(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 566: Concrete Doesn’t Spend Money, People Do

This week on The Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Dr. Lawrence Frank to talk about how the built environment and the way we get around connect to public health outcomes. We also discuss the work that led to Walk Score, the shortcomings of transportation cost benefit analysis, and the systematic externalization of health benefits.

Listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or find it in our full episode archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:

Jeff Wood: Dr. Lawrence Frank, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast.

I was always interested in design and movement through space. So as I grew up with that interest, I started thinking about architecture as a natural vocation and then landed on landscape architecture as the focus for me thinking about in designing environments that were enjoyable and beautiful and functional for different purposes.

So I went into Landscape Architecture, university of Arizona. I have a strong environmental background or interest always also thinking about not just from a transportation or any kind of thing like that. My early interest was really in beauty and enjoyment. And the kinds of options I had at that time was really to consider environmental psychology or landscape architecture as a way to apply ideas directly to place and couldn’t imagine as a 20-year-old the concept or prospect of going to college forever to do a PhD seemed overwhelming.

Landscape architecture seemed more what I was interested in. And went through the program at University of Arizona, got licensed, practiced, went back and learned very quickly that the decisions and places that I was working on. Were very unimaginative and very car dependent and very monotonous and right away became interested in what happens upstream?

How did it get who makes the decisions that lead to the kinds of environments that end up getting built earlier on in those are planners and engineers. In fact, urban planning seemed like the logical fit for me. I went back to school, got a master’s, and I tried to get a master’s in urban planning at University of Washington.

Moved from Arizona to Seattle, wanted to live in a more urban cosmopolitan city. Found it loved Seattle. This was about 1987. I moved to Seattle, or 88 from Tucson, Arizona, where I had moved in 79. So anyways, in Seattle, got a real great opportunity. Went to school there was accepted into the Urban Design and Planning program, switched over to civil engineering, got my master’s in civil engineering.

Learned that I was actually more technically oriented and enjoyed at that point, the content. So what I. Basically went through the masters in civil transportation, but really my aptitudes were more contextual, were more social justice oriented, and perhaps a little bit more on the design side than the definition of design that’s in engineering.

It was very limited, more narrow for me, but very good background and training for me to understand the behavioral effect of environments, which became my area of focus. So by the time I was finishing my master’s in around 91, I actually applied for and got in and did a PhD very quickly. I had already done a lot of the requirements and prerequisites.

So by 93 I had a PhD in urban design and planning and my dissertation and thing that I was interested in and still am is the relationship between the physical design of environments. People’s behavior and the behaviors can be not just travel. Social interaction was always a core part of my interest and sense of community.

So I have really stuck with this place, behavior exposure and then health naturally fell on top. I actually grew up in a medical household. My father was a physician. My mother ran National Kidney Foundation. My brother became a physician, but I entered medicine or public health in a very different way.

And that wasn’t my primary interest. It’s more of an outcome of the way cities are built.

Yeah, you can just look at the record. There’s no question. And I think it may have come from the fact I grew up in a H where health was so frequently discussed, but actually it was a natural outgrowth of the work because what I did different than other colleagues of mine and other students, most others, with the exception of just a couple, I’ve started studying active transportation.

I started studying walking. When that just wasn’t anything that was done in transportation. If you went to transportation conferences in the late eighties, early nineties, people were not presenting papers much on walking. There was a couple others, but what I did that was a little bit different was.

I started studying how to predict it using parcel level land use data. I got right into the weeds on the data, which is surprising ’cause I had no clue earlier on that I would’ve ever done anything like that. I wasn’t really computational or mathematically oriented at all, but conceptually definitely into the way the logic and how you measure.

Things and how to predict something. The mechanisms, I got very intrigued and got really into research design very quickly. And my dissertation that published in 94 was really the first study to really start to map out a lot of these very detailed, spatially precise methods to predict walking. And that was really the beginning.

And then health, health happened right away because 96 was the Surgeon General’s report that moderate physical activity. Actually you’re from Texas. You went to school there. That was really where the focus started shifting to walking because moderate physical activity became very clearly the population level.

Change that we needed to make that for really the masses. Just getting people to be physically not be sedentary for 30 minutes a day, just to get them moving a little bit. By the early nineties became obviously the focus, mid nineties, so that’s where the research really took off. Because walking became very clearly the form of moderate physical activity that most people had been doing, ancestors.

