 Okay, so I'm really pleased to be here. I'm Gloria Partita, the Mayor Pro Tem, City of Davis, and these future forums are one of my favorite things that we do as a community. We are a very engaged community, and so it's really exciting to see people that are excited about learning new things and that are coming together. And I'd like to thank Judy for putting this together for us, and she would like to introduce our speaker, but before she does that, Alan Hirsch has requested to take a very brief minute. Thank you very much. This is our 15th Davis Futures Forum. This is very exciting, but we're always trying to improve our marketing to increase the outreach here. So I wanna ask people how they heard about tonight's event. How many people heard about it from an email that we sent from Davis Futures Forum? How many people heard about it from the legal voters? How many people heard about it, saw an article in the enterprise? How many people got up, were on a commission and heard about it that way? City commission heard about it that way? Thank you so much. Also, if you didn't sign up on Eventbrite, I wanna be sure to catch your email address, so we'll be sending out flip cards, so you only need to put your name and email address if you didn't get an Eventbrite ticket because I wanna make sure we capture everyone's email address. Thank you so much. 15 time flies when you're having fun, huh? That's amazing. I don't usually introduce the speakers, but this is one I just had to introduce myself. He has been such an incredible inspiration to me and really made a lot of my success happen, Dick, actually. He's a pediatrician who was worried as much about why people get sick as much as, or kids get sick as much as treating the sickness, so he became a public health master's degree as well, and then he became the chief public health officer for the state of California, and then from there he moved on to the Centers for Disease Control in charge of the Environmental Center. Then he came back to California through UCLA, and then I found him retired in Berkeley, but what was so fantastic is that sometimes when you have a conversation, and it seems to change your life, this was one of one for me, where a person from the Department of Public Health in Sacramento called me up and said, okay, so you're working on walkable, livable communities, right, Judy? Yeah, well you gotta talk to Dick Jackson, and so I called the Centers for Disease Control, immediately called him, and it was one of those conversations where it just went on for an hour, and it was so intense, where I really felt strongly about what I was doing from the air quality and transportation perspective, and he felt strongly from a public health perspective, and as a result we started doing national conferences with public health community. I got a lot of funding, like maybe 10 years' worth from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. If you hadn't been there, I can't imagine that we could have been anywhere near as successful as we have been, so thank you, Dick, and now you have a wonderful evening head. Thank you. Well you folks maybe don't know it, but Judy Corbett is an absolute treasure, and the local government commission was so responsible. Some of her meetings had 1,000 people from every state in the country, and dealing with every issue, yes, air pollution, water pollution, and walkable communities, but transportation and housing policy, when you get into this stuff, it doesn't stay on the silo. It's a lot like pediatrics. The child is the integration of all the social, environmental, chemical, maternal, and other determinants of their lives, and it comes together, and the more we divide people up at our problems up, it's very 20th century thinking. Thinking you're gonna solve problems one at a time, really worked well in the 20th century, and we are dealing and confronting such profound problems as a society today, that thinking that disaggregating everything and deconstructing is gonna solve our problems. So I've got three books on the screen. The first book is Urban Sprung on Public Health. I did that with my dear friend, Hallie Frumpkin and urban planner, Larry Frank. I'll come back to them later on. The second book was Andy Dandenberg, the lead, and that was Making Healthy Places, and that's the textbook I used for 10 years at UCLA when I was teaching urban planning and health, and it, it's just a quick story about that. In my class, I required that I'd have half public health students from the School of Public Health there, and I'd have half students from some of the other schools, and I had law students and business students and urban planning students, and I remember one, I would make them do a joint presentation towards the end of the course, and Susan Handy, the terrific professor here that Davis would know this, and in the joint presentation, they'd have to pick a topic, they'd have to work with someone from the other discipline, and my favorite was a, there was a young woman who was really interested in violence against women and threats towards women. She was a public health student, she was second year, it was gonna be a capstone for her, and the third year urban planning student was interested in TODs, which is transit-oriented development, and how do you locate stations and get people out of it and have retail and all the things that would make people wanna use it, and I'm making them work together, and they've got like five weeks to prepare this thing, well, they get about a week into it, and they can't, they could barely talk to each other, they, you know, I'm really worried about women, and you're just worried about walls and doors and lights and things, well, you can imagine by the end of the five or six weeks, suddenly she realized that how you design things and the sight lines are really important, and more importantly, around architecture and planning is, everything you look at was in someone's mind at some point in the past. You are looking at the product of people's imagination, and if you can find your imagination to just disease, and you don't think about these larger elements, you miss things, and he of course didn't realize that a young woman walking alone is not gonna walk down a bare hall and turn a corner and walk into stairways that feel uncomfortable or dangerous, and so they did the most spectacular presentation, and actually we promoted it up and got an award for them, and they got married, and where I'm going with this is urban planning and public health were married in 1880, 90, 1900, 1910. Everybody knew, you didn't need to have graduate school education to know that being in a basement apartment with seven other people, breathing bad air and poor ventilation and dangerous food was gonna make you sick. You didn't have to have experimental evidence for that, but we all got in cars beginning around 1910, 2030, drove away from the cities and figured we'd solve all those problems of habitation, and for literally 20 to 30 years, there was so little research on health and the physical design of environments until really much later on, and we'll come back to that in a minute. The bottom left one is the companion book for my video series, PBS series, Designing Healthy Communities, and that was really fun, and I got to visit about a dozen major cities. I had two camera crews in Detroit for three days. I'll tell you, when my nephews saw the pictures from Detroit, they were like, oh my God, and even I was actually there the week that they were bulldozing these beautiful homes on the north side of Detroit, and one of them was Mitt Romney's child at home, and when you see what's happened to Detroit, it's really remarkable, and I also, of course, was in Atlanta because I spent 10 years of my life at the Centers for Disease Control on that trip, and my wife Joan was with me then with the three boys, and that was really, my light went on, and I'll tell you how I got into that in a couple minutes as we go along. This is a story of my life. These things never work when I want them to. One time I flew all the way across country, gave a talk to the traffic engineers who were a thousand of them in the Disneyland Hotel. They all came to hear a talk. I'm there all set, and this thing stops working. I'm gonna have to ask, no, it's got a bad battery, I'm sure. That's what always happens. I think I'm gonna have to, would it be okay? Well, we're waiting. Could I just ask for someone to do next slide? Oh, you did it. You have to shake it first? Yeah, that's all right. Oh, good, all right. So the challenge I'm gonna give Davis at the end of this is I have nothing to teach you. You've got it right. You've got the greatest city in America for bicycling, maybe Boulder would argue with you, but you've got one of the great bicycling cities. Boulder had the benefit of Fredrik Lohmsted and his sons helping to design the bikeways coming down from the flat irons. And his sons actually did the crossways bikeways and it's a wonderful, bikeable city, but Davis has this as well. And just looking at the progressiveness of the artwork and the things that the messages that you're giving to a community here is really impressive. I, with one of my students did a series of articles on urban river parkways and it was to lead up to one of the initiatives to put much more funding into with the PCL for bikeways because I believe that every river and lake in urban areas in California ought to be walkable, bikeable. EPA thought it should be a swivel fishable, yes, but it ought to be walkable, bikeable because you don't need to wag your finger at a child. If there's water around, they run around, they're active. And if you want them to bike, they will get on the bike and it's a wonderful way to experience nature and it's not as hot as being in other places as well. So I did my PEDs at UCSF. It was