Author's Forum on Urbanism – Confessions of a RecoveringEngineer: Transportation for a Small Town

Hey Terry from Atlanta. I know you know quite a few names on this list. Hey, Nate. Nate from Buffalo. How you doing, man. Nice to see you. Dave everywhere I go, I tell people how wonderful buffalo is. And I'm cheering for your football team to. Despite it all. Wow, Singapore. Yeah, that's awesome. Thank you for doing that, what time it is in Singapore said midnight, I've. I have to say, have. It's been on my list of places I would love to visit, have not had the opportunity but but have some friends who have and, yeah, seems like an amazing place thanks for being here. So I'm going to start this. Welcome to on the park bench public square conversation. Brought to you by the Congress for the new urbanism on the park bench Prince presents interactive conversations with thought leaders in New Urbanism and allied industries, providing an opportunity to engage in real time. The webinar series is a platform for senior members to engage to be and collaborate on the pressing issues of the day, the authors forum is a series within on the park bench, and it discusses recently published books by Urbanus or of interest to Urbanus. Today's open forum Confessions of a recovering engineer, transportation for a strong town with author Charles maroon and the discussion with interviewer Jocelyn Gibson. So share your thoughts on hashtag on the park bench www. tiny URL. com slash OTPB feedback and register for upcoming webinars, Tuesday October 12 at 12 noon eastern time, and other authors form restorative cities, urban design for mental health and well being. With authors Jenny row and Layla McKay and interviewer, Stephanie Bothwell and Tuesday October 26 also 12 noon at design for adaptation the climate challenge for new urbanism with Elizabeth flavor cyber can interviewer moderator recall. Go to cnu.org slash resources on the park bench. Whoops. And I wanted to remind everybody to save the dates for seeing you, 30 in Oklahoma City which is taking place March 23 through 26 2022, and it's going to be seeing us first in person Congress since 2019, everybody's really excited about that. Getting together once again, with all the people that we've been mainly communicating with on zoom and learn how a clear commitment to urbanism careful financing and resident engagement can spark a city's Renaissance. Learn more senior.org slash. Seeing you 30 registrations are going to be open December 1 on on Sr 30 Oklahoma City, but you can go to the website and you can find out travel arrangements, where it's going to take place in the hotels and, and so forth. It's going to be a great show. Charles Maroon the author of Confessions of a recovering engineer is the founder and president of strong towns. He's a professional engineer and land use planner with decades of experience. And his book his new book came out this month he is based in Brainerd, Minnesota, and Jocelyn gifts in our interviewer is a senior planner with the zoning consultancy firm zone Co. She recently joined the board of directors for the Congress for new urbanism she's based in Cincinnati. I'm Rob Stewart, editor of seeing us public square Confessions of a recovering engineer transportation for a strong town, published by Wiley and pulls back the curtain on the assumptions and approaches that go into building and maintaining your transportation systems, the transportation systems particularly our streets and roads are the bones of our communities, how we build them have consequences extend down through generations, affecting everybody's lives. Parts of the book made me very angry because of the Cavalier disregard for the impact on everyday lives. That is vividly described by Charles in the room. But there is much more to this book and we're going to be hearing more about that in the next hour. And we're going to start with a presentation by Chuck moraine and then we're going to have a discussion with Jocelyn Gibson, and we're going to go to q&a from the audience so please use the q amp a function of zoom and ask your questions as they occur to you because they will likely be answered. For less in the order that they are asked. With that, I'm going to stop sharing my screen and pass this along to chuck. Great. Thank you Rob and appreciate it thank you also to to recall, and all my CMU friends I see Andre says on here, many, many thanks for everything over many years to him and to all of you. These are my, my best friends here so I'm humbled, again, to be able to share some thoughts and ideas with you. I'm seeing you, is so many amazing thoughts and ideas have come out of seeing you. And for me, I, when I was asked to to chat here for 15 minutes about my book at the beginning and I, I didn't want to kind of preach to the choir, deciding how can I add some value to the conversation we're having here that there's so many things that learned from you that I'm just, you know, that are in the book that you know I'm not going to reflect back to you because I think you know the the experts here are in a sense, in the room. But I wanted to talk a little bit about what's in chapter eight which gets into the financing of highways and the way that we build them CMU has been a leader in highway removal and the whole conversation about highway removal and I hope that chapter eight of the book gives a little bit more to the toolkit. I focus in this chapter on. I 49 in Shreveport, I 49 is a highway, I don't even know where it starts up north somewhere, and it runs down to Lafayette, Louisiana and there's a couple of little segments of the highway that were never completed. And they were never completed because they were done. They didn't make sense. The one in Shreveport is called the inner city connector. It runs through the historic black neighborhood of Annandale. I'm sorry Allendale in in Shreveport, and the, the cost of this project is $700 million to complete this little two and a half mile stretch through the heart of the city. The project is is one that I think at CMU we would we would look at and say this should never be done, but there's a group there called the committee of 100, along with all the kind of do t bureaucracies that we're all used to that have been promoting this project for decades. As part of the environmental review process as part of the project promotion process as part of the analysis. They hired and had put together this report called the economic impacts of I 49 completion. Federal projects are required to have benefit cost analysis they look at all the benefits they compare that to the cost and they come up with these ratios and say here's why we economically are going to do this project so I want to show you what's in this report, because as Rob said some of the things made us mad when you read this book, this part should make you mad. The report lays out three different economic impacts the first one is save time and wear and tear. The second one is the impact of new development and new growth and the third one is what they call network effects and I'm going to, I'm going to break each of these down for you real quick that the first one save time, I think is best understood. Who is this old highway 91 project is now done in California. But the idea here was that we were going to widen some lanes on a highly congested cord or the cost of this project was $1.4. billion. Here's how it was reported in the local paper the Orange County Register. The project will give some relief to drivers in the regular lanes, raising their average rush hour speed from eight miles an hour to 9.4 miles an hour. I don't know what you know the culture in Southern California would would appreciate this all that much but here in Minnesota, you know your life has not made any better because you can go 9.4 miles an hour instead of eight on your commute. Nonetheless, from an engineering standpoint, the way we would look at this and come up with a cost benefit analysis that we would say, all right, it's a $1.4 billion, billion dollar project. But if we look at you know the time savings. Each person is going to save 2530 seconds on their commute, multiply that by 200,000 vehicles a day that go through here, multiply that by 365 days a year multiply that by 50 years that we think these extra lanes will be there. Multiply that by $25 an hour which is average cost of the salary and benefits per hour that Southern California resident will make, and all of a sudden this $1.4 billion project creates something like $5 billion, a benefit. Even though the benefit is, you know, measured in microseconds each day that each one spends the fact that there's so many cars and so much congestion means that this project is justified there's a there's a huge financial benefit. This is bizarre. This kind of math doesn't make any sense it particularly Not today when we're adding lanes I mean maybe when we're connecting San Diego to to LA for the first time, but when we're