(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 541: Reclaiming the Road

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Oxford Ohio City Councilor and Miami of Ohio geography professor, David Prytherch. We chat about his new book Reclaiming the Road: Mobility Justice beyond Complete Streets. We chat about how pandemic open street experiments were rediscovering original uses, the cognitive benefits of experiencing car free streets, the opening of a democratic space for a discussion of what streets could and should be.

To listen to this episode, find it first at Streetsblog USA, or it’s in the hosting archives.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of the show:

Jeff Wood: David Prytherch, welcome back to the Talking Headways podcast.

David Prytherch: It’s such a pleasure to see you again, Jeff. Thank you so much for hosting me in all that you do with the Overhead wire and the podcast. So thanks for your service to knowledge and the discipline.

Jeff Wood: Oh, well, thank you for your service and knowledge and the discipline. Writing a book is no small feat, and we’ll talk about that in a second. But before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about what you’ve been up to besides writing the book since we last chatted in 2021? I think it was episode 3 59.

David Prytherch: About what? And here we are at 500 and something.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. Yeah.

David Prytherch: So I’ve been continuing to do the same sort of thing, big picture on me, which is that I am a professor of geography at Miami University. I mainly teach urban planning. Sustainability. I’m active on campus with things like climate action. I sit on most of the planning committees that one can sit on.

I’m also an elected [00:03:00] official. I’m a city counselor in the city of Oxford, uh, and have two kids who are off to college and yeah, just trying to make through life in 2025. So that’s a separate topic. But yeah, big picture, just really interested in places and how they come to be and how we can shape them.

And I do that through teaching and research and public service.

Jeff Wood: That’s a lot of hats. How do you juggle all the hats and all the things that you do from the research? Also to being a city counselor, that seems like a lot of reading and research as well.

David Prytherch: For me, when I first started doing this, they felt like things that pulled me in separate directions.

You remember, like that was what the British Empire would do to people who would draw quarter to them by pulling in separate directions. But all of these things flow into each other for me. So the research that I’m doing, for example, on streets. Feeds into my teaching and then it feeds into my service. I think, as I probably mentioned to you in 2021, I partly got into learning about traffic engineering, so I could argue with my local engineer [00:04:00] that yes, the street was wide enough for a bike lane, and so there’s a really nice kind of dynamic that goes between teaching and research and service.

It’s a lot of different hats, but it’s all part of the same whole, which I really appreciate.

Jeff Wood: Is it hard to go into like a meeting with all of the knowledge that you have in the traffic engineering urban planning space and stuff, and go back to square one in terms of explanations or traffic engineering 1 0 1.

David Prytherch: Yeah, it’s, it’s hard. And, and to be honest, people don’t always welcome my expertise. Wanna hear about it?

Jeff Wood: You’re always an expert outside the city you live in, right?

David Prytherch: Yeah. But this is, to me, I think the engineering part of it is pretty straightforward. Like what’s the range on a possible lane width on a street, 10 to 13 feet.

But to me, what the research has helped me with is to boil it down some pretty basic principles like equity. You know that if we’re going to repave the street and we have a complete Streets policy, it’s not right to [00:05:00] not build a sidewalk. We have someone who’s blind, who lives in the neighborhood, and them walking in the street is not right.

And so I try to keep it to that basic values level and then the engineering flows from that.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. Well, let’s talk about your book Reclaiming The Road Mobility Justice Beyond Complete Streets. Where did the impetus for this one come from?

David Prytherch: So it’s really been interesting you talk about what I’ve been up to.

It’s been kind of my project over the last decade or so to understand how the geography of the Public Street came to be the way it was, which for me then became very much a study of the legal and the policy and the engineering’s frameworks that govern the street. And so that was my last book in 2018.

Law Engineering in American right away was just trying to really like. Critically analyzed these important procedural and design frameworks through the filter of mobility justice, which ultimately became kind of an indictment of how bad. That system is, and how unjust it’s, but I was okay, that’s enough on the transportation research for a while.

And then [00:06:00] 2020 happened. And the summer of 2020 was really a remarkable time. I had already seen, for example, that in my research that was focused on complete Streets, the idea that streets should accommodate all users of all ages and abilities and all the different modes. Carve out some space for a bicycle lane or to make sure there were crosswalks and that had been building up.

But I had been able to see in the research that cities were starting to go beyond that. They were starting to do things like, parklets that maybe, uh, parking space wasn’t just for transportation, it could be for public space or cities like New York with Times Square and, and creating plazas. And so I’d seen like some kind of nascent move.

Beyond simply redesigning the transportation system to accommodate users better, to actually reclaiming the street as a public space. But those things were very limited prior to 2020. And then boom, 2020 happened and all of a sudden, um, I just have this really strong memory of being in Boston in the north end.

And [00:07:00] the pedestrians and the restaurant spaces basically had taken over the streets and the car was. God forbid you would try to drive down the street. They had completely flipped the script and I saw cities all over in what seemingly the blink of an eye, New York converted 83 miles of streets into what they called open streets.

Oakland, California closed something like 70 some miles of streets and called ’em slow Streets Parklets, and the restaurant sheds just expanded. Like it was just this really remarkable thing and I was so kind of blown away by it and really wondering a little bit like. I happened awfully fast. What were the planners thinking?

