Janette Sadik-Khan on the future of cities

What if we didn’t need cars? Janette Sadik-Khan, former Commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation, helped revolutionize some of New York’s most famous streets into navigable, car-free areas. She joins the show this week to paint a picture of cities that put people first. How has the purpose of the city changed over time? Is it really possible—and preferable—to remove cars from cities altogether? And what does the future of cities really look like? Janette also responds to speculation about the future of transportation via GPT-4’s stories of how people might traverse Istanbul and Vietnam decades from now. It turns out, we might need a lot less new technology than we think to create the people-first cities of the future. Read the AI-generated stories for this episode here. Read the transcript of this episode here. For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all of the episodes, visit www.possible.fm/podcast. Topics: 4:15 - Hellos and intros 5:06 - How do we deal with city highways? 8:21 - When and how the city became all about the car 11:37 - What people-first cities look like 13:57 - GPT-4’s story about navigating Istanbul in the future 18:10 - What does the future of our cities look like? 20:40 - How COVID-19 transformed cities 23:51 - A change we can make today to improve cities 24:57 - Why are e-bikes so innovative? 29:59 - How we can make our polis more human 33:53 - Case study: New York City 37:43 - GPT-4’s story about an innovative new transportation system 42:28 - Rapidfire questions 46:00 - Debrief with Reid and Aria Possible is a new podcast that sketches out the brightest version of the future—and what it will take to get there. Most of all, it asks: what if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way? Hosted by Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger, each episode features an interview with a visionary from a different field: climate science, media, criminal justice, and more. The conversation also features another kind of guest: GPT-4, OpenAI’s latest and most powerful language model to date. Each episode has a companion story, generated by GPT-4, which will serve as a jumping-off point for a hopeful, speculative discussion about what humanity could possibly get right if we leverage technology—and our collective effort—effectively. Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network and hosted by Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Edie Allard and Sara Schleede. Jenny Kaplan is our Executive Producer and Editor. Special thanks to Kevin Sheekey, Seth Solomonow, Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Ian Alas, Greg Beato, and Ben Relles.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  I think when our streets emptied out of cars, people suddenly saw what was possible. Right? What was literally hidden between the lanes. And at a time when we were home and worried about what this pandemic was going to bring, actually, it was our streets that brought our cities back. People came out to exercise, eat outdoors, play, school, vote. It really showed that you could change your streets. They could be different. They didn't have to be designed for cars, and they didn't have to be used the same way all the time.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Hi, I'm Reid Hoffman.

• 0:51Aria Finger?

  And I'm Aria Finger.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  We want to know what happens if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way.

• 0:58Aria Finger?

  We're speaking with visionaries in every field, from climate science to criminal justice and from entertainment to education.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  These conversations also feature another kind of guest, GPT-4, OpenAI's latest and most powerful language model to date. Each episode will have a companion story, which we've generated with GPT-4 to spark discussion. You can find these stories down in the show notes.

• 1:22Aria Finger?

  In each episode, we seek out the brightest version of the future and learn what it'll take to get there.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  This is possible.

• 1:36Aria Finger?

  I am super excited to talk about the future of cities and what the implications are for transportation, what the implications are for climate change. And not just because I am a lifelong New Yorker who grew up in the Bronx and now I live in Brooklyn, but globally, more and more people are moving to cities. We have mega cities around the world, and this is the lived experience of so many people. And there's also so many things we can learn. Small towns can learn from cities. There's so much we can learn from the cities of Europe, who are dense urban areas where you need less cars. You need less fuel. And yet, there's also so many things that are negative about cities, whether it's the segregation or poor transportation.

• 2:18Aria Finger?

  That's why we're so excited to be talking with Jeanette Sadik Khan. She has done amazing work in New York City, making it a more sort of people-friendly, transportation-friendly place. And I think we can learn so much from her about how to apply that to other places, other cities, other villages, other towns globally, as well as here in the US.

• 2:38Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, I look, I completely agree. I mean, like, for example, the, the part of what we have to do is we have to figure out how to make the path of, of the evolution and reinvention of cities, whether it's what Jeanette's done with bike lanes and paths. But I think it's super important to be thinking about how do we evolve the technology of cities? And not just the technology to make cities run, but cities themselves as a form of technology. It's part of how we evolve our, our connectedness, our togetherness. It's that physical instantiation of the space in community. And so, you know, the fact that, you know, I think we'll be talking about cities. I think we've talked about transport.

• 3:20Reid Hoffman?

  And all of us should, should always bring a little bit of a first principles thinking about like, well, what's the way it should be? And obviously, there is a way it is, which may make some the way it should be is hard to get to. But you should always be thinking about how do we get there?

• 3:36Aria Finger?

  Jeanette is one of the world's foremost authorities on transportation and urban transformation. She was commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation for four years. And in that time, she transformed New York's most iconic streets and public spaces to become more bike and pedestrian friendly, from Broadway to Herald Square. She currently works for Bloomberg Associates, where she advises city mayors on transportation practices in cities like Los Angeles, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Oakland, and Athens.

• 4:09Reid Hoffman?

  Here's our conversation with Jeanette Sadik Khan.

