Andy Boenau: Challenging the Status Quo from the Inside

Transcript

Avi Stopper

My guest is Andy Boenau, the director of transportation for the city of Richmond and the author of the Substack Urbanism Speakeasy, which he's been writing since 2013. His 2024 book is called Neighborhood Character: 365 Daily Affirmations for Defenders of the Status Quo. A recent post he wrote, "Here's Why the Status Quo Keeps Winning," caught my eye, and I wanted to have him on to talk about it and his work broadly.

Andy refers to himself as a "plangineer" and a "propaganda artist" — we'll get to that in a bit — and jokes about converting readers to the all-powerful bike lobby. He's irreverent, satirical, and, I think, deliberately provocative toward the planning and engineering establishment, even though he's a career insider. I thought it'd be great to talk with him about challenging the status quo, especially because, as a director of transportation, he sits in the seat of someone usually charged with defending it. Andy, welcome. How did I do with that intro?

Andy Boenau

That was fantastic. Thanks for having me.

Avi Stopper

All right, let's get going. So — Neighborhood Character: 365 Daily Affirmations for Defenders of the Status Quo. That's a satirical title, I think. What are your favorite affirmations?

Andy Boenau

Is it, though? Because if you read it, you're going to wonder whether it's satire or real life. I'm not one to live on the Nextdoor app, but I've seen a couple of screenshots from time to time from friends, and each time I've thought: come on. I thought my joke was better — but that's real life. We live in a sitcom.

Avi Stopper

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. But indeed, just to be humorous for a moment — what are some of your favorite affirmations for defenders of the status quo?

Andy Boenau

I'll tell you the overall theme behind writing it. I didn't do a proper book launch — I just wrote it and got it out there. I even made it so there's no audiobook version and no digital version; you have to get the hard copy, because I thought it would be fun for people to just read the back cover, with the "scathing reviews" from characters like the NIMBY.

Why I wrote it is part of my favorite thing about observing life. I'm a people watcher. I'm in transportation in large part because I'm a people watcher, not because I'm a ones-and-zeros analyst type.

One of the fascinating things about human beings is our tendency to check logic at the door. If we want a thing to be true, we'll find a thousand excuses after the fact. We'll make up our minds — "I don't want any new neighbors, I like my street just the way it is, I don't want anyone to change it" — and then come back and find a hundred or a thousand reasons to defend that. Psychologists know this, sociologists know this. But planners and engineers, who deal with the built environment, aren't trained in how our silly brains work.

So my favorite thing about writing this stuff and continuing to gently mock people who say these things out loud is: these are serious topics, but also, don't take yourself so seriously. It's okay to have an opinion — "I hope the guy next to me who has a single-family home doesn't convert it to a duplex." Fine, have your opinion. But that shouldn't entitle you to rule over his property and decide he can't do a thing with it just because you don't like it. Generally, that's my outlook on life.

Avi Stopper

I know you poke at both sides — one being self-critical and challenging how the establishment works. And I'd say — I'm curious whether you agree — that describing yourself as a people watcher is, in itself, somewhat anti-establishment. At least in the creation of bikeways, what I observe is a tendency to plan and plan and plan, then build, and then do very little observation after the fact — very little watching of how people actually interact with and behave around the things we build, in what ways they're succeeding, and in what ways they're failing. We have a tendency to build the thing and then move on to the next project. Iteration based on observation — or, as you put it more elegantly, people watching — seems not to be part of the standard process. What's your take? Do you agree that people watching isn't happening as often as it should?

Andy Boenau

Absolutely. And it ranges even to well-meaning people in the planning or engineering industries who do their work ostensibly to improve the human experience. Watching gets dismissed as a childish thing — and the downside is that it's actually childlike. There's a difference between childish and childlike. You should go through life asking dumb questions. I'm still asking myself what I want to do when I grow up.

