Our Civic Therapy miniseries continues with Reverend Donnell Wyche about WTF Transportation. We embrace our collective Big Feelings about kids being able to bike to school, e-bikes as a vector of radicalization, the just-proposed Driving Equality Ordinance, and the cost of not taking Vision Zero literally.
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Transcript
NOTE: This version of the transcript was generated by an automated transcription tool and will contain (sometimes hilarious) errors. When we have time for human editing to clean this up we will update it, but we hope this imperfect version is better than nothing.
Jess (00:05):
Welcome to today’s episode of Ann Arbor af. I’m Jess Leeta here with co-host Molly Kleinman. We both use she her pronouns, Molly and I think a lot about how to make city better through affordable and abundant housing, safer transportation outside of cars. I already can’t wait to yell about this and community safety beyond law enforcement. Can’t wait to yell about this either. Talk about these issues because we know whatever we’re trying to accomplish, we can’t do it alone. So we’re right here with you learning how to get informed so we can get involved. Today we are continuing our new mini series civic therapy conversations where we embrace the big feelings we have about public policy and public process. Today we’re talking with Reverend Donne WeCh about WTF transportation. And Donnel has let us know ahead of time that yes, there will be swearing. Not from him, but plenty for Molly and me.
(00:59):
Reverend WeCh is a senior pastor at Vineyard Church of Ann Arbor, and his work embodies the intersection of race, faith, politics, and technology. He’s also an avid cyclist and has pedaled over 7,700 miles on his Magnum Metro plus e-bike since 2018. I love that. On this bike since 2018, it should have its own decal. Community engagement includes coordinating the Wasaw Faith Leaders Forum, serving on the city of Ann Arbor Planning Commission. Thank you for your service. And collaborating with justice system representatives on the Warrant Resolution project is a founding member of the coalition for re-envisioning our safety, a grassroots advocacy group that is helping to establish the first unarmed public safety program in Ann Arbor. He’s also involved with the Wasana Equity Partnership, interfaith Council for Peace and Justice, and the Religious Action of Affordable Housing. So we have a few ways to come into conversation today, but I appreciate that I am talking to two of the folks that maybe have the biggest feelings I know around transportation. So maybe I can ask you what’s a big feeling today? I don’t want to ask, were you almost hit by a car today? Because I don’t want to anticipate that, but what’s a big feeling today?
Donnell (02:11):
Well, I’ll jump in. Thanks for having me. It’s lovely to be with you and to be a part of this conversation. I’ll start with this week, I sent an email to my city council members because I did almost get hit three times during an 11 mile bike through our city, first at Fuller and East Medical Drive, that damn bridge that the city council decided to add an extra lane to because they didn’t want to turn down U of M’S money to rehab the bridge. Someone right at the intersection decided not to yield at a red light. I had the traffic signal, I was in the crosswalk, but they were in a big ass truck. So they can’t see me because I’m out of their sight line and they start towards me. I’m just a man with a helmet on a bike. I can’t stop a two ton vehicle. That was number one. Number two, I am on the new bike path that they put in on division between Hoover and Packard. And I called in support of removing the parking from that road, excited to go down the bike path and guess what’s in the middle of a bike path. Yeah, a delivery person,
Molly (03:35):
My gosh,
Donnell (03:36):
He was great. I told him, you’re in the bike path, please move your vehicle. And he got in his car and he pulled into the driveway. Oh wow. That was a good interaction. So I was grateful for that. I want to thank him. He was really awesome. And then on my way home on Main Street, just near Pioneer, I’m just on the bike path and guess what’s there? An Ann Arbor police, s u v cruiser on the sidewalk blocking the path and there’s a car on the bike path and they’re taking a report there and it’s like bikers be damned, pedestrians be damned. If you were in a multimodal device trying to make your way, you have to now enter the traffic and there are no cutouts for you to get back onto the sidewalk. You are damned. And what I realized with all of this is we have all these policies about how we want to get to Vision Zero, but these policies aren’t actually affecting the built environment. So those are my big feelings as we get started.
