Janette Sadik-Khan on the Future of Cities

JANETTE:
I think when, you know, our streets emptied out of cars, people suddenly saw what was possible, right? What was literally hidden between the lanes. And at a time when we were home and, you know, worried about what this pandemic was going to bring, actually it was our streets that brought our cities back. People came out to exercise, eat outdoors, play, school, vote. It really showed that you could change your streets. They could be different. They didn’t have to be designed for cars, and they didn’t have to be used the same way all the time.

REID:
Hi, I’m Reid Hoffman.

ARIA:
And I’m Aria Finger.

REID:
We want to know what happens if, in the future, everything breaks humanity’s way.

ARIA:
We’re speaking with visionaries in every field, from climate science to criminal justice, and from entertainment to education.

REID:
These conversations also feature another kind of guest, GPT-4, OpenAI’s latest and most powerful language model to date. Each episode will have a companion story, which we’ve generated with GPT-4 to spark discussion. You can find these stories down in the show notes.

ARIA:
In each episode, we seek out the brightest version of the future and learn what it’ll take to get there.

REID:
This is Possible.

ARIA:
I am super excited to talk about the future of cities and what the implications are for transportation, what the implications are for climate change. And not just because I am a lifelong New Yorker who grew up in the Bronx, and now I live in Brooklyn. But, you know, globally, more and more people are moving to cities. We have megacities around the world, and this is the lived experience of so many people. And there’s also so many things we can learn. Small towns can learn from cities, there’s so much we can learn from the cities of Europe, who are dense urban areas where you need less cars, you need less fuel. And yet, there’s also so many things that are negative about cities, whether it’s the segregation or poor transportation. That’s why we’re so excited to be talking with Janette Sadik-Khan. She has done amazing work in New York City making it a more sort of people-friendly, transportation-friendly place. And I think we can learn so much from her about how to apply that to other places, other cities, other villages, other towns, globally, as well as here in the us.

REID:
Yeah, look, I completely agree. I mean, for example, part of we have to do is we have to figure out how to make the path of the evolution and reinvention of cities, whether it’s what Janette’s done with bike lanes and paths. But I think it’s super important to be thinking about how do we evolve the technology of cities? And not just the technology to make cities run, but cities themselves as a form of technology. It’s part of how we evolve our connectedness, our togetherness. It’s that physical instantiation of the space and community. And so, the fact that – I think we’ll be talking about cities, I think we’ll be talking about transport, and all of us should always bring a little bit of a first-principles thinking about like, “well, look, what’s the way it should be?” And obviously there is a way it is, which may make the way it should be hard to get to. But you should always be thinking about how do we get there.

ARIA:
Janette is one of the world’s foremost authorities on transportation and urban transformation. She was commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation for four years. And in that time she transformed New York’s most iconic streets and public spaces to become more bike and pedestrian friendly from Broadway to Herald Square. She currently works for Bloomberg Associates, where she advises city mayors on transportation practices in cities like Los Angeles, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Oakland, and Athens.

REID:
Here’s our conversation with Janette Sadik-Khan.

Janette, we haven’t met yet, but you were recommended to me by several people in my network. But also when we asked GPT-4 about the leading thinkers on cities and transportation, it also mentioned you. So you are adored by humans and AI alike. [laugh]

JANETTE:
[laugh] Well you hang out in mischievous circles.

ARIA:
And I have to say, Janette, as the New Yorker on the call, which we mentioned, I actually, today I was running around New York City from meeting to meeting. So I was walking, I was taking the subway, I was going through a pedestrian-only plaza, so I was getting to see some of your brilliance firsthand, which was a lot of fun. And actually, Reid and I have a good friend, Cindy McLaughlin, and when I told her that we were going to be talking to you, she was like, “oh my God, you have to ask her this question.” She was like, “Aria, Robert Moses destroyed the city in the 50s and 60s. He created the BQE [Brooklyn Queens Expressway.] Much like in many cities across the country, we have these urban highways that were created to encourage commuters to come back in, and obviously as they’re looking to potentially expand, they want to make it five lanes, six lanes. Like, just as we’re trying to get cars out of the city, we want to make it a people-first city, are these expansions to these highways, like, is this just a faucet that we’re turning on to get the cars back in? How do you think about these highways in cities and specifically New York, and how do we need to deal with them?

