Talking Headways: A Streetsblog Podcast

This week we’re chatting with Nico Larco, an Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Oregon and  Co-Director of the Sustainable Cities Initiative.  We talk about the secondary effects of autonomous vehicles and e-commerce such as street design, parking, and land values.  We also talk about terrestrial drones, zombie cars, delivery bee hives, and the fact that cities just aren’t ready yet for an autonomous future.

This week Robin Rather of Collective Strength joins the podcast to talk about missteps in the planning profession.  She discusses how she got to thinking about urban issues and why she believes current planning practice is stuck in the 1990s. We also talk about the often jargon filled language the profession uses and use an example paragraph from Austin’s current code rewrite to illustrate.

This week is the first part of two where I chat with Jonn Elledge, the editor of City Metric and the host of the Skylines podcast.  In this episode Jonn interviews me about US transportation, particularly the history of urban subways and light rail and we also talk about transport politics and possible futures.

This week we welcome back Tanya Snyder of Politico Magazine for the 150th episode of Talking Headways. We discuss aviation legislation in the house of representatives including what it means for drones and whether private jets should pay more for air traffic control. We also talk about legislation on self-driving vehicles and all of the smaller details you might not have heard before including state versus federal regulations of vehicles and children’s safety.

This week we’re joined by Lee Einsweiler of Code Studio in Austin Texas.  We talk about all things land use codes and zoning including what goes into a zoning code, different countries approaches to zoning, the dreaded topic of parking, as well as why they usually haven’t been updated for 50 years.

This week on Talking Headways we’re joined by Zack Wasserman, Head of Global Business Development at Via, a ride sharing company headquartered in New York.  We talk about Via’s role as a ride sharing provider and software builder for transit agencies and how we can get more people sharing rides.  We also discuss how future transportation will likely change in lower density places and the role of innovation in both the public and private sector transportation space.

This week we’re coming to you from the UITP Global Transport Summit in Montreal with guest Projjal Dutta, the Director of Sustainability at the NYMTA.  We chat about the idea of transit avoided carbon, how you measure emissions, and the impact of Superstorm Sandy on sustainability thinking in the NY region.

This week on the podcast we’re chatting with Beth Osborne of T4America and Kevin DeGood of The Center for American Progress about infrastructure plans of the new administration.  We talk about the budget process skinny or thick, the possible benefits and drawbacks of public private partnerships, the difference between funding and financing, and what this means for transportation in rural areas. 

This week we’re joined by Patrick Oliva, the Co-Founder of the Paris Process on Mobility and Climate to talk about decarbonization of transport.  We chat about electrification of the transport sector and what it means for climate change, the role cities need to play in the Paris process and what levels of government work best, and the what the focus should be for mayors in the coming decade.

This week we’re joined by Matthew Heins to talk about his book The Globalization of American Infrastructure: The Shipping Container and Freight Transportation.  Matthew talks about how the American highway and rail systems created a global standard for shipping containers, the local actors shaping globalization, containerization’s effects on labor and relevance to an automated trucking future, and the massive intermodal terminals in cities like Chicago.