Mondays 160: The Long & Winding Road with Wes Marshall

October 14, 2024

This week on Mondays Wes Marshall is back! We chat about his trip to Bogota Columbia, the connections between biological structure and the built environment, and of course we discuss the news from last week including climate migration, high speed rail, roundabouts, and healthy urbanism.

Check out below for the show notes including links to the items we chatted about and a full AI generated unedited transcript of this show. And don’t forget to check this out on YouTube.

Show Notes

Ants that count – NPR

Austin to Mexico HSR? MySA

Japan’s 60 years of HSR – The Guardian

To Mexico Under Wires – The Overhead Wire

Moving to Disaster Prone Areas – New York Times

Nowhere is safe, not even climate havens – The Guardian

Galveston at the edge of the seawall – Washington Post

A worse case scenario – Washington Post

Rebuilding roads post disaster – Wired Magazine

The Sprawl – The Overhead Wire

The Modular Roundabout – Equipment World

Rethinking La Rambla – El Pais

Obvious Solutions v. Actual Ones – The Overhead Wire

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Full Transcript:

[00:00:00] Jeff Wood: You’re listening to the Talking Headways podcast network.

Happy Monday This is Monday’s at the Overhead Wire sponsored by our super generous patreon supporters. I’m Jeff Wood your host and joined by Wes Marshall. Wes, welcome back.

[00:00:10] Wes Marshall: Thanks. Good to be here again.

[00:00:11] Jeff Wood: Yeah, so, um, we’re gonna dive into something real quick But I I also want to ask you like how was your you had a long trip a big trip that you that you took How was that?

[00:00:20] Wes Marshall: I’ve been traveling too much but So I had not actually been to South America. I’d been to some of the islands, been to Mexico, like Cabo, but this is my first time to South America and it was great. I had a, it’s a long travel day to get there and back. But once you’re there, there’s, um. Now, there’s a lot of amazing stuff and you can eat really well for really cheap, which is kind of fun too.

[00:00:45] So it was a good time. I saw a lot of interesting presentations, met a lot of great people and learned a lot and also try to share some of what I know. Hopefully it helps them out a little bit. We’ll, we’ll see.

[00:00:56] Jeff Wood: Yeah, I mean, it sounds awesome to, to go there. And I’m just always interested in the travel because, you know, usually my travel trips have gone like East or West, right?

[00:01:05] I’ve gone to China, I’ve gone to Europe. And so you get time zone changes and all that stuff, but you still have a, it’s a really long distance to get down there, but then your time zone doesn’t necessarily, or maybe it’s like an hour or two. So I’m wondering how that impacts you, because the time zone changes, you can kind of like, you know, when you’re going to Europe or when you go to China, you have to reset your body and all this stuff.

[00:01:22] But, Going north south is another interesting kind of different, you know, way of going, doing things.

[00:01:28] Wes Marshall: Oh yeah, no, I’m the same way. I’ve been, you know, Europe and like Australia, places like that, but here, because I connected through Atlanta, so it’s a two hour difference from Denver to Atlanta, and then to go back to Bogota, you end up on Central Time.

[00:01:40] So you end up traveling all day, and you end up, for me, only one time zone away, so it’s a little bit weird. And the other strange thing is, um, the people Maybe this is just what I noticed. I had a breakfast scheduled for like 6am the day I got there, which I thought was pretty early, and I get out there and the streets are just full.

[00:02:01] There’s so many people in Bogota. I think there’s 9 million in that city compared to like 6 million in all of Colorado. But still, it feels like they’re all out at 5 something am. At the same time, whenever something is scheduled, it always starts late. So they’re all up super early, but everything Starts like a half an hour later,

[00:02:22] It’s this weird combination just hanging out,

[00:02:24] Jeff Wood: you know, just hanging out. Yeah. . Yeah. Did you get to ride tr, did you get to ride trans millennial?

[00:02:29] Wes Marshall: Um, I did not, but we took a, a few tours of like, some of the station areas, honestly, where there were some pedestrian hotspots where there were a lot of fatalities and, you know, they were trying to fix it with.

[00:02:41] You know, these big overpasses that cost millions of dollars and none of the pedestrians are using them. And you can see, you know, the social paths where pedestrians are what they’re actually doing. And, you know, we’re talking about how they need to design for for that and how people actually use these places as opposed to these big overpasses.

[00:02:59] But we got up close and personal with the TransMilano system. And, um, it’s amazing how full those buses are. And I think our community is. Now, I joke to my class about how relative capacity is, so when you think of like a full train in Denver, it’s nowhere close to like the full trains you see like in Tokyo or Bogota or places like that, so capacity is just a relative phenomenon and there they seemed, they seemed So well used and, um, it’s interesting how politically they’re, they’re seeing, because I think a lot of people on the far left don’t like it because it’s connected with Penelosa who is more on the right.

[00:03:40] So there’s interesting political dynamics to it all as well. Um, but it’s, it’s a great system. Um, you can see how well it works and I mean, how many people are using it and using it really to get everywhere they need to go.

[00:03:53] Jeff Wood: I never, I never understood a crush load until I was on a bus in China, and I could basically taste the cinnamon gum that the little kid standing next to me was chewing.

[00:04:03] Have

[00:04:04] Wes Marshall: you seen those videos where those dudes in the white gloves are pushing?

[00:04:07] Jeff Wood: Yeah, in, in Tokyo, it is crazy. Like, they have pushers. Well, you think they’re gonna, like,

[00:04:11] Wes Marshall: walk up and be like, oh, no, no, come off, wait for the next one. But that’s not what they do. They end up, like, just shoving these people till There is no airspace.

[00:04:19] Jeff Wood: I don’t quite understand that. Cause there’s been a couple of times when, uh, you know, I, I wasn’t feeling like, uh, I had like, um, something going on with me and I was in, in a BART train and it was like a little bit hot. And I was always feeling like I was going to pass out. So I have no idea how people like, don’t like end up on the floor or just like, if they’re squished, they’re just like sitting there.

[00:04:37] Yeah. It seems hard to

[00:04:38] Wes Marshall: imagine that kind of like. Transit fullness. I mean, I was in, you know, the D. C. Metro a few times when a train comes by, you’re waiting for your connection, and it’s sort of too full, so you need to wait for the next one, um, but at the same time, it’s nowhere nearly as full as those trains you’re seeing in those videos.

[00:04:55] Jeff Wood: That’s crazy. That’s crazy. Well, so, last, last episode after, after we were finished, you were like, oh, so let’s talk about, because I had, I had mentioned my Cars or Cholesterol, you know, merch and all that stuff, uh, bit. ly slash Cars or Cholesterol for folks who want to get some, um, I mentioned it and you were like, Hey, I want to go on this kind of journey about thinking about, um, you know, cities and transportation as, uh, as people.

[00:05:18] You know, human biology to a certain extent. So I kind of want to get your thoughts on that because you wanted to explain it a little bit more. And I think we could have like a really fun conversation about this topic.

[00:05:29] Wes Marshall: Yeah, I was originally thinking of saving it for like your puppies and butterflies, whatever you call it at the end of the connection, but it’s fun to talk about it at the top.

[00:05:38] So what I was originally thinking is, you know, the cars are cholesterol, like the graphic is great. It’s an interesting thing. I was just trying to connect it. With I guess my own worldview to some extent, because I did my dissertation work on street networks. Yeah, there’s a great, uh, logo there for folks

[00:05:54] Jeff Wood: watching on YouTube.

[00:05:56] Wes Marshall: Um, so when I did my, my dissertation, I was looking at street networks and, you know, a lot of people. You hear the idea, it’s like, oh, living on a cul de sac is safer, so when people have kids, they move to these places, and what my dissertation did was try to see if that is true or not, and what I ended up finding is that, well, yes, it’s true if you never leave your cul de sac, but the source of cities, the source of designs we need to support cul de sac design end up with those big, nasty arterials, and those cities end up killing, like, two to three times more people per population than the more gridded cities.

[00:06:30] So yes, you may get more fender benders on the gridded cities, um, but you get, you know, way fewer severe injuries, way fewer fatalities. So part of my thinking is I, I purposely at the time did not even visit these cities that I was studying. And the idea to some extent was The tree, the street network, you know, almost like archaeologists would treat dinosaur bones, right?

[00:06:54] Like, we find all these dinosaur bones, we put them together, and then we can sort of tell how these dinosaurs lived, and if they used their hind legs, or their, how they walked, how they lived. And that was a little bit my thinking with the dissertation. I could look at a street network and you get a sense of how people behave and it turned out to be true because I did subsequent papers on things like modal choice, whether people are walking, biking more, um, whether they’re driving more, like how much vehicle miles traveled, the differences between these different types of networks.

[00:07:27] We ended up doing papers later after my dissertation on public health outcomes, whether there’s higher rates of obesity, diabetes, um, high blood pressure, um, heart disease, all that sort of stuff. And there was like, and you can sort of tell how people use these places often based on those street networks.

[00:07:45] So to me, I always thought of the street networks as the bones. And this is something I think harkens back to, I think I was talking to, um, same as Alex Marshall. I haven’t, he wrote a book called house that the cities work. Um, I’m at CNU and this is the discussions we were having. And I bet around the time I was doing my dissertations like 2006 or something like that.

[00:08:07] Um, and he also talked about the ideas, you know, the street network is the bones. So when you think about cars or cholesterol, you know, I started going down other rabbit holes, like, well, if maybe cars are the bad cholesterol and walking, biking is the good cholesterol. Um, you know, what does that make transit, the connective tissue, the intersections, the joints, like, there’s so many things you can think about.

[00:08:32] So that is sort of where I’m starting from, like, my baseline, but I wanted to get your thoughts on, on how these, all these things can come together, because when you think about cities and streets and people, like, The metaphor for the human body for all this stuff. It makes a lot of sense and you can kind of see the biological overtones and how cities actually function because they’re way more complex than, you know, just water through a pipe like civil engineers treated as.

[00:08:59] Jeff Wood: Yeah. Yeah. It’s such a big topic because I, as we were talking earlier, um, I, I, you know, I started to think about this and I went down this rabbit hole and then all these news items popped up. I looked into the archive that I have about urban metabolism, uh, and then all these, you know, different news items and papers that people had written started popping up as well.

[00:09:20] And I couldn’t quite absorb all of them to be honest with you. There’s so much stuff, but it seems like back in like Victorian era or something along those lines, people started really, or when they started figuring out like how, bodies actually worked instead of like using the humors and things like that, uh, to figure a bloodletting or whatever they were doing at the time.

[00:09:36] I did take a class in college about like medieval health history, and it was really weird what people were thinking was the right way to do things. Uh, the miasma and the, and the idea of, you know, just bad air and stuff like that, which was kind of right to a certain extent, but it wasn’t really, um, But when people started figuring out how this stuff really works, you know, when, when, when cholera and Jon Snow and the maps and all those stuff, um, people started comparing bodies to cities and started thinking about that stuff.

[00:10:01] And so I found that really interesting to think about this, like, quote, unquote, urban metabolism and how we ingest data. Um, you know, we extract resources and pull them in and use them and then have waste products that come out as well. And so you think about, you know, the, our, our waste systems and how that matches, uh, the different, uh, let’s see, uh, I have, I have a couple of written down here that I thought about where connected.

[00:10:25] So the electrical grid, maybe like the nervous system, uh, drainage and wastewater might be like the excretory system, which is like how we, we deal with waste in the human body. Um, Public works, transportation, the cardiovascular system, the skeletal system, um, the parks and green space as the respiratory system for.

[00:10:41] So if we take like a, uh, a larger look at it, there’s probably each system in the human body. You could probably compare to some, um, to some way that we look at the way that we’re building cities today. And so I find that interesting. Especially as we move forward to when we get to this point of talking about, um, when we talk about, um, urban metabolism, thinking about data metabolism, how much we’re data we’re creating to and like, so thinking about the discussion that Michael baddie and I had a couple months ago about, you know, compute the computable city, all this stuff.

[00:11:13] We used to look at it like this, you know, you get the census every 10 years and then you do calculations and data analysis and stuff. And now it’s like real time. And so we’re processing all this information. So I feel like all of that is connected in some sort of way. Um, and so I, I find that the, there’s probably some way that you could tie them all together, but maybe not exactly on top of each other, but there’s probably something to be said about.

