Podcast

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 more housing by giving residents better travel options through GreenTRIP Certification.

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 see what issues people are working on and which regions are the most innovative. Her in-depth case studies look at the San Francisco Bay Area and the Washington DC region.

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 leave the cozy boundary it creates, and the best place to get southern hospitality in town.

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.

In this week’s Talking Headways, Tanya and I discuss Uber's planned data release, wondering whether it's a boon to cities or just a clever PR move on the part of a company trying to deal with poor public perception.

Stuck in Seattle or Stuck in Sherman Oaks. There are so many places to get stuck these days and so many clowns and jokers making it worse.

In California, whether you’re building an office tower or a new transit line, you’re going to run up against the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The law determines how much environmental analysis you need to do for new projects. But sadly, in practice it’s better at propagating car-oriented development than improving the quality of the environment.

Do you ever think about the ecology of the city you live in? Not just the parks and the smog. Scientists are starting to examine urban ecosystems more holistically: the trees and the concrete, natural gas lines and soil, water pipes and rivers. The natural and the synthetic feed off each other in surprising ways. We're not scientists, but we found it interesting.

Has the stupor worn off yet? Election Day was last Tuesday, and we'll be living with the results for years. But Beth Osborne, a former Hill staffer and U.S. DOT official now at Transportation for America, says the changes on the Hill are no big deal: Nothing was getting done anyway.