Building cities that don’t require citizens to own a car to prosper is arguably the greatest climate positive action we could do. The trouble is, there are a ton of complex physical, social, economic, and political systems to navigate to take that action. To take a nibble off of the elephant, I joined a focus group last year in my town of Cary, North Carolina that continues to work on developing a plan for on-street bike infrastructure. Through that group, I met Jared Draper of the Toole Design Group. I caught up with him to chat about how their flavor of consulting works, what impact it is having, and why he got into this gig in the first place.
Below you will find a lightly edited transcript of the interview for those who prefer to read. If you prefer to listen or watch, this interview is available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and as an RSS feed.
Dustin: Welcome back to the Sustainable Advantages Climate Innovators Series. I’m here with Jared Draper of the Toole Design Group. Jared tell us about what you do over there at the Toole Design Group.
Jared: Thanks. Like you said, my name is Jared. I currently lead the Raleigh office as the director for Toole Design. We have over 20 offices across the country. My background is in urban planning. I'm a senior planner here and recently became one of the owners of Toole Design Group and so excited to be part of this company. I guess what I do here is I work with a team to collaborate on a variety of projects and our goal as Toole Design Group is to think about people-focused spaces and mobility. We are a group of planners, landscape architects, and engineers that emphasize mobility and changing streets and trails that emphasize how people can walk, access transit, or ride a bike instead of taking trips in a personal vehicle.
Dustin: So basically when a city or I guess you also deal with commercial kind of setups as well, when they say, “Hey we want to kind of look into how we should handle our transportation strategy going forward.” Is that when they contract you all?
Jared: Absolutely. Yeah, most of our work is on the public side. So most of our clients are municipalities, regional organizations, or even state governments like Departments of Transportation. However, there's always this growing group of developers on the private side that are thinking about mobility and transportation in a brand new way as they do their developments. There are times that we get pulled into those types of projects as well.
Dustin: What made you choose to get into this kind of consulting?
Jared: What a great story. I have to start way back by growing up really. My kind of summer jobs and even jobs during school were around construction and labor so I did a lot of manual labor got to undergrad and then grad school and focused on humanities thinking about people and got into urban planning by simply entering a Google search that said “people plus changing cities” and thinking that this was like construction plus the people side and that's how I kind of ended up in urban planning.
It was the perfect fit because I love the idea of thinking strategically about how systems and networks can work together. The impact on the built environment is what I think is the most valuable piece because that's what impacts our lives every single day. So after grad school, I worked for a city for five years in Colorado. Understanding kind of the public side of that work and doing permits and a lot of great and not great stories from there, but then ultimately realized that what I cared the most about was how people walk and bike in their communities and what they have access to and don't have access to There's a very few opportunities for that on the public side. It's growing but I saw consulting as the best way to get that as part of my job every single day.
There are a handful of companies that do this exclusively and Toole Design has been around for over 20 years and one that I've been following for a while. I put my name out there several different times and finally had the opportunity to work here and I've been here for a little over eight years and it's still one of the best professional choices that I think I've ever made.
Dustin: That's a cool story because I guess that's a story that you would have to be a certain age to be able to appreciate where you can Google search for what do I want to be when I grow up and then push it right?
Jared: Yeah, I guess it was right when you could do those kinds of searches and so it felt like maybe I hit the jackpot on my Google search.
Dustin: Yeah, the fact that you mentioned that you put a ‘plus’ in that's the sweet spot for me too. Pivoting away a bit, you mentioned that there are not a lot of firms that do this kind of planning consulting. I guess that's what differentiates the Toole Design Group away from other consulting firms. Let's say I'm the City of Raleigh and I say, I just have this space. I don't know what I'm going to do with it or if we need to build our transportation plan for the next 10 years. If I don't think about Bikes or people, I'm just like, “Hey, we just have to build a plan.” How does Toole Design Group kind of wedge themselves in there? What's the process to say, “Hey, you have another option.”
