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ModeShift Episode 6: A car-light vision for the U.S.

Written by Via Transportation | Nov 1, 2022 4:00:00 AM

The average LA commuter spends five days a year stuck in traffic; pedestrian deaths are the highest they’ve been in 40 years in the U.S.; and the transportation sector is the biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in America. They’re all products of a system that has prioritized automobiles over people for decades.

But ‘car free’ or ‘car light’ approaches to urban planning are taking hold in cities and neighborhoods around the world. From Amsterdam to Barcelona to Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates, officials are getting serious about redesigning their communities for car-free living. The concept sounds a bit radical. But it doesn’t mean getting rid of cars altogether. It’s about reimagining communities to shift the balance in favor of new transit options.

In this episode, Andrei and Tiffany explore what transportation in the U.S. would look like if most of us didn't have to reach for our car keys every day. Guests:

Listen to ModeShift on Apple , Spotify, or anywhere you listen to podcasts.

Transcript.

Andrei Greenawalt: Tiffany, have you ever been to Amsterdam?

Tiffany Chu: Yes, it is incredible. It is such a beautiful city. Loved it. I remember exiting from the train station and there were just waves and waves of cyclists, pedestrians, folks getting on and off light rail and almost not a single car in sight.

Andrei Greenawalt: I love it too. I've been a few times, the first time when I was about 12, my last time was a couple years ago. And every time I go it just blows my mind. It is so beautiful, as you just said. It is, I think, one of the most romantic cities in the world and I just love it. The canals, the bicycles, everything there is awesome. I think when I talk about how much I like it, I've never been that good at conveying exactly what makes it so magical. But we then talked to Cornelia Dinca. She's the founder of Sustainable Amsterdam.

Cornelia Dinca: Sometimes I say it's kind of like this feeling of almost floating through the city. It's hard to describe, but it's this kind of magical feeling where it's the opposite of being in your car stressed out because you're trying to get to work, but there's a traffic jam. So it's like if you turn that around 180 degrees, it's like your every commute or every trip in the city is like a moment of inspiration.

Tiffany Chu: Man, what a great description. I want to float through Boston.

Andrei Greenawalt: I know, right? I wish I could have floated through DC on that sweaty public transit trip I took in our first episode. I was in LA for work a couple weeks ago, and everywhere I went there, I kept thinking about Cornelia feeling really inspired by her commutes instead of totally stressed out by them. And Yonah Freemark, if you remember, he was on our show a few episodes back. He's the researcher at the Urban Institute and he described, if you recall, LA completely differently than the way Cornelia talks about Amsterdam.

Yonah Freemark: If you go out and walk around so many parts of LA, you'll find enormous arterial streets with terrible pedestrian crossings. You'll find a complete lack of quality bike infrastructure where people feel safe biking around. You'll find cars dominating virtually every space you look at in the environment. And when you have conditions like that, no matter how many investments you make in the public transportation, you're going to be having a society that is structured around needing to drive because no one wants to not drive in an environment that feels terrible if you're not in a car.

Tiffany Chu: Wow. Yes, I remember that tape. And I cannot think of a clearer contrast than Amsterdam and Los Angeles. LA is definitely not floaty.

Andrei Greenawalt: No, it is not floaty at all. It was a city made by cars, and if you talk to anyone there, they will tell you how frustrating it is to get across that city. The average LA commuter spends five days a year stuck in traffic, and pedestrian deaths have risen steadily in the city, and nationally for that matter, for the past 40 years. So how did we end up with these totally different outcomes?

Tiffany Chu: It all comes back to one simple thing, the car, or rather how we build our communities and our cities around the car.

Cornelia Dinca: We've just gone so far in this direction of car dependence. The only way to get back to a more balanced equilibrium is to be a little bit extreme about reclaiming these cities.

Andrei Greenawalt: In our final episode of this season, the car-free city, the concept sounds a little radical, but it doesn't mean getting rid of cars altogether. Rather, it's about reimagining our communities to prioritize people over vehicles. What if most of us didn't have to reach for our car keys before walking out the front door every morning?

Tiffany Chu: What if we could float more and stress less?

Andrei Greenawalt: Yes.

Tiffany Chu: I'm Tiffany Chu.

Andrei Greenawalt: And I'm Andrei Greenawalt, and this is ModeShift.

Tiffany Chu: A show about the past, present, and future of how we move.

