Elizabeth Adams: The Most Scalable Bikeway in America?

Elizabeth Adams is the Deputy Director of Public Affairs at Transportation Alternatives, the juggernaut advocacy powerhouse in New York City, where she's been involved in everything from bike transportation to bus rapid transit to congestion pricing. What we're here to talk about, however, is something almost absurdly specific: a specific bike facility that I am obsessed with. It's in Brooklyn on Berry Street near the Williamsburg Bridge. I don't know if a podcast episode has ever been devoted to a somewhat nondescript bike facility, but as you'll hear, this is amazing transformational bike infrastructure. It has potential to scale quickly and inexpensively beyond anything else that I have seen anywhere.

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Transcript

Avi Stopper (00:00)

Welcome to Bike Networks Now. I'm Avi Stopper, the founder of Bike Streets. Through a series of conversations with leaders in bike transportation and beyond, we're trying to answer a question: Why is bike transportation still not possible for most people in American cities, and how can we make it a reality? Despite voter support and billions of dollars of investment, there's no city in America where biking is a practical reality for people of all ages and abilities. Why is that? And how can we fix it so anyone can ride to the places they want to go today? These aren't just freewheeling conversations. We're in search of an answer. And that answer—a modern approach to innovation—is the topic of a book we're writing on how cities can make bike transportation possible today.

Avi Stopper (00:48)

My guest is Elizabeth Adams, deputy director of public affairs at Transportation Alternatives, the juggernaut advocacy powerhouse in New York City, where she's been involved in everything from bike transportation to bus rapid transit to congestion pricing. I should note as a quick aside that a study just came out in the last few days indicating that since congestion pricing kicked in, air quality in New York City has improved by 22%.

What we're here today to talk about, however, is something almost absurdly specific. We're going to go deep on a specific bike facility that I am obsessed with. It's in Brooklyn on Berry Street near the Williamsburg Bridge. I don't know if a podcast episode has ever been devoted to a somewhat nondescript bike facility, but as you'll hear, this is amazing transformational bike infrastructure. It has potential to scale quickly and inexpensively beyond anything else that I have seen anywhere.

Before joining Transportation Alternatives, Elizabeth was the legislative director for New York City Council member Stephen Levin in the 33rd district. It's a city council district with a mere 170,000 people that is right along the waterfront in Brooklyn. So Elizabeth had a front seat to the development of the bike infrastructure on Berry and may be as well positioned as anyone to describe the history of its development. And that's what we're going to go deep on today. Elizabeth, welcome. How did I do with that intro?

Elizabeth Adams (02:25)

That was great, thanks. Yeah, great to be here.

Avi Stopper (02:27)

So to start, if you'll indulge me, I want to tell you the story of how I discovered and became obsessed with Berry Street. Earlier this year, I was traveling on the East Coast and the folks at the Boston Cyclist Union gave me an awesome tour of Greater Boston. And then I rode in Brooklyn with Jon Orcutt, the former director of policy at the New York City Department of Transportation. As I flew back to Denver later that day, I played back our ride in my mind and one section of infrastructure on the ride stuck out. It was puzzling. I had never seen this kind of thing before. I just kept wondering what was that?

I checked my ride track in the Bike Streets app when I got home and found that it was Berry Street right next to the Williamsburg Bridge. I then pulled up Google Street View on my computer and again, was just like, even as I was confronted with what it looked like, what is this? And in the Street View images, the proof is actually in the pudding. There are bicyclists in the Street View images. There are people pushing strollers in the middle of a New York City street. It's astonishing. So let's start there. In the most literal terms, can you please answer my question? What is the bike infrastructure on Berry Street?

Elizabeth Adams (03:51)

Berry Street is an Open Street. It was an open street from the pandemic that has been made permanent and serves really as a bike boulevard. So it's now a two-way cycling route. It has traffic calming measures up and down the corridor with a number of intersection enhancements, pedestrian safety measures like daylighting, and it also has vehicle loading zones for truck loading at the end of each curb so that we are reducing traffic volumes and trucks in the neighborhood still allow for kind of local delivery in and out for businesses on the corridor.

It serves really as a public space, an open green space for a lot of residents in Brooklyn. It is frequented by, as you said, people pushing strollers with their kids, older adults who are using walkers or people with wheelchairs, and people cycling. So it is a bike boulevard as well as a shared street. Cars are not allowed to go more than five miles per hour on it. If they go up, they have to turn kind of off of it. So really trying to keep the traffic flowing towards other streets. And it's really just a lovely space.

I lived over there a number of years and you know, going to restaurants or you're going to have a drink and hang out on the street—you're kind of walking up and down the corridor. It works really well for as well as pedestrian space and that really is the vision, right? You can get around in multiple ways and feel really safe doing so and it has been really great for safety improvements in the neighborhood.

Avi Stopper (05:42)

And so this bike boulevard set of conditions is accomplished through what I found to be a truly astonishing bit of design, which is a series of alternating one-way streets. So Berry itself is one way, but it is not one way in the same direction for a protracted stretch of blocks. Instead, every two or three blocks, the direction of the one way changes. And that is—I think the foundational condition that prevents or precludes almost entirely through traffic. Am I right in understanding that that is the key design element that takes what was probably a collector? I think I've looked at it in the historical Street View and it was a mid-sized street and turns it into this bike boulevard.

Elizabeth Adams (06:31)

Yes, exactly. So the idea really is that you're continually moving cars off of it rather than having it be just a major through route for vehicles, especially cars coming off the bridge or going up into Queens. This really keeps vehicles going to other streets and then kind of slows the flow of traffic everywhere. So it keeps the whole neighborhood moving better.

Avi Stopper (07:02)

How would you describe what Berry was like before this temporary Open Streets initiative at the beginning of the pandemic?

Elizabeth Adams (07:10)

Yeah, so it was really congested and very crowded. And the history of Williamsburg is an industrial neighborhood with a lot of truck traffic, with a lot of cars. That has shifted over the last decade, several years, to be much more of a vibrant residential neighborhood, yet the infrastructure and the street design has not caught up. Neighbors have been calling for a redesign and a restructuring of Berry Street for years because it was—because of the focus on car infrastructure and truck design—it made it really unsafe, made it clogged if you're trying to get out and shop and kind of walk around the neighborhood. It was really not suited for that or really designed with that in mind.

So, you know, there have been years of people kind of calling for changes and for better bike infrastructure and pedestrian space overall. And then when the pandemic hit, it really kind of opened up this opportunity in an entirely new way that was just extremely organic in the way that people were looking for more public space.

Avi Stopper (08:23)

Can you describe what happened in the early days of the pandemic and how it started this evolution into its current state?

Elizabeth Adams (08:30)

At the start of the pandemic, New Yorkers were looking for a lot more space, space to get outside, to get outside safely, to be able to breathe fresh air, get together with friends, family. And Open Streets really popped up as a response to this, as people saying, look, the way that we have prioritized our streetscape does not make sense. It does not work. And there was just kind of a really natural push for corridors frankly and big ones to be used in a different way.

Berry Street section is 1.1 miles of a street that was turned into an open street and so that was kind of off of Broadway getting off of the bridge towards up towards McCarren Park. And it was just kind of a really wonderful time, I have to say, in terms of how the community came together for this. I was part of that with some neighbors who were fighting to get like those sawhorse, A-frame police barricades that you kind of just put out in the street. It was very low resource and just like, we're just gonna put some markers in the street and close them off and get outside. And it worked.

Really, you instantly saw Berry Street come alive. Restaurants that were at risk of closing put some chairs outside. People kind of sat in the street. There was activation throughout the day and evening and night that Berry Street just hadn't seen in years and years and years. It became part of people's routines. And honestly, it became part of my routine during the pandemic. You know, I go to Berry Street to like go for a walk or get some exercise.

Avi Stopper (10:30)

So this process that you just described, you're putting out sawhorses. I have a lot of questions about the mechanics of how this worked. Were you literally putting sawhorses in the street every day?

Elizabeth Adams (10:40)

Yes. So it was volunteer-led. The city had a program called Open Streets that allowed for the application for sections of streets to be closed during certain hours. But the implementation was left to volunteers and community groups. So we would literally go out there in the morning—there was a core group of maybe five to seven neighbors who were really committed to this—and we would set up the barricades at the entry points to the street, usually around 8 or 9 AM.

And then we would take them down in the evening, usually around 8 or 9 PM. So it was a 12-hour operation every single day. And it was a lot of work, but it was also really rewarding because you could see immediately the impact it was having on the neighborhood and on people's daily lives.

Avi Stopper (11:20)

That is remarkable. And so this was happening seven days a week?

Elizabeth Adams (11:25)

Initially it was happening on weekends and then it expanded to seven days a week, yes. During the height of the pandemic when everyone was home and people really needed this space, it was operating daily. And I think that daily operation was really key to its success because it allowed people to incorporate it into their daily routines and really see it as part of the neighborhood rather than just a special event.

Avi Stopper (11:50)

And how long did this volunteer operation continue before it became permanent?

Elizabeth Adams (11:55)

The volunteer operation continued for about two years. So from the spring of 2020 through early 2022. And during that time, there was a lot of advocacy work happening to try to get the city to make it permanent. We were working with Transportation Alternatives, we were working with our city council member Stephen Levin, we were working with DOT directly to say, look, this is clearly working. People love it. It's improving safety. It's creating community space. Let's figure out how to make this permanent.

And the city was pretty receptive to that, but it took time to figure out the logistics and the funding and the design elements that would be needed to make it work permanently without volunteers having to set up barricades every day.

Avi Stopper (12:35)

Can you describe what the permanent implementation looks like? How is it different from the temporary version?

Elizabeth Adams (12:41)

So the permanent implementation has much more substantial infrastructure. Instead of temporary barricades that we were putting out every day, there are now permanent bollards and planters and other fixed infrastructure that creates the traffic calming and the direction changes that prevent through traffic.

The city also installed permanent signage to make it clear to drivers that this is a shared space with very low speed limits. They improved the intersections with better crosswalks and daylighting to improve visibility and safety. And they created those permanent loading zones that I mentioned earlier so that businesses can still receive deliveries but in a way that doesn't interfere with the bike and pedestrian space.

Avi Stopper (13:20)

One of the things that strikes me about this is the level of community engagement and the sustained commitment that was required. Can you talk about what made that possible? What were the conditions that allowed for this kind of sustained volunteer effort?

Elizabeth Adams (13:35)

I think there were a few key factors. One was that the pandemic created this moment where people really understood viscerally the value of public space and the problems with our car-centric street design. People were stuck at home, they needed places to go outside safely, and Berry Street provided that.

Second, Williamsburg has a pretty engaged and organized community. There were already neighborhood groups and networks that could be activated around this issue. And third, the benefits were so immediate and obvious that it created its own momentum. Once people experienced what it was like to have this kind of space, they didn't want to go back.

But I do want to acknowledge that this level of volunteer commitment is not realistic or sustainable everywhere. It requires people who have the time and capacity to do this kind of work, and not everyone has that privilege. So while I think the Berry Street model is replicable in many ways, the volunteer implementation model probably isn't.

Avi Stopper (14:35)

That's a really important point. So if we're thinking about scaling this approach, what would need to be different?

Elizabeth Adams (14:42)

I think cities need to be prepared to do the implementation themselves rather than relying on volunteers. The volunteer model worked for Berry Street because it was during the pandemic when people had different schedules and priorities, and because we had a very committed core group. But that's not something you can count on in every neighborhood.

So if cities want to replicate this approach, they need to have the staff capacity and the resources to do the daily setup and maintenance, at least initially. And they need to be prepared to move relatively quickly to permanent implementation so that the volunteer burden doesn't become unsustainable.

Avi Stopper (15:15)

What role did political leadership play in this process? You mentioned working with Council Member Levin—what was that relationship like?

Elizabeth Adams (15:23)

Stephen was really crucial to this. He understood immediately the value of what we were doing and he was willing to advocate for it at the city level. He helped navigate the bureaucratic process of getting approvals and funding for the permanent implementation. And he provided political cover when there was pushback from some community members or business owners who were concerned about the changes.

Having that political support was essential because it gave the DOT confidence that this was something the community really wanted and that there was political will behind it. Without that, I don't think we would have been able to make the transition to permanent implementation.

Avi Stopper (16:00)

Were there opponents to this project? How did you handle pushback?

Elizabeth Adams (16:05)

There was some pushback, mostly from people who were concerned about losing parking or who were worried about emergency vehicle access. We tried to address those concerns proactively by making sure there were still loading zones for businesses and by working with the fire department to ensure emergency vehicles could still get through.

But honestly, the opposition was pretty minimal compared to what you often see with bike infrastructure projects. I think that's partly because the benefits were so visible and immediate, and partly because it grew out of a genuine community need during the pandemic rather than being imposed from above.

Avi Stopper (16:40)

Looking back on this whole process, what do you think are the key lessons for other cities or other advocates who might want to try something similar?

Elizabeth Adams (16:50)

I think the biggest lesson is the importance of community organizing and having neighbors who are willing to fight for this kind of infrastructure. The volunteer effort wasn't sustainable long-term, but it was crucial for demonstrating that there was real community support and for showing what was possible.

The second lesson is about timing. The pandemic created this unique moment where people were more open to thinking differently about how we use our streets. That window may not always be there, so advocates need to be ready to act when those moments arise.

And the third lesson is about partnerships. Working with DOT, working with our council member, working with Transportation Alternatives—having those relationships and that institutional support was crucial for moving from a temporary experiment to permanent infrastructure.

Avi Stopper (17:35)

What about the design itself? The alternating one-way sections seem like such a simple but brilliant solution. Had you seen that approach used elsewhere?

Elizabeth Adams (17:45)

The alternating one-way design was really DOT's innovation. They looked at the street configuration and the traffic patterns and figured out that this would be the most effective way to prevent through traffic while still allowing local access. I hadn't seen it used exactly this way before, but it's such an elegant solution because it doesn't require a lot of expensive infrastructure—just some signage and bollards at key points.

The beauty of it is that it makes the street essentially useless for through traffic while keeping it fully functional for people who actually live or work in the neighborhood. Cars can still get where they need to go, but they can't use Berry Street as a shortcut to avoid traffic on other streets.

Avi Stopper (18:25)

How has this affected the broader transportation network in the neighborhood? Did traffic just move to parallel streets?

Elizabeth Adams (18:33)

That's always the concern with traffic calming measures, and DOT did study this carefully. There was some increase in traffic on parallel streets, but it wasn't as dramatic as people feared. I think that's partly because of the way the alternating one-way design works—it doesn't just divert traffic, it actually discourages some car trips altogether by making driving less convenient than walking or biking.

And the benefits on Berry Street itself were so significant—not just for cyclists and pedestrians, but also for the businesses and residents along the corridor—that I think most people felt it was a worthwhile trade-off.

Avi Stopper (19:10)

What's the current status of Berry Street? How is it working now that it's been permanent for a while?

Elizabeth Adams (19:17)

It's working really well. It's become a really integral part of the neighborhood transportation network and the community space. You see families using it, commuters using it to get to and from the Williamsburg Bridge, people just hanging out and socializing. It's exactly what we hoped it would become.

The businesses along the corridor have generally been happy with it because it's brought more foot traffic and created a more pleasant environment for their customers. And the safety improvements have been significant—we've seen a real reduction in crashes and injuries.

Avi Stopper (19:50)

Have there been any unexpected challenges or benefits since it became permanent?

Elizabeth Adams (19:55)

One challenge that we didn't fully anticipate was maintenance. With all the increased foot traffic and bike traffic, the street surface needs more frequent attention. And the planters and other infrastructure require ongoing care.

But on the benefits side, it's been amazing to see how it's changed the character of the neighborhood. It's created this spine of community space that connects different parts of Williamsburg in a way that didn't exist before. And it's inspired other streets improvement projects in the area—I think it's shown people what's possible when we prioritize people over cars in our street design.

Avi Stopper (20:30)

How replicable do you think this model is? What would it take for other cities to do something similar?

Elizabeth Adams (20:37)

I think the model is very replicable, but cities need to be thoughtful about adapting it to their specific context. The alternating one-way design might not work everywhere, but the basic principle of using simple, inexpensive interventions to prevent through traffic while creating space for bikes and pedestrians—that can work in a lot of places.

The key is having the political will to try it and the community engagement to make it work. Cities also need to be prepared to act quickly when opportunities arise, like during the pandemic, rather than getting bogged down in years of planning and process.

Avi Stopper (21:10)

What role do you think the pandemic played in making this possible? Could this have happened without that catalyst?

Elizabeth Adams (21:18)

The pandemic was absolutely crucial. It created this moment where everyone understood the need for public space and where the normal political and bureaucratic barriers were temporarily lowered. The city was willing to try things on a temporary basis that they might never have approved as permanent projects.

Without the pandemic, I think we would have needed years of traditional community planning processes, environmental reviews, all the usual bureaucracy. And by the time we got through all that, the momentum and community energy might have been lost.

So while I hope we can learn to be more nimble and experimental even without a crisis, I do think the pandemic created a unique opportunity that allowed this to happen much faster than it otherwise would have.

Avi Stopper (22:00)

How has your experience with Berry Street influenced your work at Transportation Alternatives?

Elizabeth Adams (22:06)

It's been hugely influential. It's given me a really concrete example of how community organizing and smart street design can come together to create something that works for everyone. And it's shown me the importance of being ready to act when opportunities arise rather than waiting for perfect conditions.

