Mr. Barricade: How to Quick Build a Connected City
Vignesh Swaminathan is an engineer, transportation planner, and content creator. Formerly the the CEO of a civil engineering firm, he now works as a project engineer and has over 1.7 million followers on TikTok, where he discusses urban infrastructure and transportation planning.
Tiffany and Vignesh discuss how transportation planning affects other aspects of cities such as housing. Vignesh explains how he works with quick-build projects, intersection design, and social media to make cities stronger.
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Tiffany Owens Reed 0:06
Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of the bottom up Revolution podcast. For the past few weeks, I have been creating a series of conversations with individuals who I will be interviewing live at the National gathering on a panel about content creation and how social media can help advance the strong towns movement. It's been a really exciting collection of conversations. If you haven't listened to them, I hope you'll go back. I believe there are four total. Today is the last one. I also hope that if you're coming to the national gathering, you will consider attending the panel, or at least stopping by to say hi. It's always an exciting time to meet people who listen to the show and yeah, hear your ideas and any feedback you'd like to share. But this whole series of conversations has been really exciting for me, because I think the content creator space is just really fascinating. It kind of just came out of nowhere. It truly represents sort of the bottom up spirit that we have at strong towns in order to challenge the status quo about how we've been designing and developing our cities, in order to bring new solutions to the table in our communities. I'm convinced that we need more ordinary people involved in those conversations, more ordinary people who understand the issues, the challenges we're facing, what's at stake and potential solutions that could work. But you know that just brings us to another challenge. How do we find these people? How do we help them become aware of this conversation? How do we equip them with the information and the perspective they need to begin to advocate in their towns. This is where the content creators universe, so to speak, has emerged to present a surprising and perhaps unexpected solution. They've been making content on YouTube, on Tiktok, on Instagram, on Facebook, and really helping bridge this knowledge gap, really helping more ordinary people become aware of this whole conversation and discover ways that they can begin to show up to the conversations happening in their town. I think the work they're doing is so essential to helping grow the strong towns movement. But even more than that, I think the work they're doing is essential to helping more and more people just sort of re evaluate the status quo, to rethink this experiment, and to begin to ask if we can be doing things better, to really help our towns emerge as resilient and also beautiful places. So today is the last conversation in this series, and today I'm joined by Vignesh Swaminathan, who many of you may know as Mr. Barricade, either on Tiktok or on Instagram. He is an urbanist design strategist and transportation planner with a proven track record of reshaping urban mobility. Formerly the CEO of a civil engineering firm called crossroad lab and the lead engineer of the boring company in Las Vegas. He's now a Project Engineer at kimley horn Vignesh leads protected bike lane projects and solves intricate geometric challenges across interchanges and urban corridors. He also engages a vibrant online community on Tiktok, where he educates over 1.7 million followers on the inner workings of urban infrastructure and transportation planning. I've seen some of his content. He does it in a way that's extremely accessible and really easy to understand, which I think is critical. Vinesh, welcome to the bottom up Revolution podcast.
Vignesh Swaminathan 3:28
Well, thank you, Tiffany, thanks for having me.
Tiffany Owens Reed 3:31
There's so much that I'm hoping we get to cover in today's conversation. But to kick things off, I want to give you a chance to sort of just tell your story a little bit. Can you share with us what inspired you to go into engineering as a career? Maybe a little bit of the backstory into that. You know what sets you off on that trajectory?
Vignesh Swaminathan 3:52
Sure. So Ignacio, I grew up in Cupertino, California, in the Santa Clara County in this area, there was a history of having bike infrastructure. So I was able to see bike lanes being placed and being used. I rode my bike to school. But as I traveled outside of that area, both to affluent neighborhoods and not so affluent neighborhoods, I really saw the stark difference, both in affluent neighborhoods, they try to keep people out and lower income neighborhoods there, what the infrastructure was never thought about. And it really got me really interested to see how why things are different in different areas, and what we can do about that. Um, I originally wanted to get into housing because I knew the Bay Area was going towards a housing crisis. I graduated high school in 2008 and I kind of had a feeling that we were getting to a point where housing was getting too expensive, where I wouldn't be able to afford a home, and with the concept of supply and demand, I thought that I wanted to get into housing as I explored that as an option, and I originally started in construction management, I realized that I could do civil engineering, but also realized that housing is not. Is held back by a lot of the engineering and planning and transportation issues that we have in our in our communities. And so I realized I could make a bigger difference focusing on transportation than I would be on building housing. Because if you were to be a developer or working construction, I really just ride the market. When the market is good, I build housing. I don't really solve the world's problems. And so working in transportation was an opportunity for me to kind of tackle those problems and see how I could fit myself in and help
Tiffany Owens Reed 5:27
that's really interesting. Thanks for sharing that. I'm just wondering if you can maybe go a little bit in depth on one thing you said, one idea you said, because I think our listeners would find this helpful and also interesting. Can you can you explain what you were seeing or what you kind of realized about the relationship between housing and transportation? I can't summarize. I can't repeat it exactly how you said it, but I think you said, you know, if the housing was being held back by some of the transportation decisions, can you, can you share a little bit more about what you were what you were seeing, and how you see that? Um,
Vignesh Swaminathan 6:01
so the housing comes in multiple different forms, you know, single family, multifamily and everything in between. And when we go build single family housing, when you build it on the outskirts of town, you have to build roads and highway ramps and access to freeways for people to be able to get in and out of their city. And housing that's built further and further away ends up being the slightly cheaper and cheaper, and then you end up having people out of desperation, out of there just to where they're at financially. They end up moving further and further away. And you start to see that committed communities and parents have to drive multiple hours to get to work. Bay Area is a huge commuter city, the main cities of San Francisco, Oakland and San Francisco are major work hubs, but not everybody who works there, who lives in that city, or can afford to live in that city, and as many people that drive in from the Central Valley, from Santa Cruz County, from the from the north, from Sacramento, and they commute very long distances, and that really can affect quality of Life for families, if you're away from your kids for two, three hours a day, not being able to parent, not be able to have family time, being there on time for dinner, that can really affect the family dynamic. And developers end up going where it's cheaper to build, which is further and further out. There's also the environmental consideration of expanding our growth boundaries in our county, and how that affects drainage and the environment and endangered species, native native species. And so that's one aspect of transportation when we go further and further out. The second aspect, when we do multi family housing in dense areas, we end up having to not rely on the car because we can't build in as much parking as we do for a studio now, one studio parking minimum requirements, sometimes one or even two parking spaces, two parking spaces as big, as big as some of the studios I've lived in over the years. And so it's a kind of a waste of time, a waste of space, and a waste of time for developers to build that. And so transportation and housing go hand in hand. And when a developer has to build transport, build housing, they have to based on the older system of level of service. So we can get into that a little bit later, but they were required to do mitigation measures for that, for their housing development, by either widening lanes and having minimum parking requirements. And they would do that by either going and doing the infrastructure of widening lanes, adding extra ramps, or they would pay fees to the to the city to go do that. And a lot of times that held back developers from from building. They just are focused on their housing, and then they ever have to pay these fees or do extra work, and that's what holds back a lot of the development of housing. We just don't have space. And we have areas that have already built out the previous generation. Back in the 80s and 70s and 90s, they were able to build housing and extra lots that were available. But our 15 minute city has expanded because of the car, and we've kind of reached capacity. And so now we're we've kind of passed a tipping point, and so transportation is really what holds housing back.