putting on the 16th and 17th and 18th lanes, not so much in in Shreveport, the numbers are even crazier, right, the number of through trips on the I 49 connector. So, people that will go all the way through and not stop 235 a day that's that's not a typo. The total commuters are a little over 3000. I want to give you some perspective on these numbers I said they're not a typo. This is my street. This is my little street in Brainerd Minnesota where I live, that sidewalk on the right is actually my house goes you know connected to that sidewalk. My little street so in front of my kind of Sleepy small town house gets 455 cars a day, but through trips on the I 49 inner city connector are 235 per day. The cost of this project the I 49 Project $700 million. So, this is a system and I want to give you this confidence going forward. A lot of the things that we see in highway building today are insane people stand up with straight faces and degrees and initials behind their name and make arguments on how this is really good. And we look at it, we're like this is crazy, I want to give you assurance that yes this is actually crazy in this report they said they're going to say 53 cents a trip. That's $1.4 million increase in what they call household income. Every time you say you take a trip, you don't get 53 cents of household income you save 53 cents worth of time, theoretically, but they said that's 1.4 million and over the 20 years of the project that's a $45 million in aggregate savings that all of us in Shreveport will share because of this highway being built through this neighborhood. So we got 45 million in. In time, and wear and tear kind of save the next impact is development and and this is where I mean, the time saved is actually a crazy And this is where I mean, the time saved is actually a crazy number. That's the most credible of the three numbers, right. This one actually becomes was where things get absurd. So there's a paradox in these reports. And you have to scratch very far below the surface to find it. The paradox in the report is that there's going to be all kinds of increases in growth and development and energy and people because of this highway investment. But there's actually going to be a decrease in travel time. So in other words, you're going to be able to have your cake and eat it too There's gonna be lots and lots of people in activity and stuff going on, but there's not going to be too much, you And then the second part we say yeah but there's going to be all this development like all this stuff going on, aka congestion. They estimate the development impact at $800 million per year. So every year after this highways built there's going to be $800 million of economic activity as a direct result of this highway that number kind of just emerges it's kind of like pulled out of the sky is going to say something a little more vulgar than that, it's kind of just like pulled out of thin air. This $800 million. I want to show you how absurd. This is because when you look at the other numbers they have in the report. It kind of shines that, you know, this is a nonsensical number, 100 million dollars per year is $237 per turn sorry $37,000 per year, per commuter Shreveport is actually a rather poor city I put this photo up here of what the typical commuter in Shreveport must look like after this project because that's, again, like, not a real number right that doesn't make any sense. The, the report projects that a number of new jobs and to report this is the population report how it has shrunk over time that last 2030 bit at the end there is a projection based off of the overall trend line. Here's the number of jobs that is being projected 30,600, and how it compares to that population loss basically all the population loss they've had and more would be made up in new jobs that would be created solely because of this highway like jobs that would not happen. Theoretically without this highway again. This is clearly not a real number. And then this is my favorite one. $800 million per year. If you look at that in terms of commuter trips. That's 9.1 new jobs per trip. And that got me thinking like what kind of industry creates 9.1 jobs per trip and I figured they must be in like the clown car industry, right, like I don't. The people in Shreveport are going to pack a whole ton of people in their cars and make a whole bunch of value for driving around on this new highway, again, I laugh. You know the clunker thing, this is an absurdity these numbers are not real. They're really like being pulled out of the air. And of course, when we look at this, it's important to understand how they count this economic development they'll say, we're projecting a new McDonald's here. And, of course, you know, we can look at the system and understand that it with declining population and McDonald's that was built 25 years ago up the road. What this means is that the old McDonald's is going to close. And there's going to be a new McDonald's on the new interchange. This is how this kind of development works and if you step back and you did an honest evaluation you would say there's $10 million of new sales from the new McDonald's. But there's $10 million in lost sales from the old McDonald's and if you were to compare those two and an economic analysis and add them up, you would say 10 million and new sales minus 10 million a la sales equals zero, right but that's not how the report does it report says there's $10 million in economic activity as a result of this highway do that over every Walmart every strip mall every you know Verizon Wireless store, and you can get a whole bunch of money aggregated per year that you can project out kind of ignoring the impacts on the rest of the system. These are fraudulent numbers and they don't stand up when you start to internally reference them to the other numbers that they use in the system. Nonetheless, we've got 45 million in save time and now we have 16,000,000,000,016 trillion in development. Again, less credible as we go. I'm going to give you the craziest one here at the end. And if you want to, you know, batten down things so you don't start throwing things at the screen. Please, as as a trigger warning because the network effects are the most absurd. In the report. They cite you know and understand this is a benefit cost analysis to decide if the federal government should allocate almost a billion dollars to Shreveport, you know, an amount of money that is like one and a half size of their entire annual do t budget so this is like a serious undertaking right in this report they refer to this other report by a guy named poodle and Lee, a pair of researchers university researchers who wrote this report called size sprawl speed and the efficiency of cities. If you ever look at this report. The report is kind of like a conversation between two researchers who are pulling data from different cities in France and in South Korea, but they, they, the wreath of people who put together the I 49 benefit cost analysis, pulled out one line from this report and it's this one, increasing speed by 10% increases labor productivity by 2.9% so if you can move more people, more quickly through the city, you can actually increase labor productivity and that has all kinds of network effects that we can quantify here for our benefit cost analysis. Pluto is from France, he teaches at the University of Paris he looked at 22 cities, not including Paris throughout France, Lee is from South Seoul, South Korea, he looked at three different cities and data they had three different cities, not soul in Korea. In order to kind of get our minds wrapped around what was being put forward here. I compared I looked for a city in France, that had a population similar to Shreveport and my, my French is horrible. I know this is a beautiful name and if you speak French, you can say this beautifully I can't, I'm from Minnesota I never learned French. So I'm not even going to pretend to say this name, but you had two cities have roughly the same population in France, the city's 30 square miles in Shreveport, you've got four times the area right four times the distance. Remember, the idea here is if we can speed people up, we increase labor force productivity, the fascinating thing is that this is probably true. If you're in France, right. If you're in a French city. That is a well designed place where you know you have real neighborhoods things within walking distance. You've got real transit systems getting people around places. Yes, if you can speed this up if you can increase the efficiency of your transit system. If you can, you know, eliminate some of the congestion, you see in these places and allow people to get places more quickly. You can probably see labor force gains, but you can see that report is a very different place. And the idea that you would go to this European study and like cherry pick this one line out of here and say these conclusions from this place