 Joining us for the latest installation in our innovators and transportation speaker series We're very excited to welcome Jeffrey Thunlin as our next speaker in the series tonight So Jeffrey is a principal and director strategy at Nelson Nygard He is also the author of sustainable transportation planning tools for creating healthy vibrant and resilient communities So please join me in welcoming Jeffrey Thunlin. Thank you So good evening The transportation industry is a very strange complicated place full of paradox and contradiction Many of the things that we do to think that we're solving one problem end up exacerbating it More importantly, many of the things that we do were not clear why exactly we're doing them so this presentation is about performance metrics and Aligning our values with what we expect transportation to deliver and What we expect government to deliver as well So I'm going to cover a couple of key points One is a little bit of thinking about what transportation is in general. What role do we serve? Another a little bit about what actually is congestion since congestion seems to be the thing that we're most asked to solve We'll talk a little bit about the future of technology and autonomous vehicles that are not going to solve all of our problems In fact, all of the current data says that autonomous vehicles are greatly going to exacerbate our problems And finally we're going to talk a little bit about solutions out of this problem. I'm going to be drawing Actually a little bit from my experience in Oakland, which is very very different from Santa Cruz in many ways I chose Oakland in part because it is so very different, but like Santa Cruz Oakland is really clear about what its values are and Oakland's work over the last two years Clarifying its values and aligning the mechanics of governance with those values has allowed Oakland to make some very rapid Progress on using its limited resources in order to achieve its goals We can also talk a little bit about other places that are in some ways More like Santa Cruz like Santa Monica, which is much bigger or I love Vista, which is smaller or bolder Which is a more of a college town, but let's talk about Oakland for now. So let's get started Congestion is Incredibly frustrating. In fact, road rage is actually a clinical term road rage happens when We're trapped inside a vehicle that promised to deliver us freedom and mobility and power and autonomy and social status and instead it delivers this and If you scream or try to express your frustration Nobody hears you And so all of The that part of the brain that is set aside for social communication and understanding All of that doesn't work anymore because we're isolated inside our cars And so when somebody cuts you off in the road That person has threatened you directly has threatened your health and safety and has also threatened your social status Now this person may not have any awareness that they've done this But the primitive part of your brain the reptilian cortex the brain All of its threat responses get sent off and it demands a response now this person may have actually Realized that they've done something wrong and it's trying to say oh, I'm terribly sorry I didn't mean to cut you off, but they have no way of communicating that with you and their silence Triggers even more deeply the threat to your basic social status and now you must be compensated So for those of us who drive cars Perhaps you've had the experience of saying things out loud that you would never say under any of their contents while behind a wheel or threatening the lives of Your self your loved ones or other people on the roadway This is the reptilian part of your brain triggering the fight or flight response that forces us to do things that we would never otherwise do and This same sort of phenomenon that happens to us angry and frustrated in the road Also complies itself out in the transportation politics and the politics of transportation and our inability to agree on ways out of this problem Part of it is also that the world of transportation is completely disconnected from the world of economics So for those of you who remember Econ 101 back in high school you'll remember the basic laws of Adam Smith and there's of course the supply curve Which says that the more somebody is willing to pay for something the more the market will tend to supply that and the demand Curve which says when the price of a good drops the more people will demand it with the equilibrium point being The price that enables the market to deliver the good at a profit And in a sustained manner so for every commodity in our society We use price to balance supply and demand the only exception to this in American society is parking and driving For parking and driving we use time to balance supply and demand Congestion is simply what happens when the demand for mobility equals the supply Command congesting this just the equilibrium point for the supply and demand equation Congestion is exactly the same thing that happened in the Soviet Union with bread The Russians decided to socialize bread and the result was scarcity here in the United States rather than socializing Housing or healthcare we've socialized driving and the result is the severe congestion that you all experience out there every day Another problem with our field of transportation is our inability to use systems thinking So we get very very frustrated with congested it makes us rather sad and we complain to city government And we demand that taxes be raised in order to build a new project at a lane or an overpass and we go out and we have years and years of fighting and finally we went up the ballot and We get enough money to widen the roadway and we widen the roadway and it's great You know, there's like three years of construction chaos, but now it's finally open. It's awesome and driving is faster For most people in my industry. This is where the thinking stops, right? I've added another lane I made driving faster problem solved on to the next thing nothing more needed to be done here But of course transportation is a complex system and when you make driving faster people make different choices Oh, why don't we go across town for lunch because you know, the highway is widened or better yet, honey Why don't we move to the bigger cheaper house farther away because of the new road? so faster driving means more people drive which means there's congestion which makes us sad and Pretty much every city in the United States is trapped in this ridiculous childish death spiral of Congestion and yet we still believe right when we're sitting there frustrated in our car that surely just one more lane over there It's like so obvious if there were another lane there I could merge into that and finally driving would be easier and if we can't you know add another lane over there Alon must will come add another lane underground and that will finally solve our congested problem. I promise you it's going to be great So there's many things that we can do in transportation, but one thing we have absolutely no control over is congestion Congestion is not an infrastructure problem. Congestion is an economic problem Congestion is just what happens the demand for mobility will supply and just like any other economic scarcity problem We have only two or three maybe tools for solving congestion One is you can just make people wait it out like you just make congestion so bad that people make other choices That's kind of what we're doing now Two is you can destroy your regional economy Detroit solved its congestion problem briefly although congestion is rising there again That's you know pretty much the most effective tool that is used in the United States for addressing congestion is destroying the economy The third is recognizing that just like food and clothing and housing and your cell phone bill the only way to solve an economic problem is through price and The price that is right for congestion is always the lowest price that allows traffic to flow smoothly again and yet Everything that we're doing in transportation points us in the wrong direction So in my world the primary metric of success The thing that determines whether the road is the right dimension or the intersection signal timing is correct Or whether a bus lane is warranted or whether we can take out a lane to add a bike lane or reconfigure an intersection There's a single metric that drives all decision-making is called intersection level of service level of service or LOS How many of you heard of LOS like oh the intersection doesn't work the intersection fails But level of service is a really simple metric what level of service measures is the average seconds of delay that a car Experiences at an intersection in the peak one hour as measured off of the peak 15 minutes So it's a metric of seconds of delay that a car is experiencing at the peak of the peak and Of course, it's great at a letter grade system with level service a meaning There's no congestion. It's great. You can drive as fast as you want and Levels are but you know every grade levels about another 15 seconds of delay with level service F being 80 seconds delay or more with the presumption being that level service F or 80 seconds of delay Not only has the intersection failed, but your city traffic engineer has failed personally She is a personal failure for having allowed an intersection to get to 80 seconds of delay in the peak 15 minutes Or more commonly at 80 seconds of delay in the peak 15 minutes in the year 2035 So level service, it's a useful metric for some things like balancing signal timing But like so much that we do in transportation. It has some unintended negative consequences So one of the first consequences is that Traffic volume is not consistent throughout the day so on a typical arterial you've got a big spike in the morning and then you know the reverse commute spike in the afternoon and If that's your roadway capacity, what level of service focuses on is that right? That's the only thing that we care about so imagine if Southwest Airlines every time Three more people wanted to get on that high demand 7 a.m. Flight to Los Angeles that every time there were three more people that wanted that Southwest Airlines went out and bought another airplane no private company or Rational government would ever focus on that part of the equation What they would focus on is all of the wasted infrastructure that they have built that is not being used all of that empty street space That's in the opposite direction and the rest of the day rather than raising that red bar They would flatten the kerf in order to make more effective use out of our incredibly expensive capital investments in streets and roads and highways level service also says that the The epitome of what my industry can achieve is something as beautiful as this. This is the ultimate achievement in the transportation industry You can drive as fast as you want now You know of course, we don't need to ask What the accommodation is for the pedestrians or what the resulting land value is here? This is level service a This on the other hand, this is University Avenue in Palo Alto University Avenue Palo Alto used to have four lanes. It now only has two lanes It's at level service F not in the peak 15 minutes. It's a level service at 15 hours a day Palo Alto could double the capacity of University Avenue tomorrow and it chooses not to Because the function of University Avenue in Palo Alto is supporting one of the highest grossing retail streets in California, this is the entire tax base of Palo Alto The performance metric for University Avenue is not level of service It's retail sales tax per square foot, which is extraordinarily successful So how you look at level service varies very much depending upon your perspective with a traffic engineer saying that University Avenue in Palo Alto is a complete disaster and nameless Silicon Valley Street is perfection And an economist taking a very different viewpoint Similarly, if you're a retailer the optimal level of service is E That a is worse than F. A is a disaster for retailers because traffic is moving too fast to see your storefront You want traffic to be slow But not Catastrophically so so level service needs to be seen in its appropriate context But more importantly, we need to think of the other unintended negative consequences of level of service So level service first of all is a metric of vehicle delay not person delay So if you're a passenger on board of 40 passenger bus You were valued at 1 40th the value of somebody driving alone in a car And if you're on foot or on a bike, it's not that you don't matter at all Oh, you matter you matter in so far as you slow down Those people who really matter which are those of us driving our cars So There's some perhaps equity and efficiency problems about this, but it also has an incredibly poor impact on space utilization and traffic efficiency because what level of service does is it? Rewards the most space inefficient mode of transportation it says that the mode of transportation that takes up 10 times as much space as