What if the street itself did most of the work of slowing cars, instead of another sign or speed trap? Drawing on a new Bloomberg CityLab piece, Carlee Alm‑LaBar is joined by Edward Erfurt and Ann Arbor’s transportation manager, Malisa McCreedy, to talk about what these deaths say about speed, design, and the values baked into our networks. They explore why Vision Zero efforts struggle, how Ann Arbor is embedding safety into every project, and why planners and engineers often hesitate to talk openly about crashes, using Ann Arbor’s crash analysis studio, university partnerships, and quick‑build projects to show how a city can respond more directly to serious crashes.
Hi everyone. This is Carlee and welcome to Up Zoned, a podcast from Strong Towns where we take a current news story about cities and use it to explore deeper concepts about how our cities work and what we can do to make them work better.
With me today, I have frequent guest and Strong Towns Chief Technical Advisor, Edward Erfurt, as well as Malisa McCreedy from Ann Arbor, Michigan. You guys are probably familiar with Edward, but I'd like to briefly introduce Malisa. We're so excited to have her today. She is the transportation manager for the city of Ann Arbor, and she brings more than 20 years of leadership experience in public sector transportation, mobility systems, and community-focused planning.
Before she was in Ann Arbor, she was the director of transportation and mobility for the city of Gainesville, Florida, where she led a consolidated department overseeing multimodal planning, transit, parking, and Smart Mobility initiatives. Her experience also includes significant roles in Portland, Charlotte, and Orlando, so she's got a ton of experience to talk to us about transportation and transportation management. Malisa, welcome — and Edward, glad to have you back.
Thank you.
Great. Thanks, Carlee.
I came across this week an article from Bloomberg CityLab from one of my favorite transportation authors to read, David Zipper, who interviewed a professor from the University of New Mexico looking at what's really driving the continued rise in pedestrian deaths in the United States. I know this is something both of you are working on, so I'm excited to talk to you today.
At the most basic level, the story continues to point to a mix of factors: larger vehicles, road design, driver behavior, changes in how people are moving around our communities — framed as a safety issue — and that people are driving more dangerously and vehicles are getting bigger. But Edward and I frequently talk about moving beyond this blame idea. So we wanted to talk to you guys today about what our transportation system is designed to prioritize, what this article really highlights about that, and what our continued rise in pedestrian deaths reveals about the underlying incentives of our transportation system.
So I'm really excited to have two experts in this conversation. Edward, I'll start with you. What did you think about this story when you read it, and what did the headline say to you?
I think this is the question that every city, every elected official, every citizen is asking, because I think people are fed up with the amount of fatalities and carnage happening in our streets — and that's streets, roads, highways. We have an epidemic. Everybody's talking about it, and we're all chasing that one thing: if we just drove a little bit better, if we all had the right device on our vehicles, or our cars drove automatically, if only we had a little bit better design, or we lowered all of our speeds — if we just did that one thing, that is the smoking gun that will save hundreds of thousands of lives.
I think anybody in this work, anybody that takes a minute to really look at street deaths, finds out that — as this article identifies — there is no one smoking gun in this struggle. Our cities are highly complex places overlaid with lots of complicated systems. It takes more than one program, one person, or one thing to address this struggle that all of our cities across North America are facing.
100%. Malisa, what stood out to you in the article?
Well, I completely agree with everything Edward just said — it isn't just one thing. But I like how the article talked about the different factors and then highlighted that speed is one of the biggest issues. How do we address speed, manage speed? That is a combination of factors, and road design is one of the biggest key factors.
I did like how the article looked at the top things that we can point to and say, these are the things we need to focus on. The challenge, of course, is focusing on all those things at once, which is not something that is easily done.
No. I thought it was interesting — and you guys work in cities on this very topic. Malisa, you're now in Ann Arbor, but you've been in a variety of cities. How do you feel like you can focus the conversation on speed? Is that helpful to the conversation? Or do you find that when you talk to officials in your role, you're juggling so many potential causes that it's really hard to drive to the root of the problem?
I think when you focus on speed management, you're able to talk about all of the other variables. In order to reduce speeds, it has a lot to do with road design, with driver behavior, with pedestrian behavior, and where we're expecting pedestrians to walk. You can also talk about the vehicles themselves.