Tiffany Owens Reed 9:06
Yeah, that's really helpful. That's a really helpful overview. And I think you're right that housing and transportation definitely go hand in hand. I think, I think there's so many opportunity costs to driving that never really get talked about, and I think it's so much emphasis put on, oh, we can just solve that problem by driving, and it's always just presented as a solution. But I think what you're getting at is like, no, the more you're pushing people out and the more time you're asking them to spend in their car. There's so many other things you're asking them to give up, or other costs they have to absorb. If that's spending more money on repairs or spending more money on gas, right? But also giving up, like you said, the time with their families or hobbies or just their effects on their overall health? And I think, yeah, I think that's just, it's really helpful to hear someone kind of articulate, like, no housing and transportation. They go together, you know? And I think that's true about so many issues in our cities. There. Not just individual issues. You know, they're in, they're embedded in a connected like they're embedded and connected to so many other things. And I think we have to start looking at them as system problems, not just individual problems. Yeah, thank you for giving us overview kind of how you got into this. Can you, I would like to hear a little bit more about kind of how your career took off. I know from conversation that we've had outside of this that your career has really spanned so many different sectors of the engineering and transportation space. Could you share about that journey and maybe share two or three insights you've learned from how that how the engineering world thinks about transportation? Yeah,
Vignesh Swaminathan 10:38
so, um, engineering focuses on objectives and constraints, and that's you try to maximize or minimum minimize your objectives within your constraints. And what that does, it creates a really kind of awkward goals that aren't necessarily with the same objectives that the individuals need and want. Engineers are trained for liability, not livability. And when we, we, I, we have to add in all those metrics of livability to really come up with great engineering solutions. And when I, throughout my career, the main theme of my career is I've always worked for worked in jobs or in careers outside of when I ran my own company that have been kind of steering in the opposite direction of where we're trying to head and in New Urbanism and these new goals that we have, and I've kind of helped those industries steer back towards where we want to go. I started my career originally in parking in for downtown San Jose, and I first whenever I got a new job, I went and I studied how they're doing it, what their objectives and constraints are, why they're doing the things they do, and I try to figure out how I can steer it in a better direction. And in parking. Working for a downtown, I work for City of San Jose's parking and downtown operations, and that's the twofold there's parking both on street and off street, and there's also the operations of downtown. How do we work with the businesses, local businesses, different concerts, events, marathons, street festivals. How do we manage the parking for these key big events? You know, I planned out Obama's motorcade to get to his to his hotel. I planned out different marathons and how to shut down the street and allow for people to get to church on Sunday, when the marathons are going. And I planned out how to how we're going to deal with parking overflow for large events and where they're going to park. And what I saw from that is the objectives of parking is a wallet delivery system for your downtown. It brings people who have what they believe have money in their pocket, and they come to the downtown and they want to spend money. What's missing from that is everybody who can get to a downtown without needing to drive and without needing to park, through transit, through walking, through actually living in a downtown so the downtown's not dead at night. And I kind of saw that firsthand, what our goals were, why we were doing that, and I slowly helped them steer towards making downtown into a more livable place. We did that by beautifying sidewalks, putting in bike lanes, taking away parking and even a travel lane for bike lanes, and that way, we can provide people to be able to access all the areas of downtown without needing to drive. This is a long time ago before Uber was normalized and how people got around downtown was getting out of their parking garage, driving across downtown and parking somewhere else, and then walking to where they need to go, and that's how it was normalized. But by beautifying the sidewalks and improving our bike infrastructure, we were able to slowly encourage people to do more and more. I remember when we started figuring out, hey, what do bike lanes look like? How do buffers look like? Do we want to use green and then slowly that developing into protected bike lanes and protected intersections to the downtown? And I've seen that growth. So I started my career in parking and learned all about that also worked in smart parking, digital signs that change that are dynamic to where people need to park, so they can be directed to where they park, smart parking, red and green lights over each parking spot and showing the volumes of parking all the smart meters I walked every street in downtown as as a young engineer with a wheel and math every meter and kind of saw where we didn't need them and where we needed them. And then after that, I moved on to go work for a highway consultant. Next thing after parking was to figure out why we're building highways the way we are. And I did some as a new engineer. I saw some things that were very, very interesting. I worked on some, some highway widening plans, where I took a lot of property and I look, remember looking at the property names and seeing that they're all Hispanic names, and be like, that's a little weird. I remember being going and talking to clients, and clients saying, hey, we want to have our community meeting at 3pm so we don't have to hire a translator. And be like, that's a little weird, you know? And then and I saw the what metrics we were using for highway expansion, and. And a lot of it was based on parking minimums for a lot of these new developments, malls, shopping centers, and those parking minimums are planning for Black Friday, and we're not having black friday every day. So if you have a large amount of parking there, and you have roads that are that early, that are not as wide, you end up continuously needing to widen the roads to meet what the parking was planned for, because naturally, someone's going to look at that parking and be like, you know, it's really easy to go and park in front of that shopping center. I'm going to drive even though it's close by. And I saw that most traffic is caused from people who are driving within 510, minutes, short trips. And for a lot of short trips, people do drive, and that causes most of the traffic. And if we have most of the traffic costs for people driving less than 1015, minutes where they could be biking or walking or using a different mode, then that traffic pulls away from people that actually need to commute to people actually need to go far. And in our roads get hit capacity because people are just getting off an exit and getting off exit and getting off the next exit and going to where they need to go, instead of taking local roads or using local transit. And it's not really helping our system. Yeah, it's a convenience for people, but it's not really helping the system for everybody that needs to use it. And so I saw that firsthand, and then part of that work, I started to work on complete streets. The state government in California has been very progressive, and they wanted to start to steer away from people being blind on a car, both for greenhouse gas emissions and also for quality of life. And they have goals. And yet, as you know from this, even the name of this podcast, bottom up versus top down. Planning things from a top down, done by policymakers may not understand all the different aspects that go to into developing and building something. They sometimes, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But what they did in California is they knew that if they had this, if they start changing things on the high level policy levels, we all will have to figure it out as people who deliver projects. So they started having goals of complete streets. So there I started to work on complete streets, which is very new for the highway consulting firm that I was worth was working for. They never worked on roads that had to do with beautification, bike infrastructure, and they never really had to deal with making ADA more accessible, going past the minimum ADA requirements. And so I started to lead those type of projects, using all the experience I had from widening and doing the highway work to start narrowing and widening sidewalks and putting in bike lanes. And I worked on some of the first early concepts of protected bike lanes, before they even, we even knew what to call them, or knew what that would uh, would be like, um. And then I went and I started my own firm because I had a feeling that this is taking too long. We're treating these local cities like highway projects, where we're just continuously racking up the bill. These cities are starting to go bankrupt and having to phase projects. And I started my own firm to do focus on quick build, and we'll talk about that a little later.