JANETTE:
You know, when you think about it, Robert Moses actually laid the foundation that allowed us to create the innovation that followed. We were actually able to repurpose all that excess roadway and turn it into bike lanes and bus lanes and pedestrian plazas. And so I think it’s a really important lesson, not only for cities like New York, but cities across the country and across the world, that you have some of your greatest resources hidden in plain sight. And it’s about using your imagination to repurpose that asset to higher use. Because when you think about it, so many of our streets, you’ve seen this in New York City, Reid, you’ve seen this in the Bay Area in California, those streets have been the same way for like 60, 70 years. And you think about the changes in 60 years, 70 years in tech, think about just culturally, society, music, every single area has transformed. But our streets, our streets are like Jurassic Park man. They are just, you know, immovable. And so there is a lot of magic to be made, a lot of alchemy that’s available to us if we just look at our streets a little differently.

REID:
How do you think about the function of a city and the design of it? And how is that function improved through changing the design? Just as you’re referring to, like, look, we have these cities, these streets here this way for many decades and it’s good to have an upgrade.

JANETTE:
Yeah, it’s true. I mean, when you think about it, Reid and Aria, in so many ways, cities throughout history have been built around their people and by the transportation technology of their time. Ancient cities were built on rivers and harbors, towns harnessed the power of waterways to move their mills and obtain drinking water and move goods. But ancient cities stretched only as far as the territory that could be crossed on foot. And so, as cities grew and people were able to get around with horses and carriages and buses and trains and streetcars, the urban footprint expanded. And when the automobile arrived on city streets, it wasn’t just new hardware running on old streets. There was a revolution in the design of cities themselves. After centuries of building cities around people, we started to rebuild them around the car.

And urban planners, you know, restricted the role of people in the street. You’ll remember car companies came out with this campaign that demonized pedestrians as jay-walkers: “we can’t have that kind of thing going on in the street, we need to prioritize the car.” And they cleared them out of the way and widened the roadbed to accommodate, you know, speeding vehicles and places to park cars. This approach destroyed downtowns. You see office towers in the center of barren parking lots today. And so you see the physical legacy of that policy in city after city. And the car also changed the law. A lot of American cities have restrictions on what you can build where. Developers can build only single family houses in certain places and offices are zoned in one area and shopping in another area, to the point where in many American cities almost every trip from going to work to getting a gallon of milk requires getting into a car.

And it just doesn’t have to be that way. 85% of trips in the United States are taken in a car, and that number is over 80% in Europe, which we always think of as, like, you know, the “nirvana of transportation.” But we can get a lot out of trips by biking and walking just by making our roads easier to walk and bike and to take transportation. And the reason why, is that over 50% of trips in the United States are under three miles. So think about that. That’s a distance that’s easily bikeable, that’s easily walkable. And it’s not that people are choosing to drive for every trip because they like it so much, it’s because there’s no choice. So many cities lack good sidewalks, safe crosswalks. You wait for a bus on a dirt path on the side of the road for an hour at a time. So, I think you really get out of your street what you put into it. And I think we need a revolution in transportation planning that resets the 20th century rules and allows more compact development, alternatives to driving. And you’re not going to do that with just smarter cars and flying taxis. We need better streets and stronger neighborhoods.

ARIA:
Well, I’m definitely pro smarter cars and flying taxis, but yes, I agree.

Actually, Janette, your stats blew me away as someone who’s, like, obsessed with stats that surprise. Both the 50% of trips being three miles or less. I mean, I read a lot of what you’ve been saying and it’s like, that’s an e-bike trip. I mean, that is like the easiest trip you can take. But I also have to admit, I’m shocked that in Europe, 80% of trips are still by car. Because like you said, we think of it as this utopia. I feel like there’s the – of course, there’s a backlash to everything right now and people backlash to car-free cities. And I think you and others have smartly said, “these are not car-free cities, these are people-first districts.” As someone who loves New York, takes the subway all the time, looks at my step count constantly and wants to walk wherever I go, but I also have a car, and I have three kids, and I have a minivan to go pick up a lot of stuff – like, what does a people-first district look like? How can it accommodate people who might have a lot of stuff to put in a car, but also it can create this better, quieter, cleaner, more environmentally-sound future?

JANETTE:
Well, I can assure you that nobody’s coming for your car.

ARIA:
[laugh] Not in America at least.

JANETTE:
No. And you know, the idea of the car-free city is catching on, but I really think it needs some rebranding.

ARIA:
Yes.

