Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Conversations about Creating a Culture of Activity: Profiling the people, places, programs, and policies that help to promote a culture of activity within our communities.
Note: This transcript was exported from the video version of this episode, and it has not been copyedited
00:00:00:18 - 00:00:08:19
John Simmerman
All right, all right, all right. We are live. We are live. Welcome back to the Active Towns podcast, Chuck Aaron.
00:00:08:21 - 00:00:10:08
Chuck Marohn
Hey, friend. Nice to see you.
00:00:10:10 - 00:00:36:12
John Simmerman
Yes, very nice to see you. This is always special, being able to broadcast live with you, out here in the YouTube format. We have done this multiple times over the years. Since I started the YouTube channel back in 2021, after I interviewed a chap by the name of Jason Slaughter with Not Just Bikes. And, I was like, oh, hey, this is kind of cool hanging out in the YouTube world.
00:00:36:14 - 00:00:56:06
John Simmerman
So this is this is fun. Now, we didn't do a live broadcast last year because we were together in Providence and did a walk and talk, and we'll talk a little bit about that, later, because it's going to be pertinent to the discussion that we're having today, which is mission accomplished. Time to end highway expansions.
00:00:56:09 - 00:01:11:20
John Simmerman
And, we got to see, a highway removal project there in Providence, which was fantastic. So we'll talk a little bit about that. But, first and foremost, let's turn the tables over to you and just do a quick introduction. Who the heck is Chuck Marone?
00:01:11:22 - 00:01:35:23
Chuck Marohn
Hey, man, it's nice to see you. I'm the. I'm the founder and president of an organization called Strong Towns. And we do advocacy around making cities financially stronger and more prosperous places to live. That intersects with a whole bunch of things that people just experience in their daily lives. I'm a civil engineer. I'm a Land-Use planner. I'm also an author.
00:01:35:25 - 00:01:57:22
Chuck Marohn
And so a lot of what we look at are things like, how does Safe Streets affect where we live? How does housing options and availability affect the financial health of our cities? How do in the case of the stuff we're going to talk mostly about today, how do highway expansions impact, our local economy, our regional economy, our national economy?
00:01:57:25 - 00:02:25:21
Chuck Marohn
And again, you know, how we live as families and small businesses. So we focused mostly bottom up. We've got thousands of members around the world. We've got hundreds of what we call local conversations, local groups that are working in different cities to to change their conversation, their and make their places stronger. And yeah, you and I go way, way back to the very early days where Strong Towns was just me writing a blog.
00:02:25:24 - 00:02:37:01
Chuck Marohn
And so you've kind of been, an active partner and, and kind of going alongside of us that entire time. So I kind of feel like, you know, we're old hat together, you and me.
00:02:37:04 - 00:02:50:06
John Simmerman
Yeah. It's funny. I think we first physically met back at CNU 20, in West Palm Beach, Florida. Okay. And, and so that would have been in 2022.
00:02:50:08 - 00:02:52:00
Chuck Marohn
My corduroy jacket days.
00:02:52:03 - 00:02:54:09
John Simmerman
Yeah. Your corduroy jacket days. I was hanging.
00:02:54:09 - 00:02:56:19
Chuck Marohn
Out. I've told you that story, right?
00:02:56:21 - 00:02:57:29
John Simmerman
No, no. Tell me the story.
00:02:57:29 - 00:03:29:11
Chuck Marohn
Corduroy jacket. The only. Okay, I'm going to seeing you. And I know that, you know. But seeing you there, a bunch of hoity toity architects or a bunch of them, and they all, like, dress like they're important. And I'm. And I'm an engineer from a small town in Minnesota. I don't have nice clothes. I mean, my stuff comes from, like, jcpenney's use racks, but I had, like, a corduroy, blazer and I'm like, well, I'll bring this corduroy blazer and I'll wear it if it's appropriate.
00:03:29:11 - 00:03:48:27
Chuck Marohn
Like, you know, in, in the hall. And I got there, and it never occurred to me that, like, corduroy would not go well with West Palm Beach. Hot. It's just like, because I'm from Minnesota. I mean, that's like, that's what you would wear. And, everybody, like, not everybody, but a lot of people were like, wow, corduroy.
00:03:48:27 - 00:04:15:21
Chuck Marohn
That's really bold. And I got my remarks on it and I thought, what, what, what am I like? It took me a while to figure out why people were remarking, you know, like why this was odd to people. Because I thought, like, wow, I must look really good in this thing. No, you just look really dumb in 90 degree with, like, 85% humidity, walking around in corduroy.
00:04:15:24 - 00:04:35:28
John Simmerman
So. Yeah. Yeah. Well, in the irony, of course, is that, you know, in hot environments like Florida in Austin, Texas, where I used to live, somewhat here in Hawaii, in Kona in the summertime, it's, it's it can be very, very hot outside, but then inside it's so incredibly cold because they're pumping the AC like like crazy.
00:04:36:00 - 00:04:41:23
John Simmerman
So you were probably quite comfortable indoors, but then as soon as you stepped out, you were like, oh my God.
00:04:41:25 - 00:05:01:13
Chuck Marohn
I'm belt. I mean, I just thought, I mean, at that point you know, I've got a wardrobe now because I have to because I do a lot more public speaking and going around. But yeah, you know, back then it was like I just thought being hot and uncomfortable kind of went along with having a sport coat on, like, you know, fancy clothes.
00:05:01:18 - 00:05:14:07
Chuck Marohn
So you can see I'm in my office attire today, which is, you know, any time I come into the studio here. Yeah. Where I don't have to travel. And I'm sorry I didn't dress up, you know, for you, but I figured you wouldn't. You'd be cool with it.
00:05:14:07 - 00:05:31:02
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah, it's it's half the time, you know, one of us is dressing down. I happen to be, wearing a collared shirt, here today, but, Yeah. Why don't you, step back just a little bit and tell a little bit of the story of the sweatshirt that you're in? Because I know the story, but,
00:05:31:07 - 00:05:32:15
John Simmerman
Yeah. Go ahead.
00:05:32:17 - 00:05:54:06
Chuck Marohn
So I went, okay, I'm working on the fourth book. I've got a five book agreement with Wiley Publishing. The fourth book is going to be on economic development. And as part of that, I've, I've been able to to incorporate some field research. I was I was told that the city of Hazzard, Kentucky is doing some really cool things in their downtown.
00:05:54:09 - 00:06:27:19
Chuck Marohn
Let me just say that's an understatement. And I don't, you know, I'm still kind of processing my thoughts about it. But I will say this as a as a northerner, as a minnesotan, if you told me exciting, innovative, doing like strong towns stuff, where is that place? And you gave me a hundred, you know, 100 guesses, I would never have come up with southern Kentucky as a place.
00:06:27:19 - 00:07:09:11
Chuck Marohn
And that's because of my ignorance. That's because, like, I did not correctly understand what was going on there. I went to Hazzard and spent the day. They were so generous to me with their time, showing me around, talking to me about their journey. I want to without putting them down in any way. I want to say a place that started near rock bottom or near the bottom, but through really, like, inspiring, incremental, like, let's do this thing in this thing and this thing built up to where they've got a downtown that is very successful today and, you know, full of local businesses, full of local success stories, compete out competing Amazon with
00:07:09:11 - 00:07:41:00
Chuck Marohn
like a local strategy that is really innovative, doing all kinds of retail and service and, and food. This is an exciting place. And it was really the byproduct of artists, people who really just cared about that. Like, some of the most inspiring things were how when they did think they needed outside technical professionals and they would bring in an architect and an architect and say, you can't do this, and you got to spend millions of dollars doing it this way.
00:07:41:03 - 00:07:59:29
Chuck Marohn
And then the architect would leave and they would say, okay, what's the essence of what we are required to do? Let's roll up our sleeves and figure out how to do it for $50,000. And that's what they did over and over and over again. And so inspiring. Yeah. So when I left, I, they had a clothier there that was a local.
00:08:00:04 - 00:08:22:06
Chuck Marohn
Like they actually make the sweatshirts there, right. You know, do all the printing. So I'm like, first of all I need a Hazzard sweatshirt because I'm going to wear this because I want people to ask me about Hazzard. And then, you know, I bought another one too, on Appalachia. I'm just really this is not a place that I thought I would fit in, right?
00:08:22:06 - 00:08:44:21
Chuck Marohn
And I just loved it for so many reasons and let me also say, because I think we all have a sense of what Appalachia is. I mean, I am from Minnesota, we are very nice, but we do think a lot of ourselves in terms of we're very smart, we're very prudent. We you know, that dotted and, I think if we were condescending, we would never be to your face.
00:08:44:26 - 00:09:16:11
Chuck Marohn
But behind your back, Minnesotans might be like, well, Appalachia, you know, they're. Yeah. What I'm telling you, I was brought around. The tour I got was from a young female artist, a black entrepreneur, and a gay, married man who ran a, an art center. They said we love it here. Everybody loves us. We love everybody.
00:09:16:11 - 00:09:47:07
Chuck Marohn
We're accepted like we're part of the heartbeat of this community. This is the most like, fantastic, exciting place you can be. And, you know, I even ran into a Catholic married man who was so proud of what he did that he held his wedding reception in the downtown, like, took over the street and did his wedding reception there so his family would have to come to the downtown and experience how cool it was because they thought the downtown is horrible, hazardous, horrible.
00:09:47:13 - 00:10:06:10
Chuck Marohn
Like, this place is really bad. And he's like, now let me show you. It's really super cool. Yeah. So I just I'm so jazzed about it, I, I really am excited to tell stories in this book because the economic development thing is the thing that everybody kind of circles around. You know, we're going to expand highways for growth.
00:10:06:16 - 00:10:28:26
Chuck Marohn
We're going to scrub the street for economic development. No, we can't take out those parking spots because jobs. And I think what's exciting about writing this book is not only getting to challenge some of those paradigms, but then show over and over and over again the way people are doing the most astounding things without any of those pre assumptions built in.
00:10:28:26 - 00:10:57:00
John Simmerman
Right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Now, okay. So we talked a little bit about the book. So let's the books you know the five book deal with Wiley. So we had the first book, which was Strong Towns and really introducing the organization in a formal way. You had previously written a version of that first book that was kind of like Amazon self-published sort of thing, which was probably a good exercise for you.
00:10:57:00 - 00:11:22:23
John Simmerman
And like you said, you and I go way, way back, you know, 2012 was when we first met in person, 20 12th December is when I, finished, a focused interview and survey that I was conducting and narrowed in on my next initiatives, because in 2020 or 2011, I founded my nonprofit, advocates for Healthy Communities.
00:11:22:25 - 00:11:44:27
John Simmerman
I was conducting a study, and I was trying to understand why certain towns, certain communities have this culture of activity. And, and this phrase kept coming up, oh, I moved to this place, fill in the blank, whether it's Austin, Texas or Boulder, Colorado or wherever, because it was an active community. It was an active city. It was an active town.
00:11:45:00 - 00:12:13:07
John Simmerman
Then the only URL's available were was active towns, sorg and active towns. Dot com I reached out to you in December of 2012 and said, Chuck, is it okay? Is it okay if I name my next two active towns and you're like, hell yeah, go for it. I did, and so in 2013, I hit the road with my little Honda Element and traveled all over the place, including I went up to Minnesota.
00:12:13:08 - 00:12:20:02
John Simmerman
Yeah. Soda to to hang out with you a little bit. And, and and these are some of the images that I shot in.
00:12:20:05 - 00:12:20:21
Chuck Marohn
June.
00:12:20:27 - 00:12:43:13
John Simmerman
June 30th, 2013. It it's almost feels like a movie set. And you know what I say when I say that because, you know, there's a little bit of life, but, yeah, you know, this is this is your reality, this is your hometown. This is where you grew up. I mean, literally, you place on a.
00:12:43:13 - 00:12:44:06
Chuck Marohn
Farm.
00:12:44:09 - 00:13:17:15
John Simmerman
Just outside, but this is the. Yeah, this is the historic water tower. And this is what inspired living in this environment and trying to get your head wrapped around the insanity of our development pattern. Now, compared to when you know, these communities, these types of communities, and your curbside chat has a series of photos that talks about when this was just ramshackle little wooden shacks and then got grand.
00:13:17:17 - 00:13:40:00
John Simmerman
And then, you know, the irony, of course, is that there were beautiful structures here that got torn through here. Empty lots and parking lots. Yeah. Talk a little bit about that story. Because that's part of the DNA of how we got to the writing that first book. And then we'll talk about the second book, confessions in the third book, The Housing Trap, and then the fourth book coming.
00:13:40:00 - 00:13:41:06
John Simmerman
Yeah.
00:13:41:08 - 00:14:07:10
Chuck Marohn
You were you were here. And I will always be grateful to you because I, I'm it's hard. Even when you show these pictures, I get a little emotional because, I mean, like, this is my place. I love it, I love it, like, deeply and in an irrational way. I, I've recognized that I am now old enough to remember things that most people do not.
