(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 582: A Latent Hazard Activated by Conflict

This week we’re joined by Professor Eric Dumbaugh of Florida Atlantic University to share his new paper on Land Use and Road Safety: Understanding the Persistence of Vulnerable Road User Deaths and Injuries in the United States. We discuss the connections between the siting of destinations and deaths of vulnerable road users as well as a long game needed for true road safety.

You can listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA

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Below is a full AI generated unedited transcript of this episode:

I, uh, have a PhD in civil engineering, master’s degrees in planning and civil engineering, and then an undergraduate degree in English literature.

So I’ve been doing that since about 1999

So I was traveling around New York, New Jersey, these areas. I spent a lot of time in different cities and a lot of time traveling between them to get this technology working, and I became very interested in the cities themselves and the movement in it. And then during some of my commuting there, a fellow by the name of William H. Whyte passed away.

Um, and as I spent so much time in the car, I got to hear they… After he died, they played an interview with him on Fresh Air, and I was in the car so long that I not only heard the original airing, but the repeat airing. So I was in the car a l- a long time that day. I heard it twice, and it got me thinking about design and cities and streets and public spaces.

I was fascinated by that, and it just sorta gravitated into what I’m doing now.

So when he was president, uh, see, I knew I was engaged with a lot of his transportation reform activities, and so that’s what got me into the New Urbanist group.

So I got to work with them on that, and I’ve been involved with the organization since.

too.

Yeah. Yes. The, those fire departments, they’re always, uh, getting in the way of good urbanism and good streets.

And so we, you know, we’re like, “Well, why do you need a ladder truck to handle a heart attack?” And it’s, well, a lot of the times we’re not going to the station and back. We’re going from, you know, the cardiac event to a fire to somebody else. So they’ll have multiple stops on there. Something like 15, 20% of all their trips were like that.

And so it was a learning process on both sides, and they have unique demands. Now, the fire departments are very much into connected street networks. They innately get that. So if you want an advocate for connecting your street network, building connectivity, and the pedestrian benefits of that, the fire department’s your friend.

They’re just gonna make you put that, you know, 20-foot clear on the street, so you’re gonna have to accept, you know, the 20-foot clear on the, on the right of way there. They said they would be fine with that if w- if we would put residential sprinklers in everyone’s homes, that they would be fine with the response times with that.

But the construction costs on that made that unrealistic, so. But yeah, I was part of that. It was a fun project.

And so that put the kibosh on that. But it turned out okay because we ended up taking a parking lot that was owned by a church and making it into a town square, which is very popular now. It has the farmers market and everything going on. Well, you’ve got a new paper out, Land Use and Road Safety: Understanding the Persistence of Vulnerable Road User Deaths and Injuries.

I’m wondering if you can give us a little bit of the basics of what you found and why you were looking in this specific direction.

But I’ve also had a chance to work in Europe. I was working in Sweden, and for their arterial streets, their designs are indistinguishable from what we use in the United States. The lane widths, the design features are exactly the same. The difference is what we put along our streets, right? So the difference is not how we design the streets, but rather what we allow to occur along the streets.

In Western Europe, which we often use as the model, we go on vacation and we see their cities and we say, “Oh, this is really rather lovely. We should have our streets designed like this.” But we don’t look at either side of the right of way. The streets that we’re looking at are essentially pre-automobile streets.

They’re streets that were built in the Renaissance through the early industrial era, and then most of the growth and development in Europe stops. They didn’t have this post-war boom and growth, and even places like England and Germany that got bombed out in the Second World War, when it came time to rebuild after the Second World War, they didn’t build American style.

They did not build the stuff we built. They essentially rebuilt the urban fabric that they had, and they haven’t had a lot of population growth since then. So when we start looking at street design solutions from Europe, what we need to understand is we’re looking at a built environment context where the automobile is adapted into a pre-automobile form.

