Chris Zegras: Sometimes we think about it in the joy. Right. That joy ride, that term. Right. It's like if you're lucky enough to drive a convertible on a beach highway in the summertime with no traffic. Right. Those are memories of mobility. Most of the time. And I think maybe the best of mobility is when we don't even need to think about it. We don't have to think about it because it's seamless, because it's easy, because it's dignified. So.

John Harrold: Hi, I'm John Harrold and today we have Chris Zegras who is a professor of mobility and urban planning and the head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning here at MIT. Chris, welcome.

Chris Zegras: Hi, John. Thanks.

John Harrold: So today we're going to talk about urban mobility. What is urban mobility?

Chris Zegras: We typically think about mobility in terms of motor vehicles. Right. And of course that's a critical part of how we get around. And yet I think as important as maybe a slight, a nuance to this or a subtlety: what mobility is really doing is enabling us to realize ourselves. I mean, that sounds sort of philosophical, but to, you know, accomplish the daily needs, getting to school, getting to work, getting to health care, getting groceries. But, it's also about the things that we desire, and how we are able to achieve them. That can be by walking, that can be by cycling, that can be by taking the bus. That can be by driving ourselves or being driven by others. And of course, especially in the last, say, eight years or so, we've seen a growth in, virtual mobility or

Chris Zegras: virtual accessibility where we're not moving. Bits and atoms are moving. And we're often staying put, but it's still accessing information. The example I like to give dates me: when I was growing up, I remember when what we call today ATMs began appearing at banks--automated teller machines. Why are they called that? Because they used to be a bank teller. Where you would go and deposit your money and take out your cash. And of course those now most of our bank transactions are online. Rarely do we have to go to the bank anymore, but we're still getting all of the benefits of having a bank. And I guess because of that, we're able to access these ATMs in places that we couldn't have a bank, right, or when a bank wouldn't be open. I think most of us experience mobility when it's or I guess

Chris Zegras: we remember our experiences of mobility primarily when it's not working well. Yeah, the traffic I was stuck in or the potholes that are, you know, bending my bicycle rims or ruining my car's suspension. Sometimes we think about it in the joy, right. That joy ride. That term right of like, if you're lucky enough to drive a convertible on a beach highway in the summertime with no traffic. Right. Those are memories of mobility most of the time. And I think maybe the best of mobility is when we don't even need to think about it. We don't have to think about it because it's seamless, because it's easy, because it's dignified.

John Harrold: So the fundamental challenge of mobility is it's designed to, or its intention is to move large numbers of people, often at around the same times of day, to many of the same destinations. Right? That's the source of congestion.

Chris Zegras: Yeah. And, you know, sorry. Go ahead. Yeah.

John Harrold: I mean, and you can point there at the same time, which means that we need to build a system that works at capacity. But that capacity happens twice a day. Right. Or ten times a week. Right.

Chris Zegras: You know, although, I mean, that has changed a bit, right? Once more as, especially post-Covid, as work schedules have become more hybrid and, the peaks might have gone down a bit, but they're more spread out. And yet your point is exactly right. We've built for the 90th percentile. A good example. There's a, an academic. His name was Professor Donald Shoup, who was the czar of parking. His expertise was parking, academic from UCLA. And he talked about how our parking standards, for example, at shopping malls are built for the peak. But that peak actually could be once a year like. Yeah, Christmas time and then most of the year many Vin by shopping malls. And most of the time in these large vast modestly full lots at best. And the mobility system is somewhat similar more generally.

Chris Zegras: Right. We build infrastructure often for that peak and then is that being overbuilt and might, might there be different ways of managing that peak, more economically efficient ways.

John Harrold: But how do you how do you analyze how people get around and make recommendations on how to do that to people that are putting down the concrete?

Chris Zegras: That's a yeah, that's a good question. The history of modern transportation planning. It starts in the 1920s, I think, as we currently understand it, but it really reaches its peak in early sophistication post-World War II, the 1950s, the dawn of, the first use of computing and planning, and the beginning of the widespread use of surveys, means of collecting data from people that you can generalize towards the population more. at large. Yeah. And you know, the basic approach was you would use surveys of how people move around. Originally it was really mostly just for the journey to work by car. And then you fed this information into models to predict where people might go. And then you, validated those models by counting,

Chris Zegras: like on highways or at intersections, like how many vehicles are going by. And then you would use these approaches to predict the future and what that future would need in terms of and again, when we started where we should build more highways. And that was the prevailing approach, up until I'd say the early 1980s. But when we, the mainstream B started becoming more sophisticated in the techniques that we used to, better plan for transportation.

