 I'm Liza Mundy. I'm the head of New America's Bread-Winning and Caregiving Program, which is our fancy name for our work family program. We are very happy to have with us from Los Angeles, Salita Reynolds, who is the general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation. We're going to talk about a topic that is very near and dear to the heart of every working parent, which is how you get from place A to place B to place C in the course of a single day, which is something that we all have to do. And in cities, there are particular challenges, but I think there are also really innovative and wonderful opportunities that are changing the lives of people and changing the face of cities. Salita is also on the advisory board of WTS International, which is an organization of female transportation planners that seeks to nurture women in leadership roles and drive more women into what is a very male-dominated field. And these women are producing a lot of the innovative solutions to work family and transportation challenges and literally changing the face of cities around the United States. Just to elaborate a little bit on your bio, Salita is, as head of the Department of Transportation, she's responsible for managing over 6,500 miles of streets, that's 6,500 miles of streets, 26 million trips on dash buses, 35,000 parking meters, and the most advanced traffic signal system in the country with 4,500 traffic lights. She's responsible for implementing Great Streets for Los Angeles, which is a plan to reduce traffic deaths, double the number of people riding bites, and expand access to transportation choices for Angelenos and the region. We're really glad that you're here. We hope that you left somebody in charge. I have a few people. OK, good. So LA is still moving today. Traffic signal's still on. OK, that's great. Traffic is still in Los Angeles. Everybody relax. Great. So as I said, as a working parent who lives in the suburbs and works in the city, just the daily logistics of getting around is a subject that is very near and dear to my heart, also now as the parent of teenagers who have been learning to drive. It's a subject near and dear to my heart. And whenever I think about sort of cities and work family logistics, my memory is drawn actually to the morning of September 11, 2001, I had two young children who were both in different schools, one in preschool, one in elementary school. My husband that morning had already left for his job in national security. He was already in a vault in DC. When I had dropped my son off at preschool and heard over the radio what was happening, and it was not clear really at that point what was happening, there was a lot of confusion and panic, obviously. And I didn't know whether to pick up my kids or whether they should shelter in place, whether I should go to work, I worked for a newspaper, this was news. But I knew that I didn't want to have a tunnel, a metro tunnel or a bridge in between myself and my children on a day like 9-11. So I made the choice to pick up my kids, to take them to my house, to let my boss know that I was going to try to work from home at a time when it wasn't that common to do so. I knew I wasn't going to see my spouse for a long time that day. I had friends who were already in DC, and I tried to reach them to say I could pick up their children from school. They were already walking across the Key Bridge to try to get back to Arlington to their kids. Meanwhile, our neighbors had very young children in daycare in the Pentagon. They were both employed by the Pentagon but did not work in the Pentagon. So they were also separated from their children. And the mother finally commandeered a vehicle just to drive up to the Pentagon to make sure that their children were safe and they were. But I think that day just sort of cast into relief the really fragile system that we all have, the sort of day-to-day challenges where you're going to be physically separated from your children, from your partner if you have one, and your children are also probably physically separated from each other if there's a couple years between them. And so it just cast into relief the challenges that we all face every day at the same time now as the parent of teenagers learning how to drive. I have seen a lot of changes in cities that we're going to talk about today. So it seems even a very different environment than it was 14 or 15 years ago. So I thought I would, the first question I would ask is that I'm not one of the people who believes that the world will automatically be better if women are running it, although it would be great to have more women running more parts of it. But as we get more women in charge of major transportation systems in cities, how do things change, if at all? And let's say you're a working parent and when you moved to Los Angeles you had to make a decision about where you were going to live and how your work day was going to unfold. Yeah, and before I get to that, just a word about disasters and what they teach us about transportation. A while ago, a few years ago, Washington, D.C. had an earthquake, and as somebody who's lived for the last 17 years on the West Coast in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle, we all felt for you, but also had a little chuckle at your expense, and that at the time. Okay, the bottles rattled on the shelves. Never forget, hashtag never forget. The thing that was fascinating to me is that Washington, D.C. had just launched capital bike share not long before that. And that was the day where there was a single biggest sort of spike in use for bike sharing. You could see bike share sort of struggling along and then