The United States, it’s totally different. Nearly all of our growth has happened since that Second World War, right? We had, in 1950, we had about 150 million people. Now we’re at about 330 million, and all of that was built on an entirely different design model that came of age in the 1910s and 1920s that was centered around integrating automobile into the urban fabric.

So the streets are neither good nor bad. The safety problem on the streets happens when we start programming activities on them and those then different sorts of users start entering into them. So in the study, what I wanted to look at was, is the issue really street design? Is it speed? Or is it, is there something else going on here?

And what I found in the study is that after you control for land use, things like speed and geometric design don’t really matter that much. What’s going on is we’re putting these land uses on either side of the street And it’s activating different activities there. So the way I like to think of this in a systems perspective is high-speed roads we understand are inherently hazardous in an impact, right?

We’ve all seen the graphic where, you know, your chance of surviving a 40 mile per hour crash is like… or your chance of dying is 90%. We’ve all seen that. The question is, why is somebody walking there? They’re not walking there in Sweden because there’s nothing to walk to. All of those land uses are prohibited along their arterials.

Like in Germany, they’re prohibited by law. You can’t build that stuff there. In the United States, our development model is we build the residential community as a cell, and then we export all of the other uses outside. And going back to Clarence Perry, right, where do we put these uses? Well, let’s put them on the arterials, right?

They want that traffic, so let’s put them there. And it’s their presence there that’s then generating the hazard, because once you put them there, you start drawing the activities to them. You draw the pedestrians to them, you draw the cyclists to them, you draw the cars in and out of the driveways. One of the things in a study I did about 15, 20 years ago now is that the factors in urban areas that are hazardous for pedestrians and cyclists are the same factors that are hazardous for motorists.

Now, often here in the United States, we have this cars versus vulnerable users. The safety problem for these users is exactly the same, and it’s the confluence of activities at these points. So the question then becomes: Why are we putting these uses in these environments, right? And what do we do about that to retrofit it going forward?

So the study is really… The argument that it’s making here is we can pick on the engineers all we want, but the real problem is our land use plan. You know, the engineer, and I have a graphic I like in the article that I think does a good job of illustrating this, the traffic engineer was never tasked with city design.

The traffic engineer was tasked with moving traffic. That was part of the configuration that came about in the 1920s and ’30s. They go out and they build perfectly fine roads, rural roads, ex-urban roads that are indistinguishable from the European counterparts. The difference is our planners, our local economic development people, they get real excited about bringing in growth, and they’re experiencing growth, and they channel it over these roads.

So roads that are perfectly fine in an undeveloped context become developed. Think of them as a latent hazard, right? The speed is hazardous, but it’s only hazard if it’s activated. And when you put these land uses on there, when your local planner colors their land use map red and says, “We’re gonna allow this development along here,” they’re activating that error.

So it’s gonna bring people along these streets, it’s gonna generate activity, it’s gonna generate conflicts, and it’s gonna create deaths and injuries. It was always hazardous, but the hazard wasn’t activated until we encouraged people to come to these locations. So it’s not the one thing, it’s the entire development paradigm

It’s intuitive. It makes intuitive sense to me that, you know, where you’re going matters, specifically where you’re putting a lot of these uses. But I’m curious what got you to that space in terms of, like, kind of switching it around to think about the land uses versus the roads.

It dealt with the engineering theories that inform street design. It- street trees was specifically what I was interested in. I’d been looking at that for a while, but when you start really looking at streets and you deal in a substantive way, you see things, you see 10-foot lanes that are dangerous. You see 12-foot lanes that are perfectly safe.

A lot of the narrative we have doesn’t correspond with what’s actually happening on the ground. When you start developing an evidence base, you know, I’ve had the good fortune of being able to travel around a lot and work with lots of different cities and see a lot of different things. You start realizing that some of the things that we assume are true aren’t borne out in practice.