really, I was, we were sending home a pair of twins that were born about 12 weeks early and I'm sure we were spending 10 to $15,000 a day in their care when they were in the intensive care unit even back then. And I remember the awful feeling when I sent these two sweet little children but they were really tiny home with the 19 year old mother. And I thought, you know, I'm not sure I wanna be doing this at the end of the disease pipeline and I really wanna figure out ways to move up that disease pipeline and there's a, the reason I went to medical school, I didn't know it until I was in psychotherapy at age 40 something was my dad had been a fighter pilot during World War II. He had been in the South Pacific. He crashed over Iwo Jima. He spent three weeks in the hospital. He survived a massacre and the barracks on Iwo Jima. He comes back, has three kids by his high school sweetheart and he dies in 1949 of polio in two days leaving my mother a widow and impoverished. Back then this was a huge hit and I think the trauma of my own childhood set me up for, you know, what can I do for other kids? I don't wanna see other kids go through this and so I fell in love with pediatrics. I fell in love with immunization. I get very upset with people tell me they're against immunization because I've seen children die of whooping cough and chicken pox and garacella, et cetera. I don't really wanna hear this so I'm not terribly patient. But the thing about pediatrics is you, when you look at a child you're looking at one frame and you look at it in a movie and this is a movable, moving picture and you're always thinking forward. What's it gonna be like for this child in the future? And one of the things we do, Dr. Knows, we look at the height and weight and we wanna make sure the children are tracking along. If you're 30th percentile for height and weight you wanna stay 30th percentile for height and weight and not fall off or go up too high. We're seeing about five to eight children a day. My pediatric friends are seeing with obesity, overweight, hypertension. You'll find that they've got high cholesterol levels and I'll show you some more data in a minute. In America, we are very good at blaming the victim. If you just had more self-discipline you wouldn't be doing this. And one of my themes here is it's very hard to create or have self-discipline if we create environments that are hostile to your efforts to be healthy. The classic thing, I actually, didn't you love the World Series? The last game was phenomenal. Every other ads telling you to do something unhealthy. Just watch, eat junk, drink drunk and put your behind in a vehicle and sit there and don't exercise. But it was still a good World Series. So we encourage kids to no TV, no soft drinks and we ought to be taxing them and that's another discussion. And two months later, really the child can't change anything. And so two months after that the child's taking something perhaps for making this one up, it's a composite but it happens all the time. Something for cholesterol, something for blood sugar. If you've got that much overweight you probably have hypertension, high blood pressure and cost you about $400 a month. The point of this though is we have medicalized what is in fact an environmentally induced disease. And we have rigged the environment against the child. We've rigged the child, the environment against the doctor and the nurse then the caregivers and the parents and we've rigged the system against us and by us I also mean the US and I'm gonna show you what I mean by that. In general the more money that a country spends on medical care, the longer people live. It's not perfect but in Russia they, it's a couple years old but they spend about $1,800 a year and people live on average to age 68. Norway lived to about 84 and they spend $5,000. There's a country missing from this graph. We're now over $10,000 per person in America and we live about the same amount of time as the people in Costa Rica who spend seven times less per capita. And what it is is we're spending our effort on the end of the disease pipeline when in fact it goes back to pediatrics. We've got to really think about intervening all the way through the lifespan. Remember I was talking about the folks living in the basement in 1880, 1890, the average American now lives 30 years longer than then. How many of those years came from medical care? The stuff going on in the doctor's office, the white coat, the pharmaceutical industry, except for immunization, five years. Okay, medical care gave five years, 25 years came from better air, better water, better food, better workplaces, and the intervention in the physical environment, by the way, it's seven times safer per mile to drive in America. I'm not a big fan of driving, but it is still a lot better than when I got my driver's permit because we've done things to make vehicles and roadways and other things safer. But sitting in a car isn't especially good for us. And there's a whole set of reasons why we've gained so much weight. At one point we were consuming in 19, in the year 2000, we were consuming 60, I'm sorry, now I don't remember, but it was 60 grams a day of sugar, which your liver is not set up to consume that much fructose. You can actually handle glucose pretty well, but that's a lot of fructose. It gives you a risk for a fatty liver and other things. So in 1990, I had been, I was the pesticide doctor, and I was dealing, in the early 80s, dealing a lot with farm worker poisonings and those things. And I got to know this stuff well. And if you know pesticides and agriculture in California, you learn a bunch of things. You learn about water pollution and worker health and air pollution. But what do you really learn about? Money and politics, because that's really what it is largely about in so many ways. So it was, in 1994, I was asked to become the director of environmental health, the United States of America. Joan and the boys, we were living there in Berkeley, and they were thrilled to move to a place where they could each have their own bedroom until they realized it was 100 degrees and 100% humidity every single day for four months a year. And I wasn't thrilled because I suddenly realized the high school five years, five miles away, the grammar school five miles away, there was no sidewalk. There was no way for kids to get to school unless they were driven. And so suddenly their lifestyle became, and they were able to bike before, getting in a car, sitting in a box, getting up in a box, sitting in a box at school, coming home in a box, watching a box, going to bed in a box, and then wondering why they're hyperactive because they need to do something. So I go to CDC in 1994, and we weren't even paying attention to the obesity epidemic back then. And by 96, I'm really frustrated and I'm worried about a lot of stuff. I'm worried about climate change. I'm worried about lead poisoning. We had a $50 million program for lead poisoning. We had a $40 million program for childhood asthma. We had a program looking at the cruise ships docking on the United States ports, which actually I got some of these ideas. Turns out so many of the poisonings, diarrhea outbreaks, Legionnaires outbreaks on cruise ships were due to bad original design of the galleys and the filters and the other systems on the cruise ships. And I agitated with the cruise ship industry to say, we want to inspect your ships, not when you come to port, we want to inspect them as you build them. We want the galleys for the chicken and all the stuff like over there and let the waste over here and vegetables over here. And by the way, I'd love this one. If the galley workers are making chicken and there's a toilet latrine head there, they could not get out the door automatically unless they use their knee, made the water come out, wash their hands on the door would slowly open for them, which I always thought was a good idea. But disease rates dropped dramatically by just changing the physical environment on cruise ships. So by 1998, CDC now has the chronic disease center and they came out with the physical activity and health report for the Surgeon General. And they're presenting it in the conference room where Dr. Satcher, the head of CDC is there with 14 of his senior staff. And everybody's looking at, oh yeah, physical activity, that's really good. We ought to tell people to do more physical activity and we'll really support this. We'll get the Surgeon General to really carry this and I don't think CDC has any right to issue this report. No, there's not a sidewalk within five miles of CDC. Telling people to walk when it's thoroughly dangerous to walk makes no sense at all. And of course, Dr. Satcher and I were friends by that point and he knew what I was doing. But he began to be a lot more supportive about, we need to really rethink access around the whole Emory CDC campus. When this came out, this contrast between 1990 and 2000 and the rates of obesity, and I'm gonna jump to 2016, here's California with about 20% adults being obese, but I do a lot of talks. I was in, doing a talk in Virginia a couple weeks ago and they're up to 25 to 30% of the adults being obese in Virginia. This, people were really shocked by it. And you know, it's changed so many things. The Coast Guards now had to recalculate how much weight you can put in a boat because Americans, elevators have been recalculated and we're spending on a billion dollars additional jet fuel every year because Americans are bigger. But the average Americans gained, well, I have the slide. If somebody had said to me 20 years ago that 40% of American adults would be obese, a BMI greater than 30, I never would have believed it. And 20% of our kids, now about one in six kids cannot get into the US military because they're so physically out of shape. The generals are