- Are you looking for an affordable home,

located near school work and fun?

Are you downsizing or leaving the area

and looking to sell your home?

Reach out to the State College

community Land Trust today.

We have been buying, rehabbing

and selling permanently

affordable homes in the State

College Borough since 1996.

We keep land and trust

and homes within reach always so

that income qualified

individuals, families,

and their pets can find

their forever homes.

- You are watching CNET

Center County's Government

and Educational Access Network.

- Sponsorship for this program

is brought to you in part

by Town and Gown Magazine.

If it's happening in Happy Valley,

it's in town and Gown Magazine.

- Welcome everybody. We're very

happy to have you receiving.

I'm Dan Marriott, associate Professor

of Landscape Partnership at Penn State.

I know you're familiar with

the Rethinking 3 22 project

and you've seen many of

our students wandering

around your homes, your fields,

and in your offices as well

over the last couple years.

And I know you're also familiar

with the Rethinking 3 22 booklet,

which the students have produced.

I wanna let you know that mines two

and three will be

available on December 5th.

We're going to final editing right now.

So feedback from the student

projects in the fall of 23

and the spring of 24 are on their way out

to continue the information sharing

that we've been doing with this project.

We're very proud of the

documents contribution

to Rethinking 3 22,

and I'm deeply grateful for all of you

for your generous embrace of my students

that they've been working with you

all over the last couple years.

My students, raise your hands, guys.

So they're the future of

transportation in this country,

so be nice to them when it's over.

We are in the middle of a

transportation revolution right

now here in the Commonwealth,

in the US and around the globe.

We are rethinking how we're

moving around the landscape

and we're rethinking

how we're impacting the

land at the same time.

It's an important conversation.

It's a conversation for the

21st century that we need

to brace and think about carefully.

The goal of Rethinking 3

22 has to provide visitors

and residents who walk, bus, bike

and drive through Penn Brush Valley

and throughout the center

region with new ways

to think about our relationship

with transportation and mobility.

And it's a way to have a conversation

for the larger valley in

region two, within the context

of the State College area

connector to me and to my class.

It's not just a possibility

of a certain type of road

going through the valley.

It's an opportunity to

rethink the large area here

and what we wanna be in the

future, who we are right now,

and how can we change

roads, change communities,

but suit other actions too in

terms of environmental issues,

climate change issues,

connectivity and all that.

So it's an opportunity to talk and engage.

Tommy Honors, who's here,

asked me to get involved

with this project just over two years ago.

Tom, thank you. He said, we'd really like

to get your expertise as part of this.

I really hesitated because

I know what it's like.

Transportation projects are challenging,

divisive, and exhausting.

But I went to a meeting here

and I was really impressed

with the people that I met,

and I was impressed by the idea

of the civil conversation

that I was hearing.

There were lots of different opinions for

and against different things,

very strongly held opinions,

but everyone did agree on one

thing, which I really liked.

It was clear that the road

belonged on that other side

of the valley, Okay?

Which theoretically is quite successful,

but that impressed me as an opportunity.

I thought it'd be a great chance to get my

students engaged with this.

Importantly though, and this

is what really got me engaged

with the project, everyone I spoke to

and everyone I've spoken

to over the last two years,

and I've told my students

as well, everyone knows

that the road is not safe,

that something has to change.

And that's not a bad

place to be starting from.

The other thing we're

hearing too is the beauty

of the valley and that these changes need

to respect this gateway

to breathtaking agricultural landscape

in the shadow of Mount Ni.

It's who we are as a region,

it's who we're as a university,

and it's an important part

of the cultural landscape

and context of Pennsylvania.

And this is really important to me.

We have all these things. We've

got conversations and ideas,

and this is where we're going with this.

So we started the studio

course in the fall of 2022

in the Department of

Landscape Architecture.

You all know, and my students

have been instructed very

much, we are not endorsing

any corridor, quite frankly,

that's not our job.

It's for you, the people

for whom the decisions will

have the greatest impact to make

that decision based on

what you know from Pendot

and based on what we can share

with you, we view our job is

to provide information and ideas

and options so you can think

about the whole project

holistically within a larger context.

To this end, and while

we're here this evening,

I invited my friend and

colleague in Lockwood

who immediately offered to bring along the

rest of his staff as well.

Cindy Berger and Alex

Mcca from Tool Design.

They just arrived this

afternoon from Orlando, Oakland,

California, and Chicago.

So yeah,

and we had a few fall

leaves left, so I'm very,

very happy for that as well.

So their office is transforming

how we think about

transportation, and I'm so honored

and pleased to have them here

to share their knowledge with all of you.

There's lots of different

ways to think about this,

and we're gonna share, as

we've been doing all along

different things to give you a menu,

to give you some choices, to give you

some moments of conversation.

I think this is a really

exciting time with this project.

I first worked with Ian in

2002 on a controversial freeway

project for this historical Royal Cycle

Parkway in California.

We were working with Caltrans,

which is the State Department

of Transportation there.

It's the highest, it

was the highest accident

facility in Los Angeles.

So it's not an enviable title,

but it was quite a challenge

to figure that out.

And what I really loved about

first getting up Ian, was,

and I've been saying this to my class

and everyone I've talked to

here too, safety matters.

Safety is important. We never do anything

that doesn't have an impact

that's favorably moving

forward regarding safety.

But Ian's ability to look at

safety through the context

of the place gave us a whole new way

and a way to talk to Caltrans about

how we can look at safety and improving

the community's overall as well.

We also work together at

different times in the Middleburg

traffic coming project for us, route 50

and Virginia communities came together.

They were concerned about

the intersection between

through truck traffic

and local communities.

Does that sound slightly

familiar to anybody? Okay.

So there are models for

these types of concerns

and models for these types of

problems to be solved as well.

Since that time, our careers, I think,

have been crisscrossing all

over the place, often one of us

before, after the other one,

and not realizing it until

recently quite honestly.

But I'm really excited to have him here.

So this evening would not be

possible without the support

of the Department of

Landscape Architecture,

which is committed following this project

with the studio course

happening every year.

So we'll be a resource for the

communities as we go through.

We are here tonight through

the generous, generous

support from the Hamer

Center for Community Design,

also the Stockman School

and the Center County Historical Society.

In addition, we've had great

support from the Penn State

Sustainability and the Penn,

State Larson Transportation,

Penn, State Larson

Transportation Institute

in the College of Engineering.

I also wanna thank Pendot

Pendot is here tonight.

They has shown a genuine

interest in this project.

They've been coming, they've

talked to our students,

they've been coming to all the student

presentations since we started this.

So thank you to PennDOT.

Lastly, I wanna thank all

of you for welcoming me

and my students into

your homes, your farms,

your communities,

offices and organizations

from Clearwater Conservancy

to Koons and Darlington Farms.

It's been enlightening.

And all these voices

and all these ideas help

give us a stronger idea of

what we have here and

what needs to happen here.

So now I hope you will

join me in welcoming Ian

and its brilliant team from

Tool Design for an evening

of Rethinking 3 22.

- Hi everybody, thanks for coming.

We're really happy to be here.

We didn't, we didn't

bring our whole staff.

We had 320 people in our

staff, so three of us here came

really happy to be here.

Between us, we've probably

been involved with about 30

or 40 different highway

imagining projects.

Oh no, I am Is it plugged in?

Yeah.

- Next one.

- Nope. Okay.

I hope I'm not stepping on

something that's important.

All right, try again. So,

So we didn't bring the whole crew

and our firm.

We're a mission based firm,

and we don't build highways.

We reimagine them, we take them down,

we change 'em into boulevards.

We try and make them

suit their communities.

We, most of our projects

are in urban environments

where the highway was plowed through and,

and created lots of problems.

But we also work in

many rural environments,

and I'll show you some of those tonight.

And we've been gathering in cities

and so forth about 10,000 years.

And for the last hundred

years, we've had cars,

cars have been popular, and

they have completely changed the

way we live and move and so on.

And so we've had about

three generations struggling

with these issues and about

400 generations getting us to

where we're at right now.

And I think in the last

couple of generations,

we're realizing that what

we thought was the right way

of going about things in the 1950s

and sixties might not

have been exactly right.

We've had some trial and error,

and I think we're, we're learning

and we're, I think we're

getting better at living

with our environment and

in our, in our landscapes,

in our cities and in our rural areas.

So we're gonna go over a

whole bunch of projects

and ideas with you tonight.

I'm a transportation engineer.

I, I do a lot of work with Multim Modalism

to help folks ride bikes,

take transit, walk, drive

in harmony so that, that

some don't preclude others

with me is Alex and Cindy.

Alex will be speaking first.

He, he has a background in urban design

through a sustainability lens.

And he has worked with the

Congress of the new urbanism

where he ran their free

way was no futures project,

and did a lot of research on cities

around the country reimagining

their, their highways,

cities, and rural areas.

He joined Tool Design Group

and he's part of our, our

highway reimagining group.

And he's also an urban designer.

And Cindy's here,

and she's a,

she has a background in landscape

architecture and planning.

She's our national urban design lead,

and she works in all sizes

and shapes of communities

right across the country,

and she is passionate

about the whole highway

reimagining area as well.

So I think I'll, I'll stop there

and Alex will, will kick us off,

and then Cindy will do the middle part

and I'll, I'll do the end part.

Okay, thank you.

- Okay, cool. Okay, thanks Ian.

So that's us, as you can tell.

So that's, so I just wanna

kind of start off things

to give us, to give you all a sense of

how we got here in the highway

re reimagining movement in,

when the, when the Interstate

Highway Act came to be,

it was 1956, and in 15 years,

we built 26,000 miles of

interstate highway in this country.

And to give you a sense, that is

enough to encircle the earth.

And then some, the number today

is closer to almost double

that 48,000 miles of interstate highway.

That's an awful lot of lands

of, of concrete and asphalt.

