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The Importance of Livable Streets with Bruce Appleyard

The Importance of Livable Streets with Bruce Appleyard

The War on Cars Jan 20, 2026 52 min
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About this episode

Exploring the concept of livable streets, Dr. Bruce Appleyard shares insights from his father's influential work and his own updates in 'Livable Streets 2.0'. The discussion delves into the impact of traffic on community connections, safety, and urban design, highlighting personal experiences that shaped their perspectives. Bruce recounts the tragic loss of his father to a drunk driver, which fueled his passion for advocating safer, more human-centered urban environments. The episode emphasizes the importance of designing streets that foster social ties and prioritize the well-being of all community members.

Topics: livable streets urban design traffic safety community connections personal stories urban planning history social isolation children's safety traffic violence environmental impact
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The street can either bring us together and knit us together or it could rip us apart.
And I think that his research really helped open our eyes to the, what I also call, not
just the conflict and the power dynamic of the streets, but also the promise, like
what is the promise of our streets?
This is the War on Cars.
I'm Sarah Goodyear.
I'm recording this in Brooklyn shortly after returning from the second leg of our book
tour.
It is really good to be home and relaxing for a second.
I'm going to just get a little business out of the way really quickly before we
get to today's guest.
First of all, you can find us on Patreon at patreon.com slash the War on Cars pod.
If you want to support us, we really do depend on our Patreon supporters.
So thank you so much to all of you.
And if you're interested in getting our book, Life After Cars, freeing ourselves from
the tyranny of the automobile, you can do that by going to lifeaftercars.com.
And there you will find links to many booksellers, including bookshop.com.
And you will also find our upcoming tour dates.
We do have more dates booked in 2026 already.
I think the first one is in Miami in mid-January.
So go check it out, lifeaftercars.com.
All right, let's get right to our guest because we have a really special one with
us here today.
This is somebody who has spent a lifetime thinking about what we mean when we talk
about livable streets and why it is so important that we build our cities with
human beings in mind first and foremost.
Dr. Bruce Applyard is a professor of urban design and city planning at
San Diego State University.
Bruce's research makes an appearance in lifeaftercars, which we'll talk about
in a moment.
And his father, Donald Applyard, was a legend in this field for his work that led
to the indispensable book, Livable Streets, published in 1981.
And we talk about him in the book, too.
In 2020, Bruce published Livable Streets 2.0, which brings his father's book up
to date while preserving its core principles and teachings.
Bruce Applyard, welcome to the war on cars.
Thank you so much.
It's a great honor to be here with you and to talk about this important topic
for our entire world.
So looking at Livable Streets 2.0, you include the original dedication that
your father put in the book to children whose lives are threatened by traffic
and to all those who suffer noise, vibration, fumes, dirt, ugliness,
loneliness, alienation, or other impoverishments due to its presence.
I just think that that is so beautiful.
And in such a short little space, it sums up so many of the things that
automobile traffic does to us and takes from us.
And it just sums it up so perfectly.
Yeah, my father was a very poetic writer.
And I think he was able to capture things very well.
And it sort of touches on a bigger background story of the book, which is
when I was four years old, I was hit nearly killed by a driver.
And my father at that time started the research that became a seminal to Livable
Streets.
And the sad part about Livable Streets was that a year after Livable
Streets was published, my father was killed by a speeding drunk driver
when I was 17.
The book was never reprinted, but it captures both how the book itself is
bookended by these two horrific events of traffic violence.
And yet my father throughout the book and what I try to do with the update
to the book as well is to capture what cars really mean to our community,
how they harm us, their invisible harms, how they affect us,
our social connections, our sense of community, our sense of place,
as well as the issues associated with collisions and casualties.
So it's my understanding from reading the book that you didn't really have
a memory of being hit by this driver.
Can you talk a little bit about what your awareness was as you were growing
up of that incident and how it affected your family?
Sure.
So I was hit by a car and a driver and thrown about 30 feet and went into the
hospital and went into a coma for about a day.
As I understand it, trauma will erase your memory of the actual collision.