every other mode of transportation is The one that we care about and that we've got to get the more space efficient modes out of the way It assumes that the other modes are the problem and that this is the third three promenade in downtown Santa Monica a Complete disaster from a level of service standpoint because all of those pedestrians crossing the street are Getting in the way of left turning movements for cars, which are the thing that really matters But it gets weirder as you start applying level of service in a traffic impact analysis Or an environmental analysis So under the old sequel rules the California Environmental Quality Act rules that Santa Cruz still uses the game that we transportation people play is is knowing that my development project Only has a significant traffic impact if it triggers level of service from D to E or E to F So I can add just a tiny number of new trips in the year 2035 And that is considered a significant impact on the environment and must be mitigated The easiest way to mitigate a traffic impact like that is to simply shrink the project So that you get one motor vehicle trip under whatever threshold it is that you trip Which means eliminating housing units Our favorite thing to do is to cut housing units from a project in order to avoid tripping a level of service threshold This of course doesn't mean that Housing demand goes away. No housing demand stays the same that housing demand is just met farther away Somewhere else So that's our other favorite thing to do because level of service in environmental analysis Only looks at the intersections the immediate vicinity of the project So the best thing to do under sequel is to move the project to a more isolated rural location Where the intersections are still at a or B? Not realizing that I have done just doubled the vehicle trip generation rate and tripled vehicle miles traveled and all of those motor vehicle trips end up back in the city, of course But I don't have to count that anymore or mitigate it This is the game that we play and this is why in a place like Santa Cruz County your very rules designed to mitigate traffic congestion are the thing that has created your traffic congestion problem and It gets even better So if I'm you know at the end of the city where there's an opportunity to widen the roadways So I can't shrink the project or move it. I've actually got to Save the California environment by widening the road, which is the primary function of the California Environmental Quality Act I Have to widen the road in order to accommodate a worst-case scenario level of motor vehicle trip generation for my project because we need to be Conservative in an environmental analysis So we assume the worst rate of driving and then we build to accommodate the worst rate of driving Which then has a series of impacts one is it makes it a lot easier to drive But more importantly, it makes it that much more difficult to walk or bike or to take transit So the number of times I've been asked to eliminate a bike lane in order to add a car lane as part of an environmental Analysis or eliminate a crosswalk like in this project so that you can now no longer Get across the street to the bus stop The environmental mitigations that we're required to do by your rules Make it easier to drive and much more difficult for existing people to walk or bike or to take transit Over reliance on level of service is creating the very problems. It was intended to solve Now we're fortunate that thanks to Senate bill 743 All local jurisdictions in California still have another year to eliminate use of level of service from environmental analysis or at least findings of significance in environmental analysis because our previous since 1977 approach to sequel has Probably sequel has I would argue the transportation analysis conventions under sequel have done more harm to the California Environment than anything else in California history. So we're hoping to fix that But it requires all local jurisdictions to take action so that sequel is no longer creating Traffic and co2 problem and instead that the California Environmental Quality Act works in support of the California All right, let's talk a little bit about autonomous vehicles because they're really happening. It's exciting There's all kinds of interesting opportunity with autonomous vehicles And it's something that we've been talking about for a very very long time So we've been talking about this since at least the 1930s and fully developed by the 1940s And we were promise it was right around the corner, you know in 1946 And indeed the sort of marketing images are also basically identical except like the interior design is like by Tim cook And instead of playing board games, you know, there's a video game and they're like there's no longer any children and ambiguous ethnicity So, you know, there's some things have been modernized, but the idea of limitless mobility is exactly the same So here's a question for all of you. I bet some of you know the answer to this Who's investing the most in autonomous vehicle technology? anyway Google Google's investing the most in autonomous vehicle technology So that's kind of weird like Google's not a car company. What's Google's revenue model? What how do they make their money? Do they sell information like they sell web searches? What's Google's revenue model? 95% of Google's revenue comes from advertising So what is an ad firm doing? Building cars that seems kind of weird The car industry is really difficult and expensive to break into Why is an ad company getting into the autonomous vehicle business? Well, that's when things start to get kind of weird so one thing to keep in mind is that like Back in the 1980s people thought when the internet was being invented that the revenue model for the internet like old media Companies that were you know selling magazines and newspapers, right? They could go online and sell magazines and newspapers online and that was going to be the revenue model It was going to be the old economy Moved into the internet everything else would be the same No, the only ways to make money off of the internet Are ads like Google Bundled services like Amazon like oh if you like that book, perhaps you would like this crockpot And of course sex and that's a whole other lecture about the relationship between the sex industry and autonomous vehicles That is actually being talked about a lot at technology conferences Right it gets weird so One of the things that is interesting to me is that uber and lyft are enabling us to think through some of the unintended consequences of Autonomous vehicles in advance of them actually rolling out so uber and lyft are quite similar Except that there's a driver that you're still paying for So ab use are sort of like a cheaper version of uber and lyft Which is great But we're also seeing you know at the technology shows and I should get better photos of this the you know Like the new windshield technology that is completely it's an opaque video screen Because of course your car Knows who you are It has your credit card information. It knows where you are and where you're going to and it has your entire internet search history So the revenue model for the future of mobility is not mobility The revenue model for the future of mobility is capturing the value of time of the people inside The vehicle so there's the hulu model that says the future of mobility is completely free And the only thing that you will pay for is to turn the ads off and to be allowed to look out the windshield The other models right so tinder zappos. They're all investing in av technology So zappos is already sending avs out Fully stocked with shoes that fit your feet and that match your previous spending And your trip to work is free provided you literally walk out in a new pair of shoes so The world was getting really interesting and part of the implications of this I mean the the social and political implications of it get really scary as you start thinking about like, okay Like I'd be willing to share a ride, but you know only with somebody of 4.5 stars or better Or I'd be willing to share a ride, but You know, I'm just it's not that I'm racist. It's just that I work comfortable, you know with people of my own skin tone So all of the social horror of social media and the tribalism that is happening in online space Gets translated into physical space through the arrival of autonomous vehicles and these companies are already accommodating that because The advertising industry is the industry of making you feel inadequate That's the business that ad companies are in And so what better way to make you feel inadequate than to capitalize upon your deepest basis fears and tribalism But of course the other thing that happens when mobility gets a lot cheaper Is people drive a lot more which we're already seeing with uber and lyft and the dramatic increase in vehicle miles travel That is resulting from this cheaper more readily available more ubiquitous form of mobility So we're starting to do the math on all of this. There's some quite interesting upsides to ad technology Parking demand goes away Like most of us are estimating about 80 percent of urban parking demand simply evaporates And we're already seeing this in a big way in san francisco in oakland where it's always cheaper to take uber and lyft That it is to drive and park And so both san francisco and oakland are selling off their municipal parking garages For real estate development because the revenue is dropping so much that they won't be able to pay the debt service on their facilities So there's a pretty significant downside for people who own significant supplies of underground or structured parking that can't be retrofitted There's also huge downsides in terms of increased sprawl the public health implications of Removing walkability of ubiquitous door to door mobility on replacing walking and biking trips We're also very much worried about transit agencies that don't step it up and exert leadership So there's a lot of low productive Suburban transit that can simply go away and be replaced by autonomous vehicle technology But because it takes the same amount of space to move somebody in a private car or an uber or an autonomous uber Cities are dependent upon high capacity mobility in order to make the mathematics of limited Street right-of-way work So the transit agencies that move towards High capacity autonomy and more importantly the transit agencies that partner with municipalities In order to allocate street space for the most efficient modes of transportation Those are going to be the ones that win Those who just let the current market move forward are going to end up with a big disaster And so the starting point for moving forward in the right way Is recognizing the most valuable capital asset of any municipality Is the street rates of way That land between private property It's about 25 to 35 percent of the land area of any municipality It's phenomenally valuable Streets are publicly owned land And municipalities must assert not only their right But their responsibility to manage the public right-of-way for the public good To welcome private companies and private individuals to take advantage of the public right-of-way But only to the extent the public good is respected cities need to manage their streets So cities should welcome scooters and uber and lyft and Waymo and all of this sort of interesting New mobility that's being thrown out there into the public right-of-way But cities must carefully regulate all of this Not saying no, but rather to be quite clear about the expected outcomes That cities want on their public rights of way and to be certain that they can measure those outcomes So that they know what to do when new technology shows up at their doorstep One of the things of course that autonomous vehicles give us the power to do In a way that can be seamless and equitable is to finally use price to balance supply and demand So if the vehicle has payment integrated into it, right, you know It's just another utility that you use And like with electricity that costs more during peak periods So should driving but more importantly the thing that we need to price is not just driving itself But wasting limited street space I would argue the thing that most needs to be priced is not the vehicle trip But empty seats So sure you can drive in your giant google rv with your water bed and your desk and your entertainment console And you could have that google rv circle around in public streets all day long because that is easier than finding a parking space But you should be paying for wasting that space and similarly if i'm willing to take a crowded Bus or walk My mobility wallet should be reloaded because i am making the most efficient possible use of limited space At a congested time when those streets need to deliver a lot of person movement So in order to get through all of this our transit agencies need to step into a leadership position and particularly collaborate with municipalities transit needs to define its function And it particularly needs to define the equity