Barb Chamberlain on the Past, Present, and Future of Transportation
This one is long but really worth the whole read (or listen!). Active transportation requires an active leader. Barb's one we should be modeling the role after.
I haven’t had the pleasure of working with Barb Chamberlain—yet. As the Active Transportation Director for WSDOT in the Pacific Northwest, Barb’s both lived the life of an advocate and user of active transportation—biking, walking, rolling, and more—and now administers it statewide. Her breadth of expertise is a direct of her experience working in and around safe mobility for many years across many states and through different roles.
Too often my biggest argument is that professional experience does not necessitate expertise (in most cases); a sentence that starts with, “As a …,” and continues, “I’m therefore qualified to command your respect for my opinions on the following…,” almost immediately loses me and I start looking for ways to refute anything written or spoken. As a result, I am naturally skeptical of position as it relates to posture.
Barb Chamberlain is a professional whose opinions are fully based on truth and lived experience—and I had to know more. So I interviewed her, the results of which you can find below. It’s been edited for length, clarity, and style.
My name is Barb Chamberlain. I am the Director of the Active Transportation division at the Washington State Department of Transportation [Ed. Through February 2024, Barb will serve as Acting Assistant Secretary for Regional Operations and will return to Active Transportation Director thereafter!]. I've been doing that for seven years. Before that, I ran the statewide bike advocacy, at the nonprofit Washington Bikes for several years. Before that, I worked in higher ed in community and government relations. Once upon a time, I was an elected official in North Idaho. So I've had a serendipitous career path.
Transportation policy feels like the work I was meant to do. I started out thinking I was going to be a writer, a lawyer, or a marine biologist who talked to dolphins!
I had worked for a publishing company, and small publishing companies go out of business a lot. At one point, I happened to go to a women's political conference and mentioned that I wanted to run for office someday. Long story short, I got recruited later that year to run for the state legislature. And people said, “No, it's never a bad time to run. But the issues are on your side this year.” I didn't think I was ready to run. I beat a four-term incumbent.
I had been a trail advocate locally—I had worked on the North Idaho Centennial Trail committee. I'd ridden my bike informally, casually, or recreationally and then ended up riding my bike as a mom with a couple of babies in a carrier after a while, in a trailer, and finding out what it's like when it doesn't feel safe to be out there with your babies.
As a legislator, I worked a lot on things to do with the environment and with children—daycare—and I didn't work a lot on transportation policy directly, other than wishing we built more trails.
Fast forwarding, I ended up working for Washington State University at the Spokane campus and working on community and government relations, and at some point, the city built a bike lane in front of my house. It became an invitation to ride and be a bike commuter for the first time in my life. There's nothing like being a bike commuter that makes you into a bike advocate because you wonder why the driver didn't see you and stop at that corner where you were sitting, waiting to go. That got me involved at the local level.
I ended up on the bike advisory board; I connected with the statewide advocacy nonprofits, and they said, “Yeah, we'd help you get things going.” And so I launched the Bike to Work Week celebration. Lots more people turned out and signed up than we had planned—it took off. That volunteer time is really what launched me into transportation policy work because I got a higher profile as a bike advocate.
When that same statewide nonprofit advertised for an executive director, I said, “Oh, I am ready to do that work,” and jumped in. That meant moving to Seattle, and I did that for several years. WSDOT created this division—the Active Transportation Division—and the position of director opened. I jumped again. So it’s been a winding path.
A lot of transportation professionals take a similar winding career pathway, and I think that our industry is better for it. People come from all sorts of backgrounds, and then they're able to apply those backgrounds to our customers or clients in the public. If we were all just trained bees, I don't think we'd have the richness that our field has.
What's one thing you can tell me about Eastern Washington or northern Idaho that people may not know, in terms of transportation policy?
That's a fun question. Okay, this is fine-grained. The Centennial Trail runs along the Spokane River, and it has two different names, because it's the Spokane River Centennial Trail on the Washington side, and it's the North Idaho Centennial Trail on the Idaho side. It's the same trail running along the same river. One piece of it runs on top of a fiber optic connection. When I was on the committee in North Idaho, we got the local agency to say, “Yes, you can use that right of way for your fancy connection you need as long as you put a trail on top of it.” Broadband connectivity and trails should go hand in hand in more places.
So: what have we gotten wrong in how we approach transportation policy?