[00:11:34] The skeletal system being the roads and the excretory system being the waste management and the respiratory system being the plants and trees and all the stuff that we want to put together and layering those on top of each other. There’s probably some sort of a metabolic calculation you can make to figure out whether cities grow at a certain rate or not.

[00:11:53] And I think people try to do that actually. Um, so that’s kind of like what my brain started going to, but it’s way too much information to try to distill into like a small soundbite. So that’s how I did it.

[00:12:05] Wes Marshall: Yeah, now there’s some obvious ones. I mean like you mentioned the you know, digestive system might be like sanitation department or like the Healthcare system might be like the immune system of our bodies, but I think the way I’m trying to think about it bigger picture is like it helps us see and understand our city’s infrastructure and the people in it, maybe in a more integrated way, like we can start thinking about what are the empty calories.

[00:12:30] Of a city, right? How can we, you know, maybe compare air pollution to smoking? And then, you know, maybe we can start seeing, well, how do we make a city healthier? And, you know, things like fewer cars on the road. I mean, reducing air pollution, reducing commute times. And, you know, start thinking about how we can build a city for that.

[00:12:49] Um, uh, you also sent that, um, article from Rotterdam, I think it was? Um, They talked about trying to put that urban me metabolism stuff in action. Um, I know I like, I think there’s also a difference between all these different systems we’re thinking about and then, you know, thinking about things like cars are the bad cholesterol bikes and pedestrians, or the good cholesterol, like there’s simpler ways to think about stuff.

[00:13:17] As well, um, you know, air pollution might be just like the toxins in our bloodstream, like the intersections are the joints. Um,

[00:13:26] Jeff Wood: and you need, you need filters, right? You need filters. Well, it’s like something I always, it’s, it’s like something I always tell people, or I always think about when I’m, I’m talking about air pollution or air quality is like, nobody would ever well, some people do in this unfortunate, but nobody would ever like go in their garage, close their doors and let their car run because they know that.

[00:13:47] You know, that’s going to end poorly for them. And so you’re doing that on a larger scale outdoors. That can’t be good for us. And so you need some sort of system or filtration to kind of clean that up, or you just don’t do it at all. It’s like going vegan, right? You just, you, you decide that you’re just not going to have all these things that you think are going to be bad to your system, uh, meets and, and whatever else.

[00:14:09] I, I don’t subscribe to that personally, but. It’s how some folks feel, um, and so, yeah, I, I, I, I get your gist, um, and I think that there’s probably ways to think about it to a larger scale. It just so massive that it’s hard to kind of break it down. But when you get to like the little vignettes, like the cars are cholesterol, or maybe the air pollution is, you know, Um, you know, is like the cleaning toxins out of the blood.

[00:14:35] Um, you might be able to like tell little stories, uh, to, to get that point across.

[00:14:40] Wes Marshall: Yeah. I mean, you could say parking lots and this corresponds to what you’re just saying, and maybe parking lots are like the fatty tissue or, um, you know, when you have a car crash or a fatal one, that’s kind of like having a heart attack or, you know, when you think about, well, what would congestion pricing be in this scheme?

[00:14:56] Is that like a medicine? Is that like, uh, You know, some sort of lifestyle. Are you going to the gym? Is that your diet? I don’t know. Like, so there’s different things you can think about that simplifies it as opposed to thinking about all the system level stuff and all that urban metabolism research seems to be pointing to.

[00:15:12] Um, you know, like who are the surgeons in this? Like, is it the traffic engineers? Is the translation planners? Is it, you know, the way the market economy works with housing? I mean, where does housing fit into this? I don’t know. There’s interesting things you could. You could do and in a way that’s much more simpler than I think like the initial or metabolism because you’re right.

[00:15:34] That is overwhelming to think about all those different things and how they connect. And, you know, I’m sort of thinking about the parks and rec show and like, each department is in there.

[00:15:45] Jeff Wood: Who’s the Ron Swanson, right?

[00:15:48] Wes Marshall: That’s always the best question. Who’s the Ron

[00:15:50] Jeff Wood: Swanson? Who’s the Ron Swanson? Um, well, no, it brings up also like this thing that I’ve really been struck by over the last several years, which is when we talked to Mindy Fullilove, Dr.

[00:15:58] Mindy Fullilove, um, you know, she talks about the biopsychosocial model and how there’s a biomedical model and the biopsychosocial model. And so, When you think about her work in, in talking about this idea of root shock, moving people away from the places where they grew up in the homes that they lived in, um, you know, a lot of the medical stuff that happens can be predicted ahead of time, or there’s a system in place that can help in your time of need that isn’t based on the medical system.

[00:16:25] That’s the last resort, right? So you have. The doctor’s office, you have all the medicines, you have all the things that are like, this is the last resort of things when you’re having trouble with your health, but in the meantime, or before that, you have all of these, you know, systems that exist to make you healthier, the built environment that you live in, the transportation that you use, the, the amount of that you walk or bike, um, the amount of exercise you get, um, the social, um, you know, social group that you run in.

[00:16:51] One of the things that. Uh, I saw, I think it was the Ig Nobel’s came out and this one guy had disproved blue zones, right? Blue zones, the idea that you have certain parts of the world that like live longer than the others. And they, they, they brought it down to like, there’s a lot of falsification of records in these places versus other places.

[00:17:09] So people are getting all the benefits. of their grandparents or something along those lines. Um, but also the biggest kind of determinant of social determinant of health is your, your, your networks, the people that you’re around. And so, you know, determining that before you, you know, having a good, you know, social network, having friends and family, having the people around you to, you know, make you not lonely.

[00:17:30] The loneliness epidemic is a huge thing right now, uh, discussed and especially by the Surgeon General. Those are the things that, that before you get to the doctor’s office, you know, those are the social networks and the things that actually can keep your health going. And so if we think about, you know, urban systems from that perspective, as you know, you can think about it from a two and two tiers, you can preventative medicine and then the medical medicine, right?

[00:17:52] Preventative medicine is all this other stuff, the biopsychosocial model, thinking about your friends, networks and all that stuff. And then you have the medicine at the end, at the end stage, which is like, okay, I have. You know, I got a infection. I need my penicillin and that that’ll make me better. But before that, maybe don’t, you know, have a neighborhood where you have to step on thorns all the time, where you might get a cut.

[00:18:11] Right. Um, so thinking about it that way also is interesting to me as well.

[00:18:16] Wes Marshall: And I saw the, the blue zone debunking research, like it’s the places where the government gives a lot of benefits to like. Yeah. Age 65 or plus or something and those same places often don’t have good birth records So people when they’re like 40 would be like, oh, yeah, i’m 65 like give me all those benefits all of a sudden when they get to be like 75 they think they’re 100 the government does and Um, that’s that was really interesting.

[00:18:41] So I remember uh, chuck marone’s book the confessions of a recovering engineer He had a short chapter in there like learning from biology and not physics You Like, in terms of how we build streets, how we build cities, and one thing I talked about in my book was yeah, that we need more kind of generalists and not specialists, and I pointed the two of my best grad students weren’t civil engineering undergrads like a lot of my other students were, they, this is just a strange coincidence, both of them were biology majors as undergrads, like one had a double major with French and the other had a minor with French literature.

[00:19:17] And it’s just a weird coincidence they both had this, but they were much better than a lot of our typical students to kind of seeing the bigger picture to understanding that, you know, there are no simple solutions sometimes when it comes to transportation and cities that there’s complex feedback loops.

[00:19:35] There’s things that people that are impacted by things that we do as transportation engineers that Translation engineers never usually think about. So there is some benefit, I think, to thinking about things in the kind of the bigger, you know, more holistic ways. But having that background, like maybe in the biology type things, and maybe thinking about these things seems like it doesn’t hurt the cause for, I mean, big picture, right?

[00:20:03] Jeff Wood: Yeah. No, I think, well, I think the holistic thing is really important. I mean, that’s, I’ve talked about this on the show many times and we might have talked about this last time, but the, the idea that you can connect, you know, the environment, cities, urban issues, and urbanism and transportation is really important because all these things are connected.

[00:20:20] And, um, you know, I, I think at our peril, we silo and. You know, try too hard to, um, you know, put things in their boxes. And, and if we don’t think holistically, we’ll get these outcomes that we’re really not looking for with those bad feedback feedback loops that you were talking about. And so, um, that’s really interesting.

[00:20:38] It’s really interesting. They were bright biology, but also interesting. They were French. Uh, majors and, um, I’m not sure why the case, but also, you know, there’s something, uh, you know, French was a main language for a really long time. And so I wonder if there’s a lot of historical, uh, you know, manuscripts or, or books or something like that, that they could read that might have some more information of, of maybe what French speaking folks are thinking about these things long time ago.

[00:21:03] I’m always interested, like, I wish I knew Chinese, my wife, because I’m sure that there’s tons of like books in some obscure library that has something interesting in it, um, that I’ve probably just couldn’t, uh, couldn’t find, but, you know, I guess that’s part of living one life instead of a million.

[00:21:22] Wes Marshall: Yeah, I mean, it was funny because when I was in Bogota, everyone’s speaking Spanish and they always had sort of an interpreter with me.

[00:21:28] And by the way, those people are amazing. Like, they’re Repeating what I’m saying in real time, also listening to what I’m saying and like repeating that in a second.

[00:21:39] Jeff Wood: It’s

[00:21:39] Wes Marshall: awesome. It’s so awesome, but at the same time when I had five years of high school, like middle school Spanish, and all I can sort of ask for is where the library is.

[00:21:49] Donde

[00:21:50] Jeff Wood: esta la biblioteca? Exactly.

[00:21:53] Wes Marshall: We do such a bad job, I think, of teaching four languages in this country. It feels like it’s better now, like my daughter’s in middle school and like the way they’re doing it is, I don’t know, it makes more sense to me than just learning vocab. Yeah, I have lots of

[00:22:06] Jeff Wood: vocab.

[00:22:10] Wes Marshall: I can barely have a conversation with somebody when I was in Bogota, right?

[00:22:14] I can, if they’re talking slow enough and I can probably get out a few things, but yeah, think about trying to spend five years of your life learning, you know, some other language and still ending up where I ended up with Spanish. Like, You don’t have time for that. Like you only have, like you said, one life to live.

[00:22:30] Jeff Wood: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:22:32] Wes Marshall: Lingo might be better, I’m not sure. My son is learning some languages on that and is having fun, but I’m not sure. It’s a hard thing and maybe some people’s brain wraps around it a lot easier because you hear these people that know like six languages.

[00:22:46] Jeff Wood: Some people are linguistically talented.

[00:22:49] One of our neighbors in Texas knew like five or six languages and I guess they were all tied to like a romance language, but You, he could speak them all fluently. And it was like, what, I wish I was like that. I wish my brain worked that way. Um, yeah, mine

[00:23:03] Wes Marshall: doesn’t either. And some of these like professor types that were in Bogota with me, they didn’t need the translator.

[00:23:08] They just started speaking in Spanish. And, um, I was like, nope, I sort of need that.

[00:23:13] Jeff Wood: What’s crazy is if you ever go to like an IUTP conference, which is like the international APTA, right. They, they have like on the plenaries, at least the one that I went to in Montreal, they have like, A whole like side room and they’re all boxes and they’re all translators for different languages.

[00:23:30] And so you can get your pieces to correspond with the box and the person who’s translating in that language. So you have like a French, you have like Spanish, German, Japanese, Italian, whatever it is. Like they have somebody and in these, in these like kind of rooms doing the translations for the plenary.

[00:23:45] And it’s really wild, like seeing all the, all, and I’m sure international conferences are all like, you look at the UN, these people have earpieces in, right? They’re all have translators of some sort.

[00:23:53] Wes Marshall: Which was so cool. And they gave us headphones to like, even when we did some of our walking towards some of the hotspots, I could just throw on the headphones and people were having like a powwow.

[00:24:02] I could just walk away and kind of explore. Cause I could still hear them talking and get a translation. I didn’t have to like stand right next to him. So it was actually. Pretty useful. I could just take a lot more pictures of the streets and the intersections than I would have if I was right up listening to them.

[00:24:16] Talk.

[00:24:16] Jeff Wood: That’s

[00:24:16] Wes Marshall: awesome.