Molly (04:46):
Yes, Donnel, you’ve just demonstrated beautifully why I wanted to bring you on today for this conversation about transportation because I know that you do all of this work. You’re on planning commission, so we could have brought you to talk about housing. You do all this work around housing access and a lot of work on racial justice was, which I’m also really excited to talk about today, but you ride your bike in this city and so you just by virtue of that fact deeply what’s going wrong here and because of all your other work, you can situate it in the bigger context, which is one of the things that I was hoping to do today is to try and take my feelings and give them some structure. It’s possible the structure is going to be one of those peg boards with the red string connecting lots of different things.
(05:34):
Like I’m an obsessed serial killer hunter, but that’s some sort of context. So yeah, feelings that I’m having lately about transportation. It’s funny, all during the school year, I had to walk my kids across Packard at this spot without a crossing guard and without a traffic light. And so I have all of every day starts with frustration and now I’m taking my kids to camp and our route to camp, we can stay totally on neighborhood streets and we bike there and it’s a very different, much more relaxing and joyful experience of transportation. And yet the feelings that I want to talk about are still about school transportation because yesterday was the staff retreat for School of public policy, which is where I work. And I was connecting with some of my colleagues at another research center who are, there’s two different education policy research centers.
(06:32):
And so, so I’m talking to my friends who are in the ED policy space. I’m not in ed policy, but we’re talking as parents about our kids and what schools they’re going to and the different issues we’ve been having. And we start talking about transportation and they start thinking, oh, this is like someone should do some research on this. And I was like, yes, someone should. It’s not going to be me, but maybe it’s going to be you. And so yesterday was doing these rants that I do a lot about how the schools have this sort of unrecognized role in the transportation system and especially in the failures that we have here. So Donnel, you were talking earlier about the experience of getting your kids to school not in a car and how drivers make it worse. And that’s my experience too, right down to the fact that they sit out front and idle their cars and we just have to stand there breathing their exhausts. But the choices the school district makes around busing and who gets a bus and the busing area encourages and often forces people to drive their kids to school. Yeah. So that’s where a lot of my feelings and frustrations are right now, even though school is over and I have a break from that. I can’t stop thinking about it.
Donnell (07:49):
No, it, it’s a real challenge. So we go to our neighborhood elementary school and we can walk to school and often we want to bike to school, we have to cross seventh, so we’re on SI church, we have to cross seventh or we can go further down and take Greenview. Both of those roads feed in from SEO church and they come in to the neighborhood. And often what we see, even though they change seventh to make a pedestrian island because it’s a really big artillery road or whatever that thing is called. And so
Molly (08:27):
Pedestrians
Donnell (08:28):
Man, oh, is it? Okay, great. So they put a pedestrian, no
Molly (08:31):
Arterial, but they’re using it like a weapon, like P pee.
Donnell (08:33):
Yes. There we go. That there we go. That that’s what I really meant. And so they have the pedestrian island and my eight year old almost got hit probably three times, comes to mind. One by a neighbor who will remain anonymous, who was fabbing their home, so big old delivery truck and they couldn’t see because the sight lines are really bad and they’re making tight turns. And she came to the intersection, she saw, and I was on my bike ahead of her and she stopped because she’s like, they don’t see me dad, and I’m not going to come. So I had to turn around and put my body in the road in order to make it safe for her to go. And then the thing that just sort of caught me off guard with the delivery truck, but more so with parents that are driving in is I often, they’re rushing.
(09:30):
I think that’s the big thing. We’re running late, we’ve got to get to a meeting, we got to get drop off so we’re not being our best selves. So we’re taking shortcuts. We’re trying to cut the light or speed down so that we can drop the kid off and get onto the next thing. But the problem is, is there’s a human being that stands in those crosswalks. And when we are going fast and not paying attention, it creates all this harm. There’s no crossing guard there. She lives in the neighborhood, she should be able to bike to school. There should be a safe path to school, but there’s not. And that’s because we designed it that way. We designed it so that she does not have a safe path to school. How do I know? Well, when they do the bike days, when they invite kids to bike, they bring out dozens of adults, put them in bright colors to stop traffic.
