Transit For A Habitable Planet

Quinn: [00:00:00] Exactly, why the hell is America's public transportation so terrible? That's today's big question, and my guest is Nicholas Dagen Bloom. He's the author of the subtly titled new book, the Great American Transit Disaster. Nicholas is a professor of urban policy and planning at Hunter College. He's the author of a bunch of books, including Public Housing That Worked, The Metropolitan Airport and How States Shaped Post-War America.

He's also the co-editor of the prize-winning Public Housing Myths and Affordable Housing in New York. This new book, the Great American Transit Disaster, out now, is a deep dive into how we got here, and importantly where I've really understood for the first time through Nick's overwhelming evidence that as he puts it, transit divestment was a choice rather than destiny, with a lot of actors [00:01:00] involved.

So, what's important to take away here before we get going is that willful divestment over the past 100 years to purposefully build out our car culture today drives a full third of our greenhouse gas emissions. So obviously we all drive, we get it. Undoing it won't be an easy or simple task. But the good news is they’re, like most of our problems, is they're choices we made and we can make different ones.

And there are multi solving opportunities everywhere for not only. Less racism and fewer emissions, but for more and better housing everywhere, for better and more plentiful transportation options that are safer and for healthier bodies and minds. Welcome to Important, Not Important. My name is Quinn Emmett, and this is science for people who give a shit. In these weekly conversations, I'm so lucky to take a deep dive with an incredible human like Nick, who's working on the front lines of the past and the future to build a radically better [00:02:00] today and tomorrow for everyone.

Along the way you and I are going to discover tips and strategies and stories and a lot of evidence you can use to get involved, to understand problems, and to undo them to become better and more effective for yourself and to help us unfuck this entire thing.

So please enjoy my conversation with Nick.

Nick, welcome to the show. Thanks for hopping on.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: Thanks so much. It's an honor to be here.

Quinn: The plan today is to read your book line by line, page by page to people. How long do you think that might take?

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: 120,000 words? It's going to take a while. It's going to take a while.

Quinn: I don't know if you saw this week and I'm totally forgetting the gentleman's name, the gentleman who edited all of Caro's, books about Moses and Lyndon B Johnson.

He passed away this week and they were telling the story about how the first draft of…

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: The Power Broker?

Quinn: Might have been The Power Broker, or it was the first Lyndon -- The point is the first draft was a million [00:03:00] words and they cut 400,000 words out, and you're just like, oh my God.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: This was longer. I should warn you, this book was longer and my editor did good to me. And he said, you know, we didn't give you this much like, this much runway for this thing. You got to bring it down. So I did. And it was better for it. I have to say.

Quinn: It's fantastic you showed your work and that really matters. Look, there's a time for fluff. And there's a time for not, and you got it all out there and that's great.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: Well, I mean, one thing by the way, why it gets longer is it's six cities. So, you know, if you take that 120,000 words across six cities, like a lot of traditional history books, you know, it'll be one city, and they're trying prove everything with one city, but you got to really look at the national picture.

That's why I did six cities.

Quinn: Yeah. And that's really important because, obviously our cities are very different. Like this is just a complicated country and all those things, they're all moving goalposts and changing over time and the demographics changed entirely and they have very different geographies.

And all this different stuff. But also just gives it context, you know? In my sense, so when I look at things like, so [00:04:00] we're working with a group to try to write some very basic policy stuff that is transplantable across local cities and towns based on, so in France they basically, which it's easier, it's a little homogenous, more homogenous.

One of their climate things is any parking lot over 80 spots has to have solar over it now. That's the deal. So we are looking at that going, Okay. Adapt that to, it's never going to pass federally clearly. Right? And even on the state level it’s tough, but how can we do that in towns and cities, but also look at big box stores, like, okay, any roof over this size because the centralized solar and stuff is just going to be a more difficult lift. So how do we build these things but also work on it with transmission so that we can look at these things and go, yes, every city in town is different and every situation is different.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: But it's doable. You can look at zoning law was the same thing in the twenties. They came up with a kind of the national government, the federal government came up with a model, you know, legislation and then, you know, it was adapted by different states and then all the local governments followed [00:05:00] from those states.

So definitely doable to have successful.

Quinn: Yeah, it's just like, how do we give people like a, I don't want to say like lowest common denominator, but like these are the 10 things you can take to your city council to at least start the conversation, you know, because it's pretty tough for regular folks to walk into these things and say like, what do I say?

Like what? Much less, what is the most effective way to get my foot in the door? So, anyways, yes, it's helpful to show six cities over 120,000 words. I thought it was great. So, Nick, we ask everybody one question to get started. It's a little ridiculous, but I usually get pretty great answers. So the question is, why are you vital to the survival of the species?

I encourage you --

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: Am I personally vital?

Quinn: Personally. That's right, you got to be bold and honest here.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: Okay. Well certainly this is a clarion call, you know, the last week or two in New York area, for instance we had just, a really frightening wake up call about the [00:06:00] impacts on our quality of life with the smoke, you know, from the Quebec fires and, you know, you can look at not for nothing but a hundred years of auto oriented, you know, development with very few options for transit really developed in the United States.

That is a direct contributor right? To whether we have more smoke-filled days. And there's no question about it, especially because transportation has become one of the leading sources of greenhouse gas emission in the US. So, to the extent I can rally people to, you know, invest in transit even at this lowest point.

Because actually what we see is, I think it's just like this really important moment. And they've had before with transit in the 1940s and fifties, it's at the crisis moment is when you invest. Because when you're down, that's when you can rebuild from there.

Quinn: It is.

And we're getting pretty low. Things are orange everywhere.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: Yeah. Yeah. Well, literally the sky's orange. Yes.

Quinn: [00:07:00] It's not ideal. And it is helpful to finally have someone write sort of the definitive take almost in a way that, and again, not to diminish your work. And in a way we can go look, this is settled now, let's take what we can to learn from it.

And apply that going forward. Instead of constantly arguing about the why of how we got here. And the how of where we are. Here's how it is, here's how it went across the six most applicable cities and let's move forward, you know? Because there's, again, I just spent 15 years in Los Angeles.

I sat there and had to deal with them expanding the 405 for what, however long that took. It was completely insane. That's how I got to my mother-in-law's house. It was crazy. As much of a nightmare as Los Angeles is public transportation wise. You look at something like Atlanta and you go, oh yeah.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: LA's a paradise, LA's got a solid, you know, bus systems slow, but it has it, they are expanding their rail network.

I mean, not as many people are using it as possible, but from what I understand, their bus system has come back pretty strong overall. So, there is opportunity.

Quinn: I wanted [00:08:00] to share a brief story to kind of get us to where we're going here. So again, about 15 years ago in Los Angeles, I had just lived in New York and Spain and London and was raised here, there's no real public transportation. I mean, there's horses that walk by occasionally, but my wife throws a birthday party. My future wife was a birthday party and I don't recall who I was talking to, which is probably important because I keep telling everyone this story. And I don't remember the context of the conversation except for that it was about the pluses and minuses of public transportation and how much I enjoyed using them.

