 Good afternoon and welcome to today's last and actually it's a bonus really special bonus energy seminar for this quarter And our speaker today is Jim brainer who I just met But I've been reading a lot of background material on him since a few weeks ago when Leon Min the Managing director of the bits and watts initiative here at Stanford recommended him as a really really good speaker for our audience here and online reading through Jim's background. I think I did this with Sarah Carney saying he she Kind of invented impact investment before it was called the impact investment I think in Jim's case. I was told maybe 10 or 15 years ago that the cities were the action on climate change policy and Sustainability and actually didn't believe that and then I was visited by a few people from big cities reading Jim's bio I think he started working on this about 30 years ago so he was literally way way ahead of his time that he's going to tell us today a Tale of three cities, which I assume is different levels of development in Carmel, Indiana where he's from in a blue a purple district. Maybe yeah, man purple district in a Red state can I call it? Well, it used to be 50-50 today. I'm not so sure Yeah, yeah, so he's actually taken the city through the sequence of urban renewal or urban renewal into sustainability and now evidently the net zero Greenhouse gases or full sustainability thing As the social science part of me says this is ideal because usually what you don't have is longitudinal observations that is one single case or industry or City where you have good data over a long period of time So we have here embodied in Jim kind of 30 year I I think before you got into politics top politics you were already interested in these kinds of things So without further fanfare, I'd like to introduce Jim to tell us his story before I totally rude it But I'm trying to do it for him. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. Thank you See my I don't need the hand mic apparently so So Carmel Indiana When I became mayor in 1996 It was a city of about 27,000 people today. It's over a hundred thousand people So it's had a tremendous amount of population growth What I want to do today though is talk a little bit about how cities in general have changed and So the tale of three cities It's Carmel's story But it's also the story of car suburbs all over the United States and to some extent in Europe and other places, too And to understand what we did wrong. I think we have to Look back in an interdisciplinary way at how cities were built before cars and then What we did wrong the last 70 some years and then where we're headed. So those those are the three cities So think about our cities The last hundred and twenty years at the close of World War two 19 August in 1945 We still had not achieved 25% car ownership in the United States Only one out of fewer than one out of four households had an automobile And so our cities were still built for pedestrians for the most part some of the big cities had some public transit But generally people were able to walk or ride a bike Most places that they needed to go on a daily basis Go back a few more years. Well, and so what shape were our cities in in 1945? First of all, there hadn't been one of their anybody known the depression October started on October of 1929 There hadn't been any building really since then there've been tremendous amounts of immigration into the United States because World War two And the rest of the world was in a depression as well And we were still a lot better than a lot of other places Antibiotics have been invented, but they Didn't figure out how to mass produce them yet. So they were just pretty much used for our soldiers during the war and every house Still generally in the cold areas had a coal Furnace in the basement if you go look back at traditional areas throughout the United States You still see that in the older houses built before 1945 1950 you'll see that a place where the coal would have been dumped in from a truck Every couple weeks set in a big pie on the basement Whoever's in the house or shoveled into the furnace at night. It would heat up the house and the fire went out You can go put more coal in the house. Terrible Way to pollute cities. I remember going to large cities as a child in the 1960s and Washing my face and hands at the end of the day and asking my mother, you know, why is this thing black? What's all this on my you know, what's all this has come as cold dust? So our cities were overcrowded. They had lots of disease and they were dirty We also had this theme running through American history starting with Thomas Jefferson About the US being agrarian small crafts shops Farmers without all the problems of the big European cities. There's this theme throughout American history that encouraged That was really anti-city in many ways So you think about the end of World War two Asia was in shambles from the war Europe was in shambles Our industrial might was untouched. So the average working person Was probably better off in the US of the recession after there's usually a recession after a war as soldiers come back And there aren't enough jobs But really didn't have much of one after World War two because we needed to go to work to supply Europe and Asia to help them rebuild and And so the average working person was making more money than ever. They were crowded It's like let's we can afford the cars were inexpensive gas was particularly inexpensive And so let's move out in the suburbs Levittowns in New Jersey area were started. Everybody had a little yard But what we were doing we were building suburban sprawl without really realizing it. We had built cities for people for Millennia Now we had automobiles and we started to build for automobiles not people So today the pendulum swing back we made lots of mistakes the average of study that shows the average American spends two hours a day in their automobile the average adult spends two hours a day in their automobile And that includes it's an average so includes all the people in the big cities. They don't have cars and don't drive So there's lots of people spending three or more hours in their cars They may be building to to afford a house. They went for their family. That's a long way from where they work Which is a higher rent district But we have builder cities or what sort of quality of life is that you're spending three hours a day in an automobile and that's because of poor city design and So when I first read from mayor back in 1995 I knocked on lots of doors and asked people what their hopes and desires and Aspirations were for the place they had decided to call home And I kept in a thousand different ways. I heard I wish we could walk somewhere. We needed to go a useful walk I wish You know I could walk to the store as I could walk to dinner I