Chuck Marohn  0:00  

Hey everybody. This is Chuck Marohn. Welcome back to the Strong Towns Podcast. Engineers aren't usually known for being cool. We're actually not known for even being very interesting, but my guest today breaks the mold. You might know him as Mr. Barricade, Vignesh Swaminathan. Please, my Minnesota Norwegian tongue. I hope I got that right. He's a civil engineer and a project manager at Kimley Horn. He's designed protected bike lanes and intersections across the Bay Area. He's built a massive following on Tiktok by making street design not just understandable, but actually kind of fun and cool. Vignesh, welcome to the Strong Towns Podcast.

Vignesh Swaminathan  0:50  

Well, thank you, Chuck. Thanks for having me.

Chuck Marohn  0:52  

Have I done justice to your name or injustice to your name? I try very hard. I'm sorry.

Vignesh Swaminathan  0:58  

It's close. It's Vignesh.

Chuck Marohn  1:00  

I'm going to try really hard to get that right. My brain just struggles with that. I will do better. I feel like people that have been around Strong Towns for a while have heard of you because I know we've had you on The Bottom-Up Revolution podcast, and we've done some other things. You were at our National Gathering. I want to give people just a little bit of introduction before we get into geeky stuff. I've heard the story about how you became Mr. Barricade, and how the pandemic gave you a little nudge to start communicating with people in this way. I'm kind of interested in the young engineer during the, what I would just call, the brainwashing phase. You know, you get out of school, and then you start working as an engineer in training, and they start telling you, "Here's how we do things." What was the process like for you? And when did you have this, like, progressive wake up? Like, "Maybe what I'm being told is not exactly how everything should work." What was that process for you?

Vignesh Swaminathan  2:05  

It was a combination of quite a few things. I grew up in the town of Cupertino, and in Cupertino, they had a kind of a priority of cycling. They put regular bike lanes, maybe a shared route through a neighborhood. They've had some historic traffic diversion where bikes were able to get through and cars wouldn't. And as I would bike around and travel around the Santa Clara County, both to go to higher income areas and lower income areas, I'd see the bike lanes drop, and I would be wondering why. Through growing up in Silicon Valley, I learned how to code really early on in my life, and I had a little parking app, and went to school for civil engineering, and I was approaching different cities and universities to map out the parking around the university, to try to get students a place to park that was nearby to the university, or in and around downtown, so there would be less circling. And then I approached the city of San Jose, and they were like, "We don't have any data. Would you like a job here?" And then I got one of my first jobs in the downtown operations and parking group. Through that, I still had kind of a highway parking mentality. I was working in that industry, and I really was trying to do that first and then transfer into construction management, because I wanted to build homes. I knew the Bay Area was leading towards a housing crisis. It already saw the hints of that back in 2009, 2010. I saw that the things that were holding back housing, a lot of times, was transportation, and the type of housing that we needed was density, and not necessarily expanding out. We already had hit traffic capacity. And when I was working in the downtown operations and parking, and I was all about parking because it's the first thing you do when you go somewhere, it's the first thing you do when you leave somewhere. But I saw some of the first times that we took away parking and put in little trees, took away parking and put in the bike lane. And I saw the effects of that really changed the downtown. It encourage the downtown to stop becoming a parking center for people and become a place for people to actually live and thrive. And when I saw that change start to happen, I saw that this is going to solve our density issues, and this is going to get more people walking around in downtown. The downtown is going to be less of a scary place at night, and more of a place that people want to be and thrive. That's when I really had that aha moment about, like, "Oh, I see where we're headed, and I see how we can build density."

Chuck Marohn  4:29  

You're talking about San Jose at this point, right?

Vignesh Swaminathan  4:32  

Yes. And I saw that. And San Jose has been a great city that has done a lot of things right, some things wrong, but done a lot of things right to continue to reinvigorate it. It's one of the few cities in the Bay Area. Between San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose, San Jose is a city that's kind of come back in a huge way after the pandemic, and it's by following some of the same things that I've been seeing and pushing for and making happen over the last decade or so.

Chuck Marohn  4:57  

It's so interesting because I know, even from my perspective, as someone who's visited a number of times but obviously never lived in the Bay Area, it sometimes seems like an anomaly nationally. Like San Francisco is a strange place, and the Bay Area is a strange place compared to other other places. But yet, a lot of the work that you do and some of the issues that you're dealing with are very familiar to me, even in a small town, even in a non-Bay Area, non-high density kind of area. When you talk about the idea of "we don't just want to be a place to park," that seems so obvious in a place like San Francisco. Why do you think it was not obvious, even five, six years ago? What, what was the thing that you think was holding us back?

Vignesh Swaminathan  5:51  

Well, I think it just comes from the root of how we've planned our cities. As we know, we have minimum parking requirements, and we think of parking as the only wallet delivery system to a downtown, as if it's the only way and the only type of people that can and will spend money in the city are those who will drive in with money in their wallet and then park and then come out and spend their money. But we know now, and over the years we've seen the success of that, that people are willing to bike and spend their money, people are willing to take transit and spend their money, people are willing to move to an area where they can have economic freedom and spend their money. By building the downtime to just be less of an entertainment hub and a spending hub, to also be a place where people can live and work and plan their whole lives, is something that's always been there. We've always had new urbanism and people moving into dense areas. I'd say this is just a next wave of that that's happening in a much larger way. And in small towns and large towns, you'll see people who, at different points in their life or different life choices, they may want to live in an apartment or condo in a downtown, as opposed to being in a suburb, further away from everything. I'm seeing that now with work from home and other things. There's a new wave of that. We will be like, "Hey, I'm already at home all the time. Do I really want to be on the outskirts? Would I rather be in a place where there's more things to do midday, afternoon, evenings?" I'm seeing that shift happen now.

