Norm Van Eeden Petersman 0:01

"Your reward is no headline." That's a phrase that Josh Stewart used yesterday in our session of Ask Strong Towns Anything. I've been thinking about it and want to share his full remarks with you on this episode of Bottom-Up Shorts.

Josh is a past guest on Bottom-Up Shorts. If you want, you can go in the show notes and find that past recording. He is an advocate for safe streets in Littleton, Colorado, and we asked him on to talk with our members and grapple with many of the real challenges that we face in our communities with the way in which our streets are not only laid out, but the way in which that space is prioritized for people on foot, for vulnerable road users, versus or along with the many people that are driving through our spaces. He said one of the things that stands out is that we can see our values in the streets that we have created.

So in this section of the Ask Strong Towns Anything session that we did for our Strong Towns members, Josh really captures something so powerful, and I wanted to share it with you as a special version of this Bottom-Up Short. So I'll be back afterwards. But here's Josh.

Josh Stewart 1:19

My story starts with the onset of a tragedy. My son was hit and killed by a driver while he was riding his bike to school. That just opened my eyes and really made me realize the struggles that we have, the problems with our current situations, and really that there is hope and there are things that could be done and there's change that can be made. So I have truly just dedicated the majority of my time to making sure that those things happen here locally, and I'm planting seeds everywhere I can throughout the nation, throughout the world, and hoping that others have an enlightenment as well, and without having to have the tragedy that my family has had to have in the last couple of years.

Realizing every city has budget constraints, it's not necessarily—first you need to recognize that budget constraints just mean they're saying that this particular thing is less important than something else, first and foremost. So what the challenge is is not getting more money, but it's recognizing that street safety is actually a higher priority than maybe some of the other things that they currently see as a higher priority. So first that's a challenge, and that's really difficult because many city council people and government employees don't see flexibility in budget as an option.

But in Littleton, and I'm sure this is true with a majority of the cities out there, we actually have a transportation master plan that had been adopted years before Liam was killed. That transportation master plan really prioritized cars, level of service, speed through the city, and looking at our neighborhood streets as more of avenues for people to get to work, rather than what they are—streets that everybody uses, places for gathering, community, travel to the grocery store. Those were a spot for elderly people in wheelchairs, people that are just using alternative modes of transportation. So I've worked hard to get that transportation master plan revised.

In my journey, I joined our transportation and mobility board of the city, and that's something that I would really love just for everyone in this room to hear and understand. The city—all cities—are very deep in where they look for input, where they get information from. Many cities have a mobility board or a transportation board that is formed out of citizens, and those citizens give input to the city council, who then gives priority to the budget. That's where you really can make an impact. So maybe you don't have the ear of a city council member, but you possibly have the ear of somebody on that board, and you could talk to them about your concerns. You could talk to them about the recommendations that they're going to make to the city council, to the city manager, and the budgetary constraints that come along with that.

When you change a transportation master plan, you're kind of changing the way a city thinks about a new street. That's important, because hopefully, if you can't get the current streets redone, which is very high cost to get that in place, at least you can make sure that any new street that's being built fits a priority that matches the values of understanding who uses this street—and it's not just cars. So that's where we've seen in Littleton, making recommendations to our transportation master plan, the set-aside budget that says when it gets rebuilt or gets built in the first place, this is what it needs to look like. This is who it needs to think about. We need to consider the avenues of what it's used—other than just cars and commuting. But also, does it connect to grocery store? Does it connect to park? Does it connect to school? Which are all places that don't necessarily get driven to, right? People don't like to drive to their city park. People would much rather push a stroller there. So it's taking that into account and to really change the mindset of those that set aside that money in the first place.

For me, it feels like everything that we don't take action on could be the possible loss of life, and it's frightening for me. So it's much harder for me to handle that. But our city has taken on a lot of those temporary projects that you just mentioned, and I think that helps me to also understand and also to accept that it's better to test than to throw in a final plan. Final plans are extremely expensive. Final plans, if you don't have enough data—final plans get just changed by bureaucracy. So it's better to put these test projects in place first, so you have data to protect the plan, the final plan, from the bureaucratic nonsense that's going to happen down the road.

So what we've done a lot in Littleton is just these pilot projects. Let's see what an armadillo does to a street. Let's see what a zebra does to a street. Let's see what a bollard does to a street. What is the feedback that we get on that? For me, it was hard to see these temp projects go up rather than permanent solutions go in. But then I started to really come to grips with, we're not testing what makes a street better. We're kind of, in some parts, teaching people that behavior—your past behavior—wasn't the right behavior. Because the majority of people that are using these streets are the ones that live there.

One of the struggles is that if you drive the same street every day, you're subconsciously looking for the way to make it the most efficient for you personally, and not necessarily for everybody else on the road. So you might find it's safe to speed in this one area. "Oh, there's always a speed trap here." "Oh, there's a speed intervention, like a speed bump or something like that, but I know if I go far to the right, I don't get bumped." So those are the sorts of things that neighborhoods—the people that live there—have changed, and they don't even realize that their behavior has been modified by the street itself.

So by putting in a temporary project, it's part behavior modification. So it's going to make every person that uses that street uncomfortable. For me, that was one of the hardest things to come to terms with. At first, you're going to get a lot of complaints, but that's good. That's saying that people who are using it before are now admitting to the fact that they were using it in a way that wasn't the expected behavior. You put in a modification that forces people to slow down and go the speed limit, and then they complain. They're just admitting that they were speeding before. So that's important. But that's great data, because when we go forward and we want to get that final project done and we want to put in that thing that my grandchildren will be using, I know that we tested the right things, we got the feedback, and we knew what the right thing was, and nobody changed it because we didn't have that data to support the proper change.

