Vignesh Swaminathan: aka @MrBarricade, Community, Mobility | Turn the Lens #17

Jeff: Right, I think everything's recording, so we'll go, I just count it in, and we'll go.  

>> I want you all to become like Pam. The secret goal of my presence on the internet is to teach you all how to be more like her, to show you how to organize your community, know what to demand your city leaders for, and teach you how to micromanage city staff. This in my experience is the best way to actually make change, and it's not just for transportation. It could be for police brutality, getting the right type of jobs for your community, housing issues, climate action, and much, much more. So the secret sauce of making a difference is creating an exhibit, memo, and costs and getting community consensus and I'll teach you how.

>> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with Turn the Lens, coming to you from the home studio, and as some of you know, one of my little hobbies that I do, actually I do it a lot is my personal electric vehicles, and I'm out riding them all the time, whether it's an electric bike or my one wheel, and so I'm really concerned about this interaction between cars, pedestrians, electric vehicles, bicycles. It's a complicated thing, and it gets really complicated at intersections and it gets dangerous at intersections, and I found this guy, and we're going to welcome him in a minute on TikTok, who not only is doing amazing things around those intersections and increasing the safety, but he's doing it in a really novel and innovative way. So let's welcome in, through the magic of the internet and the magic of the zoom he's Vignesh Swaminathan. He's the founder, CEO, and President of Crossroad Labs. Vignesh, welcome.

>> Thank you, Jeff. Thank you for having me.

>> And I guess that's probably not even the right introduction, right? You're much more known these days as Mr. Barricade, so Mr. Barricade on TikTok. Give us a, just a quick overview about Mr. Barricade on TikTok. You've got nine, or 600,000 followers, almost 700,000 followers. You talk about traffic and traffic cones. How did this happen?

>> Well, people know me as Mr. Barricade for quite some time, just for my work in the industry and my work in the area, and then I jumped on TikTok as kind of a way for me to kind of get away from my work. I have my work and I have a few different political worlds where I sit on different boards and I wanted the place to kind of dance or kind of have a little fun, just like a way to just kind of release some energy, and then I somehow accidentally got popular on that app, and then I used it to talk about roadway and infrastructure and teach people and now it's an aspect of my practice, which involves community outreach and social media. I joined TikTok to kind of experiment with that and they end up working out well when I was, I learned about how to work the app and now I'm now I'm teaching people about roadway, I'm teaching people about drainage, if there's a video that has a big drainage issue or something that has the infrastructure, I comment and explain that video, and I've built a bit of a following around drainage and infrastructure.

>> I love it, I love it. Such an innovative use of kind of a modern technology and a modern social skill to get out complicated messaging, and you've said on a number of things that you've taken the challenge to make it simple and make it easy and make it fun to make people communicate, but let's back up a couple steps. The story of how you got into this, and I've watched you tell it a number of times. I think it's fascinating in terms of the very simple thing in terms of transforming a space with cones, and I wonder if you can share with the folks when you kind of realized what that magic was and how really simple it was to use these little plastic orange things, and to actually change the culture of a physical space.

>> Yes, I was lucky in my career that one of my first jobs in the industry in the city of San Jose, when I started an intern, was working with traffic control and that includes cones, barricades, different types of signage to shut down a street. I worked for downtown operations in the city of San Jose, where I was leading any type of event that the parking grew, and so if there was a festival, there was a marathon, or a concert, I would shut down the street or figure out the traffic control with cones and barricades, and I coordinated with police and volunteers and city staff to shut down the streets. There I learned a lot about community engagement. If you can imagine a marathon might go around a church on a Sunday, and then we have to figure out how to get people to church and back across the marathon lines, and a lot of like logistics that came with that that I saw with the community outreach needed for that and the actual cultural change of the street.

It went from a five lane busy roadway to suddenly there was drink permits allowed in the street if they were behind the barricades. And so I was able to really have my juices flowing from them about what is possible, and later in life, I worked for a highway consulting firm and I heard about this concept called tactical urbanism, where they would shut down the street with cones and barricades and have a block party to kind of get community outreach and more, and I was remember facilitating that from the city side, and I also knew about a concept of protected bike lanes and protected intersections, which is an intersection design that comes with a Dutch, which idea is they would like to make sure the bicycle feels protected as they go through the intersection, and so I knew this concept was something that was going to be coming to America in a huge way, and we're going to need to figure out how to deal with protected bike lanes at the intersection because bicycle culture is very much car centric right now, where we are telling cyclists that they have to merge with traffic.

If people try to weave through traffic to make a left turn or take the stop sign with traffic, and that's how we are trained, and I grew up in the area, I grew up in Cupertino and that's how we had bike lanes from when I was very young, and that's how we rode and being a protected bike lane, how you make a left turn? And how do you get out of the bike lane? And these are things that cities aren't answering for. What cities prefer to do is they prefer to just make the protected bike lane go dash at the intersection and let them be back to the bike lane. For me and many people that I work with the community, I know that the intersection is what the big troubling part is for people so I wanted to the focus on that.

