This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Elaine Clegg, CEO of Valley Regional Transit in Boise Idaho. We chat about how the Boise bus system is changing, the impact of fast regional growth, energy infrastructure and favorite transportation board games.
To listen to this episode you can find it at Streetsblog USA or in our hosting archive.
Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of the episode:
On January 1st 94% of India’s trains have been electrified. In 2015 just 45% of the system had overhead wires, but a dependence on foreign oil imports to power diesel locomotives led the country to move towards 100% electric trains which will happen soon, and a goal of becoming net zero by 2030 is closer to reality.
I would love to see this happen here, but we’re distracted by plans for hydrogen train sets, freight rail companies set in their ways, and a deep dislike of overhead wires. I’m looking forward to seeing what Caltrain’s success looks like after electrification and wonder if that will change minds around the country on reducing emissions without having to carry energy on board.
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The EPA is preparing to reject an air quality plan for the Los Angeles region put together by the South Coast Air Quality Management District because it won’t do enough to reduce smog. The District plan calls for the Federal Government to reduce 67 tons of emissions a day through the things it can control such as shipping, trains, and aircraft. The EPA then says states can’t tell the Federal Government what to do under the Clean Air Act or the Constitution, and it seems to have degraded into a Spider-Man meme where everyone is pointing at each other as if to find the imposter.
None of these agencies or the state of California seems to really want to deal with the true cause of the problem which is transportation emissions that we continue to make worse with highway expansion after highway expansion while we also slow walk solutions that can reduce the federally regulated airport emissions such as high speed rail. The port of Long Beach is already spending $1.5B to reduce truck trips with trains, why not electrify them? Even CARB, the California agency responsible for reductions in pollutants has said reducing VMT is important, but has punted to other agencies to enforce their mandates that ignore climate impacts of driving expansion.
Punting doesn’t seem to be going well. So maybe this is what the EPA is working towards since the region won’t get federal highway funding if this ends up at an impasse. And the Clean Air Act says that federally funded projects shouldn’t be increasing pollution in already polluted areas. Any other request to reduce driving is politically charged as a recent California Transportation Commission meeting showed. So this might just be the only way to get California to stop expanding highways since no one else will.
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This week on the Talking Headways Podcast we’re joined by Dr. Kathryn Howell, Director of the National Center for Smart Growth at the University of Maryland. We talk about her daily e-bike commute, organizing around the Purple Line, the importance of eviction data, and commercial displacement.
This episode was produced in partnership with Mpact.
To listen to this episode, head to Streetsblog USA or find it in the hosting archive.
Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of the episode:
Many times in my daily search on items related to housing I come across pieces that share stories about communes or ecovillages, co-housing and co-living. Many of these ideas born out of high housing costs and a disconnect from modern life also lead to higher level health discussions, like the idea of blue zones or health care design such as the French neighborhood created for people with Alzheimer’s. Most of these items are optimistic and share a way of living that creates a sense of community for those that choose it as well as a basic level of care that’s expected as long as we’re living.
To a certain extent I think I personally connect all these dots because I feel many in society are looking for community, or more specifically, the group they can relate to. Not only that, they want to feel like someone has their back. We’ve designed cities for a lot of individualism with cars and single family homes, but the inertia of that decision has taken us away from some of the natural connections that can be made in a more compact community. Not sure how we fix it, but the connected city brings all these issues together and sometimes gets us to think more seriously about it.
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If you’re in the Bay Area this Thursday, we’re hosting a happy hour with Urban Environmentalists Bay Area, Streets for People, and Seamless Bay Area at Elixir on Thursday February 1st at 6pm. It’s easy access to BART at 16th/Mission and I hope folks can join us!
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One of the premises of Des Fitzgerald’s book The Living City (Ep 456) is that he’s not quite been sold on the benefits of trees to cities or human health. He’s not saying there isn’t a connection, but he also believes the research is not quite as solid as people make it out to be from a number of observational health studies. Many of those trees and green spaces are also in rich neighborhoods and absent in poor neighborhoods, where there are possible other issues related to a number of socioeconomic factors.
Tree politics can also be confounded he says by people’s feelings about what makes ‘the good city’, and “that kind of sense that you govern the trees, you govern the city.”
Enter Aruni Bhatnagar, a cardiology researcher whose “Green Heart Louisville” project featured in yesterday’s Washington Post is seeking to show a real clinical connection between greenness and human health such as reduced stress and less hardening of arteries from transportation pollution.