And I have faint memories of the ambulance showing up and things like
that, but the memory of the accident was erased from my conscious
understanding of things.
But every so often as I was growing up, I was visited by the most
horrific nightmare of a wall of metal and glass rolling over my right shoulder
and tossing me within difference.
And I understood that later in life when I started taking
psych classes at UC Berkeley that that was the traumatic memory
of the collision that occurred.
And that affected me quite a bit growing up to remember what it was
like to actually be hit by a car.
So that must have been so terrifying for your parents.
Did your parents talk to you about that experience much as you were growing up?
Oh, absolutely.
And as I started to work on Louisville Street's 2.0, I started
interviewing people that worked with my father.
And they kept saying, were you the son that was hit by a car nearly
killed because your father couldn't stop talking about you?
So my father's concern and care for children came out of his concern
and care for his own child.
And it wasn't a rhetorical exercise for him.
He actually felt the visceral concern that a parent would have for a child's
safety.
And so that was a major part of Louisville Street's.
Yeah, and we talk on the show a lot about how sometimes people can see
harms that are being caused, environmental harms.
They can only see them clearly when their children are affected.
Like, we can see, oh, it's not OK for a child to be in this situation
when we might just say for ourselves as adults, like, OK, well, that's
just the way it is.
But a lot of people do get kind of radicalized into this movement when
they have kids and they see them on the street and they're, say, wait a second,
this is not OK.
Right, right.
Now, it's an important barometer to us as to how we view children in and
around our streets and their safety.
And it's an important thing, research that I've done with asking
parents' questions about how they feel about their children's safety that
yields quite interesting results.
And it's important for us to understand how streets work for children
as they are the important aspects of our communities are both our
children in our streets and how we actually try to get them to work together.
Your father became passionate about these issues and did this amazing
work for the city of San Francisco surveying different neighborhoods and
the people in those neighborhoods about what their social lives were like,
what their experience of streets were like.
And we can get into that in more detail, we will.
But right after, as you say, the book that was based on his research,
Liveable Streets was published, he was tragically killed by a drunk driver.
Maybe you could tell us about what that was like for you as a 17-year-old
and how that has reverberated through your life.
Absolutely.
So essentially the day before he was killed, I drove him to the San
Francisco airport.
And in those days, you could walk to the gate and I hugged him goodbye.
And we talked about when we'd see each other again.
And then two days later, I was sitting down for homework at my home in Berkeley.
And the call came in, and next thing I know, my mother's screaming bloody
murder because they've just told her that my father was killed by a speeding
drunk driver.
And as happens with traffic deaths, it's incredibly sudden.
It's absolutely sudden.
And there's so many balls up in the air that to this day, I'm still working to
kind of help bring some of those down for my father's professional life.
But even for my family, it was an incredible crater in our family.
It's the main breadwinner and the mainstay of the family.
It was hard to miss them like that.
So it's incredibly painful.
And to this day, even sitting here today, it's a little bit
tersweet because there's both a celebration of my father's work and my life.
But yeah, we also have to talk about the reality of how tragic this was and what
cars have done to our communities and to our families and to our people.
All those things really come together.
And working on Louisville Street's 2.0, it was both cathartic, but it was
also heartbreaking along the way as well.
Yeah, I'm sure.
I just lost my own father just three years ago and he didn't get to see my book come out.
And I know that how I feel about that and how to have your whole adult life and all of
your accomplishments be something that you know that your father would have been so proud of you
and to not be able to share that with him must be incredibly painful.
Yeah, I'm so sorry to hear about your loss.
Oh, thank you.
Thank you.
It was much more time appropriate.
But yeah, these are the things and then you do start thinking about what values have you
been passed on by your parents and how can you exemplify those, the good things that
they've given you and how can you bring those forward in the world.
And that's really what you've done with this edition of this book because, you
know, I think people inside this movement, the Livable Streets movement as it is often
called, you know, many of them know your father's work and have seen it summarized.
But yeah, just finding a copy of the book, you know, it's not easy.
It's something that is not readily in circulation.
And so I think it's so important to reiterate these ideas and let's get into that right
now.
