Avi Stopper chats with Mike Lydon, author of "Tactical Urbanism" and one of the 100 most influential urbanists of all time alongside, according to Planetizen.

We go deep on tactical urbanism, where’s it’s worked and why it hasn’t become the dominant paradigm in planning. We dive into the challenges cities face implementing this approach from leadership turnover to fatigue, and how a new generation of transportation planners is embracing the promise and experimental spirit of tactical urbanism.

Avi Stopper (00:00)

Welcome to Bike Networks Now. I'm Avi Stopper, the founder of Bike Streets. Through a series of conversations with leaders in bike transportation and beyond, 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 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 that answer—a modern approach to innovation—is the topic of a book we're writing on how cities can make bike transportation possible today.

Avi Stopper (00:51)

I have been really looking forward to this conversation with Mike Lydon, a planner and principal at Street Plans and the author of one of my favorite books, "Tactical Urbanism." In 2018, Mike was named as one of the top 100 most influential urbanists of all time. Other names on that list include Jane Jacobs, Rachel Carson, Janette Sadik-Khan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Daniel Burnham—pretty rarefied air.

In my last conversation with Randy Neufeld, I made the argument that tactical urbanism is the tool that can make innovation in the right-of-way scientific, and that a scientific approach is more likely to produce the outcomes we seek. The status quo planning process lacks empiricism. We theorize, we plan, then we build, and then we walk away. This is a disastrous approach to innovation. If you've tried to build things that people use—products of all sorts—it's no surprise that the status quo approach to building bike infrastructure produces very limited results.

So what better way to explore the possibilities of tactical urbanism and why it hasn't become the standard than with the guy who actually literally wrote the book on it? Mike Lydon, thanks for joining me. How was that intro? And if you disagree, by all means, let's get into it.

Mike Lydon (02:13)

No, thank you. It's a really nice intro. I don't necessarily disagree, but it feels silly to hear your name next to the people that you listed—heroes of all ours, right?

Avi Stopper (02:21)

That's a pretty awesome list. Well done, bravo sir. So let's just start with a very high-level question: What is a story that to you exemplifies tactical urbanism as you understand it?

Mike Lydon (02:37)

One story. Wow. Okay. First thing that comes to mind—I think there's two types, right? There's sort of the unsanctioned, very DIY bottom-up. And then there's the more, let's say, professionalized tactical urbanism that we engage in a lot these days.

Avi Stopper (02:55)

Let's go with the latter. We're thinking about government innovation here.

Mike Lydon (03:04)

During the pandemic, New York City introduces Open Streets as a program. The initial first brush of this program—it was just these metal barricades put in the street that said you can still drive here, you just got to get out of your car and then move the thing, drive in the block, and then put it back, ideally, right? And that really didn't prove to be super successful initially, particularly I think in business districts in New York City. We have a lot of business improvement districts where there's a lot of capacity and care for the public realm.

So the idea—the root cause of it and like how cheap that was and how easy it was to basically get an open street—was actually government innovation, and it had a lot of possibility and power behind it. But it needed community groups. It needed business improvement districts and businesses to kind of really start to take ownership of it to evolve it. And that's what happened. And I'm thinking of an example in the Flatiron District where we got engaged to help them deliver on two car-free blocks on Broadway between 25th and 27th Street. So it's just north of Madison Square Park if you can envision it.

And you know, very cheap project. We just painted both blocks blue and then we took a detail in stencil form—like large stencil form—off of the Flatiron building itself and put it onto the asphalt and painted that white, and that was it. And then the BID brought in pretty simple furniture. In addition, these businesses had already started building these sheds out into the street, started serving food out in the street, and it went from being a corridor that prior to March of that year was just throughput for vehicles—traffic striping everywhere, just not a very nice place to walk—to all of it being quiet, car-free, and full of outdoor dining, full of outdoor conversations, people working outside, of course at the time, with the pandemic.

So it was an incredible change that was very inexpensive that no one had really been asking for really. No one was organized around this idea of either Open Street specifically prior to the pandemic in that form, or even more specifically in that district on those two blocks. But the restaurant cluster kind of made it obvious that the BID could help take it to the next level, and they did.

And so then you fast forward a couple of years, and the entire stretch from the plazas in Flatiron and Madison Square Park all the way up to Herald Square—so we're talking about almost 10 blocks—got completely transformed with an interim material set that's very common here in New York City. It's not permanent infrastructure, it's not curbing concrete and permanent street trees—it's kind of making do with the resources that they had, including making those two blocks that were piloted during the depth of the pandemic more permanent. And it was just an unbelievable success for the district.

And now driving is super minimized on that corridor and you've got these two car-free blocks and it now links Herald Square all the way down to Union Square as basically one pedestrian-dominated corridor as it always should have been. And so the space inversion has happened. We now have the majority of space for the majority of users, which are people walking and cycling.

