Me too. And there is this greenies. And I had this this brass Penny was that my father. And I was standing there I was playing it and that I was really suddenly something clicked I was like oh. That must Those are all the bridges this Williamsburg Bridge as a Manhattan Bridge there's the Brooklyn Bridge that's New York it's small now. And I'm looking at the Statue of Liberty and my grandmother Anastasia Panny came from Albania and they went to Ellis Island I could see my history there too and I was suddenly hit me like oh my goodness this is like a coral reef. You can't see the people but look at this beautiful structure to him . That in that there it was just the whole city. Whole. Nature. Everything. Was. Connected and spiritual the 1st time. And so skip decided to stay. For a while for a while all over the world people are now moving of course we know this from that country to the city at this point who will 2 years ago across this extraordinary benchmark that's physicist Geoff West where more than Hoffa very planet is now open on if the one percent yet not made us wonder the cow do cities work is there some deep organic logic that holds all these people together or is right or gentle era puts it presages just these tumors of people on the landscape. Jabil Ron I'm Robert Krulwich This is Radio Lab and our topic today sitting. In a new. Very So in talking about cities I almost want to turn to New York City with its kind of hard to know where to start because every city has its own its own unique feel. Like for instance let me just give you my own stupid example here so every time I go to St Louis to visit my Mom and Dad I'm on the plane I mean my own kind of groove and I step off the plane into the airport and it's just like with the 1st step. Just to hit this wall of something is different like you feel the difference in your bones because well that's the question is he there I'm here what gives the city its feel oh is this Mr Bobbsey This is Mr Bob Levey Mr Bob Levine is a professor of psychology California State University and he thinks the answer to that question is time time that each city warps time in its own unique way my cities are my subjects and he studied this idea for the past 30 years in all kinds of different ways we looked at things like percentage of people wearing watches how long to take bank tellers in each city to change a 20 dollar bill really yeah and then we we looked at talking speed really talking there we get on the phone. Call post offices and set seemed like something that would be available every place and make a standard request which tell me the difference between regular mail certified mail and heard mail Ok certified is what you just need someone to find then he says they calculate the number of syllables Perceptor regular mail order mail that Salt Lake City Utah $2.00 syllables per 2nd but if you want. Springfield Mass. Just $3.00 syllables per 2nd and this one 3rd. Not really sure where it's from because tape lost the id it could be Nashville. I only want to know. If you want to. And if it is National $2.00 syllables per 2nd. Spring feels like but the whole talking thing was just really a prelude for Bob It got him into what he's most known for and what we find most fascinating we actually looked up at walking speed walking because well what I would do is I would get into a new suit and I'm in Mumbai India when I'm fighting each young man in Thailand we have to put out a call to radio listeners everywhere. To help us repeat study Hey good morning radio I'm recording from Dublin and downtown Oslo Copenhagen I would get into a new city and step one I would scope out mean business and shop in your living room books telling me the whole street names to get out some street roll ups bring my red string 60 feet long 20 metres means I'm here with the safety please step 3 use that string to measure out the design I just have to rule out some good you taped to one end to the sidewalk and it would just make the Morse the form go undercover to get in the card or. You know act like you're in a paper for waiting for somebody to write myself a discrete plate sound pretty it's fine to use a stopwatch high ridges a stopwatch stopwatch the 1st watch is working ready. And all goes quiet the minute I want to start early and start stop on it this experiment was actually harder than you would think. A lot of people do things not very easy to do timing was an issue people trying to sell you the puzzle I don't need this you're showing look I just don't know pensions time can't go get. This. Done step by step. Step. Step. Step. Actually. It didn't sound like that at all they were in sync as you can imagine every city had its own. Separate steps every step that is there to say step step step to fit which on some level we knew but still the range was pretty amazing stuff toughened to 14.4 seconds 27 seconds Buchanan Liberia 13.8 when is Sarah's $12.00 Mexico City 10 point one seconds Copenhagen 1.5 seconds 11.7 poor claim to have sick Jerusalem just to break it down on the high end you've got step steps you're on it step step step step the Dubliner s. Issues 9.5 minutes temperance forced to take on average 10.76 seconds to cover 60 feet compare that to Buchanan Liberia step step step step step something that actually the head got a teen pink blouse whose walkers covered the same distance in about 21 seconds 21 seconds so if you don't think about it in football terms by the time the Dubliner has scored a touchdown right from you can lay Bierria is somewhere I guess around midfield. In this book I think cording Oblivion is if you do these under the same conditions same place you will get the same time these times don't change Dublin is always about this steps you're on it's step step step and you stand in Liberia is always around this. Step Manhattan is we found is right about here and usually the step with thunder step step step in pink though Dublin but not bad but why the consistency What is it what is it that makes that walking speed. Where does it come from you know I mean is anybody beating the drum how well can you change the walk say a bunch of us got together and decided that we were just going to buy 5 percent on a given day we are. Do it will you will notice the difference do we make the city. Or does the city make us thank you to our lockers doesn't win a fight it was stuff like yeah that done this or that I'm here I kill them in Copenhagen I don't care and Scotch for the Borg and they're essential Thailand for game of energy xico city and I'm in Mumbai markets know how to open an art and props also to Daniel Estrin and an