Bicycle City: Riding the Bike Boom to a Brighter Future

May is Bike Month and it timed perfect to interview Dan Piatkowski on his book coming out this month titled "Bicycle City: Riding the Bike Boom to a Brighter Future." Our conversation sheds light on the power of e-bikes as vehicles for sustainable urban transport. We tackle the questions around electric vehicles and their true impact on city design, challenging the prevalent notion that technological advancement alone can solve our environmental issues. We also examine the agility of urban centers during times of crisis, drawing parallels to the rapid changes seen in response to the pandemic and the lessons we can carry forward for climate action. As we wrap up this episode, the notion of 'car light' living steers us toward a vision of cities abundant with walkable streets and bike paths that are inclusive for all. 

Show Notes:

• Further Reading: Dark PR by Grant Ennis,  Autonorama by Peter Norton, Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt; Killed by a Traffic Engineer by Wes Marshall, When Driving is not an Option by Anna Zivarts.
• Further Utopian Reading: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson's work, Cory Doctorow’s work
• To help support the show, pick up a copy of the book through our Amazon Affiliates page at https://amzn.to/3VpKbW8 or even better, get a copy through your local bookstore!
• To view the show transcripts, click on the episode at https://bookedonplanning.buzzsprout.com/

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Transcript

Stephanie Rouse: 0:00

This episode is brought to you by Marvin Planning Consultants. Marvin Planning Consultants, established in 2009, is committed to their clients and professional organizations. Their team of planners has served on chapter division and national committees, including as the Nebraska Chapter President. In addition, they are committed to supporting their chapter in various APA divisions. 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, we talk with author Dan Piatowski on his book Bicycle City Riding the Bike Boom to a Brighter Future. This was top of my must read list this year when I saw the Island Press list of forthcoming books, because it's not only a book about biking, which I love and do for work, but it also was written by a former professor at the University of Nebraska who left to go teach in

Jennifer Hiatt: 1:20

As I mentioned in the episode, I've never learned how to ride a bike. It just really wasn't on my radar as a kid and I've never felt the need as an adult until actually reading Dan's book. One of the reasons, frankly, was that it just wasn't really appealing to me for longer distance to travel and I've always lived like at least five miles from where I work and I know that's not technically a long bike ride, but it felt very long to me. But Dan's description of how easy an e-bike makes a trip, I'm much more open to giving it a try.

Stephanie Rouse: 1:46

Yeah, I think that's a valid excuse of not having learned to ride a bike. Thanks, stephanie. And I was once in the class of riders who felt that an e-bike was cheating and endured some pretty hilly commutes when I lived in Minneapolis and Omaha. But I've since changed my tune, having purchased an e-bike last year, and it really gave me a ton more freedom to ride all the way across the city to my in-laws without really questioning it, or, in the case of my job, moving our trail counters around via bike rather than driving them to each spot, which really felt kind of odd driving counters around that are counting bikes. So I feel much better about riding around the trails and it's a ton easier to do it by bike.

Jennifer Hiatt: 2:28

That's really fair. I also really appreciated Dan pointing out how much greenwashing is occurring in the electric vehicle space. I was of the opinion of like, oh, my next car I'll just get an electric vehicle and totally save the planet. I obviously understood the automotive industry as it currently is, it's unsustainable. But electric vehicles have kind of been presented to us as the end-all, be-all for sustainable transportation and such a primary message in society that I really hadn't stopped to think through how it's just the same song and a different tune and not really solving our transportation problems.

Stephanie Rouse: 3:01

Yeah, and Dan pointed out one of his book recommendations gets to this point of marketing and greenwashing and how society really glosses over the real impacts on some of these things like electric vehicles Exactly. It's really frustrating seeing all the federal funding that's being devoted to EV infrastructure and tax credits going to electrification. But a much cheaper program would just be to offer rebates for electric bikes. But it's been shot down time and again, despite advocacy efforts around them.

Jennifer Hiatt: 3:31

Which really doesn't make sense when we're facing such an uncertain climate. Future, exactly Without further ado, let's get into our conversation with Dan Piotrowski on his book Bicycle City riding the bike boom to a brighter future on his book Bicycle City Riding the Bike Boom to a Brighter Future.