We all do it outside of work. You can be a person who only lives in AutoCAD or some design software, or a permit technician at a local government agency, or a consultant designing transit routes all day, and never think about how people move through the stuff after it's built. But then you go home, sit on the porch, and watch people. If you're at the mall waiting for your kids while they're roaming around at ballet class, you're people watching. It's human nature. So it's a shame that, as grown-ups, we don't practice people watching more often in our professional work.

One of the biggest misses of standard planning and engineering as industries is that we don't teach our people to watch others. It starts in school. If my job is to design a network of bike infrastructure — maybe a combination of paths and on-street facilities, maybe going through parks — I should absolutely observe to see if things are working, just like any scientist in another field. If a physician is testing an idea, they'll see if they can replicate it, and if other things happen, they'll make notes: that's interesting, I wonder what happened there. But we aren't trained in that kind of observation. I think it's partly this American cultural thing of saying there's hard science over here and soft things over there — and people watching gets filed under "soft."

What's interesting at the same time is that even those within planning, engineering, and architecture who aren't constantly people watching will name heroes like William H. Whyte and Jane Jacobs — people who were famously people watchers and documenters of people watching.

Avi Stopper

I'd ask whether you feel incentive design is part of the problem — that we tend to reward the creation of things rather than the outputs those things should produce. In other words, the things themselves become the ends instead of a means to an end, which produces a set of behaviors from planners and engineers focused simply on constructing the thing rather than on its ultimate use. Is that something you see playing out — that we plant a flag and declare success when we've built the thing, rather than when the thing is actually used?

Andy Boenau

I think that's true; it does happen a lot. Though I also think about the idea that the purpose of a system is what it does. If an engineer's job is to deliver a set of design plans, or oversee a consulting team delivering them, there's process in that. If the system of that team is to deliver a paper product — design plans for a bike infrastructure network — then delivering it is "good." But there are going to be limitations in that system.

Even though planners and engineers as groups love to poke at each other — planners will say engineers are the reason we can't have better bike infrastructure; engineers will say planners make the rules that prevent it (both are accurate, by the way) — they both tend to be process-oriented and checklist-oriented. They want to follow the rules.

And I'll say, as much as I like to poke status quo in the eye — and it's easy to take some big behemoth thing and say "I'm anti-big-thing" — there are a lot of applications where status quo is good. Gravity is real, so there are a lot of ways we design our environment that take gravity into account. There are architectural, engineering, and planning habits that should remain the status quo. Even lighthearted things — I think it's good that it's customary to chew with your mouth closed at a table with other people. So I'm not saying status quo is evil for its own sake.

But when you have all these processes — if you're a planner whose job is to receive a set of plans and say "yes, they meet our rules" or "no, they don't," and that's that — that doesn't make you an anti-bike person as an individual. The big miss is that planners and engineers aren't encouraged or incentivized, either on the small team or coming up through the industry, to problem-solve at a bigger level: "Is this the fifth car-oriented project in a row I've received that virtually rules out riding a bike? I wonder if that's about our rules, or a coincidence." And if every single project coming into my shop meets my rules and is also terrible for riding bikes — hmm, maybe I should take a look at my rules. Maybe we can change them. That kind of critical thinking and problem solving is not common among planners and engineers who deal with the built environment.

Avi Stopper

Do you feel that's cultural — that DOT-type organizations aren't encouraging that questioning? Back to your point about childlike wonder: is one of the missing components an organizational culture that really encourages asking these basic questions? Why is it this way? Is it logical? Does it make sense? Is it producing the outcomes we seek?

Andy Boenau

I think it's cultural, but bigger than engineering. I was born and raised in the United States, and I've been in this industry since the late '90s. I can say without a shadow of a doubt this is a planning and engineering cultural thing — but it's broader. As Americans, we aren't typically taught and encouraged to be critical thinkers. We're quick to argue, but we're not good at something like a Socratic circle. Talk to an American kid about Socrates and asking questions — trying to get to the essence of a thing, wrestling with questions, looking for truth rather than just to be right as an individual — and it's a painful exercise, because we're not trained or encouraged to do it. Many of our workplaces don't encourage that behavior either.