At Transportation Alternatives, we're always looking for ways to support community-led initiatives like this and to help scale successful models to other neighborhoods. Berry Street has become a really powerful example that we can point to when we're talking to other communities about what's possible.

Avi Stopper (22:40)

Are there other examples of streets in New York that have been transformed in similar ways?

Elizabeth Adams (22:46)

There are several other Open Streets that have become permanent or are in the process of becoming permanent. Each one has its own unique design solution based on the specific street configuration and community needs, but they all share this basic principle of prioritizing people over cars.

I think the Open Streets program during the pandemic really demonstrated to the city that there's a lot of appetite for this kind of infrastructure and that it can work in many different contexts. So we're seeing more experimentation and more willingness to try innovative design solutions.

Avi Stopper (23:15)

What advice would you give to advocates in other cities who are interested in trying something like this?

Elizabeth Adams (23:22)

Start by building community support. The infrastructure is only as strong as the organizing behind it. Get your neighbors involved, build relationships with local businesses, and make sure you have a core group of people who are committed to making it work.

Second, build relationships with the relevant government agencies before you need them. Get to know the planners and engineers who would be involved in implementing this kind of project. Understand their constraints and their priorities.

And third, be ready to act when opportunities arise. Whether it's a crisis like the pandemic or just a change in political leadership, there are moments when the normal barriers are lowered and bold ideas become possible. You want to be ready for those moments.

Avi Stopper (24:00)

What are Transportation Alternatives' priorities going forward? How does street design fit into the broader advocacy agenda?

Elizabeth Adams (24:08)

Street design is absolutely central to our work. We're focused on creating a transportation system that prioritizes safety, equity, and sustainability, and that means fundamentally rethinking how we design and use our streets.

We're working on Vision Zero to eliminate traffic deaths, we're advocating for more and better bike infrastructure, we're pushing for better bus service and bus lanes, and we're supporting communities that want to create more people-centered streets like Berry Street.

The pandemic showed us that change is possible much faster than we thought, and I think that's given us more ambition about what we can accomplish in the next few years.

Avi Stopper (24:45)

Looking to the future, how do you think street design in New York will evolve over the next decade?

Elizabeth Adams (24:52)

I think we're going to see a lot more experimentation and innovation. The success of projects like Berry Street has shown that there's public support for bold changes and that they can work really well when they're designed thoughtfully.

I expect to see more bike infrastructure, more bus lanes, more pedestrian space, and more creative solutions that prioritize people over cars. The challenge will be scaling these innovations and making sure they're implemented equitably across all neighborhoods, not just the ones with the most political power or organizing capacity.

Avi Stopper (25:25)

Is there anything we haven't covered about Berry Street that you think is important for people to understand?

Elizabeth Adams (25:32)

I think one thing that's really important to understand is that Berry Street works because it's part of a broader network. It connects to the Williamsburg Bridge, it connects to other bike infrastructure in the area, and it serves multiple types of trips—commuting, recreation, local errands.

Too often we think about bike infrastructure in isolation, but the most successful projects are the ones that connect people to the places they actually want to go. Berry Street works because it's not just a nice amenity—it's actually useful transportation infrastructure that makes it easier for people to get around without a car.

Avi Stopper (26:05)

Before we wrap up, I want to ask about the maintenance and operations of Berry Street. Who's responsible for keeping it clean and functional?

Elizabeth Adams (26:14)

That's handled by the city now, which is a huge improvement from the volunteer model. The Department of Transportation is responsible for maintaining the infrastructure—the bollards, the signage, the street markings. Parks Department handles the planters and green infrastructure. And Sanitation handles the regular cleaning.

Having that professional maintenance is crucial for the long-term success of the project. During the volunteer phase, we were constantly worried about things like snow clearance in the winter or making sure the barriers were properly positioned. Now that's all handled systematically by the city.

Avi Stopper (26:45)

How do you think the success of Berry Street has influenced other transportation projects in New York?

Elizabeth Adams (26:52)

I think it's been really influential in showing that community-led projects can work and that temporary experiments can lead to permanent change. It's also demonstrated the value of simple, low-cost interventions that can be implemented quickly and adjusted as needed.

We've seen that approach applied to other projects across the city—trying things out on a temporary basis, gathering community feedback, and then making them permanent if they work. That's a much more nimble and responsive approach than the traditional model of spending years planning something and then implementing it all at once.

Avi Stopper (27:25)

What would you say to someone who argues that resources spent on bike infrastructure like this could be better used for other transportation priorities?

Elizabeth Adams (27:34)

I think the great thing about projects like Berry Street is that they're actually very cost-effective. The infrastructure is relatively inexpensive compared to something like a new subway line or highway expansion, but the benefits are significant—improved safety, better air quality, more physical activity, stronger communities.

And it's not an either/or situation. We need better subway service AND better bike infrastructure AND better bus service. A truly sustainable transportation system requires multiple options that work together, and bike infrastructure is a crucial part of that.

Avi Stopper (28:05)

How important do you think it is for advocates to have deep expertise in transportation planning and engineering?

Elizabeth Adams (28:13)

I think it's important to understand the basics, but you don't need to be an expert. What's more important is understanding your community's needs and being able to communicate those effectively to the experts who do the detailed design work.

The Berry Street project succeeded because we had strong community organizing combined with good technical expertise from DOT. Neither one would have been sufficient on its own, but together they were really powerful.

Avi Stopper (28:40)

What's your sense of how quickly this kind of infrastructure can be implemented in other places? Is the Berry Street timeline replicable?

Elizabeth Adams (28:49)

I think the timeline can be much faster in places where there's already political support and community engagement. The pandemic created this unique situation where we had to prove demand through two years of volunteer work, but in a normal situation, a city could probably implement something similar much more quickly.

The key is having the political will to try it and the flexibility to adjust as you learn what works and what doesn't. That requires a different approach to planning than what most cities are used to, but I think Berry Street has shown that it's possible and effective.

Avi Stopper (29:20)

How do you think about the relationship between temporary and permanent infrastructure in transportation advocacy?

Elizabeth Adams (29:28)

I think temporary infrastructure is a really powerful tool for demonstrating what's possible and building public support for permanent change. But it's important to have a clear path from temporary to permanent, because the temporary phase can be exhausting for communities and it can create uncertainty that makes it harder to build lasting support.

The ideal is probably what we saw with Berry Street—a relatively short temporary phase that allows you to test and refine the design, followed by quick implementation of permanent infrastructure. The temporary phase shouldn't go on indefinitely.

Avi Stopper (30:00)

What metrics do you use to measure the success of a project like Berry Street?

Elizabeth Adams (30:06)

We look at a lot of different things—safety data, usage counts, community feedback, economic impact on local businesses. But honestly, sometimes the most important metric is just watching how people use the space. When you see families with young children using the street confidently, when you see older adults who feel comfortable walking there, when you see local businesses thriving—those are the indicators that tell you the project is really working.

The quantitative data is important for making the case to policymakers, but the qualitative experience is what really matters for people's daily lives.

Avi Stopper (30:40)

Are there aspects of the Berry Street design that you would change or improve if you were starting over?

Elizabeth Adams (30:47)

I think the basic concept is really solid, but there are always small improvements you could make. Better wayfinding signage, more comfortable seating areas, maybe some weather protection. And I think we could have done more to engage local artists and make it feel more like a unique neighborhood space rather than just transportation infrastructure.

But overall, I'm really happy with how it turned out. It's accomplished what we hoped it would accomplish, and it's become a model that other communities can adapt to their own needs.

Avi Stopper (31:15)

How do you balance the needs of different users—cyclists, pedestrians, families with strollers, people with mobility devices?

Elizabeth Adams (31:24)

That was definitely a challenge in the design process, but I think the key was making the space flexible rather than trying to designate specific areas for specific uses. The street is wide enough that people can share it comfortably, and the low-stress environment means that conflicts between different users are rare.

We also made sure that the intersections and access points are designed to work for people with different mobility needs. That's something that requires careful attention to detail, but it's absolutely crucial for making the space truly accessible to everyone.

Avi Stopper (31:55)

What role did local businesses play in the development and implementation of Berry Street?

Elizabeth Adams (32:02)

Local businesses were generally supportive, especially once they saw how much foot traffic the Open Street was generating. During the pandemic, when many businesses were struggling, the additional customers who came to Berry Street because it was a pleasant place to walk and hang out were really valuable.

We made sure to include loading zones in the permanent design so that businesses could still receive deliveries, and I think that helped address any concerns about the changes affecting their operations. Most businesses now see Berry Street as an asset that makes their location more attractive to customers.

Avi Stopper (32:35)

How has Berry Street changed your own relationship with your neighborhood?

Elizabeth Adams (32:41)

It's made me feel much more connected to the community. During the volunteer phase, I got to know neighbors I never would have met otherwise, and that sense of shared ownership of the space has continued even now that it's permanent.

It's also changed how I move around the neighborhood. I bike more, I walk more, and I feel safer doing both. It's given me a much deeper appreciation for what's possible when we design streets for people instead of just for cars.

Avi Stopper (33:10)

What would you say to critics who argue that projects like this primarily benefit affluent neighborhoods?

Elizabeth Adams (33:17)

That's a really important concern, and it's something we think about a lot at Transportation Alternatives. The truth is that safe streets and good transportation infrastructure benefit everyone, but too often they get implemented first in neighborhoods that have more political power.

I think the answer is to make sure we're actively working to implement these kinds of improvements in all neighborhoods, especially those that have been historically underinvested in. Berry Street shouldn't be unique—every neighborhood should have safe, comfortable streets that work for everyone.

Avi Stopper (33:50)

How do you think about the role of car storage—parking—in projects like this?

Elizabeth Adams (33:57)

Parking is always a challenge because there's never enough of it to satisfy everyone, but I think Berry Street shows that you can remove some parking without causing major problems if you're providing good alternatives.

The key is being strategic about it—keeping loading zones where businesses need them, making sure there are other transportation options available, and being responsive to legitimate concerns from residents and businesses. But ultimately, I think we have to acknowledge that we can't prioritize car storage over safety and mobility.

Avi Stopper (34:30)

What's your sense of how Berry Street has influenced transportation planning practice in New York?

Elizabeth Adams (34:37)

I think it's been really influential in showing DOT and other agencies that community-led projects can work and that temporary experiments can be a valuable tool for testing new ideas. We're seeing more willingness to try things out on a pilot basis and more openness to community input in the design process.

It's also demonstrated the value of simple, flexible design solutions that can be implemented quickly and adjusted as needed. That's a different approach from the traditional model of doing years of planning and then implementing a fixed design.

Avi Stopper (35:10)

Looking back, what surprised you most about this whole process?

Elizabeth Adams (35:16)

I think what surprised me most was how quickly people adapted to using the space and how normal it became. I expected it would take time for people to feel comfortable walking in the street or letting their kids play there, but it happened almost immediately.

It really reinforced for me that people want these kinds of spaces—they're just not usually available. When you create them, people know how to use them and they value them immensely.

Avi Stopper (35:45)

How do you think about the relationship between infrastructure and community building?

Elizabeth Adams (35:52)

I think good infrastructure can be a catalyst for community building, but it's not automatic. Berry Street worked because there was already a strong community that was ready to take ownership of the space and because we had ongoing organizing and engagement around it.

The infrastructure creates the conditions for community interaction, but the community building happens through the relationships and the shared investment that people have in making the space work for everyone.

Avi Stopper (36:20)

What are you most excited about for the future of transportation in New York?

Elizabeth Adams (36:26)

I'm excited about the momentum that projects like Berry Street have created. There's a growing understanding that we can do things differently and that change can happen much faster than we thought. I'm excited to see that applied to bigger challenges like improving bus service and creating more connected bike networks.

I'm also excited about the next generation of advocates and planners who are coming up with even more creative and ambitious ideas about how our streets can work for everyone.

Avi Stopper (36:55)

How do you maintain momentum and energy for this work when progress can sometimes feel slow?

Elizabeth Adams (37:02)

Projects like Berry Street are actually a big part of how I maintain momentum, because they show that change is possible and that the work we're doing really does make a difference in people's daily lives. When I'm having a frustrating day dealing with bureaucracy or politics, I can ride down Berry Street and see families using the space and remember why this work matters.

And I think building those small victories creates energy for bigger changes. Every successful project makes the next one a little easier and builds more support for the broader vision of better streets for everyone.

Avi Stopper (37:35)

Is there a particular moment from the Berry Street project that stands out to you as especially meaningful?

Elizabeth Adams (37:43)

There was a day during the early volunteer phase when I was setting up barricades in the morning and I saw this older gentleman who I'd seen walking in the neighborhood for years, but he always looked really stressed and hurried because he was trying to navigate around cars and trucks. That morning, he was just strolling down the middle of Berry Street with this completely relaxed expression, taking his time, enjoying the morning.

That moment really crystallized for me what this project was about—it wasn't just about bike infrastructure or traffic calming, it was about giving people the space and the freedom to move through their neighborhood comfortably and safely. That's something everyone deserves, regardless of whether they drive or bike or walk.

Avi Stopper (38:25)

How do you think about equity in the context of bicycle infrastructure?

Elizabeth Adams (38:31)

Equity has to be central to this work. Too often, bike infrastructure gets implemented first in neighborhoods that already have resources and political power, while communities that would benefit most from safe, affordable transportation options are left out.

I think the answer is to be intentional about prioritizing investments in neighborhoods that have been historically underinvested in, and to make sure that community voices are centered in the planning process. But we also have to recognize that good infrastructure benefits everyone—it's not a zero-sum game.

Avi Stopper (39:05)

What advice would you give to someone who wants to get involved in transportation advocacy in their own community?

Elizabeth Adams (39:12)

Start by talking to your neighbors and finding out what their transportation challenges are. Build relationships with people who use the streets in different ways—people who walk, people who bike, people who drive, people who use transit. Understanding those different perspectives is crucial for building broad support for change.

Then get to know your local transportation agency and your elected officials. Understand how decisions get made and where there are opportunities for community input. And don't be afraid to start small—sometimes a simple project like a bike rack or a better crosswalk can build momentum for bigger changes.

Avi Stopper (39:45)

How important is it to have professional support from organizations like Transportation Alternatives?

Elizabeth Adams (39:52)

Professional advocacy organizations can be really valuable because they have the expertise and the resources to navigate complex policy and technical issues. But I think the most powerful advocacy happens when you have strong community organizing combined with institutional support.

Transportation Alternatives was helpful with Berry Street because we could provide technical expertise and help navigate the city bureaucracy, but the project succeeded because there was genuine community ownership and investment. You need both pieces.

Avi Stopper (40:20)

How do you think about the role of volunteers in sustaining transportation advocacy?

Elizabeth Adams (40:26)

Volunteers are absolutely essential—they bring passion and community knowledge that you can't get any other way. But I think we have to be careful not to rely too heavily on volunteer labor, especially for ongoing maintenance or implementation.

The Berry Street project required an enormous amount of volunteer time and energy, and that's not sustainable long-term. It worked as a way to demonstrate community support and test the concept, but I'm glad the city took over the permanent implementation. We need to find ways to harness volunteer energy for advocacy and organizing while making sure the actual infrastructure work is professionally supported.

Avi Stopper (41:05)

What role has social media and digital organizing played in your advocacy work?

Elizabeth Adams (41:11)

Social media has been really important for building awareness and mobilizing support, especially during the pandemic when we couldn't have in-person meetings. We used it to share updates about Berry Street, to organize volunteer shifts, and to celebrate successes.

But I think digital organizing works best when it's combined with face-to-face relationship building. The core organizing for Berry Street happened through neighbors talking to neighbors, attending community meetings, and working together on the daily setup. Social media amplified that work, but it couldn't replace it.

Avi Stopper (41:40)

How do you balance the immediate needs of your community with longer-term advocacy goals?

Elizabeth Adams (41:47)

I think projects like Berry Street are great because they address both. It met an immediate need for public space during the pandemic, but it also advanced longer-term goals around creating better bike infrastructure and more people-centered streets.

The key is finding opportunities where short-term wins can build toward bigger changes. Sometimes you have to be strategic about which battles to fight and when, but I think there are usually ways to make progress on immediate concerns while keeping the bigger vision in mind.

Avi Stopper (42:15)

What do you think advocates need to understand about working with government agencies?

Elizabeth Adams (42:22)

I think it's important to understand that most people who work in government agencies want to do good work and create positive change, but they're operating within institutional constraints that can make it hard to be innovative or responsive.

Building relationships with agency staff, understanding their priorities and limitations, and finding ways to make their jobs easier can be really effective. Sometimes that means bringing technical expertise, sometimes it means organizing community support, sometimes it means providing political cover for bold decisions.

Avi Stopper (42:50)

How has your perspective on transportation planning evolved through this work?

Elizabeth Adams (42:56)

I think I've become much more appreciative of the value of experimentation and iteration. The traditional planning model of spending years studying something and then implementing a fixed design doesn't leave room for learning and adaptation.

The Berry Street project showed me that you can learn a lot by trying something, seeing how it works, and then making adjustments. That requires a different mindset from planners and agencies, but it can lead to much better outcomes.

Avi Stopper (43:25)

What would you say to people who are skeptical about the benefits of bike infrastructure?

Elizabeth Adams (43:32)

I would invite them to spend some time on Berry Street and see how it actually works. I think a lot of skepticism comes from people imagining what bike infrastructure might be like rather than experiencing what good bike infrastructure actually is.