worried about this. I am not picking on people for being overweight. I'm not happy with how much I weigh, but if you create an environment that makes it hard to be healthy, makes it hard to be to healthy food, I have a pediatrician friend that was taking care of kids in Richmond, California. And one year she said to me, I've seen six girls in their teens who have had gallbladder surgery because of cholesterol, gallstones, because they're eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner in fast food joints and there was really no place to buy healthy food. So again, it was the environment, I believe, is driving a lot of this, not all of it, but a good portion of it. So thinking about this medical side, this is the graph of how much your risk of diabetes goes up as your body mass index goes up. And the teal-colored line is how much it goes up for women. I'm not proud of it, but my risk of getting diabetes now is six times higher than it would have been if I was still back down at pretty skinny like when I was a kid. But if I were a woman, I'd be 28 times the risk. And if I was really severely obese, I'd be about 35 times the risk. So you've seen the obesity maps. What do you think's gonna happen to the diabetes maps? 1995, 2003, a new meaning for the red states. And 2016, we're now spending 2% of all the money in America on diabetes. Average reduction in lifespan in the range of about seven years. And we're spending a billion dollars a year just on prosthesis. Artificial limbs, lower legs, for people who lose them because of diabetes. It's hugely expensive. And much more important than the expense is just the health impact on folks that are dealing with all of this. When I was in my PEEDS training at UCS, Pediatrics Training at UCSF, we'd go over to the Diabetes Clinic on Parnassus Avenue there in San Francisco. And I'd see 10 children with diabetes. They all were what we call juvenile diabetics. I never saw an adult-onset diabetic in that child with diabetes, in that clinic, that whole time. This is prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. 30 to half the kids now in the Diabetes Clinic with type two, quote unquote, adults-onset diabetes. And we're seeing, and you've seen them, 17-year-olds with diseases of 70-year-olds between the joint wear and tear from the weight and the heart work and liver work. Fatty liver is fairly common in some of these kids as well, which is related to this. This is the article about prosthetics. Going along with all of this is, what's the second most prescribed drug, second most common disease in America after tooth decay is depression. And I think in some ways, and I think Judy and I have talked a lot about this, we create environments. I don't think Davis falls into this, but we create many environments that are socially isolating. If you're elderly, you're living alone, you've lost your friends. In an old Mexican village or an Italian village, you could go down to Central Square and you'd have people that talk to you, you'd play cards, you could talk. Children might be running around. There was a mix of all sorts of cultural family that made you feel welcome. But now some of the most isolating environments can be. In the video series, we interviewed six girls in Smyrna, Georgia. And the interviewer said, they're 13, 14, 15 years. What do you do for fun? Well, we ask our mothers to take us to the mall. And well, what do you do? Well, we just laugh and walk around and we come home. Well, how often do you do that? Oh, when we get a ride, maybe once every couple of weeks. You know, the job of a child is, you know, as a parent, you wanna give a child a challenge that's not so easy to board and not so hard they fail. And so you're always titrating the challenge to be appropriate and to put a child in a challenge-free environment and then figure they're gonna have autonomy and confidence when they get out in the world. We have kids coming into UCLA when I was there who never took a bus and don't know how to take a bus. And so we'd actually have the upper grads. Take them, come on, we'll get on the bus and go to the beach today rather than get in a car. Because once people do things, they're more willing to do it by the sidebar that on the campus, we're actually working very hard to have much healthier, good food because we don't want the kids going off campus, particularly Thursday and Friday night and getting drunk and trying to drive home afterwards. I know that doesn't happen with Davis kids, but it happens at UCLA. Ah, skip this one. I know seven, 10,000 steps, people are saying, well, it could be 7,000. But the truth is walking is good for us. It's the one essential thing. My poor wife had to get a new knee because it's our one, a big recreation. One day when we were young, we dayhiked half, not half, high dayhiked number time. We dayhiked Mount Whitney, which was a damn hard walk. And I think it's been a real contribution in our lifetime. This is the classic study. NIH, National Institutes of Health, was doing a study comparing treatment for people with pre-diabetes. They had elevated H1C and glucose, but they didn't have full-blown diabetes, with sugar in their urine. And they gave one group fen-fen, they gave one group bitformin, they gave one group nothing, and they gave another group an intervention where they got people out to walk three to four times a week for at least a good half hour. The group that had the best outcome of all those treatment arms was the ones that were doing the walking, burning off those calories. They lost about five to seven percent of their body weight, and it was the treatment that really worked the best with the least complications. So I talked about arriving at CDC and getting sworn in, but underneath this story is the other thing I was really worried about was not when I first got there, but the more I learned from really the experts around climate change and what was going to happen. Atlanta had terrible air quality. The highways were much too wide, people got, went everywhere by car, it was totally car dependent. We had to ratchet down the amount of air pollution that was in Atlanta, and we had to get people to walk more. To make a long story short, three successes I'm proud of, one was, and this Henry Waxman was behind this one, Congressman Waxman from California, he cut off, he reduced the funding for cities if they were out of compliance with air pollution regulations, and the funding was for highways. So suddenly, guess what one of the biggest companies besides Coca-Cola is in Atlanta? UPS, and UPS does not want you to cut back the highway funding, and they turned out to be one of our big allies to really improve air quality and reduce it going out. The other big thing we did in Atlanta to improve air quality is we had the Olympics. And when we had the Olympic Games, the air quality improved by about 50%, and childhood asthma admissions in the hospitals dropped by about eight to 10%. And it was this natural experiment that said, oh, you know, improve air quality, people get better. But I became increasingly worried about climate change, but telling people I was worried about polar bears wasn't getting me anywhere. And so I had to think about ways I could really protect the environment and really promote health. I make the students memorize this one, but it's what it's really about is, I can't order you to stop smoking, but I can work to assure the conditions where you can be healthy. I can make sure the soda machines, if they got heavily sugared beverages, that those drinks cost five to 10 cents more, that you're not allowed to smoke in here. By the way, those interventions have worked extraordinarily well in terms of really changing the environment. But the other aspect of that, by the way, is, focus on the kids. The seatbelt laws really worked because they started with the children and it became normative for you to have a seatbelt. And the same with tobacco, kids were going home and saying, grandpa, you're gonna kill yourself, you're gonna kill us by smoking, and you've all probably had that experience or have seen it happen. So Judy's heard me tell this story, but I was really depressed. I missed California. My family wanted to be back in California. I was going to Washington every week and feeling beat up over trying to get the Congress to worry about a lot of things I was worried about. And I'm driving to down Buford Highway, which is a totally stupid road, because it's a state highway, a half a mile parallel to Highway 85, a eight lane interstate freeway. And people are driving down this 100 year old road, seven lanes wide, at 50, 60 miles an hour. And they're the homes of the poor on both sides of the street, because if you got any money, you're not really want to live there. And the poor folks are trying to, they're all working downtown in low paid jobs. And it's a mile, a mile and a half between crosswalks. And you're late for work and the bus goes by every half hour, what do you do? You run across the street and there's a break in the 50 mile an hour traffic. It's the highest pedestrian death rate in the state of Georgia. And I'm on my way to work downtown and to Dr. Satcher's office. I'm really stressing and it's 95 degrees out, 95% humidity and I'm late and I look over to the right side of the road and this elderly woman is walking along and she's carrying a plastic shopping bag, one in each hand. And she's bent over with osteoporosis and she has red hair. And she looks like my mother. And I want to stop and give her a ride, of course. And I don't do it, I go to the headquarters and they're all talking this big stuff and I'm sitting there going, that poor woman collapses and dies. The cause of death will be heat stroke. And it won't be bad air quality, black top asphalt, lack of trees, heat island effects. And if she gets killed by a truck going