Talking Headways: A Streetsblog Podcast

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.

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.

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 Francisco Bay Area and the Washington DC region.

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 swerve from a discussion about Al Gore’s $90T plan to remake cities without cars into a chat about America’s crumbling infrastructure. Or splintering. Depends on what material the pipes are made from. And for the final few minutes there is a celebration of Denver’s 10 year anniversary of the Fastracks vote. Regionalism and light rail on freight rights-of-way is debated and the locals might know what Randy means when he mentions Biker Jim. All that and more on this week’s Talking Headway Podcast

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 hear him tell it (and then argue with Jeff about it). You thought the Oakland airport connector was a good idea just because transit is good? Get schooled. Didn’t know the country was getting its first bus/rail/bike/ped (but no cars!) bridge? Learn about it here. Wondering how escalator length impacts subway ridership? Yup, you heard it here first, folks. With that, I present to you: Yonah and Jeff on the transit starts of 2014 and 2015. Spoiler alert: Last year was a good year for expanding transportation options, and this year stands to be even better. But don’t take my word for it. Have a listen.

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 sink. It's not going well. And to be honest, it was always destined to not go well, but it was a crappy plan to begin with. Luckily, there is a rescue plan for the rescue plan, if anyone cares to carry it out. It starts with some accountability and ends -- spoiler alert! -- with pulling the damn plug. But if the new tunnel to replace Seattle's Alaskan Way Viaduct is likely to cause traffic tie-ups, it's nothing compared to the perennial jam on LA's I-405. The popular navigation app Waze has started directing drivers off the freeway and into the residential neighborhood of Sherman Oaks, infuriating the people who live there. Their solution: Try to convince Waze there are traffic jams in Sherman Oaks too. Our solution: Build a better transportation system. And that's it! This is our last podcast until the New Year. You can catch up on anything you missed on iTunes or Stitcher, and if you follow our RSS feed (or our Twitter feeds) you'll be the first to know when a new episode is out. Happy Holidays, and Happy Trails!

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 determine traffic impact focus on individual intersections, instead of the region as a whole. As a result, they end up penalizing urban infill development and transit projects while promoting sprawl and road expansion. Here’s the good news: This traffic measure, known as Level of Service (LOS), is set to be overhauled in California. Last year, Governor Brown signed into law SB743. Mostly what that bill does is allow the Sacramento Kings to build a new stadium. But the other thing it does is allow for the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research to come up with a new measure to replace LOS. We’ve discussed this on Streetsblog before, and this week’s Talking Headways is a special podcast episode all about how LOS works against sustainable development patterns and what is being done to change it. Jeff produced this podcast for the NRDC Urban Solutions Program. Guests include Jeff Tumlin of Nelson\Nygaard, Amanda Eaken of NRDC, and Chris Ganson of the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research. Hope you enjoy it. Catch us on iTunes, Stitcher, and the RSS feed. And we'll see you on Twitter.

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 National Highway System. Chuck Marohn at Strong Towns thinks it's a good idea (which should be a surprise to nobody). Jeff and I aren't so sure. Could rail really pick up the slack? Would states make better decisions? What funding source would replace the federal gas tax? Enjoy this, our 42nd episode of Talking Headways. Find us on the Twitters already. And oh yeah, also on iTunes, Stitcher, and the RSS feed.