JANETTE:
You know, a car-free city isn’t one where cars have been banned like some kind of “no drive zone.” It’s a city where their footprint has been reduced and where they’re not the dominant player in every public space and street. It’s really a car-light city: a place where cars aren’t banned, but they aren’t necessary, and there are many other choices. And we’re seeing that in lots of cities. I don’t know if you’ve been to Oslo at all, but they’ve gotten rid of street parking in most of its city center. And cars and trucks can still access the area to pick up and drop off people and there are still private parking lots, but the streets themselves are no longer exclusively for moving and storing cars, and making them much more of a city for people. And you’ve seen that in Paris, you may have seen what Mayor Hidalgo is doing, and reconfiguring these streets so they’re not just places where people drive through, they’re places that people go to.

So, many cities are pursuing this. And I think the smartest city isn’t one that has the newest apps that help you summon a shared ride to go from place to place. I think the smartest city is when you don’t need to drive in the first place.

ARIA:
I think I like that again, because you’re opening up a new kind of freedom, right? It’s before you were captured by your car and especially because of the, you know, inequities across the US and elsewhere. People might not have a car. The best city is not where the poor can afford cars, it’s where the rich take public transportation. And so how do we create this city where that’s accessible? And so GPT-4 generated an AI story and it follows a 20 year old with no driver’s license who is trying to get to a birthday party across Istanbul in the future. They travel by e-bike, an autonomous water taxi, and foot and, you know, seamless technology along the way. And one of the things that I love that you do is that if you’re thinking about living your life right now and you don’t have the car you rely on, it seems worse. But I think what we see in Paris and some of the changes you’ve made in New York is like, let’s show you actually how this is better. Let’s show you how this is a better world. So I would love your reflections on that story about the future. What would you change? Did it seem accurate? What is promising? What did you think?

JANETTE:
I thought it was interesting. I’d never come across this approach before, so I was fascinated by how this went and it made me want to jump in and and and play around a little more. So thank you for that.

But I was really struck by the fact that first of all, our friend in Istanbul was told by the AI to take a bus, to a water taxi, to a bike-share bike, right? And I actually used Google Maps to route the trip from, I think it was Beyoğlu to Sultanahmet Square in Istanbul, and I took a look at the map, and if Emre just hopped on the Number 77 bus [laugh] and took the T1 Tram, he could have made it to his Nene’s house in 30 minutes just using today’s technology instead of the hour plus odyssey by walk, by boat, that it took. And so, I want to hope that the transportation technology of the future can make a trip faster and more efficient and less expensive.

ARIA:
I love it. I love it. You’re like, “actually I tried this out and I am smarter than the AI and here’s where we are.”

REID:
The current AI is a generativity AI. So it tells stories. Sometimes the stories are very interesting, and good theory, and good everything else. As it’s integrated and grounded – as, you know, Bing has recently done in search – it actually then gets a highly factual thing. So obviously being integrated into what is the actual, essentially APIs, for this kind of transportation and so forth, then what actually works wouldn’t be a super step forward, but it’s doable in, you know, n days of work.

JANETTE:
Right. Well, you know, the other thing that I thought was you’re talking to the storytelling piece here and there was a piece that really I think stood up for me, that people really need to be highly integrated into the facts and the algorithm. Because what we saw in the description that you sent me was that in the city of 15 million people, there were only passing mentions of people in this story. There were no people in the street, there was no one else on the bus, there was no one mentioned in the water taxi, no mention of cars and traffic. And so the story mentioned that cars had been banned, which seems to me the most futuristic prediction of all, but if that was the case, I would expect that he would’ve run across a lot of people getting around on foot and people on bikes.

And it does remind me of a lot of the visualizations you see of the future of transportation online. Like, if you google that, you know, “the future of transportation,” you see hundreds of renderings of driverless cars and flying taxis and drones and hyperloops. But in almost all of these visions, there are no people that are visible in the street and the sidewalk where these driverless cars and drones are running. And so I’d like to see the next generation of AI think about what the street life looks like, because the point of transportation technology shouldn’t be to have cooler cars, it should be to have better streets and more active life in cities.

ARIA:
I couldn’t agree more. People-first, certainly.

REID:
So, you know, there was a study and the UN estimated, I think, 90% of the US population will live in cities by 2050. How much is the history of humanity essentially the history of cities? What is our city grand arc as humanity?

