Ian Lockwood: Thoughts From an Engineer
How should engineers be thinking about building wealth in communities?
That’s just one of the questions Chuck Marohn asks of Ian Lockwood, a recognized national leader in sustainable transportation policy and urban design. Lockwood is currently a livable transportation engineer for Toole Design, an engineering firm which works to build safer and more walkable streets. On this Strong Towns Podcast, join Marohn and Lockwood as they talk about the work of Toole Design, complete streets, and more.
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Chuck Marohn:
Hi everybody, this is Chuck Marohn with The Strong Towns Podcast. Welcome back. It's nice to talk to you. I have, for a long time, been an admirer of Ian Lockwood. And if you have read Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, you've heard or seen or read a couple of times where I referenced him and his work. Ian is a professional engineer. He's a livable transportation engineer with the Toole Design Group, one of the nation's top premier organizations doing sustainable transportation. He is nationally recognized as a leader in that, in policy and design.
Our paths have crossed a few times, and I think we call each other friends. I would like to hang out even more than we have been, but he promised to come on the podcast. And so here we go. Ian Lockwood, welcome to The Strong Towns Podcast.
Ian Lockwood:
Thank you. I'm pleased to be here and I'm really happy that you do this podcast to get the good word out to everybody.
Chuck Marohn:
Thank you, friend. Talk a little bit about the Toole Design Group. Because I get calls all the time, "Chuck, we love Strong Towns. We need this done. Will you come help us?" And I'm like, "No, no. We don't do any consulting work. We don't do that. Call Toole Design Group." And I send all kinds of people your way. So maybe you can just talk a little bit about what you all do and I think maybe what makes you different than other firms that do similar work.
Ian Lockwood:
Okay. Well, Toole Design Group was founded about 20 years ago by Jennifer Toole, and hence the name. And she started with two people in Maryland, and now there's over 300 people in 18 offices right across the United States, coast to coast, north to south, and also up in Canada. And all we do is livable transportation projects. Jennifer has a very strong ethic. And so we don't build highways in cities, we don't make arterial roads wider and faster. What we do do is we help redesign cities to be more equitable. We design cities to advance walking and cycling and transit and to help people with vision disabilities and mobility disabilities.
So we're really trying to make better cities. So that's it. That's us in a nutshell. We do complete streets, we do highway removals, we do network design, we do downtown revitalization work and trails. Just about anything you can imagine in the public realm, from designing open spaces and parks, to road diets on big arterials, anything to make cities nicer for people.
Chuck Marohn:
I'm going to say something because I'm an engineer and I want you to push back on this if you think it's unfair, but I suspect you will agree. I see a lot of engineering firms that do similar work, but they also do the arterial roads and the highways and the frontage roads and the big greenfield expansions. And what I see with those firms is that they look at that as the bread and butter and they look at the work that you do as the marketing fluff, extra stuff, and their heart is not really in it. And when I watch you all, when I watch Toole Design Group, it seems to me that your heart is in it. Is that fair? Am I misrepresenting the industry?
Ian Lockwood:
I know. I think you hit it on the head. There is a few firms in this country that helped pioneer highway removals and road diets and complete streets. And Toole Design Group was one of them. Dan Burden was visiting a project we were working on in West Palm Beach back in the nineties, and he called it a road diet. And I said, "What's a road diet?" And he said, "I don't know. I just made it up." And so I said, "Well, what do you think it means?" And he said, "It means taking away lanes to make room for other things that are important." I said, "Well, what about if we narrow the lanes too?" And he says, "Well, that too." So it's narrowing lanes or removing lanes.
And then when Barbara McCann coined the term complete streets, there was two of us, employees of Toole Design Group, who worked with her on defining it to make it contagious and sticky. And most places have complete streets ordinances now. We were brought in by an arm of federal highways to help coin the language for highway removals, because they had lots of words for expanding and building and justifying highways, but no vocabulary for removing them. And we'd probably done more highway removal work than any other company. So we helped them come up with the language.
And so we've had a history of being on the cutting edge of these changes. And once we make those changes and they become more normalized and there's money in it, then other firms who were on the sidelines, doing what I would call conventional car oriented projects, started getting interested. And now with some of the new federal funding and so forth, that's reconnecting communities and the SS4A money and whatnot. They're very interested in it.
But on one hand, they're widening highways and so forth, and on the other hand, they're talking the talk. But where were they when we helped pioneer this stuff? And I think they're a little bit conflicted, and we're not. And our brand is ethics, empathy, and equity. Those are the new three E's instead of enforcement and engineering and-
Chuck Marohn:
Yes.
Ian Lockwood:
... education. So we have our own three E's
Chuck Marohn:
Say that again. I want to write that down.
Ian Lockwood:
Yeah. It's ethics, empathy, and equity. And so we just don't do motordrome oriented projects. We just can't do it because we don't want to be conflicted. And of course, we understand that a lot of those companies are profit driven and they will do what the client wants. But on the other hand, as professionals, I think it's our obligation to take a stand and do what we think is right for society and for the planet. And so we just won't do that kind of work. And so we're completely unconflicted.