function that transit agencies serve to make sure that Uh that private companies are not simply chasing their private profit And pursuing convenience for the most privileged members of society So this is the thing that silicon valley is best at right silicon valley is so good at providing even more convenience for extraordinarily privileged people like me Public agencies on the other hand need to make sure that we're not leaving people behind in this technological revolution And not only because it's unfair or wrong and we should have learned our lessons last time We left a quarter of americans behind in the previous technological revolution It's also because our economy and our competitiveness depends upon being able to tap The entrepreneurialism and hard work of all americans If we exclude people from the equation If we exclude people of color or women or older adults or people with disabilities We lose our global economic competitiveness social equity is the right thing to do. It is also economically necessary So let's talk about other things that we need to do as well. So I mentioned that In transportation we can do many things one thing that we cannot do is solve for traffic congestion We do however as my physician friends complained to me about We in transportation have more control over public health outcomes than the medical industry does The medical industry just cleans up the mess that we have created In my work in oakland. So I served as interim director of the oakland department of transportation serving to create a new city department and put it on on a path Aligning the city's transportation policies with its valleys in an oakland I found that I was responsible for knocking 15 years off the lifespan of children growing up in low-income neighborhoods In oakland largely as a result of transportation investments in the past. So we Put our all of our polluting industries where low-income children of color live We put our freeway on and off ramps Where low-income children live and as a result they get run down in traffic And because of the way we designed our streets in the low-income neighborhoods We deny our low-income children the ability to walk or bike safely to school All that together knocks 15 years off the life of kids growing up in certain census strike districts And the health data is is very very clear We also know of course from the film molly That things will get worse in the future Unless we correct for them now And we also know from investments like this. This was a little project called latham square in downtown oakland That when you invest in really troubled places and create quality create a quality of experience that people love walking and biking and socialism And the human body needs 10,000 steps every single day in order to function optimally If we expect if we design our cities so that in order to get your 10,000 steps You've got to drive to the gym and walk on a treadmill. You're dooming your residents to poor health So the starting point for any conversation about transportation has to be unrelentingly high quality walkability and bikeability If not, you're creating a far worse set of problems Interestingly, another thing that we in transportation can do is create happiness And this has always been seen as a sort of weird like amorphous word that is subject to judgment But in fact Neuroscience is teaching us a lot about the biology of happiness and the very predictable physical characteristics of communities That make us happy So this is a neuropeptide called oxytocin. It's produced in the brain When we gaze longingly into the eyes of somebody that we love It's produced with breastfeeding and most prominently with orgasm But it's also produced when we exercise outdoors It is not produced when we exercise on a treadmill and they don't understand why But we see the results of it and you've perhaps experienced having a horrible awful argument with somebody that you love And you were about to say something you were going to regret and you went outside And you went for a swim or a walk or a run or a bike ride And suddenly about 15 minutes into that your entire perspective changed This is your biology. It is a fixed part of our humanity that we can design for it And of course the alternative Is the kind of road rage That triggers the fight or flight instinct in the brain And the most prominent characteristic of that is shutting off the prefrontal cortex the brain That part of the brain that allows us to think through the consequences of our actions And I would argue that part of what is most deeply wrong with our national Politics these days is the fact that so many of us are stuck in a car We've actually lost the ability physically to think through the consequences of our actions The transportation industry also has a bigger impact on land value and economic development than your economic development department does In fact, I would argue that our primary function in transportation is the creation of land value Or the exporting of land value from city centers to the sperm and edge That's been our primary function in the past. We're trying to learn from those mistakes But there's also this sort of function of making the most efficient use out of space And I told you this before and it's super important under a man that It takes up 10 times as much space to move somebody in a car than walking or biking or transit I am not a better person or a more noble human being when I walk or bike or take transit I'm just more space efficient So if you want people to be able to drive when they need to drive By far the most effective way of doing that is making it possible for someone else To walk or bike or take transit because every time somebody gets in a car They're excluding nine other people from being able to use the transportation system Cars aren't bad. They're just inefficient They're a trade-off between convenience and efficiency cars are phenomenally convenient It's been you know inventions few inventions. That's wonderfully delightfully convenient as the car But there are also few inventions as space inefficient And of course, yeah autonomy doesn't solve the problem Transport is now in the united states Yay, we're now the biggest contributor to co2 So as the energy sector has cleaned up the transport sector has gotten worse We contribute by far the largest share of criterion pollutants And now we are the biggest contributor to co2 emissions here in california It's now just over 50% and of that 70% is not airplanes and boats and trucks It's personal driving. It was me driving down here from san francisco I am a fundamental part of the co2 problem and unless we're getting serious about driving We are climate denialists all of us myself included Transport also has other interesting relationship with social equity including the fact that particularly as we're Suburbanizing poverty low-income households Are having to spend an increasing share of their disposable income and disposable time on mobility We're making poor people drive farther and spend more and that is denying them opportunities To find paths out of poverty But we also know that in the face of rising rents, right, you know, we have some control over that It's limited We can keep communities whole by reducing household transportation costs far more readily than we can Reducing rent So in oakland, one of the things we realized was how phenomenally cheap it was to simply give free bus passes to all low-income youth cost nothing and have profoundly positive impacts on school attendance rates and household low-income household expenditure Of course, we are You know the leading cause of death particularly for young people in america, you know, there's the whole variety of causal elements And the addition of 40 million americans That are not 40 million 40 thousand americans that are killed every year Directly by automobiles as a result of letting humans roll themselves at each other at 70 miles an hour That's a whole other lecture But the thing that I actually wanted to get to was equity Because this was the topic that moved the needle as we started to define what transportation was for in oakland And it made us have some really really uncomfortable conversations about what exactly it was that we meant by equity So equity is one of these ambiguous terms that kind of hard to define It's a term that requires that we look at the past. It's a term that requires that we have conversations that are inclusive um, and it's a term that is about making sure that Everyone has the same kind of opportunities Recognizing we all start from a different place It made us have really uncomfortable conversations about race Which is always fun, particularly for a white guy in the department head position in oakland um, and it also made us Have conversations about the difference between equity and equality And that equality is in fact the enemy of equity That if you assume that what we want to do is to equalize our investments You're taking people who have a very very fortunate starting place And equalizing investment to them, which simply accelerates How much more advantage they are in the future Similarly those people who are in a not so good starting place you give them an equal investment That doesn't help very much for somebody that's in a tough starting place and oh my goodness if you've read, uh, the color of law Um, my industry and the financial services industry have a lot of making up to do of how we've stripped away capital Quite intentionally from people and people of color In the united states part of it driven by maps like these. This is the red lining map of oakland All those places in red on the map Are places where it was illegal to get a mortgage And where my industry got extra points for building transportation projects Because that was defined as blight and blight was defined as african-american ownership So, uh, you'll see most of the big transportation infrastructure investments Oh in oakland over the last 50 years were in the red areas of the map the highways that really Created so many problems and as we started looking in detail at our health and demographic and performance rates this map pattern Replicates itself today So our task in the oakland department of transportation was first really clarifying what our values Work particularly equity and how to define that and then looking at all of the mechanics of governance and aligning All of those details with our values So we started with values and that was a long very painful conversation We started translating that into goals and objectives and strategies that our department could actually do Very importantly, we we knew that we had to have quantitative performance metrics That related back to every single one of our values And this was hard because those those metrics needed to be quantitative They needed to be rooted in existing or readily available data or otherwise like nobody would use them And they needed to be sort of the shortest list of metrics That um people would believe spoke to their core values But the most important step here Was tying all of this to your budget The most powerful statement of values in any community has absolutely nothing to do with your general plan or some policy document Or some land use plan The only useful statement of your values is your budget And then finally we needed to make sure that we were reporting back to our policy makers and to our community That government was actually investing limited tax dollars wisely in order to Meet the needs and values of our community And again reminding you that where all of this plays out is in the budget So so we went through this process And got a lot of clarity about what it was that we were doing and developed a strategic plan that was very action oriented And very values oriented and it allowed us to get a phenomenal amount of work Unstuck stuff that had been stuck for 15 years. So We basically eliminated minimum partner requirements and the whole urban part of the city. We radically We Changed all the parking management codes city-wide basically doing value pricing for parking throughout the city We limited the use of level of service and traffic impact analysis. We formed a department And managed to attract a permanent director who is amazing We developed some a whole new set of tools because there were no off-the-shelf tools that we could use for Measuring equity in our community all of this together allowed us to take in a very Stressed community a 350 million dollar infrastructure bond to the voters that passed with over 80 percent of the vote We radically changed all of our construction projects impact rules our traffic signal guidance are all of the sort of messy mechanics at the staff level Basically to get staff to look at everything that they did and figure out How is what i'm doing helping to deliver on oaklands clearly held And finally it enabled us to pass In a time where we actually had a shrinking capital budget For the city and operating budget for the city a whole new budget that allocated a lot of money to transportation So i'll want to walk you through if you see the presentation