Why Social Interaction Should Influence City Planning, With Dr. Patricia Tice
Dr. Patricia Tice has been an transportation engineer, planner, researcher and self-proclaimed geek for nearly 30 years. She spent the first decade of her career doing hundreds of traffic impact studies. In 2011, she started her own consulting firm and, a few years later, completed a PhD in transportation engineering.
In this episode of The Bottom-Up Revolution, Patricia talks about her research into human behavior, as well as the role of human interaction and LEGO in urban design.
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Tiffany Owens Reed 0:06
Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of the bottom up Revolution podcast. I'm your host, Tiffany Owens Reid. I'm a writer for strong towns, and on this show, I get to talk to ordinary people who are improving their communities in a bottom up, grassroots, organic fashion. As you may know, the transportation conversation at strong towns spans a variety of topics, from safety to financing to design standards. One aspect of the conversation that I think is particularly interesting is human behavior, specifically understanding driver behavior. I think it can be so easy to vilify drivers, especially when they make bad decisions. But it takes a different kind of attitude to be curious about them, about the decisions they make, and what it takes to make them make different and hopefully safer decisions. That is something our guest today specializes in, among many other things, and I'm excited to bring her insights to you today. Dr Patricia Tyus has been an transportation engineer, planner, researcher and self proclaimed geek. I did not put that in the bio. She typed the bio mostly for nearly 30 years. She spent the first decade of her career doing hundreds of traffic impact studies. In 2011 she started her own consulting firm, and a few years later, completed a PhD in transportation engineering. We will talk about what she discovered from her research about human behavior, both inside and outside of a car. It's very interesting to say the least. Since earning her PhD in 2021 she has advocated for a walkable, livable world. She maintains her weekly blog on substack called profound insights. And to help you understand, the title of this, she says the best insights are not created but found by professionals who take the time to look for them. Patricia, welcome to the bottom up Revolution podcast.
Patricia Tice 1:44
Thank you.
Tiffany Owens Reed 1:46
We've crossed paths several times at different conferences, so I am really glad that I finally get to bring you on the show. I know that there's so much to talk about, and I have total confidence that this is just gonna be very profound for our audience. Sure you have many insights to share, but let's start off talking a little bit about your story. Tell us a bit about your background in transportation engineering. The thing I want to know most is what attracted you to that line of work in the first place?
Patricia Tice 2:15
Well, it was kind of by accident. 30 years ago, I was working on a PhD in structural engineering, working with historic structures, and I absolutely loved that work. But you ever get the feeling that you're climbing up a ladder as fast as you can, and the ladder is leaning on the wrong building, you get very close to the top and you realize that the view isn't quite right, and you're like, Oh, now what? I was very fortunate at the end of that time that I got the chance to go do an Eno transportation policy fellowship. Basically, they took graduate students who were in transportation of some kind, and I was working on a transportation building, and they dragged us around DC for three or four days, introducing us to anybody and everybody who was in transportation policy, the folks that stay from administration to administration, not just the folks that are that change out all the time. And I absolutely fell in love, but I was almost finished with my masters, and I was like, well, Oh, well. And then I got out and, and I didn't finish the PhD, because it was just too much at that time. And, and I started working in structures, and it took me just a couple of months to figure out that that was the most boring thing on the face of the earth. No offense to structural engineers, but, wow, you're doing an awful lot of the same things over and over and over again all the time and and I just, I couldn't do that for very long, and I got I was very fortunate. I ended up landing in a transportation company where I just was doing small impact studies on suburban projects, and I did that for about a decade. It was a lot of fun, but while I was doing my graduate work, I kind of had, I somebody asked me a few months ago who radicalized you and and I think ultimately it came down to the time that I spent in West Virginia while I was doing my graduate work, because I lived within walkable distance of the video store and the hot dog shop, and my husband's work was like three doors down from the house. And you know, I I worked at the university 30 minutes away, but everything else was walkable. The the house next door to me had been a butcher shop at one point, and I got to thinking how nice it would be if you lived in a place where you could just go to the places you wanted to go without having to hop in a car. And what would it feel like to be in a community where everybody. They walked together and spent time together, and actually, you know, bumped into each other on the sidewalk and and it was something very different from the way that I grew up in central Florida, which is, you know, all cars, there's just, oh yes,
Tiffany Owens Reed 5:18
I have paid my Florida dues. Lived in Orlando currently during high school, and
Patricia Tice 5:23
I grew up on a farm. I mean, it was five miles to school. And you know, we actually would take the bus from the school out to where I lived, because I lived on the demonstration farm for the school. And so even the school would bus kids out in the middle of class to do things so you didn't do anything that didn't involve the car somehow. And having a place that that wasn't necessarily the case felt so freeing. And then I get back to Florida, it's the same old, same old, and it's it's fine, but I'm sitting there wondering, what does it look like to be able to go to the grocery store? It's kind of like wanting to have a fruit tree in your yard, you know,
Tiffany Owens Reed 6:13
or an avocado tree, where the avocados are right all the time. Just when you
Patricia Tice 6:19
need one, they're right. Yeah, if you don't need to go anywhere. You walk out the front door the I have a mulberry tree that just goes crazy in the spring, and it's like having a candy shop in my front yard. What's not to love and, and I had never had anything like that growing up and and so I really loved it, but it wasn't. It was so far out of my realm of experience. At one point, I had someone who said, Hey, would you like to come work for us? And it was at a really interesting company called glading Jackson, and they, as a consultancy, really wanted to be thought leaders, and they're very they have a long history within CNU and within all of the new urbanist work, Ian Lockwood, Walter, Kulash, a whole bunch of the the celebrities within New Urbanism worked At Gladding Jackson and and so I went and joined them because I had run out of things to learn in the other place. And still love them. I still do work for them occasionally, still, but I kept getting asked this question at at the lunch table, it'd be things like, Are you one of those engineers and and, of course, of course, I'm not one of those engineers. Why would I be 1am? I? What are those engineers? What are you? What the heck are you talking about that? It was very condescending, and I get it now, I understand what they were talking about now, but at the time, it was like, whatever. Okay, I'm doing the best I know how. And it took me about two years to figure out what they were talking about. And they'd say crazy things like, Oh, well, you never need more than a two lane road and and I would sort of look at them like, Are you sure? Because that really doesn't match my experience. I know you have a good reason for saying that you're not crazy, but it took me about two years to figure out what they were talking about. When I did figure it out that they were talking about dense urban, walkable spaces that have a really nice grid, and we have that nice grid, you don't need more than two lanes. The grid works great without it. In fact, throwing more than two lanes in kind of ruins things. When I finally figured out what they were talking about. I was like, Well, okay, I get what they're saying, but they have no data. There is nothing to back up what they're talking about. And I can't take this back to all my engineering buddies and say, hey, look, this is a different way of doing life, and it works better because there wasn't anything I could hand them to validate what I was saying.