And all I remember is at the end she said, but then when you get off the subway, you'd have to walk to where you're going. And I thought of that immediately because in the intro to your book, you said, and I'll quote here, transit agencies go through the motions of printing schedules and deploying buses or trains, but their service has become irrelevant to most Americans.

And that's just the thing in many of our big cities, [00:09:00] again, you talked about six of them and the national outlook. Public transportation might be an option and in a couple it's even popular. But in some of those, and in many others, it's actually just that. It's like not even a consideration for so many.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: It's maybe one or 2%. More people are often walking or biking in many American cities.

Quinn: Which is great.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: Yeah, we're not against that.

Quinn: Right? No. We need all of the things. Right. But, so I wanted to actually start with this part, which I'm curious about. We're going to take this deep dive into why things are the way they are.

But now in 2023, which is not really what your book is about, how do you feel like public awareness and perception might actually be any part of the problem at all?

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: Oh, that's a good one. So, I mean, one is I do think there are improvements in public awareness of the value of transit in the last few years.

And I actually think social media has been very good in bringing a new awareness for, and also a tool for transit advocates. And sort of that, on the other hand, [00:10:00] transit has a number of kind of built in problems. Like most public institutions, for one thing, they have press offices. Press offices are big problem because if anything goes wrong, right?

You know, it's an easy story. It's an easy article for the kind of if it bleeds, it leads, you know, nighttime reporting. So you get basically anyone who's not riding transit gets the worst possible takes on transit, in some cities every day. So, you know, even though in a city like New York, between January and April this year, 90 some people have been killed in car related accidents.

And 19,000, injured. That is a statistic and a situation that is not easily reportable. If a train derails, if somebody's held up, if there's an issue on transit that's like a, this very kind of like sensational moment and you fill a year [00:11:00] of sensational moments on transit and good luck.

Good luck getting people in there. I mean, so that's one, you know, that the image is not there. The other, you know, there are other image issues. I think, the who of riding transit in so many American cities. Primarily non-white populations riding transit in many American cities, waiting for buses and bus stops that have no shade protection, delayed buses and service and so forth.

And for a very long time, since transit was disinvested in the 1940s and fifties in the Us you know, transit was slower, in most American cities and less reliable than having a car. And so that's another, I think people just experience, they don't see a lot of transit and the transit that they see in reality is often, you know, one bus here and there.

And they don't think to themselves, oh, you know, yeah, you know, I could do that. You know, I could ride that bus, right? But if you see, you know, if you're like in most American suburbs where most Americans live, maybe they see a [00:12:00] bus, I don't know when, maybe not ever, you know, like once an hour.

Whereas you go to even a place like Canada, you go to Toronto or a place like that, they got buses going all over their suburbs and places like that. So I think between the kind of media framing as, you know, transit’s this horrible, dangerous thing and look at what COVID, you remember those early COVID memes and things like that?

About transit. It was like everyone's getting it on, you know? Cause it started, you know, so much started in New York and it's like you're going to get it in, you know, transit. So that media narrative was the danger, transit is fundamentally dangerous. And then the other side of it, which is that people don't have any other countervailing information and what they see is often not very positive.

Quinn: The media is the worst. We're aware of that. But it is also interesting. It is one of those, and again, having, I was, you know, lived in all these transit happy places and used it and it was fantastic. And then spent all this time in Los Angeles. And then it's one of the, almost one of those things like, how do you get a job?

Because experience begets [00:13:00] experience, but how do you get experience if no one will give you the job? And I remember a new soccer team started in Los Angeles and they play, I don’t know how much time you've spent there, if at all, but they built this brand new stadium. It's fantastic.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: The SoFi Stadium?

Quinn: A different one. That's the football team. This is the soccer team, the LAFC.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: Well, there's a transit story related to SoFi too.

Quinn: Oh God, I'm sure. I'm sure. Yeah. Talk about knocking down 700,000 homes. So they played down near USC. And I remember I got season tickets and I was really excited and then I realized I was like, driving down there's going to be a huge pain in the ass, getting out of there's going to, I mean Dodger Stadium, it's a nightmare.

I was like, I'm not doing that. And I realized there's actually a red line stop not too far from where I lived. I couldn't quite e-bike there without dying. But I could drive and park there and I could take the red line and I could switch and I could go there. And I was like, I've been here for like 12 years and I've never done this, but is it going to work?

And I remember taking it and they designed it to their credit so that you walk in, [00:14:00] you go past the science museum and you go through the rose garden, you walk up to the stadium and then you walk back out and you go and they got cops directing everybody to the subway and it's super great. And I was like, this is what it could be.

It's so great, but it's really easy to look at a map again, like Los Angeles, just the subway and the buses have gotten better and go like, well, this doesn't go anywhere near my home. Why would I ever even try it?

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: Right? I mean, that's the, when you look at American cities, you have a better chance of getting to a stadium on a rail line in the US because there is and that has to do with the politics behind transit, right?

Which is that if you're going to sell you know, a very expensive transit investment, very often it's kind of regional and it's like most suburbanites never ride transit. So you're like, Hey, you know what we're going to do? We're going to run this transit by the stadium. Or buy this big hospital complex or you know, like these major sites.

Even though quite frankly, although soccer might be better, I don't know how heavy the season is, but you won't get a lot of use like on a daily basis. But I will say this, baseball stadiums are better, you know, they have [00:15:00] actually a lot of games. They're actually pretty good.

But the football stadium ones, which you'll just see all across the country, you'll see the light rail running to the football stadium. It's like, you know, I don't even know how many games that is at home, but it's not many. As you point out, it absolutely can be done. You can think about it.

It's not cheap. It's got to be subsidized and you know, that's how it goes.

Quinn: So let's talk a little bit about why this conversation is so important besides just public transportation is great and driving is a nightmare.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: And killing the planet.

Quinn: Right, exactly. I mean, anyone listening to this understands that smog, greenhouse gas emissions of every kind coming off tires, water pollution just blew through all the non-white neighborhoods with highways. Like you said, traffic violence is a nightmare. These are choices we've made. And what you did is you directly took on this idea, and it's legendary whenever you walk around Los Angeles, which is car companies killed this utopian public transit place. And your point was, [00:16:00] it really was about us. It was about city and state leaders and planners. And voters saying, we're not going to do it, and we're definitely not going to pay for it. And I'm very interested in these levers of power like we were discussing offline across sort of the portfolio of what we talk about here.

Because our most effective avenues of change are going to be the same levers. So you kind of highlighted three sort of tent poles and then illustrated them across the cities of why things went down the way they did. And I kind of want to reverse the order you've got them in the book and start with white flight. So as far as I understand from your book, and again, you tried to make it pretty clear, transit was pretty darn white for a long time. And then it became less so, and that's seemingly where a lot of these problems began. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: Before the major era of white flight in the 1940s and fifties, you know, your average transit rider in American city was a white worker working, maybe middle [00:17:00] class, riding street cars, buses, electric charlie coaches and so forth.

So when riding, you know, when we've talked about, it's basically the sort of high point of American transit goes from really the 1880s to the 1920s and thirties. You know, it was a white phenomenon. And around, what's really interesting about that era, right, is that's when you get this whole kind of neighborhood complex of the kind of white ethnic neighborhoods that grew up around transit, whether they're rapid lines or street cars or trolley coach lines of stores and businesses and so forth that grew up around those areas.

