Andy Boenau: Rethinking Traffic Engineering: Questioning Established Norms & Prioritizing Human Well-being in Urban Plannin

Austin Tunnell

That's what's wrong with traffic engineering. That no one's ever looking back at to say, is this a good idea? Sprawl development where you have to be stuck in a car is bad for our brains. So much of this could be reduced or even eliminated if our built environment, the physical surroundings were different.

Austin Tunnell

Today my guest is Andy Baino who has a planning and engineering background. He's a writer, writes the Urbanism SpeakEasy on, I believe that is a sub stack or maybe it is UrbanismSpeakeasy .com. When we get into infrastructure and why an intersection looks the way it does, Andy is also a big bike advocate and enthusiast. And it was a great conversation. Hope you enjoy. My name's Austin and this is the Build and Culture Podcast. Andy, it's good to have you on and good to be meeting you for the first time. The internet is an amazing place, isn't it? Good to meet you. It is, you know, and I was not on X or Twitter until about a year and a half ago is when I started getting on. I had no idea what I was missing. my goodness. It's so much more interesting than all the other places. Welcome to my home. I kid you not. So, I'm proud to have met you. That's how I met you. I had no idea that this is how we are going to start this conversation. But this, but why not? The internet is amazing. And I have, I'm not going to say I have zero tolerance for friends that are like, Twitter's a dumpster fire. It's a hell hole. Like yes. And yeah, it's fantastic. It's only getting better. It's only getting better. I have, I seriously don't have time. I mean, I'm not going to tell somebody. here's what you should do. You should use the following sites. I mean, everybody's got their own types. So for me, because I love this kind of stuff about the built environment and people watching, X and LinkedIn are my two. They make sense for me. And I'm one person. I don't have time to be choosing 10 different social media platforms. I can't be... I got no time for that. But man, there are so many people, especially... And I get flack from this. from from friends, but especially since It came under new ownership I will say the pipes are cleared so much more I mean, I can't tell you how much better engagement is and I don't mean engagement just like echo chamber I mean Interacting with people that I wouldn't have seen otherwise and they wouldn't have seen me. It's been fantastic

Austin Tunnell

That's interesting. I hadn't actually heard anyone say it's been positive change. I haven't asked that many people haven't been on before the change. That's actually why it was just such a big deal in the news. I was like, what is the big deal? And like, I didn't really understand tweeting and threads. I was like, what? I don't get what this is. And then I finally kind of figured it out after just being on there for a little bit. And you just meet incredible people. I mean, like brilliant people working at the top of their game and finance, real estate, industry, urbanism, design, whatever. And like they're sharing what they know. It's really amazing. That's why I love it. Because it's exactly that. Everybody's accessible. And I know it's overused to say it's the world's largest cocktail party. But it's not even cocktail party. I mean, I know because even that alone makes people think, I got it. It's an event. I've got to be an extrovert or something like that. It's just people are accessible. So in urbanism speak, just in the same way that universal design is a thing that you want. everybody, all ages and abilities to be able to access stuff. That's how I see that platform. And I have experienced it firsthand. Anybody up to it, including the president of the United States, and if someday we privatize the moon and somebody owns the moon, you can reach out to these people directly. And of course, there are tons of bots on there. There are tons of people that are just there to repeat information. But if you can work your way through them and find actual human beings that are doing actual work in the real world. it's fantastic. Really fantastic. I agree. Yeah, I've got, I can't even keep track of the ever growing list of people that were once strangers and now friends for better and worse probably through the internet and specifically X because you can just jump in out of nowhere and non sequitur. a question, a comment, an article. And it's just so good. If you can have the spirit to always be learning, no matter how old you are and whatever dumb degrees you have, if you could always be learning and find those topics that you're interested in, man, it's fantastic. In fact, I think that's how I'm pretty sure I found you because of you posting just something about one of your building design or development designs and the circle.

Austin Tunnell

a brick entryway and how people thought it was cool to hang out at that spot. And just like that thing alone started a little thread. And then I shared that with somebody else and that started a whole conversation. It's probably why we're here today. Yeah. So and speaking of you mentioned dumb, dumb degrees. So people know a little bit about your background. You know, you refer to yourself sometimes, or at least in your writing as a plan engineer. So you can just give a little bit of background of what you've done. in the past and what your background is. Let's see. So, plan engineer is a term that people have used over the years, like a combination of a planner and engineer. So, I say that, well, at the very beginning of my career, I started as a traditional traffic engineer, which, you know, if you meet me in 2024 and hear, in the 90s, he was a traffic engineer, those two things might not seem to go together. because I rail on the traffic engineering industry, justifiably, on a consistent basis. But I started my career not knowing at all what I wanted to do when I grew up. And so just through the years, I've been asking myself regularly silly questions like, what do I want to do? What do I like doing? And I grew up... in Northern Virginia suburbs of DC. And so traffic was something that, of course, knew something about. And so when I was an intern at a planning and engineering firm, just rotating through the different disciplines, every like one group after another, I was like, that's over my head, that's over my head, that's over my head. Then we got the traffic engineer. It's like, I can get that. That I'm looking for like the cartoon version of work. This is it. Give me that every day all day. there's public meetings involved. Fantastic. I can go just hang out someplace and listen to people. I will sign me up. So that's how it started. That's pretty funny. So I actually really want to. OK, I want to hear the tirade if you can on traffic engineers. You just mentioned it and it's like, what would be like the things that just kind of spill out of your mouth when you're when you're talking to someone like me or for someone the first time here and you're like.

Austin Tunnell

talking about traffic engineers, someone that has no idea that the industry is broken or like even what they do, you know, and because I think it's just so easy. I do this, everyone does this. You look at the world and you just assume the way it is is for a good reason until you get old enough or you see, you know, you're an expert in your industry and then you start going, my gosh. Yeah, we're doing really stupid stuff. But for most people in the way I grew up until like really I learned, I grew up in the suburbs of Houston. So I just look around and going like, Yeah, this is all normal. This is all normal. So, yeah, like it. So. One way. So again, if somebody was if I was to talk with somebody right now in twenty twenty four about these kinds of things and they have some baseline understanding of the built environment or urbanism, or they would say things like I want a walkable place or a walkable development. And they heard me say something critical of traffic engineering. That would be a very easy kind of thing, because right now with. so much available on the internet, it's easy to just Google what's wrong with traffic engineering and get a whole bunch of responses back. It's also common for people who study urban planning and or sustainability or environmental science to have some exposure of the harms of traffic engineering over the years. I didn't study those things. I didn't know those things. I grew up, like you, it sounds like, or similar to you, I grew up just thinking this is normal. And then when I was working as an intern and then starting my career as a traffic engineer, there was nothing in me that thought, here's how things are supposed to be. It's supposed to be this, and I'm working towards this. Whether this is a highway expansion or bike lanes, there was none of that. I was... I was there trying to figure out in the short term, I need to earn money. In the long term, do I like, is any of this interesting? Do I like the people that I'm working with? It was really that simple for me. But the easiest way for me to describe what's wrong with the traffic engineering industry is just tell you one, I mean, one example of the very start of my career. I think this was the first summer that I was an intern. I don't think this was even year one, but it was either, so it was either year zero or year one.