again There's some links in here that you can look at all of this The funny little wet tool that we developed to help us with some of our decision making Particularly around equity and in the equity conversation in order to get past a start place where we were about Reparations basically around recognizing okay, we've screwed over a lot of people for 70 years Uh Like are they do reparations that conversation wasn't going to lead us to a productive place So instead we started with disparities like okay We're not going to have that conversation, but we could recognize look children growing up in these neighborhoods have 15 years knocked off their lives Children growing up in these neighborhoods lose a year of school attainment regardless of income or ethnicity These are serious problems that we have the power to correct So we started with existing disparities with a focus on kids We looked at health we looked at jobs accessibility We looked at safety and we looked very carefully at issues that children and seniors were facing And we started with the metropolitan transportation commissions sort of communities of concern for oakland Which was basically all of the oakland flats. That was not very helpful to us So instead we took that data and we desegregated it into all of the different demographic factors that mattered And we broke it down By census block groups that we can see at a fine level the patterns including things like low-income population older adults And we pulled all of this together into a disadvantage index and allowed our policy makers To weight these different demographic factors in different ways Um, of course realizing that because this map perfectly matches the red lining map of 1965 That no matter how you weighted the different factors you still end up with exactly the same map So we allowed some playing around with the weighting and then we added a whole bunch of other things as well including Environmental and social resilience factors and a bunch of data around mobility But then allowed us to layer in all of our capital projects into this map and evaluate both The projects each individually to see how well each project met our goals But also packages of projects as well um, and the result of that was A lot greater trust building with our policy makers in the community that we were spending oakland's extremely limited resources In a way that benefited the community as a whole and that they could see and track The progress that we were making knowing we were not going to solve 70 years worth of disinvestment in one capital budget cycle So the thing that I leave you with is there are many ways in which Santa Cruz is completely different than oakland but one thing that you have in common Is a great deal of clarity and passion about your values Your values in Santa Cruz in Santa Cruz county are different than oakland's values But you know what your values are So can you have a civic conversation about exactly what your values are and then find ways Of quantifying the degree to which those values are being attained and how different transportation projects Are moving you towards values alignment along with the ways that your existing projects and priorities and metrics and tools Are pointing you in the wrong direction So that I've gone over time. I'm happy to take any questions. Thank you so much Any questions? I love questions in Santa Cruz. Don't be shy. Yes in the back I'm really interested in this idea of a mobility wallet that you mentioned And have do you know of any cities that have actually done that? It seems like Building on your idea of price that it could really be interesting to like there was a way of Calibrating a mobility wallet that also took into account equity and that you know people might get paid for Taking modes of transportation that produce less co2 They would get paid They would have to pay for taking their car Maybe it would be less if they carpooled, you know, etc. And it it would seem like that kind of Market mechanism assuming it was equitable could really Really allocate the space that you're talking about officially So, uh, yeah, good question. The city that's furthest ahead is Helsinki Uh, which is has some significant advantages in part the federal rules around mobility are remarkably different So Helsinki was actually or the Finnish government was Actually inspired by the United States federal communication commission They like the history of the FCC in the United States is amazing and phenomenally positive The United States federal government asserted its ownership of the airwaves in the early 20th century And said the airwaves are in the public trust And the government has the responsibility to manage the airways of the public good to promote innovation and private profit But to also ensure competition and to ensure social certain social goals are met So the Finnish government said that's the way we need to manage our streets The streets are a limited renewable resource It's held in the public trust and the streets need to be managed in a way that promotes innovation and private profit While also supporting the public good So the Finnish government moved merged its transportation Department into its telecommunications department. So they have a department of telecommunications and transportation Because they're all utilities, right? Transport is a utility Um, and they then said okay Private industry like you know government we're like there's some things we're really good at other things We're not so good at we can actually necessarily need to be in the business Of operating transportation if the private sector wants to step in great but only if you're doing it more efficiently and Supporting the public good. So the government defined what it meant by equity, which is different in a Finnish context And the city of Helsinki is taking that several steps further. There's an app called whiz that is the you know the sort of integrator app in Helsinki That is basically a public-private partnership that provides effectively a mobility wallet That's good on all forms of transportation That rewards you for Being efficient and being carbon clean and being pollution clean There are lots of efforts at that underway in the united states like there's conversations like moval wants to do that The you know city of Portland is talking about it Stanford weirdly does an you know sort of clunky old-school version of it already with its park and cash out program Which they've had since the 90s And you know a variety of other places having these conversations Of course the federal government is pushing us in the opposite direction with its pending legislation governing autonomous vehicles That are making all of the same mistakes that the federal and state governments made in the early 1930s When regulating the private automobile, but that's a that's a whole other topic other questions There's one here in the front. Yeah, I was wondering about the relationship between Oakland and metropolitan transportation and aback because How much how much involvement from MTC did you have? Uh, no So, I mean MTC the Metropolitan Transportation Commission is sort of like the RTC here Um, they're the metropolitan planning organization. They dole out cash So to a certain degree The work that we did getting Oakland's act together Helped Oakland be more competitive For grant funding both at the regional level as well as at the county level The previous reputation of the city had been that you know, it sort of struggled with You know sort of clarity about why it was applying for what so having these sorts of tools Allow the city of Oakland to create a more compelling story To the point actually where the city was awarded a problematic amount of money like it was super popular and You know when I left there were concerns like how on earth are we going to spend this money? Because it requires a certain amount of staff effort Just to manage even managing outside consultants. So that's a that's an enviable problem to have And that that helped with this It's a rare one. It's a rare one. Yeah, like, uh, I like too much money. Uh, he was first and now I'll get you I'm hoping I can lead you back to this point with somewhat in the beginning of your presentation when you show that photograph of how As part of your consulting you had to widen streets Particularly for some regulations in california. I can't remember exactly the term that you use Yes Can you elaborate on that? Yeah, so this is a fun topic. So the california environmental quality act Landmark legislation Signed in what 1977 there's maybe some of 1970 oh, sorry. Okay. Good signed in 1970 You know really the landmark like state level environmental legislation in the united states And had the promise for doing so much good Um, the word traffic or congestion Did not appear in the sequel legislation actually until three years ago Um, so the legislation itself um I think was full of good intentions, but as the practice of environmental law progressed um The process um was Dominated I would argue out of a fear That all that change was bad So the practice tended to say Rather rather than ask the question How do we accommodate the expected population growth in california? What's the best way to accommodate? um new population Or what's the lowest impact way of citing a wastewater treatment plant like where's the best location for a wastewater treatment plant? um, or How do we distribute? um regional funding or Manage the transportation system in order to produce the best environmental outcomes sequel is not allowed to ask those questions Instead sequel looks at individual projects and says um, how do we Uh, how do we reduce negative impact for this project as opposed to how do we accommodate needs? um, the result of that is that sequel has tended to be a very powerful tool for people who want to stop change Rather than a tool for shaping change in the most Um, environmentally and socially and economically beneficial ways Um, so the washington state environmental process Is much different. Um, it tries to Um, uh, figure out how do we how do we create a more equitable society or how do we solve our co2 problem? Um at a larger scale Rather than at the microscopic scale as we do in california with all of its negative unintended consequences So so past practice in sequa Has uh said Okay, uh, you're gonna build a project um That's going to generate traffic and in order to estimate that traffic generation. We are asked to go to this this book Called the it traffic generation manual and you open it up and you know, you go to a specific land use And there's data, you know from florida in the 1970s and you apply that trip generation rate to the project Which is the worst-case scenario level of traffic And then you add some background growth and you see how many cars there are going to be the nearby intersections And then typically the path is to widen those intersections in order to accommodate that growth Or kill the project It's kind of the two primary choices There are other ways of using sequa for better outcomes But typically the process runs like that And the result is that the california environmental quality act that was intended to reduce congestion Has in fact been the the Primary factor for exacerbating congestion throughout the state That nothing has been worse at exacerbating our traffic adjustment problems than the california environmental quality act And how it has been practiced. So the the rules are changing There's a law that was passed about four years ago now called senate bill 743 That is eliminating use of level service For a finding of significance And substituting that with per capita vehicle miles traveled As the default metric although local jurisdictions have a lot of flexibility in The metrics that they use so this is very different So whereas in current practice in order to solve your traffic problem, you have to shrink the project or move it farther away or kill it If you switch to per capita vehicle miles traveled You can't shrink the project anymore Because it's measured on a per capita basis not on a total basis And if you exceed Your existing rate of driving You can't move the project farther away You can move the project to a place closer to transit in order to mitigate the problem Or you can invest in walking and biking and transit Similarly, if you want to do a road widening project You can't widen roadways faster than your rate of job and population growth Without a finding of significance. So it up ends practice in a really profound way so far Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose have a limited level of service There are a whole array of other cities that are on their way And the result of it has been I think there's been a lot of fear of like, okay, we've just radically changed the metrics Is this going to disrupt everything in the development world? And so far the experience in all three of those cities has been very positive And it's producing better projects better mitigations less driving And yeah, much better environmental and traffic outcomes So, yes, you had a question in the front Yeah, I want to build