(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 509: City Tech with Rob Walker
November 20, 2024
This week on Talking Headways we’re joined by writer Rob Walker to talk about his book, City Tech: 20 Apps, Ideas, and Innovations Changing the Urban Landscape. We discuss data collection, misconceptions, impressive transportation technologies such as e-bikes, and how technology has progressed in the last decade.
You can listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or on our hosting site.
Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:
[00:02:39] Jeff Wood: Rob Walker, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast.
Rob Walker: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Jeff Wood: Thanks for being here before we get started. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
[00:02:51] Rob Walker: My name’s Rob Walker. I’m a writer. I live in new Orleans. I write about technology and design and all sorts of things. [00:02:59] And one of the things I do is write a column called city tech, which is exactly what it sounds like for the Lincoln instituted plan policy. And that’s what we’re here to talk about today. The book version of city tech. [00:03:11] Jeff Wood: Yeah, because you read the column and then you put together you compiled all of this into a book from the last Oh, since 2015, right? [00:03:18] That’s the timeline that we’re on. [00:03:20] Rob Walker: Yeah, the column started in 2015. So it’s 20 columns and then some updates and things like that. A lot of lovely graphics and photography that the. Editors there added that make me look good, so I appreciate that. It was an interesting challenge though, dealing with the range of topics over such an amount of time. [00:03:40] We weren’t sure when we started the column, it was a new column. There was a new editor there called Maureen Clark and we had worked together before and she wanted someone with a journalistic background to come in and. Had a pretty open mandate as to what we were going to cover and that ended up evolving over time as the book shows, because by the end we’re getting into the technology of materials and things like this, but it started with a pretty straightforward set of ideas about, apps. [00:04:13] Things like this that we’re being experimented with, and we were interested in particular in the sort of crossover of private sector projects, academic projects, and actual policy city government. We were looking for different examples where those things were coming together. [00:04:30] Jeff Wood: And how did you get into this topic? [00:04:33] Is it something that you’ve always cared about cities and technology? Or is it something that you stumbled upon? Is it something that you dreamt about when you were a little kid? [00:04:42] Rob Walker: No I was writing about technology, which is why I think Maureen thought of me at the time. I was writing for Yahoo tech and technology was my beat and that just overlapped with cities in a natural way, but it wasn’t part of what I was covering at Yahoo. [00:04:56] And I think she was looking for someone who Was maybe not coming from an immersed city background, but coming with a more open, I don’t want to say make it sound like people with a more open attitude toward what was, what’s catching my eye, what’s an interest to me, who’s not, maybe going to all the conferences that everyone else is going to [00:05:16] Jeff Wood: maybe less a preconceived notion. [00:05:18] Rob Walker: Yeah, I think she was going for that. And this is the common thing is to go for the 50 50 split of he’s informed about 1 thing, but curious about another. And I was very, I’ve written about city related stuff. I also wrote for design observer at that time. And which occasionally touch on city related issues. [00:05:33] I don’t position myself as an expert on planning or land use. But I position myself as being very curious about it and very, I live in cities. I love cities. I’m originally from Texas, originally from a small town. It’s no longer a small town. It’s now a suburb of Katy, Texas, outside of Houston. [00:05:52] But I’ve also, I lived in New York for years. I lived in Savannah. I live in New Orleans now. We lived in Jersey for a while. So I’ve experienced different. I have point of view about different kinds of approaches to how cities operate and all the big questions that affect all of us from transportation to, housing. [00:06:11] So I was curious to see what’s really going on from a practical point of view, but also trying to keep a big picture point of view. Because I think that one of the interesting things about technology as a beat is that it’s both very personal and very, meta not to use a company name, but it’s pervasive, it’s very pervasive and it controls the big things and it touches us in small ways. [00:06:34] It’s with us in our hand and out of sight. And that applies to the way it works out in cities, too. [00:06:41] Jeff Wood: Since you started writing this in 2015, how are you feeling about technology and the evolution of cities and how the two are being melted together? [00:06:50] Rob Walker: It’s a good question because, obviously mixed. [00:06:52] But what I would say that one of the big things that I’ve learned in the process of doing the column is I probably went into it with some stereotypical notions of government being very slow. and deliberative and not Super responsive to real life changes on the ground and the technology community being very quick and nimble, but also maybe reckless and in some cases indifferent to policy, almost challenging policy. [00:07:25] And I think that there’s some truth in that. And I’ve written things about that. But I found or we found a lot of examples of crossover of cities that were