And when the interstate

highway system went in, even

before it went in, we had pe

a lot of people, including

a really intelligent sociologist

at urban thinker Nate Louis

Mumford, who understood

and feared what the highways

would do to our cities.

He talked about highways

or highways as arteries

and entering into the

delicate tissue of our cities.

And he was right. There

was something wrong with en

with these highways

entering into our cities.

The intention, the original intention

of the interstate system was,

as this image shows, the,

the interstates would

link cities together,

but it would not route through them.

Instead, the highways would

sort of stay on the periphery

of the urban environment,

and the, the streets would,

the interstate would sort

of diffuse into this local street network

and be contact sensitive

to the area in which the,

the streets were into.

But as we know, that's not

necessarily what happened.

As implemented, the highways

were built on the outsides

and into the cities,

and it created massive

interchanges, huge land needs,

and several severed

and destroyed thousands of

neighborhoods across the country.

What happened? Well, Eisen,

Dwight ED Eisenhower, who

signed the interstate Highway act into law

later regretted part of the decision.

He said that was against

his original intent.

He, he, he, he went on

to say it was against his

original concept and wishes

and did not love that his name

was attached to the legacy

of the interstate highway system.

But as we know, the highways were built.

So what happens now?

No city was left unchanged by

the interstate highway system.

City images were changed,

city form was changed.

The nature and relationship

between land use

and transportation was forever changed.

But today there's this opportunity,

and it's called highway reimagining.

So what happens now, what,

what Ian was mentioning,

what we do as a firm is we help

communities reimagine highways.

And the question that is

presented tonight is what hap

what, what does that look like?

This is just a graphic that shows

that you can rethink these, these highways

as something different, as something

that is contact sensitive

that is more closely related

to the original intent of the

interstate highway system.

And so that the highways are not just,

or that these, these paths are not just

conduits for fast moving cars.

And it's also important

to note that as soon

as the highways went into these cities,

people have been trying to get them out.

The movement started small,

but it's been going on for

decades and has gained success

and has had a lot of setbacks.

I think Ian, you've personally

been involved in about 35, 36

different highway reimaginings

around the country over

the past three decades.

So Ian's had a hand in

and a great menu of these,

but for many of us, the

the moment came here

with the every place

counts design challenge.

That was the U-S-D-O-T

In 2016, the final year

of the Obama administration

had this design challenge

that happened in four cities

to help these communities reimagine

what the highway had done to

and to bifurcate their neighborhoods.

And how could, and ask

the question, how could

changes be made to reconnect

to those, those communities.

It was the first major

admission by the US government

that highways actually did

harm to these communities.

And what was also going

on in the background

after, for several years of

advocacy work is an organization

that I used to work at and was involved in

the congress of the urbanism.

They had been tracking

highway removals since, well,

for the better part of two decades now,

putting out a biannual report,

freeways without Futures,

that list the top 10

highway highways that need

to go in the United States.

But they've been tracking these

efforts since the nineties.

And there's this broader

coalition today too

on the Freeway Fighters Network.

They are currently actively

tracking almost a hundred active

highway removal campaigns

in the United States.

And it's a coalition of

advocates that are sharing ideas,

asking for help, signing

letters, sharing advice,

and brainstorming ways in which they

can reconnect their communities.

And with all of this momentum,

and with all of this,

all these conversations

happening there isn't there?

There had, there was not a great language

to talk about these issues.

So there was a need for,

for a common language that,

so people could have sort of

informed conversations about

the types of projects that they

wanted to see in their communities.

So tool design several

years ago worked on this,

the emerging language of

higher removals to put forth a,

a vocabulary for a way for people

to the communities campaigns

to talk about highway removal.

And it's important to note

that the language is evolving.

That's why it says evolving language,

that no highway removal is the same.

We often work in very urban communities,

but this is applicable in

rural communities as well.

Within the report, we separated out

different, different types.

There's ways to mitigate

existing highways.

So here six different ways,

highways can be mitigated.

The worst impacts. And I'm

sure any of you who've been on,

on these highways, you are

familiar with a lot of these.

And there are more that are adding in.

There's an entire collection

around interchange

and ramp removal that helps to

make highway removal possible

and highway rema reimagining possible

that Ian will talk about.

And even widening, stopping

widening from happening too

within, within that

typology or those typology.

There are several removal types

which we'll talk about too.

Here are a couple spur

section relocation prevention

and redundant section removal.

But what I, and I think

it's critical to know, is

that the answer to the question

of is it removal or is it mitigation?

Is, is the highway still there?

'cause if it's still

there, it's just mitigated.

And why is that important? Well,

mitigation solves micro problems.

It solves problems just in

the small area in which the

mitigation is happening.

Those include local noise

pollution, light pollution,

maybe disconnections for bus and bikes

and ps it maybe fix some aesthetic issues

and might help increase

adjacent land values.

But you still end up with

a highway on either side

of the mitigated issue.

So that can be great in certain places.

It's not generally what we advocate for.

That's what you're seeing

here with the cap in proposal

for the Vine Street Expressway

in Philadelphia, if any

of you're familiar, but removal

or reimagining the highway goes

as goes several steps further.

It solves macro and micro problems.

So what that does, what that does is

what it changes things like

city form and city image.

What is your city, what is your Borough,

what does your town, what

does your community want to be

removing the highway reimagining

what it can be can change the entire image

and trajectory of a place.

And I wanna give you a few examples.

So this is Rochester, New York.

You're gonna hear

several examples tonight.

This is just, this is just one.

This, the rule inter

of the interloop dates back to the 1990s.

It was actually written

into the comprehensive plan,

the 1999 comprehensive

plan, the renaissance plan

for Rochester, New York.

They, they understood

that the traffic volumes

on the highway did not

necessitate the need for a highway.

So they put it in their plan.

They said, we are going into

the 21st century, it's 1990.

We're going, what, what do we want to be?

We don't want this here

anymore. So they planned,

they didn't have the funding,

but they had the idea.

And it was only two and

a half mile long section.

But at the its final peak

before it closed down, 7,000 cars per day.

Very, very few. This

is what it looked like.

I don't have a historic

photo, but you can imagine

that this was a row of buildings,

a vibrant neighborhood before.

This is the sunken highway,

the depressed highway that was put in.

And it took nearly a decade of planning

and engineering, lots of

discussions and political will.

But eventually this got

filled in to look like this.

The city even put up a live

stream to watch people to, to

for the entire filling in process.

So you could see truckloads

of dirt being dumped in

to raise up the depressed

highway to street level.

They put in a brand new street.

There's new development going

in, housing needed housing

and titch the community together.

And another final example that

I wanna give you is Detroit.

So this is a historic

street network of Detroit.

After World War ii, Detroit was growing.

It had enormous wealth, you

know, unscathed by World War ii,

but it also has the moniker of Motor City

because it went all in on cars.

It went all, all in on a set of values

that said car is king.

And they built a lot of highways.

So this is Hastings Street in Detroit,

a vibrant black neighborhood.

Take a look at this steeple here.

This is the street network that resulted

after Detroit went in all in on highways.

This is what it turned

into, this connectivity

and the relationship changed.

The city formed, changed,

completely transformed

the image of the city.

And here it is. And this

is what was put in. Yes

- Is,

- And you can see that's the change.

And it's, it didn't just,

it didn't just change the

relationship in the neighborhoods

adjacent to the highway

north of the highway,

the entire form, the, the

entire relationship changed,

became a logistics center.

People left, people fled

the city of Detroit.

And this is what it looks like today.

But I say all of this

because there's, there's,

there's hope, there's,

there was an opening

for re-imagining, this is the 3, 3 75,

the highway that I just showed you.

3 75, about 15 years ago,

there was this initial sketch

that you see here that Ian did,

shared it with the Michigan DOT.

And he was laughed out of the room.

But good ideas are hard to keep down.

And this idea sort of crept in

and it bubbled for several years.

And the, the idea to

remove this stub of 3 75

and restore the relationships

started to become popular.

And in 2017, the Michigan

DOT heard the cries

of the community saying, we

want something done with this.

And they decided to move

ahead with ripping out I 3 75

and restore the a surface street.

And it's important because Detroit,

this is all happening in the

backdrop of Detroit coming back

and the vibrancy of, of the

city of Detroit being restored.

And it's been, it's seen

this major renaissance.

And why it's seeing this

major renaissance is

because it's doing all the

things that it had done

before the highways went in.

It was investing in people

and places, transit, art,

multimodal connections, joy and health.

It's not all great. The plan

by the DOT imagine that a

group of engineers planning,

taking out a highway, they

still didn't quite get it right.

The community was pretty

unhappy with what the city

of Detroit, or sorry, with

Michigan DOT had put forth some

suggestions from, or some

quotes from concerned citizens,

what happened to resorting Hasting Street.

They're replacing a highway

with a big arterial road,

which is also a barrier.

But you know, there's something

to be said about applauding

the, the DOT, you know,

when your dog quit

Shakespeare, it's not correct,

it's not cool to correct his grammar.

So it's a major admission,

it's a major admission

that the DOT is doing the right thing

and removing this highway and,

and allowing the communities to reconnect

and reimagining a different

future for the city of Detroit.

And in fact, we're, we

have been helping them with

a peer review of their

plan to make it even better

and to hopefully produce better outcomes

for the city of Detroit.

And one of the last things I'll

say is this is all happening

in the, in the background

of, remember how I mentioned

that the U-S-D-O-T made this admission

that highways were a problem?

Well now the U-S-D-O-T

has something called the

reconnecting communities pilot program

or pilot grant program,

which maybe some of you have heard about.

And they've pledged over a billion dollars

for highway reimaginings

and similar efforts to

reconnect communities

and to address the barriers

caused by infrastructure.

So there is money behind this.

There is backing by

the federal government.

There is this understanding

that now is the time

to be thinking about

reimagining these spaces.

So before I pass it over to

Cindy, what I want to say is

that the decision to

reimagine 3 22 is not a

technical feasibility issue.