on the left, really translate well to the place on the right is an absurdity right these are two very different places and the idea that there's some kind of correlation is just crazy. So, we pull up this line increasing speed by 10% increases labor productivity by 2.9% predominantly. The I 49 economic impact study says that this is going to have an impact of $62,118,727. Over the next 20 years, you have to admire the brass of such specificity. Right. Interestingly, later on in the report, there's a line again for brutally that says when the average potential job home distance increases by 10%, the effective size of the labor market decreases by 11.5% So, Think back to this French town. When you spread people out and you give a lot of distance between them, your productivity and your labor market goes down, that that would seem to if we're cherry picking things out of a report from France to us in Shreveport that would seem to be applicable, at least equally applicable if not more applicable. Then the last correlation that they brought out. Of course, they didn't include this in the analysis, they said there's no impact to this, we're going to ignore this completely even though this kind of defines what report would look like. So we've got $45 million in, save time. We got $16 trillion in development impacts. And then we have $62,118,727 in network effects over 20 years. This is an absurd analysis, and this maybe takes the absurdity of these benefit cost analysis, one degree beyond what we normally see. But I want to tell you that this is very typical of what we see in other places when we're doing similar kind of projects in the book, and I apologize for my vanity here for putting a picture myself but there's a quote from the book, this goes beyond rigor, to something rightly thought of as institutionalized dishonesty and that's exactly what this is, this is a lie that we tell ourselves when we want to justify new construction when we want to justify a project. This is an institutionalized way that we have used and abused what should be a very rigorous process for producing these types of analysis, we should want to know as a society are these good investments or not. And the reality is that the system that we often assume is working to develop that type of conclusion is actually been co opted by an engineering industry by an economic development industry by, you know, the highway building industry that simply wants to build more stuff, regardless of if it makes economic sense for us for the country or for the community. With that will give a pause here and I'll wait for Jason to come back on, and we're going to chat a little bit. Thank you. Hope you are Johnson. Mr. Perfect. There we go. Well thank you chuck thank you for that. And just talking about this book, this book. This book Confessions of a recovering engineer transportation for a strong town. It's not, it's not necessarily a standalone book work. But part of a series that includes your preaching both to 2019 strong towns a bottom up revolution for to rebuild American prosperity. Can you explain the progression and the interplay between these books, and also your upcoming plans books. Yeah, no, I appreciate that question it for many years, I was kind of working up to writing a book in fact I started writing the blog back in 2008 as a way to organize my thoughts and get to a point where I could, I could write a book. And for years, I've kind of been putting together outlines and dealing with different publishers. And the reality is is there's there was there was too many things to pack in and so the way I was able to do the first book strong towns a bottom up revolution was really by taking all of the talk about strobes and transportation and all of that out and just focusing on the way cities are built and the way the underlying finances drives that development pattern. The second book on transportation. now came out this month. We are working internally here, Daniel Harris and I are co writing a book on housing. And so that will be the third book in the series. The fourth book is going to be on economic development and then the fifth book is going to be on urban design and then I've decided I'm going to retire and maybe I'll, I'll, I'll just hang out with CMU full time. I don't think anyone would protest but. So, so, in addition to this book online you've got a great repository of information and people that are really interested in the contents of this second book. Um, can you talk a little bit about that website in case anyone on on this webinar wants to find it and sort of what's included in the book. Yeah. Well, so, so let's take that two ways for this book in specific we created a website called confessions dot engineer that's that's the we bought the dot engineer domain confessions dot engineer so you can go there and there's a bunch of supplemental material on the book every chapter has maps photos images quotes dialogue, videos, supporting material. And so, The book is meant to be. Well, I was right for my dad. My dad is a guy who worked at the paper mill and then went back to school and became a teacher, not an academic, but someone who will read if you put a good book in front of them. I always write for my dad as the target audience and so the book is very readable it's very accessible. It's designed to tell a story, but for those people who want to get more technical confessions that engineer has got all that information, strong tons of course, we've had the website for, you know, over a decade now, and there's just a huge backlog of information all of it which is creative commons license so all of it is is free for everybody here to use to access to share. I like to tell people if I've written something on strong towns that that you find really compelling. Feel free to copy it, paste it into your own document put your name on it. pretend you wrote it like I don't care, we're really trying to just get these ideas and this message out. And if you can use our work for good in your community, please do that. Great, well thank you. I just want to remind the viewers that there is a q amp a button and we are going to be taking some questions from the audience at the end so if there's anything that's come up please feel free to enter it were logging them and We're logging them and we'll be asking those questions at the end but I did want to get back to the book you spend a lot of time talking about the contents in chapter eight, and sort of justification analyses for for huge highway expenditures in chapter two you spend a lot of time talking to the difference between the streets and roads degrading roads to make them more street light or degrading streets to make them more roads like reduces the overall value provided by the transportation system. And so I just want it was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that. I feel like there's a number of things in this book that are deeply subversive, and by subversive I mean, we've created a certain power structure in local government around transportation spending. In fact, the the the next slide, which I didn't do. I'll flip back to this right and how to my presentation because I forgot I had one more in here comes from. Really sudden. Why do you rob banks because that's where the money is right. And in our transportation system. What we do is we tend to define lots of local problems as transportation problems and empower our engineers, because that's where the money is that we're about to at the federal level of proof hundreds of billions of dollars of transportation spending lots of cities will be getting lots of money to do transportation projects. The idea of taking what is the standard practice of engineering and the language they use, particularly the hierarchical road network, the idea of local streets, running data collector streets going into arterial streets, that whole framework of that whole conversation is, is, is around the idea of moving traffic quickly. And it's one of those, like base concepts that's never debated that's never discussed by by stepping back and redefining our systems in different ways in ways that elected officials. Local advocates and others can not only understand but then start to us as either a road or a street, it takes, I think what is a really powerful insight of CMU and makes it active in a way that people can use. So, a road is a connection between two places, we can think of it as a replacement of a railroad which is a road on rails and if you think of the the base nature of a railroad, you get on in one spot and you get off in another and there's a high speed connection between the two. A street then is a platform for building wealth. And sometimes, you know, my friends, push back on me a little bit here, like why are you focused on wealth, wealth and good place making our highly correlated wealth and quality of life is highly correlated what we're doing in a city is we're trying to build a viable