>> Well, let's just back up a step though, before we get into the details and talk about the streets. I went to the smart cities event that Ford put on years ago and Janette Sadik-Khan spoke and it really changed my life and she was the first one that kind of pointed out to me, that that cities have streets and she's in New York, she worked for Mayor Bloomberg back in the day, and you talk about the total square footage of acreage represented by streets. It's a phenomenal asset that really doesn't get thought about much as an asset, because it's just a thoroughfare, and then I think with COVID and the acceleration of kind of parklets and closing down streets and moving restaurants in the streets, and it really begs this bigger question, and some of the stuff that you exposed when you were converting a street into a concert venue or a marathon venue or a community venue about how cities should use that asset, and should it always be car first?

It's funny when you look at futuristic artist's interpretation of the future of a city, some of them are kind of the old school marketplace, lots of people, lots of kids, everybody out enjoying themselves, and then the other one they're really futuristic ones, there's no people. It's like all this beautiful, like high-end car design. Where's the people? So I just from a civic point of view and you get to work with a lot of civic people, they really realize the power and the value of this asset with a slight kind of reconfiguration into something beyond just having a place for cars to park.

>> Yes, and I was blessed in my first, my job at the city of San Jose. We started to think about that a little differently. We will say, there's a big event coming, and how many cars are people going to come on vehicles? How many people are going to come on bikes? How many people are going to come on transit? And we start to orient things differently. Cities are starting to realize back when I started my career many years ago, and it's still taking a long time for them to realize is that the economy of your downtown does not need to be by somebody in a car with a wallet. If somebody, your economy or downtown can be driven by somebody in a bike with a wallet or somebody on transit with a wallet and the concept of people biking and people on transit having money is kind of new to cities. It's hard for people to picture, cities only, their mentality was that only people who drive have money to spend in the city and we should prioritize free parking, easy access to parking because those are our target audience, and so that comes from having a design user and that design users like very fixed on somebody who has money, powered cell phone, car to park, and now for equity and all these other terms that we've been talking about to kind of make the city more designed for more accessibility, we are changing our design user to maybe be somebody in a wheelchair, somebody riding a bike, somebody who's blind, somebody who may not speak the language, right?

And those are all people who do have money and they do want to spend it in downtown, and we should be trying to encourage that, and that's what these are parkletts and bike facilities, and all this new age thinking is coming from. The models you're talking about with the futuristic are mainly driven by self-driving car companies that are like trying to promote a model of single car ownership by cars, but that's not really where the city would like to go. This comes from a sustainability perspective as well. We found that designing for cars endlessly is not something that we can actually attain. Have you heard of the concept of VMT and level of service?

>> No.

>> Well, I'm going to explain it to you, and I'm trying to spend as simply as I can, but traffic engineering has been based on something called level of service for forever. The city has to provide a certain level of service on the street for through fair traffic.

>> Jeff: Is that like a mandate or dictate? When you say that, where's that come from?

>> Vignesh: It's the unit of measurement, it's the fundamental unit measurement of traffic flow in rates of A through M, and this is how traffic engineers have based highway design, if you add a lane, if a new development is built, how much parking and how much lanes need to go into the driveway. Level of service has been our entire thinking for forever and people don't realize that it's actually dictating all of our lives and so I can explain it like if we widen the highway 101 to four lanes, more people move to Morgan Hill. We want the six lanes, more people move to Gilroy. We wanted it eight lanes, more people moved to Hollister, Los Banos, and as we move to 10 lanes, there's no end to it. Then just people just now we're affecting people's lives, and you're not building enough housing here, so people of low income are having to go drive three, four or five hours a day, and they're losing money and time with their family, so it's not sustainable from a community perspective and a pollution, energy perspective.

And also level of service will tell a developer, Hey, you're building this much parking so you need to improve all these signals for the city and you're going to pay for that, and that's how cities would get signals improves when new developments came was through level of service. Now the new mentality of California is something called a VMT or vehicle miles traveled, that then what the goal is is how can we reduce the amount of vehicle miles traveled to any development? So if a new development is being built, the cities now say, Hey, we want you to reduce the amount of parking, and we want you to put bike storage, maybe even a shower for your employees. We want you to put transit and maybe you'd even stipend Uber for your employees or Uber for your residents, and how can we reduce the amount of vehicles trips, because there's no point, we want to build up, and we want to build densely, but if we're building two parking spots for one studio, it doesn't make sense, and so we're trying to, and that's the new mentality, and so with the stuff that Janette Sadik-Khan has talked about was kind of starting to push this agenda. Now, VMT is in our policy, it's in our standards, and that's what our basing a lot of things on, and the resulting projects are what you see what I work on, which is protected bike lanes and quick build protected bike lanes for developments and for cities. I work for some of the tech campuses in the area, and I designed their bike lanes, and for them, they're doing stuff in the public right of way, and they're trying to reduce the amount of vehicle trips, and so they're basically putting two-way cycle tracks on both sides of the street, which shuttles and more so they can prove to the city, Hey, we built enough things that can take our employees here, and we won't cause more traffic.

