Talking Headways: A Streetsblog Podcast

This week we're joined by Pulitzer Prize winning author Francis Fitzgerald to talk about her 1986 book Cities on a Hill. We discuss the different "visionary" communities from the book including Rajneeshpuram in Oregon, San Francisco's Castro district, Sun City retirement communities, and Jerry Falwell's moral majority in Lynchburg Virginia. Francis also talks about living in New York City and restaurant culture in Vietnam.

This week we're going back to NACTO in Seattle and listening to a plenary given by the Los Angeles Bicycle Coalition's Tamika Butler. The plenary, "Planning While Black" goes through some of Tamika's personal history, issues of diversity and equity, and how we should be planning for people who aren't represented in the process.

This week we're joined by Stephane Eboko of Ma3route, a transportation information platform with over half a million users in Nairobi Kenya. We chat about the platform and how it helps travelers in the city avoid traffic, what interesting reports and information have come from users reporting their experiences, and what travel is like in Kenya's Capital.

This week we head to Seattle for the NACTO Designing Cities Conference<> to discuss the myriad of issues transportation agencies face when trying to move projects forward and the relationships that make it work out in the end. Moderated by David Bragdon, Executive Director of TransitCenter, the panel features LA DOT's General Manager Seleta Reynolds, LACMTA's Deputy Chief Executive Officer Stephanie Wiggins, Seattle DOT's Director Scott Kubly, and Sound Transit CEO Peter Rogoff.

This week on Talking Headways we're joined by Emily Perlmeter of the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas Texas. She joins us to talk about the half million people that live in informal settlements on the US side of the Mexican border called Colonias. She discusses how these settlements are formed and the demographics of who lives there as well as their strengths and hardships. Join us as we take a look into a little discussed housing problem you might not have known existed.

This week we're back at the Shared Use Mobility Summit in Chicago listening to a great panel discussing how we can use a changing technology and information landscape to get more equitable outcomes. Jackie Grimshaw of the Center for Neighborhood Technology moderates this panel featuring Anita Cozart, Deputy Director at the Center for Infrastructure Equity at Policy Link, Rob Puentes President and CEO for the Eno Center for Transportation and Joshua Schank, the Chief Innovation Officer at LA Metro. A lot of interesting discussions come up including the idea that innovation doesn't always have to be from technology, the fact that not all people are benefitting from transportation investments, the measurement bias in the models we use to make transportation decisions and much much more. It's a great discussion and I highly recommend the listen.

This week we're at the Shared Use Mobility Summit in Chicago listening to a keynote speech from Zipcar Co-Founder Robin Chase. Robin talks about her ideas on the brave new world of shared mobility services and autonomous vehicles. She discusses how autonomous vehicles could be heaven by making space for more active transportation like biking and walking or a hell where we are just swapping out everyone's cars for a driverless version and continuing existing policies.

This week we're in Madison Wisconsin for the Empty Storefronts Conference and joined by former Mayor and Executive Director of the Wisconsin Bike Fed Dave Cieslewicz. We chat about his transportation hero, how bikes interact with small businesses, economic development, and why new technologies should make us think twice about building new parking spaces.

This week we're joined live from Rail~Volution by Houston Metro Board Member Christof Spieler. We talk about the progress on Houston's bus reimagining and Christof gives tips for public engagement and system planning. There's also a discussion about route alignments for bus and rail lines and a plea to use more data when making decisions.

This week we're chatting with Ian Brown, former Managing Director for London Rail. We discuss everything London transport including operations contracts, congestion pricing, constructing, financing and making the case for the massive Crossrail project, cycling, bus operations and even contactless payment systems.