Talking Headways: A Streetsblog Podcast

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 Certification.

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 working on, which regions were the most innovative, and case studies that look at the San Francisco Bay Area and the Washington DC region.  

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 creates,  and Randy shares the best place to get southern hospitality in town.   From there we swerve from a discussion about Al Gore’s $90T plan to remake cities without cars into a chat about America’s crumbling infrastructure.  Or splintering.  Depends on what material the pipes are made from.    And for the final few minutes there is a celebration of Denver’s 10 year anniversary of the Fastracks vote.  Regionalism and light rail on freight rights-of-way is debated and the locals might know what Randy means when he mentions Biker Jim.       All that and more on this week’s Talking Headway Podcast  

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 compendium of "Openings and Construction Starts Planned for 2015" or you can come straight here and hear him tell it (and then argue with Jeff about it). You thought the Oakland airport connector was a good idea just because transit is good? Get schooled. Didn’t know the country was getting its first bus/rail/bike/ped (but no cars!) bridge? Learn about it here. Wondering how escalator length impacts subway ridership? Yup, you heard it here first, folks. With that, I present to you: Yonah and Jeff on the transit starts of 2014 and 2015. Spoiler alert: Last year was a good year for expanding transportation options, and

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 option -- and it got stuck just 1,000 feet in. Last December. Now the rescue plan is making downtown sink. It's not going well. And to be honest, it was always destined to not go well, but it was a crappy plan to begin with. Luckily, there is a rescue plan for the rescue plan, if anyone cares to carry it out. It starts with some accountability and ends -- spoiler alert! -- with pulling the damn plug. But if the new tunnel to replace Seattle's Alaskan Way Viaduct is likely to cause traffic tie-ups, it's nothing compared to the perennial jam on LA's I-405. The popular navigation app Waze has started directing drivers of

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’s impact on the environment, it looks mostly at its impact on traffic. And the measures CEQA uses to determine traffic impact focus on individual intersections, instead of the region as a whole. As a result, they end up penalizing urban infill development and transit projects while promoting sprawl and road expansion.  Here’s the good news: This traffic measure, known as Level of Service (LOS), is set to be overhauled in California. Last year, Governor Brown signed into law SB743. Mostly what that bill does is allow the Sacramento Kings to build a new stadium. But the other thing it does is allow for the Governor’s

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 ecosystem to the highway system -- specifically, the argument made by Evan Jenkins in The Week to abolish the National Highway System. Chuck Marohn at Strong Towns thinks it's a good idea (which should be a surprise to nobody). Jeff and I aren't so sure. Could rail really pick up the slack? Would states make better decisions? What funding source would replace the federal gas tax?  Enjoy this, our 42nd episode of Talking Headways. Find us on the Twitters already. And oh yeah, also on iTunes, Stitcher, and the RSS feed.

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 House and a Republican Senate that will preside over it. Will lawmakers raise the specter of devolution of transportation funding to the states? Will they suggest that the Highway Trust Fund should just be used for highways? Of course they will! But the conversation won't end there.  Even the short-term extensions aren't as easy as they used to be, and that could make the politics of a long-term bill a little easier to manage. Some people blame the end of earmarks for the difficulty passing a bill, but Beth makes the point that you can't very well turn a transportation bill into a Christmas tree for every member of Co

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 a while now. Uber's response is something like, "Catch me if you can, old geezer." DC's contribution to that conversation strengthens Uber's position. In other news, a front group for the oil industry is trying to cause panic among California drivers about a "hidden gas tax" that's going to hit come January. What they're really talking about is California's landmark cap-and-trade law to limit greenhouse gas emissions, which will start including transportation fuels at the beginning of the year. Jeff and I called up Melanie Curry of Streetsblog LA to explain to us a campaign that didn't seem to really make any sense a

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 encourage you to bike to them). Next, we shift gears to talk about how Vision Zero is unfolding in New York City. Streetsblog has called attention to the need to go beyond grand policy pronouncements and do the dirty work of changing the very culture that surrounds mobility. Specifically, the police need to stop forgiving deadly "errors" by drivers and start taking death by auto as seriously as other preventable deaths. And then we called it a day because really, that was a lot. Tell us about your favorite video store, or your least bike-friendly cop, or whatever you feel like telling us, in the comments. And find us on

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 from the bicycle advocacy world. The League of American Bicyclists, along with countless other groups around the country, are out to change that. We covered their report on equity in the bicycling movement last week -- but there was still lots more to talk about. So Jeff and I called up Adonia Lugo, the League's Equity Initiative Manager. We talked about what groups can do if they want to reach out to new constituencies, whether infrastructure design really needs a multicultural perspective, and how the movement can start "seeing" bicyclists that don't fit the dominant stereotype.  We know you have strong feelings about

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 Seleta Reynolds.) Then Jeff and I move on to Helsinki, Finland, and its even more ambitious goal: Zero private cars by 2025. They have a plan to do it, which includes many elements that are already in place in the United States and that haven't -- yet -- brought us to zero cars. We talk about what Helsinki has in store that could get them to their goal. And then we research Finnish fauna. I know you're listening to this podcast on your phone while you're on on your bike or whatever, but when you get to a safe place to stop, shout at us in the comments.  And find us on iTunes and Stitcher and the RSS feed.

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 survey results from Transit Center [PDF] (and of course, The Onion) to shed light on what the people want from their transit systems. And we agree: While millennials are an important cohort to look at as we examine changing trends in transportation habits, good lord we are sick of talking about them Stay tuned till the end of the podcast for Jeff's rundown of the conferences you can still attend this season -- there are, according to his count, 50 bajillion more. Pick one and go skip all the sessions and hang out in the hallways like the cool kids. And hang out with us by subscribing to Talking Headways on our RSS feed, 

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 Talking Headways short in which we discuss the Federal Highway Administration's recent (er, not so recent anymore) announcement that Americans are driving more than anytime since 2008 and so we'd better spend lots more on highways. Here's a quick visual to help you understand just one reason we thought their reasoning was flawed: Above, the change in total vehicle miles traveled, and below, the change in per capita vehicle miles traveled. You'll have to listen to the podcast to hear the rest. It's a short one; you can listen to the whole thing while you fold the laundry. And there's something extra-adorable in there a

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 take on bike and pedestrian safety as one of its top issues. And we debate the pros and cons of holding the next Pro-Walk Pro-Bike in Vancouver. There were hundreds of workshops, panels, presentations, and tours -- not to mention countless side conversations, power lunches, and informal caucuses that were probably at least as energizing as the formal sessions -- so my impressions are just one tiny slice of the pie. We'd love to hear your thoughts of the conference, the host city, and your experience in the comments. Keep up with us (if you can) at our RSS feed or subscribe on Stitcher or iTunes. 

Forgive us for the unacceptable two-week gap between podcast episodes but this one is totally worth the wait. Your transit geekery will feast on our in-depth exploration of three transit lines (in order of fantasy to reality): Las Vegas, Minneapolis, and Salt Lake City. Despite having population density that rivals Manhattan, the Las Vegas strip doesn't have high-quality transit running along its full length, but that might be about to change. Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, a light rail line is inching closer to reality but its route stops just short of the densest parts of the region, making it far less useful than it could be. And in Salt Lake City, a line that fails on many metrics is still being hailed as a great success. And, do I still even need to say it? The comments. The RSS feed. Stitcher. iTunes. That is all.