 The bottom line is that the more cyclists that are out on our streets, the safer our streets are. And it's not about what you wrap around your head, it's about how you design your streets so that you're encouraging people to ride. And what we've seen is that all of the cities that launch bike share systems that have mandated helmets, they're systems tanked. And so, and what we've seen is in New York City after three years, 25 million rides and not a single fatality. I'm pleased to introduce tonight's program with Jeanette Sadakhan in conversation with Harvard University Professor Gerald Caden, discussing her book Street Fight, Handbook for an Urban Revolution, which she co-authored with Seth Salamano. Jeanette Sadakhan is a principal with Bloomberg Associates, working with mayors around the world to reimagine and redesign their cities. She is internationally recognized for her expertise in transportation issues, public policy development and innovative finance. I have to say it's a particular honor to have Gerald Caden do this part of the presentation with me because Gerald Caden had a sentence that completely struck me and moved me and for six and a half years when I was New York City DOT commissioner and now still at Bloomberg Associates, it's pinned above my desk, the only phrase that is pinned above my desk. And what he wrote was to plan his human and to implement his divine. And that is so true. So thank you for that inspiration. And it's wonderful to be here with family and friends, you know, to see Ari and Yohai Benkler, deep, deep, old, old friends and to see Joe Barr and Brooke McKenna raise your hands, you know, people that actually helped implement the change that we saw on the ground in New York City is really wonderful. It's one of the best things about coming to these kinds of events. And before I get started, I want to thank the 4,500 men and women at the New York City Department of Transportation who not only took such good care of our infrastructure, but they were the ones that implemented these changes that I'm going to talk about tonight and they really are the true heroes. And there is one other true hero that's here tonight, and that is Seth Salamano, who's my co-writer, he's my colleague, he was the press secretary, he was the guy that actually messaged the change that was so important, telling the story of what happened on the ground. So I'm going to start with a question. What do you guys think about when you think about streets? Bicycle. Bicycle. Well, that's probably why you're here tonight. Buildings. Buildings. Buildings. What else? Safety. Safety. People. People. Walking. Walking. Walking. Cars. Cars. There we go. Finally cars. Most people start with cars because most people, when they think about the streets, think about a scene that looks like this. And when you think about it, streets are what make a city great or a city not so great. But for so many years, our streets have been governed by this kind of dashboard view at the road. And leaders would look at a street like this and say, yep, everything's working just fine. But it wasn't always this way. You know what this street is? South Station. South Station, exactly. So this is South Station a hundred years ago. And this is South Station today. And you can see the choices were willed away. And this is basically what we have become used to. And streets can be lively places for people. But for decades, they've become places for cars with all of the deadly consequences. 33,000 people dying every year on our streets, you know, abandoned downtowns, lifeless streets. And this didn't happen by chance. This actually happened by design. And this design had an impact on how you get around. I mean, you look at a street like this, like, where would you even walk to on this street, right? And most of the 2.5 million streets in this country go unnoticed like this. And sometimes we have this game I used to play called Frogger. How many played Frogger, right? We all played Frogger. I actually think this should be called pedestrian. And here is the real life translation. And there are all sorts of ways that a street wants to be used. And people show us how the street wants to be used. But this is a sign of how our streets have let people fall through the cracks. And you look at a street like this and you think that people just have given up the battle, that they're tired of constantly fighting the car, and they've forgotten that our streets could actually be any different. And it really wasn't a fair fight. Because when you think about it, the standards for our streets come from the federal government, right? They set the standards about the size of the fonts, you know, that we have, the width of our lanes. It's like the 10 commandments, but 500 pages long and with the best clip art money can buy. They just forgot one thing, people. An emoji interpretation of this would look like this. You start with a city. You throw in some rows and some stop lights. You take out those pesky pedestrians. And voila, you have a fantastic street. Fast cars, a lot of engineers celebrating yet another job well done. Just don't try to cross that street on foot. But it doesn't have to be that way. We can reimagine, we can reclaim, we can redesign our streets. And it just awaits those who care and those who dare. And this vision stemmed from Mayor Bloomberg's Plan YC agenda, this long-range sustainability plan that was about how are we going to accommodate the million more people that were expected to move to New York City by 2030 and still improve the quality of life in neighborhoods and the quality of life in business districts. And that had profound implications for how we designed our streets. So we translated that vision into a new strategic plan, the first ever strategic plan for the New York City Department of Transportation, that brought us closer to the city that we wanted to see. And by the time the Bloomberg administration ended in 2013, New York City was a very different place. First Avenue, before and after, we created 400 miles of bike lanes, 60 pedestrian plazas, seven rapid bus lines. We launched the largest bike share program in North America, and we had the safest streets since the city kept records. But that was the short version. The slightly longer version is that it was a fight every day to give people choices for getting around. And every inch of the 180 acres that we took back from cars and gave back to people on foot and on bike was a battle. And we were fighting to change the culture of New York City and to set New York City in a new direction. And I learned some lessons along the way, lessons that I think are applicable to many, many places, including here in Boston. And the first lesson is that you can paint the city you want to see. And like any city, when we started, we had to start with a budget that we had, and we had to start with the streets that we had. But you can accomplish a lot just with the supplies that you have on hand. And we wanted to show New Yorkers what was possible, because New Yorkers had actually given up hope that nothing had changed on the streets in 60 years. They didn't actually think the change could happen. You take a picture like this, Times Square in the 1950s and Times Square in 2008, 60 years later, nothing has changed except for the tail fins, right? So imagine if you were in business and you didn't change your major capital asset for 50 years. You wouldn't still be in business. So a few months after my appointment, we got to work quickly. This is the first. We took an underutilized parking lot on Pearl Street in Brooklyn and made it into a plaza virtually overnight. Just painted it, just painted the curves, painted the insides, threw up some tables and chairs, turned it from a place for people to park