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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
00:00:00:01 - 00:00:22:16
Ashton Rohmer
I get into my head a lot about, should we really be looking at separate infrastructure, or should we be looking at shared streets? We can't all have the hands, shared street smiling. Obviously that's not going to work in a major arterial and we need safe infrastructure because people are perishing on our streets. However, how do we work from the streets that have the separate infrastructure?
00:00:22:16 - 00:00:39:22
Ashton Rohmer
Because we can't, you know, and then is shared streets really the the ideal so that we respect that other road users exist and that we fight the tendency to just look at our phones when we're doing things and not really get out in the world and engage with each other.
00:00:39:24 - 00:01:09:09
John Simmerman
Hey everyone, welcome to the Active Towns Channel. My name is John Simmerman and that is Ashton Roehmer, a PhD candidate in peace and conflict resolution from George Mason University in Washington, DC. And we're going to be diving into some really cool research that she has been doing, looking at modal normative stuff and cars. But before we get to that, I just want to say, if you're enjoying this content here on the Active Towns Channel, please consider supporting my efforts by becoming an active town's ambassador.
00:01:09:10 - 00:01:25:25
John Simmerman
Hey, super easy to do. Just click on the joint button right here on YouTube down below, or you can navigate over to Active Towns, or click on the support tab at the top of the page. And there's several different options, including becoming a Patreon supporter. Hey, patrons, do get early and ad free access to all my video content.
00:01:25:26 - 00:01:32:27
John Simmerman
Okay, let's get right to it with Ashton.
00:01:33:00 - 00:01:37:01
John Simmerman
Ashton, thank you so much for joining me on the Active Towns podcast. Welcome.
00:01:37:03 - 00:01:39:28
Ashton Rohmer
Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.
00:01:40:01 - 00:01:46:03
John Simmerman
As you probably know, I love giving my guest just an opportunity to introduce themselves. So who is Ashton?
00:01:46:06 - 00:02:17:28
Ashton Rohmer
Sure. My name is Ashton Roemer. I am an urban planner by training and a fifth year PhD candidate in Peace and Conflict resolution. My research looks through the lens of critical transportation studies to examine how our car centric ways fundamentally alter how we relate to each other in our built environments, and I would argue how cars have caused a very serious rupture in our social capital.
00:02:18:00 - 00:02:27:10
Ashton Rohmer
I live in Washington, D.C. with my wonderful partner and my most excellent research assistant, tulip, which I think you have some pictures of.
00:02:27:13 - 00:02:29:22
John Simmerman
There we have.
00:02:29:25 - 00:02:44:25
Ashton Rohmer
Two of them. My folding bike, my room and I have had the great privilege of being able to travel with her to a bunch of cool places. And I'll share a little bit about the research that is particularly relevant a little bit later in our chat.
00:02:44:27 - 00:02:59:11
John Simmerman
I'm jealous now because I realize after 15 years of having my Brompton and having it take me all around the world. I've never named it. I should have come up with a really cool name.
00:02:59:13 - 00:03:12:26
Ashton Rohmer
Yeah. So this is the matcha green color, which just reminds me of the petals of a tulip. And so. And I often take her to gardens, and, you know, I have an old lady like that. So? So. Yeah. So maybe you can come up with some cool name at some point.
00:03:13:01 - 00:03:40:21
John Simmerman
To keep you. Yeah, probably for the next one. I'm. I'm coveting the new titanium version as I'm getting older and older and I'm traveling around the world, I'm starting to realize that the weight is starting to bother me. So I may look to lighten my load at some point in time, but I just need to figure out how to actually fund that because they're pretty expensive.
00:03:40:23 - 00:03:57:10
Ashton Rohmer
Well, so it's funny because I actually got tulip with a research grant to do some research, and I was contemplating the titanium one, and I said, you know what? When I'm like 70, that will be what I invest in. But for the next, you know, 40 years, this is what I've got. So.
00:03:57:13 - 00:04:16:00
John Simmerman
Well, I'm 61 and I'm already starting to feel like given the, the, the load of all the camera gear and all of that. Yeah, I might want to lighten my load. Fantastic. Well, talk a little bit about your inspiration. What sort of is the origin of of what got you interested?
00:04:16:01 - 00:04:47:02
Ashton Rohmer
Absolutely. So I read a book back in, I think it was 2013 called Your Brain on Nature. And actually you would probably be interested in this given your public health background, but this is a book that I encountered when I was in my early 20s, trying to figure out my way in the world, and it was the first time that I put together that our built and unbuilt environments can have a profound impact on our mental health, our physical health, our community well-being.
00:04:47:02 - 00:05:13:26
Ashton Rohmer
And so when I read this book, I started to see the world around me through an entirely different perspective kaleidoscope. And that's what led me to urban planning. I did my master's and been planning at uncW, Chapel Hill. When I was there. I actually didn't study transportation, which is where I find myself now. But I did land use and environmental planning and a specialization in natural hazards resilience.
00:05:13:26 - 00:05:52:10
Ashton Rohmer
So I spent a lot of time thinking about climate change, disaster recovery, hazard mitigation. These are some pictures from a town in eastern North Carolina called Kinston. And part of the work that I did when I was at uncW was to think about how to recover from Hurricane Matthew, which hit partway through my program. And so what's interesting about this space is that I started to ask questions in my master's program about community engagement, how we thought about community, who has a right to decide what happens in a community.
00:05:52:10 - 00:06:14:13
Ashton Rohmer
And you had these towns in eastern North Carolina that were completely decimated by Hurricane Matthew. And we're trying to figure out what the future looked like. We went to Kinston as a case study of what towns had decided to do back in the late 1990s, after a series of hurricanes destroyed them. And this is what we find laying in their wake.
00:06:14:15 - 00:06:39:18
Ashton Rohmer
So we have this ghost apocalyptic, you know, what was that show where they had the zombies walking around? Like when you walk into this 900 acre area where there used to be an entire neighborhood, it's just empty because folks took what are called buyouts. Community buyouts are when the government offers you the pre flood value of your home to move, and then they maintain the federal government.
00:06:39:18 - 00:07:09:10
Ashton Rohmer
But local municipalities maintain the property in perpetuity as open space. But what it brings up are these really fraught questions about who gets to stay, who gets an offer. And these were questions that my dispute resolution class wasn't really helping me answer. Like it's not a baton. Best alternative to agreement situation because folks have such deeply held beliefs and ideas about spaces.
00:07:09:14 - 00:07:39:08
Ashton Rohmer
And so a lot of the communities that were impacted by these storms were historic black communities. And so you get into a really tricky situation where you start asking, should a lower income black community be offered by outs because they're at the highest risk, knowing that you're going to displace a community with deep and culturally significant ties to the land, should buyouts be focused on higher income coastal areas so that the land can be reclaimed from private ownership back to the public realm?
00:07:39:10 - 00:08:08:28
Ashton Rohmer
What about the people who weren't offered buyouts and have no option but to stay in a town that is hemorrhaging taxpayers? Who gets to count as community? You know, these are some of the questions that I encountered in my master's program and in the time in between my masters and my PhD, where I was a consultant with FEMA, thinking at a, you know, both at a local level and at at a higher level from a policy and planning perspective of how we think about community and belonging and justice.
00:08:09:01 - 00:08:12:13
Ashton Rohmer
And that has fundamentally shaped my trajectory since then.
00:08:12:20 - 00:08:21:19
John Simmerman
Yeah, in Community and Belonging comes up in this book, the classic Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam.
