Quotables IV...Getting Back to a New Normal

Cut out that doom scrolling. There's a real life hero's quest for you to conquer.

Earlier this year, I had started a series on different statements I wouldn’t mind being known for. I’m going back to transportation quotables by the end of this post, but I’ll give you a crisis one just to get things started:

A crisis will not ruin your organization. It will only show you what kind of organization you have.

That goes for marriages, companies, and a thousand other social groups. When the chips are down, you see how people react. I’ve seen lots of deep compassion and support over the last few weeks. I’ve also seen a lot of freaking out. There is profound fear that good programs are getting axed. So many of my friends are either losing their jobs or so afraid of losing their jobs that they have quit taking initiative. It ain’t pretty.

A reality check discussion:

Several of the moms hang out together at lunch on Wednesdays after our young adults with Down syndrome finish their morning class. Today the topic of discussion was grants and government work. One of my buddies (we’ll call her “C”) just recently joined the community advisory board for the local MPO. What she had in mind starting out was the ability to support and guide the transportation disadvantaged program—but she’s looking at the whole kit-and-caboodle now. She seemed flabbergasted that projects take 9-12 years to go from concept to ribbon cutting. My other friend at the table is a transportation grant writer (we’ll call her “J”). She knows how long it takes and how much the consultant projects cost—and the billable rates that are involved. Political will takes time to build. Even after you get money allocated, it takes 18 months or more to do procurement—and the consultants have almost as much money invested in the proposals as the government has at that point, money that all but one of them will lose. After the initial design, it goes into public involvement—and that really takes time. Then, once everyone is reasonably unhappy, the design is finalized, you have to send it out to right of way acquisition and then construction bids—more time and money—and that’s all before even a shovel-full of dirt is moved. She said they’re working on a contract or two that will do quick-builds using CSA contracts, but she’s too new to recognize how that will help (it will, but there’s a long way to go).

C has dealt with university grants in the past. One of them looked at one-on-one mentoring, group coaching, or no support for transition to work services for disabled folks in High Schools—for $28 million. One that she partnered with at a local university was $5 million and ended up only looking at 9 out of the 28 kids they had planned. The last phase of the project was cut off by COVID, so there was no final report, no outcomes, nothing to show for the entire effort. She hasn’t given up yet, but it’s hard for any of us to see 40-60% of a university budget going to overhead—straight off the top, before any salaries are paid, students are hired, or data is analyzed. All of that extra time means extra money. Our kids are worried about the US debt—and they have every right to be.

Reagan most famously said, “The most frightening words in the English language are:

‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’

(Run!)

I have been a transportation engineer for about 30 years now. I’ve been staring at the problem for this entire time trying to figure out how we got into this mess. The congestion never goes away. Our society is fraying at the edges. We are vulnerable to foreign craziness. We are lonely, afraid, and disconnected. Our local businesses struggle to get customers, which makes us far too dependent on folks from the other side of the world. The car isn’t responsible for all of that, but I’d peg it as a huge part of about 60% of it.

I’m working through the history of the railroads and robber barons at the moment and I’m more convinced every day that government intervention is a huge part of the problem. Well meaning people see a problem too big to wrap their arms around. They look at the scale of the federal budget and think that if we throw enough government money at it, the problem will get fixed—the best experts will get called in, their wisdom will save the world, and there will be plenty of money left over to actually fix the problem. I am one of those experts—I have a contract with FHWA to help them tackle some pretty gnarly issues. Will they care about those issues in a year? I hope so. I think there are ways that the government could help that are inexpensive and efficient. Mostly, they could get out of the way.

Some of those experts are more Profits than Prophets. More often than not, whoever the political donors are determines the solutions that get funded, and usually that means money coming back into the donor’s pockets. This is a problem that goes back millennia, so no finger pointing. Motornormativity (a new term that focuses on how stupidity gets baked into our auto-oriented assumptions) was actively cultivated by folks that made cars and tires. GM was actually convicted of creating a monopoly and driving the local street-cars out of business. They got a slap on the wrist, but the long term consequences have been devastating to our hearts, minds and pocketbooks.

What was good for GM was not good for the country.

Federal dollars enabled driving after WWII as a military strategy—but it was your money, collected from individuals and businesses all over the US that was used to create the 90/10 match. They took your money and handed it back to you telling you it was free. There is no free lunch. You paid for it.

This didn’t start with the interstates. Before that, government money was drawn into the railroads. James Hill had built his own railroad without any subsidies, but the other robber barons got federal help, and ended up not doing nearly as well because of it. When it’s your own money on the line, you take care of your people and make things efficient. When it’s Uncle Sam’s money, fast and stupid are the SOP. When they still couldn’t compete with Hill even with the Federal money, they called foul on a monopoly, making sure that they could keep him from undercutting their prices. This is the case where the term predatory pricing was introduced. Predatory pricing is a myth. A better product and an efficient back end can explain most of the big boys. Same happened again with Standard Oil. Why do we all use Google? Because 2nd best isn’t even close. Firefox gave Chrome a run for their money for a moment, but it didn’t last long. As the accident attorney John Morgan says, “How did we get big? We won, a lot.”