JANETTE:
It’s such a great question, such a profound question actually. I mean, when you think about our history, it’s a history of the public common, right? I mean, you go back to, you know, the Agora in Athens, Boston Public Common, look at Tiananmen Square, Taksim Square, our cities really are about our public spaces and 56% of the population today lives in cities and it’s going to be 70% globally by 2050. So the future of the planet is in cities and we need to do whatever we can to make them better, safer, more affordable, efficient, beautiful places to live, work, play, and invest. That’s really a goal. And that’s not only good for the planet, because we can conserve more and we live more efficiently, but it’s also better for the ecosystem because we’re able to conserve other spaces and places for the environment.

And so I really believe that density is destiny here. And we’re seeing that arc again, going back to reclaiming spaces for people, making the public commons, putting the public back in the commons and not privatizing it, and not turning it into this dystopian piece where, yes, we’ll take people out of the – we’ll design them out of the street and just have driverless autonomous cars go. And, you know, we’ll have flying choppers and everybody will be in their hermetically sealed pods. I think we’ve seen the future in that movie WALL-E. I’m not sure anybody really liked it. It was a great movie though.

ARIA:
The UN report with 90% was an estimate before COVID. And I’m not sure if there’s an updated report, but I think to your point, we’re assuming that it’s going to be 70% plus of people in cities globally, and maybe even more in the us. How do you think the COVID working from home, working remotely – ridership in New York City subways is down to 50%, there’s less people at the bars and the restaurants in San Francisco on a Friday night than pre-COVID – How do you think that reshaped cities? And what are the changes we need to make to accommodate what potentially is sort of a different trajectory than we had pre-COVID?

And I think that’s a really fundamental piece. And it was interesting to me too, to see how after the pandemic so many cities kept their pandemic changes. In New York City, they freed up 10,000 parking spaces. 10,000… if I had taken 10,000 parking spaces away from people, you can just imagine what would’ve happened! I mean, you saw what happened with what I did already. 10,000 parking spaces?

So anyway, you see the outdoor cafes, you see this thriving life. And we did a study that was reported on in the New York Times that showed that businesses that did that saw a 20% increase in revenue, and businesses that didn’t put out outdoor seating saw decreases. And so I think this is a new investment strategy for cities and a new investment strategy for our streets that’s going to change forever. And so whether it’s making car-light streets, you know, where kids can come out and play and there are areas for pickup and drop off. And so, I think people are really bringing a new imaginative take on how we can use this huge resource that takes up about a third of space in cities and repurpose them to a higher end.

ARIA:
Janette, it’s so funny, that’s just reminding me that I actually don’t bike around New York City a lot, but during the pandemic I was pregnant and I had to get to my doctor’s appointment in Manhattan from Brooklyn. And so I took the Citi Bike right across the street from my apartment, and there were no cars driving so I was unafraid, and I biked across the Brooklyn Bridge every week, six months pregnant for my doctor’s appointment. And it was so lovely, right? So, yeah, I want that back. I want that back. [laugh]

JANETTE:
Yeah, no, the joy. And that’s part of the reason, I mean, working for Mayor Bloomberg, we put down 400 miles of bike lanes and we put down the first parking-protected bike lanes in the United States, because the idea was we really wanted to create a connected network that made it possible for you to get to where you needed to go safely, joyfully, without getting into a car. And in the process, we made our streets safer for everyone.

REID:
If you could give advice to someone who could – like, each Mayor of each city, and say, “wave a wand and do these 1-3 things within the next couple years,” what would those things be?

JANETTE:
I think that really the innovation that’s made the most difference in transforming cities around the world has been bike lanes, and particularly protected bike lanes. And I really think if you want to change the world, you can start by building a bike lane. And when you think about it over the last decade, while we’ve been dreaming about self-driving cars and flying cars, the real revolution has been in the bike lane. There’s now 1500 miles of bike lanes in New York City and they’re building cycling superhighways in Paris and London and Milan. And it’s a new way of viewing transportation in cities. And, increasingly, it’s not just a way to get around. These bike lanes are really a new anchor for a new approach to the way that cities are designed.

ARIA:
Can you talk a little bit about the e-bike? Because I have to admit, I have never rode on one. And so for all of our listeners who don’t use e-bikes regularly, I didn’t realize what a revolution it was. So I would love to hear you talk about how that sort of changes the game from just regular bicycles.