And we're bidding on some high removal work in California right now. And a lot of our competition would've built the highway that we helped stop and we are removing the remnant part of it. We're hoping to remove the remnant part of it, I should say. And they're bidding on that too. So they go either way. And that's a little disingenuous in terms of your principles to do that as a firm. And they'll say it's other people, it's other departments, but hey, it's still the same firm.
Chuck Marohn:
Yeah, it's still the same internal operation. I worked in an engineering firm for half a dozen years, and I get it, they were very good people there. But at the end of the day, this is what paid the bills. And what paid the bills was the stuff that you guys aren't doing. This is the tricky thing that I've always run into is when I talk to professionals and they are trapped in this notion that this is how you pay the bills. Toole Design Group did not get to be this 18 offices and hundreds of people because you can't pay the bills doing what you're doing.
I mean, there is a demand for this. It is a high value added product. And my argument has always been, if you can help a place make a cheaper investment or a lower cost investment that has higher financial returns for them and leads to higher quality of life, you should actually be paid a premium over the engineer that just cranks out the same junk that everybody else does.
Ian Lockwood:
Yeah. I put the whole highway building, especially in cities... I actually don't have a [inaudible 00:08:23] between cities or around cities, just in them. So I put that into what I call the extraction economy. When you take value from certain groups of people or if you take value from mother nature or the planet to make profit, I think it's not an equitable thing or it's not an ethical thing. And what we try and do is we try to add value through innovation.
And frankly, we've spoken to our competitors who are large firms. And they'll say, "Yeah, we make a lot of money on the car carrying capacity increasing type projects, the highway building projects and so forth. And the complete streets and the separated bicycle facilities and those sorts of things, they lose money on. But it's a loss leader because it greenwashes their websites and makes them look like they're part of the solution and they're willing to do that.
Now, we've had to make money on the margins of adding bike claims, these sorts of things and traffic calming and road diets. And the margins are much thinner. When you're trying to add value through creativity and innovation and change things, it's much more difficult to make money than when you're just perpetuating the status quo, highway oriented, extraction type projects. But luckily, I think things are changing. The federal government, more so than ever, is supporting this stuff now. Most state DOTs have complete streets ordinances. Everyone's talking about contact sensitivity these days.
I still think we have a lot of work to do to change things. And a lot of our cities have been highly damaged and are car dependent, so we have to do a lot of work to help, give real choices to people and that kind of stuff. So I think there's a lot of room in this movement still. And if the big companies are getting involved, that's fine. We're not too worried about them because I think folks can recognize people who have been in this for a long time and have showed that commitment over literally decades compared to the new kids on the block, these big firms who, I call imitators, some of them. Some of them are quite good, but some of them, I call imitators.
Chuck Marohn:
Yeah. I'm glad you used the term greenwashing because I wanted to... I've got it later on in the questions that I've got for you, which we haven't even gotten to yet because this is so good. This is two engineers talking, it's the most exciting thing anyone can listen to. I've gotten this little kerfuffle over complete streets because I said some negative things in my book about the concept, and I wrote a recent piece where I question some of the advocacy around complete streets. And this is really responding not to, I think, the underlying concept of it, but to what I see as a broad scale industry embrace of it as a loss leader marketing kind of approach.
And I'm wondering if you see that the way that I see it. Because I watch all these firms. It's a little bit like the DEI stuff that people do where you can tell we're going through the motions here on diversity, equity, and inclusion because we want to be a player in the system and we want to buffer ourselves from critique, but we don't really embrace it internally. It's not something we really believe. And I get that sense on a lot of the complete streets stuff that these firms pump out is like that's part of the marketing brochure, but it's not part of the culture. Because I watch the work that they do. And the work that they do is 99% about moving vehicles quickly with a 1% genuflect towards what boxes do we need to check to be able to call this a complete street. Am I out of line?
Ian Lockwood:
I think you can see it that way. So when Barbara McCann coined the term and we were sitting around, there was about 10 of us sitting around trying to define it for a couple of days. The bottom line was that we wanted designers in cities to design streets that were comfortable for all the different user groups to use. It was about comfort. And comfort, in our minds, was the feeling of safety. Do they feel at ease with their environment? Which is different than safety. In our minds, that was a statistical thing, number of crashes, deaths and injuries. And comfort was, "Are you willing to let your kid walk to school? Are you comfortable with the route? Do you feel comfortable on your bicycle if you're heading downtown?" And if you don't, you won't do it.
And you may not have any idea about how safe you actually are because you don't have the statistics. Who does? Even on their own street, how many people know how many crashes there've been? They probably don't. So they don't have the information about safety, but they know exactly how they feel. And so people make decisions based on their comfort. And so the whole idea was to make streets comfortable for all these folks so that people will choose to walk and to ride and walk to school and what have you. And that meant design changes.
So that was the intent, was to make life more enjoyable and increase quality of life and to give people choices. I think the rub comes when you have to make choices of the allocation of the space. [inaudible 00:14:08] only so big. And I think you can tell the difference between someone who's committed and someone who's involved by, if they're willing to reallocate space away from the motorist to make things nicer for more vulnerable users. And I've been involved in projects. You've got a seven lanes street, three going each way with turn lanes.
