When it comes to the goal of safer streets and "Vision Zero," how much of a focus should we put on individual driver behaviors and infrastructure design? The "systems versus people" debate is raging as cities and advocates grapple with record traffic fatalities.

Tara Goddard, PhD, is an assistant professor at the School of Urban Planning at Texas A & M University. She earned her doctorate in urban planning from Portland State University and she's led several studies about car culture, "windshield bias" and more.

Host: Jonathan Maus, editor and publisher of BikePortland.

Links:

• Dr. Goddard Texas A & M Bio Page / @DrTaraGoddard on Twitter
• PSU Transportation Safety Culture Webinar with Dr. Goddard on February 16th
• That driving-centric KATU-TV story
• Book: There Are No Accidents, byJessie Singer (Simon & Schuster, 2022)
• Cars are rewiring our brains to ignore all the bad stuff about driving (Article on Ian Walker's "motonormativity" research in The Verge)

Jonathan Maus 0:00

Welcome to the bikeportland podcast. I'm your host Jonathan Maus my guest. This episode is Dr. Tara Goddard, an assistant professor in the School of Urban Planning at Texas a&m University. There are many reasons why I wanted to talk with Dr. Goddard right now. One of the main focuses of her research is how social psychology impacts the way people drive. It's a field that's gaining momentum as cities and their advocates, many of whom are reeling from record traffic fatalities, realize that building safer streets isn't happening nearly fast enough. And that bad behaviors by people who use them can easily Trump even the best road designs. I also wanted to talk with Dr. Goddard, because her field of study includes the impact of linguistics and semantics on transportation culture, which if you read by Portland, you will know is a topic that is very near and dear to my heart. I'm also someone who respects people with diverse perspectives. And I think Dr. Goddard has tons of it. She's worked in academia, earning a PhD in urban planning from Portland State University, which is where I first heard about her work. And she has a civil engineering degree from UC Davis in California. But she's also worked in government as a planner for the city of Sacramento. And as a bicycle and pedestrian program coordinator for the city of Davis, Dr. Goddard has worked on the inside and outside of government. And she's also relatively active on Twitter, which love it or hate, it does give one a certain dose of perspective. I also want to turn listeners on to an upcoming Portland State University webinar, where Dr. Goddard will present her latest thinking on car culture, windshield bias, and a lot more. That webinar is free. And it happens Thursday, February 16, from 12 to 1pm. Look for the link to register and learn more. I'll put that in the show notes. And with that, here's our conversation.

Dr. Terry Goddard, thanks for coming on the show.

Tara Goddard 1:53

Yeah, thanks for having me. Um, but so before we get into some of the nitty gritty, I'm hoping people can get a better sense of like who you are as a person so they can understand where you're coming from a little bit more. Do you mind sharing a little bit about your? This is a question I love to ask all my guests this. Do you mind sharing a little bit about your sort of relationship to cycling or in like personal mobility in general? Sure, sure. So I grew up in a really rural part of far Northern California. And so I did in a town called, actually a community outside of a town called Susanville, California, which even a lot of Californians haven't heard of. And so I did grow up. Bicycling, and walking to the little neighborhood school got driven or drove started driving to high school because it was about three miles. Although it's funny to think back, my dad was probably one of the only people in the entire town that would bike to work. And it was about seven miles. And he would do it for exercise and put on his spandex and get on his road bike. And, you know, at the time, I had no idea it was such a radical thing. But it was I went off to school to UC Santa Barbara, because it was as far as I can get from my hometown and still be in California. And that also it was on the beach, which is how you know, an 18 year old is making those big decisions about where to go to school. And UC Santa Barbara, for those who don't know, is really a very bike skateboard friendly place. It's probably one of the better or best I think bike friendly campuses. So mediately was also getting around that way. I got into transportation during a master's that I was doing at UC Davis and discovered that as a profession, really just discovered my love for transportation, partly because I was interested in being more sustainable, generally, and how do we make society better. And of course, transportation touches all our lives. And so that was just really interesting to me. And being in Davis, of course, bike bike town, USA, it was it was everywhere, it was getting everywhere by bike. And so I did my program there. And then when worked as a transportation planner in Sacramento, got the opportunity to do the be the Bike Ped coordinator in Davis. After that, and was that for four years. And, you know, for a lot of people, it's like, oh, that's the dream job. Why would you ever leave. But partly in that job, I one realized I was a research nerd. And that was just really what kind of gets me up in the morning. And I have so many questions I wanted to ask. And also there was a lot in that job that just realized, well, you know, if we build it, and people still don't come right, or if people aren't using things the way we expect them to, or things aren't working the way why is that and so I just there was a lot I felt like that I really wanted to understand more, which is also why I went back to school. So that's a very long answer to your question.

