Jeff Wood

Kevin DeGood of the Center for American Progress and Deron Lovaas of NRDC join the podcast this week to talk about rules proposed by U.S. DOT to measure congestion and greenhouse gas emissions. These rules matter because they'll create new feedback loops for transportation agencies -- the feds can create incentives to reduce car trips and carbon pollution if they choose. A draft released in April was not very encouraging, but the final rules could be much better.

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.

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 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.

This week we're joined by Nathan Landau, a transit planner in the Bay Area and author of the travel guide Car Free Los Angeles and Southern California. It's got great places to eat, theater, live music, and even local book stores. But why write a travel guide that focuses on getting around without a car? And why is a northern California planner writing about the southern part of the state? Listen and find out.

Rob Sadow, CEO and co-founder of carpooling app Scoop, joins us this week to talk about how the company got started and what they are trying to achieve.

This week we’re talking about water in cities. It's a topic that doesn’t get much attention because the infrastructure is mostly underground, but after putting this together I believe thinking about water infrastructure and climate change is more important than ever.

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 handy spreadsheet.

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 organization that publishes Streetsblog USA).

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.