Talking Headways Podcast: Self Driving Cars Getting Drunk on Motor Oil

For the 150th episode of the podcast, this week we welcome back Talking Headways co-founder Tanya Snyder, now a reporter at Politico Magazine. We get into the developing topic of regulating self-driving vehicles, including issues of children’s safety and state versus federal rules. We also discuss aviation legislation in the House of Representatives, what it means for drones, and whether private jets should pay more for air traffic control.

Talking Headways Podcast: Sharing a Ride to the Future

This week’s guest on Talking Headways is Zack Wasserman, head of global business development at Via, a ride-hailing company headquartered in New York. We talk about Via’s role as a trip provider, as well as a software builder for transit agencies, and how we can get more people sharing rides. We also discuss how transportation systems are likely to change in lower density places and the role of technological and policy innovation in both the public and private transportation sectors.

Talking Headways Podcast: Giving Away TIGER and Transit Money to Wall Street

This week Beth Osborne of T4America and Kevin DeGood of The Center for American Progress join us to discuss infrastructure and the new administration. We talk about the budget process — “skinny” or “thick”? — the possible benefits and drawbacks of public-private partnerships, and the difference between funding and financing.

Talking Headways Podcast: Zero Emissions Cities Are the Key

We’re joined by Patrick Oliva, co-founder of the Paris Process on Mobility and Climate,to talk about the decarbonization of transport. The conversation touches on the electrification of the transportation 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 to address climate change, and what the focus should be for mayors in the coming decade.

Talking Headways Podcast: More Than Just a Box

On the podcast I’m joined by Matthew Heins, author of 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, containerization’s effects on labor and relevance to an automated trucking future, and the massive intermodal freight terminals in cities like Chicago.

Diridon Station and More Notes from French High Speed Rail

There are a couple of pieces of interest that have come out in the last week talking about high speed rail and TOD at Diridon.  Google is getting involved and SPUR is making case studies on main rail station revitalizations the centerpiece of their most recent Urbanist publication.

In regards to Google, the thinking for the Diridon area is ambitious and much more intelligent than what Apple has done with their suburban campus.  By buying up properties around Diridon, they are putting themselves at the center of a major regional transportation hub with light rail, Caltain, High Speed Rail, a revamped bus network, and future BART extensions that allow them to perhaps in the future spend less on their own private transportation modes.

"Google ultimately intends to buy all the parcels in a roughly 240-acre area that would be needed for the mega-campus, said a person familiar with the matter."

Our good friend and podcast guest host Eric Eidlin is also now in San Jose working on the Diridon project so I want to go back in time and pull out a few quotes from Episode 2 of our French HSR podcast as we think about transforming the area around Diridon Station.




Pull Quotes from Episode 2

Stephan De Fay on Return on Investment

"For its part, the French state, in designating a project to be a [project of national importance], is not saying that it wants to receive a full return on its investment in a narrow financial sense. Rather, it is affirming that it wants its money to produce real effects – real effects on the economy, on the housing market—and that these effects are not likely to materialize simply by allowing development to occur in a laissez-faire, Malthusian way."

Stephan De Fay on Overcoming Political Boundaries

"The issue that surfaced early on with the Grand Paris project was the strong and enduring divide between the governance structures of the City of Paris and that of the surrounding metropolitan region.  Just one figure that is quite awful.  In the Paris urban region, we have 1,483 mayors.  This is awful in terms of governance.  The first step of the Grand Paris was to deal with this.  We realized that it was a matter of economic competitiveness.  In order Paris to be economically competitive with other global cities—and with London in particular—we realized early one that we needed to overcome this governance problem."

Stephan De Fay on Big Development and Transportation Project Timelines

"And one point that bubbled to the top that focused a lot of attention because it’s a very big investment --32 billion Euros in this case—was the transportation project.  But the transportation project was actually not really the primary driver.  It was a consequence of a vision, where of course, mobility was a crucial element.  After articulating the vision, the next step was to figure out how to implement it.  And here we came back to transportation.  Because the problem between transportation and district redevelopment is that the transportation project takes longer than the first steps of the urban redevelopment of the district.  And in fact, you can’t really start the redevelopment of the district in earnest until the transportation infrastructure that will serve it is about to be operational.  It is not enough for this infrastructure to simply be promised.  And this is the reason why the primary focus of the Grand Paris project today is on the transit stations and supporting infrastructure.  Because the stations are the nodes of the urban development of the different districts that surround them."

