My typical greeting of “Hey Beautiful!” or “Hey, Handsome!” is often greeted with a chuckle and a bashful smile. A good friend tried to hand me his glasses yesterday because I obviously needed them more than he did. Believe it or not, I actually mean it--I believe the human spirit is the most beautiful thing in the world. People usually tell white lies or polite fiction to make those around them more comfortable. Most are rarely fooled but appreciate the consideration.

Transportation engineers unwittingly have fallen into the white lie/polite fiction trap as well but it has some serious negative consequences. Here’s the way it plays out:

The roadway design standards dictate a wide open corridor, but since we would like people to be walking or biking on it, the community stipulates a ridiculously low speed limit. The jurisdiction posts a white lie that 35 is an appropriate speed limit for that corridor, but no one is fooled. Despite the 4’ bike lane that probably cost an additional half million per mile, it gets used about once a month by a daring member of the spandex crowd or a South American visitor that hasn’t figured out the perils yet. The multi-use path is set back far from the road, next to the subdivision walls. Twice a week you might see a jogger or two chugging away for their morning run. There are no destinations for a half a mile that anyone would want to visit on foot. Nevertheless, it is posted for heavy enforcement and about every quarter the local police run a speed trap, dropping the speeds near the posted limit during that time. Otherwise, the average speed is 45+ and the 85th percentile is well over 50. Crashes are basically non-existent, but not because of the low speed limit. What few crashes are there happen because some are going 35 for fear of a ticket while most are going 50 and getting irritated.

I’ll grant that setting speeds based on the 85th percentile speed alone is not ideal, but divorcing the speed limit from reality isn’t good either. As designers, we are loudly declaring what the appropriate speed is by what we build, but we often don’t realize what we’re saying. The question becomes, how can a designer understand what they’ve just told the driver--is there a Rosetta stone that will help us translate our symbols to ourselves?

The good news is that the research we did at UCF created that Rosetta stone. These new tools and new psychological frameworks can allow engineers to have a better understanding of what drivers will believe is a realistic speed based on what the driver sees in the roadway. In testing, it’s usually within about 3 mph of the midblock 85th percentile speed, especially if you get the visual width of the corridor right.

The formula has 3 main dimensions: the visual width of the corridor, the doorway density (a proxy for human interaction potential), and the block length. When it’s off, it’s usually overshooting the estimate for a good reason, like tourists who are lost or jam conditions that depress the 85th percentile speed, but not the free flow speed.

This type of tool makes the design and policy decisions abundantly clear:

• Clear zones everywhere? That’s fine, but there’s no way you’ll get a free flow speed down in a walkable range--that’s not what walkable corridors look like.

• Subdivision walls? Same issue: no people, no reason to slow down.

• Short blocks, tight corridors, lots of doorways up close? You might get a lower operational speed than you post.

Here’s where the rubber hits the road. If your community wants to optimize vehicle throughput on a corridor, that’s fine, but it’s an intentional choice that is at odds with a multimodal environment. Pedestrians and cyclists will not see it as safe and won’t come--they shouldn’t. Drivers won’t slow down. You don’t really want them to.

If, on the other hand, you want to shift modes away from personal vehicles to avoid congestion or reduce your ecological footprint, you need to have corridors that are not optimized for the vehicle at all. That may mean telling your fire department they can’t buy a ladder truck for a 8 story building because you don’t have any. You’ll need to reconsider standard 12 foot lanes and building setbacks while you’re at it.

If you are blessed with a pre-WWII grid network, you can have both. There’s redundancy that will support both strategies. If you’re retrofitting 1970’s suburbia, it’s going to be uphill, but it’s still doable when you think small, take advantage of natural mid-block crossings, and create safe connections between your nodes. Those 1970’s fire zones in your strip shopping centers can make great bike paths.

This is doable, but we have to quit lying to ourselves.

Up Next:

Still in writing and book launch mode, so I’m hoping to get the next in the series on community types and working with their politics out by next Friday. We’ll see how that goes. I may just have cool new pics from DC, but that’s another story…

I love their bookstores.

I love their little old churches.

I love their chocolate shops.

My daughter in love is tickled by yarn stores. (Qiviut at $145 for a one ounce skein? My son balked on that one but it's so soft!)

I see the pizza shops and chuckle when show up as often as coffee shops.

Mostly, I love the little general stores. Just about every place I go, I try to get a decent picture or two of local retail. I did a post on neighborhood retail a few years ago and those little holes in the wall still have my heart. What I love about them is the relationships they build and maintain.

The sweet shopkeep here described this spot as the TJ Maxx of Skagway—and I did find a cute everyday shirt here.

So why can I only find them on vacation?

The 1990’s were hard on local grocery stores, and probably for good reason. Many of the anti-trust regulations on the books just aren’t enforced for grocery chains or general retail, which makes things easier on the consumer, not harder. Besides their advanced distribution and warehouse management systems, the larger chains can scale a manufacturing business lickety split—get your product into a WalMart and they’ll order millions of your widget. It’s almost “winning the lottery” money, and that means economies of scale and far lower costs.

It’s easy to turn your nose up at places like Walmart or chain stores, but when your discretionary income is razor thin, places like that are make or break for single moms and low income wage earners. When Katie is living on her own, she’s going to have to try to live on $900 a month. She won’t have the luxury for much more—and she’s not alone.

These days, Amazon and direct to market are eating the chain systems alive. Local manufacturers can show up there, but the chains don't usually make anything they can post there. The only way they can compete is to drop the scale of their stores and distribute them throughout the landscape. The only thing that will get you to bypass Amazon is a personal connection. If you’re less than a mile from the store—and you hire friendly, customer-sensitive people—you’ve got a fighting chance. Otherwise, you’re toast.

There are places where local scale general stores still work: areas where the entire landscape is rural or isolated tourist spots. WalMart still makes it there, but they’re the only ones, and even they don’t make it there that often.

What makes that work?

They obviously know their customer and tailor everything to their needs as closely as possible. When I visited Halifax, the little corner store in Hydrostone would go around the neighborhood during snowstorms, taking orders that they would deliver later. If you needed milk, or sugar, or a TV dinner or two, they were close enough to save you a trip to a bigger chain.

Many times, it’s a captive audience. In tourist towns, it’s usually a remote enough location that locals have few other options for day to day needs. They might still go down the mountain or out of town for bigger trips on a monthly basis, but those trips are rare. Juneau has the smallest Costco in the world. When they got their first McDonalds, the line was several miles long and they ran out of food. Someone even flew down from Skagway and ordered 800 hamburgers and took them back to hand them out—there are only about 850 people who permanently live there. In Skagway, our bus driver described the local Ace hardware store this way:

They can’t say that because they’re leaving people without what they need. They are careful to have what people need, particularly in the off-season when it’s hard to get around. I walked around. They’re pretty crammed and comprehensive.

I got the same sense in the general store on Beech Mountain, or the stores in any small town in New Hampshire. Theyve learned from experience and personal requests. They make a pile of money in the busy season from the tourists, which offsets their costs for the locals. Alaska tax structure even takes this into account. Sales tax pops up to 8% in the tourist season and drops to 2% in the off-season.

Is this transferrable?

Sometimes—and maybe. It’s a rough question.

A few weeks ago, I spent some time talking with my new friend, Sharon Woods, who is a bona-fide retail expert and economist. She thinks that Publix’s strategy of dropping the store scale and distributing through the landscape isn’t dropping the size enough. They’re building too much and going to end up outrunning their profitability. I’m not seeing that in real time yet, but she’s far smarter about this than I am.

Walgreens and CVS have tried that strategy and have had to pull back quite a bit. If any retailer had a chance at pulling off a general store at a hyper-local scale from location alone, they had thrown enough money at it to succeed. There was a time I would choose one over the other based on relationships with the pharmacist at the drive through window. That helps the pharmacy, but did nothing for the store. Even Neighborhood WalMart stores are driving foot traffic to their larger supercenters rather than replacing them, except in rare occasions where options are far more limited.

A change in seasons.

I’ve been thinking hard about the cultural changes that are happening at the moment. Systems are getting dismantled for interconnected networks. Control is getting shoved down to the local level in every arena. People are starving for human connection. The differentiating value brick and mortar stores bring to the negotiation is the human touch they can provide. The systems have out systemed anything else. Efficiency alone is not enough for a business to thrive. The big boys have quite a bit of inertia, but are getting a lot of push-back.

Can they survive it? Not without some structural changes.

CVS and Walgreens tried to scale the system alone. That wasn’t enough. They had interconnected pharmacy computer systems and negotiation power with the big insurance companies, but without the relationships, they haven’t seen any success in their higher profit retail systems.

WalMart and Chick-fil-a continue to succeed because they pay extraordinarily close attention at a local level. They have systematized local information and culture (respectively).

Merge the two at a much smaller scale and there may be a winner out there.

I would upload more cute pictures, but shipboard wifi has its limits. Maybe I'll post a few notes here and there.

Up next:

I’m already started on the third community type in our administrative series and it should be a juicy one. I may even be home long enough to get some real writing in.

The folks at the New Hampshire ACEC gave me this topic, as only a group from New Hampshire could. I absolutely loved my time there. They are rebellious in all of the right ways for all of the right reasons.

My friend, Tyler Valia, recorded the talk for me, and I’ve added in the slides—the video is not super steady, but he was a real trooper and his arms were really tired by the time it was all over.

This is only the first half—I broke in the middle for them to discuss their own local issues, and then we had a really great discussion together afterwards. Feel free to join the discussion by thinking through the exercise yourself. Post in the comments the map location and your thoughts and we can all join in!

This week I’ve been at the 34th Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU)—it’s exhilarating and delightful to be around such fertile minds and passionate hearts. They know what it takes to turn a city or town into a thriving community. It has a lot to do with how you structure the streets and land uses. There are solid, dimensional principles that go into designing a place where people genuinely enjoy walking and that makes it so much more natural to form connections within that community. Those principles may apply to every community, anywhere, but if you sidestep the personality of that unique place, the plan and the response is likely to fall short of the target—and fall flat with the people who are there.

A few years ago, I stumbled onto a fractal system that goes a long way towards understanding both the genus loci of a place, and the political and personal systems that work within it. It’s been interesting to decode the places within this framework, because it helps unpack what that community is made for and how it will walk out its identity or fall into shadow as it twists that makeup.

It helps to look at the community’s history, but ultimately the foundation of a community’s identity is the question or principle that sits at the core of their being—and the typical core questions fit within one of 7 principles. There are two other overlays beyond the 7 principles, which create a potential of 42 unique community types. Once you understand where a community (or person) fits within these types, you have a good idea of what they treasure and how they will respond politically, including the types of regulations they will prefer and the ways that their internal operations will function.

Earlier today, I spent a few minutes with a friend in the halls and was able to completely decode the entire political structure at his new job and help him understand how to reframe how he works with his city manager and his staff in ways that fit their culture and will get him the outcomes he needs. He demanded to see the whole system, so I’ll start unpacking it this week.

If you want an overview of the 7 positions in this archetype, I did blog posts on the theory for the first 3 and then the last 4 several months ago. This post is already getting long in the tooth, so I’ll probably do two a week—with a break next week for a very special post.

This week, I’m going to do a high level summary of the key diagnostics that I typically use to identify which of the 7 I’m dealing with in a community, and what I would expect to see in their operational systems and politics.

One caveat: these archetypes apply at every scale, so when you’re looking at an individual community, you will see multiple layers at the same time. For instance, I live in the North American Continent and the US in particular, which are both in the first position (Prophet). They are dominated by the drive to understand nature and innovate with it. I also live in Florida which is a 5th position (Giver) state, focused on stewardship of its ecology and the movement of its guests, which creates a win-win for both the guests and the natives. The Orlando metropolitan area sits in the third position (Teacher) which is expertise focused, and in the City of Winter Garden, which is also Giver, but as a former agricultural center, places a high priority on land stewardship. Each of these scales imposes a layer of that principle upon the place.

Position 1: Prophet

The principle: design. The desire to understand the underlying principles that govern all of creation so that they can be combined in novel ways to innovate and solve problems.

Diagnostic: Innovation, reinvention, idealism that often fails in practice, delays, hesitation, hypocrisy.

Prophet communities are very idealistic but often relationally naive. They will constantly try to reinvent the wheel, which means that they will unintentionally generate layers of regulations every time they start the cycle over again. They are often problem focused, rather than vision directed, which means they’re constantly trying to optimize as well—which doesn’t help.

Example: A great example of this is Boston, where 80% of their existing properties are non-conforming—which means they couldn’t be built as they currently exist under the regulations. By now, nothing could actually get built under their code without some kind of exception. That means they often fly by the seat of their pants. They try some amazingly innovative strategies, but need to have help from the outside to evaluate how it’s working so they have the cover to completely let components or plans go if needed.

Strategy: Dream with them. Appeal to their love of the ideal and get them to identify principles they do actually care about, then ruthlessly eliminate anything and everything that isn’t covered by that principle. Ban them from any new regulations. Give them permission to fail (they will often) and throw it out just as fast—sunset regulations from the beginning so that they need to reevaluate whether it’s working. Push them gently to complete by anticipating the good that will come at the end of the process.

Position 2: Servant.

The Principle: Authority. I serve someone who ranks above me and protects me. Other people submit to my authority and I protect them.

Diagnostic Cues: Practically invisible. Strict titled hierarchies. Loyal and protective. Often active military presence or history. Hospitality and medical industries. Excellent food.

In servant communities, the relationship within the hierarchy trumps everything else. That means written regulations are often ignored in comparison to commands from a superior. They are extraordinarily defensive and protective of those in their own group: don’t hurt their people. They may appear to be the most mild-mannered folks, but if an outsider hurts their people, they will respond with extreme prejudice, occasionally bordering on violence. They have a very responsive service culture, great hospitality, and even better food. They are good at healing people’s wounds, which attracts the broken and those that would take advantage of them.

Example: Both the state of Georgia and Atlanta fit this culture, along with the city my friend is working in. Coming from the outside, it’s often horrifying to see the regulations that are regularly ignored or disregarded. Within that culture, their immediate supervisor’s direction trumps any written regulations.