• 4:15Reid Hoffman?

  Jeanette, we haven't met yet, but you were recommended to me by several people in my network. But also, when we asked G P T four about the leading thinkers on cities and transportation, it also mentioned you. So you were adored by humans and A I alike.

• 4:33Speaker 00

  Well, you hang out in mischievous circles.

• 4:37Aria Finger?

  And I have to say, Jeanette, as the New Yorker on the call, which we mentioned, I actually, today, I was running around New York City from meeting to meeting. So I was walking, I was taking the subway, I was going through pedestrian-only plazas. So I was getting to see some of your brilliance firsthand, which was was a lot of fun. And I actually, Reid and I have a good friend Cindy McLaughlin, and I told her that we were going to be talking to you. She was like, oh, my God, you have to ask her this question. She she was like, Aria, Robert Moses destroyed the city in the 50s and 60s. He created the B Q E. Much like in many cities across the country, we have these urban highways that were created to encourage commuters to come back in. And obviously, as you know, they're looking to

• 5:20Aria Finger?

  potentially expand. They want to make it five lanes, six lanes. Like, just as we're trying to get cars out of the city, we want to make it a people-first city. Are these expansions to these highways, like, is this just a faucet that we're turning on to get the cars back in? Like, how do you think about these highways in cities, and specifically New York? And how do we need to deal with them?

• 5:39Speaker 00

  You know, when you think about it, Robert Moses actually laid the foundation that allowed us to create the innovation that followed. We were actually able to repurpose all that excess roadway and turn it into bike lanes and bus lanes and pedestrian plazas. And so I think it's a really important lesson, not only, you know, for cities like New York, but cities across the country and across the world, that you have some of your greatest resources hidden in plain sight. And it's about using your imagination to repurpose that asset to higher use. Because when you think about it, so many of our streets, you

• 6:23Speaker 00

  know, you've seen this in New York City, Reid, you've seen this in Bay Area in California, you know, those streets have been the same way. For like sixty, seventy years, and you think about the changes in sixty or seventy years in tech, think about just culturally, society, music, every, every single area has transformed. But our streets, our streets are like Jurassic Park, man. They are just, you know, immovable. And so there is a lot of magic to be made, a lot of alchemy that's available to us if we just look at our streets a little differently.

• 7:04Reid Hoffman?

  How do you think about the function of a city and the design of it? And how does that function improved through changing the design? Just as you're referring to, it's like, well, we have these cities, these streets here this way for many decades, and it's good to have an upgrade.

• 7:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's true. I mean, when you think about it, Reed and Aria, in so many ways, cities throughout history have been built around their people and by the transportation technology of their time. So ancient cities were built on rivers and harbors. You know, towns harnessed the power of waterways to move, you know, their mills and obtain drinking water and move goods. But ancient cities stretched only as far as the territory that could be crossed on foot. And so as cities grew and people were able to get around with horses and carriages and, you know, buses and trains and streetcars, the urban footprint

• 8:01Speaker 00

  expanded. And when the automobile arrived on city streets, it wasn't just new hardware running on old streets. There was a revolution in the design of cities themselves. After centuries of building cities around people, we started to rebuild them around the car. And urban planners, you know, restricted the role of people in the street. You remember car companies came out with this campaign that demonized pedestrians as jaywalkers, you know? We can't have that kind of thing going on in the street. We need to prioritize the car. And they, you know, cleared them out of the way and widened the roadbed to accommodate, you know, speeding vehicles and, and places to park cars.

• 8:46Speaker 00

  This approach destroyed downtowns. You know, you see office towers in the center of, you know, barren parking lots today. And so that you see the physical legacy of that policy, you know, in city after city. And, you know, the car also changed the law. You know, a lot of American cities have restrictions on what you can build where. You know, developers can build only single family houses in certain places. And offices are zoned in one area and shopping in another area. To the point where, you know, in many American cities, almost every trip from going to work

• 9:30Speaker 00

  to getting a gallon of milk requires getting into a car. And it just doesn't have to be that way. Eighty-five percent of trips in the United States are taken in a car. And that number is over eighty percent in Europe, which we always think of as like, you know, the nirvana of transportation. But we can get a lot out of trips by bike and walking just by making our roads easier to walk and bike and to take transportation. And the reason why is that over fifty percent of trips in the United States are under three miles. So think about that. That's a distance that's easily bikeable, that's easily walkable.

• 10:13Speaker 00

  And it's not that people are choosing to drive for every trip because they like it so much. It's because there's no choice. So many cities lack good sidewalks, safe crosswalks. You know, you wait for a bus on a dirt path, you know, on the side of the road for an hour at a time. So I think you really get out of your street what you put into it. And I think we need a revolution in transportation planning that resets the 20th century rules and allows more compact development alternatives to driving. You're not going to do that with just smarter cars and flying taxis. We need, you know, better streets and stronger neighborhoods.

• 10:55Aria Finger?