(10:27):
So that is a design failure number one. Then we have three points of entry into the school, and we’ve tried to discourage parents from coming through the main entry so that they’re not idling. We tell parents, don’t idle. The city has an anti idling ordinance. It doesn’t mean anything. Parents get there early and they sit in their car for 20 minutes and they’re idling away. I want to put a big balloon on the back of their exhaust pipe so that they can see how much exhaust they’re creating by sitting there. But that’s not going to happen. Pretty much every day I drop the kids off to school on my bike, someone tries to kill me without a doubt it it’s either they’re making a left turn and they’re only looking right, they’re making a right turn, they’re only looking left. And this is the dark side. It creates this space where I’m like, how do I get your attention? Is it a paint filled balloon that explodes on the windshield so that you know I’m here? I think we talked about those safety flags attached with bricks. And then you realize, okay, that’s the dark side. These are my neighbors. Yeah, I do. I don’t want to harm my neighbors, but I also don’t want my kid to die. So how do we live in this space together? And I can’t by talking to my neighbor, get my neighbor to change their behavior. I think what it requires is we have to change the built environment because we have to force a behavior change because the rationalization just doesn’t work because we’re in different conversations.
Jess (12:12):
My bike lane is usually housing, but I am somebody who likes to bike and walk when I can. And I have heard over and over again, and I’ve experienced this myself, that nothing radicalizes you trying to get around the city without being in a car. Are you familiar with the unity walk that happens once a year from Ann Mall to YP to
Donnell (12:31):
Gypsy,
Jess (12:32):
And then people walking along Washington are like, wow, this is terrible. We could do something about that. And every year it peels a few people into the transportation conversation, which are fricking love because they’re finding it through the conversation that they were already in, which is about community resilience, community conversation. And they’re like, oh, and transportation can be a part of that, you and too. And coming to that through kind of a racialized lens, which I think is really powerful. And this kind of brings me to what has lit me up is lighting me up in this conversation, which is something that Molly has called other people have called car brainin, which is a lot of things, but it is also this thing that when you step into your car and you close the door, you also close the door on part of your humanity and you become another person behind the wheel and suddenly your time is more precious than anyone else’s time.
(13:27):
And cutting that three seconds at the stop sign is more important than stopping. And we assume that we have a right to that behavior. I’m sure you’ve seen that at planning commission comments. I’ve seen that at hundreds of community meetings where drivers are considered and consider themselves another class of person and a better one. Just so when I knew I wanted to talk about brain today, that wasn’t even the thing. The thing that I wanted to talk about was being in Michigan, I’m originally from Georgia, folks, I know I’m from Atlanta and being in Michigan, it is still wild to me all this time later, how much of a default cars are, and I can feel the big three from Detroit, like this inexorable north pole on the magnet or magnet on a compass. Anyway, that thing that just keeps drawing you in, that’s what it feels like. I mean, I’m from Atlanta, we’re not exactly known as a bastion of transportation, but there is an assumption that if you need to get somewhere and your car breaks down, you can take Marta here, you’re on the phone with your friends going, who can drive me? And just, oh, the default drives me nuts.
Molly (14:36):
Yeah. And it affects policy in so many large and small ways. Everything from dots unwillingness to put in a single crosswalk on a road where people have died all the way up to spending millions and millions and millions of dollars to expand highways and add lanes. But we can’t get, Detroit can’t get enough bus drivers for the many, many people who are not driving. And I got radicalized here. I’m also not from here. And sometimes I think about how unfortunate it is that I became a transportation advocate in Michigan of all places because we’re up against so much more here and so much unwillingness and almost discomfort to challenge the auto industry because there’s often these really personal feelings of loyalty because your dad worked at Ford or you work at gm and I don’t know how to get around those feelings that people have that are not my feelings.
Donnell (15:47):
I grew up in DC and our family didn’t own a car and we survived quite well in the city. And we grew up in southeast DC which didn’t have the metro until decades later on a train on our side of the river, the Anacostia River. So we had to use the bus. And from a very early age, I was on the bus. We didn’t have school buses. They gave us metro cards and that’s how we got around. I didn’t get my first car, wait for it until I had to move to Michigan. I didn’t have a car in college either. I didn’t even have a driver’s license until I was a senior in college. That’s when I got my driver’s license. And so I think you’re right. The car centric design, we see it even inside our city. You have, what is it? Foresight Middle school and the elementary school there are complaining of noise because of 14 lines.