JANETTE:
Absolutely. I think, you know, take a look at Citi Bike, which we leveraged after building those bike lanes, we wanted to provide a new mobility option with this bike share program, which by the way, everybody thought was going to be yet another “blood in the streets move” by the crazy transportation commissioner. And, you know, what ended up happening is now there are 100,000 people that are using these bikes every day. And even more so to your point, Aria, because they’re e-bikes, and you can use e-bikes to get around, really easily, really efficiently, really effectively. You can get around without breaking a sweat. You know, those trips under three miles that I talked about, you can get around without breaking a sweat. And I think electric bikes actually have a growth opportunity that is way beyond what we have for almost any other mode.

You know, I mentioned before that most of these trips are under three miles and taking that one step further, almost two thirds of trips are less than five miles, which you can easily do on an electric bike in 30 minutes. And so, if even a fraction of car trips in cities shift to e-bikes, it really represents the potential to move hundreds of thousands of trips on just a fraction of that road space, and without all the noise, and the parking punishment that comes from those car trips.

REID:
The e-bikes is a good bridge to: where are you looking at how we can advance technology to make this a better problem? Obviously it’s like, look, the technology utopians go, “hey, automatic vehicles! Flying cars!” Both of which, by the way, I’ve invested in, because I am very positive on the re-humanification of space. Like if you go, “hey, this is what I would call for technologists to think about in building technology to make cities better, to make them more equitable, to make them more human,” what would be some of the gestures that you would make there?

JANETTE:
Well, I do think that technology can do a lot to help our cities, but I think again, the frame has got to be a people-centered frame rather than a tech-centered frame, which is always how it seems to go. It’s always, these solutions are always, what’s the problem you’re trying to solve here? In many cities, for example, if you’re an older person who wants to get a ride to a doctor’s appointment, if you have to use public transportation or access-a-ride, you have got to call a number, you’ve got to do it two days in advance, you call back the day before the appointment, with this pickup window, wait outside, hope that this van or bus shows up, it will make multiple stops. You know, that’s a problem statement that we can solve with technology. We can have apps that can do real time dispatching and networking.

There are a lot of neighborhoods where transit doesn’t reach, and we need to rethink our transit networks. They were designed half a century ago when most commuters traveled to office jobs downtown. And today, there are more trips than ever going to neighborhoods outside of the core. And so, we really do need to look at ways to kind of reimagine what that’s about.

I also think one of the more disturbing trends that I see in automobile design is this trend toward massive vehicles, right? Trucks and SUVs make up 80% of sales. But they’re not just dominant in the market, they’re deadlier in the street. Like, two to three times more deadly. And they’re expensive, $50,000, which – Americans now pay over $700 a month in car payments, two months of car payments pays outright for an e-bike or a scooter or a cargo bike. And so looking at the frame that way I think is important. And my prediction is that as micro-mobility technology improves, and as innovators innovate, we’re going to see challenges in the car market betting against the idea that bigger is better. Some people may not be ready to get on a scooter, but you know, a compact vehicle may make more sense than driving a big car or purchasing a second car. So I think that’s one big area.

REID:
What do you think, in addition to transport areas and that kind of thing, obviously one of the things we’d hoped for is parking garages, could be reclaimed as human spaces, whether it’s housing or parks or other kinds of things. What do you think would be the other ways in which, like, if you could you kind of say, “hey, this would be the kind of thing I would be looking for for the reconfiguration of the polis,” what would be some of that, those, those kind of technological gestures?

JANETTE:
Well, I do think that rethinking the car print of parking garages is certainly an area that’s got some real play, and looking at these garages as spaces to move micro-mobility, and to do freight differently, is certainly something I was even looking back to do in New York City. And you know, when you think about it, think about what you really like in a favorite city or a favorite town. What makes you happy there? Just imagining it, or your listeners listening, what do you really like about these places? And usually it’s that they’re very easy to walk around, they’re easy to shop and eat and hang out. It’s all in one place and we kind of know it when we see it, right? And so you sort of wonder why aren’t more places designed this way? You walk around Paris or you walk around Greenwich Village, my neighborhood, you walk around Boston, even walk around Disneyland, you know, that’s what people like about it. It’s all right there. And so when you think about it, it’s not really the technology. We can, we can repurpose parking spaces tomorrow and parking lots today. We can do this, all of this work right now. And I think that’s behind a lot of the work on a 15-minute neighborhood.

NEWS REEL:
15-minute cities are basically where bigger cities are divided up into smaller sections or neighborhoods. Everything people need, like shops, gyms, and bars, are all within a 15 minute walk or cycle.

NEWS REEL:
The idea of 15 minute cities is spread to Paris, Melbourne, and South Korea attracted by the promise of lower car use and a better quality of life.

