Mike Lydon on the City & Change

Mike Lydon is Co-Founder and Principal at Street Plans, leading the firm's New York City office, and is an internationally recognized urban planner, writer, speaker, and advocate for livable cities. As the creator of The Open Streets Project and co-author of the Tactical Urbanism series, Mike is a founding member of the Congress for the New Urbanism and serves on Transportation Alternatives’ Executive Committee for the New York City Harbor Ring project.

I start all these conversations with a question I borrowed from a friend of mine. She lives here in Hudson, she's an oral historian, and she's got this question that I think is really beautiful, so I stole it from her. Before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in total control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want. The question is, where do you come from?

I guess my most immediate response would be I come from Maine.

What does it mean to be from Maine?

I think it means to be self-reliant, independent, and in some ways, creative. There's an ethic of you do all you can with what you have in Maine. I think that's really important. There's sort of a humbleness there, and there's a really good sense of humor. I feel like all those things in Maine are qualities I don't embody, but I aspire to them.

Can you tell me a story about the creativity, or what growing up was about? How did that show up?

I think it's creativity in work - getting by and knowing how to maximize what you can do in your job, and to do well by people. What you observe a lot in Maine is people have to get creative around their work schedule. In the summertime, I do this, and in the fall and spring, I do this, in the winter, I do that. There's a flexibility of how you go about work and getting by, using your own creativity and will to do that. It's a long-term ethic that's part of Maine.

There's a novelist I know - I love all of his work - David Carkeet is his name, and he wrote a book called "From Away," set in Maine. Is that a Maine expression?

[Note: It’s not set in Maine. I was wrong. It’s Vermont.]

Yeah, anyone who's not from Maine is "from away." I'll tell you a quick funny story that speaks to that. We were just up visiting my parents with my two sons and my wife, and there's this annual pumpkin festival that started in our town maybe 10 or 15 years ago, long after I moved away to New York City.

One of the penultimate events of many over the course of this weekend, which attracts thousands of people now, is they take these big pumpkins and raise them up with a crane, then drop them on my old middle school soccer field. The first one is like a 500-pound pumpkin, and this crane goes up 200 feet, and they drop it. The whole crowd is encircled at a somewhat safe radius from the explosion of the pumpkin. Then they double the size of the pumpkin, and they bring out this beater car and park it in the middle of the soccer field, lining up the crane and the pumpkin to crush this car.

The announcer remarks that the car is from Massachusetts, not Maine, and everyone cheers. So there's just this "us and them" mentality, which is not always the most healthy thing, but it's definitely an ongoing kind of running joke about whether you're from here or not.

Do you remember as a kid what you wanted to be when you grew up?

I wanted to be an NBA point guard, or I wanted to be a city planner. I was pretty good at basketball, but I'm 5'9" - I'm not that good. And I went the other path and became a city planner.

How did city planning show up in your life as a kid? What was your experience in rural Maine? How did you know that it existed? I feel like I had a city planner awakening at like 39.

Being from small towns in Maine, they have these really lovely main streets where it's the center of life, and you hardly go a day without being in that environment for some period of time. I was just always fascinated by going to town and what town offered. That draw to those types of environments - I couldn't put real language to it at a young age - was a really strong baseline for me on what I enjoyed about public life and places that one inhabits.

It was somewhere around fourth or fifth grade where I got access to SimCity, the video game. To this point in my life, I was obsessed with sports. I wanted to play sports outside most of the time. If I had access to a video game on my Tandy 1000 computer, I had sports games, except for SimCity. And I was obsessed with it really quickly.

Then I started doing academic project fairs or science fairs in fifth grade, investigating city planning. I read books from the library that talked about Roman cities and how they started and grew and the life that became part of those cities. It was super inspiring to me. I just continued that thread all the way through the end of college when I did a thesis on an urban planning issue in Maine that also was about Native American history, economics, and culture.

It just grew with me. And then in college, I did a lot more research on who are my North Stars in this field and what's the kind of work that I want to do. It all just sort of snowballed from there.

And tell me where you are now and what your role, what your work, what you're working on these days.

I now live in Brooklyn, New York, which I like to say is basically like one big downtown Maine village. The urban form is actually not that much different. If you were in downtown Brooklyn or Manhattan, then yes. But if you're on Fulton Street or DeKalb Avenue, Fort Greene, these places that I inhabit a lot - two, three, four-story buildings, mixed-use commercial apartments above - it's very similar to downtown where I grew up. It's just there's a lot more of it, which is awesome. It just goes on and on.