Strategy: Explicitly recognize the value of the hierarchy. Start by making an Org Chart and get everyone to agree on it—ask for individual personal agreement from every person if necessary. Make sure you have the honor and support of those above you. Make sure those below you understand that you value the regulations. Demonstrate that you follow them, and that you expect them to do so as well. Then train them to bring any violations you make against the regulations to your attention so you can correct the issue—and make sure that you do. They will learn to expect that from those under them in the hierarchy. They expect you to defend them from your superiors and will feel betrayed if you don’t. Don’t let them put you in a position where you have to choose who to support—them or the regulations. Take advantage of their sensitivity to the needs of those they serve and honor them for it. They will never seek out that honor but will burn out without it.

Up Next:

I have a special video post coming out next week that I think you’ll love. It’s a recording of the keynote I gave at the New Hampshire ACEC Transportation Conference entitled: Are speed limits a relic of the past? It felt right to release it on the 125th anniversary of the speed limit, so it will appear next Thursday, on May 21st.

Miranda Priestly is the ultimate personification of “boundaries” in the most toxic way. You won’t break her. You will only break against her. She has a goal bigger than herself and provides artwork that is inspiring to many, but the cost is steep—to her and everyone around her. The entire industry is steeped in selfishness, and she is its orchestrator. She is not ostensibly evil in the traditional sense. She just wants what she wants and will not tolerate anything less—and that may be the point of the movie.

The movie pivots on the moment when Andy Sachs, her new, “smart, fat girl,” realizes that in order to survive the demands of her job, she is becoming just like her boss. Andy claims that she could never throw her coworkers under the bus for her own personal gain, and Miranda shows her that she already has. Then she delivers this chilling line:

When Andy pushes back and says, “but what if this isn’t what I want?” Miranda laughs it off with, “Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Andrea. Everybody wants this. Everybody wants to be us.”

When they arrive at the next destination, Miranda turns around to order Andy to do something and she’s no longer there. She has walked away. She has done just what Miranda gave her permission to do: choose for herself.

Choices made for others or for ourselves?

The world we live in didn’t happen overnight. It was created one choice at a time. Each of those individual choices were made to care for those we love, but had an undercurrent of selfishness that is hard to notice:

• We pick a good school district because we care about our kid’ future (and ours).

• We choose a quiet neighborhood street because we want the peace and quiet—and we want a place our kids can play outside.

• We buy our kids (and ourselves) video games and cell phones because it will make them happy.

• We pick houses based on their future resale value and fight like heck to keep that value up.

• We want a fast road and a close parking space because every moment spent there is a moment we are away from our families.

None of those choices are inherently bad—but all of them are a narrowly framed response to an immediate issue. They are little “s” selfish. They seem sensible—we are caring for those we love—but they ultimately come down to choosing for ourselves, not that different from what Miranda Priestly describes. What they all have in common is the failure to zoom out and see the wider, long term implication—for others and ultimately for ourselves.

They follow the iron law, which says:

“Do unto others before they get a chance to do to you”

It’s a subtle but toxic twist on the proactiveness of the golden rule:

“Do unto others as you would have them do to you.”

It lends a hard edge to life that eventually cuts ourselves down with the cuts we deliver. It feels a lot like the portraits in the Haunted Mansion that look fine on the surface, but as the ceiling rises, you see a deeper truth—each person is self-composed, and blissfully unaware they are self-destructing with their own choices.

What goes around should come back around. You can’t get to a win-win if you don’t get a win for yourself. The problem is that we define our own self interest far too narrowly. We think only about what we control, not about the wider sphere of what we influence. We’re thinking about what’s good for us individually, right now, not what’s good for our community for multiple generations.

Part of that is the culture we’ve inherited.

I read through The Culture Code last week while I was on the road. It was written by a psychotherapist that began working for companies to help guide their advertising. He does three hour focus sessions with people from a specific culture to unpack their cultural goggles for an idea. In the US, the code for health is movement and the code for America is a dream.

What we’ve lost sight of is that the faster you move, the less you can connect. We didn’t lose the ability to connect. We lost the conditions that make connection normal and routine.

It’s easy to see symptoms of it everywhere if you know what you’re looking at.

• The Gen-Z stare gets developed when toddlers see parents faces as they look at screens, during the stage of life that they are learning how to make those expressions and how to feel what those expressions mean.

• Teens are anxious because they’re constantly under criticism digitally but have no grounding in human, embodied connection

• Kids choose video games for the adventure—the outside world is too dangerous to face—too much traffic and kidnapping.

• We act like we are manipulating robots around other machines when we drive—what compassion does a box need from me?

• You can have anything in the world within a few days shipping time, but you can’t know the person who made it—and they certainly didn’t make it for you.

• Subdivision walls keep strangers out—sorta—while the gates advertise that you have something worth stealing.

The core of the problem is narrow self-interest. One of the most permanent and inescapable manifestations is in our built world: our roads, our zoning, our subdivisions, our office buildings, and our shopping centers.

Visitors from the UK are often surprised that in the US we describe distance in terms of time. We describe a destination as about half an hour away, when they expect to hear how many miles away it is. It’s a natural outcome of the way we move and paradoxically, the way congestion limits our movement.

The curse of unlimited funds

I tried to explain this to a friend yesterday. The community she lives in is comparatively wealthy and has had access to nearly unlimited transportation funding for the last few decades.

They were wealthy enough to vote in an extra penny sales tax for transportation—and they’ve used it. They’ve widened nearly everything. The temporary relief meant that they attracted multiple corporate headquarters—large office buildings that used to generate heavy traffic two or three times a day, as their workers came in every day from their gated subdivisions miles away. Shopping centers ringed the edges in huge linear clusters. Work from home didn’t dampen their demand. It just spread it throughout the day as people shifted their trips to retail instead of the office.

In that county, they just eliminated their fixed route bus system in favor of an on-demand option that quickly became overwhelmed. Neither system worked well, but at least you could plan getting to work and back on a scheduled bus—where they existed. Now everyone has access but no one can use it. Wait times are completely unreliable: 30 minutes can easily turn into multiple hours without warning. They’re even having a problem with people cancelling trips as they’re in-route because they’ve waited too long already. She believed that it would work better if they had on-demand service to connect up with fixed route service—but they’re already out of money in the first place and that would mean buying two different sets of vehicles when they can’t really even afford one.

They fixed the obvious problems, at least for a little while—congestion got better with every completed project and then rapidly got worse. Development roared forward. Because they could make more space in the road, they spread things apart.

It’s like drinking salt water when you’re thirsty. Every drop in only makes the problem worse.

Everything goes faster, so it can be spread farther apart. Spreading things apart guarantees unending roadway congestion and no place to pick everyone up. It’s a vicious cycle that will not get better without structural changes.

I love our governor, but there are realities he just hasn’t understood yet. When the unmet demand would require 22 lanes of roadway, adding two isn’t going to help. The level of thinking that created the problem will not solve it.

In the end, all of this driving makes us far less human. We go faster and connections get harder to make all the time—and stopped in traffic is absolutely the worst place to make a friend.

Eventually, she asked: “So what would you do about it?”

Small disruptions.

We got here by thinking big. We get out of it by thinking small.

• The grocery stores are already doing it: smaller footprints distributed throughout the landscape—get them within a mile of every home and things shift fast if you have the connectivity.

• A ubiquitous bike network that serves up to 15 mph and bans everything above it. (Don’t get me started on the high speed bikes).

• Offices become a place for meetings and collaboration not an everyday affair.

• Transit stops at the grocery stores, not door to door pickup.

• Make it a pain in the neck to develop anything large and super easy to develop any infill or anything small. Small is flexible.

• Judge the value of a property or development on a per-acre basis. This balances out the utility costs with the revenue.

• Require a 40 year development plan for every project—tell me how you are going to keep your financing stable during the refinancing of each 10 year balloon loan. No more disposable projects.

• Fund economic development Fathers (and Mothers) to care for local business districts and generate event plans that keep foot traffic high.

• Require first right of refusal and automatic renewals for existing commercial tenant leases, especially when it’s locally run or operated businesses, even after properties change hands.

• Hold bike rodeo’s at local schools and incorporate bike training into PE curriculum. There’s nothing as self-righteous or influential as a 2nd grader.

• Find charities to fund bike and helmet programs for kids.

• Do trade in’s that exchange racing bikes for cruisers.

• For that matter, just get out and walk your dog.

None of this is going to work quickly. We didn’t get here overnight, and we’re not getting ourselves out of it overnight. Some of the worst struggles come when this starts to succeed and large investors try to scale things or buy up local businesses.

Up Next:

Maybe I’ll do a photo run of fun things I saw on my latest trips through New England. Next week I’ll be in Baltimore, so I’ll probably have some new photos from that too.

“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.’"—Ronald Reagan, August 12, 1986.

I spent the better part of last week in New England—and don’t you dare call it the Northeast. I’m told by the locals that you can tell the difference by who they root for. New Englander’s root for the Red Socks, not the Yankees. (The rest of the country is looking at football, so the distinction may be lost on me a bit.)

My focus was on the state of New Hampshire where I was speaking to the statewide ACEC/NHDOT Technology Transfer Conference. Travelling around New Hampshire feels surreal. The landscapes remind me of the North Carolina mountains, but without the suburbs. Sure, you can find a few WalMart’s along the major highways, but not many. There is plenty of rural, but the towns remain compact and cohesive. In many ways, it lays out like the rural portions of Europe, where compact towns are connected by a fine-grained network of roads. There are streets in town and roads outside of it, and few confusions to cause trouble between them.

There’s a good reason for this.

An Issue of Trust.

The state motto for New Hampshire is “Live free or die.” It’s a hard-earned truth that continues to resonate for them.

New Hampshire had long stretches of history that were unfairly controlled by outside powers—especially the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the New York colony, and the Crown. Land ownership shifted often based on global or regional political whims. That meant that you could clear a plot of land, put a house on it, and try to begin to farm the rocky soil, only to have someone from several hundred miles away claim all of your hard work as theirs.

One of their earliest industries was timber production, but the Crown claimed all of the tall, straight pine trees for ship masts. If a tree got marked with a broad arrow, the land owner couldn’t cut or sell it. Enforcing this led to the 1772 Pine Tree Riots—and centuries of distrust. You can still get shirts for it—one arm reads “God’s will be done.” and the other “Wise Men Company.” The Pine Tree Riots were believed to be the inspiration for the Boston Tea Party.

The Crown wasn’t just taxing output—it was pre-claiming the best natural resources across large areas of New Hampshire. The tallest, straightest white pines—often the most valuable asset a landowner had—were effectively off-limits. The only recourse was to circle the wagons and protect themselves locally. Is it any wonder that they had serious trust issues for anyone above the local level?

There were a few exceptions, but very few. Honest people came up from Boston and created a series of mills in Manchester that treated their people so well, they didn’t need to worry about labor unions for many decades. That external partnership created the largest city in the state—which still only has about 100,000 people. If you don’t trust folks, your circle of friends stays small and your local communities do too. This is still true today. One of the conference attendees mentioned a public hearing where the final decisions were couched in terms of community rivalries that date back to a single football game that happened 50 years ago.

Uncle Sam and Ike Need You!

So, when it came time for Eisenhower and the Feds to offer $9 for every dollar that local agencies spend on a federal interstate system, the rest of the country took the money. There were squabbles about where the interstates should go, especially in some big cities, but the rollout was large scale and fast for such a huge project.

But not in New Hampshire.

Tip O’Neill was probably thinking of New Hampshire when he said, “All politics are local.” NHDOT has 6 districts, and they all run independently. Decision-making in NH happens at a community level. That means if you’re going to do anything, there is no large-scale political body that will do the job. You’re going to have to get everyone—and I mean everyone—on board. That takes time.

The first 16-mile segment got built quickly, but that was a coastline connector that reinforced existing transportation patterns. As they started pushing in towards the center of the state, progress slowed dramatically. By the time they get past Manchester and heading towards Concord, sections get built as local concerns are addressed, but it’s slow-walked. The Franconia Notch project drug out well into the 1980’s. Ultimately, they stretched the implementation across nearly 50 years for a bare-bones system.

Two Roads Diverged in a Wood…

In other states, the entire community structure reorganized itself around this faster mode. Distance collapses. Trips that would have taken half a day now take an hour. Regions become markets. Movement concentrates into a few high-speed corridors and everything else reorganizes around the speed that is now possible.

• Retail scales up

• Development spreads out

• Local streets become feeders to something bigger

It’s efficient, but it also does something subtle. It disconnects people. You make housing choices based on what’s inside and in the back yard, not the community around you. You go to stores that are too large and too far away to care about what you need or make any relationships with the people who provide the stuff of your life. Your social connections become intentional choices to hang around those like you rather than serendipitous meetings of people that are wildly different. Our tolerance for each other erodes. Along the way, you’re alone. When you arrive, you’re lost in a crowd.

The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 didn’t require every state to internalize the same development pattern, but once the system existed, the incentives were overwhelming: speed, scale, and aggregation won over connection and community cohesiveness.

The result is not chaos. It is a highly ordered system that does exactly what it was designed to do: get people places fast. But if you’re getting somewhere fast, everything along the way becomes a blur. The trip becomes an abstraction—origin, corridor, destination—with very little in between that demands attention. Locations only matter if they are directly connected to that system. People only matter if you choose to let them in. You teeter between isolation and overwhelm.

The Road Less Taken

Spend time in parts of New Hampshire, and you can begin to see what might have happened if the national pattern had unfolded differently. The abstraction starts to break down—not everywhere, and not completely, but the fabric of the whole feels different. The interstate system exists there too, and its influence is real, but it serves the towns rather than dominating and restructuring them. The network never fully collapsed into a single dominant corridor. Instead, movement distributes across a finer-grained web of routes, and those routes remain embedded within the towns themselves.

You still need a car—maybe more than we do in our suburbs, but probably not as often. Many of the people live outside of the town, but unlike the rest of middle-America, you have a town to center around. You get Goldilocks levels of attention and relationships: face to face town scale and neighbors you recognize, even if you don’t know them all. I was genuinely surprised at how often I’d stumble across a pre-teen on their bicycle on a roller-coaster road with no sidewalks.