And we want wider edges for people on foot and on by bike and for transit stops and that kind of thing. And they say, "Well, we can't do that because we need this for not just motorists, but peak hour times for motorists." So 10 hours a week. That's more important than three entire other modes. So you can see where they're wired. So I think there's room for it. And if you want to see the litmus test, see when you have limited space, what their choices are. And that's where-
Chuck Marohn:
Yeah. I think that's a really good standard.
Ian Lockwood:
... you can see if they believe in it.
Chuck Marohn:
I think that there's probably some people listening up to this point that hear you talk about ethics, empathy, and equity, and think that your design approach is very hippie-ish and not grounded in reality. And I want to ask you to talk a little bit about building wealth in a community and your theories around that. When we were together in October, you did a great presentation. And I think the very first slide talked about the need to build wealth in a community and the need to make investments in places that actually created value. Why is that so important and how should engineers be thinking about this as they assemble projects?
Ian Lockwood:
Wow, that's a big topic, the hippie and not reality. So...
Chuck Marohn:
Don't get hung up on that. The thing is, I think there's a lot of people in this world who approach design and they'll say, "Well, we have to make sure this is equitable. We have to make sure that we're using an empathetic approach." And people hear that and they say, "Well, this is not." Engineers hear that and they say, "This is not serious." But the reality is, and I think, you know and I know that if you want to build wealth, that's where you start. Right?
Ian Lockwood:
So I think pragmatic is a way of describing what we believe. And it's a shame it's a faith-based thing. But I think the evidence, if you want to get away from belief systems, is in our favor. For example, we were working for a client in Houston and we had proposed a group of measures increasing the network separated by facilities, trails, slowing things down, slowing the speeds of the motors down and championing transit and all the sorts of pro city things that you would want.
And they were worried about quality of life and why they couldn't attract employees to their area, because we were so car centric and barriers all over the place. And we got into our pinup halfway through the project. And one of the leaders of our client team said, "No, I don't want all this mamby-pamby, east coast elitist stuff telling us what to do in Texas. I want real transportation solutions." And so I questioned him on it. I said, "What do you mean by real?" And he goes, "You know. Real transportation solutions." And they use really meaning car centric transportation solutions.
Chuck Marohn:
Right. Right.
Ian Lockwood:
And I said, "What do you have against what we were suggesting?" And he says, "I don't want my taxes to go up." Bottom line, "I don't want to pay for all these frills and all this useless stuff." So I verified and I said, "Really? That's what you're concerned about?" He goes, "Yeah. I don't want my taxes to go up." So then I said, "Do you know the government for the whole..." Well, not the government, but the country has a gross domestic product. And each city has what's called city wealth. It's like the GDP for city. And I'm going to get the numbers wrong in this conversation that we're having, but I said, "Do you know how much this..." I had the numbers that's right at the time. But I said, "Do you know how much money, all in, Houston spends on transportation of their city wealth?" And it's about 16%.
And he goes, "Oh, okay." And I said, "Well, how about New York City? How much do they spend all in?" And it's something like 10%. So all the subways and all that extra stuff they have to pay for actually makes it less expensive. And I said, "Let's go a little more socialistic. Let's go to Toronto, Canada. How much do they spend all in with their layers of transit and paths and whatnot?" And it's about 7%. I'm going to get the numbers wrong a little bit, but you get the idea, right?
Chuck Marohn:
Right.
Ian Lockwood:
And then what if we go totally socialistic and go to Copenhagen? How much do they spend all in? And it's about 4%.
Chuck Marohn:
Wow.
Ian Lockwood:
Now, in the seventies, they were so car dependent. In Denmark, they're building bypasses like we were. And they ran out of money and they had to think more creatively and more pragmatically. And they started building bike facilities and bike parking and transit systems and so on. And they evolved their cities to be not very car dependent anymore. And people have choices. We chose a different path. And getting back to the Houston example, and I said to the fellow, "You've chosen the most expensive land consumptive transportation system ever invented in the history of the world, and that's what you're pushing right now?
And I said, "And you are worried about your taxes going up. And if you want your taxes to come down, you need to start thinking far more sustainably and inclusively and then start building much less expensive infrastructure that takes a lot less to maintain. And then your taxes will start coming down over time like they did there and like they do in any city that gets on with this approach." And then this guy stood there for a couple of minutes, and he's one of the sorts of people you don't interrupt when he is thinking kind of thing. And then he turned to the rest of his client team and said, "Well, gentlemen, looks like we're going to be building a shit ton of trails and network and transit."
Chuck Marohn:
Wow.
Ian Lockwood:
So he actually cared about his taxes and then realized that he couldn't sustain financially this idea of just motordrome all the time. That was not going to pencil out. And you see the work by Joe Minicozzi about these car dependent suburbs, just the infrastructure costs are just unsustainable. Eventually, they'll eclipse-
Chuck Marohn:
Staggering.
Ian Lockwood:
Yeah. They'll eclipse the ability to pay and that whole system will start to fall apart. And some places already has. Like Detroit championed highways and wide arterials. 1.2 million people left the 1.8 million people city into the suburbs, and the people could not afford the infrastructure anymore and it went bankrupt. So there's models that are success where they invested in sustainable type and active modes. And in other places where they spent, I'm not going to say invest, they spent money on motordrome and damage themselves.
