Nancy Full

The speaker discusses their involvement in the Traffic Safety Commission and their efforts to prioritize mobility and safety over parking in their city. They describe a specific instance where they successfully petitioned to have a stop sign moved to improve safety on their street. They have been a member of the commission for a long time and have become critical of the traditional thinking of traffic engineers. I've been doing that. I've been doing that. Okay, now the first thing you need to ask is, do I have permission to record? Yes. Do I have your permission to record? Yes, you do. Okay, thank you. It sounds real good. I'm still doing my morning routine. It's all bollocks stuff right now. Okay. Yeah, and then I sent you the gift agreement. I don't know if you had a chance to look at it, if you have any questions. No, but it lets me know what I can and cannot say. This is not a private conversation. This is a public conversation. So that's basically what it amounts to. But yeah, I'll probably sign the thing. Don't worry about it. Okay. I'm just going to be more circumspect in what I say. Okay. Okay. But yeah, so what I originally thought, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you suggest we talk about, but when you rescued Boo, or escorted Boo home, I don't remember when it was. It was mid-October, and you talked about the traffic safety. Oh, yeah. And had a long conversation about parking and about Houston and all of this. And so I went to the minutes of the meeting, and this is what the minutes said. Basically nothing. Exactly. September 24-24, City Council work session, TSC update, engineering staff, presentation, off-street versus on-street parking options, garage capacity and design, first street depot lot, RFQ submissions. That wasn't my meeting. That's City Council. Oh, okay. So was your meeting the – Second Thursday of the month, so I can tell you the date. In September, it would have been Thursday the 12th. Thursday the 12th. Okay. Well, then I went and watched the recording, which is cool, and that discussion was an hour long. Yeah. And it started with that long presentation with the engineering staff, you know, all of their parking studies and traffic flows and street widths, and then you introduced – Oh, that was the one where they were talking about possibly doing some one-way stuff downtown. Uh-huh. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I watched that one. I think I wasn't there for that one, I don't think, or was I? I can't remember. The one I'm thinking of is the one when – then you introduced your Word document where you had the pictures of parking in Houston and the Elmer Lovejoy and Sanborn. Oh, that one. Now, those pictures and that recording, that was of the Traffic Safety Commission. Traffic Safety Commission, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that wasn't – I guess we did, TSC, I guess we did talk about the one-ways. They suck. Yeah. But it was interesting to me that the minutes have, you know – No, the minutes of our meetings are a legal document saying we discussed it. If we vote on something, we carefully – it can take us as long to figure out what we're going to vote on as it does the whole meeting. I mean, it can take us 20 minutes to figure out what our motion is, what we're going to vote on. Because that is a legal document that runs – then city council, if they approve our minutes, they are kind of approving what we voted on. Okay. But that has no flavor of the discussion. It has no flavor of the discussion whatsoever. I was showing that, you know, this is what happens – the Houston picture was this is what happens when you make parking in automobiles. You're dominant in what you're in favor of, what you're trying to do to – what your priorities are. Right. If your priorities are parking, you end up with that downtown Houston. And then another one of those pictures was if you took downtown and didn't have any parking at all in downtown and put all the parking around the perimeter, you would end up with that. And it's to show how much we put into parking. Uh-huh. You know, because it's the same number of buildings, but there's no parking. So everybody has to park out in the middle of god-fuck-nowhere. I don't know if I'm allowed to swear in your podcast. You're allowed. And that's – it was an equivalent drawing. This is what happens when you prioritize parking. We need to prioritize mobility to get people downtown instead of – because cars don't shop. People shop. Cars don't go to the restaurants. People go to restaurants. You know, and people do things. Cars just take up space and kill people. So how do you prioritize mobility? You're going to get a good lecture on this one. If you make it so that people can move around safely without a car, you are prioritizing mobility. If you ask the general public what they want from their streets and their street plan, they will tell you number one is safety. They want to be able to walk downtown, walk to the grocery store, walk to the library, walk to campus. Same thing, ride a bike, downtown, grocery store, campus, the library, without worrying about getting squished, getting killed. And we have built a transportation system in this country that prioritizes people in two-ton steel boxes. Everybody's going to be in a car going everywhere. And we continue to do it even though today we have learned that – some people have learned that that's not an effective way of doing this. I mean, if you ask the public, number one is safety. Number two is ease and comfort of doing – getting around. And number three is speed. You look at the results, the – what do you call it? You know, the results of the system we have built and you dig into it and you will find number one is speed, number two is comfort, number three is safety. Traffic engineers build their intersections, build their streets, build their bridges, and then they accommodate pedestrians and bicycles. Let's build our streets, build our intersections, and then accommodate the cars. Do you hear the difference? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So how did you get involved in this? Well, and this is what I was thinking about 9th Street and Lewis. Okay. When I first got on the traffic commission, I did it – it started out with the stop sign at 2nd and Steele. The city put stop signs in mostly the tree area, but the residential neighborhoods, every other block, kind of a herringbone pattern. You can go two blocks and then you have to stop, go two blocks, you have to stop. And for both directions, east, west, north, south. They came to 2nd Street and since it parallels 3rd Street and there isn't much cross traffic on 2nd Street in the neighborhoods, that is south of Sheridan, they made 2nd Street a through street. They put all the stop signs on the cross streets and made it so you could go from Spring Creek or Russell, actually it's Russell down that far, all the way to Sheridan without stopping. At that time, there was a large employer downtown in the old Penny's building. They all came on shift in the morning. They would come flying down Spring Creek, Russell. They had a 50-50 chance of getting across 3rd Street on a green light because there were so many cars. It would stay green until everybody's crossed. They would then make a right turn on 2nd Street and go flying down 2nd Street but they wouldn't stop at Sheridan. One block before Sheridan, at Park, they would make a left, go half a block to that funny little 1st Street down there, make a right and zoom downtown. From the time they left their apartment up across 15th Street in Spring Creek, they didn't have to stop until they were parking because of the way the streets lined out. We had people doing 40 miles an hour down our street. There are children that live in this neighborhood. We have pets. We have elderly people. At that time, I could name every one of them. They've all changed now but we still have a neighborhood of a variety of ages and physical abilities on 2nd Street. I said, this sucks. That stop sign is not making it safer. So I went and I found out how to get things changed. I went to City Hall and asked. So then I wrote a little petition and I went to everybody within one block of that stop sign and asked them, would you like it changed? I never went to a house more than twice. If I didn't catch them home once, I'd try one more time. I missed one house. But I went to every single property owner within one block, including the mini-mart, of that stop sign and they all signed. And so I submitted my stuff, filled out the paperwork and submitted it for traffic, the traffic commission. And I didn't have to go to the meeting but I did. And they said, yeah, we'll move that. We'll change that stop sign. It took them a couple of months for the work order and all that stuff and I think they had to wait until the ground thawed and, you know, there's impediments that way. And one day I happened to be out in my yard and here comes a couple of city trucks, one of them with a post hole digger on it. And two guys grabbed the stop sign and started shaking it and wiggling it, pulled it out of the ground, and meanwhile the post hole digger is digging a hole and they literally moved the stop sign. Are we on a quiet street again? Just that much is what it took because it made people want to drive fast, go drive on Third Street, stay out of the residential neighborhoods. And that put ideas in my head. Pretty soon I signed up and they hired me on. It's a hiring process like any other job except you don't get paid. And one time out of petty cash they bought us donuts and nobody ate them for a meeting. But there's no – the only benefit is that you can get involved in the community and something you have an interest in. And so I got into traffic commission and after a couple of years they elected me chair and I've been there ever since. How long have you been on? Or when did you get the job? I'm not sure. It's like 14 years, 16 years, or maybe that's how long I've been volunteering at the animal shelter and I've got 16 years and 14. I don't know. Long time. Long time. Long time. And I started out when I was on the traffic commission thinking, these engineers are really smart. I don't believe a thing they say anymore. That's changed. And that is just – and I've had discussion with them that I'm glad I am not a traffic engineer because I'm not constrained by the rules and way you were taught to think. I can think the way I want to think. And a good example of that is Prexy's Pasture. The student union, the current entrance from campus to the student union, is the original entrance. They've added the handicap ramp. It used to be just stairs. In the 70s, they added on a – in the basement was kind of a cafeteria and a bowling alley and a – Barbershop. I remember a barbershop. There was a barbershop down there and a banana tree in a little garden. And upstairs they had offices in what they called the breezeway. And we used to set our tables up in that breezeway, you know, for various groups that were trying to talk to the students. And during class change, you could feel that thing, boing, boing, boing, boing, boing, because it was suspended. And that made me kind of wonder. But apparently it's good. And if you went up the tower to, like, the newspaper office, the KUWR used to be up there, too. If you went up that tower and you looked out at Praxese Pasture, the new entrance now is closed off. It's just kind of a blank courtyard. It doesn't go anywhere. Nobody goes there. It's full of bike racks. It's where the little bear statue is. Yeah, yeah. The bear. Yeah. But that was the main entrance to the Union. And if you went up and watched that, went up the tower in the Union and watched, so you got an aerial view. Praxese Pasture, they had all these crisscrossing sidewalks that nobody was using. And there was a dirt trail about 12 feet wide, 14 feet wide, where the kids were coming out of the Union and going to the classroom building. Like a cow path. It was a cow path. And then they would get partway. They'd get a quarter of the way or a fifth of the way across Praxese, and then they'd hit one of those