Roadways for People: Rethinking Transportation Planning and Engineering
Reviewing Lynn Peterson's excellent book in conversation.
“City planners must also recognize that the process is the project.” — Janette Sadik-Khan
From the foreword to Lynn Peterson’s book—Roadways for People: Rethinking Transportation Planning and Engineering—this quote is an essential postmodern approach to transportation planning in the 21st century. It deconstructs the idea that our job as planners and urbanists is to embrace holistic progress as only the change in physical form. The house, as it were, is more than the slab of materials and the land it’s built on—turns out that who gets to build it and who gets to live in it are an essential part of its lore and its place in space. We celebrate less the architect and more the community that gives them value.
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In the modernist spirit, traditional planning is linear, path-dependent, exhaustive(ish), and outcome-oriented. The mid-century team planners that paved the way1 called this rational planning—its methods borne directly from scientific reasoning.
This model—from the very exciting book called “Urban Planning Theory since 1945”—is ostensibly correct. On its face, the rational method has no scientific holes. It’s mean to cover all possible, identifiable, measurable alternatives that would be a solution to some problems and it will continue to iterate until the correct solution is implemented and measured.
So—if the model is rational and planners follow it with honesty and earnestness, then there should have been no need for Lynn’s book. Why do we have to rethink something that has to work if we believe in a scientific approach? Lynn’s assertion is Janette’s assertion: “The problem,” she writes in Roadways for People, “is that we each have an understanding in our head of what we think the problem is. And we define that from our own lived experience rather than the experiences of the people whose problem we want to solve.” Nowhere on the above chart is the identification of a diverse public of stakeholders, reckoning with history, or building consent to build.
For too long in our past and present, we’ve skated past (1) and leaned way way way too far into (2) through (4). Forget (5); there’s no time or budget to evaluate. We have to build.
If that quote sounds familiar, and it should if you’ve read my writing before, it’s because Lynn was (and is) a dear friend and mentor of mine. She’s managed to channel her exasperation into one of the United States’ premier infrastructure thinkers. Lynn’s resume commands respect. It’s filled with thought and people leadership: as Secretary of Washington State’s Department of Transportation, she led land, sea, and air projects across a state that’s as culturally diverse as it is topologically. At Metro Council, in the Portland, OR region, she’s led local, transformational projects that aim to improve the quality of life for people in three Oregon counties. In between, Lynn taught me how to think and ask the right questions before assuming the wrong answers.
And now, she’s distilled these thoughts for everyone to have access to. I spoke to her a few weeks ago and below is an abridged interview with Lynn Peterson, Metro Council President and author of Roadways for People.
I’m here with Lynn Peterson co-author of Roadways for People [Ed. With Elizabeth Doerr]. Why did you decide to write it? Why now?
You and I have lived quite a bit of the history of working with DOTs across the nation through Smart Growth America. It felt like we were lacking a textbook that was also relatable to advocates or planners or engineers—anybody who really wants to build community with a transportation project.
I was taught how to build a transportation project, but I wasn't taught how to build a community with a transportation project. And there's a distinct difference. I've spent my entire 30 years in this profession trying to figure out how to build community rather than just building a project completely out of context without understanding the full impact of what that one project can have on people's opportunities in life or on their health. If you're just talking about material science and concrete, you're not talking about how that project transforms and elevates opportunity for people.
Would you recommend if someone reads this book, they read it straight through? Or can they pick a chapter that most interests them? There was a chapter I was immediately drawn to called “Getting Out of Our Silos.” That's the first chapter I read even though you’ve slotted it as the fourth.
I loved all the examples. “Here are the questions to ask when you're identifying the problem for the first time.” It seems so obvious, but we really don't do that do it as a standard practice, do we? For someone approaching this topic for the first time, should the reader read it straight through, or is there some sort of an opportunity to pick and choose if there’s limited time?