This can get insulated and stultifying. I’ve lived in cliquish rural communities. It’s not all sweetness and light. There are high barriers to trust, but the interactions that build trust are built into the daily fabric of life—a tip of the hat here, a chance meeting in a grocery store aisle, meeting each other’s kids at a tee-ball game. Retail consists of mom and pop stores or small chains tailored to meet the needs of their own community. The scale remains small both dimensionally and relationally, so you’re not ping-ponging between isolation and overwhelm.

The terrain helps—and may very well create the type of trust issues that kept New Hampshire from becoming the same type of place as the rest of the country. Mountains lend themselves to cultures of honor where self-defense is a DIY affair and egos can run amok, but New England Puritan sensibilities keep the arrogance and bravado in check.

Can we get back to something like this?

Maybe.

The bar for what we deem a success is low here. We’ll put up with a lot before we want to make it better. For Americans, perfection is not a state to be attained. For us, it means death and finality. If it’s perfect, it can no longer grow or change—but we are perfectly happy if something just works and keeps working. That means Amazon and WalMart can provide functional access to goods that can always beat local networks on price because it’s “good enough.”

Working against this trend is our own national independence streak—an attitude that feels remarkably similar to the self-reliant posture that reigns in New Hampshire. We don’t like being boxed in. As systems begin to enforce control, they lose their market. Look at what happened this month with Claude. The government throws its weight around and the backlash is immediate—best advertising for Claude they ever got. We’re more like a frog in a kettle with corporations, but we will jump out on that one too.

The era we’re in fits the small scale, distributed model far better than the large scale systems we’ve created in the last century. Distributed networks use systems as support but aren’t controlled by them. Alignment is unforced and wildly creative. Genuine human interaction can’t be replicated by a computer and therefore becomes the rarest and most valuable of commodities—worth spending extra money on.

There’s 80 years of inertia on the big scale, suburban model, but it’s changing fast and we’re not far from the tipping point—if we haven’t passed it already. I’m seeing titles like, “Boomers, Millennials don’t want your 3,500 square foot McMansions.” Walkable communities have a huge price premium. Retail is scaling down in size and distributing throughout the landscape.

Roadway network is harder to transform, but the economics are in our favor. It’s a heck of a lot cheaper to provide snippets of connectivity that create a network than to buy up a bunch of property along an existing roadway—and better for the long term health of the community. Politically, it’s still a hard-sell, but we really can’t afford that much roadway construction anyway. The better we get at keeping things closer to home, the less we need to deal with congestion. People who walk and bike are healthier, happier, and live longer. They find social networks that give them a reason to live.

If you want to see a better world—one more like the world we could have had—live local has to become the theme of our work going forward:

• Improving connectivity

• Scaling down

• Connecting face to face

• Choosing a purchase in person over digital convenience

Can we do this? I don’t know that the old way will continue to work, so we’re going to have to figure it out. I’m seeing it change all the time.

Up Next:

I’ve got two directions to look—and one of them may get covered over on JesusGeeks. I’ve been toying with an archetype sequence of 7 for the last few years and it’s been amazing to see how well that fits within the 7 states within New England. It may be a great case study to begin to think about why some things work in some places and fall flat in others. We all say that we want communities to walk out their own authentic identity, but it’s hard to help them do that if you don’t understand the core of that identity. I’ll probably cover that set of ideas in both places.

I also just got back from watching our first batch of eye-tracking videos for a research project at UConn—and it’s been wild to see how our eyes navigate the world around us.

For that matter, I may just post the video from the NH Keynote—There’s a lot of travel coming up.

We’ll see. There’s never a shortage of something to talk about.

While I’m at it, I’d love to hear what you would like me to discuss. I’m always open to suggestions.

If I blindfolded you and placed you in a car, the engine noise might give you a hint, but as long as I kept the same speed, you would have no idea how fast we were going.

We can kinda feel acceleration—it feels like a force on your body—but even that we don’t feel well. As long as the acceleration was consistent, we would feel a force, but after a few seconds, you would begin to ignore that too. That’s why you feel the first second or two on a long elevator ride but not much more.

What we feel is jerk—the change in the change in speed. Mathematically, we call that the second derivative. Folks who design simulator rides use that to their advantage to trick your brain into thinking you’re doing wild, crazy things.

So what do we use?

One tool our minds use is called motion parallax. When you drive down a road, the things that are closer to the vehicle feel like they’re moving faster than the things far away. It works best when there are things close to the vehicle and you’re going pretty fast.

You would think that would be all you need, but believe it or not, it only has a small impact on how you drive. Don’t believe me? Then why do people go over 50 mph on this beauty?

The reason has to do with how salient—mentally important—each of those trees are. In this case, the block length is well over a mile and there are few conflicts at the ends of these blocks. The trees go by fast, but that only feels exhilarating, not risky. As much as we worry about clear zone, there are also remarkably few crashes on this corridor and last I checked, no fatalities. It’s not forgiving, but drivers know that and act accordingly.

What changes our speed is the interaction we anticipate—and that is a dopamine issue.

Dopamine and memory.

Have you ever tried a dopamine fast? It’s excruciating, but everything feels more alive afterwards. The wild thing about a dopamine fast is that you remember almost nothing from that time. Memory requires dopamine.

Have you ever driven somewhere and had no memory of the drive? That’s why. Every risk, every conflict, every interaction—good or bad—pulls on dopamine. It’s as if your brain is saying, “You win or you learn—and that’s a win too.” Even the negative reinforcement that comes with a bad outcome gets you a bit of dopamine so you can encode the memory.

Memory works in segments

Jeffery Zacks is one of the world’s foremost experts in what’s called, “event segmentation theory.” What he found is that memories are stored in segments. We don’t experience memory as a stream of time. We experience it in short bursts that contain critical moments.

Your brain naturally parses activity into discrete events. The boundaries of these events occur when your brain encounters a prediction error—and your brain hates being wrong because then it has to update its mental model. That takes work and brains are notoriously lazy. They’re also stimulus hungry, so there’s a bit of a push-pull effect going on here.

For his book, Flicker, Jeffery Zacks interviewed film makers and timed out how fast camera angles and scenes changed. Every camera angle, scene change, or plot twist requires your brain to update its model. You can feel this in the pacing in the movie:

• Fast-paced scenes → ~3–5 seconds between meaningful updates

• Moderate pacing → ~5–8 seconds

• Slower, dramatic scenes → can stretch to ~8–12 seconds (but risk disengagement if nothing changes cognitively)

It’s not how fast we move, it’s how often things change

We define speed as distance over time, but what if we thought of speed as the inverse of frequency:

That’s actually how your brain feels speed. It’s not the distance you cover, it’s the pattern of interactions you experience.

So let’s think about this in terms of driving in a downtown neighborhood or a commercial street. Every block end that gets used regularly provides a scene change—that’s a given. Doorways are potential scene changes. Conflicts or risks are scene changes to your brain. Each of these requires you to reengage. What if we think of our brains as looking for a goldilocks level of reengagement: somewhere between 3 and 8 seconds. If we calculate that in terms of speed and how far apart the changes happen, this is what we get:

Get into the pink and you’re approaching overwhelm. Get into the blue and your drivers will disengage. You’re looking to keep things between 5-8 seconds. For instance:

• Place your speed bumps 100-150 feet apart in a parking lot and your drivers will be comfortable at 15 mph between them. That means you’re probably wasting them if you put them at the end of every drive aisle (60 feet)—and you’re irritating your driver to boot.

• On the other hand, if you’ve closed off a block for an access management scheme and you block length is now 1,200 feet long, you may be looking at speeds that are pretty darn high—or drivers that are checked out and texting.

This probably explains a lot of why things like block length and doorway density had such a large impact on the speed drivers select.

We’ll be testing this (I hope) over the next few weeks. I’ll let you know what comes up.

Up Next:

Next week, I’ll be in New Hampshire at the ACEC Technical Exchange Conference, then doing some data reduction at UConn. If you’re in New Hampshire or Connecticut, let me know and we may be able to connect up.

My husband has gotten on a walking kick. He has a mile and a half loop around our house that he frequents several times a day now. It sports a brick street with cute 50’s bungalows, a view of the lake, two mini libraries, a linear park, and occasionally a rabbit or two if we get out early enough. A local Osprey flies over head with a fish every few days and the hawks that live in the creek valley yell at it like mad. The woodpecker even seems to take his mornings pretty easily, perched atop a tree rather than pecking away.

I’ve tried to talk him into other routes, but he likes his world predictable—which means I get to watch subtle things change over time. The freeze earlier this year spared one stand of bamboo and killed another. There are a few benches, but not many—a bench in the right place is a delight. There are a few e-bikes, but not many and they’re tolerably well behaved.

We recognize the folks that are out about the same time, though subtle timing changes keep those connections hit or miss. This morning we saw that we had missed one pair we regularly see by a few moments. Rather than walking towards us, we were behind them today—and they never looked back.

It got me thinking about he way our vision works.

Why don’t we have eyes in the back of our heads?

When my oldest was little, I told him I had eyes in the back of my head—and I know he checked multiple times. Moms keep their heads on a swivel because they have to.

In most of the West, this day is set aside to remember a sacrifice so horrifying and amazing it boggles the mind. He who had everything gave it all up for those that were His enemies in the most excruciating way possible.

We keep tabs on what is behind us, both in the moment and metaphorically. When we enter a room or a space, we create a 3D model of that space on which to hang all of our memories. We often scan the area at first and then remember where the people are in that room or road because they’re important to our brains. Close your eyes right now. Who is in the room with you? Where are they? Who was the last person in the room with you and where were they? All of those things are readily available to your memory. Even the dog sleeping next to me is accounted for (and she’s not as grumpy as she looks).

We remember the parts of our past that had impact or meaning—moments flooded with dopamine or adrenaline—yet the seasons of our lives when there is no joy fade into the background. That makes me wonder about what people with Parkinson’s remember once their dopamine systems begin to collapse.

Yet, we are not designed to look behind us.

Our eyes face forward.

We see within about a 20 degree cone around our focal point, but even there, we don’t see very far. It is fascinating to me that we can understand emotions out to about a hundred feet, but not much farther.

It’s a hint.

In our lives, we can make big plans and toy with big ideas far ahead of us, but relationships—the things that ultimately matter to us—can only be built up close. There are pivotal moments in our lives and in those moments when we dream big dreams, but those dreams are cloudy at best. Few parents plan for their newborn to be prom queen or football star—although some do. We learn who they are as we come to know them as people. And over time, the change.

Some of the best marriage advice I’ve heard in the last 40 years is to recognize that you have not married one person—they are ultimately many women and men with an eternal spirit. They will change dramatically over time. Your job is to recognize and celebrate those changes as they come. You cannot serve the person they were or the person they will be. You can only rejoice in who they are right now.

It’s also critical to understand that when you’re moving fast, your focus will always be very far ahead of you, which means you’ll miss seeing the people that you are passing by. Unless you keep them close and they’re moving with you at the same speed, You’ll quickly pass them by.

Does that mean we don’t plan ahead or make goals? Heavens, no! If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Plans are nothing; planning is everything. We hold those plans loosely knowing that the days are long and the years are far shorter than we could have ever imagined.

I talk a lot about driving in this blog, but we rarely think of driving as it is:

We don’t understand our drive as a route, we feel it as a series of flows and interruptions—and we rarely remember much of what has gone before this moment. Speed isn’t just a velocity, its the frequency at which the world goes by. We can’t see the entire length of our drive, only this moment.

We are actually incapable of feeling speed, and we rarely feel the change in speed either. What we notice is the change in the change in our speed—the 2nd derivative—also known as jerk. Seems like as we’re moving through life, jerks are about all we notice there too.

The High Speed Backwards Chase

Florida Man is funny. Last week someone got stopped for driving backwards on a 4-lane roadway. He claimed it was stuck in reverse and was driving to get it fixed, but was also driving on a suspended license.

How many of us feel like our lives are broken and all we can see is behind us? It’s hard to let go of the past when it feels unresolved. Our brains are prediction engines—and they hate to be wrong. When you’re focused on the past, your brain will only expect that past to repeat itself—and your brain will make sure it does, even if it hurts you to do so.

Days to remember, Lives to live forward

On this Good Friday, it’s proper to think of the past. During the Last Supper, Jesus told us to take moments to remember. He also chose to walk that path for the joy set before him—looking forward to what that sacrifice would buy for Him and for us. Yet,

He lived in moments:

• showing us how to let go of the past so that it doesn’t imprison us there.

• showing others how not to worry about tomorrow—for tomorrow has enough trouble of its own

We can choose to fully embody the present moment as well.

We’ve had at least 3 generations of whack-a-mole: technical experts see specific problems and provide solutions for those problems. Then they wonder why the whole doesn’t hold together.

Transportation is a great example of how this goes wrong and I want to apologize to my kids for the world they inherited. We’re trying to put it back together as fast as we can.

The 1st problem was literally horse sh!t.

At the turn of the century New York City was drowning in it—100,000 horses generating 15-30 pounds daily. The opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883 irreversibly exploded the vehicle volume and distance that people regularly traveled. The first international planning conference in 1898 ended early because they couldn’t find a solution to the issue. All of the titans of industry lived and worked in the City and their problems became their target for making money.

The replacement needed to be compact and non-biological. Others invented the automobile. Ford’s assembly line made it scalable. Firestone, Edison, and Ford (who were close friends and had neighboring houses in Fort Meyers, Florida) got rid of the manure. The Rockefellers had a waste by-product from their lamp oil that could run the machine. This made long distance travel normal, while making a ton of money for all 4.

Safety whack-a-mole

Over the next 50 years, there was a repeatable cycle:

• improve the machine,

• expand its use,

• find a new safety problem,

• fix the problem:

Long distance travel had been normal for rural communities in the past, but trips to town were fairly infrequent. The car meant you could go basically every day, which meant that speed began to matter. Faster cars meant trouble.

• 1902 Connecticut passed the first speed limits: 12 mph city, 15 mph country

• 1916 Federal Highways program—paving roads, creating standards

• 1921 Dusenberg Model A: Brakes!! (hydraulic brakes, specifically)

• 1926 Standardized 16 as the minimum driving age in most states

• 1927 Ford Model A: Laminated safety glass

• 1935 MUTCD standardizes signs so they can be recognized quickly

In the 1930’s and 40’s, human factors became a part of roadway and vehicle design processes.

