Gia Biagi on the Past, Present, and Future of Transportation
"My time as CDOT Commissioner certainly deepened my understanding of cities and their inherent possibilities." Read more now
Once again, I bring you several hundred relevant words from one of our great leaders—this time it’s Gia Biagi, who, up until recently, lent her talents and vision to the City of Chicago as its Transportation Commissioner. It’s a huge job and the awesome responsibility to ensure more than 4,000 miles of streets, sidewalks, bike lanes, and more hasn’t been lost on our excellent interviewee. Gia’s since moved (back) to Studio Gang where she’s looking beyond Chicago to apply lessons learned to help more people safely and efficiently.
But Chicago’s always home. This interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness. Remember to click the button below to get these posts right in your inbox biweekly.
I’m the Principal of Urbanism + Civic Impact at Studio Gang, which is an architecture and urban design firm here in Chicago with offices in San Francisco, New York, and Paris.
Most recently, I'm a recovering city official. I spent the last four years as Commissioner of Chicago's Department of Transportation (CDOT). CDOT is responsible for the whole tabletop of the city—everything from 4,000 miles of streets, 300 bridges, 3,000 signalized intersections, and 300,000 streetlights to all of the sidewalks and bike lanes, the signs and signals, our city’s bike share and e-scooter programs, public way permits, and more. The work also meant thinking about how we realize a vision for a more equitable transportation system—what are the goals, strategies, and tactics? And how do we connect our policies to filling the pothole, meaning influencing all the scales of how people experience the city and our leverage across those scales for taking action? From policy to potholes and back again!
What was the most surprising thing that you had to learn in your transition into a city DOT leader, maybe specifically in Chicago, or in general?
Maybe I was not so much surprised as reminded of the immense magnitude of influence that you can have in a city through the responsibilities entrusted to a transportation department. In every neighborhood, on nearly every block, there is a street, a sidewalk, an alley, and a streetlight. There is some piece of the public realm—what we own together—in every part of a city. There’s no place without assets and opportunity. It’s a humbling responsibility and an incredible opportunity to make substantive, long-term changes using the tools of a transportation department and the thinking around important transit policies, all at your fingertips.
My time as CDOT Commissioner certainly deepened my understanding of cities and their inherent possibilities. I remain in awe of the people who work at our CDOT and their ability to take an idea—like asking, “How do we center our work around mobility justice and have that be a throughline to the shovel going into the ground in a neighborhood that hasn't seen an improvement in 60 years?”—and then bring it to life.
What makes Chicago unique compared to other cities?
I could go on for a long time about that, but I'm glad you asked the question because I'm often asked, “What cities are your touchstones?” or “Who are you trying to copy?” I understand where those questions come from, but there's something unique in each city—the values that underpin it, how they’re articulated, the geography, the people, the culture. All of those things really do matter. And I think Chicago is so special along those lines in a couple of ways.
One: We're a city of urban planners and architects at our core. If you go back to frameworks like the 1909 Burnham and Bennett Plan of Chicago that laid out in chapters the systems that we have to care about in our city, it's not a perfect plan, but it sat on my desk still when I was planning director at the Park District and later as head of CDOT because there are references there that have structured the bones of our city and continue to reverberate.
Two: Our lakefront, which is a continuous, 24-mile publicly accessible system of protected running paths, bike lanes, parkland, and beaches. It's very rare in a city of this size to have an uninterrupted, publicly owned, and publicly accessible waterfront. I love going to Paris and looking at what they've done along the Seine. But look at the mileage of the public waterfront and continuous, dedicated bike and pedestrian ways that we already have and care for in Chicago – it’s an incredible asset.
Third: The river system that migrates through our city differently than in other places creates these unusual opportunities where we have to negotiate between that nodal public space system of parks and networked experience of the public way across neighborhoods.
I also think our story, in some ways, is similar to those of other cities, but we have our own particular story about segregation, redlining, and systemic racism that manifests in the present day and must be addressed. Chicago continues to ask questions like, how do we end generational poverty? How do we make sure that we're a city that reduces violence? How do we address these difficult, adaptive challenges? Every city is facing its history and version of these questions, but I have a great appreciation for how Chicago has tried to say it out loud. We didn’t always, but we’re saying it out loud now and trying to take on our past and present challenges.
Let's be more specific: what have we gotten wrong in our approach to transportation planning?
A couple of things. Part of my work at Studio Gang is thinking across scales.
That is, thinking at a systems level and a “sidewalk square” level. A challenge of working in transportation is that it’s very systems-level focused and you're often forgetting about that throughline to the one-foot level experience that people have. What’s their encounter with their mobility network—if they've got a good one or not—and with infrastructure, investments, or our maintenance of the public way? That one-foot level encounter with how we care for our transportation infrastructure is every bit of a barometer of the health of a city. And how well we care for it sends a signal to that person on that block about whether their city cares about them or not.