Jonathan Maus 4:37

For folks that aren't well versed in the world of Dr. Tara Goddard. Well, can you describe and not in its full breadth, of course, because you have touched on some pretty pretty interesting topics and a lot of depth and breadth. But can you just describe sort of like, how do you describe the kind of research that you do?

Tara Goddard 4:53

Yeah, so I really am at the nexus of the built environment

and on kind of the social psychology and behavior aspects of how we move through the built environment. And I'm particularly interested in safety and the safety of people outside of vehicles. But because so much of the safety of people outside of vehicles is in the hands of people inside of vehicles, I do a lot of studying of drivers. So whether it's behavior or culture, or the way we talk about crashes, is a big part of my research, as I'm sure we'll talk about, that is what I do the most of and so I've, you know, I'm interested in when that's happening in the safe systems, whether it's in like semantics, and linguistics, whether it's in climate change, and now a little bit, I'm looking at disasters and wildfire. But all within that overarching interest in safety and vulnerable road users as we often refer to them. Yeah, thanks for explaining that the kind of research you do, there's just so there's so many directions we could go, given your expertise, experience and your research. And then given the kind of stuff that I do, where I've been like sort of editorializing about this stuff and covering it from the media angle. But to just help us get focused, I'll start by just let's look at some headlines of just seeing like this week, okay, so in your home home state of the state and that your home state, the state you're in now, and in Texas, they're in use. And just last week, I saw this story about how in the last month alone, or so, police officers and patrol cars ran into three people and killed them that were walking, right, that is just tragic and super upsetting. And I just can't even believe that the headline as I read it, within their statements, they made their statements about the crashes. They were really, I mean, seem to me very clearly blaming the victims. That so that's like one headline I saw in one sort of story that as I'm, as I'm thinking about talking to you. And then in Portland, we've had, you know, record breaking pedestrian fatalities in terms of our yearly tally of road deaths. And so there have been the of course, the the expected media stories, where you have the local media person sort of sticking a mic in the face of someone from the Portland Bureau of Transportation and asking them, hey, Vision Zero is failing, what's going on? Why? Why is this happening. But what they don't talk about in those stories almost ever, is the role of the actual people who are driving the cars. Right. So that's another another note. And then just today, one of our local stations did a story about recent safety upgrades on a southeast Division Street, which was so driving centric, they interviewed a business owner who has this long history of testifying at city council, that immediate island that they put in is just destroying her business. And a few other people who just were really mad about it, the whole framing just had this sense of like, this is a bad thing. This has been a bad thing for local people, right. But what I thought was really interesting was the B roll the whole time showed these really dangerous behaviors from drivers, which were then never talked about in the actual coverage from the little anchor person on the street, which to me, it was just so classic, like, literally someone hit a median, like flip their car over. And the people were saying how they were very, very happy that the driver was still okay. And then people parking and bike lanes and stuff like that. I thought that was just such an interesting disconnect. Right? How is that connected to the bad outcomes that we keep having here in America in terms of road safety? Yeah, so great questions, the common thread through all of that really has to do with what I talk a lot about, and what I study a lot, I usually use the term car culture. There's been a lot of talk in the last week or two since the study out of the UK came out with Ian Walker, Dr. Ian Walker and his colleagues, the Moto normativity, which, you know, is a great term that kind of builds off the idea of say hetero normativity is really the same idea. Right? So what is the default, and in the US, as I'm going to be talking about in this upcoming Nitze webinar extensively, you know, that is our default. And it's it's the system that we're in, and that we identify with, that we depend on, we built our way around it. And it's really, really important because and this is not something new, right? We've known this for a long time. And it's, it's not the same in every country. I remember, very early in my career. I mean, it's probably 20 years ago, now, Dr. Peter Firth saying, he's comparing the us of the Netherlands and there's this great thing where he says, saying, You're a bicyclist in the Netherlands is like saying your toothbrush or And his point was, of course you are like, it's, it's what you do, like it's no big deal, right? It's not an identity. And that's different than here, right? Where you have to kind of it becomes part of your identity, because we have, you know, the system that you it's either the default or not and you end up having to defend it or not. And it shapes our worldview or shapes our understanding of what's possible, it becomes a scapegoat for things. So the business on division, this idea that a median is