And last point—I know this is a long story but you asked—the last point I would make is during the original couple-month-long pilot, the BID started to notice that a lot of the cycling was going contraflow, was going northbound. Prior to the pandemic, there was a southbound bike lane. And because all this contraflow activity started to happen—because when you change the city, you change the patterns of people's daily lives—and so those plazas made it all more attractive because it stopped a lot of free-flowing traffic on Broadway, diverted to other avenues. So it was a lot less risky to bike northbound. It was faster.

So all of a sudden you have this cycling traffic at 20, 25% of the volumes, and in the redesigned DOT version of this transformation on Broadway, they put in a two-way bike lane, which is heavily used, right? So if you just designed that all at once out of a box as a designer, you probably never would have put in a two-way bike lane. But then that was like this component that emerged that was so obvious to do once the behavior had changed on the street.

So I think to me, that's one of the best ways of—we talk about short-term action, long-term change—how you change a city rapidly and what happens, what can occur, what the potential of our cities are when you take that first initial step.

Avi Stopper (07:55)

It's a brilliant example. Thank you for starting there. And one of my all-time favorite stories in Denver was that, again, during the pandemic, Denver did what they called Shared Streets, which sound quite similar, and using little more than Type III barricades, they transformed these residential corridors into incredible havens for people walking, pushing strollers, riding bikes. It was remarkable. And through that, I learned the power of a Type III barricade. It's remarkable.

So I wanted to just follow up on that. There were two interesting words that you used in there. You used "improvement" and you said "evolution." And it seems to me that those are just implicit components of a tactical urbanist approach. And in my intro, I said that the status quo approach is about theorizing, planning, building, and then typically walking away. We dust off our hands, we're done, and we walk away and that's it. Do you accept that? Do you see that as the dominant approach to development, or do you see that more and more projects are being done in this incrementalist, evolutionary type of approach that you described?

Mike Lydon (09:07)

I mean, certainly both, but mostly that is the conventional planning process, the conventional design process that cities have deployed for several generations. But I would say in the last 10 years, and particularly in the last four or five, you've seen a rapid adoption of these principles, even if you aren't calling it tactical urbanism, which is fine. We say that at the end of our book. We say, don't care what you call it, as long as the spirit of the methodology is there and you're intending to create these lasting changes, coming at it from a completely different angle, which is test before you invest. Just get a prototype out there because you learn so much.

There's this Jaime Lerner quote. Jaime Lerner used to be the mayor of Curitiba, Brazil. And basically, as I understand it, invented bus rapid transit. Like, what do you do? We need to move millions of people, but you don't have money to build a subway. You get tactical. You make the bus the subway, effectively, right? It was such a hack on the city. He has this great quote in his book, "Urban Acupuncture," about—you can't control every variable in a city. It's silly. Don't even try. You can't control all inputs, all outcomes, and so it's much better, I think, to take these first initial steps to try things out and learn from them and not overcommit, because then you really learn what the need is through both qualitative and quantitative evaluation. And to me, that's a very powerful framework in how we think about changing cities.

Avi Stopper (10:45)

I think I often observe what I would consider kind of a perversion of tactical urbanism, which is the use of ephemeral materials—things like flex posts and paint. And then there is no follow-through on the actual iterative type of approach that you're describing. Do you observe that? Do you consider—where is—which is to say that in some cases I observe cities saying we are doing this in a modern innovation type of approach. We are doing tactical urbanism or whatever term they use, but actually when push comes to shove, they're not ultimately coming back and observing. I rarely see planners sitting out in folding chairs, watching how people are engaging with something that they just built. Do you see that to be the case?

Mike Lydon (11:34)

Yeah, it's pretty commonplace. I mean, they get the initial project kit and the design and the ground with lightweight materials bit of this, but the evaluate and iterate part and also tying that directly to a process that communicates and can pipeline these projects to become permanent when they're mostly successful, right? That is still the biggest missing piece of this across the whole globe—is that very few cities can tell you that they have a process to go from the temporary or interim into the permanent. It does happen with frequency. It's not like anyone's put a process around that that can be replicated and scaled for any particular place that I know of, where you can say this goes in today, we know if it's successful in three years' time, we've already lined up the budget to follow through on this, and just kind of keep that cycle moving in a predictable manner.

And that's because I think a lot of funding and budgets and stuff like that is very much tied to politics and the whims of the day. And so it's hard for them—it's hard for city leaders and city agencies to commit because they don't know themselves what next year is going to bring necessarily, even if the capital plan says this, that's not always the case.

Avi Stopper (12:51)

The ideas that you outline in "Tactical Urbanism" are pretty revolutionary, pretty different from the status quo. I'm curious how you personally arrived at this transformation. I know it had something to do with your time in Miami, but I'm curious to hear you describe the narrative. And was there an epiphany type of moment, or was it a gradual series of observations that led to a changing set of views on how projects that you were working on needed to be developed?

Mike Lydon (13:21)

I think it was a little bit of both. You know, while in Miami, I was working on some very ambitious projects for a great planning firm, including like taking the zoning code of Miami and throwing it into the garbage bin and starting over. Denver did something actually very similar a few years later. Very hard work politically. And so I was able to see like this very complex, slow-moving beast from the inside. And it was absolutely worth sticking with as a city initiative from city leaders.