Berry Street isn't just a bike lane—it's a community space that happens to be really good for cycling. It's safer for everyone, it's more pleasant for everyone, and it's better for local businesses. Once people see that, it's hard to argue against it.

Avi Stopper (44:00)

How do you measure your own success as an advocate?

Elizabeth Adams (44:05)

For me, success is about seeing real changes in people's daily lives. Projects like Berry Street are incredibly rewarding because you can see the impact so directly—families using the space, people biking who never biked before, businesses thriving, crashes and injuries reduced.

But I also think success is about building the foundation for future changes. Every project that works well makes the next one easier. Every person who has a positive experience with bike infrastructure becomes an advocate. That cumulative impact is just as important as the immediate benefits.

Avi Stopper (44:40)

What questions do you think we should be asking about the future of urban transportation?

Elizabeth Adams (44:47)

I think we need to be asking how we can create transportation systems that work for everyone, not just people who can afford cars. How do we design streets that are safe for children and older adults? How do we make sure that new infrastructure benefits communities that have been historically excluded? How do we address climate change while also improving people's quality of life?

And I think we need to be asking how we can be more experimental and responsive in our planning processes. How do we learn faster? How do we fail faster when things don't work? How do we scale up the things that do work?

Avi Stopper (45:20)

Any final thoughts on the Berry Street project or lessons for other communities?

Elizabeth Adams (45:27)

I think the most important lesson is that change is possible much faster than we often assume, but it requires both strong community organizing and institutional support. You can't do it with just one or the other.

And I think Berry Street shows that good transportation infrastructure isn't just about moving people efficiently—it's about creating spaces where communities can thrive. When we design streets for people instead of just for cars, we get benefits that go far beyond transportation.

That reliance on volunteer capacity can also be really harmful to sustaining this work because that's a privilege question. Like who has time in some neighborhoods? If people are like, I really like this, but I don't have the free time to kind of volunteer and keep it going and push forward myself. And they also deserve safe streets and bike infrastructure and public space. And so I think that that has to be part of this too—great and important to have neighborhood activation and pressure and expertise. And also we should not just rely solely on volunteers to have our streets working for us, right? That simply can't be the way to do it. And it just won't last. And I think Berry Street is a really incredible case of activism and community engagement and great design. I wish everyone had all that.

Avi Stopper (41:51)

In what ways do you think this has informed or changed—and to the extent that it's possible to make this about Berry Street, that's great, but shared streets more broadly or open streets as they were called there. To what degree would you say that this has changed the way advocacy in New York is done or the way people think about the path to successful projects?

Elizabeth Adams (42:15)

I think as many ways as you can reach neighbors and get people's feedback and input—to me it's a truism, but organizing gets the goods every time. DOT was really great in pushing this and had the kind of wind in their sails from us to do so.

I guess, yeah, I mean, I think partnership between everyone—I think that's a question for wherever you are is like, who are your people in government, right? Like, if your Department of Transportation is like 50 years behind, that's a whole different thing. But if you have folks there who have like a really great sense of city planning that we all want—that's not stuck in the 50s—then I think like, use them, work with them, all of that, as much as possible because a lot of people are trying to do really cool things on the street and getting people together, inside and outside of government, I think is just always key to that.

Avi Stopper (43:24)

This strikes a chord because it echoes a point that Mike Lydon, the author of the book Tactical Urbanism made in a previous conversation that I had, that there needs to be a new level of trust between departments of transportation and advocates because there's a lot of energy and a lot of enthusiasm. And it's certainly something that I have observed. And what you just described, this dependency that the DOT had on you to go out and set up these barricades day to day—it seems to me it's an incredible step forward in the level of trust to say you as a private citizen may go do this. We are so frequently admonished to not touch anything, right? And that is, it's the public right of way, the city has dominion over it, city is responsible for it, et cetera.

Do not touch it, do not change it. And that is a really remarkable departure, at least from what I've observed. And I think that that is what Mike Lydon was describing. So I want to finish with just an anecdote, if you'll indulge me here. On maybe a recent trip that you had down Berry Street and what was notable about it, or maybe what was not? What is just the kind of day-to-day mundane reality of that corridor from a pedestrian standpoint, or maybe you were riding your bike? What do you recall from a recent trip down that street?

Elizabeth Adams (44:51)

Yeah, I mean, I will say as a bike rider, it is always the route that I take, which is lovely. Just, you know, it always—so I'll say two things. One, when I'm biking down Berry, I just feel like a huge wave of appreciation for our city and for feeling really comfortable and calm. And it's a great—this sounds corny, but biking is a great way to see your city, to be in the neighborhood, the kind of ease that you can move through it and feel not stressed or at risk and to feel relaxed with the amount of space that you have. I think that's one thing—as a bike rider, we constantly can feel like pressured for space, either in a narrow bike lane or right next to a car. It's like, it's this space stress. And so that is a really incredible thing for me of just feeling that you have space and that you deserve space and are guaranteed space.

And then I will say a second kind of feeling that I've had as a pedestrian walking is sometimes I'm struck by the kind of look—like the looks that you see people have. They're just like not questioning. They're just like, yep, I'm here. And that to me just makes me think of the thing of like something is always like crazy or radical until it's done. And then it's just like normal and what it is. And so when I see people like walking down Berry with their stroller or just like something that for years would never be possible. You can't just like, walk a stroller in a street. And like, and, you know, with no stress in their mind, just like doing it like totally normal and the amount of work that goes behind and goes into that being possible for someone to just feel calm and normal about what they're doing. That look that you can see in someone just always gets me that I love.

Avi Stopper (47:00)

Maybe that is what we should be aspiring to is this sense of normalcy such that it just fades into the background and this just becomes the normal way that things work. All right, so a lot of our Bike Streets work is about local knowledge. So next time those of us who are fanboys of Berry are out there just riding idly back and forth, what is a great bakery, coffee shop, pizza shop, where should one go when on Berry? What's your favorite stop?

Elizabeth Adams (47:29)

Yeah, there's a bunch of great spots. I really love—there's like a really great Vietnamese place, Lucy's on Berry Street. I would say just pick any, pick one with people outside. Those are always fun.

Avi Stopper (47:45)

Great, well, I am looking forward to my next bike ride down Berry now that I understand it in a lot more detail. Elizabeth Adams, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

Elizabeth Adams (47:55)

Yeah, great, thank you, thank you so much.

Avi Stopper (47:59)

Thanks for listening. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for guests you'd like to hear from, drop us a line at info@bikestreets.com. Bike Networks Now is a production of Bike Streets. Anyone should be able to ride a bike to any destination in their city today. You can learn more about our work at bikestreets.com.

Sara Studdard: Getting Cities to Move Fast on Bikes

As much as anyone I know, Sara Studdard has cracked the nut on how to get cities to move fast in the construction of bike infrastructure. Sara is a partner at City Thread and developed the Accelerated Mobility Playbook, a roadmap that helps cities make big progress on bike and mobility projects in general in 24 to 36 months. Sara has worked with cities like Austin, Providence, Pittsburgh, and Denver to build bike infrastructure at a pace that previously was not imagined to be possible. I want to understand what Sara has learned, what the playbook is all about, and how they get cities to move quickly.

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Transcript

Avi Stopper (00:01)

Welcome to Bike Networks Now. I'm Avi Stopper, the founder of Bike Streets. Through a series of conversations with leaders in bike transportation and beyond, we're trying to answer a question: Why is bike transportation still not possible for most people in American cities, and how can we make it a reality? Despite voter support and billions of dollars of investment, there's no city in America where biking is a practical reality for people of all ages and abilities. Why is that? And how can we fix it so anyone can ride to the places they want to go today? These aren't just freewheeling conversations. We're in search of an answer. And that answer—a modern approach to innovation—is the topic of a book we're writing on how cities can make bike transportation possible today.

Avi Stopper (00:51)

As much as anyone I know, Sara Studdard has cracked the nut on how to get cities to move fast in the construction of bike infrastructure. Sara is a partner at City Thread and developed the Accelerated Mobility Playbook, a roadmap that helps cities make big progress on bike and mobility projects in general in 24 to 36 months. Sara has worked with cities like Austin, Providence, Pittsburgh, and Denver to build bike infrastructure at a pace that previously was not imagined to be possible. I want to understand what Sara has learned, what the playbook is all about, and how they get cities to move quickly.

Sara's bio includes this tantalizing question, quote: "Sara led the first crowdfunding infrastructure campaign since the Statue of Liberty in 1885—true or false?" Sara, welcome. I'm going to guess that it's true only because it is such an unusual question that it must indeed be the case. Am I right?

Sara Studdard (01:47)

Ha ha ha! You're correct. It is true.

Avi Stopper (01:54)

What was that project?

Sara Studdard (01:55)

Over 10 years ago, I was living and working in Memphis, Tennessee. I was doing economic development and placemaking for an arts district, Crosstown Arts District. And there was this amazing project that was going to connect Memphis's jewel of an urban park, the Overton Park, to a Memphis suburb—again, high-quality park called Shelby Farms—that would be a mostly fully protected connection between these two parks. We had politicians supporting it, residents and business owners supported it, but there was a challenge around finding the final funding needed to make it possible.

And so I had the opportunity and the gumption where I led a crowdfunding campaign where folks contributed $5, $10, $500 to raise $75,000 to help complete the Hampline connecting these two parks. And for those that don't know, part of the Statue of Liberty also included a bit of crowdfunding as well. And so at the time it was one of our messaging points and I still use it to this day.

Avi Stopper (03:18)

That is astonishing, well done. I think that's become something of a standard, right? I mean, it's not like the dominant paradigm for how things get funded, but I feel like I see these things quite frequently.

Sara Studdard (03:24)

Yeah, this was early in the crowdfunding space and it was actually with this great organization that is no longer around called IOBY that was really—was actually sort of like the non-profit version of GoFundMe. And so they offered fiscal sponsorship if you didn't have the right type of business entity and also really supported residents who are passionate about making changes in their community about how do you ask your neighbor for $25 and how do you do that over a period of time to meet your goal? And so it was really exciting. Memphis was a test community for this very community-centered crowdfunding campaign platform.

Avi Stopper (04:23)

Well, I think it's a good segue because so much of building infrastructure is about capital and of course, political capital—things we probably need to look at separately. But I was just, as an illustration of this, talking to a hardworking Dallas bike transportation planner, and she worked incredibly hard to complete a new bike master plan for the city. And I asked what their plans are to execute on this plan, to actually build it. And I was unsurprised to hear that the expectation is this sort of 25-year generational time horizon. Obviously, there are really significant political capital and capital capital considerations in that. I'm curious to hear, considering your work, what comes to mind when you hear that kind of timeline?

Sara Studdard (05:02)

Yeah. Well, I'm not surprised that those are timelines that we hear from communities across the country, regardless of size, geography, or political affiliation. And I would say that at City Thread, we really operate from the perspective that the status quo, as you gave a great example of, says that transformative mobility projects do take decades, do take generations. And also that they can't be done without meaningful stakeholder involvement, which helps overcome some of the capital and political barriers that you've mentioned.

And so at City Thread, we use our proven playbook called the Accelerated Mobility Playbook or "the Playbook" to really accelerate important projects that make those connections—like neighborhoods, parks, grocery stores, you know, makes a single bike lane connected to another bike lane so you can actually get where you want to go without being inconvenienced or confused.

And so we really believe that projects take too long. And there is a way that the variety of stakeholders who are vital to making changes in our streets and in our public space—there's just another sort of paradigm to organize folks around in order to move that 25-year timeline to two to three years, or for large, big, huge projects, you know, to five years. And we know that it can work and it can happen.

Avi Stopper (07:07)

Okay, we are sitting at the feet of the oracle. Tell us, how do you do it? How do you get this buy-in? How do you get them to believe, and of equal importance, how do you actually make it happen?

Sara Studdard (07:10)

Ha ha ha! Yeah, well I would say first, big ideas need real community buy-in. And so that means thinking about your constituents as not just people who are going to use the trail or the protected bike network, but thinking about residents, businesses, churches, nonprofits, local leaders—not your usual traditional suspects, but those who, you know, communicated with the right message or who may be on the fence can sort of show elected leaders that there is public support to do this big idea and to do it and to complete it and ensure that fairness and accountability are at its core.

We really believe that, you know, when local government isn't bogged down by inefficiencies, they are able to take on these projects and that collaborating and resourcing and funding community leaders, city staff, as well as making sure that elected leaders have the information they need to know that the person that has their cell phone number and maybe has some power and influence is not representing the broader perspective of residents. That they can really tackle urgent projects like now instead of pushing them off to the next administration.

We always say that funding is sort of the free bingo card. Yes, it's a challenge, but if you have sort of elected leaders committed, city staff that has the resources, the support from their boss, the elected leader, and then a diverse group of residents who are organized, that you can really find the funding to move on ambitious, thoughtfully ambitious projects.

Avi Stopper (09:27)

What strikes me as very unusual or different from what I think I typically observe is this idea of a broad coalition, because typically when one of these projects is being considered, there are the bike people and then there are the people who are against the bike people. And then there's a broad swath of folks, a huge swath, probably a vast majority in fact, that are not engaged at all. And maybe those are the folks that you're reaching out to.

How do you encourage cities to explain the vision of a future that bike people understand, but maybe people who have not spent so much time thinking about these cycling utopias that we all dream of don't really understand? They're not something that they've really considered before. How do you get those people—business owners, community leaders, leaders of cultural and religious organizations—how do you get those folks on board with something that they haven't really imagined before?

Sara Studdard (10:32)

Yeah, so the way that we do it is built on a messaging framework that makes a value proposition to all of those folks that you just mentioned. It makes a value proposition that biking and walking infrastructure does benefit them whether they choose to use it at all. And so for the past probably seven or eight years, we've been continuing to test and refine this message in communities across the country.

We use the type of polling that politicians use to know if they're going to win a campaign or not. So it's a representative sample of the community to ensure that we're capturing all viewpoints, all ages, races, gender, like all of the ways that folks identify and affiliate with to be able to say, and this is true, that in the majority, like a high majority of cities across the US that 75% of residents, particularly voters, when you talk to them that a protected bike lane will make their car trip less confusing or more convenient because there is a space on the road for everyone. When you tell them that congestion will actually reduce because traffic flow will change due to an updated intersection that provides safety for people crossing while walking or in a wheelchair, et cetera, that when you talk about the infrastructure and how it will benefit them, that you begin to get folks to be able to align around a shared goal that could be, let's build 10 miles of our trail system in two years. And for us, the sort of secret sauce is it's not about behavior change.

In order for folks to even have the opportunity to consider changing their behavior, we believe, and I know your work with the cool neighborhood streets and the alternative routes is so important. But there are streets that do need a heavy level of protection for families to feel comfortable using. And that by just talking about how infrastructure benefits them without asking them to do anything but support the infrastructure, we're able to organize people locally to agree on that shared goal. It has a measurement, and widens the net and has a different type of message on why a bike lane is important to the health and growth and vitality of the community today, you know, and in the future.

Avi Stopper (13:34)

Elaborate on that point about it not being about behavior change. That really catches my ear.

Sara Studdard (13:39)

Yeah. Well, humans don't really like to be told what to do. And there's a ton of research out there about successful behavior change campaigns, whether it's smoking cessation or even some of the climate work that's happened across the globe. But they're really, really expensive. They're like hundreds of millions of dollars expensive. So A, like there's not the resources to do that. And if we want to get things done quickly, we need to be able to organize people quickly. And so being able to really sort of like remove the—

In my perspective, I think a lot of advocates who are solely focused on whether it's transit or biking or recycling, right? Like there's a bit of shame attached to the message on how they're wanting folks to like get on their side. And so by just focusing on an agreement that this infrastructure should be built, we found that we get, you know, 75% and above percent support of just completing the project. That doesn't mean that folks, yeah.

Avi Stopper (14:54)

Got it. So the message maybe then is not, we're gonna get you to become a bicyclist. The message is more, these types of changes in the right-of-way are going to benefit you in these ways, one of which is that certain people who choose to ride bikes will be riding in a more protected environment, but we are not shaming you into becoming one of those. We're not coming for your cars, you know?

Sara Studdard (15:01)

Correct. Exactly, yeah. You did, yeah. I would say that's correct. I would say the one caveat is convenience over safety of even yourself or the other individual resonates most with residents. It makes me and everyone I share it with feel like slightly sad about humanity, but really people having the confidence that they will be able to continue to walk out or however they get out of their house, out of their house, and get where they need to go in a predictable way. That sort of predictability and consistency is really important in organizing folks. And then the community in the city has to deliver on it and demonstrate that the promise that they made, the value proposition that was shared, was real.

Avi Stopper (16:25)

So it sounds like you're framing the message in a way that is going to resonate with people rather than repel them. And while safety is clearly a priority, the priority for so many of us who work in transportation, the framing that you lead with is actually about convenience and how you're going to make their lives easier. It's not we're making your neighborhood safer.

Sara Studdard (16:53)

And you know, there are places where, you know, safety is the way you communicate in certain neighborhoods. We use safety as like a secondary message a lot, but convenience is like the winner in terms of when you think about running a campaign, like you put convenience and safety on the ballot box. And when it comes down to it, convenience always wins in terms of what people are wanting more of when it comes down to it. Which sort of relates to like, we are organizing folks and then activating them to show elected leadership and city staff that a majority of residents do want this 10 miles of trails built. And we're doing that over and over and over again, working in collaboration with all of the steps it takes on the local government side to complete a project.