I’m not saying anti-trust legislation is always a problem. When we stopped enforcing antitrust legislation in the retail industry, it drove all the local grocers out of business—not because the big boys were better at providing for the customer, but because they could cut better deals with logistics providers when the little guys were out of the picture. That was bad for the logistics industry and bad for the local grocers. It’s also enabled us to source stuff from a lot farther than was wise.

But what about congestion?

No one likes being stuck in traffic. Inexpensive fuel feels like a boon, especially for lower income families. There’s a trickle down effect in fuel prices that is unique and ubiquitous. Getting that cost down is a huge help to them. Unfortunately, the secondary impact is that traffic always gets a lot worse when gas prices go down. The proximate solution is to widen the road, but that’s a trap. Congestion management is a classic wicked problem: every direct solution you try only makes it worse. We’ve been widening for 80 years now. If it were going to fix the problem, it would have done it by now. You can’t pave over the world.

This is where the next quotable comes in:

Widening from 2 to 4 is harsh medicine but widening from 4 to 6 kills the patient and empties their bank account.

Network works.

Widening always costs you far more than money. As I was prepping for the ITE walking tour of Winter Garden a few weeks ago, I went through the history of their CRA—a brilliant win-win strategy that has revitalized many communities in Florida that is currently under assault in the legislature. One of the early hurdles they had to fend off was the FDOT proposal to widen their main street through the middle of town to a 5-lane highway. There were only 3 businesses functioning in the downtown at that point. The extra width would have attracted all the local traffic that uses the network system now and driven away even those few businesses that remained. It would have created a local route that parallels SR 50 that would be just as congested as SR 50 is today. None of what came later could have ever materialized. That CRA has grown the tax base from $23M in 1992 to $340M today—and made it the talk of the region and the world. The extra lanes weren’t needed. The town core was. A downtown core should always be a place, not a link.

There are other streets in Winter Garden that didn’t cut through the center of town that could have survived widening to 4-lanes, maybe, but they didn’t have to. We have plenty of roadway network in the old city so the local traffic never gets overloaded. Even Story Road, which also parallels SR 50, is rarely overloaded and it’s still 2 lanes. It’s a lot straighter road and has fewer interruptions, so, in theory, it should be way over capacity, but it’s not and never will be. There are other options.

Widening from 2 to 4 usually shifts the dominance entirely to the car, because the cross section looks wide. With the dominance shifted, it attracts more traffic. Cognitively, the route becomes prioritized, even if there are alternatives. New businesses push themselves back from the road behind ever larger parking lots. Older properties might still be close to the road, but no one wants to walk there so they struggle to get people to stop in. No one wants to live on a 4-lane road, so any residential is ensconced behind subdivision walls or gets converted to commercial uses. Those walls mean no connectivity between the neighborhoods (who wants the cut-through traffic?), which means everyone uses the new, wider, increasingly congested road—but certainly not for walking or biking: too dangerous. When you run a traffic simulation into the future, you bump up against another quotable:

Travel demand models are an exercise in self fulfilling dread.

All the minor streets are usually eliminated in travel demand models, because they mess up the current year prediction. Unfortunately, this means that the redundancy that could get used by local drivers is never considered, and the model shows the future year traffic as completely overloaded. Of course, that answer implies that you’ll have to widen it again.

The angst that started with the 2-4 widening becomes toxic at the 4-6 stage. Widening from 4 to 6 lanes usually involves buying a bunch of the property along the road—which makes it exorbitantly expensive both during the project and later when you need to maintain it. Even if you subsidize the businesses during construction, the new layout kills them within a year or two. The parking lots get bigger—which leads to much higher speed and really inattentive drivers. The character of SR 50 didn’t survive going to 6-lanes and that usually seems to be the case. Only a handful of the original businesses survived—even the Burger King had to be completely reconstructed—and getting in and out of them is painful.

Even if you set aside enough Right of Way for a future widening when you first build a road, the logical design choices for the road—wide buffers on each side, medians, wide lanes—mean that people will use it like a highway, no matter what you post it at. It’s no surprise that developers throw up subdivision walls and buffering from the future monstrosity. The planning process itself will rule out ever having a street there.

So what is the solution?

So, Patricia, you’re the expert. What do we do about it? Here’s a few more quotables that I’d love to be known for:

I am not against driving. I love to drive. As our only option, it's a prison.

The Feds have had their thumb on the scales in favor of the automobile for the last century. For the last 20 years, they tried to add another thumb to the walking and biking side. It’s probably time to get rid of both thumbs.

