I’ll post it on social media on Friday…share if you like, but in the meantime…

As a gift, just because I can:

A thing of beauty is a joy forever…—John Keats (by way of Mary Poppins…)

I had planned to do a random post about benches, third places, and public space—and I have a bunch of pictures just burning a hole in my pocket, so for your enjoyment:

A bench in the right place…

A bench in the right place is a delight…and Disney is very good at that. I’ve been collecting quiet places around the campus. It’s easy to get overheated and overstressed—and these spots are always a balm.

If you’re at Disney on Sunday mornings, you could probably catch me there walking around.

We’ll be back on schedule next week! Got a series coming on aging…

Now, I’m going to quit preaching and go to meddling. This is a hot take you can feel free to disagree with, but not at a funeral:

In other words, this operational condition is insanity. Yes, the speed limit sign next to the cyclist reads 35 mph, but there’s no way drivers are going to go that slow without some very consistent enforcement—and it’s not right to design a road with this cross section and expect drivers to think that 35 mph is the appropriate speed. A collision between that cyclist and someone using this road as it was designed—for 50 mph—is not going to go well.

Some day, I’m going to do a survey of LTS 3 and 4 cyclists asking what their worst injury has been. No one will notice that I’m just looking to see how many of them have never gotten seriously hurt. (You’ll all forget I said this later…)

Honestly, I see this type of behavior as same category of insanity that motorcyclists exercise. They are completely unprotected from all of the inertia problems we’ve been trying to eliminate. Last week, we made it clear that conspicuity is rarely guaranteed, especially at these middle speeds. We let guys on motorcycles do stupid things anyway, but I’ve quit feeling guilty about that. (to Brent Lacy: sorry, not sorry). I haven’t quite quit feeling concerned about cyclists, but some days, I’m close.

What makes this critical is the rise of e-bikes, particularly the fast ones. My Switch-bike conversion kit will get my cruiser up to 20 mph—and no, I don’t ever want to be going that fast on it.

We built a transportation system with two obvious buckets: vehicles belong in the road, and people belong off to the side. That is especially true here in Florida where our drivers will, in fact, run you over.

E-bikes are exposing how badly that binary system works.

I love (and hate) E-Bikes.

E-bikes solve a lot of problems. I got a conversion kit for myself just to try it out.

• We have a few hills around here and it’s nice that I don’t have to worry about not making it up the hill.

• I’m not as afraid about ranging farther from home. I’m not likely to get so tired that I can’t get back.

• They’re dirt cheap in comparison to a golf cart or used car.

• They’ll go places that a golf cart can’t legally go.

• They’re the right size for a short trip. It feels like overkill to use a two-ton SUV to pop down to the store.

• I don’t need to worry about finding a parking space—a decent lock is good enough and there’s usually plenty of places to park.

• Parking is usually right next to the doorway.

• They make a great adaptive transportation option when a wheelchair isn’t available—especially when you’re in DC and a wheelchair is hard to maneuver in crowds.

• I love the feel of air being shoved into my lungs. Better than a drug high.

Having said all of that, policy folks are tearing their hair out about them. The problem is speed incompatibility, and it’s a problem that’s built into our minds and bodies:

We don’t perceive speed.

Our bodies feel acceleration and the change in acceleration, but don’t feel speed at all. When people are going about the same speed next to each other, we perceive that as basically sitting still. Think about when you’re driving on a high-speed highway. You may be going 80 mph, but the vehicles around you look like they’re either stationary beside you or maybe creeping up or lagging behind. That’s how flocking works for birds—don’t get too close, don’t pull away, and go about the same direction. As long as we’re going about the same speed, even a bird-brain can process that.

The farther apart the speed gets in the same space, the less we can deal with it cognitively, and the more likely it is that we’ll end up bumping into each other. That’s when we really feel how fast we’re going.

In terms of human transportation, that means there are a handful of buckets that seem to work pretty well on their own or maybe adjacent to each other. Lumping more than two categories together doesn’t work:

• 3–12 mph: fast walking, bike riding, strollers, wheelchairs — shared-path ecosystem.

• 12–20 mph: cycling territory — On-street (?) facilities and genuinely slow streets.

• 16–28+ mph: racing bikes, e-bikes, pocket rockets, and scooters — incompatible with pedestrians, but still vulnerable to motor traffic.

• 25–45 mph motor traffic: The range that face to face interaction collapses—creating a perceptual danger zone compounds the speed differential.

I’ve been tracking my own walking pace in the past few months. 3 mph is a pretty stiff clip for a suburbanite, but kinda slow for city folks. Kids and seniors are closer to 2.5 mph. Putting me in the same trail with a typical cyclist might work if we do a bit of painting to encourage fast and slow to keep to their own areas. A recreational cyclist on $5,000 racing bike is not safe on the same trail—for either of us. Same goes for an e-scooter or e-bike running all out. We can manage some differential, but the wider that gets, the worse the consequences.

Early on, I started tracking the regulatory systems for e-scooters and was a bit surprised when Denver capped speeds at 12 mph because it looked so much slower than the other systems. Looking back, that was a very smart move.

So if we can’t have these speeds on the same facility, what do we do?

Network, network, network…

One of my dear friends, Lisa Nisenson, has been staring at this issue for the last 7 years—so I’m going to let her round out the discussion of this topic:

Early on, we recognized both the peril and promise of “new mobility.” The early fights focused on the sidewalk litter posed by shared models of electric scooters and bikes. As vehicle prices have come down and living expenses have skyrocketed, however we are looking at a much larger issue within transportation system planning.

Tackling the larger issues requires a bit of reframing. An e-scooter may be a driver’s annoyance, but service workers’ Godsend. For those tied to a two-seat, hour-long bus ride, an e-bike can reduce the time, distance and uncertainty. Just as communities have rallied around workforce housing, workforce transportation needs to be just as prominent. The two issues are tightly linked and recognizing micromobility’s place in the system is a necessary step.

The same goes for school travel and a new type of “Safe Routes to School.” Wellington Florida just passed an age limit of 15, not realizing how popular scooters and e-bikes are with the pre-driving crowd (and their parents).

A second realization is that e-bike riders, like those using only pedal power, prefer cycling infrastructure that is physically separated from auto traffic. While this does not solve the high-speed and low-speed mix of bicyclists, it does mean that the pool of people advocating for lanes is growing.

So, it boils down to what can we do right now? When talking about the next steps, it’s helpful to take a page from the low-stress bicycling network playbook and adapt it for bikers traveling between 15 and 28 miles an hour. That’s a great speed for a neighborhood street—too fast for the sidewalk, but it will work fine for a local road. The analysis would seek out routes linking jobs, transit hubs, universities, and other activity centers where distances between homes and destinations are a bit longer than how we’ve planned for analogue cycling. The idea is a mix where higher speed bikes travel with automobiles at speeds consistent with neighborhood speeds.

Second, like roadways, trail calming is a thing and a good idea in areas where various trail users need to slow down. Using “Quick Build” construction techniques, a city can test pilot routes.

Lastly, constant outreach, training, and education are needed. Irvine California’s Police Department hosts the Irvine Rider Education Program focused on students between the ages of 12 and 17.

I’ll second that last thought—but I’d push even farther down in age. Kids can be the most self-righteous crusaders the world has ever seen. Teach them that bike riding is ecologically friendly, socially responsible, and gives them the freedom they want, and you’ll change the entire community in a decade or two.

Besides getting mom out of the car line.

But we don’t.

It’s funny how assumptions can hide in plain sight.

1. Everyone is careful,

2. Distractions are rare and manageable,

3. If they can be seen, they will…

I was just as guilty as anyone else. When I started my research nearly 5 years ago, we ordered a data tabulation from the SHRP 2 NDS study. The SHRP2 NDS was a massive two year long effort that put over 100 sensors on about 3300 cars and just left them there for a year. I asked the folks at Virginia Tech to tabulate 2,000 moments in that vast database—midblock urban sections where walking, biking, or transit were to be expected. They would watch the driver to see if they were looking at the road or something else. Then they would list out any other tasks beyond driving that they were doing.

On a whim, I asked them to tabulate whether a vulnerable road user was there—someone walking or biking usually.

They called back about a few sections…”Does down the street and around the corner count?” Probably not—just what’s in the corridor.

Then I made a video just to rough out what drivers were looking at based on the perceptual narrowing study. I asked my assistant to put a red blob over every pedestrian—for their privacy, but also to make them obvious in the video.

What happened next terrified me. Let’s go to the video…

I backchecked my assistant’s work twice, and I know he had checked it at least twice too. In this tiny clip, there were 3 pedestrians—a dad first, and then a mom with a stroller. It wasn’t until the 4th time through that I caught that they were there. The car even moves into the lane right next to them and we still missed them.

Let’s take a look at that data again…

Did you catch my faulty assumption?

My assumptions about the NDS data we had gotten went right out the window. We had a little bit of money left in the budget, so we asked the Virginia Tech team to go back through all of the times someone was present and identify whether the driver actually saw them and how big the group was. I gave them a 200 ms minimum, but it was mostly a perceptual task for the researcher. Human eyes are actually pretty good at this task—far better than most computers could be.

What we found was equally terrifying. At low speeds—below about 20 mph for the segment’s 85th percentile speed—pedestrians and bicycles got seen pretty well: up to 80% or so. Once speeds made it into the low to mid 20’s, it was about 50/50 until you got up into the 45 mph range—which was usually so wide open that pedestrians stuck out like a sore thumb.

We’re using a much more stringent criteria for the eye tracking study we’re working on right now at UConn—we’re very confident about misses, but giving people a huge margin for the benefit of the doubt. The same pattern seems to be holding. Miss rates are the worst between about 20 mph and 35 or 40 mph.

Enclosure seems to matter a bit. Tighter building envelopes around the road seem to increase the odds, but that’s probably because people expect to see pedestrians hanging around in places where the buildings are close to the road—which is not a bad assumption.

We see what we expect to see. Remember the Basketball Video with the guy in the Gorilla Suit?

We all know it happens. There’s an entire stream of research literature on “Looked but Didn’t See” phenomena. Police document it in the crash report narratives. They’ll write, “Driver didn’t see” or “driver claimed they came out of nowhere” all the time. I’d love to see a default checkbox added to the standard Crash Report form for all pedestrian collisions labeled: “Driver didn’t see.” No blame, just a checkbox so we can track it.

We all experience it ourselves—Near misses catch us by surprise all the time. It was funny to watch what happened after a near miss in our latest eye tracking study. One of the drivers nearly hit someone in a crosswalk—nearly, but not quite. Before the near miss, the driver just piddled along—she saw some things, but wasn’t actively looking. Afterwards, she was very intent about looking up and down every single crosswalk, making sure there wasn’t anyone standing on the sides. How long will that last? Probably not more than a few hours or days.

Bad assumptions=bad design standards

The catch is that this same faulty assumption makes it into our design criteria. There is basically nothing in the standard design requirements that addresses this type of perceptual blindness.

What we require is the possibility that someone can be seen, not whether they are likely to be seen. There are three design places where this gets addressed, mostly in a back-handed way:

1. Sight triangles. Nothing can obscure visibility at a corner making it impossible to see a pedestrian. Florida does have standards that allow for tree trunks because they don’t block much and you see around them as you move by.

2. Decision Sight Distance. This part of the standards recognizes that it may take additional time to see what’s around, so you need to have visibility for the distance that accounts for that time at an assumed speed.

3. Lighting. Florida specifically discusses the need for lighting at crosswalks, particularly where there have been problems in the past.

In general, we’re thinking from the driver’s point of view and capability is all that we measure. This paper by Roknuzzaman et. al. specifically talks about how Stopping Sight Distance (SSD), Decision Sight Distance (DSD), Passing Sight Distance (PSD) and Intersection Sight Distance (ISD) are all driver-centric metrics. Roknuzzaman and his team introduce a new metric, Pedestrian Crossing Sight Distance (PCSD), as a pedestrian centered metric that shifts the safety burden onto the pedestrian. As much as we don’t want to have to shift that burden that way, it makes some sense. They’re far more likely to care and shift behavior accordingly. Even then, the capacity to see is assumed to be enough—the probability of being seen is not considered.

Distance doesn’t guarantee observation

Notice that all of these metrics are distances. The assumption is that if we give drivers more time, then they’ll be able to see what they need to see, but it doesn’t address whether clutter, workload, or expectations impact this issue. Time—and therefore distance—may not matter at all.

Giving more time may just give drivers more ability to space out.

The problem is that we aren’t looking to satisfy a minimum probability. We need to know that drivers will see them, every single time it matters. It only takes one miss to create a tragedy.

• If drivers don’t expect to see someone, we can’t guarantee they will.

• If there’s clutter that draws their attention away from the critical locations, then we can’t guarantee they will.

• If they’re either overworked or underworked, then we can’t guarantee they will.

Those outside edges in the speed graph work well. Either drivers expect to see people and are already going slow because of it or we give them enough mental and physical space that pedestrians are ridiculously obvious and rightfully terrified of the consequences.

So what do we do?

Make pedestrians obvious or keep them protected.

• Bulb-outs.

• Intersection daylighting.

• Flashing lights.

• Signals if we have to.

• Raised crosswalks.

• Fences where compliance is terrible.

Those treatments work for different reasons, but they all do one of two things: they either make the person harder to miss or reduce the consequences when someone does. If either of those fail, then we need to keep pedestrians out harm’s way. That’s the design standard we’re missing.

Right now, we can design a street that meets every requirement for sight distance, visibility, lighting, and stopping distance and still have half the drivers fail to notice the pedestrian standing right there.

Technically, the pedestrian is visible, but that won’t matter if they’re functionally invisible.

We’ve spent decades asking whether drivers can see the person in front of them. Maybe it’s time our design standards started asking a much harder question:

Will they?

Up next:

I’m likely to poke the bear. We’re going to talk speeding bikes and e-bikes.

• Change is disruptive and overwhelming. It plays havoc with the way people see the world, much less how they experience it in their daily routines.

• Shepherding means guiding others through the stuff of life—those routines that allow for growth, nurture, and multiplication.

They're nearly opposites—or at least they used to be.

Change has become a fixture of our lives. What feels exciting for the young and uninitiated feels irritating as you get older. “Set in your ways” can be a shorthand for “I’ve had to relearn how to do this 10 times and you’re going to make me do it again?—I’m done!!! I’ve got better things to do!”

There’s only one problem with that:

And boy do we have problems.

To the man with a hammer, everything is a nail. That’s fine if you’ve got a bunch of nails, but hammering screws seems like it should work, and doesn’t at all.

The Young, The Old, and the Wily.

In his landmark book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn described scientific change as a young man’s game, but that’s not entirely true. Any kid can point out that the Emperor has no clothes. Getting him a blanket and a new tailor is a different task—and one that the child won’t be able to do.

• Youth has an advantage in recognizing the dissonance: “Why are we doing it this way? This obviously doesn’t work.”

• Experience has an advantage in diagnosis: “I know why this keeps failing, including the second- and third-order effects that aren’t obvious at first.”

• Add in some wily divergence and you have hope for reconstruction: “If you change your perspective, the problems become solvable, and we may not need to throw out everything we’ve ever known.”

The young revolutionary might be trusted because they aren’t vested in the old system. An older change shepherd can be trusted for something richer: they have lived long enough with the old system to see it differently. They can see what needs to be pitched and what needs to be preserved.

But How Do You Trust in a Transition?

Before you hand someone a sledgehammer, they need your trust—but it’s not the same kind of trust as you would give to your interior decorator. You’re not maintaining what you like. They need to help you find what has to go and what needs to stay so you can go forward.

Those wily foxes need years of experience on the edges. They need to know the terrain, but they can't have the luxury of an unquestioned allegiance to the previous paradigm. They won’t be the ones with all of of the accolades and social acceptance that unquestioned allegiance brings, but that independence sets them up to recognize and answer questions the younger critic may not even know exist.

And they must trust themselves before others trust them. That’s not automatic. Self-doubt nips at your heels relentlessly. There are two layers to that trust for a change shepherd: they have to trust the vision they’ve seen and demonstrate the ideas can be trusted even when they come out of left field. When those two converge, it’s miraculous.