sidewalks. They'd narrow it down, the stream of traffic. It was bumper to bumper. Fortunately, they all went one way first and then came the other way as class got out the other way. They didn't have a lot of crashes there. You know, it switched directions, that part. And the university had to go in there and say, oh, look, here's where people are going, let's put a sidewalk there. And now you climb up the tower of Praxese, nobody uses that sidewalk. It's just a big old slab of concrete because they moved the Union back over to the original place. And now, since they pulled all the cars out around Praxese, that's where the people walk because it's wide and it's pedestrian and there's no cars. Right? Right. Yeah, that's the kind of way I see it so that I watch what people are doing and do my evaluations and what I think, how can we make this better, you know, safer or what have you by observation, not what some green book says, some engineering book says. Right. So, yeah, that's the conversation I've had with the engineers is I watch what's going on. What are people doing? What is the effect of widening this street? What is the effect of putting a stop of one pair of stop signs, changing the direction of an intersection? What is the effect of that? I saw what happened when they put the stop signs in. I got them to change them and I saw what happened. That's my way of looking at it. In that meeting, the meeting where you had your Word document with the photos, I think it was Brett Glass who said something along the lines of, we don't need radical urbanist thinking or something along those lines. Do you remember that? Not off the top of my head. What do you think he was talking about when he said a radical urbanist and do you think you are one? I am not as radical as I would like to be. I do not know enough about the new urbanism stuff. I do know what I see. You know, I listened to the city council meeting about parking. We need more parking downtown. Okay. Where are you going to put it? Where are you going to put it and how are you going to pay for it? Well, they looked at a parking garage and nobody realized, and I didn't realize until later on, that you can't put a parking garage in that empty lot. You can't put – and it was in that meeting that the light bulb went on in my head. It should have gone on a week beforehand. That is, in order to build a parking garage, you have to have ramps. You can have X number of rise over run on your slope. You have to have landings at both ends. Now, you can bring your ramps to the slope ends right at the sidewalk, the ramp to sidewalk line. That's legal, but you've got to have a landing at the top, and you've got to have two ramps, one going up, one going down. You can't share them because somebody halfway down doesn't want to meet somebody halfway up. Somebody's got to back up, and you don't want people backing up in a parking garage. Not like that. There isn't room. That available space there is a third of a block. It's not even a half a block. If you run the ramps on the long direction, there's no room for parking. You'll get like 30 spots per layer, and that's not much additional parking. So you're going to have to go up and up and up and up and up. People don't want to go up and up and up because then they've got to come down to go shopping. If you put them on the other direction, they're too steep. It won't work. You cannot build a parking garage there. The one the university built, yeah, they took a chunk out of it for the police department, but it's a city block. They used an example of the one in Cheyenne. That's a city block, that parking garage. And it is from not curb to curb, but sidewalk to sidewalk. Literally. I was over in Cheyenne after that meeting. I went and drove around there, you know, and looked at it. It's like I drove in. You don't have to pay to go in. You're supposed, you know, they go and ticket and make sure you whatever. You know, as long as I'm driving around in it, they're not going to ticket me. They're not fast enough for moving targets over there, I guess. But they've been really clamping down on parking in Cheyenne. How many times are you doing research? So it sounds like you're experiencing parking garage in Cheyenne. I was in Cheyenne. I was in Cheyenne to pick up this new computer that doesn't want to work on Zoom. And I drove past the parking garage, and it took me like 10, 15 minutes to drive into their parking garage and look around and say, okay, that's what it is. And it's often empty, and they paid for it because the Downtown Business Association and Chamber of Commerce and those kind of organizations, I don't know the specific names of the organizations or whatever, but the pro-business downtown business organizations buy parking places, like 100 of them, and they pay the rent on them every year for so many years to get that thing paid off. So, yeah, it's not, you cannot make money on a parking garage in Wyoming because people aren't going to pay enough to pay off that parking garage. They think parking should be free. Everybody thinks parking should be free, except me, in the radical urbanists. So all of a sudden you're a radical urbanist. How much time do I spend doing this? I listen to podcasts. I usually have at least one traffic-y type book. Every chair I've got in the house has got a book next to it. And no matter where I sit down, there's a book saying, come on, read me, read me, read me. I've been trying to read one of those that you gave me, and some of the numbers are kind of interesting, but that's a 20-year-old book. Right, yeah. Numbers have changed. So if I do find something of interest, then I have to go look up the current numbers. But other than that, I've read it already. I haven't finished the book, but I have read their arguments already. Right. Yeah. And I don't know, I spend maybe an hour a day is all. But I just—no, let me see if I—I like—I'm a bicyclist, so I tend to look at this from the angle of riding a bike, and that's how I get around town mostly. I tend not to drive over 22, 24 miles an hour like up Sheridan. I'll go