Avi Stopper (00:01)

Hey everyone, welcome to Bike Networks Now. I'm Avi Stopper, the founder of Bike Streets. Through a series of conversations with leaders in bike transportation, we're trying to answer a question: Why is bike transportation still not possible for most people in American cities? And how can we make it a reality?

Despite voter support and billions of dollars of investment, there's no city in America where biking is truly a practical reality for people of all ages and abilities. Why is that? And how can we fix it so anyone can ride to the places they want to go today? These aren't just freewheeling conversations. We're in search of an answer. And our best understanding of that answer is the topic of a book we're writing on how cities can make bike transportation possible today.

Avi Stopper (00:55)

I want to start this series of conversations with Randy Neufeld, who I consider to be one of the founding fathers of bike advocacy in America. In 1987, Randy became the first executive director of the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation. At that time, if I'm not mistaken, professional bike advocacy wasn't really a thing, and certainly I was just a kid ripping around Albuquerque on a BMX bike.

Randy subsequently led community investment with SRAM, the bicycle components manufacturer. And in that role, he led the distribution of bike advocacy grants. Investments included early funding of things like Safe Routes to School and the Green Lane Project. Randy has an expansive view of bike advocacy and an enormous amount of energy and enthusiasm for making healthy transportation possible. Randy and I don't always agree on everything, which we both agree is an important way to advance our work and understanding of the problems and potential solutions. Randy, thanks for joining me. How did I do with that preamble?

Randy Neufeld (02:08)

You did great. It's always a delight to talk to you. I really enjoy our discussions and I think today will be no exception.

Avi Stopper (02:16)

Likewise. I think as I was preparing for this, one of the things I really find enjoyable about our conversation is your insistence on using the term "human muscle." You say it with such zeal. What is it about that framing that resonates so much with you?

Randy Neufeld (02:35)

Well, I've actually been thinking about that framing some more, and maybe a good way to start to talk about the framing is my advocacy for a new verb. A new verb, and that verb is one we currently use as an adjective: "active." And I like it as a verb.

Avi Stopper (02:50)

A new verb.

Randy Neufeld (03:02)

Juxtaposed to "drive." So you "active" somewhere as opposed to "drive" somewhere. So you could say, "See Spot run, active Spot active." And then also the participle form is one that I've started to use, which is "activating." As really a shorthand—I get kind of tired of saying "walking and biking" a million times. I really want to include other forms of human muscle-powered mobility like skating, skateboarding, running, all those sorts of things. You could even say kayaking and things like that.

Avi Stopper (03:55)

What is it about the use of human muscle that appeals to you so much? Why is that so compelling to you?

Randy Neufeld (04:02)

It's about the use of our bodies in modern society. And you could say that the result of the Industrial Revolution is that we're just useless blobs. I've been looking at expanding it just beyond human muscle, but it's really our joints and our muscles and our nervous system and our circulatory system and our lungs and our brain—all of those things doing things.

And it turns out that us moving, physical activity, is super important, not just to our physical health, but also to our mental health and our wellbeing. When we start to move, we initiate this biochemical cascade of endorphins and other things that help us feel good about ourselves. I like to sometimes talk about endocannabinoids. We all know cannabinoids—they're legal in most states now. Endocannabinoids have been legal in all states forever and they always will be legal because we make them in our brains.

Avi Stopper (05:38)

I did not think that this was going to turn in the direction of cannabis, but you never know in a conversation with you.

Randy Neufeld (05:42)

Cannabis, but the reason we have cannabinoid receptors in our brain—it's a kind of lucky thing that the hemp plant stumbled into. But we have these cannabinoid receptors, and exercise and physical activity—basically, after 20 minutes of exerting yourself, you start putting these things out and it makes you feel good. It's your body's way of encouraging you to continue to hunt and gather, even though it's difficult and maybe taxing to do.

And so what happens is in this modern society where our bodies become useless, we become sedentary, we look at screens, and we are denying ourselves these physical biochemical experiences that are critical to our wellbeing, our social relationships. There's an author of a book that I like a lot called "The Joy of Movement," and she talks about how these endocannabinoids and physical activity essentially brings long-term joy to physical activity and to social relationships. And so it's really interesting how important it is to be active in daily mobility, not just for your own health, but for the quality of your relationships and really the cohesiveness of society.

