Note: This transcript was exported from the video version of this episode, and it has not been copyedited
00:00:00:01 - 00:00:29:01
Dr. Patricia Tice
But as you're walking, you're developing ideas. You're. You're interacting with other people. It it it's inherently a social act. And so as you're doing that, you're building relationships. You meet the people who are out walking their dogs. You connect with people in ways that you can't. If all you're doing is driving. And when you're driving, it's all that time, all day long that you're chewing up.
00:00:29:03 - 00:00:38:11
Dr. Patricia Tice
You know, if you're spending 90 minutes a day in a car, that's 90 minutes you can't impact and you can't relate to anybody else.
00:00:38:13 - 00:00:39:10
John Simmerman
Right? Yeah.
00:00:39:12 - 00:00:41:08
Dr. Patricia Tice
This is this is insanity.
00:00:41:09 - 00:01:08:07
John Simmerman
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Active Towns channel. My name is John Simmerman, and that is Patricia Tice from the Orlando area. She is a transportation engineer that went back, got her PhD and really focused in on the psychology of our transportation systems and how to make them safer for everyone, all ages and abilities. It is a long one, so let's get right to it with Patricia.
00:01:08:10 - 00:01:12:28
John Simmerman
Patricia Tice, thank you so much for joining me on the Active Towns Podcast. Welcome.
00:01:13:00 - 00:01:15:05
Dr. Patricia Tice
I'm so glad to be here.
00:01:15:08 - 00:01:22:13
John Simmerman
Patricia, I love giving my guest just a quick little opportunity to introduce themselves. So who the heck is Patricia Tice?
00:01:22:15 - 00:01:44:07
Dr. Patricia Tice
Well, I started out in transportation engineering and doing suburban impact studies. You know that. And I would get all the weird ones, the the strange things that nobody else wanted to touch. But after about ten years of that, I kind of started getting bored. And so I joined a boutique little community design firm with lots of landscape architects and urban designers.
00:01:44:10 - 00:02:08:21
Dr. Patricia Tice
So I spent the first 2 or 3 years getting asked every day, are you one of those engineers? And it took me about two years to figure out. Yeah, I probably was. And another two years to figure out how I could be something that was not quite one of those engineers. And during that time, I figured out that the landscape architects were kind of on to something.
00:02:08:21 - 00:02:29:26
Dr. Patricia Tice
They, they, they knew something that the engineers didn't know, but they didn't have any data to back it up. There was. Yeah. And engineers live and die on their data. So no, wait, data. No, you're not going to convince anybody of anything. And so I couldn't go back to all my engineering friends and say, hey, you know, we need to do the entire world differently.
00:02:29:29 - 00:02:49:20
Dr. Patricia Tice
And so I was like, okay, fine. Eventually I went back and did a PhD. And it's nice when you go back and do that later in life because you can you kind of know where the problems are. You don't have to rely on your advisor or someone else to tell you where the problems are. You can lift them.
00:02:49:23 - 00:03:01:16
Dr. Patricia Tice
And so I went to fDOT and said, hey, wouldn't you like to be able to design a roadway where everybody did what you wanted them to do without having to tell them to do it?
00:03:01:19 - 00:03:02:16
Dr. Patricia Tice
Yeah, in other words.
00:03:02:16 - 00:03:03:14
John Simmerman
In other words, it's like.
00:03:03:14 - 00:03:04:13
Dr. Patricia Tice
That would be awesome.
00:03:04:18 - 00:03:06:07
John Simmerman
It built into the design.
00:03:06:12 - 00:03:29:08
Dr. Patricia Tice
Yeah, yeah. No. How do I design a road where people go 35 and and. Wow. Yeah. And they're like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that'd be great. Here. Have money. So I it's weird going to graduate school when you bring your own research. But that was that was loads of fun. Got my own graduate students.
00:03:29:11 - 00:03:55:18
Dr. Patricia Tice
Oh. Works. And it gave me a chance to to finally follow up on what had been a lifetime hobby in neuroscience. And I absolutely have loved studying psychology since high school. And I went to, one of my committee members was actually in the human factors department. Peter Hancock, just an absolute legend in human factors.
00:03:55:20 - 00:04:14:15
Dr. Patricia Tice
And I asked him at the beginning is most of what I want to research is in psychology. Should I do psychology or engineering? And he's like, well, you know, if you do engineering, we'll let you do psychology, right. If you do psychology, they may not let you do engineering.
00:04:14:18 - 00:04:18:23
John Simmerman
That's a fascinating observation. Yeah, I get that.
00:04:18:23 - 00:04:34:20
Dr. Patricia Tice
Besides, I already had a masters, so that gave me a two year headstart. And it I took a lot of the human factors classes that the psychologists have to take all of them. But but most of the ones I didn't take were like research methods, which, you know, I was doing anyway.
00:04:34:22 - 00:04:40:27
John Simmerman
You know, you you mentioned FDA, you know, D.O.T., so you're obviously in Florida.
00:04:41:00 - 00:04:56:18
Dr. Patricia Tice
Yeah, I'm, I'm in Florida. I live in a beautiful little side of Orlando on the West. I am literally ten miles north of the Magic Kingdom as the crow flies. And so when we drive down the main road in winter, going to.
00:04:56:18 - 00:04:58:24
John Simmerman
Pull, I'm going to pull that up. I'm going to pull that up.
00:04:58:27 - 00:05:01:09
Dr. Patricia Tice
Here we are. Oh, yeah. It's beautiful.
00:05:01:12 - 00:05:04:07
John Simmerman
So there's land. Oh, yeah. Yep. There you are.
00:05:04:07 - 00:05:19:02
Dr. Patricia Tice
And we're in Winter garden. Yeah. And when you drive down the main road in Winter garden, going north south, you can actually watch the fireworks at night nearly every night. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's really beautiful.
00:05:19:05 - 00:05:31:01
John Simmerman
Now, now that little star or over here off to the far right. The little gold star here. That's the the main campus. Where you doing your your work at the main campus.
00:05:31:04 - 00:05:57:07
Dr. Patricia Tice
I was it was about a 45 minute commute and. Yeah. Yeah, I actually went back to school with my son when he went to I did too. And the first year I drove, okay. And the second year he said, you're not driving anymore. And I really can't blame him. I, I, I'm terrible. I really don't need a device to be distracted.
00:05:57:08 - 00:06:18:22
Dr. Patricia Tice
I I'm very squirrel prone, so, he he drove the next. You know, it was another two before I finished my my research or, well, finish my degree. And then I kept going for another year and a half after that. And he he finished out in his four years and, we left each other alone, which was awesome.
00:06:18:27 - 00:06:22:22
Dr. Patricia Tice
He would come raid the office for food on occasion. But what college student wouldn't?
00:06:22:25 - 00:06:44:14
John Simmerman
Right, right. So you referenced earlier, in that relationship with the boutique firm where they're like, are you one of those transportation engineers? Engineers? Explain for the audience what you mean by that. I mean, I think I know what you mean by that, but I want you explain and really spell it out.
00:06:44:16 - 00:07:04:16
Dr. Patricia Tice
It's a lot of what Wes Marshall has been talking about it with. Killed by a traffic engineer. People who are engineers who are really focused in on the driving environment, engineers who are really thinking in terms of what it takes to get cars from here to there and not necessarily what it takes to get the system to work together.
