7 Questions with Kyle Wagenschutz

Kyle Wagenschutz is a Partner at City Thread, a national nonprofit organization working to connect people and communities and change the way that local leaders think about infrastructure projects with an eye on mobility for all. Kyle was also recognized as a White House Champion of Change under President Obama for his work leading Memphis’s first active transportation master plan. The program secured funding to construct more than 200 miles of new and dedicated bike lanes.

He sat down with us to give his answers to 7 Questions.

1. Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to be involved with City Thread.

   The more I do this kind of introduction, I realize how much further back that background goes. It feels like just yesterday I was doing some of this, but it's like, actually, that was like a decade ago. The short story is that I spent about 20 years living in Memphis, TN. I was there to go to college at the University of Memphis.

   I got involved in local advocacy, working to promote and encourage the city to build bicycle lanes and trails. From there, I got involved in the election campaign for mayor. I went to a city planning school. All of that leads to a moment in 2010 when I'm hired by the city of Memphis to be the first program manager for its bicycling and walking programs. And so I am fresh out of grad school. I've never worked for the city government before. My only experience is as an advocate and agitator asking for things. And suddenly, I'm plunked into a traffic engineering department inside of city hall. I'm not a traffic engineer. And the mayor tells me that I have one goal, and that's to get Memphis off the list of the worst places to bicycle in America. Memphis had the dubious title of receiving that recognition two times in a row. The mayor said, I don't know what you need to do. We've never done this before, but that's your goal. Get off this list. I spent the next seven years trying to figure out how to make that happen. Like learning in real time, how government works, how it doesn't work. How do we get projects across the finish line?

   Through that period, we built hundreds of miles of new bicycle trails, bicycle lanes, and sidewalks, and set up new planning and funding sources for years to come from there. I left the city of Memphis in 2016, worked for a national group that was helping to do very similar kinds of things, but at a much bigger scale, as I'm helping 10 cities accelerate their infrastructure programs. And then in 2022, two partners and I started City Thread to continue doing that work. And so today, we are working on things that go beyond bicycles, thinking about the kinds of projects and programs that cities are leading, wanting to be able to help communities get things done faster so that residents who are here today can get what they need when they need it.

2. How do you communicate the heart of City Thread’s mission in a way that resonates with people outside your organization?

   This is really the crux of the way that we think about how we begin to interact with communities and begin to help them craft their strategy. The first rule of working in bicycle lanes is not to talk about bicycle lanes. There's no winning message around the bicycle lanes that exist.

   In some ways, our experience really is kind of picked off kind of the worst example, like one of the hardest things to advance as a part of this work. But that also gave us some really clear insight and how to actually do what you're suggesting is like connect with people, make a value proposition for this thing that we're trying to advance in a way that resonates with them, meets people where they are and attempts to understand how can we take this very practical thing that's building a bicycle lane that's improving public parks that's thinking about new community centers or any kind of public infrastructure. How do we take this thing and make it relevant to people who may never actually use that, and that for us is the secret is how do we how do we communicate a message about the value that a bicycle brings to a community?

   To a person who is never going to get on a bicycle and is never actually going to use that bicycle light, how do we communicate a message about the importance of funding public education to people who don't have kids and who don't directly benefit from that? That's the real secret sauce for all of this. And the way that we attempt to understand that is by doing something like basic audience research. There's no magic sauce here, right? It's polling, it's focus groups, it's talking with people one-on-one. It’s dedicating the time to understanding the audience that we're attempting to speak to. What kind of messages do they want to hear? We find missing opportunities in cities by doing that research on a routine basis because people's perceptions change. The things they want to hear change. Audiences change. Building that into the work plan, into the workflow, isn't always a natural exercise for cities, for local partners, frankly, because it's expensive and time-consuming. But the more that you can commit to having that kind of regular audience research and forming the decision that you make, the better your decisions are.

3. Your organization deals with accessibility, mobility, and community-focused infrastructure initiatives. Many of our readers might not immediately understand why these things matter. How do you explain it in a way that grabs attention?

   Thinking very specifically about mobility and transportation at a very superficial high level, every single day, someone has to get somewhere, or something has to get to a person. You can begin to connect with people at the most fundamental level around transportation, and mobility is like we are moving every day. It seems like an unimportant part of our life because it's just something we do. It's kind of like brushing your teeth, right? You just get up, and you just brush your teeth. You don't pat yourself on the back necessarily for brushing your teeth today. It's just the thing that you do. And transportation can be the same way. It can feel mundane. It can feel unimportant. But people do recognize when those systems break down, and they feel pain, or they feel the stress, or they feel the anxiety when those systems aren't working.