When you do see it, you see tremendous advances in civilization. You see bursts of technological innovation. You see an industrial revolution. Not because people are trying to prove themselves right, but because they're genuinely curious. Then they try to solve problems, or figure out what makes a thing happen, how to replicate it, whether it needs to scale. There's a lot of excitement when you embrace that critical thinking.

To your question — is this an engineering cultural thing? In engineering circles I'll say: you engineers need to be critical thinkers. You think you're problem solvers, and you're problem solvers with an asterisk, because you've got blinders on. You're solving problems within a preset group of rules — rules you can challenge, but you're so accustomed to staying within what you've been told to do. If I'm with planners, I tell them the same thing: as a fellow planner, I'm exhorting you, please be a critical thinker. Be willing to look at your own rules. If you're a local or state government planner, you're the one setting the rules for traffic engineers to write traffic studies that justify more car traffic — wider roads, faster cars. Those rules are set by planning groups. So if I'm with planners, I challenge planners; if I'm with engineers, I challenge engineers.

But broadly, this is cultural. We don't get this kind of schooling in school. I hate school — I love learning things I'm interested in, but our school system is a mess. From kindergarten all the way through higher education, it's rare for an American student to really absorb critical thinking, get taught how to do it, get to exercise it, and see all the benefits and joy that come from it.

Avi Stopper

What are some specific ways that encouraging critical thinking, in your current role leading transportation in Richmond, has produced results — gotten people to think differently? When you encourage engineers and planners to think critically, what breakthroughs have you achieved as a result?

Andy Boenau

It's a new role, so I don't have a great "here's the before and after" yet. But I'll tell you where I'm headed in this role, and also the big picture. Big picture, here's an example. The very beginning of my career was eye-opening. I didn't learn about walkable design, bike-friendly infrastructure, human-scale design, or Jane Jacobs in college. I came upon these things by asking dumb questions — or what I thought were dumb questions.

I was learning to use software to analyze traffic at an intersection, and there was a little box that said, "click this to convert this intersection to a roundabout and analyze it as a roundabout." I didn't know anything, so I asked my boss: I've run the analysis as a traffic signal — do I also check this box and do it as a roundabout? And he said, "What are we, France?" So I did the nervous laughter — "yeah, we're not France, are we?" — with no idea why we shouldn't. But the message was loud and clear: don't analyze as a roundabout.

I learned over time by asking more questions. Why don't we? Well, we don't analyze as roundabouts because that's not what we do in the US. Well, why don't we do them in the US? Is it because they're more dangerous? No, actually they're safer — but we don't like them. So when you're willing to just say "why do we do this thing?" — not from a point of pride, thinking you know better than someone else, because sometimes the status quo is right and the thing that's always done is always done for a good reason — but when you get answers back that are fluffy, like "our fathers' fathers' fathers have always done this," that doesn't sit well with me. And anyone who has issues with authority won't sit well with it either.

Here in Richmond, we're in a really good situation. From the administration to local politicians — we have nine city council members and a mayor — and the staff, everyone is very pro-walk, pro-bike, pro-transit. There will be arguments from time to time about the application of things, of course — that gets back to the fun of writing Neighborhood Character. But generally, City Hall is moving in the same direction and wants the same things. And that's great about Richmond culture: Richmond broadly wants pro-walk, pro-bike, pro-bus infrastructure. It's not a huge city — about 250,000 people, a little less. We're an old mid-Atlantic city with great bones, a very walkable city. We want to be much better, but as far as American cities go, we've got a great starting point to build on.