00:14:07:17 - 00:14:27:14
Chuck Marohn
I mean, I'm only 52. It's not like I'm old, but like that particular corner right there. I remember when that burned down, like I remember when that was. Those were businesses in there, and now it's a parking lot. I remember that. And I remember, like, I was on my way to school on the school bus, and we were going by and you could see the smoke coming out of downtown.
00:14:27:20 - 00:14:43:21
Chuck Marohn
I remember when that burned down, I remember, you know, across the street and up the block when that was the twin movie theater, the place where I saw Star Wars as a little kid, and of course, Star Wars, like, you know, like every, every kid that is my age was shaped by Star Wars to one degree or another.
00:14:43:21 - 00:15:18:02
Chuck Marohn
I mean, we played that every day at home. I dressed up as Star Wars characters for Halloween every year. So this is my place. And you being able to describe, you know, as an engineer and as a planner, the, the you kind of irrational tearing down and pursuit of this kind of new way of building that that we and really every city in North America has pursued since the end of World War two.
00:15:18:04 - 00:15:34:26
Chuck Marohn
That's that's what my first book is about. And, you know, I think I grew up in a place where we, we it was so exciting to get the Walmart, and it was so exciting to get the the target store. And it was so exciting to get the Arby's drive through because that felt like and look like progress.
00:15:34:26 - 00:16:10:22
Chuck Marohn
And I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm saying those things like I lived through that. That was my experience. I remember going through the taco Bell drive through as a teenager going, oh my gosh, like, we're this is this place is happening now. We got a Taco Bell because this was like a nothing town in the middle of nowhere. It it has it took me a while to recognize not just what we lost from a, you know, the heart strings standpoint, but these were horrible financial decisions.
00:16:10:22 - 00:16:38:10
Chuck Marohn
These were decisions that we are still struggling to recover from financially. Because when we when we look at just basic financial modeling, this block right here is the most financially productive block. Despite the decline and half the block being parking, it is one of the top five most productive square foot of land in all of central Minnesota.
00:16:38:12 - 00:17:11:19
John Simmerman
And Chuck, what you mean by it. And Chuck, what you mean by that is literally on a per acre basis, the return of revenue to the coffers of the city is much greater than the same, you know, amount of space, the same jar, you know, the same acreage, at a large framed, quote unquote, traditional modern big block, you know, big box store where over half of the things are, you know, a parking lot or whatever.
00:17:11:21 - 00:17:34:29
John Simmerman
And you do a great job of just comparing, like the Taco John's to the little run down thing and those little run down things are less impressive than this. And yet and even those, you know, little shops and stores, they were single story. They still can, you know, returned more tax revenue than the brand new spanking new Taco John's.
00:17:35:02 - 00:17:36:12
John Simmerman
Yeah.
00:17:36:15 - 00:17:55:05
Chuck Marohn
I feel like a lot of times when people, first come across town, shrink towns, they, they want to put us through like a traditional urbanist lens, which is I love cities, aren't they great? And there's a, there's a reaction to that, which is like, you know, cities are cities are run down, they're decrepit, they're dangerous. They're what?
00:17:55:07 - 00:18:19:27
Chuck Marohn
I, I don't when I look at that and when I say that, what I'm saying is that as an engineer, I'm a civil engineer. We have we have paved, we have put in sidewalks, we put in street lights, we put in drainage systems and sewer and water and utilities. We built these things at a cost. We then get tax base, that relationship with that, that relationship between what we get and what we spend.
00:18:20:00 - 00:18:41:18
Chuck Marohn
The best nine blocks is, are these nine blocks in downtown, right in the entire county? We've modeled the entire county. That is the best. Some of the worst is the stuff out on the highway strip, where we've got the Super Walmart and the Costco and the Home Depot. Not because those places are not big taxpayers. And don't they?
00:18:41:19 - 00:19:05:12
Chuck Marohn
They they do pay a lot of taxes, but they take an enormous amount of public infrastructure in order to get that investment and sustain that investment. And when you you look at it in two dimensions, not just one who's our biggest taxpayer? Walmart, Costco, where is our highest return on investment? The core of the downtown. And it's not even you, it's John.
00:19:05:12 - 00:19:41:07
Chuck Marohn
It's not even close. It's like 20 X difference. It's it is not like we're talking like a little bit. It is so phenomenally different. So the more stuff we build on the edge, the poorer we get. The more stuff we tear down the downtown, the poorer we get. I live five blocks from the core downtown, and, you know, my entire neighborhood has been atrophied and and just, like, gone through decades and decades and decades of decline and neglect because we think they actions out on the edge and the reality is, is all the action is in the middle of the city.
00:19:41:07 - 00:19:44:05
Chuck Marohn
And if we focused on that, we would be rich.
00:19:44:07 - 00:20:32:13
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. And of course, are very good friends, and colleagues. Joe, I'm in a cozy with urban three. His firm does a fantastic job of actually modeling that return that you're talking about. And you can kind of see this in the landing page on his website here. Those those tall, spiky red bars are that tax revenue per acre return on those core downtown areas, which is basically saying in another way that as we spread out horizontally, we, you know, continued to to have to invest in the infrastructure to be able to, you know, make those places livable and, you know, available for commerce, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
00:20:32:19 - 00:20:59:01
John Simmerman
But at the same time, you are not able to collect enough taxes to actually support the long term viability and the long term risk, you know, liability, financial liabilities of those properties. So what ends up happening is our downtown cores, sometimes rundown downtown cores end up supporting the suburbs, which is counterintuitive because most people don't believe that that is the case.
00:20:59:03 - 00:20:59:24
John Simmerman
Well.
00:20:59:27 - 00:21:21:05
Chuck Marohn
We've call it a Ponzi scheme, because out on the edge, when you build, you generally can have those costs wrapped up into something else. I mean, I do this kind of work as an engineer in my early years of doing it, and I remember working for like Menards and Menards paid to run all the sewer and water and roadway when they built their store, and then they gifted it to the city.
00:21:21:11 - 00:21:57:09
Chuck Marohn
So from the city, it's just like sheer revenue, like this is just we're just raking in money. The thing is, when you have to go fix that stuff, ultimately that's when the price insolvency comes in. So in a Ponzi scheme way, you get like 2 or 3 decades of free cash flow, and then you get this huge fiscal cliff that you know, is bankrupting the city, is weighing down everything else, is is making it so we can't invest in all the other things we have, but we have the husk of a of a building now out on the edge where, you know, with sewer and water.
00:21:57:11 - 00:22:20:08
Chuck Marohn
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Joe has called him and him and me. He said we're, we're peanut butter and chocolate and I think I'm the peanut butter of that. I think Joe's the chocolate. Yeah. I for years understood the cost part of it, but the revenue side of it was a mystery to me. And Joe understood the revenue side, but did not understand the cost side.
00:22:20:11 - 00:22:41:22
Chuck Marohn
And you and I met in West Palm Beach. Joe and I met in Madison at seeing you there. And when I met him, it was one of the most exciting days of my life because he literally got up and in six minutes answered all of the questions I was struggling with. And then I got up and answered all the questions he was struggling with, with my six minute presentation.
00:22:41:24 - 00:22:47:09
Chuck Marohn
And then we've just been, like, in love with each other ever since.
00:22:47:12 - 00:23:12:12
John Simmerman
Yeah. It's fun. Your your one two punch when you and Joe give a presentation is is fantastic. Takes me back to the very first time that you and I shared stages together, which was in San Antonio back in 2014, which ultimately led to, you know, dot, dot dot us moving to Austin, Texas, 11 years ago, it November of 2014.
00:23:12:15 - 00:23:28:11
John Simmerman
And, and you know that those memories are like really, really special and cherished. Let's get to the second book. So the second book was confessions. Talk a little bit about confessions.
00:23:28:14 - 00:23:45:04
Chuck Marohn
When I said five books, I, I had one book in mind. And then as I was putting the outline together, it was like, you know, this is to do this, to do this in a way, it's got to be five books is kind of like, you know, George Lucas going with Star Wars and being like, here's the story I want to tell.
00:23:45:04 - 00:24:17:00
Chuck Marohn
And they're like, okay, pick the best one and do that one first. And if that one works, you can do the rest. Confessions was the book I wanted to write more than anything because it's all about it's about transportation. And I start the whole story with, the whole story centers around the streets in Springfield, Massachusetts, where I just happened to be there looking at this dangerous thing that the city had had and transformed this downtown street into the worst kind of traffic sewer.
00:24:17:03 - 00:24:39:08
Chuck Marohn
And it was clearly dangerous. And it was clearly like out of context with what was going on. There was a library on one side of the street, a parking lot on the other side of the street, and people just walking back and forth on this, basically like human bowling alley with cars, speeding in this one way through the middle of this walkable, otherwise walkable neighborhood.
00:24:39:10 - 00:25:15:02
Chuck Marohn
Yeah. And that very night this family was hit. A little girl was killed. She's the same age as my little girl was at that point. And I just remember sitting there in color agony, thinking like, what if? What if I had to go through this right now? Like, I can't, I can't imagine it. I think the story would have ended there, except the fact that the city, in a sense, refused to do anything as more and more people were hit and and multiple people were killed at this same site and the city went through like, every iteration of denial.
00:25:15:04 - 00:25:51:19
Chuck Marohn
And so the book is a analysis and breakdown of the mindset of an engineer from how we design streets to how we design roads, to how we fund projects, to how we handle safety, to all of that, trying to focus on the lens of this, this block in this experience. And at the end of each chapter, I try to so it's not all there's this fine line between wanting it to be a good read and a good story, and a kind of emotionally resonant with people and wanting to make it practical so people can actually take the lessons and apply them.
00:25:51:24 - 00:26:14:16
Chuck Marohn
So at the end of each chapter, I have like, here's the takeaway for the the technical professional or the mayor or the person, the council member who's trying to implement these ideas here's like the things you do. So to me, it's a it's a very practical book, but it is also hopefully one that is emotionally resonant enough where it makes people want to do things differently.
00:26:14:19 - 00:26:19:22
John Simmerman
Right? Yeah. And what year was this published?
00:26:19:24 - 00:26:42:19
Chuck Marohn
I think that was 21. Yeah. The first one was 2019. Yeah. And then I think this one was 2021 and I and then skipping the trip is 2024. Yeah. Yeah. So you know this so this book was the easiest one to write because it was such every story in here was a story that I had worked on for years and wanted to tell.
00:26:42:21 - 00:27:12:02
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. And we'll we'll see it later in this conversation. We're going to be talking about transportation a lot because we want to talk about Mission Accomplished. The, you know, bringing an end to our continuous expansion in addiction to highways and highway expansion. But before we do that, I did want to just comment and say that I find the confessions book to now be like a, it has a wonderful cousin.
00:27:12:02 - 00:27:33:19
John Simmerman
It has a wonderful partner book. Wes Marshall's book, killed by a traffic engineer. You know, this is again, that one two punch. It's like this one. Set it up. And then he he got inspired to to write his book. He came up with that title ten years ago, but because of the pandemic, he was able to really dive into the research on that.
00:27:33:21 - 00:28:10:01
John Simmerman
And I find your two books between Wes, his book and your book, and you guys had a wonderful, podcast episode where the two of you got and talk through, you know, the stuff because you're both writing from the same script. He just happens to be writing from a, a slightly different one. And he talks about it in, in I and we as a professor of engineering and, you know, responsible for trying to shape future minds and saying that, you know, and you say this too, we can't be in this blame game.
00:28:10:04 - 00:28:36:12
John Simmerman
And you and I had a live stream where we talked about, we can't have this blame game. That was three years ago or two years ago. We did the blame game three years ago, I think we did confessions. But talk a little bit about that, because I think that's a really important thing to have. Understanding that we have to have a certain sense of empathy for the fact that we can't just be blaming drivers, we can't be blaming the engineers.
00:28:36:19 - 00:28:43:09
John Simmerman
But at the same time, we have to be clear eyed about the reality of how we got where we are.
00:28:43:11 - 00:29:04:25
Chuck Marohn
Well, for me, let me do it this way. So my father in law is a civil engineer, which is kind of funny because my wife and I met in junior high in this very building I'm sitting in now, today, and, and dated all through junior high and high school and college and then got married. We had been dating a number of years and she said, like, her dad works for cities.
00:29:04:25 - 00:29:22:19
Chuck Marohn
And I thought, well, he's like drives a snow plow or something. That was my like, you know, assumption I had. I had no idea what he did, but I was putting in the context of like my kind of blue collar farm family and, I was over there one day and my future mother in law said, so you're going to college.
00:29:22:19 - 00:29:37:14
Chuck Marohn
What do you want to do in college? I think she was bright. I was going to say be a drummer, because that was part of what I wanted to do. And I said, well, I'm thinking about being a civil engineer. And she said, oh, well, Bill is a civil engineer. I looked at my girlfriend, you know, my wife now, and I'm like, you didn't tell me this.
00:29:37:14 - 00:30:03:01
Chuck Marohn
Like what? This thing crossed your mind that your dad is actually the thing that I want to go to school to do. When I'm writing this book and when I'm thinking about this and when I talk about empathy, a big part of the motivating factor here is recognizing that, I, I can't really look at my father in law and say your life was wasted, right?