by there will be motor vehicle trauma. That's the cause of death. And it won't be absence of sidewalks, absence of public transportation, poor urban planning. And I literally that day went back and called my friend Howard Frumpkin. I said, howie, I'm focused on stuff in the North Pole and parts per million and parts per billion. And I think we should be really focused on where people live. People really care about where mom and dad live and where their children live and their grandchildren live. And getting the message across about healthy places can help people be healthy is really what we should be doing. Which is what that first book came out of. And I wrote, I'm gonna skip this one. Actually, I'll show this one for just a reason. You know the obesity epidemic? One of the things we people tell is, eat locally grown food. Don't eat stuff that's coming in from Chile. If you can get it locally grown. And we have paved over the best farmland in the world in the United States. And now it's covered with houses instead of crops. And it so upsets me when I go to Salinas and Castroville in that area. And they're literally creating these huge automalls with nothing but asphalt and concrete. And again, we're losing some of the finest farmland in the world. Actually, I'll go back to this from here. The United States has paved over the equivalent area of the state of Georgia, 60,000 square miles. Parking has consumed the equivalent area of the island of Puerto Rico. Every car, there are more cars in California than there are licensed drivers. Every car needs four parking spaces. Work, home, church, and Sunday before Christmas or something. And that's a lot of photosynthesis. About one seventh of all the CO2 increase on planet Earth, the atmosphere, is due to removal of photosynthesis, removal of tree cover. This is a picture of the New Jersey state flower. And back when, you have to see all these movies from San Francisco at LA. The opening of Disneyland, I love it. Watch the opening of Disneyland and you see the Magic Mountain and Ticker Bell and you look over and here's Highway 5 and there's five cars on it. That was 1955, it was a five year. But now, there's nothing but cars and they're stopped. They're going five miles an hour. So thinking we're gonna fix America by everybody getting in a car, which we've done in LA. Now, 100 years ago, you could take the red line from the beach downtown and you'd go seven miles an hour. And today, if you have a Lamborghini, you can go downtown at seven miles an hour. So thinking cars are gonna fix all of our problems. So I'm there and I'm working with my friend, Chris, who was the first urban planner that they ever hired at CDC. And I said, we need to write an article. And so we wrote this article about how we're building America is killing people. Well, you can bet that the National Association of Home Builders didn't like me at all. And two dozen of them wrote to the head of CDC and said, fire that fool, Jackson. He doesn't know what he's talking about. In fact, people that live in suburbs live longer than people that live in cities. A highly scientific observation, it was actually true. Why do people who live in the suburbs live longer than people who live in inner cities? Income is the big driver of how long you live. And there was no controlled studies whatsoever, but it made a good soundbite for the senator from Oklahoma. And I'm not making that up. So I called in, I said, Dick, where's your data? There is no data. I had met Dr. Handy by then, and there's only like 14 studies on this. Oh, Jeff, it's just common sense. Dick, you can't write articles based on common sense. You have to find the research and then we'll do it. But he didn't fire me, so that was good. So we spent a lot of time thinking about how do we tell people that you've got to exercise? And so we docs have been wagging our fingers at people because that's what we do really. You've gotta do this. And so here is a stunning paper comparing the health of Americans from a generation ago till now. So these are people, you know, 40, you know, they're 50s, and it doesn't matter what the study is. It's an extraordinarily robust physical exam and lab exam of about 5,000 American people per year. And you just take a bunch of them and compare them to a bunch nowadays and see what happens and how they're different. Do you think excellent health went up or down over that short generation? That's a big deal. People know if they're healthy or not. They might not be perfectly accurate, but you know, if I say I feel good, usually you're pretty right. Any limitations? That's a substantial increase and you're multiplying at times a quarter of a billion people. You need a wheelchair or a cane? Doubling, relative doubling. Folks not that old in a short time. Our genes, our gene size may have changed, but our genes did not transform over that period of time. We're the same people we were before. You know this one. Smoking went down, good. Obesity went up, but you did not know this one. Next one. And I didn't. None of us knew it. Remember all that finger wagging? Wanna see how successful we were? No physical activity. The one thing we know for sure with the least complications to get people to be healthier is to get them to be physically active. That's a big deal. If the big takeaway here is we create environments that entice people to be active. Make it irresistible. You take a bunch of, we had three boys. You take a bunch of little boys to the beach. You don't need to tell them to run around and be active. It's actually they've got some friends. You put children in the right environment. You put older folks in the right environment. Some people it's window shopping, but it's still, they're walking. And the last people we think about, or last thing we think about when we build subdivisions in America is people. So imagine you moved into the house over here and you made friends with the family on the other side of the fence. And gee, Thanksgiving's coming up. We don't know anybody in the neighborhood. Baby, maybe we can get together to have Thanksgiving. Oh yeah, let's do that. But you don't wanna throw the turkey over the fence or the baby over the fence. So I wonder how I get to their house. I'd better, I'd better Google it. And turns out that I could drive seven miles, 17 minutes to get 65 feet to see someone else. This is a true one, but it sounds like a joke, but underneath this is, like a lot of humor, is the reality that the last thing we think about when we build is how do we help people be together to be alive, to be connected, to be socialized. And so rather than return on investment, I wanna be returned on the quality of life. I hate to say it. I always love Davis, but I find it really hard to drive here in the dark. I think you ought to require everybody to wear one of those yellow vests we can get from the French because it's tough visibility. If you're hit by a car going 20 miles an hour, you have about a 5% chance of dying. And we have just put in place 20 is plenty on the UCLA campus. I've been the lead for the built environment at UCLA. We've reduced it by about 700 car parking spaces. We've done to unified bike sharing from the entire region, which is a lot harder. The hardest people we find to work with are some of our geriatric neighbors living over in Beverly Hills who just really wanna drive their big fat cars everywhere, but the kids are really on board for this. Last couple slides. And you've done a great job, and I'm embarrassing. I drove from the Berkeley to Sacramento and back 500 times. And by the way, it took me twice as long tonight as it did 15 years ago. But it was before we had the train, and I, my wife and I, we just didn't take the train this time, but look at this difference. This is a study that was being done for a totally other reason, but the questions was, do you use the light rail going downtown in Charlotte to the banks and everything else downtown? And it turned out the folks that were using light rail after a couple years weighed about six and a half pounds less than the people that were driving. And they were just taking light rail because they wanted to read a book and talk to somebody else and relax, but turned out they were weighing less and more active. So the Academy of Pediatrics has taken a statement and we need to create environments that make it easier for children to be healthy. The National Academy of Sciences has come out with about 30 recommendations about how we stop the obesity epidemic, look at recommendation number one, make physical activity an integral and routine part of life, a directive to the people designing communities. Buildings need to be healthier. No one should be taking an elevator if you can just walk up a couple of flight of stairs. Kaiser has taken this message up very well. I always wonder how they got it past their safety people, but it's still an important message, take the stairs. I was thinking about Davis and creating a diverse community. And I was now complaining about the old folks in Beverly Hills, but about half the guys are riding bicycles now and they're really important allies, the old guys. So they're important allies as we go forward. But I think some of the college towns need to think about how you diversify and the boomers, the t-shirts, do you know the okay boomers t-shirts where the millennials have decided that we are ruining the world? I think we need to build some bridges here and get to know each other better. This is the surgeon general saying we need to walk. This is Caltrans, and I think every employee at Caltrans needs to be measured on their work performance, including what are they doing to promote health through active transportation and reduced pollution. And the way you change the culture of an organization and a big organization is you put it in the performance