Critical Conversations in Transportation Planning: Wes Marshall and Trung Vo, AICP

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[00:27] - Divya Gandhi: Welcome to Critical Conversations in Transportation Planning, where we are bringing you a series of interviews with pioneers and industry leaders who are offering their insights into some of the most challenging issues facing our field. This podcast is produced by the American Planning Association's Transportation Planning Division. TPD connects planners across all transportation modes to share innovation, foster collaboration, and advocate for sustainable mobility solutions.

I'm Divya Gandhi, a transportation planner and a member of the Transportation Planning Division Board.

 

[01:02] - Em Hall: And I'm Dr. Em Hall, an urban planning consultant and member of the TPD Board of Directors.

 

[01:06] - Divya Gandhi: In this episode, we speak with Wes Marshall of the University of Colorado, Denver, and Trung Vo of Toole Design Group.

 

[01:16] - Em Hall: We really enjoyed this conversation. Let's get right into it.

 

[01:21] - Wes Marshall: Wes Marshall, Professor of Civil Engineering at University of Colorado, Denver.

 

[01:25] - Trung Vo: Trung Vo, Toole Design, Denver Office Director.

 

[01:29] - Em Hall: First, we just wanted I wanted to hear a little bit about each of your paths, what brought you to planning, to the topics that you work on. 

 

[01:38] - Wes Marshall: That's a big question. I could talk for 25 minutes, so I'm right there. [laughs]

 

[01:41] - Em Hall: Give us the three-minute version. [laughs]

 

[01:44] - Wes Marshall: So I grew up right in and around Boston in Watertown. And as a kid, transportation wasn't something you really thought about. It was easy. As a kid, I could walk or bike all over town. And then I did civil engineering, but I wasn't focused on transportation either. It was more structural, but it was site engineering, so you're a little bit of a jack of all trades. But when I got into the workforce and we started building things, it was the transportation piece that was always the worst. It was the part that drove me crazy because it was never as good as the stuff I saw in and around me.

I then moved to Connecticut and I lived for the first time in a place I couldn't leave my street without being in a car, and it drove me insane. It really just drove me crazy. I'm the person that wants to ask, "Why? Why do we do it this way?" I wasn't getting good answers. Next thing you know, I'm in grad school. And a professor. So that's how I got here, I guess.

 

[02:34] - Em Hall: That's great.

 

[02:37] - Trung Vo: So for me — it's interesting, I was born in Dorchester, so I also was in the Boston area. Haven't been back in a while. But for me, the way that I got into transportation was I thought I was going to be an aerospace engineer, went to Georgia Tech. And I remember looking out one of our dorms and seeing I-85, I-75, all 16 lanes or whatever, and thought, "Someone should do something about that."

And that's how I got into transportation. But I thought I was going to be a traffic engineer, to be totally honest. I mean, all of my undergrad and graduate work was based in traffic analysis, signal operations, focusing really just on cars. And so when I got into the workforce, that's what I thought I was going to do. And then I realized it was starting to hurt my soul a little bit and dehumanize transportation in a way.

And so through my consulting work early on, I thought, "There's got to be more than this." And then I learned about transportation planning. And then all of a sudden, I thought, "What a cool way to consider the engineering side and what really matters from that perspective." But then humanizing it and thinking more at a community level, at a systems level, rather than just looking at numbers and data.

 

[03:54] - Em Hall: Great.

 

[03:55] - Divya Gandhi: Excellent. So, wanting to understand, how did you guys find yourself doing, specifically, transportation safety work?

 

[04:04] - Wes Marshall: It's just such a big problem. I think we underestimated it, is what I always notice. We treat it — you go in the news every night and you can see somebody had died. It's like a dripping faucet, and nobody really pays that much attention to it unless it's somebody you know or care about. It's not like a plane crash or a train crash. I mean, that's like a fire hose, and we try to fix those things immediately, and it's a big national uproar. But we've killed way more people on the roads, and to me, it's a public health emergency that we don't treat like that whatsoever.

When I started looking into my kind of research, and you start seeing the lack of science behind why we do what we do in the roads that are killing people, it's like, wait a second. We always say safety is our first priority, but it's just not true.

 

[04:52] - Trung Vo: I think some of it is tied to what we say is the ethos of engineering, which is to consider the safety and health and welfare of the public. And sometimes it feels disingenuous when we're not really thinking seriously about the consequences of some of our decisions from an engineering or even from a planning perspective.