Stephanie Rouse: 3:51

Well, dan, thank you for joining us on Booked On Planning to talk about your hot off the press book, bicycle City Riding the Bike Boom to a Brighter Future. Our audience knows that Jennifer and I are recording from Lincoln, nebraska, where you spent several years as a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and I was happy to see that we made it into the book. They also know that I'm a multimodal transportation planner for the city, so the book was really top of my list. When I saw Island Press send out the list of their books this year, it was definitely one that was going to make the cut for this year's episodes.

Stephanie Rouse: 4:18

It was kind of strange reading through about Lincoln as this positive example of a mid-sized bicycle city, because most days I feel like I'm really fighting an uphill battle about getting bike lanes built. What we're really doing well, though and you point this out in the book is that we're very much a recreational riding community. We have a great trail system and a gravel riding community that you highlight. How can cities like us take a strength like that and turn it into more support for everyday biking?

Dan Piatkowski: 4:48

So I guess, first off, thank you for having me on the podcast. It's really cool to be here. The reason that I included Lincoln in the book is because Lincoln really has all the ingredients of what can be a really fantastic bicycle city. I agree with you in the sense that it's kind of like I had this frustration when I was living there, of all the things are almost there, everything's simmering and there just needs to be kind of a boiling point or something. But that's also not to say that there aren't great things happening, and so another reason I wanted to include Lincoln and to have a conversation about the cities that we don't normally think about when we talk about bicycling is because, even though Lincoln isn't like the Amsterdam of Nebraska or whatever I don't know what it would be Great things are happening, and great things are happening in lots of places, and I think a lot of the times it kind of doesn't break through into the kind of the larger conversation that can be really disheartening when you're working in places that are not really well known, and it shouldn't be. You know, we should be trying to celebrate even the small victories. I don't mean to diminish what's happening in Lincoln, because these are not small victories. There's really huge, massive, cool things happening in Lincoln and, as you point out, yes, they are primarily in the recreational riding universe, which is a great start, and it's more than a great start, it's a great thing on its own, in its own right. You know, the fact that people are traveling to Lincoln to cycle there and to do competitive events there is incredible, it's huge, and I think that that in itself is a really powerful factor in transitioning from a place that's great for recreational riding to a place that's great for riding in general.

Dan Piatkowski: 6:35

Is that wider attention, that wider interest, but also that wider recognition of the real benefits of these types of activities beyond the benefits just for those who are directly involved in them.

Dan Piatkowski: 6:49

I think Lincoln is absolutely starting to see that.

Dan Piatkowski: 6:51

Hopefully, it's one of many things that are really pushing the ball forward in Lincoln and places like Lincoln. I keep referring specifically to Lincoln, but this is something that I think is happening all over the Midwest, with gravel cycling in particular. I think the next steps to really move from the kind of the recreational, focused sphere of things into the wider public conscience and to make Lincoln much more bike friendly is, of course, continuing to demonstrate the benefits of these activities and of these events to the wider community, getting more people involved, because that means it's more people who are thinking about hey, I can go out and ride on gravel all weekend long, but it's still impossible for me to safely ride to work. That's a problem that I want to take to my city council, that I want to take to my local leaders and demand change about. And then I think the demanding change component is where I think the advocacy world and the people who are involved in recreational riding can try to branch out and build broader coalitions with other groups whose goals really do align and overlap.

Jennifer Hiatt: 7:57

So as much as our audience knows that Stephanie is the active transportation person who cycles everywhere, they equally know that I actually don't know how to ride a bike.

Jennifer Hiatt: 8:05

I grew up 12 miles from anywhere on gravel and just never really seemed like something I needed to do. But I told Stephanie this weekend on our way back from the APA conference after reading your book. I was like, okay, I'll learn how to ride a bike because it kind of seems cool. I'm kind of excited to like learn to navigate a city in a different way. So if anybody was on the fence, pick up the book and you'll be convinced to ride your bike too. But one of the ideas that jumped out at me when I was reading through, as a non-cyclist, I picked up on the greenwashing of the auto industry that you discuss through the idea of electric vehicles being the green savior for climate change and such. So can you discuss what exactly that looks like and why the EVs aren't the environmental savior that they're portrayed to be, and how actually e-bikes probably are better overall for our environmental concerns?