Jared: Yeah, maybe I'll back up just a little because I think that though you're right, there are a lot of consulting firms that do planning design engineering out there and I would say that even in all of those firms whether they're really large or really small there's a lot of great people that have some of the same passions and appreciate what we do at Toole Design. I think what sets us apart is that it's us being a mission-driven firm thinking about people in the way that they kind of move that's our sole focus. We don't have a small group that's doing this kind of work and then another part of our group widening highways and building things that we think are detrimental to culture, society, and the environment. This is all that we do and so being mission-driven is something that I think is one of the reasons that we also say no to certain projects because we don't believe that they place the same value on adding real benefits to our communities.
Being, out loud, a mission-driven firm at Toole Design is something that we're proud of. We're woman-owned, Jennifer Toole has been at this work for a long time, and she is a North Carolina native which is also really exciting. We believe that there's kind of a new way of thinking about transportation that kind of moves us away from the traditional way of thinking about it. We believe that ethics, equity, and empathy are things that we should be leading with and we have some information on kind of what we call the three new E’s. Internally, we have a lot of shared values that we talk about often and it's about how we collaborate, how we can be good stewards, how we can elevate our expertise in this realm, and advocate for social justice. Those are things that I would say set us apart and I think when a community has choices about doing a plan or doing a project sometimes everything that we are aligns with what they want to do.
Sometimes there are kind of bottom lines of, “We've worked with this other firm before. We can move through their process a little bit more quickly.” There could be costs and time constraints and all of those things. I would say that often we challenge the way that our clients think about a project and that can take some time but it's all because we're challenging the way that we internally are always thinking about those projects and how we can make them better as our communities change and shift due to challenges as well as opportunities.
Dustin: Yeah, I guess I've seen that some working with you through the Cary bike focus group. It's not always, “Okay, here's where we're going to put a bunch of bike infrastructure.” It's more like, “Here's how we're going communicate about infrastructure. Here's how we're going to communicate about what the goal is.” Kind of backing up to build the momentum. So it's less about the nuts and bolts of where should we put in a roundabout or something. It's more about if we get a shared value system in there then you can make lasting change. I guess that's kind of the idea, right?
Jared: Yeah, I mean, I think that you have hit it right on and obviously the Cary bike plan is a really good example, but I think it's one that we see over and over again. Honestly, it's something that we kind of start with at the beginning of a project. A community has said we want to do this thing. The understanding of “why” and the value or benefit that it has when it's done is the harder part to get through but that's what creates lasting change and starts to change attitudes and impact culture rather than just saying, “Here's what it is.” I think about my kids and the number of times I answer the question “why” and if I just dismiss those all of the time. I can't say that I always answer them, but if I dismiss them all of the time then I'm not teaching them to think for themselves or to be critical thinkers, right? We want our kids to be curious so that they can learn and kind of grow. In the same way, we want our clients, projects, and communities to do the same thing, so we should be answering those questions about “why”.
Dustin: I think that's kind of a different approach than I would expect many places would take. So let's talk about how it's worked out. So maybe some successes or some failures and they don't have to be from Toole Design Group. You kind of alluded to when you worked in Colorado that maybe you had some spectacular failures, but I'd love to hear about, a project that you were really proud of first and something that really worked well.
Don't say Cary because it's not done yet.
Jared: Yeah, I mean It's not done yet, but I expect it's going to be a success.
We can start with failures. I don't know if I could point to a project as a whole as a failure. I think there are a lot of aspects of failures and different things that we've done whether it's been the way that we've done engagement for planning projects or even design projects. They weren't wholly as inclusive as they could have been. They didn't reach a representative group of the population. This is a bigger problem of planning historically is that we have just kind of let the squeaky wheel and those that are the loudest in the room dominate the conversation and direct the path. I can list numerous of those when I was on the public side where we were trying to push something through or there was a project that really would have been beneficial to so many people and because there are a few really loud people that completely altered the direction and that engagement didn't give voices equal platforms. It created a hierarchy and that shouldn't be the intent. While at Toole Design I think that we've had projects that we've worked on that had a lot of community support and had very little political backing and because of that at the end of the day failed. They had really good ideas. They had things that people were excited about and the plans weren't adopted or they were adopted and they sat on the shelf because people didn't think that they had a lot of value.
I think that goes back to the emphasis on the “why”. It is so important I want to talk about success because I think there's, been a lot of success too, unless you have a question.
