Episode 109: Inclusive Transportation with Veronica O. Davis 

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Doug: Hey, everyone. Just a quick note to let you know that the audio on this one is not up to our normal standards. I recorded this in my home studio, also known as my bedroom, so it didn’t come out great. Still, I think you will love what our guest has to say, and we really appreciate your support.

Doug: This is The War on Cars. I’m Doug Gordon. I want to get right to it. Our guest for this episode is Veronica O. Davis. Veronica is the director of transportation and drainage operations for the City of Houston. She’s also the co-founder of Inspire Green LLC, which is an environmental and urban planning consulting company. Throughout her career, she’s been involved in transportation and streets-related issues at just about every level you can imagine, from being one of the cofounders of Black Women Bike in Washington, DC, to serving as the vice president of the National Association of City Transportation Officials. Basically, if you can name a mode of transportation, chances are something related to it is on Veronica’s resume—I think maybe aside from, like, aviation and boats. Is that right, Veronica?

Veronica O. Davis: Actually, that’s not right. Fun fact. Fun fact. I was an intern at New York City Department of Transportation in 2002, and I worked for the Office of Private Ferry Operations. And I looked at the analysis of taking the ferry to the airports, and the feasibility of it and the marketability of it. So I have worked on boats.

Doug: Okay. So basically everything but space at this point. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. I need to just say Veronica O. Davis, welcome to The War on Cars.

Veronica O. Davis: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Doug: You are also the author of a brand new book. It’s called Inclusive Transportation: A Manifesto for Repairing Divided Communities. It’s out now from Island Press. It speaks to transportation planners, public officials, advocates like myself, Basically, anybody who has ever attended a community meeting about bike lanes or bus lanes and has wondered, “Are we doing this right? Is there a better way? What are we even doing here?” I found the book to be a big help personally, as someone who has been doing this for a long time, especially—and I think we’ll probably get into this—as, like, the stereotype of the white bicycle advocate. So I think it was really helpful to take the opportunity to rethink my role in this. And the book offers lots of chances to do that. I’ve already welcomed you to The War on Cars, so let’s get to it.

Veronica O. Davis: Absolutely. And so as you mentioned, I am the director of transportation and drainage operations for the city of Houston, fourth-largest city. But everything I say here today, it reflects myself and not the city of Houston. So I just want to get that disclaimer out there so that I can continue to be the director of transportation and drainage operations.

Doug: [laughs] Yeah. The listeners can’t see this, but there’s 10 lawyers standing behind Veronica right now.

Veronica O. Davis: [laughs]

Doug: No, there’s nobody. She’s alone. It’s okay. Yeah, we won’t get into too much Houston-related stuff, although I think, you know, Houston, there’s so much going on there. I would love to come down and really dig into that city.

Veronica O. Davis: Yeah, it’s a scrappy little city and that is getting it done. So come visit. Just not during the summertime. [laughs]

Doug: Right. Yeah. One of the things that your book asks readers to do is to tell what you call their “transportation story.” You’re outspoken about the fact that transportation is sort of in your blood.

Veronica O. Davis: 2 Yeah, I always joke I was born into it. So a funny story is my dad used to work for UMTA, so Urban Mass Transportation Authority, and that’s before—the predecessor to FTA. And my mom went into labor outside of the US DOT building while waiting for my dad to come out of a meeting. So I feel like it was meant to be. My mom is from East Baton Rouge and she was in high school when our family home was taken to build I-10. So it is very personal.

Veronica O. Davis: I think sometimes particularly, you know, Doug, you and I, we’re young and things that happened can feel like it’s so far away, but then when you realize that my mom, you know, is a living, breathing person, and she was of an age to remember what was going on, it really begins to put the timeline in perspective, especially when we’re working in different communities.

Veronica O. Davis: Whether it’s on the advocacy side or the public sector side, you’re dealing with communities that remember when the Cross Bronx Expressway was put in, you’re dealing with communities that remember when the highway was built or, you know, the community was divided. And so it’s not—we’re not that far removed for many of these actions. So really framing that, and then I talk about growing up in a little itty bitty town called Maplewood, New Jersey. My parents commuted into New York every day. My mom worked for New York Transit Authority, and so traveling with her to Brooklyn for work when I had days off of school. And then my dad worked for Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and then moved over to the shipping side with SeaLand, which was—eventually became CSX.