00:07:04:16 - 00:07:29:17
Dr. Patricia Tice
Well. You know, never considering walking or bike. I have to tell you the first time, my boss. And this was actually before I joined Gliding Jackson. The first time my boss told me that a level service F could be a good thing. It was a bit of an upside down thing to hear. Because you spend all of your time when you're doing these traffic impact studies, trying to keep things from failing.
00:07:29:20 - 00:07:30:24
John Simmerman
Right?
00:07:30:27 - 00:07:59:13
Dr. Patricia Tice
And you get into downtown Orlando or, you know, downtown anywhere, actually. And it's gridlock. And that's a good thing. You know, there are times of the day that things are going to be bumper to bumper. That technically is a failure, but not really. It's it's a different it's a different environment. You want all of that activity and it's it's an easy thing for a regular traffic engineer to miss.
00:07:59:15 - 00:08:22:18
Dr. Patricia Tice
You know, that that we're our job is not necessarily to get all of the cars to go where they're supposed to go. Our job is to get people where they need to be and and it's a it's it's such a subtle twist. It's really, really hard to pin that down in your head and figure out why that is now.
00:08:22:20 - 00:08:40:23
Dr. Patricia Tice
I, I'm grateful for all the stuff that Wes has done. I'm grateful for all the stuff that that Chuck Maron has done. Another one that you've had on your podcast recently? In a lot of ways, they make my work much easier because they've had to kind of take a couple of bullets that I probably won't have to take.
00:08:40:25 - 00:08:54:23
John Simmerman
Well, and plus, Wes literally has a chapter that talks about how, you know, approaching the design of streets. We need to be leaning into other fields. And, and Chuck says the same thing, such as psychology and and.
00:08:54:24 - 00:09:20:17
Dr. Patricia Tice
And social and landscape architecture and anthropology and sociology and all of those. So all of them are really important. But at the same time, a lot of what I'm trying to do is to go back to the engineers and say, hey, what you've been doing isn't necessarily wrong. It's just not complete. And it's very easy for folks like Wes, who's a professor, and his job is really to push back on the industry.
00:09:20:20 - 00:09:41:15
Dr. Patricia Tice
And and Chuck, who is a former practicing engineer and, and very much an advocate, and his job is to push back on the industry, and it makes it easier for me to go back to them and say, you know, I get it. You guys are getting beat up. And and you're only doing what we told you to do.
00:09:41:18 - 00:10:08:11
Dr. Patricia Tice
That's that is what it is. I can't I can't undo the last century of vehicle dominance, but it's time to add to our repertoire. We can't we can't do this all in one direction. And that really, from a political standpoint, it's something that's giving me a little bit of heartburn over the last few weeks. And maybe into that a little later.
00:10:08:11 - 00:10:28:03
Dr. Patricia Tice
It's, I've had gotten into a couple of debates in the last few days about road diets, and the value of road diets. And you saw in my blog post, I think it was not last week, but the week before. One of the things that I love to say is that when you treat your pavement like gold, you get heaven like this.
00:10:28:06 - 00:11:01:24
Dr. Patricia Tice
And that is really critical because every inch of pavement that you need, you do genuinely need. And if you shortchange the pavement that you have for it, you know, if you're if you're trying to do something without enough roadway that's going to cause problems that you don't want to have. But if you if instead, you give too much room, drivers are going to take every inch you give them and they're going to run with it literally the go as fast as they possibly can.
00:11:01:24 - 00:11:08:16
Dr. Patricia Tice
And so you you want every inch you need, but you don't want a single inch more than that.
00:11:08:19 - 00:11:21:27
John Simmerman
Yeah. And I and I'm, I'm glad you brought that up because I wanted to bring this particular post up. And by the way, folks, we are actually, at the, you know, your page here. So this is your your blog. This is your blog. This is where.
00:11:21:29 - 00:11:23:21
Dr. Patricia Tice
You have a better picture at the beginning.
00:11:23:23 - 00:11:51:23
John Simmerman
Yeah. There you go. Well, we this is a really good picture that's down here because, you know, we see in in a three frame, approach here, the first picture on the left. And we'll try to describe this for the listening only audience as well. And trying to be conscious of that. So explain to us the, the photo to the left, the photo to the right, and then we'll get to the diagram and the illustration that that comes up in the end.
00:11:51:26 - 00:12:12:28
Dr. Patricia Tice
Yeah. The one on the left is the road as it was before. And it's a four lane section. So there's, you know, a double yellow line down the middle and then just two travel lanes with on street parking on both sides. So it looks kind of wide. The buildings are actually facing the street. So it is genuinely trying to be a street.
00:12:13:00 - 00:12:33:18
Dr. Patricia Tice
And we'll talk about that in a minute. But it's it's got a lot of room. It's got a lot of space to move in and the lanes are kind of wide. So what they did, and this is actually Edgewater Drive, this was, one of the first road diets that was done really in the country. And what they did was they took that four lanes and they converted it to three.
00:12:33:20 - 00:12:53:03
Dr. Patricia Tice
So if you have to do a turn, you know, if you need to turn into a business, you need to make a left. There's room for you to get out of the way of the people around you. So you can still go without anything in the way. Everybody moves to the center, right? But you're you're giving more space for bicycles.
00:12:53:03 - 00:13:13:16
Dr. Patricia Tice
They added in a really nice bike lane. You've got more space for the on street parking. Everything seems to work just a little bit better, because you don't have those conflicts in the in the two lanes on each side. You're not having to worry about people weaving in and out or people trying to jump around. Somebody who's trying to do a left.
00:13:13:18 - 00:13:43:14
Dr. Patricia Tice
It works so much better now. They're breakpoints for this. If you've got more than 20,000 vehicles a day, you can't do this. It just won't work. You'll end up overloading the one lane you have left, and it just doesn't work well enough to to to make it worth your while. But if you've got less than 20,000 a day, and most of the time you do, when you've got good street network, there's no good reason why you should have over 20 if you got less than 20.
00:13:43:16 - 00:13:56:17
Dr. Patricia Tice
There's no good reason not to reallocate that space. It actually operates better as three than it did is four, and you have fewer crashes. You kill less people. Which I mean, I don't know about you, but I think that's a win.
00:13:56:20 - 00:14:20:23
John Simmerman
Yeah. I mean, and to be clear, you know, in for folks who aren't, you know, familiar with, with Wes's, book and, you know, some people, especially in the industry, were were shocked by the title of the book, you know, killed by a traffic engineer. It almost seemed salacious, necessary. It was necessary. And he writes in it.
00:14:20:26 - 00:14:45:00
John Simmerman
He writes it from the standpoint of he is a traffic engineer. He is an engineer. He's a professor of traffic engineering. He writes it in the eye, and we tone throughout that. But to his point, and I think to your point, too, is that those were the challenges that we were, putting forth to our engineers was to solve a specific type of problem.
00:14:45:04 - 00:15:02:12
John Simmerman
And that problem was really pushing as many motor vehicles through as possible. It was all about, you know, level of service, which is, you know, a, a technical term, that, you know, that is in traffic engineering for the flow. The and you mentioned how well.
00:15:02:15 - 00:15:03:29
Dr. Patricia Tice
How well does it flow.
00:15:04:01 - 00:15:07:06
John Simmerman
Exactly. And I mentioned earlier the grading system. Yeah.
00:15:07:08 - 00:15:30:11
Dr. Patricia Tice
Yeah. Most people don't realize, particularly in Florida for the last 20, 30 years, if you were trying to build a new project, if you wanted to build a daycare, which, by the way, get you a nasty, ugly public hearing. But if you're trying to build it, it's amazing how much people, how much traffic people think daycares make.