00:30:03:08 - 00:30:28:09
Chuck Marohn
Or or you need to admit or acknowledge that your life was wasted building things. You know, you dedicated your entire professional career because he did. He the first company he worked for, our college was called suburban, and they literally built suburbia around many of the Saint Paul. I mean, he's 84 today. So he was like the very first, like suburban expansion.
00:30:28:09 - 00:30:49:12
Chuck Marohn
This was him is it's not a coherent conversation for us to have to me to say, your life has been wasted. Everything you did is bad. You know, throw it all out, flip over the chessboard like we're done. That's not I think there's an emotional part of that argument, but also is like a practical part of the argument.
00:30:49:19 - 00:31:15:20
Chuck Marohn
I think, trying to understand the motivations of why he and others in his generation did this and thought this was a good idea. What was good of it, you know what what what? Because we're stuck with it now. Like we have to keep it like we have to salvage some good out of it. I think there's also like a recognition that not just him, but like the generation that he taught is still there, doing this kind of work.
00:31:15:22 - 00:31:44:07
Chuck Marohn
The generation after that is like still there doing this. And we have to be able to communicate with them in a way that does not just say you are the problem, the end, but actually has a conversation about, okay, like, how do we meld the things that you're sensitive to in the priorities that you have with, I think an evolving understanding of, of how cities work and how this infrastructure is helpful or not.
00:31:44:10 - 00:32:10:24
Chuck Marohn
And I try to do that in my book. I mean, when I say confessions, I am inviting people to go on a journey with me of self reflection. I don't throw out level of service. I don't throw out, you know, warrants. I don't throw out a lot of the things that I see advocates saying, these are like horrible things that are produced, horrible outcomes.
00:32:10:24 - 00:32:39:00
Chuck Marohn
Get rid of them. I'm like, no, they're often misapplied when they're applied over here. They're genius. And when they're applied over here, they're missing. They're misapplied. Here's how we would apply it more consistently. That's an invitation for serious professionals to, in a sense, continue to learn. Which really that's what that's what engineering is best. Does. It never says we are done world without end.
00:32:39:00 - 00:32:50:11
Chuck Marohn
This is all over. It's like a continuous process of learning. And I'm I'm trying to invite them to do that as a way to solve these problems and make things better.
00:32:50:13 - 00:32:55:01
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. And what I found brilliant too, about, brilliant.
00:32:55:01 - 00:32:57:10
Chuck Marohn
Is a strong word. John.
00:32:57:12 - 00:33:20:10
John Simmerman
Well, what I found brilliant, too, about the combination of the two books. And it just so happens that your your book, escaping the housing trap is right next to killed by a traffic engineer. In my store, in my bookshop.org. This is, this is if, folks, if you support this, you know, little bookshop, you help support active towns.
00:33:20:12 - 00:33:50:01
John Simmerman
But what I found, you know, really wonderful about the combination and brilliant about the two books. Confessions and killed by a traffic Engineer, is that, you know, you know, he goes through that process of going, doing the research of understanding how we actually got in this mess and dictating and really understanding that all these guidelines and standards, etc., they they seem like they're science and evidence based, but in fact, they are not.
00:33:50:08 - 00:34:15:18
John Simmerman
And so you sort of teed it up. And then in terms of, hey, these are the confessions, these are the things that I'm working through. Why is it we are creating a system that is literally killing people? And he follows up and and really dives deep into that. So I was really, really, heartened by the fact that the two of you had that episode that you had, and that was fairly recent because it was after you and I saw each other.
00:34:15:20 - 00:34:19:18
John Simmerman
In Providence and, you know, and had our walk about.
00:34:19:20 - 00:34:21:27
Chuck Marohn
Well, can I make a confession now?
00:34:21:27 - 00:34:23:15
John Simmerman
Please do. Yeah.
00:34:23:18 - 00:34:54:26
Chuck Marohn
So, I did not know that West and I had met years ago, and I, you know, I apologize to him because I. I meet a lot of people, and I. I'm bad at names, and I try really hard. I do, but it's hard for me. Anyway, we met years ago, and I. I didn't recall that, but when his book came out, I had a very negative reaction to the title, and I had a very negative reaction to the title, because I feel like a lot of a lot of what we do as strong towns is bottom up building of consensus.
00:34:55:02 - 00:35:27:25
Chuck Marohn
I mean that that is our path to change. And that means that when you demonize people, when you, you know, I get the housing thing is very raw for me right now. And, you know, there's there's gimmes are good, NIMBYs are bad, NIMBYs are good, gimmes are bad. It's this like us versus them thing. And for the work that we are doing and the way we're trying to do it, which is bringing decision makers at the local level together with people who are influencing those decisions, to people, with people who want to see change.
00:35:28:01 - 00:35:57:17
Chuck Marohn
So elected officials, technical professionals, citizens, who cares how we talk about it when they are at war with each other? Nothing productive really happens. They actually need to be on the same page. And that means that we have to be able to talk to each other. So I had this negative reaction just to the cover of the book, and the idea that this would be something that would, would, in my circles, be perceived as antagonizing people that we need help with.
00:35:57:19 - 00:36:29:23
Chuck Marohn
Okay. Then I read the book and then I talked to Wes, and I'm like, this is such a beautiful this is such a beautiful compilation of things and is so brilliantly done. It's really well done. Wes is such a kind person and approachable person, just really someone who cares deeply. Someone who as a, you know, as an engineer himself, like says like we we need to own a little bit of this, and we need to have some, some moral urgency to what we do.
00:36:29:25 - 00:36:52:06
Chuck Marohn
I, I felt bad for my rather ignorant reaction to his work. And yeah, I'm glad to see you promoting it, because it is it is a great book and a great set of insights. To me, it is. It is. There's no such thing. It's Donald Trump's book on free parking for traffic engineering. That's what it is.
00:36:52:08 - 00:37:21:24
John Simmerman
Yeah, I I'll make a confession, too, since Wes is, another one of my really, really good friends in this space, I felt like, I was like, in between, you know, these two people that I love so much and respect so much, and. And I'm like, no, Chuck, you know, because you, you literally publicly, you know, talked in your presentation at, at Providence about the title of the book in the book.
00:37:21:27 - 00:37:44:20
John Simmerman
And I'm like, okay, how do I how do I intercede here? And the way that I did it was you and I the next day, we're filming, we were actually doing a walk about after we turned the cameras off. We had lunch and I said, please, Chuck, just read the book. I think the tours are preaching from the same script here, so I'm really glad that that happened.
00:37:44:20 - 00:37:45:16
John Simmerman
Yes.
00:37:45:18 - 00:38:12:03
Chuck Marohn
Yeah. It's okay. There's a certain and again, like the housing situation is really raw for me right now because I'm. Yeah, I mean there's, there's a certain, advocacy message that we get primed, particularly on social media and stuff. Yeah, that that kind of rewards confrontation. Right. And so to me, I when I was in Providence and I'm talking to our members, our local conversations are people who are working in the trenches.
00:38:12:06 - 00:38:39:26
Chuck Marohn
I'm like, you can't walk into a city engineer's office throwdown, killed by a traffic engineer and say, you're killing people. Like, that's just not how you have a dialog with someone, right? But I do think that you can take that book which talks to engineers in engineering ish language and say, hey, here's an excerpt that I think you could read that would maybe help you, you know, understand what people over here are upset about, or here's something.
00:38:39:28 - 00:39:03:27
Chuck Marohn
And so, yeah, I do. I feel like for me, when I'm talking to like, our people, I really try to get them to emphasize the empathy part and the humility part, and the idea that that engineer might be an old coot and a total jerk and not responsive to you. But until him, that person moves out of their job, you're going to have to work with them.
00:39:04:05 - 00:39:18:08
Chuck Marohn
So let's, let's, let's keep that like framing and, you know, try to make good things happen. I do think that that's important. But I also do think now that this book is a big part of making that happen.
00:39:18:10 - 00:39:33:02
John Simmerman
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And, and again, that that sense of empathy for understanding how we got here, which is a big part of that. It's raw right now. So let's get over to, escaping the housing trap. We and hey John about. Yeah, yeah.
00:39:33:04 - 00:39:56:20
Chuck Marohn
Can I say one thing on empathy? Yeah. Because I feel like in advocacy world, empathy is often misinterpreted as like sympathy or agreement. Yes. And it's really not. It's just understanding. I, I love my father in law. He is a nice man. And I've tried really hard to understand the mindset of people who did this kind of stuff in the 50s and 60s.
00:39:56:23 - 00:40:07:06
Chuck Marohn
That doesn't mean I think it's right, or that I agree with it, or that I think we should have done it. There's a very different empathy is just trying to understand the world from their perspective. Right? Right.
00:40:07:12 - 00:40:33:17
John Simmerman
Yes. Yes. Yeah. That that understanding how we got here and understanding that, you know, in West has a fabulous job of talking about this because he talks about how these engineers are actually trained and, you know, the fact that, you know, they may only have one if not if that, you know, class on transportation and then are suddenly, you know, thrown into needing to to do that.
00:40:33:19 - 00:40:59:07
John Simmerman
We'll get back to transportation a little bit. But because it's raw, let's talk a little bit about this book that came out. And you and I talked about this book extensively on our walkabout at Kgnu in Cincinnati. And so I'll, I'll point people to that particular, series of videos. I think it's, I think it's a two part, yeah, we walked around Cincinnati and we talked about, escaping the housing trap.
00:40:59:10 - 00:41:10:14
John Simmerman
You wrote this along with, Daniel here, I guess, talk a little bit about escaping the housing trap and why this is so raw. The housing situation.
00:41:10:16 - 00:41:34:18
Chuck Marohn
I mean, how's he was in the state of the Union speech this week? I did not watch it, but I saw the news reports and all that. You know, we we we have taken the places that we live. And for reasons that, you know, I spend three chapters in the book kind of outlining, we have turned them into financial products.
00:41:34:20 - 00:41:56:24
Chuck Marohn
And so a house is doing two things that ultimately are at odds with each other. The first thing it's doing is providing people shelter, a place to live. And in the United States, you know, the your home is your castle. It's the American dream to own a home. We we we've created a whole mythos around homeownership, here in the United States.
00:41:56:26 - 00:42:16:24
Chuck Marohn
But that mythos does not necessarily drive home ownership as much as it drives. The other thing that a home is, which is a base, foundational financial product for our economy. When people buy homes, they generally do that through a mortgage, mortgages today. And this is different than it was 100 years ago. And it's evolved to this.
00:42:16:24 - 00:42:34:02
Chuck Marohn
So it didn't happen overnight. It's been a constant series of shifts and responses. But when you buy a house and you get a mortgage, that mortgage is bundled with other. It's sold off to a secondary market, it's bundled with other mortgages turned into all kinds of financial products. And derivatives and financial products. And then there's bets made on them.
00:42:34:02 - 00:43:00:28
Chuck Marohn
And those products become the the reserve in a sense, the foundational reserve, a pension funds and insurance companies and banks. And so the tension it creates in our system is that as a financial product, not only does it can't drop in value because it literally undermines the financial foundation of banks and insurance companies and pension funds and everything else.
00:43:01:00 - 00:43:21:26
Chuck Marohn
But it really helps everything if it goes up in value, if these things appreciate and become more financially secure over time and pay, you know you can do more bets on them and have lower carrying costs on them. Like, this is all really good. So an economy, when housing prices are going up like everything prospers across the board.
00:43:21:28 - 00:43:57:09
Chuck Marohn
And in an economy where housing prices stagnate or, you know, let's just say drop, all kinds of bad, bad consequences happen throughout the financial system. The problem is when housing prices go up, it becomes harder to buy a house. And when housing prices systematically go up across the board for decades and decades and decades, people get squeezed out of homeownership in a way that, you know, as we see this large group of millennials kind of flow into this age where, okay, I'll rent for a while and, trying to get into a house, so can I get into a house?
00:43:57:11 - 00:44:28:28
Chuck Marohn
And many, many, many of them are finding themselves shut out of homeownership. It has created, a lot of instability, a lot of friction, a lot of, you know, a lot of difficulty throughout our society culturally, financially, and, you know, in many other dimensions. This is the trap, right? Yeah. He can't be a good financial product and a home, you know, broadly affordable home at the same time.
00:44:29:01 - 00:44:36:03
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. Shelter or investment product. You know, your retirement or shelter. Yeah. Yeah.
00:44:36:05 - 00:44:56:29
Chuck Marohn
And I think the thing that is like to me like very raw. Right now is that there's a, there's a huge conversation around housing in the housing advocacy space. And that space is not new. It's decades old. When we were writing the book, I mean, I was reading stuff written in the 50s and 60s by housing advocates that basically you could just copy and paste.
00:44:57:01 - 00:45:20:08
Chuck Marohn
And it's the same thing we're saying today. These problems have been around for a long, long, long time. But you you look at that and there is a I'm going to say this and I don't say this with arrogance, but there is a kind of blindness or un willful ignorance to the whole kind of financial side of it.