I'm hoping that those stories in the first few chapters ring true to the professionals and advocates alike, of the difficulties that we have all faced as a society trying to solve transportation issues and also pointing out as quickly and as completely as we could, the very specific intergenerational wealth that was stolen from BIPOC communities when we put transportation projects through them, whether that was the actual devaluing of their land because of tax increment financing (TIF) districts or whether that was the impact that the transportation project had on their access, the connectivity within the transportation system for them, or just the devaluation of the community itself by not investing in the community around a project but only in the project itself.
Trying to set up that context is really important. This book is the first of two books in my head because while there's a little bit of practical design in here for the engineers, it's really about community engagement. It’s about allowing more than just the throughput users of a highway to dictate what the transportation system will look like. And it’s about what the transportation system should look like for those living around a transportation project, which may be even more important.
When you're building out a transportation system, the main thoroughfare can't work unless the adjacent transportation system also works. Sometimes we forget that we own this asset and we're managing that asset, and that asset is only an interstate or it's only an arterial or it's only the local roadways, and to your point, we’ve got to get out of our silos. We’re managing a system with our partners.
We must start thinking of the transportation system as a whole and what our responsibility is to make the whole transportation system and the whole community work, not just our assets.
How do you walk through testing your assumptions? Each part of a major planning, design, and construction project doesn't get into the depth of practical design when it comes to standards and guidelines. Guidelines have held us back from being innovative, but there are also myths related to liability, as engineers, if they don’t the guidelines if anything happens. But, as an engineer, you're liable if you're not using your engineering background and your common sense to test out your assumptions on the ground.
So practical design is a tool to implement. But to actually write the problem statement and get a full set of solutions, you need to involve community and test your assumptions until 80% of the community backs them. We also get a little too hung up on if we can measure “it.” So much of what a community experiences is lived experience; and we can't collect all that data, and we'll never be able to collect all that data.
But we can collect the stories. We can go walk the project, we can go bike the project, we can go ride transit through the project, not just Google Earth as the then-deputy Hawaii DOT director said when we were in Hawaii together. During a DOT training, we walked a future light rail station site and the neighborhood around it. And the next morning, he came in and said, “I have made a huge mistake” to the 100-plus people that he had asked to come and get training. And I was like, “Oh, what have we done?” And it turns out, he said, “When I came back to Hawaii DOT from the private sector, after being gone for many years, I was taken aback by how all of you were designing your projects from Google Maps. I told you that you had to go drive through the project.
I'm telling you now after that experience of walking through the community and seeing how hard it's going to be for the kids at the school to even get to the light rail station, let alone the lack of connectivity for anybody trying to commute using that light rail station in the future, I want you to go walk it; I want you to go bike and I want you to go take transit through it so you see it through other people's eyes.”
Test your assumptions. I think that speaks volumes. And now he's the Secretary for the incoming governor.
Having that opportunity to have 100 people trained through that training was great, but his impact on the entire state of Hawaii about the meaning of community is much bigger than just the DOT.
It's that kind of impact that I'm hoping to have by people reading the entirety of the book: what have we assumed as we have gone through the last 50 to 60 years of transportation that we never should have been assuming, that we should have been testing our assumptions about?
I’m happy to have these 200 pages as a reference. It’s a textbook and a reference. If I’m having an issue where my practice is failing me, where do I go? To practical theory—and Roadways for People.
I'm in New York, and we just don't ask what problems people are having. There are smart people that work at all the interconnected agencies, and they want to do the work, but the leadership doesn't want to ask the questions. It feels like we're spinning our wheels. One of the reasons why I think congestion pricing in New York is flailing and support is dispersed is that we really haven't coalesced around what the problem it’s trying to solve.
Or communicated the value, right? Any transportation project has huge, huge impacts— it's very disruptive when you change a transportation system, even one little segment of it. We are trained as planners and engineers on some very fundamental performance metrics and never on others unless we’ve got leadership that understands community engagement and understands how the public will be rating us on whether we are successful or not.