00:15:30:11 - 00:15:52:04
Dr. Patricia Tice
And they just don't. At any rate, if you're trying to come and build a daycare or a school or, you know, a subdivision or something like that, you literally have to hire a traffic engineer who looks at all of the roadways around your project and adds the traffic that you're going to make to all of those other roads, and then evaluates whether or not they're still going to function or not.
00:15:52:06 - 00:16:09:26
Dr. Patricia Tice
Now our our car for functioning was pretty darn low. So this is not everybody's going to be going by swimmingly. This was everybody's going to be able to make it through. And so a lot of times we get complaints and hearings. Our traffic is terrible.
00:16:09:28 - 00:16:30:01
John Simmerman
Well, we we can we can talk a little bit about, you know, that whole concept of what people's perceptions of terrible are. But we here's a I'm a I'm an a jump forward to what we have in front of us, which is you. Then continue on to simulator. Yeah. So this is 24 years later after these changes were going.
00:16:30:01 - 00:16:33:14
John Simmerman
And now we're looking at a proposed design.
00:16:33:17 - 00:16:36:00
Dr. Patricia Tice
That is permanent. Wow.
00:16:36:03 - 00:16:37:27
John Simmerman
Wow.
00:16:38:00 - 00:17:03:27
Dr. Patricia Tice
That they had a chance 12 years ago to to turn it back. That that that's the neat thing about roadways. About every 10 to 12 years, you have to redo the pavement. It just it wears out and and so, you know, every inch that's the other reason you don't want any more pavement than you can. You have to have because every inch of pavement you have is an inch you're going to have to maintain.
00:17:03:29 - 00:17:26:06
Dr. Patricia Tice
And that means every ten years you're going to have to fix it. So they got to the ten year mark, and they went back to the community and said, hey, we're going to re stripe it all. Do you want it back the way it was before or you want to keep this? And it was not unanimous, but it was pretty close to unanimous saying, oh my goodness, this is still so much better than it was before.
00:17:26:06 - 00:17:53:19
Dr. Patricia Tice
It works great. Everybody's happy. Everybody's making lots of money. I mean, the the walking, what people forget about walking and biking is that these are people who literally walk into the door of your store and buy things. And so this walkable environment kind of thing makes people money. And that's really important. So you've got places like Edgewater Drive now where 22 years in.
00:17:53:21 - 00:18:13:18
Dr. Patricia Tice
So they they did the initial project in 2002. It was when it was completed. They planned it in 2000. So they they finished in 2002. We're at 20, 24, 25 this next year. They're going to take all of the changes that they did in paint, and they're going to turn them into curbs.
00:18:13:21 - 00:18:51:18
John Simmerman
Yeah. And plus and I'll add this and also more importantly going from a not a best in class bike lane, just a painted bike lane to a more authentic a more authentic separated all ages and abilities, facility. And we'll come back to, we'll come back to the psychology of how important it is to create environments where truly all ages and all abilities feel like they have agency of being able to get to where they need to get to.
00:18:51:24 - 00:19:18:18
John Simmerman
Absolutely important. What's really, really fascinating about these three photos and and again, apologies to the, to, to to to the, listening only audience. I know you can't see this. But really we went from, you know, those four travel lanes, down to two travel lanes with the center turn lane. We do have parking lanes on either side, so there's parking Street on street parking on either side.
00:19:18:20 - 00:19:44:11
John Simmerman
So this really is a really wide. You know, stretch of asphalt. It's a it's a, it's a it's a lot of tarmac. But really in that final version of the proposed design, we've really narrowed things down. We've d paved a bit. We've got some greenery in here as well as putting in those, authentically protected and separated infrastructure for people walking and biking.
00:19:44:17 - 00:20:03:00
John Simmerman
So hopefully that helps out our listening only audience as well. This is tremendous. Now, what I want to say to you is this is that you mentioned it earlier when we were looking at these photos and we were discussing the traffic volumes and saying, oh, well, you know, if you've got x number of, of vehicles traveling through here, you may not be able to do that.
00:20:03:08 - 00:20:36:08
John Simmerman
One of the things that I try to push back on from a public health perspective is saying, you know, hey, if this is where we want to get to, if we want to create a street that is truly a street and is a welcoming environment and is the platform for building wealth and vitality and vibrancy and make it healthier for everybody else, at some point we have to stop, you know, bowing down to what the vehicle counts are currently or projected out in the future.
00:20:36:15 - 00:21:04:02
John Simmerman
And that's where your line work comes in, because you were in the world of projections and say, let's, let's take a step back and say, is this the place we want? Do we want it to be a traffic sewer that's pushing through and bowing down to the loss? Or do we want to create a different type of loss, like a real space, like a level of of comfort and a level of safety and, and really, you know, looking at that.
00:21:04:02 - 00:21:21:03
John Simmerman
So I always try to, to whenever we start to talk about what current, you know, the current counts are of vehicles, I like to pause and say, well, what is it we want? Do we want to create a space, a place, or is it a pipe? Is it something that's just going to shoot people through?
00:21:21:05 - 00:21:50:24
Dr. Patricia Tice
Well, and I think the issue at hand, the thing that makes it possible to do that is the network. Yes. No. If you don't have another another avenue to work with, if that's the if you've put all your eggs in one basket and that one road is the only road you have, it's a congestion trap. So you you literally have boxed yourself into this is the only place I'm going to let cars move around.
00:21:50:27 - 00:22:11:20
Dr. Patricia Tice
When you run out of room on that, you're going to want to widen it. And it's it's kind of the evil version of give a mouse a cookie. You know, it just it runs in, in this, this really negative spiral when you have a grid. You see how those old grids used to work. And these are not even AI grids.
00:22:11:20 - 00:22:30:07
Dr. Patricia Tice
But when you have a beautiful grid network that you can actually work with, there's all of these alternatives. Now the downside to that and federal highways, both federal highways and federal Housing Authority, which is actually the one that published this particular set of diagrams, this is the precursor to HUD.
00:22:30:09 - 00:22:31:08
John Simmerman
Right?
00:22:31:10 - 00:23:00:03
Dr. Patricia Tice
When they were trying to tell communities how to design their subdivisions, they were encouraging them starting in the late 30s into the 50s, encouraging them to avoid cut through traffic because cut through traffic was becoming something of a problem. And, and you can have capacity issues on a major roadway that spill over into the neighborhood, and then the neighborhood does actually have a problem.
00:23:00:05 - 00:23:11:16
Dr. Patricia Tice
But that really only happens when you're mistaking a regional facility for your downtown. Now you have to.
00:23:11:19 - 00:23:24:22
John Simmerman
There's which when you think of it, when you think of it, Patricia, you just said that, you know, treating like your downtown, like a regional facility. So many of our main streets got converted over into roads like this.
00:23:24:25 - 00:23:33:15
Dr. Patricia Tice
Well, and there was a reason. I mean, you remember the movie cars. Okay. And the bypass that killed the town.
00:23:33:18 - 00:23:34:18
John Simmerman
Sure, sure.
00:23:34:21 - 00:24:00:12
Dr. Patricia Tice
That happened everywhere. This is a four lane section with on street parking. Okay. Now the on street parking is kind of small. If you had to convert this to six lanes without a median, in theory, you might be able to get away with it. Maybe you'd be pushing it hard and there, and you'd probably have to take quite a bit of sidewalk to do it too.
