Booked on Planning
Booked on Planning
Reclaiming the Road
What if the biggest public space in your city isn’t a park—it’s the street right outside your door? We sit down with author and planner‑geographer David Prytherch to rethink roads as social infrastructure and unpack why “complete streets” is only the starting line. From the rapid legal and engineering turn that handed streets to cars a century ago to the community‑led experiments that reclaimed asphalt during the pandemic, this conversation traces the power dynamics that shape everyday mobility—and how to change them.
We dig into mobility justice in plain language: not just bikes versus cars, but who feels safe, who gets heard, and where public money actually lands. David lays out how pop‑ups, parklets, and open streets create a cognitive shift that policy can lock in, and why “messy shared space” often calms traffic better than paint and signs. You’ll hear practical, scalable ideas—default speed humps, daylighted intersections, neighborhood greenways, curb‑level plazas—and a frank look at bottom‑up versus top‑down delivery. Boston’s standardized traffic calming and Queens’ 34th Avenue transformation show two paths to lasting change, each grounded in data, culture, and community stewardship.
If you care about safer streets, small business vitality, public health, or equitable access, this episode offers a toolkit and a mindset. We share a reading list—from Peter Norton’s Fighting Traffic to Mimi Sheller’s Mobility Justice—and outline how cities can move from car hegemony to people‑first design without breaking budgets. Enjoyed the conversation? Subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with a friend or colleague who plans, pedals, or simply walks their city.
Show Notes:
- Further Reading:
- Fighting Traffic: the Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City by Peter Norton
- Mobility Justice: the Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes by Mimi Sheller
- Justice in the Interstates: The Racist Truth about Urban Highways by Ryan Reft, Amanda Phillips de Lucas, Rebecca Retzlaff
- Cyclescapes of the Uneven City: Bicycle Infrastructure and Uneven Development by John G. Stehlin
- Law, Engineering, and The American Right-of-Way by David Prytherch (free download here).
- To view the show transcripts, click on the episode at https://bookedonplanning.buzzsprout.com/
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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 David Prytherch on his book Reclaiming the Road: Mobility Justice Beyond Complete Streets. I think this is maybe rounding out our transportation series. If you've been listening to the last few episodes, we've hit quite a bit on parking and other transportation-related books. But this is kind of taking the concept of complete streets and pushing it a little bit further. The author isn't just making the case about mobility and providing mobility for all road users, but also taking kind of this justice perspective and ensuring there's equity baked into our complete streets approach.
Jennifer Hiatt:And what a way to end our transportation series, honestly. I was really impressed with the fact that David was able to pull almost all of the history of transportation into the first chapter of his book. You know, we've been reading a lot of transportation books lately, and that history's kind of been pocketed. But then when he pulled it all together and it was really able to see from start to finish how the transportation industry has shaped America, it was pretty interesting.
Stephanie Rouse:Yeah, you mentioned how he really relied heavily on Peter Norton's book, Fighting Traffic, which I went back and looked, and it's it's an older book. I think it was published in the 90s and somehow has kind of slipped through the cracks of books that I've read. It's uh one of his many recommended readings that I'll have to go back to and check out.
Jennifer Hiatt:Yeah, I was also surprised by the fact that a book from the 90s was still so very relevant to today's transportation theories, you'd think we'd maybe have updated some stuff by now. Haven't evolved too much. Let's get into our conversation with author David Perchert on his book, Reclaiming the Road, Mobility Justice Beyond Complete Streets.
Stephanie Rouse:David, thank you for joining us on Booked on Planning to talk about your book, Reclaiming the Road: Mobility Justice Beyond Complete Streets.
David Prytherch:Thank you so much. It's so nice to be here, Stephanie and Jennifer.
Stephanie Rouse:So Beyond Complete Streets is advocating for streets as social infrastructure. What changes would make our streets supportive of this type of interaction in addition to spaces that support equitable mobility?