Chuck Marohn  7:14  

You brought up Cupertino as you grew up, and you said, "I went to the affluent neighborhoods, and they had bike lanes and good walkability. And I went to the poorer neighborhoods, and they did not." Is that a fair representation of what you said?

Vignesh Swaminathan  7:30  

Cupertino's kind of like a higher middle-income area, but I would go to the areas are more affluent, and the bike lanes would go away as well, and I'd go to the areas that weren't so affluent, and they would also go away. It's kind of different styles.

Chuck Marohn  7:43  

Diagnose that for me, because I think that's an interesting observation,

Vignesh Swaminathan  7:47  

Yeah. I'll use an example of what I saw. So next to Cupertino, there's Los Altos and Saratoga. When you go into those communities, suddenly there's no sidewalks, there's no street lights, there's no bike lanes. They try to keep a more rural natural feel, even though it's in an urban area. And that, by system of design, is trying to keep people out of their town. They don't necessarily want people to just jump off a bus and just wander around. They wanted it to just be for the people that are in the area, that know how to use the area. I've seen less and less of of that. There's also a lot of people that do ride recreationally in those communities, with the lycra and they go in groups, and they're willing to take the lane and they're willing to ride their bike more similar to a car. Similar to how we've had from the American Society of Cycling, they've always advocated for more vehicle-centric cycling. It's kind of more of what you see in those communities. When I go to some of the lower income communities, East San Jose, East Palo Alto. A lot of these areas, sadly, also don't have street lights, but there is really small broken-up sidewalks. A lot of the people in those communities do need to use their vehicle to commute for their type of occupation, whether it's a truck or some other type. They have to drive very far, so there's a high demand for parking. People are parked up and on the sidewalk, because there's a limited amount of parking spaces and the sidewalk with is not really well utilized. So it is not a very walkable area. It doesn't feel very comfortable for people. And you will see a lack of bicycle facilities in those areas. Those have now changed quite a bit, but when I was growing up, that's kind of how I saw the nature of how things were. Compare that to Cupertino, which has had some tech campuses and was where people lived. It also had a lot of recreational trails. So they planned that people who live in the area will also bike and walk to work. They're a little ahead of the game, if I will, when I grew up there.

Chuck Marohn  9:52  

What does that transformation look like? I'd like to give you what I see like, not the Bay Area, but tell me what that transformation has been like, I'm interested in that.

Vignesh Swaminathan  10:03  

It's been interesting, and it happens in different ways, and it's somewhat political and controversial. In some of the affluent areas, now with work from home, I've seen a lot of people who are at home now, and they're walking around their neighborhood with their dog midday because they can do that. And then they're realizing, "Hey, this area is not as walkable, this area is not as nice. We would like trails. We would like to be able to access the few grocery stores that are in town." And there's a type of people who have the ability to work from home and have the time and the flexibility in their work schedule, and they're the ones realizing that, and they're the ones advocating for that. They may still not necessarily want new people or different people to come into their neighborhood, but we're seeing with California's housing policy that there's a push to build density in certain areas. There's housing mandates. And so this is something that I see as a growing need in these communities, and those cities are scrambling to figure that out. Los Altos has some great bike lanes now. They may not have sidewalks everywhere, but they have wide shoulders where people walk, similar to Saratoga. They're starting to incorporate more street lighting, and they have a trail network that they're trying to grow out, that's going either along the railroad track or along creeks that are there, and they're planning accordingly. They also have a downtown that is fairly walkable, and people want to get to that downtown. So putting bike infrastructure and pedestrian infrastructure to those areas is happening more and more. There still isn't a lot of transit in those areas because they are in the outskirts of town, but we're seeing that shift. In the lower income areas, sadly, there's a level of gentrification that comes in because those areas are close to job centers. I used to live in East Palo Alto for a few years. East Palo Alto, sadly, has always been the subject of gentrification. Sun Microsystems came and moved there many years ago because it was one of the cheaper areas to build their manufacturing and also pollute. And then eventually it went into more of a cloud-based thinking and less pollution. Now Facebook is moved into there. And so there's been a level of new people moving into that community and asking for more of this type of infrastructure. And there's been a combative reservation between between the two communities. It's like "Hey, you're building bike lanes and making the streets safer for more people to move in. The reason I live here is because it's cheaper, and you make these and now you're making it very expensive." And that's a very complicated conversation to have and to figure out. I've worked on some housing projects in those areas where we've had to communicate that, and communicate how the housing project is really curtailed to that local community and not going to be a form of displacement. Sometimes, bike infrastructure can be seen as a form of displacement in those communities, because it's not necessarily how people in those communities get around, or know how to get around. I think that's historically why we haven't seen it, and now we're shifting towards it.

Chuck Marohn  13:07  

It's really interesting. Let me give you maybe a Midwest corollary. And then I'd like to explore that idea of of investment and displacement, because I look out my window here, and I live in one of the poorer major cities in Minnesota, in one of the poorer neighborhoods in that area. Outside my window is that. We tend to lead the state in unemployment. We tend to have a lot of struggles. It's a naturally walkable neighborhood, but a neighborhood where there's a big deemphasis on maintaining the sidewalks, maintaining walkability. The highway that runs through the city, if you want to cross it, you sometimes have to walk six blocks up the road for a safe place to cross. And then, even when it's raining or 40 below, you've got to wait 90 seconds for the light to cycle, even though there's low traffic volumes, that kind of thing. Walking and biking is an afterthought, even though a lot of people in this neighborhood don't own cars or they have to bike and walk. That's how they get around. If we go three miles, four miles out of town to cul-de-sac land, where you've got a higher comparative level of affluence, there's been huge investments there in recreational transportation. They're gonna have nice trails for people to walk on. People go walk their dogs in the evening. It's not transportation in me, getting to work or getting to the doctor, but it's a lifestyle investment. If you came to my neighborhood and said, "We're going to really make it more bikeable and walkable," I don't think it would be a dislocation kind of thing, but it would really make life better for people here in a big way. I think people who live in that kind of place struggle to understand the Bay Area kind of, "Well, we got to be really careful about when we invest here, because when we make it easier for people who don't have cars to walk, we also dislocate those people." How do you deal with that tension, and how do you think it should translate into a place unlike the Bay Area, where I think you have a development pattern that's probably more common to most of America?