There is nothing I love more than to see the light come on in someone’s eyes.

Let me give you an example:

Last week Susan Loftus, Camilla Dartnell, and I presented on the Next Gen Bike Level of Traffic Stress framework. They did most of the hard work and called me in to talk about the human psychology that underpins it. I also love facilitating, so it was a treat to help them flow with all the interaction they had already built into the presentation.

In the past, most bike amenities or facilities have been designed by the “cycling experts,”—people who regularly cycle, usually in some pretty risky places.

Our Delphi Panel of 18 international experts estimated that these high tolerance cyclists account for about 12% of the population, but they’re designing for all of the rest of us. We needed them to wedge the doors open, but if we want biking to become mainstream, what they can tolerate isn’t going to work for everyone else. We have to design for the other 68%. (About 20% won't join in no matter what we do.)

What I love about conferences are the discussions in the halls and in the sessions. Later that week over lunch, a well-known cycling designer told me that our presentation had shifted his thinking quite a bit. He had always been puzzled about why his wife didn’t share his enthusiasm for taking their children out riding with him, even in places he thought were fine to ride on. One of my slides talked directly about the sense of responsibility caregivers feel and the problems of sharing attention between the environment and monitoring the child—and he finally got it.

What will tip one person’s perspective is not always what will tip everyone else—so we cast a wide net. We also talked about children, sensory sensitivity, cognitive disabilities, aging, women, and risk aversion—all of which provide good reasons to say “nope” to the types of places that most LTS 3 and 4 cyclists would tolerate. Nowhere else in engineering do we design for the most skillful or daring. We don’t routinely build bridges that look like tightropes. Our highways feel like they’re designed for NASCAR drivers, but they’re not. We build them to be forgiving because people make mistakes. Unfortunately, that extra grace also enables a bit of NASCAR behavior.

It feels easier to retrofit a high-risk cycling amenity into the existing designs, but if we’re not serving the bulk of the population, then we’re wasting money and burning political good will. Bike lanes may not be a DEI thing, but honestly, are you surprised that folks came to that conclusion? It sure looks like checking a very expensive box.

At $12 per square foot, that’s an extra $900k per mile. Most of us can remember our first million dollar mile design. Now the buffered bike lane is a million dollar add-on that only works for the cycling margins and marginalized.

Honestly, we were happy to get anything, but it isn’t a minimum viable product for what we were really hoping for. We wanted a completely different way of interacting with each other—one that consumed less energy and connected us with each other face to face instead of through Mario-cart style interaction over steering wheels.

There are far better reasons to design for a less confident audience. Any politician can see which bike facilities will actually get most of their people to the places they need to go and which are a publicly funded gym membership. One is a politically brave transition that pays off big in terms of new tax revenue because it explodes the value of every property it touches. The other will waste public funds that are already tight. Both get a ribbon-cutting. Only one makes their job easier over time.

None of these concepts have come to me overnight. It is Professionally Found Insights, after all—anything I invent is suspect, but I’ve gotten good at finding a new way to see, often based on some very old ways of seeing. That takes time and no small amount of terror. The most compelling points have been discovered over an entire career of frustration—moments when I've see the light at the end of the tunnel and realized it’s an oncoming train.

The Overton Stretch

As much as I love this work, I often feel self-conscious about spending most of my life stretching Overton Windows—the range of shared understanding that is politely agreed upon. Contrarians like me are constantly tugging at these boundaries, hoping they'll bend gently without shattering.

This comes with a constant dread: when am I going to finally jump so far ahead that people can't keep up anymore? Every stretch erodes trust in the short term, but hopefully builds it in the long run. When an old but fresh idea fully lands with someone and their world flips right-side up, the relief of a lifeboat in the storm beats treading water.

So for my own sanity, this week I'm running down a list of what I've done to build competence in seeing differently and how I work to demonstrate trust in those new perspectives. If you’re in the business of changing people's minds and direction, you are welcome to come along for the ride.

How I find the new world

The key lies in what I’m focusing on. I am not usually staring at a broken system until the answer appears. Pain and problems make great alarms but remarkably bad teachers. My life is a treasure hunt—constantly watching for places where the alignment flows and asking why. Here are the habits that make this happen:

• I assume there is an order that can and will be found. In mathematics, a wicked problem is a messy situation where the obvious fixes only make things worse. In contrast, an elegant solution fixes multiple competing demands simultaneously. The key to solving a wicked problem is to find the perspective that uncovers the matching elegant solution—and I believe with all of my being there is always an elegant solution to be found.

• I collect patterns like a pack-rat—and I pull them from everywhere. No domain is off-limits for gathering or applying. I’m constantly hunting for systems, analogies, mechanisms, old practices, psychological principles, historical examples, theological structures, design cases, and anything else that might illuminate the core underlying dynamics that shape the way the world really works.

• I’m looking for trajectories over time, not staring at existing states. I’m constantly asking what existed before the current paradigm, what was lost when it changed, what the present model is trying to fix, and where each potential trajectory leads next. The patterns I have collected help me understand what that terrain that journey will have to traverse.

• I change the level of the question. In brain science, there are about 9 layers of analysis, and each layer impacts the ones above and below it. For instance, what goes on chemically impacts the ways neurons fire at the next level up, but it also cascades up and down through every other level. A sticky problem we recognize at one level rarely emerges from that level—if it did, we would have already found the solution and fixed it. I start asking, “What is the underlying function? What assumptions are creating this conflict? What human mechanism is actually driving the behavior? What macro issues are creating feedback loops that change the micro level?”

• I explore a pattern I’m recognizing from multiple directions. Once I think I have the underlying structure, I look for it elsewhere. Does it show up in another city, another population, another historical period, another design context?

• I give individual people the benefit of the doubt. I’m more likely to assume incompetence than malice in individual choices. I ask, “What legitimate need made this choice make sense to them?” Then I’ll ask, “How does meeting an individual need change the way the whole group operates? If everyone chose the same way, what would happen?” That leads to the next step.

• I assume those emergent patterns usually default to generating chaotic harm. This is how entropy plays out in the real world. Conspiracies happen, but far less than chaos. Let things go, and they will go badly. (This is deeply informed by my junk room, garden weeding, and any number of political scenarios I’ve watched blow up in people’s faces). I also assume there is at least one elegant solution or set of strategies. The goal is to set people up for a win-win and create positive feedback loops—but people don’t fall into these. Those synergies need to be found, shared, and reinforced without coercion.

• Then I apply the framework predictively. Once the pattern is clear and an elegant solution is coming into view, I anticipate how it will work itself out in a case I have not yet examined, and then see how well the prediction holds. If works from several different directions, then I’ve found something structural rather than merely descriptive.

Seeing it is not the same as sharing it.

Seeing the new paradigm is only the first step. If it can’t get shared, it changes nothing. The hard part is not usually finding one perfect argument. It is finding enough ways into the same reality that people can recognize it from where they already stand. A trustworthy change shepherd does not ask people to leap into a world only they can see. They build enough of the path that they can see the next foothold for themselves.

I’m a good storyteller, but I’ve realized over the last two years that people don’t remember what I say. They remember what they say. I can lead them to an idea, but unless they reach that conclusion moments before I give it to them, it never becomes their own. Much of that is instinctive and relational. You have to embody alignment with their perspective—all of their own good, bad, and ugly—before they can stretch to see a new one.

Here’s how:

• I start with something people can already recognize—an image, a behavior, a familiar frustration, a concrete place, a story.

• I honor what is due honor, even if it can’t go forward with us. Caricature serves no one. I lean towards, “That was true, but incomplete.”

• I ask a question that destabilizes the default explanation without immediately replacing it. I make the existing reality visible enough that the old explanation stops being sufficient. I let people notice the mismatch themselves.

• I move back and forth between abstraction and concrete examples until the new frame becomes usable.

• I use multiple independent kinds of evidence—research, lived behavior, history, analogy, images, humor, edge cases. I’m triangulating the new perspective in public the same way I discovered it in private, often using the same patterns that broke my own perspective.

• I give people room to generate the conclusion themselves. People must participate in exactly that way: they must see, name, discuss, or apply the ideas before I hand them the final formulation.

• I compress ideas into something memorably sticky using real-life visual, tactile, or sensory ideas—hammering screws, publicly funded gym memberships, designing for “Nope.”

• Then I make the framework do real work. I move quickly toward: “If this is true, what would we expect to see? What would we design differently? What happens in this other case?” Conceptual agreement is not enough. I want the new perspective to become an instrument they can use.

It must be an invitation, not an argument that forces them to concede.

Then I do it again and again…every week, every presentation, every conversation.

So what about you?

What have you learned about the difference between winning an argument and giving someone a new way to see?

If you’re trying to move an Overton Window of your own, what helps people trust you enough to look through it?

I’d love to know any tricks or tracks that you use to move people forward. Post in the comments and I’ll respond to each one.

AI Policy: I use AI, but not to generate text indiscriminately. I have read every sentence and they are exactly what I mean.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been staring at eye tracking as people drive—it’s fascinating in a very boring sort of way. As I was getting the literature review together, I stumbled on this wild study by Chaney, Baer and Tovar, that looked at how men and women see the world—or at least how college students see their campus. The results were fascinating.

Nearly 600 people were shown photographs of college-campus walking environments and asked to click on the parts of the image that stood out to them. This is the tamest of their heat maps—daytime in a fairly security neutral location. Some of the other pictures were pretty creepy, and at night—and the differences were pretty striking. If nothing else, the overall context of the set would make you feel a bit more wary of your world, and a lot more compassionate towards college-aged gals.

The girls were more likely to identify bushes, dark areas, and other spaces outside the walking path—particularly at night and in places where escape might be difficult. But the resulting heat maps make the difference hard to miss. Women and men were, quite literally, attending to different parts of the same environment.

That could be due to the fact that these were college kids—with all the fears that come with living in an unfamiliar urban environment with real risks. The article was published in the Journal, Violence and Gender, so they interpreted the results based on security—but I’m not as sure that it’s the only explanation.

I’m seeing a similar pattern in the eye tracking studies I’m doing right now and there’s no security issues at all. There’s no difference between the genders in how many pedestrians they see, but my overall sense is that the guys tend to focus on the roadway and fixed objects more while the women tend to explore the environment with a wider scanning range.

There is a whole line of psychological research that looks at how women and men see the world—and in general, they’ve found an average female orientation toward people and relationships and an average male orientation toward things (here’s a great paper on it by Rong, James, and Armstrong). That doesn’t mean women ignore the physical environment or men ignore people. But it does suggest that the same scene may carry different kinds of information. Who else is here? What are they doing? Where are they going? How are they likely to interact with me? Those questions can broaden the portion of the environment that feels relevant.

And that raises an interesting question for bicycle planning:

What are we assuming a bike rider is paying attention to?

We normally think about roadway attention as object based: locate the car, estimate its speed, identify the curb, find the gap. But actual cycling is highly interpersonal: Does that driver see me? Is she yielding? Is he about to turn? Does that pedestrian know I’m here? If women are somewhat more oriented toward social/contextual information on average, the traffic environment may actually impose a different attentional workload, not merely a higher subjective fear level.

Transportation engineers tend to think about the traffic environment: cars, trucks, turning movements, speed, volume, driveways, intersections—but the human being on the bicycle may be processing quite a bit more:

• A woman may be monitoring traffic while simultaneously monitoring the broader environment for personal security.

• A parent may be watching traffic while also watching a six-year-old who has suddenly become fascinated by a squirrel.

• A child may know perfectly well how to ride a bicycle but still lack the developmental ability to predict where the next hazard is going to come from.

• Someone with sensory sensitivity may be trying to filter engine noise, movement, visual clutter, horns, pavement vibration, and a vehicle passing three feet from their elbow.

• An older adult may simply need another second or two to perceive the situation, decide what it means, and respond.

Same street; very different set of cognitive tasks—and some of those tasks are deal-killers.

We’ve spent a lot of time trying to determine the Level of Traffic Stress of the bicycle facility, as if that were something we could mathematically measure in a roadway design. We have spent considerably less time asking:

Stressful to whom?

That question is at the heart of some work I’ll be presenting next week with Susan Loftus and Camilla Dartnell at the APBP National Convention.

The original Bicycle Level of Traffic Stress framework gave us an enormously useful idea: not everybody is willing to bicycle under the same traffic conditions. But the population definitions were fairly simple. LTS 1 was intended to accommodate children. LTS 2 was intended for “most adults.” The more we dug into those categories, the less satisfying they became.

Children are not merely tiny, timid adults. People with low traffic-stress tolerance are not simply inexperienced cyclists who need to toughen up. And “most adults” turns out to hide an awful lot of human variation:

• Risk tolerance.

• Sensory processing.

• Cognitive load.

• Developmental capacity.

• Reaction time.

• Responsibility for another person.

• Personal security.

• Perceived control.

All of these change the way people experience the same bicycle facility.

Who is doing the measuring?

There is another uncomfortable wrinkle here.

The people who design bicycle facilities, write guidance, serve on technical committees, and participate in bicycle research are disproportionately people who already ride bicycles. That sounds like expertise—and it is—but expertise comes with a lens.

If I am comfortable riding next to 35-mph traffic, it is remarkably easy for me to look at a buffered bike lane and think:

“That seems pretty comfortable, for me.”

That last part tends to disappear. Turns out, that “for me…” thing only accounts for about 12% of the population—that’s the percentage of riders that our expert panel estimated would be comfortable with LTS 3 or 4. The rest of us are looking at them and thinking, “Are you serious?”

Biking can’t be just about recreation.

Recreation can be a gateway drug to get some folks involved, but that group seems to love the thrill of a risky behavior to start with. You can’t build a transportation system on that basis.

See, I have a dog in this fight. I have people in my life who may never be able to drive and they need more than just an outdoor gym. Even without her issues, I’m watching community devolve into niche groups that only see each other online—and that’s not healthy.

We need to know people that are very different than us, face to face. Studies find that people with more depressive symptoms often have smaller, less interconnected, more fragmented social networks—like the online networks we have become accustomed to. The cohesive or embedded networks you build in real life are associated with better mental well-being.

The old Sesame Street song is a far older cry than we realize:

Oh, who are the people in your neighborhood?
In your neighborhood? In your neighborhood?
Say, who are the people in your neighborhood?
The people that you meet each day…

Well, they're the people that you meet
When you're walking down the street
They're the people that you meet each day.

I need that kind of world for Katie—and it’s going to be hard to get that kind of place without biking networks that work for people like her.

If we want cycling to become ordinary transportation rather than a spandex crowd activity we cannot settle for a network that assumes a high risk tolerance. We have to design for the people who are looking at the street and saying:

Nope.

And it’s a lot larger group than we thought—at least 40% of the population need LTS 1 facilities to even try. Another 20% are in the no-way, no-how crowd, and there may be some of them that are “no-way, no-how” because we’ve only given them deal-killers to use. One of Camilla’s friends lived in some of the most bikable neighborhoods in the US and never biked—we would class her in the “No Way, No How” group. She moved to Singapore and went looking for one.

What changes when we change the standard?

I’ve been lucky enough—no, blessed enough—to live in an area of town where LTS 1 is pretty routine. It’s been that way for about 20 years now. The changes in the way the community operated didn’t come overnight, but they did come.

There are major regional trails that get used by novices and athletes alike—the spine is now about 25 years old and spans about 32 miles. Those trails connect up to the back-roads that the US Olympics team uses to train, although, thankfully, they rarely use the local trails. There are multiple bike shops in my town, but that’s not where the major changes have occurred.

The first species to return were the golf carts.

We have so many golf carts now, we have separate parking areas for them, though they often take up the regular parking spaces head-on.

The bike racks are almost always used and often full. The kids bike down the street without hesitation—even streets that have been pretty wide and fast in the past. The city has added speed cushions to make that a bit better.

Parents are coming downtown just for fun, with their kids. Ice cream on a hot evening is an amazing way to get out and away from a TV. I’ve even seen suburban moms trade out their Suburbans for kids in cargo bikes at Church on a Wednesday night.