Bhatnagar’s project has planted 8,000 trees and shrubs and has gotten super detailed health data from 500 residents including blood, urine, and hair samples and set up the study from a baseline of unhealthy air next to a major highway in a neighborhood with little existing greenery.
He cautions, rightly so, about expectations, but also believes he’s starting to see some results including higher pollution near fast food restaurants and better sleep near greenery. Soon Des might not be able to be as skeptical about health connections, but he’s also not wrong about the politics of trees and by proxy the cities in which they live. In the future it may just be, if you govern the trees (and reduce transportation pollution), you can save the planet and the humans that reside on it.
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If you’re in the Bay Area this Thursday, we’re hosting a happy hour with Urban Environmentalists Bay Area, Streets for People, and Seamless Bay Area at Elixir on Thursday February 1st at 6pm. It’s easy access to BART at 16th/Mission and I hope folks can join us!
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For this intro post and more news in your inbox every morning, sign up for a two week free trial of The Overhead Wire Daily, our popular newsletter established in 2006.
This week on the podcast we’re Han Solo but we’ve got some great news and information for you including items on Beverly Hills residents being denied permits for underground pools, we’ve got money for transit operations in a house bill, and we’re noticing the Introvert Economy is in full swing. Come join us, we were told there would be no math in podcasting, but it turns out that’s just not true.
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Join our February Happy Hour!
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Below the fold are more show notes…
CA State Senator Scott Wiener will introduce two traffic safety bills to reduce traffic deaths. He detailed them both in a thread on Twitter. The first would require auto manufacturers to add a speed limiter to vehicles that only allows ten miles above a speed limit. The second would require Caltrans to upgrade safety features on roads when doing capital work.
I don’t recommend going to Twitter to see the replies, but I will say it was an amazing show of (mostly) men tweeting about the ability to break the speed limit as if it were a god given right. For that reason, the bill which I believe is necessary to stem the traffic safety epidemic, will be hard to pass. People will be very angry and let legislators know. But Senator Wiener has picked up hard issues before and got them through. Just look at his record on housing.
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If you’re in the Bay Area we’re hosting a happy hour with Urban Environmentalists Bay Area, Streets for People, and Seamless Bay Area at Elixir on Thursday February 1st at 6pm. It’s easy access to BART at 16th/Mission and I hope folks can join us!
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For this intro post and more news in your inbox every morning, sign up for a two week free trial of The Overhead Wire Daily, our popular newsletter established in 2006.
This week we’re joined by Angie Schmitt, Owner and Principal at 3MPH Planning and Consulting. We chat about changing travel behavior in cities, the impact of recent social isolation on social trust, and polarization in policy solutions.
To listen to this episode, visit Streetsblog USA or our hosting archive.
Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:
There’s been a lot of discussion about loneliness after it was declared to be an epidemic by the US Surgeon General. Yesterday we shared an item by Alan Ehrenhalt on the subject but we’re also seeing the idea splinter off into what I believe are related sub-discussions.
There are a couple of items that connect for me on this subject today. First is an opinion item in Bloomberg discussing the Introvert Economy. Allison Scharger notes that younger generations just aren’t going out as much and staying in to be online, even with friends. Many of us got sucked into that world by the pandemic and lockdowns and perhaps just stayed there. But as an introvert myself, even I couldn’t take that much time away from larger groups of friends and family and I’m really feeling a need to get back out again, though everyone has their own pace.
Others seem to need more human connection as well. I read a few years ago that grocery stores in the Netherlands would keep a lane open that was slower and allowed for more human connection that some of the patrons craved. And today’s item in CNN that discussed how self checkout lines are actually dampening customer loyalty because the stores are shifting the work of checkout from employees to customers. And although it doesn’t mention it, there’s something emotional missing as well when you aren’t connecting with a cashier.
I do think that idea of shifting the work on individuals is becoming an important marker. Social interaction was easier when you did it more often. But these frictionless solutions to commerce online and in person are making it easier to avoid connection, perhaps to our detriment.
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Speaking of getting together… if you’re in the Bay Area we’re hosting a happy hour with Urban Environmentalists Bay Area, Streets for People, and Seamless Bay Area at Elixir on Thursday February 1st at 6pm. It’s easy access to BART at 16th/Mission and I hope folks can join us!