Dan Piatkowski: 8:55

Yeah, it's like endlessly frustrating to me that EV cars are getting all of the attention and I know I'm not the only one. For the book I talked to lots of people who are advocates and professionals working in active transportation and working to advocate for cycling, and it's so frustrating that EV cars are just they're sucking up all the oxygen. There's no good reason for it because, yeah, as you say, it's all greenwashing. But it's really effective greenwashing, and that's the problem. And it's really effective because it's offering us an easy solution to a complicated issue. You know, ev cars are great in the sense that I'm worried about how my lifestyle impacts the climate, but it's hard to change my lifestyle. Oh, if I just swap out to the next model year car that has a different engine, then everything is better. That's really easy to sell to people to literally sell to people but it's so problematic because it's ignoring all of the larger impacts of autodependence. So an EV car is better than a traditional combustion engine car because of the tailpipe emissions the emissions that are coming out of the tailpipe as you drive that car. There's zero with an EV car, obviously. So that's great, but it ignores all of the broader impacts of the car on our society and all the broader negative impacts, I should say, of the car in our society.

Dan Piatkowski: 10:16

So there's the climate impacts, but there's also health impacts and equity impacts of us relying on cars, and all of that is not the fact of the car itself. It's the fact of designing cities around cars and so having sprawling cities that act as heat islands. Spending all of our money on expensive infrastructure that also has a carbon footprint, forcing ourselves to drive everywhere means that we're not getting exercise and daily activity. To drive everywhere means that we're not getting exercise and daily activity, so these big, much more important impacts are all ignored in kind of the EV greenwashing. I think.

Dan Piatkowski: 10:53

The other piece of that, though, is that, in a political sense, it's also really easy to sell electric vehicles. It's easy for politicians to sell big infrastructure projects, to sell big plans, to sell ribbon cuttings and all that kind of stuff. It's not quite as easy to do that with electric bikes, for example. Oh yeah, the other real problem with electric vehicles that I don't think we're talking enough about is they're really heavy, and that means they're really dangerous when they hit people. It also means that they tear up our roads and they really increase the particulate matter in our cities a lot. So sorry, that was another piece.

Jennifer Hiatt: 11:25

Previously, my thought process was okay, well, when I get my new car which won't be for a while, but I'll just get an electric vehicle, like I'll feel better about it we're getting charging stations throughout rural Nebraska so I'll be able to drive home and charge my car and all of that. And then when you were talking about you know just the weight of the battery and about you know just the weight of the battery, and I've been in a pretty bad car accident. I was hit by a car and then I couldn't stop thinking about like, oh God, what if that car weighed so much more than it already does? And so that was actually what convinced me, that point. So it's not a small point that you're making there.

Dan Piatkowski: 11:58

Yeah, I hope that more people talk about it. It's really terrifying, especially when we talk about impacts for vulnerable road users, you know, for kids and for older people, like this is. I think it's really scary stuff. But yeah, and then, on the other hand, it's like e-bikes, which are a fraction of the price, a fraction of the climate impacts to produce, because, of course, they do still have batteries, but they're much smaller. But you know, an e-bike allows us to get away from some of that auto-oriented built environment, to take some of that space that we would have for parking and for driving and for extra lanes and utilize it in much better, more interesting, more dynamic and more productive ways that also help us fight things like climate change.

Stephanie Rouse: 13:10

Yeah, the cost piece of that always gets me, because we at a city level are really investing into EVs and we did an EV readiness plan and reduce the amount of vehicles on the road, but we're instead focusing on the really high dollar EV vehicles instead that are becoming more of an equity issue too. I mean, a $3,000 e-bike is still not a super affordable means of transportation, but when you compare it to a $30,000 or $40,000 or $50,000 vehicle, it's way more affordable to get around the community and Lincoln's really pretty flat until you get to the edges of town. I think a better program to invest in.