So the question then becomes why? And again, I’ve always been interested in cities themselves, so it’s not just been street design, it’s how that street integrates with what’s going on on either side of it. And again, having the good fortune of having worked internationally and seeing how other people do things, you start to look at what are the real differences here?

And you realize that the differences really aren’t street design per se. The differences are the environments in which the streets operate. And so it’s seeing these things over time and then starting to ask, “Well, why is this the case? What’s the difference?” That’s sort of how I got here.

I presented a TRB panel and everything, and one thing it told me was that, you know, the more office and commercial density you put around the end of a train station, then you’d get more ridership because ultimately that’s where the people wanted to go. And then, you know, as Pushkaref and Zupan told us, if you put more residential density on the other side of the line, you get even more.

And so that density and that access really makes people want to go to that area. And so when I was reading your paper, I was thinking kind of the same thing in terms of like, you’re putting these gas stations, these big box stores, you’re putting these, all these destinations in these places, and people want to get to those destinations.

And so, you know, that’s where the conflicts happen, right? That’s where a lot of this stuff happens because of those destinations that they put places. So I think that’s a very interesting parallel thinking of like the discussion about access, destinations, and the conflicts that ensue.

When you start looking at who gets killed and when they get killed or when they get hit, we know that lower income folks, minority populations are three to four times more likely to get injured or killed while walking and cycling than more affluent ones. The presumption we have is it’s, well, they’re less likely to own an automobile, so they’re more likely to walk to destinations, their exposures are.

That’s actually not true. When you start looking at National Household Travel Survey, the group that walks the most are our most affluent populations, right? In terms of the total mileage they walk, it’s the highest. But the reason they walk is for recreational and exercise. They’re walking their dogs. You know, they’re going around the block for exercise.

They’re not trying to get anywhere meaningful, right? So if their environment’s unsafe, they can just get in their car and drive somewhere else, or they can select a neighborhood that’s safe to walk in. They’re not trying to achieve anything. Lower income folks, interestingly, actually don’t walk more than they do, and they make fewer trips.

What happens when people lose access to a car is they don’t walk more, they just take fewer trips and they rely on friends and family members. But when they do walk, they’re not walking for recreation, they’re walking for utilitarian purposes. They’re walking because they need food. They’re walking to the grocery store, they’re walking to the drugstore, they’re walking to the fast food restaurant.

Lower income neighborhoods, they’re walking to the gas stations because in food deserts, that’s where you get your food. So they’re walking to these destinations, and unlike in affluent areas where they can walk in their suburban community, they’re walking to the arterial, right? And that’s where they’re getting hit.

So we’re drawing them to these environments that are inherently unsafe for them. The other thing that comes in is you’ll see a lot about most pedestrians getting killed at night, and the least satisfying conclusion to that is the one that always pops up, which is, “Oh, well, let’s put in more streetlights.”

The one thing I’d like to see tested, and I think this is it, is I think it’s a function of exposure. Because the lower income populations are gonna be accessing food destinations more often than not in the late afternoon and early evening, right? That’s what we see here in South Florida when I did a study for Florida DOT.

It may be true that lighting’s a contributing factor, but exposure’s gonna be the big one. They’re trying to access these destinations. It happens, you know, after 6:30. So the exposure’s happening there, the crashes are happening there, right? So that too is gonna be a function of land use drawing people to environments that are unsafe.

I think as much as lighting, it’s exposure. So when we start looking at people and not just streets, but what are people doing and where are they doing, when are they doing, how are they doing them, that is sort of what the land use question starts to answer. And when you start to see that, suddenly all these pieces in the road safety picture sort of come together.

Or take another one too, which is, you know, traffic fatalities, they’ve been relatively flatlining Motorists are getting safer. You’re less likely to die when you drive, but our vehicle technologies are better. It’s being offset by increases in pedestrian activity. You’re safer in the car, but as you try to access these environments, if people feel increasingly financially crunched, they’re gonna be more likely to walk to these destinations, they’re gonna be more likely to get injured or killed.

