Critical Conversations in Transportation Planning: Reverend Jessica Abell

[00:00] - Sponsor message: This episode of the APA podcast is brought to you by Caltrans. Caltrans is now hiring innovators, problem solvers, and creative thinkers to transform transportation across California. Join a team focused on safety and innovation with great benefits and room to grow. Apply now at caltranscareers.com.

[00:21] - Em Hall: Welcome to Critical Conversations Transportation Planning, where we're bringing you a series of interviews with pioneers and industry leaders who are offering their insights into some of the most challenging issues facing our field. This podcast is produced by the American Planning Association's Transportation Planning Division. Tpd connects planners working across all transportation modes to share innovation, foster collaboration, and advocate for sustainable mobility solutions. I'm Dr. Em Hall, an urban planning consultant and member of the TPD Board of Directors.

[00:58] - Divya Gandhi: I'm Divya Gandhi, a transportation planner and a member of the TPD Board of Directors.

[01:03] - Em Hall: In this episode, we speak with Reverend Jessica Abell of Living Waters Community Church in Denver.

[01:09] - Divya Gandhi: We really enjoyed this conversation, so let's get right into it.

[01:14] - Rev. Jessica Abell: My name is Jessica Abell, Reverend Jessica Abel. I live here in Metro Denver.

[01:19] - Divya Gandhi: Jessica, tell us what brings you to the National Planning Conference and your journey into urban planning.

[01:28] - Rev. Jessica Abell: Well, obviously, it's here this year. It makes travel to it much easier than often. Actually, I hadn't been to a professional planning conference in many, many years until the National Transportation and City Officials Conference was here two summers ago. So that was really fun to reconnect with some folks. But I am in my mid-fifties, a very socially justice-active, politically active Gen-Xer, and have been my whole life. I've also been involved in church and ministry my whole life. Had not been intending to get a master's degree in City and Regional Planning. That was certainly not on my scope. I was in school at the University of Memphis in the '90s, and I was in a program that allowed me to develop my own bachelor's degree with an advisory committee of faculty members. I have a BLS, a Bachelor of Liberal Studies. One of the graduation requirements was taking what's called an integrative course, something that was taught by someone bringing in inter-disciplinary subjects. The course, Making the Humane City, was taught by the late great Jean Pearson, the now deceased founder of the graduate program in City and Regional Planning at what was then Memphis State University.

He opened up this incredible world of what planning could be. This idea that there was actually a discipline out there that was committed to making the world better, to facilitating to building people's common lives, to holding that knowledge of how the mechanics of how we could live together better. I just threw myself into that, got my master's in City and Regional Planning in 2000. It has been a couple of decades since I've been involved in the industry, in the discipline, in the profession, whatever it is that we're calling ourselves now, and got back involved involved three or four years ago, maybe seven or eight years ago, when I started doing more policy-oriented climate justice work. I professionally work in faith-based climate justice world, our human response to our changing climate. There are policy tethers and tentacles in that, traffic and transportation being primary. I never lost my love of transportation and traffic planning Never lost it. It was my favorite subject in school in the '90s. I loved how transportation and traffic and transportation planning was like chaos theory in motion. It was like fluid mechanics with people you could look at in the car. It's dynamic and exciting, and everyone cares about it, right?

[04:22] - Divya Gandhi: Yeah. Yeah. Wonderful. Wow. So doing, Jessica, doing the work that you do now, how has your planning How has your education influenced your approach to the ministry? And do you find any surprising overlaps between urban planning and pastoring?

[04:39] - Rev. Jessica Abell: Do you think? Well, one is the very practical, which was one of the reasons why I knew this was the right path 25 years ago when I got that degree the first time was so often any house of worship, this is certainly not constrained to Christianity or even mainline Protestantism. Any house of worship in its urban community has a need, a necessity to understand the mechanics of the community around it. If it wants to reopen the choir school that was there in the '50s and '60s, they better look at their community's transportation patterns and how it's going to affect things, or it's going to get shut down, which I can tell you some churches where that has happened, where they've attempted to renew ministries that the neighborhood hadn't been used to that Or you are a synagogue that has a particular ministry to the unhoused, and you want to set up shelter for them, but you have been told your zoning doesn't allow it, you know what you can do? You can get a variant, you can go get an ally in the planning department. You go fill out the right paperwork, and you can do that.