• 1935 Driver’s licenses required in 39 states

• 1944 Interstate system recommended

• 1949 First crash test dummy: Sierra Sam

• Ball Bank Indicators used to set advisory speed limits on curves

The social upheaval in the 1960’s and 1970’s got knee jerk reactions in the form of laws and regulations:

• 1967 Seatbelts and clear zones

• 1972 National speed limit and artists scream: “I can’t drive 55”

• 1979 National crash reporting standards and database

• 1980’s/90’s—mandatory seat belt laws

All of this looks like solid improvements. So why am I apologizing?

Higher, Further, Faster, Baby…

Here’s the problem with engineers: we will solve the problem you put in front of us. During the 20th century, the problem we were given was quite limited in scope:

We have to show up at public hearings. We hear people complain about congestion and cut-through. Short political cycles mean mayors and council officials screaming “fix it and fix it fast!”

You can do it right, do it cheap, or do it fast. At most you can achieve two out of three. Guess which two gets prioritized. Each individual decision seems right and proper. Every one of them creates its own horse-manure scale problem:

• In the 1940’s cut-through was a problem, so we created subdivisions, cul-de-sac’s, and walls.

• The easiest solution to congestion is widening—and the walls mean there aren’t many options.

• People will spill out onto the roads if you don’t have enough parking, so minimums should be a part of the code.

• Driving is no longer an option—you can’t survive without it. All those roads need to be maintained via tax dollars.

• No one walks so they’re fat and stressed. Because we have no incidental relationships, silo relationships multiple and echo chambers abound. We feel disconnected and lonely.

The Higher, Faster, Farther paradigm ramps up the scale and separates people from each other, all while it lowers property values and increases government cost.

This is a symptom of a much larger issue: making choices that band-aid pain rather than create win-win’s. Those individual choices look great, but create problems at scale. We see this all over:

• Distribution chains mean anti-trust laws are outdated and shouldn’t be enforced—thus killing the local grocery.

• The American Dream: Your own home with a white picket fence and no noisy neighbors—large lots take up space.

• Kids can get kidnapped so we have to drive them to school—eliminating the opportunity for them to grow and creating new traffic jams.

• Amazon is easier than a local store—which means you can’t actually go to a store and get stuff because they’re all gone.

• Phone apps make your life easier while they track everything you do and replace human options to do the same things. Eventually there are no other ways.

• AI is easier than actually writing—Disclaimer: I only use AI for looking up stuff, not writing. All of those beautiful em dashes are mine and mine alone.

You don’t know what you don’t know.

None of us intended any of this. Many of these choices feel harmless on their own—like skipping the gym—eventually you don’t go at all and your body falls apart (I know…I quit preaching and went to meddling). Some of these are too far gone to get back, but not all of them.

When you get the perspective right, the solutions become obvious, even if they aren’t easy.

The Amish were able to see this coming and walked away before the damage was done. We see them as backwards. They’re healthy and reasonably happy because they retain connected communities that genuinely care about each other. Suicides and ADHD are rare in their teens while it’s nearly epidemic in the general population. Part of the reason is that they view every technology from the lens of how it either creates or erodes community connection.

I’m not arguing that we all go back to horse and buggy—that’s what got this negative cycle started and NYC wouldn’t survive!! I’m not even sure we should completely give up our cars. The question is less whether it’s a good tool and more of whether it makes a good master. When we make default assumptions about what is available, what we assume becomes a requirement.

Even a Live Local strategy would help. The market is already making that shift. All we need to do is keep out of its way—allow smaller footprints, fewer parking spaces, infill, accessory dwelling units, accessory commercial units—every one of these makes a huge difference.

Up Next:

Ok, I will actually work on video editing next week so I can get you the 4th of the mental frameworks. I figure if I can get them done at least once a month, it’s a good start.

"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough”—Albert Einstein.

I have a confession to make.

I hate roadway design manuals. I hate the MUTCD. I hate the Greenbook. For that matter, I don’t love the context classification manual for FDOT. I understand their necessity, but they’re overwhelming. Check this. Measure that. If this, then go look up factor x in table 10-2—-AARRRRGGGHHHH!!!

My hat is off to designers who have to navigate this maze day-in and day-out. I just want to scream:

I know that might be naive. I understand the push to multiply rules better than most. There’s a reason why you often need a license to do this kind of work—we kill people without realizing it all the time. When you look at each situation and ask what should you do, the right answer is often, “It depends,”—and the mindsets entrenched in a PE’s training will often point their focus on the wrong things.

Decisions and memory

One of the least understood psychological issues is the problem of memory and decision fatigue. Give people 3 choices and they can make up their mind. Give them 4 and they’ll walk away from making the decision.

This has a lot to do with something called digit span: it’s the amount of things you can keep in your short term memory at any one time. We used to think a typical digit span for an adult was about 7—but that was when we needed to remember 7-digit phone numbers regularly, and it was easy to forget that there was a bunch of chunking going on. You’re weren’t remembering 4656732; you were remembering 465-67-32: three chunks.

In a decision, you’re not just looking at three options—you’re also looking at three comparisons between the options. That’s 6 things to keep in your memory, and then you’ll need to store the decision itself—that’s 7. You’re done. That’s all you can hold onto mentally.

With 4 options, that’s 6 unique comparisons between them, plus the decision (4+6+1), so we’re up to 11 things to hold in your mind: too much. At 5 options, you’ve got 10 comparisons, which means 16 things to hold onto in your head—where’s the aspirin?

Can you see why design manuals make me crazy? That’s a lot of decisions to fall through the cracks.

Yes, it gets systemized. There's a process. You don’t have to do everything at once, but all of these steps mean there are a lot of places where this can go wrong. You’re not thinking in terms of why each table exists—that’s nearly invisible to the designer. You’re thinking about the next step in the process without thinking about the dynamics that generated that step.

What’s worse is that AI can and will do that far faster than you ever could. Even if it follows all of the steps correctly, there is still some massive judgement issues that will fall through the cracks—and an AI hallucination on a design project can become very costly. Design engineers risk becoming completely obsolete and the machine will not do any better a job than you did.

Clarity can make a huge difference.

Talking past each other.

At nearly every conference I go to that looks at urban design, there’s always a gripe session about how engineers always muck everything up. The good ones try to find ways for the two professions to work together, but the friction is real. An urban designer looks at the system very differently than a roadway engineer. Their goals are not the same, so their choices are nearly opposite from each other.

These are two very different strategic approaches. When you truly get the contrast, it’s easy to see why they don’t speak the same language.

One of the ways that planners have tried to bridge the gap is the movement and place framework. Engineers think about how much movement is desired. Urban designers think about how significant the place is. They are not the same ideas, but they’re related. If you think about movement on a scale from link (lots of movement) to node (lots of access), that creates one continuum. The other continuum runs from a “place” where things happen to a “corridor” where human activity gets washed away by the flood of movement or the lack of destinations. One of my mentors called the spaces between subdivision walls the “tube” and told me that it was the most non-place environment there is. Things work well in quadrants I and III and really mess up in quadrants II and IV.

In order to manage these two concepts simultaneously, the brilliant folks in New Zealand came up with the movement and place framework. There are five levels for each, which creates a 5x5 matrix—25 cells. When the numbers contrast, things work pretty well. When they match, things get messy.

They’ve had the good sense to grey out most of P-5. The lower section is where stroads normally sit, but problems tend to amplify where M1 and P1 meet too. In their vernacular, those are the crazymaking transit hubs where buses and trains and cars all try to connect together. For us, those are the 6-lane highways where people are trying to get to a grocery store or cross the road to get to the right transit stop.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

The biggest takeaway I found in my driver behavior research is that there are really only two types of mental states in driving. You are either interpersonally interacting or mechanically manipulating. At most, there might be a third: disengaged periodic scanning, but I try not to think about that. The drivers aren’t thinking about their driving much there either, and despite the theoretical risks, those places have outstanding safety records. When it goes bad, it really goes bad, but that rarely happens.

So we have—at most—three mental states to work with and 25 options for design. That beats the infinite number of combinations in traditional design manuals, but not by much. Can you see why designers can’t think on their feet?

That’s 25 options + 300 potential comparisons + one final decision = 326 things to keep in the designer’s mind to manage only three head spaces. Way beyond too much! Even if you drop that down to a 2x2 area in the diagram, you’re still probably looking at 4 potential options for each place (11 things to keep in mind), which is still way too much.

Calgon take me away!!! (if that’s before your time, look it up on YouTube—You’re welcome.)

The real problem is that if you aren’t sure what you’re dealing with, neither are your drivers.

What if we dropped the nuance?

That’s what a buddy of mine, Steven Florko, just pulled off—and it’s stunningly beautiful. He’s been reading my work since the beginning and I get a message from him nearly every week as he’s working through the ideas. He gave me permission to share it with you all because the idea is critical—but if you want to use it, he’s your guy.

What if we drop the movement and place framework from 5 layers on each dimension to just 3.

If our minds and bodies only work in those three buckets (and they may only really work in two), then it makes sense to create only those three types of environments so that each user (and designer) knows which one to use.

Florko calls it Movement and Place Lite.

He frames it in terms of responsibility: What do we hold the street design accountable to accomplish? What are its goals?

For movement, the three levels encompass the rough equivalent of arterials, collectors, and local streets, but the nuance is focused on the bottom side of the scale rather than the top. In Florida, we would probably put both the arterials and collectors in M1, and local streets would get split into M2 and M3. The split point is key because the operating speeds are very different. M3 should naturally stay well below 20 mph. M2 will usually hover between 22 and 35 for 85th percentile—which means a posting of no more than 30 mph, and might require some pressure to keep it there. M1 is a lost cause and should be treated that way. These are the breakpoints for when drivers can successfully interact with the folks on the side of the road, and they are a result of the mental state that drivers have chosen.

For place, the categories are dictated by the form—which is basically all that the drivers see anyway. The way that the buildings address the street—and the scale they do it at is what will decide how fast drivers go and how much they engage.

These two are not independent of each other—or at least they shouldn’t be. Life happens, but when the numbers match things go haywire and nothing works. All 9 cells exist in the matrix, but over time, they should collapse to just the three on the diagonal from top left to bottom right.

Is this tight enough a framework?

I’m not sure. I suspect we could probably collapse this down to a 4-cell matrix. As Steven and I have been talking about it, the real breakpoint in place is dimensional. A P1 that is huge can be a nightmare. Here’s the example he gave me and it’s spot on:

On the other hand, a P2 that is tight can be really slow and place-supporting, like this:

The political advantage:

Have you ever tried to explain some design nuance to a politician within the 3 minute limits used for a public hearing? Even if you had an infinite amount of time, they don’t have the mental bandwidth to stick with you. Collapsing the potential options gives them something they can wrap their heads around and explain to their people. More importantly, it forces them to prioritize their goals. If we can clearly communicate that a facility can be a road or a street but not both, then we’ll get roads and streets that work better and don’t kill people as often.

And that’s a real win.

Up Next:

Not sure!! I have the video largely recorded for the next mental framework, but we’ll have to see if there is time to get that edited for you all. We may work on refining this model down even farther. We’ll see!

You get what you expect to get—whether that is a fear or a fortune.

For the first few years of my career, I did traffic impact studies. When a developer wanted to build something new, an engineer would need to forecast what traffic the project would generate and how that would impact the system. It was the principle of:

Any future failures would need to be remediated by the developer.

Unfortunately, this was never a Current + Project = Future effort. We were required to assume a background growth rate. That meant we needed to look at the historical volumes on every road around the project to identify how fast they were growing and then grow the current volume into the future before we added in the traffic from the project. On the surface, that seems like a reasonable way to make sure you never have problems in your roadway network. (Watch me put my Dr. Phil hat back on:)

How’s that working for you?

Let me give you a silly example of why that doesn’t work:

The Weatherman

So why is the weatherman so freaked out? The growth rate is only 5 percent per hour!

Few systems maintain trends indefinitely—even a trend as stable as this one. What goes up, must come down. Capacity constrains systems, and they eventually come into equilibrium.

It didn’t matter how often I argued the point, the pushback was always the same: A capacity constraint means that we aren’t satisfying the latent demand. What they were implying is that communities would be leaving money on the table—because movement equals economic prosperity. They could force the developer to pay or build the roadway they needed and it felt like a win for the citizens.

Now, most of my readers are going to think I’m going to talk about induced demand, so I’ll let you insert your best argument mentally here. Take a moment to enjoy how beautifully that argument is crafted in your own mind. You’re welcome!

I’m going to go somewhere else with this today.

The consequences

Here’s the thing: our minds (and our bureaucratic systems) are prediction engines. We will literally reshape reality to blow up in our faces rather than be wrong.

• We fear that we will run out of roadway capacity—because that’s the one consequence the local agency can’t remediate on their own.

• So we test to see if that is going to happen, assuming the worst case—and that confirms our worst fears.

• So we demand that the developer build new lanes to create new capacity to meet that demand. And we demand a huge parking lot to store all the cars we expect to see on their worst day.

• Those roadways and parking lots are now too wide to cross on foot…

• Which amplifies the roadway demand even farther.

• Eventually, widening consumes the local businesses themselves—trading out high-value local businesses with low value national chains.

• Each widening adds less capacity than the last—the time through the intersections limits how much capacity can get through. All the space in the world won’t get you the capacity you want when you have to wait at lights.

So that explains why the traffic is so bad, but that’s not the worst of the consequences.

Throwing good money after bad

The WalMart or Target has a catchment area about 6 miles in radius, while the grocery only serves about 1.5 miles around it—that’s an area of 113 square miles for the bigger store in comparison to 7 square miles for the grocery. That sounds like the bigger store is of more benefit to the community—more people get served. That’s the way that rural communities see the economics, because their roadway systems are still sparse, for the moment. Around here, things don’t stay that way.

By the time the roadway network all fills in, it takes at least 16 times the roads to serve the bigger store.

But what about frequency? A big WalMart trip doesn’t happen as often as a local grocery pop-in, so that looks like the economy of scale is working for us too.

But maybe not.