So that’s … I think land use is sort of the missing piece that sort of brings all the pieces together.

Was this a factor in studying the specific types of places because of the kind of known quantity of traffic collisions and things like that?

I think Florida is the best case because more than most other states, it’s really been ground zero for this uniquely American style of growth. There was almost nothing down here in 1950 and 1960. It wasn’t until air conditioning became common that people came down. That’s what brought my dad’s family down here to do construction, you know.

And when my dad was a kid, even when I was a kid down here, there wasn’t that much here, right? A lot of South Florida was still rural. All of this growth happened in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. It just blew up, and it became essentially the American development paradigm on steroids more than any other place because it was all built during that time where this design paradigm prevailed.

So you see it here because we’ve got more of it here.

But there’s 85 miles of greenbelt trails in this development, and I could get anywhere from one side to the other without crossing a major arterial because they’ve designed in underpasses for the trail system.

And actually, funny story, Ian McHarg designed The Woodlands, right? The original section of it anyways for George Mitchell, and the guys that designed Kingwood actually gave George Mitchell the name Ian McHarg to actually go and do that. So I have a whole episode coming out on it, and I’m really excited to share it.

There’s really cool stories about that. It just makes me think of this, like, layered network that was created there but wasn’t created elsewhere. The autocentric kind of form took hold, and then it dispersed everywhere, and so The Woodlands and Kingwood are actually outliers in that respect because of their trail systems, because of the way they were designed in the ’70s, in the early ’70s, uh, you know, partly during the oil crisis.

And we had some places that decided to go similar directions but not quite, and we could have gone that way, but we just didn’t learn the lessons from them.

You know, the families are coming in, the GI generation’s coming in. You start trimming out the things that cost a little extra in land development. So that model got lost.

Houses before 1929 almost always faced the street. That was where it was. This is let’s turn the back to the street, the street’s inherently bad. The activity is gonna be faced in the back. Now it’s just the default model, and then you drive in to what is the front of your house.

Got a big garage up there. I

And your research, I mean, it was really interesting, you know, on the 50 worst intersections, 36 of those were grocery or big box stores. Mm-hmm. Which is a huge number, and connects the dots so much for me personally.

There was something drawing e- every one of the 50. Every single one. But yeah, the big box stores, and it would make sense. They’re drawing the greatest number of people there. Like, that’s where the most activity is.

basically the food desert, uh, didn’t exist before the 1980s really. There was a lot of grocery stores and competition and everything, and lots of neighborhoods, even poor neighborhoods, had grocery stores. And then, you know, basically the US, uh, lots of things happened. The Motor Carrier Act happened. The Robinson-Patman Act stopped being enforced.

A lot of things happened in suburban design and urban growth that led to a lot of subdivisions and things like that. But what’s interesting about it to me is that we used to have these grocery stores and neighborhood retail that just really doesn’t exist because of the consolidation of a lot of these larger companies, it feels like.

And so the kind of growth and the hyper-growth of some of these organizations like Walmarts and Targets and everything else, and their practices for where they site their buildings and the locations on arterials and large plots of land on the outside of town really do increase that exposure, increase that risk for people.

And so that’s part of the story too, I feel like.

They didn’t have a single grocery store there, and so the state was doing a big job. We need to get these people to a grocery store. We need to give them access to healthy food. I mean, you have– All of these neighborhoods will have the little shop, you know, the little sundry shop that will have junk food.

They’ll have the potato chips and then the, you know, the pickled sausages, right? They’ll have those things, but how do we get people access to healthy food? So they managed to get, I believe it was a Kroger that came in there. They were able to, through tax incentive, to get a Kroger come into Newark’s Central Ward, and within a year, it was the highest grossing per square foot Kroger of the entire thing, ’cause people didn’t have access to it.