[00:24:17] Jeff Wood: Well, I want to I want to hear from folks. I want to hear from folks what they think if there’s like, any like, biological connections to planning transportation, planning, urban planning, they have on their minds, uh, send in the overhead wire at gmail. com. Feel free to let us know. And I’ll share those with Wes.

[00:24:31] Uh, because it is interesting to think about those. Connections between the two. And there I’m sure that, you know, we’ve all seen the, we’ve all seen the slime mold that recreates a transit network, transportation networks, right? You’ve seen that. Uh, where somebody puts, like, pieces of food at major urban centers, and then they have the slime mold recreate the, the, the subway network or something along those lines.

[00:24:49] Um, there is, there are connections there. It’s really interesting.

[00:24:52] Wes Marshall: A friend of mine, um, Nick Lowndes at UConn, was doing some research on street networks and ants. So, like, sort of letting ants, uh, Develop their networks and trying to see how that would work as a transportation network. I’m not sure whatever happened to the output of that study.

[00:25:06] But when he was writing that proposal, I was like, Oh, that’s interesting. We’ll see what happens.

[00:25:10] Jeff Wood: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. And don’t get me started on ants. Like, they count, they count in their head how far they go. And I know people research on that. Yeah. Yeah, so, um, an old friend of mine, um, basically did this research where they looked at like the distance to ants and how they kind of found their way back and forth between places.

[00:25:30] And they count because what would happen is, um, they did this kind of weird experiment where they cut their legs in half. And so they only went halfway, uh, and back to where they were supposed to be. And so they figured out that they actually count their steps. Um, I have to look up the research and see, like, if that’s, if I’m remembering it, right.

[00:25:51] But it feels like that’s what they did. Um, so people do all kinds of, I’ll call it kinds of weird.

[00:25:56] Wes Marshall: Really interesting. And I’m glad I’m not doing research like that where I have to cut off.

[00:26:01] Jeff Wood: I know. Why would I, I was thinking like, why would you do that in the first place? But apparently somebody did. And it sounds like a little bit like animal cruelty of certain sorts, but ants, I don’t know.

[00:26:10] Wes Marshall: My high school biology class, I had all these fruit flies living in my room. Cause I, my like term project was on their eye color and I had to use like ether to put them asleep and count how many different eye colors. And, um, I think in the end I used too much ether and they all died. Like it was, Oh my gosh.

[00:26:29] Jeff Wood: Just don’t use the ether on yourself. No, I’m

[00:26:31] Wes Marshall: glad I’m

[00:26:32] Jeff Wood: not doing that kind of research. No, no. Well, thanks to everybody who’s ordered bus and bike scarves. Uh, I just put out a call on, on, on threads and, uh, Twitter and on Macedon showing, having a, I put up a picture and put up a link. So check that out. If you get a chance, uh, email me at the overhead wire at gmail.

[00:26:48] com. If you want to get one or go to the overhead wire. com as always, thanks to our Patreon supporters, patreon. com slash the overhead wire. Also, thanks to everybody who’s been buying books at the bookshop site bookshop. org slash shop slash the overhead wire. Um, Paul comfort’s book is number one in that, in that, uh, domain right now, folks have been, uh, taken that one to home with them.

[00:27:06] So that’s been good. And then also, as we mentioned, uh, cars are cholesterol, uh, Richard was enske who designed that image for us. Uh, he is at Dick David sketches on Instagram. It’s inktober. Which is a month where you get a prompt every single day during October, uh, if you’re an artist and you make a drawing.

[00:27:23] So he does robots and every day is a different robot that he likes to draw. So go check him out if you get a chance. And we also strongly suggest folks sign up for the newsletter, which is, uh, newly improved. We actually, um, just redid our website and. In the newsletter, in addition to the articles, we have the tags underneath each article.

[00:27:40] So if you’re a subscriber, you can click on a tag of a topic you care about and see all of the previous articles on that topic we’ve ever posted. So check that out. If you get a chance, this is episode one 60, we’re live and in session. And also before we get to the show, I want to let folks know, you can get your podcasts anywhere on iHeartRadio, Spotify, Overcast, PocketCast, Apple Podcasts, wherever you find your podcasts.

[00:27:59] This is also be on YouTube. So check that out if you get a chance. So. The reason why people are here, the news, uh, I, I do, I do hope that folks like, uh, uh, us chatting and all that stuff because it’s fun. Um, but also you all are come here to hear the news and listen to kind of what’s going on. So, um, I’ve got some good news stories for you, uh, starting off with, uh, Connecting Texas and Mexico officials from Texas and Mexico got together to discuss passenger rail between Austin, San Antonio, and the city of Monterey in Mexico.

[00:28:30] The line would be promoted as increasing commerce between the two cities and mirrors, a Mexican expansion plan that would connect Mexico city and the Texas and Arizona borders. However, the biggest barrier would be funding as tech start is now focused on expanding roads and aligned between Houston and Dallas that has Amtrak’s attention as well.

[00:28:45] This was by Chris Della Jones in my San Antonio. And this is also on the heels of. Another item that I feel like is connected to this, which is the 60 year anniversary of high speed rail in Japan, Japan’s first high speed rail line launched 60 years ago between Tokyo and Osaka, just before the Olympics cutting travel time from seven hours to four and ushering in a new era of transportation.

[00:29:05] And that item is by Justin Curry in the guardian. So Wes, what do you think about connecting Texas and Mexico with high speed rail? Or electrified rail, I should say.

[00:29:16] Wes Marshall: This would be great, right? I mean, I, when I first read this, I thought of, it was a, I think it was a tweet I saw, but I looked it up and I couldn’t find it, but somebody was just starting off with the lyrics to the song, Don’t Stop Believing, the journey song, like small town girl living in a lonely world.

[00:29:31] She took the midnight train going anywhere, and they wrote like dot, dot, dot. It’s like, no, she didn’t. Like, her options were extremely limited due to our terrible rail network. So she didn’t really get to go anywhere. She went probably You know, to a very limited subset of options. And this would, I don’t know, this would be so cool.

[00:29:51] And it was interesting to sort of see some of the history of how many rail lines there were at one point. At the same time, you start seeing them immediately jump to, well, we don’t have money for this. Like we can’t ever fund it. And then when I look up how much money tech stuff is spent on highways. No, they’ve just dedicated, I think, like a hundred billion dollars to highways over the next decade, right?

[00:30:14] A

[00:30:14] Jeff Wood: hundred, a hundred fifty billion or something like that, they’re like, this is our hundred fifty billion dollar plan for highways. Yeah, so that feels like a

[00:30:20] Wes Marshall: A false argument. They have the money, but they’re just sort of not willing to put it towards this, they’d much more rather put it towards highways.

[00:30:26] So, like, that hurdle just seems like a false one to me, but yeah, I mean, I feel like it would be, it would be a great thing. Like, uh, you’re from Texas, so I’m curious to hear your thoughts on what, how it would change, like, lives down there.

[00:30:42] Jeff Wood: It’s interesting. I wouldn’t have changed my life, honestly, because I was going back and forth between Houston and Austin, um, but I do think that there’s a lot of folks who go back that, you know, they, they have family in Mexico.

[00:30:52] Um, there’s a lot of trade that happens between Mexico and Texas. Um, obviously they, the largest thing is actually cars. The Mexico builds cars like Volkswagens and stuff, and then they send them over the border to the United States, um, and sell them. And so there’s a big trade, uh, you know, yeah. Thing going on with that.

[00:31:11] And so I think that that would be really helpful too. But I think the biggest thing is just kind of connected commerce and connecting people with their families and folks, and even getting people to go over and do some, some traveling and stuff. I know, um, you know, when I was younger, I remember going to a soccer tournament and one of the teams was from Monterey and they sent, they gave us like one of their little flags and I still have it.

[00:31:32] And I was just like, that’s so cool. Like the people coming over from Mexico to come to this soccer tournament in Houston somewhere. Um, and just like those types of connections I feel like would be very valuable people could come from, you know, Monterey and go to a soccer tournament in, in Austin, and they could just go for the weekend and go on the train and they wouldn’t have to drive up, You know, up through San Antonio and up to I 35.

[00:31:53] And so I think those types of connections would be really fun and really important. Um, I do think you’re right about, you know, there’s plenty of money in Texas to do this. And also on the other side of the equation, Mexico is planning to do these makes these connections from Mexico city to Arizona and Texas.

[00:32:09] And through Monterey, right? So, um, that’s a huge thing that, that Claudia Sean bomb, the new president of Mexico is actually put some focus into. She doesn’t, the previous president did a bunch of rail line expansions, the, the Aztec train and things like that. Um, but most of it was diesel or, or, you know, uh, you know, fuels that wouldn’t, uh, jive with, uh, You know, the president, the new president’s, uh, climate sensibility.

[00:32:35] So her idea is to put electrification, electrification, electrify, electrification. Is that a thing? Electrification, electrifying the rail lines.

[00:32:43] Wes Marshall: If it’s not, it should be.

[00:32:46] Jeff Wood: Uh, and so she has plans for like 1800 miles, uh, Of of rail line and and going, you know, and 7 different lines are in her plan. Uh, that, you know, I actually, I think I linked to it in 1 of the stories that I wrote up for the overhead wire.

[00:33:00] Um, but there’s a big plan down there. And so it’s only, you know, it’s only realistic to actually make the connection between those lines that are going to Mexico City and going north towards San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, and, uh, Oklahoma City, uh, and beyond. And so, you know, those connections I think are going to be really important.

[00:33:17] And it kind of goes back to that idea of, of what Japan did in the sixties before the Tokyo Olympics and, you know, connecting all those smaller places that could be connected with a faster train. And I think that’s something that we’re kind of missing these days, uh, from our infrastructure discussion is we, we talk Airlines and we talk about driving, but what about a faster connection between smaller towns?

[00:33:36] Uh, one of the things that was happening here in California during the discussion about where we should put our high speed rail line was, well, we should just run it up by five. The only places that matter are Los Angeles and San Francisco. So just connect those two, which you leave out 3. 5 million people that are in the Central Valley in these huge growing places like.

[00:33:52] Fresno and Bakersfield. And so I think that with all of the stuff that’s happening in the manufacturing space, uh, from the chips act, from, uh, from the, you know, infrastructure bill from the inflation reduction act, all this investment that’s going on in alternative energy. What if we had a transportation network that connected all these places that we’re doing the manufacturing and you had these, the ability to go between these places and, and if you could take a train to anywhere.

[00:34:18] Like the journey song said, you could go somewhere. And so you could go to these smaller places and it connects the economies of these places. And I think that that’s a really, really big, important point of this is that you’re not just connecting San Antonio, Austin, and Monterey. You’re connecting a number of the towns along the way.

[00:34:34] And I think that’s the same with Tokyo and the Shinkansen was you’re not just connecting these two major cities. You’re connecting some of the places in between. And so you’re bringing them along and your economic development plans.

[00:34:46] Wes Marshall: Well, you’re not just connecting them. I mean, to some extent, you’re changing them.

[00:34:50] Like, people always, in the Denver area, talk about, like, a train to the mountains. Like, if we could get to, you know, Breckenridge or Vail or, you know, some of those mountain towns on a high speed rail, it’s, you’re not just connecting it and, you know, replacing the car trips people are doing now. If you can get from a city Like Vale or town like Vale to Denver in like less than an hour.

[00:35:10] You’re changing what Vale is and who lives there and how they use that place. And, you know, there are examples I’ve heard of, you know, these high speed rails between like towns in China that were separated by a mountain that it, you know, what was once a 10 hour drive became a one hour drive. Um, I think I’m also wondering, like, how, like, with that and with this change, how land uses and those changes respond to, like, in Japan, like, before and after the high speed rail.

[00:35:38] Um, you might remember this better than I do, but I guess it was back with the Obama administration where they were talking about high speed rail in, like, Florida. Right. And at the time, I was like, well, that would be cool. But at the same time, all those Florida cities aren’t that walkable once you get off the train.

[00:35:53] Like, what do you do then? Like, now it’s maybe easier because there’s scooters or Uber things like that. You know, you wouldn’t really get the benefits of high speed rail unless those cities We’re a little bit different than they were then or even now. So, uh, yeah, I’d be curious how these places change to not just, you know, you’re not just connecting what they are, you’re changing what they’re going to be.

