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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
00:00:00:03 - 00:00:04:13
John Simmerman
Wes Marshall. Welcome back to the Active Towns Channel.
00:00:04:15 - 00:00:06:03
Wes Marshall
Thanks, John. Good to see you again.
00:00:06:06 - 00:00:29:03
John Simmerman
Yeah, good to see you. yeah. And and really special to do something live to as, as a, I want to say that this was something that you really recommended. You wanted to speak to the audience live today to talk about your new book, which is right here, killed by a traffic engineer, shattering the delusion that science underlines our transportation system.
00:00:29:05 - 00:00:40:21
John Simmerman
Yeah, I got my copy right here, too. Super, super excited to to do this live with you. Yeah. Why don't you just take this moment to introduce yourself? Who the heck is West Marshall?
00:00:40:23 - 00:00:58:06
Wes Marshall
All right, so I'm a professor of civil engineering at University of Colorado Denver. I have a joint appointment in urban planning. I've been here for 15 years now. Originally, I'm from the Boston area, so, got my degrees back back east. And, you know, I don't want to spend 20 minutes monologuing about who I am, but that's sort of the gist of it.
00:00:58:06 - 00:01:13:17
Wes Marshall
And I do research on transportation safety, sustainability, transit oriented communities, a lot of stuff sort of in the genre. There's a big, big umbrella there, but the safety stuff is what I've been working on a lot, especially as this book came together.
00:01:13:23 - 00:01:41:17
John Simmerman
And I I'd say, welcome back, because you've actually been, here on the channel before. and it was a some time ago we had you on. I want to say this is way back in season two. I think it was like episode number. What was it? Number 58 right here. Boom. Yeah. Episode number 58, season two. So, and it was audio only at that time, so,
00:01:41:19 - 00:01:54:15
John Simmerman
Yeah. So so that's good. And hey, Gary Hardy's checking in. Nick. Nick Kirk is, checking in as well. good to see you. Gary, of course, is, coming in from Lakewood. Yeah. That's great. That's fantastic.
00:01:54:15 - 00:01:56:26
Wes Marshall
So more recently, because we did the bike ride.
00:01:56:28 - 00:02:24:04
John Simmerman
I was just going to say. But that is absolutely, you know, true. Yes. We did this back in season two. This is episode 58. And that was that one was audio only. But we did some really cool stuff out on, on the streets of Denver and and it looked and felt a little bit like this. We were just kind of cruising around the neighborhoods and, talking a little bit about the stuff that was on the ground.
00:02:24:07 - 00:02:53:04
John Simmerman
So, folks, we're going to include the links to these, videos and the other podcast episode, in the video's description below after this live, live stream. So you'll be able to check that out. but yeah, we're we're here really to talk about this really cool book that you wrote. Talk a little bit about this journey. I mean, what inspired you to, you know, sit down and do this?
00:02:53:07 - 00:03:11:04
John Simmerman
And I kind of know because, yeah, we we talked a little bit about it before, in actually in the, in part two of that video ride, you talked a little bit about the book and what inspired you. So I know it inspired you to write this darn thing, and I know it took you a while to do it.
00:03:11:07 - 00:03:14:17
John Simmerman
What inspired you to do this?
00:03:14:19 - 00:03:42:20
Wes Marshall
well, it was the stuff that was driving me crazy. you know, I remember a lot of the stuff I do in transportation engineering. It seems overly simplified, and I initially it wasn't even even though I was in the civil engineering discipline, I sort of pushed against the transportation part. I didn't seem as interesting back then, but when I got into the workforce, that was the piece of all the projects I was working on because I was a civil engineer.
00:03:42:20 - 00:03:59:12
Wes Marshall
So I was doing transportation a little structural, like hydrology, stuff like that. But the transportation pieces are always what bother me. Like the stuff we were building was never as good as the stuff I saw in and around me in, in Boston or in Watertown, where I'm from, which is one of those towns touching Boston on the west side there.
00:03:59:14 - 00:04:19:06
Wes Marshall
And over time it just bother me. And then I finally moved to Connecticut. And this the first time I lived in a place where I could not leave my street without being in a car. And it drove me crazy. Like, it's really just drove me nuts. I was like, how do we do places? I can literally see a corner store and I can't get there without being in a car.
00:04:19:09 - 00:04:38:26
Wes Marshall
so back then I started kind of digging into things more and more, try to figure out why, and eventually it led me to get a master's and PhD in this. And over time, you know, I have 75, 80 papers now. They kind of hit at the tip of the iceberg of all our problems. The things I see us doing.
00:04:39:03 - 00:04:48:27
Wes Marshall
But I feel it felt like I was missing the foundation. So that's what the book came in as like, how do I really do something bigger to figure out what's wrong with with why we're doing what we're doing?
00:04:49:00 - 00:05:28:08
John Simmerman
Yeah. And I guess one of the things that it's always good to pause and talk about is who a transportation or a traffic engineer is and how that's, that's rather special because you do a good job. I think, in the book of getting into the historical context of this, when you talk a little bit about that profession, in the fact that people are going to be shocked when they when they learn how little actual formal training or training people have in the expertise or in the specialty that is called traffic or transportation engineering.
00:05:28:11 - 00:05:45:26
Wes Marshall
Yeah. I mean, a lot of folks would say that our problem is were two siloed, that we're sort of off doing their own thing. I mean, to some extent that's true. At the same time, what I'm saying in the book is we don't even teach our transportation engineers enough to have their own silo, like, we come from a discipline of civil engineering.
00:05:45:26 - 00:06:15:13
Wes Marshall
And in civil, you're taking like the structural classes in environmental classes, hydrology classes, and most people. So I only took one transportation engineering class as an undergrad. I proceeded to work for, you know, five, six years. I get my professional engineering license in transportation. Like that was my DEP section. I'd only taken one class at that point. So when I went back and got my master's and PhD, I then realized I knew nothing like I really knew nothing.
00:06:15:13 - 00:06:34:07
Wes Marshall
So, you know, as a young engineer, having taken one class, they give you all these thousand page guidebooks and you don't know enough to do anything but to follow the guidebooks. And that's sort of the problem. Like we're not even teaching them enough. And the way our accreditation works, it's possible to do the same path that I did and have taken zero courses.
00:06:34:10 - 00:06:56:00
Wes Marshall
You only have to have sort of four subdisciplines within civil to be accredited. So you can become a professional transportation engineer. In fact, one of our faculty here, she got her degree at the Colorado School of Mines. And back then they had zero. So she was a practicing transportation traffic engineer for 15, 20 years until she got her master's with us.
00:06:56:00 - 00:07:02:21
Wes Marshall
She had never taken a single course, so it seemed shocking. But that's that's how it is.
00:07:02:24 - 00:07:29:20
John Simmerman
Yeah. And we've got some other folks who are chiming in here and Gary Toth chiming in. Thank you very much for for joining us here. In fact, I'm gonna put this, under the podcast onto the thing. he says transportation engineers are basically accountants. They apply the standards developed by other years, years, if not decades ago, learning nothing about road design in college.
00:07:29:23 - 00:08:03:02
John Simmerman
One of the things that you talk about in the book, which I think is incredibly important, too, is that there's that lack of feedback loop that takes place in in terms of truly taking a spirit of learning from what goes on. You basically taking what's in the standards. And then these guidebooks and I even say standards and scare quotes and and then not really even like pausing and going back and, and truly measuring things, at least from a safety perspective as to whether it was effective or not.