The metrics that a community is going to have for success are much different than what we're taught in planning school and engineering school. In planning school, we're taught this very linear approach. You write your problem statement, you go out and you tell the community, and you get their feedback, there might be some engagement via a small change here or there, but we'd never actually go back and change the entire problem statement. We just keep moving along because there's a timeline that's been set out in time as money.
So we push forward because the timeline says we have to have things complete, but it doesn't say we have to have the right answer, or we have to have done the deep engagement, or we spent the two years prior to doing this conversation, making sure that the community-based organizations had the capacity to be able to actually work with us in a meaningful way as we did at Metro with the transportation package that we put out to the ballot.
It's a whole different mindset to think that it's community-included conversation and the linear approach learned by planners tends to have systematic racism built into it. Because people don't have the capacity to meet the timeline, to understand the technical, to understand the financial, to be able to participate, or even have the time to participate. So how you break down those barriers takes time.
In engineering I was taught there were four performance metrics that made me a successful engineer, the first two were design: move as many vehicles as safely as possible as fast as possible. The last two in construction were that I built the project on time and under budget. That’s the entire universe of success metrics and is not what the community is basing success on. They're looking at it like, “Well, I could barely safely walk to the bus stop before and now there's no way I can—your project has just made it completely inaccessible to me. What makes you think this is a successful transportation project?
It's the quickest way to get to a lawsuit, it's the quickest way to have just have dark money and bad money come in and start a propaganda campaign against your project. It's so easy when project leaders have lost that community's trust.
We saw it in Nashville. There were outside factors that contributed to the eventual “no” vote on the transit referendum. But they said to the community: here's the plan, you'll like it. It takes a longer run-up when you’re asking for a lot of money. I think the long tail needs to be at in the beginning rather than at the end of project development.
Let's go out and just have conversations with no agenda and build that trust back. How do I convince my boss and my boss's boss, that this is a good use of my salary? I want to spend 90 hours this month just going to church or the park or barbershop or hanging out at a bar and just honestly talk about what I’m doing: “I'm here with the DOT, but we’re not changing anything,” and then actually don’t make huge changes right away. They're not going to believe you for the first two weeks.
Don’t go in with a project. But you hear that there is a safety issue, and you just go back to HQ and get it fixed. Those small things add up to a lot better understanding of the community. There was an up-and-comer WashDOT who really wanted to be a regional manager. And he said, “What advice would you give me?” and I said, “Well, are you involved at the local level in this district at all? Are you on the planning commission? Are you on the transportation commission right now? Are you part of Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts? How are you learning about the community and what the barriers are to success for a wide range of people?”
We are about accessibility and providing that opportunity for a job, education, healthcare, and for the ability to get good food. We are either the variable or the accessibility, we are one or the other. And this person was like, “I don't understand. Why would I want to go on the planning commission?”
Here's the problem. If you don't understand your community, then what are you doing? Why do you want to be a regional manager?
Every solution becomes another problem—that's the issue there. So, you're making problems and not coming to the community with solutions? As you and Beth Osborne probably would both say there are only so many times you can go back to the community with your handout and say, “More please!”
We opened the book with the Rose Quarter Project in the Portland region. We've seen the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) recently take shortcuts. They want to do an environmental assessment (EA) rather than a full environmental impact statement (EIS) because they think it will be quicker. But, every time they took the shortcut, the Fed said, “Okay. If they lost trust with the community, they had to stop. They had to say they were sorry. And then they had to start again.” It's not a quicker way through.
I don't know how many times we have to fail before we learn that upfront work reduces risk on the back end of the project.
We have to fail every time it seems. These conferences that we go to, or that we have been to, need to be focused on this: more sharing success stories and best practices and some organization—USDOT or not—should be keeping a log that's on USDOT's website and everywhere else. Here’s a problem: “How can I see how it played out in this state, in this state, and in this state,” then you go back and you apply your local politics, your local context, and community engagement in your state and that’s the shortcut: let me go find an example of where this has worked before. Let me take it, recontextualize it, and then have a conversation with folks. There’s no shortcut for the second part.