A lot of focus I've been involved in relates to autonomous vehicle pilots and connected vehicle pilots — how technology is going to save us. Well, technology might be a piece of it. But I really think that at the end of the day, it comes down to people interacting with one another and how that happens. So creating the spaces where people interact and slowing down speeds is key. The article even references how European roads are set up differently and the speeds are slower. While we're not Europe, and I get that we have a different culture here, I think focusing on speed management helps tell the story better.
Yeah, that's really interesting. Edward, do you have anything to add to that? Do you find it difficult when you're working in communities to orient the conversation around speed management?
When I go to places and talk about speed management — and this is even before Strong Towns, working in cities — there are two voices that always come up in the public realm. The first are the folks who understand that lower speeds result in lower fatalities when vehicles contact people. When we look at all the speed studies, we know that the percentage of fatality occurring is far lower at 20 miles an hour, and it exponentially goes up when you go to 30 or 35 miles an hour. So the folks that know that data immediately say we should have all of our streets posted at 20 miles an hour, and when we collide into folks, the number of fatalities will be lower. That is an action people can take.
But I think all of us know as humans that we will drive the speeds at which we are comfortable. Even in some European cities — I've ridden in cars with friends in Rome, and it's like a Fellini movie. They're zipping around in little tiny cars as fast as they can, because they are comfortable at that level of speed. So just posting signs is the first piece.
The other reaction — which is the knee-jerk response anytime this comes up — is enforcement: if only we had more police officers out there, or speed cameras up, we will crack this down and teach people to drive slower. From the studies we've seen and written about at Strong Towns, as soon as the enforcement leaves, the speeds return.
This comes back to the idea that people are going to drive the speeds at which they're comfortable. When designers in cities bring all of the knowledge from all of the standards, we try to create places that are comfortable for people to go a little bit faster, to fit a little bit more in — and not just vehicles. We also overlay bike lanes, crosswalks, sidewalks, and all of this design work. What I've found is that it's admirable to lower speeds with signs and quick to do enforcement, but if we really want to tackle speeds — which is one of the top contributing factors we've seen in all of our crash analysis studios — we have to create an environment that speaks to all users so that they know intrinsically, without reading the sign, a speed that is appropriate for the surrounding uses and context.
We have eight decades of building really big, wide, fast things that push throughput. So as shared in the article, I would push back a little on what Professor Fairchuck says about needing to switch modes. I think we really need to switch the way we design this stuff. I think we let engineers off the hook if we just say we want to get 20% of people out of cars, because we skip over the fact that in our built environment we've built something that tells people to go faster.
I come from an architecture background, and in the architecture profession we are trained to observe how people use spaces and respond through our designs. You can see that in the built environment — if it's good architecture, you know where the front door of a building is, you know where you're permitted to sit. When we go out to the street, there's this misconnection between observing how people use the space and what we actually design. That's the bigger problem — not just modes.
Sometimes when I talk to engineers — bless their hearts, they love all the standards — they ask, what is the standard? How wide should the lane widths be? That is such a variable. We want that warm comfort of a standard, but we need to actually observe, and some of the things that might sound crazy: when we break away from the standards that follow the way people use space, nine- or ten-foot lane widths may not actually be the right response. There may be something different that needs to be used, modified block by block.
I would like to give a real-world example we have in Ann Arbor. We just redesigned State Street, which is in the heart of where students are for the University of Michigan. We put in a bus-only lane. There's a protected cycle track that's raised, and there are raised crosswalks. Now when you try to drive down that street, you really understand there are going to be pedestrians, buses, bikes. You understand how the space is defined. Edward, I really liked your point about that — that it's really about what the road is telling you, without having to have signs tell you. I completely agree with that 100%.
When you were saying, Edward, that the article cites this mode shift — I think that mode shift, to be successful, needs to be driven by the design. It has to become more desirable, more comfortable, or easier to take those different modes of transportation. It can't just work as cheerleading people into different ways of doing things.
No, the space needs to be inviting and comfortable.
Yep. It needs to be easier to do it that way. Go ahead, Edward.
On the other spectrum, there are places where we just have to acknowledge that people on bikes don't exist. When we talk about State Street in Ann Arbor, that's a highly pedestrian environment — you have a major university there, lots of traffic flow, and then you overlay football and invite all these people to your community. That area has high pedestrian traffic.
But if we go outside of Ann Arbor, out to some rural areas, there are folks advocating for crosswalks on super-wide roads intended to carry lots of traffic. Our roadway classifications get blurry at certain times. When I go out in a community, I identify two types of transportation systems, which we simplify as streets and roads.