Vignesh Swaminathan  15:30  

Yeah, well, I think it's important to start with the history of how those areas came to be. A lot of those areas were historically grid neighborhoods and easy to get around. Maybe they have been built in a way that has maybe some not so great environmental effects. A lot of these historically red lined areas were in low lying flood plains, and they were built to be walkable and have access, but they were built in areas that did not want to have major investment because of the poor soil or other things. And then that eventually was where lower income folks moved to. They're built with a very small cross section, parking on both sides, maybe skinny roads. Then eventually, when we build highways and rail, those are the areas that those went through because they already were cheaper areas for right-of-way take. In the areas where you have the suburbs, they're in the hills, they're a little bit quieter, there's more real estate, and so there's more space to put in bikeways and do this type of implementation. If you want to take up space to put in different infrastructure in these other areas, there's something that has to give. Eeither you have to take from the sidewalk or you have to take from parking. Historically, communities moved there because it was close to where they worked. It was a factory in downtown or some other warehouse in the area or in the industrial area, and being in these grid neighborhoods that was close to those areas was a nice place to be. You're an up and coming family, you moved from somewhere far away to come there for work, the work wasn't the highest paying job but it was something that was going to get your family out of the the class or situation that you were in. And so that's where, historically, the lower income communities have moved to for upward economic mobility. But then we've had changes. We've had environmental policies that have maybe moved some manufacturing out of the country, we've had changes in the type of work that we do, and so those areas end up not being as attractive because they're not as close to work anymore. But they're close to different types of work now. Now we have different commercial spaces. In the Bay Area, a lot of the tech companies moved into old manufacturing areas. You can't have people live there because the soil is contaminated, but you can have people work there. Now these industrial areas are areas where we are having those type of higher paying jobs. And so these areas that we're talking about that we want to make walkable are attractive now because they're close to where people want to work. But then you have a combination of people that want to move to those areas because they're close to where you work, and also people whose family has generationally been there and generationally have not had the upwards economic mobility, because the housing prices have not gone up as much as they they have in other areas. Those communities either have got those jobs in those higher paying fields and those higher paying land uses, or they have to drive very far to get to work, and so they're reliant on the car. And so when we want to put bike infrastructure in, we have to take away parking or we have to make them into one-way streets or something. We'll put in transit and more. There has to be that compromise. And so that's what irks those communities. "Hey, you're coming in and you're putting in this bike infrastructure. I don't even work nearby, and you're going to take away my parking to do that. How does that make any sense?" Now, what I found helps with doing that -- and I'm going to talk about both housing and infrastructure. When it comes to infrastructure, sometimes I've worked on projects where the city just wants to put in a shared lane or bike lane as part of their master plan, but they're missing some of the core issues that are in that community. And those issues are ADA compliance, directional ramps. Those issues are street lighting. Those issues are drainage, a lot of times these communities in low lying flood plains have very poor drainage and floods. And what really annoys those communities is that, "Hey, you're putting in a bike marking or a bike lane and taking away parking, but you're not addressing the actual flooding issue that's bringing my home value down. You're not affecting the streetlight issue that makes it feel unsafe to walk around." So when we do those those projects in those areas, I call it an incomplete street. We're putting in bike lanes and we're calling it a complete street, but it's really incomplete where we're not putting in drainage swales, lighting, maybe some different land uses. We're not really solving the root cause or root issues that are in that community. And I've seen that firsthand. I've seen projects where we put in some speed bumps because there's speeding or cut through traffic, but we're not addressing the fact that the inlet doesn't actually function and it's flooding someone's front yard and they have constant damages to their home. And I think that's something that we need to address. We need to show that we that we're doing this for that community, not doing this to invite new people into the community, and that's the tough conversation.

Chuck Marohn  20:38  

That is. Yeah, keep going.

Vignesh Swaminathan  20:40  

Second part is, when we do housing and development, we've got to make sure that the housing is not only affordable for those communities, for that step. As much as some people like and don't like affordable housing, because it puts people into tears, the problem that we have in a lot of these areas is that the community is going from renting or multiple families living in grandma's home, and now they need to go to that next step of economic mobility. And the market-rate housing is just too high. So affordable housing is a great step to eventually have more market-rate housing. That's one thing. But also there maybe can be options of stipends for the local community, there may be places where local businesses have a place with reduced rent in those multi-use buildings, maybe they get a priority. And we really do something to show that we're not putting in a new Starbucks in that community, but we're really putting in the local restaurant that's already existed. Maybe someone's doing it out of their home, or it's something that's happening on the street. That culture and community can still be here and be celebrated, in a way, with this new development. If that communication happens, where we're doing the infrastructure for that community, for them all to be able to to thrive in their own community, and we're putting in land uses that prioritize that community, either by being affordable or a stipend or priority for local businesses, then it can help gel better with that community. Saying, "Hey, we're trying to make things better, but we're doing it with you as the first priority." If we just do a typical 5-over-1 building, and we just put in whatever the mainstream companies are, Jamba juice, Starbucks, Subway, then it really just defaces what's been there for many years, and the discrepancies we've seen in investment over the years. That can be a shot in the neck for someone in the community who's just feels like, "This wasn't built for me at all." I've seen projects that have tried to do that and also not done well. Amazon moved into East Palo Alto, and they said they're going to create a job center that's going to have job training and stuff like that. They didn't really continue on with that investment, and that really put a bad taste in everybody's mouth in that community. So when new development was coming and they were going to do even more -- and I actually was a big fan of that new development, it was going to be a large housing complex that was going to do a lot for the local community -- that bad taste from previous bad actors was still there, and they ended up reducing the size of that new development and being delayed. So these steps are hard, and we're constantly thinking about how to do them better, but it is a tough conversation to have, because we don't want to displace history and community, especially with minority communities or immigrant communities. They're writing their history right then and there, and then, when they have to move somewhere else, that history gets very spread out.

