Ep70: Kevin Heffernan - Go Bike Buffalo, Safer Streets, and the Case for a Different City

So we, we put everything together and drained all the accounts on rise to put one last piece together.

And it was Buffalo in 2051.

And I had briefly had this idea of like, let's make it this climate dystopia, you know, like give everybody a warning of all the things we've got to fix.

And I was like, no, one's going to read it.

Like they get enough of that.

So let's make it a utopian Buffalo in the future.

And so we decided, okay, we're going to have a setting.

So it's 2051.

150 years later, the Pan American Exposition is back in town for the 150th anniversary.

This is the name of the mayor.

The Bills by now have won seven championships.

The Sabres have six Stanley Cups.

At the time, the women's hockey team was still – The Buttes.

Yeah, they were still playing.

So we're like, and this, they've got championships and they're out here.

And so then we also were like, we reached out to all these nonprofits and we're like, if everything you're working for right now comes true, everything in your vision statements, your mission statements, what will the city look like? And we said, but also keep it to two pages.

So we asked 12 organizations.

We had 24 pages and we had freelance authors for this magazine.

We're like, here's a 24 page report that you need to read.

And this is going to paint your vision of the city of Buffalo in 2051, when all these ills that all these nonprofits are trying to solve.

have, have happened.

They've, they've succeeded.

Um, so we of course went to go bike.

Um, and you know, the Humboldt expressway is filled in.

There is no one 90 people can actually walk from their neighborhood to the Niagara river.