Was that just, did they do it like that? Or were they ready for this moment? So there was this radical very sudden in the summer of 2020, reclaiming of the streets or something other than transportation and beyond just alternative transportation, it was reclaiming the street as a public space the way we might have experienced it 110 or 120 years ago.

So I [00:08:00] felt like, okay, something new is going on there. But then the really remarkable thing was the summer of 2020 was the summer of George Floyd and a summer of incredibly robust conversations about equity in the United States, again, which had been brewing for some time, including in the transportation space where we had this complete streets movement that was saying, Hey, this, to be fair, the streets should balance all users.

Then we started to have people saying, well, is that really enough? There are other equity issues beyond just whether you’re a driver or a pedestrian or cyclist. What about gentrification and how may a transportation improvement, maybe perhaps impact kind of racial justice? And there was kind of a discontent that the Complete Streets movement, which mainly focused on intermodal equity, wasn’t capturing all of the dimensions of equity.

And then of course, 2020 just blew that open where we started really taking a hard look at equity and everything. And so just as fast as cities were moving to reclaim their streets, the Complete Streets [00:09:00] Coalition, smart Growth America, all of a sudden we’re incorporating new discourses of equity. Into their definition of complete streets by talking about historic patterns of disinvestment.

And those two major forces, theoretical and practical, came together literally on the street space. I mean, George Floyd was killed on the street where he was killed, became a public plaza, black Lives Matter plazas. And so all of that stuff was going on, which to me was very, very interesting. But within that, I saw that there were some tensions that I, myself, as a transportation advocate was trying to struggle with.

I’d always thought that bike lanes were good. Things like creating a bike lane for a cyclist was good. That was moving towards transportation equity and seeing the critiques that, oh no, a bike lane is a white lane, and that’s part of green gentrification. I started to see that there were these kind of different equity conversations that seemed to be.

Either talking past each other or colliding. And as a person who is not only a geographer, but a planner, I know that decisions have to be [00:10:00] made to paint the bike lane or not. How do you allocate the street space? So I felt like there were all these different ways of talking about equity that didn’t seem like they always jived with each other.

And I conceptually need to figure out, well, what would a just street look like? If you had to do it and you had to make choices, how would you juggle these different. So my book is two things. One, it’s an attempt to grapple with and create an intersectional idea of mobility justice that I hope would actually be workable, that you could actually try to juggle those different ways of thinking about equity.

That’s part of it, but then it’s also to apply that to all these really, what I thought were pretty interesting things that were happening on streets, like the slowing the streets or the closing the streets we call open streets or. Of streets, so lots going on in the book, but lots was happening in 2020 in in the year since.

Jeff Wood: There’s so much and there’s so much of that to pull together, right? It’s a really hard idea to construct some sort of argument around it feels like. And one of the things that stood out to me from reading was just like this idea [00:11:00] that streets aren’t just a physical space. They’re actually social constructs as well, right?

So like we engineer them for traffic flow, but when we do that, what are we taking away? And so what does this look like? Like a hundred years ago before the cars were here, was it more equal? You know, there obviously were racial differences, like people’s opinions about what should be in the street, commerce, et cetera.

And so, you know, looking back in time before the car, which makes our job a whole lot of a mess, now, where do we stand even before cars came to, to bother us on our streets.

David Prytherch: I think what’s so interesting, and part of my project has been, and this is where the, you know, the Peter Nortons of the world have been so helpful in helping us understand what happened to streets a hundred years ago.

They went from being social spaces that were relatively lightly regulated because they were understood to be public and there were some norms, but it was the introduction of the automobile that led to a very codified rule-based engineering of the space where it became infrastructure and in becoming a highly [00:12:00] engineered infrastructure.

It wasn’t just about that the street got paved and striped and all those sorts of things. Infrastructure is one of those things that kind of dispersively we take out of the category of being social. As I was working with the last book, once you start thinking of the street as like a conduit for cars, you place a different set of expectations from the street that tend then to be technical.

And so what’s so powerful to me about what’s happened in recent years is a kind of lowering of the veil, which is. Okay. The street, yeah, it is infrastructure, but it is, and all it has been a public space. And so to look back at how did people share the street space 120 years ago? Those norms have been forgotten ’cause they’re subsumed under this whole edifice of traffic engineering.

But this is what the experiment of, for example, open streets, cities had to kind of rediscover like how do you. Juggle this stuff and what’s ultimately a very amorphous space? [00:13:00] The street as we engineer it. Okay. There’s a lane for car and another lane for car and a bike lane, and, and everybody’s got their space and it’s, it’s orderly.

The minute you kind of create, it’s pedestrianized, but we’re still letting bicycles through and maybe we’re letting slow cars through. It’s probably not labeled and marked and divided and chopped up. It’s then it’s organically shared space. It’s really messy. And that’s what I think cities have been trying to struggle with is to relearn what some of that sharing was like from a social point of view that cannot be captured in signs and markings and statutes.

Jeff Wood: From like a neuroscience perspective, it’s also interesting because people’s brains basically break when you start to put in some of this chaos, uh, or some of the perceived chaos, I should say, of putting in a bike in a place where people usually walk or anything that might not be, and ’cause they understand cars go here and pedestrians and everybody else go here.