We all know it's hard and

we know it can be done.

It has been done, it has

it, it's gonna continue

to happen in communities

all across the country,

but also just like those

other projects that I shared

with you, that it must be a

community driven decision.

So I'm gonna pass it on to Cindy.

- Good to go. Okay, great. Awesome.

Yes, it is such an important note

that it is a community-driven decision.

I think that's what we're here

really to, to convey that,

you know, you, you need to be a part

of the conversation moving,

moving forward in what happens

with 3 20 22.

And I'd offer also, you know,

when we think about

these systems, so often

engineers are part of the,

the, the conversation and front

and center and our

profession, Dan's profession,

my profession as landscape

architects also have some,

some influence here

and want to provide you

with some thoughts around

how landscape architects might

approach some of these projects.

This image is, is a bit

of a jarring contrast to

what I'm going to be talking about,

but it's a really important one for me.

You know, this is what we end up creating

when we just have a singular

mindset to a, a solution if,

when we engineer it and

not think about the design

of a place, it's a powerful image.

I love it. Well, I mean,

I don't think I love it,

but it's, I really appreciate

it for two reasons.

One, that's my boss in

yellow and he did survive.

So that's a, that's a

really important thing.

And it's also a reminder

to me kind of daily,

is when we think about our

linear spaces, again with

that singular mentality

and we focus on speed, we

add just one more lane.

This was also a road

that was much smaller.

It was probably not over

some other, it wasn't a,

wasn't a overpass, you know, we, we,

this we add just another

lane is what we talk about.

And, and this is, you

know, it could be anywhere.

USA, right? This is

technically our public realm.

And it also makes me think

about what if we were

to call these spaces linear landscapes,

would we bring a

different mindset to them?

Would we bring a different process and

therefore a different designed solution?

We look at communities large

and small across the country,

and we talk about, when we

talk about quality of life,

we often look at indicators

like parks and open space.

The black figures on this slide are parks

and over space, actually of Detroit.

So that's a good synergy

in our presentations here.

But, you know, we talk

about acreage of open space,

we talk about how far people

are from these open spaces,

and we actually sometimes

even, you know, rank our cities

or communities based on these open spaces.

But I, you know, we also need

to be thinking about these spaces.

These are public rights of way,

these are also public open spaces

and they actually arguably

make up the largest amount

of public space in a city and

commun and in communities.

And if, again, if we conceive

of these assets differently,

yes, they definitely need

to provide a transportation function.

We know that. But as

possible to think of them

as multifunctional spaces.

And we surely would

design them differently.

Perhaps we would design them

with the same approach we do

to our parks, to the places

that we love and cherish.

And so I'm gonna talk a a

little bit about a different,

different kind of a di

design approach I think

that could perhaps resonate and

apply to thinking about 3 22

and perhaps other public rights

of way are conceived

in and around the area.

It's the idea of path as place.

And I'm gonna say this is

a, a very personal kind

of conversation for me.

This idea came to me actually

when I was riding on a trail.

Not unlike this space, I did

not have this beautiful side

or, or this, you know, context

in, in which I was, I was Dr.

Biking. But this little tiny detail here,

this is a flush ribbon curb.

And it really,

in this instance when I was

biking along this trail, I I,

there was an area in the community

where they were actually ripping this out.

And I was really to widen the trail.

Certainly there's, you know,

reasons that they were doing

that, but it was really

a, a, a bummer to me

because it really completes

that trail for me.

It certainly has a function,

it's actually a structural detail

to keep an asphalt trail from sloughing

or from eroding at the edges.

But it also ends, adds to

the feeling of completeness

to the placeness of that trail.

And it's still, you know,

again, largely a place to move

through, but the, the feeling

feels different, right?

So, you know, a typical

trail feels a little bit

just quick kind of slap dash.

But when we add that, that

that detail, you know, so

that was the idea behind Pathis place.

It was a powerful experience

to me in my work, in

as a landscape architect in

transportation and mobility.

And it led me to this

idea of Pathis place.

And I think it's, it, it, you

know, we can, we can define

any path as a, a road, a

street, a trail, a track,

a highway, even a route.

Any, any linear feature

as through its design

and competition com

composition, excuse me, is all

or part of a place, a

defined area, a location

or a space within a built

or natural environment.

So that's the idea behind it.

And it's a, it's been helpful for us

as we work within communities

to talk about it in that space.

I think because we all know

and love places that in our communities,

and it's about bringing that

sort of sense sensibility

and that a sense, a sense of

attention to detail even at,

at any, at any scale.

So you know it, when you experience it,

it can happen in a variety of

scales and different contexts.

This is an old elevated rail

becomes, becomes a place in,

in New York if you've been here.

It's, it's a wonderful experience

on the high line Bikeways

through, again, detailing.

This one's profoundly

memorable, as is this one.

Again, just that sensibility to,

to really crafting the

space, even a highway.

I'm not suggesting this for 3 22 at all.

Ian will share some,

some great i ideas there.

But this, this highway,

Paris Park Pike in

Kentucky becomes a scenic

and memorable experience

because of how the paths the

road work with the topography,

they respect the landscape and

capitalize on the view sheds.

Certainly, again, not

appropriate for your context,

but I think it's a, another

example of a path is place.

And so generally what we,

we often talk about is

our experience of path

and place are being, are

really inextricably linked.

Sometimes the path

and the place are the same

such as a main street.

These are some fun cartoons that Ian did

for this, for this idea.

And sometimes the path really

contributes and it supports its place.

A street a down in a downtown

or adjacent to a parkway or waterfront.

A path can be equal but is

never more important than a place.

You know, it's like, as

we see in the bottom,

it should never dominate

that sense of, of place.

And, and what it does, it really

deteriorates the, the sense

of community and that sense of, of,

of enjoyment in that space.

It's, it's certainly applicable

to every context as well.

So it can grow from a real

urban idea to a, a natural,

of course that's gonna

look different, right?

Path is place is gonna look different in,

in different contexts.

And so how can we design, you know,

not engineer the right solution here?

And I think it doesn't mean

that engineering isn't a part

of the solution, but that

we need to work together.

I don't think there's a

singular discipline that

that has the solution solution,

but rather it comes from an approach.

And if we conceive of

the context as placed,

we will design these spaces differently.

So I actually came across this article

not long ago actually.

Dan was a part of this, this,

if you haven't read it,

I really recommend it.

Roadways and the land, the

landscape architect's role,

this was actually from

2000, the year 2000.

But it, it so resonated with me

and I wanted to share this aspect.

You know, I do think the role

of landscape architect is,

is perhaps a missing link

in the current solutions.

And this article goes on to

say that landscape architects

must develop well-defined aesthetic rules

to complement the very

well-defined structural

and engineering rules.

And this is, this is

certainly likely true.

And, and, but I'd also, if it's an offer,

it's about an approach how we

as landscape architects think about space.

And there are three components

I think I'd like to, to share

with you about, about

how we think about space

and what might happen with 3 22.

It's the ideas of curation, of

culture and of choreography.

So the idea of curation, the

act of forming an experience

through the selection and

organization of elements.

Think of a museum experience,

a park space you love,

even the grocery store.

These experiences are highly

curated in your, in in your,

for for for you to have

the right experience there.

And it's about the pro,

the, the, you know,

in, in a landscape.

And certainly this is not applicable here,

but I think it's a really great

easy image to, to understand

what I'm talking about

in terms of curation.

But it's about the program of space,

it's about relationships and orientation.

We're thinking about this

as landscape architects,

often on a micro and a macro level, again,

not necessarily the right solution,

but people know where the

space is very legible.

People know where to walk,

they know where biking is,

they know where there might be Eddie ease

or places of respite along there.

And so maybe in, in the

context of 3 22, those sort

of programmatic elements

are at a greater scale.

And maybe we're thinking

about the relationships

and sequence of space, you

know, as people pass through.

And that those who want to

be in that location as well.

Culture is the expression of

shared values, experiences,

and histories of place.

I think that's really,

really pretty fundamental

when you talk about a

community based decision

that we bring all the people

and all of the different

voices of, of folks who,

who not only passed through

this area but want to be there.

This is, you know, every

place is the culture of many.

And and this is a diagram

I just, I just share

'cause I love how, how sim,

how, how elegant it is.

And there's many different people that,

and groups that inhabit a

space that pass through it

and enjoy the space.

This diagram really represents

the broad range of users,

again, not necessarily for 3 22,

but in this, in this project,

talking about their own

identities, their stories

and their re their timescale

in which they experience space.

So each of these different

community groups talked about

how they experience place when they're

there, how often they're there.

And then I think the, the

interesting thing is the

relationships in this space.

So again, when we think about culture

and curate, culture of space,

thinking about all those user

groups is really important.

Not just those who are passing through

and choreography is the act

of composing various movements

within and through space.

And so, you know, oftentimes

as landscape architects,

when we design park spaces,

when we design streets,

when we design for public realm, you know,

we're thinking about that ex

that sequence of experience,

the dance that we all do in public space.

It's constantly in the forefront

of our mind as designers.

And how, how, how do,

or how should different modes interact?

I think for a transportation project.

These are just fun diagrams

by Lawrence Halprin landscape

architect that I love.

He designed this space up above,

but sort of talking about the

sequence of space and, and,

and the kind of like idea of

what, how he wanted people

to experience his landscapes.

And I think it was a, a real nice sort of

rhythm that he, he created.

He, his wife was also a dancer,

so I think he was very inspired by her

as a choreographer as well.

So something to think about in your space.

How are you choreographing

that along 3, 3 22.

And I'm gonna, the last thing

I'm gonna I'll do is share

with you a, a project

we're, we're working on,

this is near my neck of the

woods out in California.

And you can kind of see is

this the, yeah, here is,

let's see, there's a highway here

and you can just see they

really, really, really wanted

to connect this all the

way over to a highway here.