>> Right, right, and so are cities getting it in terms of the value? Is it coming back from the studies about what is the economic impact of a more pedestrian centric or less car centric piece of commercial area versus a car-centric one?

>> They are starting to get those studies, but that's going to be happening right now. Like we're right now in that moment where we're changing our thinking, a lot of new developers are starting to be like, okay, we'll do VMT now, we'll do the extra mile of putting in transit. To be honest, it's in a developer's interest to do that because then they don't have to build as much parking, which they think is a waste of space anyway. so it's in everybody's interest to become a build densely, but I'll tell you in terms of studies proving that, no, we haven't seen as much of it yet because COVID and more, but we have seen in New York City and other areas, they've done studies about Times Square and the evolution of Time Square and Times Square has taken up space from cars and made it into more walkable for tourists, but those are only localized to those kinds of like key centers. Not really like in a small town downtown or a regular size downtown. You can see the effects of it in Times Square.

>> So let's shift gears a little bit and talk about execution 'cause at the end of the day, it's this great talk, but you're out there getting stuff done and using tools, and again, Janette talks, she talked about the lingua franca of the traffic department being cones and barriers and things, and they're good with moving cement, and again, you took it to this next level, and I think it's really interesting. We had a huge project here, the Ross Road bicycle project in Palo Alto, hotly contested, lots of interesting design things we could talk about for a long time, but what I think is interesting about your approach is A, you don't necessarily have to have it nailed in advance. There's this concept of almost like dev ops and software development, where you put down some paint and you put down some plastic and you find out, and the other thing I just laughed reminded me of next door was using local just signs in people's front yards with the QR code, so they can get more information and participate.

I thought it was really interesting. One of your other interviews, you talked about, NIMBYs, right? Not in my backyard, but you also talked about kind of the hardcore bikers almost in the same breath, because they're invested in a very particular point of view and not necessarily thinking in terms of a broader application of this space, to many people from young people to old people, families, single people, et cetera.

>> That's what we're trying to do these days. What we call quick build and putting it in the street and telling people that it's not permanent and we can take it out, and we have some hidden secrets that we can tell people now like in San Jose, we have specific areas that we knew were going to be contentious that we painted with water-based paint to see how people liked the facilities first. We took away a right turn pocket and had the bike still where the right turn pocket was, and we had the cars turned around that right turn pocket, and everybody was able to turn it. It was designed properly for the buses and more, but a lot of people felt that it was just too aggressive, and so we put back with a very nice right turn pocket that had a nice way for bikes to get across it as well, and just by us doing that on one part of this 16 mile network of downtown, it just gave the community a lot more appreciation for the city actually listening, and how they agreed and a lot of them slowly understood what the point of this project was and how it's helping and they see the benefits of it now.

These projects, when we do these in a typical capital implement projects with concrete and more, we have community meetings. I don't know if you know this about me, but I actually designed Charleston Arastradero for many years. I worked on that for a while in Palo Alto.

>> Oh they just finished that last year or so?

>> Yes, yes, and when I worked on it, it was supposed to happen at one time, and I quit my job kind of over that project, and I'll talk a little bit about that, about how that job was significant part of my change in thinking is I worked for this highway company, we were designing a lot of highways, and when we started approaching Charleston Arastradero, the city wanted to do it like a capital improvement project, which is like a highway, and so when we approach it, we approach it, we have community meetings and we have exhibits and I hosted, as many people will remember me from the Charleston Arastradero meetings because I hosted all those meetings for years, and there we had many meetings with all the different community groups and people came in and that was a very involved community where it's Palo Alto so Palo Alto is a very big. They come in there when they're educated and they know what's going on, and they know who to talk to, and so it was very different from other communities that I work with, but it was also very nice to see a community that was that involved, 'cause that's what I would like all communities to be like.

And there they were approaching it from a very highway perspective of we're going to rip out the road, we're going to put in curbs, we're going to put in swales and more, and I felt that that was a waste of time to be honest with you. The amount of time and effort we spend on doing all that outreach, a lot of those folks, kids graduated school, a lot of things happened through those years. People were looking at that project from early 2002 to, and when I was working on it, when I was working on it that was in '11 or so? 2010? 2012 was when I was working on it, and then they're already like, oh, we have all this project we never move forward with and everybody's angry at us, and so we picked it up and then we did all these outreach and we're ready to go build it, and suddenly they wanted to add a lot more stuff and it just felt like it just, everything got delayed.