a little faster on Grand just because there's so many other people wanting to get—you know, they're all in a hurry, so I try not to slow traffic down too much. But I go at the speed that I'm used to seeing the world, which is going uphill is 12 miles an hour, coming downhill is 15. Yeah. You know. How many miles do you ride a week? I don't know. I don't know. I do know that my mother gifted me her car 20 years ago, 21 years ago. It had 95,000 miles on it, her 89 Camry. It's got 123 now. Wow. So I've done 28,000 miles in 20 years. Yeah. Wow. All the little errands you run in a car, I do it on a bicycle. The grocery store, the animal shelter, going to Goodwill, the library, campus, wherever I need to go. The only place I don't is doctor's appointments just because out of respect for the medical, I don't want to be stinky when I get there. Yeah. They're going to have to touch this body, and I don't want them to touch a sweaty, stinky body. I thought it was interesting in your presentation you had a picture of Elmer Lovejoy with a Studebaker. Yeah, there was. It's stacked with bicycles. Why did you include that photo? Just because it was humorous and absurd. He invented the first motor car in Wyoming. He was one of the first motor car inventors. Everyone was an individual creation. There was no teams of engineers. It was just nice tinkering, you know, in the shed. And Wyoming's first motor car was built by Elmer Lovejoy. It was a steamer, I think. I don't think it was electric. I think it was steam. And I could research him more if I wanted, but he ran a bicycle shop. Che Guevara, in all his travels in Central and South America, he said if you want to do a revolution, get the bike mechanics on your side because they can fix anything. That's good advice. Yes. And Elmer Lovejoy, he ran a bicycle shop in Laramie. We had bicycles for 50 years before we had cars. Yeah. You know, it's not like bicycles are this new thing and all these electric bikes and scooters and all this stuff. You know, we've always had cars. No, we have not always had cars. We've had bicycles longer and we've had people on foot and on horse longer than that. But this car thing, this is newfangled. This is not the way it has to be. It's an experiment. The results are in now and it's not doing us any good. Okay, what happens was after World War II, the powers that be were afraid that we were going to go into a depression, go back into the depression. It was because we picked up production so fast and had so many people employed, either in the military or in the factories, that the economy finally came out of the depression. It was what Roosevelt was trying to do with putting people to work in the Work Projects Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and all those other things, was get people back to work, you know. Get them working so they've got money in their pockets so they spend money, which gets other people working. You know, if you've had any economics at all, you understand that circular way of working. World War II, we win. We've got all these factories that used to make automobiles and now they make tanks. Well, we don't need any more tanks. We've got enough tanks. We need airplanes. We're going to fly people. But we don't need tanks anymore. Well, how do we keep this economy that was barreling along during World War II? People had jobs. A lot of them were getting killed, but people had jobs. How do we keep that going? We build houses. We expand our cities. You know, suburbia comes out. We put covenants in so we can't have people of color living in suburbia, and everybody's going to drive a car. We designed our road systems to go in the cities, out of cities. Go to the suburbs. You know, you had a yard. Your kids could play in it. You had a safe street. We went from gridded streets where you could go anywhere you wanted. It was all interconnected to what they call the lollipop pattern, which is all the dead-end streets with the cul-de-sac on the end, so you could turn your fire truck around. We changed our design process. We have it. You can see it in Laramie's neighborhoods. Houses built before World War II and the invention of air conditioning have vertical windows. Houses built after World War II have horizontal windows, the picture window. And that style changed because windows were no longer the only source of ventilation you had. Now, we never done much air conditioning in Laramie because it doesn't get that hot here, but the style was copied from the rest of the country. I mean, you walk around neighborhoods, and you can see the houses that look like, wow, it's got horizontal windows, but it doesn't look right. Those have been remodeled. They were trying to modernize them, and those are air quotes from the broadcaster. And so the houses that were built with pre-air conditioning down in our neighborhood, 2nd Street, 5th Street, 4th Street, whatever, the lots are long and skinny. The frontage isn't that much. I mean, the house you know that I live on is, like, there were five lots divided three ways to make the three houses. That's five lots. Lots were 22, 24 feet wide, which is very typical of a walking neighborhood. You can get a lot of people can walk out their front door, and you can have, like, 12 families on one block to walk downtown, to go to work, to go shop, to go be with other people. Now, we no longer put alleys in because they're expensive to maintain, and they take up space that's not anything but an alley. Right. We make the houses there, the lots, long, the frontage is long, and the lots aren't as deep. And every house has a yard still. But by doing so, you can only have maybe four houses on a block. Go to Alta Vista, and you've got three. The Alta Vista and the Richards Park neighborhoods are the epitome of this kind of stretching things out. And because things are farther apart, you can't – you'd end up driving because it's so far to walk. You have to walk blocks to get to even the main road where you could catch a bus, if you had a bus. Whereas with the narrow, skinny lots, things aren't far apart. It takes me 20 