on that And there always is that trying to, that challenge of trying to explain this level of service And the point is that it's not traffic engineering And I'm just astonished to hear that it's been, that this bill eliminated it Because no one that I know of has been from the county that's been talking about it Well, it's been a huge topic Is it going to zero a deadline? Or are people supposed to stay out in fact? Yeah, I think the deadline, it's January 1st, 2020 I think, I'm not sure about that If you go to the Office of Planning Research website They have many, many, many pages of Senate Bill 743 guidance And there's also been a fair amount written about the results in Oakland San Francisco and San Jose And how positive those have been Yes, question over here I wanted to add to this, I'm a secret practitioner But there's a couple other modifications to the transportation law That have come into the law And that are I think beneficial One is that all modes need to be looked at And as recently as five years ago, it was only car trips Now that was the metric Now it's required that bicycles and pedestrian trips or mobility is also included Granted, that started with just a paragraph or two in the analysis But I think that's growing We're seeing more and more level of service for pedestrians and so on So that is coming into more balance The other thing is that we have eliminated or the state has eliminated The metric of parking requirements as a significant impact Doesn't mean a jurisdiction can't look at parking in their secret documents But they cannot find a significant impact due to lack of parking Which should have the effect of reducing the demand for or the standards for Requiring four spaces per thousand feet or whatever over time Yeah, I think there's also a lot of confusion about environmental law in general And metrics that make sense in your environmental analysis And metrics that are just really pointless in your environmental analysis for a specific project So I think parking is a very good one Like it's a terrible thing to put in your environmental analysis That somehow it's better for the California environment the more parking you have Now it may be perfectly reasonable to have a strong parking management requirement in your planning code But not in your environmental analysis requirements Right, so these are different analytical tools and different metrics Are right at different scales and in different planning processes And it gets very very confusing very quickly If you're a neighborhood resident who just wants to have a decent quality of life And cares about social equity in the environment It requires like years of training to figure out how all of this works And particularly the unintended negative consequences of some very Good signing good sounding ideas like putting level of service in sequence Other questions? Yes? Can you talk about what Oakland did about parking requirements? Yeah, so Oakland started recognizing like most urban places That parking parking demand is declining as a result of Uber and Lyft Particularly in nighttime entertainment restaurant destinations And that parking is very expensive to supply So it costs like in order to not subsidize parking You need to charge between 10 and 25 dollars a day Like that's the that's the actual cost of providing parking In a place with reasonable land value like coastal California So if you're not charging 10 to 25 dollars a day Somebody is paying for that parking It's just not the person using the parking And the value of providing free or discounted parking Greatly exceeds the cost of solving all homelessness Or providing free healthcare for all Americans So this is an extraordinarily expensive It's a delightful benefit like I love free parking I parked free today it was very exciting for me But I knew that the cost of that parking was hidden in the cost of my hotel room And that other visitors who didn't bring their cars to downtown Santa Cruz Had to pay a higher hotel rate in order to accommodate my free parking So free parking is great just like free ice cream or free education or free healthcare The question is given our limited resources as a society Where do we want to invest that? And what's the consequence of socializing parking Socializing housing for cars And you know I mean here in Santa Cruz County There are four housing units for every car And not enough housing units for every people Or for all your people Yeah in the back Can you talk about performance measures in the open? I don't know in terms of your reading of the transportation in the open Is there time to kind of like measure those And like specifically for active transportation and biking Like have there been increases in biking And what measures were taken like you know putting executive planes Or getting a flexure program to open running Yep that's a really good question So again like different performance metrics for different ideas So we you know we restructured the way we measured performance in the budget We restructured the way that we measured performance in a development impact analysis We also restructured the way we reviewed performance of street capital projects So it's a great example Telegraph Avenue you know big major important arterial in Oakland Comes right into downtown Used to have five lanes We did a road diet project with protected and partly protected bikeways Super controversial It was one that I inherited And it became clear that that project was going to have to be dug up And we were going to have to revert the project back to the way things were Unless we acted really quickly So we staff went out and collected a huge amount of data We looked at sales tax return for the retailers on the corridor And like we were hearing you know you know For some of the retailers who were doing badly We were only hearing from them We wanted to know the actual data We of course collected all the safety data We did hand counts of all the users We collected incredibly detailed speed data And also made observations of behavior That allowed us to tell a much more nuanced story Like there were clearly some employers That are some retailers that were having a hard time But on the whole retail was doing much better And most retailers were happy with the change We dramatically increased the number of cyclists We nearly doubled the number of pedestrians Which was totally unexpected And we had basically the same volume of cars But that traffic was now driving the speed limit Rather than exceeding the speed limit But that the volume was only went down slightly We also completely eliminated crosswalk violation crashes On what had previously been one of the highest injury corridors in the entire city We also found some problems Like we uncovered some pretty serious problems As a result of transit of bus bike weaving That caused us to accelerate some changes In the pilot project to create bus boarding islands That had otherwise like just couldn't be funded in phase one Because we didn't have the cash So we found the cash We also corrected some of the geometrics Where there were some potential safety issues At certain intersections So that enabled us to finally have a robust conversation With the community and at council to say Yeah, there's some downsides to this project But here's the array of things that we're trying to achieve And we didn't do well on these two And here's what we're going to do to correct that But in all of these like things are better And then we went out and actually started fixing things So that helped to establish a broader understanding About what the project was trying to achieve It helped to garner some trust with our agency partners and with the community And it made us realize that we didn't ever want to do another bike project Ever again in the city of Oakland We were going to do streets projects That the most profound thing about this thing that had been marketed as a bike project Was not its impact on cycling but its impact on walking No more bike projects Every time the city goes out and does project It's going to be about the whole community and all the users It's about the people And you know not just the social equity but the economic performance as well That we needed to look at all the things We also needed to not make it ugly Right, so we did a pilot project And we just sort of threw stuff out there because we didn't have resources We had community resources who were willing to come in and hand paint everything Because Oakland, but we had to ask them first And we needed to think about beauty and community involvement As part of the mining process as well So it was a really interesting set of lessons learned You can Google Telegraph Avenue Progress Report If you want to see the result of that analysis That was a report that our staff people put together themselves It was I was so proud of them when they did that People who haven't asked questions yet, yes I was one of those cyclists on Telegraph Avenue So thank you Oh yeah, good I lived there for just four years But I spent the rest of my adult life here And you mentioned that you felt like we would You know, Santa Cruz knows what our values are as a county And I wonder about that And I think if we asked them in this room We might come up with really different answers to that question And I wonder if a better way to approach it Might be this performance indicators and budget Part of the discussion that you raised I wonder if it would be helpful if you shared with us some of those When you just talked about a few You know, we have created what I think of as traffic islands in the county And people who are really trying to get from a list of other Are actually in the islands that they cannot move And so how would you approach thinking about Indicators that could maybe better articulate our values Around moving people who are at most need with equity lines So in Oakland we were rather fortunate that there was a remarkable level of convergence around values That's the majority of the population like kind of felt like we want the same thing In other communities where I've worked in like Santa Monica There is some convergence on some topics and deep divergence on other topics And that is also important to articulate So if you can define the topic you can say okay We're all in agreement about this this and this like you know forward But on these topics, you know, there are hot button topics in passionate communities Where there is strong divergence and that's okay What you need to then do is to document that divergence And admit to it and say look we're like this is democracy. We're all in this together. It is not winner take all But a decision about when there's divergence Where on that continuum of divergence You choose to fall and that's okay You can you know say like if half the people want this And half the people want that like the policy makers can say all right, we're going to do this And sometimes sometimes it is a fixed choice and you do have to pick a winner or loser Other on other values oriented topics You can choose the midpoint on a spectrum But all of these things require community conversation. So Um, I mean everywhere I work. I use a lot of really cheesy tools like dot exercises like, you know, do I know I know You've been in a lot of community meetings, I'm sure you've been forced to use dots Dots are a really really useful tool when talking about values. So on a topic like To what degree do I want free parking versus available parking? You can have one or the other you can't have both Um, you know, and there's no correct answer Uh, and there and that that's a topic like, you know, if I'm doing a parking study oftentimes There's this crazy divergence like, you know, it like it's in Leviticus that parking shall be free at all times like, okay I want free parking you're going to be driving around in circles for a while, but that's okay Like I I'm the technical guy. I can tell you the consequences of that, you know, similarly like, you know, like no I'm a like total libertarian parking activist like, you know, everything should be priced and managed. Um Yeah, if whether there's divergence or whether people like go in the middle or everyone goes to one extreme As an outsider, it's never my job to tell you what your values are It's my job to help you articulate that and to identify Like where everyone's in the same place or when there's deep divergence and then what you do next So that's the the first thing to start with is to identify that divergence and then decide Whether this is a topic That either requires some more education about okay, so wait, why do you think that and do you understand the consequences of that choice Sometimes you need a little bit more education other times you just have a deeply divided community and you're going to have to make a call Um, so we wanted some examples of stuff other than equity. So like really so Yeah, so in oakland, um a place where there was there is deep divergence is to what degree should we use our limited resources In order for to correct for past inequity in our neighborhoods Versus build our tax base By, you know