I think for me, the way that I got into safety is the way that I got into transportation, because I think if you're going to work in transportation, safety better be at the top of your list or else we are condoning the reality that our streets and systems are not safe, and in particular for lower-income and Black and Brown communities.

 

[05:38] - Divya Gandhi: Thank you, Trung, and thank you, Wes, for that perspective. So it sounds like you're both working locally but also have an eye for national trends in designing our streets for safety. What are you seeing nationwide that's important for planners in any size locality to think or know about?

 

[05:59] - Wes Marshall: It's hard to point at examples. I always feel like when it comes to transportation and stuff like that, context matters, the culture of the place matters. I can't point to Copenhagen and say that Denver should do that because the engineer, their eyes glaze over. We're not Copenhagen. We can't possibly do that. I can't even point to Portland or Boulder and tell a lot of engineers they should do what they're doing. It doesn't register. But if you point... Denver is a great example for places. You can point to Denver and other cities can wrap their head around like, "Oh, if Denver can do it, then so can we." So I try not to say, "Oh, this is a great thing so-and-so is doing." You got to think about who and where and that social-cultural aspect of these things to get at it. But there is a lot of good stuff happening. Yeah, it's tricky, though, to do it in that way.

 

[06:54] - Trung Vo: I think the communities that are taking it seriously are willing to accept the trade-offs of reducing or minimizing motor vehicle speeds. Speed kills. It's the core of safety. If folks weren't driving as fast as they are, then there would be fewer collisions, and there would be fewer fatalities and serious injuries resulting from those collisions.

If there's going to be a big change, then elected officials, engineers, planners, other stakeholders need to be okay and willing to tolerate and accept and maybe even desire what they might lose, quote-unquote, by reducing motor vehicle speeds.

 

[07:44] - Wes Marshall: It's not even a big trade-off either. When you look at some of the data, I know Boulder put in a bike lane on Folsom a while back, and big uproar about exactly what you're talking about. People were not willing to give up that trade-off. It seemed like there was congestion intersection. There seemed like speeds were lower. But if you looked at the data, people were still averaging higher than the speed limit over that corridor — but they pulled it out anyways.

That's the thing — when you lowered speeds in urban places, it doesn't actually increase people's overall travel time all that much. It's so minuscule in the grand scheme of things that it's a trade-off we should be willing to make, but it doesn't... A lot of stuff in transportation is counterintuitive. You don't see it or feel it. When you're in a car and you're going slow, it's hard to really understand that you're going to get there almost as quickly.

 

[08:33] - Em Hall: Yeah, we're having this discussion in Chicago right now. They're considering lowering the speed limit throughout the city to 25 from 30, right? And all the typical arguments are coming up. And we're lucky that we have an active bike community, pedestrian community. There are a lot of folks that use transit and active transportation and can advocate for something like that in a way that it's not totally balanced toward car drivers, right? But not every community has that.

You talked about moving to a place where it's a car-centric culture. Have you guys looked at any examples where that local context is so car- and driver-centric? What does designing safe street networks look like when there isn't a lot of active transportation or transit? Or do you need to start with those places first and make your case and then move to somewhere where everybody drives?

 

[09:23] - Wes Marshall: It's a chicken and egg issue. There's a reason. A road isn't safe if you have no pedestrian or bicyclist deaths, right? It often means you've created a road that scares off all the potential pedestrians and bicyclists. If you've read When Driving Is Not an Option or a book like that, you realize that more than 30 percent of the population can't, doesn't drive. Then you think about kids and older people. So many people don't. It's a huge population. More than that, to me, freedom isn't being able to drive a car everywhere you want. Freedom is being able to pick something different. You could walk or bike, and we have to build places that allow that, and allow that safely. So the problem is we just haven't built enough of them.

 

[10:07] - Em Hall: If you don't see that around you, the safe walking path or things.

 

[10:12] - Wes Marshall:  It doesn't mean people don't want it.

 

[10:13] - Em Hall: Right. They just don't know what it looks like.