Avi Stopper (07:40)

It's a great place to start this whole series of conversations with that as an umbrella, because all too often we get way deep into wonkish things like "should there be a diverter" or "what should the form factor be of this particular bike facility?" And it's important to zoom out and remind ourselves why we're doing this. And ultimately, it's about human vitality and thriving.

Randy Neufeld (08:05)

Yeah. And one of the simple ways to think about it is that when we're myopic about access as being the only goal of mobility and transportation, we forget that moving—that active mobility—is not just a means of mobility, but it is actually a goal of mobility. And it's not just A-to-B trips that are important, but A-to-A trips that make sense and are valuable as well.

Avi Stopper (08:46)

All right, so you've been studying this and observing this for decades. And I know from our conversations previously that your understanding of the landscape has evolved. I'm curious: what do you think are the main impediments, the main reason that, to use your term, "activating" isn't the status quo, is not the standard? It's so good for us. It produces such good feelings when we do it. People say that they want to do it. Why is this not more of a status quo?

Randy Neufeld (09:17)

I think it is not more of the status quo because driving is the status quo. So we're totally engulfed in a routine, a habit that has all the solutions, all the cultural and social aspects of daily activity sort of embedded in driving culture, the driving paradigm. And so when you plunk down a bikeway, even a complete network of bikeways in this overall driving paradigm, it's very difficult for people to utilize it because they're so used to doing other things—driving—and they're so used to all of their social influences and relationships assuming that you're going to be driving.

Avi Stopper (10:26)

One of the elements that I would consider part of the orthodoxy of how people think about bike infrastructure is an "if you build it, they will come" mentality. And I am, to say the least, circumspect about that because I know that when you build products, irrespective of what kind of product you're building, it is very difficult to get people to know about the product and to use the product. So is that your take as well? Do you feel like the "if you build it, they will come" mentality or view of bike infrastructure is mistaken, incomplete, inadequate?

Randy Neufeld (11:02)

I would say it's incomplete. So if you don't build it, they won't come. But if you do build it, they won't necessarily come unless some other things are in place. And those things are what I call the human empowerment pieces. So it's knowing how to use the system, feeling comfortable in the system, solving the practical issues that are involved.

Avi Stopper (11:39)

What would you say some of those elements are? Like, for example, feeling comfortable in the system. What does that mean to you?

Randy Neufeld (11:47)

Feeling comfortable in the system would be not just that you don't think you might die, but that your stress levels are low to the point where you can focus on things other than not dying. So you can focus on nature, you can focus on the people that you're traveling with, you can focus on the environment that's around you, and you can focus somewhat on the experience that you're having.

Avi Stopper (12:27)

Is that ultimately an infrastructure problem? For example, if the infrastructure is not comfortable, it doesn't meet that threshold?

Randy Neufeld (12:38)

It's an infrastructure issue, but it's not black and white. There are times in the last week where I have been comfortable with the current infrastructure in Chicago. I have had a good experience. In some cases, I was going somewhere and I was comfortable for part of the trip and not comfortable for other parts of the trip. So there are people who really center their lives around active mobility and are able to utilize the current infrastructure. There are people who don't see the current infrastructure as being something that they could identify with or utilize at all.

And so it's not black and white, as in there's a perfect network that we could build and then everyone's going to be comfortable. But how can we build the most comfort into the network that we've got now as fast as possible? And then how can we create the cultural and community elements that allow what we've got to be more comfortable for more people?

Avi Stopper (14:03)

Let's talk a little bit about those cultural and community outreach types of things. What do you see as being essential and elemental to that? And I'm thinking specifically about the fact that there are cultural things that make this type of behavior that we are describing abnormal. Let's just face it.

The status quo, which is, as you said, when you need to go somewhere, you hop in a car and you drive there, is just so assumed that doing anything else is abnormal. What do you think is the way to start to shift that culture? Is it to see other people doing this and for it to look really enjoyable, pleasant and fun? Is it that you're sitting in your car, stuck in traffic, and you see all these people riding past you who are not only moving faster through a city, they also look like they're enjoying it and deriving some benefit from it? What do you think are the cultural elements that start to shift this when it really is—I mean, those of us who are steeped in this, we hop on our bikes and we ride somewhere and we think it's the most normal thing in the world, right? But the people around us think we're crazy.