Chuck Marohn  23:31  

I've heard you say that, in particular in the Bay Area, that housing is in some ways being held back by transportation. I would like to understand that from your perspective, because what what I see -- I was in Denver last week, and I feel like this is active there, as well as other places. You look at transportation as the way we're going to get housing. "If we build this new transportation thing, it opens up more land and we can go build more homes or we can get people across town quicker and give them access to more jobs." There's a whole housing conversation that's about building more and more of what we have in order to create housing. I struggle with that in many ways, but I know that the struggle in the Bay Area is different even from that. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean and how, if you were going to advise a city where you work on how we do transportation in a way that also fuels good housing, what would that look like through your eyes?

Vignesh Swaminathan  24:36  

Sure. Well, the Bay Area, like many areas between the 80s and 90s, has hit its traffic capacity. We've changed, back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, from level of service to VMT. And for your audience, level of service is how we've analyzed traffic. It's a funtion that looks at a road where A is free flow, everybody can go to whatever speed they want to go, and F is gridlock traffic. It goes A to F. Based on the parking minimums of a new development, they would say, "Oh, this new development is going to be generating this many more trips, and this many more trips need to be accommodated in some way." And there'll be widening of the roads, widening of the exit ramp, adding a new right-turn pocket, to be able to accommodate that development. To do new development, especially infill development, required a lot of widening of the roads, and made it very unsafe to walk or bike around in a dense area. So developers would either build out the roads, pay an extra fee to the city for them to build out the roads, or build somewhere else on the outskirts of town. And then we have continuous sprawl and continuous traffic capacity being hit. The concept of induced demand kept coming up of like, "Oh, you build a road from four lanes to eight lanes, more people move an hour away. Eight lanes to 10 lanes, two hours away, etc, etc. That continued. We changed that to VMT, where we tell a developer, "Hey, you're going to generate trips. That's going to happen. How can you reduce the type of trips that you're you're going to generate by reducing the amount of vehicle miles that are traveled to your facility?" And so they would have to figure out, "Am I going to build more transit. Am I going to put in more bike lanes? Am I going to put in showers for people who bike to be able to clean themselves up before they go to work? Am I going to build multiple land uses where people can live and there's also shops downstairs, and there's a daycare nearby, and there's a school nearby?" We build these developments that have multiple land uses so people can live, eat, work, play, thrive in the same area. We've been following that trend for the last decade here, of encouraging that type of development, so developers will get either a fast-track process or the fees for their type of development will be reduced by not building a two-car garage for every studio. They reduce that down. That's been working fairly well, but we still hit certain roadblocks. You know, the original goal of VMT was to reduce emissions, not necessarily to reduce the time people spend driving. That was the original goal. And now that we have electric vehicles, soon to be autonomous vehicles, hybrids and more, they're taking away the HOV sticker for electric vehicles soon, and the tax breaks because our climate is getting better. We're doing better with that. A newer conversation needs to be had about our goals. Do we want to reduce the time people are in a car? Yes and no. Because, yeah, being in a car is a waste of time. Nobody's making money off of that. But being in a car and going places and going to different cities that are further away does bring economic activity to those other downtowns. I might say I want to go to the beach one day, I might want to go to this other city. It's far away. I do need to drive. We do want to encourage that economic ability. So how can we accommodate us also wanting to encourage that by reducing vehicle trips at the same time? And they may seem like very contradictory things. It's because different people are doing different things in different ways. If we can reduce the short trips that people do, because the majority of trips are happening by people just going to grocery store or just going to get coffee in their neighborhood and driving. If we can encourage people to to not be in a car for that, then we allow for the roads to have capacity for people who want to go far to that area. And we can still have the same investment that we've had over the last years in adding bike lanes or whatever, but we will be able to take in more people. And so that's where the goal of where we're heading. VMT helps that in some ways and doesn't help in some ways. That metric is good and bad for that. We've had new things that have come up. In California there's right now SB 79, which I'm a huge advocate for. It is building up to six story housing a half mile from every major train station and major rapid bus station. That way people who say, "Hey, you know what? I don't mind not driving for some of my trips," them living near a transit station provides that option. I live a train near a train station. Tonight, I'm going to go see a Giants game in San Francisco. I'm just going to go home, change it to my Giants gear, take the train up, and go to the city. For a lot of people, that might be like, "Whoa. I never take the train." And those people can still do that, but at least for people like me who are willing to do that, we offset those vehicle trips, and we make it easier for people who are going to do that to be able to drive into the city. That's how we create that capacity for everybody. I'm not going to be here as an advocate hitting my chest, saying "Everyone's going to ride a bike and everyone's going to take the train." That's going to be impossible, but we at least have some people who are willing to do that, do that, and others who can't or are not willing to do that have more capacity for them.