And I felt, Hey, you know what? We could put some cones down and got feedback and been done with this project a while ago. We could put some posts down, and at the end of day, we weren't really messing with the intersections as much as I would've liked to so we could have done a lot of these as a trial run and the community would have loved it. We had the space for it and more, and this was happened to me on three jobs, one in Lodi, Shoreline Boulevard to Middlefield North in Mountain View, I was a lead designer on that, and Charleston Arastradero, I was the lead designer and engineer on these three jobs, and I was just very frustrated with how long they were taking and how the community has already moved on from things while the city, while we're working on it, and we're making decisions behind closed doors that really the community should be involved with, but that outreach period has been finished, and so I started the company that is more quick build projects, and the folks who have been doing tactical urbanism right now are not traffic engineers and civil engineers.

They're mainly planners and artists, and they work on shutting down the streets so they can put art into the street, but there isn't really somebody who has a civil engineer who actually understands traffic control, which I did from doing construction and doing events and also managing cones of barricades for construction, and so I applied those skills and knowledge and went through all the different specs and started to design intersections and roads that people couldn't really argue with me that they were bad. And what I mean by that is I didn't rip up, touch the curbs or drainage, so I did not trigger anything that required me to do CEQA. I try not to modify lanes and take away lanes so I also didn't trigger CEQA because these two are environmental triggers. They require me to go to a whole different process.

>> What is that? You said sequel?

>> CEQA, C-E-Q-A, is our environmental regulations here in California as NEPA is the federal regulation and CEQA is California regulation, and this is what delays projects. It requires a certain amount of.

>> So you're saying your technique is to try to avoid these things that that can get in the way by just making things simply and not tripping into complicated nasty area?

>> Exactly, and that's how I've been able to deliver projects so quickly and efficiently compared to other consultants that are having to do with the entire environmental process and build a client, which is a city on all these environmental processes, I've shortened it down to say, Hey, I'm just doing a striping project with some cones and barricades is just like a maintenance project. You're going to paint the street anyway, and so with San Jose, San Jose was going to spend $30 million on just paving the streets and my project of making 16 miles of protected, not all it was protected, but around six, seven miles double-side where are protected in that area, and we did 58 protected corners. If you can kind of imagine not all roads are symmetrical, 58 protected corners only cost it $1.6 million compared to the $30 million the city was already going to spend on maintenance.

>> Jeff: I was going to ask you what your magnitude differences are but you just outlined it. You just outlined it there.

>> And if they were to do it with concrete, it would cost them hundreds of millions of dollars just to revive.

>> So one of the other interesting concepts that Janette brought up is curb management, and let's talk about it in the context of this 16 mile stretch which you've talked about a number of times, kind of your breakout project in San Jose, 16 miles of protected bike lanes with, you said, over 50 intersections. The cool thing Janette talked about it is curb management, and this is our Amazon purchases are coming to the curb and people are buying dog food online, and this whole shift of kind of logistics distribution, way worse in New York than in the west coast where we have a little bit more space, but curbs are really difficult, right turns are really difficult, and the other thing I thought that she said was crazy is that there's like this one old Bible that everybody used to design all their roads that's been around forever that predates bikes and peds and everything else so share this, what are some of the tips and tricks when you're putting in a system like this? Are there kind of standard repeatable processes for a large majority of intersections? Or is everything just ridiculously unique as you're trying to replicate something like 56 plus whatever intersections?

>> To be honest with you, a lot of things are quite unique and it's frustrating, but that's just because of the nature of our life and our city that every block and people live there and they have a unique perspective on what they need. There are some standards that we can use, but they require some education. Let's say we have a protected bike lane and I want to have a loading zone that takes an Amazon drop-off location, which is one of them in downtown San Jose, that we had and we've had the bike lane and we have the loading buffer and for the doors to open it, and we have where the cars are sitting and so when the people get out, they open a door and the buffer, and they can stand there and with the bikes past, and then they cross over that, and there's people coming there every 15 minutes to drop off their car and crossing back and forth. It's more people crossing the bike lane than there are people actually biking in the bike lane at that one location because of the drop-off, and so planning all that stuff out is very critical in the downtown and I did something very different than anybody else when I did it in downtown.