David Prytherch:So I am a geographer and a planner, and both geographers and planners think a lot about spaces. We do tend to focus on physical infrastructure. That's often a tool that we're focused on, but ultimately we're trying to build better places. And the street has been engineered. I don't know, in many planners, cities, that the people who are really control of the city may not be the planners, maybe transportation engineers who have engineered the street as infrastructure. But those of us who are geographers and planners and social scientists or community members know the street is a social space. So, you know, my book tries to explore that in some depth. At one level, like you say, it's about the idea that even mobility, there's a lot of diversity in mobility. There are diverse people getting around the city in diverse ways. And so at least being accommodating of different modes of transportation, and that's the philosophy that underlies the complete streets movement and the complete streets policies. But beyond that, you know, that still buys into the idea that we are our modes. But we are more than just our modes. We're people and we relate to each other in public space. At one level, it's just about traffic, like not trying to bang into each other, but we converse with people and we we make friends and we form relationships. And ultimately our communities, streets are literally at the center of our communities. We don't often see them that way. And often they're designed, to be honest, more effectively as barriers to community. If you think of our some of our strodes and how the road provides transportation but divides people in places, to think about a street as social infrastructure means thinking about the social connections. And I could go on with this because at one level it's it's really interesting. It's about sharing public space, because the street is a public space. But you know, what I've learned is when people become engaged in the street, they start to form connections with each other. If you've ever been involved in a planning process to help envision or redesign a street, the product of that process is maybe a redesign of a street, but the process itself builds a new community of people, maybe a new consensus about what the street is and what the community is about. So I think viewing streets through that broader lens just opens us up to what we already know, which is streets are social spaces. Yeah, they're infrastructure, but they're not just infrastructure.
Jennifer Hiatt:We actually had a call workshop yesterday and we were talking about Lincoln's infrastructure, and 40% of our downtown area is public right-of-way, and the majority of that public right-of-way is impact streets. So you think about almost half of the land mass of our downtown is taken up by what we're considering right now infrastructure instead of social area. That's a lot of space.
David Prytherch:And if you walk through a town or you look at any city from Google Earth, you start to realize how impoverished a use of space that can be. You know, many of our streets, and I don't know, Lincoln, but many of our streets are way overdesigned. We allocate way more space than is necessary. And we're just kind of used to that, seeing six-lane boulevards that are mostly empty much of the time. But if you start thinking about their potential, you know, it's not very satisfying the way we've been using all of that hyper valuable space. And one of the other statistics that's really interesting is that, but a lot of cities have concluded that when they add up all the land that a municipality is managing, you know, the parks and the sewage treatment plants, that the public right away might be 80% in many cities of the land that the city owns. I think what a lot of cities have concluded is maybe there's a better way to use all of this space for a broader range of uses, you know, especially when that that space is kind of underutilized, a lot of parking that sits vacant.
Jennifer Hiatt:Can you start the book with an excellent overview of the history of the street? I think maybe the most complete history of the street that I have seen in one book. So I really appreciate it. What are some of the historical uses of streets that we have lost as our streets have become in fact conduits for cars?
David Prytherch:Well, this is where I have to acknowledge and tip my hat to some of the people who have kind of helped me understand that. And Peter Norton is a historian. But his book, Fighting Traffic, here's the bottom line. For 99.99% of history, our streets were multi-purpose public spaces. Yes, they were devoted to transportation as a primary use. I think we understood that that's what streets were for, were for circulation. But up until about 100 years ago, it was always assumed that that circulation was balanced against other things. A, that there were different forms of circulation, that you could walk along the street, you could walk across the street, but you could also stop and talk to someone in the street. You could operate a pushcart at the margins and sell vegetables that kids could play. And there were certain norms around that public space. And again, this is where I have to acknowledge Peter Norton because he is the one who kind of opened my eyes to this, that the idea of a street that's just devoted to vehicular traffic is a really recent invention. We in the 21st century think 100 years ago sounds like a really, really, really long time ago, but it's not. And so it was really a hundred years ago, and his book is wonderful for summarizing that incredibly violent history. Because what happened is that drivers, you know, we had had this system, and yeah, there were streetcars, and streetcars ran over people and horses, carts. It was a dangerous space, and there was it was a shared space of bodies in motion. And that's always a little bit dangerous, and there were norms and around that. But it was the flood of cars that happened after Henry Ford kind of perfected the mass manufacturing of cars, where all of a sudden these people, instead of circulating at three or five or eight miles an hour, driving 25 miles an hour in these vehicles that were heavy, and and it was literally carnage on the American street in the 1920s. Hundreds of thousands of American pedestrians died in that carnage. And and the way that we as a society sorted out like, what do we do? Should we give a street over the car to pedestrians? Ultimately, as we all know, Moterdom, which was a kind of an alliance of transportation engineers and car companies, and they decided, and we as a society adopted those assumptions that the street was, as it may be defined in the Nebraska statutes as it is in Ohio, that the street is for the purposes of vehicular travel. So in the 1920s, really, really quickly, really just in a decade or two, we went from a multi-purpose space in which you could walk across the street and stop and chat and play into a thoroughfare. And the edifice of all that was not just the street, it was the state statutes that defined the purpose of the street, you know, that it defined the purpose of the street for vehicular travel, it defined right away and gave right away to cars. It defined who had to yield to whom. Following from that was a this is my previous book, kind of went into a lot of depth on this, but tort law, like when two bodies collide with each other, with when a car hits a pedestrian, who's at fault? There's a body of case law that is equally autocentric. I mean, you can, as a pedestrian, can get hit by a car, and you yourself can be held liable for the damages to the bumper that hit you. We created a whole traffic engineering paradigm around those assumptions. So here we are in 2025. We've been living in that system. Anybody who's younger than 100 years old, that's the only system we've really known. But that system is relatively new. It was created quickly. And I think what that story does is it just reminds us, and this is the title of my book, is reclaiming the road. This is not a new claim for pedestrians to say, hey, I should have a right to walk, you know, not just along the street on the sidewalk, but maybe in the middle of it, is not some new and novel claim. That's reclaiming what the street was for millennia. And it's only just in the last hundred years that we became kind of alienated from these public spaces that run right up through the middle of our streets. So yeah, it's an interesting history. And I appreciate I'm as a geographer, I also want to go back for the context, but I think that context is not just kind of informative, but it's politically relevant because this is not some special pleading for people in Lycra. This is these are public spaces that were designed to be shared by all of us, and we can do that again.