So people might say it sounds hippy, but I think it's pragmatic, I think it's responsible, I think it's planet friendly, I think it helps all age levels, it rewards proximity, all the sorts of things that makes great cities. So I think those sorts of folks probably rely on sound bite logic and they haven't really thought about this very deeply. So I don't give their opinions much weight except that they vote and they complain. And so I think it behooves all of us to do just what we're doing now and talk about it, get the word out and let folks know the truth about transportation in cities.
Chuck Marohn:
You said earlier that you really don't have a problem with highway building between cities. And in that, we're on the same page. I think that the interstate highway system at its most genuine is a fantastic investment. Can you talk a little bit about the interstate highway system and some of the lessons that we learned from that that got brought into urban areas? I know in the talk that you gave in October that we were at together, you talk about travel time as a measurement of success as opposed to building value in a place. And it seems to me like we learned a lot of things in the highway building era that we have now misappropriated or misallocated those lessons to places where they don't belong.
Ian Lockwood:
Yeah. You brought up a bunch of thoughts. So first of all, when you are in a rural environment, your distances are inherently great. And so higher speeds make sense. When you're in a city, they don't. They actually do some harm. And I'll explain why. So cities have existed for 10,000 years, give or take. And why do we even have cities? They're invented to bring people together for exchange, social exchange, economic exchange, goods, services, education, entertainment, security, labor. It all comes together in cities.
And the transportation purpose of cities was always to reduce trip lengths, to make proximities so that exchange could happen effectively and efficiently. And the modern transportation profession was all about increasing speeds because of the new invention, the car. And so they started rewarding speeds and inventing metrics that supported speeds, like levels of service and VRC ratios and all these sorts of things.
And it tended to spread cities out, increasing trip lengths. Which is, when you think about the purpose of cities, is anti city. And so the cities that did that the most tend to be the worst cities, and the cities that didn't, tend to be the best cities. So if we want to reverse those trends and get more valuable cities, we need to start rewarding the short trip. I tell the story about the two dentists. One lives 15 miles out of town and drives into work to his office every day. He goes down all these different streets, probably passes through a hundred different sets of signals. And then there's the other dentist in his office and she walks across the street from her apartment.
And those two trips are the exact same value to society, but one gets hundreds of thousands of dollars of subsidies and the other one doesn't even get counted, let alone get a subsidy.
Chuck Marohn:
Right.
Ian Lockwood:
So I think we keep rewarding the problem, and we need to start rewarding the solutions and taxing the problems, and making it easy to design places so you have pretty well everything you need on a daily and weekly basis close at hand. And if you look back in history, the best places, the longer trips in the built environment were handled through transit, not big, long, fast roads. And so if we want to increase the value of cities, it's a holistic thing. We have to start rewarding proximity, shorter trips, we need to start rewarding different modes.
And so the idea is that our cities can grow in populations and their economies can grow. So there's more trip making. But if the modal splits change and the trip lengths change in the other direction, then you can make a bigger, more prosperous city and have less traffic. And that's how the best cities do it. There's four metrics, vehicle miles traveled, modal split, number of trips, and average trip length. And if you get those metrics going in the right direction, you're going to have a fantastic city.
But if you go with that conventional assumption that we have to keep widening and lengthening trips, you're going to have a really terrible city, very expensive city, and an unsustainable city.
Chuck Marohn:
Why do we cling to that? Why do we cling to that? Because to me, what you're saying is obvious. And I feel like, you described an interaction with a leader in Houston where he came in with one internal gut reaction, belief, and in a couple statements of logic, because that person was thinking about it, were able to make this leap. I feel like anyone who thinks about this sincerely for any period of time reaches the conclusion you just elucidated. Why is our engineering class, why are transportation professionals so reluctant to make this shift? Why is it so difficult?
Ian Lockwood:
So I think it boils down to a couple of things. The first one is, if you ask anybody, would you rather be able to get to work faster or slower? They're going to say faster. And so then, it's rational in their self-interest to want to get to work faster rather than slower. How about to the grocery store? Do you want to get there faster or slower? It's faster. The park, faster. Of course that's rational in one's self-interest. So doesn't make sense that everybody should be able to get places faster rather than slower, so shouldn't we speed up all the streets in the city so everyone can get places faster rather than slower? And it's what we call a tragedy, the commons value.
It's like, if everybody who had a boat could catch as many fish as they wanted, we'd have no fish in our lakes and oceans. So we have to manage these resources. When we have a city and if we speed everything up, it's going to damage the whole and create sprawl and all kinds of barrier effects and so forth. So anytime where something is rational in one self-interest, if it's scaled up to societal sizes and it results in harm, it's called bad public policy. So when the modernists were creating all of these metrics about speed and moving traffic, it was all based on a very individualistic thing. Everybody wants personally to go faster rather than slower.
And they ignored this scaling problem that it created. And the cities that tried to speed themselves up the most are probably the worst cities. And the ones that didn't are probably the best. The other thing that happened too is that there was this disconnect with the modernists movement where they really champion specialists. So you deal with transportation, you deal with land use, you deal with parks, you deal with housing, you deal with urban forestry. And so the transportation people were like, "Okay, we're on our own. We don't have to care about anything else. We're indifferent to land use."
