The Bottom-Up Revolution
Columbia, South Carolina, is the 12th deadliest metro for pedestrians in America. Columbia resident Regan Freeman is working to change that, as the director of a statewide pedestrian and bicycle safety nonprofit. Regan explains how he’s making progress despite the challenges — by meeting people where they are, showing what’s possible, and working both locally and at the state level.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hi everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Bottom-Up Revolution podcast. I'm your host, Tiffany Owens. I'm excited today to be bringing you a conversation with someone who I think can really speak to the interconnected and collaborative nature of driving change in our cities in an incremental fashion.
So many of the core campaigns that we care about at Strong Towns are audacious goals. I think whenever you stop to reflect on something like how do we change zoning, or how do we bring more active transportation to our towns, I think one of the realities is that achieving those goals rarely is a one-man show. It really requires lots of people coming to the table and sometimes working at various levels of government to bring about change. Today's guest is going to be able to speak to that, and I think it brings a really good perspective to this conversation.
Regan Freeman serves as Executive Director of Palmetto Walk Bike, South Carolina's only statewide nonprofit focused on pedestrian and bicycle safety and advocacy, working towards a more livable and economically prosperous community. He also serves as the advocacy director for the Colatown Bike Collective in Columbia, South Carolina. His focus is on making Columbia and South Carolina more livable by advancing people-oriented places that support safety, economic development, and long-term community vitality.
But what I think is really interesting about his work is that he really works at both the state level and the local level. So we're going to have a chance to talk about that, specifically in the context of active transportation. Regan, welcome to the Bottom-Up Revolution podcast.
I'm looking forward to speaking with you today. Thanks, Tiffany. I appreciate it.
So tell us your backstory a bit. Where did you grow up? Where's home for you? How did you land in Columbia?
Yeah, so I am a South Carolina native. I grew up in Clinton, South Carolina, which is a small town in the upstate of my state. I came here to Columbia, South Carolina for college. I went to the University of South Carolina. I guess I started in 2014, so I've been here since and really enjoy it. Columbia is our state capital, so I think there's a lot of connection between this work on the local level and the state level as well. So that's a good fit for what I'm doing now.
So let's talk about the biking side of your story. Have you been a lifelong biker? Did you start biking when you moved to Columbia? How did that come about? Maybe you can tell us the journey from, I don't know, maybe if cycling was a hobby to now it's literally your day job in a way, or thinking about biking. Tell us that story.
Yeah, sure. The dreaded lycra cyclist, right? No, no, I was a runner. I got into running—
In undergrad. I was a distance runner too. What did you run?
I just did the 5K. I didn't even do it competitively. I just did it as just a way to stay healthy. It was more on the street. Clinton, where I'm from originally, is a small town. So coming here, which is—I mean, it's not the biggest city in the world, but it's a city. It's a town. The university is inherently walkable in that way.
I think for a lot of people, the same thing—you have the chance to be in a place that is inherently walkable and bikeable. While that's true in certain parts, there's definitely huge gaps in that space too. So that's where I come from. I got into cycling, actually during COVID, just as an addition to the running. The more I think I did that more recreationally originally, I realized, yeah, this is actually a really great part of my life, and I can use it not just to get exercise, but I can use it to go to work. I can use it to go to the grocery store. You can start to see it as a huge part of the way, really, my community connects into itself. That's really exciting.
So can you share some of those observations when you first got on a bike and started biking around in your city for those reasons, to go to the store, to go to work? What were you noticing? Maybe if you have some memories?
Yeah, it's so funny. I got to give a shout out to my dear friend JD Howard, who is one of these old, salty road cyclists who's been biking forever. He gave me an old bike and I brought it back home. We were in Jekyll Island, which is where I biked for the first time as an adult. Most people don't really bike after being a kid, at least in my neck of the woods.
But yeah, I remember getting on that bike and trying to ride around my neighborhood and noticing, you know, maybe the neighborhood streets from my apartment were fine, but if I wanted to go anywhere—if I wanted to do anything substantially—that means I needed to cross some sketchy intersections. I needed to try to navigate around conflict or traffic or whatever that looked like.
You can see really early—I think you probably see it more on a bike than in most places, even as a pedestrian—this is not built for me. I'm almost an interloper, if you will. People can be aggressive, especially if you just don't know what you're doing. It's just a new experience. So yeah, definitely eye-opening.
