Talking Headways Podcast

Think land use is none of a transit agency's business? Think again. Transit routes serving sprawled-out areas draw fewer riders and cost more to operate than routes serving compact, walkable development.

This week I'm chatting with Akshay Mani, a sustainable transportation planner who has worked for Cambridge Systematics in the United States and the World Resources Institute’s EMBARQ program in India. Akshay joined us from Chennai to talk about transportation and the growth of Indian cities.

This week we’re chatting with Jason Jordan, director of the Center for Transportation Excellence (CFTE) and policy director at the American Planning Association. Jason tells us how CFTE got started and why ballot measures for transportation have been so successful compared to other types of spending. He also describes scenarios where transportation ballot measures tend to do well and those where they tend to fail.

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.

Gabe Klein joins us this week to talk about how to get things done and make big changes to improve city streets and transportation. Gabe has served as the transportation chief of both Chicago and Washington, DC, and prior to his stint in government was an executive with Zipcar (he is also currently on the board of OpenPlans, the organization that publishes Streetsblog USA).

This week we’re bringing you our recording from the last weekend in October at the Rail~Volution conference, where we interviewed Catherine Cuellar, director of Entrepreneurs for North Texas and former executive director of the Dallas Arts District, and Dave Unsworth, the director of capital projects at TriMet in Portland, Oregon.

How do the places we inhabit lead to systemic public health problems?

This week we talk to Mike Lydon of The Street Plans Collaborative and co-author of the recent book Tactical Urbanism. Based on his experience with tactical urbanism, Mike says you know an idea has "made it" when it gets co-opted for things that don’t fit the actual definition. We also discuss how to take a small planning idea and make it bigger, and whether urbanism goes through cycles like fashion, with ideas from the past coming back into style.

Dr. Kevin Gurney is a carbon cycle scientist at Arizona State University. I recently came across an article in Nature about his work measuring carbon emissions from mobile sources at street level, and I wanted to find out more.