How Taking a Walk Can Make Your City Stronger
Ashley Thornton is the founder of Waco Walks, an organization devoted to promoting walkability in Waco, Texas. She was inspired to start the organization after spending a year with walking as her primary form of transportation.
Ashley and Tiffany discuss the design choices that make Waco difficult to walk in and how Waco Walks is working to change that.
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Tiffany Owens Reed 0:06
Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. I'm your host, Tiffany Owens Reed. At Strong Towns, we often say that getting involved in your community can often begin by taking really small steps. And one of the small steps you may have heard us talk about often literally involves taking steps. If you don't know, we are huge fans of taking walks, of walking our neighborhoods, walking our town, walking our city. I honestly can't think of a better way to discover your town in a new light than by lacing up your shoes and going for a walk and seeing what you notice. The simple action of walking can often become a jumping off point for the first step in the Strong Towns advocacy process, humbly observing where your community is struggling. Today's guest is a master at walking her town and using those walks to advocate for a better city. And as a special bonus, she's actually the first guest I've had on the show who is a Waco local. So this is my first local guest, which is really exciting. Ashley Thorton is a retired instructional designer and longtime resident of Waco, Texas, where she founded Waco Walks, an organization devoted to exploring Waco on foot and working to make Waco a more walkable community. She's also the founder of Act Locally Waco, a website and newsletter focused on making it easy for people to get involved in building up the Waco community. She's very active in community, and has done so much more than what I can fit into this introduction, but for now, I am excited to welcome Ashley to the show. Ashley, welcome to The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast.
Ashley Thornton 1:42
Thank you, Tiffany. I'm looking forward to this.
Tiffany Owens Reed 1:45
Can you share how you came to call Waco home? Because, if I understand correctly, you're not originally from Waco, but you have lived here for several decades. Can you tell us a little bit about that story?
Ashley Thornton 1:56
Yes. I a lot of people, if they know anything about Waco, they know that this is the home of Baylor University. I grew up a lot of different places, but I went to high school in Baytown, Texas, which is about four hours from here. But I came to Baylor as a student, met my husband here, made a lot of friends here, and then my husband and I moved to Austin for about five minutes. Could never find a lot of work there, so we moved to Houston for nine or 10 years and loved Houston. Houston is really the land of opportunity. There's a lot of fun things going on, but at some point, really kind of simultaneously, we both kind of said, you know, little bit tired of Houston, and we had good friends still in Waco, so we just brought our resumes one weekend, and then we both found jobs and moved, so the rest is history. We've been here 30 years almost.
Tiffany Owens Reed 2:50
I imagine you've really seen the city change in that time. I've only been here for five and I feel like it's still changed a lot since I've been here. What has that been like, just kind of watching the city over three decades?
Ashley Thornton 3:02
It has changed a ton. Especially if I take into account when we were students here, holy cow, it's a whole different place. But just since we've lived here, it kind of exploded, I feel like. You mentioned that I started Act Locally Waco, which I started that because back then, in 2008 when I started it, there was a lot of people who were like, oh, Waco, it's okay, but there's nothing to do here. And so I started it to help people find the things that there were here to do and ways to get involved in things to do. And then over the course of the next 10 years, it went from there's nothing to do here to, holy cow, you can't possibly do all the fun stuff there is to do here. So it's been quite a transition.
Tiffany Owens Reed 3:49
So I'm not sure exactly which year you did this. You can fill in that detail for me in your answer. But one year, you chose to make walking your main way of getting around Waco, which I know from previous conversations that you had done something similar in Houston, if I recall correctly. Can you tell us more about that? And then what inspired you to do that in Waco? and I would love it if maybe you could share a story or two from what that experience was like and what taught you.
Ashley Thornton 4:23
We started Waco Walks in October of 2016 so it was probably 2016, I guess, was the year that I did that. And people have asked me that before. I don't have a super good explanation of why I did it, except I think it was almost kind of like a spiritual yearning maybe. I've always loved to walk. I've always found walking very meditational and peaceful and something that helps me kind of get my head on straight. And so I've always kind of loved to do that, especially when I had things on my mind that I wanted to think through. Yeah, and I think that year I was just kind of figuring out what I wanted to do next. You know, I was having a lot of fun working at Baylor still, but already starting to feel the itch of, maybe I want to do something a little bit different. It was my New Year's resolution. And so it just seemed like kind of a fun new year's resolution to see if it could be done, because Waco to me, felt like a small town, coming from Houston. I thought, Gosh, I wonder if I could do that. I wonder if I could commute basically by walking and then just do as much as I could by walking. I didn't do every single thing. I didn't try going to the grocery store and stuff like that. But I walked a lot!
Tiffany Owens Reed 5:53
I was gonna ask if you could kind of give some details to like, what exactly did that involve? Was it just commuting to work on foot, or were there other places that you put on your list and then some places that you didn't try to pull off through walking? How did you break it down?