to a place that people actually wanted to be. And it didn't take millions and it didn't take decades. And we did these kinds of transformations all over town on 14th Street, the first pedestrian plaza there. And it's actually hard for people to remember what it was actually like before because once you adapt it, people adopt it. It happens fast. We did this in a place called Madison Square and we turned what was a, what happened there? A warn of lanes created 65,000 square feet of new space and it was like a Star Trek episode. Like I keep talking about it this way because it was. Like no people were there and next day all these people are there. Where were these people before? I have no idea where they were before but they were there. This is actually an art class, an art class that came out one hour after we started putting out there. So I mean we are actually starving for public space in New York City. And today it is one of the most successful public spaces in New York City and people will choose to sit in the plaza rather than in the beautiful Madison Square Park next door because they want to feel the energy of the place, feel the pulse of the city. So after we started doing these showcase projects around the city we actually took our toolkit to Times Square, Crossroads of the World, and to see what was possible. How many of you have been to Times Square? How many of you have been to Times Square in the last five years? Oh, God the tourism program is working. So fantastic. Okay, so you all know that Manhattan's on a grid, Broadway cuts diagonally, it's done wonderful things, it creates squares but it creates these congestion hotspots and for 200 years I think people try to fix it, try to figure out how to make it work better. Slip lanes, different traffic signals, all sorts of things, nothing worked. 350,000 people, 350,000 people walk through Times Square every day. They were 90% of the traffic and yet they only had 10% of the space. So we needed to take a bigger idea, look at it differently. And so we came to Mayor Bloomberg with this big idea that we were gonna close Broadway from 42nd to 47th Street to Cars. We were gonna restore the grid and we were gonna make it work better. And I might add that this was in the middle of a reelection campaign. And so I will never forget, going to City Hall, there was this big round table, second floor of City Hall, big round table, sort of knights of the round table, all the deputy mayors are all assembled around this round table and I'm there and I'm pitching this idea about closing Times Square to Cars and like everybody's not so excited about this plan. And so it didn't look good, I thought, but as it was winding down and I was a little depressed, the mayor turned to me and he said, you know, he looked around the table and he said, you know, I don't ask my commissioners to do the right thing according to the political calendar. I asked my commissioners to do the right thing, period. He shook my hand and he said, let's do it. Which still gives me goosebumps today. I mean, it was an extraordinary moment. And doing it as a pilot program was really key. We were going to test it out, we were going to see if it worked, we'd keep it, if it didn't work, we'd put it back. And that was in a really important moment because it also allowed people to see and feel and touch the changes, you know, small businesses, residents that worked there weren't relying on dry engineering drawings, they could see it for themselves and it worked. People came out immediately and the beach chairs became a symbol of New York City. There were like t-shirts that were printed, I don't know if anybody has one, it says, I beach chair New York. And I thought that was the mark of a totally new approach to things. And nobody talked about the fact that we'd closed Times Square to cars. Everybody talked about the beach chairs. Did you like the beach chairs? The color of the beach chairs. The beach chairs were a little tatty, you know. Was this not working? But nobody talked about the fact that we'd closed Times Square to cars. So if you've got a big project, I think you should be thinking about beach chairs. Joe Barr ordered beach chairs. And for New Yorkers who wouldn't be caught dead in Times Square, it became this great new living room. And the reconstruction work continues to this day and it has really become a destination that is worthy of its name, the crossroads of the world. And it remade this image of New York. Just started with them traffic cones and some beach chairs. I actually have one of those beach chairs in my office today. It's like a little piece of New York City history. I love it, I actually had to get permission to put it there. But it's great. And it's a model that any city can follow. And by any measure, it was a big success. And of course, we measured a lot because I worked for a data-driven mayor who believes in God we trust and everyone else bring data. And we called our plan Greenlight for Midtown because we wanted to make it clear that we were gonna keep traffic moving, but we also developed new ways to measure what was happening beyond the traffic flow. To take a look at the safety and the mobility benefits. And we found 80% fewer people walking in the road and pedestrian and motorist injuries who were down, which is not a surprise, right? Because what would happen is New Yorkers would trade the safety of the sidewalk for the street because you know how we are in New York. If there are people that are walking for people abreast, we start to go crazy. We start to vibrate, you know, literally vibrate. We can't take it, move out of the way. And we would jump into the street. And now people actually had the real estate to walk. And so it was a much safer place. And these kinds of figures actually turned business owners into some of our biggest allies. Because in addition to the safety benefits, we found economic development benefits. It became one of the top 10 retail locations on the planet because cars don't shop, people do. Really important. And we found with these analyses that it was very important to look at what happened, not just curb to curb, but also what happened to the cash register. So this analysis we took to other projects we found 50% increase on retail sales and on the avenues where we put in protected bike lanes. We saw similar results where we put in pedestrian pauses and similarly when we put in SBS road routes. And so these kinds of facts really turned some of our biggest enemies into our biggest allies and our streets moved from being governed by anecdote. I don't like this, businesses don't. To analysis where we could show exactly what happened on the street. And economics aside, there is nothing more important than safety and we were committed to reducing fatalities by 50%. And we started by collecting data on 7,000 crashes. We wanted to find out the who, the what, the where, the when, the why of traffic crashes. We use these findings to make interventions on dangerous corridors and intersections. And I think that really is the reason why traffic fatalities are the lowest levels in 100 years. And this kind of data driven approach is being used by mayors all around the country. And they're committing to this idea of vision zero, eliminated traffic fatalities because they understand that with leadership and with data, these kinds of traffic crashes can be predicted and they can be prevented. And of course, every city is unique, right? Boston is different from LA, is different from Chicago, is different from San Francisco, but we all face some of the same challenges. And so if you see something that you think might work on your streets, try it out for size, just try. And shortly after starting at DOT, I went to Bogota. I checked out their bus rapid transit system. They turned trips that used to take hours into minutes. You've probably all, how many been to Bogota? Who? You should get out to Bogota. New mayor there, Enrique Pinalosa, fantastic. And so really move buses faster. And it was a great lesson for New York City. New York City has the largest bus fleet in North America and we have the slowest bus speeds. In fact, every year, every year Joe knows this, there's a competition between a bus and a person on a trike. And who wins every year? Yep, yep, trike wins every year. And in fact, my chief engineer used to say that the only way to get across town was to be born there. That's true. And so we imported this concept. We did off-board fare collection, dedicated lanes, camera enforced, all-door boarding, and we saw great results. 