A reliable bus is a big improvement, but Mobile is also looking at how appearance, comfort and the experience around the trip can make transit more appealing to people who have other options. The idea comes from “A Streetcar Named Spiro: Mobile Mayor Pushes Trolley-Filled Future,” published by AL.com and Mass Transit. Norm Van Eeden Petersman talks with Levette Fuller, Strong Towns board member, and Wanda Cochran, an attorney in Mobile, Alabama, about what happens after the basics start working. The trolley idea gets at the gap between a transit system that technically works and one that people actually want to use, especially in a city where most residents are accustomed to driving. Better service helps close that gap, but so does making the ride feel more inviting and making the experience around the bus stop more comfortable and practical.
So if we put a fresh skin on an older technology of a bus, will it actually help people use our transit systems more effectively and get to where they need to go? Which is obviously the primary purpose of our transit systems. Mobile, Alabama, is rebuilding its transit system right now. They've got a new operator. They have new routes that they've rolled out. It has a new name. They've introduced microtransit, and if the mayor gets his way, eventually a whole lot of their buses are going to look like old-fashioned trolleys.
This rebuild is coming after some very real operational problems that they've been trying to address. Before Via took over the system in 2025, the City of Mobile, by their number, says roughly 20% of the scheduled buses were not running as planned. Within about 90 days under the new operator, according to the city's number, that number has fallen to nearly zero. So this isn't just a story about making buses look nicer. Mobile is also showing that if you change how your system is operating, you can start to really improve reliability, but also potentially attract more riders to your transit system.
Now, the mayor has another theory, though, that appearance matters in this. Distinctive trolley-style buses might change how people perceive public transit and persuade people who have other choices to choose the choice of riding transit. At first glance, that's an easy idea that some might make fun of. Why worry about what the bus looks like when people just need the bus to show up? But there's also a more interesting question here. Once you get the bus to show up, what comes next? How does a city figure out what is really keeping people off of transit, and how does it know whether the next investment is actually going to solve that problem?
Joining us today is a near neighbor of the Mobile community, Levette Fuller, who is a Strong Towns board member and a former Shreveport, Alabama, city council member. She's also a founding member of Reform Shreveport, an organization dedicated to bringing citizens together to share ideas and implement solutions to improve Shreveport's built environment. So welcome, Levette.
Thanks, Norm. It's a pleasure to be here with you. I'm excited to get to speak with you.
Yeah, it's great to have you on Upzoned. I'm also joined by Wanda Cochran, an attorney with City Law Alabama and a Strong Towns member for nearly six years, who brings a fresh perspective from Mobile, Alabama, as a resident there. She is involved in various community efforts, including local governance and legal work, and really understands, I think, the community context behind the headline as well. So, Wanda.
I'm happy to be here, Norm. Thank you.
Thank you. I will note my geography as somebody on the clear other side of the continent. It means that Shreveport is no longer in Alabama; it's moved to Louisiana. I definitely want to open this up, Levette, for your impressions of what you're seeing in a story about a community that is offering transit, but not at the levels that you're seeing in Shreveport, for example. What are some of the things that stood out in this article?
Well, it's interesting to compare because population-wise and land-area-wise, we're somewhat comparable. Shreveport historically had been a very car-centric place because we were a GM manufacturing city for a very, very long time. We're not anymore, but it's very much a part of our identity to be in a car, and there's been a stigma attached to being on a bus for a very, very long time.
It's been really heartening to see that we do have such good ridership, and we have a very responsive transit system now. It's great to see that our ridership is as high as it is, and our buses are free right now. I know stigma is kind of a shady word to use in this context, but I think that the mayor might be onto something: if you change out the aesthetic, it changes the esteem that people feel, and it changes the way they perceive riding on public transportation. It glamorizes it a little bit, or romanticizes it even. I think there's something to that.
Totally. Wanda, being in Mobile, I'm assuming there are times where you're on the bus, but also, what would it look like if trolleys are introduced in the discussion? Do you want to shed light on some of the things that you picked up as you read the article as a local?
Yeah, I'm interested to hear the history of Shreveport. Mobile's history is much different. We're a very old city dating back to the 1700s, and we have a beautiful downtown street grid that is fantastic. Our city is bordered on one side by a river, so all of our development proceeds from the river west. As you drive west on the roads, you get a visual index of development from the traditional urban core to the first trolley suburbs, then the '60s and '70s. It's really an interesting visual place to be.