[00:36:18] Jeff Wood: It’s interesting because I feel like you’re correct, but also I want to say that, um, We, we would more treat these places like mini airports than we would maybe like a mini subway stations. And I, and I do think that it’s important to have walkability and the ability to get somewhere when you get off the train to, you know, a destination.

[00:36:38] But also I think that there’s, um, something to be said for when you get to a destination, when you fly somewhere, you don’t necessarily have a car either. You may rent a car, you may take a taxi, you may, um, get on the bus or whatever it may be, or you might have some friend pick you up from the airport, whatever it may be.

[00:36:53] But I feel like that’s the kind of like. Interconnected, uh, you know, intermodal thinking that maybe these stations would perpetuate rather than, um, maybe more like a subway, but I do think that they are more useful if you come into a place where you can get to a number of other places without having to have somebody pick you up in a car, for example.

[00:37:13] Um, so there’s like a difference in thinking maybe about like, when you arrive somewhere, what does that mean? Uh, and how are you going to get somewhere, uh, you know, otherwise. And so. Yeah, I, I, I do think there’s that discussion that he’s having and a lot of cities, they, they want to be more walkable. They want to try to, you know, make their downtowns in the places that that also, you know, is another question too, is like, where do you put these stations?

[00:37:37] Do you put them where they’re supposed to be in the downtown in the place where is most walkable? Or are you trying to get them or be like Bakersfield, which decided to put it far out because it’s cheaper. And, uh, you know, it doesn’t bother some people. People in the downtown area, when they’re doing construction, there’s a, there’s, you know, uh, Eric Eidlin of the show, um, teaches about, you know, high speed rail in France and Germany.

[00:38:00] He went to head a German Marshall fund fellowship to go over there and do some research. He talked about these, these French beat field stations where there’s nothing there and people just parked their cars and then they drive, you know, they go somewhere else. And so there’s not a lot of economic development or development that goes around these beat field stations, but they do serve some sort of a purpose, like a parking ride to a certain extent, but they’re not going to be the most.

[00:38:19] Bang for your buck in terms of economic development, for sure.

[00:38:22] Wes Marshall: I would love it if they, I mean, some of them just went off to the middle of nowhere and started building new towns as opposed to just. Paralleling our highways, like at a smaller scale.

[00:38:31] Jeff Wood: That’s true.

[00:38:32] Wes Marshall: The Denver light rail, I think one of the mistakes we made here is we just paralleled a lot of the highways.

[00:38:37] Like the thinking was, oh, we hope this reduces congestion. And that’s really not what transit is for. So it didn’t fail because it never reduced congestion, but it’s supposed to do something else, right? It’s supposed to connect people to opportunities. And that’s what it did. It gave people options. It gave people a different way to get around.

[00:38:52] And now we’re changing over from park and rides more to TODs or transit oriented communities. At the same time, every single one of those station areas, you’re cutting off half of the walkable space with like a highway. Or like this heavy freight rail and you would get the same sort of issues if you do this along highways through big cities, like, or is there going to end up like parking rides and it’s going to be replacing more airport trips than anything else.

[00:39:22] Um, I don’t know. I’d be curious. I mean, the way we built America, a lot of it was just, we were just. Throwing railroads out to like Chicago all of a sudden Chicago becomes this big city because of the railroad and why can’t we do that again? Like why can’t we have new cities and start them rather than with a highway do it with rail?

[00:39:41] Jeff Wood: Yeah, no, it’s it’s a good point. Um, I feel like there’s a you know, even though the subway’s in new york city, right? There’s a lot of places that they’ve just built the subway to and it was empty at the time and now it’s a Thriving huge neighborhood. Um, totally it’s also kind of a it goes to that thinking about You Like, what are, what are our investments for?

[00:40:01] Right. Are they for, you know, moving people? Are they for economic development? Are they for both? Um, and what that means overall, in terms of where you’re trying to cite stations, I feel like we have this problem, like you mentioned, where we’re, we’re always kind of second fiddle to the roads and, and in Denver, specifically at the tech center, I always wondered why, like the, the, the line doesn’t go underneath the tech center instead of like around on the other side of the highway.

[00:40:27] We have to. Walk over this big thing. It would have been hugely beneficial to the property owners there. Um, and connect downtown and, and, and the tech center in that way. Um, it is kind of now, but you have to walk across the highway, right? And, and cold morning. I can’t imagine that’s very fun. So, um, you know, it’s like, we’re always, like you said, copying where the highway went, but.

[00:40:48] The transit systems that we should be building are the ones where we’re creating place and, you know, developing a different way of, of living

[00:40:57] Wes Marshall: even my campus. I’m on the rare rear campus in downtown Denver. I what I can’t verify the story, but I’ve heard it from a few different folks. Is that R. T. D. R.

[00:41:06] transit provider. They offered to put our transit station in the middle of campus. The powers that be of campus at the time said no, like we wanted out on the edge and that’s where our light rail stations are. Like from my office, I have to go to the edge of campus to get to any of them. Um, you know, same thing happened at one of the malls down one of the southeast or southwest corridors.

[00:41:27] I don’t go to malls very often. I can’t remember what the name of the mall was, but apparently the owner of the mall didn’t think the type of people that shop in malls would be using transit. So the light rail station is on the far end of the parking lot Um, like along like the highway or the rail and in order for someone to get from the rail station to the, to the mall, they have to walk across the entirety of the whole mall parking lot, you know, how big mall parking lots are.

[00:41:52] But you couldn’t even do that at the beginning because there was no connection. So I think the mall owner had to go back later and add a pedestrian bridge or something like that because he finally realized that people that use transit also shop at malls.

[00:42:05] Jeff Wood: Yeah.

[00:42:06] Wes Marshall: Um, that became.

[00:42:07] Jeff Wood: Wasn’t there also like, wasn’t there also like a medical center up, um, that connects, like the, the airport line goes like this, and then there’s a line that comes like this, and then there’s like a medical center, and they made them go around, or made them,

[00:42:19] Wes Marshall: you know.

[00:42:19] It’s kind of part of my university, so the Andrews Medical Campus is part of CU Denver. It’s on the other side of where I live, and for that one, they were actually worried about the train shaking some, You know, high medical equipment that is very precise, right? If the train is shaking the ground, like it might mess up some of the things they’re doing.

[00:42:41] So they put that one sort of on the edge of it as well. And there’s a shuttle that brings people back from that train station to, you know, where they’re going, but also parking. It’s free in a lot of those areas. So it doesn’t, it doesn’t really matter. A lot of people doesn’t really make sense to use the transit.

[00:42:55] Jeff Wood: Yeah,

[00:42:56] Wes Marshall: there’s well, I

[00:42:57] Jeff Wood: feel like the university of Minnesota tried to make that same argument with the green line to where they’re like, we have some, some medical equipment or some, you know, some seismic, uh, something we had to measure with, with millibars and it’s not going in the train and just like, just put rubber underneath the tracks.

[00:43:12] You’re, you’re fine.

[00:43:13] Wes Marshall: It seems like a fixable problem to me. Like, so You know, it was a lot of extra work to move it from where the plan was, and it’s not nearly as convenient for people that use it. So, yeah, I didn’t really dive into it at the time, but it’s, um, you know, it’s a problem that should have been able to be fixed, it feels like.

[00:43:34] Jeff Wood: Well, hopefully these, uh, I know that the lines in Mexico will be built. Uh, the president has said that that’s part of her plan. Um, and then let’s see what happens in Texas. I think that, um, you know, it’s interesting that Texas and, and, and Mexican, you know, leaders have signed, uh, basically signed, uh, a pact to say that they’re going to explore this.

[00:43:51] And so we’ll see what actually comes, uh, comes of that.

[00:43:54] Wes Marshall: Yeah, I’m, I’m excited to see

[00:43:56] Jeff Wood: what happens. All right. Next up maps show hazards and migration as the U S population shifts. Much of the growth is happening in areas prone to wildfires, flooding and extreme heat. The sprawl increases demand for infrastructure and services while placing more people in the path of extreme weather, undermining gains and building codes and resilience efforts.

[00:44:12] This was by Mira Rojan Sakhul and Nadia Parikh. Popovich in the New York times, this was a really cool, like interactive map. They showed where migration was happening, but also where kind of some of the hazards are and they overlap with each other, obviously. Um, I was hit in the face with the sprawl. I’m wondering what you, what you, uh, took away from this one.

[00:44:32] Wes Marshall: I think the first thing I took away from some of these articles in this whole list you had was just how awesome the maps were.

[00:44:38] Jeff Wood: Yeah, they’re great.

[00:44:39] Wes Marshall: There’s some great graphics, there’s some great before and after, there’s great maps. Um, you know, so that was, you know, they’re really fun articles to kind of flip through.

[00:44:47] Especially for me, I also, In addition to transportation courses, I’m teaching like an intro to GIS course, right? So I’m always looking for cool maps to show people. Like, I remember a bunch of years ago, I went to Edward Tufte. Do you know that guy? Yeah, yeah. He does those envisioning information things and sort of has a great presentation on how important the visualization of our data is.

[00:45:07] And a lot of this reminded me of that. Um, I also saw an article. I think a couple of days before you sent me these, Zillow is going to start giving information about climate risk on their

[00:45:21] Jeff Wood: Oh, I thought they already did that. They’re doing, they’re, they’ve made an announcement about it.

[00:45:25] Wes Marshall: They made an announcement.

[00:45:26] So they’re, is it on there already?

[00:45:28] Jeff Wood: I, I thought maybe when you start, or maybe it’s a different, uh, maybe it’s, um, not Zillow, but Redfin or somebody has, um, you know, they, they have like flooding, the flood maps or the hundred year flood plains or something like that. You can like turn on the, the, the layer or something like that.

[00:45:40] Yeah, no,

[00:45:41] Wes Marshall: I think there’s, um, I think what I read, there’s five different. Areas, like categories of information, so flood, wildfire, wind, heat and air quality, along with some insurance recommendations for this. Because one of the things we actually did in my GIS class was show that a lot of these places that are most prone to, like, wildfires or floods.

[00:46:03] are attracting a lot of inmovers. And not only are these people being put at risk, but it exacerbates the risk in these places. So there seems to be a disconnect between all of this in a way that, like, we’re not spatially organizing ourselves in a way that helps any of these problems. And yes, I get it.

[00:46:22] I’m a, I’m a guy that loves going to the beach and being in Denver, that’s one of the things I miss. So we always go to Cape Cod every year and spend some time there. And, you know, I, I look at some of the sort of the houses for sale and some of them are way lower than you would think. And the reason being is because that house, like I did the math on one of them.

[00:46:42] I try to look at how far the coast is coming in,

[00:46:44] Speaker 3: like in

[00:46:45] Wes Marshall: eight years, that house should be gone. Yeah. That’s why that house is a fraction of the price. Or you hear about these houses in Nantucket that would be like a multi million dollar house selling for like 200 grand because it’s going to be gone in a couple of years.

[00:46:57] It’s an interesting sort of problem that we’re still attracting people to these risky areas instead of trying to attract people to places that are lower risk. At the same time, there are fewer places that are lower risk too. So, I think Denver is one of those places, but it’s, you know, there’s different risks, right?

[00:47:19] Jeff Wood: I saw, I think it was on Instagram or something. I saw like the, in North Carolina on the Outer Banks, there’s like, they have every other day, it feels like they have, they show a picture of a house getting demolished. Broken down because it, it finally, the, the ocean caught up with it. Um, and then that, I mean, that, that goes to the also, also the discussion that they’re having in Galveston, that was one of the other articles that I’ve, I’ve shared with you.

[00:47:39] I have a whole list of them. There’s a bunch of Washington post ones about the Galveston and flooding in North Carolina and repairing roads and all that stuff, but the Galveston one. Specifically, Galveston is interesting to me because I grew up in Houston and you always hear about how there was this huge, it’s like 1906 earthquake in San Francisco.

[00:47:57] There was a 1900 hurricane in Galveston. Galveston was the largest city was the state Capitol. It was the place for commerce because it was right on the ocean. Right. But it got wiped out completely by this hurricane in 1900. And so they actually backfilled the land. They raised it up like five, 10 feet, and then they built this huge seawall and now.