The more I really loved it—it was during COVID, it was something to do, a way to stay healthy and all that kind of stuff. So you really also see a different scale of the area on that too. We have a great national park about 15 miles outside of town called Congaree National Park. It's one of the least visited ones in our entire nation. It's beautiful. It's old growth swamp land. Incredibly, it is a nightmare to get out there. It turns from city into stroad land out to just really high-speed rural highways. Trying to get out there just to ride bikes in farmland and getting back in is itself very eye-opening early on, not really knowing where to go.
I feel like—I don't feel this, I know this—whenever you change your primary way of moving around a place, you're going to see things totally differently. Even last night, I had a rare opportunity to be out of the house by myself without the kids, my two kids. I went for a little walk downtown. Actually, I was at a city council meeting and it ended early, so I was like, I still have a babysitter. I should take a little walk.
Just walking five blocks of downtown and turning around and walking back, it was just so such a good reminder of how different downtown feels when I'm not in my car. I could hear all the loud people on their motorcycles. I could feel the width of the lanes differently. I could feel the lack of people and foot traffic. It's pretty deserted. When you're blazing through downtown just trying to hurry up and get home at 35 miles an hour, you're not really noticing. You're not feeling those things. You're not seeing those things in that way.
I agree, it's really—your body's literally not in that space. It's in the space of the car. It totally changes how you experience time, how you experience space, how you experience places and even other people. So I always feel like if you're interested in your city, the first thing you should do is start experiencing it outside of a car and just see what stands out.
Yeah, go ahead. I was just saying, to your point, I think that was part of it. I think the other piece is when you get to know where the spots are—where the green lights are, or where the quieter streets are—you also formed a mental map in a different way than I knew my city before. I think that was true learning to run and where to run, but also really mostly biking. I want to give biking a lot of credit because you get that scale. You know where things are, and I mean, it's just so different to view your city that way because you really see those gaps. It's really, really evident when there's not a space built for folks versus when there is.
For sure. Yeah, I feel like we could nerd out on how awesome biking is. Commuter biking, it's so much fun. I miss it. But let's talk about how did this turn into, okay, first it was, oh, I can do this to stay in shape, and this is fun, and now I can do this to get to work, to wait a second—this is a thing we really should be changing in our town. How did the advocacy side come about? Maybe you can share that part of your professional journey a bit.
Yeah, it's a great question. I'm sure everybody on here says the version of, well, my path is very strange, and I think mine's probably true as well. I was doing some nonprofit fundraising, actually, in the civil rights space. I really enjoyed that. Biking was a hobby. It was being used just for local trips and transportation.
I was looking for new opportunities, and I actually joined up with our local bike advocacy group, the Colatown Bike Collective, which I'm still affiliated with. I was just doing their fundraising. They work in two big fields. They actually provide bikes to people in need of transportation, especially folks who are coming out of homelessness or poverty, trying to provide that access to getting where people need to go, which is critical. Then secondarily, they've always been about how do we make our community safer for people on bikes, but also much more.
Getting into that was really my first step into a larger world. I think that's a Star Wars quote, which is dorky, but it all flows together. So that gave me another angle on what's actually going on here. Because I think you probably know this more than anybody—it's much different when you know the players involved. It's much different if you're just riding around and you get that general vibe of, oh, this doesn't feel great. I don't really want to bike around here, walk around here. Something's wrong because the street is not built for people, versus if you're with a group who knows, hey, we're having this meeting, or there's a community public input meeting about a bike lane. That gives you that context. It gives you that ability to get involved in that way.
So yeah, that's my first step, and we've just been building that relationship. We had a really great watershed moment in our town just a couple years ago. We actually got our first buffered bike lane put in on a road called River Drive. There's some history there, but we actually brought 50 people—members of the community, families, older folks, younger folks on bikes. That was really the moment when we realized that we had the capacity, but also just the interest and the buy-in from the community to really become a big champion for the connectivity for our city. So that's the Columbia moment.
Then beyond that, my other role, which is more on the state level, also came from this. I was really enjoying it as we were building these chops. The state advocacy group, which we just rebranded about a year ago from—it used to be called the Palmetto Cycling Coalition—was looking for new leadership. So I just jumped on and have been helping them out. We've actually rebranded the state organization too that works with our state DOT and other regional partners, just like we are here in Columbia, to be that statewide voice for the same things we're doing.
I think a lot of communities and states are doing this, to try to make our entire state much more livable. So yeah, I have a unique perspective doing this work, working with the folks at the very top end and also the folks who are really on the ground.
Yeah, exactly. That's what I think is so interesting about what you're doing. What do you feel like you've learned the most about working at both of those levels—both working at the state but also working at the local level? What has that taught you about how change happens or how to advocate well? Any insights you'd like to share?
