>> In three.
>> Hey, welcome back and ready. Jeff Frick here coming to you from the home office for another episode of "Turn The Lens," and I'm really excited for this next episode. I talk a lot about leadership and I talk a lot about culture and I talk a lot about communications. What you don't hear me talk about as much is a passion that I have, that the people that really know me know, and that's really all about mobility and what's happening in mobility. I really got into it with my personal electric vehicles, my scooters, my one wheels and my e-bikes and I really became interested in the transformational capabilities. I think of e-bikes is kind of this bridge between bikes and cars and really opening an opportunity to have fewer cars on the road. And after spending 20,000 miles standing in the streets next to cars and buses and everything else, I can tell you, I get really... You get to know it and I'm really excited at these next guests, they've been kind of leading a charge of rethink about the way we think about cities and streets for a long, long time.
So let's welcome in through the magic of the internet from all the way across the Atlantic. We've got Chris Bruntlett and Melissa Bruntlett, the founders of Modacity. So Chris, Melissa welcome.
>> Hello?
>> Thanks for having us Jeff, glad to see you.
>> Absolutely and I guess you have real jobs too, right? So Chris is also the Marketing and Communications Manager at the Dutch Cycling Embassy. And Melissa is the Internal Communication Specialist for Mobycon. So you guys wrote a book, when did you write this book? Like 2018, "The Dutch Cycling City." "The Dutch Blueprint For Urban Vitality Biking the Dutch City." I saw this after going to this Ford event on smart cities and I picked up this and I picked up Jeanette Sadik-Khan's book on "Street Fight" and really taking back the streets. And it really just blew my mind to rethink about streets and cities, not from a car-centric point, but really from a people-centric point. You started out talking about bikes but now in your new book, "Curbing Traffic," it's way more than bikes and it is really more about human-centric design for cities, not car-centric first, but really thinking about people.
So first off, great to meet you finally, after all these years. And I'm curious kind of how you made the transition from kind of a bike-centric kind of point of view, to really, this is a much broader point of view. I'm going to start with you, Melissa.
>> Yeah, I think for us, we set it out as cycling advocates. That's very much where we sort of fell into this in terms of we'd always been cycling and we grew up on bikes riding around in the '80s and '90s without aging ourselves. But it wasn't until moving to Vancouver and being in a city that was investing in cycling from the get-go that we really started to realize what was possible when we started cycling. And yeah, that just grew into a passion that became a Modacity and became our passion project on the side to becoming full-time jobs moving here. But yeah, this transition from cycling to everything is sort of, I think an extension of what we were already doing, is trying to help people understand the bike is a tool or a means to get around cities in a more human way, but there's so many benefits that come from that, from being more connected to your city, being more connected to the people in the city to helping you as an individual feel better, not just physically, but also mentally. And so that really became the inspiration for "Curbing Traffic," for the second book, is talking to people about beyond just how wonderful cycling can be. What does it mean when our cities become less car oriented for us as individuals?
>> Right, right. And then Chris, we had this interesting event happen 18 months ago, basically March 13th, lucky Friday, the 13th, where the whole world got shut down. It's 7 billion peoples suddenly had their lives in a light switch moment, right? This doesn't ever happen, it certainly hasn't happened that I can think of. And there's a theme that COVID was this accelerant to a whole lot of transformational trends that were already kind of happening and kind of moving along. And I would say, certainly making cities more bike-friendly in the U.S would be part of that. But suddenly we're seeing this huge accelerant because, "Oh, my goodness, guess what? I can go walk the streets like I could never walk before. I've got empty streets, I'm not surrounded by all this traffic noise." When you think of the messaging in your goal of trying to get the stuff out and then suddenly COVID happens and suddenly people are experiencing some of the stuff that you actually talk about, not necessarily because they wanted to, but because it was forced upon them. How's that changed kind of the acceptance of some of the messaging in your book?