One of my big challenges is the pockets of people who are influential but, at their core, don't care first about human flourishing for the city — they care about their own personal flourishing. If they feel any threat or sense of loss — for example, if they have to park a block away from their home — that's felt as a loss. Those are the people I'm focusing my energy on: finding ways to get them to think differently about public space; reframing how we talk about mobility; reframing how we talk about something as simple as the bus. If the bus is frequent, convenient, and reliable, then the bus in Richmond is an express sidewalk. Who wouldn't want sidewalks — and express sidewalks? It's not a charity thing for "those poor people who can't afford a car," or just for a college kid who can't yet afford one. It's for everybody. Just like everyone should be able to use the sidewalk — how great is it if everyone can also use the express sidewalk?

Avi Stopper

I love your emphasis on "why" — simply asking, why is it this way? Does it have to be? Is there something innate that dictates this must be the way things work going forward, just because it's how they've worked historically? For my group, Bike Streets, one of our central arguments is oriented around the question of "why bike networks?" When you think about a network, you need a comprehensive, connected network. Why is it that bike networks have always been built one facility at a time, rather than what we call a network-first approach — asking how a city can quickly create a complete, comprehensive network without gaps, so we have a network to begin with? Why does it have to be this one-bikeway-at-a-time, piecemeal approach? I'm curious for your response, and whether you think, on the merits, that's a good critical-thinking question to be asking.

Andy Boenau

Yeah, absolutely — even just as a matter of checking your own biases. I think you and I would both consider ourselves joyful members of the all-powerful bike lobby: we want people to have the freedom to use a bike to get around. It's a great tool. But we're not forcing anybody to do it. So something as basic as looking at the design of a bike lane and asking, is this the right width? Is the bike lane design we've been using good? Are there downsides?

One of my favorite quotes — not just from economics, but from Thomas Sowell, the economist — is: there are no solutions, only trade-offs. So don't even attach morality to it. Don't say something is right or wrong. Just start from: if we have bike lanes that are only three feet wide, what are the trade-offs? If we have bike lanes that are eight feet wide, what are the trade-offs? Check the bias at the door for a second, and just start thinking about trade-offs. I don't even like to say "pros and cons" — just trade-offs. Force yourself, for a brief period, to document what happens. If I turn this lever, what else happens? If I turn these two levers up, what else happens? That's a really important exercise.

To your point about links versus networks: if we have the choice between one mile of continuous, premium, corridor-level bike lane, what are the trade-offs of that versus a smaller network? And there are trade-offs — because with a smaller network, you'll have a neighborhood over here saying, "Why don't we have anything? Why do those guys get it all? Is it because they're rich? Because they're well connected?" So everything has trade-offs.

Avi Stopper

I think that's a brilliant framing. The way I've long thought about this — and, frankly, one of the reasons we get heat for some of our advocacy — is oriented around exactly those trade-offs. What we're fundamentally saying (and I'm curious whether you think I'm framing it correctly) is this: say your budget equals X. You can use that budget to create a premium, excellent protected bikeway on an arterial street. The trade-off is you get that, but you may miss the opportunity for a complete network, because you're preoccupied with that one facility. On the flip side, if you take a network-first approach — since your budget is basically the same — you're thinking about how to create bike boulevards and lower-cost, lighter-touch facilities, and your trade-off is saying maybe now is not the moment for the really high-end protected bike lane on the arterial. Is that the right way to think about it?

Andy Boenau

I think so — because then you're also asking another one of the "why" questions, and its sibling, the "what if." If you're constantly asking "why do we do this?" and "what if we did this other thing?", the combination might lead you to say: if we're taking a network approach, let's take one neighborhood at a time. Picture a waffle grid of a comfortable bike network. What if not all of those streets have true bike lanes, but they're comfortable? A low-stress street is one where hardly anybody is driving, or where the cars that are driving are calm and under control. Is that part of a comfortable bike network?

