Drivers are usually treated as the obstacle when cities try to build better places for walking, biking and transit. Houssam Elokda of Happy Cities and Nick Falbo of Mobycon argue that this framing misses something important: people-centered places still have to work for the people arriving by car. Their framework starts with a counterintuitive idea borrowed from Dutch design, that going slower can be faster, because what drivers often value most is a trip that feels steady and predictable rather than one that moves quickly in short bursts. This is a different way of thinking about street design, one that moves past speed as the main measure and asks how the whole trip works for people.
Hey everybody! This is Chuck Marohn. Welcome back to the Strong Towns podcast. Over the years, we've become rather well known for the term stroad and for describing why stroads fail? Why this combination of street and road fails to really function well in any way? It's one of those things that has become now ubiquitous in transportation conversations. We all see stroads, we all know stroads, we all understand it. I think one of the things that we've struggled with, and I've I've acknowledged this conceptually, we've struggled to explain what comes after the stroad. When you have a city full of stroads, what do you do? I've actually had interviews with engineering groups, and I've said like to me, this is this is part of the practice that we as a profession need to figure out, need to try to understand.
I'm going to share with you today a report that I think is the closest step towards doing that I have seen, and I am ridiculously excited to have our two guests here. Houssam Elokda is managing principal at Happy Cities, where he works at the intersection of urban design, housing, and human well-being. He's led planning, development, and policy work in communities ranging from small towns to major cities, including Dubai, Cairo, and Vancouver. Houssam, welcome to the Strong Towns podcast.
I'm really excited. It's so nice to see you. You're in Halifax. Remind me what time zone Halifax is. Is that Atlantic time zone? It's a Atlantic time, not sweet.
All right, going to the entire other sideof the continent, a very different time zone. Nick Falbo is a senior integrated mobility consultant with Mobycon. Before joining Mobycon, he was a senior transportation planner with the City of Portland. He helped develop NACTO's urban bike design guide. He's perhaps best known in transportation circles for coining the term "protected intersection," and today he works on adapting Dutch transportation and street design principles to the North American context. Nick, you and I have not met before until just now. Welcome. I'm happy to have you as a guest on our Strong Towns podcast.
Thanks, Chuck. So excited to be here to share more about all the great work we've been doing in mobility.
Absolutely, and you are in Portland, so we are we have the continent covered in terms of time zones right now. Yes, yeah. The report that we're going to talk about today is one put out jointly by Happy Cities and Mobycon called "How to Design for Cars in People-Centered Places." The subtitle is "Practical Design Strategies to Meet the Needs of Drivers While Creating Great Places for People." Maybe I'll start with you, Nick, and then we can we can hear from Houssam. I feel like one of the challenges that we've always had in reaching engineers and technical professionals and others is that the language and the conversation around design tends to put a conflict between automobile travel and non-automobile travel, and it makes the dialog often anti-car almost when it comes out of people's mouth. Hey, the car is a net negative.
We need to build for people. That's the antithesis of building for cars. I feel like you here in this report are trying to take on that embedded understanding in, particularly the engineering profession, but in just transportation planning in general head on. Can you talk about that conflict, and talk about how you're intellectually approaching that here.
Yeah, absolutely. It's too often we do fall into this sort of us versus them mentality when we're trying to improve our cities for walking and biking and transit. We get inspired by the potential solutions out there, and it just feels like we've been spending decades planning for the car. We need to just do 180 degree pivot, focus on walking and biking, kind of ignore the needs of drivers. I don't know about you, but it feels to me like it's pretty clear that hasn't quite worked out the way that we've wanted. Progress has been slower, and we need to find a way to kind of move forward faster. A lot of the work that I do at Mobycon is very much inspired by the work in the Netherlands. We're a Dutch-based company, and so we try to bring the best of Dutch design solutions here into North America.
I think everyone when they go to Amsterdam or other places in the Netherlands, it's really easy to see how great it is for people, for people walking, for people cycling, hopping on the tram and taking transit. But they maybe don't realize that it's also great for driving. There's more access to jobs by car in Amsterdam in 30 minutes than there is in Atlanta. It's also consistently been rated one of the best places to be a driver. So the trick to what the Dutch are doing isn't just making it great to be a pedestrian walking and biking. It's the way they think about how driving fits into their communities as well. There's sort of a longstanding quote you've probably heard that the best bike plan is a car plan.
This is something that the Dutch say a lot, where we need to think about the circulation as a whole in order to provide the best quality of experience for people walking and biking and taking transit.
Houssam, follow up on that. I feel like you're arguing that thoughtfully designing for cars actually produces better people-centered places. How does that shift change the conversation and how we approach this? What does that look like when we are actually getting down to work?