Retail occupancy rates are over 90%—stores only stay closed long enough for a new tenant to move in. They’re not struggling to stay profitable like most downtown retail—they’re thriving. Our latest kerfuffle happened when a new investment group started buying up the retail spots downtown and kicking older tenants out. Most of them have found new spots around the corner, and are filling in the blocks at the ends of the street that hadn’t been as busy. They have loyal customer bases, and that will end up adding active areas beyond the main two blocks. Scary, but good.

People come just to hang out. It’s easy to recognize the people you see regularly. The splash pad and the running lawn stay busy. Scooters and strollers are just as welcome as everything else.

I was in St. Charles, Missouri last week—it’s the other side of the river from St. Louis. The downtown is absolutely adorable: old and quaint in the perfect touristy way. I talked with one of the restaurant owners, who bemoaned the neglect the locals gave to their beautiful downtown. They get some tourists on the weekend, but the slightest let-up from the tourism district and it all evaporates. I wondered why the locals don’t spend time there.

There’s plenty of parking, but the downtown could be the type of place you go to without moving your car—a beautiful evening outing rather than a “Pile in, kids” frustration. It’s a perfect little street grid. What gives?

I think I’m beginning to see.

Main Street (in red, by the river) is surrounded by a moat. 5th Street, the yellow line four blocks north is a high-speed, 3-lane local arterial and it can be tricky to cross it. Everything south of it is LTS 1. All it takes is one major LTS 2, with a few iffy crossings and it isolates the entire area. Would I trust Katie to cross this:

Maybe…but it’s no slam dunk.

And that may be the problem with the way we’ve historically thought about bicycle Level of Traffic Stress. We tend to rate each individual piece of infrastructure and ask whether a reasonably capable cyclist can navigate it.

People don’t experience networks that way.

One uncomfortable crossing can erase four blocks of beautiful LTS 1 streets on both sides. One gap can make a downtown effectively inaccessible. One place where you have to be fast, confident, attentive, and willing to negotiate with traffic can be enough to turn an otherwise useful trip into:

Nope.

That is why getting LTS 1 right matters. It isn’t about making every bike ride perfectly comfortable. It isn’t about assuming people are incapable of learning new skills. And it certainly isn’t about building bicycle networks only for recreation. It is about recognizing that people arrive at the street with different developmental abilities, different sensory systems, different responsibilities, different ways of reading the environment, and different tolerances for risk.

Because when it does, something interesting happens.

• Kids appear.

• Parents appear.

• Older people appear.

• Cargo bikes appear.

• People start making little trips they would have driven before.

• They stop just passing through and start hanging around.

• They recognize people. They become regulars.

Eventually, you don’t just have a better bicycle network. You have a neighborhood again. You have a community willing to invest in itself. You create a place where people don’t want to leave—a place where people want to come and build something new.

That is what Susan Loftus, Camilla Dartnell, and I will be talking about next week at the APBP 2026 Conference as we introduce the NextGen Bicycle Level of Traffic Stress work.

We’ve spent a long time asking how stressful the street is. It may be time to get much more serious about creating systems that work for the least of these, rather than throwing the easiest fix at the one’s clamoring for it.

The post described Stockholm’s “Speed Camera Lottery,”—a three-day experiment conducted in 2010. Drivers who obeyed the speed limit were entered into a lottery. Drivers who exceeded the limit could still be penalized. During the trial, the average speed reportedly fell from 32 km/h to 25 km/h—a reduction of about 22 percent.

My response was:

Carrots, not sticks.

Apparently, that touched a nerve.

The experiment is easy to oversimplify. It was not a permanent Swedish traffic program. It was a short Volkswagen-sponsored demonstration developed through its “Fun Theory” campaign in cooperation with Sweden’s National Society for Road Safety. (Honestly, anything that comes out of a “fun theory” frame of mind has a better chance of working than most.) We can’t be sure, but some people say that the speeding fines actually funded the prize during the pilot.

We use fines and punishments because our brain tilts that way—the risk of pain counts double the chance of pleasure. The amygdala’s adrenaline beats the hypothalamus’ dopamine every single time—but it’s like comparing a sledgehammer to water. They both break down rock, but one destroys (and is hard to lift) and the other shapes. Your amygdala is a touchy little thing and will freak you out given the slightest opportunity—but micro-dopamine hits can be found everywhere, and they’re great for shaping behavior.

That brings up a deeper question:

Why are we so quick to punish unsafe behavior, yet so reluctant to examine the system producing it?

Every street is a behavior-change program

A credible speed limit is reinforced by everything the driver sees—not merely by the number on the sign.

Drivers respond to the threats that show up in signs, laws, and tickets, but those threats are momentary and we’re really good at figuring out which threats are real and which are not. If you want enforcement to change what’s going on, you’d better be putting a cop out on that section every 3 weeks or less—because that’s about how long it takes for people to go back to normal.

Drivers never stop responding to the full environment around them. A wide, open roadway with long sight distances tells a driver that speed is comfortable. Broad lanes reduce the sense of constraint. Large setbacks and few visible people make the road feel uneventful. Repetition encourages automaticity. Besides avoiding the risks of social embarrassment for being late, speed is its own reward.

People do what we have taught them to do, then we install a lower speed-limit sign and expect the driver to override everything else the roadway is communicating.

As Dr. Phil would say, “How’s that working for you?”

Enforcement is supposed to be there to handle the crazies—to keep them from hurting people other than themselves. When enforcement gets asked to correct behavior that the physical environment invites, it’s not fair to anybody—and they have better things to do.

The Speed Camera Lottery reversed the emotional structure of that interaction. The camera was no longer present only to catch someone doing something wrong. It also noticed people doing something right. It’s a surprisingly powerful shift.

Reward changes what people notice

Rewards do more than offer an incentive. They direct attention.

A typical driver may treat the speed limit as background information, particularly when the road itself feels safe at a higher speed. I’ve been watching eye tracking videos the last few weeks. If drivers notice a speed limit sign (and they don’t always), they usually look at their speedometer in the very next moment. That doesn’t mean they’ll change anything, but they will look.

The possibility of a reward gives the driver a reason to consciously think through the speed they’re using. If you post a 4 lane divided highway at 35 mph, it’s not going to help. You designed that thing for 50+ and it would function fine at 70. It’s too far a stretch. You’re beating a dead horse.

But if you have a city street that was accidentally designed for 35 mph thirty years ago, you might be able to talk people into 25 with a dynamic messaging sign…maybe. Depends a lot on what lines that street. For a moment, compliance could become a generous favor you’re granting that silly municipal official rather than an irritating restriction.

Of course, we can’t run a lottery at every speed camera. The novelty would wear off eventually anyway. I keep turning in McDonald’s surveys because I get a BOGO hamburger. I quit turning in Wal Mart surveys because I never win their silly lottery. We know when the rewards work and when they don’t. The same thing would happen here. A three-day (corporate branded) experiment is not enough evidence to establish a permanent policy. It does give us a vivid demonstration of a real no-brainer: people learn from the consequences built into a system.

Transportation professionals should be asking:

• What behavior does this street make easy?

• What behavior does it make uncomfortable?

• What receives immediate feedback?

• What gets rewarded with smoother movement, reduced effort or greater convenience?

• What do drivers have to fight the design in order to do?

The best reward may be a street that works

“Carrots, not sticks” does not have to mean paying people to obey the law, although there are times that it could cost us less to do that.

The reward for driving at an appropriate urban speed can mean hitting a string of green lights because they’re timed for 30 mph—then tell people that it’s designed for that. It can be a street whose visual complexity naturally sustains attention. It can be buildings, trees, crossings and human activity that accurately communicate that the driver is moving through a place rather than along an isolated transportation corridor.

We could design some streets that make sense at a low speed and recognize when we haven’t. Both of them are quite safe. It’s only when we confuse the two that people get hurt.

That’s the real lesson from the Stockholm story. People are hungry for approaches that do more than blame, threaten and punish. They recognize that systems shape behavior, even when our policies pretend otherwise.

The Speed Camera Lottery briefly rewarded drivers for slowing down. The larger challenge is to design streets that stop rewarding them for speeding in the first place—or at least be honest about it when we do.

Everything is crafted to speak. A skyline, façade, hotel lobby, historic district, public square, or brightly lit boulevard communicates an entire argument almost instantly. It tells us what kind of place we have entered, who belongs there, what sort of behavior is expected, what history matters, and what future is being promised. In an Exhorter city, the physical environment is the stage for a narrative.

That helps explain both Miami’s brilliance and its instability. It also helps explain why the modern form-based code emerged from a Miami architectural practice. Because their culture is framed around story, presentation matters to them—which makes FBC’s a natural extension of their thinking patterns.

Most zoning codes regulate land use—what goes on inside the building. Form Based Codes (FBC’s) flip that idea on its head. With few exceptions, assuming there isn’t anything annoying in terms of light, noise, or chemicals, what goes on inside the building is your problem, not something to be dictated by the public. Some FBC’s still regulate a few general land use categories, but there’s far more flexibility than most typical zoning strategies.

The outside presentation to the rest of the world is all that impacts the rest of the world, so that’s what gets regulated. The standards that the agency will hold you to are built around the streetscape and the visual presentation of the public realm. It’s a very image-based way to build a city—and one of the hallmarks of an Exhorter community, like Miami.

Miami is intensely aware of presentation. It is a city of architecture, fashion, hospitality, nightlife, spectacle, reinvention, political theater, and carefully managed impressions. Miami Beach, in particular, can feel less like a city that was gradually built than a stage set that has been continuously rewritten without ever quite closing between productions. It would be easy to diagnose all of that as image-consciousness and stop there, but image is not the deepest Exhorter gift.

A City That Understands Presentation

Miami Beach did not simply accumulate a distinctive architectural collection. Its Art Deco hotels, signs, colors, sidewalks, landscape, and relationship to the ocean work together to create an experience that is immediately recognizable. The buildings do more than contain hotel rooms, restaurants, shops, and apartments. Collectively, they explain what Miami Beach believes itself to be.

Protecting that environment is not merely a matter of saving pretty façades. At its best, preservation protects the cultural legibility of the place. Remove enough of the physical narrative and Miami Beach may continue to occupy the same island, but it will no longer tell the same story.

That instinct is profoundly Exhorter. The place understands that form shapes expectation and expectation shapes behavior. The way a street looks changes how people enter it, how long they remain, what they wear, what they believe is possible there, and what they are willing to pay for the privilege of participating in it.

Of course, the shadow is never far away. A community skilled at producing a persuasive public identity can become equally skilled at hiding whatever does not support it. Glamour may cover dysfunction. Personal relationships and reputation may substitute for transparent procedure. The right introduction may matter more than the published process. Public virtue and private dealing can drift apart while the success of the performance convinces everyone that the system must somehow be working.

Miami did not invent political corruption, land speculation, gambling, organized crime, or transactional development. Those threads were present long before the major Cuban migrations, and have never belonged to one ethnic group. Cuban exile culture did, however, add another extraordinarily powerful narrative layer—one shaped by revolution, displacement, betrayal, anti-communism, lost property, family loyalty, and the conviction that history must be remembered correctly. Like most big cities, Miami often leans left—but the moment socialism enters the conversation, they’re out.

The result is a city where architecture, politics, commerce, identity, and history are constantly being narrated. That is the cultural environment from which DPZ emerged.

The Problem Was Bigger Than the Building

Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk founded their practice in 1980. According to DPZ’s own history, they began as architects, but their early buildings repeatedly confronted them with the deficiencies of the surrounding suburban context. The problem was not merely that individual buildings were badly designed. The larger development pattern was producing the wrong relationships among buildings, streets, public spaces, and people.

The Operating System fractal I’m describing proceeds as a sequence. The fractal position prior to Exhorter is Teacher, and is grounded in rigorous study, expertise, and careful examination. When a shift occurs from one position to the next, it often requires excellence to the point of frustration in the previous step. In this case, expertise must become entrenched enough to produce things that theoretically should work but don’t—like spectacular buildings that don’t work well together. To make this transition, the innovators will use the tools of the previous season to reground everything back into reality so they can tell the right story.

Early on, Duany and Plater-Zybek spent time measuring every single detail in Key West and other enchanting towns. They knew they liked it, but were searching for why.

They were treating the town as evidence.

They watched to see where people interacted. They looked at rooftops, and how they fit together. They measured roof pitches, building widths, lot dimensions, setbacks, porch depths, fences, openings, frontage conditions, street sections, and the transitions between public and private space. The point was to discover which physical relationships repeated across places that had remained desirable, adaptable, and socially active.

An architect is usually hired to design a building. The site may be surrounded by wide roads, isolated land uses, vast parking lots, disconnected subdivisions, and drainage systems that make walking almost impossible, but the architect’s formal responsibility stops at the property line.

DPZ recognized that the building could not solve the larger story by itself.

A beautiful building placed behind a field of parking was still participating in an automobile-dominated environment. A porch facing a high-speed arterial was not creating social life merely because it resembled the porch of an older neighborhood. A carefully designed mixed-use project could not function as an actual neighborhood if the surrounding code separated every use, disconnected every street, and required nearly every person to arrive by car.

The context was not neutral. It was producing consequences.

Conventional zoning generally begins with use. It asks whether a parcel is residential, commercial, industrial, institutional, or some approved combination of those categories. The underlying assumption is that if incompatible activities are separated and the technical standards are met, an acceptable place will emerge. But regulations create patterns whether or not they acknowledge that they are doing so.

• Separate every use.

• Increase the distance between daily destinations.

• Require enough parking for every activity to function independently.

• Make the street primarily responsible for moving traffic.

• Move civic and social life away from the public realm and into private interiors.

Repeat the pattern across enough land for enough years, and automobile dependence begins to appear natural. Isolation starts to feel like privacy. The inability to walk anywhere useful becomes an ordinary feature of modern life rather than the predictable consequence of a regulatory system.

DPZ looked at the accumulated outcome and recognized the causal sequence. The regulations were already telling a story—just the wrong one.

The emerging form-based approach was therefore not fundamentally about preserving an image. The visible forms carried social instructions. The relationships among buildings, frontages, streets, and public spaces made particular patterns of movement and encounter more likely. They do not dictate the story, but they create the conditions in which certain stories can repeatedly occur.

That empirical exploration is visible in the vocabulary DPZ eventually developed. Its Lexicon of New Urbanism distinguishes building types, frontage types, thoroughfares, setbacks, public space, private space, and the many other components that form recognizable urban environments. Form-based and transect-based codes then organize those components as related systems rather than isolated aesthetic details.

This is also why the term “DNA” in their formulation works so well. DNA is not a photograph of an organism. It is a compact set of instructions capable of generating and regulating form. Similarly, DPZ’s early codes were not intended to reproduce every historic building. They selected a small number of relationships that could guide many designers and builders toward a coherent larger outcome.

Seaside and the Code Behind the Town

Seaside is widely regarded as the first fully realized New Urbanist community, and its early urban code is commonly identified as the first serious modern form-based code or its principal prototype. The code shifted attention away from regulating land use alone and toward the physical relationships that create the public realm.

That distinction sounds technical until we look at what it actually means.

A conventional zoning code may tell us that housing is allowed on a site, establish a maximum density, require setbacks, calculate parking, and limit building height. Each rule may be precise, but the collection of rules does not necessarily explain what sort of street or neighborhood will result.

A form-based code begins with a different concern: What kind of place will these buildings create together?

That question is pure Exhorter. It moves beyond the isolated object and asks what social story the cumulative pattern will produce.

Buildings placed close enough to the street create a sense of enclosure. Doors and windows along the frontage connect private activity to public life. Short blocks give pedestrians options and increase the number of possible routes. Compatible uses placed near one another make daily needs reachable. Parking placed behind or beside buildings allows the primary frontage to address people rather than automobiles. Squares, porches, stoops, and civic spaces give the life of the community somewhere to become visible.

A particular physical relationship makes one behavior more likely and another more difficult. Repeat that relationship across a street, neighborhood, or town, and the individual behaviors begin to form a social pattern.

DPZ did not simply code what a traditional town looked like. They attempted to code what made it work. That is a much more consequential project than reproducing a preferred architectural style. It treats the built environment as a causal system rather than a collection of objects.