Stephanie Rouse:So one early movement, just maybe over a decade or so old at this point, is complete streets, an attempt to reclaim the road for not just motor vehicles. I think a lot of people understand what this is and it's kind of permeated the field, but what hasn't is this more targeted focus on kind of diversity, equity, inclusion within our public streets. Lincoln does have a complete streets policy that was adopted in 2013, but it's kind of your standard early version of what complete streets policies look like. What would it look like for communities to update these and be more inclusive?
David Prytherch:Well, this is really an interesting and a big challenge. And this is where to have one foot, as I do in geography and in planning, but I think many planners were dealing with this too, is that in the United States, simply to make a claim that a street as an infrastructure that we're all paying for and that we all have a legal right to use should provide us some measure of safety and accessibility. Like it's a radical argument in the United States, but it's it's so commonsensical that it's been really powerful that we have thousands of communities that have adopted complete streets policies. But as you know, it was really just about equity among modes, because if you think about the street as a transportation space, as transportation infrastructure, then that's the way we we think about streets. We have modes and our our state statutes, it's a geography that's defined in terms of modes and which modes get which portion of the space and how much space each mode gets. Our engineering manuals are premised on that. And so, yeah, it was just to achieve some measure of equity among modes is complicated enough. And I don't know how it's going for you in Lincoln, but that alone is a really uneven project in the United States. And it's going to take us a long time to approximate that kind of equity, but we've all laid down a lot of bike lanes in the last 10 years. But what was interesting, and this was brewing, I think, at least in my left field peripheral vision, was some of the claims that were maybe coming more from the social scientists, from the critical social scientists who were saying, hey, you know, those complete streets do great for transportation. But what about these other equity issues that are tied up in streets, like whether it's identity things like race or gender, but also that streets are part of broader equity issues like urban change, what worries about gentrification. And so you could see that there was at one level, the scholars were saying, hey, we can't isolate transportation from the broader social issues. And the designers, the planners were like, oh wow, I can't speak for other planners, but I think some of the equity conversations around 2020 caught some of us maybe feeling a little flat-footed, which is we had not 100% thought about maybe we've been focusing on the modal piece of it and hadn't thought about what were the relationships to and some of those conversations were really hard. Like, you know, I don't think I have a copy of at hand, but to hear bike lanes be described as white lanes, like that was really hard. Like I thought bike lanes were good. I thought bike lanes helped cyclists, and in many places, cyclists are people who can't afford cars. Like I thought I was doing good equity work, but then in a lot of communities, people were afraid about bicycle lanes because of maybe it was a harbinger of gentrification. So that was partly the book was to try to sort through hey, these feel like colliding principle schemes. Like I thought the bicycle lane was good, but now someone's telling me it's bad. And and really why one person thinks it's good and another person thinks it's bad is it's about where they're coming from in terms of how they're defining equity. I guess my point is I had to first figure out what do we mean by mobility justice? What does that mean and all these different axes that combine to make a just street? What does that mean in in practical terms? It's easier said than done. It comes down to things like not just viewing the street as an infrastructure space, but engaging people. This comes back to what we were talking about before is the process, I think, is really a key part of this. It's like the street is still just a transportation space. It's not going to fix housing affordability. We can't put too much weight on the street to solve all of our problems. However, I believe as a planner, the best way to do that is to engage as many people as possible. That making our street space a little more democratic and our decision making a little more democratic, then we can start to accommodate more diverse voices. And then maybe we design the street in a better, more democratic way that achieves a justice socially and not just kind of intermodally.
Jennifer Hiatt:And one of the steps on the pathway of making that more equitable road is the fact that you discussed that we need to have a cognitive shift, not just a physical shift in the road. And I think, you know, planners, geographers, even some transportation engineers that you talk to are there. But how do we get that cognitive shift to happen for the general public?