Randy Neufeld (15:05)

Yeah, I think that's a very important question. And my answer is not that we need to think about this individualistically, but that whole issue of feeling abnormal, being abnormal—I think the solution is to create the new normal.

So what we've got is we've got a driving paradigm in which those of us who are trying to live active lives feel out of place. We need to create a new place, a new culture, a new community where we feel at home. This is our home team. We identify with them and then we help each other solve the practical problems of activating in a driving world.

Avi Stopper (16:06)

It strikes me there's this adoption idea in consumer products called "crossing the chasm," where you have a set of folks who are the early adopters and then the big difficulty is to, quote-unquote, cross the chasm and get to the mass market. Do you think that it is the normalization of this within a group of early adopters—and obviously those of us who are those early adopters have people in our orbit who are observing us, who occasionally ride with us—and that that is the way to kind of jump the track and get to those other folks? Which is to say we have a vibrant, robust group of folks in this sort of inner circle, the early adoption circle. And then as more and more people become part of that, then we start to be able to reach out to folks who are really in that kind of mythical "interested but concerned" category, right? We always talk about 60% of people say they want to ride their bikes more. Do they, or is that just a stated belief that isn't really substantiated by action?

Randy Neufeld (17:11)

We definitely need to gather the early adopters. One of the things about the crossing the chasm theory is that the reason that there's a chasm is because the mainstream needs for adoption are different than what the early adopters need for adoption. And a lot of the early adopters are people who like to be different, who like to innovate, who enjoy that kind of status. And the mainstream is more—they want reliability and normalcy and those kinds of things.

So I think my simple thing, and maybe this is kind of what we're trying to do with Good For Us, which is the organization that I'm trying to develop that we're still really trying to figure out, is: how do we gather those early adopters, but understand the needs of the mainstream and the interests of the mainstream so that the early adopters can meet their needs and attract the mainstream as well?

Avi Stopper (18:27)

As you're saying that, I'm thinking about myself in my early 20s, riding around Chicago downtown without any bike infrastructure. And I'm curious if you feel like for those folks who are in this almost countercultural movement, there is one thing which is just to be different. And I'd have to kind of search my soul a little bit to think about whether that's why I was doing it. But for folks more in the mainstream, is it ultimately that comfort thing and about a connected, high-comfort infrastructure environment?

Randy Neufeld (19:01)

Even the bold and fearless need some level of comfort in their lives. So it is a mix of wanting to feel comfortable, but there's also some things that are just practical questions. It's not really about comfort and safety. It's really about how do you live this different kind of life?

There's a saying I've heard: "Everybody's got a bike, but nobody's got a lock." And people just don't know how to take their bikes somewhere, secure it, how to carry their groceries home, how to ride with children, how to ride with other people, how to navigate and find the best and most comfortable routes, how to maintain their bike, how to have fenders so that they don't get crap on their clothes when the ground is wet, how to have lights so they can ride at night. There's this whole set of practical questions.

And it's important to remember that the car solves all of those immediately as soon as you buy it. You've got a trunk, you've got a key, you've got seats for other people. All those practical problems are essentially solved in the design of the car. And on the bicycle side, our product is much more primitive and not as well developed. As simple as it is, and as long as it's been around, it's still very primitive. Our industry is about performance and not about reliability and utility. And so there's all kinds of issues that are harder practical issues in addition to that safety and comfort.

Avi Stopper (21:12)

That's a great point. And it makes me think about the number of conversations that I've had with folks who haven't ridden their bike in a while. Why? Because they have a flat tire and it's in the garage. So there are—which is not to say cars can't get flat tires, but there is certainly a lot more infrastructure, a lot more infrastructure that is readily available. You call AAA and they come and they fix your car for you.