wish there wasn't so much traffic congestion I wish I didn't have to drive to the neighboring big city to see a show or to Do things I wish I could walk to places near my house or make short drives I wish I were in the car less so we started to analyze why our cities Were we're not being built anybody go for a romantic walk past the Walmart parking lot lately Think about that Course not so how do we design our cities look more like the old beautiful European cities cities and other continents were built pre-automobile Because think of the energy we're building our cities so that people have no choice But to use all sorts of fossil fuels every day because they have to Most of our suburbs and remember just because someone lives in a Large city doesn't mean that they're not living in the suburban sprawl development pattern 70% of American households live in what we would call suburban sprawl big lot houses single use Zoning, but you know what single use zoning is? It's where the land use Laws say you can only do one thing on this land and it made sense in the 1900s when this started called Euclidean zoning and The city planners are one big victory they figured out that if they moved all the houses away from the noxious factories We had back around the 1900s that longevity Would increase and when about 20 year period increased by almost 15 years By doing that so it was a huge victory, but we kept doing it. We no longer had to So now all the houses are here all the stores are here the offices you work in are over here downtown's over here You can't walk to a corner market to buy bread or milk You can't walk in fact anywhere you need to go you can go out for a walk Our houses change instead of having front porches in many places moved up close to the street We can talk to people on the sidewalk Now you have what's called a snub nose garage where all you see is a garage sticking out at the street You might not even know your neighbors Here besides on either side of your house or across the street And that's important to this town square idea was a Roman forum or New England town square You know we're a country made up with people from all different places and it's important for our body politic I think that they're Building the city design our places where people come together and get to know people from different backgrounds different experiences That's very important to our form of government Sitting inside a car doesn't allow for social interaction Maybe a little bit if you're illegally text testing, I suppose why you're stopped and traveling, but that would be it So we really changed how we build our cities We had all the suburban sprawl and some of the congestion was created, you know in the middle part of the country We had farm to market or county roads or called different things in different places, but there was a mile grid It was basically the farmers just to take goods To the small towns nearby But yet in a city, we traditionally had a block every 500 feet 4 to 500 feet So in a mile 5,280 feet in a mile You might have 10 roads, but yet in these suburban areas it had been former Rural areas now we had a road every mile And and so do we really need that to be a 10 lane road? To carry the same amount of traffic and we've also created this system because Separating all the uses where people were in their cars way too much of the time So why were we building our cities like this? How do we change our suburban areas to make them more pedestrian friendly? Still accommodate cars but start designing for people cut down on the amount of time people are in a car So we found that only is just better for the environment, but it's much better For a variety of reasons So that's our little old downtown that all the buildings you see there were public private partnerships, which is how we Figured out how to get around the legal and financial hurdles of not building everything to look like the big box parking lot So I talk about these things around the country in different places and I know start with this slide You probably know where that is according out of Ireland looking over at San Diego And you know it's 72 because it's always 72 beautiful sailboats palm trees mountains Ocean and I say this is not caramel Indiana Then the next slide I say this isn't caramel Indiana either Nor is that I think that's somewhere in your ministry seen all out in this area I said on the other hand, that's our palette. That's what we have to work with Then I say they had the same palette Lousy weather no mountains and no oceans and they built a beautiful city we can do the same thing and So many of our suburban areas are growing quickly. This is important that we think about how these suburban areas grow So that is not caramel either, but that's what we're trying to avoid Nobody goes for a manic walk past that nobody walks past that period That's one of my favorite pictures to talk about how we Approach walk ability now think exactly what's happening in this slide These guys are paying money to go get on a stair master, but yet they're taking the escalator to get there But it's a philosophy we have in this country That of course on the left Save you're in a wheelchair. That's not going to work out very well. Is it that's how some engineers? Utility engineers in particular Treat pedestrianism you see this all over the country We have to do better than that then look at the houses on the right So you'd had a beer or two. Would you even get the right house? They all had the snub nose garages You can't walk anywhere you need to go you can't walk to a corner store That is not the type of neighborhoods we should be building So there's Carmel's downtown it was founded as a little Quaker community back in the 1830s I did not grow up there like most people that live there because it's grown so quickly Downtown pretty much had gone away had a couple stores in it was abandoned when I first ran for office in 1995 I asked people where the downtown area was and there was disagreement People did not identify this little old area in many cases is even being the downtown But we put up the archways. We were 50 square miles. That's double the size the island of Manhattan So we knew that little four block area that had been a downtown for seven hundred people at the end of World War two Every poor agricultural community would not work. We wanted to preserve it So we enter into a series of we put up the archways made at the art and design district specialized Retail brought the buildings up to the street to the series of public-private partnerships To get new buildings going in that area and I'll talk a little bit more about the public-private partnerships and how We created a walkable more traditional Streetscape and city And why that doesn't happen today in most suburban areas So that was one of the first projects we did it's an