection of undesirable activities that people think will lower their property value or potentially subjective to property damage, things like that. And the inconsistency of their classification as a vehicle makes it hard for people to reliably use a skateboard as a mode of transportation, pair that with the fact that quote unquote real skateboarding is mostly focused on tricks and you have a sort of double bind where the public doesn’t see skateboarding as a motor transportation, skateboarding internally doesn’t really champion skateboarding as a motor Transportation, and so its likelihood to be used as a motor Transportation is compromised on both ends,

Jeff Wood (9m 44s):
But at the same time, like that’s what drew people to skateboarding as well. Right. I imagine that kind of different type of tool that can be used to make people upset, push back against the establishment as it were.

Aaron Breetwor (9m 57s):
Yeah, I mean, the question of whether or not skateboarding is popular because it is, countercultural is an interesting one. As an industry, skateboarding tends to come and go in waves. One of the most notable booms in skateboarding history was the introduction of urethane into the wheel design. The original skateboards, as I said, were roller skates, right? You took a steel wheeled roller skate, broke it in half and made a skateboard. There was then a move over to clay wheels. Neither steel or clay was particularly good at dealing with bumps in the road. And so its classification as a toy was largely due to the fact that it was actually just a really hard thing to use. With the introduction of urethane, we see a softer way to move through the landscape and that actually is what contributed to its boom and popularity.

Aaron Breetwor (10m 46s):
So every time skateboarding gets more accessible, it gets more popular. And I would argue that the tendency to sort of frame skateboarding as countercultural is perhaps more something that’s put upon it by people in the media, property owners and the like. And even people who want to sell skateboards for some reason then is an actual attractor for people who will be using skateboards.

Jeff Wood (11m 15s):
That’s really interesting just because of, like you said, outsold in the media as something that is, like I said, countercultural to for lack of a better term because it’s sold that way and all throughout its kind of evolution as well, right? So early days, people finding pools in Southern California and those types of things to today where even now it’s kind of in San Francisco for example, there’s a discussion about that because of what happened with the hill bomb, right? So it’s interesting to see how people wish to be perceived or people get into the sport or use it as transportation versus how it’s seen from the outside. And then also how it’s talked about from the outside as well.

Aaron Breetwor (11m 49s):
Yeah, I mean there’s an undeniable countercultural element to it, but the sort of culture that it is opposed to is honestly just one of inefficiency. A skateboard is a great way to get from point A to point B. It’s a great way to make use of an empty parking lot. It’s a great way to turn a ledge into a playground. And so it’s utility in the service of creativity or efficient movement is undeniable. And so much of our culture and our built environment is set up to deny those things to people, right? A car centric culture is ostensibly efficient, but we know that that’s not the case. And bicycles are ostensibly the great green alternative to cars, and yet they’re dependent on global supply chains for aluminum and steel and rubber and the like.

Aaron Breetwor (12m 39s):
So there’s a lot, it’s not really discussed there. And the skateboard tends to foil a lot of those claims, at least for some group of the population that could conceivably be the user base of skateboarding.

Jeff Wood (12m 51s):
I was reading some pieces by Sonoma State professor Kevin Fang, who’s also an avid skateboard supporter, and the quote that I brought out of one of his papers was blending near bicycling speeds with pedestrian like flexibility, which makes a lot of sense when you think about it. You can use it as a pedestrian and you can use it on a bus, you can use it gonna, the grocery store, you can basically carry it with you when you get off, when you stop being a skateboarder and you start being a pedestrian. Whereas, the walk sheds and the bike sheds and all the sheds we talk about, there’s probably a skateboard shed, right, that ends and starts at the front doors of wherever you went and wherever you’re going. And so I, I found that really interesting too, that discussion of efficiency and an an acknowledgement that it’s not gonna be for everyone, but it’s definitely gonna be for some people.

Aaron Breetwor (13m 33s):
Right, exactly. I think by advocating for skateboarding, I am not advocating that everybody become a skateboarder. My interest is largely in transportation officials and Transportation advocates becoming champions of skateboarding because of the implications it has for the built environment and the way that we think about building infrastructure. I mean, as far as efficiencies are concerned, in the room that I’m in right now, which is just my, my back office, I think I have these 10 skateboards either hanging on the wall or in some piles in the closet. And I can’t imagine being in a room with 10 bikes. My partner and child would not be happy, but skateboards can serve as decoration. And I think we know that, a bus only has room on the front in San Francisco for four bikes.

Aaron Breetwor (14m 17s):
And I’ve been on the back of a bus in San Francisco with 30 people with skateboards. The ability to transition, as you said, between being a pedestrian and then being somebody who can move as fast or faster than a bike as fast or faster than a car and still be in control, just it means that you’ve got a superpower that’s not accessible to any other moat.

Jeff Wood (14m 37s):
90% of California cities regulate skateboards in some way. What did the laws usually say about skateboarding?

Aaron Breetwor (14m 43s):
California is really unique in terms of its skateboarding laws because at a state level, the only thing that’s stipulated is that every city gets to make its own skateboarding laws. Other states don’t include skateboards in their vehicle code at all. There are some advocates in Oregon who really struggle with the lack of a legal status period for skateboards. It makes it very challenging for them to put forth city level legislation, let alone state level legislation. California’s permissive state level law means that San Francisco can come up with its own. And we’ve got one I would say of the best city level laws in the country.