[00:48:16] People developers see there’s a, there’s value to living near the beach, like you’re talking about, but they’re like inching to maybe a little bit outside the seawall, maybe a little bit on the side. And it’s like, are you serious right now? You want to, you want to build and sell, or you want to buy a condo that’s like, On the other side of the seawall, just barely, uh, where the, where if there is a hurricane storm surge, is this going to wipe you out unless you have like a, you’re ridiculously, you know, concrete build, um, that have that some people have done like that.

[00:48:45] You see these pictures in, in, uh, Alabama or wherever have somebody that decided to build a storm home. And it’s the only one left on, on the, on the ocean, uh, after it, after it gets comes through. But. You know, they, they want to keep doing this. And so people are putting themselves at risk by building these homes in these places, because.

[00:49:03] They have access to the beach.

[00:49:05] Wes Marshall: That history of Galveston was super interesting to me. I didn’t really know all this. I mean, the fact that 6000 people died in that hurricane in 1900 and then, you know, around 1930, they literally just raised every building and they. There’s this amazing before and after graphic of a house that was raised and they built this elevated walkway for pedestrians that became the sidewalk.

[00:49:31] And it was way higher than where the original sidewalk was, but then you see, You know, what do they have like a 17 foot seawall they built and yeah, there’s that one example of, um, like the Riviera buildings that were on the water. They used to have a pool, but the pool’s gone and now these three buildings or two buildings are right on the edge of the water.

[00:49:50] And a lot of it, I grew up in the Boston area, so a lot of it reminded me of the fact Boston was built on wetlands or marshes, like a lot of it. Something like 1 6th of Boston was just fill. Yeah. They took some of the hills in Boston. They covered the marshes and wetlands and, you know, things like the Trinity church.

[00:50:10] I’ve heard of like 4500 wood pilings keeping it up because it would just sink otherwise. And I think it’s similar for, you know, lower Manhattan had some of this Tokyo. San Francisco.

[00:50:22] Jeff Wood: Yeah. San Francisco. The Netherlands. They filled in a lot.

[00:50:24] Wes Marshall: Um, I think the Netherlands did it differently. They built some dams and pumped out the water as opposed to just filling it, but it’s really interesting.

[00:50:32] And, um, one of the places we go in Cape Cod, there’s these, it’s near like Nassau beach. Um, now there’s, there’s three lighthouses. I think they’re called the three sisters and they’re sort of on land and a little bit further up from the beach. this last summer, I was looking at the map and They had moved them like two or three times over history, like they used to be here and then they moved them here because like the ocean keeps coming further and further in.

[00:50:59] It’s like, and you just sort of realize that someday like Cape Cod will be gone, like Galveston, you can only fight it for so long. And, and then it becomes a question like, is it worth it? Like, is it, are we using tax dollars for this kind of stuff? Yeah. Um, does it make sense to keep going back to these places that are having these thousand year floods like every other year?

[00:51:24] Um, if you know the definition of a hundred year flood or something, it means that in any given year, there’s a one in a hundred chance of you having a flood to that level. But those numbers don’t. They’re being thrown out the window because we’re getting these floods way more often than statistically we should be able to.

[00:51:39] Jeff Wood: I think in Houston, uh, right around Harvey or something like that, Hurricane Harvey, which dropped like 50 inches in like three days, which is an insane amount of water. Um, they had like in the last five years or something, they had like 300 year floods. So yeah, the, the, the new math is not working out for it.

[00:51:55] Um, There were three things I wanted to mention about these, I, these things, and I, I’ve been writing a little bit about this recently. And so I’ve been thinking about a little bit more about it, but I think there’s three kind of important things to consider when we’re talking about kind of migration, climate change, insurance stuff, et cetera.

[00:52:09] Um, the first thing is like the amount we’re sprawling is crazy. The, the people that are moving from the manufacturing belt, the historic, uh, you know, manufacturing belt of the United States, I think people, They have called in the rust belt, but I’m trying to get away from that to a certain extent. Um, but people move from there to the sunbelt and, you know, basically we’ve sprawled so much.

[00:52:28] We’re putting more people in harm’s way. I think there was, there was, uh, in the article, they talk about this insurance company, Swiss Re, who’s saying like, well, about 10 years ago, 15 years ago, the, the hurricanes that have came, came through wouldn’t have had as much impact because there wouldn’t have been as many people living in the, in, in the way.

[00:52:42] Right. And so you have that issue specifically. Um, and so we’re, we’re incentivizing the sprawl. We’re incentivizing people to live in these dangerous areas. The second thing is like the amount of storm damage and potential and risk is driving up these insurance costs, which is making some companies, some of these companies leave states altogether.

[00:52:59] And it creates a situation where the state has to like step up and create its own insurance, like Florida has. Um, but then what that makes happen is like all of the state. Taxpayers are on the hook for these bailouts, uh, that come along. And so we actually had David Schleicher on the show, uh, and this, I keep coming back to this guy, I think it’s really interesting, but he wrote his book in a bad state talking about like bailouts and what they mean for, um, transportation bonds, right?

[00:53:25] So basically cities are built on municipal bonds and bond ratings. And so if the state can’t back these bonds, and if this, if The U S has to bail out too many times. We hit this moral dilemma where, um, you know, can we keep building infrastructure? Can we build climate infrastructure if it’s going to cost so much because the bond ratings go down.

[00:53:44] So there’s that impact as well. And the third thing that I thought about was like, there’s no such thing as a climate Haven, right? We like this. This is kind of, there’s a reckoning coming because of my second point about insurance and how insurance rates are going up, and it’s gonna cause a lot of people to not be insured.

[00:54:00] Uh, you were talking about the houses that only going for like $200,000 because they would be 5 million, but instead, you know, the insurance rates probably crazy on them and um, and they’re gonna be gone. So it’s only worth like a hundred thousand, 200,000 investment if that. And so I think this is actually going to lead to like a new migration period.

[00:54:17] And so you’re going to have to figure out, and this is, goes back to that discussion we’re about having about high speed rail and where you put stations. Right. It’s like if people are migrating back to the industrial core of, you know, of, of the Northwest, Northeast. Then where do you put the houses? Where do you build the infrastructure?

[00:54:35] Where do you have people move to? Is it in the core cities where you can, you know, create more climate resilience, or are you going to just keep sprawling again and put them in more harm’s way because there isn’t a climate haven? So those are the three things that kind of came to my mind as I was thinking about this and as I’ve been thinking about this over time is, you know, basically if people are getting, there is going to be this migration.

[00:54:54] We had this migration before it put people in harm’s way. We’re going to have this migration again. What are we going to do next time?

[00:55:00] Wes Marshall: It’s funny because some of those articles on Asheville you sent, they literally said that real estate experts were touting these Asheville as a climate haven, but then what do they have two and a half feet of rain in three days and yeah, hundreds and hundreds of roads were closed and it’s, it’s.

[00:55:18] Yeah, it was interesting to see some of the stuff of what they want to do, like the spongy roads that are permeable and stuff like that. Um, I don’t know, we have to think differently, we have to do something differently because we can’t keep recovering to the, on the regular basis we’ve had to do from all these sort of things.

[00:55:39] Um, oh, one other point I was, is, is rust belt not a word we should be using anymore? I didn’t know that was the

[00:55:46] Jeff Wood: I, I feel like I feel like I, I also wrote about this a little while ago too, is like, there’s, um, what’s the best way to put it? Like mentally when, when folks in like places like Detroit, there’s a story that they tell themselves over and over and over.

[00:56:02] Like, we’re not, we’re not, we’re not good enough or we’re not, we’re not growing population. We’re, we’re shrinking cities. We’re all these things. But then recently, they actually had a growth in population because of all the stuff that’s happening there. And so, I feel like it changes the whole narrative of the place.

[00:56:17] And so, that’s my thinking anyways. Is that like, if we stop calling place the Rust Belt, maybe it will not be the Rust Belt anymore, right? It’ll be a manufacturing belt.

[00:56:25] Wes Marshall: I think of Rust Belt as like these cool, recovering cities now. I don’t think of it as a negative. If it was me living in one of those places, I think I would own it.

[00:56:34] Like, oh yeah, rust Belt. Oh, okay. Yeah. I don’t know. But I’m not from those places, so I, maybe I’m mistaken. .

[00:56:42] Jeff Wood: I mean, I don’t wanna speak for anybody because I am not either. But, um, it’s just kind of the idea that I had as trying just to, to help change the narrative in some way and not call it like a, his, you know, the historic manufacturing center, uh, rather than the rust Belt, I guess.

[00:56:55] Rust is. Is it has a certain connotation, but you’re right. I mean, there is also like, Hey, there’s these lots of cool places that have this, these good bones. Every time

[00:57:04] Wes Marshall: I go to one of those cities, it’s always better than I thought it would be. Right. You’re like, Oh yeah, this is kind of cool. Then you go to some of the newer cities and it’s like, eh, I don’t know.

[00:57:13] This is, it’s a lot of glass and steel. And it

[00:57:17] Jeff Wood: looks, it looks the same as everywhere else. Uh,

[00:57:19] Wes Marshall: right. So, I mean, I, I love a lot of those cities and, um, I don’t know. If it was me, I said I would, I would own it. And I

[00:57:28] Jeff Wood: don’t know. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s so tricky language these days. Like, what are you supposed to say and not say?

[00:57:32] And when you’re going to get in trouble, but I, that was me. I’m not necessarily any like larger, um, larger theme or anything like that. Maybe there’s other people that are doing the same thing, but, um, Yeah. I just want to make

[00:57:45] Wes Marshall: sure I wasn’t missing something. No, I don’t

[00:57:47] Jeff Wood: think so. But maybe, maybe we are. Uh, I’ll have to look that up.

[00:57:50] I’ll have to look it up

[00:57:52] Wes Marshall: or somebody from those places can just,

[00:57:54] Jeff Wood: yeah, just send it, send us a note and let us know, do you still use Rust Belt? Is it still kosher to do so? All right, next up, a quick build roundabout. A new quick build roundabout system, uh, the Nebraska Department of Transportation’s new roundabout in Ashland, Nebraska has won an innovation award the project costing 1, 000, 000 instead of the typical 000, 000 for a concrete roundabout used a modular system of recycled plastic planks bolted to the existing concrete.

[00:58:18] This approach eliminates the need for full intersection reconstruction, reducing construction timelines from several months to just weeks. This was by Ben Thorpe and Equipment World. I posted this article and I. It did, it was a little bit like an advertisement for this company, but at the same time, they did give a lot of really good information.

[00:58:36] And I actually went back in and looked a little bit deeper about like, what it was like, whether the planks were plastic and whether recycled and things like that. But it is interesting how much, um, You know, it costs to build around just a simple roundabout. If you’re going to reconstruct the sheet and all that stuff.

[00:58:50] I don’t know what, what do you, what do you think about this? Like, is this something that you come across in, in, uh, in teaching classes? Like how much stuff costs and time to, to build it. And you know, whether that actually means it’s going to get built or not.

[00:59:04] Wes Marshall: Yeah, it’s part of it for sure. And, um, like, with this, like, even if you’re, I mean, the way they compare the prices in this, they’re comparing it to the concrete roundabouts.

[00:59:13] But if you compare it to one signalized intersection, it’s way cheaper than, like, one single, It’s definitely going to be over a million dollars to do anything like that. And like roundabouts are cheaper, even if you did the concrete version. But then if you talk about what they’re doing here, you know, it feels like to some extent they’re learning a little bit from some of the quick build bike infrastructure we’ve been doing over the years.

[00:59:37] Um, Denver’s done a lot of quick build traffic circles. Um, there was one, right along my, one of the routes I take to bike in and out of work, I saw them sort of drawing the white circle in the morning, and when I came back that afternoon, it was done, and all it is was a bunch of these rubberized curbs that they use for the bike infrastructure, they made a circle out of them, and they just filled it with asphalt, so it’s like six inches high, that was it, and it was built in one day, and it was, You know, pretty cheap and maybe someday they can make it out of maybe more permanent materials like you did see with a lot of other tactical urbanism type stuff, but it works well as is and even with the stuff we’re talking about in this article, they’re talking, even though they say it lasts 10 to 15 years, like the guy in the article says it should last like 25, like that’s what their data is telling us.

[01:00:30] And I, I never heard of the America’s transportation awards, but apparently in one,

[01:00:36] Jeff Wood: I’m sure there’s plenty of awards that exist. I have no idea about. We should just, you know what, we should just create an awards like show and like, you know, the, the streets blog does, they have a street sees, right? There’s a street sees award.