Tiffany Owens Reed 18:02
Yeah, yeah, we'll jump into that in a little bit. I'm, I feel like I'm kind of holding myself back, because I feel like ever so much of what you were saying with those three points of your career, parking, highways, downtowns and the complete streets, it in there's, it's just kind of sparking all these ideas in my head of like other other fun topics. But it seems to me one, one thing I will say is that it it seems like kind of what we were saying at the beginning of this show, that you were very into, attuned to, sort of the way that there was a lack of systematic, systemic thinking, like seeing everything as one system, and instead kind of breaking down everything into its own isolated problem, and then trying to solve that problem, instead of being able to see, well, well, if you expand that highway, how does that affect, not just the, you know, the experience of being on that highway, but how does it affect the entire neighborhoods around it, but also The small businesses around. But then, like, what you were saying about, well, there are some people who need to quickly just kind of keep moving through, versus people who are just using the highway for these really quick trips. That, to me, just seems like a really clear snapshot of, like someone who kind of understands systems thinking of like, let's look at this as one coherent ecosystem. Versus, I don't know what you would call the opposite. I don't know if there's an opposite of that, but it seems, it seems like, just from what you've explaining, like the transportation world kind of has a hard time thinking in terms of systems. Would you say that's accurate? I'd say
Vignesh Swaminathan 19:34
that's that's accurate to a certain extent. We try to think about systems, but the system needs to have all the variables for us to actually think about. And what we've been focusing on is only vehicle traffic. The entire field of traffic engineering, a lot of transportation engineering, is only focused on vehicle traffic. And how do you focus on vehicle traffic? What frustrates people the most is traffic, right? And so we've been focusing on a metric called level of service below. Of service is a density function. More people that are on the road, the more delay, and that's been the only metric that we've used to analyze traffic. It didn't matter if somebody was driving long distance or someone was driving a short distance. It was about how many people are on the road and how much delay is it causing in each individual segment and each intersection, which is a very flawed metric to plan out, because the result of that is, Hey, It's too, too dense. What do we have to do? The only solution is to widen. And when you widen the road from two lanes to four lanes, more people move further away. You wind it from four lanes to six lanes, more people move over the mountain. Wind from six lanes to eight lanes, more people move to a cheaper area on the other side of the mountain. And that keeps, keeps progressing. And so, um, one of the things that we changed in California, and that's something that's changing across the country, is we changed the metric from our environmental planning documents, from level of service and traffic being a something that needs to be mitigated. And mitigated means that we have to figure out how to how to make it less works. And instead of us focusing a level of service, we started to change it to a metric called VMT, which is vehicle miles traveled. And that goal was, Let's study how many vehicle miles are traveling on the road, the amount of people, the amount of vehicles times the amount of miles that it's traveling. Was take that and figure out how to reduce that, and that's going to be a newer metric. It may not even be the best metric just yet. Maybe it's better to study person models, but right now, we changed it to vehicle miles, and what that did is it told cities to, hey, stop promoting outside single family housing that's being built out on the outskirts of town, and how do we prioritize density that's in the center of our town, and that that helped solve the parking wallet delivery system, which is saying, hey, instead of people having to drive into your downtown and park, let's figure out how to get people to live in your downtown and make it a nice place to be. And they will spend more money, because if you're living your morning, evening, afternoon, how where you eat, play, work, live, go to school and thrive. Are all in one area. There's probably spending a lot of money every day in that area just to live. And that ended up being a newer metric that we shifted to. It was done by policy makers, not by traffic engineers. And so a lot of traffic engineers cause a lot of stir. It still causes a lot of stir. A lot of traffic engineers hold on to level of service. But now we have goals in California trigger figure out how to reduce VMT, and that's been a pretty much a game changer since around 2013 2014
Tiffany Owens Reed 22:35
So you started to hint at this already, but this will be a great chance for us to kind of continue the story, because what you learned from all of those roles you were in, as you mentioned, inspired you to start your own firm, and you focused on quick build as sort of like a paradigm for solving transportation issues. Can you tell us about that journey, and also the partnership you had with NACTO to sort of formalize your insights into this quick build program, sure.
