At last month’s Rail~Volution conference I caught up with Houston Metro board member Christof Spieler. Hear from Christof about the progress on Houston’s bus reimagining and his tips for public engagement and transit system planning. We also discuss route alignments for bus and rail lines and the importance of good data when making decisions about transit systems.

Our guest this week is Rob Puentes of the Eno Center for Transportation, an organization that has focused on better transportation outcomes for 95 years. Rob touches on a number of topics that we don’t usually explore in-depth, like aviation, freight, and coordinating automated vehicle policy. With November 8 less than two months away, we also discuss the presidential election. Enjoy.

Patrick Kennedy comes on the podcast this week to talk about what’s going on in Dallas. We discuss the highway removal campaign known as A New Dallas and the recent Texas DOT CityMap Plan to re-imagine the freeways and roads in the city’s downtown. We also discuss downtown subways, urban politics, why existing walkable neighborhoods matter to new walkable neighborhoods, and what’s going [...]

This week we’ve got a fascinating discussion from the Live.Ride.Share conference in Denver earlier this year. Hear what representatives from NRDC, Uber, Lyft, and U.S. DOT think about the future of shared-use mobility systems, carpooling services, autonomous vehicles, and their impact on cities and greenhouse gases. Speakers include: Mark Dowd, deputy assistant secretary for research and technology at U.S. [...]

Laurel Paget-Seekins joins the podcast this week to talk about her days as a transit activist in Atlanta, what Santiago, Chile, taught her about transit networks, and her current work on data collection and dissemination as the director of strategic initiatives at the MBTA in Boston. We discuss the MBTA’s data blog and dashboard, how the agency collects [...]

This week I’m joined by James Rojas of Place It! to talk about art in planning and Latino urbanism. James is an award-winning planner and a native Angeleno, and he tells us about how growing up in East LA and visiting his grandmother’s house shaped the way he thinks about urban spaces and design. Tune in and hear James discuss the [...]

Think land use is none of a transit agency’s business? Think again. Transit routes serving sprawled-out areas draw fewer riders and cost more to operate than routes serving compact, walkable development. This week, Brian McMahon and GB Arrington join me to talk about our excellent new report, Linking Transit Agencies and Land Use Decision Making. This is a research [...]

This week we’re chatting with Jason Jordan, director of the Center for Transportation Excellence (CFTE) and policy director at the American Planning Association. Jason tells us how CFTE got started and why ballot measures for transportation have been so successful compared to other types of spending. He also describes scenarios where transportation ballot measures tend to do well and [...]

On September 30, Houston passed a new comprehensive plan, more than 14 years in the making, and ceased to be the largest city in the United States without one. Jay Crossley of Houston Tomorrow and Streetsblog Texas joins us this week to discuss Plan Houston and how it allows the city to stop “planning by pitchfork.” Houston is famously [...]

This week’s guest is Matt Johnson, a bike planner for Montgomery County, Maryland and a writer at Greater Greater Washington. Instead of visiting every baseball park or trying out each city’s regional cuisine, Matt rides their rail systems. In fact, he’s ridden every American urban rail system open today (101 total), as shown in this [...]

This week we’re joined by Trish Wallace and Jillian Harris, transportation planners at the City of San Antonio. Tune in and hear about the history of the San Antonio Riverwalk, the city’s bike master plan, and the inner workings of the SATomorrow Plan. Our discussion of San Antonio’s growth leads us to all sorts of Texas planning quirks [...]

This week’s guest is Janne Flisrand, an independent consultant and writer at Streets.mn. In her work as a “network weaver,” Janne thinks about how to elevate different voices and make sure everyone in a movement has a place to share their expertise and opinions. In this episode we talk about the importance of relationships in cities — between neighbors and between elected [...]