Olmsted: Recent Episodes
Ned Melanson
Big steel boxes hurtling around cities at high speeds, spewing toxic gases and killing thousands every year... what could go wrong? Daniel Knowles (Midwest correspondant at The Economist) sits down with me to discuss his upcoming book Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It. He's not saying we should ban cars cold turkey, but it might be time we start cutting back.
Carmageddon will be available in March 2023. Pre-order it here.
Follow Daniel on Twitter.
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Show Notes:
- The problem with cars in cities
- Disney presents: the driver and the walker
- Rise of the auto centric era - US to them
- How the bike industry birthed its greatest foe (the car)
- 1920s anti-car protests in Baltimore, Cinncinati, NYC, etc
- Jaywalking laws
- British used to cycle 18 billion miles a year
- The car can arrive and take over quicky
- Yossarian problem of cars
- Cars are sexy
- American transport consultants go globe trotting
- Speculative streetcar developers vs suburban sprawl developers
- People don’t like having their houses knocked down
- Detroit’s decline
- A parking lot the size of West Virginia
- A lot of our problems have autos at the root
- Roads as racial barriers
- We have way too many cars and we drive too far
- Cars and social trust
- Atomized existences
- Oh yeah, cars kill millions of people every year
- When a road is taken away there’s no outpouring of anger
- Paris’ rapid transformation to a cycling city
- Tokyo has no street parking
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What's old is new. Lauren Mayer, communications manager for the Congress for the New Urbanism, joins the pod to talk sprawl, burning streetcars, urban "renewal" and highway removal, Albany, OKC, and Tulsa, and why New Urbanism is for everyone.
www.cnu.org
Twitter: @NewUrbanism
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Show notes:
- CNU background and history, reaction to 20th century sprawl
- Problems with suburban sprawl, bad for community building
- No sidewalks, unsafe for kids
- No parks nearby
- Unsafe for walking, not getting around in a car
- Last street car burning in St. Paul minnesota
- What’s a streetcar suburb
- Suburbs themselves are not bad ideas, it’s how they’re constructed and how car-centric they are
- CNU in OKC
- Current zoning doesn’t allow you to build the communities you love
- Urban renewal - urban highway construction - red-lining and discrimination
- Albany interstate 787: cuts the city apart, highway removal movement
- Using federal infra dollars to start healing process
- There’s still highway expansion projects across the country
- Can’t just be about highway removal, need the whole urbanist package to solve our problems
- Tulsa parking lot activation - CNU project
- “New urbanism has an impact at every scale”
- Listening to and getting buy-in from the community
- Getting community support for highway removal
- Biden admiistration - momentum for freeway removals, studies and funding
- The engineering profession - focus on “grey” infrastructure, “this road needs to move people faster”
- Department of Transportation looking to the future
- Reconnecting communities grant - still highway expansions being proposed to get this grant funding
- Why urbanism?
- New urbanism is for everyone
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Google Glass, Snap Spectacles, Facebook/Meta Oculus. Augmented reality is coming whether we like it or not. But is there a good way to take on AR? Can it help with making our cities more democratically engaged and create meaninful places in the real world? Software engineer Justin Copenhaver founded Urality to solve the problem of digital placemaking in our cities. He joins the Olmsted Podcast to discuss the intersection of augmented reality and urbanism.
Links:
Check out Urality here: https://www.urality.com/
Follow Justin on Twitter: @copeonarope
Join the Olmsted Slack community!
Notes:
- Urality, digital placemaking and way finding + community storytelling app that Justin is building;
- Good AR vs Bad AR (billboard effect, attention economy);
- AR and placemaking + urban planning + gaining political support for something like a bike lane by projecting it in AR;
- Digital democracy, technocracy, tyranny of a vocal minority;
- Strong towns, density, land value tax, fiscally sound cities;
- DENSITY!;
- How to bring a tangent full circle 101;
- Pandemic and people spending time in their communities for the first time;
- Lack of shame on facebook;
- Social media! But good;
- Is tourism a dirty word?;
- Problems with EVs;
- Justin’s opinion on the trajectory of the urbanism movement - incrementalism;
- Tactical urbanism;
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Notes:
- Micromobility
- Definition; Rebalancing and how software / optimization comes into solve hard problems
- What’s holding US cities back from taking advantage of mobility tech
- Axel
- US trucking regulation history
- All the data gathered around trucking and what you can build with it
- Similarities between micromobility optimization and trucking optimization
- Fragmentation in the trucking industr; Game of Trucks; Trucker turnover
- Dhruv’s Wolvervine-based vision of autonomous trucking
- Different types of automated trucking
- Dhruv’s first principles as an entrepreneur
Links:
Axel, a universal data platform for trucking: https://www.axleapi.com/
Check out Dhruv's podcast How Tech Becomes Law
Notes:
- Picnic test
- Why we don’t have urban freight anymore
- Industry moving out of the cities
- Externalities that trucks have to (not) pay vs what freight rail has to pay
- He's not anti truck
- Railroads and trucks can go side by side
- I unload my pet peeves about urban trucks
- Industrial policy
- EVs and their problems
- Using urban rail lines for both freight and passenger
- The recent (almost) labor strike on the freight rails
- Some men and women just like driving heavy machinary
- Humans vs machine driving trains
Notes:
- The New Jerset governor thinks widening the highway will be good for the environment ("just like a totally asinine not founded in reality statement and claim”)
- Grassroots advocacy groups + the mayor of Jersey City opposes highway expansion
- Low income communities, including parks and schools, that sit right next to the highway and will be negatively affected - lead paint chips rain down on the playground
- The current system isn’t safe no matter what mode you’re traveling in
- I get schooled in the term accident vs collision
- What led Tyler to urbanism, he was very car centric
- Tyler convinced his EMT colleague to buy an ebike
- What the biggest obstruction for emts is for getting to calls (its cars)
Notes: The council member Jesse mentions did eventually come on board with the Throggs Neck rezoning and it was passed by the city council on 10/12/22.