So part of it might be that. Part of it might also be siting practices-

I mean, I, I’m just thinking, like, how hard would it be to pull these commercial uses off of the arterial roads and put them somewhere else that doesn’t create as much conflict, or design them in a way to start with that makes them all interior and you don’t have as many people necessarily crossing these larger streets to get to them?

That’s one model. And that was– I mean, that worked when the US was a high-growth country, which we’re not anymore, right? Our, our population’s stabilizing. So the question, I think the challenge for us is we built all of this stuff. Now we own it and what are we gonna do with it? Now, if there’s a silver lining to this cloud, is that most of the stuff that gets built is disposable, right?

It was not built for generations. It was built for a financial model where the building wasn’t meant to last. They would capitalize on their investment in the building in 15 years, then they walk away, right? So now you’ve got… And you’ll see it in every metropolitan area. It’s the strip mall that eventually has the vape shop and the dollar store, and it goes into decline, and it goes into disrepair.

We need to start thinking of these places as land banks for redevelopment. Like, let’s wipe that off. We’ve oversaturated, we’ve over-zoned our materials for retail. We don’t have anywhere near the demand for the retail that we’ve permitted in our land use plans. So we need to start rethinking the land use plans for what are we gonna do with this stuff when we don’t have the demand that we used to and where the infrastructure, the, the buildings that we have start to deteriorate.

And this is where you have some exciting opportunities for redevelopment, right? Where we can start taking overlay districts, for example. New urbanists will do this a lot. New urbanists are big fans of the overlay district in the redevelopment plan. They’re not doing it for safety, but we ought to be, right?

If we start taking safety, we start integrating safety into traffic impact analyses, into site planning, right? It’s not really integrated in any substantive way now into that, but we can start doing that. So we’ve built this first wave and the second wave of suburbia. What do we do is we start being forced to redevelop this.

In South Florida, it’s particularly pronounced because we’re built out on Southeast Florida. We’ve got the ocean on one side and the Everglades on the other, and even h- in this state, politically, there’s not a lot of public willingness to build any further west into the Everglades. So then it becomes how do we reconfigure, how do we build the infrastructure and the cities and the environments that we have?

You know, I ha- I’ve thought about this in my head for a while, but I think we’re kind of like potted plants. We’re hitting the edge of our pots in terms- Mm … of, like, where we’ve grown and developed, and now we have to go inwards. But the problem with the inwards is that there’s a lot of NIMBYs, there’s a lot of kinda sclerotic growth in some of these neighborhoods that are older, and they might just need, like, a little bit of a shot in the arm to start thinking differently about how they can redevelop and be successful again.

Because there’s no large tracts of land on the outside of these m- metropolitan areas anymore that can just build massive amounts of single-family housing. And so if you can’t build the same amount of housing, but you have the same kinda pressure and growth, uh, what are you gonna do? And so sometimes it’s, it is rethinking the places that you’re talking about, rethinking these commercial spaces that have kind of been worn out.

They’re 20 years old. They’re getting past their useful lives. Um, they need to kind of switch, and unless we can do that, I think we might not be able to address some of the problems that we have with housing prices and a bunch of other things that are happening.

It’s separate from what you’re looking at specifically, I know, but it is something that has to do with growth and how we put things together, and then where we site things, right?

You can keep pushing out to the north and the west quite a bit further. I mean, here we’re seeing it too. Here, the growth is going up the eastern coastline.

Building up in the north is, but then people drive.

Higher vehicle speeds were associated with significantly fewer of these crash types, while wider medians were associated with more.”

But to handle the turning maneuvers, we do turn lanes in that median. So the whole paved width of the median is gonna be, you know, 25 feet, but when you get to the intersection, 20 of those feet’s gonna be two turn lanes. So the median, those wide medians are gonna be associated with more turn lanes. So with the wider medians, it was the introduction of turn lanes, which means the addition of tr- traffic conflicts at those intersection locations, especially when you’ve got, as we still do, the permitted left turn, right?