It's really important that we create more people-centered places, right? Like this is the prosperity of our communities. This is how we connect. The places where we connect. The places where we identify with these communities. The problem is cities have made two consistent mistakes. Either to accommodate cars, they go too far, and they accommodate it in incompatible ways, and thus they ruin what makes people-centered places worth visiting, or they flip to the other side completely, as Nick was saying, and ignore the needs of drivers, which is really problematic.
If the majority of your residents drive, we even use these the inverted triangle of priority and streets, and drivers look and see themselves at the bottom, and what they read from that is that this isn't for us, so they resist it, and they don't see themselves in it, and they don't see it as something that is also for them. This is the thing that we learned in this collaboration with Mobicon is that people-centered places are a way of providing better access for drivers as well. So you can improve access for drivers with speed. This is this is the one we know, the one where all the standards in North America are designed for, which is getting people from A to B faster. But proximity is this other method of bringing A and B closer, concentrating destinations in places where people are willing to walk and bike and take transit.
When we give drivers access to these places, their convenience improves, their collective well being improves. It's kind of like people-centered places. As I believe Yongle always said, like a good public space is kind of like a good party, you when you're in it. Well, I think in North America we've been hosting these parties and telling drivers that they're not invited. This guide is really about showing how drivers can be good guests at the party, not come in and take all the appetizers and ruin the whole thing for everyone, which is which is how the fear of mingling these two.
So it's it's about how to manage and give different design language for how the car can exist in people-centered places, how it needs to operate, and how we need to design around the needs of people and the priorities of people, giving access without ruining the experience of being in a people-centered place.
I have been critical, let's say, of complete streets for a long time, and I let me qualify that because I think that the inspiration behind Complete Streets is really sound, and I think that a lot of the things that we can we can point to a number of places where Complete Streets has made a big difference. But as an engineer, as someone working in this, it was how do we cram everything into one place into one design, and never seemed quite like the right fit to me for a number of reasons. You all and Nick, I'll I'll go to you with this. You all talk in this report about the idea of complete networks, and that seems to me to be like a more I'll use the words like sophisticated way of thinking about this. Not every street needs to do everything, but everything needs to happen in a way that actually works.
What does a complete network approach allow you to do that a complete streets framework doesn't?
Yeah, this is a greatgreat question. You open the chat talking about Stroads, right? The classic street that is trying to do everything. It is trying to be a place that is good for walking and biking and driving. Trying to be a place that can support commercial. But I think we've seen that doesn't work. It's important to know that not every place in your community needs to be a people-centered place. In fact, one of the key things in this guide is to be very clear about. Where those people-centered places are, and just as you don't need every place to be people-centered, you don't need every street to be the best complete street there is. So when we take a step back and look at a network approach to thinking about mobility, we're really focused on trying to provide the best experience for kind of all users.
When you try to do everything everywhere, you don't achieve that. You don't achieve good mobility. You don't achieve good place. So we really encourage people to identify where they want what type of activity, and then to design for it by focusing on the network. You can provide perhaps a better quality of experience for people cycling, I think we've all seen these sometimes protected bike lanes on big busy streets, and recognize that actually, even though it's protected and you're meeting all the latest design guidelines, it isn't the best experience for people cycling. To the degree that we're trying to not necessarily breed frustration among drivers, trying to do all of these things at once can sometimes create the wrong result.
So focusing on where we want drivers to be, and focusing on where we want people to be, can really allow you to provide better quality experience for everybody. In the guide, we talk a little bit about things like road bypasses. This is an example where we're providing explicitly a route for drivers that is meant to be fast and get them between long distances quickly. But if you can build that, then what you also need to do is complement that with a very high quality experience for the places, those people-centered places where the cycling can be really high quality on calmer streets, the pedestrian environment can be really high quality with good destination amenities.
So by separating these different uses, you can let them be what they need to be and design toward those goals, and then in the end create a better experience for everybody.
I do feel like, in many ways, complete streets asks everybody to compromise and have a suboptimal experience. What you're talking about is like this over here is going to be an awesome experience for you, and then this over here is going to be an awesome experience for you. Those are different, and we actually can't mix them cleanly to have them be optimum for everybody. But if you build the network, everybody gets the optimum or close to closer to the optimum experience. Am I?
By taking a step back and looking at the network, you can actually design for your users appropriately. If we can move the traffic to this location over here, away from the people, away from the people-centered places, and you can give them a high quality of experience. All of a sudden, all that traffic volume is no longer on your local streets, impacting your bike routes, on your main streets, impacting the pedestrian experience. We can make those places fantastic for biking, fantastic for walking, and so yeah. By separating those things at the network level, it allows you to make a whole different set of choices at the street level, where I think that experience really manifests in these people-centered places.
