Seven years of planning have not produced a version of Boston’s Blue Hill Avenue redesign that everyone can live with. In the Boston Globe article “More Parking, Fewer Bike Lanes: City of Boston and MBTA Release New Blue Hill Avenue Redesign,” the latest proposal restores parking and traffic space while reducing parts of the planned bike network. Norm Van Eeden Petersman talks with transportation historian Peter Norton and Ann Arbor transportation manager Malisa McCreedy about what happens when a street is expected to satisfy every demand, even when those priorities conflict. As each revision absorbs another concern, the challenge is whether the city can keep its focus on what will actually work best there instead of reopening the same choices again and again.
Goldilocks eventually found a bowl of porridge that worked for her, but can the same be said for big transit projects in our cities? There's a familiar promise that comes with a major street redesign. If we listen carefully enough, study the options long enough, and put enough options out there, and then revise the plan enough times, maybe we can arrive at something everyone can live with, but what happens when the problem actually isn't just a lack of listening? When the street that we want to do these things on simply can't do everything everyone wants it to do.
Welcome to Upzoned, a Strong Towns podcast where we take a story from the news and we upzone it. We talk about it together, and today I'm joined by two guests who bring extremely helpful perspectives to that question. Peter Norton is an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia, where he studies the history of technology and streets and mobility, and he's the author of two great books. One is Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, and then his second is Autonorama: The Illusory promise of high tech driving, and then also joining us is Malisa McCreedy, the transportation manager for the city of Ann Arbor, Michigan.
She brings more than 20 years of experience in public sector transportation, mobility, and community focused planning work. So, Peter and Malisa, welcome to Upzoned.
Glad to be here.
It's good to be here.
Now we've got quite a great article today to talk about from the Boston Globe. It comes under the headline "More Parking, Fewer Bike Lanes. City of Boston and their transit agency released new Blue Hill Avenue Redesign.” It was written by reporter D.T.
Coley and looks at the latest redesign of a significant stretch of Blue Hill Avenue in the city of Boston. The proposal is significant because it calls for center-running bus lanes. But now, after years of public feedback, it's actually been revised several times. Now there's a new restoration of the plan that includes more space for parking and removes much of the previously promised and proposed cycling infrastructure that was included, including the ability to do a significant loop from several of the nearby roads and major routes through the community.
Now, a bit of background: the project has been in the works since 2019. They actually began working on these and showing these center running, bus lane concepts in 2020, but then they had to restart the process with more money, and formally committed to actually using Blue Hill as a busway in 2024. The redesigns continue to roll in. They are hoping construction will begin in 2028.
About 52% of the people traveling through the corridor at rush hour, according to Streetsblog Massachusetts, are on buses, and the consequence of this you can imagine a lot of those buses can get bogged down or clogged up on these vital roadways, and so the latest plan, in restoring more general traffic lanes and parking and cutting back on parts of the proposed bike network has definitely stirred up a lot of frustration or a lot of anxiety, a lot of frustrated concern that everything is going to be cut back over time.
Now, one note to make is that none of us on the on this podcast are Bostonians, although maybe perhaps you have Boston roots, but we have members in the Strong Towns network that are in the Boston area, and they've said you know this part of a broader pattern of Boston transportation projects getting delayed or reconsidered at the last minute amid really heated political disputes, and so the question for us is: After seven years of going through all of this public engagement, when and in what way can consultation actually resolve when the street itself is such a scarce resource, and if you're going to improve a corridor like this, should you do it as one major project or try to bundle, or does bundling everything together make change harder than it needs to be?
Peter, let's start with you. Just as you took this in, and as you've probably been tracking this as a Northeasterner. What are some of the things that have stood out for you?
Well, I want to begin by saying that I don't know Blue Hill Avenue specifically, so all I know about the project is what I've read about it. It is, of course, a classic problem in the trade-offs between the local user, the person who's going through the community, the person who lives in the community, the person who is a driver only, the person who rides the bus, and so on. This, of course, is a classic dilemma. As a historian, though, I find it significant that we're talking about a route that.
Was a major street railway corridor until the 50s with parallel double streetcar lines, and they were in the center of the street as streetcar lines typically were. While the center of the street is no longer our preferred locale for public transportation, there are certain advantages that come with it, in that it tends to promote a redefinition of the rest of the street as a more inclusive space, since people need to cross into the middle of the street to access the transit, whether that transit is a streetcar or a trackless trolley or a bus. So I.