Ashley Thornton 6:08
I was working at Baylor at the time, and they have a nice parking garage. It's a university. They have all kinds of places to park. And it takes an hour to walk from my house to Baylor. And again, that didn't seem like a lot to me, because coming from Houston, that was kind of what my commute was anyway. So I didn't it did not seem unreasonable to me to spend an hour commuting by foot. And so what I would do is, on Monday, I would drive and park my car in the covered parking at Baylor. And then during the week, I would walk back and forth to home. And then I would try to do as many you know, like if I had a meeting or something like that downtown, that was pretty easy walk from Baylor, and meetings in the evenings, you know, were pretty easy. And really the only thing I didn't try was grocery store, just because I didn't have a good way to carry things and that kind of thing. So I usually would take the car for that. So I would walk everywhere during the week, and then on Fridays, I would drive my car home in case I needed it on the weekend, and then I would drive it back Monday. So that was kind of my plan.
Tiffany Owens Reed 7:20
Do you have any stories or memories that you like to share from that year, or just things that you noticed or that stood out to you in a way that you hadn't really noticed before about the city?
Ashley Thornton 7:31
Oh yeah. One story in particular that I always think about is, I went walking. You know, I was walking everywhere. And one day it rained, and I had an umbrella, which was fine, and kept most of me dry, except my shoes got soaking wet. So I had this brilliant plan that I was going to go to this little coin hop laundry that's kind of close to Baylor, and just take my shoes off and throw them in the dryer and then put them back on. You know, I thought, well, this will take like, 10 minutes. I'll put my shoes back on, then I'll go back to work. And so this particular coin op laundry is in kind of a Hispanic part of town, so all the instructions on all the machines were in Spanish, which I don't speak Spanish. And it turns out that they've invented this thing called a front loading washing machine, which I had never seen before, and so I thought it was a dryer, and I couldn't read the instructions on it, so I threw my shoes in there real quick, and I put my quarters in, I turned it on, and I watched my shoes get submerged completely in water, and then I couldn't figure out how to turn the washing machine out without the water going everywhere. So instead of being five minutes of throwing my shoes in the dryer, it was, you know, 45 minutes of washing them.
Tiffany Owens Reed 8:53
Oh my gosh.
Ashley Thornton 8:54
And meanwhile, I'm barefooted, right? I don't have any shoes. And so anyway, that was probably my most ill planned adventure. Plus, this was in the middle of the day when I was supposed to be at work. But the thing I noticed most of all, which surprised me, was that, even though I was really the only one walking, everyone else was driving mostly, how many people I ran into and had conversations with as I was walking. I'd be walking through downtown, and people would be coming in and out of a coffee shop, maybe, and I would run into them and we'd have a little conversation. Or I'd be walking past somebody's work, and they'd be coming in from their car, and we'd have a great conversation. I still try to walk quite a bit, and the other day, I walked from home to downtown, and I ran into two different people I hadn't seen in ages, and got two great hugs on my way in to have my biscuit at Whataburger. And it really surprised me how much I ran in to people and had, like unexpected little conversations and and little sparks of community. It was fun.
Tiffany Owens Reed 10:09
I did not include your deep loyalty to Whataburger and your introduction. Horrible omission.
Ashley Thornton 10:17
Yes, I'm quite notoriously devoted.
Tiffany Owens Reed 10:20
What about the built environment? What did you notice about the built environment as you were taking these walks, like what stood out to you, just as a human being, not in a car, navigating very busy, in my opinion, very busy, very dangerous, very non aesthetic streets.
Ashley Thornton 10:42
No, yeah, I think that's really true. I feel like, having done it, that you can walk just about anywhere in Waco. There's few places that you just absolutely cannot walk in the city of Waco proper. I mean, for people who don't know about Waco, there's a lot of kind of suburbs around the edge of town, and you cannot always walk from Waco out to the suburbs or anything like that. But in Waco, there's pretty much no place you can't walk. However, there are very few places where it looks safe and friendly to walk. I mean, there's not very good sidewalks. The roads are, to me, wide enough that I didn't ever feel, you know, scared, and the traffic is not super busy. But I mean, it's weirdly set up for walking and not set up for walking. Because there's an old part of town that's been here since like 1849 that is a classic old town that was totally set up for walking. It was built before there was any way to get around except for walking. And that part is set up for walking. But then I live in kind of the next ring that was built, maybe during the 20s, first founded in the 20s. And you can definitely walk from where I live into town, but it's clearly not set up for walking. So, I mean, I guess that's what I noticed, was that to me, it seems like it would be so easy to make it completely easy to walk here. But choices were made along the way not to do that.
Tiffany Owens Reed 12:21
Yeah, that's how I felt about Waco when I got here. It felt like a small town with really oversized infrastructure, like everything was just oversized for how small it was. It's kind of weird to put it in words, but sometimes when I was trying to get places, I was like, This feels like it's taking an unnecessary amount of time for how small the city actually is. Like somehow, the way that the roads were designed, or the routes were designed, just made everything feel inefficiently, much longer and bigger and farther, even though, geographically, it's not really that far. But I think you're right. Like, it would take some serious political muscle and true vision casting and investment, but Waco definitely strikes me -- maybe not the suburbs, but all the little neighborhoods -- if you were on a bike, on an electric bike, you could get literally, from any neighborhood, I think, to downtown pretty quickly. I didn't have a car for a year, and I remember thinking, like, this should be so much easier, so much more comfortable than it is. Like, it's such a perk to Waco that's being completely unactivated. So many neighborhoods could be easily connected to downtown through bike infrastructure and walking infrastructure, and more people would come downtown and spend more money if they didn't have to worry about parking. So it was just a very odd experience.