  Well, I'm definitely pro smarter cars and flying taxis. But yes, I agree. Actually, Jeanette, your stats blew me away as someone who's like obsessed with stats that surprise. Both the 50% of trips being three miles or less. I mean, I read a lot of what you've been saying. And it's like, that's an e-bike trip. I mean, that is like the easiest trip you can take. But I also have to admit, I'm shocked that in Europe, 80% of trips are still by car. Because like you said, we think of it as this utopia. I feel like there's the, of course, there's a backlash to everything right now. And people backlash to car free cities. And I think you and others have smartly said, like, these are not car free cities. These are people first districts.

• 11:37Aria Finger?

  As someone who loves New York, takes the subway all the time, looks at my step count constantly and wants to walk wherever I go, but I also have a car and I have three kids and I have a minivan to go pick up a lot of stuff. Like, what does a people first district look like? How can it accommodate people who might have a lot of stuff to put in a car? But also, it can create this, you know, this better, quieter, cleaner, more mentally sound future.

• 12:03Speaker 00

  Well, I can assure you that nobody's coming for your car.

• 12:07Aria Finger?

  Not in America, at least.

• 12:09Speaker 00

  And, you know, the idea of the car free city is catching on, but I really think it needs some rebranding.

• 12:16Aria Finger?

  Yes.

• 12:16Speaker 00

  You know, a car free city isn't one where cars have been banned, like some kind of no drive zone. It's a city where their footprint has been reduced. And where they're not the dominant player in every public space and street. It's really a car light city, you know, a place where cars aren't banned, but they aren't necessary. And there are many other choices. And we're seeing that in lots of cities, you know, you, I don't know if you've been to Oslo at all, but they've gotten rid of street parking and most of it's city center. And cars and trucks can still access, you know, the area to pick up and drop off people. And there, there's still private parking lots.

• 12:59Speaker 00

  But the streets themselves are no longer exclusively for moving and storing cars, you know, and making them much more of a city for people. And you've seen that in Paris. You may have seen what Mayor Hidalgo is doing and reconfiguring these streets. So they're not just places where people drive through. They're places that people go to. So many cities are pursuing this. And I think the smartest city isn't one that has, you know, the newest apps that help you summon a shared ride to go from place to place. I think the smartest city is when you don't need to drive in the first place.

• 13:36Aria Finger?

  I think I like that again because it's, you're opening up a new kind of freedom. It's before you were captured by your car. And especially because of the, you know, inequities across the US and elsewhere. People might not have a car. The best city is not where the, the poor can afford cars. It's where the rich take public transportation. And so how do we create this city where that's accessible? And so GPT-4 generated an AI story and it follows a 20-year-old with no driver's license, who is trying to get to a birthday party across Istanbul in the future. They travel by e-bike, an autonomous water taxi, and foot and, you know, sort of seamless technology along the way.

• 14:25Aria Finger?

  And, and one of the things that I love that you do is that if you're thinking about living your life right now and you don't have the car you rely on, it seems worse. But I think what we see in Paris and some of the changes you've made in New York is like, let's show you actually how this is better. Let's show you how this is a better world. So I would love your reflections on, on that story about the future. What would you change? Did it seem accurate? What is promising? What did you think?

• 14:50Speaker 00

  I thought it was interesting. I'd never come across that, this approach before. So I was fascinated by how this went and it made me like want to jump in and, and play around a little more.

• 15:01Aria Finger?

  Yeah.

• 15:02Speaker 00

  So, so thank you for that. But I was really struck by the fact that, first of all, our friend in Istanbul was told by the AI to take a bus to a water taxi, to a bike share bike, right? And I actually use Google, Google Maps to route the trip from, I think it was Beyoglu to Sultanate Square in Istanbul. And I took a look at the map and if Emre just hopped on the number 77 bus and took the T1 tram, he could have made it to his nene's house in 30 minutes. Just using today's technology instead of the hour plus odyssey by, you know,

• 15:46Speaker 00

  walk by boat, you know, that it took. And so I would hope that the transportation technology of the future can make a trip faster and more efficient and less expensive.

• 15:58Aria Finger?

  I love it. I love it. You're like, actually, I tried this out and I am smarter than the AI. And here's where we are.

• 16:05Reid Hoffman?

  The current AI is a generativity AI, so it tells stories. Sometimes the stories are very, very interesting and good theory and good everything else. As it's integrated and grounded, as Bing has recently done in search, it actually then gets a highly factual thing. So obviously being integrated into, what is the actual, like essentially APIs for this kind of transportation and so what then? What actually works would be a super step forward, but is doable in, you know, N days of work.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  Right. Well, you know, the other thing that I thought was, you know, you're talking to the storytelling piece here. And there was a piece that really, I think, stood up for me that people really need to be highly integrated into the facts in the algorithm. Because what we saw in the description that you sent me was that in the city of 15 million people, you know, there were only passing mentions of people in this story. There were no people in the street. There were, there was no one else on the bus. There was no one mentioned in the water taxi, no mention of cars in traffic. And so the story mentioned that cars had been banned, which seems to me the most futuristic prediction of all.