Tiffany Owens Reed 9:23
I want to ask you, Patricia here, had you, had you, had you heard about the new urbanist movement before this? Not
Patricia Tice 9:30
really. I don't know that I had heard much about it. It was out there on the edge, but, there wasn't an awful lot of people talking about it. And the first few times I sat down with folks like Troy Russ, I don't know that I ever did sit down with Troy Russ, but I did sit down with Ian Lockwood, and they started describing what an urban downtown looks like, versus. Suburban downtown core, and describing that you could have a downtown core that was, in fact, suburban, not urban. It was. It was a bit difficult to wrap my mind around. And I understand that now, and I've actually written about it now, and we saw that in the data too, that, and we'll get to that in a second.
Tiffany Owens Reed 10:25
Yeah, I'm just curious, because you had that experience in West Virginia, and then you go back to Florida. Now you're working around these new urbanists. When did it click that what they were talking about was what you had experienced in that town where you could walk more places?
Patricia Tice 10:38
Well, I sat down with Pete Seckler, who, by the way, is one of the coolest urban designers I've ever met. He just, he really gets both urban and suburban, and knows what it takes to change things from one to the other and and I think what hit me finally was he said, You know, I don't mind suburbia that much. It just doesn't grow up very well. And that was an interesting observation that it as urban environments grow, they become richer, their fabric becomes more ornate and beautiful and interconnected, and the way that people use them is just spectacular. But as suburbia grows up, it gets ugly. It doesn't do that well. It gets congested. It gets crowded. People don't really want to people don't have any way to connect with each other. They're never having these incidental connections between each other, and that makes things very isolated and lonely. Well, it's
Tiffany Owens Reed 11:51
also like what Chuck says in his book about how the basic mindset of the suburb is everyone who comes is a threat, versus like the dinner party potluck. You know? He uses that metaphor of, like, the more people who come, the better it gets, because there's more food to pick from, there's more variety, there's more conversation, there's more spontaneity. That, I think that's kind of the dynamic, you know, but then, you know, you think about that, how people act when more people move in, into suburbs, it's like, Huh, you know, everything. And I think what he's getting to is the way that the value system is set up too, that like more people coming in actually becomes a threat, because it could distort house values, home values, you know, it could mess up the character of the neighborhood. And, yeah, she's a very different attitude towards like, what does it mean when more people come here? Well,
Patricia Tice 12:36
and I think that's an interesting dynamic, and it has a lot to do with the rural, suburban, urban transition. What happens is you've got people who have lived multi generationally in rural communities, and rural communities tend to have very tight, close knit relationships inside and they're open to people that are outside, but those people are still outside. They're not insiders, they're outsiders, and they're welcome to come, and they're welcome to visit, they're welcome to do all of those things, but they never really, truly belong. When you get into the suburban thing, you no longer have those long term, multi generational in group kind of things going on, and you've got enough people that you really don't know the people that are around you, maybe more than a house or two in your neighborhood, and so everybody feels like they're on the out group, from what you used To know in terms of being in an in group? Yeah, I
Tiffany Owens Reed 13:43
can see that being the case. We jump from urban to suburban, but then there's, I mean, rural to suburban, but then there's urban in the middle, where it's like, depending on which period of time you're talking about in American history, that could also be very tense, kind of a pressure cooker, and kind of a, kind of a weird situation, because I think people romanticize the city sometimes. But when you look, when you actually read about what it was like historically, it was like kind of, in some ways cool and in some ways kind of miserable.