Aaron Breetwor (15m 24s):
Here. Skateboards are classified as non-motorized user propelled vehicles that excludes bicycles because bicycles are legislated at the state level. They exist more ubiquitously within the vehicle code. And there’s very few city level laws that apply to bikes that don’t apply at the state level as well. But for us in San Francisco, the non-motorized user propelled vehicle status allows us to operate in the street and on the sidewalk, meaning we have actually the most legal protections of any other class of vehicle. Also included in the non-motorized user propelled vehicle banner are roller skates, roller blades and push scooters.

Aaron Breetwor (16m 8s):
That means that, the sort of collection of vehicles here, all stand to benefit from things that accommodate them, which seems sort of obvious, but when people say sustainable Transportation, they often say walking and biking or walking and biking and Transit or walking and biking in Transit and rolling. You just don’t really get there. If, you don’t actually nod to those particular vehicles that are addressed within that classification of non-motorized use propelled vehicle. And I would argue that the skateboard of all of those modes is the one that’s the most important to site because it is the most vulnerable

Jeff Wood (16m 46s):
And vulnerable In what specific, I mean, I saw a thing that said basically 75% of skateboard deaths are from cars. So is that the vulnerability to collisions to interacting with other transportation modes or also just being outcast by business districts and people that just don’t like the idea of the noise that comes from skateboards or whatever it may be?

Aaron Breetwor (17m 8s):
I think the cultural vulnerability is super important. To note specifically what I’m talking about is the size of the wheels. Roller skates and roller blades have a similar size of wheel, however, they’re just not used as ubiquitously. And so I would for the moment, discount them from this conversation if we were just to compare scooters and skateboards, the wheels of a scooter tend to be much larger, even just twice as big as as a skateboard wheel. And so the smaller the wheel, the more vulnerable the vehicle is to whatever exists in the roadway. And so the same things that affect, say somebody with crutches or a walker or a wheelchair or a cane, also have an impact on people who use Skateboards of the small wheeled modes.

Aaron Breetwor (17m 54s):
Skateboards are one of the most common that is used for transportation and any sort of elements in the built environment that are made or left in disrepair that as a result of their status don’t accommodate the smooth movement of small wheels makes it harder for a skateboard to get through the built environment. So the vulnerability of a skateboard is largely due to the fact that they’re not accounted for as a mode and they’re therefore not designed for.

Jeff Wood (18m 18s):
And some examples of this, and you showed this to me when we were on our walk the other day, things like the way that curbs are designed, the way that we, for accessibility for other modes, for pedestrians who are visually impaired, they have the dots on every intersection. Those can make trouble for skateboarders. The road just being repaired in itself is another issue. Potholes and things like that, especially with such small wheels, those types of things that you’re talking about,

Aaron Breetwor (18m 43s):
Right? We name our spaces after the modes we expect to see in them. So a bike lane is for bikes and a sidewalk is for walking, and a driving lane is for driving. And the standards to which we design each of those spaces often reflects that same thing. The mode that we expect to see in them, a crack in a sidewalk, well perhaps maintained by say the department for urban forestry may be left in disrepair, but if you’re somebody who walks, you can just step over that crack. Now, if you’re somebody who rolls, whether wheelchair or skateboard, you are going to be forced to encounter that, right? And most people, wheelchair are not going to jump over a crack on the sidewalk.

Aaron Breetwor (19m 23s):
And most people on a skateboard aren’t going to either, whether because they’re holding a cup of coffee or rolling around with groceries or just really aren’t in the mood to do any fancy acrobatics, , we’re in contact with the ground. And so we are going to feel whatever is on the ground. So whether it’s expansion gaps in the sidewalk racks in the sidewalk, the lip of a driveway, the truncated domes of the curb cut potholes, the texture of a manhole, cover reflectors in the road, particularly sharp speed bumps. I mean, there’s any number of things that are fine when you encounter them with wheels that have 22 inch diameter but are not fine when your wheel is only 60 millimeters tall

Jeff Wood (20m 6s):
Or dots on Dolores Street. Right? But even then, like I was thinking about that, I got a rental car recently and I was driving down Dolores and . You come across these dots, which are meant to , keep skateboarders from bombing the hill, but it’s actually unsafe for drivers too because If, you actually try to break on those dots. Sometimes I felt the brakes kind of ski a little bit , it’s on a downhill. And so it’s possible that you end up in the intersection rather than stopping before that. So those dots specifically feel unsafe for everybody, but they’re meant for discouraging skateboarding specifically

Aaron Breetwor (20m 39s):
In most cities, except for skate parks, the only architecture that you’ll see that focuses on skateboarding is architecture that is antis skateboarding. And whether it’s a skate stopper on a ledge or the bots dots on Dolores Street, most things that you see that even suggested skateboarding exists at all are there to prevent it from working. And often those preventative measures are against the types of skateboarding that are spectacular, right? Tricks and things like that. In the case of Dolores, these are bumps that are put in the roadway. Now, Dolores is a particularly steep street, right? So to be able to get down that hill on a skateboard, you have to be able to operate with a certain amount of control. And plenty of people will argue whether or not that’s possible.