I feel I feel deferential in a in a big way to Malisa as the person who actually works on these problems and works with the communities and has to deal with the inevitable criticism. Whenever you satisfy one party, you're going to you're going to cause strife with another, and so my hat is off to Malisa. While I can offer that historical perspective, the real practical nuts and bolts of it is something I would turn to her for.
Yeah, Malisa, what a great setup. Go ahead.
Well, the trade-offs, like you mentioned, are real. The every road can't be everything to everyone. It just doesn't function. I think what people tend to also wrestle with or not quite think about is curb lines don't move all that frequently, but the travel patterns within those curb lines move a lot, and based on development that might be going in, or commuter patterns, if you know people are moving more into that area, all those things can change how people are moving through that part of town or on that street.
So I think part of our challenge, and we are working right now on a multi-lane study. We're looking at 10 different corridors that are city-controlled streets that are multi-lane, and they're the last ones that have not been attempted to be have any lane reassignment done on them, and so we've been going through this analysis for the last year. Every corridor has demands, right? So we've got our transit demands.
We have very robust transit here. We have two different transit agencies. Actually, we have the University of Michigan, who runs their own transit system, and then we have a city transit system. We have a very engaged and very robust bicycling community.
We have a lot of cycle tracks and ways to get around town. We're always looking for more opportunities for that. We have a lot of council direction currently that wants us to be, reducing speeds and looking at Vision Zero and all those things, and prioritizing transit as well as biking and walking, and not as concerned about travel delay. As we all know, political will can change and direction can change, and so how we figure out those tradeoffs is very challenging because you have very Strong opinions, and it's the edges of the community or the edges of the opinions, the for and against, right?
For any type of thing that you're talking about, are usually typically vocal, and then you have the majority of people who just want to use the road, and so, so yeah, we wrestle with this constantly on every single project that we work with. So and we do a lot of engagement. You're right, seven years of engagement is a long time to be engaged on a project. COVID was in the middle of that.
Stuff has changed. Travel patterns have changed, right? So even though they started the study in 2019, stuff changed for over the course of three or four years, and now you're having to go back and look at what you're doing. I think the in this the case of this particular project that center running bus is a great idea.
As Peter mentioned, you know that is an historic way to deliver transit service. If transit's the priority, though, they really have to focus on how people are getting to it. So if the priority though is to move commuter cars as quickly as possible, so I think in this case they really need to define who is the priority, and I think that might help with the conversation in the community. If the whoever the electeds or whoever wants to take that lead and draw the heat, right?
So if we're going to prioritize transit in this corridor, then you really have to say that's the priority, and we're going to do enhanced pedestrian crossings, and people are going to be able to get around, and it seems like they're doing all these additional sidewalk improvements. So I think what you emphasize and how you expect the street to function is something that needs to be defined. Did I ramble too much?
No, that's that's fantastic, and it's quite something in reading the press coverage that you know there's protests and then there's counter protests, and they are you know making sure that their voices are heard, and I think that there can at times be a really constructive value in that. So in my city, one of the things that we recognized is we needed to be quite out there in terms of what we were, in a sense, demanding or politely asking for, because we're Canadians after all. What we were looking for needed to be really pushing the envelope, especially for us on housing. Our local group was saying on housing, we need to you know make it by right across the whole city.
Let's go, let's go, let's go, because the result and the consequence of this that we had seen earlier, council members would get a staff report, they would get the recommendations, they would get the technical drawings, and then on the dais they would say, well, I've heard some concerns that X, Y, and Z, and so is there a way that we can do half of what you're proposing? I was like, half is already what the council what the council is seeing. Like, if you were to ask the staff genuinely, what do you think would address these problems and you know
Deal with travel delays, you know allow for multimodal transportation in this area, you would get a much more like robust plan, and instead they've already whittled it down, and now you're at the dais saying, "What if we whittle it down even further? It does seem to me, Peter, as we look at this plan, like going back to the drawing board over and over and over again, must not only be exhausting but also counterproductive. Do you want to share just like some of your observations of general pattern making here, and why these projects can at times almost get to the point where it's like, all right, we just have to let this thing cool off and come back to it at some point.