You start the book by defining the idea of a livable street.
So maybe you could talk about what a livable street is and why that idea is so important
as we think about how we build our cities.
Well, livable street is like a good friend.
It's one that gives you energy, it helps bring you together, it helps connect you
with members of the community of who you are.
It helps you take care of business as you need to, access different things to buy and food
to get and to replenish yourself, to nourish yourself.
Whereas a livable street is a street you want to avoid.
It takes energy out of you and it doesn't give you a chance to really recuperate.
It just is an impersonal socially isolating place.
And so those are some of the things I think about when we think about a livable street
and an unlivable street.
And these are the things my father showed in his research, in his seminal graphics of
the research as well that I think are worth talking about.
Yeah, that's what I was going to go to next.
So let's talk about what he discovered and specifically I think one of the things
that is just so remarkable and that, you know, we wrote about in the book and
that many people have pulled out.
And it's really startling research that's been replicated since.
And it talks about the effect on social ties on streets with light, medium and heavy traffic.
Could you summarize that and sort of explain what the graphics show?
Sure.
Sure.
I believe we'll make these available up online with the podcast.
Yeah.
Just on our show page at thewaroncars.org and you'll be able to, if you want to just
pull them up while you're listening or after you've listened, we'll put up these graphics
so you can see exactly what you're talking about.
But why don't you describe them to us, Bruce?
I will.
And I just want to say that I think these graphics are some of the most iconic
graphics of research in city playing and urban design.
They really have just withstood the test of time and really have enduring legs to talk
about the research.
And effectively what my father did was he found three streets in San Francisco that were similar
in all respects except their levels of traffic.
And then he asked a series of questions.
He had the graphics organized where you have light on top, which makes sense, moderate,
and then heavy at the bottom.
And he asked a series of questions.
And one question he asked was, you know, what is the location of your friends and acquaintances?
And what the graphic shows is that on the light traffic street, if you don't have very
much traffic, a livable street is one that knits the community together.
You have people who are showing their social ties across the street in all forms and
fashion all the way across the street multiple times and creating a really strong web of connection
between the community.
So a light traffic street knits a community together, whereas a heavily traffic street
rips your community apart.
And you have three times as many friends and twice as many acquaintances on a light
traffic street versus a heavily traffic street.
And this became a seminal research to show the invisible harms that traffic has on our
social ties and our ability to build community, much more so than collisions and casualty
rates.
And it shows that there's so much more of an impact that cars have on people and
communities.
Yeah.
I mean, this is one of the things that there's been a lot of emphasis over the
last 10 to 15 years on the Vision Zero model, which there's a number of things to say about
that and we won't get into all of it.
But the idea that we're aiming for zero fatalities and serious injuries, and that's a worthy
goal.
But as you say, it doesn't address the multiple harms that traffic does to us
even when it's not directly killing us.
And those include these social effects that your father so deftly teased out with his
research.
And I think that it's something we all understand intuitively, but to actually have
the data to back it up is really profound and I think really important.
And I talk about his research and this aspect of it all the time, because I think everybody
should know this.
Absolutely.
I couldn't agree with you more.
I mean, it just shows you the multiple harms that cars have on our communities.
Much more so than just the casualty rates.
Up until this point, it was hard for anyone to imagine or really put their finger on
it.
But everyone probably had a sense that cars were having this effect.
But it wasn't until this research and the graphics that were created by Betty Drake,
by the way, a great illustrator that worked for my father.
It wasn't until these graphics were created that people really saw these harms that were
invisible up until that point.
And in his book, he also talks about the way that different demographic groups are
affected by this, that a lot of families would be moving away from heavy traffic
street or even the moderate traffic street as the traffic was increasing, that was
sort of forcing people out of their historic neighborhoods.
And then what really struck me was that many people who were left on the high traffic
streets were, I think that he said that many of them were older people, women,
especially widows, perhaps, who didn't have anyone that they were living with,
that they were completely isolated and increasingly isolated as the traffic
sort of kept them inside.
And the fear and the noise just contributed to their isolation.
And then younger people were moving away because it just wasn't a desirable
place to raise children.