And for millennia, thousands of years, that’s what we did. And we had engineered it out of our lives, if you’ve heard that before.

And it’s the mirror image of the Woodlands, which is on the other side of the highway, which is where Ian McHarg tested some of his really famous work. And so it’s interesting because what happened at all have a podcast about this coming out soon, but we had these green belt trails throughout the community and we had 75, 80 miles of them and none of them crossed any major roads They went underneath if they did that, they had underpasses for them and everything.

But it was this really rare place in Texas where I grew up and I shaped the way I looked at things. And it’s interesting to hear you talk about walking and the way that we think about it now, and also cycling and active transportation generally. And at that time I, I ran track and cross country and these trails were just like something that we had and was available to us.

And I didn’t know any different until I moved to other places and they didn’t exist anywhere else. And so I thought that was really interesting, especially in light of the evolution that you’ve talked about. And I’m also curious from your perspective, like thinking about it from the 1980s, 1990s and two thousands to now, there’s been a explosion of discussion about the public health implications of walking, biking, active transportation, the built environment, the particulates in the car impacts of everything.

And so I’m wondering what’s changed since that the time when you started working on this stuff versus now.

I’m gonna go there next. And how the two relate or don’t. So over the last three decades. We have learned that our notions about the connections between when urban sprawl and public health was written, it was shortly after that. I’d already been working on the topic for a decade when folks in public health.

Especially environmental health and CDC started really focusing on it. So it was really wonderful to see others join the bandwagon and start to really get interested.

My co-authors, Franken and Jackson got interested around the turn of the millennium. Around 2000 we started seeing, and then I had previous to them and working with started conversations with folks in public health, and particular Jim Salas, who I still work with and who’s been a very productive researcher and colleague of mine for a long time.

Where we started actually doing basic research on the topic in physical activity the physical activity, exercise, science and behavior and nutrition part of CDC, that whole chronic disease branch they were in earlier. Environmental health came a little later and then took it on fully. But still interesting to see different parts of the public health arena slowly engage in the built environment as it became topical.

As it became topical, it attracted people who wanted to find things to talk about who were interested, obviously in environments and environmental health, and clearly interested in the fact that this topic attracts a lot of attention, and it’s a way to potentially influence the wellness of the public.

So anyways. The evolution you asked over the last 30 years, what’s changed? Lots of different groups, as we’ve seen slowly have come on board. As it becomes clearer and clearer through the evidence side, we build stronger evidence now. We’ve recently summarized there’s studies all over the world that we’ve found causal evidence exists.

We started with notions, testing hypotheses. Associations were established with lots of conjecture, that it’s self-selection and the things you’re observing aren’t really the environment. It’s just masking the underlying attitudes and values. I’ve always viewed that as a wasteful use of energy because what better situation than to have an unmet demand for something that people wanna do that’s good for them and good for the environment?

I’ve actually always thought. So even if it is, the mechanism is only enabling the underlying attitudes, if that even were the case, which it’s not, it would still make sense to provide more of that. Like all the more reason than if you had, than if you had a situation where you were trying to promote something.

That underlying attitudes were the opposite. But in this case, we have coherence, we have adherence, we have synergy. We have everything we need. And so getting on with building and actively shifting the funding within the transportation I’m gonna talk about within, so that what are we building and how is that changing?

We’re doing a very poor job of that. We keep making terrible decisions. The economics underneath the decisions, the cost benefit analysis, the methodologies are so warped and so distorted. We systematically continue to externalize the economically derived health-based benefits that we get from investing in active transportation.

Most of my work in the last decade has been on this topic. I’ve been a professor my whole career. I started at Georgia Tech eight years later, went to Vancouver, university of British Columbia, was there for 18 years, and then moved to University of California, San Diego about five years ago. And then throughout my whole career, I’ve been working on this scientifically, but at the same time, I’ve run a company called Urban Design for Health.

It started in 97, almost 30 years ago, 29. And that company has taken the evidence and applied it directly to one project after another with decision makers, end users, NGOs Houston Air Alliance, trying to fight widening of the highway system in downtown Houston, or it could be the Los Angeles area, Southern California Association of Governments, our biggest MPO, where we monetize the health benefits of active transportation infrastructure investments.