20% reduction in travel time and a 10% increase in ridership and a 71% increase in retail sales along the corridors, which put a few more holes in the myth that traffic lanes and free parking are the drivers of economic growth. We also went to Copenhagen in 2007 and like almost everybody else in traffic management, we had never seen a protective bike lane. And I toured the city with John and Jan Gell and we found these protective bike lanes. The idea that you could actually take a row of cars and use, push those parked cars away from the curb and use those parked cars to protect the cyclists and the traffic, which was such a brilliant idea and it was so fast, did not take a lot of money. People in parking traded places and we did this all over the city and it was the start of a new era for cyclists and we really built this backbone, this biking backbone into New York City. This is the map in 2007 when we started and this is the map in 2013 and I love this map because it looks so easy. I could do this all day. I'm allered in, no problem. It's just like that, voila, there they go. You all know that, right? So, but we're now seeing these protected lanes explode all over the country since we launched the first one about 10 years ago. And I think that's due to some of the guidance that we're seeing in word of mouth from NACTO and National Association of City Transportation Officials in Boston is a member of this and it's great. And it really has given cities a permission slip to innovate and go beyond the traditional design guidance that didn't even allow protected bike lanes to happen. And you know there is a seismic shift going on when you see a city like Los Angeles building protected bike lanes. And you're also seeing that in Seattle and Indianapolis and Atlanta and Chicago and it is proof that exchanging ideas can kick this car culture to the curb. And you can see signs of what needs to be done by following the people and there are possibilities on your streets here right now. And I'm gonna show you what I mean. This is 51st Street between 6th and 7th Avenue. People will cross mid block because nobody wanted to walk to the end of the street to cross at the crosswalk. And so they will cross mid block and so we channeled a little Harry Potter and we created six and a half avenue. And it's now connected to this eight block series of six and a half avenue crossings. And we did this by just following where the people went and following their footsteps. And this kind of theory applies everywhere you look like here in the Bronx clearly need a sidewalk and the trampled grass was sending a message about what the neighborhood needed. And by looking at where people are walking today you can see the city of tomorrow. And following the people does not stop with street design. We actually turned the community engagement process on its head. We actually asked communities to join together to tell us where they wanted to put plazas. And so they would organize the local political people, the community people, the local businesses and they would take ownership of these places. And so giving people the power actually transforms the city and we expanded these kinds of application paced programs to things like street seats, to bike corrals, to bike racks and we put them where communities said they wanted them. We also worked with artists like David Byrne who created these fantastic bike racks and we worked with local artists to bring new life to old surfaces. And when you think about it, our city is this great canvas of opportunity. You have great artists here in Boston. Think about harnessing them and using them to help transform these spaces. We did it on bridge surfaces on New Jersey barriers. New Jersey barriers, it seems like a joke. It's like a political joke here, New Jersey barriers. And in a city where this used to pass as public seating, we asked people to make recommendations for our new city benches which we put at over a thousand locations. And we also started a system of way finding maps. We have a great system of signage for cars but we have very little system of signage for people. And we actually found out the need when we did a survey and we found out that at any given point in time, 10% of New Yorkers are lost. You probably met them, right? And that's just the 10% that would admit it. So the program was about making it easier to get around and their input was an important part of the process because the public domain is the public's domain and they will do everything they can to defend it, to improve it, to put it back the way it was. So a city government that's looking to make big changes naturally has a push-pull relationship with community groups and those relationships are as important as building, as whatever you build with a concrete asphalt and steel. We have a lot of people that have very strong voices in New York City, we have 59 community boards, we have 130 elected officials, we have 8.5 million opinionated New Yorkers which meant meetings, lots of meetings, 2,000 meetings. Every project where there was a bridge project, a road project, a bike project went through this process which was critical for getting local buy-in. And the advocacy community played a crucial role and there was a growing coalition of New Yorkers much like Bostonians that are passionate about their streets and fighting to take them back. Here, you know, Eric McCord, Paul Steeley White, Clarence Eckerson, Brad Lander, I say these names everywhere I go because they really made a difference. And you take a look here at the Boston Cyclist Union, Walk Boston, Mass Bike, Livable Streets Alliance, Transit Matters, these are the folks that are doing the hard work of making this change happen on the ground. And so I want all of you to give them a big round of applause. It's tireless work, it's thankless work and it's so important. And in New York, we also had Families for Safe Streets that took ownership of this crucial issue and they channeled the excruciating loss that they experienced into meaningful action. And in this case, lowered the speed limit in New York City to 20 miles an hour. And they are making sure that Vision Zero is just not another slogan in New York City. So if I've made it seem like it's very easy, we just wave these wands and that's what we did in New York City. There were some bumps in the road. Does anybody recognize what street this is? That's the Prospect Park West. Yes, Prospect Park West, you get a bonus card. So this was a dangerous street, lot of speeding cars, people cycling on the sidewalk, the community asked us three, four, five times to fix it. And so we did, we put in a two-way protected bike lane and we had great results, speeding down 75%, bike ridership quadrupled, nobody riding on the sidewalk. Fantastic, right? One of our best projects, not so much. As I learned early on, when you push the status quo, the status quo pushes back and these are protesters that came out to object to the fact that these slower speeds somehow