   It’s like when you're not thinking about transportation as an important part of your life, but on your drive to work, if there's construction, you're like, holy smokes, what are they doing now? You begin to feel the slowdown, or when you see someone driving erratically. And you're like, boy, that's unsafe. I wish somebody would deal with this. Suddenly, that's where transportation becomes real to people. You have to recognize that it's a mundane, normal activity that is not top of mind in terms of anyone's priority to think about. When they do have to think about it, that's when they feel conflicted about what's happening. It's rarely a good thing. Again, nobody's waking up to say, “I'm really glad the mayor got the stoplights powered today. I'm going to email the mayor to say, thank you for keeping the bulbs turned on. That's just kind of the thing that doesn't happen.

   What that allows, in some ways, it's a good way to think about how we message about improvements that we need, to be making routine maintenance, changing the way our streets work, addressing unsafe conditions, adding capacity for public transit and walking and biking, and accessibility improvements. There are a ton of issues that need to be addressed in our transportation system. What we must figure out is how to talk about those in a way that doesn't trigger those negative reactions to them. And in a way, say, somebody's solving the problem that I feel. And that, for us, was a couple of years of audience research across the country to say, the United States has a unique cultural relationship with transportation, primarily around driving cars. It's different than what we can learn from European counterparts or other counterparts from around the world. We do have this unique cultural fascination and addiction to driving that does affect all of our perceptions around this work. And it took a lot of years to really dig down into that.

   What we found is that, very simply, people are primarily concerned about the convenience of maintaining and controlling their own schedule. It's not about safety, it's not about the environment, it’s not about community well-being or the pride I feel in the place I live, it's not about biking, not about having all this oxygen. People just fundamentally want to control their schedule in a way that they want to leave their house precisely when they think they should leave their house and get to their destination precisely when they think they should arrive. It's not based on reality. There's no data here that you can really point to, right? It's like people just want to be in control of what they're doing. And when our transportation system interrupts that control, whether it's through construction, whether it's through, , someone who rides a bus and the bus doesn't show up on time, whether it's through someone who rides a bicycle and the bike lane just stops and you got to figure out how to go the last 100 feet on your own, all of those situations are where people lose control of what's happening, and that drives them to do unsafe things. It drives them to make poor decisions about the future of transportation. Frankly, in some ways, it just encourages them to keep driving every single day. There's a lot built into people's aspirations for transportation that influences how we actually talk.

4. How do you adjust your messaging for different audiences, like donors, policymakers, and community organizations?

   In some ways, the strategy is the same as if we are running a campaign to promote some mobility project, where it's like, I don't want to talk about the mobility project itself. I want to talk about the benefits that it's going to bring to the community. And I want those benefits to align with the vision that the community members have for their community. When we're talking to other audiences, elected leaders, city staff, local funders, and philanthropic organizations, it's a very similar kind of strategy, right? I'm trying to understand what those individual groups or audiences want as a part of this experience, right? Do they want something from this campaign? What's the bigger, higher-level goal that they want? And how do we make the campaign serve that aspiration that they have individually? In the same way that talking to people directly about mobility projects is never going to be very sexy or very appealing, it's also not very sexy or appealing for a lot of those other groups. The mayor does not want to know how wide the white dotted line on the road is. So many of our communications around city transportation projects, whether it's mobility or any other kind of physical thing that cities are building, tend to be about the technical details of the project itself and what those technical details are going to allow us to do. What they want to know is, how long this construction is going to last, and how long it is? Is it going to be better when it's done?

   Whether we're working on the outside as a group of advocates, whether we're working inside City Hall as a set of bureaucrats, we tend to coalesce around this thing that we're doing instead of thinking about how we're talking about, enriching people about what they want to achieve. Somebody once told me that great messaging isn't what we want to say, it's what people want to hear, consistent with who we are. I think cities and advocates tend to think that messaging is about what they want to say. It's like, here's my issue. Here's my position. Here's the thing I want to promote.

   And here's what I want to tell you about it. And that's wrapped up in good intentions. I want to tell you about the benefits of this thing that I'm doing, but people don't want to hear that. You have to find out what they actually want to hear. Whenever I go into a community that's thinking about its communications for an infrastructure project, we just go through a straightforward exercise. It's like, what do you want to say? We list it all out.