00:24:00:15 - 00:24:15:16
Dr. Patricia Tice
Yeah. What happens when you go from four lanes to six lanes? And this is this is the blog two weeks from now, I think. What happens when you go from four lanes to six lanes is that the treatment kills the patient?
00:24:15:18 - 00:24:16:18
John Simmerman
Right.
00:24:16:21 - 00:24:42:14
Dr. Patricia Tice
So all of that land use or along the sides of the roadway has to be purchased to fit the road, and you no longer have anything left. And and so you end up with massive parking lots and big box stores where you used to have this entire ecosystem that helped the roadway to function as something more than just a through path.
00:24:42:17 - 00:25:02:21
Dr. Patricia Tice
So going from 2 to 4 is hard medicine. Going from 4 to 6 kills the patient, you know, and and we try often when you're doing a roadway widening there's usually budget money to give to the businesses on the side of the road to help them maintain their business while it's under construction.
00:25:02:23 - 00:25:03:23
John Simmerman
Right.
00:25:03:26 - 00:25:26:10
Dr. Patricia Tice
Most of them don't make it 12 months after the construction is done, because the construction, because the nature of the roadway has changed. You can't just stop and hop out of your car and pop into the store anymore. It doesn't work that way. You've now taken what was genuinely a street and you've turned it into a road.
00:25:26:12 - 00:25:47:22
John Simmerman
Yeah. Which is why I wanted to go to this visual here. Is that. Yes. You're absolutely right. We've taken what was was probably originally a street, and we've made it a road, meaning we've made something that prioritizes the movement of people through the space, not really attracting people to come and stay in the space, which is what we see with this.
00:25:47:22 - 00:25:56:29
John Simmerman
And so, yeah, you've got the definition of the street and the road once you go through, you know, the additional points that you'd like to cover with us.
00:25:57:01 - 00:26:21:17
Dr. Patricia Tice
The, the idea of a street is it comes back to what we discovered in the research. I was trying to figure out how we would build a road that everyone would behave on, and and what I realized very early on, or early enough? Not early enough to, to start the project with it, but early enough was that it had absolutely nothing to do with what we were building.
00:26:21:19 - 00:26:46:06
Dr. Patricia Tice
It had everything to do with whether or not there were people in the space. And the thing is, once you learn to drive nearly all of what you're doing is automatic. This is a picture of my son, who is a far better driver than me now. But, it's a picture of him trying to learn to drive. And I don't know if you remember emotionally what that felt like.
00:26:46:08 - 00:27:00:21
Dr. Patricia Tice
And everything was new, and you had to think about every single movement that you made. And it's miserable. It's it's nothing works and it's really unsafe.
00:27:00:24 - 00:27:02:25
John Simmerman
So because it's it's this, it's system.
00:27:02:27 - 00:27:22:16
Dr. Patricia Tice
Because it's slow. Yeah. It's it's the part of your brain that actually is thinking in words and ideas and, and that part of your brain doesn't do a really good job of driving. It can take the driver's test and it'll pass it fine, but it will not make you a good driver. If you go to the next one.
00:27:22:18 - 00:27:48:27
Dr. Patricia Tice
What really is driving is a completely different system. You have a different part of your brain that is much, much older. You train it by experience and so as you're learning to drive over the first 6 or 8 months, you're giving it experience after experience after experience so that everything that you do becomes automatic. It's very it's very, very good at statistics.
00:27:48:29 - 00:28:06:27
Dr. Patricia Tice
You know, there were actually research studies in psychology where, you know, they would stack two, they would have two decks in front of you and they'd stack one deck in your favor and the other one against you. And it took two rounds of the game before you could figure out which one was stacked and which one wasn't. Now you couldn't.
00:28:06:29 - 00:28:35:00
Dr. Patricia Tice
You couldn't tell with words why you knew that one is a better one than that one. But your hand would reach for the good one before it reached for the bad one, right? And that's what we're doing when we're driving. As you're driving. You're you're figuring it out and everything becomes super automatic. But when you're in a space like this, there's a very subtle change.
00:28:35:02 - 00:29:03:05
Dr. Patricia Tice
See that? That system one is there for your survival. It's trying to get you fed, and it's trying to keep you alive. Right? Or or not decked. You know, but it's also maintaining your social position in your, in your group and, and in many ways that often is more important to, to that part of your brain than your own physical safety.
00:29:03:08 - 00:29:38:19
Dr. Patricia Tice
Your position socially is so critical to you, you will it actually gets managed by those automatic systems. And so you get into an environment like this where you're doing everything face to face. And I'd, I and all of a sudden you don't want to look like a jerk. The interesting thing about that is that when you're down at a speed that you can interact with other people, you have an entirely different set of neuro neurological structures that are made to do just that.
00:29:38:21 - 00:29:46:27
Dr. Patricia Tice
And when you get people down into that, that speed range and that speed range is a lot slower than we ever dreamed.
00:29:47:00 - 00:29:47:27
John Simmerman
Exactly.
00:29:47:29 - 00:30:17:20
Dr. Patricia Tice
It breaks it, you know, some, my guess is I know it's between 20 and 25. I'm absolutely confident that, my guess is it's around 23. So somewhere around 23 miles an hour. It you you break from face to face, which is something that is millennia old. I mean, we've been doing this for the entire span of humanity.
00:30:17:22 - 00:30:45:01
Dr. Patricia Tice
It's something that you start training in from infancy, from from the very first time your mom picks you up and holds you. And right after you're born, you're trained to to do eye to eye, face to face. There are entire structures in your brain that do nothing but that. And the wild thing about that is that every time you'd get, you'd decode a face.
00:30:45:03 - 00:31:12:12
Dr. Patricia Tice
Every time you see another person's face, you get a dopamine hit, right? You're actually getting rewarded for doing that. It's subtle. It's not something that you would notice, but it is. And and if it's somebody you know and you enjoy, you get an oxytocin hit on top of that. So you know, a double whammy. But that's what I mean about those automatic systems beginning to come into play.
00:31:12:14 - 00:31:36:04
Dr. Patricia Tice
When you get into these really tight environments where you're at the range that you can actually interact with other people eye to eye, it's no longer stressful because you're trying to manage where the vehicle is, because you're not worrying about the conflict with the vehicle in front of you, you're worrying about the conflict with another person, and that is a hold.
00:31:36:07 - 00:32:03:12
Dr. Patricia Tice
That's the difference between a street and a road. In a street, the conflicts are all negotiated eye to eye in a roadway. You've got a big machine that you're running and it's working with another. You're looking at other big machines because they're they're big and you're looking you're going fast enough that you're not focusing close to yourself. You're focusing a long way away.
00:32:03:15 - 00:32:04:23
John Simmerman
Exactly.
00:32:04:25 - 00:32:31:24
Dr. Patricia Tice
And and it's it's two completely different driving styles. What you're focusing on is completely different. And so the way that you respond to everyone around you, and we know the limitations of that because we know how far you can see another person. So once you've learned how to drive and you're now pulling in all of those automatic responses, you only see people's faces about 90ft into the distance.
00:32:31:26 - 00:32:58:14
Dr. Patricia Tice
And you can't tell the difference between a face and a clock at 16 degrees. You can see the move, but you can't really tell that that's a face once you get out beyond about 16 degrees. So you're looking at a very narrow cone in front of you. Now, by the way, you see that striped sock over there? If you're wearing striped socks is a cyclist.