Otherwise, it seems like there's just no good way to move ahead.
This a real scrum. You have people pushing in all different directions, as Malisa indicated as well, and you, as Malisa also said, you're not going to satisfy everybody. I find it significant that we're talking about a corridor that already has a majority of bus riders, and that suggests to me that unlike some iffy experiments of attempting to attract people to transit, where the ridership is vanishingly low, as is very common in North American cities, there's an advantage here that we could be talking about a real transit corridor.
I would like to know, for example, if that number, the current bus ridership number, is limited by the capacity of the current system rather than by demand, because if it is, that would be another reason to really promote a very transit-friendly transit priority route, which has big advantages for a city that really doesn't need more private passenger cars entering it into downtown Boston, and where we want to welcome people who want bus service, and it's quite possible, I think, for a center of the street bus service to be very welcoming. I live near Richmond, Virginia, where we have that on Broad Street, and it works very well.
It there is a tension or a friction point where the bus rider has to get between the curb and the center of the street. But I think with some traffic engineering that recognizes that need and that alerts drivers that they have a responsibility to not interfere with that flow of passengers between the center of the street and the sidewalk. That it is possible to make that work very well. We can learn from experience on that, since that was the historical pattern.
We can also learn from cities like Richmond, Virginia, where that is now the norm.
So in places that have like a streetcar, history that have those wider roads, I, I was in Pensacola and I was just curious, why is this road so large? Then I did a little bit of searching, and it was like, oh, it used they used to run a streetcar up and down it. In those situations, are those prime candidates to return this type of service and reestablish that. Often, what will happen is it just becomes greenway, and you know there's a little bit of landscaping, a little bit of shrubs that are poorly maintained, and it's like that has value, but for a limited, limited amount of value, I should say.
Is there a case to be made that's a great indicator of past patterns that actually can be reattached to that place.
There are multiple wins with recognizing that a wide right of way on an urban street can become a really attractive transit corridor because not only can it serve the transit well, it can also. Counteract a serious problem we have in North American cities, which is wide urban thoroughfares that invite speeding and drivers passing each other and environments that are hostile to walking and dangerous to walking and biking. So you know my answer to your question is an emphatic yes. A wide corridor without transit accommodation is a wonderful opportunity for better transit.
Yeah.
And then Malisa, you're a transportation manager, and I don't know if you have any seven-year projects in the works, but it also feels like a Strong Towns you know thought on this often like all right what's the next smallest thing that can be done and I mean they are filling in potholes and the article said that they were you know addressing some street lights and making them better and adding in the occasional thing but it does seem that the mega project mindset of all right we need all the drawings all at once, in order to be able to have you know the right height of a crosswalk and all of those things, I understand from an engineering perspective if you're going to do four blocks, you may as well do eight.
But the flip side, and we see this with construction too, where all eight blocks are going to get ripped up, all eight blocks are going to be blocked with cones, and all eight blocks are then going to be one by one by one dealt with, but the whole project just feels so much more monumental than if you just maybe sacrifice a little bit of efficiency and actually did a block by block treatment. Now it would be tricky because those buses, if you know move them from the right aisle all the way into the center aisle, but we already do that for construction. We already do that. We do lots of those types of accommodations.
So in you must have to be somewhat nimble in your work while also respecting safety. But what does that nimbleness look like? It's not to say, "Oh, Boston, go and do this. But I just feel like a lot of our places are gripped with this dread of these kinds of projects because they just get dragged out for so long.
How do we address that? Is there is there something in your toolkit that maybe other places can consider?
Yes, I would say Ann Arbor has done a really good job. So I've been here only just over a year, but I have worked in several other cities in the transportation space, and here it's very different because there is actual council direction that says any road resurfacing project, any pavement maintenance project, any utility project, any you know any type of capital project that's getting built has to be looked at for improvements for pedestrians, for bikes, for speed management to meet our Vision Zero goals in reducing vehicle miles traveled, so there's council direction for that.
So consequently, there is a very robust CIP process here, capital improvement program, and we everyone on my team is involved in that process. We also are involved in the design of every road resurfacing project. We sit on any utility project that's coming in, so that and we've already identified through the CIP process when these projects are coming, what kinds of improvements we'd like to see that we have already identified. So when something pops up, which happened to us this past summer because we're in Northern City.