Andrei Greenawalt: So Tiffany, in this episode, we're going to dig into how cities are designing for people-centric mobility instead of car-centric mobility. But before we do that, I think we should probably give our definition of what a car-free city or a car-free community even is.

Tiffany Chu: Definitely. When people hear car free, they probably think about banning cars altogether.

Reporter: Several cities around the world, including London, Paris, and Montreal, are looking at ways to dramatically reduce the number of vehicles in its streets.

Andrei Greenawalt: From Barcelona to Oslo, to Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates, officials are getting serious about redesigning their communities for car-free living.

Reporter: Many cities in Europe are flirting with banning private cars from the roads and many more have at least partial bans in place.

Tiffany Chu: Now, bans or partial bans are one tool that cities are exploring, but we have a much broader and inclusive definition. What we're really talking about is creating enough alternatives to allow anyone to get around without a car. So it's actually about giving people more choices, not less, for a better quality of life.

Reporter: There is the obvious reason to combat climate change, but car-free cities are also leading to a better quality of life. Without cars, there's less smell, less noise, more space to walk, to dine outdoors, to play.

Andrei Greenawalt: I think this is a really crucial point, because there are huge benefits to fewer cars. It means fewer injuries and deaths from accidents. It means lower healthcare costs, lower air pollution and climate pollution, more space that can be used for green parks or other uses, and better real estate values. But this all only works if it's paired with better transit and mobility alternatives. So let's dig deeper into our definition. Can you say more about the importance of choice, Tiffany?

Tiffany Chu: Yeah. It's about being able to walk out your front door, and have a multitude of different choices to get to where you need to go. And if one isn't available, you can choose another. In most places in the US, folks only have one real choice: their car. What if you had an abundance of mobility choices, an abundance of optionality?

Andrei Greenawalt: Yeah, that would be amazing. I think if we're talking about where do we start on getting a car-free city going, it starts with this abundance of mobility choices. And if you have that in place, then over time, fewer and fewer people will drive and you can start to impose policies that also disincentivize driving and push more and more people to these alternatives. And over time, can we get to a point where in certain cities we have a much smaller percentage of travel by car, something like 10% of travel by car, not zero car trips, but a very small percentage of what's happening.

Tiffany Chu: Yeah. And however we define it, this concept feels so ridiculously impossible to most people outside of America's biggest cities. So many of our communities were purpose-built for the car with so much of our valuable land used for parking lots, highways, and arterial roads. So many people in the US have lived their entire lives around the car. Can you blame people for thinking there's no way to undo this?

Andrei Greenawalt: No, it does feel super daunting. When we think about where do we start on even tackling this problem, we probably need to take a look at some transportation history. People often point to cities like Amsterdam or Copenhagen as these meccas of car-free living as if they have always been that way. But Cornelia Dinca, the founder of Sustainable Amsterdam, who we heard at the top of the show, she explained how that's not really true. Amsterdam, for example, actually invested heavily in car-centric design after World War II, just like most cities in the United States.

Cornelia Dinca: So Amsterdam has this reputation of being a bike city. So what's very surprising for many people, and also for me, was to find out that in fact, this wasn't always the case. This idea that Amsterdam was not always Amsterdam, that if you look at these photos from Amsterdam in the 1970s and 1980s, it was much more like your average North American city. Sidewalks were covered in cars, parked cars, double parked cars, all the beautiful public squares that people really enjoy today were basically used as parking lots. A lot of the city was being actually torn down and demolished to make room for these modernist highways and modernist buildings.

Andrei Greenawalt: Traffic experts from the US went to Europe in the '60s and '70s to try to sell this idea of the car-centric city. Their pitch was basically, "Look, if you want to be a modern city, you have to stop being nostalgic about the past and you got to start embracing the car." And Amsterdam did that, at least for a bit.

Cornelia Dinca: I like to say that Amsterdam was the combination of lucky and wise that it didn't go down that path too far. It made some mistakes. And we have some of these modernist highways, actually one to show kind of through the city center, which was then also reclaimed.

Tiffany Chu: I had heard about this part of Amsterdam's history and I've seen the photos, but if Amsterdam was already on this road to redesigning their city for their car, what changed?