Dan Piatkowski: 13:29

I totally agree. And you have a question later on about this, about sort of finding money to pay for bike projects and it's like man, we are just throwing so much money at things that are just yeah, it's just such wishful thinking. So Peter Norton's book Autonorama he talks a lot about this techno-utopianism in transportation and always being sold on the next big technology that's going to fix all of our problems. And I definitely would recommend that your listeners check that book out, if they haven't already, because it gets at a lot of the history of these things and how it's been kind of a consistent narrative in transportation that we really have a lot of the answers in front of us and you know it doesn't take a PhD to know why a lot of people don't ride a bike in a lot of places in the US. You know, but somehow we still are kind of taken in by these false narratives of technology saving us.

Stephanie Rouse: 14:17

Yeah, such a simple solution that's been around for hundreds of years.

Dan Piatkowski: 14:21

Yeah, absolutely.

Stephanie Rouse: 14:23

So you discussed this idea of latent demand in the world of bicycling, evidence by the pandemic bike boom, and we definitely saw this here in Lincoln, where our trails saw crazy increases in writing in 2020, 2021. But then we also kind of returned to somewhat of a business as usual after that. The last couple of years we've seen fairly similar rates on our trail system as we did before the boom. How can we still use this previous bike boom during the pandemic to communicate to our elected officials that the demand really is there?

Dan Piatkowski: 14:53

Yeah, it's such a good question because it's really disheartening to see how many places have so easily reverted to old habits.

Dan Piatkowski: 15:02

That evidence is still there.

Dan Piatkowski: 15:04

Of course, it's always getting older, but it's there.

Dan Piatkowski: 15:07

It just needs the right, I think, the right audience to hear it. The other thing that might help elected officials put it together and put together the reasons why it matters so much is that people, I think, based on the experience of those who were able to ride more during the pandemic, the experience of those who were able to work remotely, the experience of those who were able to not spend an hour of their day or more commuting back and forth in the morning and the afternoon, that was a really powerful experience and a motivator, I think, to make people think about how their communities can work very differently and how their daily lives can work very differently, very differently, and how their daily lives can work very differently. I think it's kind of a motivator to convince elected officials to invest more in the local community and neighborhood amenities. It still always requires a champion more realistically, champions to get elected officials to hear these things, and I guess that's the hard thing about data is people can always ignore it in favor of wishful thinking.

Jennifer Hiatt: 16:03

In the US we design our transportation systems to move as many cars as possible, as quickly as possible. I was even sitting in a meeting one time where a traffic engineer used the term. We have some cars leaving the road instead of we have people driving off of the road or wrecking or whatever. We know in this conversation that that's a crazy way to design for safety, but we have to convince other people that it's a crazy way to design for safety. So how can a systems approach you discuss in the book solve our road safety problem?

Dan Piatkowski: 16:33

Yeah, yeah, it's amazing to me the ways in which we are just okay with the system as it is. I'm not a safety expert, but I included it in the book because it obviously is meaningful with any transportation discussion, walking and bicycling and safety. When it comes to walking and bicycling, and in doing that research, one of the things that I found out was well, that I guess I didn't find out but really started to understand is, when we talk about safety in the US, or when we talk about addressing safety in the US, we use an individual perspective where we say, okay, this person was driving drunk, this person was not paying attention and that's what caused this crash that maybe killed people or whatever. We don't stop and think like, what's the system that allowed all this to happen? You know, our only mechanism for addressing those sorts of things is to try to punish people after the fact and use that punishment as sort of a like a fear-based motivator right To switch to the kind of a systems-based approach to how do we deal with traffic safety. That could be things like you know, how do we make sure that crashes don't happen to begin with? How do we make sure that, even if crashes happen, they're at such low speeds that the problems from them are going to be so minimal. And that's something that the Vision Zero approach is really good at and really good at articulating, and a lot of that has to do with, obviously, lowering speeds in our cities not just in our cities, but everywhere. It also means making more dynamic environments. You know, there's this interesting effect where when you're driving through an area and the less safe it feels, the safer it actually is.