Patricia Tice 14:12
That's what suburbanites see, that what, what you just described about the the dinner party thing, is exactly the problem that that most suburbanites see of dense urban areas, that that it's a dinner party with too many people and not enough chairs and and everybody's fighting for a chair at the table. And, you know, playing musical chairs in the middle of a dinner party isn't any fun either, and so figuring out how to hit that sweet spot without without overwhelming, without underwhelming. It's interesting when you read Jane Jacobs, she talks about the social ethics of relationships in a. In Greenwich Village and in the city. And you know, some of the things that were epiphanies for me were things like, you know, a pharmacist would know every single person in the entire community and might be carrying on a conversation one to one as a friend, or at least as a close acquaintance with a person at their counter, but the pharmacist would never dare introduce one of his patrons to a different patron without their permission. And and that whole coming from a rural background, everybody knew, everybody else you know that, that that whole dynamic was something that was completely foreign to me, that that you would protect someone's personal social relationships, because that that's never anything I had ever had to worry about it. It becomes an interesting dynamic. I feel
Tiffany Owens Reed 15:57
like if Chuck were listening to this, he would say, but guys, that's not the point of the metaphor. I think, I think, if I recall it correctly, the point of the metaphor has a lot to do with how the old, the traditional pattern of building allowed for more agility in terms of, like the actual buildings themselves, right? Rather,
Patricia Tice 16:14
you can pull more chairs up to an urban table, right? And I think that's what
Tiffany Owens Reed 16:18
he's getting at, rather than necessarily the social dynamics. I feel like that might be a slightly different side to it, and it's very complex with lots of different layers. But I think what you're getting at with the way that, like, I think when he's getting that there, is how suburbs are locked in place, like, you can't add anything, you can't add a small shop and a coffee shop and Adu, no. And, you know, a community,
Patricia Tice 16:38
yeah, yeah. And that's the problem you have. You have a lot more dynamic stuff going on because there's a lot less regulation. We've got a lot of states right now who are pushing adu regulations where you can have accessory dwelling units by right in almost every parcel, which is a very strong towns way of going about things. The catch is that the vast majority of the housing at this point is in HOAs. Yeah, you know. And yeah, the state law may allow you to have that, but your HOA may not, and that becomes a whole different issue. So you know that I think a lot of what we need to and I think strong towns has a better chance at this than anybody else, to be able to communicate the value of new urbanism and urbanism in general, we're going to have to find a way to sort of understand why suburban folks are so terrified of big cities, and and begin to bridge that gap in terms of towns. Because one of
Tiffany Owens Reed 17:46
the things I've been thinking about so much, and I think you're right with, like, so much of this has to do with starting with understanding people, like, actually understanding like, what are their foundational driving narratives and like and values and how they're shaping how they see the world, and what I'll briefly say, which, if you've been listening to this podcast consecutively for several weeks, you may have heard me say this before. I can't remember, but I'm going to say this, and then I'm going to I'm going to require us to move on to talking about your research and data. So let me but I think there's a really fascinating history behind the move of Americans away from cities to the suburbs. It's one thing I'll say. And I actually think it's it goes pretty deep. And I think people who try to like hurry up and get people to embrace walkability, it would help us to be probably honor that history a little bit more. And we might not agree with it. You might think it's silly, but I think it's actually worthwhile to consider like America was very different place than like Europe, right? They came, they had farms, they had, you know, and so, and then you realize that the city itself has only really existed for about 200 years, ish, not even that long, like, less than that. And the context behind how we got cities and how they were populated, and then all the fights about different things there, and then you layer that with like different ideologies around the family and home and moral development, which was a really big deal back in the day, like people saw a very strong connection between moral development and the way you were like and the type of building you were living in. So I think there's and then you look at like the 70s with crime, and even then you look at COVID, and then you look at like more crime. I think, like I said, I don't think we have to agree with the impulse, but I think it's helpful to try to understand, how is this position rational, how does this make sense? And then to use that to shape a better story. And I have been testing this theory in my head that, like, what the story made to tell people? I think there's a case to be made for talking more about, like, how design can reconnect us, kind of like this, like idea of, like, connective urbanism. How can we, how can we become connected again, and then use that as an off point to talk about specific changes we'd like to. See. Because I think people can get around that. I think they understand that the reality of feeling disconnected, of feeling fragmented, of feeling polarized. And I wonder sometimes if changing the narrative from like you should just like bike lanes to like, Hey, do you feel disconnected and like you wish you could talk to your neighbor, or do you wish you could walk down the street? And I think people go, yes,
Patricia Tice 20:23