Veronica O. Davis: So my childhood was really in the industry from different perspectives. And I tried to run away from it. In my mind, I was gonna go to Juilliard. I wasn’t quite good enough of a dancer, even though I’ve been trained my whole life. Wasn’t good enough for Juilliard. And even going to Maryland, I started engineering and decided that I was fighting. I was like, “I’m not gonna follow in my parents footsteps.” And then here I am. [laughs]

Doug: I was gonna ask this question. I feel like there is a different version of you that rebelled against your parents, right? An alternate timeline Veronica, that says, “No way.” But your dad at some point actually did say to you, “You know, you should think about being a civil engineer.”

Veronica O. Davis: Absolutely. When I was applying to school, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. You know, I was interested in a lot of things. I was very into sports. I was very into dance. So I was a Renaissance teen, you know? I did it all. And I didn’t know what I wanted to study, and so my dad was like, “Just, you know, you should do engineering.” I was very good at math. I loved math. I loved science so much so, my junior year I took senior-level physics, and then I took chemistry as a junior. And so that’s when my dad encouraged me to apply to engineering schools. So even then I was like, “Fine, I’ll do engineering.”

Veronica O. Davis: But freshman year I walked out of chemistry, and I was like, “I am gonna declare my major and I need something where I never have to take another chemistry class.” And so that’s how I ended up being in civil. And then even then I was like, “I’m gonna do structures.” And I know we talked about aviation, but one of my first internships was at National Airport, Reagan National Airport if you’re new to DC, but National Airport. And then I was like, “Nah, I don’t think I like this.” And so ended up in transportation. But again, you know, the more I pulled away from it, the more it grabbed me and pulled me back.

Doug: And so you also have this unique perspective because you worked for the Federal Highway Administration for awhile, right?

Veronica O. Davis: Correct.

Doug: For a couple of years.

Veronica O. Davis: Mm-hmm.

Doug: Yeah. What did you do there?

Veronica O. Davis: So I don’t know—I think the program still exists, but it was a really great program. It was called the Professional Development Program, and many of my colleagues now are running transportation agencies both at Federal Highway and then just around and local. But it was a two-year program, and you spent two years getting a lot of training. So leadership training, training on different competencies. Then you get a chance to rotate what’s called temporary duty assignments. So although I was based out of headquarters in DC, I had an opportunity to work in the North Carolina Division office in Raleigh, North Carolina. I had an opportunity to come to Houston and work at the Houston Galveston Area Council, which is the regional MPO. I got a chance to work for EPA and the Office of Transportation and Air Quality in Ann Arbor, Michigan. And then I got a chance to work in the Maryland division office in Baltimore.

Veronica O. Davis: And so through those experiences, you get to work on different things. I got to work on the environmental side of reviewing the environmental impact statements for highways. My dark cloud is I was one of the federal reviewers on the environmental impact statement for the Intercounty Connector in Maryland, which is, you know, kind of the big highway that connects Montgomery and Prince George’s County. And it had been on the books for decades, so I am in the record of decision as one of the reviewers and commenters. But I also had really great experiences being able to work at H-GAC. So right after Hurricane Katrina, and then Rita was right after I moved here about a week after. And so getting to do a lot of that analysis on why the evacuation failed, and the different lessons learned and kind of what are the recommendations, you know, as you move forward. So I got a chance to work on that.

Veronica O. Davis: So really just kind of a breadth of experience, and it helped me understand that I didn’t want to stay at the federal government, mainly because it was a great experience. I got a chance to even work on a lot of regulation, but you realize you’re so far removed from people. You know, you’re looking at a document, and that is your extent of people. It’s, you know, numbers. It’s 50,000 people and that’s it, but you don’t know who they are. And so that’s part of the reason why I left, because I wanted to work on projects that were a little bit closer to people. But then I made the mistake of going into local government and planning, and I was like, “Whoa, this is a little bit too much people. I need a little bit of a buffer.” Because then you realize, you know, you’re in it, especially on the planning side, versus being on the transportation-engineering side. But when you’re on the planning side, you are in it with people and it’s tough.

Doug: So you were talking about your family history in Baton Rouge and I-10, and there’s a part of your book where you talk about that removal, right, that a lot of the planners and engineers have, and this idea of a “finding of no significant impact.” But for the people whose homes are taken, there’s a quite significant impact. Bringing it back to this idea of your transportation story, what did you bring from that background to all of these different cities and projects that you worked on?