John Harrold: And are these techniques or these, like, tools or these mathematical models or is this borrowing from other disciplines, like what?

Chris Zegras: I think it's all of the above. Okay. I mean, in fact, the traditional methods, a lot of it came from, like geography. A lot of it came from physics. You know, and of course, from other social sciences, economics plays an important role, I think. Not to mention, of course, civil engineering. Yeah. Engineering, in making sure roads stay. Roads, bridges. Yeah. Yeah. But I think the there's I would, I guess I would highlight two main areas of change or sources of change. One is in, unsurprisingly, like advances in computational power and advances in our ability to sense things in different ways. So it gives us a much, a potentially much richer picture of how people actually do get around or how goods do get around, which allows us then better predictive capabilities.

Chris Zegras: And then, of course, there's also the growth in computational modeling or computational power, which allows us to model more sophisticatedly. As well as more sophisticated nuances. I'm sorry to use. The terms but in a richer picture of how we go about our days and the role that mobility can and does, might play.

John Harrold: And by richer picture, I'm imagining you've got like this picture picture of how people move around and you can zoom in closer on to maybe, maybe something's right and you have a with their base, you can zoom even closer on to like specific behaviors or, or things that happen. Right? Is that what you mean by the richer picture?

Chris Zegras: Yes. That is, but I did want to pick up on the one other side of it. I think that's important. Yeah. The other, aspect and this is relevant to all areas of planning, but I'm going to talk just about like, say, transportation mobility planning is the importance of, meaningfully engaging. People in the process. Right. We had historically say called it public outreach. Then public participation or public engagement. But I would actually say we need to be calling it public empowerment. Yeah. Empowering people to have a, a more meaningful, say in and influence over the decisions that we make, because transportation planning is ultimately, largely done by the public sector. Whether it be a city, whether it be the state or even the federal government. It's one of these examples that we use for government is all roads.

John Harrold: We have to have the roads. It's, it's, it's a go to conversation piece for it. And they talk about how local governments really important. And this is really important for your everyday life. what happens there. And I guess getting people involved in that is really important. Plus people are supportive or they're not supportive. They can they can make things easier or cause some friction. You know, I know, I know you've developed this way of communicating transportation to people. Right? This is a tangible tools right in the CityScope. So can you can you talk a little bit more about that, about how communicate, you know, these ways are communicating to the people that can be affected by these changes.

Chris Zegras: Yes. So we have over the years with many partners, you know, former students, experimented with different tools that aim to bring more voices to the table and bring other forms of knowledge and expertise to the table, because in the end of the day, we all have an expertise in mobility because we all do it. Right. And that experience is very important. But of course it's not necessarily, easily incorporated into traditional traditional approaches which tend to be dominated by technical expertise or, you know, or not unimportant mathematical knowledge or other forms of knowledge that not necessarily every layperson has, but every layperson has their own experiences that are valuable. So the idea is, how can we, co-create spaces that we can co-learn together to help improve systems? So, for example, you mentioned one tool, that was developed

Chris Zegras: together with Dr. Anson Stewart, who's still in, at the Urban Transport Systems Lab at MIT. The idea being, Whether you can, by creating interactive spaces that represent possible changes in the system that people can explore on their own, in their own, using their own familiarity with, say, maps, help inform them of the types of changes that can be made and what those the effects of those changes might be, for example, on their ability for their kids to get to school more quickly or more reliably, or for them to be able to explore new parts of the city that they otherwise wouldn't be familiar with until they realize that the bus is actually going to become more reliable. So, those are the types of tools that I think technology is enabling because of open source data, because of, because of open data and

Chris Zegras: open source, computational tools. But more importantly, I think because of a different way we might think about how we approach engaging and empowering the public in, contributing to decision making. The other thing I there was another I wanted to return to your earlier question. Yeah. Of course, you had mentioned about, Like the other aspect I had mentioned, there's two main areas that have changed. One is like, well, we need to engage and empower the public more. But the other, as we continue to become more sophisticated in how we understand the role of mobility and improving our quality of life. I think an important distinction is we historically, as I mentioned early on, it was mostly the journey to work by vehicles, by vehicle drivers. Right? Yeah. And today we understand, of course, mobility is much more complex. And so we think about this in

Chris Zegras: terms of the activities that people undertake every day. Not only individuals but as parts of household units.