David Prytherch:We were talking before the podcast was recording about, I think you guys have been involved with some stuff about parklets and parking day. And this is the power of the pop-up, and what I would call the radical power of the pop-up is that what a lot of cities know is that what we're confronting here is to make a street not just more walkable, bikeable, bike lanes, that alone confronts the hegemony of the automobile. And as we've learned in the United States, that stuff is political. The politics are pretty fierce. You know, I mean, we're seeing it right now with like people using their vehicles as weapons against other people, the hostility towards pedestrians and bicyclists. You know, those politics are pretty intense because we have a group of people who have enjoyed hegemony over the roadway space, you know, and anytime you confront the hegemony of any group who's enjoyed privileges, they don't love giving up their privileges. So, what I think you can do is to do those things that enable people to imagine a different order. And this is the power of like a parking day where you can convert a parking space into a public space, even if it's just for a day, sit on the asphalt in a lawn chair and be like, wow, there's a lot of space here. Like, what if we changed it? This was the power of things like cyclovia or open streets, some of these events. Okay, we're gonna close down some streets just on a weekend, allow some people to walk and bike and rollerblade down the middle of the roadway. It doesn't instantly upend the social order at which cars are at the center. I don't know about you, but you know, we do this in Oxford here in Ohio. We we close our streets on certain Friday nights in the summertime. To walk down the middle of the public right away on the double yellow line and stand there and talk to somebody and maybe share a beer, it gives you a taste of something that's different. Once you've had a taste of democracy, you don't want to give it up. You know, when you have a taste of civil rights, you don't want to go back to that order. And so I think the pop-up is a way of giving people a stake and like, wow, this could be different. It shifts your mind a little ways. And I think then you can start to have conversations. The other thing I think is really important, and this is in my book, I talk about how we went from all these little pop-ups before COVID that were very limited. You know, it was a few parklets to all of a sudden there was this push to reclaim the street during COVID. We can talk about more of that in a minute, but it gave people a taste and a stake in the roadway. Small businesses who would join roadways have a pretty good stake in them. Neighbors have a pretty good stake in them. And once you give people a stake in something, then they are stakeholder. I don't know what the origin of the word stakeholder is, but it has the word hold in there, you know, that once you have a stake, you hold on to it. And now we've got a counter-constituency to the drivers. You know, you've you've had podcasts like about street bites. The roadway space is a contested space. So what we need is multiple people vying over it to achieve something that's a little bit more balanced, and that's how you move forward.
Stephanie Rouse:So you just mentioned how there's a lot of communities that were piloting these kind of concepts before the pandemic, even, but the pandemic really gave them license to really go big with it and test them out. And some of the communities have been successful at maintaining those, those kind of programs, others have not and have had to scale back or close some of the programs. What do you see as like the most effective approaches or which communities were most effective at making these permanent solutions?
David Prytherch:Yeah, that was a really core part of my book because I had seen that stuff like you have. I mean, you guys work for a planning agency. I'm a city counselor here in Oxford, and we had tested a few of those things. But I was really struck by the scale at which some cities, and my book really, you know, it just focused on nine major U.S. cities. So I can really only talk about their experience. But yeah, it was a moment. I think many of us in in the pandemic, as as dark as the pandemic was, we saw kind of a window of opportunity, which was like, wow, the world could be really different. Like the streets suddenly emptied of cars, and and so it provided a window, just like I was talking about that, even if just sharing the street on a Saturday night during an event gives you a window into how the world could be. Pandemic, when it came to streets, gave us a window on how the world could be. You know, it was just a window, and the window started closing pretty quickly. When there were no cars on the street, it was easy to claim them for public space. But when people started wanting to drive back to work, and and that happened, the pandemic felt like it took forever, but it happened relatively quickly. But this is where planners, you know, I think those of us who are in planning believe in the power of systems and we believe in policies and we believe in design manuals. And and the street, of all things, is as chaotic as it seems from the outside, the street is one of the most regulated, ordered spaces that's engineered very specifically. Yeah, I mean, people are going to and fro, but the city has pretty good control over that. When I talk about the success, it was less about the open streets or the slow streets than it more, I think it was about the policy shift that communities went back, many of which were already, for example, in the process of revising their transportation and mobility plans. Like there was already a big move, like cities were reorganizing their public works departments, you know, from being bureaus of motor vehicles to being departments of mobility and infrastructure. They were already starting to think about equity. So I think what the pandemic did was just a catalyst for really realigning the big picture plans. You know, those of us in planning love plans, but ultimately it is about the rule systems. And so cities that went back and redesigned their street guidelines to say, hey, like a shared street is a legitimate use. Or a lot of cities had been operating under the assumption that speed humps were impermissible. I mean, that's the engineers would have told you about like Boston, such a walkable city, but up until you know less than a decade ago, their public works department thought that speed humps were bad and couldn't be done. And so they broke through on some things. So yeah, I think that ultimately the power is in this is what we learned a century ago, where to effectuate a takeover of cars of the street, you had to do it in law and engineering and design. All backed up socially, you know, like people have to support stuff socially for the for the plans and the policies to work. But the big change was really the plans and policies. So now it's not so satisfying because it's not so quick, but they start to weave these things into the stuff that you're familiar with. But most people, you know, capital budgets, like slowly doing a speed hump at a time or a project here at a time. It's very uneven work. And as we've learned in our national politics, you know, just because you think something's going in a direction doesn't mean it couldn't turn around again and go in an opposite direction. So there's going to be a push and pull and tug over this stuff, and it's really hard to know exactly where it's going to go.