JANETTE:
Actually, it doesn’t have to be technology, it’s just bringing a revolutionary lens to the assets that we have right now. So I do think that, again, you saw that value during the pandemic when life was changed to just the sort of walkable distance from one’s home and people wanted these car-free spaces. And so, if you think about it a little bit further, what if there was a school nearby, where a parent or a caregiver could drop off the kids at school? Or people didn’t have to travel far to send a package, or doctor’s offices were right there? So no matter where you lived, most of life’s routines could be accomplished just on foot or on bike or you could get public transportation. What a revolution that would be.

ARIA:
I mean, Janette, obviously New York still has a long way to go, but I saw this great tweet recently where someone said, “we created one car free city that became the cultural and financial capital of the United States. And then we stopped.” [laugh] It’s like, and then we decided never again. One question I have for you, because, you know, again, we’re imagining this future: what is possible, how can we be more equitable, more environmentally friendly, better. Again, this is not like a, “let’s make a worse city.” Let’s make a way better city for people. And I’m thinking about the difference between New York and San Francisco, and in New York, everyone I know who lives in the suburbs commutes in through Metro North on a train. In San Francisco, anyone I know who commutes in from the suburbs commutes in by car. And obviously a few years ago Google had their electric buses and people derided the Google Bus as like, “ugh, look at this thing for the rich, taking workers from San Francisco down to the [South] Bay.” And in my mind that, well, that was better than the alternative, which wasn’t taking the Caltrain, the alternative was driving. And so, my frustration was that there was honestly just no alternative for these people. They wanted to get to their office, if they didn’t want it to take an hour and a half, so, okay, they took an electric bus, which is again better than driving by themselves.

Like what are we missing to get there? Is it political will, citizens have to demand this? Like, what’s in the way of achieving this better future, whether it’s a more 15-minute city or just better public transportation, so people see that as a better option, not just a cheaper option, or not just environmentally-friendly option.

JANETTE:
Anytime you change the status quo, it’s a street fight, you know? I mean you could have a job for life if you stick with the status quo. And I certainly saw that in New York City, we definitely ruffled the status quo, making it easier for people to get around by bus-building. Now there’s 17 rapid bus lines in New York City: fast, clean, easy to use, easy to get on and off, right? We’ve got 10,000 bikes: easy to use, easy to get on, easy to get off. Places to make it easier to walk. We had the visionary leadership of Michael Bloomberg, which helped us accomplish a lot of those goals. But a lot of what Mike made possible was his vision for the future, which was PlaNYC, which was looking at, “okay, we’re supposed to get a million more people moving to New York in 2030. How do we design a city that accommodates those new people and continues to grow and thrive with a high quality of life in our business districts and neighborhoods?” And then came up with 127 initiatives for how we were going to get there. And why did that matter? Obviously there were profound implications for transportation, right? We were not going to get there by triple decking our roadways. We had to reallocate the street space for different purposes to make it easier to get around more sustainably. In addition to having a plan, it really mattered because not every New Yorker was going to be supportive of a bike lane, not every New Yorker was going to be supportive of a bus lane, or a pedestrian plaza, right? There are 8.5 million New Yorkers, and I started to believe there were 8.5 million traffic engineers, because everybody had a very strong view of what their streets would be used for.

But even though they didn’t agree with the specifics of a particular project, they knew why it was being done. And I think that’s really important. I think people can be inspired by what you are trying to do, a larger vision. And so I think that’s really important. And of course political will is important and having the wherewithal to stand up and say, “we need to do things differently.” And it’s interesting because after all of the changes that we brought to New York City streets – the 400 miles of bike lanes, the 70 plazas, that eight rapid bus lines, the repurposing of all of these crosswalks iandn streets – at the end of the Bloomberg administration, 73% support for bike share, 72% support for the plazas, 64% support for the bike lanes. If these changes had been running for office, they would’ve won in a landslide, right?

And yet people think of this work as politically toxic. And it’s not. And you’re seeing in city after city where you’ve got a mayor that’s ambitious: London, Mayor Khan; Paris, Mayor Hidalgo, Clover Moore in Sydney; Mayor Colau in Barcelona; Mayor Sala in Milan. These people are being reelected over big margins. And so, these are politically smart strategies, despite what people sort of think, “oh, it’s safer to do nothing.” No! In fact, people respect that change. And so the point isn’t to avoid controversy, the point is to succeed despite the controversy. Bring a vision. People will appreciate it.

ARIA:
I love that.