Avi Stopper (17:58)

How do you find that these messages scale? To what degree are they plug and play? In other words, a message that resonates in one community or one city. How well does that work? You describe your work as creating a playbook or toolkit. So do the messages generally translate both from city to city, from different types of neighborhoods and socioeconomic environments to others? To what extent is there this level of we understand the way, generally speaking, that we want to engage with folks and then we can use it elsewhere?

Sara Studdard (18:34)

Yeah, I would say that it translates like relatively well to communities of all shapes and sizes and backgrounds, but we do rely on audience research. So polling and focus groups and conversations with folks to really refine it and ensure that the order of the words resonates the most that maybe in some communities safety is what people are really passionate about. It could be a reaction to deaths or fatalities. In some places we found that like the streets are confusing and like using words like confusing really works. But I would say at the core what is sort of like 100% replicable to date is framing, changing streets as something that benefits everyone and really focusing it on the infrastructure and that the infrastructure provides you with more choices and it's on you. You have the independence and the control to decide what choice you're going to take.

Avi Stopper (19:51)

Okay, so I have a very dim view on the way community engagement is currently done. In the conventional form with public meetings where you have a tiny fraction of loud people on either end of the spectrum who show up and a giant mass of other folks is just never really reached. And of course, one of the tropes that we hear over and over and over again is, I didn't know that that was happening. I didn't know that this was going on. This particular planning process was undertaken over the course of three or five years and they start to build it and you hear this uproar from the neighbors that I didn't know that this was happening and yet there were flyers and all sorts of other indications, emails that came out that this was underway. So is part of the playbook figuring out how to actually get to folks who usually don't get their voices heard? And what techniques do you find actually work in that context?

Sara Studdard (20:49)

Yeah, I would say first of all, by doing and investing in audience research that the decision maker or the elected leader trusts. So using the same pollster that the mayor uses when running their campaigns. That majority support helps create political cover, that the really loud people are actually a minority and they should be listened to and they should be respected, but that there's this sort of silent majority that do support ambitious goals around changing our streets. So that we find to be like incredibly effective. It's speaking an elected leader's language, talking about voters, you know, whether they want to get reelected or they're leaving a legacy in office, right? There's an ego component of it that like actually they are making the majority of the people that live in their community happy to help make it feel less overwhelming for elected leaders and for city staff who I personally have like immense empathy for who are in public meetings, you know, not necessarily treated—yeah, treated kindly, right? So I would say that like data component helps and then.

What we have found is that by, you know, we utilize philanthropy. We utilize funding that is not from city, state or federal to fund the majority of activities. And this not only gives a diverse coalition that's organized a bit of leverage to come to the table with some power and leverage to say like, hey, like, you know, we were supposed to hit five miles of the trail system this year. And like, I don't think that's like, you are telling us that can't happen. Do you need help or like, do we need to pull back on what we're doing because, you know, we're no longer accountable partners to each other.

But I would say that we use paid media campaigns to drive folks to do whatever city staff and decision makers within a local government, like whatever they need. Surveys, do they need emails? Do they need like 311 requests? Like we found that like a lot of the disconnect in a city's community engagement process is that the city is wanting to receive and analyze information differently than community groups are giving them that information. So they're kind of talking past each other. And it's also then ensuring that you know, local governments who may not have all of the resources and time and capacity to do, you know, door-to-door canvassing or pop up at every farmer's market, et cetera, that there's this funded coalition that's both separate from the city because no surprise to you, I'm sure, or the listeners, like the majority of Americans don't trust government to have this third party group engage with their people, talk to them in the way that they talk to each other and then direct that support in the way that the decision maker needs it and city staff need it in order to move quickly and not like slow things down because there's uncertainty because the same people have come to like the last four public meetings and they both yelled the same things. It's getting out of that sort of repetitive process.

Avi Stopper (24:48)

Okay, so a targeted advertising campaign brings people initially into the conversation, folks who are not normally going to public meetings, someone who encounters it on the local subreddit or Instagram or something like that. They get their voice heard through that. So there is some initial point of contact that I would imagine is pretty far from getting them to be in the supporters column, right for a particular project that is being conceived? Am I right about that? And if so, what is the progression of this person who you now have on an email list, who is now in a broader pool of folks who are being reached about a project? What does the campaign look like that brings them into the supporters column?

Sara Studdard (25:34)

Yeah. Yep, so I would say the like furthest away, like the person who's just seen a few ads, whether it's on what you said or even like on a bus wrap, you know, by signing up to the newsletter, they're agreeing that they support the city investing in streets or a specific goal even. And so there's a kind of light sort of commitment or yes, could be apathetic, but there's sort of like an inherent level of support by joining the email list.

And then when we're working really like deeply in a community that has a really ambitious goal, we just completed our work in Bentonville, Arkansas, where they built 30 miles of their planned biking and walking network in three years. Very cool. It's amazing. They accelerated their pace of implementation by 13 times.

And so in Bentonville, we had a full-time local project manager who helped launch the Bentonville Moves Coalition that was a diverse coalition of all of the stakeholders we've just discussed. So there's a full-time person who is sort of able to make the coalition legitimate and then work directly with a variety of stakeholder groups with like, you know, do you need sponsorship for the like church carol tour you want to do? Like sure, we'll support that. Mini grants for, you know, neighborhood associations to utilize or ballet schools who want to like do their recital like in a park. Like so engaging in thoughtful ways with groups to then have a smaller pool of the email subscribers to be able to tap and say, like, would you do this op-ed about why this goal of like accelerating the bike network buildout makes sense for you as like a ballet studio or hey like we actually need like a parent and a grandparent to show up to the city council meeting like who's available and here's some talking points and so it's really relationship-led from there to sort of remove give those usual suspects a break to not attend so many community meetings and then get new voices and perspectives to talk about why it's important to them.

And it also is really fascinating because you can see how a ballet teacher can talk about why not only a network of safe and connected and protected bike lanes matters to Bentonville, but she can also just talk about like without even using the word bike, like why it's important to her ballet studio. Like it gives parents confidence on dropping the kids off. We like to play outside and now there's an intersection that's shorter for me and my little ballet dancers to cross. And so again, it's like people are able to authentically talk about this shared goal. And again, I think by like removing sort of like, we're introducing choice by saying you'll have more choices via infrastructure, though you don't have to change. I think by removing that, really allows everyone in a community to think about what would it do for them and then be able to speak to it authentically.

Avi Stopper (29:33)

It strikes me that what you're describing here is a deep bench and I'm going to file away this idea of the either literal or figurative ballet teacher or ballet studio owner. I love that. But what occurs to me is that it's almost like if your title is your name comma bike advocate. We need you to not be the one who is doing the talking. Maybe some of the technical talking about certain elements or something like that, but we need a representative sample of supporters who are new voices who aren't heard. Am I interpreting that correctly? And is that something that you have seen really work?

Sara Studdard (30:11)

Yep. Yep. Yeah, no, you've said it exactly. And I would also add, it not only matters around who staff and decision makers are hearing from, but we've also found that we really work to like build trust between elected officials and city staff around plans where, you know, the engineers and the community and the bike advocates who have an opinion on like how wide a protected lane should be on everything to like also begin to through small wins where the city delivers and completes projects like they said they would.

That we also really work to like remove the, you know, accredited or not sort of like residents who have opinions from the process because that is another big barrier like that slows things down. But you have to have trust and you have to have you know a concept of accountability to do that but it's also like making life easier for everyone because everyone's aligned that like we want to in Bentonville 30 miles and three years.

And the first year, everyone has a project list. You get into the weeds and you begin to see that, the city staff actually is competent and capable to deliver high-quality designs. And if they do need technical assistance, there's funding available to fill those gaps. And by the end of—by November was when we had our celebration. By the end, like the people who were spending, you know, hours of their valuable time sort of picking apart a design, like now are just enjoying using it or driving by it, right? Because they trust the city. Yeah.

Avi Stopper (32:24)

You mean we as bike advocates don't need to do anything at this point. So that construction 30 miles in three years reminds me of something from Denver, which was 125 miles in five years. Were you behind that campaign? Were you involved in that?

Sara Studdard (32:38)

Yeah. At a previous organization, City Thread partner Kyle Wagenschutz and I had the great ability where we sort of tested out like why does it take cities so long? And we worked in Denver, Austin, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, and Providence.

Avi Stopper (33:02)

Okay, and that construction, X number of miles in Y number of years, you find that that is strategic? Is that something that you are really trying to get cities to adopt because that creates a very clear goal with kind of like a binary outcome. We did this or we did not do this.

Sara Studdard (33:19)

Exactly. Yeah, there's a quantitative way to measure it. And it's a way to, again, hold folks accountable. And then also through, you know, now we've worked with now over like 17 communities. We actually have like a pretty good idea about how fast cities can actually move when it comes to particularly like changes to the street. And so it's also helping folks identify like what the goal should be. What needs to be in place, like a city readiness sort of level for them to move faster.

And then for us, the acceleration component is not only because, you know, the world is burning. People need to get places. There's all of these valid reasons to invest in streets. But the acceleration also builds trust because local government has said they're going to do something. Residents feel heard. They've done it. And then it's just like rinse and repeat. And so it creates a new framework or a new relationship between city staff, elected leaders and residents.

Avi Stopper (34:36)

It's a good governance thing at the end of the day. I mean, it strikes me that it's very aligned with the ideas surrounding the abundance agenda.

Sara Studdard (34:39)

Yep. Exactly. Very much so.

Avi Stopper (34:47)

I'm curious to hear, 17 cities is astonishing, congrats, that's phenomenal. Is there one in particular that stands out, and maybe you anticipated this question with the mention of Bentonville, which is a little bit maybe of an unfair case because of certain investment interests there, but are there any cities in particular where you just feel like this is the test case, we crushed it here, this is, can we just replicate what we did here everywhere?

Sara Studdard (35:18)

Yes, can I give three examples? Yeah, so I would say Bentonville is special. It's where Walmart is headquartered for those that don't know. There is an interested funder who's funded a ton into their mountain biking trail system in Northwest Arkansas. So like there's an active funder. I would just say the city of Bentonville, residents have a variety of opinions around how a single funder has shaped the size, feel, look, you know, of their city. And so for us, the playbook really allowed us to come in. All of the funding went through City Thread and we were really able to sort of separate the who's funding this, like who's behind this by getting elected leaders on board who for a lot of reasons are sensitive to being drawn towards a certain funder's own interest. We also, again, were able to fund this coalition that to the average person and authentically was like a diverse coalition wanting to support the city to build 30 miles in three years and then I would also say like Bentonville is a majority conservative community it has like tripled in growth over the last 10 years. It is a place where change is a bit scary because a lot has been happening. And by having the grandparents who've lived in Bentonville, when it was a very small community and now it's almost a 60,000 residents, this has happened over the last 10 years, to get that diversity of people to be like, yeah, we need to like smartly think about investing in our streets and we can do it in an apolitical way and we can also potentially regain more independence and control as a local government because through this process we have a better idea of like how much to ask council for each year or what state funding could we access and how can we be leaders and how the streets should look and so you know, I think that the city of Bentonville is like an amazing example. Yes there are caveats but at the end of the day like the city staff and the mayor mayor Stephanie Orman and the coalition like they're the ones who got it done. Yeah.

Last year, Cleveland, a majority African American black community with a young, energetic black mayor announced that they are going to and are in the process of building 50 miles of their planned biking and walking network in three years and have done like really interesting things both around return to work initiatives and downtown Cleveland where like Sherwin-Williams like global headquarters is down to neighborhoods who like really just want like the blighted property to like be maintained. Have done really interesting ways and like engaging that diverse coalition and then Columbus, Ohio also is like one of the fastest growing cities in the US? Like has like truly like necessary needs to reorganize their street. They've gone through our grant program and are working on sort of making a acceleration commitment. And then I would also just add like we've also worked in communities like Hood River, Oregon, where like 5,000 people live there and maybe they have 15,000 people daily during like their tourism season who are also thinking about, you know, how moving quickly both serves residents and tourists. So I just added Hood River in to say that it's like, this is not like a mid-sized city solution. It really is a solution for communities of all size because it really centers like people and systems and like ensures that at the end of the day, you've not only achieved your goal, but you've created new systems that can be replicated. Like our whole thing is like, we want to make cities work for everyone. there's not, bureaucracy is not full of all bad things, right? Bureaucracy was created to be fair, just equal. And humans have gotten in there and helped slow things down. And so we want to make the parts of bureaucracy that preserve justice work and work quickly while also trying to overcome the parts that get into red tape or people with power and influences making decisions that affect thousands and thousands of people that live there.

Avi Stopper (41:03)

Okay, so back to my original question about Dallas. It sounds like maybe Dallas has this new bike master plan. Maybe the first thing that you would suggest to them is that they need to set an aggressive and ambitious goal around what they're going to do over a certain period of time. And acknowledging that there are probably a bunch of steps in the middle there, but really the way that you go from this really shiny, cool PDF to actually starting to produce that as a reality on the streets is by setting the incentives perhaps from a political level around, okay, we have this thing, city council has approved it, we said we're going to do it. Now the way to initiate this is to develop the facility and the skills to roll it out quickly. Is that an accurate summary?

Sara Studdard (42:02)

That's accurate. I would also just add that they should apply for our technical assistance grant and receive the assessment. And then we provide communities with the playbook that outlines everything that you just stated, like over whatever timeline works with a budget on how much it'll cost. And then Dallas can decide they want to hire City Thread to like facilitate it all or they have all of the information they need and what decisions need to be made and who needs to be at the table to do what you just stated.

Avi Stopper (42:44)

To what extent is, I'm kind of obsessed with tactical urbanism. And to what extent is that part of the playbook? Is that a tool that you use demonstration projects to build, if the objective is to build broad coalitions that are going to be unassailable politically, because they represent a huge plurality of the population, to what extent have you found tactical urbanism to be a useful tool to show people rather than tell them what a set of proposed changes might actually do. And to the ballet studio owner's questions, this is how it's going to make life better for you, how your business is going to improve as a result.

Sara Studdard (43:29)

That's a really great question. I would say it really depends on the level of political commitment. Cleveland is planning to roll out their 50 miles over the next three years with quick build solutions that have a bit of permanence to them, like something that can be installed today and like still exist three years from now with the goal to then go back and make it more permanent. We've also seen great examples that are more pop-up quick build opportunities. And I would just say like where I have caution around doing quick build is if you don't have a true understanding of the decision, the person that's gonna say keep it or take it out. If you don't know exactly like what they're gonna do, quick build is just by nature easier to remove and less permanent. And so I just think that's something to consider if you're between elections or you're not quite sure, but it is a wonderful tool to use to both be cost effective and financially responsible and in pop-up situations to your point, you know, make the case that it does benefit a variety of people in a variety of modes.

Avi Stopper (44:57)

One of the coalition questions that that raises for me is so many people seem to object so vocally to plastic flex posts in particular. It just seems like the most divisive piece of infrastructure. How do you, do you see that indeed creating problems in the construction of a really strong unassailable coalition or, or do you end up having to pivot to other, you know, to other materials that the material where the material, just feels to me sometimes like it's an unforced error because we know that lots of people are going to get very excited about plastic flex posts in particular. So how do you, there's this interesting tension there and I'm curious how you navigate that.

Sara Studdard (45:52)

Yeah, again, it really is like a case by case perspective, like where like we helped New Orleans build 27 miles of their bike network. We also helped them create an entire bike plan in six months that was equity driven and flex posts became like a very contentious challenge in a neighborhood. And so we were fortunate to have a council member who like was all in is who the mayor was looking to to be like do we pull them out and they were able to like negotiate with the residents around a plan that would eventually replace the flex posts but I would also say like because of the nature of our work, like we have a real, the folks on the ground have a strong pulse on like what people want, what they don't want, what their level of like friction is to help like get ahead of that, where it's like, okay, flex posts are like a no, like we should never mention them. Like what are the alternatives? What's the cost like benefit analysis to figure out like what the right strategy is. And maybe it's moving on to another neighborhood or maybe it's finding, you know, like something else. But that's been sort of our, it's not easy. It is like, it's very contentious. It's almost like, it's not bike lash. It's like flex post lash in some way. But by knowing exactly like what the vibe on the street is, it's helpful.

Avi Stopper (47:46)

Are there other tools in the playbook that we haven't discussed that you think are really elemental to success?

Sara Studdard (47:53)

I think we've covered them all, but establishing a shared goal that all the needed stakeholders required like agree on and are committed to that can be measured. It's then aligning all of the variety of partners needed to be successful, understanding what they need. That could be data, it could be funding, it could be money, it could be just someone telling them thank you, it's then resourcing those partners with like what they've said they needed. And then it's just moving quickly and refining on the way when you realize, you know, maybe we moved too fast or this could be faster or we missed a step and then like completing projects and continuing to like fully complete projects to see them all the way through.

Avi Stopper (48:50)

All right, we'll end with a softball question. You've done this all over the place. Do you get to go to these places first off? And second, what's it like when you're out riding on these, riding a bike on these facilities that you really helped bring to fruition that were tucked away in a plan somewhere maybe, but far from creation?

Sara Studdard (48:51)

Yeah. I would say, when I have the fortunate job to visit amazing communities with people who care about their community, who then take me on the most terrifying bike ride or walk that I've ever been on because they're just showing me all the challenges.

Avi Stopper (49:28)

How bad it is.