Aaron Breetwor (21m 21s):
I can tell you as an experienced practitioner that it absolutely is If. you put something in the roadway that is there to create turbulence for somebody. Yeah, you might dissuade some element of people from doing it, but you’re also making it dangerous for anybody who is going to use it. In the case of those bot saws on Dolores, whenever I drive my kid to school, the warning light comes on on my truck because I’m spinning out on them , I’ve heard of people hydroplaning on them on a motorcycle. I mean, we really should talk about those, those dots in a sort of a pointed way. I’d, I’d love to get into sort of the story of why they’re there.

Jeff Wood (21m 54s):
Yeah. I also want to hear a little bit more about what happened this last year with the hill bomb and the police action and all of the things that are going along with that, because I think that’s kind of encompassing of how skateboards are treated in cities. And even if San Francisco is a more friendly place via policy to skateboarding, it doesn’t act like that in this instance, right?

Aaron Breetwor (22m 18s):
The Dolores Hiba is a community organized event. It’s unsanctioned in as much as there’s no permits for it, there’s no lead organizer. And the day that it happens, , somebody in high school makes a poster and puts it on the internet and says, Hey, come out, we’re gonna skate this hill. And a bunch of people show up and they go to the top and they skate down.

Jeff Wood (22m 37s):
Which by the way, I should mention that Dolores the Hill is pretty substantial. And it is actually a place when I, it was like 2008, I think before the presidential election I can remember ’cause I saw Obama posters all over the place, but it was the place where they held a, a Red Bull Derby for box racers because it’s so steep, right? It’s like one of those things where because of its steepness, it’s seen as a place for jumps and tricks and fun, but then it’s discouraged. So I, I just want to like, for folks that aren’t from San Francisco, I kind of wanna lay out the, like the, the steepness of this hill before we go any further. Right?

Aaron Breetwor (23m 14s):
Right. And it’s, it’s worth pointing out that it’s, it’s steep and it’s smooth. There’s plenty of steep streets in San Francisco that are paved with concrete and are particularly rough. This is a, a, a good street because it is made with asphalt and it’s got a nice grade to it. I should say that my friends and I skate steeper streets on a regular basis. My friends and I tend to use soft wheels. So you’re able to carve and drift and do all kinds of things to manage your speed in a way that’s a little bit harder to do with hard wheels. The Dolores Hill bomb is typically attended by people who would fall within that, again, quote unquote category of real skateboarding. They’re out there with boards that are good for tricks, good for jumping, have hard wheels.

Aaron Breetwor (23m 57s):
Hard wheels are harder to stop with. They may enter into a drift more easily, but they have less stopping power once they are in a drift, and that can make them harder to manage at speed. So you have this particular cohort of skateboarders coming out to skate this hill on a regular basis. Some of them can handle themselves, some of them can’t. Generally speaking, it works out pretty well. However, there have been instances where you had say a bicyclist standing in the roadway who got hit by a skateboarder and then died. Now anybody standing in the roadway who gets hit by somebody moving at the speed of traffic is at risk of serious injury.

Aaron Breetwor (24m 37s):
So whether or not that was due to skateboarding or just somebody standing in the roadway, I, I maybe leave for other people to discern for themselves. But this event has been going on for a number of years. At some point during the summer, people gather and they skate down this hill. There’s no road closure permit and people just deal with it at different years, the police have responded differently to it. It’s often lumped in alongside things like side shows, which is when people come out with cars, new donuts and things like that. That’s not to say that that’s what the skateboarders do at those events, but it’s treated that way by people who are, say, responsible for a district, like a district supervisor or something like that. We’ll often lump them in together when they’re talking about them to MTA officials.

Aaron Breetwor (25m 20s):
So this particular year, well in advance of the hill bomb happening, both the police and the district supervisor reached out to the municipal transit authority to talk about how to make sure that the event didn’t happen. There wasn’t any discussion of community organizing or outreach to make sure that the event, if it was going to happen, could happen in a way that was safe. The conversation began with, let’s make sure that this is impossible. What we saw this last summer was a militant police presence riot gear and the like implemented to disperse the crowd and stop the event. What ended up happening was kids were kettled and at least 80 minors were held until four in the morning without the ability to call their parents.

Aaron Breetwor (26m 4s):
There were kids who were cold and not given any sort of blankets to stay warm. There were kids who wet themselves in the street, and there were parents whose children were not participating in the event, but the kids got swept up and were held. It was nobody won this year. I mean, it was, it was just a, a real mess. And there was $134,000 spent in police overtime budget, not to mention all of the costs associated with the legal fees that happened after the fact because of the unlawful arrest of so many of these kids, for a fraction of that cost, they could have shut down the road, made it safe, and everybody could have had a great time, and that didn’t happen.