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For this intro post and more news in your inbox every morning, sign up for a two week free trial of The Overhead Wire Daily, our popular newsletter established in 2006.
One of the things about the Inflation Reduction Act that’s really interesting is that it allows direct pay for cities and other tax-exempt entities. What this means is that tax credits can be treated like refundable tax payments and large utility projects like solar funded by cities or publicly owned utilities can get up to a 40% rebate (direct payment) by the Federal Government (EPA summary here).
In the past it was a tax credit scheme that only for profit companies but now many agencies and cities could apply to reduce their energy consumption and carbon footprint. I haven’t seen a lot of instances of transit agencies using these new tools yet but it might be something beneficial down the road, especially in the move towards electrification of fleets or other potential energy needs. As we know, transit agencies are climate agencies now.
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If you’re in the Bay Area we’re hosting a happy hour with Urban Environmentalists Bay Area and Streets for People at Elixir on Thursday February 1st at 6pm. It’s easy access to BART at 16th/Mission and I hope folks can join us!
~~~
For this intro post and more news in your inbox every morning, sign up for a two week free trial of The Overhead Wire Daily, our popular newsletter established in 2006.
A new analysis shared by the Seattle environmental group Coltura and featured in the New York Times found that 10% of drivers go over 40,000 miles per year, but make up 1/3rd of gasoline use for the United States. In some states it’s seen as an imperative that these folks switch to electric vehicles as they have an outsized influence on climate emissions, so they are looking for ways to incentivize a transition based on miles driven. These folks are often in the trades driving from job to job or live on the periphery of a region.
But it also gets to a larger idea about local and non-local trips that friend of the newsletter Dan Sturges has been thinking about for a while and wrote up in his recent book Near to Far. Only 2% of trips are over 50 miles while 71% of trips are within an 8 mile radius. In the Coltura study, 21 million Americans make up 35% of gas usage because they drive larger than needed vehicles around and live further from destinations. Dan argues, as does a former Ferrari designer, that the vehicles themselves could change to fit the needs of people and destination distance. We also see evidence that larger vehicles and larger batteries are slowing the transition to electric because they make cars cost so much too. Perhaps our incentives need to be better targeted, like towards the longer distance drivers, but also towards switching to local sized electric vehicle types.
There’s a lot of path dependence, not only in how we design our vehicles, but our neighborhoods that could be changed to be more climate and energy efficient. Architects that designed a neighborhood in Arvada Colorado for example found that just changing the orientation of houses in a subdivision based on sun direction can save 30% in energy costs. Imagine if they were dense as well.
This idea of smaller vehicles for shorter trips might be the other side of the coin to incentivizing long distance based drivers to switch vehicles to electric. Just like the 15 minute city idea is the flip side of how we build neighborhoods now. There are many potential solutions for the problems we face from a climate and transportation standpoint, perhaps all we need is to flip our prior orientations ever so slightly.
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This week we’re joined by Beth Osborne, Vice President for Transportation and Thriving Communities at Smart Growth America. We chat about the Greenhouse Gas Emissions Measure Rule that will make State DOTs and MPOs measure emissions on the federal highway system. We also talk about how Beth thinks we have things lining up for positive change, politics of implementing rules, and how the NTSB treats air travel and surface transportation so differently.
You can listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or find it in our hosting archive.
Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of the episode:
Seoul South Korea is piloting a ‘climate card’ that allows unlimited transit trips for $47 a month to boost ridership after pandemic drops. Another $2 gets you unlimited bike share trips as well. They hope to boost transit ridership with the card which is a pretty amazing deal when you think about it.
But it also reminds me of an item we shared at the end of last year from Seattle where a lot of local businesses were buying tickets for employees. With low cost multi-use cards and employer purchase programs that promote transit use, agencies can get low cost transportation options to residents. Of course we need good service to entice people too, but there are multiple angles to approach the current ridership challenges.
This week on Mondays we’re Han Solo! We’ve got a great set of news items for your consideration. We talk about manufactured housing, dangerous driving, Winnipeg transit, and a Pew study about housing supply in Minneapolis with some interesting results.
Below are links to the items we shared on the show.
Join our February Happy Hour!
Apparently conspiracy theorists can change national transportation policy. In England, Ministers of the Department for Transport used the 15 minute city conspiracy theories and backlash as a basis for policy, orienting policy towards drivers. Amazingly, people didn’t take the rhetoric of leaders seriously and thought it was just hot air, but lately when people say they are going to do something, we should probably believe them.