We want to find the shortest pathway through: if you have not spent the time in the community, getting to know folks, and what they're up against every day, even the case studies won't help you because you need to have that contextual basis to relate back to what someone said in passing, though it’s not the same. Maybe if I took that idea and tweaked it a bit, and went back to that someone and said: What if we were able to do this with the community? What if we were able to do a design charrette around this interchange? Let me test that assumption that the kids can't get from one side of the neighborhood to where the middle school is, safely.
And we don't have any trees and it’s super hot and we're sending everybody out there in this heat. Why don't we have a design charrette and see if we can all get to an agreement on what that problem statement is and what the set of solutions could be? It's really not that much more money or that much more time to get it right for everybody and not just one user type: the vehicle that needs to go as fast as possible.
We're in this for the long haul. The culture of transportation in this country is not close to that—there are certain pockets and there are certain states and communities and regions where they are moving much closer to this process with a passionate director of a regional transportation organization, or folks in northern Indiana (MACOG) or Hawaii DOT who are doing it now
It's happening really slowly, and the pedestrian epidemic is getting worse, our carbon emissions are getting worse, and racism is still built into our process. How do we short-circuit this transition? Because we took a long time to get here is it going to take equally long to undo?
Having this conversation is a good start and getting the book into as many hands of as many people so that the right questions are being asked at the right time.
The number one thing we found WashDOT is that the entirety of the system is built on risk and liability and we started to understand that the risk to our projects increases exponentially if we didn’t start it with these conversations and get that problem statement correct.
The solution set starts out too narrow. They’re not achieving the results that the people are looking for, who are going to judge whether we did a good job or not.
I we can get to a project quickly enough, and say, “We need to slow down, and we need to test these assumptions,” that's the first thing. Second, if we find ourselves skidding, call a timeout, and don't just keep falling forward, right off the cliff, that's ridiculous. If we catch ourselves before the community catches that a project’s off-track, then we have an opportunity to say:
“Hey, we have a timeout because we are about to not meet your needs in any way, shape, or form as far as I can understand. We're going to slow down here, we're going to check in and make sure that we understood correctly what your problems actually are with the existing system, so we make it better, not worse.”
If we find ourselves completely missing the mark, and the community is upset, then we have a much harder time because now we have to rebuild that trust. And it's going to take much longer than if we had started this project with an open mind and open heart, rather than just saying, “This is a level of service (LOS) issue. If we put it into risk assessment terms and financial risks, technical risks, political risks, and things we need to manage as a project manager, all of this is within their hands!
We need to be teaching how to juggle all of it because obviously, we can't make everybody happy. But what we do know is that we should not make anybody worse off, and we should be aiming to make everybody better off. And that performance metric is not the one I was taught as a traffic engineer. We need our folks in professional organizations to be looking at the ethics portion of their profession and understand what that means applied to our projects. We need all our professional organizations from ITE, to ASCE, to APA, all of them to actually dive in and say, “Hey, this is the important metrics you're not taught in school.”
This is why I was thrilled to work for SGA in the first place because I was taught in school the four-step transportation planning model and risk assessment, but I really didn't understand the politics and the policy and the community aspects of transportation. How could I have?
The more we have performance metrics that give us a wider range of being able to see what's going on and how we are benefiting folks, the better off we will be, but that takes the professional organizations to understand how to give the professionals in the field access to the lived experiences as real data, even though it's qualitative instead of quantitative. We must look at a much larger array of performance metrics. My professor at Portland State University used to say, “You have to manage multiple vague and conflicting goals,” and as engineers and as planners, we are taught we're trying to narrow those variables down so that we can have success. But there’s a lot more to it than that. If you’re only trying to solve for a narrow set of variables, you're going to have “success.”