that's that's one of the beautiful things we have here in the community I live in now, and I know that was on your list of questions. So we are back on topic, or at least close to back on top. The community that I live in now has the traditional grid pre World War Two downtown, and it the city is called Winter Garden. I was just talking to a buddy of mine who who's lived here for the last 30 plus 50 plus years, and he's like, there was a long time it was called Winter garbage. Oh, my God, it they started CRA in 92 and at the time, all of the properties in the entire CRA had a valuation of $23 million a CRA is a Community Redevelopment Agency. It's a tax increment financing which means that they freeze the tax base at the base year, and it the extra amount above that, a certain percentage of that goes back to the city, but the vast majority of it goes into reinvestment in that area. And today, the valuation of those prop those same properties, is 340 million, and a lot of it had to do with the streetscape that glading Jackson did. I joined the company right about the time that they finished the streetscape in my community. It's about a mile from where I live. Katie. I have a 22 year old with Down syndrome. She can walk there on her own without any help at all, and she hangs out down there. She thinks it's the coolest thing in the world. She is the unofficial mayor. Everyone knows her, but it's this sense of connection that is so missing in suburbia. You go downtown and everybody, you can't say that everybody knows each other, but everybody recognizes at least a few people there. And you don't feel alone. You don't feel like you're stuck in your house watching TV. You actually have a place that you can go and connect with other people. And it's that connection that ultimately again to get back, because I know you want me to get back to the topic I the research topic that I was writing on when we went to look at the data on why drivers pay attention and why they don't, and we actually had naturalistic driving data. They This is the coolest study that the federal government before you
Tiffany Owens Reed 23:07
get into that Can you back up a little bit and just kind of give us a little bit of a context to going into this research. What inspired it? What were you What were you looking for? Well,
Patricia Tice 23:16
okay, so after working at glading Jackson, I knew that there was something cool about this urbanism thing, and I could recognize that people drove differently in an urban environment than they do in a suburban environment. Okay? And the question was, can I make people do that without telling them to do it? You know, is there a way that I could actually design an environment where people behave as opposed to, you know, like having to put a sign up and say, I want you to go 25 miles an hour. Can I actually design something where people choose to go 25 without me having to say so, because they think it's the right thing to do, and I don't have to tell them to do it and and so I went to when I started my PhD, I had had about six years of a physical problem that that really put me on my backside for a long time. And the minute I got a little bit of relief on that, I signed up to do a PhD. And the wild thing about doing a PhD in the second half of your career is that, you know where the questions are. You know when you're 25 Yeah, you have no clue. You just don't have enough experience, right? But when you've had another 25 years of practicing in it, you can go, oh, I don't know how to do that. Would be really nice if somebody could figure that out. And so I went to FDOT and said, Hey, wouldn't you like to know how to design a place where people will actually do what you want them to do? And they're like, oh my gosh, yes. Please go figure that out and come back and tell us. And we figured out really quickly. We found a data set that was awesome, and we're going to go. Back to the data set. The data set was called the sharp, two naturalistic driving study. And I swear this is the best use of federal funds I ever saw. They they took, this was 2010 2011 so right after the the economic collapse, with stimulus money, and they basically took about 3300 cars in six cities around the country, and they put 100 instruments on every car, and then let them drive for a year, and just collected data for an entire year. And after about two or three weeks, you forget that anybody's watching you. And so you've got this perfectly natural data from people who are just doing everyday driving runs doing whatever they're going to do. And, and so I pulled a very small amount, I mean, this created four petabytes of data, huge amounts of data, most of it in video and and I pulled a very, very small amount, some of it from Tampa, some of it from Seattle, to try to see why drivers would actually pay attention, and so we looked at attention at two different ways. One of them was, do you have your eyes on the road? And then the other one was, what kind of multitasking is going on? How many different things are you doing at one time? Because there are environments where multitasking works, you know, you're not It's not ideal, but you do it, and it doesn't really cause any problems. There are other environments where you tell the kids to be quiet in the back seat, because you have to concentrate on what you're doing. And there's a wide range in between that. And so what we were looking for was, what is it about the environment that actually demands your attention? And then what environments would give you the freedom to zone out or not pay attention? And ultimately, I was looking at whether or not they were paying attention, but the real question came down to why? What is it about what they're doing that changes their attention. Why does that change? It and ultimately, staring at the data, it took me about six months to figure out, oh, it's the people. It's not the people in the car, it's the people outside of the car. It's it's the interaction that they're having with the other people in the environment. And sometimes it's not even the interaction in real time. It's the potential for interaction. So you go into an urban environment and you expect to see people crossing the road. You expect to see people walking around. You expect to see risks. And you know, sometimes that's a risk thing. Sometimes that's just an engagement thing. You know, where, where you expect to interact with another person. And the wild thing about that, when we went back to the hardcore psychology literature to try to understand what I was looking at, to understand what the data was showing me. One of the wild things about that was that there's a dopamine response every time you see another person's face. That's actually what cues you to recognize that you see a person. It's one of the most tragic things we've ever discovered, because as you get older, if you start going into Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, where the dopamine systems are impaired, you lose the ability to recognize faces. But it's not just that. You lose the ability to recognize if a face is familiar to you, you lose the ability to recognize that it is a face, and that is utterly devastating, because we use other people's facial expressions to develop and to maintain empathy. When you see another person's expression, you give a micro expression that mirrors it so that you can actually feel that expression with them. That's how we develop empathy as a baby, and it still works in adulthood, when you can no longer recognize that another person is a person, you lose all of that emotional connection person to person as well. And it's not just facial expressions. It's also body language. You read people's body language and and that body language can communicate to you the emotional state of the person that you're seeing. And ultimately, that's what you're looking for, your your automatic systems, the parts of you that are driving, because once you learn to drive your most of your driving is done automatically. You need that. I don't know if you remember what it was like to learn to drive, but it's terrible. It's, it's, it's horrifying. You have to think about every single moment and every single. Movement that you do, and your brain just doesn't work that fast. And so within about six months, you get it all really automatic, and everything flows and and your driving becomes really smooth and at least comparatively safe. It takes about two years for that to really level out. But if you're not driving automatically, if you're trying to think about every single movement that you make, you really don't drive very well, and so we really need those automatic systems, and that's part of why things like the umetcd has so much consistency to it. You know that the striping on the road is almost exactly the same every single place you go all over the country, the signs are all identical, because we want you to respond to those without thinking. Can