We do consulting work all over the country. Since having kids, I've focused more of my time and energy from DC up to Maine on the East Coast. That's everything from developing active transportation plans for communities to installing street improvements. We do a lot of work where we literally transform environments temporarily to show what's possible and to learn from those changes and how people respond to them, both with their behavior and their support or not.

A lot of our focus at the moment is on two things. First is street safety and really helping communities drill down on where they need to spend their limited resources to get the biggest outcomes when it relates to people of any age or ability being able to move around their city safely. Second is public realm activation or enhancement. We've got fascinating projects on the San Francisco waterfront, the Cleveland waterfront, the West Palm Beach waterfront, and 14th Street here in Manhattan, where we're looking at something more permanent than the temporary work we did together in Hudson - something that can last five, 15, 20 years, really be that interim change, but provide immediate spark or improvement to the way people experience streets.

How has the field changed since you entered it? You're sort of responsible for tactical urbanism, which is this approach to community engagement that's revolutionary. There was maybe a behavioral revolution in marketing too, where we could learn differently by focusing on how people behave as opposed to what they say they're going to do. But I'm curious, how did tactical urbanism arise for you? And how did that change how urban planning works?

I think for me, it was just being an impatient 25-year-old and wanting to see the change in the world happen quickly. I went right from that thesis I wrote in college to one year working for an advocacy organization in Boston around cycling issues to then going to grad school. All the way through that process, I didn't understand the politics. I didn't understand how important moving the needle is of public opinion and being able to cut through some of the debate sphere where we can talk about these things until we're blue in the face. But when you actually do something, you get a result - something you can actually measure and people can experience.

You can see behavior change. You can see someone say, "I don't support that," then say, "Actually, that's not so bad." Even if they don't personally like it, they see positive things happening in their neighborhood or community as a result of it.

That was really the inspiration - let's see if we can just get things done quickly. There were a number of different initiatives and projects in the mid-aughts that really spoke to that. I was able to be inspired and define what that inspiration was: What are the core principles of this? What's the through line between these disparate initiatives and cities that I'm seeing?

Particularly as a response to the Great Recession and very diminished resources at a municipal level, how can we continue to make places more livable quickly and inexpensively? That first booklet we put together was just kind of a thing to share with my friends, my nerdy urbanist friends. Like, "Here, this is what I was talking about. This is the idea. What do you guys think?"

This was a time when online tools were starting to proliferate. Social media was starting to proliferate, so things could spread way faster than even a decade prior. You can throw it up online with no expectation, and it was downloaded thousands and thousands of times. Now we have these tools you can track - like, "Wow, 100 downloads in Russia today." That's crazy. People got really excited by it, as I was, but no one had a name or a term for it.

It created a virtuous circle where now we call it something. We can learn from each other. People start practicing it, trying it, failing, succeeding. Long story short, it's like the punk rocker's gone mainstream. This stuff is embedded everywhere in cities around the world.

The thing that really brought it to a new level was the pandemic. People started to get tactical on these quick projects and initiatives not as being nice to have or doing one here and there, but these became emergency crisis response tools that we knew they could be, but never anticipated would have to be at a global scale.

I think that and just over 10 years leading up to the pandemic, sharing a lot of resources, developing things for free and sharing them - that's very much important to me, something I learned from music. I'm not a big Grateful Dead fan, but the way they built their fan base - I'm a Dave Matthews Band fan - the way they built their fan base in the early '90s was trading tapes. Let people just record and take it and run with it and share it. And it grows and grows and grows. That's kind of the idea I brought to the very first publication and publications thereafter - if you put it out there in the world, if it's a good idea, people will just spread it. And that's what happened.

What do you love about the work? Where's the joy in it for you? What's the part of all the stuff that you do that you really love more than anything else?

I think it's just the realization that people can change their cities positively and quickly. It doesn't have to be this multi-decade slog, although it often is. When you get people who are just waiting by the bus stop, or they're on their way to the grocery store, or they're walking their kids to school, and there's a change that happened effectively overnight, you can really see the joy that people have in seeing something just different and better.