I've got to tell you, for background, this mayor is just in year one of his first term. I was so excited when I heard him talking about transit because it's been a long time since we've had a leader with that focus, or audience, or whatever, talk about a vision. It's a destination that we all want to arrive at one day, which is having good connections and transit. I totally admire his way of putting the trolley as the symbol. The trolley is, in fact, a symbol, but it is not transit. Using the trolley to engender civic pride, I think, is really important, but the next step has got to be: what else can we do now?
For the Strong Towns take on it, some small steps that could be added right now that wouldn't be a budget buster would be to focus on the experience of waiting for the trolley. We don't have very many good shelters or bus benches, and there are other aspects of transit. You walk to the bus stop, you wait at the bus stop, then you have the experience of being on the bus, and then you arrive. All of those things are integrated. I think when you get into this discussion, we forget that we're talking about a system, an organic system, not just little parts and pieces of how many riders and all of that kind of stuff. So I'm totally excited, but cautiously optimistic. This could actually be a game changer for this town if he can pull it off.
One of the layers of it is that these trolleys are sort of right in the middle between a shuttle bus that just does a quick little run and the larger buses that some of the grant dollars have been made available to buy. But the perception is, with lower ridership, it doesn't make sense to run these cavernous buses on routes that have only picked up a handful of people. Whereas if they're on the trolley, it's actually better suited. I don't know if you've ever been to a concert that was in a space that was too large for it, and it just feels weird, where you're thinking, I like what's going on, but I also feel like we're wasting resources and we're not using this well, and I miss that sense that I actually belong here. There's an intimacy, even in a good trolley or a good shuttle, where you're thinking, we few are doing a thing together. That's one of the things that stood out for me in this article. Was there something that you've noticed in your community in terms of this? We sometimes run buses on routes that are just not fit for the size that they are.
Most people don't ride the bus. We don't have very high ridership, and I haven't tried it lately. But the real obstacle to ridership for people who have options—I have a car, so I prefer to go by bike, and I would take the bus—is that you're just unwilling to wait for an hour. But the size of the bus and the appearance of the bus are important for a town like ours, which is old, because downtown we still have fairly lovely-sized streets that are very intimate. Anybody that's ever stood on the side of the road and waited for a bus and felt the impact of big old vehicles going by knows it creates a very unpleasant place to be. In our older neighborhoods, we're already designed for transit. We once had a functioning trolley system, which was dismantled. Having smaller vehicles can create more of an urban intimacy that you're not going to get with a big vehicle.
I agree with that. We've had—and I'm sorry to interrupt, but I've got to note what we've got here—our director for SporTran, which is the operator for our transit in Shreveport. We have become so responsive over probably the last eight years. You see it in COVID; it's before-and-after times, is what it feels like.
We went to a lot of smaller buses that are almost the size of a Sprinter van, or just a little bit larger than that, shuttle size. We also have on-demand small cars that can take people from one stop to the nearest stop to the location that they're trying to reach, their destination. All of that has made a huge difference in our ridership. It's made it way more accessible for way more people, and it makes a big difference versus having a huge bus that you can't fill up going on routes that are not necessarily the right routes.
When I, as a council member, had constituents with concerns about safety, about the length of time that they were waiting, or about their stop going away, if there were big issues with it, I could go to the director, whose name is Denera Washington—I'd love to give him a shout-out. I could call him up and say, 'Hey, I've got constituents that are concerned about X, Y, and Z. Can you look at it again?' He would run the data and be able to say, 'No, we can totally make these adjustments.' Just retooling it and having people that are ready to adapt makes a huge difference. It makes people more likely to want to participate in the public transit system.
But then, isn't one of the challenges that emerges that there's this hesitance to run a mixed fleet? I've never understood it because, in my mind, if I look in my toolkit, I've got wrenches of all different sizes. I have everything that I need, and it's a mishmash, but it works. I understand that sometimes you need different-size garages, and you need different technicians that are trained on different things. But there is no one-size-fits-all for our transit systems. The whole layer to me that's fascinating about this is that optics really matter. There's that line that if you want a good transit system, one of the indicators is that people of all means are willing to ride it and make a point of actually doing so. Shreveport is getting closer to that, where the average is 14.4 rides per person every single year. So that means a significant number of people are actually using it, whether daily or near-monthly, or certainly more than monthly, and are hopping on the bus. Whereas in Mobile, it's two and a half rides per person, even though your populations are virtually the same. Mobile has more people, and yet so few are making that choice. I think an element of it is if it feels unsafe, or if it feels unclean, or if it feels unreliable, that is going to have a significant impact on us.