But when you went to each of the public meetings, you kind of saw the same faces, the same issues and tensions kept arising, and people were arguing over things that weren't real, that hadn't really been built, right? They're like worried about something like a four-story building next to their two-story home. They're worried about that, but like they're not living next to that kind of thing. So do they really know that it's not that bad to live next to a four-story home? You know? So these arguments were just kind of out there in the ether. It was all politics. It was all bullshit, honestly.

And so being one who was then reading a lot of blogs at the time—remember that was very popular, podcasts were another thing, but like the blog and Streetfilms, quite honestly. Clarence Eckerson's early work with Streetfilms documenting different things around the world and just like reading about citizen things that were starting to happen, like innovative things that inspired me. I was getting led to this idea drip by drip.

And then it was really being in the streets of downtown Miami for the first time when we held our own open streets, ciclovía-style, Bogotá-styled event there where thousands of people are in the streets. They're walking, they're cycling, they're jogging, they're socializing, they're happy. And it costs like next to nothing. You know, like the experience—we got people the experience of this. Then we can build a constituency once they've had the experience, whether that's a curb extension on a corner and they realize it's safer now, or it's three miles of car-free streets where they've gone and had a great day with their kids, and they see the city in a completely different way and they get a taste of it.

So that was a combination of things and I just kept finding these examples of like, well this thing started with guerrilla action, this started like a really innovative mayor and they started cheap and they started cheerful and then it became permanent. Like aha, there's got to be a way to describe this. You know, there's got to be some sort of word for it. And that's like where it all sort of germinated.

And to end the story, it was a blog post from a landscape architect here in New York who had coined or described the work on Broadway—this initial deployment of the lawn chairs to pedestrianize it. He just didn't call it tactical urbanism. He just used the word "tactical." And I read that blog post and I was like, that's it. That's the word. I looked up the definition in the dictionary and I thought about, okay, this is urbanism, and just put the two together. So that's how it happened.

Avi Stopper (16:18)

Thank you for providing the perfect segue to my next question, which is you in the book define "tactical," and I think that one of the more interesting, kind of surprising themes to me that is a current throughout the book is this comparing and contrasting big versus small. And in a nutshell you define tactical as small. Talk a little bit about that distinction between small and big. What do you see as small and what do you see as big, and why is small preferable to big?

Mike Lydon (16:49)

Small is nimble, small involves a lot more inputs, which is maybe counterintuitive to the idea of big. Big is slow, big is expensive, big is risky politically, and small isn't. And so that was, again, coming up against these political scenarios or just the politics of any given city, it's so difficult to break through that. And people's opinions and thoughts on their own neighborhoods and their own city get formed and then entrenched and it becomes like hard battles over issues that I really wish weren't hard battles, but they are.

And so how do you break through that? How do you get through the logjam and say a better world is possible? Again, it was the small things you can do, the quick things you can do, things you can sneak in in the middle of the night, quite literally, to demonstrate that these things are very possible and that people really appreciate them. And I'm a very strong believer that there's a vast, silent majority who really appreciate and will not fight back against livability improvements as we see them in terms of safer streets and public spaces and denser cities and walkability. I think there's an inherent thirst for that all over this country that doesn't get tapped into effectively, and tactical urbanism can help.

Avi Stopper (18:11)

Those are not the people who are showing up at public meetings. One thing that, apropos, I saw and observed during the Denver Shared Streets program that really transformed my thinking was the way in which neighbors loved them and revered them and wanted them made permanent. And one can only imagine the status quo approach. We've all been there on many occasions where if you were to go in and say, "Hey, we're basically going to cut through traffic entirely on this street and we're going to put a bunch of barricades in the middle," it would create a conflagration.

And so the incredible thing about the tool that you have created with tactical urbanism, I think, is the ability to create alignment between people who might at times be in conflict over theoretical future states that are hard to imagine. And what's so powerful is that there is the promise of ephemerality baked into that, which is to say it's going to be gone in the next couple of days. We just want to see how it works and what you think about it and tell us what you like and what you don't like.

And when the city of Denver surveyed people on these corridors after they took out the Type III barricades—by the way, that was a program that was supposed to last two months, but people loved it so much it lasted two years—when they finally took it out, they surveyed folks and more than 90% of people on the corridors said that they loved them and wanted them to be made permanent. I defy you to find anything that gets 90-plus percent support. It's pretty astonishing.

Back to the question of big versus small, probably the most famous—and correct me if you think I'm wrong—most famous example of tactical urbanism we've already referenced is the way that the New York City Department of Transportation redesigned Times Square using orange barrels and folding chairs. And I think of Times Square as probably the most important or significant intersection in America. And it's interesting to think about that in the context of big versus small. I think you would probably argue that that is small, and yet it seems big. There's some paradox in there. Help me think about how you would define that as small.