Dustin: I had a question on the gap between community and I guess the political side of things. It is interesting because generally you would expect those things would align and I guess when they don't it's problematic. So how do you close that gap? Is it just a matter of telling the community to go get engaged with their city leaders? Is it voting? Is that simple?
Jared: I don't think anything on the political side is that simple. I do think that bringing elected officials and decision-makers into the process very early is essential. It shows that they're not up on a dais making a decision without any other kind of voices behind it, right? You want them at the meeting where there's a hundred other people talking about this and giving feedback. You want them to hear and give their own input on the projects and the process as it's developing. That becomes such a valuable piece. At the end of the day, there are sometimes that you won't change minds and I don't think that we're in a business of just changing people's minds. We're in a business of kind of thinking through and being critical thinkers on the work that we're doing and getting really good evidence on why it can be valuable to a community. So hopefully that answers your question. We're not the gap closer.
Dustin: Yeah. Yeah, you're not the gap closer. I was more thinking about people who are listening and thinking, “How can I close that gap?” But I think that that's a reasonable way to think about it. All right. Let's talk about a success.
Jared: There’s a lot of past success that I think about, but in this moment right now, there's such a big emphasis on safety at the federal level. Roadway safety. There's a lot of money that's also available for communities that are trying to prioritize safety which is a kind of a crazy thing that we are at a place where we have to say we are now prioritizing safety. That ultimately means that, in the past, we probably weren't.
In addition to bike plans, which I absolutely love, I’ve been working on other kinds of planning efforts. There are several Safety Action plans often called Vision Zero, which is kind of a brand around eliminating fatal and serious injury roadway crashes. One of the things that I've been fascinated about in that realm has been working with communities to rethink kind of everything around roadway safety and changing culture around safety. It is not like just an elected official’s decision top-down. It's also a bottom-up where you have to have people in the community that say they care about this a lot and that needs to infiltrate daily conversations and the way that we talk to co-workers and families and others. Recently we did a regional Safety Action Plan in Northwest Arkansas. Because of it and one of those communities saying we recognize the value of this change and we want to pursue things that are in this plan. We want to take a lot of action steps. They committed to that and simultaneously said we're also going to pursue a big Federal Grant.
They were awarded what I believe is the second highest of its kind of funding of 25 million dollars in safety funds to kickstart a few projects that will radically change their community when it comes to roadway safety and access to transit and walking and biking. It’s a huge opportunity there that's in Fayetteville, Arkansas so I think that's really cool.
The other part of the success there is we're starting to do things differently instead of saying safety is just one of the things that we're looking at. We're kind of using this safety as a blanket. Cary’s bike plans are a good example of what we're saying. We're not kind of lowering our standard to have bikeway infrastructure. That is not safe. We’ve kind of eliminated the need for that to be a lens that we look through because everything we're looking at is about safety already. That is a huge success for the future.
Dustin: 25 million dollars for Fayetteville, Arkansas, which is not like a huge city. So that's a pretty big game changer. I think that hopefully, they can get the speed bumps and the corridor changes that need to happen in place, but that's pretty nice. Of course when the roads are safer, then you can get some more bikes and people out there too. I see the strategy.
Jared: Yeah.
Dustin: One last question for you, kind of a magic wand question. What's the 30-second thing that you wish would happen so that Toole Design Group could help make mobility improvements? What's the one thing that you wish would happen?
Jared: Wow, it's things I think about all the time. We could just emphasize separating users. We could just start with schools. My kids walk to elementary school and that is such a delightful part of our day. If I could wave my wand I would say that every city within the one mile around their schools was the safest place to ride a bike or jump on a bus. That we wouldn't say that the big streets, the highways, arterial type of streets that are in those areas are too hard for us to deal with. I would say that my wand would just make all of that safe for the kids, families, teachers, and administrators to get there safely and not feel like they're taking their lives into their own hands. So there's my wand.
Dustin: As a guy with four kids in the house, I support your wand and I'll be over here waving my magic wand too, Jared.
Jared: Perfect.
Dustin: I appreciate the conversation and we'll talk again soon.
Jared: Thanks, Dustin
A conversation with Jared Draper of the Toole Design Group