Most people do this big planning effort and they bring everybody into meetings and then they go and they say, this is what we're doing, and everybody's eyes are glossed over trying to understand where their city is and people are looking like, yeah, I walked by a tree. Where is the tree that I walked by? Oh, that's a tree. Okay now I understand where I am, but like that process is not really working, and what I did is I drew everything in AutoCAD and to a 10% level of detail, which is like, just getting started and I went and I printed the sheets and I went to the, all the businesses and I'm like, Hey, this is the plan sheet, and let's draw on this together, like, what do you need? And he's like, Hey, I got a beer truck, the beer trucks got to back in here. I need to get into this area. What about if you put the freight loading zone here and can your guy walk over? He's like, no, I need a ramp to do it. What if you get a metal ramp and you put the metal ramp, do you let them teach them how to put the metal ramp on the curb? Is that a possibility? He's like you asked me to get a ramp. Yeah, maybe the city can help you get this ramp in and your guys can use it, and he's like, fine. Put your truck over here and we can get a ramp across, get up to curb, and these are the kind of negotiations that are needed that most engineers don't want to want to do and most planners are scared to do because they like to produce a nice, thick document, and pat themselves back on a thick document when I'm working construction and I've been working in community outreach and we're working in an event so I was very comfortable with talking to anybody about this kind of stuff, and so from that point, when I worked at the city of San Jose they started calling me Mr. Barricade back then, and when I did events, and then when I came back, some of the people even recognized, the businesses recognized me. Hey, you're that barricade guy from years ago, and I was like, yeah, now I'm putting in bike lanes in front of your business now, and they're like, oh okay.

>> That's great. I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about the impact of these e-vehicles. Again, I'm a huge enthusiast. I actually think that the scooter experiment, I don't know is necessarily all good news or bad news with the large public scooter company rolls outs, but they're there, and then there's their e-bikes, which I think are just transformational, because I think it's a form factor that most people are familiar with, and then there's all the kind of random things. Now what's interesting is those things were used to be positioned as last mile vehicles. You don't take your bike to get to your public transit, and then at the other end to get to work. Well, as the technology has evolved and thank goodness for electric cars, right? The battery technology, all that stuff's evolving so now you've gotten, and I think you ride a scooter, these things can go 10, 15, 20 miles.

They're no longer last mile vehicles. The batteries are only getting better if you charge at location now. People are selling these little converters, you can plug into an EV system and get 110. How does that change all of the calculus in? And hopefully I'm convinced there'll be new form factors that are more appropriate for 50 year olds and 60 year olds and 70 year olds and 80 year olds that'll get them outside, and won't be the scary looking thing at Safeway that some people, but there's so much opportunity to rethink the way people get around both for recreation as well as utility. How are you kind of calculating in the rise of the PEV, the personal electric vehicle?

>> Oh, we're calculating in a huge way. There's going to be a movement of folks who, it's already kind of started with fast bikes. If you can imagine like aggressive cyclists go pretty fast they go 23, 25, 30 miles an hour, and they want to be like a vehicle, and also cyclists want to be like a pedestrian, and so where do cyclists go in this equation? And now with these PEVS are more, a lot of people who jumping on these are novice and they don't actually know how to ride a scooter, they just download an app, and they're trying to get around Chicago or some city, and they're just trying to figure it out. They went the wrong way in the sidewalk. They want to be on a sidewalk, but someone's there in the street so it's kind of confusion needs to put a space and that's what we brought up about putting in protected bike lanes. Now, because it encourages more of this type of user. It also encourages folks who are elderly to maybe use the mobility scooters and be in a protected bike lane and be on the curb ramps, and I've heard that from a lot of people with the mobility scooters that don't like to use the curb ramps, because for the press a button, they have to go up the ramp, press the button, and do a little loop to line up with the next crosswalk, and that's a little dance that they don't want to do, and the protected bike lane, they can just go straight and go wait, and then they get detected and they get to go with protective bikes, and so a lot of people like those type of vehicles, and so we're trying to encourage more of these protected bike lanes and protected intersections.

We do know that these PEVs go fast and some of them can go up to 50 miles an hour and so we're not trying to actually design for those folks, to be honest with you. Those folks that they want to be like a vehicle, they're going to be like a vehicle so ride with vehicle traffic. If you're riding more than 30 miles an hour or 25 miles an hour, get out of the bike lane and be riding with traffic, and you shouldn't be in, and that's something that we have to educate people about because a lot of people just, just get zip up and they'll be in like a five, six foot protected bike lane. There'll be trash or there'll be a scooter or somebody crossing and that's not safe because we're not coming behind a car. If they parked a car and they crossed a buffer, we can't have people going that fast in the protected bike lanes. These goes into kind of the idea you kind of mentioned, we've talked a little bit about curb management before, but where are these things going to park and how are we going to store these things when they go where they are?

And I was lucky that I worked on some of the first curb management stuff in San Jose, where we put a zip car logos down on the street. Macklin's Zipcar was a big thing. And now these students are taking a parking spaces now, and the negotiation with the city of, Hey, we're making the loss of the parking space, but the scooter company is paying fees to do that, and there's agreements with these scooter companies to operate in each city and they can range. They have many different agreements. Some of them are a flat fee, some of them have to be spread out equally so they can't just let the EVs be in downtown. They have to also be equally in the low-income areas where they maybe get less used, maybe they get trashed in those areas, but the e-companies have to do that, and a lot of e-companies, they try it and it's not profitable for them and then they can't grow, and so then they just shut down the cities because of these regulations, but I'm really excited for the evolution of this.

even the other day, I was looking into the one wheels and the different types of scooters that I can take out in different areas and whenever I go to a new city, sometimes I do bring a helmet and I go rent a scooters in different areas so it's definitely a new aspect to our planning. It goes into VMT as well, so a business could potentially provide e-scooters to their employees, and that would reduce the amount of vehicle trips that they are having for their building, and so this could be a way in terms of policy, that it also becomes part of our lives in many ways. With COVID we expected that a lot of people would not like to touch a public scooter as much as they used to, but I do believe that that life will come back once we get out of this COVID mess.