(16:57):
Lines elementary. And the decibel level is sustained at north of 150 decibels when they’re out on the playground, which is enough to cause permanent hearing loss. And then the parents and the residents say, we need to do something about this. And everyone just sort of shrugs, do you really want us to shut down 14? And everyone on this conversation would be like, yes, we could make it into a paradise. It would be quite fantastic. But no, we would literally be driven out of the city. They would find us, round us up and send us somewhere else. And I’ve heard city council members talk about this conversation that we are in and say, but we’ve got to fix the roads. We’re not going to get rid of cars. We can’t assume that we’re going to be able to have a different kind of infrastructure. Go ahead,
Jess (17:53):
Jess. So I want to ask y’all a question that’s related to that. So I hear what you’re saying that the city council members are saying they have to fix the roads. I also hear something on a consistent basis, which is enraging and I have to walk away because I don’t have a productive response, which is drivers are also our constituents. And so they feel like they’re having a fidelity to their community by upholding these morays around, these assumptions around driving. And first of all, again, that’s car brain. We are assuming that the more vulnerable users of the road, and let’s talk about that for a second, who’s vulnerable on the road? It’s not cars. These urban legends going around about car drivers crashing and dying because of people who are walking on looking at their phones. No, that’s an urban legend. Let’s let it go. But it’s people who are outside of cars. It’s people who have mobility, disabilities and other disabilities like vision and hearing disabilities. It’s kids, it’s seniors, it’s people of color. So I get really frustrated that our city council members do not typically talk or think or work in terms of vulnerable road users, vulner, they think and work in terms of vocal road users. And those are the drivers. And so I just wonder what do we do about that? How do we start to reorient that?
Molly (19:15):
This is a big part of it for me is they believe that they’re talking about the convenience of people who have to drive versus the convenience of people who choose to walk or bike. So they’re putting them on this even level where in fact, driving is a choice. So yes, there are people who have to drive, but if we did different things on a policy level, there would be way fewer people who would have to drive. Many people have to bike or walk because they can’t afford a car or they can’t drive. And furthermore, it’s not about their convenience. It’s literally life and death. And I think about the protest movement in the Netherlands that got them to where they are today, which was about the kinder, the deaths of children and stopping the deaths of children. And we have had deaths of children in Ann Arbor, but for whatever reason, our leaders are not willing to consider that. That’s what we’re talking about, that it is life and death. And we also don’t have an advocacy infrastructure here that frames it that way. A lot of our advocacy is more on the recreation side.
Donnell (20:26):
Yeah, this fills a lot. So from the work that I do, the organizing I do and the policy work I do, this fills a lot. Like what we’re talking about are acts of God and when we put them or the divine, ooh. So when we put them in that category, it creates a ramp for us to say there’s nothing we can do to stop it. It’s just too big. And so it was Labor Day weekend. That was the first weekend that I got my new e-bike and I think 2018. And I went for a 20 mile bike. It’s like trying to test out the battery, the range. I was just like, I’m just going to go as far as I can in the city. And I was coming back from Gallup Park along the hospital and I was crossing over Fuller by the pool. There’s the rapid flashing beacon that’s there.
(21:20):
I hit the button, I weighed it. The car’s closest to me came to a stop. The next lane over the car came to a stop. I was starting to move, but something told me to look in my peripheral to the left. And I noticed that there was a car coming pretty fast and they were not gonnas be able to stop in time. And that’s exactly what happened. This car comes slams into the back of a stopped car pushing that car across the crosswalk intersection. Where had I gone? I would’ve been be here with you all today. I would not be here if I hadn’t stopped. And I left that incident, that accident with two feelings. One, this is a joke. This is really a joke. What we have designed here, we are asking people to risk their lives to cross the street. It’s a 45 mile an hour road, four lanes of traffic and what is supposed to stop a driver who is already distracted?
(22:25):
Cause we’ve made our car super comfortable. So they have 17 inch flat screen TVs and we have our phones. And thank goodness that Michigan’s passing a law that’ll go into effect at July one to say, you’ve got to be completely hands free. I watched so many people drive with one hand on the steering wheel and one hand on their phone talking into their speaker. And I’m like, can we get everybody to go back to driver’s ed? And then I also left that feeling guilty. I felt some amount of culpability because of that accident. And I had to sit with that for a whole weekend and I had to preach at the end of that weekend. And I brought that story in because I was carrying that guilt of because I pushed that button, someone’s car got damaged and then I had to unpack that story and say, Nope, that wasn’t your fault.