00:08:03:04 - 00:08:19:10
Wes Marshall
So I will say like, what are my original thoughts for how the book might go was to interview people like Gary, because Gary was at the new Jersey Dot in the 70s and 80s, and man, does Gary have some good stories to tell about those times there. but then.
00:08:19:15 - 00:08:22:23
John Simmerman
He's he's literally mentioning one right now. And there.
00:08:22:24 - 00:08:40:16
Wes Marshall
Guys, you don't have to be anecdotal, right? So I wanted the book to be more and I ended up going a different direction. But he and you are totally right on this. Like a lot of the stuff, when I try to figure out why. So my goal was to go down all these different rabbit holes that are just pointing out, like, here's what we do wrong and here's how we could do it better.
00:08:40:18 - 00:09:04:27
Wes Marshall
I really wanted to understand why we do each of these things, and a lot of times there was an original study like a simple one might be like the idea that wider roads are safer. that's been an idea that's perpetuated in traffic transportation engineering for the last 100 years. But when you look back and find the original study, it compares roads from 1820 20 to 24ft wide.
00:09:04:27 - 00:09:29:21
Wes Marshall
So the widest road they looked at in the 1930s when they did a study was 24ft wide. And sure, 24ft wide might be safer than 18ft wide, you know, that goes into the original guidebooks. But then ten, 15 years later, we don't even see it anymore. But the idea keeps going and nobody goes back. And to check to see what what was the original state, what were the specifics or the details?
00:09:29:24 - 00:09:47:24
Wes Marshall
And that information does not extrapolate to 60, 80, 100 hundred and 20ft. And that's it. Kind of roads are building today based on that theory that was based on science. But the science is way more limited than I think. I had no idea that this was the case till I found the end of that rabbit hole.
00:09:47:26 - 00:10:12:20
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. Now, you mentioned it earlier, when you talked a little bit about, the silos in Cathie Tuttle, you know, basically is saying transportation engineers should also know, psychology, landscape architecture, you know, project management, and, you know, and be very good at studying how people act. And that's the human dynamics. That's a that plays a big part of your book, too.
00:10:12:22 - 00:10:31:28
Wes Marshall
Well, I think that's part of the disconnect within civil engineering and what transportation engineers do. So when you're a structural engineer, you know, I was taught you figure out how much force there is or how big the beam needs to be. Then you usually sort of multiply that number by three and give yourself a factor of safety. Same thing happens when you design a culvert.
00:10:32:00 - 00:10:47:28
Wes Marshall
You figure out how big it needs to be. You can make it bigger. It might cost you more, but Mother Nature is not going to be windier because you chose a bigger beam. Transportation. If you use that same thinking, you add humans to the mix. It doesn't work. If I make the road wider like we just talked about.
00:10:48:01 - 00:11:12:29
Wes Marshall
In theory, if people behave the exact same way on the wider road, the narrow road, then it should be safer. But humans aren't like that. We respond to whatever's put in front of us. We behave differently, you know, because we come from this discipline that doesn't account for the sort of the human behavior elements as much. I think it's been hard for our discipline to get that right and to really based more in empiricism than theory.
00:11:13:01 - 00:11:40:28
John Simmerman
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. and one of the one of the things that is, I think, I think a theme that, you know, we have when it comes to transportation engineering and road design and actually Gary is mentioning it right now in talking about, you know, what we think is safer. And in this case, he's talking about, you know, quote unquote wider is safer.
00:11:41:01 - 00:12:05:22
John Simmerman
You know, people might assume that, yeah, you know, a wider road, it must be safer. Right. And it's like, well, not really. I mean, it just encourages faster driving. But talk a little bit about how that became a theme when you're writing this book and you're researching it, how frequently you know, that comes up is, is that the same?
00:12:05:22 - 00:12:13:04
John Simmerman
Is it may come get a veil or a varnish of this is safer, but in reality that's not what they're going for.
00:12:13:11 - 00:12:35:11
Wes Marshall
Yeah. I mean, it comes up a lot of times. And I mean, I saw the same thing even more recently when I was, you know, proposing to work on a project with our Colorado Dot. And the idea was to look at the retro reflectivity of the lines in the road. And their entire goal was to figure out when they degrade enough that they need to be replaced, because the thinking is it'll be different in the mountains versus downtown Denver.
00:12:35:13 - 00:13:00:08
Wes Marshall
You see how, I mean, maybe the suburban places have a different thing. So they wanted statistical models to get that. And there's a couple papers out there that show that maybe better reflectivity actually leads to worse safety, because you can imagine if you can't see the road at all and it's foggy, you won't drive. But if you can kind of see the road because of the the lines, and you might actually try to do things that maybe you shouldn't be doing.
00:13:00:10 - 00:13:18:21
Wes Marshall
So I was trying to say, let's take a step back and see if it's safer or not to better understand that. And the answer was, well, we don't care about that. We just want to know when to replace them. And you saw the same thing throughout history. Like I give the story of, you know, like one of the Ohio Odot or something, looking at edge lines, on roads.
00:13:18:23 - 00:13:39:18
Wes Marshall
And they found when they added the edge lines that it made things worse, instead of sort of rethinking their plan to edge line every road, they just went ahead and did it. They just. And then it ended up becoming part of our guidelines. you know, some people call them standards, but it just becomes embedded in it in the theory that edge lines should help make sense.
00:13:39:18 - 00:13:59:08
Wes Marshall
But empirically, they did it. They were making things worse. So we needed more research. A lot of times we can't even answer whether what is safe or not. We don't even know, but we're just simply basing it on the theory of what should be safer. And that always doesn't. You know, there's a lot of counterintuitive things in transportation.
00:13:59:11 - 00:14:01:20
Wes Marshall
So that's part of the problem. Yeah, yeah.
00:14:01:23 - 00:14:24:11
John Simmerman
I see one of the comments, out there is, talking about somebody looking for your book. And it just it occurred to me we didn't even mention the fact that your book is to be published, next week. So on June 4th, it will become available again. It is, a, published by Island Press. I do have it out on, my bookstore as well.
00:14:24:14 - 00:14:47:08
John Simmerman
so bookshop.com and, I'll again, provide all these links in to your book is right there next to your old book, your textbook, bicycling for transportation. And, very close to Dan Kowski, Bicycle City book and, Jeff Maroons new escaping the housing track. So, folks, you can head on over to, the active towns, bookshop.
00:14:47:08 - 00:14:56:25
John Simmerman
I can throw that link, into the chat as well. So, yeah, it's going to be pretty exciting to to get this baby out there. How many years were you, collecting and working on this?
00:14:56:28 - 00:15:14:20
Wes Marshall
Oh, gosh. you know, I really I mean, the idea of the book's been around in my head for ten, 12, 15 years. Like, I even knew the title back then. And at first I thought, oh, maybe I'll just kind of point out what's wrong. But like I said, I wanted to dive deeper when the pandemic hit. That gave me a chance to really do that.
00:15:14:20 - 00:15:40:13
Wes Marshall
So, you know, I was really deep in those rabbit holes. I had like a thousand pages of notes that I was trying to turn into something that made sense. So I think it was 18 months of really reading all these amazing papers from the 30s, 4050s books, stuff like that. I'm looking at our old manuals. I had, I spent a lot of time looking on eBay for old traffic engineering stuff, like our office stuff like, what are you buying?