And so the assumption was that all else would stay equal if you sped things up. And if everything stayed equal, that would've probably been fine. But it didn't. It changed markets, it changed land use planning, it changed expectations, it changed everything. In fact, the car was probably the biggest disrupting technology that cities have ever experienced. And when you think about it, like I said before, cities have been around 10,000 years. We domesticated horses maybe 5,000 years ago. Transit came in 400 years ago, bikes 200 years ago, trolleys and rail about 170.
The car is a new kid on the block. They were only invented like 130 years ago and they've only been popular for maybe three generations. And so we've had 400 years of trial... No, sorry, 400 generations of trial and error to get cities. Right? And then in two or three generations, we completely changed everything around the car. And the arrogance of our profession to think that we got it right in the fifties and sixties with highway building and speeding things up and with these speed oriented metrics. Like, okay, we've tried it and there's error. There's all kinds of error. Community health, infrastructure costs, safety, there's so many things that didn't work out. Cities did not get better.
And look at any cities that took that way with gusto, really damaged themselves a lot. And all the boats didn't rise together. There was a lot of people left behind, a lot of profit was made by various industries, and it didn't quite work out all else being equal. All else was not equal. And now, our generation and the ones to follow have to fix this stuff. We can't keep going on like we are because it's not sustainable financially or health wise or equity wise or anything, and it's really harmful for the planet. So we have to make some tough choices now. And I think education is part of it. We need to get the word out about what's going on.
Chuck Marohn:
There's a quote that I've seen attributed to Winston Churchill, but I looked it up, it's actually a guy named Ernest Rutherford, who was a British physicist. And he said, "We've run out of money. It's time to start thinking." You mentioned I think the Dutch, earlier. You mentioned European cities where they did run out of money in this highway experimentation phase, and it did force them to think differently. It's hard for me not to look at my fellow engineers and my colleagues and see that there's some motivated reasoning in the fact that we've lavishly funded highways and we have not lavishly funded arcs, sidewalks, street trees, transit, other amenities.
I wonder if there is a human motivated reasoning that you would identify that has kept us from, in a sense, reforming. Why would I change when the system is working out pretty well for me right now? Why wouldn't I just cling to these adages like, wouldn't you rather get to the grocery store faster than slower? That kind of thing.
Ian Lockwood:
I think that's fine if you're able-bodied, adult, affluent enough to drive and you live in a nice neighborhood and all that kind of thing. So most decision makers are probably in that category. So I could see them making decisions to perpetuate that system. But there's a lot of young people who are bored to death in the suburbs. There's a lot of elderly people who are bored to death in the suburbs. There's people who can't afford a car or don't want to own a car. People just don't have the choices anymore. And it's a problem.
And I think part of it too is cultural. When the modernists took over the transportation agenda, they came and invented their own language. So they called road widenings improvements when they're really just widenings. And how can you argue with an improvement? Right? It's inherently better. Upgrading a street. It has to be better, right? It's an upgrade after all. So there's this whole jargon that they created and it put these positive spins on motordrome. The capacity of a street. Our profession defines it as how many cars can cross a line in an hour.
Chuck Marohn:
Right.
Ian Lockwood:
Streets of the capacity to nurture businesses, to create identity, to be recreational facilities, to be social spaces. Yeah, they capacitated all kinds of stuff. But the term hijack the role of the street for motoring. And one of the ones that really bugs me is, cars have been popular for 75 years and we've been walking in cities for 10,000 years. And that's the alternative mode?
Chuck Marohn:
Right.
Ian Lockwood:
I would suggest that's really fundamental. So by calling it alternative, it means it's weird or odd, it's not normal.
Chuck Marohn:
Yeah. Alts transportation could all walking. That's what the alternate, the fringe people do, is they walk, right?
Ian Lockwood:
Yeah. The crazy people.
Chuck Marohn:
Yeah.
Ian Lockwood:
So my older sister, I remember in the seventies, she explained to me about the women's movement. She said the women's movement is trying to change the language. Like from chairman, fireman, fire, policeman, manpower, which is now human resources, police officer, chair, to remove the gender bias from the language. And she said, if you change the language, you can change the culture. And if you change the culture, you can change policies and decisions. And we have this incredibly biased language in transportation planning.
And it sounds great for a city commissioner or some other decision maker. Yeah, we're improving things and we're increasing the capacity, we're increasing mobility. And all of these terms have had their definitions twisted to support motordrome, or they're just blatantly biased. So we need objective translations, and that will help change the culture. And the finance thing. So going back 15 years, a group hired us to work in Detroit. Motown. They build cars, right? And there was Interstate 375, which went right down Hastings Street, the heart of the black community in Detroit, arguably one of the most important black communities in the country because that was where Motown was. A lot of the culture and music came out of there.
And 375 went right down Hastings Street, and obliterated all of the social connections and economic connections that that community had built up over a long period of time. And it wasn't long before the rest of the neighborhood died away and got usurped through logistics and trucking and stuff just encompassed the whole neighborhood. Anyways. So we were working on some urban design studies in Detroit and we voluntarily took on 375. So we had four studies and we added a fifth pro bono, and that was the 375 project. And we suggested removing it and reconnecting the street network. Which Detroit had a beautiful street network at the turn of-
Chuck Marohn:
Absolutely.
Ian Lockwood:
... the World War II.