But then when you start mixing even more. It’s like people complain more about whether they’re [00:14:00] gonna get run over by an e-bike than the tens of thousands of people that are killed by cars every year. Right? So it’s like this interesting neurological change in people’s minds, and they can’t quite put their heads around it because it doesn’t make sense along the lines that they’re used to.

David Prytherch: It’s really a powerful thing, and this is why I think that some of the stuff that I was studying in the book and the whole range of ways that cities are reclaiming streets, but even those events that are ephemeral, you know, one of the things that really paved the way for this a lot was the open streets summer streets, which you close off streets for a weekend.

They were ephemeral events, but there’s something probably, and I’m not a neuroscientist, but cognitively powerful about walking down the middle of the street. That used to be the domain of the car and experiencing it as something different. And so even though planners, for example, recognized that some of these interventions were not.

Full reclaiming of the street. I think they saw there was a lot of cognitive benefit to [00:15:00] stepping off the curb and sharing the space in a new way. And yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if there are neural pathways that need to form in order to be able to deal with that. But it’s only by doing it that you can then see the world in a different way and then figure out how can I live with the e-bikes and the restaurant sheds and the delivery trucks?

Sharing the city and its spaces is really hard. We do it in other places. We’ve always had parks that were shared spaces and we expect them to be somewhat messy and organic and the street. I think we can learn to see it in that way also.

Jeff Wood: That kind of gets into the issue of belonging too, like who belongs in the street or who’s allowed to be in the street.

And I don’t think you mentioned the veil of ignorance, but that’s what you’re referencing in the book. What’s one of my favorite things that I’ve learned from Carol Martins and, and some of the stuff that’s been out there recently is like this idea that if you have a desert island, for example, and you don’t know whether you’re rich or poor, when you get to that desert island, like how would you set up your transportation [00:16:00] system, making sure, like beforehand you set something up where you can thrive later on is a kind of a good proxy for figuring out whether it’s fair or not for everybody. And so I think this idea of fairness, this idea of belonging is a really important point that you make in the book. And begs the question like, who belongs and who is this fair to when we’re talking about streets and how their space is allocated?

David Prytherch: Well, this is one of the things that I think we were talking about when we talked last time. I mean, I think geographers, for example, we talk a lot about the right to the city. I think each of us from our own positions, you know, we have a claim on the city, but we’re not the only ones. There are different people in different modes of transportation, and there are people of different races and genders and economic statuses and from different neighborhoods.

And so we all want and have a right to be belong in the spaces of the city. So how do we make that fair? And as you know, one of those really great frameworks is to think about like via raw and kind of a political philosophy. This idea of the initial [00:17:00] position of equality or however he frames it that, yeah, that at least in theory, you shouldn’t be disadvantaged from the very minute you entered the street.

By this standard, now enter the street as a bicycle. It’s, and right from the get go, you’re behind. I think that was a great kind of way to think about some of those other frameworks are as a geographer, distributional fairness. Do I have access to mobility? Do the streets, does the network distribute mobility and the goods and bads of mobility?

Equitably, you can look at the equity of sharing the street space, as I say, with go from the Google map view to the street view. You know, at that level is the public right of way, divided up in a way that we can all access it and feel belonging there. Part of the wrestling with this is for many people, equity was about race and gender and national identity and full stop, which it does mean that, but then those things then intersect with, different people of different races are walking and driving and biking, and then you have all these other forms of equity that are lace based equity. The idea of [00:18:00] gentrification, I think it’s important to figure out sustainability and intergenerational equity. Okay, so maybe we don’t do a bike lane because we’re worried about gentrification, but what does that do to the future person if we don’t achieve decarbonization?

And then there’s procedural equity and all those things. So there’s so many wonderful, wonderful ways to talk about equity, but they sometimes talk past each other. And my goal was to try to see if we can weave them together into one framework, which interestingly, we can talk later about that. The planners, of course, are thinking about that step two, and, and they’ve created equity matrices that, that they’re running projects through matrices that try to do this very thing.

To try to weight the variable to try to do the best they can.

Jeff Wood: That might be interesting too, because when we start to kind of systematize stuff, things can get lost in the wash. You know, like when we try it too hard almost sometimes, uh, we overdo it. We chatted with, somebody recently wrote a book, the Computable City.

Mm. And they were talking about transportation models [00:19:00] and how we’ve gone to computers to like try to figure out all these variables. And then in the end, humans make decisions irrationally sometimes. And so it’s hard to say that like a model is actually the best way of going about it. And so there’s positive attempts to make everything fair and then like how much is going too far.

It’s an interesting kind of conundrum and question about the use of technology, which has its own biases.

David Prytherch: One of the kind of concrete examples of that that I saw was one way to think about justice is kind of a procedural justice. For example, in the past, streets have been planned by traffic engineers, not very accountable to the public, and neighbors didn’t have a lot of say.

But what came out of some of these things, like something as simple as a speed hump or a slow street. City started to open up to neighborhood requests that, Hey, I’ve got a local street. I’ve got people speeding down at, can I please get a traffic hump? Or can you do a slow street study here? Or, Hey, I would like to have a [00:20:00] parklet in front of my business, New York City, the open Streets program by neighborhood request at one level.