subsidizing the downtown like that's a deep deep divergent topic that required, um a conversation about like, okay, so here's the consequences of doing one or the other like if like I want to like You know fund the neighborhoods, but I also recognize That one of the best ways of funding the neighborhoods is generating a tax base that makes government solvent That enables me to have money to subsidize that you know that to fund the neighborhoods. So Exploring how Um making what might seem to be the wrong choice in the short term could actually be the right choice in the long run If your goal is neighborhood equity, right? So that way you're doing your downtown economic development for the right reason, right? So you market that aspect of your budget as this is building our municipal tax base and We're committing then as revenues increase that we're going to disproportionately spend that net revenue on these other things So, uh, and there was certainly a lot of conversation about that In the municipal budget conversations Another place where there's interesting Divergence oftentimes is maintenance So, um all california cities Have a structural deferred maintenance problem. There is not a single city in california Um that can maintain the infrastructure that it has today This is partly due to prop 13. That's you know, one of perhaps the biggest factors, but there are a whole variety of other structural problems Um that are currently pointing all california municipalities and counties towards bankruptcy Like on the current trajectory and the basically the thing that we do in order to get ourselves out of like buy a little bit more time Is raise sales taxes and occasionally property taxes, but mostly sales tax So we use the most regressive form of taxation In order to deal with structural problems Um, and we uh, and and we basically tax young people In order to afford our subsidized quality of life as old people um so That that is perhaps the hardest conversation to have in any budget is If you really wanted to make sense of your municipal resources, the first thing that you invest in Is eliminating your deferred maintenance problem. It's like living on your credit cards and yet at the same time The existing need is so great that There's great temptation to invest in capital projects to solve the existing need problems The the task then is to make sure that your capital projects that you're building Have maintenance thinking built into them that your capital projects aren't exacerbating your structural deferred maintenance problem But it's so tempting if you're an elected official to like, you know build shiny things that are great For the short term but then start falling apart And right. Thank you term limits in california for exacerbating that problem But we're not solving all problems in california. We had more questions. You had one in the front I just I wanted to see if you could Yeah, and we have an interesting situation in santa cruz right now. We are we have a library a downtown library that is 50 or maybe And everybody voted to A sales tax so that we could improve the library facilities and after that pass with a nice margin A proposal came forward that well now from the city managers that run the library system We must carry down the library and rebuild it in another location with a parking garage and so I'm wondering What is what you're you know, it's as you're you're saying uber and lyft are going to just you know drive the parking needs out of business So I'm just wondering what you're you know, what you're how you would analyze that So in full disclosure one of my former colleagues Led the downtown santa cruz parking study that looked at that issue I had no involvement in it and I am not going to comment on any other controversy of that particular project But I will say that parking is simply a form of Access so parking is great and an essential part of any functioning downtown It's also very expensive so You know things that we always help our clients ask is what's the most cost-effective mix of investments in parking In shuttles and bike facilities In whatever in order to meet your downtown or campus or you know corporate headquarters access needs And how does that mix change over time? So something that we're discovering right now is that the availability of alternatives to driving is increasing And the cost of those alternatives is decreasing. So as a result the price elasticity for parking demand Is increasing on an upward curve So as So so thinking about parking as an economist rather than an engineer Is an important foundation to making the best possible investment There's also significant risk involved as technology changes like we know autonomous vehicles We're going to wipe out parking demand. We don't know when So we seem to be getting close But the last technological hurdles for autonomous vehicles are tough ones So like is this really here? Is it happening? You know five years from now or Like are we repeating 1945 all over again and it's still 50 years from now? I think the answer is somewhere in between Um, but uh parking structure, you know, it's a 50 year investment Um, so what's the debt service? What's the debt period and what revenue is going to pay for that debt? I'm this this was part of you know part of the challenge that many cities have had like Fresno Um, bankrupted its parking authority Because it used straight line analysis For projecting future parking demand rather than recognizing that in economics. There are no straight lines. Everything is on a curve And guessing the shape of that curve, you know, that's that's challenging There's a question over here on the left or yeah, uh your experience with um eliminating off-street parking demand Do you need to kind of hit a tipping point of like available infrastructure? Or do you need to just have to reach a certain density with other infrastructure available or do you just take away the parking or do you need a campaign first Well, so kind of all the above like there's no the the places that have succeeded in creating significant mode shift Um have done so in many different ways Some have done them in really like libertarian Economic ways where it was sort of all about price and supply and demand Others have achieved that largely through, you know, social campaigning And good marketing others have done it simply by providing really really high quality alternatives Like you know people people do what's most pleasant and most convenient um, so it's sort of You know there you could do it any way All of the experiences that we've seen have done it Incrementally, uh, well with a couple of exceptions. I think the gates foundation results in seattle have been really compelling where the gates foundation which had been You know first they'd been giving away free parking and then they switched to monthly passes where you like you decided like I'm a parker or I'm not a parker and then they went to uh A daily parking cash out amount And that resulted in a dramatic reduction in Driving because people were paid by the day not to drive and we're really motivated By cash so, you know gates and other employers have said that it's more cost effective for us To pay our employees not to drive than it is to build them structured parking and Our employees who don't drive Stay longer are happier and are significantly more productive so google invests in its massive shuttle network Largely for employee attraction retention and particularly productivity reasons like you don't have to have very many engineers on a bus Working 45 minutes longer per day in order to pay the cost of the driver Right, so so it sort of depends upon your motivation how you Invest in these changes Yeah Process that you described in oakland because My experience in a number of different cities is the values get defined pretty generically, you know like for example Here they might say Economy economic development equity in the environment right at very broad topics And then we go out to a consultant like you or one of your colleagues And we'll get back And they're looking at the various options and we'll get back a 500 page report and there'll be a Five page matrix in there checking off How each of these options conforms to Economy economic development the equity in the environment, but there's no rigor, you know, there's no rigor There's no measurement. There's no sense of Which actually delivers The highest bang for the buck in all the areas that you talked about like health and safety and transit and Employees that you know person satisfaction and equity and so forth And so, you know, you put up a pretty detailed matrix of that with little dials and so forth of how Your outcomes were achieved and I I'm just wondering like how do you get from What normally happens to a more rigorous analysis? First of the values and what they actually are beyond a word Because then everybody subscribes there or Overlay overlays their ideological bent and projects on those values that are very generic, right? Yeah, I okay. So good question So part of it is in defining those policy statements a little bit more clearly like we use There's there's lots of coded language we use in order to be meaningless like Balanced transportation system like what the hell does that mean, right? Or uh, I don't know We we in order to avoid the hard work We we love obfuscating or using language that means something Means one thing to one person. It means the absolute opposite to another audience So that is lazy consulting And it doesn't serve our clients well unless what the client wants is just to avoid dealing with the problem And maintain it. Well, actually what what that means is you're just maintaining the status quo, right? And that's what for like any budgeting process For any municipal budget or corporate budget you start your budget process with last year's budget. It's like, okay How much did I spend? Where did I not spend like, you know, where the counts you never ask wait? Why are we spending this money? so um So part of it is insisting upon clearer language and acknowledging when there's divergence when there's disagreement and Clarifying that disagreement it's doing the homework to find out. Okay, so you're against project a and you're for it But why what is it about project a that bugs you or what do you think project? You know b is going to achieve that makes you so rapidly supporting it like Why are you disagreeing? um, and in many cases people fixate on the object rather than What we're trying to accomplish as a civil society So doing that homework around what the heck is it that we're trying to accomplish and how would we know if we accomplished it? um can reveal a lot it can also reveal that hysteria around parking and transportation Is used as a proxy for completely unrelated concerns So hysteria around parking and transportation is always used to deal with fear of change um oftentimes at fear of change the fear is rooted in fear of social change Or loss of community character And that needs to be defined Like will I still be relevant in my community? Or am I concerned about black people moving here? Right because that's why people use the environmental process is for racism And that needs to be called out Out loud in public and then ignored So Like revealing what we're really after And also revealing when people are using parking and transportation fear as a proxy for something completely unrelated Because then you can spend a lot of time and money Pretending to solve their parking and transportation problem But you've not actually solved it because they were looking for something else um so You know when i'm working particularly in coastal california cities one of the things that I first start talking about is community character What is it about this place that you love and what are you afraid of losing? Because trying to stop change Change doesn't stop change keeps going and trying to hold on to anything from our you know Brown hair To our relationships like if you cling too hard you're going to ruin your relationship So unless you're really clear about what it is that you love about that relationship Right, you know, I love these things about my partner and you know, you know And so I need to be this person for my partner in order for him to give me that So I have conversations about community character. What is it about Santa Cruz county that like you're really worried about losing? Given demographic shift given economic changes and given population changes because those things will continue to happen if we just try to stop them That's not going to work. It's going to be really really unpleasant And it is going to reward the most privileged and deny opportunities for younger people and people of color And that's where much of california is at these days And I don't think any of us wanted that But that's the result that we've had of not having a Clear and more direct and more fearless conversation about what we love about our places in california Yeah, you know, so you have to do that Before you can actually start having a conversation about how to measure it and my recommendation about