old warehouse building that was abandoned and we got a developer We see we move the building up to the street We know that pedestrians feel much more comfortable if the building is close to the street And there's a line of cars parked along the street. They feel secure in that space There's a lot of research that provides that data And we put up another public-private partnership a design center that has a hundred and twenty car underground garage So go back to this picture That one See those big parking lots Why? How do you make that into a better streetscape than what it is? That's not caramel again, but you know, it's not pretty. It's ugly Nobody likes walking through those parking lots. They feel dangerous and open The stores aren't architecturally interesting. There's boxes Why do developers build that? Why does cities allow that to be built requiring long car trips? They're huge stores. So that means they have to attract people in a large geographic area The only way to get there is to drive. It just adds this whole thing. We have to spend all this time in our cars The reason is that an underground parking spot cost about $80,000 to build a precast Garage multi-story garage like many I see here on this campus cost about $40,000 a spot to build Businesses generally unless they're in a very high land cost area can't afford that and still make money Oops, what did I do? There we go so in this case we took that old liquor store and in empty building and Turned it in the design center, but all the cars are stored underground for people that go there We also I also have this theory that architecture got very uninteresting It became very plain and simple about the time after World War two that we all got in cars and quit walking around looking at it So we tried as we do these public-private partnerships to create a more traditional city We focus on interesting architecture of all different styles But detail that is interesting to the pedestrian there You see that we also got rid of some straight parking spots and bumped got rid of those spots and allowed people to start dining in those areas long before the pandemic Bike share there's our former mayor in the bottom left She's it was in her late 80s at that point And we're doing our first bike share and she said you know I don't know if I don't want to get on a two-wheel bike anymore But I want to do one of those old people's bikes with three wheels And so we got a picture of a mayor Jane there on her bike on the Tricycle that we have as part of our bike share program, but so many cities also don't provide We've built 250 miles of bike trails in our city some Independent trails away from roads but many along our arterial and major roads as well So the idea is you can bike from any neighborhood in our 50 square miles It's anywhere else in the city and particularly our downtown Flip through some of these when you're developing an urban density small urban gardens and spaces like this become very important The building you see on the right has a two-level underground parking garage We'll talk more about that building in a minute Has a center courtyard there you see it when you build it slightly higher densities You have to pay a lot of attention to good design public spaces and detail in terms of public art Materials because people are out walking and paying attention to it You have to make it a great play a beautiful place for people to spend time so Get into a little bit of math here cities have to provide services in Most states cities live off property tax a tax on the value of property So I want to go through the revenue side remember There's always two sides or an income statement revenue and expenses go through the revenue first So this is that building I showed you in our new downtown one of our public private partnerships the AV that stands for assessed value is Just under fifty one million dollars on two point one acres Now if you look at one of our big box stores over in the right, you'll see that it's 20 almost 26 acres just under 12 million an acre So look at the difference in assessed value. Here's another example. This is Again the same building on the left Sophia Square and Carmel two point one acres 47 million is the earlier slide assessed value So it's twenty three point five million an acre. You then apply that to the tax rate where there's one two or three percent Fisher's is our neighboring community to the east Big Ikea big box store the huge parking lot and a top top golf facility you have those out here You know what I'm talking about top golf so big parking lots so it also has a Fifty million dollar roughly assessed value, but the value per acre is one million Value in Sophia Square the five-story European-like building that had been built forever beautiful courtyard nice architecture underground parking 23.5 million So that provides enough revenue for the city and when we do these public private partnerships We take a lot of that Anticipated revenue though let the developer borrow against it Future property taxes for 25 years to build that underground garage. Otherwise You have to have this huge service parking lot So that's just the revenue side of it, but there's enough money left over then to say okay, we're helping you out Mrs. Developer and Mr. Developer a lot We want really good architecture. We want really good building materials. We want buildings are going to last We want buildings are going to be Net carbon zero in some cases. We're getting more and more towards that. We have some leverage and negotiating power as a city But that's just the revenue side talk about the expense side Anybody know what a two-lane road a mile of two-lane road from scratch would cost But I want to guess I Wish more than double that about 12 about 12 million in the Midwest today That's a nice road storm sewers and bike path on the side Street lighting at the intersections and so on nice road And you might get it down to eight or nine million if you didn't have curbs and and had ditches instead but it's very expensive and then you need a fire station every five miles or so and The staff of fire station is three to four million dollars a year you need police to patrol all these roads and Every city only has so much capital to be invested There's not unlimited capital to be invested in most cities. So you're gonna get investment You're gonna get X amount probably not much more than that amount so if it's sprawled out ten times Farther along that road you have to pay for the road you have to pay for the sewer It's pay for the electrical wires. You have to pay For water pipes you have to police those roads So the cost of the expense side and that equation goes way up as well You're sprout out and it's there forever basically So there's a lot of suburban areas that are doing well financially now But they won't be when their growth