As white people left these neighborhoods though, as the neighborhoods, basically as African-Americans migrated north or migrated to cities in the south, white residents left those neighborhoods behind for either kind of more suburban type development within the city limits or the suburbs themselves.

And because they maintained, even though they were leaving, the white populations maintained political power into the 1960s in [00:18:00] most American cities. And that's crucial because it was very clear from the 1930s to the 1960s that the private transit companies were basically bleeding the systems dry and that the only way to save this whole apparatus, right, of good transit would be to either subsidize the private companies, right, or basically take over, have municipal ownership, which was not unknown at the time, and the white power structure in these cities during this time basically said, we're not doing it.

The white voters who were dominant in this period, as there was this era of transition, but it was still white dominated, they had no interest. When asked to vote for bonds for transit, they rejected them. What happens is, as transit's ridership shifts, because the neighborhoods, the African-American neighborhoods were the ones that had the most transit, right?

They were really set up well for transit, as those areas became African-American. The private companies that were running the good transit there began disinvesting steeply in their [00:19:00] transit operations, and they didn't also extend them to the suburbs where these white people were moving with the cars and so forth.

What you end up with is a steeply declining first private and then public resource in what were increasingly, primarily African-American neighborhoods. Even after a while, you know, anyone, even African-American residents, abandoned transit in so many cities, if they could get cars, they did. That's a really crucial part of this story.

As neighborhoods were disinvested, you also had fewer riders available in the neighborhoods that had the most transit infrastructure. You can look at like the way, I've got these maps like of west side of, you know, Baltimore and Atlanta, places like that, which basically you can see that the neighborhoods that had the most riders were the east and west sides, which had increasingly at African-American majority population and you know, between 1960 and 2000, they also lose a lot of their riders too in that period.

Quinn: Well, it's a flywheel. Right. And you talked about, and we'll get into like how these really were forced to be these pay as you go systems [00:20:00] and you get white voters and people in power who stopped riding it and thus, and then refused to subsidize it. And then it starts to fall apart and only Black people are using it.

And then it becomes just a shittier mode of transportation because it's not kept up with. And so fewer people are using it and so fewer people are paying for it and it's still not being subsidized even more. And then you've got examples, like, I remember being so excited to highlight this point in one of your parts on Atlanta.

Obviously, gerrymandering is not, it's obviously such a huge piece of the puzzle today with everything we're dealing with. And you made this point about Atlanta annexing Fulton County, which was very white, and them not only not building out there, but it effectively added, what was it, like 600,000 new white voters to the role?

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: Yeah. To maintain the white majority. Yeah. In the city. Yeah, and white majority in a landscape that was increasingly autocentric. Because the other part of that is, and you [00:21:00] indicated that too, is that every American city almost, these new emergent white, either urban areas through annexation or these white suburbs were areas where the car was dominant. So good luck getting like high quality transit out of drivers. It's very difficult to do. You know, it's a pretty heavy load because their transit needs are taken care, I mean, their transportation needs are taken care of without transit. They don't need it.

And then the city governments in this period were just totally all in on not just highways by the way. You know, you'll see a lot, you go to a lot of American cities, see a lot of parkways. Or street widening was big in Atlanta. You mentioned that. They recreate either the central cities to be more car friendly or they create whole areas where you move so frictionless through areas except at rush hours or places like that, it's so frictionless for sort of everyday life on the car. That to exchange [00:22:00] the frictionless-ness of a car with that of transit it's asking a lot.

Quinn: And it's such a crucial period for that too, because obviously we know what a nightmare traffic is now, as a personal and as a Atlanta experience, but as you talked about, there were all these beautiful parkways. It went from a Sunday drive to we're going to use these for transportation, great. Now we're going to widen them and we're going to plow down even more stuff.

And that was the same period when you've got segregation coming apart in some ways and in some cities, but not all of them. And when you're defunding these things.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: Right, when you integrate transit in Atlanta, people are all, you know, a lot of the white people, I mean, that's another factor, it's not just the disinvestment itself or movement, but when in the south you had the mandated integration of transit. That's another factor, right? Driving whites further out. Right? And the way they protect themselves right, is through, primarily through zoning. They create environments which, because of the socioeconomic differences, both then and now between [00:23:00] a large portion of the white and Black population, basically create these large, very expensive homes, or comparatively expensive homes, very hard to serve single family home areas effectively.

Not impossible, but very hard to serve them effectively with transit. Certainly not with unsubsidized transit. And so they create a whole world, that is transit hostile, I guess I would say. And that helps protect kind of the privilege that white people had achieved in basically being financed for these new homes and so forth through the federal government and also private enterprise.

Quinn: And it's not just the residential part, which is important, but at one point you described, you know, a relatively early Chicago where, and I think I have the quote here again, this sort of stuck with me with my Los Angeles experience where you said long neighborhood commercial strips, parallel streetcar and elevated lines and stops with notable clusters as diagonal cross streets, where 75% of neighborhood communities and shopping centers developed around transfer points or [00:24:00] terminals of transit routes.

Now I thought about the, again, about 15 years where I lived right near Ventura Boulevard in Los Angeles, which I think by some accounts, and it might be a myth, is the longest, contiguous stretch of commercial real estate on the planet, I think. And there is no protected bus lane. There is no subway, there is no street car.

There isn't even a protected bike lane. And you just look at that and go, what, like how, and there's residence is you know, on either side of it. You've got kind of got the hills on one side, but again, you read about what the most effective way is. And this was so much of what the zoning situation was in California the past 10 years is allowing, upscaling in transit defined areas where it already is to try to improve existing systems, which I know you talked a lot about wasted money on.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: Yeah. There's that new legislation allowing for residential development all in those commercial districts. That's pretty linear. That's a pretty exciting one. Kind of going back to the Chicago, you know, the [00:25:00] pre-zoning era.

Quinn: Well, and that's what I mean is like I look at that and go we learned these lessons so early, this should seem, we did seem so applicable now, but at the same time then I thought about again, your points of, I mean obviously we need to look the, so many of these problems of ours require what I call the kitchen sink approach or portfolio approach, which isn't just like for hunger, it's not just feed people tonight, it's also draft legislation, so there's not as much food waste or, you know, the Farm Bill, all these different things. But in this case, we clearly need to build new transportation. Right. But we also know how enormously expensive that can be. I mean, you look at the second Avenue subway in New York and in the past 20 years of that, it's unbelievable.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: Yeah. There's always this like, let's build a line. Let's extend out a line and see how that goes. And that'll attract people. But what the history of transit tells you is something else, right? Which is that a line will only prosper, to the extent that development can all happen alongside it, to basically take advantage of [00:26:00] this new amazing piece of infrastructure.

And that's why actually the Second Avenue extension, at least in 96th Street, was a pretty good investment. Cause you get a couple hundred thousand people out of it, so that's good. You know, it's a few billion dollars, whatever, 6 billion came out. But you're actually getting riders. But you have examples.

So many examples after the heyday of transit in our current world, right? Basically since the federal government started paying for this stuff in the sixties, certainly the seventies, and to today, where basically you have extensions of lines like really nice, like honestly, you know, our light rail lines are awesome and they're beautiful and the rest, the problem is that there's no, like you're talking about the kitchen sink, right? It's like, oops, we forgot to zone.