It's a great question. It's more of an observation about people. You know this before, but at the end of the day, it is just people, which is good. It's actually very true. That's awesome to me. Being in our state capital where our state DOT is, and all these people are, the state legislators—you can go talk to these people. They may not necessarily agree with you firsthand, but they're there, and you can engage with them.
I have also found that the people who are really doing this work day-to-day also are interested in making just the safest and most connected places they can make. Sometimes that's a culture shift, especially when it comes to our state DOT. My predecessor got the Complete Streets referendum adopted and a guideline for our state to begin doing that work, which is great. We're building on top of that, but that's just a long-term improvement. That is a culture shift inherently.
But also, if you get to know those folks and you understand also what's coming down the pipe, it also helps the local side. Having that communication—I mean, I work in both sides, but I also have a bunch of great partners across the state. Folks who are doing this work in Charleston and in Greenville and Spartanburg and all these areas across South Carolina. They're all essentially doing the same thing, which is being a positive voice and engaging with the people both on the state level and on the ground in their communities.
That's almost reassuring in a way. I found it feels like everyone's willing to have a conversation. Because it's such a newer concept about thinking about this in this way. For such a long time, our communities have really just been built for the car with really not that consideration of the pedestrian. It's been hugely consequential.
I think we've also found too, like most places have, there's a tremendous economic angle to build walkable places, especially in redevelopment of communities. There's a quality of life angle, there's a health angle. There's so many ways to look at this. It's been really inspiring to see so many different people—people who you may not think actually are aligned from maybe a traditional political perspective—really are. Because we just want to try to make where we live, whether that's South Carolina, or in my case Columbia, or really across anywhere in South Carolina, just better than it is. That can mean a lot of things.
How did you make the connection? Make the jump from, oh, I care about biking, to wait, this is more. This is about more than just biking. This is about a better connected, more beautiful, more livable place. How did you make that jump?
You know, that's a really good question. I mean, my work—you tend to look at things from a structural lens. I think that's from my background. I mean, I was going to go to law school and try to do that world at a point in my life. So I think that might just be how I view the world.
I think also I'm stubborn enough to realize that maybe the third time I'm getting annoyed at whatever intersection where the ped button doesn't work when I'm trying to cross the street, maybe I'm stubborn enough to realize, well, maybe I can get that fixed if I go to the guy at the top or something like that. So yeah, it's probably not a great answer, but I think that's just at least how I view it. Those things are important.
I feel like it's an important connection. Because we were talking about this before I hit record—how biking is almost a proxy for the bigger question of what kind of place do you want to live in. I think cars are also a proxy for that. Because they're both huge decisions that shape so much of the kind of place you live in.
Can you speak to what it's been like to talk to people on the local level about and maybe helping them make that connection of, this is not just about more biking. This is about a bigger conversation of what kind of city do we want. Then, once we have that vision, now we can start making decisions about how do we want to get around. Can you just talk about what that's been like, having conversations with people?
We're so lucky. I mean, there's so many great people. I think this is going to sound very Gen Z of me, but some people—I think a lot of people—understand just the vibe of what a nice place is. Just innately. There's really no other way to say that. If you have a choice, are you going to pick the traditional stroad with the McDonald's and the tax place versus a beautiful historic downtown core?
Every place cannot be built like that, but why not understand what that difference is? So I think a lot of people innately get this. I think we're very lucky here in Columbia where there's been many conversations way before we were involved, which I'm thankful for. Many people who are viewing this from a lot of different lenses. So it might not be biking, but they're looking at it from—the term we hear a lot here is livability, or walkability, or connectivity. That's a big word we use a lot because we think it's just broader.
Really, a lot of the work that we do on both the local and state level is just coalition building. We're not trying to tear anything down. Really, credit to you all—I mean, I love how you guys frame this in some of your work. Just trying to be a positive voice for change. It's really not constructive to show up to the meeting and yell and kick and holler. It's just simply about building and trying to make change where you can.
To me, I think a lot about—and I think it resonates with a lot of people on the local side too—I think there's something very moving about trying to fix what you can fix. Find that one problem. Whether initially when we started going to that public meeting, or finding—I think the next thing we did was realize there's a curb that could be cut on a sidewalk that we knew was being used as a connection to another area across the street. Those things build and build.
Now we're in a position to be able to not only talk to neighborhood groups about why this matters, but also be in the decision-making process and know who our decision-makers are, and who the staff are in these worlds where these decisions are made. It's really paying off.
We're always trying to view it as—sure, we love bikes, and we'll go to bat for bikes. But to be honest with you, outside of our names, we're really talking about something much more because we think it just catches a whole lot more people with a lot more vested interests.