I think we have a shared concept of roads and streets as different things, but you have this interesting term in the report, you distinguish between a play street and a flow street, and I think like a like a superficial reading of the report, you might say, well, a flow street is just a stroad with a different name, but I feel like it's it's not, and it's doing something substantively different. How is a flow street genuinely a useful third category in this conversation, and what are you what are you trying to accomplish with this distinction between play streets and flow streets?
Yeah, so if you think about kind of the traditional hierarchy of streets, arterial, collector, local, this is the car-centered language of hierarchy. The play street and flow street hierarchy goes from the car-centered arterial towards the people-centered flow street, and then the people-centered play street. The key distinction here is that we need to recognize that in people-centered areas, the goal is different, right? In people-centered areas, creating an experience where walking, cycling, and taking transit and active mobility in general is comfortable is fundamental to the success of this place. It does not work without it, right? Because if that condition doesn't exist, people will just choose to drive, and you will not be able to provide the proximity of destinations and the density that is fundamental to its to its success.
So when you put that as the top goal, the top goal is not it's not necessarily moving people. It's not necessarily fitting everything in one place. It's it's not all. It's creating a place that feels comfortable for people to navigate in these methods. Then you put that as the hard limit, and you say, okay, how can the street move cars in ways, or busses, or bikes, or whatever, in ways that protect that most important goal, and when you think about what complete streets do that negate that, is that okay you want to add a bus lane, you add a bike lane, you also want to add a travel lane, and you also want to make it a nice main street with wide sidewalks where people can walk on shops. Well, guess what?
To fit all of that, it's pretty wide street, and there's no version of a street that wide that will be truly comfortable for humans, because we just we don't and the speed and the amount of vehicles that pass through, these are goals that are fundamentally in conflict. The goal of creating a place and the goal of having adequate flow. So when we say, okay, you want to create a street that allows for the flow of traffic and busses and heavier vehicles that contradict what the people experience, that can happen in people-centered places. But it needs to happen and play by people-centered rules, which is slow speeds, consistent flow. We use these two terms particularly because slow speeds is what is needed for humans. This is how people feel comfortable around bigger vehicles that can kill you.
The consistent flow is what drivers need, and drivers. The most frustrating thing is unpredictable trips. It's the stop and stop and move kind of stop and go type of traffic, and these kinds of like unpredictability in the flow. People prefer this is we've seen this in service drivers prefer a consistent trip, a consistent flow, even if the time ends up being the same. But it's when you're like stuck and stopped, even if the go covers up for the stopping, it's a lower driving experience, right? So what we propose for that flow street is to prioritize designs that have steady and slow speeds, and we do that by using no stop intersections, prioritize things like roundabouts, but particularly by putting the appropriate uses alongside of these flow streets.
So when we say like balancing transportation and land use, let's say you're planning for this to be a flow street where cars capacity has to be high. You can't you can't have a really small storefronts with patios and things like that. They're conflicting uses because these are destinations. They generate activities. They generate stopping. They clash with the flow concept. So you say build your flow network. This is your kind of network of through movement.
Don't try to fit everything in one street, so the networks of busses and cars and bikes can have to work on somewhat complementary but parallel ways, and match the land uses to them, and that will give people a good driving experience that doesn't contradict with the with the play streets, but in between those flow streets, that network of flow streets, that what that buys you is the ability to say, okay, hey, I prioritize the consistent movement for you there. Here on the play street, I will not compromise. I will create the most adequate people experience possible. We will be uncompromising about it. We're not going to apologize for it because we've done the work. We've gained the trust, and we can show people that their driving experience is going to be managed in a different way.
That balance is so important to make everything work. To know where you can compromise and where you can, I think the thing that gets me the most excited about the framework that you're putting forth here is the idea that it doesn't call on engineers to be even dumber. It actually like calls on them to elevate their craft. One of the conflicts that engineers have to deal with is the idea that you go to become an engineer because you are about solving complex problems. You're about dealing with constraints and making things work and trying to optimize over a system. Then we get you into the North American engineering context and we say, "Here's the road standard. Apply it on this street without any sense of the context or anything else, and then the reform people come in and say, "Well, here's the complete street standard.
Apply this now and make it work. You spend your time trying to figure out how runoff flows as opposed to how humans flow. Nick, let me let me ask you this. Inherent in modern engineering is this idea that speed is kind of a proxy for quality of a trip, and what Houssam just talked about was actually a compromise of that or a shifting of that. I feel like I want to ask this on behalf of engineers: If I'm not designing for speed, what should I be designing for? What's the what's the what's the thing that I should be having in the back of my mind as trying to optimize? Yeah, it's really it's really wild. I feel like we've known this in the transportation planning and engineering profession for a long time that drivers really value reliability, right?