place where people want to live, invest in stay be part of. And so, a street is a platform for building that place, and local officials can, can, can you know the book very clearly in chapter two says the idea of making this decision, is this a road, or is this a street. It's not a technical one. It's not that we need an engineering degree to be able to do this it's not that we need to bring in some expert to do this, this is a this is a social decision. This is a decision that we can make as a community through our elected officials through whatever process and say, over here we're trying to build a place that is a street over here we're trying to build a get from one place and other, that's a road, and that designation should have huge implications for not only how we think about these places, but how we approach them from a design standpoint. And maybe heating that is normal, total deference to commuters. Right. Well, I think. Yeah, when I say subversive what I'm really talking about is getting away from the engineer dominated view, which is about speed and volume of traffic and this relates to a whole economic model based on commuters, you know, coming in from the distant driving through the middle of the core of the city, and and get to an economic model that is really about place, how do we build great places, and how do we make the building of great places the foundation of our economic system. Right, right. And you briefly mentioned the rail in there so I'm going to kind of latch on to that in the book you're a bit critical high speed rail which is part of an ambitious climate change proposals like the green New Deal. You don't explicitly mentioned modern streetcar systems. However, several cities have built or are exploring building large speaker system, including Kansas City Detroit and my own city, you're at MIT which has. Yeah, and. And so I just would like you to explain your, your critique of high speed rail, first, and then also, whether any of those critiques applies modern history courses. Yeah, I appreciate the question. Because, you know, my the writing I do on. I think there's 90,000 words in this book and I probably wrote 500 on high speed rail, but it is something that a lot of people ask because it's the thing people are talking about. I am very much a diet and exercise, kind of person as opposed to the Wonder pill kind of person. And I think, you know, using that analogy, and applying it to cities. There's a whole lot that cities should do could do could easily do today, that would improve people's lives that would make their places more productive that that would be a walk, don't run kind of strategy that sit on the sidelines, and they sit on the sidelines, waiting for the big transformation to come. For me, high speed rail. I mean I've written high speed rail and other parts of the world It's wonderful. I'm not going to suggest that it isn't. But if we step back and look at the urgent needs of our cities today. I find it to be here in North America more of a distraction than anywhere than anything else. If the idea of high speed rail is that somehow, it is a transformative investment for climate change. I find that to be on its face, rather ridiculous, particularly in comparison to the benefits that we could have by just allowing people, the mechanism to walk one or two blocks to get somewhere. That is almost, you know, if it's not impossible physically it's so despotic and most of our places that people just don't do it, and the gains that we could make in terms of climate in terms of reduce carbon emissions, just by making fractional investments in walking and biking would be enormous. That being said, the street car thing is very interesting because there is a there is a very powerful mechanism that street cars bring about, particularly on. I mean, look at the name it's a street car. it's not a road car. It's not. It's a street car and when we're talking about building spectacular places, what we see is that the best places the places that people want to be in the places that are most financial financially productive. Eventually crowd out the automobile, and the crowd out the automobile by having higher and higher levels of great transit service and great pedestrian space, and they don't credit the automobile because they hate cars and they're anti American or whatever we want to say that, you know, they credit the automobile because the automobile is a very expensive very low returning type of investment. When you have automobiles, you have to store them they take up a lot of space, all that space can be used for more productive things. And so street cars are part of a mechanism by which we incrementally build wealth in places they're part of that replacement of the automobile that happens. I think, you know, the challenge always is, when are we ready for like when is the, when are we ready to crowd out the automobiles and what you see in places like Cincinnati, or, particularly the one that I'm most familiar with is what you see in a place like Memphis where they did the streetcar or Kansas City, is that the streetcar is not crowding out anything it has to ride within traffic, it has to sit at streetlights and it's, it's not given the difference and the priority that it should be to actually be a real viable transit investment. And so, don't think that makes it a bad investment, but it does call into question our commitment to it. And also, you know, the amount of return and value that we're actually going to get when we do those things. I in that chapter where I talk about high speed rail and where I talk about, you know, I think it's called fads or something I can't write what I call the chapter, but I spent a whole beginning of chapter talking about walking, and how, you know, if we we were to just like not be a bipedal species but someday you know but we could go and like sell people on Hey now you can walk. It would be like the greatest innovation in all of you know i mean it is the greatest innovation and all of human history fact that we can walk on two feet around. And so many things in our society that we struggle with would be made easier. If people actually just walked a mile or two a day and from a public standpoint we should be seeking to make that as easy as possible. That's the low hanging fruit but yeah and I see some people who did not call and I know they'll appreciate that insight. I do want to go back to the High Speed Rail question and this is a bit of a question out of ignorance, but when you start to, you know you talked initially about justifying use expenditures. When you start, you know with transportation is the largest carbon emitter in the country when you start factoring in costs retrieval for mitigation, does that does that. Does that help the justification, much more. And is that being done at any great, great. So, let me say this with with, because I know a lot of people on this call, are, are very enamored and taken by high speed rail and I'm not going to stand up here and say that it's not superior to the number of road trips we're taking that is not superior to flying from LA to San Francisco, that it wouldn't be great to be able to get on high speed rail in New York and make it to Washington DC. I get those arguments and I, I respect the fact that if we're looking at option A and option B that that high speed rail makes a lot more sense than building a bunch of more bunch of our highways or even electrifying the automobile fleet. That being said, I still will go back to and and, you know, I live in Brainerd Minnesota, I live in a small town in northern Minnesota. I spent last week in Shreveport and Sulphur Springs Texas spend it outside of Dallas. You know, I spent it in the, let's just say the, the, the middle of America, right, which is a little bit different than than the places where I speed rail is being discussed today. And in, in our conversation here. In particular, and I do think in those as well but let's start here. I think there's such urgency to do basic things that are in front of us. You know, in so many places we can't walk, six blocks from my house to the core downtown. For those blocks are really nice the last two are horrible and they're horrible because of the highway we built through the middle of town. That is easily fixable and it's fixable in pennies fractions of pennies on the dollar of what we would spend on, you know, large carbon mitigation and it would have huge amounts of impact in terms of people driving less and admitting less carbon, that it really bothers me that we are in many ways distracted by the shiny object, when really our cities need to thicken up fast, they need to become financially productive they are insolvent they are struggling we are hurting people's quality of life. We are doing deep damage to society because of the bad financial decisions were making on the local level, we can align a pro environment pro carbon policy with a policy of bike walk and building great cities in a way that I think is transformative and powerful and we'll have much greater impact than anything we could do, you know, silver bullet big project kind of way. Does that I you asked it twice and i hope i'm robert We have time for one more question before you. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. It's just one more question. You know, I think the pandemic has brought into public consciousness, a lot more than before. The way that streets to serve actual humans, instead of solely automobiles. And you do you see this as perhaps the larger cultural shift, or do you see this as maybe a fleeting moment in time. I see yes, I think both. I think the, I think what the way this, this, I think will play out is that the great places and and we're in, I think a period of transition right now where, you know, cities are all redefining themselves. I think the ones that that become the next generation of great places will be the ones where this is not a fleeting moment where this is something that they latch on to and use as as kind of an affirmation that we can do something different. I think the places that are very quick to unwind this and go in the other direction or the going to be the laggards in sense of reinventing themselves and figuring out what this next version of America is going to look like. So I'm going to remind everybody to use the q amp a function of zoom and to ask your questions. And it may be a good time. Jocelyn to get to q&a from the audience. Yeah, definitely. So, I will ask our first question here from Bill Can you believe me Sorry. Is there a name for this intellectual trickery that engineers engaging, namely, adding a marginal individual benefits to claim a larger collective benefit that is actually not collective. Additionally, can engineer to be retrained to identify this as a fallacy. So let me start with the last part I think the answer is yes and I hope and I hope and pray that it's Yes, I feel like, what is what has happened here is, I think we do a disservice if we look at it as nefarious, I don't think the people who put together the I 49 project in Shreveport, to put together the, the economic analysis actually thought they were perpetuating a fraud. I think they're just using industry best practices. I think they're using like what is an accepted approach within the industry. This is what their peers do this is what everyone does. And, and the thing is if you have a certain worldview about moving automobiles quickly moving high volume so automobiles quickly through cities. None of this, like, you know, rubs up against your worldview, so you can be a completely coherent thoughtful person with a completely messed up view of how things actually work without being like something nefarious. I do feel like the answer here is, is twofold it's one. Yes, we need to educate engineers differently. We need to get this out, but I think to we also and this is why I wrote this book in the way that I did, is to subvert power from the systems that when I sit down with my own local engineer and I talked to him about this, he's like no, like this, like, I, you're wrong. But when I talked to my city council and he hears me doing that and they go back to him and then it starts to like move around the community, all of a sudden now is, he's not getting it from an antagonist he's getting it from his boss or an ally or a friend or a neighbor, and it starts to open up things and I have a sense that, you know, most humans are very good I think most engineers want to do good things. We just have to get them a different toolkit a different framework in which to think about this stuff. And quite frankly, take away their power shift that power to other people who can make. I think the more critical decisions about place making. Right. And it does kind of feed into the next question from minor league Johnstone, what is the math on the cost of physical, mental health, from all the pollution like an accident. Um, I think that that is a good question, and I think that is a worthy question of exploration. It's not one that I spend a lot of time on. And it's not one that I have an answer for, and I'll say why don't spend a lot of time on it. I've been at, you know, many many. My, my career. For many years, was going to city council meetings I mean I've done the 10,000 hours plus at planning commission meetings and council meetings and all the places where decisions like this are made. And the person shows up with all the data and all the arguments about public health and mental health and environment and and and go down the litany of things you know that we should be doing. And then, you know, the one person shows up and says, Well, I can create five jobs or we're going to build this new building or, you know, some economic impact and that just crowds out everything else. And so, I don't think that those are like a legitimate arguments. But what we try to do at strong towns and what I've tried to do since I started writing the blog in 2008, is try to correct the the the fallacies and the economics, because that is really what is crowding out the other legitimate considerations like you know the cost of mental health and pollution and what have you. I mean, we have a bad week. I hope what I showed you in the beginning of my presentation was that we're making decisions that are have this veneer of economic to them, you know like, like someone sat down and random benefit cost analysis, and you know I'm not good at math or I don't know numbers and this sounds official and whatever, and it's it's a bunch of crap I mean it's not real, like, this is fictitious. And I think that if, if we can get that message out, it opens up the conversation for all these other messages. Right. And we have another question here from Nathan north. Oh, we're talking about being your, who is. So we talked about who is going to change the system that gives hope to city securing gigantic funding for poorly planned elevated interstates running through these cities and what is the path for change your perspective. Um, yeah no it's it's a really good question, and I have an easy answer for it but I'm trying to think of how this answer would go down for nature for others. I read the book and I, I wrote a piece for CNN earlier this year that talked about the interstate 35 through Dallas and talked about this project and reports and then also talked about South Bend, Indiana, we you know where where Secretary Buddha just just from was the mayor. And in this piece I tried to make the argument that the interstate system is done. Like we we built it we did what we set out to do. In fact it was done many many decades ago, let's declare victory and move on. And I actually think that if you look at the history of federal funding of major transportation infrastructure. It is more a case of have the money. Find the project, then have the need find the money. And so, I would you know if given unilateral decision making process, I would go to a maintenance only transportation approach at the federal level and I would turn it all back to states and I would love to have this conversation in 50 states where we could, you know debate real return on investment. But if you have a federal government that can print money and borrow money and basically you know come up with trillions of dollars of infrastructure spending to do projects that we don't want and don't need and actually are doing harm. To me the answer is, why would we support any federal action on this I would like to see the interstate system, and all the kind of gas tax surrounding, you know, trust funds and all that just wound down. And that would put us kind of like Canada which has no similar system to we do and you're from Canada, you can get around there pretty well. Yeah. I feel like the, the, the, the infrastructure bill that we have now particularly a byproduct of partners, but the bipartisan consensus bill is basically a highway building bill wrapped in a veneer of, you know, happy talk language to try to make it go down with a bunch of coalition partners, and I would, I would like to see it not be passed. I think we'd be better off if it wasn't. Okay. And this question for Rob which he can answer in one anonymous attendee wants to know how they're going to get the credit for attending the training problem, I'll let you cover that at the end. But this is a this is a question, kind of plays into what you just said and also specifically to the Shreveport project can be worked at any economic impact numbers you feel are more appropriate for the sheet or highway positive or negative. So, I mean, the short answer to that is yes but I think the deeper answer is like where do you who's measuring and what are you measuring. A lot of what gets measured in these analyses, come from a federal perspective I wrote about this in the first book in terms of Hurricane Katrina. If you are a federal bean counter. You're an economist at the Treasury