So yeah—but coping with the delay, I'll never feel comfortable with how long it takes for government to respond to these issues. But if you can make sure that the people that are making the decisions have the right mindset, maybe not the right amount of money, but the right mindset, that gives me solace in knowing that we will see the change that we're hoping for.

Cities just need that permission to be able to do the right thing, and a lot of them don't give themselves that permission. There's this deep-seated irony that they hire highly qualified individuals—city planners, street designers—to work on staff of the city, but then utilize very little of their skills in designing a street. They call in consultants, they call in outside third-party companies to do this work, and so they just turn into managers of other people's work.

In Colorado, and I'm sure this is similar in many other states, cities have qualified immunity if they design the streets. Third-party agencies do not. So what happens is, if a city were to design the street, they could actually take novel approaches and try new things. A third-party contractor is scared to try new things because they are actually liable. So they will just use the tried and true—just saying stuff that has precedence in court that they're not liable for. So you don't get good ideas. You don't get new ideas. That is one of the biggest struggles of what pushes back good street design and taking care of the people that live there, when cities can react quickly and use the knowledge base and the experts they have on staff to do so.

I think that makes a lot of sense. Right now, getting a study done is kind of pushing off the guilt. I think cities often feel like they're admitting fault if they redesign an intersection where somebody was killed, and we need to let them know that we don't see it like that. It's not admitting that you were guilty or you knew something was going to happen. It's taking action on something that did happen. It's, instead of treating death as a data point about this intersection, let's treat it as the balloon popped. We saw it coming, and now it popped. Now we got to start over from scratch and rethink this whole thing, rather than just saying death happens sometimes, and we're going to keep the design.

When a city does community engagement, they're hoping to get buy-in from those residents. In my experience, what happens is that residents that show up kind of deem themselves amateur experts on what the only solution could be, and anything the city comes back with is wrong and awful. So you're actually not getting buy-in. You're actually getting a lot of antagonists that come to these meetings and saying, "Well, the only right thing is an extra lane, because traffic is awful right here," or speed bumps, or something that the experts know is not the right answer. I hear way too often when we do city engagement, we'll show an idea and they're immediate: "Oh, the fire trucks will never be able to use that." It's like, "Oh, guys, that was the first thing we thought of. There's experts in the room."

So in my experience—my house in our neighborhood is about 65 years old, and so it goes back to the early '60s when it was built. There were brochures at that time advertising this neighborhood that said, "Big, wide streets for walking and playing in." Over that 60 years, they have transformed into big, wide streets for driving fast and parking in. We don't have good sidewalks here, because that was the mindset back then.

I really think a good design is creating spaces for people where they want to be. So rather than putting in great sidewalks, let's think of the idea of a multi-use path through these neighborhoods where we're actually designating a portion of the street for that use. Then generationally, we don't lose that purpose, right? It makes sense to everybody that shows up there. Big, wide streets are beautiful, and if a neighborhood has that culture of walking in them, and then the people driving in there expect to see people in those streets, that's great. But if that slips for a second, it goes right to being just taken over by cars. That's the danger, in my opinion, of the sidewalk-free subdivision.

This is something that we don't talk about often enough. We're always thinking about the driver and their behavior. But if I'm thinking about going to the ice cream store, but "Oh man, I got to cross that busy intersection, and it's always crazy," and I get in my car and go there instead, that's one less person walking to that location. If that intersection suddenly becomes easier and safer for me to walk to, that creates this mass where more walkers, more pedestrians, more people on bicycles actually create safer streets because the drivers are more aware of what's going on there. They're looking for that more. It's the lone walker, every so often, that's in the most dangerous situation, no matter how nice the street might be. So we want to encourage people to walk and ride as much as possible, and I think that those types of intersections actually do that.

Gosh, I'm really happy how many people are here and how many people are listening and educating themselves on all of this. I really encourage you to exercise patience. We talked a lot about how it does take a long time, but that doesn't mean inaction is the right choice. Always make the action and think about how we can shorten those times and those people that you talk to and really still work hard. This work that many of you are interested in or maybe already doing—your reward is that there isn't a headline, and that's not measurable.

So it's so important that you take this information and you use it to actually make the changes that you want to see in your neighborhoods and your communities. Involve those that are out there. Talk to not just city council, but talk to your school districts. Talk to anybody that has a vested interest in the safety of transportation in their city. I'm so happy to see many of you out there, and I hope the seeds are planted, and I hope many of you will go out and plant more seeds, and there will be lots of us talking about street safety and behaviors and make this world a better place.

Norm Van Eeden Petersman 15:03

With that, I'm so grateful for the time that Josh spent with our members during that session of Ask Strong Towns Anything. Really powerful. Like he said, there are many of us, and a greater number is needed in order to be able to address the challenges that we have created for ourselves on our streets. If we've done this to ourselves, we can also bring about the change. So I hope that you are encouraged. I hope in your own way that you're able to identify one small thing that you can do in your communities. With that, take care and take care of your places.

The State of Strong Towns meeting is coming up, January 29th. If you are already a Strong Towns member, consider this your invitation. You will receive the link and updates directly in your inbox. If you're not a member yet, now is the time to join at strongtowns.org/membership so you do not miss it. We will share where the movement stands, how it got here, and what lies ahead in 2026. We really want you there.