That's right.
I mean, people who could move away would move away.
And people who were there were then more isolated.
So they became socially desolate, isolated places.
And yes, he found that there were older individuals who were basically
stuck in these apartments and without really any means to connect with those
outside or along the street or across the street.
Right.
And we're talking here about people who are living in San Francisco,
which was and remains one of the most dynamic walkable cities in the
United States of America and considered to be, you know, I think when
people think of San Francisco, they don't think of it the same way they
might think of, say, Houston or Los Angeles as being a place where cars
completely dominate everything.
But even so, cars were deforming really social relations.
And this was in the late 60s when he began his research.
So, you know, I think that generationally we've lost track of how much we've
lost, you know, that our awareness of what sort of baseline normal life might
be like in a human settlement has been so radically altered over the past five
or six generations that we don't even really know what we're missing in a way.
Right, exactly.
And when you start moving to the suburbs and people are just really
totally socially isolated the way the suburbs are designed, at least folks
here were experiencing traffic and had sort of a sense of urban life.
But we've seen people, you know, leaving these streets, going to
the suburbs and escaping, if you will.
And it's created another sort of social isolation in our culture when we have
people who are so then in such auto dependency.
Yes, and that actually makes a great transition to some of your own
research that has also just really caught the imagination and the
interest of so many people, myself included.
And that is the work that you've done with cognitive mapping and children and
kids who live in neighborhoods like what you're talking about, where they're
not hanging out on the street and playing on the street or where that's
not sort of something that's been historically done.
And so why do you talk about your research about kids and their
cognitive maps and how you've explored that reality?
Sure, I'd be happy to, you know, inspired by my brother's work in the
little streets and also his mentor's work, Kevin Lynch, in the image of the city.
I created a research approach that merged the two methods and asked questions
about the effects of traffic and inadequate pedestrian facilities on
schoolchildren, children who are nine and 10 years old in the
suburban San Francisco Bay Area in Contra Costa County, to be exact.
And I had children draw maps to help explain their journey from home to school.
In one of the communities I looked at, I looked at a heavily
trafficked community and a lightly trafficked community.
And in the heavily trafficked community, there were no sidewalks
leading to school, even though it was built in the model of the
neighborhood unit principles where you build your neighborhood around
the schools in a way that kids can walk to it so they don't have
to cross any busy streets.
So there was no sidewalk in this heavily trafficked street.
And we compared the light traffic street with the heavily
trafficked neighborhood.
And then I helped the community get a grant to build a pathway
along its busiest street.
So I did a study before the pathway was built and after the pathway
was built and found some really interesting results.
I found that that there's a major effect of building the pathway
along the heavily trafficked street before the pathway was built.
There were enormous notations of danger and dislike and a very
limited sense of place in community that the children felt.
They also had fewer places that they like to play and enjoy
and fewer locations for their friends and acquaintances.
After the pathway was built, there was a much richer sense of place.
There was many fewer indications of danger and dislike.
Many more places where children like to play.
For example, the before group indicated danger twice the rate
of the after group.
They represented dislike five times more than the after group.
And the sense of place improved by three times
between the before and after group.
So there was all these really great things that came from just
building a sidewalk where you should have built it in the first place.
So I've been I've been actually I was just up in university place
up in near Seattle Tacoma with Dan Burton in the past few days.
And we were looking at a whole community that used to have no
sidewalks whatsoever, and they've done a tremendous job
in buildings projects that have sidewalks.
This is the same kind of condition where we're trying
to like actually just build sidewalks.
So children can have a really wonderful experience.
Just a couple of other maps that were interesting.
One was from a child who was driven everywhere.
And to be asked how to get from home to school,
they saw their world as a series of unlinked paths
between home and other locations, but nothing was really connected.
And there was no it's a very sterile sense of their world
with no sense of context or place.
And they would, for example, go on the road to their friend's
house, then to the mall, then pet go, then back, and then one path
taking takes them to the school in their in their church.
And another path will take them to the other climbing tree.
So basically when driven everywhere, children became
cognitively disconnected from their environment.