measuring it is focus most of your Data analytics on the most difficult topics You can spend a huge amount of effort collecting data and building modeling tools for stuff that isn't moving the needle Like it's it's not a key differentiator in deciding whether you spend money on this or that Focus your data and your analytics on the hard stuff So that your policy makers can make an informed decision and move forward And report back to the electorate about how they did Because I can promise you You know travel demand models are incredibly sophisticated and smart, but they are no better than tarot cards at predicting the future We're really bad in our industry at predicting the future We require constant checking back to see how our predictive models did and adjustment It is no wonder. Nobody trusts us All right, other questions There were a couple more anyone else Yes, sir, we should probably Well, there's nobody's gotten it all together like there's really interesting case studies that are scattered around Places that have done really well So Santa Monica is an interesting place to look at because they had been so deeply and Meanly divided on topics of development and the result was that the only people who won in the development approval process were the real estate attorneys and And certain well-powered neighborhood associations That would get hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash from development projects in exchange for allowing those processes to move forward So it was really bad for the city And Santa Monica went through a long process of trying to define community character that it wanted to hold on to And instead of just torturing developers that only the meanest and most rapacious developers could possibly get through the development approval process With really really horrible ugly projects They instead said, okay Developers Here's some this these are guidelines for how your project needs to work to fit to look to fit in our community Oh, by the way, we're going to have No net new motor vehicle trips cap city-wide and your development project has to dramatically slash its vehicle trip generation rate And in addition to that you need to pay into development impact fee pool To bring down motor vehicle trips elsewhere so that the net impact is zero That that instead of using density control as a proxy for traffic management Santa Monica tries to limit vehicle trip generation directly Mountain view does that even further in the north base shore precise plan where Employers there are basically allowed unlimited development, but their peak period vehicle trip Account is is limited and gets measured every year and the city will padlock your doors if you generate too many car trips Including google stores like and they're serious about it So, um, so that's an interesting case. Um, I think downtown boulder is quite instructive because they've been at this for a really, really long time boulder Delegated to its downtown business improvement district the authority to Um manage and build parking So the merchants have been whining about, you know, give me more parking give me more parking and the city is like that's expensive Like we can't raise taxes to build your garage and they said well make us responsible for it and the city said, okay fine It's all yours Uh, and then they're like, oh parking's expensive Uh So, you know, they built some parking structures But then realized it was so much cheaper to give every downtown employee a free transit pass Then it was to build parking structure number five They realized that it was cheaper for them to use their revenue to promote walking and biking and to You know pay for musicians Then it was to build parking structure number five that by using their revenue in order to Create a great destination They met their economic development goals so much better than parking structure number five ever would have um, and You know and it shares some sort of cultural characteristics With Santa Cruz. I'm sure you guys have looked at boulder in the past, but it's it's always an interesting place to go Check on they're also realizing that They haven't done much in a while Right, so they were the bee's knees in the 80s And they've been riding on those coattails for a long time And are wondering particularly on the topic of housing on boulder is an outrageously expensive place to live Because they've made smart investments and as a result it's unaffordable to the students who go to the university that is in part You know responsible and to their entire service industry So the fact that they've succeeded on making a great place has created severe traffic congestion problems Because they haven't kept up with housing and so that is that's a very very deep debate right now for boulder between those who Are in and really appreciate Their glorious quality of life And those who are concerned about the equity implications Of denying newcomers the opportunity to live there as well as the traffic implications So might be familiar with the kind of anywhere in coastal california Yes Bike lane, bike share, parking, transit lane You can always count on a hue and cry from business owners, property owners, homeowners that It's going to be kind of the end of the world How do you convince them that it's not the end of the world and there could actually be positive outcomes? So with data Michael Bloomberg when he was mayor of new york Was famous for saying trust in god But for everything else bring me data So the starting point for any of those conversations is you know Parking spaces and roads are phenomenally valuable capital assets. You've got billions of dollars in roads here in sancras And you don't know anything about them. Like you it's like you have like 12 747 jets that you're just kind of ignoring So collect some data about parking utilization And demand rates and see like can you can you rearrange the the parking demand physically? Like is there enough parking? Or can the parking situation be managed so that you can accommodate these cars? But you also need to recognize that There are people living in the houses along that street where you're eliminating parking and merchants trying to do business That have established their lives and businesses based upon the assumption Of readily available front door parking and that changing that is incredibly disruptive Small businesses in this country live or die on a less than 10 percent margin So if you take away a small business owners, you know 10 percent of their business Like not only might they go bankrupt, but that's their entire All of their equity All their capital and their family's business, right? It's small business owners are right to be exceedingly conservative And they are in many ways the foundation the base of the entrepreneurialism of your community You'll also probably find here in Santa Cruz if it's typical that your small business owners are disproportionately women and people of color Um and in your like sidewalk oriented retail Most of that is in local ownership rather than Chain stores and big bucks, right? So the the profit that gets returned to the community is higher than a you know Store with his headquarters is in North Carolina so like That's not to say don't do the project But to take special care Of your sidewalk oriented small locally owned businesses because they are also exceedingly important from a transportation perspective Walkable retail is really really difficult to create a new This is something that developers all over the country struggle with and mostly fail at If you've got either a downtown or a neighborhood commercial district that is successful and walkable Those places generate less than half of the vehicle miles traveled Of that those same stores if they were to be in a you know typical strip mall or suburban format so uh And and talk about that stuff out loud and find ways of saying okay Like we need to have a community conversation about this, but we want to make sure that you're kept whole in the process As conditions change so it's been very strange to me watching this conversation in san francisco over 20 years Where parking removal even 10 years ago was utterly unthinkable People are not blinking In part because of the way that uber just uber and lift as well as e scooters and e bikes Have shifted the balance of the conversation to have folks think Why do I still own a car anyways? I don't know why I own a car I own a car for nostalgic reasons It is completely ridiculous For somebody like me to own a car anymore It's cheaper for me to take uber all the way down here to santa cruz Then it is to drive myself Because of the value of my time that I get back Right. It's a hundred dollar uber trip, but it's Uh It's six hundred dollars in my time that is freedom. I mean I drove myself because I wanted to see some other things But yeah, I mean it's it's funny the way things are changing smaller cities Like santa cruz are gonna they're you know on a different place to the curve than the denser places Where uber and lift are more ubiquitous and where parking is the assumption that parking would be free is kind of ridiculous right In places like this like there still is sort of widespread belief that free parking isn't limited All right, it's probably should be is it time to wrap up whenever how long are we going to? I'm gonna keep you here all night Oh, yeah, okay. Well, let's keep going All right. Yes Yeah Yeah, okay, great. One of my favorite topics I actually like I am a techno skeptic on most topics like don't get me started on hyperlink Um, the e-scooters. I'm kind of in love with them There are however some major problems with them, but problems that are easily overcomeable So one of the problems is uh, it's a design flaw It's easy to tip them over and when you tip them over they become really dangerous tripping hazards They're also, uh, they go at an interesting speed Uh and a speed that's too fast to go on the sidewalk Generally speaking like, you know except for when the sidewalks are super wide. There's no one around. Um It's sort of like with skateboards like if you're if you're young and fit And you know how agile you are like it seems totally easy and not a problem to be You know writing your e-scooter fast from the skateboard If you're an older adult or somebody that's dealing with like bone density loss Being knocked by somebody on an e-scooter like you can break a hip It's really bad. Like you're you know, there can be utterly terrifying to other pedestrians So I think the solution generally speaking is one, you know Some of the e-scooter providers have been a little bit better. Um What is the one that now requires you to take a photo? Um, yeah, so yeah bird and one of the other ones does too because I just had to do it the other night So one of so bird when you get off your your scooter and you park it you Before you can log out you have to take a picture of it to show that it's parked in a safe manner It's not an environment a big prompt, but it you know works. It works. Yeah, people. Yeah Um that that said I think generally speaking What's happening right now is there's this interesting explosion of small electric wheeled human scaled things um And this is really good because they're phenomenally space efficient and they can travel significant distances One of the things I like about the scooters is they're accessible to a broader array of people than bicycles are So people with some array of cognitive and physical impairments Can ride an e-scooter that wouldn't be able to actually maneuver a bike You also like unlike a segway a segway. You don't look like an idiot when you're riding a scooter They're they're more appealing to a broader array of demographics as well Um, there's also this phenomenon as you know, amazon deliveries and uber and lyft are increasing that there's a lot more activity That is happening at the curb. So a lot more pickup and drop-off So there's this convergence of the greater demand for protected bikeways just for people on bikes Which solve your curbside pickup and drop-off problem That eliminate the conflict between, you know, your uber driver trying to get to the curb and the cyclist being cut off It also creates the right kind of space for this whole family Of kind of 15 mile an hour little electric wheel things And I think it gets to be quite interesting. Um, and There's the possibility now of once these things start becoming ubiquitous to have a more sophisticated conversation about parking Because what it means is you can drive and park and park in the big empty church parking lot That's three blocks away And then get on the e-scooter to get to the front door Right, so you can start to like, oh, right We can start thinking about this as a system so I can provide the protected bikeway by eliminating the parking lane And I can replace that parking that accessibility even better by taking advantage of underutilized parking that I already have Um, but it requires all of these steps and it means working with the providers to, uh, uh Encourage better behavior It means providing places where e-scooters can park without tipping over and, you know