The Strong Towns Podcast

This week on the Strong Towns Podcast, host Chuck Marohn welcomes back a special return guest: Jarrett Walker, head of Jarrett Walker + Associates, a transit-planning firm based in Portland, Oregon. Walker has been a consultant in public transit network, design, and policy for many decades now, and has worked all across North America and other countries worldwide. He’s also the author of the book Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives, as well as the blog Human Transit. Recently while doing his end-of-the-year desk cleaning, Chuck came across an article that Walker wrote in 2018 for the Journal of Public Transportation titled “To Predict with Confidence, Plan for Freedom.” Upon rereading it (for the fourth time), Chuck knew he wanted to talk to Walker about this piece. So, join in for this conversation about the limitations of prediction, starting with a story seven or eight years ago, when Walker was developing a proposed redesign for the bus netwo

Can driverless cars really be the “safe, sustainable, and inclusive ‘mobility solutions’ that tech companies and automakers are promising us”? In his newest book, Autonorama: The Illusory Promise of High-Tech Driving, technology historian Peter Norton argues that we should treat these utopian promises about driverless vehicles with a great deal more caution and skepticism. Autonorama exposes how, from its inception in the Depression era, the automobile was a subject of controversy; believe it or not, not everyone initially wanted cars around. Over time, however, a shift occurred that caused us to see automobiles as the solution, and a not a problem, for our transportation needs in cities. Today on the Strong Towns Podcast, host Chuck Marohn is interviewing Peter Norton about Autonorama. They discuss the history behind our shift in perception toward cars—up to our current societal fixation on driverless cars, the wrong answer for a problem we can solve with resources we already have, and without doing furthe

Americans drove less during the early months of pandemic, yet traffic fatalities increased. There was a sense among many safety experts that this was an anomaly, that fatality rates would revert to trend once people started driving again. That didn’t happen. Instead, as overall driving levels have returned to normal, crashes and fatality rates have remained shockingly high. These results are not explainable by any theory of traffic safety being used by modern transportation professionals. As a result, there has been a search for explanations, one that has embraced some of our newest and most divisive cultural narratives while simultaneously managing to rehash some old and worn-out memes. All this while missing the obvious factor that is, in some ways, too painful for industry insiders to acknowledge.  So, what is going on?

This week on the Strong Towns Podcast, we’re kicking off the new year by featuring a special guest: Tim Soerens, author and co-founder of the Parish Collective. Last year, Chuck read Tim’s books The New Parish: How Neighborhood Churches Are Transforming Mission, Discipleship and Community and Everywhere You Look: Discovering the Church Right Where You Are—and even recommended them to his priest! If you’re not Christian or not religious, don’t worry: Tim’s not here to preach, but rather to talk about community, and the position of churches within a community. His organization, the Parish Collective, is a network of place-based churches and small community groups who are all wrestling with the question of how to reconnect churches with their neighborhoods. Furthermore, they’re encouraging people to consider what part locally connected churches can play in the strengthening and holistic renewal of a place over time. Strong Towns is, of course, a secular organization. Still, we love hearing about how faith comm

There have been dozens of people hit on State Street in Springfield, Massachusetts, in recent years, including Gayle Ball who was recently killed crossing State Street in front of the Central Library.  Council members are demanding action and they called a special meeting to discuss what can be done. The city’s engineer was there as well, and what ensued was a conversation in two different languages.  One is the urgent language of the elected official, reflecting the sadness, fear, and anxiety of residents who have long dealt with this dangerous street. The other is the language of the professional, reflecting the process, standards, and accepted practices of the profession. In this episode, Chuck Marohn plays interpreter, explaining to the city’s engineer—in his language—what he’s being asked to do while explaining to everyone else—in their language—what exactly the engineer is saying.

All of a sudden, the new book from Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, has been out for nearly two months. It’s already received dozens of five-star reviews, and Chuck is out talking about the book around the country, both through events and in the media. Thousands of new people are encountering the Strong Towns message of how to fix the broken—i.e., dangerous, ineffective, wasteful—North American transportation system. We recently invited the book’s earliest and most passionate supporters—including people who preordered Confessions, Strong Towns members, and members of the book launch team—to a Q&A with Chuck. We spent an hour drilling down into the specifics of how to make transportation better and reform the engineering professions. The questions we received from these brilliant and engaged advocates were so good that we wanted to share the Q&A as an episode of the Strong Towns Podcast. In this episode, Chuck answers questions about transportation technology

Hey Strong Towns Podcast listeners, it's been a while. Chuck's been out on the road, but the subject of this episode was too important not to talk about now. We're revisiting a library in Springfield that many of you are familiar with, as the dangerous stroad in front of it, State Street, has been a subject many times in Strong Towns articles (and in Chuck's latest book, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer). Well, State Street is back in the news, and not because it's gotten any safer. We're sorry to report that it's become the site of another tragedy—one that could have been completely avoided. We need to stop allowing this to happen. You might feel powerless listening to stories like this, but there is something you can do right now to help spread information about the dangers of stroads, and support the activists who are working to make our places safer: You can become a Strong Towns member. Your support is what empowers this movement, so click here to join in and make a difference today.