Roads are automobile-centric — they're about getting from destination to destination. The way we accommodate other users on roads is not going to be crosswalks and sidewalks and bike lanes overlaid on top. There's a different operating system there. Streets are where we're prioritizing safety and where we have a mix of uses. A lot of times when we get into these conversations, somebody will email me after a podcast and say, 'Oh my gosh, Edward and Strong Towns only wants people walking everywhere.' No — there's a lot of context in all of our built environment.
If we're in the urban area, we're talking streets. When we're talking in rural or suburban areas, those are roads. Streets are about commerce, interaction, people, and safety. Roads are about moving high volumes of traffic at speed between destinations. We just need to delineate those. When we have these conversations, the engineering profession has done lots of safety advancements on our federal highway systems where we can go at speed — the signs are big, the language and communication there has made it so we can go faster with more people, and we have seen lower fatalities. It's when we blend the two that we're having these problems.
I think that's a great point. Malisa talked about competing values, and when you are trying to build a road that is all things to all people — that's kind of what Edward was talking about — he's explicitly helping communities understand: I'm not asking this street to be all things to all people, I'm asking it to do these specific functions. Malisa, you've been in Ann Arbor but you've worked in a lot of communities on this issue. Do you find it easy to talk in terms of values, or is that a challenge?
It's a challenge, because of the many influences — the elected officials and the priorities of the city or the agenda of the council. I've been lucky to work in places that have prioritized biking, walking, and transit use. I've also worked in those same communities when administrations changed and the priorities changed, but you still want to do the work.
In a lot of places I've been able to work — like Orlando or Charlotte, North Carolina, where they were growing very fast — there are a lot of state roads that just get wider and wider. They're meant to carry traffic, but they also have lots of residential uses around them. To Edward's point, the land use context is huge, and the state of Florida Department of Transportation actually created context-sensitive design, which is wonderful because it helps the conversation when you're talking to the DOTs about state roads.
In Charlotte, it was explosive growth, and we had farm-to-market roads — exactly what Edward was just talking about with rural roads. We had two-lane roads with ditches that had no sidewalks, that were getting redeveloped quicker than we could keep up with, trying to add sidewalks or anything else for people to move around. But then they were starting to get served by transit because there was demand for it. It's a very hard space to work in when you've got that transition going on, and it's hard for the infrastructure to keep up — which is one of the key tenets of Strong Towns.
When you're dealing with a city the size of a county, several hundred square miles, it is a very hard conversation. While people are all supportive of safety, what safety means is different things to different people. Balancing all those demands is definitely challenging. So focusing on breaking it down to just streets or roads is a great way to help the conversation.
Some of that conversation, as outlined in the article, involves data gaps. Whenever we talk about roads, whenever we talk about the built environment, there's all this data we have to collect: how many vehicles traveled there, what was the speed study, what were people's opinions. One of the gaps is understanding how many people are riding and biking.
Working with Ann Arbor the last couple of months, they have access to an enormous amount of data sets that help fill in those gaps. When I go to cities, the first thing I ask them to do is a walk audit — go out and look at places. Just as we do a speed study, we can observe where people are walking and find what the desire paths are. These are things we can observe in the field as professionals and turn into a study.
But Malisa, I know you have access to some incredible data sets and tools. There's also an app my family uses called Bike Streets, where people can download it and map their bike rides, and that goes to a map of places. Several cities across the country — like Tempe, Arizona — are using that to help evaluate their priority spots for bicycle connections, and their data sets are showing things that wouldn't show up any other way.
That's actually a great transition to my next question, because the author interviewed a gentleman who's running the Center for Pedestrian and Cycling, which is indicated to be the first of its kind — a transportation center focused exclusively on non-car mobility. Malisa, the last two communities you've worked in, Ann Arbor and Gainesville, are university towns. If you all had a direct line to the research this center was doing in New Mexico, what would be helpful to you in the conversation of making our community streets safer? What would you love to see them digging into right now?
Well, actually, in both communities where I've had a major university, I've worked closely with those universities on research. In Gainesville, it was more focused on smart cities technology, but we were also very focused on non-motorized users. We were doing near-miss work, pedestrian and bike-focused projects, and also working with the user interface with autonomous vehicles, and working with the public health side of the University of Florida. In every case, I've been able to work with researchers.