Austin Tunnell

I'm working on this in a software program that analyzes traffic operations at an intersection. And so this is a common type of thing. If your listeners aren't familiar with this, if a Department of Transportation or a Public Works Department is evaluating a street or a long quarter with a bunch of intersections, they have ways of analyzing. how bad traffic is. Because we all know sometimes you feel like you're in gridlock, you can't get through the lights. Don't they fix this? Isn't anybody thinking of this? There are people who analyze this. So I was learning how to analyze traffic. And in this software, I had these little toggles up and down for things like how many seconds the light is red, how many seconds it's yellow and green, and how many cars are turning left and going straight and turning right from all the different approaches. how wide the lanes are. It would start with these default settings in everything. And then you would go in with your cursor, early Windows years was awesome, and change all these settings. And then it would spit out the results and say, your intersection is, and then it would give you a report card like you got in school, A, B, C, D, or F. And then the grades were reflecting how much time you had to wait in order to get through an intersection one at a time. And so this seemed like I'm learning all these little pieces one thing at a time. Like, okay, intersection delay, what makes an A versus a B? What's a B versus a C? We want good grades. Everybody knows we want good grades. So as I'm learning this, I see all these default settings like 12 foot lane width, the through lane. And then one of my options is, do you want to add another through lane? Okay, yes. I'm looking at this picture of... the intersection that I'm analyzing and the real world intersection has two lanes that go through. So I need to add a second one. So I add it and it says, how wide is the, you know, starts with the lane width. And so I don't know the answer. How wide is that lane? I have no idea. So I asked my boss, what, what do I put here? and it was just like, well, what's the default? Well, 12. Okay. Yeah. Use 12. Why do we use 12? So I'm not using, I'm not asking questions because I know something I'm just asking. well, that's what we always use 12.

Austin Tunnell

Okay. Same thing for proposing a widening. So if the project says one option that the DOT is considering is a four lane road instead of a two lane road or whatever addition there is, any additional lane is going to be 12 feet because that's the default. Why is that the default? Because that's just the way we do it. I didn't argue with them like, you don't understand. Here's the thing about lane widths. Because I didn't know. Same kind of software. Not all at once, but over those early months of learning how to analyze intersections, our software got an update where you could now convert this intersection from a signal to a roundabout. So you could say, analyze my signal, grade it for me, and then grade it for me as if it was a roundabout. I was like, that's interesting. Boss, do I... click this box to say analyze as a roundabout. And he goes, no, what if we France? No, we don't, we don't do roundabouts. I was about to ask why we don't have any roundabouts in this country. Okay. I'm asking like, well, why? Well, just cause we, that's, that's the way we go. And that in a nutshell, a long winded, a very large nutshell, that's what's wrong with traffic engineering. The traffic that that's one major thing wrong with traffic engineering is that it has these core. things, these core parts of the engine that drive it, that no one's ever looking back at to say, is this a good idea? And so generation after generation of traffic engineer, no matter how idealistic they start out in their career, that quickly goes away because they start working in these analysis software and they just start, they're trained. to do things the way that they've always done things. So there's not this opportunity to just stop and stare at the sky or stare at a wall or at each other and be like, is this a good idea? Is there any difference between a 12 foot lane and a 10 foot lane? If so, what is that difference? Like you would think engineers are like, as much as they claim to be problem solvers, you would think that they would be trying to solve problems. And that's just not the case in traffic engineering and some other aspects of

Austin Tunnell

of the transportation industry. It's just, it's more about how can I fit in and maybe get a promotion at my job or that sort of thing. So that's one aspect of it is just this focus on how things have always been done. And then the other thing that I would mention, and then I will stop rambling and let you talk. The other thing that is so, so awful about the traffic engineering industry, and this is directly related, it's an output actually of the planning industry, is the way that intersections and streets are analyzed as if the only thing that matters is pumping vehicle traffic, motor vehicle traffic, as quickly and as efficiently as possible. And I would put efficient in giant air quotes because that means fast, like speedy. How can we get people pumped through? Much like you would want to pump wastewater through a pipe, How can we pump traffic through an intersection? And the way that this is reflected in a terrible but genius way is this report card level of service is what it's called that looks like school because we've been well programmed to think conditioned that A's are good, F's are bad, anything approaching an F is bad. And when a traffic engineer analyzes something and it's the result is a good grade and you look at you reverse engineering, you go, well, why is it a good grade? Well, it's a good grade because it pumps so many cars through. Well, what's a bad grade? A bad grade would be something like there are a lot of people walking across the street. There are a lot of people, maybe they're older people that are moving slower across the street. There's some wheelchairs and strollers. Maybe there's a beach on the other side. Maybe there's some other scenic outlook. Like, Cars are going slowly. This is bad. This is very bad. And so traffic engineering rewards a type of intersection and a type of street that turns out is actually what we humans want and need and crave, frankly. Yeah. Boy, you opened up a lot of stuff there I want to talk about because you start off and I like how specific you are when you say traffic engineering industry, the planning.

Austin Tunnell

industry, because really what you're referring to is literally the industry, not necessarily the people. Now, there can be people in an industry that you might have a problem with. But for the most part, and I experienced this myself, and it's hard sometimes to critique because people in that industry will automatically get upset. And it's like, I'm not trying to critique you or something or an individual person, but it is an industry and it needs to be addressed and frankly, in a lot of ways, dismantled and rebuilt because It's so, I don't know, I've been thinking just more and more about this, like how kind of programmed we are as humans, you know, like we think we're very independent and I think you can be independent. I don't mean, I absolutely think there's free will and stuff, but you know, we grow up in school and school is very, it's all about discipline and obedience. And it's not about questioning and university is supposed to be about questioning and stuff, but I don't even know if that's really true at most places or most universities. And then, you know, if you're working in a professional industry, whether it's engineering or architecture or a doctor, like you've got these decades old or centuries old institutions that are kind of like very top down and very kind of control and power oriented. And just, it's like, here is the truth and here is what you're going to do. And it, and it does kind of kill a lot of them. Like you're saying the curiosity and the questioning. of it. And that's what I see too is just like, why should it be 10 feet versus 12 feet? And you're just like, I don't know. I mean, that's what the computer says. Like that's what it says. And I assume it says that because someone much smarter than me knew and put it there. And that's what like, the more that I'm in this business, the more I realize a lot of times there wasn't someone smarter making that decision. We think there is. And I'm not saying they were stupid at all. They were probably trying to solve a problem. And maybe they solved that problem and created a bunch of others they didn't foresee or who knows what it was. Could have been random lobbying, bureaucracy, one random person that wasn't really, some judges in a court one time and the decision gets made. And then before it's just the law of the land forever and never goes back and gets questioned again. That's a serious problem. Yeah, I don't think I would even hold in contempt the people who were the early highway builders.