Vignesh Swaminathan 23:05
Um, so when I worked for the city of San Jose in downtown operations, I did a lot of traffic control. I shut down streets for marathons and festivals. That's kind of where the name Mr. Barricade came about, because people were starting to call me that. Because if you wanted to shut down the street, called Mr. Barricade, and I took dad and my highway experience of working on highways and doing traffic control for highways, and I felt, Hey, why are we spending so much money on doing these protected bike lanes the way we are protected bike lanes and civil engineering, a lot of it has to do with drainage. You're modifying drainage. All this new road is new impervious area, meaning that water can't go through it to go to where it was, went naturally into the soil. And now we have to figure out how to get water out and get it into a drainage inlet, and get it go dump into a water channel or creep. And water is treated like a waste product. And we've started to do some swales, where we try to rejuvenate the groundwater table. But a lot of it has to a drainage. And drainage is the most costly part of civil engineering, because it's a lot. You know, the world didn't have drainage infrastructure before humans, and now we're putting in so much. And you can look at a map and you see a lot of gray, and so that was a big, costly part. And I felt, Hey, why are we doing all this work of modifying drainage just for protected bike lane. It's costing too much. People don't even know if they like protected bike lanes right now. They don't even know how to use them. Cars. Don't know how to look for bikes and protected bike lanes. So we're putting a lot of money for something that people are going to hate, they're going to like, be like, Hey, I don't understand this, and I hate this. And so I felt that we could do something different. So I combined my traffic control, experience of putting in cones that have certain reflectivity and and also my protected intersection of protected bike lane research, and I felt that we could do the same thing with paint and post, and that would be a something that can be done quickly, without the same environmental impacts as affecting drainage. It also could kind. Be a peel off the band aid approach, where you kind of put it down and people can react to it. It could say, hey, hey, if you don't like it, we can take it out, and they can take it out. But as a way of forming, doing community outreach on the street, live beta testing, and that way, you can see how people react to it. You can also learn if it's appropriate there. Unlike highways, where you can take away a bunch of property, put a bunch of sound walls, and follow a standard, we have to do a lot of tweaks to fit these stuff in our existing infrastructure. And blowing up a road is too costly, so these tweaks can be done with painted posts. So I was very inspired by a few projects that I worked on that I knew in my heart were never going to get built. And those projects still was it 10 years later, have never been built, you know. And I knew that we're doing a great project, protected bike lanes, intersections, bus lane. And I knew that where this project is going to hold its head of the hostage for many years, they're never going to solve it. They're never going to have money for it. And so I knew I could build projects faster, cheaper, with paint and post and get more results. I remember going to community meetings, and this lady was talking about a crosswalk that she wanted, and she her kids have already went through elementary, middle school, high school, graduated college, and a crosswalk never got built. And I'll say that's just paint and post like we can do this right? And so I started a company named crossroad lab. I didn't want to name a company after my name, like a lot of consultants do. I wanted to do something that people could kind of recognize. And there I kind of focused on quick build projects. And the trick was, cities are already paving their roads on the regular, and when they paid it, they put a note saying to the contractor, place everything back in kind. And I was like, why are we doing this? We're spending as much money as a new project, but telling the contract to place everything in kind because we can't draw plans quickly and do all that engineering. And I felt I can do that engineering. I can do it costly, cost saving. I don't have to prepare other sheets for drainage and utilities. I can just do signing and striping. We can make a huge difference. And so I started marketing and talking to different cities about this quick build concept. It came from the roots of tactical urbanism, which is like where we shut down the street and put an art another painted post and block it off. But how can I do that with my traffic control, where I still allow traffic, but I create a portion of the street for people to walk and bike, and I helped build some of the first protected intersections of the country, but with painting posts, and a lot of people were very afraid of that, because they're like, hey, no cars hit curbs. What if the car runs over this painted post? What are we going to do? And I took that, I felt that if I create things that are bright at night, visually seen, posts that look like that you don't want to hit. I use specific, specific posts. And I did research. I use very wide post. There's a post called the case 71 which is 10 inches wide, that looks like a bollard. People are not going to want to hit that. And so even though, even though it is, it is soft, but people It looks scary. And so I use that post to build protected intersections where bikes cross in two stages. And what that means is, instead of a bike having to who wants to make a left turn and having to weave over multiple lanes of traffic to get the left of the pocket, they cross in two stages, like a pedestrian. And that's the big change that comes with protected bike lanes, is you're in a protected area. How are you going to get to make a left turn? You cross over one leg and you cross over the other leg. And a lot of cyclists, especially avid cyclists, they were like, no, we want to ride with traffic, but that precludes a lot of people. That precludes children, the elderly, a lot of people, everybody who doesn't want to ride in lycra, you know, with traffic, you know, it precludes people from getting to work. And so I knew that if our goal was to reduce BMT, if our goal was to change how people go use the facilities, you should be able to trust your child or your grandma to be able to ride in this facility. And so that's where I felt that if we do these paint and post, we can get it done, we can hear feedback from drivers, we can change it and tweak it. And I'm proud to say, almost all the intersections that I've worked on have stayed out there the exact same way, and it's very normalized. Yeah,
Tiffany Owens Reed 29:02
that'd be something to feel really proud of looking back. Yeah, we'll talk more about about your kind of trajectory and what you're doing now in a bit, but you're leading a session at the National gathering on quick build, and I I'm planning on attending, so I'm really excited to learn more about all of this. But for our listeners, maybe some of them who can't make it to the gathering, I'm just curious if you could share maybe, like one I don't know, like practical suggestion for someone who's listening to this and they're thinking, Man, how can I bring quick build to my city? How can I help my city see the value of testing an idea of just putting something down that's cheap and temporary. Maybe you could just give some suggestions on, like, here's who you should talk to, you know. And even, like, maybe one strategy, like, what you said about, you know, not putting things back in kind or or even just understanding, like, well, you need to sync it up to when that street is going to get repairs anyway. That can make it a little bit easier to get your idea through. So maybe if you could just kind of give, like, maybe one suggestion, or maybe one or two suggestions to someone who wants to see that in their town, but they're not sure who to talk to, where to start,
Vignesh Swaminathan 30:11