00:08:21:20 - 00:08:57:25
Ashton Rohmer
Yes, yes. So this was the book that I think made me realize that I needed to go into a PhD program. When you find yourself reading tomes like this in your free time for fun, you get a sense that maybe you are a closet nerd who needs to just embrace, you know, being in academia or scholarly spaces. And really, what I found is that I had the incredible opportunity to work with some really dedicated and hardworking public servants at FEMA who were grappling with some really complex challenges, both from a policy standpoint, from a technical standpoint.
00:08:57:25 - 00:09:26:15
Ashton Rohmer
But I was still coming up against these questions that didn't have easy answers. I don't even know if they had any answers, and they certainly didn't have answers. That left me feeling ethically and morally kind of right. And so when you read a book like Bowling Alone and you think about bigger picture, how our society is really grappling with what it means to belong and to be welcome in spaces and to connect with people.
00:09:26:15 - 00:10:05:24
Ashton Rohmer
I couldn't get some questions out of my brain at that point. I was actually still thinking about community engagement around land use and environmental planning. But when I moved to Washington, D.C. in 2017, I gave up my car and my partner and I use walking, biking, public transit to get around. And so in the early stages of my PhD program, I started to think about our built environment through the perspective of somebody who gets around on two feet and two wheels and how, again, like our social fabric is, I think, fractured by our reliance on cars.
00:10:05:24 - 00:10:09:21
Ashton Rohmer
And that's what has propelled me through my dissertation research.
00:10:09:24 - 00:10:43:24
John Simmerman
So this particular book, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival of American Community, was published 26 years ago. It's basically an entire generation ago. I'm sure there's people who are tuning in listening to this on the audio only, as well as tuning in here on YouTube and Patreon and watching the video. What's your summary of of this book? What's the what's the essence for those people who might be just getting their very first introduction to Boeing alone?
00:10:43:24 - 00:11:04:18
John Simmerman
Or maybe they've heard it off to the side, but maybe aren't really haven't had a chance to think of it from an academic perspective or from a nerds perspective who's nerding out on this kind of stuff? What's your take and how and how did that kind of influence the next step towards that PhD for you?
00:11:04:20 - 00:11:38:07
Ashton Rohmer
So Robert Putnam, I believe, is a political scientist, and he looked at some really staggering statistics of the ways that people in American society at least, had historically engaged in their communities. And so he was looking at memberships and, you know, local clubs and religious groups and bowling leagues. And he found a precipitous decline basically since the 50s and 60s, where you had people that were increasingly opting out of those social spaces.
00:11:38:07 - 00:11:57:04
Ashton Rohmer
And in turn, you know, we have folks like the who's talking about epidemic of loneliness and how that's, you know, a public health crisis. And so Robert Putnam really put this idea on the map that they're using. Data has been a really.
00:11:57:07 - 00:12:25:26
Ashton Rohmer
Big shift in how we spend our time and who we spend our time with. In the book, he has a few things that he posits are some of the culprits in this. And what's interesting is that some of it comes back to cars. It is our suburbanization and the land use patterns that have made car travel the kind of default in most American places.
00:12:25:28 - 00:12:48:24
Ashton Rohmer
Interestingly, he also points a finger at TVs. And so now we have this interesting moment where we have TVs in cars. And so we have both of these things because we have infotainment systems that people are watching. And so I think he did some really incredible work that folks in the interim have really picked up in thinking about how, how do we get back to a place.
00:12:48:24 - 00:13:12:19
Ashton Rohmer
And he actually published another book I want to say was maybe 3 or 4 years ago. I'm forgetting the name of it now, but where he has a more hopeful look at how to get from a very mean society to a very we society. But my argument would be we need to look at our built environment and our transportation systems to start.
00:13:12:21 - 00:13:37:18
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. I think the book you might be referencing was published in 2020, The Upswing How America Came Together a Century ago and how we can do so again. And I think that that's that's a kind of a cool thing to to see that sort of sandwiching in 26 years ago this came out, this is pre-Internet taking over.
00:13:37:18 - 00:14:09:13
John Simmerman
And you know, certainly pre computerized supercomputers in your back pocket and the role that social media has had. And so yeah, huge huge difference on that in six years ago came out with, you know the upswing. So very very interesting kind of going back to to that first book that kind of influenced you to get engaged in, involved at a deeper level.
00:14:09:18 - 00:14:39:12
John Simmerman
You know, the brain on nature that reminds me of also kind of a similarly connected body of work by Richard Louvre and him talking about the Last Child Left Outside kind of thing. And the his other book he had was nature. And the term that he came up was, was nature deficit disorder. And so there's all these different overlapping themes.
00:14:39:12 - 00:15:00:03
John Simmerman
And again, a common denominator, as we will find out, is cars, cars, cars. And we're going to be talking a lot about that later. So fantastic. Well talk a little bit about what it means then to.
00:15:00:06 - 00:15:15:07
John Simmerman
To pull the trigger and and enroll in a PhD program. And as I like to jokingly say, and needle my friends that have done this because I dodged it, I almost did it. I almost I almost.
00:15:15:09 - 00:15:15:18
Ashton Rohmer
Went.
00:15:15:18 - 00:15:35:12
John Simmerman
Into this, I almost went into the same program that Wes Marshall is part of. And so I would have been, you know, sort of in his under his wing at some point in time. But since I'm like a decade or two older than him, he is. I was like, yeah, maybe I won't do that. But I used to jokingly say pilot higher and deeper.
00:15:35:14 - 00:15:56:07
John Simmerman
So getting a PhD, that's a huge thing. Talk a little bit about this process, because the other thing that that I used to say is that, yes, if you're going to go do this and if you're depending on what your career track is going to be with your PhD, it's publish or perish. And so you end up starting to do these types of things.
00:15:56:07 - 00:16:05:20
John Simmerman
So talk a little bit about that process of your in your PhD. And now you're starting to produce documents and in publishing. So go ahead.
00:16:05:22 - 00:16:30:03
Ashton Rohmer
Gosh that's a good question. I have had a an interesting experience. So urban planning is a very, as you were alluding to, a very interdisciplinary field. And that's what really drew me to it, because once you start to peel back the layers, you see all of the things that are built. Environment intersects with peace and conflict studies is also a highly interdisciplinary field.
00:16:30:04 - 00:16:52:09
Ashton Rohmer
I actually thought about going to a planning PhD program. There are several reasons why I didn't, but one of them was I wanted to look at planning from a different perspective. I got a master's degree. I wanted to to really open the floodgates, if you will, and think about the decisions that we've been making as planners from a different disciplinary home.
00:16:52:12 - 00:16:59:15
Ashton Rohmer
So what's been very interesting, being in a peace and conflict program, though, is that.
00:16:59:18 - 00:17:23:27
Ashton Rohmer
Maybe no one uses biking and walking and public transit to get around in my field, because surely if they did, they would have started to apply the concepts and frameworks that I encountered in my doctoral coursework to how our mobility systems are planned and structured. I haven't been able to find anyone who looks at cars through a peace and conflict lens.
00:17:23:27 - 00:17:43:24
Ashton Rohmer
I got desk rejected at the first three journals that I submitted this piece to because they didn't have war and, you know, didn't feature. However, there's research by folks estimating that the number of people who have died in car crashes since the rise of the automobile, 60 to 80 million people, which is roughly how many people died in the world wars.
00:17:43:25 - 00:18:17:03
Ashton Rohmer
And so part of my academic scholarly goal is to change ever so slightly, if I can, the discourse that happens in different fields by colliding them together. And so this is as true for peace and conflict studies as it is, honestly, for urban planning, because I sit on the edge of either of both of these fields, I consider myself like native proficiency and planning, and I'm now fluent in peace and conflict.