Dan Piatkowski: 18:19

A journalist named Tom Vanderbilt wrote a great book called Traffic. I think it was probably about 10 years ago, and he talked about how Sweden changed from driving on the left side of the road to driving on the right side of the road to come in line with the rest of Europe and this was in the 60s or 70s and how, rather than that causing tons of accidents and crashes, there was actually a massive drop in crashes directly after they changed from one side of the road to the other, and that crash rate didn't go back up to normal until. It took like a year or something to get to that point. And that's because everybody was paying attention, everybody was a little on edge, everybody was a little focused, a little more focused, and so I think that that's always a helpful story for me when it comes to talking to people about safety. It's also a good argument for slower streets, but also for multimodal streets. The more people and the more things going on and the slower the speeds of everybody, the safer an environment is going to be.

Stephanie Rouse: 19:13

I'd heard that story before and I was trying to remember where, and I think a similar. The chaos is what makes people drive better was in Chuck Marone's book, talking about immigrant population that just doesn't obey traffic laws and would just kind of cross the street on reds, and everyone got used to that, and so they just slowed down, paid more attention and drove better as a result, whereas here, yeah, our approach is we know people are going to be bad drivers, so let's do everything we can to make it easier for them to drive faster and account for things. I hate the term fixed hazard objects. When we talk about a tree, it drives me nuts. So it is encouraging, though, that there's so much federal funding out there for Vision Zero plans and communities. I think there's like five or six that got awarded just in Nebraska alone, so a lot of communities are going to be switching over to this safe systems approach, and hopefully it'll actually be implemented in our work across the nation too.

Dan Piatkowski: 20:09

Yeah, that's something that is even you know just in the course of the last year or whatever, that I've been working on this book. It's amazing to see the progress in Vision Zero and also just a lot of great books. It's hard to keep track of all the fantastic safety books that have just come out, and I think everybody's understanding of why our roads are so dangerous has just really increased dramatically.

Stephanie Rouse: 20:33

So the pandemic showed us that we can change really fast when we need to. And climate change, while it's becoming more front of mind and a lot of communities are really focusing on how we address it, it feels so slow compared to the rapid changes that we made during the pandemic. How can we get cities to change just as quickly when there isn't this looming public health crisis?

Dan Piatkowski: 20:56

Yeah, I mean the short answer is we got to stand up and shout really loud, right? I wrote the book because I wasn't really sure if cities could change quickly and in the course of my research I convinced myself that yes, given the right circumstances and the political will, places can change. But addressing that political will component is certainly, you know, the million dollar question. I guess for each one of these questions I'm going to probably plug a different book, it seems like, because I just realized well, it's booked on planning.

Jennifer Hiatt: 21:28

I think that's totally fine.

Dan Piatkowski: 21:30

Okay, awesome.

Dan Piatkowski: 21:31

So your listeners should definitely check out dark PR by a guy named Grant Ennis, and you know he talks about the ways in which public relations campaigns have kept us from, or distracted us from really changing things like road safety or addressing climate change and things like that.

Dan Piatkowski: 21:48

And one of the things that he talks about at the end of his book is that nothing affects change the way that effective organizing and, you know, effective advocacy does, and that's how to go about it. The difficult thing is, obviously, how do you get a lot of people who have busy lives and have lots of things to do all the time to organize, to make change and to affect something that, while it is an existential crisis, it's also something that on a day-to-day level you can kind of ignore. But I think that in the last couple of years especially, it's becoming a lot harder to ignore that and increasingly, especially in agricultural state, climate change is so real it's affecting bottom lines like a lot of people in a lot of places never thought it would. So I think that you know the will is there. I think it needs to be channeled.

Jennifer Hiatt: 22:39

Not really transportation related, but I always found it very fascinating how quickly Nebraska's stance on global warming technically first before climate change rate shifted really quickly as soon as the farmers stepped in and were like no, no, listen, we actually have some problems. Our growing seasons are changing, we're getting wetter in the spring and drier in the fall and we need to try and shift that. I'm not saying that we're a progressive state on this by any means, but it wasn't until farmers out in western part of the state were like no, we've got issues out here that any of our state representatives started listening to us. So listen to the farmers.

Dan Piatkowski: 23:12

Yeah, no, I totally agree. So, first off, I guess I use global warming and climate change interchangeably sometimes. Sometimes I actually like global warming. I feel like it sounds more serious and impactful. You know, I've always lived in blue islands and red states, kind of been where I've lived and where I've worked for most of my career before moving to Norway, and I was always struck, and still always struck, by how much overlap there is in what I think about and what I think about when it comes to good urbanism and what so many people in rural areas think about. Both of us hate the suburbs, both of us hate sprawling developments that become terrible uses of our land and of our natural resources and all of these things. So I mean, that's another way in which there's just there's a lot of overlap that I think gets lost sometimes.