sure. So, as you know, in strong towns, it takes a takes a village. It takes everybody to to build something, and everybody's got different priorities, from the business owner to the fire department to your city engineers, and you have to try to find a solution that can match everybody's priorities. And I truly believe that build is that solution, or is one of the major solutions for this? And I'm going to go back to some things I talked about, about objectives and constraints. You know, for a city staff, they're like, oh my god, I have to widen the road. That's so much drainage work, so much civil work, I have to change flow lines. Well, quick build puts out that constraint, you know, and you're like, Okay, I'm already spending so much money on paving the project. That's part of our annual plan. Well, quick build solves that. You're doing the same thing. They're almost the same cost with paint and post. And then the other constraint that so that solves the city staff. The other constraint is, who uses the facility lot? People don't know this, but most of our curb lines are designed for not only large trucks, but for emergency vehicles. And so we have to plan for that. And so emergency vehicles, their budgets are based on response time. And so when you put in a protected bike lane, they're start to freak out. They're like, hey, the whole point of the bike lane is a bike lane is just a shoulder. It's not really a facility. It's exclusive to bikes. And during an emergency, the cars will pull over into that shoulder, and so you have to communicate to your fire department about how this is going to work. And some cycle advocates may hate this, but I've planned a lot of my protected bike lanes so that an emergency vehicle couldn't ride through and mow down the posts with during an emergency they created their own express lane to get to where they need to go. And this is, I think, is practical, because it's easier for a cyclist or pedestrian to get out of the way than something in a full car in traffic. And so talking to your fire department is really critical when delivering quick build projects to to ensure that it that it's it's still the roads are still used, used by using the same way that they are used right now. The other thing with Quick Build is that it's a form of community outreach. Is they call it now. Nowadays they call the grants demonstration projects, and you'll see federal grants for demonstration projects. That word wasn't there when we started talking about this stuff. And demonstration projects are saying, you put something out there, you use it to get feedback, and you help use that to help get more money to do something even bigger and quick build is the first step of seeing if people will actually use the facilities. That way getting your community to understand that the city is trying to have a change and use and as an opportunity to put in a lot of fun stuff, our events, street street closures, and people talk about it, and it helps start the conversation. Because when you put something out there, and you have everybody driving past, average traffic during like in a busy area is 10,000 vehicles per lane per day, you know. And so you got 10,000 people driving past free advertising for a new concept and then, and that way you can help start the conversation. So what I'll be talking about in my in my session, is kind of the reasons we do quick build, some of the issues and people that we have to talk to, and the next steps of after quick build. So how do you get to that stage where you took up some real estate, and what are you going to do after you take that real estate, and how we start getting to curbs, and how we starting to deal with snow and drainage and other other constraints that are stuff, some of the stuff that city staff is worried about with these new concepts,
Tiffany Owens Reed 33:37
I think having that approach, I suspect It takes more work on the front end to do that kind of research, to take the time to understand things like draining or how this would affect, you know, the fire department's budget, some maybe some of those more nitty gritty or technical aspects. But I have a hunch that if you went into a meeting with, you know, a city staffer, or a few city staffers, and you could already articulate your idea and language that they understood with respect to their constraints and their incentives and their goals. I have a hunch that would make it a lot. I don't know if it make it easier, but I feel like there would be a greater level of appreciation that you're able to situate an idea within the specifics of what each department kind of has to think about and work with. So I just, I appreciate your emphasis on taking the time to understand not just who you need to speak to, but what are the constraints that they're working with and what are their overall goals. So in the middle of this, like really interesting professional journey you've been on, you found yourself starting a Tiktok channel. Can you tell us what inspired that idea and what you were hoping to accomplish at the time, and what you're still hoping to accomplish as you continue to make content there? Yeah. Yeah,
Vignesh Swaminathan 35:00
sure. So originally it started off being, I want to share what we're doing, and that's because Google Maps isn't updated as regularly as frequency as people, as other planners and engineers needed to. I A lot of times when I was speaking at conferences and sharing what we were doing, was the first time that people have seen that, and I'd be like, I've been seeing this for years. We've been working on this for a while, but Google Maps only updates every few years, and so people were couldn't see and look at what we were doing. And so I could share images or at conferences. But Tiktok was a way of me sharing a video. It also was a way for me to share it and convince the public, because that's really who we're trying to convince. You know, engineers can look up manual look up manuals. They can call up somebody in a different city and say, Hey, do you have your as built? I want to study them. And everyone's willing to share, because everybody has the same goals. But how do you convince the community of this kind of stuff? And so vertical video on your phone when people are scrolling through many, many different things, is a really useful way of being able to show the POV of people's lives. And what I did is I showed how people use these facilities and will use these facilities from their view angle, so the camera is at an eye level height. Sometimes I'll stand in the middle of the lane and show what it's going to look like for a driver, how they're going to turn their neck and check, and how the blind spots are reduced when we do protected intersections. And I would walk around an intersection and I would point and show a lot of times, when you go to community meetings, they show plan new diagrams of what the road looks like. And not everybody is scrolling through Google Maps like you and me and other people who are who nerd out of this kind of stuff. A lot of most people just drive around, and then they just react. And so showing it from that point of view is really important to share with the community. I remember being community, having community meetings, and talking about the goals and the plan and showing a diagram of what we're talking about. I remember this lady pointing out to me, and she was very intrigued, but she was interested in what we're talking about, and she was like, so where's the big tree? And I had to point it out to it. And she was like, Oh, now, I now understand what we're talking about. And that really was struck me as being like, hey, these planner diagrams aren't really for everybody. And so I was original goal. Um, I never had much social media before tick tock. And so I jumped on, kind of just figured out how tick tock works, figure out the algorithm. Algorithm work with music and sounds. I have a time of a huge Hip Hop head, and I love seeing everybody have fun on tick tock. And I first jumped into that, and I realized I could use it for my work. And so I started to show show people the type of work that I was doing, and my perspective with doing it. I also had a little bit of freedom, because I was running my own firm at own firm at the time, and so I was had some more room to experiment. And it got it got a lot of interest, because actually, everybody's really interested in their infrastructure. It was also, honestly a channel for me to a way for me to channel my energy and thinking about this infrastructure instead of bugging my friends and family. And so the algorithm with the social media will find the right people to you, find people that are interested in what you're talking about. The algorithm is based on watch time. So if somebody's watching your videos for a long period of time, it'll help bring people who also watch that type of content, and kind of helps build that audience. And so urbanism and talking to that in simple words without complex jargon, in less than a minute. There's so much more than coming to a community meeting or sitting for hours in a council meeting and like listening to people talk, and if I can explain something really complex with the experience that I have in less than a minute, that's what does well on Tiktok. If you notice, a lot of the people on Tiktok are your doctors, lawyers, people who are professionals, and they explain their complex profession in a minute. And that's what I did with civil engineering and urban planning, and that really helped bring a lot of people into the fold, a lot of people interested in what we're talking about, and I made it understandable to people. So when people drive around, they start to think about what they saw online and realize that's the reasons why we do the things we do. And I joke with people, it's kind of like a new updates to the map of a video game of life, you know? And like, if people see these updates, they wonder why, why it's happening. And this is a reasoning way that they can be involved with that conversation.