When you go to a city council meeting or a public workshop, these debates take up so much oxygen in the room. Yes, they're important conversations to have, but it's usually a very small slice of the community that's participating. You start to understand that real gap between what politicians and leaders think is public sentiment and what is actual public sentiment when you're on the ground doing the work. That's what's exciting to me - showing that support, bringing that support, seeing that immediate transformation. It's like, "Wow, we have this street that's terrible and unsafe, and people are complaining about it, but people can't decide on the change. Let's just do the change, and then we'll talk about the pros and cons thereafter." The power of that is really addicting.

Can you tell me more about that gap, the distance between what the leadership believes to be public sentiment versus the sentiment that you get when you're on the ground talking to people?

Right now in New York City, we're having this major battle over the "City of Yes," which is just very moderate changes to the zoning code that would allow for more housing to be built in all the neighborhoods. That's sort of a way to allow for, hopefully, the supply to increase so that affordability can also increase.

You see the polls on this, and it's like 75%, 82% of people really want to see more affordable housing in New York City. But then if you listen to the city councilors and people who are pushing back on some of the details of that proposal, you would think that it was the other way around, that 80% of the people didn't want to support this initiative.

That's just one example, but this happens everywhere on public issues and how we think about how our communities grow and change. It's pernicious because then it becomes self-reinforcing, where you're trying to keep the status quo in place, or you nudge it a little bit here and there. But we need transformative change in our communities. I feel like people are more ready for that and more wanting that once they are allowed to experience and see it.

What are the ingredients in a successful transformation? I've followed the work that you guys do, and I've seen this stuff. Is it Jersey City? I feel like you've had some moments that are... I mean, you've had a lot of success across the board, but what are the ingredients in a city or a municipality for making the kind of changes to the streets?

It's political will. It's just having leadership. It's leadership from the mayor setting the tone and providing direction to staff and saying, "I'll give you cover," on down to leadership at staff levels, and then partnerships with community leaders, organizations that are on the ground, CBOs, nonprofits, advocacy groups who really care deeply about cities and their issues.

I am much better at assessing now when we go into a community whether they have that mix or not. If they have it, then we can really see sustained change relatively quickly. That was 100% the case in Jersey City. You've had great leadership from Mayor Fulop. You had political continuity - in the third term, you have time to scale things that you might get done in the first four years.

If you get invited back and invited back again, you really can grow dramatic influence and impact if you are committed to the work and you have the leadership in place that just believes in that every day, is doing that work every day. That adds up very impressively over eight to twelve years.

We've walked into communities where there's not even an advocacy sector. There's no one asking for change. And if no one's asking for change from the bottom up, you're certainly not going to necessarily get it from the top down. That's not to say we can't try and do the work. It's just the expectations that I have now personally are different. I don't want to be disappointed that you come in all excited about being able to transform someplace and you realize those ingredients are not there yet.

And that's okay. You have to start somewhere to build that in. But it would take time for a lot of communities that we've worked with in the past to sort of get to that level. If you look globally, there's always these leading cities. I'd say London under Sadiq Khan and Paris with Anne Hidalgo - these are visionary people who've been given permission over many terms to make these impacts. And the impacts that they make get bigger and more impressive every year.

You go to a city like New York, and under de Blasio, it was kind of carrying the status quo to a degree from the innovative administration before. And then with our current administration - well, you've seen the headlines, it's a disaster. So we don't have that same leadership here. Those ebbs and flows of leadership, aligned with staff leadership and on-the-ground advocacy, is where you get the special sauce.

I was struck by your description of Brooklyn as - what did you say? You called it urban villages, is that right?

Just like a series of urban villages.

So I just wondered, as a city planner, what do you see that a jackass like me doesn't see? When you look at a neighborhood in Brooklyn, as an urbanist, what are the principles that you understand about how that came to be that make it so valuable that Johnny Q Public walking around just sees a sidewalk and a crosswalk and a street where the cars go?

It's the level of density - the amount of people that are here always around you. I pulled the census tract that I live in now, and it's like eight or nine blocks by one or two blocks. It's a very small swath in the census tract, and the population is like three times my town in Maine, in a tiny fraction of the land.

It's such an efficient use of land that allows for so many types of people and ideas and things to happen in a very limited space. And that to me is the alchemy. There's a muscularity to the city, to Brooklyn. You can go for miles and it feels like it's a sustained level of energy, whereas in the town I grew up, that sustained level of energy is on two or three blocks. So that's sort of the power.

Do you have mentors or touchstones that you constantly return to, either just internally, to sort of touch ground on foundational ideas?

