How Do We Design for Drivers?

The Strong Towns Podcast

Host Chuck Maron interviews Houssam Elokda of Happy Cities and Nick Falbo of MobyCon about their joint report, 'How to Design for Cars in People-Cent

Key takeaways

• Houssam Elokda and Nick Falbo co-authored a report advocating for parallel design standards that treat drivers as guests rather than obstacles in walkable areas.
• The Dutch concept of 'going slower is faster' translates to prioritizing steady, predictable traffic flow over raw speed metrics on local streets.

Main topics

• Street design frameworks
• Dutch transportation principles

Notable quotes

"The best bike plan is a car plan."

Conclusion

The episode provides transportation professionals with a practical, empa

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:09) Hey everybody, this is Chuck Maron. Welcome back to the Strong Towns podcast. Over the years, we've become rather well known for the term strode and for describing why strodes fail, why this combination of street and road fails to really function well in any way. And it's one of those things that has become now ubiquitous in transportation conversations. We all see Strode's, we all know Strode's, we all understand it. I think one of the things that we've struggled with, and I've acknowledged this conceptually, we've struggled to explain what comes after the Strode. When you have a city full of Strode's, what do you do? And I've actually had interviews with engineering groups and I've said, to me, this is part of the practice that we as a profession need to figure out, need to try to understand. I'm going to share with you today a report that I think is the closest step towards doing that, that I have seen. And I am ridiculously excited to have our two guests here. Hussam Alokda is managing principal at Happy Cities, where he works at the intersection of urban design, housing, and human well-being. He's led planning, development, and policy work in communities ranging from small towns to major cities, including Dubai, Cairo, and Vancouver. Husam, welcome to the Stronghouse Podcast. Speaker 2 (1:30) Thank you for having me, Chuck. I'm really excited. It's Speaker 4 (1:33) so nice to see you. You're in Halifax. Remind me what time zone Halifax is. Is that Atlantic time zone? Speaker 2 (1:39) It's Atlantic time, yeah. Sweet. Speaker 4 (1:42) All right. Going to the entire other side of the continent, a very different time zone. Nick Falbo is a senior integrated mobility consultant with MobiCon. Before joining MobiCon, he was a senior transportation planner with the city of Portland. helped develop NACTO's Urban Bike Design Guide. He's perhaps best known in transportation circles for coining the term protected intersection. And today he works on adapting Dutch transportation and street design principles to the North American context. Nick, you and I have not met before until just now. Welcome. I'm happy to have you as a guest on our Strong Towns podcast. Speaker 3 (2:18) Thanks, Chuck. So excited to be here to share more about all the great work Speaker 4 (2:23) we've been doing in mobility. Absolutely. And you are in Portland. So we have the continent covered in terms of time zones right now. Speaker 3 (2:31) Yes. Yeah. Speaker 4 (2:32) The report that we're going to talk about today is one put out jointly by Happy Cities and MobyCon called How to Design for Cars in People-Centered Places. The subtitle is Practical Design Strategies to Meet the Needs of Drivers While Creating Great Places for People. Maybe I'll start with you, Nick, and then... We can hear from Husam. I feel like one of the challenges that we've always had in reaching engineers and technical professionals and others is that the language and the conversation around design tends to put a conflict between automobile travel and non-automobile travel. And it makes the dialogue often... anti-car almost when it comes out of people's mouth. Hey, the car is a net negative. We need to build for people. That's the antithesis of building for cars. I feel like you here in this report are trying to take on that embedded understanding in particularly the engineering profession, but in just transportation planning in general, head on. Can you talk about that conflict and talk about how you're intellectually approaching that here? Speaker 3 (3:44) Yeah, absolutely. Speaker 4 (3:46) You Speaker 3 (3:46) know, it's too often we do fall into this sort of us versus them mentality when we're trying to improve our cities for walking and biking and transit. You know, we we get inspired by the potential solutions out there. And it just feels like, you know, we've been spending decades planning for the car. We need to just do one hundred and eighty degree pivot, focus on walking and biking, kind of ignore the needs of drivers. I don't know about you, but it feels to me like it's pretty clear that that hasn't quite worked out the way that we've wanted. Progress has been slower and we need to find a way to kind of move forward faster. You know, a lot of the work that I do at MobyCon is very much inspired by the work in the Netherlands. We're a Dutch-based company, and so we try to bring the best of Dutch design solutions here into North America. And I think, you know, everyone, when they go to Amsterdam or other places in the Netherlands, it's really easy to see how great it is for people, for people walking, for people cycling, hopping on the tram and taking transit. they maybe don't realize that it's also great for driving. There's more access to jobs by car in Amsterdam in 30 minutes than there is in Atlanta. You know, it's also consistently been rated one of the best places to be a driver. So the trick to what the Dutch are doing isn't just making it great to be a pedestrian walking and biking. It's the way they think about how driving fits into their communities as well. And there's sort of a... Long-standing quote, you've probably heard that the best bike plan is a car plan. This is something that the Dutch say a lot, where we need to think about the circulation as a whole in order to provide the best quality of experience for people walking and biking and taking transit. Speaker 4 (5:33) Sam, follow up on that. I feel like you're arguing that thoughtfully designing for cars actually produces better people-centered places. How does that shift change the conversation and how we approach this? And what does that look like when we're actually getting down to work? Speaker 2 (5:54) It's really important that we create more people-centered places, right? Like this is the prosperity of our communities. This is how we connect, the places where we connect, the places where we identify with these communities. The problem is cities have made two consistent mistakes, either to accommodate cars. They go too far and they accommodate