Department or the, you know, Bureau of economic statistics or whatever, and and and you're, you're blind to any human pain and suffering you're blind to the hopes and wishes and dreams of people you're just counting beans in a, in a spreadsheet in Washington DC. Hurricane Katrina was a major positive event. Right. It created all kinds of jobs are created all kinds of economic transactions. If your measurement is GDP and unemployment Hurricane Katrina was a huge panacea for you it boosted GDP multiple quarters, after it happened. If you are a poor family in New Orleans, and your family's wealth as modest as it might be, but your wealth and capacity is wrapped up in a building that has been handed down to you multiple generations, and all the relationships that you have in your neighborhood including with your, your minister and your friend next door and the woman up the street who looked after your sick kid and and and your life is one based on you know putting together a great gumbo recipes and having wonderful music and enjoying a quality of life. All of a sudden now Hurricane Katrina is like the greatest disaster you've ever experienced it wiped out your wealth your capacity, your ability to live the life that you wanted. So, so whose measurement matters, whose measurement counts, like what what measurements should we be motivated by. And I think one of the things that I mean, one of the things that we talk about a lot of strong towns is building wealth actually means building wealth for people for small businesses, it means neighborhoods becoming having more capacity to do more things within them. And that is often at odds with the economy we've created that is very focused on transactions. As those transactions can be measured in GDP can be measured in arising stock market can be measured in a growing bond market. These things are all negatively correlated with overall human prosperity and flourishing and that's kind of where, you know, if we were going to measure the impact in Shreveport, You look at 549 and I take, you know, Miss Dorothy Wylie's house. Dorothy I spent some time with last week, she's a beautiful, wonderful woman who's trying to get her neighborhood. To be a prosperous place, and she's struggling because the sword of Damocles of the highway is hanging over it. And what would look like Success to me is Miss Dorothy's property becoming 5% more valuable next year and 5% more valuable the year after and her having more neighbors with more capacity and, eventually, you know, having the the wealth of the neighborhood grow incrementally over time that that would that would be success. But that doesn't correlate to the way we measure it in a national sense. Right. And sorry jumping around a bit back to talking about the federal infrastructure plan. This is a question from Johnny. We know, assuming the federal assuming the infrastructure fantastic other opportunity to use federal money to do good for city, or at least potentially limit the impact of unending highway widening. Yes, but it will happen at the state level. This package is being passed without reform, so that you know that there was some talk early on about having reform be part of this. The impetus now and this is not a partisan statement. The impetus now is really about getting a bill passed. You know, so we can demonstrate bipartisan bona fides and what have you, as a political strategy I have no comment I don't really know. But what it means from a practical standpoint is that any reform will have to happen at the state level, your state will get the money and the money, sometimes comes with strings, but a lot of times it's just lump sum given through legacy programs and states can change legacy programs to a degree. And so what we'll have is a state by state, kind of, you know, recognition of how this money should be spent. And where it should go some of it though is going to come through the old legacy systems and it's going to like this amount for I ways and this is amount for, you know, this type of transit and you know this funds this program and that program and there's not a lot of discretion in that, which is very sad, but yeah john. By the way, did not call john like the best looking guy in Kansas City I think I spent in Cincinnati I think I said that was john I love you man, but you're gonna have to go to the state legislature which is not a you know in Ohio is not I'm inviting place for you right now. I would like to see more power given to cities to have the discretion to do things because the reality is that we're going to spend a trillion dollars on transportation infrastructure. And the reality is is that if you actually look at the problems that most of our places are facing. They're not transportation problems. We make them into transportation problems because that's where the money is. But they're not transportation problems. Okay. And this is getting a little strategy This question is from Ryan Amazon I apologize if I mispronounced that question I also I was a planner. He's like planners, maybe not engineers the most interested in these topics, and how do we engage engineers and the things we're talking about here. I think what you're gonna say with any human and that makes us like engineers are not humans. When when we're engaging with people. And this is something that we talked to our members about a lot at strong towns. We have to do more listening than we do talking we have to do more understanding than we do preaching we have to be humble. And so all of these things happen on relationships. I feel like there's a dual strategy that has to take place here one. And you see this throughout the the new book. There are places where we say, this is a decision being made by engineers today that is not an engineering decision whether something is a rotor to street is not an engineering decision. It does not require an engineering license degree training, any background, we can make that decision for ourselves, and then instructor engineer in terms of what the ramifications of that are there are other places where you know we delineate in the book, here's decisions that engineers are really good at making his decisions that engineers are not good at making, we need to make these. So I think a combination of really trying to engage Listen, be humble have conversations with, you know, but then also shifting power, I mean at the end of the day, these all come down to people and how people make decisions, and when you empower when, when you give one department or one person or one like silo. A huge budget. Lots of discretion. you let them make decisions that are beyond, you know, their, their knowledge center their background base, and then you give other people the ability to comment on it as like a way to have input, what you've done is you've, you've concentrated lots of power at the local government level we can diffuse that power and see much better outcomes. And I think, I think, let engineers be who they are, which is really good problem solvers. We just asked them to solve the wrong problems and then giving them kind of unchecked authority to develop a whole set of understandings around that whole set of misunderstandings around that. Okay, I'm going to mention that we are now at the hour point. And we got more questions to answer so we're going to keep on going. And there, for those who have to leave, we will be posting the video. Seeing your website within about a day. I wanted to talk a little bit about, there isn't a CPE credit that is available. If you watch this live, and there's seeing you a credit available if you watch it live, or in the recorded video for anybody who has a question about that, please put your email in the chat, and we'll respond directly there should be something as well, in our email will be sending to all the registrants, but I'm going to actually take it frog frog is it to ask a question, Chuck if I came in the book you talk about speed, In the book you talk about speed, then capacity safety and cost as the priorities of the engineering system right now and you kind of critique that order. There's nowhere even mentioned, you can talk about that but there's nowhere even mentioned in that the public realm. It doesn't make the list. And in a city or town neighborhood the public realm is like so important for everybody's life and engineers are the designers of the public ground the chief designers and they don't seem to acknowledge it exists. Can you talk a little bit about that. I think it goes back to its kind of goes back to what Jocelyn asked me, it very early on, you know, what we've asked engineers to do is to move vehicles. And then everything else becomes a subordinate task to that. And so, my recitation of what the design process is and then understand that we're in chapter one I talked about the process that engineers use to design streets, they start with the design speed and then they look at the design volume, and then they