Austin Tunnell

like figuring out how to solve certain problems. I hold in contempt the people, our peers now today, who refuse to question how things happened. That, like you have today at your disposal, the internet, again, like you have resources at your fingertips to do some digging, to find out how and why these things, and then undo them. Because even now when we do, we have things like you mentioned about, or you were reacting to the lane width issue. More and more studies being done about very niche topics like the width of a lane in certain contexts and what that means in terms of crashes and in terms of speeds. So there was some very, very specific research about these kinds of topics. And then when you unpack it, the reaction from a road designer, a civil engineer or a traffic engineer is generally... Well, so what? Because our default is 12. Like, so what if 10 is safer, the default is 12. Well, why is the default 12? Well, because that's always like, that's our default. That's just it. And they're just stuck. And you're absolutely right that schooling, I think plays a huge role in it. Like we in North America go through all these years of conformity training. Like that's what we're supposed to be doing. That's a good word for it. Yeah. I never realized what it was, but I think that is kind of what it is. Years ago, so I, yeah, I can't remember where I first heard the phrase, but I started using it a lot. I haven't used it in a while, but conformity is not maturity. And that's not to say that all conformity is wrong. Like I'm wearing clothes, you're wearing clothes. It just turns out that the culture in which we live, like this. Conforming like this is a good idea. But to start out, to start a conversation with somebody, I find it a fun icebreaker to like react to this thought. Conformity is not maturity or do the opposite. Conformity is maturity. You show me that you are a mature person, a strong intellect, if you are known as a conformist. React. And again, I think it's...

Austin Tunnell

It's useful for people to get into those exercises because like you hinted at or maybe you didn't hint, maybe you said it bluntly. We don't learn these things in school generally. We don't learn these things even in higher education unless we're one of the few, like very small percentage of people who are studying how to unpack these things. So you might be going deep on Socratic method because of your particular major, but that's a tiny fraction of people. The people who need to understand Socratic method and being critical thinkers are architects, engineers, wastewater engineers, traffic engineers, city planners, land use planners, like all of us people that do ordinary work in the built environment. Because it's the built environment, it has to do with human beings. And the one thing that none of us learned about in college is human beings and what human, how our silly brains work. how we work as individuals, how we think as individuals, and then how all that changes when we're in a group. It's wild. But yeah, all that stuff. The last thing I'll say on that is you mentioned the individuals versus the industry as a group. I think it's both. So one thing that I enjoy doing and I've seen, I've seen some sick, I don't want to over make too much of a comparison with the matrix, but it's very useful to talk about like red pill, blue pill, that sort of thing. But there is on the one hand, the industry at large, like this big abstract blob of land use planning, traffic engineering, highway building, like these kinds of industries that have a lot of people within them. And a lot of them are, as we've been saying, conformist. Like they're not doing their work because they're trying to screw people over. They're not doing their work because they're trying to make life miserable. The opposite is probably true. They think like they're in an industry that makes stuff. That's cool. We're in an industry that plans stuff. But then, I find it beneficial for the people who are willing to challenge the industry that they are in to then take it head on, address them one -on -one as an individual and challenge them. This is what you're suggesting. This is what you're propping up. You as one person are doing this. How does that make you feel? Think on that. Let's talk about that. Because what happens without that kind of one -on -one, hey, are you part of the problem? Are you one of the baddies?

Austin Tunnell

to take on a meme is we just keep doing what we're doing and we blame that abstract industry over there without taking some ownership to be like, yeah, I actually am part of the problem. Is there anything I can do differently? If yes, what? No, that is a really good point because there's a balance there between being generous and... understanding that most people aren't out to like do bad work, right? People are, but at the same time, if you're still perpetuating like things that harm people, you're still perpetuating things that harm people. It reminded me, I was talking about this. We had a baby recently a few weeks ago, ended up in the hospital. We're going to try to do a home birth, but some issues ended up in the hospital. Everyone's okay. But I was trying to find some drinks the next day and found the vending machine room. and there's five, six vending machines in there, like big vending machines. And I literally am looking for just sparkling water, some like La Croix or something, some sparkling water and a coffee, like a cold brew coffee. That's it, with nothing in it, which you can find all over the grocery store. In a hospital, there's nothing of the sort. There is only soda and coffee with 50 grams of plus sugar in it. And then there's this one tiny thing of just bottled water, but literally everything else is soda and just sugar. in a hospital. And I was just sitting there just shaking my head going, are you serious? And I was telling my sister later. And she mentioned, she's like, well, it's not like those are the hospitals. And I thought, it's like, yeah, that's true. There's someone probably running those vending machines. And I was like, you know what? I don't care. That's wrong. At that point, if you're... The people that work in that hospital and the hospital administrators and the doctors could be like, what are we doing? We're not allowing this. And they could stop it like that. And I'm not saying... I'm mad at them because they haven't, but I would talk to them. If I saw someone as an individual and saying, why aren't you doing something about this? You're keeping people in the hospital, that's for sure. That's a good path to repeat business. They're savvy business managers. There is a lot of that though, just like not wanting to rock. That's really what it comes down to is I think there's so many problems in the world now and we really need people acting courageously and speaking out, but also doing it in productive ways, not just like...

Austin Tunnell

yelling at people. I kind of like that idea of the one -on -one conversation seems really smart. Have you had any success with, I don't know, like city councilors or things like that in government of kind of convincing them of these things? Some people that really were on a different place because they didn't know. Have you had any success? Yeah, it's so in one of the, so for a lot of years in my career, working in consulting at one advantage of, well, two advantages related to your question. One is I had an opportunity to be exposed to all types of projects in all types of areas and areas like different geography, different politics, granola Northwest, New England, the South, the desert. I mean, just all over the place. And then my backyard in the mid Atlantic. So I got to see and learn about different various planning and engineering specific type things like access management, roundabouts, bike infrastructure, intersection design and analysis in all of these different sort of backgrounds or contexts. And then at the same time that I was learning about that, because I don't know if always is right, but for as long as I can remember really enjoyed advertising and propaganda and that sort of thing. So as a side, I was learning about how is it like, why did I choose years ago? Why would I instinctively go to Best Buy, but not Circuit City, even if Circuit City had a cheaper price on something. Coke, Pepsi, you know, all these, there's, there's loads of material about this in the marketing world, but that was something I was interested in. And related to that, I was starting to read business books that... had to do, I was seeing themes of persuasion come out because in these business books, they were talking about how do you, if you were working for an organization, you've got to get more work. How do you get more work? Well, it's competitive. It's a competitive landscape. How do you persuade a potential client that you are the one for the job as an individual or as a company, you've got to persuade them. And one of the things that stuck with me was this idea of shared interests versus stated positions. And,