>> It's no exaggeration, I think to say that it's changed everything and prior to COVID, Melissa and I always joked that what was necessary to make change around the world at the same scale that happened here in the Netherlands. The only thing that would be making that happen is if everybody got a plane ticket and came to the Netherlands and experienced that firsthand. Well, lo and behold, they didn't need to buy a plane ticket. Corona created those conditions for them and stripped all the cars from the streets for weeks and months. They were able to hear the birds in their city, they were able to interact with their neighbors. They were able to get outside and walk, cycle, skateboards, roller skate without the fear of cars and much like the oil crisis that happened here in the Netherlands in 1970s, this hopefully, and so far from what we've seen could be this light bulb moment for other cities around the world and other national governments to start moving away from the single occupant private automobile as the sole means of transport and building out more reliable, more resilient and more diverse mobility networks to help people move around their city. And yeah, it's changed everything and as you say, there's cities everywhere that have started building temporary bike lanes, networks of bike infrastructure and reallocating road space and parking space for dining areas after dining areas. I mean it's decades and decades of advocacy to get to this point and we've suddenly seen it move at a scale and speed that were far beyond many of our wildest dreams.
>> Right, right. I mean, the parklets and stuff, again, back to the Janette's book and what they did in Manhattan in giving all those kinds of funny shaped intersections where they had and just really messy car spaces and they turned them into these great pedestrian spaces. Now you can hang out in the middle of New York and drink your coffee and hang out with your friend and look up at the buildings and really enjoy the city, such a very different thing. But I want to first, I want to talk about kind of the direct stuff and then to get into some of the second order stuff. And in terms of direct stuff, one of the things that strikes me of the book is that it's really a system, right? That makes the Dutch system work, it's not any one component in and of itself, but there's a whole bunch of little things. The sum total of which are really, really powerful. And I think it's important to point out that it's by an intentional design and that I think there's a great line in one of the books that talks about, we made cities, we made them this way so we can make them a different way too.
And I think what's pretty interesting is how quickly a fundamental change in a philosophy. I just talked to Mr. Barricade to go from something like level of services that dictate how streets are regulated and built and scaled to VMT, vehicle miles traveled, which actually the goal is to reduce the miles. A simple policy change like that changes everything and changes the way designers... The Dutch design is pretty interesting, right? One thing I think most people don't know, is you want to blend when possible, that sounds so counterintuitive. Melissa, explain that to us blend when possible. I thought it was all about separation.
>> Yeah, well, that's, I think one of the really striking things that we really try to emphasize when we're talking about building traffic calming into cities, is it's not always about separation and oftentimes a separation is sort of like the nice icing on the cake at the end because the approach here is really to look at streets very much at a network level. So there are essentially three levels of roads. There's your flow roads or your highways, places where we get onto to get somewhere really fast, there's your through roads, which is more of your arterials, or your shopping district streets or where businesses might be located where you're working. And then there's the access streets or the neighborhood streets. And each of those needs to be treated in a different way, we're not going to separate bike lanes on a neighborhood street because it's meant to be a place for community and for gathering and so the important thing at that level is to traffic calm, to reduce speeds down to 30 kilometers an hour or less, which is about 20 miles per hour or less, excuse my conversion there.
>> Right, right.
>> And create this environment where cars behave in a much different way. You change the psychology of how people approach the space where you now realize you are in a neighborhood area. You need to act accordingly, you slow down, treatments like chicanes or speed tables that force just a different change in texture or a different change in space, inherently causes people to slow down. And then when you move out to your through roads, where cars start moving a little faster then, okay, we now know that through countless research papers that a collision between a motor vehicle and a vulnerable road user of 30 kilometers an hour or more, or over 30 kilometers an hour increases the risk of injury or death. So now we know those two modes don't mix anymore. They can't share that same space comfortably and still in the case of human error, come out okay. So now we need to separate. So there is where it makes sense, there's where you put the investment in creating that cycle network of separated lanes and then you can save the lower cost efforts for your neighborhoods to make them much more of a community space as opposed to a space for traveling through.
>> Right, right. I just love the concept you talk about kind of who pushes the beg button. And again, it goes back to how you're prioritizing. Did the people have to push the beg button for the cars to stop or does the car have to push the beg button for the people to stop? And to me, that's such a simple and insightful illustration how you can change your priorities and really change things around. Chris I want to come back to you about these pesky things called parking and theft, which are huge incumbent or problems with kind of bike culture. 'Cause certainly here in San Francisco, the theft problem is out of control. Again, you guys have this kind of systems approach. One of the interesting components is relatively inexpensive bicycles and then I've seen some crazy parking stuff. Talk about kind of these infrastructure pieces beyond simply the bike itself in the streets that enable it to happen. Because if without that, you get to your destination, you have no place to put your bike, it's kind of a bummer.