say, okay, given these two parameters, what is the code book say as a safe way to do this and at what cost, it would be at that point that you would then start to add in the extras, you know, use the air quotes there these are these are the extras. And so, I talk a little bit in the book about Complete Streets. Complete Streets is a approach that I think is a rational one and if I go to kind of great lengths to applaud. What I think is the decent human good things about it. But the reason why it has, I think, been as effective as it has been through the state do t is you know getting adopted and getting passed out and getting some funding is because it doesn't challenge. The priority system of the engineering profession. Complete Streets is one of the extras so once you get through designing for cars and the speed and the throughput that you want. Then you can say okay how do we add on a place for people to walk and a place for people to bike and a place for transit How do those things happen. The reality is that a great street is actually a compromise of speed, it actually puts the safety of people and I think we could, we could put the safety of people we can we can draw a straight line to that between the safety of people that comfort to I mean this is channeling Jeff's back here a little bit. And what makes a good walk, but but that whole rubric that he's created you're correlating that quality a place quality of a walk with safety. If we put that first. What we recognize is that there has to be a compromise on speed and volume in order to have that place necessarily a compromise in the throughput of traffic in order to actually build a place that is safe that people want to be that is that great walk that Jeff describes. And so, I don't ignore it. As much as I, you know, deal with the, the deal with the reality as the decisions are being made. What we want to do is we want to get people on streets with the right value set which begins with safety and begins with place and begins with kind of that that correlation between the two, and acknowledges that in order to get that in order to get that value that we all share in those places we have to sacrifice speed throughput speed, we have to sacrifice volume of traffic. And if we're willing to take that leap, which the standard engineering design process is not willing to do. All of a sudden, all the rest of our jobs as new urbanists become way easier become way easier. If that's on the table it's transformative to us as a group. Thank you. Thank you Rob. And we'll, we'll go back to some questions from audience members. So this one applies more to county rural county roads from Eugene Schwartz within our rural county roads largely or major topic of comment or engineering department I tell complainer's that the only way to improve their streets, is to get their neighbors to agree to form a road improvement district to tax themselves enough to pay for it and it's maintenance. Is this an appropriate strong towns or small. Yes, double thumbs up. Fantastic. And it's very it's very interesting. I grew up on a farm. You know, it was a farm homestead by my great great grandparents. And when I was a little kid. The road was like two tire tracks through the woods, I mean that was like the road. And I could get to town. You know into into Brainerd into the city in like eight minutes. right i mean you drive the little dirt road, you'd get to the major county road that was a kind of a smaller road to you take that in and then you got on a little, like maybe a mile and half a highway and then got into town. It's like eight minutes. If my parents were going to leave their house today, which you know the the school district bought up land by them build a big school, they, they, they made a, you know, huge wide road way of their house roundabouts and all this and it's you know very impressive and then you've got the wind out county road and they've added all this capacity. The reality is, is they can get to town now about eight minutes. I really haven't changed their, their travel time at all because now you've got signals you've got other you know you've got all these other things that go into it. There's a, there's a Farm to Market road program through the federal government that that goes down to the state governments that basically gives money to upgrade rural roads with the idea that this will help farmers get their stuff to market. And it's completely misplaced money, it's money that is spent, improving marginal speeds on marginal roads that if you just drove really slow it would cost you an extra minute of time for one guy on a, on a, you know, with a with a with a tractor is really is really a suit is really a silly kind of program. And, you know, if we instead spend that money, not building out the interchanges and the Walmart's and that kind of continual frontage roads up and down our highways, but instead allow those highways to really move products from one market to another. That would have way more transformative effect for farmers than, you know, giving them a paved road in front of their place. But yeah, Gene you're on exact right track. Let them pay for that themselves. Great, and moving into a question from Kenneth months and this is a question I also experienced doing some pedestrian safety overhauls in my own neighborhoods and working to that and being told it that certain things really aren't possible because the fire department mandates. Have you looked at fire department or emergency vehicles. And have you looked at Fire Department minutes for wider street with and large radius at intersections and how you're working for deals with that and in building streets. Yeah, this is a, this, this is horrible. The thing that I've come to recognize though about fire departments, is that they're there. They're a trailing, not a leading type of influence. So, in every city where I've run into this like I'll just take mine. The fire department will say well we have to have these really wide streets and like disaster will happen if it just doesn't occur and they've got this standard and then they buy bigger trucks and they're like you know it's becomes a self reinforcing cycle. And so then we go out to the, you know, handful of pleasant nice small streets we have and we take the council members and we take the members of the public and we say so. The Street has to be ripped up and they're like oh no we would never do that. Well, how can you not like this, this doesn't meet your standard, and it's like a culturally a step too far for the you know for the elected leaders to follow this crazy Fire Department edict. And so the way to deal to me with the firefighters is again to shift power to other places you have to start with a different value set. I actually think that Jeff speck in his hundred one Rules for Radicals, So I have that one sitting back here. Um, yeah walkable city rules this one right here. Actually describes this beautifully Jeff, I don't know if you're here but I'll give you an advertisement. It describes how you make a fire department officials, basically like the safety officers. And so they're, they're, you know, responsible for more than just getting to the fire quickly. They're actually part of an overall conversation about safety and the community. But then, you, you, you don't give them veto power over the street like literally, you let them enter the conversation at a different point today we we bring them in as allies of the, of the engineer who wants to move traffic quickly and at high volumes and you bring them in as their ally and then they can find all kinds of reasons to do that. You bring them in in a different spot where it's like okay we're building a street we're building a place for people a place to build wealth. That is going to mean slow traffic, so this this is what we have to do from an engineering standpoint to make this place successful. And then the question becomes to the fire department. How do you make this net safe. That's a different question, because that may mean you need a smaller truck that may mean you need a different response that may mean something else. But you're bringing them in at a point where the kind of geometric or the, the, the, the value decisions have already been made and are done. Does that make sense. Johnson, it does. Okay. It doesn't make sense. Yeah. And though we are jumping around a little bit, I apologize, you're fine. No, It's really good. But it does go back to something that you talked a lot about today. Do you know, do you know of anyone from Marina curry, I believe, as you know of anyone who's tracking or has gone back to look at what economic impact projections were for highway expansion, and then compared it to the promises made not traffic projections but just the economic impact for. Yes, Marina it's appreciate that question I've seen it done. Anecdotally, you know, there's. I've not seen a done, like in a broad sense, you know like, Let's do a systematic