(23:23):
You weren’t driving. It wasn’t your fault. You needed to ensure your safety. And that’s what we do. We shift the blame and responsibility from the driver to the pedestrian, to the biker, to the person with mobility disability. And we say to them, you are in the way of what we are trying to do. You are the problem. If you went away, everything would be okay. And I don’t think we hear it that way. I don’t think we talk about it that way, Jess. And I think that is fundamentally the problem is that city council is saying, well, we are doing things donne. I got a very lovely response from my city council member, Donnel A, I’m glad you’re okay. B, I’m sorry this happened to you. So check marks for acknowledging my humanity in the problem. And then went on and said, we are doing some things about it. And I’m like, you’re putting in a plastic separator. You’re not putting in a Ballard. When the D D A came to planning commission to talk about how to change the downtown because they lost thousands of workers and they want to make it more residential friendly, I said, how are you going to change the built infrastructure to make it safe for bikers? And it was like crickets. They were like, well, we put in the bike lanes.
Jess (24:48):
I hear you. And speaking as a DDA board member and not for the board standard disclaimer, whatever. We are severely constrained by mdot with what we can, how we can actually interfere with the roads. We cannot put up items that will damage cars. Oh,
Molly (25:03):
Tell me about this, Jess, tell me about this. Cause I keep hearing that we can’t with Ballards and I don’t know where the can’t comes from. It’s coming from Mdot,
Jess (25:12):
Coming from mdot and my understanding, not an engineer or whatever. My understanding is that we cannot put something in the street that’s ground into the street like a metal pole or something like that, that sticks up that would harm a car if it ran into it. And that’s why you see these plastic crayons all over the city.
Molly (25:31):
That’s a state, that’s a state law. That’s like every, that’s
Jess (25:34):
My understanding. And that’s why we did the curbs on division and figured that out as we were building the bike separated infrastructure, we kind of realized as we went that we could do that. And so you didn’t originally see the curbs on William? You do now because we built that one first. But you do on first because we figured that out. And it’s not just the curb. Those down, there’s are planters. Those are substantial. But yeah, we heard from the engineers at MDOT that we weren’t, and I think that that was pretty close to the language. We weren’t allowed to put in something that would damage a car. And that whole, what about damaging a human being thing was considered not a relevant argument.
Molly (26:09):
So it’s so infuriating. But that tells me also that is a point for advocacy that I was not aware we needed to be fighting the state on this. I thought this these were city level decisions that were being made for reasons I didn’t understand.
Jess (26:24):
No. And we’re also severely constrained even with those stupid plastic crayons that go up anywhere, everywhere. We’re super, super constrained on those. White is one of the only allowable colors, white and yellow and maybe one other one because we were going to do something high viz couldn’t do that.
Donnell (26:40):
So that’s what I mean when I say the act of God, there’s nothing we can do about it. You just have to accept that this is the reality. And so then from a policy standpoint, it’s like, well, do we really believe in Vision Zero when that one kid got killed going to Herron High School because of the lack of visibility, that’s when we should have just stopped everything. We should have just stopped everything and said, we have to fix this and we can’t go forward until we fix it. And that kid’s life is enough to sort of wake us up. And what you will find is if it happens to a policymaker’s kid, then they will shepherd those resources to make sure it doesn’t happen to someone else’s kid. And this might be too far, and I’ll find out about it when this podcast drops is maybe the city should say, we expect two to eight people to die every year in our city because of how we built our traffic.
(27:50):
And we’re going to conduct a lottery so that you can expect to know that your ticket is being called. Because otherwise we’re just not being honest about it. And I’ve told my family, I was like, if I die as a result of a traffic incident, please take my rotting corpse to city council into the chamber and just leave it there and say, you decided this is a policy decision and do it until it’s not feasible to carry my riding corpse into there. And my wife’s like, maybe I’ll think about it. My kids are like, dad, have you lost your mind? And I was like, but sometimes that’s the only way to get folks. Every time I do an advocacy call, I invite city council to go on a call with me. Maybe that’s one thing we should do is organize some ride alongs where we get some bikes.