>> Yeah, I think this is a tremendous point and something that frustrated us immensely when we lived in Vancouver because the city, like many other cities was spending all of its time and energy on the infrastructure, be it the lanes and the intersection design and the traffic calming. It didn't see the bike parking as part of that infrastructure and we were making this point that just like car parking is essential at the beginning and the end of every car journey, we need to start considering where people parked their bikes. And that's not just putting a staple rack on the sidewalk and giving people one or two bike parking spaces per block, but actually taking this seriously by reallocating, whether it's a curb side space or an indoor retail space to give people a secure, comfortable, supervised, ideally space to leave their bike.
And I think this is now something where the Netherlands is really leading, is in the city centers and the retail complexes that the public transportation facilities there are really convenient, well lit, safe, supervised bike parking spaces that are available completely free for people to use. And they're obviously much more likely to leave their, whether it's just 100 year old bicycle, their beat up bicycle in the city center, or if it's a two, three, 4,000 Euro electric bike or electric cargo bike, people do not want to just leave that out on the streets for fear of it being it being stolen. And I think theft is, when we talk about barriers to mass cycling, we always talk about the infrastructure keeping people safe. We don't think about the threat effects being a barrier, but it most definitely is.
And that we found even in Vancouver, it stopped our family from cycling certain places in the city if we knew we did not have an end of trip facility there for our bicycles. And that meant we couldn't shop in certain areas, that meant that we didn't spend our money in other areas. So there are knock on effects here that we need to take into consideration. Because yeah, as I said at the start, parking is infrastructure.
>> Right, right. The other thing I think is so cool about the Dutch design is trying to change behavior with design versus instruction, making it incapable because of traffic calming measures and physical barriers and a lot of kind of visual indicators that is not just, "Hey, slow down for the pedestrians." You have to, if you're in one of these areas via design, I think is pretty interesting. And then the other piece is this concept of never stopping and this elegant dance kind of at the intersections. And I wonder if you could talk to that a little bit, Melissa, especially as the mom, you had pretty young kids, you guys headed over there, they didn't grow up necessarily in this environment but you've described it in a number of places in the book, where it's this kind of elegant dance at a human speed that enables people to see react, read and make the proper decisions to get through that turn about or whatever the interchange is without having to stop.
>> Yeah, it's this really ingenious treatment. And to be honest when we first moved here, it's sort of striking because we've grown up in North America, there's stop signs or stoplights everywhere, everywhere where roads intersect, there's something telling you you need to stop. And then here, there's at least in Delft, it's rare if ever that we see a stop sign. And a stop lights are only at major intersections where there's still protection. But you start to get used to it because of the way and the speed at which we're moving around. So, because most people are getting around on a bicycle, we're all moving about the same speed and the geometry of these upright bikes forces everyone to sort of be at an upright or seated, sort of... If you had to see it as sort of way of moving around in the city like you're moving around on a stool.
So you're forced to make eye contact with people and because there's no sign telling you, "Oh, now it's your turn to stop." You, with that very social sort of approach, you look at people and you make that eye contact and there's nods or there's... You've waved someone through or if someone doesn't look at you, you know they're not going to stop. And it becomes this sort of way of approaching how you navigate, which seems chaotic but when you're in it and when you see these subtle movements, you suddenly start to adapt your behavior and people become much more accustomed to knowing through those visual cues, through sometimes speaking to each other, that it's your turn to go or it's my turn. And it's something that, as you pointed out, our kids have become very adept at very quickly. It's how they get to and from school, neither of them have to go through any intersections really to get to school and the ones that they do are not signalized. So it forces even from a very young age, kids getting used to acknowledging their fellow humans as they're moving through the city. And they're, I think for the outsider, it looks dangerous and it looks chaotic but once you're in it and you see it in action and because people are forced to slow down, it becomes in a lot of ways safer for how we navigate.
>> Right, right. No, I think that's going to see if you're going to get to the end of the story, that even if you do crash, even if there is a bump or whatever, you're going at a speed and you're going into a situation and it's a side bump, not a 90 degree bump at speed. So all these things are so interesting how they combine to make it safer. And there's, I think it was Jeanette Sadik-Khan or somebody talking about bike helmets versus no bike helmets. And like bike helmets are not the answer, that's a symptom of the problem. The problem is to have safe streets so you don't necessarily need to have bike helmets as often, wear them if you want to but try to reduce the interchanges between bikes and peds and cars, for sure.