So I wanted to ask you because you have, probably more than anyone that I know at least, a truly longitudinal view of the narrative arc of bike advocacy in this country. And I'm curious to get your take on where you think we are at this particular moment. Are we making progress? Are we moving in the wrong direction in some cases? I would imagine that it's not a black or white type of situation, but I'm curious to hear—I know you're generally an optimist, if not a pragmatist as well—but I'm curious to hear where you see us being in this story of trying to make active transportation possible in America.

Randy Neufeld (22:26)

Let me give you a 15-minute answer or less. And I'm delighted to answer that question, but I'd like a little bit of your take on that question as well. We have gone from having essentially no specific bicycle infrastructure—bike lanes or parking—to trying some out, demonstrating that it can happen, really just trying to put anything in anywhere we could without really thinking that much about what would be the best, because the best wasn't possible. It was either something or nothing. And so we kind of put some stuff in.

And then a couple of things happened. One is we started to think about what might be better and eventually looked at what I call protected infrastructure—sort of all ages and abilities infrastructure. So who are we building things for?

Avi Stopper (23:40)

If I could just interrupt, could you give us some timestamps on some of these moments in the process?

Randy Neufeld (23:48)

So the timestamps—the first bike lanes in America were in the '70s.

Avi Stopper (23:48)

Decade timestamps might be adequate.

Avi Stopper (23:55)

Davis maybe?

Randy Neufeld (24:02)

Davis, yes, in Davis and Chicago. And so I know Chicago the best. Chicago did an experimental bike lane. It was a failure in 1972. Everything was ripped out in 1973. That time frame is interesting because the Dutch did their bike lane experiments in Delft in 1978. So we had a six-year head start on the Dutch, but obviously did not follow through in the same kind of ways. I think that comparison is really important, but we did some early bike lane stuff. There was a bike boom in like '73, and as soon as that bike boom was gone, those early experiments were gone.

There was a big movement called vehicular cycling, which maybe still exists some to this day, which is that bicyclists fare best when they act and are treated as drivers. "We don't need no stinking infrastructure" and "there needs to be a system." And it really wasn't until late '90s, early 2000s when people just got tired of that and scared of it.

One thing that most people don't talk about when they talk about this cycling infrastructure trajectory in the US is the growth of vehicle miles traveled during this time. And so when I was—50 years ago, 1975—I was 16 years old in Arizona. There was one-third of the amount of traffic on US roads. One-third. So you could take two out of every three cars gone. So I could ride my bike in Phoenix without bike lanes, but the traffic situation was very different. And I think that as traffic progressed, it really became necessary to have a separate system so that the perfect world was you had a bicycle system, a pedestrian system, and a car system. And where they met and intersected or overlapped, there was an organization to that. That's what the Dutch have. That's in some ways what we're trying to get, and we're still kind of awkward around that.

Avi Stopper (27:04)

I've never thought about it in those terms—that it is three systems that have to work basically in parallel, but they also intersect at various moments, and at those intersections we need to provide order.

Randy Neufeld (27:17)

And the fact that we don't have a complete bike system, or you could say the fact that the bike system and the road system are the same system, and you have these two separate users with different needs, different speeds, different spatial requirements, different abilities, sharing the same space—that's what causes all the animosity between those user groups. Sometimes even within a person when they're sometimes a bicyclist and sometimes a car driver.

I remember talking to someone—a woman who was drawing my blood—and she asked me about what I did and I told her about bike lanes and stuff and she clearly was agitated by the idea of bike lanes. And I described protected bike lanes to her and she immediately said, "I would pay more tax money to get some of those on California Avenue because then I wouldn't have to figure out where those bicyclists are going." She wanted them out of her way. And I think that the idea of a complete system for cyclists is very compelling to everyone. And we don't have one.

And we've been building it fairly rapidly since the late '90s, the early 2000s. And the protected infrastructure started happening in New York City around 2007. And then lots of other cities, some of them organized by the Green Lane Project, really accelerated the rollout of protected infrastructure from 2012 to 2015. And part of that project was figuring out a way that it could become normal, normal kind of practice.

Avi Stopper (29:38)

You were instrumental in the creation of the Green Lane Project. Describe what it was and what some of its successes and failures were.