Andrei Greenawalt: Public pressure. In 1971, there were more than 3000 car-related deaths in the Netherlands, and 500 of them were children. And so there was this campaign called "Stop de kindermoord" or stop the children's murders. And a lot of people in the city started protesting against this car-centric vision for the city, including a bunch of kids.

News clip: [Chanting in Dutch].

Andrei Greenawalt: If you look on YouTube, you can find these great clips from 1972 in Amsterdam where children were actually blocking off city streets to cars, to advocate for more play-safe streets. Here they're chanting, "Get these cars out of the way. We want to play." And you see in the footage that Amsterdam looked a lot less appealing in the 1970s than it does today.

Tiffany Chu: Okay, just Googled it. Oh, crazy. This clip I just clicked on is all in Dutch, but there's this kid maybe nine or 10 with a classic Beetles haircut, and he's walking down the middle of some noisy street in Amsterdam, and then there are these kids in the streets with signs. It's kind of incredible. As a public servant, I've been thinking a lot about protests and how cities should react or not react to various protests that happen, but it feels like they worked here.

News clip: [Chanting in Dutch].

Andrei Greenawalt: Yeah, they were definitely a big piece of the puzzle. There was this other movement called the Cyclists' Union, which built on the momentum and pushed for more support for bikes. And then in 1973 we had the Arab oil crisis, and that forced local leaders to seek alternatives to gas-fueled cars, which further turned the tide toward redesigning the city. And these same kind of protests were actually happening in the US as well. They just never made it into the history books.

Peter Norton: In almost every city, certainly every city where I've checked, and also a lot of small towns and suburbs, people, especially mothers of children, blocked streets demanding that the authorities step in and slow the vehicles down so that their children could go outside safely, so that their children could go to their friends' houses safely, and so that they themselves could walk around the street safely too.

Andrei Greenawalt: This is Peter Norton. He's the University of Virginia professor we met back in episode one. And Peter says that from the late 1940s to the 1970s, a lot of women in the US weren't loving the shift to car-centric living.

Peter Norton: From their point of view, this idea of a city where you can drive anywhere at any time was not a utopia. It was a dystopia almost.

Andrei Greenawalt: And so they started protesting. And not just well-to-do white women, Peter explained that middle and working class women of all ethnicities took to the streets.

Peter Norton: These protests took the form of blocking the local streets to get attention. The reporters would come and ask, "What's going on?" And they'd tell the reporters, "We want a stop sign. We want a traffic light. We want the cars slowed down. We want some speed enforcement." And very often they would get results. This is another illustration of how we have selectively omitted part of our history. And it's a very crucial one because it compels us to question the story that says, everybody welcomed this transformation.

Tiffany Chu: This is fascinating. I remember in the first episode, Peter talked about how it was the automakers and the other industry players who aggressively lobbied for car-centric policies. And then you also have these pockets of resistance in the US to car dependency. But why were there such different outcomes in the Netherlands versus the US?

Andrei Greenawalt: I think it comes down to a combination of culture and geography. America built the first mass-produced car. It's also a very big country, so it spent decades building new cities around the car after World War II. Amsterdam, which is in a country that is quite flat geographically, already had a rich bicycle culture, and that made it a viable alternative when the moment arose.

Cornelia Dinca: It was absolutely not a walk in the park. It was not kumbaya, this transition in Amsterdam by any means. It took more than a decade of campaigning and lobbying and this kind of guerilla activism and all kinds of initiatives. Again, Amsterdam had kind of adopted or was on that path to some extent, but a lot of people could still remember a time when they would have biked to school as children themselves or played in the streets with their friends. So there was this collective memory that we can go back to a different time that is actually a more inspiring way to live.

Tiffany Chu: So, that idea of having a collective memory of a more inspiring way to live really hits me. I had a great childhood. I was really lucky, a daughter of Taiwanese immigrants who was born in Flushing, Queens. But then I grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey in the '80s and '90s, the definition of my parents' American dream. And to get anywhere, I had a hitch a ride with my friends or my parents. And so I became a part of a suburban generation that never knew any other way moving around.

Andrei Greenawalt: And that brings us to another important historical point. Your experience is America's experience, the suburbs pretty much squashed any dreams of car-free living From about the 1950s on.

Ellen Dunham-Jones: Post-war suburbs become an absolute federally-sponsored mass development project really designed to kickstart the economy after World War II.