on that day it just went to the heavens. So it told us a lot about what kind of safety nets exist when major disasters strike and they are not always the things that come front of mind. And when I tell my emergency preparedness guys that we got to get bike share because earthquake, they look at me kind of cross-eyed. But to answer your original question, Mayor Garcetti just released, Eric Garcetti in Los Angeles just released the first of three reports on the status of women and girls in Los Angeles. And one of the pieces of that was about women in leadership and government, in particular currently there is only one woman on the Los Angeles City Council. And the mayor has made it a point to try and rectify that in the leadership roles and particularly in non-traditional departments. So there's a woman who manages the Department of Water and Power, Department of Transportation. He has appointed about 50% of the general managers and commissioners, he's appointed have been women. So I think that we have yet to see what kind of results will come from that kind of intentional placement of women in leadership roles. But what I will say is that in the last five or 10 years there has been a complete sea change in transportation in particular, how we think about incorporating public health, injury prevention, the childhood obesity epidemic, economic development into transportation. Sort of most notably in New York, under the leadership of Jeanette Sadek Khan, who was a commissioner of transportation under Mayor Bloomberg. She really changed the game and changed the playbook that we use to design streets. And really what she did was to create the kind of environment where women in particular and children sort of and older adults, people eight to 80, would feel more comfortable getting on a bike and would be safer, measurably safer walking. The current commissioner, Polly Trottenberg, has carried that into a strong focus on Vision Zero, which is sort of a radical goal to get to zero traffic deaths in a very short amount of time. Because in a lot of our cities now we have more people dying, trying to get around town than we do from sort of homicides and gang and gun violence, but we consider that a normal price of getting around town. So I think that what you see in some of these cities where women have sort of taken on leadership roles is a greater emphasis on safety, a very different approach to the design of the streets and how space is allocated and who the streets are for, who they are there to serve. And then to your question about moving to Los Angeles because I'm in transportation, the very first thing I thought is that I wanna live within a 20 minute transit commute of where I was gonna work. I wanted to live in a neighborhood with an excellent walk score, so I wanted to live in a place where myself and my two kids and my husband would be able to walk. What is a walk score exactly? Walk score is this really easy to understand tool that allows you to put in your address and then it gives you a score of zero to 100 and it's based on the number of destinations you could easily reach on foot. So it is a measure, an immediate measure of how much time you might have to spend in your car if you lived in that given location. So I wanted a good walk score, I wanted a 20 minute transit commute and I wanted reasonably acceptable public schools, which is in Los Angeles that narrows you down to about three neighborhoods depending on where you work. So it was a way first a very practical way to sort of narrow down a very large city, but also a recognition that we asked the transportation system to do a lot of heavy lifting. We asked the transportation system to sort of account for the fact that we have a jobs housing mismatch, that we have a lack of affordable housing near where people work, that we don't have strong quality, free public education that is universally sort of accessible to folks. And so the transportation system has to bear the burden of all of those policy pieces. So I think about that a lot in my commute and also when I talk to people because I'm frequently asked to fix traffic in Los Angeles and I sort of feel like, well let's fix wages and affordable housing and then we can work on it. And then people can live anywhere, everybody can live close to where they work because every school system is desirable and every neighborhood is desirable. And there's enough housing for people to live where they want to live. I thought journalists had to field a lot of complaints and criticism about their work and I'm afraid I had not thought about the plight of the transportation plan. Spends their time in government. Right, right, right, of course. So, and let's talk a little bit more about the changes that have taken place, the revolution that's taken place in cities because when I look around at DC and I look at the bike lanes and I look at the changes and I'm really happy to see all of those changes. I don't really think of them as, I think of them as changes that are mostly for the benefit, I would say of millennials actually. I think of them as being for the benefit of single people and I have actually said to my 16 year old son, you know, why don't you bike? Why don't you use the metro system? You don't necessarily need to get your license. In fact, I didn't even have to say that to him. You know, the way that we were all, you know, at the DMV when we were 16 to get our license, he didn't get his license for about a year because he didn't feel the need to. But in what way are these revolutionary changes of benefit to working families, if at all? So that's not just your son, that's actually a strong trend across there, deferring, getting