John Harrold: So what other like activities are top of mind for this kind of conversations?

Chris Zegras: Well, I think just for an example, the mobility of care, right. In an aging society and in multigenerational generational households, to whom does the burden, the burden fall? I mean, I checked myself on the burden. Right. Because that immediately assumes it's a burden. But like the responsibility fall for, you know, ensuring safe mobility for older adults in the household. Or for the younger children in the household. These are, you know, typically considered maintenance activities, or household care activities, but they're fundamental to quality of life. And if we think about oh, we just but what's most important is that people can get to work on time. Of course that's important because that's a key aspect of our economy. But we can't, ignore that.

Everyone has a finite amount of time in a day, and that time has to be used for, all of those daily needs and wants, which include taking care of ourselves and taking care of others.

Chris Zegras: The mobility system has a fundamental role to play there, and if we're not considering that when we plan our systems, we're only planning for a part of, the human existence. And I think that can be a problem.

John Harrold: It is a difficult task to be able to do that, and to get everyone's buy in on that and realize, like, all these things are going because we experience, you know, this, you know, this time where we're commuting, we experience it and our thoughts are come, are overwhelmed by the bad experience of the commuting and the undignified part rather than the fun part. So I think that's important to be able to share and grow. On that note, right. We can also see how sometimes these systems we are experiencing our transit, our times. And when things do go wrong, sometimes they go wrong really quickly or they go wrong really well. And like, how do you, I guess, analyze or understand those systems at these as you capacity?

Are these events that happen rarely, like when it's raining and all of a sudden your commute goes from even on the bus, you know, it'll go from, an hour to two hours or something like that.

Chris Zegras: Yeah. I think the it's consider just this past January here in Boston area. Yeah. Right. We had some significant snowfall events that really threw the entire mobility system into chaos. Might be slightly too extreme, but really, hampered its ability to perform adequately and for a long time. So even when people are going back to work, it was still like, you don't have the full capacity. You know, and people's ability to navigate is compromised, right? And it's, I mean, the reality is it's very hard to it's not so hard to necessarily anticipate those problems because we're pretty good at predicting weather these days. Not perfect. But it's very hard to, tactically plan for system resilience. And basically everyone has to build a, a large cushion into their days,

Chris Zegras: to make sure, for example, that they can get to school on time because they don't know what the when the bus is going to come. And it's not because the buses, it's not the T's fault per se, but it's because every stop, every bus stop takes much longer to board an on board because there's snow blocking everything. And vehicles that get there's much less effective roadway capacity because of snowbanks. I think another example of importance here in Greater Boston has been the, ongoing maintenance challenges for our, urban transit system. You know, which we colloquially call the T. And you know, the MBTA that operates the system has been largely operates the system has been, really working over the last four years in, fixing the maintenance backlog. Right, which has really made it

Chris Zegras: difficult for many users on a daily basis because of delays that, you know, even when the delays are known, when the trains are effectively operating at five miles an hour, with slow zones and so forth, it really changes. I mean, the impact and quality of life is, can be drastic, and it can also have the, unfortunate consequence of turning people off from public transit forever.

John Harrold: Yeah. Because if you're just using it for that one time, like, oh, let me, let me, let me take the T today. Right. And all of a sudden you're late, right. You're like, well, I was I should have drove. Right. You know, even though Boston driving is difficult, you know, like they always say, Boston is an hour from Boston, right? But these things kind of, these are problems that are difficult to solve because we've inherited a lot of things. Right. And you're trying to build on this inherited space. And that's part of those local challenges. But when you're looking at a place like Boston and Cambridge, I mean, you have some, some, some great work you do here, but you also don't work at analyzing urban mobility in other parts of the world. Can you talk a little bit about that, about what things are? Well, it doesn't matter where in the world that you've looked.

There's these things that are the same or these things that like, well, when you're dealing with Cambridge, you gotta know what that's like here. And it doesn't even translate to Boston. So. So there's things that you can learn from other people and not it's seems like a, an interesting like to set a challenge to this study.