I do want to mention this—in South Carolina, I think our state has the third most deadliest roads for pedestrians or vehicular fatalities. Then on top of that, Columbia is ranked—I think it's the Smart Growth America report Dangerous by Design—as the 12th or tied for 12th as the deadliest metro in the nation for pedestrian deaths. So there's a lot of urgency. There's a lot of need. There's definitely, absolutely a crisis. It's finding what tone and what angle to approach it depending on who you're talking to.
For some people, what really resonates is the public health or the safety angle. For some people, it's going to be, if we build this, there's certainly an economic development angle. For some people, it's, hey, you enjoy riding bikes on the greenway. Wouldn't it be cool if the greenway went to your house? Something very simple.
Columbia is unique—not unique, but we are lucky. We've got 30 miles of greenway already built. It ain't connected, which I lose my mind about, but that's getting worked on. I think showing people maybe the things they're familiar with and being able to frame it as, what if there was more? What if there was more of that? So I think we're very lucky where there are people doing the work, whether on the city staff side or the county staff side, or just people doing work in different fields. You can show them something that maybe they can relate to.
Do you ever have a moment though where you feel like people use these very popular words—livability, sustainable, blah blah blah—and they just can't seem to make the connection to you have got to rethink how you get around? Or, okay, now can everyone say, repeat after me, we must rethink the car. Do you find sometimes we're toeing around it and moving around it, but no one really wants to say the elephant in the room, which is we want this place—we want a beautiful, safe, sustainable—give me the word. We all say these things, but then it's still a huge cognitive jump for people to put two and two together and say, okay, we want these things. We have this vision of a place, but now we have to make very specific decisions about certain things.
I mean, it really doesn't do you much good if you build this place and everybody drives there. There's no other way to say that. Yeah, you raise a great point. I think we're again—I got to give credit to a lot of people, both inside and outside. I mean, before we were even really leaning into this world, I think three or four years ago now, there was a huge, really productive conversation on parking minimums, and there was zoning reform for that, at least on the Columbia side of our metropolitan region. We're divided by a river in two counties.
But yeah, I think there's been a lot of people for a long time talking about this. So we're trying to find the best way to almost plug what we know matters, which is a genuine modal shift—providing reasonable alternatives to driving everywhere.
We're at the point where we're not only, to your point, "yes-and-ing" to what they're saying and how do you get there, but we're also trying to maybe find people who may just not think about this, who may live in or represent a more suburban context. We're trying to thread that needle.
So I hear you. I mean, I agree with you completely, but it just really depends on who we're talking to. I live actually around the edge of suburb land. I'm near my downtown core. I have a walkable grocery store, but about maybe two miles out is our interstate, and that's where the suburb part of West Columbia begins. That's just a different conversation with, say, that rep versus maybe the one who represents me or the folks in Columbia.
I think at the heart of it, it's about figuring out what people value and then helping them connect those values to the decisions we make about our places. Because I think even people who live in the suburbs, they're not like, "Oh yeah, we love privacy and not speaking to anybody and having to get in the car for everything. These are the things we dream of." No, they probably value other things, and this is the closest they can get to living that out.
So I think it's figuring out what are those values, and how do we connect that to a vision of a place, and help people see what you actually value, you're not really getting in this pattern of sprawl and isolation and being cut off from each other. I think there's actually a silent—maybe despair is too dramatic of a word, but I really think people are picking what's being offered to them. But what's being offered—I still think there are so many latent desires and dreams of living a particular kind of way that's not really being fully expressed in what's offered to them in the market.
I think it's going to be very dignifying to talk to people not as the villain—"oh my god, you live in the suburbs"—but as what do you value? What resonates with you about this? What would you love to see be different? Help them see it is possible to use design to make our values real in the real world, which is what design should do.
That's exactly right. I agree completely. I mentioned our budding greenway network here. We are bounded by three rivers—the Congaree, which flows from the Saluda and Broad. They're working to build, I think now the plan is 30 miles of greenway connecting all these different places.
So for a lot of people who may live in that context near us, they travel to have that experience. They go and do a walk, or they take the greenway to go walk and experience something that is built more for people in that way. So we're lucky where we have those examples. People are craving more. They're actively in design. They're being built. Work is ongoing.
So we're lucky where we have those touch points. More recently, there's been, I think, a lot of progress to show people also what is possible. I find a lot of my work, especially on the local level—to your point, it's showing people what can be. You mentioned a latent desire. I mean, people, they thought, that's the house I'm going to move to. They're not really probably thinking about the things that they don't want necessarily.