And the, the Cal Ranch

started to buy up this land

and the city and the

community really fought that.

But they had already

purchased some of that land,

you can see actually

where they're gonna put

some interchange here.

And it's been sitting like

this for years, many decades

since the, the since Caltran

started buying up the land

and that they've actually

now given the land back

to the city or they've

given it to the city.

It was pub it was

homeowners who lived here,

but now it's back to the city.

And so they've started to

develop this parkway concept

and we're working to help them

on reimagining this space.

And, and this is the parkway

here that they're gonna connect

and perhaps, you know,

debatable whether it's the

right, you know, solution.

But I think what I, what I

wanna mention here is, you know,

that it is gonna connect to two parks.

A parkway was meant to originally,

it is original concept was

meant to connect two parks

and then have a park-like

experience through it.

And so in this instance,

in creating a parkway versus a highway

of a much smaller road

that leaves such wonderful

opportunities for other things,

things like creek restoration.

It can, they can, we can

address water quality in this

future h housing opportunities

that we are sorely in need

of multifamily housing in that area.

So really has presented

a wonderful opportunity.

If this had all been an interchange,

it would be a really different experience

for, for this community.

Another way to look at it in

cross-section again, how it,

it, you know, it we're allowing

for multifunction multi multiple

functions in this space.

A wonderful creek restoration,

places to inhabit, you know,

and, and transportation

certainly is within this

mobility is within it, but it's not

dominating the experience.

The par parkway over here

is, is not a barrier.

So this is what it, it sort

of is looking like in

some of the renderings.

We have been really focused

on the design of the, of the,

the trail system, which in this

one looks like it just goes

straight as a bullet, but

actually comes through

and meanders into some of this area.

And then some of these,

these other spaces,

this restorations creek restoration and,

and also the park spaces along it.

And the transportation system

is certainly part of it,

but walking and biking

isn't an afterthought.

It's not just accommodated,

but it's celebrated.

So another quote from

that wonderful article

that I mentioned earlier,

and I think this is,

this is really an important one,

three mentalities should

be gathered around the drawing board.

One should be creative and

aesthetic, the second analytical

and the third technical and practical.

If these three mentalities do

not exist in a single mind,

they must always be present

in terms of absolute equality

in the group or team

responsible for design.

And I think that's so critical

when we're thinking about our

roadway systems and how

they really work within our,

our, our landscapes.

And so I would offer an addition to, to to

to Alex's thoughts.

So as he mentioned, we know

it's technically feasible

to reimagine some of these highways.

It must be community driven.

And if that path has placed

approach were employed,

what were, what would the solution be?

So I'll hand it over to Ian.

- Thank you Cindy. Okay, so

what I'd like to talk about

is both the part of 3 22 that's in town

and also the the rural part to your east.

And I'm gonna start with some stories from

other places where we work.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna go

over the battle we had over

Virginia Group 50.

So this was my very first

highway re-imagining project

that started in 1995.

And it involved these

three little towns in

this absolutely beautiful

countryside with, you know,

functioning, working ranches and farms

and a lot of equestrian activities.

And they're called Upperville,

Aldi and Middleburg.

So there's Aldi,

Middleburg, and Upperville.

And the, the rural road that ran

through the area also ran

through these three little villages,

which made their main street.

And so over time the Virginia

DOT evolved the main streets

to look more or less like the highway.

And so folks were speeding

through the highway

and they had a lot of safety

issues in their community.

And so, so the DOT

offered to help these little villages

by doing bypasses around them so

that the traffic didn't

have to go through their,

through their towns.

However, if the traffic didn't

go through the towns, it had

to go through the landscape.

And on each side of these little

towns, there was all sorts

of historic resources.

There was people's

farms, there was families

who had worked this land for generations

and it was just frankly

beautiful countryside.

And they, so everyone on the north side

of these three little

towns wanted the bypasses

to go on the south side of the town.

Everyone on the south side

wanted the bypasses on the north.

And so it became a real feud.

And so I was asked to arbitrate

between these different

folks and it wasn't pleasant

and friends turned into

enemies over this depending on

what side of town they lived on.

And so what was at stake

was literally the farm and

the land and the landscape.

So folks didn't want those

beautiful landscapes destroyed.

Now the folks who ran businesses

in the three little towns

didn't want the bypasses at all

because they knew if the

bypass went in there would be

what we call bypass development.

And they're usually in

the form of national,

oh geez, I know what I'm doing.

I'm touching

The power button.

The, the switch to the power bar

that runs this whole thing

is right by my left foot.

And if I move my foot, wait,

which is I flick the switch,

- You're there.

- That's,

- Yeah, but I,

- So when this gets turned into a video,

you can edit this out, right?

Okay. Not

- Ian, when I was

working there, they never

took me to the beach like this.

- That's the ocean that

just goes up the edge of dc.

See, okay,

I'm gonna stand a little

further away from that switch.

So the folks who had the

farms didn't want the bypasses

and on their side of town

and these, the business

people didn't want the

national chains to come

in and knock out the

local hardware store and so forth.

That happens so often in

these smaller communities.

So I, it was a bit of a conjure there,

there wasn't a good answer.

And so I asked the community to

talk about the vision,

what, how did they want

to see their community over time?

And I, and I asked them

to think about what these,

this place should be in a hundred years.

And I picked a hundred years

because that meant everybody

in the room would be dead

by the time the a

hundred years had passed.

And that meant we didn't

have to worry about budgets

and, you know, personal

issues or anything like that.

And they described this

beautiful bucolic countryside,

unspoiled with the,

with the way of life,

the rural way of life

that they'd enjoyed for,

you know, generations.

And none of them had a highway bypass

in their, their vision,

not a single person.

And so they met and they talked about it,

and they came to a consensus.

And this was their, their vision that

the future of rural Route 50 is a scenic,

unique rural community in a historical,

agricultural quiet and natural setting.

And then they spelled it

out what this vision meant.

This vision statement was

developed as a means to guide

and assess land use planning

and transportation decisions

for the next a hundred years

with the idea that any proposal

for change should be measured against it

or in terms of its potential to fulfill

or destroy the vision.

So this became a litmus

test for everything.

If the change helped,

they would support it.

If it hurt, they would,

they would fight it,

which is a very powerful thing

because they just loved their

community and their countryside.

And so there was no room for a bypass

and there was a safety issue.

And so I recalled from a

friend of mine, he was the head

of transportation for Denmark.

And in, so this is 19 95, 19 96.

And when he was a young

engineer in the early seventies,

Denmark ran out of money for

highway bypasses and so forth,

and they wanted to put

public money into, you know,

crazy things like healthcare and education

and these other, so that's

where their values lay.

So they, they were running out of money

and so they couldn't build the bypasses.

So his employer, the,

their equivalent of the DOT

gave him three little

towns to experiment on.

And each one of them

had a highway come in,

became the main street, and

came out as a highway again.

And they had safety issues and problems

and they would've had a

bypass, had they had the money.

So he ended up, in retrospect,

retrofitting the main streets

to slow the traffic down and

and allow the town functions

and the traffic functions

to coexist in harmony.

And the three towns were very different

and they were each hugely successful.

And so that became national

policy', you know, very quickly.

And so the DOT saved a lot of money.

The businesses didn't

lose to bypass development

and the, the rural roads were,

were preserved and it was a huge success.

And now if you go anywhere in Europe,

there's an organization called P Arc

that's like the Institute of

Transportation Engineers here.

And this, these ideas spread all over.

So if you're in France or Switzerland

or anywhere like that, Germany,

you'll see his fingerprints.

A little rural highway will come in,

there'll be a transition

zone as you enter town,

and then you'll, it'll be calmed

and it'll become a little

rural road at the other end.

So that's the book he, he wrote

and he gave me a copy of it.

And in it it talks about the theory.

So historically these

communities were fine,

the rural road would go through

and be a functioning main street.

But as the street was

specialized for throughput

and motor vehicle users,

it became more of a, a a,

like a highway and it

split the town in half.

It became a barrier. And so

the, the knee jerk reaction was

to build bypass and

that's what was happening,

which they couldn't afford.

So the idea was to change the

nature of the street again so

that the, the different

user groups could coexist.

So this resonated really

well with the community

to change the design of the road

that all the user groups could

use the same space equitably.

And that's what Cindy was talking about.

And we thought it was great.

It would save the DOT money,

it would save the landscape,

it would save people's farms

and would save the businesses

and it would be safer, all the problems

that were, everyone was complaining about.

So we suggested this, the community

and I suggested this to the DOT

and there was this oversized

negative reaction against this.

Like it was not just no,

but they were viscerally

saying, no, absolutely not.

You have to have a bypass.

And we were wondering why.

And so we kept pushing

because it seemed like

a really great idea.

It works all over Europe

for about 20 years that we work here.

And, and since then,

we've done this in a few

places now and it works fine.

So they were really

supportive of this idea.

And then, so there's the

three little towns out here

and there's Washington DC and

West Virginia is over there.

What we learned was that the DOT

wasn't there to help

the three little towns

with the safety on their,

their main streets.

They needed these bypasses

'cause there was a plan that wasn't public

to build a giant freeway from Washington

to West Virginia.

And it happened to go down Route 50.

They needed the right of way.

That's what this was about.

It wasn't about safety, it was

about building this giant highway.

But Senator Byrd from West Virginia had

championed and his

economic development plan

for West Virginia was to

build this giant highway so

that he could build

tracked homes, you know,

low density suburban

homes in West Virginia

and that would help his economy.

And people would then drive

all the way through Virginia

to get to work in Washington DC every

day in the morning and the afternoon.

That was his idea of a great idea.

And so once folks

knew that, then it wasn't a debate anymore

about bypasses

or anything, the whole nature

of the conversation changed

and everybody had to mobilize

to prevent this interstate

highway from coming in

and destroying their

farms, their way of life,

the landscape and the history.

And so the area was threatened

with this large highway

and it, and this is a

functioning farming area,

it's been like that for a long time.