 

[10:15] - Wes Marshall: Yeah. And most people live in a place where they don't understand it. And that's the thing I noticed when I first moved to that place where I couldn't leave my street without being in a car. I would ask my neighbors, "How do you all live like this? I can just physically see a corner store, and I can't get there without being in a car." They're like, "Just drive there." I'm like, "You don't get it." They just didn't understand what they were missing or what it... People need to see it, feel it to really get it. And people will go on vacations and they'll love when they go to Europe or even Disney World or Main Street. It's great walking around. Then they go home and they live in a place where they can't do that, and they never question it.

 

[10:53] - Em Hall: Got to see it. You're out there designing as an engineer. How are you thinking about these things or get people to envision something they don't know or see every day?

 

[11:03] - Trung Vo: I think there's a default assumption that driving is the default. It's — you should just expect to be able to drive where you want to go, and park when you get there. So much so that I think we ask questions that are critical of active transportation or transit that we don't ask of driving.

So for example, I had a conversation yesterday, in fact, about this potential bike facility on our trail bikeway. It was going to result in some trade-offs. And one of the folks in the room said, "Hey, do we even know how many people are going to use that bicycle facility if it gets implemented?" And it's kind of an impossible question to answer, but no one asks that question when we build a new road. Like, we got to make sure that people would drive on this road.

And so for me, I think that a huge part of planners and engineers and designers and other folks collaborating with one another is to understand what are the core needs for whatever project it is, and then what are the core fears? What are folks really worried about? And then finding some common ground there can be really valuable.

So rather than just trying to push the bicycle or walking on foot, maybe it's like, can we have a safer or more connected community? Or can we have more foot traffic for businesses that are maybe concerned about losing passersby in vehicles, right? So finding some common ground, I think, is quite important because I think if you start with bicycle, it may not get very far if someone is predisposed to oppose that idea.

 

[12:43] - Em Hall: Yeah. Do you have a success story that's a story that stands out in your career or in research that you've done, Wes, where you're like, "I didn't think this is going to work," and it worked? Anybody you've won over?

 

[12:53] - Wes Marshall: Yeah, right outside here, 15th Street. When I first got here, it was four lanes of one-way traffic and five lanes in some sections. I think the city had promised to do a protected bikeway at first, and it was hard to even get that. When they first put it in, it wasn't that. It was a buffer bike lane. Like, "Oh, we couldn't do it." They had the plowing. They had X, Y, and Z as to why they couldn't do the protected bikeway. Over time, one of my students did this video before and after, and put some cones out to show what it was like. And cars were using the bike lane as a car lane, like 60 times per hour in the initial. And then we put cones up and it dropped to one. And you can see it went from just not safe to safe. Within a month, the city changed it and fixed that.

[13:36] - Em Hall: That's incredible.

[13:37] - Wes Marshall: But now there's two bus-only lanes on that same street. How they did that, they just made a policy change. Instead of counting cars, we're going to count people. And all of a sudden, the buses get a lot more priority.

So when I look at that street now, you have the red bus lanes, you have the green bike lane. It looks like Christmas. And 10 years ago, that was a moonshot. I was like, "There's no way a street could ever look like that in downtown Denver." And it's right outside the convention center where we're sitting.

 

[14:05] - Em Hall: It's a great example. Yeah.

 

[14:06] - Trung Vo: There are several streets like that in Denver. So we worked specifically on 17th and 18th streets. Same configuration, right? There was five lanes, I think, previously. And then now we've got a bikeway, a protected bikeway on the left side, I think two travel lanes, and then a bus lane on the right side.

It just feels like, when I first moved to Denver in 2018, I saw the street and I was like, "What is this? Why does this exist?" I actually remember when I was on Instagram at the time, I took a photo in the street and I thought, "This is opportunity." Right? And then three years later, four years later, we were able to design it, and now it's in.

 

[14:46] - Wes Marshall: And all the traffic models were telling them they couldn't possibly do what's there now. I remember one of the new skyscrapers came in and they closed two lanes of the street for a year. And that traffic armageddon never materialized.

Then you start looking at it like, well, maybe we can do this. Maybe the traffic models are wrong. And it's true. Look out there now. There isn't that congestion they would have expected when they were telling us no.

 

[15:10] - Em Hall: That's incredible.

 

[15:12] - Divya Gandhi: Yeah. Wow. Well, it sounds like there's a lot of alignment here, considering the fact that you're coming from the academia side and you're actually in the industry. But having observed this throughout, there sometimes seems to be a divide or even tension or misalignment between academia and actual industry practitioners. I was wondering, in your experience, what are some productive ways that individuals in both of these different sectors can actually collaborate to achieve common and shared goals and complement the work that is being done at both ends?