They had a $13 billion set aside, and we got hired to demonstrate the economic benefits. Lo and behold. When we ran the cost benefit model working, I hired aecom, my subcontractor, and we measured directly the health related benefits that would be derived from this investment. We calculated an $8 and 41 cent return on that investment, conservatively, not even including chronic disease of the elderly where most chronic disease exists, and we ended up showing a hundred billion dollars return on investment through the life of the plan.

So the, these are the kinds of things that we’re just it’s shocking the degree of distortion that we’ve been able to allow happen. Of course, it’s now looking at the way the world is. I suppose this isn’t shocking at all. We should expect it, but what we’re excluding costs bigger than the infrastructure costs that are even being considered by excluding the health impacts, the health related economic impacts, because it’s not just reduction in cost of illness by avoided disease.

It’s the lack of engagement in workforce participation, workforce productivity, the fact that infrastructure, active transportation, infrastructure and transit, both put money in people’s pockets who spend money in the economy that give you bigger multiplier rather than material oriented investment in highways and roads that concrete doesn’t spend money.

People do.

The more amount of money that stays there, the more it can be spent on the things that matter. For folks that might not be familiar and I understand a lot of this stuff, but I’m curious, what are those economic benefits of the way that we should be building cities and our built environment?

You talked about avoided health costs, but there’s so many different things that go into the number amount that comes out when we say that there’s $8 of benefit from every dollar spent. If you expanded upon that, what would you say is many of the reasons why we can save money when we’re building towards a more active transportation system?

Uncaptured. When we tried to capture it, we ended up with about a third from that bucket. And then the other bucket, the other third is tourism. The part I mentioned about capturing the land value. And then it’s when you get the indirect effects, not just the direct effects through the cost benefit analysis.

Those are the pathways that we measured. I’m not really sure what else we would need to add, except that we did not calculate or capture the benefits. We haven’t really monetized the health of the mental health. Side of this. And it’s not just about the money part, it’s about the quality of life. We really like to put dollar signs on things, and in fact, we’re not even doing that.

Past the money is really what kind of a world are we creating for people and how well do people get to live and how close to the life they would ideally wanna be living? Are they able to live in the different, in the environments we’re building? And so we have made some progress. I’d like to point out a couple things that have happened.

I think. Many agencies are now quite familiar with Health Impact assessment, have done health impact assessments. They’re starting at certain levels within government and in within other industry. There’s been obviously a raised awareness. People are aware of this topic. They’re aware that these relationships exist.

We’ve failed terribly by not req, there’s no requirement that the health impacts be captured within decision making. So they’re still externalized. Both. We seem to capture the cost of the infrastructure, but we failed to measure the benefit. So it’s very distorted and that leads to the kinds of decisions that we’re making.

Our decision making approach is that the whole canvas of factors that we should be looking at, we’re looking at a quarter of it. And so where do we see improvement? I’d like to think that some more progressive cities are doing a better job trying to capture some of these benefits. I think we failed mostly on educating the public when it comes time to vote for decisions.

We’re really what’s in it for them, their health, their wellness, their quality of life. That’s what’s in it for them. Their safety, their ability to age in the environments that they love with the neighbors that they know that’s what they’re missing, that’s what’s in it for them. And that should compel and motivate them to want to support the infrastructure decisions that are needed to retrofit.

And yes, we can retrofit, we can change our communities, not everywhere, but in many targeted locations.

Also if you have a higher incidences of homeless who, if folks are given housing, they end up not going to the emergency room as much and you save money from that. But it gets that idea of running cities like a business and running cities like a business with a ledger that only takes costs and benefits into it, is a really frustrating way of thinking about running a city.

We systematically externalize the health related impacts when we’re making transportation decisions. When a transit line is compared to a roadway widening in a corridor. There’s the indirect effect on the transit’s benefit on health in monetary terms is never, if it’s happened, it’s very rare. Now, some transit agencies are talking about it, transit agencies, but within the roadway, within the MPO modeling a typical cost benefit analysis process, when a roadway widening is considered, there’s very little effort or even understanding that the health piece extends into economics, I believe.

And there’s also frustrating things that you discussed in your recent kind of replay of a paper that you wrote back in the early two thousands about how we still talk about cars and driving, but now we’re focusing on electric cars and autonomous cars. But it doesn’t, it still doesn’t negate the fact that you’re not walking, you’re still in the car, whether it’s electric or autonomous or otherwise.