That's a great question. I'll start by saying that people thought they were getting it right. And it's hard to remember now, when we look at those unintended or intended consequences, that they had some reasons in front of them for doing what they did. I don't want to disrespect the effort that went into solving the problems that were in front of them. As a species, we're not very good at looking past that immediate problem and saying over the long run, “Is this what we want to do?”
If we had said at the beginning, do we want to cut neighborhoods in half and make it unsafe for kids to walk to school, and make people spend more time and money to get to and from work and the store? Nobody would have written that justification. So they didn't know that's what they were doing. They thought they were providing mobility and doing good things for people at the moment.
So what they got wrong was things they didn't mean to get wrong. They didn't ask those questions, so we privileged driving over every other mode. We privileged commute trips over the other 80% of reasons we go places, we increased cost, we increased disconnection from each other, and we increased pollution. These are all negative externalities. We said that the desirable outcome here is rapid travel by vehicle, and then we said, “Measure that; improve that.” We didn't ask who was left out. We didn't ask, “Are we measuring the time for somebody who's walking alongside that highway, and they're hoping they don't miss the bus, and the bus only runs once an hour?” We didn't measure the time of the people who were waiting for the crosswalk sign and they were still waiting because they got there half a second after the travel lane light turned green. There's no setting that says, “Automatically go to WALK.” There's only a setting that says automatically go to the green because we assume people drive. So we built in all of these default settings for the convenience of people driving.
There's more. We hurt locally owned economies and businesses because it got so easy to drive to the suburban mall and the big box chain, so we’re sending profits out of town. At the same time, we made local businesses think that drivers were the people they depended on. So a Catch-22 there [Ed. It was/is a nefarious and wicked problem].
There’s more. We also only engaged with the people who had the time, the money, and the privilege to show up at town hall meetings and say what they wanted. And we assumed that those voices represented the whole community's interest. So now the “room” is filled with middle-class or richer, white people with no disabilities, who probably mostly work in white-collar jobs. There's nobody in the room from the swing shift. There's nobody from the shop floor; there isn't the nursing assistant, who helped my mom when she had to live in a dementia care center; there's nobody who needs three bus transfers to get there; there’s nobody who brings their kids because childcare is going to charge by the minute when you're late.
When I was a new legislator, I took my babies to things early on, and I was the only person in the room with a child. And I could do that because I was a state legislator. Other people didn't feel like they could show up with their kids in tow. Nobody's at these meetings if they can't drive if you're holding it in a place that's only accessible by driving.
It’s very circular reasoning about who defines the problem, and who talks about the problem with a solution to the problem.
In many parts of the country, people who are in charge of making these decisions still have not changed their approach. Do you think this problem is still embedded in local culture? How do we center the problem identification in small towns that don't see biking, walking, transit, or any other active mode of transportation as a viable alternative to driving for every trip?
We still have that problem. Part of it is on the staff side for the agencies. If you're going to change how you do community engagement, spend time within the community, embedded in the community.
They still hold meetings after hours. I talked recently to a colleague who lives in another city in Washington, and he goes to his community neighborhood council meetings at night because he lives there. He could be there as an agency representative, too. But are we going to adjust his schedule and say, “Hey, we recognize that you went to something that didn't start til seven o'clock. So come in later tomorrow.” Public employment isn't set up for that kind of schedule flexing.
But we're asking other people to flex to us.
Broadband connectivity and trails should go hand in hand in more places.
What the pandemic forced on us and taught us is that if you go to more online engagement, it's more accessible to people who might face those transportation barriers or time and family obligation conflicts. You can engage more people, but you have to be deliberate in how you do that outreach to let them know about the opportunity; you have to make sure your presentation itself will be accessible: Are you captioning? Do you have an ASL interpreter? Are you holding it in a second or a third language? What are the things you're doing that tell people they are welcome to log on if it's not showing up in person?
We're all collectively getting better, but we’re still learning how to do it.
If people don't think that active transportation or transit service is a solution to their problem, we need to start by listening to what they think the problems are. Because transportation shouldn't be the end: transportation is the means to an end. Here’s a disconnect: we often come in with our project as the end, because we're going to build a thing. So we're very focused on building that thing and, “You're gonna love the thing, whatever's in the thing.”