00:45:20:11 - 00:45:52:21
Chuck Marohn
And that side is like the dominant side. I mean, that all the other housing conversations are like the tip of the iceberg, the, the, the marketing thing that we talk about and the, the everything under the waterline. This massive thing is trillions of dollars in play in mortgage related products in our financial system. And, you know, we argue over what's above the waterline, like it's life and death.
00:45:52:24 - 00:46:18:28
Chuck Marohn
And we just are kind of, you know, ignorant in so many ways of the fact that, like, this system under the waterline is what controls all of it. Right. And yeah, that that makes that makes dialog hard because, you know, if, if, if you're dealing with a tiny percentage of it, you can only affect it in superficial ways.
00:46:19:00 - 00:46:31:21
Chuck Marohn
And if you really want to get to housing affordability, those things seem incredibly radical to everybody. Who's in that. Yeah. Above the waterline space.
00:46:31:24 - 00:46:56:05
John Simmerman
And and you and I talk about this during our walk and talk in Cincinnati. And again, I'll provide those links, after the live stream is done in the show notes in the video description below. So folks can, you know, go back and watch the Cincinnati walk and talk. And we talk a lot about the book, and we talk about this concept of gentle density and being able to thicken up or a housing stock.
00:46:56:05 - 00:47:30:04
John Simmerman
A big part of our challenge is just like with transportation and you, you, you channeled, the late, great Donald Trump and his his passion around, you know, working on parking reform and and trying to like, get to the the rules that dictate what we get. You know, when it comes to car parking. Well, the rules of what we get when we look at restrictive single family housing situations where all of these communities are, you know, preserved in amber.
00:47:30:04 - 00:48:03:03
John Simmerman
And it makes it difficult for people to thicken up the housing stock in neighborhoods, which might actually be walkable to downtown areas. And so we we try to quote unquote, preserve the, the, the character of, you know, communities and not allow, more housing. And I think the great example that you, you know, used is like, we need to make it legal for people to be able to, you know, have more flexibility with what they even do with their property.
00:48:03:05 - 00:48:23:03
John Simmerman
There's a certain amount of freedom and independence just in that from a land use perspective. But we have all of these restrictive, you know, ordinances and zoning that that comes in and comes into play. Talk about a little bit about that, and then we'll shift gears and and talk about the, the freeway situation in the hyper expansion situation.
00:48:23:05 - 00:48:52:21
Chuck Marohn
So it's been so interesting being on the road talking about housing, because I did a big book tour and that's, that's essentially wound down now. But I still get asked to go do housing talks quite a bit. It's fascinating to me because I realized when I was out on the road that people were having a hard time taking the thoughts in the book and the thoughts on my presentation and translating them into steps that they could do.
00:48:52:24 - 00:49:11:19
Chuck Marohn
And to me, I'm like, you know, I had one mayor and I can't think of her name. She was so wonderful, up in Massachusetts, and she had read the book and she had listened to the presentation. And then she asked me like, well, what's the thing we should do? And I'm like, I just spent an hour talking like, I have three chapters in the book about what you should do.
00:49:11:19 - 00:49:32:09
Chuck Marohn
Like, why was this hard? And I realized that because housing is such this big, complex thing that getting started is really hard. Like, what is the first step? And so we put together these three toolkits. Two of them are out. One of them is in the process of being developed. But the first one is all about what you just brought up, which is regulatory reform.
00:49:32:11 - 00:49:58:05
Chuck Marohn
Every city can change their zoning codes to allow neighborhoods to thicken up and change over time. There's no federal mandate. There's no state mandate. There's there's nothing but our own decisions and our own inertia that is preventing us from fixing our local zoning codes, our approval processes. What we allow, what we don't allow, that is all under our control.
00:49:58:11 - 00:50:18:06
Chuck Marohn
So any city that standing there today going, we have an affordable housing problem can actually take the first step. And fix their own codes and regulations and approaches. The second toolkit that we so the first toolkit is all about how to do that. Six things, six reforms. Every city should make better. Just like go do it right.
00:50:18:09 - 00:50:42:05
Chuck Marohn
The second toolkit is all about who is going to build the entry level units that we need, who's going to build the housing supply that is not existing in our market today. And so we look at how local governments, how cities can foster, and what we call an ecosystem of incremental developers and ecosystem is, you know, of a three star word.
00:50:42:08 - 00:51:04:25
Chuck Marohn
What we're trying to say is that it's not just builders, it's people who support builders, it's people who support those people. It's it's the plumber who does side gigs for the local incremental guy while he's trying to get his own plumber business started, working for somebody else. You know, it's it's the banker who gets incremental development and knows how to write those kind of loans.
00:51:04:27 - 00:51:27:27
Chuck Marohn
That ecosystem doesn't exist in most cities, but we can foster it and build it and create it and nurture it over time so that people get off the sidelines and start building the kind of housing that would actually change the dynamics of our housing market locally. The third toolkit then, is how cities can finance this stuff. And that is that is the hardest one.
00:51:27:27 - 00:51:56:04
Chuck Marohn
That's why it will be the last one. It's I'm taking a little bit longer with it, because what we have in this world where the financial products are wired for building single family homes or like large apartment complexes, those things are really good financial products because they're able to be bundled with other similar products and securitized and, you know, all the stuff we talked about earlier, there's a there's a layer of products, though, that don't lend themselves to that system.
00:51:56:06 - 00:52:38:03
Chuck Marohn
Those are backyard cottages, duplex conversions, small homes, you know, starter homes, entry level homes. These things don't fit well in that national financing matrix. But cities can fund them. And by fund them, I mean they can be the financing for them without losing money and without taking on risk. So most of the times when cities are asked to be part of the housing solution, it is how can we get a city to make a dumb investment that doesn't scale where they will lose money, they will lose taxpayer money getting marginal numbers of kind of affordable units.
00:52:38:05 - 00:52:59:25
Chuck Marohn
What we are talking about is how do cities build affordable units at scale without risking taxpayer money and without losing money in the process? And they can do that by using their leverage in the marketplace to actually finance things that have huge market demand that people will be happy to pay for, but which there's no financial products today to deliver them.
00:52:59:28 - 00:53:22:22
Chuck Marohn
And I feel like that's a really exciting part of this and why I'm maybe taking my time to make sure we get it right is because, that is the missing component here that nobody else has really fleshed out in a way that it I think it needs to be and will be game changing when when cities start to do this kind of work.
00:53:22:24 - 00:53:59:03
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. And and just to be clear, to draw the, the connection to, to why it's so important, you know, from an active towns perspective to I'm not sure why this is taking so long to, to load right here. But the reason why this is, is relevant to the active towns message is that the, the ability to have housing within a meaningful, you know, it to meaningful destinations within easy walking and biking distance is a big part of this.
00:53:59:05 - 00:54:29:03
John Simmerman
The whole concept of, you know, creating strong towns, creating villages that are in communities that are resilient is that you we've got, you know, meaningful destinations within easy walking and biking distance. We have a transportation system that supports something other than must drive everywhere for everything. And the visual that I was trying to pull up here, you know, I'm not sure why it's not showing up, but it's showing up on my screen.
00:54:29:05 - 00:55:15:24
John Simmerman
Is the two thumbnails from our walk about Providence, where one thumbnail is is part two is us in the beautiful, rich, gentle density neighborhood up near Brown. You university there. And we were just reveling in in how much housing was there? All of it within easy walking distance to downtown Providence. And then the second, thumbnail, which was the part one, which is of the free rain removal process that took place in Providence, where they were able to fight back and remove a devastating freeway that cut through the middle of the city, which, you know, was tragic.
00:55:15:24 - 00:55:27:01
John Simmerman
And it was something that happened in City after city after city when the project, the interstate project, went beyond what its original mandate was.
00:55:27:03 - 00:55:56:17
Chuck Marohn
So let me let me paint of a Venn diagram overlap of what I think is like the work you're doing and the work we're doing. Here in Brainerd, we have this thing called the Paul Bunyan Trail, and it it runs north and south. I can actually drive out to a park and ride, get my bike out. I mean, I could bike there, but it's, it's it's it's meant for people to drive to get their bike out.
00:55:56:20 - 00:56:22:23
Chuck Marohn
And then I can take a recreational trail up to my in-laws house and then go like 50 miles north of that on an old railroad track, rails to trails. It's great. It's good exercise. It's really fun. We will bike up there sometimes it's it's a wonderful recreational kind of thing. When I think active towns and when I look at what I, what we are doing at strong Towns, I can do that.
00:56:22:25 - 00:56:47:07
Chuck Marohn
But it's hard to walk the six blocks to the downtown. And not that it's like physically hard because I'm an active person and I will do it, but if you're in a wheelchair, it's really nasty. If you're doing it in February, you're going to have to stand on the edge of the strode through the middle of town for, you know, two minutes while the light cycles, because cars are driving through the middle of the city at 50 miles an hour.
00:56:47:10 - 00:57:12:06
Chuck Marohn
It is a place that suppresses, walking and biking and favor of making it really the default easy way to get in your car and drive even like two blocks. I have met my neighbors at the park, which is a block and a half from my house, and they have shown up in their car, which is like a block or two blocks, like I've seen people get in their car, drive two blocks to get to the park.
00:57:12:09 - 00:57:33:12
Chuck Marohn
And it's not because it is not technically walkable or within one, but it's because it is not a pleasant walk. It's not really a walking work, and getting there by car is like really easy to do. So to me, the Venn diagram overlap for our work is not like the recreational trail, which you're not against and I'm not against, and I don't think it's bad.
00:57:33:14 - 00:57:52:01
Chuck Marohn
But if we're like, what's the vision of an active town? It's a to me, it's a place where just going about your day, you're going to get 10,000 steps. You're not going to get them because I'm going to go out and walk till I get my 10,000 steps. You're going to get them because like every day you're just like going about life.
00:57:52:01 - 00:58:04:01
Chuck Marohn
And it means you're a little bit more active than you would be if you just lived in a car oriented suburb where every trip is a car trip. Is that a fair like, yeah.
00:58:04:04 - 00:58:21:20
John Simmerman
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, to me, you know, when we look at investment of, of our tax dollars and creating what I call activity assets, you know, the things that we can put it on a pin in a map and say, hey, over here, we've got this feeder trail that is going to connect us to the Paul Bunyan Trail.
00:58:21:22 - 00:58:54:22
John Simmerman
And we're going to build this. We're going to invest money in this. It should be something more than just recreation. There should be a cohesiveness and a connectivity of our multi-use paths so that they can also serve as meaningful transportation corridors. Get kids to school. We should be siting our schools in places where we can utilize facilities like this to be able to deliver kiddos to their parks, to the little League ballpark, to the schools, to meaningful shopping destinations.
00:58:54:22 - 00:59:29:02
John Simmerman
And so when I see the most stellar examples of active towns worldwide, globally, I think of a place like Ola, Finland, which is, very much, built on a suburban context. But they integrated an off street network of pathways so that kids can ride to school in the dead of winter at levels that are 60 to 70% of riding the school on, you know, up near the Arctic Circle, mind you, right on and textured snowy, you know, pathways.
00:59:29:04 - 00:59:53:13
John Simmerman
But it because it's safe and inviting. It's part of a of what I like to call a redundancy, a mobility systems where you can choose to drive a car. Yes, you can still do that. You can choose to take public transit, but you can also walk and bike to meaningful destinations. And so there is that, that overlay of multiple transportation systems that are in place.
00:59:53:13 - 01:00:23:07
John Simmerman
And so, yes, I totally agree with your your take on that. I think that when we think of building facilities like this, we also need to be, you know, saying, okay, and how connected is this so that it can be one part of the solution that helps people be able to get around and have that independence, that mobility, independence and freedom so they don't feel like they have to drive everywhere for every chore.
01:00:23:09 - 01:00:26:25
Chuck Marohn
Can I radicalize this one step further?
01:00:26:27 - 01:00:32:21
John Simmerman
Yeah. Do so because we're going to get radical here saying we have to stop building, freeway miles.
01:00:32:23 - 01:00:55:15
Chuck Marohn
Okay. So so you just showed an underpass that we built under a bridge over the Mississippi River. And when I go on that path with my wife or my kids, we always take that under. But when I go by myself with the dog, I don't take that path. I go across the road and I cross right in the middle, and I'm like, this is where it should.
01:00:55:15 - 01:01:07:01
Chuck Marohn
This is where the crossing should be, right? So this comes out of confessions a little bit, but it's actually intertwined with all the books that I've written right now.
01:01:07:04 - 01:01:29:14
Chuck Marohn
And I'm not, I'm not I'm not saying this is like your vision. This is like the default, we're going to really embrace recreation in America in terms of like design. We're going to make complete streets and things are walkable. What it is is that we have auto infrastructure. And in the past we've just had, you know, biking, walking infrastructure.