Over the years, the mentorship has evolved as my career has evolved. There are certainly early urban designers and planners that I look to and was inspired by, and still am inspired by, but in a different way. I was so inspired by the ideas of Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and people who were involved with real reform of sprawl in the '80s and '90s - just totally digging out the principles from the dustbin of history and saying, "This is how we do walkability and we've not been doing it for 40 years. That's the problem. We can start doing it again."

Growing up in a small town in Maine, going to college in Maine, in that environment with a little bit of sprawl around you, I had no idea - I had no lived experience in what you see outside of Atlanta, or even outside Boston or other metro areas where it goes on for miles and miles. Knowing that there was an alternative out there, that was something that was possible - at that time, it was very edge. It was like, "Oh, you want to allow mixed-use buildings again? You can't even finance that. It's not legal." Banks wouldn't do it.

That's where - banks wouldn't give up. It was very difficult to get financing for a mixed-use building or for walkable projects. That just wasn't what people were looking to do. This whole parallel system had to be rebuilt, and it's still not a level playing field, though it's certainly more so today.

Now if I look at some of those early people that inspired me, a lot of them are in their own businesses and had the pains and challenges of running a small business like we do. Now my questions are different. Like, "How did you get over this? How did you grow to that next level? What did you learn when you took on projects that might've been pushing the bounds of what you had skill sets in?" Those kind of more experiential things and not just the ideas that I look for now in terms of mentorship.

You talked about sprawl. One of the early projects in my career, I was living in San Francisco with a brand consultancy and we were hired by Chevron to do a brand audit. We went to Atlanta and I did a lot of interviews with people at gas stations and in their homes. I remember being told at the time, this was early nineties, that I think maybe I heard this, that it was sort of the fastest growing human settlement in history, the way that Atlanta was developing its suburbs. Does that resonate with you?

Oh yeah, totally. You can fit amazing Italian city cores into a highway interchange in Atlanta. This is a great actual diagram that a colleague put together one time where an amazing small city in Italy was compared to show the use of land. Look how we're using our land - this is insane. We're not making more land. Why are we using it this way?

The other thing I remember from that project was an interview I had with a woman who described her relationship with her car. She said, "When my mom died, I left my house and I went and sat in my car and I cried." That's the place she went to feel safe, you know? She was looking for a place to be away from her family, a place where she could let down her guard and really weep. How do you think about the car and car culture in your work? I feel like you must be bumping up against it all the time. How do you think about it and talk about it? Because it is so deep, our relationship with the car, what we expect of it.

It's the biggest challenge. Even just peeling off and battling small parts of that culture, it's so ingrained. And by the way, it's a new culture. This is not, in the arc of our country, the arc of human civilization, this is the tiny blip in which people had access to these things and how seductive and quickly we took that up and reordered everything. We reordered all of our cities to accommodate this thing. It's wild.

There's a fascination that I have culturally in these moments and what had to happen in the '20s and '30s and '40s and '50s to really ingrain this. That's a masterclass in cultural revolution - not in a good way, in my opinion - but it's a masterclass. How do you influence change industrially at that scale? That's impressive.

I don't know if we have it in us to as a culture anymore to do that - from the most moneyed corners of societies to our political leaders, to people falling in line. Like we were put forth this new challenge of climate and resilience. I don't know if we have it in us to be able to take something that massive on to fully reorder society again. I could be wrong. We may be forced to, but it's impressive.

It comes down to a clear understanding that people need to travel long distances. And the car is amazing to do that in lots of ways, in lots of environments. In a city, small or large, it is the least efficient and worst way to get around a community. So it's really trying to think about what is the right tool in the places where you are. What do you need to do? And why is it that you think you have to drive three miles to get milk?

Is that land use? Yeah, we put the big shopping center a mile out of town on a crappy five-lane road. So you'd be insane to walk that. I understand why people make this choice, but it becomes a choice you make very easily and then you don't question it again. A lot of the things we do in our work is to ask those questions. Like, why are you doing it this way?

Usually, towns and villages and cities have this great historic example, which people love. And then they have this other example where people don't love those environments, but they don't question them. They don't question it could be any different. We ask a lot of questions and we try to show people that it could be different. In some ways, quite simply, that's the work we're trying to do. But it is very difficult to just have people reimagine the way things work, the way they move around and inspiring people on an everyday basis to try something new when maybe the environment around them doesn't really support that.

