Transforming Transportation Systems According to Naomi Dorner and Tamika Butler
Aug 22, 2023Season 2Episode 13
Booked on Planning
Ever wondered how mobility justice could revolutionize city planning and transportation strategy? Get ready to challenge the status quo as we dive into the fascinating world of human-centered transportation systems by reviewing a few recent American Planning Association interviews with Naomi Dorner and Tamika Butler. Dorner, an urban planning expert and transportation strategist, introduces us to the concept of mobility justice, a term that underscores the need for people to move freely without fear or anxiety. But, how can you encapsulate community's needs and wants into raw numbers? Butler illuminates us on the distinction between knowledge and wisdom, emphasizing the importance of community engagement in truly interpreting their needs.
Ever wondered how mobility justice could revolutionize city planning and transportation strategy? Get ready to challenge the status quo as we dive into the fascinating world of human-centered transportation systems by reviewing a few recent American Planning Association interviews with Naomi Dorner and Tamika Butler. Dorner, an urban planning expert and transportation strategist, introduces us to the concept of mobility justice, a term that underscores the need for people to move freely without fear or anxiety. But, how can you encapsulate community's needs and wants into raw numbers? Butler illuminates us on the distinction between knowledge and wisdom, emphasizing the importance of community engagement in truly interpreting their needs.
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Stephanie:
You're listening to the Booked On Planning podcast, a project of the Nebraska chapter of the American Planning Association. In each episode we dive into how cities function by talking with authors on housing, transportation and everything in between. Join us as we get Booked On Planning. Welcome back, bookworms, to another episode of Booked On Planning. In this episode, jennifer and I are talking about a short article from the American Planning Association on Mobility Justice from the perspective of transportation strategist Naomi Dorner. We also listened to two podcast episodes from APA, one an interview with Naomi and another with Tamika Butler, who wrote the introduction to Veronica Davis' book Inclusive Transportation, which we covered a couple weeks ago. If you haven't checked out that episode yet, make sure to queue it up in your podcast and listen to that next.
Stephanie:
In reading and listening to these interviews, a very prominent theme emerging around transportation planning is the need to stop thinking about it as transportation and instead think of it as mobility Tamika said in the interview. Quote I would challenge people to really think about our work as mobility work, as justice work, not just transportation work or not just transportation p". The episode with Naomi Dorner is titled Navigating Mobility Justice. Naomi defines mobility justice as the ability to move freely, the ability to self-determine how you want to move, where you want to go, what you want to do and to thrive and to be able to do all that without persecution, without harassment. We have been siloing transportation for so long as to how to move cars instead of how to move people that we have some pretty unjust transportation systems in the US and from my experience, it's been challenging to change the conversation to one not just about transportation but instead founding it on mobility.
Jennifer:
I would agree that it really has been challenging to change the narrative. As I said in the interview with Veronica, I have not spent a lot of time in my career thinking about transportation. I just actively go where I want to go and I don't really think about how I get there, which gets probably a failure for a planner. So I have really enjoyed this month's discussions on mobility and learning how to reframe the conversation.
Jennifer:
Before I worked in municipal government, I walked to developers through land use and environmental regulations to make sure their projects were legally sound and then I left the rest up to the engineers creating the development. And now that I'm having to actually like, reconsider and think about redevelopment work from the city's perspective, it's really shifted mine. I find it actually very frustrating right now to sit in master planning sessions and try to have a full discussion on how people should be able to experience the areas that we are redeveloping. A lot of that quote, unquote experience comes from how they can navigate the area and every time we bring up multimodal options, many of the developers that I've worked with really push back on it and I know that it can increase the bottom line. But, like you said, it's challenging to shift the perspective on mobility and it's a really important part of at least the redevelopment work that we do.
Stephanie:
I'm kind of curious if the next generation of developers because we're starting to see that in other professions of the next generation of engineers that are starting to think more multimodal, that are coming out of college, if there's kind of this next generation of developers too that are going to think more holistically about their developments and make sure they're making those connections.