For me, in a practical way, planning has been the mechanics to allow the work that my ministry wants. But from a way to think standpoint, it gave me an interdisciplinary platform to begin ministry with and in, which was incredibly helpful because there's always something else going on under the surface in any of these organizations. Let me tell you that Houses of Worship are full of that, full of the narrative that they'll tell you on the surface, but you don't hear the story underneath. A lot of the conflict management, the assessing out where are your assets. I use There's a lot of community development techniques all the time in ministry. Now, there are a lot of places where institutional Houses of Worship and their jurisdictions, their municipalities, Their community organizations, their MPOs, have a lot of co-work, but rarely think of it that way.

[06:56] - Em Hall: Talking about houses of worship, I often think of it as institutions in communities of any size, rural, suburban, ex-urban, rural. Sometimes particularly suited to observe a community over time and in different ways and interfacing with people in a way that maybe doesn't happen anywhere else. Absolutely. In your observation as a pastor and a planner, what conversations can these institutions facilitate that maybe aren't happening, that you think should be happening? What's different when you're coming at planning from where you sit in a house of worship?

[07:34] - Rev. Jessica Abell: That's a really good question. One of the things I have discovered just doing the work is that those of us who are representing a house of worship, as long as we are not giant jerks, when we first come to your meeting, You will do it this way. The Bible tells us this. As long as you're not a big jerk, they extend an amazing amount of grace. Yeah. Right? Okay. They really will. They will entertain community leaders, business leaders. They will entertain a lot of odd things. Also, churches, synagogues, mosques, houses of worship are still seen as fairly neutral ground. Interesting. At least for institutions and This is not for your general public, because churches have done a lot of damage to people, and there's a lot of church trauma out there. A lot of people won't come to a meeting at a church. But for more traditional institutional members and stakeholders, churches are still safe places to meet. I'm thinking of the Episcopal Cathedral in Chicago, where it was the only place where Dr. King would meet with Mayor Daley. It's the only place he felt safe. Sometimes, houses of worship can be common ground.

Also, As you say, they are often anchor institutions in their communities. But because of displacement patterns and the way people have moved, often the membership does not live near their synagogue, mosque, church any longer. Those places, those houses of worship, need to be more intentional about weaving themselves back into their community life and having some of those conversations. So offering to host some of those things is often a really great use. I also think churches have no idea of the huge number of community assets they have, and communities don't know how many assets houses of worship have. Like that back unused baseball diamond that the church is grieving the fact that they don't have enough youth, that baseball diamond could become a community garden that fed the neighborhood, but nobody really thinks like that. Or if they spent $5,000, their old parish kitchen that hasn't had to put on a dinner for 300 people in 25 years could become a commercial kitchen for pop-up chefs, because that's one of the hardest things, getting something off the ground. Food-wise is getting a food-grade kitchen. So we have a lot of assets for each other. We don't need to be burdens to each other, the city, the community, and houses of worship. We need to find ways to hold those things together.

[10:12] - Em Hall: I think there is attention sometimes, especially in urban areas where there's a housing shortage, and then there's a huge church that you think 10 people come to once a week, and you think, Well, they have all that space, and what's going on there? How do you reach out as a leader in the church, or how do you work with the community to identify how that space can best be used the other X hours or days of the week?

[10:36] - Rev. Jessica Abell: Well, first you ask. You have some meetings. You actually invite people who live there to come talk with you about the space. But there's an interesting movement in congregations these days called Yimby, yes, in my backyard. Yimby in God's backyard, this idea. There are congregations all over the country taking that old lot, That old parking lot, that old baseball diamond, that decrepit building we used to have Sunday school in but haven't since 1976. They're taking that, taking it down and putting affordable housing on the lot. But doing climate justice work that I do, I would just assume that be planted or a small solar array to be the site of community solar. Churches, mosques, synagogues could do that. I have often been involved with a national organization called Inter Faith Faith, Power, and Light. The idea being it's a faith-based response to climate change that we, in Houses of Worship, need to be thinking intentionally about our power and our light.

[11:40] - Em Hall: Literally.

[11:43] - Rev. Jessica Abell: Oh, that's lovely new display idea, Pastor Fred. How are you going to power it?

[11:50] - Em Hall: So interesting. Let's talk a little bit about the transportation aspect of it all then. Totally.

[11:57] - Divya Gandhi:

Jessica, tell us what you mean by street disruptions to get started with.