Tiffany Owens Reed 39:22
Yeah. So, speaking of that, I'm just curious, what are your thoughts on how you think we can effectively help people who are consuming the content to actually move into a more active role within their communities, like showing showing up to the conversations and the community meetings and all, you know, all the quote, unquote boring stuff. What do you think? What do you think could help? Because I feel like there was, I feel like content like yours was helping bridge the knowledge gap. But now I feel like we have to bridge the action gap. You know, I feel like more and more people are finding content like yours or not. Just bikes or streetcraft or, you know, Justine's content or Rachel's content. You know, they're finding the channels, and they're finding and it's getting, I feel like it's getting more saturated, but I still think there's still a question of like, okay, well, how do we translate that audience into people who are starting to pay attention to their communities and figure out ways that they can take what they've learned and begin to advocate where they live. What are your thoughts on how we can help bridge that, that gap as well? Sure.
Vignesh Swaminathan 40:28
So nowadays, after COVID, we're in a very digital age, so people have access to zoom meetings for council meetings, there's public participation, but people also to understand how city councils and commissions work and how to follow agenda items all the way through the process. And that's difficult, but it is. It is one of the best avenues to to follow a project and follow something through the process, is figuring out when it's talked about in the commission meeting, and as it progresses up to council, hearing, going and speaking or going and listening about that. That's one way. The other way is our new digital world, where we have access to technology wherever we go, I found more people coming to a community meeting and more public participation from a QR code on a lawn sign than actually the mailers and the outreach that we do. Typically supposed to send mailers 500 feet from the project, sometimes 100 feet from the project, sometimes project, sometimes. But the amount of people that actually will go scan a QR code and give the response is fast, so much larger than the typical outreach way we do outreach, having community meetings at times that are more accessible to people in the evenings, where there's multiple languages being translated, whether it's daycare, so people can bring their kids
Tiffany Owens Reed 41:45
about to say, childcare, that's why I can't really go to them that much. Yeah,
Vignesh Swaminathan 41:50
the things that hold people back go to food, maybe a raffle, maybe even an opportunity to talk about things that are not even on the topic of the meeting, because people are just upset. And creating more access to that is really, really important, getting the community involved. And I think the last thing that I'll say to that is that people are upset, and people generally don't know the right jargon and how to participate. They go to a meeting and they talk all fancy and so trying to simplify that jargon through social media will help educate people in a way that they can participate. Even I would all my experience, I sometimes will go try to figure out a way of how to how to explain something to somebody who does not know anything about this topic, or I'll even ask AI to tell me, explain to me like I'm five, you know, so I can understand that concept. And that's really critical to to being able to be fully thorough in a topic. If I can explain something to somebody in a way that they can understand it. I chose that I know what I'm talking about. Different audiences, yeah.
Tiffany Owens Reed 43:05
Um, so let's, let's go back to um, kind of this journey you've been on professionally. As I mentioned in your introduction, you're now at kimley horn leading a department there in San Jose. Can you share a little bit about that role and what you're hoping to accomplish in this capacity?
Vignesh Swaminathan 43:29
Sure, I had a bit of a stint before killing horn, and I'll talk about that real quick. Is I kind of left the industry, and I said, I've done my part. I've done a lot of this industry. It's going in the right direction. There's not much more I can do in terms of protected bike lanes that I want to lanes. And I wanted to see something different. And so I went to go work for the boring company in Las Vegas, working on tunnels and and wanted to see what they were about. And it was very interesting company to work for. They are trying to solve traffic in their own way. Do I necessarily agree with the way they're doing it? Not so much. But what I thought was really cool is, is them being able to deal with a new dimension of going underground, and how those tunnels can be used for bikeways and infrastructure in different ways, storm sewer, and also what they're doing in moving people. With Teslas, they're able to move a lot of people every day. It's very, very it's a very efficient system. It is it great to have the private sector as involved in the in in this, not so much, because they're not actually trying to solve equity and our community problems. They're just trying to move more people where they can spend more money, which is the original goals, parking. And so I wanted to see that study. That was another journey on my way of of seeing what, what industries that I don't necessarily agree with to are doing, and how can I steer that in a way. And after seeing that, and seeing how the private sector really pushes it with compared to consultants that are working with the city, it's how somebody else is trying to. Relate to city. After seeing that, it was really valuable for me to say, hey, I want to come back to an industry that kind of does it all. Kimberly horn is a very large firm, and they do a lot of different types of projects. Originally was a traffic engineering firm that has grown into doing roadway, civil, solar and a lot of development work. They build a lot of housing and a lot of commercial areas, and every office is slightly different because it's large company, but with being here in San Jose, I'm able to grow practice doing things I love and meeting the goals that I've always had, and they've been very supportive in that. And so what I'm working on in San Jose is how to deal with the next step of protected intersections is, how do we get bikeways and safe streets to work across tough barriers, creeks, highway interchanges, bridges, across freeways? These are the things that separate neighborhoods, but from equity and equity perspective and even an access perspective. And how can I work on that type of work? And I've been doing working with developers on their developments, putting in protected bike lanes and ways for people to bike through developments, allowing access for people to not have to go up to an intersection and walk back perpendicularly. They can actually bike through at an angle, which is their desire line. I'm able to work on how to get bikeways across freeway interchanges, either in a separate path that's totally separate from track, from Highway ramps, or sometimes the tough thing of dealing with bikeways going across highway ramps. And it's been, it's been a great experience being here, and I'm able to work on much larger projects, and Caltrans work, and Caltrans has a lot of the same goals now that they've grown into over the last 1020, years, in how to get access across their freeway interchanges. Everybody's on the VMT train, everybody's trying to improve transit. And what I'm doing here is I'm taking a lot of the quick build projects that I've worked on. Are cities that wanted to do quick build, but never, never, were on that wave. And how are they getting raised protected curb, protected bike lanes and inter checks and intersections through their city? And how do they meet their VMT and housing goals? And it's been, it's been kind of coming full circle, coming back to the consulting room or working for highway consultant, but now everybody's drank the Kool Aid. Everybody sees the goals, and now we're building out this debate area to the next phase. And so now I'm working on a lot more heavy duty projects, both quick projects that are in quick turnaround, but using a lot of civil work, some paint and post projects. But a lot of the work I'm working on now is some of the slower projects that frustrated me before, but I'm able to steer it the right way within you, with the right objectives and constraints, and actually make sure that we're getting it through the Caltrans process, through the environmental impact reports, and we're able to take the master plans and actually build them out in a way that is That solves the goals of our community here, I