00:15:40:13 - 00:15:57:20
Wes Marshall
And it was always the weirdest things. so 18 months of that, six months of just trying to organize this puzzle in my head and turn it into something that at least made sense to me, a year of writing. And then I started looking for a publisher, and it was sort of a year before then and now to to get it published.
00:15:57:20 - 00:16:06:08
Wes Marshall
And like I will say, for whatever reason, Amazon's already shipped it out to people like, so people that ordered there have already received them, even though it officially doesn't come out till June 4th.
00:16:06:10 - 00:16:27:01
John Simmerman
Yeah. You know, it's it's and I really have to, you know, send a big, huge thank you out to Ireland press. I was able to get an advanced copy of the book and, and cram through and read, it's 88 chapters, books. Prepare yourself. But the good news is, is each chapter is only a few pages long.
00:16:27:03 - 00:16:38:10
John Simmerman
What what sort of prompted you to to to take that writing technique, that mechanism of really short chapters and sort of engaging stories.
00:16:38:12 - 00:16:58:03
Wes Marshall
So I was I mean, I during that six months of kind of fitting the puzzle together, I wanted to be really intentional about how I wrote and how I thought about this, and I wanted to put something out in the world that is something I'd want to read. And even if I wasn't a transportation nerd that would read these books anyways, I wanted something that I would read.
00:16:58:03 - 00:17:16:25
Wes Marshall
And, you know, at the same time, I'm literally talking about kids dying. So I, I needed to add levity. And doing it in this structure led each of those short chapters have a beginning, middle, and end. And then I could organize those into parts and those parts. So there's 12 parts, 88 chapters, but each of the parts kind of has a beginning, middle and end.
00:17:16:27 - 00:17:36:06
Wes Marshall
So it made sense and it work. I mean, I read a lot of transportation books, I read a lot of other stuff, and I know what I it's easier to read and what feels like a slog. And I just leaned heavily into what I like reading so that that was the intent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Originally it was a hundred chapters.
00:17:36:07 - 00:17:39:07
Wes Marshall
Also had to do so in the process. Yeah.
00:17:39:07 - 00:17:42:22
John Simmerman
It was we get the streamlined version of it. Yeah.
00:17:42:24 - 00:18:06:10
Wes Marshall
It was longer than the Prisoner of Azkaban, but when the publisher gets involved like, oh, that's too expensive to publish, we need to cut it back. so what ended up happening is I more combined and streamlined. Some chapters, like none of the ideas got taken out, but it it ended up being a good number. But even till the end, a lot of people were pushing for like a conventional big introduction or conventional big conclusion.
00:18:06:10 - 00:18:18:15
Wes Marshall
And I was just bored even thinking about that. So I just really push back and like, no, I like the short chapter structure. So hopefully people agree. We'll see. But I'm happy with how it turned out.
00:18:18:17 - 00:18:56:03
John Simmerman
Yeah, well, you and I had the opportunity to walk around, Cincinnati, just a couple of weeks ago. we both were attending the, the Congress for New Urbanism. I was there for the Strong Towns national gathering as well. we we took my copy of the book because I had a copy of the book before you had a copy of the book, and, we posed out in the middle of one of their overly wide built streets and, and got the, the thumbnail shot for, for this live stream and, but when we were walking around a little bit, I expressed, you know, to you that I felt the book
00:18:56:06 - 00:19:27:18
John Simmerman
was very, very special because, a you took the time to really, I think, write it from a personal perspective. You, you, you, you know, you're kind of calling out engineers and traffic engineers, but at the same time, throughout the book, you are reminding us that that's you. You write it very much from that, that first person perspective of saying, you know, I, I'm part of this, this group that needs to evolve and needs to change, needs to, you know, get with it.
00:19:27:21 - 00:19:51:28
Wes Marshall
Yeah. And I use we sort of throughout I mean in lobbying myself in this field. I mean because if traffic engineers and transportation engineers can get past the title, I think they'll agree with me because I'm not blaming them. I don't I didn't think they were out there being malicious. A lot of times this is just what we were taught, that a lot of this was passed down to us, and we don't have the time or the wherewithal to figure out what's behind it.
00:19:51:28 - 00:20:16:09
Wes Marshall
We just assume whoever wrote it did their homework. And in now there's a hundred years of science behind it. So I think that's sort of the the prior. I see a good, question from cycle smarter. They're they they asked if rumble strips are really good, which is funny because like when I first went back to grad school, one of the symposiums we have every week, there was a former student that came back and they did a, a rumble strips safety paper.
00:20:16:11 - 00:20:34:21
Wes Marshall
and the idea, the theory behind rumble strips make perfect sense. Like, you know, if you're maybe falling asleep, you're going off the road. Yeah. You pull back. And what that study from Connecticut found is that like. Yes. It keeps you from those run off the road type crashes that, you know, where you go off the road, you might hit a tree or something.
00:20:34:29 - 00:21:09:19
Wes Marshall
But a lot of people, when you hit the rumble strip, you jerk the wheel the other way. So on a lot of streets, it was leading to more head on collisions with cars coming from the other direction. And that's a much more serious crash. So the safety wasn't as sort of simple as you would think. And actually, I was at a conference more recently on commercial drivers, and there was a study and they interviewed truck drivers, and a lot of them said they were no longer afraid of falling asleep at the wheel because the rumble strip would wake them up, which is also another unintended consequence.
00:21:09:22 - 00:21:21:04
Wes Marshall
And that speaks to the bigger picture that a lot of the stuff you think should. Obviously the safety doesn't. Then you have the mix of bicyclists trying to go over rumble strip. That's a whole nother can of worms. Yeah.
00:21:21:06 - 00:21:44:28
John Simmerman
And you also talk about this in the book as well. Is that having a safety mechanism, even like a technology, say, safety mechanism that helps. Correct, you know, something like that, analogous to like the rumble strip. It's like then people start get, you know, human behavior is such that, oh, yeah, no, I'm not even paying attention now because I know my car will warn me if I'm doing something.
00:21:45:00 - 00:21:49:26
John Simmerman
I think it was even somebody like, you know, like not even looking to see if it was clear.
00:21:49:28 - 00:22:06:03
Wes Marshall
Yeah. This was more than ten years ago. My neighbor and I were driving to the mountains. He had a new nice, I think it was a BMW. And he had the he had a warning that would tell you if there's a car in your adjacent lane when you're turning, if you're trying to change lanes on the highway. And he wasn't looking at all, he was just changing lanes like crazy.
00:22:06:06 - 00:22:23:25
Wes Marshall
I was like, what are you doing then? Can you do that? Just go now. The car rule. Tell me. so if you think about it in terms of, well, if you have that technology in addition to what you would normally do, which would be look over your shoulder or use your mirrors, and you can imagine they would definitely be safer.
00:22:23:27 - 00:22:46:05
Wes Marshall
But if you're using that technology as your entire crutch and you know it gets dusty, like maybe it's not working at the time because we know full well like the technology that helps your car stop for pedestrians. Like the research shows, that doesn't work well at night. It doesn't work well when the pedestrian skin is darker. It's kind of a coin flip if it's going to stop.
00:22:46:08 - 00:23:06:06
Wes Marshall
But if you're relying on that technology more than yourself, you know, all that is sort of, you know. So, Kara, there were dangling in front of ourselves. It's usually, you know, five years away that is going to solve our safety problems. And it's really not it could lead to just as many different safety problems, but just as big of them.