reviews. You ask them, what have you done? And the first time you say, well, I never thought of that. Nobody told me it was important. But by the third time they go for the performance and appraisal and the promotion, oh, I guess the boss means it. The Urban Land Institute and the developers, literally the head of the ULI said to me, doc, we gotta stop building around golf courses. We gotta start building around walking and active communities. This is their 10 principles, but I like this one. It goes back to make healthy choices easy. And you've done a lot of this in maybe last couple of slides. I love the rental bikes down there in Washington, D.C., near Union Station. And I noticed two police vehicles right there next to the station. And I thought, gee, I wonder what they cost and how many calories could I burn if I was on one versus the other? And so I looked it up. And the segue cost about five grand and you burn 200 calories an hour standing on it. And if you're on the mountain bike, they cost about one fifth as much and you burn three to four times as many calories. So which one would you want your police officer on when all is said and done? And maybe some decals. You drain to the river here and to the underground aquifer, but maybe the city ought to buy some decals like this. So I've been moderately provocative and maybe you knew half of this, but it's just been a pleasure and maybe the big takeaway I want to offer is you are the model for California. And thinking about how you can carry a message without being arrogant, by the way, I learned in Washington, D.C. if you said you're from California, none of the senators listened to you. And I learned in Sacramento, if you say you're from Berkeley, nobody listens. But maybe if you're from Davis, the rest of the state will listen. But we've just got a pound the table. We've got to be forthright about the messages. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. That was, yes, no, no, please stay, answer questions. So what we're gonna do now is we're going to invite our panelists up and they will each speak for five minutes and then we will open it up to question and answers. And I'd like to take this moment to acknowledge our sponsors, the city of Davis, Bike Davis, for giving us the opportunity to bring Richard here and Davis Media Access for videoing this session and it will soon be on their website. We'd also like to thank Cool Davis for administrative and marketing support. So now I'd like to invite our panelists up. Yeah, yes, yes, yes. It's so formal. Feel so official. Okay, so today we have Denise Peach, recently retired chief of Community Services Branch of the California Health and Welfare Agency. Denise is now giving back to the Davis community as a board member of both Village Homes Homeowners Association and YOLO Healthy Aging Alliance. We also have Larry Green. Larry was formerly the Air Pollution Control Officer for the YOLO Solano Air District before moving on to head the Sacramento Metropolitan Air Pollution Control District. He is currently serving as executive director of the California Air Pollution Control Officers Association, continues to be a strong supporter of land use patterns that offer an alternative to the car was a leader in creating a regional collaborative to address climate adaptation initiatives in the Sacramento area. And lastly we have Dr. Susan Handy, who is a professor of environmental science and policy and director of the National Center for Sustainable Transportation housed at UC Davis. Her research focuses on strategies for reducing car dependence and on the role of the built environment in promoting active travel. She has raised two daughters in Davis and rides her bike to work in. So each of you will have five minutes and I will set my timer. And you can go first. Hi, so I happen to have the great privilege of living next door to Judy Corbett. So that's how I get the point for this evening. So and also got some time to spend with Dr. Jackson and his lovely wife at dinner. So some of the things that I wanted to just mention that I reacted to tonight, that you said I love the, instead of thinking in terms of ROI, to think of R-O-Q-L, I guess that would be the return on quality of life instead of just return on investment. I like that a lot and I think it fits very well with as we think about the Davis downtown plan and some of the things that we're seeing in that right now, responding to it through that lens. I'd also like to mention just wearing my YOLA Healthy Aging Alliance hat tonight. We have been in the Alliance here. We have been conducting town hall meetings and that is as a result of a grant that we received from the Scan Foundation and the purpose of these town hall meetings, we've been doing them throughout YOLA County. We've had three so far. We've done one out in winters, one in West Sacramento and one in Davis. And the purpose is to collect information from people about their towns and this is all feeding up into the governor's master plan for aging, which many of us who've been working in the aging field for a long time have been waiting for something effective to come out of the governor's office, to come out of the administration for aging services and bringing together especially things at the community-based level, long-term services and supports that we desperately need in a fragmented system. So we've been having these town hall meetings and hearing from a lot of people about their towns and what they think is needed, what works in the town, what doesn't work, what kinds of things they wanna see happening. And as part of this, we've also been working through the AARP age-friendly city perspective. West Sacramento is the only city in YOLA County that has signed on to that initiative so far and we're trying to advocate at YOLA Healthy Aging Alliance for getting all of the cities and the county to sign on to that. So I especially appreciate Dr. Jackson bringing up a number of things. One thing I really liked when you said the environment is rigged against the child, I'd say that I'd expand that to say it's often rigged against the aging and disord differently abled. The story about the elderly woman walking along probably what was, it looked like about a six-lane road stooped over carrying shopping bags in the 100% heat, probably not because she wanted to for exercise or well-being but because she had to. That environment is not just not friendly to her, it is actually actively hostile to her so especially appreciated that story and thinking about it about how the environment can be rigged against us. So the age-friendly city initiative through AARP if anybody wants to look it up on the website just quickly given it a buzz here so you might be interested in it and look at it and our efforts with the Yellow Healthy Aging Alliance to push that forward here in Yellow County. We're gonna go to Woodland in another couple of weeks. Looking over at Sheila, our executive director, yeah. And have another town hall meeting and again, collect information from people about what they want to see in this governor's plan statewide, bringing it down to the local level. What do we need for supports for a healthy environment? So I think there's some really good things going on there and again, I think it applies as we think about Davis's downtown plan and we think about a more compact sort of downtown area and what that means for people and means probably reduced social isolation opportunities because more people are there, more eyes are on the street for the children, for the elderly, for everyone and more contact with each other as well as more physical health and more safety. So more opportunities for engagement is a huge piece of that and so I appreciated Dr. Jackson's focus on that. I think that's probably five minutes. Yeah? Well, I wanna thank Judy for inviting me to be a part of this and thank Dick for that wonderful talk. I think it was probably about 18 years ago, maybe when I first heard you talk on this topic and that was right about the time when the public health field and the urban planning field, transportation being a part of that, rediscovered each other and it was a really interesting time in that we had these very different languages that we had to learn. In transportation, we talked about non-motorized transportation, so defining walking and biking relative to driving and of course we were focused on the environmental benefits of non-motorized travel. So then we meet up with public health and it's wonderful because they talk about active travel which I think is the right way to be thinking about it and then brought this understanding of the health benefits of walking and biking and really gave the urban planners a whole nother way to sell investments in these modes. So yeah, it was quite an exciting time in the field and I personally learned a whole lot. Dick talked about conditions in which people can be healthy which I think is a really important idea and he also talked about Davis as a model, Davis as a model and I do think it is a model and I talk about Davis in lots of my talks all over the place and I'm very proud of what we do here. We've done lots of surveys in Davis and thanks to those of you who have answered our surveys when we've asked you to participate and we find for example that of UC Davis people, faculty, staff, students who live in Davis, roughly 50% are biking to campus, pretty awesome. We've surveyed at the high school and a third of kids are biking to school, also pretty awesome. When I share those numbers elsewhere in the US, people go ooh, they are so impressed but if I share those numbers in places like the Netherlands or Denmark, they're much too polite to say it but I know they're thinking can't you do a little better than that and so that's the way I think about it. We've created a place in which people can