Talking Headways: A Streetsblog Podcast

Episode 53: Growing Up and Out in Houston Texas Part 1

Episode 52: They Took Our Jobs!! ...Downtown

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. 

Episode 51: The Peking Order

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.

Episode 50: Green Tripping

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.

Episode 49: They Know Where the Bodies Are Buried

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 Franci...

Episode 48: Urbanism in the Style of Gangnam

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 ...

Episode 47: We Are Speeding by Design

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. 

Episode 46: Free Ranging Transport Data

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

Episode 45: The Year in Transit Starts (feat. Yonah Freemark)

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 ...

Episode 44: Here I Am, Stuck in Seattle With You

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 down...

Episode 43: Level of Disservice

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 u...

Episode 42: I'm Not a Scientist

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 t...

Episode 41: You've Got to Fight for Your Right to Party Politics

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 dev...

Episode 40: Uber and the Case of the Hidden Gas Tax

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 contribu...

Episode 39: That Indie Flick You Were Looking 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 encourage you to bike to them). Next, we shift gears to talk about how Vision Zero is unfolding in ...

Episode 38: Dear Bike People

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 gro...

Episode 37: Zero Deaths, Zero Cars, Zero Eurasian Water Shrews

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: Z...

Episode 36: OMG Enough About Millennials Already

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 peopl...

Episode 35: The Real News About America’s Driving Habits (Short)

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...

Episode 34: Pro-Walk Pro-Bike Redux

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 holdin...

Episode 33: Jeff's Milkshake

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...

Episode 32: Crown Prince of Fresh Air

What would you think of a city planner, out ruffling feathers with his bold ideas about density and urbanism -- who commutes to work an hour each way from his ranch way outside the city? Ironic -- or hypocritical? That's the question we wrestle with in our discussion of Brad Buchanan, the head honcho at Denver's Department of Community Planning and Development.  And then we head from Denver to Dallas, where MPO chief Michael Morris has unilaterally declared that the plan to convert I-345 in...

Episode 31: Zoned Out

Welcome to the dog days of summer! Before skipping town, Congress passed a transportation funding patch so they wouldn't have to deal with the real problem of the unsustainable way our nation builds and pays for infrastructure. I give the briefest possible rundown of where we are now before Jeff and I launch into discussions about the issues of the day: zoning and ride-share. Houston is famous for its wild-west attitude toward zoning, but that laissez-faire approach was put to the test rece...

Episode 30: Poor Door Von Spreckelsen

In this week's podcast, Jeff and I take on the infamous New York City "poor door," designed to keep tenants of affordable units segregated from the wealthy residents that occupy the rest of the high-rise at 40 Riverside. In the process, we take on the assumptions and methods that cities use to provide housing, and by the time we're done, we've blown a hole in the whole capitalist system. Then we investigate the reasons behind the assertion that "restaurants really can determine the fate of ...

Episode 29: Square Footage

Welcome to Episode 29 of the Talking Headways podcast. In it, we evaluate the potential of Boston's attempt to "gentrification-proof" the Fairmount Line, building affordable housing to keep transit from displacing people with low incomes. Too often, the allure of transit raises rents, bringing in a new demographic of people who can pay them -- and who, ironically, usually have cars. One innovative way to build affordable housing -- and keep your not-quite-grown kids under your watch at the ...

Episode 28: Good Riddance, "Level of Service"

All the buzz is about Arlington, Virginia, these days -- the Washington, DC suburb has seen its population rise and its car traffic drop at the same time. How did they do it? It could be a lesson for Palo Alto, California, which is considering various growth proposals, including one that would invite greater density as long as it comes with no additional driving, carbon emissions, or water use.  Denser, more transit-oriented development would be a big win for Palo Alto, but ironically, Cali...

Episode 27: Walt Disney, City Planner

While most people know Walt Disney as the creator of lovable characters like Mickey Mouse and movies like Snow White and Fantasia, Disney doesn't get as much credit for his design of Disneyland. Turns out Disney made himself an expert on the subject.       This podcast isn't a typical Talking Headways conversation. It's a 45-minute episode, produced by Jeff for the Overhead Wire, on one topic: the history and ideas of Walt Disney the planner. Guests Sam Gennawey, an urban planner and autho...

Episode 26: Helmet Hair

Did you wear your helmet when you biked to work this morning? Whether you did or you didn't, it's up to you. So why are there so many people shrieking about it? On one side, the 85-percenters, overstating the protection helmets offer against head injuries. On the other side, the 3-footers, claiming that it's actually safer to go helmetless because drivers give you more space and a host of other reasons. Some recent hysteria around bike-share and head injuries fueled this fire. Jeff and Tanya...

Episode 25: Rondo Revisited

Finally, there is a light rail line connecting the Twin Cities. The Green Line, running 11 miles from Union Depot in downtown St. Paul to Target Field in downtown Minneapolis, cost $957 million and several decades to build. The process of choosing stations was contentious but eventually embraced the proposals of the low-income communities that wanted stations, and the line is already being looked at as a model. It's not the fastest way between the two downtowns, but it might be the best way....