And it threatened their, they're

character rich little rural roads.

It was going down a highway

that has a lot of stone bridges

and stone walls along the side.

Civil war battles were

fought across these walls.

So steeping in history, it

was, is a real hand fisted kind

of context and sensitive idea,

which galvanized the entire

community against this idea

of taking this absolutely

beautiful country road

and turning into something

that did not belong in

that context, in that landscape.

And the Virginia DOT had started it

and it was starting to get widened.

And, and what followed it was exactly

what people feared was the suburban sprawl

and what were beautiful farms.

The last crop they would

grow is the suburban houses.

And that would be a, the

developers would make one time

profit and the land would be gone forever.

So we met in, at the

school, at the churches,

in people's houses, we drew these plans

of, of the whole corridor.

There was like hundreds

of feet of these drawings

of the whole corridor about how

to deal with each intersection.

'cause this was kind of new stuff.

That's our, our parade float

for the Christmas parade,

you know, to get the word out.

And we wrote lots of papers

and this is a public meeting

that was well attended

and one of these times

there was 600 people.

And when we had meetings like

this, 400 people showed up.

Like, like every adult

that wasn't babysitting

was at those meetings.

We even wrote a musical about it.

And so we had the vanilla

department of transportation

'cause we didn't wanna, you

know, call anybody out anyway.

And it was an educational musical about

highway reimagine.

It's been performed twice, you know.

And then, so we drew plans,

artists in the community

volunteer their time

and like this sort of highway

entrance into this one town would turn

into something beautiful like that.

Some of the busier intersections would

turn into roundabouts.

So we'd have the, you

know, keep preserve the,

the rural road and have town

friendly speeds when the,

when the, the road got to towns so

that the towns wouldn't get divided

and different cross sections.

This one was for where

there was a left turn.

So we, we developed a beautiful

median with an opening

so people could turn in and,

and keep the, the, the aesthetic

and the look that everybody wanted.

This was one of the, the main towns

with a entry sequence at each end

and a slower speed through the town.

So all of these plans came

together and the fight continued.

It was a, a vicious fight.

We got, we got federal funding for this

and they did everything they

could to kill the funding

to use it for other things.

It lasted for years and we eventually won,

but it wasn't a technical decision.

And Alex went over that a little bit.

It got, it was political eventually.

'cause the DOT could not say yes

to the community because they were

charged with building this highway.

So it didn't matter what we said, they had

to keep pushing their agenda.

And it eventually went

to Senator Warner in Virginia,

the old, the older one.

Some of you might remember him.

He was very powerful senator. Yeah.

And, and also Senator Graham in,

in Florida to help support that.

'cause we were, we were

doing a another equally cool

project in Florida at the time.

And so they decided

that the giant highway was not happening

and that, that this context sensitive

landscape preservation

site project would happen.

So 29 years later, the project

has been an enormous success.

VDOT now uses it as their poster child

for contact sensor design.

And the traffic volumes haven't changed.

And this is an important point

because when I arrived on

the scene in the nineties,

the traffic forecasts were saying

that the traffic volumes are gonna double.

You know, they have this modeling

that said the traffic

volumes are gonna go up.

And so then we had to,

to do these bypasses

to accommodate the additional traffic.

And we look back in time

and the, the traffic forecast

from the seventies said

that the traffic volumes are

gonna double by the nineties.

And it was the nineties and

they hadn't changed the eighties

forecast said the same thing

and we weren't halfway there.

And so we figured that the

only way that the traffic

forecast could occur is

if the highways was built.

So it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, right?

So it had they built it,

the traffic volumes would've gone up

and they would've said, Hey, see,

good thing we built the highway.

So, and I'll go over a

few examples of where

traffic demand forecast modeling

should not be the driver

of the decision for your community.

It should be your vision because

the traffic demand forecast

models are only one version of the future.

If you decide to lower your

traffic volumes, you can

by, by making changes.

And I just want to

guarantee to you tonight

that traffic volumes are not

an incompressible fluid in a

pipe that has to go somewhere.

They're malleable.

They can go up depending on what you do,

and they could go down

depending on what you do.

So this is another project

in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

This is the, the river

that's the downtown.

And they were trying to revitalize it by

building an aquarium, but the

downtown wasn't very walkable,

but they thought, hey,

if we build an aquarium,

people come downtown and they'll

stay for lunch and so on.

Well, people would drive downtown, they go

to the aquarium and then they'd drive out.

It wasn't a place. And one

of the problems was

they weren't connecting

to the waterfront, this

lack of connection.

And so we thought, well, why

don't we just change that

big road into a two-lane street

and create steps down to the waterfront.

And that would really help

the downtown have an address.

Now the Tennessee

D-O-D-O-T at the time now,

they support what happened afterwards.

But at the time they didn't say no.

They said, hell no, you can't do that.

The, the city's lifeblood is the highway

and the mobility it

provides, it's so important

for the economic health

and the convenience

of the motoring public, and they said,

we have to fight congestion.

So we e we shouldn't take it away.

First of all, take the lanes

away, we should add lanes.

'cause removing it is

simply anti-progress.

And, and the city, the community

was saying that walkability

and access is more important,

and that's key to the economic

and social health of the city.

And the highway is context insensitive.

So two completely different

paradigms, two different ways

of looking at the same situation.

And I'll go into that in a

little more detail later.

So that's the before picture.

There's the aquarium on the left,

and this is the same place after.

And so clearly we won the, the struggle

and people come down here all the time.

We reconnected.

This was an access managed street,

and we reconnected it.

And now the downtown's more

connected. It's more vibrant.

Other investments have come,

there's more jobs and people

and activity and social

and economic exchange happening

today than ever before.

And now the DOT supports the project.

And if you ask anybody, if

they want the big road back

to cut the, the waterfront up

and create a barrier, they

would not want it back.

But it's incredible at the

time how necessary it seems

to keep the big road, but the

city gets better every time.

This is just a bit of theory.

Some of you may know this idea about the

tragedy, the commons.

It goes back to ancient

times when there was a common

grazing ground and it was

rational in the self-interest

of each shepherd to to use the

common grazing ground as much

as they could because it

would save their own grazing

grounds for labor in the season.

So it was rational in their self-interest.

But if every shepherd were to do that,

they would end up destroying

the common grazing ground.

It was called the tragedy of the Commons.

And so when you have a public resource

and it's mismanaged, it gets destroyed

and you, so you have to manage it

so it can keep adding

utility to all the shepherds.

And there's lots of examples of this.

If everybody who has a boat

could catch as many codfish

as they wanted, we'd have

no cod in the oceans.

If everybody with a chainsaw could cut

and sell wood as much

as they wanted, we'd,

our forest would be decimated.

And if people could pollute instead

of paying the money to

have cleaner processes,

then we'd have acid rain in our streams

and our air quality would be terrible.

So these are all examples of tragedy.

The common is when it's rational

and self-interest of the

individuals not to do,

to to profit,

but it, it ends up hurting

everybody including themselves.

This I want to talk about the tragedy

of the commons in terms of

the perspective on speed,

because highways and interstates

and so forth are all about

speed and car carrying capacity.

You might remember the old at

and t commercial where

the adult sits with the,

the school kids and says,

which is better, fast or slow?

And they all yell fast.

And the narrator says, in

a nice, heavy, low voice,

it's not complicated, faster is better,

and which might be true

for internet speed, but,

but what about streets?

So for 10,000 years we've

had cities and streets

and for all

but 100 of those years,

value was a function

of proximity to the center.

So the closer you were to the core,

the more valuable the land.

As you moved out, it got less valuable.

And after World War II in

particular, the idea was,

the conventional theory was

that value was a function of travel time.

And the idea was if we

could speed up the streets

and the roads, then the five minute

and the 10 minute value

contours would spread out.

Unfortunately, this, this sounded great

and it, it, it informed

most of the metrics

that modern transportation

engineers use now

to evaluate projects

and do their planning.

But it, it doesn't work.

So the value didn't spread, it

was transferred to the edges.

This actually devalued

the, the inner areas.

And Detroit's a very good example of that.

But many more cities and also the streets

and roads that got sped up became barriers

and denied access across,

and it changed the character of the place.

But to an individual, like if I asked you,

would you rather be able to drive

to work faster rather than slower,

you would probably say faster.

It's rational in your self-interest.

So if you ask everybody driving

along, would you rather get

to wherever you're going

faster rather than slower?

They would, it would be

rational in the self-interest to do that.

So isn't it good public policy'

to take all the roads in

and outside of your city

and speed them all up?

But the cities that do that

have the biggest transportation

problems and the most congestion.

Houston is a poster job for that

or Phoenix or places like that.

So what it does is it, it sends value out

and you end up with a lot

of suburban sprawl and,

and issues in the core and in, in

and along the streets that

become the barrier streets.

So this is a tragedy that common.

So what's rational in self-interest

in an individual driver

when scaled up to society

can do a lot of harm

to your landscapes and to your,

to your built environments.

Now the, the sort of

support for this I idea of speed is,

is it's nice at an individual level.

It's very nice to be able

to get faster rather than slower.

However, it created a

conventional paradigm.

The whole industry switched where the

higher calling was the

track demand forecast model.

And experts told the public what was good

for them in terms of transportation.

The focus was rewarding.

Longer automobile trips, not access to

land or anything like that.

And, and you probably recognize

some of these are the ideas

to fight congestion, increased speeds

and keep traffic moving.

And they were indifferent to

the land use relationships,

which is really important in this context.

But it's simple. It's really

simple and easy to understand.

And it can be argued in sound

bites even though development

is, is is not simple

and that the strategies

are pretty commonly known,

adding lanes and speeding things up.

And the capacity of streets

was to move traffic.

But the cities that did this the most,

now we've had three generations

of this kind of thinking.

They lack identity of

poor health outcomes.

Cars were thought of as freedom back then,

but now you have to use your car.