(28:45):
We ask city council members to go on ride alongs with us, try going down division to pick up the border to border trail at Argo Cascade, and you’ve got the protection down division. Then it goes down to a bike lane in front of the Episcopal church and community high, and then it just goes away. I go that route every single day when I go out for a bike. And just the other day A S U V came roaring up to the back of me all because I was going 17 miles an hour on my bike. It’s a 25 mile an hour street just because you had to slow down to not kill me and then go to a light where you were going to have to stop. And I just bike up next to you and I wave and I go, look, we both made it and we couldn’t have made it alive, but you could be less angry and you could have more joy that I’m here and I could not be afraid of you.
(29:44):
But our city council has decided, nope, Darnell. That’s just not how we want it done. We want these cars to mow you down. Now having said that, let me just say one other thing, sorry, Myla, which is I’ve been here for 26 years and things have improved. I do want to acknowledge that because sometimes with people like us that do community organizing, we see acutely what the problems are and we’re constantly putting the problems in front of folks and people get upset. They’re like, but you noticed we’ve done things. So here’s our moment. This is our moment of zen. Things have improved. They just haven’t improved enough.
Molly (30:25):
And
Donnell (30:25):
They’re not, go ahead. No, no, I was going to say, and no one gets a pat on the back. They
Molly (30:31):
Haven’t improved enough and they’re not improving fast enough.
Donnell (30:35):
There you go.
Molly (30:36):
I’m going to take it to a sad place for a second, and I’m sorry everyone, but I’m going to move it. I’m going to move through it real fast. But probably some of our listeners know that my husband died last year and I had to look my kids in the face and tell them, I don’t want anyone to have to do that. When I say Vision zero, I mean fucking zero. Like zero. And we are not behaving. We fucking mean zero. And so last night we had a transportation commission meeting and council member Cynthia Harrison came to talk to us about the Driving equality ordinance, which passed first reading at City Council this week. And it’s an ordinance to get rid of secondary traffic stops for things, mostly equipment violations, things like a chipped windshield or loud exhaust, because we know from extensive evidence that those stops are executed disproportionately on people of color, especially black men.
(31:39):
And that those stops can result in death for the driver. And at one point council member Harrison was talking last night and she said, people say that Ann Arbor doesn’t really have a reputation for pulling people out of their cars and beating them up, but I’m trying to prevent this from happening even one time. I want to limit contact between law enforcement and civilians so that this doesn’t happen even once it’s preventative. And that language was so familiar to me because that’s how, exactly how I feel about these other kinds of road safety things where I don’t want even one person to experience these kinds of life altering crashes, whether it’s death, whether it’s a severe injury, even just a SUV driver zooming up behind you, which means your heart is racing. The stress and the ongoing stress is another kind of health impact for people who have to move around on these streets. And those are disproportionate as well. It adds to all of the other stressors that disabled people, black people experience living in our society that contribute to more illness earlier death. And to me, this is where it starts to all get connected again. But I don’t want it to happen even one time and we are not behaving as though we feel that urgency.
Jess (33:07):
Molly, first of all, I want to pause and say thank you for sharing that story. I often feel we are most vulnerable and most powerful when we bring our hardest parts to the work that we do. So I just want to appreciate you for that. And your kids are really lucky to have you. And your city was really lucky to have you and we’re lucky to have you on the pod. So thanks for being Molly. I was in policy discussion a couple of days ago with folks who are, I’m, I’m trying to keep this as vague as possible, so I’m sanitizing as we go. But essentially we were having a potential policy discussion around making changes that would make it easier to create housing. And somebody brought up the fact that a lot of the housing that’s being produced, especially in other communities who were doing it faster than we are, it all looks the same.
(33:56):
It feels banal, it feels ugly, it feels whatever. And he started talking about legislating beauty, and I was like, well, a, we’re really bad at that and B, we shouldn’t do that. And C, it’s actually not super legal. And the ones for whom it was legal, I’m really sorry because I try not to make this comparison too often, but you do have to go back to the Nazis who made Aestheticization a federal of offense if you crossed that line. So maybe let’s not do that. And he said that, okay, but beauty is really important to our constituents, so I think we need to, or not constituents, but the folks that we’re speaking for. And so I think we need to have that discussion here. And I found that irresponsible because I think for folks who are at policy tables who are at organizing tables, we’re at any table whatsoever.