made the street less safe. And a local newspaper called it one of the most contested slab of concrete outside the Gaza Strip. And you can see what they found so threatening. I mean, who would want to live near a scene like this, right? I actually thought it was a joke until they filed a lawsuit. And in fact, yeah, no, exactly, right? I mean, so, but unfortunately this lawsuit is still around, I testified three weeks ago in court, six years after we installed this. I have to say that if this lawsuit were a child, it would be old enough to ride in the bike lane. But bike lash is not just a New York phenomenon, as you all know, you've been there, you know, the symptoms, like when you start seeing headlines like these. And I think a surreal part of the bike lash is having to defend actions that make your streets safer instead of defending them in their dangerous status quo state. But you really need to stand your ground and make your policy based on, make your projects based on policy and not on the press. And so we launched city bikes, 6,000 bikes, 330 stations. We knew it would be loved, but we also knew that we would be criticized along the way. A local magazine, I think, did a great job of analyzing why New Yorkers had such strong reactions, apparently. They did like anything healthy, environmental, that involved sharing, or was vaguely French. True, great bend diagram. And the tipping point in this backlash came from a Wall Street Journal video rant. Yes, people have seen this, Dorothy Rabinowitz, editorial board member of the journal who criticized us saying that we were bike crazed and that she represented the majority of New Yorkers that opposed the bikes, that they begrime the city, she said that we were part of some all-powerful bike lobby that was working hand in hand with a totalitarian mayor. So, of course, we printed up these little pins that said all-powerful bike lobby. Totally jazzed about that. But my hero, John Stuart, told it like it was. They're just f'ing bikes, lady. And I think bike lash is a sign that you're doing something right. And it's what happens when you challenge the status quo and you move to a new road order. And today, a typical rider looks like the guy on the right rather than the Mad Max messenger on the left. And it's a major step, people using bikes for commuting, to run errands, to get married, members of Congress, or a bloomin' hour getting around. And it is popular. People are way ahead of the press and the politicians when it comes to these changes. By the end of the Bloomberg administration, we saw 63% support for bike share. We saw 62% support for plazas, 64% support for bike lanes. If this was an election, it would be a landslide. And we saw how much it changed just six months ago when the new administration talked about tearing out the plazas to deal with the scantily clad women and the LMOs that were soliciting tourists for tips. And let's just say it did not go over so well. And people rushed to defend the Times Square plazas and all the rest of the plazas. And when you think about it, six years ago, people were up in arms because we were taking the cars out of Times Square. And six years later, they were up in arms because there was thought about putting them back in. It is a new status quo. And you're seeing this new status quo on your streets, whether it's Western Avenue right here in Cambridge, whether it is on Mass Avenue at Beacon. I mean, these aren't aspirational renderings from some foreign land. These are changes that have been set in stone right here. And you need to fight for these changes. You need to vote for these changes. You need to demand that your elected officials push more of these kinds of changes. And we know it is a fight. It is a fight to take streets back for people. It is a street fight. But it is a fight that we can win. And it is a fight that we must win. Because when you change the street, you change the world. Thank you. Let me just say, first of all, your book is a great read. And for those of you who just heard that presentation, I mean, you can see how funny and smart and charming and everything else Jeanette is. But it was a lot of hard stuff right here. I mean, she's also a transportation geek. But what I want to say about the book is it has all that in there, which is great. And it's very accessible. But it's also just a one hell of a funny read. It's a terrific read. So whether you're a transportation aficionado geek or just someone who's a normal person, I strongly recommend that even without. They're mutually exclusive? We can talk about that. Even without a 20% discount. So look, on April 27, 2007, at a press conference announcing your appointment, you write in your book that Mayor Bloomberg turned to you and said, and I have to read this. He must have said this, by the way, Soto Voce, I assume. He said, don't fuck it up. That's in her book. And you didn't, by the way. And that raises, I think, an important question, because that's really the mayor just turning it over to you, as you said. And I want to ask, how important was it? Is it, do you think, for the success of a commissioner in transportation or anything? But let's say you as transportation commissioner to have a mayor backing you up. And then, of course, there's this particular mayor, Mayor Bloomberg. I mean, is that without that? Yeah, no, it's not like unless you have Mayor Bloomberg all is lost. I mean, it definitely helps. And when he said that to me, I walked around for six months being very concerned about this don't fuck it up thing. I was really worried about it, don't fuck it up. Then I found out he said that to everybody. I was much more relinked after I heard that. But then in the beginning, when we started doing a lot of the work, I did feel like we were given this long leash. We kept doing all these things. We did a lot of work right after I was appointed in 2007, we did bus lanes, and we did protected bike lanes, and we did plazas, we did all this stuff. And I kept wondering, is this just paying out the line until I'm choked or something like that? But he is a guy that is all about innovation and he really likes to try things out. But I think that the big moment with my Bloomberg really came when the worst of the bike lash hit, where it was a daily, daily barrage. I mean the tabloids every day would have cartoons and pictures and headlines, horrible stuff. And I started feeling like I was gonna lose my job. And so I actually prepared, I went to talk to the mayor to say like, because you don't wanna be a liability. And it was feeling kind of grim at this point. And he wouldn't even like hear it. He wouldn't even hear it. And the rumor around City Hall was that like if the tabloids call for your resignation, then you have a job for life in the administration. So I clearly had a job for life. And actually the New York Post ended up writing an editorial that said, please keep Jeanette because they were doing this reverse psychology thing. Like maybe if they called for me to stay, he would fire me. So it helps to work for a mayor that really does get it. But these kinds of changes, because so much of the work that we did, you can try it and see if it works. And if it doesn't work, put it back. And mayors are really interested in doing something that can happen in a four year period, right? Very hard to do an infrastructure project that happens within four years. That rarely happens. And it's also rare for people to say, nope, our streets are absolutely perfect and you shouldn't touch them or try. Anything at all, right? And so I think that that idea of trying things is really appealing to mayors around the world. And so it's not just a New York City story. I think the interesting piece is you're seeing this kind of work happen all over the country