feet to walk to my neighbors. In Alta Vista, it takes you 100 to go next door to see your neighbors. So by stretching things out, you encourage car usage. With zoning, you say – well, you know, and some zoning makes sense. You don't want the nuclear bomb factory right next to your house. You don't want the chemical plant right next to your house. I mean, you look at Cancer Alley down in Louisiana. Yeah. Yeah, it's killing people. It kills people down there. So there is benefits to zoning. But you look at Laramie and the only places where there are businesses, basically, are Grand Avenue and 3rd Street and the downtown next to 3rd Street. You know, that there is a coffee shop at the Civic Center, the old junior high. That's pretty amazing. I think it's the only place there that you can just walk in with cash and purchase something in that whole building, in that whole neighborhood, unless you go to the library and buy a used book off the friend's shelf. And how many – you look around the neighborhoods of Laramie. There's no coffee shops. There's nothing. Where they built the credit union building, which they've now moved out of, over on Reynolds, there's a mini-mart there and a – there's something else there. There's a mini-mart. Nothing's moved into that old bank building that I know of. But there's – that's like the only non-residential thing going on. There's an office park up the way, but it's far enough away from the mini-mart that walking down to the mini-mart to get a cup of coffee at lunchtime doesn't happen. Right, right. It doesn't happen. But it's probably – my guess is that that business park on 22nd Street, next to the old Springwind, isn't zoned that they could put in a coffee shop. It's business only, doctor's office only. It forces people to get in their car and drive. You look at the strip mall we've got on North 3rd Street. We had the grocery store, and now they've got Ross and the Homeplace and then the – Fitment, Fitment, yeah, yeah. People aren't going to go to the building store and the Safeway on the same trip unless they take the car and they move that car. Because everything's all stretched out. Nobody wants to walk across parking lots. Right. It's not human nature. Parking lots are dangerous. There's cars moving around and backing up and, you know, maneuvering and doing all that stuff. People don't want to walk there. People want to get away from those cars or have the cars be guaranteed stationary and parked on the street, and they want to walk in a place where they feel safe. Right. You mentioned earlier that we should be prioritizing mobility. What would that do to the community's economy if mobility was prioritized? It costs you $10,000 a year to own and feed a car. I get away with a little bit less because I drive so little, and it's an old car, and it's relatively cheap to insure, and it's paid for, and getting parts is a beast. You know, I had to replace some parts on it, and it cost me $100. But I don't know how much you make, but a person making, say, $50,000 a year, that means the first couple hours of their day is – they're working – is to care and feed that car. Paying for parking, paying for insurance, paying for fuel, paying for tires and maintenance. Making car payments because most people don't drive 35-, 40-year-old cars. Yeah, most people are making payments, and the insurance costs are crazy now because cars have all these extra features they didn't used to have. So how much of your day are you working just to pay to have the car? What would you do if you didn't have to spend that money? What would you do with $10,000 more income a year? Come on, Sean, tell me. Boy, I would love to have that. Yeah, $10,000 a year. You could take a vacation, a nice vacation. You know, I could take a cruise ship for a week or two, you know, to Hawaii and back. Heck yeah. I could eat in downtown Laramie. Every day. Every day. Yeah, you could go downtown and enjoy meals out, not have to do the dishes, not have to do the cooking. You could go to a lot of movies. I mean, I just dropped $50 to go see the Grand Theft Ballet, you know, because I've got the money. I'd probably spend, oh, $2,000, $3,000 on the car, the biggest cost being insurance. And then once in a while I drop a couple hundred on maintenance. You know, I need a tune-up or, you know, an oil change and that kind of stuff. And tires often weather check out before they wear out, you know, because it's parking outside. And fuel is a very minimal cost for me because I don't drive it. So I have figured out how to have that car for when I need a car, you know, like if I want to go somewhere out of town, but save that cost. The question you gave me was what? If mobility were prioritized, how would that affect Laramie's economy? How many, we got 35,000 in Laramie? Okay, let me get this to go away. Pull up. I'm going to do some arithmetic on my computer here because I can't do numbers that big. 35, let's assume we have 35,000 people in Laramie. That's 35,000 I got. Okay, times 10,000. $350 million. $350 million is what? 10,000 times 3,500 people or 35,000 people. $350 million. What could Laramie do with $350 million? We'd be able to afford to buy stuff downtown and not have to drive out to the big box on the east edge of town. You know, the big box would do better because some people would still drive out there or go out there, ride the bus, whatever, if they didn't have a car. But you know the economics of, I spend a dollar at your son's restaurant. Some of that is his tip, which he spends on rent or on groceries or whatever. Some of that goes to the restaurant owner. Some of that goes to the Cisco truck where they got the food. Some of that money goes to, but a lot of it's going to stay in town. And then your son's money, he spends at the grocery store. Some of that goes to paying the clerk at the grocery store and the people that stock the shelves at the grocery store, right? Some of the money circulates and stays in town. Some of it comes out. But money that comes from other towns, too, comes into Laramie. Right. Yeah, that's, I had economics