stops they're living off the growth They're gonna be in worse shape than the traditional cities I think financially because they haven't fiscally modeled their growth out in the future and they also haven't Modeled how much carb extra carbon then it's gonna be very hard for them to get to net zero carbon because of the squirrel So we had that little area that was the old village area We went about five blocks south that was an old grocery store And that's what sits there now. There's a public-private partnership as well Has an underground parking garage. It's 88 acres. That's just the corner of it Obviously so much nicer looking building that's what you can do in these public-private partnerships But hundreds of million dollars of investment right in our downtown area where we already had police and fire and Perimeter roads and all these things so we can afford then to get the cars underground in garages With money left over for public art for social services all the things that cities many times don't have money for That's a office complex. You see the underground garage the entrance to it's very subtle But again, that's a site. That's a 20,000 square foot building. There are five of them on that site Without the underground parking we would have had one so our revenue went up five times We did it in an area where we don't have to add fire or police or any primitive roads water and sewer already provided to that site We anchored Indianapolis's were we share a border with Indianapolis or some people would say we're a suburb I like to say we're an edge city but they'd invested a lot in amateur and professional sports, so we built a Concert hall be like it. This is a Course inspired by Palladio's Villa rotunda, which was built in the 1500s outside of Venice and for Shinza italy and of course he was inspired by the panthenon in Rome and other classical buildings But we built our economic development around the arts again public architecture needs to be beautiful Especially if people are going to want to live in your community and walk around it Oops, I keep hitting the wrong button there There we go There's there's a villa rotunda up in the top left and then there's the inside of our hall on the right And of course public spaces become very important and that's really a center of our city You see the farmers market taking place. That's the Saturday morning when that happens You need places people from around the community to be able to come together and get to know each other Especially when you're building a denser A denser city There it is in the winter a holiday market ice skating. That's the way it looks today It's another project that connects those two redevelopment districts. Again, you see that small plaza There's lots of roles about Data and evidence that shows you can't make those areas too big people won't use them But this area has hundreds of people in it most evenings Most of the year That's a brand new street we built through that area One of the things we learned about street design is one thing that cuts down on pedestrians and encourages people to drive Is that speeds are too high. It's dangerous to walk along the street pedestrians don't like to do that Lanes are generally 12 feet wide. So we made our lanes On this street about eight and a half feet wide We found we don't even need to put up speed limit signs because no one can speed people don't speed through Through that area the trail is a rail to trail project a firmer rail Was a train track up until about the 1970s. I'm told Is the wide serpentine path in the middle is actually wider than the vehicular lanes on either side And in this case we had so much pedestrian traffic. We actually if you look carefully, you'll see we separated The walking trail from the bike trail through this area Here it is You see the red brick on the left is actually the vehicular street And the trail is on the right and if you were standing there Looking at it straight on you'd see the trail is about two feet wider than the car lane Um, it's another big box store Dick's sporting goods But we didn't put a parking lot in front at least we forced the cars to the back and build a park in front Makes it prettier sign pollution is also something that I think Is not good for our roads. We spend so much money on street construction We might as well make our streets beautiful. You spend about two to five percent more you can make them beautiful One of the things you can do that's the same street Looking south into the Indianapolis, which does not control their signs and then looking north From the same intersection into caramel where we don't allow off-premise signs And I apparently one day it was blue sky and the other day wasn't but I don't know why that happened Um, this is interesting. This is a five lane street on the left that we took What we call suicide lane running down the middle Uh, we had stop lights on it I'm going to talk about roundabouts for a minute. We have built more roundabouts in any other city In the country if you go back to the new york times in november 21st last year sunday times on the Front page is an article about all the carbon savings The tons of carbon we save tons of carbon we save every day Because people aren't idling at stop lights and they're not starting that big heavy vehicle from zero So, you know physics remember your physics class takes more energy to go from zero 15 That's from 15 to 30 We also so our our safety is number one reason we build roundabouts our Fatality rate is two per hundred thousand per year national average is just under 12 We're one six the national average other cheaper to build and maintain But they also move 50 percent more cars per hour How many times you've been in the stop light when you're the only car there and you're sitting there idling And nobody's at any of the other three entrances. You're just sitting there And that's what we eliminate But speed's the big thing everybody Anybody in this room, uh ever speed up to go through a yellow light or a green light? I didn't think so We all do Even green lights we had the data on this people speed up because they don't want to turn yellow or reds They see it a block away and they they accelerate over the speed limit and get through it before it changes Well human error rate never changes So we know the possibility of a serious accident is much greater higher speeds at lower speeds Where everybody has to slow down at the roundabout Somebody makes a mistake and they will because we're humans and humans make mistakes and it's a percentage We know what that percentage is generally But the percentage goes down at roundabouts because there's more time to correct a mistake The response time is much greater So it's better for younger drivers or elderly drivers. It's better for pedestrians counterintuitive Pedestrians sometimes say I don't