actually quite responsive to working with an uber or something like that to experiment, do a pilot program to see, can uber be used as a last mile solution and X, Y, Z situations, things like this. [00:07:49] Not just that kind of crossover, but crossover with academia. Cutting edge research, finding ways into city run experiments around materials or around just all kinds of things. And then even citizen activists. We have in the book that one of my favorite examples is this wayfinding program that was in Durham and was online thing. [00:08:10] Originally, the guy did it without permission and you could go onto the site and print signs and put up wayfinding markers that would encourage walking in areas where It had been overlooked and instead of stomping him out, the city had worked with him and then other cities worked for them to create similar programs in San Jose and elsewhere. [00:08:32] And I was genuinely surprised to come across things like that because I had this. Vision of siloedness in these questions. That’s been a real stumbling block. And there is truth to the siloedness that comes up from time to time in the column too. But to answer your overriding question, this is 1 of the things that I feel pretty good about the direction that we’re moving in with that. [00:08:55] I think that there’s more openness to experimentation and different kinds of groups working together, different constituencies. [00:09:02] Jeff Wood: Yeah, it’s interesting to think about that specific example to walk your city because I feel like Mitchell Silver is a particularly open person in terms of thinking about how things are changing, how things are going in the future of cities. [00:09:14] And so it’s interesting to think about how he responded to that initially, even this was one of the early examples that you gave. So it was ahead of a lot of some of the more pernicious examples of technology companies stepping on city’s toes or overstepping their boundaries. And so I found that Really fascinating to how Durham and Mitchell responded to that. [00:09:34] Yeah, you probably shouldn’t have done this, but it’s pretty cool. And you’re right [00:09:38] Rob Walker: that, maybe it was possible for that attitude to take hold because it wasn’t quite as bad as some of the things with Airbnb disrupting housing markets and things like this that are a little bit harder to just shrug off. [00:09:51] But still. I think that we assume that there will be a kind of knee jerk reaction to these kind of experiment, unauthorized experiments. Like, why should we, even if it is cool, why should we show you any openness or open mindedness? And yeah, I think that I just saw more examples of that, more of that spirit than I was anticipating. [00:10:11] Jeff Wood: One of the things that I thought of when I was reading the book was what’s the end game for all of this technology? What is the end result? Are we looking for poverty reduction? Are we looking for climate change impact? Are we looking for quality of life issues? What are we trying to do by inserting technology into our living urban spaces? [00:10:30] Rob Walker: There’s a million ways to answer that, and it depends on the motive of who’s involved. Speaking very broadly, it’s a mix of all the classic things that are all the classic problems of cities, of, livability and affordability, and the problems that cities are always wrestling with. I will say that climate change became a more and more pervasive theme as the column went on. [00:10:51] As you say, I started in 2015. It’s not like climate change wasn’t a known issue then. But it just, by the time you get to the sort of final third of the book, almost every single topic has some angle on climate change, which is in a way, heartening, it’s good to know that it’s a front and center issue with just about everybody and just about everything. [00:11:15] One of the more recent columns that was in the book is about. Road materials and surfaces. And so this is an example of something that you don’t necessarily think of when you think of technology, but reflective paint being used on parking lots and roadways, especially in places like Phoenix and San Antonio, where they’re doing big pilot programs. [00:11:36] They can use existing materials that are actually much better reflecting light and therefore reducing heat and carbon emissions. But it also, the fact that cities like that are using them gooses the marketplace, gives companies a reason to put more money in R& D to make even better alternatives that are even cheaper. [00:11:57] And that’s an example of how the public and private sectors are helping each other. Climate change, although it is controversial on a sort of nationwide political level, There doesn’t seem to be that kind of confusion on the ground in the cities that I was dealing with. I did not have trouble finding, it just became an inescapable topic that I it’s weird in some ways, the national discourse about it among high level politicians about it’s all, it’s unproven and things like this. [00:12:26] The cities are where the, actual business of governing our lives. And managing reality happens and there, this is an accepted fact. And people are really trying in many ways to come up with solutions that have an impact as fast as possible and as lasting as possible. [00:12:44] Jeff Wood: It’s interesting because I feel like on the national level, or at least the kind of the 30, 000 foot level, it’s easy to go into your silo and your echo chambers and kind of talk randomly about stuff. But when you’re in Florida or you’re in Phoenix or you’re in, unfortunately, recently Asheville, North Carolina, you see what happens. And it’s real and it hits you like a ton of bricks and Cities and governments