Mike Lydon (20:24)

Okay, so it was a—let's call it massive idea pitched in 1969 to pedestrianize Broadway from Times Square to Union Square, right? Where it interrupts the grid as it goes and creates traffic snarls. And so it's a massive corridor. You understand why it was not—40 years of lobbying or advocacy or organizing capacity and energy spent to pedestrianize that corridor. You had to go small to go big. There's just no way to do that politically. Like you would have been—conflagrations, to use your word, left and right. Rich, entitled landowners and cranky residents and on down the line, you just never get that over the hill to completion politically.

So small was lawn chairs in the intersection for a weekend. That's like $12 a chair or something, whatever it was. And it was an accident because the furniture they actually ordered didn't arrive in time. I don't know if you know that part of the story, but they just basically went themselves to nearby hardware stores in the city and said, let's grab their chairs and their chairs and their chairs.

And so I think it was the response and the enthusiasm of the public—I said, silent majority. It was so miserable. It's still miserable to be there, quite frankly, but it's so much less miserable than it was. But it was the joy of seeing a cheap lawn chair in the middle of the street, which is normally filled with honking yellow cabs and minimal space for people and just the aesthetic of that with these billboards and the lights and the massive big buildings. And you've got this $10 chair that's revolutionized this place. Put the square back in the square. Small. That's as small and cheap as you can get.

But they were smart because the Department of Transportation didn't just like take them away and say, okay, that was a fun experiment. That's what we call a demonstration. It's good for engaging people and proving people liked it, but you have to really, to have I think better success—to get back to your idea of being a little more scientific about this stuff—you have to evaluate over longer periods of time, four seasons, whatever it may be, different dynamics on how things actually perform. And so they just painted the street after that. It was like a phase two. And that held the space until they were able to get the capital project constructed like four years later.

So, you know, lawn chairs to permanent infrastructure in five years is about as fast as you can do it in a complex urban environment like that in America. Like sometimes it goes a little faster, but that's about as fast as you can go. So you had to work small to go big. And then that was like this, you know, urban acupuncture—that was like the pinprick. And then now it's radiated all the way down the majority of Broadway. So that original 1969 vision is much closer to reality now than it ever could have been prior to that intervention with the lawn chairs. Brilliant stuff.

Avi Stopper (23:31)

It's an incredible story and it pains me to say that I certainly observe the opposite happening all over the place right now. And one particularly germane or timely such project in Denver is on one of the streets that's on the high injury network. It's called Alameda Avenue and it's basically been a five-year planning process to take a four-lane road down to a three-lane road with left turns made more easy than they have been historically. And at the 11th hour, there was a somewhat shocking turn of events where a local billionaire opposed to the project basically called in a favor and all of a sudden the skids are being thrown on that project.

And say what you will about the way that the brakes had been thrown on it. I'm curious though, and of course I should just note that in the opposition to this project are a substantial number of claims that can't be substantiated without actual observation. I know that the consultants ran all the models and did all this predicting and projecting what's going to happen, but at its essence, we haven't really seen what this project is going to do. It's basically a half-mile corridor or so. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on whether that type of project, indeed whether all types of projects should get this kind of ephemeral treatment to observe and demonstrate empirically whether the outcomes that we are being told in the normal planning process and the outcomes that we are being told by those who are pushing back on it—what is the actual reality? And it seems to me that the only way to understand it is to observe the actual reality of what it's going to be.

Mike Lydon (25:26)

Yeah, I obviously subscribe to that 100%. I mean, I think just a lot of our work is exactly that street typology—going either five to three or four to three. And so when we started a lot of our work, it was very much like intersection, street corner, parking space, extra small spaces. But when you get more linear on those corridors—a half mile is a really great scale for transformation. We do a lot of projects that are right around that distance. And the traffic evaporation, the increase in cycling, the safety gains—it becomes pretty real pretty fast once those pilot projects are in the ground.

And that's not to say they don't get watered down or reversed after the fact. We've got plenty of war stories where the data, the science is showing you this is a home run. But you could have a changing city council as happens, right? And the politics could flip or people might run against the project and a number of voters decide that, you know what, let's get this project out and we'll vote for representatives who are saying that they'll do that. And you still get a lot of that happening. So it's not a perfect methodology in the sense that—I always tell people it goes both ways, easy in and easy out to a degree. You're not getting a lot of those projects happening necessarily because they're a bit of a—they're technically fairly straightforward, but they require a little bit more altering of the roadway, right? There's some signal issues you have to think about. Removing striping, adding striping, how you do that effectively—do you grind it out? Do you cover it up with black paint or tape or gray paint or tape?

There's these steps like to make that kind of project a little bit more complex than something like an intersection-based project. And so I think that's why some cities don't take them on because even though they know it's not expensive like a permanent project, there's also not a lot of slush money around to allow that kind of project to happen at that scale. So, you know, yeah.

Avi Stopper (27:41)

It's a dynamic environment for sure. There are political considerations, there are practical considerations. I'm curious to hear—where this is 2025, 2026, when we're having this conversation, it's 10 years since you wrote the book, it's more than 15 years since Times Square had the treatment that we just discussed. Setting aside those political—it's hard to control for those variables to be fair—but setting aside for a moment the political considerations and some of the practical challenges. I'm just curious to hear your take on why this set of ideas has not been broadly adopted and why it just is not the status quo, the expectation on every project.