If we started with, “What are the problems or challenges that you have in your community?” [Ed: I did not put Barb up to this] and then we understand how this project actually might meet you where you are, and match with your values and support what you're trying to get done, we would describe it differently. We're not well-resourced to do that type of engagement. For transportation agencies that kind of engagement is often tied to a project. So we already have an answer: we're going to ask you a lot of questions, and we're going to build a thing. That's what we're going to do. [Ed: I think it’s shocking, but not surprising, how much of people’s time we waste.]
I don't know if there's any transportation agency that can say, “Yeah, we're gonna go listen to you. And at the end of this, we're not going to build a thing, because we heard that we don't need to build a thing.”
Would that be the outcome in some places? If you said, “What's your challenge here?” The challenge is: that delivery trucks clog this street at this time of day. One answer is: let's make a bigger street and then everybody can get around the delivery trucks. A different answer might be: let's ask all of the businesses to talk to their delivery services and tell them to come before 6 a.m. and after 7 p.m. And then we're not going to be clogged and we're going to get our delivery stuff. Now everybody there has to shift how they deal with deliveries. But we also don't need a wider street. So we solved a problem without building a thing.
How do we get communities to think collectively? What is the actual problem? And then what's the full array of solutions or pieces of solutions that they come up with together?
What would you say to planners who would push back against this idea? Those who’d say, “What does the public know?” Or the public doesn't know anything? Why should we spend more time than is necessary to talk to them?”
They shouldn't spend time talking to them. They should spend time listening to them. That's hard to hear. If you are a burned-out, tired planner, and you have been listening, and you have the constraints: a time, scope, budget, deadline, and all of the rest, it would be really rewarding to get the kind of support from management. It's incumbent on their bosses and their bosses’ bosses to get this and to start making some space for it. That's not an easy answer, but it really would help. How do we have these conversations and acknowledge and understand how tired everybody is?
At the very first principles of state agency culture; a lot is riding on the STIP [State Transportation Improvement Program], and a lot is riding on the TIPs [Transportation Improvement Program] that are supported or submitted to the state for inclusion in the statewide planning process. [Ed. It’s a funnel.] These projects are often put on a list of “first come, first served.” There's often no public prioritization, based on the needs of what the public has told the planners and the engineers and the decision makers, what the problems are.
There’s a misunderstanding within the industry that leaks into the public sphere about what it is we're doing as planners, policymakers, and builders.
A lot of the engagement is tied to a convoluted environmental process where planners have to “engage,” but this engagement often devolves into ticking a checkbox, and eventually the taxpaying public wants to see something for their money. This is the deliverable culture at the state level and below. If I'm going to tell my boss and my boss's boss that I think a good use of my time for the next couple of weeks is to go to different community locations and sit there and just listen and not have a presentation or not talk at people and not plan at people and just spend 25 hours listening—how do they then justify that thousands of dollars that I’m going to spend doing that?
Roger Millar—WashDOT’s CEO—describes this process traditionally as “design, display, defend.” The decision feels like it's made on the front end.
What, then, is the value of that time spent being in the community listening and learning and getting a sense of the place so that we can stop talking about “placemaking”? One of my colleagues in our eastern region talks about “placekeeping”—people already live in a place; they already have things they love about a place. They also might hate the place that they want to change. But for us to come from the outside to say, “We're sure there's something wrong here” is pretty patronizing.
I don't think that's what planners intend to do, but that can be how it's received. I had the chance last year to go through the Dignity Institute taught by Dr. Destiny Thomas, who runs the Thrivance Group, which she founded in Los Angeles. She talks about dignity-informed community engagement. You start by saying, “My job is to create space and protect space in which you express your sense of dignity.”
It's starting from a place of respect and that would stop me from saying some things as if I'm the one who knows more than you about your place. I first think: “Am I respecting what you know that I know about this place? Because I don't.”
I come at it from a policymaker perspective, from somebody who did a ton of community engagement: “Yes, I have some things to share with you. But I need to collect what you think about those things.” And if I'm talking, I'm not listening.
I've built my practice around dignity and safety. When I talk to someone or a community, or I'm listening, or I'm in the middle of conversations, I'm trying to collaborate, and I want to produce outcomes and increase dignity and quality of life.