On December 3, 2014, a 7-year-old girl named Destiny Gonzalez was killed while crossing State Street in Springfield, Massachusetts. What gets lost in the shocking statistics about the number of pedestrians who die each year in traffic crashes—4,884 in the U.S. in 2014, more than 6,700 in 2020—is that they aren’t “statistics” at all, or even “pedestrians” really, but people with names, who had hopes and dreams, and family and friends forever changed by the loss of their loved one. That was certainly the case with Destiny, who was killed while leaving the Central Library with her mother and cousin. She also left behind a father, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends. Something else that gets lost in these discussions is how our streets got so unsafe to begin with. Our streets, roads, and stroads are designed according to values so embedded that traffic engineers themselves might not be constantly aware of them. That’s a problem because you can’t fix something you don’t even know exists.

Have you visited the Strong Towns Action Lab? That's where we keep our best, most actionable content. We've written a lot over the years, and we wanted to have a place we could direct people to when they want to quickly access our top content—including videos, podcasts, and e-books. Think of it as a database of resources that we've cultivated just for you! Beyond that, the Action Lab is also where we've begun collecting questions from our readers and listeners, and today we wanted to take a look at some of those here on the Strong Towns Podcast. So, Chuck Marohn will be responding to your questions on things like how to begin slowing cars down on residential streets, how to implement Strong Towns principles when you work for a large-scale development firm, how to implement incrementalism in your place, how to measure success in import replacement, and more! If you've got a burning query that you want us to answer next time, head on over to the Community Section of the Acton Lab, and post it there. Our goal

Which comes first: a great transit system or a great city that can support it? What role does high-speed rail play in an overall, effective transportation system? And is an incremental approach really possible with high-speed transit? These are important questions with potentially complex answers. For insight we turned to Rick Harnish. He’s executive director of the High Speed Rail Alliance, the nation’s largest high-speed rail advocacy organization. The organization’s goal is to make high-speed trains “fast, frequent, and affordable.” Harnish cofounded the Alliance in 1993 (he’s also a Strong Towns member), and we’re pleased to welcome him as our guest this week on the Strong Towns Podcast. In this episode, Harnish and Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn talk about how much of the transit that gets built is based on what places need versus what they can get funding for. They discuss the problem of thinking about transit as a “charitable overlay” to an auto-oriented system, and whether we can afford to fun

This week on the Strong Towns podcast, Chuck makes a confession about something he did that he now regrets...and you might be surprised at how much of it revolves around poor placement of park benches in his town of Brainerd, Minnesota. Of course, that's not all this episode deals with. What Chuck's beef with his local park's benches really boils down to is the systematic devaluation of public space, by people who have both good intentions and not a clue what they're doing. Their misguided attempts to enhance the park has actually made it a worse place to be. By extension, its ability to generate wealth and provide a beautiful public area for the neighborhood has been impaired. How can you deal with similar issues in your own place? Maybe not with the exact approach that Chuck took (again, there are some regrets expressed in this episode), but there's still a lot we can learn from Brainerd's example. And if you really want to learn the ropes of urban design, then you need to enroll in our newest Academy cou

For more than four years, Strong Towns has been telling the story of the so-called I-49 Connector project in Shreveport, Louisiana. We say “so-called” because while this project may seek to connect two sections of I-49, it will do so by rending the Allendale neighborhood, a vibrant, predominantly black neighborhood that is the gateway to downtown Shreveport. It will also cost an extraordinary amount of money—an estimated $700 million—for less than four miles of road. Some state and city officials have been pushing for the project for years, but a growing grassroots movement of neighborhood leaders are fighting back. According to a local ABC affiliate, after decades of studies and meetings and discussion, a decision on the project is expected in late 2021 or early 2022. In this episode of The Strong Towns Podcast, we’re sharing the audio from a webcast we did last week. Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn and Program Director Rachel Quednau interview four exceptional leaders working to stop the urban highway

You've read Granola Shotgun. You've seen Johnny Sanphillippo on our website (including in an article just released today). You've heard him on the Strong Towns Podcast multiple times, and those interviews have each been hits with our listeners. So, we've invited him back again to chat with Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn. For those who don't know yet, Johnny is a blogger and small-scale developer working with property in and around Madison, Wisconsin. His adventures (and sometimes misadventures) in the suburbs of Madison, along with traveling, interviewing others, and photographing places around the country, have all afforded him some interesting insights into the North American development pattern. On this episode of the Strong Towns Podcast, he shares his perspectives on “occupying” the suburbs on its own terms, the future of our relationship with the automobile, dealing with complex problems (especially when those problems become a crisis), "dystopian" views, intergenerational cooperation, and more.

