Podcast

Our guest is former Madison mayor and current Wisconsin Bike Fed Executive Director Dave Cieslewicz.

This week we’re chatting with Ian Brown, former managing director for London Rail. Ian discusses everything London transport, including congestion pricing; constructing, financing; and making the case for the massive Crossrail project; bus operations; cycling; operations contracts; and even contactless fare payment systems.

This week I’m joined by Tiffany Chu, co-founder of the transit planning software firm Remix, which helps agencies quickly assess the impact of potential changes in service. Tiffany discusses the response the company has received from the transit industry and what got it started. We also talk about the possible policy implications of Remix, as well as the movement towards open data.

This week I'm joined by cartographer Gretchen Peterson to talk about mapmaking and her new book, City Maps: A Coloring Book for Adults. We discuss why she made the book and why she chose the 40 city maps she included in it.

This week we're doing something a little different with the podcast. It's the morning plenary from last month's Live.Ride.Share conference in Denver. You'll hear Jill Locantore of WalkDenver introduce University of Virginia Professor Peter Norton, author of Fighting Traffic, who discusses how automobiles were sold to the public at the beginning of the motor age. Following Norton is Gabe Klein, former transportation director in Washington DC and Chicago, who talks about how cars are changing and what that means for streets and cities.

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.