   There's no shortage of things that they want to tell you about the project, because people are proud. People who work in the city are proud of this work. People who work in cities are there because they want to make improvements in the place where they live. Like they're highly motivated by doing good things. They're proud of their work. They want to show it off. There's no real opportunity to show it off outside of them doing their own self-promotion. When you ask them to write down what they want to say, it's a long list. You're like, okay, well, that will never fit on a billboard. The next list that we make is what people want to hear. And oftentimes there's crickets, right? That's really where we utilize polling and focus groups to really drive to that. Once we have those two columns of information, then we can say, okay, here's what people want to hear. Here's what we want to say. How do we how do we blend those two? And that's the magic sauce in this. It's like recognizing that it's not just all about what we want to do. It's about recognizing that our audience is hearing us in very different ways, and they actually have a pretty prescribed set of things that they want to hear. And that can range; it differs city to city, location to location, subject matter to subject matter. It could be that people just want to hear that the government is doing a good job at delivering public services.

   And so you just need to craft a message around government efficiency and getting things done. It could be that this community is really concerned about public safety. And so you need to figure out how your park improvement project speaks to people about public safety in a real way. And so, it's not always easy to marry those two together, but you can't answer the question about crafting a message if you don't understand both sides of that equation.

5. Elevator pitch: If you only had 30 seconds to explain why your work is important, how would you do it, or what would you say?

   Yeah, fundamentally at a super high level, our experience of working in communities is that there's really strong alignment between the vision that elected officials bring to their campaigns and to their election and the community that elects them. But sometimes the systems that are designed to keep things fair and accountable within government end up doing the opposite. They wind up slowing down progress and frustrating the people who are like really on board with doing this thing. But suddenly it's going to take 10 years to actually get it done. And so when government works, when bureaucracy works, it helps cities make really smart decisions and helps them move faster. But when those structures in those systems bog things down, there's no momentum. It scares off the investment, and from the elected officials’ standpoint, the constituents that helped elect you are just stuck waiting for this change that you can't deliver. And I think if you think about there's a national discourse around this, the inability of government to deliver for the people who are living and working in our cities.

   So, frankly, and simply put, we help governments and cities work together so that the bureaucracy works for people and not against them. And so our model is built on teaming up with city staff and elected officials, community leaders, and we help them craft a plan to move faster and to deliver the projects and the programs that people want without sacrificing the fairness, without sacrificing equity and accountability by just recognizing that these systems that we've built up to try to promote those things are actually doing the opposite. They're preventing us from making progress. So, whether that is through mobility projects, which we do a lot of, again, whether it's through any kind of public infrastructure or programs that cities want to deliver, our mantra is that it shouldn't take 10 years to see something get done that everybody agrees should be done. And it's possible to do it within a couple of years. It's just that the strategy of doing it requires preparation and some thought, and advanced work. And if you can build those coalitions of people, if you can have the right resources in place, and you can have a plan for how you will sustain momentum when those bad things are going to pop up or the distracting things are going to pop up, if you can have a plan for how you sustain momentum through those, you can actually achieve quite a bit. And that serves everybody well. It serves the government. Like, suddenly, the government is a trusted community partner. People believe what your local elected officials are saying they're actually going to do. It changes the way elections happen. Instead of electing people who we know just are going to maintain the status quo, we're electing people with vision who want to change things with a promise and a trust that that could actually happen in our lifetimes.

   I joke with one of my partners, Sarah Center, that we met while I was working in Memphis, and we joke a lot of times that we actually met on a project working together that took about 10 years to get built. Wild community support, federal grant funding in place, momentum, and public support from a media standpoint. There's no reason why this project took 10 years other than that's just the way the system allowed it to progress. And the joke is that we actually moved away from Memphis before it actually ever got done. We met while working on this project. Both of us moved away. And we had to go back and visit this thing that we started, because it wasn't finished in our tenure there. And there's no real reason for that. And so a lot of our work is about proving that concept. We've helped cities across the country implement whole chunks of their active transportation plans in a couple of years. We've currently got 17 cities that we're working with right now who are saying, we made these master plans to build new sidewalk networks, or to improve all of our intersections, or to build new bicycle trails. And we've got this goal to build 200 miles, and we're building about one mile per year. And you're like, oh, well, we'll all be gone before you ever see this. And so it's like, how do we take these master plans and these visions and bring them to today? Make them current issues that people need to talk about and invest time and energy thinking about, rather than it just being some in-the-sky aberration that might happen one day, but is unlikely for any of us to actually see it.

6. Some issues don’t seem urgent to the average person, even if they have huge long-term consequences. How do you overcome apathy or resistance?