assessment I. Needed they did say their names are in there Ok So getting back to that question I asked a 2nd ago why is it that cities develop a particular beat Yes I mean is it because the city does it to the people or the people do it to the city Yeah and we ran into a couple of guys who many least have the the start of an answer yes. A couple of physicists Eilean f.b.i. Named Jeffrey West and Lesia Betancourt This is Jeff rivers of the other side of the trail here as well cool there at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and lots of bases nothing like the cities we just visit it's almost biblical that it's experience of. The blue skies a sort of make you break them put a menorah is good thing brave enough in fact to claim from their high desert perch . That these beaches the meter of every city that we've just been to actually has underneath it a kind of logic if you told me the average speed of walking in some city and seek our Rochester New York where people walk about this 60 feet in 12.67 seconds if you don't tell them Roger and just tell him the number of beats he will tell you the population is baby one of a quarter 1000000000 people actual population $1030000.00 people and the average wage about $60000.00 a year. Actual average wage $15580.00 Wow but that wouldn't have let me ask you a precise question Are you a 100 percent correct or you are saying something close to a 100 percent other things 80 percent but if you start with just the number of footfalls per unit of time they can tell you all kinds of other things about the same place I can tell you how much crime there is in the city income wages g.d.p. Number colleges restaurant fancy restaurant the theaters police patent still being produced cultural events per capita. Libraries and the number of Aids cases it's going to have this you really mean all of these things are related in a quantitative and I use the word predictive rational Are you saying that just from the number of footsteps for a given time that you can tell but can you tell me how many libraries there are yes tell me how many should expect how many things can you count when your. Infinite number but it's limited by the things for which there are data they've got data from the u.s. Census that's Jonah Lehrer he's written about Luis and Jeff and he's the one to kind of got us thinking about all that if they are from Japan and China they're from sociological surveys displayed on cell phones when they put all these numbers together they discovered a deep pattern called comes from the footnote not the footstep Lamie of in the footsteps are reflection of this deep and fundamental pattern that governs everything just one fact what is it you really want to know you know what is it size how many people live their size matters size is the largest determinant of all characteristics of a city they would say Tell me the size of the city and I can explain the vast majority of all these different variables that we can measure as a city scales up they say 100-002-2000 extension 00 1000000 to 2000000000. Everything about it all those things that they've been measuring they scale up to but they scale up into a very simple mathematical formula it does not matter New York has big skyscrapers and it's on the ocean and the. Rocky Mountains the San Francisco San Francisco Bay Wait a 2nd wait wait wait thank you I was with you right up until that last point I mean you go to the Midwest and it's landlocked and then you go to Fort City and it's one of your I mean that's a minor it matters but these actually are superficial effects and account for only 1020 percent of a variation what they're saying is that those specificities the the local history is in large part insignificant but it is completely overwhelmed by these generic laws of urban scaling that to me is a very interesting and surprising idea something because we don't think of cities like that at all no we certainly do not that's because you're not a physicist so you don't think you know abstractly in that regard well why should I because sometimes it can be very useful remember what these guys have done is they've just created a average profile for every size city so if you're 1000000 or 7000000 or 12000000 here's how many things you should have now you can ask Ok let's look specifically at that city and also is it over performing underperforming right so what are some cities that are over performing for their size of the large cities San Francisco is quite an innovative city New York's about average about. Terms New York's below average you're just roughly speaking the number of patents that should 1st saw you produce for example about twice as many patents as Boston we do. To produce many more given the size difference between About average because they're counting patents. I mean who may who do we don't have into this is one of the problems with their larger theory which is that you know the engine that they were lying on your data at the us census collectors so that's a real blind spot hounding fabulous if we ever can figure out a way to count fabulous because he has a point you're not taking into account what actually the experience of living in a place well what this theory. Is tell you about the essence of New York the New York ness of New York. So to speak the soul of the city and where does that come from. Who knows. I mean I think there's a broad question is well obviously it has something to do with lots of people being jammed into a tight space Vironment bumping into each other kind of people who moved there what the physicists we call human friction in that story you can't really tell in math but you can hear it takes Skip he gave producer Aaron Scott a tour of his block. In Brooklyn listen to who keeps into every day so he took us on this tour of the 1st place we went was this Jamaican body shop but it happens in cars. Pushing the specialist. I mean it's basically these you know West Indies Jamaican guys listening to records . And hip hop. Reggae know what I call economy. Like it's one place and across across the street from this is kinda. Hidden with the dogs Jewish cookie big. Number one from that the butcher that sells live goats and chickens and here are the goats and on the corners. I. Kind of crossed our church I was in every Sunday they give it up to God with this exceedingly enthusiastic band. A huddle at the window. And I think this is the best music to feel that deeply. And then across the street from that one is a mosque. It's beautiful inside the cross the street there's this big building and the proprietor of the space is 8 foot fetish film producers