I know, I know, I put a lot on your plate there at the beginning there. And I think you touched on a lot of stuff as well. But I want to drill down a little bit to what I think is sort of the crux of, of the debate, or one of the one of the many different crux of this debate, which can go a lot of directions is this idea of like the system versus people. You know, like do we fix? Do we should we focus on fixing the roads and the infrastructure? Or should we look inward and focus on changing culture and changing behaviors, it seems to me that just sort of traditionally, in general, the D O T 's have always really been the ones to push the individual behavior thing, which to me, it's always seemed like sort of a cover your ass kind of move. So the natural reflex since the do T's which for folks don't know the Department of Transportation's so the natural reflex, if they're saying its individual behaviors, the problem of why we have so many traffic, deaths and crashes, the reflex from advocates was sort of to swing to the other direction, and sort of take on the mantle of Well, no, it's not individual behavior. It's the design of roads that you're putting out for those people that consume which is leading to all these terrible outcomes.

So I have a feeling that you're a bit concerned with where that balance is. And I just wonder, can you share sort of what do you think is the risk of focusing too much on infrastructure when we talk about crashes and safety issues on the road?

Yeah, I really appreciate this question. Because I am concerned about it is something I've really noticed. And I think I want to say, first of all, I think there's a place for all of those, I think the biggest danger is to say that one or the other is should be our focus, because all the pieces are important. And I think you know, certainly especially in online debates, there's a tendency to want to say, oh, like we should do one or the other. And so I think we always need to get away from that there's a role for all of that. And I think in particular, when you're talking about, say advocacy versus agency folks versus researchers, like we have different roles to play or journalists or writers, authors, whatever. And so those are all should be complementary. That said, I do think that there's a few reasons that we shouldn't just be totally focused on the built environment and I want to differentiate between talking about systems as the built environment versus systems more broadly, when system This could be systems of policy systems of regulation systems of law. Because I think that is a really valuable thing of taking into account those larger systems, which are really important. The problem with just focusing on the built environment is several fold. One, it's really slow to change. And if we're going to wait and rely on, well, let's just wait till we can give drivers all the safer signals with a built environment, we're going to be losing 40,000 people a year or more until that happens. Second of all, there's a lot of behaviors that are still happening that we can't just explain away with the built environment, all these a lot of these other things also have to change in order for the built environment to change, right, some of the regulatory things like the Texas laws that say, oh, all this money has to go first to highway projects, before it can go to other things. But a really important piece that I'm really focused on. And I think partly this is because of my interest in the social psychology pieces of this is that these systems still rely on on are made up of people, right. And because I'm an educator who's focused on planners and engineers, and because I, myself am a former practitioner, as a planner, an engineer, I'm really focused on that group. And so if we have those people who themselves have biases, or we have biases, and these behavioral issues, but we're the ones making the planning decisions, and the engineering decisions, and writing the guidebooks and writing the documents, and we're not dealing with those cultures, and those biases, that these things are going to change either. So that's why I think it's also we can't just be giving a kind of a like, oh, let's, let's just focus on the system. Well, systems are made up of people. So that matters, too.

Yeah, I hear you're saying, if we agree that culture change is a big part of improving America's road culture, right? Improving car culture in America, however, we want to put it. So we agree that behavior change is important. I'm worried that we don't really have like, we've institutionalized infrastructure changes, we have a whole system of do T's we have projects that people, you know, you talk about infrastructure, people know who does that it's like a known thing. We haven't done the same thing with culture change, behavior change. And sort of related to that, is that the government, the agencies, the do T's have always played like this massive role in the idea of road safety in America. But what if they aren't, they're just not equipped to deal with these cultural change issues. So, you know, what do we do? Who takes on that role? Or should I wonder what you think about should government be the ones involved in that? Right? And just what what do you what do you think about that? Like, where is sort of the natural home to really have stronger tools and programs to help America's road culture change?