Tiffany Owens Reed 30:45
you explain what that is for listeners who may not know the MUTCD, the
Patricia Tice 30:49
mucc, D is the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices. And if you've ever gone to another, another state and looked around and realized, oh, a stop sign is the same here as it is there, and all of my directional signs look exactly the same, and the striping in the road looks exactly the same. The reason for that is a big old fat book. It's about 1200 pages long, and it has very specific regulations for font for font size, for the shape, the color, everything has to be exactly the same. And the reason they're doing that is because we're asking our bodies to do something they're not made to do. You're not made to go 50 miles an hour. Your reflexes aren't good enough to handle that, and so the only way we can actually get our reflexes to be accurate enough to manage that environment is to make the environment very predictable. But of course, because it's predictable, we space out that it's it's a catch 22 we have to have it that predictable to be able to function, but because it's that predictable, we can ignore it. And so there's a balance there. What breaks that cycle of predictability and being able to ignore the environment is the people, because people are never going to be predictable. They're just not, and we don't want them to be and so when you're interacting in a space where you expect to have people, that's a wild card, and you're you have to stay engaged, you have to pay attention, you have to focus on the environment, because you don't know what those people are going to Do, and you get rewarded for paying attention to them biologically. So it's not necessarily a stressful kind of thing. It can be if it's overwhelming, but it's it's not inherently stressful. Your body's made to look for people. This is something we do from the time we're infants. We've been doing that a lot longer than we've been doing driving. So it's a good thing. And, you know, in fact, come to think of it, that's one of those things that really bothers me about iPad kids, you know, the kids that have grown up, you know, focusing on digital and screens. How much of that neurological primacy, the primacy of interacting with other human beings, gets weeded out by our focus on non organic structures, you know, the videos and the like. And I don't, I don't have a good solution for that. I do know it's a problem and and I'm terrified by it, to be honest, because a lot of the advantages that we get in a city have to do with the fact that people take up a huge amount of real estate in your brain. And and you you have hardwired stuff going on in there that says that people are more important. What happens if you destroy those structures, you things can go haywire. The catch is and the reason why cities operate differently than suburbs or town or the big, wide roadways are a problem is that you've got physical limitations on how far you can see. You could really only see facial expressions out to about 90 feet. And when you're driving, you're really only looking about 20 degrees from center. So when you put that down on a plan, you're basically monitoring a corridor that's about 60 feet wide. You It's not that you can't see things outside of it. You're just not looking for things that are outside of it. You're reflexively going to be looking at that maybe 6090, feet at the most. And it doesn't matter how fast you're going, even when you're on a highway, you're still looking at a piece of ground that's about 60 feet wide. That's what's behind perceptual. Narrowing we've we've talked about in in urban design that the faster you go, the less you see. That's true, and it's not true at the same time your your vision narrows. You focus on a tighter area. But the reason why you're focusing on a tighter area is because you're looking further down the road and you're still looking at the same 60 foot wide piece of ground. It's just a lot farther down the road, so you're not going to take in as big of an angle. You're just looking at the same space. But that means that there's limitations on how big an urban space can be before it quits acting like an urban space. This
Tiffany Owens Reed 35:40
is what I want to ask you about next. So this is all the research and the data, all these insights you're collecting. I'm sure you're going to you were going to get here anyway, but connect this to this side of it, like building the actual places. How does this translate into, like, actual design decisions within the transportation world
Patricia Tice 36:01
well, and that's one of the things that we're still working out little by little. But the immediate implications are, when you're dealing with a roadway that's really, really wide, drivers are not going to treat that roadway with the same interactivity. And there are very interesting relationships between how wide the road looks and how fast people choose to drive. And so if you, if you don't, if you don't put a sign up, or even if you do put a sign up, people actually ignore the signs nine times out of 10. Anyway, I I don't think it's actually that they ignore the signs. I don't think they look at the speedometer. You know, they just between the two of them. This is just that sign versus what's on my speedometer. Just does not connect.
Tiffany Owens Reed 36:54
I have so many questions about speedometers and the way that they're designed in the first place. Oh,
Patricia Tice 36:59
gosh, that's that's another year. I haven't done that yet. I'm noticing I have a relatively new car, and so my speedometer actually shows me the posted speed limit right next
Tiffany Owens Reed 37:14
to me. Why? Why do they allow the design of speedometer to show the potential to go 100 and miles, 180 miles per hour,
Patricia Tice 37:23
I don't know, because it makes guys who want a really muscle bound car feel good.
Tiffany Owens Reed 37:32
Yeah, it's another episode.
Patricia Tice 37:36
It makes me feel good too, because I really want my cars to be muscle bound, to have a car, you got to drive a car. I mean, really.