And so that raises your risks of obesity by 6% as you stated early on, and you’ve restated

And one of ’em was sedentary time in cars and car time. And the driving really is a predictor of obesity. And of course it has to be because it’s sitting. So the paper was invited for it to be revisited by the journal. I was invited to write an update. And much like your first question is what have we learned and what have we changed?

We’ve learned that, that in fact, every study that’s been done since then, replicating, it’s been replicated. I conceptualized it and did it first, and since then, it’s been replicated many times to the extent that some people have written. Papers that are summaries of all the summer of the times, it’s been re reproven again and again to be it’s still true.

It was true then, and it will be true in the future. So the finding is not an anomaly. It’s so obvious that I got teased by my childhood friends like you, you get paid to do that, like you got paid. My thought was it had never been conceptualized driving, had never ever been discussed before, that as I’m driving, I’m spending all my time in my car and that’s making me fat.

I never heard anybody really say that, but if you can take something that’s so fundamental, like so many people spend a lot of time driving, most Americans spend more time driving than they would like, and when they’re stuck in traffic, they get really pissed off. So to be able to measure that, not only are they being stuck in traffic.

They’re getting fat while they’re doing it, they’re getting unhealthy, they’re getting unattractive. They’re ruining a significant portion of their life doing it, and they’re ruining the environment by doing it. So all that kind of fits together into a really kind of an, I wouldn’t say nice, but a kind of an awful package of badness.

And that’s what, that was. What kind of was maybe perhaps in a way clever about it because it hadn’t really been thought of that way as a direct shot at one behavior. So we were all studying and looking and ramping up studies on physical activity, the health benefits of being active, but the health cost of being inactive or driving was actually fairer gain for criticism.

And that’s why I think it really resonated. And that’s why it was so cited. And I think looking back, it was very organically conceived of while I was sitting in my car. And someone ran by and I’m like, I have data to measure that I’m gonna do it. It wasn’t even the intent of the study, it was like the moment of awareness.

It was like, wow, let’s do that. So what we’ve learned obviously the metrics and how to measure stuff isn’t really that interesting for our discussion, except to know that we have really good data to measure it now. ’cause we have our phones so we can measure it better. But that’s not gonna change decision making around this topic.

It’s so understood. So the thing is, in our decision making apparatus, we rely heavily on this cost benefit analysis approach. We really think that’s the the gold standard. And so if we’re gonna use it, then we at least are responsible to include the costs and the benefits, the big ones. You shouldn’t be allowed to eliminate something that’s massive.

If it’s like a minor economic impact, a triviality fine. But when we’re talking about health, which is a significant portion of our entire economy and how it’s related to something as fundamental as how we get around every day and how we build our communities, we’re really responsible to capture that.

And that’s the point, is that we need to inspire ourselves, our students the people that are coming after us into this field. And that’s what I think my colleagues, the people I’ve written books with and others are interested in doing, is that we certainly want to have known that we were able to push this forward enough that it is more and more difficult to ignore.

And that’s what my company’s been doing, is through this national public health assessment model, we call it N fam, that tool is effectively helping those in locations of government NGOs are able to get that evidence right into the decision making process right then. So we were able to use it to protect that $13 billion in Los Angeles.

We were able to use it in Houston. Buttigieg was able to I was part of a group and some of that evidence help there we’re able to contribute and in some places directly help and really. There are certain places along the way where there’s a window of opportunity and you need to have the evidence right there to make a difference where there’s a legal challenge.

And that’s what this has been able to do, so that we now have case studies. We’ve got about 15 regions. Sacramento’s regional planning agency, the Sacramento Council of Government, Secog, has used our tool, our work. We just finished working with them on their long range transportation plan and they were able to make some headway, maybe shift the discussion a little bit more towards a more compact future for that region.

All else being equal, there’s a lot of debate that happened with ’em, San Joaquin Council of Governments, we’ve worked with them three times now on their transportation update their long range plan, and they’ve been very focused on equity and environmental justice and trying to invest. Active transportation improvements into their lower income minority communities.

And this evidence helped them do that. We published on that extensively. There’s a number of case studies around the country where we’ve actually had an impact in. Right now we’re working in St. Louis with an authority that’s responsible for the Great River Greenway Authority that’s responsible for building bike infrastructure and active transportation greenways throughout the St.

Louis region. I think we’re learning a lot there in terms of ways to influence, help them get the data and evidence showing the health, quantifying the health and related economic benefits of the investments that they’re making in that region. So those are meaningful, practical opportunities.