00:32:58:16 - 00:33:26:08
Dr. Patricia Tice
There are actually studies that show you can actually see that almost 1000ft in the distance, because they're moving up and down, and it's a really bright contrast. But that is the absolute limit. You can read body language. You can read very extreme body language out to about 300ft. You read regular body language maybe at 130, 550ft or so.
00:33:26:11 - 00:33:49:14
Dr. Patricia Tice
I think it my suspicion is and I have not been able to prove this yet, but I'm working on it. My suspicion is that that 300ft is the boundary for feeling comfortable in a social environment. We know that in a shopping mall, if you put the anchors more than 600ft apart, the anchor on the end falls off.
00:33:49:16 - 00:33:54:22
Dr. Patricia Tice
The businesses in between die. You don't want to use the you'll get in your car and drive to it.
00:33:54:22 - 00:34:17:15
John Simmerman
You won't walk it, right? Which is a point that you also make when you realize when you talk about the fact that a lot of people will. When we throw these words around, right in urbanism and in active mobility, and we're like, well, we want a walkable city in and all of us. And you make the point that in fact, it's it's a lot smaller than we think it is.
00:34:17:15 - 00:34:40:01
Dr. Patricia Tice
It's ridiculously small. And the blocks have to be small, too. So engineers typically think of a quarter mile walk. Shit, a quarter mile walk is a five minute walk. That's a quarter mile diameter. It's a quarter mile from one side of the circle to the other. And a lot of engineers will assume that you're working with a quarter mile radius, which is a half a mile, and you're not.
00:34:40:04 - 00:35:10:09
Dr. Patricia Tice
Every urban cluster that I've seen around the world fits pretty much in that scale. You can see it's basically four, maybe four and a half blocks long. When the blocks get beyond about 600ft long, for some reason the walkability drops off completely. That's one of the reasons why Miami and LA really struggle. They have these beautiful grid networks, and you would think that that would be very, very walkable.
00:35:10:12 - 00:35:40:03
Dr. Patricia Tice
But the blocks are just this much too long. I mean, in Miami they run usually about 750 in LA. You know, you're looking at six 8750 as much as 900 in spots. But because the blocks are that long, it the drivers don't get enough interruptions. They're not seeing something new. Often enough, the people who are walking feel like they're out in the middle of nowhere, and they don't feel safe because they can't.
00:35:40:08 - 00:36:00:24
Dr. Patricia Tice
They can't wave at somebody and say, hey, I'm in trouble and expect them to see it. And I think that's what drives that 600ft and you can only see about 300ft. So if you're standing dead in the middle of the block, you can still see what's happening at both ends, right? Right. Once it gets past about 600, you can't really see the end of the block anymore.
00:36:00:24 - 00:36:30:01
Dr. Patricia Tice
When you're in the middle. And it gets scary and and overwhelming. And so cities like Winter garden, when you look at the downtown core, it's almost exactly a quarter mile from end to end. Even Walmart knows this. It is literally an eighth of a mile from the milk carton to the back of where they think you're going to park, and if you look at the edge of this picture, you can see there's this line of these little islands that follows that eighth of a mile circle.
00:36:30:03 - 00:36:36:18
Dr. Patricia Tice
You can tell they're having their employees park outside of that because they know their customers won't.
00:36:36:20 - 00:36:37:10
John Simmerman
Right.
00:36:37:13 - 00:37:01:15
Dr. Patricia Tice
Yeah. And the city has required a minimum amount of parking that they'll never use. But they know that they're only going to use out to where those those little medians out there are and, and anything beyond that, you know, we'll give it to you if you have to. Barcelona. You know, we love Barcelona. Barcelona has completely revolutionized the way we think of cities.
00:37:01:17 - 00:37:37:05
Dr. Patricia Tice
But the size is perfect, right? I mean, look at that. It's the exact same size as all the others. Portland is the next one. Portland. The blocks are so small you can actually get four blocks in. It's a 4x4 instead of a three by three. And now Portland is is the ideal selfishness the reason why Portland's blocks are so small is because the folks who developed Portland figured out that corner lots were more valuable than center lots, and so they wanted all corner lots because it would make the city more valuable.
00:37:37:12 - 00:38:05:15
Dr. Patricia Tice
And it has, but not because it's all corner lots. It has because the blocks are so short, it makes it a breeze to walk through it. It's just so easy. Everything is just right there. Everything feels like a room. It doesn't feel like a road. I mean, it doesn't feel like a highway. It feels like you're in this very enclosed space that that feels very comfortable.
00:38:05:21 - 00:38:25:00
Dr. Patricia Tice
The other neat thing about Portland is that you remember, when you go back to the go back to the, the picture road showing you how far you can see the one right after that. If you were to take that 90ft and you and the 20 degrees and you put that down on a plan view, look on it.
00:38:25:03 - 00:38:52:17
Dr. Patricia Tice
Look at it from above, it turns out that those two together create a 60ft wide corridor. And everything we do as a driver pretty much happens within that 60ft. You know, even if you're driving in an area that's much, much bigger than that, the area you're watching is that's 30ft on either side of you. You're not going to pay attention to much outside of that.
00:38:52:17 - 00:39:12:15
Dr. Patricia Tice
Now, the wild thing is this popped up everywhere. I mean, it it felt like you'd call it a good, a bad penny, but it was a good penny, and it just kept coming up all over the place. So you've heard of perceptual narrowing that the faster you go, the less you see.
00:39:12:18 - 00:39:13:26
John Simmerman
Right?
00:39:13:28 - 00:39:35:08
Dr. Patricia Tice
Kind of. That's actually not true. What they didn't realize when they did the study and the study was actually simulation, you know, so they were working in a simulator. What they didn't think about was how far ahead the is actually looking as they drive. So if you're going really, really fast, you're focusing pretty far down the road. If you're going slow, you're looking right in front of you.
00:39:35:11 - 00:40:00:28
Dr. Patricia Tice
When you take that into account, it turns out. You're looking at a narrower angle. It's not that you're looking at less, it's that the angle you're looking at has towed in just a little bit. And the reason for that is that you're looking at a 60ft piece of ground. No matter how far ahead you're looking, you're still looking at the same 60ft piece of ground.
00:40:00:28 - 00:40:35:15
Dr. Patricia Tice
But if that 60ft piece of ground is 300ft in front of you, instead of 50ft in front of you, the angle is going to be a lot narrower than it is when it's right up close to you. City streets, worldwide, before the car, the main arterials all over the world, if it's if the main arterial was not going to be used for a parade and parades that are an exception, as long as you didn't have some egotistical tyrant who wants to hold a parade every other week, you know, just is what it is.
00:40:35:17 - 00:41:06:06
Dr. Patricia Tice
They want to show off. I kind of would, too, if I had an army. But if you're not dealing with parade grounds, without exception, throughout the world, the main roadways are somewhere between 60 and 90ft from building face to building face all over the world. And, you know, you look at Paris. Paris is all 60s, when it goes beyond 60s, they'll put a boulevard in the middle and they'll put a park down the middle of it.
00:41:06:09 - 00:41:21:03
Dr. Patricia Tice
And and they're beautiful. They're stunning. But that becomes a problem when you have a place like you look at that, that very first picture where I'm looking out from the gazebo. Right. And the distance between the buildings is actually 110ft.
00:41:21:05 - 00:41:21:22
John Simmerman
00:41:21:25 - 00:41:52:25
Dr. Patricia Tice
So it's two wide and two wide by quite a bit actually. It, it's almost uncomfortably too wide. And if you didn't do something in the center to sort of break it up into two different spaces, it would feel like a highway. They wanted to turn this, fDOT wanted to turn this into a five lane highway right. So you you remember what the picture I showed you earlier that had the the four lanes with the on street parking.