It is time to rebalance our network. We have plenty of big roads. If we didn’t build any more for another 3 decades, our cities and local governments would be far more solvent. Maintenance is a problem that is rapidly blowing up in our faces. Impact fees collected from a developer may be able to fund the initial roadway construction, but the minute that it is handed over to the local agency, they haven’t gained an asset. They’ve taken on an obligation. If you built on the roads you already had, the value per acre goes up too, and that will help you take in as much revenue as you will need to pay out in utilities and facilities maintenance.

Going forward, we need connections that work at a local scale to balance out all the arterials and collectors we already have. There’s good news on that score:

Sidewalks and bike paths are a lot cheaper than travel lanes.

This answer may be simple, but it will not be easy.

We didn’t get her overnight. We’re not getting out of here overnight either.

The best answers are going to come incrementally—one day at a time, one project at a time.

The hero’s quest:

As in any good story, there are three challenges our heroes will have to face to get our great grandchildren a future they can live with:

Obviously, our first challenge is that no one wants to walk or bike right now. You can hear the critics cry: The weather’s bad, it’s not safe, and there’s nowhere to go anyway.

If you give people somewhere to go within a reasonable distance, people will make a way. (We see it in the pedestrian fatalities). The land use side is rapidly changing on its own. The only way for brick and mortar retail to compete with Amazon is to create relationships with their customers—and you can’t do that if you’re not in their neighborhood. Most areas have grocery stores within a mile or two, and that is imminently bikeable, especially with a pedal-assist e-bike. Under those circumstances, if you build it they will come. Adding kid-friendly bike and walk features will mean all it takes is an early adopter and a second joiner, and it will regularly get used. It’s going to have to be easy enough for a 7 year old to use it, but that’s doable.

The second challenge is that trying to create a federal bike or walk system is like whittling with a sledgehammer. The scale is off. The locals can do a much better job at that. Even trying to fund this federally will just repeat the mistakes of the past. Time to take hands off, send the money back to the locals and let them do their job. It may take time for them to recognize what they need to do about these shifts, but money talks, and walkable urban is making a lot of people money right now.

Are some communities going to mess it up? Absolutely. That’s their right. It’s time to let grownups be grownups and give them a chance to live with the consequences. How will anyone figure it out if we keep trying to rescue them? All it takes is one community doing it right to show everyone else the way: Barcelona showed us that.

The real challenge is finding champions who understand the problem and are willing to go to bat to solve it at a local level. I can’t make you take ownership for your own hometown, but I can work to make sure that someone does that where I live. You can do the same.

Getting the information out is another matter entirely. Knowing how to implement safe, connected bike and walk systems is not something that everyone has experience with—and a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Even knowing that it can and should be done is not getting traction—especially in the south where most conservatives live.

This is a way that the feds can make a meaningful contribution. The reason they hired me is because I’ve been able to unlock the code for why a street and a road don’t work the same and what it takes to get streets to work well. A list of engineering details is great, but without a way to think about the problem, innovation isn’t possible. These teams have a lot of experience working out the details in real life. There is an entire group that used to do nothing but travel to different areas teaching local folks how to make places where all people can move around safely. The bully pulpit extends to everyone in the executive branch—which is all of those agencies that are currently under fire. Is it too late to fix those relationships? I hope not.

We still have a pedestrian and bike fatality problem that has not gone away—if anything, it’s getting worse. After looking at the most recent 5 years of data, I’m convinced that about half of those fatalities are coming from working class folks who are just trying to get across the road to a store after work—often to feed their kids dinner, get diapers, or walk home from their job. That’s not ok and those are people that this administration cares about. They shouldn’t have to drive 700 feet to get to the store on the other side of the road. That’s silly.

From a bigger picture standpoint, having all of our eggs in the car-centric basket is costing us a lot more than money and time. It’s tearing apart the social connections within our communities. Without people walking around in the neighborhood, no one knows anyone else—we’re stuck at home watching an endless news cycle that is making money on building fear. We care more about national politics than the people down the street because that’s what we’re staring at. Only we can’t do nearly as much about stuff in Washington than we can in our own neighborhoods. We feel powerless because we’re focusing on stuff that we can’t do anything about nationally instead of what we can do locally. Our power never changed. Only our focus.

Without places where people will feel safe to walk and bike, congestion is only going to get worse. Local businesses will not have the foot traffic to compete against multinational conglomerates. Our kids will have nowhere to go and will get mentored by people we don’t know. We can complain all day about kids being consumed by screens, but without walkable places, what else are they going to do? Our seniors will die lonely and afraid, either locked in nursing homes or alone in their own homes—and they’ll die a lot earlier because they can’t get the kind of exercise into their daily routines that keeps people living longer.

It’s not a war on cars. Its a grass-roots fight to take back our lives.

Tomorrow:

To implement these types of changes in your community, a cookie-cutter approach is not going to work. Every place is unique and requires its own approach both for design and administration. That’s why I’m unpacking the Fractal of 7. When you know what principle your community is framed around, you can use that to help them make their home the best version of itself.