We only construct from April to November, so there's a very busy construction season here. So, as we have a capital pavement maintenance program, so they're just doing some ceiling treatment on the pavement to continue the life of the pavement without doing an actual resurfacing. We had that program. We missed a project.
It just so happened that it was a gap in the bike network. We were able to make sure that we were able to restripe bike lanes, or we were able to stripe bike lanes on a section that was missing the bike lane connectivity on either side of the two intersections. So we were able to take advantage of that because we also transportation just became its own department in the last year, and it used to be under engineering, so we also happen to have our own budget. So we were able to bring some money to the table to say we need to do this.
Can we make sure that we include this as part of that project? So I think there's opportunities like that in every city to be working with the other departments that are controlling those types of projects, because sometimes it's it'll be under a public works department. Here it happens to be under engineering. We happen to be used to be under engineering.
We work with engineering all the time, so we work really closely with our colleagues on that. But there's also that council direction that helped because it's saying you have to do this, and you all have to figure it out as staff. So I think when those opportunities pop up, we've done some paint and post. So for curb extensions in areas, we've done paint and post demonstration projects to figure out how something might work.
So. Like I said, Ann Arbor is ahead of the curve on a lot of that because in a lot of places it might be you might have one staff person who will like when I worked for the city of Orlando, I was the bicycle pedestrian transit planner. I used to work closely with engineering under Public Works whenever they were identifying the road resurfacing to see if we could put bike lanes in as part of that project, but I was doing that like I wasn't mandated, but I built the relationship with the public works director to make sure that they were going that we were going to be at the table. So I think there's different ways you can approach it.
And Peter, can you set this in a bit of historical context? Of you wrote a book about the dawn of the motor age and the reversion of a lot of streets into primary roadways, and when we think about you know responses to bike lanes in the province of Ontario, where the premier is using it as you know an opportunity to gain political points with a certain class of people, Florida and many other places, this feels that it's a new you know dawning of a new age, but there's resistance. Do you want to share just what that's like, and some that bigger pattern?
Because what Malisa is talking about, I'm like, I would love if my city really reassured me to say, yeah, we're following Malisa's model and we're doing the exact same thing. I see the opposite because of that version. Josh Stewart, who is a Strong Towns member in Littleton, Colorado. He said, "When the suburbs were first created, there was a general shared understanding that the streets are shared, and over time, the Watchmen gave up and stopped paying attention to that shared promise.
The result is they became auto domains. That's that's part of that story. But I feel like now we're trying to undo that miss or that missed opportunity, but can you shed more light on that background?
I can try. So that's a great setup. The situation we're in now is when we want to reimagine a street as being for something other than fast driving. We are up against a perception that well, obviously, you're talking about some radical change relative to what streets are really for, which is for driving.
Now, if we take a longer historical view, what we find, of course, is that prioritizing driving everywhere was itself a radical and initially quite bizarre idea. In fact, the initial proponents of this themselves called their own vision of car-dominated streets a radical idea. A road builder named Edward Marin, a very influential man, back in 1922, said the obvious solution, and to him, solution meant the obvious way to prioritize driving, the obvious solution lies only in a radical revision of our conception of what a city street is for, and by radical redefinition, he meant redefining it to what, in fact, we have today.
So this was a very successful vision, which means that if we go back and look at streets as they were in North America before that radical revision. We actually have a lot to learn because they too were favoring walking. They too were favoring mixed uses for streets. They too wanted to be welcoming to transit.
They too wanted people who rode the streetcar to have safe and convenient access to the middle of the street, where all of the boarding and alighting from streetcars happened. In fact, they had what we would now call traffic calming. They didn't call it that, but they had innumerable traffic calming techniques, some of which we have reinvented from scratch because we have lost touch with that history. So for example, the paint and post projects that Malisa referred to, instead of posts, they had little objects on the road called they called buttons, like little dome-shaped buttons that they put on the street.
Those were extremely common in Canada and the U.S. 100 years ago, and they were there to do what the paint and post installations do now-that is, to guide the driver, to slow the driver down, to prevent the driver from taking a really large radius turn at high speed and more of a right angle turn at low speed. They were doing this traffic calming in a really ambitious way.
