Talking Headways: The Year in Transit Expansion With Yonah Freemark

This week Yonah Freemark is back on the podcast to talk about his annual transit project list. He and Steven Vance of Streetsblog Chicago made a new way to visualize the transit projects in various stages of planning and construction — an interactive, open source map called Transit Explorer, for which he kindly asks for your assistance.

Yonah and I discuss whether subway systems are possible in the future given political and fiscal realities. He points us to Toronto’s transit expansions and goes into how Los Angeles and Seattle are now the big planners and doers in the U.S. We also talk about current trends like the proliferation of streetcar projects and the public-private partnership model used to build several commuter rail lines opening in Denver this year.

In true transit nerd fashion, I ask Yonah to look into future and tell us whether LA and Seattle will vote for transit this year, how the H Street Streetcar will turn out, and whether Austin will finally get over the hump and build rail in the core. Listen in and add your own predictions for the year ahead in the comments.