Veronica O. Davis: So my great grandmother had a house, and then my grandparents’ house was right behind it, so they took my grandparents’ house but they did not take my great grandmother’s house. So as a child, even being eight, nine years old and going to visit my great grandmother, I remember her house under the highway. And so again, it’s very—it’s very personal. And, you know, what it brings, it’s—it’s very hard because, you know, I also am certified in yoga because, of course. And, you know, even with yoga, it’s a principle of, you know, a hamsa of not harming.

Veronica O. Davis: And so I try to bring that into the work. And I think that’s what was hard for me working in some of the jobs is that you are so removed from the people that there is no finding of significant impact, right? You’re talking about a, you know, project that’s hundreds of millions, maybe even billions of dollars. You talk about the economic opportunity from it. What’s a hundred homes to sacrifice, right? It’s just words on a paper. And I think that’s where I struggled being a reviewer, because from a mathematical perspective, it’s not really all that significant, right? You’ve sacrificed a hundred homes for the greater good of the region, the state. And it’s hard.

Veronica O. Davis: And so, therefore, you know, you realize I need to beat that activism piece that is there both instilled in me from my parents and my grandparents as well. You know, that’s where that piece comes in. And you’re just like, ooh, there’s gotta be a better way. We are very smart people. We can put people on the moon. We can figure out how to plan better transportation systems. You know, a lot of us that are in practice now, we were never trained on this. We were just trained on volume and capacity, right? Level of service, traffic flow optimization. We weren’t taught about transportation systems and how they all work together. And most people never learned about public transportation.

Veronica O. Davis: And so that’s why I start the book with inviting all readers to say, “Hey, investigate.” Why do you make the decisions you make? Why are you in the industry? Why do you choose to drive, or why do you choose to bike? You know, what is it about your story, whether it’s a family story or what have you, that cause you to make the decisions today? So just getting people to pause, because I think so often we can be so removed from the work that we do versus bringing ourselves to our work every day.

Doug: Yeah. I mean, I think for me, someone who’s not a professional or an engineer, just asking that question as an advocate: why am I interested in this? Like, why have I devoted so much time to this?

Veronica O. Davis: So why are you, Doug? Why are you so passionate that you have an entire podcast? Why are you so passionate?

Doug: I’ve always found myself drawn to living in cities. I grew up in a very white, really non-diverse Boston suburb, and found it to be—look, there were good things about it, there were bad things about it, but I found it to be very isolating. As soon as I could, I drove into Boston, would park the car, and then walk around and take the T. Like, there was always something that I was drawn to. I had a lot of family in New York. My family is originally from here, so as soon as I could get back here, I did.

Doug: I’ve always been fundamentally interested in questions of power, and for some reason I’ve always felt like when you’re riding a bike or walking or rolling down the street or whatever it is, it’s a really stark illustration of who has power and who doesn’t. I think once I started to realize that there are people who make decisions about who gets the power and those people have more power, I started to question a lot. You know, I don’t have, like, a very deep transportation story. I grew up a pretty privileged white, straight male living in the United States. So I wish I could say I had some, like, great struggle or something like that. It’s just a thing I started to get really interested in. I think, to be honest, as one of the few Jewish kids in my largely white Christian town, I started to feel that minor sense of otherness that allowed me to identify with people with perhaps a much bigger sense of otherness where they’re from. So that’s sort of all informed where I am today. That’s a very incomplete answer.

Veronica O. Davis: No, it’s okay. And all transportation stories don’t have to have a struggle. I mean, even for me, you know, I grew up in a really—again, Maplewood, New Jersey. Just Google it. It’s an adorable little town.

Doug: It’s a cute—it’s a very lovely little, you know, like, streetcar suburb, kind of place.

Veronica O. Davis: It very is. It’s a very walkable town. I remember growing up, getting on my bike and just going, right? Because my mom didn’t have to worry about me. Although my town was very hilly, so we did walk the bikes up. But, you know, my parents did commute into New York, and so my mom’s round-trip commute was about two hours. She would take New Jersey Transit into Midtown, and then take the train down to Brooklyn. And then my dad, same thing. And so part of that informed for me as an adult that, like, I’m not really trying to live that far from work. And soon as I was able to save up money and buy a place, I bought a house that was like a 15-minute bus ride to work, because I was like, I am not trying to do a long commute. And that has informed a lot of my decision making even now as an adult living here in Houston, of being willing to pay a little bit more for housing to have a shorter commute. You know, my commute now is 25 minutes, and that includes a daycare drop off, talking to the teacher, giving lots of hugs and kisses. But a lot of those things just inform kind of who we are and our experiences.