their driver's licenses, they own fewer vehicles. And even younger adults as they come into cities because it's impossible to get a job which is an undergraduate degree anymore, you have to have a master's which means you come into the workforce usually under crushing debt. So you literally cannot afford a car which is a really expensive, expensive extra thing. You know, I also think about older adults. You know, older adults that would like to and are going to want to age in place and we have done absolutely nothing to prepare for that. We have not clustered services. We have not built places where people can be car light or car free that meet them where they are. And then when I think about working families in particular, I don't so much think about the commute because that is a really complex thing to overcome requires heavy investment in really expensive infrastructure. But I think a lot about giving families the opportunity to unplug and spend time with each other and work physical activity into their normal daily lives. And the way that we've designed sort of biking and walking infrastructure in this country for the last 50 years has not accommodated that. So, you know, there's some great information about what women in particular want. You know, when you look at who bikes in America and American cities, it's usually three or four to one men to women. You just, we are not, there are not a lot of women out. Is it a heels thing? I mean, is it? It's not, because when you go to, we can go, I'll get on a bike share bike after this. When you look at Scandinavian countries, Northern European countries, it is exactly the opposite. Right. And women in those countries drive the transportation decisions, just like women in this country do. So, you know, there is, and why is that? Well, I think it, part of it is cultural, clearly. But I think it begins and ends with the infrastructure. When there is nothing between you and moving traffic, but a four inch wide white stripe, you are not gonna get on a bike and you're not gonna put your kid on a bike. You know, and you're definitely not gonna take your parents out for a bike ride. And so then you have dramatically reduced the amount of roaming space that you have as a family and with your kids on the weekends or when you wanna do errands or when you wanna, you know, go to the store, go out to eat breakfast, go pick up your dry cleaning. It all has to happen in a car because the perception of safety is so important for women in particular. And that is why that separation that gets built into sort of more progressive or sort of 21st century bike infrastructure has resulted in a dramatic increase in the number of women biking in those cities and in those places where it exists. So if you have physical curbs that separate the bike lane from the, you're more likely to get women in those lanes. It can be a physical curb, it can be a plastic bollard, it can be a lane of a row of parked cars where you flip-flop the parking and the bike lane so the bike lane is adjacent to the sidewalk. There is a huge toolbox that's available. The trouble is that in built out cities our most valuable sort of piece of, our most valuable thing is space. Space is at a premium and to give space to something you must take it from something else because we are no longer in the business of widening our roads and decking our freeways and I hope we're not gonna be in that business. But that's sort of where we are. And so saving lives and achieving these other goals comes at a cost. And that cost is typically, those battles are fought and won and lost at the local neighborhood level. And it's interesting, just sort of the change in philosophy about sort of who is served by our transportation networks and who should be prioritized. The idea that the most vulnerable are the people who should be served, that we should be thinking about children and the elderly or families. That really is a novel concept, right? I mean, who, what was the thinking 40 or 50 years ago about who was served by our transportation networks? Well, I think that we had this sort of, the dream of the automobile tied into a lot of core American values about independence and freedom and Los Angeles in particular is a city that is built around the automobile. And the idea was, initially when sort of automobiles replaced the cable car systems that we had in a lot of our cities, there was this dream of sort of perfect separation. So you could see it in sort of, World's Fair exhibits and things like that, that there would be vehicles and then there would be a totally separate set of infrastructure for people walking in more vulnerable users. That never came to pass. Right, elevated. You got it. And you'll see little bits and pieces of it. You know, pedestrian crossovers that nobody uses. You see groups of people just like taking their lives in their hands and like running across these crazy streets. Right, Roslyn, Tyson. Yeah, I mean, even on the strip in Las Vegas, you know, I'll go there and you'll see the people, you know, the tourists will use the escalators and the over crossings, but the people who work at those places every day are running across the strip down below because they don't want to take the time and the trouble to go over because it's not efficient if you're on foot. So I think that there was, that was the idea that you should be able to go wherever you want, whenever you want, as fast as you want. And the safety thinking was around things like seatbelts, airbags, the design of the vehicle, and that the system design was designed to account for driver error, which actually had the unintended outcome of creating a system