Chuck Marohn:
The 20th century. Yeah.
Ian Lockwood:
And they had a fantastic transit system. They had done so much during World War II. They made a lot of money on the war effort by building things, and flush with money, and they wanted to be one of the best cities in the world. And so they spent a ton of money on modernist thinking, highway building, widenings and so on, towers in the park, like Lafayette Park and so on. And destroyed a lot of the relationships and quality of life in Detroit. And two-thirds of the people left. So we thought, okay, why don't we just remove the highway, reestablish Hastings Street and reconnect the community together.
And I was ridiculed. People are thinking, "You are crazy to talk like that. This is Detroit. This is the opposite of what we think and what we do here." And then-
Chuck Marohn:
How's that going for you?
Ian Lockwood:
Yeah.
Chuck Marohn:
How's that working out for you?
Ian Lockwood:
So a visceral negative reaction. And we get various degrees of that in places, now even. And so a few years later, this guy calls me up, this very enlightened guy from the Michigan DOT, James Schultz calls me up. I didn't know who he was, but he explained he was a senior guy at the Michigan DOT, and that they were looking at 375 and they were having difficulty maintaining it. It was so expensive. All the bridges were falling down. They just didn't have the money. And then he had our product from our urban design workshop and he said, "Maybe this is the answer." So I thought, great.
Chuck Marohn:
Maybe.
Ian Lockwood:
So he took it on the chin too and he championed it at Michigan DOT. But I don't know, 10 years ago maybe, or five, no, maybe five years ago, the governor and the secretary of the DOT finally announced that 375 is coming out. And then just a few months ago, the head of the US DOT, Pete Buttigieg, has announced $105 million grant to help them remove it. So we went from me being ridiculed for suggesting it, to the top guy in transportation in the country helping funding it to remove with the support of the Michigan DOT.
Chuck Marohn:
That's amazing.
Ian Lockwood:
So that's how far the pendulum has changed from total motordrome thinking to, "Hey, let's do something smart." So I think the culture's changing. Clearly, it's changing.
Chuck Marohn:
I do too. I feel like it is too. I still feel like... And I don't know what the answer ultimately is, but it feels like, even with the most recent federal legislation, we're going to fund some reconnecting neighborhoods, we're going to fund some neighborhood level stuff. But for every dollar we spend there, we're going to spend, I don't know how many, 10, 20, a 100, whatever it is, on ultimately highway widenings and expansions and other kind of things. And it's very frustrating at times, because I do feel like that motivated reasoning, which is a very human response, right? What's the old adage? It's difficult to get someone to change their mind about something when their job depends on them not changing their mind, right?
Ian Lockwood:
Yeah.
Chuck Marohn:
I know a lot of these engineers, and I think they're very... I tell this story sometimes. I did an internship when I was really young at the State Department of Transportation, and we had an intersection that had been recently built and redone, a highway that had been expanded, and people kept being killed there repeatedly. It seemed like it was a monthly occurrence. It might not have been that often, but it was one of these left turns across traffic with four lanes, and it was very fast, very dangerous, and people kept getting killed, especially elderly people who have a difficult time judging those gaps.
And I watched an engineer in the office with me. Call came in, someone had gotten sideswiped, and a elderly woman had gotten killed, and he went in the back room and cried. And I watched him. I mean, this was a man who had no connection to this person, did not know who they were, did not know anything about them. He was not responsible for the design, although he was part of a team that ultimately was working on it. But it was a combination of the tragedy and the powerlessness, but also I think being embedded in the system.
I tell this story because I don't know any engineer that I would say is not a good person, is not a decent, caring, kind, human being, yet it does feel like. And certainly, the view from much of the public is that, who's created this evil system that ignores basic human needs, that puts people in such dangerous situations? I don't know. I don't know if you have a thought or if you reconciled that or struggled with that notion.
Ian Lockwood:
Yeah, I struggle with it too. And it makes me think of... There's a state road that leads the airport where I live, and it just got rebuilt recently and it's a big seven to nine lane wide street. And some of the posted speed limits is 45 and 50 miles an hour. This is a fast road. And because of the suburban standards that have been applied to it, the intersection spacing is very far apart and there's bus stops and shops and neighborhoods and schools.
Chuck Marohn:
All this complexity.
Ian Lockwood:
Yeah. And people are crossing the street. And there's these little signs that when somebody gets killed, your family can have one of these little signs put up saying drive safely. And they put them on the side of the street. And they're there for a year as a memorial thing to the location where the person got killed. And there's parts of that street where there's always three or four of these things. And I've lived here for over 20 years and there's always these signs. And so people are getting killed routinely on this street. It's pretty clear it's dangerous.
However, that street meets all of the modern standards and guidelines. Like it's completely up to code, so to speak. And so I think there's a difference between freedom from liability and safe. People could say, "I followed the standards." It's like, in the World War II, "I was just following orders, that's why we've murdered all these people." So they're just following standards. But I don't think freedom from liability is one sort of safety, sort of professional safety from liability, but it needs to also overlap with real safety. How many people are getting killed and injured and crashes, and comfort.