Sara Studdard (49:31)

It's a good like real life experience. But then to come back a few years later and be on like a very convenient and comfortable and connected experience like whether you're biking or walking or taking the bus like it's emotional like these are plans that like human beings invested in money was spent and a lot of times they sit on a shelf or they take you know a generation to get complete and so for me it's just getting to like bask in the glow of the people on the ground that actually achieved it and not being scared.

Avi Stopper (50:12)

I hope that your phone has lots of those before and after pictures that you just use as motivation on an ongoing basis. Well, thank you so much for chatting with me about this and congrats. Here is to the next 17 cities.

Sara Studdard (50:16)

Yes. Yes. Yes, thank you, Avi. I appreciate that.

Avi Stopper (50:31)

Thanks for listening. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for guests you'd like to hear from, drop us a line at info@bikestreets.com. Bike Networks Now is a production of Bike Streets. Anyone should be able to ride a bike to any destination in their city today. You can learn more about our work at bikestreets.com.

Mike Lydon: The Visionary Behind Tactical Urbanism

Avi Stopper chats with Mike Lydon, author of "Tactical Urbanism" and one of the 100 most influential urbanists of all time alongside, according to Planetizen.

We go deep on tactical urbanism, where’s it’s worked and why it hasn’t become the dominant paradigm in planning. We dive into the challenges cities face implementing this approach from leadership turnover to fatigue, and how a new generation of transportation planners is embracing the promise and experimental spirit of tactical urbanism.

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Transcript

Avi Stopper (00:00)

Welcome to Bike Networks Now. I'm Avi Stopper, the founder of Bike Streets. Through a series of conversations with leaders in bike transportation and beyond, we're trying to answer a question: Why is bike transportation still not possible for most people in American cities, and how can we make it a reality? Despite voter support and billions of dollars of investment, there's no city in America where biking is a practical reality for people of all ages and abilities. Why is that? And how can we fix it so anyone can ride to the places they want to go today?

These aren't just freewheeling conversations. We're in search of an answer. And that answer—a modern approach to innovation—is the topic of a book we're writing on how cities can make bike transportation possible today.

Avi Stopper (00:51)

I have been really looking forward to this conversation with Mike Lydon, a planner and principal at Street Plans and the author of one of my favorite books, "Tactical Urbanism." In 2018, Mike was named as one of the top 100 most influential urbanists of all time. Other names on that list include Jane Jacobs, Rachel Carson, Janette Sadik-Khan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Daniel Burnham—pretty rarefied air.

In my last conversation with Randy Neufeld, I made the argument that tactical urbanism is the tool that can make innovation in the right-of-way scientific, and that a scientific approach is more likely to produce the outcomes we seek. The status quo planning process lacks empiricism. We theorize, we plan, then we build, and then we walk away. This is a disastrous approach to innovation. If you've tried to build things that people use—products of all sorts—it's no surprise that the status quo approach to building bike infrastructure produces very limited results.

So what better way to explore the possibilities of tactical urbanism and why it hasn't become the standard than with the guy who actually literally wrote the book on it? Mike Lydon, thanks for joining me. How was that intro? And if you disagree, by all means, let's get into it.

Mike Lydon (02:13)

No, thank you. It's a really nice intro. I don't necessarily disagree, but it feels silly to hear your name next to the people that you listed—heroes of all ours, right?

Avi Stopper (02:21)

That's a pretty awesome list. Well done, bravo sir. So let's just start with a very high-level question: What is a story that to you exemplifies tactical urbanism as you understand it?

Mike Lydon (02:37)

One story. Wow. Okay. First thing that comes to mind—I think there's two types, right? There's sort of the unsanctioned, very DIY bottom-up. And then there's the more, let's say, professionalized tactical urbanism that we engage in a lot these days.

Avi Stopper (02:55)

Let's go with the latter. We're thinking about government innovation here.

Mike Lydon (03:04)

During the pandemic, New York City introduces Open Streets as a program. The initial first brush of this program—it was just these metal barricades put in the street that said you can still drive here, you just got to get out of your car and then move the thing, drive in the block, and then put it back, ideally, right? And that really didn't prove to be super successful initially, particularly I think in business districts in New York City. We have a lot of business improvement districts where there's a lot of capacity and care for the public realm.

So the idea—the root cause of it and like how cheap that was and how easy it was to basically get an open street—was actually government innovation, and it had a lot of possibility and power behind it. But it needed community groups. It needed business improvement districts and businesses to kind of really start to take ownership of it to evolve it. And that's what happened. And I'm thinking of an example in the Flatiron District where we got engaged to help them deliver on two car-free blocks on Broadway between 25th and 27th Street. So it's just north of Madison Square Park if you can envision it.

And you know, very cheap project. We just painted both blocks blue and then we took a detail in stencil form—like large stencil form—off of the Flatiron building itself and put it onto the asphalt and painted that white, and that was it. And then the BID brought in pretty simple furniture. In addition, these businesses had already started building these sheds out into the street, started serving food out in the street, and it went from being a corridor that prior to March of that year was just throughput for vehicles—traffic striping everywhere, just not a very nice place to walk—to all of it being quiet, car-free, and full of outdoor dining, full of outdoor conversations, people working outside, of course at the time, with the pandemic.

So it was an incredible change that was very inexpensive that no one had really been asking for really. No one was organized around this idea of either Open Street specifically prior to the pandemic in that form, or even more specifically in that district on those two blocks. But the restaurant cluster kind of made it obvious that the BID could help take it to the next level, and they did.

And so then you fast forward a couple of years, and the entire stretch from the plazas in Flatiron and Madison Square Park all the way up to Herald Square—so we're talking about almost 10 blocks—got completely transformed with an interim material set that's very common here in New York City. It's not permanent infrastructure, it's not curbing concrete and permanent street trees—it's kind of making do with the resources that they had, including making those two blocks that were piloted during the depth of the pandemic more permanent. And it was just an unbelievable success for the district.

And now driving is super minimized on that corridor and you've got these two car-free blocks and it now links Herald Square all the way down to Union Square as basically one pedestrian-dominated corridor as it always should have been. And so the space inversion has happened. We now have the majority of space for the majority of users, which are people walking and cycling.

And last point—I know this is a long story but you asked—the last point I would make is during the original couple-month-long pilot, the BID started to notice that a lot of the cycling was going contraflow, was going northbound. Prior to the pandemic, there was a southbound bike lane. And because all this contraflow activity started to happen—because when you change the city, you change the patterns of people's daily lives—and so those plazas made it all more attractive because it stopped a lot of free-flowing traffic on Broadway, diverted to other avenues. So it was a lot less risky to bike northbound. It was faster.

So all of a sudden you have this cycling traffic at 20, 25% of the volumes, and in the redesigned DOT version of this transformation on Broadway, they put in a two-way bike lane, which is heavily used, right? So if you just designed that all at once out of a box as a designer, you probably never would have put in a two-way bike lane. But then that was like this component that emerged that was so obvious to do once the behavior had changed on the street.

So I think to me, that's one of the best ways of—we talk about short-term action, long-term change—how you change a city rapidly and what happens, what can occur, what the potential of our cities are when you take that first initial step.

Avi Stopper (07:55)

It's a brilliant example. Thank you for starting there. And one of my all-time favorite stories in Denver was that, again, during the pandemic, Denver did what they called Shared Streets, which sound quite similar, and using little more than Type III barricades, they transformed these residential corridors into incredible havens for people walking, pushing strollers, riding bikes. It was remarkable. And through that, I learned the power of a Type III barricade. It's remarkable.

So I wanted to just follow up on that. There were two interesting words that you used in there. You used "improvement" and you said "evolution." And it seems to me that those are just implicit components of a tactical urbanist approach. And in my intro, I said that the status quo approach is about theorizing, planning, building, and then typically walking away. We dust off our hands, we're done, and we walk away and that's it. Do you accept that? Do you see that as the dominant approach to development, or do you see that more and more projects are being done in this incrementalist, evolutionary type of approach that you described?

Mike Lydon (09:07)

I mean, certainly both, but mostly that is the conventional planning process, the conventional design process that cities have deployed for several generations. But I would say in the last 10 years, and particularly in the last four or five, you've seen a rapid adoption of these principles, even if you aren't calling it tactical urbanism, which is fine. We say that at the end of our book. We say, don't care what you call it, as long as the spirit of the methodology is there and you're intending to create these lasting changes, coming at it from a completely different angle, which is test before you invest. Just get a prototype out there because you learn so much.

There's this Jaime Lerner quote. Jaime Lerner used to be the mayor of Curitiba, Brazil. And basically, as I understand it, invented bus rapid transit. Like, what do you do? We need to move millions of people, but you don't have money to build a subway. You get tactical. You make the bus the subway, effectively, right? It was such a hack on the city. He has this great quote in his book, "Urban Acupuncture," about—you can't control every variable in a city. It's silly. Don't even try. You can't control all inputs, all outcomes, and so it's much better, I think, to take these first initial steps to try things out and learn from them and not overcommit, because then you really learn what the need is through both qualitative and quantitative evaluation. And to me, that's a very powerful framework in how we think about changing cities.

Avi Stopper (10:45)

I think I often observe what I would consider kind of a perversion of tactical urbanism, which is the use of ephemeral materials—things like flex posts and paint. And then there is no follow-through on the actual iterative type of approach that you're describing. Do you observe that? Do you consider—where is—which is to say that in some cases I observe cities saying we are doing this in a modern innovation type of approach. We are doing tactical urbanism or whatever term they use, but actually when push comes to shove, they're not ultimately coming back and observing. I rarely see planners sitting out in folding chairs, watching how people are engaging with something that they just built. Do you see that to be the case?

Mike Lydon (11:34)

Yeah, it's pretty commonplace. I mean, they get the initial project kit and the design and the ground with lightweight materials bit of this, but the evaluate and iterate part and also tying that directly to a process that communicates and can pipeline these projects to become permanent when they're mostly successful, right? That is still the biggest missing piece of this across the whole globe—is that very few cities can tell you that they have a process to go from the temporary or interim into the permanent. It does happen with frequency. It's not like anyone's put a process around that that can be replicated and scaled for any particular place that I know of, where you can say this goes in today, we know if it's successful in three years' time, we've already lined up the budget to follow through on this, and just kind of keep that cycle moving in a predictable manner.

And that's because I think a lot of funding and budgets and stuff like that is very much tied to politics and the whims of the day. And so it's hard for them—it's hard for city leaders and city agencies to commit because they don't know themselves what next year is going to bring necessarily, even if the capital plan says this, that's not always the case.

Avi Stopper (12:51)

The ideas that you outline in "Tactical Urbanism" are pretty revolutionary, pretty different from the status quo. I'm curious how you personally arrived at this transformation. I know it had something to do with your time in Miami, but I'm curious to hear you describe the narrative. And was there an epiphany type of moment, or was it a gradual series of observations that led to a changing set of views on how projects that you were working on needed to be developed?

Mike Lydon (13:21)

I think it was a little bit of both. You know, while in Miami, I was working on some very ambitious projects for a great planning firm, including like taking the zoning code of Miami and throwing it into the garbage bin and starting over. Denver did something actually very similar a few years later. Very hard work politically. And so I was able to see like this very complex, slow-moving beast from the inside. And it was absolutely worth sticking with as a city initiative from city leaders.

But when you went to each of the public meetings, you kind of saw the same faces, the same issues and tensions kept arising, and people were arguing over things that weren't real, that hadn't really been built, right? They're like worried about something like a four-story building next to their two-story home. They're worried about that, but like they're not living next to that kind of thing. So do they really know that it's not that bad to live next to a four-story home? You know? So these arguments were just kind of out there in the ether. It was all politics. It was all bullshit, honestly.

And so being one who was then reading a lot of blogs at the time—remember that was very popular, podcasts were another thing, but like the blog and Streetfilms, quite honestly. Clarence Eckerson's early work with Streetfilms documenting different things around the world and just like reading about citizen things that were starting to happen, like innovative things that inspired me. I was getting led to this idea drip by drip.

And then it was really being in the streets of downtown Miami for the first time when we held our own open streets, ciclovía-style, Bogotá-styled event there where thousands of people are in the streets. They're walking, they're cycling, they're jogging, they're socializing, they're happy. And it costs like next to nothing. You know, like the experience—we got people the experience of this. Then we can build a constituency once they've had the experience, whether that's a curb extension on a corner and they realize it's safer now, or it's three miles of car-free streets where they've gone and had a great day with their kids, and they see the city in a completely different way and they get a taste of it.

So that was a combination of things and I just kept finding these examples of like, well this thing started with guerrilla action, this started like a really innovative mayor and they started cheap and they started cheerful and then it became permanent. Like aha, there's got to be a way to describe this. You know, there's got to be some sort of word for it. And that's like where it all sort of germinated.

And to end the story, it was a blog post from a landscape architect here in New York who had coined or described the work on Broadway—this initial deployment of the lawn chairs to pedestrianize it. He just didn't call it tactical urbanism. He just used the word "tactical." And I read that blog post and I was like, that's it. That's the word. I looked up the definition in the dictionary and I thought about, okay, this is urbanism, and just put the two together. So that's how it happened.

Avi Stopper (16:18)

Thank you for providing the perfect segue to my next question, which is you in the book define "tactical," and I think that one of the more interesting, kind of surprising themes to me that is a current throughout the book is this comparing and contrasting big versus small. And in a nutshell you define tactical as small. Talk a little bit about that distinction between small and big. What do you see as small and what do you see as big, and why is small preferable to big?

Mike Lydon (16:49)

Small is nimble, small involves a lot more inputs, which is maybe counterintuitive to the idea of big. Big is slow, big is expensive, big is risky politically, and small isn't. And so that was, again, coming up against these political scenarios or just the politics of any given city, it's so difficult to break through that. And people's opinions and thoughts on their own neighborhoods and their own city get formed and then entrenched and it becomes like hard battles over issues that I really wish weren't hard battles, but they are.

And so how do you break through that? How do you get through the logjam and say a better world is possible? Again, it was the small things you can do, the quick things you can do, things you can sneak in in the middle of the night, quite literally, to demonstrate that these things are very possible and that people really appreciate them. And I'm a very strong believer that there's a vast, silent majority who really appreciate and will not fight back against livability improvements as we see them in terms of safer streets and public spaces and denser cities and walkability. I think there's an inherent thirst for that all over this country that doesn't get tapped into effectively, and tactical urbanism can help.

Avi Stopper (18:11)

Those are not the people who are showing up at public meetings. One thing that, apropos, I saw and observed during the Denver Shared Streets program that really transformed my thinking was the way in which neighbors loved them and revered them and wanted them made permanent. And one can only imagine the status quo approach. We've all been there on many occasions where if you were to go in and say, "Hey, we're basically going to cut through traffic entirely on this street and we're going to put a bunch of barricades in the middle," it would create a conflagration.

And so the incredible thing about the tool that you have created with tactical urbanism, I think, is the ability to create alignment between people who might at times be in conflict over theoretical future states that are hard to imagine. And what's so powerful is that there is the promise of ephemerality baked into that, which is to say it's going to be gone in the next couple of days. We just want to see how it works and what you think about it and tell us what you like and what you don't like.

And when the city of Denver surveyed people on these corridors after they took out the Type III barricades—by the way, that was a program that was supposed to last two months, but people loved it so much it lasted two years—when they finally took it out, they surveyed folks and more than 90% of people on the corridors said that they loved them and wanted them to be made permanent. I defy you to find anything that gets 90-plus percent support. It's pretty astonishing.

Back to the question of big versus small, probably the most famous—and correct me if you think I'm wrong—most famous example of tactical urbanism we've already referenced is the way that the New York City Department of Transportation redesigned Times Square using orange barrels and folding chairs. And I think of Times Square as probably the most important or significant intersection in America. And it's interesting to think about that in the context of big versus small. I think you would probably argue that that is small, and yet it seems big. There's some paradox in there. Help me think about how you would define that as small.

Mike Lydon (20:24)

Okay, so it was a—let's call it massive idea pitched in 1969 to pedestrianize Broadway from Times Square to Union Square, right? Where it interrupts the grid as it goes and creates traffic snarls. And so it's a massive corridor. You understand why it was not—40 years of lobbying or advocacy or organizing capacity and energy spent to pedestrianize that corridor. You had to go small to go big. There's just no way to do that politically. Like you would have been—conflagrations, to use your word, left and right. Rich, entitled landowners and cranky residents and on down the line, you just never get that over the hill to completion politically.

So small was lawn chairs in the intersection for a weekend. That's like $12 a chair or something, whatever it was. And it was an accident because the furniture they actually ordered didn't arrive in time. I don't know if you know that part of the story, but they just basically went themselves to nearby hardware stores in the city and said, let's grab their chairs and their chairs and their chairs.

And so I think it was the response and the enthusiasm of the public—I said, silent majority. It was so miserable. It's still miserable to be there, quite frankly, but it's so much less miserable than it was. But it was the joy of seeing a cheap lawn chair in the middle of the street, which is normally filled with honking yellow cabs and minimal space for people and just the aesthetic of that with these billboards and the lights and the massive big buildings. And you've got this $10 chair that's revolutionized this place. Put the square back in the square. Small. That's as small and cheap as you can get.

But they were smart because the Department of Transportation didn't just like take them away and say, okay, that was a fun experiment. That's what we call a demonstration. It's good for engaging people and proving people liked it, but you have to really, to have I think better success—to get back to your idea of being a little more scientific about this stuff—you have to evaluate over longer periods of time, four seasons, whatever it may be, different dynamics on how things actually perform. And so they just painted the street after that. It was like a phase two. And that held the space until they were able to get the capital project constructed like four years later.

