This week I chat with Jeramey Jannene of Streetsblog Network blog Urban Milwaukee. Jeramey discusses freeway teardowns, freeway expansion, the new bike-share system, the transit funding situation in the city, the city’s streetcar plans, and the city’s really high weighted density. And we talk about water. Milwaukee is becoming the “Fresh Coast,” an innovative place for studying […]

This week on the podcast we’re bringing you the keynote address from the 2015 National Bike Summit, hosted by the League of American Bicyclists. The LAB’s Liz Murphy introduces Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett, who talks about how he took his city from being rated as one of the least physically fit to one of the fittest. Cornett […]

This week we’re joined by Kevin DeGood of the Center for American Progress, who along with Andrew Schwartz recently wrote a report called Advancing a Multimodal Transportation System by Eliminating Funding Restrictions. Sound too wonky? I call it the “Roads Don’t Pay for Themselves Report.” When approximately 5.5 percent of roads carry 55 percent of the traffic, you would expect them to […]

Clifton Lemon and Steve Lawton of LightPlace Advisors join me this week to talk about how lighting is going to change in cities with the advent of the LED. We learn about what fire and light means to humans and why the street light might become one of the most valuable assets a city has. Clifton […]

Christof Spieler joins me again to continue our discussion of Houston. This time we talk transportation and all the great things Houston is working on. Uptown, home to the highest building in the U.S. outside of a central business district, will soon be getting true Bus Rapid Transit, and people on bikes are now rolling next to the bayous and connecting […]

This week and next I’m joined by Christof Spieler, a vice president of Morris Architects who serves on the board of Houston Metro, to talk about Houston. Everything is bigger in Texas, including the podcasts. Christof tells stories about how planning works in Houston, including how Intercontinental Airport was sited during a backroom deal and how people inside the city think […]

This week on the Talking Headways Podcast I’m joined by Joe Cortright of City Observatory to nerd out on employment data and discuss their most recent report, Surging City Center Job Growth. We learn how employment cores for many cities are growing and why this looks like a long-term shift. Joe also talks about how they measured […]

This week on the podcast I’m joined by Dr. Mariela Alfonzo to discuss her recent paper, “Walkability, Obesity and Urban Design in Chinese Neighborhoods,” in the journal Preventive Medicine. The findings on both cycling and obesity might surprise you. We also discuss how policy change works in Chinese cities and how much power mayors have to […]

This week Ann Cheng of the California advocacy group Transform joins me to talk about their GreenTRIP program. Ann is a planner and the former mayor of El Cerrito, as well as one of San Francisco Business Times “40 Under Forty” in 2014. On the podcast she discusses how housing developers can build less parking and […]

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 […]

Guest host Randy Simes, owner of UrbanCincy.com and headlines writer for Streetsblog Ohio, 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, the Belt Line and the people who won’t […]

Guest host Tim Halbur, formerly of Planetizen and CNU fame, joins me this week to chat about the process engineers use to designate speed limits, as recently examined by Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight. We’re 85 percent sure it’s not good. We also get into a discussion about Jared Green’s article on whether delivery trucks should be […]