That puts that multiple thread in as people are trying to cross the adjacent street with the walk signal. Now, mid-block medians weren’t a problem. Mid-block, people do the staged crossing where they cross halfway the street, they’re in the center line median, they’re safe there, and then they do the second half of the crossing.

The intersections is where the median’s the problem. The speed one is also because of a confounding variable. So if the median is the result of turn lanes, the speed is the result of development, ’cause once you start seeing posted speed limits in excess of 40, 45 miles an hour, they don’t have any development on either side of it.

So once, in Florida, once we start getting that development, the speed limit gets dropped to at most 45, even though we’ll have suburban arterials that may be 50 or 55. But they only permit that when none of this development is there, right? So this is the high-end suburban stuff where the arterials themselves are fully access managed and landscaped, and there is no development on either side of it, right?

It backs up to a subdivision that’s heavily bermed, right? It’s got a wall in the berm there that prevents traffic from getting through. The speed is getting at the land use issue, too, indirectly. That make sense? Traffic engineers get speed in a basic sense. Like, they understand that where you’ve got development, speed is no good.

But the pressure is 40 or 45, or in the more rural, 35. Thirty-five, forty-five, that band, you’re gonna see development there. But once you get above 45, you’re not gonna see it anymore. That’s what’s going on there. So it, it’s, let’s state it another way in a more succinct way. It’s related to speed limit setting practices.

So the engineers, the Florida DOT, the counties will look at what’s on either side of that right of way and determine whether or n- what speed is most appropriate for that environment. These aren’t heartless people. They just like think it might be a little, little too fast

Unless there’s… It’s designed in a certain way where there’s a way to cross or safely or… But they are higher speed, but also they are places where there is conflict. I mean, there’s gonna be people trying to cross at some points. Even if you have a berm in the back of your neighborhood, I know that, like, you’re gonna wanna go to your friend’s house in the other neighborhood that has a berm on the other side of the arterial.

And so I think that seems like part of the issue, too. Actually, I just released this morning a discussion with folks, uh, at Brown University about a paper called Community Severance, and they were looking at New York City, which is a totally different animal to a certain extent- Mm-hmm … than South Florida.

But at the same time, they found that the calculated community severance, which is, like, the barriers that arterial roads and traffic put up to people that keep them in their communities, and they found a higher incidence of schizophrenia in these areas outside of air pollution, right? They adjusted for the air pollution variable.

Huh. And so it, it’s really interesting to think about it from that perspective of, like, these roads are basically like big walls between each of these neighborhoods. And people are gonna try to cross them because they wanna get to the thing that’s on the other side, and that’s the land use aspect of it, right?

And so I don’t know how you mitigate that really if you’re gonna continue to build roads for cars or have to get people to get places in these kind of exurban and suburban environments.

You need to tailor the street design for that use. Here’s the problem, though. We built 200,000 miles of urban arterial, right? That’s like three times the interstate highway system, almost four times the interstate highway system. We’re not rebuilding all of it. We can’t even get a two-mile light rail system built anywhere, right?

Reconstructing the arterial system is not gonna happen. At best, it’s gonna be a spot treatment for the worst locations. Not that we do that now. I mean, even our Vision Zero cities don’t tend to prioritize the places where the problems are because they’re able to color every pedestrian improvement as a safety improvement, so they just stick it in the places where it’ll make the wealthier folks happy.

And certainly down here, we know where the high crash locations are in South Florida, right? That’s not where we’re putting the infrastructure in. But the solution here, we’re not gonna rebuild 200,000 miles of arterial. We’re gonna do spot treatments at specific locations. We need to be strategic about that, and it’s often gonna require us to focus on populations that don’t get the attention they deserve.

But the other solution is to reconfigure the stuff that’s still adaptable. So the suburban, the exurban stuff that’s in decline, wipe it out and reconfigure it. So it’s gonna be a two-pronged solution, the cheaper of which, and the most pragmatic of which, is gonna be the redevelopment plan because that’s one that you can finance on the private sector, right?