Randy Neufeld (29:48)

So it was a four-year project. I was at SRAM at the time, SRAM bicycle component manufacturer. I was the director of the SRAM Cycling Fund, which was a $10 million advocacy fund, which we spent over about a six-year period. And the idea with the Green Lane Project was we saw some successes around separated infrastructure. What the Dutch called cycle tracks, what the folks in the planning world also called cycle tracks, because that's basically what the British called bike lanes—cycle tracks. And then the Dutch described their fietspads as cycle tracks, but fietspads weren't bike lanes. Fietspads were protected bike lanes.

And so we launched this project over four years. We had two cohorts of six cities. We did a competitive process, advertised for who was interested, who wanted to try this innovation—and they were already starting to do it. And then there were a number of things that were part of the project. But one of the things the project showed was that when cities did things together and had a little friendly competition and got to know other people, that they were able to innovate and change faster and better than when they were just on their own. And then if issues, backlash would come up, they would fold, but with sort of more of a spotlight on things and peers looking at what they were doing, you had more activity.

So we created a database, we did a bunch of communications and education around protected bike lanes, why you would have separation from traffic, what the reasons for separation were, what kinds of separation, how would you maintain them, how would you grow them? And that growth is a really important question because I know that you talk a lot about complete networks, and complete networks are super important. It's very hard to create a complete network and then plunk it down on a city or region or an area. And so how you grow them, how you prioritize, and then integrate with other transitional infrastructure that's out there as well.

The Green Lane Project was really trying to institutionalize this new tool in the toolbox. It was never saying everything should be a protected bike lane. Neighborhood greenways is another tool in the toolbox. Modal filters is another tool in the toolbox, which is diverters and ways that allow some modes to go through and others not. There's a lot of tools in the toolbox, but it was really NACTO's work—the National Association of City Transportation Officials, which is the progressive cities transportation organization—putting these things forward. One of the things we did was fund the first edition of the NACTO Bikeway Guide, which kind of created a new set of rules and regulation. We had a specific strategy to get federal funding acceptance of the new infrastructure. There was a lot of bureaucratic scheming going on. A lot of it wasn't perfect, but it was certainly a major step forward, taking something that was on the fringe and putting it in the mainstream. Probably one of the main things we did was early on we figured out what to call these things, and "protected bike lanes" was what we came up with.

Avi Stopper (34:41)

I didn't realize there was going to be so much etymology in this conversation, but this is great. So you promised a 15-minute answer to that question—you delivered. But when you initially responded, you were about to answer my question with a question of your own, which was what my take is on it. And I appreciate that, not because I want to hear myself talk, but because part of the reason, the rationale for having these conversations, is that we are trying to develop a theory for how cities can quickly accelerate the transition and transformation of networks to a point where bike transportation is a normal, everyday thing in cities across the country.

I would say that my response to your question to my question—my theory—is that basically cities have, we as advocates have, all of the tools that we need. I think we have a problematic approach to innovation. I think that at its essence, and you've mentioned this earlier in the conversation, what we're dealing with is one of the most fundamental human behaviors at this point in America: how do people go from one place to another? And I think that while we have this incredible toolkit to innovate, I think that our approach to innovation in the public right-of-way, in the public domain, is pretty antiquated, pretty retrograde relative to the way that innovation in startups, for example, is conducted.

And at its essence, what we are trying to do with Bike Streets is design, create, help animate a new path forward that uses the tools that exist already, applies them in an approach that is steeped in the philosophy, the ideas of modern innovation, which I should say is somewhat anachronistic in its own right because modern innovation is actually animated itself by the scientific method. And what I find fascinating in the way that I observe cities undertaking innovation projects is that they're not scientific.

There's plenty of data that's invoked, certainly. There is plenty of process that's invoked, but the way that we are trying to transform one of the most fundamental behaviors strikes me as not very scientific. I'm curious to hear your take on that.

Randy Neufeld (37:24)

Well, I think what's missing from your description, and so maybe I'll follow up with another question and then I'll answer my take on that, is sort of what the mechanism is—what are you actually doing? It's one thing to say you're innovating. It's another thing to say what kind of innovation, what you're actually doing. You could say your goal is leadership, but the real question is: what's the mechanism that you're proposing to use?