Pretty much word of mouth, but we a little bit, I put a newsletter out once a year. I don’t know who gets it, but it’s a pretty small, I don’t know, but sign me up. I wish I’d marketed more, but I did wanna mention one thing, which is recently with AI and digital images. It’s become possible to expand our definition of what walkability really is.

So there are certain points in time where the science advances enough in a way that makes it really more useful for the public. And I know in your podcast and your show, obviously you’re interested in the way places get built, our quality of life. And so science is really a means to an end. It’s not an end in itself for me either, actually.

I don’t think the public at all, jazzed and listeners about equations or metrics. Maybe

So I did the algorithms, I did the research that led to walk Score three times. Actually brought that to Matt Lerner who was working at Walk front seat.

And then he went and built a First Walk score that was a airline distance, people walking across water. And that became a problem. So there was a grant from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that I got. I gave part of the money to Matt and actually gave him our results. And that’s where we measured walk score using network distance.

And we built algorithms that I imagine got incorporated into their tool, although it was never really formally acknowledged, but we published that paper in 2021. So we’ve built a lot of tools, but we never knew where people could really walk ’cause we never really mapped as much in our walkability definition.

For national data sets that we build the smart location database for the US EPA that’s a very commonly used data set. We build the national environment data set for Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s culture of health. We build the metrics that go into their annual report card. We were doing that for quite a while using some of the, these national data that we were able to put together at the census block group level.

So anyways, none of it had pedestrian features. We didn’t know where the benches were, we didn’t know where the sidewalks were. In those data sets, in our carefully done studies where we get a lot more funding to, to study an area, we walk around and map everything and we know these features matter. We published on it.

But now with ai. Using machine learning, we can have digital images scanned and reviewed. So we’re able to measure and incorporate more on an automated way. Things that have a tremendous cost benefit. Sidewalks, seating, lighting, street furniture, trees, shade, eyes on the street. All of these things give us incredible return on investment when they’re invested in communities that are high concentrations of chronic disease, ’cause they’re lower income minority and where these things are missing.

So I just wanted to make the point that we’re getting a little bit of interest in advancement because the definition in our, in the minds of, I think the public. Your listeners and others who are perhaps not in this field professionally, but interested in it all of us, our definition of how walkable our neighborhood is more a function of how easy it actually and safe it is to walk.

So these features are now becoming as they always should have been part of the walkability rubric and measurement.

At least that popped up.

Which is that we are all uniquely different in terms of our demographics, the different demographic subgroups, women versus men, old versus young, rich versus poor, react and respond very differently to different types of investments that we make in communities. And we do know, we publish before that walkability seems to predict active transportation in men better than women, I believe.

A study came outta Stanford, led by Dr. Abby King, a longtime colleague of mine recently published. And I believe nature showed this finding again, still showing differences. They better, the models better predicted men than female physical activity using I think, cell phones. So now we’re able to capture that better.

And what we’ve learned from my PhD student, Benet at Carey, who’s finished his dissertation at the University of British Columbia, he found in his work he focused on pedestrian. Microscale, these pedestrian design features I mentioned, the sidewalks, the seating, the lighting. He incorporated that into his work and by doing so, he was able to demonstrate that is actually what needs to be present for women to walk more.

And this was in a group of elderly, older adults. So we’re learning that there are certain things that matter to different subgroups in order for them to really engage more fully in their community into the investment and to benefit.

There’s the heat island effect and whether there’s tree cover or not. The amount of particulates and emissions that come from major roads that are near certain neighborhoods and things like that. There’s definitely a difference between who can and can’t actually access the built environment that is most beneficial.

What we know over the years is that walkability is a poor predictor of health characteristics in the most underserved, and the reason is that walkability is systematically where it’s more walkable. Wealthy people who live in walkable environments get walkability with all the good stuff. The parks, the green space, theran good transit access shops and services, all the amenities.

Poor don’t get that. They get walkability with air pollution, with noise, injury risk, and lack of trees. So that’s, so walkability doesn’t perform well for the lowest decile of income. It’s not a good predictor, but it’s not that the walkability is the problem, it’s what it’s associated with. So we have to remember that these relationships exist between opportunity that’s created through walkability and the impact of other factors that hang along with it or don’t.

