Will This Transportation System Be More Popular Than Cars?
Jeral Poskey is the founder and CEO of Swyft Cities, a California-based tech company that’s spearheading a totally new transportation system. Jeral explains his unique approach to creating realistic transportation innovations. He describes the transportation system Swyft Cities has created and how it could address the issues that many cities face — like traffic, land wasted on parking, and difficulty with infill development.
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Tiffany Owens Reed 0:00
Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. I'm your host, Tiffany. I'm a writer at Strong Towns, and it's my honor to host this show where I get to bring on people from such a wide range of backgrounds, experiences, and industries to share how they are helping advance innovative solutions and helping improve their communities from the bottom up in a truly organic fashion. In today's episode, we'll delve into the world of transportation innovation. If you're part of the Strong Towns movement, then you know that we're always seeking to advance and amplify conversations and reforms around street safety, reduced highway expansions and greater investment in alternative modes of transportation. It can be easy to be really discouraged and overwhelmed when thinking about how to fix some of our city's biggest transportation problems, because they seem so complicated. Given the extent to which our cities seem locked in car dependence, sometimes it can feel nearly impossible to envision a different future. Well, in today's conversation, I'm going to speak with someone who loves not only thinking about this complex challenge, but who is able to see it as an invitation to radical creativity, and who is helping create a truly interesting solution to the problem of car dependence in our cities. Jeral Poskey is founder and CEO of Swyft Cities, a California based tech company spearheading a totally new transportation technology in partnership with the New Zealand-based company Holmes Solutions. Prior to founding Swyft Cities, Jeral was a project executive for transportation planning and real estate development at Google. In today's conversation, we're going to be talking about his story and his fascination with transportation; a little bit of his professional background and what he's working on at Swyft; and we're going to have a lot of fun talking about what this transportation innovation looks like. Jeral, welcome to The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast.
Jeral Poskey 2:00
Thanks, Tiffany, it is great to be here.
Tiffany Owens Reed 2:02
I am really looking forward to our conversation. To kick things off, could you please share with us a little bit about your fascination with transportation and how that has evolved over the years?
Jeral Poskey 2:15
Yeah, it's funny. I was one of those kids who was into trains. I still have my first grade transportation booklet I created by cutting pictures out of a magazine. It was like everything about me, but I always thought it was more of a hobby. So when I went to college undergrad, I would sign up for urban planning courses so you could buy the course pack. You had to be in the course to buy the course pack. Then I would drop the class and go back to my other classes, but I would study the course pack because it was what I was interested in. But I didn't think of it as my career. I went to grad school, and I would take time away from grad school to go to transportation conferences. I got my first job, I would take vacation days to go to transportation conferences. And eventually the light bulb went off. Maybe I should be doing transportation.
Tiffany Owens Reed 2:59
That is so interesting. My son right now, he's almost two, and he's fascinated with every form of transportation. So I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that this is the beginning to a career and transportation innovation. Hopefully it's not the beginning to a fascination with pickup trucks, but I'm trying to just not take it too seriously. I'm like, he's barely two, we'll be okay. It's okay if he's identifying every pickup truck he sees in Texas. That's a really interesting story. I'm just curious, why did you not think of it as a career from the start? What were you planning on going into?
Jeral Poskey 3:38
A PhD program in economics was what I studied first after undergrad. That was where my brain had been. I was going to be a professor of economics. I like optimization. I like math. It seemed to bring all those things together. And transportation was just not where my thought process was.
Tiffany Owens Reed 3:57
So can you share with us about maybe, did those worlds collide? Was there a point where you realized that you didn't have to be either or? Or maybe your background in economics helped give you an interesting perspective on transportation, and what was that like?
Jeral Poskey 4:08
Yes, I think it led to what I call a career web instead of a career ladder. I did not just get in a profession and go straight along the typical path. I was in politics, I was in tech, I was in real estate, and all of those coming together just brings perspectives that I never would have gotten had I followed a traditional path. I think one of the key parts was choosing to go back to school. It made me make a decision of, was I going to go back to engineering school? Which was the plan. I think that's what I wasn't fascinated about before in transportation, that the path forward was civil engineering or maybe transportation engineering, if that was offered. Those parts weren't the part that interested me the most. I was into new, experimental, cutting edge transportation, and I was already active in the industry. I was with some industry organizations. My thought process was that there's lots of engineers with these ideas, and the world is not short one engineer. It's not one more engineer that's going to make a difference. None of them are approaching it with the business perspective of how this actually gets implemented. How do you bring this idea into the real world, through all the obstacles that are there to go from zero to 100% of a working product? And so I went to business school at Stanford, and that was an era when there were no transportation people in business schools. That was a different world. It was all engineering. And so a business perspective was what I wanted to bring into the transportation world. So that was the approach.
Jeral Poskey 4:56
I want to give you a chance to nerd out a little bit. When I was in college, I tried to take as many economics classes as I could, and I find it to be such a helpful framework for thinking about cities and so many of the challenges that we're facing. How does your background in economics help you think about transportation in general? Like, where is that overlap that gets you really excited when you're thinking about these challenges?