Austin Tunnell

I promise this is an answer to your question. The stated positions is when you say, for example, I hate roundabouts and somebody else says, I love roundabouts. Like those two stated position, they can't possibly meet, right? Like they are in direct opposition. Shared interest is when you... dismiss those statements and you start asking questions to find out what do you want? What is it? What's the outcome that you're hoping for? What is the, what's on the horizon in your mind? And perhaps you're interacting with the one in a bazillion person that says, my purpose in life is to never see a roundabout. Like that's my, but that's, we know that's not going to happen in real life. Really what people are wanting. If they say, I hate roundabouts or I don't want roundabouts, they have in their mind a certain set of things about the, that they associate with roundabouts. And so when you start asking questions that don't have to do with what's the answer of this intersection, what do you want? Well, I want my neighborhood to be quiet. I want my property value to stay high. I want my kids to be able to do this. I want that. I want, like, you start figuring out what is it that a person wants about this area. And then the same thing with the person that's pro roundabout. Forget about your biases for this particular type of intersection. What do you want out of a neighborhood? And it's just start asking those questions and then you, it's not at all difficult to find shared interests among people who start a conversation with like this oppositional, I want this, no, I want the opposite. And this, I've seen this work with just any type of human being. As a dad, I've seen it with kids, as somebody that's trying to win work, I've seen it work where our team is demonstrating like shared interests with the client. So it's not this kind of adversarial, you know, you're on this side of the table and they're on this side of the table. And like, is this consultant trying to screw us over? Like finding shared interest was really important. And I've seen it, I use the roundabout as a first example, because it comes to mind because I've seen firsthand where people are ready to legislate.

Austin Tunnell

something because they just have in their mind, this is awful. And then they come around to realizing, I had really no practical reason to take that position. Now that I understand that this is one tool to see the outcome that I want, then I'm going in that. I support this thing. I'm in this direction. I'm going along with it. So that idea of shared interests, finding shared interests, hugely, hugely underappreciated among those of us that deal with the public in any way, whether it's pitching your job, your work, or it's pitching an idea for a planning commission or city council. Probably like a hot potato one that's going on right now across the country would be things like zoning reform or parking reform. And these are two topics where it's... I will say historically, going back a few years before there was this big online NIMBY versus YIMBY kind of thing that you could find, it ended up coming down to local politics. So parking reform would be something like if you had a strong local chamber of commerce, let's say, they would just, their default position, back to defaults and conformity, their default position was car parking is always good for business. That's the worldview. Well, I found this study. Now I found 10 studies. Here's 50 studies that say that's not necessarily true. And here's a bunch of sister cities to us. And they found the opposite. They found that they've tweaked things like this. It's better for business. Fewer cars in this area is actually good for business. And you would get that same kind of pushback of, but that's not what we do. Car parking is good for business. So there's going to be the conformist who cannot be converted. That's fine. Those people exist. They will always exist. But there will also be people who are willing to listen because if they truly are thinking, like they're curious and they go, I want my business to thrive. Is this true? Could this possibly be true? That reforming our parking, like stop stopping the government mandate of how many car parking spaces I have to put in for my business. Could that possibly be good for me? I'm willing to investigate. You'll find those shared interests. And so...

Austin Tunnell

these kinds of movements of parking reform and then zoning reform, very similar with missing middle housing and other things. I realize I'm throwing out jargon at you, but these are kind of planner and engineering things that they go in that same kind of category. If you start asking questions of people, what do you want? What are you trying to reach in your area? Is it abundant housing? How do you define abundant housing? Is it good or bad to have more than one type of of house as a choice. Like should we only have a house that's at least this big on a giant parcel of land? Or is there ever a time when it would be good to offer something else? Like what if it was legal for you to convert your shed into an office? Without getting thrown in prison, I like that one. Yeah. So these are all related things that whether you're a politician or you're talking to somebody who could be. I'm a politician. This idea of shared interests, I think, is just, it's so, so fundamental. When I learned it, I was like, holy cow, I must be the last person on earth to have learned this. And then I looked around, I'm like, why is not, why is it everybody talking about shared interests? This is crazy. I think that's a great, I hadn't heard of exactly like this, stated position versus shared interests. I wrote that down because I like that as a really quick reminder to always be thinking that way. Because you're absolutely right. And I have also found that people actually do want more of the same thing than they realize when you start with the solution and people are basically just like talking about the solution. But of course, you know, we don't all know the solutions to everything because we're not experts in every field. But if you start talking about what you want, you mentioned that the multiple housings and not just would it be OK to have, you know, different types of housing in the neighborhood? It's even better to say, would you like your grandma to be able to live in the neighborhood? Right. And a six hundred square foot. rented flat, you know? So that way they're not in your house, but they're also not in some like nursing institution three miles away that feels like a place to go die. You know, and they actually get to be part of your community. You can just stop by rather than a two hour visit. You get to swing by for a 15 minute chat, a 30 minute chat, you know, and that gets people nodding really fast because there is a lot of agreement because people know, like when you start talking about kids and freedom with kids,

Austin Tunnell

of man, when you live in an isolated suburban subdivision, good luck. Everything's got to be planned. You want to have a playdate that better be scheduled in the calendar and mom or dad better be available to drive. You hope better cars work and you're not in too bad of traffic. And, you know, it's just, and that idea of, of kind of this, to achieve what people want absolutely does not mean skyscrapers. It absolutely doesn't even mean bunches of apartment buildings over and over again. Like we're designing something on 80 acres right now that's kind of outside the city. And it's got some larger, a few larger kind of what we're calling estate lots, but then there's a village center and there's all these small things and there's coffee houses and fourplexes and all sorts of stuff intertwined into almost like a complete. village, you know? And then the people that are looking at the big lots, they're not looking at this and going, we don't want to live next to these four places because it's all beautifully like actually done and curated and there's a reason for it. And, you know, and it's exciting and there's balance of vibrancy and privacy. No, that's, that's, that's, that's really good. One of the silliest arguments on social media and you'll of course, I see this on X all the time, but, that there has to be this binary choice between you're either in the countryside essentially, like the best looking suburban development that's just green everywhere and lots of space, or you're stacked like sardines. There is no in -between, it's only one or the other. It's the dumbest, laziest claim. It's also common. I agree. It's common. And I think part of it is, and this just goes to things I've learned about persuasion and storytelling and just how people, how our brains work. Like you mentioned about a grandparent, it's so much more helpful to articulate a very specific example.

Austin Tunnell

So it's both, it's not one or the other. Like you have to be able to talk about in the abstract, missing middle housing in these different types of terms, mixed use development, and that that means a combination of things. You have to be able to say those things in these broad sweeping things. You also should have a very specific example or two to describe what it is so that a person can visualize it so that they're not just seeing in their mind a tower to the sky. and another one and another one and another one. Instead, they're visualizing, you know, kind of what you just described. A single family house, a house the same size, but it's two units, another single family house. Like these things aren't that complicated. We trick ourselves, I think, into thinking that this is so, so difficult. No, I think you're right. I was actually in this conversation recently about that idea of it's either urban or it's suburban, you know, and then suburban often comes with an idea of the suburbs that's not actually real, you know, because you're saying it's kind of like when people think about it, it's like the best of the suburbs. Right. But most of the suburbs today are not that they certainly won't be in 20 or 30 years. Yeah, it's a stressful version of the end of Wally. Like we're. That's the way it is. And it brings out aggressiveness. I mean, it's why one of my. fun third rails to grab firmly is this idea of car brain. Just that it's, we all know it's true. We joke about it. Like anybody that's seen the office space, which any good American has, use the opening scene when the opening credits are rolling of the guys sitting in traffic, each in their own car and getting so furious at traffic. Like we, we, any of us who, whether you've been a city or a suburb, like, but any, especially those of us in the group in the suburbs. We live that. And then even if you commute into a city or out of a city, like in a car, you know that. And so we know that when we are behind the wheel, there's something about that that changes in us. Like we act more aggressively. We do things that we would not ordinarily do. Even if we were in line together or near each other in the suburban Costco, we would treat each other differently. Every once in a while, there's that rogue person with the giant cart. But for the most part, you...