Stephan De Fay on Governance

"One of the clear challenges that I noticed in California – and this hadn’t occurred to me before coming to California in October – relates to governance.  In France, we have one French railroad company and not 15. When you enter a transit station in the Bay Area, it is very strange.  In San Francisco, for example, when you enter a station it is so strange from a European perspective, that there is a lack of comprehensive passenger information.  And there is no integrated ticketing.  And so on.  But this is a big challenge for the customer.   And it is something that needs to be dealt with both at the station level and the district level."

Etienne Tricaud on Risk and Integration

"I would also like to mention a risk.  Coming from our experience, there is one risk in a project like Diridon or LA Union station.  And it is that some decisions are taken too early in terms of infrastructure, in terms of the types of projects and location of projects around the station that become obstacles for the next steps.  I remember when we were at Diridon, we had discussions, and I understood that some decisions – or perhaps not decisions, but studies – had been made regarding the location of the future BART portal, as well as for a potential viaduct for the high-speed train.  And it is good that studies had been done and reflections made on all of these questions.  But decisions on these things should only be made if – and only if – they are considered at a more global scale.  And to be sure that the decision is really the right answer for a specific item or issue within the global vision"

Talking Headways Podcasts: Dr. Lisa Schweitzer

I took a longer session with Dr. Schweitzer and turned it into two podcasts below.

Lightsaber Fights From Autonomous Pods


Supply and Demand is So Boring

Talking Headways Podcast: The Streets Revolution Will Be Televised in Purple

This week’s guest is Streetfilms’ own Clarence Eckerson Jr. Clarence tells us about his start working in video with the BikeTV cable access show, what goes into making Streetfilms, and the best way to approach people on the street for interviews. Listen and you might also catch a few stories about Veronica Moss and the Zozo.

Talking Headways Podcast: The Urban Policy Translator

This week we’re joined by Shelley Poticha, director of NRDC’s Urban Solutions Program, who tells us about the organization’s new programs like SPARCC and the City Energy Project. We get into federal policy like the Clean Power Plan and the story of how FTA and HUD were finally connected, and we talk about The Next American Metropolis, the 1993 book about transit-oriented development she wrote with Peter Calthorpe.

Talking Headways Podcast: The Battery Powered Electric Bus

This week I’m chatting with Matt Horton of Proterra, a company that designs and manufactures battery powered electric buses. We cover the basics of electric buses, power consumption and recharging, the benefits and costs, as well as potential environmental effects.

Podcast: Saving Cities One Picture at a Time

This week on Talking Headways I talk with Chuck Wolfe about his new book, Seeing the Better City. Chuck shares how he makes urban diaries with images, and weighs in on the best ways for bloggers and urbanists to use pictures in their work and advocacy.

Podcast: The Future Is Not Far Away

Our guest this week is Sylvain Haon of the International Association of Public Transport ahead of the organization’s global summit in Montreal. We talk about big transit projects happening around the world, the transition toward mobility as a service, sustainable mobility planning in Europe, and how autonomous vehicles will complement transit in the future.

Podcast: Transport Oakland

I can’t believe this episode is finally out for everyone to hear! More than 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 the city put together a new Transportation Department.

Today I’m pleased to post the first (and hopefully not the last) episode in a series on the Oakland Transportation Department — how it came to be and what comes next. This installments follows a new advocacy group, Transport Oakland, as a parklet project they supported becomes political.

Future episodes will concentrate more specifically on the politics and mechanics of the department, but I thought this would be a good starting point. I hope you enjoy the launch of the series, and hopefully it won’t take another year to get to episode two!

Podcast: APTA's Darnell Grisby

This week’s guest is Darnell Grisby, director of policy development and research at the American Public Transportation Association. We discuss the national drop in transit ridership, who rides transit in the United States, and federal policy going forward. Darnell also talks about new technologies that might be coming to transit agencies, including autonomous buses, better payment systems, and more.