00:18:17:03 - 00:18:49:06
Ashton Rohmer
Even though it's not my my home department. I go to peace conferences, I go to planning conferences, and I'm seeing it as this outside entity because I'm really trying to poke holes in both. And so to your point about academia, we are also at a very interesting moment in higher education where what we knew about the worlds and when I started my PhD in 2021 was very different about than than we are now with changes in funding structures in AI and that sort of thing.
00:18:49:08 - 00:18:54:14
John Simmerman
So and also the demonization of science and research in general.
00:18:54:18 - 00:19:29:22
Ashton Rohmer
So yes. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm, you know, I try to be a critical scholar. And so a lot of the work that I'm pushing forward, I think, you know, I think of, I think of it as the uncomfortable truth and maybe not the inconvenient truth, but certainly uncomfortable truth that the fact that I see, for example, planning research that doesn't first and foremost foreground the idea that cars cause tremendous harm and violence in our society.
00:19:29:27 - 00:19:52:15
Ashton Rohmer
I'm not sure if that's because folks are nervous about the implications of getting funding, or getting tenure, or getting accepted by mainstream media, or if it's because, as a profession, planners are still a little bit hesitant to go so far as to say that there is something called vehicular violence out in the world, right?
00:19:52:16 - 00:19:58:18
John Simmerman
Yeah. It's interesting to the.
00:19:58:20 - 00:20:27:28
John Simmerman
Connections that are in play here, as you were. You were talking about this and how, you know, it's so difficult to get the attention and the approvals necessary to even publish your work because there's such this, this bias that exists out there. And then there's also and we'll get to biases later. But there's also this, this belief that, no, no, we're like really focused in our narrow little niche right in here.
00:20:27:28 - 00:20:59:13
John Simmerman
And this is what we do. And we don't like go outside these boundaries. But the absolute truth is, and both Chuck Maron in his book confessions of a Recovering Engineer, and Wes Marshall in his book killed by a Traffic Engineer, they both talk about the fact that to deal with the violence that's happening out on our streets, we actually need to be less or approach this in less of a singular approach.
00:20:59:14 - 00:21:21:09
John Simmerman
And what I'm talking about here is it needs to be something that's pulled together and cobbled together with more diverse voices. And so as you were talking, I'm thinking, oh, I'm, I'm hearing about sociology here. So there's a lot of sociologists that are going on. You know, we were referencing Robert Putnam Putnam and the work that he was doing.
00:21:21:13 - 00:21:47:09
John Simmerman
I'm also in the back of my mind going, yeah, had I done that PhD program, I would have had a joint sort of appointment with the public health department and, and the public health side of things and even the, the advanced degrees that I have in public health or in the psychology rounds with behavior change. And so it's like, oh, yeah, it's it's not any one thing.
00:21:47:16 - 00:21:56:06
John Simmerman
It's so diverse and so interconnected, which makes it challenging to have these discussions about it.
00:21:56:07 - 00:22:37:01
Ashton Rohmer
Yeah, it does, but I mean, for every challenge there's an opportunity because it means that for all of those and maybe we can talk a little bit about the framework that the paper uses. But the reason why I think that this is actually maybe something that can be leveraged as an advantage is if you think about how complex the system is and how many dimensions are to it, that means that people who have different skill sets and have different passions can all plug in into the thing that they find most aggravating or, you know, detrimental and chip away at that little piece.
00:22:37:01 - 00:23:03:22
Ashton Rohmer
But I think the challenge comes when you lose sight of that bigger picture while you're in, in your silo. And so I think we need to be doing maybe a little bit more of this to really grapple with how these pieces play together in a reinforcing, you know, system, if you will. And so to that, and this paper is published in Peace Review.
00:23:03:22 - 00:23:35:07
Ashton Rohmer
And in it I take a prominent peace and conflict studies scholar named Johan Tung, who promoted this idea after looking at conflicts around the world that most conflicts can be analyzed through three different types of violence. One is direct violence. So this is your interpersonal behavior. Someone stabs someone and or, you know, abuses them in some way. It's an individual actor committing violence.
00:23:35:14 - 00:24:05:19
Ashton Rohmer
The second dimension is structural. So this is violence that is permitted by societal structures, whether it's institutions, bureaucratic processes, infrastructure. In the case that we have here, although I'm I'm grappling with whether or not it's a separate category in my head after I'm after you publish something, always think of something else. And then, of course, we have the cultural dynamic, which is aspects of mainstream culture and society that legitimize the violence.
00:24:05:19 - 00:24:39:23
Ashton Rohmer
And so when we look at how your tongue is defining violence, it's anything that limits your physical, mental kind of potential. When we apply this to cars, and I draw on one thing that I really appreciated about writing this article is that I drew on so many disciplines, notably not peace and conflict, but pretty much everyone else. Everything from business to gender, in women's studies, to public health, to medicine, to communication and media economics.
00:24:39:25 - 00:25:07:16
Ashton Rohmer
You know, like across the board, there is something in it for everybody. So I did an analysis of fatal hit and run crashes using USDOT data from 2008 2022, and I compared the number of pedestrians and the number of car occupants that were killed to show that there is a really sobering increase in the number of pedestrians that are killed in these crashes.
00:25:07:19 - 00:25:30:15
Ashton Rohmer
Partly, I did this because my reviewers wanted some quantitative data to show because the kind of theoretical framework. But also what's interesting about this is that it helps us think about those three dimensions in a very concrete way. And so, of course, you know, a hit and run crash is when someone uses their vehicle, hit someone, and leaves that person to an uncertain outcome.
00:25:30:16 - 00:25:56:09
Ashton Rohmer
Most of the time, though, sadly, the person dies. That is, of course, direct violence. That is one actor committing violence against another. If we look at the structural dynamic, we might say that structural violence was embedded in the fact that the pedestrian didn't have a safe area of refuge, that we criminalize jaywalking, that we don't have safe road conditions.
00:25:56:09 - 00:26:30:15
Ashton Rohmer
There are myriad things that kind of contributed to that direct violence happening. And then when we look at the cultural side of things, we have, for example, like the terrific work of folks like Kelsey Ralph, until I got her looking at how media and police report portrayals of these crashes often victimize the pedestrian or the person riding a bicycle, they don't look at the wide range of conditions that contributed to the crash, like the structural issues, like the, you know, distracted driver or what have you.
00:26:30:15 - 00:26:54:12
Ashton Rohmer
And so when you put these together, you start to see a really complex and reinforcing what I call conflict system of vehicular violence, where each of these things is reliant on another and you can't really pull it out without tugging the other two, but they can be distinguished and kind of delineated as, as these three different nodes.
00:26:54:14 - 00:27:36:03
John Simmerman
Yeah. Whenever we talk about vehicular violence and we use that term violence, we get pushback from folks that are like, but that direct actor didn't mean necessarily to commit said violence. Lean into that a little bit. Why did you stick with that? Because I agree with you. I think it is vehicular violence, whether it was intentional or not, and whether it was intentional or not could also trickle down to could be a structural issue that, you know, encouraged that speeding that then resulted in that collision, that crash.
00:27:36:04 - 00:28:04:00
John Simmerman
It could be cultural. The fact that 115 plus people a day die on US roads, and yet it's not even in the news, you know, it's like culturally accepted. It's legitimizing that violence just because we're not talking about it. But lean into that a little bit. Why did you choose to use violence in this context of the carnage that's happening out on our roads?
00:28:04:02 - 00:28:20:03
Ashton Rohmer
I think for a few reasons. One is these are people who die, their loved ones. There are people with families and jobs and purposes and community work.
00:28:20:06 - 00:28:39:25
John Simmerman
And not just fatalities too. I mean, literally every single day, thousands upon thousands of people in the United States are caught up in these crashes, and many of them are serious, debilitating injuries. So, yeah, 115 fatalities per day, but thousands of of debilitating injuries. So yes.
00:28:39:26 - 00:29:18:19
Ashton Rohmer
Not to mention the loved ones who have to care for those folks. Not to mention the people who have witnessed the crash and have to live with whatever trauma that you know, they have to carry on. I think most people have witnessed a crash, or at least the immediate aftermath of it, and the fact that I've never seen a bombing happen, but I've seen crashes means that every day that I walk out of my home, I actually am embedded in this conflict system because I can't go more than two blocks without someone devaluing my life as a pedestrian, or someone riding a bike, or someone on a bus.
00:29:18:21 - 00:29:42:19
John Simmerman
Yeah. And I think also if we if we can, we also pause to. And Chuck does a good job. Chuck Marone does a good job of strong towns of having some empathy to for the driving public is that we're caught up in a system in a structure where car dependency and motor normativity is is the de facto is.
00:29:42:19 - 00:29:56:04
John Simmerman
We have to have some empathy for the fact that, again, they may not be intending on creating violence, a violent situation, a crash, a collision. They too are impacted by this as well.
00:29:56:07 - 00:30:17:09
Ashton Rohmer
Yeah. And I mean, I absolutely agree. I think I would I would say a couple of things, though. I've, I've driven before, I easily become the worst version of myself when I get behind the wheel because I am angry at everybody. And it immediately boils down to the zero sum game where the the gain of one person is my loss.
00:30:17:09 - 00:30:35:28
Ashton Rohmer
And so a lot of times when we have these debates about what happens on our streets, I don't think there is anywhere in the United States that seriously considering outlawing using cars like cars will always be there. And yet what we're just asking for is that someone who uses another mode of transportation can do so without fearing for their lives.
00:30:35:28 - 00:30:57:09
Ashton Rohmer
And I understand that there are a lot of people who don't intend to do anything, and I certainly understand, like I've been in those situations. However, we also have a society where people, you know, there's been some great research out of Australia where people literally think that folks who ride bicycles are less than human.
00:30:57:09 - 00:31:05:15
John Simmerman
To lean into that. That's that's a dehumanizing type of thing. And it was a fascinating study that came out, I don't know, maybe eight years ago, something like that.
00:31:05:16 - 00:31:06:15
Ashton Rohmer
There have been a couple, but.
00:31:06:15 - 00:31:33:18
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah, the one I'm thinking of is like they equated them to a person on a bike as if they're a pest, like a cockroach, you know, and like literally. And it's challenging to. But what's interesting is that you just mentioned something that I think bears leaning into, which is we are we become our own worst version of ourselves when we get behind the wheel of an automobile.
00:31:33:19 - 00:32:01:14
John Simmerman
We're commanding a machine that could, you know, with one acceleration, become a weapon. And Tom Vanderbilt, in his book traffic, did a fabulous job of profiling this Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde sort of transformation that happens. And he was following up on something that even Walt Disney picked up on in 1954 with his classic Motor Mania, with goofy.
00:32:01:14 - 00:32:43:09
John Simmerman
And how, you know, Mr. Walker turns into Mr. Wheeler and begin again becomes his own worst version of himself. And I think that that again, understanding that and having empathy for the human nature side of things is incredibly important to understand how we got here. And that brings us towards this concept of what the great work that Ian Walker and Terror Goddard are doing, and really motor normativity and this concept of cars walk us through this particular research article that you put together.
00:32:43:12 - 00:33:19:22
Ashton Rohmer
Yeah. So I am a huge fan of the work that folks have been doing on Modern Normativity. I think it outlines some really important psychological biases that help to partly explain what happens when this is the environment that we grow up in. What I struggled to find, though, was vocabulary for what I was seeing living in DC. I would and I you know, also, I'm standing on the shoulders of giants like Peter Norton, who did such an incredible job outlining how we got to where we are.
00:33:19:25 - 00:33:47:18
Ashton Rohmer
However, when I'm in my local DC council meeting, I don't see lobbyists milling around, you know, in the background. I don't see well, certainly right now it's a little bit different. But, you know, a lot of these testimonies were actually delivered during a Democratic presidency where we didn't have, you know, people from the federal government coming in and saying certain things.
00:33:47:20 - 00:34:20:02
Ashton Rohmer
I so this attempt, you know, my pointing this term, the ideology of Car suppress, what it really tries to do is put terminology to the beliefs that people use to maintain power, and not just any people, but actually private citizens who are acting of their own accord. On a Wednesday morning, dialing into a DC council hearing to wield power over a modal hierarchy that cars are currently at the top of.
00:34:20:04 - 00:34:49:06
Ashton Rohmer
And so when there is a threat to car dominance, either through reducing the speed or storage space allocated to cars or just space, generally there is this reaction. And what we see when we look at the data of what people share in these public meetings is that there are rhetorical devices that people use, and that those rhetorical devices seemed evidence a more coherent set of beliefs because of how many recurring patterns there are.
00:34:49:07 - 00:35:17:15
Ashton Rohmer
So when I did this paper, I looked at a larger corpus of 200 testimonies that were delivered at DC Council hearings. Public, you know, live orally. And I whittled them down to a sample of 57. And these were all private citizens who again expressed some opposition to measures that were meant to either reduce the speed of or the space allocated to cars.
00:35:17:18 - 00:35:44:25
Ashton Rohmer
And the this was interesting in part because a lot of the discourse, I think, tends to think that this is a polarized issue, that there are left leaning folks, and they all love bike lanes and busses and pedestrian infrastructure and their right leaning folks, and they're the ones that we really need to look out for. But I was seeing in city after liberal city after Liberal City, DC is one of the most liberal cities in the country.
00:35:44:26 - 00:36:17:28
Ashton Rohmer
We had our mayor walking back, promises to install safe transportation infrastructure, and we see that in these headlines. We have evidence based solutions to increase street safety. And yet they keep getting scaled back. They keep getting paused. They in some cases are ripped out even after implementation. And so I wanted to look at we have these biases, but they don't necessarily explain what happens when they enter civic discourse and are used as a leverage of power, a lover of power.
00:36:17:28 - 00:36:43:00
Ashton Rohmer
So looking beyond rhetoric and really putting power into the conversation, and I found that Norman Fairclough was one of the kind of pioneers in this type of analysis called critical discourse analysis to be very important, because if these biases exist, I could easily look at the testimonies that I looked at and say, gosh, it seems like people really like their parking, but that's not the story.
00:36:43:07 - 00:37:07:00
Ashton Rohmer
I could say people really don't like bike lanes. My research is not about bike lanes. My research is about cars and how people who have beliefs about the appropriate uses and users of our streets influence political decision making at the hyper local level. So I will just pause there, because I think you've gone through a couple of slides and I'm not sure if I've done them all justice.
00:37:07:02 - 00:37:07:15
John Simmerman
Yeah.
00:37:07:15 - 00:37:09:03
Ashton Rohmer
Well, I think what's really.
00:37:09:03 - 00:37:48:00
John Simmerman
Really fascinating too, if we go back to the very first sort of overview here, the ideology of cast in three main beliefs, you're absolutely right. Is this this is not just a right or left sort of thing. Car brain. This concept of motor normativity infects us all. And sometimes you have to be very intentional to make sure that you're not just viewing the world through that windshield bias of of like, oh my gosh, you know, of course this is happening.
00:37:48:00 - 00:38:11:21
John Simmerman
And of course we accept this. And, and streets are most definitely for cars, right. And I'm like, no, there's a reason why I put this on my coffee mug so I can remind myself over and over and over again on screen streets have existed in in our human habitats for literally thousands of years. The automobile came around about 120 years ago.
00:38:11:21 - 00:38:51:20
John Simmerman
And you referenced Peter Norton. He does a wonderful job of documenting the history, especially in his book Fighting Traffic, of that narrative that took place, of that that transformation of the streets and the criminalization of anybody on the street in any other mode of mobility other than being in a car. And so, yeah, I think it's important to understand that, yes, when it comes down to your particular location, you may have fights that are right versus left, and they may kind of get in these nice little things.
00:38:51:20 - 00:39:32:28
John Simmerman
But the, the, the disease that is motor normativity and the virus of accepting that that's the way of motor moto monoculture. It's insidious. And you know, the wonderful book dark PR by Grant Ennis really talks about how masterfully the motor vehicle industry did of framing the messages and reinforcing the messages that this is what is normal. If you want to do something other than drive, it becomes alternative transportation.
00:39:33:00 - 00:40:11:04
John Simmerman
It's like, wait a minute. No, this is the original mode to getting on your feet and walking. That's not an alternative. That's the original. So yes, I love the fact that you're really leaning into that. This is about power. This is about ideology. And yeah, I really, really am super stoked that we're having this conversation because I think it's it's a it's one of the things that is difficult for us to do because we're bouncing around these ideas within our, you know, bubble.
00:40:11:04 - 00:40:31:09
John Simmerman
They call it the urban ism and transportation and active transportation bubble. But, you know, we keep figuring out, okay, well, how do we break outside of our bubble so that we can start having these conversations with the people out there who aren't thinking about this stuff all day long?
00:40:31:12 - 00:40:51:10
Ashton Rohmer
Yeah. And I think, I mean, maybe if we can go back, I'll walk through the beliefs really quickly. But just on that point, you know, if we think about this as an ideology, it it raises. And again, this is the through line. My you know, I brought up your brain on nature and my work with FEMA and the disaster resilience space.
00:40:51:15 - 00:41:19:01
Ashton Rohmer
If these are deeply held beliefs that folks have, what does that mean for community engagement? How do we you know, I've seen people hear data and it goes in one ear and out the other. I've seen people here really tragic stories about crash impacts, and it goes right over their heads. And so it, I think, asks some really profound questions about how we break through that ideology.
00:41:19:03 - 00:41:43:16
Ashton Rohmer
And so let me just walk through the core beliefs here. I think most folks who are followers of active towns, probably this is very legible to them. The first is amount of monoculture. And this is the idea that streets should serve the needs of motorists. The second is autoimmunity, which is at. Harms caused by driving should be overlooked, and the third is modal marginalization.
00:41:43:18 - 00:42:07:13
Ashton Rohmer
Other road users don't deserve political representation. And again, we see this in public discourse. And so if you can scroll down I'll show examples of how this actually manifests in language that is being put out into the world. If you go down to I think one of the slides is, yeah, this one, we can start with this one.
00:42:07:13 - 00:42:30:07
Ashton Rohmer
So this is just one example. This person is saying the District Department of Transportation and DC is trying to do too much with the narrow streets we have. There's no space for bike lanes. There's no space for streetcars, which unfortunately DC just lost our streetcar. There's no space for bus only lanes, and there's no space, not even for these little, you know, pylons, yellow and white poles that they have erected but do not keeps trying to do all those things.
00:42:30:07 - 00:42:59:20
Ashton Rohmer
The government keeps paying engineers to design the impossible. I call this rhetorical device static scarcity, because it's saying our streets are made for cars, and we can see that in the language because they're being constructed streets as these unchanging entities that are very limited in space. Of course, if we step back just for a moment, what this public witness is failing to mention is that there's plenty of space for cars, but there's not space for anything else.
00:42:59:22 - 00:43:20:09
Ashton Rohmer
So let's see the next one. We'll try to I'll try to go through these little quickly. So autoimmunity. So this is a quotation. Bike lanes will actually make the avenue less safe by causing confusion for drivers. Bus passengers sue visitors and pedestrians. 7000 cars per day. Diverting into neighborhood streets will make the side streets more dangerous to especially for children.
00:43:20:09 - 00:43:52:18
Ashton Rohmer
So I call this rhetorical device blame inversion. And what we see happening here is someone implicitly recognizing the harm that comes from cars. They are dangerous and yet still trying to invert that blame to bike lanes. And I want to again, kind of highlight I don't see my work as work on bike lash. I see my work as centering cars because if this were in any other place, I heard from somebody who lives in Copenhagen.
00:43:52:20 - 00:44:22:02
Ashton Rohmer
They had proposed a bus lane that got a lot of support, and that bus lane became a contentious debate in their local elections. So in that case, it wasn't bike lanes, it was a bus lane. But it's anything that threatens the dominance of cars on our public streets and bike lanes just happened to be the thing in a lot of American cities, because we don't have a lot of American cities that are pushing forward bus only lanes in a lot of downtown places.
00:44:22:02 - 00:44:48:15
Ashton Rohmer
We have decent sidewalk networks, and also people who drive cars rely on pedestrian infrastructure. And so bike lanes are the bipartisan thing to hate because it's the most. And this will get to the next rhetorical device, my, you know, minority form of transportation. So this last rhetorical device I called nefarious minority, I'll read the quotation at this point.
00:44:48:15 - 00:45:16:00
Ashton Rohmer
I have hundreds of data points that show how undemocratic the bike lane agenda really is. I can confidently say the vast majority of bureaucratic agencies have been corrupted by paid activists, while silencing citizens who care about their city. So the idea here is if you are advocating for anything other than, you know, car centric infrastructure, you are a fringe group who has these very nefarious aims.
00:45:16:00 - 00:45:41:21
Ashton Rohmer
You don't care about your city. You don't. You actually don't even live in this city. You're not considered a neighbor of mine or a constituent that should be represented through political processes. And so together, these three really structure a moral understanding of how our political system and the planning processes that have outputs that impact us all every day, kind of carry out into the world.
00:45:41:24 - 00:46:15:18
Ashton Rohmer
And they do that through language in these public meetings. Now, I will note, I looked at data from 2021 to 2024, which was in parallel with the rise in what we called in DC Street. So these are places where lanes that were dedicated to car parking, car storage, car travel were converted to outdoor cafes so that businesses during the Covid pandemic could keep their operations going with safe protocols in place.
00:46:15:20 - 00:46:43:10
Ashton Rohmer
Yet when I look at the data, I think it was about 10% of those 67 testimonies included studies as the thing that they were very grumpy about, and everyone that talked about the Schraeder also talked about the bike lanes. And so we have this interesting thing where it is about identity in a way that doesn't carry over to other discussions about how we use our space.
00:46:43:13 - 00:47:10:15
Ashton Rohmer
And this is, I think, where the power piece comes in. And I'll also note as a as a teaser, perhaps most, not most, a good number of the testimonies that I looked at, we're talking about Connecticut Avenue Northwest, which is a major thoroughfare from Maryland suburbs down into downtown DC, where thousands of car commuters kind of travel every day, and it's anywhere from 4 to 6 lanes, depending on how you count and whether reverse lanes, that sort of thing.
00:47:10:15 - 00:47:37:22
Ashton Rohmer
But it's a massive major arterial. And there was a proposed, I forget how many. It's like a three mile long corridor, and they were going to apply protected bike lanes to some chunk of it, along with a lot of other safety measures. Unfortunately, even though there was a lot of public support and the mayor had promised Connecticut Avenue will continue forward with no bike lanes.
00:47:38:00 - 00:48:15:27
Ashton Rohmer
And so the tragic irony of this is that if you look at the data in DC, car drivers are the second and occupants more generally are the second group in terms of people who die in car crashes. So pedestrians are most at risk, but people who are in cars are in that second slot. And so in going against all of these research based, evidence backed safety mechanisms, this ideology carries forward a system that's actually suboptimal for everybody.
00:48:16:04 - 00:48:45:28
John Simmerman
Yeah. Yeah. It is interesting to I love this particular quote in that it really kind of gets to the conspiracy theory sort of angle that folks have bought into. It's like this is a bike lane agenda and it's these are nefarious, you know, folks that are trying to upset the status quo of the normal people. And I get it.
00:48:45:28 - 00:49:19:19
John Simmerman
I totally understand that when you are a member of the dominant group and the status quo, anything that that sort of smacks of, of taking away a little bit of your freedom to drive anywhere as fast as you want, seems like a threat on your freedom and independence. And so we get this sort of framing of, of anybody who supports this sort of thing as these are the agitators, these are the outsiders.
00:49:19:19 - 00:49:50:19
John Simmerman
It's them. These are the the folks that want to cause anarchy to what is an ordered area, which or existence which is drive everywhere for everything. So it's I think this is well studied and it's something where we have been, you know, long embracing this as the tongue in cheek. Yes. We are the all powerful bike lobby. That's us, you know.
00:49:50:21 - 00:50:14:19
John Simmerman
Look it up. You can get you can you can get your own t shirt, the bike lobby and, and even, you know, Doug and and Sarah, you know, with the war on cars, you know, that's tongue in cheek based on the fact that, you know, that that narrative kept coming up over and over and over again is the all powerful bike lobby is waging a war on cars.
00:50:14:19 - 00:50:20:19
John Simmerman
And so, yeah, it's this nefarious minority that's out there. Yeah. How dare we?
00:50:20:21 - 00:50:49:22
Ashton Rohmer
Yeah. Well, I mean, I think, you know, to your point, I think this is where I'm trying to also remember, you know, I'm someone who's in peace and conflict planning and how so many of these processes reflect what you find in war torn societies and sectarian strife the world over. For generations, there's this demonization of a group, and there's also this, you know, interesting thing where you have bus drivers and pedestrians and people who ride bikes pitted against each other in these conflicts.
00:50:49:25 - 00:51:04:25
Ashton Rohmer
But another thing I wanted to note about the previous slide is that, you know, I'm I always find it very interesting when people who I think are promoting.
00:51:04:27 - 00:51:45:27
Ashton Rohmer
All ages, all abilities, mobility will say to me, I hate when that white guy, that old white guy in his Lycra, stands up in a public meeting asking for a bike lane, because I tend to think that no matter who you are, you have a right to get from point A to point B without dying. And yes, we can certainly have a lot of concerns about how there are equity implications of where we put bike lanes, and there are challenges with ensuring that the places that have the most dangerous roads, which are largely in lower income communities of color, 100%.
00:51:45:28 - 00:52:16:13
Ashton Rohmer
However, there is no reason why we should think of one life as any more or less valuable than another life. And I get a little bit concerned when we have folks in the bike lobby who start to point at people. And again, I'm not trying to say that they shouldn't, you know, that we shouldn't have some critical, reflective skills to say, you know, stand up or sit down or whatever the idea is, but at a very kind of ethical level.
00:52:16:15 - 00:52:45:25
Ashton Rohmer
I think that it raises some really interesting questions about how we decide who has the right to exist on our streets, and what it says about a lot of larger societal understandings about identity and belonging, and how power really operates. Because someone driving a car in a spatial context is always going to have more power over somebody who is not in a car.
00:52:45:26 - 00:52:47:09
Ashton Rohmer
At the end of the day.
00:52:47:12 - 00:52:52:00
John Simmerman
I wish we had an all powerful bike lobby. We do not.
00:52:52:02 - 00:53:10:19
Ashton Rohmer
And, you know, all powerful pedestrian lobby and bus lobby. But this is another thing. It's like, I want to see these cross modal collaborations to really call attention to its. Sure, bike lanes are nice, but I just want safe streets for everybody.
00:53:10:21 - 00:53:43:21
John Simmerman
Exactly. And to the point that actually Grant Ennis made in his book dark PR, this is exactly what motorhome wants this. You know, they want to see us anything other than streets for cars to be able to drive as fast as possible, you know, whenever you want, everywhere. They want to see infighting happening. They want to see the pedestrians fighting against the the people on bikes.
00:53:43:21 - 00:54:06:26
John Simmerman
They want to see conflicts between transit and the bus users, etc., because then it it's like, oh, see, this is so complicated, this is so complex. And therefore since it's so complex, we need to study this more and we need to. And while all of this happens at just it continues to be motor dumb driver happy motoring of drive everywhere for everything.
00:54:06:26 - 00:54:25:14
John Simmerman
So this is right into one of the reframing, you know, tactics, tactics that they have employed and have been employing for the better part of the last 70 to 80 years. And so yeah, yeah, it's good stuff. Okay. So the, the, the paper makes three moves.
00:54:25:16 - 00:54:58:07
Ashton Rohmer
Yeah. I she it as not being about necessarily car culture or modern or automobile even though there's been, you know, tremendous and terrific research on all those friends. I see it as really building on those and, and looking at this as a cohesive set of beliefs, a system of beliefs that's leveraged to maintain, maintain power over the modal hierarchy, both in our, you know, in this case in our public forums, but also on our public streets.
00:54:58:08 - 00:55:22:16
Ashton Rohmer
I think the second is I'm looking at data. This is, you know, this is what actual people are saying in discourse and public meetings, in my case in Washington, DC. But we have I'm leading a survey coming up where we hope to actually take the beliefs that I find and put them in a nationally representative study of us adults to see.
00:55:22:19 - 00:55:55:25
Ashton Rohmer
I don't think it's just a DC thing. I think that these are actually beliefs that permeate American culture, and also try to look at who are the folks that have these beliefs, how much do they adhere to them? How much do they hang together? And the last thing is, you know, I there have been folks pointing really rightfully so at these macro forces, whether it's the, you know, the bad actors in the dark PR space or the state or technology or capitalism, and I don't have any issues with pointing fingers in that place.
00:55:55:25 - 00:56:34:08
Ashton Rohmer
But what I think is really under theorized in the literature is the fact that someone across the street can get a speed bump removed means that it's maybe PR dark PR kind of succeeding, but this is a real person who is we are giving power to to make me less safe. And that is agency at the hyper local level with members of the public who are enabled by bureaucratic processes to make decisions about how our streets value life.
00:56:34:14 - 00:56:37:21
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah.
00:56:37:24 - 00:56:40:28
John Simmerman
Amazing. Okay.
00:56:41:00 - 00:56:41:27
Ashton Rohmer
Yeah.
00:56:42:00 - 00:56:43:04
John Simmerman
This is imperative.
00:56:43:06 - 00:57:06:28
Ashton Rohmer
Yes. This is how I close the paper. So for our listening only folks, the issues posed by our mobility status quo are not engineering problems to be modeled or long range plans to be strategized, but constitute a moral project to be scrutinized as social construct to be challenged and a system of power to be dismantled. So that is my my call to my people, my planning people.
00:57:07:01 - 00:57:40:28
Ashton Rohmer
And in some ways, you know, activists and folks that I really respect and and really enjoy working with and want to collaborate with. But I think, you know, we often, I think, forget the moral tenor because we get caught up in a lot of things that make sense to get caught up in. But if if we're not understanding how cars are fundamentally changing, how we relate to people and how it's eroding and destroying our social contract, I think that is really limiting our ability to.
00:57:41:00 - 00:58:11:25
Ashton Rohmer
And maybe this will be my my power pivot here to what is possible on our streets. And so I'm a peace and conflict person, which means I don't only look at the the doom and gloom, I also look at the brighter spots. I'm alluded to this in the beginning when I showed the tulip pictures, but I have another stream of research that is theorizing care of mobility on our streets and what it would look like to to do some reimagining of what's possible of our public ground.
00:58:11:26 - 00:58:12:16
Ashton Rohmer
I think that.
00:58:12:16 - 00:58:48:15
John Simmerman
There's also just an incredibly fundamental misconception to about what active mobility infrastructure is for. I try to reinforce all the time that what I'm talking about is creating an environment that is safe and inviting for all ages and abilities. And what I mean by that is literally just that all ages, all abilities. Not John, when he's, you know, in his Lycra and on his racing bike, you know, I can ride pretty much on anything.
00:58:48:21 - 00:59:10:04
John Simmerman
You know, I have that confidence and that ability to to feel comfortable pretty much doing that anywhere. What I want is for a parent to feel comfortable letting their children be able to walk or bike, you know, or rollerblade or skateboard or scooter.
00:59:10:04 - 00:59:11:06
Ashton Rohmer
Wherever they want.
00:59:11:07 - 00:59:45:12
John Simmerman
To, you know, have, you know, in Tim Gill's perspective, you know, recreating this freedom of movement, the freedom to roam as Laura, excuse me, Lenore Skinner's says, you know, having free range kids, being able to command the city if the city is safe and inviting for our youngest, the children, it's going to be de facto safe and inviting for our our copula, as we say in Hawaii, our eldest and and I think that that's one of the key things.
00:59:45:12 - 01:00:02:07
John Simmerman
And so when we talk about creating all ages and all abilities, infrastructure, and you're going to experience a little bit of this in the future because you're going to be spending some time in in the Netherlands soon. Where are you going to be in the Netherlands?
01:00:02:14 - 01:00:30:03
Ashton Rohmer
That's a great idea. Great question. Wherever we can find housing, if anyone knows any place. But on that point I thought maybe you can bring up. There's one more picture that I shared, because I think this is a really nice kind of segue to. I helped start a bike bus in my neighborhood in southwest DC, and became completely enamored with the potential of what it shares about our streets.
01:00:30:03 - 01:01:08:08
Ashton Rohmer
And I think one thing that's nice about street design is that if you make streets for all ages and abilities, everyone who ever uses a street, whether they live on the corner or if they live, you know, five minutes down the street or five states away, they will be safe in that place. So I did, I tulip, and I took Amtrak up and down the Northeast Corridor, and we I biked with about a dozen bike bus routes in 7 or 7 cities across five states to learn how they are transforming, how we think about what's possible.
01:01:08:12 - 01:01:56:15
Ashton Rohmer
And so the word cloud is I had asked I also interviewed about two dozen bike bus participants, organizers about how they would describe bike bus. And you can see immediately, you know, these are sized based on how common they were in the responses. How much? Not only does making streets accessible to people of all ages and abilities do good things from a health perspective and for ensuring that kids can have freedom, but they have so many other second order benefits around creating a sense of community that people, if we go back to bowling alone that have, or if you go back to your brain on nature, you know, getting access to green space can completely
01:01:56:15 - 01:02:19:19
Ashton Rohmer
invigorate people and bring out the best in them. So I've also done a little bit of consulting work where I'm trying to see from a community engagement perspective, what people think a caring street would look like. What does it mean if you foreground care? And then maybe you can pull up the quotation in the bottom left. This is one of the most profound pieces that came out of my interviews.
01:02:19:19 - 01:02:38:02
Ashton Rohmer
I'll read it for our listening only audience. The Bike Bus is a is about moving together and being together, and being in a space where we can give our kids freedom because we're together with them, because we're creating. I love this image, a rolling village for our kids to be in. My middle child is five, and you can just be out in the group because other people will watch for him to make sure he doesn't get hit.
01:02:38:03 - 01:02:59:15
Ashton Rohmer
I tear up almost every time, because a lot of times I feel like I have to be that infrastructure for my child by myself. I have to physically block traffic on all sides, but to be able to entrust that to other adults is incredibly freeing. And so we have these streets where adults must act as the physical infrastructure that our streets otherwise lack, for our kids to be able to have a sense of childhood and play.
01:02:59:15 - 01:03:18:09
Ashton Rohmer
And we know from tremendous work, especially from folks like John Hate, who this is a developmentally necessary activity for kids to play. This is how they learn how to, you know, be in the world and interact with other human beings. And the fact that that's being shortchanged is just such a shame.
01:03:18:13 - 01:03:28:00
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. And it's it's worth repeating to a couple of different factors. One.
01:03:28:02 - 01:04:05:27
John Simmerman
The, the concept of an all ages and abilities street. A people oriented street doesn't necessarily mean that you have protected bike lanes. It just means that it is safe and inviting for all users. And so and I reinforce this by saying, hey, 60 to 70% of all of the quote unquote cycle infrastructure that the Dutch have are some form of shared street, whether it's a feet strong or whether it's their residential access roads which may not have any sidewalks, and therefore it's a shared street environment for everybody.
01:04:06:00 - 01:04:39:28
John Simmerman
What is the common? Common factor is motor vehicle speeds have been calmed down to nonlethal levels. And I think that's what's really, really important. And getting back to that one comment of saying, well, our streets just don't have enough space to have all of this stuff. Well, gee, it sounds like you're describing a space on a street, probably in a residential area very common in DC, where it's narrow enough, where this should be a slow street environment and a traffic calmed environment and a street for people.
01:04:39:28 - 01:05:24:01
John Simmerman
So I just want to reinforce that. The other second thing I wanted to reinforce, too, is that the result of safer infrastructure and safer streets for everybody and in all ages and abilities approach to an entire community. You are able to see this concept of free range kids and independence and mobility, independence for all ages and abilities. And and so you don't have to have a special day of a bike bus, because literally every day feels like that and you're going to have so much fun when you are over in the Netherlands, because you're going to have an opportunity to really experience this.
01:05:24:01 - 01:05:48:12
John Simmerman
I do have some suggestions for you in terms of which city you should, you know, make your home stay in to make this happen. And I would be happy to introduce you to some of my friends and colleagues over there to do that. And folks, you can follow along with Ashton's field research and work that she's going to be doing out there at her website, peace and planning.
01:05:48:14 - 01:05:59:00
John Simmerman
So be sure to head on over and is are is there an ability for them to follow along with posts? Is there a subscription? Yes. Yes.
01:05:59:04 - 01:05:59:18
Ashton Rohmer
Exactly.
01:05:59:19 - 01:06:00:13
John Simmerman
Yeah okay.
