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In this episode, transportation planner Warren Logan shares his expertise on how cities can make fast, cheap, impactful improvements to safety and walkability.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsWhen it comes to reducing transportation emissions, two main ideas compete for mindshare in the climate space. First is switching out internal combustion engine vehicles for electric vehicles. Second is improving the built environment to make walking, biking, and public transit easier, to reduce the amount of miles traveled in cars and trucks altogether.The conventional wisdom is that the former is faster. There are a few key policy levers that can be pulled to get massive numbers of EVs on the roads, whereas urban improvements proceed one at a time, each facing its own bespoke set of challenges.But there are people out there at the city level working to increase the speed of those improvements. One of them is Warren Logan, currently a partner at Lighthouse Public Affairs, but before that, policy director of mobility in the Oakland, California, mayor's office, a senior transportation planner for San Francisco, and an intern in the transportation office at Berkeley, California.In his time working on transportation projects, Logan has given a lot of thought to, and done a lot of work on, improving city processes to make safety and walkability improvements faster and less capital-intensive. He wants cities to free themselves up to make fast, cheap changes that can have big impacts without an enormous investment of time and money.As listeners will have noticed, I have been somewhat obsessed lately with urban design and transportation issues. I hope you will indulge me in another conversation about the nature of resistance to urban improvements, the kinds of changes that can be made quickly to dramatically improve safety, and the larger need to avoid over-reliance on EVs.Warren Logan, thank you for coming to Volts and sharing your time.Warren LoganThank you so much for having me, David.David RobertsLet's start with a little Warren background, a little Warren history here. Tell us sort of what your position was and what you're more to the point, sort of what your engagement was in transportation and transportation projects. Tell us about your last few years.Warren LoganSure. So before my time at Lighthouse Public Affairs, as a partner in Public Affairs, I was Mayor Libby Schaaf's Policy Director of Transportation and Government Affairs of the City of Oakland, which is two jobs that they pushed together. And I think it's important to share here just quickly that before my time in the mayor's office, I was also a transportation planner in the city and county of San Francisco. And before that was an urban designer as a consultant in the East Bay, in the Bay area here. And before that was a transportation planner again for the city of Berkeley.So my point here is I've done a lot of different cool transportation work across the Bay.David RobertsYeah, you must know so many NIMBYs. It's like a NIMBY survey you've done with your career.Warren LoganYeah.David RobertsBerkeley to Oakland.Warren LoganYou got it. And this might come out later in our podcast, but most of the subjects I've worked on have been like, "what's the most contentious issue at the time? Changing parking pricing. Let's talk about bike lanes. Let's talk about ... let's keep the city from falling apart during COVID," easy subjects really.David RobertsTell us then at the sort of high level of abstraction, which is just let's address this argument. If I'm Joe Schmo on the street, I know transportation needs to be decarbonized. And I look around and I was like, "oh, there's the decarbonized transportation right there. It's called an electric vehicle. Let's just stop making the gas vehicles, start making the electric vehicles. Problem done. Let's move on to the next problem." I think that is a fairly widespread disposition toward this issue. So just tell us why you think that at the broadest level, why that kind of thinking is insufficient.Warren LoganSure. So to all the Joe Schmos out there, the truth of the matter is that just switching to electric cars is not going to solve all of our climate issues. And I'm sure we'll go into all the different reasons why. But for me, and probably for anyone who's ever been near cars at all, it's not just about the climate that we have to think about. It's like traffic safety as well. And I can only stress this enough, that if you get hit by a car, it doesn't matter if it was an electric vehicle or not. In fact, it might be worse because they're heavier, which is in no way to say we shouldn't be considering electric vehicles.David RobertsAnd you might not hear it coming right?Warren LoganAnd you might not hear it coming, right. So, David, your point is so good, though, that there is certainly room for absolutely decarbonizing our vehicles. I will admit I own an electric vehicle, and I own an electric bike, and that together, those two means of transportation get me really far.David RobertsBut if you're talking to Joe Schmo and Joe Schmo says, "if I switch out all the cars, what is the remainder? What is left?" What is the ... and remember, we're just talking climate here. Like, there are obviously other issues of urban life, but if we're just focusing on climate, what is the remainder that's left after the electric vehicles?Warren LoganYeah, the remainder also includes public transit, which also we need to work on decarbonizing here in the Bay. And actually, in California, we passed a bill, I want to say last year or the year before that required that all of the transit agencies shift over the next, I think, ten years to electric buses, or electric and hydrogen, alternate fuel sources. So it's not just that we need more EV cars. We need EV trucks for all of the deliveries. We need EVs for the buses and similarly for trains. Not every train is electric. We're very fortunate here in the bay that Bart runs on electricity, but there are plenty of trains across the country that still use gas and diesel, et cetera.So there's plenty of room for improvement across every subsector of transportation.David RobertsContinuing as Joe Schmo here, I don't know why I chose this name, but we're stuck with it now. Another sort of, I think, intuition a lot of people have in this exchange is, "okay, I get it that maybe EVs aren't enough. I get it that there are other goals. We want quality of life, we want walkability, things like this. We want more public space." But in terms of speed, and this is really where the rubber hits the road in this argument.Warren LoganLiterally.David RobertsYes. I think Joe Schmo thinks, just quitting making ice vehicles and starting making EVs. I can see that happening quickly. The market seems to be accelerating, but it seems like changes in urbanism, changes in urban form, changes in building, changes in the way we do streets, this kind of thing take forever. Aren't they just intrinsically slower?Warren LoganThey don't have to be. Let me kind of break apart what you just shared, the first of which is that I don't think that speed is the only thing we're trying to optimize when it comes to transportation, even though I think you, Joe, and all the other Joes out there think I want to get there quickly. Absolutely. I'm not here to delay your travel, certainly. And yet, one of the things I've learned in my time as a transportation planner is that people really discount just how bad traffic can get at times and that they're part of that issue, and that once you get to your destination, parking is not typically readily available depending on where you're going.And so oftentimes when people say, well, my door to door time is only ten minutes, that's not really true. And there are plenty of studies that have been conducted, in fact, by my alma mater at UC Berkeley showcasing that people underestimate how much time it takes to drive somewhere and overestimate how much time they think it will take to take any other form of transportation. And I think that that's incredibly important. The second bit here. And I think this is kind of fascinating, that we've all gotten kind of explore this during COVID Is that the time that it takes for you to travel from point A to B, B to C, and C to A again or wherever you're going may not necessarily be as fast if you are not driving.But you are able to recoup the value of that time by answering emails or taking phone calls while you're sitting on an ideally quiet train, getting from your place to place. And then the last bit too, is that not everyone can or even wants to drive. Like fundamentally, driving is, I think, an exercise that people have truly believe that it's like the most fun thing you can do. And that's not really true for most people. Like, driving kind of sucks a lot of times.And we kind of have this idea that if only there was one more lane or if only the seats had air conditioning, I would enjoy this really rote exercise that gets really tough. And you're just I mean, there's a thing for it. It's called road rage.David RobertsWell, you'll notice that the number one most notable feature of car commercials is that they only contain one car in them, only the car you're supposed to buy. There are never any other cars on the street. I'm like, "where is that?"Warren LoganLike, where's the rest of this? Right? You never see a commercial of a car like, "hi, this is you stuck in traffic all day because this is what it's like to drive in a real city, or even in suburbs for that matter."David RobertsAll of that is interesting about speed of travel within the city, but that was not exactly the speed I was asking you about. I mean, sure, now I'm fascinated and want to follow up.Warren LoganI understand your second question, which is like, the speed of implementation, right?David RobertsYeah, speed of implementation. How fast are we reducing greenhouse gas, I guess, is where the rubber hits the road. Full of automotive metaphors today. This is not on purpose.Warren LoganI love it. It's great. I'm going to get my book of idioms, and I'll see if I can go toe to toe with you, which there's one right there. So in terms of speed of implementation, I think that I'm going to call BS, right? Like a. some people really can switch their cars quickly. That's true. There are people with means to go out and buy electric vehicles, but they're a. not free, nor are they cheap. The lowest price EV is, I think, the Nissan Leaf maybe. And you're still pushing like 40K. That's an expensive car for a lot of people.There are plenty of people ... and I want to just kind of talk about the ways in which people interact with the city, or even with suburbs, or even rural areas, is that there are lots of people who are in some ways so low income they have to drive, which is a really hard thing for people to conceptualize. But let me just unpack that for a second. We in America have actively discouraged people from living near their jobs vis-a-vis suburbanization. And then as more of, I would suppose, like my generation especially, have started shifting back towards city centers the price of housing in, I want to say all the cities, wildly here for a second, has gotten really, really high in places that are close to jobs.Which means then that the lower income folks, of whatever age we're talking about for a second, are then actively discouraged from both living in a city and actively pushed to farther and farther places that are not well served by transit, not very accessible by buses, or trains, or even bikeways, or by extension jobs. And Oaklanders kind of face this a lot where I live. But it's true of a lot of places that you have no option but to drive, but for the fact that you barely can really afford the car that you're driving, and there isn't an option for you to upgrade to a more efficient car.I think that that's kind of the fantasy that a lot of people want to live in, that if you own a car, you also have the means to maintain that car properly and by extension, perhaps switch the car that you're driving overnight. Oh, I just decided tomorrow I'm going to go buy a Tesla. That's not real. And so for a whole swath of people who are out there on our streets driving, their option for switching vehicles is really, really limited. And I can't speak for many other cities, but I can at least say for the Bay.If I step outside of my house right now, I can watch a bunch of cars that were built in the 90s or even early 80s. None of those people, and this is sort of a sweeping generalization, but I would just expect that most of the people driving those vehicles probably can't afford even a moderately priced electric car. Because we're talking about buying a $1,000 car, not a 10, or a 20, or 30, or $40,000 car, let alone financing a car, right. And I'm not even going down a rabbit hole of people's credit and their ability to buy cars.David RobertsIt's just one more way that we've made it expensive to be poor in the US, right? Like they are paying a ton for gas right now, but do not have the means. They could save money in the long term by buying the electric vehicle, but you have to have that upfront capital. If you don't have it, you're just stuck with these ongoing costs.Warren LoganAbsolutely. And so that is just one example of many that I will share with you in just a second of why this fantasy that we're living in that everyone can just switch to electric vehicles is just not real. So let's now shift gears to all of the other tools in our toolbox that we do have at our disposal. And this is kind of the thing I've said to lots of people, right, that we choose not to use effectively. So if we wanted tomorrow to have half of our streets dedicated to walking and bicycling, that is actually possible.And I know it's possible because I did it. And so you probably saw the kind of beginning of COVID, let's rewind two years plus a few months, right. A number of cities started implementing shared streets, healthy streets, slow streets, whatever name we gave them. I think that that movement proved that we've just been sitting on this gold mine of opportunity. And I want people to truly examine why is it that we refuse to exercise our ability to make that type of big shift, why we choose not to use that power, right? And so implicit in that question is holding all of your listeners by having them hold aside their opinions of whether or not we should have done that, just like set that aside for a second, because I've gotten enough heat about that for now.But to at least focus on the fact that not only was it possible, but it was possible in a lot of different cities with a lot of demographics, a lot of different economics, right, like a lot of different politics, that lots of different places did this really big thing nearly overnight. And not just like when I say nearly overnight, like over a couple of years. I mean, the time and space between a few text messages between myself, Mayor Shaaf and the DOT director here in Oakland, and then them setting up the signs is, I think, 72 hours. So I'm not making this up when I say that truly these types of changes are possible.However, and this is kind of the big caveat about speed, is that we have to choose to want that reality. And I think that that's the part that really gets me about let's just switch…
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