like roundabouts. I don't like stepping out in front of the traffic But if you're hit at 15 miles an hour, you're probably going to survive you're hit at 15 miles an hour You're probably not going to survive. There's a sliding scale between those two speeds Um, but anyway, that's range lane road on the left when it was five lanes with stop lights There it is today on the right after we installed the roundabouts Cut the road most Most of it down to one lane in each direction with a center median Bicycle lane and guess what we're moving eight percent more traffic per hour But it's so much better for pedestrians You can see buildings of different ages. They're seeing how some of the buildings are up to the street That's under our new laws Previously the buildings set back from the street. So you saw the parking lot not the building So that'll change over time as the older buildings are replaced Uh, that was a state road on the left in 19 uh early 2000 2005 I convinced the state of Indiana they were going to add lanes to that road We had that r5 mile stretch of that state maintained road and that city road Um We'd have an average of two fatalities a year We replaced it with these roundabout interchange separated grade We didn't use tight diamonds. We have taken 40 some more houses had we used tight diamonds as opposed to the roundabouts It was a tight diamond Any civil engineers here the tight diamond configuration you have to keep drawing that The lights farther apart on the side You think about the interstate exit Those lights they calculate how many cars are going to be queued between the light on one side and the light on the other side And keep drawing them farther apart as traffic increases. So we'd have to take a lot of houses We took A fraction of the number of houses to do this six different intersections We haven't had a fatality And an intersection on that street since we did this 12 years ago Almost 14 years ago now And you can see it's much better for pedestrians too. So it encourages people to walk and sort of get in their car and drive somewhere Now there's our rail or trail project. This is important for cities You have to have options to get anywhere in the city by bike or on foot If you don't have those options people are going to drive. They're going to burn more carbon It's going to make it impossible for us to get to carbon neutral Electric cars are going to help. It's going to be a long time before we can completely convert All this roundabout on the lower levels, I'll tell you a funny story I got an email number of years ago from a fellow identified himself as President of the British Roundabout Appreciation Society And he said we put out a calendar every year and we'd like you to submit some photos for our calendar We sell the calendar. So what do you use the money for and he never answered that question And I called him on the phone after the email and I was about noon one o'clock in the afternoon Eastern time zone and so I knew in England. It was about six or seven o'clock and I kept hearing what sounded like pub noise in the background And he said I said, where are you? So I'm in a meeting of the Roundabout Appreciation Society. I said, do you meet in a pub? And he said, of course And I said, what do you use the proceeds for beer money? And he Kind of paused and never answered that question. So I think it was a yes But anyway that roundabout on the bottom was on the front of their calendar that year We bought about 9,000 copies to use as economic development You know hand them out to people and so on and so those guys over in britain got a lot of our beer We've got a lot of money of ours for beer These are roundabout statistics, but it shows if you look at 2004 Traffic fatalities see how it's come down over the years. We already had a lot of roundabouts in 2004, but it's It's Come down quite a bit since then. You need to look at some of the other indiana cities on the list go over and look at Valparaiso 24 per 100,000 versus 2.2 Accident comparisons the number of roundabouts. I hate charts on on power point, but take a look at that very quickly Number of roundabouts at that point. We had 141 or 147 now that was last year But you see the number of roundabouts directly corresponding to the number of accidents and Even more importantly from the energy standpoint the amount of carbon goes down drastically Contrasted the stoplights But it's more than just the carbon save there It's about a lifestyle that we're building so people had the ability To live in an area where they don't have to use their car much Maybe a couple is able to cut down from two to one. It's important for poor people Especially the rents as high as they are today If they can get rid of the cost of one car or maybe go down to zero cars Even a suburban area and least one when they need to go somewhere Some of our public art, which I thought you might find interesting Again, if you're building a pedestrian friendly city, you need to make those walks interesting Instead of putting all the art in a sculpture park where only people are interested and go to it I believe in spreading it out through the community so everybody gets to experience it Sometimes I get criticized people say Well, you could spend that money people need housing. They all these poor people need things Why are you spending money on art? That's that's uh Not necessary and I say, you know, you and I usually talking to somebody who's fairly well healed You and I can travel to the best places on earth and see beautiful things Poor people can't they have a right to have their community be beautiful too But I also believe that encourages pedestrianism it makes that walk interesting It's got to be a useful walk somewhere you want to go and it also needs to be an interesting walk There's uh, we put sculpture in our runabouts too. That's uh Hoey car and michael anybody guys are probably too young to know too much about hoey car and michael But he wrote the most recorded song ever back 100 years ago called star dust he was from indiana. He wrote it indiana university in bloomington But there's a sculpture a gramophone with stars and dust coming stars and moons coming out To commemorate star dust in front of our cancer hall We find the roundabouts actually work better with obstructions in the middle You know, most people try to be nice. They see somebody coming and they're looking all over the roundabout They're really just supposed to look to the left. We find they flow better There's less idling if they can't see across Uh forces them intuitively just to look to the left for the gap, which is what they're supposed to do There's more of our roundabout sculpture So we're trying to do to build a city that encourages less car traffic that That um It's pedestrian friendly. It's bicycle friendly mixed use so that people Don't have to drive long