have no choice but to respond to the disasters that happen when climate fuels them to the next level. [00:13:18] That’s just what it is. And so we see this all the time, right? We see cities like you’re talking about, like Phoenix, thinking about, how much albedo the road has. [00:13:27] Speaker 3: Yeah. [00:13:27] Jeff Wood: How much reflective property it has because, otherwise you hear these stories of people’s shoes melting on the street. [00:13:33] Things like that. Yeah. It’s real to so many people, it’s just a weird thing when you get to that higher level that it can be covered up or it can be discussed in a way that’s circular and weird. [00:13:44] Rob Walker: Yeah, in that column, San Antonio was a good example of, I guess it was not this past summer, but the summer before. [00:13:51] When all these records were getting broken and they had to, I forget the exact number, but they had the projected average temperature would be X, Y, Z by the year 2035. And instead they hit it that year. And it just became a wake up call for the local government, the kind of chief environmental officer who had been struggling to get attention to get these, just got the green light, go for it. [00:14:14] Let’s get these pilots going on whatever we can do to reduce. The impact of this, not someday, but immediately now, of course, we can’t turn around overnight, but that attitude makes a big difference in the long run. And, to go back to the theme of technology. This is a little bit, I haven’t really ever written about this, but I think that the idea of positioning. [00:14:38] Issues as issues that technology can help us solve is actually very attractive to government officials for both good reasons, which is this is active steps we can take, but also maybe some other reasons, which is we’re not really asking people to make sacrifices, which is not a popular thing. [00:15:03] So that’s the double edged sword. And that’s why as good as we feel about some of the technology changes that are happening there. I don’t want to sound to pie in the sky about all this. I don’t think that we can just have lightning bolt our way out of these things. But a lot of small experiments combined with some small behavior change, I think, can add up. [00:15:22] Jeff Wood: There was a number of themes that came across in the book and I guess they’re like topic areas. And some of the articles that you wrote cover a bunch of different than that. We just talked about climate change and climate action, but there’s also, mobility, innovation, information, and data and sharing those types of things. [00:15:35] And then built environment solutions, like the 3d printing and things like that. And so those are the generally like the four categories that I could think of that kind of itemized what was going on. I like to categorize stuff, but I found that really interesting. And I’m wondering what, from a transportation standpoint What struck you the most from this kind of movement? [00:15:52] There’s a number of different mobility ideas in there. There’s the curb management, there’s dockless bikes, e bikes, delivery systems, and electric buses. Obviously it comes over into some of the climate stuff too, but I’m curious, like what was the thing that struck you the most out of some of those transportation ideas and mobility thoughts? [00:16:08] Rob Walker: Sure, a couple of things. One, definitely the climate change, the carbon emission angle just comes up over and over again in those things. A second thing, and this was a stealth theme in the book, that is most clearly revealed Through the transportation variations and experiments, but was the effect of the pandemic, which the pandemic didn’t exactly change the way we think about transportation, although it did offer a glimpse of a very different transportation world for a brief period of time. [00:16:44] So it did that and secondary, the green lighting of new projects and new experiments and new pilots almost overnight at much faster pace than government is used to working in even simple things like. Approving the use of the roadway outside of a restaurant for tables, so people can have outdoor dining is a zoning change that would have called, taking years of debate and they would do it in a week. [00:17:11] And then so to take it more to a planning level, Aspen was 1 place where they took advantage of this. Moment to just rewire their whole thinking about how the curb is managed in downtown Aspen, which is very small area. And they have rules about parking and implemented new technology that would keep track of you could get appointments for the curbside. [00:17:33] Now, did all this stuff stick? No, a lot of it didn’t, but it introduced a new kind of discourse around transportation. The curb. Traffic flow, how to use crucial land of the downtown urban core in a place like or in any city like that, where there have been debates for years about how parking should be managed about who should have access to the curb, whether it should be for and, it was dealing with. [00:18:00] We were living in a world there. A world that hasn’t gone away where there’s a lot more delivery stuff going on. So maybe you want to privilege delivery over customer parking by the department store. And that became that just transportation was one of the places where you saw that play out the most emphatically and undeniably. [00:18:18] And I think that while some of those experiments didn’t work out. You’re seeing an openness to flexibility that has persisted, and we’re not really talking about the pandemic anymore, but I think that it did show us a different vision of street ingestion could be addressed. [00:18:35] Jeff Wood: I feel like that also ties into the ideas that were shared in the piece