Andrei Greenawalt: This is Ellen Dunham-Jones. Ellen teaches architecture and urban design at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. And one of her claims to fame, she is known as the "dead malls expert".

Ellen Dunham-Jones: Yeah. When the media need a professor to verify our malls dying and what's happening to them, I often get the call.

Andrei Greenawalt: She actually manages a database of dead malls. But her expertise, it's not malls per se, it's what those dead malls tell us about the suburbs, their history, their impact, and how we might change them for the better going forward.

Ellen Dunham-Jones: In the very early 2000s is about when we hit the tipping point of more than 50% of the US population live in the suburbs.

Andrei Greenawalt: And is it still the case today that more than 50% of Americans live in the suburbs?

Ellen Dunham-Jones: Absolutely, yes.

Andrei Greenawalt: I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about the growth of suburban malls, how that connects to the growth of our car dependency in the US, and are those two connected and what the consequences of that have been?

Ellen Dunham-Jones: Both the development of malls and the development of this car-dependent model of suburbia, both of them come out of that same drive by the federal government to sort of use suburbanization as a way to kickstart the economy.

Reporter: With a population being spread out thinner than in the city proper, there was a crying need for a new concept in retailing, some place where Mr. and Mrs. Suburbia could park their car easily and then take care of all their family's needs. This idea of one-stop shopping was translated into the shopping center.

Ellen Dunham-Jones: The government built highways, soon followed by shopping centers. Even the museums, the magazines, the TV shows, they all promoted suburbia as the ideal of modern living. And I think we ended up then using the tool of zoning to segregate out, okay, houses on big lots are over here, houses on tiny lots, you're over here and, oh, apartments, you're way over there, and the government center's over here, retail over there, business center over there. The only way to get around to all these different uses was by high speed roads.

Andrei Greenawalt: But this plan to use suburbia to grow the economy, it ended up creating a whole new problem.

Ellen Dunham-Jones: Most people in suburbia, most people everywhere, they have a car, even though it's parked 93% of the time, they feel they have to have this expensive object for when they have to get around and that they can't rely on transit, it's too far away. They don't have enough alternatives.

Tiffany Chu: So this is really the crux of the issue, isn't it? The majority of us, whether we live in the suburbs of Bridgewater, New Jersey or Central LA, just don't have enough options that aren't a car when we need to get from point A to B. And this goes back to episode one when Peter Norton said, "This is the result of very clear decisions that made the system this way."

Andrei Greenawalt: So for us to even imagine a car-free city or car-light cities in the US, we have to create options that are more appealing and more accessible for people than firing up the car. And in the US, that does feel like a hard lift.

Tiffany Chu: Yeah. Even in San Francisco, when I was on the Congestion Pricing Advisory Committee, a city as progressive as San Francisco, people were so fearful of something that was about taking their beloved automobile away, because it was a symbol of freedom. And I'm curious, did you ask Ellen about this? Given our deep connection to the suburban lifestyle, how realistic does she think the car-free city concept is for the US?

Andrei Greenawalt: Well, she's making it work for herself. She gave up her car seven years ago and she's been getting around the Atlanta area by walking, biking, and via public transit ever since. And I asked her what she thought it would take to change our collective thinking.

Ellen Dunham-Jones: Most of the places that are car-free or have gone car-free are places we love to go as tourists. Whether it's congestion pricing in London, 15 minute cities in Paris, super blocks in Barcelona, not providing parking in new neighborhoods in Freiberg, Germany, I mean these are just the European examples. In the US, there are at least a dozen car-free island resort areas such as Fire Island. And if we could just get more people to say, "Gee, why is this so pleasant? Couldn't we do this at home?" I would say right now it depends on what are those backups that you have? How close are you to transit? How many options do you have?

Andrei Greenawalt: Here we are back at this concept of options and how do we provide those options for people? Well, one way is, as we've talked about in this series, is that there are new technology tools that have come online over the last few years that are creating more mobility options both in cities and suburban areas and rural areas alike.

Tiffany Chu: Right. So there was Caroline Rodriguez from episode three, and she helped start up a new transit agency in rural Utah using an on-demand system, making it possible for people living in a county of almost 2000 square miles to get anywhere they want to go without a car.

Andrei Greenawalt: And then there's the mayor from Valdosta, Georgia who was in that same episode, he launched an on-demand transit service for his city that ended up getting something like 40,000 more rides in the first year of service than they were anticipating.