Tiffany Owens Reed 48:02
find that really interesting that you get to work on these more connective projects, thinking specifically about helping people get across highways and stuff like that, because I find that the perceived connection, connectivity of the fabric of a city is one of the biggest determinants as to whether or not people will bike or walk like I think infrastructure is really important, and maybe things like shade or just comfort and beauty. But I've been thinking about this lately, and I realized I was like, if your mind thinks of gaps in the fabric where it doesn't know if, if you'll be able to cross that street, or if there's this one random intersection that just feels really unsafe, even if there's technically a bike like those points of connection can be so critical to how our brain perceives the landscape, and so critical to informing the mobility transport, like the mobility decision that we make. You know, I think about this because, like for instance, I live pretty close to a friend here, but she's not even I'm pretty sure it's like less than a mile away, but when I think about it on even, like a subconscious level, like the way that that route lights up for me is so a kind of dangerous, but just disconnected, that I never walk it, and I never would Walk it with my child, right? So I don't know. I just find that very interesting that you that you get to focus on, like these connective junk, this connective intersection, to really think about, how do we keep the fabric? How do we stitch the fabric back together? So that when someone is thinking about maybe I'll bike to work that day, or thinking about their commute on their bike, it kind of lights up as more attractive because you're getting rid of some of those gaps, some of those holes in the cloth, so to speak.
Vignesh Swaminathan 49:50
Yeah, 100% and that's my goal from day one. And I'm very happy and proud that I get to work on that right now. As you said very well, the main reason that pulls people back from bike. Into a certain location is maybe the one intersection or one crossing that's just really, really tough. And kind of the problem that kind of comes from the problem of, honestly, bike master plans that have been happening, you know, bike master plans will say, we want to put this bike route. They'll have a big, thick line with a big, thick number on big lines. It'll be like, Hey, this is where we want to do that. There'll be a ribbon cutting ceremony saying, Hey, we did so many miles, but every intersection is tough. Are these tough intersections of what's holding back? And so working on focusing on intersections has been like the spine of my career, and and those details are only solved when you get to the standard detail level, you get to the standard specs level, you get to the intersection of signal timing level, and that's not really solved in the master plan and and in the fact that I get to focus on that is being really fruitful. And even though it may be slower, even though there's a lot more parties involved, even though there's different right of way and there's different goals, you're talking to the traffic department. You're talking to the traffic engineers, you're talking to public works, you're talking to transportation, you're talking to planning, you're talking to the state government or the county that owns different roads. Sometimes property lines go through intersections, and that intersection has been ignored by everybody, because the different jurisdictions just be like, that's on the edge of our our area, and that's just not the area that we want to we don't know who's going to actually do it. I'm able to solve those problems by bringing everybody together. And at the end of the day, intersection design for bike and pedestrina is about, do I know where to wait? Am I comfortable where where I want to wait and when I cross? Am I? Is other people going to cross me? You know? And if I can solve those problems in a way that's very, very understandable, explain it to the community, it's very, very It provides so much more access. I'm actually big fan of, kind of sometimes leaving the segments as bike lanes, where they are right now, and just solving the intersections, and I've done it a few times whether, but the bike lane stays where it is, the parking is still next to the curb, but at the intersection, the bikeway comes up against the curb and the protected intersection is there. And that doesn't solve what the council members want to be part of saying that we did so many miles and we cut the ribbon right that, but that's actually solves where the crashes happen. As we know, most crashes happen between bike and pedestrian and cars. Is when turning vehicles cross bikes and pedestrians, and happens both for the right turn the left turn coming. And I'm sure everybody who's listening has been to this where they're crossing an intersection and they suddenly are shocked by somebody trying to make a right turn, and they cross a little bit more, and they're suddenly shocked by somebody trying to make a left turn while they're crossing. And that's what's scary. This is what happens at all of our intersections. We can solve that with signal timing, with geometry, and it really, really makes a huge difference. And I'm solving it with a geometry because that's very intuitive to people, because so having to what someone's not paying attention to a light, they're gonna go through it, you know. But if you saw with geometry, they're about to hit something, and so they're gonna pay attention a lot more.
Tiffany Owens Reed 53:12
Yeah. Sorry, I didn't mean to butt in there. But what you're talking about with that weird triple signal situation, a left or right and a pedestrian, it just blows my mind, how this even exists. Just has anyone existed? Has anyone responsible for this existed outside of a car? But yeah, I think you're right that like focusing on this, on those intersections, that it really is important, because I don't get to bike commute as much. But I remember when I when I did bike more, you know, the anxiety would just go up the closer you're getting to those intersections, right, because of the uncertainty or the unpredictability. Or am I going to be respected as a participant here? Or are people just going to ignore me and only focus on the cars and is infrastructure going to end? Or is it just, is it going to vanish and then reappear later. So I think you're right that like putting energy on the intersections and really thinking about, Hey, how can we reduce uncertainty for everyone involved while still preserving, you know, a generally pleasant experience, even for drivers. You know, it's not saying that it needs to be miserable just because you're in a car. I think, I think there are ways to make it more frictionless and less less unpredictable for everybody. I wanted to just ask one last question about kind of your your content work. I've seen a little bit of what you've posted, and I appreciate how it's so specific, because I think this is one that you're getting at with how you know, the master plans are in the big ideas can only carry you so far, right? Like, the idea of multimodal transit is great, but that can only carry you so far. The idea of a bike lane is great, but that can only carry you so far. At some point you have, like, what you're saying, you have to get outside the master plan and become extremely specific about. About your local context, about a specific intersection, and walk around and notice what's happening there, and take notes on the activities and the friction point. So I'm just curious, like, what are you hoping that people watching your content, what they're how they're able to like, translate that in their specific context? Because I feel like that's one of the unique things about what the content that you make is that it is so specific. And I feel like that can really empower people to, like, go to city council meetings, or go to meetings and conversations and say like, Hey, come look at this one specific Street, and look at this one specific problem and actually have a productive conversation about it. I'm just curious what you would say to that, or kind of how you think about like, I hope someone watching this. What are you hoping that that translates into, in terms of action?