• 17:17Speaker 00

  But if that was the case, I would expect that, you know, he would have run across a lot of people getting around on foot and people in bikes. And it does remind me of a lot of the visualizations you see of the future of transportation online. Like, if you Google that, you know, the future of transportation, you see hundreds of renderings of driverless cars and flying taxis and drones and hyperloops. But in almost all of these visions, there are no people that are visible in the street and the sidewalk where these driverless cars and drones are running. And so I'd like to see the next generation of AI think about what the street life looks like. Because the point of transportation technology shouldn't be to have cooler

• 18:02Speaker 00

  cars. It should be to have better streets and more active life in cities. I couldn't agree more. People first, certainly.

• 18:10Reid Hoffman?

  So, you know, there was a study in the UN estimated, I think, 90% of the US population will live in cities by 2050. You know, kind of how is the history of humanity, essentially the history of cities? What is our city kind of grand arc as humanity?

• 18:26Speaker 00

  It's such a great question, such a profound question, actually. I mean, when you think about our history, it's really all, it's a history of the public commons, right? I mean, you go back to, you know, the Agora in Athens, Boston Public Commons, look at Tiananmen Square, Tuxton Square, you know, our cities really are about our public spaces. And 56% of the population today lives in cities, and it's going to be 70% globally by 2050. So the future of the planet is in cities, and we need to do whatever we can to make them better, safer, more affordable, efficient, beautiful places

• 19:08Speaker 00

  to live, work, play, and invest. That's really a goal. And that's, that's not only good for the planet, because, you know, we conserve more and we, we live more efficiently. But it's also better for the ecosystem because we're able to conserve other spaces and places for the environment. And so I really believe that density is destiny here. And we're seeing that arc, again, going back to reclaiming spaces for people, making the public comments, putting the public back in the comments and not privatizing it and not turning it into this dystopian piece where, yes, we'll take people out of the,

• 19:47Speaker 00

  we'll design them out of the street and just have driverless autonomous cars go and, you know, we'll have flying choppers and everybody will be in their hermetically sealed pods, you know? I think we've seen, we've seen the future in that movie, Wally. I'm not sure anybody really liked it. It was a great movie, though.

• 20:11Aria Finger?

  The UN, the UN report with 90% was an estimate before COVID. And I'm not, I'm not sure if there's like an updated report, but I think to your point, we're, we're assuming that it's going to be 70% plus of people in cities globally and maybe even more in the US. How do you think the COVID, working from home, working remotely, ridership in New York City subways is down to 50%. There's less people, you know, at the bars and the restaurants in San Francisco on a Friday night than pre-COVID. How do you think that reshaped cities? And what are the changes we need to make to accommodate what potentially is sort of a different trajectory than we had pre-COVID?

• 20:49Speaker 00

  It's another great question, Aria, because a lot of, I think the pandemic showed what was possible. I think when, you know, our streets emptied out of cars, people suddenly saw what was possible, right? What was literally hidden between the lanes. And at a time when we, you know, we were at home and, you know, worried about what this pandemic was going to bring, actually, it was our streets that brought our cities back. People came out to exercise, eat outdoors, play, school, boat. It really showed that you could change your streets. They could be different. They didn't have to be designed for cars and they didn't have to be used. Used the same way all the time. We've got this temporal view that our streets have to be

• 21:33Speaker 00

  used the same way all the time. I think we need to plan and build and strive for an in-person city. And I think that's a really fundamental piece. And it was interesting to me, too, to see how after the pandemic, so many cities kept their pandemic changes. In New York City, they were freed up 10,000 parking spaces, 10,000. If I had taken 10,000 parking spaces away from people, you can just imagine what would have happened. I mean, you saw what happened with what I did already. 10,000 parking spaces? So anyway, you see the outdoor cafes, you see the thriving life. And we did a study that was reported on in the New York Times that showed that businesses

• 22:16Speaker 00

  that did that saw 20% increase in revenue. And businesses that didn't put out outdoor seating, you know, saw decreases. And so I think this is a new investment strategy for cities and a new investment strategy for our streets that's going to change forever. And so whether it's making car light streets, you know, where kids can come out and play and there are areas for pickup and drop off. And so I think people are really bringing a new imaginative take on how we can use this huge resource that takes up about a third of space in cities and repurpose them to higher end.

• 22:56Aria Finger?

  Jeanette, it's so funny. That's just reminding me that I actually don't bike around New York City a lot. But during the pandemic, I was pregnant and I had to get to my doctor's appointment in Manhattan from Brooklyn. And so I took the city bike right across the street from my apartment. And there were no cars driving, so I was unafraid. And I biked across the Brooklyn Bridge every week, six months pregnant for my doctor's appointment. And it was so lovely.

• 23:19Speaker 00

  Right.

• 23:19Aria Finger?

  Oh, yeah, I want that back. I want that back.

• 23:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, the joy, and that's part of the reason, I mean, working for Mayor Bloomberg. You know, we put down 400 miles of bike lanes and we put down the first parking protected bike lanes in the United States because the idea was we really wanted to create a connected network that made it possible for you to get to where you needed to go safely, joyfully, without getting into a car. And in the process, we made our streets safer for everyone.

• 23:51Reid Hoffman?

  If you could give an advice to someone who could like each, each mayor, each city and say, wave a wand and do these one to three things within the next couple of years, what would those things be?