00:23:06:08 - 00:23:41:17
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have a comment here from, Jordan, a character, and it says, it it seems like the, the transportation engineering is at, at some level, we're getting basically what, you know, the client is wanting. In other words, the population in the city, that's what we're getting. And we're we're giving engineers the, the goal of of building something and a legacy of 100 years of building something in a certain way to prioritize a certain thing, typically level of service, traffic flow.
00:23:41:19 - 00:24:07:11
John Simmerman
And so that's what engineers are doing. They're building to that. And I think that that's one of the things that another comment that came through from Jeffrey Saint Pierre here on, you know, something that Chuck has said is that, you know, part of the problem is that this is, you know, kind of what we've been, you know, we've been doing these are the assumptions of that we have been putting, you know, towards our planners and our, transportation engineers.
00:24:07:13 - 00:24:16:01
John Simmerman
You know, it's kind of like to your point, you mention it and you're not blaming them. It's the system that we built. We need to revamp the system to revamp the profession.
00:24:16:03 - 00:24:42:02
Wes Marshall
And for whatever reason, they give sort of the most quantitative, quantitative of all these disciplines final say in the streets. So the engineers are the ones that get final, say. I've seen so many cities, like when I first came to Denver, they're planning and then engineering public works were in sort of different silos. Planning was putting together these amazing plans for bikes that works and all this great stuff, but it was just collecting dust on the shelf and it was public works.
00:24:42:02 - 00:25:02:08
Wes Marshall
And the engineers just saying, hey, we can't do that. So the onus is on engineers. Like, even if the client is saying we want X, Y, and z, historically, we've done a good job of saying no. If the client's asking for something that is safer, if they're asking for traffic calming, engineers will say no, right? But the opposite can have to.
00:25:02:08 - 00:25:13:20
Wes Marshall
Like if the client is asking for something that you know is focused on capacity and speed, we have we can use engineering judgment to say no to that as well.
00:25:13:23 - 00:25:40:07
John Simmerman
Yeah. And a major theme throughout the book too is that, again, I mentioned it earlier. There's this veneer of yet we're doing these changes and we're doing these things and we're doing it in the name of safety. We're creating wider lanes because it gives the perception, the false perception of safety. It's really not what's happening. You just mentioned something about traffic calming and added, Adam, booster, just, had a question about this.
00:25:40:07 - 00:25:46:11
John Simmerman
And he says, is traffic calming good for cars and trucks? Trucks take wider turns, etc.?
00:25:46:14 - 00:26:04:13
Wes Marshall
or depends on the traffic. I mean, it's a big umbrella of stuff, but I mean, just from the fundamental physics things that are reducing force, an acceleration like some slower speeds is just fundamental to safer streets. And if traffic calming can help do that, then it's heading in the right direction.
00:26:04:16 - 00:26:34:12
John Simmerman
Yeah. And, Kathy Tuttle has has come up with an interesting question in terms of and Chuck Marone talks about this two is strong towns in terms of who should be designing our streets. He's put forth the idea in his book, confessions of a Traffic and Recovering Engineer, about a street design team of like, a group of people, and therefore the traffic engineer is one of the voices, but doesn't necessarily isn't necessarily the most powerful voice or the most or the end all.
00:26:34:18 - 00:26:47:14
John Simmerman
And, and so her question is, you know, is it that, is it your conclusion that, traffic engineers should design roads or, you know, why not these other people or why not a street design team like, what Chuck is proposing.
00:26:47:17 - 00:27:20:13
Wes Marshall
It could be a team, but at the same, I don't think traffic engineering in their current form could. Like, I talk about what we would need to do a better job at that. You know, part of the problem is we honestly believe that those things do lead to better safety. And it's just not true. And we haven't like because we're taking a structural engineering classes, we haven't given our road designers like, you know, things about human ecology or understanding the impact of the streets in the neighborhood or climate change or all that sort of stuff like we need.
00:27:20:18 - 00:27:40:01
Wes Marshall
You know, I argue that we need more of a generalist mentality. We can get that through a team like Chuck's proposing. And like Kathy mentioned, but I, I think traffic engineers, because there are good ones that have that ability. they're just not getting it from our traditional engineering education system. Yeah.
00:27:40:04 - 00:28:03:03
John Simmerman
And I think part of the problem, too, is that they keep rolling out this, you know, time and time again of, well, 95, 94 to 95% of all traffic crashes are related to human, choice or error. And it's like, yeah. And, and and you posed the following question that, you know, if it is the problem, what is the solution?
00:28:03:05 - 00:28:16:06
John Simmerman
But yeah, I mean, that's also a dodge of ultimate responsibility of, you know, what what really caused the chain reaction of, you know, the human error happening in the first place?
00:28:16:08 - 00:28:35:19
Wes Marshall
It's it's it's a cop out. That's what leads us to I mean, we all want a more data driven approach to road safety. Right. And the problem with that is that all of our data is telling us we have a huge human error problem, like it's telling us that these people are speeding or they're jaywalking or whatever it is they're they're doing that is sort of wrong.
00:28:35:21 - 00:29:08:13
Wes Marshall
But at the same time, what that leads to is us focusing all of our safety money and effort and focus is on education and enforcement. It's letting the traffic engineers off the hook. It's also removing sort of the feedback loop to help us do better. because in reality, like if somebody is speeding and if you look at a lot of our roads, there's so wide that everyone is speeding like it is the normal behavior when the normal behavior is considered an error, is that really an error?
00:29:08:15 - 00:29:29:13
Wes Marshall
So I would say that to me that's an engineering problem. That should be the onus should be on us to have designed it better. Or like with jaywalking somebody's jaywalking gets hit. It becomes like, well, who's at fault? Is it the driver? Is it the person jaywalking? Like with the right of way at that time? Let's take a step back and think about why was this person crossing where they were?
00:29:29:15 - 00:29:54:21
Wes Marshall
Where's the nearest crosswalk? Is it a lot of cases like a half mile away? And even look at the path between where the person is and that crosswalk. It's, you know, crappy sidewalks, missing sidewalks. And even if they get, there's a terrible crosswalk and there's a come all the way back and the other side of the street, and we do that, you know, we have a bus stop here and like an apartment complex right across the street, like they're doing a very rational thing.
00:29:54:24 - 00:30:11:10
Wes Marshall
But our data is telling us human error problem. They were jaywalking. We need to teach them not to jaywalk. We need to put up, you know, if we do treat it like an engineering problem, like we'll put up a fence to try to keep it from jaywalking. But that's not what I'm talking about. It's more like we could have designed it better.
00:30:11:12 - 00:30:29:26
Wes Marshall
We failed these people. We could have put out a better way to cross better side, all that sort of stuff. And that is sort of one of the overarching themes of the book, is that disconnect between our data just leading us down that path of human error and not giving us a chance or even the wherewithal to think we need to do better.
00:30:29:28 - 00:30:58:05
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. we've got a comment here from, Cycle Smarter, who basically says if you get the engineering wrong and, you know, education enforcement, you know, are not going to be able to fix it, you mean, at best what you're doing when we have the engineering wrong, which we have had the engineering wrong, arguably one could say is that we the education and the enforcement just is like this, this Band-Aid, where you're trying to make do with what you've got.