told me your feet Show me your feet he . Got Jamaicans supports such shoes in the fifty's spandex thesis. Set in gave warn me your feet on the same block absolutely for me that's the hammer the nails that's the wrong greedy and. 2 now on the take it home and assemble it into a song and when you heard his music did you hear all that stuff some of it is clearer than others. The sounds of the neighborhood like the reg Aton music the West Indies auto body shops he kind of takes them and then filters it through some device that makes it sound like fellows feel. Today that Aaron spoke with Skip was the day skip decided he's leaving New York City and he put in his notice which I guess makes his latest album Sonic New York kind of a Dear John letter to the city you can hear it on our website Radiolab dot org And Robert Viens book the one about walking in time stuff is called the geography of time more information about that too on our website Radiolab dot org Also you can subscribe to our podcast or. I'm a radio level listener from Calgary Alberta Canada Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred p. Sloan Foundation and seek public understanding of science and technology in the modern world more information about Sloan at w.w.w. Dot Sloan dot org That's just so old calling from. Radiolab is part of progress but. By eating food the scientists have some good options from multiple As far as comparisons of say the boat. All on its funded progress but progress there. I'm Jeremy Hobson Amtrak c.e.o. Richard Anderson says some of the railroads 15 cross-country routes are not good for business everybody needs to understand those 15 routes take about a $1000000000.00 cash a year from our congressional grants a wide ranging conversation about rail travel with the head of Amtrak next time on here now Monday between 11 in the morning and one in the afternoon on k c l u n n Saturday Barbara 102.3 f.m. 1340 am has just it may seem it's really good to see it on the sidewalk k.c.l. You news 'd stories that expand your world this project is called so many libraries unsane their punctuation marks fabricated in a thin steel. That look sounds work free open air lending life with the I love it actual It's Malcolm that but k.c.a.l. You news on your radio on the case and when you tell your smart speaker to play k.c.l. You on the next fresh air actor David Harbor from the Netflix series stranger things he plays the skeptical police chief of a sleepy town besieged by supernatural events on the worst thing it's ever happened here was when an owl attacked Eleanor Gillespie's head because he thought that her hair was a nest and we remember New Yorker cartoonist again Wilson who died recently joined us fresh air for Monday between one and 2 in the afternoon also at 8 in the evening on Cape Cod and. I'm Robert Krulwich this is radio and our subject right now is city so far we've tried to pin down the character of a place with man or with a story or with music. But trying to take a snapshot of something that's growing and changing all the time and that feeling that Skip had on the rooftop like a city with. Maybe the city really is like a living. Will you know some boys that's exactly right there. All through growing think about it says Jeff west every day every minute in comes energy food trucks water people out goes garbage they key is Song Stories people energy and energy out energy energy that's just what a city needs to do says Jeff metabolize food so to speak because without butts organisms Susan Swan will simply have to track So how does a city stay alive what does agree the take for a city to grow all that question got me thinking about New York and led me to a place I've been wanted to go for a while. Think. Of the river a little bit. Where are you under ground up 200 feet underground. So this is the sound of one of the city's one of them I'm standing in it it's actually what you would imagine. Being. You know. Polished cement. It seems to go forever. So that basically that you might call it a smaller are very inside the city's circulatory system when this is online in a couple months it will pump up to 290000000 gallons a day if. Something like that which is an awesome thought in the literal sense to wait and see. When you walk through the streets of it and this is Catherine Dempsey from the Department of Environmental Protection is water tunnels are anywhere from 20800 feet below your feet and they just they're silently there and when you turn on your tan. You take a drink. Of water. You are basking in a daily convene. Yes that is born from Blood Sweat and death. To explain you really have to go back to a time when there were no tunnels this would be. 79900 or so around that time says historian Diane glue should New York's population was booming tripled and 20 years and you suddenly had 100000 people all getting their water from the same spot a large freshwater pond called the collect and they had pigs one on around by the hundreds and the chamber pots on the streets and there were livestock in Lower Manhattan at the time people had cows for milk and so when they died they had to do something with them so. Often she says they threw their dead cows and everything else in the pond the same pond they were drinking from right now. Not surprisingly as the city grew people got sick in 798 there was yellow fever epidemic killed a couple of 1000 people and cholera and typhoid city officials were like this has to change and as if to accentuate the point in 835 there was a huge fire the fire department rushes out to put out the fire but they can't it was in December and the rivers froze and they couldn't get water to the fires if you don't have water to fight the fire the city burns out it's pretty simple Yeah 700 buildings so that's our starting point a New York City that could not grow by the way the guy we just heard John checked on here he says sand og part of the long line of guys who blasted New York out of its poopy pawn phase and into his future here as you question why why you go. Well it should be clear tunnel plasters or earthmovers or something that's more or give any idea where that they came from comes in the dictionary it's very early and I love to look at people's faces when they ask me that night that's the answer this is scribe in Webster's dictionary as a laborer who digs or works in sand originals same hogs. These soft ground guys compressed air that's way to nothing to back up for a 2nd when the city decided to scrap the pond in favor of clean water from upstate it's faced a couple of challenges in this is also true when they decide to build the subway s