01:01:29:14 - 01:01:53:29
Chuck Marohn
And it's not really all that valuable. And what generally advocates have tried to do is say, can we consider biking and walking infrastructure to great. And I think there is this like place where it's like, okay, can we actually make them up to here where they're on level with auto infrastructure? So we're talking about investments that would be taking equivalence seriously.
01:01:54:01 - 01:02:17:26
Chuck Marohn
That is looked at like is like the pinnacle of success. Like if we could somehow get to that in America right now, we're here and we're trying to just bring it up to here like, oh, wow, look at the progress we've made. And like, yeah, here's what I'm saying. As a strong hands approach, if you want to build a city that is financially successful, financially successful, let's put all the recreation and public health and cultural things and all that.
01:02:18:01 - 01:02:34:27
Chuck Marohn
Let's put all that aside and let's just look sheer at the money. What you will do is when you get into an urban area, you will build it for biking and walking. Right. And you will that the first thing you build for and you will make that primacy like you will. You will say, that's how we're going to get rich.
01:02:34:29 - 01:03:01:16
Chuck Marohn
And then we will accommodate automobiles in that structure to the extent that we can where it's not disruptive of this. Right. That's actually what success looks like in a strong town. And I, I, I struggle sometimes not with you, John. I love you and I think you and I share this vision, but I do feel like a lot of times because, you know, a lot of people will go visit Europe and it's like, oh, it's great.
01:03:01:16 - 01:03:26:07
Chuck Marohn
Why can't we do that here? And they look at success in, in some matrix of like, if we can. And it translates into what we build. If we can just marginally consider people who bike and walk as like a social good, that would be really nice for poor people. And some, you know, people in spandex will also use it to get their their groove on, you know, when they're trying to be healthy.
01:03:26:10 - 01:03:45:10
Chuck Marohn
And that's not the strong towns vision. The strength is vision is like literally your place is bankrupt. We want to fix that. The way you fix it is to make better investments. And those look like people who can bike and walk everywhere. Yeah. And by the way, it's also good for public health and overall prosperity and business growth, housing creation.
01:03:45:10 - 01:04:00:27
Chuck Marohn
And like there's a whole bunch of other dimensions that that works in. But I didn't get here because I'm a public health advocate. I got here because cities are going broken. I'm trying to solve that problem. And it just so happens that solving that problem also makes a lot of other problems better, too.
01:04:00:29 - 01:04:35:14
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. Well, I did get here as a public health advocate and and health promotion advocate and understanding the psychology of, of how people can adopt and, establish, habit patterns, active mobility, habit patterns. And we have to make it, safe and inviting and beautiful and pleasurable. We we can't just keep throwing people, along strobes and expect that, you know, they'll they'll create a habit out of that, nor feel comfortable doing that from an all ages and abilities perspective.
01:04:35:20 - 01:05:01:14
John Simmerman
We've got a comment here from, one of my favorite, folks out of Sir Halton Bosch, Den Bosch there in the Netherlands. Too late, unfortunately, but there's always the replay. Chuck Ryan is my favorite guest. Yes! Yay! Thank you. Thank you so much, Renee. And, he also talks a little bit about what I just mentioned in terms of the redundancy of, you know, the mobility networks.
01:05:01:14 - 01:05:20:00
John Simmerman
And he talks and he addresses that the overlay, the the redundancy of mobility networks in the Netherlands. They have, a specific word that they use, and and I apologize, Renee, I can't actually pronounce it right now, but, Jason and I talked about it.
01:05:20:01 - 01:05:20:15
Chuck Marohn
Words.
01:05:20:17 - 01:05:44:19
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, Jason and I talk about this extensively in my second interview with him in December of 2021. And it's this concept of disentangling the mobility networks. And so that we're not putting, or, you know, leaning into the only cycle networks are along roads. And it's like, you know, you disentangle them, you create a redundancy of mobility networks.
01:05:44:19 - 01:06:02:12
John Simmerman
You've got and you can choose, you have mobility, independence and freedom of being able to get to your said destination by either driving. Yes, walking, biking, transit. You've got those that mobility choice. Let's go back over here to Providence. This thing is loaded.
01:06:02:19 - 01:06:03:05
Chuck Marohn
We are.
01:06:03:10 - 01:06:31:06
John Simmerman
And and here we are. So part one we were we we made our way over to this bridge. And this is a bike and pedestrian bridge. I think technically it's a pedestrian only bridge, but everybody rides on it as well. And then part two, we were off in the neighborhood like we were just mentioning. We were talking about, the richness of of the environment and the housing that was in place.
01:06:31:08 - 01:06:39:08
John Simmerman
Let's tee up. Mission accomplished. What is going on with this particular initiative?
01:06:39:10 - 01:07:03:20
Chuck Marohn
Well, as long as we have five priority campaigns and one of them is ending highway expansions, and you may say like, okay, most of our stuff is bottom up and very local. It's all stuff that we can do together in our community. But ending highway expansions is one of these things that kind of transcends the local. Why are we focus on ending highway expansions?
01:07:03:22 - 01:07:30:25
Chuck Marohn
It's because the most destructive thing that we do to cities is to build highways in them and around them. Right. It it actually, when you go through a city with a highway, when you're expanding a highway in a city, when you have a highway through a city today, what you are doing is you are literally robbing them of tax base and capacity in order to increase traffic flow.
01:07:30:28 - 01:08:01:18
Chuck Marohn
I like to point out here that my home town, at the end of World War two, was 13,500 people today, where 13,500 people are ADT is up, a thousand times our, our, you know, the amount of land area we have is ten. We, we have so basically we have the same people driving around more, not any more economy, not any more local wealth, in fact, less local wealth today than we had back at the end of World War two.
01:08:01:20 - 01:08:28:01
Chuck Marohn
But we do have a lot more people driving a lot more places. Has this made us richer and wealthier? No, it's it's made us way poorer. Right. When we build out on the edge of town, that when we build the highways out on the edge, when we're adding that third lane, that fourth lane, that fifth lane, what we're doing is we are giving subsidy to a development pattern that, again, is the least financially productive development pattern that we have.
01:08:28:04 - 01:08:56:26
Chuck Marohn
It is a developed pattern that is costing us the most and giving us the least tax base. And. It is doing it in a way where we are building more of what we already have. In a sense, we're building more of like the worse stuff. And so for us, any highway expansions is a very simple step that we can take nationwide that will have huge ripple effects on, how we think about cities everywhere.
01:08:56:29 - 01:09:24:16
Chuck Marohn
Mission accomplished starts with the recognition that again, and I'll go back to my father in law, who worked for suburban and was building this stuff. You know, he was part of the first iteration of highway expansions. This is a recognition that we set out to build something, an interstate system. And we're we did it. And whether you think that we did it well or did it poorly, or whether you think that it was a great idea or a bad idea, we built it.
01:09:24:19 - 01:09:50:20
Chuck Marohn
We built what was originally envisioned, and we finished that system like, it is done. It's been done for 30 plus years. In fact, it was 90% done by the early 1980s. It is substantially done today, and we've never really taken the system that we set up to do this big thing and asked, when it's done, what should we do with it?
01:09:50:22 - 01:10:16:03
Chuck Marohn
Right. What we have done with it is we have repurposed it to essentially be a grab bag of money for every kind of project that people could come up with, and some of those projects we can say are redeeming. I would always argue, and I have argued for years, that whatever you think is redeeming the pennies spent on that are paid for with dollars spent on stuff that you're not going to find redeeming.
01:10:16:06 - 01:10:37:17
Chuck Marohn
And so what we are calling for, and this is a this is a slide where I'm trying to like, what are we trying to get out of our transportation system? We want reliable connections between cities. We want transit to work and actually be meaningful and function. We want our streets to be safe, and we want people to be able to experience living in the city and being in the city in a way that they don't feel threatened.
01:10:37:19 - 01:11:13:19
Chuck Marohn
And we want our places to be prosperous. We want people to be able to have families and open businesses and commune with each other and do things. Yeah, this is not a question of like, we want different things. It's really a question of is this system we designed to build and finance highway construction across an entire continent, the system that we should have in place to maintain and steward this system in a radically changing and different economic circumstance and clearly like, no, it's not.
01:11:13:21 - 01:11:40:05
Chuck Marohn
We need to envision something new. And we do kind of John, leave open the idea of what new should be. What we are calling for is an end to the existing system. And then in a sense, take the financial apparatus that we created to fund highway expansions and allow that apparatus to pass through to the states with the states, you know, which they are.
01:11:40:05 - 01:12:06:03
Chuck Marohn
Now, the federal government does not build any highways. The federal government does not maintain any highways in our current system. This is all done by the states require the states to continue to maintain the interstate system, but then give them the flexibility to in New York, if they want to fund a tunnel under the river, do that in Minnesota if they want to build a trail or a sidewalk, allow them to do that in Idaho if they want to expand a highway.
01:12:06:05 - 01:12:28:16
Chuck Marohn
Okay, that's probably not what I would do, but I think we should have innovation at the state level to try to figure out how do we take the new economy we have today and better serve it with transportation that meets our current needs instead of the needs of 1950s, 1960s America, which is very, very different.
01:12:28:18 - 01:12:58:23
John Simmerman
Yeah. And, you know, the image that we have on, on screen now is, is sort of leaning into the fact that we, we also sort of confused the difference between an interstate system that connects, you know, city to city. And we applied highway standards to what should have been streets. And we've created strobes. We created high speed areas where we also have lots of conflicts.
01:12:58:23 - 01:13:28:00
John Simmerman
And therefore the result is we have lots of this crashes where the cost of the the structure in the system that we've built of applying, you know, not only adding miles to the interstate network. That should have been mission accomplished a long time ago, but we're also applying highway standards to places that should be streets for people, not for high speed motor vehicle traffic.
01:13:28:02 - 01:13:33:19
Chuck Marohn
I think one of the hardest parts of this message.
01:13:33:21 - 01:14:03:22
Chuck Marohn
Is, is how we are communicating to people who are, advocates for biking and walking because when, when, when you advocate for biking and walking and you hear the transportation bills being debated and you look at how the system has manifested, you're very frustrated with the federal government because the federal government has, like, as you said, like built kind of sustained the worst of the infrastructure.
01:14:03:24 - 01:14:29:25
Chuck Marohn
Right. The problem is that we have wrapped the aspirations of biking walking advocates into every, bill since the early 1990s that we're all about reform. We are going to have safe routes to school. We're going to have complete streets. We're going to have raised grants and tiger grants and bill grants and competitive grant programs so that you can be innovative and build things.
01:14:29:27 - 01:15:09:18
Chuck Marohn
And I feel like we're, you know, three decades into this now, have kind of a broad realization amongst people who politically might be on team Red or Team Blue, or come at it from a bottom up or a top down approach, like I think we're creating we've generated that consensus understanding now that reforming the federal system by, you know, having pennies on the dollar of grants for biking and walking as the way we market a bill where you're spending hundreds of billions on highway expansions.
01:15:09:20 - 01:15:10:16
John Simmerman
Right.
01:15:10:18 - 01:15:31:01
Chuck Marohn
Is not a fair. It's not a good trade off. It is. Yeah. It the thing that gets the headlines and the thing that gets a banners. And actually, when I was talking to people as we were developing this set of this report and the set of insights, the big pushback that I got was from people who had gotten raise grants recently.
01:15:31:01 - 01:15:52:28
Chuck Marohn
And they're like, Chuck, this race Grant made a huge difference in our community. It allowed us to do this thing that we otherwise weren't going to do, and it was really hard to get people in that position to step back and recognize that a the Res grant was allowing them to overcome it. A tiny, tiny place to a tiny, tiny degree.
01:15:53:00 - 01:16:19:07
Chuck Marohn
All of the harm done by all the other spending that came with the race grant that is like automatic, formulaic, no review, no competitive grant. It just gets funded as a matter of like business. And two, they were never going to catch up and actually do good projects if we're also simultaneously funding all of the bad stuff. Right.
01:16:19:11 - 01:16:44:28
Chuck Marohn
And so this is a step back and saying we're I want to say this right, because I'm not saying we can't reform the federal government. I think we can, but I don't think the way that we reform the federal government in this case is to ask them to innovate while they're also funding the current system at scale as like pass through dollars.
01:16:45:01 - 01:17:20:01
Chuck Marohn
I think we actually reform the system by having states serve their role, which is in our system like places of innovation and the pushback to that is, well, Chuck, insert state I don't like is going to do retrograde dumb stuff. And my response is like, yes, I'm sure that there will be states who do retrograde dumb stuff, but I think they will learn very quickly that if they don't have to meet Fred, because right now, John, if you are a state dot and you want to do something really dumb, there's a federal program where you can get money reimbursed money to do that, like.
01:17:20:04 - 01:17:35:11
Chuck Marohn
Right. It's we want to add highway expansion. Okay. We got a program like do that. Does that program have to competitively compete against other state. No it doesn't. It just you do it and then you apply for reimbursement and you get it. It's automatic. You don't have to go to the governor. You don't have to go to legislature.