be healthy but what about the 50% who aren't biking to campus and what about the 70% of kids who aren't biking to DHS and actually it's about, some of them are walking, some are taking the bus but it's somewhat over 50% are driving or being driven to Davis High School. Can't we do better and I think this is an area where we on the planning and transportation side of things still have a lot to learn from public health. We've created good conditions here but how do we get more people to take advantage of that? So plug for Davis Bicycles and Cool Davis and lots of other programs around here that are trying to make that kind of thing happen and then I think kind of the last point I wanna make, I mean clearly our fixation on the car and the privilege that we give to the car is a big part of the challenge here and it's gonna take a really big shift in thinking not only among planners and transportation planners in particular but among the public to start thinking about our public environments in a very different way. The line I like to use is that for all these decades we've focused on making it easier to drive. What we need to do is focus on making it easier not to have to drive. And I'm lucky to live in a place like Davis where that's true, it's possible to not have to drive at least not very much on the time. But that leads me to the point I wanna end on. There are a lot of equity issues and justice issues we need to think about with respect to this topic but I'm increasingly worried that having that possibility of not having to drive is a privilege. You think about where in the state it is possible not to have to drive so much and there are pretty pricey places to be Davis included. So how do we bring more affordability to those places where not driving is possible and how do we make driving less more possible in places that are more affordable? We have a lot of work to do. So I too have enjoyed Dr. Jackson over the many years. I very much appreciated the time that I've been able to see him at New Partners for Smart Growth and many other places that I think I have at least two of those three books and read those at home. So, and Judy, thank you for inviting me here. Those events, absolutely true, connecting all those different stove pipes together has had a tremendous effect in many communities around the US. The thing I'm gonna focus on is again that comment about have we rigged the environment against the kid? And that got me thinking and I went back to a question that Peter asked me when I first got here. He says, well, what do you think about what's going on with climate change? Are you optimistic or pessimistic? Well, I was in Paris and I was at the UN meeting there and given what's happened since that time with the euphoria and what's happening to today, I'm not nearly as optimistic as I was. But how does that affect our children? As if you went out and asked people, what do you think about climate change? In an elevator, you'd get party line answers probably. People have heard that as a code word. But if you started talking and you said, do you think the climate in Davis or wherever you are in California is changing? A lot of people know that that's really happening and it's not just in California. The effects of climate change, heat, vectors, flooding, sea level rise, wildfire, impact different parts of the US differently. If you're in the Midwest, you're thinking about flooding. If you're in Florida, Southern Florida, you're thinking about sea level rise. So all of those factors have impacted children in physical ways. I was driving on I-5 the other day with my two grandkids and in the back car, bringing them back from Sacramento. And they saw the fire there where the I-5 was closed because in the middle that caught on fire and it was a big long stretch there about a quarter mile where everything had burned and they were cleaning that up. My two granddaughters focused right on the fire. They know about fire. We have this movement of youth around the world and we think, are these just a small group of people? I would bet you that every kid in the Midwest that's been impacted by flooding or their friends and families or they've seen it on television, every one of those kids knows about flooding and they're thinking about it. Just like my kids are thinking about fire. They see it on television. They see smoke. When my grandkids see smoke in the sky, they see it, they talk about it. That's something that's physically on their minds. So when we think about the physical things that impact kids, those vectors, heat, mosquitoes, diseases, flooding and so on, that's one piece of it. But the other piece is in their minds. All those kids, I'll bet you a lot of kids around the US wherever you are, they're thinking about that as an impact in their lives and something they're seeing on television. I know every kid in California is thinking and understands and knows we have a fire problem in California. If you're thinking about that all the time, that's something that's on your mind. That's a problem that you have that I didn't have when I was in North Carolina. As a kid, I wasn't thinking about climate change. I was thinking about dinner, going out and playing in the woods and doing a lot of other things. I didn't have those problems. So in addition, so with this idea of rigging the environment against the child, we've not only rigged it against the child in the way of the physical things, but we've rigged it in the way of the psychological things that we're thinking about. So that idea that you brought forth, if we're gonna communicate climate to people, I really haven't seen a lot about how this thought theme, this idea on all these kids' heads is really impacting how they look at the future and what they think about the world that we're delivering them. It's probably not just a bunch of people, a small group that are activists. It's probably a lot of kids, probably your grandkids and your children are probably thinking about this and knowing about this. So I'm gonna go back in some of the venues that I work in, Cool Davis and some of the other pieces of my life after retirement and try to think about how to frame that message into the communication that we do as sort of a message. And maybe a message I would use. And so those times when I have somebody who maybe doesn't agree politically, but maybe would be willing to talk about that idea. So that's a thought and idea. That's my response to tonight. Every time I hear you speak, I learned something. Take away something. Thank you. Okay, so we are going to open up for question and answer. And I would ask that people ask very succinct one answer. Let's get to questions. Yes. Okay, yes. Hi, so marrying the urban planning and public health is awesome, but it seems like there's still a missing at least one or two facets, which would be psychology and sociology. So getting people not to want to drive. How do we do that? I'll stop for a short question. Actually, I'm gonna jump in with a quick one. Do you know how RJ Reynolds got women to start smoking? They hired a bunch of beautiful flappers and women in the 1920s to walk up Fifth Avenue and the Easter Parade carrying cigarettes. And the coolest women that all the young women wanted to sort of emulate, they knew exactly how to market ill health. And I think we've gotta figure out how the coolest kids on campus actually be biking as well. You've given more thought to it, but I think you can market this. Yeah, and I think that's something we've gotten from public health is the grounding in psychology, whereas transportation has always been grounded in economics and people are maximizing their utility and minimizing travel time. I think from psychology, we learn so much more about how people are making the choices they do. Fun is really important. We've been doing some work on jump bikes, surveying people about jump bike use, and we're gonna start surveying people about scooters, which is maybe a whole another separate conversation, public health-wise. But fun is a really big part of that. And I think that's where events like Lupa-Lusa, where you get families out riding the loop in May. Thank you, Crystal, for getting that going to begin with. You know, if you can get people seeing how fun it can be, that's gonna help. I mean, it's not the only thing, but fun is a big factor, right? I mean, that's why people who bike are biking. It's a lot because they enjoy it and because it's fun, not just because it gets them from point A to point B. It's marketing and messaging, and you have to have a currency that people want and are interested in. And currencies that people are interested in are their pocketbook, and their health. And I love that slide that you showed about the car, that it eats money and shortens your life. Those kind of things are good messages to people. And when we were telling people they couldn't burn their wood stoves in Sacramento on certain nights, we would get calls up. And I would say, do you remember last summer when we were smoked out by the fires up in Yosemite? And they said, yeah. I said, well, the air pollution in your community when six fireplaces in your community are on is worse than that. And they say, oh, okay, I understand, got it. No more questions. So you have to connect something, figure out something that connects fun, money, their health, they're gonna live longer, and community. For some people, responsibility and the sense of having a community together and you're doing something together, that only works for some people though, like this crowd of people that's in here tonight. I'm just, this isn't at all my area, but I just quickly, today when I went to your website or there was an announcement, oh, it was on the announcement for Davis Futures and there was a link to your seven minute video. And then on there, somehow it popped