Jeral Poskey 5:26
Yeah, two areas in particular. One being that a lot of economics is about optimization, finding the maximum of a curve or the minimum of a curve, or just more generally, at concept level, how do you get the most benefit or the reduced cost? And then there's an element that says that can all be reduced to equations, which makes it more similar to the transportation world or the engineering world. It's not philosophy, it has math behind it. So what I got excited about was that economics allows you to optimize lots of things. And, you know, I remember a conversation I had with a woman on a bus. I'm from a small town where everybody knows everybody. So I'm in a city going to college, and I think it's my job to talk to the people around me. And between my my poor Spanish and her poor English, I'm learning that she's taking that bus to her job in South Austin, and I'm doing the math like, you have to change busses at least once, probably twice. You know, she's spending an hour and a half to get to work. And then she tells me that's her first job, and she has her second job. And like, okay, she's spending two and a half hours a day in transportation. That is not optimal. That's not optimal for her. That's not optimal for our economy, that people are wasting that much time. A hard working person who's willing to work two jobs, that much productivity just goes out the window. So I think whether you're optimizing dollars and cents or you're optimizing someone's life or the economy, that's what economics brings to the world of transportation.
Tiffany Owens Reed 7:47
I will refrain from going further down this fun rabbit trail, because I think there's so many interesting ideas and what you were just explaining. It just makes me wonder, like, What would change in how we think about cities, and how we talk about cities and so many of our challenges if we were able to apply some of those frameworks, I guess you could say, from the world of economics. But I would like to get back to your story, and I'm going to ask if you can bridge the gap first, or continue the story of your professional journey and how that brought you to Google. And can you share about how that led you to starting Swyft Cities?
Jeral Poskey 8:22
After getting my MBA, I went to my dream job, which was a transportation startup making small, lightweight monorails. Similar to what we ended up with, but 20 years earlier in time. It's a grind. Startups are tough. Being in the startup is hard. I was doing that for three years, and then when I took a break from that, I wanted something calm and normal. Google in 2006 was, compared to a startup, relatively calm and normal. But that was the go-go, high-growth, sort of Google at its experimental peak. So I started there as managing data analytics teams based on my economics background. But pretty quickly, people discovered my real passion and background, and I moved over into the real estate team, where the goal was to minimize the amount we're having to spend on transportation. How do you give people a great experience getting to work and not have to build acres of surface parking or hundreds of millions of dollars of parking garages. And how do you make a better environment that's not focused around the car? I will say that I had been at a startup, I had been trying to sell a mass transit system before. In the very first meeting I had at Google with a new startup company, within the first two minutes, I realized everything I had done wrong before. Now I was on the customer side of the table. Now I'm seeing it from a whole new perspective. So now being on the inside and seeing this is how it adds value. This is how you can cut the cost of parking. This is how you can add real estate value. This is all the red tape you have to be terrified about that means you may not want to get started on even a great project if you're not sure you're going to get to the end point. So just being able to see the cost, the benefits, the value, the risk, from the perspective of someone who might be a customer of an advanced transportation product that was just eye opening. And as you remember that day of like, oh, now I'm on the other side of the table. I don't care about your big vision. I care about whether you can deliver steel and concrete on time and on budget. And that makes a difference.
Jeral Poskey 8:22
So what did that ultimately lead you to next?
Jeral Poskey 9:35
Well, Google had spent years building out a terrific bus system. It had gotten an area where 95% of the people would have driven a car to work down to about 65%. So 30% of the people were taking the bus, and the value was there. Google understood that's 30% less parking you have to build. That's 30% more land that's available for better uses than parking. It's a win-win scenario. The cities like it. They're able to get more more people in an area, more tax base without having it to be wasted on parking. But basically, it had huge capture of people more than 10 miles from work, but people who are within 10 miles of the office, especially within five miles of the office. You're there. It's a 20 minute drive. Maybe it's 30, maybe it's 35 due to traffic, but compared to waiting for a bus, you're just so close to work. Some would bike,we definitely had great success with the bike. But you had a lot of other people who still weren't gonna bike and needed another way to get to work other than their car. And basically at that distances, the busses weren't competitive. They were going to be making multiple stops. They were going to be stuck in traffic, just like the car was. There was no room to add bus rapid transit lanes, and so we were stuck. And the challenge was, as the campuses were getting bigger and bigger -- at one point, the one building of the Mountain View campus to the farthest building of the Sunnyvale campus was seven miles -- things are spread out. You're trying to move people efficiently, you're wanting this great environment, and you just can't get there with cars or busses or anything on the ground. The problem was big enough and the value was there, so we were allowed to try something new. We started with three different ideas in parallel, and the one that became Swyft Cities quickly rose to the top as just the one thing that could change everything.