That’s wonderful. It’s so democratic to let the people say, Hey, I want this in my neighborhood. But then you map that stuff and you realize that, oh, things that are Volunteeristic, lo and behold, the people who ask for the resources are the people with the resources who know how to ask for resources.

And so the map of open streets in New York City is a pretty stark map of. Where the business improvement districts are and where the active neighbors are. And so many of the cities I was talking to were backing away a little bit from that and to try to rely on data because what, on what level seemed equitable, wasn’t producing spatially equitable, racially equitable outcomes.

And so they were trying to use mapping to identify where resources should go based on things like. Traffic accidents and age and race and income [00:21:00] and we’re trying to some kind of hybrid of the two. And that’s where, yeah, I guess I see the world like through the eyes of a planner who has X amount of resources and needs to allocate them.

And do you do a bike lane or not? Which I think forces to articulate what your values are and operationalize them, which for critical geographers, like myself, one could critique those things. But I think anybody who has to take an action, I have a lot of respect for their attempts to operationalize what they see as mobility, justice through the allocation of resources and improvements across the city.

And they, they’ll admit it’s a messy business.

Jeff Wood: Yeah, that’s what I did, you know, when I worked at my former job is like data analysis of maps and locating resources and making typologies, right, of like yeah. Where stuff should go. And so I, I love it, but I just, sometimes it’s almost like some of those best city in the world ranking systems where you’re like where’s this come from?

Like by Wallet Hub? Yeah. Yeah. By Wallet Hub. Exactly. Exactly.

David Prytherch: It really was really interesting though, because I just had really [00:22:00] great conversation with a transportation planner in LA and they just. For example, they found that a Volunteeristic neighborhood requested slow Streets program drained their staff resources because those people in the better off neighborhoods just took so much staff time to get it right and other neighborhoods quotas they would say.

Let us know when it’s done. Yeah. Yeah, it’s, it’s a really very interesting, and I think that the planners were, again, simultaneously trying to redesign streets, which was an organic process, but they were also trying to redefine what equity was and apply it to streets, which again was messy.

Jeff Wood: The question I wrote down when I was reading the section of the book we were talking about is, you know, what is the difference between procedural justice in creating equitable outcomes and say implementation of justice where the transportation is actually constructed.

So that’s that kind of edge between like the planning of it and then the decision making towards the construction of it, which I found very fascinating.

David Prytherch: Yeah, I mean there are just so many layers to how streets come to [00:23:00] be in terms of the allocation resources, thinking them as networks that span metropolitan scale down to the level of inches and how people are engaged in the process.

It’s really complicated, but what I would say in general, one could critique the imperfections in that procedural justice. In all of this stuff, we need to compare it. Against what the norm is in the United States to the planning and engineering of streets, which is typically A, in terms of its justice, its bias towards the automobile and unjust towards all other users.

And procedurally, people don’t often get a say in, all engineers come in and they’re kind of gonna do what they’re gonna do on your street. And so what I was really struck by is the opening of a democratic space through all this. One of the things I found super interesting was by opening the street to a conversation about what the street could [00:24:00] be into that space came.

People like a really classic example. People I spoke to the 34th Avenue in Queens in New York, where they created an open street in the height of the pandemic. But that required, a lot of those cities right from the get go. Like, we don’t have the staffing to put up those barricades and take down those barricades every day.

So people in the neighborhood rose up and organized to deploy barricades, which then led to the creation of what are now I imagine, 5 0 1 C3 roof, like the 34th Avenue Open Street that have boards of directors. And there’s a whole new political space that opened up by people who are charged with kind of organizing and thinking about and advocating for their streets.

That didn’t really exist in that same way before. And I think just in the same way that if you step onto the street and get that sense of liberation, like, wow, like walking up the middle of the street feels really good, like I don’t want to give that up. Actually having a say in the future of your street, being able [00:25:00] to talk to the transportation agencies and say, no, what we want here is this and that.

Empowerment and the capacity building to know who to call and what to say and what to ask for was really kind of profound. I think in terms of changing the dynamics of streets, and if we accept that they are public spaces, then they are political spaces, then we need to have a politics that can make decisions that these are not just engineering decisions.

Now, of course, that’s really tricky. I mean, nimbyism is tricky. Giving locals a say over their street is not always democracy. A whole other book one could write is the role business.

Stepped into this space and have run with it. I think that our cities are increasingly being planned by business improvement districts and you know, one can have questions about how great that is.

Jeff Wood: I mean, I, I have a negative story about that, west Portal here in San Francisco, family of four was killed and the [00:26:00] city started to think about, you know, rethinking the street so that it’s safer.

And then the business district said no. And they had the ultimate decision for some reason. And it wasn’t just like the business district, it was like who they had pointed to the advisory committee that made the final decision to the supervisor that basically didn’t move forward with as much of a change as people who are promoting safety wanted.

So that’s a perfect example of what you’re talking about,

David Prytherch: but it can cut both ways. You know, one of the things, if you talk to people like Robin about Oko, who was involved in Parklets in San Francisco prior to 2020. He said that every, every new parklet was a pitched battle against the businesses because they were afraid of parking being lost.