>> Chris talks about an anecdote in the book, in the second book, about when he and Etienne were cycling to school and they witnessed a crash at an intersection where those visual cues or those social cues were overlooked for a brief moment and two cyclists or people on a bike hit each other. And they both got up acknowledged one who was at fault or who wasn't, it doesn't matter. They got up acknowledged each other and then carried on their way and the severity of that crash was so minimal. I mean, I accidentally bumped into somebody once myself and admitted my fault and everyone was fine. The other person was a little bit angry at me but we all carried on in our day. And that slower speed really helps to mitigate the seriousness of and the severity of those crashes.
>> Right. I want to use this as a segue to talk about some of these second order impacts 'cause I think these are really profound. And I think this is what got me excited about the space in the first place, is when you spend more time outside and you start to get the benefits of just fresh air and movement and because I'm on one of these E things, I'm super hyper-conscious to be respectful and engaging with people that I pass, try to represent the community. So I wave, I say, hi, I smile, I slow down. Basically try to interact with all their senses. And what strikes me is the story that you just told is the engagement that your kids are having with their community, actively versus the really kind of horrific thing you described in the book about backseat kids and the experience of what the backseat kid is getting when they're going to soccer practice or they're going to school or they're going to piano, they're sitting in the back of the car, looking at the back of their parents' head, looking at the back of the car in front of them. Oh, it was just horrific and I didn't even know, you mentioned a bunch of the studies. I'll turn it over to you, Chris, that there's a lot of research that this is not a good way to be, it's not good for mental health.
>> Yeah, exactly and it's not good for the development of our children. And we talk about this phenomenon, this recent phenomenon, very recent phenomenon of helicopter parenting and constant supervision of our children as if it's a cultural thing. And the fact of the matter is we can draw a direct line with this development, with the rise of speed and volume of cars on our street. So it's this direct response to the car and the children, which Dr. Lia Karsten admitted to us, our competitors. When there's more cars on the street, they will push the children off the street and into their houses. And then when the children needs to get to school or need to get to ballet class or they to get to a friend's house or a swimming lesson, the parent has to supervise them usually in the backseat of the car to wherever they're going.
So they're never out of their parents' gaze, they're never out of this glass and steel bubble. They're never exposed to other children outside of their social status or ethnic status or the like and they grew up very protected, very isolated. It's this backseat generation, this bubble wrap generation in the backseat of the car or on the couch and in the classroom. And then it's not until they're go to university that they're given this freedom for the first time and we see how that happens, how that ends up very poorly into their young adulthood. So Dutch children are the happiest in the world for a good reason. In insofar as the car has been controlled on their streets, the speed and volume of it has been reduced.
They have this great infrastructure, so they can walk and cycle and take public transport within their own city, between cities, everywhere they need to go. At the age of eight or nine, they are navigating their city independently. And this has tremendous knock on effects in terms of their mental health, their physical health and their development into young adulthood. And this is all told in the first chapter of the book, because we had obviously firsthand experience seeing our children spread their wings for the very first time, which was quite exciting.
>> Yeah, it's funny in the book you talk about, I think you're comparing your commute or the kids' commute, I can't remember exactly. But when you actually kind of really break it down and be very specific as to the number of intersections you go through over, the number of busy streets you cross and really break it down. And the comparison between what you had in Vancouver and what you have now is just night and day. And I wonder if people would be less helicoptery if the stress of knowing that the kid didn't have to transverse six busy streets but had a bike, would people be less helicoptery and let them go. It's really interesting, it's a big problem. Oh my gosh, the traffic jams around the schools in the morning are just completely ridiculous and they're also unsafe and people do U-turns, and it's just not a good situation. But let's shift gears a little bit from one end of the age spectrum to the other end of the age spectrum.
Because another pretty common misbelief is that older folks can't get around without cars and you guys highlight, it's actually just the opposite of that. A car-centric culture actually is debilitating for mobility for older folks, it's not more enabling. I wonder if you can dive into that a little bit, Melissa.