about sidewalk labs, right? [00:18:40] Because who has control over public spaces? And who, and the privacy issue is a huge deal, but who owns data, who owns the curb, who owns places and things that are public or personally owned. And so I think that there’s a connection there. I’m trying to make the connection anyways, in my head, but it feels like there’s something that’s connected there. [00:18:59] Rob Walker: So sidewalk labs or the sidewalk experiment in Toronto, when we wrote about it in the magazine was. It’s still alive, but troubled, and it was troubled over this privacy issue that ultimately did seem to sink it. And it was an example of, all the happy things I said earlier about cities and companies maybe having more productive partnerships. [00:19:23] This was an example of kind of the exact opposite, but it, we felt like it was important to include this in the book because it’s a good object lesson in how, in retrospect, obviously Not to proceed when the profit motive of 1 group is just overwhelming their decision making apparently to the point that they’re not getting buy in from the general public. [00:19:50] So all those and I was guilty of this just now, I guess in this. When we were talking about the different constituencies, government, private sector, academia, who did I leave out? I left out the actual public. And that’s, I think what they did in Toronto to a large extent was the public didn’t have the buy in. [00:20:08] And as, from having a background in this stuff, sometimes it’s hard to get the public to pay attention and to be engaged and to give feedback until it’s too late until they’re complaining. And the train has left the station. In this case, we saw here’s how it can go awry. And I think we can learn from this in ways that will help the next version of this kind of project succeed a little bit better. [00:20:30] And there are other examples in the book of organizations that are specifically trying to get better at the offer tools, co urbanized being one, specifically trying to build and offer tools that Try to meet the public where it is to get that crucial feedback, because that is what’s going to make these things live or die. [00:20:49] And that’s especially true if we’re continue to deal with the reality of we have these existing cities. We have these existing infrastructures that have to be dealt with. Because the 1 thing I will say also that the book. Doesn’t really directly address, but it comes up in an update to the sidewalks thing is there is now this sort of. [00:21:10] Bubbling up utopian idea of building cities from scratch, which is not a totally new phenomenon, but it just seems to be getting more brass or something. Lately. There’s this 1 project outside of San Francisco that I’m sure you’re there with California [00:21:23] Jeff Wood: forever, [00:21:24] Rob Walker: California forever. And look, fine, but we’re not going to build new cities our way out of this. [00:21:31] Situation we have to deal with the existing stuff and that means dealing with the existing people and the existing citizens and finding ways to get their buy in without exploiting them because that’s what they’ve lost control of the narrative because it just became a story about companies looking to track you everywhere you went and monetizing that. [00:21:55] And it sounded, it started to sound like RoboCop or Blade Runner or something and. They just didn’t have the buy in. So they ended up getting in the sort of war of public relations over how that thing should proceed. They forgot or didn’t prepare themselves well enough for the idea that technology for all of the utopian sheen that comes with it that we’ve talked about. [00:22:18] Also has a dystopian shadow following it around, and that can be a real problem if you run up against the group of activists who have a better sense of channeling the public’s opinion than you do. [00:22:31] Jeff Wood: The California forever example is really interesting because it feels like it’s almost sidewalk labs. How. [00:22:38] Toronto public portrayed it on like steroids, where these people with huge amount of money, the people that were bankrolling California forever, and they’re still working on it, but they decided to take the ballot measure off of the ballot because they knew that they were going to get destroyed. [00:22:53] The people that there, it felt like they are trying to remove themselves from the governance of the public by building these new cities, right? And so they are tired of being told what to do where they are. And so let’s build. And that’s somewhat of a simplification but let’s build a new city to where we have control over things. [00:23:13] And so the public isn’t there to start. The public is the public that we choose and the public that we want to move in. And so I find that really fascinating as well, from that perspective of we don’t have to deal with the public. We get to choose the public, [00:23:26] Rob Walker: right? And I think that’s a good summary because that’s in effect, the only if that’s the problem that you’re setting out to solve. [00:23:34] Is, floating above existing regulation and public opinion. You can solve that problem by building, but you’re not solving any other problems. You’re not solving traffic problems in the places that exist. You’re not solving carbon problems. You’re not. And you can do whatever you want in terms of it can all be solar power or whatever they have in mind, but you’re having no broader impact. [00:23:57] It does no good to build a sparkling model. That is built with indifference to the way people actually behave and live and want to operate. But it is interesting. Maybe it will be maybe it will be a lab that teaches us something as we go along. It just