Quinn: Right. So there's nobody there.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: Oh, there's nobody there. Right. And if you do, oh, we do these like park and ride crap, you know, like where basically people drive their cars there.

But that's like, your capacity's pretty limited, right? You know, a few thousand, maybe you get a few thousand cars in a parking lot if you're lucky. But that's tough. And then we don't do the, you know, some cities like Portland did a better job of, LA's trying, and [00:27:00] Boston, you know, the feeder bus, right?

You want to feed the buses in. But if you don't have a bus network, you can't feed people to the transit lines to get them up. So we've done a lot, there's actually been a pretty impressive amount of rail extension in the US since the seventies. Unfortunately, most of those underperform because they often run through like disused rail quarters or they run through areas that are fundamentally not great transit markets.

So you're right, you have to like, you have to deal with the zoning at one time, right? You have to deal with housing discrimination. You have to make sure that it’s affordable, by the way, if you build all luxury housing, this is, the studies have all shown this. If you build a whole bunch of luxury housing with parking underneath it, you don't get a lot of riders.

You say, oh, it's transit-oriented development. Yeah, it's transit adjacent as they say, but like if everyone could just store their car underneath, right? You don't get that many riders. So you have to make sure that there's working class housing as part of that as well. And then the other big piece, the all kitchen sink thing is, you know, it could be a beautiful rail line, but if that thing shows up [00:28:00] like once an hour, forget it.

No one's, you know, it's got to be like a six minute headway, maybe 10. Right? And like a lot of times a day if it shuts down at 11, 12 o'clock at night, good luck with that. So you're absolutely right.

Quinn: Yeah. And that's one of the things we saw. I believe it was the new Boston mayor who apparently is fantastic.

And one of the things I believe, and again, I might destroy this, one of her first things she did was to, I think, keep a lot of the public transit free, like they had incentivized during Covid, and that's great on the one hand, but it seems like the more persuasive argument is we just need more of it. Like you said, these things have to come at a max of 10 minutes.

Otherwise people are going, what am I doing here?

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: Right. Free for crap. I mean, it doesn't help anyone, right? I mean, you can offer people free things, but if I can't get to my job in a reasonable amount of time or pick up my kid, or get on and off. Free doesn't help that much. I will say this, I mean, I think the fair model, right, which Boston is working on and some other cities have done, which is like an income graded piece that, [00:29:00] you know, that makes sense, but the free fair model works better in a city like Boston in essence, already because you have more transit than they preserved.

You know, that chapter on Boston, it's like, well you can talk about free fairs when you've gotten to a level of like subsidy that's pretty unbelievable by American standards.

Quinn: And that's the key, right? Because if you're reduced in fairs, that means it's reduced revenues. So it's got to come from somewhere or you've got shitty service. So like you said, you know, we seem to be agreement on the kitchen sink approach. There are some places where we're starting to see, like you said finally in California, some upzoning in a lot of different ways. We're seeing in a few places parking minimums go away, which is very exciting to me. But obviously this is not a revolution yet. But those are really important pieces of the puzzles.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: They are. They'll have long term effects.

Quinn: Do you feel like you're starting to see more subsidization in local and state places? I mean, obviously state houses are going in two different directions these days.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: I mean, the Covid piece was great from the [00:30:00] federal money. I mean, since the 1970s it was the first time we've had significant federal operating support. And, you know, that made a difference for so many people who need to get to jobs and still do. And it's basically saved transit up to this point.

And then we do see, like California just bailed out Bay Area Transit with some important pieces. New York has just bailed out the MDA, New York State. So the states do have the funding, or at least the taxing or other capabilities, congestion, charging, whatever it is, to basically put transit on a much more stable basis.

So we do see some of that. City government though, good luck on that. I mean, I think they're headed for such big problems, you know, with, you know, downtown real estate values with the work from home thing and other stuff like that. I mean, I wouldn't want to depend on city governments, and that's one of the problems with free fair so far, is that a lot of this is driven by city councils and mayors who are basically going to be facing major financial problems.

So if they can get it, I will say this, if you can get a kind of [00:31:00] free fair component, like New York's going to do a couple bus lines with the state deal, great. That works, right? Because basically that's money that's covering this experiment. But if you don't have that, depending on city government will be very difficult, although, that's not to say, you know, a city like San Francisco and Boston, they have had basically local tax revenues which have gone to support transit for decades and decades.

And that has basically helped them in the dips. And to basically not have to cut. Because the whole problem is when you start cutting, that's when people start abandoning transit. It is like, when you can't depend on it, you start thinking, well, it might cost me 30-40% of my income to have a car, but I need to have a job, and so they're going to do that.

Quinn: And that's understandable. I empathize with that. You know, totally. We have so many choices that have compounded on choices, often on purpose in this country to create systems that are very harmful and inescapable. Most important being number two [00:32:00] there for a lot of folks.

Whether it's food or air pollution or heat or whatever, or healthcare, whatever it might be. But sometimes there is an alternative and sometimes the alternative is like, well then I got to get a car. But it's incredibly unaffordable.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: Unbelievable now, $700 is the like average.

Quinn: But for the point is for some people it's either like I don't have healthcare or I do.

Especially in these states that won't pass, take the federal Medicaid money. But in most places you can figure out some version of the car thing or you don't, and you see people working and this is my thing that's, you're totally right. This office commercial real estate thing is going to be a nightmare at some point.

I mean, I was just looking at numbers this week that said in some of these studies it's like 25, 35% vacancy rates, which is incredible.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: They're going to reassess all that property.

Quinn: Interest rates are double what they were, et cetera. But there's also huge numbers of people though that need transportation that don't work in these big office buildings.

They're in service jobs and things like that in these hourly jobs all around cities that require things like this.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: So, you know, there are other [00:33:00] institutions that can take a role in this. So, you know, cities obviously don't have a lot of money, but you know, in most American cities, the biggest employers now are nonprofit, hospital and university systems.

And I would say nonprofit in quotes, they somehow have millions of dollars for their executives and so forth. What they can do to support transit, in this case, a lot of their service workers, like you mentioned, and there are some that do it, MIT does it, the universities in Pittsburgh do it, there are other cities, they can buy transit in bulk, that is passes for their workers. And give them to them for free, because currently the transit benefit can be used for parking or transit. You're $300 a month tax free withdrawal. It can be used for parking or transit. So you know what a lot of these institutions have done?

They've built massive parking complexes. Just enormous. And if they said, you know, we're going to give you a free transit pass that could be a game changer, I think for many cities. But they'd have to, in the all in the kitchen think thing, they'd have to [00:34:00] work with a transit agency to make sure that there's sufficient service, that people would be able to really use it to go to the kind of dispersed metropolis where it is.

So, I mean, that's one example. Something can be done. There are, I mean, there are examples of cities which are building kind of clusters of housing along their transit lines. But again, you know, that has to be done with an eye to not providing all this parking as part of it. So I do think the parking, Henry Graybar's book is great.

You know, I think this is the parking component is crucial if you provide subsidized, you have subsidized cheap parking competing with subsidized transit and you know, because of how Americans now live. Mostly subsidized parking is going to win. That's a tough one.