Austin Tunnell

you are much more civil. And people just, they shy away from that kind of thing. But that's one of those things that's like, no, I'm not trying to convince you where to live or how to live, or that you should be stacked up on top of each other like sardines. I'm just asking you - Or that we shouldn't have cars. Yeah, exactly. I'm asking you to consider - You're not anti -car. What if it was legal to have a couple of different types of land uses in the same neighborhood so that if you wanted to walk six blocks to pick up the prescription - to get a couple bags of groceries, that that was an option for you. Wouldn't that be something? If you've been enjoying the Building Culture podcast and are listening on Apple or Spotify, could you pause for just a moment and leave a five -star review? My goal is to get to 100 reviews. And if you do, take a screenshot and email it to playbook at buildingculture .com. Playbook, P -L -A -Y -B -O -O -K at buildingculture .com. And when we hit 100, I'll randomly pick... five winners and send them a building culture hat that looks just like this. I appreciate it and back to the show. That's a great way to flip it. And you know, I want to talk a few kind of specifics from your perspective. You talk about we're suffering the, I don't know, the consequences of unhealthy infrastructure. And of course I have things in my head I think about, but what are... some of the main kind of things that like the top, I don't know, five doesn't have to be a specific number of things, but what are the top things in your kind of mind that just come to mind about unhealthy infrastructure and the consequences of it? So I started down this deep dive into junk infrastructure a few years ago. It was in one of my idea books. Like I'll jot ideas down and then. occasionally go revisit them and turn them into something like this needs to be a book, this needs to be a blog, this needs to be a mockumentary or whatever, something. And then one of those things that I had to note, I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it, was this idea of healthy versus unhealthy infrastructure. And there were a few things that happened around the same time that got me thinking about this. Because again, with background originally in traffic engineering then,

Austin Tunnell

transportation planning and more of the land use side and then urban planning and bicycle infrastructure. Like I had this kind of course in the very human scale design, you might say, new urbanism. When I found those people, I was like, there are more of me. This is great. But I knew in my mind, from my work experience, I knew some very clear things like traffic crashes. I spent a lot of time for a period of time, doing highway safety and then more, not so much highways, but like intersection safety, where I was looking at crash reports and having to analyze crashes and then learning about how you reduce crashes. And so from a very technical engineering point of view, none of this was like fluffy planner talk. It was very, very analytical. And so I was very aware that there's this physical health outcome of, our bodies are getting crushed by the vehicles. As our vehicles are bonking into each other, it's not like a cartoon bonking. We are destroying our bodies in car crashes. If we could reduce crashes, we would save our bodies. So that's one version of physical health is just protect the shell and the stuff that's inside of it. But then in my idea book, one of the things that happened besides that kind of learning, on the job about traffic safety. Somebody sent me an article that had a video that now this video is probably, it's probably like 15 years old. But there was a Parkinson's patient who could barely walk. He's, he could barely stand actually. And so an orderly or a nurse is helping him down the hallway to get him outside. And there's no context to this video. It's just this grainy shaky cam. And they're trying to get him out. He, a couple of times, He bends over to the side, like his whole body's kind of collapsing to one side, touches the ground, she helps him back up. They finally get this guy outside. And then there's a bicycle waiting for him. Doctor helps him get up on the bike. They push him off. I mean, clearly this wasn't the first time it happened, but effortlessly rides his bicycle through the parking lot and around the building and then comes back down. No problem. They stop the bike and then they have to help him because he can't walk or barely stand up even.

Austin Tunnell

And so that was one thing, like some doctors can't figure it out, but for whatever reason, this Parkinson's patient, very old man who can barely get around by himself, when he gets on a bicycle, everything's different. And then something else that I was thinking about. That's fascinating. Yeah, yeah, it's out there, it's on YouTube, I'm sure it's still on YouTube. And then another thing related to that was somebody sent me a story that this... It was a friend who has nothing to do with like their job is not the built environment, but a story about a doctor who had written prescriptions for healthy behavior like walking, walking once a week. Like I am writing an actual script for you to walk once a day or to ride a bicycle once a week. So things like that. And. So then I was learning about, there's a term for this, social prescribing. If only doctors would do that more often. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Back to your point about the sugar water in the hospitals. But I had these ideas, like, or these things that were just kind of at first living in the book and then bouncing around my head off and on for a while. And I started to dig into, well, what is healthy for us? And who defines healthy? Because I am the last person on earth that wants to tell someone else how to live or where to live I want I want you to make your own decisions I'm also the first person to say you should have options like you should be able you want to live in a small environment You should have that option. You want to live in a big environment. You should have that option but As far as health goes I was seeing all these medical research studies that were talking about anxiety and depression, especially, related to physical environments. And so these medical studies were not necessarily digging into the history of infrastructure. That wasn't their purpose. Their purpose was just simply connecting the dots. And then I thought, wow, I'm seeing a lot of this dot connecting that ends at infrastructure. Like it starts with obesity, heart disease.

Austin Tunnell

And then mental health, anxiety and depression. I'm seeing these different kinds of health things and there are different studies that are tying it back to infrastructure, but that's kind of this wall where it ends. And I thought, well, I know what's on the other side. Like I know all these other dots to connect. I know about zoning and the horrors of zoning. I know about road widening and traffic engineering. Like I know how this infrastructure is the way it is. I know why it's gotten to this point. What I didn't know until I started digging was, wow, doctors know, like they've been saying for years, many years, surgeon generals have been saying this, like the built environment as we know it in modern day does not fit us as human beings. And one example of this is if you're walking down a street and I think anybody would nod that, yeah, this is true. If you're walking down kind of a typical American arterial, let's say it's four or six lanes wide with the. grassy median. And on one side, you've got the Coles and Target and Burger King. On the other side, you've got a strip mall and McDonald's and the other stuff. Shoe store. Standard Americana in our modern day. When you walk... Random aside, I drove down to Austin a few weeks ago. And because you drive through Denton and Dallas, near Dallas and stuff, about three hours of it really isn't even countryside. It's just... literally every five miles, you see the exact same sign of, you know, like exit here for this, this and this, but you're in a city and it's literally the same thing over again. Like they might swap. Maybe the coal skips a few, maybe the Chick -fil -A skips a few, but it's just like literally same thing over and over and for three hours, for hundreds of miles. Yeah. It's copy paste, copy paste. And it turns out that if you're walking in those environments, that the trauma on you, like your brain doesn't know some things different, like on the inside, it's just, it's... There's some amount of ones and zeros that our brain calculates. And one of those things is the intensity of a walk on a sidewalk. If you happen to have a sidewalk on that kind of arterial, it feels so traumatic that it's similar that if you were to do a same kind of trauma scan on somebody that's suffering PTSD, so somebody that's been in combat, actual warfare and has survived warfare.