The pandemic shifted the dynamic where all of a sudden the businesses were like, Hey, that street space is maybe more valuable to be activated as outdoor cafe, and that’s cars from parked somewhere else. And so they became a force, advocating for, the allyships that came out of. In San Francisco, for [00:27:00] example, like the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, I think it’s called wrestling with everybody.

But it was really interesting because you know, they were looking to create these shared spaces in San Francisco, and it turns out the fire department was the major impediment because the fire department didn’t want anything that prohibited their ability to navigate. So the restaurant association was kind of allied with those people were trying to convert the streets into public spaces.

I was thinking about the downtown San Francisco partnership. I can’t remember the name of the streets, but with the loss of jobs downtown, they’re trying to recreate a Pedestrianized destination. And so for them, reclaiming Streets was a really great economic development strategy. Yeah, I, I have mixed feelings about it because when you think about the motor dem, as Peter Norton would call it, has been such a monolithic force dominating the streets in the United States.

What possible force could you imagine that would be a countervailing counterweight to motor dem? It might be the real estate industry, the real estate industry [00:28:00] in the United States, real estate and cars. There probably are two like, and so what’s really played out was that capitalism saw the value of the street space and was happy to make a claim in it.

Very complicated. You

Jeff Wood: know, capitalism or capitalists.

David Prytherch: Uh uh, yeah, I don’t know. Capitalists, downtown real estate interests. Yeah. They were very happy to lease out street space for private enterprise, which is complicated. Yeah. And that again, is one of those things that planners were trying to juggle, like really interesting stuff on the leasing rates.

Like what’s an appropriate leasing rate for per square foot of the street. But I think, again, the planners are strategic people. I was talking to Jason Patton who’s in, who’s a transportation planner in Oakland, and he was one of the primary people managing the Slow Streets program. He spoke about Nimbyism, like if you could harness Nimbyism.

As a force for progressive good that, for example, NIMBYs don’t love through traffic on their streets. You know, like who [00:29:00] does. And so if you can harness that local energy, that local interest in the street might help advance citywide, bicycle Boulevard agenda. So I guess the point is, is that streets are political spaces.

And so far the engineers kind of kept, the politics were hidden inside the black box. But now that it’s a little bit more out in the open, I guess at least you can see who the power players are, and you can have the conversation in a political arena and not hide it behind the obfuscation of engineering.

Jeff Wood: Direct quote from your book, adjust Street would allow Democratic access along with transportation access.

David Prytherch: Well, that’s the thing. I mean, I think that one of the most powerful things that engineers do is they make the conversations seem not like a democratic conversation. That it becomes a technical conversation that we, in the United States, when we call something infrastructure, we tend to defer to the experts.

I find it the same with [00:30:00] law. You know that case law is legible to anybody who can read English. You can read the law and understand it. You don’t need a law degree. But there’s certain things that we just. We defer to the experts on, and I’m not saying that the average person should defend themselves in court or try to engineer a street, but I think the first thing we have to do is recognize that these processes should be open to public comprehension.

We should have conversations about them in language that is not overly technical, that we should have processes. And you know, I really do credit planners with trying to do that. What they found sometimes is that two, democracy is not a good thing either. I mean, try to plan a bicycle network and you soon start to question how much democracy you should really afford.

I mean, I’ll say this about the interstate highway system. If you asked each farmer along the route whether they wanted to contribute their land to the project. You wouldn’t have it, you know? So there’s a tension there that I think cities are trying to work [00:31:00] through, but I think there’s more space for democracy in the planning streets.

Much, much more space. If

Jeff Wood: that gets into something else, you write a book about is like the guides and the technical aspect of this. You praise NTO for being more accessible from a layman’s perspective. You know, the guides are very easy to understand, got the nice pictures in them, but there’s all these guides out there that harder for people to kind of understand if you’re going through them.

They’re also very expensive. I mean, the Asto bike guide is like, 350, 400, $500 or whatever, which I guess like. A state highway department can afford. Right. But it’s hard for even somebody who’s super interested in this to get a copy of the book.

David Prytherch: Well, that’s the thing. I could look it up. I think that price you quoted was probably for the PDF download.

It’s crazy. And so, yeah, for me to even to do this research on trying to do interlibrary loan to get a copy of Dash Dope Policy on Geometric Design, the Green Book for trying to encourage my local engineer to buy it so I could borrow it. [00:32:00] Right then and there that tells you, there’s a whole conversation we can have and, you know, those manuals, those asto manuals.

Asto is not a governmental agency. Aashto is a quai public group. You know, it’s, yeah. There’s a whole critique one could make about how undemocratic that aspect of our roadway design is. The manuals are put together not by democratically elected or appointed people. The manuals are written in a obfuscatory way.

They are hugely expensive, and then the processes of the actual design of the street are typically pretty black box. I am a city counselor and I have such limited sway over the decisions that are made over the local streets because the engineers don’t want to let me in. They don’t wanna let anyone in.

They like to have discretion. So, yes, I think there’s a lot that, that could be critiqued also about, you know, Michael Bloomberg’s money. There’s mm-hmm. One could critique that. What I see in those manuals [00:33:00] is they’re all rooted in the accepted standards. Like when you open up the Urban Streets design guide, you’re seeing what’s permissible under ASTO manuals.