The rules were not intended to make every building identical. They created a shared grammar within which many architects and builders could work. Nor did the grammar remain fixed after Seaside. Other practitioners tested the elements under different legal systems, climates, markets, and existing urban conditions. Some approaches emphasized frontage, others building type, street form, transect, architecture, or administrative simplicity. The developing field learned by changing the order and weight of the pieces and observing what happened.

When Form-Based Codes Become Costume

The problem comes when another community copies the visible vocabulary without understanding the causal narrative. Then the form-based code becomes one more aesthetic overlay.

It requires porches without asking whether the porch is deep enough, shaded enough, or close enough to the sidewalk for anyone to use it. It mandates windows without asking whether anything active or visible occurs behind them. It regulates roof pitches, materials, colors, and architectural styles while leaving the roadway so wide and fast that no pedestrian can comfortably experience the carefully composed façades.

The community reproduces the appearance of traditional urbanism while preserving the operating system of suburban separation. The result is costume.

This is the Exhorter shadow in regulatory form—a hint at a story long forgotten and no longer relevant. If you’re a Star Trek Fan, it’s “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.” The image remains after the causal relationship has been lost. The code can describe exactly what a building should look like but can no longer explain what human outcome the requirement is supposed to produce to any but those who remember the original story.

That distinction separates a true form-based code from architectural theme control. A healthy code or review process should be able to explain that a blank wall reduces engagement along the sidewalk, that an excessive setback weakens the spatial definition of the street, that parking placed between the building and sidewalk interrupts the pedestrian sequence, or that a long block reduces route choice and concentrates movement.

The unhealthy process says the building does not fit the neighborhood’s character. It is not compatible. It does not feel right. We’ll know the right design when we see it.

One explains consequences. The other enforces an image.

This is also where form-based codes can become contaminated by the larger administrative system. A city may adopt a coherent code intended to produce walkable urban form but leave the older departmental standards in place. Planning requires the building at the sidewalk while utilities require wide easements through the frontage. The code calls for narrow streets and tight corners while fire review insists on geometry designed for the largest possible apparatus. The form-based code tells one causal story, but all the smaller administrative stories remain intact.

Rather than replacing the fragmented system, the code becomes one more layer added to it.

The story that was meant to organize the parts becomes another voice competing for control.

What DPZ Really Coded

Form-based codes are sometimes dismissed as nostalgic because their early examples drew heavily from traditional towns. Some of that criticism is understandable. New Urbanist projects can become precious, overly controlled, stylistically narrow, or financially inaccessible. A code can certainly be used to preserve a preferred visual identity without producing the social outcomes used to justify it.

But nostalgia does not explain the original insight.

Traditional towns provided evidence. Their buildings and streets showed that certain physical relationships had repeatedly supported walkability, mixed use, adaptability, public life, and incremental change. DPZ’s work tried to extract those relationships and place them into a reproducible framework.

The important question was not: How can we make new development look old?

It was: What physical relationships allow a collection of private buildings to create a coherent public place?

That is a cause-and-effect question. And the answer could never be found by designing one heroic building at a time. It required looking beyond the object to the social sequence created by the whole.

• A building shapes a frontage.

• A frontage shapes a street.

• A street shapes repeated movement and encounter.

• Repeated encounters shape expectation.

• Expectation shapes behavior.

• Behavior, repeated over time, becomes culture.

That is the Exhorter chain.

Miami’s cultural gift was the instinctive recognition that physical form communicates. DPZ’s achievement was to push beyond communication into consequence—to identify the relationships through which the built environment does not merely represent a way of life but helps produce it.

They did not code appearance. They coded consequence.

And that could only have come from Miami.

The earlier intellectual stream that fed Form Based Codes

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out an earlier source for FBC’s on the west coast—and it naturally follows the fractal development pattern. It was a West coast source that Matt Lambert of DPZ brought back to my attention as he read an early draft of this post.

When we started this series, the first OS of Cities we discussed was Prophet, which is framed around understanding core principles and then rearranging those principles to innovate. It’s highly intellectual, but incredibly creative. It challenges a shallow understanding of truth itself in order to understand capital “T” Truth. Berkeley, like Boston, is an idea generation academia, not a knowledge verification academia, and Berkeley birthed the key intellectual foundation for FBC’s.

One of the key influences in DPZ’s approach was a Berkeley professor, Christopher Alexander. His book, A Pattern Language, laid out the concepts and principles of urban design in a theoretical way. It is a beautiful, almost textbook example of how a Prophet personality creates their intellectual frameworks. That Prophet stream supplied a way of seeing. A porch, courtyard, street, entrance, boundary, or public square could be understood as part of a larger language rather than an isolated design choice. It’s a way of thinking that feels native to me. Tell me why and I’ll be able to tell you what to do.

Unfortunately, government can’t live on theory alone. They need concrete dimensions and a shared vocabulary to create regulations—and government systems must all have those Servant-type hierarchies to function. It’s the heart of “Just tell me what to do!” It needs a teacher process to pin down the details and edges, verifying the theory and translating it into the real world. But details are boring and frustrate political types. They need something they can understand and build agreement around.

That’s where the Exhorter comes in. An architect steeped in an Exhorter ecosystem could craft a functioning, credible story. The measured elements were reorganized into a causal account of how physical form shapes movement, encounter, expectation, and public life. Relationships could be translated into enforceable rules.

Alexander supplied the Prophetic pattern language. Key West supplied the working example for a Teacher-type examination to gather evidence. DPZ transformed them into a regulatory grammar. Miss any of those steps and there’s no path to a workable plan.

Of course, once you have a plan, you have to maintain it. That’s where the next OS of communities will come in.

Up Next:

This week is the National Down Syndrome Congress, so that’s where my head will be (mostly). I did a post over on Brick City Lab that I’ll probably expand on from a transit standpoint, building out what ADA looks like beyond looking at physical disability.

Or, I’ll be working on the talk for the American Ped Bike Association in Pittsburgh, early next month. Susan Loftus and I are going to be talking about how our human psychology interacts with the built world, especially for the more cautious riders out there (like me.)

This one took some time to wrap my head around. Exhorter is often described in terms of charisma, communication, influence, or image. They are flashy, beautiful, and engaging—but they are symptoms, not causes. It doesn’t quite reach the underlying principle. Exhorter communities are asking:

They intuitively feel the string of connection between what people believe, the choices they make, the habits those choices create, and the collective consequences that eventually follow. Then they integrate that complicated causal chain into a story that people can understand and remember and built (or rebuilt) their social systems around those parables.

That is an extraordinarily important civic gift.

At the scale of a city, consequences emerge so gradually that it’s easy to miss their causes. A road widening changes travel behavior, shifting what developers are willing to build, weakening older centers and systems. That changes who can reach daily needs without a car, which eventually changes the culture of the entire community. Each decision may appear reasonable when viewed in isolation. It takes an Exhorter to connect them into a coherent account of what happened.

• We did this.

• Therefore, that followed.

• We repeated it long enough that it became normal.

• This new normal reshaped who we are.

• Do we want to continue this narrative, or choose a better one?

The Principle: Influence

Arthur Burk, who identified the original framework, associated the fourth position with reality and consequences, yet seemed puzzled by the consistently extroverted presentation of most Exhorters. He described them as “a party waiting to happen”—and they are!

For a long time, I assumed this connection to reality was fairly simple. If you understand reality but the people around you don’t, you still have to live with the consequences of their choices. That is part of it, but the mechanism is more subtle:

Facts become important when they are placed into the right sequence. Choices become clear when their consequences are made visible. A disconnected statistic may be ignored, but a story allows people to experience where the current path leads—mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

This is what makes a good story so powerful and what makes a bad story feel flat. The book, Wired for Story argues that the brain is not drawn to narrative simply because people enjoy being entertained. Story helps us simulate cause and effect. We follow what a person wants, what they believe, the choices they make under pressure, and how those choices change what happens next. The story allows us to experience the consequences without having to endure all of them ourselves. I’ve heard that called allowing someone else to pay your “stupid tax.” It’s a fitting metaphor.

Healthy Exhorters ground their lives in reality. Unhealthy ones will twist the focus in their narratives to manipulate—twisting reality out of shape—and they’re very good at it. Some of the most influential people in all history were Exhorters: Hitler, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Eva Peron, Walt Disney (not Roy), and P.T. Barnum.

Exhorter communities do this at scale. They develop strong stories about where they came from, who they are now, what threatens them, and what kind of future they are trying to create. They are exceptionally good at helping people feel the trajectory of a decision before its full consequences arrive.

That makes them extremely good at selling real estate, at every level from parcels to cities. They make their world attractive and people are drawn to them. Their property values certainly seem to grow accordingly—at least when they get their story straight.

The Diagnostics

Exhorter places are usually memorable.

They care about experience, communication, cultural identity, hospitality, and entertainment. Every detail feeds or degrades the story, so their environments are made to feel flawless. They often attract tourism, media, performance, nightlife, conventions, marketing, publishing, music, or film. Even when none of those industries dominates, the community generally has a strong awareness of how it is perceived.

Their built environments are dramatic, highly curated, or intensely symbolic. Streets, public spaces, architecture, signs, festivals, and civic rituals all participate in the story of the place. For that matter, the place must have a story—a mythos—that shapes its identity and presentation.

When they’re healthy, this focus on image is not merely for image’s sake. A façade, public square, skyline, boulevard, historic district, or neighborhood frontage can tell people very quickly who belongs, what behavior is expected, what history is being honored, and what future is being promised.

The shadow appears when the compressed story becomes detached from the underlying reality:

• Branding replaces meaning.

• Public presentation becomes more important than actual consequences.

• Projects are celebrated (and there will be many projects) because they communicate progress while quietly producing displacement, congestion, financial fragility, or a public realm no one can comfortably use.

• The mythos remains persuasive long after the causal logic beneath it has failed.

This is where Exhorter communities can become maddening to work with. They are likely to have very detailed regulations, but complying with the regulations is not always enough. The project must also tell the correct story.

• It has to fit the community’s identity.

• It has to reflect the character of the neighborhood.

• It has to communicate the proper relationship to history.

• It has to look like the future the city believes it is becoming.

The difficulty, of course, is that the community’s shared mythos may be integrated deeply into the psyche of everyone who already belongs to the culture and yet be nearly impossible for an outsider to decipher. Find the story, and you’ll find their heart.

Development Review as Narrative Review

As with the other archetypes, this theme plays out in the development review process. Nashville, Los Angeles, and California carry strong Exhorter characteristics, although they express them differently.

Nashville is negotiating between rapid growth and a cultural identity valuable enough to attract that growth in the first place. Its review process is not merely asking whether a project complies. It is also asking whether the project strengthens the Nashville story or gradually consumes it.

Nashville was an early adopter for Form Based Codes, and is now experimenting with broader design-based zoning. It is beginning to create distinctive urban neighborhoods that function almost like small towns of their own, but it is doing so within a culture whose inherited mythos remains deeply rural and relational. Nashville may be a major metropolitan area, yet people still describe it as a small town where everyone knows everyone. The stories that animate country music—belonging, loyalty, betrayal, memory, home, and the consequences of leaving or staying—still shape how the community understands change and relates to outsiders. That gives Nashville a powerful sense of identity, but it also means that becoming physically urban without feeling as though it has betrayed its own story will be an uphill battle.

It also explains why many of the most wealthy and influential people in Nashville have moved (and are changing) small towns like Franklin and Leiper’s Fork. These towns are are what Nashville would want to be if it didn’t need to be a big city. The explosion of farmettes about an hour away from the City also fits the story line.

Los Angeles makes the same instinct far more complicated because there is no single Los Angeles story. There are dozens of overlapping neighborhood identities, historic districts, political constituencies, and institutional gatekeepers. A project may be acceptable to one audience and threatening to another, so development review becomes an exercise in fragmented narrative authority. The applicant is not merely submitting plans. The applicant is continually explaining what the project means to the next group with the power to delay, reshape, or reject it. California carries that logic to the state scale. CEQA makes the causal story public before allowing the action to proceed.

The shadow appears when the demand for a complete and defensible story becomes so elaborate that it prevents the very outcomes that they say they want. California’s increasing reliance on objective standards and ministerial housing approvals is, in part, an attempt to declare that projects meeting the adopted rules should not also have to win an extended argument about whether they belong.

When the Smaller Stories Take Over

This is the key issue in Exhorter communities: Stories operate at multiple scales, but there is rarely, if ever, a master storyteller that can weave all of those stories together.

A city may have a large public story about the kind of place it wants to become. But every department, review board, neighborhood, technical discipline, and administrative unit also develops a smaller story about what it is responsible for protecting.

• The transportation department has a story about safety and flow—that comes from a traffic jam that shut down the city.

• The fire marshal has a story about emergency access, grounded in the heartbreak of a call that came a few moments too late.

• The stormwater department has a story about runoff and system capacity—and remembers the flooding and rescues that the regulation will prevent.

• Historic preservation has a pile of stories it’s trying not to lose track of.

• Economic development has a story about investment and competitiveness that includes the successes of an Olympics and the disasters of losing corporate HQ’s.

• Neighborhood organizations have stories about displacement, character, and promises that were broken before.

Each of those stories are true. Each may describe a real chain of cause and effect. The problem begins when no one is responsible for deciding how the smaller stories fit within the larger one.

Administrative units are not naturally inclined to release their narratives. Their authority, staffing, procedures, and professional identity are often built around them. A department may have been created because a past failure caused real harm, and its regulations become the institutional memory of that harm.

From inside the unit, loosening the rule does not feel like simplifying a process. It feels like forgetting the lesson of the story. So the requirements accumulate:

• Planning wants the building close to the street to support pedestrian activity.

• Another department wants it moved back for visibility or access.

• One reviewer wants smaller curb radii and tighter intersections.

• Another requires turning templates based on the largest imaginable emergency vehicle.

• Preservation wants the project to remain visually subordinate.

• Economic development wants an iconic statement. Transportation wants predictable movement.

• Utilities want uninterrupted service corridors.

None of those requirements necessarily appears irrational when viewed from inside the story that produced it. Together, they may make a coherent project impossible.

Vermont has taken this to the extreme. Act 250 requires any developer making a land use change to essentially tell his story to the local community. Even the state website about it is dominated by the historical narrative, not the present regulatory framework. It requires the applicant to explain how the project fits into Vermont’s larger story about land, settlement, community capacity, scenic identity, and the consequences of growth. The law is the institutional memory of stories that didn’t live up to Vermont’s image and ideals. The 10 criteria that must be satisfied are essentially narrative prompts that must be answered before the community will allow something to become its next chapter.

Administrative Contamination

The Incremental Development Alliance uses the term administrative contamination to describe the accumulation of requirements, reviews, and procedural burdens that migrate from one context into another until even small, straightforward projects are forced to carry the regulatory weight designed for much larger or riskier development.

The phrase is especially useful because the contamination is rarely deliberate. No single department sets out to create an impossible system. Each one adds a requirement that makes sense within its own narrative. Over time, the stories overlap, duplicate one another, and sometimes directly conflict without anyone recognizing that the whole process has lost the plot.

We touched on this problem in Prophet communities, where new rules often emerge from new principles, exceptions, or perceived technical risks. Prophet systems can become trapped in endless refinement because every newly discovered problem appears to require another safeguard.

In Exhorter communities, the problem may be even harder to unwind because the regulations are not merely attached to principles. They are attached to heartstrings tugged and remembered consequences. The regulation becomes the moral of the story. Once that happens, removing it can feel like denying the harm that created it—or worse, erasing a part of their identity.

This is why Exhorter regulatory systems can continue multiplying long after the original conditions have changed. The city’s main story says one thing. Its administrative stories produce another. The smaller narrative remains emotionally and institutionally powerful even when it no longer serves the larger civic story.

Because Exhorter communities are so skilled at explaining consequences, they may be strangely slow to recognize when their own accumulated explanations have become mutually contradictory. Each department can still explain why its requirement exists. What no one can explain is why the combined system produces the opposite of the city’s stated goals.

There are too many competing stories, each carrying enough truth and institutional loyalty that no one is willing to let it go—and no one has the authority to leave anything on the cutting-room floor, or move on to a new chapter.