Austin Tunnell

and they're struggling on the insides, but they don't look wounded on the outside. The mind thinks of those two things in the same kind of way. And this is one quick tangent, is one reason why I have very little patience for people, well -meaning people in the urbanist world or architecture world who say, technology is not for us. We know how to make things good. We've known this for thousands of years, how to develop cities and design cities. On the one hand, yes, we've known for thousands of years how to build stuff that's good for human beings. On the other hand, man, there's some incredible technology, including language, which is one of my favorite technologies, but technologies that helps us help, not me, but smart people scan brains and scan heart rates and figure out, the human body is reacting to these ways. Our eyeballs are looking at these things like, heat maps of where your eyes look, which tells architects something, tells engineers something. So there's some incredible technology that's reinforcing this notion that sprawl development, just kind of everything spread out where you have to be stuck in a car. And the only way to get around everything is in a car is bad for our brains. Not to mention the physical stuff like, you know, it's easy to say, well, pollution is probably bad. Yeah, it is. But... These things that we, I think every American household, I'm sure, knows somebody in their immediate household or very close to them that's suffering from some type of anxiety or depression. And so much of this could be reduced or even eliminated if our built environment, the physical surroundings were different. So to me, like that's a pretty big deal. If we as planners and engineers who have nothing to do with medicine, allegedly, if we knew that, And we understood how the human mind worked a little bit and understood how the human body worked just a little bit. That should be some incredible motivating juice to make something different. Man. Yeah, you hit on a lot of things there again, because that's one of my, well, to start with, that's one of my biggest critiques of kind of like architecture, the architecture industry and architecture schools. And I have not gone to architecture school. There's great ones out there, but.

Austin Tunnell

Very few of them. And actually, I only know of a couple. Start with like what it means to be human and the human experience. Like, why are we doing any of this? When you think about it, if you work in the industry of infrastructure, architecture, planning, whatever, you are quite literally building the habitat of everyone else. And every mammal has like ideal habitats and non -ideal habitats where they're going to thrive or not thrive. And humans are more adaptable than most. But as you're talking about with studies and I haven't heard that one, can you send me that study by the way? Or what is that one called about the PTSD one? I don't have the study in front of me, but that's one thing that I'm working on with the documentary is one woman in particular who has an incredible story that the the I'm happy to spoil this part of it, but she says new urbanism saved my life. And what she means is like the the shift in living in an isolated neighborhood. I mean, She was not in a dangerous neighborhood. She was just isolated. It was a standard suburban type of development. And I hear myself saying suburban, but really sprawl type development. Not simply that it was a residential area, but a sprawl area where you had to force yourself to interact with other human beings because everybody just drives up into their garage and then conducts their life inside of that, their own house. And being in an environment where she had the option, to walk to everything, including outdoor festivals and farmers markets and grocery store, just all these things. It was the in a new urbanism development. She could tell herself at the beginning, she said it was really hard, but she could make herself once a week, walk outside, make eye contact with one person and say hi, and then rush back home and hide. And then she was able to increase that habit over time to the point where now she has a whole business where she helps other combat vets deal with this kind of stuff and and like make lifestyle changes so that they don't have to go the chemical route, let's say. Right, which you know, that recent study that came out that was showing SSRIs being really far down the list on being effective in that and like dancing is up at the top.

Austin Tunnell

Literally, above all the drugs and stuff. And then there was multiple other things before, like way down the list is SSRI, or am I saying that right? SSRIs anyway. That was one of my favorite recent ones. There's been a lot of work in this area. I mean, one thing that I would look up is social prescribing, because you'll find yourself, I mean, you'll do a happy dance at the keyboard on that, because there's just so much good stuff out there. Dancing is one of those fun ones. I mean, it's hard to not make fun of... planners and engineers who reject this kind of thing when doctors are saying, you must be the worst type of person. Like you don't want anybody to live a joyful life because your work is keeping people in misery. Wouldn't it be great if your work instead was creating joy and laughter and dancing in the streets, which is, turns out quite healing. You know, it seems like a lot of it when I think about it as we're talking, like a lot of the, response from people that seems quite cold about this stuff, like almost not believing like that this person, you know, it's the same walking down a sidewalk on an arterial and having PTSD and all that. And people just kind of like shaking their heads, not believing it. A lot of that to me comes from like this almost hyper rationalistic approach where we're like, we really see humans as, as just gears and microprocessors for brains. You know, it's like, we understand, like we understand the humans and they've, They need to eat and they need to sleep and yeah, they need to go to school and a few other things. But like, that's it. We can understand that humans from a completely materialistic mindset. But what they're finding, whether it's doctors or psychologists or is as the fields evolve, cause you're talking about like, it was years ago, but I read a whole book on embodied cognition, which wasn't even related to architecture at the time, but just describing how kind of this. new whole field of study of embodied cognition and the idea that, wait, our bodies are so much more part of who we are in our minds than we ever thought before. It's not that all our thinking just happens in our brains and tells our body what to do when we go do it because the brain is the control center and our body is just the, I don't know, the physical suit, the human suit we wear. That's not true at all. I mean, they're talking about a second brain in the gut now. They're talking about that.

Austin Tunnell

literally by changing the human body, if we had evolved differently with the human body, even with the same brain and stuff like that, we might not just, we could be completely different people. Like that's how important our physical bodies are and tangentially the physical world is to us. So for me, and I'm reading these things, I hadn't heard that one on the PTSD, but I completely believe it. I mean, there's studies that show if you are in one of those parking lots in the Coles and you want to go to the store two over, that's, you know, two minute walk, people will get in their car and drive up to it. Right. Rather than walk because it's such a horrendous experience. Gosh, and I actually had this when I was driving down to Austin. You know, I had to pull over and stop to get things, you know, and Starbucks and all that. And just even exiting the highway in these cr - crazy lanes and stuff. It's like, what's going on? This awful parking, blah, blah, and you go in and you're finally in a place. You're like, you can just like breathe for a second because it's not terrible. But I just feel so like, I don't know. That's not fair. It's like, I don't want to like make people victims or something, but I just like look at the young kids kind of working there, the high schoolers. It's like, how much like... more enriching and life giving of this could be like in the context of a neighborhood or, you know, a multiple neighborhood or a district or something where it's like, it's not just, I don't know, some corporate, you know, industrial bureaucratic Excel speech sheet that threw up and I don't know. It's a, it really is like dehumanizing and soul psyching is what I mean. Like it truly is dehumanizing. And I don't mean that if you work in that, I mean, we all, we have to deal with it. You know, we all have to do that, but gosh, it really does have, profound effects on people on top of the actual limitations of, my kids can't do this, my kids can't do that. I'm very excited about all the kind of the new sciences and stuff coming out that even if they're not related to urbanism and architecture, you know, they're still drawing attention to the fact that the physical world and the habitats that we make for ourselves, we tend to think of our habitat as only our house. And it's like our house is a very like, it's a...