I love that idea. I mean, that question I shared - are we capable of a transformation as sweeping as the one that the automobile sort of arrived on us? There's a quote I always love that "the past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." Have you ever heard that?

No, that's great. It's really great.

We talked about cars, I guess maybe community engagement. It feels like there's two things that you're sort of embedded in - rethinking the way cities engage with how they make decisions about how they change. Tactical urbanism is this amazing tool that lets people experience the change in a very sort of scientific way. Are there other things you're seeing out there in terms of how engagement is changing the way cities are approaching change differently? Where in the process is this evolution? What's the state of urbanism and tactical urbanism as you see it? The pandemic created this explosion of opportunity. I mean, we experienced here in Hudson, we had on-street dining, we had shared streets. We had the shared space. We were experiencing the street as a shared resource, probably for the first time. And then the year after the pandemic, it shrunk and then it went away. And now we're back to mainstream American car culture in Hudson.

It was both a watershed moment for tactical urbanism, but I think there's a lot more to be learned in the failures of why cities didn't embed this and learn from all the positive things that were happening. How could that be even more positive outside the constraints of a pandemic? If we can pull this off in these conditions right now in this community, imagine if we're all healthy and able to get back to our lives, but still have this and start to double down on it and invest in the things that are working here.

I think too many people just thought of it and it was messaged as only a pandemic response. It wasn't about recovery in the future. It was about now. The framing of it allowed a lot of communities to retrench back to the status quo after the most largest threats from the pandemic were mostly behind us, at least at scale.

That's been really dispiriting in a lot of ways. I've seen this all over the country where things are sort of "back to normal." I've seen it here in New York, but there are still a lot of things where you've had successes and you've had things go to that next level, become more permanent and are truly inspiring. I think those are things to hold on to always - the inspirational examples and to learn from them.

What are you indicating? What are you, when you say it's not all good, what are you...?

I think the biggest thing that I think about - I did so many webinars during the depth of the pandemic where we'd been tracking what cities were doing and people were accessing this sort of open spreadsheet we created. We were really trying to get people access to information about who was doing what and where and what the impact was.

The lesson I kept sharing in those moments and share today is that we are our biggest barrier. This is not a technical problem. This is not a cost problem. How quick was it for the restaurants to move out onto the street and do what they did? What impact did that really have on safety? People weren't getting run over. Yes, there were fender benders and some of the dining setups got dinged or nicked or they could be rebuilt quickly because they're inexpensive.

What was actually the problem? It was our lack of imagination and our ability to move quickly. We could do this everywhere on every urban issue if we wanted to, if there was actually a way to get out of our own way. In the pandemic, it forced us to just literally get out of our own way to respond to something.

In New York, it was a very unequal, expensive, challenging outdoor dining license program before the pandemic. Of course, only the wealthier businesses would take you up on that, really only on the sidewalk. Then overnight, it was like, you just need to self-certify that you've met these very basic life safety criteria. And then we might come check on you in months, maybe we don't, but go forth and do your thing. Just don't take up a bus stop, use a certain minimum standard of something that can find that creates a barrier.

And oh my God, like 12,000 restaurants within a few months were operating in some shape or form outdoors. And wherever you think about outdoor dining, that's not the point. The point is we can get out of our own way if we just sort of unleash the power of the creativity and the energy that people have to have better cities, better streets.

So I think that's the biggest lesson - we could do it. We've proven it, but why does it have to take a global pandemic? I think it's the acute nature of that and the threat that forced us to act. But these more existential crises of climate and things are just slowly degrading our lives. We can't seem to muster the same level of commitment to get out of our own way to start to heal things.

You used the word imagination in there. What's the antidote to what you just said? We get in our own way because we don't have the imagination. What is the imagination that would be required to open up to this kind of change?

We can imagine that people don't need a car for everything. You can imagine that you don't need to park in front of the business that you're going to as human beings. Yes, people have physical disabilities. Of course, there should be spaces reserved for people to have immediate access to things that they need to access. You can do that. This is not zero sum.

It's not all outdoor dining in the curb and zero parking. But what if we just took away 10% of parking in all of our cities overnight? In New York, those 12,000 restaurants operating in the curb lane took up like 2% of parking spaces in the city. If we could just imagine 5% of that space being used for other things, not just dining, but expanded pedestrian space, better bus stops, delivery zones to help exploit some deliveries, not have to double park and clog streets and create honking. Can't we just have an imagination where we think of our streets as being a lot more flexible and human?

Yeah, this is the piece I think that was so inspiring to me. I really did have a midlife awakening to the idea of the streets. The streets are like a public space. You used the term public realm. I never really thought about streets as public space. They're so controlled, so regulated. And I know my experience in Hudson, and I guess this is sort of a trope in planning, that the police and fire, they kind of own, they kind of claim ownership for what's appropriate or inappropriate or safe or unsafe within the public realm. And so it's a massive cultural constraint because they're often the big dogs in town. Creating an argument or trying to create space for that kind of creativity can become very difficult. It seems unsafe to be creative like that.

Yeah, it's very difficult. That's ingrained. Some of the cultural attachments to large vehicles are most robust in those life safety, emergency response communities. And I get that. You are the one who's dealing with the most extreme things that happen in your community on a daily basis. You have a certain perspective and you have to respect that. If you've responded to a terrible fire, you don't want a speed bump in the road. I understand that.

But when you look at the data and the things that can be gained from slowing everything down, you would see a lot less emergency response would be needed. Most fire departments, they're not fighting fires. They're going to car crash scenes. That's what the data says. Fires happen, and it's really essential that we can respond to fires as quickly as possible.

Some of the fights in New York, it's like, "Well, the bike lanes, the damn bike lanes mean that the fire trucks can't get there." It's like, no, they're open streets. The bike lanes actually create an emergency access lane for ambulances and fire trucks that helps them bypass all the congestion in the city or in a community. There's ways to actually think about the same amount of space, but using it differently that actually creates an efficiency for response, but also allows for all these other things to proliferate and succeed, like cycling.

So it's a really challenging messaging and community support advocacy topic. But at the end of the day, it has to come from the mayor. The mayor has to tell the fire chief or the police chief, "No, this is how we're going to do it." Look, if we have these negative things happening, if people are getting hit in the outdoor dining setups left and right, then you have to be open to changing that and going back to something else or tweaking a program. But if that doesn't happen, let's just imagine that we have a better community for it. Maybe we have a safer community, we have a slower community. We have more extra revenue as a community by leveraging the value of our shared spaces and our streets. It's not just about moving things quickly.

Thank you very much. I want to take the next two minutes and indulge myself. I think I might have harassed you with an email about this at some point. You've been very generous always with my emails about issues in Hudson. But we have this main intersection in Hudson in which there's a traffic light hanging from the middle. There's no communication. You can't really see the light from any of the four corners. There's no communication or messaging or signage for any pedestrians whatsoever. I've documented the way that people really, I think, correctly misuse it. They interpret the right of way for them that's not legally there. And there's also a phenomenon that when I'm at that corner, because there's no message designed for me, I sometimes get the signals crossed. I sometimes misread whether it's my right of way or not because I'm reading the green light for them and the red light for them. And then I'll cross against traffic, even though I've done the due diligence of trying to interpret the signs. I'm so attached to this idea as being like a real phenomenon that I feel like it's called eavesdropping. I want to call this experience the problem of eavesdropping and a bad intersection. And it sends me into traffic because they're not being communicated to and they're having to listen in on other conversations. And as a result, misinterpret the rules of the road. How do you feel about that?

That's interesting. Eavesdropping is a really interesting term for that. What if the signal went away? There is power and safety in ambiguity in the right places. I wouldn't say it's on a 45-mile-an-hour road, but in the center of Hudson, if the traffic signal went away and there was no clear direction, then that gives the pedestrian a chance to own the intersection because the driver doesn't know what to expect. They have to go slowly because they're oncoming cars. There's a pedestrian, there's a cyclist, there's a dog, there's a little kid.

You have to actually take the cues of the environment to inform your behavior rather than be an automaton where it's like, green go, red stop, and use your brain. When you have a slow environment, it allows us to process information much more rapidly and in a way that positively influences people's behavior around you. And as a pedestrian, if you're walking down the middle of the street and you have someone who's actually paying attention to you because they don't feel like they're safe moving through the intersection, that kind of gives you power back. That gives you the ability to take your rightful place in the hierarchy of urban streets and be the primary user in that environment.

Thank you so much, Mike. It was good to see you. I appreciate your time. I really appreciate you accepting this invitation.

Thanks, Peter. Good to see you. Take care.

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