Tiffany Owens Reed 37:44
Well, what I want to know is, like, I want to talk a little bit more about impact now. So you did this research, what? How is that? How is that translated into the work you're doing now? Tell, tell us a bit about the work you're doing now and the conversations you're having, and maybe a little bit of what you're hoping to accomplish. Well,
Patricia Tice 38:00
okay, so if it's the people that matters, in the way that people drive and in the way the built environment works, if, if the ability to interact with another person in that space is what's driving, everything about the way that people drive, and then driving all of those other things we were talking about earlier, you know, all of the social connection, all of that connectivity between social groups and person to person, if it's all about the people, then Figuring out how to make those interpersonal connections really robust is absolutely critical to getting the society we want to live in. You know, if I have, I have toyed with the idea of writing a book, and at some point I'm, I am going to have to write this one, and it's, the question of, would Jesus drive? And it's an interesting question, not obviously, in an environment where everybody drives, this is you just have to do what everybody's doing, because that's what it takes to function. But so much of our lives are embedded in hurry and hurry sickness, and it shortcuts our ability to interact with each other. It shortcuts our ability to create relationships and to build those relationships. And you know, we we complain like crazy about our kids wanting to stay home and play video games, but they don't really have anywhere to go. You know what? There's nowhere safe that they could actually go walk and do something different. And so the question of, what does it take to get ourselves out of this echo chamber that the TV and the car and the single family house all represent? You know, this independent lifestyle? People and get ourselves into something that works better in terms of community, it all comes back to that same revelation that it's always the people that matters, over and over and over again, it's always been the people that matters. And so when you, when you start thinking about that, you there's implications at every level, from the way a region works together as a system all the way down to the way a crosswalk rock works at an intersection, and every single level in between, there's implications in every single space. And so the blog that I'm writing right now has a lot to do with, first of all, describing the research that we did and what it means. But beyond that, what are its implications? So why is it that when I build a four lane road, it ruins everything on the side of the road, and when I build a six lane road, even if I pay the businesses to stay in business while I'm building the road, they die within a year afterwards. It's because the nature of that facility has changed. It's no longer an interactive space that people can work in. It also has implications for pedestrian safety and all of this strode issue is inherently bound up in the scale of the space. So when you've got a very large space, drivers are not expecting to see pedestrians. They're out of their visual monitoring area. They're not really monitoring that area very well outside of that 60 feet, and because of that you've got, they're not expecting to see pedestrians. The pedestrians see a 35 mile an hour speed limit, and they're expecting that the drivers are watching out for them, but they're not. And so you've got this mismatch in expectations, right? That kills people? Yeah, I was just
Tiffany Owens Reed 42:03
gonna say, it sounds like so much of what you're getting at is the way design shapes what people expect and how they behave with each other. I was going
Patricia Tice 42:12
through the pedestrian fatality data, and I'm convinced, based on based on an analysis I did last year, we know that about three quarters of the pedestrian fatalities happen at night. Okay, that so we know that there's some visibility issues going on there. A quarter of them happen during the day, three quarters at night. When you break that down into a bin that goes from six to 10pm and then a different bin that goes from 10 to dawn. About two thirds of it are from six to 10, and about 1/3 is from 10 to dawn. So about a quarter of our pedestrian fatalities are probably dealing with some kind of impairment. It could be the pedestrian who's impaired. It could be the driver that's impaired. It could just be that they're tired. It could be a dozen different things. But you know, this is, this is ugly, and it may that's going to need a completely different fix. Okay, that means that half of our fatalities, half of our pay strain fatalities, are happening between six and 10pm those are not impaired fatalities. Those are people walking home from work. Those are people who are going across the street from an apartment complex to a grocery store, trying to cross a five lane road. These are people that are just trying to do life, and they can't because they've got a five or six or seven lane roadway in the way and all of that, it shouldn't be a death sentence to walk to the grocery store, and the grocery stores are have changed their footprint. Amazon has made a huge change in the way that we do retail. You know, the at first when Amazon came on the market, the retail just it looked like retail was dying and all of the brick and mortar stores were going away. But what they figured out, very quickly, or within about five years, is that if they scattered themselves throughout the landscape, and you made sure that there was a store maybe every two miles on center, you know, so that you're never more than maybe a mile and a half from the store. You can start creating these communities around that store, and you start building your market share, not based on price or on the goods that you provide, but based on relationships, because you're back to this same small town feel. You walk into the grocery store and you know the clerks that work in the grocery store, you know the guy who actually runs the grocery store. You see people in that store that are your. Neighbors that go to the same elementary school that you know, all of your social groups are embedded in this retail now, the step that they haven't done yet, and it's a yet, because I'm beginning to see hints at it happening, is turning those retail spaces, those very local, hyper local neighborhood stores into third places, into places where you have food truck court outside, or you have a park or a gathering space where people can just come and hang out, as opposed to just as opposed to just going into the store. And when you start creating these social spaces along with that local retail, you begin to create that community cohesiveness again, and, and all of that comes back to, how am I creating relationships with other people, going
Tiffany Owens Reed 45:52
back to that connective urbanism we were talking about earlier, and,
Patricia Tice 45:55
and it's that human connection over and over and over again. It just it, you know, you, once you've created a five Lane facility, it's too big to do those human connections anymore. Yeah.
Tiffany Owens Reed 46:09
I mean, that's like, the epitome of what you're saying, of, like so much of how we've been designing our transportation infrastructure or our places. It's just too big for people in a funny kind of way.