and in many places around the world. Right, so it's not everybody can have Mayor Bloomberg. I mean, maybe he'll be Mayor of London, who knows. But... No. No? I don't think so. All right, maybe Boris Johnson, well. All right, so you need the deeply supportive mayor. It's great if you have that kind of mayor. But you raise this interesting issue of fast implementation. Right in your book, the fast implementation of projects proved to be far more effective than the traditional model of attempting to achieve near unanimity on projects. And efforts to reach an idealized consensus have resulted in years of indecision, inaction and paralysis by analysis as leaders attempt to placate the opposition that accompanies any change to streets. Right. So that does raise a question, I suppose, of the democratic process and traditional public participation models or even non-traditional or collaborative models. And you showed an image tonight, even, of lots of people and getting the advocates involved. But at some level, would you say, you know what, you've got to sort of go with what you think is right. Maybe do a pilot project. You know, it doesn't have to be everything. It can't be everything. Go fast. And why are you a little less about the bike lash and everything else? Well, you know, I think it's important. We didn't start, and we started in communities where there was support for the work, right? So we did the showcase, the pilots, in places where we knew that there was a lot of appetite for that project. And so that actually, that made it easy to do a bunch of the, if we'd started doing a pilot project in Times Square right off the bat, you know, we wouldn't be having this conversation today. But so doing that I think is really, it's important to be very opportunistic about where you start your innovations. And then, you know, it's a really, I think, an inaccurate meme that we just went in and waved this wand into heck with everybody's opinion. All of our projects went through community board review and approval, right? And so what we wanted to do was demonstrate what was possible on the streets, because New Yorkers really didn't have any imagination, have any thought about how they could be different because they hadn't been different in 60 years. Our streets had been in suspended animation for 60 years. So nobody had any expectation that the street could be different in. So changing people's expectation by showing them the world of the possible quickly and in places where they were interested in that kind of change went a long way to people saying like, hey, I'd like that. And sort of skip over the 25 years of planning studies and modeling studies and all the rest because in New York City, any capital construction project takes at least five years to get done. So we would still be talking about Times Square or any of these projects if we had gone through the traditional process. So showing the world of the possible, moving quickly, working in areas where there was support and then turning the entire program into an application-based program. So the communities actually applied to us. They were the ones that drove the innovation. And so part of that was really flipping the relationship that you have with government on its head. So by the end of the administration, we had this huge demand for plazas, for bike lanes, for bus lanes. And I think it's really important because it's important for getting the DNA of change really inculcated into the system. It'd be very difficult for a subsequent administration that has like lots of communities demanding all of these projects to say no. Right. So it's interesting in the book you, maybe not surprisingly when you really think about what you did because you were a builder. So you write quite favorably about Robert Moses as well as Jane Jacobs. And it makes me think, are you really the stepchild of the two of them? Or, well, I assume stepchild. Well, Mike Lumbergrove tiled up, which really made me creep down. What about that? It was a very quick question. Well, actually, there are two very influential Janes in your life. And you write about this quite poignantly, I think. Your mother, Jane McCarthy, has played, obviously, a major role in your life. And she advised you, which was, I think, good advice, that if you want to touch people's lives, you either go into sanitation or transportation. How great is that? So my question, could you have been an equally transformative commissioner of sanitation? And if so, how? And you've never been asked that question. No, I have not been asked that question. I'm just gonna leave it to your imaginations. Audience? Well, look, I mean, you know the thing that's really important about this book? Is this book is about transportation, but this book can be about almost anything. I mean, moving quickly, having a vision, moving quickly, trying things out, measuring it with data, looking at the impacts. This is, these are ideas that work in virtually every field. And so whether it's sanitation, whether it's education, whether it's criminal justice, we need to move at a very different metabolism than the way we've moved to date. Did part of the pilot idea come from, I'll now give your father equal time, Oran Sada Khan, who advised you to throw mud balls at the wall and see what sticks. By the way, is that exactly what he said? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. He probably liked me to put it a little more profoundly, but it was really about the mud balls. And you know, I loved that analogy. You know, the idea of just to keep trying things and throw things and see what sticks just keep experimenting. And he was really about, if you're not experimenting, if you're not trying new things, if you're not pushing the envelope, then you are not working hard enough. And he was really all about that. So yeah, I mean, I still, I read about it in the book. I still, every time I walk through a plaza, I think of him, you know, and yeah. All right. Well, sticking with your family. Wow, this is really getting deep. Well, this is all in your book. You see, it's really a, it's a personal kind of revelation of your, I mean, it's in your book. Yeah. I think that's terrific. Because these, we are not just, you know, born as commissioners of transportation. We come to that. So you were riding double on a bike steered by your husband. Yeah. Mark Geistfeld. And I think, by the way, since you were riding double in New York City, it's a good thing that one of his specialties indeed is tort law. He's a law professor at NYU. That's so good. So look, riding in Manhattan or other American cities, no matter what you say, but you can disagree with me, isn't the same as riding in Amsterdam. I mean, or is it? I mean, do you think I'm being unfair? I was just in Amsterdam a couple of months ago and went riding out in the rain. And what did you think? And I felt pretty safe and good. Why? And that's because of the dedicated lanes, the culture. I mean, lots of, most people were sort of going along on bikes. And did anybody have helmets? Very few helmets, right? Not that I, well, I'm going to get to that in a moment. Oh, okay, sorry. Because I do wonder, but let me get to that right now, in fact. I do wonder why would the city bike program quite frankly? And I think I know the answer and it's partially New Zealand and it didn't work there fully. And there are other sort of, that helmets were indeed not sort of part of, right next to the bikes, there's the helmet dispenser. So that we get people to wear helmets. Well, think about it for a second, first of all. Just think about it for a second. First of all, these huge helmet dispensing machines. And then also like wearing somebody else's helmet. Is that like, I mean, talk about creeping you out. That one is like really