Tiffany Chu: And there's also all these startups who are using computer vision and license plate readers and mobile phone apps to basically do versions of congestion pricing, not only in London, Singapore, Stockholm, but other cities are exploring these new technology tools as well. And because of these new tools, we're now able to connect people to diverse mobility options while making transit planning more efficient.

Andrei Greenawalt: Yeah. And I think we have to be willing to use every single tool that we have in the toolbox to move things in a better direction. And Ellen reflected that a bit in her comments.

Ellen Dunham-Jones: I think there's a number of reasons why car-free, even in suburbia, it's the heavy lift, we know, but trying to do car-free in suburbia, I think now is exactly the right time to try to deal with that. I know a lot of folks that would actually welcome having microtransit options that much more convenient and easy for them to access and have them feel safe with that. So everything from looking at the demographics, understanding the changes in technology, the new forms of mobility, and really thinking fresh about what is it, that promise of suburbia is sort of city out your front door, countryside out your back door, are there ways that if we really significantly reduce the car, we can reimagine new ways of delivering versions of that promise?

Tiffany Chu: Okay. So we're taking this optimistic, inclusive approach to the car-free concept, but this whole idea of car free or car-light communities can really scare people off too.

Andrei Greenawalt: Yeah, right. I mean, if you just hear the phrase, the first thing that might pop to your mind is that there's going to be some policy that's going to take my car away or make it impossibly expensive to drive around. And that's the only option I have today to really get around my community. So I totally agree. I think Cornelia Dinca, when we were talking to her, she definitely honed in on this question of communications and messaging.

Cornelia Dinca: I'm not necessarily a huge fan of the whole car-free city concept per se, because it's a little bit absolutist. It's a little bit too extreme if you say no cars at all. It's a little bit too extreme and it's also saying too much what you don't want compared to spinning it around and talking more about what you want in cities. So you can talk about a kid-friendly city. So can children walk or bike to school on their own or play in their streets without parents having to worry about them crossing the street, for example, right? So I think it's good to talk about all these other things you get in the city when cities are not so car dominated and car dependent. The reason we have to use this kind of terminology is just to even make people aware and to be able to put on the agenda kind of these alternative imageries of what cities can be like if not every trip was dependent on the automobile.

Tiffany Chu: So whether we call them car-free or car-light communities, why aren't we seeing a more rapid push behind the concept? What's holding us back?

Andrei Greenawalt: Yeah, I think there's a lot of factors. I mean, as we've dissected, our political system is deeply tied to cars, that reflects our culture. We love cars, we associate them with personal freedom. We don't like the idea of giving them up. I don't think it's widely understood the impact that our car dependency is having. And so Cornelia, she's not even American and she gets it.

Cornelia Dinca: So people act like the car is their firstborn child and if you tell them they can no longer park in front of their house, they get very angry and mad and emotional and so on. I mean, you basically said it, right? It's this idea of it's our culture, the North American culture. The American culture is so closely linked to the automobile, there's nothing we can do about it. And I always like to push back on that idea because I think culture changes all the time. And I think again, this is what we've seen in Amsterdam in the 1970s and in the 1980s is that culture can change. It could change from this much more bike-friendly culture to a car-dominated culture, and then it could also change back again.

Tiffany Chu: I'm hearing some optimism there. Even though change is very tough, it's possible.

Andrei Greenawalt: Absolutely. We just have to keep talking about the viable alternatives and then step by step show how they can work. Otherwise, people, they won't think there's any other way.

Cornelia Dinca: Quite often we tend to think, okay, streets are made out of stone and out of asphalt and we can't change them. And in fact we can. But if you don't have any good or recent examples, or if there isn't a discussion or a dialogue or a collective process to actually re-envision the streets, then it's very easy to think, well, there's no way to change. So having this massive system change is what is very paralyzing for people very often.

Andrei Greenawalt: Our entire lifetimes in the US, we've lived in a country that's dominated by the car. So, Tiffany, do you think this concept of a car-free community or communities across the country, is that even possible here?

Tiffany Chu: Well, not only is it possible, it's already happening in places like Fire Island in New York. There's a cool startup in Tempe, Arizona right outside of Phoenix called Culdesac, where a good friend of mine, Ryan Johnson, is trying to start a new car-free community. And we can always look to places like Europe, like Venice, city centers in Barcelona, Ghent. This is so possible, it's just a matter of political will.