Quinn: I mean, I think of, obviously Paris is one example. They've just been nibbling and nibbling.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: Yeah. Take away the side, the street parking.

Quinn: It really is supply and demand on all these different fronts. From the public transportation to parking, to highways, to housing, and all these things make, and if you just start [00:35:00] to take away where you can drive.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: If you make it difficult, you got to make it worse and worse. And you also got to sit tight when people scream.

Quinn: And that's what New York did for a long time. I remember oh God, what was the transportation commissioner when I was there? Khan, I believe the name was Khan. Yeah. Holy shit. Were people so mad at this woman.

I mean, oh my God. And now look at it. I mean, they've made just enormous, obviously congestion pricing has taken like 20 years to get going, but they have, it has made a difference what they've done.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: It has. And we still have millions of like, on-street free parking and you know, if they start pulling that or charging for it.

You could fund transit easily. And some studies have done, you could easily fund transit with that. But it will take a kind of political courage that is difficult for people have to answer to voters.

Quinn: But it also is going to require, and this is again, something I harp on a lot, like the subsidies part really sticks with me because among the many things I try to help our audience understand when they say like, what can I do? It is often to start with understanding what we subsidize. And to what extent, and on the other hand, [00:36:00] the costs we still and historically just steadfastly refuse to even calculate much less pay.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: Well, Massachusetts, there's a study from Harvard Kennedy School that was at 64 billion a year in auto related costs to the whole system of maintaining auto infrastructure.

Quinn: Sure, but that doesn't even include the pollution part and the health part and all of these different things, like we refuse to calculate externalities for anything we do. I mean that's why the SEC has taken so long on making one single rule about this stuff.

You know, so I wonder because you know, as you pointed out, San Francisco and Boston and New York. Imperfect obviously. But there's some examples there of maybe some things we can learn from as far as what small or big cities, hopefully subsidized by the state. Cause like you said, city councils can be a nightmare.

Like what are transferable lessons there that we can use as we try to pick this thing apart? Like, where are taxes effective? Where do they come [00:37:00] from?

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: I do think that the transit advocates in those cities pretty early had a very good idea and they stuck to it of what transit offered in terms of social equity or, you know, basically that was a really important, like you look at talking about New York, right?

You know, the subway is a form of transportation, but it was also a form of reform, which was, we want to get people out of the tenements, right? In horrible conditions. So we're going to build the subway, we're going to subsidize these private companies to basically get people out. And, you know, that is, that's crucial, right?

To have a vision, right? And the same in Boston, the idea was like the working class needs this. We have to basically subsidize it because most people can't afford a car, that's back in the twenties. And San Francisco, of course, had left wing movements that were very important.

The sense of like the greater good that would be served by basically destroying the private transit company with a public alternative. [00:38:00] And so they had that. They also were unapologetic, and this includes both transit advocates and politicians paying for this out of a sales tax, a property tax element, whatever it is, or state tax, that this was just the cost of maintaining these systems over time.

You never should apologize for this because it's around, it's a small, the numbers sound big, you know, like millions here. The aggregate, they sound big because you're serving many people across in one system and they aren't dispersed and things like that.

But the truth is they were, you know, in these cities, transit has never been one of the big cost factors compared to schools or policing or whatever else these cities were doing. So I do think you have to be unapologetic. I think you do have to compromise and make deals very often with the suburbs.

So sometimes you do end up with systems, which, you know, maybe it's not exactly fair. You know, suburbs do get something in it, you know? But then the city gets that [00:39:00] funding. But I do think aiming for what's really important right, is operating funding. And I think that gets often overlooked because you know, this whole idea of building the shiny thing, it attracts city leaders, it attracts suburban leaders.

Oh, this like fancy line, whatever. But what matters most in my telling, and I think of my research and my findings is, does that bus show up or that tram show up every five minutes and it can be the oldest, damn tram you've ever seen, right? You go to Boston, they're running like 1940s, fifties equipment on this one line, the Madhuban band line. You just keep modernizing it. And like in San Francisco, they ran these old trolley coaches. Boston, when I lived there years ago, there were old trolley coaches, like the electric trolley buses, which are now hot, right? You know, these have been running for almost a hundred years in some cases.

Quinn: Don't tell anybody. It's super old technology.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: It's super old tech, right. But, you know, that's the key, it doesn't have to be fancy, it just has to be there, and there's nothing worse than like a cold night [00:40:00] and the thing doesn't show up. And, you know what? If you've got to wait outside for a cold, beautiful, light rail line, nobody wants that.

And you want, that old bus shows up and it kind of, you know, goes along like, who cares? Get me there. That's what I want. And that's operating. That's operating.

Quinn: And I understand. And again, having been in New York, and I was in London when they started congestion pricing, like I was sort of the Forrest Fump of bouncing around all these places trying to pull it together.

Los Angeles gets the Olympics and they go, how the hell are we going to redo all of our transportation in time for this? It's funny, I was just thinking when you're talking, it's a ridiculous analogy, but my children got a dog three years ago and they thought this was really great. And I was like, well, now we have to take care of it.

You have to feed it and you have to clean up the poop. And they're like, whoa!

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: I use that same one. I do that too.

Quinn: And I'm like, guys, that's the deal. Like you can't just, it's not just the shiny puppy, that's great, but like, you got to walk it, you got to pick up the stuff. And they're like grumbling about it.

I'm like, well then I guess we'll get rid of the dog. No.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: The amount of time to build it is nothing. It pales in comparison to the [00:41:00] amount of time, you will maintain that system. And unless you have a steady flow of money, whether it's fairs or usually it's a combination of fairs and subsidies. It's not going to work.

Quinn: And it's obviously that balance is going to be adjustable over time, depending on how it's doing and how much maintenance is required. Our car is aging out over a period of time. How does it amortize? Every city's a little bit different. Cause some got light rails, some are underground entirely, some buses.

But obviously the combination is really the key, right? How is it frequent? How is it fair? How is it subsidized?

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: Yeah. And buses. I mean, you can get to a decent bus system pretty quickly compared to rail. And that's why actually I think it's very exciting now, I think everyone should support bus rapid transit opportunities.

I don’t know if you've been to Richmond lately, but it's getting a lot of attention for its bus rapid transit and you know, what does it do? You know, it's got it's own lanes for part of it. It's frequent service, it's modern, but you know, it's not too, you don't have to have rails.

And that is really, you know, that's the new thing. And so, [00:42:00] and they also have the density around those spots and workplaces.

Quinn: It's low hanging fruit, you know, relative to building new lines. You know, it's not as sexy, but man it really works. So a friend of mine is working in government and is responsible for paying out some of this infrastructure cash, of which there's a lot and it's frustrating because you've also got, we have all these incremental pieces, and again, there's going to be trade offs, but you've got Houston getting this 10 billion, I think, highway expansion, right? And they're demolishing something like a thousand homes. It's a billion degrees there today, I think it's like a hundred billion dollars of the infrastructure deal is going to highway and bridge programs.