Jeral Poskey 9:58
I appreciate when you're talking about transportation -- and we're going to talk about this later -- how you're able to talk about it, not just in terms of mobility, but also you're able to talk about it using more complex and holistic language. I think that's accurate, and I think it's really helpful to remember that, when we're talking about transportation, we are talking about a complex challenge. It's not just mobility. It's also land value, it's also the parking side of it, right? So I think sometimes it can be, well, we want to just move around differently. Or, yeah, thinking of transportation in this oversimplified way as just movement, but I think you touched on so many other things that are related to that. And again, we'll delve into sort of this holistic nature of understanding both the challenge of transportation and also the solutions, how they also have to be holistic. So let's continue here. And I would like to ask you if you could describe the solution that you found. What was this innovation? And maybe you can describe it for our listeners. Since this is not a visual podcast, they won't actually be able to see pictures or anything like that. But yeah, walk us through the new vehicles, or the innovation that you all created. And then maybe you can tell us a little bit about how you all spun off from Google to creating Swyft Cities.
Jeral Poskey 10:23
I'll start by saying we had eight criteria that we said were going to be essential. Sustainability, low operating costs, low construction costs were three of them. But basically, the biggest important thing is to make a transportation system that people will choose to ride. So it needed to be basically faster and better than your car experience. We ended up concluding that it needed to be on demand. You didn't need to wait for it on some 20 minute schedule. It needed to be separated from the rest of traffic. It couldn't be stuck in the same traffic as everyone else. And it needed to go where you wanted it to go and not just be stuck on a single path. There was a bit more to it, but the net result was something that, for your listeners, start by picturing a ski gondola. You're in the mountains, and there's something that goes from A to B. It's on a cable, and these vehicles are pretty dumb. They just grab onto the cable, and the cable goes all day. Now be prepared to kind of undo all of that. First, don't go up the mountain. Go across a city, go across a busy office or industrial area. And number one, the cable is not moving anymore. The cable is fixed, and the vehicles are driving themselves along the cable. Number two, the vehicles aren't stuck going in a straight line. Every time they reach a post, they're able to turn, go a different direction or switch and even take a totally different line. So now the lines are interconnected. Each vehicle is operating independently and can follow a unique path. And number three, we keep the vehicles small and for your private group. So you pick the destination, your vehicle takes whatever path it needs through the system to get to the station you chose. The next vehicle behind you, different people get in, they pick a different destination, they're going to take their own unique path. Along the way, you as a rider have no stop lights, no stop signs, no traffic. You even skip all the stations in between. When you come to a station, if that's not your stop, you keep going. If it is your stop, you're going to pull off to the side. The cable brings you down to ground level. It's like a bus stop, very simple, not a big transit station. And you can have these stops really as often as you want, because they're not blocking all the other traffic. So it brings this non-stop, on-demand transit from A to B, with a great view the whole time. That finally, is something that can beat the car.
Tiffany Owens Reed 16:35
One thing you said at the beginning of that description that I think is really important to notice is how you were emphasizing that it needs to be something that a passenger would choose. And I think the way you describe how that decision making would play out is very important, because I think there are a variety of motivations for people to pick transportation other than the car, and understanding what those motivations are and kind of the thought process around transportation is so critical to actually being successful at presenting alternative modes and actually convincing people to pick them. And I think this is where your business background is really evident. And I think it can actually be really helpful to think about it from a business perspective, because people might have all kinds of intentions and motivations, but at the end of the day, we're going to make decisions based on a certain set of criteria. No matter how many good intentions we might have to not use our car or to use the bus or to use the bike, if certain criteria aren't there, it's actually very difficult to get people to push past those and to pick their ideal option. You know, it's like I would love to get around by bike in my city, or I would love to pick non-car options. But when I actually sit down and have to do the math or think about my user experience, it doesn't matter how much I want to. What matters is, is this actually feasible? Desirable? More efficient, safer, more pleasant? So your emphasis on the user experience is a critical part, in my opinion, of actually being successful at advancing alternative transportation in our cities. We have to think about it from the end user and what they're actually looking for, and make it an option that they actually want to choose, not an option that they have to feel like they're being virtuous. Make it an easy choice, not a virtuous choice.
Jeral Poskey 18:29
And there's a lot of us in the urban planning and transportation space -- and I'm reminded of one person I've had some good debates on -- who often make the mistake of planning for how people ought to behave. And one person, he was bringing great data of how just a 1/3 of a mile walk twice a day would make you healthier, save you money in the long run, and all these reasons why somebody ought to want to walk a third of a mile. And therefore we were deciding spacing between stations and that, no, no, you should make them walk longer because it's good for them. That's how people ought to behave. And of course, they're not making that connection. But so many of us in this field design for how people ought to behave, rather than just facing the reality that they want something simple. They want to get in their car, and they want to go right now, and you've got to outperform that if you're going to get them to not take their car.
Tiffany Owens Reed 19:25
I would like you to explain one feature in a little bit more detail. You explained the on-demand aspect and the custom route approach. I've looked at your website, I've listened to other podcasts, but I think it's just hitting me now, and I'm like, wow, that's really interesting. Can you explain just briefly how you figured out that feature was more efficient than having the station system, like how a subway would work?