And just to highlight a couple of the benefits—what we have just described is a scenario in which you can build alignment and political consensus across a large swath of people if indeed the outcomes are what we project them to be. So why do you find—and I think that this is, we're not really talking about this specific to bike infrastructure, which is where I'm most interested in this application, but broadly speaking—I'm curious if you think there are significant cultural challenges, organizational change management types of processes. Why is it that every department of transportation has not felt completely unbridled by this toolkit? Why do they not feel like this is the way for them to create the vision of the future that they see? And it's not like we're absent proof points. Literally Times Square was redesigned this way.

Mike Lydon (29:17)

Yeah, that's a great question. I don't think I have all the answers to that one for sure. But I think it's a number of things. Before I get into those, I'll just share—it is night and day for us where we were 10 years ago when we were writing the book. I think the take-up rate of tactical urbanism or quick-build projects, however you want to call them, is incredible across the industry. You know, the federal Safe Streets and Roads for All grant program, $5 billion of which 60% has to go into planning—within those planning dollars, you can do demonstration and quick-build projects. They funded it, right? Like they funded it at a massive scale. We're seeing lots of communities doing that. So I think it is changing, but it is slow, right? You would think that there's enough of these examples that there'd be a lot still more of it happening at scale.

I think there's a couple things. One is when you do one, it takes a lot of energy, takes a lot of capacity. There's sort of like a burnout risk to it at the municipal level, I think, where you get these great people who are passionate about all the work and they go through one of these and they've dropped everything for six months and they have all these other demands on their time and the resources of the city, and it's hard for them to imagine getting back on the treadmill even if they've had like a massive success. And so that's why I don't think you've seen in some ways a lot of the one-offs become two, three, four, and five-offs. Again, it is happening—it's happening in places—but usually when there's a higher capacity staff with more people and more resources to keep replicating it. So in the smaller communities, it's challenging.

There's details like union contracts to deal with. So for example, we work in a city often and been doing tactical projects there for years where just until this past year, their public works staff were not allowed to technically bolt anything into the ground. So every project we did, we had to epoxy any of these vertical elements. And so the first snowplow that comes by or the first car that hits it at any speed—gone, right? And it created like a maintenance headache. So while they kept at it to their credit, there was this one issue that they couldn't get solved. It took years to solve it. And now they finally can bolt things in.

There's all these factors. And it's different in every single city—look what the factors are. And finally, to achieve the vision, you have to have the vision. And generationally, I'm seeing this turnover where like a lot of my clients now are like my age, even younger, you know, in their 30s and 40s. And they kind of grew up on Streetfilms. So they came into this with an orientation that was very different than transportation planners or engineers, planners from who are now entering their retirement years. So that leadership turnover is actually helping a lot, but that's taken a generation of people who said yes or no to greenlight a lot of these projects and these approaches—for them to sunset their career and have new people, new ideas, and new approaches come in and take leadership reins. So that is—and that's happening, but again, that's a city by city, department by department, position by position evolution that takes time.

Avi Stopper (32:53)

One of the things that I'm really curious about is the way that you talk about DIY projects. There are these governmental projects and then there are the DIY projects. And I'm curious to hear what advice you have for folks who are concerned about the risks and the legality of changing the public right-of-way. And just as a case in point, I vividly remember a bike ride I went on with the Department of Transportation Infrastructure Executive Director, and he admonished me very, very explicitly: do not do the things that you are saying you're going to do. So what's your advice to people who are thinking about putting up some cones near a school where they're a crossing guard or maybe changing the geometry of the intersection near their house where there's a lot of cut-through traffic?

Mike Lydon (33:46)

Yeah, there are very clear risks to that. I mean, I think the biggest risk and outcome that I've seen is, you know, there's been a few folks who've been arrested for—typically it's crosswalks. That's the thing that, the most basic of thing gets to be the most, you know, risky for activists. And so you have to be aware that that could be the outcome. That said, I think it's pretty rare that that's the outcome.

And so I think one of the things you should be doing is making sure you've exhausted a lot of the other options—showing up to the meetings if you have the time, definitely organizing your neighbors or immediate constituents around where you might be seeking to make a change. Documenting that, like, "Hey, I sent four emails to my counselor, called the DOT nine times, sent you guys videos of this child almost being hit on their way to school." Whatever it is, be able to document all of that before you do the overnight guerrilla activity, let's say, is really important. Because then there's a paper trail, then there's a history of this, there's a justification that plays out in the media with that storyline.

And I think if you can get people organized around at least that concept of wanting to see the change happen, then you've got people in your community that are organized, and that's powerful. That then can filter up to city councilors and whatnot and start to blunt some of the knee-jerk reactions from legal departments.