For example, Pittsburgh [Ed. I really like DOMI] is the most dignity-focused city DOT in the country based on how they actually run the practice. Planning is tied to a Bill of Rights of sorts called the City’s Mobility Principles. Decisions are reorganized in a way that focuses on the people we should be caring about: the 90-year-old grandmother able to get fresh groceries in peace and with dignity; a seven-year-old able to walk to school via Safe Routes to School; even motorists should be able to get to their destination with dignity. They shouldn't have to sit in ridiculous amounts of traffic on an over-engineered road and they shouldn't have to search for parking forever (because we haven't priced parking correctly).
I'm not anti-car in a way that a lot of my other planning colleagues might be. I'm pro-mode choice. I care about creating opportunities for people to choose how they want to get to their destination, rather than design a place where they're forced to drive. But maybe there's no room to have a car. And there are no transit options. And the streets are not fit to bike for everyone. So what do you do?
I talk about two concepts a lot. One is, to people's surprise, how drivers deserve to have better information. We need to provide roads that give them the information so they can see me crossing and they can stop in time. We both have a better day when that happens. All of the people in that space have a better interaction if the driver is going at a speed that's appropriate for the context, has a clear line of sight to see me crossing, and can get across the street in time. That's good for everybody.
There's no “us and them” in that. But we often describe it as if pedestrian facilities are for “pedestrians”...but we're all pedestrians. It’s the same for bike lanes and bike facilities and trails: everybody's getting some more information from that design context when they have facilities that make sense and that are legible. You can read the roadway. And so I think we need to stop talking about it as if pedestrian and bike facilities are just for some people, and not for everyone. The roadway design should serve everyone. And if we can get to that, then I think we get away from some of the divide in talking to rooms that I know are full of mostly people who drive to all of their destinations.
I can still say, “...and when you get there, you want to be able to cross the street, right?” That's pedestrian infrastructure.
The other thing I talk a lot about is transportation independence. My parents were older when I was born, so I've already been through the experience of my dad driving when it was not safe for him and other people that he was still driving. He had no concept of how to get around in any other way. He was a driver. And then after a certain point, stop signs were only suggestions, so he wasn't safe. But he didn't want to lose his independence.
I've told my kids that I've already got that figured out. I moved to a place where I have transit a block away, and I happen to live in a town that doesn't charge any fare for riding transit. So I have fare-free transit. I can bike everywhere. I've taken care of my transportation independence by planning ahead.
If we think about how will we stay independent, when we’ve aged out of driving safely, then we’re going to want to have the community ready for us and our needs. AAA talks about driving retirement, that people have outlived their ability to drive safely, and they need to know that they need to stop driving. That's a really hard realization. At some point, you just sell your father's car [so he can’t drive] and then move on. Who wants to lose their independence? Nobody.
We have conflated driving with independence and we need to decouple that and say, “I want to be independent in the sense that I want to be free to choose what works for me, for my time, for my pocketbook, for my destination, for my kids, for my family,” whatever it is, because that's a very American value if you talk about freedom and independence.
So we can talk about common values and come to common ground.
I had an anecdotal realization recently. I live in Brooklyn, and it's particularly challenging to bike safely in my neighborhood for lots of reasons. But I think part of it is the incomplete and halfway-built bike network here. I think sometimes building an unsafe bike lane or just painting the street is worse than no bike lane at all. To your first point, the information is faulty: what we see in Brooklyn there’s often no space for bikes to have to themselves. For a lot of drivers, the thought pattern is, “I am out of the driving lane, and I can pull over and double park.” When I'm biking along we—the driver and I—no longer have that quick information built in of who is traveling along what part of the street.
I then have to negotiate, wordlessly with the driver, who might be driving too fast, not paying attention to me, or doesn’t have enough time to make a split-second decision to stop, slow down, or continue in my best interest.
Because at least when I'm riding in traffic if a driver is mad that I’m “taking up their lane,” at least they know that I’m there. Drivers get irrational when a biker is sharing the space with them. So much rage. But at least they can see me if they want to.
I had the experience where I was biking in a shared lane—two lanes in each direction. So mind you, any driver could just move over a lane and go around me. And because I was a bit close to the edge, a driver chose to squeeze by me in the same lane instead of going around. And that was not a safe choice.
The driver probably didn’t know that their action also violated Washington State law because we have a Move Over Law: if you can move over a lane you're required to. Coming back on that same route, in the other direction I said, “Okay, I'm not a gutter bunny. I'm gonna ride out where they have to move over.” I will decide for both of us. Those circumstances are not ideal.
