Talking Headways: A Streetsblog Podcast

This week we're at the Shared Use Mobility Summit in Chicago listening to a keynote speech from Zipcar Co-Founder Robin Chase. Robin talks about her ideas on the brave new world of shared mobility services and autonomous vehicles. She discusses how autonomous vehicles could be heaven by making space for more active transportation like biking and walking or a hell where we are just swapping out everyone's cars for a driverless version and continuing existing policies.

This week we're in Madison Wisconsin for the Empty Storefronts Conference and joined by former Mayor and Executive Director of the Wisconsin Bike Fed Dave Cieslewicz. We chat about his transportation hero, how bikes interact with small businesses, economic development, and why new technologies should make us think twice about building new parking spaces.

This week we're joined live from Rail~Volution by Houston Metro Board Member Christof Spieler. We talk about the progress on Houston's bus reimagining and Christof gives tips for public engagement and system planning. There's also a discussion about route alignments for bus and rail lines and a plea to use more data when making decisions.

This week we're chatting with Ian Brown, former Managing Director for London Rail. We discuss everything London transport including operations contracts, congestion pricing, constructing, financing and making the case for the massive Crossrail project, cycling, bus operations and even contactless payment systems.

This week I'm joined by Meea Kang, Rail~volution Board Member and Founding Partner of Domus Development. Meea joins me live from the Rail~volution conference to talk about what it's like to be an affordable housing developer building sustainable projects. We talk about the 16 variances it took to do TOD in Sacramento, workforce housing in Tahoe on a bus line with 60 minute headways, and what it takes to pass a state law that reduces parking requirements near transit.

This week I'm joined by Tiffany Chu, the Co-Founder of the transit planning software firm Remix. Tiffany discusses the positive responses that the company has gotten from the industry and what made got it started. We also discuss the possible policy implications as well as the movement towards open data.

This week we're chatting with transit advocate Sunday Parker about transportation access for people with disabilities. We talk about the design of transit stations, the layout of the new BART train cars and what that means for different types of users, the idea of universal design and access in the built environment overall, and our best transit days.

This week we're joined by Shane Phillips who writes at the blog Better Institutions. We chat about Los Angeles' and everyone else's housing issues including The Neighborhood Integrity Initiative, development exactions, vacancy rates, and more. Shane also talks a bit about how he keeps motivated to write the blog and what allows him to think a little bit outside the box before thinking about the importance of urbanist happy hours.

This week we're joined by Rob Puentes of the Eno Center for Transportation, a 95 year old organization focused on better transportation outcomes. We discuss a number of different topics including some we usually don't hear much about. Aviation, freight, coordinating automated vehicle policy, and the presidential election are some of the big topics in our discussion.

This week we're joined by former Vancouver BC chief planner Brent Toderian. We discuss the best way to do density, when towers are appropriate for cities, what type of cities should take on the Olympics, and what happens to a planner after they have kids. Brent also talks about the negatives of not only NIMBYs but YIMBYs and whether we should believe all those articles that rank cities by any measure.