Here’s your current street. This is what the street could like in the future, and then with all kinds of annotations about the standards, it’s an incredible tool. For opening up the conversation and within those manuals, even though those manuals themselves have been pretty much traditionally just about complete streets, about bicycle lanes and things like that, but they also have opened up standards for parklets and standards for shared streets, and in a very quick dynamic dialogue with practitioners.

So they came out with a pandemic manual. You know, the, an NATO Guide to Pandemic Streets, I think in May or early June of 2020, put together very, very quickly. In part because shared streets and things like that were already in the manuals. But Oakland was testing out slow streets and Europe, and NATO is talking to [00:34:00] practitioners.

And so we talk about policy, mobility and geography. Oakland was testing something which then became the model for the NDO manual, the Pandemic Streets Manual, which then became the standard for cities across the United States all in real time in like in a matter of weeks or months. So yeah, I mean, I think that mistakes will get made.

I mean, I think engineers will probably would hate that kind of rapid dynamic change, but, well, you’re talking

Jeff Wood: to Bill and it took him 10 years to write. The next bike guide for Aashto. Right. Wow. ’cause like that’s how long it took them to put it together. 10 years is a long time. I mean, think about 2014 and you know, the iPhone was only out in what, 2009 or something like that.

Right. Yeah. So like, think about how much changed since then.

David Prytherch: And these are very dynamic times and that I think is the whole other theme, which was planners kind of universally. Saw a window of opportunity in the pandemic, but the pandemic, because it was kind of an emergency suspended bureaucracy and enabled a certain [00:35:00] amount of experimentation and innovation and speed, that what I had hypothesized when I thought how quickly cities laid out all this stuff.

I was like, wow, I bet the planets were ready for this moment. And in a way they were. They had been trying and trying and trying and trying. And making incremental progress. And they just, in summer 2020, a window opened up where the typical rules were suspended and they were given a green light to just innovate, and they did with incredible rapidity.

I think, again, if you talk to them planners, much as they want to innovate, they too are methodical and mistakes were made. I mean, I think you talk to people like Jason Patton with the Oakland Department of Transportation, the speed with which they rolled out slow streets. Was too fast and there were mistakes made that then they had to correct for in terms of doing something top down and not engaging residents.

But that was what was so interesting in that moment because when I was researching the book, they [00:36:00] were coming out of that emergency moment, and then the new rule systems were being codified, but differently than they were before. It was like a shift where it came in one way, there was a wide open window, but then these new norms were being.

Then kind of clamp down and be durable again for the next 10 or 20 years. So to see experiments being turned into manuals as a geographer and a planter is really fascinating to see new social ideas articulated in new norms. Very, very interesting time to study and, and even though some of those parklets have disappeared and some of those bike lanes have been ripped up and the shared streets, maybe not all ’em are still there.

Policies are now in place, and that’s pretty powerful in the world of transportation planning and engineering to have codified standards that support doing these sorts of things.

Jeff Wood: When you’re just chatting about how fast they did the Pandemic Streets Guide in 2020, I was thinking about like the standard zoning enabling act, putting that together and then having basically [00:37:00] every city in the country over the next like five, 10 years, adopt something like that.

And then we have zoning, and then obviously that was too fast. And the reasons why they did it was not because of zoning necessarily. We had Yoni Applebaum on Facebook stuck to talk about that specifically. But just the ability to get something done and fast, changed cities forever. What’s interesting about this time when it happened for the streets is that the cars slowly crept back in.

Right? It is like you got ’em out of the street. Certain streets were slowed down on streets. Not even really kicking ’em out, but just slowly ’em down and then slowly they reasserted themselves in the space, which is, interesting. And also kind of a bummer for us who wanted to continue the slowness.

David Prytherch: It was a very interesting time, and even as I was writing it, it was uncertain where it would all go because what had been this kind of enthusiasm and this moment, it is a pretty profound thing when you have been struggling with busy through traffic on your street for decades. You’ve been begging for speed humps and not been getting them, [00:38:00] and then all of a sudden barricades are erected on your street and you can have a block party on your street.

Like what a feeling. I think that a lot of people had a sense of possibility, but the automobile is a pretty powerful force in American society and drivers. Were not going to see that space for that long before trying to make claims back on it again. And that’s why a lot of these things, these barricades went up.

Then they came back down again for a lot of reasons. The traffic volume, picking up barricades. Temporary solutions are very costly to transportation agencies, and they kept having to replace the barricades and they were getting moved. And transportation engineers want durable engineered solutions to things.

So maybe it’ll all just go back to the equilibrium it was before, but I think that, again, people got a window into something that they wanted to then hold onto and they codified those things and some people were really disappointed. To use that example of [00:39:00] people in Oakland who had been begging for traffic speed humps and got a slow street and then the city pulled it off, they’re still begging for their traffic calming.

And the city’s kind of like. Sorry. According to our equity matrices, you know, your neighborhood really doesn’t need it as bad as some other neighborhood does. And so I think anytime there’s a, a moment, a window and you can see a different kind of world that you, you wanna look into it and peer into it and pandemic was that, but.

I think the baseline shifted on some of these things and in a way that I, again, I think about the street as territory and I think a lot of people didn’t think they had a stake in the territory, and I think that, for example, giving businesses and downtown real estate interest a stake in the street. It’s like they’ve held onto that and now they have a countervailing argument to parking, for example.