There's a related thing I see happening in advocacy right now. As we learn more — especially from folks overseas, where premium bike infrastructure generally happens before it does in the US — anybody who ultimately wants people to have the freedom to ride bikes in a city, town, or county knows what top-shelf bike infrastructure looks like, because other countries have been ahead of us: separated from car traffic, paths through parks, landscaped islands between you and motor vehicles. We know what premium looks like. But if you put your money only into premium, you have to ask the trade-off questions. I could spend $2 million on a few blocks of premium bike lane, or I could use cheaper methods — just paint and flex posts — and have a whole network: that waffle grid across a neighborhood or three. It doesn't give you the same physical protection as premium, but that's the trade-off conversation.

If I want to change the culture — if I want people to see that there really is an opportunity to ride bikes — am I putting residents in a position where, if we only do premium, it's really their grandkids who'll get to ride safely, and they themselves will never be able to ride around town? So first, the corridor-versus-network question is very important. And then, within the network approach: what makes up a network? Does it have to be streets with bike lanes, or is it anything that's comfortable? Including low-stress streets in this conversation is something we're doing in Richmond.

Another thing: we don't manage our local transit system — we only have buses; we're just surface transportation — but we do what we can to roll out the red carpet for transit, because we see the bus as an extension of walking. A transit trip is just a walking trip that moves a little faster. And there are times when a corridor needs to prioritize that express sidewalk, the buses. There's only so much space. We're not suburbia, and we're not one of those European cities that were bombed out during World War II and got a blank canvas to start from. We have tight streets — for the most part, a tight grid city. So some corridors need to prioritize the express sidewalk.

Does that mean there's no opportunity to ride bikes there? Sometimes there are parallel corridors that are low-stress. But what about corridors that don't have space for bike lanes, where the parallel streets don't either? So one thing we'll be doing is taking the opportunity, where we have dedicated transit lanes that make the bus a true express sidewalk — not stuck in traffic — to let that space also be used by people riding bikes. Again, it's not the same as a completely separated path in the woods, or a protected bike lane with a landscaped median. But it's an important part of systems thinking, or network thinking, about connecting streets to each other. I expect to see that expand more and more in the US.

And you're seeing, in recent years, more cities and counties across the country finally understand that this mobility stuff is not red versus blue. You don't need to play the political game where buses are for Democrats and cars are for Republicans. It's so silly. Regardless of local politics, people are seeing the opportunities in a good transit system and a good bike system. And if we can think not just about a network of bike lanes, but about how these things work together, that opens up exciting opportunities.

Avi Stopper

You choose your words really carefully and, I think, intentionally — "express sidewalk." That's no accident. And your piece about why the status quo keeps winning is, at its essence, about how emotion drives people's responses to things, and how that produces outcomes in how people respond to projects under consideration. Can you lay out the general thesis of that piece, and what you've seen that prompted it?

Andy Boenau

I don't know if anything in particular prompted it. But on the emotional front — and forgive me, whoever in my network I'm stealing this from; I'm pretty sure it was Ann Sussman, a cognitive architect who does fantastic work on how the built environment affects how we feel, act, and respond as human beings — the statement is this: we think we're thinking creatures who sometimes feel, but really we're feeling creatures who sometimes think.

The social sciences know this. Behavioral economics knows this. Psychiatrists and psychologists know this. Planners, engineers, and architects aren't taught about the human brain or how people behave. Even marketers and advertisers know these things — their business depends on it. Their livelihood depends on making the right gambles about emotion. So if your entire livelihood depends on people buying your product, and you're marketing to emotion, and it's working — why shouldn't we learn from them? That's not to say every seller does everything right, but it's a core thing other industries identified and made use of long ago. And here we are, planning the built environment around us, where human beings are going to do things, and we don't take into account — or even learn — what it takes to change a person's behavior.

How do you nudge behavior? How do you guide a person to do one thing and not another? How do you calm a person down when they get into the car carrying the baggage of a day — they're angry, their kid did something terrible first thing in the morning, whatever? We're humans; we carry emotional baggage. Then we get in a motor vehicle, we're impatient, and we do terrible things behind the wheel. We don't understand how dangerous it is to go 45 miles an hour down a city street, because it feels safe inside our car. It's just one thing after another.