seems to me that the priority should be dealing with the reality as it is. [00:24:20] Rather than trying to build a dream over here in the corner and hope, I don’t really, I honestly don’t understand what the argument is for what broader impact it will have beyond itself. [00:24:31] Jeff Wood: It reminds me of this episode we did a long time ago with Frances Fitzgerald, Pulitzer Prize winner, about her book, City on a Hill. [00:24:37] And a lot of the book was just these utopias gone wrong and Rajnish Puram and other ones like that, that just like they started out with good intentions, but in the end they didn’t work out well. Although there The idea of the Castro, which was interesting from the aspect of growing a place where there could be, gay rights movement and things like that. [00:24:56] But the backlash to it at the time was tough to read back on as well. [00:25:00] Rob Walker: Both designers and technologists in all fields are constantly learning. The one thing you learn from doing this stuff is that the user really matters and will teach you things that you couldn’t anticipate, and then you could only learn by. [00:25:17] Prototyping getting something out there and the idea of prototyping a whole city. It’s just okay, then what do you do when that one doesn’t really work out? Do you just build another one next to that? And you keep going at some point. You’ve got to figure out how to deal with the atoms that are in place rather than the abstract ideas that you can try to make into atoms. [00:25:38] Jeff Wood: Another kind of sub theme that came up for me and actually Greg talked about it at the end was this idea of regulation partnership, but also the capacity building for public entities and to work with these groups that are trying to, do something a little different. And so what did you see from that perspective of the potential for building public capacity for building up knowledge bases inside of cities so that they can deal with all of these kind of new things that are coming at them? [00:26:04] Rob Walker: Yeah, I would describe it as a pretty ad hoc situation at this point, but one thing I can say is that that there were smaller cities. Where there seemed to be more capacity for doing more progressive experimentation, and there’s a city Altamont Springs in Florida that they were the ones who did the pilot with Uber, actually those smaller cities where there’s, I guess it’s because there’s less bureaucracy. [00:26:29] I’m not quite sure what the reason is, but it just seems to vary. We just did another one. That’s not in the book, but we did a column about permitting processes. In Honolulu and some other places trying to implement AI solutions, which kind of makes sense because they can process the applications much faster than traditional human. [00:26:53] You mentioned Greg, that’s more his territory of what’s going to happen than than what I’ve really seen concrete examples of so far. So I just think it, I know it’s not a very satisfying answer, but I feel like it just really depends on the city and the context of the individual. [00:27:09] Municipality. [00:27:11] Jeff Wood: Yeah, because I feel like it is complex, but we also, I think we’ve, to a certain extent, we’ve decimated some of our public capacity over the years by saying that we don’t need as much government. And so what we’re finding, and there’s a research paper about this come out recently, where. [00:27:25] The counties that, and this is just on road building itself is the counties that don’t have the public capacity to do a lot of bidding processes and make sure that they’re getting the lowest bid and all those things end up hiring consultants. And then they end up having higher costs for their road building that they do, or the reconstruction of roads or the paving which is something that every county does, obviously. [00:27:47] And so looking at that. From a national level, that’s a really interesting look at kind of the loss of capacity over time and what that means for budgets at the local level and where that money goes. And so it’s interesting to look at it from this perspective of technology and how some of these companies are coming in and trying to do different things. [00:28:04] And some of it’s really innovative, but if you don’t have the regulator or the partner, they are to do it with you. It’s just, it might not quite work out the way, or it might not be a long term, benefit or solution. [00:28:16] Rob Walker: Yeah, I tend to agree. There’s not many people waving the flag for that. What you find is that is like this AI thing I was talking about. [00:28:24] There’s a hope that technology will somehow help solve that capacity problem in some way. But instead of hiring back more. Humans to execute, governance and policy that maybe technology can make that process much more efficient. I don’t think that there’s currently a lot of hard proof of that. [00:28:45] And we’ve just lived through, it’s been decades of the public opinion of slimming down government being a goal in some ways, slimming down government being a necessity, because by and large, State municipal governments have to balance their budgets, so they can’t float T bills or whatever and run a trillion dollar deficit. [00:29:04] So that has played out in significant ways. I’ve mentioned I live in New Orleans, and I mentioned Airbnb. This is not something from the book, but it is something I’ve written about. When Airbnb came into New Orleans, New Orleans has a lot of challenges as a city to run from potholes to inadequate police force and, all the flood issues and et cetera, and, Airbnb showed up and just was a 3000 pound gorilla that the city just had to respond to. And to this day is still rewriting legislation and