People hate being stuck in traffic, but it's also pretty clear that the way we've been going about building our cities has not provided that. We provided traffic jams at rush hour,
What's the what's the what's the thing that I should be having in the back of my mind as trying to optimize? Yeah, it's really it's really wild. I feel like we've known this in the transportation planning and engineering profession for a long time that drivers really value reliability, right? People hate being stuck in traffic, but it's also pretty clear that the way we've been going about building our cities has not provided that. We provided traffic jams at rush hour, and then free-flowing, dangerous streets off hours. Right? Like it's sort of the opposite. Like you said, engineers love solving problems, and we try to give them these other problems to solve. But the system we've been doing the approach for complete streets has not gotten us there.
There is a little bit of a movement I'd say in the profession towards you context sensitive solutions trying to design slightly differently in different contexts acknowledging that there are different contexts is a good first step. Not every city has really embraced this philosophy, but in the guide we really do lean in on this idea that you can design differently in different places, and we try to take that kind of as far as possible. There's a saying in the Netherlands that we've adapted into this guide that says going slower is faster, which sounds totally backwards, but in the case of these flow streets, that's exactly how that works. Is that we really emphasize flow over stopping, and we are able to move a lot of cars very reliably through these people-centered places.
This is the new goal that engineers should embrace: is creating reliable, free-flowing kind of conditions, and you do that through simple design. Actually, the best flow street is a single lane in each direction. Happens to be really also very good for safety in a street that doesn't have conflicting land uses that create the stopping behavior and kind of conflicting movements that can slow people down. So this is the new focus: is steady, slow, and safe flow.
Just to add to that a little bit, just a very useful visual. Maybe we're working right now in a town called Wolfville in Nova Scotia. It's about an hour away from us, small town, but really progressive in the way that they're trying to solve these problems. They have one of the most popular main streets in the province. It's a really great destination. It's also like a connection between east communities, east and west of it. So it has this conflict of being a really well loved place street, but also being a flow street.
We're trying working with them, trying to solve the traffic issues that happen around that street, they're getting to the place where the usual tension point where it's like okay maybe it's time to at a traffic light maybe it's time to widen the street, and what we showed them a visual of okay here is what level A service looks like on your main street, and we gen we generated this image using AI just to visualize it for them, and that it got everyone being like, "Oh, that's not what we want. Right. That removes everything that we love about this place, but from a from a transportation engineering perspective, that is the optimal that you're designing for. But in a people-centered place, that optimal does not does not work. So we need different language for what is optimal service in people-centered places.
What is level A for people-centered, and what we try to define that in the in the in the report by saying, like the level A experience for drivers in people-centered place has to look like, you're moving consistently, steadily through a flow street, you are transitioning and moving slower in a kind of an we call an access zone between a flow street and the play street, and you're being directed quickly to a place where you can park. You can reliably find the spot. You don't have to circle around for 15 to 20 minutes. Then when the moment you get out of the car or the parking lot, you are met with an excellent walking experience that gets you to many destinations.
We need the stand like the parallel standard for people-centered places to redefine what is the optimal experience that engineers should be designing for, and I think that summarizes what we're really trying to do for this whole paper, which is. We're trying to, say your car-centered standards-they belong in places that you will designate as car-centered, and there's a place for those in business parks and highways and things like that. But in the places that you, with the community, with the decision makers decide this is going to be our people-centered place. We need a different standard, different language for how to optimize the performance of these spaces for vehicles in ways that don't compromise the people-centered experience.
So it's parallel language, and it's just about being context classification is a common concept in engineering, but it's been usually kept to like urban, suburban, rural, towns, like things like that. The key thing we're saying here is we need kind of an overarching two sets of contexts of people-centered and car-centered, and different, completely different best practice and expectation in the people-centered that is currently totally undeveloped.
Hopefully, until we release this paper, I want to go off my script here for a second because as you two have talked, I always think when I'm doing this, like, how is my dad going to understand this? I want to throw this out there, which may seem a little odd, but I actually think is really helpful. One of the places my dad has been to is Disney World, and I keep trying to have him understand. Like I'm like, Dad, look at this. You can drive at Disney World really, really well. You can get from one park to the other. It's really smooth. There's not a lot of friction. The intersections are very distant, and like the flow works really well.