Ashley Thornton 13:58
It is. I've heard various explanations from various people through the years about why that is. When Waco was first built, you know, back in the 1800s early 1900s, we had electric street cars that went everywhere, you know. So that infrastructure died, I guess, when cars were became popular.
Tiffany Owens Reed 14:25
I mean, did they die, or were they violently murdered?
Ashley Thornton 14:28
Yeah right! I wasn't here, so I don't know, but it just seems like to me, holy cow, what a loss.
Tiffany Owens Reed 14:36
Yeah, no, you can still see the two car lines in some of the neighborhoods. And I think Waco has that historic pattern of the streetcar suburb all around even those original suburbs, they were not suburbs the way we think of them, like Woodway. They were streetcar suburbs where you had collections of houses, each with their own commercial district, and then a streetcar that could connect everyone to that, plus to downtown, which I think was the most ideal form of city. I think it was, yeah, brilliant. So you can still see those tracks in some of the neighborhoods. I'm sure most of our listeners know the story of how that went, just in terms of the whole automobile versus street car saga. Anyway, let's get back to your story. So I know you had mentioned that walking was this thing that you really enjoyed, kind of gave you time to process. But I'm just curious, like, especially as someone who spent a lot of time in Texas, there's such a deep car culture here, truck culture. Like, how did you even, how did you even come across walking as, like, a valid mobility option? Do you have, like, a memory of when you realized walking can be leisure, but can also be practical in terms of a form of commuting?
Ashley Thornton 16:00
Maybe this doesn't happen as much anymore, but I'm old enough that it was not unusual to walk to school, even if you lived pretty far away from school. And so I grew up walking to school, you know, like walking to my elementary school and then walking even to middle school. I really didn't start taking the bus till I was in high school. And so I guess I just always have thought walking was a normal way to get around places. When we lived in Houston, you can walk a lot of places. In Houston, I don't think people realize that, but you can. It's just that most people don't live close enough to do that, and we lived pretty close to downtown, so it was not unreasonable to walk from our house to downtown Houston. At the time, it was not super set up for walking, but you could, you could walk in downtown. What it boils down for me is that, even as an adult, I just don't like to drive. I just don't like to drive. It's not fun to me. I don't like it.
Tiffany Owens Reed 17:10
Contrary to what you see in the car commercials, it's actually not always that fun. You're not racing around in these, you know, gorgeous canyons, driving your super sexy Jeep through a creek and other natural terrains that you shouldn't be driving through, or the other alternative, which is you're like driving through a downtown completely empty of any other cars.
Ashley Thornton 17:34
Exactly. Yes, I just never have liked to drive.
Tiffany Owens Reed 17:41
I grew up traveling a lot and doing lots of road trips, and I feel like highway driving could kind of be enjoyable in a way, but when it came to the micro trips of doing errands in town, that's the part that really gets me. Especially when you do that in Texas with the heat, you know, like, you're just gonna have to keep moving in and out of a car that you're not driving long enough to actually cool it down, so you're just in and out of this hot box. I don't think anyone listening to this, or anyone at Strong Towns would say, like, there's never a good time to drive or driving can never be helpful. I think it can. I think it's when it's become sort of this monopoly on how we get around, where it's like, you don't have any other option. You have to do this, even though it's super inefficient and costly and really uncomfortable and stresses you out, and it's really dangerous the whole time. How much energy do you think you spend focusing on not having an accident or hitting someone or something, right? It's not that driving shouldn't be an option, but the idea that it should be the only one.
Ashley Thornton 18:54
That's really my only regret so far in life. No telling what I might do next, but I always wished that I had lived somewhere for a while where you really could just take the subway or do whatever and not have to have a car. But I never did. I never lived any place like that.
Tiffany Owens Reed 19:09
It's not too late, Ashley. We believe in you.
Ashley Thornton 19:17
I know right!
Tiffany Owens Reed 19:21
Can you tell us more about how your experience walking Waco led you to starting the organization Waco Walks and, yeah, just tell us a little bit more about what you've achieved there and how that's grown over the years.