Jeral Poskey 20:07
Yeah, it's counterintuitive. I think even in the transportation world, people focus on peak characteristics, so they say, oh, but a bus could hold 40 or 60 people. Wouldn't that be more efficient? And the answer is yes. If you're moving around a bus all day, and it's on average, carrying 40 or 60 people, that would be more efficient than moving them around five people at a time. The reality is, the bus is moving pretty much at peak demand, probably only one trip in the morning and one trip in the evening. The rest of the day, it's repeating that route over and over, and then its ridership is often around four to seven during those other times. And you look at the weight of the bus and the number of people you're moving over the course of the day, and it's not so efficient, especially in the circulator settings that we are focused on. So a long distance bus that can get on the highway and make a long trip. And trains especially. They're going longer distances, you can fill them up with people, they're actually very efficient once they're full. Great. Let's have those. And when they're running, let's keep them as full as possible. But over the course of a day, they're typically not very full. And so we can't just focus on that peak hour, that one trip where it's loaded and say, Wow, that's a really efficient system, if it also had to run mostly empty most of the day. The average capacity outside of New York City and Chicago and some other key routes, in a typical city that's considering new transportation, the smaller on-demand vehicles actually end up being more efficient over a full 24 hour day than running big vehicles around that are awesomely efficient during the peaks but woefully inefficient during the off peaks.
Tiffany Owens Reed 21:50
Helpful. Thank you for explaining that. So I want to ask you this next question, which is sort of like two questions wrapped in one. First, how would you summarize the challenges our cities are facing as it pertains to transportation? And then the second part of that question would be, how does this technology address those challenges? Can you walk us through that?
Jeral Poskey 22:18
Cities are facing a world where people have more options. Used to be either drive yourself, bus or taxi. Now there's Lyft, there's Uber, there's all sorts of things that exist or are coming very soon. The autonomous vehicles are just around the corner. We have to to face up to what that's bringing to the table. So cities are facing worse and worse traffic. Traffic is getting worse around the world. Mass transit is not growing in its share of ridership, as its share of the solution. And a lot of cities are facing financial problems, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that they have aging infrastructure that costs a lot to replace. Plus, so much of the real estate that exists in cities is dedicated to parking, and it's really not value add from a tax base. There's a set of cities these fast growing suburbs that you're familiar with. I won't call anybody out by name, because it's pretty much true for all these fast growing suburbs that are the place to be. They have built their economy on being the place of growth, being the place of new development, new offices, new housing developments. And that's great as long as that lasts. And then you find they get about 93%, has been my observation. They get about 93% built out or more, and they look and say, Wait a second, our whole city financial model is based around being new growth and new development and those big, wide streets that we built perfectly for all of this stuff. But if we're going to keep solvent, we have to find ways of bringing new people in, even when there's not new land to build on. So that means going back and having to do infill, and yet they didn't design for infill. And at that point, it's too late to say, Oh, we designed the suburb that is not fit for busses. It is not fit for trains. And now they realize, uh oh, we need something that matches our spread out pattern but responds to the fact that traffic is already dense. Nothing out there today matches what they need. And that's when they come to us and say, Hey, we've got this problem. Then it's often, usually in a small area. Hey, we're just trying to get across this this freeway, we need to connect this new area to that area, but there's no good way to do it. And that's the foot in the door. That's the starter project that we say, hey, it starts small. But after you build that, after you've solved that problem, then people see, oh, it's easy to expand. I want to go over here, next. I want to go over there, next. It doesn't require them saying, well, now we got to add a yellow line. They have to connect to the green line. Now, even as it gets bigger, you just get in a vehicle, tell it where you're going. It's going to get you straight to your destination. You don't care how big the system is if you were already getting your needs met. But, man, every time the system gets bigger, now you've got new places to go, and new people are going to be attracted to where you like to go. So as that happens in the city, you see that this can be a short term solution or a small scale solution in one area, but it can grow and expand and serve much more of my city's transportation needs.
Tiffany Owens Reed 25:30
The way you describe the problem that cities are facing is kind of grounding. In a way, there's sort of a mathematical or geometric aspect to the problem you described. There is a sense of like limitation to growth, whether that's looking at it from a land perspective, but also just the size of cars. Like there's only so much infrastructure you can build for cars before you literally don't have a city anymore. It's like, where's the end point to expanding roads and expanding highways and giving more parking? And I think that's just a really interesting way of thinking about it. Well, we only have so much land, and then we have these big machines, and they're going to take up so much space, and at a certain point, we just can't hold anymore. And so thinking about it from that perspective, makes it easier to see the people who are talking about infill and embracing new levels of density or different modes of transportation. At the end of the day, it is a numbers game. At least that's one simple way of looking at it. It's a numbers game from a geometric perspective, a mathematical perspective, but also a financial perspective. So we'll talk a little bit more about the nuances of how these solutions are playing out in some of your cases. But before we do that, can you say a little bit more about Swyft Cities. What about it makes it such a cost efficient and geometrically efficient solution for these challenges of cities running out of land, needing to infill, but they can't just keep adding in more cars. What are some of the talking points on like, why your solution can help tackle some of those specific challenges?