So that street is not comfortable nor safe. It's just, there's no liability involved. It's always the user being blamed, which is why I like this whole Vision Zero thing. Vision Zero, in a lot of places, is just a glorified safety program. But when we really look at the founding of Vision Zero in Sweden, there was a bunch of different aspects. And one of it is that the jurisdictions are responsible for the outcomes, not just the users. So when someone gets killed, they're also responsible. And I think if we made jurisdictions-
Chuck Marohn:
Radical. Yeah.
Ian Lockwood:
... and design engineers more responsible for the outcomes, then you're not going to see 50 mile an hour speed limits on streets where people are crossing to get to the bus stop. If you're liable for that, you're not going to do that. But as long as you can say, "Hey, I was just following standards," we're going to perpetuate this wrong-headed high speed mentality out there. Because it goes back to our, yeah whatever, I'd rather get to the airport faster rather than slower. So I think it boils down to values and responsibility. To keep blaming the users for these, what is it, 40,000 people a year getting killed in our streets?
Chuck Marohn:
Yeah.
Ian Lockwood:
That's ridiculous. So it's not working. The high speed mentality isn't working today.
Chuck Marohn:
Let me ask you this question. On a street with complexity, and let's just say a street where people are going to be crossing on foot to get to a bus stop or what have you, what is a safe automobile speed? If you have traffic on that street and you're going to have people routinely crossing, what is a safe design speed for that street?
Ian Lockwood:
Well, there's really only one. It's just if the cars are parked.
Chuck Marohn:
Right. Zero. Yeah.
Ian Lockwood:
But I think you have to look at what happens when someone gets hit. And so after about 22 miles an hour, your chances of dying are higher than not, and under there, your chances of surviving are more than 50%. So that may be a threshold we choose. I think the human body was designed to run into a brick wall at about 20 miles an hour and survive. So that's the threshold, I think. So then we just have to... Especially where we're starting from with these high speed roads, like most streets... Well, all streets in the United States and every city operated at four to eight miles an hour for most of their histories.
Chuck Marohn:
Right.
Ian Lockwood:
It was only recently where cars came along where we could go faster than your horse walked. And so this high speed thing is a pretty new thing in the history of cities. And so we really need to start slowing these things down. And 30 is way safer than 50, 20 is safer than 30. But I think public opinion and other sorts of things and politics all play into it. But I think we need to systematically start slowing our cities down, starting with the big arterials and the collectors and so forth, because that's where most people are getting killed right now.
Chuck Marohn:
So let me ask you this. If I'm a public official and I'm listening to you today, does that mean I go out and make the speed limit 20 miles an hour throughout my city? Is that then job done? And hire a bunch of police officers and speed cameras.
Ian Lockwood:
Yeah. That's the reaction we would get, which is ridiculous because you would never do that and that would be irresponsible because the design is what dictates how fast people will go, not the posted limit. And so often, in the past, we would design a street for 60 miles an hour and posted at 50, and we're surprised that people are all driving 60. Or we designed it for 40 and we posted at 25, and we're wondering why is everyone's driving at 40 miles an hour.
Chuck Marohn:
Right.
Ian Lockwood:
So I think it's a thing that we need to do on the margins. We can't just do a blanket change. When I was in charge of transportation in the city of West Palm Beach back in the nineties, I went out of my way to slow everything down. And so Dixie Highway, Olive Avenue, these streets, there's fewer lanes on them today, and they're slower than they were. And I remember Palm Beach County complaining that we're going to create carmageddon kind of thing if we did that.
Chuck Marohn:
Right.
Ian Lockwood:
And it's congested. There's no doubt about it. But when we started, it was not a great city. It had 7,000 bucks in reserves, 80% vacancies on the main shopping street. HBO did a documentary on drug abuse in the United States called Undercover USA, Crack America. And they filmed it in our downtown because we had all this drug-
Chuck Marohn:
Wow. Yeah.
Ian Lockwood:
... and prostitution and gangs and all that kind of stuff. So many of our buildings were boarded up. And we slowly created value in our city and our neighborhoods by slowing things down, improving the public realm for people, planting trees for shade and comfort and these kinds of things. And value came back. And I attribute the Renaissance at West Palm Beach to a mayor named Nancy Graham. And she had this vision of a nice city. And not just the buildings, but the public realm.
And I have a saying that infrastructure drives outcomes. And so as we restored the public realm to places that people would want to dwell and spend time, you're softening them, and people came back. I think before she left office, there's like $3 billion of investment in a city that only had disinvestment for several decades. And that's just one example. South Bend is a more contemporary example that everyone points to. And so when we got there to help out with the Smart Streets initiative, they had these big four-lane one-way state roads and now they're two-way two lanes with left turn lanes and street trees and separate bike facilities.
Hundreds of millions of dollars float into that downtown and launched Pete Buttigieg up to national prominence, and now he's the head of transportation guy. And that city, their staff are quite sophisticated now about livable transportation. And they're systematically, soberly working with their community to spread this kind of thinking to other places to add value to them as well, and make a nice city. So there's a big difference between a nice city, a pleasant city to live in, and a place that you can just drive around fast in.
Chuck Marohn:
Right. Right.
Ian Lockwood:
So I want to get back to that hippie versus reality thing. That's reality. That's a nice city emerging from the ashes of a city that had disinvestment for ages. So this is very practical, tax friendly, people friendly, economy friendly, safety friendly things that we're talking about here. But cities are complicated and they don't lend themselves to soundbite solutions. And so it's difficult to [inaudible 00:52:45].