Back to the rage component. Motorists, perfectly normal until they get behind the wheel of a car, see a bike going five to ten miles an hour in front of them, in a heavily populated, dense urban area, and then turn into maniacs. As soon as they get a chance, they're going to get around that bike as fast as possible and speed up to pass at an unsafe speed. Tale as old as time.
Who does that benefit? Certainly not the caregiver crossing the street at the crosswalk. What they then see is a motorist accelerating into a stop sign. And this is where the information gets lost in a lot of ways.
When we teach Driver's Ed, or when you get your license renewed, there's got to be a way to teach people to respect others on the road. What are some steps we can take as policymakers, advocates, and members of our community to improve our system for everybody?
I talk a lot about facilities. But since we were just talking about behavioral decisions, I would change Driver’s Ed to Mobility Ed—and it would start in elementary school. You would learn all about looking both ways before you cross the street and walking against traffic, which is a cultural norm and the law in the US, but not everywhere.
Parents would no longer drop their kids off right in front of school because that would be the safe zone for the walking school bus. In the UK they’ve established a “quiet zone” around school and parents can't drive up to the school door anymore.
We would prioritize walking and ADA-accessible connections to schools, so a kid with a disability can be part of this experience, too. Then as you get older, you'd be getting bike safety education, and you'd learn, “When I'm on a bike, I go with traffic, not against traffic.” And you'd learn how to make decisions about: “Is this a place where I should ride on the sidewalk because I don't know if the drivers can see me?” You really would work through learning how to interact and read what's happening around you. You'd get to learn how to use transit, how to read a bus schedule, and how to figure out if a trip is going to require a transfer.
You've worked through all of that long before we hand out any car keys. You already have transportation independence, because you already know how to get around without a car. And you've had all of those experiences of being the person who's not in the car. What we've done there is build empathy, so that when you do learn to drive, you say, “Oh, I'm pulling onto a one-way, but I have to look both directions, because there might be somebody crossing. I know what it feels like when the driver pulls out in front of me without looking.”
That's a multigenerational strategy. It's going to take a while, but we could start that right now.
A 2022 transportation revenue and investment package called Move Ahead Washington passed in my state. One of the programs that funds is school-based bike education. We had a program like that, but it didn't have enough funding to really scale statewide; this now has more money. It includes funding to give bikes to the students and their families when they participate.
If I'm a school board member in a local community, what's the first step that I would take to help implement this process program?
The first step you would take is to look at where you are choosing to build your schools and not build them on cheap land outside of town. You would build them where students can walk or bike to school. You would not approve school campus building designs that have the drop-off spot right in front except for school bus access.
You would look at, “What does it mean to arrive at our school? What assumptions have we made?” Perhaps the school's best drop-off is along its side, and the front of the school is a welcoming space that feels like you can just walk up to it. I've invited you to walk up to it. So the school board has a lot of power in school siting. That's really critical to the education of our children.
You can say: “We want our PE classes and our health classes and the rest of the curriculum to make sure we embed these ideas around healthy activity and healthy transportation.” I think school boards have a great deal of power, and they can also make sure that when they hold school board meetings, they could lead by example, and arrive by bike or arrive by bus or walk to the school board meeting. The principals could walk or bike to school and teachers could walk or bike to school. Those are individual decisions, not ones the school board can force, but there's a lot of leadership by example possible.
What would you say to local business owners who push back on bike lanes or removal of parking outside of their premises, claiming that there is a connection between any loss of revenue and an increase in bike lanes?
Well, there's plenty of research. If they seem like people who respond to research, I can send them the studies, I can show them the picture of how 12 bikes can be parked in the space of one car, and ask them how many customers they want per square foot. That's kind of snarky sounding. But really, do you want 12 customers or do you want one customer?
I can let them know that because I bike, even though I carry less, that means if I need stuff, I'm going to stop more often. And I end up making more little impulse purchases that add up, so on average, I will spend more per month than the driver who comes once. I can make sure I take my bike helmet in when I go in and they’ll see that I'm a bike customer.