Yeah. It’s been really interesting. I don’t know where it’s all going to go, but I think just like when you walk down to the middle of the street and you’re like, wow, it’s amazing. [00:40:00] Imagine if more streets were like this. I think what happened in 2020s, people started realizing how much real estate was in the public street.

There’s a lot of space there that we’ve been using for two purposes, primarily driving and parking. I think that once people started dawn on them, like, oh, this is potentially usable leaseable space. I think that kind of thinking is hard to get out of your head, but we’ll have to see where goes.

Jeff Wood: One customer versus 10 maybe.

Something along those lines and the magic numbers add up. Yeah. The other thing that you mentioned, you know, having a stake was, you know, cyclists and pedestrians felt like they finally had a stake in the street. And the one example from Pittsburgh where there was a person says, if the city cares about it, then I feel as a cyclist or as a pedestrian, like I belong there.

Otherwise, I feel like I’m not welcome.

David Prytherch: That’s the thing. I hesitate to liken streets to really serious movements like the Civil Rights movement, but we are talking about rights and justice. And I think the way oppression happens [00:41:00] is you, you deny people, you deny them their rights, you deny them the ability to exercise their rights, or you convince them that they don’t have rights at all.

And, and you might as well just live under. Subjugation, and that’s how Jim Crow worked. But once you gave people the opportunity to vote, they were willing to risk water cannons to get to the polls or to exercise their rights. Cyclists and pedestrians. And the street is also a space of rights. And again, I know it’s not the civil rights movement, but it’s a space that kills a lot of people.

The street is a really dangerous place to exercise your rights as a pedestrian cyclist. And this is where, for me, the equity is about things like identity, like race, but to be a cyclist, whatever your race is to be subject to a power system that is really stacked against you. And the consequences are really high.

They’re life and death consequences. You ride a bicycle and here on my wrist, on my watch is my road id. ‘Cause if I go out onto the roadway, I think [00:42:00] there’s a non insignificant chance I don’t come back. So to me, I feel like the politics of that is pretty serious. But yeah, I think once you’ve seen, once you’ve had a taste of what it’s like to have a claim on the street, to have a voice, you’re unlikely to give it up.

All of a sudden you realize that, Hey, I do deserve space on the street. Hey, I do deserve a seat at the table. And you’re unlikely to give it back without a little bit of a fight. And so that’s what I’ve seen in recent decades. Like you live in a city with very, very robust bicycle advocacy and one could critique that, you know, bicycle advocates not always the most diverse crowd, but compared to the vehicular interest, it’s a different voice.

Jeff Wood: Going in a little bit of a different direction. One of the things that I’ve been talking about lately, and again, I started thinking about with your book, is the idea of needing more public sector capacity. You mentioned earlier the need for transportation departments to move new barriers at the end of streets at the end of the day, or beginning of the day, and all of these, different organizations and such [00:43:00] popping up.

But I also took from that, that maybe we need the public sector capacity to be more equitable. In the sense that we need more people to organize the streets, maybe help design the streets that isn’t just the traffic engineers so that we can have more equitable space for people to organize and to transport themselves.

So that was another thing that came up was like, how much does public sector capacity impact what we can actually do in streets and how equitable they can be.

David Prytherch: One of the really interesting things in kind of researching the book was mainly about what happened in 2020 and the years following, but I tried to do a bit of history on what cities have been doing, and one of the major things that had been happening in cities was the reorganization of transportation departments, where transportation departments were in public works.

They were defined very narrowly. Many of these cities had created new departments of mobility and infrastructure. Often now directed by people who were bicycle advocates, [00:44:00] which to me, uh, you know, we’re always trying to move ahead to get to the next frontier. But to have to rename your transportation department, your streets department, which was presumed vehicular into a, you know, department of Mobility and infrastructure, and then to appoint a bicycle advocate.

In charge of it was a pretty significant shift. And it’s not going to say that those processes are very durable. You know, sometimes people write about infrastructure as being ober, it the vehicle killer, that standard mindset of paving is really strong. But now you have someone at the top who could say, well, how are we budgeting our money?

How do we allocate our staffing so we have more people dedicated to these programs? Yeah, I’m a city counselor and so. This wasn’t in the book, but I’ll share the anecdote. You know, my city, we have a paving budget, $600,000 a year, and that paving budget is directed entirely towards making sure streets are smooth for cars.

We have $50,000 allocated for [00:45:00] pedestrian bicycle. It’s not proportional to the amount, it’s a college town. We should probably be allocating the resource proportional to the users, but we don’t. One of the things that’s interesting and what I was seeing and, and talking to planners, ’cause I think planners generally, they’re thinking idealistically about, they’re thinking about how the city could be, but they do have one foot in the pragmatics of how cities get run, how dollars get allocated, how staffing, resources get allocated.

And so what’s been happening is the shift. It’s still tilted towards the car, but I think this was also a moment where, yeah, city like New York now have like public space. I’m trying to think of what Kyle Gorman’s title is. He’s like a public space advocate or something. And you know, the idea that you can create a staffing position inside a Department of Transportation dedicated to activating public spaces.