And this was an important thing to find out about how
children who are driven everywhere really have a limited
sense of their home community.
Another student was able to walk and bicycle everywhere
and had a much stronger and these students both were given the
same amount of same instructions, the same amount of time
to draw their maps and they drew dramatically different maps.
And this other child who's able to walk and bicycle everywhere
had a much richer sense of place of their of the trees
of their of the creek in their school and a really great
understanding of their of the street patterns of their street.
And they offered a testimony, which I'll read to you now,
which is I like my neighborhood because I have lots of friends
because I can play there whatever I want.
I like everything in my neighborhood and I also
dislike nothing in my neighborhood.
And I also ride my bike everywhere or I walk.
And again, sort of a strong, powerful testimony
about what it means to be able to walk and bike in your neighborhood.
Yeah, I love the combination of, you know, is it the hard
data and then the the testimony and that's something
your father did as well.
And I think it's it's a really powerful combination.
I always think about this work that you did and I think
about parents and how much time these days parents spend,
especially affluent educated parents, how much time
and money they spend getting their kids every single class
and tutor and advantage that they can possibly find to pay money for.
And yet they often are containing their children in an environment
that radically limits their children's ability to use
their natural aptitude for navigating, for exploring,
for understanding environment.
And if you care about your child's development,
wouldn't you want them to be able to explore the world
in the way that children of human beings and hominins
have done for millennia, right?
I mean, that's absolutely that just is something
that just kind of blows my mind.
It's like they don't even think about what their kids
are missing by not being able to figure out like,
oh, if I go to this corner and I turn the corner,
then I can see down the street whether Bobby is playing down
on his, you know, in front of his house.
Or, you know, they just that's just not something
that kids have available to them a lot of the time.
And what does that do to your to your sense of self
and possibility and just your normal ability
to sort of go about human life in a productive way?
We found that progressing along a continuum of spatial
knowledge was really limited unless the children were able
to get around independently.
And I think as you're bringing up the importance
of independent mobility and in terms not just in terms
of cognitive development, which we found,
but also in terms of physical health and being able
to function well in school and do well in school.
And I think just have independence around even,
you know, not just for children, but also for parents.
So parents have the ability to not have to be shackled
into carrying their children everywhere.
Yeah.
And I mean, this gets to one of the sort of core concepts
in the book, which is the concept of street ecology.
Maybe you could talk a little bit about that idea
and how you construct a theory of street ecology.
Certainly.
I mean, this is one of the important contributions
my father made and really talks about how nurturing
and caring is the environment for you.
And, you know, how is it helping us evolve
and grow and connect with members of the community?
How how is it not just in terms of environmental
quality, but ecological quality?
How is it inviting us to have a feel a bigger sense
of our neighborhood and home territory,
which is another one of my father's findings
in around the community?
So it actually it takes the idea of the street
environment and gives it a much richer sense
of what it is and of what it can be.
And I think that's another important contribution
that, you know, aside from it being just a conduit
for traffic, it's really thinking about the street
environment as being a place for people
and the hearts of our cities.
And then there's a related sort of negative
concept that you discuss, which is the barrier
effect and how poorly designed roads
and stroads and, you know, major arterials
and all of these dead spaces that we have
constructed in order to give cars free rain
have those pieces of infrastructure
actually create barriers to human connection
and achievement and opportunity.
Absolutely. So and as research really bears
us out that the heavily traffic street
is the one that rips the community apart
and is a barrier to it.
And and others have done some important
research on the barrier effects of traffic.
And, you know, again, it's the it's the street
can either bring us together and knit us
together or could rip us apart.
And I think that his research really helped
open our eyes to the what I also call
not just the conflict in the power dynamic
of the streets, but also the promise,
like, what is the promise of our streets?
And so I basically took the book
and divided it.
I reorganized the book a bit
and divided it into these four parts.
One is the conflict, which is the research
we talked about, the power dynamics
and the promise.
And then after that, the future and the promise
being how can we actually realize
the promise of our streets?
And that's another sort of hopeful message
I feel I feel my father also pioneered.