Jennifer Hiatt:I think my favorite term from the book was the idea of a messy shared space. Sometimes think I'm kind of a messy person, so I appreciated it that you referred to that idea. So, what is a messy shared space and what are the benefits of all that mess?
David Prytherch:Well, this is where to me, you know, a kind of epiphany I had, which is that we tend to view streets as, you know, the other term I use is pipes for cars. I mean, we design them as conduits. And you just think about the geography of the street and all these linear things, you know, that we have different paint colors to mark the edge of the roadway in the middle of the roadway, and and markings to channel people around islands. It's all designed very much like hydraulic engineering, in which instead of water molecules, it's people in bikes and cars and trucks moving down the street. And that's the way we typically think of it, but that's not how we think of a park. And so to me, we've long recognized that parks are public spaces. And so the literature on public space and geography and planning and other disciplines has often focused on parks and plazas because we we understand those things to be public and we understand they're they will be messy. We understand that they will be contested. They're the places where people will go to protest. We understand there will be tugs of war between public uses and private uses. Like, do we let a concessioner set out cafe tables in the middle of the plaza? How much do we charge them? How do we juggle all these different uses? There's definitely systems to that. I mean, classic, if you've ever been to a European plaza, I mean, they have rules that are governing the food deliveries can happen and taxi drivers can drive to hotels on the plaza, but they've got speeds and those cafes you're sitting at, there are rules around those. But they are messy spaces, you know, because they are public, they're shared by people and they are unstructured. Yeah, parks have pathways and they have different rules and stuff, but like the really great parks, they're just different than a street. And so I think when you start thinking about the street a little bit more like a park would be, then you have to realize, like, okay, well, we're gonna have to juggle these uses that like we are maybe are going to introduce some public uses. Like this was to me like the novelty of, okay, well, we used to have parklets and they were just public spaces, but now we're going to let someone lease out the street space. How much do you charge for that? You know? Those are really super interesting conversations that the people I interviewed in the book were wrestling with. What's the per square foot cost to lease out the public right-of-way? Again, we've been doing that on the sidewalk, which we also assumed the sidewalk was public space. But I think my book tried to push the envelope a little bit and I use the metaphor of the curb a lot because we would think about parks, plazas, and sidewalks as being public spaces, but the asphalt, we just like our gaze, like our public space gaze ended at the curb because we assume that the roadway that was asphalt, and asphalt, that's the engineers control that. But I think what pandemic did was we introduced messiness on the roadway. And it's messy these days. I mean, you throw in micromobility, you know, you've got people zipping along on scooters and people in wheelchairs, and it's a very messy space. And a hundred years ago, they created a place to try to create order. And I think we when you've got bodies in motion going to and fro, you need some rules because otherwise some people run over other people. But I think that accepting a certain amount of mess and assuming that this is a social space and people are going to work it out. The rules in engineering can't govern human behavior 100%. Like maybe there are other design cues that can help make people behave. If you think about a great plaza, there are not a lot of markings there. There's not even a lot of signage. Yet somehow in that Jane Jacobs way, there's a choreography of it that is just beautiful and organic and rhythmic and somehow it's it works because for reasons other than clear rule systems.
Stephanie Rouse:I feel like that's kind of what complete streets approaches or changes that we're trying to make to the rigid structure of street design is going towards of bringing back the visual cues that encourage drivers to slow down and to pay attention and having trees bordering it, which were obstructions adjacent to the roadway. We had to take them all out because it was dangerous. And like bringing buildings back towards the street to again define the space and help encourage motorists to drive more safely. And so it's it's encouraging to see those kind of changes in the strict engineering field because they've tended to be so rigid about the rules that have really shaped the way our streets have looked.