i It's a really, I mean, of course, this is the question, right? How do we affect this change? And not keep letting this happen? I totally agree with you about this. Well, what are they doing? I just want to say really fast, just because it's directly related. We said, as I'm preparing for this webinar next week, I was going through, you know, there's a lot going on, it's a one year anniversary of the USDA OTS national roadway safety strategy. And they just put out the allies in action is their statements from all these different partners, I just went through all the statements of the allies in action, in that I found that they use in all those statements, the word encourage six times support 30 times regulate zero times mandate, one time require one time and that was from Washington, D O T, that's not even from any of these, like, automotive or tech companies, right? So we're still seeing a lot of this just kind of fluffy, you know, mealy mouthed things that aren't really going to lead to any actionable change. And that is where I think we need to figure out how do we put real pressure and not keep doing this, like pat on the back? Okay, Vision Zero road safety strategy, but it's not actually leading to, you know, any actionable change.

Yeah. And I think that gets to one of the tensions I've been feeling, which is, as I've sort of teased out this idea that I said before about how, like, you'll see the local media, you'll see people ask this question of why is Vision Zero failing when they see like a record number of deaths, right? And it really, it's getting to really bother me that the whole conversation is like looking at the looking at the agency and saying, Why have you failed us when there's no one is ever looking in the mirror and saying, What can I do personally, to help, you know, affect a different future? So, I mean, part of the problem with this is that when you bring up blame and who's responsible for things people get prickly people get defensive. Is there anything that you done in your research that could help us understand a better way to sort of like frame this stuff in a way that doesn't make people so defensive. So we can move past some of those, you know, some of that controversial, you know, tension. Yeah. Um,

I do think storytelling is really important and thinking about how we're framing these. And I do think that's where, you know, maybe some of the work like looking back in time, like what mad did around alcohol, although, of course, we've now seen a swing back around alcohol, which is really frustrating. I do wonder, too. And this is someone where I'm not an expert. And I would love to talk more with like social psychologists and sociologists and public health people is where, what issues were kind of shame, culture and guilt culture are more effective, versus normalizing, but shifting stuff, like to make things more accepted, but safer. So let me give you a better example. Like with smoking, it's like, oh, we made that shameful. It's, I mean, still a lot of people do it, but it's shameful. You gotta go off in your own little space to do it, you know, it's not, you know, or, and even in this UK study, they literally use smoking, to compare with car fumes to show the difference between, you know, what people will excuse as far as kind of a secondhand smoke versus secondhand fumes. Whereas with an in this, this came to mind, because there's a thing and Jesse singers book, there are no accidents, where I actually disagree with an argument argument she makes about HIV. And she says something about if we treated HIV as only an individual problem, we would, we would only preach abstinence only education. But it's actually not what we do part of dealing with HIV was talking about safe, like condoms, right? Safe sex with condom use. And I actually think that is maybe an interesting thing to think about. It's not a perfect analogy. So excuse me, but thinking about how do we make something more like okay, we're going to be doing these things. But here's how to do it safer. This is a very unformed, uninformed new idea. I'm thinking of like, just as a comparison of totally ostracizing people for something that's really unhealthy. versus saying, like, this is something we all do we all sex, we all drive or whatever. Here's, here's how to weigh you know, here's how to make it safer. But I also i, and this is against me want to just to respond to an earlier comment. I also think we still there's a lot to discuss when we're talking about individual behaviors between the kind of, again, what Jesse's book discusses a lot with like errors, where we're driving to the built environment, the environment tells us it's okay to go fast, we go fast, versus a lot of the negative behaviors that people are doing all the time where people do know, it's not safe, and they're doing it anyways, their prayers, prioritizing their own behaviors. And I think again, COVID has really shown us that it's not a few bad apples, it's a lot of people who are willing to kind of behave badly. My I've been using for years, the thing you do things behind the wheel, you'd never do in the supermarket, right? You've never run into someone, you know, aggressively. You've never shouted someone. I'm not sure it can use that analogy anymore. Because all of a sudden, people aren't doing things in supermarkets that I never thought they do. Right. And so I do feel like some of the behavior we're seeing even worse on the roads, like with some of the guardrails off, no pun intended. Like, again, and so I do think there's this whole range of kind of individual behaviors that we are going to have to figure out a different series of ways to approach and it's not going to be one size fits all. So some things are going to need to be like, this is the this is socially unacceptable, versus like, here's a safer way to do this thing. Versus like, no, here, this is something and again, we haven't even touched on this, but this is you are strictly liable, like strict liability for doing this thing. And if you do it, you are going to be like severely punished. I mean, punished and like money and losing your car.