>> Yeah, well, I think we often forget that just as we can't drive until we're 16 in most countries, until we have a driver's license, we all reached a certain point in our lives where we do not have the physical capacity anymore to operate a motor vehicle. So for some people that's later in life, other people, it could be as early as late 60s, early 70s. And so when that happens, if you've grown up in an environment where you're 100% dependent on your personal vehicle or someone else's personal vehicle to get you around, you enter into this stage where you're not sure what to do. And Chris remembers hearing about his grandfather, when he was no longer able to drive that was very isolating for him. He didn't know how to get anywhere, The bus system didn't give him that same freedom to get where he needed to, it wasn't frequent or fast enough.
So when we assume that everyone can drive and everyone will drive and we design our networks to enable that, quote unquote, we then create these disabling environments where we force, especially our elderly to be stuck in their homes, completely dependent on other people to get around. And at a time in our lives where we inherently will start to experience more loss through our social networks, through family that passes on, this creates a very isolating environment. We become more depressed, we feel more alone. We become more distrustful of other people and overall, that's not the quality of life that we all want as we get older. We all dream of retiring and being social and being connected and being able to enjoy life after working so hard to get to that point, that if our transport networks force us to suddenly be stuck at home, we lose all of that freedom that we worked so hard to gain.
And for what? Because we drove around all the time and because our networks were designed that way. And what we've found here is because for the same reason as our children are able to experience freedom of mobility, we see people well into their 80s and 90s using bicycles or e-bikes or walking or using mobility aids to get around the city at a human scale, to feel a part of society, to come into the city center for market days on Thursdays and Saturdays and really interact with friends, but also with other people and feel because they've aged, they're no longer separated. They're still a part of civic life. And I think that's really a value that all cities should be inherently building into how we want people to age in place and feel like they're still a part of our community, even as they get older.
>> Right, right. It's really interesting 'cause if it's car-centric, which it is here and it's kind of like you're 16 and you get your driver's license now suddenly you're mobile and then it's so depressing for older folks, right? You take their driver's license away, you take the car keys away and it's so binary, right? It's like it's over as opposed to, if it was less car-centric and more transportation-centric than that particular means of mobility might be taken away but it's just one of many and not the only one. And I wonder Chris, the other piece of it that I'm sure surprises, a lot of people in the book, is people with disabilities. And I love the great... There's a great quote, it says, "The people don't have disabilities, the cities have disabilities." And you don't really understand what's going on in Dutch design until you actually have disabilities and you have to go someplace and then that's when you really feel that. I wonder if you can share kind of generally, but then also kind of what happens now with this E evolution that now adds basically power to almost any platform.
>> Yeah, I think one of the first things you'll notice in the Netherlands, when you come here is the number of people with varying abilities using the streets and that is people on tricycles, people with hand cycle, people with walking devices, people in scoot-mobiles, that is motorized wheelchairs or just plain old wheelchairs out on the street, participating in society. And I think elsewhere, when we start talking about inconvenience in cars and creating cycling infrastructure, one of the first things you always hear is, "What about the disabled?" Either in good faith or in bad faith, it's either coming from a place of concern or a place of ignorance. And the fact of the matter is that in many of these places, people with disabilities don't have access to a car or don't want to be dependent on a car.
In the UK alone, it's 60% of people with disabilities don't have access to a car versus 16% of the general population. But these people are used as an excuse not to reallocate road space as if they're one amorphous blob and at the end of the day everybody has differing abilities. Everybody is on this scale as we point out in the book from fully able-bodied to fully disabled and we go through that scale of ability on any given day. And the truth is that for many people here, the bicycle is like a rolling walking stick. It is a mobility device, whether it's two wheels, three wheels, electrically assisted or not. And the networks of cycling infrastructure are actually just mobility infrastructure.
And we tell the story of our friend, Maya, who has multiple sclerosis, does not have a driver's license but has one of these motorized wheelchairs and the infrastructure for her is completely liberating. It allows her to do her groceries independently, it allows her to pick up her children. It allows her to take well, rolling walks in the countryside to get fresh air and get out into the forests and the polders. So it's yeah, it really quite much bigger than transportation and a lot of these topics are much bigger than just transportation. But for people with disabilities in particular, because they're not invited to the table, because they're not represented in the decision making process or within these departments that are planning these mobility networks then they're often... The assumption is just made that they want to drive everywhere or they have to drive everywhere. And so any inconvenience to the car is disabling when the fact of the matter is it's our cities that are disabling.