Avi Stopper (35:08)

How about this one? Just try this on for size. I've spent five years trying to get the city of Denver to let me put eight traffic cones at one residential intersection for two hours. All of the major mayoral candidates supported this in their campaigns, as did a number of folks on city council, and it has still not happened. And obviously one could go out and place said cones at an intersection. I have been—my advocacy has really been oriented around trying to help the city develop this muscle, right? And the belief, the self-belief that this is something that they can do and the conviction that this is indeed a hugely beneficial tool in the toolkit that could transform everything. And so my theory has been, and this is getting back to big versus small, this is the most ridiculously absurdly small thing one would think. And yet it has been—I haven't been able to get it done.

Mike Lydon (36:17)

Yeah, it's so frustrating. We've worked with a number of communities where they've actually put in policy and process to allow citizens to do the work, at least to test these ideas. And that's one of my biggest things I talk about in any lecture or presentation format, even like this, is there's this us versus them mentality of like city and citizen and the leaders in the cities and the agencies, the city councils, the mayors, et cetera, who understand it's "we" that can get this stuff done. Like how do we tap the energy and direct the energy and the creativity and passion of our citizens to do what is inherently in all of our policies, all of our plans we talk about on the campaign trail—safer streets.

There's this untapped resource of passion that yes can be exhausted with volunteerism and whatnot over time, but I think that's also a resource that can replenish itself where if you allow people to go out and do these basic, basic things that aren't technically challenging—it is not technically difficult to measure out and paint a crosswalk. Any eighth grader can do that on paper, right? It's just allowing it to happen. And so there are cities who've done some of that work where they just said, "Fine, just go do it yourself and we'll monitor it," right? "And let us know how it goes."

Or I think cities should be creating whole resource kits for communities and like, "Sure you have to tell the city, look it's this intersection," and they'll take a basic look at it from like a life safety perspective. If it passes the smell test, you know, or whatever, great, go, green light. And then the crosswalk emerges and it's there for the next several years and like check—that one's done. So I think cities could really expand their capacity to expand their imagination to allow people to help that want to help.

Avi Stopper (38:07)

Is there a city that you see as the shining light on this?

Mike Lydon (38:11)

Well, for a long time, I would say Burlington, Vermont, which is a community we worked in that first allowed this to happen, to my knowledge. But it seems to ebb and flow. I did work there for a number of years. I don't stay up on every news headline and deployment of our toolkits and all that. It's not possible. But for years, they were putting these pieces all into place. They sort of realized they were a small city with small staff with a little bit of advocates and a lot of passion, that if they could put in the demonstration activities to allow some of the citizens and advocates to kind of bring the political will to the table, it helps city staff.

So there's a demonstration project policy and then we worked on their quick-build program which then can take more like interim designs or pilots forward where like citizen skill stops. That's where they can use their skills on that instead. And they implemented a number of projects that way. They were in this bike and ped master plan we worked on, right? And those were all setups for more capital investments. It's a bunch of road diets that we put in the plan all done with just striping and whatnot. You can see that arc and that trajectory.

But again, department heads leave, city councils change, mayors change, the executive director and the staff at the local advocacy group change, and the focus changed. And so to keep something like that moving for a decade-plus is really challenging work for everybody, right? That's just the ebb and flow. So some things rise up for a few years, some things rise down. It can be tricky, but I'd say overall—answer your question now—it's like Jersey City has been one of the best at this, and nothing is written down. There is no policy or guidance. It's been internalized. It is practice. If you want to go create a bike lane for a day, it happens. It's an amazing, amazing just set of circumstances that came about. And it's where I'd point people to now.

Avi Stopper (40:18)

One of the things that I observe often in the right-of-way, and I'm curious to see if you think it—if you see it this way—is people encounter construction when they're driving every day. And I see construction basically as a form of tactical urbanism. And one of the things in my own work that I have tried to do is reframe construction as temporary conditions, as a demonstration project. Right now they're building a BRT system on the main US highway through the center of Denver—Colfax Avenue. And what is normally a four-lane road, high speed, high injury network certainly, is now a two-lane road and just dramatically more chill, radically more chill even. Do you think about, and do you know of any discussion about trying to normalize tactical urbanism by likening it to construction and saying, you know, "City, you which feel that tactical urbanism is so outside of your sphere of wherewithal, you're actually doing this every single day all over the city streets"?

Mike Lydon (41:29)

Yeah, it's an amazing, amazing point. Part of the language of our materials, the reason we went so neon and cone-heavy in those early days was because it read like construction projects. So therefore, someone must be working on this who's allowed to work on this, you know? Right? Like, there was a real reason for that.

Avi Stopper (41:49)

You just claim the authority and then everyone goes along with it, right?

Mike Lydon (41:56)

I mean, Jason Roberts has the best quote on this ever from the Better Block founder. He said, "Just put on a yellow vest and you can do anything." Right? But no, I think it's—what's the missing piece of this is no one's actually paying attention and doing the evaluation on that four-to-two-lane conversion. The traffic has already evaporated, right? To a degree. Like people have found other ways to get around at other times, other modes. Like Denver has not come to a standstill, right? I'm assuming on this project. So there's so much—like there's a lesson in that.