REID:
Yeah. Well, speaking of visions, let’s take a look at our second AI-generated story about the politician, tech entrepreneur, and manufacturing company who partnered to create a new transportation system in Da Nang, Vietnam.

AI STORY:
Huy, Lan, and Zero decided to work together to create a new transportation system for Da Nang: one that would reduce congestion, emissions, and costs, and increase accessibility, efficiency, and convenience. They called it Flex, and it was based on three principles: modularity, adaptability, and affordability. Modularity meant that the vehicles could be assembled and disassembled according to the user’s preference and purpose, using different modules that could attach and detach easily. For example, a user could choose a single-seat module for a solo trip, a four-seat module for a family outing, a cargo module for a delivery, or a bike module for a leisure ride. The modules could also be combined and reconfigured to form a larger or smaller vehicle such as a bus, a truck, or a car. The modules were stored and distributed in various hubs around the city where users could access them through a smart app that scanned their biometric bracelet and their digital identity.

REID:
Did you have any reflections of the story? Once again, you probably went and did something factual and smart as opposed to the generative capabilities, but anything you’d change or what seemed promising?

JANETTE:
First of all, I think this whole thing’s really cool. So I really love the speculation. But again, not to harp on it, I think these AI stories need more people and less, you know, modularity. We all want to see alternatives and we all want to see future-first and people-first transportation, but we also want to see a lot more walkable neighborhoods. I think this story touches on some important topics that I think we need to watch. To the extent that we can, we just don’t want to swap out today’s cars and motorbikes for a higher tech version or one that uses electricity or hydrogen cells instead of gas. Because cars don’t just consume energy, they consume space and they require more urban space to accommodate them, to move them, to store them. So, everything we put on the street needs to be accommodated for years and decades.

Again, I’d like to see clean, efficient, and unobtrusive transportation in cities. I want to see cleaner and safer streets, and there’s like 1.35 million people that die on streets around the world every year. I’m not really counting on safer cars to fix it. I’m counting on safer cities and I think we don’t really need to wait for new technology to start solving the problems of our streets and our neighborhoods today.

ARIA:
Often what we see in cities is transportation is used to bring lower income people from the fringes of the cities or from the suburbs into the cities because cities are getting more expensive. And as you said in New York, you were building for a million new residents. You know, there’s other cities that are growing even faster. Nashville has transformed from where it was 30 years ago, cities, of course, in China, Vietnam, et cetera, are growing even more quickly. India. How do we build these cities continuously to both make sure that current residents aren’t displaced, to make sure that it’s more equitable, to make sure that the city core isn’t just folks who are rich and the low income folks are sort of in the outside rings and suburbs. Do you have thoughts on, like, how do we do that as these cities are growing and growing?

JANETTE:
Cities get out of their streets what they put into them. You’ve probably seen Seattle, right, with its transit investment, while you saw ridership in other cities flatten or decreasing, Seattle, in 2019, had 92,000 more people commuting to downtown jobs than 10 years earlier. And because of the transit investments you saw ridership increase by 50%. While the number of people who drove alone dropped by 25%. So we had more people and fewer cars. It was a strong, solid transit investment. And so I think that’s a really important part of the design of cities in the future. You know, I just really do believe that we have to focus on some of the secret sauces that make our city so great: that’s investing in transit, making it easier to get around by biking and walking. And it’s not anti-tech and anti-car to make these kinds of statements. It’s really pro-choice and and pro opportunity.

ARIA:
We are going to be moving on to our rapid fire questions. So, the first question that we ask every guest is, is there a movie song or book that fills you with optimism for the future? And you can say your own! Streetfight is allowed, you can plug your own book, but then give us another. [laugh]

JANETTE:
[laugh] Okay, well, certainly you should pick up a copy of Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution, written by me and my colleague Seth Solomonow. It is an amazing read, a page turner, as Reid and Aria know, and so, you know, hurry up and pick that up.

But while you’re there, I can’t recommend enough Ministry for the Future written by Kim Stanley Robinson, which is my very, very, very favorite book. I mean, I’ve read everything he’s written and that is really, hands down, top – he’s a visionary, speculative fiction writer who imagines Earth’s near future contending with climate change and the human response, and how we would try to think our way out of this climate calamity. He imagines an institutional “ministry for the future,” created by this climate accord, tasked with advocating for future inhabitants of the earth and taking steps today to ensure that a healthy and just world awaits them. And it’s not just a story, it’s also a strategy, and I think that’s a really cool part of it. We have the opportunity and the responsibility to imagine ourselves as agents of change, not just for the world that we want to live in, but as agents of change for the people that we will never meet in the future, that we won’t accomplish in a single lifetime. It’s very exciting to read. And I thought it was interesting, while there’s a lot of high-tech innovation in the book, a lot of it is just imagining the machineries of government differently.