Transportation sometimes gets stuck at one end of that spectrum, which ranges from completing mobility systems that connect the entire grid to filling a single pothole. What we have got to get good at is toggling back and forth across scales constantly. You don't get to stay at one end of that spectrum. Everyone in an organization needs to be able to understand a little bit of that movement across scales—that the work that you’re doing to put a smart node on top of that light fixture fits into how we reduce violence in neighborhoods and helps us to better operate our entire lighting network.
The second thing I think about is who the expert is. This is not anything new in the transportation field, talking about who's at the table. If you're not at the table, you're on the menu, as it’s said. But, even if you're at the table, you still need to eat. And just because you're in the room doesn't mean that you're getting your fair share or even being heard at that table.
There’s been a great conversation, for the last five or ten years, about how we make sure that we think about expertise as a very broad funnel of information. My top engineer can certainly tell me about the right turning radius, but Mrs. Jones—who lives on the block, sits on her porch and watches that street every day—knows more about her street than probably anyone else. How do we value that information because it’s more than anecdotes, isn’t it? An accumulation of those anecdotes becomes data. There’s a pattern. This kind of information has been overlooked. It's getting better, but I still think that expertise is everywhere and relentlessly pursuing it has been an oversight in the industry.
Transportation is also typically more oriented towards things like maintenance and replacing what's there. If we can find a way to do this better than before, more holistically, and in a way that allows people to recognize those small one-foot level improvements, then we can build trust to work together on systems change. These one-foot level improvements are basics, and we have to be brilliant at those basics. That's a phrase I'm stealing from the former mayor of Memphis, Mayor Strickland, who talked about “being brilliant at the basics.” If you can't do a good job of filling that pothole or fixing those lights, and if you can't show the public that you can manage all of these things in this comprehensive way, you will never get them to go with you on the big visionary things.
There seems to be this constant push and pull between communications and technical. How much of the problem do you think is rooted in our lack of technical capacity versus the lack of communications across the different scales that you're talking about?
There are two kinds of problems in the world. There are the technical ones and there are the adaptive ones. We're very good at solving technical problems in this field, like the Rubik's Cube. I know what it looks like when it's done and I know how to solve it. Then there are the adaptive challenges. They’re like a hurricane and you can't really solve a hurricane.
The big challenges that matter are in that camp. It’s not to say that technical skills aren’t needed, but they can’t lead. They fit inside a larger context that is murky. We have to nest that technical work inside that adaptive lens and know what we're solving for.
I know you want to ask me about the future and I think this relates in a way to the questions that we're asking. Are we asking the right questions? That's how we pivot toward what's next. There are no right answers to the wrong question. That’s from the author Ursula K. Le Guin. I think that's the challenge for this field right now. Are we asking the right questions? Are the right people in the room asking and answering these questions? How do we enable ourselves to sit with ambiguity and try to sift through it rather than say, “What's the tool off the shelf that I can use to get at this?” The tool is going to be less important than the job.
My theory continues to be that we don't even know how to ask the right questions to the right people. Do you agree with that?
We’re often walking around with hammers looking for nails. Not to go too far with this analogy, but where did I get the hammer? What does the hammer look like? It's definable. It's measurable. We know what it looks like when we see it. We know how to use it. The harder thing is to try to describe a future that we would like to see and then extrapolate the sets of questions that might get us there. That's hard stuff. That doesn't mean that we don't have the intelligence in the field and it doesn't mean we don't need that technical work, but we need to know what that technical work is in service of.
That's the concept of our urbanism practice: how do we put our tools in service of what people need and hope for? To figure out what people need and hope for, we have to be in dialogue, we have to ask the right questions, hopefully, and then say, “I have this tool, maybe the supplies, let's try that out.” The other piece of that is asking, who gets to have the toolbox and who gets to have their hands on the tools? We work to not hold on to those so tightly so that other folks can have their hands at the wheel. It's part of that acknowledgment that expertise is everywhere and it's real. Let's remove the barriers to letting the expertise have influence.
I'm a big process person, and I think we need to take a look under the hood of our process: how we describe projects and how we describe problems, how we fund and how we build, and ultimately how we acknowledge error or and then build in feedback loops into our planning process. Oftentimes, that last part gets chopped off for time or money.
It comes down to the structure of our government: the federalism that allows states to operate and allows cities and towns to be relatively independent, depending on the type of state we're in (Home Rule vs. Dillon’s Rule.)