In fact, in some ways, they were more zealous about it than we are today. So today, one of the attractions of a post, a plastic post, for us now, is that we know that if a driver strikes it, they're not going to hurt themselves or even damage the car. Well, they had the opposite mentality 100 years ago. They said, "Let's make these things really hard.
Let's make them out of concrete and steel, because we want drivers to know that if you don't behave yourself, you will damage your car. I have people, authorities, municipal authorities, 100 years ago on the record saying, "Yes, we." Designed this thing so it will damage your car if you hit without the object itself getting a scratch. That was the stronger version of traffic calming that they had in North America century ago.
Now I'm not suggesting that we necessarily need to go back to that, but we do have a lot to learn from the people who were committed a century ago to slowing drivers down, especially on turns. We have a big problem in North America with the wide-angle left turn that can continue at high speed around the middle of the intersection. People trying to walk in those places where drivers are taking turns at high speed, they're stressed out. They're looking at the green light as their opportunity to cross.
But we've got turning drivers on green lights, and even turning drivers on red lights when you have right on red, where walking is just really deterred, and people cared about that a century ago. The next generation of traffic engineers thought of those people as unscientific, which I think was a real disservice to them. Because while they didn't have the same college-trained methods, they did have a lot of practical, hands-on experience that gave them some real wisdom about how to manage traffic that we can learn from today.
Are we on scientific, Malisa?
Well, I always like to say it's common sense, which is of course not so common. But we all live in that practical space, right? So we all are road users, regardless of how we're traveling, and at some point we're all pedestrians, right? So I think places have tools that they can choose to implement to improve those spaces for everyone, and how that gets prioritized takes a lot of political will as well as staff who are eager and embrace the ideas and want to make it happen as quickly as possible.
Funding is a piece of that. Political will is the biggest piece, I would say, because you can have all the funding you want, but if you don't have the support to implement it, it's tough. Ann Arbor does have a no right turn on red proliferation throughout the downtown, in particular, and it is enforced. People do; it has changed the driver culture here.
People do; there isn't a lot of abuse of that one in particular. Flashing yellow arrows are a huge thing that we have implemented at our traffic signals: if a pedestrian button is actuated, we have accessible pedestrian buttons everywhere. The flashing yellow arrow won't come up. So there's some tools that can be used to create a more pedestrian-friendly environment or a better user experience for everyone, because in those cases it's also slowing the traffic down.
It's making sure drivers are being safe and it we've reduced crashes. So there's tools that can be used definitely that are not super expensive by any stretch and that just require some follow-up or some implementation of,
yeah, yeah, and I also think too, coming to Peter, what you're saying about the posts. My vision is every fifth one should have like a sticker rebar in it, just as like surprise, like you shouldn't have been running these over, and just create a little bit of fragility in people's experience, and actually would have a real impact. The other the other challenge, especially in a place like Blue Hill Avenue, is just the unseenness of alternate ways of getting around. So everybody that's walking, everybody that is, choosing to cycle on an on an adjacent street, and then all of the people that are in many cases packed into the buses because these buses are full.
That's almost the only time that you really notice. Whoa, that bus is really doing its work here. One of I got this on Twitter from I don't even know who, but you know the idea of everybody drive to work week. So I love the idea of you know bike to work week, and everybody gets a you know a chance to experiment with it, and it's like, oh, that was cute.
I dropped off my kids on my bike, and it was nice. Maybe you convert one of them. I think we would convert a lot more people to being avid transit supporters if we said everybody get in the car. So if you walk, you're driving, and it would just we know we know instinctively it would just be madness, absolute chaos.
Nothing would work, and then it would be like, so we're looking at spending 173 million dollars on the Blue Hill Avenue redesign. Are you in? It'd be like, yes, I'm in. Make it happen.
We need this because this going to create the conditions, which I can still, if I need to, use a vehicle. But much of the opportunity for other people to get out of my way will be funded and. I think if it's it's maybe a little crass or mercenary to say fund transit to get other people out of your way if you are that class of an individual that needs to be persuaded that this actually for you and maybe this part of the challenge Malisa that you can touch on in Ann Arbor I'm sure this happens too there's the two concerns that are emerging in the material about Boston, but I hear it all over. Either I don't use this, or this not for us.
So there are you know real important community members. There's a large black community in the Blue Hill Avenue area, and that and some of their leaders have said this not actually for us. This for other people, and it's hard. I'm clear across the continent, saying, "Well, I think it is for you, but I want to be very respectful in how I utter that.