trying to figure out how to regulate these things. So they, so that they don’t have too much of a negative impact on the housing stock and they just don’t have the Capacity, so I couldn’t agree more with your general point, but I think that a lot of the people who are thinking about it right now and who have that technology bent really do see technology as being more of a solution than a problem and tend not to be as aware of the negative repercussions that some innovation and innovation over here can have a negative impact over there. [00:30:06] If you’re not sufficiently, if you don’t have sufficient capacity to handle it, to deal with the change that it’s causing. What gets disrupted? There isn’t hotels. It’s city government. [00:30:15] Jeff Wood: Yeah. Another thing that came to mind while I was reading the book was, and we had talked with other folks about this specific idea as well, is that Chattanooga put together a really awesome thing, which is a public broadband network that could be accessed by everybody. [00:30:31] But it also brings up this idea of the over regulation in my mind, because Chattanooga is rare in that it’s one of the few places that actually does this because, The telecoms and the internet companies that are out there, the ISPs are, telling state legislatures and locals that they should write laws that say that you can’t even do this. [00:30:51] So like when the infrastructure bill passed, there is a hope that more cities would go this route and provide public infrastructure, but it ended up that. There’s a lot of places that can’t do it at all. And so I’m wondering how much that played into some of your columns, which is like this over regulation, this kind of constraint on some, really good ideas like what happened in Chattanooga with the broadband expansion. [00:31:13] Rob Walker: Yeah, we’ve tended to, with the exception of sidewalk, we’ve tended to. Steer more in direction of here’s something that worked rather than here’s something that fell apart. And here’s why or here’s something that they’re just trying and Chattanooga was obviously a standout. And there were a lot of things about the situation there that were unique to that place. [00:31:33] Including they have a utility that’s just very forward thinking and aggressive and fighting the kinds of fights that you’re talking about of having, competing interest, trying to stop them so we can only hope that they. That people pick up on that and, lead by example, approach. [00:31:53] But, yeah, I think that your general point is right that the tech companies and the, and by extension, the cable and so on providers, they don’t want government regulation unless it’s regulating in a way that throws up barriers to their potential competitors, but that’s an old story. And that’s not probably going to go away. [00:32:15] It’s hard to say whether that’s something that You know I think that it can be fought at a local level on an exception by exception basis, but it’s not easy. That’s something where we need a kind of national tone to be set about what is good regulation. What is bad regulation? And right now we’re just very far away from having a serious. [00:32:34] National debate about that. That’s the positions are cartoonish and, um, we’re still debating whether tick tock should be banned. And until we can move with 1 purpose on questions as basic as that. And I think. Some of these more complex things are just going to continue to be fought out in the trenches. [00:32:54] Jeff Wood: There’s also an interesting, 1 of the themes that I came up with information and data. So you have Chattanooga. You have the sidewalk labs discussion. You have dockless bikes, Strava, streetlights, community engagement. The Strava 1 was really interesting to me. As well, because I remember at the time when the data came out that everyone was really excited about it, but then people started putting up, signs that are like we have to be careful about this because who is using Strava and who are the ones creating these paths and these data that is this is very useful for cities. [00:33:23] But I think that kind of how Strava fell into it was another interesting story that you unearthed as well. [00:33:29] Rob Walker: Yeah, it was something that fell into it is right. And I think that by and large, while there have been the problems that you’ve discussed, they’ve been a good example of how a tech, a private tech enterprise that is throwing off this data that can be of use found a way to be pretty openly responsive. [00:33:53] To cities and municipalities saying, Hey, is there a way you can make this data accessible to us? And they formed this whole other units or travel metro that I don’t know that it’s a cash cow for them per se, but I think that, with all the cautionary notes that you just properly sounded about who is exactly, this data could be skewed in some way, it’s also it’s just true that it’s. [00:34:17] Presenting a form of data, a trove of data that was just previously unavailable beyond what you can do with people standing with clickers and things like this. It’s a good example. And it hung around when I first wrote about it, it was pretty new and it wasn’t clear to me anyway, if it would, Persist, or if they would spin it off, or find some way to, I don’t think it was contributing meaningfully to their bottom line. [00:34:44] And so that made it tentative in my view. So I’m pleased that it’s still around and still being put to use. I’m sure that there are planners who would like different kinds of access to that data. Then Strava is. Able to provide, but I think it’s been an overall positive contribution to it’s a good example of these kind of cross fertilization things that I was surprised to find from when I