01:17:35:13 - 01:17:55:01
Chuck Marohn
You just run it as a dot because that money is just programed in. We want to do something innovative. Oh, you've got a competitive grant program you go through, and we've got a tiny bucket for that stuff over here. What I'm saying is wipe out all of that right. And every state is going to get a pot of money to do with it as they will.
01:17:55:03 - 01:18:20:25
Chuck Marohn
I think they will very quickly figure out that doing the same old dumb stuff is just putting them, but setting them back, and some states will be leaders on that and figure it out really, really quickly. Others will be laggards. But you do that for a decade, and every city is going to be building infrastructure that actually makes way better sense that that more closely aligns with what you want to see and what we want to see.
01:18:20:27 - 01:18:21:29
Chuck Marohn
Right.
01:18:22:01 - 01:18:48:22
John Simmerman
And you know, the image on screen here, you know, it says there's no stop condition and is exemplifies. You know what we were talking about the insanity of what we found ourselves in. We were leveraging these federal dollars of expansion of highways and highway miles indefinitely. Again, that wasn't the original vision from the 1950s just to connect, you know, connect community to community.
01:18:48:24 - 01:19:22:20
John Simmerman
And, you know, we just kept adding more and more lane miles. And we know that if we add more lane miles and transform our built environment to support driving for everything, it also reinforces the had, you know, the, the actual, habitation patterns and where we end up living and it becomes, you know, Donald Shoup again will channel the late, great Donald Trump again, he talks about how free parking is a fertility drug for cars in your city.
01:19:22:23 - 01:19:43:07
John Simmerman
Well, so are lane miles. If we keep building out more and more lane miles to do that. One of the comments here in, in the, in the the very active, little feed that we have here, you know, talks a little bit about, well, you know, why isn't it that we're not able to build more parking that is more vertically oriented?
01:19:43:07 - 01:20:12:02
John Simmerman
And Rene, you know, kind of chimes in and talks a little bit about how, yeah, one of the things that they do in the Netherlands to incentivize people to choose to bike, especially to the transit network, to the rail stations, is to create a, a wonderful, inviting parking environment for people to incentivize people to, ride their bike instead of drive to said transit stop, you know, to to the main train station.
01:20:12:04 - 01:20:35:13
John Simmerman
And yes, we we get what we incentivize and we get the behavior that we support through our infrastructure. So when we build shit like this, it becomes very attractive to, to be able to get in one's car. We can't blame people for getting into cars. If what we have done all of this time is just invest in drive everywhere for everything.
01:20:35:18 - 01:20:58:09
John Simmerman
And I think that, you know, it gets to the the point of the conversation that's going on in the chat right now, which is that, yeah, if this is what we're building, we're getting the result, including the result of what we saw with the photo of the crash. That's not an accident. That's a planned result of the system that we have created.
01:20:58:11 - 01:21:22:29
Chuck Marohn
I think downstream of that to what you do. And this is why the Netherlands is astounding. Understand that, you know, the U.S. has 50 states. And in a sense, I think, like almost all of them are larger geographically than the Netherlands. And they all have. I'm, I'm reading, Colin Woodward's latest book, which it builds off of American nations.
01:21:23:02 - 01:21:43:01
Chuck Marohn
And it's really, you know, it's reinforcing the idea to me that like, cultures are very different. I was in, like I said, hazard, as in Kentucky this week. It's a beautiful place, and I really found myself loving it. But it's a very different culture than you have in Minnesota. It's a different nation, to use Colin Woodward's term.
01:21:43:03 - 01:22:13:28
Chuck Marohn
And so, you know, there's a certain why don't we do it this way? I think that we should recognize that there's also a certain this is the way we've always done it. And your culture kind of makes sense to you because it is the culture you live in. And so if we are going to change this on American terms, it has to be congruent with how we think of ourselves or the myths we tell each other about ourselves and who we see ourselves as being.
01:22:14:01 - 01:22:35:07
Chuck Marohn
So when you when you get into strong towns, you see a lot of us is trying to have a story about who we are as Americans and what we're all about, because we are about today driving everywhere we go, and we are about, what what the automobile has done for us and what that shopping experience at the Costco is like and all that.
01:22:35:09 - 01:23:12:16
Chuck Marohn
I think we also are, you know, there's a part of us that is about neighborhood and about community and about, a different set of things that we can lean into to kind of change that conversation. I don't think the conversation can change when, as you say, we are funding the the fertility drug of driving it. It can't change if we stop funding that in that way and allow us more flexibility at the state level, at the local level, to choose different things, different parts of our culture and our conversations can start to be more coherent then.
01:23:12:19 - 01:23:40:17
Chuck Marohn
And we can actually put money behind those things, in a way that I think will start to reshape what people expect, what people want, and what people consider good. This this slide here is all of the goals that are included in federal legislation. So we actually have written federal legislation for funding, and directing the U.S. Dot.
01:23:40:23 - 01:24:02:09
Chuck Marohn
And we've said, here's all the things we want you to do. And if you read them, there's 23 different goals. They're incoherent, they don't connect with each other. And no one is like primary over the other. Like, are we about safety or are we about mobility? Because those two things kind of contradict each other in a lot of ways.
01:24:02:12 - 01:24:33:01
Chuck Marohn
Are we about reducing congestion or are we about reducing emissions because, you know, we have these programs, the the congestion mitigation and air quality programs that say they're there's they're the same. And the reality is, is that when you make it when you reduce congestion, you make it so people drive more. And yes, you can have, emission reduction in the one car that's not stuck in traffic, but now it's emitting more emissions because it's driving ten times as far these.
01:24:33:03 - 01:24:56:06
Chuck Marohn
We we tend to measure these things in incoherent ways because our goals are not cohere. They're a grab bag of what everybody would like to see happen. And this is a system without focus, without purpose. It has focus and purpose around the 1950s. In 2026, it needs to be redefined, right?
01:24:56:08 - 01:25:32:08
John Simmerman
Well, and and it brings us back to a slide that you talk about, you know, extensively in confessions and in saying that there's a disconnect between the goals of the system, the transportation system, and the traffic engineers and the people responsible for implementing a community's plan versus the desires and goals of a community, the desires and goals of the community are more aligned around you know that that first big word right there, is it safe?
01:25:32:08 - 01:25:57:16
John Simmerman
Is it comfortable? Am I able to get to meaningful destinations? And I have mobility choice versus the goals of, you know, prioritizing speed and bowing down to the, you know, the god of loss level of service and throughput of motor vehicle traffic. So there's a there's a fundamental I can't remember the exact, you know, four things that you had but you talk about.
01:25:57:16 - 01:25:57:19
Chuck Marohn
Yeah.
01:25:57:19 - 01:26:05:00
John Simmerman
No nice alignment between the four different factors between these two groups.
01:26:05:03 - 01:26:30:04
Chuck Marohn
I wrote I wrote an article called Confessions of Recovery Engineer in the early, early Days of Strong Towns, and that was, yeah, there were a handful of articles that I wrote that went viral for me at the time that really, I think created Strong heads as we know it today. And one of them was that one. And it is this insight that the design process we use doesn't align with our values.
01:26:30:04 - 01:26:54:05
Chuck Marohn
It was really like looking at the engineering profession, because if you ask engineers, what's the number one most important thing, they would say safety. But when they do design they start with what's the design speed. What is the volume of vehicles that we're going to handle, given those two things, which are not able to be compromised, those are the two primary objectives.
01:26:54:08 - 01:27:21:18
Chuck Marohn
What is a safe design? And when you look at that design, it's always a compromise of safety. Right. Because we have to meet this speed and this volume. And then how much does that cost. And if you if you reconcile that with the values and I used I do when I'm giving a transportation talk particularly, you know with technical professionals but but with the public do sometimes I will walk them through an exercise where I'm like, okay, here's the four values.
01:27:21:18 - 01:27:41:16
Chuck Marohn
Which one of these are the most important to you? And it's always safety. And cost is always number two. And volume is always more important than speed. What we look at is that the actual values we have that we express, that are in our heart, are not reflected in the design process that we use to actually build places.
01:27:41:19 - 01:28:07:22
Chuck Marohn
And so what we get is we get this mismatch. And the book, that article we're trying to identify that and help people wrestle with it because yeah, if you want safety in in urban areas in particular, you have to actually compromise mobility. You have to reduce traffic volumes. You have to reduce traffic speeds as the only way to get to safety in a complex urban environment.
01:28:07:25 - 01:28:21:12
Chuck Marohn
If you're not interested in safety, then yeah, you can you can have 30 mile an hour traffic through the middle of a busy urban street or 40 or 50 mile an hour traffic. Right?
01:28:21:14 - 01:29:11:05
John Simmerman
Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. In. Which is why I've been really, critical of the concept of, declaring Vision Zero, you know, just saying. Oh, we declare Vision Zero, just like, you know, from the office, you know, the lead character declaring bankruptcy. No, you can't just declare Vision Zero. You actually have to get real about the fact that if you're serious about achieving the goal of a lip eliminating serious traffic, crashes and resulting in serious injury and fatalities, we have to slow motor vehicle speeds down in areas of conflict in other words, within our city limits, within the city, we need to be able to bring the traffic speeds
01:29:11:05 - 01:29:45:10
John Simmerman
down. We've channeled the Dutch multiple times. We've got several Dutch, folks out in the chat right now. And we, we, we look to that and say, you know, one of the great things that they did do is, you know, in, within their, their you know, vital, vibrant, intense, you know, city centers, they've created an environment where the majority, you know, the majority of the area, the majority of the streets are 30km/h or less, you know, and the built environment reinforces that behavior.
01:29:45:12 - 01:30:05:12
John Simmerman
You know, there's lots of feed streets. There's lots of, you know, of streets that are paved in red bricks. That sends a message to the driver, oh, I'm not in a go fast mode. If I want to go fast, there's a network for that. But that network transitions into a slow speed area. So I was always, you know, feeling like, okay, this is great.
01:30:05:12 - 01:30:26:06
John Simmerman
I'm glad people are getting excited about trying to eliminate serious, you know, crashes and injuries and death and all that. But are you serious about actually slowing motor vehicle speeds down within these environments? Because that is the reality. You're going to have to do that. And and I don't want to hold the Dutch cities up as being perfect.
01:30:26:06 - 01:31:01:01
John Simmerman
They're not they're constantly trying to improve. And many of the cities are expanding the 30km/h zones and doing what they can to traffic homes. So there's there's definitely a spirit of continuous improvement with that. So I just want to put that out there too. I want to pull this slide up because this is what you were talking about, is that we have to get away from this concept of reform as a distraction, and we have to get away from this concept of people trying to create safer streets, more people oriented places, more active mobility.
01:31:01:03 - 01:31:30:14
John Simmerman
We've got to get away from the addiction of just getting the little pennies and pittance from the tiger grants, and from the res grants, and from the bills, where the vast majority of the funding continues to support the expansion of the highway network, which is exactly what you're saying. So you've always been critical of the fact that, you know, the the bike ped folks are, like, excited to get whatever little tiny little fraction of what they get and think that that's reform.
01:31:30:14 - 01:31:38:04
John Simmerman
That's not reform. Reform is completely changing. You know how we're going about this.
01:31:38:06 - 01:32:03:28
Chuck Marohn
I struggled with how to communicate this, and I actually had a vision in my head, I'll describe to you I because I can't draw. I'm, I am not a good I'm an engineer. I'm, I'm not a good at at drawing. I had this vision in my head of, like, there's two doors you can go through, and one door has, like, this massive pot of money on the other side.
01:32:04:00 - 01:32:23:19
Chuck Marohn
And that was the door that all the dots get to walk through for highway expansion. So it's like a highway expansion door. You just walk in, get your money like it's wide open, but you can only go in if you are a state dot doing a highway like there's just a ton of money. And then there's the door for bike walk, and that has like a tiny little bit of money.
01:32:23:22 - 01:32:49:09
Chuck Marohn
And everybody going in that door has to compete with each other to see who gets to go in. Right. So the way that came out in my like, PowerPoint world is a Disney line. And for those people who don't go to Disney parks, Disney done something that is really gross in my mind. You used to have this shared experience called the Fast Pass, where it allowed you to skip like a line every, like 2 or 3 hours.
01:32:49:11 - 01:33:02:17
Chuck Marohn
It was very egalitarian because everybody was in the park could get a Fastpass for their favorite ride. They had a certain number each day, so if you got there early, you could get the one for your favorite ride. If you got there a little bit late, you could get your favorite ride, but it would be later in the day.
01:33:02:20 - 01:33:24:06
Chuck Marohn
It kind of evened out and it felt equal because everybody was treated the same. Now they have this thing called the lightning lane, where you can pay to skip the line, and you can pay to skip all the lines or a few of the lines or, and and it makes it so it's not egalitarian anymore. It's very much like there's a rich place and there's a poor place.
01:33:24:09 - 01:33:46:21
Chuck Marohn
Okay. If you are a bike walk advocate and you want your raise grant, you're going to go through the poor line. You're going to go through the whole, I mean, you're going to stand in a long, long line. You're going to fill out a bunch of forms. You're going to wait, wait, wait around, you're going to compete with everybody else, and then you're going to get in and you're going to get a tiny pot of money at the end.