it in incompatible ways. And thus they ruin what makes people-centered places worth visiting. Or they flip to the other side completely, as Nick was saying, and ignore the needs of drivers, which is really problematic if the majority of your residents drive. We even use the inverted triangle of priority in streets and drivers look and see themselves at the bottom. And what they read. from that is that this isn't for us. So they resist it and they don't see themselves in it and they don't see it as something that is also for them. And this is the thing that we learned in this collaboration with Mobicon is that people-centered places are a way of providing better access for drivers as well. So you can improve access for drivers with speed. This is the one we know. the one where all the standards in North America are designed for, which is getting people from A to B faster. But proximity is this other method of bringing A and B closer, concentrating destinations in places where people are willing to walk and bike and take transit. When we give drivers access to these places, their convenience improves, their collective well-being improves. It's kind of like people center places. As I believe Jan-Gel always said, a good public space is kind of like a good party. You know when you're in it. Well, I think in North America, we've been hosting these parties and telling drivers that they're not invited. And this guide is really about showing how drivers can be good guests of the party. not come in and take all the appetizers and ruin the whole thing for everyone, which is, you know, how, you know, the fear of mingling these two. So it's about how to manage and give different design language for how the car can exist in people-centered places, how it needs to operate and how we need to design around the needs of people and the priorities of people. giving access without ruining the experience of being in a people-centered place. Speaker 4 (8:30) I have been critical, let's say, of Complete Streets for a long time. And let me qualify that because I think that the inspiration behind Complete Streets is really sound. And I think that a lot of the things that we can point to a number of places where Complete Streets has made a big difference. But as an engineer, as someone working in this, it was... How do we cram everything into one place, into one design? And never seemed quite like the right fit to me for a number of reasons. You all, and Nick, I'll go to you with this. You all talk in this report about the idea of complete networks. And that seems to me to be like a more... I'll use the words like sophisticated way of thinking about this. Not every street needs to do everything, but everything needs to happen in a way that actually works. What does a complete network approach allow you to do that a complete streets framework doesn't? Speaker 3 (9:31) Yeah, this is a great, great question. You opened the chat talking about Strode's, right? The classic street that is trying to do everything. It is trying to be a place that is good for walking and biking and driving, trying to be a place that can support commercial. But I think we've seen that that doesn't work. You know, it's important to know that not every place in your community needs to be a people-centered place. In fact, one of the key things in this guide is to be very clear about where those people-centered places are. And just as you don't need every place to be people-centered, you don't need every street to be the... the best complete street there is. So when we take a step back and look at a network approach to thinking about mobility, we're really focused on trying to provide the best experience for kind of all users. And when you try to do everything everywhere, you don't achieve that. You don't achieve good mobility. You don't achieve good place. And so we really encourage people to identify where they want. what type of activity and then to design for it. By focusing on the network, you can provide perhaps a better quality of experience for people cycling. I think we've all seen these sometimes protected bike lanes on big, busy streets and recognize that that actually, even though it's protected and you're meeting all the latest design guidelines. it isn't the best experience for people cycling. And, you know, and to the degree that we're trying to not necessarily breed frustration among drivers, you know, trying to do all of these things at once can sometimes create the wrong results. So focusing on where we want drivers to be and focusing on where we want people to be can really allow you to provide better quality experience for everybody. In the guide, we talk a little bit about things like road bypasses. This is an example where we're providing explicitly a route for drivers that is meant to be fast and get them between long distances quickly. But if you can build that, then what you also need to do is complement that with a very high quality experience. for the places, those people-centered places where the cycling can be really high quality on calmer streets, the pedestrian environment can be really high quality with good destination amenities. So by separating these different uses, you can let them be what they need to be and design toward those goals, and then in the end, create a better experience for everybody. I Speaker 4 (12:02) do feel like in many ways, Complete Streets asks, everybody to compromise and have a suboptimal experience. And what you're talking about is like this over here is going to be an awesome experience for you. And then this over here is going to be an awesome experience for you. Those are different. And we actually can't mix them cleanly to have them be optimum for everybody. But if you build the network, everybody gets the optimum or close to closer to the optimum experience. Am I? Yeah, exactly. Speaker 3 (12:32) Exactly. By taking a step back and looking at the network, you can actually design for your users appropriately. If we can move the traffic to this location over here, away from the people, away from the people-centered places, and you can give them a high quality of experience, and all of a sudden... all that traffic volume is no longer on your local streets, impacting your bike routes, on your main streets, impacting the pedestrian experience. And we can make those places fantastic for biking, fantastic for walking. And so, yeah, by separating those things at the network level, it allows you to make a whole different set of choices at the street level, where I think that experience really manifests in these people-centered places. Speaker 4 (13:14) I think we have a shared concept of roads and streets as different things, but you have this interesting term in the report. You distinguish between a place street and a flow street. And I think like a