So, you know, lawn chairs to permanent infrastructure in five years is about as fast as you can do it in a complex urban environment like that in America. Like sometimes it goes a little faster, but that's about as fast as you can go. So you had to work small to go big. And then that was like this, you know, urban acupuncture—that was like the pinprick. And then now it's radiated all the way down the majority of Broadway. So that original 1969 vision is much closer to reality now than it ever could have been prior to that intervention with the lawn chairs. Brilliant stuff.

Avi Stopper (23:31)

It's an incredible story and it pains me to say that I certainly observe the opposite happening all over the place right now. And one particularly germane or timely such project in Denver is on one of the streets that's on the high injury network. It's called Alameda Avenue and it's basically been a five-year planning process to take a four-lane road down to a three-lane road with left turns made more easy than they have been historically. And at the 11th hour, there was a somewhat shocking turn of events where a local billionaire opposed to the project basically called in a favor and all of a sudden the skids are being thrown on that project.

And say what you will about the way that the brakes had been thrown on it. I'm curious though, and of course I should just note that in the opposition to this project are a substantial number of claims that can't be substantiated without actual observation. I know that the consultants ran all the models and did all this predicting and projecting what's going to happen, but at its essence, we haven't really seen what this project is going to do. It's basically a half-mile corridor or so. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on whether that type of project, indeed whether all types of projects should get this kind of ephemeral treatment to observe and demonstrate empirically whether the outcomes that we are being told in the normal planning process and the outcomes that we are being told by those who are pushing back on it—what is the actual reality? And it seems to me that the only way to understand it is to observe the actual reality of what it's going to be.

Mike Lydon (25:26)

Yeah, I obviously subscribe to that 100%. I mean, I think just a lot of our work is exactly that street typology—going either five to three or four to three. And so when we started a lot of our work, it was very much like intersection, street corner, parking space, extra small spaces. But when you get more linear on those corridors—a half mile is a really great scale for transformation. We do a lot of projects that are right around that distance. And the traffic evaporation, the increase in cycling, the safety gains—it becomes pretty real pretty fast once those pilot projects are in the ground.

And that's not to say they don't get watered down or reversed after the fact. We've got plenty of war stories where the data, the science is showing you this is a home run. But you could have a changing city council as happens, right? And the politics could flip or people might run against the project and a number of voters decide that, you know what, let's get this project out and we'll vote for representatives who are saying that they'll do that. And you still get a lot of that happening. So it's not a perfect methodology in the sense that—I always tell people it goes both ways, easy in and easy out to a degree. You're not getting a lot of those projects happening necessarily because they're a bit of a—they're technically fairly straightforward, but they require a little bit more altering of the roadway, right? There's some signal issues you have to think about. Removing striping, adding striping, how you do that effectively—do you grind it out? Do you cover it up with black paint or tape or gray paint or tape?

There's these steps like to make that kind of project a little bit more complex than something like an intersection-based project. And so I think that's why some cities don't take them on because even though they know it's not expensive like a permanent project, there's also not a lot of slush money around to allow that kind of project to happen at that scale. So, you know, yeah.

Avi Stopper (27:41)

It's a dynamic environment for sure. There are political considerations, there are practical considerations. I'm curious to hear—where this is 2025, 2026, when we're having this conversation, it's 10 years since you wrote the book, it's more than 15 years since Times Square had the treatment that we just discussed. Setting aside those political—it's hard to control for those variables to be fair—but setting aside for a moment the political considerations and some of the practical challenges. I'm just curious to hear your take on why this set of ideas has not been broadly adopted and why it just is not the status quo, the expectation on every project.

And just to highlight a couple of the benefits—what we have just described is a scenario in which you can build alignment and political consensus across a large swath of people if indeed the outcomes are what we project them to be. So why do you find—and I think that this is, we're not really talking about this specific to bike infrastructure, which is where I'm most interested in this application, but broadly speaking—I'm curious if you think there are significant cultural challenges, organizational change management types of processes. Why is it that every department of transportation has not felt completely unbridled by this toolkit? Why do they not feel like this is the way for them to create the vision of the future that they see? And it's not like we're absent proof points. Literally Times Square was redesigned this way.

Mike Lydon (29:17)

Yeah, that's a great question. I don't think I have all the answers to that one for sure. But I think it's a number of things. Before I get into those, I'll just share—it is night and day for us where we were 10 years ago when we were writing the book. I think the take-up rate of tactical urbanism or quick-build projects, however you want to call them, is incredible across the industry. You know, the federal Safe Streets and Roads for All grant program, $5 billion of which 60% has to go into planning—within those planning dollars, you can do demonstration and quick-build projects. They funded it, right? Like they funded it at a massive scale. We're seeing lots of communities doing that. So I think it is changing, but it is slow, right? You would think that there's enough of these examples that there'd be a lot still more of it happening at scale.

I think there's a couple things. One is when you do one, it takes a lot of energy, takes a lot of capacity. There's sort of like a burnout risk to it at the municipal level, I think, where you get these great people who are passionate about all the work and they go through one of these and they've dropped everything for six months and they have all these other demands on their time and the resources of the city, and it's hard for them to imagine getting back on the treadmill even if they've had like a massive success. And so that's why I don't think you've seen in some ways a lot of the one-offs become two, three, four, and five-offs. Again, it is happening—it's happening in places—but usually when there's a higher capacity staff with more people and more resources to keep replicating it. So in the smaller communities, it's challenging.

There's details like union contracts to deal with. So for example, we work in a city often and been doing tactical projects there for years where just until this past year, their public works staff were not allowed to technically bolt anything into the ground. So every project we did, we had to epoxy any of these vertical elements. And so the first snowplow that comes by or the first car that hits it at any speed—gone, right? And it created like a maintenance headache. So while they kept at it to their credit, there was this one issue that they couldn't get solved. It took years to solve it. And now they finally can bolt things in.

There's all these factors. And it's different in every single city—look what the factors are. And finally, to achieve the vision, you have to have the vision. And generationally, I'm seeing this turnover where like a lot of my clients now are like my age, even younger, you know, in their 30s and 40s. And they kind of grew up on Streetfilms. So they came into this with an orientation that was very different than transportation planners or engineers, planners from who are now entering their retirement years. So that leadership turnover is actually helping a lot, but that's taken a generation of people who said yes or no to greenlight a lot of these projects and these approaches—for them to sunset their career and have new people, new ideas, and new approaches come in and take leadership reins. So that is—and that's happening, but again, that's a city by city, department by department, position by position evolution that takes time.

Avi Stopper (32:53)

One of the things that I'm really curious about is the way that you talk about DIY projects. There are these governmental projects and then there are the DIY projects. And I'm curious to hear what advice you have for folks who are concerned about the risks and the legality of changing the public right-of-way. And just as a case in point, I vividly remember a bike ride I went on with the Department of Transportation Infrastructure Executive Director, and he admonished me very, very explicitly: do not do the things that you are saying you're going to do. So what's your advice to people who are thinking about putting up some cones near a school where they're a crossing guard or maybe changing the geometry of the intersection near their house where there's a lot of cut-through traffic?

Mike Lydon (33:46)

Yeah, there are very clear risks to that. I mean, I think the biggest risk and outcome that I've seen is, you know, there's been a few folks who've been arrested for—typically it's crosswalks. That's the thing that, the most basic of thing gets to be the most, you know, risky for activists. And so you have to be aware that that could be the outcome. That said, I think it's pretty rare that that's the outcome.

And so I think one of the things you should be doing is making sure you've exhausted a lot of the other options—showing up to the meetings if you have the time, definitely organizing your neighbors or immediate constituents around where you might be seeking to make a change. Documenting that, like, "Hey, I sent four emails to my counselor, called the DOT nine times, sent you guys videos of this child almost being hit on their way to school." Whatever it is, be able to document all of that before you do the overnight guerrilla activity, let's say, is really important. Because then there's a paper trail, then there's a history of this, there's a justification that plays out in the media with that storyline.

And I think if you can get people organized around at least that concept of wanting to see the change happen, then you've got people in your community that are organized, and that's powerful. That then can filter up to city councilors and whatnot and start to blunt some of the knee-jerk reactions from legal departments.

Avi Stopper (35:08)

How about this one? Just try this on for size. I've spent five years trying to get the city of Denver to let me put eight traffic cones at one residential intersection for two hours. All of the major mayoral candidates supported this in their campaigns, as did a number of folks on city council, and it has still not happened. And obviously one could go out and place said cones at an intersection. I have been—my advocacy has really been oriented around trying to help the city develop this muscle, right? And the belief, the self-belief that this is something that they can do and the conviction that this is indeed a hugely beneficial tool in the toolkit that could transform everything. And so my theory has been, and this is getting back to big versus small, this is the most ridiculously absurdly small thing one would think. And yet it has been—I haven't been able to get it done.

Mike Lydon (36:17)

Yeah, it's so frustrating. We've worked with a number of communities where they've actually put in policy and process to allow citizens to do the work, at least to test these ideas. And that's one of my biggest things I talk about in any lecture or presentation format, even like this, is there's this us versus them mentality of like city and citizen and the leaders in the cities and the agencies, the city councils, the mayors, et cetera, who understand it's "we" that can get this stuff done. Like how do we tap the energy and direct the energy and the creativity and passion of our citizens to do what is inherently in all of our policies, all of our plans we talk about on the campaign trail—safer streets.

There's this untapped resource of passion that yes can be exhausted with volunteerism and whatnot over time, but I think that's also a resource that can replenish itself where if you allow people to go out and do these basic, basic things that aren't technically challenging—it is not technically difficult to measure out and paint a crosswalk. Any eighth grader can do that on paper, right? It's just allowing it to happen. And so there are cities who've done some of that work where they just said, "Fine, just go do it yourself and we'll monitor it," right? "And let us know how it goes."

Or I think cities should be creating whole resource kits for communities and like, "Sure you have to tell the city, look it's this intersection," and they'll take a basic look at it from like a life safety perspective. If it passes the smell test, you know, or whatever, great, go, green light. And then the crosswalk emerges and it's there for the next several years and like check—that one's done. So I think cities could really expand their capacity to expand their imagination to allow people to help that want to help.

Avi Stopper (38:07)

Is there a city that you see as the shining light on this?

Mike Lydon (38:11)

Well, for a long time, I would say Burlington, Vermont, which is a community we worked in that first allowed this to happen, to my knowledge. But it seems to ebb and flow. I did work there for a number of years. I don't stay up on every news headline and deployment of our toolkits and all that. It's not possible. But for years, they were putting these pieces all into place. They sort of realized they were a small city with small staff with a little bit of advocates and a lot of passion, that if they could put in the demonstration activities to allow some of the citizens and advocates to kind of bring the political will to the table, it helps city staff.

So there's a demonstration project policy and then we worked on their quick-build program which then can take more like interim designs or pilots forward where like citizen skill stops. That's where they can use their skills on that instead. And they implemented a number of projects that way. They were in this bike and ped master plan we worked on, right? And those were all setups for more capital investments. It's a bunch of road diets that we put in the plan all done with just striping and whatnot. You can see that arc and that trajectory.

But again, department heads leave, city councils change, mayors change, the executive director and the staff at the local advocacy group change, and the focus changed. And so to keep something like that moving for a decade-plus is really challenging work for everybody, right? That's just the ebb and flow. So some things rise up for a few years, some things rise down. It can be tricky, but I'd say overall—answer your question now—it's like Jersey City has been one of the best at this, and nothing is written down. There is no policy or guidance. It's been internalized. It is practice. If you want to go create a bike lane for a day, it happens. It's an amazing, amazing just set of circumstances that came about. And it's where I'd point people to now.

Avi Stopper (40:18)

One of the things that I observe often in the right-of-way, and I'm curious to see if you think it—if you see it this way—is people encounter construction when they're driving every day. And I see construction basically as a form of tactical urbanism. And one of the things in my own work that I have tried to do is reframe construction as temporary conditions, as a demonstration project. Right now they're building a BRT system on the main US highway through the center of Denver—Colfax Avenue. And what is normally a four-lane road, high speed, high injury network certainly, is now a two-lane road and just dramatically more chill, radically more chill even. Do you think about, and do you know of any discussion about trying to normalize tactical urbanism by likening it to construction and saying, you know, "City, you which feel that tactical urbanism is so outside of your sphere of wherewithal, you're actually doing this every single day all over the city streets"?

Mike Lydon (41:29)

Yeah, it's an amazing, amazing point. Part of the language of our materials, the reason we went so neon and cone-heavy in those early days was because it read like construction projects. So therefore, someone must be working on this who's allowed to work on this, you know? Right? Like, there was a real reason for that.

Avi Stopper (41:49)

You just claim the authority and then everyone goes along with it, right?

Mike Lydon (41:56)

I mean, Jason Roberts has the best quote on this ever from the Better Block founder. He said, "Just put on a yellow vest and you can do anything." Right? But no, I think it's—what's the missing piece of this is no one's actually paying attention and doing the evaluation on that four-to-two-lane conversion. The traffic has already evaporated, right? To a degree. Like people have found other ways to get around at other times, other modes. Like Denver has not come to a standstill, right? I'm assuming on this project. So there's so much—like there's a lesson in that.

But I think on the flip side, business owners, residents on those corridors—during that construction, it's loud, noisy, hard to get to my property, whatever it may be. There's real constraints and challenges to that kind of stuff, but particularly when you're talking about a linear big thing like a BRT versus a couple intersections or a quarter mile of street. I always felt like we should be doing a lot more analysis, and cities should be doing a lot more analysis of these conditions, and having plan B on the shelf ready to go so that they could say, "Actually, we're not going to put it back. We're not putting it back to four lanes. We're going to keep it like this in perpetuity because it seems to be working."

There's not enough of that sort of nimbleness, I think, built into the run-of-the-mill construction projects, because what they're building is something that has been conceived of probably five, 10, 15 years ago. And that's part of the challenge too, is that sort of inertia and the lengthy timelines to get things constructed mean that conditions can change and you wind up—like, go back to Burlington, this is an amazing example. They had basically a highway that was supposed to come through South Burlington, like a spur off of Interstate 89, if I remember correctly. And residents fought it and fought it and fought it and fought it and there's this big pot of federal money. And they fought it—in fact, there's a public art installation off of this like, I think it's an off-ramp up there that is—it's 40 feet high or not. You should look this up, but it's a bunch of file cabinets and it's like an ode to the amount of bureaucracy and paperwork filed to fight this project.

But when I was doing a lot of work there, they were still having to get some parts of this project built. And this is like 20 years later. The city no longer wants it. Mayor's against it, council's against it, residents and neighborhood are against it. And yet they're just like, "Well, we have to do it, some component of it." So even when you have all those things aligned, sometimes you have these processes and inertia and federal kind of initiatives that are very difficult to stop. That's a little bit of an aside, but...

Avi Stopper (44:46)

I want to talk a little bit about community engagement, which is such an important part of any planning and design process. And of course, there's the caricature, which is actually fairly accurate, of the way that conventional public meetings go, which is that you have a tiny fraction of supporters, a tiny fraction of opponents. They argue very vociferously about it. And then we say we've done community engagement and some decision has arrived at—perhaps a negotiated settlement, perhaps it's scuttled entirely, or maybe it proceeds as originally conceived.

One of the things that I find to be so powerful about the tactical urbanist approach is that it obviates the need for these community meetings. And planners all the time are lamenting the low turnout that they get. And what I contend, and I'm curious to hear your take on this, is that tactical urbanism is the way to get 100% community engagement. 100% is slight hyperbole, right? But basically, if you put something like this in the right-of-way where people experience it, I think of it as experiential community engagement. Because if you put it in the right-of-way, 100% of people for whom that change is relevant are going to experience it, barring out-of-town travel and they just didn't happen to go there that particular day.

And so I'm curious to hear your take on the community engagement process, which often just deteriorates into a lot of speculative verbal sparring as opposed to this, like, "Here's what it looks like." And one of the things that I find so powerful and important about that is that the community engagement process as it stands asks people to do something for which the human cognitive abilities are not well suited, which is to imagine some future state. And of course, we reflexively push back on in many cases on some imagined future state. It is very, very difficult and almost impractical to ask people to participate in this exercise where you go up and you put stickers on a wall and it's a bunch of pictures of what different installations might look like and you're like, "I like this one. I don't like this one."

Whereas with Shared Streets in Denver, for example, it's just like, there's the thing. Go out and experience it and tell us based on lived experience. We're not cutting out communication. Rather, the communication is built on actual experience that people have rather than this perceived boogeyman scenario that everything is going to fall apart when this thing is installed. Or to be fair and to be intellectually honest, that it's going to perform—I think that those who support these types of projects often are put in a place where we reflexively have to support them, even if there is no empirical proof that they are indeed going to produce that desired set of outcomes.

And I think that that ultimately really has hamstrung a lot of bike infrastructure—is that there is a set of assumptions that a certain treatment is going to work. And then we support it whole hog because we know that if we don't, if we call it into question, it's going to get cut. And so we end up having feeling obligated to support it and it is far from optimized. And I think of the incremental approach as being about optimization and improvement. I'm curious to hear your—that was a little bit of a harangue, but you know—this take on the current approach to community engagement and how tactical urbanism can really break through the morass.

Mike Lydon (48:28)

Yeah, you articulated it beautifully. I mean, that's kind of the whole point, is that 100% engagement idea. We also can obviate need for study. "Well, you can't go and do the temporary, you know, interim six-month road diet test because we need to study it first." No, the project is the study. We have to tell that to engineers over and over and over. Don't waste our time, don't waste your time, don't waste taxpayer money. The project will tell us what works and what doesn't. That's the study. And that is heard more now I think than it used to be, which is good.