Chris Zegras: Yeah, that's a great question. I have had the fortune in over my career of being able to study mobility in other contexts, sometimes in a fair amount of depth, both as a scholar and as a user. Right. And the systems, but I think I'll a few, a couple of trends that I think and, and examples of, innovation, that are worth pointing out. And I say innovation that to some they might sound very like basic, but I still think from like the point of view of, like typical approaches to mobility. They're innovative. I think the first I'll talk about, is, there is seems to me anecdotally and in data that I've seen from around the world, certainly an uptick in people's willingness to embrace

Chris Zegras: active mobility modes, you know, cycling, walking, and other forms of what we call micromobility, right? Even like scooters and e-bikes and, some of that, the new technologies we see on streets and sidewalks everyday more and more, but seeming very much to be an uptake in, in, in, in these types of modes, which then poses a planning challenge because of course urban space is limited. So something's got to give. If you give more space to cyclist who loses that space. Fortunately, in many places around the world, we have, a surplus of space for most of the time. Again, because we design for, you know, that high peak which occurs for a few hours in the day or we over designed for parking. Cambridge is a good example, I think, of repurposing street space, for a more equitable allocation amongst users.

The second I would say, which is interesting, has been, innovative use of infrastructure to, prioritize,

Chris Zegras: public transport, especially buses. I know that we think of buses or many people might think of buses. Oh, it's old fashioned, right? Who rides the bus? You only ride the bus if you have no other choice. But in fact, bus mobility is continuously innovating. And I think, the ability of some governments and urban planners in urban designers and traffic and transport engineers to give physical priority to buses is has been quite important. We've tried to do a little of that in Boston, in the greater Boston area, but not nearly as effectively or ambitiously as we could. I would point to places like Mexico City, which is a huge megalopolis with a very complex political setting, meaning multiple jurisdictions, and a lot of traditional urban areas, because, you know, it's got to its modern city has like colonial origins. And yet they really have innovated in making, the bus

Chris Zegras: the fastest way to get around in many, many cases. The other example, I'll use, is, better pricing of mobility. You know, and I'll point to the example of Singapore, which is a place where I've had a chance to do a fair amount of work, which early, early on in its when it was still an emerging economy. Now it's one of the richest countries in the world. Recognize that road use was scarce when you're a small island. And so we need to price this like a scarce economic resource, which it is. And so you introduce pricing signals which show, which help users make better decisions from a societal perspective with respect to what ways you choose to move around in the city, even in a city that's, you know, very hot most of the year. But, what we call, congestion pricing.

John Harrold: Yeah. And so, so that's one way that Singapore has developed like a nice solution to that problem using the congestion pricing was developing. Are there any other examples you can point to that of places that have had have tried some things and they seem to be working or some things that people are trying and you're like, hey, I wonder how that's going to go.

Chris Zegras: I think the other, Very tangible example that is, viable across contexts is, what we, what we call, at least in the US, transit-oriented development. So transit being shorthand for public transport or public transit. And this is the idea that you should concentrate urban development around where you have massive, concentrations of people, which tends to be where there's mass transit. Right here. And, at MIT, we have the example of Kendall Square, right? Yeah. Which is, in the last 30 years become a very strong concentration of, economic innovation. And that has corresponded with a and very intense densification of land uses. Right. If you look, look at aerial images from the 1980s of Kendall Square and compare them to today, they're unrecognizable.

Chris Zegras: Meaning it was once large lots that were unoccupied or parking. And today it's some of the highest priced real estate in the nation. And, it happens to be right above the red line. And most of that development was done with not an expansion of roadway, but actually, what we'd call a road diet. They reduced the amount of space given to automobiles and rededicated space to pedestrians, rededicated space to cyclists. And this was largely enabled by the transit, the red line. But I also think it's linked to the idea that, human innovation, still tends to thrive on face to face interactions. Right. And I think this is ever more important in a world where, you know, digital intelligence is everywhere present and the codification of so many, processes, is ever more real. That human

Chris Zegras: ness of innovation becomes ever more valuable. Certain things we can only learn by exchanging each other, by bumping into each other, by having that watercooler effect, or by bumping into each other on the sidewalk. And so Kendall Square enables that because it's a dense, human centric space. And mobility plays a role in that.

John Harrold: And that goes back to like, really what mobility is about getting people to where they need to go and getting ideas, I guess, as well, where they need to be going. Right.