We found that you find people where they are. That's just probably part of being in South Carolina. But no one's the villain. I've not met a single person who's like, "I actually love driving fast through a pedestrian area" or "I love living by myself and not having—"
Come to Waco. You'll find them here. I'm just kidding.
I want to believe in people. People are, at least what I found, inherently kind. So when we talk to people, it can be as simple as we want our kids to be feeling as safe as possible. We would love the ability for our kids to perhaps bike to school and have that experience. Something just that broad.
But I feel like most people also live in a state of cognitive dissonance, though. Because I think about the people who do drive fast through neighborhoods. I think most of us—I think cars force us to live in a paradox, actually, and a perpetual state of self-contradiction in a lot of ways.
Because people will say that. They'll say, oh, we really care about safety, or we really care about community and getting to know people, and blah blah blah. But then, people also really want the convenience and the privacy and the speed of the private automobile. So I don't know. I think most of us actually live in a state of contradiction. It just is not something we actually have to consciously articulate or think about on a daily basis.
I say this as someone who—I do get in the car and I'm like, why is this person going so slow? Or why is that person trying to cross the street in front of me? Here I am, host of the Bottom-Up Revolution podcast, and I'm frustrated because the pedestrian wants to cross in front of me.
So I think that's something to wrestle with there, and being aware of—most people don't have to confront those contradictions on a regular basis. I think that's a big part of the transportation conversation. Because the minute you—I've heard people, I remember commenting once on how a street that I've noticed has been put on a street diet is actually a lot safer. I know it is objectively safer. They put a bike lane in, they slowed it down, they redid it, and it is a lot safer, but everybody has to drive so slow.
I mentioned this to someone who lives there. She's like, "Yeah, I hate it now. I have to go so slow." But turn around and talk to her about safety, and if I would explain it, I think she would resonate and agree with it. But there's still that lived experience. I think people have to wrestle with that. Understanding and acknowledging we're going to have to wrestle with this is a big part of the transportation conversation. It is culture. It's also psychology.
It's the reality of man. To your point, I think at least here—I can only speak to what we see—our best successes have been framing it as obviously quality of life, it's everything you talked about without necessarily nudging it. But I think also we just want to give people the choice. I think even that way you frame giving people that option, maybe that freedom of having the ability to go from point A to point B without necessarily having to get into a car. That resonates with a lot of people.
We have—I mentioned my university, it's just down the street. I think people very specifically here understand the menace that is the 18-year-old driving 20 miles over. I'm just kidding. But you know, finding how you get people to buy into this vision. We're very lucky. Our city has the capacity to have this. Columbia is a grid. It was designed—it's one of the earliest planned cities after the country became the country in the 1700s, 1780s. So we have this grid which we're very lucky did not get a center freeway through it back in the 1950s and '60s. It was too poor to do that.
So we have an intact street network. Our rights-of-way are huge. There's a lot of places in South Carolina in our communities where that is true. Now, granted, things have been terrible since for a lot of reasons—overbuilt, way over capacity, way too wide lanes. But at least here in Columbia, what our success has been, what people's success has been is we have the ability to maybe readjust who has what percentage of the road. You can actually still make it easy flowing for drivers but also provide safe, protected spaces for everybody else.
It's exciting that we have a canvas. We've been able to slowly begin to get some changes going, which we think is indicative of where we think our community is going.
So if you had to say, okay, just for people who are like, yeah, but what does an advocate do all day though—talk about the state level. Is there maybe one or two things that you're really chasing right now, that you're really—where do you see opportunities for positive change? Then maybe you could say locally, what's maybe one or two things that you're really pushing for or hoping to accomplish?
Yeah, so it's a really interesting time on the state level now. There's actually a conversation on the state level going right now for funding our South Carolina Department of Transportation. We've definitely been watching. We've been involved. We participated in all the public hearings.
We're really trying to ensure that when it's funded, all the money is not going to paving and widening interstates. We're actually really optimistic that a good amount of money is going to be going to a category DOT called safety. There's another category for regional mobility.
I'll touch on safety first. The ask from the state agency to our legislature is a couple hundred million more for safety. They've essentially communicated that the stuff they're going to prioritize, if that money comes in, is to essentially accomplish all the things they've put into their Pedestrian Bike Safety Action Plan, which is huge. Those are high-crash intersections, corridors, all those kinds of things. We want to see many more road safety audits happening in South Carolina, which we're lucky they've begun to happen. Several have happened in Columbia. They're happening all over the state, and those are getting real, concrete, tangible change. We can fix stroads, my friends. We can do it.
That's one big piece we're watching. The other thing is we're working with a lot of other organizations, both on the state and more nonprofit side. We're building actually case studies of where we think active transportation products have worked and really not only best practice, but just things we've learned.