Chuck Marohn:
I feel like in both of those examples, the West Palm Beach and the South Bend, your overall infrastructure cost to build the higher quality option would be less than the four-lane couplet both ways. That's the part that's remarkable to me is that we can actually build better infrastructure at lower cost and get a higher return and a better quality city. It frustrates me when engineers, in a sense, insist on doing the opposite, which is destroying value for the places they work.
I want to ask you one last question, and it really is about public officials. Here's what I want. I'd like you to give some advice to public officials. If there's mayors and city council members listening today, or even elected technical professionals that want to go in this direction but are struggling, and they're struggling because they're afraid of public perception or they're afraid of the argument that they're going to have to have with their DOT or with whoever, what advice do you give them as they start down this path?
Because I feel like you're doing heroic work. I feel like Toole Design is doing heroic work. But it shouldn't be heroic. It should just be the way things are done. What do you tell people who want to follow down this heroic path?
Ian Lockwood:
Well, you need to develop some scripts, some ways to defend great city making. And so reading is a good piece of advice. Like your book and Jeff Speck's book and a few other books are really good things to read, because it arms you with some vocabulary, which you can counter the modernist arguments with. I think public officials should take advantage of the Mayor's Institute on City Design and the CDCs Walkability Action Institute where they get to meet people who have done the sorts of things that we do, and they get what we call a capacity building where they learn the value sets, the scripts, the language, the stories that can support great cities.
The conventional paradigm, the modernists developed, they point to the traffic demand forecast model for the direction. They look to experts. And the experts will tell them, "We have to fight congestion. We have to increase speeds. We have to keep traffic moving." And I would challenge them to start their discussions with their community on the community's values, and just ask people what they like about the city they want to preserve, what they don't like about it they like to change, and what's missing.
Describe your city a 100 years from now or 120 years from now, assuming budget is not an issue, politic is not an issue, you can just have the best city. And they'll describe a wonderful place where their kids can walk to school, where there's grocery store nearby, and all these fantastic things. And inevitably, they align themselves with what we call traditional values, the things that have stood the test of time for hundreds of years, even before the car. And we call that community vision. That's where you want to go. And have a vision driven process rather than a traffic demand model driven process.
And then, we had a litmus test in West Palm Beach, and it was, does the change reward the short trip or the transit trip? And if the answer is yes, then it's probably a good idea. If the answer is no, it's probably a bad idea. And it didn't matter if it was a land use change, a change to a street. If it rewards the short trip or the transit trip, it's probably a city friendly thing. And in that way, those leaders can start making better places, they could advance the community's priorities, safer speeds will resolve, shorter trips will happen, investment will come back, people will come back. Their streets will start to nurture businesses as opposed to just moving traffic. They'll have increased social interaction. They will have community pride. There'll be character.
And when you take it to its nth degree, like 10, 20 years, if you keep working at this, it'll have a stronger identity, there'll be better health outcomes, people have more modal options, they'll use less energy and the place will be more vibrant. But it doesn't happen with a snap of the fingers. Somebody has to stop the bleeding first of all, and get off this treadmill of chasing congestion and so forth, and get onto city making. And I think we need to break down these silos. Don't have transportation engineers designing all your streets. Get your landscape architects involved, get your planners involved, get the community involved, and come up with something that's appealing to everybody, not just a traffic model.
Chuck Marohn:
Ian, you are heroic. I do love your work and everything that you're doing. It is a breath of fresh air. And I do think that, in an engineering profession, full of really good people who I think do work that is questionable, you are a shining light. Can you tell our audience, if they want to follow your work, if they want to get in touch with you, if they want to engage Toole Design, what's the best way to go about doing this?
Ian Lockwood:
Just like everything, just go to Toole Design's website and call anybody and we'll be able to help you. And if you call me, I'll be happy to answer your call and help you any way I can.
Chuck Marohn:
All right. Very good.
Ian Lockwood:
Well, thank you for doing this. This has been fun.
Chuck Marohn:
Hey, thank you. This has been a blast. We should do this again. I feel like you and I could talk for hours.
Ian Lockwood:
I'm certain of it.
Chuck Marohn:
I think when we advertise two engineers talking, people imagine something far more boring than this. I always tell people I'm not a very good engineer, so maybe that's my excuse. I think you're probably a great engineer in the true sense. But we both are maybe not normal engineers. Is that fair?
Ian Lockwood:
Well, I'm into building great cities, you're into great communication. I think, what do they say? To build a great city, you need a village.
Chuck Marohn:
Yeah. Yeah. So we help each other.
Ian Lockwood:
So it needs of lots of people, lots of perspectives.
Chuck Marohn:
Ian Lockwood, livable transportation engineer at Toole Design Group, thanks for taking the time to chat with us today.
Ian Lockwood:
Thank you Chuck.
Chuck Marohn:
Thank you. And thanks everybody for listening. Keep doing what you can to build a strong town.
ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES
The traffic engineering profession has three responses to fatal crashes: blame the driver, call for more engineering or conclude it was an accident that couldn't be prevented. These are understandable human reactions. Here's why they're also inadequate and what should be done instead.