There’s a strange hope here: A talented, charismatic storyteller can do just that. To the outsiders, it will look like they’re ignoring things—they are. They’re prioritizing what must be remembered in the grander story of the whole. They’re closing one story arc and opening a new one.

How to Work with an Exhorter Community

The first rule is to understand the community’s story before presenting your solution. Don’t expect them to understand your story from drawings alone. They will tell a story, but perhaps not the one you intended.

Find out what the community believes it has survived, what it is proud of, what it fears becoming, and what future it is trying to create. Listen for the causal explanations people repeat. Every community has stories about the decision that ruined downtown, the highway that divided the neighborhood, the development that “put us on the map,” or the historic building whose demolition became the symbol of everything that went wrong. Those stories may not be perfectly accurate, but they reveal the causal structure through which the community interprets new proposals.

Then explain your project as a sequence.

• We want to do this project because (insert a compelling story here).

• Because we place the building here, the sidewalk will feel like this.

• Because the entrance faces this direction, these people will encounter one another.

• Because we preserve this connection, the older neighborhood remains physically and socially linked to the new development.

• Because we handle parking this way, the project can accommodate vehicles without allowing them to dominate the public realm.

Show what the design causes.

Do not merely say that it is beautiful, innovative, sustainable, or consistent with best practices. Teacher communities may be persuaded by the evidence behind those claims. Prophet communities may be energized by their novelty. Exhorter communities need to understand where the choices lead—and it better look flawlessly consistent with their own story.

It is also important to tell the truth.

Exhorter communities can detect a weak story very quickly, but they can also become captivated by a compelling one. A polished narrative that hides consequences may succeed temporarily and create enormous distrust when reality catches up. You don’t want to become a cautionary tale.

How to Trigger an Exhorter Community

Tell them the story does not matter.

• Explain that design is objective and people should simply follow the technical standards.

• Propose a Hero building that draws attention to itself, interrupting their story

• Dismiss local identity as nostalgia or branding.

• Present a project that uses all the right visual cues but clearly produces the opposite social outcome.

• Or, perhaps (if you’re ridiculously ambitious or foolish), demonstrate that the community’s preferred explanation of itself is inconsistent with what it has actually built.

That last one may be necessary, but it should be done carefully—and you better hide a zinger of an emotional plot twist at the end of that story.

Exhorter communities often have a painful gap between the story they tell and the consequences their systems produce. A city may describe itself as welcoming while creating a public realm that excludes anyone without a car. It may celebrate authenticity while regulating every new project into a marketable imitation of the past. It may proclaim environmental leadership in one domain while throwing five others under the bus.

Pointing out the contradiction will feel less like technical criticism and more like an attack on their identity. The goal is not to destroy the story. It is to reconnect it to reality.

Exhorter Takeaways

Exhorter communities understand that places are not neutral containers. Streets, buildings, public spaces, institutions, and regulations create repeated experiences. Those experiences shape expectations. Expectations influence behavior. Repeated behavior eventually becomes culture.

At their best, these communities make those connections visible. They help people recognize where a decision leads before the consequences become irreversible. They preserve meaningful physical narratives, communicate complicated civic ideas, and build places that allow a community’s values to be experienced rather than merely announced.

Development review becomes theater. Branding replaces function. The right words and visual gestures gain approval even when the physical system produces the wrong outcome. Smaller administrative stories multiply until they overwhelm the larger narrative the community claims to be pursuing.

Exhorter communities will always care about appearance—and they will care a lot. The question is whether it can explain why the appearance matters, what behavior it encourages, and what future it makes more likely. Their shadow appears when the story becomes more important than the truth it was meant to explain.

Up Next:

As you might guess, an Exhorter community is tailor made for a form based code—in fact, form based codes could only have come from an Exhorter community, and they did. But that is a story for next week.

Fear or Tension are not good driving companions

Some drivers were really nervous. Others were pretty relaxed. Most of them got more relaxed the longer we had them drive. You can see their tension in their visual search patterns. They see every sign and stare at the road, but there’s not a lot of reserve flexibility to respond to unexpected things. They slam on the breaks for short yellows. They see the crosswalk sign before they see the crosswalk—at least in the high speed sections. They’re not looking around at anything other than the road. You can almost feel their knuckles turning white. I would call their visual search patterns very road-centric. Whatever is right in front of them is what they focus on. You would think that was a good thing, but it feels comparatively unsafe.

There were others that hadn’t driven that area in a while and were excited to do so. Their eyes were everywhere. Their focus remained at or above the horizon. They still glanced down at the lines and over at some of the signs, but they could see the gestalt far better. Was that distraction? Probably. It felt a lot more comfortable.

Could that be their normal? Maybe—for both drivers—but I doubt it, or at least I hope not. The first felt exhausting. The second made me tired by the end of it.

Then there were the folks that were genuinely familiar with the area. They saw what they needed to see. They didn’t miss much. Although they didn’t fixate every speed limit or warning sign, they responded as if they had. No surprises. Few, if any abrupt changes. Even things that were surprising—and there always are a few things—were handled without skipping a beat. No tension, no hesitation—seamless, effortless. Much better.

We’re looking at the striping a lot more than I expected.

The literature says that we keep our lane position using our ambient vision. As long as the road remains within about a 20 degree angle of our focal point, we’re good. We don’t need to actually focus on the lines—they just need to be in our visual field. That was what the best Human Factors experts theorized and it’s what we’ve been assuming for a long time. That’s not really how it works. Driver’s regularly pop back to the striping using their focal points—that 2 degree or less center point of your vision you use to read—for the most fleeting of moments. Some drivers regularly bounce from the outside line to the middle to the inside line, over and over—at least until there’s someone in front of them. Other drivers only do that every few seconds, but all of them I’ve seen so far do it. It looks about like this.

Sometimes they glance at the center, sometimes the center of the lane, but they always come back to it.

Eyes are Fast.

One of the biggest things I feel as I watch these videos is that a few seconds in driving feels like an eternity after watching eye tracking. I knew that in my head. I’m still shocked by it as I watch. Human eyes don't move like a security camera slowly panning across a scene. They jump.

For instance, glances down to the speedometer are rare in an urban setting, but—depending on the driver—are far more common in higher speed or highway settings. Some people rarely look in urban settings at all. A nervous driver will see every single speed limit sign and immediately check their speedometer—or at least will check it as they get up to speed. More relaxed drivers skip most of those signs and skip looking at their speedometer until they’re on the open road.

All of them look ridiculously quickly down at their dashboard. This has been measured in simulators (and we’ll be measuring it too), but glances as short as 70 milliseconds were seen—which is far lower than the threshold for conscious thought. Typical glances were around 300 ms, which is closer to consciousness.

Get out of my way!

The other observation is that we don’t like our view blocked. It’s frustrating. Our eyes trace the edges of the vehicle ahead looking beyond it. We look at the back of that vehicle, especially as the speed is changing, but mostly we want to see around it. We might be following at a second or two—and our glances may remain around that distance the vast majority of the time—but we’re always bouncing out farther ahead to anticipate what’s coming.

There will be more.

I’m doing my best to watch through all of the videos—at least all of them where we don’t tell them what we’re looking for—but it takes time. I’ll probably pop back on and give you some updates as I find them.

It begins, as all good legal documents do, with a statement of true principles that we held as self-evident upon which we could attempt to build a society:

• Equal value—we may not always be valued equally by the marketplace, but each one is created to be intrinsically valuable, regardless of who they are or what they can contribute.

• Equal rights—also given by God, but more hope than entitlement: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Potential, but requiring a bit of DIY.

It declares that government must create the space for that potential, based on the willing consent of the governed. It continues with a detailed list of the offenses against these principles. It lists the patience with which they have borne these offenses, and provides a bill of divorce dictating the terms: “enemies in war, in peace friends.”

The other tyranny

If you read through the Declaration of Independence, they’re fighting hard against the first. After 250 years, we’re struggling with the latter.

The Founders declared independence from a distant autocracy that made decisions without understanding local realities. Sound familiar? An autocratic bureaucracy isn’t all that different from a democratic one—except toppling an autocrat is a lot easier than upending the sedimentary rock of incremental legislation. Or chiseling away at fossilized regulations that were intended to cement an ideal in place for all eternity.

Living, organic systems don’t ossify.

Over 250 years, we’ve created layers of institutions to solve real problems. Those institutions have accomplished remarkable things—but they can also become disconnected from the people they’re meant to serve. The transportation profession wrestles with this constantly: standards, manuals, warrants, funding formulas, environmental review, liability, procurement...Every rule was written for a reason. Each regulation was intended to address a specific problem, but they take over like arthritis in aging joints, fossilizing what was once flexible—adding costs, layering in time. When the process becomes the goal, it can unintentionally constrain the very freedom it was intended to enable.

The Declaration wasn't merely about removing a king. It was about returning responsibility to people closer to the problem. Living systems don't merely need freedom from oppression; they need the wisdom to adapt.

Today, the problems feel far more intractable—something to be chiseled at rather than something that can be overturned. The institutions that shape the way we function and move have become the tyrants to overthrow—or not. Not every regulation is bad. It’s a lot easier to identify a target in a man than discern what is helpful and what isn’t in legislation.

The Next Culture

More importantly, our culture has dramatically changed. At the time, they were in a stewardship and investment culture. The entire British Empire was an exercise in optimizing the utilization of resources—and the colonies flowed in that theme. Much of the Declaration of Independence was aimed at the ways that people and resources were being wasted through George’s failed stewardship.

In the early 20th century, we moved to a systems culture—that helped us scale to become who we are today. The regulations we created shaped whether we are free to destroy ourselves or free to thrive. They were generated using systems architecture mindsets—but that same systems culture is currently strangling us.

We’ve outgrown it, but the systems remain in place, cementing us into an amber-like tomb.

I don’t have any idea, but it’s likely to be far more local than anything we’ve seen before. Institutions are essential, but they need people willing to ask, "Is this still helping us accomplish the purpose it was created for?" and those questions will have very different answers depending on your local community. Once those questions are asked and answered, you still need to figure out how to align well with those around you—the others that aren’t you, but bump up against your world.

Transportation forces the question

Like our circulatory system, we’ll need connections that create the interfaces where alignment can be created. Transportation is one of those quiet systems that determines whether freedom is theoretical or practical:

• Can you get to work?

• Can your child safely reach a friend’s house?

• Can an older adult remain connected after giving up the keys?

• Can a person with a disability participate without depending on someone else?

• How do these physical connections create or impede connections within society?

Those aren’t just transportation questions—they’re questions about how fully people can experience the independence we celebrate.

We did a decent job of answering the systems question in the last century, but we can do better. The regulations we move forward with can reconsider alignment at a far finer resolution. We can opt for tailor made rather than one size fits all. We can determine where the friction occurs and target the friction rather than the friction maker.

A different type of petition

Can we make it to another 250? That’s hard to say. We’ve been flexible enough to make it through some pretty tough transitions, but we have become proud—and stiff necked. Flexibility isn’t exactly our strong suit when we hold on to that type of mindset.

Two hundred fifty years ago our predecessors declared the kind of nation they hoped to build in the form of a prayer of petition to the Divine Judge of the world. They had a defendant to blame and a solution in mind. We inherited that declaration.

We have a far more difficult task. We have seen the enemy, and he is us. That calls for a different type of petition: repentance, or better phrased: a changing of the minds. We can recognize that we have gotten ourselves into a pretty pickle, but we’re going to need help seeing where we went wrong—and even more help understanding how to get it right.

One thing is for sure: we didn’t get here overnight and it’s not likely we’ll get out of it that quickly either. We'll need the same courage to question ourselves that they had to question a king.

• They petitioned because they believed they were right.

  • We petition because we don’t know all the places we’ve become wrong.

• They asked for justice.

  • We need wisdom.

• They sought freedom from a tyrant.

  • We need freedom from our own rigidity.

This is part and parcel of growing up. Kids ask their dads to fight their battles and rescue them from their enemies. As you grow up, you find that the problems are all of your own making. Dad can and will help, but it may be your responsibility to do the repair. Unfortunately, teenagers are notoriously bad at asking for advice.

We will need far more humility than our forefathers began with, appealing to a Judge above ourselves for much more than injunctive relief. We will need settled serenity to recognize what should remain unchanged, the courage to adapt all that should change, and the humble wisdom to know the difference.

Perhaps the greatest challenge isn't changing our systems. It's recognizing that we need to.

A few years ago, a friend of ours had to retire from truck driving. His back was shredded and he often needed a walker or a cane. In his boredom, he began walking the local mall—first only a few stores, then one hallway, then a full route—today he walks it multiple times and his back pain is all but gone.

My husband has struggled with chronic back pain for decades. A car crash in the 1990’s earned him two surgeries and low-grade pain. A second crash—while he was going 75 on the Beachline—earned him two artificial disks in his neck, 3 fused vertebrae and 4 more surgeries. Over the last 6 months, he has started walking. It’s just a few miles or so each day, but now the drive to Tampa and back doesn’t automatically have him reaching for heavy duty pain pills.

We’ve known for decades that health outcomes in suburban environments are terrible. Lifespan is shorter. Obesity is out of control. Chronic illnesses are epidemic. Stores never needed mobility scooters for their customers when I was young. They do now.

Suburban DC visitors are in for a shock

Over the next few weeks, DC will be flooded with visitors from all over the US for the 250 year anniversary of our country and the National State Fair. It’s hard to see how big the National Mall is when you’re standing on it. There’s a strange optical illusion there: the Washington Monument sits on a hill that visually obliterates the normal curvature of the earth. It looks like it’s right next to you, no matter where you stand. It’s actually about 2 miles from the Capital to the Lincoln Memorial. Many of them will struggle to see it all because it’s a lot bigger than they expect. I have a funny mom story about that but it will wait for another day.

All of these suburban folks will be visiting from all 50 states and many will wake up the next morning with a Disney rash around their ankles—a combination of heat, poor circulation, and longer than normal walks that creates red blotches that will scare just about anyone. A quick internet search—or ChatGPT—may save some of them an unnecessary trip to the ER, but it’s pretty frightening to wake up to.

I was there earlier this week to walk it. My right foot has bothered me for weeks and I tripped last weekend. Add to that the Fibromyalgia I’ve fought for years (and I’m winning—thank you very much) and I was only able to make it about half the way—12,308 steps to be exact—before I knew that had to stop. I found a surprising accommodation: one of the Capital Bikeshare e-bikes.

No, I’m not supposed to use them on the sidewalks, but I live in Florida and bikes on roads get people killed. Put me in the lower end of the cautious bikers because I’m not about to add to the pain I already have. I also know how to ride a bike at a slow walking speed.

An hour of biking later and I had made it around the rest of the Mall and the ridiculously large closed off area around the White House—and the mileage on the bike read at least 3 miles less than when I picked it up. I’ve been walking with my husband pretty regularly, so a few miles (and low 5 digit step counts) are not out of my current range. There was a time that they were. When I got my breakthrough in Fibromyalgia and went back to school, two 5,000 step days would lose me a day in bed. It took several years to get the stamina back and it’s easy to lose it even now.

When you live in a world where driving and sitting dominate your lifestyle, it’s easy to decondition. The walking that most city-dwellers take for granted just doesn’t fit into the hours in the day for a suburbanite. When you’re spending your 60-90 minutes of travel time sitting instead of moving, you’ll need to choose to allocate time to exercise. I lived in Maine for a summer and biked 4 miles in and out to the University each day. By the end of the summer, I looked gorgeous. Once I got back to my suburban apartment in Gainesville, I couldn’t sustain it. Life gets in the way.

One of the many golden nuggets of truth in Theo of Golden (which I highly recommend for your summer reading pleasure) is this one liner, delivered by a homeless woman:

You could phrase it, “move it or lose it,” but the truth is the opposite. If you don’t move it, you’ll never lose it.

This is another one of the brutal costs that driving silently robs us of in a less than walkable world. Driving steals our health and shortens our lives. It isolates us—and lonely people have safety nets full of holes and statistically die far earlier than they should. It’s not the kind of harm that you see after a single day. It accumulates slowly and feels inexorable. Far too many end up in mobility scooters far earlier in life than they need to.