When you get there, you get out of your car, and you're greeted by what, in a sense, is like a great pedestrian transition experience to a place that is literally like the most intensely designed pedestrian realm imaginable. I mean, they call it a stage, literally theme parks. I've tried to explain this to him as like, okay, Dad, this is like the hyper like reality of this spectrum. But what you're really talking about is building a place where the car, the auto function, works really, really well. To do that, it's almost like the absence of the complexity function or the people center function. I think sometimes that gets confused for highway, right?
Like now it's speed, and what I hear you saying is we can actually do that in a city in a way that's compatible with a city without making it a highway, transitioning then to the human-centered function, you're in your Magic Kingdom. You're walking around. You don't expect cars. You don't want to run into whatever. It's it's complexity. There's lots of stuff going on. I feel like when we present people with here's the way they do in Amsterdam. It's in a North American context, it's hard to reach and react to. I've found that my dad gets it when I say, "Dad, remember when we went to Disney World and how great like this sequence of things was? Tell me, tell me where you're both nodding. So I, I must not be too crazy in explaining this to my dad. Nick, how would you improve what I just said, yeah.
I mean, I think I think the you don't have to do it the way they do in the Netherlands. You do it the way they do in Disneyland. Is it's compelling in a way, right? They do have these highly people-centered places,
Yeah. I mean, I think I think the you don't have to do it the way they do in the Netherlands. You do it the way they do in Disneyland. Is it's compelling in a way, right? They do have these highly people-centered places, and they have kind of full control. I mean, obviously, a city is a little bit of a messier place. There's just more going on. We've got a little bit more history and the existing world that's built. That's maybe our biggest challenge when you try to compare it to something like Disneyland. Is we are trying to build and change an existing world, right? That we've built up over the years, maybe gone in directions we shouldn't have gone. But, but yes, we want to create these nodes that are the kind of pinnacle of people-oriented places, and we want to be able to connect them for drivers.
That's going to be on a more kind of a car-oriented street, but also with transit, so that you don't have to rely on the car. A big part of this, even though we spend a lot of time with the guy talking about designing for cars, is that we are we're actually these are places that do rely on transit and they rely on walking and biking and they are inherently these sort of multimodal and active transportation centers. So, so yeah, I mean, I think if we can if we can manage to kind of tell that story that by making these places great places to be pedestrians, and then connecting those places with great routes that are easy to drive on and safe for everyone around them, then that is that is the right message we want to be giving that we can build these places and find that balance.
But we have to just think about it in a different way than we have been up till now.
I can't tell you how many timesI've seen the middle class family who probably has never taken a bus in their life get out and stand at the bus stop at Disney World and be all excited about the trip they're about to take. I do feel like there is a like, in a North American context, a relatable experience. Houssam, I want to I want to ask you about that last quarter mile, getting to the engineer, and what we're asking the engineer to do. Oftentimes, the engineer designs the auto space, and then the pedestrian space is the afterthought to that. It's so we'll slap a sidewalk on the side, or will they're forcing us to put in a protected bike lane? So then we got to take this row of businesses to widen the street out. It is the it is the afterthought.
I feel like what you're asking for here is a recognition that making the auto experience work means you also have to have a thought to what happens at the end of that auto trip. What's the interplay there between those two things, and how should an engineer, a street designer, a transportation designer think about those things together?
Two really linked and important things to be mindful of. The first is that great places shorten trips, right? Like that is the function of a great place, because if it's a place where people are comfortable to walk more meters or more distances, then you are able to concentrate a much larger amount of destinations within that great place, and the greater the place, the more people are willing to walk there. So instead of from a from an engineering perspective, instead of having multiple trips to multiple different locations, think about a really great main street and what it would take in terms of additional trips to spread out these destinations over larger areas, you are bringing everything closer together, and you're optimizing one trip to get to many more destinations.
So the quality of that place, and the likelihood that people want to go there and want to spend time there, it is critical to the success, so that means that place has can't the street can't be too wide. If cars are going through it, they have to go at extremely low speeds. It has to be sticky. We call sticky that like many things to see comfortable elements. It also represent the community. What is a great place, a great main street, but a representation of what a community shows to visitors and to people coming in, right? So this is so critical, and we want transportation engineers to see the success of place as part of meeting the needs of drivers and having a great driving experience. The second part of this is parking. So we often, as designers of people-centered places, have this weird relationship with parking.
We're like, I need to provide you, but I don't like you. I want to keep you far away, and we always see it as like a negative thing, and that we have to deal with. I think we're encouraging people to flip their relationship with it and recognize that, the moment that a driver leaves their vehicle, they become a pedestrian. They deserve a good experience from when the moment they become a pedestrian as a pedestrian, but also they have the potential to be adding to the vibrancy and to the success of the great place. So what we've identified there is what we call a park one strategy. You get to a very easy flow street trip to the parking lot. You in a place where you will always find parking, and the moment you exit the parking lot, you're part of a great experience.