And one of the things that's holding us back,
I think, is what you refer to
as the Stockholm syndrome of the street.
Explain what you mean by that.
Well, there's this sort of sense that
when we look at that post-accident interviews
that people take on extra responsibility
for like a bicyclist.
We found that bicyclists and pedestrians
take on extra setups of responsibility
that they were actually more at fault
than they were, than they really should be.
In terms of being hit in the street ecology.
And so I came up with my friend,
Arthur Grenbeck, the idea that there's a
Stockholm syndrome of the street,
that people are actually beholden to their captors,
which are which are the cars.
And in the book, I also talk about auto domination
and what does that actually mean?
What does it actually look like?
So this auto domination, there's this kinship
you feel to your captors.
And taking on the responsibility of
you're being hit by a car,
either as a bicyclist or a pedestrian,
is given greater weight.
So that's basically the Stockholm syndrome of the street.
Yeah, it's this idea, you know,
I've spoken with Dr. Ian Walker,
whose work on motor normativity is so important.
And he talks about the is-ought fallacy
that, you know, that we think,
well, this is the way it is.
That means it's the way it ought to be.
And I think that's very much at play here that,
you know, well, I feel scared to ride my bike.
Riding my bike is dangerous.
I might get hit.
That's the way it is.
I guess that's the way it's supposed to be
because, you know, that's the way it is.
And I am dealing with something in my neighborhood
where there's a new bike lane
on the street adjacent to my house.
And there's a lot of pushback going on
from the business community
because it's made it...
You can't double park on the street anymore
now that there's a bike lane.
And they say that they need people
to be able to double park,
which is, of course, illegal and dangerous.
That without double parking,
their businesses are going to go under,
which, you know, is not likely to be true.
But I feel anxious as much as I want
this bike lane to stay in there.
And I'm, you know, really dedicated
to sort of fighting for the bike lane.
There's a part of me that I've been sensing
where I feel anxious about it.
There's part of me that's like,
oh, maybe we should just let them have it back
for the cars because...
And I've been sort of wondering,
like, why do I feel that way?
And then I was reading this and I'm like,
oh, it's that.
It's that I want to ingratiate myself
in a sense or form an alliance
with those forces of power
because I don't have confidence
that I will be able to be a respected
entity in the community
because cars are so dominated, right?
You know, it's such an attractive mode of travel.
And I can imagine it with what you're saying, too,
that there are people who you respect
and like who might feel this need
to, like, support driving.
It is, again, this sort of Stockholm syndrome
of the street that there is that we all sort of feel like,
oh, maybe we should consider
facilitating the automobile.
Maybe we should support these automobile
philic motions and actions.
So, yeah, but we also need to recognize
how we need to re-see the environment
and re-see things and then and understand
that we're in this sort of matrix of auto-domination
and it sort of it rules our world.
And in so many ways, I mean, one of the things
that Dan Burton, I talked about
with these street transformation projects
that we're studying is that
there's always so much opposition
because once you touch the street,
everyone gets involved.
And so, I mean, I think there's this way that we need to
when I followed it is I always think of the song,
hey, what's that sound?
Everyone, look what's going down or going around.
And I think that that's sort of what he did
is he helped us see something new and afresh.
If I can, I want to share with you
one of the warnings my father provided
because I think it's one of the best
statements about auto-domination there is.
OK. He said, the automobile
satisfyer of private needs, demands and whims
has created an insatiable demand for access
and a whole profession of planners and engineers
both serving and further stimulating that demand.
Yeah, that that really puts it in a nutshell.
That's as you say, he he had a real talent for writing
and he did that talent.
I think sort of his graceful writing is
you know, an embodiment of his graceful thinking
about these these things.
And he was such a sort of inventive
and an imaginative thinker.
I want to talk about two future related things
before we end this conversation.
And one of them is something I've been struggling
to wrap my mind around for a couple of years now.
And that is the advent of autonomous vehicles
and robot robot taxis in particular.
There's so much debate in the transportation community
at this point, you know, well, they're safer
than human drivers.
They're going to result in a lot fewer fatalities
and injuries.