(34:44):
I think it’s our responsibility to correctly represent back to the folks that we’re speaking with, what is and isn’t possible and legal and urgent. And for folks to continue over representing driver urgency in public conversation, a, not taking vision 0, 0, 0 seriously. And B, we are totally discounting the amount of work that we individually need to do to be able to attain our A two zero goal of a 50% reduction in V M T vehicle miles traveled by 2030 less than seven years away, and we are not remotely on track. And if we took that goal seriously, we would be making different decisions about our dollars and our time and our staffing and that this isn’t a knock on O S I, the Office of Sustainability and Innovations. I know that they’re taking all that sweet millage money and turning it into a lot of work and good things. And a lot of that work and good things isn’t actually touching the roads because it’s complicated and because I think they know they don’t really have the support of the community when it comes to how we get around.
Donnell (35:59):
And that was something that I discovered sitting at the planning table. Surprisingly, the planning commission oversees the city’s capital plan and it’s a responsibility of the planning commission to approve that. And then it goes to city council. So that’s where I asked my questions and my questions were, how come we’re not putting in protected bike infrastructure every time we touch a road that felt like it felt like a low hanging fruit type of thing? And then you get into the complication of how the money comes, whether it’s a road bond or it’s state funding, or it’s coming out of the local municipalities tax coffers. And based on where that funding source comes from, you can do certain things with it. And then you discover that everything, this is by design. When I first got involved in housing, it was around tiny houses or our houseless community.
(37:08):
Someone had donated a patch of land and said, let’s just make this a place where people who are houseless can live. And then we discovered, oh, the state considers that a campground, and guess what? What’s in state law? You can’t have a campground inside of city limits. And so I was like, somebody somewhere at a table said, let’s make sure this doesn’t happen. And then this is how you get to the racialization. So how the majority of black folk in the city of Ann Arbor lived in the fifth Ward and how the gentrification has occurred in Kerrytown and how we’re clawing that back right now with the Catherine Street development and acknowledging the people who were displaced because of housing. You start to see that all of what we’re experiencing is because someone sat somewhere and said, I don’t want this. And they had the space at the table to convince the other people to agree, and then they put it in.
(38:11):
And now we’re seeing the consequences of that and how harmful it is, how it’s costing life and limb. And Molly, thank you for sharing that story. And again, like Jess said, just sorry that you had to bring that painful story into this very public place, but I’m grateful for that. I remember when council member Harrison had to tell one of her stories at the table. At the end of the meeting, I sent her a text and I said, I’m so sorry that you had to disclose that painful story in such a public space. And at the same time, I’m grateful that you did because it helps change the conversation that we’re having because it’s about real people, real situations and real difficult things that we have to do. And I think that’s our opportunity, which is to say to our policymakers, you can actually resist state law. We have a pattern of doing that in Ann Arbor. I always go back to the marijuana law. The state of Michigan was going to send armed state troopers into the city of Ann Arbor to enforce the marijuana laws. When Ann Arbor decriminalized, Ann Arbor has been on the forefront, we said, Hey, there needs to be feminine products in every bathroom. So we’re we’re going to make that a law and we’re going to enforce that law.
Jess (39:38):
Sorry, darn interrupt. So we’re going to call him menstrual hygiene products and not
Donnell (39:41):
Thank you. Thank you. I was pulling in my head and then, gotcha. It didn’t come out. You saw it. And so we’re
Jess (39:48):
It on the go.
Donnell (39:50):
And so we now have that in all of the bathrooms. But our church did that years ago. We had always had products available because it’s just the right thing to do and it’s to make it possible for people to be in this space. So we know how to do this work. We see the example when council members care about something, when it means something to them. They marshal the resources to get something done. We know how to get this done. And I think, Molly, you are absolutely right that at this moment we don’t actually care about this. We’ve written a report about it, we’ve published a paper about it, we’ve set some goals about it, but we haven’t actually built the policies to make it real.
Molly (40:43):
And I know because in this country, no one is very far removed from someone who’s been killed in a car crash. I feel lucky that I don’t personally don’t know anyone, but I have multiple friends who’ve lost siblings, who’ve lost close family. And that’s a part of the urgency for me too, is knowing what that loss and that devastation looks like. And so I know our leaders know those people and have those experiences, and I want them to be guided by that and not by those feelings of inconvenience from people who are in very well protected large metal boxes.
