The Bottom-Up Revolution
Many cities will greenlight a billion-dollar highway but struggle to paint a crosswalk. Liza Burkin has spent 12 years changing that through advocacy, private consulting, and federal policymaking. The founder of Providence Streets Coalition, she joins Tiffany to share hard-won lessons on political navigation and practical tools anyone can use to start transforming their streets.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. I'm your host, Tiffany, coming to you from Waco, Texas, where I am proud to report we are getting a little bit of fall weather. I always get nostalgic this time of year for living on the East Coast. If you don't know, I went to school in New York City, and I also spent some time living in Providence, Rhode Island. If you were at the National Gathering this year, you would have had a chance to enjoy one of my favorite cities. I just find myself thinking a lot about the time I got to spend living in that part of the country. And definitely one of the things I miss the most is the opportunity to ride public transit. I lived in Providence for a little bit. They didn't actually have a lot of public transit, but I did have a bike there, so I got to bike a little bit around. I don't know, I just miss it. I miss the sweaters and the scarves and the fun adventure of getting around these cities using an option other than a car. Today, I'm joined by someone who I suspect has similar feelings and interest in these matters and is also coming to us from Providence, Rhode Island. Liza Birkin is a transportation planner and community organizer skilled at building the human infrastructure necessary to change physical infrastructure. Liza has spent the last 12 years advancing active and public transit systems in roles ranging from grassroots advocacy to private consulting to federal policymaking, in addition to her planning role at Neighborways, which we will talk about. She is the founder and board president of the Providence Streets Coalition, Liza, welcome to The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. I'm really looking forward to speaking with you today.
Thank you so much for having me, Tiffany. This is so much fun.
I feel like we have so much we need to nerd out about, so much to cover. So I always like to start the show giving people a chance to tell a little bit of their story. I'm probably going to say the name of your hometown incorrectly, because I know that in Massachusetts and Rhode Island there's very special ways of pronouncing some places, but I'm going to do my best. You're from Sudbury, Massachusetts. Did I say that right?
You did. It kind of sounds like suburb.
I thought it almost sounded like Sadbury, which I don't really think is what we're going for, Sadbury. Okay, you're from Sudbury, Massachusetts, which is a town not far from Boston. Tell us a little bit about your upbringing, about your hometown. What was it like growing up there? What did you appreciate about it? If there's anything about your upbringing that shapes what you do now, I'd love to hear.
Yeah, so Sudbury is kind of an exurban town of Boston. My parents commuted by car into the city, and every single trip we made was by car. There was really not an opportunity to walk or bike, and the towns around us had commuter rail into Boston, but we did not have a station in our town. It's a beautiful town, don't get me wrong. It's really nice for road biking, and the schools were great, but I noticed early on how much I really didn't like our town compared to Concord, which is just one town over and has a main street. It has a walkable, historic Main Street. So I would ride my bike there all the time and just be thinking, wow, I really hate my town compared to this town. This is years and years before I even understood what urban planning was. I was thinking, wow, the built environment is really influencing my choices. When I choose to do stuff, I'm going to go to this town and not into my town because my town had no town center. It was just strip malls. There was really no central gathering place.
So was it just built that way? Was it kind of just your typical suburban sort of strip mall, single family home combination put outside of big city? Do you know anything about the story?
Yeah, pretty much. It's really historic. The Wayside Inn is from Sudbury, and Thoreau and Longfellow, the transcendental poets of the Enlightenment, lived there and worked there. So there's some cool stuff. There are very cool historic cemeteries, if you're into that, very cool Revolutionary War history. The zip code of my town is 01776, so it's very much—oh, wow, yeah, because the story goes that Concord and Lexington were fighting over it, and so they gave it to Sudbury instead. So there's some very cool history, but the built environment just got 20th century arterialed pretty badly.
Wow, yeah. I feel like that's such an interesting dynamic to so many American towns. Even this past weekend, I took my son—well, my two children, one's a newborn, so he's here for the ride, no matter what we're doing. But I took Levi, who's two, to Temple, Texas, which is about 40 minutes from where I live. We were going to investigate a Facebook Marketplace deal that didn't turn out to be a good deal, which was always very sad. But to justify this trip, I also did a little digging into what is Temple like? It's just this random place we drive by whenever we're on our way to Austin. Turns out there's a fascinating history there, fascinating railway history there. There's this old train station. There's this huge history and heritage and pride around being this railway stop, and all these interesting businesses that came out of it, and entrepreneurs, and just all these interesting stories. You go there today, and you have no idea. I mean, for various reasons, and I feel like this is a reality for so many places, especially the more west you go, the less likely, but more likely they were just kind of built out to be suburbs. Places in Arizona, stuff like that. But there are always just these hidden stories underneath the surface. It was really kind of funny, kind of sad, because we went to the train museum, and it was awesome. He's really into trains right now, also terrified. But we were looking at—they had a couple train cars from the Santa Fe train line. We went to the exhibit, and just so much fascinating technology and gadgets and systems that they invented to sustain this thing. Then the sad part is, we went out of the exhibit. We went outside to look at the actual cars, and we saw the Amtrak pull up, and I was just struck by the complete loss of magic, the complete loss of beauty and romanticism and just pride. It just made me so sad. I was thinking, I'm glad Amtrak is still going, but once you've seen where we've come from, you just got to ask yourself, what happened?