South Carolina is unique where our state actually controls a huge majority of the roads, has ownership of our roads, versus maybe other states where cities or towns control them. That's historically been a huge tension point of, well, we can't do that because DOT won't let us, or something like that. There's a lot of opportunity to show, actually, this has been done in other places. It's just how do you maybe talk about it? How do you communicate that need and show what can be done?
So yeah, it's a big moment right now, I think, to be in my role and get the regional partners I mentioned involved as well. They're even talking about road turnback, which may mean maybe some more local control to try to even more improve some important categories.
Can you talk about that in more detail? Because that's a big challenge for y'all, and I think a lot of people advocating for this run into this as well, where they see dangerous areas, but their city technically can't really do anything about it because it belongs to the state. Can you talk about what that's like?
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I mean, that's a conversation happening. I can't tell you it's going to happen yet, but DOT is proposing it. They really want to try to adjust the amount of roads they control. It's a crazy number. I think it's a huge—maybe 70 or 80% of the roads in our state is owned by them.
That's crazy.
It's funny because the practice they had was, oh, you've built a suburb and it's 1975? Sure, we'll take it. Sure. So they're really trying to hand back more of the more residential streets, which makes a ton of sense.
I will say—and I got to shout out my friend Katie Zimmerman in Charleston with Charleston Moves—she mentioned this to me, and I think about it. It is a cop-out. We know, and I know this in this work, if you ask somebody and their initial reaction is, "Well, we can't do anything. It's just state DOT," that's true, but it's also not. There are ways to communicate and share that there's a need.
We're very lucky where the people who work in our state DOT are professionals. Their interest is in safety and in getting people there safely, no matter what kind of mode of transportation you are. There is now a planning office. There's now a bike-ped planner on the state level. So there's conversations happening where I think these people hear us. If there's opportunities with a local group I'm working with to try to say, "Hey, there needs to be a crosswalk here," that's a conversation with a district traffic engineer we can have. Those things can be moved.
It's maybe not obvious. I can't give you a protected bike lane overnight, but I think we can begin those conversations, which to be honest, to me that's transformative work because it's just those kinds of changes over time that begin to add to real more things.
So we're excited. They're trying to find the best way to incentivize locals to take them back over. I think there's questions about maybe a fund to support maintenance, which I absolutely think is needed. You can't expect a city to take a road back without money to maintain it.
I am very interested in how this goes because they're even saying we have sales taxes here in South Carolina that are capped at 1%, and they're saying that a possible incentive is going to be if you take back the roads we want you to take back, we'll let you do a 2% transportation sales tax, which is a lot of money in certain contexts. So it could allow for another funding source, but we'll see.
I mean, a lot of what I'm interested in right now is in those bigger categories of funding. I mentioned safety. Regional mobility is more money to our local MPOs and councils of government, which we know are those quick-hit projects. So additional sidewalks, you know, whatever that looks like. That's where we think we can hopefully allow the people who are doing this work not on the state level alone, but also at this more regional level, to get the kinds of communities they want to see—get more resources.
That's so helpful. I'm glad you were able to outline that because I think sometimes it can be hard to really understand what does it mean? What are you doing? I do know that when you're talking at the state level, usually you are talking about money. That's usually a big problem. But okay, so tell us about the local level. What are some of the goals that you're pursuing there?
I got to shout this out. We were just recognized by People for Bikes for what I think is the best project in South Carolina. South Main Street here in Columbia opened last year. It is one of the first protected bike lanes in South Carolina. It's sidewalk level, which we think is the first of its kind in South Carolina, and it's our first protected bike lane in Columbia.
So we're taking that energy and that recognition at that national level, and we're trying to push for more. The city is doing a new expansion for a street called William Street. They're building a new waterfront park. They're trying to connect this greenway system I've mentioned to you. We actually work with them. It's going to be a fully protected bike lane all the way down. We're talking with the designer. We're going to push for hopefully our first protected intersection in the city going into this new gateway district.
So it's really just that kind of stuff. We just started a bike wayfinding pilot in town, which the signs just came up last week, which is so exciting. So just more stuff like that. Just building it where we can.
Longer term, we're trying to get our greenway network all the way to that national park I mentioned to you. I think that's a dream of mine. I think it happens sooner than we think. We just got to get people dreaming that way.
How do you think about—what in your spare time when you're lying awake at night learning out about biking like all of us who love Strong Towns—how do you process what I feel like is the catch-22 of the active transportation puzzle world? I don't know what the right word is, but the sort of, well, we need density for this to work, but we need this to work in order to justify density.