So if you’re poor, you’re gonna have to live on the busy street, right? Where the air pollution is not two blocks away. So you’re gonna have the noise, you’re gonna have the air pollution. And we know, in fact, I did a study in oh seven that was right about oh 6 0 7 in Vancouver with some other colleagues showing that walkability was walkability is a great predictor of exposure to air pollution, small particulates.

And so that’s bad news. It sure is, but for wealthy people, they’re not experiencing that because the particulates, the air pollution effect dissipates. It’s only right next to the busy streets. So that is where land values lower and where it’s less desirable to live. And so we have these social justice impacts and so it’s good.

You bring up a lot of the discussion we’ve had has been focused on how walkability affects behavior and how those behaviors then affect chronic disease. Through weight and not just directly, but at the same time, environmental impacts just by merely location determine if you’re gonna be breathing healthier, clean air, if you’re gonna be exposed to injury risk, if the noise is gonna be high or, and that’s gonna affect your blood cortisol levels.

All of those factors are happening at the same time. And so we have to be mindful of the behavior and exposure interface. Those things really matter.

And so we’ve been doing this for 20, 30 years where we think about the core and the main arterial where this transit’s gonna go. And so that might be the most natural place for a tall building and where people will be in a place where it’s more walkable. You saw this in the Roslyn Belston corridor in Washington, DC where they protected the suburbs and they put everything on that dense corridor.

And so now there’s a discussion about should we really be doing that? We’re putting people in harm’s way. If there’s cars and if there’s particular matter, if there’s emissions, maybe we should be thinking about putting more people inside. These neighborhoods instead of on the edges where they are more impacted, as you just mentioned.

Well, California statewide is doing everything it can to try to create affordable housing. Where is that housing gonna go? It’s not gonna go on the most expensive land. And this is our problem as a society, is that if you lead with the money and if you make the decision from a practical governance perspective, you only have so much resource.

If your goal is to maximize the benefit of that resource, and you wanna provide as much housing as possible, if the land costs way more, you’re gonna have much less housing built. But if we’re able to demonstrate through the research that, in fact, when you internalize the downstream health effects of this land use decision, whether or not the growth goes right in the busy streets or two streets in yields a greater cost benefit than maybe we would change some decisions.

Or maybe there’s a compromise. Some other solutions could be developed, especially in the way we distribute our transportation funding. There might be other creative ways that we can go about that decision making process. ’cause that’s really the key. So land use decisions are predicated on a, on legal tools, right?

That we use zoning. Development regulations, whether they be subdivision zoning or building codes, three levels, and those decisions are supposed to support public health. So have any of your other speakers spoken to the legal use of zoning?

We had us folks on recently talking about the history of planning in the United States. Yoni. Applebaum came on to talk about his book Stuck. I don’t know if you read that one. Ben Schneider came on and talked recently about Euclid versus Ambler Realty. The actual, the dissenting, of course, opinion of the Supreme Court at that time mentioned that people expected change over time.

They expected things to get bigger, and so when that court case came through and change zoning forever in the United States, it made us go into different trajectory. A lot of that stuff’s really interesting and we have covered that a number of times on the show.

You have a really unique overview of what’s going on through your interactions with other people that are each doing a piece of this. So we just finished a meta, an analysis, a global review of causal evidence of how the built environment affects body weight as just an overall catchment of health.

There’s a reason we did that. We were funded by Novo Nordisk and they were interested in weight trajectories, but we have. Come to the end of that and I was writing up this study and I didn’t wanna do another lit review, cause it is, even though it’s of causal evidence. And the good news is there’s a lot, there’s a bunch of causal evidence, which is great, but I’m targeting it in a very, trying to wrap it around the decision making that we do.

Because causation should matter more than other evidence levels. It meets us the level where I don’t think writing up a review in the absence of what the decisions that are being made around that topic is appropriate.

We’ve been doing our newsletter for 20 years now. Every day we go through about 1500 news items a day and we pull out the 40 that we think are the most interesting in the number of different categories, environment, urban issues, design, transportation, and everything’s connected. I’ve had folks ask me like, can you just do transportation?

I was like, no, I can’t do just transportation because it’s not just about transportation, it’s about all of this. ’cause it all connects to itself. And I’ve been trying to think about what is the most equitable way all of this comes together and it’s really hard because there are so many topics you could write 10 Lewis Mumford’s, the city in histories in that time period, and still not get to the bottom or connect the dots the way that maybe they should be.