But flipping it from the people-centered perspective, now if you have the connection between the parking lot and the main street, for example, and this came up as well in the in Wolfville as a example I mentioned earlier, is that we're we're working on relocating the main parking lot to reconnect through a street called Central Avenue, which is currently not really very well used. There's not a lot of pedestrian traffic, but the plan is once we locate the parking lot there, there's going to be a lot more pedestrian traffic because it's the main and the easiest and most direct way between the parking lot and the main street. So when we talk to the business and we businesses there, and we explain, that vision, they're excited about parking for their people-centered place because it fits that vision.
But also, when we say now we're going to reclaim more space for people on the street because that's going to be its main function. It's going to be that thoroughfare, that's not met with resistance. It's met with excitement because now this is businesses say like this is going to bring me more foot traffic. So parking that fuels vibrancy and the fact that great places shorten trips, these two together contribute to part of a great driving experience and improving the people-centered experience.
Nick, you are in Portland. I would say one of the things that I have experienced in Portland over the years is a kind of growing awareness and understanding that when we build a transit stop, when we're putting a couple 100 million dollars into a transit stop. We should probably think about how people get to it, and like what the connections are around it. To me, that was one of those silo things where, like, okay, the transit people think about this, but they don't go outside of that. Then you've got this world class thing, but nobody can get to it, or nobody can get to it easily. I feel like what you're challenging engineers to do, or transportation professionals of all types to do, is to not think of this in terms of one mode or one length of a trip, but to think about it in terms of like the entire experience.
I may be asking you to build on what Houssam just talked about, but I do feel like there's something there that, again, I keep getting back to this idea that this is not a diminishment of the engineering profession. If anything, it's like calling them to the next and the next and the next level of sophistication in what they're actually doing. Earlier, Houssam was talking about the need for a rethinking the level of service for drivers when we talk about these pedestrian-oriented places, and he
He mentioned the idea that walk from the parking lot to your destination should be a part of that calculation. Imagine if when we're doing these analysis of the level of service for drivers in these places, that we include that pedestrian experience component. That just embed into that the level of service for drivers involves a high quality of experience for the part of their trip where they're a pedestrian, and that is thinking more holistically about how we move around as people and what we're actually trying to do. Which isn't drive. No one's just trying to drive. Right? We're trying to get where we're going, and we're trying to be in that place.
So, this guide really tries to help you take more of an embedded perspective of the whole journey from your home to the parking lot, from the parking lot to your-I guess it'd be into the neighborhood, into the neighborhood, into the parking lot, from the parking lot to your destination. Each of those steps along the way, you need a different thing, you need a different thing. That first part of the journey you might want speed. That second part of the journey you're in the neighborhood, that needs to be slower, more steady, more reliable. Then when you get into the parking lot and become a pedestrian, it's about being that pedestrian. So it does feel like it's not modal anymore. It's it's about people and it's about what we need to be satisfied as we're trying to get what we actually want.
Nick, I want to ask you a question about the Dutch. In the guide that you put together, you talk about bypasses, and I think like the bypass function is a really important function in a city, but here in the U.S. We tend to mine our bypass function for short-term economic growth. The bypass includes interchanges, frontage roads, the strip mall, the Arby's, the Costco, the hotel. Talk to me about that trade-off, and I'm I'm really interested in how you protect. How do the Dutch protect the bypass function, and how would that translate to here in North America, where we think of it most often as an economic development strategy, not a mobility strategy.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's even worse than that in North America, we build the bypass and view that as future economic growth. But then we also don't do anything about the main street that we tried to bypass in the first place, right? Like the purist view of this. What they do in the Netherlands is they build that bypass, and then they go to the what was formerly the kind of stroad like overused main street, and they scale that back away from cars and lean into it hard as a place for people. So not only you're getting improvements for drivers on the new bypass, you're getting improvements for everyone else on the new people-centered Main Street. I think here in the states, we've we've kind of forgotten to do that second step, and then we did that whole first step wrong.
So I do know the land use regime is different in the Netherlands in terms of public ownership and influence over how land gets developed. I think that is an important distinction, but it really does point to the importance of regional planning here in the United States. This is it's a real thing that we do. So. Some areas it's more powerful than others. Here in Portland, we have a pretty strong regional planning level of government that helps us connect our places and think big about how mobility works-not just within an individual city, but across cities and how they connect. So, I think leaning hard on that, really owning that responsibility as professionals, as planners and engineers, that yeah, the whole premise of this bypass is not to open up new land for development.