Aaron Breetwor (26m 46s):
Now, the police presence, which is sort of the, the major issue that was in the news from this last year, tends to overshadow the road infrastructure, which we were just talking about before, right? The bot stops that are there, those were first put on the street in 2021, I believe. Following , another year’s event, Jeffrey Tulin, the director of the MTA, took responsibility for it, citing that he had relationships with the quote unquote old guard of skateboarding. And they supported that implementation and that he loves skateboarding in the city and hates to do this. And if any young queer Bipoc people wanted to be involved with the implementation of slow streets and whatnot around the city, that they should reach out to him.

Aaron Breetwor (27m 28s):
So this was sort of, he was doing two things at once. He’s saying, Hey, we have to shut this down to skateboarders, but also skateboarders, please get involved because we’d love to have you in the advocacy conversation in San Francisco, as far as I know, after that year, there was nobody included in any of those conversations. Then this past year, supervisor Delman and the police both reached out to the MTA in order to encourage more measures to be taken to make the street even more impassable to skateboards. And so they expanded the bot dots into the north and southbound lanes and onto additional blocks, making the street all the more impassable in more areas. So when the cops showed up to shut down the event, that got the lion’s share of attention because of the malpractice of the San Francisco Police Department.

Aaron Breetwor (28m 12s):
What was left unaddressed was the fact that the city had taken unprecedented measures to make the street dangerous, to ride on a skateboard, which in San Francisco is a legally protected class of vehicle. I filed a sunshine request to look at all of the communications about this work. Jamie Parks, the recently departed director of Livable Streets in San Francisco, noted to the people who were talking about this, that it is legal to skateboard in the street and therefore the city could be liable for anything they did to make it impassable to skateboards. He also said, we’ve already discussed this and we should probably stop emailing about it. And the thread stops there, and then some months later the bot dots emerge on the street and then the rest is already written about in the news.

Aaron Breetwor (28m 59s):
I’ve been to the city meetings multiple times to mention the bot dots and get no response when I talk about this. There’s no accountability for the fact that these things were there. And as I said, these are unprecedented bot dots have been used in the past to put down in intersections in order to dissuade sideshows, right? Again, cars doing donuts in the middle of the street. And the reason that’s useful is because they raise the tires up off the ground and make it harder for them to do drifts. But every single time you put down bot sauce to stop a sideshow, you leave a pathway through so that bicyclists and motorcyclists can make it through safely. And the conversation around these particular bot spots was such that they wanted no inch of the street to be passable. And so there is no room for anybody to get through on a skateboard or anything else.

Aaron Breetwor (29m 43s):
The only sort of notable aside here is that between this past year when they put the new bot dots in and the original installation in 2021, a 40 50-year-old neo cyclist rode over those bot dots in the middle of the night on Dolores lost balance, hit a parked car and died. So antis skateboarding infrastructure is harmful to other people, and we could change the conversation to talk about park benches in the same ways that antis skateboarding infrastructure also prevents people from laying down antis skateboarding infrastructures also anti houseless infrastructure. , we talk about vulnerability, right? If, you prioritize the success of skateboarding, safe passage of skateboarding.

Aaron Breetwor (30m 24s):
You are also prioritizing other marginalized people and their existence in public space.

Jeff Wood (30m 29s):
I dunno if I have much to say after, after that.

Aaron Breetwor (30m 32s):
At the end of the day, the same argument against skateboarding is the argument that we have against people who are interested in registering their discontent with the status quo. And functionally what that is is pushback against marginalized people. And so anything that is said about skateboarders as a way to sort of say, well, we don’t want them in our community, is a dog whistle for racism and a dog whistle classism. And it’s, it’s worth saying loudly because skateboarding is an 80-year-old moat and most people grew up with skateboarding at this point. And so the fact that it continues to exist within a marginalized position within public consciousness is evidence of a certain other set, OFMs and phobias that use skateboarding as a way to beat up on marginalized people and , if, if we wanted skateboarding to happen in a safer way, we would promote skateboarding education and we would promote the proliferation of spaces for skateboarding to happen safely, whether that be a skate park or just lanes that can accommodate them safely.

Aaron Breetwor (31m 35s):
Yeah. And low turbulence. When people wanna learn how to skateboard for transportation right now, their options are to do it in the street or to do it on either a tennis court or a school blacktop. And both school blacktops and tennis courts typically have signs that say no skateboarding. Yeah. Again, with antis skateboarding infrastructure, whether that’s at the level of the built environment or the way that we legislate it, it’s, it’s very hard for people who are well-meaning to integrate this tool into their daily lives because of the way that we think about it. And it’s not because of anything inherent to the tool itself, it’s because of the various apparatuses that surround it.

Jeff Wood (32m 9s):
So what’s happening now at the city then? I saw that there’s a working group that’s focused on the subject. What’s happening there?

Aaron Breetwor (32m 18s):
So the County Transportation Authority, which is the purse strings of San Francisco’s Municipal Transit Authority, started a skateboarding subcommittee in the wake of Dolores. There’s been one meeting so far, the recording of it is available online. They asked me to come and present at that meeting, and I presented as an expert on skateboarding for transportation, referencing, as you mentioned, Kevin Fang and others who come before me who have done great research and done a good job sort of synthesizing all the existing literature on skateboarding. What I proposed to the committee was that having a director for skateboarding would be useful for the city because it would help them to perform cross departmental work that would allow the various authorities to sink on skateboarding and and their policies around it.