distances to go for their daily needs We try to design for people not cars hierarchy of buildings harmony of the land and built surroundings and that means Net zero buildings too and we can at a human scale We we pay attention to enclosures and how the pedestrian feels in us, you know A city pay attention to the aesthetics again to encourage pedestrianism not driving And learn for thousands of years of good city design That we we learned a lot before the car came along Remember we didn't get over 25% corner ship until after 1945 So this idea of building cities for vehicles is really pretty new in the scope of human history now We've entered into a partnership with Volkswagen to study lots of our data and to Where they're test city worldwide? We have 600 some cameras in public spaces. We blur out faces and license plates for privacy purposes One of the most wagon leads on this was be with us today But he ended up being hospitalized So I am going to try to talk about his portion of this he was going to be with us virtually but can't be so You saw the suburban sprawl which is typical of lots of cities built in the last 75 years You've seen what we have done differently than most suburbs Now I want to talk about where we go in the future as a suburban city and think about this our suburbs in many ways We're 70 70 percent of the u.s. Population lives and what we consider suburban sprawl Development pattern How are we going to fix this where do we go in the future? How do we Fix the sprawl and at the same time reduce our carbon emissions our energy use So this is an open data platform that we're using We use all these cameras there We're almost getting to the density where a suburb can have decent public transit so many times I think when When cities First put in public transit they look for a busy street They buy a bus a harrow bus driver and the bus runs up and down that street. It may work. It may not they're not They're basing it mainly in apocryphal information what they think are worth. They're not basing it on data generally speaking So we're going to have more data than almost any other city has when we institute Public transit in a few years. We're getting to the point where we have enough density in our downtown area It'll never work in the areas with large lot subdivisions, but in a downtown area will work We have 150 corporate headquarters and move people around in those areas Eventually connect to indianapolis's public transit system Which isn't very good quite honestly, but eventually we'll connect but first we're going to do this internal to caramel system So every camera has been turned into analytical source enhanced public safety and emergency response services Let's talk about that for a minute. Let's say an aimless driver is on the way To a run and there's an obstruction a mile ahead the aimless driver can't see it yet But he's eventually going to have to reroute or there's traffic congestion Well, if the cameras are talking to each other and can send a message to that driver They can avoid that area hit and run driver Well, they're going to help the person that's been injured And somebody else is running away if the cameras can talk to each other in real time And then talk to a human the police know where to go find that person that's running away Fire truck on the way to a fire same thing obstruction up ahead or it's traffic up ahead What's the best route to get that truck piece of equipment to where it needs to be? Um So we we went out to our employees with Volkswagen and said All the way the lowest level employees. How would you use all this data that we're going to require? And it was amazing some of the guys that you know worked in sewers and picked up dead animals every day off the street had great ideas Dead animal guys said we have four people that go out every day find roadkill And then they remove it Because it's not laying on the road all cities do this I think Um, they say you know if those cameras could tell us where those dead animals were Three of us could probably get other jobs. I think they were looking for better jobs Uh, I would be Now that's a great idea. What if the cameras could identify that? What if a camera could identify a branch that's come down on the streets blocking traffic? What if a storm sewer is blocked and it's raiding and there's a flood because that sewer is not draining properly All these things are done, you know, we wait for the public to call it in or a city employee is out driving around they may see it um We can help generate carbon credits by tracking zero mission journeys Um, we you know, there's a a private market for carbon credits that's developing um California is ahead of the game on this europe's been doing it for some time um, but if we can Have data that proves carbon savings through investments the city makes We do those in partnerships with private companies those credits can be actually Become a source of revenue then for the taxpayers um You know as we go to autonomous driving a lot of these cameras will be used probably at some point Uh for autonomous driving there's going to be two models where a private company owns the data And you can imagine all the issues with that Privacy issues and so on or the taxpayers can own it through their local government And i'm an advocate that the taxpayers ought to own it. So we would retain ownership control of the data um There's some ideas popped up And we're still coming up with with uh, we have about 80 80 potential applications Uh from the data that we're obtaining with both swaggering through our cameras Didn't realize he's popped up later. Um One of the things I think government in particular so many times Makes decisions really important decisions that cost the taxpayers tremendous amounts of money They're not doing anything wrong particularly except they're making the decisions based on emotion that data because there's a dearth of data Available to these decision makers. So our camera project with volkswagen will allow us to make better decisions Be able to cut down design the best city that we can to get to that net carbon zero Uh, there's examples of what some of the camera shots look like that. They're analyzing in uh, the volkswagen headquarters in northern germany um But this is done 24 seven computer analysis and sometimes visual They're looking at one of the things we're doing in our intersections We know our fatality rates really low compared to almost any other city anywhere Uh, but we're now looking for near misses to make better improvements and You'd have to put somebody at every intersection doing that visually for a long time But the cameras can do it they can tell us Based on good programming Where those near misses are occurring and then we can focus on that intersection Oops there there we go Visualization of the data based on observed objects And