Back to the emotional point of view: if I, as someone in transportation, see the terrible behaviors happening on city streets — and the elephant in the room when it comes to danger is people driving their cars, that's the huge danger — and I'm trying to persuade people to change their behavior, then I'm looking for all the opportunities. What are the engineering ways to change behavior? What are the enforcement ways the police department can change behavior? Parking enforcement? What carrots and sticks? What are the education ways, the marketing campaigns that can help change behavior?

But it all starts — this goes all the way back to the beginning of our conversation — with a willingness to ask: why do we do the things we do? Is there a better way? What if we did something different? Even good marketers do this. They'll say, "My brand is not performing as well as it should, and I'm not sure why," or "I've got this service priced at a thousand dollars a month and nobody's nibbling." The knee-jerk reaction — what I think planners and engineers would generally do — is "that thing's not working, shut it off." But marketers understand that sometimes the opposite of a good idea is also a good idea. Maybe this service shouldn't be a thousand dollars — maybe it should be three thousand. Maybe I'm not reaching the right customer. Again, this is related to emotion. You have to understand: we are feeling creatures who sometimes think, not thinking creatures who sometimes feel.

Avi Stopper

That's a great summary. I want to pull in a couple of examples from the piece. Your thesis, I think, is that people defending the status quo — NIMBYs, quote-unquote — are often instinctually very good at this. An example of a NIMBY-type response would be something like: "Think of the families who've lived here for generations. This plan will destroy the community we've spent decades building together." That's a strong emotional appeal.

By contrast, you're suggesting that those of us challenging the status quo need to present our messages with the same kind of emotional resonance — something like: "I've watched friends and family get priced out over the years. These changes finally give young people and working families a real chance to stay and build their lives here." That second quote is, I think, the kind of appeal you're suggesting urbanists should make. First, did I get that right? And second, can you contrast that with the fairly prosaic arguments — or, to borrow the title of another of your books, the "boring industry speak" — that typically get used and just won't tap into that emotional need?

Andy Boenau

I think this gets, again, to both planners and engineers, since in so many ways they're similar — the stereotypical planner and the stereotypical transportation engineer. The tendency is to take yourself too seriously: this is important stuff, it's black and white, I'm right, I know what I'm talking about, here's the data, I will present the data, these are the facts, I am correct. All those facts can be a hundred percent true — but what's the point, if you're overlooking human nature? If you present it that way, you might as well be delivering the message in another language. People can't understand what you're saying; it's a foreign tongue. You've got to understand how humans are.

When we relax and talk about something outside our area of expertise, emotion comes through naturally. I'm not a soccer fan, but the World Cup is happening right now. If a bunch of people are talking in the office kitchen about whatever game was on last night, somebody's going to make an emotional case about the game, about the ruling — "the ref said this, the ref did that." It's easy to do when you're relaxed, because it's outside your expertise. You don't care about the emotion coming through; you're just talking with other people. Then suddenly, when it's our job, it's "I've got to stiffen up, be straight-laced, use more adverbs, make my sentences longer, my email needs to be a nine-hundred-word blog post." Everything about our work gets unnecessarily complicated, I think because deep down we're taking ourselves too seriously. It is serious stuff — but you don't have to take yourself seriously.

And appealing to emotion isn't some 20th-century marketing gimmick that emerged when TV took off. Aristotle talked about this — making appeals to evidence, to credibility, and to emotion, and how, when you do all three, that's the most powerful way to persuade or guide someone toward the truth of a thing. It's the combination. So facts are important, yes. Credibility is important — I didn't just start talking about bike networks last week. But also emotion. If you can't communicate in a way humans are ready to receive, what's the point?