>> You've probably read it, the Dutch Blueprint for Urban Building: Building the Cycling City, by Melissa and Chris Bruntlett. They're over in Amsterdam. So they've got bicycle highways over there. I think one of the really cool things I've seen over there is parking for bikes at scale, 'cause that's the one bad thing about bikes. They get stolen a lot and for all the car parking there's not a lot of great covered, locked, secure bicycle covering so what are some of the things that when you look across the pond or in either direction that you see as real great opportunities that we'll have here eventually, we're just not quite there yet.

>> We're close. I mean I've had a close relationship with the Dutch standards for awhile. Story behind that is when I worked on Shoreline Boulevard, which is not built yet, that was going to have protected bike lanes and big intersections, and I, on Reddit, I was asking people questions and somebody from the Netherlands said, Hey, I'm coming to San Francisco, and I said, Hey, can you buy these books and bring them to me? And they brought the books to me and I had a beer with them in San Francisco, and I designed off of those books many, many years ago, and that kind of helped me grow into this protected bike lane space. So I say protected, the main concept of the Dutch principle have is with different speed differentials, and so if a cyclist is going at a certain speed or a PEV or a electric bike or a pedestrians going at a certain speed, let's say that speed is pedestrian five miles an hour, to a cyclist maybe like 15 miles an hour, 12 miles an hour, and a car, if the car would have hit that person and a car is going more than 30, 40 an hour, they might most likely die, and so the Dutch are trying to control the speed differential through design.

In America, if a cyclist is waiting in the bike lane and the car is a runaway vehicle, they can smack in that person and that person will die. In a Dutch design, when the car turns around one of these protected corners, by the turn radii, they are forced to slow down and they physically won't be able to go at a speed differential that would actually kill that user, and so they, by design almost eliminated almost all of the crashes that can happen between a car and a cyclist at these key intersections by purely the radius because you physically can't turn, so that's the same principle that I brought over here is you physically, even if you try at my intersections, and then I try, I have a little car that is zippy, and I'll try to go fast around my own intersections and skirt, and here my tire screech, and I know I'm not going fast enough to actually hurt somebody or kill somebody.

I'm might be fast enough to hurt somebody, but not fast enough to kill somebody and that's by design. Another principle that they use is if the cars and bikes have to share, they want to make sure that the actual road has less vehicle traffic. It's a low volume street, so it feels comfortable for bikes and cars to share, and they do that at putting speed humps and all of that stuff we've seen in the U.S. But one thing they do differently is they do something called traffic diversion, and you might see this in Palo Alto where there's areas where cars can't get through, but bikes can get through. Good principle. It makes a road more comfortable for the community that's there. It makes it more oriented for the residents that are there, and it's not as a thoroughfare, and this is a principle that the Dutch use throughout their planning to make sure that you have roads that are for cars only, you have roads that are for bikes and cars with separation, or you have less cars and you have this mix design, and these are principles that are more human oriented that force you to make eye contact, and that's really, really their principles. You'd go slow enough that you can negotiate with eye contact or your turn slow enough that you can negotiate with eye contact and looking at like a baby on board sign, or somebody flagging somebody down or a red brake lights, and these are principles that they've brought into the design that we're starting to bring into here.

>> Yeah, I don't know why that one doesn't get used more often. It's so simple just to not let cars go through every so many blocks and guess what, they don't. They go one block over. It's just, it's so simple.

>> The people's perception I've told people like, Hey, it's going to raise your property value because there's less traffic and they're like, oh, I get it.

>> All right so I want to shift gears again and talk just a little bit about social media and communicating via social media and taking risks on social media, because let's face it, it's a loaded gun in a way you can accidentally do something poorly, and you even said in some of your interviews, you got a bunch of racist stuff and you got some hate stuff and this and that because of your profession and job, you're used to kind of hostile city council meetings or whatever. But I wonder if you could share, because I think it's hard for older people to kind of gronk that these kind of new age things that they think their kids or their grandkids are using, can be effective and maybe it's not TikTok for them, it was for you, and I think another thing you said is you channel all your social into your primary vehicle, which is your TikTok platform, but just kind of how that experience has evolved and how it's really impacted the way that you think about communications in 2021.