Aaron Breetwor (33m 5s):
The biggest challenge that San Francisco faces with regard to its transportation planning, I would argue, is the split between public works and the MTA. To say more about that by point of comparison, in New York, sidewalks and streets are managed by the same department. Whereas in San Francisco, anything that you wanna do in the roadway between the two curbs is the purview of the municipal transit authority. Whereas the space between the curb and the building front is the purview of the Department of Public Works and also the purview of private building owners. And so these splits and jurisdiction make it challenging to have holistic conversations about the movements of vehicles and people.

Aaron Breetwor (33m 47s):
I said before that the non-motorized use peled vehicle is the only class of vehicle that’s allowed in both spaces. And so it’s uniquely susceptible to the silo effect of those two organizations because where one’s jurisdiction ends and the other begins, there are often transitions that are inable by skateboard, and it’s not always clear whose purview those transitions are.

Jeff Wood (34m 14s):
If we look out broader than the city of San Francisco and go kind of national, what are some things that cities should be doing related to skateboarding and thinking about how those worlds kind of come together and how to not necessarily regulate, but like allow for the movement of these vehicles

Aaron Breetwor (34m 34s):
At the level of the paradigm. Just as far as non automotive transportation is concerned, I think the easiest lift federally globally would just be to say walking, biking, and skating. You don’t even have to say skateboarding, just say skating. And you can include roller skates in there saying, walking and biking and skating immediately poses a question. What do you mean when you say skating? Why would you say skating and not just walking and biking so well, because skateboards are uniquely susceptible to certain elements of the built environment, they’re also uniquely advantageous. And just by saying skateboarding, you draw attention to all of the areas of failure and success that are not touched.

Aaron Breetwor (35m 15s):
When you just focus on walking and biking, you’re just talking about walking, biking, you’re talking about sidewalks and bike lanes, maybe the space of the roadway, but you’re not talking about the transitions between them because bikes aren’t allowed on the sidewalk and people aren’t supposed to be in the road just saying it, just acknowledging it as a mode changes the conversation. If, you wanna get more granular than that. There’s the laws that govern skateboarding. It would be great if state level laws existed, even a federal law that protected skateboards. But being able to take one, particularly effective city level law and making it state level would help to set precedent in other states so that people moving from one place to another could reliably feel safe using these devices. And then planning for them at the level of infrastructure is really key.

Aaron Breetwor (35m 58s):
And the challenge there is to convince people in various public works departments that the needs of a skateboard should be accounted for when we’re talking about expansion gaps, sidewalks, or the height of a driveway lip, or the material that we’re using to resurface our roads or how long a speed bump is or the transitions between it. All of these things just tend to be talked about only with regard to the vehicles that we expect to be using them. If we expected to see skateboards using them, it might change the conversation.

Jeff Wood (36m 32s):
Does skateboarding often get lumped in with the general idea of micro mobility too?

Aaron Breetwor (36m 37s):
I think skateboarding can be gestured at in micro mobility conversations, but it’s not often planned for. NDO recently released A PDF on designing for things with small wheels, and I attended a webinar that they gave on the subject, and they didn’t say the word skateboard until 45 minutes into the presentation. There are skateboards in the PDF, there are little illustrations of them, but there’s no mention of the unique affordances required for successful low turbulence mobility by a skateboard. My general thought here is that If, you plan for the most marginalized, you inevitably include the success of less marginalized people and modes.

Aaron Breetwor (37m 18s):
If skateboards are the most marginalized mode, then they should actually lead the conversation because anything that’s going to be good for a skateboard and it’s small wheels and the sensitivities that it experiences will inevitably be good for anything that has a larger wheel to it. The conversation that NATA was putting forward was largely focused on bicycles that had wheels, say, with a 10 inch diameter instead of a 22 inch diameter. So half the size definitely more sensitive, but 10 inches is still a lot more than 60 millimeters.

Jeff Wood (37m 52s):
I find just the idea interesting of leading with skateboarding, thinking about how all those things fit together and from the built environment perspective too. Are there any cities that are places that have done this that have focused on helping skateboarding along, or at least trying to figure out how to design for all modes that way?

Aaron Breetwor (38m 10s):
In Portland, there are some signs throughout the city that indicate skate routes. There’s little people pushing on skateboards and they say, this is the way to go. If, you wanna commute by skateboard. I don’t know anybody who lives in Portland who follows those signs. So setting aside that as perhaps the sole example of signage or infrastructure that is explicitly pros skateboarding, I don’t think that there’s an example of any city who has yet taken the lead on championing skateboarding as a mode of transportation and then planning for its success.

Jeff Wood (38m 45s):
I noticed that college towns are often the places, at least from Dr. Fang’s work. College towns are often the places where you get the most skateboarders, at least in places like uc, Santa Barbara, the mode share for skateboarding was 8% versus 7% cars to get to campus. And so that kind of feels like one of the places where it might be valuable to consider if you’re gonna start somewhere. College campuses seem like good places to go.