Podcast: More Scenes for the Shared Use Mobility Summit

This week we’re time-warping back to a different era — last October, and the Shared Use Mobility Summit in Chicago. Laura Washington of the Chicago Sun Times hosted this panel featuring the Metropolitan Planning Council’s MarySue Barrett, the Shared Use Mobility Center’s Sharon Feigon, and Transportation for America’s James Corless.

They discuss what they think federal policy will be like with a new administration and what to expect from a Republican Congress. A lot has happened since then, but it’s still an enlightening discussion with valuable information about the nation’s current infrastructure policy situation.

Podcast: Designing City Streets for People

This week Corinne Kisner and Matthew Roe of the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) tell us about their influential series of street design guides — manuals that give transportation engineers “permission” to reorient streets so walking, biking, and transit come first. Listen in and learn how the guides are put together and how cities are using them to change their streets to prioritize people instead of cars.

Podcast: Transit Predictions for 2017 with Yonah Freemark

This week we’re joined by Yonah Freemark, author of the Transport Politic and Streetsblog’s new series Getting Transit Right. Each year, Yonah and I predict what’s in store for transit in the next 12 months and break down the results of last year’s transit predictions. In between, Yonah and I talk about high-speed rail, transit and development, Elon Musk’s crazy tunnel ideas, and the future of federal policy.


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Podcast: Can All Cities Be Great?

The guest this episode is Alexander Garvin, author of the recently released book What Makes a Great City. We chat about why people are an important factor in building cities and taking pictures; Houston’s Post Oak Boulevard is going to show up Chicago, San Francisco, and New York’s best streets; and Alexander’s heroes, from Edmund Bacon to Haussmann to Robert Moses.

Podcast: High Speed Rail Station Planning in France, Parts 1 & 2

In a two part discussion of French high-speed rail and cities, guest host and German Marshall Fund fellow Eric Eidlin interviews Stephan de Fay, executive director of Bordeaux Euratlantique, the public agency overseeing the redevelopment of Bordeaux’s main train station, and Etienne Tricaud, president and CEO of AREP, the French railway’s architecture office.

We thought you might find their thoughts on the subject illuminating so we pulled some specific quotes from Episode 1.  We'll be back with more in Episode 2 in a subsequent post.


A few quotes of significance from the first episode:

On the citizens mental map of France:

HSR has fundamentally changed the mental map of France. Time-space relationships are now completely different. The French now think of their country as a network of cities that are easily connected to one another. - Etienne Tricaud

On having experts in-house:

...we exist to take risks and to take decisions. At some point, we need to be able to evaluate things by ourselves. It is not our role to do architectural design, for example. But having people on staff who know how to design, and who therefore also know how to speak intelligently with people who design is very important. This in-house competency helps us to be more relevant, both in terms of the questions that we ask and ultimately the decisions that we make. - Stephan de Fay

On urban planning:

Fundamentally, architecture is space planning, it’s organization of the space. So early on, we need to think about the organization of the pedestrian spaces of the station, the organization of the surrounding district, as well as the layout of the local transportation systems that serve the station.- Etienne Tricaud

On value:

However, if the public sector leverages that value of the investment that it is making in transportation (HSR), additional public subsidy for urban development in station areas is not necessary. In our case, our expenditures are equal to our revenues. We invest one billion euros on the district around the station and we earn on billion euros through the sale of construction rights. - Stephan de Fay

The audio above was first posted at Streetsblog USA.



The audio above was first posted at Streetsblog USA.

Podcast: Innovation, Introverts, and Uber Wars

This week we’re joined by David Zipper, managing director at 1776 Ventures, a global startup hub based in Washington, DC. A veteran of the Bloomberg administration in New York City and the administrations of Adrian Fenty and Vincent Gray in Washington, David discusses the deal DC struck with Living Social and the introduction of ride-hailing regulations during the city’s infamous Uber Wars. We also chat about transportation companies blossoming around the globe and what traits make for great innovators.