Doug: I want to talk a little bit more about what I think is sort of the core of your book, which is the planning process and the public engagement process. These are two things that are often confused with each other. They are the subject of a lot of debate here on this podcast, in sort of urbanist circles as well, like, what is a good public engagement process? Often we know what a bad example is because that’s usually the default. Is there in your mind the platonic ideal of a public engagement process?

Veronica O. Davis: I think it comes down to being honest about what you’re doing. I think in some cases it’s okay to say this is what the project’s gonna be and not pretend. Because I think that’s where people start putting their guards up of your pretending, and you come out and say, “Okay, Doug. You know, tell me what is it that you would like to see? Like, what—” no, we know that we have done the analysis, and we’re gonna put a bus-only lane on this street. That is the decision, right?

Veronica O. Davis: And so it’s being honest sometimes about these decisions of this is the decision, here’s why we made the decision. Here is where you can have input of, you know, hey, maybe we need to talk about bus stops. Do you—should we move this one? Should we move this one? Could the bus stops be better? I think it is just going ahead and being honest sometimes about your intentions.

Veronica O. Davis: I think when you pretend and create a process around a pretend decision, that’s where you start riling up a lot of conflict. I think one, when you don’t acknowledge just kind of bigger issues that are happening in the neighborhood, like even bike lanes. Bike lanes are just—it brings out the emotions in every community. And it’s not so much about the bike lanes itself, right? It is in some cases a perception. It is you’re challenging my culture of—you know, I may come from a person where, no, you should drive. Driving as a symbol of status. So why would you put this bike lane, because that means poor people are going to bike. Like, no.

Veronica O. Davis: Or in some cases in, you know, maybe lower-income neighborhoods, it’s not that I don’t want the bike lane, but I ride the bus. Like, you’re trying to force me to do something different. I already don’t have a car. I’m trying to ride the bus. My bus doesn’t show up on time. My bus is crowded. Can I get a reliable bus, and then I’ll talk to you about your bike lane? And that’s kind of a thing that gets missed of you gotta give people what they need. I mean, equity is about giving people what they need, and if you’ve met my basic needs, then I can have a conversation with you about anything else. And I had a meeting that went awry, and I know some people have heard me tell the story. I discovered the hard way that the library in DC have their own police department. [laughs]

Doug: Yeah, I thought this was a great story. I mean, you literally say that this was one of the lower moments of your career so far.

Veronica O. Davis: Ooh, it was a lot—it was a lot of bourbon that night. For those of you that may be familiar with DC, this goes through right in the middle of DC, and almost like the ground zero for not really gentrification per se, but a grasping of culture. So this largely goes through downtown where you have a lot of office buildings, and you have a lot of, you know, museums and all that other stuff. And that part really wasn’t the issue. It was the part where you’re going through the neighborhood. So you had historically Black churches that have been in the city through all of it, right? Through the riots, through the crack epidemic, through all the renewal and urban revival and all of that. So they’ve been through it all. You had a, you know, Black community holding on in order to stay. You had new residents coming in, you had urban development. And so the bike lane really was just the straw that broke the camel’s back, you know? Not to use the euphemism, but it really was. It wasn’t about the bike lane. It was about this tension that was just growing and growing and growing, and the bike lane is just the thing that just sent it all over the edge. And so there’s like this picture of me that’s on Twitter. I’ve used it in presentations where I have, like, no life in my face. It was just like the—okay, here we go, Doug. Let’s take it back old school. It was like, “Calgon, take me away!” [laughs]

Doug: [laughs] You hit on something that I feel like is really, really important, which is that the bike lane becomes the thing you can fight, because someone who builds that glass luxury condominium building, they can do that as a right. Someone opens up like a little cafe that to some people might symbolize gentrification, well, you can’t deny them their business license. But the bike lane becomes a thing you can fight because it’s—for the most part, it’s not in the ground yet at the point that you’re fighting it. If it is, it’s just paint. You can get it reversed. And I think you have a really great part that comes out of this story and I want to continue it, but I think it’s really important to hit here is that sometimes we often are arguing about the how and the what will happen and the statistics and fatalities and parking spaces, but you ask people in the book to really consider the “why” questions.

