Interview on The Peggy Smedley Show (transcript)
I was recently on Peggy Smedley’s Podcast:
Talking about
How the field of transportation has changed.
Challenges cities are going to face and lessons learned.
How cities are going to have to change and be reimagined for the future.
THE PEGGY SMEDLEY SHOW
Transcript — Interview with David Levinson, Professor, University of Sydney [From .mp3, transcribed and cleaned up by Claude AI, I make no guarantees, but far more readable than otherwise.]
============================================================================
[INTRO]
Welcome back to the Peggy Smedley Show, your voice for our Connected World, with your host Peggy Smedley.
----
PEGGY: Hello, listen, and welcome back to the Peggy Smedley Show. I’m your host, Peggy Smedley. Today we’re looking at how transportation is evolving as cities grow, technologies accelerate, and data reshapes every decision we make. Few scholars have done more to explain how networks form, adapt, and influence the way we live than my guest today. His research has helped shape cities, rethink infrastructure, understand long-term investment outcomes, and prepare for the next wave of mobility innovation. Join me in welcoming David Levinson, Professor at the University of Sydney and one of the most respected voices in modern transportation research. David, welcome to the show.
DAVID: Thank you for having me.
PEGGY: So David, as a professor you’ve done some incredible research, and I’m really thrilled you could join us today. I thought maybe we could start — if you don’t mind — how has the field of transportation changed since you began your career?
DAVID: Obviously, aging myself — starting my career in 1989 or so — I worked as a planner, and at the time we were envisioning lots of things about the future. Planners were developing 5, 10, 30-year plans, and what we imagined in 30 years — this was in Montgomery County, Maryland — was essentially continued deployment of the traditional freeway system, some new light rail lines, plans for higher-density development around train stations. But our assumptions were always built in, and it’s still built into the planning field, that technology never changes. So there were no assumptions in 1989 that in the next 30 years there would be shifts in how people went to work, how people drove, whether there’d be autonomous vehicles or electric vehicles. And one could argue there are still not really autonomous vehicles that most people use on a daily basis — but they exist now.
The planning for that didn’t exist at all in the 1980s and 1990s. People were talking about it as a frontier of research, but the planning for it also didn’t exist in the 2000s and 2010s, even though the technology kept getting closer. EVs are useful, but they don’t change how people get around very much. Autonomous vehicles, on the other hand, are going to change significantly how people travel — and that’s still not embedded or considered in transport plans.
There have been other technology shifts. E-bikes is another thing the field completely missed. The rise in delivery — not just from e-bikes but from services like Amazon and grocery delivery — was completely ignored. The field was basically assuming people would continue to behave the way they did in 1988, just extrapolated out 30 years because there would be more people, rather than looking at how things might change.
If you say 1989 plus 30 years, that puts us at 2019–2020. And in 2020 there’s a huge shock — COVID — and the changes that came with it, particularly the increase in work from home. At the time the question was how much of that would be sticky, and we’re starting to get that answer. A lot of it is, for office workers.
Now we’re coming into a new wave — AI and computation — that is also going to change who does what, where they do it, and how they do it. We have no clear sense of how that’s going to affect the changing nature of work, shopping, and life — but from a transport perspective, where people are going to go and when.
So I think we’ve missed in the transport field. On one hand there’s a set of people advancing technology. On the other there’s a set of people planning and engineering transport who are looking at the world as if it will be like today, instead of asking: these technologies will be here, how do we skate to where the puck is going, as Wayne Gretzky said, rather than to where the puck is.
PEGGY: I love that analogy, because I think that’s what we need the next generation of workers to think about — where is the puck — and thinking so broadly. Because when you mentioned autonomous vehicles, we’re just finally getting to level four, which we’re talking about maybe happening this year. We’ve been talking about this for the past decade, so that’s really interesting. And I think AI is going to accelerate it much faster than we ever thought. You raise a good point that brings us to the challenges cities are going to face. We’re talking about this big push with EVs — now EVs have halted or slowed a little in the United States, though there’s still a big push in other countries where they’re growing. We’ve seen some growth here, but not what we had a couple of years ago. So I guess that raises the question: what are the biggest challenges facing cities today, with everything you just mentioned?