Now in Ann Arbor, we're working with researchers at the UM Transportation Research Institute — UMTRI. We have a couple of projects with them, including near-miss analytics focused on the pedestrian and bike side, as well as a traffic signal-focused project.
Getting to your question about what we would ask for — when you work in places with major universities that are interested in this research, they're always looking for projects for their students. We've had grad students doing projects for us as well, helping us collect data. When I was in Orlando, we used University of Central Florida students to do a walking audit of the entire downtown. We gave them some training, sent them out with clipboards, and had them doing both qualitative and quantitative assessments: what are the speed limits, how wide are the sidewalks, how many trees are there, how comfortable do you feel. Even in Charlotte, I worked with a student on his doctoral research doing a pre- and post-public health study on one of our road diets, actually.
The study looked at how comfortable people felt and whether they used biking and walking more before and after we went in and put in bike lanes and sidewalks. I've been very lucky on the research side of it. Even in Portland, I worked with Portland State on some things. I've been lucky to work in cities that had universities interested in the work we were doing.
That's great. Edward, anything you would add to the research conversation?
On top of that, as citizens, every time your community does a transportation study or one of these public input processes, sharing where you walk and how you walk is really important. That creates a data set that has huge influence on these big regional plans. It's not fast work — those plans take years — but from my own personal experience, when we have some sort of MPO regional plan, transportation plan, or Bike-Ped update, I make sure I put lots of pins on the map, and I have all my friends put lots of pins on the map of where we walk and ride and where we wish we had things, because they're asking for that input.
I'm amazed how all of that builds up a crescendo and influences decision-making. There are many places in my own community that people didn't expect anyone to be walking, because there was no data set to show it — until there's that public process. So there's some really high-tech stuff we can do with apps and our phones, and there's some really low-tech stuff — old-school public engagement. I just encourage folks to do the all-of-the-above approach. It may not seem like it's contributing, but I assure you it is.
I totally agree, Edward. One of my most favorite things to do when we're looking at biking and walking around schools and connectivity is asking students to draw maps of how they get to school if they walk or bike. That is one of the most interesting ways to get information, because you learn things like, 'I won't walk by that house because there's a mean dog there,' or 'I won't walk down that street because when I try to cross I can't see around the bush.' When you actually talk to the children who are trying to get to school, it's always a great — and very low-tech — way to get information.
That's great. I'm going to switch gears a little bit. The article does point out the challenges we've seen across the country as Vision Zero has come across the Atlantic and been implemented in many cities. We often work with Vision Zero and connect with them on a variety of things. The article points out it has been a different challenge in the states to implement and see the same successes seen across the pond. The article cites inherent design systems that are different.
I'm curious how you guys think about Vision Zero and how we continue to build on it so that we can take some of the good and make sure we're ultimately achieving the goals. Malisa, I'll start with you, because I know part of the reason you're working with us at Strong Towns is to continue to make things better and safer in your community.
Absolutely. Achieving the goals is challenging, and it takes commitment. Fortunately, the city of Ann Arbor is extremely committed to achieving those goals. In Gainesville and in Portland, we also had Vision Zero plans. I think a lot of cities have folks working there who really want to implement this program. Obviously, we're all looking to reduce deaths and serious injuries.
I think it's really hard to make those changes without the commitment that we have in Ann Arbor. The focus is on: how are we slowing speeds, how are we changing our built environment, how are we making it easier for people to bike and walk, how are we making it safer for everyone to interact on our streets? There's a lot of funding dedicated to that, and we have embedded Vision Zero priorities in every single project.
Regardless of what project is going on in the city — whether it's a utility project, road resurfacing, or a capital improvement project — our planners, engineers, and transportation team are on every single one of those projects, making sure we're looking at opportunities for crosswalks, signal upgrades, bike lanes, or anything we can do to make the environment more comfortable and safe for all users. It's Council directed, which is very nice to have.
A lot of cities aren't able to do all of those different pieces that help move Vision Zero forward. You might be able to do a signature project, or under Safe Streets and Roads for All you might be able to do some really good planning or demonstration work. But having that commitment embedded in everything that is done is definitely not something you see everywhere.
There were two key things you said that I see as part of a systems approach: we have to be looking at this from every angle and every contributing piece, and we need the leadership support — whether it's the Council or the elected executive — having the people in charge continue to make these things a priority really helps the teams on the implementation side.