To get the people on the bikes and to make biking more visible, because I feel like a lot of cities, they do the lanes and they do all the things, but they still don't see people biking. That's partly because, well, it doesn't make sense to bike because everything is still too spread out. There's no bike parking. The parking lots to get to the Target are still terrifying to get through. Or per capita, they're just not enough destinations for it to make sense for people to really embrace biking as a primary way of getting things done.
How do you wrestle with that? Or I guess maybe a specific way of framing this is, how do you think about the land use side to active transportation and what needs to happen there in order for it to really be the true, full-hearted alternative that it can be for people?
Well, you know, it's funny. You mentioned that our city has taken great strides in the last few years. I got to give credit to our council and our staff and our admin over here in Columbia. They have really prioritized infill development. Again, I mentioned the parking reform.
You even mentioned getting people on the bikes too. There's a critical mass that's occurred in our city and in our community, in our region. A lot of these projects which have had a long-time horizon—they're beginning to get connected. There's things I didn't necessarily mention, but even if you look, the South Main Street project connects to a very important corridor called Green Street, which is going to flow to that protected intersection in the park I mentioned.
We're at a point now where all of this stuff is beginning to get connected. Along with that, the density is cropping up in our town. So I think we're seeing a moment. It's not everybody, but you're seeing—especially the fact the university is right there—you have a good amount of people who are walking and biking and using these resources. That creates that buy-in.
There is a point now where I can take somebody who's interested in supporting this, or perhaps even skeptical, I can walk them to South Main, which is again next to our state house. It's right there. That's why it's such an important project. I can just gesture and show them, like, there's people on bikes. There's just that kind of energy.
Now granted, that's not everywhere. But that is what we know is our load star or that is the proof of concept, and it's happening right now. Our city is doing something really interesting where it's being built out right now. It's not perfect. There's certainly a few gaps and everything, but we're at the point now where you can actually actively use a bike to get around. I was not able to do what I'm doing now three, four, five years ago. This is all very new in that way where, at least here in Columbia, I can bike to a grocery store. I can bike to a meeting downtown. I can go bike to pick up some good coffee. That is actually very doable. It's not necessarily on fully protected infrastructure, but those connections are being made. That's what's so exciting.
So it actually—I'm excited is the point I'm getting to. I think there are signs of life saying they're there. There are signs that the progress is going to continue, and there's enough buy-in, if you will.
Yeah, and it seems like there's an awareness that land use has to be part of the conversation if we're really going to make this work. I think that's like half the battle is just making sure people understand it's not just about lanes, it's also about destinations and making sure that we have more of them and that it's more dense and all the things. So that's great that you're seeing that.
Because there's no magic formula where you snap your finger. I mean, I don't know if you've been following what's been happening in Paris. Maybe she does have a magic formula. It does feel like she snapped her fingers and Paris became bikeable. That's a whole other conversation. But anyway, I think the point is, yeah, I think it is important to keep that in mind. The bike infrastructure is one thing. Destinations is another thing.
We got destinations. And let me say this too. I mean, it's even small stuff like shade. Here in Columbia, South Carolina—
Gosh, I was just thinking about that for you guys.
That's something that, I mean, we just did a brand new downtown master plan. There's zoning guidelines with it. It's making sure that those things are prioritized and that kind of public-facing stuff that people are engaging with day-to-day.
We are very lucky to have a lot of great people working on this. It's been under the wire right now, maybe by design, to make sure that the stuff is just moving, and nothing's been dramatic. It's simply just been, hey, this is where we're shifting for a lot of reasons.
I'm very lucky where we have people who are letting those people know that this stuff matters and it's a priority. That's true on the state level. It's also true on the local level. So I just—I'm so optimistic that for our state and really just for where I live in Columbia, good stuff's coming. I really feel that.
No one hears about Columbia. No one may have heard of Columbia, South Carolina. But I really believe you will. I mean, this connectivity is coming, and it's very exciting.
So what would you say is your biggest challenge right now?
You know, it's interesting. I think, well, let me tell you a story. So I mentioned all this is very new. Part of the reason that is, back in 2018, there was a buffered bike lane project that got rolled out a little incorrectly. It was on a DOT road. I don't think there was great communication at that time for getting the product done, and there was a lot of pushback.
So I think for a lot of these people doing this work now, I think there was a lot of skittishness on this. There maybe was a hesitancy to really buy into this because they believed no one was supporting it.
So a big challenge, I think, historically has been overcoming that. The other piece is letting people know that this is a priority. By people, I mean the people who are making the decisions.