00:41:52:27 - 00:42:16:04
Dr. Patricia Tice
That's what fDOT wanted for that roadway, right? Of course. And and that's what they do. That's what they do. But could you imagine there is no way we we could have gotten to the value the economic development, the benefit of everything that we've done in downtown Plant Street, you know, in downtown Winter garden, if that had been a five lane roadway right.
00:42:16:06 - 00:42:39:28
Dr. Patricia Tice
And that's the that's the joy of doing a road diet. When you do a road diet in a place that can afford the road diet that has businesses on both sides, you start creating value. I just looked up the CRA on that the other day. They started the CRA in 92 with and it was very blighted at the time.
00:42:39:28 - 00:43:07:24
Dr. Patricia Tice
They were in a lot of trouble. All of the properties together in the entire CRA were worth $23 million, which for an entire downtown area was even in 92 was not much, was kind of bad. The numbers last year were 340 million for the same properties. Now, we've had 30 years, and a lot of that's come in the last year because property values have gone crazy.
00:43:07:26 - 00:43:36:27
Dr. Patricia Tice
But the value that that kind of street scrape creates is tremendous. We don't have vacancies on that road. Those businesses are only vacant long enough to negotiate with a new tenant. If somebody leaves, they they've got five people coming begging to take it. And, and our turnover, I mean, there's, there's a 96% occupancy rate in downtown Winter garden at this point.
00:43:36:29 - 00:43:56:27
Dr. Patricia Tice
Right. And it it makes the city a tremendous amount of money. And honestly, I can't think of anything more conservative than building cities the way we have for the last 5000 years. Right. You know, up until.
00:43:56:27 - 00:43:59:26
John Simmerman
About 120 years ago. Yeah.
00:43:59:29 - 00:44:24:05
Dr. Patricia Tice
Well, I mean, and and they, you know, and that was I think that's ultimately an issue of an agricultural land use not growing up particularly wisely because, I mean, Winter garden is actually the downtown core for a very agricultural area. That whole area, it was a train stop where people would load up vegetables to send to the Northeast Corridor.
00:44:24:05 - 00:44:53:15
Dr. Patricia Tice
So the area around this is very suburban. It has, you know, we have the very tight grid that you saw in the in the first picture. And it it extends about three quarters of a mile outside of that quarter mile circle. So you have about of a mile square a mile round for the downtown area. The area outside of that was all farms, our agricultural communities, not even communities, just agricultural land.
00:44:53:19 - 00:45:19:00
Dr. Patricia Tice
And if you try to develop that quickly, you don't take the time. And and of course, when you've got the pressure of building a state highway instead of a local network, right, which feeds into all of this, then you don't build the network. And because you don't build the network, every road that you build turns into these massive highways because you keep running out of room.
00:45:19:03 - 00:45:47:28
Dr. Patricia Tice
You haven't given any redundancy to the system. And and that's ultimately Pennywise pound foolish. Yeah. We built fewer roads, but we're going to have to maintain the exact same number of lane miles. The roads that we did build, we didn't connect up well enough for them to actually be beneficial to the community. And in the long run, we're going to get to the point that we can't afford to maintain what we have.
00:45:48:00 - 00:46:02:27
John Simmerman
Well, yeah. To your point of what you said earlier, is that the the picture on the left has a far greater return on investment from a per acre basis than the picture on the right. You can't sustain the, you know, the that struggle.
00:46:02:28 - 00:46:36:00
Dr. Patricia Tice
You're not getting enough money in on that road to pay to to maintain that road. Now the wild thing is, when you start looking at that from, from a wider system standpoint, when you put in those redundant facilities, you open up the opportunity to develop all of those redundant roads. So all of them become opportunities for offices and and shopping center shopping, but not shopping centers, you know, not massive parking lots.
00:46:36:00 - 00:46:47:06
Dr. Patricia Tice
You've got mom and pop stores. And and in a lot of ways, Amazon has totally been our friend on this, go, go show them the fish.
00:46:47:08 - 00:47:08:26
John Simmerman
Yeah. I'll show I'll show them the fish in a second. But I did want to take a moment to, like, bring, bring this together too, because we see we just talked about the financial viability between these two. And we see that the one on the left, this is, for the listening only audience. This is a, a beautiful image of a, you know, a narrow space.
00:47:08:26 - 00:47:44:16
John Simmerman
We do have some angled parking there. We've got buildings right up to the street. And then, of course, we have our strode, which is terrible, terrible for return on investment per acre. But then we also bring up the point that this type, Charleston Street, you know, we don't see speeding here because, again, the design doesn't encourage speeding. So from an active towns perspective, we also know which place is more conducive to poor people out to encourage people to walk to their meaningful destinations because they're not being bombarded by, pollution and, and, and high speeds of traffic.
00:47:44:16 - 00:47:45:25
John Simmerman
So yeah, absolutely.
00:47:46:02 - 00:48:08:00
Dr. Patricia Tice
I actually had we did a video PG, and I worked for me for a while, and I had him go out and record video just driving around, and then we took those shapes that came from the perceptual narrowing study, and we stuck them on the video. You know, we we interpolated so we could get a the right size shape for every five mile an hour increment.
00:48:08:00 - 00:48:34:24
Dr. Patricia Tice
Right. So it would go in and out at the faster you were going, the narrower it would get. The the slower you were going, the wider it would get. And I still have that on my YouTube channel actually. Yeah. So if you want to find it later, it's, it's actually there on my YouTube channel. But the the interesting thing about that was that we have one little section right there, right near that picture.
00:48:34:24 - 00:49:00:28
Dr. Patricia Tice
You were just showing that the, the really, really wide roadway. So six lane highway with a two way left turn lane in the middle. So there's a suicide lane that runs down the middle super wide. We were going about 32, 33 miles an hour okay. And I told him to go through the entire video and place a red blur on top of every single pedestrian in the video, partly so you could see that there was a pedestrian there.
00:49:00:28 - 00:49:27:09
Dr. Patricia Tice
So they were really obvious. And also that, you know, hide them. So that you can't see who they are. Right. There was this one section right there in that exact section of roadway that we watched that video four different times before. We actually saw the pedestrians that were walking on the side of the road, and we were looking for them, you know, we could run it at any speed we wanted.
00:49:27:11 - 00:49:51:14
Dr. Patricia Tice
We were trying to find them and it scared the mess out of me. I mean, it was absolute terrifying. We were literally in either the middle lane or the the, you know, one of the third lane over, but you just you could not see it. And if I were driving that and it was it wasn't just one, it was it was a dad.
00:49:51:17 - 00:50:21:01
Dr. Patricia Tice
And then and it was this exact spot actually, that this spot on the right there was a dad, and then there was a mom with a stroller. So it was two groups with three different people. We watched that video four times before we saw them, and that terrified me that, you know, we assume that if there's line of sight that you're actually going to see the pedestrians in that space, that is a bad assumption.
00:50:21:03 - 00:50:43:09
Dr. Patricia Tice
And so I made them go back through in my data stream, we were looking at, at natural driving. So we had we had people that were, you know, it was a really cool data data set. They basically took about 3300 cars, and they put 100 instruments on each car and let people drive them for a year. So huge amounts of data, we pulled a very small amount of it.