Avi Stopper (37:55)

Fair rejoinder. The mechanism that I'm proposing we use is basically the scientific method. And I would contend that we don't currently use the scientific method. We do this incredibly intensive upfront planning process that takes years, tons of time, tons of money, tons of taxpayer money. And three, four, five years later, in some cases, you have the solution.

Randy Neufeld (38:21)

Yeah, so just to be clear for listeners, you're talking about the scientific method. You're talking about trying something, evaluating it, and then trying the next thing or something else based on that evaluation. Is that right?

Avi Stopper (39:00)

Right. So yeah, in this context, first I'm sort of describing the current approach, what I think of as the status quo approach. We're not doing that. Cities spend years and tons of taxpayer money designing these facilities. Then the plan comes out as if we received the tablets from on high. And to be fair to hardworking civil servants, they are running the process that they have been taught.

But the problem is that in a complex innovation environment where you're trying to actually change really fundamental behavior, the ideas that we come up with, even though they may be informed by best practices, are at best hypotheses. And with that level of humility in mind, that this idea that I have for how I might get someone to ride a bike instead of drive a car on a particular trip—that is a really significant leap of faith. And so from a modern innovation standpoint and using the scientific method, that hypothesis is informed by the deep knowledge that planners have, that engineers have. But ultimately we don't know if it's going to work until we get it out into the built environment.

And then this raises the question of how we think about actually testing things. So we create a hypothesis with a scientific method, we test it, we observe it. We observe it quantitatively and qualitatively. This is how modern products are developed—through quantitative evaluation and also through the qualitative discussions that people have with customers. And then we look at what's working and what's not. We say there are no sacred cows in this and we iterate, create our new hypothesis, and we test the next version.

Now this seems like it might be impractical in the built environment because what we're talking about is concrete and really expensive projects, but tactical urbanism has provided—when I say earlier that we have the tools to do this—tactical urbanism has provided us with the toolkit to accomplish this. And look no further than what Janette Sadik-Khan did in New York City with Times Square. They literally redesigned the most complex intersection in America using a bunch of orange barrels, right?

I don't understand—that to me is science. I don't understand, and I'm curious to hear your take, why that has not become the standard operating procedure. We're 20 years out from that Times Square project. Why is it that we still do what in software development and product development is described as a waterfall approach—this incredibly protracted step-by-step planning process that eventually produces the golden solution?

I don't understand, and I see that golden solution failing. So what I don't understand is why what Janette Sadik-Khan, who is widely considered the luminary in this field, why that has not been adopted and embraced broadly. And yes, there are some demonstration projects here and there, but it is a far cry from making the standard procedure to be one in which we use demonstration projects in the scientific method.

I'm curious to hear your take and please push back because I'm trying to fundamentally understand this tension that I observe everywhere.

Randy Neufeld (42:19)

Yeah, no, I think you're right. I think, first of all, your enthusiasm for demonstration is actually taking hold somewhat. There's an organization in Texas called Better Block, which is really sort of one of the main organizations of tactical urbanism. They've been in operation for about a decade or so. And it's mostly around neighborhood street development, not so much bikeway networks or road networks. But People for Bikes did a book on quick builds. So the term that's being used in engineering planning is "quick builds." If you read the NACTO literature, I think it's pretty much what you're describing, which is being able to build things quickly and then be able to adjust, change, and sort of schedule the next quick build based upon what the experience and the evaluation of that facility is. And so...

Avi Stopper (43:44)

Do you see that iteration, that iterative component actually happening? I'm sort of... interesting.

Randy Neufeld (43:49)

It's definitely happening here in Chicago.

Avi Stopper (43:52)

But what I fail to see in the quick build approach—I hear people talk about quick builds—I don't see is the scientific component of a bunch of people out there counting what's going on, observing what's going on. And then taking the stuff out, coming up with a new engineering plan and coming back and fixing it based on both quantitative observation and the qualitative observations that they have from watching people interact with it and hearing from neighbors. Am I missing something? Are you seeing that as...