Jeral Poskey 27:32
The flexibility that we bring is one of the things that gives opportunity, but also controls cost. Anything that you're putting in linearly, whether it's a sidewalk or a bike lane or a bus rapid transit lane or a car expansion, you have to change every single foot of the path. Little things like adding a bike lane to a street, you have to move the curbs, which means moving the gutters, which means moving the water system underneath. Anything you do in infrastructure turns into massive projects, even if they look simple on the surface. What we do is, by being elevated and cable based, now you only have to worry about how you're impacting the ground every 300 feet or so. And we have a lot of flexibility. If you need to go 350, that's fine. If that would put you in the middle of a street, go 226. It doesn't matter structurally. You're just able to pick and choose where you put the columns, and then you stretch the cable to match. That flexibility and ability to avoid the underground obstacles gives you the ability to move faster, to avoid the really expensive places that run up costs in other projects, and overall, make the make the project faster and easier to build and at lower cost. So once you've done that, you've solved a lot of challenges. And then the flexibility of where it goes, the flexibility of adding multiple stations, of expanding the system over time. The word modular It's like Legos. Here's my poles, here's my cable. Where do I put them? How do I arrange them? How do I interconnect them? And it's just a joy to plan. It gives you a great number of options, probably more options than you had before. But they're good options to have. How many stations do I want? It's not like, ah, more stations are going to slow things down, it has to make more and more stops. These are like fun, exciting things to plan.
Tiffany Owens Reed 29:44
So you've mentioned on social media this idea that transportation drives urban form. I want to ask you to explain that a little bit. As you're having conversations with these cities, and they're bringing their needs to you, and you're kind of looking at the story of the of American urbanism and where we go from here, would you say that a city's needs determine what kind of transportation they end up with? Or would you say it's the reverse, that our transportation choices determine what kind of cities we end up with? And I guess there's two ways of looking at this. One, you could kind of take a historical approach and kind of see how our choices have got us to where we are. But I'm also curious how you think about this as an innovator, like as you're looking toward the future and the choices that we can still make now.
Jeral Poskey 30:32
I think the easy answer would be to say, Oh, it's a chicken egg problem, and shrug your shoulders and say, well, they're just interdependent. But looking back at the data, some that we're not quite ready to share, but looking at it across the world, but especially in the US, it looks like the transportation is what drives the urban form. More than 100 years ago, you built the streetcar out to the suburbs and built the suburb. It was very clear that the transportation was driving the urban form. But even in other areas where it's not so obvious. If people know a big freeway is coming, they build the types of developments that are focused around driving: strip malls and big suburban developments. If they know a train is coming, they can make different types of investments, more higher density living, whether that's townhomes or apartments, tighter commercial spaces. And it is the transportation and it's the foreshadowing of what's coming that kind of allows the two to go together. So it's a great opportunity for us. Every place we're going, people say, here's our problem. Here's seven places that are really busy in my city, and we need to connect these places across this highway. And maybe after that, phase two is like, connect these three or four more. And then somewhere along the way, the light bulb goes off and they say, Oh, wait, here's places that aren't busy today. It's not dense, it's used car lots, it's storage warehouses, it's things that really aren't adding a whole lot of value to the city's tax base. And they say, Oh, now that we've got this network that connects all of the happening places, all of the major activity centers, why don't you go over here? This would now turn into an activity center. Now that land's going to have value, now that's going to be where our future growth is. So it's almost interesting. It's funny to me to keep my smile inside and see how long it takes them to draw that conclusion on their own. But inevitably, they get there and say, Oh, first you connect what's there. You let the transportation respond to the urban form. But after that, this transportation can drive higher density, better use urban form.
Tiffany Owens Reed 32:55
The phrase transportation drives urban form is so helpful. I feel like it helps summarize something I've thought about for years, but never really had a succinct phrase for describing it. And even before you got streetcars, and even before you had mobility technology, you had walking. And that was one of the first forms of transportation that shaped and influenced and determined their urban form. And this is one of those relationships that I really, personally just want more people to understand, how the urban form and transportation go hand in hand. And I think you just said it so well. It's like, when people know the new highway is coming, it immediately unlocks a particular way of building and design. Right? It's almost like subconscious in a way. The mode of movement that you've chosen immediately tells you how to build. And I think this is one of those connections that can really help people interpret the built environment around them, when they understand it and also understand sort of the interconnectedness behind so many of the solutions that we want to see in our cities. And this might be a good place to talk about that. You're technically in the world of transportation innovation, but in a way, you see this very holistically. It's not just about transportation, right? Can you talk about what that looks like? What does it look like to take a holistic view of cities, a holistic view of transportation? You know, at Strong Towns, we're talking about parking and housing and financial accountability and bike lanes. I feel like it's easy to kind of get stuck thinking about just one of those, but in reality, they're all so connected. How do you see that? How do you articulate sort of the interconnectedness and the holistic nature of all of these issues, not only as problems, but as but but also the holistic nature of what solutions could look like?