Chris Zegras: I that's very important. So I mentioned early on, right, that, well, mobility is about the movement of people like to jobs or to school and goods. Right. And often those goods are like not only the goods have to get to the store, but now in many ever increasingly the goods get to our houses, right? Yeah. But I think that the mobility of ideas we are still, I would say, the most valuable container of ideas. Right. And so we having those ideas in random ways, bumping into each other and creating new knowledge is, I still think a really great value of the places that we build. And mobility has a critical role. Maybe I'm distracting a little bit.

John Harrold: But you mentioned how Kendall Square developed, you know, that Kendall Square for people who aren't in Cambridge? That's where MIT is. That's where we're sitting in Kendall Square. And I see places kind of growing as well. And maybe is the term New urbanism, where you have places where people can work, they can live, they can have fun, and they can do things. And then around transit, I mean, I see, place near assembly, which is a place, not far from here, is also on the mass transit line, but they're building this type of thing. So what do you think about this movement for New urbanism and do people do it right? Are people usually getting it wrong. Like there's a lot of car centric part. Like they do build space for people to come from outside there. So yeah. So what do you think of this concept? And have I described it?

Chris Zegras: Well, yes, I think you have. I'll say first. So I'm not an urban designer. Right. And so, I apologize to the urban designers who might be listening today. So New Urbanism is a term that I would say is, is is very similar. Maybe, a cousin of what I called earlier, transit-oriented development. Right. But the basic idea is you can also think in another era. In fact, in the 80s, we often the term, as I understand it, was often called urban villages. Right. But the idea is, and this also goes back to before there was any mechanized modes of mobility. Most cities were, you know, 15 minutes walkable. Right. Again, I'm not. And there's a big movement about the 15-minute city. I'm not going to get into that per se. But it's but again the idea that you can build places where you can live, work, be entertained, satisfy most of your daily wants and needs is highly attractive.

Chris Zegras: And conceptually makes a lot of sense. And yet it's also, we need to recognize the limitations. You can't over engineer place because we have freedom of mobility and, you know, I happen to live in Cambridge Port and I'm lucky, which is, again, a neighborhood relatively close to MIT. And I and I and I'm lucky enough to work at MIT pretty close by. But I often want to go to Dorchester. It's on the other side of the city. Yeah. Right. So it's a different village. And I often go across villages. In fact, most of us don't have. It would be unrealistic, in my view, for us to imagine that all of our daily wants and needs can be satisfied in within a 15-minute radius of our homes. Yeah. And I think we put too much, we expect too much. We're not, the beauty of the human existence, in part, is because of the randomness, right?

Chris Zegras: We don't want to be constrained. Yeah, we are sort of footloose and we want to make the mobility system should enable that, always subject to the fact that we have environmental constraints and financial resource constraints that we are always bumping up against and need to respect.

John Harrold: I guess one thing that I've kind of realizing from this conversation is, you know, aside from like, there's highway systems, right? Which those are a bit removed from, from your pedestrian experience. Right. But they're important. But there's a lot of in, in a city, you have a lot of transportation that comes through. And people who utilize that transportation of people that are really important there who work in these cities, but they don't often always live there. Right. If you come in to work, you Kendall Square, you could be coming through 3 or 4 municipalities, on the streets. And so the decisions are even on bicycle, it's easy enough to bike through 3 or 4 municipalities to get to Kendall Square. And the decisions that affect your life time on commute and your safety are done by people who are living in the place you're going through.

So it just does that kind of it's I don't know if it's if it's such an intractable problem or if that's a problem that you've addressed, but it just seems to me is like this interesting feature of urban mobility.

Chris Zegras: Well, I think there's a lot in that, inquiry. So I will try to unpack it a little. I did want to perhaps I'll take issue with the freeway comment, like, okay. Because as a pedestrian, in fact, freeways are very real. Well, yes. Right. I mean, because they often while they're as a pedestrian, they're impenetrable. So if I happen to live on one side of a freeway and where I want to get on the other side of the freeway and I'm a pedestrian, you're out of luck. And there's a huge dialog about the FIFA World Cup in New York about how people can't get there because that's, it's encased in freeways. And that's known in transport planning as the barrier effect. Yeah. And again, you mentioned earlier, I apologize to those who are not from Greater Boston, where I'm using a lot of Boston examples. But, John, you mentioned earlier Assembly Square. Yeah. Which is, a New Urbanist development.

If you if I may, that came out of an old, abandoned I think it really was at one point a factory site, assembly square.