 

[15:45] - Wes Marshall: I mean, I was in consulting for seven years before I went back to school. It was that seven years of anger that led me to go back to school. [laughs] So I have that perspective. I know what people need to do good work. For me, I'm trying to — I'm not sure what the right term is — give you the ammunition. When someone's saying you can't do a bike lane because it's not actually safer, I say, "Well, here's some research that shows that it is." I'm trying to help you all answer the burning questions and provide that information, some real research behind it, and trying to help us all be more empirical in what we're doing.

 

[16:22] - Trung Vo: Yeah, I think there's... From my perspective, I don't see maybe that same tension that others are seeing in different parts of the country. I think, I mean, there's a lot of — for me, I feel like there's a lot of synergy, at least in Denver. We often think about CU Denver's Master's of Urban Regional Planning program as a great pipeline for folks that we might consider teaming with or hiring or whatever in the future. So I think there's actually really great connectivity there.

I also think that our work at Toole Design is not just planning and designing streets, but we also do quite a bit of research work as well. So we will work on NCHRP projects. We'll team with universities and research institutes to do some of that work. So, yeah, I think it's —

 

[17:11] - Wes Marshall: I mean, there are some consultants I'd probably have much more tension with in a discussion like this. You’re not one of them.

 

[17:18] - Trung Vo: [laughs] That's good to hear.

 

[17:19] - Divya Gandhi: This is so great to see, yeah.

 

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[17:56] - Em Hall: You both mentioned research. What is missing in the research? Or what would you like to see more of happening out there? I just finished a planning program, but I'm in the business world now. Divya is on the consultant side, so we see a lot of different things. But I mean, a lot of times, yeah, you just don't have the data that you need. And you guys sound like you go out and get it when you need it. But what is missing out there? What would you like to see be a focus in other places, maybe?

 

[18:27] - Wes Marshall: I think the problem is more that we're not listening to the research that is there.

 

[18:32] - Em Hall: Okay, say more on that.

 

[18:33] - Wes Marshall: So we have all these manuals. As a traffic engineer, I'm given like five or six thousand-page manuals when they're thrown on your desk and you just have to follow them. You assume whoever wrote these knows more than you do. And they're based on theories from the 1930s, '40s, '50s. They're not based on today's research. So we know what makes streets safer. Like, lower speeds. And it's the fundamental physics of the equation we're not paying attention to in those manuals. So we need to start listening to the empiricism that is out there in the research.

I mean, of course, I have a long list of things that the research could be doing better and we could get better data on either crashes or active transportation counts. There's so many things I could list, but it's really like, let's start listening to what the research, what the empirical data is telling us and not just assuming. Because so much stuff in transportation is counterintuitive. Our theories were wrong about stuff, and we're still following them thinking it was based on science, and it's not.

 

[19:35] - Trung Vo: Amen.

 

[19:36] - Wes Marshall: [laughs] Thanks, man.

 

[19:41] - Divya Gandhi: Wes, in your book, Killed by a Traffic Engineer, you're very aligned to what you just shared. You've argued that many of the traffic engineering standards we rely on today are based on flawed assumptions rather than true science. So if you had the power to rewrite these rules from scratch, what are the top three fundamental changes you would make to how we design and regulate our streets?

 

[20:06] - Wes Marshall: Top three. I mean, that's it. I mean, I was trying to mention before how we're trying to do a bike lane, how many people are going to use this bike lane? When we design a road, we are trying to estimate not even how many people are going to use that road in a car today. It's 20 years in the future. We're predicting way out. We assume we need to accommodate that number of cars that we're extrapolating into the future. We don't. That's a choice we're making. There's no science behind it. So that's a big one.

Another one might be the level of service. Like, the science behind that is so haphazard. It was thrown together in a contentious meeting in the '50s, and it hasn't changed much at all. But it is something that is not even from our manual side, it's more from the municipality side. They've all put this into their code. I have my students do what I call a "Charming Street" study, where they try to take a dangerous street and make it more like their favorite street, and see what the hurdles are. The hurdles aren't the manuals. Sometimes it's the fire marshal and the fire codes, but more often than not, it's level of service. So that's something. Instead of asking, "What's the before and after level of service?" Maybe ask, "Here's the different scenarios. What's the actual safety expectations on these different scenarios?" We could ask for that, and then we would start doing that.