Aaron Breetwor (39m 8s):
Yeah, colleges are probably the best way to understand how skateboards could be championed in the built environment. People leave home, they leave high school where they do or don’t get driven around by their parents where they do or don’t have access to a car. And they often move to these college campuses where having a car is super cumbersome and having a bike involves either storing your bicycle in your dorm, which may or may not be on the first floor or storing your bike in a bike rack alongside upwards of 200 other bicycles. Life being what it is on a college campus. Everybody lives in a similar area and goes to school in a similar area. And so there’s a bottleneck at either end with getting your bike out of the building and getting yourself into the building.

Aaron Breetwor (39m 51s):
And If, you are like many college kids, you are staying up late studying or doing whatever you do up late and perhaps sleeping in late and waking up just in time for you to get to class, hopefully on time. And If, you have to deal with bringing your bike downstairs or unlocking your bike and then bringing your bike inside or locking your bike up on the other end. You are compromising those extra few valuable minutes of sleep that you would’ve otherwise had to do. Anything else I can relate, brush your teeth, eat some breakfast, cram a few notes in before the test. The skateboard exists within college campuses as a great tool for spaces that are crowded and give people the freedom they need to move from point A to point B without all of that extra weight and mass of a bicycle.

Aaron Breetwor (40m 38s):
Notably, skateboarding is often illegal on college campuses often regulated against. And so that’s, it’s just a particular instance of . People are against skateboards in those spaces because they think of them as more recreational than focused on Transportation. They’re concerned about skateboarding and its use on say, stair sets and ledges and the property damage associated with those sorts of uses. And we’re so focused on preventing that, that we also prevent people from making a sound decision for transportation.

Jeff Wood (41m 12s):
I think Cal State campuses banned skateboarding and they did it because a professor was killed after getting hit by a bike. But bikes weren’t banned. Skateboards were. And so I find that kind of telling about the way Skateboards are treated not just on campuses but in in cities and around the country,

Aaron Breetwor (41m 29s):
Right? We often talk about the property damage that comes from skateboards, and we’re very quick to legislate against them. As a result, we spend a lot less time talking about, say, the damage that can be done to an entire city when a sports team wins or loses a championship. And we’re not very quick to outlaw sports. And well, if we promote skateboarding, then when we promoting property damage, well, when you promote walking, you’re not inherently promoting parkour, right? And when you promote driving, you’re not inherently promoting Formula One driving. When you promote biking, you’re not inherently promoting BMX riding, right? Like skateboarding is not inherently recreational and it’s not inherently focused on property damage. And so disentangling, those things may make it a lot easier for people to have those conversations.

Aaron Breetwor (42m 13s):
It seems odd to me that we often pick skateboarding as a place to house some of our most draconian policies. And it’s notable that skateboards are one of the best solutions for people who are economically challenged or challenged in terms of the space that they have to store any other mode of Transportation. We’re dancing around this subject that Skateboards are incredibly useful for marginalized people, whether you are houseless or low income or live in a multi-generational home that doesn’t have a lot of space in it, or you and your many siblings need to go with your single parent across town to many different schools. The skateboard fits well into all of those situations.

Aaron Breetwor (42m 56s):
There are myriad examples of people who will throw out a bicycle because they don’t have the tools or the nearby facility is necessary to change a tire. And so a bicycle doesn’t work for them. The San Francisco Bike Coalition has stories of people who won’t take a free bike because they don’t have the space to store them in their apartment. And so a skateboard fits into the space that bicycles don’t. And when you legislate against skateboarding because of the way that it might be used for recreational purposes, you also prevent its uptake or transportation in ways that reify transportation insecurity among marginalized populations.

Aaron Breetwor (43m 36s):
There’s one other thing that we should address here. ’cause I’ve, I said that skateboarding and San Francisco is great because of the permissive laws, but the one thing that I didn’t mention is that in San Francisco skateboarding on the sidewalk is illegal after sunset and before sunrise. So it is legal for you to ride in the street, the bike lane after sunset and before sunrise, but it’s not allowed on the sidewalk. It’s also not allowed in any business district. And a business district is simply defined as the space 20 feet in front of any business. You’re also not allowed to skate in or about a Transit stop now in a Transit stop. I can understand that. I guess If, you don’t want me to ride and the BART station fine, but what does it mean to be about a transit stop?

Aaron Breetwor (44m 20s):
And how flexible are those definitions and when are they enforced? I’ve personally never been pulled over by the cops for riding a skateboard. I’ve almost been hit by the cops riding a skateboard even when wearing high vis gear. But we know from this past summer at Dolores that the police will, with complete disregard for people’s legal rights, kettle them and tie them up in zip ties for being skateboarders or being associated with skateboarders or being in in the wrong place at the wrong time when skateboarding is happening. And so the ways in which those laws are written provide opportunities for police to have interactions with vulnerable populations whenever they see fit, to interpret the laws the way that suit their ends.

Aaron Breetwor (45m 9s):
And so if skateboarding on the sidewalk is illegal after sunset, and I work at a restaurant and I get out after sunset and I leave that restaurant and I throw my skateboard down on the sidewalk to push home, technically I’m breaking the law. That sort of thing doesn’t exist for bicycles. It doesn’t exist for cars. Nobody says you can’t use your particular mode in a particular place at a particular time. You are just allowed to use these things. And so while the non-motorized user propelled vehicle, the status has a ton of advantages to it, there are some fatal flaws that allow vulnerable populations to be policed more heavily.