[12:02] - Rev. Jessica Abell: Well, it's funny because I am so politically involved that when I started talking to my friends about this, they assumed I meant a street protest or a march. I was saying, And did you know there are 500 street disruptions in the city of New York across the five boroughs a day? My friends are like, No, that seems even high for the people you know, Jessica. Oh, no. A street disruption is any cut into a roadway. Any cut into a roadway. So repairing your pothole to changing your entire gutter system to stormwater management work to changing the traffic lights out. All of that is a street disruption. Those are the inevitable consequences of life. Even the best designed streets need repair. Even the most wonderful water system needs its pipes tweaked occasionally. Then there are the street disruptions that are not planned, the water main bursting, that thing, or at some intersection of a climate disaster with our urban infrastructure, which is beginning to happen more and more and will happen more and more. The idea behind looking more intentionally at these street disruptions is that they affect so many different spheres at one time in so many different ways, and we never talk about that intersection.

A single street disruption, even if it is a small one, like a pothole fix, is still going to disturb the transportation pattern of the business across the street or the residents across the street. One of the things we'll talk about tomorrow morning in our presentation. This is a disruption that happened and affected the lives of 750 households in one neighborhood. These street disruptions, I like to say, as someone who works in harm reduction and ministry and working with a lot of folks in disaster times, and someone who has a planning degree, I like to say that anything predictable is preventable. That anything we can pattern out, we can plan for. This is primary in that. Engineers, planners, community leaders, and business leaders never sit down to talk about the actual changes and disruptions that are necessary to maintain their infrastructure. And goodness, never have conversations about how that might be changed in the future so that it is less disruptive to all of those parties. So we will talk a little bit about utilidores tomorrow. This idea of having more permanently ensconced pipelines for these infrastructures. So really, we felt like street disruption was this... Everybody understands what it is, right? As far as a cut into the street is a problem.

[15:05] - Em Hall: Some things just... you can't get somewhere

[15:08] - Rev. Jessica Abell: Can't get somewhere...The road is... You can't park there, you can't be there, you can't access that. Everyone understands how disruptive this disruption is. That sounds so redundant. I apologize for the syllogism. But one of our points is that you can then look at these things Use over time and look at their impact, and you can cross-indicate them with all sorts of things that are actual about people's lives, how long a business is closed, how it affects its sales, what kinds of quality of life issues these are affecting for residents. If we start to look at those things as vertically intersectional, not just horizontally intersectional, but in their planning, implementation, effect all of it across these disciplines, then we can radically affect people's quality of life. It It will make utility projects shorter. It will make disruptions shorter and less severe in effect and deleterious effect, right? And to the businesses. Yeah.

[16:12] - Sponsor message: Imagine shaping California's future creating multimodal systems that connect people and strengthen communities. At Caltrans, transportation planners are leading the way with innovative solutions that keep California moving into the future. With great benefits, room to grow, and work that truly matters. Build your next career at Caltrans. Apply now at caltranscareers.com.

[16:39] - Divya Gandhi: Wow. You naturally took us into our next question, which was really about the index, the disruption occurrence index, which is a new tool designed to capture the disruptive effects of streetcarts, infrastructure improvements, and a host of other interventions that affect transportation system.  Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

[17:01] - Rev. Jessica Abell: Sure. Now, I am not the coder. I am not the engineer, again. I can't tell you too much about the actual index itself, except to say that it comes from this real-world data. Taking this data of New York was really transformative for Mark to be able to see this mapped. We all have some GIS little videos showing an example of this in New York. What Something that something like the disruption index allows you to do is if you're a community group and you're particularly concerned about something like duration of access to this park, you can say, Look, we know that this street disruption project is coming, and it has a disruption index factor of 10 out of a scale of 15 because it is going to affect these. I'm making up these numbers, please. Sure. Okay, good. Because it's going to affect these seven different things as we can show you by these performance indicators from this data aggregation, we can show you where and how these kinds of street disruptions are going to disturb your neighborhood or going to affect your business and that thing. What it does, do you remember the early days of quality of life? Sure. We still argue about what that means and what scale is that. But originally, the idea was, My Lord, we've never even tried to capture this. We've never even tried to say, Here are the of a complex, of a high quality of life might be. This doesn't exist in the world of transportation planning and traffic management right now. It's not like we're coming up with a new version of something that exists.

[18:42] - Em Hall: It's a whole new thing.

[18:43] - Rev. Jessica Abell: It's a whole new thing in that it's a tool that will enable people all along that intersectionality as well. A transportation planner, a community member, a business leader, a visitor. I want to plan an event. Sure. Right? This one. Totally.

[19:06] - Em Hall: Yeah.