David Prytherch:It is really interesting because I don't know about you, but I just think there were certain things that we bought into. And one of those was is like I'm a big multimodal advocate, and so I'm a believer in bike lanes because you could carve out a space and dedicate it and engineer it for bikes. And I think bike lanes are really, really great. But what the book really taught me was that maybe sometimes it's not about separating the users through dedicated spaces. Maybe it comes through throwing them all in together. And that's where, yeah, you're right. And and the classic example of that are slow or shared streets techniques. And this is the the beauty and the genius of the Dutch voonf, like the shared street, where no, instead of clearing the street of obstructions, introduce obstructions to the street. Let there be some parked cars on the side every once in a while, chicanes or trees or street furniture or kids playing. It's a crazy kind of idea, but if you have shared or naked streets, we have some on campus right outside my building. It's like the absence of the infrastructure. Now we have pedestrians walking up the middle of the roadway, and the cars somehow fall in line and go slow and defer to them. These are the second order things that people don't really understand in the public, which is like, oh, if I have speeding, what we should do is have police enforcing it or this or that. But no, the police can't be everywhere. What you need is an environment with cues that encourages the kind of behavior that you want. And I find that that stuff is just like you're saying it's counterintuitive. The engineers were like the tree was a bad thing, like a tree could be crashed into. We need to get the pedestrians out of the street so the cars don't hit them. Well, no, actually, what if we introduce obstructions and we encourage people to walk or play or bike in the middle of the street? You get these really, really great outcomes. The other really, really great outcome is that it turns out that we have a lot of streets that can be converted into shared streets in a way in a much lower cost way, either to parking or capital dollars, than trying to introduce bike lanes on some really busy thoroughfare where maybe a cyclist doesn't want to be anywhere. So that's the beauty of the bike boulevard. And ultimately, many of us live on these local streets or local collectors, and we don't really want the busy traffic anyway. You know, in my own community of Oxford, we're still one of those communities that just doesn't really do traffic calming because we think the speed humps are going to mess up. The snow plows and we worried about fire trucks. But that to me was really kind of the big epiphany is that wow, you just look around all these streets could be at relatively low cost converted into something that hits on so many other things other than just moving cars.
Stephanie Rouse:You have all these great case studies from all over the US within your book. And in that, a theme that kept coming up in each one of these was this push and pull between a bottom-up versus a top-down approach to all of these programs. And I feel like planners have generally understood that bottom-up is better. We want the communities to have ownership of these projects and to be able to weigh in versus us just coming in and telling them what to do. But that kind of backfired in a lot of these projects during COVID because communities that didn't have the resources or didn't have the time weren't teleworking, weren't able to take advantage of the programs. And it was the wealthier communities that were. So what do you think is the right approach here?
David Prytherch:It was a really interesting outcome that kind of challenged some of the assumptions that in my book I try to define what a just street would be and an equitable street. And clearly from a procedural equity point of view, we believe that more engagement is better, that bottom-up is better. But this is the lesson of equity in a way that's kind of hard to grapple with. But what they found is when they would have programs that were, for example, by request, like speed humps by request or slow streets by request or open streets by request, who has the wherewithal to request it? It's people who are already in the know. And so what they found is, you know, to this day, if you look on NYC, whatever open data is, and see where the open streets are in New York City, they're clustered in the highest income neighborhoods. Because those people, A, have the political wherewithal, they know who to call, they know how to speak the language that we in government speak. You know, they they know how to navigate those systems. It comes down to things like a I could write a whole other book about the role of business improvement districts, in which businesses have the resources to band together to advocate for themselves. So many cities lacking resources are letting their business districts, business improvement districts, do the planning downtown. But then there are other neighborhoods that don't have such things. And the other part of it is to talk to platters, is that those kind of privileged neighborhoods are also a real drain on staff time. You know, they're the kind of people who will call you up. It was a great quote from Claire Eberly, who works for Los Angeles Department of Transportation. She would say how some of the neighborhoods that were kind of privileged would draw so much staff time, and the other neighborhoods were like, tell us when it's done. And so I think what a lot of cities have done is try to strike a balance. And what they've done is to use data, the power of GIS, using equity criteria, however they're defining it, whether it's age or race or income or access to schools or whatever. And they're trying to prioritize which areas really need it based on the data and making some of those decisions in a data-driven, plan-driven way. It doesn't mean it's not democratic. I mean, as you guys know, this is the nature of land use regulation sometimes, which is you do a comprehensive planning process which is super open and conversational, and we want your input, we want your input, but ultimately it might get translated into a zoning regulation that's not that voluntary. And engineers know this. Uh, you know, in roadways, I always joke that like if it were up to bottom-up participation, we wouldn't have an interstate highway system. Like, if you want to create a network that punches its way across space to connect point A to point B, you cannot give every landowner veto power over the thing. This is why we have eminent domain. Sometimes, I mean, if you look at the eminent domain statute in Nebraska, it may say, but like in Ohio, private property rights are sacrosanct except when subservient to the public welfare. So what planners are trying to do is figure out what the public welfare is, and that's as messy as the street. It's some combination of universal principles. We believe everyone should have access to something, some degree of data driven, these are the places we believe deserve the resources. Yes, there's going to be participation. What I learned is it's a messy business there too. But I would say even though they pull back a little bit from the COVID engagement with public transportation, planning and engineering has not been our most democratic sphere of public decision making. I still view it as a fairly black box process of how roads get designed and engineered that don't open up a lot of space. So I think much as cities have pulled back, I think the bottom line is we could still use more democracy in our streets are designed rather than less, even if we have to safeguard against people with resources just pulling more resources to themselves to the detriment of communities that are less empowered.