up on YouTube that Jeff Speck YouTube video and he was a previous speaker that the Futures Forum brought here and he had some great things to say about the how-tos. Not at all my area, but it was a really good video, so check that out. In Los Angeles, they do a sick la via about once every six weeks and where they shut down a major boulevard and the classic one was they shut down a Wilshire boulevard for 15 miles and the mayor said, you have to do this, but the police hated it, the retail hated it, metro transportation hated it. Turned out that 300,000 people showed up, they were all smiling. There was no crime, business got better and at the end families would, the child would say, this is cool, I love it. One parent would say, I had no idea it was so beautiful and the other parent would say, I got downtown faster on my bike than I did in the car. So events really, I know you do events, but events really matter. What would you think of promoting climate victory gardens which are gardens tended in such a way as to sequester carbon in the soil? I've heard that such gardens would involve composting and mulching. I'll jump in just for fun because I went recently to a presentation by the Vine down at the Bicycle Museum and they're doing a presentation next Tuesday night I think on this very subject on gardening and composting and sequestering of carbon for that. But anyway, there are good events going on in town on that very subject, but just as a hobbyist gardener and somebody who cares about this very issue, I love it and I pay attention to all sorts of crazy bloggers on this subject and if you're interested in getting a movement going, I'm interested in joining in. Just to show how crazy I am, the one of the ultimate composting challenges is maybe we should stop cremating people or burying them in steel boxes with other kinds of metals and go back to natural burials. And I'm not, I'm absolutely serious. I had two physician friends who have been buried in natural park areas in cotton sheet but not with the crazy stuff we do as we compost ourselves eventually. Hi, I was sort of wondering what your guys' thoughts were on electric vehicles and it seems like they answer some questions but there's a big void with actually connecting some of these dots that we're talking about. So that's where a lot of focus is right now on Teslas and electric vehicles so I'm interested to hear your thoughts about it. One of the, I told someone one time that as an air pollution control officer thinking about the road from, coming from El Dorado County down to Sacramento, a perfect air day would be a complete traffic standstill, all electric cars. Nobody's going anywhere and they're not producing any pollution. So that's right. So just like everything else, electric cars are a step in the right direction but it's really how they're used. And if everybody's driving in the single vehicles, yes, you've solved part of a problem especially if you're getting renewable energy into those cars but you're not solving congestion, people are still in cars, they're not getting exercise. So it is a piece of it but I'm interested in the scooters. We now have electric bikes in Sacramento that when those electric bikes went in we took us three years to get a company in here and get those bikes into Sacramento. And when the company came in they said they would break even at two trips a day per bicycle and they were getting something like what, six? They were getting a really high rate. One of the highest they'd ever gotten anywhere in Sacramento on those electric bikes, on those bicycles. And it was just, and people were out riding them. Obviously people wanted that, they were doing that. And that, you have an electric vehicle for everybody. You can pedal it a little bit and get some exercise and it's not using up any energy and nobody's on the road and it's often faster. I personally love my Chevy Bolt fully electric but I probably drive it a little more because I feel less guilty. So there is some rebound effect that people have measured. But it doesn't solve all the problems, right? I mean the problem with cars isn't just what's coming out of the tailpipe. It's all that pavement that we heard about. We still need that. Yeah, and it still impacts the walking and the biking environment. I mean EVs tend to be a lot smaller than our big gas guzzling SUVs which is then safer for bikes and pedestrians. But there's so many issues still with electric vehicles. And projections for the state show that even if we can get a reasonably realistic adoption rate of EVs, it's not enough. We've still gotta get people to drive less to meet our greenhouse gas emission reduction targets. E-Bikes, I'm really hot on E-Bikes. I think they have so much potential to get more people on bikes and more trips on bikes. If you haven't tried one, I recommend it. Jump bikes are electric assist. They're fun. And who would've thought we need electric bikes in Davis which is perfectly flat. But we've got those bridges over the freeway which on my bike are kind of a pain. And it gets really hot and it's nice to have a little assist. So like I said, we're serving people about jump bikes but we're also sort of trying to measure whether experience with the jump bikes is gonna increase interest in owning your own E-Bike. And I think that's, I think there's just so much potential there. The electric scooters are another matter. I agree. Scooter skeptic, health wise, you're not getting the exercise and the injuries that were, we don't have great data yet but the data that we do have suggests that that's a big problem. So I'd rather we stuck to bikes personally. If I apologize for the personal story but our oldest son is a doc at CDC with three little kids and about four years ago he bought an electric boost bike. Atlanta is hot and humid. And he used to bike but he derived totally drenched in sweat and he had to wear a uniform because he's public health service. And so now he can come and go and not be drenched in sweat and gets, and I'm not making it up, gets there faster than he would in a car. And he uses a lot of back streets cause it's prettier. Hi, what about the barriers to building, building livable community, institutional barriers like the National Institution of Home Builders? Have they basically come around? What's the stories there? And also I know we, Judy had a struggle building village homes, building kind of these new types of communities. How have cities adapted and be more flexible, building more healthy communities and got, so we move away from form, parking drives form. So, so what if we react to those questions? I'd say we're still on that journey. I've had some amazing conversations with the federal housing people. This is not an easy administration to get progressive funding through, but funding ultimately, the mortgages, the how you can, one of the big issues here is how do we have enough homes for people and deal with the homeless issue? But then as we build, how do we do it in ways that people can build equity and live there? I regret two things I didn't learn in school. One was economics and one was acting because both of them are very useful. I live in Davis, work in Sacramento. Initially was pretty excited that yes, there is a bike path that links them, but then the four miles of Causeway is pretty noxious. Is there any move afoot to make a better pathway between here and Sacramento? Just, it's too noisy, you're breathing fumes. It's not as rewarding as almost any of the rest of my biking when I try to go between here and Sacramento. I don't know the answer to that, but I know how you can be part of the answer to that. They have an unmet needs form that SACOG does in every county every year. And go to the SACOG website, see when that forum is gonna be here in Davis. And you know, was it two nights ago? Well, you're gonna have to wait 363 more days, I guess. But you can probably do a written comment in there. That kind of comment though, over the years, we finally saw another bike path show up in the planning for SACOG coming across the river. It wasn't there long ago, but it's coming back in there now. So we need a lot of people saying that that's important. And with Jump Bikes, with them being the big supporter for that, maybe that gives them an epitys to wanna get more people back and forth on the Jump Bikes that they supported. So. When Charleston put in their new bridge, Ravenel, I think is the name of it, and the community demanded there be a bike route along the side of that bridge, and it's quite a beautiful vista of the city. They got all kinds of it. No, it's not worth the money. We're not gonna do it. You know, I'll never get a return on investment. It's the third most visited tourist attraction in Charleston, which is loaded with tourist attractions. People love it. So I have heard that some talk about a new bike bridge in conjunction with taking the current bike path and using that for widening I-80, which that's a whole nother discussion. I will be happy to contribute that bike path because I've ridden many times on that and that is a hazard and not a fun thing to do. So if they build a new bridge, that would be wonderful. It'd be nice if we got one without the widening. Separated from the freeway. Okay, just to answer somebody else's question, there is, if you go to the Seacock website and I think just look up Unmet Transit Needs, there's a website that has a webpage that shows how to write in or email and all that stuff. And I think it's for quite some more weeks, it's they're open to taking input. So my question is for the panelists and everybody here, how can we make the regional bike share system fun when it excludes everyone under 18 from using it? That's probably a legal question. And we struggled a lot when we were putting the bike idea together, we struggled a lot with how do you