Yeah, like they go back to the safe sex and safe driving thing. Not only is that you know, provocative and interesting just on its on its face, but it actually gets to a way that I've framed things this thing a lot, which is obviously I get pushback, I try to make a big tent and try to appeal to people from all different sorts of like, political, whatever agenda is whatever. So I'm aware that when I talk about being car free and not driving, it's got very little juice beyond a small group of people. So what I like to say is I'm not against car use. I'm against car abuse. So it seems like you know, that kind of thing, right of talking about hey, yeah, we're going to drive people can drive but we're trying to get so that people don't drive like complete jerks and idiots and do all kinds of crazy things that you know, that hurt people. So um I wonder sort of on that note where just in terms of describing this, and I agree with you, by the way that the guardrails have come off, I think that is a big problem that people need to talk about the idea of, of, and I think it runs into other public problems or public safety problems we're having, whether it's gun violence or other thing, which is this sense of despair, the sense of like, people are just like, Screw it and do whatever I want. And it leaks into other other things. So I wonder, Where do you stand on the term traffic violence, it's an interesting way, it's come up quite a bit more in terms of like actual advocacy documents and advocacy, like speaking and stuff like that, like a couple of last session in the Salem in the Oregon legislature down in Salem, an advocate from the street trusses, which is our nonprofit advocacy group here in Portland, they were testifying down in Salem to lawmakers, and they use the word traffic violence and some testimony. And one of the the chairs of one of the committees, they were talking to one of the representatives down there, like stopped the whole thing and was like, Could you please not use that? Why are you using that word traffic violence? I just think that's a little bit going that's a little bit too much. Um, we shouldn't be using that term. Right? So it gets to this idea of like, how do we frame stuff? What do you think about that term? Do you think it's a term that advocates should use to describe what's going on out there? Is it too? Is it too forceful? And it just pushes people away? Like, do you have a sense of that?

That is a really good question. And so obviously, I'm someone who thinks about language and, and framing and semantics all the time. And I have been using it quite a bit. And I, I do understand that, certainly understand how for some people that it could be triggering, if they're talking about things where they're like, Well, it's, it's not intentional, if they're like, I want to reserve that word for intentional cases, or when someone who, you know, for the road rage incidents or for the shootings, which have the road rage shootings have gone up significantly, you know, which is something else, that's just really alarming. What I do, I don't know that I've seen a good term that really gets people thinking about, okay, it's not an accident, these aren't, these are preventable, these are not just the cost of doing business that we should accept. But they aren't necessarily intentional, like road rage. And I think the reason that people have been using them is because by their nature, traffic crashes are violent, right? The outcome is violent, they are severe, and even the most modest, moderate, especially when it includes someone outside a vehicle is violent to the human body. So I would certainly be interested to know if people have suggestions for something that finds a middle ground. But so far, I have been using that that term quite a bit.

Okay, thanks. And correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me just from from where I sit that the field itself of this kind of transportation, culture research, I'm not sure of a good term to use for it. But let's say the field that you're in, you mentioned Ian Walker, who did great work around motor normativity, which I'll put a link in the show notes, too. It's really interesting. Just new, new study that came out. Jennifer dill, another person at Portland State University did stuff about like preference of where, where bike riders would choose to go, the more of like the psychology piece, it still seems to me compared to studying signals and freeway on ramps and other things that this side of transportation research is smaller. You're biased in this but do you think more research and science in and of itself, being part of the conversation can maybe help? You know, bring the temperature down a little bit and make these conversations more productive?