study of this, largely because all of this stuff, and this is I think the big tell all these economic analyses and projections are done in pursuit of landing the project and getting the project done No, nobody and this is going to sound deeply cynical. But I don't think it's that nefarious nobody is really interested in whether this works out or not. There's no like department, trying to figure this out that the task that everybody has within the systems is the next project it's not evaluating the last project, no politician wants the project reviewed that way, sure they'll go to the ribbon cutting and the point to the anecdotal things that say very good, but no one wants like a systematic analysis and so there's really no like mechanism to even gather the data. The closest thing that I've seen is what Joe Monaco's these group urban three put together in Kansas City, where they went back and they looked at the tax increment financing packages that had been done. And they said, Okay, here's what we gave them. Here's what we got, like, Did this make any sense. And these were like a decade or two later, and you know systematically over and over and over again it was, it was really sad and pathetic, what resulted. So really I wish there was a good study and I wish there was a way to, to, you know, point to like here's someone who did that but I've never seen anything like that, not systematically okay great art. Ellen has asked a really specific question about Oregon but I think it gets into a question that all of us are probably thinking is concerned citizens, most effective ways to plug in, maybe a concerned citizen that's a little more sort of educated on these topics in the average. But, Oregon State do t has many questionable highway whitening projects in the works my concerns but whining I five to the roads quarter conclude it will increase traffic hazard accident rate and severity it fatalities. I submitted the features in detail but Oda refuses to address them let's try to get a lawyer to file complaints. But what what should concerns or concerned Oregonians do. Oh, that's a. So, I got the rest of question. And then the last part like oh I don't what should you do, I don't know, because I think the thing to understand here is that the highway department looks at safety and safety reduction differently than, then you do it looks at, you know, different than reality, I think, You know, in coven. One of the things that we experienced early on in the pandemic. that kind of blew everybody's mind. Not me, not I think a lot of people on this this call, but a lot of people out there in the transportation world was that even though driving was dramatically down fatalities were way up, and you started to see this incoherence from places like the National Highway Transportation Safety Board issuing these press releases begging people bank, like literally begging people to start wearing their seatbelts again and stop driving drunk. As if like all of a sudden the pandemic hit and we all just became like what the hell we're going to die anyway let's go drive without seatbelts and speed and drive drunk. This is an absurdity that they're there. They made it sound like all of a sudden we had this epidemic of reckless behavior when the reality is, what happened was the congestion, that normally calms traffic and makes our crashes into fender benders instead of fatalities was gone. And so what was left were massively over engineered roads strobes and interchanges where people could use that full capacity of the road, all day and all evening and and they were driving really fast they were driving excessively fast and you had more precious. And because you had more crashes, you know, the number of people with seatbelts problems and with, you know, all of that started statistically to show up. But it was not like some epidemic of recklessness. It was the reality is that most of what we spend building in what engineers think of as safety in the systems is actually the opposite it actually creates danger. The traffic congestion overcomes that and makes it seem like it's less, but it you know if you look at any city, when to the fatalities happen. They happen at night, they have been an offer, they don't happen during peak hours they happen during the times when there's like a modest amount of congestion or kind of free flowing traffic because that's when you get high speeds, and you get complexity in the system. If you go to rural areas, there's much higher rates of fatalities and crashes in rural areas and it's not because we're drunkards it's not because we are somehow like more reckless then all of you. It's because our systems are over designed and we have less periods of congestion, that that compensate for that and so we're driving a more dangerous environments, all the time. I don't know what as a citizen you do to overcome this. Again, I kind of get into the idea that I think that the main thing we can do is start to focus our neighborhoods, our local communities on building great streets shift that conversation locally so our city engineers are actually allies and building great places and not kind of allies of this speed and volume mantra. And if we can do that. I think the deities are really functionally broke, I mean they have way more lane miles than they have capacity to maintain. And so at some point they're also going to have a conversation about how we do things differently and I think if we are the decision, if we're doing good practices at the local level we're in a good position to influence that debate differently as well. Sorry Rob if I want to. I mean, we're kind of getting toward the end of the, the q&a Jocelyn Do you have any final questions or comments or things that you want to say, I just want to yeah did you want me for the last point, you know, I mentioned that in my own neighborhood. I've gotten involved in some pedestrian safety measures. So that is one way that you can get involved and it's sort of basic advice but through getting involved in my community council I was able to help be a steward and communicate with my neighborhood about the different pedestrian safety measures that were available to us and we confronted exactly some of the issues that Chuck. a highway leading onto a highway that bisects my neighborhood which is extremely walkable and so to walk with business district by sex but bisected by a highway going onto a highway. What does it look like to when someone's at the pedestrian intersection and they apply to cross. What does having a pedestrian phases of life look like. And so asking that question to your city officials and having them say, we could do that but we won't. We will only do that in your campus, we would only do that in like the most high traffic area of the city so your neighborhood stays bisected so this is like sort of one example but finding out the way my city is approaching these issues, it, you know, engaging this way isn't super, super helpful and informative. That's a great example, there's a great example. And I mean, it's. If we go back to like the climate discussion. A lot of people will say, you know like, Well how do I affect the United Nations and how do I get, you know us climate policy changed and, and I get that like motivation like I respect that. The reality is is that most of us can have a very tiny tiny impact on those places but all of us can have a huge impact on our neighborhoods. And part of what we're trying to do at strong towns is like mobilize that change because when we're all doing things that empower our neighborhoods and make them better places we're actually transforming everything. And we're creating room for others to I mean I think one of the things that we've been able to do quite successfully as from towns and CMU has been a leader in this to you look at like parking minimums parking minimums was a niche thing. And we, you know, seven, eight years ago started to put a map together to say here's all the places that have done it, and now it's it's a it's far more ubiquitous and it's. We all know in the trenches. The first thing that a public official is going to say is well what cities done this before, you know where's the exam. I don't want to go first like who's the other place that's done this and by having, you know as you guys as as strong towns and as seeing us composite. All these examples of places doing great things, it becomes easier for other people to imagine it being done as well. So Jocelyn that's a great example of local leadership. Well, thanks again for joining us today, and Confessions of a recovering engineer I'm going to plug it for you. Thank you so much. order it online and echo thank you very much checking Thank you know it's always really enlightening to to hear you talk in thanks Jocelyn for doing this. So, with that and I want to thank everybody who's listening. And we'll see you another time on sounds good. Man, sounds good. And we'll see you in Oklahoma. Yes.