get low income people into the system? You know, those are problems and issues that need to be made. Do you have an answer? Somebody have an answer in the crowd here? I bet somebody, by the way, Seacock is the Sacramento Area Council of Governments. As a government person, formally I use acronyms too much and I have to explain this. It's a history bike cap, which is the main bike cap into town from where I live in East Davis. I ride my bike to work, I ride my bike to do all my shopping, but it is horrendous. It is not pleasant. Well, I think. I'm all invited to send things to the public works people who are nice about it. But I don't see the political will at the city to get these things fixed and opt to what I would consider just a normal safe standard. I think you were the one who made the wine. Yeah, I was going to suggest that you come when it's the city council sitting up here because they need to. So people are going to be there. I'm one. So I'm here and I absolutely agree with you. And so we were really disappointed. I wasn't on council yet, but we were really disappointed when the tax didn't pass to fix roads and bike lanes. And so now. What's the roads? Well, the bike lanes are definitely need to be fixed. And I can tell you that, yes, I bike and I have a son who is in a motorized wheelchair. And he was riding a bike lane at night. There was a huge dividend. His wheelchair flipped. You know, he was injured. And we had a hard time finding him because he didn't know where he was on the bike path. And so that was, so I personally am aware of the bike paths and it's really important to me. And, you know, when that happened, I said, I'm going to write a strongly letter, worded letter to myself, I think. And so. So, absolutely, absolutely, it is something. It's gonna, it is money. And this is the challenge, right? So, but we are, right. Okay. You've had a question. So, we're gonna take somebody who hasn't. Okay. Back here. Can I go back to the last one for just one second? I'm sorry. I read an article, headline two days ago, that a bunch of the additional tax we're putting on the gasoline, the carbon tax, it's up to a couple billion bucks. And the governor is trying to put a lot more of it into active transportation. And he's getting a lot of pushback. So I think these voices that we're hearing right now if I've got this wrong, please correct me, but I think these voices are so important. Somebody asked earlier about the impediments, we're the impediment, right? I mean, we need to be willing to pay for it and we need to be willing to let the right things happen. You know, when the city's trying to do good bike stuff, not everybody in town likes what they're doing and then there's pushback. So, you know, those who believe that this would be the right approach, that this is where we need to be spending our money, we need to speak up more loudly. Okay, we're gonna take one more question because we'd like to end in a timely fashion. This is for Dr. Jackson. In your research and experience, what are the elements that entice people to walk more? Susan is the researcher. I'm a long way from research, but number one, it's gotta be safe, especially for family members, but for all of us too, most of us avoid really uneven sidewalks and difficult and LA has got all these white figs and they'll heave the pavement up six inches, 10 inches. You cannot, you don't dare walk at night without a flashlight. So, the sidewalk surfaces have to be safe. Distance is another, you know, we really usually walk about a quarter to a mile, quarter mile to about a mile and after that we wanna ride. And some, those would be the big ones for me. What do you think, Susan? Yeah, exactly. I start with distance. You know, it has to be within walking distance. That's a necessary condition, but not sufficient. You need protection and then enjoyment. And there are a lot of different sub dimensions of those things. And eyes on the street, which is an aspect of safety, the more that you feel like you're surrounded by people that you feel safe with and care about. You know, the New York Subways, the big change in New York Subways from the 70s until now is it's now filled with working people. And when you get on, I'm not putting, you know, you get on the train and it's all working people going about their lives, you feel quite safe. Did you wanna, no? Okay, so I'd like to thank our panelists and our speaker again and I'd like to thank everyone for coming out. And Judy. And I'd like to thank Judy as well. Say, Judy. How are you? Good to see you. Thank you for coming. Oh, biking guy. Thank you for doing this. Yeah, it's making a difference. So it's rewarding. I'm gonna keep doing it. Keep doing it. Yeah, I think you get quite a group of interested people here. If we could have follow up maybe on some of these things. Implement some ordinance changes and implementation of things that would help with development. That takes a lot of buy-in from a lot of people. Private property that gets into kind of private property rights and just the amount of staff it takes to monitor privately owned, say, neighborhood trees. So historically that hasn't been done in Davis. And just the monitoring and the new code that would have to be written would be, have to be watertight with our community involvement. And I'll just leave it at that. I know, but where it's being recorded that's why we want the mics, yeah, yeah. So one other thing to think about and there's a word called liability and the city cannot take on the liability of private property. There becomes a very big gray area if the city recommends a tree and that tree, say, falls down and crushes your house or that tree is a palm tree and it catches a fire like a catcher's mitt and burns down. If that's something that the city recommended someone to put in, who's getting sued? It's the city. So they can't really, for liability reasons, take on any private property. And I think that would make sense to most people here because when the city gets sued it's your tax dollars that pay that lawsuit. So you would prefer them to, as Erin said, you can, master plan is gonna be public knowledge. You can use it and benefit from that and get a recommendation. But the minute you start asking the city to take on private trees, it's a liability issue. And I wouldn't recommend that. Thank you. Any final thoughts from our panelists or Jeremy? At all? Not hearing any. Well, and then I'll give Alan, Alan just give Alan the last word here since he was the primary organizer this evening. Thank you very much. This is a question kind of, I go to the city council meetings very frequently and I've kind of known as the part-time Lorax. I pick for the trees here. I'm also very, very alone when I'm at the trees at the council meeting. And it makes the changes here, it takes political will. And I'm wondering, have you seen any cities where I, where, and how can we basically mobilize more people to go to the council, to get council to fund more, to make more presence politically and go to the commissions to push, to develop, and Rob's frustrated the developers basically walk over him and he doesn't have the tools to basically push back. Have you seen any cities where basically people have been mobilized to basically push back as a force at the city council? And also how can Tree Davis get more involved politically, not just wonderful to plant a tree, but you need to basically be out there and pushing on our leaders to say, this is important as cannabis. I mean, the tree ordinance was delayed for 18 months because everyone wanted to legalize cannibals in the city of Davis, which was wonderful, but I thought the trees are a little more long lasting things. I like the comment about who has a model of doing political work and what can Tree Davis to get more involved politically? I will just briefly say that the new mayor in the city of Thousand Oaks ran on the urban forestry master plan platform and getting those five medians implemented was one of the key parts of her platform that that's the reason why we're doing it right now. So I mean, you've got to go from the top down. That's my recommendation, email, talk to them, get out there, get to the council meetings. I mean, there are guys at the city of Thousand Oaks councils because I was there for years on end and there were guys that showed up every single time and gave a presentation about something else that nobody there was talking about, but there's no reason you can't do that. You can't sit there and say, I've heard the urban forestry master plan is coming. I care. That's all you need to say. If you say it enough, they will care too. On the Tree Davis issue. So Alan and I have talked about this one on one, but everything we do at Tree Davis has to be funded, basically, and that's when I was describing our relationship with the city changing from just being contractual to being more of a partnership level that was enabled because of funding. We worked directly with the city to apply for this grant and that allows me to pay the bills, pay the good people to do the good work. And so basically, if Tree Davis is gonna be able to be more of an advocate at a political level, we have to find the funds in order to be able to do that. Here, here. That's good. So, well, with that, thank you to our panel. Thank you to our speakers. All in order for this evening, big round of applause. Once again, this event, this evening's event has been videotaped and recorded and so will be available. I know that Cool Davis has been posting them on the Cool Davis website and I think Davis Media Access has also been running them as well. So you can be in contact with the Davis Futures Forum folks or Davis Media Access about future opportunities in Cool Davis to see these videos. And thank you very much for coming. We really appreciate it. Have a good evening.