Yeah, absolutely. And you're right, I am biased because I always think that more science is good science. And certainly, you know, folks like Alexa Dell Boston, in Australia, if you'll remember she did that great study, looking at how people view bicycles as less than human were so it was like the evolution of man thing, but instead it was the bicyclist to insect you know, those are you know, there's so there's really cool science Rachael Aldred in the UK has done some great work and others looking at kind of this, the social psychology piece of how we view people and you know, Walker has been doing this as long as anybody I've known where how even how we describe people outside the vehicle with like human versus kind of object language, but anyhow, but I think to one of the gaps that would really help and this is why I'm so interested in it really helped like you're talking bringing down the temperature and more importantly kind of really move things forward, which will help bring down the temperature is understanding how it affects policymaking how it affects decision making, how it's going to affect the ash toe guide, and the Highway Design Manual. And NITSA rulemaking and these things that really need to change in order for safety to get better. I mean, we're always as humans going to have our challenges with tribes, right? It's like hardwired into our DNA. But I think the more that we can do interdisciplinary work and learn from anthropologists and sociologists, and you know, people in other fields who do good work and understanding how to break down stereotypes of all kinds, and how to improve these kinds of intergroup relations, I think is really, really important and can be really helpful. And we're just, in many ways scratching the surface in the transportation field. And it's why I am so interested in working with folks in those fields in my own work. And it's really exciting to me.

Cool. You were saying about, you mentioned the police earlier. And we've talked a little bit about not just the importance of changing culture in terms of individual drivers, but working our way upstream into like how the system is impacted. And of course, police officers and police agencies are definitely part of the system, they're out doing traffic stops, they are responding to all these crashes and stuff. So one thing I've always been concerned about with this policing, part of the conversation is how they are like sort of the sole voice of what happens at a crash, because they're the ones that respond, that gives them a tremendous amount of power to set the narrative. That's one thing. The second piece of that is that they put out a press statement from their own officers accounts, which then gets regurgitated by the news media, right. And so the news media runs these press statements, but they never say it's coming from the police. Really, it's not really clear. So I think most of the public just reads these things, and thinks this is like reported news, which then gives it another added layer of authority and credibility when it really is just a government press release from a police bureau. So I wonder if you have any thoughts on what can be done to sort of improve that police to media pipeline, and how we can stop having these really terrible, like news stories about crashes that can often set in and exacerbate and perpetuate these sort of like false narratives about traffic culture.

So one, the work that we did with the with the New Jersey police, where we were asking them, what's one of the outcomes of that is we actually came up with some guidance documents aimed at police to say, you know, keeping it simple focus on the facts, don't, you know, get out things to, you know, don't say things to the press, when before the investigation is finished, you know, there's different guidance, and so I can share that with you to share in the notes, I think that's really important. Also a reminder to journalists, and with the understanding that, you know, journalism is under more pressure than ever, you're under huge time constrained budget constraints. You know, beat reporters are juggling a lot. There might not be a lot of training people are new, all those kinds of constraints. But But journalism, like your job isn't to just pair it with the police isn't just to replicate the press release, it is to interrogate like, what is going on there? Are there trends is this part of a bigger pattern and things like that, right. So those are all things that can improve that process. As well, we one of the study that I've been doing here at Texas a&m, and we're preparing right now so that we can publish is we've been looking at the crash report forms for all the 50 states, every single one is different. I had no idea that there was so little standardization and so much variety in the way that even on scene Crash Reporting gets done. So there is a huge burden, frankly, on police on scene for what they have to do to collect. And so you know, then on the scene that the officer is responsible for public safety, if there's you know, directing traffic, making sure there's no additional things getting hurt, collecting information. Sometimes they're filling out these reports later for an a different spot. Also something that I learned at a recent traffic safety conference, which was mostly law enforcement is hearing them the pressure to report things in such a way that they get a conviction, essentially. So they'll often put things that are the easiest to prove. So rather than put what might really be all the contributing factors, they'll do something like departed the lane or failed to maintain lane position, because that's yeah, they ran they left the lane. That's kind of irrefutable, right. And I'm not saying that they lied. It's not that they lied, that happened. That's just the easiest thing to write down because it's like, okay, in court, the drivers like there's nothing to say there. But then we don't have good data and a good understanding of what really happened and that's this might sound a little tangential, but it's all part of these larger issues. And these challenges of what's been collected on seeing it crashes, what's the training? What are the forms? So we need to be looking at how are we like collecting the data? What's the training happening with the police? And then what are these, you know, again, these, the police have their own challenges with windshield bias that we all have. And so these problems, then, like you're saying, they kind of, you know, they get worse down the road, right, like, so then it gets replicated by the or that gets repeated by the journalist, and then it gets the the public, just assume that that's what happened are, what the truth is, and that victim blaming just gets carried on. And then we just all kind of assume that pedestrians dart into rows and dark clothes everywhere, and it's all their fault. Right. So there's just huge amounts of work. I think that needs to be done with better training. One of the things that we've talked about, like, again, another thing that I learned is that they don't all use like the same digital system to record things like there's vendors who will bid for a police like department or jurisdiction to use them as their online reporting form. It's like, well, let's better standardized, like, there could be regulation that standardizes, what gets collected on a scene, that then can also be even the wording that it spits out in its forms, doesn't victim blame, for example. And there's also larger issues that I think are important to talk about with say that I'm interested in looking at with, say, police pursuits, and and when those are necessary, then so but and then a third study that I did with these colleagues is we actually were working with a group of New Jersey police and asking them, you know, how do you feel about using crash versus accident? And how do you feel about focusing on the driver, and there was a lot of general support, but they had a lot of the pushback had to do with one just kind of institutional feeling they were pushing against institutional change. And then some real concerns about liability, which we feel is unfounded. But what a huge perception issue. So I don't know if that answers your question. But there's, there's so much complexity with the police issue. You know, not even touching on the issue of armed responses and biased, you know, racially biased stops and high speed chases, and all these things that I think,