Andrei Greenawalt: Yeah. And I think it's also interesting that New York City is likely to very soon have congestion pricing. They passed a law to do that. They're just kind of going through the approval process with the federal government. That'll be the first city in the US to start to charge drivers for driving into congested areas of Manhattan. Even though it was super politically difficult to get that accomplished, the reason that's even only possible in New York is because there were great mobility options in place. I think if we can start to build those mobility options elsewhere, it opens up the opportunity to generate funding to do even more. There are a bunch of people in the US who are living in communities that are effectively car free or car light, and that is really important. Even though we're talking about a much broader vision and this being in many more communities across the US, people are living this experience today of getting around their community without a car. And so I think, again, it just comes back to choice and other options to get around. As Peter Norton says, framing this all around choice, it's a critical piece of the American identity.

Peter Norton: Right now, Americans don't have choices, most of us. And when I say choices, I don't just mean the theoretical possibility of getting a bus or the theoretical possibility of riding a bike, but the attractive equivalence of that choice. In other words, is riding a bike as inviting and as safe to you as riding in your car? And this is a country that has often stood for valuing individual liberty, individual choice. And if we really value choice, then maybe that fact can help us to ensure that people who choose not to drive have that choice, not just as a theoretical possibility, but as an attractive opportunity.

Andrei Greenawalt: Jerome Horne talks about this too. He's the transit expert we've heard from a couple times this season, and Jerome thinks there are a lot of shared values that can make the car-free concept more attractive.

Jerome Horne: We sort of have to meet people where they're at and appeal to core values with folks about don't you want cleaner air? Don't you want a safer community? And I think once you begin to have conversations with people about what their values are, we find out that a lot of us are very similar in what we want. We want to make the world a better place. We want to reduce crime and violence and particularly death from being struck by automobiles for a lot of pedestrians. But how we get there, it's messy. It's a little complicated. It's ambiguous. But I think beginning to build that bridge with, hey, if we allow more people to get around their community, walking, biking, and taking transit, for those who still want to or will continue to drive, their experience will be better.

Tiffany Chu: I got to say after this series, I feel like we can get to a place in this country where cars will one day feel optional, not mandatory.

Andrei Greenawalt: I do too. And I think it's important to remember that this won't all come at once. There's a lot of steps along the way that can have a massive positive impact on people's economic mobility, their health, and their quality of life. And I asked Shyam Kannan, the planning expert at HDR who we've heard from in this series about what it'll take to move the ball forward. And his answer, it felt like an appropriate place to close.

Shyam Kannan: To those that ask that question, I challenge them to pivot their thinking slightly because in this country at least, and in most of our cities, one third of the population is too young to drive. One third of the population is too old to drive, and half of the working population might not be able to afford a personal vehicle. The challenge for us is to realize that for vast swaths of today's population, the city's already a car-free city, but not by choice. And we have an obligation to make their lives as seamless as possible today with investments we can make today to not only make their lives better, but also to improve society for all of us. So my challenge to the policy makers is to focus their intent on those populations today that don't have the luxury of dreaming of a "car-free city." We'll get there, we'll get to a place where we don't need to make these immense personal investments in infrastructure to get around. But we have a lot of stuff we can do this afternoon that doesn't require us to wait 40 years.

Tiffany Chu: Amen. To not waiting.

Andrei Greenawalt: To not waiting. That concludes our sixth and final episode of this season. Thank you so much for sticking with us. And if you like what you've heard this season, please share a link on social media with the transit nerd in your life. ModeShift is produced by Via in partnership with Post Script Media. Via's technology enables partners to create end-to-end transit systems from planning better networks and streets to operating efficient, equitable public transit. Learn more at ridewithvia.com. This show is hosted by me, Andrei Greenawalt.

Tiffany Chu: And me, Tiffany Chu. The show is produced by Steven Lacey, Ann Bailey, Cecily Meza-Martinez and Dalvin Aboagye of Post Script Media. It's also produced by Francis Cooperman, Andy Ambrosius and Andrei Greenawalt from Via. Sean Marquand composed our theme song and mixed the show.

Andrei Greenawalt: Thanks, Tiffany, for being my co-host for this awesome Season 1 of ModeShift. And to all our listeners, thanks so much for sticking with us. Are we done?

Tiffany Chu: I think we're done.