[01:00:48] So maybe we should just create the, the, the West Marshall inaugural, uh, transportation awards and then give out, no, you got to put your name on it, you know, um,

[01:00:59] Wes Marshall: so there’s one example from San Francisco. Have you seen that one? I couldn’t find where in San Francisco was, I didn’t see that one. No, of it. Um, yeah.

[01:01:07] And then there’s a great quote from the guy with the construction company and in Nebraska. He’s like, I’m more of a concrete guy myself, but

[01:01:16] Jeff Wood: that’s a great endorsement. Right? Like, I’m, I’m, this is I’m a concrete guy through and through, but this is pretty cool. How much does an intersection cost with lights and stuff?

[01:01:25] Like, how, how much does that? They usually run like if you put up a traffic light,

[01:01:29] Wes Marshall: yeah, it’s way more than anyone would think. I mean, just usually the signals these days and like the components that need to go with it, like the thing that we placed on the side of the road there. I mean, we’re talking over a million dollars.

[01:01:40] Um, from what I’ve heard, I’m not in the consultant world anymore. So we’re doing it more from teaching students how to do it. But, um, you know, the cost SMS we’re doing in class or more, you know, they’re rougher than you would do as a consultant, but you know, they’re, they’re ballparking it. And. It’s, it’s more expensive than you would think.

[01:01:56] So a roundabout, not only do you defray the cost of, you know, some of those initial traffic signal type stuff, but the maintenance is lower. You don’t have to, you know, re time them and do all that sort of stuff down the line they do with traffic signals and, you know, at least in Colorado, there’s issues with, we switched to like LED lights on our traffic signals and now they don’t get warm enough to melt the snow on them.

[01:02:20] So there’s issues like that. You know roundabouts solve all those problems and we also know They’re safer. There’s a huge reduction in fatalities severe injuries um I don’t love how a lot of places think they need these two or three lane roundabouts when they really don’t because those aren’t quite as safe and I think that’s a whole nother issue But a lot of times the one lane roundabouts can handle 20 000 cars per day or something like that.

[01:02:47] Um, so Something like that is a smaller footprint. It’s cheaper You And they work, um, you know, there’s still some folks that just get mad at roundabouts and they conflate them with rotaries like we have in Massachusetts or, you know, they think they’re just too European for us, but we know they’re safer and they’re also cheaper.

[01:03:08] Jeff Wood: So if we were gonna, you know, point out what part of the body a roundabout would be, what would that one be?

[01:03:15] Wes Marshall: I don’t know. So if intersections are the joints, um,

[01:03:20] Jeff Wood: would it be like a hip replacement?

[01:03:21] Wes Marshall: Yeah. I don’t know. I mean, cause it seems like the roundabout was a more natural way to do it. Right. So the traffic signal is sort of the robotic elbow or something like that.

[01:03:32] Right. Yeah. It’s like our half robot cyborg type.

[01:03:41] Jeff Wood: Something like that.

[01:03:43] Wes Marshall: Um,

[01:03:44] Jeff Wood: I don’t know. I don’t know. I just started that out there cause I was like, oh, well this, this is a, uh, uh, a Infrastructure thing, maybe it fits or maybe it doesn’t.

[01:03:51] Wes Marshall: Yeah. And then we also have those new like turbo roundabouts that are, have you heard of those?

[01:03:55] Jeff Wood: No, what’s that?

[01:03:56] Wes Marshall: Um, I think California did their first one.

[01:03:59] So the idea is that you have to make a decision as to where you’re going before you even pick a lane, as you get into the roundabout, then each lane is very definitive and oftentimes there’s barriers between the lanes. So you don’t have people changing lanes within the roundabout. Like if you’re in the right lane of the roundabout, you go right.

[01:04:18] If you’re like in the middle lane, you’re going to go straight. If you’re in the left lane, you’re kind of taking a left out of the roundabout. And it’s much more structured and for the big roundabouts, it’s oftentimes a better design. So there are some folks I know, um, like Peter Firth at Northeastern loves these turbo roundabouts.

[01:04:36] Jeff Wood: Oh, that’s interesting. I never heard of that before, or I’ve seen that one of them. I mean, I was, I was just like on a, uh, where were we? We were in, uh, somewhere South, uh, on the coast and we were driving through, um, Paso Robles actually. And there was like this kidney shaped one. And so we’ve, we went the wrong way, uh, the first time, but there’s

[01:04:54] Wes Marshall: one in New Haven that’s shaped like a peanut.

[01:04:57] Like the peanut roundabout,

[01:04:58] Jeff Wood: like a peanut. Yeah. I mean, it seems like there’s some, they’re, they’re starting to morph from just a plain old circle and they’re getting, getting really adventurous with the shapes.

[01:05:06] Wes Marshall: Have you seen, I think it’s called the magic roundabout is somewhere in England where you have this big roundabout in the middle and there’s five little ones.

[01:05:12] Oh yeah. I’ve seen that. I’ve seen like the

[01:05:14] Jeff Wood: overhead, uh, overhead fish is like crazy. It’s like, how do you, how do you figure that out? Um,

[01:05:19] Wes Marshall: yeah. And it is also there you’re on the other side of the road. So it would be, it would break a lot of people’s brains trying to maneuver through that.

[01:05:26] Jeff Wood: Yeah, when I was, uh, I flew into Aberdeen, uh, to visit a friend, uh, one summer and we were on the wrong, we were going through roundabouts and then we were on the wrong side of the road.

[01:05:34] And I was just like, I, there’s no way I could have done this myself.

[01:05:37] Wes Marshall: Yeah, but out in Australia, they drive on the other side of the road. And, um, like luckily I biked mostly for the first four months. So I got used to it. And the last couple of months we were driving up and down the coast a little bit. So.

[01:05:48] Uh, it felt better. If I had done it from the get go, it would have been tough.

[01:05:52] Jeff Wood: Yeah, yeah, it seems like it’s tough. All right, next up, Rethinking La Rambla. In Barcelona, officials are worried about over tourism in the form of rowdy bachelor and bachelorette parties and the proliferation of what some see as tacky souvenir shops and restaurants along the iconic street La Rambla.

[01:06:08] To remedy this planners will redesign the street with sidewalks widened to five meters, 16 feet and vehicle lanes reduced for internal trips and buses only while three new public squares will be created. The plans don’t incorporate a focus on housing and commercial support to bring a more diverse crowd though.

[01:06:22] Some of these features were part of earlier proposals. This is by Ianco Lopez in El Pais. Um, what’d you think? What’d you think of this one?

[01:06:31] Wes Marshall: Well, there are also some, I guess, tertiary proposals to like ban tourist housing in the whole city. Yeah. I think they’re,

[01:06:39] Jeff Wood: they’re trying to get rid of Airbnb and stuff like that.

[01:06:41] Right. Yeah.

[01:06:42] Wes Marshall: Um, which makes sense. So you can see a lot of neighborhoods that have become sort of overrun with Airbnb and this feels like one of them. Like when I was looking up more about the street in this part of the city, like there, I found a quote from some Spanish poet saying like, he feels like it’s one of the only streets in the world he wishes would never end.

[01:07:01] Yeah. Which I thought was interesting when I compared to like Colfax in Denver, which. Actually never

[01:07:07] Jeff Wood: ends.

[01:07:08] Wes Marshall: Was billed as the longest commercial street in America. Like a portion of it is like 26 and a half miles. And for much of it, you kind of wish it would end. It’s getting better, but, um, and I, I think what they’re trying to do is like increase the With the sidewalks from like 11 and a half to 16 and a half, they’re trying to reduce the number of lanes of car traffic.

[01:07:33] Um, at the same time, it feels a little bit like Denver’s Pedestrian Mall, the 16th Street Mall. People from this area don’t really use it. It’s a place that tourists go. It’s a place that people going to the convention center that are here for conferences go to, partially because it’s filled with a lot of kind of chain restaurants and that’s not where people are looking to go.

[01:07:55] And maybe that’s not the case where we’re talking about here in Barcelona, but it, when I’m reading these articles about it, it feels a little bit like that. And they talk about how the locals never go on the street. They just go across it, which I thought was a really interesting way to describe how the locals use it.

[01:08:13] Like, they never go up and down that street. It’s just tourists.

[01:08:17] Jeff Wood: Yeah, I mean, it was interesting because the, the article is interesting to me specifically, and it is kind of an example of redesigning a street and thinking about how to kind of change the uses through street design, but also how everything should be connected.

[01:08:30] Right. And the, and the uses that they want or don’t want, um, in the United States, we talk about, um, some of the places like the 16th street mall, or even, um, you know, plazas in, in places like Seattle, where they have this kind of. Right. Program of trying to get rid of the unwanted elements, the senior elements of something in order to liven up the place.

[01:08:50] Um, and in this instance, they want to get rid of the stag and Hindus, which is the British term for, you know, a bachelor, bachelorette parties and. Also, they want to just get, they just don’t want the tourism. They want the over tourism. They just want the street to be, you know, more mix of people, which could be solved through housing or solved through some sort of social, uh, social housing for commercial districts or something that was what they were thinking.

[01:09:15] But it just, it’s just the thing about it was interesting to me. It was just like the trying to micromanage the uses. Or the street design so that you get the type of people that you want to get on a street. And so I’m wondering like, is that actually even possible? Can you change a place to get the different people?

[01:09:34] Can you kick out like souvenir shops and kitschy restaurants that have served this clientele and the street for a really long time and pay a pay a pay. You know, seem to be continuing to make money off of it.

[01:09:46] Wes Marshall: When I was at University of Connecticut, they were building like a new town center for stores, Connecticut.

[01:09:51] Um, and one of the meetings I remember going to like the, the master developer, the way they talked about like filling this town center with shops and whatever, they called it casting. They’re trying to cast like they need an ice cream shop and a cookie shop. Like, they’re trying to make sure all the things fit together and become greater than the sum of their parts.

[01:10:13] At the same time, it feels a little bit un American not to be like, well, like, here’s how much it costs. Whoever wants it, come get it. Um, and with respect to your other question, that Seattle article that you linked to, where they talk about New York City and Bryant Park, did you read that part?

[01:10:32] Jeff Wood: Yeah, yeah.

[01:10:32] Wes Marshall: Um, and how that was Movable

[01:10:33] Jeff Wood: chairs and all that stuff.

[01:10:35] Wes Marshall: Well, it was a place that was known for drugs and whatever else back in the 70s, and then, instead of trying to kick out the bad elements, they tried to make it, More appealing to everyone right they try to open it up and that was the way they designed it like you were saying but also adding like places where people to play chess and all this sort of stuff so over time, it became, I guess what they wanted versus what Seattle’s doing.

[01:11:01] I don’t know if this is. When I read this, I was like, is this really true? Like anyone with a drug conviction can be like taken out of the park.

[01:11:07] Jeff Wood: Apparently that’s what the deal is.

[01:11:10] Wes Marshall: That seems crazy. How do you figure that

[01:11:12] Jeff Wood: out? Like, do you ask, ask everybody in there? Like, do you have a conviction? Do you have a conviction?

[01:11:16] Wes Marshall: Yeah. Now that seemed bizarre to me. Um, that’s sort of the stay out of drug area. So, um, I’m not sure how that would work in practicality, but at the same time, you know, I mean, Denver’s got a lot of homeless folks and there’s certain neighborhoods where Like, they’re on the sidewalks, um, you know, with tents or things like that.

[01:11:36] And, like, yes, you don’t want to criminalize homelessness, but, like, you also can’t walk out your front door and have people living on your sidewalk. Like, you can’t have your kids walk to school if that’s what the environment is like. And I don’t know, so it was a tough situation that we’re put in, but it seems like New York was more on the right track.

[01:11:55] Like, try to make it nicer, better. Try to Improve it and it’s a little bit different than what Barcelona is dealing with like rowdy bass red parties. It feels more like a Vegas problem Yeah than Seattle or New York City, but, you know, they’re still trying to micromanage our places, which doesn’t seem like the right approach.

[01:12:18] Jeff Wood: Yeah. They want to create some sort of a, like a, um, a guardian, like a guardian ship. Uh, so people feel ownership of a, of a space, right? That’s, that was the kind of the theme for the article, uh, from, uh, From Seattle, uh, who wrote that article Samuel wolf in the urbanist wrote that piece. Um, but yeah, I just, uh, I’m, I’m always interested in like, what is the right kind of urbanism?