Jeral Poskey 35:00
Yeah, I'm wanting to get pulled back into some data that I won't go deeply into, because, A) we're not ready to share, and B) this is an audio format, which is difficult. But I think I can simplify to say that the data that I'd puzzle over for years. You had to look at it just the right way and then realize, oh, it totally tells a story that's, in hindsight, almost obvious. U.S. cities are not that different from the way cities are trending around the world, but let's just assume you call them U.S. cities for now. They typically have a dense urban core, skyscrapers, and then it spreads out, and you kind of get the feeling that it would be a smooth curve. That there's this big spike in the middle, and if you just kind of use your hand to draw a slope, you would think it kind of spreads out. And what we see, well, to your first point I think we kind of all agree, when you travel to Europe, you travel other places, you know what cities you like. You know what level of density feels right. And it's not giant parking lots, and it's not skyscrapers, it's something in between. We'll call that medium density, or mid density. You kind of know that it's there. And if you then graph cities in the U.S., Canada, we've done Australia, you would think there might be a smooth curve that says there's high density areas, there's low density areas, and there's kind of a transition between. And it turns out there's this gap that's exactly in this area of mid density. And it's because -- a little bit of inference here, but allow me to kind of jump ahead in the story -- if you didn't build your transit system 100 years ago, and you don't have a place where there's lots of travel to the center, and then there's sort of medium busy stops, and there's then suburban stops to your mass transit system. If you don't have that precedent, then your city is built in one of two ways. It's either around the areas where the mass transit works. Think of the 1950s, Oh, we bring everybody from the suburbs into downtown, we built skyscrapers there, we send them out. So it's actually just either the mass transit part of the city or the car part of the city. And that mid density part that we all know we love, almost doesn't exist. It's just extremely rare in the U.S. And it's this notion to say there is not a transportation system that serves that level of density. You could not build that if everybody has to drive there and park somewhere. But it's also not really dense enough for a whole transit system to be built to support that middle level of density. That middle works only if you have a higher density with train, say, somewhere else to attract the people. So there's no mid density, mid capacity transportation system that's out there today, and that's the gap we're filling. By connecting you to that train station, by letting you get that mid density type of transportation with minimal footprint, we can fill in that gap and allow that that density. And that's not just what people love. We know that environmentally, where you want to be is not in the suburbs, but it's actually not in the skyscrapers either. They're good on what's called operational carbon, being very efficient, but the extra carbon it takes to build those offsets their good impact for decades. So you want to be in the mid density. People love the mid density. And there's not a transportation system until now that can actually make that mid density effective in places that weren't built around mass transit, you know, 200 years ago.
Tiffany Owens Reed 38:25
And I think what you're getting at with that mid density, it kind of points to the holistic approach that you're trying to take, where it's not just about solving, like what you mentioned earlier with Google, that shorter distance travel. You know, it's not just a transportation problem. This can also unlock a different approach to how we're using our land, around housing and parking and small business, real estate and everything. It really is a package deal. Like you said, transportation drives the urban form. I think, when you start diving into the specifics of the particularities of the urban form that works for this transportation solution, you find yourself unlocking much more efficient solutions to some of those other challenges as well.
Jeral Poskey 39:13
And if we can look ahead and say, The world is changing quickly, faster than it ever has, how are other forms of transportation going to change this? I think it's frightening. You look at the various the various innovations. The eVTOLs, the flying cars, that's going to make it easy to get 40 miles from a home in the distant suburbs to your office. Great. Now you have a 4000 square foot home on a half acre lot, but it also means you're driving to the grocery store. Every trip is a drive. Every trip you're now probably 10 miles outside of, even the small town that exists out there that is not the urban form. I think anybody listening to this podcast is interested in, on the other end, autonomous vehicles. Yeah, you might have been somebody who wanted to take the bus before, and maybe the autonomous vehicle is a little bit slower, but you can read, you can play video games, you can watch movies, you sleep. They are going to bring so much more traffic to our streets. Some of that's good mobility for the young, the elderly people who had other challenges of moving around in the world that's dominated by autos, but it's still more cars on the street. It kind of creates this recurring thing that says, well, once I'm in one of these, I don't really care as much how far I'm going. I'm not stressed out by traffic. I can live farther out or I didn't even mind that traffic is worse. I'll just put up with it because I'm working on my laptop during the drive. All of these other new solutions are going to make it harder for mass transit to compete, harder for smart land use to compete. And we're really going to have to be proactive to say, how do we manage that? And to go back to an economics term, tragedy of the commons. Maybe not everybody knows that. It's the notion that, I think classically, a field in the middle of the city is a place for everybody to graze their animals, and suddenly it's overused, and there's too many people all trying to graze their animals on the shared field. And now every animal is hungry. That's cars. You know, everybody would be better off ifeverybody got on the train or off the bus. But in a given day, as we said at the beginning, you're about to go to work. I don't want to wait for the bus, I'm just going to drive. And every single person is making that self interested decision, that what's right for them is to drive. It makes it harder for the bus to move, and so now it pulls more people out. And so that Tragedy of Commons is going into the next phase of transportation. Well, now it's a pain to be in any other mode, so I might as well take the autonomous vehicle. Or boy, wouldn't life be great if I live 40 miles away from everybody else on a half acre lot. How do you give people a logical choice that makes sense to get them to something they'll actually prefer? But you have to create that mechanism to allow people to choose that.