We hear it all the time: “Keep your options open.” It’s the philosophy that shapes much of our approach to education, career, and relationships. It also shapes where we choose to live and, critically, how we live there. Pete Davis calls this infinite browsing mode, and he says it is the defining characteristic of our time. Davis compares it to a long hallway with countless doors, each of which leads to new possibilities. Having options can be fun and even liberating. But there are also downsides of hopping from room to room, of living life in the hallway. And the thing is, says Davis, the people we most admire—for example, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mister Rogers, Dorothy Day, or the unsung local advocate going about the work of making the neighborhood better—are the folks who ignored the advice to keep their options open. Rather, they are, in a word, dedicated. A few years ago, Pete Davis helped bring Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn to speak at Harvard. We’re thrilled now to welcome Davis in return

The traditional development pattern of towns and cities evolved with humans, the same way ant hills evolved with the ant and bee hives evolved with the bee. Yet around the time of the Great Depression, North Americans began jettisoning millennia of accumulated wisdom about city-building in favor of a suburban development pattern that was scaled for cars rather than people, built to a finished state and all at once, resistant to feedback and adaptation, and ultimately unable to pay for itself. At Strong Towns we call this massive and relatively sudden shift the “Suburban Experiment”—and we’re all the guinea pigs. Several generations into this experiment, the data is in: the suburban development pattern doesn’t work: North American cities exchanged long-term stability for near-term growth, but now the bills are coming due. An entire continent of cities are slipping toward insolvency. Last month, Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn was the guest on Saving Elephants, a podcast geared toward conservative Millenn

How far should we go in trusting experts? That's the question that Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn tackles this week on the Strong Towns Podcast. By taking a trip through the past to the present, Chuck looks at various events in recent history—from 9/11 and the Iraq War to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic—to see what they can teach us about blindly trusting in "absolute" expertise. It's a question that plays a central role in Chuck's new book, Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, which is available for preorder and will be coming out on September 8. In the book, Chuck systematically disassembles all of the things that engineers have gotten wrong over the years, and all the faulty, costly, dangerous standards they have embedded into the profession, as a result. In spite of these issues and in spite of the need for reform, the word of engineers is treated as nearly infallible. They are, after all, the experts. That's not to say that there is no place for experts in society. If you're going to build a

Jason Slaughter is the creator of Not Just Bikes, a fast-growing YouTube channel about urban planning and urban life. Based in Amsterdam, he often makes videos about why city living in The Netherlands is so good...including the bikes, but not just the bikes. Yet Slaughter grew up in London, Ontario, and many of his most-watched videos feature trenchant analyses of the North American suburban development pattern. He’s also creating a popular series (with five installments so far) on core Strong Towns themes. We’re excited to welcome Jason Slaughter as this week’s guest on the Strong Towns Podcast. In this episode, Slaughter tells Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn the story of how a half-mile, death-defying walk along a Houston stroad changed everything for him. They talk about why Amsterdam’s renown for its bikeability and bike culture wasn’t an inevitability, and what other cities—from Brussels to Brainerd—can learn from Amsterdam’s example. They also discuss Amsterdam’s safe streets movement, why Slaughte

Last week, we announced that Strong Towns has filed a lawsuit against the Minnesota Board of Engineering Licensure in federal district court. For more information about the case, its background, and anything that we're doing in relation to it, check out the landing page we've made where you can read the full complaint and get some additional context on our reform efforts. On Thursday, we held a briefing to chat about the lawsuit with our supporters. As guest speakers, the briefing features a member of the legal team, William Mohrman, along with Strong Towns board member John Reuter and Strong Towns member and Mayor Pro Tem of Costa Mesa, California, Andrea Marr—an engineer who has faced similar issues in the past with her local board. Strong Towns Founder and President Charles Marohn was also there to present some of the details of the case and answer questions from attendees. We believe that you should have access to all the details about Strong Towns' efforts to protect the right to call for essential ref

A small group of professional engineers are using the licensing process to stifle calls for reform and retaliate against Strong Towns for its advocacy. The Strong Towns organization advocates for reforming the way we build our cities, especially the approach that many professional engineers take with transportation and infrastructure systems. Our critiques of engineers include our video “Conversation with an Engineer,” our many statements on the way engineering organizations advocate for state and federal funding, and our assertion that engineers are often grossly negligent in their street designs when it comes to their treatment of people walking and biking.  This September, Wiley & Sons will publish Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: A Strong Towns Approach to Transportation, a book written by Charles Marohn that is deeply critical of the standard approach to transportation used by many American engineers.  While there are a growing number of engineers that support the kind of reforms Strong Towns

How much conscious thought goes into our reactions to a place? It might be less than you think. The more we come to understand the human brain, the more we see how much the unconscious mind, and our need to socialize in particular, influences us. And by extension, it influences our architecture. Our capacity for recognizing human faces, for example, has subtly shaped many traditional styles of buildings. (You might even be picturing it now: the windows as "eyes," the door as a "mouth.") This is an aspect of neuropsychology that other industries readily acknowledge. Your brain is drawn to, and can process, a face far faster than writing and other symbols. Advertisers use this to their advantage to get people's attention and make them feel comfortable...so why don't modern architects heed this aspect of human nature? And as architecture moves further away from its stylistic roots, what are the consequences for us, on a psychological level? This week on the Strong Towns Podcast, Strong Towns president Char