They are electrically powered
so they don't have tailpipe emissions, etc, etc.
And I know all of that
and I accept all of that.
And yet somehow just viscerally, I don't want them.
And I have been trying to interrogate why it is
that that I don't want them.
And then, you know, I came upon this passage in your book.
If this new wave of driverless cars are large, fast
and everywhere, there is little doubt that our sense
of the street, our senses of the essence
of what it feels to be human could be deadened.
And then you go on to say, we need to be stewards
of our own humanity and dignity in the face
of this newly emerging, highly technical society.
In short, our streets should cradle our humanity
by fostering dignified human experiences
for restorative, rejuvenating and joyful exchanges
between people of all ages and backgrounds.
And I just agree with that so thoroughly.
And I guess I understand the advantages
that these vehicles represent in many ways.
But I'd love to hear you talk about what you think
are the threats to the very core concept
of livable streets that autonomous vehicles
and robotaxis embody.
Right. Well, thanks for bringing up that quote
because I think it embodies a lot of
what I'm shooting for in terms of, you know,
making sure that we're careful going forward.
And I'd have to say that when we look at the history
of auto orientation and new automotive technologies,
they've often led to bigger, faster cars.
And that's that's one of the big concerns.
And I think that there's been enough written
that I hope that sort of is moderating
the approaches that the autonomous vehicle companies are taking
because you're right, that actually the the technology
that they offer in terms of making things safer
could be really beneficial.
And I think that we should actually take those technologies
now and adopt them in in current vehicles,
such as speed governors and intelligent speed assistance
technology anti breaking systems
and and also making smaller vehicles as well.
So I think it's it's it's something we need to carefully monitor.
Going forward.
And I think that one of the things I've heard is that
the autonomous vehicle trip rate right now is still pretty low.
It's taking a long time to deploy
the whole autonomous vehicle system.
And their their collision safety profile,
I think is is doing pretty well right now.
But my concern is that the vehicles are bigger and faster
and lead to an environment where
pedestrians, especially and bicyclists, get edged out.
And one of the reasons that I feel this is important is
autonomous vehicles are still trying to figure out
how to operate with pedestrians in the mix.
I think that the last thing I'd want to see is pedestrians
get sort of edged out of the street environment
because of autonomous vehicles.
Yeah, that's something I've worried about.
And people keep telling me not to worry about it.
But I was just in Austin and Austin to my eye
has more autonomous vehicles than San Francisco, Los Angeles,
you know, where it's become common to see them on the street,
of course, but in Austin, you can stand on any street downtown.
And, you know, within just a few minutes,
you'll see three, five, ten go by, you know, several at a time.
And it sort of gives you an idea of what the streetscape might be like.
If all of the vehicles were autonomous.
And it's interesting because as a pedestrian,
even as I understand that I'm safer with autonomous vehicles,
there's something about them not having human beings
in control of them and of removing that human element
from the street as flawed and dangerous as human drivers are,
that the idea that all of the vehicles around me one day
might be vehicles to which I cannot make any appeal
on a human level.
It's sort of like, you know, now when you call customer service,
you only get a bot.
You only get, you know, an automated answer.
And that's going to be more and more true.
And it just seems like just another way
that human beings are going to be removed from, you know,
a lot of places stores,
you don't have a human being checking you out anymore, et cetera.
So, you know, as much as I know, you know,
gosh, human drivers are terrible.
I see them do terrible things every day
and you don't see Waymo's doing that.
But the texture of the street,
there's something about the ecology of the street
that is changed in a profound way
by having robot cars that concerns me.
No, absolutely.
I mean, my concern is that it's going to feel
like living in a watch, you know,
it's going to feel just that mechanized.
And I think removing that human element is really a problem.
That's why I think what we should shoot for
is to modify the cars that exist on the road right now
and those that get purchased
with like intelligent speed assistance technology
and speed governors and early detection braking systems
and hopefully make smaller vehicles.
And I think those would be,
I mean, if we can do those with autonomous vehicles,
we should do those with existing vehicles now.