Tiffany Owens Reed 42:20
I think the other side to that as well is putting city leaders in a position to realize the implications of the technologies that they allow, and the built fabric that emerges from such technologies. And I guess this is the thing that puzzles me the most about talking about this in the context of the U.S. There just seems to be either shocking levels of ignorance, or shocking levels of avoidance and denial about even just the financial implications of some of these transportation technologies. I guess sprawl would be the best way to summarize it. And at a certain point, you kind of have to ask yourself, what will it take to help us see that there are serious threats to our long term solvency or long term ability to exist if we don't take seriously the relationship between transportation, the built urban form, and our financial sustainability? How do you wrestle with that side of it?
Jeral Poskey 43:23
I mean, I am hoping that your next guest is the person who has figured out how to communicate this. We've used the word holistic, and that's true. Things are interconnected and interrelated, and yet decision makers often at the city level and above -- you know, I think we all try to isolate things, and we try to take one decision at a time. So then they make a transportation decision, and it's just too much. Even people in this field are struggling to understand how the land use and the transportation, the housing and the the economics of it all fit together. So to ask somebody who's on a city council. Last week the sewer was the issue, next week it's something else. This week is transportation. Okay, we're going to make the transportation decision that says, oh, autonomous vehicles are coming to our city. Great. You know, bring them in. Oh, we want a place to land a flying car, that sounds fun and exciting. How to get them to realize that you're not just making a transportation decision. You're making a decision that affects your land use. You're making a decision that affects the economics of your city, your tax base for decades to come. I mean, some of these decisions will last 100 years into the future, when you pass up an opportunity that you can't get back again. I am not the one to solve the communications challenge. I wish I were. So I hope that your next guest, or the one after that, is the one who will learn, how do we communicate the holistic nature of all of these things? And I'll just say it's probably dollars and cents. There's a someone who worked, and I believe it was the city of Fate, Texas, who put them on like a 20 year budget. To where they understood that when building that new housing development, the developer will put in the utilities for free, it sounds like it sounds like such a win for the city, but 20 years from now, that's going to all need to be replaced. And how do you think about that? And how do you force a city to budget that? 20 years from now, those aren't going to be new houses anymore. They're going to be used houses, and now you're stuck with the upkeep. It's probably around the dollars and cents versions of the story and getting people to look long term and understand it's not the decision today. What is your decision doing 20 years from now?
Tiffany Owens Reed 45:33
Exactly. I think you hit it the nail on the head with that. I think it really is finding a new way to communicate that helps our decision makers take that long term perspective and really look at the big picture. Can you talk to me aboutwhat it's like to actually implement this technology that you all have designed in cities? Like, what is the context where this is working? Because I can suspect someone listening to this might be getting really excited, and maybe they're in a normal suburb and they're thinking, like, oh, this could really help some of our traffic issues. So what's the context where this is making the most sense? Is it kind of in a suburban retrofit context? Can it work there? Is it working better with like new developments that are being built from the bottom up? Is it working better more in like amenity settings at the start, kind of connecting people across like parks or shopping plazas or stuff like that? How are you navigating, sort of the potential for what it could be with the realities of how you can kind of start now in terms of the context that makes the most sense?
Jeral Poskey 46:46
I'll start with the some of our private sector customers, then get into the city and urban type issues. One of the design criteria we had at the beginning was it should be able to be built in two years or less. And that's crazy for a transportation system. But if you were thinking that your your customer is the private side, developers, even the really big ones, are pretty much doing things in two year construction chunks. If I brought you a great transportation solution that takes five years to build to your development that's going to be up and running two years from now, well, great, then I still need to build all the parking, because for the first three years, your system won't be there to solve my problem. So it had to be in this fast development mindset. So when we have done that, now we're seeing in the private sector, the interest is coming from places that typically have an entertainment component. They are ski villages. We're not trying to bring people up and down the mountains, but you're serving that that always backed up piece of traffic along the mountain road. And they need to connect these buildings that are usually on rugged terrain. Some of them have been large real estate developers who are building really large sites. Often, if you're building a big site, you've got your housing, you've got your offices, you've got entertainment, you may be building five parking places for one person to use during the day. Totally doesn't make sense. So how do I put all the parking in one place and give people an easy way to connect throughout the site? So when you're there early enough in the process, it's really easy to plan ourselves in, to get with the master planning teams and work it in. In other cases, it's similar, but it's retrofit. I have to be a bit vague on all of these, because developers want to save the big news until later. But yeah, where they're altering the site. They're adding things, and they want to add this in to an existing site. We get most excited about things that are more in the urban context. And let's start with the suburban because that's just easier. Typically wide streets, often underground utilities. There's nothing overhead to interfere with. And yet they have this need. Their finances are going to get squeezed if they don't have new development. So they have to infill. They have to bring a more interesting place. But they never designed their streets for more traffic, and they never designed around how to make busses and trains effective here. In either of those cases, it's around getting started with a particular place that you have in mind. What's your particular problem that you want solved? It's typically not more than two miles in distance in that initial spot. And then, what's your vision? In the urban context, I will say it gets more challenging. There's a lot more to squeeze in. There's a lot more constraints. And so those are going to take a little bit longer. It's a little bit harder to try something totally new when you've got all of those constraints. But universities, ski resorts, large real estate development, there's a hospital district which has more than 100,000 trips a day in this very small area that they don't have a good way to get around. They send people back to their cars to drive. When you need an X ray, you have to go somewhere else. So those types of environments that are already dense, that are already active, that have bad traffic, is typically where we're starting and then scaling from there. Like I said, people then say, oh, I want you to connect to this other interesting place. And then the light bulb goes, goes off, and they say, Oh, here's a place that's not active today that could be if we could just connect it into everything else.
Tiffany Owens Reed 50:34
Do you find when you all are designing these solutions that you need a minimum cluster of destinations for it to for it to work? What's sort of your baseline, thinking about the user experience? Is it like, we need a minimum of seven possible destinations they would want to go to within a certain radius? What's sort of the spatial planning around a minimal viable route. Does that make sense?
Jeral Poskey 51:09
Right. And every time I've tried to say, this is the typical location or typical environment, then I immediately hit an exception. I would say, from a real estate side, you're probably going to see something that's a million and a half square feet and up. That's the level where you're going to have potentially four to 5000 parking spaces. Now you've got hundreds of millions of dollars at stake. So that's one of the things you look for, is something that's of a big enough scale and spread out enough to be to be rational. But we've had a case where a hospital had a piece of land on the other side of railroad tracks that had no crossing. The pedestrian bridge to connect the two would have been $50 million. And it's just like, point. You could just go from A to B, back and forth, like an elevator, but going horizontally. Okay, that's an exception. That's not our main market, but it's a maybe, or it's a yes in their case. But I would say, typically, you're right. I mean, you kind of want three to five different stops to start. Seven would be, it would be a great number. Irvine, California, I think we're in the news now. It's 12 stops across a giant spread out Park area. Those are great starter locations, like I said. A couple of miles across is a good way to think about this. And we can worry about bigger systems and how it grows from there after you get the first part up and running.
Tiffany Owens Reed 52:38
Very cool. This is all very exciting. So I think we're going to wrap up here. I would love it if you could tell us, as we get ready to part ways, a little bit about your city, like, where are you based? And maybe we could tell us a little bit about what you love about it. And if people were coming to visit for a day trip, a couple hours. What are some local places you like to recommend people check out to get a slice of local life? Or anything related to transportation that you particularly enjoy talking about relative to your to your home base.
Jeral Poskey 53:12
Well, I am in Mountain View, California, recording from home at the moment. So I'm right here, and Mountain View is just a very easy city to get addicted to. It's got this great downtown that during covid, the streets were closed to traffic, and they have stayed closed. So you just have this wonderful area to stroll. There are dozens and dozens of restaurants of all sorts of varieties. They're affordable. We say Palo Alto, which is the next town up. That's where you go if your company is paying the bill for dinner. Mountain View is where you go if you're paying the bill for dinner. About 20 yards behind me sitting here, a new complete street is being built along California street. So by the time people get here who have listened to this, grab a bike and ride down California street to the San Antonio area. Eat and drink and dine yourself over there, and then get out to the bay trail. That's past the Googleplex, where Google's headquarters is in Mountain View. There is this wonderful trail that we can pat ourselves on the back. My team, when we were at Google, built a big, noticeable segment of that, that a connected Mountain View and Sunnyvale. But it's just a great place to get out to nature, be out there on the bay and just feel like you're away from everything in Silicon Valley for a few minutes while you're out there.
Tiffany Owens Reed 54:33
Sounds dreamy. Do you have a favorite restaurant or a favorite cafe or like, coffee shop that you like to give a shout out for?
Jeral Poskey 54:41
Oh boy, somebody's gonna kill me for not mentioning them. But it changes enough. There's churn, you know, fresh long noodles suddenly went from no restaurants to I think there's three of them in downtown Mountain View now. Boba tea is probably almost a dozen places that you could get that. So the gelato restaurant, though, the gelato store, is probably the place that has lines. Even in the winter, there's lines out the door to get gelato. It's just that that's probably the one thing that you say inevitably people are standing in line for is gelato.
Tiffany Owens Reed 55:19
Well Jeral, thank you so much for coming on the show with me and for the great conversation. We'll definitely put links to those recommendations and links to Swyft Cities and yeah, just places where people can find out more about what you're doing and see a visual version of this. But I'm very excited to keep tabs on on what you all are creating and the solutions that you're bringing to various cities. If you're listening to this, thank you so much for joining us for another conversation. I'll be back soon with another guest. And the meantime, if there's someone in your community who you think would make a great guest with the show, please nominate them using the suggested guest form in our show notes. And I hope that this conversation and all of our conversations have inspired you to realize that there's probably something that you can be contributing to your city. In that spirit, I will end, as we always do, with saying, keep doing what you can to build a strong town.
ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES
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Swyft Cities (site)
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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.