You could do 4 weekly grocery trips and drive the same number of miles as one WalMart trip. Every mile traveled isn’t just congestion. It’s wear and tear, and every inch of those roads has to be maintained by the community.

Hmm…this isn’t working quite like we thought. That’s ok, right, because the bigger property gets more taxes?

Well, yes and no.

A 250,000 square foot WalMart or Target has a little over twice as much value as a 90,000 square foot grocery. Sixteen times the roadway miles and maintenance costs. Only double the revenue. That’s a guaranteed red balance sheet.

This happens all across the community in nearly every type of land use. When we look at the taxes, property values increase with size, but not nearly as fast as obligations. Bigger is not better. Four quarter acre home lots will get more tax value than one 1-acre lot—with very few exceptions. Four quarter acre duplexes will get you even more. Which one costs the local government more to serve? From a roadway standpoint there is no comparison. The quantities end up working out about the same as the retail example. In terms of other utilities, the mismatch isn’t quite as stark, but it’s still not good.

Communities realize too late that they have bitten off far more than they can chew. The bankruptcy of Detroit was not an outlier. It was a harbinger. (Strong Towns has just created a Finance Decoder that can find these problems before they become unfixable.)

Increasing maintenance costs mean some projects get put off and that lowers the value of the properties even more. Once the community realizes the problem, they can’t afford to raise taxes to cover the shortfall. That will drive people away and drop property values—which will not help their bottom line.

And here is where an unlikely disruptor can shift the economics.

Enter the Lowly Bicycle.

Walkable, bikable communities get a huge property value bonus for at least a half mile around each functional trail system…

But wait! There’s more!

If you lean in and try to make walking and biking work as a functional part of the transportation system, the feedback loops reverse.

To make walking or biking work, you need to have places to go within biking range of your homes. That means you allow local neighborhood retail to scatter throughout the residential areas. The smaller footprints mean smaller catchment areas that keep trips close to home. This drop in scale also helps local stores compete with delivery services (like Amazon) based on relationships rather than volume or price. You start building accidental communities and third places where neighbors build acquaintance level relationships—and it’s those out-of-the-house relationships that create resiliency in crisis, improve health outcomes, and decimate loneliness.

These smaller shops don’t need as much parking, so it’s a lot easier to get to them—they takes up less space—making it even easier to bike to. Even if those trips don’t shift to biking, they’re a lot shorter.

The freight vehicles you need to serve them are smaller, which means less damage to the pavement—another win.

The change in lifestyle means developers are attracted to build even more in the area—and new development has a lot higher property value than old development. All the orphan parcels that were too big for a house but too small for much else turn into the most valuable parcels in the area.

Is it really that simple?

This is not pie in the sky. This is a proven model that builds real economic value for both the community and the people who live and develop within it. I’ve seen it happen here, where I live. My home is double the value it was when we bought it—about the time that our downtown bike-mecca streetscape finished. Property values in the region have grown, but not nearly as much as ours.

The 22 mile Atlanta Beltline Loop is blowing up value everywhere it touches. Horizon West, between where I live and the Magic Mouse, has not done a good job on keeping the land use mix resolution it was designed to have, but the fact that everything is connected up with bike trails means that people use them anyway—even when it’s not ideal, it still works.

Ironically it was Henry Ford who said:

If you believe you can create a place where people interact face to face, you will make choices that bring that future into your present.

Up Next:

So it looks like it’s going to take me longer than I like to do video. I’m not quitting, but that series will just have to come out monthly or so until I get better at this. As you can see, I’m putting audio on these—and will try to make audio (good, bad, or ugly) for each one. Hopefully, that will feed into an audio-only podcast at least.

The next few months are going to get very busy—so I may do short updates here and there instead of longer posts, or at least I’m going to try.

If you’re in New Hampshire, I’ll be speaking in April at the ACEC NH/NHDOT Technical Transfer Conference. And it looks like I will be making it to CNU-34 in Arkansas in May. I’ll take suggestions on which venue to pick!!

Transcript:

Have you ever felt invisible as a pedestrian?

I started a study. We drove an area and we recorded that area, and then after we  recorded the area and the different speeds, we tried to mark every single pedestrian that was there. There was one section of the drive that we looked through four times before we saw the pedestrians on the side of the road.

Why is that? What is it about the driving task that makes us so blind to the people around us? Do we stop being people when we’re driving?  It has a lot to do with our ability to see and how far we’re capable of seeing other people, specifically other people’s faces.

You can see most facial expressions, almost every single one of them, with great clarity out to about 90 feet. You can see extreme expressions out to about 135 feet.

Your eyes actually have a very small spot right in the middle that has super, super amazing resolution.  That area right around your focal point can see the difference between a millimeter at 90 feet. And that’s the way your eyes have always worked.  You don’t even see more than black and white outside of about 10 to 15 degrees, but you remember what those colors are, and so you imagine those colors. What you’re capable of seeing as a human being is very important in terms of the way you behave. 

The things that you can readily see and recognize as threats or treats, those things get really high priority in your mind, and the fact that you can focus on them and see them very clearly, all the way out to 90 feet, it means that what’s within that 90 feet is really important to your brain.

What’s outside of it loses its significance because the things that are outside of that distance are not likely to give you any kind of social feedback. They’re not likely to be close enough in proximity to physically hurt you, and they’re also not likely to be close enough to you to give you anything of real value.

You’ve lost all your social connection past that distance. You’ve lost all your physical threat past that distance, and you’ve lost all the benefits too. So let’s see what that looks like when we put it in a plan view.

So what can you see?

Now, here’s the thing. As a driver, I see directly in front of me. I can move my head a little bit, but I don’t know about you. As you get older, that doesn’t happen as much, and it turns out you really didn’t need to. Your eyes do an awful lot of that work on their own. But when you’re looking forward, your eyes really only work about  20 degrees from center. At 16 degrees you can’t tell the difference between a clock face and a human face. Which means as a driver, you quit looking any farther out than about 20 degrees.

Now, if you’re turning the corner, you know, if you’ve got things that you have to look at, you do that. For the most part, particularly when you’re driving down a straight section of roadway, you’re pretty much looking straight ahead and at a 20 degree angle around you.  

When you throw that onto a planned view, that 20 degrees and the 90 feet that you can see basically everything. You get a corridor that’s about 60 feet wide.

Now that number pops up in a lot of places around the world. In most of the oldest cities.   In the oldest parts of the world, the busiest biggest road they have is often 60 feet wide from building face to building face. If there are parade routes, they get a little bigger, but for the most part, that 60 feet dimension pops up everywhere and it has a lot to do with your ability to feel comfortable in that space.

So if that area is only 60 feet wide and you’re walking down the center of it, you can unconsciously monitor everything that’s going on around you without having to actually lay your eyes on the things that are happening there. You know who’s there. You know what’s going on, and if there’s any threats or any friends treats, you know that you can see them out of the corner of your eye, and you don’t actually have to focus on them to pay attention to it. 

The problem is when you get to corridors that are wider than that. You can’t do that unconsciously anymore. You have to actually turn your head and turn your eyes and scan to see all of the things around you. That means you’re keeping your head on a swivel and it’s a very uncomfortable feeling. 

Architects will often talk about as space that is really large as feeling open and exposed.   Now when you’re driving what you’re looking for, the targets that you’re trying to focus on are big rectangular boxes. And so they can be a long way away ‘cause they’re huge and you’ll still see them, they’ll still be within your 20 degree cone of vision. They’ll still be something that you can actually see because they’re large enough to pay attention to.  

But people are very small in comparison to those big boxes.   So you get into those big environments like I just showed you and people are dwarfed by that environment and you don’t pay attention to them. 

This is the third of the mental frameworks. The first one was that nearly everything that you do is automatic. The second one is that people get priority. You’re gonna see people faster and easier than anything else if you’re capable of seeing them. And that’s the third one. Capability. Your perception has limits.

You can only see so much so far. If it’s a big thing, you can see it farther away. If it’s something like a human being that really matters to your brain, you need to be in a very compact, very contained, very enclosed space. Those spaces that feel like you’re moving through a room, not flying through a freeway.

Knowing this, how should we think about safety? 

So if we want our pedestrians to be able to be seen, it happens automatically in those compact spaces, but there’s no guarantee you’re going to see them in those bigger spaces. That means that we’re gonna have to take care to make sure that people can see them. Or they’re not going to be in a place where a driver can hit them because he didn’t. 

There’s a huge percentage of crashes that the driver never saw what was going on. Now is that because the driver wasn’t paying attention? Maybe. But to be honest, that’s probably only a very small percentage. The thing is, what they’re looking for is very small in comparison to what they’re normally focusing on, and so we are expecting people to see things that they’re really not capable of seeing. When you get into a four or a six lane highway or even a seven lane section. The chances of people seeing the pedestrians on the side of the road are really very small. 

That’s a river, not a road. We would never have a canal or a river that we didn’t put a guardrail on, especially if we knew people were going to be walking next to it. You know, if it’s a section of canal that nobody ever walks on, that’s one thing, but if you’ve got a section of canal that’s got a pedestrian walkway or a pathway on it, no one would assume that that pedestrian doesn’t need a railing because if nothing else, there’s gonna be kids there. There’s gonna be people moving around there, and you would never want to have the risk of them falling in. How is a roadway any different? They’re not.  

So if you’re in the process of designing or redesigning corridors. If you’re thinking about how those corridors work from a pedestrian or a bicycle standpoint, when it gets above about three lanes, you’re looking at a river, not a road, and you need a railing, especially if you’re gonna have people there regularly.   In places where it’s really tight and contained and the environment is very narrow. 

You don’t need as much because people are already focusing very close to themselves, and it’s much more likely that they can actually interact with the people around them face to face.

Up Next:

So next week we’re gonna talk about expectations. I mentioned expectations a couple of times, and it’s a really key part of driver psychology. What you see is not what’s visibly in front of you. You see what you expect to see, and if you don’t expect to see it, you’re probably gonna miss it

See ya next week (I hope!)

Programming notes:

If you are a regular follower, you’ll notice that it’s taken a few weeks to get back to this ongoing video/podcast series. I’m still working out the kinks on creating and editing video. As you can see, I tried Descript this week and it worked tolerably well—not perfect, but the audio comes out fine and it gives me the ability to show you pictures without too much trouble. So much in urban design and psychology has to do with what it looks like!! Let me know in the comments what you think about how it came out—and whether the way the video jumps sometimes from word to word drives you crazy.

If I can’t get the next Mental Framework in a video by next week, a friend of mine, Steven Florko, has come up with a very cool way of thinking about movement and place—and I’m itching to show it to you.

Which one of these two streets would you like to live on?

Both of these streets have about the same relative value in their community—very high end, but not the top of the food chain. Their dimensions are pretty similar—the one on the left is only 5 feet wider than the one on the right. Both are likely to have a moderate amount of cut through. So, which one is going to get treated like a speedway—and why?

We know the answers to those questions in our guts, but I suspect you’d be hard pressed to figure out the specifics that make the most difference. Take a few minutes (and if you’re an engineer, take your professional hat off) and really look. What do you see as a driver? What do you expect as a driver? As a pedestrian?

Got a question yesterday from DeCarlo Brown in Maine about a community redoing their design standards—specifically their residential streets. To be honest, I don’t have a great, ‘off the shelf’ easy reference for him. (Maybe some of you do—post below and we’ll all benefit.) So, I thought I might give you a few pictures to ponder. I’m way behind on sending posts (lots of travel crazy), so it seems like a great time for a diversion. I’ll update you on the podcast shenanigans at the end.

The problem with the question is that just about anyone can do a really great job designing a street, even with some pretty terrible standards—and you can have really outstanding standards that get applied badly, which leaves you with a hot mess. I hope I can prove to you by the end that it’s not the street standards themselves that make the difference.

This post got way too long, so I’m going to break it up into a few smaller topics.

Is it, “We measure what matters,” or “What gets measured matters”?

Yes.

We measure what things that have to do with our priorities, but what gets measured ends up framing the way we negotiate the tradeoffs. That means that the critical questions often don’t get asked at all because they don’t come up—then we end up with something we really didn’t want and aren’t quite sure why.

The reason things go sideways is that the measurable, verifiable standards we publish in the regulations rarely use the same metrics that our human eyes and brains use to evaluate what speed and behavior are appropriate. We tend to drive what we see and that’s not an easy thing to get into a land development code. You can put yourself out of the game with bad standards, but even if you do things perfectly, you’ve only set yourself up for success—it’s no guarantee. No one intends to create bad standards or a bad design, but they happen by committee all the time.

Take a look at this:

Compare it to this one…

The street dimensions are identical. Nearly everything within the cross section is the same, but I can tell you that the second one gets a totally different behavior than the first. Go a little farther down this street and it gets worse—there’s a retention pond off to the left, and then it feels really open.

Why?

Enclosure.

What you may have started to notice is that the cross sections that feel tight have a better chance of getting people to slow down and pay attention. That’s not your imagination. That’s your biology. You can subconsciously monitor everything in front of you out to about 30-45 feet to your right and left and around 150 feet in front of you. Within that space, your brain can see what’s going on without your eyes having to land on every single thing. Those spaces feel cozy and make your body feel relaxed, assuming there’s not so much around you that you can’t keep track anymore. When the space gets larger, your brain can’t watch that big an area anymore without your conscious help—which puts you on guard. Wide open spaces tend to feel exposed. Compact is comfortable.

Having boundaries around you that limit what you need to look out for creates a short-cut in your brain—and brains are very lazy. As a driver, if all I need to watch out for is the space immediately around me, I’ve got hardware in my brain that is equipped to do that without me having to watch it do its job. Obstacles can make this more complicated, which means that I’ll need to slow down to deal with the potential conflicts.

Here’s what my street looked like in 2019 vs today.

There are two main differences. First, time matters for trees—It takes a while for street trees to mature into the fluffy walls that frame the space. Second, for some reason, we have a lot more vehicles on the street these days. The families across the street have high schoolers or grandparents that come watch kids. We have a company vehicle on the street lately as does my next door neighbor. Between these two changes, people tend to move a lot more slowly than before—though it was never fast, by any means. Both of these factors create enclosure, as does the short block length.