Ashley Thornton 19:40
Yes, so the year I was walking, I picked up Jeff Specks book, walkable cities. I mean, I had never really studied anything about walking. I had always just walked. And then I just happened to see that book. I don't know where I saw it. I thought, oh, a book about walking. So I got it, and I just thought it was fascinating, and so I just put it out on Facebook, hey, I'm reading this book about walking. Anybody want to talk about it? And sure enough, about 20 people said, yeah, let's get together and talk about it. So we just had a little book discussion group for two, three sessions. We talked about it. Turns out that there was a pretty active group of people in Waco, like in the 70s, who had been really pushing for sidewalks and different things like that, and they had just all gotten kind of older but not old enough to not be on Facebook, because when they saw the thing, they were like, Oh yeah, let's talk about that. So we had several conversations. It was really good, and really then somebody, not me, another person in the group who since then moved away, said, Well, if we're going to have this group talking about walking, we should walk. And so we did. So our very first walk was a scavenger hunt in downtown Waco for Halloween, and we just had a great time with that. And then we started about once a month having some kind of little walk around some part of town, very casual. There's about 12 of us. And then we started just spreading the word a little bit more. And it built up pretty quickly to about 30 or 40 people would come on the walks. And then we just kept doing it. Now, gosh, if we have less than 50 or so on a walk, it's unusual. Sometimes we have up to 100. We started out, I think, a lot more activist, you know, trying to really convince people to do more policy work around making the town more walkable. Not policy work, I guess, but, you know, trying to advocate more for walkability. There was a good little core group who was interested in that, and we've kept that going through the years, mainly helping the city get grants for different walking projects, but mainly it was just people wanted to learn more about Waco. They wanted to get out and see things on foot that they weren't noticing. A lot of our walks have to do with history or science. We've walked along the river and talked about different things related to geology and science. We've walked around town and done all kinds of different history walks. We've done all kinds of subjects. We had one random one that was a math and parking walk one year. We talked about how much math goes into planning downtown, and talked about how parking gets figured out. And we had a walk one time, this guy who had written a book about African Americans in the space program. And so for the anniversary of the landing on the moon, we had a moonwalk where we walked around, and then every place we stopped, he talked a little bit about his book about the space program. It was very random.
Tiffany Owens Reed 22:57
For a minute I thought you were going to say you literally moonwalked all over Waco. That would be a next level of dedication.
Ashley Thornton 23:09
We're not that talented. But, I mean, we just have had a ton of fun with it through the years, and now we have a pretty dedicated group of folks who comes out just about every time. So that's fun.
Tiffany Owens Reed 23:24
Do you have an insight from Jeff Specks book that you find that just really stuck with you, or that helped you see Waco differently, or just think about walkability differently?
Ashley Thornton 23:37
When I think about that book, there's two things that stick out to me. One is just that analysis of is the place where you're walking walkable and also does it feel safe and comfortable? Because I hadn't really ever thought about that before, because I'd never lived any place where they had safe, comfortable feeling places to walk. So I didn't pay that much attention to it. But when I was reading that and he was talking about how people won't walk unless they feel safe and comfortable, I was like, Oh yeah, I can totally see that. And that made me look at things differently around town. But I think the main insight that came from my book that has really just kind of become a metaphor for a lot of things in my life, not just walking, is the idea of connectivity. It's all fine and good to have a little patch where you can walk, but if it's not connected to something you want to go to, it doesn't really help that much. We have a lot of wonderful spaces in Waco like Cameron Park, where you can drive your car to Cameron Park and go for a nice walking Cameron Park and then get back in your car and go back home. But thinking of it as, I want my home to be connected to my place of work or to a place that I want to go to is just not very connected. And that that idea of connectivity just applies to so many things. When I think about the different nonprofits in town, sometimes I think of it now as little bits of sidewalk that aren't connected together, and so we're not getting where we want to go, and just that idea of how important the connectivity is.
Tiffany Owens Reed 25:31
Yeah, you're right. That is so important. I definitely experienced that when I spent that year without a car. Well, I would borrow a car to get groceries, but for the most part, I would walk from where I live to downtown or bike. I was working at a coworking space that year, so I had a pretty regular schedule, but I remember noticing the lack of connectivity, especially with the bike lanes. I used to joke like, do they think that bikers just get sucked up by aliens at the end of the street and then drop down again two blocks later? Like, why did this just randomly end?
Ashley Thornton 26:16
Yeah, I don't really ride a bike that much because I never feel safe biking around town. I mean, I feel, perhaps incorrectly, that if I'm walking, I can leap out of the way if I need to. But I always felt like on a bike that, holy cow, people were just riding right up on me, and I'm not a strong enough biker to feel good about that.
Tiffany Owens Reed 26:44
With the connectivity issue, though, I think it's a good reminder that conversations about mobility in general have to be treated with complex goods, as I can them. In the sense that they're not simple. You can't just be like, Oh, we have a sidewalk. Now you can walk. It's like no, walkability is actually a zoning question. It's a housing question, it's an infrastructure question. The best way to achieve a walkable city is to think about it, not just in terms of, is there a sidewalk, but like you said, is it connected to places where people want to go? Is it enjoyable? Are they able to reach meaningful destinations within a reasonable amount of time? You know, thinking about the natural environment of a place. Waco gets very hot in the summer, like, Okay, well how are we going to think about that? What about children? So I think a lot of people talk about mobility as its own end, like, oh, we should make things more walkable. And I actually think we should make things better connected, and then walkability just happens. And then people just walk because it makes sense. So I almost feel like connective urbanism needs to be the point. And then walkability and bikeability come out of that. I think it's a slight flip of the script, but I think it really matters.
Ashley Thornton 28:13
Especially if you're kind of trying to get people to make that transition from thinking of walking as exercise or entertainment or something like that, into thinking of it as transportation. You know, that's particularly important. Waco is not a wealthy community. There are a ton of people in Waco who could benefit from not having to have a car. I mean really, any young, any young family could benefit from being able to make it on one car. I think there's very few people who couldn't benefit from that. But you know, we're just not set up that way for most people, and that's such a shame.