In terms of a third thing, do you want to give the third thing? I think I've given enough here.

 

[21:41] - Trung Vo: I think connected to level of service, I think I would rewrite this assumption that traffic will always increase. Motor vehicle traffic, specifically, will increase. And so connected to level of service, it's not just level of service, it's peak hour level of service. The worst hour in the morning and the worst hour in the afternoon, and those volumes —

 

[22:03] - Wes Marshall: Sometimes even 15 minutes if we're talking about an intersection.

 

[22:06] - Trung Vo: Yeah, peak 15 minutes, right? And we're looking at, we want this intersection or this street to handle the peak. And if that's good, then it'll handle every other 15 minute or hour of the day, but it doesn't take into account all the safety trade-offs, right? So there's level of service, but then there is this assumption of background growth. And so what a DOT or an agency might do is they might look at the previous 10 years of traffic growth, and then they might say, "Okay, it looks like two percent. We're going to... It's the year 2025. We're going to plan for 2045. We're going to grow the background traffic by two percent every single year and then plan for that."

 

[22:51] - Wes Marshall: I was always told to use three percent, like when I was a young engineer, just assume three percent, and that turns 10,000 cars into like 18, 19,000 over the time span we're talking.

[23:01] - Trung Vo: Exactly.

[23:02] - Wes Marshall: And like I said, you don't have to accommodate that. Sometimes it's about asking the right question. Like, what are streets for? In a downtown area, the streets aren't necessarily for meeting the peak 15 minutes or the peak hour. They're for so much else. And by just following those protocols, we're not getting what we actually want. We're just doing what we've always done.

 

[23:23] - Trung Vo: It's very reactive rather than, hey, let's proactively plan for a slow and calm street or street network.

 

[23:29] - Wes Marshall: What is your vision for this street? And if you show people, they start realizing what they want. The way you get there isn't the way we're doing business.

 

[23:40] - Em Hall: So, Trung, you're an owner of your firm, and I'm sure you guys are always hiring. You work with a lot of young people who are super excited. They come out of these great planning programs, these planning schools.

 

[23:49] - Trung Vo: Sure.

 

[23:50] - Em Hall: Or they may have all these very large volumes of rules in front of them. What are you looking for in a young planner that excites you about what they're going to bring to the work? And then also then how do you change maybe some of those assumptions or mindsets if you're trained a certain way, especially on the engineering side? How are you guys trying to break the mold or shape that vision that you're bringing here for the next generation of planners?

 

[24:21] - Trung Vo: So here's the reality about Toole Design. We are a mission-driven values-based company. I like to say that we're trying to save lives, and we're trying to change communities for the better. But the only way that we can accomplish that mission and achieve those goals is to continue to survive and thrive as a business. So from an ownership perspective, we're not out there trying to, I don't know, ruffle a lot of feathers when we don't need to. So rather, we want similar outcomes for every community that we work with. We want it to be safe. We want it to be socially, racially equitable. We want it feel like a place where people can age in place. We want communities to be connected. But that can look a number of different ways depending on the context of that community, where they are in the evolution — like, a Denver is going to be different than a Thornton. It's going to look different.

So for a junior planner coming out of school, I would want to harness a lot of that energy and that passion because I think it's good. And I don't want it to, I wouldn't want anyone's passion to wane over time because they just get pummeled into the ground. But at the same time, there's a place for tact and diplomacy and being persuasive and convincing. When I'm thinking about a junior planner joining Toole Design, I want both. I want someone who believes in the mission, loves the work that they do, believes in transforming communities for the better, but then also being able to communicate that and be really thoughtful about reading the room and being able to win people over.

 

[26:07] - Em Hall: That's what you're teaching in your classroom, probably, Wes.

 

[26:10] - Wes Marshall: I mean, one of the great things about being in academia as a professor, especially as a tenured professor, I can ruffle a few feathers. [laughs] I don't mind doing so. That's the title of my book. But I think if engineers actually read it, I'm not blaming them. I'm saying they're just doing what we were taught. I was in the same boat. I was doing what I was taught, and none of us knew enough to know that what we were being taught just wasn't quite so. There wasn't the science we thought behind it.