in college 50 years ago. You know, I mean, 40, 50 years ago. I mean, I don't remember what you call this theory, but it's money circulates. Right, right. You drop $350 million a year in Laramie and it's going to circulate. But it's also, Cheyenne would be in the same situation. It would circulate. You know, Fort Collins, Casper, Rollins. Rollins could use that kind of money, really. Let me ask that same question, but instead of what would prioritizing mobility do economically, what would it do socially? It would, oh, socially. If people had enough money in their pocket that they weren't worried about do I pay the gas bill or the light bill this month, you know? How can I find cheaper cell service? The people, I know from personal experience, I haven't really looked into this, but I know from personal experience when I started collecting both my GI retirement and my social security, that I've got more money coming in now than I need to get through the month. I can pay the light bill, the gas, all the utilities, not a problem. I can get them all paid. I can pay, just write a check for the insurance. I can, you know, do, I've got money left over. I can actually afford to drive occasionally. And I can enjoy it and make another trip to Cheyenne when I'm not going over just for my meds at the air base or business at AARP. You know, if I just want to go to Cheyenne, I can go to Cheyenne if I so choose. Woo-hoo. I can drop 50 bucks on the Ukrainian ballet and sit in the front row. I can do that. So, yeah, socially, you know, I can be the person that brings the food to the party, you know, because I've got the money. I can afford to buy the food and bring it to the party. Whereas before, it was always, you know, I never did the bag of chips thing. That sucks. But I have really cheap fudge that I know how to make it. I can make it in half an hour and have it ready to serve. And everybody loves fudge. People get bored with chips. But, yeah, it makes it so that people can socialize more. Well, like you said, you can eat out in the restaurants. It's a buzz. What would it do cynically? That I don't know. That I have found that people that have more money than what they need, and this is what kind of scares me, tend to be I've got mine, screw you more than those. They found that the lower income people are much more generous than the high income people with their money. The high income people may drop $10,000 on something, whereas the low income person might only be able to drop $25. But as a percentage of income and people putting time in, that's one thing I got really into was time because I didn't have the money. So I learned how I worked political campaigns, doing the civic stuff like being a founder of BikeNet, volunteering at the shelter. I put my time in. Traffic Commission, I put my time in because I can do that because I don't have the money. And at Traffic Commission, they don't need money. They meet once a month and drink water. That's interesting thinking about time as the value that you're contributing to the community. Yeah, and time and effort. And so that's – I don't know a good – I don't have a radical urbanist answer to that. But I do know that we're all better off when we're all better off. And it's the disparity between those that have and those that have more and those that don't have enough. Those disparities are what can cause a lot of social friction. Can you think about that? It's like you look at the – not the salaries because they're all set by federal law, but the wealth of Congress critters and senators and those kind of people. And they're not getting paid that much. How come they've got so much wealth? Well, one, they had to have the wealth to get elected. You know, if I were to run for Congress, nobody's going to – I ain't going to have – I ain't going to do it because I don't have the money to pay for a campaign, right? But I think if we had less – you know, $10,000 for you and me is a lot of money. $10,000 for the president of the university is hosting a dinner on campus for one night for his cronies. Right. Not that he would have – I don't know how they finance those things, but I haven't been invited to any of them for years. So it's interesting to me that as an activist you're working from within the system, at least as it relates to – or is that – do you agree with that? Yeah. Yeah. And I realize I'm up against a very, very steep wall. The system is very well entrenched. And sometimes it's pointed out to me and it's like a sledgehammer upside the head. We did a subcommittee on speed reduction. And I ended up writing that all up. I went to city council and all three of the subcommittee – no, I think I was the only one from the subcommittee that showed up. And I sent what I had written ahead of time to all the city councilors so they knew what I was going to be saying. And the city administration knew what I was going to be – when you send to all the city councilors at once it goes to the city manager's office so she knows – she knew what I was going to – they had no arguments to refute what I was saying. So they came up with the argument that – okay, things like crashes. I wasn't talking about crashes. I was talking about – though I did have a list of all the citations and crashes and all that and it was in my report. What they came up with was the bicycle pedestrian crashes with cars. About half the time it was the pedestrian or bicyclist's fault because it was at night and they were wearing dark clothing. Excuse me, when two cars crash into each other at night, do you cite the black car because it's harder to see than the white car? No, no, no. You go out and measure and decide who ran the stop sign, right, who had the right of way. You know, that's the pedestrian's fault because they're crossing the street at a corner where they're supposed to – every corner has a crosswalk whether it's painted or not. That is where we want the pedestrians to cross. Now, it didn't happen that way before we had cars. People just walked wherever they wanted to. But pedestrians crossing, they're going from – they're