DAVID: There are lots of different kinds of cities with lots of different kinds of challenges. If you think of an American city, that’s very different from an Asian city or a European city. The American city is much more auto-oriented. There hasn’t been any meaningful increase in public transport use in decades — it’s been declining since the 1940s, leveled out, with minor upticks or downticks in any given year, but nothing significant. The level of active transport in US cities — there are a few exceptions: Portland, Oregon; Minneapolis — where there’s a plausible amount of bicycle use. But most American cities, most people are not going to consider bicycles a serious mode of transport, whereas in European or Asian cities they will.
Then there’s the question of how many people work in the CBD — the central business district — versus suburban office parks. Are those suburban office parks clustered around train stations or are they low density? The land use pattern the US built — and that other countries have followed to a lesser extent since the 1940s — has made it very difficult to plan for any mode other than the automobile as the primary way people get around in metropolitan areas.
The problems of the CBD are different from the problems of the outer suburbs, and what solutions make sense will differ. How are we going to address them? I think we’ve been looking at and admiring transport problems for a very long time without really solving them, especially in the United States.
The Bloomberg administration proposed road pricing in New York City in 2000. Transport economists had been proposing road pricing for decades before that. It finally got deployed and opened in 2025. Seventeen years to put in a congestion pricing toll in the densest part of the United States — that says a lot about the lack of seriousness about solving problems in the US. We can go along living in mediocrity, or we can choose to live better. And we keep choosing mediocrity.
PEGGY: Let’s look at what’s happening. We have crumbling infrastructure — failing bridges, failing roads. And then factor in COVID: rural and urban areas have changed. Factor in autonomous vehicles — cities have to rethink who’s driving, distracted driving, cameras, connected cities. If all that’s true, our cities have to be different from what they were 30, 50, or 100 years ago when the highway system was first created. So hopefully there are lessons learned — but maybe not, because sometimes we’re a little lazy in how we do things. Are there lessons learned from historical transportation trends, or are we still moving in the mediocrity you mentioned?
DAVID: There are people who have learned those lessons — but they have not been learned by society at large. You can look at plans, and many are thoughtful, and many say yes, I’d rather live in this imagined future than the world we have today. We have a vision, and we take maybe a baby step in that direction, but then lots of other things happen around us that are much more significant.
We built the interstate highway system starting in the 1950s. We’ve replaced large elements of it, but it’s an old system. Anyone who owns an old house knows that systems need to be maintained and replaced. We’ve decided that’s not our first priority. Our first priority — I’ll pick on one thing — was opening up streetcars in US cities that don’t really go anywhere. There was a federal program, and politicians with a nostalgic vision of America from the 1940s because they could remember streetcars from their childhood put them in. It’s an enormous expense these days compared to what it was 120 years ago, because we can’t build anything inexpensively anymore. These streetcars serve almost nobody. They take resources away from useful public transport — buses, bus rapid transit systems that could be deployed immediately in lots of places. It eats up the budget.
We’ve been spending money on new things rather than maintaining existing things, as if we’re growing at the rate we were in the 1950s. But if you look at demographic forecasts — if anti-immigration movements succeed across the developed world — most of those countries are going to be depopulating. You already see it in Europe and East Asia. If the United States didn’t have immigration, it would be depopulating. The same is true of Australia in short order. And you’re planning for demographic growth while investing in new things that eat up the resources for maintaining what you have.
If you let your existing infrastructure fail, that’s much more costly than any gains from putting in new infrastructure on the outer fringe to promote development in a world where population is largely stagnant at best. We have our priorities wrong. And changing people’s mindsets is really hard. You have planners who don’t imagine any technology changes. You have elderly politicians trying to restore a nostalgic vision — in all parties, not just one. And you have technologists bringing new technologies, but not new highways, as if someone else is supposed to take care of the highways. Which yes, someone else is supposed to do — but it’s not necessarily happening. We’re underfunding it.
Users don’t pay the full cost of operating and maintaining the infrastructure they use. The highway trust fund, funded largely through motor fuel taxes, is underfunded at the federal level and has to borrow from the general budget to pay for road expenditures. There’s a fundamental lack of seriousness in how this gets funded. And America seems incapable of learning from what other countries do. Other countries pay for their infrastructure from user fees. Americans are outraged if the price of gas goes up ten cents.
PEGGY: There are a couple of things there. One, we get outraged because of the delays — projects supposed to be done at a set time take three years longer, contractors take longer, and consumers freak out. But the second big thing is: when infrastructure fails and lives are lost — and we both know this has happened many times, not just here but globally — that’s when people notice. And unfortunately it takes a catastrophic event for people to take notice. That’s unfortunate, because we don’t need that to happen. That’s when everybody says, why didn’t we address that sooner? ASCE does a report card every year and points out everything that’s failing. Those are significant things to pay attention to. And I think when you talk about investments and when they succeed or fail long term, that’s something that has to be addressed.