>> Yeah. Well, a lot of communication comes from what we had in the past. If you go look up stuff on the internet, you go find a professional who knows this stuff, and you learn from them, and what I've tried to do is I'm trying to humanize a lot of that by saying, Hey, I'm not only going to teach you, but I'm also just a person and this is my personality and more, and it's something that I haven't been able to do in my community meetings as much. But when I do show my self in my community meetings, when I hosted or angry council meetings, people come up and be like, you're making this worse for bikes because of this, or you're making it worse for cars because people get angry at me in these meetings, and when I tell them, Hey, I actually grew up in the area like I'm from Cupertino, and this is what's what, Hey, you know, I get it, man. I shop at that Safeway too, like, I get it, and people be like, oh, this guy, he gets my problem 'cause he's driven on the, he's actually from here, he's not just an outside consultant that's just messing with my town, and they're used to yelling at their city staff and now they have to yell at the consultant and humanizing myself I found very beneficial when I have the meetings and so that's what I did with my TikTok.

I got popular accidentally on TikTok. I was just having a good time kind of learning about the app, learning about the algorithm, seeing what's work and testing stuff. I love messing with algorithms and this was just a one where I could customize it for myself, and then I got popular. I got around to 250,000 people that are watching me make dance videos in between my zoom calls. So in between my zoom calls, I'd be like, make a little dance with your finger guns or whatever, and like, I posted them, they would get popular and I would go live, and people ask me what I do and I explained my work. I might show my work to people once in a while and so my live streams where people knew about my work but my videos are just for fun. And then I dealt with a lot of weird hate on the internet. And what I did is dealt with with the hate is how I would do it in the community meetings. I'd kind of explain logically why that didn't work.

Why that didn't make sense, and that doesn't work very well in the internet, and I learned that the hard way. People came at to me in different ways. But then I learned more about how the internet works with social media and how we have to build a culture, and so what I did is I built a culture with my platform of folks who understood what is racist, understood what is not racist, and it would combat that in my comments, and I've also taught people about intersections and drainage and how they can be involved in their community through my videos, and the reason is is so they're more enabled when they come to community meetings about the vocabulary of drainage, the vocabulary of what's happening with their community traffic wise, diversion, all these different traffic coning tools and things. I'm enabling people buy through my videos because I have to explain these in the beginning of every community meeting.

One thing that I'm doing differently is I'm bringing in this equity conversation, which is something that's been involved with us for a very long time, but our industry is shifting towards this now. When I had community meetings when I started my career, I'm not going to name the cities, but some cities would tell me to have the community meetings at 3:00 PM only in English, because I didn't want too many people to come to the meeting. They just wanted the same people who half the time that are retired landlords who have time, and they can come to the meetings since we don't want to get a certain type of people that come to the meetings, and now we do it differently. Now we have daycare, we have food, we have it in multiple languages. We are people that are involved, we find champions in the community, and more, and I wasn't able to have that during the pandemic. There also is a lot of historical racial issues that we have in our community, and when I say racial issues, I mean that there's been historical disinvestment in certain communities, and those communities don't really realize that that's why their community is the way it is. You can talk about the differences between east Palo Alto and Palo Alto or what you see in Oakland, where there is poor drainage or other areas that deal with pollution or other types of environmental hazards where the community does not realize that that's what's affecting them and what most other people would buy land somewhere else, because they know, Hey, I'm not going to be next in the flood zone, or I'm not going to be next to where the pollution is, and so people live in the peninsula and other areas where they avoid those kinds of hazards or they've had policies to avoid those hazards, but in certain communities over time, the last 50, 60 years they haven't, and so I'm trying to teach people in my videos about what these hazards are, why they're important, why the community is not at the same level as other communities, because people are scratching their heads, and I'm sure you can imagine somebody who grew up in east Oakland knows that, Hey, how come Berkeley has curb and gutter and the sidewalks and a little downtown that's walkable and my neighborhood doesn't.

What does that do to their psyche? And I meet so many people and that like hey, there's actually the systemic issue. It's not just because the city government is, how do I say this? The city government has not used a tax payer money to properly upgrade your community, and for me, I grew up in Cupertino and I didn't deal with much racism in Cupertino. Cupertino is a very diverse area. I never dealt with that as much, middle school bullying is more. Cupertino always has had bike lanes and always it had paved streets, and they pride themselves on having the second best paving condition index in the whole bay area, and so for me to grow up in that community and then go to other communities that are even local, like I go to east, I go to east San Jose and things aren't up to par.

I go to Saratoga and they refuse to put in sidewalks. And so you see these differences and I'm trying to educate people through my videos so they are as educated as the people who would come that the 3:00 PM meetings if you know what I mean. And so I found with my TikTok and people coming back to me and be like, Hey, you know what? I was able to get that curb ramp built in my town. People will come back and tell me, Hey now I'm able to go to my community meeting. I'm going to advocate for bike lanes and more, and people are, I'm able to reach to a wide audience. One thing that I've done differently with my TikTok than most other professionals is I don't purely talk about roadway and drainage. I show off my personality in a lot of different ways to my music or dance to things that I'm doing, and that makes me more, what's the word?