Back to the NIMBYs themselves: if people feel they're going to lose something — "there goes the neighborhood; if this happens, all is lost" — then they're going to unload with emotion. That's why I say NIMBYs, or my new favorite version from Gil Peñalosa, CAVE people — citizens against virtually everything. If the CAVE people feel like it's the dark night of the soul, like all is lost, then of course they'll try anything and everything. And they're very good marketers for doing nothing, for keeping things as they were. So if those of us who want a city to grow and be healthy — who want it to be more than an idea, who want our place to actually grow — we've got to not just copy the CAVE people because they're the CAVE people, but go back to these roots of reaching people, all the way back to Aristotle: make appeals to credibility, to evidence, and — most importantly, I'd say — to emotion.

Avi Stopper

There's a really interesting paradox baked into that: this is a discipline that likes to think of itself as scientific, yet there's this oversight of being unscientific about how human beings process information. That's where the emotional gap enters. Your point about loss versus gain, scarcity versus abundance, is really well taken. It seems to me there are basically two ways to appeal to emotion. One is telling — storytelling, persuasive language, the language of abundance and gain rather than scarcity and loss. The other is showing people. I'd love your take on tactical urbanism as a way to create emotional connections.

People hear about something abstract and wonkish — a diverter on a quiet residential street. That's a very technical idea, and it's difficult for most people to imagine what the result of putting something like that in the neighborhood might be. And yet, consistently, over and over — Janette Sadik-Khan showed this in New York City, Mike Lydon has written about it expansively in Tactical Urbanism — when people actually interact with these things and start to experience them (you're showing them rather than telling them), the emotional connection is "wow, my street just got way better," and it's very well received. So how do you think about the balance of telling and showing?

Andy Boenau

I adore tactical urbanism and the folks you mentioned. They're heroes of the profession. Interestingly — as a sidebar — I'm going to give a session to the American Planning Association on this topic of heroes. It's interesting that in planning, the heroes are very rarely people who came up within the planning industry. Look at the top-ten lists — the greatest fill-in-the-blank as ranked by American Planning Association members — and it's rarely someone who came through the system. Again, that's not to say the status quo is inherently evil, but it's interesting. Why is it that this system, which produces all these AICPs every single year, isn't producing tons of heroes?

Tactical urbanism is one of those great examples. It's like Jane Jacobs — many years later, people say, "She was amazing, the way she did this and that." She was poking holes in your rules, planners. She was saying city planning as an industry is a disaster, and you should be run out of town, because you're telling other people what they can and can't do on a block — you're preventing a block from having any life. Why do you hate fun? Why do you hate kids? The planners of her day hated her for it, because she was the adversary. Decades later, they adore her.

Same kind of thing with tactical urbanism, or guerrilla urbanism. I don't know if you're familiar with the Guerrilla Gardener — the story, I'm pretty sure, out of Los Angeles, where growing tomatoes in the grassy strip by the sidewalk or on a median was illegal. This guy very smartly did it in a way that would make a scene and get press attention. He was arrested for growing vegetables and fruits, and for teaching neighbors how to grow them so they could eat healthy in a food desert. These things come out because the status quo is jacked up about something — either preventing us from having nice things, or attacking us when we do good things.

I think we're at an interesting spot now, after many years of quick-build and tactical urbanism projects. Especially with the growth of the internet — I don't think this would be happening without it — you can instantly share pictures and videos of things anywhere in the world. Any human being can very quickly see the benefits of a 10-foot lane versus a 12-foot lane, the benefits of tightening up what used to be a slip lane and turning it into something else, the benefits of just about any common tactical urbanism project. So we're at a fun tipping point where, for a lot of cities, it's no longer about testing a thing to see if it will work. It's converting it into what we in Richmond call quick-build projects.

We know, for example, that rearranging the street space — realizing we don't need two general-purpose car lanes, we only need one — makes room for bikes. We could wait a generation for a very nice, top-shelf concrete landscaped island, or we can quick-build using paint and flex posts and create a network of bike lanes, and use paint and signs to create a network of transit lanes. You can do a lot of stuff that 15 years ago would have been called a tactical urbanism experiment to see if it would work. Now we know it works. It'll be safer for people riding bikes, and — happy coincidence — safer for the people driving who will never use the bike lanes. So it's a fun way of looking at tactical urbanism now.