bad. But the bottom line is, is that the more cyclists that are out on our streets, the safer our streets are. And it's not about what you wrap around your head. It's about how you design your streets so that you're encouraging people to ride. And what we've seen is that all of the cities that launch bike share systems that had mandated helmets, they're systems tanked. And so, and what we've seen is, in New York City after three years, 25 million rides and not a single fatality, by the way. So what we're seeing is that the more and more, there is a truism, safety in numbers. The more cyclists that we see on our streets, the safer our streets are, not only for cyclists, but they're safer for everybody else on the street. Because when motorists are going down, driving down a street and they see pedestrians on the pedestrian islands and cyclists in the lanes, they start to naturally slow down. And instead of seeing a street that looks like a runway that's like, gentlemen, prepare for takeoff and zoom as fast as you can to get through the green light and the light after that, it really changes the behavior on the street and people look out for one another. And that is a really important part of what cyclists can bring to a city. And so I really believe if you wanna build a better city, start by building a bike lane. Well, clearly that's absolutely central. You bike backlash, by the way. I mean, I loved your story, you know, you're telling of the women on bikes and the experience in the Williamsburg neighborhood, which has many observant Jews located there. And the headline in the newspaper that you write about was Hossied Lust Cause. Or it's the Hossied versus the Hotties in a Brooklyn bike war because they didn't like, I guess, women riding bicycles. I guess you can't really make these things up. I mean, your book is just very, very funny. With all of the backlash to the bikes, to the plazas, et cetera, I do wonder, and I'm sincere on this, did your feelings ever actually get hurt? And I'm asking sincerely. I mean, was that tough? Yes, of course, of course my feelings were hurt. I mean, do you just say, no, I'm doing it fine, I'm right, this is great, and all that, or? No, no, I mean, you definitely have to learn how to take criticism. And you think you know it until it's day after day after day, and then it gets really hard when you go for longer and longer runs. And my son, Max, who was nine years old when I started at New York City DOT, and then he's now in college, he used to say, we had this funny thing where I came back after being attacked one day, really upset by the New York Post, some latest thing they'd done, and Max was like, you know, mom, nobody beats the New York Post. And then, like a couple of days later, I was a big cartoon in the daily news and big story, and I was very upset and came back home and Max said, like, you know, mom, nobody really reads the daily news. And then, about two weeks later, there was this terrible hit piece in the New York Times, and Max said, well, yeah, some people read the news. So was the reporter Matt Flagenheimer? No, Matt actually wrote a great story. Well, this is great in your book when you talk about how, I guess, you know, starting with the bikes, he's, you know, you get him on a bike, right, when you're starting with the program, and he nearly crashes. And later on, I guess, took bike lessons. Oh, it was horrible. I mean, I've never seen, I've never had my heart drop that quickly into my stomach, so we launched CityBike, we were launching the CityBike program, the branding, right, so CityBike is there, CityBank is there, and so I'm pressing one of these new bikes on Matt Flagenheimer, the new transportation reporter for the New York Times. Right, I'm like, no, no, he's like, no, no, it's okay. I'm like, no, no, ride the bike, ride it, you'll see, you'll tell you, you'll like it. And he gets on the bike, and he's like, and it's clear, he's going to crash and fall. And like, literally, he like, starts to fall over, and I'm like, oh my God, there goes, like, you know, I was worried about the press coverage before. This is definitely not helping. And so what he did is he actually turned this experience, he went to take a learn to bike course, and then he turned it into a front page story in the New York Times, which was fantastic, which was like something like, whoa, whoa, whoa, ah, or something like that. So, but you never know one of those very scary moments. So, you know, let's talk about public space a little bit, and we're going to get to our colleagues here in the audience shortly. I mean, you really became, in some ways, the commissioner of public space in New York. You conceived of it that way, really, as I own a hell of a lot of real estate. 25% of the land mass in New York City is streets. I can do sort of, not whatever I want to do with it, but you know, I can figure out how to use this. And of course we've got the commissioner of parks, and you know, the commissioner has, in this case, he has his parks. They're privately owned public spaces, something near and dear to my heart, owned by private developers, private owners of residential commercial buildings. You know, you added up 10% of Central Park, but you have 25% of the city, and you realize this is not about streets as for cars, obviously, and you're totally known for that and you mentioned that. Viewed through another lens, we had control over more than just concrete, asphalt, steel, and striping lanes. These are the fundamental materials that govern the entire public realm, and it's just interesting to me that you became, I think, the public space curator of New York City. Well, it's a we kind of a proposition. Always a we. But I think that it was, it was really transformative in looking at the space between buildings very differently, that it wasn't just about cars, that it was really about people, and it was, it was a really, it was a sea change, and changing the status quo, which was all about that, it's about cars, it's about cars, and when you started to show the incredible opportunities that were hidden in plain sight, literally trapped between these lanes, right, overly wide lanes that we had in the city, that were really more designed for highways than they were for cities, right? So you could repurpose that and use it to make life in the city much better. That was a huge thing. I mean, one of my lines that I used to say was like that I was the biggest real estate developer in New York City and I was standing Donald Trump. Who? So now I say other people. But it is, but it is, it is this notion that I think that transportation professionals are starting to really be much more ambitious about what they can do with this space. One of the great things that we had from the legacy of Robert Moses was these incredibly wide streets that we could actually then repurpose for better and higher use. Do you think cities ought to have somebody who sort of looks at the whole public space sphere, because it's not just streets, it is also parks. It's privately owned public spaces and other kinds of things in a way. I mean, it's funny, you were terrific and a commissioner of transportation and yes, you have your real estate. But in a way, horizontally, there's more public spaces. Well, it's a really important point. And I worked hand in glove with Adrian Benabee, who was a fantastic parks commissioner. But it really does tie. And I said this at the beginning and I maybe just need to underscore it that a lot of this vision came from Plan YC, which was the Mayor's Long Range Sustainability Program. And it had like 132 different initiatives in it. And but the big piece, one of the big pieces that it did was it busted through the silos of city planning, right? Instead of just like transportation over