crossing 8th Street, going up Sheridan or whatever and they get hit by a car because they weren't seen because they were wearing dark colored clothing or they were a kid listening to rock and roll on his headphones or, you know, somebody just talking on the phone, distracted. But it's the pedestrian's fault because they were doing that? No, it is the car's fault. Nothing happened to the car. Maybe they got a little dent in their bumper, but the pedestrian is in the hospital. It's the car's fault. But they cite the pedestrian or the bicyclist because they were wearing dark colored clothing. Or the bicyclist wasn't wearing a helmet. I don't know how if I wear a helmet it's going to improve your crappy driving. I don't think I have any control over your crappy driving, you know. We need to engineer our streets so that people go slower. So this is what you presented to the council? No, this is the argument they had. They couldn't refute what I had sent. I can send you the paper. Yeah, I'd love to see it. I'll send it. Rattle my case so I remember because this is going to be a long conversation. They got the chief of police to get up there and talk about crashes. Not speeding citations, not speed, crashes. And how they can blame half of them on the pedestrian or the bicyclist because they were wearing dark clothing. They had a couple other arguments like that. That reducing the speed limit is not going to help Laramie. I had the numbers like when you hit a person at 20 miles an hour, the numbers, different people have come up with different numbers. But basically if you hit somebody at 20 miles an hour, you have a one chance in 10 of killing them. If you hit them at 40 miles an hour, you have a one chance in 10 of them surviving. Mass times velocity squared. And talk to all your gun friends. They all know that formula. Mass times velocity squared. That's why the AR-15 is such a deadly weapon. It's shooting a .223. That's a .22 with one more thousandth of an inch ammeter. That's the bullet, the 5.56 round that's in an AR-15. I know it. I was 24 years in the military. I know that number. The reason it is so deadly is it's such a high velocity. Mass times velocity squared is what produces. That's why the impact from one of those rounds is so deadly. The .45 slug, which is more than twice the diameter, or 9 millimeter, which is more than twice the diameter, or almost twice the diameter of that 5.56 round, doesn't do near the damage as that AR-15 or M-16 round. Mass times velocity squared. And now cars are even more deadly because they've got that big, ugly front end. Go look at your F-Series 4 pickup trucks. They're the worst. Dodges are bad. Chevys are bad. SUVs, they all have that big front end. My little sedan, if you all stand out in the street and I hit you, I'm going to take out your knees. You may end up on crutches, wheelchair, canes for the rest of your life, but you're going to roll over the hood and land in the street. If I go and get an SUV or an F-350 or even an F-150 and I hit you with that, I'm hitting your torso, I am hitting your head, and then I'm knocking you down and then driving over you. Now, what do you think, even at the same speed, who do you think is going to survive? Yeah. And Laramie can't change the way cars are built. And the automotive folks are going to say, well, this is what people want. No, this is what you are saying, people, and telling them they want. Because that's what's out there. Go to any car dealership, look at every new car they've got, not one of them is going to take out knees. They're all going to take out torsos. And then you get people driving those great big cars with that great big front end that you need a step ladder to get in. Yeah. And they can't see what's in front of them. No. They can't see until you get 20, 30 feet out in front of them if there's a child there in a crosswalk. They can't see that because the hood's in the way. How do you get people to think more about people's relationships with streets and automobiles? There's five of us now, which is enough to start. We're going to try to start what's called a Strong Towns group. A fellow named Chuck Marone did a – you can find the video. It's Conversations with an Engineer. And then Chuck Marone – I don't know – how do you spell – I never remember how to spell his last name. And then just put Chuck after it. You'll get it. It's two little puppy dogs animated talking to each other. You just got to watch. You just got to see this. It's like – it's Traffic Commission 101, City Engineer 101. But – because he started out as an engineer, and then he went into planning, and then it dawned on him that he was not making things better. And he went rabbit hole and got into this. And he now runs a nonprofit that has, like, 12 employees. And it's all by donation. And he doesn't get any federal grants. He doesn't get any of this money. He's gone one way. And he's more into the economics of what's going on. And some of it I don't agree with. But I stay basically with just the transportation because I'm getting old. If I were a 20-year-old doing this, I could study up on this stuff and, you know, become an expert. As it is, I'm just autodidactic. You know, so I have to – I keep myself narrow enough to keep it under control. There are so many rabbit holes in this. But the Strong Towns group – you can get ahold of me, or you, if somebody wants to get involved in this. It looks at how we can make improvements in the community from the bottom up rather than the top down. Strong Towns is a measure of how they measure what they've accomplished. They're doing it more economically. I can see economics and things, but I'm doing it more just talk to people and what I see on the street. Am I seeing more bicep – I'm seeing – definitely the last 10 years, I've seen more winter bicep length. One, winters aren't as gnarly. And, two, there's just more people out there. Yeah. You know? And, yeah, I was down at the bike shop yesterday just hanging around. There was a bike on the stand that they were working on. Man, it could have been my bike. It had