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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
00:00:00:02 - 00:00:04:00
John Simmerman
Michael Pollack, thank you so much for joining me on the Active Towns podcast.
00:00:04:02 - 00:00:07:13
Michael Pollack
Thank you so much for having me on, John. It's a real, real pleasure.
00:00:07:15 - 00:00:25:06
John Simmerman
Michael, we are going to be diving into your book that you recently wrote, Sidewalk Nation sidewalk. Yeah, but before we do that, I always give my guess just a quick 30s or so to do a brief introduction. So who the heck is Michael Pollack?
00:00:25:08 - 00:01:02:15
Michael Pollack
Well, Michael Pollack is a professor of law at the Benjamin and Cardozo School of Law in New York City. And at Cardozo, I teach and write about property law, constitutional law, local governments, and primarily how all sorts of institutions of local government work together to make decisions about how to regulate and structure our neighborhoods, and how those processes and those laws shape people's ability to participate in society and flourish, both as individuals and as whole communities.
00:01:02:18 - 00:01:08:08
John Simmerman
Fascinating, fascinating. So are you originally from New York?
00:01:08:10 - 00:01:18:09
Michael Pollack
I am, I'm from Westchester, so just north of the city. But I went to law school here in the city, and I've been living in Brooklyn now and teaching at Cardozo for just about ten years.
00:01:18:09 - 00:01:36:16
John Simmerman
So this, this topic, the sidewalk and Sidewalk Nation, is probably something near and dear to your heart because you're probably one of the best cities in North America, arguably the best city in North America to experience life on foot.
00:01:36:19 - 00:02:01:22
Michael Pollack
That's absolutely right. And a lot of ways, New York City is is unique, right? It has a a life and a culture that really is built for and revolves around both traveling by sidewalk and using the sidewalks for all sorts of other of other purposes and uses. And that, candidly, is, of course, how I got into this research and what started initially to get me interested in looking into it more closely.
00:02:01:22 - 00:02:27:13
Michael Pollack
But in the course of writing this book, I had the opportunity to travel around the country and talk with folks in cities and towns, big cities, small towns, rural areas, suburban areas. And what's fascinating, and what I try to catalog in the book is just how much variation there is in terms of what sidewalk culture is like, as well as sidewalk law as well as sidewalk reality.
00:02:27:14 - 00:02:37:24
Michael Pollack
Right. What are the facts on the ground, so to speak? But in addition to how much variation there is, what's also really striking is how much there is that is in common across all of these places.
00:02:38:00 - 00:03:09:26
John Simmerman
It's it's fascinating to you get into a little bit of the history of how sidewalks came about. Give us, give us a taste. I mean, how did we even end up here with this thing, this part of land? You know, you said that's one of your areas of expertise and study is, is land and land use and how that gets then the legal ramifications and the regal legal aspects of land.
00:03:09:27 - 00:03:12:10
John Simmerman
How did we end up with sidewalks?
00:03:12:13 - 00:03:34:16
Michael Pollack
There's a lot in that question, right? So how did we end up with sidewalks as a as a space? And also how did we end up with sidewalks being regulated and operated and built the way that we do them today? So how do we end up with sidewalks as a space? Well, the earliest sidewalks in the United States are centuries old.
00:03:34:16 - 00:03:58:04
Michael Pollack
Some of them, for example, in Louisiana, when it was a French territory, some of them in New Amsterdam, when Manhattan was New Amsterdam, or Boston when it was a British colonial city designed primarily to separate the place where people would be walking from, the place where the horses would be moving and where they would be waist and mud and puddles and all of that sort of thing.
00:03:58:06 - 00:04:37:01
Michael Pollack
Many of them were sort of crude wooden walkways, not quite the sort of built up permanent cement structures that we have today. But at those earlier stages, A they were primarily just as a mode of transportation. And B and this goes into the how the law operates today, they were the responsibility of the property owner. So for example, a saloon or a business would put one in front of its building so that customers would be able to, you know, step in and out of the of the place of business or out of the boarding house or the home without stepping directly into the into the gutter.
00:04:37:03 - 00:05:12:29
Michael Pollack
But there wasn't as much sort of uniform municipal construction of these spaces for a very, very long time. And even once there was the sort of precedent that the adjacent property owner was primarily responsible for this space and was viewed as the primary beneficiary of the space that stuck around. And so that's why today, even in most cities, it is the property owner that has to pay, to maintain, to fix, to remove the snow, and in some cases even to build the sidewalk directly in front of their property.
00:05:13:01 - 00:05:20:13
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. I'm going to pull up an image. Let me see if you this is an image that is familiar to you.
00:05:20:15 - 00:05:22:14
Michael Pollack
Oh yes, I love this.
00:05:22:18 - 00:05:53:28
John Simmerman
This is a classic image. It's from believe a Swedish artist. Yeah. Carl. And to me, this is like, this epitomizes to a little bit of our challenge. It's like one of the reasons why in our car dominated reality that we have now, that it feels like this, we're constrained off to a very, very small pushed off to a very, very small amount of real estate off to the side, the sidewalk.
00:05:53:28 - 00:06:17:25
John Simmerman
And but there's this it's like these vast caverns of nothingness or sheer death, you know, to to the left, you know, if you're if you're walking in that direction, it's just like are. And we have to have these, like, bridges to be able to get across. We call them sidewalks or excuse me, crosswalks to be able to get across at the intersections.
00:06:17:25 - 00:06:47:20
John Simmerman
And it's a little bit you talk a little bit about this in the book that yes, sidewalks existed prior to the automobile at some level, but from a law and legal perspective, they really took on precedents and shape and and really started to shape our cities once the automobile came around and we made it illegal for pedestrians to, quote unquote, cross wherever.
00:06:47:22 - 00:07:02:03
John Simmerman
Peter Norton and I discussed the history of the jaywalking term and how that became a legal thing, that you can't just cross the street when it's appropriate and practical and pragmatic for you to do so.
00:07:02:06 - 00:07:21:24
Michael Pollack
Yeah, that's absolutely right. You know, and I think what's what's so fascinating about that image is you see in, in all of what's called the right of way, the space between the buildings, how much of that right of way is sort of dedicated to pedestrians and how much of it is dedicated to cars. And, you know, this is not an exaggeration.
00:07:21:24 - 00:07:44:26
Michael Pollack
It's sort of this, this in the image. It's sort of a 9,010% split, maybe an 80 over 20 split. And, you know, look, I'm not I'm not antique. I don't I don't own one here living in Brooklyn. It would be for, for my life. Very inefficient and expensive to have one. But I'm not opposed to cars. I think that obviously for a lot of folks, it's a very important way to get around.
00:07:44:26 - 00:08:11:10
Michael Pollack
But we have to think carefully about the balance that we're striking, right, in terms of how much space is available for which particular modes of transportation the ticket. Given that, and I write about this quite a bit in the book, users of the sidewalk for transportation tend to. I mean, New York City is a is a bit of a of a counterexample just because car ownership rates are so low in New York relative to other parts of the country.
00:08:11:10 - 00:08:34:01
Michael Pollack
But in most other cities, car ownership rates are higher. The among wealthier residents, among residents, often along racial lines. So white residents tend to own cars more than other residents, and car ownership rates are higher among people who do not have disabilities. And so the more space we give over to cars, in the less space we give over to sidewalks.
00:08:34:01 - 00:09:00:07
Michael Pollack
We're privileging not just one kind of transportation, but also one particular kind of resident. And so poorer people, people of color, people with disabilities or mobility limitations tend primarily to rely on sidewalks to get around. And the less space that's available for them, or the more dangerous those spaces are, the more difficult it can be for them to get around both socially, economically, for their jobs, to run errands.
00:09:00:09 - 00:09:03:04
Michael Pollack
Sort of all of the the habits of daily life.
00:09:03:10 - 00:09:33:22
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. And you mentioned, you know, the reality there in New York City, whether it's Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, whatever, in in reality, depending on the borough you're in and the neighborhood you're in, the balance of pedestrians to the number of cars is skewed, you know, way towards the pedestrian side. There's, you know, 10 to 1, 20 to 1 of pedestrians versus the number of cars there.
00:09:33:22 - 00:10:03:04
John Simmerman
And yet we still see what we saw in that cartoon there. An arrogance of space, the the automobile taking up the vast majority of the land versus, you know, the, the, the amount that's cordoned off to the side. And in this image here, these collage of images, here we see that that little tiny space that set aside to, you know, for the, the quote unquote people.
00:10:03:10 - 00:10:49:19
John Simmerman
I won't even call them pedestrians, just people outside of cars is also playing host to so many other activities. And I'm really glad that you included this picture of all the trash bags there, because that's I look at that and I laugh because that's quintessential New York, right? There is these piles and piles of piles of trash. Now, I know that they're working on a new scheme to to adopt something along the lines of what we see in, in Utrecht and Amsterdam and other places in Europe where it's containerized underneath and, and it gets handled in a much more dignified way for the people out there in the space.
00:10:49:24 - 00:10:53:04
John Simmerman
Walk us through this, this collage of images real quick.
00:10:53:06 - 00:11:36:02
Michael Pollack
Sure. First, there's just on the on the trash point. Finding ways to get trash off the New York City sidewalk is a huge step forward. The the the more dramatic form the prime there. Yes, exactly. The more dramatic forms of containerization you're talking about are absolutely something that the city is exploring. But even so far, I mean, this photo that I all that I took a few years ago is already, fortunately a little bit out of date in that we do now at least put our trash in trash cans trash containers though those are on the sidewalk now recycling.
00:11:36:02 - 00:12:07:08
Michael Pollack
And this image is a lot of blue bags for recycling that still often is just in in the bags. But in the last year or two, we have seen actually a good deal of of improvement in terms of the piles of bags slowly approaching other American cities in finding these, these solutions. But anyway, these, these, these images generally are trying to illustrate, and I both use them in the book as well as a lot of narratives to to describe just how many other activities or uses get made of the sidewalk.
00:12:07:08 - 00:12:32:21
Michael Pollack
And as you were saying, right. It's just more and more burden placed on this small bit of the public right of way, on the small bit of land. Right. So sidewalks, yeah, they get us from place to place, but they also serve as sort of community gathering spaces. They serve as places for sidewalk dining. You see in some of these images, they service places for construction.
00:12:32:21 - 00:12:57:00
Michael Pollack
You see in the, the top right, the sort of classic New York City construction shed behind that green you see in that image as well. On the right side, this link NYC sort of console. Those are designed to have advertising and sometimes maps or fun facts about New York City history. There's a phone hook up there. Those take up space as well actually.
00:12:57:01 - 00:13:15:24
Michael Pollack
You know, you can see farther back in the background there a mailbox, father in the deep background, a sort of safety scaffolding there doing, you know, work on the on the wall of a building back there. You see in the image on the top left and the bottom right, sandwich boards for advertising. Just so, so many commercial uses.
00:13:15:24 - 00:13:41:07
Michael Pollack
Construction uses governmental uses like the link NYC structures not pictured here, but bus stops, subway station entrances, security cameras, telephone poles. I write in the book a lot. Sidewalks are not just used by businesses or by communities. They're also used by the government for utilities, for surveillance, for policing. They're used by folks. And we have some images later on.
00:13:41:08 - 00:14:10:09
Michael Pollack
They're used by folks for protesting, for picketing, for speaking. And, you know, so in the in the aggregate, there are just so many activities competing for a very narrow strip of space and all of them colliding with one another. Because one of the things that makes sidewalk so special is that they are accessible to everybody. They are open 24 over seven, 365, and they are open to everyone.
00:14:10:09 - 00:14:51:15
Michael Pollack
And that sort of democratic nature of the sidewalk really is is one of their great features. But at the same time, it's also one of their great risks, which is that without any sort of management, that wonderful collision of vibrant activity risks degrading the usefulness of the space for everybody. You know, there's a famous urbanist, Jane Jacobs. I'm sure you know all about Jane Jacobs, who had talked about the sidewalk ballet when she was writing about Greenwich Village and the at almost 80 years ago, the sort of beautiful sidewalk ballet of all of these activities and how vibrant it made the space.
00:14:51:15 - 00:15:04:24
Michael Pollack
And that's true at the same time, though, as cities get denser, as more and more use gets made of the space, that ballet maybe needs a choreographer. And that's part of what I talk about in the book.
00:15:04:26 - 00:15:28:03
John Simmerman
Yeah. In fact, the subtitle to the book is The Life and Law of America's Most Overlooked Resource. And let's talk a little bit about that. That overlooked part about this. Why is it overlooked? Is it is it just because they're you you and they just people don't really even understand where they come from?
00:15:28:04 - 00:15:47:06
Michael Pollack
Yeah. I mean, I think that's a great question with a bunch of answers. So one reason they're overlooked is that they are ubiquitous. It's very easy to take them for granted. It's sort of like it's some respect, the air we breathe. And so it just is there another reason that they're overlooked is that many communities don't rely on them nearly as much as New York City or Manhattan does.
00:15:47:07 - 00:16:15:24
Michael Pollack
And so they're there to some degree, depending on on the city. But because they're not used as effectively or as heavily as they might be, it can be easy to forget that they're there until it becomes a problem. Right? That's that's how things tend to tend to be, right. So often in our lives, we overlook things that are essential and that we rely on in ways we don't always realize until suddenly they're gone or there's a problem.
00:16:15:24 - 00:16:46:16
Michael Pollack
And so there are tragic stories, and I don't want to sort of just invoke tragedy, but tragic stories of folks, small towns where kids routinely walk to school from home to school, and there's no sidewalk in this suburban neighborhood, and no one really thinks twice about it until, tragically, someone gets injured in a car crash, right? And then suddenly the idea that, well, gosh, maybe we need a protected, elevated space where our kids can walk to school.
00:16:46:16 - 00:17:06:14
Michael Pollack
That might be the thing that makes folks pay attention in these images right now. These are all from Colorado, some in Denver, some in Boulder. Again, you see all of these uses, the commerce, the dining. But I want to talk briefly about on the left, the the lime scooters. Right. So this is another commercial use of sidewalk space.
00:17:06:14 - 00:17:28:01
Michael Pollack
Folks can rent these scooters. Lime bird other other companies in New York City. We tend more toward the bikes to rent rather than the scooters, but these things take up sidewalk space. And this is private enterprise thinking. This is a great idea and it is a very good idea. But no one really thought at the beginning, where are the scooters going to go?
00:17:28:03 - 00:17:52:18
Michael Pollack
Right? So people could rent them, and then once they got to where they were going, they would just leave them on the sidewalk, sometimes tipped over, sometimes right in the middle. And that creates a real accessibility hurdle. It creates a real obstacle to other uses of the space. So the story of these scooters is just another example of how easy it can be to take for granted or to overlook the value of this space.
00:17:52:18 - 00:18:17:21
Michael Pollack
And so what Boulder has done in this image is worked with lime to create what they call lime groves, which are these green painted rectangles on the sidewalk where residents or users are supposed to park the scooter and lime has GPS functionality to be able to tell where the scooters are, and it effectively won't it. It'll lock you out of using the scooter unless it's put back into this, into this rectangle.
00:18:17:21 - 00:18:39:01
Michael Pollack
So that's a nice example of the public private partnership being deployed to solve that problem. But it's a solution to a problem that never should have been a problem in the first place. Right. And so it's understanding how we take for granted or overlook these things. And it's great when we wake up and fix them. But so many problems, we don't end up waking and fixing until it is too late.
00:18:39:02 - 00:19:05:18
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting too, because I was living in Austin, Texas, when the scooter companies decided just to launch and just dump them onto the streets of Austin during South by Southwest, they had been working with the city to try to come up with a plan, a management plan to be able to roll them out. And in the end, they just like, well, you're not moving fast enough.
00:19:05:18 - 00:19:35:04
John Simmerman
We're just going to do it. And the whole thought process was them with them was more along the lines of Uber and Lyft of, yeah, we're just going to deploy. You know, we don't we don't care. You know what you guys say we're going to break things first and then we'll figure things out. And so I chuckle when I heard or read in the book that they call these lime groves, because that's better than the the alternative of Lyme disease, which is what it was like when you had lime spread.
00:19:35:07 - 00:20:03:20
John Simmerman
These, these scooters spread across the the sidewalk there. And this other image immediately to the right and above that also looks like Pearl Street. They're in Boulder. And you just see the vibrancy that does happen out in these spaces. And you can see even in the distance behind the scooters here on the image on the left, we've got the bee cycle station, so we've got the bike share station there.
00:20:03:20 - 00:20:35:22
John Simmerman
So these spaces are really working for us, the people and working hard. And it's this interesting dynamic too, because it's space. That's public space. It's space that commerce happens as well as we've got, you know, we've got the outdoor seating that's happening to. So this interesting balance of this very unique resource that cities have of a little bit of quasi commerce, a little bit of private stuff going on.
00:20:35:22 - 00:20:57:06
John Simmerman
But it's all public and it has to be accessible, accessible accessibility. Ada, you know, all of these things. It's just it's a really, really fascinating mix of stuff. And your book just does a wonderful job of tapping into all of these different levels of complexity that's out there.
00:20:57:08 - 00:21:17:09
Michael Pollack
Well thank you. Yeah. I mean, you know, I think to your question earlier also about why why they tend to get overlooked is I think part of it is it's easy to take them for granted, but part of it is that our politics just tend not to center them. Our local governments too often tend not to center them.
00:21:17:10 - 00:21:46:20
Michael Pollack
The book contains a number of stories, interviews with officials again across the country who are doing terrific, really community focused sidewalk work and are trying to make their sidewalks work well for their communities and all of the constituents. Right. Boulder is, among many others, a big success in that, in that regard. But in far too many cities, sidewalks sort of fall through the cracks again, no pun intended.
00:21:46:22 - 00:22:17:18
Michael Pollack
Part of the reason why is that many, especially in big cities, many large municipal governments don't have a particular agency or particular department of government that is focused on the sidewalk. Rather, they tend to be mostly the purview of the Department of Transportation. But Dot is also primarily focused on the roads, the places where the cars go. And to the extent that they focus on sidewalks, it's primarily with the mobility use in mind.
00:22:17:19 - 00:22:44:16
Michael Pollack
So it's with the getting from point A to point B, and it's a whole mess of other agencies that regulate the restaurants and the signs and the construction and the utilities and the bus stops and the homelessness and just all of the other potential uses of the space. And so the book calls for more coherent, dedicated government attention on sidewalk regulation and sidewalk use.
00:22:44:19 - 00:22:59:02
Michael Pollack
But the other way that they fall through the cracks and, you know, we touched on this a little bit at the beginning, is the role of private responsibility for sidewalks. And so, again, the book is also a call to to rethink how we do a lot of that as well.
00:22:59:04 - 00:23:26:04
John Simmerman
So in general, the the concept of right of way, the public domain, the right of way, how's I understand that there is some nuance and difference, maybe state to state, maybe, I don't know, maybe even city to city. But in general, in the United States, when we think of the right of way and we think of the domain, the public domain, what is that space?
00:23:26:07 - 00:23:28:14
John Simmerman
How does one define it?
00:23:28:16 - 00:23:53:12
Michael Pollack
So it absolutely does differ city to city, not just state to state. So in some municipalities the private property line. And we can just take these images as an example. The private property line in some municipalities runs from the face of the building back. Right. And so the, the therefore the public space is the space between the faces of the two buildings.
00:23:53:14 - 00:24:27:06
Michael Pollack
In other municipalities, the private property line runs to the curb and sometimes even beyond the curb into the street. At some point in those municipalities, though, the sidewalk might technically literally be private property, the public has what's called an easement to access to be on that private land. And so bottom line, either the sidewalk is and the whole right of way either is, in fact public property, by which I mean owned by the government, or it might be private property.
00:24:27:06 - 00:24:48:02
Michael Pollack
But there is this public right, this public property, right of access and of use of that land. What's interesting is that one might think that are the rules must therefore be different depending on whether it's private property with this public easement or public property. But as a matter of property law, the rules aren't really that different at all.
00:24:48:04 - 00:25:13:20
Michael Pollack
And the reason is that generally when someone has an easement. So, for example, if you and I are neighbors and I have a right to cross your land to get to a road or the the ocean, it's my responsibility as the one who has that access, right. It's my responsibility to take care of the pathway that I use to maintain that access.
00:25:13:22 - 00:25:43:08
Michael Pollack
Your only responsibility is to not interfere with my access. And so transport all of that to the sidewalk context, whether it is government owned land or whether the public simply has this right to access it. Either way, it's the public. It's the government's responsibility, or at least ought to be to maintain that space. And yet, when it comes to sidewalks, as I was saying far too often, it is the adjacent property owner who has that responsibility.
00:25:43:08 - 00:25:47:12
Michael Pollack
And that's just not an arrangement that we make in any other part of property law.
00:25:47:19 - 00:26:16:21
John Simmerman
Yeah. And in you and I know that we're in alignment on this because we talked about this before, is that it's just ludicrous to me that this space, this this right of way, this public domain, it's just it's ludicrous to me that we turn this part of public land, you know, over to the individual property owner to build and maintain.
00:26:16:21 - 00:26:43:12
John Simmerman
And it's just, you know, and as an example, if we go, we've got some images later, but with some snow. But this is Boulder and Denver, you know, when the snow hits, whether it's a residential property or commercial property that snow maintenance, you know, falls upon that, that property owner, to me, that's just ridiculous. You wouldn't do that with the street, you know, and this is part of the right of way.
00:26:43:12 - 00:27:00:25
Michael Pollack
We don't do it with the street. We don't do it with parks either. Right. I can tell you the the history. It's not going to it's not going to convince you otherwise. It doesn't convince me. But the the history here is, as I was saying before, the original sort of conceit of sidewalks was that they benefited the property owner.
00:27:00:27 - 00:27:25:16
Michael Pollack
It was sort of amenity for that business or for that home, not really for the community. And the other primary justification that was offered hundreds of years ago was, well, it's just easier this way. The city can't afford to take care of it all, can't get to it all very quickly. And so it just sort of makes efficiency sense or cost saving sense to put that burden on the adjacent landowner.
00:27:25:18 - 00:27:49:22
Michael Pollack
Now, even centuries ago, there were people, judges, policymakers who were critical of this, but they they were losing this fight and they have continued to lose this fight generally. Again, there there are there are municipalities where the government does take responsibility for some or all of this sidewalk maintenance and caretaking. And I'm pleased to say that number is growing.
00:27:49:25 - 00:28:11:13
Michael Pollack
I hope that folks who read the book join the effort to make that number continue to grow, but it really is at odds with so many other uses of of space. And not only is it puts a significant burden on property owners who may not be equipped to handle it, right. The idea was it'll just be easier this way.
00:28:11:14 - 00:28:39:06
Michael Pollack
It may not, in fact, be easier this way, right? It may be that many property owners are too old, otherwise unable otherwise out of town. Right to when when the snowfall hits. We can't afford to pay somebody to take care of it for them. It's certainly true that in small suburbs and whatnot, there's a lot of great stories of all the kids on the block get together and go around and shovel everyone's driveway or sidewalk for a few dollars or some hot coke or whatever.
00:28:39:06 - 00:29:05:09
Michael Pollack
And that's that's great. When that happens, communities can and do band together to take care of themselves. Quite often in larger cities, especially where there's less personal relationship. However, that's where that tends to to not work as effectively. But again, there are municipalities making making strides in the right direction toward more governmental management. And I think that's really important.
00:29:05:10 - 00:29:27:22
Michael Pollack
Another reason I think it's really important is that the more that a private property owner is given responsibility over this space, the more they might start to believe or act like they really own that space or exclusively own that space. And that sort of sense of territoriality is again at odds with the vision of sidewalks as community space.
00:29:27:26 - 00:29:47:10
Michael Pollack
And so I think it would be really better to have a more clear, clean separation between what's yours is yours and what's ours is ours, for better and for worse. We take care of it as a community, as a government. And you don't have the same exclusivity as you would if it was purely private.
00:29:47:13 - 00:30:00:25
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. This series of images here will describe it for the the listening only audience that doesn't have the benefit of the visuals. Go ahead and walk us through this collage of images here.
00:30:00:25 - 00:30:27:10
Michael Pollack
So these are a few images of sidewalk delivery robots. So this is one of the what I view as sort of next big thing, or at least next potential big thing in sidewalk commerce. This has been going on for a few years. Different companies piloting delivery robots, some of them remote controlled by a human someplace else, some of them autonomous, and they trundle down the sidewalk to deliver.
00:30:27:10 - 00:30:55:25
Michael Pollack
The idea would be to deliver packages to deliver food deliveries. Amazon had piloted some, Fedex had piloted some of these. Many of those sort of those pilot programs didn't quite take off. The ones that we see the most often being deployed are the food delivery robots. So, you know, for a DoorDash or something like that, instead of a human career, the restaurant or grocery store will put the the food in the robot and it will go to you.
00:30:55:27 - 00:31:17:04
Michael Pollack
I don't know if anyone watched John Mulaney Netflix talk show everybody's in LA, but he had a delivery robot that he named Sammo, who would sort of come out on stage periodically and bring drinks to, to to the guests of his talk show. That's exactly what these look like and what these are. And so it's another sort of like the Lime Scooters.
00:31:17:04 - 00:31:48:22
Michael Pollack
It's another private commercial use of this space that, again, inherently nothing wrong with it, in fact, could be really valuable for folks. But it raises a lot of questions of there's only so much space. The image on the right shows, frankly, this robot taking up most of the width of the sidewalk. And there are unfortunate stories of a robot getting stuck or getting stuck in a curb cut and a person in a wheelchair who can navigate less, you know, easily around it, kind of getting trapped on the sidewalk behind the robot.
00:31:48:24 - 00:32:22:02
Michael Pollack
Those are problems that that need to be worked out. If communities want to see this kind of thing get deployed. The other interesting thing from folks I've spoken to have been piloting these these robots is they are helping to reveal a lot of the terrain problems that everyday people are dealing with all the time. Right? They struggle with the same tree roots and other unevenness in the in the sidewalk that pedestrians do that folks in wheelchairs do, folks with other mobility limitations do they struggle with those things all the time?
00:32:22:02 - 00:32:54:09
Michael Pollack
And in fact, I was just reading in the news. A couple of municipalities are considering using robots like these two identify flaws in the flaws in the sidewalk. So yeah, these images are from New Orleans, which has particularly difficult time keeping their sidewalks flat and even. And so a lot of these images involve huge tree roots that have caused a lot of upheaval of these pavers, to the point where this is not, again, for the folks who are just listening, not just a little bump.
00:32:54:09 - 00:33:17:21
Michael Pollack
This is choppy and a, you know, pretty steep, you know, 45, 50, 60 degree angle to get up and over a tree root. And part of the problem is the tree roots themselves. Trees are a great thing for sidewalks because they absorb water and storm runoff. So that doesn't flood. But they're also a problem because the roots grow and can lift up the the concrete.
00:33:17:26 - 00:33:40:06
Michael Pollack
In fact. Brief tangent I talk a lot in the book about sidewalk trees. They're really essential for shade, for oxygenation. They help to cool a street, to help, to cool a community. And again, it tends to be wealthier communities that have more trees and poor communities that are hotter and less tree covered. But again, the trees are not a unalloyed good.
00:33:40:07 - 00:34:14:02
Michael Pollack
They also cause these problems. New Orleans in particular, has a problem that's compounded by the fact that as the tree roots grow up, the ground actually subsides down. And so because of New Orleans very spongy terrain, in fact, the city is sort of built on very unstable ground. The ground slowly collapses. And the more that the city pumps out water to avoid storm surge or flooding by pumping out that water, they're just sort of wringing out the sponge and the ground falls further.
00:34:14:02 - 00:34:29:14
Michael Pollack
So you get this separation between the the the tree root and the ground creating these, these cracks in the sidewalk. And so that's a problem that they have to deal with. That's sort of unique in New Orleans. But versions of it pervade sidewalks everywhere.
00:34:29:19 - 00:34:56:10
John Simmerman
It occurs to me. We should probably talk a little bit about the structure of the book. You've mentioned New Orleans, we've mentioned Denver, we've mentioned Boulder, obviously, New York City. The why don't you walk through kind of the concept that you employed in introducing the big cities and then the, the matching pair of some of the smaller cities or towns?
00:34:56:13 - 00:35:21:08
Michael Pollack
Yeah. So the book sort of works in two rough halves. The first half is the travelog descriptive information gathering portion of the book. So I went to New York, Texas, Louisiana and Colorado, and in each of those states explored three or sometimes four cities, some, you know, usually one one big anchor city and then some smaller towns and suburbs.
00:35:21:08 - 00:35:49:01
Michael Pollack
And each of them was chosen with a particular goal in mind to try to illuminate some kind of some some sort of stand in for that, this kind of place. Right. So a college town, for example, like College Station in Texas, where Texas A&M University is, or in Colorado, for example, we talk about Denver and Boulder, but a very rural mountain town called Nederland to try to illuminate a place that is more rural doesn't really have very much in the way of sidewalks.
00:35:49:01 - 00:36:15:08
Michael Pollack
And maybe some might argue, not much of a need for them. Places in Texas that are more car reliant, or less places in New York that are more car reliant or less, and then also trying to gather information about what is sidewalk life, what is the law, what are the needs and the preferences of these communities, but also trying to use all of those stories to tell bigger stories about law and policy.
00:36:15:08 - 00:36:40:07
Michael Pollack
So in addition to sort of obviously, I have a view on what municipalities ought to do with respect to their sidewalks. But the bigger lesson of the book, or what I hope the bigger takeaway of the book is for for folks, is not necessarily agreeing with my prescription, but rather just to care more about their sidewalks. And so there's a lot of obvious reasons for that.
00:36:40:07 - 00:37:08:07
Michael Pollack
But what I try to do in the book is illuminate just how many related issues of law and policy there are that impact the sidewalk, or that the sidewalk impacts. And so to get folks to see that, okay, maybe sidewalks aren't your passion like they are mine. Maybe climate change is your passion, or maybe homelessness is your passion for maybe civil rights of people in their encounters with police or your passion.
00:37:08:08 - 00:37:35:09
Michael Pollack
Maybe historic preservation is your passion, whatever it may be. What I try to illustrate in the book is how all of these issues run through the sidewalk, and how solutions to them, or at least progress on them, necessarily, will require thinking about those issues as part of a more cohesive whole. And that more cohesive whole is what kind of sidewalk space do we want in our communities?
00:37:35:09 - 00:38:01:09
Michael Pollack
What do we think the sidewalks in our communities are for? And once we have a better idea of what and who we think they're for, then we can make more responsible policy choices about how to carefully construct them and regulate them and manage them so that we can achieve whatever our goals may be. So in these in these pictures, for example, here, these are just some other uses on the right.
00:38:01:09 - 00:38:25:28
Michael Pollack
This is a can't quite tell what it is about explanation. It's there are sort of velvet ropes, if you will, to to wait in line for in this case a popular ice cream store. But a lot of businesses have people waiting in line, concert venues have people waiting in line. And those are again, uses of the sidewalk. The image on the left is a very New York City image, the sort of construction scaffolding or called sidewalk shed.
00:38:26:00 - 00:38:50:09
Michael Pollack
Former Mayor Eric Adams and current mayors Zoran Mamdani have both promised to be more aggressive about getting these down to loosen some of the legal restrictions that require businesses to put them up, and then to punish businesses and building owners that have them up for too long. But that's a ubiquitous part of sidewalk life in New York. That, again, doesn't really come up that often elsewhere.
00:38:50:09 - 00:39:08:28
Michael Pollack
Which begs the question why not? And maybe New York could learn something from those other cities. Maybe other cities could learn something from New York. So that's another reason I try to explore all these different municipalities, is so that folks can maybe learn how others are handling common issues and try to deploy those same solutions back home.
00:39:09:04 - 00:39:43:26
John Simmerman
Yeah, this this collage of images here of the snow on the sidewalk really was probably what brought to my attention the insanity of how we manage our sidewalk space at the city level when I'm originally from Los Angeles, and so I didn't frequently have to deal with snow. But when I moved from Los Angeles to Ann Arbor, Michigan to go to graduate school, suddenly snow became a thing.
00:39:43:26 - 00:40:05:22
John Simmerman
And I was also picking up running. And so I was running a lot. Long story short, I went back to Southern California after a five year stint, went to move to Chicago. And so back and forth, back and forth, back in the snow. Now I'm in Hawaii. No snow. Well, there's snow on the top of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, but I don't have to have this type of situation.
00:40:05:22 - 00:40:33:12
John Simmerman
But it was really when I moved to Boulder and was a property owner in Boulder, and suddenly had the responsibility of making sure that someone was around at the house. If I was traveling for business to deal with the snow and ice in front of my property, because unlike the street in front of my property, the snow maintenance was my business.
00:40:33:14 - 00:40:38:09
John Simmerman
That's insane. It's really is insane.
00:40:38:10 - 00:40:58:26
Michael Pollack
I, I obviously agree, right? Part of what I'm trying to illustrate in these kinds of images is also the inconsistency. Right? So on the image on the right, you can see in the, in the immediate foreground that the sidewalk is pretty clear. And then the building switches to another, another owner and suddenly it hasn't been been cleared. And so that inconsistency is a problem.
00:40:58:26 - 00:41:20:10
Michael Pollack
It's also to be clear, even in the non snowy communities, when you have private responsibility for maintenance, you can have the same kinds of inconsistency, right? A very smooth and even sidewalk and then suddenly a very choppy uneven one. But yeah, it's a the the snow clearance is a huge issue for sidewalks, for accessibility, for pedestrians. You're absolutely right.
00:41:20:10 - 00:41:44:27
Michael Pollack
The roads get cleared by the city relatively promptly, and the sidewalks folks are left to really fend for themselves. It is sometimes a city will go and find people if they haven't shoveled their sidewalk promptly enough. And of course, people should promptly shovel their sidewalks. But that system of fines is wildly inefficient and delayed and doesn't really get the get the actual job done right.
00:41:44:27 - 00:42:07:12
Michael Pollack
It doesn't doesn't make the sidewalk become clear. And so in all of the interviews I conducted, all the folks that I met with, like I said before, there are more and more cities that are taking on the maintenance responsibility for fixing broken sidewalks. And I think that's terrific and the absolutely the correct step. But when I asked these same folks, well, what about the snow?
00:42:07:12 - 00:42:32:21
Michael Pollack
Have you thought about doing the same thing in terms of having city responsibility for snow clearing? Most of them balked, right? That that was a bridge too far. A lot of cities will help out. If individuals say, I'm I'm elderly, I can't do it. I can't afford to hire someone. Maybe the city will come and help out there sometimes in a heavily trafficked, you know, center of a city, a downtown corridor.
00:42:32:21 - 00:42:48:22
Michael Pollack
Maybe they'll do some there. But a lot of city governments take the view that it's just like, as I was saying before, it's just too much. It's just too much work. It's just too much space. And to your point, imagine them saying that about the roads, right? Imagine them saying it's the roads. There's just too many roads. We can't get to it.
00:42:48:22 - 00:43:17:27
Michael Pollack
Good luck and shovel your own street. I think people would get very upset about that, but we've become sort of used to this being the reality on on sidewalks. And I think it's time that we ask, maybe there's a better way to, to do this and to do it more efficiently. Right? It would make more economic sense for a city to have a small, you know, sidewalk with snowplow, like a bobcat, for example, that could clear an entire block of snow off of a sidewalk very easily.
00:43:18:00 - 00:43:34:13
Michael Pollack
No individual property owner has an incentive, especially again in a city, to do that kind of thing, to own that kind of thing. And so it's going to take a lot longer and be a lot more costly to do. So I really think there is a better way out there. And I think we just need to begin advocating for it more.
00:43:34:15 - 00:43:56:26
John Simmerman
I went back to the delightful image of our cute little robots delivering our stuff, and want to hone in on the image to the right that you called out earlier, because the the thing that really comes across with this image is that, yes, this little pink little robot is taking up the entire width for the most part of this narrow sidewalk.
00:43:56:26 - 00:44:22:27
John Simmerman
And that's what I wanted to hone in on, is the fact that, you know, when cities come to me and they're asking, they're saying, John, you know, how wide should we make our active mobility infrastructure, whether it's, you know, shared use paths and bike lanes and sidewalks or whatever? The answer that, that I always come back with is wider and it says, no, no, no, how wide should we make it?
00:44:22:27 - 00:45:01:22
John Simmerman
I says, yeah, wider than that. To wider than the widest amount that you think that you need. You need it to be wider. And this is a great example of why. And it also brings us to, to this. Is that a wider side path, sidewalk, multi-use path makes it that much easier for supporting the variety of different uses that will, you know, be taking place now and in the future, and also makes it easier for city sidewalk department, side path departments, staff and equipment to be able to maintain them.
00:45:01:22 - 00:45:44:26
John Simmerman
In the city of Boulder, they actually clear all of their multi-use paths, the riparian corridors and the Boulder Creek path. And all of those are cleared by the Parks and Rec department that has specialized equipment that can just get down there and do that. And the great thing about living in Boulder was, I always knew that my multi-use paths throughout the city of Boulder were cleared first thing in the morning when I would get up, and since I would ride my bike throughout Boulder all seasons, I knew that I could get there even more reliably than the side streets, which weren't prioritized for snow removal on the streets.
00:45:44:26 - 00:45:51:12
John Simmerman
And so they actually prioritized having those active mobility pathways plowed first.
00:45:51:14 - 00:46:09:14
Michael Pollack
You know, and so I obviously I think wider. Yes, it creates, as you said, it creates more space for more uses. But we also need to recognize that the wider it is, the more space there is to have to clear of snow, for example, the more space there is to have to maintain. And there's a cost with all of that.
00:46:09:15 - 00:46:27:21
Michael Pollack
Similarly. Similarly, the wider it is. I mean, look, sidewalks can be well designed to promote drainage, for example, have bio swales and more trees, more plants, more gravel. But the more impermeable surface that there is, the more flooding risk there is.
00:46:27:28 - 00:46:56:28
John Simmerman
I'm really glad that you include. I'm glad that you included that as like a subtheme to the book. Is that combination of yes, these are wonderful amenities. In my terminology. I call them activity assets. These are infrastructure. These are an inventory of infrastructure that encourages active living and active mobility. But at the same time, we have to keep in mind that are we just creating more and more impervious surfaces?
00:46:57:00 - 00:47:24:14
John Simmerman
One of the great things that I've been documenting in the Netherlands is that they are doing a fantastic job with their pedestrian infrastructure and the cycle infrastructure of integrating stormwater management and runoff, and especially in the last five years, they've really leaned into the rain garden approach and really doing what they can to soak up as much of the stormwater as possible.
00:47:24:14 - 00:47:41:26
John Simmerman
And of any country, you know, that that needs to be worried about water management. It's, you know, a country that is, you know, always fighting that, just like New Orleans, always fighting, you know, the the water management side of things.
00:47:41:27 - 00:47:53:15
Michael Pollack
As I say. In fact, in New Orleans, officials that I spoke with are talking to folks in Amsterdam to try to learn a lot of these strategies and see what they can deploy for their own.
00:47:53:18 - 00:48:16:25
John Simmerman
Yeah. This collage of images. I'll let you address what you wanted to talk about this, but I'll tell you what my take is on it right away before we dive into that, is that this is, again, a great reason for there to be a department of sidewalks or a department of side paths that is responsible for the upkeep, the maintenance, the build out.
00:48:16:27 - 00:48:18:09
John Simmerman
Go ahead. Take it away.
00:48:18:10 - 00:48:44:08
Michael Pollack
Yeah. So what you're seeing in a lot of these images is really not well-maintained. Sidewalks, really cracked, collapsing sidewalks that are not adjacent to an actively used building. Right. So there's not a property owner next door who really is there to take care of them. In one of the images, there is a building, but it's fenced off. Clearly there's been some closure or change in ownership.
00:48:44:12 - 00:49:02:25
Michael Pollack
Others run along a highway overpass or next to a field. And so in those cases, it in fact is the city's responsibility. If there is no private I mean, because it means that that the city is the owner of that of that land. And so where there is where there is no private owner. Yeah, the city does have the responsibility.
00:49:02:25 - 00:49:13:07
Michael Pollack
But in a general scheme of private responsibility, it can be easy to overlook the areas where the city does have that responsibility.
00:49:13:08 - 00:49:28:13
John Simmerman
And if we can just imagine the same four images which are identifying the challenges of of the broken sidewalks, if we imagine that this is in a snowy environment and we just had a snowfall, what do you think the the result is going to be?
00:49:28:14 - 00:49:49:10
Michael Pollack
Exactly. Right now, critics of what I would have are skeptics of what I have to say is, well, look, the government's doing a bad job of the sidewalks it's responsible for, and you want to have them be responsible for more, right? If you go back to the image of the of the snow, the snowy sidewalks, the image on the left that's actually sidewalk in front of a police precinct.
00:49:49:10 - 00:50:30:21
Michael Pollack
And so it is not the case that the government right now is always a great steward of the sidewalk. And so I am sensitive to the idea that just putting the government in charge is not, on its own, a solution. We need to make sure the government does a better job of the sidewalks that it's responsible for. And that's where the my focus on accountability, on more dedicated funding and financing for these efforts that if we as a community said the government is responsible for this, then folks would be able to look at these sidewalks and say, that's the government's fault, and I want to have accountability and do something about that.
00:50:30:21 - 00:50:54:13
Michael Pollack
Right now, no one really knows who's responsible. And I don't blame them because sometimes it's this, sometimes it's that. I was in a on one of my one of my research trips in Hudson, New York, a small suburb up the Hudson River north of the city. I was in a bar after a day of interviewing, and I was talking to the bartender about getting her take on what's the sidewalk situation like in Hudson.
00:50:54:13 - 00:51:21:16
Michael Pollack
And she, like most people, A, had complaints and B was very transparent about and I have no idea who's to blame. Right. And I think that that having no idea who's to blame is how we end up with a situation where there's a problem that no one is really accountable for. And so, like I said, I'm not naive in thinking that if we put the government in charge overnight, they'll just do a great job and everything will be fine.
00:51:21:18 - 00:51:31:03
Michael Pollack
No, we need to then hold our government accountable to make sure that they do a better job. And I think that the only way to really effectively do that is to place the legal burden on them.
00:51:31:04 - 00:52:03:28
John Simmerman
Yeah. So I went back to our collage of three images from Boulder in Denver to discuss one of the potential ways to pay for the buildout and maintenance of sidewalks. And you discuss this in the book, and that is business improvement districts and other types of creative structures that can create the funds necessary to to maintain them. Why don't you go ahead and talk a little bit about that?
00:52:03:28 - 00:52:13:00
John Simmerman
And I think that one of the two New York towns that you profiled had a creative solution along those lines as well.
00:52:13:02 - 00:52:35:03
Michael Pollack
Yeah. So Hudson, which I was just discussing, is one of them. They were inspired by Ithaca, New York, where Cornell University is upstate. In fact, Ithaca's former mayor, Svante Myrick, took the sidewalk issue very seriously and really pioneered a lot of this work up in, in Ithaca and was a model for a lot of other for a lot of other cities.
00:52:35:03 - 00:53:02:10
Michael Pollack
Denver followed a similar path, in fact, by voter referendum. So I tell the story in the book of the local activist organizations that were working really hard to convince their fellow voters, their fellow residents, that transitioning to more of a system of government responsibility would be a good thing. And it's a remarkable story of how, if you really do engage a community on these issues, you can make real positive change.
00:53:02:12 - 00:53:26:16
Michael Pollack
So what all these cities do in slight variations, but basically what they do is there is a particular there is an annual charge imposed on property owners as part of their property taxes. Sometimes it's depending on the sort of number of feet of sidewalk that their property spans. Sometimes it's more of a flat fee again, the fund differently in these different municipalities.
00:53:26:16 - 00:53:55:10
Michael Pollack
And that money is a dedicated into a sidewalk improvement fund. So it is not just a general property tax revenue that the city can spend on, whatever that is, money specifically dedicated for sidewalk repair and sidewalk maintenance. And these fees are not very high. And one of the things that came up in, in Denver, in sort of in their in their campaigning for this referendum, is helping people to see that they're already paying for sidewalks.
00:53:55:10 - 00:54:17:07
Michael Pollack
Now they're paying for it either by paying someone to clear the snow, by paying for in their own time to clear the snow, and they're paying for it in the form of these repair bills, right when the sidewalk is cracked and the city says, you have to take care of this and repair this, Svante Myrick in Ithaca told me he used to call it the game of sidewalk roulette, right.
00:54:17:10 - 00:54:40:19
Michael Pollack
A property owner never knew when they were going to get this bill. And it would be it could be thousands and thousands of dollars to repair the sidewalk. And so rather than having a potential $1,100 bill hanging over your head, and you don't know when it's going to come instead, to have a much smaller, sometimes as low as like $8 a quarter or something like that, right?
00:54:40:21 - 00:55:16:12
Michael Pollack
A regular thing you can budget for into your into your household budget. And then it's off your hands, out of your hands. And now the city is taking the money from everybody and using it to identify the highest priority areas for repair or maintenance and deploying it more effectively and efficiently. Right. So this to me is a really powerful way to raise the revenue necessary to do this work in a way that's fair and is distributed across an entire city at a at an affordable level, instead of hitting people unexpectedly at a really unaffordable level.
00:55:16:15 - 00:55:56:26
John Simmerman
Right, right. And in the case of like Austin, Texas, in downtown Austin, where we had a business improvement district and a business improvement organization, downtown downtown Austin Association or something like that, all the businesses and all the landowners are paying into a pot, a kitty. And there's there's the maintenance, there's the beautification, there's policing, you know, there's somebody there who's an information person, there's somebody there who's intervening on the homelessness situation.
00:55:56:28 - 00:56:38:24
John Simmerman
These are all of that, that that balance, that ballet that we were talking about earlier, that Jane Jacobs, you know, referenced some of it's not is attractive. And so you're constantly managing all of these different tensions. I'm going to ask you something here in in another creative solution that Donald Shoup shared with me just before his passing, a few weeks before he passed away, he came on the podcast and we were discussing the Los Angeles Challenge and specifically the challenge of welcoming in the world for the Olympics and for the World Cup and all of these big things that were happening.
00:56:38:27 - 00:57:10:14
John Simmerman
And again, another city that's under a consent decree for having sidewalks that are ineffective and not consistent and in violation of Ada, et cetera, etc., goes on and on and on. And he came up with the creative solution of tying a fund, a funding mechanism to a process when a property is sold that that's when the, you know, that that fund, that money would be collected.
00:57:10:14 - 00:57:47:07
John Simmerman
So it's not going after current owners that are not planning on selling, but when a property flips, when it does that. And he pointed out that that might be enough money so that the city could actually bond this because they could say, well, this is kind of what we expect is going to happen, whatever, how many billions of dollars that could end up being so that it could be bonded out so that you could get a city to deploy quickly and get the deficiencies addressed now versus decades from now.
00:57:47:07 - 00:58:08:20
John Simmerman
Because, quite frankly, that was the conversation we were having was that the city needs to move fast to be ready for the Olympics. You know, it's like you can't just be like wishing that it'll get taken care of. Any thoughts along those lines of that being a really creative way to, like, try to make it happen fast, build it out.
00:58:08:21 - 00:58:26:18
John Simmerman
There's efficiencies that you were talking about before of if it's within a department of sidewalks or side paths that the city controls, you're taking that obligation and responsibility away from the individual property owner. And you can just do it, do it and make it happen.
00:58:26:20 - 00:58:53:13
Michael Pollack
I mean, so Donald Shoup, obviously an enormous, towering intellect in this field and, and such a path breaker and sort of paying attention to parking and sidewalks and streets and design and how these choices really affect our lives, you know, and so bonding out for these, for, for this sort of revenue is another really powerful way to generate a lot of, a lot of the necessary money.
00:58:53:14 - 00:59:15:06
Michael Pollack
Grants are another source of capital that a lot of cities rely on, but there just isn't enough of these are some of these federal Dot grants, state Dot grants, private grant making entities. But they're highly competitive and there's not enough of them. And oftentimes, the cost of applying for the grant and complying with the grant eats up a lot of the money itself.
00:59:15:08 - 00:59:40:04
Michael Pollack
So looking for new sources of revenue is really powerful and is really important. And a bond issue is a great way to to do that. The concern that I have about tying the levy on the property owner to the sale of the house, or the sale of the property is in some municipalities. There's not a lot of turnover in property ownership, because there's not a lot of demand to live in that community.
00:59:40:04 - 01:00:00:04
Michael Pollack
And sometimes the reason there's not a lot of demand is the sidewalks are bad. And so there's very little there's very little commerce, there's very little activity. And so you might have where the market is sort of frozen, you might not be able to, to, to generate much of that revenue where the market is pretty active and properties are changing hands all the time, that can be quite effective.
01:00:00:06 - 01:00:27:15
Michael Pollack
You know, I think it's still a little bit it lands pretty heavy as a chunk of change at one time. Whereas the the Denver approach is a more spread out feeling of I pay a little bit, you know, over time. And personally in my own budgeting that sounds appealing. But I think there are a lot of municipalities where that should be an idea makes a lot of sense, but I just think we need to be careful about making sure we're identifying the right kind of housing market where it would work.
01:00:27:15 - 01:00:46:03
Michael Pollack
But the point is, right, there are a lot of ways there are a lot more ways to raise this money than simply let's raise everybody's taxes. Which to be clear, is that is an option, but not one that I'm necessarily endorsing. Right? I think it's looking for other creative ways to either raise the money or frankly, repurpose the money.
01:00:46:04 - 01:00:57:14
Michael Pollack
Right. We could hold revenue constant and decide we want to have a different spending priority, that it's important to spend money on sidewalks. And maybe there's something else we can spend a little less money on.
01:00:57:16 - 01:01:34:13
John Simmerman
Yeah. And I went back to this collage of the three images from Boulder and Denver to exemplify yet another creative solution that Professor Shoup outlined in his quintessential book, the pivotal book of the The High Cost of Free Parking. And that was the success example in Pasadena, where they used the actual revenue that was being generated by getting the pricing right at the curb for the parking, and then actually investing that money right there in that community, in that neighborhood.
01:01:34:13 - 01:02:05:10
John Simmerman
And so now you've got, you know, you've got a defined amount of money coming in that can be invested in that valuable space, that sidewalk, that public realm, and the flywheel effect of the positive cycle that took place is that as the as the sidewalk got better and better, and I can verify and testify that it got much better from when I used to work on Colorado Boulevard right there in downtown Pasadena in 1990.
01:02:05:13 - 01:02:31:18
John Simmerman
It was the hellhole back then, but then that process turned it into one of the most successful examples of the virtuous cycle of investing back in to the space that you have. And so to your point, there's a lot of creative ways to fund this. And I call bullshit on every single city that says we can't afford to take care of our sidewalks.
01:02:31:18 - 01:02:58:19
John Simmerman
We need to rely on the private owners to do this because they are literally just burning money on their streets, and oftentimes they're continuing to expand their roadway miles, even maintaining the existing roadway miles that they have. And so Chuck Marone and I call are calling out cities and states to be able to say, we have to stop this.
01:02:58:20 - 01:03:12:18
John Simmerman
You know, this concept of continually expanding, especially state highways. And, you know, in, in expanding the capacity of those, those travel lanes, those roadway miles.
01:03:12:22 - 01:03:33:20
Michael Pollack
You know, the thing about parking, I mean, so I agree, I subscribe to everything you just said. And you were saying, talking before about how we treat sidewalks in such a distinct way compared to other public space. We treat parking in a very distinct way, too, right? No other. I can't store any of my belongings on at the curbside for free, right?
01:03:33:21 - 01:03:35:15
Michael Pollack
But I can store my car there.
01:03:35:18 - 01:03:40:18
John Simmerman
Michael, give it a try. You know, take your refrigerator out there and set it up.
01:03:40:25 - 01:04:02:01
Michael Pollack
People. People have, right. People sometimes will as a sort of protest or performance art. Right. Set up a little, you know, dining area or seating area. Right. And that's that's that that's illegal. The other intersection between parking and and sidewalks that I think is important to sort of add to this conversation is more of work about parking minimums.
01:04:02:01 - 01:04:24:15
Michael Pollack
So requirements in local law that when you build a building, depending on the size or use of that building, it has to have a certain number of surface parking spaces on the on the lot. This is a huge source of wasted land in Houston, in Los Angeles, even in New York, at parts of New York and a lot of other cities.
01:04:24:16 - 01:04:49:00
Michael Pollack
And not only is it a source of land that can't be used for other for other uses to house people or to have more, more businesses, it also pushes the the housing or the business farther away from the sidewalk. And so it makes walking around to run errands or to live your life that much less appealing, because there's an ocean of parking lot between where the pedestrian is and where the building is.
01:04:49:01 - 01:05:10:18
Michael Pollack
And so rethinking how we deal with parking, whether it's more and more pricing of it at the curb, more putting it underground, we're putting it out of a downtown core. I think that's really important. One of the things that people love most about, for example, the French Quarter in New Orleans, is that there's no parking lots there like there is elsewhere.
01:05:10:18 - 01:05:34:19
Michael Pollack
And there are cities even in Texas. I write about Georgetown, Texas, which is an outside of Austin, their historic downtown. All of the parking is pushed away. There are parking lots outside of the downtown, and then you are walking around. There are a couple of spots for like small polling spots for particular businesses, but most of the parking is put away and it makes that area so much more vibrant, so much more walkable.
01:05:34:19 - 01:05:42:03
Michael Pollack
And it enables the city to make money on the parking lots, which they can. Then, as you were saying, pour back into improving the sidewalks.
01:05:42:06 - 01:06:08:19
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. And in fact, the the county courthouse is right there in the center of Georgetown. It's Williamson County, and I've attended several big, huge fairs that have taken place right there on those streets. They just, you know, closed that off to cars and close that off to parking, you know, to be able to have a massive street fair around that old historic county courthouse there.
01:06:08:20 - 01:06:15:04
John Simmerman
You just mentioned protests. So let's go to this collage of images about us speaking up.
01:06:15:07 - 01:06:36:16
Michael Pollack
Yeah, right. So sidewalks are also a huge place, a huge site of First Amendment activity. So protesting, picketing, public art as well. But we can focus on the protest and the picketing, in large part because if you want to protest a particular business or a particular thing, being able to be right in front of it is part of the point.
01:06:36:18 - 01:07:06:08
Michael Pollack
Of course. Therefore, the it is obstructive, but the obstruction is the point, right. And so a lot of our First Amendment law has been made in cases involving sidewalk speech, sidewalk protests like in these images, also sidewalk petitioning. Right? So for example, in Denver, the folks who are doing the work on that sidewalk funding referendum were standing on sidewalks with clipboards asking folks to sign the petition to join the referendum effort.
01:07:06:08 - 01:07:29:21
Michael Pollack
So we we gather signatures, we hand out leaflets, we we engage in all of these sort of core political speech activities on the sidewalk. And those are, again, part and parcel of thinking about what is this space for? We want as a society to allow this kind of free speech to occur, but we also have to recognize that it does have this obstructive cost.
01:07:29:21 - 01:07:54:08
Michael Pollack
Sometimes it has more than an obstructive cost than most folks might feel unsafe by the activity or the speech. Sometimes folks might be bothered by the noise. Right. And so again, it's about striking a balance. And here the Constitution, the way that the Supreme Court and other federal courts have interpreted the Constitution, is one that is pretty generous toward speech, but not but also not as generous as you might think.
01:07:54:09 - 01:07:55:18
Michael Pollack
Right. So municipalities.
01:07:55:19 - 01:08:02:10
John Simmerman
You have you have a great example of a nine year old getting in trouble because of chalk art on sidewalk. Right?
01:08:02:10 - 01:08:40:02
Michael Pollack
Right. And so municipalities do actually have some latitude in terms of constructing this additional aspect of sidewalk life. And that's my point is, to the extent that governments have this kind of of authority, that means we do, right? That means we as voters do, we as advocates do. And so thinking carefully about what we want our communities to be and how the sidewalk plays a role in that community, self-definition and self-determination and all of the ways, all the all the facets of that, from speech to policing to climate resilience and accessibility and commerce and all of it.
01:08:40:03 - 01:08:51:26
Michael Pollack
Right? All of it is, is part of this bigger tapestry that we need to think carefully about and then advocate for the kind of sidewalk life that we need and that we think our communities deserve.
01:08:52:03 - 01:09:17:00
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. There's two areas that prompted the thought for me with the Active Towns Channel, I'm constantly profiling what cities are doing around the globe to encourage more people to live a healthy, active lifestyle. You've probably noticed my mug streets are for people. The tagline that I came up with, it wasn't my original. I wasn't the originator of that.
01:09:17:00 - 01:09:43:18
John Simmerman
But I adopted it. And I bring up the point that, you know, long before the automobile kicked us off of the streets, streets really were for people. I mean, we came together. Yes. Eventually we started getting pushed to the to the side, the sidewalk. But yes. So talk a little bit about that, that we're not prescribing that there needs to be sidewalks everywhere always.
01:09:43:19 - 01:09:57:25
John Simmerman
You can have shared streets and they can be quite delightful, but they should be traffic calmed and they should be environments where all ages and abilities feel comfortable getting to their meaningful destinations by walking by.
01:09:57:26 - 01:10:20:24
Michael Pollack
Yeah, that's absolutely right. You know, and as I was saying before, right, there are costs to having sidewalks from whether it's more impermeable surface or just the cost of building them. And these, these examples, this comes up in Houston as well, for example, where you have in front of some new remodel, there's a stretch of sidewalk and then it connects to nothing on either side.
01:10:20:25 - 01:10:25:09
Michael Pollack
That's a waste of space and a waste of money, right? Sidewalks only.
01:10:25:14 - 01:10:52:18
John Simmerman
I also say this too, is sometimes it's not even just a money thing. Sometimes it's a practicality of an impossibility based on other factors. So, for example, just like in Houston, there in Austin, as trees are beloved. And so our neighborhood had just a wonderful tree canopy of live oaks. Well guess what? Most of those live oaks got planted right there in that eight foot section.
01:10:52:18 - 01:11:20:01
John Simmerman
And so there. So I mean, there are 120 plus years old now. And so they're like so beloved that you would not be able to even put a sidewalk in to that eight foot space. And so that's one of the reasons when people say, well, why don't we have sidewalks in this neighborhood? And I said, well, take a look at that tree canopy and that, that, that is so beloved, do you want that to have to go away?
01:11:20:06 - 01:11:44:06
Michael Pollack
There are so many reasons why folks might be opposed to having sidewalks, and some of them are like that. Some of them are about sort of the certain bucolic nature that, you know, some folks associate sidewalks with a certain kind of like planned suburb, and they like a slightly more wild suburb. A common refrain I heard a lot was, you know, that sidewalks bring crime.
01:11:44:06 - 01:11:54:10
Michael Pollack
And I always sort of questioned, questioned what was really behind that, because, of course, if someone is coming to rob my house, they're not planning to get away on foot. They're probably going to get away by car and they're going to drive.
01:11:54:12 - 01:12:16:02
John Simmerman
Can I share with you what I wrote in the in the margins in the book? When, when, when that was there, I said that that is a typical car brain response. And other words, the Moto normative response to, oh, we don't want sidewalks or side paths or multi-use or bikeways in our neighborhood, because that's how the crime is going to get to us.
01:12:16:07 - 01:12:28:04
John Simmerman
No, no, no, no, that's that's a car brain response of of giving the drivers the motor vehicle driver who you probably are a pass. And that's part of car brain.
01:12:28:07 - 01:12:46:26
Michael Pollack
It's also part of what I think, what a lot of those folks really mean, a lot of the time is it just means that it will bring in other people, right? Folks who are outside of the community will be able to get here more easily, and that has race and class implications at all the rest. But there are a lot of reasons why folks might not want a sidewalk, some of them better than others.
01:12:46:26 - 01:13:15:08
Michael Pollack
But the point is, sidewalks only work as part of a network. If a stretch of disconnected sidewalk doesn't really do anyone any good. And so it only makes sense to to have sidewalks in a community if they're going to be in the community, throughout the community and place there intentionally with an idea, with a plan about how they're going to be put into place, who's going to take care of them, where is the money coming from?
01:13:15:08 - 01:13:34:21
Michael Pollack
What uses are going to be allowed or not allowed or permitted in what ways? And I think right now we're talking primarily about places that don't have sidewalks, but might consider installing them. Right. In a lot of places they already exist. And so the question then is just what do we do about it? But where they don't and how to maintain them exactly, but where they don't already exist?
01:13:34:22 - 01:13:54:03
Michael Pollack
Yeah, I'm not here in this book saying, you know, carpet the country with sidewalks, but rather before you cut, before you take that step or before you take the step of, we're not going to have them think carefully about how you're going to do it if you want it. And if you think you don't want them, think carefully about the future.
01:13:54:04 - 01:14:24:04
Michael Pollack
Right. So in in College Station, Texas, for example, they are anticipating really significant population growth in that city, both a growing of the city, but also due to some changes in Texas annexation law. Another intersection I talk about in the book, they expect more growth, more, more clustered growth inside of that city. So if that's what you expect, think now about how all those extra people are going to get around.
01:14:24:04 - 01:14:43:24
Michael Pollack
There's not going to be room for them all to be driving or parking. And so now, now is the time to be thoughtful about, let's put in some alternative mobility infrastructure that and plan it, plan it and put it in now in a way where it will be there for when it's necessary. But yeah, so community doesn't want it.
01:14:43:25 - 01:15:06:24
Michael Pollack
They shouldn't have to have it. I'm not saying that anything. Otherwise what they should have to do, of course, is if they're if they're a part of a larger city, right. They do make use of it in the rest of the city. And so they do have a shared obligation to take care of it and pay for it and fund it in the places where it exists, but in front of their own street, in front of their own house.
01:15:06:24 - 01:15:18:03
Michael Pollack
That isn't necessarily required or frankly, even necessarily a good thing. It's a question of if we want it, let's let's do it with a plan. Let's do it with in with some intentionality.
01:15:18:10 - 01:15:52:19
John Simmerman
Right. And what I would say is go a step further and say that if you if you don't want them there, that's fine. But on behalf of, you know, the 30 to 40% of the population, that's not a driving population for whatever reason, they're too young, they're too old. They have disabilities that don't allow them to drive. You also need to make sure that there's a redundancy of mobility networks where if like in the case of my streets where we didn't have sidewalks, then it should be a traffic calming environment.
01:15:52:19 - 01:16:20:20
John Simmerman
That's an all ages and abilities environment where that person can get around in their wheelchair. That young, that young child can get to the park and to their friends house and to school under their own power in a traffic calming environment. And that's exactly what we're seeing in the Netherlands in particular, which I love to, to to study is their redundancy of their mobility networks is just world class.
01:16:20:20 - 01:16:47:19
John Simmerman
They have this, you know, incredible walking network, incredible cycling network, transit network and driving network. And so these are all redundancies of of, you know, networks that run in parallel to each other. You can get to all destinations through any of those modes, but they're also integrated too. So you can use the cycle network to access the transit network.
01:16:47:20 - 01:17:13:02
John Simmerman
ET cetera, etc., etc.. To close this out, I want you to to to talk a little bit about a glaring omission that you made in the book. And that glaring omission is the side paths. I kept being intentional about saying side paths as well as sidewalks. And folks, you know, friends of you that are tuning in from from the UK.
01:17:13:04 - 01:17:45:24
John Simmerman
Yeah, sidewalks are called pavements there. So they have different names in different areas. But talk a little bit about this concept of side paths and multi-use paths and, and boulders. Implementing this concept along 36 highway 36, which is also 28th Street, is there because it's a highway. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to have cycle lanes in the roadway.
01:17:45:25 - 01:18:02:07
John Simmerman
So they're making an extremely wide side path, which means it becomes a de facto multi-use path. Talk a little bit about that, because you didn't really have much emphasis on this concept of side paths.
01:18:02:09 - 01:18:26:26
Michael Pollack
Yeah. So Boulder's a great example. Houston's actually another great example. So Houston has the Nicholson Trail, the MKT trail right. These are these paved multi-use paths that are, you know, sometimes, as you say, it is a side path in that it parallels some car, some car road, highway, but sometimes it's not. Sometimes it is along an old railroad right of way.
01:18:26:27 - 01:19:05:21
Michael Pollack
Sometimes it just sort of runs through different neighborhoods. Those are terrific. Right. And I write about them primarily in the in the Texas in the Houston context. But they pop up again, as you say, in, in Boulder, which has a terrific network of them. And I write about them in Houston, in part to show there really popular. And in in a city where it's easy to dismiss any sort of interest in anything other than cars, the use of these trails proves that actually people do want something else and make use of something else that is more walkable, bike able, and so on.
01:19:05:24 - 01:19:36:00
Michael Pollack
The reason they don't figure as heavily in the book is that they don't present the same collision of uses and property conflict that sidewalks do, right? Because these side paths that, to use your your terminology, generally do not allow the dining and the commerce and the speech activity right to the same extent and generally, although again, not exclusively, they are government property and they are maintained by the government.
01:19:36:00 - 01:19:58:08
Michael Pollack
And so they don't pose those same sorts of conflicts and those same sort of accountability gaps and responsibility gaps that I talk about with respect to sidewalks. But they are absolutely a critical part of that, you know, multimodal pedestrian and other infrastructure. And I would love to see more cities and towns do more with that kind of thing.
01:19:58:09 - 01:20:17:18
Michael Pollack
Particularly. You mentioned biking, right? I'm not I'm not a cyclist. It scares the hell out of me to to to bike in any sort of place where there are also cars. But if I lived someplace that had these kinds of paths that were not just protected from the cars, but really quite separated from the cars, I might do it a lot more.
01:20:17:20 - 01:20:33:03
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, Michael, this has been an absolute joy and pleasure. Michael Pawlak with the new book, Sidewalk Nation The Life and Law of America's Most Overlooked Resources. When does the book come out?
01:20:33:09 - 01:20:45:03
Michael Pollack
It's officially out on June 2nd, but it is available now for preorder through all sorts of outlets Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Harvard University, Harvard University Press, and wherever you get your books.
01:20:45:06 - 01:21:08:04
John Simmerman
Yeah, yeah. Fantastic. And in fact, folks, you can head on over to my website and in my bookstore, I have it listed here on the list of books from the folks that I featured here on the podcast. And there it is, Sidewalk Nation, just a few books over from the book that we mentioned from Donald Shoot the high cost of free parking.
01:21:08:06 - 01:21:12:12
John Simmerman
Again, Michael, thank you so very much for joining me on the Active Towns podcast.
01:21:12:13 - 01:21:14:09
Michael Pollack
Thank you, John. Really appreciate it.
01:21:14:10 - 01:21:33:13
John Simmerman
And I just want to also say thank you all so much to all my Active Towns ambassadors supporting the channel financially via YouTube super thanks to YouTube memberships. Buy me a coffee, Patreon and making donations to the nonprofit again, I simply could not produce this content without your support. Thank you all so very much.