That’s a little different from how things were 20 years ago.

Jeff Wood: So from putting together the book, what stands out from all your research that you’ve done? Like is there anything that felt like an [00:46:00] aha moment? You’ve, you know, studied this stuff for a long time. I imagine that some of it wasn’t necessarily surprising, but is there anything that stuck out?

David Prytherch: Well, I guess for me, even as someone who’s thought about streets through the lens of public space and through the lens of equity and social justice, the standard hegemonic way of thinking about streets is still. Our brains, you know, maybe like you’re saying in the neural pathways, but we continue to see it as infrastructure.

We literally, I don’t think we see streets, we look out at all of this asphalt, which some of the statistics that NTO uses, you know, something like 25 to 30% of most downtown land area is in street space. In many cities, 50 to 80% of the municipally owned land is blocked up in the public right away. It’s huge.

It’s a huge expanse of space, which to me, like I just continue reminded by like, wow, this is a lot of territory we’re talking about. I [00:47:00] did a little back of that envelope map. You add up how much roadway areas in the United States, it’s greater than the four smallest states in the United States. So if we talk about the street having the geography, no doubt, like it’s a lot of space.

But what that says is like, wow, the potential there. When we think about the problems that we have, where we have park poor neighborhoods and no readily available land bin, new parks, what about all that excess asphalt? When we think about climate change and urban heat island and all of these areas that.

Have urban heat island in part because they don’t have trees because they were redlined. What about planning some things in the public right of way? Like to me, the big aha moment is to just see the space as something that’s at play in solving the problems that we have in the city because it’s a vast area, much of which has been way over designed in the United States, and much of it could be [00:48:00] reclaimed for other things.

I think in many places without significant loss, even to vehicular, you know, like look at many of our big boulevards and the capacity of the roadway relative to the flow. So that’s the kind of aha moment for me that wow, our cities could be so different. Places just did a little bit more of what some of these cities did, and as profound as that stuff was for me, in many of these streets, it was always a small proportion of the total number of streets, but the potential is just enormous.

Jeff Wood: So what’s the solution? What do you think is the way forward? How should we use your book to continue the good work that happened during the pandemic and after it?

David Prytherch: For me at least, but I think for other people too, the equity issues still remain something of a conundrum. Like how do we balance all these competing priorities?

I mean, I wrote this book before 2025, and now all of a sudden we’re like the shift of a conversation about equity again. But cities are trying to think about the [00:49:00] streets in terms of fairness. And so I hope that people use my book to try to think through and resolve what can seem like. Contradictions that are hard to reconcile either conceptually or practically.

And, and I hope that it helps them think about how to balance and, and make choices in their streets. But I also do find that the power of planning is the planners. I always joke with my students, the planning is one of those places where plagiarism is okay. That imitation is the, the theor form of flat that I studied, nine cities.

But these were just a few of the cities that were doing some of these things, and small towns, big cities, villages, were closing alleys to create, like I’m hoping people use the book to gain inspiration for what’s possible. But I do write it grounded in policies, little like the NTO manual. It opens up your mind to what’s possible, but is grounded in the realities of what’s [00:50:00] practicable.

Because you cannot just dream with something as rigidly constructed and regulated as a street. You have to be able to talk the language of design in order to accomplish it. Yeah, I think that if you think of how many millions of square miles of roadway there are in the United States, there’s a lot of work that could be done to create really wonderful spaces.

It’s a messy process. These cities have paved the way for us to pardon the Met Pun, but I think we can learn a lot from them and the mistakes they made, and I hope we keep the project going and I hope the book helps people think about that. It was written. You know, it’s an academic book. So it has to speak to an academic audience.

But I think there are a lot of, we’re having this conversation. There are a lot of literate people passionate about transportation, who little bit are a lot wonky when it comes to this stuff. And so I’m hoping some of the details that they may enjoy, but even if you’re not a transportation Wong, there’s stories.

There’s stories of people trying to do something different and better and that kind of stuff. Inspiration.

Jeff Wood: Reclaiming the Road [00:51:00] Mobility Justice beyond Complete Streets. Where can folks get a copy?

David Prytherch: So it is on sale. If you just Google it, you can buy it directly from the University of Minnesota Press, which is a really wonderful press.

So happy to publish with them. It can be ordered through many of our local bookstores. I think a lot of local bookstores are tied in with the University of Minnesota Press, and so if City Lights Bookstore, your local bookstore, Powells, and you know, you can go there, hopefully find it on the shelf or you can order it through them.

And yes, wherever else you buy books or your local library.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. And where can folks find you if you wish to be found?

David Prytherch: So here at Miami University, again, the power of Google Department of Geography. I’ll give you my email, which is P-R-Y-T-H-E-D as in David, [email protected]. I’m on LinkedIn. I’m also on Instagram as landscape geographer, is my handle there.

So yeah, those are some of the places where you can find me. We’re out walking the streets or biking the streets of [00:52:00] Oxford, Ohio. We’re arguing with my city engineering why we should build a bike lane here or there, or close an alley.

Jeff Wood: Awesome. Well, David, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time.

David Prytherch: I so appreciate what you do, Jeff, like you’re an aggregator of information and I really love reading the overhead wire and knowing what’s going on. So happy to have another wonderful conversation.