• 24:02Speaker 00

  I think that really the innovation that's made the most difference in transforming cities around the world has been bike lanes and particularly protected bike lanes. And I really think if you want to change the world, you can start by building a bike lane. And when you think about it, over the last decade, you know, while we've been dreaming about self-driving cars and flying cars, the real revolution has been in the bike lane. There is now 1,500 miles of bike lanes in New York City and they're building cycling superhighways in Paris and London and Milan. And it's a, it's a new way of viewing transportation

• 24:44Speaker 00

  in cities. And increasingly, it's not just a way to get around. These bike lanes are really a new anchor for a new approach to the way that cities are, are designed.

• 24:57Aria Finger?

  Can you talk a little bit about the e-bike? Because I have to admit, I have never rode on one. And so for all of our listeners who don't use e-bikes regularly, I didn't, I didn't realize what a revolution it was. So I would love to hear you talk about how that sort of changes the game from just regular bicycles.

• 25:13Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I think, you know, you take a look at, at City Bike, you know, which, you know, we leveraged after building those bike lanes. We wanted to provide a new mobility option with this bike share program, which by the way, everybody thought was going to be yet another, you know, blood in the streets move by the crazy. Transportation Commissioner. And you know, what ended up happening is now there are a hundred thousand people that are using these bikes every day. And even more so, to your point, Arya, because they're e-bikes. And you can use e-bikes to get around, you know, really easily, really efficiently, really effectively. You can get around without

• 25:54Speaker 00

  breaking a sweat, you know, those trips under three miles that I talked about, you can get around without breaking a sweat. And I think electric bikes actually have a growth opportunity that is way beyond what we have for almost any other mode. You know, I mentioned before that, you know, most of these trips are under three miles. And, you know, taking that one step further, almost two thirds of trips are less than five miles, which you can easily do on an electric bike, you know, in 30 minutes. And so if even a fraction of car trips in cities shift to e-bikes, it really represents the potential to move hundreds of thousands of trips, you know, on just a fraction of that road space and

• 26:37Speaker 00

  without all the noise, you know, and the parking punishment that comes from those car trips.

• 26:44Reid Hoffman?

  The e-bikes is a good bridge to where are you looking at kind of how we can advance technology to make this, you know, better problem. Obviously, it's like, look, the technology utopians end to go, hey, automatic vehicles, you know, flying cars, both of which, by the way, I've invested in because I am very positive on the, the re-humanification of space. Like, if you go, hey, this is what I would call for technologists to think about in building technology to make cities better, to make them more equitable, to make them more human. What, what would be some of the gestures that you would make there?

• 27:20Speaker 00

  Well, I do think that technology can do a lot to help our cities. But I think, again, the frame has got to be a people centered frame, rather than a tech centered frame, which is always how it seems to go. It's always these solutions are always, you know, what's the problem you're trying to solve here? In many cities, for example, like if you're an older person and wants to get a ride to a doctor's appointment, you know, using transport, you know, if you have to use public transportation or, you know, access a ride, you know, you gotta call a number, you know, you gotta do it two days in advance, you can call back the day before the appointment, you know, with this pickup window, you know, wait outside, hope that this van or bus shows up.

• 28:06Speaker 00

  It will make multiple stops, you know, that's a problem statement that we, we can solve with technology. We can have apps that can do real time dispatching and networking. There are a lot of neighborhoods where, you know, transit doesn't reach, you know, and we need to rethink our, our transit networks, you know, these, they were designed half a century ago when most commuters traveled to office jobs downtown. And today there are more trips than ever going to neighborhoods outside of the core. And so, you know, we really do need to look at ways to kind of reimagine what that's about. I also think one of the more disturbing trends that I see in automobile design

• 28:49Speaker 00

  is this trend toward massive vehicles, right? Trucks and SUVs make up, you know, 80% of sales, but they're not just dominant in the market, they're deadlier in the street, like two to three times more deadly. And they're expensive, you know, $50,000, which, you know, Americans now pay over $700 a month in car payment. You know, two months of car payments pays outright for an e-bike or a scooter or a cargo bike. And so, looking at the frame that way, I think is important. And my prediction is that as micro mobility technology improves and as innovators innovate, we're going to see challenges in the car market betting against the idea that bigger is better. Some people may not be ready to get on a scooter, but

• 29:33Speaker 00

  You know, a compact vehicle may make more sense than driving a big car or purchasing a second car. So I think that's one big area.

• 29:42Reid Hoffman?

  What do you think in addition to transport areas and kind of thing? You know, obviously, one of the things we'd hope for is like parking garages could be reclaimed as as human spaces, whether it's housing or parks or other kinds of things. What do you think would be the other ways in which, like if you could, you kind of say, hey, this would be the kind of thing I would be looking for for the reconfiguration of the of the Polis. You know, what would be some of that, those, those kind of technological gestures?

• 30:10Speaker 00

  Well, I do think that rethinking the car print of parking garages is certainly, you know, an area that's got some real play and looking at these garages as spaces to move micromobility and to do freight differently is certainly something I was even looking back to do in New York City. And, you know, when you think about it, think about what you really like in a favorite city or a favorite town. What makes you happy there? You know, just imagining it, you know, or your listeners listening, what do you really like about these places? And usually it's that they're very easy to walk around.