00:30:58:07 - 00:31:24:13
John Simmerman
And an another great one here from, that also kind of hits to your point, from, Gary Hardy, you know, talking about, how, you know, when we look at how the Copenhagen, Netherlands do it, the first question they ask is not who's at fault, but what can be done, you know, what can we do? What can we what changes can we make to make the street design better is a pretty fundamental questions to be asking.
00:31:24:16 - 00:31:47:19
Wes Marshall
It is everybody, education in enforcement. It makes us feel like we're doing something, but in reality it is bordering on victim blaming. And we've put them in a bad situation. Like there's a lot of things like these aren't random events that are happening as sort of traffic engineers will tell you. I think a lot of these are systematic, like we know where these problems are happening, we know why they're happening.
00:31:47:21 - 00:32:06:24
Wes Marshall
Like even when somebody is taking like a left turn on an arterial, if you're a driver taking a left turn at it's a permissive signals. Or at the same time we're telling pedestrians it's their turn to go. That driver is what are they focused on? They're focused on the oncoming traffic. They're looking for a gap to shoot so they can take the left turn.
00:32:06:26 - 00:32:26:04
Wes Marshall
They have back pressure behind them. They also have that A-pillar kind of in their way. Or the pedestrian would be like, this is a systematic problem. We put these people in a terrible situation, but then if they hit that pedestrian, it's either the pedestrian or the driver at fault. Nobody steps back and say, hey, wait, shouldn't we have just designed this better?
00:32:26:04 - 00:32:39:10
Wes Marshall
Like, it's a simple solution, but we're not even considering that because the data is all telling us it's a human error problem and we sort of hope technology will fix it, or we hope education or enforcement will fix it.
00:32:39:13 - 00:33:30:14
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. a good part of the book, too, is going into the history of, of the profession and the history of, these manuals and these guide books that are out there, rather than just like, vilifying these things, especially the CD. But, talk a little bit about the context and the challenge that we have when when we talk about trying to create safer environments, create safer streets and, and more livable places, when we have a profession that is pointing to these guidebooks and saying, you know, this is what we're we're building to or this is what we're doing, I know because I read the book that that's also a little bit
00:33:30:14 - 00:33:40:06
John Simmerman
of a cop out, but talk a little bit more about, why you spent so much time diving into, you know, the context of, of these manuals.
00:33:40:09 - 00:33:57:08
Wes Marshall
Well, it gets to the question of sort of why engineers are doing what they're doing, and it links to that education piece I brought up before we kind of put it in the workplace. We haven't even use these manuals that much in our education. But we get into the workplace, we're told to design a street or something, and they give us all these books.
00:33:57:10 - 00:34:13:05
Wes Marshall
And like I said, we just assume whoever wrote them knew more than we did. And these books have been around, you know, four out of five of them have been around for like a hundred, almost hundred years, like the highway safety manuals. I only knew one, but that's a different category. We don't use that in the same way.
00:34:13:07 - 00:34:41:23
Wes Marshall
So it was sort of understanding how engineers use them, but how these manuals themselves work, because there's a lot of inertia behind that whole system. And even today we have these big committees, and there's a lot of groupthink. And I know some great people that have been on, like the mute committee, like Bill Schultz, those people like that, that are pushing for better solutions for things that would make the streets safer.
00:34:41:23 - 00:35:12:19
Wes Marshall
But they're met with so much pushback. And because there's so much inertia in the manuals, like they're things like they're making little changes. The newer version of The Mugged is definitely better than the older version, but it's still not great. There's still a lot of fundamental problems with it. So kind of giving people an understanding of how these books even came to be, how they've progressed through the years, and how a lot of times, like the things that we see in them, like those citations of the original studies get pulled out as we get further away from them.
00:35:12:19 - 00:35:32:26
Wes Marshall
Like no longer do they want to cite a study from the 1940s, so they don't even cited anymore, but they still cite they still mentioned the results from it. So having to find those original studies was like, oh my God. Like, that's why we do this. Like really, seriously, like, can we do better? So the things we think are set in stone, turns out they aren't.
00:35:32:26 - 00:35:47:25
Wes Marshall
And the engineers back then would have said the same thing, like, hey, we don't know what we're doing. We're going to try this. Here's the first study. You all need to do better with it later in, you know, ten, 20 years passes and we forget how iffy that original science was.
00:35:47:27 - 00:36:12:25
John Simmerman
Yeah. Kathy, you know, sort of points out here too, that, you know, these books, like the mute CDs, have some legal standing to them. but the other thing that is in all of these, these manuals and guidebooks is they emphasize, go out of their way to emphasize that the engineers should use their engineering judgment. They don't have to just follow this as a prescription.
00:36:12:28 - 00:36:38:14
Wes Marshall
Yeah, even I mean, out of these books, the one that is closest to being what we would say is a standard is the much like we obviously can't make our stop signs green in this country, right? But at the same time, that book, I think I counted 167 times, they mentioned the words engineering judgment. So in almost every case, they give us the ability to use our engineering judgment to do better.
00:36:38:14 - 00:36:58:18
Wes Marshall
And there are I have a whole section on liability two, where I go through how an engineer can actually do that because part of the problem is we're not giving engineers enough education to actually have engineering judgment. We don't have a feedback loop. So where can you even get it from? And what's interesting about the TCD, that's one of the few books that actually defines engineering judgment.
00:36:58:24 - 00:37:14:28
Wes Marshall
But they say matter of factly that you don't even have to document your engineering judgment, like there's no requirement to do so. So if I'm an engineer, young engineer, trying to figure out why, maybe some of the older engineers are doing what they're doing. They don't have to document that anywhere. So there's no place for me to go.
00:37:14:28 - 00:37:34:27
Wes Marshall
There's no repository of how engineering judgment, how people are using it. So there's a lot of sort of problems within it. But engineers have a lot more leeway than maybe they know, but they also have a lot more leeway than they're letting on when it comes to what these manuals are telling them.
00:37:34:29 - 00:37:47:15
John Simmerman
Yeah, there's a question out here that's even asking is, you know, is it, you know, fear of lawsuits and liability that is dictating a lot of what gets design these days out on our streets?
00:37:47:17 - 00:38:09:19
Wes Marshall
Yeah. And I joke that the liability is kind of the boogeyman in the room that engineers all use. That is, you know, oh, we have to use this manual. We have to use these guidelines because reliable or if they're not. And then I start talking about how that conflict, like if we're designing things based on a manual that we know is unsafe, that we know is not based on safety, there are certain to be some lawsuits.
00:38:09:19 - 00:38:26:11
Wes Marshall
And I talk about one from New York City, where a kid was hit and the city was held liable, even though their road met every day at every guideline that we have. They knew full well data speeding problem. They knew full well they the safety problem, and they didn't do anything about it. They weren't doing things like traffic calming.
00:38:26:18 - 00:38:35:27
Wes Marshall
So they were actually held liable, had to pay millions of dollars because they followed the standards, because they followed the guidelines and didn't think beyond that.
00:38:36:00 - 00:38:53:22
John Simmerman
Yeah. You know, Adam has a few questions about driver's manuals and driver's licenses and the education that goes on in that. And it reminds me that kind of every state has a different approach to, you know, their licensing and what's in a driver's manual, too.
00:38:53:24 - 00:39:14:16
Wes Marshall
And I don't think I'm alone in saying that, like my driver education, when I was 16, it was a joke. Like we didn't learn much of anything. We were watching these old videos from the 50s in a dark room, and there's a bunch of teenagers half asleep, and the only time you learned anything was sort of out on the road.