Jennifer Hiatt: 23:57

I agree the urban-rural divide shouldn't be as wide as people perceive it to be. I worked in small towns before coming to Lincoln, so I feel that very deeply. To build off of Stephanie's pandemic question, do you know how all the quick changes from the pandemic were funded and if that type of funding is still available? Because Stephanie and I bump up against this question with all of our projects. Kind of the split is that she sort of designs and thinks those things and then I'm on the funding side of it. So I'm always trying to figure out how we can use our incentive based tools and we do use those tools as best that we can. But there just doesn't seem to be money available for this type of development and very few of our developers are that kind of forward thinking that they're willing to invest in it. So how can a city try and finance this kind of infrastructure?

Dan Piatkowski: 24:45

I have no idea honestly, you know, mostly because I haven't worked in in that side of planning, you know, and the financial side and all of that is just. It's something that I didn't understand well when I lived in the US and it's something that I'm like purposely trying to forget because I found it so infinitely frustrating now that I don't live there. But, that said, it's always so insane to me how we can always somehow find money for terrible, backwards, useless road projects and for street widening projects and for parking lots forever, but we can't find the minuscule percentage of that money that could be used for bike and ped infrastructure. So it's just sort of this colossally infuriating thing. To use Lincoln as an example, the South Beltway Loop that money came from somewhere.

Dan Piatkowski: 25:39

Obviously its route to funding a highway project was pretty circuitous and it's kind of hard to bring back to the local community. But that's part of the problem with transportation funding in general is it kind of gets lost in this federal washing machine. And then there's these state and local issues. When the reality is, when it comes to paying for your buck, investing in bike ped projects is always a better investment. I'm not answering your question, but I think I'm more just ranting.

Stephanie Rouse: 26:06

And I'll rant along with you. It is so funny because I'll get back from like a conference or something. I'm like, oh, we could use highway safety funds to do some of this pedestrian bicycle infrastructure. And then I'm told that, oh no, we're already doing that for this other roadway safety project for cars. And then at the federal level you have grant funding coming out very minimally. But then there's finally one that's focused on active transportation, the active transportation infrastructure investment program. But they set this minimum of $15 million projects. I'm like that doesn't help these smaller communities like us out. How are we going to come up with a $3 million match? And the amount that they have set aside is like we maybe get two or three communities help. So it's very frustrating that there's all this money out there for road projects and electric vehicles and we can't even get an e-bike federal program set up.

Jennifer Hiatt: 26:58

And very importantly, in Lincoln, you're one bypass behind. We've moved on to the West bypass now.

Dan Piatkowski: 27:04

Oh, of course.

Jennifer Hiatt: 27:05

Of course.

Dan Piatkowski: 27:08

Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, it's like for non-transportation people. The types of amounts of money that we're throwing around sound crazy. But yeah, it's like you can do so much when it comes to bike ped projects for a couple hundred thousand dollars, but you can't even get started on road projects for that amount of money, and it's just, it's wild.

Jennifer Hiatt: 27:26

We were just talking about one small road here in Lincoln, some developments happening and it's driven by state requirements, city requirements and then private infrastructure and we all gathered up together in a room to talk about. You know, okay, what do we need here? We didn't even include a trails person at this point. It's so far to the north. What was the point and the number that we came up with for just a few miles of road and an intersection was that we were going to need almost $100 million of infrastructure for turn lanes and $100 million for an intersection and a few miles of road.

Dan Piatkowski: 28:04

Yeah.

Jennifer Hiatt: 28:04

Why.

