Jeff Wood
Recent Posts
Talking Headways Podcast: The Essential Link Between Transit and Land Use
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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 […]
Talking Headways Podcast: The Indian Transportation Context
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This week I’m chatting with Akshay Mani, a sustainable transportation planner who has worked for Cambridge Systematics in the United States and the World Resources Institute’s EMBARQ program in India. Akshay joined us from Chennai to talk about transportation and the growth of Indian cities. We discuss India’s rapid urbanization and the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, a […]
Talking Headways Podcast: New Tactics for Transportation Ballot Measures
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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 […]
Talking Headways: The Year in Transit Expansion With Yonah Freemark
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This week Yonah Freemark is back on the podcast to talk about his annual transit project list. He and Steven Vance of Streetsblog Chicago made a new way to visualize the transit projects in various stages of planning and construction — an interactive, open source map called Transit Explorer, for which he kindly asks for your […]
Talking Headways Podcast: Gabe Klein’s Start Up City
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Gabe Klein joins us this week to talk about how to get things done and make big changes to improve city streets and transportation. Gabe has served as the transportation chief of both Chicago and Washington, DC, and prior to his stint in government was an executive with Zipcar (he is also currently on the board of OpenPlans, the […]
Live From Dallas: Arts Districts, Carless Bridges, and Electric Light Parades
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This week we’re bringing you our recording from the last weekend in October at the Rail~Volution conference, where we interviewed Catherine Cuellar, director of Entrepreneurs for North Texas and former executive director of the Dallas Arts District, and Dave Unsworth, the director of capital projects at TriMet in Portland, Oregon. Catherine talks about how Dallas’s […]
Talking Headways: Richard Jackson on City Environments and Public Health
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How do the places we inhabit lead to systemic public health problems? On the podcast this week, I discuss this question with Dr. Richard Jackson of UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health. Jackson is the author of three books on the subject of the built environment and public health, and hosted the PBS series Designing Healthy Communities. He has […]
Talking Headways Podcast: Pattern Cities and the Bellbottoms of Urbanism
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This week we talk to Mike Lydon of The Street Plans Collaborative and co-author of the recent book Tactical Urbanism. Based on his experience with tactical urbanism, Mike says you know an idea has “made it” when it gets co-opted for things that don’t fit the actual definition. We also discuss how to take a small planning idea and […]
Talking Headways Podcast: Measuring Carbon Emissions at Street Level
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Dr. Kevin Gurney is a carbon cycle scientist at Arizona State University. I recently came across an article in Nature about his work measuring carbon emissions from mobile sources at street level, and I wanted to find out more. On the podcast, I asked Dr. Gurney why cities are important to climate change, and why political boundaries make […]
Talking Headways Podcast: 3 Weeks in the Mountain West Without a Car
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This week I chat with author and city planner Tim Sullivan about his new book, Ways to the West. The book documents his attempt to take a three week road trip without a car, and his encounters with various planners, city officials, and other characters along the way. Tim talks about the history of the Western grid […]
Talking Headways Podcast: The Transportation Innovation Revolution
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Shin-pei Tsay of Transit Center joins me this week to delve into her new report, A People’s History of Recent Urban Transportation Innovation, which examines how advocacy and political leadership have combined in several American cities to produce a more multi-modal transportation network. We discuss the cycle of change, why mayors and local activists (who Transit Center calls “the […]
Talking Headways Podcast: The Urban Displacement Project
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This week my guest is Miriam Zuk of UC Berkeley’s Center for Community Innovation, who discusses how the team at the Urban Displacement Project has studied and mapped out gentrification and displacement risk in the Bay Area. We talk about the relationship between transit and rising property values, as well as the widespread portrayal of gentrification in the media as a […]