00:39:14:18 - 00:39:34:11
Wes Marshall
and you get a little bit of that. But at that age, and I mentioned the book, I mean, I drove as fast as they could everywhere I went. I was lucky to have a 1983 Chrysler Barron. That didn't go very fast. but that's not is what happens. A lot of kids and I know in Colorado here like they they're just changing this law now.
00:39:34:11 - 00:39:56:15
Wes Marshall
But when you're getting your permanent 15, you have to take something like 30 hours of in classroom type stuff. You can do it online now. But if you get your permit at like 16, you don't have to do any of that all of a sudden, like they assume you're a year more mature. You don't have to do any of the classroom work, which makes no sense.
00:39:56:15 - 00:40:17:13
Wes Marshall
Like all of a sudden you can just get your license with a little bit of on-street driving and no classroom work at all. Now they're changing it. I just saw in the news the other day that they're trying to fix that kind of loophole that keeps kids from having any education. Yeah, I mean, I think it's hard to even say that the driver education system works because we're doing such a bad job with it.
00:40:17:19 - 00:40:33:25
Wes Marshall
But the research on that is so sparse and old that it's more like it. Or people are changing people's attitude. Like, that's sort of the question those research papers are asking. They're not asking where they're actually leading to safer drivers or safer streets or all that sort of stuff.
00:40:33:28 - 00:40:42:01
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. And, Jeffrey was just, asking to, as a reminder, what city did you grow up in and get your driver's license from?
00:40:42:01 - 00:40:59:15
Wes Marshall
That was in Massachusetts in the I, you know, some of the early stories in the book and. Yeah. And trying to tell my origin story, I think a lot of people that do stuff like this, it's either 1 or 2 ways you grow up in a place, or you can walk or bike as a kid. You finally move somewhere that you can.
00:40:59:15 - 00:41:17:16
Wes Marshall
And like me, it drove me crazy. Or the opposite. You drove, you grew up in a place where you were chauffeured all over town as a kid, and that you had no place to go, but maybe your cul de sac. And then you moved to a place where you have the freedom to sort of go anywhere using transit, walking, biking, and you're like, oh my God, this is like another planet.
00:41:17:16 - 00:41:22:25
Wes Marshall
And like, those are sort of the two origin stories. You see for people that are in this space.
00:41:22:27 - 00:41:51:03
John Simmerman
You know, one of the, lines that are of conversation that are going out here, Gary is talking a little bit about how, you know, in the past, you know, situations of, of using engineering judgment and, you know, Caltrans basically, you know, making sure you document it. I was blown away in your book how, even some of these manuals don't even require document citation of the engineering judgment when they do decide to do something differently.
00:41:51:03 - 00:41:53:29
John Simmerman
I was just like.
00:41:54:01 - 00:42:21:04
Wes Marshall
Yeah. But I mean, to be honest, if you're protecting yourself from liability and you're trying to do something beyond it, I mean, I go through what's called the rational process, where it almost functions like a tactical urbanism experiment. Or if you document a problem, if you collect some data, if you show you have a speeding problem and you do traffic calming to try to fix that, let's say, and then you show that what you did fix that problem, it's really hard for an engineer to be held liable.
00:42:21:05 - 00:42:44:02
Wes Marshall
In fact, reviewing did a lot of great research back in traffic calming was all the rage like 20 plus years ago, and he found almost no cases of traffic engineers getting sued for that. Like that is not what happened. Like even though that fear, like the idea that we'd be sued, is what kept traffic engineers from doing it.
00:42:44:02 - 00:43:05:00
Wes Marshall
It was not the reality. Again, the other way traffic engineers can protect themselves is to put up a sign so that can cut both ways, like, well, put up a sign, you know, a joke that, you know, I've taken pictures. One of my students took a great picture of an intersection. Just a dangerous intersection ahead. Like engineers don't try to fix the problem.
00:43:05:00 - 00:43:23:15
Wes Marshall
We just put up the sign and at first that we were talking like, well, why would anybody do this? Like, just fix the problem? But it comes back to the liability. They're protecting themselves. So if you start doing something traffic calming, you just start doing things that are out of the ordinary, and you put up a sign beforehand that tells drivers that this is coming.
00:43:23:18 - 00:43:32:28
Wes Marshall
Even though we know urban drivers miss half of all signs, that's still protects you from liability. Like something that simple can protect the engineer.
00:43:33:00 - 00:43:50:13
John Simmerman
Yeah, it reminds me what you're saying about the signs of, you know, it's just like, oh, at least we're doing something. It kind of reminds me of, this set of slides that you have here when we're looking at this massive, you know, five lane road and, you know, it's like, well, how do we how do we try to fix this?
00:43:50:13 - 00:44:06:21
John Simmerman
And so you, you know, you start talking about, you know, well, let's put a little Band-Aid on it and then, you know, oh, okay. We're going to need to put a whole lot of Band-Aids on it, but we're not really addressing the underlying fact that putting a sign up or, you know, doing anything to really change the engineering on these things.
00:44:06:24 - 00:44:20:01
Wes Marshall
Yeah, the problem is way more fundamental. And it's fundamental to all those manuals is fundamental to the whole discipline of transportation, traffic engineering. And that's really what I was trying to kind of uncover and and show.
00:44:20:03 - 00:44:38:20
John Simmerman
Yeah. Eric has an interesting question here. I if I remember correctly, Eric, you're you're from Sweden and in Stockholm area. the same question. Educating engineers is educating drivers. Are there good examples in any countries who do we know that is doing a good job, out there worldwide?
00:44:38:22 - 00:45:00:24
Wes Marshall
Well, I mean, we're we have a new human centered transportation program. So our transportation engineering is within this thing. So we are teaching things differently here. But at the same time, I remember, Sir Norman Garrick, he was my pizza advisor. He lives in Zurich now. But, this is probably 2012 or 13. I was visiting them when he was on sabbatical, and we took a tour with their bike planners.
00:45:00:24 - 00:45:23:16
Wes Marshall
We went around the whole city of Zurich and we started talking to the bike planner, the bike engineer, after we're like, well, what is your background? And he had a traffic psychology degree, which when you think about what he does for a job, it makes perfect sense. But that's not a degree we have in this country. But I guess in Switzerland or some of those European countries, that is something that's offered.
00:45:23:16 - 00:45:52:20
Wes Marshall
So it makes perfect sense. But we're not providing that. like there's I think there's only one undergraduate transportation. I think Morgan State has an undergraduate transportation program, but everyone else is sort of embedded within civil engineering, or maybe if they have a planning undergrad, but typically it isn't what it should be. And I think it's obvious when you start looking at what we should be doing versus what we are doing.
00:45:52:22 - 00:46:19:24
John Simmerman
Yeah, it's an interesting question too. And it brings us back to, you know, what is our client asking for? And so the question is, at the local level, have you seen a city council required safety to be the lead policy instead of focusing on capacity that, you know, that dreaded loss? are we seeing, you know, some cities, you know, coming around and city councils and city leaders, you know, saying, you know, no, we don't we don't want to prioritize this.
00:46:19:24 - 00:46:27:13
John Simmerman
We want to prioritize the safety, health and well-being and vitality and vibrancy of our community, not traffic engineering.