But how do we pulling maybe out of the Blue Hill context? How do we actually say, "Like this for all of us, plural, but also there's there's a material benefit that each of us receives when these types of changes are made, and Peter, to your point, when the restoration of something that actually worked well until a pretty concerted effort was made to undo that actually is reestablished.
I think in for Blue Hill in particular and in general, one of the ways that I think we can message is we're not saying you're going to ride transit every day. I'm not. I don't like to drive a car every day. So if it's options, if it's we're providing opportunity for I used to talk about you know when I was really in the pedestrian bike space.
So wouldn't it be nice if it's a nice day out and you have the opportunity to walk to lunch from your office instead of having to get in your car and drive there. You might not use it every day. You might not bike every day. You might not take transit every day.
But it's nice when you have those options when you want to do that. Maybe you don't want to sit in traffic this morning. Maybe you'd rather take the bus and be able to catch up on a book you're reading or you know emails or something, some other use of that time that you would spend sitting in traffic. So I think part of it's the messaging of how we're not expecting you to do a complete lifestyle change.
We're just suggesting that there's opportunities and options that actually benefit everyone. So the folks who can't drive or the folks who aren't able to use transit because they have to be certain places at certain times because their transit in their area doesn't run as frequently. But it is the, there's so many complicating and nuanced layers to that, right? If you have frequent transit and it's convenient, people are going to be more likely to use it.
If you don't have parking spaces for people to go to, they're more likely to shift to transit or to biking or to walking. So there's ways to incentivize it as well. Adding car lanes and adding parking spaces on this corridor in Boston is not the way to incentivize transit. So making the transit more convenient, making it more comfortable, making it more accessible for everyone to even consider using it.
Those are ways of you know really I think having that conversation of this for you, this for everyone. While you might not have a global perspective of I you know maybe it's I don't care about anyone else but me, which is fair. So I think targeting your message to the folks who are just you know can't conceptualize themselves using transit, making it appeal in such a way that well maybe you would if it was the right circumstance.
Yeah, yeah. Well, and what stands out in the Blue Hill pattern too is there you know read I think you know wanting to make sure that there's still angled parking available in front of some of the businesses, and yet there's bus stops nearby, and there's the thing that would be sacrificed in order for that to happen is cycling lanes that would come right by many of those same businesses, and then there would be an improved sidewalk as well. I wonder too, sometimes our bus stops are actually like great advertising opportunities. So what about providing for those local businesses?
Hey, you all get like a chunk of you know prominent display material, and we will keep this up, and we will do it, say, for 10 years, and let's see if we can actually offset and actually overcome your perceived loss of customers with the capture of a whole new audience of people that are actually interested, and I, I sometimes worry that you know when it comes to construction projects for transit like this, I see you know in Vancouver we have the Broadway project that's underway right now, and the businesses are really struggling, and I don't know to what extent they've even done small things like, hey, we're gonna really like double down on everybody gets a sandwich board sign.
Everybody gets like extra bits of visibility. I think we started to do more of that. Even a neighborhood ambassador that was just hired to stand at the corner and say, "Hey, there's a great pizza shop right over there. There's a great wedding dress store.
So go tell your friends. Like we could actually return a bit of that life to the street, and people would start to say. Oh, I got off at that stop for those 18 businesses that are there. A lot of times, the business owners don't know that someone came by bus because no one walks in and says, "Hi, I came by bus today.
Yet, if we actually began to count up the value in that, that would certainly make a difference as well. Peter, I can see you leaning forward, so go ahead and jump right in.
Oh well, I just was absorbed by your wonderful ideas there, Norm. There are some there's some real terrific ones there. As a rule, the more you favor walking, cycling, and transit, the more you're you're favoring the local population and also the local retail enterprises. I do think it's also worth making a distinction between accommodating driving and accommodating fast driving.
Now, you can accommodate driving and still give leave good choices for people. That's that's doable. The difficulty comes when you start trying to accommodate fast driving. Once you once you're accommodating fast driving, everything else gets harder and also less safe.
So it becomes harder to have transit where there's fast driving. It becomes harder to have walkability and bikeability where there's fast driving. So there's a nice possibility that leaves for accommodating drivers, provided they are prepared to have to drive slowly, and the street design can reinforce that. There's a there's a beautiful side effect, which is that this then tends to favor the local drivers, and actually keeps out the people who are the long distance people who are cutting through your neighborhood?