It's your only choice. So if

you don't have any choices,

that is a diminishment of Freeman freedom,

especially if you can't afford

a car or you're too young

or too old or, or something like that.

And it uses a lot of land and energy

and you have less vibrant places.

So it hasn't stood the test of time.

We've had 10,000 years of evolving cities

and this has been around

for just three generations

and it hasn't worked

out as it was intended.

Just the idea was that you

just moved around faster

and everything else has stayed the same.

But markets changed, land

use, planning changed,

all sorts of things change.

And there's this traditional paradigm,

which is the other way

of looking at the world

from a transportation lens.

And this dates back thousands of years.

And it's about community values,

advancing community values.

It's about rewarding short trips

and different types of users.

It's about maximizing proximity in place.

It's integrated with

land use and landscapes.

It's about shorter speeds,

nurturing businesses

and what's on the sides of the street.

And the cities that do this the most tend

to have strong identities,

use less energy,

have more modal choices.

So the, the, the point of this is

that speed is like a

pathogen for development.

This is a typical city

in the United States

and you can see the parts that were built

before World War ii.

And you can see the, the old farm areas

that were outta the city

that had been suburbanized.

And, and as we speed cities

up, the suburbs keep growing.

And you can see that around here.

You know, you can, you just go

to the southwest of the city

or the north, any, any direction

where the streets have been sped up.

You see this kind of development now

and above the horizon line.

You see these green bars

and they represent value

per acre in terms of taxes

and underneath represents the costs,

the expenses per acre for

samples, sewers and fire services

and police services and so forth.

The, the more urban higher density areas

generate more than enough

income to cover their services.

Load density, suburban development

doesn't, they cost more

in services than they generate in taxes.

And everyone in the suburbs

thinks they're paying their,

their fair share, but

they're actually not.

They're being subsidized by

the, the older built areas.

And this is, I haven't seen

an exception to this yet.

Urban three is the company

that studies these things.

They haven't found an exception yet.

But what happens at some point

when the suburbs grow enough,

you start running out of money

and have budget issues as a municipality

and you can't afford anything else

but to fund infrastructure

and you have school funding

issues, you have all sorts

of funding issues because

so much money is ending up

subsidizing the expenses out here.

So this, so I always thought

these issues would be based

solving these issues

based on, you know, safety

and place making and so forth.

But there's a strong economic case

for not speeding up traffic.

So you lose your

landscapes. This is Buffalo.

Back in the day when there

was no highways in Buffalo,

and this was the highway

plan, very complicated.

As you can see. I 1951,

and I just wanna use this

one example of a highway.

This is a old leafy neighborhood

and this was a, an avenue

with a linear park down

the middle with trees.

And one winter somebody came

in and cut down all the trees.

And, and again, I just wanna point out

that church steep hiding

behind the trees there.

And then shortly after

all the trees were removed

and watch, look for the steeple.

And they have to picture that got built.

And so they left the houses.

They, so they got no

compensation for this.

Their streets became the frontage lanes

and this is what they built.

And what effect do you think

that had on their quality

of life and their property

value and their neighborhood

and walkability, placemaking

and, and all that.

This is the, this is Buffalo

and this is in the, they have

this fantastic Olmsted park

system and, and you have the art gallery

and the science museum and

so forth built into the

beautiful landscape.

Can you imagine sitting

on the patio here and,

and looking at art

and then, you know, you've

got the backdrop of the water

and then this got built

through, that's the same view.

And the idea was to speed folks

through from the city out

into the, the rural area,

which was becoming suburbanized

and it completely devalued

the entire park system in the

neighborhoods and the quality

of life in the community.

And that's the comparison.

Now, can you imagine having a, you know,

a reception out here now with

the, the interstate going by?

- Who was responsible

for that? Robert Moses.

- Yeah, Robert Moses has his

fingers in all these pies.

And, and then, so this is

what happened to Buffalo.

They lost 55% of their population.

The whole city declined and

moved out to the suburbs

and became car dependent.

And so we were asked to come

and look at this highway that was built

through the park system

called the Sujata Parkway.

And the New York DOT

said, oh yeah, we're open

to all your ideas, but you have

to accommodate this much

traffic and this design speed

and you can't touch the

interchanges at the end.

A lot of flexibility there, right?

So you have two interchanges,

what can you build

between two interchanges,

both besides the highway?

So it brings up the idea of a cama.

Like if you want to build

something nice between here,

you get this composition

of incongruent parts

that are unrealistic.

And so they basically just said

you have to build a highway.

And so we didn't, we didn't accept that.

And this is a football player

heading out to a fancy dinner

with his cleats and his helmet on.

So that's what they're asking us to do.

But in a transportation

form, since it was a

football town, we thought we'd use that.

This is Robert Moses,

sorry, not Robert Moses.

It's Olmsted. And Olmsted

was a fantastic landscape

architect and he, he designed

all these really great

places in cities and he was

concerned about things like

health and the functionality of the space

and how it looked and felt.

And he was an artist. He was

an artist with the landscape.

And so these are the

sorts of places he built,

which they put highways through.

Now this is a piece of

art by Vincent Van Gogh

and it was stolen in 1945

at the end of the second World War.

Now this art is hanging in

your grandfather's basement.

It's not his. And if

he puts it in his will

for you, it's not yours.

You have to return it to the owners.

And it was not the New York DOT's, right?

To destroy this piece of art

that belonged to the people

and make this highway system.

It needs to be restored

and given back to the

people it was not.

We'll take questions at the end. Thanks.

It's not the New York DOT's prerogative

to dictate the terms of the replacement.

They should not have taken the art.

So they can't tell you what sort

of piece you need to put in its place.

It's up to the community.

So we recommended removing the highway

and restoring the re the

relationships that existed.

And what would you put in a park?

An avenue. A a, an alley, A highway.

How about a parkway

that was not in the

environmental assessment

by the New York DOT.

So just right there, you know,

that the environmental assessment wasn't

worth, the paper was written on.

And after, after we did their

our public meeting about this,

they rescinded their

environmental assessment

because it did not include

a parkway in a park.

Rookie mistake. I would

suggest. So what's the context?

What's important in this landscape

and whose model should apply?

Should it be the interstate builder

or should it be the community?

Should it be something to do with parks?

Like how do you approach this problem?

So let's talk about 3 22.

That's what it looks

like right at this arrow.

Now are you, I have a question for you.

Are you allowed to walk or

ride your bike on this highway?

Okay, you can't. Now let's say you could

you, let's say it was live.

Would you ride your bike

or walk along it? No. Okay.

Just shouted a couple answers.

Why not? It's dangerous.

Okay. If what else?

There's no room too fast. Ugly.

Ugly, okay. Hostile. Right.

Okay, well that's, that's good to know.

Now, at, at way over here

on the other side of the 99,

you've got this fantastic

hotel and convention center

and other things there and it's,

it's about almost two miles

to the middle of State College.

Have any of you walked there?

- I have.

- Oh, okay. And you're, and you're alive.

Okay, great. Has anybody

ridden your bike there?

Oh, you have two? Okay.

Okay. Three people.

How was the experience?

Was it something that you would

recommend for your, your mom?

- It was a secretive farm

road under the highway.

- Okay. Over, over there. Okay,

so it's not pleasant, right?

It's not a, it is a nice

thing. You go, it's so close.

And these are the traffic

volumes, the busy part's.

39,000 up here is 28 and it's,

and it goes down in the rural area.

It's only 14,000 cars a day.

And this reminded me of my bike ride.

So I live in Maitland, Florida.

There's my house, there's,

there's downtown where I go

to on my bike all the time

and it's a city hall, a grocery store,

all shops and restaurants and so on.

And that's my bike route.

And sometimes I go further

down to downtown Orlando

and that, and that's

the street I ride down.

So I ride down the bike lane,

kids are riding the school,

you see the school crossing.

So it's, it is part of the neighborhood

that's the, these are the traffic volumes.

These are the busy parts, 47,000, 34,000,

and about 30,000 along the street.

And now when you compare the two,

there's almost twice the traffic here

and double the traffic then

that's on this highway is here.

It's a little bit longer and it's slower.

And I do this every week,

a couple times a week and it's fine.

It, and so the environment

that you create has a big

difference on your willingness

to use the space and then the connectivity

and the value to your community.

This is not a barrier, that's a barrier.

This is dangerous, this is not dangerous.

So you get the picture right

and it carries more traffic.

So these are the two areas

at the exact same scale,

taken from the exact same

height above the ground.

And this is what we call the

blast zone of the highway.

And you can see the area that's consumed

where you don't want to be near.

And it's, it's just car

oriented and hostile.

And I'll show you the blast zone of the,

the signal ice intersection

that processes more traffic.

It's right there. So that intersection

processes more traffic

than this and pedestrians

and you have business up to it.

Tax paying businesses

unlike anything around here.

So which intersection is

contributing more to society

and to your place?

So let's take a, a closer look at this

unbelievable interchange,

like that's unique.

Let's pretend it's not there

and we're gonna start again.

Let, let's say you put 99 in

on this exact same alignment

and we're gonna recycle

all the bridges so it,

so it doesn't cost much.

You could achieve the same thing

with, with the same volumes

with a parkway and a,

a connected little network of streets.

You still have a couple ramps

on and off so you can get on

and off to go anywhere you want,

but way simpler, way less land.

And you can connect to the

development over here in the

neighborhood and so on because

there's already bridges there.

And you could probably make

another connection down

to the football stadium, you

know, for game day or whatever,

or other purposes so you

can get more connections

'cause you're not on

an access managed road.

And then you could do a

trail system connecting your

existing trails and make

a very comfortable walk

or ride through your community,

which you can't do today.

There's people who drive

between, you know, two land uses,

which are, you know, a mile or two away

and they have to use an

interstate and a highway to do it.

Like that's ridiculous and

it processes more traffic.

