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...
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 s...
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...
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 N...
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 devoluti...
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...
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 ...
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 a...
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 p...
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...
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 re...
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...
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 i...
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 into a ...
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 recently ...
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 ci...
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 sam...
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, Californi...
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 author of three ...
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 m...
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. Je...
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 Virginia from...
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 followi...
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 thought t...
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 easy enough...
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, where...
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 remar...
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 incomes ....