Veronica O. Davis: Mm-hmm. You know, we were at a community meeting, and these women just rolled up on me and they were just so mad. They were just mad. And I was like, “Wait, wait, wait!” And, you know, this is where it is important to have people who reflect the community. I know that, you know, in the Black community, we call it code switching. And so I was talking with these women, and I covered my name tag. I was like, “Okay, sis. Like, what are you mad about? Like, what’s the what? Tell me what the issue is, because—I don’t want the bike lane. I can’t do anything with that. There’s a lot of things I don’t want. Tell me why.” And so they were like, “‘Cause I don’t bike.” “Oh, okay. So why don’t you bike?” “Well, because I don’t have a bike, and it’s been years since I biked.” “Okay, so if you had a bike, would you bike?” “Well—well, maybe.”

Veronica O. Davis: And so it was just like, really kind of unpacking and unarming. And so at the time, you know, being one of the leaders of Black Women Bike within DC, you know, being able to get their contact information and connect them with some of the other members within Black Women Bike DC. And it just disarmed them a little bit because I think sometimes—I know there’s the thing that’s like interested but concerned. I think there’s a lot of people who are like, “I don’t even know I’m interested because no one’s asked me.” Right? I think that’s really what it is. And so, you know, by presenting it as like, “Well, why don’t you? Like, this would be great for you. You could, you know—you don’t have to bike to church, you know, but you could just, you know, bike to the grocery store, save yourself a little money on gas.” And I think framing it that way made a difference.

Doug: Yeah. And I’m sorry I didn’t really get into Black Women Bike earlier, but I do think it’s a thing that sort of also separates you from a lot of civic officials, that you have this incredible educational background, like, you talked about your family’s story, but you’re also this street-level activist who kind of got out there on two wheels and understands what is keeping people from getting on bikes, especially women of color. And I think that obviously served you well in this story about the Eastern Downtown Cycle Track Project. I mean, when I read that story in the book, there were a lot of forehead-slapping moments in that story. And one of which you alluded to, which is that the team that was presenting the project was not reflective of the larger community.

Veronica O. Davis: At all.

Doug: And I was reminded of a story here in Brooklyn, the Classon Avenue Bike Lane Project, which similarly went through a historically Black neighborhood, a neighborhood where a lot of Black homeowners, you know, had fought really hard to purchase and hold onto their homes and invest in the neighborhoods through similar periods of history in New York—the ’70s and ’80s especially. And there was a meeting about this bike lane project, and I think all of the presenters from the bike team from New York City DOT were white men.

Veronica O. Davis: Mm hmm.

Doug: And as you point out in the story about the DC project, the engineers and planners were the white men, and the women and women of color were sort of out in the lobby dealing with the overflow of the angry people who couldn’t get into the meeting.

Veronica O. Davis: Whew! Yeah. And I think it’s one of those you realize how bad the optics were, you know, now that you have this room. Because particularly one of the Black churches, like, shipped in people, so you had the room was just packed with older Black parishioners. And then you have these, you know, white guys, all pretty young, you know, standing in the front as the, like, engineering team. And then the rest of us, we were all in the lobby and had a whole separate meeting. And it was very interesting that the meeting that the women—and we were all mixed, you know, Black, white, Latina, Asian. And so we had a whole separate meeting in the lobby—impromptu—and the vibe of what was going on in the lobby was very different than the vibe that was happening in the room itself. And it is one of those, like, head slaps. And not in a performative way, I think it’s—because this is what I don’t want is people to be like, “Let me go find the one Black employee and put them in front of the Black community.”

Doug: Yeah. And, you know, you talk a little bit in the book about sort of like not—beyond not just, like, tokenizing people, not using other people’s issues as a means to an end, which we sometimes see a lot on both sides of these issues.

Veronica O. Davis: Absolutely.

Doug: You know, whether it’s people with disabilities or low-income people, really centering those people in the process so they’re not just being used.

Veronica O. Davis: Absolutely. And each group is not a monolith, and they’re gonna have their disagreements within their groups. And so just sitting back, observing, watching, understanding, and not in a way that, like, feels like you’re at the zoo and you’re like, you know, here is the zebra and I’m watching the zebra at the zoo. But really watching from a space of learning. And so that’s the big thing that I challenge—if you don’t take anything away from the book, that’s the one thing I hope people take—well, it’s two. That’s one thing I hope people take away from is really taking the time to decenter yourself and understand other people’s lived experiences.

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Doug: I thought one of the really interesting lessons from the DC project that you were talking about was the planning department comes in and they say, “We want to put this cycle track along this major corridor that cuts through all these different neighborhoods.” And the sidewalk thing came up. Basically like, “You want to put a bike lane in? Come on, how come I don’t even have a good sidewalk on my block?”