That’s one that you can get developers to look at. There was an interesting study I did with a couple of colleagues, Tab Combs and Jesse Saganor. Um, we were looking at safety and traffic impact analyses, and we did a panel with developers. And we wanted to see what developers thought about bringing safety considerations into site planning and design.

They were all cool with it. Like, they had no problems with it. They understood how they could market it. What they said was, “Here’s the problem. The problem is it doesn’t come into the preliminary reviews. The problem is the planning department’s gonna start doing this ad hoc stuff afterwards. Like, if they could come in when we’re doing our initial site plan and provide clear criteria for what to do, we’re all about that.

What we don’t wanna do is get jerked around in the site plan review process through various iterations.” Right? So if we can get our local governments to think about safety in a real way, and zoning ordinances don’t think about safety at all. Subdivision regulations don’t really think about safety either other than on the residential street.

There may be some consideration of, you know, the signals at the intersections where they connect, but not really. If we can start bringing safety into this land use side, we’ve got an opportunity to make a real difference. Now, it’s not a difference that we see tomorrow, right? It’s a difference that we see in 20 years.

It’s a difference that our kids see.

A lot of death and injuries that are happening today are the result of development decisions that happened 30, 40 years ago, right? It’s somebody had a great plan for developing their community. Let’s bring in the Walmart, right? That’ll increase the tax base. Let’s let them come in, right? Let’s bring in the commercial on the arterial.

It looks good on our tax base. Safety’s not considered, right? The roads these were put in were perfectly safe until that development happened. So getting the land use plan to recognize that reality that the consequences are gonna come later, and being proactive about that, that I think is the other real big piece of the puzzle here.

well, if you start to figure out beginning before you even build any houses in the neighborhood or if you’re gonna redevelop a house in the neighborhood, you need to start thinking about all the things that are gonna be a problem for you. If you have a flooding problem, that’s something that, you know, a LEED certified house is not gonna be solving for you specifically unless you take the steps to do it ahead of time.

And so you’re on the same path as her, which is like, you need to do all these things and focus on like, what are the problems? How can we solve them? And then let’s do this together at the start rather than changing it up halfway through or figuring out halfway through that you need, you know, something else in your, you know, HVAC system that will re- reduce the smoke from the fires that are gonna happen or whatever it may be.

But, you know, whatever’s impacting epidemiologically this neighborhood, how can we address that at the start rather than later on? And I think that’s a, you know, important part of what you’re saying too, is like these site plans, the way that we do planning specifically, if we have safety in mind to start with, we can do it better later on.

Which is why, you know, I talk about my neighborhood all the time, it, that I grew up in Houston. I’m in San Francisco now, but where I grew up in Houston is like, I didn’t know any better that this was a place that was safe for me, safer than all other places, suburban places. But it was planned like that to start with.

They laid it out that way to start with, and it turned out that way. And so now it’s, you know, the dividends are, you know, visible. 26 of 30 years from 1981 till, uh, 2010 or something like that, a school from The Woodlands or Kingwood won the state cross-country championship. Uh, why is that? ‘Cause the infrastructure that was laid down in these neighborhoods in the largest schools.

So there’s an infrastructure like it to tell. It tells you later on, like what the benefits are. And so I think that’s important. You know, plan first, uh, get the results later.

Right? So now you’ve gotta fight a political battle with adjusting the zoning ordinance or figuring out the homeowners association.

So I don’t know. So what do you think going forward? Like, what’s the next thing that you’re gonna look at given the findings from this report?

So you have England I like as an example. You have Ebenezer Howard, you have the Garden City. We understand that as a model for suburbia, but we don’t necessarily understand it as also being a mechanism for social reform. Like, it was not just a housing solution. It was a problem to social insurance, health, retirement, all of these social ills.