Chuck Marohn  30:05  

Can I ask you a question about engineers? Because I feel like, for a long period of time, we have tried to solve traffic congestion abd the level of service problem by adding capacity. And what I hear you saying is that, in the Bay Area, just geometry says we can't do that. There's literally not enough space to widen lanes and all this. What about in places where there is the geometry to do that? I mean, we can go south and north of the Bay Area, and we see places where the proposed solution to congestion is to add capacity, as opposed to adding other destinations and other places that to replace long trips with short trips. As a profession, as engineers, how should we think about this in places where you don't have the physical constraints that you do in a high density city?

Vignesh Swaminathan  31:08  

For a lot of engineers, we're scratching our head, and they still are scratching their head when VMT is talked about, because VMT is not a clear metric that us engineers think by. Level of service is very easy to understand for an engineer. Some other people may be like, "Level of service doesn't make any sense. Why are we doing that?" But for an engineer, it's a metric that you can maximize and minimize, and you meet certain constraints. "Okay, I can do something and I can remove that constraint, and then a metric gets better or worse." And that's why level of service based on density is just a clear equation. Compare that to VMT. It's a little bit of subjective. "Okay, I have a point system. I'm putting in bike infrastructure and transit infrastructure. This point system is going to somehow reduce people from from from driving?" That's confusing for an engineer to to understand, even though engineers are supposedly smart.

Chuck Marohn  32:00  

I'm hearing you describe a short feedback loop versus a long feedback loop, right? Like if I widen on this lane, I can show that level of service is going to be better, at least, like, the day after I finished the project. But if I put in a bike lane over here, the person living there may or may not bike to the store, there might not even be a store there for five years. Those are long feedback loops. Am I understanding what you're saying?

Vignesh Swaminathan  32:25  

You are exactly. When you try to reduce VMT, you're putting in this infrastructure not knowing if somebody is going to use it or not, because there could be nothing there or people just may not want to bike because of weather conditions or whatnot. It's a very long-term approach of changing the habits of people. People will only change a habit if there's a nicer, better option available, and that habit can be changed by putting in some of this infrastructure. It can be put in by reducing parking in that area and it being a little tougher to find parking. Developers don't mind either way. A developer will say, "If you reduce the parking, I have more space to put in my stuff." They actually like the reduction of parking a lot of times, because it's less costly to build a parking garage and it's a better utilization of the space for their own economic activity. But level of service is not going to go away, nor has it. It's still a function that we check to see if something's going to fail or not. The VMT is going to help us to try to build different habits in people, and then later down the line the road may get more capacity, the level of service may go down. I've seen that when we do our analysis of a road diet. Immediately the road diet's gonna be tough, but that road has a history of fatalities and it's not necessarily an arterial road. We want people to use the proper arterials. Over time, people generally start shifting toward using those other arterials because the speed limit is reduced on this road that we put the road diet on. Then people start using the roads with the appropriate class as to where they're supposed to be used for, instead of using this cut through as they once did. So by putting in some of these VMT measures, reducing the parking and providing more options for people and making it less easy of an option to drive and park at the mall or drive and park for small trips where you're not carrying large loads of stuff, we can eventually start building those different habits. Then, when we analyze VMT a few years from now, we'll start to see that there are a lot of people who are doing different trips in a different way. I will say the pandemic has kind of thrown a wrench in some of our thinking. We don't have the same morning and evening peak as we once did, especially in areas like the Bay Area, where there are a lot of people that work from home, I think a higher percentage than in most areas. We start seeing just a large peak throughout the whole day, and there's a lot of activity in the afternoon. So some of the ways that we've been doing analysis with level of service, where we assume for morning and evening peak, don't really work anymore. There's also a lot more home delivery of food and goods. People are shopping online more. So there's definitely a need to take a hard look at how we're trending. And how we're trending is going to be different depending on the type of jobs that we have in different areas. You have to think, who is actually going to commute via bicycle or via transit? It's somebody who is not carrying a lot to go to work. Those people are either going to go work in retail, where they're going and selling something, or they're the people who carry a laptop and go to work. Now, a lot of those people who would carry a laptop and go to work are now working from home. So our type of jobs and type of work is really going to be different from location to location now, compared to how we used to think about it pre-pandemic. We'll see how policy makers are changing that. I've seen in San Francisco that the mayor has said that all city employees have to come back to work. By the city taking that first step, eventually the other companies will start to follow suit. With this new AI boom and also layoffs, I'm sure we'll see a lot of people saying, "Hey, why am I paying my AI software engineer this much money to be in the area when they're not ever coming to work? Does that actually make any sense? Do we force that person to come to work, or do we hire somebody remotely who will take less money and not necessarily need to be in the area?" I think, over the next couple years, we're going to see some of these tech companies take a hard look at their staff and make some changes. But eventually, we will get back to building capacity for whoever needs to get to work, not whoever doesn't. Right now, we're in a bit of a flux time that's following the pandemic. We're still seeing where we're going to end up.

Chuck Marohn  36:57  

One of the more brilliant things that I've watched you do is explain these small projects in terms of helping people get around and use the city better. We talk about humbly observing and then taking the next smallest step. And I've just been really inspired by watching you live that and do that day after day. How do you, as an engineer, sell the VMT-based approach to politicians in a financial constrained world? I mean, none of these cities have any money to do anything. And I'm thinking, Engineer A goes to them and says, "I have a level of service model. Here's what it says we need to do. We got to go out and do this project. It's $20 million but we can get $10 million from the state through this program or that program, and we just got to kick in this." And then you show up with a VMT model, and you say, "Well, we got to go build this thing. It might only be $200,000 but I don't really even know if anyone's going to use it. They might use it two or three years from now, but we got to do that and another thing and another thing." What would be the sales pitch from an engineering standpoint for the VMT model to politicians and a public that, let's face it, no one has any money to just throw around.