Chris Zegras: In fact, I if I'm not mistaken, it was a Ford assembly site, I don't remember, I think it was, automobile assembly place, but don't quote me. Which is right adjacent to, a train stop. But is actually separated from most of the rest of the urban fabric by the, by 93. Yeah. Right. So that is the barrier effect. So I just wanted to mention that highways do affect us. Oh yes. Trans. Right. And they affect us in many ways. I'm not saying how all highways are bad, but they do have impacts that we need to be aware of. But your point about this, like, I'll use a, I'll just say like the multi-jurisdictional city is, is is relevant in so many different dimensions. So I wanted to, riff on it, if I may.

John Harrold: Yeah. Please, please.

Chris Zegras: Because on the one hand, what transportation planning in a place again like Boston? In many respects has to be regional right or metropolitan wide. And but depending on where you draw the boundaries in the greater Boston area, it's anywhere between 60 and 160 cities and towns. Yeah. Right. And so the the birth of modern transportation planning in the U.S, in part, was to try to, overcome that challenge. Right? They created what are called metropolitan planning organizations. And these were designed to be, supra jurisdictional, for lack of a better word, but, you know, basically so that Brookline and Cambridge and Brockton and, you know, name your, Watertown, etc. had to come together to cooperate on transportation infrastructure that is going to cross boundaries, right. And,

Chris Zegras: so that's that's a challenge. And one of the ways you can do induce that cooperation is through money. Right. And that's why the federal government played a role, because the federal government recycles our tax dollars, our gas tax dollars back into the states and then into metropolitan areas. Still a challenge. Different metropolitan areas in the United States have tackled this in different ways, some with like, explicit regional governments. Right? Yeah. And many other places I mentioned Singapore earlier has the advantage of it's a city state. Yeah. And so do a lot there. Its authority is all urban. Yeah. There's much less like well, my town in your town. Well sorry. This is this is the national interest. And we have a single, you know, a unitary authority there to actually assist that greatly. And London is another good example.

I think, in terms of, like the Greater London Authority, Transport for London is a, a pretty well empowered regional transportation planning. And entity,

Chris Zegras: and but I just wanted to mention but the thing the other point that you raised, I think is really important, and I don't think in my own experience, we've really grappled well with is the fact that many beneficiaries of a mobility system aren't necessarily the residents of the real estate through which the transport system is operating. Right. I'm going to bring up another Boston example, Blue Hill Avenue. Okay. Rich, which I don't even know. Yeah. So it's in South Boston and it runs basically from, say, downtown roughly to the southern border, the town of Milton, which is just on the edge of southern Boston. It's bounded by the Neponset River. Very highly trafficked avenue. Okay. The really important bus corridor, Route 28 operates on it. And, not with very little transit priority.

Chris Zegras: And so in fact, Route 28, if not mistaken, is one of the has among the highest ridership of any bus route in the city. There's been over mainly you mentioned the city.

John Harrold: You mean the whole greater city because the of the.

Chris Zegras: Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah. The MBTA thank you. That's important clarification again I don't quote me exactly on the numbers, but it's. Yeah, at least top five. The, Over many years, there's been efforts to improve bus service there. It's a, it's a relatively marginalized community. Has been, seeing very, modest public investment over the years, black and brown community, that really could use transit enhancements because they're transit dependent. And, I mean, but sorry. Go ahead.

John Harrold: We can't get too much it. Do we there be a whole conversation for you talk about how like this how the where people live in the class structure really has an impact on, on transit and access to transit and technology and transit too. So like them, the people that are from marginalized, but they also work and they're part of the economy of the entire greater Boston area. So their access has even though we may think it's one, one person from, from like a low income area. But people who take this line, especially since it's really important, are important for the engine, for the entire region's right economy.

Chris Zegras: Absolutely. I mean, and so that's critical. The. However, prioritizing bus transport on that, Blue Hill Avenue will require some sacrifice, right. Many of that much of Blue Hill Avenue is three lanes in both directions. With parking as well. Not everywhere. There's places where it's more constricted. And there have been many that have said this is a perfect, corridor to implement bus rapid transit. This idea of like, you know, dedicated lanes for buses, bus priority intersections, priority boarding at, at nice, dignified stations. But that would require, for example, maybe loss of some parking or loss of a vehicle, automobile travel lane. So it becomes highly controversial. And that often just lends itself to stalemate. Okay, well, then we can't do anything.