Vignesh Swaminathan 55:48
I think what I'm hoping for is that when people see my content and the roads that I've worked on, they see that somebody else is doing this and it's solving the problems, and this could happen in their own community. One thing that I haven't made a lot of content of is bad intersections, and what's makes them bad. I've done a lot of showing off the intersections that I've worked on and how to solve the problems, but I haven't done a lot of like, this is this is just bad. These are the reasons they're bad, I think for two reasons. One, as a consultant, I don't want to talk too bad about any specific client. And then the other is that, am I really showing anybody anything, if I'm just beating my chest about us, about a problem, you know? And I wanted to focus on solutions, and so I've really shown people that solutions can work, and this is how they work, and this is kind of the compromises or the benefits of these different solutions and and how they came about when, and I hope to inspire city staff and communities to kind of advocate for that, and I hope to inspire, or hope to show and teach how the steps to towards getting there. And that steps is a holistic approach, but the other day, it comes down to the details of how we cat up plans and how we work through our intersections and we still meet our objectives and constraints, both with would actually making a difference, and I made it In a way that doesn't make me a scary person who's what be behind the desk of a city, city, staff or commission. I make me just be like you. I'm also in the community with you. I'm interact with the facilities the same way you are. I may be in a suit, riding a bike everywhere, but that's not crazy. You could still do that and and I'm just a person like you who's part of the your same fabric of your of your society, but also fighting and making this change. And I hope to inspire other people who feel like, Hey, you're not as you're not a small voice in this, you know, people don't realize that the loudest person in the room, the squeaky wheel, gets the grease at a lot of time at City. And if I can make everybody squeaky, you know, then we just really start making this
Tiffany Owens Reed 58:04
stuff work. That's a great quote. Okay, well, this has been fantastic. I'm really glad we were able to have this conversation before the gathering in closing, can you tell us a little bit about the city where you're based? What do you love about it, and what are some local spots you like to recommend people check out to get a slice of local life?
Vignesh Swaminathan 58:22
Sure. Um, so I'm based in San Jose, California. I've been living in a downtown area for most of my my life, around half my life, and it's it's really been an area of innovation. San Jose calls itself the capital of Silicon Valley because we have a lot of new tech and new ideas, and people really try to push things forwards. Being the capital of the Silicon Valley, we have a lot of the world's problems first and the worst, income inequality. We have people totally disconnected and behind a computer all day. We have people that are really fighting for change. We have a very driver centric area, but it was really being changing here this San Jose is one of the only cities in the country, and I'm proud to say I was part of it that brought that. When the scooters came out into down into the city, they never got rid of them. They kept them there the whole time because we built infrastructure for them, right when they started to come and work and function well, and they still there, and everybody uses them. And so it's a very, very unique place. When people come out here, I recommend to check out the downtown, see the infrastructure that we built and how people use it. I recommend they go to Fremont, which is a suburban area that has built out this infrastructure as well. Fremont has really been progressing in inputting print protective bike ways. They've used traffic engineering and to make Fremont. And I'm proud to say that I think the public works director has done a great job of making it it's rated the happiest place in the country because it has the most amount of parks, it has the most amount of access and. And people can get anywhere and be in the city, and it's a great place to raise a family. So I'd recommend people check out Fremont. I also recommend people to check out some of these really fancy tech campuses that we have here that's kind of a tourist attraction. Sometimes we have a lot of good protected bikeways around the tech campuses. They have really interesting architecture, and it's really been something that's been the fabric of this area as much as we love or hate them. They've really been, really been a big part of of this area. I'd recommend going into shoreline and Boulevard area and checking out the Google campuses. They have a lot of bike ways around there, and they've done a good job of building up the infrastructure for their employees, not for everybody, because not everybody work lives and works out there, but it's a way for them to reduce the amount of EMT for their new developments. And then I recommend people take the train. Cal train has one, become one, a very, very efficient system. It's one of the first electrified trains. It's really fast to get up and down from San Francisco and San Jose, and it's got Wi Fi and plugs, and it's clean and it's safe. I reckon people check that out. And when you come up here, you always get a check on San Francisco. San Francisco is one of the cities that has been dealing with infrastructure in a boat by a topographical perspective of being very steep, and also just from some of it societal issues that they're trying to work through, and they have good bike infrastructure and beautiful areas. Check out both combination of of the nature at the Presidio and dense urban urban life. So I recommend people check that out. Do you have a favorite,
Tiffany Owens Reed 1:01:37
like cafe or lunch spot, or I feel like in
Vignesh Swaminathan 1:01:43
downtown Jose, I recommend people check out San Pedro square, because everybody says that it's kind of definition of of what I say, how development and density happens to take an old warehouse and made it into a hipster food court and into tall buildings. And so I recommend people check out San Pedro square, and people check out our Big Trail network. We have a very large trail network of of of of spokes that take people from the hills, and they follow the creeks and get towards the bay. And there's a trail all the way around the bay, called the bay trail, and so you can ride around the bay, have sea across the bay, and then ride back into the city following these creeks. Um, we're blessed that we're in a pretty flat area, so we able to build a lot of this infrastructure and make it accessible. It's very large city. Um, but a lot of the transit and bikeways come to the downtown and leave from the downtown, yeah, and so I think there's a lot of potential out here for more, and it keeps the work exciting. All right. Well,
Tiffany Owens Reed 1:02:50
again, thank you so much for coming on to share your story and your insights with us. I know that I learned a lot, and I'm excited to learn more at your session, at the National gathering, if you're listening to this, thank you for joining us for another episode. I'll put all the links to everything in our show notes. If you're coming to the national gathering, please consider checking out our panel, or at least popping in to say hello. And If there's someone in your community who you think would make a great guest for this show, please let us know using the suggested guest form that we always include in the show notes. I'll be back soon with another conversation. In the meantime, 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.