Tiffany Owens Reed 29:03
I think the opportunity is thinking about it less as a trend and a political thing, and more like a straight up economic decision. If we can connect people better to the places where they need to go, while reducing the cost of getting there,that would be a win. That's a productivity gain, that's an efficiency gain, there's an economic benefit in that. But I think sometimes walkability and bikeability have this, like branding problem, where it comes across as more of a activist thing, rather than thinking of it in very practical terms of how would this option make life easier for people, and what are the decisions they might start making or stop making or make differently, and how might that contribute to the overall productivity of your city?
Ashley Thornton 30:04
Well, I mean, it is weird for such a humble and ancient activity that it has somehow gotten connected with, like fancy urban places where only rich people can afford to live.
Tiffany Owens Reed 30:22
Yeah, it is, it really is. I feel like it's extremes. It's either bougie and hipster, or it's like, desperately poor and homeless, like those are the associations with walking and biking.
Ashley Thornton 30:34
Yeah, I had people ask me pretty often, because I would be walking in places that were not designated as walking places, well, aren't you afraid people will think you're homeless? And I was like, thing one, why do I care? Thing two, why would you assume that just because somebody is walking down the street that they're homeless? I mean, that's just such a weird thing, but it goes back to exactly what you're saying.
Tiffany Owens Reed 31:18
When I moved here from Brooklyn and started doing all that walking, I got stopped multiple times by people thinking I was in a state of distress.
Ashley Thornton 31:25
Yes, yes. Are you okay? Can I give you a ride?
Tiffany Owens Reed 31:28
And I'm like, nope, I'm just walking. You know, humans were doing this for a long time, not that long ago.
Ashley Thornton 31:35
Yeah, that happened to me all the time too. They see some old lady walking down the side of the road. They're like, are you okay? I'm fine, just walking.
Tiffany Owens Reed 31:45
So when you started Waco Walks, were you expecting it to take off the way it did? Just, I mean, you've been doing it for 10 years now, right?
Ashley Thornton 31:54
I was not expecting it at all. I was really surprised at how much it took off. For a while people thought, well, this will be a thing that tourists like to do. So I thought maybe that's why it's gotten popular, because tourists like to do it. But not at all. I mean, we hardly ever get anybody from out of town to come on a walk. It's very much people from Waco that come on these walks, not tourists. I don't know how a tourist would find out about it, to tell you the truth. But I've been pretty surprised at how popular it's been and continues to be.
Tiffany Owens Reed 32:49
Do you have any stories of people going on these walks, and just what their reactions are to seeing the city outside of a car, if it's like their first time really walking Waco?
Ashley Thornton 33:07
Oh, yeah. Well, just constantly every walk, I have several people say, Wow, you just notice so many more things when you're walking. I never even saw that before. You know, things like that. I mean, that happens every single time. And yeah, I mean, you zoom past things and you just never see them.
Tiffany Owens Reed 33:34
Exactly. So I know that you mentioned at the start of Waco Walks, it had a bit more sort of like an activist tone in the sense of, like, focusing a lot on making Waco more walkable. And it changed a little bit since then, but you've still been pretty involved with conversations about walkability and Waco. Can you talk about how you've been able to leverage your experience as a long time Waco resident, and then leading these walks into conversations at more of the government level in terms of how Waco can become more walkable? What have you been able to do there, and what has that experience taught you?
Ashley Thornton 34:10
I would say there are two main ways that I feel like we've been most helpful. One is when the city is applying for grants. Every year, some branch of the city usually applies for some version of a Safe Walk to schools grant, to make sure there's sidewalks around schools and things like that. And the most helpful thing we can do about that is a lot of that is based on community input, and I can always generate a lot of signatures on a petition, or several letters from people. Because, if nothing else, I have everybody's emails. You know, I have an email list of people who are interested in Waco Walks, and I can send out a thing and say, hey, they're doing this. Anybody who wants to write a letter, send it here. And that has been helpful through the years. The other thing that has been helpful is like, for example, one of my favorite walks we ever did was a walk on 25th Street. 25th Street is a one way street?
Tiffany Owens Reed 35:18
Brave walk.
Ashley Thornton 35:19
Yes, right. It's a one way street. People zoom down it. It's through a historically Hispanic part of town. There's an elementary school, there's a grocery store. I mean, there's a lot of really interesting little businesses that are cropping up along 25th Street, but it's one way and not super walking friendly. And so we have this organization in town called grassroots community development, and they contacted me about doing a walk on 25th Street. So we did the walk on 25th Street, and then at the end, they had a tent set up with all these maps and everything where you could make comments and so we had 60 or 70 people come on that walk. And we walked, and it became very obvious to all those 60 or 70 people, the sidewalks are horrible. We had a lady in a wheelchair who literally got pitched out of the wheelchair onto the ground because she went over a bump in the sidewalk.
Tiffany Owens Reed 36:26
Oh my gosh.