01:06:00:15 - 01:06:02:12
Ashton Rohmer
There is a subscription.
01:06:02:14 - 01:06:25:14
John Simmerman
Fantastic. And the on screen here you can also see for the viewing audience you can see some additional links. I'll be sure to include all of these links in the show notes below, and follow along with Ashton's work on LinkedIn and also on blue Sky. Final words. Anything that we didn't mention that you want to make sure to leave the audience with?
01:06:25:16 - 01:06:33:06
Ashton Rohmer
Oh gosh, I am.
01:06:33:08 - 01:07:09:09
Ashton Rohmer
Very lucky to be able to do this work every day, and I want to really appreciate the work of activists and advocates that are doing this work every day. I think one of the most powerful images that came out of the bike busses is, you know, turning the mundane into magical. And I think that that's really, you know, how we might be able to think about what is possible on our streets when you think about it from, you know, a peace or a caring or a commons lens.
01:07:09:09 - 01:07:15:04
Ashton Rohmer
So thank you so much for having me. It's been a real treat to talk with you, and I appreciate all the work that you do on active towns. John.
01:07:15:12 - 01:07:18:24
John Simmerman
Thank you. Well, I'm not going to let you go quite yet because there's one little.
01:07:18:25 - 01:07:21:01
Ashton Rohmer
Niggle that I want to.
01:07:21:03 - 01:07:40:19
John Simmerman
I've said this many times on the channel, so you may have heard me say this before. I love double entendres. And so one of the things that I talk about when I talk about active towns, and one of the things that was in the back of my mind when I established that as the name for this initiative was that, yes, it's physical activity.
01:07:40:19 - 01:08:12:28
John Simmerman
It's activity that you're seeing. But the other side of it kind of ties into. What Robert Putnam was talking about. And it talks about community and active in terms of community engagement. And it's one of the things that I notice, and you will notice when you are spending time in the Netherlands, is that you? Because you're not in this hermetically sealed metal box, you're brushing shoulders with people all the time, you're making slight little movements and etc. you're seeing familiar strangers and faces.
01:08:12:28 - 01:08:36:06
John Simmerman
And I also say that, you know, an active town, an active community becomes an engaged community. People care about one another. They notice things because they're traveling closer to human speed, walking and biking. Comment a little bit on that, because I think this gets to the peace and conflict stuff, because you have to figure.
01:08:36:06 - 01:08:37:03
John Simmerman
Out how to.
01:08:37:04 - 01:08:45:20
John Simmerman
Interact with people as people. Not hiding in her medically sealed metal boxes.
01:08:45:22 - 01:08:58:18
Ashton Rohmer
Yeah, I've thought about this as social severance. This if you're in a car that's lifted several feet off the ground and you have windows up, and if you have tinted windows, which is really just makes me.
01:08:58:20 - 01:09:02:02
John Simmerman
But we're supposed to make eye contact with people, right?
01:09:02:02 - 01:09:29:02
Ashton Rohmer
Yeah. Good luck. Yeah. That it fundamentally removes people from the public realm. Like you are putting people in public and public space in private vehicles. And so there are deeper questions that I'm interested in around how we think about streets as commons and what that means to to be in that way. But I think another thing that, you know, I think a lot about is we try to design our streets to force compliance.
01:09:29:03 - 01:09:58:08
Ashton Rohmer
What would it look like to cultivate care? And the reason why I say this is I think a lot of people get very excited about biking because they say, this is the thing that's going to solve all of our problems. If you are on a bicycle and you are going 25 miles an hour and you cannot be attentive to or responsive to the needs of people who are navigating the built environment, you know you are going to do a lot less harm than someone driving a car.
01:09:58:08 - 01:10:28:02
Ashton Rohmer
But I would like to live in a world where we just appreciate that other people exist, and that we delight in the fact that we can enjoy our public spaces together, and that we can build bonds outside of 100% outside of vehicles. But there's this inverse correlation between speed and separation and care. Like if you are separated from other people, you can't care for them.
01:10:28:09 - 01:10:49:27
Ashton Rohmer
And likewise, if you've ever tried to feed a two year old quickly, you know that that's not going to work. Like you can't do things caring that are also very fast. And so I think, you know, I don't want necessarily my I mean, obviously, I'm very critical of cars in the way that they have fundamentally fractured our social networks and our cohesion and our, you know, all of that.
01:10:50:04 - 01:11:11:13
Ashton Rohmer
And there are some aspects of automobile that are kind of like making their way into how we think about streets. And I want to step back a little bit and say, well, if we were to start from scratch, I think we would want to build some of those interpersonal connections. And what are the conditions that really cultivate that?
01:11:11:15 - 01:11:34:21
Ashton Rohmer
And I actually get into really I get into my head a lot about should we really be looking at separate infrastructure, or should we be looking at shared streets? We can't all have the motor or motorman. It's been a long day, shared Street, smiling. Obviously that's not going to work in a major arterial, and we need safe infrastructure because people are perishing on our streets.
01:11:34:21 - 01:11:59:00
Ashton Rohmer
However, how do we work from the streets that have the separate infrastructure? Because we can't, you know, and then is shared streets really the the ideal so that we respect that other road users exist and that we fight the tendency to just look at our phones when we're doing things and not really get out in the world and engage with each other.
01:11:59:02 - 01:12:25:15
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah, that's really, really great point. And the Dutch being the pragmatic group that they are, they they kind of have a rule associated with that and saying that, you know, if, if the design of the court or of the street is going to be where we are embracing motor vehicle traveling faster than 30km/h than separation is required.
01:12:25:18 - 01:12:52:25
John Simmerman
And really their mantra is share when possible, separate when necessary. And I think that that kind of explains a little bit to that concept, that 60 to 70% of the network is actually some form of shared space. So that is fantastic. And again, I'm super, super excited for you at having this opportunity to spend some time there. And will it be an entire year that you'll be over there?
01:12:52:27 - 01:12:57:12
Ashton Rohmer
Yeah, that's the plan at least. So that's the that's the plan.
01:12:57:14 - 01:13:06:19
John Simmerman
Let's make it happen. And you and I will talk offline about some ideas for that. Ashton, thank you so much for joining me on the Active Towns podcast.
01:13:06:26 - 01:13:08:20
Ashton Rohmer
I really enjoyed it. Thanks, John.
01:13:08:24 - 01:13:13:13
John Simmerman
Hey everyone. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode with Austin Roamer, please.
01:13:13:13 - 01:13:14:12
John Simmerman
Give it a thumbs up.
01:13:14:12 - 01:13:31:01
John Simmerman
And 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 that subscription button down below and be sure to ring that notification bell. And again, if you're enjoying this content here on the Active Towns Channel, please consider supporting my efforts by becoming an Active Towns Ambassador.
01:13:31:02 - 01:13:54:07
John Simmerman
Again, super easy to do. Just click on the join button right here in YouTube, or navigate over to Active Towns, or click on the support tab at the top of the page. And there are several different options, including becoming a Patreon supporter again, patrons do get an ad free access to all of this video content. You can also make a donation to my nonprofit advocates for Healthy Communities, as well as you can buy me a coffee again.
01:13:54:07 - 01:14:15:26
John Simmerman
Every little bit helps and is really, truly appreciated and no better time than now to say Mahalo new Low. Thank you very much to all my active towns ambassadors. I simply could not produce this content without your financial support. Again, thank you all so much for tuning in today. And until next time, this is John signing off by wishing you a health and happiness.
01:14:15:27 - 01:14:17:16
John Simmerman
Cheers and aloha!