Is it? For whom? How do you know when a project is successful? And how do we communicate that success metric effectively? Because comms is another thing—that’s the whole other side of this conversation, right? If you have your data, you've got your planning marching orders: how do you communicate? What channels do you use? How do you get the right people in the rooms over multiple months to have a conversation? It’s not as simple as setting up poster boards at a primary school at six o'clock once a month for two months.
So. Many. Stories. While I was at WashDOT we had a public town hall planned for a project at a private golf course that was not accessible by transit. Who's going to feel like that is a place that they should be? Not even I feel like I should be at a private golf course, and I have white privilege! I want to recognize that point.
When you talk about somebody who is getting off work from their job at Target, and they're like, “You know what, I need to know more about this because I want to be involved,” but they can't get there because they've got daycare, so they need to go pick up first and it’s all just too hard. What can we do to help this person get involved?
How are we breaking down the barriers to people being involved in their community? Are we going to listen to them when they show up? Are we going to care about the fact that this person has to take two buses and there's no good transfer? Are you going to say, “That's the transit agency’s problem?”
What is our responsibility? It's much larger than what we think it is as professionals, and we can't just be narrowly managing an asset. We are partners in managing a transportation system and we can't walk away from the other aspects of it when it’s not in our “lane.”
It’s supposed to be hard. It’s a check. If we want to spend billions of taxpayer dollars, we should have to jump through a lot of hoops to make sure that we’re getting it right.
For my first principles, we need to examine projects through two lenses: dignity and safety. Safety first, too. Every project and every variable needs to make our system safer. The second aspect is dignity. We can give illustrative examples because there’s someone in someone's life with a mobility challenge. They use a walker or a wheelchair or have a child in a stroller: how do you make their trip to the supermarket not embarrassing to the point where they struggle to get to a bus stop?
Is there a sidewalk or a bus shelter? Are we running buses frequently enough, buses capable of transporting folks who have different needs? Everything else is secondary: fiscal return is important, but it's not as important if we see transportation as a public good and a public service, which I do.
We do need to make decisions, so that's why I believe there's that 80% rule: if 80% of the people are saying it’s a good project, and no one is saying it's a great project, you've probably done your job and you've probably figured out how to balance project needs to get the best outcome we could possibly get.
The bigger point that you were just making, and I just want to make sure that we highlight it and talk about it, is the myth that there are a lot of folks who want to get rid of the regulation around transportation projects, because we should be able to put these things down quicker; it shouldn't take 10 to 15 years.
The reason it takes so long is not because of the actual Environmental Impact Statement work or the Environmental Assessment work is because we screwed it up. And we have had to start over so many times. The Columbia River Crossing on I-5 between Oregon and Washington is probably the best example I have had in my career where I had to shut down the project after we spent $280 million between two states planning for a replacement Interstate bridge because no one was listening to the people. Neither Oregon nor Washington residents were happy.
The problem statement was set up incorrectly and the solution set was too narrow. When your solution set is too narrow, you're not solving all the actual problems on the ground, and people revolt. We had both governors in listening mode; we had both DOT directors in listening mode. We had those folks hiring staff whose job was to listen and create the bigger problem statement with a wider range of solution sets and home in on those solution sets that were going to be paved over before…and now we have ownership from a wide coalition of interests. Wow. Amazing! You roll people; they revolt? Include people so they have ownership. It's not rocket science, but it takes a lot of work either way and this way you get through faster.
It's counterintuitive. Almost every answer that you think is the simplest on the surface, usually it's the opposite is true. It's incredible. When you widen the highway, you make traffic worse. How do you explain that to someone who just wants to get to their job and doesn’t have time to think about the systems implications of network restructuring?
We can’t just rest on the fact that we're moving people faster and safer. It’s making sure that we're connecting communities, not dissecting communities. It takes time and talent and listening, listening, listening, listening.
literally.