And so it’s really hard because there is so much, but the first person that does it and puts everything together that can actually make sense of everything. And it does make sense to us because we’ve you’ve read the literature, in all the different topic areas, and they all connect the public health.

I rambled a little bit earlier about homelessness and housing and healthcare costs and a number of things, but they all connect to transportation. And the way of our built environment is designed the way that we subsidized things back in the fifties and sixties, the way that the Robinson Patman Act was ignored by the Reagan administration and caused food deserts because they allowed unfair competition between big box stores and local groceries.

Those types of things all come together in one thing. I’m toying with this idea that we had an off-ramp ability in the seventies with the oil crisis and we didn’t take it. And

there’s a lot to be said about that. And I, going back to my neighborhood that was built in the seventies, it was built by folks who were inspired by Columbia, Maryland and Victor Gruin and other folks like that.

And there was a neighborhood, the Woodlands is similar which is designed by Ian MCC car in Texas. It’s still a suburb, but you can get around everywhere on a. Without crossing a major road, you can get everywhere in the subdivision without getting in your car. And so there was an opportunity to make cities and places that were better, but we didn’t take it.

And so now we’re suffering all of these impacts, these health impacts, these horrible outcomes of our built environment. Obesity dementia, Alzheimer’s, everything that you can think of under the sun the chronic diseases, the degradation of our environment. And it comes from the way that we think about our communities as just a place that isn’t connected to everything else in which it is.

Totally. That’s our sandbox, right?

Yeah.

I think if you do two things, it’s two you can go to three maybe four. But when you get past a number of discreet phenomena, it becomes too messy. So I think we can get the connection from the physical design of environment to behavior and an exposure and health and cost. Like that’s, I stay in there mostly, but occasionally I’ll go outside of that a little bit.

And I think this advancement around ai capturing the pedestrian features are modifiable. They’re less subject to neighborhood resistance than other fact densification. San Diego, where I’m living now is, it’s just so that you can’t even talk about putting developers, they’re letting a few projects by and happen, but we have train stations that have opened five years ago that have no density there.

It’s unbelievable. There’s no air rights discussion. It’s a city of 4 million people almost. There’s no air rights utilization in many of the train stations that have just opened. They’re not even talking about it. It’s as if it doesn’t have any value, and we have terrible traffic congestion, so it’s like, when would it ever kick in? Like how could that even be? We’re having a massive debate. They wanna charge for parking. In Balboa Park where all the museums are. Can you imagine? I can’t imagine. I told them, I can’t imagine how they don’t.

I can’t even believe that the parking is free in Balboa Park.

My neighbors walking by, I live relatively close by. They asked me and that we were talking, they couldn’t even, they walked away when I told ’em my opinion. They don’t even wanna talk to you. They hate they any you, you wanna charge for parking or you like those bike lanes that they put in. I’m like, I went backwards 30 years when I left Vancouver and moved here.

It’s like I’m in a, I know it’s just like going backwards 30 years.

The people that you were talking about in Balboa Park about parking, obviously that space is owned by the city. And residents should get the most value out of it that they possibly can one way or another. And we should share that space. And the best way to share it is to price it. He was talking to him about misinformation and how basically we need a lot of organizing.

It’s not just the information that we have. Like you’ve created such great information. We have the podcast, we share information. But it’s also about organizing people to disseminate that information to socially prove to other people that this is a positive way to go. It’s one of these things I’ve been leaning towards.

We had Carter Lavin on the show who is an organizer here in the Bay Area, and he wrote a book about how to organize around transportation. ’cause it’s not enough to be right. It’s not enough to be right about everything. You have to tell people it’s right, but then you also have to get them to believe you and to go along with you.

And so the best way of doing that is to getting into the trenches, talking to people, organizing with them, maybe winning a ballot measure with them getting people involved. And so I’m leaning towards that is we’re gonna get there, but we have work to do and we need all the tools that we have available, whether that’s the research or the information that we know is right, but we need to tell everybody else about it.

And it’s just changing a culture. And I find that there’s a lot of stuff out there specifically online that is helping, right? City nerd Ray Delahanty, the war on cars folks, whether you like the term war on cars or not, they’re actually building a culture and getting people to talk with other people about this topic.

Creating an organizing principle. They were those guys and the folks in New York City who fought back against Kath OL’s, pause of congestion pricing really did bring it back. No matter what KA says, no matter what Governor Hool says she said they were always gonna be turned back on. I’m not, I don’t actually believe that it was the pressure from the social organizing that happened over time.