we're not limited to see pedestrians Are seen to as well as bicyclists and that's important It's one of our roundabouts But this is how the technology works so in conclusion to summarize We're trying to build a city for variety of reasons that People have choices where they live We know there's a lot of reasons to build walkable pedestrian friendly cities carbon emissions are one of them Economic developments one we have a shortage of workers in this country Until all the people in the baby boomer generation like me die off. We're going to have this imbalance We're still using lots of services and goods. It's not enough people to do the work There's a lot of statistical data that that shows going to continue for another 25 30 years Only way to fix that is with immigration That's another lecture But but i'm in favor of Of that, but we're not doing that as a country So cities are in this competitive race People in the best and brightest right right i've got 150 corporations Headquartered in caramel if they can't hire and attract the best and brightest people from the best universities around the globe They're not going to expand in caramel indiana. They're and they may leave So we've got to build a beautiful city that competes with the best cities in the globe One way one piece of that is is a clean city City that has good air quality Uh people are concerned about the environment. They're concerned about carbon emissions. That's a part of the piece Uh, but we got to make it a beautiful city We got to make it pedestrian friendly to cut down on people just getting their cars and driving places And we have designed we've done a terrible job As a society in designing our city for the last 75 years I think the pendulum is starting to swing back to design efficient cities we've known since Ancient civilizations that to be successful whether it's a empire or a country or a city You've got to move people and goods around safely safely and efficiently And that's what we're doing We know that people have choices where they're going to live where they're going to choose to raise their families And spend their careers So we've got a build a beautiful workable city and a big piece of that Is building a city where people don't have to spend the u.s. Average of two hours in their car every day and There's health reasons Under sorgseninger when he was governor had a public health commissioner named Richard Jackson Taught at UCLA and then it finished up his career at Berkeley wrote a book urban sprawl and public health We know if people walk just 10 minutes a day BC rates go down by 35% Overweight rates go down by a similar amount. He has a great book. You ought to read this book sometime in your spare time it's Chalk full of data Notre Dame gave them their dry house price for authoring it Another good book to read would be Jeff Spack. He's teaches part time at Harvard used to run the country's endowment for the arts He wrote a book called suburban city rise a sprawl and decline in the american dream He's followed it up with two other books walkable city And walkable city rules all three of those I recommend We need to rethink how we design our cities if we're ever going to get to net carbon zero And hopefully this has helped you think about some of these issues. Do you have any questions? Complaints usually when I'm in karma said we miss anybody's trash Trash pick up usually when I'm speaking locally somebody has a complaint. We have a few minutes left for questions. So please free to speak up Sure, um, I'm for the record. I'm from the Midwest too. I'm from minnesota. Where are you from? I'm from egan minnesota So it's kind of looks like giant Costco pictures you had up there But I'm kind of wondering how we can take this model and apply it to the whole country because it almost feels Permanently like expanded and spread out. So Would that require people to move from the suburbs back into? You know central areas or what would that require? I don't think that's the way it's going to play out I think it's a matter of education Example, hopefully caramel serves as a good example Um Education of city planners educated or people education of people in elected positions that make land use Decisions investment decisions Uh, you know representative governments a hard form of government But we've got to take this this isn't going to be something can be mandated from the federal government It's going to have to be done community by community basically through education discussion And uh examples And it's going to be a long haul. I mean it's not going to happen overnight But that's why it's important for people like you who are going to be leaders in your communities to understand city design is a huge part back when um um We thought we were going to be the u.s. Is going to leave the paris climate agreement the mayors I'm active in the u.s. Congress of mayors who represent national association of mayors We had to gather started doing the math and realized that we could meet the u.s. Goals which probably aren't aggressive enough But we can meet those goals if the city's just banded together and did the right things over the next 10 15 years fortunately, we're back in the tree but We're never out. We just given notice. We were going to go out under the last president But um cities can make a huge impact. I think it's going to be done at the local level There's some things. It's nice to have a good national partner, too. I don't there's some national standards that need to be Be set but a lot of the hard work has to be done at the local level So this is a little more of us a specific question But I was really interested by the financing mechanism you're talking about for the undergrounding of the parking Yes, go into just one or two more cases on that California has a similar state by state, but it's it's what we the acronym is tiff that stands for tax incremental finance And so what happens is we have we set a base year that our redevelopment commission most cities have something by a similar name Sets that base year And then the increase in taxes in the next 25 years goes into a separate pot And then that pot the anticipated revenue you can borrow against it sometimes the developer borrows against it Sometimes the city does it sometimes the city backs it up Every transaction is a bit different Then that money is used to pave that underground parking or that parking Structure that otherwise wouldn't have been economical never would have been built because it's not economical and the developer couldn't have made any money Uh, it's particularly true in areas where land cost is very low You know a big city where the land cost is a lot. Yeah, that makes sense to put the maybe can be done independently But in most of the country it can't be We take our parking garages and face them with housing and businesses as well