Talking Headways: A Streetsblog Podcast

This week we’re back with part 2 of our discussion with Dr. Lisa Schweitzer of USC’s Price School of Public Policy.  We talk about the idea of jobs housing balance, her blog post on the Smartest Boy Urbanist, her favorite planning books and mentors, and we get a preview of her upcoming book on firearms and cities. 

This week we're joined by Dr. Lisa Schweitzer of USC's Sol Price School of Public Policy. For this first episode of two with Dr. Schweitzer we chat about how her students respond to urban planning classes, the recent dustup between bike advocates during a city council election in Los Angeles, and autonomous vehicles and land policy.

This week we chat with Streetfilms own Clarence Eckerson Jr.  We chat about how he started making films and his beginnings with BikeTV.  Additionally, we talk about the best way to make films and what some of recommendations are for approaching people on the street.  There might also be a few stories about Veronica Moss, The Zozo, and The Color Gurple.

This week we’re joined by Shelley Poticha, Director of NRDC’s Urban Solutions Program.  We chat about a couple of programs she’s working on at NRDC including SPARCC and the City Energy Project.  I ask about the Clean Power Plan and we talk about how FTA and HUD were finally connected as well as the 1993 book she wrote with Peter Calthorpe about TOD called The Next American Metropolis.

This week we’re chatting with Matt Horton of Proterra, a company that designs and manufactures battery powered electric buses.  We chat about the basics of electric buses, power consumption and recharging, the benefits and costs, as well as possible environmental outcomes. 

This week we’re chatting with Chuck Wolfe about his new book Seeing the Better City.  We discuss how he makes his own urban diaries with images, the ability to sense events long passed in places we know, the best way for bloggers and urbanists to use pictures in their work and advocacy, and a future where images are data mined hopefully not resulting in the extermination of humans by our AI overlords. 

This week we’re joined by UITP’s Sylvain Haon ahead of the organization’s global public transport summit in Montreal.  We talk about big projects happening around the world, private and public moves towards mobility as a service, sustainable mobility planning in Europe, and how autonomous vehicles will help transit support a shared transportation future.

I can’t believe this episode is finally out for everyone to hear!  Over a year ago I was approached by a colleague who told me that something big was happening in Oakland and that I should monitor the process as they try to put together a new Transportation Department.  This the first and hopefully not the last episode in this series I’m starting on the Oakland Transportation Department to cover how it came to be and what comes next.  This particular episode follows new advocacy group Transport Oakland as a parklet project they wanted to see completed became political.  Future episodes will cover more politics and mechanics of the department specifically, but I thought this would be a good starting point.  So I hope you enjoy this first part of the series, and hopefully it won’t take another year to get to episode 2!

This week we’re joined by Darnell Grisby, Director of Policy Development and Research at the American Public Transportation Association (APTA). We talk about the national dip in transit ridership, who rides transit around the United States and federal policy going forward.  Darnell also talks about technology innovation that might be coming to transit agencies including autonomous buses, different vehicle sizes, new payment systems and more.   

This week we’re back at the Shared Use Mobility Summit in Chicago this last October.  In what feels like a bit of a time warp, Laura Washington of the Chicago Sun Times hosts a panel featuring The Metropolitan Planning Council’s MarySue Barrett, the Shared Use Mobility Center’s Sharon Feigon, and Transportation for America’s James Corless. The panel discusses what they think federal policy will be like with a new administration and what to expect from a Republican Congress.  There’s a lot of valuable information for thinking about our current infrastructure spending discussion including partnerships and programs even though there was no knowledge of the eventual November winner.