Another statistic, Norm, that you may be interested in about Mobile is we have a very high incidence of car ownership. I forget the number right now, but very high compared to other cities around us. The reason for that is because we don't have transit. So from a public-policy point of view, you want to think about what it means to create a system that requires all citizens to have access to a car, and what you wind up with, which is what we have.
I will give a shout-out to our transit system. If you take those buses, they are squeaky clean. When they come, they come on time. What we are lacking is frequency of service and the infrastructure around it to make the system a success. It breaks my heart. Mobile and Shreveport get really hot down here. If you are stuck on the side of the road and it's 95 degrees and 90% humidity, and you are waiting for a bus, it's awful. We also are one of the rainiest cities in America. Can you imagine standing at a bus stop in the rain and cars whooshing by and splashing you with water? That's cruel. It's inhumane.
There's a balance to be struck here, and I think the mayor's on the right track. Let's get our symbol. Let's get our ideal. Now let's start working on the building blocks to make it a truly fantastic transit system that'll meet the needs of our citizens for the next 50 years. That makes sense.
I think having leadership that's interested in it is going to be the biggest thing, and you already have that. He's starting early. He's in year one of a first term. That's a great place to be ambitious and to be enthusiastic about what's possible. But he's probably also looking at infrastructure costs in a lot of different ways. Fewer people in cars on streets means less road maintenance. If he's thinking in those terms, you absolutely want to make walkability, public transit, and bikeability a key component now, rather than being upfront saying we're driving too much and we're not going to do anything but put more budget dollars toward roads. It's definitely a broader way of thinking about it that clearly doesn't occur to everyone. But I think that you've got a lot of reason to be optimistic about what could happen next.
Yes, and another factor is air pollution. People don't realize how much air pollution is affected by all these cars on the road. I have a car. I love to drive my car, but I also love to not drive my car. I live in the core of our downtown. On Friday afternoon, there are traffic jams, and sometimes there's gridlock, and all of those huge vehicles are parked and they're just spewing out all kinds of things. You think, that's a big deal. I can smell it, you can taste it, and it's a quality-of-life issue. I think every car you can get off the road for good reason is a wonderful win, and maybe that's the metric you use instead of how many riders do we have: how many cars did we reduce this year?
One hundred percent. What it can do, especially in a community like Mobile, is you have endless capacity to increase ridership because right now it's so low that even a doubling is a significant opportunity to be like, all right, that's now taking that next step. One of the things that we really need in our communities as well is that sense of, oh, you take the bus, so do I. There's that shared participation in it. Pretty quickly, people become advocates, and they're like, that was so easy. I got to read, or I got to do my homework, or I got to participate in a great conversation with a stranger.
I think it also comes down to having—we'll talk about fares in a moment because there's a fascinating Shreveport element to this—but if I were to say, what do we need to break down that stigma? We need clean buses, and so it's great that they're making that a priority. We need good stops, and those good stops should definitely have shade. There's a great book by Sam Bloch with the title Shade, and he made the distinction—and it kind of blew my mind because I should have thought of this a long time ago—there are two types of shade: natural shade and constructed shade. If we don't have one, we can use the other.
When you have natural shade, like good street trees, that actually makes that bus stop really pleasant to stand out and wait at. If you don't have that, construct something, or allow a nearby building to have an awning that people can go and rest under. Incentivize that rather than, as we often see, marking that as an encumbrance or an encroachment on the public realm. Be like, no, that's vital transit infrastructure that we're making possible here.
Another layer of it as well is the stronger that we can make the walkshed around it. Think of a watershed: it funnels down into a particular place. It would be amazing if we actually took a really serious look at each bus stop and said this bus stop is the equivalent of the mouth of a good river, and it is connected to a much bigger water system. Let's make sure all the little tributaries are pleasant.