It's harder to be a visible transit user—it doesn't show quite the same way that a bike helmet does. But because bike lanes often are that piece of the facility that gets the pushback, I think this is where it does make the most difference. When I go into a business that has a bike rack, I make a point of saying, “Thanks for having the bike rack out front. That's why I'm spending my money.” I make sure they know it matters. Individuals can do that and advocates can organize efforts to do that.
One business owner at a time.
I'm at the state policy level now; I'm not the local bike advocate. When I was in Spokane, we went around and asked, “Can we put out a poster for Bike to Work Week in your window and we'll tell people you're one of our supporters?” We made sure that there was some kind of return for them for being bike-friendly.
This type of advocacy work is a great example of often unbillable deep listening work that's required to make sure that everyone is at least aware of or has been able to give their feedback about a certain project that's being thought through. A good example of this was the Washington Avenue bus lane in Boston that rolled out a few years ago. The city did a lot of work engaging with and canvassing each and every business along Washington Avenue to get their thoughts and feedback about what was happening. It’s not a perfect process.
As we talked about, thought, canvassing these business owners would have been more effective before the project had all but been decided.
That said, even when the bus lane went in, and even if certain businesses were still against it, there was a sense of: “The city cared about what I thought, whether they did what I wanted or not.” It's hard to quantify that type of goodwill.
To wit: we have to do this type of deep listening work and it's incumbent on agency leadership and I think it's incumbent on the people who do it best to teach younger planners or reluctant engineers that we’re not just moving dots along a map. This is real people and real stuff.
Another element of that is conflicts and lawsuits, which cost time and money, and nobody wants to lose time and money. There's a real business case to be made for the value of investing time in relationship building.
When I do show up, and I do have a design, and I am going to display it, it’s important that I'm not a stranger and we've had a conversation. No, we can't agree with 100% of you, because you don't all agree amongst yourselves. There's going to be a decision, and you will know that your position has been heard, reflected on, considered, and addressed to the extent that we can address it.
If you're doing that kind of listening, and if you have that relationship because you invested some time, then it's easier to have a hard conversation because you're not strangers to each other. Over the long run, it's hard to count avoided costs, but it's real. We can call it a risk management strategy. There is a return on this investment.
I’m not a lawyer, but the way I understand our government is set up allows people to bring lawsuits against projects for good reasons and not good reasons. I would hope that a judge would be able to say, “You've had three opportunities. The agency made every possible effort to come to you and hear you out on this. Why weren't you able to magically think of this new option when you had that chance?”
I’m also not a lawyer, but you [citizen] don't have grounds for a lawsuit just because you don't like the decision that was made. There's no legal standing—“I disagree” is not grounds for a case.
If our staff has exercised reasonable engineering judgment, and we haven't violated any of the actual procedural requirements, then you don't have many opportunities to sue just because you don't like what we did.
When you ask, “What can we do better right now?” we need planners and engineers to learn what they don't know about active transportation because they often didn't learn it in engineering school. They think a slip lane is great because it doesn't slow a driver down and if I'm the person who's about to cross that street, and I want the driver to slow down! They've been trained to build projects that have advantages for one mode, but disadvantages for another mode.
One of the things to do right now is to fill those gaps in their knowledge and say, “You know what, we started building a transportation system and now we want you to finish building a transportation system that's going to be a system for everybody. And we don't want you to build things that don't facilitate transportation.
“We also want you to understand where you do or do not have legal protection so that there isn't a fear of lawsuits holding projects back.” We want to break down the fear of lawsuits or opposition by saying, “Yes, you do now know what you're doing on active transportation, you have a full suite of tools, and you understand the basis for the decisions that you're making. You have our support. So let's go ahead and do it.”
Right now, I would say we're telling people to do better. But are we giving them the tools to do better?
Filing a lawsuit, even if it's frivolous, can slow down a project for weeks [Barb: “Make that months and years.”] while papers are filed and make their way through our arduous court system. We have to re-engage with people and make it clear that this is just not how we do things here. We're not going to just make every project into a legal battle because we have cultivated this process where we're fighting each other all the time. There's a way to undo this. But it's going to take generations to overcome decades, years, of bad will. It’s not going to happen overnight.
I don't feel like I get people saying to me, “Well, I can't do that, because we might get sued.”
They want to know that we use the right terminology to describe things. For example, I would not say that we made a street “safe,” I would say we made it “safer.” Safer is relative: we have reduced crash exposure or reduced the severity and frequency of potential crashes.