Jennifer Hiatt:I was just talking with one of our residents. We're doing a bridge replacement project, and she made the comment that she had attended a public input session, I guess, to talk about a roundabout. And when she was asking an engineer questions, the engineer said, It's not actually up for discussion. We're just here to show you what's going on.
David Prytherch:And how often does that happen? And this is where those of us who are listening as planners, you know, this is why the people who work in community development departments, for which we spend so much time in board meetings. And, you know, my community development director in the city of Oxford, he supervises, I think, three or four boards. He spends so much time in meetings. Guess how many boards the engineers answer to? Zero. And and they like it that way. And that's a whole other hegemony thing, which is, you know, who would like to have absolute dominion over your domain? And the engineers have enjoyed a pretty for good reasons. They do highly technical things that are they're not for all of us to understand. Roadway geometry is complicated. I wouldn't hope to try to do it, but partly it is they have just enjoyed uncontested hegemony over the decision making and the process with a lot of resources at their disposal, and the public's messy. Like the engineering manuals do not make much accounting for neighborhood opposition or the subtleties of culture. That's why I think a lot of cities have tried to create a more interdisciplinary approach to transportation. This is why we've pulled some of that decision making out of a public works department and put them into more of an interdisciplinary sphere. We have those same things here. And I don't think that's going to change instantly, but maybe we can make it a little more democratic.
Jennifer Hiatt:And speaking of all your excellent case studies, what were some of the more surprising or successful examples of communities transforming their streets?
David Prytherch:Well, this is perhaps the less sexy one, but what was really interesting to me was to talk to Boston, because Boston is a city that's a very walkable city, very dense, you know, they've got very narrow streets with um a lot of car parked cars. And what was kind of, I guess, ironic is they had begun a process of doing these slow streets plans where they did a wonderful process of going in neighborhood by neighborhood, engaging people in charrettes and all that stuff that we, you know, as planners just really love and believe in so fervently, making very kind of context-sensitive decisions about how do we slow streets by, you know, daylighting intersections or adding new crosswalks or all that good stuff. But ironically, what they found is that was a slow business and it was costly. So what Boston did, and I feels weird because it is, is they actually went the other way, which is they just said, you know what, there are a lot of different techniques, but the speed hump is the single most effective technique. You know, the bang for the buck is is highest with the speed hump. And as long as we engineer it to be a standard feature, we're just gonna do it. And we're not going to have a charrette to ask you whether you want it on your street, you know, they say just in the same way we would stripe a crosswalk, which doesn't require committee to do, they make a decision about speed humps. Again, it's kind of counterintuitive because again, we love all that hands-on planning. But if you're a city like Boston that has public safety issues, you have a limited budget, and you're trying to do the most thing that you can, it's it's not super innovative, but it was a very effective strategy that they could scale up. And so now they just say it's kind of a universal feature. If you live on a local street, expect a speed hump at some point. That of course is not as fun. I mean, I think that the open streets, the most kind of like organic and cool one was 34th Avenue in Queens in New York, which was an open street that unlike some of those other ones that were, you know, that I was mentioning were done in Manhattan or Brooklyn, higher income gentrifying areas. This is a very diverse low-income immigrant neighborhood that those places were hit really hard by COVID. You know, those were the places where people died because they were in dense housing. And so those neighbors kind of took charge of this street at a time when people didn't even know how to administer these things. Remember, with COVID, it was really hard because we didn't really want people to have mass gatherings. So there are mixed feelings about having people in public, and and they were like, well, the police should manage this so they can keep people social distance. And it was like, okay, that looks like a crime scene, not like a public space. So they basically handed it over to the people, and the people organized themselves. And this again, that if they've done really, really cool things infrastructure-wise, and they're now in the process of after having closed the street with barricades and all those interim strategies, they are going through a permanent redesign of the street as a series of rooms of pedestrian plazas linked by slow streets, and they're they're going to redesign the street in that way, which is itself just super cool. But the beauty of it was the pop-up nature. I visited that neighborhood on a beautiful fall day, and there's some pictures in the book. Yeah, they had done stuff like barricades at major intersections, but it was a street that looked like any other street. There were cars parked along it, but it was strung up with tables with small vendors like young people who made earrings out of polymer or, you know, people, artists, strung along the side of the roadway on card tables. And yeah, there was a barricade, but it was it was those little cues that were enough to enable a person to feel safe. The cars went slow. And while I'm there, someone literally started a couple started dancing in the middle of the street because they could, and it was joyful. And again, the infrastructure was not just physical, it was this organization that now exists, this 34th Avenue Open Streets Coalition of people who were empowered in their street, who programmed the street with English as a second language and closing swaps and food banks, and it's this super vibrant public space that, yeah, New York Department of Transportation kind of was the framework for it, but the people just took it over. And it it just was very empowering. Yeah, the the street can only solve so many problems, but when you can take a street and now it's a place for kids to play or for English as a second line, you know, it's a space of social integration and and small business ownership and and people dancing in joy. Like it's I love and uh traffic engineering as much as an ex-person, but it's it gave me a lot of hope about the future of the city through such things that were at one level radical, but also not super costly. It was just empowering.