I once heard of a neighborhood in College Park—the gridded section of Orlando just north of downtown—that was having an issue with speed. After the Edgewater Drive road diet, there was a bit more cut through than before. The neighbors got together and created a parking plan that forced drivers to wind their way through the cars, like a downhill slalom at the Olympics. Worked like a charm.

Let’s take a look at what they tried on N. Pebble Beach:

That’s a golf cart lane on each side that doesn’t get used by the golf carts—there’s a picture a few hundred feet from here with the golf cart in the travel lane! When you have 36 feet to work with, there’s a lot you can do in the roadway, but it probably hasn’t helped much on the speeding.

Nice try. No dice.

You can see that as the landscaping fills in closer to the street it helps, but it’s still not great. Part of the problem is that converting this to a golf cart lane entrenches that pavement space as roadway, and limits the ability to do on-street parking in front of the houses. You’ll hear some folks complain that on-street parking lowers their property value, but which lowers it more—the speedway in front of the home or the parking?

So what can you do?

If you’re working with street design standards (not roads—that’s another day), there are a few things that do really help for enclosure.

• On-street parking. I’m not a huge fan of going less than 24 feet wide if you’re just going to leave the street as a typical cross section, but without on street parking that actually happens on a regular basis, 24 feet is really wide. HOA’s are only shooting themselves in the foot when they demand no parking on the street. You’re better off enforcing no parking across the sidewalks.

• Bulb-outs. When there’s a lot of cut-through or less consistent on-street parking occupancy, structure sections of striped on-street parking with bulb-outs that narrow the cross section down to something more manageable. It works best if those bulb-outs have their own curb and gutter—so you can pack them full of trees and benches. Anything vertical will help. If you want to test it out, use large potted plants to stand in until you are ready to reconstruct the pavement.

• Tree-lawns that include trees. (This assumes sidewalks—which are not always a good assumption). Trees put skin in the game for drivers and make pedestrians feel cool and safe. If nothing else, if a driver goes out of the roadway, they’re going to scratch their paint. I once lived in a community where people weren’t allowed to plant trees in their tree lawns because the city had put all the utilities there. Utilities go under the sidewalk or behind it. Tree lawns are for trees.

• Sidewalks. It’s the people moving around in the space that will ultimately change driver behavior. Don’t believe me? How do people drive through your downtown in the middle of the night? Personally, I never specified a sidewalk less than 6 feet wide—no mom should have to pick which toddler’s hand she gets to hold on their walk.

• Building orientation. Speed is always going to be a bit better when drivers can see the fronts of the houses—30 feet to the right of the driver or less. Driving around the outside walls of subdivisions creates a “So what?” attitude.

• Setbacks matter. The biggest thing that frames up the street is the distance between the buildings, which is usually dictated by the setbacks and what is allowed into them. Setbacks define where the front of the building lines up, but you can permit things like stoops, porches, or overhangs within that setback. That will really make a difference in how wide the street looks. If you really want to keep speed under control, limit setbacks to 18 feet.

Next Week:

We’re in the middle of two series right now:

I got stuck on the third of the mental frameworks videos/podcasts so that will come through probably next week.

There are two other issues that I want to flesh out for this series—how far ahead you can see and the bigger land use context. I’ll see if I can turn these into video/podcasts eventually, but there’s a learning curve, so give me a minute or two to work it out.

I’m going to try not to clutter your inbox, but I’m trying out what it looks like to convert or generate this material in video and port it over to a podcast on YouTube and (in the future) Spotify. (I’d love feedback on what you would enjoy and/or tips from anyone on making this as seamless as possible.)

I’m going to do video posts jthat get popped out to YouTube and a podcast for the next few weeks while I’m in book production mode. I’ll be back to early Friday morning within a few weeks—I promise.

If you want a deeper dive into this, check out my overview on the 7 Mental Frameworks.

Thanks for coming along!

We do what we have always done unless we choose to do otherwise.

I heard someone say that last week and it landed like a ton of bricks. This idea explains so much about driving, it’s hard to overstate it.

Driving is, by far, our most over-rehearsed skill. We practice daily—and not just fiddling around. It’s deliberate practice that drives towards continual improvement. 10,000 hours? That comes and goes within 30 years, and most drivers go 50 years or more. We’re constantly trying to shave a few seconds off our old time or beat the GPS prediction—legally, of course. We know which lanes on every segment will get us to our destination fastest. We know every short cut. We can tell when the signal timing is off or has changed. We know every place we have ever seen someone pulled over on the side of the road. This awareness may not be conscious but it’s there, guiding every little move with a precision that is quickly forgotten.

Engineers encourage this. Every sign, every pavement marking, every light must be absolutely uniform so that drivers can respond without any hesitation or uncertainty. We have a manual that is 3 inches thick, filled with rules and dimensions, detailed with specific examples that must be followed without exception. Even if it isn’t ideal, there is legal protection in following it to the letter. Deviate and you must be able to prove to a judge and jury that you are more right than the PhD research scientists that made the rules—even when the rules apply to situations far beyond what was examined in those studies. These are studies that shape our lives but never get read after they are applied to the standards.

“What we have always done” consists of a set of learned patterns we pick up from watching other people drive. The decisions we make under this type of response take about 0.2 seconds—about the same amount of time it takes to read facial expressions. To change those responses, it takes half a second and an intentional pre-made choice to override your automatic behavior. And it stays that way until you have trained yourself into a new automatic behavior pattern. I took a few minutes today to describe how this works in today’s video podcast.

Office Hours?

If anyone is interested or in the Orlando area, I’m open to having office hours on Sunday afternoons in downtown Winter Garden. Check in with me and I’d love to hang out and talk shop.

I’d also like to know what you think about the video/podcast options I’m opening up. Preferences?

My friend, Boni Kutela from Texas A&m recorded this for me oIn the poster floor at TRB (many thanks!!). We were talking about the relationship between speed and safety, so I figured I would loop you all in on the discussion. You can think about them as two sides to the same coin, but it’s not always as cut and dried.

Enjoy!!

The Transportation Research Board holds its Annual Meeting early in January every year—and it all starts next week (eeee!!!) At its height, it was 14,000 transportation engineers, planners, policy makers and geeks of all kinds. It’s still a pretty big deal, even if the numbers are down a bit.

I’ve been a transportation engineer for over 30 years now, but I’ve only been going to TRB since 2020. It was supposed to be a Monday through Thursday affair, but it’s long since bled over into Sunday for workshops. Then other groups hold events the weekend before.

Ostensibly, it’s another research and committee conference. Just about every transportation graduate student and most professors are there presenting some type of research. The committees that recommend research (and policy at times) all meet during the week. My first year, it felt like drinking from a fire-hose. there was not a single block of time that had less than 5 places I wanted to be simultaneously. Five years later, it’s still overwhelming, but not nearly as much.

My advice, if this is your first year:

Prioritize. It’s overwhelming at first. Identify what relationships you need to grow and what you want to accomplish during the week. You can read the papers later (or scan them during the week if you can catch your breath). The poster sessions are the best. Committee work is where change happens, but narrow down to 2 or 3--any more will leave you drained.

If you’re into urban design, safety, or cities, Transportation Camp on Saturday is the best thing all week, but has already sold out, again!!! (more on T-Camp in a minute)

Each year, Greg Rogers hosts a spreadsheet for all the cocktail parties--most of the real work gets done there.

Here’s my scoop on what makes TRB really work. I’d love to know what parts you love the most! Leave me a comment and we can all benefit!

For me, the week starts out at T-Camp

Transportation Camp

This is absolutely my favorite event all year (and they skipped most of it last year…booh!) T-Camp is an un-conference put on by Transportation for America on the Saturday before TRB. It is nearly completely unscripted. You arrive to bagels and construction paper on your tables and are issued 10 dots. On the construction paper, you write the title of a session you’re proposing and a short description. All of these get posted on a board and you vote on the sessions you want to see with your dots.

During a keynote, they look through all of the proposals and schedule the winners into rooms—about 10 options per time block. Since none of these are known in advance or recorded (unless you record them yourself), the presentations can be polished or goofy; gems or gripe sessions—or both. The only thing you’re guaranteed is a chance to open your minds to ideas from others who think seriously about this.

Most of us come with presentations from the previous year or partnerships that we don’t get to do often. The discussions reverberate throughout the next year. It’s a time for fresh bread, half-baked potatoes, whattabouts, and innovative ideas from the people around the world that have poured their hearts and souls into the same passions you have.

In 2024, Stephen Ratke and I did our first joint round of Street Stroad Bingo—and it was probably one of the easiest and most enjoyable ways to really talk through how the details and land use make or break a roadway design.

I usually get to do a debate session of some type that fleshes out the conflicts in the ethical mindsets for engineers vs. planners—but this year, I think that prize session will hopefully go to Steven. He’s planning a session titled “Killed by a Traffic Engineer or Saved by a Traffic Engineer?” and he’s letting me join. Likely to be a winner with a lot of light to go with the heat.

Sometimes I’ll propose a session that I’m surprised gets picked up and it becomes more of a discussion than a presentation. I forgot that I proposed a session in 2024 on Women and Disabilities and transportation design—it turned into great discussion!

Committee Meetings

This is another great place to figure out what is currently the hot takes in each niche. The committee structure has experienced a 52-pickup moment twice since I’ve been attending, first voluntary and this time involuntary. When I started, there were hundreds of committees and subcommittees—the tree had gotten very leggy and was in desperate need of pruning.

So they tried—but no tree likes to prune itself. Committees are designed to review papers for the annual meeting, produce sessions, webinars and workshops to summarize new research, and create research needs statements that the feds and state agencies will want to fund. They steer where the research is going next and help get the word out when ideas are shifting. Curiosity can often outstretch utility—I know it often does for me—and a lot of committees began to stretch well beyond their original mandate. Sometimes that’s good, but it can get unwieldy. The first restructure was supposed to fix that. It helped, but it didn’t do much.

DOGE took a hacksaw to the whole. This year, all committees were completely restructured and all members had to reapply for the new committees—and each person could only be on one committee. Was that good or bad? Probably both. The number and structure for the committees is much more manageable—this year I only have one committee overlap instead of 4 or 5. The committees were also reminded of their scope limits (sternly, but gently). We’ll see how mad people are when we get there. There should be a bit of heat about it, but frankly, someone from the outside needed to do it because we weren’t able to do it ourselves.

Workshops, lectures, and posters, oh my!!

There are three types of events—workshops, lectern sessions, and poster sessions.

Workshops are usually on Sunday or Thursday and have about 3 hours to tackle a topic. The best ones have a handful of great speakers and time to actually work on a topic—generate ideas, create collaborations, and such. There are a few that are full to the brim with speakers, and that’s ok too.

Lectern sessions are just that—3 or 4 papers on a single topic. They’re ok, but like I said, unless you want to meet up with a speaker later at a cocktail party, you can usually get that information another way—it’s an ok use of your time if the paper is exactly what you need this week, but that’s rarely the case. People wander in and out constantly because there’s way too much to do at TRB to sit still for any length of time.

The real gold is in the Poster Sessions. This feels a lot like leafing through a really good magazine on your favorite subject. These are not graphic artists, so there are few who do a really good job on the poster, but the titles are helpful and the author is standing in front of it. When something catches your eye, you can get a quick 5-minute summary and ask questions, which is far better than just reading the paper. I’ve found several real gems there. I’ve also given informal workshops there. Someone asks the right question and they get more than they could have paid me for. After a few years, you find your friends there and get to see what they’ve been working on. It’s probably the best kept secret.

The real TRB: the parties.

As with everything else in this world, what makes TRB really work are the relationships. Most of us can lay our hands on the research without too much trouble. I’ve had several papers and posters I’ve presented at TRB through the years that didn’t make it into publication, but the vast majority do, eventually. The data is important, but not nearly as important as the discussions.

The parties are not your typical social events. They’re geek-fests.

People huddle around a few drinks and snacky foods and talk about ratios, and crash histories, and design details. Passions and insights flow far more readily than the alcohol. You catch people’s gut reads and the impressions they would hesitate to swear to in a paper but know in their hearts. You find out where their next curiosity will lead them. You find out what agency leaders are genuinely struggling with. The debates pin down competing principles and tradeoffs—So automated left turn enforcement drops head on collisions, but ramps up rear end crashes, and those are not low speed rear end hits. We may not have won the day on this one yet…

The authors of the papers you cite throughout the year are often there. You can ask about those irritating little details and get a straight answer, or at least a genuine, “I’m not sure…” You cement connections that become research collaborations. You see how what is killing your system works beautifully elsewhere and why.

So are you coming?

What am I missing out on? What is your favorite parts? Any tips or hints? Leave me a comment and we can all benefit!

For that matter, I’ll be walking the halls, so stop me if you see me!!

Last week I had a trip to NYC and ended up doing it in a very European way—mostly trains, subways, and friends. There were a few cab and Lyft trips here and there, but mostly, I took publicly available train routes. There was a bunch of good, bad, and ugly, but it created a pretty wild overview and I thought I might bring you along for the ride.

Leg 1: Orlando to NYC—Amtrak Coach

Since we were still at home, I could keep an eye on when the train was to arrive—and that was probably a harbinger for the entire trip. They ended up about 2 1/2 hours late getting to Orlando from Miami. Amtrak’s on-time performance is abysmal—about 36% of the passengers on the Floridian, the Miami/DC/Chicago route arrive on time—and they give them 15 minutes of fudge time to count it on-time.

In this case, someone got hit on the rails on the way up from Miami and they had to change out the engine—not a good start. In 2024, there were 954 rail fatalities in the US—nearly all of which are on the rails, not on the train. In comparison, the EU saw 750 fatalities and 2,357 suicides, for a total of just over 3,100 total deaths. (We really need to separate those numbers out for our data too).

The train was fairly comfortable, but the person next to me had just gotten back on the train after taking a less than legal smoke break. They don’t like you changing seats much, but they let me move at that point. She disappeared around Jax, so I had a pair of seats to myself for the overnight.

The seats are pretty comfortable—about like first class seats on a plane—but the cars can get pretty chaotic on the long-haul rides, because you’re sleeping in those seats. You can take a bit more baggage on a train than a plane, but you’ll end up needing it. You’ll need to pack a blanket and something resembling a pillow to sleep in, along with snacks. The cafe car is basically microwave heat up food only (and the microwave is not for you) and closes frequently. There weren’t any showers that I could find on the Coach train, but the bathrooms were large enough to change in if you needed to.