But it seems to be based on these old models and these old formulas that we haven't adjusted along the way. And it's so hard, it's like when someone, the smaller example, when someone buys a gas car now, we're keeping cars for something like 12 years now for the longest we ever have. Or someone putting in a furnace again instead of a heat pump, you're going [00:43:00] like, well that's one that's just now locked in for another 12 years.

Like, how do we work around those things that are going to be big set backs?

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: How do we stop us from building in new generation? You've hit it, which is we're building an entire new infrastructure, a car oriented infrastructure, whether electric or gas, and that means basically because electric cars are so expensive at this point, the charging infrastructures not there, we are locking ourselves in for probably decades right of the car culture with all that it brings with it. There is money for transit in there, but it's, again, it's for like mostly for new construction of lines, there is a push to have some of the federal capital money be used for operating. But yeah, I don't know that Americans are serious. I mean, I hate to say it, but I think it just gets down to that idea that Americans are still in denial about the contribution of the car culture to, and it’s really the truck [00:44:00] culture because very few people actually drive cars anymore, but, or whatever. But the contribution of the car culture to the climate crisis and until we pass whatever that point is, you know, people just can't see that, I mean, think about all the inks build on electric cars at this point and you know, it wasn't even GM in these companies so much, right?

I mean it was, there's this kind of shiny object like we can do all of this, we can have this sort of utopia without any sacrifice. And that has, I guess, something to do with like American consumer culture more generally. I mean, buses are way better than electric cars. Rail is way better. I mean, but getting people to sort of think about like taking those things, subsidizing them, it's a big challenge.

You probably need a kind of, we do have really good transit advocacy organizations right now, but I would definitely say if there are any funders, hello, of like large foundations, start dumping some money. I mean, look at Bloomberg and smoking and things like that.

Quinn: We are really from 50 minute [00:45:00] groceries to whatever you want to call it, to going to the emergency room every time we're sick.

Like convenience is such a big part of right this country. But it's funny because the driving has also gotten so inconvenient in many cases, but we're not willing to try the alternative. Because in a lot of ways the alternative isn't there or it's not better. And the long-term effort, much less mindset to or I guess to reverse those long-term mindset, much less effort to actually fix it, to build a better system requires on it itself so much effort. There's not a lot of questions here. It's mostly me venting to you. I'm realizing at this point.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: That's fine. That's fine.

Quinn: I want to be clear. There's a lot of wins. There's some really great stuff happening. Like you said, there's amazing transit organizations, there's really great supporters. Parking minimums are going away. California passing ADUs and upscaling is great.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: I will say this, that is not going to yield much for a long time. You’re not, you don't get riders very [00:46:00] quickly because you know you’ve got to change the zoning, you got to get the financing to build the stuff.

The people have to move in. They have to realize that, because they're all going to bring their cars with them initially. So we're looking at 10 to 20 years before you'd really see neighborhoods. I think. I mean, there are a few exemptions, you know, where neighborhoods are already getting dense in some places, but that's pretty limited because so many places have put the parking under these new, four over ones.

Quinn: Well that's the problem. If you don't up zone and take away, or at least drastically reduce parking minimums, it's just the same shit.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: It's the same stuff. It doesn't change anything because it's so convenient. They literally, you can, in the, you know, what is it, these new apartment complexes, you can literally drive to your door.

So you have the equivalent, like in these ramps, right. You drive like right up to your door and so it's the equivalent of a vertical ranch house. It's like you just, all you have to do is do a couple turns and you pull right up into your house. I don't know how transit competes with that.

That's a pretty tough sell. Cost wise. I mean, I do think cost is something, I mean, I think the [00:47:00] other words deeply subsidized the e-cars and all the rest of it. But I do think the cost of, you know, is it 700 for an average car payment now? You know, it's unbelievable. I think think there may be more and more people will find themselves not only house poor in the US but car poor.

And I think that a lot of people who didn't ever think of transit before, like I think about, you know, people talk about, oh, you know, San Francisco's got all these problems now, right? Because all these tech workers aren't there. And I was thinking, well, you know, transit was going down before the pandemic because the tech workers had so much money, they were like Ubering everywhere and you know, like that sort of thing. So it's like, you know, transit is actually coming back a bit in San Francisco, considering how few people are going into San Francisco's downtown. I'm actually very nicely surprised at how many people are actually riding transit. Because it's miserable to drive there.

It's miserable to park. It's extremely expensive to live there. So you know what you think, I think I'm going to ride transit. Right? And so you have to get to that [00:48:00] like somewhere that crucial moment, that threshold where like people finally go there's something running in front of my house.

I don't know what it is. It seems to be a large object and you can get on and pay or not, or whatever, right? And I might actually get on that thing and might benefit from it. And I am broke. I don't have a lot of money. Or I’m tired of paying for it or I'm just cheap, maybe I'm just cheap and I'm tired of like putting all this money in Elon Musk hands.

Quinn: It's wild because we often say these things out loud again. I remember being in L.A., you know, sort of pre Uber, Lyft, and people wouldn't take public transportation and it wasn't good enough at that point. They weren't really thinking about it. They hadn't rebuilt a lot of the bus stuff yet. There was no apps to be able to tell when things were coming and this and that.

And you know, again, this was sort of the time of that question of then I would have to walk to where I was going. And at the same time you're going, well you got drive through traffic. You got to find parking when you get there. You got to pay for parking.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: Yeah, you don't count that time. It's been studied. They don't count that time. They count only that little bridge, like when they're driving. They don't count the time to get to [00:49:00] your car.

Quinn: No, they don't count the 20 bucks it costs to park at a doctor's office for an appointment that takes 15 minutes because healthcare is broken.

Different conversation. We won't get into it, but it's fascinating because we do need to come to terms a little bit with different imperfect systems that have some friction but are more beneficial to the, these greater goals.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: I'll give you a metaphor or not a metaphor, but like an example. I don't don’t know if it’s really a metaphor. But anyway, I lived in New Orleans before Katrina and I was helping run a program at Two Lane I called the Urban Village and we brought in somebody from the Army Corps of Engineers to talk about the defense systems for flooding. You know, I remember that this laptop was having problems that worried me right there.

And in New Orleans at that time, we were all very interested, this was before Katrina, you know, there was a lot of kind of like, well we don't want these walls around the city in the same way. You know, cause it's going to have environmental effects, it's going to be ugly. We don't want any of [00:50:00] this. And then Katrina happened.

Now I was, I moved to New York by then and the city is flooded. It's decimated. And what do they do then? They say Army Corps of Engineer. What do you need to do? And how much do we need to spend to do this? And I hate to say it, but I kind of think that's how it's going to go with the climate crisis and mass transit, which is that right now we're in this sort of like this delusion that there's some kind of no frictionless car oriented way to get us to lower emissions.

Even though it's very clear that the complexity of creating all these e-cars and charging them and the road systems and all the rest of it, and the tires and all the crap, it's just awful. Right? But we are so enamored with the idea that there's an easy fix or that it's going to happen the way we want it, but that's not what's going to happen.

And when those days that happen like with the smog here in New York, but the flooding and [00:51:00] Sandy and when it's time there's going to be a lot of harm, I mean, this sounds apocalyptic in a way, but I don't think it is. Like, I think that politicians and everybody are going to have to say, you know, we thought we could do it with electric cars.