So they're beautiful and it's not walking past a boring parking garage for a whole block again It goes against that interesting walk idea Um, so we make sure I saw some on campus today and it wasn't an interesting walk Because all you saw was a world car is inside a garage if there had been housing placed on the outside of that parking garage Or a building it would have been a much more interesting walk along that block So we try to do that Um So that's that's how we do it. That's the financial hero takes a partnership So we set up the district. We have to take that money and segregate it We have to enter into a project agreement with the developer each one is independently negotiated That's why a lot of suburban areas and cities aren't using these tools because they're complex and hard quite honestly But we insist on it We've done about 70 of those transactions now in our downtown area in the last 20 some years And hasn't gotten easier to do those as you've developed some institutional knowledge about how that happened Absolutely, and have the private parties also developed some confidence in this Not working with carmel as we first started it I talked to the developer and developers as long as they make a reasonable profit They'll do anything you want them to generally They just want to make money and build something nice and want to be proud of it And they I get them all excited about it They go away and about six weeks later they come back and say we can't do it after a while I realized it was the lenders saying no So I started to say, okay, I will meet with you, but only if you bring your banker with you And then we actually did some seminars for the lenders and once the lenders understood the city's Policy was behind, you know, we weren't going to let this Fail we were going to be there as partners to make sure it didn't fail We're going to build a competitive city A beautiful city then the lenders now there's a line of people trying to do transactions with us Hi, mayor brainert, my name is will actually from Volkswagen and may know that technically that That's Unfortunately not shown up today. So my question to you is Um, especially on this issue of data privacy, um, I think this is a Pretty airy topic for for most folks who live in the u.s Of course, Europe as well, right because when this topic comes up, um, you start to think of this positive and negative like box where you got to check like a positive You can use data to you know, improve the lives of every everyday citizens right on the negative It shows up upon privacy So how would you characterize the sort of the political climate over in Indiana and how It's accepted or treated the privacy The folks from Europe were very concerned about when we started the project And so they said we under our laws we had to block out the faces and the license plates. I said, that's fine Think about it. I'm a lawyer by training And one of the things you learn in law schools, there's no expectation of privacy in a public Place You have an expectation of privacy in a private home or a privately owned building, but when you're on a public street You're in public and somebody can take a picture of you and you can't really stop it them Arrestments a different issue, but just somebody taking a picture is no x you can't control that the police patrol or public streets to keep people safe The cameras are simply an extension Of what government does in these public spaces So if if we're looking for criminals Through one of our cameras, it's an extension of the police We could hire more police officers to do it or we could use a camera Late doesn't change it. It's probably a more efficient way to patrol our streets But legally and a few people have asked me about it And I've explained it in that way and I haven't had any serious complaints I think that would be the case through most of the country I think people know that when they're in a public area, they're they have no Really privacy rights if if they're in a public area and they're in their home You know, if we had one of our cameras looking at somebody's living room, that's a totally different story That would be illegal. Yeah, I mean that's good to know because I think one of the Points that stops a lot of people from wanting to participate in the overall smart city initiative right because Yeah, naturally, you might think this is a good cause to contribute towards either The software side or throughout the means, right? But there's I think a general like maybe Unwarranted fear or for this privacy issue that's stopping a lot of people. So thank you for touching on that subject I think too that We need to make sure it's used Responsibly if it were abused I think there'd be more pushback and there as there should be probably So we don't use it to write tickets for people running through swallowing on many stop lights left But if we did we don't use it for that we use it to go back and look for criminals for Serious crime. We don't enforce traffic violations offer like some of the european countries do I think it's You know, I point out to people that do have concerns about this is controlled by people you elect If you don't like the way it's being used just need to elect new people Thank you great Speaking of one. I can't resist this. I wonder Since you're such a tremendous resource on this subject if there is a way you can leverage this I know you're on various boards and panels with mayors in the us and abroad But I do wonder on the federal side since the current transportation sector Is is also a Hoosier Who I think you know if there's any way you can use him even if he just sends you around to the cities But it sounds like You may be able that Kind of through him Disseminate some of these tricks of the trade that you were talking to Fletcher about in this last question as well Federal highway has some incentives for roundabout construction right now Pete Peter judge came to caramel the first month. He was mayor and I convinced me I grew up near south bend where he was mayor two hours north where I am now And I convinced him to build some roundabouts at least I'm going to take credit for that and uh It went over very well for him. I think so he's familiar with what we've done And as are many of his staff Um, I don't know if he knows our most current statistics I think I probably need to update him and somebody else that asked that question today and Thought I probably should do that Well, with that said, we're totally out of time, but thank you so much for that inspiring talk We're really hoping to see you more in the future. I understand you have some family out in the bay area So anytime you want to stop by feel free to give us a call and we'll Do a good job posting it as we get out of covet. We can do a more cordial job. I thought I'd leave so thank you very much Thank you. Thank you