Episode 24: A Butterfly Flaps Its Wings In the Metro

The metro is coming to Loudon County. Eventually. The Silver Line expansion that opens this summer will only go as far as Reston, but by 2018 it'll be in Loudon, one of the nation's fastest-growing -- and wealthiest -- counties. As the county continues to add population density -- in large part by growing its communities of color -- will it hit 800 people per square mile, which is the threshold at which places magically turn from Republican to Democrat? And if it does, will it turn Virgini...

Episode 23: Les Rues Are Made for Walking

This week, Smart Growth America brought us the bad news: More than 47,000 people died while walking between 2003 and 2012. Most are killed on high-speed arterial roads. A disproportionate number are elderly or racial minorities. Paris brought us the antidote: The city is lowering its default speed limit to 30 kilometers, or about 18 miles, per hour. Speeds are already set at that level in about a third of the city's streets. That's good policy, and one cities around the world should be foll...

Episode 22: Houston, Transit Paradise

Welcome to a super-long extra-bonus episode of Talking Headways! We only took on two topics this week, but we got so gonzo excited about them both we just couldn’t shut up. First, we talked to Christof Spieler, a member of Houston Metro, about the “blank-sheet” bus overhaul he helped design. Instead of trying to tweak the current system around its edges, Metro decided to start again from scratch, planning a system of routes and service that makes sense for the way the city is now. They thou...

Episode 21: The Census' Deep Dive Into Biking and Walking

We were so excited about the Census' first-ever report exclusively focused on biking and walking that we devoted this entire episode of the Talking Headways podcast to an interview with its author, Brian McKenzie.  Bike commuting is up 60 percent since 2000, the Census data shows, and people with low incomes are by far the biggest proportion of the riding public.  People who bike and walk are hungry for reliable data. While government-sanctioned statistics on vehicle-miles-traveled are eas...

Episode 20: California Über Alles

Welcome to our all-California, all-the-time episode of the Talking Headways podcast. We start with a statewide debate over whether $60,000+ Teslas should qualify for tax breaks -- or whether any electric vehicles should get tax breaks. Then on to the conversation about how California's cap-and-trade dollars should be spent. One proposal, from the State Senate leader, would spend it on affordable housing, sustainable communities, transit, and high-speed rail. And then we zoom in on Fresno, ...

Episode 19: Escobar's Escalators

Did you go to the World Urban Forum in Medellín, Colombia last week? Neither did your hosts Jeff Wood and Tanya Snyder, but we sure found a lot to say about it anyway -- or at least, about the remarkable urban transformation that Medellín made, in the midst of war, to make the city's transportation infrastructure more equitable.  But first, we talked to our very own Angie Schmitt about the Parking Madness tournament. Did she know Rochester was a winner from the moment she laid eyes on that ...

Episode 18: Let Them Drive Cars

Quick quiz: What city is the world leader in highway teardowns? San Francisco? Portland? Madrid? Wrong, wrong, wrong. It's Seoul, South Korea, which has removed 15 urban highways -- and is about to remove another. In this week's Talking Headways episode, Jeff and I talk about what can take the place of a freeway in a city and why it's worth it. We also debunk the argument, made in Atlantic Cities and the Washington Post last week, that promoting car access will benefit people with low inco...

Episode 17: Play the Gray Away

Jeff and Tanya had a great time this week, getting all outraged at the short-sighted move by the Tennessee Senate to ban dedicated lanes for transit and high and mighty about cities that devote too much space to surface parking, at the expense of just about everything else. And then we treat ourselves to a fun conversation about the origin of the American playground -- and whether the entire city should be the playground. We think you'll enjoy this one. Meanwhile, have you subscribed to th...

Episode 16: Knight Rider Rides Again

It was a dark and stormy day in San Francisco and Jeff Wood stayed dry in Woonerf studios, recording the Talking Headways podcast with co-host Tanya Snyder, who was bitter that days after the spring equinox, Washington, DC, was getting hit with another snowstorm. But more importantly -- will New York's gangbusters Citi Bike system wobble due to management issues and financial problems? What can Chicago (and, oh, every other American city) do to create more affordable housing in the neighbor...

Episode 15: From the Free Market to the Flea Market

You think the conflict between Uber and regular taxi drivers -- and cities like Seattle -- is bad? Check out how new taxi apps in China are upending the transportation system and central economic planning. Meanwhile, in Houston, a flea market has brought revitalization without gentrification to a depressed area near the airport, and now an urban design firm is bringing in pop-up infrastructure. And Californians are proving that the culture shift away from the automobile and toward other mode...

Episode 14: Taking Transit Numbers for a Spin

What a week! Transit numbers skyrocketed (ahem, by 1.1 percent) to levels not seen since 1956 (depending how you look at it). And Radio Shack is shutting down 20 percent of its stores. And there's a new video game for transit nerds to stay up all night obsessing over! And we tackle the fundamental question of how to make a real change in how people get around. Will it happen just by improving transit and other modes -- or do you need to make driving less appealing, as Emily Badger suggests ...