Dan Piatkowski: 28:06

You know, and so, in contrast, you were just in Minneapolis for APA, and so so long ago at this point, over a decade ago, when I was working on my PhD, I was studying the non-motorized transportation pilot program, and that gave four communities in the US $25 million each, and Minneapolis was one of those communities, and they were given $25 million to invest in bike ped projects however they saw fit, and they invested really heavily in a public works department that had bike ped people embedded within that department, and in so doing, they really what was a huge amount of money still is a huge amount of money for bike ped projects, but it's nothing when it comes to other types of projects really set the Twin Cities on the path to now leading the nation not that many years later in terms of bicycle friendliness, and so, yeah, it's crazy what even small amounts of money can do for cities.

Stephanie Rouse: 29:00

Yeah, and I think some of the issue with us not being able to get the programs and the funding at federal, state, local levels for bike infrastructure is because we have such a car dominated culture in the US that is, let's build things quickly, cheaply, move cars as fast as possible, and the approach embedded in the transportation planning field ignores that people need and want choices, and how we choose to travel is more complex than let's just get in a car and get there. How do we rid our profession of such an entrenched idea that designing for cars and moving cars quickly is the only way to go?

Dan Piatkowski: 29:36

It's something that you know. On the one hand, it definitely depends on incentives. You know, historically speaking, the incentives for how we design and plan transportation have always been based around speed, and you know the utility of getting to places quickly so that you can engage in, you know, economically important and useful activities you know. So part of it, I think, is there's a systems aspect that we need to talk about how to change the way that we measure the success or failure of given projects. But the other thing about it that I think in a much bigger picture is, like you know, I'm certainly not the first person to make this point, but it's so silly how everybody goes on vacation to walkable places.

Dan Piatkowski: 30:18

Actually, I think it was in the Walter White documentary that was done in like the 1960s or something about public spaces, where he mentions about how people go to places like Disneyland to experience a walkable place where you can actually stop and stand and spend time in and it's nice. Everybody spends thousands of dollars to go on these vacations and nobody ever thinks that, hey, we could just do that in our own cities and towns. Squaring that circle is always something that I'm shocked doesn't get more attention.

Jennifer Hiatt: 30:51

Shameless plug on our behalf, but you could 100% learn about William White and his American urbanist by listening to our February podcast.

Dan Piatkowski: 31:00

That's great.

Jennifer Hiatt: 31:01

You make the point in the book that it's not just the planning profession actually that needs to be rid of such ideas. Car culture has permeated every area of our political system as well, and car lobbyists are pushing out every other voice, especially in the new infrastructure and climate bills this year and I was very disappointed to see the act of transportation really didn't make it into the infrastructure bill. How can we as planners, but just generally also as public, make sure that lawmakers are hearing every perspective in this conversation, from top to bottom, federal to local?

Dan Piatkowski: 31:36

Yeah, so I was also. Really I continue to be depressed by the challenges to get things like e-bike incentives through. But yeah, I think, to make sure that lawmakers hear us, you've got to be louder, and that's unfortunately the reality there. But yeah, it's also. It's really difficult. We're at a time where it's really hard to be heard over the voice of all of these things, and especially the car lobby right now.

Dan Piatkowski: 31:59

But it's funny to be heard over the voice of all of these things, and especially the car lobby right now. But it's funny, you know. I mean I did a presentation a couple weeks ago and I just started putting together, looking around on the internet, to put together this list of car makers who are now making e-bikes and through like all sorts of Reddit posts and everything else, it's 15 or 20 different car makers are now making e-bikes and some of them are actually making real ones. Others are making gimmicky ones. But I think that obviously the auto industry is nervous and they should be looking at e-bike sales they really should be and so I think that again, it's like all the ingredients are there. There needs to be this final push to get things to be heard.

Stephanie Rouse: 32:38

While it is Bicycle City, a major focus of the book isn't necessarily just how to make's ability to drive, but just making it a smaller emphasis in our cities, which to some is still the end of the world, but for a lot of people, car light is a better term. Have you seen this way of approaching the conversation received by the public?

Dan Piatkowski: 33:16

Can you all tell me what the response is after this podcast goes up?

Dan Piatkowski: 33:20

What the response is after this podcast goes up? Yeah, it's. I haven't tested this term out, you know, as you say, it's super like agro car people get riled up at anything, you know, and there's no calming them and there's no room for a rational conversation there. But the reason that I like the term car light and I've started using it is because it's just realistic. You know. It's accurate. It's an honest description of what the goals that I'm advocating for include. I like car light as a term because it's more options. It's about better, more prosperous places. It's not about taking something away from people. That's not realistic.