Randy Neufeld (44:24)

I am seeing that, and I think it's not pervasive, but certainly in the leading NACTO cities, the leading progressive large cities, there's a great deal of that. The one disconnect that I think I would point out and that has to do with exactly how does the status quo work? And if I were a member of the Institute of Transportation Engineers and I was a totally car-oriented person, I would cuss and scream about that the scientific method was not being used adequately in the transportation process. And everything you're talking about in terms of innovation and experimentation and change in the bike process—I want to see that in the highway design process. I want to see that in these other processes.

But it is difficult to insert it because the way that the transportation system evolves is very definitely this process. And this process has not served us well for many reasons. And it's not just bikes, but sort of the whole development of transportation. And that is why one of the most brilliant strategies that we've had since the beginning is a concept that started in 2000 that was originally called "routine accommodation" and eventually became "complete streets." And the idea of complete streets is that all users are considered in all phases of project design, implementation, evaluation, etc., so that you're going from just one user being considered.

The opportunity for the science that you're talking about is within 5% of projects. Because 95% of the transportation implementation machine is about maintaining and renewing what we've already got—fixing the potholes, restriping the crosswalks, doing all that kind of thing. We are not maintaining our infrastructure properly. The change of that infrastructure, the 5%, is really the opportunity for the science. And the big problem that we have is really not that the bike stuff isn't being done innovatively. It's that the overall process is geared towards the hegemony of the driving culture.

And you build new roads to increase capacity because "the way to make congestion go away is to add new capacity." And that ignores the latent demand. And you never get around to a modal shift or cultural shift. And so I think that's the big problem. I think the idea of innovating and moving quickly is a good one. The trick is to find the place within the process where you can do that. I think you have allies for that idea. They may let you know a little bit more about what their constraints are. It's a little bit different to try things when you're in charge of everything than when it has to go through years of community involvement process and these kinds of things. It's a trickier process, but there's no question that we're currently missing innovation opportunities. I think some of that innovation needs to occur around, let's say, the repaving process. So when repaving happens, are there things that we can do cheaply to make it better?

The one thing about your thoughts is that it is around the issue of bringing this bicycle network that currently is fragmented. What are faster, better, smarter ways of making it happen? Sort of the question before that is really: what's the opportunity for that? Because you describe the older bike planning process, which you kind of put a plan together. And usually there was no implementation phase of that plan. Usually it was just a plan and then you tried to implement it within the normal transportation process. And that has been a failure. And I think we want to look at how can we create these opportunities for doing things when those resources and agency time are scarce.

Avi Stopper (50:52)

I think you're circling around something that I have been thinking increasingly is that at its essence, what we're talking about is an organizational change management process within departments of transportation. And what I will say optimistically is that you referenced, of course, the NACTO standards, even the ideas that vehicular cycling produced, which are essentially that cyclists have a place in the right-of-way, that the right-of-way is a place that cyclists can use, even if the whole approach to cycling there is impractical and clearly empirically not successful—is that there is a precedent, there are precedents for organizational and philosophical changes within departments of transportation, and that's good news. We could go on and on with this and I think we should.

Randy Neufeld (51:46)

We could and we should, yeah, but at another time maybe. Yes.

Avi Stopper (51:51)

But I do want to finish by asking you a little bit about Good For Us. Before we started recording here, you mentioned that you're writing the, quote-unquote, "Good For Us manifesto." What is that all about?

Randy Neufeld (51:55)

As I said earlier, I think that activating—active mobility, all the ways we move our body within the public right-of-way—is super important to people being happy and healthy, to thriving in the modern world. And I'm really looking for ways... I would say that Good For Us is kind of a work in progress, but fundamentally, I want to gather organized people who are interested in activating more and driving less and pull us together in an organized way, help each other to thrive in that space, particularly looking at those human empowerment factors—the things that we can control: knowledge and culture and community, looking at those factors, pull those things together. So we create this alternative home team.

That when we build new infrastructure, people just aren't trying to use that infrastructure within the current driving paradigm. But there's a group of folks that will help them and that they can be part of—they might even identify with. It's really trying to create this alternative paradigm. I don't want to create a new organization in that we have plenty of organizations already, but I'm interested in some kind of union of people and businesses and agencies that operates within the current structures, but addresses that missing mutual aid issue.

Avi Stopper (54:04)

To be continued, Randy. Thank you so much for your time, your insights, and let's talk again soon.