And so in order to make these changes, we need that to happen. We need that social pressure on political folks, on, on elected officials that comes from this knowledge that we’ve built up over time. The knowledge that you’ve built up over time,

So there’s a little bit of and safety. Seems to be the one topic that survives Republican administrations when we have them.

And the transportation challenges loneliness epidemic, the problems that will exist when people can’t get outta their houses and they can’t get to their healthcare and they can’t do this, that the other thing, because they don’t have the act of transportation because they’re not allowed to drive anymore.

They’re not mentally fit to drive or physically fit to drive anymore. Crazy.

Arm them with, line them up with someone is not just good at the communication, but you have evidence, producers, knowledge creators, communicators, and then publicists. People that are actually, or that are in the media, these different camps. And the more horizontal connection across between so that we take the evidence that we have and generate it as a society more collectively and connect the people.

Really good knowledge producers need to be connected with good media, savvy media people. So that, and they get recognized as the researcher, not just have it handed off to people that talk about it and bump off the researcher. ’cause that happens a lot. You’re in a position where you have a mental map of these are people that do a lot of writing or good writers good.

And they’re connected, they’re in the press. And then people that are good communicating all of that. That I think could, we could accelerate a lot of change. And then people in government positions of course, who are obviously the decision makers you want as many of those as you can. Those are the kind of things that might give more legs to our effort.

It’s very frustrating to see the cost benefit thing is where I’m focused the most. Now. We have a lot of case studies where we’ve monetized and demonstrated the scale of the economic impacts. And I think that maybe is a, is an area where we’ll hopefully work.

There’s been a lot of negative news lately, and I find that I need to have something to grab onto. I recently went to China with my wife and hung out there for a month and visited my daughter’s grandparents and it was just amazing to see. What society could do if it pulled together. I understand the differences in governing systems and all that stuff, but 48,000 miles of high-speed rails, 48,000 miles.

And so I’m wondering what you are, what you gravitate towards, what you’re getting positive vibes from, what you’re excited about.

And that was a patent that was awarded in 2021. In 2024, we updated it to include mental health, and I’m very enthusiastic and excited about, we developed a commercialization and marketing plan for that, which identifies. Two different groups of users and users for that technology, which collectively I think could really bring to the general public.

To professionals tools that could be used like on your phone to navigate w score tells us, for example, where there are destinations, but this would be a real way to know, I’m planning a trip, I’m going to Europe and I wanna stay in hotels. I’m partially handicapped and I need to have places within 300 feet that I can walk to so you’ll know where the actual truly walkable places are to live, to visit and all that.

So I’m excited about that and hopefully bringing that technology forward for everybody to use. We’re rolling out a lot of decision support infrastructure that stuff’s gonna be helpful. So I feel like some closure because that’s getting it really out into the world. So I’m really happy about that and I’m also excited to see not only the tools getting used more, having an impact.

But I, I always look at life that every action has a reaction and the pendulum just like slammed right now in our country so far to the right. And I believe that the kind of response, there’s a lot of changes in a lot of dialogues right now that are encouraging. It’s shifting. And so I think we should remember that in this moment.

This is not our brightest hour today, but it could be not long before we see the sun again.

Maybe the most satisfying was to be part of that large coalition of people that really stopped the freeway widening in Houston or in Los Angeles, really made it possible for that money to remain on active transportation. And most interestingly I guess is that when that challenge came within Los Angeles from the roadway lobbies, they literally, I don’t think had any idea that there would even possibly be an economic argument that would be made on the, their probably thought was, sidewalks and bikeways are nice, but that’s not gonna get goods to market.

We build the economy. We’re not a triviality. That’s not a nicety. But when we came back and showed, no, this in fact is how people remain healthy. There’s an economic benefit of that. That’s huge. I think that probably really surprised them. I don’t think they were expecting that. I think they were thinking, this money’s fair game.

We’re gonna grab it. We are going after it.

+++

Get the show ad free on Patreon!

Find out about our newsletter and archive on YouTube!

Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, Instagram, YouTube, Flickr, Substack … @theoverheadwire

Follow us on Mastadon [email protected]

Support the show on Patreon

http://patreon.com/theoverheadwire

Buy books on our Bookshop.org Affiliate site!

And get our Cars are Cholesterol shirt at Tee-Public!

And everything else at http://theoverheadwire.com