Dan Piatkowski: 34:02

I recognize that cars are useful, valuable transportation tools that we've just overutilized and relied upon a little bit more than a little bit too much for quite some time, but there's no reason to just throw them away completely.

Dan Piatkowski: 34:15

You know it's like it's the argument of I can love cars but also hate traffic and do things to address traffic, and so I think that's the root of that car light terminology. The other thing, though, about it is trying to bridge some of the divides that I think are starting to spring up between people who are advocating for walkable and bicycle places and people who, maybe because of disability or other reasons, are not able to take full advantage of places that are car-free, and so I want to make sure that you know car light, I think, means getting rid of the excess cars and maintaining them for those who need them and for the purposes that they're useful and important. So I think that that's another important issue that I think gets ignored a lot, and you know I mean I hope that you have a whole other podcast about ableism and active transportation, because that's such a huge issue as well, and I can recommend a book for that. It's either just come out or will is about to come out is Anna Zivart's book when driving is not an option.

Jennifer Hiatt: 35:13

So we have discussed many amazing books throughout this entire episode, but our final question always is because this is book on planning what books would you recommend others check out?

Dan Piatkowski: 35:24

So this is probably the question that I've spent the most time with. You know, it's like asking, asking somebody for a mixtape or something. You know I'm such a nerd and so I read a lot, so from the interview to this point I mentioned Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt. There is West Marshall's, killed by a Traffic Engineer, dark PR by Grant Ennis, peter Norton's Autonorama, anna Zivart's, when Driving is Not an Option. Those are all the kind of the planning specific or the sort of related to the planning sphere.

Dan Piatkowski: 35:53

But I always have really been into science fiction and well, one of the motivators for the book was what would be called a critical utopian literature, and that's literature that grapples with how to make better futures, rather than dystopian literature and dystopian science fiction, which I think gets all the all the attention in the popular press. But critical utopian literature in some ways it starts and ends with, like the incredible Ursula Le Guin and the dispossessed. But also read William Gibson's work, any of it, all of it, it's all great. And for a more recent person doing critical utopian literature, check out Cory Doctorow.

Jennifer Hiatt: 36:32

So I have been waiting for three seasons for someone to bring up fiction as well as nonfiction. When we ask this question, I just think that it's so important. Planning exists in so many fiction novels and nobody has brought it up. Thank you, yay.

Dan Piatkowski: 36:50

I'm so glad I could because, yeah, you know, long before I cared at all about bicycles, I cared about cities. And I cared about cities because I read about them in books. And so, you know, before I knew what being a planner was, I was reading books as a kid. And so, you know, before I knew what being a planner was, I was reading books as a kid. So, yeah, I'm so glad that this became part of the podcast.

Jennifer Hiatt: 37:07

I agree. I grew up in a village in the middle of Nebraska with 400 people, and our big trips were maybe to Denver or Lincoln. We never went to Omaha, and so the only way I got to experience city life is through reading about it.

Dan Piatkowski: 37:24

Yeah, as a kid who grew up in the suburbs of Phoenix, that was the way that I was able to escape that pretty monotonous environment. So I'm with you.

Stephanie Rouse: 37:33

Well, I don't want to take up too much more of your time because you're about to start your weekend, as Jennifer and I are just getting going on our Friday, but really appreciate you talking with us about your book and excited to see Island Press's publishing of it. It should be coming out next month. When does the book get released?

Dan Piatkowski: 37:52

Yes, it comes out the end of May.

Stephanie Rouse: 37:55

Perfect time to wrap up Bike Month. Thank you so much for talking with us today.

Dan Piatkowski: 38:00

Yeah, thank you both. Great to be here. You so much for talking with us today.

Jennifer Hiatt: 38:03

Yeah, thank you both. Great to be here. We hope you enjoyed this conversation with author Dan Piotrowski on his book Bicycle City Riding the Bike Boom to a Brighter Future. You can get your own copy through the publisher at islandpressorg and check out the other great titles we've covered while you're there, or go ahead and click the link in the show notes. That will take you directly to our affiliate page. Remember to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts and 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.