Ashley Thornton 36:28
Yes, it was terrible. Luckily, the guy who's actually now the fire chief was on the walk with us and and he knew how to pick her up and put her back in her chair and everything. Because, I mean, she went over a bump and just went flying out of her chair. It was awful. The sidewalks were terrible. It was obvious to everybody how dangerous it was to have in the car zoom by so fast. We got to meet all these great business owners up and down the street who were like, you know, if people would just be going the tiniest bit slower. There's a wonderful tortilla. There's a place where you can get paletas -- if you don't know what that is, it's like ice cream on a stick. There's all kinds of little restaurants. So that was just a great partnership, because there were people who came and walked who would probably never go into that neighborhood, except for they just always come on Waco Walks. So they came on the walk. They got to see all that, got to give their feedback into the system. I mean, it was just a really positive engagement opportunity.
Tiffany Owens Reed 37:37
The entire time I've lived in Waco, I feel like I've known about Waco Walks. I've been on a few. I feel like there's always been a conversation around walkability in Waco and improving it. But I feel like, as is the case in many cities in the country, change is really slow. What's your perspective on that? Why is it so hard to make Waco safer for walking? I'm not even talking about the entire city. I'm just talking about things like 25th street or Franklin Avenue, so dangerous. You know, areas around Baylor that are really dangerous, and all these students constantly competing with cars. There's just all these pockets where I'm like, can you just pick one pocket and fix it? It's not that hard. I think my experience has been that it's very confusing to figure out who is the decision maker, and in those conversations, it feels like there's always another long study that has to happen, and another long grant application and another long analysis and like, multiple rounds, and I'm just like, Y'all, does this have to take that long, seriously? People are always almost getting into accidents in these areas. Like, why? It just seems like there's such a mismatch between the importance of this and the process associated with it. I know it doesn't originate in Waco. This is the way things are in many cities around the country. But as someone who's been here longer and been involved longer with this conversation and had a lot more insight, you've been at so many community meetings, you've been part of this for so long. I mean, how do you process this when you think about, I've been here for so long, and this one area is still-
Ashley Thornton 39:24
A mess, yeah. Somebody a long time ago said to me that, when it comes to this kind of thing, you almost have to think in terms of decades instead of years. Which is a little bit disheartening, but the planning process is so weirdly long and un-nimble. Like if something gets planned, like 10 years ago, and then it gets to be five years into it, and you're like, well we could just put up this little railing right here, and this would make this feel like a whole lot safer place to walk. And people are like, Nope, it's not in the plan. Because every little thing has to be voted on and done all this. And so they're just not nimble at all. And I guess this is a comment on the litigious nature of our society now, but it's very hard to get anybody to just try a little experiment. Like, let's just try a little experiment. We don't even have to lay the sidewalks. Let's just put some tape up in this area and see if people use it. But I will say, by way of maybe not being completely discouraging, that since 2016 when we really started doing Waco Walks till now, I have seen some good changes. Like, for example, we have sidewalk all the way down Waco drive now. I have people tell me all the time they just think that's dumb, because nobody walks along Waco drive, and it is an awful place to walk. However, a lot of people walk on Waco drive because they don't have cars, because the area of town where people who don't have very much money live, and the area of town where there's jobs, where a lot of these people who don't have much money work, there was no connection in between. And you could look along the side of Waco drive and see the little trail where people had been walking for years and they had worn down the grass. Well, now we have sidewalk that whole way, which is a huge improvement, as far as literally using walking as a form of transportation for people who literally have no other choice.
Tiffany Owens Reed 41:59
Yeah, that's an interesting case study, because I remember seeing that and being like, Are you kidding me? I think it just felt very incomplete. It's like, can you also make the sidewalks wider? Can you also put some trees? Can you also slow the cars, so that it's actually a comprehensively improved situation, rather than just sticking the sidewalk down? It felt to me like part of the solution, but not the entire solution, right? And I think this is one of the problems when people talk about walkability, they just focus so much on the infrastructure. Like, well, we put a sidewalk.
Ashley Thornton 42:38
Okay, step one, check. So I don't know if this make you feel better or worse about that, but that sidewalk was actually step two. For years, we had little curb cut ramps at all the main intersections onto Waco drive that went to nothing. For years it was like that. And then finally, they made the sidewalk to connect. And I was like, how could that be useful to anybody? But they were like, Hey, that was the grant that year. We got that grant.
Tiffany Owens Reed 43:24
Yeah, which is like the other side to this, where so often transportation decisions are being shaped by the money that's available at the federal level, not by locally grounded observation and political will, right? And I get it, if the money is out there to fix this problem, go get it. But it creates this weird incentive structure where it's like, well, you know, if the money is there, we'll go solve this problem, which I guess it's fine that you solved it, but it's very odd to me how you got there.