>> Right, I wonder in terms of kind of investment, when you look at investment dollars and investment numbers, in transportation at the city level or whatever the logical level of investment is. What percentage of, I mean, I don't even know this giant percentage, is towards the car mobility and freeways and this and that. And you mentioned that it's hard to get going on kind of public service and alternatives, unless you have enough frequency to make it worthwhile. Then, as we talked about earlier in the conversation, most of that stuff's geared to the nine to five commute with very, very heavy coverage during certain windows and basically none. How does cities get over the hump? What type of kind of carve out from say, traditional car budgets can be carved into some of these other multimodal, whether it's bicycles or increasing frequency of public transit or having a place to lock the bike when I get to my destination.
How much do they need to kind of carve out to get to a piece where you start to get a little bit of a flywheel? 'Cause as you said, I think in one of the book and you see it here in New York, right? You never check the subway schedule, you just walked down and one's going to be coming within about 15 minutes or so, I don't even know. You don't really worry about, it's a very different way to think about transit compared to, "Oh crap, I missed the train. There's only one more in two hours if I miss that, I'm stuck in the city." So how are cities thinking about are they carving, how much are they carving? From the finance and municipal investment point of view, how are people rethinking that? How should they think about it?
>> I think it's hard to say exactly what that magic number is in terms of budget. It's because every city's a little bit different. Every city has different problems and it's finding the right solution. But I think what oftentimes we've talked about, and I know a lot of other people working in this field have talked about, is if you want to reach a certain mode share or a certain shift in how people move, then say you want to have 5% of the population cycling then you should probably be dedicating at least 5% of that transportation budget that you have to investing in cycling and oftentimes it's really not. We've got 80, 90% invested in building out new roads and repairing and maintaining the existing roads we have and drops in the bucket really are invested in cycling or invested in public transportation.
And so if we want to see that shift often a good place to start is what is your goal for this year, the next five years? How do you want to increase mode share for walking, cycling and public transport? Okay, well then you need to examine how much of the percentage of your budget is being invested that way. And then thinking beyond the budget, what is going to facilitate that? And you touched on a good point that it's not one mode necessarily but it's the combination. How do we make it so that walking and cycling and public transportation can all compliment each other in a way that makes it more attractive for people that they might think, "Okay, today I'll leave the car at home because I need to make a bunch of trips, but I can get to the shop, to the doctor and to school by walking and cycling, or if I need to go further field, I can combine biking and public transportation to make that trip easy, whether that's during commute hours or outside of commute hours." And that's a really good point that you brought up is, if we're not enabling people that are making trips outside of commuting hours or work shift work. Essential workers that are working in our hospitals right now don't work 9:00 to 5:00, they work 12:00 to 12:00, or what have you.
>> Right.
>> Making sure that we're providing those options for those people when they need it. And not just when those of us who are lucky enough to work a 9:00 to 5:00 need it, then we can start to see a bit of a shift.
>> I'm curious in your consulting with cities and municipalities. Are there certain types of projects that just have a really great ROI that are relatively simple to implement that have just kind of, "Yay, look, you can see, you can feel, you can touch and smell," that kind of helps people kind of get over the humper it gives them a great positive relatively low expense investment return.
>> Yeah, that was the exact thought that occurred to me when Melissa was answering your question, was that we can't just be looking at these transportation costs solely as costs because they each have their own return on investment. And as it stands, obviously, anything to do with active travel provides a return on investment because you are improving the air quality, reducing the noise pollution. You are giving people a physically active way to move around their city. Potentially if you do it correctly, reduce congestion on the streets and saving people time. And this is, I think, kind of part of this emerging field that's coming out of the Netherlands, this idea of bikeconomics, which is looking at transportation investment through the lens of the cost benefits to society.
And before we start throwing billions at motorways and car infrastructure, can we see that very small and targeted investments in walking and cycling and public transport actually provide a 20, 30, sometimes 40 fold return on that investment to our society that's making us richer and more prosperous and healthier and happier. And yeah, it is exactly what happened during the COVID crisis where suddenly cities were forced to look at the reality of their public transport systems. People didn't want to use the buses and trains and trams anymore. If they didn't build out an alternative to the public transport system through better walking and cycling conditions, the additional weight of all those extra car journeys on top of the existing traffic would create such a cost to society.