If you live in a place that looks like this, you probably won’t need these helps until you’re in your 90’s. If not, it’s going to be a lot earlier.

More than one obesity epidemic

Can you fix it? Individually, you can join a gym or run your suburbs—but that takes even more time away from your family. It’s takes a lot of effort get that exercise in when you live in a suburb—but it’s an effort you shouldn’t need to expend. We were made to have walking as an ordinary part of an ordinary day.

Can we fix our obese land uses—huge shopping centers and grocery stores surrounded by heat island parking lots—it’s about as easy to fix that as it is to lose weight without Zepbound. Can we find a weight loss drug for our planners and politicians that will shrink the scale of our world like these new drugs shrink the number on the scale? I don’t know. Mostly it seems to take hard work: connections, incremental development, and a lot of getting out of people’s way.

Once it goes on, it’s a lot harder to get it off than to keep it from going on in the first place.

We’ve come to the third position in the hidden operating systems of communities. To recap, we’re exploring how to understand the unique genus loci of a place using the fractals of 7, 2, and 3—and today I’m looking at the third position in the Fractal of 7.

I’m going to reiterate that each of the positions can apply at each scale, which means that each community may have overlays operating simultaneously. Teacher communities in a prophet state or giver state will carry the same underlying motivation but may respond differently because of the impact of the regional tone.

Each community has a key principle or question that it organizes itself around. A few weeks ago, we looked at the first two positions—Prophet and Servant. Prophet communities are asking about the nature of the world and the principles that run it. Servant communities focus on relationships, but do so within defined hierarchies.

The Teacher Principle: Responsibility

Teacher communities are still very relational, but they care more about the qualifications of those who are above and below than just the office itself. Legitimacy is the name of the game.

The key question the community is asking is:

Credentialing, competence, and credibility are all that matters. What is wild about this drive is that expertise alone is never enough. Even an expert will be required to bring receipts. Teacher communities organize around responsibility. Their core challenge is determining who can legitimately be trusted with it.

The Diagnostics:

Teacher communities will multiply institutions: hospitals, universities, banks, churches, and research institutes. It often includes military institutions, but not operational military bases: command, logistics, or training centers. Both Prophet and Teacher communities have lots of universities, but they’re very different from each other. Teacher institutions are the “keepers of the flame,” not the innovation centers that are common in Prophet communities.

Their job is not to discover new truth so much as to refine, preserve, verify, and transmit what is already known. They delineate the acceptable knowledge base and credential the experts. Their bibliographies are longer than their papers. They will have multiple church denominations because every time one expert disagrees with another expert, it creates a new following.

Their park systems are usually quite good and are often named in honor of specific experts or leaders that shaped the community. Regional or extra-regional transportation systems are common because they are driven to pull in expertise beyond their own region.

Examples:

All of New England is a teacher region as is the state of North Carolina and the cities of Baltimore and Cleveland. I live in a teacher region—both Orlando and Orange County are Teacher communities, with a lot of overlap. Since I live in this type of community, I've seen it work in very fine detail—both its good side and its shadow.

For both Orlando and Orange County, the legitimacy of every project is crafted through a gauntlet of expert evaluations. The irony is that even the experts need to bring receipts—a long list of experts and other teams that have tried the same strategies successfully.

The city and the county handle these dynamics a little differently.

Orlando keeps its expertise largely in-house. Until recently, Orlando had design studios that cover each neighborhood. If you want to do a traffic study for a project in the city, most jurisdictions allow the consultant to run the regional model on their own. Orlando had its own model that it kept updated with every project that was approved. You could still do a study, but most of the working parts were already done for you (and they charged you for that).

Orange County keeps quite a bit of expertise in-house, but they’re far more likely to lean on the best and brightest consultants they can find—and even then, they are skittish about trusting them. This is largely a trauma response. A few decades ago, a new political leader came in, wanting to streamline their systems. In the process, she made the mistake of publicly dressing down one of the technical staff on camera, for the whole world to see. From there, the administrative systems multiplied accountability structures. They already had a huge number of review committees. Those committees grew exponentially from there—both in the number of committees and the number of people on each committee.

Whether because of that incident or because it reflected a broader institutional wound, Orange County increasingly developed overlapping accountability structures. Review became more collaborative, more cross-checked, and more distributed among multiple experts. It’s not unusual to see a committee with more than half a dozen people on it. If their politicians will not trust them, then they will distribute that accountability as widely as possible to keep the blame from falling on any specific staff person.

Teacher systems have trust issues, by design. They are made to verify information and will not take anything for granted. Add insult to that and you’ll get a bureaucratic slog. The current leadership is trying to restore some trust, but it’s an uphill battle.

Strategy:

In a teacher community, the rule is:

And of course, that data better be from someone established, credentialed, and trustworthy.

I wish I had recognized these dynamics earlier. I asked a friend about this issue the other day and she immediately questioned whether I had the expertise to discuss sociology and whether I had looked into the available literature on change management. I have, but probably not as much as she would prefer. The response was so on the nose, I almost laughed out loud.

I’ve given them innovative solutions that a prophet community would have loved and run with. Instead, I often have gotten asked, “Who has tried this before?” Honestly, my typical response would often be something along the lines of, “If you wanted something someone else had done, why did you ask me?” That’s not helpful.

They will love something innovative—that someone else has already tried. Teacher communities want to be first, but they prefer to be best. They are not going to trust even the best expert with something that hasn’t been tried yet. If someone else has proven the concept, they will often improve upon it—so bring bibliographies. Expect that they will aspire to something cutting edge but will not trust it. They are not early adopters, but they can be second tier adopters.

From a development standpoint expect that the review will be long, technically sophisticated, and may very well miss big picture details in the process. They can become so focused on verifying the individual components that they lose sight of how those components interact as a whole.

How to trigger people in a Teacher community.

Sometimes the best diagnostic is what flips people out. As important as it is to know how to work with them, it’s more important to know what not to do.

For Heaven’s sake, never question their credibility, particularly in public. Teachers do not move quickly and you will have just bought yourself triple the amount of delay and about 5 rounds of response to comments. An offended teacher will find others to share the accountability with—which will double the cooks in the kitchen. Of course, trying to pressure them to hurry up will make them go so much faster…(not.)

An applicant says: “Just trust me.” The administrator hears: “I have no evidence and I’m going to pull the wool over your eyes.” If you get frustrated and say, “Just do it…” they’ll hear, “Ignore due diligence.” They will not confuse confidence with credibility. Without data to back you up, they’ll just see some cock-sure egotist that they’re itching to take down a notch.

Try saying, “Experts are the problem.” You might as well drop a 20 megaton nuclear bomb. Your life is not going to go well.

There’s only one thing that will irritate a teacher more than all of these other things: Bring them a problem and a novel solution (that will work), but don’t bother to look up how others have fixed it. They occasionally love finding new strategies, but finding out that someone already figured it out before they did will just make them annoyed and jealous. They might have had a tiny moment of joy in the discovery, which then gets blown by someone else beating them to the punch. The fact that you didn’t do your homework only adds to the annoyance. No, that doesn’t make sense. They wouldn’t have trusted the new thing anyway, but they’ll still get frustrated.

Teacher Takeaways:

Teacher communities are trying to determine who can be trusted with responsibility. Their preferred tool for doing so is verification. If you know that going in, you can work with it. If you don’t, you’ll get blind-sided by the repeated requests for more information.

Ironically, both of the two archetypes that value information have the same potential issue. Prophet communities dream and rarely live up to those dreams. Teacher communities want proof it will work—which means endless studies. In the end, it takes forever for anything to get done.

Speed is not always an asset in the development world. Teacher communities are often beautiful—thoughtfully crafted—and stable. It may take a long time to get through the process, but what you’ll end up with can be well worth the extra effort. Here in the US, we have far too temporary a building habit. They can make that work, but they can also settle into creating things that last.

They have excesses but they usually learn from their mistakes. Many of the most influential centers of learning globally are teacher communities. They also solidify information and practice for other communities.

Be trustworthy, and surround yourself with trustworthiness and credentials and you’ll do great.

Break that trust and it will take a long time to regain it.

The texts came through one after another over the airplane WiFi. Katie’s driver couldn’t find her. He had arrived early, then he left before the scheduled pickup time. And now my daughter—with Down syndrome—was stranded.

Normally, I get those calls. I’m not supposed to, but I do. They’re supposed to call her. This time I couldn’t help. It is remarkably difficult to solve a transportation problem from seat 17A of a commercial airliner.

Ironically, I was out of town for a research review meeting. The topic: understanding and measuring disability needs for transit.

Fortunately, everything worked out—because someone added an extra hour to their commute home to rescue her. I owe her big-time. As I sat there staring helplessly at those messages, I found myself thinking about how many families simply stop trying. Their kids—and their parents—die a little more every day from boredom and isolation.

Everyone talks about transportation as a question of movement. For our family, it’s a question of trust.

• Can Katie get where she needs to go?

• Can she get home again?

• Can we depend on the system when we’re not there to rescue her?

This spring has been all about movement for me. The travel list has been delightful and a bit overwhelming. No, I’m not slowing down—I thought I was, but it’s not happening. That hits harder for us than most empty nesters. Sure, PJ’s gone, but Katie’s not, and her schedule has gotten just as packed as ours. She volunteers twice a week, usually has a class once a week, and board meetings or socials usually once or twice a week.

That means we’ve been stress testing Lynx and their ADA paratransit systems—and for more than just ourselves. Our local support group, the Down Syndrome Foundation of Florida, has just completed a 12 week in-person course with 15 adults, teaching them how to successfully walk, bike, and take transit. That was another level of stress testing that had some pretty rocky incidents.

We made it through getting everyone signed up and into the paratransit systems, which is a hurdle of its own. They figured out how to use the downtown circulator, the on-demand downtown shuttles, the light-rail system, and ultimately were required to do at least a few trips on the paratransit system. Fixed route will come in the follow-up class. It was just too much to try for the first time through. We had multiple families that got stuck on paratransit trips for hours either due to high demand or genuinely stupid routing. A block or two diversion could have saved at least an hour in more than one case.

If it can’t get someone where they need to go consistently, safely, and within something approaching a reasonable amount of time, it gets removed from their slate of options to make that trip. We’ve got backups on our backups, but sometimes the failures get pretty serious. Lyft and Uber can help in a pinch, but they’re not good long term solutions. For those without other options, it’s the only way. There will come a day when she is one of those folks.

So why is transit in a suburb so hard?

For transit to work you have to have somewhere that the people and the bus can meet. In a city, the land use has clusters where the activity happens, then it peters out a bit before it ramps back up to another center. You can pick folks up at the center and people know where to walk to get the bus. There’s a bit of give and take for both.

In a suburb, every block, every road, every location is about the same. The land use oozes together like slime with miles of the same before you get to anything. No one knows where to gather to get to a bus, so the bus has to stop over and over.

People are pretty resilient and will figure things out eventually. Low income folks walk at times or end up getting an e-bike or a scooter when they can’t afford a car. That will get them a few miles, but it’s not all that safe—and certainly won’t work for a single mom with toddlers.

And it won’t work for Katie.

We live about a mile from our local downtown, and with a great sidewalk network, that means she’s in great shape for getting there and back. Our region is a lot larger than her one mile stomping grounds. The fixed route bus doesn’t go there. It should, but that pushes the bus route beyond an hour, which messes up the headways. Can they fix that with a few less stops? Maybe. We’ll see.

The trips that just don’t get made.

A car-based society leaves a lot of people out. Of course, folks like Katie get the worst of it, but she’s not the only one, and the problem is coming for all of us. The most beautiful suburban McMansion becomes a prison when daughter takes your T-bird away.

Transportation planners often talk about mobility as if it begins with buses, trains, and roads. It doesn’t.

Mobility begins with land use.

The best mobility strategy is a solid urban land use plan—one that has concentrations rather than snot-slime single-family separated from tangles of retail; one that has a network rather than a bunch of dead ends. When you’ve got walkable clusters—internally connected concentrations of land use that can be accessed by walking, spaced out from each other a bit—you can figure out where to put the stops. The bus doesn’t take forever because it doesn’t stop everywhere. Even when you have to drive, you don’t need to drive as far.

And people like Katie get options.

Because this isn’t really a story about transit. It’s a story about independence. One day, Katie will need to navigate much of the world without me standing beside her. So will millions of older adults who eventually hand over their car keys.

My typical greeting of “Hey Beautiful!” or “Hey, Handsome!” is often greeted with a chuckle and a bashful smile. A good friend tried to hand me his glasses yesterday because I obviously needed them more than he did. Believe it or not, I actually mean it--I believe the human spirit is the most beautiful thing in the world. People usually tell white lies or polite fiction to make those around them more comfortable. Most are rarely fooled but appreciate the consideration.

Transportation engineers unwittingly have fallen into the white lie/polite fiction trap as well but it has some serious negative consequences. Here’s the way it plays out:

The roadway design standards dictate a wide open corridor, but since we would like people to be walking or biking on it, the community stipulates a ridiculously low speed limit. The jurisdiction posts a white lie that 35 is an appropriate speed limit for that corridor, but no one is fooled. Despite the 4’ bike lane that probably cost an additional half million per mile, it gets used about once a month by a daring member of the spandex crowd or a South American visitor that hasn’t figured out the perils yet. The multi-use path is set back far from the road, next to the subdivision walls. Twice a week you might see a jogger or two chugging away for their morning run. There are no destinations for a half a mile that anyone would want to visit on foot. Nevertheless, it is posted for heavy enforcement and about every quarter the local police run a speed trap, dropping the speeds near the posted limit during that time. Otherwise, the average speed is 45+ and the 85th percentile is well over 50. Crashes are basically non-existent, but not because of the low speed limit. What few crashes are there happen because some are going 35 for fear of a ticket while most are going 50 and getting irritated.

I’ll grant that setting speeds based on the 85th percentile speed alone is not ideal, but divorcing the speed limit from reality isn’t good either. As designers, we are loudly declaring what the appropriate speed is by what we build, but we often don’t realize what we’re saying. The question becomes, how can a designer understand what they’ve just told the driver--is there a Rosetta stone that will help us translate our symbols to ourselves?

The good news is that the research we did at UCF created that Rosetta stone. These new tools and new psychological frameworks can allow engineers to have a better understanding of what drivers will believe is a realistic speed based on what the driver sees in the roadway. In testing, it’s usually within about 3 mph of the midblock 85th percentile speed, especially if you get the visual width of the corridor right.

The formula has 3 main dimensions: the visual width of the corridor, the doorway density (a proxy for human interaction potential), and the block length. When it’s off, it’s usually overshooting the estimate for a good reason, like tourists who are lost or jam conditions that depress the 85th percentile speed, but not the free flow speed.

This type of tool makes the design and policy decisions abundantly clear:

• Clear zones everywhere? That’s fine, but there’s no way you’ll get a free flow speed down in a walkable range--that’s not what walkable corridors look like.

• Subdivision walls? Same issue: no people, no reason to slow down.

• Short blocks, tight corridors, lots of doorways up close? You might get a lower operational speed than you post.

Here’s where the rubber hits the road. If your community wants to optimize vehicle throughput on a corridor, that’s fine, but it’s an intentional choice that is at odds with a multimodal environment. Pedestrians and cyclists will not see it as safe and won’t come--they shouldn’t. Drivers won’t slow down. You don’t really want them to.

If, on the other hand, you want to shift modes away from personal vehicles to avoid congestion or reduce your ecological footprint, you need to have corridors that are not optimized for the vehicle at all. That may mean telling your fire department they can’t buy a ladder truck for a 8 story building because you don’t have any. You’ll need to reconsider standard 12 foot lanes and building setbacks while you’re at it.

If you are blessed with a pre-WWII grid network, you can have both. There’s redundancy that will support both strategies. If you’re retrofitting 1970’s suburbia, it’s going to be uphill, but it’s still doable when you think small, take advantage of natural mid-block crossings, and create safe connections between your nodes. Those 1970’s fire zones in your strip shopping centers can make great bike paths.

This is doable, but we have to quit lying to ourselves.

Up Next:

Still in writing and book launch mode, so I’m hoping to get the next in the series on community types and working with their politics out by next Friday. We’ll see how that goes. I may just have cool new pics from DC, but that’s another story…

I love their bookstores.