here and environment over here and parks over here, it broke through that and took a holistic view of that real estate, of all of that asset group and said, how are we going to look at this differently so that we actually make the best possible use and are the smartest we can be in terms of using these assets to accommodate and improve the city? So two final questions very quickly. Careers in transportation, there may be students here, there may be others who would like to get into transportation. Do it. Do it. What should they do? Now we need more now. What should they do? Join up now. What should they do other than joining up now? I mean, is there an education at? That's good. Join up now. A lawyer? I mean, is there a training in particular that you'd recommend? No, I mean, I think everybody takes their own path. I mean, certainly looking at my career, it only made sense in the rear view mirror. It did not make sense as I was going through it. But I think following your passion is really important and I think that what's really exciting to me is the young people that I see that are really passionate about transportation and urban planning and changing the world and I am very hopeful based on the people that I see about what the future can be. So you're right now finally, and this is my final question, one of the Avengers at Bloomberg Associates when I've talked about that before. I'm going to quote that. Yes, I know. So what's your future? You're at Bloomberg Associates now. Could you share with us what you see for your future? Well, I'm really at Bloomberg Associates. It's funny, I spent half my career on the public sector and half on the private sector and this is now kind of at Bloomberg Associates the blending of the two really. And so we provide council to mayors around the country and around the world for free and in exchange these mayors agreed to implement the programs and fund them and so it's kind of like a catalytic philanthropy and so it doesn't really get much better than that. So I'm pretty happy where we are right now and I just find it really exciting to be able to translate some of the lessons that we've learned in New York City and help other cities improve their streets, improve the quality of life in their neighborhoods and improve the way people get around affordably, effectively, quickly. I just think it's a really interesting moment in time that we are in with cities and when cities are in the future, half the world lives in cities. You know those numbers are growing and I think it's an incredible moment in time and I encourage all of you to not do sanitation, transportation and thank you. Alright, so what do you think is sort of the future of public streets and public spaces? Because if you ask me I think that the sort of ultimate sign of success is when you go into like a bank or a little restaurant and instead of having like a mural of the city 120 years ago or paintings of like the streets from Sienna or Florence or something like that it has pictures of the city then and there. Well I think you're starting to see cities reclaim, you know, the space for people and you're starting to see, you know, healthy streets have like lots of different kinds of activities going on and I actually think you see it, you know, the more people you see on the street the better quality a street has and so you're seeing, through NACTO the National Association of City Transportation Officials and the design guidance that's out there a lot of cities that may not have, that have wanted to make these kinds of changes to redesign their streets to make them easier and better for people but didn't actually have the design guidance to point to because the Green Book, the METCD wouldn't allow those kinds of innovations to happen and so I think what you're going to see is more and more flourishing of these kinds of ideas because it's not just green crunchy good things to do they're actually really important for economic development and they're really important for the safety and security of people in a city, not to mention the livability and quality of life and for cities, people, you know companies and people can move almost anywhere these days, right? And so improving the quality of life of your city is an economic development strategy so I think you're starting to see mirrors get more and more competitive about who can build the most bike lanes who can do the most plazas I mean when I was there like Rahm Emanuel I was more protective like you I was like that's a good competition to have A comment on slow zones Listen, Europe December talks a lot of transition planners in Switzerland they're doing slow zones in all the city these are 20, 30 kilometer sections of the city and the tire cities are being built in that way how do you see the future of slow zones? Well, in the interest of time I cut this talk way down and I had, even though it must have felt like forever but we did have, we did do slow zones and in fact so these 20 mile hour zones where we would narrow the streets in so many neighborhoods, I don't know if it is true here but in so many neighborhoods in New York City these streets and neighborhoods were used as shortcuts and it was a disaster and so these cars would go speeding through and so we created an application based program where I talked about how you can apply for plazas, you can apply for bike lanes you can apply for bustling and so you could apply for neighborhood slow zones because we heard people were just devastated about the speeding that was happening in their neighborhoods and so narrowing the street putting up really distinctive signs and we put them all over the city and so neighborhoods could apply for neighborhood slow zones That's such a great question and we broke a smiley did a lot of this work so we actually ended up doing a lot on enforcement and on permitting and we also found that like we would see a construction zone happen and then the bike lane in particular would always seem to just get disappeared, you know, like it didn't matter so we actually started enforcing it and we put it into our guidance that if a construction project was happening you had to maintain the bike lane, you had to protect it and build it and we would cite people that didn't follow the rules Of your 4,500 employees how many were enforcement people? Well, we didn't have a lot of enforcement people actually we actually depended on a lot on PD for a lot of the enforcement so I had a very good relationship with our police commissioner who was actually fantastic he did an amazing job, he was probably one of the most progressive police commissioners in transportation that this country has ever seen but it is a big issue and coordinating those development plans is really important so it's really important that the city itself, you know work to police that, you know I work in public health and I don't know how much you know Boston but it's a very segregated city and I work a lot in sort of poor racial and ethnically people in color neighborhoods and I just worry a lot about the how these designs get rolled out like in Boston there's much talk about protected bike lane, historic you know sort of it's more almost like a purist thing you know, part of Boston as opposed to, you know a lot of these neighborhoods where you don't see bicyclists because they would be insane I mean I'm like out there, you know going on and so I just worry about as you talk to neighborhoods and other city people because they're not necessarily the communities that are going to have the loudest voices like we want the protected bike lanes first, you know well, you know, my first of all I think transportation is all about social justice right, it really is all about social justice and we were all about providing choices for people