Right? Or, we thought we could do it with this way, but this is it. You know, like, we are either going to have a habitable planet, right? Or not. The research I have seen recently says, habitable planet, you don't get there if every American keeps driving an SUV, it just doesn't happen. Or even a car, you've got to have transit as a component of it.

Quinn: That's it. You just do. And again, it's going to take a lot of upfront money and it's going to take ongoing dedicated money and willpower and all these different things, but there's really no way to ignore. This is a third of our collective footprint. Full stop. So that's a big number.

And when you start to take that down, it makes a big difference. And it also, and again, separate conversation, but my job as a generalist who is [00:52:00] not a scientist or journalist or any of these things, is helping people understand how these things intersect. Whether you can, you know, assume them from the surface level or not, but we have a loneliness epidemic.

And when you are in your car by yourself on these commutes, it's not super healthy. And also you're not moving and you're more sedentary. And we have all these issues that, again, there are no silver bullets to any of these things. And if they were, we definitely would do them. Certainly. But you also want to show people that these are what they call multi solving level opportunities to improve things on a variety of measures.

It's very easy to see that all of our preexisting asthma and other cardio- respiratory, cardiopulmonary conditions, made Covid much more fatal here than it ever needed to be.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: We're an athleisure society that doesn't walk, you know, everyone's wearing athleisure everywhere, and they're getting their cars.

Quinn: No one's saying this stuff isn’t comfortable, and also yeah, right. Exactly.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: It's like, use your athleisure to go to the transit stop and then ride.

Quinn: And it's a hard one. It's hard to break habits, it's hard to [00:53:00] break systems. Obviously these are easier choices for a lot of us than some of us who are otherwise trapped in them.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: The other piece is, I'll say this is, you know, for people who, you know, what really has worried me about the abandonment of transit and use transit myself, is that you have basically, we go back to the racial and social divisions, right? You're not, if your world becomes this bubble, of kind of, the suburbs that you're in, where you basically don't share space in a way where people are not serving you, like you're actually sharing an experience. Where they're not just the service worker or something like that. I think that, and I think there's some research indicating this, that empathy, right, and your ability to understand what people go through is very different if you actually share space schools, transit libraries, and things like that.

And we have not, we're not a terribly empathetic [00:54:00] society. So I would say you could, there is potential in transit for all those folks who are interested in a more just society. You know that riding transit will definitely bring you in contact with people who you maybe don't have contact with every day.

And that might be a good thing. Might not be a great thing always. It's not always a great thing.

Quinn: No, it's not. They're all imperfect. But it's 70% of the reason I send my kids who are just wildly privileged to public school. Because I'm like, good luck. That's life. That's what it's like out there, you know?

Same reason my 10 year old wants to be a paleontologist. I was like, that's great and I'm so excited for you, but you're going to be a waiter first because you need to learn how to like be in this shit and you got to learn how to like, literally work for your money. And yes, sir. No sir. I'm sorry.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: We sound kind of grumpy, I guess we just had a little like grumpy dads.

Quinn: Like I mean, I'm fully that guy, but you know, again, like I said, this has turned fewer questions. Go drive the bus. How great would it be if you were just like, I mean, I drive one of those F750 raptors, but it's fine.

No, I mean, look it [00:55:00] is a deeply problematic hole we are in that is very complex. But again, I try to and the listeners get this, we don't shy away from hard conversations here. There's often fun ones. Again, I usually use this example, there's a young woman I talked to recently who has, don't even get me started with how this even begins.

She's figured out how to use sound cannons on drones, all autonomously linked to push wildfires back. And I was like, listen, I don't have any idea what you're talking about, but this sounds great and I hope everybody supports you. That's just insane. It's, you know, I talked to these other, these women scientists a couple years ago who are using, figured out they could use zebra fish to try to fight pediatric cancer.

And I'm like, that's great. I don't even know where you buy a zebra fish. Like, much less how you use it for cancer. These are incredible opportunities to fix these horrible things, and this is less sexy than those. But at the same time, it fundamentally applies to so many pieces of our society, which is an opportunity.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: We could tax [00:56:00] zebra fish.

I mean, that would be like congestion zebra, like there's too many.

Quinn: All the zebra fish moved to Texas because they didn't want to pay income taxes. It's a nightmare. There is some coveting obviously going on but I think it is though, like your book to bring it all the way back around.

It's important to like, fully reckon with what we, the bed we've made and why and how so that we can tear it apart and look at it and go, okay, how do we reverse these choices along the way?

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: Yeah. We still live in a small D democracy and you have opportunities to vote for, to put things on ballots and to vote for people who will support these things.

And I've seen it in my own, you know, the last few years here. I mean, you look at a state like New York, there's a lot of question whether the MTA would bail out or the state would bail out the MTA. And you know, because downstate, because New York City was so in for the governor, Governor Hochul, you know what, she delivered.

Yeah, it was a priority. It was delivered. And that's what you got to do. People [00:57:00] got to vote where there's transit, they need to vote. And where they're not, well, we'll hope, but.

Quinn: It's one of my favorite organizations is run by a friend of mine, Amanda Lipman. It's called Run For Something. And all they do is recruit and support young, progressive state and local candidates essentially.

And often it's the people who have experienced these things the most. They have been a nurse, or they are people who need to ride transit. So they can speak to what that experience is like and why it matters. And what happens when you start to put those people in office from the ground up. It's not only do they hopefully graduate to the House of Representatives or whatever it might be, but they can start to affect things in a way that you will feel and you will notice.

And we always talk about like, look, you know, Nick, you're not going to stop the jet stream from slowing down here. But the climate change is the heat you feel on your back. It's the water you drink, right? It's the air you breathe and you can actually affect those things. And doing it on the local level and the state level really does matter,

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: Especially for something like transit, which [00:58:00] historically has been funded in its operations at that level.

I mean, yeah, it's tough lift at the federal level right now to get new operating subsidies for transit. But there's definitely, because of the importance of city economies to regions it's a doable lift, right?

Quinn: It is. And everywhere is complex and has its own complexities. And I think about, I've got an Apple note full of like 7,000 links and things I'm going to eventually sell to where I am now, which is it seems like small potatoes, but we've got the City of Williamsburg, which is not very large. It is surrounded by an area called James City County. It's integrated with the world's largest open air museum. Colonial Williamsburg, which is a nonprofit foundation, but 10 feet this way is a state university.

The College of William and Mary. And all these pieces could totally work for transit. Could totally work. And you've already got, again, Colonial Williamsburg is shut down to cars. It's already walkable.

Quinn: You've got the College Mary campus great with pedestrians. But every time you pull a string, you find out more things, which is, you can go to the [00:59:00] city of Williamsburg and say, where's all your protected bike lane guys?

And they go, yeah, here's the deal. The largest landowner is a nonprofit foundation, which doesn't pay property taxes. We've got a state university. There's, again, it's Colonial Williamsburg. So there's all these 400 year old churches that take up land that also don't pay property taxes. They're like, we would love to build those things.