Now this is the blast zone of,

because you still have a couple

ramps because you have 99,

but look at the

relationship with the land.

You could, this could be

parks, it could be development,

it could be all kinds of

beautiful contributing things

and a lack of a barrier.

So let's look at the, the broader picture.

So we just talked about

how we could simplify this

and make it into a, a

more contributing place.

And the same thing could be at these

other locations as well.

And there's lots of

different ways of doing that.

We, and then at Miller Road,

this is not a very elegant

transition between a highway

and your beautiful landscape

with your rural road.

So this is the, the city develops.

So it's, it's hopped the highway

and it's, it's gonna continue to do that.

There's three places

to access the highway.

This, the place is going to grow.

And you've got a highway

here and a highway here.

And just like in Buffalo,

you've got two interchanges

pointing at each other.

And the New York DOT really wanted

to connect them with another highway.

And I can come up with lots

of other ones like in

the seven 10 freeway in,

in Pasadena is being removed

and they want to keep the connections.

It it begs itself for another highway.

As long as this highway stays

and this highway stays,

it's, there's gonna be this

just huge desire to connect them.

Now this was built in the sixties.

Now why would anybody

build something like that

around a little town

with a little railroad,

with interchanges and so forth

because they had a plan to continue this

and make this into a big highway.

And that was built in the sixties.

So the plan probably

existed in the fifties.

So this idea comes from

the 1950s by people

who had no experience with the effects

of highways on communities and landscapes.

That wasn't a thing back then.

So we're living with a

predetermined outcome

of getting an entertained

interstate through here.

But now we know we don't have

to do that. We have choices.

There's examples around the

country of not doing that.

So what we call that part of

three twenty two that attached

to 99 is a spur.

And what we are suggesting

is to reimagine it.

You don't have to have that

barrier in your community.

You don't have to have

a low performing street

in terms of connectivity.

And multimodal is in the

middle of your community.

You could replace it with

something very simple

that can carry more traffic,

can can, can be more permeable

and higher performing at a

lower cost than keeping that

overly fast highway in your community

that you can't even walk

or ride your bike on.

So we would suggest re-imagining that.

And then, oh, just

before I go on then that

it shows a commitment

to contact sensitivity through

this corridor, through the,

the town part and in the rural part.

And then the likelihood of

just waiting another 10 years

and trying to build an interstate

and then another 10 years

that sort of preoccupation

with one of finishing that

1950s idea would, would go away

permanently for maybe a hundred years,

like your vision might say.

So here's a couple of

thoughts that I'm gonna add to

what Alex and Cindy said.

I would not allow if I were you in your

community, I wouldn't build an interstate.

I think if you build an

interstate through your valley,

it's going to, in my

view, destroy your valley.

It's going to destroy its

aesthetic, it's noise level,

it's gonna have a couple of interchanges,

which will focus all your value

traffic on a couple of spots.

And the total, your character

and your history will be

destroyed just like it

would've on route 50.

It doesn't fit it, it fits here.

So that's, you gotta look for a good fit.

A two-lane parkway could contribute

to place as a, as a thought.

So if this, so if a parkway

is not a serious alternative,

then there's something

wrong with the planning.

Just like New York. If they

don't, if whoever's coming up

with the options for this, this idea, if,

if this doesn't include a two lane parkway

with left turns at key key locations

and maybe roundabouts at busy

intersections, you need to

question the EA because it's incomplete.

You know, I don't know, maybe

something like this, maybe

you would probably want

your, your farms reflected.

This is just a parkway elsewhere.

You can see the path here for recreation.

But something beautiful, something

that actually adds even more

so than the existing the road.

And I suspect that the road that goes

through now is on the best alignment

because it was put there historically for,

for probably sensible reasons.

But something like this

would make the place

really, really beautiful.

And then, and don't get

bamboozled by the traffic

forecasts there.

Like I said, there's just

one version of the future.

And think a hundred years, not 20

or 25, typically

forecasts go out 25 years,

but take whatever percentage,

let's say it's 25% or 30%

and then multiply that

over 10, a hundred years,

you're gonna, you, you

really want a couple

hundred percent more traffic.

It will just continue to grow.

So think about where you want

it ultimately for your great,

great great great grandchildren

and plan for that, design for that.

Keep your historic place intact.

So they're, they're talking

to the council here and,

and the guy says that the

traffic demand forecast model

says we need two more lanes.

We empathize, but there's no choice.

Now we showed you some

examples today of real places

that did not follow the

traffic demand forecast model

and are better today for it.

So are you gonna believe what you see

or what came out of a model?

So that's the question you have to take.

Now the model has pseudoscience

kind of supporting it.

So it's got some kind of

kind of scientific backing

or at least sounding backing behind it.

But it's built up on

a bunch of assignments

or sorry, assumptions, all with error.

Never accept the idea that your

ideas, your values are as important

or more important than

that model that your say

and your, your judgment

is less than than that of

a conventional model.

And just like cities can look

at Copenhagen, great model,

they don't have to follow up the forecast

either, neither do you.

And then, and then change 3 22

in town and in your rural

area as it ought to be,

you know, along it as you travel along it

and across it, how does it contribute

to the place like Cindy was talking about?

And at the end of the day, I suspect that

the, the DOT won't agree

to what I'm talking about.

And I suspect like in a lot of the other,

these other projects that

the people you're talking to

aren't allowed to agree to that yet

because the vision has

been since the fifties

or sixties to build it through here.

So it's gonna be a

really tough road ahead,

like Alex said, it's

hard, it's really hard to,

to change the trajectory

of these sorts of things

and it will probably end up

being a political solution.

But you have to go through

the exercises, you have

to do the EAs, you have to

do the studies, you have to,

and you have to stay consistent

with what's important

to you as a community.

And with that, I think we'll

thank you for your attention

and we'll maybe the other two can come up

and we can have some

discussion with some questions.

Thanks.

So any thoughts, questions,

discussions, protests?

So in, as as is the culture

here was start at, left

and moved to the right, so maybe

up here in the third row please.

- I dunno how many

- This road was stopped before.

It was 16 years

before they connected from

near Park Park near Fairview to,

it was, it was a, it wasn't

Urban Parkway eventually,

but what it's, what they wanted

to do was use federal money,

make it all 4% grades

and, and make, and there was no assets.

We live in college, Township

the parks, it was going to go

through two federally pointed parks.

That's the only way we

stopped it, right, is we found

endangered plants and

endangered animals in

federally funded parks.

And it worked.

- And when they, so I mean

to share that with the,

the group, so she mentioned

that it, this it's been fought

before and won and they used

endangered plants and animals

and parks to stop it.

You have more tools now than you did

before to help your vision prevail.

But we didn't talk about it very much.

But we were part

of the big seven 10 fight

in Pasadena, California.

It's the longest running freeway

fight in America history.

And since World War ii, every 10 years,

Caltrans has been trying

to build this highway

through the community and

every 10 years the community

rises up and stops it again.

They only need yes once

and then it gets destroyed

and they, they bought it actually

the Caltrans had actually

bought hundreds

and hundreds of historic

homes that they were going

to demolish and they were neglecting them

so they would like

demolish over time, which,

which they ended up

having to stop doing that.

But they kept getting defeated

by the community over and over again.

And the most recent one, I

think we've been involved

with two of those fights

every decade or so.

And the last one we finally killed it.

We, we, we called it, what was it?

The, what are those things

that raise outta the ground?

They don't die. I can't remember.

Yeah, the zombie highway.

That was it. We called

it the zombie highway

'cause it kept, we couldn't kill it

and it got, it got stopped

and the last version

of it was they were gonna build a tunnel

under the entire city

of, of South Pasadena,

five mile tunnel through three fault

lines or something like that.

Like what could go wrong?

Like, and the cost was

unbelievable, but that,

but they had two stubs facing

each other just like you have

and they just really wanted

to connect that together.

So you're gonna fight

it and fight it again

and you'll, you'll end

up fighting it again

and again even if you win this time.

But if you can start rolling

back that stub that goes

through your town, then

it shows a commitment

to your vision and your context.

And so that's why we, we

would highly recommend that.

So let's get another question.

You had, I'm right just

behind me. Yes, I'm,

- So I understand everything you're saying

and I am really favorable

parkway type road.

But I want to know if you

went on that road today

and if you saw the thousands

of trucks, 18 wheelers

that are flooding through this

road, this, in my opinion,

is the reason that a

parkway is problematic

because then you force local traffic

to drive in the road with

18 wheelers that are headed

through and beyond state college.

They're not stopping here,

they're going to I 99

and those are the most

dangerous vehicles on the road.

So I would almost rather have

a road that goes through fast,

gets 'em out, keep the

local roads as you know,

as they are and go around,

I don't know what the solution is.

Your pictures show all these

parkways with nice little

SUVs and little cars all

flowing nicely through

and that is not the

reality of 3 22 at all.

- Yeah, we saw that today.

And do you think you get more

trucks if you speed it up

or less trucks if you slow it down?

- Well I think if you slow down

they might go somewhere else. That's the

- Idea.

Yeah. So, so one of the,

the worst, the one thing

that's bad in a community is

having trucks going through it.

There's no doubt about it. But having

to go through fast is even worse.

And I suspect there's also

local traffic on 3 22.

In fact, anybody going to

that hotel is probably on it as well.

And I also suspect there's

something wrong with the turnpike

and the tolling and field.

So your, your community is

getting kind of sacrificed

for the benefit of cut

through truck traffic.

And so if truck traffic is the problem

or a problem rewarding it is

probably not a good solution.

You should, you should

seriously think about it and,

and look at if that's a problem, start put

that in Your vision is to

reduce the track traffic and,

and reduce their impacts.

Like when I, the noise from

the tires, there's two sources

of noise from trucks,

brakes and engine and tires.

And when they're going fast, you can hear

that noise a couple miles away.

Your entire Happy Valley is

going to be truck tire noise.

And so you don't even have

to be on the highway to,

to be impacted by that.