that was very easy to drive very fast, wide lanes, big sloping curves. We think about freeway design. What we found is that gives us exactly the opposite outcome of safety when it comes to safety and in particular, when you look at the people who are involved in, people who are severely injured or die in crashes, older adults and children are overrepresented. In fact, half of the people in Los Angeles who died in pedestrian crashes last year were older adults because they are much less likely to be able to overcome a significant injury. And these crashes have real costs. They have the immaterial costs to our families, to our communities, to our cities, but they also have actual costs because about 75% of the healthcare costs that come out of those crashes are borne by Medicare and Medicaid. So these are societal costs and they're hidden that are a direct outcome of the way we've designed our system. And I know that you're referring to them as crashes and not as accidents, right? Because there's a philosophy behind that, right? There is. So the idea is, you know, accidents are sort of the prevalent word and the idea is, well, it's an accident. Couldn't have been prevented. Nothing we could have done about it. It's just acceptable. That's just the way it is. The state of the practice in transportation for the last 10 years has been to call them crashes or collisions because they are preventable and language really, really matters. To the point where it's such a tick with me now that when my husband will say something like to my daughter, it's okay, you spilled that milk. It was just an accident. I'll be like, no, it was a crash. Actually, right? That was an accident. You're good. I'll allow it. You know, I was struck reading a Q&A with you though that you talk about, again, part of this philosophy of changing the way we think about who is served by our transportation network, that it's your job to slow people down, right? So for the sake of children and the elderly, but as a sort of a working parent who has had to run from work to the car to drive my kids to, I don't know, a play or wherever they have to be, things move pretty slowly as it is, right? But sort of in the wrong situation. So when I was teaching my children to drive, I had to reckon with the fact that when they saw me driving, I was often like beating my head against the steering wheel, shouting, go, go to the person in front of me. And I had to change that behavior. So it's hard, right? Because often we are too slow and we're all overwhelmed and living, trying to get from point A to point B. So how do you strike that balance of slowing people down in situations where they should be going slowly, but enabling them to move fast enough that they're not crazed? So I think there's a cultural piece there. You know, I describe sort of the driving culture along the West Coast, because I've lived in Seattle and spent a lot of time in Vancouver, in Portland. And up there, Seattle drivers are the most chill drivers. If you need to get over at the last minute on the freeway, they will wave you over. Oh, sure, get on over, I'm in no hurry. Because I'm very practical and I left a full hour before I needed to get to my destination. So I am not in a hurry. And there are a lot of narrow streets in Seattle where only one car can go and drivers literally have to collaborate to make it work. I have to look you in the eye, you have to look me in the eye. I have to pull over because we're not gonna play chicken and let you buy and then we both wave at each other, right? And there's a skit on Portlandia that makes fun of that. No, you go, no, you go and they're ordering takeout and trying to out collide each other. When you get down to the Bay Area, things start to change a little bit. The East Bay and Berkeley people will still stop like you start my husband crazy, like, just go, I can wait, there's nobody behind you, but the driver will stop and wave you across, go ahead, cross the street. Once you get down to Los Angeles, things are different. People are aggressive. I don't have the exact number, but something like about a quarter of the system is down at any given time because of crashes because people have been involved in crashes. And so major parts of the freeway system closed on any given commute day, right? When I think I've done a lot of work in schools over the years, the Safe Routes to School movement, it's very well established in this country, great, it's wealth, it's funding, has survived multiple transportation bills because it's something people really understand and care about, but a school is like a special event twice a day. And the very parents who are telling you because they are public witnesses to a million near hidden misses every day, you have got to do something about this, you have got to slow people down are exactly the ones, when I give the principal a radar gun, are exactly the ones that are speeding down the street and making illegal use and the same thing happens in neighborhoods. I want you to slow everybody else down, except me, so that I can drive as quickly as possible. I want you to get everybody into a bike so that there's no more traffic for me. So there's a real sort of fundamental cultural change that we have to get to and it exists in pockets in this country. So I don't think it's out of our reach and there are great models for culture change and transportation. You think about when I was growing up, you didn't wear seat belts, there weren't, I wasn't in a booster seat until I was in the front seat when I was three, four, maybe. And that's not the way we do it anymore and that's not acceptable. So I think that we can get to that place and