Veronica O. Davis: Yup.

Doug: And a really easy pitfall to avoid would have been for the Department of Transportation or Public Works to have said, “Hey, before we go to this community with this bike lane project, let’s go fix all the sidewalks. Let’s talk to the business owners about what they need. Let’s talk to the residents about what they need.” And that process can be challenging, too, but I thought that was a really important lesson as well.

Veronica O. Davis: It’s a very important lesson, and I think it would have made things a lot easier, because even people who would have supported the project weren’t at the table because they’re like, “I don’t really care. Again, you haven’t met my basic need of I can’t push this stroller down the street. Why are you talking to me about a bike lane?” That was one of the concerns of, you know, one of the churches. They’re like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. My parishioners can’t even get across the street.”

Doug: You have, like, a great list of four big reasons why there’s this disconnect between the public engagement process and the planning process. We talked a little bit about them. You know, this idea that the engagement team and the planning team or the engineering side are often on kind of separate tracks that don’t speak to each other. You talked about this idea that the transportation team sometimes just says, “Yeah, we know what we want to do, but we have to kind of check this box of public engagement.” This idea, which you also hit on, that planners and engineers are not trained in effective public engagement, which I think is something that this book is hopefully trying to correct. But then you had a really great one, which is that governments are sometimes afraid of the public.

Veronica O. Davis: What happens is, because people remember the last time they got yelled at, and so then now they have to go back to this community, right, and do a project meeting. And so then they’re like, “No, but people are gonna yell at us, so—” and they’re so afraid of getting yelled at that they create this, like, public meeting and we’re gonna do this. We’re gonna make it very short. We’re not gonna have a presentation. No, we’re not gonna allow these things. And so then the public comes and then they’re rightfully upset and they’re like, “See, see, see? We told you they were gonna get upset.” And so sometimes what happens is that some governments are afraid in large part because engineers aren’t trained on this. I personally don’t like the stereotype that engineers are introverts, but some engineers are. And so, you know, that’s why they go into engineering. “I don’t really want to talk to people, I just want to design this thing.” And so you have that going on too, where people already have anxiety about public speaking, and then now people are yelling at me and it’s like, “Ah!” You know?

Doug: And nobody’s served well by that process.

Veronica O. Davis: Nobody.

Doug: No, not the—not the engineer, not the engagement person, and certainly not the neighbors who are screaming at each other.

Veronica O. Davis: Absolutely. And, you know, I think that’s one of the things I always urge people, even when you know what the project is going to be, try to break off just something that the community controls. I had another project where for safety reasons, the road was split and there was this wall that was gonna be built. And so the community was just upset about this wall. And, you know—and we had a pre-meeting with the client prior to this. I was like, “What can you allow them to decide?” So it was landscaping. There was a landscaping committee. And then what we also got them to agree was they were gonna mock up two different stone walls, and the community could vote on which type of stone that they wanted to be on the wall. And it helps people to still feel like I have some type of decision-making power, but it’s—you have to sometimes be very clear, like, safety is non-negotiable. So within our budget, within our time available to us, this is what it’s gonna be, but you guys can decide what the wall looks like. And so I think it’s really important for agencies to try to allow people to have some decision making. And again, if it’s something simple, something cosmetic, let them pick it.

Doug: There’s a word that you talk about in the book that I tend to not like very much, although you unpack in a really great way, and that’s the word “stakeholder,” because often the word “stakeholder” in the mouths of bureaucrats, at least in my experience here in New York, usually means people who are primarily concerned with parking and access for drivers. “Stakeholder” usually doesn’t mean people who just want to get from point A to point B on their bike without being killed. It doesn’t usually mean people who would benefit from a faster bus commute but are stuck on the bus and can’t come to a meeting at 6:30 pm on a Wednesday night. But you take the word “stakeholder” and you break it down into sort of four different types of people.

Veronica O. Davis: So I talk about, you know, people with the power. And that can look like a lot of different things. You know, in some cases there’s the obvious people with power, your elected officials, even someone like myself that sits in a position where I am empowered to make a lot of decisions. And for the ones I’m not, I have the ear of the person empowered to make a lot of those decisions. And so it’s just understanding that there are people with power. There’s people with informal power. Like, I know in my neighborhood, there’s like every neighborhood has that, like, mayor that is the informal mayor. It’s the person that can get everybody to come to a meeting. It’s the person that can whip people up.