Patricia Tice 46:19
And then the reason it becomes that way is because there's no alternatives when you had the grid network. Let me give you an example. I The the major road that runs through winter garden is a six lane highway that runs from the east to the west coast of Florida. So it's a major principal arterial for all of the state of Florida, but it, you know, runs right through the not the middle of the downtown, but through the middle of the town. Right. It's paralleled by the Turnpike, which is this massive seven Lane freeway, you know, not free tollway. But the other day, one of the directions on the turnpike was completely shut down. There was an accident on the turnpike totally closed down. So what happened is, I'm driving around on my local six lane highway that actually has access to the KFC I was getting dinner at, and the Dollar Tree and half a dozen other places, right? And I'm looking at this roadway going, this is not usually this busy. This is bumper to bumper, and it's bumper to bumper for five miles. Why in the world is this going on? And I pull open the map, and I can see that the Turnpike is shut down. So when the turnpike shut down, my major arterial shut down, but if my major arterial shuts down, then where else is it going to go? Is there another alternative route for the traffic to spill into? Because I've got a grid network on one side, yes. On that side, there were lots of little network streets that the traffic could funnel into none of them were overloaded. It worked fine on the south side of that same road, not at all, none. So there were no alternative routes south of there that could actually absorb that traffic and and that is happening in microcosm every single day, every peak hour, because there's no alternative routes. You don't get a choice. You end up having to put all your eggs in one basket, and that basket is never full enough. I used to do but I still do travel demand modeling, and that's where you actually have a computer model that projects what the traffic volumes are going to be on a roadway, right? And you put in the future people, and where they live and where they work and all of that things, and you figure out where they're going to go. We can run it without congestion, usually the final analysis, you can just the roads up, and then it sort of balances out where people go. You can run it without though. And they ran an analysis at one point on I four, which runs, which is the major highway that runs through the middle of Orlando, north, south, and it would take 27 lanes of traffic to be able to support what demand is inherently there, you can never widen that wide enough to be able to handle the demand. You can provide alternatives. And when you provide alternatives that serve local traffic, you don't need 27 lanes. You've got those 27 lanes scattered throughout the community exactly where you need
Tiffany Owens Reed 49:39
them. And then, of course, there's the whole conversation around just basic transit variety, which would Oh yeah, well, out of their cars in the first place. But to wrap up, I want to ask you, if you can share a little bit about how you're getting this work in front of transportation professionals. I know that you use Legos, so I'll use that as a little teaser. Our listeners, but tell us how you are, how you're bringing these ideas to transportation professionals, helping change the conversation and having a lot of fun with logos. In the meantime, well,
Patricia Tice 50:09
one of the coolest things I've had had chance to work on lately, and we're actually going to do a workshop at the ITE international conference that's here in Orlando coming up in a few months. We call it Brick City Lab. And from an urban design standpoint, it is utterly fascinating. Loads of fun. Basically, I have all of these Lego buildings. Lego has a modular standard where the buildings are all about the same size, and I'll lay out black paper. Of course, I talk about all the things I've just been talking about, what it takes to design a really robust Street. Most engineers have never had the chance to actually try to design a street themselves. They get roadway projects, they get highway projects, but they've never actually thought through the details of what it takes to design a street. And so I'll lay out black paper, and I'll give them the buildings, and then give them several different scenarios, and then they actually get to use the buildings, and, you know, some extra Lego pieces and some cars and silver Sharpies. And it turns out, if you use the friend scale, which is the little girl, Legos, one stud is one foot. And so you can actually map out Lane widths. You can you can actually space the buildings as far apart as you want. For one of the exercises, I've got another exercise where I space the buildings way too far apart, and then they have to figure out what they do in between to make it work. Because, you know, a lot of times when you're dealing with a city, the buildings are where they are. You're not moving them, but you still need a street that works. And so you have to figure out how to deal with the fact that the buildings are way too far apart, and you need a space that feels more intimate, but you've got a space that feels like a highway. You know? What is it that you can do to actually change that? And and it's, it's been interesting the several times that we've done it, to see the solutions that that people come up with, because they're not that they're unique. I had one group that actually said, Do I need to have a road here at all? And ultimately the answer was, I don't know. What do you think and and in that case, they actually they gave me a space that, if the mayor came through and said, No, I want two lanes of traffic, they could throw a two lane road in. But they use most of the space is park space because they wanted that space to be really very active, and it was an absolutely beautiful design. We also use it to help teach people with disabilities how to walk in those environments, because a lot of times people, particularly with cognitive disabilities, don't really think through you know, well, why would you use a crosswalk? Do you want to go down a dark alley? What does it look like to have eyes on the street? You know? Is this a place that's safe for you to walk, or is this a place that's going to be scary, because they don't really have instincts for that
Tiffany Owens Reed 53:16
when you're doing these workshops, or just doing your speaking and giving presentations, what have you been hearing in terms of the, like, the biggest challenges? Or, if you had to say, this is where the conversation is right now as it pertains to whether it's highway design or church or, like, more local, like on the city level, what would you say are some of the Yeah, if you had to say, this is where the conversation is right now, maybe what you think some opportunity, I
Patricia Tice 53:41
think a lot of it, there's there's several issues. The biggest issue is that it feels overwhelming that we're so far down this path figuring out how to fix it in real time, in a real situation where people are actually dealing with a concrete environment in front of them that's already very much a strode and probably isn't going to change. But the question of, What do I do? How do I fix this is a huge question, and there are a lot of times I'm not sure I have the best answers for that. We did have a corridor here in Orlando that was, you know, very heavily, had a history of being, of having a lot of impaired pedestrians and impaired drivers. And they went through and they put Pedestrian Hybrid beacons, which are basically traffic signals for pedestrians to cross the road. And they put them about every 600 feet for an entire mile. It looks like a Christmas tree when you're driving down it, because it's red and green the whole way and and it, and we've actually been able to keep people from getting killed. But it cost an exorbitant amount of money. It was $9 million for that one mile. And. And you know the question of, how do you how do you justify that? I think there's questions about recreational versus functional facilities. A lot of the biking lobby in the past, and this is changing. Some has been pushing to have trail systems, which is easy for transportation engineers to blow off as you want me to build you a $50 million gym for the you know, go find a gym. I need to build transportation infrastructure that will actually get people from here to there. I don't want to spend $50 million when I don't have a lot of money building you a recreational facility, you know? And and that's where that that land use change, where the shopping center resolution, is making a big difference. Because if you're looking at trying to build a facility that works for a seven year old to get to the grocery store. That's a transportation use. That's not a recreational use. We're not doing this as a fluff. This is a real use. It just like