It is to allow for mobility in the place that exists today, so that we can then move those cars away and then create even better places here in the city that we have now, so it is kind of a return to our city rather than an emphasis on growth and expansion and sprawl. Yeah.
Think about this: like every time that car-centered, a car bypass is being built, most cases it's taking traffic from a place in the city, and it's redirecting it to that bypass. Usually, the need for that bypass is to alleviate a traffic problem somewhere. We want to encourage both car-oriented designers and people-centered designers to think about when we build that bypass, where else can we reclaim space for people that the that the transfer is happening, but often the reclamation is not. That's the kind of like mental model that we want to put in people's heads to always think of these two as a package that has to come together.
Whether you're designing the bypass or you're advocating for the people-centered place, so in a in an in an ideal world, I want a people-centered designer like myself when they hear that there's a new car bypass project to actually be excited about it because they know that it can come with a significant improvement to a people-centered place.
Sam, you and I spoke a couple weeks ago, and you said something that I want to circle back to. You said you've watched good pedestrian projects fail because they weren't compatible with the way people actually get around today. I want you to make the argument to pedestrian advocates, transit advocates, bike advocates, people place advocates that we can't be just anti-car. We actually have to have a positive experience for drivers if we want to build great people-centered places and actually have a less car-dependent society.
Yeah, it's kind of as I said earlier, in a sense that when your residential base, your community base is predominantly drivers, and you're designing a place, and sometimes explicitly in the language used, they're being told that this place is not for them. They have only ever seen themselves as drivers because that's the system that has forced them into that, or they choose to do that. Like that's that's okay. This is the key thing is the messaging is we're trying to give people more options, but when you lead with exclusion exclusive language, they don't feel like this is for them, and what happens is either they fight your project as if it's the apocalypse for them, or the project happens and it actually follows through on the language and does not meet the needs of drivers effectively, and then they don't see it as a place for them.
They don't visit their needs are not met there, and the next project will fail or the following project. Meeting the needs of drivers is key to the success of people-centered places, and having the language of doing it. But most importantly, really, it's just like this practice of using more empathy in our language, not creating more divides in the process of city building, because people-centered places and the growth of people-centered places is critical to every community's success. It is essential social infrastructure, and we cannot afford to not build them. This is this is this is bigger than our identity politics. This is bigger than our divides. Like this is about the future of our communities and the future of our connection with each other. So we need to be practical in how we communicate.
We need to be inclusive in how we communicate, and we need to redefine people-centered places as the tool that helps everyone's lives get better, including drivers.
Let me end with this, and I'll start with you, Nick, and then Sam. You can follow up. I run into a lot of mayors and local leaders, even engineers and planners and other staff people who are very excited. About this, but they feel overwhelmed. They feel overwhelmed because there's so much inertia behind the current system. They've got this massive thing they can't maintain and sustain already. Rebuilding seems like such a huge cost. When you go to a new place and you're talking to people who are intellectually like on the same page, like I'm emotionally, I want to do this. How do you break it down for them in a starting spot? How do you give them a step or two or three that they can take right now to start to make some progress?
Yeah, I think it's important to know that every place, every community's in kind of in a different place on their journey as they're trying to create more walkable, vibrant centers. So, the first step I would encourage everyone to do is kind of define those people-centered places. Some cities maybe have the beginnings of this in their policy or their understanding of how their city functions, but define those people-centered places that you want this uncompromising quality of walking and biking and transit access. That need you need to know where those boundaries are and know where those places are, so just you can have that first conversation. Okay, now how do we connect them? You need to rethink the street designs and the standards within those places, and this isn't necessarily your whole city, right?
This is just these critical places that matter. Then, yeah, I think ideally, you're building these larger projects that can support everyone, that can address drivers' mobility needs, address pedestrian mobility needs. But building cities is one step at a time. So all of your decisions, as you kind of build individual projects, should be in service of this new goal, and be very careful about maybe some other big projects in your community that are countering this very important goal of building and strengthening those people-centered places. That's great, Sam. Where would you start?
Just reiterating part of that, and then adding a little bit on top of it. So I'm I'm gonna give the example of, your typical North American city that's been stuck in car-oriented development for so long. Maybe they have a somewhat walkable downtown, but it's probably been, deteriorating over the years with the with the car-centered designs that have intruded into it, so as Nick said, the first step is bring your decision makers, bring your planners, bring your engineers. Talk about what does people-centered mean, what does that goal mean, and where are we going to prioritize it? We emphasize that you need to be selective on that, especially if you don't have a base of people-centered places to build off of.