01:33:46:24 - 01:34:03:05
Chuck Marohn
If you are a state dot, you get to go in the lightning lane. You get to take your project to the front of the line. You basically go do your project, and then you go to the front of the line and you say, give me my money back. You get a reimbursement, and as long as you can get like one of the programs, you just skip all the lines.
01:34:03:05 - 01:34:25:25
Chuck Marohn
You just walk right through. You just get your money. It's just wired to you. And so it is a very in a sense, when we approve these bills, the way the the lobbyists and the advocates and the people who are trying to, like, make a deal, the way they turn around and sell it to the bike walk people is, hey, we came up with this reform program for you.
01:34:25:25 - 01:34:41:26
Chuck Marohn
We're reforming the system. You can go and it's a competitive grant, and you can do innovative things and line up. That's like a sales job as a con job to get you to support the lightning lane for everybody else who's doing the highway expansions to just get their huge pot of money.
01:34:41:29 - 01:34:43:18
John Simmerman
And and can I say.
01:34:43:18 - 01:34:45:09
Chuck Marohn
That's offensive to me? Yeah.
01:34:45:13 - 01:35:09:06
John Simmerman
Yeah, it's offensive to you. But it's also from a behavior change perspective doesn't work. Because if we doesn't work making it easier for people and we're subsidizing people driving, it's not going to do that. I mean, it's not going to be, successful in, in transforming what we really need to do. And again, channeling the Dutch, we need to be thinking about how do we create redundancy of mobility networks.
01:35:09:12 - 01:35:32:18
John Simmerman
And there's an overlay. And people can make the pragmatic and practical choice of going, oh, hey, my journey on this particular trip is only going to be like, you know, between 5 and 10km. It's a beautiful day. I happen to have an electric assist bike, and I've got a delightful path that I can ride on and safe city streets in the interim.
01:35:32:18 - 01:35:54:14
John Simmerman
On either end, I'm going to choose to ride versus it could be a terrible day, you know, weather wise. And maybe I decide to just ride my bike to the transit station, lock my bike up in the transit station, jump on the train and be able to get there. Or yes, I can drive. I can get in my car and just drive because I have the those mobility networks.
01:35:54:17 - 01:36:20:21
John Simmerman
What we're really talking about here is putting an end to continually supporting the expansion of the one system, the drive everywhere, for everything system, and not just settling for crumbs along the way. Now, that's exactly right. You don't know this about me, but I too am a big fan of Disneyland. Oh, really? I did not, and I and I said Disneyland because I grew up not far from sure.
01:36:20:21 - 01:36:21:16
Chuck Marohn
Well, I was born.
01:36:21:21 - 01:36:33:22
John Simmerman
Far from Disneyland, and so I'm old enough that I can remember what an e-ticket is. So there you go. We had the coupons the the yeah, etc. so that's good stuff.
01:36:33:24 - 01:36:53:18
Chuck Marohn
Can I yeah. Can we go back once I because I just want to I want to I want to carry this analogy like one step further. Yes. Here's the thing about the lightning lane today is that you can actually in most rides you can see the people in the lightning lane. Yeah. And I have I have because I've been going long enough to the parks.
01:36:53:21 - 01:37:19:09
Chuck Marohn
You can watch people get irritated with the people in the lightning lane because they're in the regular lane and they're standing still, and then they're watching these people who paid for the, you know, like you, you're already paying a lot to be there. Here's people who are paying even more. Get to skip the lines. I think that if you had the people getting raise grants, being able to see the dots, getting money like they were in the same line, it would irritate them.
01:37:19:11 - 01:37:37:02
Chuck Marohn
The difference is the lightning lane for the dots is like off stage. They just bring you back to the room with the money and give it to you. You. If you're standing in the regular line as like a bike walk, advocate, you're just looking around at the other bike walk advocates going, hey, this is awesome. We're all in line for a raise grant.
01:37:37:06 - 01:37:59:19
Chuck Marohn
I hope I get mine, I hope you get yours. Like, let's go. And you're all like celebrating your stuff. Meanwhile, backstage, everybody's getting to ride the ride as many times as they want because they're in the state dot doing a highway expansion. And you're oblivious to it because it's not in front of you, right? Yeah. Yeah. That that's so wrong.
01:37:59:22 - 01:38:22:19
John Simmerman
Yeah yeah yeah. No, it really is. And and no I don't want to, you know, extend any shade at all to the hard working people who are, you know, trying to get those little bits of you know, money from that system. What we're really talking about is we need to have a different discussion. We need to have the discussion that mission accomplished.
01:38:22:22 - 01:38:41:12
John Simmerman
We have built out the interstate system. We have to stop adding highway capacity. We need to completely, fundamentally change the Department of Transportation at the fundament at the federal level. This is a huge departure for your organization because you don't normally get in federal stuff.
01:38:41:14 - 01:39:03:11
Chuck Marohn
No, we don't do this at all. John. Let me let me say this. If you were actually going to and this is going to be a very provocative and I, I, I say this intentionally, if you were going to create a system to pacify the loudest critiques and the the most stringent advocates, this is what it would look like.
01:39:03:13 - 01:39:23:17
Chuck Marohn
You would give them a shiny, big, bright door to go through, and you would give them, like, you know, their trifle pittance on the other side, and you would keep all the other stuff hidden from the public and just run that funnel, that big machine out the back. Yeah, this is a huge departure for us because we don't deal with federal policy, really.
01:39:23:17 - 01:39:44:18
Chuck Marohn
We are very focused on cities and what we do at the local level. I will say that this is very important to that. It's a big, huge thing that impacts how we talk about cities. I'm, I'm going to sit here right now and tell you we're not lobbyists. I don't have connections in Washington DC. We don't think that we are going to change federal policy.
01:39:44:25 - 01:40:03:22
Chuck Marohn
The Federal Highway Trust Fund runs out at the end of September, and there will have to be a reauthorization. And I do think that that will be messy. And there'll be a lot of red blue arguments on that. But I'm not pretending that we are affecting that conversation. The conversation we're affecting is the one people are having at the advocacy level.
01:40:03:25 - 01:40:23:23
Chuck Marohn
And what we really want more than anything else is for mayors, city council members, technical staff and then local advocates who generally are all supportive of the system because they want their share of the table scrap. We want them to rise up and say, this is a bad system. I don't want my table scraps. I want you to do away with it.
01:40:23:25 - 01:40:24:19
Chuck Marohn
I want it to you.
01:40:24:19 - 01:40:43:04
John Simmerman
Just you just mentioned the Highway Trust Fund. So we have to talk about this slide. And and I know you and Beth Osborne have had a wonderful conversation about this, these challenges that that are out there. Talk a little bit about the insolvency of of of what we're the system that we have created.
01:40:43:07 - 01:41:06:29
Chuck Marohn
Transportation for America, Beth and Steve Davis, they they are they are really the ones with the deep insights on like the functioning of the system, that it's easy to look at this and say, read the systems and solve it. And it is. I think what's important to realize here is two things. First, there's a belief in our country that gas tax funds the highway system.
01:41:07:01 - 01:41:29:03
Chuck Marohn
Oh. How quaint. The gas tax funded the construction. The highway system. It does not fund what we do today. The trust fund went insolvent in 2008. And since then, there have been a series of trust fund bailouts where we have taken regular tax dollars, tax dollars, you and me spent, and we have put them and let's let's be clear, borrowed money.
01:41:29:03 - 01:41:55:02
Chuck Marohn
Right. So if you care about the national debt, we are borrowing lots, billions, hundreds of billions of dollars and putting it into, highway expansions and highway building and a little bit of this raise grants and other things. We've we put that money in and you can see the green is the size of the bailouts. There's a bank, you know, big bailout, bigger bailout, biggest bailout, the, Infrastructure Act, the bipartisan infrastructure bill during the Biden administration.
01:41:55:02 - 01:42:20:07
Chuck Marohn
Is that last bump up. You can see that by the by September of this year, we spent all that money, and we're now going to go back in the red again. This is a system that is I mean, it is insolvent highways do not pay for themselves. We can't even there's there's not even any like, crazy economist math that make this system solvent.
01:42:20:09 - 01:42:40:29
Chuck Marohn
It is defunct. It doesn't work. And the thing is, there had an all kinds of models that have looked at, okay, how much do we need to raise the gas tax to make this system self-funding? And what they find is that when you raise the gas tax, what do people do? They drive less because it costs more to drive.
01:42:41:02 - 01:43:08:20
Chuck Marohn
And that means you collect less money. So you have to raise the gas tax even more, in which case people drive even less. And if you run this model out, what you end up with is an infinite gas tax with nobody driving. Right. And what that should tell you is not that that is like a real scenario. What it tells you is that our behavior does not value transportation as highly as our political system values transportation.
01:43:08:22 - 01:43:28:23
Chuck Marohn
In other words, if if we went to the libertarian dream of a user pays model and we got rid of all the gas taxes, and we just said, when you drive on that road, you pay for it. Driving would drop by 90%. The only reason we drive today is not because it adds value to our life, but because we built a transportation system that requires people to drive a lot.
01:43:28:25 - 01:43:32:16
Chuck Marohn
Yeah, that's that's it. That's what the math tells you.
01:43:32:19 - 01:44:22:26
John Simmerman
Well, it's all related to, you know, going back to the Ponzi scheme because you cannot you cannot actually tax people enough, given the current development pattern, to be able to sustain the system that we've created, you can't actually tax people enough at the pump. And, you know, as part of, you know, to sustain and fund the ever expansion of a freeway system and highway and applying highway standards to cities, the fact that many of our most dangerous roads that exist, within the cities, which should be streets, which should be the platform for building wealth and vitality and health and well-being are highway standards, sort of roads, high strip or high speed areas with lots
01:44:22:26 - 01:44:31:11
John Simmerman
of conflict points. I mean, just a recipe for disaster, which we have been, you know, experiencing for the last 80 some odd years.
01:44:31:14 - 01:45:01:01
Chuck Marohn
You just prompt something in my head and I've not thought this through. So I might say something that would just be like, totally, you know, just crediting. Let me, let me take the AOC, Bernie Sanders and the Donald Trump Mega and mash them together for a second, because there is a there is a mindset that says, and understand how we spending in the 50s and 60s was an extension of the New Deal.
01:45:01:04 - 01:45:16:26
Chuck Marohn
This was how we, you know, juiced our economy after World War two to make sure that we weren't going to slide back into the Great Depression. You know, we're demobilizing all these troops were shutting down all these industries of war. We don't want to go back into the depression. What are we going to do? We're going to grow, grow, grow our economy.
01:45:16:26 - 01:45:37:15
Chuck Marohn
How are we going to do that? We're going to build interstate highways. We're going to create, all these housing programs to build more housing. We're going to create commercial development programs to get businesses going. We did all this from the top down to try to like, juice the economy. What you see today is that when the economy slows down, infrastructure is the way we overcome that.
01:45:37:20 - 01:45:58:18
Chuck Marohn
We go back to the 1950s, 60s playbook. Can we say, all right, we're going to have good union jobs building highways, building frontage roads, and then building all the stuff that comes out of that, the the Arby's and the Taco Bell and the Walmart, like all of that is just instant economic multiplier. And all we got to do is build highways.
01:45:58:20 - 01:46:45:11
Chuck Marohn
If you are an AOC, Bernie Sanders type, or if you are a mega Republican, you have embraced a certain mindset that says the government can be a difference maker in creating jobs, generating economic development. And that has generally manifested in let's go out and build these highways. Like, let's do that because of the multiplier effect. What my appeal would be to those, and this is a little bit in the report, if you actually get into that mindset, I think you have to struggle with the idea of, is this the multiplier we want or is the multiplier we want building manufacturing plants because they use steel and concrete and workers and all that too.
01:46:45:16 - 01:47:08:13
Chuck Marohn
And when you have all that going to highways, it makes offshoring industry all that much more expensive. Is this building green infrastructure? Because if you want to build solar panels and windmills and do all that, that takes concrete and steel and all the things that we're putting into the next interchange for the next gas station and the next strip mall, do you want on shoring of jobs?
01:47:08:13 - 01:47:42:23
Chuck Marohn
Do you want, you know, American chip manufacturing? Do you want and you go through like the list of the things that they say they want when you fund highways, the way we fund highways today, you are robbing all of those other things that you say you want of the human capital, the resources. You're at the very least massively increasing the cost of doing all those other things while you're getting a tiny, tiny multiplier compared to, you know, in theory, what those other things would get right.
01:47:42:25 - 01:47:59:25
Chuck Marohn
I think that there is a kind of cross political consensus that we can come to that says this is maybe the thing we should have done in the 1950s and 60s. Maybe it is certainly not the thing we should be doing today. We are much more urgent needs, right?
01:47:59:28 - 01:48:27:15
John Simmerman
Yeah. So we've referenced, Cincinnati, we've referenced, Providence, recently the that's where we've been, you know, getting together and doing our walk and talks, this coming spring may be. Yeah. Fayetteville. Yeah. In May. So if I pull up, the website here and we go over to this, May 18th through the 20th, get your tickets now.