Edward, anything you would add to how we can help Vision Zero succeed so that we can see more and more cities achieving these efforts?
What I'm seeing — and we're working with multiple cities and sharing findings from the crash analysis studios — is that our professionals, the folks who really know the built environment and transportation engineering, are very afraid to talk about safety. The cities where Vision Zero is floundering share this pattern: they're afraid to talk about safety, because if you talk about safety, you have to take accountability and responsibility for that built environment.
What we hear in the crash studios is that when we identify a dangerous intersection and point out all the observational contributing factors for a crash — which are many — we find that intersection is following the same standards as 80 other intersections in the city. If the city acknowledges that something was unsafe and takes on the responsibility of the contributing factors, the pushback I get is that all of a sudden it's overwhelming, because now there are 80 to 90 intersections they'd all have to fix at once.
So they fall back on the idea of blame: if you break the rules, there's a penalty, there is legal action. Cities are afraid to talk about safety in a timely manner — they're waiting until the black box has been downloaded, until all the criminal actions have occurred. They're not looking at what we know today immediately, because we've found in all 27 crash studios we've done that there are at least half a dozen things cities could go out and do tomorrow, quickly and cheaply, that would address some of those contributing factors. But some Vision Zero cities won't sit down and analyze the crashes until a year after the crash, because they don't want to interfere with any legal or insurance proceedings.
The other key element is that many cities are stuck behind their plans. If it's not in the plan, they don't want to act on it. I understand where this is coming from, and it's not a fault — it's a reaction. When you go out in public and take on responsibility, you become the spokesperson, the face of that. As technical professionals in City Hall, you don't have to spend very much time reading the newspaper or watching the news to see the friction between the public and local government. Everywhere I go, these local government folks — public servants who truly love the cities they work in — have been abused. They've stumbled in public, and that is a memory they never want to repeat.
So because we're afraid to talk about safety, because we're afraid to acknowledge responsibility, we develop these super elaborate plans. If it's not in the plan, we're not taking action, or if it is in the plan, it goes through the typical bureaucratic process of over-engagement: too large of a project, lots of funding required, lots of time. The work we've been trying to do with the crash studio is just to be more responsive — to help our professionals and our cities talk differently about crashes, to talk openly about contributing factors, to acknowledge them. That is really the thing we're missing as a profession.
In the architecture world, if a building collapses, every architect talks about it. The Citicorp building in New York is something we study in architecture school all the time — a misunderstanding of the engineering calculations where the building almost fell over. The architecture profession looks at those buildings and tries to build a better code and teach more things in school so we don't repeat those things. We don't provide that same grace or openness when we talk about roadways.
It's even worse when a bad roadway design comes up — even though it's rooted in all of the broader pieces — for some reason it's always the engineer or the firm that worked on it who's at fault. We've got to break that process so that we can really talk about safety in a much broader sense, in a way that allows us to work as a community to address the things that would make our streets safer.
The shift in trying to talk about crashes as a more urgent matter to solve — and it seems to me like Ann Arbor is a model of that — when leadership gets behind it, it really provides the support that cities need to actually go make changes. For a while there was a sense that there wasn't a lot that could be done. Some of the previous work by this author, David Zipper, exposed some of the COVID trends where driving was down but fatalities were up. I actually think that was an important data point that made people more aware of how these different systems contribute — wait a second, it's counterintuitive that if driving is going down, fatalities are going up. So what's going on?
One final question: the piece ends on autonomous vehicles, and Malisa, you've got some experience with pilots and things like that. I'd love to hear how you talk internally about the future of AVs and how it interacts with your desire to keep the streets of Ann Arbor safe. How complicated is this, and what are you learning?
I think emerging technology is a piece of the conversation, but at the end of the day, how our roads are designed is really dictating how people use them. The autonomous vehicle and connected vehicle technology — connected to everything — is an interesting space. If you really want to see the way we can look at things and all the data we can get off traffic signals, cars, and behavior, it's fascinating.
But as far as autonomous vehicles go themselves, I think our streets are designed in such a way that it's very difficult for an autonomous vehicle to function. It might function on a typical street segment, but every road in our cities and across the country is designed so differently — we have such different intersections, different signals, different road uses. There's not a one-size-fits-all, and I think that's challenging from the technology side.
So I think staying focused on what we know can improve the built environment for people to move safely is money well spent to improve our cities and the quality of life that our residents experience.