Avi Stopper

So, you're a bit of an outside-the-box thinker, a bit of a provocateur — and yet you're in the firmament. You're running a DOT. I think it's fascinating that you have that role, and it seems to me we need more people like you in those roles. So how did this come to pass? How did you become the director of transportation there, and how can we get more folks like you into that kind of role?

Andy Boenau

Good question. My entire career was outside any government agency — government agencies were my clients. I'd only been on the consultant side: telling people what to do, how to make things better, analyzing things. I started my career as a traffic engineer. So I don't know how somebody goes through all those years saying, "If there's one thing I know for sure, it's that I will never, ever work for a government agency," to being the person sitting in this role. It could be that, as a contrarian — my dad worked for the Federal Transit Administration for a hundred years, so I knew: one, he works in transportation, so clearly I won't; two, he works for a government agency, so obviously I never would. And here I am, all these years later, doing exactly that.

I see this as a role you'll either love or hate — there's no in-between, no mediocre version of it. I'm a wabi-sabi, punk-rock type of person. I like fast and sloppy things; I'm not interested in perfection. In school, that was partly because I wasn't a good student — "who wants an A-plus anyway?" — so it was easy to line up with that.

But if you take into account the rules of the game — just like, if you're looking at a chessboard you don't play checkers, and if you're looking at a checkers board you don't play chess, and if you're swimming you don't try to sprint across water — then understanding the rules of engagement matters. Where's the red tape and where isn't there? What can I control? What can I influence but not control? And what's the category of thing I can neither influence nor control, so I might as well not waste energy there? That's part of my daily reminder to self: find the category I can't even influence, don't bother with it, and go all in on the other two.

I'm in a fortunate spot. We've got a well-oiled machine for delivering work. Over the next five or six years, the city is going to spend over a billion — with a B — dollars in transportation and safety improvements. And it's not even mostly local money; about 90 to 95% of our funding is federal, state, and regional grants. So we're not competing with a parks project or a school project — we're chasing grant money for these projects, which can be a challenge.

Like you said earlier about funding corridors versus networks: a lot of these grants have strings attached, and some strings prohibit you from doing a whole network. You have to do a street from here to there — a very simplistic approach. But those are the rules of engagement, so we play by them. If we're pursuing a grant scored on safety — how do you reduce crashes, how do you reduce speed — and we know we want to expand the bike network, then we frame the approach to demonstrate that when you do this street rearrangement, you'll reduce speeds, reduce severe crashes, and save lives. That's a safety win. That's how we go all in. We're not emphasizing that people get to ride bikes, that their liberty is expanding — we're focused on safety. And if a different grant has a different angle, we go after that. You just have to be smart about the game you're playing. That's the lay of the land in Richmond.

As far as getting more people to do these kinds of things — it comes back to what we discussed earlier: being willing, even happy, to ask "why" and "what if" questions, and then spending time learning how humans tick. You may not love advertising and marketing as much as I do — it may not be an instant love — but at least make yourself learn it. Make that your vegetables. Eat your vegetables by learning about behavioral economics and decision making. Why are the cereal boxes placed the way they are? Why are the logos designed the way they are? There's science behind it, because of how we — silly feeling creatures who sometimes think — behave in a store. If you're willing to ask those "why" and "what if" questions, it's funny how quickly other people start looking to you: "Maybe you can help me over here with this thing." I'm not special. So much of it comes out of asking those questions. And if you get a little critical mass — to speak in bike terms — of people asking "why" and "what if" across departments, then things really get exciting.

Avi Stopper

Well, let's leave it there — I think we could go on for hours. Keep pumping out the interesting countercultural ideas, Andy, and working to change things from within. Thanks so much for your time.

Andy Boenau

Things do get better in the end. Thanks for having me.