Vignesh Swaminathan  38:27  

Yeah, well, when I started my firm a while ago, I focused on quick-build projects, because quick-build projects are a great way of doing this first step. We're trying to build different habits. I don't even know if people are going to use the facility like we want them to use the facility. Us doing a major investment in concrete and civil improvements that somebody might might love, tap with their wheel and hate, and also maybe modify the drainage of the roadway. That's some major investments that we're talking about. Modifying drainage is a major investment.

Chuck Marohn  39:04  

Major investment, yeah.

Vignesh Swaminathan  39:06  

If we can do something like that with paint and post and learn from that, and use that as a form of outreach to explain why we're doing it, also see how people are using it, make adjustments down the line. That's a much cheaper investment that can be done through paving maintenance, and then we can start seeing how people are using those facilities better. We've seen the success of that in the Bay Area. I worked on the same road in multiple phases. I worked on it back when we were adding another lane, and then I've worked on it when we're taking away the lane and putting in a bike lane and parking. And then I'm working on it when we're taking the bike lane away and putting in a protected bike lane and switched up parking with quick-build. And then I've done it where we just put in precast concrete blocks, and we're doing that as next phase. And then now I'm working on a lot of them where we're putting in the lighting, the drainage, the bioswales, and we're doing a full rebuild. And we're doing that through the new developments that are happening in that area, by building other developments frontages. I've seen that happen multiple phases where I've worked on the same street multiple times as we've progressed through that change. When I travel the country, and I see a lot of times, the road has not been touched in 100 years, and that's just because they haven't started doing this phase approach of encouraging that,

Chuck Marohn  40:25  

Can I interrupt you for a sec? Because I feel like you just said something brilliant that I think will pass by a lot of people. I think the engineering mindset is to let that road decay to nothing until we have the money and the resources and the project to fix it perfectly forever. And what you talked about is going to the same road three different times at three different phases. That's so not the way engineers are trained to approach things. I've always thought that's a direct result of affluence, we just have so much money that we can always think about the finished state as opposed to iteratively fixing something. But I feel like you're describing it as, like, even if you had tons of money, this is the smart way to do it. Is that fair?

Vignesh Swaminathan  41:13  

Yeah, to a certain extent. You have certain communities that were built out a long time ago, and they decay, and then we go build a new community, and that good does well, and then it decays, and we keep expanding our cities, and we keep doing that. We've reached a certain limit over the 80s and 90s with the car where we can't do that anymore. In a lot of areas that are in a valley, let's take Las Vegas for an example. I lived there for a year. Las Vegas Valley has fully built out. Now people are moving into the hills and they're moving really far away, and the traffic is hitting capacity. The only solution is to build in unless we have a new mode of transportation that's going to make us continue to do that. We may with self driving cars, and I'll talk about that in a bit, but that's been our thought process. We have the car. Car can go 65 miles per hour. We're going to keep going until we hit capacity. The approach that I'm talking about is, the Bay Area hit that capacity a while ago, and we also have environmental policies that want us to not go outside of our urban growth boundary. So we're trying to figure out what we can do within our own areas. And for those in the audience who don't know what an urban growth boundary is, it's an artificial line that the city draws around an area where they say, "We're only going to build density in here, and we're not going to go affect impervious areas or grassy areas anymore, because we don't want to add more impact to our drainage infrastructure. We're going to limit the water that goes into the drain system from roads and rooftops by keeping these areas natural and preserving stuff." The Bay Area has a lot of preservation. We've had Open Space Preservation since the 50s and 40s by advocates. A lot of those areas are prime real estate to build a bunch of homes, but we've kept those as hiking trails and mountain biking trails and equestrian areas. We preserve those areas so that we have nice nature near where we live. A lot of cities haven't really thought about that, and they just continue to expand out and out. What we're trying to do is utilize the investment that we already have and keep these areas fresh, and keep these areas as places that people want to be. Some may say "Oh no, you're also adding to the gentrification problem of rebuilding an area that was already allowed to decay." But that's also not fair to the people that are in that community. Saying "Hey, we let this area decay, but now we're here to invest in it" or "We're not going to invest in it." So we're continuing to try and build different habits and and work with different modes. I mentioned self driving cars.

Chuck Marohn  41:13  

Yeah.

Vignesh Swaminathan  41:17  

I do have a feeling that's going to change a lot. It's definitely a new mode of transportation in the Bay Area. A few months ago, I saw there's a new vehicle called Tensor that is going to be selling a personal self driving car by the end of 2026. Now, that's going to change a lot, because a lot of people that already work from home or have to work in an office a few days a week, they might say, "Hey, you know what? I'm going to go move to the outskirts of the Bay Area, and a few days of work, I'm going to take my self driving car in, and I'm going to do my Google or Zoom or Microsoft Teams meeting in my car on my way to work, continue to work for five to eight hours, and then go back." I could see these urban growth boundary policies getting eliminated someday, sadly, and us expanding out and building more suburbs. Now that has pros and cons. Do we want to affect the urban growth boundary? We have a lot of beautiful nature in California. The majority of California is not built out. Compared to LA, where you have homes all over every single mountain, a lot of the Bay Area has a lot of nature. But also it could provide affordability to people in areas where it's not affordable now for people to have that point in their life when they have the kids and the dog and they want the area for the kids to go play. So these are problems that we're going to face in the next few years. I'm watching it closely to see where we end up. Wherever we end up, we're going to need to solve all these problems at once. It's not just saying, "Hey, we're going to switch gears and just build new suburbia." We're going to still need to do stuff in the dense areas, and we're going to still need to do stuff in the suburbia and make these areas nice places to be. Maybe when we build it from the first time, we can build it with bike paths and recreation. But we're going to be solving all different types of problems at the same time. And that's what's exciting about being a civil engineer and a transportation engineer. We're not always doing one thing. We're continuously doing all of it. It just has different types of features and different elements in different localities.