But I'll give you an example of what the dynamics you just described, specific to biking. I'll hold up my partner Tony, who's really, really good at this work of the engagement, getting people into a room and then understanding what is it that project design needs to be? Because we try to be as intellectually honest as possible. We have to pursue projects largely through doing proposals that are vetted and written long before we had the input into them. And because this work is still kind of niche, there's a lot of people writing scopes of work who've never done this work. And so there's this mismatch all the time. And once we get engaged, we have to be honest with our clients and say, "What you think this project is may not be where we end up. Let's engage people. Let's go door to door. Let's walk the street with neighbors. Let's have meetings. Yes, we still do meetings." And try to vet this out a little bit so that we can design something that's responsive to the need and the desire of the community at large.

And so one example from Tony's work in Asheville, North Carolina was a project that was funded by a donor through Asheville on Bikes, a great local advocacy organization. And given the advocacy organization's focus and given the funder's desires, the whole thing is like, "We're going to go build a protected bike lane on Coxe Avenue that's going to be reconstructed in five years' time. There's dollars already allocated for it. Let's prove that a bike lane is valuable."

And so once the engagement happened, Tony kind of redirected the ship and said, "People are definitely in favor of safe infrastructure for cycling, but they don't just want a street with green bike lanes. They want something more." More aesthetically, functionally, "We've got these narrow, decrepit sidewalks. How do we privilege people who are walking and not just cycling?"

So long story short, the project became eight feet of space basically on either side of the road—maybe it was seven or eight feet—that just was painted a solid tan and it was allowed that you could cycle there. But it didn't look like the bike lane. And so the parking got squeezed in, the travel lanes got much narrower. We did this big-ass mural treatment on this block that had just been redeveloped with a whole bunch of new apartments. It was kind of the centerpiece that was designed by a local artist. And long story short, I think that played really well with a lot of people. And it was definitely a project that was not without controversy. It was the first time anything—it was like six blocks long or whatever it was, was a big project. And it's right on the edge of their downtown.

And you know, fast forward, and not every element that we tested made it into the final design, but that work then was leveraged for, I think it's a $15 million project with most of that funding coming from the state to redesign that street. It's going to have bike lanes, but it's also going to have that block where the mural was. It's also going to have this plaza that's level with a sidewalk that could be opened and closed for events. And that was something that very much we tested and brought to the table that the community wanted. We did that in paint, and now it's going to be hardened with concrete and landscaping, et cetera.

So you don't always get what you ultimately test initially, but a lot of these ideas and concepts get vetted and brought through, and they live a final life or a much longer life once the capital infrastructure can be realized. And so again, that engagement piece was so vital at the beginning. If we had just put in green bike lanes, I don't know if they would have gotten the political will necessarily. Maybe they would have, but maybe not, to actually continue to get that thing moving through the process of getting the funding that they need to actually be able to afford to reconstruct the street.

Avi Stopper (53:05)

One last question before we wrap it up, and I would be remiss not to mention or reference your inclusion of a book that is very near and dear to me in "Tactical Urbanism," and I'm referring to "The Lean Startup." Early in my startup career, I was building products that I used to think of it as the big reveal basically. We would spend a lot of time, a lot of money, we would go big, right? The word "big" is everywhere in this. We would go big. And then we would six months, eight months, 12 months later, pull back the black velvet blanket that was covering what we had just developed. And we're like, "Okay, here it is, the product."

And I had this view of the entrepreneur, of the innovator in this probably mythical Steve Jobs kind of view, which is that you're supposed to have a crystal ball. You're supposed to be able to envision the future and then relentlessly, mercilessly, ruthlessly prosecute your agenda. And in the midst of that and in the midst of having a series of products that were just not working in the way that I wanted to, I discovered this blog called Startup Lessons Learned, and Startup Lessons Learned evolved into a book called "The Lean Startup," which has really become foundational for me in the way that I think about building things. And I love that there's a vein of that running through "Tactical Urbanism." I'm curious just to hear how you encountered that. And it feels to me like it's a really interesting cross-pollination of business and startups and entrepreneurship and innovation in a for-profit context and encountering a different type of innovation, but innovation nonetheless.

Mike Lydon (54:56)

Yeah, you know, I can't remember exactly where I came across that book, but I know exactly where it is on my shelf at home. And I only read it once but it was super powerful because what I do often is I look for other fields that can explain to me better my own, right? And that book was exactly that. Like, where can I find a quote or a description or an idea or something that completely maps onto urban planning and design, but was not sourced from the industry? That gives me like a broader understanding of what is it we're doing here. And that book was certainly it with the minimal viable product—like just the framing of that. When I read that, I was like, that's what this is. That's what we're doing. And it was a way to sort of validate the concept early on.

If you had to think about that time, the notion of startups and where the internet was at that time, still pretty early days compared to where things are now—the billions it has created and the, you know, it's just a very different world economically, politically, socially, I think around technology and around this startup idea. But that book was pure. It was really about, you know, A/B testing, MVPs, just like shedding the things that don't work—shed, shed, shed, shed. And I think what I've continued to think about that book is it's a mindset and a framework for very dynamic situations that we all live in, and that's exactly what a city is. It's never still, it's dynamic, it's always changing.

So you've got to constantly be A/B testing to figure out what's working in the moment and build it, keep going, and then you might have to move on and discard it later. But that's what cities are in the long arc of history—is just constant evolution. And that's a book that really framed the idea for me for the first time that it's relevant to urban planning.

Avi Stopper (56:47)

Mike, thanks so much. This has been a real pleasure.

Mike Lydon (56:50)

You too, Avi. Thanks for having me.

Randy Neufeld: A Founding Father of Bike Advocacy

In this kickoff episode of Bike Networks Now, host Avi Stopper chats with Randy Neufeld, one of the founding fathers of bike advocacy in America and former executive director of the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation. Randy brings his trademark energy and unique perspective on why bike transportation remains impractical for most Americans.

We talk about the cultural and practical barriers that prevent cycling from going mainstream, from the simple problem of bike locks to the complex challenge of creating comfort in a car-dominated world.

Randy shares the inside story of the Green Lane Project, which helped institutionalize protected bike lanes across American cities, and discusses his current work developing "Good For Us"—an initiative to create alternative communities for people seeking to live more active lives.

And we discuss conventional planning approaches and applying startup-style innovation and the scientific method to building bike infrastructure.

This episode sets the stage for exploring the central question in these conversations: how can cities make bike transportation a practical reality for people of all ages and abilities?

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Transcript

Avi Stopper (00:01)

Hey everyone, welcome to Bike Networks Now. I'm Avi Stopper, the founder of Bike Streets. Through a series of conversations with leaders in bike transportation, we're trying to answer a question: Why is bike transportation still not possible for most people in American cities? And how can we make it a reality?

Despite voter support and billions of dollars of investment, there's no city in America where biking is truly a practical reality for people of all ages and abilities. Why is that? And how can we fix it so anyone can ride to the places they want to go today? These aren't just freewheeling conversations. We're in search of an answer. And our best understanding of that answer is the topic of a book we're writing on how cities can make bike transportation possible today.

Avi Stopper (00:55)

I want to start this series of conversations with Randy Neufeld, who I consider to be one of the founding fathers of bike advocacy in America. In 1987, Randy became the first executive director of the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation. At that time, if I'm not mistaken, professional bike advocacy wasn't really a thing, and certainly I was just a kid ripping around Albuquerque on a BMX bike.

Randy subsequently led community investment with SRAM, the bicycle components manufacturer. And in that role, he led the distribution of bike advocacy grants. Investments included early funding of things like Safe Routes to School and the Green Lane Project. Randy has an expansive view of bike advocacy and an enormous amount of energy and enthusiasm for making healthy transportation possible. Randy and I don't always agree on everything, which we both agree is an important way to advance our work and understanding of the problems and potential solutions. Randy, thanks for joining me. How did I do with that preamble?

Randy Neufeld (02:08)

You did great. It's always a delight to talk to you. I really enjoy our discussions and I think today will be no exception.

Avi Stopper (02:16)

Likewise. I think as I was preparing for this, one of the things I really find enjoyable about our conversation is your insistence on using the term "human muscle." You say it with such zeal. What is it about that framing that resonates so much with you?

Randy Neufeld (02:35)

Well, I've actually been thinking about that framing some more, and maybe a good way to start to talk about the framing is my advocacy for a new verb. A new verb, and that verb is one we currently use as an adjective: "active." And I like it as a verb.

Avi Stopper (02:50)

A new verb.

Randy Neufeld (03:02)

Juxtaposed to "drive." So you "active" somewhere as opposed to "drive" somewhere. So you could say, "See Spot run, active Spot active." And then also the participle form is one that I've started to use, which is "activating." As really a shorthand—I get kind of tired of saying "walking and biking" a million times. I really want to include other forms of human muscle-powered mobility like skating, skateboarding, running, all those sorts of things. You could even say kayaking and things like that.

Avi Stopper (03:55)

What is it about the use of human muscle that appeals to you so much? Why is that so compelling to you?

Randy Neufeld (04:02)

It's about the use of our bodies in modern society. And you could say that the result of the Industrial Revolution is that we're just useless blobs. I've been looking at expanding it just beyond human muscle, but it's really our joints and our muscles and our nervous system and our circulatory system and our lungs and our brain—all of those things doing things.

And it turns out that us moving, physical activity, is super important, not just to our physical health, but also to our mental health and our wellbeing. When we start to move, we initiate this biochemical cascade of endorphins and other things that help us feel good about ourselves. I like to sometimes talk about endocannabinoids. We all know cannabinoids—they're legal in most states now. Endocannabinoids have been legal in all states forever and they always will be legal because we make them in our brains.

Avi Stopper (05:38)

I did not think that this was going to turn in the direction of cannabis, but you never know in a conversation with you.

Randy Neufeld (05:42)

Cannabis, but the reason we have cannabinoid receptors in our brain—it's a kind of lucky thing that the hemp plant stumbled into. But we have these cannabinoid receptors, and exercise and physical activity—basically, after 20 minutes of exerting yourself, you start putting these things out and it makes you feel good. It's your body's way of encouraging you to continue to hunt and gather, even though it's difficult and maybe taxing to do.

And so what happens is in this modern society where our bodies become useless, we become sedentary, we look at screens, and we are denying ourselves these physical biochemical experiences that are critical to our wellbeing, our social relationships. There's an author of a book that I like a lot called "The Joy of Movement," and she talks about how these endocannabinoids and physical activity essentially brings long-term joy to physical activity and to social relationships. And so it's really interesting how important it is to be active in daily mobility, not just for your own health, but for the quality of your relationships and really the cohesiveness of society.

Avi Stopper (07:40)

It's a great place to start this whole series of conversations with that as an umbrella, because all too often we get way deep into wonkish things like "should there be a diverter" or "what should the form factor be of this particular bike facility?" And it's important to zoom out and remind ourselves why we're doing this. And ultimately, it's about human vitality and thriving.

Randy Neufeld (08:05)

Yeah. And one of the simple ways to think about it is that when we're myopic about access as being the only goal of mobility and transportation, we forget that moving—that active mobility—is not just a means of mobility, but it is actually a goal of mobility. And it's not just A-to-B trips that are important, but A-to-A trips that make sense and are valuable as well.

Avi Stopper (08:46)

All right, so you've been studying this and observing this for decades. And I know from our conversations previously that your understanding of the landscape has evolved. I'm curious: what do you think are the main impediments, the main reason that, to use your term, "activating" isn't the status quo, is not the standard? It's so good for us. It produces such good feelings when we do it. People say that they want to do it. Why is this not more of a status quo?

Randy Neufeld (09:17)

I think it is not more of the status quo because driving is the status quo. So we're totally engulfed in a routine, a habit that has all the solutions, all the cultural and social aspects of daily activity sort of embedded in driving culture, the driving paradigm. And so when you plunk down a bikeway, even a complete network of bikeways in this overall driving paradigm, it's very difficult for people to utilize it because they're so used to doing other things—driving—and they're so used to all of their social influences and relationships assuming that you're going to be driving.

Avi Stopper (10:26)

One of the elements that I would consider part of the orthodoxy of how people think about bike infrastructure is an "if you build it, they will come" mentality. And I am, to say the least, circumspect about that because I know that when you build products, irrespective of what kind of product you're building, it is very difficult to get people to know about the product and to use the product. So is that your take as well? Do you feel like the "if you build it, they will come" mentality or view of bike infrastructure is mistaken, incomplete, inadequate?

Randy Neufeld (11:02)

I would say it's incomplete. So if you don't build it, they won't come. But if you do build it, they won't necessarily come unless some other things are in place. And those things are what I call the human empowerment pieces. So it's knowing how to use the system, feeling comfortable in the system, solving the practical issues that are involved.

Avi Stopper (11:39)

What would you say some of those elements are? Like, for example, feeling comfortable in the system. What does that mean to you?

Randy Neufeld (11:47)

Feeling comfortable in the system would be not just that you don't think you might die, but that your stress levels are low to the point where you can focus on things other than not dying. So you can focus on nature, you can focus on the people that you're traveling with, you can focus on the environment that's around you, and you can focus somewhat on the experience that you're having.

Avi Stopper (12:27)

Is that ultimately an infrastructure problem? For example, if the infrastructure is not comfortable, it doesn't meet that threshold?

Randy Neufeld (12:38)

It's an infrastructure issue, but it's not black and white. There are times in the last week where I have been comfortable with the current infrastructure in Chicago. I have had a good experience. In some cases, I was going somewhere and I was comfortable for part of the trip and not comfortable for other parts of the trip. So there are people who really center their lives around active mobility and are able to utilize the current infrastructure. There are people who don't see the current infrastructure as being something that they could identify with or utilize at all.

And so it's not black and white, as in there's a perfect network that we could build and then everyone's going to be comfortable. But how can we build the most comfort into the network that we've got now as fast as possible? And then how can we create the cultural and community elements that allow what we've got to be more comfortable for more people?

Avi Stopper (14:03)

Let's talk a little bit about those cultural and community outreach types of things. What do you see as being essential and elemental to that? And I'm thinking specifically about the fact that there are cultural things that make this type of behavior that we are describing abnormal. Let's just face it.

The status quo, which is, as you said, when you need to go somewhere, you hop in a car and you drive there, is just so assumed that doing anything else is abnormal. What do you think is the way to start to shift that culture? Is it to see other people doing this and for it to look really enjoyable, pleasant and fun? Is it that you're sitting in your car, stuck in traffic, and you see all these people riding past you who are not only moving faster through a city, they also look like they're enjoying it and deriving some benefit from it? What do you think are the cultural elements that start to shift this when it really is—I mean, those of us who are steeped in this, we hop on our bikes and we ride somewhere and we think it's the most normal thing in the world, right? But the people around us think we're crazy.

Randy Neufeld (15:05)

Yeah, I think that's a very important question. And my answer is not that we need to think about this individualistically, but that whole issue of feeling abnormal, being abnormal—I think the solution is to create the new normal.

So what we've got is we've got a driving paradigm in which those of us who are trying to live active lives feel out of place. We need to create a new place, a new culture, a new community where we feel at home. This is our home team. We identify with them and then we help each other solve the practical problems of activating in a driving world.

Avi Stopper (16:06)

It strikes me there's this adoption idea in consumer products called "crossing the chasm," where you have a set of folks who are the early adopters and then the big difficulty is to, quote-unquote, cross the chasm and get to the mass market. Do you think that it is the normalization of this within a group of early adopters—and obviously those of us who are those early adopters have people in our orbit who are observing us, who occasionally ride with us—and that that is the way to kind of jump the track and get to those other folks? Which is to say we have a vibrant, robust group of folks in this sort of inner circle, the early adoption circle. And then as more and more people become part of that, then we start to be able to reach out to folks who are really in that kind of mythical "interested but concerned" category, right? We always talk about 60% of people say they want to ride their bikes more. Do they, or is that just a stated belief that isn't really substantiated by action?

Randy Neufeld (17:11)

We definitely need to gather the early adopters. One of the things about the crossing the chasm theory is that the reason that there's a chasm is because the mainstream needs for adoption are different than what the early adopters need for adoption. And a lot of the early adopters are people who like to be different, who like to innovate, who enjoy that kind of status. And the mainstream is more—they want reliability and normalcy and those kinds of things.

So I think my simple thing, and maybe this is kind of what we're trying to do with Good For Us, which is the organization that I'm trying to develop that we're still really trying to figure out, is: how do we gather those early adopters, but understand the needs of the mainstream and the interests of the mainstream so that the early adopters can meet their needs and attract the mainstream as well?

Avi Stopper (18:27)

As you're saying that, I'm thinking about myself in my early 20s, riding around Chicago downtown without any bike infrastructure. And I'm curious if you feel like for those folks who are in this almost countercultural movement, there is one thing which is just to be different. And I'd have to kind of search my soul a little bit to think about whether that's why I was doing it. But for folks more in the mainstream, is it ultimately that comfort thing and about a connected, high-comfort infrastructure environment?

Randy Neufeld (19:01)

Even the bold and fearless need some level of comfort in their lives. So it is a mix of wanting to feel comfortable, but there's also some things that are just practical questions. It's not really about comfort and safety. It's really about how do you live this different kind of life?