speed is important because it is a huge predictor of how severe or fatal an outcome is gonna be on a street. And that is related to the amount of things you can pay attention to if you're going, say, 25 miles an hour versus 30, 40, 50, your field of vision just really collapses. And so it's not that speed itself is bad and the arrival, I think, of things like connected and driverless vehicles in our cities will have a huge sort of major seismic shift. You're observing things have changed a lot in the last five years. We are right on the cusp of things changing more than they've changed in the last, I'll say 100, 125 years with the arrival of different kinds of vehicles and also with the arrival of services and technology and sort of the intersection of transportation and technology that I think will really change the way that we think about transportation and we think about getting around. That's great. And we need to make sure, obviously, that there's not the same thing as a digital divide in which only sort of middle class and upper class families are being served by the transportation system. And I know we're just about out of time, but could you point to innovations or cities or places that have done a particularly good job of serving lower income communities or people who are working part-time jobs and have to get around from one place to another and struggle to find a good quality child care center and any sort of policy solution or place that you would cite? Yeah, I'll say two things. One is the federal government has long had in place a funding stream called Jobs Access Reverse Commute Money that cities have used to try and help specifically lower income folks and lower income communities make that reverse commute. They may not be needing to go into the job center. They may be going out to provide care or to provide services out in the suburbs. And that funding stream has had some moderate success, but it's really, it's very difficult to provide a sort of time sensitive and time respectful reverse commute affordable option. I think the arrival of things like, I mean you're starting to see the beginning of it with things like Uber, Lyft, companies like Bridge, moving towards a service-based model and not a vehicle-based model of how to get around. With the arrival of connected and maybe driverless vehicles, I'm hoping that that trend continues. But what I hear when I talk to people all the way from the federal government, federal level on down to the state is that the market will figure it out. Don't worry about it, government people, the market will figure it out. Market's not gonna figure it out, right? Because on one hand you have auto manufacturers who are keenly interested in restoring the model of individual vehicle ownership. What they are trying to create is basically a home entertainment system on wheels because consumers are not interested in the motor underneath anymore. They care about how connected the vehicle is. Can you get wifi? Is there a TV screen right in front of me while I'm driving, et cetera. And so that's where they're trying to go. Then you have companies that are sort of inching into the space like Google, Apple that are first of all not accustomed to making products that kill people. And so they are much more safety sensitive. And second of all, not in it to sell cars. In it to create really interesting solutions to city problems. And so I think that sort of for two reasons government needs to be involved. One is to help continue the shift away from individual auto ownership for a whole host of reasons. Sustainability, public health, et cetera. But also because we don't want people to be left behind. When you think about bike sharing and car sharing and all these services, they are not well used in lower income neighborhoods. And part of that is about money. But there's also a cultural barrier there that we don't understand enough about yet. And that is where I think government needs to be involved in making sure that the number of jobs you can get to within 60 minutes in a car is dramatically, dramatically higher than on public transit. And so as these sort of service based models come into cities we need to make sure that everybody has access to those same sort of same services. Right, right. So I think we're just, we are I think out of town out of time, if you could just talk for 30 seconds about how the transportation community reacted to the presidential inauguration as we were talking about in the green room I think that would be eliminating. So if you live in DC, which is I love cities and DC is a fantastic city, you've noticed probably that there's been a different approach to bike infrastructure. When New York sort of changed the playbook for design it unleashed this huge latent demand and now there's over 200 in the US of these kind of protected bike ways. And DC was right on their heels and built this bike way down Pennsylvania Avenue. And in the transportation community we're all like, wow, look at that, it's amazing. And we were very excited. But then to see it during the inauguration because we had heard that maybe they might have to black out the street and they weren't gonna show it. But there it was in all of its glory. I have to tell you, it was just like the Twitter sphere in sort of super nerdy transportation circles just went nuts. And of course the sort of bike advocacy folks in the US also were just, I mean that picture of the president first lady holding hands and walking and a bike lane was there. It just, it felt like we had arrived. That's great. So it was, yeah, it was a big deal. That's great. Well thank you, thank you so much for coming to the US. Thank you.