00:46:27:15 - 00:46:50:08
Wes Marshall
Yeah. You're seeing cities in Denver or Seattle, places like that that have tried to have like a citywide 20 mile an hour policy so that like the funny thing with Vision Zero is that it seems like it's failed. But at the same time, I would argue we haven't even tried it. Like, we know that fast cars on big streets like the one behind me are problematic, but we haven't really done anything about a lot of those problems.
00:46:50:08 - 00:47:10:22
Wes Marshall
We haven't done anything about the type of the most engineered roads that are high injury networks. So cities have tried to do things like doing the 20 mile an hour city at speed limit, but they haven't done much other than just change the signs that say it. They haven't had enough money or wherewithal to do the engineering necessary to make that self enforcing.
00:47:11:00 - 00:47:32:26
Wes Marshall
So again, like even the more progressive cities will then look at their data and think they have a human error problem, they got all these speeders. But it's like, well, we just throw up a 20 mile an hour sign. But the speed with the streets seems to be telling drivers is that you should be going 40. And we know full well that drivers behave what the street is telling them, much more so than what the sign is telling them.
00:47:32:28 - 00:47:52:26
Wes Marshall
So that's what happens. And it it doesn't lead us to getting where we want. But you can see how they're trying. Right. And they they're trying to do what the question is suggesting. But they can't get there strictly based on changing a simple policy or with education.
00:47:52:26 - 00:48:14:20
John Simmerman
Enforcement is something that really has to, you know, permeate through the organization, you know, the organization of the city and that be the new marching orders. And, you know, Kathy, reminds me that, yeah, I mean, Hoboken, new Jersey is a great example. Jersey city, also in new Jersey, is a great example of, you know, just tremendous progress.
00:48:14:23 - 00:48:45:17
John Simmerman
with Vision Zero. I really appreciate the portion of the book. When you talk about Vision Zero, I've always had the same criticism of Vision Zero that I have with, Complete Streets as well as with, Safe Systems approach is that they just get co-opted, by the institution that is motor dumb and road building as being another way to, to make money, but not really do anything fundamentally different.
00:48:45:19 - 00:48:52:06
John Simmerman
But to your point, if we actually were sincere about it, we could we could do that.
00:48:52:09 - 00:49:13:28
Wes Marshall
Yeah. Vision zero, where we're doing the same thing that we've always done under a different brella it's business as usual. But, you know, maybe we're doing a few more protected bike lanes to make it seem like we're doing something like, I know in in Denver's Vision Zero, we have sort of that upside down triangle. And the idea with that is we're going to prioritize the pedestrians, most of all the top.
00:49:14:00 - 00:49:37:04
Wes Marshall
And then it works that way down to bicyclists and transit users freight, urban freight. And the bottom is drivers. Like if we really did what that is telling us to do, it would totally revamp the way we design streets. Like we would start with the sidewalks, right? Just make sure the sidewalks are safe. We have good sidewalks, we have good crossings and we don't do that.
00:49:37:04 - 00:49:56:20
Wes Marshall
Traffic engineer start with the central line. We figure out how much space cars need and then we, you know, maybe add some space for bikes. And if we have any space left over, we give it over to pedestrians. So we haven't really changed fundamentally what we do. We're still doing the same thing. But it's not it's what we're saying we're doing.
00:49:56:20 - 00:50:25:29
Wes Marshall
So there's a difference between, go to the details espoused there versus there and use stuff like that. But, you know, fundamentally we you know, Hoboken is an interesting example. I think there I mean, obviously, getting a lot of attention for having zero deaths are getting a lot of attention for the daylighting at the intersections. But when I look back at what Hoboken did prior to that, they put a ton of effort into just measuring their sidewalks where they were, where they were decrepit, measuring where their bikes facilities are.
00:50:25:29 - 00:50:48:12
Wes Marshall
So they had a really good understanding of just the fundamentals of, you know, things like sidewalks. And you get that right. It can lead you in the right direction. But a lot of times we get distracted by things like the Hyperloop or Avs, and it's hard to get excited about that stuff when you can't even build our freaking sidewalks in a major city like Denver, you know, right near downtown.
00:50:48:14 - 00:50:52:12
Wes Marshall
you got to get the fundamentals right first, and then the other stuff can fall on the place.
00:50:52:14 - 00:51:14:07
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. Gary, you know, kind of channels a little bit from, our good friend Fred Kent, used to call designing the place first, then fitting the streets in upside down planning, and, you know, and Kathy basically says, let's start with the person first before even starting with the sidewalk. But I love that concept of starting from the outside and then designing in.
00:51:14:09 - 00:51:31:28
John Simmerman
I put this image on, on screen here so that we can kind of see, you know. Yeah. What would it be like if we we started first with the pedestrian realm and the people space and, and then moved in and said, okay, is this an area where we want it to be truly safe and welcoming all ages and abilities to be able to ride a bike?
00:51:31:28 - 00:51:51:19
John Simmerman
Okay. How would we do this? Something differently here. And then at the end, if we're, you know, what's left over and maybe what's left over on the street, this like this is going to be something analogous to like a feed straw or, or some other, you know, yield street or something like that. It's going to be much narrower than this.
00:51:51:19 - 00:51:56:11
John Simmerman
And this is not going to be the same amount of, of paved auto centric space.
00:51:56:13 - 00:52:11:18
Wes Marshall
Or as is, we often end up saying, well, we don't have enough room for pedestrians at the ends, let's not worry about it. So you could have the opposite here. After you do everything you need to do for the other modes. Well, we don't have enough space left over for cars, so I guess they'll have to go in a different street so you could see the opposite.
00:52:11:18 - 00:52:15:26
Wes Marshall
But in this country, I mean, no one's doing anything close to this.
00:52:15:29 - 00:52:37:00
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's really interesting too. And we've got a couple of, folks from, the Netherlands, you know, Kylee Van Damme from the village of, of Halton, just outside of Utrecht. And as she's talking a little bit about Robert, Dirk's talking about that in version theory. have you had a chance to visit Halton?
00:52:37:02 - 00:52:38:03
Wes Marshall
I've not know.
00:52:38:05 - 00:53:00:19
John Simmerman
Yeah, it's a fabulous place. thank you so much for tuning in, Kylie. I'll see you in a few weeks. when I'm, there in the Netherlands. it's a wonderful community that was developed as a brand new book that's going to be coming out, about it, published in English and, talking about how this new town was developed and really prioritizing people over automobiles.
00:53:00:19 - 00:53:34:01
John Simmerman
And what's great, you know, is that I think it really started hitting stride back in the 1980s. And so, yeah. So I look forward to, coming in visiting you. Kylie, I wanted to shift gears a little bit to talk about when we're looking at trying to fit everybody in. Okay. So we've got limited amount of space, you know, how are traffic engineers and cities going to be able to really kind of approach this so that, you know, kind of everybody has their space and has their ability to be able to get around safely.
00:53:34:05 - 00:53:49:07
John Simmerman
Obviously, the Netherlands is a wonderful example of how they're balancing that. They've got the some of the highest satisfaction levels of motorists there in the country. But at the same time, there's a different relationship to our streets, our public spaces and how people get along out in that space.
00:53:49:09 - 00:54:10:06
Wes Marshall
We got to change just the fundamentals. I mean, I joke in the book that it's safety. Third, I mean, engineers will say safety is our first priority. It's not true. It's capacity and not even capacity today. Like we're talking capacity for cars and like 20 years from now. So we've been designing our streets for sort of that predicted demand.