There's a saying I've heard: "Everybody's got a bike, but nobody's got a lock." And people just don't know how to take their bikes somewhere, secure it, how to carry their groceries home, how to ride with children, how to ride with other people, how to navigate and find the best and most comfortable routes, how to maintain their bike, how to have fenders so that they don't get crap on their clothes when the ground is wet, how to have lights so they can ride at night. There's this whole set of practical questions.

And it's important to remember that the car solves all of those immediately as soon as you buy it. You've got a trunk, you've got a key, you've got seats for other people. All those practical problems are essentially solved in the design of the car. And on the bicycle side, our product is much more primitive and not as well developed. As simple as it is, and as long as it's been around, it's still very primitive. Our industry is about performance and not about reliability and utility. And so there's all kinds of issues that are harder practical issues in addition to that safety and comfort.

Avi Stopper (21:12)

That's a great point. And it makes me think about the number of conversations that I've had with folks who haven't ridden their bike in a while. Why? Because they have a flat tire and it's in the garage. So there are—which is not to say cars can't get flat tires, but there is certainly a lot more infrastructure, a lot more infrastructure that is readily available. You call AAA and they come and they fix your car for you.

So I wanted to ask you because you have, probably more than anyone that I know at least, a truly longitudinal view of the narrative arc of bike advocacy in this country. And I'm curious to get your take on where you think we are at this particular moment. Are we making progress? Are we moving in the wrong direction in some cases? I would imagine that it's not a black or white type of situation, but I'm curious to hear—I know you're generally an optimist, if not a pragmatist as well—but I'm curious to hear where you see us being in this story of trying to make active transportation possible in America.

Randy Neufeld (22:26)

Let me give you a 15-minute answer or less. And I'm delighted to answer that question, but I'd like a little bit of your take on that question as well. We have gone from having essentially no specific bicycle infrastructure—bike lanes or parking—to trying some out, demonstrating that it can happen, really just trying to put anything in anywhere we could without really thinking that much about what would be the best, because the best wasn't possible. It was either something or nothing. And so we kind of put some stuff in.

And then a couple of things happened. One is we started to think about what might be better and eventually looked at what I call protected infrastructure—sort of all ages and abilities infrastructure. So who are we building things for?

Avi Stopper (23:40)

If I could just interrupt, could you give us some timestamps on some of these moments in the process?

Randy Neufeld (23:48)

So the timestamps—the first bike lanes in America were in the '70s.

Avi Stopper (23:48)

Decade timestamps might be adequate.

Avi Stopper (23:55)

Davis maybe?

Randy Neufeld (24:02)

Davis, yes, in Davis and Chicago. And so I know Chicago the best. Chicago did an experimental bike lane. It was a failure in 1972. Everything was ripped out in 1973. That time frame is interesting because the Dutch did their bike lane experiments in Delft in 1978. So we had a six-year head start on the Dutch, but obviously did not follow through in the same kind of ways. I think that comparison is really important, but we did some early bike lane stuff. There was a bike boom in like '73, and as soon as that bike boom was gone, those early experiments were gone.

There was a big movement called vehicular cycling, which maybe still exists some to this day, which is that bicyclists fare best when they act and are treated as drivers. "We don't need no stinking infrastructure" and "there needs to be a system." And it really wasn't until late '90s, early 2000s when people just got tired of that and scared of it.

One thing that most people don't talk about when they talk about this cycling infrastructure trajectory in the US is the growth of vehicle miles traveled during this time. And so when I was—50 years ago, 1975—I was 16 years old in Arizona. There was one-third of the amount of traffic on US roads. One-third. So you could take two out of every three cars gone. So I could ride my bike in Phoenix without bike lanes, but the traffic situation was very different. And I think that as traffic progressed, it really became necessary to have a separate system so that the perfect world was you had a bicycle system, a pedestrian system, and a car system. And where they met and intersected or overlapped, there was an organization to that. That's what the Dutch have. That's in some ways what we're trying to get, and we're still kind of awkward around that.

Avi Stopper (27:04)

I've never thought about it in those terms—that it is three systems that have to work basically in parallel, but they also intersect at various moments, and at those intersections we need to provide order.

Randy Neufeld (27:17)

And the fact that we don't have a complete bike system, or you could say the fact that the bike system and the road system are the same system, and you have these two separate users with different needs, different speeds, different spatial requirements, different abilities, sharing the same space—that's what causes all the animosity between those user groups. Sometimes even within a person when they're sometimes a bicyclist and sometimes a car driver.

I remember talking to someone—a woman who was drawing my blood—and she asked me about what I did and I told her about bike lanes and stuff and she clearly was agitated by the idea of bike lanes. And I described protected bike lanes to her and she immediately said, "I would pay more tax money to get some of those on California Avenue because then I wouldn't have to figure out where those bicyclists are going." She wanted them out of her way. And I think that the idea of a complete system for cyclists is very compelling to everyone. And we don't have one.

And we've been building it fairly rapidly since the late '90s, the early 2000s. And the protected infrastructure started happening in New York City around 2007. And then lots of other cities, some of them organized by the Green Lane Project, really accelerated the rollout of protected infrastructure from 2012 to 2015. And part of that project was figuring out a way that it could become normal, normal kind of practice.

Avi Stopper (29:38)

You were instrumental in the creation of the Green Lane Project. Describe what it was and what some of its successes and failures were.

Randy Neufeld (29:48)

So it was a four-year project. I was at SRAM at the time, SRAM bicycle component manufacturer. I was the director of the SRAM Cycling Fund, which was a $10 million advocacy fund, which we spent over about a six-year period. And the idea with the Green Lane Project was we saw some successes around separated infrastructure. What the Dutch called cycle tracks, what the folks in the planning world also called cycle tracks, because that's basically what the British called bike lanes—cycle tracks. And then the Dutch described their fietspads as cycle tracks, but fietspads weren't bike lanes. Fietspads were protected bike lanes.

And so we launched this project over four years. We had two cohorts of six cities. We did a competitive process, advertised for who was interested, who wanted to try this innovation—and they were already starting to do it. And then there were a number of things that were part of the project. But one of the things the project showed was that when cities did things together and had a little friendly competition and got to know other people, that they were able to innovate and change faster and better than when they were just on their own. And then if issues, backlash would come up, they would fold, but with sort of more of a spotlight on things and peers looking at what they were doing, you had more activity.

So we created a database, we did a bunch of communications and education around protected bike lanes, why you would have separation from traffic, what the reasons for separation were, what kinds of separation, how would you maintain them, how would you grow them? And that growth is a really important question because I know that you talk a lot about complete networks, and complete networks are super important. It's very hard to create a complete network and then plunk it down on a city or region or an area. And so how you grow them, how you prioritize, and then integrate with other transitional infrastructure that's out there as well.

The Green Lane Project was really trying to institutionalize this new tool in the toolbox. It was never saying everything should be a protected bike lane. Neighborhood greenways is another tool in the toolbox. Modal filters is another tool in the toolbox, which is diverters and ways that allow some modes to go through and others not. There's a lot of tools in the toolbox, but it was really NACTO's work—the National Association of City Transportation Officials, which is the progressive cities transportation organization—putting these things forward. One of the things we did was fund the first edition of the NACTO Bikeway Guide, which kind of created a new set of rules and regulation. We had a specific strategy to get federal funding acceptance of the new infrastructure. There was a lot of bureaucratic scheming going on. A lot of it wasn't perfect, but it was certainly a major step forward, taking something that was on the fringe and putting it in the mainstream. Probably one of the main things we did was early on we figured out what to call these things, and "protected bike lanes" was what we came up with.

Avi Stopper (34:41)

I didn't realize there was going to be so much etymology in this conversation, but this is great. So you promised a 15-minute answer to that question—you delivered. But when you initially responded, you were about to answer my question with a question of your own, which was what my take is on it. And I appreciate that, not because I want to hear myself talk, but because part of the reason, the rationale for having these conversations, is that we are trying to develop a theory for how cities can quickly accelerate the transition and transformation of networks to a point where bike transportation is a normal, everyday thing in cities across the country.

I would say that my response to your question to my question—my theory—is that basically cities have, we as advocates have, all of the tools that we need. I think we have a problematic approach to innovation. I think that at its essence, and you've mentioned this earlier in the conversation, what we're dealing with is one of the most fundamental human behaviors at this point in America: how do people go from one place to another? And I think that while we have this incredible toolkit to innovate, I think that our approach to innovation in the public right-of-way, in the public domain, is pretty antiquated, pretty retrograde relative to the way that innovation in startups, for example, is conducted.

And at its essence, what we are trying to do with Bike Streets is design, create, help animate a new path forward that uses the tools that exist already, applies them in an approach that is steeped in the philosophy, the ideas of modern innovation, which I should say is somewhat anachronistic in its own right because modern innovation is actually animated itself by the scientific method. And what I find fascinating in the way that I observe cities undertaking innovation projects is that they're not scientific.

There's plenty of data that's invoked, certainly. There is plenty of process that's invoked, but the way that we are trying to transform one of the most fundamental behaviors strikes me as not very scientific. I'm curious to hear your take on that.

Randy Neufeld (37:24)

Well, I think what's missing from your description, and so maybe I'll follow up with another question and then I'll answer my take on that, is sort of what the mechanism is—what are you actually doing? It's one thing to say you're innovating. It's another thing to say what kind of innovation, what you're actually doing. You could say your goal is leadership, but the real question is: what's the mechanism that you're proposing to use?

Avi Stopper (37:55)

Fair rejoinder. The mechanism that I'm proposing we use is basically the scientific method. And I would contend that we don't currently use the scientific method. We do this incredibly intensive upfront planning process that takes years, tons of time, tons of money, tons of taxpayer money. And three, four, five years later, in some cases, you have the solution.

Randy Neufeld (38:21)

Yeah, so just to be clear for listeners, you're talking about the scientific method. You're talking about trying something, evaluating it, and then trying the next thing or something else based on that evaluation. Is that right?

Avi Stopper (39:00)

Right. So yeah, in this context, first I'm sort of describing the current approach, what I think of as the status quo approach. We're not doing that. Cities spend years and tons of taxpayer money designing these facilities. Then the plan comes out as if we received the tablets from on high. And to be fair to hardworking civil servants, they are running the process that they have been taught.

But the problem is that in a complex innovation environment where you're trying to actually change really fundamental behavior, the ideas that we come up with, even though they may be informed by best practices, are at best hypotheses. And with that level of humility in mind, that this idea that I have for how I might get someone to ride a bike instead of drive a car on a particular trip—that is a really significant leap of faith. And so from a modern innovation standpoint and using the scientific method, that hypothesis is informed by the deep knowledge that planners have, that engineers have. But ultimately we don't know if it's going to work until we get it out into the built environment.

And then this raises the question of how we think about actually testing things. So we create a hypothesis with a scientific method, we test it, we observe it. We observe it quantitatively and qualitatively. This is how modern products are developed—through quantitative evaluation and also through the qualitative discussions that people have with customers. And then we look at what's working and what's not. We say there are no sacred cows in this and we iterate, create our new hypothesis, and we test the next version.

Now this seems like it might be impractical in the built environment because what we're talking about is concrete and really expensive projects, but tactical urbanism has provided—when I say earlier that we have the tools to do this—tactical urbanism has provided us with the toolkit to accomplish this. And look no further than what Janette Sadik-Khan did in New York City with Times Square. They literally redesigned the most complex intersection in America using a bunch of orange barrels, right?

I don't understand—that to me is science. I don't understand, and I'm curious to hear your take, why that has not become the standard operating procedure. We're 20 years out from that Times Square project. Why is it that we still do what in software development and product development is described as a waterfall approach—this incredibly protracted step-by-step planning process that eventually produces the golden solution?

I don't understand, and I see that golden solution failing. So what I don't understand is why what Janette Sadik-Khan, who is widely considered the luminary in this field, why that has not been adopted and embraced broadly. And yes, there are some demonstration projects here and there, but it is a far cry from making the standard procedure to be one in which we use demonstration projects in the scientific method.

I'm curious to hear your take and please push back because I'm trying to fundamentally understand this tension that I observe everywhere.

Randy Neufeld (42:19)

Yeah, no, I think you're right. I think, first of all, your enthusiasm for demonstration is actually taking hold somewhat. There's an organization in Texas called Better Block, which is really sort of one of the main organizations of tactical urbanism. They've been in operation for about a decade or so. And it's mostly around neighborhood street development, not so much bikeway networks or road networks. But People for Bikes did a book on quick builds. So the term that's being used in engineering planning is "quick builds." If you read the NACTO literature, I think it's pretty much what you're describing, which is being able to build things quickly and then be able to adjust, change, and sort of schedule the next quick build based upon what the experience and the evaluation of that facility is. And so...

Avi Stopper (43:44)

Do you see that iteration, that iterative component actually happening? I'm sort of... interesting.

Randy Neufeld (43:49)

It's definitely happening here in Chicago.

Avi Stopper (43:52)

But what I fail to see in the quick build approach—I hear people talk about quick builds—I don't see is the scientific component of a bunch of people out there counting what's going on, observing what's going on. And then taking the stuff out, coming up with a new engineering plan and coming back and fixing it based on both quantitative observation and the qualitative observations that they have from watching people interact with it and hearing from neighbors. Am I missing something? Are you seeing that as...

Randy Neufeld (44:24)

I am seeing that, and I think it's not pervasive, but certainly in the leading NACTO cities, the leading progressive large cities, there's a great deal of that. The one disconnect that I think I would point out and that has to do with exactly how does the status quo work? And if I were a member of the Institute of Transportation Engineers and I was a totally car-oriented person, I would cuss and scream about that the scientific method was not being used adequately in the transportation process. And everything you're talking about in terms of innovation and experimentation and change in the bike process—I want to see that in the highway design process. I want to see that in these other processes.

But it is difficult to insert it because the way that the transportation system evolves is very definitely this process. And this process has not served us well for many reasons. And it's not just bikes, but sort of the whole development of transportation. And that is why one of the most brilliant strategies that we've had since the beginning is a concept that started in 2000 that was originally called "routine accommodation" and eventually became "complete streets." And the idea of complete streets is that all users are considered in all phases of project design, implementation, evaluation, etc., so that you're going from just one user being considered.

The opportunity for the science that you're talking about is within 5% of projects. Because 95% of the transportation implementation machine is about maintaining and renewing what we've already got—fixing the potholes, restriping the crosswalks, doing all that kind of thing. We are not maintaining our infrastructure properly. The change of that infrastructure, the 5%, is really the opportunity for the science. And the big problem that we have is really not that the bike stuff isn't being done innovatively. It's that the overall process is geared towards the hegemony of the driving culture.

And you build new roads to increase capacity because "the way to make congestion go away is to add new capacity." And that ignores the latent demand. And you never get around to a modal shift or cultural shift. And so I think that's the big problem. I think the idea of innovating and moving quickly is a good one. The trick is to find the place within the process where you can do that. I think you have allies for that idea. They may let you know a little bit more about what their constraints are. It's a little bit different to try things when you're in charge of everything than when it has to go through years of community involvement process and these kinds of things. It's a trickier process, but there's no question that we're currently missing innovation opportunities. I think some of that innovation needs to occur around, let's say, the repaving process. So when repaving happens, are there things that we can do cheaply to make it better?

The one thing about your thoughts is that it is around the issue of bringing this bicycle network that currently is fragmented. What are faster, better, smarter ways of making it happen? Sort of the question before that is really: what's the opportunity for that? Because you describe the older bike planning process, which you kind of put a plan together. And usually there was no implementation phase of that plan. Usually it was just a plan and then you tried to implement it within the normal transportation process. And that has been a failure. And I think we want to look at how can we create these opportunities for doing things when those resources and agency time are scarce.

Avi Stopper (50:52)

I think you're circling around something that I have been thinking increasingly is that at its essence, what we're talking about is an organizational change management process within departments of transportation. And what I will say optimistically is that you referenced, of course, the NACTO standards, even the ideas that vehicular cycling produced, which are essentially that cyclists have a place in the right-of-way, that the right-of-way is a place that cyclists can use, even if the whole approach to cycling there is impractical and clearly empirically not successful—is that there is a precedent, there are precedents for organizational and philosophical changes within departments of transportation, and that's good news. We could go on and on with this and I think we should.

Randy Neufeld (51:46)

We could and we should, yeah, but at another time maybe. Yes.

Avi Stopper (51:51)

But I do want to finish by asking you a little bit about Good For Us. Before we started recording here, you mentioned that you're writing the, quote-unquote, "Good For Us manifesto." What is that all about?

Randy Neufeld (51:55)

As I said earlier, I think that activating—active mobility, all the ways we move our body within the public right-of-way—is super important to people being happy and healthy, to thriving in the modern world. And I'm really looking for ways... I would say that Good For Us is kind of a work in progress, but fundamentally, I want to gather organized people who are interested in activating more and driving less and pull us together in an organized way, help each other to thrive in that space, particularly looking at those human empowerment factors—the things that we can control: knowledge and culture and community, looking at those factors, pull those things together. So we create this alternative home team.

That when we build new infrastructure, people just aren't trying to use that infrastructure within the current driving paradigm. But there's a group of folks that will help them and that they can be part of—they might even identify with. It's really trying to create this alternative paradigm. I don't want to create a new organization in that we have plenty of organizations already, but I'm interested in some kind of union of people and businesses and agencies that operates within the current structures, but addresses that missing mutual aid issue.

Avi Stopper (54:04)

To be continued, Randy. Thank you so much for your time, your insights, and let's talk again soon.