Ashley Thornton 43:54
The other thing that I think happens a lot is our mindset about sidewalks is that they're very expensive. I don't know how many meetings I've been at where, for example, there was this meeting about building a highway out to China spring, and they have all these little community input meetings, and nobody ever goes to them. And so I'll go and it'll just be like me and the poor people who are running the meeting, and maybe one other person. So I go to the meeting, and they're like, Well, we're thinking about building this road out to China spring, it's going to cost 60 majillion bajillion dollars. And I'll say, Well, I don't care about the road out to China spring, but I would really like to have better sidewalks here in Waco. And they would say, well, that's super expensive, I don't think you realize. And I would say, Well, I think I realized that a highway out to China spring costs way more than sidewalks do. And they would say, but the China spring people! And I would say, well, the China spring people aren't at this meeting, but I am. And it's just like, for some reason, we think it's a reasonable investment to build cities out in the middle of nowhere and build roads out to them, but not a reasonable investment to build sidewalks in the town we already have.
Tiffany Owens Reed 45:20
Yeah, a paradigmatic problem. The more people I have on the show, the more I learned from the conversations, and the more I think about cities, the more I realize that the entire paradigm that governs these types of decision is so mismatched. You know, you're talking about a human ecosystem. You're dealing with human beings. You're dealing with limited information, and you're living in a context of perpetual uncertainty, and yet you've overlaid that with this hyper rigid, bureaucratic, super long, inflexible system of making decisions that operates off of the very faulty and problematic assumption that you can predict the future. I think that explains so much of the breakdown we're seeing in cities. And I also think it's designed to keep people tired and bored of getting involved. Like, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but part of me feels like this is all designed to just make us all stay home and just be like, That's a waste of my time.
Ashley Thornton 46:38
No hope. Yeah, I do not give anybody credit to have thought through, how can we make people more bored so they leave us alone? But it certainly has resulted in that.
Tiffany Owens Reed 46:51
It has. But if you think about it, if you're if you're operating in a highly bureaucratic system where everyone is going to have an interest in things being as predictable as possible. I'm not saying it's like a malicious plot, but you can see how it's not a crazy jump. We need stability in order for this to work. And if we keep doing experiments or getting more people involved or letting people fix their own problems, the entire system won't work. If your priority is on, you know, a stable, bureaucratic, compliant system.
Ashley Thornton 47:26
Yeah, it's tricky. The thing that makes it hard is we're spending everybody's money, right? So it feels like you need to go through a lot of rigmarole to make sure everybody's happy when we're spending everybody's money. And so it's hard to convince people that we should be able to spend their money more aggressively and flexibly.
Tiffany Owens Reed 47:54
I can see that, how it's almost like a story of of being overly cautious.
Ashley Thornton 47:59
Yes, yes. People, by their nature, I've read, are more concerned about getting gypped than they are about getting a good deal. And so we put all these mechanisms in place to make sure that nobody's gypping us, and we lose out on the benefit that we would gain from being less cautious. You know, the cost of mistrust is high.
Tiffany Owens Reed 48:26
Which is ironic, because we're not even in that great of a financial situation at the end of all of this. Like building those roads to the suburbs, those are very expensive. How are we going to pay for that? So if that's one way of looking at it, we're not even achieving that goal because we're just setting up taxpayers to have to deal with multiple rounds of underfunded liabilities down the line anyway.
Ashley Thornton 48:58
Yeah, I think we have weirdly convinced ourselves that we're happier when we are separated from each other, and I think that's actually not the case, but we've convinced ourselves of that. We've convinced ourselves you'll be happier if you move to this out away place Like my sister. No offense to my sister, she's awesome. But she lives in this neighborhood where it's huge houses with even huger yards, so people literally have to have little tractors to mow their yard. They can't just, like, mow their yard with a lawnmower. It's huge. And they have one weekend a year, or maybe two weekends a year that they designate as garage sale weekend. So if you're going to have a garage sale, you have it on that weekend. So I thought, Well, that'll fun. We'll just walk around and go to different garage sales. But you cannot. You go to a garage sale in your car, you get back in your car, you drive to the next garage sale. I mean, because the neighborhood is so ridiculously big. I mean, we've just convinced ourselves that that's what is happy, if you live on your own huge plot of land with just your little family by itself. And I don't think that is what makes us happy.
Tiffany Owens Reed 50:13
It might make us comfortable, but that's a very different conversation. In the sense that it's minimizing unpredictability to some degree.
Ashley Thornton 50:23
I guess. I don't know, but to me, it's very weird and creepy. But she loves it.
Tiffany Owens Reed 50:32
Ashley, if you had a magic wand, is there anything that you fantasize about fixing when it comes to Waco and walkability?
Ashley Thornton 50:42
I would put the street cars back. To me, the missing piece of the puzzle is public transportation, even more so than walkability. You know, if I could just hop in a street car and go to work and then walk all around wherever I needed to when I was there, and then hop back on the street car and get back home, that would be fantastic. That we had that and we let it die just kills me. That and just trains in general, I just feel like, holy cow, we had all this great infrastructure and we just let it die because we thought cars were the magical, wonderful thing. It makes me sad that all that stuff is gone, and I would love to be able to take advantage of public transportation. And if we had decent public transportation, young families could easily make it with just one car, or older people like me who don't like to drive at night. That's what I would get with my magic wand. I would have our street car system back.
Tiffany Owens Reed 52:01
All right. So in closing, here, Ashley, this has been a great conversation. I'm really appreciate the chance to hear more of your story and your insights. So I ask this question to every guest, but it'll be really fun to ask you, because we live in the same town, we'll actually get to swap notes a little bit. But what are some of your favorite places around town where you like to tell people to go, if they're coming through, to visit, to get a slice of local life? I don't know if Watta burger counts because it's not local.
Ashley Thornton 52:31
Yeah no, it's not. So I'm gonna have to think outside the box a little bit. I mean, the the classics, the classics are like Cameron Park, beautiful, great. We like to do disc golf and things like that. That's probably the most classic place to tell people, assuming that you're not going to tell them fixer upper, because they would already know that. That's the reason why they're here in the first place. But I think I mean to me, when I think about what I love about living here. I mean, I feel like we have really good food here. I mean, I realize it's not like Houston, where there's a lot of diversity of food, but my taste in food tends toward, you know, requiring lots of vitamin G, which is my word for grease. And so I think we have several great Mexican food places, Tex Mex places. To me, I love El Conquistador la fiesta. The little food truck that is in front of the courthouse has the best corn tortillas in town. So food places, I think Waco is a fun place, if you'd like to just wander around in, like junkie antique stores. We have a collection of junkie antique stores to wander around in.
Tiffany Owens Reed 53:51
There's Cameron Trading Post downtown.
Ashley Thornton 53:54
Yes, Cameron Trading Company is great. LaSalle.
Tiffany Owens Reed 53:58
LaSalle moved really close to Pinewood. I feel like that could actually be a fun little walk, because now you have Pinewood. Okay, you have harvest where they have amazing breakfasts, and you can go over to Pinewood and get coffee. You can walk there, and there's little alleys that connect them. So you could technically walk the little alleys, and then you could do you could keep walking from Pinewood to La Salle, the vintage market, and then the library right across the street. And then there's another luna juice bar that just changed into, like, more of an eater. Bbut you could keep walking Austin and there's like, even more shops. You're not going to have a ton of street life. It's not going to feel like you're in a big, bustling city having a day out shopping. And in my opinion, there are parts of it that do feel kind of dangerous, but you could do it.
Ashley Thornton 54:49
Yeah, no, you can totally do it. I never have felt like they were dangerous.
Tiffany Owens Reed 54:54
There's one area where Austin is like exposed before you get to the trees, that area where there's that -- I call it cowboy parking, where it's that diagonal parallel parking, because to me, it just reminds me of when I got to Texas. So I feel like it is wider and it's more exposed there. And I don't know, it just feels a little nervous.
Ashley Thornton 55:25
There's definitely that little place right around where harvest is. There's like, art resale, if you hadn't been in there, it's very funky. He decorates with skeletons, yeah. But he is a hoot.
Tiffany Owens Reed 55:40
I got her sunglasses from him once. He's a character. But there's also next door to harvest, there's like a more high end gift shop that's really pretty, so beautiful. Again, that whole area. I feel like this is unique Waco thing. People have come here and figured out how to open really interesting businesses in the middle of really horrible infrastructure. And I have so much respect for the business owners here, because they really have to work with a pretty terrible landscape, but they just keep finding ways to do it, like common grounds opening on Franklin, like in the valley of despair.
Ashley Thornton 56:21
In an old Whataburger!
Tiffany Owens Reed 56:23
Is that what it is? Okay, now we know. So, full circle, Ashley, full circle.
Ashley Thornton 56:29
Full circle, yes.
Tiffany Owens Reed 56:32
But, I mean, I see this pattern a lot, where it's like really desolate environment. But then you get these business owners who come in and they open these really beautiful little businesses and shops, and I'm just like, Now, can we just find a way to like, validate their investment by working on the actual landscape itself? Make it more beautiful, make it more connective, make it safer, make it more dignifying for the human beings that live and shop and invest here, I kind of took over your answer. What's your opinion on double R?
Ashley Thornton 57:03
Oh, I love double R. Yummy.
Tiffany Owens Reed 57:06
So good. Great burgers. Okay, so we've got we've got a couple Mexican restaurants, we've got some vintage shopping, we've got double R. I will wrap up with asking if you have a favorite coffee shop, because this is going to be an interesting I'm very curious about your answer to this one.
Ashley Thornton 57:21
I don't, because I don't drink coffee.
Tiffany Owens Reed 57:22
I had a feeling!
Ashley Thornton 57:24
What I'll say instead is that I really like Azteca ice cream, where you can get ice cream, and the Paletta place on 25th Street, excellent. So I'm trading coffee for ice cream.
Tiffany Owens Reed 57:40
You're making quality decisions in this stage of life, Ashley. Now all we have to do is get you to go live in Brooklyn for a year and then come back to Waco and we can swap notes. Over a really good burger at double R.
Ashley Thornton 57:54
Yes, yes.
Tiffany Owens Reed 57:56
Thank you so much Ashley for coming on the show, for sharing your story. To our listeners, thanks for joining us for another conversation. I'll be back soon with with another episode. In the meantime, if you know someone who you think would be a great fit for the show, please let us know using the suggested guest form in the show notes. I look forward to bringing you more conversations. In the meantime, keep doing what you can to build a strong town.
ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES
Local Recommendations:
Waco Walks (Facebook)
Act Locally Waco (site)
Tiffany Owens Reed (Instagram)
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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.