Veronica O. Davis: I talk about the naysayers. And I’m very careful to split. People are saying no for different reasons. Some people are saying no because it’s like, “No, I don’t want to be harmed.” And having the respect there. There are people that are gonna say no because they’re just like, “I am perfectly fine with how things are, and I don’t want anything to change, and so my answer is always gonna be no.” And so it is important. And it’s like what you’re talking about, Doug. It’s the people who are like, “No, I don’t want to deal with traffic. I don’t want to lose my parking. I’m not giving up anything. Don’t care. This is my life. You go move somewhere else if you want something different.”

Doug: And you’re very careful to distinguish some of these people from what we might just call straight up NIMBYism.

Veronica O. Davis: Straight up. Exactly. And so it’s important to ask the questions of, like, “Okay, but why?” Like, tell me what it is. Don’t just say I don’t want the bike lane, because that doesn’t—that doesn’t get me anything. I talk about the silently suffering, and those are the people that don’t have the time to go to a public meeting because they are just trying to exist. And if you want to know the silently suffering, look at COVID, right? So COVID, you had many of us were privileged to be able to work from home. I know for me here, I had a lot of my staff still, you know, fix the potholes and still fix the traffic signals. And they can’t work from home. And then there’s the—you know, the advocates, right? The champions, the people who are passionately for things. And there’s a care and a duty, because sometimes advocates can push to the point where they won’t accept anything but. You have to be willing to compromise. And it’s hard, right? And advocates would say, “I don’t want to compromise my safety. I’m gonna die!” Right?

Doug: [laughs]

Veronica O. Davis: And it’s like I hear you.

Doug: Wait, you’re saying we can be a little dramatic? I’m not sure I understand.

Veronica O. Davis: You know, champions can be dramatic, you know?

Doug: [laughs]

Veronica O. Davis: And so it is even with that group of—understanding champions that have ulterior motives, because sometimes they will turn a silently suffering’s issue into their issue in order to push what they want. But that might not necessarily meet the needs of that community that’s silently suffering. Even though I’m talking mostly to people, you know, working on projects, I think there’s a space for advocates to see where they fall, and where sometimes the championing of something can be at the expense of the group that continues to suffer because of that championing, you know? And it could be things like, “Oh, we need more enforcement. Enforcement, enforcement, because I don’t want to die!”

Veronica O. Davis: And what happens is who gets enforced upon? And I know that we see it in New York City, right? We’ve seen the clips of people who are on bikes, you know, the silently suffering who are now getting body slammed because they’re on their electric bike, because they’re part of a delivery service. And so I think that’s the balance. And I’m not saying that advocates are, you know, supporting that, but sometimes asking for certain things, you don’t necessarily get what you want.

Veronica O. Davis: There’s actually a really great line, so Princess and the Frog, one of the songs, that you got what you wanted, but you lost what you had.

Doug: Yeah, yeah.

Veronica O. Davis: You know, sometimes you can end up in those type of situations. You got what you wanted was enforcement, but not in the way that you want it. And so I think that there’s always a care that happens when we’re championing those things.

Doug: Yeah. I’ll say as an advocate who I think has been all of the things that you’re talking about—you know, I’ve been that person who wouldn’t accept compromise, and whose enthusiasm for a project probably did a disservice, but I’ve also—now I’m the chair of the transportation committee of my local community board, and I’ve been the person who has to talk other people down and say, “Look, this is the best we can get, right? And we can either settle for this and work towards something better in the future, or we can just hold out and get nothing.”

Veronica O. Davis: Mm-hmm.

Doug: You know, so I definitely have experienced that from lots of different sides, and that it’s tough. Incrementalism feels insufficient. In many ways it is, given the challenges we have with climate, for example, and certainly, you know, people who’ve been holding out for a long time for equity and equitable outcomes don’t feel like they should have to wait another day or a minute longer. But it gets really, really hard. And I’ve also seen the people who are kind of latching on to other issues, and I sometimes say to them—and this works on both sides, the people for the project and against the project—”I see that you care about or seem to care about right now, disability access. Have you cared about that before you got involved with this project? And if you didn’t, that might be a sign that you need to do more work.”

Doug: To tie it back to the title of your book, Inclusive Transportation, you’re fundamentally asking questions about equity. And what I really, really appreciated about your interrogation of that word, to talk about language, is that you ask people, “What does equity look like if we can achieve it?” And everybody’s definition is gonna be a little different, but it’s an outcome-focused question.