Episode 13: Live (Well, Taped) from the National Bike Summit

This week, more than 700 bicycling advocates converged in Washington -- despite a snowstorm that closed down the federal government on Monday and thousands of cancelled flights -- to learn from each other and compare notes from the past year in bicycling advocacy. Tuesday, as the summit wound down and participants started gearing up for Wednesday's Lobby Day on Capitol Hill, hosts Jeff and Tanya were joined by Doug Gordon of Brooklyn Spoke, Suepinda Keith of Triangle Bikeworks in Chapel Hil...

Episode 12: Freeways Without Futures, Tollways Without Tomorrows

So, Bertha is stuck underneath Seattle. Jeff Wood and I ask the essential question: Does it matter? Traffic has collapsed around Seattle's Alaskan Way Viaduct. Image: Sightline Does Seattle really need that new traffic sewer, when traffic on the Alaskan Way Viaduct has been plummeting? Or is Seattle's $2.8 billion road project destined to be a Freeway without a Future? We highlight this week's public conversation over CNU's big report calling out highways just begging to be drowned in the...

Episode 11: Hug That Streetcar

Hosts Jeff Wood of the Overhead Wire (now working with NRDC's crack transportation team) and Streetsblog's Tanya Snyder talk to Randy Simes in this week's podcast about the dazzling success of the pro-streetcar movement in Cincinnati -- and how they finally grabbed the long-elusive gold ring. Then Randy stayed with us to discuss the false choice between transit that's useful and transit that's fun and beautiful. And we analyze an architect's proposal to expand BART's capacity by building a ...

Episode 10: How Does This Podcast Make You Feel?

This week, Jeff Wood and I get morose and indignant, in turns, about Miami-Dade County's misuse of transit funds for roads and the depressing trend of pedestrian malls going belly-up. And then we peek behind the curtain at an exciting new frontier for urban planning: connecting urban form with the feelings they inspire. And then, just for you: a bonus Valentine's Day outtake at the end. How could you not listen to the whole thing? You can subscribe to this podcast’s RSS feed or subscribe to...

Episode 9: With Special Guest Jan Gehl

Danish architect and urban planner Jan Gehl, who led the turn away from modernism and toward livable cities dominated by public space for people and not cars, is on a U.S. tour. Tanya got to sit down with him in Washington. In this episode of Talking Headways, you can hear Gehl in his own words about everything from his assertion that "the tower is the lazy architect's answer to density" to the Moscow mayor's hyper-efficient way of getting people to stop parking on Main Street. You can sub...

Episode 8: Bikes of Ill Repute

Jeff Wood and Tanya Snyder are back with episode 8 of the Talking Headways podcast. We talk about the Los Angeles Metro's decision not to extend light rail all the way to LAX (and what they're doing instead), plus some analysis of what rail can really do in a city as spread-out as LA. Then we head east to Princeton, New Jersey, where we debunk the thesis that low sales of luxury condos somehow equates to a rejection of walkability. And finally, back west to Seattle, which finds itself with a...

Episode 7: Vision Zero

The best thing about hosting a Streetsblog podcast is getting to call on other Streetsblog reporters for the lowdown on the biggest news of the week. In this case, Jeff Wood and I called on Ben Fried, Streetsblog's editor-in-chief and New York-based reporter, to explain why we can stop being cynical and just appreciate that a New York mayor just dedicated himself to a vision of zero traffic deaths in the city. We also took a look at how California is changing its environmental laws to stop ...

Episode 6: Fifty Minutes Talking About Transit in the U.S. and We Never Mention New York

This week, podcast co-host Jeff Wood and I got to chat with The Transport Politic's Yonah Freemark about the outlook for new transit projects in 2014. Building off Yonah's thorough (and colorful!) outline of the year's expected transit starts, we talked about the projects we were most excited about, including some that have been a long time coming. And we take a look back at what kind of year 2013 was for transit. This conversation was so good we went over our usual half-hour time slot and ...

Episode 5: Get Off My Lawn

Jeff Wood and Tanya Snyder talk about the news of the week that most tickled us or burned us -- the BBC's exposé of anti-social design features that not-so-subtly tell us to stay away, San Francisco's brewing class war over the Google bus, and a bad decision by Cincinnati's new mayor and city council to "pause" construction of the streetcar. (Note: Watch for breaking news on that last item.) Meanwhile, I wax nostalgic for public space in Havana and Jeff laments slow progress on the Geary Bo...

Episode 4: Car Brain

Jeff and Tanya discuss the impressive turnout -- and possible pitfalls -- of London's 1,000-person die-in for cyclists' rights. We try to contain our envy (but not our amazement) at Paul Salopek's seven-year journey tracing the path of Homo sapiens from the Rift Valley to Tierra del Fuego. And we admit that yes, even passionate transit advocates know what it means to embarrassed about taking the bus.