But I think on the flip side, business owners, residents on those corridors—during that construction, it's loud, noisy, hard to get to my property, whatever it may be. There's real constraints and challenges to that kind of stuff, but particularly when you're talking about a linear big thing like a BRT versus a couple intersections or a quarter mile of street. I always felt like we should be doing a lot more analysis, and cities should be doing a lot more analysis of these conditions, and having plan B on the shelf ready to go so that they could say, "Actually, we're not going to put it back. We're not putting it back to four lanes. We're going to keep it like this in perpetuity because it seems to be working."

There's not enough of that sort of nimbleness, I think, built into the run-of-the-mill construction projects, because what they're building is something that has been conceived of probably five, 10, 15 years ago. And that's part of the challenge too, is that sort of inertia and the lengthy timelines to get things constructed mean that conditions can change and you wind up—like, go back to Burlington, this is an amazing example. They had basically a highway that was supposed to come through South Burlington, like a spur off of Interstate 89, if I remember correctly. And residents fought it and fought it and fought it and fought it and there's this big pot of federal money. And they fought it—in fact, there's a public art installation off of this like, I think it's an off-ramp up there that is—it's 40 feet high or not. You should look this up, but it's a bunch of file cabinets and it's like an ode to the amount of bureaucracy and paperwork filed to fight this project.

But when I was doing a lot of work there, they were still having to get some parts of this project built. And this is like 20 years later. The city no longer wants it. Mayor's against it, council's against it, residents and neighborhood are against it. And yet they're just like, "Well, we have to do it, some component of it." So even when you have all those things aligned, sometimes you have these processes and inertia and federal kind of initiatives that are very difficult to stop. That's a little bit of an aside, but...

Avi Stopper (44:46)

I want to talk a little bit about community engagement, which is such an important part of any planning and design process. And of course, there's the caricature, which is actually fairly accurate, of the way that conventional public meetings go, which is that you have a tiny fraction of supporters, a tiny fraction of opponents. They argue very vociferously about it. And then we say we've done community engagement and some decision has arrived at—perhaps a negotiated settlement, perhaps it's scuttled entirely, or maybe it proceeds as originally conceived.

One of the things that I find to be so powerful about the tactical urbanist approach is that it obviates the need for these community meetings. And planners all the time are lamenting the low turnout that they get. And what I contend, and I'm curious to hear your take on this, is that tactical urbanism is the way to get 100% community engagement. 100% is slight hyperbole, right? But basically, if you put something like this in the right-of-way where people experience it, I think of it as experiential community engagement. Because if you put it in the right-of-way, 100% of people for whom that change is relevant are going to experience it, barring out-of-town travel and they just didn't happen to go there that particular day.

And so I'm curious to hear your take on the community engagement process, which often just deteriorates into a lot of speculative verbal sparring as opposed to this, like, "Here's what it looks like." And one of the things that I find so powerful and important about that is that the community engagement process as it stands asks people to do something for which the human cognitive abilities are not well suited, which is to imagine some future state. And of course, we reflexively push back on in many cases on some imagined future state. It is very, very difficult and almost impractical to ask people to participate in this exercise where you go up and you put stickers on a wall and it's a bunch of pictures of what different installations might look like and you're like, "I like this one. I don't like this one."

Whereas with Shared Streets in Denver, for example, it's just like, there's the thing. Go out and experience it and tell us based on lived experience. We're not cutting out communication. Rather, the communication is built on actual experience that people have rather than this perceived boogeyman scenario that everything is going to fall apart when this thing is installed. Or to be fair and to be intellectually honest, that it's going to perform—I think that those who support these types of projects often are put in a place where we reflexively have to support them, even if there is no empirical proof that they are indeed going to produce that desired set of outcomes.

And I think that that ultimately really has hamstrung a lot of bike infrastructure—is that there is a set of assumptions that a certain treatment is going to work. And then we support it whole hog because we know that if we don't, if we call it into question, it's going to get cut. And so we end up having feeling obligated to support it and it is far from optimized. And I think of the incremental approach as being about optimization and improvement. I'm curious to hear your—that was a little bit of a harangue, but you know—this take on the current approach to community engagement and how tactical urbanism can really break through the morass.

Mike Lydon (48:28)

Yeah, you articulated it beautifully. I mean, that's kind of the whole point, is that 100% engagement idea. We also can obviate need for study. "Well, you can't go and do the temporary, you know, interim six-month road diet test because we need to study it first." No, the project is the study. We have to tell that to engineers over and over and over. Don't waste our time, don't waste your time, don't waste taxpayer money. The project will tell us what works and what doesn't. That's the study. And that is heard more now I think than it used to be, which is good.

But I'll give you an example of what the dynamics you just described, specific to biking. I'll hold up my partner Tony, who's really, really good at this work of the engagement, getting people into a room and then understanding what is it that project design needs to be? Because we try to be as intellectually honest as possible. We have to pursue projects largely through doing proposals that are vetted and written long before we had the input into them. And because this work is still kind of niche, there's a lot of people writing scopes of work who've never done this work. And so there's this mismatch all the time. And once we get engaged, we have to be honest with our clients and say, "What you think this project is may not be where we end up. Let's engage people. Let's go door to door. Let's walk the street with neighbors. Let's have meetings. Yes, we still do meetings." And try to vet this out a little bit so that we can design something that's responsive to the need and the desire of the community at large.