Jess (41:31):
And I wonder, something that I’m reflecting on as I’m hearing y’all both talk is that in housing, in transportation, a lot of what I hear is frustration and criticism of what’s not working, of the data we have of who’s vulnerable, who’s getting hurt, who’s doing all of these things. I wonder, and this is absolutely, and I don’t know, I wonder, are we spending enough time articulating what we want to see? Are we spending enough time articulating that mode shift thing is real and is going to be uncomfortable, but are we talking enough about it and about what it looks like the day you leave your car in the driveway and you try biking to work and you arrive a little sweaty and you wore the wrong pants, but then it ended up okay and you figured out over the next couple of weeks how to dress for breaking to work. And I wonder, are we talking enough about that?
Molly (42:21):
I love that as the framing of looking at what we want to build and what we want to the world that we want to create. I’ve been coaching a couple of colleagues into their first family bike purchases so that they can bike with their kids. And I just saw a coworker yesterday who I had coached through this process, and I was like, how is your bike? And she said, the kids love it. We love it. I’m having trouble because some places I don’t feel comfortable biking, but they love it. And I want to be able to just bask in that new bike joy without the little voice in my head that says, oh God, I hope I’m not responsible for them getting hurt when a crash happens. But I would love to be able to lean into that vision of joy and happiness and happy kids on bikes getting to school.
Jess (43:18):
So we’re headed into wrap up territory. But on that note, I wonder if I can invite the three of us into, here’s the last thing I want to yell into the podcast void before we sign off for today. And it can be a joyful yell or it can be a gleeful rage yell, whatever sits on your spirit.
Donnell (43:35):
For me, I’d love for more people to bike because I think the joy that I’ve experienced it since probably 2012, almost a decade, 11 years of biking, is it humanizes my experience of the city because the biking is at a human scale. So just we’re able to see more, we’re able to experience the beauty of our city on the bike. I think the anxiety that Molly talked about earlier of having the car as I was biking and even thinking about joining you all today, the thing that was on my mind was like, oh, it takes me until I get into the protected sort of bike space of the be the B trail before I actually relax. And I would us to have that experience anywhere in the city. And maybe my real vision is I’d love for my eight year old and my 11 year old to be able to bike from our house to the downtown library to play the summer game at the library without me having to accompany them because there’s a safe path for my kids and the kids of our community to enjoy their city. And that’s a vision that I want to see happen before I die. I really would love that vision to be real and I’m willing to work towards it. But we need willing partners and I don’t know that we do actually have willing partners.
Jess (45:18):
I appreciate that Donnel, and maybe I’ll step your goal up one higher and say maybe not only before you die, but while your kids are kids, wouldn’t that be amazing? So for me, Molly mentioned part of her life, I’ll, I’ll say that. Part of mine is over the last few months I’ve been having more and more trouble getting around to the point where now I’m primarily navigating using a wheelchair and I will not belabor the point of barriers and threshold access and how difficult it is to access. What I want to talk about is the utter joy. When I come into a space and I know that I’ve been anticipated when things are at the right height, when things are comfortable, where folks don’t have to figure out how to see me or where to put me or whatever. There is something I’m with you on that joy of being on a bike that feels like being five years old, no matter where I am or what I’m doing, being in the wheelchair and coming into a space where I have clearly been anticipated and designed for feels like coming home, even if I’m coming there for the first time.
(46:18):
And I love that. Let’s do more of that.
Molly (46:24):
I love that too. And I think I’m going to stop right here
(46:34):
And say that’s it for this episode of Ann Arbor. F Huge thanks to Donna White for coming to join us today. Come check out past episodes and transcripts at our website, ann arbor f.com. Keep the conversation going with fellow Ann Arbor efforts on Twitter and at the A two Council hashtag and Facebook in the Ann Arbor Housing for All Facebook group. And if you want to send us a few dollars@kofi.com slash ann Arbor af to help us with hosting, we always appreciate it. We’re your co-host, Molly Kleinman and Jess Lita and humongous thanks to producer Scott Trudeau. The music is, I don’t know, by grapes. Get informed, then Get involved. It’s your city.
Jess (47:11):
Okay.
Donnell (47:12):
And it’s Donnel is actually a Celtic name. It’s derived from Donald, and it means the leader of a group.
Jess (47:20):
Well, we need to work that in. I.