Austin Tunnell

big part of our lives, but it's still actually kind of a small part of our lives. Well, there's a lot more to our daily lives than just inside our home. Yeah, it's true. And I think, I mean, I'm hopeful for the future. I see a lot of different, but related things happening slowly and suddenly, including everything that we've been talking about, like people understanding now in much more detail how... traffic is analyzed and how maybe it could be analyzed differently and how like you're hearing more and more people say things or respond to something like, rush hour was awful. And a response might be good, like, okay, leave at a different time or, you know, post pandemic where now commuting habits are totally different. For some people they won't change, but for many people they have. just thinking about things very differently or willing to entertain things. People are entertaining protected bike lanes in a way that they never used to do. And it's not simply that data exists that says things like, hey, bicycle infrastructure is good for business. It's how people connect with those stories. So maybe they experienced something themselves. Maybe they visited a place... that recently put in some new stuff. Maybe they took a Walmart vacation to Bentonville, Arkansas and were like, wow, this bicycle infrastructure down here is amazing. I wish my place could copy some of this. And people, whether they're in a blue state or city or a red state or city, everybody is seeing examples of things like better walking environments, better bicycling environments, rolling back these... silly zoning rules that force everybody into zones like the food zone over there and the play zone over there and the sleep zone over here and you have to drive to all the different zones. People are starting to legalize that in very different political climates. And so it took decades and then all of a sudden it's like boom, boom, boom. People are waking up to this stuff. The yimby -nimby debates, yes in my backyard versus no in my backyard is a very housing centric thing. Austin Tunnell (01:01:17.068) but it relates also to transportation. And then, you're getting like the electric bike craze that really spiked during the lockdown period where people needed to get outside and be with other human beings in spite of what they were told. People just were like, no, enough of this. I'm getting outside. And so bicycles were flying off the shelves and then e -bikes were picking up. And so now because of the technology of e -bikes, suddenly the... I was gonna say the sky is the limit, but that's the wrong direction. Like the horizon's the limit as far as where you can get with an electric bike. And so that's just one of many things that people, it's impacting how people think about what the environment could be. Like what our physical surroundings could be like. So you can suddenly dream big without realizing you're dreaming big. Because now an e -bike is normal enough. You're like, yeah, I could totally see. never widening that main road through town again. I think it's totally, it's definitely wide enough. People can think that because they realize, there's an option to get from here to there. It doesn't have to involve a car. Yeah. Our cities can have a lot more centers to them and be more decentralized, more wholess, a grouping of more whole places. But I also like what you're talking about that it's not political. Like it often is made political for some reason, the idea of whether it's 50 minute cities or whatever. And it's like, I don't care about that stuff at all, because what we're talking about is designing for humans and that is not political. Like what is the best, most kind of thriving environment for humans? You've got preferences, yeah, but it has nothing to do with political preferences. And it's like, if you're on the blue side, it's, yeah. This all the stuff we're talking about is better for the climate. It's better for the environment. It's more equitable. It's follow all you could go down that list. And if I want to convince, you know, the red crowd or something, it'd be like, yeah, you want more freedom of mobility to have options, you know, to, for your kids to be able to run around and to walk to school, to get themselves to school to both. Doesn't everyone want to like be able to have grandma live nearby or have their daughter coming home from college or, you know, graduated college? Maybe they live two blocks over. Austin Tunnell (01:03:35.724) you know, in a fourplex for their first apartment, you know, and they're not, you know, on the other side of town. It really is. You're right. There's something going on right now, culturally, even though there's still a lot of energy going in the wrong way, just because it's the system continuing to produce things. There's so much counter cultural stuff going on, I think probably because a lot of the work the New Orbiters have done over the past 40 years. You know, there's real examples out there of people that can go look and walk. You know, we just had some people go to Serenby and where else did they go? Trilith, I think. And I just loved it, you know, to be able to actually see what we're talking about when we use terms and talk about human scale. And then you actually, people go and experience it. They're like, we get it. We love this. Yeah. You know, and I think that's pretty cool. Yeah. I got a question on, you know, protected bike lanes and just bike lanes in general, what makes successful bike lanes just from your observations and experience? Because I'll give you one example. I very much applaud Oklahoma City where I am. They're trying to do more bike infrastructure and there's this Northwest street that they just put some bike lanes in on and they've got these little, what do you, I don't know, they're not ballers because they - Flexpost? Flexpost, yeah. So the cars don't, you know. crash into them, I guess, or get injured. The cars don't hurt themselves if they hit them. But I've seen, I can count on two hands the number of bikers I've seen on it. And I would have to be, if I lived next to it and I was quite motivated, I would probably use it. But it's like, it's two lanes of traffic going both ways. It's just got these push over, little plastic things. There's no trees, there's no that thing. So it's just like concrete and ugly. And it's just... people aren't gonna use it or people don't use it. And then people then use it as an excuse. See, bike lanes don't work. Look, no one's using it. It's like, my God. Because for me, I'm like, if you've just taken that median, and maybe there was not money for it, but if you take the median, plant trees down it, have the bike lane, actually make it protected, and then also have trees on that side. And then suddenly you've actually got this beautiful boulevard where you're going, Dad, at least in 15 years, it's gonna take some time. It's a common question, it's a good question, though, what makes a good bike lane? Austin Tunnell (01:05:51.98) or bike lanes, plural. And I think I haven't said this before, as you were talking, this occurred to me that I think it's like if you were to say, what makes a good house? What is a good house? Tell me a good house. It's a giant, it depends. So there's a lot of basics, like you need a roof, you need walls, like you need shelter, you need to be protected from the elements. So there's things about a house that can be, that are true, regardless of size and location. So with bike lanes, the first thing that comes, the first reason why I say it depends is, well, two things. One is everything costs money. You mentioned it. So the more substantial a thing is, like concrete, the more expensive it's going to be. And then the more of it, the more expensive it's going to be. So that's always going to be one factor is how much does a thing cost? And then the other factor is, thinking of bike lanes in terms of a network in the same way that you would do any other transportation connectivity. I mean, roads are not, they have not been for thousands of years designed as just isolated things to be like, look, we now have a place you can take your vehicle out and test drive it. But that's how we treat bike lanes. We treat them like, here's this thing. If you find yourself lost, but with a bicycle, in this area of town, lucky you, there's a lane for you. That's how they're treated. That's a good way to say it. So a network is everything. I mean, a network, this is true socializing too. The network is everything. The same is true for mobility. You need to have all these things connected. So a bike lane to nowhere is probably not going to be used very much or, you know, except for those circumstances where somebody comes out of a bicycling black hole. And it just appeared there, a wormhole, I guess. Let me get my scientific terms correct. But the other thing I would say related to that is an entire network does not have to be made up of all the best type of pieces. It doesn't have to be all top shelf asphalt paths completely apart from motor traffic. Austin Tunnell (01:08:16.876) But there should be some things like that in an area as part of a network. And the reason why I say the network is such an important thing is