• 30:54Speaker 00

  They're easy to shop and eat and hang out. It's all in one place and we kind of know it when we see it. Right? And so you sort of wonder why aren't more places designed this way? You use, you know, walk around Paris or walk around the Greenwich Village, my neighborhood, you know, walk around Boston, even walk around Disneyland, you know, that's what people like about it. It's all right there. And so when you think about it, it's actually kind of the, it's not really the technology. We can, we can repurpose parking spaces tomorrow and parking lots today. We can do this, all of this work right now. And I think that's behind a lot of the work on like a 15 minute neighborhood.

• 31:35Speaker 04

  15 minute cities are basically where bigger cities are divided up into smaller sections or neighborhoods. Everything people need, like shops, gyms and bars are all within a 15 minute walk or cycle.

• 31:47Speaker 05

  The idea of 15 minute cities is spread to Paris, Melbourne and South Korea, attracted by the promise of lower car use and a better quality of life.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  Actually, it doesn't have to be technology. It's just bringing a revolutionary lens. To the assets that we have right now. So I do think that, again, you saw that value during the pandemic when, you know, life was changed to just the sort of walkable distance from one's home. And people wanted these car-free spaces. And so if you think about it a little bit further, you know, what if there was a school nearby? You know, where a parent or caregiver could drop off the kids at school? Or people didn't have to travel far to send a package? Or doctors' offices were right there? So no matter where you lived, most of life's routines could be accomplished just on foot or on bike. Or you could get to public transportation. You know, what a revolution that would be.

• 32:37Aria Finger?

  I mean, Jeanette, obviously, New York still has a long way to go. But I saw this great tweet recently where someone said, "We created one car-free city that became the cultural and financial capital of the United States, and then we stopped.

• 32:51Aria Finger?

  And then we decided, never again." One question I have for you, because, you know, again, we're imagining this future. What is possible? How can we be more equitable, more environmentally friendly, you know, better? Again, this is not like a, let's make a worse city. Let's make a way better city for people. And I'm thinking about the difference between New York and San Francisco. And in New York, everyone I know who lives in the suburbs commutes in through Metro North on a train. In San Francisco, anyone I know who commutes in from the suburbs commutes in by car. And obviously, a few years ago, Google had their electric buses and people derided the, you know, the Google bus as like, oh, look at this thing for the rich, taking workers from San Francisco, you know, down to the Bay. And in my mind, that, well, that was better than the alternative, which wasn't taking

• 33:36Aria Finger?

  the Caltrain. The alternative was driving. And so my frustration was that there was honestly just no alternative for these people. They wanted to get to their office. They didn't want it to take an hour and a half. So, okay, they took an electric bus, which is, again, better than driving by themselves. Like, what are we missing to get there? Is it, is it political will? Does citizens have to demand this? Is it like, what's in the way of achieving this better future? Whether it's a more 15-minute city or just better public transportation? So people see that as a better option, not just a cheaper option or not just environmentally friendly option?

• 34:11Speaker 00

  Anytime you change the status quo, it's a street bite, you know? I mean, you could have a job for life if you stick with the status quo, you know? And I certainly saw that in New York City, you know? We definitely ruffled the status quo, making it easier for people to get around by a bus building. Now, there's 17 rapid bus lines in New York City. Fast, clean, easy to use, easy to get on and off, right? We've got 10,000 bikes, you know, easy to use, easy to get on, easy to get off, places to make it easier to walk. We had the visionary leadership of Michael Bloomberg, you know, which helped us accomplish a lot of those goals. But a lot of what Mike made possible was his vision for the future, which was Plan

• 34:56Speaker 00

  Y C, which was looking at, okay, we're supposed to get a million more people moving to New York in 2030. How do we design a city that accommodates those new people and continues to grow and thrive with a high quality of life in our business districts and neighborhoods? And then came up with 127 initiatives for how we were going to get there. Now, why did that matter? Obviously, there were profound implications for transportation, right? We were not going to get there by triple decking our roadways. We had to reallocate the street space for different purposes to make it easier to get around more sustainably.

• 35:37Speaker 00

  In addition to having a plan, it really mattered because not every New Yorker was going to be supportive of a bike lane, not every New Yorker was going to be supportive of a bus lane or a pedestrian plaza, right? There are 8.5 million New Yorkers, and I started to believe there are 8.5 million traffic engineers because everybody had a very strong view of what their streets would be used for. But even though they didn't agree with the specifics of a particular project, they knew why it was being done. And I think that's really important. I think people can be inspired by what you are trying to do, a larger vision. And so I think that's really important. And of course, political will is important.