That's the language if you look at the planning documents. They have collector streets, and they use the language of rivers. I want to, like Levette, give a shout-out to one of our councilors, and I believe it was Councilman Penn who was quoted in the article about the mayor's idea. I think he put out the idea that let's find a corridor that we think would be heavily used, run it every 15 minutes all day long as an experiment, and see what happens. Mobile can do that because we really only have four roads for our east-west arterials, so I think that is a real opportunity.
The other thing that's the elephant in the room here is we have a huge suburban population across our bay. The last time I looked at the numbers, I believe it was estimated there were between 20,000 and 50,000 trips daily into our city across the highways. I am not a transit planner, and I don't know how to do that, but it seems to me we're missing an opportunity to reduce that traffic and make a pleasant experience for that, because otherwise, our beautiful main street in the middle of town is really just a corridor for pass-through traffic.
We definitely are a city that's kind of got the doughnut with the hole in the middle, where you have so much outmigration. What that leaves you with is the few people who very much believe in living in a historic urban neighborhood and have enough income to try to maintain that lifestyle. That means their car trips are going to be shorter and that they get to enjoy a certain amount of mixed-use zoning where everything is very close to where they live. But then you also have this checkerboard effect of people who don't have as much and are living in neighborhoods that need quite a bit more loving care than they're receiving, while people move further and further out.
Joe Minicozzi has actually done assessments of Shreveport to show us what our downtown productivity is, what it could be, what the surrounding neighborhoods could and should be, and where this sort of sugar high of productivity now is going to decrease fairly rapidly because you're not putting away money to actually maintain all of that. So with all this population moving out, what we have are opportunities through federal funding and these enticements to put transit in areas where you have more housing, or better yet, to start doing infill that can align with that transit, bring people back inside the city, and by doing that, you're making happier and more vibrant places for people to live and not have to spend as much time in their car. Then that cycle can be this really beautiful kind of ecosystem.
Yes. I think our big gap here is infill. We have lots and lots of land adjacent to downtown. We have lots of neighborhoods that have been built out and occupied forever, and they were once connected. They were gradually disconnected over time, and younger people, in particular, want to be downtown. Older people benefit from being downtown. Mobile is not a fast-growing city. I think the leadership wants it to be, but I think the real opportunity comes when you're not in a high-growth, high-pressure mode: you have time to think about things. You're not making decisions on the fly, and you can be careful.
I would like to see, in addition to putting the symbol out there, some other symbols out there. Like, look at this cool shelter. Look at our zoning study. In our midtown area, you can drive around on your bike and see the remnants of all of these corner stores that used to exist, because those neighborhoods were built to have a little corner store or a barber shop, but all of that development is now illegal. So getting that message out is that we don't have a law that makes it possible for people to have a complete neighborhood. It's either you're going to go commercial or not, and there's this middle ground there. That's a big message to get out.
There's the tension that there's really exciting opportunity. The obstacle is the opportunity, but it can be really slow going. It can get really frustrating sometimes when you see all the potential—my favorite word to love to hate. If it's untapped, then what we have is stagnation instead of looking at the opportunity and seizing it. I think a lot of mid-sized and smaller cities are having those struggles, especially in the South, where it's really warm and you get really heavy rain sometimes. You have basically every reason in the world to not want to be on your feet, and every reason in the world to want to have, or to believe you need, a car.
When I was on council and we were looking at bus shelters, we did have a federal allocation that I used a portion of to put in some bus shelters. I was told at that time, in maybe 2020 or 2021, that a bus shelter with the construction was about $17,000 per.
My goodness.
So that they're compliant. I don't think that was necessarily too many bells and whistles. I don't know if that was with—
No massage chairs or anything like that.
But it might have just been to do the standard, the base for it with ADA compliance and ramps, and then to actually put it in place. We were able to do, based on the data, my most frequented stops in my district, and we were able to place those. It's really nice to be able to see them being used where they just did not exist.
If you don't have a shelter, if you don't have shade, if you don't have shelter from storms, then that's a usage opportunity that's going away. But there's a cost associated with that that you have to also consider when you're trying to increase your user numbers and when you're buying replacement trolleys, when you're basically through attrition getting rid of your older buses.
When you were on the council, Levette, was it your experience that people complained about homeless people hanging out in the shelters? Did you have that experience?
Oh, yeah, absolutely. In particular, in our downtown area, that's going to be an issue for people. I won't say that there isn't some hostile design architecture on the benches at our downtown bus shelters, at those stops. That was a decision that was outside of my scope, but I think part of our issue is our downtown is currently underutilized. As people move out, a lot of our businesses don't have to be downtown; their offices don't have to be downtown, so they're kind of scattering out. We are trying to focus on more programming and things that bring people back inside.
What I've reflected on is that you don't notice people who are unhoused if you have a lot of anything else going on. Also, if you're a compassionate person, a person with limited places to go still deserves to exist and have humanity that's recognized as humanity. But that's a soapbox that I can get on in another episode of another show. We definitely have had those issues. Our downtown is probably one of our safest districts by the numbers, but the perception of safety still leaves a little bit to be desired. Perception is reality, and the numbers don't necessarily do enough to motivate people. But you don't hear about that as much outside of the downtown area.
Yeah. I mean, as somebody who lives in the central business district, seriously in the middle, people that don't live here perceive downtown as a destination. It's a place you go for celebrations and whatnot. But our downtown is also a collection of neighborhoods, and trying to strike a balance between neighbors and destination is difficult. On the block that I live on, just this little block, which is probably a couple hundred feet long, there's an architect, a law office, a communications firm, a beauty shop, a burger joint, a doughnut shop—all of those uses in just this one tiny little footprint. When people come down here and visit, they don't understand that there are people living above those stores. Then when they see homeless people at shelters, it's, oh, downtown's horrible. But let me tell you, as somebody who lives here, I think it's one of the safest places you can be. I feel very safe walking around at night. Now, I'm not out at two in the morning clubbing, but—
That's after the next National Gathering.
As my mother said, nothing good happens after midnight.
Yeah. That totally touches on something that I think, as the city is looking at expensive trolley purchases and reallocating funds and improving routes, every city has within its capacity to actually adjust its policy. I would love to see something like a 'boost the stop' program where, within, say, 300 feet of every single bus stop, there should be a radius that says low-scale or small-scale retail is totally acceptable. If you want to put up a front-yard cidery and sell your cider right at the street, if you want to introduce a hair salon—imagine if, instead of what you described as one stop that is close to all of those features because it's downtown, and we've become accustomed to that, the things that make these downtown areas so interesting, so vibrant, so justifying of a good bus stop and good services and good investment were available to everybody else.
It would be super interesting if you were, for example, incentivizing people. You don't even have to change your garage to sell something out of your front garage, because I know that there are bus stops in front of people that have garages. So that if I got off, I got off at a destination not just of my home or a friend's home, where we've got this clear distinction of that's a residential route. No, that is a neighborhood route. What do neighborhoods want? They want ice cream. They want the ability to get your hair cut. You want to be able to go visit your accountant, and, oh, I took the bus there because it was right on the transit route.
Anything that we could do in our city code to actually say we embrace and welcome the adaptation of existing buildings to sell what you want, serve whom you want, create those conditions. When the inevitable question comes up, what about all the extra parking that that will generate? Say we have the perfect relief valve for that, which is a regular feature of our bus service. We already know that it stops there. We already know that it is a great benefit.
I have a bus stop right outside my window, and it is only ever available for school students in the morning and then just residents that are here because we have nothing else here. We're in a monoculture, and it breaks my heart. Ironically, when my son was selling lemonade here, guess who bought lemonade from him? The bus driver pulled over, came and bought lemonade, said, 'I love seeing you boys out here,' and then carried on in the route because all of a sudden there was that activation. Not only was that person's day a little brighter and my son was appreciating it, but it actually proved as a point of concept that you can do this. I saw people waiting at the bus stop walk over, get some lemonade, and go back to the stop.
I'm like, that's awesome, and it's interesting to me that we can actually say this is a radius in which we want this to occur. It's already transit-enabled. Instead, we say, 'Oh, let's do transit-oriented development,' and so we build the developments because we've already run the bus services out to some new greenfield. I'm like, we've got the ability to unlock this.
Well, I really envy Levette and Shreveport, and I don't know if she's the one that made it happen. But the fact that she got Urban Three to—or somebody got Urban Three in there to do the economic analysis—I really wish we could do that here. It may be a myth, it may not be a myth, but the party line is that we go after big business, and I just am not seeing how big business is showing up in our city coffers. So I think an honest, detailed analysis of where the money is coming from is going to have to guide your future investment.
You've just said so many things in such a short time that get my brain buzzing. One is the economic development component of all of this and the way we think about it, this kind of big-picture, top-down way we think of it, starting with your governor down to your mayor and then all your councilors. The biggest thing that they can do, the most monumental thing they can do in economic development, is find a big company to come in and be an employer. Even if that employer gets incentives, the employees will be paying income and property taxes back into your community. But that means those people have to live within your city and not in the suburb for you to actually see any revenue from that. You still have to have an appealing place for people to want to raise their families.
But if you have a local business, that local dollar is going to get banked local, and it's going to circulate more frequently. I think people lose sight of the benefits of that while we're chasing these big industry dollars. We forget that even those employees—and I had to look it up, your big employers, your big industry things around manufacturing and shipbuilding and aerospace—all of that, they still wouldn't mind the novelty of a local ice cream shop and a local coffee shop. They're going to get their hair cut and done locally, and those are the local dollars.
Even more than that, anyone that comes up with a new candle, a new bath product, beauty products in your community, they're a small manufacturer. They can be doing any of those things that might at first seem novel, but that's going to be an employer and then a dollar that's going to circulate in your community even more. I do think that the kind of built environment that we're creating could be more conducive to enticing people that want to participate in that local environment or that local economy.
My comfort book—some people's comfort book might be a children's fantasy series or whatever that they really love and repeat reading over and over again—my comfort book is Happy City, Charles Montgomery, and this conversation is really about that. If we say that American cities with big suburbs are experiencing a loneliness epidemic, part of that is your lack of opportunities to interact with people because we're in these silos. We're on our phones. We use so much technology, and when we're not, we have very few reasons to be on the street, in the park, in the market, participating in spontaneous life with our neighbors. Those things do help us to release endorphins and to be a happy person, but only if you feel safe doing it.
As it pertains to this conversation around the trolley, having a cute mode of transportation that you're not responsible for navigating, at least a few times during your day, with some safety, gives you an opportunity to not have to focus on driving, to actually participate in community life, get on and off of it, walk around a little, be a part of your community, and spend more money, for better or worse, because you're going to see more things when you're walking on the sidewalk past all of the shops and wonderful things that your community has or could have. You're going to have a different quality of life, and for me, it's a better quality of life.
I also live in a historic neighborhood that's adjacent to our downtown. Unfortunately, because we built an elevated highway for I-49, and I-20 displaced 5,000 to 7,000 people between my neighborhood and downtown, there isn't this natural progression. Instead, we have this psychological and physical boundary of these big bridges, where you don't necessarily feel safe going from one neighborhood to the next on foot. That's a big thing for me: thinking, wow, I do live in a fairly walkable neighborhood, but what if it were more connected to our downtown? How would we perceive our downtown?
I was recently in Toronto, and I was telling Norm about a neighborhood that I was staying in. It had a lot of those elevated highways. But because it is such a densely populated city, I noticed that there was a playground under an elevated expressway, and there was a farmers market, and it was full of people. Pretty soon, a lot of artists were invited to come and decorate the posts and all of that. You come to realize that when you have enough people and you have some softness in that, all of a sudden it recedes from your consciousness. It's not in the forefront. It's not the raw, dark, scary kind. Now, I'm all for tearing them all down, but in the meantime—
Knit the community back together as best you can with what you have. I think that's a smart thing to do. I think that a city in Ohio—and I don't want to say the wrong one—has acknowledged that they had a sports complex on one side and then everything else on the other, and they had to start employing strategies to knit those things back together because that disconnect was costing them money.
Yeah. The money thing is important, so maybe one day we'll get an Urban Three analysis.
It was very useful. I can't so much take full credit. First, my group Reform Shreveport, in 2016—we're hitting 10 years right now—we brought Chuck in, and one of the things he mentioned was Joe and what they did in Lafayette, Louisiana. So then we brought Joe in to talk to us and show us all of what he's done across the country and show us the data.
Fast-forward to me getting on city council, going through lockdown, having federal funds available for our communities, and I was able to propose for some of that funding to be used. I went to the group text with the guys in my group Reform Shreveport and said, 'If we had money, what would you do? What would you want to see us do?' I came up with my list, and some of it was the bus shelters, some equipment for property standards, and doing a few things for beautification. We did do some murals under the highway, actually. Then I was able to put some funding toward bringing Urban Three to Shreveport.