I wrote an article, Street Livability
and the Era of Driverless Cars
that talks about, Billy Riggs and I talk about
the different approaches we should be taking
in terms of the street, the vehicles and the drivers.
And so that might be something your listeners
might want to look at as well.
I want to wrap up now, but you talk about the future.
And I again, want to just ask you an open-ended question.
What are some of the ways that we can continue
to fight for livable streets, for human streets
and for sort of the humanity of cities in general?
Like, how can people fight for that?
Because I think that increasingly we're living in a world
as we've been saying where humanity is being drained out
of so many of the interactions that we have
and that we've taken for granted.
And we're seeing these record rates of loneliness,
depression, anxiety.
How can we fight for livable streets
that are good and healthy for humans?
Good question.
And I mean, I'm sorry for the shameless plug,
but the research in livable streets and livable streets
2.0 is seminal and timeless
and can help people understand the greater harms
that cars and traffic affect,
impart on communities and impact communities with.
And I think that that research could be used
to help mobilize efforts to do such things
as slow traffic down.
One of the biggest harms is speeding traffic.
One of the graphics that I'll provide
for you to put up online is that traffic casualties
and fatalities go up dramatically
between 20 and 30 miles an hour.
Now, why is that?
Well, basically I think that we as humans
have evolved to withstand head trauma
at the highest speeds we can run,
which is around 25 miles an hour.
So there's a physio biologic component
to slowing cars down.
And I think slowing vehicles down is key
to making our streets safer.
And also lower the noise impacts,
lower the fear impacts, things like that.
So slowing cars down I think is really key.
And I think we do the term
intelligence speed assistance technology,
traffic calming and just the way we design our streets.
Again, I think the research, moderating speeds.
The book also has, it has a whole roadmap
of doing things for pedestrians and bicyclists
as well as traffic calming.
My father in the original book,
Livable Streets was really about traffic calming.
And I added whole sections on pedestrian and bicycle
planning and street redesign.
I took the book from 300 pages to 600 pages
and added these sections.
So it's a much larger book.
It also talks about mobilizing people
to make street changes.
And as we mentioned,
changing the street environment's not easy.
So it also talks about being a change agent,
how to mobilize support for your efforts.
And so there could be many different efforts
taken by many different people to lower speeds,
to improve pedestrian and bicycle
and traffic calming infrastructure.
And just be open to the idea of changing your environment.
As Dan Burton and I talked about the last few days,
being change agents is so important
to transforming our street environments
to make them safer and livable.
And that requires bravery and information
and solidarity with your fellow residents
and your neighbors and really making,
keeping those human connections alive.
So sort of by fighting for your streets to be more human,
I think you're already activating.
Yeah, absolutely.
But what you need to be cognizant of
is that there are gonna be a lot of people
resisting the change.
It takes a lot of patience and effort
to get that change to happen,
but be aware and be fulfilled by the fact
that a lot of people have gone through this before.
Yeah.
Well, thank you so much for joining us, Bruce.
This was really great.
And I just have to say what an honor
you've done to your father's legacy
by continuing it and broadening it and keeping it alive.
So thank you for doing that.
Thank you so much.
I appreciate all the work you've done.
Thank you so much for having me
and congratulations on your book as well.
That's it for this episode of The War on Cars.
Thanks again to Bruce Applyard for joining us.
Remember, you can support us
by signing up on Patreon at patreon.com
slash The War on Cars pod.
And you can read our book, Life After Cars,
freeing ourselves from the tyranny of the automobile
out now from Thesis, a Penguin Random House imprint.
Go to lifeaftercars.com
to find out more about the book
and also our upcoming tour dates.
A big thanks to everyone who supports us,
including our top Patreon contributors,
Charlie G of Human Powered Law in Portland, Oregon,
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Thanks also to our friends at Cleverhood.
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The War on Cars is produced with support
from the Helen and William Mazer Foundation.
This episode was edited by Samantha Gatzek.
It was recorded by Walter Nordquist
at the Brooklyn Podcasting Studio.
Our theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear.
Transcripts are by Russell Gregg.
Our logo is by Danny Finkel.
I'm Sarah Goodyear, and this is The War on Cars.

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