They went a specific direction with this. We brought that over here And we integrated that with the automobile and with a very distinctly American notion of individualism and social responsibility. And it’s because of that that we took the big fork that we took. So I’m spending a lot of time looking at historical stuff right now at the very earliest stages of the planning profession when we started doing…

You have the original conferences of city planning when these first people came together to talk about industrial reform and how that got deviated. And I think one of the big villains for road safety that we never even mention but who looms over all of it is Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.

He derailed that and moved it into professionalism. Let’s focus on forecasting. Let’s focus on, you know, site planning and design, and leave these other elements outside of it. So when we start getting these other notions of how we build a city all bundled together, you get the stuff that we have, right?

And it becomes problematic because what we call path dependence, which is these institutions come into place for largely arbitrary reasons, but it becomes v- very difficult to alter their trajectories. You’re not gonna find, for example, a single person planner in a metropolitan planning organization that says, “Oh, I’m gonna build more suburban sprawl,” but they’re gonna approve plan after plan that does that.

So I’ve just been digging into a lot of historical stuff lately. And, you know, I’ve spent… Up to my career now, it’s all been data analysis and data crunching, and right now the only data I’m looking at are page numbers.

To understand now, we need to understand why we made the decisions we made.

And so, you know, then we put the ember veil on top of all development by Euclid actually being ruled on by the Supreme Court. So- Mm … you know, that period of time, there was a lot of whys and, and forks in the road that you coulda gone in different directions. Another one that, that I was reminded of when you were talking is Yoni Appelbaum’s Stuck.

Um, and I don’t know if you’ve read that one. Um, but- You know, he talks about actually earlier on than that the land use kind of traditions of the North and the South. Northern United States had a land use tradition of collectivism. People were allowed to live in this small village where you were born and, and likely died.

Um, you weren’t necessarily allowed to leave, but they took care of everything. They took care of your healthcare. You had a job. You had things, uh, that you were connected to, uh, your society and your religion. Whereas in the South, it was very stratified. Uh, there was, like, rich and poor. The levels of… They were very high, but they were also very low, and there was a lot of individualism, right?

And so these, this collective idea and this individual idea from the North versus the South then bled into the rest of the country as this kind of weird thing where you’re like, “Well, I should be able to tell you what you can do with your property from the North, and then nobody can tell me what I can do with my property in the South.”

And so this interesting kind of m- mesh- mishmash that ends up towards the predicament that we’re in now with housing, but a, a bunch of other things, and it leads towards Euclid, and it leads towards a number of other things that got us here. So that’s super fascinating that you’re working on this.

Right now, we’re sort of tweaking at the edges of the problems of the system. Addressing speed limits is the edge of the problem, right? It’s not to say that reducing speed limits isn’t a good thing to do, but it doesn’t really solve our problem. And if we were serious about it, if we wanted to address speed limits, every new production vehicle can read the speed limit-

What is the core of the system that we’re really addressing? That’s sorta, I think, where we’re at, and I think we sort of have reached an end of doing the things we’ve done. Certainly, the high growth phase of America is over. So now that we’ve, you know, we’ve eaten this big meal of development, now we can start digesting it, right?

And the exciting things about cities is they are dynamic and they evolve, right? I mean, you look at, you know, maps of New Amsterdam Right? From 1600. And Wall Street is where the old wall was, right? They’ve got agriculture going on the back end of the wall. Now it’s Skyscraper National Park, right? Cities evolve and they change, and for us it’s thinking about how we can harness these forces towards a better end.

I think too often we’re fighting about vehicle lanes. They don’t matter, right? They don’t really matter,

I still have my Atlanta phone number from when I was at Georgia Tech doing civil engineering. Nice.

We’re all concerned about protecting our families and our children. And this is an opportunity, I think, where we can all sort of think about the things that we have in common in moving forward. So yeah, the extent that I can help foster that conversation, I’m excited to do it.

I, I’m super excited to read what you come up with.