And the Italian government, for example, calculated if they did nothing, it would cost their society an additional 20 billion in congestion and pollution and the like, and it's by very modest creation of walking and cycling infrastructure, they could inversely save their society tens of billions because they would avoid that worst case scenario. So the cost of doing nothing was too high and actually intervening with a very modest investment, in this case, it was a pop-up network of walking and cycling routes in the city to replace the public transport network, put a lot of extra euros and they in the public well. So this is, I think the more balanced approach that cities in Europe are starting to take and hopefully as you roll out this infrastructure money in the United States, you start to take a more broader view of these transportation investments.
>> Right, the externalities, I think, was what they called them in economics, but nobody likes to count the externalities, right? I mean, we were talking about deaths the other day. I just looked it up, there's 1.35 million people killed on the road every year, nobody talks about it. I just looked it up right obviously as a comp to aviation, I couldn't find one year in the last 10 or since 2006, that there'd been 1,000 people killed in aviation, even with the 737 crashes that happened. So now unfortunately, people just accept some of these externalities and all these costs that you've outlined pretty significantly in the book. And I want to kind of bring it back to where I think where these huge benefits are. And again, I think nothing like a COVID walk on April 15th, 2020, when everything was dead quiet, there's not a car in the street and you're outside kind of re-experiencing the space that was around you that you probably hated and take a minute to stop.
'Cause as you said, were generally going someplace, not necessarily being someplace. And secondly, we didn't have the noise pollution. We didn't have all the cars, we didn't have the traffic. So I think looking at the health benefits, which is such a big issue that we have now are huge. I think the community impacts, which you've talked about and knowing your neighbors and being friends with your neighbors and having a relationship with your neighbors as things are getting so divisive 'cause people are still stuck in their bubbles listening to what they want to listen to on the radio. Well, kind of last word, why don't we go to you first, Melissa? What's the big piece that most people miss when they first enter this space?
>> Yeah, I mean, I think at the beginning, we talked about how our focus is so much on moving people on that level of service that you mentioned earlier. And we very rarely stopped to think about what the experience is in a place. And we talked about this and the therapeutic chapter of the book. All of us are guilty of squirreling away money for the escape or vacation to unplug and get away and really rejuvenate. And we don't stop to think, "What does it mean that we need to escape our cities to feel healthy again?" Our cities should be the places that yes, vacations are lovely and important, but at the end of your Workday or when you just need a break in the middle of the day, you should be able to walk outside your front door and just be able to have that moment of calm as well.
And so, we're spending so much focus on how people move but we need to also look at the quality of the stay as well, so that when we take a walk and we can hear kids playing, we can hear birds singing. Sure, there might be cars in that space, but they're not there at this very ominous sort of place. They're just part of the background where you can really experience the joy that our cities can be without having to escape them in the first place and enjoy the people that you're walking with, or the people that you bumped into. And I think the more we focus on what that human experience is outside of cars and really what our experience is like with each other and the space, I think the better quality of our environments we can create just by shifting our thinking.
>> Love it. Chris, some parting thoughts?
>> Yeah, no, I think I would just second what Melissa said. I mean, it still astounds me that people go on holidays halfway around the world to travel to these walkable human scale communities. And then they come back to their kind of reality and they fight against changes that would make that type of walkability and bikeability in density in their own neighborhoods because they think that wouldn't work here. And there's nothing no more depressing words in our world than hearing that over and over and over again, "That wouldn't work here, that's not possible here. Our city is different." And I think not only is that a lazy excuse, it's been proved wrong time and time again. The first book, "Building the Cycling City" is filled with 10 examples of cities outside the Netherlands that have implemented some of these ideas and got it started on their own journeys.
It may take another 30 or 40 years, but it's most definitely possible if you set your sights high enough, if you have the political leadership and the support from the electorate and the long-term vision to make it happen. And I think as COVID hit and we suddenly saw 400 cities around the world implement temporary bike infrastructure, that idea that our city is different is becoming less and less prevalent and proven wrong time and time again. And hopefully we can move past this idea that these principles are not transferable and that every city is a snowflake because what works in Amsterdam is not going to to be a copy and paste in a place like Los Angeles but there are very real, very practical ideas, especially with e-bikes, especially with longterm long distance cycling infrastructure, especially with the bike-train combination that's used here in the Netherlands, where you can start reducing car dependency, reducing car dominance. It's not going to happen overnight and it's not going to be with a 50% mode share like here in the Netherlands, but it would make a city like Los Angeles, all the more livable, all the more sustainable, all the most affordable and just a better place for everyone that lives there. So at the end of the day, yeah, we're talking about better cities for everyone and we need to stop having these silly little battles about bike lanes, because I think we would all agree with that we want more livable and equitable cities.