We don't have any money to do that. Yeah, but these are the pieces that should come together. Because you go to the endowment at Colonial Williamsburg and say, Hey guys, you want tourism to go back up to what it was before 2008 and 2018. Then you got to start making the entire entity better. You get more college students, you get younger people to work downtown. All these pieces.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: Universities have a good, I can say, I mean, resorts like Disney and also universities actually have a pretty, in terms of their own circulator systems. So in some places like Ann Arbor and so forth, I mean, they're moving like a lot of people. So there's definitely, you have enough institutional mojo there to basically put together circulator systems that could be very effective.

But again, you'd have to do things like make sure that [01:00:00] it's not too easy, you know, to drive to the, whatever the Winn-Dixie or whatever it is there, right. And that sort of thing. But yeah, you should be, you could be such a beautiful and wonderful bikeable, walkable, enough transit for those who need it kind of system. Absolutely.

Quinn: Yeah, it's easy to walk in and show them like a fancy PowerPoint and say, make this 400 year old town, sort of give it fiber internet and make it super bikeable. And that's great.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: Or put the charging stations in.

Quinn: Yeah, exactly. But not too many, you know, it's complicated, but it is doable.

And again, my goal is to try to keep finding, as we talked about a little bit offline, like what are lowest common denominator pieces of the puzzle that we can transplant from city and state to say like, this works, these arguments work, these are the pieces that help fund it. To try to again, have these things built on each other.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: I think livability, what you bring up there is, I think for a city like yours is the livability factor. Can be a very big one to kind of leverage transit and so forth. I mean, if you really have the kind of, [01:01:00] I mean, if, because a lot of times traffic can be, even though you live in a small place because you have limited roads, it could be just awful.

Quinn: Yeah. And again, my perspective is skewed coming from Los Angeles, you know? If we're four minutes late to preschool, it's going to take half an hour to get there. But anyways there's, I think there's some glimmers out there, but it's going to be a lot to undo, you know, your 120,000 book.

We're going to have to make it thing in the past here, Nick. Alright. You've spent enough time, I got a couple questions I'm going to ask you that I ask everyone, and then we're going to get you out of here. Does that sound good? Nick, when was the first time in your life when you realized you had the quote unquote, power of change or the power to do something that you felt was outwardly meaningful?

It could have been recently, it could have been your book, it could be teaching, could be any of these things. Where was sort of the spark for you?

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: I mean, I was involved pretty early in college in the eighties in the Earth Day organizations and helped organize, this is in Madison, Wisconsin, earth Day celebrations, which, you [01:02:00] know, it's so, it was such a different time where really environmentalism was, you know, such at the margins.

But we would put those together every year and that was, you know, it was both my own awareness and our ability to drive other awareness around that. So I feel like that's kind of where the idea that you can organize and develop something of meaning for people on a social issue of importance. I would say that though, I mean certainly through teaching, I feel like that's sort of my impact.

I've taught so many thousands of students now and you know, the teaching piece of it, I've been very lucky in the sense that I'm able to teach in areas like urban planning and urban affairs and so forth, which, you know, you were able to bring a kind of consciousness to students about things like longstanding racial disinvestment and inequity but also opportunities for making better places, right?

By showing them what's going on in Europe or in certain [01:03:00] cities. There are tremendous opportunities there. So I think that teaching remains an opportunity for so many people to basically get ideas in circulation that can really help consciousness in that way.

Quinn: I love that. That's fantastic.

Nick, who is someone who has positively impacted your work in the past six months?

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: I mean, I was able to bring the book to more people's attention because like of David Zipper, who's a freelance writer with Bloomberg and so forth. Otherwise, you know, this is a pretty, you know, it's a university press book, which is great.

His basically attention that he paid to the book in Vox and Bloomberg was able to basically help create you know, an audience for what was really a, you know, something that I felt very strongly about and researched a long time to a wider audience and tell a story that I think needed to be told right now.

And I was so grateful to him because, we're going through a period where almost every state has to decide whether they're going to fund transit. And [01:04:00] so it's nice to be able to say, here's what happens if you don't. My book's a warning, right? So I owe him a lot. And I think actually the country owes him a lot in that way because he's out there on a lot of issues.

You know? And in terms of environment, I think he's got a lot of sense about like, what could really have impact, you know, whether he's big on e-bikes he's somewhat skeptical of, you know, the electric car is going to solve everything. You know, those sorts of things. And so a lot of how reshaping cities can be better places.

So I definitely admire his ability to communicate with a wider public in that way.

Quinn: I love that, the e-bikes thing is a whole thing we haven't even dug into.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: I love it. I have one. I love it. Love it.

Quinn: Oh, I'm obsessed with it.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: It's my last mile solution. It's how I go to my train station. I love it. I live up a hill and so it's a really big hill.

And so in the night it's like, turn it on.

Quinn: Oh yeah. Hundred percent. It's cheating. It's fantastic. Yeah, it's wild to look at things like the subsidies in Colorado that started in Denver and they've, I think they just passed the entire state in Colorado for e-bikes. They can't, they literally cannot keep these [01:05:00] subsidies, I guess, in stock as you were.

It's pretty incredible. Last one. What is a book you've read in the past year or so that has opened your mind to maybe a topic you hadn't considered before or has changed your thinking in some fundamental way, or at least challenged?

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: I'm a little old for that. I'm a little baked in. I don't don’t know. Totally changed my thinking. I don't know.

Quinn: That's fair. That's fair. Or just a new idea where you're like, well, shit, I'd never read about this.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: I mean, I like the Jeff Speck, you know, the walkable, sort of the, I'm trying to get the name, the title in a minute. I was just rereading that.

Quinn: Walkable City. Is that what it is? I think it was Walkable City. Walkable City Rules.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom:. Yeah. Walkable City. Yeah. It's still so great. Funny. Totally on target. You know, his description for instance of like state highway agencies and their ability to ruin cities. Love it. And it's not just highways, but actually how the state roots. But he talks about, because he's done a lot of this [01:06:00] consultancy on walkability, you know, like, I know it's bad, you know, he is like, he says like, I know it's going to be bad if I have to deal with like state officials on like a route.

Cause all they're interested in is getting, you know, cars from point A to point B. I highly recommend that book. And, you know, to rediscover it again, he's put a new like an afterward, an update that's also very good. So I definitely feel like that's still like one that everyone should read if they want to get into kind of the transportation alternatives.

Quinn: I love it. Thank you so much. Your book is The Great American Transit Disaster. It is a light beach read for everyone. There it is. Highly recommend it. I mean, just so many footnotes. It's great. Thank you for, I mean, truly the work that must have been required to do this is unbelievable because the writing the book is hard but is the easy part.

I mean, truly you pulled it all together. So we appreciate that. Thank you for your time and yeah, go check out the book and we've also got some other resources. We'll put in the show notes for folks so they can really [01:07:00] get a good education on this before they go start protesting.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Quinn: Absolutely. It matters to understand the complexity. And choices that got us to where we are, so we can undo them as quickly as possible.

That’s it. Important, Not Important is hosted by me. It is produced by Willow Beck, it is edited by Anthony Luciani. And the music is by Tim Blaine. You can read our critically acclaimed newsletter and get notified about new podcast convos at important not important dot com slash subscribe. We've got t-shirts and hoodies and coffee stuff at our store.

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That's it. Thanks for giving a shit and have a great day.[01:08:00]