Jeff Wood (45m 51s):
Yeah, that’s a good point.

Aaron Breetwor (45m 52s):
You have other guests who have come on who speak so eloquently to the failures of the current paradigm of transportation planning and non automotive transportation planning. What I often hear missing in their critique or their, or their plans for the future are things that I, I think are supported through a focus on skateboarding. And I think there’s often a possibility for misunderstanding the work that I do as trying to center skateboarding as the primary mode that people should be thinking about and talking about. And that’s really not what it is. It’s just that If, you add skateboarding into the conversation. You help to sort of knock off some of the hard edges of existing transportation planning.

Aaron Breetwor (46m 37s):
Bicycles are embroiled in sort of like a, a smear campaign, or they have political baggage. People often see new bicycle infrastructure as being sort of a harbinger of gentrification. And so when you focus solely on bicycles as your primary mode of non automotive Transportation planning, you run the risk of getting tangled up in those conversations. Or people say, well, I don’t ride a bike, or I don’t own a bike. And so If, you add additional modes alongside that. You say, well, it’s not really about bicycles, it’s just about non automotive transportation.

Jeff Wood (47m 9s):
What’s interesting about that is everything seems to have a constituency of some sort, a political constituency for that matter. And I feel like skateboards might not have that baggage yet if, if it becomes a more popular mode or at least more popular in terms of trying to advocate for what you’re advocating for, it might end up getting there, but at the moment you could probably introduce it as some sort of a neutral actor, right, in a way that’s positive. You teach classes at local schools on skateboarding. What do you teach your students, or what are some of the things that you impart upon them?

Aaron Breetwor (47m 44s):
The focus of all the classes that I teach is on skateboarding as a mode of transportation. Anything that people wanna do beyond just knowing how to get from point A to point B, I would say is exciting and provides an opportunity for self-exploration for an entire lifetime. But it’s not the focus. And by bringing people in and saying, Hey, base level here, you just need to be able to push and turn and stop. You open up the world to a lot more people. So when I teach, of course, the first thing that we focus on is safety. Most injuries and skateboarding happen in the first few days, and the most common injuries are a concussion and broken wrist. You can solve all of that with wrist guards, helmets, and somebody who knows how to teach you can actually get somebody to be an incredibly proficient skateboarder and have them never fall down.

Aaron Breetwor (48m 31s):
I know that plenty of people do go out and learn how to ride a bike by themselves, but I think most of us, when we think about learning how to ride a bike, we think about that interaction between some kind of adult who knows how to use the bicycle and some not yet bicycle ready person who either has somebody holding the handlebars with them or supporting them by holding onto the seat or what have you. There’s any number of ways that you could teach somebody how to ride a bike without forcing them to fall over and skin their knee. The same thing can be done with a skateboard. And yet most of the stories you hear about people’s first time skateboarding, it’s like, oh, I took it out and I took it to the top of the biggest tail in my town, and I tried to go down and I got wobbles and I fell and I either hit my head or broke my wrist or got massive road rash.

Aaron Breetwor (49m 12s):
Somehow we don’t associate learning how to skateboard with the need for supervision in the way that we do bicycling. And I think if we were to think of skateboarding like bicycling as a skill that could be passed down from one generation to the next, it would be a lot easier for us to make sense of, of how it fits into the broader culture. And so that’s what we do is we just teach skateboarding like a motor transportation. City of San Francisco gives a quarter million dollars to the SF Bike Coalition to do bicycle education. There’s nothing like that for skateboarding in the city. And so we start with boards that have soft wheels that are large enough to get over racks, and we just get kids rolling. We start them sitting down because you can learn the most important lesson on a skateboard while you’re seated.

Aaron Breetwor (49m 57s):
It’s just look where you wanna go, because the way skateboards work, wherever your eyes are focused, that’s the direction that you’re going to tend. And so we can teach that with kids sitting down so that if they do tip over, they’re not falling very far at all. And then gradually we have them stand up and we can hold their hands and we can teach them not just to look where they wanna go, but to point where they wanna go and use their shoulders to help direct that movement. You can introduce things like cones to give them things to turn around, and we teach them these skills, then we teach them to teach each other because the fundamentals are easily transferable. And the better they’re able to articulate it to somebody else, the more obvious it is that they know it. And we do have some ramps and we teach people how to drop in and , carve up a ramp, things like that, such that they’re able to take those skills to skate parks if they want to.

Aaron Breetwor (50m 42s):
But it really isn’t the focus, it’s just about getting more people on board. I’ve spent most of my time teaching elementary aged children. My class was technically third through fifth graders, but I often had first and second graders coming as well after the standard class period was over. And what was amazing to me is that while my fifth grade class was largely boys, every grade below that was either equal parts boys and girls or majority girls. What’s important to note there is that , we tend to socialize women to be risk averse, but that often doesn’t happen until, say, adolescent age and into high school. And so at a young age, between the ages of say, five and 10, all genders are equally capable of learning this skill and don’t feel averse to it for any sort of social reasons.