I’m careful with language so I don't inadvertently say something actionable. It's a weird piece of this work. For example, Jay Smith, Assistant Chief Counsel at Missouri DOT gave a presentation to an AASHTO joint meeting and he said just following the Green Book is not today's tort liability defense. You need a design file that documents your analysis and the basis for your decisions and it cannot be “I followed the book or I used a cookie-cutter design.”
I didn't think I was going to start the morning fascinated by tort liability.
What, looking back, would constitute a successful future? What would that look like to you?
Wakanda! The only thing they were missing were Vibranium bicycles.
Looking back, if we have taught ourselves that at the end of a statement or an assertion, we ask, “For whom?” and we answer that every single time, we’ll be living in a successful transportation landscape.
So if we say we're going to improve throughput and decrease wait times at that intersection, we say, “For whom?” When we answer it, we say, “Oh, for the people inside the cars,” but with what effect on the pedestrians and the cyclists and everybody else?
If we got good at asking, every time, “Who is benefiting? Who is paying the cost of that benefit? Where's the benefit? And where's the burden?”
We started to ask: “What did we do for white neighborhoods at what cost to Black neighborhoods?” We collected and analyzed data and we told stories supported by data. We use those stories to tell an equity story, and we’ve started to change the outcomes. If we look at Washington State data—we are not different from any of the other states—serious and fatal crashes happen disproportionately in poor places, with higher-than-average poverty rates, and in places whose residents are predominantly Black, Indigenous, and/or People of Color (BIPOC).
We used these data to tell this story. We said we cannot get to zero traffic deaths without addressing active transportation safety because our serious and fatal crashes are out of proportion for the share of trips or miles traveled. And we couldn’t address active transportation safety without addressing equity. If we used data, and we prioritized the actors in this story, then we would improve the places first that need the most. Those are often the same places where people are more reliant on walking, biking, and transit, and are less apt to have personal vehicles available.
We made it better for everybody who goes through those places now that we've recognized that our suburban roadways were way overbuilt but can be successfully repurposed and reallocated. We have beautiful, protected bike lanes. And drivers have a center turn lane where they need it. The roads have been slowed down so drivers can see a person who's crossing because there are also bump-outs and marked crosswalks and street trees. This street has bus shelters for shade because it got hotter because of climate change.
We've shown people what a great street can be, and we've repurposed what were in the past not great streets. And those businesses along the way, said, “Wow, I have a lot more people stopping because they're going slow enough that they can see the sign in the window that tells them I'm having an awesome sale, right? So this was good for business, it was even good for my business.”
We can do this. If you want a timeframe, I'm a little more challenged. But I'm pretty excited in Washington because our legislature just adopted a genuinely historic transportation investment package [in 2022]. It does not rely on gas tax, it is investing carbon funds via the Climate Commitment Act. And they flip-flopped the usual proportions: the majority of the next 16-year package will go to active transportation and transit. In that bill, they've explicitly talked about the fact that we have gaps in the active transportation network and we need to prioritize projects, especially in overburdened communities.
I feel like in a successful future, we have made up for those mistakes of the past and changed the nature of those streets and places—and that we have not displaced the people who are living there today as we did that. (There's a whole housing policy side of this that my agency doesn't get to decide or control.) That’s critical: because making it better for active transportation shouldn't result in jacking up all the rents and forcing everybody out. We have to have these improvements everywhere so that all the neighborhoods are great.
Last question: are you optimistic about the future?
Most days.
And is there anything that you'd like to plug any work you'd like people to know about?
We've developed a policy framework around how to approach setting speed limits based on context, not based on the 85th percentile. It's not something that's coming up, necessarily, but that policy framework is out there. Any place could adopt it: they can take our lit review and take the principles and say yes, as a city council, we're going to adopt this approach to setting speed limits, and then we're going to put funds into changing the streets so we achieve the target speeds here. That's some of the work that we've done that we incorporated those principles into our active transportation plan.
And we've had a statewide bike conference, “Washington Bike, Walk, Roll Summit” for the last couple of years. I started that conference when I was at Washington Bikes and now we're a sponsor of it! It continues to be put on by Washington Bikes and Cascade Bicycle Club.
And I'm proud of the kinds of keynote speakers and the kind of equity priority and content that that summit has had. And there will be another one in 2024. People from anywhere can come to these!
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