first went into the column [00:35:10] Jeff Wood: along those same lines. [00:35:11] I’m curious of your thoughts on like data collection and consumption and digestion of it. We recently chatted with Michael Batty about his book, the computable city. And what he was talking about was just this massive amount of data that’s being created and digested and consumed and metabolized every day, every second compared to what we used to do with the census. [00:35:32] And I’m wondering like what you’ve seen from this column in terms of the creation of data for cities to use. And it goes along the lines of those Strava example, but you must have kind Looked at this and seen just this explosion of information. [00:35:47] Rob Walker: Yeah, there definitely is an explosion of information and not just a new information, but also just accessibility of information that was there all along. [00:35:56] So the challenge has become, it seems to me, just anecdotally, and this comes up in some of the columns. The challenge isn’t what data can we get? The challenge is how do we harness and control it and turn into something useful? Because it is this sort of fire hose of things and data is controlled by many different sources. [00:36:15] There was 1 column where I wrote about some different municipalities trying to create a kind of climate. Back to climate a climate dashboard figure out what can we do what policy decisions can we make on a local level. And this was 1 town in Massachusetts. We’re going to make it on a local level. [00:36:36] That will have an impact on carbon emissions and how do we measure it? To talk about that, they needed to get. All kinds of traffic data that were really controlled by the state and all kinds of other data that were controlled by other entities and then synthesize them. And that proved to be a kind of an insurmountable challenge so far that they were not able to, they could get some inputs, but not enough inputs. [00:37:03] And I think that’s going to be the challenge for a while and you see it in other things in mapping and stuff like this, where the satellite imagery is insane now, and there’s just, there’s tons and tons of data available, but there’s not a lot of smart ways to it takes a lot of thought. [00:37:19] To figure out how to control it and then you some piece of data that you might want to add to your formula. Might not be available or it might belong to some private entity or someone might want to leverage it. They might just have it in a format that doesn’t fit your format. So that’s the real challenge. [00:37:35] It’s not the data. It’s the control of the data. [00:37:40] Jeff Wood: I know that for me, when I was back in 2013, I was working on an equity atlas for Los Angeles and 1 of the things that came up was we wanted to look at health data. Health data at the time, and even now I imagine is not very good and there’s HIPAA, regulations that keep you from getting certain information and stuff. [00:37:58] But, we had granular employment data at the block level, we had a lot of hazards data, we had all kinds of stuff. But if we wanted to combine the transportation policy with, say, like the air quality or something like the respiratory disease instances, there’s at the county level and the county level doesn’t add up. [00:38:17] Really help you very much when you’re trying to look at the place by place block by block impacts of a road, for example, or a transit system or something like that. So that’s still the case. I feel like even though that was like 10 years ago, 12 years ago, I still feel like there’s probably a, like you mentioned, there’s so much stuff that’s out there, but getting it to come together and tell a story is the hard part. [00:38:39] Rob Walker: That may have been 2013. Seems like they would have figured it out by now, the reality is that there’s so much more data being added to the puzzle. Every year, that challenge actually gets harder, and it’s very difficult to prioritize as well. If you took the health impacts, one of the stories in the book is about noise pollution, if you want to use that term. [00:38:58] And this scholar at Brown, Erica Walker, not related to me, was doing work in Jackson, Mississippi, around noise level issues. Around the time that their water system collapsed, it just became clear to her that this is ridiculous. We can’t. This is not the data that we need to be mostly focused on and she pivoted her operation to it’s they still collect noise because it still has to do with housing equity and where people are located vis a vis factories and things like this. [00:39:30] But that was a case where it was like we have this 1 data stream, but we really need to pivot to this other data stream and figure out if we can blend them. Find useful things. So those kind of on the ground solutions where you pick and learn to pick and choose and learn to not just pick and choose, but to pick your shots. [00:39:50] Like this is the crucial data stream that we need rather than go for volume of let’s get all the data in the universe. I think that may be one coping strategy that you see used [00:40:00] Jeff Wood: quality, not quantity, right? That’s the, which item in this group has like the most potential still for you? [00:40:06] Rob Walker: Oh, I think, I’ve become quite persuaded by e bikes and some of the experiments. [00:40:13] It’s funny because I’m a bike person. I’m personally as a bike person, a little skeptical of e bikes, but as a journalist who is writing about this stuff, I have been convinced that e bikes actually attract a different user base. Then bikes ever will, and I think that has a lot of potential to be leveraged. [00:40:32] Again, it’s bringing in that public side where there’s a constituency. That’s