Jennifer:
I think you might be right there. A lot of the younger developers that come into our office really do come more with a concept of an entire area than the more traditional. Here's a lot. Here's how I would like to redevelop this lot. They do come in more thinking of. I understand where my parcel fits within the scope of a community and how to access it to our really awesome bike trail system. There's probably a little bit of hope for the future, I'd say.
Stephanie:
Yeah. In the article, Naomi describes the untokening, a multicultural collective of leaders of color who share their experiences working in transportation and help communities they identify with to achieve mobility justice. She helped found the organization in 2017 and they created the principle of mobility justice. The website, which is linked in our show notes, is really graphic and it's an interesting way to communicate the principles. The document talks of shifting focus from the modes of transportation to the people using them and their experiences. Tamika echoed this to an extent in the interview when she talked about knowledge versus wisdom. We may think we know the answer based on what we've read and learned, which is our knowledge, but that doesn't mean it functions that way. It takes the wisdom of the people in the community to convey their lived experiences to know the truth. When we start listening to the community is when we start to design mobility networks that are more just.
Jennifer:
I actually really appreciated Naomi's idea of hiring community members as consultants on projects. I understand the logistical problems involved in that, but I think it is something that community should start considering. I know this doesn't have anything to do with transportation per se, but I think it really highlights the point of knowing versus wisdom. When I was a teenager, I was in a motorcycle accident and I broke my leg. It was a pretty difficult break that had to be kept very straight, so I spent a good chunk of my time in a wheelchair with my leg just sticking straight out. This made using public restrooms challenging, because sure, they were designed to be handicap accessible, but in actuality they could not accommodate the need. So after speaking with others, I realized this is a common experience that a lot of architects and design professionals don't think of because their bathrooms meet the specs. It really speaks to the idea of engaging in the community to find out what they really need and doing the work of figuring out if the regulations actually speak back to those needs.
Stephanie:
That reminds me of a project I worked on when I was a consultant and one of my coworkers actually went around with someone in a wheelchair in their downtown district to experience how difficult it was getting up and down the ramps that were supposedly ADA accessible, or even just trying to get into businesses. You might not think one little step is a big deal, but to someone that has some sort of handicap it's a major hurdle, and then that keeps them from being able to access certain places. Being able to really experience those firsthand, I think, makes a big difference in how we design communities Exactly. That also ties into the conversation with Veronica about using our lived experiences and our work to be better planners and more informed.
Stephanie:
Another theme among the interviews was that transportation shouldn't be siloed because it impacts so many more fields.
Stephanie:
How we move impacts where we live, where we work and the economics of our day-to-day lives. Transportation planners can't just focus on how to build roads, but we need to consider where those roads lead to and how they can help build up communities rather than tear them down. At the federal level, mobility justice is part of the framework for projects, but making it more integrated instead of this token engagement at the beginning of projects I think is going to be important. We're doing more of this in our own transportation department, trying to center mobility justice at the heart of our work instead of just a quick engagement checkbox at the beginning. I know we have a ways to go, but I think books like Inclusive Transportation and Hearing from Professionals working in this field day-to-day, like the interviews with Naomi and Tamika, are really helping reshape our approach and that of other cities. The more we embed this work into our own work as government planners, the less we need to find these extra budgets for project-specific public engagement, because we will have already been reaching out and working with communities we serve.
Jennifer:
I find it quite interesting that the call for desiloing is coming from people who have actually straddled different worlds. Veronica, as you heard in our previous episode, is a planner and a traffic engineer, or maybe more accurately, a traffic engineer and a planner. Naomi started as an advocate before moving into municipal government work and specifically chose studying policy over planning, feeling that that would give her a better ability to do the work she was really interested in. Tamika was a lawyer before beginning her work in mobility.
Jennifer:
I think when you have seen the situation from more than one perspective, it helps to overcome that silo effect. As Tamika said in her interview, people come to public input meetings with more than one topic on their mind If they are concerned with housing and the professional in the room responds with I just do traffic or I just do zoning, or I just do plan review or I just do whatever. It really reduces the confidence the public has in the planning process. Tamika even in her interview said someone who walks into a room and says I just do transportation isn't really someone she wants on her team.
Stephanie:
Yeah, I feel like we often forget that to the public, we're all just the city and it doesn't really matter if we're a planner working on a transportation project versus housing.
