This week we’re chatting with Ian Brown, former managing director for London Rail. Ian discusses everything London transport, including congestion pricing; constructing, financing; and making the case for the massive Crossrail project; bus operations; cycling; operations contracts; and even contactless fare payment systems.

Former Vancouver chief planner Brent Toderian joins the podcast this week to discuss the best way to do density, what types of cities should take on the Olympics, and what happens to planners after they have kids. Brent also talks about the downsides of both NIMBYism and YIMBYism, and whether you should believe what you read in all those city rankings.

Kevin DeGood of the Center for American Progress and Deron Lovaas of NRDC join the podcast this week to talk about rules proposed by U.S. DOT to measure congestion and greenhouse gas emissions. These rules matter because they’ll create new feedback loops for transportation agencies — the feds can create incentives to reduce car trips and carbon pollution if […]

Laurel Paget-Seekins joins the podcast this week to talk about her days as a transit activist in Atlanta, what Santiago, Chile, taught her about transit networks, and her current work on data collection and dissemination as the director of strategic initiatives at the MBTA in Boston. We discuss the MBTA’s data blog and dashboard, how the agency […]

This week I’m joined by James Rojas of Place It! to talk about art in planning and Latino urbanism. James is an award-winning planner and a native Angeleno, and he tells us about how growing up in East LA and visiting his grandmother’s house shaped the way he thinks about urban spaces and design. Tune in and hear James discuss […]

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, Brian McMahon and GB Arrington join me to talk about our excellent new report, Linking Transit Agencies and Land Use Decision Making. This is a […]

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. We discuss India’s rapid urbanization and the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, a […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. Catherine talks about how Dallas’s […]

How do the places we inhabit lead to systemic public health problems? On the podcast this week, I discuss this question with Dr. Richard Jackson of UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health. Jackson is the author of three books on the subject of the built environment and public health, and hosted the PBS series Designing Healthy Communities. He has […]