Unfortunately, my time ended before the assessment was complete, but the presentation was made to the city, and Reform Shreveport got to host community meetings to see what the analysis said and bring Joe back, which was amazing. I was very fortunate to have the opportunity, and I'm really glad that I was able to leverage it the way that I did.
For Mobile, I feel like that might be our final stop on the discussion because it's a great tie-in. The reason why we have transit systems is, in part, to generate greater economic capacity by pooling our resources together really effectively. They're a great tool of the public commonwealth that we can use well if we share this asset together and help it to improve our places, to create paths to prosperity for a lot more folks.
Great discussion. Let's take a moment to go into the Downzone and talk about something that we're taking in that is either transit-related. This reminds me, I think, for the very curious out there, some of you might be wondering, what's the article that you all are talking about? I failed to introduce it. So my Downzone item is actually the article we were just discussing. It's called 'A Streetcar Named Spiro: Mobile Mayor Pushes Trolley-Filled Future,' which appeared on AL.com as well as Mass Transit magazine this month. If anybody's interested, that's my Downzone item. But now, be more fun than me or more interesting. Go ahead, Levette. What's your Downzone item?
It's not going to be more fun. It's going to be probably a little bit sad. The book I've been trying to slog through—it's very dense—is Unforgiving Places by Jens Ludwig, and it's looking at how the built environment influences gun violence.
Yeah, powerful. To sum—
To sum it up quickly. But it's not been an easy read, so I have to take little breaks from it. It's been very worthwhile.
Yeah, powerful. Unforgiving Places. I'll look for that. Thank you. Wanda, what about for you?
I had two books that I think about from time to time when I think about urban creation or restoring humanity to our built environment. One is a children's author—I think he died a while back, but he's still published—Richard Scarry. He wrote all the Busytown books, and I don't know if you read Busytown to your kids, but they're filled with streets and buses and trains and an occasional pickle car. They're charming, and it comes from the connectivity of the people that are on the street. He also illustrates beautifully infrastructure and the sewers. It just encapsulates everything you would want for a city. Not that everybody has to live in a city, but if you are interested in living in a city, you want to live in Richard Scarry's world. I'm not sure where he's from. Maybe the UK.
The other one is a slog, and I don't know that I'm recommending it, but it had a big impact on me when I was slogging through it. I don't know that I ever even finished it, but the author is unusual. His name is Iain McGilchrist. The first book he wrote was called The Master and His Emissary, and then the most recent book is sort of a continuation of that called The Matter With Things. It's all about our brain and how we process information and make decisions.
As a person who has observed a lot of meetings and government officials over the years, I'm fascinated by the two things. What I would bring from McGilchrist's work about how our brain works—the holistic side of our brain, the Richard Scarry side of our brain, the brain about connection versus the engineer brain of the metrics and the data and so forth—is that cities need both. One is not better than the other. In our city now, we seem to have a mayor who's thinking holistically about transit, and now all he needs are some translators around him that can help him implement that vision in a way that we see the economic upside to it. Maybe that was too long.
No, that's fantastic. The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. You're the second person to actually recommend that book as their Downzone item within the last couple of months.
No way.
Yeah, very, very powerful. Also, I love that, Levette, you were a children's librarian in your previous life. That's amazing. My mother-in-law was also a retired school librarian. I was just thinking, too, as we close out, both Disney and Universal are opening up theme parks that are villain-themed. Where's the Richard Scarry theme park? I would go there. I bet every single Not Just Bikes audience member would go there. I bet it would be such a delightful place to live in Richard Scarry's world.
Boston. Just for the record.
Perfect. Well, this has been a fantastic discussion. Thank you so much for coming on Upzoned today.
All right. Thanks for having us. Nice to meet you, Levette.
Likewise, Wanda.
With that, we've got to get down to Mobile at some point to do a trolley tour. Maybe we'll do a trolley party as we go. I just want to thank again our guests, Levette and Wanda, for doing this. If you're listening today, I really appreciate you carving into these important questions. Probably in your community, you have lots of similar questions about your community's transit service or the lack thereof, and those deeper questions: How do we create a really good life and a prospering place for our people? With that, thanks for listening to Upzoned today. Take care and take care of your places. 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.