[19:07] - Rev. Jessica Abell: I would want to look that up. I don't actually know anything about the distribution plan and access and that stuff. Is this a subscription thing? Is it hiring marks firm? I don't have any idea. What I know is that the turning of this data and the looking at this work made it very clear that the one indices are useful. They give us an objective measure, and that's desperately what we need in this. An objective measure with shared language and shared concerns so that people can point to it and say, eventually a municipality could say, Great developer. Wonderful. Do that. But nothing that you're doing can exceed a disruption index of five. Sure. So plan it better. Yeah. Right. Well, yeah.

[20:04] - Divya Gandhi: As you're talking about this, Jessica, what I'm wondering is the implementation part and the applicability as well. Can you give us some examples, maybe local, where the tool has been used and it has led to guiding planning decisions in a route that might have not been taken previously?

[20:23] - Rev. Jessica Abell: No.

[20:24] - Em Hall: It's new? Is it still? It's brand new. Okay.

[20:27] - Rev. Jessica Abell: Because just getting people to see that this is... We've started talking about this in these adjacent professions, right? In our engineering circles, in the PUC, the Public Utility Commission folks. Why? Why would we do that? We just do what we need to do. This way, we don't have to talk to anybody else or consider anybody else. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, you're right. You don't. You don't. I suspect that what happens is that this becomes a tool, a thing that you can say, Oh, well, this plan has an index of this. But then that would need to be bound into policy somehow. Rules and regs, standard operation procedure, some. You would need to then put thresholds in. I know a lot of people have CDAs. That's what we We quickly do things here, community developer agreements. That tends to be how we manage things. So make that normative, that you cannot exceed the disruption index measure of five or you cannot exceed... We all know it takes some time to get these things going. Just starting the conversation along those lines has not been easy. I'm sure. Like I said, the community members and the business leaders, they desperately know they need it.

We don't know when this is happening. We don't know how it's going to affect our lives. We don't know what to do about We'll talk a little bit later. We'll also talk a little bit tomorrow morning about indemnification laws and how equitable or inequitable they are, where they are. There's an interesting moving forward with this is very, as all things in planning are, Very multi-layered in how it will apply. Getting some thresholds into policy or standards and regs, that's probably the first step in the next couple of years. Sure. Probably going to a lot. Probably we'll need to take it on the road to things like the National Transportation and City Official Conference and that thing. Kind of drill down into the functionaries, the people who are really doing the work.

[22:25] - Em Hall: I mean, yeah, there are a lot of potential players involved here, but who's in charge is my question, right? You can say there are 10 different groups we need to bring together. They never talk about this thing, whatever it is before it happens. But who's in charge? Do planners step up because we look across the board. Does it need to come from the mayor? What do you envision being the type of person or the industry or whatever is going to say we're going to own it?

[22:56] - Rev. Jessica Abell: I want planners to hold these things, right?

[22:57] - Em Hall: I mean, I sensed you would, but-

[22:59] - Rev. Jessica Abell: I want planners to be the one saying, we can plan better. We can plan healthy and thriving communities. Here is one of the ways we can do it by looking realistically about our infrastructure needs, our shared infrastructure and the work and That it requires to maintain that. We would love it if we moved away from having to do so much of this in the first place, which is one reason why we like the utilidores, because they enable you to actually do something like build a park on a street. It isn't going to have to be torn up because the whole fiber optic line is underneath it.

[23:35] - Em Hall: I think it makes sense that it might live with us.

[23:39] - Rev. Jessica Abell: That's where I want it. It doesn't matter how well-informed the planner is if the jurisdictional policymaker doesn't understand why it's important. But I think this about all the things. A lot of policymakers may be very progressive and very community-oriented and not understand environmental racism and environmental injustice and climate issues. Because that's my world is in climate. They don't really get those connections. I think a job of planners is to weave those connections, to name those connections. It's one of our purposes of standing at the intersection of multiple disciplines is to be able to do that translation and that sharing. Oh, look, here is this thing from engineering. Here is this thing from conflict management and nonviolent interaction. Oh, here is this thing from, I want us to be that. I want to inspire the planner's heart to hold that space again and not just work for developers.

[24:44] - Em Hall: You have to wonder how many projects never happened because the pain of construction was enough to prevent it from going forward. We don't know, we can guess, and there's probably a lot of examples. But can you think of an instance, something that inspired this or challenged this, where disruption on the other side, it was actually great, it came out great, but that pain along the way, it leaves its mark.

[25:11] - Rev. Jessica Abell: Well, I'll tell you, I'm from Memphis. Okay.

[25:13] - Em Hall: Yeah.

[25:14] - Rev. Jessica Abell: I don't know if that means anything to you, but Citizens to Preserve, Albany Park versus Volpe, Secretary of Education.

[25:19] - Em Hall: I'm not familiar with that. No.