That's great. Edward, you've cited your architecture background a couple of times in this interview, and I'm reminded of — what is it — Form follows function. That's kind of what we're saying with streets. How we build our streets is a big determinant of how safe they are, and that includes not just the street itself but the things around the street. Any last words before we go to the Down Zone?
I really want to thank Malisa for joining us. From my own experience, I know it's sometimes difficult to ask folks working in the public sector to come and have these frank conversations. I really appreciate it, because she has an enormous amount of experience that she's bringing to the table. She's not somebody who's just done a whole bunch of studies — she's actually done this work on the ground. I know this because I've lived in cities she's worked in. We also have similar and shared mentors in this space. She's walking the walk on this type of work, and I know Ann Arbor is really lucky to have her.
If we look at what Ann Arbor is doing in transportation right now — from an organizational structure standpoint, looking at how they're organizing their departments — the city leadership and management have really identified a whole new department that is multidisciplinary, soup to nuts, when it comes to the public right-of-way. If I map any city, public right-of-ways are the largest land use — anywhere from 60 to 80% of your overall land use is dedicated to streets and roads. So it is one of the most important pieces of your city that can make or break you for a whole range of reasons. For me, I'm learning a lot in our work with Ann Arbor about what they're doing in their department structure and the conversations they're having.
That's great. We are very excited to be able to give a shout out to Ann Arbor and to your leadership, Malisa. Thank you for joining us. Because Edward is a regular on Up Zoned, I'm going to ask him to start with our Down Zone. What's one thing, Edward, that you're reading or consuming right now that you want to share with our listeners?
The big thing I can't let go of right now is that at Strong Towns, we're working with cities all across North America to help them accelerate their work on safer streets by applying and activating a crash analysis studio. I'm super excited because I'm going to be in Ann Arbor later this week. They're hosting a workshop and laying everything out on the table for the public. They're going to host a demonstration crash analysis studio.
The work they've been doing for the last several years is the reason they're doing cool projects like State Street, and the reason they're seeing lower crash numbers in their city. I don't think people know about it. This is an opportunity where Strong Towns gets to partner with Ann Arbor — we've been invited in to talk about the crash analysis studio, and they're sharing with the public the full process: what happens after 911 is called, after the police report is filed, all the steps from the police department to the engineering department to operations and public works to build out and address all these pieces.
They're doing a lot of that work. I'm not going to say they've got it perfect, and I think they would say that too, but they're pretty far along in this work that I think other cities can learn from. There are already things I'm learning from Ann Arbor that we've brought back to the crash analysis studio. They have a lot of accountability through their Vision Zero and through their capital plans that we're encouraging other cities to follow. I hope I'm also able to bring things from the other cities we're working with — like Pittsburgh and Flint — back to Ann Arbor to help them advance their work. Ultimately, it's all so that we can see safer streets in communities like Ann Arbor and across North America. A little adventure this week, but I'm super hyped up about it.
That's awesome — so that was related. How about you, Malisa? What are you excited about? What are you reading or learning that you want to share with the group?
We're also excited Edward is coming, and Strong Towns will be part of our crash analysis studio that we'll be doing on Wednesday. Right now I'm currently in Detroit at the APA National Conference, the planning conference, and it's been a good couple of days. There have been some really great sessions.
One in particular stood out: San Diego is doing some quick-build guidelines and doing things with 3D printers for quick-build roundabouts. That was kind of an interesting thing I hadn't heard about before. I'm going to be reaching out to San Diego to find out more. There were also some great presentations about mobility hubs and some really good sessions overall. It's been a good couple of days.
That's wonderful. I'll share what I've been reading, and I'll also put a little work plug in there. I finally finished — probably 30 or 40 years too late — Great Expectations over the weekend. I had never read it, and it's very enjoyable trying to read some of the classics I've never managed to get to.
On a professional Down Zone note, for those of you who are regular listeners, you probably know we're a short time out from our national gathering. I really want to give a shout out to the folks in Fayetteville who have been so welcoming to us as we plan it. We'll be there in May, and I'm really excited for a great gathering. If you're listening and you haven't gotten your ticket yet and you still can, I highly recommend it — it's going to be a great few days.
Thank you both — Edward and Malisa — it was great to have you on today's episode of Up Zoned. On behalf of all of us at Strong Towns, remember to take care of yourselves and take care of your places. Thanks so much.
Thank you.
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