The clientele is largely low-income, looking for long distance travel, but it’s barely a step above Greyhound. The people are far more colorful, in good and not so good ways, than the people you meet on planes—lots of beautiful older black and Hispanic women, along with a few young bucks and dashing older gentlemen. Despite this, it was surprisingly quiet on the train.

The view from the train was stunning when I woke the next morning—Richmond had snow everywhere! In general, the view alternates between lots of vegetation and tiny town centers. There’s not much time at most stops, even smoke-break stops, so exploration is out of the question.

In DC, they switch staff over to the Northeast Corridor folks—they run a very tight but cheerful ship. Stops are super short and their on time performance is about 88%. They expect you to be ready to go by the time they stop. If you miss your stop or get on the wrong train, your fate is up to the conductor. They might just route you correctly or they could get you into a bunch of trouble.

Moynihan Station in NYC is large and a little confusing, but not that different from an airport with pre 9-11 security. They were pretty picky about checking your luggage tags—far more than they are at an airport.

Getting around in the City-Day 1

Getting a cab at the train station wasn’t that hard, although any attempts at imposing order on that system were doomed to backfire. Bossy ladies who think they can be line monitors will end up getting frustrated (no, it wasn’t me this time!!)

Getting around the city was surprisingly easy, in general, but required a bunch more inside knowledge than DC’s subway system. Payment was by credit card tap and didn’t require an app or service card. I never felt unsafe, but I was a lot more on my guard than I usually am when I’m moving around DC or other cities. There were homeless people on the train here and there, but for the most part, even the locals were friendlier than I expected—quiet, but helpful if necessary. They were even willing to return a smile on occasion. If I rode the same route regularly, I suspect I would begin to recognize people. The man with the hand-crocheted hat was trying so hard to be cool, but beamed like I had given him a medal when I mouthed that I liked his hat.

There are all these cute mini-markets in mid-town for the tourists—I assume that’s a Christmas thing, but seems like a much better way to use city streets than cars. I stayed down by the ferry the first night and it was pretty easy to get up to mid-town to meet up with friends for dinner and a show.

Getting back was a bit harder.

I ended up going down into the wrong side of the station, which meant either going out and paying again to get back on or going up one station and getting on the other train there. I should have just paid the $2.90.

When I got to the stop going the right direction, I watched my train go by on the express lanes twice before I figured out that they were rerouting around that section of stations and there weren’t a lot of great options for fixing the problem. The subway had hit someone in the meantime and had to switch tracks—and who knows for how long. I finally gave up and took a Lyft back to the hotel, which at that hour wasn’t horrible—$34ish. What should have been a half hour train ride turned into an hour plus ordeal.

NYC Day 2

The next morning, I needed to move hotels for the event so it was time to pack up and move. Switching hotels with all the extra baggage from the train was not something I was prepared to do yet, so the next morning I took a Lyft up to my Mid-town hotel (~$72ish counting tip) and at least a 45 minute ride. I’m going to learn how to pack lightly someday, I promise.

Getting around in the city reinforces how much extra exercise is built into living in that environment. The event venue for the first day was about 3 blocks—on the long side—from the hotel: 3/4 mile. I get about 4500 steps in on a good day in the suburbs. You’re happy to keep it under 12k in the city. That’s not great for those of us with hidden disabilities, but it is something you can plan and prepare for if you know that’s the way it will be. The walking pace is quite a bit faster too.

It rained that evening, so the Pizza break was ok, but damp chilly—double coats for sure. (I always forget to take the picture before I start eating).

Last Day

Day three was mostly inside for the workshop, but on the morning of the last day, I decided to pop down to the financial district again to walk around.

Now that I knew I needed to be careful where I entered and what trains I picked, getting down there was much easier. I was even able to find system maps on the train and the stop indicators. The stops were very close to where I needed to be, so that went very smoothly.

At the end of the day, after the workshop, I popped out with all my luggage (more compactly packed this time) and took the elevator down to the subway. Here’s where my inexperience ate my lunch. I got on the Q train—which is far faster and more direct than I realized. If I had known what was going on, I could have popped off at the very first stop and been right where I needed to be. Unfortunately, it took me 2 more stops to realize it and figuring out how to get back was not as simple.

I did finally make it back to Penn Station to get the NJ train to Trenton. Getting around is not self-explanatory, but the police are helpful. Bought the ticket (~$20), then got sent down the wrong ramp and made it to the door for the track I was told to use—escalator out of service. Many agencies don’t realize how much their handicapped accessibility helps long distance travelers with luggage. I asked for help and found out that probably wasn’t even the right track. Back up the ramp and around the corner to the elevator hall—which no one mentioned when I got the ticket. The track wasn’t even assigned, so there was time to grab a short bite at Duncan Donuts—their bacon and jelly croissants are very, very good and they seem to be everywhere I went.

I made it down to the track and onto a train, but getting into a regular seat was out of the question with the bags. That meant an hour long train ride fighting rolling and hard handicapped seats—not ideal, but it worked.

My friend picked me up at the station and we drove around wherever we needed, which included lovely little towns between Trenton and Philly. Princeton was enchanting. We even had more snow—which we had to shovel to get the car out.

Philly to DC

The morning started with the train from Doylestown to downtown—easy credit card tap on, but a few missed heartbeats wondering if it was coming at all with all that snow. A beautiful ride—lots of cute little snow covered downtowns, then tap off again at the main 30th street station.

There was a bunch of construction in the Philly station and I arrived right as an earlier train was leaving for DC—probably an Acela. No hope of hopping that train so I had to wait. Bummer.

Once we made it to DC, I’m back in familiar turf, but wasn’t familiar with trying to rent a car at Union station. DON’T!!!! It’s a trek to get up to the car rental place and by the time I got there, everyone had gone home. I was able to cancel the car and my friend picked me up instead. I should have just taken the line out to Dulles, but we thought it would be faster to drive—it kinda was and wasn’t. Traffic can be good or bad and you never know.

Leesburg was adorable, but again, a suburb, so driving is pretty much the best option.

The final legs home

I won the bid for a roomette for the trip home, which was pricy but far more relaxed and comfortable. Riding coach is not for the faint of heart. You can put in a cost you’re willing to pay to upgrade and if they have space available it’s yours. With the roomette, you also get access to the Amtrak executive lounge while you wait, which was quite comfy and has snacks.

A roomette is tight for two, but pretty comfy for one and very serene. There’s room for a toilet and sink in the roomette, but there was also a shower and larger toilet farther down the hall.

Amtrak’s higher tiers also come with chef prepared meals in the dining car, which were very well prepared. Probably mostly sous-vide, but quite good. The chocolate fudge cake was downright amazing. I slept far better than I expected and even slept in until almost 8 am—which was probably because I was very tired. Sleeping on the train is not for everyone (or me). There’s a lot of vibration and you can feel any issues with track welds—some sections are in better shape than others. If you can get over being constantly jostled, it’s very quiet.

We got stopped by freight trains multiple times along the route. Since 1973, passenger rail is legally required to have priority on the host lines, but if there’s a 3 mile long freight train, the sidings aren’t going to be nearly long enough—so they just wait. We also ended up waiting for an hour for a rail repair. I got some work done and had time to recover from all the rest, but internet is spotty at best. By the time we made it back to Orlando, we were 6 hours late—just in time for the end of my husband’s day, so he kindly came and got me at the station. If there is a next time, I’m leaving from Winter Park instead, where I wouldn’t feel like parking there for a few days meant risking coming back and not finding the car there.

Transportation takeaways:

We are not Germany and the trains don’t run on time. This is an issue of beggars can’t be choosers. Where Amtrak owns and runs the tracks, they’re running 88% on time. The more freight they’re sharing with, the less on-time they’re going to be—and by a lot. Hours late seems to be pretty ordinary. I’m not sure how they end up paying all that overtime.

Coach is a lot cheaper than flying and not too bad for the daytime, as long as you don’t have a bunch of time pressure or extra luggage. Overnight it’s a bear.

Roomettes are pricey, but have a bunch of perks. For the moment, you can get two passengers for the price of one in a roomette—honestly, they should be selling them that way anyway. The extra cost for a meal is pretty marginal and they have a hard time getting them sold at double the coach cost or more.

NYC is built for locals—there’s a lot of them—and requires more expertise to ride than it should. They desperately need better signage in the trains—scrolling signs showing what stop is next would be a life-saver for those of us who aren’t used to the system and can’t always get to the middle of the train to see their ancient board system. Driving in NYC is for people with money to burn.

If you want to get a sense of how the land works—really functions at large scale—a train is probably the best way to do it. Trains naturally traverse the entire transect from urban core to rural and back, over and over again. It won’t show you newer areas of the country well, but everything built before WWII and everything between those spots are on full display.

Why trains in the US are different

There’s a reason its hard to serve the US with trains. Europe has compact cities with lots of open space between them. It was built in an era when walking was the main way to travel and anything else was difficult or dangerous. We have places that were built that way and they work great for trains. Everywhere else, it’s a crap-shoot.

On the other hand, the US has the luxury of being very large and safe. When your land is given out via a horse race, it’s not going to work the same way. Cars provide flexibility to manage a much larger geography. That’s good and bad.

Would I do it again? Maybe. Throughout the northeast corridor, absolutely. It’s very easy. Everywhere else, probably not. It’s easy to forget how compact New England is in comparison to Florida, much less a gigantor like Texas. It’s about 7 hours from Tallahassee to Miami—and you can cover most of New England in about the same amount of time. Even there, the coverage is spotty. I’ve been looking at getting back from Concord NH, and it’s easier to take a $20 bus to Boston than a train when the flights are ridiculous.

Can we retrofit for trains? In some places, yes. The southeast side of Florida is trying, but it hasn’t been easy. Without places to gather people together, there’s nowhere to pick them up. We can intensify places locally and that will help move us towards spaces that work better for walking—which makes the leap to train service easier. It would take the rest of my lifetime at least. Just getting back the street car systems we’ve lost in the last century would help.

I hope the train around your Christmas tree always runs on time.

Earlier this week, I saw a post on my LinkedIn feed that tied a bunch of thoughts together beautifully—and makes for some of the best development specific investment advice I’ve ever seen. For that matter, it’s not bad Economic Director advice, either. Essentially what he’s saying is:

This is his logic:

Most cities have aging infrastructure and declining tax bases—not great for the balance sheet.

Raising taxes nets you less revenue. People leave. Property values decline—which means you can’t even get the tax revenue you had before. You need more density to make the numbers work, but that often means more noise, people, frustration, and overwhelm.

He was highlighting where cities have created loops systems, but I don’t think it takes a complete loop to ride that wave. Walkability sells.

What a community (and a developer) needs to offer is something that makes it worth dealing with the hassles of city life. Walkability fills that gap. A single walkable trail that goes nowhere won’t help. The trail and the land use go hand-in-hand, and that’s where the value gets created.

The hunger for social interaction

You sit on a trail like the Beltline and it feels like a long drink of water to a thirsty man. You suddenly realize what you’ve been missing: there’s nowhere just to sit and watch people. The great New York City parks director, William Whyte studied the dynamics of how people used public space and came to the following conclusion:

Young folks aren’t in love with driving. The millennials see a car as a depreciating asset on the balance sheet—and an expensive one at that. Kids are waiting longer to learn to drive. Would you want to learn with this level of congestion?

They can meet up with their friends online, but the people they meet online have a built-in trust problem. You can never be completely sure that they are showing you who they are and aren’t playing a long con. For that matter, you can’t be completely sure they are even people, these days.

In High school, my son made friends with people from all over the country online, but when he went to hang out with them in person—like when we visited those towns—the relationships often fell flat. These days, they hold in-person hangouts with a small friend group, but the highlight of their year so far has been meeting all of their neighbors on Halloween. It’s the one night of the year everyone pokes their heads out of their front doors and takes a look around at the other warehoused families around them. A trail spreads that one night a year into all year long.

So all we need is a trail? Not quite.

We all watched in horror last month as Federal Legislators squealed that they’re not spending any more transportation money on bike lanes or trails. There’s good reasons for them to be skeptical. An exercise trail is a lot like a gym membership. It gets used for about 2 weeks in January before life gets in the way. If all you’re building is a fancy recreational facility, that’s not a good use of transportation funding because it doesn’t transport anyone anywhere. Buying people a gym membership with tax dollars is nearly the definition of waste, fraud, and abuse.

But that mindset can rob communities of a bigger opportunity. It’s not the trail itself that’s the secret sauce. It’s where that trail gets you. When a trail is genuinely useful as a transportation mode, the benefits feel miraculous. That’s why Barrett Lindberg focuses on loop trails. They have to be long enough and wind through enough land use types to connect people’s homes to the other places they need to go on a regular basis. In transportation speak, that’s called an origin/destination or O/D pair. Give people a functional reason to use the trail regularly and they will. Give them an e-bike (not a bike format motorcycle) and they won’t mind doing it.

As a functional trail winds through existing developed land—often using old rail lines—it provides a cornucopia of (re)development opportunities. Old factories become trendy lofts. If you have to tear the factory down, all the better: that can turn into apartments with a grocery store on the first floor. Bungalows become 2 story houses. Old Sears houses become offices for lawyers and dentists. Some cities have even begun allowing ACU’s, accessory commercial units—often garage conversions—that create opportunities for small day care’s, art studios, hair salons, corner stores, or boutique craftsmen within neighborhoods. Raleigh passed an ordinance that allows up to 1,000 square feet of commercial space in its single family properties, by-right—no special approvals needed. That’s a space about 31’x31’—not much bigger than a garage or the home office I’m working out of right now.

It’s not a war on cars

It’s a thirst for community. You can’t build community from behind a steering wheel.

The reason the Amish will spend a million dollars on a state of the art harvester but won’t use a car has everything to do with how it impacts the way they show up for each other. Cars meant they would be tempted to live farther apart and spend less time with each other, so they said, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

The moment the car-crazy spell was broken for the millennials, they—and the generations after them—have walked away wherever it was at all possible. Many of them still ended up buying in suburban subdivisions because they can’t afford anything else, but they loathe them and visit walkable places for their entertainment.