00:54:10:06 - 00:54:33:25
Wes Marshall
And we know we do a crappy job of predicting it. and we don't even do a great job of riding it. So if we have a different priority, if we were prioritizing the actual humans that are walking or living or working near the street, if we're prioritizing that into our street design, we'd have plenty of room if we actually decided what is our vision for the street.
00:54:33:25 - 00:55:00:14
Wes Marshall
Like, do we really want just because some model tells us we're going to have 30,000 cars on the street in 20 years, that doesn't match the vision for this community. Like maybe 12 is the right number. This design it for 12,000 cars and make sure we have room for for everything else and for the people that are using this street not as a cut through, but as a place where they live, work, go to school, go to a park, or, you know, just going out for some exercise.
00:55:00:14 - 00:55:08:03
Wes Marshall
So there's a different fundamental shift we need to make, but it needs to be a reprioritization.
00:55:08:05 - 00:55:41:11
John Simmerman
Yeah. You know, the, the, the challenge that I continually see to and we look at trying to transform our streets is, especially what's on the ground now. They're not it's these are not streets that are being designed with that 20 year, time horizon. They're kind of already been over designed with that now. And when we talk about trying to change what's on the ground now, you get this pushback of saying, well, just don't do anything that's going to impact current capacity and current traffic flow.
00:55:41:13 - 00:56:00:23
John Simmerman
And I'm like, time out. Shouldn't we really be taking a step back and to to sort of Gary's point from earlier in saying, you know, what do we want this space to be? Do we want this to be just an auto sewer, or do we want this to be a people oriented, thriving space? And then being able to say, let's not be.
00:56:00:24 - 00:56:19:20
John Simmerman
We're focusing in still on the wrong thing when we focus in on capacity and throughput and then say, oh, let's throw a aid of safety over the top of that, that veneer of, oh, it's going to be safe, too. It's like it's fundamentally to me, it seems like we're focusing on the wrong thing. If we're not focusing on what do we want this space to be?
00:56:19:23 - 00:56:37:13
Wes Marshall
The two blocks for me, right behind me is 15th Street in downtown Denver. Used to be when I first moved here was five lanes of one way traffic. There's also some on street parking, and maybe around 2013 they were trying to add a bike lane on the street. they had promised a protected bike way. They didn't end up doing that.
00:56:37:13 - 00:56:53:17
Wes Marshall
They put in a buffer bikeway. So this fight was still like, oh, we can't take away. You can't possibly take away one lane of traffic. We can't possibly take away this parking. But they put it in and then like a year later, they built one of these skyscrapers behind me, and they closed two lanes of traffic for like, a year.
00:56:53:20 - 00:57:17:01
Wes Marshall
And there were any problems. Still, when that was done, nobody took a step back and said, hey, maybe we could do even more in this street. It took until, you know, a few years later, the city actually made a policy change where instead of counting cars, they were going to count people. All of a sudden that gave them the wherewithal to take away two more lanes of car traffic and have two bus only lanes.
00:57:17:03 - 00:57:38:16
Wes Marshall
So now you have the protected. They ended up making it protected to this protected bikeway. There's only two lanes of traffic and then there's two bus only lanes. It's still a wide street, but to me that was a moonshot ten years ago. And now it's right there. And you have the red lanes. You're the green lanes. I joke it's like Christmas every day out there because it's just fundamentally change what they they've done.
00:57:38:21 - 00:57:46:17
Wes Marshall
So a lot of times we can do better. We just have to kind of rethink what the question we're trying to answer is.
00:57:46:19 - 00:58:03:26
John Simmerman
Yeah, you know it's a good point. I put this image up on screen here to give an example of, you know, a two way cycle track. And we've got, some planting, planter protection here. You know, oftentimes that we, we here, oh, we can't possibly give up the space. The other thing we oftentimes hear is, oh, it's just too expensive.
00:58:03:26 - 00:58:17:25
John Simmerman
We can't do it. It's pennies on the dollar. Anything that we're doing this is even lighter, quicker, cheaper. When you really think of it from from a, you know, plan design perspective, compared to the massive auto infrastructure that, you know, gets built.
00:58:17:28 - 00:58:44:17
Wes Marshall
And I took this picture in Vancouver, Canada when I was there for a conference in 2010. And what was really interesting about, like, their street network, it was set up very similar to Denver, a lot of big one way streets and like, so it made perfect sense for other cities that are very similar to do this. But it was the I mean, it was like I said, it was a moonshot back then.
00:58:44:19 - 00:59:01:27
Wes Marshall
and this was 2010 and like, this would be a great one today. You know, like, this is an amazing cycle track. I think it was at Hawthorne. Yeah. It's still works when I'm trying to show that a similar. Yeah, I can go take other pictures in other cities now, but the same picture still works.
00:59:02:00 - 00:59:25:21
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. No, I hear you so to close us out here with, why don't you just give you your final, you know, sort of parting thoughts? anything that we didn't address? Folks, I know there's a lot of questions that we weren't able to get to. Right? Here's with this email, you can email him directly. I'm sure he'll he'll he'll love to talk about that, especially if you first buy the book and read the book.
00:59:25:21 - 00:59:36:05
John Simmerman
I like to emphasize that if you've got really good questions about a book, read the book first and then make sure you follow up with questions. So, close this out here with.
00:59:36:07 - 00:59:50:17
Wes Marshall
there's 100 things we didn't get to. I mean, and that is one of the things I mean, I love those books that kind of have one theme and kind of just reiterate examples were the same time I went in a different direction. So there's 88 chapters, like John had said, and there's sort of new stuff throughout the book.
00:59:50:17 - 01:00:13:05
Wes Marshall
Even though there are some theme, the tie things together, we can't possibly get to everything in an hour or so. yeah. Take a look. If you're in the Denver area, we are having a book launch event next Tuesday night. over at Iron Works, you can email me and I can send you an invite to that. So if you want to come have a couple drinks, I'm going to do a Q&A with Steve Staeger from Nine news about about the book.
01:00:13:05 - 01:00:30:13
Wes Marshall
So that should be that should be fun as well. Yeah. That's I think that's about it. John, I just want to thank you for doing this and thank everybody for coming. And I know we didn't get to all those questions, but I see some people I know they're it's great to have them there. And there's some great questions that deserve more time.
01:00:30:15 - 01:00:52:10
John Simmerman
Yeah. Yeah. Well and I really sincerely everybody. Thank you all so much for tuning in. You are literally you probably don't know this, many of you, but you're tuning in from all around the world. We've see folks, you know, tuning in from the Netherlands and all across North America. And we really, really do appreciate you tuning in today for this live streaming event.
01:00:52:10 - 01:01:14:04
John Simmerman
It's always special to do a live stream and be able to interact directly with the audience. in the actual recording of one of these episodes, Professor Wesley Marshall, thank you so very, very much for joining me once again on the Active Towns podcast. And again, thank you all so much for tuning in today and have a wonderful, wonderful weekend.
01:01:14:04 - 01:01:21:15
John Simmerman
Get out there, get a nice write in and yeah, good stuff. Let's let's wrap this up west.
01:01:21:18 - 01:01:23:12
Wes Marshall
Thank you. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, John.
01:01:23:15 - 01:01:24:21
John Simmerman
Okay. Bye, everyone.