I love their little old churches.

I love their chocolate shops.

My daughter in love is tickled by yarn stores. (Qiviut at $145 for a one ounce skein? My son balked on that one but it's so soft!)

I see the pizza shops and chuckle when show up as often as coffee shops.

Mostly, I love the little general stores. Just about every place I go, I try to get a decent picture or two of local retail. I did a post on neighborhood retail a few years ago and those little holes in the wall still have my heart. What I love about them is the relationships they build and maintain.

The sweet shopkeep here described this spot as the TJ Maxx of Skagway—and I did find a cute everyday shirt here.

So why can I only find them on vacation?

The 1990’s were hard on local grocery stores, and probably for good reason. Many of the anti-trust regulations on the books just aren’t enforced for grocery chains or general retail, which makes things easier on the consumer, not harder. Besides their advanced distribution and warehouse management systems, the larger chains can scale a manufacturing business lickety split—get your product into a WalMart and they’ll order millions of your widget. It’s almost “winning the lottery” money, and that means economies of scale and far lower costs.

It’s easy to turn your nose up at places like Walmart or chain stores, but when your discretionary income is razor thin, places like that are make or break for single moms and low income wage earners. When Katie is living on her own, she’s going to have to try to live on $900 a month. She won’t have the luxury for much more—and she’s not alone.

These days, Amazon and direct to market are eating the chain systems alive. Local manufacturers can show up there, but the chains don't usually make anything they can post there. The only way they can compete is to drop the scale of their stores and distribute them throughout the landscape. The only thing that will get you to bypass Amazon is a personal connection. If you’re less than a mile from the store—and you hire friendly, customer-sensitive people—you’ve got a fighting chance. Otherwise, you’re toast.

There are places where local scale general stores still work: areas where the entire landscape is rural or isolated tourist spots. WalMart still makes it there, but they’re the only ones, and even they don’t make it there that often.

What makes that work?

They obviously know their customer and tailor everything to their needs as closely as possible. When I visited Halifax, the little corner store in Hydrostone would go around the neighborhood during snowstorms, taking orders that they would deliver later. If you needed milk, or sugar, or a TV dinner or two, they were close enough to save you a trip to a bigger chain.

Many times, it’s a captive audience. In tourist towns, it’s usually a remote enough location that locals have few other options for day to day needs. They might still go down the mountain or out of town for bigger trips on a monthly basis, but those trips are rare. Juneau has the smallest Costco in the world. When they got their first McDonalds, the line was several miles long and they ran out of food. Someone even flew down from Skagway and ordered 800 hamburgers and took them back to hand them out—there are only about 850 people who permanently live there. In Skagway, our bus driver described the local Ace hardware store this way:

They can’t say that because they’re leaving people without what they need. They are careful to have what people need, particularly in the off-season when it’s hard to get around. I walked around. They’re pretty crammed and comprehensive.

I got the same sense in the general store on Beech Mountain, or the stores in any small town in New Hampshire. Theyve learned from experience and personal requests. They make a pile of money in the busy season from the tourists, which offsets their costs for the locals. Alaska tax structure even takes this into account. Sales tax pops up to 8% in the tourist season and drops to 2% in the off-season.

Is this transferrable?

Sometimes—and maybe. It’s a rough question.

A few weeks ago, I spent some time talking with my new friend, Sharon Woods, who is a bona-fide retail expert and economist. She thinks that Publix’s strategy of dropping the store scale and distributing through the landscape isn’t dropping the size enough. They’re building too much and going to end up outrunning their profitability. I’m not seeing that in real time yet, but she’s far smarter about this than I am.

Walgreens and CVS have tried that strategy and have had to pull back quite a bit. If any retailer had a chance at pulling off a general store at a hyper-local scale from location alone, they had thrown enough money at it to succeed. There was a time I would choose one over the other based on relationships with the pharmacist at the drive through window. That helps the pharmacy, but did nothing for the store. Even Neighborhood WalMart stores are driving foot traffic to their larger supercenters rather than replacing them, except in rare occasions where options are far more limited.

A change in seasons.

I’ve been thinking hard about the cultural changes that are happening at the moment. Systems are getting dismantled for interconnected networks. Control is getting shoved down to the local level in every arena. People are starving for human connection. The differentiating value brick and mortar stores bring to the negotiation is the human touch they can provide. The systems have out systemed anything else. Efficiency alone is not enough for a business to thrive. The big boys have quite a bit of inertia, but are getting a lot of push-back.

Can they survive it? Not without some structural changes.

CVS and Walgreens tried to scale the system alone. That wasn’t enough. They had interconnected pharmacy computer systems and negotiation power with the big insurance companies, but without the relationships, they haven’t seen any success in their higher profit retail systems.

WalMart and Chick-fil-a continue to succeed because they pay extraordinarily close attention at a local level. They have systematized local information and culture (respectively).

Merge the two at a much smaller scale and there may be a winner out there.

I would upload more cute pictures, but shipboard wifi has its limits. Maybe I'll post a few notes here and there.

Up next:

I’m already started on the third community type in our administrative series and it should be a juicy one. I may even be home long enough to get some real writing in.

The folks at the New Hampshire ACEC gave me this topic, as only a group from New Hampshire could. I absolutely loved my time there. They are rebellious in all of the right ways for all of the right reasons.

My friend, Tyler Valia, recorded the talk for me, and I’ve added in the slides—the video is not super steady, but he was a real trooper and his arms were really tired by the time it was all over.

This is only the first half—I broke in the middle for them to discuss their own local issues, and then we had a really great discussion together afterwards. Feel free to join the discussion by thinking through the exercise yourself. Post in the comments the map location and your thoughts and we can all join in!

This week I’ve been at the 34th Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU)—it’s exhilarating and delightful to be around such fertile minds and passionate hearts. They know what it takes to turn a city or town into a thriving community. It has a lot to do with how you structure the streets and land uses. There are solid, dimensional principles that go into designing a place where people genuinely enjoy walking and that makes it so much more natural to form connections within that community. Those principles may apply to every community, anywhere, but if you sidestep the personality of that unique place, the plan and the response is likely to fall short of the target—and fall flat with the people who are there.

A few years ago, I stumbled onto a fractal system that goes a long way towards understanding both the genus loci of a place, and the political and personal systems that work within it. It’s been interesting to decode the places within this framework, because it helps unpack what that community is made for and how it will walk out its identity or fall into shadow as it twists that makeup.

It helps to look at the community’s history, but ultimately the foundation of a community’s identity is the question or principle that sits at the core of their being—and the typical core questions fit within one of 7 principles. There are two other overlays beyond the 7 principles, which create a potential of 42 unique community types. Once you understand where a community (or person) fits within these types, you have a good idea of what they treasure and how they will respond politically, including the types of regulations they will prefer and the ways that their internal operations will function.

Earlier today, I spent a few minutes with a friend in the halls and was able to completely decode the entire political structure at his new job and help him understand how to reframe how he works with his city manager and his staff in ways that fit their culture and will get him the outcomes he needs. He demanded to see the whole system, so I’ll start unpacking it this week.

If you want an overview of the 7 positions in this archetype, I did blog posts on the theory for the first 3 and then the last 4 several months ago. This post is already getting long in the tooth, so I’ll probably do two a week—with a break next week for a very special post.

This week, I’m going to do a high level summary of the key diagnostics that I typically use to identify which of the 7 I’m dealing with in a community, and what I would expect to see in their operational systems and politics.

One caveat: these archetypes apply at every scale, so when you’re looking at an individual community, you will see multiple layers at the same time. For instance, I live in the North American Continent and the US in particular, which are both in the first position (Prophet). They are dominated by the drive to understand nature and innovate with it. I also live in Florida which is a 5th position (Giver) state, focused on stewardship of its ecology and the movement of its guests, which creates a win-win for both the guests and the natives. The Orlando metropolitan area sits in the third position (Teacher) which is expertise focused, and in the City of Winter Garden, which is also Giver, but as a former agricultural center, places a high priority on land stewardship. Each of these scales imposes a layer of that principle upon the place.

Position 1: Prophet

The principle: design. The desire to understand the underlying principles that govern all of creation so that they can be combined in novel ways to innovate and solve problems.

Diagnostic: Innovation, reinvention, idealism that often fails in practice, delays, hesitation, hypocrisy.

Prophet communities are very idealistic but often relationally naive. They will constantly try to reinvent the wheel, which means that they will unintentionally generate layers of regulations every time they start the cycle over again. They are often problem focused, rather than vision directed, which means they’re constantly trying to optimize as well—which doesn’t help.

Example: A great example of this is Boston, where 80% of their existing properties are non-conforming—which means they couldn’t be built as they currently exist under the regulations. By now, nothing could actually get built under their code without some kind of exception. That means they often fly by the seat of their pants. They try some amazingly innovative strategies, but need to have help from the outside to evaluate how it’s working so they have the cover to completely let components or plans go if needed.

Strategy: Dream with them. Appeal to their love of the ideal and get them to identify principles they do actually care about, then ruthlessly eliminate anything and everything that isn’t covered by that principle. Ban them from any new regulations. Give them permission to fail (they will often) and throw it out just as fast—sunset regulations from the beginning so that they need to reevaluate whether it’s working. Push them gently to complete by anticipating the good that will come at the end of the process.

Position 2: Servant.

The Principle: Authority. I serve someone who ranks above me and protects me. Other people submit to my authority and I protect them.

Diagnostic Cues: Practically invisible. Strict titled hierarchies. Loyal and protective. Often active military presence or history. Hospitality and medical industries. Excellent food.

In servant communities, the relationship within the hierarchy trumps everything else. That means written regulations are often ignored in comparison to commands from a superior. They are extraordinarily defensive and protective of those in their own group: don’t hurt their people. They may appear to be the most mild-mannered folks, but if an outsider hurts their people, they will respond with extreme prejudice, occasionally bordering on violence. They have a very responsive service culture, great hospitality, and even better food. They are good at healing people’s wounds, which attracts the broken and those that would take advantage of them.

Example: Both the state of Georgia and Atlanta fit this culture, along with the city my friend is working in. Coming from the outside, it’s often horrifying to see the regulations that are regularly ignored or disregarded. Within that culture, their immediate supervisor’s direction trumps any written regulations.

Strategy: Explicitly recognize the value of the hierarchy. Start by making an Org Chart and get everyone to agree on it—ask for individual personal agreement from every person if necessary. Make sure you have the honor and support of those above you. Make sure those below you understand that you value the regulations. Demonstrate that you follow them, and that you expect them to do so as well. Then train them to bring any violations you make against the regulations to your attention so you can correct the issue—and make sure that you do. They will learn to expect that from those under them in the hierarchy. They expect you to defend them from your superiors and will feel betrayed if you don’t. Don’t let them put you in a position where you have to choose who to support—them or the regulations. Take advantage of their sensitivity to the needs of those they serve and honor them for it. They will never seek out that honor but will burn out without it.

Up Next:

I have a special video post coming out next week that I think you’ll love. It’s a recording of the keynote I gave at the New Hampshire ACEC Transportation Conference entitled: Are speed limits a relic of the past? It felt right to release it on the 125th anniversary of the speed limit, so it will appear next Thursday, on May 21st.

Miranda Priestly is the ultimate personification of “boundaries” in the most toxic way. You won’t break her. You will only break against her. She has a goal bigger than herself and provides artwork that is inspiring to many, but the cost is steep—to her and everyone around her. The entire industry is steeped in selfishness, and she is its orchestrator. She is not ostensibly evil in the traditional sense. She just wants what she wants and will not tolerate anything less—and that may be the point of the movie.

The movie pivots on the moment when Andy Sachs, her new, “smart, fat girl,” realizes that in order to survive the demands of her job, she is becoming just like her boss. Andy claims that she could never throw her coworkers under the bus for her own personal gain, and Miranda shows her that she already has. Then she delivers this chilling line:

When Andy pushes back and says, “but what if this isn’t what I want?” Miranda laughs it off with, “Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Andrea. Everybody wants this. Everybody wants to be us.”

When they arrive at the next destination, Miranda turns around to order Andy to do something and she’s no longer there. She has walked away. She has done just what Miranda gave her permission to do: choose for herself.

Choices made for others or for ourselves?

The world we live in didn’t happen overnight. It was created one choice at a time. Each of those individual choices were made to care for those we love, but had an undercurrent of selfishness that is hard to notice:

• We pick a good school district because we care about our kid’ future (and ours).

• We choose a quiet neighborhood street because we want the peace and quiet—and we want a place our kids can play outside.

• We buy our kids (and ourselves) video games and cell phones because it will make them happy.

• We pick houses based on their future resale value and fight like heck to keep that value up.

• We want a fast road and a close parking space because every moment spent there is a moment we are away from our families.

None of those choices are inherently bad—but all of them are a narrowly framed response to an immediate issue. They are little “s” selfish. They seem sensible—we are caring for those we love—but they ultimately come down to choosing for ourselves, not that different from what Miranda Priestly describes. What they all have in common is the failure to zoom out and see the wider, long term implication—for others and ultimately for ourselves.

They follow the iron law, which says:

“Do unto others before they get a chance to do to you”

It’s a subtle but toxic twist on the proactiveness of the golden rule:

“Do unto others as you would have them do to you.”

It lends a hard edge to life that eventually cuts ourselves down with the cuts we deliver. It feels a lot like the portraits in the Haunted Mansion that look fine on the surface, but as the ceiling rises, you see a deeper truth—each person is self-composed, and blissfully unaware they are self-destructing with their own choices.

What goes around should come back around. You can’t get to a win-win if you don’t get a win for yourself. The problem is that we define our own self interest far too narrowly. We think only about what we control, not about the wider sphere of what we influence. We’re thinking about what’s good for us individually, right now, not what’s good for our community for multiple generations.

Part of that is the culture we’ve inherited.

I read through The Culture Code last week while I was on the road. It was written by a psychotherapist that began working for companies to help guide their advertising. He does three hour focus sessions with people from a specific culture to unpack their cultural goggles for an idea. In the US, the code for health is movement and the code for America is a dream.

What we’ve lost sight of is that the faster you move, the less you can connect. We didn’t lose the ability to connect. We lost the conditions that make connection normal and routine.

It’s easy to see symptoms of it everywhere if you know what you’re looking at.

• The Gen-Z stare gets developed when toddlers see parents faces as they look at screens, during the stage of life that they are learning how to make those expressions and how to feel what those expressions mean.

• Teens are anxious because they’re constantly under criticism digitally but have no grounding in human, embodied connection

• Kids choose video games for the adventure—the outside world is too dangerous to face—too much traffic and kidnapping.

• We act like we are manipulating robots around other machines when we drive—what compassion does a box need from me?

• You can have anything in the world within a few days shipping time, but you can’t know the person who made it—and they certainly didn’t make it for you.

• Subdivision walls keep strangers out—sorta—while the gates advertise that you have something worth stealing.

The core of the problem is narrow self-interest. One of the most permanent and inescapable manifestations is in our built world: our roads, our zoning, our subdivisions, our office buildings, and our shopping centers.

Visitors from the UK are often surprised that in the US we describe distance in terms of time. We describe a destination as about half an hour away, when they expect to hear how many miles away it is. It’s a natural outcome of the way we move and paradoxically, the way congestion limits our movement.

The curse of unlimited funds

I tried to explain this to a friend yesterday. The community she lives in is comparatively wealthy and has had access to nearly unlimited transportation funding for the last few decades.

They were wealthy enough to vote in an extra penny sales tax for transportation—and they’ve used it. They’ve widened nearly everything. The temporary relief meant that they attracted multiple corporate headquarters—large office buildings that used to generate heavy traffic two or three times a day, as their workers came in every day from their gated subdivisions miles away. Shopping centers ringed the edges in huge linear clusters. Work from home didn’t dampen their demand. It just spread it throughout the day as people shifted their trips to retail instead of the office.