wherever your origin and destination is within a place, you know, let's say you're making short trips that are under three miles, which is half of America's car trips. If you're making one of those standard car trips and you're trying to make it on bicycle instead of by car, it's not following a fixed route of All of us are going this exact same path. You need to be able to have options to use first street, second street, third street, fourth street, A street, B street. You need these kinds of choices. And related to that, not every street is the same. Not every street is gonna have the same type of truck traffic, for example. Some of them are gonna feel really quiet and you'll be totally fine having young kids on balanced bikes in the center of those streets. And then other streets are so, they just feel so hostile because everyone that's driving is driving way too fast and they're being aggressive and they're not paying attention to lights. They're running red lights. They're going, you know, they're spinning on corners. They're doing rights on red. They're doing all these things where you know, I, as an adult feel at risk. Last thing I'm going to do is bring my kids here with me or my senior citizen parents. Those types of roads, absolutely need some kind of treatment that physically separates you from the higher speed car traffic. So all of these kinds of things that go into making a good network for people to choose to ride bikes. For one, I encourage people that are involved in bicycle infrastructure, your job's not going to like, AI is not just simply going to kill your job. You... have a mind to apply to this kind of stuff because it's complicated. And there are a lot of variables that are constantly changing. Again, cost is a big one. But these other kinds of variables where you know, whether it's a city or a far out suburb or some rural village, your streets are... Each street is not necessarily the same as the other. So the treatment for one street does not have to necessarily be the treatment for the next street. Austin Tunnell (01:10:40.108) So that's my not so short response. I love that answer for numerous reasons, but it's also acknowledging, I think, like embedded in what you're saying is this idea of complex systems versus complicated systems, and that cities are complex systems that you can't fully understand. You know, if Chet Morone uses a watch as an example of like a watch is complicated, but you can literally dismantle it and understand how every single part works and understands and affects the other thing. With cities, when you've got tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of people, human beings involved, you cannot break down the system and say, this is exactly how everything works. And so you do need options. You do kind of need this kind of like flexibility built into everything, which also comes into the approach of it, which is. this, I would say more humble approach. And we're going to send all the bike, you know, the bikers here and this is the, they're going to travel north, south here and then, you know, east, west here. And yeah, which is how we do, you know, traffic engineering. So I definitely like the different thinking there, man, well, we could talk for hours. So I'd love to maybe have you on again, one time to rub for it, but you've got, you've got a lot of writing, you've got podcasts, you've got movies coming out, you've got a book coming out next year. Can you want to just tell anyone a few things about those things, especially I'm curious about the documentary and the book coming out next year. Do you each want to tell those and then more people can follow you? So, yeah. So, urbanismspeakeasy .com is where everything will be updated. the, the documentary, on healthy infrastructure. So I made a short, it was supposed to be a trailer, but as I was making a trailer for the film, it turned into a 20 minute short that I was then kind of basically. making a little event around in different cities where as a group, we, and I'll tell you who the we was in a second, but we would watch the film together, have a little networking time, whatever, then disperse. Like ask me anything kind of thing. Like we'd watch it, we'd talk about it, and then go our separate ways. And the way I wanted these things to work is in each location have a different... Austin Tunnell (01:13:04.78) a tight focus. So it wasn't this very broad, healthy infrastructure topic. It was specific to what do landscape architects need to understand about this? So they were watching the short with that in mind, like landscape design and architecture. And then for a different audience, it was people that are doing medical sciences and research in that field, health industry. And then in another one, it's going to be planners and transportation engineers. So each of these groups starting like getting reacting to this thing, like where I'm basically voiceover sort of a mini documentary highlighting like here are the problems, but here are three major problems that are that's making the why infrastructure is so bad for the human body and the human mind. And then I end it with. like showing some light at the end of the tunnel. There are ways out, like things can get better in the end. I'm an eternal optimist, but I'm correct about this. I have reason to be hopeful. Things can get better in the end. And spoiler alert, one way or one reason they can get better in the end is so many of these problems start and end at the local level. And so you don't have to persuade the world, you need to persuade people near you. And that is key. Related to that, the next book that I'm working on is probably going to be the start of several in this topic because I love it so much. But a hundred years ago, Walter Lippman, who's considered the father of modern journalism, wrote a book called Public Opinion. And in it, he goes through how just observations, how crowds would to support a thing or oppose the thing. And then shortly after him, Edward Bernays took what he had, what Lippman had written in public opinion and went a step further with propaganda. And then ended up using that famously with World War II and other major corporations, like helping them see, I mean, both of these guys are fascinating characters. Because I would never want my boys to grow up to be people like these two people, but they, Austin Tunnell (01:15:33.068) They're so smart. So these two, Lippman and Bernays are both incredible people to look at, to learn from because they were able to almost like a robot or a cold, far off researcher observe us humans like an out of body experience and say, that's how they do the things they do. that's why, if I turn this knob or pull this lever, these things generally happen. And, I think this is important, especially public opinion. It's such an important book. Although it was leading up, like this is, this leading up, some of it, the content was leading up to the roaring twenties and then World War II. So that some of the context doesn't make any sense at all, but a lot of it does. Like you can visualize yourself in that setting in 1922 when he first published this. And so what... what I'm gonna do is update that book for a modern audience. And it's essentially gonna be two books. I'm gonna be the parasite in Walter Lippman. I am going to take over his essence and control it so that this new version of public opinion will have my book embedded with his so that as a reader in the modern day, you'll be able to get my take on each of these sections and why I think, like, why this is important through modern stories, but then you can still have the core of his actual book, which I think is very important to read. So that was cool. I'm hoping that I can have that done in May, which is bike month. I don't know if that's actually gonna be happening, but that is my goal. Cause it is a monster undertaking. That, yeah, I can imagine. I've never written a book before, but even writing a newsletter sometimes takes me effort. So it's, yeah, it's a lot of fun. I'm excited to see that. Is that that short film is out already somewhere like public viewing or is that just private viewing? It's private viewing for now. But if you're on it, anybody that goes to urbanismspeakeasy .com, you can find this, find these things. Austin Tunnell (01:17:54.892) and you'll get updates on what happens next. Cool. And some of this was crowdfunded and people that were participating in that got access to the short film and there are going to be other things like that because that community, shockingly, most of those people are never on X even though that's my home away from home. Yeah. But that's where they're getting these kinds of updates. They're there for that long form content. Cool. Well, Andy, thanks a lot for coming on and talk to you next time. Thanks for having me, Austin. This has been fun. Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a five star review if you're on Apple or Spotify and like, subscribe, share, share with your friends. And I will put how to follow Andy in the show notes, whether as UrbanismSpeakEasy .com or his Twitter handle where he shares lots of Car wrecks. So quite entertaining to follow. Thanks and catch you on the next one.