to get around so that they didn't have to have a car a car is $10,000 a year and all of that, right but you're not going to wish people onto buses or bikes or anything like that if they're not safe, if they don't feel safe doing so and so we have to provide high quality choices in neighborhoods all across the country and all across the city and so that's what we did in New York we had a five borough plan and when it came to things like bike lanes, we created this interconnected network that wasn't all about like Midtown Manhattan most of the work was actually outside and in particular we focused a lot when we cited our bike share stations and we're working on developing that network to make sure that these stations were next to public housing and that we provided discounted fees for people that joined the program because we need to actually make it easier for people to get around people of all colors, sizes, shapes, income groups and that is an extraordinarily important part of the transportation development strategy that we pursued you talked about the importance of trying things out and innovation is about a willingness to fail could you give us an example of something that seemed like an awesome idea that didn't work and what you did after that? yeah, sure it was this thing called congestion pricing and which was it actually I wear a Sheldon's silver now yeah, you got it but it was this idea and congestion pricing like two terrible words married together awful branding, really terrible like bang, terrible idea that way so that didn't work but the thing that was really interesting is that even though congestion pricing didn't pass we could go read the book for the story but the point was that it actually changed the conversation in New York City and it really changed the understanding about how people got around which was really, really important and it laid a very different groundwork so even though it didn't pass I think the conversation was a really important one to have and now today, actually legislation was just introduced last week for a new plan much better named called Move New York like, of course Move New York, not congestion pricing Move New York and so I do think that it's a matter of when, not a matter of if with that but these are also issues of the state versus the city and who controls what you're allowed to do with regard to taxation in this place this has been a fantastic event and thanks so much for coming up here to talk to us my question is about data especially because you just mentioned social justice I think sometimes it feels like data is actually the enemy because the traffic engineer can put numbers and data into a model and then say, well in 2030 you're going to have 18 million cars and I need double left turn lanes and double right turn lanes and let's make a seven lane wide road and I have data in a queue length and I have all this data that tells me this is what I need to do and then we're on the other side trying to say well, pedestrian safety and vision zero and speeding and quality of place and a lot of softer things and we don't have a metric for what's the chance someone's going to die crossing that street or people will be too scared to bite to the new train station because your roads are horrible and so it feels like data can trump all these other things it's a really important point but I think the thing that's really interesting is that study after study after study has shown that the more when you expand a highway you just expand congestion that's what happens you don't relieve congestion Louis Mumford came up with this in the 1950s where he said like solving congestion by adding more lanes is like solving obesity by loosening your belt it doesn't work it doesn't work and so what you're starting to see is traffic engineers starting to understand that a little bit more we've got a long way to go but the other piece is to point out what else happens on the street you can actually find out how dangerous the street is and I actually think that the safety piece is one of the most important ways and one of the most important data points that you can have it's made a huge difference in terms of the vocabulary and the understanding that New Yorkers have about their streets it's become top of mind really top of mind and it wasn't there before so I think continuing to push that message about the safety piece is really important and I also think that some of the economic analyses are really important in terms of the value associated with streets that are easy to walk and bike along because it is that notion that cars don't shop, people do and when local businesses can see the benefit they start to be much more supportive so I think that can start but we've got a long way to go because so many of the studies are all about how fast the cars are moving how many cars are there and they're not about all the other ways the street is used so we have a lot further to go in terms of getting those data points together and what he has them to make the case I was trying to talk more about streets that don't exist yet when you're planning new streets so you can't measure safety and talk about induced demand in the district like you're a hippie all this great stuff done as a republican administration in a very democratic city did that actually help? well I think he's been sort of all all of the above he's sort of been all around and maybe that helped I mean he's a very pragmatic mayor and so he was really all about innovation as usual not business as usual and really wanted to try new things and I think that the success that New York City had over that 12 year period of time shows you know and a lot of unconventional ideas became conventional in that period of time I'm curious about if there's ever been sort of lawsuits I guess about we're entrusting our families and our most precious people to our streets and I'm wondering if you know I think how do you see streets you know I see them as pretty polluted pollution machines and you know it's not really fair and it's I'm curious if anybody's ever held responsible for either safety issues in other words poor planning, poor design that invites I guess I'm wondering how if there's I know I feel like we are always trying to be nice and good and we had the proper way and being inclusive and all that good stuff but I'm wondering if there's any like legal stuff. You know it's such a good question and we talk about this in the book that when you think about it we have 33,000 people dying every year on our streets and nobody is held responsible like you should lose your job right for that at least but nobody has held accountable for this. It's insane that we don't have accountability in this arena so I think that we're starting to we're starting to and I think you're starting to see a movement you see that with the vision zero movement you're actually starting to see cities adopt vision zero I think they're 14 right now and it's 17 including Cambridge thank you but you're starting to see locality say no this is not acceptable we're not taking the carnage on our streets anymore we're not living with this blood on our hands and so we're going to do something about it and we're going to direct the programs and we're going to make sure that this is addressed and I think it's a really important question I think it's a really important issue and I think you're seeing hopeful signs that changes around the corner. Janette Sada Khan sitting here our guest this evening we want to thank you so much for an incredible interview. I don't believe that the people are illegal I don't use illegal as a noun many people choose to do so and I think that some of our Republican candidates have certainly added a lot more heat than light to an already incendiary debate.