They don't want to do any retail business in your neighborhood. They're not going to your neighborhood. They are merely using your neighborhood as a an area to cut through on their way to some other destination. Now, every locality has an interest in deterring merely through traffic.
Through traffic can be accommodated in ways that does not interfere with communities if it's kept on the main highways or, in some cases, when possible on rail. But so I think there's a false dichotomy where people are thinking, well, either you're accommodating drivers or you're accommodating everybody else. Well, local drivers can be accommodated while you're also accommodating walking, biking, and transit.
And I would also add that how many of us want to live in a city where you can drive 45 miles an hour on any street at any time? Nobody wants to live in that city. They will tell you know you show people pictures. Would you rather you know be on this street with its lively shops and people walking around, and there's still on street parking and there's still cars moving, or would you rather be on a soulless commercial corridor that exists in every city everywhere that's you know eight lanes across and no trees and the most hostile environment you can consider being in, and nobody wants to live there.
It's it's such a. Pictures are useful, but when you actually have that conversation with folks, that I love the way you just said that, Peter. You're accommodating driving, but we're not accommodating fast driving. We are not car haters.
I use a car when I need to use a car. I, I'm lucky. I chose to live as close to work as possible so I can walk to work. That's my lifestyle choice.
A lot of people don't have that option. So we are still accommodating driving, but we are trying to slow it down from a speed management perspective, and I think also to add to the businesses and how you're advertising, if you're slowing cars down, people have an actual opportunity to see that there's a business there. I would also add one other thing: when I worked in a lot in the parking space, it always was amazing to me that businesses do not succeed or fail because they have parking. They're going to succeed because it's a destination that people want to get to.
When I lived in Portland, Oregon, it was there was plenty of places that were very successful restaurants that had no parking, and people still found a way to get there. So I think it also depends on the culture of the area and how people want to interact with their space.
So maybe as we close up the conversation of this, what's something that really overlaps with where you are in your community, and maybe because I think that a lot of folks as you're listening may not be living in a city quite the size of Boston, but you definitely have many of the same phenomenon, many of the same trends. What about for you, Peter? Where do you see all of that overlap?
Well, I mentioned earlier in this call in Richmond, Virginia, which is about 60 miles east of me, we have a wonderful success story in a city that has been pioneering a lot. Bold innovations in mobility in ways that favor walking, biking, and transit. The one that really reminds me of the Blue Hill Avenue corridor is the Broad Street corridor. Broad Street is Richmond's main street, and it is literally a Broad Street.
They took advantage of that to put buses in the middle of the street where the streetcars had been, and it works beautifully. It's been a thriving success story, and I think it may offer some reassurance for Bostonians who are interested in the future of Blue Hill Avenue.
Yeah, I think there's such a perception, like, oh, I, I just, I assume this going to be awful, and then the result is like, then you get really worked up to fight against that. We see that with housing too. The housing that people fight against is the housing that's going to be built, not what has been built in almost every circumstance.
I do want to be careful that it can be awful to have bus routes in the middle of the street if you continue to use the rest of the street for high-speed driving, then you really have a problem where the passengers are being deterred, and some of them are being absolutely definitively blocked from using the buses. So it does require a reimagining of the rest of the street if center lane buses are going to work well,
yeah, 100% That's a great point. What about for you, Malisa?
I would say the part about people feeling heard on both sides of the spectrum, and how do you navigate that conversation? That is probably the biggest challenge is really setting the expectations of what can be done and how it can be done, and then following through on what that, and then delivering it. Right. So I think you have to be able to navigate that space, that understanding that people on both sides are going to be less unhappy, regardless of what you're doing, and the best we can do is hopefully make them less unhappy, because you can't please, you can't please everyone all of the time, right?
So it's instead of creating an us and them or this mode versus that mode, we are really trying to be more holistic of how we're approaching the corridors and really defining the why. Why are we doing this? What is the purpose? What are the goals?
Then how are we defining success of that project that we're implementing? So we're really trying to work more on how we're going about our communication and our messaging and our engagement. I think that is across the board. Any project you do anywhere,
I love it. Well, why don't we move on over to the down zone? So this the part of the show where we just take something that we're listening to or reading, and we share it. If it has caught our interest, perhaps it'll catch the interest of others.