Walkable suburban—small towns with solid grids and traditional land use structure—are not that expensive to build. They end up needing about the same amount of land and asphalt for their roadway networks, and their utilities are cheaper to lay because it’s compact. They rapidly become very expensive to buy, which means high profit margins.

Walkable has nearly infinite demand

People used to buy homes based on the floor plan and school districts. The boomers and some of Gen-X still do. The moment they get any money and visit Europe or a walkable area, their desires change drastically. The other generations were never in love with car-world anyway.

Young people need somewhere that kids can grow up and get around—and unlike the Adam Walsh generation, the illusion of physical security no longer holds. The real dangers are these days are on the internet, not in real life. That means you can sell less space in the home (and make it more affordable) if there’s somewhere they can go outside of it.

People don’t buy from their cars and big box stores have no hope of competing with online sales. Build a personal relationship with your customers and they’ll choose you over Amazon.

Walking is good for your mind and body—and seniors care about both. Sitting will kill you, and that counts all the time you’re stuck sitting in a car. It’s really hard to get steps in, when you have nowhere to walk. That 3,500 square foot McMansion may be stunning, but when daughter takes your T-bird away, it becomes a beautiful prison. A bungalow near a walkable trail means you’ll stay active longer, which nearly magically erases the aches and pains that come with growing older. Besides, the people on the trail are fascinating to watch.

The draw of 5 acres in the country

Are there people who still want 5 acres in the country? There are a few, and there are many rural jurisdictions that will still foolishly allow people to do that. Over the long haul, it’s a huge negative on their balance sheets that most don’t even realize. You’ll eventually have to run utilities out to these huge lots. Even if they pay for the up-front cost (which is not small), it becomes a public resource, which means it will need to be maintained on the public dime. As Chuck Mahron gets the word out about long term community finance, I suspect that type of silliness will not last long. Most people who want that either genuinely want to have their own little farmette—which is not all bad—or just want to get away. The first can genuinely produce a bunch of food, if they’re careful about how they do it. The latter is a trauma response to the congestion and frustration we have generated. In past generations, the idyllic country house we long for in the wide open spaces was a working business that generated food for people and revenue for their owners. At 5 acres, it’s hard to do either one, and cementing that in place with zoning means that it will never grow up at all—that’s not good for land any more than it is for children. What happens when you want to build a home for your kids to live with you so you can enjoy your grand-kids. Not allowed.

Of course, there’s also a uniquely American survivalist mentality that believes that the world is going to h*ll in a handbasket, so I need to protect my own. Honestly, I see it a bunch in conservative Christian circles and I felt that pressure growing up. You never know when the world is going to end, so you need to get ready. The novels I read as a teenager focused on surviving after a nuclear blast—and they weren’t pretty. This prepper mindset feels like relying on your own understanding, not on God’s direction. It smells like smoke and is about as toxic. If God sends you to create a bunker in the wild, that’s fine, but how are you going to impact anyone else? It’s just an escapist rapture theology with a different wrapper. Jesus didn’t create the Branch Davidians, either in His time our ours. Do we need to be prepared? Maybe. My new packing rule is that the phrase, “Just in case,” means I’m trusting in myself, not the Father, unless He points something out specifically. If I catch myself saying, “Just in case,” it gets prayed over and usually left out. The prepper mentality is no different. He sent the 12 and the 70 out with only one pair of shoes and no bag. Most of us won’t get out of this alive anyway, and that’s ok.

REITS or Incremental development?

I’m very nearly convinced that REIT’s are demonic—at least in their current configuration. When a core human value, shelter, becomes the core of a faceless portfolio, it breeds slum lords. The push for positive cash flow on the annual balance sheet eliminates all of the oversight, foresight, and stewardship that will create a thriving multigenerational community. REIT’s are inherently designed to create bubbles—the assets generate revenue that is measured in too short a time frame. This short-cuts any maintenance or long term thinking. They inevitably end up harming the poor—usually single mothers—and God will defend them at your expense if you hurt the ones He cares for personally. It’s bad for business. Commercial REIT’s are not much better. These are the next generation of farm loans that leverage people into losing everything they have because they’re looking for short term gain rather than a legacy.

Redevelopment is hard in the short term. It’s a lot of paperwork and bureaucratic brain damage. It’s a lot easier in the short term to raze everything and start from scratch—and sometimes you have to. When you start looking at your own community as a father would, as an ecosystem that will support your children and grandchildren, the short term gains won’t be as high, but they compound exponentially. Properties build value rather than decline because people care about how they mature—and they’re allowed to mature, not just stay fixed in place, like a mausoleum. That balloon loan is easier to get refinanced at the end of the term and you have a fighting chance of paying it off entirely if you stick with it. You may not be able to do 500 units at a time to start out, but if you do a few each year, you build equity and momentum. If you want to learn how, the Incremental Development Alliance can teach you how.

If you’re a banker and can train a dozen people to do this in your community—and provide financing to help—you’ll make a lot more over the long haul as the overall property values increase around them. Donate to your local trails group or downtown business alliance. Over 20 years, they will create more value for you than a big shopping center that needs to be razed at the end of that time. In your 20’s, 20 years feels like a long time. By your 50’s it feels like a moment.

If you are a public official, you can make it easier to do that type of incremental work than to do things fast and cheap. Your community will complain less and will flex with the changes as they come. Train your real estate agents to look for redevelopment opportunities. Train your staff to look at value per acre as the chief decision metric and people served as your chief success indicator. It’s not big or flashy, but a ribbon cutting on a charity or day-care can be just more politically powerful as the ribbon cutting on a new road—it carries the value of a humane story. That’s where Linburg’s Trail strategy pays off. In the big scheme of things, trails are cheap, but they make everything around them valuable. Make space and rules for things to grow, organically, gradually over time and the improvements accrue. It will build political will—one face at a time—and all politics are local.

Up Next:

I’m trying to talk a friend into doing a deep dive on crashes and design details that should work but don’t. Otherwise, next week I’m hitting NYC, so I’m hoping to have some Christmas eye candy to post for you all!!

You start with a geographic area-land and water. The land is fair game. The water requires bridges or tunnels.

Open squares, circles, and triangles pop up in the space over time and you are given 3 initial transit lines to connect them. Little filled squares, circles, and triangles pop up next to the stations representing each “rider’s” destination goal. The riders board the trains and you watch them go from their origin to their destination. Trains have limited space, so they fill till they're full and empty when riders get to their destination. People get left at stations if there's no room on the train. The game ends (you get fired!) when too many people get left too long at a station.

Games teach us more than just their own rules. You learn principles as you play through success and failure. The rules may be simple but the game play steers you toward different strategies as you win and lose. Experience teaches you the nature of the pieces and tools at your disposal and how they work together (or don’t). The gameplay does a great job of showing what planners know but may not know how to articulate or anticipate.

Let’s start with the stations:

What are these stations?

Well, obviously they're transit stops, but lets look a little closer. What is a transit stop?

Transit stops are places where people can access high speed, long distance connections, preferably on foot.

This is the most obvious issue that keeps suburbs from jumping over the hurdle from rural to urban. Transit only works if you can get a bunch of people collected together into one place so they can get on and off together.

This is why no one likes using the bus. Every access point creates friction along the line and impedes flow. If you want lots of access, the flow slows to a crawl. If you want flow, access has to be limited.

It’s a classic tradeoff and there have been a wide range of diagrams to describe it. It’s the foundational concept underneath the idea of a functional classification. The flatter and fatter the diagram is, the better the overall system works because the extremes work fine, but the middle never will. You need facilities that allow for lots of access, but they can’t be very long because they’re not going to go very fast. The most extreme example of lots of access are the lines of doorways along a vibrant city street. On the other end of the continuum are limited access highways or interstates that run between cities. Both ends work well but the stuff in the middle doesn’t. (We call them StRoads—and they make no one happy.)

There’s a StRoad equivalent in the land

In the real world, stops have to be located somewhere you can recognize within the landscape—usually a center of some kind. If every land parcel is of equal value or importance in the landscape, it’s nearly impossible to create a transit stop—where would you put it? We call that a peanut butter smear land use and it’s not very tasty. This is what creates the middle portion of the flow/access diagram. Everyone wants to go fast, but they want the transit stop in front of their house too (or at least their next door neighbor’s house).

If you have to drive to a transit stop, it rarely works. It doesn’t make sense to leave your car at the stop and wait for a train unless there’s a real problem with having your car at your destination (like parking costs). This is where size becomes a problem.

• If the land use cluster is too large, it’s hard to place a transit stop because it’s too far to walk to the center or edge where the stop needs to be.

• If each parcel in a land cluster is large, the cluster is going to get too big to walk it

• and there won’t be enough people in that cluster to justify stopping.

This is why planners push for high density. If you’re going to get everyone together to pick them up, there needs to be a bunch of people going the same way not to far apart from each other. Transit systems work with medium or low densities in Europe, but the land use is pretty compact and car travel is expensive. It’s rare to see it work in the US.

Density doesn’t always mean high rises—the best types of density are in the 2-3 story range with smaller lots because you can connect people up to the station and each other with far fewer cars. Cars and roads upscale everything out of walking range, making it a lot harder to get enough people gathered together to make it work. Most car-centric planners pooh-pooh transit as ineffective. What they don’t know is that transit just fails faster than cars do and is easier to fix.

The Types of Stops

The game starts out with three main types of stops. The squares seem to represent town centers or major retail. Circles act a lot like residential. That means triangles are probably employment centers. For a line to succeed, you need all three on the same line. Riders are always going from one type of station to a different type. If riders need to switch trains, they’ll be waiting in the station—and that will cost you the game.

Squares are usually rare—there’s often only one of them for a long time. In most communities, the downtown core is unique and irreplaceable—at least at first. That means it’s important to make sure every line can access a square easily, if possible. Triangles (employment) are also less common, but there’s usually several of them. Residential circles pop up all over the place.

The game doesn’t start out being very picky about origins and destinations. Squares may be unique, but any triangle or circle is just as valuable as any other. (It doesn’t stay that way, but we’ll get to that in a minute.)

Expanding the System

Every Monday morning you get a new train to add to the system and a choice of one new expansion resource—a new line, a few new tunnels/bridges, or a new carriage to give you more space in the train you already have. Sometimes you can even get a high speed train.

The game gives you a choice between two of these resources—and it’s not always the resources you need. Think of this like the annual fiscal cycles. Each year you can expand your budget to meet new demands, but mid-year resource changes aren’t coming. You can only add so much at a time, and what you can get through the public review or procurement process it’s not always what you need.

One of the hardest choices is between adding a new line or adding a new carriage to a train. This represents two different strategies for expansion—long transit lines with lots of vehicle capacity or lots of lines. A long line can connect up a lot of options, but each train has to go from one end of the line to the other, which means it takes longer for a train to get back to a station—and new stations pop up along the line which means new stops that make the time even longer. You can add cars to your train and they’ll be able to carry more, but the train still has to go along the entire route—and sometimes they bunch up, leaving people stuck for a long time. If the line gets too long, the train gets full before it gets back to the core. The stops close to the downtown stay full and get you fired.

For most of the systems in the game, lots of short lines seem to work better than a few long ones. It also gives you more options for straighter lines. Zig-zag lines look short but aren’t. So here’s another big transportation takeaway:

Big swaths of single use types will mean long trips just to get to a different type of area. The longer the trips, the longer you’re spending making those trips and the more road you’re consuming (and maintaining). That’s why most transportation engineers are starting to look at VMT rather than simple roadway volume. Capacity tells you how much room you have in one spot. VMT looks at how much of the system space and time is going to get used. Half the trip length and you’ll lose overall congestion because you’re not using as much of the network.

That’s also why so many planners push mixed use. If you can access your destination without having to take a car or transit trip at all, then that’s less infrastructure that needs to be built or managed.

Polycentricity

Over time, some of the triangles will switch to stars, crosses, or other weird shapes—which also become unique. Think of these as unique attractions, hospitals, or specific industry clusters—like Silicon Valley or Hollywood. That means all stations must have access to that weird shape or you’ll collect riders at the station (and lose the game).

This is often where things go south fast. That red line was fine on its own—it had it’s own core—until that weird triangle with a round bottom edge popped up. I’ll need to make sure both the red line and the rest of the system can get there. At this point I’m hoping I get offered a new line on Monday morning so I can connect them all together, but I’m also out of bridges (which is why the red line doesn’t connect to the rest of the system). I’ll either have to rehash the whole thing and do a very short connection across the river into the rest of the system or it’s going to fail and soon.

Since this is the last screenshot I took, I’m pretty sure it failed not long after this.

If you look closely, you’ll see the Yellow line is also likely to fail within a week or two. It’s getting too much activity at each stop and the train will be full before it gets back to the town center. I can add another train to it, but it’s a temporary fix. The line is too long and the ends are too far from the core of the city. The stations will intensify faster than I’ll be able to keep up. As long as the city has to reach these outlying unique stations and the original core, there’s going to be struggle to serve both.

Mushy Marchetti

This is how congestion and Marchetti’s constant create inevitable failure. Marchetti’s constant tells us that cities will grow until the typical commute time reaches about half an hour. BigThink did an outstanding description of it here based on David Montgomery’s Bloomberg Article for CityLab.

What none of them have considered is the impact of congestion. As long as the two centers must interact regularly, congestion will eventually push the centers more than half an hour apart. The distance doesn’t change, but the time to get there does—and the time is all that matters.

This polycentricity problem isn’t new, but the car has made it far more obvious. So what’s the solution?

Over time, polycentric areas must reorient themselves to their own center and intensify from within. At that point they become multiple mono-centric cities—which now work on their own and can cooperate with the other new centers. Think of it as cell division—if a cell kept growing without dividing, it would eventually burst.

Now your turn!

The game was only a few dollars and was well worth the free time to make those transportation lessons come alive. (No, I’m not getting any of that money). There are 16 cities to try out and other modes that make it harder (or easier). After you’ve played a while, let me know what it has taught you. I’ll do a follow-up in a few weeks for any new insights.

I hope you all have a spectacular Thanksgiving!! There’s a lot to be grateful for and the remembering always re-energizes!! Love on someone for me this week!