But in terms of the young... For me, it's always the most exciting thing when you get these students, they have all their preconceived notions, and then you start seeing the light bulbs going off, and you start showing them things. We talked about things being counterintuitive, and they start looking at their streets, their cities differently. Students come back to me. I've been here for 15 years now, so it's great to see them now getting into the workplace and having power and doing good work. But they come back to me and they'll tell me they are just continuing to drive their significant others crazy because they can't go someplace without complaining about a street or stopping to take a picture or stuff like that.

 

[27:18] - Em Hall: [laughs] I can't imagine that scenario. I've never been that person.

 

[27:20] - Wes Marshall: Before, they're like, "I didn't care about any of that stuff and you've ruined me." [laughs] Now I'm out there, you can't unsee it. That's the thing. Once you start knowing and understanding, you really can't go back. It's like the Matrix. 

 

[27:34] - Em Hall: [laughs] That's incredible. We're actually starting — Divya is actually spearheading a mentorship program, both here at the conference and TPD, we're the largest division. There's about 3,000 people that are members, and students get membership free, and that's great. And we want to understand what they actually want to get out of that. So that's a big question for us, too. What's actually meaningful to join something like this? We don't want it to just be a rote activity you put on your resume, but truly get something out of it. So we're listening to younger voices as well to understand.

 

[28:09] - Wes Marshall: That's great. That's so important for them. A lot of them ask how you get a job. It's not just throwing a resume. It's like, programs like that. You start to talk to people and understand.

In this field, I think we all hit on this early. You don't really know transportation was a career, what it even looks like or how broad it is. You could be designing pavements, you could be going to community meetings, and students don't realize all the different paths. They need to start talking to us and other people to start seeing what they actually can envision themselves doing on a day-to-day basis.

 

[28:46] - Divya Gandhi: Well, it takes a lot of courage to question a lot of the ways things have been done in the past and rewrite a lot of those rules and how we continue to plan, implement, and move forward, making our streets much safer, to say the very least.

So, well, Trung and Wes, this has been tremendous. Looking ahead, what are some innovative strategies, policies, or research areas that excite you the most when it comes to improving traffic safety and achieving a real shift towards Vision Zero?

 

[29:21] - Wes Marshall: [sighs] I feel like Vision Zero is close to being... It's just business as usual under a different umbrella. We're still doing... Streets look a little bit different. We have some more bike lanes, but we haven't fundamentally changed anything. So we need to do something bigger.

And one of the overarching themes is my book is we're blaming everything on human error. So we wanted more data-driven approach to Vision Zero. And if you look at the data, the data is telling us that we have a huge human error problem. So then we end up saying, "Well, what do we do?" Well, if you have a human error problem, we focus on education or enforcement, or we hope technology will save the day. In reality, there is so much we can do with engineering. The human error thing is almost a cop-out. Yes, it's important for liability and for the police, and there are bad behaviors out there all the time. But if you look at what we can do as engineers and planners, there's so much.

But we need to start treating those crashes as just fundamentally differently. Ask why these road users are doing what they're doing. A lot of times you can see, well, they were trying to do the best they could, given what we put in front of them. Yes, they crossed there. Yes, we wanted them to walk to this crosswalk that's a half mile away, but we didn't give them a sidewalk. So what the heck do we expect them to do? Is that an error if they cross there instead of where we want them to? No, that's our fault, and we can do better.

 

[30:49] - Trung Vo: For me, I think that there is this increasing courage to tackle the last frontier in a lot of communities, which are the arterials. The arterials in many communities are trying to do so many different... We have so high and so many expectations of arterials. Some communities have a U.S. highway running through them as their Main Street, for example. That happens quite often, especially in a lot of Colorado communities. But I think more and more local and state agencies are considering, if we're going to get out of this mess that we have built ourselves into, if we look at our high-injury network in our Vision Zero plans, and we see that's basically all the arterials in our communities, then one by one, we need to start reimagining what these streets could look like. And so every project that any local agency is working right now on an arterial, we better not be reinforcing the safety problems on those streets. And we need to basically imagine every single project on an arterial is an opportunity to remove that arterial from the HIN.