So I don't know if you got prepped for this, but I do will share that something I'm listening to that I'm really enjoying is the Ballot Babes podcast. It's a very niche podcast for Winnipeg politics. But my sister in law Emma is running for reelection as a city councilor there, and so she was one of the people that was profiled on the Ballot Babes podcast. It's run by the bicycle mayor of Winnipeg, Patty Weens, and her responsibility is she has a co-host there, and they just talk through all of the different women that are running in the city of Winnipeg and assessing each of the different wards and the candidates for mayor as well.
So it's it's fascinating. It's it's irreverent in all the right ways, and really interesting, and really focused on like, hey, let's elect people that really have a clear vision for you know a really strong community. When we do that, like you said, Peter, we're not having to then make all of these compromises on, hey, how do we you know continue to make our roads a speedway, instead, how do we make great communities? So that's my item for the down zone.
What about for you, Malisa?
Well, there's so much going on, but I'm trying something new. I'm volunteering at a local music venue called The Ark, and my husband's been doing it for about a year now. It's a it's volunteer run organization. There's only like six full time people, and they do over 300 music shows or some live show a year.
It's a beloved institution here in Ann Arbor, and so it's just it's just a fun way to get out of the space that I live in, and really, and I love music, so it's it's just a way for me to also see shows because you get to actually engage in some of the, or you get to watch the act that might be performing. So
that's amazing, and I'm assuming it's not a Live Nation venue, so there's no exorbitant ticket prices. No,
you know the tickets tend to run less than $50, so it's it's it's a 400 seat venue at capacity. But they get you know some bigger acts, and they a lot of folk singer, singer songwriter acts. But their one show I'm going to volunteer at is a live improv musical, cool.
Yeah,
that sounded interesting. So anyway, it's just something fun and interesting and different that I'm I'm looking forward to.
Yeah, The Ark in Ann Arbor. That's awesome. What about for you, Peter? What's in your What's your downzone item today?
Well, as I was listening to this conversation, I a light and a more serious source of thought for me came to mind. One is on the first to begin on the light side. I thought of this because of the Broad Street example from Richmond. They, the city of Richmond, has an amazing director of transportation.
His name is Andy Baino. B-O-E-N-A-U, and I really enjoy his social media posts, which are witty and have this amazing facility for showing us how. This goes back to Malisa's point. Malisa's point about common sense.
Common sense is not that common, but it is a beautiful way of reimagining streets and transportation from a common sense point of view, applying wit, and the more serious example is that I'm nearing the end of an amazing book published in 1933 by Carter G. Woodson called *The Miseducation of the Negro* which, of course, is a is specifically about Black American history, but to me it is a wonderful revelation about how our present looks normal or not normal depending on the version of history that we have learned.
So he was writing about versions of history that were justifying inequality in the 1930s, but I'm seeing a book that's also helping me see streets and cities in 2026 where versions of history have made them look normal, but those are constructed versions of history intended to favor car domination, and it's a real inspiration to go back and find the true story, which was Carter G. Woodson's message to his readers was go back and find the real history, and I think that message applies to our subject of interest as much as it applies to his.
That's a great recommendation. I'm going to track that down because I know when we talk about at Strong Towns, like land is the base resource for building lasting prosperity. I'm very deeply aware that land is deeply contested, but also something that we need to respect together. We have you know ancestors who have lived on these lands for much longer than I have as a recent immigrant, and the result is like listening and responsibility to definitely take that seriously.
Like you said, that what history I have picked up of what I colloquially know about a place probably needs to be adjusted quite regularly in order to really understand, what the lasting impacts of decisions are going to be. So I feel like that applies as much to the Blue Hill Avenue as it does to all of our communities, and I'm really appreciating just the breadth of the conversation that we had today. Thank you both, Malisa and Peter, for coming on today.
Thank you.
It's been a joy.
We will have to reassemble the band together and play the arc, but also do another Upzoned podcast. This has been fantastic. Thank you all. I really appreciate it.
As you're listening at home, take note of the places in your community where perhaps that distinction between making it possible for cars to be accommodated versus making it possible for them to move fast is a really important and critical distinction. I think that can be one of those things that we take away from this. With that, 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.