Aaron Breetwor (51m 32s):
And where I was teaching in the Mission district, my kid was the only white kid in the school. And so I’m teaching dozens of black and brown little girls to ride a skateboard for transportation. And they’re getting a skill that has the potential to have an exponential effect on their success in life because it increases their access to the city in ways that a bicycle won’t and a bus won’t, and that a car won’t. That’s why this is so important to me. You, you deliver the skill to people who would not otherwise get access to it, and you deliver it to them using a form of skateboard that is designed to actually move in a way that will be beneficial to their life.

Aaron Breetwor (52m 13s):
And then they walk away or hopefully skate away with a skill that will last them for life.

Jeff Wood (52m 19s):
What kind of questions do you get from the kids when they first start writing?

Aaron Breetwor (52m 22s):
Plenty of kids wanna know If I can kick flip, I, I can’t kick flip. And I’ve, I’ve never landed a kick flip. And every once in a while when I’m teaching, I think, oh gosh, right, maybe this year will be the year. And I’ll spend a little bit of time myself working on it. And then I get bored and I, and I move on to just pushing and turning. ’cause that’s more fun for me. A lot of kids just wanna know, how do you do that? And , the teaching is often rather self-directed, right? The kids will get their pads on and they want help with that. They’ll say, teacher, help me. Right? So we make sure that the helmet’s on secure, the risk guards are on secure and whatnot, and then we kinda let them run free. And if they wanna learn something, they’ll say, Hey, I wanna learn how to push. Can you teach me how to push? Or, Hey, can you teach me how to stop. Can you teach me how to turn? Can you teach me how to do what they know how to do?

Aaron Breetwor (53m 4s):
The curiosity tends to emerge organically. So rather than say, Hey, this is the strict curriculum that you must learn , you teach them a safe level that they can start at, and usually they can see somebody else doing something and the curiosity will emerge organically, and then they’ll ask for help, either from the instructor or from one of their friends.

Jeff Wood (53m 22s):
That’s awesome. So whatcha working on next? What’s next up for you?

Aaron Breetwor (53m 26s):
I would love to see San Francisco begin to take skateboarding seriously. And what that looks like is seeing it built into the language of transportation planning, ideally seeing resources allocated for somebody whose responsibility it will be to focus on skateboarding. I do think that skateboards provide a unique opportunity for the city to tie their Department of Public works and the MTA together. The recently paused active communities plan, which has been a project of the San Francisco MTA, which is nominally a bike plan, but also includes other modes, has a lot of opportunity for expansion. It’s an MTA project, which means it exists on a curb to curb level, but of course, active communities exist on the sidewalk too.

Aaron Breetwor (54m 6s):
So one would think that the active communities plan would pertain to all elements of the built environment. I’m excited to push for that and to see the active communities plan not only restarted, but expanded to include the space of the sidewalk. Next steps for me, I mean, I am the brand manager of a skateboard manufacturer, so we do make skateboards and we do want to make them more accessible. So doing everything we can to make them available to low income people while still maintaining a certain level of quality is always an ongoing effort. The largest focus over the next year will be awareness, right? And making sure that people understand that skateboards are first and foremost in mode of transportation, helping to normalize that to produce literature that makes those sorts of things evident to people.

Aaron Breetwor (54m 53s):
We’ve applied for grant funding from San Francisco to organize some closed road events in San Francisco to demonstrate that it’s possible to have skateboarding exist in public space without the need for cops in riot gear. Skateboarding can be both pro-social and pro-business, and can also exist alongside public and private property in ways that are non-destructive. The city needs more examples of skateboarders who are just normal citizens who use skateboarding because it is the best thing for them. And we need to be able to see a shift in public opinion in this ostensibly progressive city to expand the conversation around transportation, to include people who don’t often have the time to show up to committee meetings in the middle of the day to talk about whether or not their needs are being met.

Jeff Wood (55m 43s):
Yeah, well, so where can folks find you, If you wish to be found?

Aaron Breetwor (55m 47s):
We’re [email protected], on Instagram at comment skateboards If. You’d like to email me? I’m available at Aaron at Comet skateboards.com. A-A-R-O-N. Always happy to chat. Really interested to talk to various Complete Streets directors, slow Streets directors, curriculum planners, all kinds of folks who believe that the sensitivities of skateboarding might help to augment their existing programs. Please do reach out. As far as I know, there really aren’t a lot of folks focusing on these sorts of things around the country, around the state, state, around the world. Most skateboarding advocates are focused on the proliferation of skate parks and spaces for recreational skateboarding.

Aaron Breetwor (56m 31s):
Skateboarding for transportation is woefully underserved, both with city institutions and advocacy. So if this sounds interesting to you, please do reach out. I’ll do my best to be of service and speak directly to the needs of your particular community.

Jeff Wood (56m 49s):
I know for a fact you’ll answer very quickly on your Instagram and on email as well. So folks, reach out. If, you get a chance. Aaron, thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate your time. Thanks

Aaron Breetwor (56m 58s):
So much for having me, Jeff