Blocking the sidewalk And it means starting to create the infrastructure For all of us to be able to use whether we're, you know, in a A motorized wheelchair, which can also be terrorizing to pedestrians But, you know, where like if I'm in my wheelchair and I want to get somewhere I'm like in my wheelchair goes 20 miles an hour. I'm going to go 20 miles an hour because like I want to get there on time So, so yeah, there was a very long answer to a short question But one that I am far more excited about than I am about autonomous vehicles because e-scooters actually solve A whole set of problems And the new problems that they create can be solved by things that create a significant array of co-benefits as well Including infrastructure that we already need if we wanted to learn from I mean we talked about like Santa Monica and Boulder We didn't talk about, you know, Copenhagen or small provincial cities in the Netherlands where It's just so delightful To walk or bike for people of all ages and abilities like I love it when I'm out with my family in Holland You know, and it's me and the 70 or ladies with their two sacks of groceries on bikes Having a great time and you know chatting with their friends, right? Right, that's the kind of place that I want to live in when I'm an old person You're gonna have to leave San Francisco hills Well, not with my so I have an e-bike in San Francisco. That is the best thing I live on top of a hill And it is totally transformed my ability to go around the city including like I would never drive to the grocery store Even though I live on top of a steep hill Because I just throw it all on the e-bike and like it still work like I gotta like it's Pretty significant work getting up that hill, but I can manage it on an e-bike, which I never could on my my normal bike Yeah, I'm back here and then over there Yeah, so so a core question with e-bikes is speed limitation Um and part of this has to do with the fixed design constraints of the human body So the human body is like our design profile is that we're designed To be able to withstand a trip and fall at our peak sustained running speed So some of you run faster than others But you know around 15 to 18 miles an hour Our body can withstand an impact and will be bruised But we can you know Dust ourselves off and continue running from the saber tooth tiger Beyond that speed because the force of impact varies by the mass of the objects involved times the square of their velocity Beyond 15 to 18 miles an hour The the threat of impact the force of impact and the damage that it causes increases exponentially To the point where at you know 35 miles an hour you're dead in an impact, but at 15 you're fine So again getting into the question of e-bikes is at what speed are they limited is a really fundamental question This is a deep debate. So there is you know in some jurisdictions their speed limited at about 22 Which you know is a very convenient speed and you know provide you have some level of protection reasonably safe But creates um sensory threat Perception issue with pedestrians in spaces where pedestrians and fast bikes are mixing So this is one of the interesting challenges that we face is that cyclist behavior Spans pretty much the full range from basically pedestrian to basically vehicle So you know children are you know families out on a path who are toodling along at a low speed Not particularly a threat and perfectly fine to have small kids, you know on paths Uh e-bike users, you know in lycra with helmets, you know going 22 Yeah, not so much So So so this is a sort of fundamental question about when your electric assist thing whatever that is When it actually is better grouped with the The vehicles with the armored the armored fast moving thing Versus when it is grouped with the unarmored pedestrian thing versus when it's kind of in the middle And then what is the appropriate design of the thing in the middle? That promotes civil behavior Right, so in my feeling and pretty much learning from the experience particularly in denmark and the netherlands Is protected bikeways are like the most obvious urban mobility Investment because they are so phenomenally efficient at moving people like They move as many people per square meter of road as a train does like far more efficient than the bus Phenomaly efficient and they have all of these incredibly positive social and public health benefits as well They're just it's just obvious like we need to provide Separated protected bikeways on all of our major streets If we want to have a healthy and equitable community and a strong economy like period This also then promotes this array of new technologies as well And that in the vehicle space what i'm hopeful is that We can also do the same thing with more armored sort of bubble things But things that are also that are smaller like why do I need like my full You know for f-150 amount of space Um when it's just me like shouldn't there be a little egg thing around me that Takes me to the destination like that's a lot of waste like I don't need two tons of armor Um, I I just need some in order to go fast All right, there's another question over here. Yeah Um And I've found it incredibly useful. I think generally there were skepticism At first from sunday we greeted out of the vapor now. I think they're widely accepted I in fact learned that we have the second highest use rate after san francisco's tart study area of the country That doesn't surprise me. So my question is and this whole thing of dockless bikes Yeah, it's it's changed the world Years ago. I used the dock system in montreal and I've seen it in the bay area la Well, the the dockless isn't that just kind of Is aren't the dock systems now just absolutely Isn't that just obsolete? Um, yeah, so this is another interesting question in our industry as well. So My sense is actually a well, it's a little bit of yes and a little bit of no Um, I think that there is still great power in mobility hubs In places that are predictable in a predictable location that pulls together This modal exchange That one of the the the only paths forward that is in a positive direction with autonomous vehicles Is under the assumption that the autonomous vehicle doesn't take you all the way to your destination It takes you to the train or it takes you to the little like mobility center at the edge of the downtown And from there you either walk or you take the smaller thing Right that your your device Allows you to buy the entire trip and it gives you a variety of choices about how to get there and you get to choose And it's all seamless But what it means is that there's a docked bike system that is there and reserved for you so that when you get off Your uber your autonomous uber or your autonomous train That bike number 12 You know at the is there for you to get to your final destination Um, so I think that docked and dockless actually exist in harmony. They complement each other The challenge is figuring out what's the optimal level of provision and where those docked facilities go I also believe that door to door ubiquitous mobility Is not good for us And one of the things that I like about Docked bike share is you do end up walking to your destination that they're not at the front door of everything that they're they're within three blocks of everything And that we continue to build walking into our daily lives because we require 10 000 steps We are also social primates and it's When we're walking that we exchange a huge amount of social information with other people out there on the sidewalk Um, and I am deeply concerned looking at what has happened to our society with social media and the internet That unless we maintain Our city sidewalks is a place where we all meet We will forget that we all have something in common and if we forget that democracy fails And fascism which we're currently testing Actually happens All right, you mentioned Copenhagen and Amsterdam and so forth The model there is so completely different from what we have in the united states Where we're paying lines on streets and having really fast cars right next to icicles and and so forth Earlier in your presentation, you mentioned the complete streets designed for people How do we get from? you know lines on pavement and high fatality rates for bicycles and pedestrians to The helmetless wonder of hundreds of thousands of bikers in Copenhagen Where people are in protected bike lanes and everyone assumes That they're going to be protected and therefore because they're safe they ride their bike Yeah, well, so we start by remembering that Copenhagen and Amsterdam were exactly the same as the united states in the mid 1970s And that's when they decided to take a different path We started in the same place and if you go out to some of the older Both danish and dutch suburbs like it looks like horrible american auto-dependent sprawl They're trying to correct a lot of that now and places that i think are particularly interesting to watch are places like rotherdam Where the entire pre-war city was destroyed in world war two it's an entirely modern city and there they You know, you can see all of the disagreements Through the history of thinking of transportation about what's the proper role of the automobile and they're undergoing Remarkable series of interventions right now to adjust the dials a little bit And it's not really fascinating. So so what do we do? Well, we recognize right again, like you got to start somewhere So best place to start is with data So you start with your safety data. Where are we killing people? Can we all agree that killing people is bad? Like maybe that's a value where there's convergence Right And if we can't agree with that because oh it was an accident Yeah, right. I'm not you know, that was a marketing term that triple a promoted like because like The fact that cars were killing people was limiting their you know, their ability to sell cars. So they They redefined it Jay walking is another marketing term that triple a and general motors Invented and then went to every state legislature to criminalize walking for the first time in world history Um a little history for you there. So uh, so moving forward right you start with data So where are people dying? Can we fix the places where people are dying? another place that's easy to start is Children children are our future, right? So where are children having a hard time walking or biking to school? Like can we all agree that kids should be able to walk and bike safely to school? Um So it's also incredibly powerful Like I love it when 12 year old girls show up to city council workshops And express their experience Um like 12 year old girls are politically unstoppable So yeah, so start with kids Because grown-ups are stuck, you know and like have bad imaginations, but children don't have that problem And then uh, you know, and then you of course you do pilot projects like okay, it's not temporary We're just gonna like rearrange the street and see how it works. Like I will we'll put it back if it doesn't work You know, it's the usual array of techniques And you know and also, you know do it incrementally. So you're gonna There's a sustainable pace of change for any physical place as well as any society If you push too hard and too fast, you will promote backlash and it'll set you back, you know, five to 10 years so Do it if you know you want change Do it steadily and slowly and keep measuring as you go along and reflecting back on like did you meet your goals? And admit it when you failed I mean in fact, that's one of the most important things that I really spent a lot of time on in oakland is training staff how to fail skillfully And to admit to first of all me as the director Like I do not ever want to find out from my constituents that we screwed something up Like you need to tell me immediately and we need to go out there and solve the problem Like do not sweep the problems under the rug and also Like don't blame someone else just help us figure out how to fix it And explain the the problem and the solution to everyone else so that we inoculate your colleagues against ever making the same mistake So and then you know it was my task to explain to the press and the policymakers like yeah Look, we screwed up on this and here's what we're going to do to fix it So that you build trust because people are not fooled like we we know when government screws something up so you know in order for people to come out and raise their tax rates to Have us have money to do stuff with We need to demonstrate that we are a trustworthy You know spender of their money and that they're getting a higher return on their investment Otherwise like they shouldn't be raising their taxes Yeah, and with that we're now over time. So, um, thank you all these were great questions. I was actually I was hoping for some more like some more grant standing or some more like, you know, like Yeah, like, you know, I like the solution to all of our problems is, you know, personal rapid transit or monorail or, you know gondolas You were a really great and thoughtful audience. All right. Thanks and good night