And so one example from Tony's work in Asheville, North Carolina was a project that was funded by a donor through Asheville on Bikes, a great local advocacy organization. And given the advocacy organization's focus and given the funder's desires, the whole thing is like, "We're going to go build a protected bike lane on Coxe Avenue that's going to be reconstructed in five years' time. There's dollars already allocated for it. Let's prove that a bike lane is valuable."

And so once the engagement happened, Tony kind of redirected the ship and said, "People are definitely in favor of safe infrastructure for cycling, but they don't just want a street with green bike lanes. They want something more." More aesthetically, functionally, "We've got these narrow, decrepit sidewalks. How do we privilege people who are walking and not just cycling?"

So long story short, the project became eight feet of space basically on either side of the road—maybe it was seven or eight feet—that just was painted a solid tan and it was allowed that you could cycle there. But it didn't look like the bike lane. And so the parking got squeezed in, the travel lanes got much narrower. We did this big-ass mural treatment on this block that had just been redeveloped with a whole bunch of new apartments. It was kind of the centerpiece that was designed by a local artist. And long story short, I think that played really well with a lot of people. And it was definitely a project that was not without controversy. It was the first time anything—it was like six blocks long or whatever it was, was a big project. And it's right on the edge of their downtown.

And you know, fast forward, and not every element that we tested made it into the final design, but that work then was leveraged for, I think it's a $15 million project with most of that funding coming from the state to redesign that street. It's going to have bike lanes, but it's also going to have that block where the mural was. It's also going to have this plaza that's level with a sidewalk that could be opened and closed for events. And that was something that very much we tested and brought to the table that the community wanted. We did that in paint, and now it's going to be hardened with concrete and landscaping, et cetera.

So you don't always get what you ultimately test initially, but a lot of these ideas and concepts get vetted and brought through, and they live a final life or a much longer life once the capital infrastructure can be realized. And so again, that engagement piece was so vital at the beginning. If we had just put in green bike lanes, I don't know if they would have gotten the political will necessarily. Maybe they would have, but maybe not, to actually continue to get that thing moving through the process of getting the funding that they need to actually be able to afford to reconstruct the street.

Avi Stopper (53:05)

One last question before we wrap it up, and I would be remiss not to mention or reference your inclusion of a book that is very near and dear to me in "Tactical Urbanism," and I'm referring to "The Lean Startup." Early in my startup career, I was building products that I used to think of it as the big reveal basically. We would spend a lot of time, a lot of money, we would go big, right? The word "big" is everywhere in this. We would go big. And then we would six months, eight months, 12 months later, pull back the black velvet blanket that was covering what we had just developed. And we're like, "Okay, here it is, the product."

And I had this view of the entrepreneur, of the innovator in this probably mythical Steve Jobs kind of view, which is that you're supposed to have a crystal ball. You're supposed to be able to envision the future and then relentlessly, mercilessly, ruthlessly prosecute your agenda. And in the midst of that and in the midst of having a series of products that were just not working in the way that I wanted to, I discovered this blog called Startup Lessons Learned, and Startup Lessons Learned evolved into a book called "The Lean Startup," which has really become foundational for me in the way that I think about building things. And I love that there's a vein of that running through "Tactical Urbanism." I'm curious just to hear how you encountered that. And it feels to me like it's a really interesting cross-pollination of business and startups and entrepreneurship and innovation in a for-profit context and encountering a different type of innovation, but innovation nonetheless.

Mike Lydon (54:56)

Yeah, you know, I can't remember exactly where I came across that book, but I know exactly where it is on my shelf at home. And I only read it once but it was super powerful because what I do often is I look for other fields that can explain to me better my own, right? And that book was exactly that. Like, where can I find a quote or a description or an idea or something that completely maps onto urban planning and design, but was not sourced from the industry? That gives me like a broader understanding of what is it we're doing here. And that book was certainly it with the minimal viable product—like just the framing of that. When I read that, I was like, that's what this is. That's what we're doing. And it was a way to sort of validate the concept early on.

If you had to think about that time, the notion of startups and where the internet was at that time, still pretty early days compared to where things are now—the billions it has created and the, you know, it's just a very different world economically, politically, socially, I think around technology and around this startup idea. But that book was pure. It was really about, you know, A/B testing, MVPs, just like shedding the things that don't work—shed, shed, shed, shed. And I think what I've continued to think about that book is it's a mindset and a framework for very dynamic situations that we all live in, and that's exactly what a city is. It's never still, it's dynamic, it's always changing.

So you've got to constantly be A/B testing to figure out what's working in the moment and build it, keep going, and then you might have to move on and discard it later. But that's what cities are in the long arc of history—is just constant evolution. And that's a book that really framed the idea for me for the first time that it's relevant to urban planning.

Avi Stopper (56:47)

Mike, thanks so much. This has been a real pleasure.

Mike Lydon (56:50)

You too, Avi. Thanks for having me.