01:48:27:21 - 01:48:37:27
John Simmerman
Connecting for I think this is what the third or fourth official large national gathering, is that correct?
01:48:37:29 - 01:48:43:20
John Simmerman
I think I mean, I know we had a de facto one back in 2014, in Minneapolis.
01:48:43:20 - 01:49:03:14
Chuck Marohn
Okay. But this is this is highly controversial. Yeah. Because because we had one way back in Minneapolis in you're right, 2014. Yeah. And that was like the first national gathering. And then we didn't do another one until a few years later. We were in Tulsa and we did a national gathering. And that was like the first national gathering.
01:49:03:17 - 01:49:27:23
Chuck Marohn
And then we did one in Cincinnati, and that was again the first national gathering. But since Cincinnati, we've done one every year. And the intention now is to continue to do one every year in the spring. We're doing it this year in May in Fayetteville. So I think officially we're calling this the third. But if you are a longtime strong towns person like you are, I mean, understand our audience.
01:49:27:28 - 01:49:50:23
Chuck Marohn
Like if we look at like our website in 2014, when we did that one in Minneapolis, we might have had 50,000 people visit our website a year. You know, that's like 2.5 million now. So it's we're not the same organization, but the people who have been with us for a long time get offended when we say the third National guy because you're like, I was at the first one, and then the first one again, and then the first one the third time.
01:49:50:25 - 01:50:03:12
Chuck Marohn
But yeah, yeah, this is I was told that you may be part of a bike ride that we're doing on some of the the cool trails in Fayetteville. I don't know if that's true. I don't want to make it on air, but.
01:50:03:14 - 01:50:21:28
John Simmerman
No, that is true. Your staff reached out to me early on, like, over a month ago and said, hey, we're going to have, like, there's a bridge day because seeing you is is happening the week prior. Which is a little different because in the past, the Strong Towns national gathering is usually been the day or two before seeing you this way.
01:50:21:28 - 01:50:39:04
John Simmerman
It's flipped, seeing news happening. And then there's a bridge over the weekend. And so, yes, I'll be part of the bike ride that I think is taking place on Sunday. The bridge day. And then, of course, on May 18th is when, the Strong Towns national gathering kicks off in Fayetteville.
01:50:39:06 - 01:50:39:22
Chuck Marohn
It's awesome.
01:50:39:26 - 01:50:40:07
John Simmerman
Looking forward.
01:50:40:08 - 01:50:50:06
Chuck Marohn
I'm excited. Man. We are, yeah. I don't think we were announced yet that Sam Quinonez is going to be our our keynote speaker.
01:50:50:08 - 01:50:51:29
John Simmerman
But no, you have announced I will announce.
01:50:52:03 - 01:51:17:26
Chuck Marohn
I will announce that here with you. Sam is, Sam writes about some of the most urgent things in America today. And I found him because he he he started his first book is about opioid addiction and kind of the devastation of that. And at the end of his book, he got into what Do We do? And his response, you know, his response was like, the places that are working are places that have built community.
01:51:17:28 - 01:51:41:13
Chuck Marohn
And that's how he found us. He's like, how do we build community? His second book, then, got into this even more, and I was in Hazzard this week because Sam told me to go to hazard. He actually wrote an article about hazard. And part of the I started this we started this talk today talking about a hazard, part of the beautiful stuff that they've done there.
01:51:41:15 - 01:52:00:07
Chuck Marohn
A large part of it has been done by recovering addicts and it's recovering addicts. And I'm going to say this and I'm trying not to be overly poetic, but it kind of comes out that way when I talk about it. There are people who are rebuilding their city while they're rebuilding themselves, and those two things go together.
01:52:00:07 - 01:52:22:22
Chuck Marohn
Right? Right. They're supporting their place, and their place is supporting them back, and that's helping them stay sober and stay clean and and stay on the right path. And it's also giving their lives a meaning. That place does give your life, when you're connected to a place, it does give you meaning. So, yeah, it's it's exciting to have Sam be there and to share that.
01:52:22:25 - 01:52:47:23
Chuck Marohn
I think Fayetteville is a really good backdrop to the entire strung man's conversation. I'm excited because, you know, there's a lot of things to be excited about with this, but we want to be in the middle of the I want to be in the middle of the country this year because being in in Providence and Cincinnati were great, but there were a lot of people on the West Coast to our strong towns who are like, okay, can we get closer to where we're at?
01:52:47:25 - 01:53:04:27
Chuck Marohn
This has become an international movement. So it's like, how do we do things to where more and more people can be part of it? I don't know quite yet where we're going to be next year, but this year will be in Fayetteville, and it is fun and accessible. And there's all kinds of great, strong town stuff going on there.
01:53:04:27 - 01:53:09:18
Chuck Marohn
And this would be a yeah, a pretty cool, pretty cool couple of days we get together.
01:53:09:20 - 01:53:27:27
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I do want to send a shout out to, everybody who has joined us today. You guys have been very active in the chat. Thank you very much. I'm not seeing any specific, last minute questions for you. Chuck, but I do want to, you know, give a shout out. Hunter, thank you so much for joining allocated brain.
01:53:28:00 - 01:53:40:05
John Simmerman
Brain. Renee. Adrian. Terry, thank you all so much for being active in the chat. I really do appreciate that. Any final, final thoughts, from you, Chuck?
01:53:40:08 - 01:53:46:23
Chuck Marohn
Dude, it's always like to say goodbye. Yeah, it's always exciting to chat with you. I'm. I'm,
01:53:46:26 - 01:54:09:06
Chuck Marohn
I know I said this before, but when you came to Brainerd, I was very frustrated because I said, this is not a walkable city. This is not a bikeable city. This is not a place where you can, you know, really get out and live an active life. And you said, why are you wrong? Let me show you all the ways you are wrong.
01:54:09:09 - 01:54:32:08
Chuck Marohn
And there have been people in my life who have opened up my eyes. I mean, I, I started as an engineer and a planner. This was not like my native language. And you take someone like Ed Erfurt, who walks around New Orleans with me and show me great architecture, and and you take, you know, other people who have done this to me who said, let me, let me get you out of your engineer brain and show you something.
01:54:32:11 - 01:54:53:10
Chuck Marohn
And you are one of the people who got me a little more, even out of my engineer brain and said, Chuck, you've got a incredibly walkable city, an incredibly bikeable city. And yes, there are challenges. Yes there are. You can be sad about losing the theater, and you can be sad about the building burning down here. You know, you can lament some of these things, but you've got a beautiful place to build off of.
01:54:53:10 - 01:55:16:24
Chuck Marohn
And I, I feel like it was that outside set of eyes on my place, that outside voice that allowed me to see new something that I already loved, but to maybe appreciate it just a little bit more. So I. I don't want to take the opportunity. I don't want to let the opportunity pass to just say thanks again for for that aspect of your relationship.
01:55:16:26 - 01:55:43:12
John Simmerman
You are correct. But you are. Yes. Thank you. Thank you very much for saying that. And you're welcome. But I need to correct you on something. I did not say it was walkable. I actually said it was bikeable, which really blew you away, which really blew you away because, you know, you were used to walking from your old office there at the, you know, the old, you know, build a house near the train station and you would walk to this destination here.
01:55:43:18 - 01:56:04:14
John Simmerman
I, you know, declared, because I showed up on my Brompton and I'm zipping around town. I'm going, oh, yeah. No, this has been great. This has been delightful. Why is it delightful? Well, because there's, like, freaking no traffic really runs into streets. And what traffic there is the cars that were going very, very slowly. And so I found it.
01:56:04:14 - 01:56:27:09
John Simmerman
You know, these are all snapshots from that trip to Brainerd in 2013. And, you know, even this disastrous street, again, there were no moving cars. I thought it would be fine getting around. And the irony, of course, to this whole thing is that back then you lived out in the exurbs. You have since become a city dweller.
01:56:27:09 - 01:56:37:21
John Simmerman
You have since moved back into your home town and, you know, live in the neighborhood, probably not far from where your grandparents, I think, had a house. Is that correct?
01:56:37:21 - 01:56:53:00
Chuck Marohn
Yeah. My, my my grandmother, my grandma was in northeast. I'm in north Brainerd, so we're probably as the it's probably a mile. But I mean, when I go to the grocery store today, we have one big box grocery store that's right by my where my grandma's house was, and that's where I. Yeah, bike over to get groceries and stuff.
01:56:53:03 - 01:56:56:03
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well and and and and bike.
01:56:56:09 - 01:57:14:05
Chuck Marohn
Bike a mile and don't run into a car. And I think that was the thing that you know, for me, when I was biking from way out in the exurbs in, I had to cross the highway, I had to cross the street. There were a lot of obstacles. But once I moved into the middle of town, you're right.
01:57:14:05 - 01:57:37:21
Chuck Marohn
Like, I'm, I'm in like a ridiculously I'm in I'm in a bikeable neighborhood that is so bikeable. And this is going to sound absurd. I don't even bike all that much anymore, because everything's so close that biking actually robs me of thinking time, because I yeah, I will, so I will get on my bike and I will get to work in two minutes as opposed to 15.
01:57:37:26 - 01:57:47:06
Chuck Marohn
And I like that 15 minutes to think and let my mind wander a little bit. It's too efficient of a neighborhood. It's two good bikeable here.
01:57:47:08 - 01:58:11:03
John Simmerman
And that brings us to the fact that, yes, your middle school building, where your current office is, is in within, easy walking distance. And so you walk from, from the house to your office where you're located right now and, and. Yeah, it's it's a delightful opportunity. Now, for a while there, you were actually filming many of these walks and you were riffing.
01:58:11:03 - 01:58:14:08
John Simmerman
Are you still producing video content on those?
01:58:14:10 - 01:58:38:24
Chuck Marohn
I will tell you, we, we have had a little bit of, staff turnover. And as part of that kind of a rethink of content strategy, we today are going to finalize hiring a, video production person. And so, yes, I think next week I will start doing those videos again. It was one of those things where like, it wasn't top of the food chain for us.
01:58:38:26 - 01:58:54:25
Chuck Marohn
And so it was a little bit like, I felt like I couldn't dominate the pipeline we had with my stuff when other stuff was like more critical. But now that we've got a little bit more capacity, that's the plan is to get back to that. You likes those riffs is what you're saying.
01:58:54:28 - 01:59:14:14
John Simmerman
Oh yeah. No I it's it's great because it's you know, it's especially when you have a channel and this is your channel. This is Chuck from small towns. So folks, be sure to subscribe to this if you'd like to, you know, here, you know, Chuck riffing on some videos, and just kind of, you know, they're not very long necessarily.
01:59:14:22 - 01:59:41:01
John Simmerman
Most of, of these are, are relatively short, you know, like five, six minutes, etc.. And we can see that, you know. Yeah. You're just kind of talking about things, in the moment. I don't want to call them low production because they're, they're actually quite low production. Yeah. They're pretty they're pretty good. You're walking and talking, which is very much, in the spirit of what you and I have been doing together, at the last two strong towns.
01:59:41:01 - 01:59:59:15
John Simmerman
National gathering is going out for a walk and chatting. So, yeah, folks, I, I do highly recommend that you, subscribe. He'll get some more refreshed content out because, he hasn't been producing, this recently because you don't do the editing or pushing it out. You just. Yeah, point your camera and talk.
01:59:59:15 - 02:00:20:17
Chuck Marohn
I'm the, I'm the diva. This is so I'm a little self-conscious about the channel because my wife thinks it's really stupid. You know, she's like, she. She is my wife. My wife's role in this world is not to, like, encourage me and say, oh, you're really awesome. It's to do the opposite. It's like to humble me continuously.
02:00:20:19 - 02:00:41:08
Chuck Marohn
And she's like, why? Why do you think anyone wants to watch? You like talking to a farmer? Like, that's really dumb. And I'm like, I don't know. There's like thousands of people who do so I, I'm, I travel a lot. Next week I'm going to be in Tulsa and then Raleigh. And when I travel, I try to take time and talk a little bit about those places too.
02:00:41:08 - 02:01:00:24
Chuck Marohn
So it's a little bit of it kind of defaults to Brainerd because I'm here enough and there's enough to talk about here, but I also try to get vignettes of other places I'm at. So, yeah, you can see the world through my eyes, which is beautiful some days, and it's crazy some days. And, you know, rambling and not very useful other days.
02:01:00:24 - 02:01:04:03
Chuck Marohn
But I try to try to make it worth people's time.
02:01:04:06 - 02:01:21:29
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. Well, again, I do highly encourage folks to, to to check that out and, yeah, it's time to bring this to a close. You gave me, two hours. We've managed to fill two hours and not surprised at all. Again, Chuck Marone, thank you so much for joining me on the Active Towns podcast. Once again.
02:01:22:01 - 02:01:25:00
Chuck Marohn
Thanks for and always nice to chat with you. We'll see each other soon.