Chuck Marohn  45:55  

You've brought up drainage a few times. I feel like, in places that are impacted by drainage, the engineers just think differently. My daughter just moved to Tucson to go to college, and I was down there for a week and just looking at things going "They have a very different relationship with drainage here." It's big monsoons, and then it's nothing. But in the Bay Area -- and I think this is probably closer to what we see in other places in the country -- when you think of level of service of a roadway, you're thinking of a drainage shed of cars filtering into a finite amount. We see it, and we see it backing up, and it's annoying because it wastes people's time in congestion. When you go underground and it's water, it's the same effect, but instead of backing people up, it floods people in ways that are really disastrous. I know you've done a lot on drainage, and I know you talk about drainage a lot. When you think about developing some of these areas around the Bay Area that haven't been developed, I think the argument is often, "Well, we could have more housing, and we could have more stuff, and we could build more things, and that would be great." And then you have someone like you who walks in and says, "Hey, be careful of the drainage." I feel like yours is an ignored exponential problem. One of those where no one would think about it until it's too costly to solve. I want to give you an opportunity to talk about that, because I do feel like when I hear the debate, I hear environmentalists fighting housing advocates, but nobody really thinks about that underlying cost, which would be intolerable to everybody.

Vignesh Swaminathan  47:41  

Yeah, and you explain it well. It's similar to a roadway, in you just having all these drain systems that eventually have to go into something. We might have the creek that goes and dumps into the bay or into the ocean or into a major river in your town, and that creek only has so much capacity. When you add more housing and add more development, you add more impervious area, impervious area meaning the water doesn't go into the soil like it used to. Then it's got to go into a drainage inlet, or go dump into a creek or water channel, and all that can get to a capacity. And then you start flooding your downtown or flooding your your major area.

Chuck Marohn  48:20  

You've never flooded before over here, and now all of a sudden it's flooding. And you're like, "Why?" And it's because half a mile over there, they did a bunch of stuff, yeah.

Vignesh Swaminathan  48:28  

That's because we always thought about water, and we still do, as a waste product. "We need to get rid of it as fast as possible. We need to put in a concrete water channel with a very low friction factor so the water just zooms out of there." Yeah, when you have monsoons and stuff like that, we need that. But it's a different type of thinking that can work with new development. In some places, it's called a sponge city, or a low-impact development, or green infrastructure. When I talk about Complete Streets, it's not just about bikes and ped, it's about green infrastructures, the planting, the lighting. What that is, is where you have the water go filter into the ground, either rejuvenating the groundwater table or filtering into little bioswales. The water goes through that, filters out the trash and debris and powder from our brake pedals and more, and then it goes into the water system. That filtration process takes time. It slows the water downins. Instead of us taking the water and pushing it out as fast as possible with metal pipes and concrete water channels, we slow the water down and let it percolate into the ground or filter. That is another option for preventing flooding. Instead of all the water coming out of the river at once -- like it rains one day and then that day and all the next day the water levels are high and then it goes down -- we allow for the water to slow down, and then the river will be at a high level for maybe the next week or two weeks, as the water eventually comes down. That's really how nature has always done things. We've always had rivers, but the water wasn't getting to the river fast enough, because it's gotta go to all the trees and create all these little streams and stuff. And as we've gone through an agricultural revolution, and now our phase of building a lot of roadway, we now have water going into these same systems, but it's going into it in a different way. By us having more areas for the water to slow down and get into the ground or in these swales, it can prevent not only flooding, but also sea level rise. Both of those work hand in hand. I have a few sea level rise projects where we're putting in levees but we're also putting a lot of planting in areas for water to soak into the ground, to help slow down the water. I talk about that on my channels, and I try to bring education to that. Now, what we talked about just now is a very complicated thing.

Chuck Marohn  50:59  

Yeah, yeah.

Vignesh Swaminathan  51:00  

What I try to do on my social media channels is talk about it in bits, in very simplistic words, of what we're doing and why we're doing it. So it's more understandable to the audience. Because someone who's going to be affected by flooding, either by a new flooding project or their home being flooded, won't fully understand the macro level about what we're doing. So explaining this in bits is something that I've tried to do, because we're all going to be affected by this in the future, by either climate change and/or just new development. These conversations are part of understanding why we do the things we do. When I do put in a lot of these protected bike lanes, we're taking up real estate for the bike lane. We're also taking up real estate for the buffer to protect the bikes. We're also taking real estate for a little bit of an area at the ends of the parking so people can see bikes when they turn. Those areas are prime for putting in bioswales. We do that with paint and posts now, and eventually those areas will become drainage facilities when we finally get to the Cadillac of complete streets.

Chuck Marohn  52:01  

One of the things that has made me really happy is to see you at Kimley Horn now. I was deeply inspired by the work you were doing before, but I recognize that the large engineering firms need to change some of their practices and some of the ways that they're doing things. Watching Kimley Horn, which is one of the nation's largest, most influential engineering firms, work with you and say, "What you're doing is something that we want to do," has given me a lot of optimism that we're moving in the right direction. Can you just take a minute and talk about how your work has changed now, and what your role there at Kimley Horn is? Feed into my optimism a little bit. I think it's warranted, right?

Vignesh Swaminathan  52:54  

Yeah. I'm really enjoying my working here at Kimley Horn. Kimley Horn is a large firm that mainly started as a traffic engineering firm. A lot of the traffic problems historically may have been caused by Kimley Horn projects, but now, Kimley Horn has realized, and the industry has realized, that we need to start building for this density and we can't keep expanding. We still work on those type of projects, but we do that through this different lens now. When I ran Crossroad Lab for seven years, I was really pioneering a lot of these new bikeway projects by either convincing cities do what we talked about earlier, with quick-build and eventually building things out, to convincing them about the changes in land use and more. By me doing that, it became now the industry norm. I'm very happy that this year, in 2025, after me working on this for the last 13 or 14 years, I've seen AASHTO put out their new bikeway guidance, which is a consolidation of a lot of the research and designs that I've been working on over the years, and that's now the National Highway standard about how to do bike infrastructure. Now it's time to work on this on a much larger scale. A lot of the projects in the Bay Area have already gone through this quick-build phase, and now we're working on this final phase where we're either helping developers build out their frontages in this style, or having cities do full roadway projects or highway projects with bike infrastructure and bioswales and green street infrastructure. The Bay Area has been working on that first, and we've had the problems the worst, and I'm having the opportunity to work on some of those projects that are much larger, and doing a lot of those best practices. Now, Kimberly Horn operates very differently. Every project manager was nice about it, and the reason I wanted to come here is they're allowing me to do basically the same thing that I was doing just under the Kimley Horn umbrella with a lot of support for proposals. It had been stuff that was bogging me down when I was running my own firm. They're also allowing me to go teach and share that with other offices and other people. So other groups are starting to do the same type of projects. My time, these days, is split between marketing, doing the work that I have, and also doing design review and educating a lot of other project and practice builders, and reviewing designs from all over the country on doing these bikeway projects. So the type of projects that I've worked on here in the Bay Area that are the norm for me, people scratching their heads trying to figure that out. Now I'm able to go provide those best practices and give my red lines to their designs, and they go and carry that forward. So we're seeing these protected bike lanes and green infrastructure projects happening throughout the country now, in line with Kimberly Horn's already main traffic practice and growing land development practice. Kimberly Horn is able to share with their agencies,  "Hey, these are the best practices of the industry right now. Let's do that now, before the regulation catches up and and tells you to do that. Let's start doing that, putting our best foot forward." It's been really nice and rewarding to work on that. I'm now working on a lot of protected bike lanes or bike paths across freeway interchanges. I'm working on land development projects that are incorporating bike paths that go through the development so that people don't have to go up to an intersection and go and make a right. They're able to actually bike through the development and there are shops near the bike facility. I'm able to work on complex Caltrans processes and convince Caltrans to do safe streets and a lot of cool projects like raising our trail crossings and swale projects. It's really nice to be able to use all parts of everything that I've learned in civil engineering now at Kimberly Horn. I'm growing a roadway team here in San Jose and leading that team, and we've grown quite a bit. I've done more work than I've ever done in one year in my own firm in the first four or five months of this year. And that practice is going to continuously grow exponentially. I look forward to working with the other offices on assisting them, or even bringing their work over here and us doing that work over here so that it can be built that way in a different state.

Chuck Marohn  57:02  

See, Iron Man, Captain America, Superman. To me, the true hero is Mr. Barricade. That's where it's at, man. You're a superhero. You really are. You asked me before we started, "What do you want to talk about?" And I'm like, "I just want you to talk about what you're doing, because it's really amazing." Vignesh, if people want to get a hold of you, I know they can follow you on Tiktok, Mr. Barricade. I think you're on Instagram too as Mr. Barricade. Where can people get in touch with you if they really want to find out more about your work and what you're doing?

Vignesh Swaminathan  57:38  

Well, I post videos on my social media mainly for the resident. People who are interested and want to learn more, they can reach out to me. I check my LinkedIn messages and my Instagram messages. Tiktok is just too many.

Chuck Marohn  57:52  

Yeah man, I'm with you.

Vignesh Swaminathan  57:55  

I also can give a plug to my email. It's my first name, Vignesh, that's V I, G, N, E, S, H, dot Swaminathan, that's spelled swam S, W, A, M, I, NATHAN at Kimley dash Horn.com. I respond and assist a lot of people, at least help them figure out the next steps or direct them to a practice builder at Kimberly Horn that's in that area that can help team with so we can work on a project together in your community. I've helped do that out of state. But if people just have average questions, Instagram and LinkedIn is the best place for me to just give quick responses to folks and help direct them in the right way. It's been really rewarding to to see that a lot of the newer engineers here at Kimley Horn were inspired by watching my videos back in 2020 and now they've graduated, and they've come to work for me here, and so that's been really inspiring. I get messages all the time from people who say, "Hey, I went and I got a commission role now because of what you've taught me" through a direct message that I helped them with, and now they're able to do work in their own community, or they're able to direct their consultants and their city staff to do things a certain way. And I see the feedback of that. It's been five years of doing social media. You and I have been doing this for about five years now, and we've really seen how that affect has come to be. It's really been an inspiring journey, and I look forward to continuing to do that.

Chuck Marohn  59:20  

Well, if you're listening to this and you are struggling to communicate safe streets concepts or quick-build concepts or just help people see their own built environment a little bit differently, check out Mr. Barricade on social media. It is very approachable. It's very fun. You might catch Vignesh dancing here and there and certainly smiling the whole time. This is not your grandpa's engineer. This is a new way of looking at things. I'm just really grateful that you're out there doing this stuff.

Vignesh Swaminathan  59:52  

Thank you, Chuck.

Chuck Marohn  59:54  

Vignesh Swaminathan, now with Kimley Horn, Mr. Barricade online, thanks so much for taking the time to chat with all of us today.

Vignesh Swaminathan  1:00:02  

Of course, anytime.

Chuck Marohn  1:00:04  

hey and thanks everybody for listening. Keep doing what you can to build a strong town.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman  1:00:12  

This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.