• 36:21Speaker 00

  And, you know, having the wherewithal to stand up and say, we need to do things differently. And it's interesting because after all of the changes that we brought to New York City streets, the 400 miles of bike lanes, the 70 pole plazas, the eight rapid bus lines, the repurposing of all of these crosswalks and streets. At the end of the Bloomberg administration, 73% support for bike share, 72% support for the plazas, 64% support for the bike lanes. If these changes had been running for office, they would have won in a landslide, right? And yet, people think of this work as politically toxic, and it's not. And you're seeing in city after city,

• 37:05Speaker 00

  where you've got a mayor that's ambitious, London Mayor Khan, Paris Mayor Idalgo, Clovermore in Sydney, Mayor Calau in Barcelona, Mayor Sala in Milan. These people are being re-elected over big margins. And so, these are politically smart strategies despite what people sort of think, "Oh, it's safer to do nothing." No, in fact, people respect that change. And so, the point isn't to avoid controversy. The point is to succeed despite the controversy.

• 37:39Aria Finger?

  Bring a vision. Bring a vision. People will appreciate it. I love that.

• 37:43Reid Hoffman?

  Well, speaking of visions, let's take a look at our second AI-generated story about the politician, tech entrepreneur, and manufacturing company who partnered to create a new transportation system in Da Nang, Vietnam.

• 38:03Speaker 06

  Hu, Lan, and Zero decided to work together to create a new transportation system for Da Nang, one that would reduce congestion, emissions, and costs, and increase accessibility, efficiency, and convenience. They called it Flex, and it was based on three principles: modularity, adaptability, and affordability. Modularity meant that the vehicles could be assembled and disassembled according to the user's preference and purpose, using different modules that could attach and detach easily. For example, a user could choose a single-seat module for a solo trip, a four-seat module for a family outing,

• 38:48Speaker 06

  a cargo module for a delivery, or a bike module for a leisure ride. The modules could also be combined and reconfigured to form a larger or smaller vehicle, such as a bus, a truck, or a car. The modules were stored and distributed in various hubs around the city, where users could access them through a smart app that scanned their biometric bracelet and their digital identity.

• 39:21Reid Hoffman?

  Did you have any reflections of this story? Once again, you probably went and did something factual and and smart as opposed to the generative capabilities, but anything you changed or what seemed promising?

• 39:32Speaker 00

  First of all, I think this whole thing's really cool. So I really love the the speculation. But again, not to harp on it, I think these AI stories need more people and less, you know, modularity, you know, we all want to see alternatives and we all want to see future first and people first transportation, but we also want to see a lot more walkable neighborhoods. I think this story touches on some important topics that I think we need to watch, you know, to the extent that we can, we just don't want to swap out today's cars and motorbikes for higher tech version or one that uses electricity or hydrogen cells instead of gas, you know, because cars don't just consume energy, they consume space and they require

• 40:15Speaker 00

  more urban space to accommodate, to move them, to store them. And so, you know, everything we put on the street needs to be accommodated for years and decades. Again, I'd like to see clean, efficient and unobtrusive transportation in cities. I want to see cleaner and safer streets and there's like 1.35 million people that die on streets around the world every year. I'm not really counting on safer cars to fix it. I'm counting on safer cities. And I think we don't really need to wait for new technology to start solving the problems of our streets and our neighborhoods today.

• 40:48Aria Finger?

  Often what we see in cities is transportation is used to bring lower income people from the fringes of the cities or from the suburbs into the cities because cities are getting more expensive. And as you said, in New York, you were building for a million new residents, you know, there's other cities that are growing even faster, you know, Nashville is transformed from where it was 30 years ago. Cities, of course, in China, Vietnam, etc., are growing even more quickly. India. How do we build these cities continuously to both make sure that current residents aren't displaced? To make sure that it's more equitable, to make sure that the city core isn't just folks who are rich and the low income folks are, you know, sort of in the outside rings of the suburbs. Do you have thoughts on like, how do we do that as these cities are growing and growing?

• 41:32Speaker 00

  Cities get out of their streets what they put into them. You've probably seen like Seattle, right? With its transit investment, you know, while you saw ridership in other cities flat or decreasing, Seattle in 2019 had 92,000 more people commuting to downtown jobs than 10 years earlier. And because of the transit investments, you saw ridership increase by 50%, you know, while the number of people who drove alone dropped by 25%. So we had more people and fewer cars. It was a strong, solid transit investment. And so I think that's a really important part of the design of cities in the future.

• 42:11Speaker 00

  You know, I just really do believe that we have to focus on, you know, some of the secret sauces that made our cities so great. That's investing in transit, making it easier to get around by biking and walking. And, you know, it's not anti-tech and anti-car to make these kinds of statements. It's, it's really pro-choice and, and pro-opportunity.

• 42:39Aria Finger?

  We are going to be moving on to our rapid fire question. So the first question that we ask every guest is, is there a movie, song, or book that fills you with optimism for the future?

• 42:49Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 42:50Aria Finger?

  And you could say your own, Street Fight is allowed. You can plug your own book, but then give us another.