So there are so many conditions that need to coexist for walkability and people-centered places to succeed, and getting all of these to happen together in the same place is very complex. If you try to just do that everywhere, you lose focus and you end up like sprinkling some improvements that don't don't kickstart a new ecosystem. That's what we're. That's what the struggle is, right? Because car-centered design is a cycle, and it's a very vicious cycle that ends up making communities poorer and poorer. The people-centered is a completely different ecosystem, and you need to like kind of like a like a tree. You need to seed it. You need to be really protective and giving it the conditions to flower, and as it grows, you manage it. But you have to get that first step right.
Once the first people-centered places succeed succeeds, it is easier to replicate that model in more places around your community. But if you if especially if within your staff you don't have the experience of going through that process of seeding that of cultivating it to grow, you're better you're you're better off getting it right in one place. We actually say like get one great block. One great block is can often be enough to kickstart a completely different cycle, but you can't have one great block is not the same as 250-50 blocks. You don't know. You need one great block and indivisible. So once you once you've identified where you're going to focus, you as we were saying get your transit network to align. Get your flow network to align.
Get the very clear vision for how parking is going to add to that, and then and then the excitement, the gift that people get when doing all this work is the fantastic people-centered place. But the critical thing. Is that people-centered places just because you create the network and you create even the vision that does not mean they're gonna happen by themselves. That's like the preconditions. You still gotta get developers on board. You still gotta actually push the change and seed it.
So aside from the network design and the land use policy aligning it, we also help communities create the development incentives and identify what is the strategic investments that the cities themselves need to make to signal to all of the players in the ecosystem that the change is going to happen, and it's going to happen here in this specific way, because when you get a developer, and we've seen this in many communities. They've made an amazing plan, amazing transportation plan. They've invested in transit, but the developers are seeing still a very car-centered place, and you're asking them to take immense risk to build a mixed-use, build a completely different model in a place that is not people-centered yet. So if they don't see the overall vision and are not incentivized to do it in that place, they won't do it.
So it's a very complex like thing with a simple goal, but you need to focus your efforts, get it right in one place, and then build that model that works in your community and replicate it elsewhere. Then as they grow, you start connecting everything together. It's a process that takes time, but you have to start now.
That's Houssam Elokda with Happy Cities. You've also been hearing from Nick Falbo with Mobycon. I want to say, people contact me all the time and say, "Well, Strong Towns help us do this. Yeah, at Strong Towns, we do a lot of media work. We're sharing a lot of messages. We're trying to change the way people think about this stuff. We develop tools that we give away for people to use to help them understand their city. We support local groups that are doing this kind of work, but we don't do the consulting work. Like I'm not writing plans, we're not doing engineering. But these two gentlemen are, and the firms that they work for are. There are a handful of companies around North America that are doing fantastic work, and these two are two of them.
The report they put together, how to design for cars in people-centered places, we will make available so that people can get it, download it, access it. I would recommend sharing this with all your city council members. I would recommend giving this to your city engineer and your city planner. This is really, I think, a bridge document to get us to a higher level of urban design. Nick, if people want to get a hold of you, get a hold of your organization and talk about how you can help them. What's the best place to do that?
Yeah, you can definitely come to our website mobycon.Com and reach out here in the states. Our little office here in Portland is kind of supporting our work. You can reach me directly at [email protected].
Houssam, I have always been admirer, or long been an admirer of Happy Cities and all the work that you do. It's some of the it's some of the greatest stuff out there. Charles is amazing, and you've got other people there who are absolutely amazing. How do we follow up with you and get a hold of you?
Yeah, we'vewe're also all great fans of Strong Towns, so it's really great to be here talking with you. You can learn more about Happy Cities at our website happycities.Com. You can reach out to me directly, Hu [email protected], or our general email [email protected]. Our the guide is on our website. It's also on Mobicon's website for everyone to download. Also, we say, if a community wants to have a conversation about how this works in their community, we're happy to present key learnings of the guide to them and have a conversation around it. We've been since it's been out. We've been doing this with many communities and learning so much as we do it, and so it's been it's been really great. But yeah, this is a conversation that we are going to keep going. Also, join our mailing list, either ours or Mobycon.
When you download the guide, you have a way to join because we're going to keep sharing things as we're learning, as we're getting conversations. We're going to keep sharing more about this. So be part of the conversation. We want this to be, a different paradigm, a different movement, and how we think about balancing the needs of people and the needs of drivers, and changing the language we use for city building.
Thanks to both of you. Thanks everybody for listening. As we say at Strong Towns, keep doing what you can to build a strong town. We'll talk to you next time. 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.