Tiffany Owens Reed 56:14
it all depends on, how are you defining transportation, right? Is it like
Patricia Tice 56:18
valid question? Yeah. I mean, you know, if we, I started doing a lot of this kind of analysis from the roadway side, in part, because we're running out of transportation money. You know that the money to build new roads just isn't there, and and we're having to spend so much money on maintenance. And I know Charles talks about this all the time, and then every new lane mile that we add into the system is not adding an asset, it's adding a liability. And so, you know, there's got to be a point at which we stop building highways. But over the last 50 years, we've slanted the system to prioritize highways, not local network. And so a lot of the question in my mind is, how do you begin rebalancing this so that we've got plenty of big roads? How do we start adding in the small roads that will actually make the big roads fine? You know, if you've got a small system that runs parallel to the big one. I can put bikes on there. I can put toddlers on there. I can put seven year olds on there. I can put moms with strollers. All of that's fine. I don't need to have them out on the big highway. I don't want them on the big highway. Don't really. I can't make them safe there, but figuring out how to do that when you don't have a grid network to work with in the first place is really hard, and that's where a lot of the work that Ellen Dunham Jones have been working on with retroviding suburban makes a huge difference, because you can start building that network in to the old shopping centers. I don't know if you've noticed, but in a lot of suburban areas, the setbacks the parking lots are all about the same depth, and so you have this very natural alignment with the fronts of the shopping centers. And as you redo those shopping centers, and they usually get redone about every 10 years, there's a financing quirk about that, most retail is actually done on a balloon loan, so at the end of 10 years, you have to refinance your loan, and you have to prove the value of your shopping center to be able to get the new loan, which means that you're going to have to reinvest in that shopping center when you're getting your new loan. Well, okay, that's a good time to go through and start building out the inside that that parking space that's not getting used. You start putting buildings in there. You can create a main street that runs parallel to this big highway, and then, and then connect that up with the next one in the next shopping center next door, do a crosswalk that lines the two of them up, and then you've got a pedestrian connection that makes sense for the pedestrian. You're not you don't have them sitting out on a six lane highway where they're not going to get seen. And it's a win win for everybody. But it's not a cheap one. No,
Tiffany Owens Reed 59:22
this has been, this has been so interesting. I'm I know there's so much more that we could talk about, and you've given me a lot to think about as well that I'm going to force myself to not go down another rabbit trail. I want to ask you about winter garden. Correct? Where you live, winter garden. I end every podcast this way, but tell us you've told us a little bit about your town already. What we'd love to know are, yeah, if you want to share more about what you love, about where you live, and maybe two or three places you like to recommend people check out to get a feel for what local life is like there.
Patricia Tice 59:59
Well, we do. Actually have certified the best farmers market in the US. We actually have won the contest for the best farmers market in the US almost for a decade running at this point.
Tiffany Owens Reed 1:00:14
Wow. That is very impressive. It is unbelievably
Patricia Tice 1:00:17
impressive, and it does not disappoint, I go to farmers markets every place I go. I have yet to find one as cool as my own, that they also have had because it's done so well. There was a business owner down the road that actually went through and built a brick and mortar site that has a brewery and then little kiosks for all of the folks that were doing well in the farmers market to actually have a seven days a week site that they can actually sell the same stuff. And so we've got a lot of really cool business incubation going on, which is fantastic. I it is the most adorable little downtown to hang out in. I wish I could tell you more restaurants that were fantastic. Unfortunately, it's an old agricultural community, and so for some reason, we have really struggled getting amazing food. We're really good food, and we have really great relationships and lots of fantastic people. The food is a B plus, and that's okay.
Tiffany Owens Reed 1:01:33
Give us one. Do you have a good diner? Like a diners are hard to find.
Patricia Tice 1:01:37
Okay, my I have a chocolate shop. It's a little cafe that I live in. Whey chocolate on plant Street is just the bomb. Scoops is across the street, which is a traditional ice cream scoop shop. They used to actually be open. It used to be the Mayberry style go in and you could actually get ice cream for two bucks for a kid's cone. Now, since COVID, it's gotten so busy they just have a window, which is kind of a bummer, and even the owner thinks it's kind of a bummer, but we haven't been able to figure out how to roll that one back. It's the the market to table is actually a a literal market to table restaurant. It is very, very expensive and very upscale, so we don't get to go to it very often, but the that food was actually really one call. It's called market to table. Okay, that's the name of the restaurant. He actually has a greenhouse on top of the building that he built where he grows most of the produce that he actually puts in the restaurant. And so there's a hydroponic greenhouse on the top of this building. There's a piano bar in the front the little coffee shop in the front of the same building actually sends most of their profits to Africa, to a community to help them, to help develop that community in multiple communities by now, and it is. It stays very, very, very, very, very busy all the time because it's great coffee and, you know, loads of fun and great atmosphere. All
Tiffany Owens Reed 1:03:21
right. Well, we'll put all of those recommendations in our show notes, as we always do. I'll also put links to your blog, your sub stack. Well, thank you so much again, and if you if you're listening to this podcast, thank you so much for joining us for another conversation. If there's someone in your community who you think we should bring on the show, please let us know using the suggested guest form that we always link in the show notes. I'll be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, check out the links below this conversation and keep doing what you can to build a strong town.
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Tiffany Owens Reed is the host of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. A graduate of The King's College and former journalist, she is a New Yorker at heart, currently living in Texas. In addition to writing for Strong Towns and freelancing as a project manager, she reads, writes, and curates content for Cities Decoded, an educational platform designed to help ordinary people understand cities. Explore free resources here and follow her on Instagram @citiesdecoded.