00:50:43:09 - 00:51:00:17
Dr. Patricia Tice
But in that data stream, my assumption was if there was a vulnerable user there as a pedestrian, a cyclist, something that that the driver would actually see them. And it turns out that above about 20 miles an hour, it's only 5050. Yeah, it's the odds of actually, that.
00:51:00:17 - 00:51:03:05
John Simmerman
Brings us back to speed again, I tell you. Yeah.
00:51:03:06 - 00:51:27:21
Dr. Patricia Tice
It does. And I'm not I'm not willing to say that speed is necessarily bad, but I am willing to say that if you're going above about 25 miles an hour, you better darn well make sure if somebody is going to be walking out that road that the driver knows they're coming. Yeah, because if the driver doesn't know they're coming, he will not see them ever.
00:51:27:23 - 00:51:50:13
Dr. Patricia Tice
It's just not going to happen. And it it's it's terrifying to me in many ways that that's true because because, you know, I, I mean, I grant you, I am not a good driver and I and I, but I probably see them more than most because I'm always looking around. Most drivers are looking at the car in front of them.
00:51:50:15 - 00:52:14:04
Dr. Patricia Tice
And and that's what they saw in the perceptual narrowing study. You were really focused in on the vehicle that's right in front of you. You're not really focused in on what's going on outside of that window. You just you don't see it. And and so places like, we have another roadway in Orlando. That was it was the red light district.
00:52:14:06 - 00:52:37:27
Dr. Patricia Tice
It's improving, but it's still pretty, pretty rough. And we were running two fatalities a year, pedestrian bike fatalities a year and five serious for ever. You know, it it was a solid five year time period before they did this last project. And and it was the kind of thing where you just like, oh, I don't care what it takes.
00:52:37:27 - 00:53:02:04
Dr. Patricia Tice
We got to get this to stop and we will throw the kitchen sink at it. And and they did they, they it was a $9 million project. They basically have a pedestrian hybrid beacon, which is a big old fat signal for crosswalk. About every 600ft along the entire corridor. You drive down the corridor and it looks like it's lit up like a Christmas tree.
00:53:02:06 - 00:53:05:15
Dr. Patricia Tice
It's just red and green down here.
00:53:05:17 - 00:53:11:29
John Simmerman
Well, and I'm glad you I'm glad you mentioned that, too. But because I want to pull up this this again going back to the.
00:53:12:05 - 00:53:19:05
Dr. Patricia Tice
And it was the success story, by the way. Sure. Yeah. After they finished all of that, we've had no fatalities on the corridor.
00:53:19:07 - 00:53:52:08
John Simmerman
When I hope for that. What I hope for that is similar to the success story that you have here with, Edgewater Drive is. So you went from here to here, and then now we're heading in this direction, and now we're starting to see, a design that, by its nature, will really reinforce. It'll work. And it reinforces what we're talking about is slowing people down, because without all the lights and all the flashing and all that, it does it naturally because of the narrowness and because of the green elements.
00:53:52:08 - 00:53:54:12
John Simmerman
And all of this is happening.
00:53:54:14 - 00:53:58:16
Dr. Patricia Tice
It's really is that it's six lanes.
00:53:58:18 - 00:54:05:06
John Simmerman
Well, yeah. I mean, again, they leaned in to maximizing this kind of insanity. Yeah.
00:54:05:09 - 00:54:31:04
Dr. Patricia Tice
But but you when when you've got a six lane roadway, it's going to be really. And it's a regional facility. It it needs to carry a lot of volume. The areas where people are crossing the road are very specific areas. So they're exact, you know, where it's going to happen. So they're able to do the things that they need to do in the places that they can, where where the problems have been.
00:54:31:06 - 00:54:58:20
Dr. Patricia Tice
There's also a huge problem with impairment in that corridor. And pedestrian impairment is an issue we don't pay nearly enough attention to. There's there's two types of we know that pedestrian fatalities, three quarters of them are happening at night, right out of those three quarters, two thirds of those three quarters. So about half of our pedestrian fatalities are happening between 6 and 10 p.m..
00:54:58:23 - 00:55:11:03
Dr. Patricia Tice
Those are functional. Those are people get off from work. They walk across the road to the grocery store, and they get hit because they're crossing at mid-block because it's a long way down to the crosswalk. Right. Okay.
00:55:11:04 - 00:55:13:08
John Simmerman
And you have an entire post on this, right?
00:55:13:10 - 00:55:40:29
Dr. Patricia Tice
I do the last quarter of those those pedestrian fatalities or after 10 p.m. and my based on what I've seen in some of the data that I've seen in some very specific local areas that have issues with a lot of impairment happening after that, it could be as much as 90% of those are impaired, where either the driver or the pedestrian was impaired.
00:55:41:02 - 00:56:13:04
Dr. Patricia Tice
And when you're looking at numbers that are that high after 11 p.m. or after 10 p.m., excuse me, you're going to have to do something really intensive to make that work because they're going to do stupid things. If we're ever going to get to Vision Zero, that's one we're going to have to get to. And and when we understand and a lot of it has to do with either liquor stores or strip clubs, because the land use itself is predatory, you're actually building addictions into people.
00:56:13:07 - 00:56:43:08
Dr. Patricia Tice
And so they start making choices that they lose their car and but they still want to get to the liquor store or the strip club. And so they'll buy a trailer right down the street from the strip club so that they can walk there and in, in the entire three mile stretch of OBT, they only fixed one mile, but in the entire three mile stretch last year, there was only one fatality, and the one fatality was running between one strip club to the other.
00:56:43:10 - 00:56:52:08
John Simmerman
Interesting. Yeah. Now, earlier, earlier you channeled, Amazon and Walmart. So I want to get it. We're running out of time here. So let's get to that.
00:56:52:08 - 00:57:17:15
Dr. Patricia Tice
So okay so so back in the 90s we had deregulation and there were all of these antitrust regulations that kept the small mom and pop grocery stores going. Deregulation happened and Walmart and Target ate them all up and they were gone. You know, the downtowns that died because there were none of those mom and pop local hardware stores or grocery stores, those kind of things.
00:57:17:17 - 00:57:41:01
Dr. Patricia Tice
The thing is that, Amazon is a much bigger fish than Walmart or Target, and it's chewin on their tail. And because of that, the interesting thing about big fish is that big fish and little fish tend to be symbiotic. The big fish can't eat the little fish and get a decent meal. And so they're perfectly happy to help them out.
00:57:41:04 - 00:58:06:23
Dr. Patricia Tice
And so, you know, you've got small local businesses that they create a product of their own. They can sell it on Amazon, Amazon, on the other hand, is eating Walmart and Target's lunch. And it's getting worse by the year. And so the the competition for those local businesses is pretty darn is loosening some. And so you go to the next thing.
00:58:06:23 - 00:58:24:05
Dr. Patricia Tice
There are three things that Amazon can't do. They can't get you something in the next five minutes. So if you need diapers or sugar you're out of luck. They're not going to pick your tomatoes out for you the way that you want. I mean, tomatoes are very specific and they can't build a relationship with you.
00:58:24:08 - 00:58:25:02
John Simmerman
Right?
00:58:25:05 - 00:58:51:00
Dr. Patricia Tice
And because they can't build a relationship with you, the grocery stores, even the chains have figured out that if they can shrink their footprint and distribute throughout the landscape, they can. Right? And so they can compete with Amazon on a relational basis. But that means that the the spacing between all of those grocery stores used to be 4 or 5 miles on center.