DAVID: ASCE is the American Society of Civil Engineers — I was once a member. I don’t want to say there isn’t failing infrastructure, because obviously I believe there is. But I wouldn’t trust their report card as the final word on the matter. They’re going to advocate for more civil engineering works — that’s logical. That said, you’re correct: we can’t respond in the absence of a crisis, and that’s unfortunate.
There’s routine maintenance that better state departments of transportation will do well, where the politics are more aligned. And yes, construction takes longer than it used to. Some of it is safety regulations so that construction workers are safer. Some of it is environmental regulations. Some of it is rising standards in construction quality. But we wind up paying much more for infrastructure than other countries pay for the same thing. There’s a project at NYU that compares rail infrastructure around the world — the US pays two, four, sometimes ten times what lower-cost developed countries pay.
PEGGY: But why? Is there a reason for that?
DAVID: On the rail side, there are a set of reasons. We over-design things. Take the Second Avenue Subway in New York — subways dug farther underground, larger and more cavernous stations. The stations are a large part of the excavation costs. And there are stations with facilities for workers underground that basically increase the volume of digging, dirt removal, and concrete pouring. Rather than value engineering to get costs out of the system, there’s an incredible amount of padding. And nobody within the organizations has the technical skills to push back on it.
We’ve lost a lot of technical capacity within governments. If you go back 50 or 70 years ago, a lot of construction work was done by the transportation agencies themselves. Beginning in the 1990s, we moved to a much more contractor-oriented system — design work farmed out to engineering firms, construction work to large international firms. There are some advantages to that: if you need to reduce staff, it’s easier to cut a contract than your own employees. But the cost is that contractors will charge much more overhead, and their incentives aren’t aligned with yours. If you work for the agency, you’re motivated to do things efficiently. If you work for a private firm and your fees are proportionate to project size, your incentive is to increase the size and scope of the project.
PEGGY: So we’re talking about unions versus non-unions in some cases.
DAVID: In some cases, but I don’t think it’s just unions. Unions are useful things. A lot of it is more like guilds — engineering consulting guilds and construction firm guilds that have an incentive to drive up costs. They describe it as raising standards of performance, but the trains don’t run more on time in the US than in these other countries.
PEGGY: Is it technology? Can the use of big data and analytics to improve transportation help eliminate some of those costs?
DAVID: I don’t think it’s technology so much as processes, politics, and having skilled people with the right aligned incentives, especially on the cost side. Countries digging subways or underground highways all use tunnel boring machines — you can argue about whether to use two machines in parallel or one large one, and that depends on the site. But Elon Musk with his Boring Company didn’t invent a more efficient way to tunnel subways. He promised this 10 to 15 years ago, he deployed tunnels in Las Vegas and maybe one or two other places, and they’re not taking the world by storm. We’ve known how to build tunnels for a long time.
From an infrastructure perspective, there are things you can do at the margins with more efficient construction or longer-lasting concrete — basic chemistry rather than Silicon Valley-style high tech. More investment in concrete roads versus asphalt. Newer bridge designs that are safer and resilient and don’t have a single point of failure, the way the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis did when it fell in 2007. Those are real technology advances. But on motor vehicles, autonomy is where much greater safety gains will come.
The US hasn’t made safety gains in a very long time. It used to be improving its crash risk on par with other countries. Then it flattened out in the 2000s and we’re at 40,000 deaths per year — better than the 1970s, but where we were 20 years ago. Other countries have continued to make progress. We’ve exhausted a lot of the safety gains that come from safer vehicles. We haven’t exhausted the gains from safer road designs and safer driver behavior.
PEGGY: And our behavior is terrible. You can see it — people driving distracted, on their phones. Not understanding to put the phone down when it comes to mobility. But what are the skills needed — maybe for an urban planner — to make better roundabouts, design better roads that protect against the distracted driver?
DAVID: Roundabouts are part of it, but the broader idea is designing roads for lower speeds. Lower speeds have two advantages: one, the driver has greater reaction time before they’re likely to hit something; two, if they do hit something they’ll do less damage because they’re going slower. Lower speeds are great for safety. Now, of course, people resist lower speeds because it’s inconvenient — it will take a little longer to get where they’re going. This is the trade-off: how much is the value of time worth versus the value of life? Other countries have prioritized life and safety.
And it’s not just fatalities — it’s also injuries, particularly life-changing injuries. Improvements in emergency medicine mean fewer people who get into a crash will die, because we can respond faster thanks to cell phones, treat them better on site, get them to the hospital faster. So the fatality rate has gone down relative to crashes. That’s good. But we’d rather have fewer crashes, and the way to achieve that is to replace the driver or get the driver to behave better.
Even if all new cars were autonomous tomorrow — which they aren’t — it would take 15 to 20 years to replace the whole fleet. So this is going to be a long deployment process. But changing speed limits is something that can literally be done overnight — with a little planning you can change the regulations and road signs very quickly and inform everybody of the new limit.
PEGGY: We’re not going to do that though, David. You look at the highway — the speed limit might be 55 or 70 and you see people passing others going 80 or 90. They’re not going to adhere to that.
DAVID: That’s an enforcement problem. If the government decides it wants more enforcement, you can have it. But you have politicians in Australia, for example, running on pulling out speed cameras or promising to notify people in advance of where speed cameras are. The current Labor leadership is saying: yes, speed cameras are a good thing, but we need to notify people that there’s one coming. If there’s a speed camera everywhere and you notify people in advance, that’s fine. But speed cameras are still rare, and telling people exactly where they are means: okay, I’ll slow down for the camera and then speed right back up. That’s not good from a safety perspective.
And most of the fatalities aren’t on interstates. They’re on rural roads or high-speed urban intersections. The pedestrian fatality rate in particular has gone way up in recent years. A lot of that is the change in vehicle size. The average car today is a truck — used to be a sedan. People have SUVs and pickup trucks where previously they’d have had a sedan. They want to be higher up so they can see farther ahead, particularly when everyone else already has a large vehicle blocking their view. It’s logical from an individual perspective to want the taller car. But the consequence is that when you hit a pedestrian, you’re hitting them in the upper half of their body rather than the lower half. Rather than breaking their legs, you break their chest — their heart, their lungs — and you’re more likely to kill them. The vehicles are also heavier, so the impact at even lower speeds is worse.
PEGGY: David, we have to wrap up here. Two things: is there something you’re working on right now that our listeners should be aware of?
DAVID: I work on lots of different things. I’ve got projects looking at how we value transport investments and the relationship between transport and land use — my favorite topic — and how we measure accessibility and how valuable it is. And then I have another project in a completely different domain: how do we design autonomous vehicles so they behave in socially beneficial ways rather than purely selfish ways? All the AVs out there are designed to move the driver from A to B as quickly and safely as possible for the driver, but they don’t think about their consequences on other vehicles or other people in the network. Maybe we can come up with algorithms that improve traffic overall as well as benefiting the individual in the vehicle.
PEGGY: Great — we’ll have to have that discussion next time. I do want to ask: what advice would you give students or those considering a career in transportation? I think there are great opportunities there.
DAVID: Certainly lots of problems, and there have been for a while. One thing people need to keep in mind is the time frames. When I started — I was a kid who liked drawing lines on maps, connecting things. You want to connect the most things for the least amount of resources. That’s what got me into this. And that’s what transportation planners do. But the amount of time you actually spend doing that is relatively low in most cases — it’s the fun part of the job, but you don’t really get to do it that much.
I think if you’re interested in planning, pay attention to the technology. If you’re interested in the technology side, pay attention to the social and political side. Being able to fuse those two domains, rather than thinking of them in isolation, is necessary going forward.
PEGGY: David, you’ve given me a lot to think about today and I really appreciate you joining me. David Levinson, Professor at the University of Sydney — thank you so much for your time. Where can our listeners go to find out more about you and everything we talked about?
DAVID: My blog and newsletter is at www.transportist.net and my website — which has all of my articles and links to my books — is at www.transportist.org.
PEGGY: David, thank you again.
DAVID: Thank you.
----
[OUTRO]
PEGGY: All right, listeners, that is all the time we have. Make sure to share and subscribe to our episodes each week. Share your thoughts with me on X, Connected World, or follow me on LinkedIn, YouTube, and continue the conversation there. Check out our website and newsletter and read our blogs at connectedworld.com or click on the show website at thePeggySmedleyShow.com. Remember, we’re live every Tuesday at 12 p.m. Central. Check out all the podcasts that come out every Thursday. This is the Peggy Smedley Show, your voice for our Connected World. And remember: with great technology comes great responsibility.