Totally, yeah. I can imagine something similar. When you see these old towns, I love how you had just that magnetic draw to a different kind of built environment, and you didn't even know why, until this whole adventure of urbanism unfolds in your life. So let's continue a little bit more with your story. Obviously, college—you told me in our intro chat that your original plan was to be a rock music journalist. Is that correct? I was very influenced by the movie Almost Famous, and I went to Madison, Wisconsin, the University of Wisconsin. Mostly my mom went there, so she made me visit, and I fell in love because it was a walkable, bikeable city with live music seven nights a week, and that's all I wanted. All I cared about was seeing live music seven nights a week. Being in a city with culture—I was starved for culture as a teenager. I was really into writing and really into music, and spent four years biking around to shows basically, and falling in love with Madison, which is just a phenomenal city. If anyone has the good fortune of living there or going there visiting, you should. It's amazing, all four seasons of the year. I just took it for granted. I took the bike infrastructure for granted and the public transit infrastructure for granted. I was not involved in any kind of organized urbanism when I was there. I just sank into it and was thinking, oh, here's how to live car free. Here's how to do groceries, here's how to do errands, here's how to do nightlife without a car. It was so amazing. The other thing I'll say about my town growing up, there was so much drunk driving. Oh my goodness, that was the culture of our high school and all the high schools really around it—rural roads in snow with not a lot of light. Parties in basements, and that was the nightlife, and it was dangerous. I feel really grateful to have made it out alive of that. Then we got to Madison, and it was yeah, we can party on foot. This is great.
Party all night and zigzag home, hopefully not.
So that was a really big part of my story. Then kind of very soon after that, I kind of fell out of love with the idea of spending my career, my intellect, on telling people what kind of music to listen to as a career. I also started growing up and thinking, well, wow, there's a lot more out there that matters more. Not that music doesn't matter. It does deeply. But yeah, I just fell out of love with the idea.
I'll give you a quick moment here. Do you have a favorite band, or what would you say is good right now?
Good right now in this moment. Well, okay, I'll just plug—so Bon Iver came out while I was in college. He's from Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
Oh yeah, yeah, no, I listened to his album every night for a long time.
The newest one I love. I absolutely love the new one from this past summer. It's beautiful.
See, you even knew there was a new one. I didn't even know. This is why we do need people. I had a brief—actually, believe it or not, I had a brief window where I was super into—I will never consider myself someone who knows what's up with music. But there were a couple podcasts I would listen to, or just websites. I actually really appreciate the people who took the time to tell everybody what was worth listening to. With the Taylor Swift album coming out lately, I'm not a Swifty at all, but I find it kind of fun to listen to people who are really into music talk about her music, and I don't know, I just think it's all very interesting and very cool.
Yeah, this is the work for all the millennials in the crowd.
Yeah, no, I remember the podcast I would listen to. They would go through different albums, kind of tell you what to listen for and what was interesting about it. I was thinking, I'm glad there are people out there doing that, because it's making my life a lot easier and more interesting. So you kind of make this pivot. I'm assuming you leave Madison. What happens next?
Yeah, so I left Madison. I actually took a road trip around the US for nine months, and kind of learned about organic farming, and just visited a lot of cities. I had a car, I also had a bike, and I just visited a lot of cities. I really wanted to get to know the US. Then I ended up back home. By that point, my mom had moved from the Boston area to Rhode Island. My cousin was working at Brown, and I was thinking, let me check out Rhode Island, see what that's about. On my road trip, I was staying, actually, with folks in Austin who were pedicabbers, and they were pedicabbing for South by Southwest. They were going to shows, and they were making tons of money riding tricycles around a music festival. They were saying, this is the life. I was browsing job listings in Rhode Island, and saw an opening for pedicabbers in Newport, Rhode Island, and was thinking, okay, maybe someone will pay me for the summer to ride a tricycle. That sounds fun. I then ended up riding tricycles for money for six years.
Oh my gosh. That's a seasonal job in that part of the country, right?
Oh, yes, that is very much a summer job. Very much a summer job. But it was so much fun, and I met some of my dearest, closest friends to this day. I got sucked into Rhode Island through that job and never left. What ended up happening is that after my first or maybe second summer doing that, a professional bike advocacy job opened up in Newport, so I was pedicabbing during the night and was able to work a nine to five actually doing professional bike advocacy, which I did not know was a career one could possibly have. But I knew that through riding pedicabs in the summer during the crush of the tourist season, the city is a parking lot and nobody moves. It's very small, very dense, very historic streets, and it is an absolute standstill. The pedicabs are really the only ones that can kind of jockey around the traffic. Newport sells itself on being this really quaint, expensive, aristocratic, Gilded Age, beautiful, oceanside destination. It is so gorgeous. If anyone wants to get around the normal tourist stuff, I have hot tips. There's also surf culture and really cool sailing culture. There's a lot, many layers. It also has some of the highest percentage of affordable housing in all of Rhode Island. It has a working class there that supports all of this. It's a fascinating place, but the mobility issues are so stark, and it was so absurd. So I was thinking, oh, professional bike advocacy, okay, I guess I will do that, because I had this communications degree, and they were looking for someone to tell their story, to sell the vision of what a different city could look like with better bike infrastructure, basically.
That was for Newport?
Yeah, an organization I still am affiliated with, called Bike Newport, Rhode Island, a bike advocacy org.
So the road trip, I'm just curious to know, how many places did you make it to? What was that like? Did you bike in each city? I had a season where I was doing a ton of traveling all over the country too. I was a big distance runner at the time, so I would try to do runs in the different cities that I would travel to, which is also another interesting way to get to know a city on foot. But I'm just curious, do you have a particular memory or favorite city or interesting biking experience from that adventure?
Yeah, definitely. I went to, I think maybe 30 states during that trip, so I went to a lot of places. I had a bike on the back of my car. I did my first ever long distance bike tour in the San Juan Islands off of Washington State. I now do long distance bike touring literally with all of my expendable time and income. So I've never done a car road trip ever again. Now I only do road trips by bike. My bike got stolen in San Francisco. That was sad. Then I bought another one. Yeah, I was riding whenever I was stopping, and it was great. I got to ride in a lot of different climates and experience a lot of different places in the US, cities of all sizes and shapes.
So, fast forwarding back to Newport. I'm assuming you were able to step into that role. What did you notice about bringing that conversation to Newport? What was that like, trying to help more people see the need for rethinking mobility there?
It was hard. It was so hard. Newport is not a place that likes to change very quickly, and I learned a lot in those early years, but I also was humbled by what I didn't know. So I was pretty—I'm trying to sell this vision, but I don't understand the steps to get there. I really didn't have a technical understanding of urban planning, and realized that pretty quickly. I was thinking, I need more training. I'm a rock critic who's writing about bikes, but I really don't have the technical skills to enact this vision, to execute this vision. So I decided I needed to go to urban planning grad school after a couple years working in Newport, and ended up at Tufts University for their urban and environmental policy and planning program, short UEP. Shout out to any UEP people listening out there. It was one of the most wonderful—it was the best two years of my life, and I learned so much there. It really gave me the tools to enact change. Yeah, I loved UEP, and cannot recommend it highly enough to the folks listening.
Can you give me an example of something that you felt like a roadblock, you felt like you were confronting and how you were able to kind of work your way through that once you were able to understand more of the technical side? Maybe something that people advocating for more bike friendly mobility might also be experiencing.
Yeah, totally. Really basic stuff like geometry of roads and standards and standard widths and design guides and how to use them, and how to use StreetMix, to just come up with your own plan, how to use one of the rolly walkie sticks to measure lane width and be thinking, okay, we've got a road here that has eight foot parking lanes and 20 foot travel lanes. Actually, we have excess space. According to the national standards, we have excess space. We could do six foot bike lanes. So it was really basic technical planning skills like that, and mapping as well—the GIS that is so helpful to prioritize streets, to do some of the data collection, that you can use that to then make prioritization matrices. Then on the qualitative side, kind of how to write a policy brief, how to communicate your vision, using data and using numbers and using standards from whether it's national standards or NACTO standards, to then basically do the work for the government officials. As an advocate, you come to them with a plan, and you're thinking, this road is this now. It could be this with my vision. I learned that in UEP, and then put it to use doing student projects for different nonprofits around the Boston area at the time. It was such an amazing learning experience because you're learning in class and then immediately executing for nonprofits and for private consulting firms.
Also, when you were in Newport trying to have these conversations, trying to improve the mobility, was most of your work interacting with more of the political side of things, or more with everyday people living there? Did you notice similarities between how they would talk about it, or differences, whether that ordinary people wanted it to be better, but it was more Council—I don't know how it was set up there—that where you were running into the roadblocks? How would you describe it?
Yeah, so back then we were doing more of what we used to say, the education and encouragement type program. So organizing rides, organizing—we had a Community Bike Kitchen, where folks would come in and learn to work on bikes. Every once in a while we'd gather around a map and be thinking, oh, we wish there was a path here, and we wish there was one there, but we weren't out there measuring the road. We weren't out there creating a real infrastructure plan. We certainly weren't digging into the funding and the politics and all of that. So we were more on the people side, and Bike Newport to this day excels at that. They are so phenomenal at getting more people on bikes. It's also a really, really difficult geometry. Just anyone who's listening, go to Google Earth. Look at Newport, Rhode Island. It's hard. These are colonial streets, and pretty much the only way to get a good connected bike network is to do parking and car removal, which we all know is very, very hard.
That's how I felt when I was in Charleston this past summer. Similar, there was this one street, I think it was called King Street, where for the life of me, I could not understand why it was open to cars at all. I just—I mean, people barely fit on the sidewalks. People were spilling off the sidewalks into the street. I was thinking, can someone explain this to me? It's so obviously a candidate for pedestrianization. What is going on? I've heard that they've started closing it once a month, I think maybe slowly taking steps, which is a good thing. But yeah, I can imagine there are a lot of parallels. But also, they also seem like the types of places where it makes sense to take thousands of heavy vehicles off of these historic streets, precisely because they're so historic.
Totally, totally. So, yeah. So after grad school, I had the opportunity to work in Providence, Rhode Island, where I had been living on and off, also kind of while I was in Newport, which has a very different situation, because in Providence, you have, kind of like Baltimore, Detroit, we actually have a lot of overbuilt streets that were way too many travel lanes, and we just don't have the vehicle volumes to justify them. So I started working there in 2019 under Mayor Jorge Elorza, who's a real great bike advocate, and really wanted to implement a lot of trails very quickly. We were able to remove some unnecessary travel lanes, and it was hard, and there are tons of crazy political battles still, but it happened, and it is still happening here, because we just have more space.
So I think a lot of people listening to the show, myself included, sometimes we wrestle with whether or not we should go to grad school because we love this stuff so much and we want to—I don't know, maybe it'd be fun. Maybe be worth it. Can you share about your experience? How did grad school prepare you to navigate both the technical and the political side that you've been mentioning? Yeah, I guess I'm most curious a little bit more to how it helped you navigate the political side, because I feel like the political side is so unique for each place you're in. So I'm just curious what—as you're looking back on that experience, how would you say it helped prepare you for that?
Yeah, when I was in grad school, I spent, I would say, more time working as, volunteering my time outside the classroom with mobility advocacy organizations than I did even doing homework and stuff. I learned so much. So Boston, the Boston area, is filled with these highly educated folks who volunteer their time, who really care about this stuff. So I would go to the Somerville Bike Committee, for instance, and be surrounded by just residents. A lot of guys who work in IT, and I'd be thinking, oh, they know more about this stuff than I do, and this is not their profession. They are software engineers. I learned so much from them, and I'm so grateful to them. They really have moved the needle a lot. So much volunteer brain power goes into this stuff, and that's true of young professionals, but also very much of retirees, very much of college students who are assigned volunteer labor for the nonprofits. So I would sit in on Somerville Bike Committee meetings. I volunteered a lot of time with the Boston Cyclists Union, and just learned how they did things and how they navigated the politics. Just kind of lent my time and my labor and my student projects to organizations like that. The Livable Streets Alliance, Boston has this amazing ecosystem of mobility advocacy organizations that all kind of work in tandem together, different geographies in the city, different—it's neighborhood level all the way up to regional level, state level stuff. MassBike, I worked for MassBike, the statewide organization for a little bit helping them. So I just tried to do a lot of volunteer projects and learn from the advocates who were in charge at the time. Being in grad school gave me the opportunity to do that. I also worked for the university, and I also worked for a private consulting firm at the time. So it was a lot. It was a lot, but I was just so into it. I was just thinking, yeah, let me at this whatever, 18 hours a day. Let's go.
What would be one piece of insight you might give—I know this is hard because every community is so different—but when it comes to navigating the political side around this conversation. If you could give one piece of advice?
Bring people in. Try not to use polarizing language. Unfortunately, with bikes, people get—it's—I don't understand it. I still, I mean, I've been doing this for 12 years, and I still don't understand why bikes are so polarizing. But when you use language that is universal around streets—safety, access, mobility, equity—in some cities, it really goes a long way. Rather than just saying I want a bike here, I think—you really try to, because the truth is that a very small percentage of the population rides bikes for transportation, very, very small. For a lot of people, it is just totally foreign, and they don't get it, and you're othered. So the more you can not other yourself, the better. I think we're at a moment in the movement where people understand not to show up at a public meeting in lycra with a helmet. I think people get that now. When I first started, that was not the case. People were in lycra, in spandex at public meetings, and it really looked like a hobby. That was the thing. It really looked like you were fighting for public space for your hobby. That never went over well. So when you talk about families and children and elders being able to move around their communities safely, it just goes such a long way. So just be really careful with language is my number one.
Yeah, that's really helpful. So you're presently engaged in this work, both as a professional and as a volunteer. I'd love to talk about what you're doing on both sides of that. Let's talk about the volunteer side first. Can you share a little bit more about Providence Streets Coalition? Kind of the story behind it and what you all are working on?
Yeah, absolutely. So the Providence Streets Coalition, I'm the founder, so I started it in 2019. We were originally started with seed funding from the PeopleForBikes Foundation as part of a five city cohort. So it was us, Pittsburgh, Denver, Austin, New Orleans, whose mayors had all made commitments to build out their bike infrastructure in a rapid, in a short amount of time, which happened to be—it was the grant was 2019 to 2021, so we hit it square during COVID. Wild times, which was good and bad for the movement. So that's kind of how it started. Some of those cities already had advocacy organizations in place, but Providence did not. We have amazing statewide mobility partners like Grow Smart Rhode Island and the Rhode Island Transit Riders and, at the time, the Rhode Island Bicycle Coalition, but none of them were focused on the city. We literally did not have a single advocacy organization that was focused on the city of Providence and advancing mobility here in the densest—in the capital of the state, where we kind of had the most latent demand and the most people already walking, biking, taking public transit. What was super cool about that is that they allowed me and they encouraged me—PeopleForBikes did, now City Thread folks—they encouraged me to not call it the Providence Bike Coalition. They said it's about streets. Bring everyone together, bring non-traditional partners in. Make sure you get grocery stores, make sure you get youth orgs, make sure you get AARP. Shout out to AARP, some of the best partners we've got. Make sure you get—in the beginning, we had car insurance companies, we had religious organizations, super, super wide range of partners to kind of march ahead with one voice and say, yes, we believe in safety and access and mobility, using this universal language of streets and not centering it and bringing the pedestrians and the transit riders and the cyclists and the skateboarders and the scooter riders all together under one umbrella.
I really love that y'all made that pivot. It reminds me of the Strong Towns campaign around safe and productive streets. Here in Waco, not too long ago, I was part of an effort where some of us got together who were into Strong Towns, and we were kind of working on starting a local conversation group here. But one of the first events we did was host—partnering with a local organization that does walks around the city—and we gave a Strong Towns tour, a Strong Towns walk around some of the core campaigns, and we use the city as a way to demonstrate some of these concepts. I got to do the one on streets. It was so helpful to do that, because as I'm wrestling through what am I going to say? I know it in my head, but I need to actually put it down on paper. It just dawned on me that when you talk about a street, you're talking about activity. The way that Strong Towns combines these things, you want it to be safe and productive. Well, then you have to ask yourself, well, at the end of the day, we're talking about activity. What kind of activity do we want to see on the street? Driving is your least productive activity. So widening the conversation around it's almost, in a way, it's—well, bikeability, almost, in a way, I feel should never be its own goal. It's when people are thinking, we want bikes just because we like bikes, I'm thinking, you're shooting yourself in the foot. Don't ever talk about bikeability for bikeability's sake. It means to other things, to other ends. My husband's a philosopher, so for anyone listening to this who's a philosopher, you'll know what I mean when I say that. But an end, what's the point of the saying? What's the purpose? Biking for biking's sake? Maybe it is to you, but I don't think it's really helpful to talk about it that way. But if you talk about bikeability, connect it to safety and productivity, then it totally changes the conversation, and it leaves room to include so many other activities. It's what are the activities that make our street vibrant, safe and productive? Driving through it in a car will be at the very bottom of the list. It won't even be on that list. This is what blows my mind about places like Charleston. I'm thinking, you're literally limiting the productivity of this street by allowing these massive SUVs to roll through it while thousands of tourists are trying to get here to patronize your shops. I don't understand.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, we have a long ways to go here in Providence too. We are definitely a walkable city, mostly due to the fact that we were established in the 1630s, hundreds of years before the car. So we had a good head start, a solid head start. But really it's only—we have amazing walkability in our neighborhoods, and then to get to the next neighborhood over, you got to cross a highway, and it's very difficult and not safe. So that's what we're really working on, is these large arterials, and it's very slow moving, and it takes a lot of time, a lot of money. That's kind of the opposite of the Strong Towns—what can you do now? Incremental. So as a volunteer organization, we do that. We find ways to move the needle forward and to support the long term plans. For instance, we have one of the most deadly streets in our whole city and one of the most unproductive where we could have thousands of housing units. It's called North Main Street. From 2023 to 2024 we had three pedestrian fatalities in 18 months, and dozens before that for the past 20 years. It parallels I-95, so it's literally a highway next to a highway. A lot of people take it to avoid the highway. But there's tons of residences, and there are lots of businesses. There are a lot of car oriented businesses, but others as well. There's the most popular, the most rapid bus line in the entire state runs on that street. So you have a lot of folks crossing the street to get to the bus across really fast moving traffic. It results in horrific pedestrian safety. So we were thinking, enough is enough. So we pushed the city, and luckily, we have an amazing city councilor in that neighborhood who started a specific task force just for that street to make short, medium and long term plans around how we're going to fix it, and we're doing the short term ones right now. Better pedestrian scale lighting is already going in, and the city restriped one of the worst intersections just this past summer to prevent right turn on red, which—because it leads right into a bike lane that goes up a side street. They were thinking, yeah, we're going to do paint and flex posts. We were thinking, there are drivers moving 45 miles an hour, paint and flex posts are going to do literally nothing. So what we decided to do was get some really huge planters. We applied for a grant. We got some big ass planters that take a lot of soil, and we asked the city, hey, can we put these in the intersection to prevent, to force drivers to slow down on this right hand curve? They were thinking, yeah, let's try it. Let's see. So we had just this past fall 30 volunteers come out and fill up the planters with dirt and plants, and then we have volunteers watering them and taking care of them. It's amazing the transformation. It's so incredible to see how drivers are taking that curve now. It's so much prettier to walk and bike past that intersection now, because you have all these native perennials kind of bursting out of these big cylindrical planters.
So North Main Street, is that on the side by Whole Foods? Okay, yeah, is it—is it a historic street? I can't remember, because I was just there and we were staying on that side of town. I'm trying to remember. I think it's paved, so it's not cobblestone, it's not brick, right?
No, no, no. So, yeah, the Whole Foods lot used to be Lippitt Hill, which was the historic Black neighborhood, which was demolished during urban renewal. Yeah, of course. So these things we know all over the country go in tandem. It's historic, usually communities of color were bulldozed to make way for urban arterials, which then kill communities of color. It's wild, how uniform that is across the country.
Yeah, okay, so it's helpful to place where what you're talking about now, because I actually walked—when we were staying there during the conference, we walked to Whole Foods one morning, and I remember thinking, I think I know—is it a slip lane? Yeah, yeah. I think I know what you're talking about. I remember having that—I don't think it was fixed when I was there last, and I was thinking, hmm, yeah. I was thinking, this feels not so great, especially with kids. Yeah, Providence is an interesting place. It definitely feels similar to Waco in some ways, in the sense that it's so small, but it feels so big. The decisions about what to build feel unnaturally large. I'm thinking, why did everything have to be so big for such a small place? I feel a little bit similarly of Waco. Sometimes I have a hard time articulating why the built environment doesn't feel right. I think a lot of the lanes are so wide for such a small place. In Providence, I think it was more that everything just felt too big for such a little place. Not dense, just too large, too large, and clunky, I don't know. So it seems—but yeah, then you have that highway going straight through the city. I mean, just straight through the city, right?
Yeah, yeah, I-95. Yeah, it's—you have the wealthy East Side in downtown, and then you have I-95 and you have everything else.
Exactly, yeah, yeah. So you've really gotten experience being on the ground, getting some of these smaller projects off that, what can we do now list, start to get those implemented. But I think in general, that most people who are trying to work on mobility issues and making these kinds of improvements, these small, incremental changes, find it really strangely hard to convince the city to take action at that scale. Could we just put some planters, or can we just put some new paint? It seems like the smallest thing is so difficult, and yet the city can move so fast to embrace these large, multi-year, million dollar, billion dollar plans. You're scratching your heads thinking, I thought you couldn't just put paint down. How is it that we can—so I think some of us struggle with, what is going on? Why do we see this weird pattern? As someone with more experience, can you share some insight as to what you've seen from where you're sitting, and why that happens?
Yeah, I think certainly a lot of the political forces are not in favor or not lined up to support small projects, which really stinks. The organized labor, they like a big shiny project. The politicians, they like a big shiny project that they can cut the ribbon on. That's kind of true of just American culture in general. We like things big and shiny. Then what I've noticed is that a lot of our city governments are not staffed. We've lost the ability to even just do small projects in house, so everything has to be contracted out, even painting a crosswalk. You have to go through a procurement process, rather than just have your DPW crew go out and do it. They're so stretched thin, and we've hollowed out a lot of our public infrastructure, and we contract everything out. So that's why you have groups doing guerrilla crosswalks, because there's nobody in the city to paint the crosswalk. Yeah, so that seems pretty endemic to a lot of American cities and Rhode Island certainly no different.
It's kind of like the missing middle of street projects. We talk about missing middle housing, but I feel like there's this category of improvements. It's also the missing middle where, yeah, it's just all the little things that would go so far making things better. But it almost seems like the system and the processes around making improvements are designed to not do those projects at that scale in a way, or, I guess, more oriented towards bigger projects. Maybe that'd be a better way of putting it.
Yeah, yeah. I think the orientation—and I will say at my new role as a planner at Neighborways Design, yeah, they really have cracked this code, and it's wonderful.
That's a great segue. Why don't you tell us more about Neighborways?
Yeah, so Neighborways is founded by one of my grad school professors, Mark Chase. He's the founder of this small design firm that really kind of—it's a funny thing. It's a private firm that started from a really grassroots kind of activist neighborhood, community organizing and academic space, because Mark does teach at Tufts, and he was my thesis advisor, and he's such an amazing mentor and friend. Then Jessica Murtell is his co-founder, who is now our CEO, and has really implemented this vision of doing small projects that are politically viable, that don't cost a lot, that are high impact, and that really bring people together to change their street together. So we do a lot of asphalt art projects, artistic traffic calming. We do a lot of green infrastructure. Then the whole idea of a neighbor way is—so some folks call them bike boulevards or neighborhood greenways, and it's kind of this Mr. Rogers ethos, won't you be my neighbor? Won't you build my neighbor way? It's the idea of doing traffic calming and wayfinding on neighborhood streets, on the residential streets, to get you to the bigger arterials, to get you to the destinations by avoiding the arterials. So the idea is to build these networks of low stress, high comfort streets that are already residential. But then maybe you do some traffic calming, you do some art, some murals, and some wayfinding so that you can figure out the way, and maybe it's a little bit out of your way. Maybe you're going three to four blocks further than you would if you were on the commercial street with the separated bike lane, with the 20,000 cars a day, but you're on a street where you can ride side by side with your kid and hear the birds. That's the whole kind of ethos and idea behind Neighborways is to find the opportunities to do these small projects. They have been doing them for 10 years. I just joined the firm this year, and I'm so excited. But we are doing a lot of mobility hubs, which is where you bring placemaking elements and transportation information, so at the bus stop, where's the bike share station, and then kind of doing public art in that place, and putting in benches and putting in picnic tables so that folks can hang out while they wait for the bus, and while they make that or while they make a transfer from bike share to the train. So we're doing a lot of mobility hubs work. We're doing a lot of planning for these low stress networks, and then we do community paint days where the community comes out and we'll design—we'll help design a mural or hire a local artist, but then people and families come out and are the physical ones to paint. It's so much fun.
I have so many thoughts on the value of shared work in our cities, but we're running close to over time. But I just love that y'all do that because I think it's critical to building civic ties for people to actually have shared work instead of everything being outsourced to professionals. That's my quick take. Love that. I love that y'all have that. I want to ask you about something that I see in my city and just get your thoughts on it. When you're talking about these Neighborways, I think about Waco. One of the challenges we have is the complete abuse of—well, maybe that's too strong a way of putting it. There are a lot of people who park on the street. It's just completely over parked. Our neighborhoods are completely over parked. I guess this is just the curse of living in a car dependent world where we have households who need multiple cars, and so they spill over and they start lining up. I find it very blighty when I drive through neighborhoods, and it's a safety issue, because it really prevents good visibility. But I think about, how can we make this better? I'm thinking, well, you could kind of make it more narrow. You could put in some bike lanes. You could connect in this way that you're talking about. But how would you ever possibly—I just think about the work you'd have to do to convince people to stop parking on the street, because then it starts to get into that weird space if people think of the street as their private good to store their private good, their private automobile. Then if the city were to say, hey, we really want to embrace more of a networked approach to mobility within our neighborhoods, which means we need all that space. We need to repurpose all that space. I'm just curious, have y'all encountered those kinds of challenges with this? Or how would you approach something like that?
Yeah, so in the—I would say most of the streets that we work on, actually having cars parked on both sides is traffic calming. So it does, because it narrows the street by 14 feet. So we're not often in the business of parking removal, except at the corners. So we tend to call it daylighting, which is so important for visibility and turning movements. We call them clear corners, and that's where we often do a lot of the art. The artwork is a lot of the times at the intersections and at the gateways, but no, I think sometimes the on-street parking on the residential streets, we see it as a way of slowing down, because if you take it away, then you're widening the street.
Let's say, take it away, replace it with something prettier. To me, it just feels really—I don't know, I've heard this view before. People see it as traffic calming, but I just find it so blighty. I just really hate when I turn on a street and it's just choked to death with 20 parked cars, and they're big, they're big pickup trucks, or sometimes they're really old, and they're falling apart. Just, and then you can't see kids if they're running out, and then traffic coming the opposite direction creates all these conflict points. Yeah, we have the corner issue, where they're parking all the way up to literally the corner, so that no one can see, so it just kind of compounds into all these issues. But yeah, something—it's just one of those puzzles I keep trying to solve in my head of how could you help people see the street as an asset for the whole neighborhood, not just as extended car parking, which I don't know, just to me defeats the whole purpose of a neighborhood when it's just a glorified parking lot. But I'll keep puzzling on this.
Hard same. Yeah.
So I'll ask you one more question, and then we'll wrap up with my last question that I ask everyone. What advice would you give to someone listening to this who cares about active transportation? They love biking. They really want to—they have a vision for their community that it could be better, better connected. It could be more accessible to people who, for whatever reason, don't want to use a car, can't, but they just feel really intimidated. It's just also complicated, the technical side, the political side, the neighborhood side, just talking to ordinary people about this. What would be some advice that you would give to them?
Yeah, okay, here's what you're gonna do. You're going to go on Amazon and buy a measuring wheel for 20 bucks. Or, if you hate Amazon, which we all should, your local—
Your local traffic safety.
Buy a measuring wheel and you're going to measure the street. You can also just do this on Google Earth, but it's typically better to get more accurate widths when you do it in person and measure the street that you want to change. So measure the distance from the curb to the parking lane lines, the width of the lanes and the curb to curb distance. Then grab a copy of NACTO's Urban Bikeway Design Guide and learn what the standard widths are for the different facilities, the changes that you want to make. Then go to StreetMix.net, and plug all that information in. Create your current street in StreetMix how things are today, and then use—it's a really easy drag and drop tool. You can just drag in a five foot bike lane. You can drag in street trees. You can drag in benches and lighting to create the vision of what you want to see. Literally, you can do all this in 30 minutes. It's amazing. Then you take that to your elected officials, and you say, hey, here's the width. This is the geometry. This is just simple math. Y'all, this is the geometry we have. Moving curbs is very expensive, so what you're trying to do is avoid moving curbs if you can. But this is typically—unless you have a lot of money, or your town has a lot of money, or you got a grant from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. But if you don't, then you're trying to work within your curb to curb distance, but you're trying to reallocate that space, usually from purely driving and parking to something else. You can create a very quick digital image of this in 30 minutes or less using Google Earth and StreetMix. So fun.
I think I found a new hobby to get me through winter. So fun. Thank you for that. I love how practical that is, and it is a really easy starting point. So thanks for sharing that. So finally, in closing, can you share with us a little bit about whatever town you'd like to share about—that's Newport or Providence or your hometown. I always love to ask people to tell us, what are a couple places you recommend people check out to get a slice of local life?
Yeah. Well, definitely talk about Providence. So, I mean, ever since we built—so Providence went through this really huge undertaking of moving Interstate 195 from downtown, about a few miles south, and opened up many, many acres of downtown land about 15 years ago at this point. One of those transformations was building a pedestrian bridge on top of the existing highway pylons, and now it is the center of the city. Immediately from day one that opened—and people grumbled, wow, did they grumble about the cost of that bridge. Then the next day, it was everyone's dating profile background and everybody's LinkedIn profile background. It just immediately became the civic space that everyone goes to, and it's so amazing. So yeah, you got to go check out the bridge and the Providence River and the Woonasquatucket River. The Woonasquatucket River Greenway is such a gem. It goes through the western neighborhoods of the city all the way out to Johnston, and it goes through parks, and there's opportunities to kayak on the river and to see a lot of native wildlife. It goes through amazing neighborhoods with incredible food. So yeah, that. Then over where I live, on the south side of Providence, you got to ride the Broad Street bike lanes down to Roger Williams Park, which you can do almost fully on fully protected infrastructure now from downtown. So I would say, yeah, if you want a real Providence experience, you can surely walk around College Hill and Federal Hill, which is all the tourism guides ever talk about. But there are amazing neighborhoods in the south and west ends of the city as well.
A lot of interesting food in Providence. I feel like it's a foodie town, for sure. What are some—what's one or two favorite places that you like to check out? I have to say, Wait, is White Electric right across the bridge? Yeah, great coffee shop.
White Electric, yeah, White Electric is just over the—
No, no, that's not the one I'm thinking of. Bolt or something like that, the one that's right next to Plant City.
There's not a coffee shop next to Plant City. There's a Guatemalan coffee truck on the—no, there is one.
I used to go there because I used to work at Hemingway's, and that seems to be where I went to get my—
Oh, Dave's. There you go. Thank you. Yes, yeah, Dave's Coffee, home of the famous Rhode Island coffee syrup, which is really great. Upasara Asian Palace in my neighborhood, best Cambodian food. Amazing. We have an amazing Cambodian community here, so many international communities. I am obsessed with The Village downtown, in downtown Providence. They're Nigerian. They make incredible, incredible food with surprisingly great vegetarian and vegan options. Then on Broad Street you'll have Chimney's and all the Dominican food you can possibly imagine.
So much fun. Yeah, I'm sorry. We had someone on from Providence not too long ago, and we were kind of goofing around about the fact that apparently the two Al Fornos have different menus. I don't know if you know. Yeah, I used to live down the block from the one on the—not in downtown, yeah, Hope Street, yeah, yeah. So many good memories there. All right. Well, this was so much fun. Thank you so much for taking time to talk with me today and sharing your story. It's been great hearing your story and hearing the insights that you've been able to gather from the work that you're doing.
Thank you so much, Tiffany, this has been awesome. If folks want to learn more, get in touch.
Yeah, find me. Yeah, yeah. We'll put all the links in the show notes so people can find you. If you're listening to this, definitely check out the show notes if you'd like to learn more about Liza's work and the organizations she's a part of, and also the great recommendation she had for us. I'll be back soon with another conversation. In the meantime, keep doing what you can to build a strong town.
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