   In some ways, right, our work can be very focused on an issue, right? Transportation, bicycling, walking, like that's never really the crux of what we are thinking about. And to answer your question like at a little bit higher level, is that what we're thinking about is how can a city build trust with its residents? How can the government take the first steps to build trust? And what the pitfall that a lot of our elected leaders and city staff fall into is that everything is a moonshot, right? It is a big picture, big swing at the bat, attempting to say, we're going to fix wealth inequality in our city with this massive program. And to get that program up and running is going to take a long time. It's going to take a ton of resources. And, how many of those moonshot kinds of projects have we seen not actually come to fruition or take decades to actually think about, or if they did come to fruition quicker, what did we have to sacrifice to make the progress actually happen?

   And so what we encourage cities to do doesn't matter. It doesn't really matter if whatever you're trying to accomplish, whether you're trying to build a bicycle lane or just have like really reliable waste collection services, is that you have to pick a very small thing, and then tell people you're going to do it, and then go actually do it. And then the next time you pick two small things, and you tell people you're going to do those two small things, and you go do those two small things. It almost doesn't matter what it actually is. It doesn't matter the size or the scale. What people are looking for is they want to be able to trust that when a city council member or the mayor or a city staffer comes to their neighborhood and talks about some kind of improvement or some kind of project or some kind of program, they just want to trust that that's actually going to happen. 

   I have a real tangible example of this, like during my time in Memphis, as I would be leading these massive street reconstruction projects, I would schedule community meetings where these projects were eventually going to be happening, well in advance of that project ever being talked about. And we would just host listening sessions with the neighbors, and we would invite as many people as we could to come. We would try to understand, like, where are they feeling problems in their community? What do they wish the city would actually do? A lot of times, it was stuff like vacant lots aren't being mowed, my trash wasn't picked up last week, there's a broken sidewalk in front of the school, and this stop sign fell down six months ago. And it's people just running through this intersection, super small, manageable things. We would host this listening session. I would go back to City Hall, and I would just walk into the office of every person who was responsible for all of those things. And I would say, ‘Hey Jim, is there any way we can get this sidewalk in front of the school fixed in the next like four weeks?’ And Jim's like, ‘Yeah, I didn't know it was broken. I just need to add it to the list.’ Or it's like, hey, I'm calling the waste collection place, the warehouse, and say, ‘Hey guys, we missed a street last week. Can you go out there and get that?’ And like, ‘Yeah, totally. We didn't know. We didn't know we missed it.’ I just became like this internal person who was walking around with this laundry list of very small things. And we would, I would just try to get as many of them done as I possibly could. And so the next time that I went out there to talk about the street reconstruction project, this thing that I'm actually charged with actually leading, we didn't have to talk about all this other stuff. What they recognized was that this is the guy I told about the sidewalk being broken in front of the school is here, and two weeks ago it got fixed. I wasn't there, I didn't take credit for it. It wasn't like, here's what you told us, and here's what we did. It was just the real tangible, like show and tell. We're going to tell you what we need. I'm going to show you that I can deliver on that.

    And so that when I have something that really requires your focus, your attention, some real consideration, we have already built the first steps, that putting some trust in place that you can trust me, that what I'm telling you and what you're telling me is a part of a conversation that we're going to have. And so I think cities tend to put too many eggs in the basket in terms of all of their communications, all happening at once big swing in the project, and really, we're just missing the opportunity to take all of these small winds and snowball them into.

7. What’s next for City Thread—any exciting projects or initiatives on the horizon? How can listeners support your work right now?

   I mentioned before, we have 17 cities that, over the last couple of years, have applied for our grant program. We are working with them at different levels and different timings for us, with how they're thinking about taking their infrastructure projects and moving them forward. A lot of communities right now have funding in place from the previous presidential administration. A lot of that infrastructure funding is coming online now.

   And I know that in the grand scheme of like, where is federal funding, federal transportation infrastructure funding is largely still intact, and cities are moving forward with that again, because everybody has to move somewhere, and something has to move to people. It's intrinsic in our lives. And so these cities are thinking about, we've had these plans, how we move them forward. And so we're working with them.

   We offer opportunities periodically for new communities to apply and be a part of our grant-funded programs. That requires a partnership between the city government and a local organization that could be an advocate, could be a local philanthropic organization, could be any community-based group. But we asked that they come together and submit an application to say that we'd like to work together on this goal or this project, this program. Can you help us design the campaign for getting that done faster? So folks can go to citythread.org and sign up for our newsletter. And that's the place where we'll be announcing when those applications open. Again, we've really built City Thread on how to make things easy for people to apply and be a part of this work. And so the applications are not onerous. They are meant to be easily accomplished, easily done, as long as you can bring together the right partners, City Thread will find a way to work with.

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