>> Jeff: Human.

>> Huh?

>> Jeff: Human, it makes you more human. You're a real person.

>> And a lot of council members and people haven't been doing that, and it's not like it's an unattainable thing, and I sit on a few different commissions. I teach people about how they can join their commissions, that people who follow me who have now been part of commissions now because of that and so this is about enabling everybody in this type of space so they can advocate for whatever they want to advocate, whether it's walkable streets, whether it is maybe an extra car lane, whatever they need to, they should be able to be enabled to do so, and I think TikTok in short form video is a great way of doing that. If you can think like a picture says a thousand words, and a short video can do even more, and a lot of this stuff has to do with perspective. If I'm showing you a plan set of a bike lane from space, you take you a few minutes to figure out where you're at and what we're looking at. But if I sit down on the street and be like, Hey, that's going to go there and you might have a car that's coming and turning like this, and I use my fingers, and I point, that's able to make people understand it more because that's how they're using the facilities, and that type of communication has been lacking in traffic engineers and planners for many, many years.

>> Well, Vignesh, you're certainly passionate and it comes through. I mean, I've got a long list of notes. We could go on and on and on. We didn't talk about, you introducing the career path to a whole new generation of young people, which you've talked about in some of your interviews, which I think is really cool. You know, there there's so many angles to this, and the thing you just talked about I saw the one TikTok where you talked about kind of this intimate interrelation between drainage and garbage and bad patching and not having a good enough tax base to do a proper job and how all these things are interrelated so I think you're doing a terrific job, and really have enjoyed getting to know you a little bit through all the media that you have, as well as your TikTok stuff, so I know we've been going long, I appreciate your time, and I'll give you kind of the last word.

What should people kind of think about? How can they help you? How can they get involved? How is the world going to be different than it was? So car centric to the exclusion of everything else in the past.

>> It's right now the right time. I think a lot of what happened during the pandemic highlighted a lot of the issues that we've been beating our chest about for a very, very long time, about more walkable streets and better drainage, making our economy more than just parking and more about events, and cities can do a lot to kind of promote economic activity in their city by bringing in developers in the right way, by having events and more, and a lot of these things are going to be coming back in a huge way. Ways people can be involved is not only going to these community meetings, but also to being in tune with your commissioners and committee members that are in your local towns. I sit on a few different committees. I'm a chair of the Valley Transportation Agency's Citizen Advisory Committee and Citizen Watchdog Committee, and I'm also the chair of the Cupertino Sustainability Commission, and anybody over 16 can go join and be in these commissions and they'll rotate the chair hat to you, and it's being really, really good for a wide variety of people to be on these commissions.

I'm the only engineer on some of these commissions. The rest of them are maybe parents from PTA, a PhD in environmental who's retired, somebody who works with buildings, and that's our commission for society and somebody who has a battery company, and we're all like on this commission together, and we have different perspectives and we're collaborating and we're talking about it, and we have people from the community that come to talk to us about what they care about, and we are able to push it up their issues to the government and make change, and that I found is the best way to make change more than berating people on social media or picketing with signs. I found the best way is to actually go to these meetings, find out when people are talking about it and interject at the right time is what I found is the best way to make change, and I want to teach people about the localized democratic system we have, because it really is easy to access in my opinion, because retired old folks who own land and want to keep this town the way it is are the ones who show up and the young people who want to actually change and make it more walkable and make it more bikeable and environmentally friendly more are too busy or don't know that these things exist, and I'm hoping that I can enable a lot more folks, wide variety of folks to come and I don't want to push one agenda. Every community is different, whether you're in rural America, you're going to be advocating for different things than you advocate for an urban America and so I just want to enable folks to be able to participate and teach them what I think the best practices are.

>> Awesome, well Vignesh, thank you for your time today, and it was really a great catching up and I hope next time we catch up, we both have our helmets on and we are out in the bay lands, enjoying some fresh air and smooth asphalt.

>> No I'd love that. I'd love that, definitely. Jeff, thank you so much for having me. This has been so much fun.

>> My pleasure, thank you. Alright, so he's Vignesh. You know him as Mr. Barricade. I'm Jeff, you're watching Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. Cool, all right, that's a wrap.

>> I want you all to become like Pam. The secret goal of my presence on the internet is to teach you all how to be more like her, to show you how to organize your community, know what to demand your city leaders for, and teach you how to micromanage city staff. This in my experience is the best way to actually make change, and it's not just for transportation. It could be for police brutality, getting the right type of jobs for your community, housing issues, climate action, and much, much more. This is why I mastered the art of being industry specific niche and trending so the secret sauce of making a difference is creating an exhibit, memo, and costs, and getting community consensus and I'll teach you how.

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