• 42:55Speaker 00

  Okay. Well, certainly you should pick up a copy of Street Fight Handbook for an Urban Revolution, written by me and my colleague Seth Solomonow. It is an amazing read. A page turner as, as Reed and Aria know. And so, you know, hurry up and, and pick that up. But while you're there. I can't recommend enough Ministry for the Future, written by Kim Stanley Robinson, which is my very, very, very favorite book. I mean, I've read everything he's written, and that is really hands down top. You know, he's a visionary speculative fiction writer who imagines Earth's near future, contending with climate change and the human response,

• 43:37Speaker 00

  and how we would try to think our way out of this climate calamity. He imagines, you know, an institutional ministry for the future, you know, created by this climate accord and tasked with advocating for future inhabitants of the Earth and taking steps today to ensure that, you know, a healthy and just world awaits them. And it's not just a story, it's also a strategy. And I think that's a really cool part of it. We have the opportunity and the responsibility to imagine ourselves as agents of change, not just for the world that we want to live in, but as agents of change for the people that we'll never meet in the future, you know, that we won't accomplish in a single lifetime. It's very exciting, you know, to read.

• 44:19Speaker 00

  And I thought it was interesting, while there's a lot of high-tech innovation in the book, you know, a lot of it is just imagining the machineries of government differently. I love that answer.

• 44:30Reid Hoffman?

  Where do you see progress or momentum outside of your industry that inspires you?

• 44:35Speaker 00

  Well, I think there's some inspiring work going on reimagining housing and housing materials and timber and sort of a 360 view of forests and timber and reinvesting, and then pacts that come together to reimagine the kind of equity that people have in their places. And so I think that there's some cutting-edge work that we're going to see about that, that's going to really lower the emissions impact of construction and will help us with the building materials and using them differently, as well as changing the design of our spaces and places.

• 45:19Reid Hoffman?

  So as a very last question, what's a good kind of final thought on what you think is possible to achieve if everything breaks humanity's way in the next 15 years? And, you know, if you were to wave your wand, what's our first step to set off in that direction?

• 45:37Speaker 00

  I do think that the future, you know, it's kind of back to the future. If we can walk everywhere or bike everywhere, get everywhere we need to go under our own energy, there's nothing that we can't achieve in cities. And so if the power goes out, you know, the, those systems still work. And so it's the ultimate resilient tech of the future.

• 46:05Reid Hoffman?

  It was obviously great talking to Jeanette, a real focus on, you know, kind of very like kind of an engineering practicality about like, look, if you had this kind of reconfiguration space, here's how it's so much better for all of the human beings living in it. And I particularly loved when we went through the first AI story. She's like, well, I went to go see how that, how you'd solve that problem. And it's like, your AI didn't solve the problem the right way. Like, like that problem is solvable today really well, let alone anything you're doing in the future. And you're like, yeah, no, that's great. Right. Cause that you need to bring that kind of pragmatic understanding in order to bring, to get to the visionary side. And so I thought, I thought the whole conversation was great.

• 46:46Aria Finger?

  And she has such a bias to action. It was so clear when she was, you know, the head of transportation for New York City. It's like, we see what needs to be done. Let's just do it and see what happens. And to exactly her point, what happened? 75% approval ratings for bike lanes and city bike and sort of all the things that they put into place. And another thing I really loved, and I'm sort of a broken record, because I think I said the same thing after we spoke to Saul Grabett, was that she talking about solutions, a lot of them to environmental problems, but also to quality of life, et cetera, that both make your life better, but are also commercially positive. Like she was talking about how businesses who utilize their outdoor spaces had actually

• 47:27Aria Finger?

  20% more business, like e-bike sales are going to exceed car sales. Like, these are commercially viable solutions right now that also happen to be positive for the climate movement and for the future of cities.

• 47:40Reid Hoffman?

  The other thing that was really awesome was it wasn't kind of a not invented here, only New York story. Like she'd highlight a bunch of different lessons from cities and other places, you know, Europe. It's like, look, it's working and this is what it already does. How do we make innovations as human beings? We look around, well, that one's good. Let's do that from this and let's build on it. Oh, no, let's synthesize it with this other one. And she's doing that from lessons all throughout a number of different cities. And I thought that was, that was also awesome.

• 48:10Aria Finger?

  She talked about how so much of this, as it always is, is a narrative problem or a marketing problem. And, you know, she wants to, she doesn't want to kill cars. She wants to make cities safer for everyone. She wants to make it, she wants to put people at the center, which is what we talk about all the time. Let's not use technology for technology's sake, but let's use technology to make us more human. And let's use technology to make our lives richer so we can hang out with the people we like to hang out with, so that we can get to the jobs that we love to do.

• 48:40Reid Hoffman?

  Now, one thing I also learned about you was bicycling across the Brooklyn Bridge we had no idea about. That's also the pleasure of doing these things.

• 48:47Aria Finger?

  So fun.

• 48:48Reid Hoffman?

  But, you know, you know, we are social animals. It's part of the reason why I like the, the progress of humanity has been in a sense of a history of the stories of cities. Like we went from hunter gatherers to agricultural sentiments. And then we figured out how to build bigger and bigger, bigger cities. And part of the reason she focuses on transport, of course, is that the, the density of that city depends a lot on what the transport mechanisms can look like. I think if we look at the future of humanity, one of the major through lines is going to be the future of cities. And what we're doing there, that's of course, one of the reasons why we were so delighted to talk to her about this critical element of humanity.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network, hosted by me, Reid Hoffman, and Aria Finger. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Edie Allard and Sarah Shleid. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor. Special thanks to Kevin Cheeky, Seth Solomonow, Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, and Ben Relis.