>> Yes, by lied. I'm going to ask you guys one more question. In the context of what we're seeing here COVID, at the great resignation and you found a passion, the two of you found a passion in this space and you decided to basically build a business around it, pack up your family and move to the center of where all the action is. I was struck getting ready for this. I remember an early morning Uber ride to go to the airport one morning and this Uber guy asked me, he said, "Would you ever get off the rat race to follow your dream and give up some money?" And I wasn't in the mood for the conversation and I was late and I had a busy thing ahead. But it's like, wow you guys have really done it, you've found this cause, this passion, and you've built a little business around it, built your lives around it.
And I just wonder if you can share for people that are maybe trying to think in this kind of great resignation to take the leap. I mean, you took a leap and moved across the Atlantic, you moved away from family, you mentioned. How has this kind of experience to go from probably an idea to two published books, you building a business and you've really made it real, that's pretty cool.
>> Yeah, yeah (laughs). It's, I mean, if you had talked to Chris and Melissa 25 years old and getting married and saying, "Hey," and well, what is it now? "16 years, you're going to be living in a completely different country doing something that you didn't study for a living and helping to change the world." We would've said, "Okay, sure, that sounds plausible." I think we've been very fortunate and we really liked and we emphasize this in the book. We did have the privilege of being able to up and move and take a risk. It did involve losing, not losing money, but spending some money that was probably saving up for retirement one day to make this move. But for us, it was important.
It was not just for us but it was for our kids to give them an opportunity to live in a place that gave them the independence that we really wanted for them. But yeah, I think people trying to get into this or thinking about doing something similar, it's important to find your niche, find what it is that you're most passionate about and make sure that it's something that you want to be passionate about for a while, because there's a lot of advocates and we would put ourselves in that level sometimes too, that they get tired. And so if what you're talking about is something that you think you will be willing to fight for, for a really long time, then find the avenues, find the ways to get in there, maybe start small and build up from there but don't let go of that passion. And even if it evolves, find a new way to use that energy so that not only can you be happy in where you're living and be working towards a greater goal but you can also be happy in what you're doing as well, so that you don't need to have that really expensive holiday every six months, to be able to forget about what it is that you do every day. (Jeff and Melissa laughing)
>> Was it hard to make the leap, Chris?
>> Yes and no. I mean, this was the decision that Melissa and I didn't take lightly but when, I think the day that I received my a job offer, we were booking flights and really kind of making the leap. There's no doubt that there were challenges along the way and an adjustment period that we're still experiencing now almost three years in with the culture, the language, the differences, but at the end of the day, yeah, I think the risk paid off and we wake up every morning on a canal watching the boats and the bikes float by, we get to go to work at our dream jobs and feel like we're doing what we were put on this earth to do.
It sounds very corny but it's true. And it took us 12, 13 years for all this hard work to pay off. So I guess the other thing I would emphasize is patience, passion and positivity. And when you combine those three elements and sometimes it takes a little bit of luck being in the right place at the right time, an opportunity will come your way that you can leverage and turn into. And we are, I think, more than ever grateful to the people that helped us get this way. There was people that... Yeah, opportunities along the way that people offered to us that we wouldn't be sitting here without them. And we try to take the opportunity to thank them as much as we can because it really is a very close knit community, the urban cycling world or the urban planning world, but we help each other. And yeah, some of us get to get to live this dream and then we help pull up hopefully, others too, so that they can live their dream lives and work their dream jobs as well.
>> Well, thanks for sharing that information with them. I'm sure that will inspire some people who need that last little push to get over the edge. Well, thank you really a ton. It's been really fun to get to know you through the books in some of the reading, in the social and then to actually get to meet you in life and for you to come on the show. I'm really thankful and really appreciate your time today.
>> Yeah, thanks so much for having us.
>> Thank you.
>> Thank you (indistinct).
>> All right, she's Melissa, he's Chris, I'm Jeff. You're watching "Turn The Lens" with Jeff Frick. We'll see you next time, thanks for watching.