Stephanie:
Even if we don't know the answer, just letting them know that we'll connect them with the right person, I think, goes a long way. That also ties into the idea of being a translator and navigator, a description that Naomi uses for her own work, which I think is such a big part of what we do as planners, whether we're in the private or the public sector. We start to see real change when we start using our lived experiences to challenge why we do something or why something's happening. We talked a little about this with Veronica in our last interview, because she asks her readers to consider their transportation story and then use that knowledge to understand how it shapes our work and how it can help us relate to the people that we're serving. I think you can also apply this to any sector of planning, not just transportation. I mean, if you're focused on housing, consider where you've lived and how you've moved over the years and how it shaped your housing story, for example. Using life experiences is a really great way to better serve as a translator in our work.
Jennifer:
I really feel what you were saying about. We're all the city. My department can sometimes be one of the first touch departments for people because it's one of the more visible departments. We're often out on the street working through a streetscape plan or something similar. We always have people come up to us in meetings and we're like well, how come you guys at the city are doing this and it ends up that it's something that I have no control over. But you have to face the problem. You have to say I hear you. I will take that to the appropriate person and get an answer for you.
Jennifer:
As I was saying earlier, I thought how Naomi came into planning was actually just really interesting, and I really like how people find planning because I feel like most people from the time they're a little kid, they're not like I want to be an urban planner.
Jennifer:
They take a course in undergrad or something, and so I think that her story was very fascinating and, as I said, she chose public policy over planning and started her career as an advocate, and it seems like that gave her a really interesting insight how to balance the needs of the city when she came into a government position versus the needs of the community the way she said it was. There was always that advocacy tension within her as she moved through the city process. She mentions the need for people on the inside to understand what it takes to really build. I feel like that can be an issue sometimes. If you're just government staff and if that's all you've ever done, then all you've ever seen is the regulatory side of things and if you shift consultant into government or government into consultant, I think that that can really be beneficial because if you are just only ever seeing the regulatory side, it can really create a barrier to creativity and thinking and creative thinking and perspective shifts that if you move between different areas you have a better ability of achieving.
Stephanie:
No, I'd agree, I think because I have that same experience of having gone government sector, private sector back to government sector, and I've talked to other planners who are always quizzing me on what it's like in the private sector because they've only worked in government sector.
Stephanie:
But I also think that the creativity and willingness to think outside the box can come with time and experience.
Stephanie:
Planners that are lifelong learners, picking up new ideas at conferences and trainings with time, can use that, as they become more comfortable in their positions, to start suggesting new ideas that they've seen elsewhere and push new ideas beyond just what's in the regulations today.
Stephanie:
But I think that takes a willingness on the part of the planner to want to continually seek out new information and test out new ideas and grow. One thing that stuck with me after listening to Naomi's interview was when she said if we could actually value communities and the people in those places and create just the kinds of solutions that communities want to see there, we'd have really dynamic approaches that could be applied. We really struggle with this, particularly in the transportation sector with engineers and assistants, that we stick to the MUTCD and other adopted manuals and not build anything the community is asking for unless we have the data to back it up. Naomi challenges this idea of treating people as data points and I agree that we need to move beyond this approach that values data over the lived experiences and stories that the community is relaying to us.
Jennifer:
It is incredibly frustrating. I feel like frustrating has been the theme of this month's episodes. One of the first things we learn as planners for a class it's a requirement in your first or second semester, doesn't seem like other professionals are getting as much exposure to is the value of the qualitative data and valuing that qualitative data the same as quantitative data. Data should just be data. All the perfect modeling in the world doesn't matter if your model creates an uncomfortable or undesirable outcome in actual practice.
Stephanie:
Well, hopefully that's changing, in the field of transportation at least, with new concepts like walk audits and block talks that are bringing the engineers along to experience the qualitative side of engineering a roadway and hearing those first-hand experiences. Well, we hope you enjoyed this article episode on transportation and mobility. As Jennifer and I discussed a few interviews from the American Planning Association podcast, remember to subscribe to the show. Wherever you listen to podcasts, please rate, review and share the show. Thank you for listening and we'll talk to you next time on Booked On Planning. Thank you.