And the, oh, where,

where were we, Montreal

or someplace like that where

the health department studied

air quality within, I think

it was, it's in Canada,

so it's in meters, but it's

about 400 yards is unhealthy.

So anybody within 400 meters

of a big highway like that,

their health is at risk.

Asthma and all, you know,

all that kind of stuff,

life expectancies were down.

So it's not cool on a

number of levels and,

and I hope you don't get into a situation

where you feel like you have

no choice, you do have a choice

and if truck traffic's part

of the problem, you, you need

to put that in the problem definition

and solve it, not accept it as a mandate.

And so I and and you certainly

don't have to reward it.

So let's, let's go to the back

and then we'll go over here. Yes sir.

- People need to remember

Route 3 22 was designed

and built about a hundred years ago

or so as the Great Lakes Highway

to get truck traffic from

the docks on the Atlantic

Coast to Great Lakes.

And it was built for that purpose.

And trucks are going to be a normal part

because railroads gone to

hell for about a handbag.

And it's a matter of mitigating

to the greatest extent possible

through traffic that we have.

That's what, that's what the,

I've been doing that, trying

that for 25 years now, but succeeded Jack.

- So truck traffic, the

gentleman was saying that

it was built for truck

traffic a hundred years ago

and I suspect there's other choices now.

It's probably not the only

truck route from the Great Lakes

to wherever you said there's so,

so I, I don't think

that's the only option.

And I think truck, the nature

of truck traffic has changed

over the last century

and it's not contact sensitive anymore.

And just because we we do did things,

you know, decades and decades

and decades ago doesn't mean

it's still a good idea today

'cause it's affecting your

safety, your health, your city,

your form, your image, your history.

So I don't think you have to

accept that original role and,

and perpetuate it, especially

in today's environment when,

when the rails aren't working as well

as they they did a hundred years ago,

maybe there's a solution

there in the long run.

But if you lose your landscapes

in the next 10 years,

you're never getting them back.

That's the thing. This

is a one time thing.

Once it's destroyed, it's really,

really, really hard to get it back.

Now people are removing

highways that were, were built

and did a lot of harm, but

it's so much easier not

to build them in the first place instead

of building them and

having to take them out.

We speak from experience on that.

Yes sir. Two,

- Yes.

Thank you very much. I I I've

been following tools work

for a long time since the second

Avenue Bikeway in Seattle.

That was the first time

I, I was aware of it.

So I have two questions.

The first and most important

one is, where's the concept out

of the traffic calming musical?

I absolutely must listen to that.

- So I went to a arts middle school

and high school, played the cello

and participated in a

bunch of musicals myself.

And this community was so

divided that I thought we got

to, we need something to

break the ice a little bit.

And so me

and this poet test from

Middleburg wrote this thing

and there was four songs

and by the engineer, by the

activist, by the Politician

and by the, who was an engineer.

Is that, is that right?

Anyway, I got that the cast

mix up, it was 1995 by the way.

And we put it on and

got people laughing and,

and then they were, and it was educational

and so they were, we used a

different way to reach people.

'cause you know, three talking

heads at a meeting like this

isn't the most exciting

thing in the world,

but a musical like that's,

that's kind of cool.

We didn't have time to throw in together,

but it, it got put on then

and it got put on again in Portland,

Oregon when we were talking

about similar subjects

and it's like a Gilbertson

Sullivan musical.

'cause you can change the

jokes for the local folks.

But, but actually it's a good point.

You, you probably won't do a musical,

but you, you need to get the word out.

You need to capacity

build in the community.

You need to build your

vocabulary and your,

and your talking points

because the, the conventional paradigm,

the conventional engineers who, who want

to build a big highway,

they have had 50 years

of building up their

scripts and their stories

and their modeling and so on.

And this is probably your first

or second big highway fight.

And so you're, you're at

a disadvantage right now.

'cause they do this for a living

and they have lots of time

and they only have to get yes once.

So it's really important to

share these ideas and, and,

and get together and

talk and communicate and,

and craft your own vision

about what this place,

what your landscapes

and what your town want

to be in a hundred years.

And that's the kind of thing

that can move the needle

and has moved the needle,

you know, across the country,

but maybe not a musical.

The guy behind you. Oh,

your second question. Yeah,

- The second question, which

I find fundamentally less

important than the musical is

that currently Southern County

has basically no reliable

in means of non automotive transport.

And so even if we were

to spend all of the money

to roll back the highway

spur to convert 3 22 into a

a parkway, maybe we do have

some longer distance bicycle trails,

but that still leaves us with a problem

of there's no transit to

mil high or Zion or Bellon.

The nearest damn track station

is 20 miles away in Tyrone.

Excuse me. What prevents us

from just fundamentally putting

a pause on the highway

projects first using all of

that money to build out better,

more multimodal active

transportation, ideally rail transit,

using the rail roads that we already have

to within two kilometers

of downtown state college.

Build that out first

and then maybe we can do

something about highways and,

and hopefully roll them back

because even if we start

rolling them back now,

it's still just a car

dependent place if a slower

and more scenic one.

- So the gentleman has a

pretty cool vision about

creating a multimodal environment.

You know, transit is a tricky subject

because unlike roads,

that's a completely, you know,

socialistic sort of thing.

Like you, you, you look

at who's using the roads

and you provide them

for free for everybody.

Yeah, sure. You pay it for, for gas

and your, your tag and everything.

But transit expected to

generate its own income.

So it has to generate

enough ridership and,

and so it, it's a bit of

an unfair playing field

that subsidies are like,

was it 90% for highways

and was it 50% for transit?

Something like that. I can't remember the

the actual percentages.

But it's, it's not an equitable situation.

However, you can start

changing your land uses

and your street network

and the highways over time

to create what's called

a transit friendly place.

It's transit ready. And then when you,

when you do have the ability

to get transit through rail or,

or bus or what have you,

you're, you're prepared.

It's hard to put in transit

when places are far apart

and sprawled and disconnected.

One of the things that you

want to do, if you were

to build a parkway, the

the one I showed you had a,

a multi-use trail alongside it,

and this is kind of a normal practice,

is parkways are multimodal

and they're crossable.

And so you could get the whole

length east west of your,

your Borough to be multimodal

and, and comfortable

and beautiful so people

could use it to get to work,

to school or just go for a nice ride.

The the idea of the trail going up, i,

I don't know all the, the landmarks,

but up from your football

stadium, through the medical area

and up to the hotel

and so forth, that could

be easily accomplished

with what we were showing.

So all of these incremental

changes can slowly

move the needle to a more walkable,

bikeable friendly, more direct.

Like you don't, if you're

driving your car even you don't

have to go outta your

way to get somewhere.

You have a direct connection to places.

So your, your vehicle miles

travel starts to go down.

And if you look at the Copenhagen model

and then you talk to a

guy like Ole Dur house

who was there at the time when they,

when they had a completely

car dependent city

and nobody biked, you know,

a few people got together,

crafted a vision and it

took them 20 years to become

a pretty nice city and

they haven't stopped,

they've never got complacent.

And they, they continue

to improve on their

performance in terms

of reducing their cost

of transportation compared

to their city wealth.

It's a, it's like a quarter.

They spend about a

quarter on transportation,

what cities like Houston

and stuff and groups spend,

'cause they're spending money

on the most expensive way

of getting around ever invented

in the history of the world.

And so if you're interested

in keeping your taxes down,

it's the Copenhagen that are, are,

are really ahead in this way.

And, and South Pasadena will be as well

because they're, they're

taking this approach

so people can get around cheaper

and in a more active way.

But I I was, I would,

it's all incremental and,

and you, you need to stop the bleeding.

Like do no, no more harm

first of all and then,

and start positioning yourself.

I remember in the

seventies going to Paris,

nobody rode a bike in Paris back then.

And now it's, it's a huge thing.

- Sorry, I just also wanted, I I think

to your point about

the, the funding, right?

You mentioned you asked,

you know, why, why,

why didn't do this,

why did we not do that?

And I would maybe offer also

that it's not mutually exclusive.

These aren't issues that are

kind of mutually exclusive

and there are funding opportunities.

So the reconnecting

communities dollars that,

that Alex mentioned comes out of Bill

the bipartisan infrastructure legislation.

And so there are pocket

buckets of money also

for transit in that.

And I think that's another

mechanism by which, you know,

to make sure that it, as Ian mentioned,

get involved in the conversation

and make sure we're not make, you know,

creating comp competing

interests that don't need to be,

you know, in a way I think

the multimodal aspect

to a parkway is part of the conversation.

But then also I think you're,

you're also asking a little

bit about funding and how do we,

how do we fund these as well?

And I think there's other opportunities.

- So part of the legislation

for reconnecting communities

at the federal level recognize

that mistakes were made

in the fifties and sixties

and I would suggest 3 22 is one of them.

'cause it cuts your city in

half and they will fund studies

and, and help with the

infrastructure changes

to reconnect communities.

The name of the, the funding source.

So, so that's being used

all over the country now to

help ameliorate some of

these sorts of problems.

There's a whole bunch of questions.

So Oh, about the guy in the white chair?

- Yeah. So I was wondering, you

have some great case studies

and you know, initially the

DOT was against your proposal

and then you turned

around, was it going to,

was it communities talking

to their politicians

to help them tell the.to

- Yeah, so it was Detroit

15 years ago or so,

and when we f when we first

suggested moving interstate,

or sorry, yeah, it's Interstate 3 75.

They literally laughed

and people question my engineering

license and all this sort of thing.

Like they thought this

is Detroit, like this is,

we, this is what we do.

And, but they thought about it and they,

and what we did is we worked the,

with the community on

things like vocabulary

and scripts so that they

could communicate with

city planners and

politicians and so forth.

And they built up a coalition of support,

which eventually prevailed

and it went right to

the federal government.

You saw the governor,

the lieutenant governor

and the, the secretary of

transportation giving a, at that,