Chris Zegras: But I think it's interesting because a lot of the opposition. I'm not saying all of the opposition, I don't know, I don't presume to know the nature of the opposition, but comes from, like local residents, right? Or local store owners who might be, you know, fearful, rightfully so, of maybe losing some parking and some of their customers come, you know, and parking the curb. And quite possibly the perspective and all of those users, they're just coming through my, my street like they're coming from one place, going to another place. And they're just using this that my customers need. Yeah. Or that I park because I'm going to church. Right. So that's a real dilemma. Like who, who, who has the right to the city, who has the right to the movement for the city. Is it like to do you know, I live in Cambridge.

You know, do I have higher rights to what happens on my street than someone who goes through my street? Because they're getting to work every day?

Chris Zegras: You know, I don't know that we have a good answer to that. Especially when it comes to the power and the political will necessary to sometimes make very difficult changes to systems that we're all used to.

John Harrold: This has been so much fun. I have so many questions. But, I mean, we only have so much time. Thank you so much. I want to ask you just one, maybe one question from my question bank. So how do you use all this knowledge? You'rereally. Well educated in urban mobility, right. And you. So how do you like your knowledge of urban mobility in your daily life?

Chris Zegras: That's a good question. It makes me think of, many, many years ago, I was in another place and someone asked me, how do you get around every day? And I said, by bike. I said, by bike. And they said, by bike. And they're like, I thought you were a transport planner. And I'm like, yeah, that's why I use a bike, right? I mean, for me, I don't know. I have not thought about this like reflexively. But for whatever reason, I've always been into bicycles. You know, I'm not like a like a cyclist, like a racer. But I've always liked them. Like a technology. They're fun to tinker with. Like I can fix them. I'm, it's very I have a lot of control over it. So I've always been into bikes and then as I got older, I always just rode a bike everywhere. Because

Chris Zegras: to me, it's like, by far the easiest way to get around. I mean, I admittedly, I organize my life around it like I choose to live in a place where I know it'll be easy for me to bike most places. I'm not saying that's necessary. I'm not saying everyone need to do this. I'm not dogmatic about it. It's entirely self-serving. But that's kind of my answer to your question is like, I, mobility and my knowledge about mobility plays a very important role in how I live my daily life. And it's mostly because, well, I can, walk out my door. I know my bike is going to be there, I can ride. I it's very predictable unless I get a flat tire or something, like, I know exactly how long it's going to take me. I never get stuck in congestion, and I always have an easy place to find parking.

And of course, there's always a risk that, you know, I might have, mishap or worse, because, you know, you're on the street with a lot of other users, some of whom are much bigger and heavier and move faster than you. Yeah. I mean, same I mean, I pick where I live, I live in Cambridge because right by the bikes and that's it's easy access to be able to get that.

Chris Zegras: And you can get that half an hour to commute to work where we need to go. Right. But I do want to emphasize, I'm not saying thus everyone needs to bike. I don't preach it, but it's just how it serves me. And I do think it can serve many people. But certainly not everyone and I don't think everyone has to do it.

John Harrold: Do you think you're more patient in traffic than other people because of your perspective or, or maybe are you more critical? You're like, you know, they build this road the wrong way.

Chris Zegras: No, I am, I am. patience is not one of my virtues. I will admit that riding around, mobilizing myself in the city often my impatience comes out in ways that I'm not proud of. I do think, I will, I know that you are out of time, but I wanted to say I do think that a real challenge for all users of the streets today pedestrians, cyclists, cars, buses, etc. is the relative, disorganization that has been introduced by platform based mobility companies, that, you know, the whose contractors don't necessarily use the roads and the curbs, in ways that are respectful for all the other users. And they create, I think, real challenges and risks to all, everyone in the city. And so this is a, an issue that's gonna come to a head at some point.

Chris Zegras: We're gonna need to understand how to limit these things, how to work with these teams or incorporate them in the future of planning. Yeah, I mean, I think I would say regulate them better. Personally, I, you know, I yeah, that could be a whole other. Of course. And with, with better experts like, I'm, I know that mostly as a layperson, but yes, I do think, there's it's better to be proactive in effectively regulating, the, training better, so that we mitigate the risk of something bad happening.

John Harrold: Well, on that note, no. Yeah, yeah. Well, hey, this is the future we have to learn about. And we'll be looking for your research to come out on on that or anything else. Thank you so much. If you want to learn more and go to learn.mit.edu.

Chris Zegras: Thank you. Thanks.