[01:12:43] Like, what’s a healthy urbanism? And what does that mean? Like, how and how do you get it without disenfranchising 1 group or another? Um, we just had, uh, Vishan Chakrabarty on to talk about his book, uh, the architecture of urbanity, and he had describes urbanity as kind of this mixing of people and places and stuff like that.

[01:13:01] And I, I found that very compelling, but at the same time, it’s hard to make all that work with some of the built environment stuff that we’ve done. Like. Some shops may not work in the place where they should work or mixing of people may not work in a place where you’re not in New York city and you just don’t have this massive amount of people because there’s less density.

[01:13:20] And so in a place that’s not as dense in a place, it’s not as dynamic. How do you create that dynamic feel? And some people do it with. You know, kind of that placemaking or that, that, that, uh, casting as you’re talking about. I mean, we, we talked on the show recently about, um, the Grove in, in Los Angeles with, in our 500th episode with, with, uh, Ken and Joseph and also with Kevin Kelly and, you know, thinking about how they’ve, Created a space by designing it right and making it so that people feel but it’s hard to do like, you know You can design that five different times.

[01:13:51] You can design a lifestyle center Uh to replace them all but only one of those might work out because of some serendipitous thing Uh, it’s hard to make it work every time

[01:14:02] Wes Marshall: Well that relates to the title of that barcelona article like that tourists want an authentic city not a theme park

[01:14:08] Speaker 3: Yeah,

[01:14:09] Wes Marshall: and a lot and i’ve i’ve seen I mean, as you know, I’ve been involved with, like, CNU and the New Urbanists for a while, I’ve been going to their conferences, and I mean, to be honest, a lot of the New Urbanist developments You know, feel more theme parky, like they looked apart, like they have all sort of the elements you expect in New Urbanism, but at the same time, they don’t, they don’t actually meet the ideals of New Urbanism, like they’re still surrounded by these giant parking lots, or there isn’t really the mixed use or, you know, there isn’t maybe as much housing in mixed in with the commercial, it’s still sort of separated, so they still sell it as New Urbanism because people are willing to pay a Premium for that sort of stuff, but it doesn’t really match.

[01:14:53] And that’s one of the things I’ve been frustrated with over the years is that a lot of people look at new urbanist developments as a failure. I was like, well, no, we didn’t really even try it. Like, it just looks like new urbanism, but it’s not like if we actually did the stuff that we’re trying to do.

[01:15:08] We’d say, especially in the transportation side, because I jokingly say that New Urbanist is really a transportation movement. It’s been kind of co opted as an architecture movement from the get go, but if you don’t get the transportation right, it doesn’t work. If you don’t get the architecture right and you get the transformation right, it still works.

[01:15:26] It could still, it could be better, but it still works and, um, it feels like that to some extent with what we’re trying to do in Barcelona is trying to not make it like a theme park. They want to actually make sure it works like a real city, like a real place. And it’s a tricky line to straddle, right?

[01:15:47] Jeff Wood: I think it’s hard to there’s 2 things like it’s hard to do on a parcel by parcel basis, right?

[01:15:51] Like new urbanism or any development where you’re trying to change the ethos of a place. But also if you try to do it in a mass production kind of way as well, like, if you’re redoing a whole airport, you know, like Stapleton or something like you, you run the risk of everything kind of feeling and looking the same.

[01:16:06] And so. You know, without individual developers building every single house differently to, you know, their own specs or whatever it might be, you have this problem. So it’s hard at a parcel level. It’s also hard at, uh, you know, a mass development level too, because of that authenticity. So it’s like you have two things colliding from that.

[01:16:23] You know, in that way, you have more control with the large parcel. Uh, but in, in the smaller parcel, you just, you have so much less control of, of this things around you that it impacts how that works out in the end.

[01:16:35] Wes Marshall: Yeah. So the neighborhood formerly known as Stapleton is where I live, right? So I kind of put my money where my mouth is when I moved here in 2009 and bought a house in Stapleton.

[01:16:44] It’s now called the Central Park neighborhood, but that’s a whole nother story. Um, Well, anyway, like it was, I think it might still be like the biggest urban redevelopment project in the country. So like a lot of the new urbanist developments are smaller, right? So you don’t have like the big bad arterials cutting through them.

[01:17:01] It’s sort of this island of nicety on the edge of it. So yes, you can walk in and around your neighborhood, but you can’t really connect to the greater city because you’re cordoned off by like those arterials. Um, Central Park neighborhood or Stapleton is big enough that we had these arterials going right through it.

[01:17:17] So I’ve written like a paper over the years showing that, you know, yes, it’s much better than a lot of the new suburban developments. At the same time, there are places where it could be better and especially among those arterials that, you know, they throw up a sign that says you should be going 30 or 35, but I pull out my radar guns and I’ve seen cars going over 70 on them.

[01:17:37] And it’s not because of enforcement or education problems because they’re designed for that. Right? So, it’s gotten better for sure. We’ve done things like, um, we’ve added a bike lane on one of the bigger arterials. It’s a protected bike lane and I would still probably bike on one of the parallel routes, but the bike lane itself has acted as traffic calming.

[01:17:56] Um, a lot of the roads that were over designed in terms of number of lanes, we’ve cut back on and added better bike facilities and traffic. So it is getting better. It’s evolving over time, but it’s a different animal when you’re doing something at that scale versus one of these smaller developments that tend to be what you see

[01:18:19] Jeff Wood: when they did, um, The design for Stapleton, do you think that you’re just talking about the roads and the, and the networks?

[01:18:25] And I’m just thinking about like, when I go visit my sister and brother in law in Bakersfield, um, the roads are super wide. Cause they’ve planned for like a six lane road going everywhere. But even though it’s only one lane, uh, you know, these roads are ones you could probably have a drag race on. And it’s like, you know, and, and not, and not blink the design of the roads is so wide.

[01:18:46] And I would wonder if like a developer, when they got up to You know, when they got the parcel, they’re like, I, I don’t want to spend all my money on the roads. I actually want to, you know, build housing on here and I want to get as much money out of it as I can. So maybe I should just put more housing and make the roads as narrow as possible.

[01:19:02] And like, you know, then you don’t have to worry about the asphalt later on replacements and stuff like that. I just, I just thinking about it from that perspective, from like, just like an economy The place and thinking about the same thing with roads highways to, I mean, we, we’ve taken away so much, uh, you know, that the, the work that, that, you know, you and norm did on the, the parking lots in, in new Haven, right?

[01:19:24] Like thinking about all that, that land that got taken away from usable uses, um, just feels like. That’s something that some of these large scale developers would want to do, but then is the city of the one that’s, that’s not allowing it to happen? Is it the transportation department that’s not allowing that happen?

[01:19:39] Is it the fire department? I mean, obviously there’s lots of answers, but.

[01:19:43] Wes Marshall: Yeah, no, for that paper I wrote about Stapleton, I interviewed Peter Kalkorp. He’s, you know, the big New Urbanist founder and designer of, of Stapleton. I interviewed like Peter Park, who was the planning director at the time. And like a lot of the stuff I heard is that, you know, You know, there were some frustration, like they were allowing, you know, maybe narrower streets than they would have otherwise, but at the same time, it was like an exemption.

[01:20:08] So, like, Peter Park was worried that, like, these things they were allowing weren’t embedded in the code for the future, that when they went back to fix something, they might have to revert to, like, what the current guidelines are saying, that would be wider or whatever it might be. Um, Peter Calthorpe was more on the side of, like, He was trying his best, but he was limited by, I mean, honestly, our traffic models, like the kind of stuff I’m talking about in my book.

[01:20:35] Um, you know, planning not just for cars today, but planning for cars 20 years into the future and making sure we can accommodate all those cars. So there are, you know, there’s like a one way couplet that’s really unnecessary cutting right through like the town center, the original town center in, in Stapleton.

[01:20:51] Um, but that was trying to be a way to catch some of the traffic on some of the nearby arterials. Which isn’t really needed or even, you know, some of the bigger materials, they’re actually not even that big. They are just two lanes in each direction. I think a lot of people in the rest of the country be like, oh, that’s tiny.

[01:21:08] Um, but they still are pretty fast. Um, And especially when you go to the newer part of Stapleton or Central Park, it’s north of the highway, it feels much more suburban up there. Like the arterials are bigger, the house lots are bigger, the commercial is limited often to like car washes and stuff like that.

[01:21:28] The kind of stuff that, my part of the neighborhood, we have tons of restaurants. Like when I first moved to Denver, and we were coming to downtown all the time to go out to eat, and now there’s You know, 30 good restaurants and walking distance to my house. We don’t have to go that far. It’s, it’s a much more, you know, it’s, it’s made the shift like Barcelona’s talking about from feeling theme parky to feeling like a real urban place.

[01:21:53] Yeah,

[01:21:54] Jeff Wood: I have to think about that. Like, after the initial, um, idea is put together and then any extensions of that idea, what does that mean? So. In Texas, like the opposite of where I grew up, I grew up in Kingwood on the other side of the woodlands, which was designed by Ian McHarg and his initial village that he designed is very, you know, it’s designed with nature.

[01:22:14] It’s kind of his ethos and stuff like that. But then when you get further out, it just becomes more and more sprawly, sprawly, suburban, the roads get wider and everything else. So whenever somebody does like one of those initial designs, like this is how it should be throughout the whole neighborhood. And then when the developers kind of take over afterwards, they.

[01:22:30] You know, revert to, to, to standard. Usually it feels like.

[01:22:35] Wes Marshall: Yeah, no, at the time when they built those first houses north of the highway, I think the developers are worried that nobody would want to live up there with very good reason. But at that time I, they got lucky because the housing prices skyrocketed.

[01:22:47] Um, so all of a sudden it was overflow. People had to. Looking for houses ended up up there. So it sold, it got off on the right foot by getting people up there from the get go. At the same time, they thought they needed to give them like slightly bigger lots and stuff like that in order to entice them there.

[01:23:05] And now when you go up there, there are some great streets and stuff, but it doesn’t, um, and maybe over time, I think part of, you know, Stapleton was an airport, so there were no trees, like, and now the trees are like 20 plus years old in parts of neighborhoods. So it starts to feel like the rest of. What you would expect in a city like Denver, but it takes some time.

[01:23:25] So I have hope for the northern part of it, the neighborhood, but it’s, they’ve limited themselves to some extent because of the highway, because of their materials, because the lot size, um, but they still have good greenways and they built schools into the neighborhood and there are commercial areas, but, um, you know, mostly it’s chains and car washes and stuff like that so far.

[01:23:44] Jeff Wood: Yeah. This is a non sequitur, but, but how’s the altitude? Like, does that do anything?

[01:23:50] Wes Marshall: Um,

[01:23:53] Jeff Wood: I’m

[01:23:53] Wes Marshall: used to it in terms of

[01:23:54] Jeff Wood: walking and so I guess, I guess, yeah, you’d get used to it, right? Yeah. No.

[01:23:57] Wes Marshall: Like when I, uh, I remember when last time I went to TRB, I took a long bike ride to the room. I, my buddy’s from college.

[01:24:03] He lives in Northern Virginia and he was huffing and puffing, but it was. For whatever reason easy for me. I like I guess I train at altitude like that’s

[01:24:12] Jeff Wood: you do you do

[01:24:14] Wes Marshall: Doing all my biking. So, um, I don’t know I think When you come here from out of town, maybe it’s harder. Like I, the only time I ever feel it if I’m up at like 13 feet, right.

[01:24:26] But even then it’s gotten better over time. Like Bogota. What are they at? They’re like eight or nine. They’re high,

[01:24:32] Jeff Wood: yeah. It’s high too. Yeah.

[01:24:33] Wes Marshall: I didn’t notice it whatsoever, but I think other people. We’re struggling a bit. Um, yeah, big picture. I think you just have to hydrate. Yes. Learned over time. Whenever I fly into Denver, I drink way more water than I normally would in the past.

[01:24:48] Yeah.

[01:24:48] Jeff Wood: You don’t realize how much is leaving when you’re talking, especially at that height. So you definitely need to do that. Good, good tips for, for going to visit. We’re going to visit. So if

[01:24:57] Wes Marshall: anyone wants to come visit me, well,

[01:25:01] Jeff Wood: this week and every week, I want to thank our generous patrons supporters. You guys are awesome.

