Talking Headways: A Streetsblog Podcast

Clifton Lemon and Steve Lawton of LightPlace Advisors join me this week to talk about how lighting is going to change in cities with the advent of the LED.

Christof Spieler joins me again to chat about Houston.  This time we chat transportation and all the great things Houston is working on. 

This week on the Talking Headways Podcast I’m joined by Joe Cortright of City Observatory to nerd out on employment data and discuss their most recent report Surging City Center Job Growth. We learn how employment cores for many cities are growing and why this looks like a longer term shift in growth.  

This week on the podcast I’m joined by Dr. Mariela Alfonzo to discuss walkability in China.   We talk about her recent paper, Walkability, obesity and urban design in Chinese neighborhoods in the journal Preventative Medicine as well as the lack of data availability for researchers, the obstacles to walking such as poles and poorly designed ramps, and the huge issue of air quality indoors and out.

This week Ann Cheng of the California Transportation Advocacy Group Transform joins me to talk about their Green Trip program.     Ann, a planner, the former Mayor of El Cerrito California, as well as one of San Francisco Business Times “40 Under Forty” in 2014 discusses how housing developers can build less parking and more housing by giving residents better travel options through Green Trip Cert...

Mariia Zimmerman of MZ Strategies joins me to chat about her new report on local advocacy for transportation reform called Transportation Transformation.    Mariia, former Deputy Director for the Office of Sustainable Communities at HUD as well as former Chief of Staff to Congressman Earl Blumenauer, spent a year probing the local transportation advocacy landscape to see what issues people were wo...

Guest host Randy Simes, Headline writer for the Streetsblog Ohio Network Blog and owner of UrbanCincy.com, joins me from South Korea to give his thoughts on his current home in the Gangnam district of Seoul and his previous one in Atlanta.   We cover Keith Parker’s turnaround of Atlanta’s transit agency MARTA, talk about the belt line and the types of people that won’t leave the cozy boundary it c...

Guest host Tim Halbur joins Jeff to talk about how we design our roads for speed, the idea that we need to design complete streets with Trucks in mind, age in cities, and the airbnb-ification of parking. 

Tanya Snyder and Jeff Wood discuss free range kids, bus riding dogs and Uber's data dump. 

This episode pretty much sums up why this podcast exists in the first place. You thought you knew something about transit? Listening to Yonah Freemark of the Transport Politic and Jeff Wood of the Overhead Wire (and my lovely co-host) geek out on transit starts of 2014 and 2015 is a humbling, and surprisingly animating, experience. You can study for this episode by reading Yonah's seventh annual c...

Stuck in Seattle or Stuck in Sherman Oaks. There are so many places to get stuck these days and so many clowns and jokers making it worse.  First, poor Bertha, stuck 100 feet under Seattle. All the tunnel boring machine wanted to do was drill a 1.7-mile tunnel for a highway that won't even access downtown and is projected to cause more congestion at a higher price than a parallel surface/transit o...

Whether you’re building an office tower or a new transit line in California, you’re going to run up against the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The law determines how much environmental analysis you need to do for new projects. But sadly, it’s better at supporting auto oriented development than it is at determining environmental impacts.  That’s because instead of looking at a project...

Do you ever think about the ecology of the city you live in? Not just the parks and the smog. Scientists are starting to examine  urban ecosystems  more holistically: the trees and the concrete, natural gas lines and soil, water pipes and rivers. The natural and the synthetic feed off each other in surprising ways.  We're not scientists , but we found it interesting. Then we move from the ecosyste...

Has the stupor worn off yet?  Election Day  was last Tuesday, and we'll be living with the results for years. But Beth Osborne, a former Hill staffer and U.S. DOT official now at Transportation for America, says the changes on the Hill are no big deal: Nothing was getting done anyway. So Beth, Jeff, and I examine the prospects for a new transportation bill. One is due in May, and it's a Republican...

Uber is celebrating. DC passed an Uber-legalization law that Uber thinks cities the world over should follow. The problem is, most cities have much more tightly regulated taxi industries than DC, with a far higher cost of entry. In those cases, letting Uber get away with providing taxi services while complying with none of the rules is unfair. The taxi companies have been screaming about this for...

If you're a Netflix member, you're part of the downfall of the  brick-and-mortar video store . There are all kinds of reasons to be sad about that, but we look at its implications for urbanism and transportation. Besides, now where will you find esoteric foreign films to impress your friends? There are  reasons to believe  a few hardy indie-shop survivors could keep hanging on for a while (and we...

Do people of color and low-income people ride bikes? Not as much as they could be, given all the great benefits biking offers, particularly to people without a lot of disposable cash.  But yes, non-white and non-rich people ride bikes  -- in many cases, more than rich and white people. But even if they're equally represented on the roads, people of color and low-income people are largely missing f...

Special guest Damien Newton of Streetsblog LA joins Jeff and me on this episode to tell us all about LADOT's new strategic plan, which includes a Vision Zero goal: zero traffic deaths by 2025, a vision all of our cities should get behind. He walks us through the oddities of LA politics and the pitfalls that may await the plan, as well as some really good reasons it could succeed. (Her name is Sele...

Jeff is back from  Rail~volution  with all the highlights from the sessions he skipped because he was deep in conversation in the hallways. Isn't that what conferences are for? We discuss what we do and don't get out of these big meetings. We also get into  CityLab 's examination of the gap between public support for transit spending and actual transit ridership, and we bring in some illuminating ...

Consider this a bonus track. A deleted scene at the end of your DVD. Extra footage. Or, consider it what it is: A short podcast episode Jeff and I recorded 2 1/2 weeks ago that never got edited because I went to Pro-Walk Pro-Bike and he went to Rail~Volution and we recorded (and actually posted) a podcast in between and basically, life got in the way. But better late than never, right? Here is a T...

After a week at the Pro-Walk Pro-Bike Pro-Place Conference in Pittsburgh, it was all I could talk about -- and luckily, Jeff was an eager audience.  In this podcast, Jeff and I talk about the relative utility of a character like  Isabella , the new fictional spokesperson of People for Bikes and the movement for safe, low-stress bikeways. We dig into the  announcement  that U.S. DOT is going to tak...