 

[32:02] - Wes Marshall: A hundred percent agree. And that's why I have a hard time seeing Vision Zero as being successful yet, because we're not willing to do it where people are dying. They're dying on those arterials, and we haven't done much there. We've been willing to put the bike lanes on other streets. We're willing to do some of the slower bulbouts on corners and stuff like that, but we're not doing it where we need to yet.

 

[32:23] - Em Hall: So, who's not at the table that needs to be then? Is it policymakers? Is it the users? Or is everybody there and they just need to be having a slightly different conversation?

 

[32:34] - Trung Vo: I think there might be some folks who know that the table exists and are not going to sit down at that table.

 

[32:39] - Wes Marshall: And a lot of the conversations end up devolving into something that has nothing to do with safety. Even something like cameras, like red light cameras or street cameras. It's like, "Oh, it's about Big Brother. It's a cash grab." It's like, "No, it's about safety." Let's keep the conversation on safety. I know some of our high-injury network streets here. We have elementary schools, like right on them, and we're not willing to even put a speed zone for a school zone on those arterials next to an elementary school. That's a choice we can make. Maybe focusing on something like kids could make those conversations easier.

 

[33:14] - Trung Vo: I do think that representation matters, though, right? And so breaking down those barriers so that we do have diverse representations at the decision-making level, that can be hard when you don't have folks who represent more diverse perspectives that can even come to the table. 

 

[33:35] - Wes Marshall: At the same time, it is a safety thing. I hate when we, as the experts in engineering or planning, are like, oh, this will help safety. Then we let the loudest voice in the room tell us no. We're like, all right, so we're not going to do this intervention. Because having started in structural engineering, we would never, ever let a public meeting tell us how big of a beam to use. The beam is going to be so big. It's not going to be any smaller. I don't care what anyone says. This is a safety thing.

We're not willing to do that in transportation. And I know full well why. We've perpetuated some atrocities in the past. So community meetings, the stakeholder engagement is so important, but so is safety. And transportation is a network issue. So if one street doesn't want a bike lane, it ruins it for everybody. We need to think about it in that way, too.

That's like Trung was saying, it's reactive, though. We're waiting for kids to get hurt in the street before we do something, and we don't have to do it that way.

 

[34:34] - Em Hall: Is there anything else you would like to share with our audience of transportation planners? Parting words of wisdom or advice or a call to action?

 

[34:44] - Trung Vo: I think I'll just say that in order to be persuasive, specifically talking to planners here, in order to be persuasive, you have to very quickly earn the respect and trust of decision-makers. And oftentimes, those decision-makers are engineers. And so learning the vernacular and trying to understand, even if you don't agree with the decades of pseudoscience, you might call it, understanding it can actually earn you a lot of credit to have those conversations so that an engineer on the other side of the table can believe that we're trying to work toward a common good rather than it being this boxing match.

 

[35:27] - Wes Marshall: And I have a chapter in my book where I go through all the jargon in terms that engineers use to help people understand what they actually mean, where there is leeway and pushback and where there isn't. And those conversations will go a lot better. And one of the classes I teach, too, I'm trying to, for the planner, I'm trying to teach them how to more effectively argue with an engineer. For the engineers, I'm trying to enlighten them to let them know that all that we've been taught so far isn't quite right.

But bigger picture, the takeaway is I think they need to realize that they can do something about it, and not just the planners or the engineers, but the public, too. If you're concerned about safety, you have a say in this, and we can do better.

 

[36:08] - Em Hall: Thank you both for your time and insights today.

 

[36:10] - Trung Vo: Thank you.

 

[36:11] - Em Hall: It's been a great conversation. 

 

[36:12] - Wes Marshall: Thanks for having us.

 

[36:13] – Producer: What's the name of your book?

 

[36:14] - Wes Marshall: Killed by a Traffic Engineer.

 

[36:18] - Trung Vo: Don't have a book, but I work for a company called Toole Design, and we're always looking to either hire or work with folks who are really trying to change transportation for the better. 

 

[36:32] - Em Hall: That's a wrap.

 

[36:33] - Divya Gandhi: That's a wrap.

 

[36:34] - Trung Vo: Thank you both.

 

[36:35] - Em Hall: Yeah, this is great. 

 

[36:37] - Divya Gandhi: Thank you for joining us for this episode of Critical Conversations in Transportation Planning. To learn more, visit APA's Transportation Planning Division website at transportation.planning.org.

 

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