Veronica O. Davis: Yeah. People can get so caught up in, like, “I need to get the words right.” Like, no, no, no. What does it look like if we achieve it? Because if equity looks like any kid, regardless of where they live, can walk to school, can be thriving, can be healthy, can laugh and play, and can independently bike on their own to the playground, if we say that that’s what equity is, then that informs a lot of the decisions that we need to make. But if we don’t think that that’s what equity is, well then that’s a different conversation. Because until we can paint what it looks like, you’re just getting caught in words. And if you can paint the picture of what you are attempting to achieve, then you can work backwards and say, “Okay, now how do we get to that vision?”

Doug: Normally, I would say that is a great place to end our episode, but I do have to ask one last question. We’ve jumped around a little bit. Chapter three.

Veronica O. Davis: Yes!

Doug: Title of that chapter, “Should There Be a War on Cars?” You’re not asking, “Should there be a podcast called The War on Cars, but should there be a war on cars?

Veronica O. Davis: Should there be a war on cars? You know, so I dance around this and I talk about, you know, it’s not that there should be a war on cars, but cars are the problem. And I think now you’re getting a lot more attention. The fact that you have over 40,000 preventable deaths every year, I think that the war is going to happen. It’s one of those things that either you change your behavior or you will be changed.

Veronica O. Davis: Our climate is changing. It is becoming more intense. What COVID taught us—what COVID should have taught us is you change the behavior or you will be forced to change your behavior. And so, you know, the war, I think—you know, who I think is gonna lead the war? It’s going to be the insurance companies. You know, you see it now where State Farm is like, “Good luck, California. We’re not insuring any more homes because of the repetitive losses.” And I think that now when you look at vehicles, I think that it’s gonna be the insurance companies that they’re gonna start calculating the cost and say they don’t want to pay out, right? They do not want to pay out. They want to collect your premium and they want all to be right with the world. That is how they make their money. They don’t make their money if there’s a whole bunch of crashes, and now they have to pay out because people are dying. That is not how they make money. That does not make them money.

Veronica O. Davis: And so I think that that is gonna be—that’s my sleeper pick for the dark horse to lead the war on cars. You see premiums are going up. I think that they are gonna eventually start saying like, hey, we’re not gonna insure this type of car. You know, we’re not gonna insure this big old truck that you’re not using for work. You’re a professional air hauler, right? You’re literally carrying air around every single day. You are not using this for work purposes, and therefore we are not gonna insure you. And I think that is gonna be the group that is gonna start really forcing a lot of this change that is gonna happen because, you know, we just can’t keep going on with crashes being where they are.

Doug: So I guess we should say, “Insurance companies? Welcome to the war on cars.” One day. Soon enough.

Veronica O. Davis: Absolutely. One day. I’m telling you, that’s my sleeper pick.

Doug: Veronica O. Davis, thank you so much for joining us. The book is called Inclusive Transportation: A Manifesto for Repairing Divided Communities. I gotta say, cities need more public officials like you. Keep up the good work down there in Houston. Hopefully we’ll get to talk again when you’re, I don’t know, leaving US DOT or something like that. I don’t want to get you in trouble, but you know what I mean.

Veronica O. Davis: I got you. Thank you for having me. It’s been a great conversation.

Doug: That’s it for this episode of The War on Cars. Thanks again to Veronica O. Davis for joining me. You can pick up a copy of Veronica’s book, Inclusive Transportation, at our official page on Bookshop.org. I’ll put a link in the show notes.

Doug: If you like what we do at The War on Cars, please become a Patreon subscriber. You can go to TheWaronCars.org and click “Support Us” and enlist today. Membership starts at just $3 per month. You’ll get access to exclusive bonus episodes, ad-free versions of regular episodes, and we’ll even send you stickers and a handwritten thank you note.

Doug: Speaking of thanks, we want to recognize our top Patreon supporters: The Parking Reform Network, Charley Gee of Human Powered Law in Portland, Oregon, the law office of Vaccaro and White in New York City, Virginia Baker. Martin Mignon and Mark Hedlund.

Doug: Many thanks to our friends at Rad Power Bikes and Cleverhood for sponsoring this episode. For a 15 percent discount on the best rain gear for walking and cycling, go to Cleverhood.com/waroncars. Use coupon code SUMMERLOVE when you check out.

Doug: This episode was edited by Ali Lemer. Our theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear. I’m Doug Gordon, and on behalf of my co-hosts, Sarah Goodyear and Aaron Naparstek, this is The War on Cars.