There's often a scale issue there as well. Folks in a small community don't “speak” MPO and do not talk directly to the state DOT. These state DOTs, then, are pulled by the ever-changing federal rules, and these rules don’t necessarily make it back down to the “block.” All this money is stuck in legislative limbo. I describe it as a big game of telephone back and forth where we're not necessarily on the same wavelength about a local community that might need something, but they don't have the technical process or personnel or time or the capacity to fill out the forms to get something in the hands of the MPO or county, which might control funding and planning and engineering for that type of project. How do you recommend we go about untangling this big rubber band ball?
There are a couple of things we should get better at.
Meeting people where they are across our boundaries. When does Chicago talk to Schaumburg, which is a giant suburb? Rarely. When they do, it's probably facilitated by the State. There ought to be a different scale of networks or a way to recognize what we have in common at different scales.
Steven Conn just put out this book, called The Lies of the Land, and it proposes that these “divides” between urban versus rural are outdated. For example, is it possible that the main difference is that rural places are less populated? Maybe it's as simple as that. Farming is a form of manufacturing now and thus the deindustrialization patterns in cities now happen in areas that we call rural. Are we seeing each other through these old archetypes?
We can recognize that there’s a lot in our shared experience. There's an Amazon fulfillment center going down the street, right here in Chicago, and then there's also one out in Kenosha. We're all negotiating these sorts of things! So how do you build a network of people that doesn't count on you being a city official or the head of your block club (even if you'll want some of both in there)? You could call it disciplines, but it's expertise when we have something in common that could give localities leverage with these other larger entities across a region.
We have a Great Lakes Commission because we cannot pretend that there's some artificial boundary that separates freshwater in Chicago from that in Wisconsin or Canada, so we form these groups to negotiate and cooperate. This operates at a city official/governor level. If we thought of the things that we need to work on together as a constellation and not some flying saucer, it might change the way we talk and act about our shared resources.
I've seen powerful networks come to life across our city, made up of people who, for example, are working on reducing violence. Small-scale, effective violence reduction work by people doing very different things than city government might help to achieve those goals. Their shared experience across that network and the ability to lean on each other to navigate questions and look to best principles instead of only best practices are invaluable. Those are the kinds of things that create both a structure and a body of knowledge that is special and different and helps us to solve problems across those bureaucratic boundaries.
When I spoke to Veronica O. Davis about her approach toward inclusion: she told me me she would hold meetings about a bus line at the bus station at seven o'clock in the morning, and she and her team would go every day for two weeks at 7 am for an hour to show that Houston’s team actually cared using the loose mantra: “I know you can't make it to me, so I'm going to make it to you.”
Let’s jump ahead: what does a successful future look like?
Sometimes I hate these future questions…
I don't know if I'll totally answer you because I think some of my answers are embedded in things that I've said, like repositioning our orientation toward adaptive challenges and creating a different constellation of people who work together toward them.
There are more granular things that we need to figure out, like what to do with the contest over the curb lane. That's a great example of needing to be doing things and asking questions about them right now before they get monetized out of public hands. The future could go any number of ways and its path is dependent on what we're doing right now.
Are you optimistic about the future?
Absolutely. I get to work in cities all over the world and very deeply here in Chicago. There are always folks who care about what happens to all of us together. There are enough people who still care and want to stay and invest in their city or place, so I'm definitely optimistic.
I have been thinking about this notion of the reciprocal city, which is grounded in this set of exchanges, relationships, and mutuality. It's not always balanced, but there is this notion that we own these things together. There are still people willing to show up and try to make something out of that civic commons. That gives me hope. I see it every day in Chicago--the folks who've been through really hard times and still get up every day and do their best.
I'm hopeful, too [Ed. Sort of]. Anything I can direct people to that showcases your recent work, to learn more about your time at CDOT or Studio Gang?
On the CDOT front, I'd love it if folks checked out our Strategic Plan for Transportation. This plan focused on recentering mobility justice, economic justice, and environmental justice and asking: if we were to reset, what are the strategies, tactics, and metrics that we would employ?
The Plan helped us move the needle on codifying mobility and economic hardship as weighted criteria for capital project selection. Everyone's doing some version of this, but I am proud of how we've done that comprehensively. If a project is in a mobility or economic hardship area in Chicago, then it means that we're going to put that project on the board.
Another city-related initiative is that we shifted our cycling strategy significantly from a commuter-focused strategy, which was great and still important, to one that was about building neighborhood networks, which takes trust-building and patience (that’s not fast enough, perhaps for anybody). We asked people, what and where are the meaningful destinations in your life? It's not just going to work, right? It’s a neighborhood strategy. Connecting the dots at that local level and building up that network is a model of patience and reciprocity. People asked us to go at their pace and we have been, and it will avalanche in the next couple of years into work that people love, appreciate, and use.
On the Studio Gang front, we just completed a fabulous project in Memphis called Tom Lee Park. It was nested in a master plan that I worked on previously to reimagine six miles of the Mississippi River waterfront in Memphis. The new park is a gem that reconnects Memphians to the River and one another.
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