you know, I'm I'm heartened at that answer, because at least I know, people are like working on this. And this is the thing that you are actually engaged with. So that is good news. I'm glad to hear that because I just think it's something that could, there are some like, not easy, but things that could change. I think that at least we should try some pilots or something. I've always personally thought we should push the idea of having templates that we can maybe try that sort of like a madlib kind of thing, where you don't have exactly

what I call it, I literally call it Mad Libs, like just fill it in the spots. Yeah, and it's easier for them. Like it reduces the burden on them like it's, I'm not, we're I'm trying to make it easier for them. And that's so much of even what I say about like the policing stuff is, let's make it easier on them. Let's make it safer for them. And it will be safer for everyone. So, you know, I'm trying to find ways that this works. Same thing with the automated enforcement, we can remove the bias, we can make it safer for the people who are being policed, and it will be safer for the police themselves. So they should get on board. But then you have the case of like, I forget which town it is, I have this story saved where, you know, they were told to not do ticket for minor offenses. And then the police chief says, Well, we're gonna ignore that because it's been bad for morale, to not do enough ticketing. And it's like, so there's some real deep culture things that need to change as well. But, but like equity, I don't think I'm probably not saying it right. And my apologies to Oberoi, Reid. You know, they've been doing some really great work with identifying ways to do automated enforcement in ways that are, you know, just and so there is work being done in this area, and I think you'll hopefully see more in the near future.

Yes, well said, I appreciate that. Okay. Last couple of things here. If you I know you one of your jobs is to educate you see yourself as someone who's educating city planners and road engineers, that's a big part of why you do the work you do. If you were standing up in a conference in front of all of them, maybe you get the keynote at Transportation Research Board, you know, something like that. What would be sort of your top thing you'd want them to leave with? What would you want to tell them?

Really good question. Wow, I mean, I'm never speechless. I have to think about that. That's a lot of pressure.

I mean, it's basically just straight off quickly synthesize all of the body of work you've done into the most salient piece, right, like, how hard is that?

Right? I guess, I guess I would say that we can expect in demand the better of ourselves and our systems. And that doesn't mean taking on our entire system. But just our little piece of that, whatever that is, and just fight that fight. And that's enough. And also find ways to find balance and the things that bring you joy and give yourself Grace along the way.

Well, Dr. Tara Goddard, thank you so much for talking to me about all this stuff. Well, thanks

for having me on. It's great to chat with you.

That was Dr. Tara, daughter and Assistant Professor in the School of Urban Planning at Texas a&m University. Thank you so much for listening. And to all of you who support bikeportland Thank you very much. It's your financial contributions that make our work possible. And if you're not a subscriber yet, please do sign up as soon as you can at bikeportland.org/support. I'm your host, Jonathan Maus. And until next time, I'll see you in the streets.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai