What Will It Take To Prepare Our City Streets For the Impending Influx of Seniors? (Greg Shill) | Otter.ai

What Will It Take To Prepare Our City Streets For the Impending Influx of Seniors? (Greg Shill)

Kea Wilson39min

Speaker 1

00:16

Hey guys, welcome to the break. I'm your host. Kea Wilson, back from a little break of my own. I was out on vacation. Thank you so much for your patience over the last few weeks, and also going forward, this summer, if this podcast is on a little bit of an irregular schedule, I'm going to be slowing down and kind of releasing episodes only when I have something really cool to show you. I decided so today, I am sending us back in time a little bit to an interview I did last month with a fantastic author, attorney and law professor, Greg Schill, about his contributions to the new book law and the 100 year life in this book, Schill digs deep into the role of transportation policy in shaping our rapidly aging country, particularly in terms of crafting laws that help elders age with grace and whenever possible, age in place, even when their driving life has come to an end, as it will for everyone who is lucky enough to get close to that 100 year mark, we published a short version of that conversation on the site, which I'll link to in the show notes, but Greg and I got into some really thorny and complicated questions that I wasn't able to include, so I thought I would bring them to you here, namely, to make streets safer for everyone, but particularly for the centenarians and near centenarians among us. Do we need to reject what Schill calls design essentialism and accept the necessity of traffic enforcement, and if so, in what forms? What will it take to get America's seniors to move to places that can support their changing mobility needs, and is that even possible or likely for a lot of people, or is it a better bet for the leaders of places where seniors already live to do the work to make it possible for more elders to get around in more ways, and does the future of Mobility for America's oldest residents really have to look like a bunch of golf carts. I learned a lot from this conversation, including how to pronounce the name of The Economist Charles Tebu, which you will hear me mangle at least once during this recording. So let's just get right into it. Here is my conversation with Professor, attorney and urbanist. Greg Schill, well, I'm excited to talk to you about this chapter. Maybe we could just start by you telling me a little bit about the book overall, because it is a fascinating project, and it's situated in a larger volume. Give me the elevator pitch. What is law in the 100 year life, and why do conversations about transportation policy belong in that conversation? How did you get involved and tap to write it,

Speaker 2

03:05

I just contribute one chapter to the book. But the premise of the book is that people are living longer than ever before, but our laws and more broadly, regulatory frameworks are in many cases a poor fit for longer lifespans. And so I think what the editors of the volume had in mind and have done in prior work of theirs is to try to begin fleshing out what a reform agenda might look like, or at least what some ideas about areas that are in need of reform might look like across multiple issue spaces, and it's a pretty wide ranging volume, and it's going going to be open access, so people can grab chapters here and there, or the whole PDF online for free, as well as buying the printed version they want. And so I was asked to contribute a chapter on transportation law and policy, because, I think, because it's, it's kind of, maybe obviously an area where we need to think seriously about how people can maintain their access to value destinations as they get into their 80s, 90s and beyond,

Speaker 1

04:16

right? I mean, it's obvious, but you have some very not obvious solutions for how to confront it, and less obvious, I should say, problems that you surface. And I think you get at that really beautifully with the way you open this chapter, which I just thought was so smart. So I'm gonna ask you to summarize it for our listeners, which is you ask readers to imagine two Americans who are born 100 years apart, one in 1824, and one in 1924 or they had turned 100 at those years. You can remind me of the specifics, and you chart how their respective transportation landscapes would shape their lives as they approach the age of 100 it's just a fascinating idea. Why don't you just summarize it? For me, from a mobility standpoint, is the. Modern centenarian better off than her counterparts who died 100 years ago at the same age. And like, why or why not?

Speaker 2

05:06

Yeah, so I think it's a little unclear. And let me just preface this by saying that there have been a lot of changes in our society over the last 200 years. You know, most of those has been, have been for the for the good. And I think, you know, we enjoy many freedoms today, and those freedoms are enjoyed more widely in society than was the case 100 or even, or certainly 200 years ago. So just to sort of put that on the table, but but strictly from a reaching destinations standpoint, the chapter opens with two people, one born in 1824 one born in 1924 and you know what happens in terms of transportation technology over the course of their lifetimes? The long and the short of it is that as the older person you know approaches 100 and in the 1920s their options for transportation are just increasing, right? And that's been the case for that person for decades, more and more trains and street cars and then automobiles. But even I'm talking about mainly day to day transportation, and they have just an increasing variety and depth of transportation options. That's not really true for the person born in 1924 that person in as they're approaching 100 and the 2020s has a range of public transit options that are, you know, shadow of what they were 50 years prior or 100 years prior, on virtually any metric, right, frequency, reliability, etc. And at the same time, this person's ability to walk to their destinations is impeded both by the ubiquity of fast, heavy motor traffic in most of this country, as well as the distance between destinations due to, you know, basic changes in the built environment, especially since World War Two, that have separated uses and reduce the level of density, partly through zoning, but also, you know, many other mechanisms. So this person has probably an increased ability when they're, you know, say, when they're 70 versus when the other person is 70, assuming they have the financial and other means to drive. But as we age, we lose our ability to drive safely. We have what's called a driving life expectancy that's shorter than our overall life expectancy, and so as this person is in their 90s, they're probably much less able, if able at all, to continue driving, and yet, they don't have walking and transit as as realistic options most likely,

Speaker 1

07:43

right? I mean, that makes complete sense to me. As a sustainable transportation advocate, I do think some folks would hear that and say, well, arguably, the modern Centurion has more mobility options than ever before. And, you know, maybe not the centurion, but the 80 year old, the 75 year old folks with knee problems and mild mobility issues that don't preclude them from driving because they're not cognitive mobility issues, but they have the ability to get around in places they never would have been able to because they have access to cars. What would you say to folks who have that view? How does that complicate this picture of what our driving culture does to older generations.

Speaker 2

08:24

I think multiple things are going on at same time. So it's certainly true that not just later in life, but especially later in life for folks with some mobility issues or mobility issues of certain types, driving is a far more useful and practical means of reaching valued destinations. And I keep using that term because that's the Urban Planning definition of what's called Accessibility, which is really just the ability of people to get to the places that they value. So I think I grant that, you know, I think that's just completely true. What happens, though, is that in the late latest season of life. You know, as a colleague of mine says, In the best case, we are all living in a period of temporary ability, right in the sense that when we're very young, we need assistance to not just transport ourselves, but to do all the things in life. And you know, late in life, that is true as well for all of us, and so at some point it becomes unsafe to drive. I have a separate paper with some co authors supported by CDC grants, looking at differences in licensure from state to state driver's licensure, and how that correlates with traffic safety. And it's just objectively true that all you know, we can't outrun Father Time forever. And so it might be that it's 75 to pick a number you know, the typical person is more able to drive than they are to take a form of transit that requires a lot of stairs, although, of course, not all four. Do, but Sure, but the premise of the book is that people are now reaching very much older ages, right in the into their 90s, into their hundreds. And there, I think there are two roles for transportation. One is just making it more possible for them to get around, which, of course, would benefit everybody, not only people in that group, but the other is just enabling more people to reach that age. Since in the US, we do have a significantly lower life expectancy than our fellow members of the wealthy country club, the OECD, and there are a few reasons for that, but one of them, clearly, is traffic crashes. Let's

Speaker 1

10:41

talk about the role of traffic. Because one of the things that really blew my mind about your observations in this paper was you make a distinction between America's trends in life expectancy and our trends. And I'm trying to remember the term personal life years lost. And you point out that in the 90s, well, up until the 90s, we had similar life expectancies to most high income nations, and they started trending down or plateauing relative to these other countries. But that if you look at personal life, years lost, basically a disturbing number of people in this country are dying really young, even as a large cohort is also living really young lives, and that's dragging the whole average down. So tell me a little bit about that distinction, why it matters, and the role that our transportation network plays in shaping those kinds of trends. Why do we need to look at both sides of the life expectancy and personal life years lost coin?

Speaker 2

11:33

Yeah. So you know, the idea is that any life lost is a sad event, right? But there is a difference between, say, Queen Elizabeth passing away three years ago of old age at the age of 96 and someone life ending suddenly and violently at the age of 18, whether that's from firearms, a drug overdose or traffic crashes, and those are really the three leading causes of premature death for young people in this country. And so the reason that I'm comfortable making that judgment is that the potential of that 18 year old to live more years is, of course, much greater than it was for Queen Elizabeth, right? That person could have lived 5060, maybe even 80 more years, whereas nobody who is at the age of 96 has that future in front of them. And so demographers and population health experts, you know, quantify this as life years, or, if you like, quality adjusted life years. So the insight here is that bringing down our traffic death rate would not only be helpful in a general sense of saving lives, but it would be specifically helpful in raising our life expectancy by conserving or increasing life years.

Speaker 1

12:59

Right? And your paper basically is broken into two sections. Here, it talks about that first question of, how do we save lives, and the second question of, how do we give people the opportunity to thrive in a environment that makes living into old age not just possible, but comfortable, even as you reach those advanced ages. But I do want to talk a little bit about the first side of that, a little bit more, because you put in to the paper this concept of design essentialism, which you wrote about before in the Atlantic. I will just be honest. I have some respectful disagreements with this part, but I'm very excited to talk to you about it and hear your point of view. But basically, you you write in this paper that there is a quote fad of design essentialism that is undermining the safe systems approach in this country and is keeping Americans from getting anywhere near 100 folks dying in their teens, even because we are over emphasizing or over privileging the role of I want to be clear if you're saying specifically road design or vehicle design, or vehicle design, or all kinds of design over other kinds of approaches, why don't you just tell me in your words, what is design essentialism? Why is that a problem, and what are some of the solutions that you would pose to cut through the

Speaker 2

14:15

roadblock? Yeah, so I would back up and just acknowledge the paramount and perhaps obvious essentialism, or essential nature of design, right? The question is, where is the room for marginal improvement? Meaning, what can we do over and above seat belts and airbags and anti lock brakes and stop signs and double yellow lines and street lights and all these other crosswalks, etc, I think there clearly is scope for improvement there, especially in dense urban areas. My objection in the chapter, as you mentioned in the Atlantic, is to this single minded focus on design. Without really any recognition of a cost benefit of design interventions, There rarely is even a semblance of a cost benefit analysis performed before many of these interventions. I could go on about the sort of actual or true cost which, of course, includes not just the construction, but the conception and the studying and the public meetings and accounting for the pushback and potential litigation then changes down the road and so and so on, but also just the opportunity cost of taking that, not just money, but resources that focus of the relevant institutions and putting it towards something else. So I think the contribution of the Vision Zero movement is to correctly anchor us a conversation here in the goal of zero deaths. But I think it has taken this idea that you can design your way to safety too far. And if you look at Sweden, where, of course, that movement arose, that's not the approach they take. They have a robust system of enforcement, for example. And they have variety of other ways of achieving much lower traffic deaths than we do, everything from public transit to having really cold weather, which in the US is also correlated with lower traffic death. So it's a big topic. The idea here is to really, what I'm arguing in this chapter is we should focus on interventions that maximize life years. And I think it's pretty clear that dollar for dollar, you know, there are better opportunities out there that they're not being seized right now,

Speaker 1

16:42

that's so interesting. I don't want to keep you here for like hours. I could talk to you about this for a really long time, because, yeah, it's, like, kind of the foundational question of a lot of advocacy right now is, you know, where do you put your emphasis? Where do you put your chips? Basically on the table. I guess the one thread I want to make sure I pull on here is, I guess I don't agree with the statement that cost benefit analysis on design is rarely done. Like, every vehicle design change, every regulatory action that's put forward by NHTSA is subject to robust like cost benefit please, yes. So

Speaker 2

17:18

that's a really important distinction. I just want to I want to, I want to really amplify actually, what you're saying. So a NHTSA rule is a federal regulation that is subject to cost benefit analysis local government changes, which are typically the entities that are implementing street design changes. They may be referencing a federal manual, but the entities that are actually doing the work spending the money, even if they're getting grants or part of it, they're local, and they are not subject to that requirement.

Speaker 1

17:49

I mean, if they're federal grantees, they are sometimes right. I mean, isn't that one of the big controversies of the Trump administration right now is they're subjecting grantees to more cost benefit analysis that like is skewed in favor of

Speaker 2

18:01

highway projects depends on the grant. But I mean, if you're adding a crosswalk or something, no. And I'm pro crosswalk. But just to go back to NHTSA, for example, if you look at the proposed changes to the two vehicle design that were made late in the Biden administration, no changes, which, by the way, I not only support, but I submitted a comment supporting basically the changes that they ultimately proposed. They themselves. NHTSA acknowledged that the number of deaths that would be prevented was very low. Now, every death avoided is a success that should be celebrated, right? So I don't want to minimize that. At the same time, we're talking about very small marginal changes, something like 1% or less of vehicle occupant deaths, for example, in one of the changes, and a far lower number in the pedestrian category. So the you know, just to contrast that small, those small numbers, which, by the way, would take decades to manifest because the rules were going to take a long time to go into effect, then you have fleet turnover. The average car on the road is 12 years old. So right? Take decades. Right. Meanwhile, lots and lots of people are being killed. Compare that with failure to wear seat belts. About half of people who are killed, vehicle occupants that are killed in car crashes are not wearing seat belts. Half speeding and drunk driving are associated with about a third of traffic deaths each there's some overlap there, so it's not two thirds together, but these are huge, huge pieces of the pie. And I worry that the focus on design is attractive because it's tangible, but it's actually a much smaller percentage of the opportunity than some of these other pieces, if we can figure out how to get people to wear seat belts, which used to be a major project back when states were in a business of you know, when they were debating whether to have seat belt laws. Now, nearly all of them have seat belt laws, and there haven't been a lot of good recent studies on how to get people to increase their compliance. So if we can figure out how to. Do that will save way more lives. Urbanists like myself would also like to make it safer to to, you know, walk and bike etcetera in cities. And I think that's perfectly that's a great goal, and we should do that too. But, you know, in terms of the life saving opportunity, I think it is actually in some of these big chunks that are persistent challenges that we have not been that we have not solved. Yeah,

Speaker 1

20:22

I mean, I guess for me, my challenge there is that I think there are design solutions to those big chunks of problems, like seat belt use. You could, you we could, you know, we can have the complex conversation about the long and very colorful history of seat belt laws in the country around like, specifically vehicle design standards and making the mandatory and similar to airbags and other things like that. But, you know, we have an approved rule right now around anti drunk driving technology. And the implementation of that is really fraught, but it does have the potential to end virtually all drunk driving as we know it. You know, absent the concerns about fleet turnover and things like that, I personally am like, how do we just expand our imagination? And what if we were talking about, like a Cash for Clunkers program for every program, every vehicle, without this anti drunk driving technology? What if we were talking about putting speed limiters on every car in America, or these bills that we're seeing out of Washington and New York and all these really other transformative places to at least put speed limiters on the cars of recidivist speeders and things like that. I don't know, I I guess you actually

Speaker 2

21:25

don't need, you don't need to wait. I mean, those technologies, the interlocks and the ISA television speed assistance for recidivist speeders don't require they can be outfitted aftermarket to existing cars. Absolutely.

Speaker 1

21:40

Yeah. I mean some respectful disagreement here. I think my biggest concern about the design essentialist argument is that I think maybe you're alighting a little bit the conversation about the harms of enforcement based models and fine based models. And I just, I don't know that we can conflate, like that conversation with a myopic focus on design alone, right? Like, I just feel like de prioritization doesn't always mean disavowal for one and like for two. They are both forms of harm, and they are both ways that people die in our society, and they both deserve attention. I don't know if that's fair to inject into this conversation. It's a little outside of the scope of the paper, but it is definitely within the scope of our coverage. So I would be remiss if I didn't mention it.

Speaker 2

22:26

I think there's room for lots of opinion here. I think the withdrawal of public services is something to be very concerned about, whether it's closing a school or park or simply deciding not to enforce life saving speed laws, for example, how we enforce those speed laws is a separate question. And talk about lack of imagination, I think there's a conflation often in the adjacent space of criminal justice reform, between enforcement on the one hand, and violent intervention by armed agents of the state. On the other probably because most of that criminal justice reform conversation does actually center on those interactions, not all, but most, and that's just one example, right? Well, obviously speed cameras are another prophylactic measures like requiring ISA and interlocks are yet another where those are ordered either mandated or by basically plea agreement, you know, via the justice system. And so those mechanisms that you praised a minute ago are actually expressions of coercion that require enforcement by the state. So it's, I think it's important to avoid a kind of binary classification here and acknowledge that there are roles for various forms of enforcement to achieve legitimate and important improvements in safety, especially for those who live in neighborhoods that have the highest rates of traffic violence. Now, of course, I'm concerned about excesses police, you know, brutality and excesses of force, harassment so on. That's why I endorse automated enforcement. There are better and worse ways to do automated enforcement, but one advantage is it's visible and can be challenged. That is to say, the cameras are public and their locations, and many states have to be publicized and advanced. And the cameras themselves do not discriminate. They can be set up to discriminate in terms of where they are and so on, but those locations, again, are public information and can be challenged. Contrast that with the discretion of individual. Officers, which is much harder to challenge, and or the abandonment of enforcement altogether, which is also legally impossible to challenge. So I think we're making a big mistake in advocating the safety conversation to people who don't have the best interests of cities or of missions of traffic violence at heart,

Speaker 1

25:26

fascinating stuff. Thank you for engaging in a respectful disagreement. I always I don't want every conversation that I have on this podcast to be like me, just like nodding my head and grinning all the time, because I think your perspective is valid. And there were moments of creativity in this paper that I was like, Yeah, I can see why this particular enforcement based model would make sense. Like you posited the idea of, like, an anti speeding bond, where everyone buys $100 bond at the beginning of the year, and if they don't get caught speeding by the end of the year, they get the money back with some interest. I thought that was a brilliant idea. And I think that's a really interesting conversation to have about how we can expand this enforcement based conversation, but I want to make sure that we get to the second half of the paper, and I don't want to waste your whole day. So let's do a quick pivot here to talk about the quality of life side of the coin, how folks in the Centurion set, or near Centurion set, cannot, just like continue to not die on our roads, but can actually enjoy their lives. So in urbanism, we tend to assume that non driving seniors will benefit from, like, all the same things that people of other age cohorts benefit from, you know, our walkable neighborhoods, our proximity of, you know, necessary destinations, all those sorts of good things. But you argue, kind of in this paper, that that's not exactly true, and we need to be using a different set of tools if we want to give people the opportunity to age in place or with grace in an area where cars are optional. What are some of those tools? And maybe we could make sure to include a definition in there somewhere of this great time out sorting concept, because I've never heard it before, and it is all over this book, and it is really useful.

Speaker 2

27:07

So there's a mid century economist named Charles Tebu, and he is famous for this sorting concept, where individuals move to the local government that best fits their preferences for public policies through mix of taxes and services. I'm quoting there from actually a summary of his theory by my colleague David schlicker at Yale, who's also written about TV sorting. So the basic idea, which I think is is in, you know, incontestable at a high level, operationalizing. It can be more challenging, but it's just that people self sort into areas that they want to be for one reason or another. The insight of TB was that people would self sort into, for example, higher tax, higher services municipalities, or lower tax, lower services municipalities, you know, by choice, on on the basis of what they wanted, either in general, or perhaps at that stage of life, if they have kids, maybe they want to be in a place that has good public schools. There are many criticisms of this, and so, you know, I don't want to tether myself to it, but the idea has merit in this, in the sense that from a policy perspective, that municipalities could do more to attract residents with the right mix of of services and and taxes. So I make both a pitch here for transportation to be sorting along transportation lines, which I call Gray, to be sorting that you know, older people can move to areas where they are able to get around, even if their ability to drive decreases. But I also acknowledge a major problem with that, which I'll get to in a second and try to work around that. So the basic idea is that right as we get older, we're less and less able to drive, and so our interest in living in a place that doesn't require driving should an expectation, you know, increase meaning we should want to be able to get to a higher share of our activities of daily life without needing a car, as you alluded to, you know, I think that that mindset would benefit everybody if municipalities decide to try to improve access without needing a car, you know, that will clearly benefit people of all ages. But I think it becomes really imperative for those of us who are fortunate to live till very old age. The problem with that is that, and this is been Doc, you know, this is an empirical finding that's been documented for quite a long time. People don't want to move, especially seniors, as a general rule, do not want to move. They don't want to move to, you know, Florida, I'm speaking in the aggregate. Obviously there are individuals who do, but they, not only do, they not want to, you know, do a major relocation, they don't even want to move out of. Of their current housing arrangement in many cases, and so, yeah, that's a problem for things like having falls on stairs and so on. But it's, it's really a problem for a theory that assumes voluntary, proactive sorting, you know, by residents as driving municipal change, changes in municipal public policy. And so what I posit in the paper is a little aspirational, the idea that, to the extent some municipalities market themselves as being not just a good place to retire in general, but a good place to to become very old and to specifically, to be able to reach, you know, all your daily needs without needing a car. That that might stimulate change in the places where people are not leaving, right? The idea is that on the margin, you know, other places, will want to keep people who are sort of on the fence about, do I move to this golf cart community, or do I move to this walkable community, or do I stay in the place I know and love, where I paid off my mortgage and I know all my neighbors and where they recently, you know, enhanced various ways of accessing local amenities that don't require driving. And just to underscore the golf cart point, I'm not taking the view here that places that are good for for seniors have to be just walkable, right? I think motorized transportation is okay. It's going to look different in different places. People have different tastes, and so there should be multiple flavors of high access communities, whether it's golf carts or small autonomous shuttles or walking or transit. And I think we should embrace the heterogeneity of preferences there all with the goal of enabling people to be where they want to be and access what they want to access without needing a

Speaker 1

31:50

car. Yeah, I think that's really well said, and it's definitely a conflict. I appreciate that you acknowledge the complexity of this conversation, also just to add one more onto it, like privilege and its role in how it navigates these decisions. As like the senior population both has some of the most concentrated like income inequality, like in our society right now, as like our aging population gets poorer and can no longer afford to move in addition to like, those emotional connections that keep people in place like, irrespective of they how they might like, vote with their feet if they could afford to. Those are all fascinating questions, and I really appreciate, though, that you acknowledge those realities in this paper. I do want to make sure, before we wrap up here, that I ask you one question that I thought was notably absent from this paper, and I was curious why, which is why you didn't talk very much about the legal policies around licensing and retesting for seniors as they age. Why isn't that included in this paper? Why did you choose to focus more on these other systems level interventions to address these, these issues? I'm just I'm curious why it didn't steer in that direction?

Speaker 2

33:00

Yeah. I mean, the reason is basically that I have a entirely separate research thread about that, with one paper that came out in January and another that's pending. That's one reason that's about the role of driver's license renewal policies on the safety of the crash involvement of senior citizens, where we find, in the first paper, a correlation, as you probably would expect, where, in broad strokes, states that set up more hurdles for license renewal, like after a certain age, you have to renew in person, or your renewal doesn't last as Long, et cetera, are correlated, not, you can't really show causation, but are correlated with strictness is correlated with lower crash involvement. So that's, that's, that's one reason, but the other, honestly, is like, you know, there was, there was limited, limitations in the format for this book chapter. They're something like a dozen chapters in the book, we all had pretty stringent length requirements, I guess. Another piece is, I'm trying to inject some new ideas here, and some ones that are that are not really well covered the grade T booth wording is one that I introduce here. The idea that older people would move to places based on their changing preferences as they age. Is hardly new, but the incorporation of the transportation component of demand into the to model is, I don't I haven't seen it elsewhere, I guess so that you know variety of reasons, lots that one could say, but certainly licensure is something to look at to some of your earlier points about trade offs. You know, there are trade offs to restricting people's access to licenses. In other words, restrictions on licensure are there's a risk of taking away people's independence when they are able to drive safely. And so. So that tends to be the predominant public health kind of concern about tightening controls on licensure. Of course, that has to be balanced against the safety risk that very old drivers tend to pose, not just to themselves, but to the public.

Speaker 1

35:16

Yeah, I appreciate that, and I appreciate that you approach this topic through so many fresh angles. I think it's something that I think about a lot in my own advocacy and my own writing, but I don't get the opportunity to talk about it as often, so maybe I'll just close us out. Do you think that the transportation advocacy community is talking enough about aging through the angles that you've outlined here? Is this going to become a bigger topic for us as the, you know, silver tsunami, as it were, descends upon America and our population ages. Why now? Why is this urgent, and what's the action item? So

Speaker 2

35:53

I'm not an elder law scholar, so I'm really not talking my own book here. When I say that, we really can't be talking about aging too much in terms of its role in public policy. That's something that that CDC funded collaboration I mentioned, really drove home for me. And then writing this paper as well, the graying of society is going to have effects across issue domains. I can't think of one that where it won't be really important, including for transportation, because transportation, unlike most other activities that enable people to participate in society, places others at risk. Right? So it may be that older people have difficulty voting, casting their ballot, because of the logistics involved in I don't even mean getting to the polls. I mean just like filling out the ballot or parsing the differences between different you know, referenda, and that's a problem on a few levels, but it doesn't create physical dangers for other members of the community or for that person themselves. You could say something similar about aging in employment where the workforce is getting older, outside of Of course, some job occupations where it would pose a physical risk, it really does, right? If your manager isn't as familiar with what is technology. Let's say that's less likely to pose Life and Death risks than somebody behind the wheel after at the age when beyond the age when they shouldn't be. And it's a thorny topic, because first of all, it's very sensitive. And second, you can't just say after X age, right? The human body doesn't age that way, where you can just say after certain age, it's just unsafe to drive, it's going to be individual assessment. Our state DMVs are really they're really not set up to be making those assessments at the scale that they would need to to act as an effective screen here, and so we rely on after the fact remedies like confidence, you know, taking away a license after somebody has had a really bad crash, or imposing other other sanctions. You know that that's often after irreparable harm has been done, so it's a real problem.

Speaker 1

38:18

Okay, that's our show. Thank you so much. Again. To my guest, Greg Schill. You will find a link to our earlier conversation with him, as well as to the book that this chapter he wrote is a part of which will be available for open access, if not already, at least very shortly. If you would like to support this show, you can do so by leaving us a positive review on Apple podcasts or Spotify or anywhere else that you listen, or just tell a friend. We just want more people to be able to tune in. The break is a production of streets blog USA. Oh, I should say also, if you'd like to support streets blog USA, we do take tax deductible contributions. We're a 501, c3, our theme music is eggshells by Christina Johnson. I am your host and editor, Kea Wilson, and before I let you go, same question as always, what is one thing you can do today to help end universal car dependency? Let me know you.

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