We're very lucky where I think people understand this in the way that I mentioned to you earlier. They're using terms like livability, walkability, or whatever. We're trying to "yes-and" it. We're trying to take it beyond and say, well, yeah, it's great you're doing this. Hey, you can connect to this thing that's just half a mile down the road. We can make that connection be an opportunity.
So yeah, probably the big challenge is—and I think this is probably fading away now—getting people over that hesitancy, which I think is essentially washed away now with new success. But the more recent challenge has been—and I don't even view it as a challenge, it's an opportunity—just to say, hey, by the way, you can also do this because of X, Y, and Z, taking people to that next step. So I wouldn't call it a challenge. It's just fun. It's work where you just show people what can be, and we're very lucky so far where that's definitely resonated in that way.
On the state level, it's making sure nothing dramatic happens, like my state legislator doesn't get rid of sidewalks or something insane, which I don't think they're going to do. On the state level, I'll say this—the big default has been we ought to get traffic moving. We've got to do all this, which is still "widen every road."
I think it's been so interesting to watch that there's been a lot of people who I maybe have not thought about it a different way through these hearings and these understandings of, that's physically not possible. How do we get them to the next step where it's mass transit, where it's rail, where it's bus rapid transit, whatever it is? Viable alternatives to driving everywhere. Getting them to that last piece is going to be the challenge of probably the next five or 10 years, but it's heading that way.
Those funding sources—maybe it's not being viewed that way, but the connectivity builds on connectivity. That's really how it works. So yeah, it's really interesting.
The other challenge—I mentioned there are crises. Unfortunately, there are parts of our city that are very deadly and very dangerous. They're not great places to walk and live. So being conscious of that and trying to be a champion for participating in those RSAs and encouraging feedback. There are certainly those pieces. I don't want to forget them.
But it's how do we—I mean, you know this in this work, you probably hear it a lot—there's the positive, and then there's the responsibility of trying to navigate those things. You kind of got to be a happy warrior. You just kind of got to celebrate what you got and just be very clear-eyed and try—
Tell me a little bit more about what you mean by the responsibility. I think that's an interesting—
Responsibility—I think it's you can enjoy this stuff. It's very, very good. But there's also the piece where it's this is ultimately people's lives. There is a consequence to bad road design where somebody's family—maybe their son or daughter or husband or wife—does not come home at night.
Again, I'm not out there as a police officer or something, but it's just, hey, when we have these conversations, when we talk with DOT—I joke a lot, and I love my engineer friends, but sometimes engineering brain is a terminal disease. You get what I'm saying? Letting people know the human cost of this. I think people are understandable with that, but it matters. It matters a lot what you're doing.
Even when we think about things in an arbitrary way, there are consequences to that. There's a consequence to bad road design. Again, I don't think that's necessarily maybe how we're pushing it every day. I don't want to be necessarily a downer because you have to work with people. But there's an importance to recognize that.
Something we're going to be doing on the state level—we're going to be updating a ped-bike crash map using data from our Department of Public Safety this year. We're very excited about that because I think there's a human cost to this and showing people where that's happened. That's not necessarily to cast blame or to cause a conflict, but just to show this matters. These are people. At the end of the day, these are people.
That matters so much. Of course, it divides on so many lines—on class, on race. We know that is disproportionately affecting different people depending on who you are. But these are our roads. These are our streets. This is our community. It matters for it to be safer for everyone.
All right. Well, thank you so much. In closing, can you share some of your favorite places around town that you'd recommend people check out if they come to visit?
Yeah, well, I got to shout out the Colatown Bike Collective, which is a wonderful community hub and a secondhand bike shop. They're the ones who really support this work on the local level.
I got to shout out—I'm drinking it right now—Indah Coffee. I-N-D-A-H. They do phenomenal single-origin coffee right here on Sumter Street. It's very walkable, very bikeable, and there's opportunities to have some good coffee and get a good bike ride in.
I'll do one more. It's called Farmers Market Exchange with an X. They're right on Lady Street at the entrance to our Vista Greenway and our Lincoln Tunnel. They are just phenomenal bagel makers. I got to always give them some love. They've got some good bike parking out front and everything.
So yeah, there's signs of life here in our Soda City, as we call Columbia. But yeah, awesome. So thank you.
All right, Regan, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story, your perspective and insights. I really appreciate it.
Yeah, thank you.
Thank you to our listeners. Thank you for joining us for another conversation. Thank you for nominating individuals like Regan to come on the show. If there's someone in your town who you think we should have on, please use the suggested guest form in our show notes. We'll put a lot of links to Regan's work in the show notes for this episode, and 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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