In that county, they just eliminated their fixed route bus system in favor of an on-demand option that quickly became overwhelmed. Neither system worked well, but at least you could plan getting to work and back on a scheduled bus—where they existed. Now everyone has access but no one can use it. Wait times are completely unreliable: 30 minutes can easily turn into multiple hours without warning. They’re even having a problem with people cancelling trips as they’re in-route because they’ve waited too long already. She believed that it would work better if they had on-demand service to connect up with fixed route service—but they’re already out of money in the first place and that would mean buying two different sets of vehicles when they can’t really even afford one.

They fixed the obvious problems, at least for a little while—congestion got better with every completed project and then rapidly got worse. Development roared forward. Because they could make more space in the road, they spread things apart.

It’s like drinking salt water when you’re thirsty. Every drop in only makes the problem worse.

Everything goes faster, so it can be spread farther apart. Spreading things apart guarantees unending roadway congestion and no place to pick everyone up. It’s a vicious cycle that will not get better without structural changes.

I love our governor, but there are realities he just hasn’t understood yet. When the unmet demand would require 22 lanes of roadway, adding two isn’t going to help. The level of thinking that created the problem will not solve it.

In the end, all of this driving makes us far less human. We go faster and connections get harder to make all the time—and stopped in traffic is absolutely the worst place to make a friend.

Eventually, she asked: “So what would you do about it?”

Small disruptions.

We got here by thinking big. We get out of it by thinking small.

• The grocery stores are already doing it: smaller footprints distributed throughout the landscape—get them within a mile of every home and things shift fast if you have the connectivity.

• A ubiquitous bike network that serves up to 15 mph and bans everything above it. (Don’t get me started on the high speed bikes).

• Offices become a place for meetings and collaboration not an everyday affair.

• Transit stops at the grocery stores, not door to door pickup.

• Make it a pain in the neck to develop anything large and super easy to develop any infill or anything small. Small is flexible.

• Judge the value of a property or development on a per-acre basis. This balances out the utility costs with the revenue.

• Require a 40 year development plan for every project—tell me how you are going to keep your financing stable during the refinancing of each 10 year balloon loan. No more disposable projects.

• Fund economic development Fathers (and Mothers) to care for local business districts and generate event plans that keep foot traffic high.

• Require first right of refusal and automatic renewals for existing commercial tenant leases, especially when it’s locally run or operated businesses, even after properties change hands.

• Hold bike rodeo’s at local schools and incorporate bike training into PE curriculum. There’s nothing as self-righteous or influential as a 2nd grader.

• Find charities to fund bike and helmet programs for kids.

• Do trade in’s that exchange racing bikes for cruisers.

• For that matter, just get out and walk your dog.

None of this is going to work quickly. We didn’t get here overnight, and we’re not getting ourselves out of it overnight. Some of the worst struggles come when this starts to succeed and large investors try to scale things or buy up local businesses.

Up Next:

Maybe I’ll do a photo run of fun things I saw on my latest trips through New England. Next week I’ll be in Baltimore, so I’ll probably have some new photos from that too.

“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.’"—Ronald Reagan, August 12, 1986.

I spent the better part of last week in New England—and don’t you dare call it the Northeast. I’m told by the locals that you can tell the difference by who they root for. New Englander’s root for the Red Socks, not the Yankees. (The rest of the country is looking at football, so the distinction may be lost on me a bit.)

My focus was on the state of New Hampshire where I was speaking to the statewide ACEC/NHDOT Technology Transfer Conference. Travelling around New Hampshire feels surreal. The landscapes remind me of the North Carolina mountains, but without the suburbs. Sure, you can find a few WalMart’s along the major highways, but not many. There is plenty of rural, but the towns remain compact and cohesive. In many ways, it lays out like the rural portions of Europe, where compact towns are connected by a fine-grained network of roads. There are streets in town and roads outside of it, and few confusions to cause trouble between them.

There’s a good reason for this.

An Issue of Trust.

The state motto for New Hampshire is “Live free or die.” It’s a hard-earned truth that continues to resonate for them.

New Hampshire had long stretches of history that were unfairly controlled by outside powers—especially the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the New York colony, and the Crown. Land ownership shifted often based on global or regional political whims. That meant that you could clear a plot of land, put a house on it, and try to begin to farm the rocky soil, only to have someone from several hundred miles away claim all of your hard work as theirs.

One of their earliest industries was timber production, but the Crown claimed all of the tall, straight pine trees for ship masts. If a tree got marked with a broad arrow, the land owner couldn’t cut or sell it. Enforcing this led to the 1772 Pine Tree Riots—and centuries of distrust. You can still get shirts for it—one arm reads “God’s will be done.” and the other “Wise Men Company.” The Pine Tree Riots were believed to be the inspiration for the Boston Tea Party.

The Crown wasn’t just taxing output—it was pre-claiming the best natural resources across large areas of New Hampshire. The tallest, straightest white pines—often the most valuable asset a landowner had—were effectively off-limits. The only recourse was to circle the wagons and protect themselves locally. Is it any wonder that they had serious trust issues for anyone above the local level?

There were a few exceptions, but very few. Honest people came up from Boston and created a series of mills in Manchester that treated their people so well, they didn’t need to worry about labor unions for many decades. That external partnership created the largest city in the state—which still only has about 100,000 people. If you don’t trust folks, your circle of friends stays small and your local communities do too. This is still true today. One of the conference attendees mentioned a public hearing where the final decisions were couched in terms of community rivalries that date back to a single football game that happened 50 years ago.

Uncle Sam and Ike Need You!

So, when it came time for Eisenhower and the Feds to offer $9 for every dollar that local agencies spend on a federal interstate system, the rest of the country took the money. There were squabbles about where the interstates should go, especially in some big cities, but the rollout was large scale and fast for such a huge project.

But not in New Hampshire.

Tip O’Neill was probably thinking of New Hampshire when he said, “All politics are local.” NHDOT has 6 districts, and they all run independently. Decision-making in NH happens at a community level. That means if you’re going to do anything, there is no large-scale political body that will do the job. You’re going to have to get everyone—and I mean everyone—on board. That takes time.

The first 16-mile segment got built quickly, but that was a coastline connector that reinforced existing transportation patterns. As they started pushing in towards the center of the state, progress slowed dramatically. By the time they get past Manchester and heading towards Concord, sections get built as local concerns are addressed, but it’s slow-walked. The Franconia Notch project drug out well into the 1980’s. Ultimately, they stretched the implementation across nearly 50 years for a bare-bones system.

Two Roads Diverged in a Wood…

In other states, the entire community structure reorganized itself around this faster mode. Distance collapses. Trips that would have taken half a day now take an hour. Regions become markets. Movement concentrates into a few high-speed corridors and everything else reorganizes around the speed that is now possible.

• Retail scales up

• Development spreads out

• Local streets become feeders to something bigger

It’s efficient, but it also does something subtle. It disconnects people. You make housing choices based on what’s inside and in the back yard, not the community around you. You go to stores that are too large and too far away to care about what you need or make any relationships with the people who provide the stuff of your life. Your social connections become intentional choices to hang around those like you rather than serendipitous meetings of people that are wildly different. Our tolerance for each other erodes. Along the way, you’re alone. When you arrive, you’re lost in a crowd.

The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 didn’t require every state to internalize the same development pattern, but once the system existed, the incentives were overwhelming: speed, scale, and aggregation won over connection and community cohesiveness.

The result is not chaos. It is a highly ordered system that does exactly what it was designed to do: get people places fast. But if you’re getting somewhere fast, everything along the way becomes a blur. The trip becomes an abstraction—origin, corridor, destination—with very little in between that demands attention. Locations only matter if they are directly connected to that system. People only matter if you choose to let them in. You teeter between isolation and overwhelm.

The Road Less Taken

Spend time in parts of New Hampshire, and you can begin to see what might have happened if the national pattern had unfolded differently. The abstraction starts to break down—not everywhere, and not completely, but the fabric of the whole feels different. The interstate system exists there too, and its influence is real, but it serves the towns rather than dominating and restructuring them. The network never fully collapsed into a single dominant corridor. Instead, movement distributes across a finer-grained web of routes, and those routes remain embedded within the towns themselves.

You still need a car—maybe more than we do in our suburbs, but probably not as often. Many of the people live outside of the town, but unlike the rest of middle-America, you have a town to center around. You get Goldilocks levels of attention and relationships: face to face town scale and neighbors you recognize, even if you don’t know them all. I was genuinely surprised at how often I’d stumble across a pre-teen on their bicycle on a roller-coaster road with no sidewalks.

This can get insulated and stultifying. I’ve lived in cliquish rural communities. It’s not all sweetness and light. There are high barriers to trust, but the interactions that build trust are built into the daily fabric of life—a tip of the hat here, a chance meeting in a grocery store aisle, meeting each other’s kids at a tee-ball game. Retail consists of mom and pop stores or small chains tailored to meet the needs of their own community. The scale remains small both dimensionally and relationally, so you’re not ping-ponging between isolation and overwhelm.

The terrain helps—and may very well create the type of trust issues that kept New Hampshire from becoming the same type of place as the rest of the country. Mountains lend themselves to cultures of honor where self-defense is a DIY affair and egos can run amok, but New England Puritan sensibilities keep the arrogance and bravado in check.

Can we get back to something like this?

Maybe.

The bar for what we deem a success is low here. We’ll put up with a lot before we want to make it better. For Americans, perfection is not a state to be attained. For us, it means death and finality. If it’s perfect, it can no longer grow or change—but we are perfectly happy if something just works and keeps working. That means Amazon and WalMart can provide functional access to goods that can always beat local networks on price because it’s “good enough.”

Working against this trend is our own national independence streak—an attitude that feels remarkably similar to the self-reliant posture that reigns in New Hampshire. We don’t like being boxed in. As systems begin to enforce control, they lose their market. Look at what happened this month with Claude. The government throws its weight around and the backlash is immediate—best advertising for Claude they ever got. We’re more like a frog in a kettle with corporations, but we will jump out on that one too.

The era we’re in fits the small scale, distributed model far better than the large scale systems we’ve created in the last century. Distributed networks use systems as support but aren’t controlled by them. Alignment is unforced and wildly creative. Genuine human interaction can’t be replicated by a computer and therefore becomes the rarest and most valuable of commodities—worth spending extra money on.

There’s 80 years of inertia on the big scale, suburban model, but it’s changing fast and we’re not far from the tipping point—if we haven’t passed it already. I’m seeing titles like, “Boomers, Millennials don’t want your 3,500 square foot McMansions.” Walkable communities have a huge price premium. Retail is scaling down in size and distributing throughout the landscape.

Roadway network is harder to transform, but the economics are in our favor. It’s a heck of a lot cheaper to provide snippets of connectivity that create a network than to buy up a bunch of property along an existing roadway—and better for the long term health of the community. Politically, it’s still a hard-sell, but we really can’t afford that much roadway construction anyway. The better we get at keeping things closer to home, the less we need to deal with congestion. People who walk and bike are healthier, happier, and live longer. They find social networks that give them a reason to live.

If you want to see a better world—one more like the world we could have had—live local has to become the theme of our work going forward:

• Improving connectivity

• Scaling down

• Connecting face to face

• Choosing a purchase in person over digital convenience

Can we do this? I don’t know that the old way will continue to work, so we’re going to have to figure it out. I’m seeing it change all the time.

Up Next:

I’ve got two directions to look—and one of them may get covered over on JesusGeeks. I’ve been toying with an archetype sequence of 7 for the last few years and it’s been amazing to see how well that fits within the 7 states within New England. It may be a great case study to begin to think about why some things work in some places and fall flat in others. We all say that we want communities to walk out their own authentic identity, but it’s hard to help them do that if you don’t understand the core of that identity. I’ll probably cover that set of ideas in both places.

I also just got back from watching our first batch of eye-tracking videos for a research project at UConn—and it’s been wild to see how our eyes navigate the world around us.

For that matter, I may just post the video from the NH Keynote—There’s a lot of travel coming up.

We’ll see. There’s never a shortage of something to talk about.

While I’m at it, I’d love to hear what you would like me to discuss. I’m always open to suggestions.

If I blindfolded you and placed you in a car, the engine noise might give you a hint, but as long as I kept the same speed, you would have no idea how fast we were going.

We can kinda feel acceleration—it feels like a force on your body—but even that we don’t feel well. As long as the acceleration was consistent, we would feel a force, but after a few seconds, you would begin to ignore that too. That’s why you feel the first second or two on a long elevator ride but not much more.

What we feel is jerk—the change in the change in speed. Mathematically, we call that the second derivative. Folks who design simulator rides use that to their advantage to trick your brain into thinking you’re doing wild, crazy things.

So what do we use?

One tool our minds use is called motion parallax. When you drive down a road, the things that are closer to the vehicle feel like they’re moving faster than the things far away. It works best when there are things close to the vehicle and you’re going pretty fast.

You would think that would be all you need, but believe it or not, it only has a small impact on how you drive. Don’t believe me? Then why do people go over 50 mph on this beauty?

The reason has to do with how salient—mentally important—each of those trees are. In this case, the block length is well over a mile and there are few conflicts at the ends of these blocks. The trees go by fast, but that only feels exhilarating, not risky. As much as we worry about clear zone, there are also remarkably few crashes on this corridor and last I checked, no fatalities. It’s not forgiving, but drivers know that and act accordingly.

What changes our speed is the interaction we anticipate—and that is a dopamine issue.

Dopamine and memory.

Have you ever tried a dopamine fast? It’s excruciating, but everything feels more alive afterwards. The wild thing about a dopamine fast is that you remember almost nothing from that time. Memory requires dopamine.

Have you ever driven somewhere and had no memory of the drive? That’s why. Every risk, every conflict, every interaction—good or bad—pulls on dopamine. It’s as if your brain is saying, “You win or you learn—and that’s a win too.” Even the negative reinforcement that comes with a bad outcome gets you a bit of dopamine so you can encode the memory.

Memory works in segments

Jeffery Zacks is one of the world’s foremost experts in what’s called, “event segmentation theory.” What he found is that memories are stored in segments. We don’t experience memory as a stream of time. We experience it in short bursts that contain critical moments.

Your brain naturally parses activity into discrete events. The boundaries of these events occur when your brain encounters a prediction error—and your brain hates being wrong because then it has to update its mental model. That takes work and brains are notoriously lazy. They’re also stimulus hungry, so there’s a bit of a push-pull effect going on here.

For his book, Flicker, Jeffery Zacks interviewed film makers and timed out how fast camera angles and scenes changed. Every camera angle, scene change, or plot twist requires your brain to update its model. You can feel this in the pacing in the movie:

• Fast-paced scenes → ~3–5 seconds between meaningful updates

• Moderate pacing → ~5–8 seconds

• Slower, dramatic scenes → can stretch to ~8–12 seconds (but risk disengagement if nothing changes cognitively)

It’s not how fast we move, it’s how often things change

We define speed as distance over time, but what if we thought of speed as the inverse of frequency:

That’s actually how your brain feels speed. It’s not the distance you cover, it’s the pattern of interactions you experience.

So let’s think about this in terms of driving in a downtown neighborhood or a commercial street. Every block end that gets used regularly provides a scene change—that’s a given. Doorways are potential scene changes. Conflicts or risks are scene changes to your brain. Each of these requires you to reengage. What if we think of our brains as looking for a goldilocks level of reengagement: somewhere between 3 and 8 seconds. If we calculate that in terms of speed and how far apart the changes happen, this is what we get:

Get into the pink and you’re approaching overwhelm. Get into the blue and your drivers will disengage. You’re looking to keep things between 5-8 seconds. For instance:

• Place your speed bumps 100-150 feet apart in a parking lot and your drivers will be comfortable at 15 mph between them. That means you’re probably wasting them if you put them at the end of every drive aisle (60 feet)—and you’re irritating your driver to boot.

• On the other hand, if you’ve closed off a block for an access management scheme and you block length is now 1,200 feet long, you may be looking at speeds that are pretty darn high—or drivers that are checked out and texting.

This probably explains a lot of why things like block length and doorway density had such a large impact on the speed drivers select.

We’ll be testing this (I hope) over the next few weeks. I’ll let you know what comes up.

Up Next:

Next week, I’ll be in New Hampshire at the ACEC Technical Exchange Conference, then doing some data reduction at UConn. If you’re in New Hampshire or Connecticut, let me know and we may be able to connect up.