Stephanie Rouse:So, as this is booked on planning, in addition to your book, which we recommend all of our listeners check out, what books would you recommend our readers also check out?
David Prytherch:There's so much to read, and based on who you have hosted, like well, I won't cover some of the stuff that's kind of in the popular planning literature, but uh, you know, I do recommend, I'm gonna hold up here, Peter Norton's book, Fighting Traffic, The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, is an incredible story of how our streets were taken over and turned into vehicular spaces. I think you hosted Mimi Shellard at some point. Her book on mobility justice, the politics of movement in an age of extremes, is really, really, really good for understanding what mobility justice is. I had an opportunity to review a book that I thought was really cool was Justice in the Interstates, the racist truth about urban highways. I think we all was understood that highways were done with a certain amount of insensitivity to racial diversity. But it turns out in the South in the 1960s, they plowed highways specifically so they could take out the houses of civil rights leaders. So the highway is a tool that has not always been used for good. John Stalin's Cyclescapes of the Unequal City talks about bicycle infrastructure. So if you want to get a dose of that kind of incomplete streets argument about how the complicated racial and social things that are tied up in things that we believe are good, like bicycle lanes, that's a good one. And though it's selfish, but I would encourage it because you can download the PDF, my own book, Law Engineering in the American Right of Way, Imagining a More Just Street, not because I'm trying to sell any more copies. You can download it for free. But it was my way of making sense of traffic law and engineering to understand just how auto-centric it was, and maybe invite us to think about revising those systems to make them a little more equitable. So much good stuff out there, but that's just a taste, you know, to help people understand some of these conversations that lie behind my book and that my book seeks to build on.
Jennifer Hiatt:And it is okay to promote your book for more sales. That is kind of the point of the podcast.
David Prytherch:Oh, yes. So so there is this other recently published book uh called Reclaiming the Road, um, Mobility Justice Beyond Complete Streets, published by the wonderful University of Minnesota Press. It's rooted in scholarly debate, so it's right at the cutting edge of some of the really complicated conversations about mobility justice. So it's a good tour of some of that scholarly stuff, but it really is written. I hope planners read it. I hope advocates read it. I hope people in neighborhoods read it. It's meant to be readable. And so, yeah, I encourage people. And for once, in in the academic world, it's priced at a price point. An average person can actually afford it. It's like $27. Yeah, I it was my way of making sense and really complicated things that were happening in the city in the last decade and hopefully pointing our way forward towards something different and better. So I hope it gets into the hands of people because there's too much roadway real estate to devote just to traffic and parking. We have to reclaim more of it, and I think our cities will be better as a result.
Stephanie Rouse:Yeah, it was a really great read. I I can attest to that it was digestible by someone who's not baked into the transportation industry. So really appreciate you taking the time, David, to talk with us about your book, Reclaiming the Road.
David Prytherch:Jennifer and Stephanie, thank you so much for the podcast. I really enjoy it. It was so wonderful to have this conversation. And a shout out to the Nebraska APA.
Jennifer Hiatt:We hope you enjoyed this conversation with author David Purchart on his book, Reclaiming the Road: Mobility Justice Beyond Complete Street. You can get your own copy through the publisher at University of Minnesota Press by supporting your local bookstore or online at bookshop.org. Remember to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to the podcast, and please rate, review, and share the show. Thank you for listening, and we'll talk to you next time on Book Town Planning.