00:58:51:07 - 00:59:16:09
Dr. Patricia Tice
So it'd be 3 or 4 miles to get to a grocery store today. They're looking at a mile and a half, if that. So you're never really more than about three quarters of a mile from a grocery store. And at that point, you build the pedestrian facilities, you build something that's safe enough for a seven year old to use, and everybody wants to use them because the grocery store is right down the road.
00:59:16:11 - 00:59:57:25
Dr. Patricia Tice
I mean, and it drives me crazy as and I am probably one of the most conservative people you will ever talk to. Yeah, planners are ridiculously liberal in general. And and I'm an engineer, so, you know, we lean, right? It drives me crazy to hear them hear my people complain about kids being stuck. What? Playing video games, you know, and the dangers of online social media and gaming and all of those things when you have nowhere for them to go, right, you can't you don't have you can't tell a kid, go play in traffic because they go play in traffic.
00:59:57:25 - 01:00:20:26
Dr. Patricia Tice
They'll die. You know, when we were kids, our parents would literally tell us, go play in traffic because we could, you know, you go play basketball in the street. It was no big deal, right? But, you know, we we could walk miles away from our home. We usually wouldn't. But, you know, you'd walk a good half mile away from home without thinking twice about it.
01:00:21:01 - 01:00:49:16
Dr. Patricia Tice
I think my husband would was a sundowner. He he would come back when the streetlights came on, eat dinner and go to bed. And, you know, if if he wasn't outside, he wasn't available. This is not an experience. My kids ever had this and and I grieve that. I think they missed out it. And frankly, it's something that the church is missing out on, too.
01:00:49:19 - 01:01:22:22
Dr. Patricia Tice
Most of the church has been developed or at least in the US, as the Bible Belt is down in the South, where everybody's driving. And so, you know, it's easy to think about driving as well. You know, that's the only thing we've ever known because it is, you know, we've had multiple generations of this. But the argument that I don't hear an awful lot of pastors talking about that needs to be brought up, is what's happening to your time, what's happening to your ability to connect to other people in your community?
01:01:22:25 - 01:01:43:08
Dr. Patricia Tice
If you're never out walking around your neighborhood, how do you know your neighbors? Right? I mean, you might know the person on the right, in the left, and maybe in front of you, but you're not going to know any more than that. How do you build relationships with your community when you never spend any time with them? But as you're walking, you're developing ideas.
01:01:43:08 - 01:02:08:26
Dr. Patricia Tice
You're you're interacting with other people. It it it's inherently a social act. And so as you're doing that, you're building relationships. You meet the people who are out walking their dogs. You connect with people in ways that you can't. If all you're doing is driving. And when you're driving, it's all that time, all day long that you're chewing up.
01:02:08:29 - 01:02:21:10
Dr. Patricia Tice
You know, if you're spending 90 minutes a day in a car, that's 90 minutes you you can't impact and you can't relate to anybody else, right? Yeah. This is this is insanity. Well, I.
01:02:21:16 - 01:02:56:04
John Simmerman
I brought up the this this image again, of the grocery stores. And I want to channel, the image that we had over here of Portland because when we were lingering on this earlier, I was thinking of all the delightful little corner businesses because you mentioned the proliferation of corners. And so we had lots of opportunities for little corner markets and corner pubs and corner coffee shops and, and we see this in a, in the Portland's we see this in the Washington, D.C. and it's, there's a reason why.
01:02:56:04 - 01:03:15:28
John Simmerman
Yeah. You're able to get more steps in if that's your need and you have the ability and you know, to be able to do that. And that's good for your health and well-being. It's so much easier to get those steps in, in this environment than an environment where if you feel like the only way to get around is by getting in the car, it makes it tough.
01:03:15:29 - 01:03:16:24
John Simmerman
Yeah.
01:03:16:26 - 01:03:36:22
Dr. Patricia Tice
You're not going to be walking. I had three months when I was in college that I lived in Maine. We lived about four and a half miles from campus, and I didn't have a car. Somebody loaned me a middle school size bicycle. So, you know, my normal size and I, you know, my knees are almost hitting my elbows.
01:03:36:25 - 01:04:03:27
Dr. Patricia Tice
It's it's so fun. At the end of that summer, I looked good, I looked amazing. I got back to Gainesville, which is actually a fairly bikeable city, all things considered. But I was in a section of town that I couldn't bike to campus, and it didn't matter how much exercise I went to the gym to try to get, I couldn't maintain it because it wasn't a part of my daily routine.
01:04:03:29 - 01:04:14:22
Dr. Patricia Tice
It wasn't an hours long of cycling every day, which, you know, if you're biking half an hour in and half an hour out, you got a full hour of, you know, and.
01:04:14:22 - 01:04:16:01
John Simmerman
You just get a in.
01:04:16:04 - 01:04:49:27
Dr. Patricia Tice
Pumping in your lungs. Exactly. Yeah. And you're forcing the air in your, into your lungs as you're going forward at that speed. And it, it makes your body feel so much better. I don't have a blog post about the new book, and, and I have not gotten the book out yet, but I have a 22 year old with down syndrome, and so she and I have now written a book together to help families that she's, and, and we just we haven't gotten it down to the Amazon yet.
01:04:49:29 - 01:05:15:10
Dr. Patricia Tice
I've been a little bit skittish, but it will be out there any day. And, and it it is specifically written to help families who have, people with, you know, have cognitive disabilities or autism down syndrome to help them think through all of the different things that go into taking an independent trip. The other thing it would be really helpful for is a young middle schooler.
01:05:15:12 - 01:05:39:22
Dr. Patricia Tice
It's the exact same kinds of things that you would want to talk with your sixth grader about, or your third grader about, you know, what does it look like to take money with you? Who do you talk to? Who don't you talk? What does it look like to walk around that environment safely? You know, and going through all of those judgment things that you don't normally think about as an adult because you've already grown through that.
01:05:39:25 - 01:06:03:24
John Simmerman
Yeah. Good stuff, good stuff. Well, this. Yeah, this has been such so much fun. We obviously could continue talking forever and ever and ever. But we do need to. We do need to wrap this up. And folks, I do want to encourage you all to to check out Patricia's work. Profound insights.substack.com is the blog you can find Patricia out on LinkedIn as well.
01:06:03:27 - 01:06:25:05
John Simmerman
You're very, busy and, engaged out on LinkedIn. So good stuff. Yes, you are producing such thoughtful pieces every week and or every other week. And I really do appreciate you contributing to this narrative. Patricia Tice, this has been such an honor and pleasure having you on the channel. Thank you so much.
01:06:25:07 - 01:06:29:13
Dr. Patricia Tice
You were a treat. And this was an absolute blast. Thank you.
01:06:29:15 - 01:06:45:07
John Simmerman
Hey, thank you all so much for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed this episode with Patricia Tice. And if you did, please give it a thumbs up. Leave a comment down below and share it with a friend. And if you haven't done so already, I'd be honored to have you subscribe to the channel. Just click on the subscription button down below and ring that notification bell.
01:06:45:13 - 01:07:06:02
John Simmerman
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01:07:06:06 - 01:07:25:09
John Simmerman
Well, that's all for now. So until next time, this is John signing off by wishing you much activity, health and happiness. Cheers and a huge shout out to all my Active Towns ambassadors supporting the channel via YouTube. Super! Thanks. Buy me a coffee! Patreon. As well as making contributions to the nonprofit. I could not do this without you.
01:07:25:11 - 01:07:27:02
John Simmerman
Thank you all so very much.