[25:20] - Rev. Jessica Abell: Stamped, even though it was decided in 1970, it was actually stamped on my actual birthday of January 24, 1971. Oh, wow. Established that you cannot take park land for a federal highway project. Wow. That wasn't planners or anyone. It was actually some little old ladies in sneakers. The idea that how we move through space and how we move needing to come from what the community's need was, was set way early for me. Set way early for me because of where I'm from. Because community action saved a large urban park, and meant that we had to think creatively about how to get around.

[26:10] - Divya Gandhi: Yeah. Wow. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you. You've mentioned that there are stories to tell about doing things differently. As transformation planners, Em and I have delved a lot into storytelling in transportation planning. We're always curious about implementation and storytelling and how it leads to very different outcomes. Can you share an example of a time when a different approach, whether in planning or in your ministry, led to an unexpected success?

[26:43] - Rev. Jessica Abell: Absolutely. We have a wonderful example of that. It happened that timeline crossover in city and county of Denver of new neighborhood plans, which happens every 10 years, was right around mid COVID. They were supposed to be starting these community plans in 2020, and the start got delayed. One of the neighborhoods on the southwest side of Denver hired the University of Denver's Oh, gosh, now I can't remember the name. Something lovely, like the Center for Transformative Studies.

[27:22] - Em Hall: We'll look it up and we'll put it in the internet.

[27:24] - Rev. Jessica Abell: You'll look it up and put it in. Okay. Hired this neighborhood to do a planning process with them. They did a very change happens at the speed of trust folks. These are the folks that they're coming from. They did community meetings, they did listening sessions, they did canvassing. They did an incredible job. Of really working with the community members of these five or six different neighborhoods that formed this area. They presented their new community plan to the land use control board. It passed. It was, whew. Then almost immediately I got to put on the shelf and put away as far as the new administration went, intending to ignore it completely. But because they had just done that work, and they had done that work at a deep relational level, and they had spent the time to build those relationships, and the work they did, their plan was excellent. Had all kinds of things you guys would love with multimodal transit paths and really Well thought out intersections of that, like how the bikes and the pedestrians would interact. They were able to counter this new... The new mayor released his new plan for that neighborhood, which got rid of all of their pathways.

They were able to take that plan, take their community power that they had built up over the last three years, and have all of that reestablished. Incredible. It has all been put back in. Because they had good planning, because they did the slow relational work, and because it was intersectional, because they talked about... In fact, their plan is really lovely. In fact, you send me a message, I'll send you a copy of it. They do this really It was a great job of what status quo planning would get you and what doing some of the things they were proposing would get you. They did really nice scenario work of spinning it out. This is what Valverde will look like. This is what West Side will look like if you guys do not get it together, if we do not act as a community in one voice. And they did.

[29:35] - Em Hall: That's great. We love to share that example. As we wrap things up, not everybody's going to be fortunate enough. We're recording this at the National Planning Conference in 2025. Not everybody will have the ability to get to see the tool in action tomorrow. But it's a new tool, although it incorporates a lot of things that I think a lot of us talk and think about. If there was one thing that planners could take away from the experience that you've had building the index, even if implementation is a little ways off, what's a piece of that or a part of what you've learned that the planners could take right away, start to make maybe a little bit of a shift out there?

[30:16] - Rev. Jessica Abell: Anytime you are dealing with any transportation pathway, anything, there are other concerns you have not considered. This isn't just the extraneous stuff you learn about all the time. These things are so crucial. There's something else you haven't thought of. So find the community member, find the business leader, and make sure you talk to the chief engineer. Don't plan that street without knowing We don't have this index yet. You can't point to it. You have to do the work. Sorry.

[30:50] - Em Hall: That's okay. I think we're willing to put in the work. That's why we have these conversations.

[30:55] - Divya Gandhi:

A hundred percent. And we've always looked at transportation as a very intersectional field. That's right. It ties in really well. So thank you for highlighting that.

[31:05] - Em Hall: Thank you for talking to us about the index and about your work. It's really interesting to hear from a very different background and approach. And I think there's a lot to take away from this. So we appreciate your time so much.

[31:17] - Rev. Jessica Abell: Thanks for asking. It was a lovely thing to be here.

[31:20] - Em Hall: Take care. Thank you. Thank you for joining us for this episode of Critical Conversations in Transportation Planning. To learn more, visit the APA's Transportation Planning Division website at transportation.planning.org.

[31:42] - Sponsor message: Ready to plan what's next for California's multimodal future? Caltrans is hiring transportation planners now. Start your journey at caltranscareers.com.