ARIA:
I love that answer.

REID:
Where do you see progress or momentum outside of your industry that inspires you?

JANETTE:
Well, I think there’s some inspiring work going on re-imagining housing and housing materials and timber, and sort of a 360 view of forests and timber and reinvesting, and then pacts that come together to reimagine the kind of equity that people have in their places. And so I think that there’s some cutting edge work that we’re going to see about that, that’s going to really lower the emissions impact of construction and will help us with the building materials and using them differently as well as changing the design of our spaces and places.

REID:
So as the very last question, what’s a good kind of final thought on what you think is possible to achieve if everything breaks humanity’s way in the next 15 years? And if you were to wave your wand, what’s our first step to set off in that direction?

JANETTE:
I do think that the future, you know, it’s kind of “back to the future.” If we can walk everywhere, or bike everywhere, get everywhere we need to go under our own energy, there’s nothing that we can’t achieve in cities. And so if the power goes out, those systems still work. It’s the ultimate resilient tech of the future.

REID:
It was obviously great talking to Janette. A real focus on, kind of, an engineering practicality about, like, “look, if you had this reconfiguration of space, here’s how it’s so much better for all of the human beings living in it.” And I particularly loved when we went through the first AI story, she’s like, “well, I went to go see how that, saw how you’d solve that problem, and it’s like, your AI didn’t solve the problem the right way. Like, that problem is solvable today! Really well, let alone! And you’re doing it in the future…” And like, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that’s great! [laugh Right? Because you need to bring that kind of pragmatic understanding in order to get to the visionary side. And so I thought the whole conversation was great.

ARIA:
And she has such a bias to action. It was so clear when she was the head of transportation for New York City. It’s like, “we see what needs to be done, let’s just do it and see what happens.” And to exactly her point: What happened? 75% approval ratings for bike lanes and Citi Bikes and all the things that they put into place. And another thing I really loved, and I’m sort of a broken record because I think I said the same thing after we spoke to Saul Griffith, was that she’s talking about solutions – a lot of them to environmental problems, but also to quality of life, et cetera – that both make your life better, but are also commercially positive. Like, she was talking about how businesses who utilize their outdoor spaces had actually 20% more business. E-bike sales are going to exceed car sales. Like, these are commercially viable solutions, right now, that also happen to be positive for the climate movement and for the future of cities.

REID:
The other thing that was really awesome was it was kind of a not “invented here, only New York” story. Like, she’d highlight a bunch of different lessons from cities and other places. Europe, look, it’s working and this is what it already does. How we make innovations as human beings is we look around go, “well that one’s good, let’s do that from this and let’s build on it. Or no, let’s synthesize it with this other one.” And she’s doing that from lessons all throughout a number of different cities. And I thought that was also awesome.

ARIA:
She talked about how so much of this, as it always is, is a narrative problem or a marketing problem. And, you know, she doesn’t want to kill cars. She wants to make cities safer for everyone. She wants to make it, she wants to put people at the center, which is what we talk about all the time. Let’s not use technology for technology’s sake, but let’s use technology to make us more human and let’s use technology to make our lives richer so we can hang out with the people we like to hang out with so that we can get to the jobs that we love to do.

REID:
Now, one thing I also learned about you is bicycling across the Brooklyn Bridge, which I had no idea about. [laugh] That’s also the pleasure of doing these things.

ARIA:
So fun.

REID:
But, you know, look, we are social animals. It’s part of the reason why the progress of humanity has been, in a sense, a history of the stories of cities. Like, we went from hunter gatherers to agricultural sentiments and then we figured out how to build bigger and bigger cities. And part of the reason she focuses on transport, of course, is that the density of that city depends a lot on what the transport mechanisms can look like. I think if we look at the future of humanity, one of the major throughlines is going to be the future of cities and what we’re doing there. That’s of course one of the reasons why we were so delighted to talk to her about this critical element of humanity.

Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network, hosted by me, Reid Hoffman, and Aria Finger. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Edie Allard and Sarah Schleede. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor. Special thanks to Kevin Sheekey, Seth Solomonow, Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Ian Alas, Greg Beato, and Ben Relles.