yeah, I’m interested in that. I’m not making it like, it doesn’t have to be positioned as a sacrifice. It can be positioned as an opportunity and. I think that there’s enough of that appeal that it could be leveraged to have actual policy impacts on things like bike lanes and bike sharing opportunities. [00:40:53] It’s funny because, you asked me that now I’m worried that I sound naive, but I am pretty optimistic about that because it’s, it is a coming together of a lot of different elements that I think are good. Even though I personally might not be getting any bike. [00:41:08] Jeff Wood: I think about it when I’m biking up a hill here in San Francisco, every time I need that pedal assist. [00:41:14] It’s easy for me [00:41:14] Rob Walker: to say New Orleans is very flat, but no it’s serious, I have been persuaded that it just, as bike issues have not, there’s not a new topic, but this has potential to really broaden it out in a way that’s a real genuine step forward, real genuine progress. And the pervasiveness of bike sharing programs has continued to grow. [00:41:34] A lot of them, including in new Orleans, they have an e bike component to them. And I think that’s helping. I feel pretty good about that. [00:41:41] Jeff Wood: One of the interesting things that stuck out to me along those lines is just like the idea in the delivery piece that you have and it fits with the e bike discussion as well, is that we have this argument that we’ve always had about taking space for bikes or for buses or whatever else it is, but now. [00:41:55] If you can bring in these smaller vehicles and start to recalibrate that discussion around, let’s move freight, let’s move people in these other lanes that aren’t for cars, right there for people and goods that are in the small packages. I thought that was really interesting because I don’t think I, I’ve, I feel like I’ve felt that discussion this way or that way, but it not like directly as it was stated in your piece, which I thought was really great. [00:42:19] Rob Walker: Yeah, I agree. And I think that, as you say, I think e bikes are a piece, a potential piece of that and maybe a potential bridge to that because I think it’s a big leap for people to say, wait a minute, we’re going to go. We just got finished building all these bike lanes. Now we’re going to build special lanes for robots or whatever. [00:42:36] People are like, you can see how that becomes a target, but the e bike becomes, It’s more relatable, it’s a big improvement for delivery. There’s a lot, there is a lot of potential there. Cause it, that’s one that sounds almost pie in the sky, but ah, come on, we’re not going to have new lanes for new kinds of, if you think about bike lanes and the progress we’ve made there, If we can see ways to adapt there’s some possibilities. [00:42:59] There’s some possibilities. [00:43:01] Jeff Wood: Yeah. And some places have a lot of space on their roads that could be repurposed. [00:43:06] So my last question is what makes you happy about the way that things are going, looking back from 2015 to now, is there something that brings you joy or just like a good feeling going forward? [00:43:17] Rob Walker: Yeah, it’s a bias of the column that I ended up talking to really cool people. Yeah, really cool stuff. [00:43:25] Both, the kinds of people who are willing to make the time to talk to me tend to be the kind of people who are optimistic, experimental. Clear eyed, but not do me in any way. So I feel good that there’s people out there who are really passionate about it, about using technology to improve city life and almost just ways that the endless innovation and sort of surprises of what do they come up with next? [00:43:53] And not all of what they come up with works. There are definitely examples. That’s what the updates serve in the book. There’s updates about actually that company went out of business. Yeah. They’re not including they’re not there anymore, but the endless optimism that’s out there, despite the challenges is great. [00:44:09] And that’s the thing that keeps me actually writing the column. So that would be the thing that makes me happiest about it. That’s awesome. [00:44:15] Jeff Wood: The book is City Tech, 20 apps, ideas, and innovations for the changing urban landscape. Where can folks pick up a copy if they want to read it? Which they should. [00:44:22] Rob Walker: I believe that it’s in bookstore. You can of course get it on Amazon or a bookshop. org or your local bookstore will probably order it for you. Or you can get at the Lincoln Institute website. [00:44:36] Jeff Wood: Awesome. And where can folks find you if you wish to be found? [00:44:39] Rob Walker: The easiest place to find me is probably either my site robwalker. [00:44:43] net or my newsletter, which is called the art of noticing, and it’s about observation and attention. And that is robwalker. substack. com. [00:44:52] Jeff Wood: Awesome. I’m going to go and subscribe to that right now. Rob, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time. Thanks so much for having me. It was a blast. [00:45:03] Thanks for joining us. The Talking Headways podcast is a project of The Overhead Wire and appears first at Streetsplug USA. Thanks to our generous Patreon supporters for supporting this show and Mondays at The Overhead Wire. You can support the show by going to patreon. com slash the overhead wire. Sign up for our 18 year old daily newsletter by visiting the overhead wire. [00:45:19] com or check the show notes for other cool merch and opportunities to connect. Follow along using your podcast track choice, but if you can’t find it there, you can always find the show at its original home, usa. streetsblog. org. We’ll see you next time at Talking Headways.