worn chain rings, worn freewheel, full tenders, you know. It was your basic no-shocks old mountain bike, you know, with a crack ridden out of it, the paint fading, you know, and beat up on the top tube, which is from leaning it up against stuff, and it chips the paint, you know. It was like, yeah, I like that bike. And, yeah, she rides – that lady rides year-round. She rides all over this town on that bike. It's like me, you know. There are more of us than just have given up. I get on my bike. Damn it, I'm a 10-year-old. You know, just as I'm going down to the other place. I get on my bike, and I'm down that little ramp driveway and up over the – going up the crown of the street, and it's just like, zoop, zoop. Yeah, woo-hoo. I'm a 10-year-old again. I'm having fun. You look at bicyclists, and we all look 10 years younger than we are. You look at people – because we're not frowning when we're riding. We're smiling. We're spending our days smiling. And you look at people driving, and they're all grumpy faced. I do that thing at Third and Grand every Friday, and I look at – they smile and they wave at me and honk, but most of the people I see in those vehicles that are sitting there waiting for the light to change, they're frowning. They're not happy. I saw a poster – well, it's just the other day. It said, Bicycles Give the Freedom that Auto Ads Only Promise. I'm going to get those stickers, and I'm going to put them all on. Yeah, that's a good – I like that. I like that. I'm going to wrap it up, but one more question. Do people ever thank you for your service on the commission? Most people don't even know it exists. It started out as a traffic – I think it was the first board and commission created by city council in the 30s because towns and cities all over the country were doing it because cars suddenly were moving in, and the automotive lobby, which is like the highway builders, the car makers, the tire makers, all the people that were making money, the petroleum folks, all those people were like, how do we promote cars? Because towns were saying, no, we don't want cars. They're killing our people. They're killing our children because children used to be able to play in the street. The car lobby won, so now you can only cross at the corner. J-walking, a J at that time was like the N-word now. Being a J meant you were a hip from the country that was too stupid to know how to tie your shoes, you know. So you were a J-walker if you didn't cross at the corner when there were no cars around, you know. You had to make – all that stuff. The car lobby won, and we're fighting back. And, yeah. Do they know we exist? No. Not unless somebody gets pissed off. They know – a lot of people know I'm on the TSC, but how do I get the stop sign moved? And I say, if you just come to a meeting, you can speak on it, but we can't do anything because it wasn't agended. I email them the form. This is how you send – this is how you get the process started. This is how the process works. I make sure that the city gets a copy of everything I've sent because it is a public – I am being official business, so I have to make it a public document, so I have to make sure the city gets a copy so they don't have to search my email because I don't want them searching my email. It's just self-protection. But, you know, I will guide them through it. I had a neighbor that needed handicapped parking out front because both her and her daughter were needing handicapped parking, and I walked them through the process. And then I didn't – when it came up for time for a vote, I knew it was going to pass, I abstained because I said, they're my neighbors and I have been helping them with this. I don't know if I have to abstain or not, but I'll abstain and then there's no trouble. Yeah. Nobody can – You're helping them navigate the system. Yeah, I help people navigate the system, and they thank me for that. But most people don't realize that they're a slave to their car. That's $10,000. And it's going up with this last bad situation we've had. It's probably 12 now. You know. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, thank you. I did tell you about 9th and Lewis and how I got changed. That was something else. It was just – it took, like, three months, and it's just like, wait a minute. This is all wrong. What we are doing is wrong. And I tried to explain to the commissioners, but I knew I had lost them after the first two minutes and just – and then I started learning how to write things up so that they could read things ahead of time. And, you know, do stuff like that and go to city council and do all that kind of – there's a lot of stuff. Anyway. Well, thank you so much. Looking forward to – maybe I'll be able to ask you questions. You added the audio. Yeah, can you send me the audio? Because if I said something that I need to, like – Please don't. Thanks. Yeah. I purposely haven't mentioned names or – Great. I like that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I'll send that to you, and I'll try to send you the transcripts, too. Well, the transcript – okay, use AI for the transcript. Do not try to transcribe it yourself. No, no, I won't. I was using Otter AI, but I have a free subscription, and I quit recording at some point. So – Oh, there's a free – Yeah, on my phone. We're still recording. Yeah. We're still – I'm recording it on Zoom, and I'm recording it on – or I was on my phone because I'm really paranoid about losing something. Yeah. I'm trying to think of the AI that AARP uses, and it's a paid one. But it does really well with city council meetings, except it can't spell Erin O'Doherty's name. I've had, like, seven different spellings of her name pop up. When I used to work in state government when Governor Friedenthal was in office, whenever I would get his name, it would auto-correct as Tetherball, Governor Tetherball. Did you tell him? No. I wonder if anybody else told him, because I probably came out of this too. Okay, well, I'm going to say goodbye. It was lovely talking to you. Okay. Have fun in D.C. Okay. Take care. Okay. Bye-bye.