[01:25:04] Keep the show going by listening each month, the show and talking headways really wouldn’t be here without you guys. So thanks very much. And you can support the show by going to patreon. com slash the overhead wire. We’ve had people sign up each month during the last several years, and we appreciate that.

[01:25:16] So 2 a month, we’ll get you some stickers and a handwritten note. I just sent out some letters last week and then 10 a month. We’ll get you one of our scarves, um, listener questions and comments. Thanks. This is part of the show where we talk about listener questions and comments. People are feel free to comment on any of the social sites where the podcast appears.

[01:25:33] Um, so a couple of weeks ago, we had a episode of the talking headways podcast with Cameron Mays of the friends, which is a transit theme band, uh, up in Cleveland, Ohio. And I had a lot of messages from folks giving me transit themed music that they listened to. Do you have any transit theme music that you listen to Wes?

[01:25:52] Wes Marshall: Um, what’s the Weird Al song? Another One Rides the Bus?

[01:25:58] Jeff Wood: I mean, that works, right? That works.

[01:26:00] Wes Marshall: Uh, yeah, there’s a lot of transportation related songs. I mean, the Beatles have a couple, like Drive My Car, Ticket to Ride. Um, but the most are bass, right? Like Little Red Corvette, or Fast Car, Low Rider.

[01:26:14] Jeff Wood: That’s what Cameron was saying is like most of the stuff that out there is like car based and driving and, and, uh, all that stuff, the beach boys and little red Corvette, things like that.

[01:26:22] Uh, yeah, magic

[01:26:23] Wes Marshall: boss by the who. I mean, that’s a,

[01:26:25] Jeff Wood: yeah. So, so, um, so yeah, so Dale McKeel wrote in, I listened to your interview with Cameron Mays of the France today and was trying to think of transit themed rock music. Of course, there’s the magic bus by the who, but the first song that came to mind was down in the tube station at midnight by the jam.

[01:26:40] Um, Which includes some tube station sounds, uh, like much of the jams music. It paints a gritty picture of life in England in the late seventies and early eighties, the jam also wrote planners dream goes wrong, not many songs about city planners, and this one doesn’t pull any punches, uh, congrats on 500 episodes.

[01:26:56] Uh, thanks Dale, uh, from Durham, North Carolina. And then David Vartanoff, who’s a frequent listener of the show, uh, and East Bayer, he sent me a old, old record on YouTube of this band called Ambrose. Uh, uh, part five are the song called Ambrose part five, and it’s basically this couple walking through a subway tube and try not to get run over.

[01:27:18] Wes Marshall: It feels like there’s fewer songs about like walking biking. Right. I mean. Yeah, came up with a few transit ones, at least, but

[01:27:25] Jeff Wood: I mean, there’s queen. I want to ride my bicycle. Um, there’s a, I know there’s a piebald song about biking. Um,

[01:27:32] Wes Marshall: there’s that 500 miles song by the proclamers. That’s

[01:27:34] Jeff Wood: right. I would walk 500 miles.

[01:27:36] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:27:37] Wes Marshall: There’s a lot of songs about cities for sure.

[01:27:40] Jeff Wood: Yeah. And the S and suburbs, right? Um, cities and suburbs. There’s a bunch of songs, but transit

[01:27:45] Wes Marshall: songs, New York’s got empire state of mind, things like that, streets, but

[01:27:50] Jeff Wood: that’s why Cameron’s catalog was really great. They had a song about BRT and about, you know, riding the bus, bus drivers, um, all weird writers, stuff like that.

[01:28:00] Everything that people come into contact with,

[01:28:02] Wes Marshall: Oh, walking in Memphis. There’s another, that’s right. Walking day song,

[01:28:06] Jeff Wood: walking in Memphis

[01:28:07] Wes Marshall: and Marcon song.

[01:28:08] Jeff Wood: Yeah. Yeah. Lots of good stuff. So if anybody has any other suggestions, feel free to write into overhead wire at gmail. com. Um, puppies and butterflies is part of the show.

[01:28:16] We talk about something fun, interesting, or maybe doesn’t fit in the other sections. Um, I’ve mentioned before that I love fall follows here. Uh, October, my, my daughter and I were walking around yesterday and kind of trying to find all the pumpkins and the skeletons and, and all the stuff in the neighborhoods.

[01:28:30] And, uh, we had a great time. And so I really enjoy that. Uh, Wes, do you have a. Do you have a puppies and butterflies this week?

[01:28:36] Wes Marshall: So my wife and youngest are out at an apple orchard today, like buying cider doughnuts, which are my favorite, um, doing stuff like that. And that made me think of how much you love fall.

[01:28:48] So that was actually on my list to talk about how much Jeff loves. I love it.

[01:28:54] Jeff Wood: Love it.

[01:28:55] Wes Marshall: Yeah.

[01:28:55] Jeff Wood: I have all these Instagram, like, Follows that I have that don’t matter any other time of the year, but right now, like it’s their time and they, where does that come from?

[01:29:04] Wes Marshall: Like, why do you, I don’t know. I grew

[01:29:08] Jeff Wood: up in Texas.

[01:29:09] We didn’t really have a fall. It was like, fall to summer and winter.

[01:29:13] Wes Marshall: It feels at least growing up in Boston. It feels like winter is coming. It feels like there’s something

[01:29:21] Jeff Wood: about, there’s something about the fall that makes me happy. And I, I read an article, actually the, the decomposing of leaves and stuff actually gives off some sort of a pheromone or something that makes people feel good or cozy.

[01:29:33] Um, so there’s probably a Higgie. I think it’s Higgie. Is that the, the feeling, the cozy feeling this, the, so that comes from that. Also. Yeah. It’s when cross country season was when I was in high school. And so like, you know, you’ve smelled the fresh cut grass and when in Texas, we have cold fronts and so you go to school in the morning at 70 degrees, you come out in the afternoon and it’s like, you know, 45 or something in, in Texas, that’s cold.

[01:29:54] And so, you know, you feel the difference, uh, you know, in October is when that really starts to start happening. And then Halloween, I always loved Halloween when I was a kid, my friends and I used to go trick or treating ice. I’d love decorating and stuff. Um, just like putting up, uh, monsters and pumpkins and all that stuff.

[01:30:12] Can’t wait to carve. Can’t wait to carve the one that I’ve got in my, my kitchen right now. One of my

[01:30:17] Wes Marshall: favorite foods is pumpkin seeds. Like I roast them with olive oil and salt and

[01:30:22] Jeff Wood: salt. Yeah, they’re good. Right? Yeah. Nobody,

[01:30:25] Wes Marshall: nobody, you can’t buy them like that anywhere. Like I buy pumpkin seeds all the time and they’re always disappointing.

[01:30:29] And the ones. We make like my kids are addicted to them. Um,

[01:30:33] Jeff Wood: there’s so many of them too. If you have enough pumpkins, right? Oh, I I buy

[01:30:36] Wes Marshall: way too many pumpkins just so I can it’s so much work though. How many pumpkins do you

[01:30:40] Jeff Wood: get?

[01:30:41] Wes Marshall: Usually like six. Oh, that’s

[01:30:43] Jeff Wood: good

[01:30:43] Wes Marshall: big ones. Like

[01:30:44] Jeff Wood: yeah,

[01:30:45] Wes Marshall: did I want all the pumpkin seeds and it’s so much work though You have to you know, scoop them out clean them wash Like roasting them you do it at a low temperature for like an hour or two Um, but they’re so good.

[01:30:57] I have to hide some pumpkin seeds from my kids because they’ll eat them all if I don’t

[01:31:01] Jeff Wood: It’s like, it’s like getting your candy on, on Halloween, but you hide some candies from the kids, but you, I don’t care

[01:31:07] Wes Marshall: about the candy. It’s just the pumpkin seeds, just the pumpkin seeds. Yeah. Well,

[01:31:09] Jeff Wood: I, I find that if we carve, so our, our, um, the front of our house is West facing.

[01:31:14] So, and there’s a, you know, the sun, when it goes down, it hits the front door pretty hard. And so if we carve the pumpkin too early, it gets really moldy really quick. So we have to be like very careful about it. I

[01:31:25] Wes Marshall: heard that, um, if you carve from the bottom, Okay. Instead of the top? You can put a hole in the bottom instead of the top and then you place it down, like it’ll last longer.

[01:31:36] Jeff Wood: That’s a good idea. Because I carve

[01:31:37] Wes Marshall: a lot of pumpkins. My wife was sending me pumpkin related, uh, new stuff, and that was one of the tricks. Like, from the back or bottom, it’ll last a lot longer. So I, same thing, if we carve it too early, like the squirrels start messing with them and they rot too quickly and they have to be thrown away before Halloween.

[01:31:54] Speaker 3: Yeah.

[01:31:54] Wes Marshall: But what I was going to try this year is another tip, um, try to carve from the bottom or back and see if it works any better.

[01:32:01] Jeff Wood: Oh, I’m doing it. What if you did lemon, like you do, you know, when you make guacamole, it keeps it from oxidizing. You get the lime there. I wonder if there’s something like that too.

[01:32:10] You could

[01:32:10] Wes Marshall: do like a shellac spray over the

[01:32:13] Jeff Wood: You could, yeah, you could just shellac the inside of it. Like, uh, some of those old stave churches in Norway that are still around from 1200. They just shellac the hell out of, uh, the hell out of them and they’re still standing.

[01:32:23] Wes Marshall: Where’s Ron Swanson? Let’s ask him.

[01:32:24] Yeah,

[01:32:25] Jeff Wood: exactly. I’m sure he’d know. I know Ron would know. He’s a, he’s a, he’s a wood carver. He’s a, he’s he, I’m sure he does. He’s got to do pumpkins and all. Well,

[01:32:32] Wes Marshall: whatever he puts on the wood would probably work for the pumpkins.

[01:32:35] Jeff Wood: Probably so. Probably so. I love it. I love it. Well, Wes, where can folks find you if you wish to be found?

[01:32:41] Wes Marshall: Um, nowhere really. I’m on a lot of podcasts and stuff like this. These days, still doing news related stuff for the book, doing a lot of speaking engagements, I’ll be in Albany at the New York bike summit this week. Um, I’ll be talking, doing keynote of the safer house for school conferences for Collins next week and various other places going to Austin next month, going to next month, traveling too much.

[01:33:04] Um,

[01:33:07] Jeff Wood: that’s another fall thing is like all the conferences are in fall. And I found out why recently. It’s because nobody is, everybody’s in school and nobody’s traveling and going vacation. So all of the hotels and stuff are super cheap in like October and November. So that’s why all the conferences actually happen during that time, which feels like overload.

[01:33:25] Wes Marshall: Yeah. TRB in January in DC. It’s like the worst time to visit DC, but I’m always so cold, but I think hotels are good. Yeah. Pretty cheap comparatively and probably so yeah, right after New Year like 15, 000 people in one conference. That is a big deal. I guess it adds up. So I gotta

[01:33:42] Jeff Wood: get back to TRB. I gotta get back.

[01:33:43] I’ve I’ve been missing it.

[01:33:45] Wes Marshall: I’ll be there this year. Um, I think I have like already 4 talks lined up. So there you

[01:33:50] Jeff Wood: go.

[01:33:50] Wes Marshall: Go.

[01:33:51] Jeff Wood: There you go. Well, you can find me on Twitter at the overhead wire [email protected]. MAs on the overhead wire, SBA social Instagram, and threads at the overhead wire, LinkedIn, whatever.

[01:34:01] You’ll find me all over the place. I’m all over the web. Uh, , thanks for joining us on Mondays at the Overhead wire. Thanks to Wes for coming back on the show again, two, two shows in a row. We really appreciate that. Uh, we’ll have you back on again soon, I hope. Yeah, I hope we can get you back on.

[01:34:16] Wes Marshall: This, yeah, this is almost two hours.

[01:34:18] This one,

[01:34:19] Jeff Wood: I know we, we’ve been talking for a long time.

[01:34:23] Wes Marshall: All right.

[01:34:24] Jeff Wood: All right. Thanks, man.

[01:34:26] Wes Marshall: Good talking to you.

Mondays 160: The Long & Winding Road with Wes Marshall

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