Also, I would highly recommend taking the time to read this deep dive piece in New York Times Magazine about dangerous driving in the United States. It’s a great look at collective trauma, history, peer pressure, and current issues around traffic safety. Because of the focus on driver attitudes and a lack of patience, I do wonder whether we can solve the issue of traffic deaths. I think we can, and we shouldn’t stop trying, but it will be hard. Especially if we only think about it from a design lens and not enforcement, education, and even public health.
I consistently go back now to the safe systems pyramid idea Kari Watkins and David Ederer shared on the podcast. Kinetic energy is what causes traffic deaths, but as the article points out, there’s a whole lot of ways it’s generated.
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This week on Talking Headways we’re joined by John King, Urban Design Critic at the SF Chronicle, to talk about his book Portal: San Francisco’s Ferry Building and the Reinvention of American Cities. We chat about the history of the Ferry Building in San Francisco which was one of the busiest city transportation hubs in the world in the early 1900s and how the building has evolved over time parallel to the ups and downs of cities.
You can listen to this episode by heading over to Streetsblog USA or at our hosting archive.
Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript for this episode:
Well that was quick, a bill that would have combined 27 Bay Area transit agencies has been pulled. It makes sense because there would need to be a more robust discussion of what that might look like before jumping in with both feet. There are labor issues, service area equity and other things to discuss.
Also, the libertarian leaning Mercatus Center has a report on the impacts of minimum lot size reform in Houston, finding that a 2013 lot size reform did not increase land values and in some instances may have reduced them. Related, in Washington State a bill that would allow lot splits was killed last year, but popped up in session again Monday, passing the WA House. California had legalized lot splits with SB9 which went into effect in 2022.
For this and more news in your inbox every morning, sign up for a two week free trial of The Overhead Wire Daily, our popular newsletter established in 2006.
We’re back from the new year but no so back that I have enough material for a Mondays show. So as we started doing at the end of last year, I’m going to share a throwback Talking Headways from time to time to go back to some episodes I found interesting and perhaps mention more than a few times during current interviews.
This episode specifically is with Clayton Nall about his book The Road to Inequality: How the Federal Highway Program Polarized America and Undermined Cities and originally was released 6 years ago in July of 2018. Clayton is now a professor at UC Santa Barbara but his book and work still ring true.
Get Clayton’s book from our bookshop.org site here.
This week on Talking Headways we’re joined by Dr. Shima Hamidi, Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University to talk about the report: A National Investigation of the Impacts of Lane Width on Traffic Safety. We chat about the data they collected for 1,100 streets, how narrowing streets can create more space for bikes and peds and how the study and determined narrower lanes are safer.
You can listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or at the hosting archive.
Below is an unedited AI generated full episode transcript:
This week we’re joined once again by Congressman Earl Blumenauer of Oregon’s 3rd District. We chat about connections between health care, food and transportation, progress on the Inflation Reduction Act and IIJA infrastructure bills, and future directions for transportation funding.
Listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or in the hosting archive.
Below is a full AI generated unedited transcript:
This week on Mondays at The Overhead Wire we celebrate the end of the year with stories from Colorado on the governor’s transit wishes for next year, learning about the new federal Emerging Project Agreement, Salt Lake’s downtown success, and how Europe wants to ban large US trucks. Hang in there with us as we finish 2023 off right.
Below are the links to the stories we talked about on the show:
This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re at the 2023 Mpact transit + mobility conference closing plenary in Phoenix Arizona. Assistant Secretary of Transportation for Transportation Policy at USDOT Christopher Coes leads a panel discussing what’s happening in central cities and how to make them thrive again.
This panel features: Karen Chapple, Ph.D., Director, School of Cities, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON | Nichol Bordeaux, Chief Planning and Engagement Officer, Utah Transit Authority, Salt Lake City, UT | Dee Brewer, Executive Director, Downtown Alliance, Salt Lake City, UT | Emeke Moneme, President, Capitol Riverfront, Washington, DC | Ryan Johnson, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Culdesac, Tempe, AZ
Listen to this episode first at Streetsblog USA or the hosting archive.
Below is a full AI generated unedited transcript of the episode:
This week on our Mondays show we’re going back and combining episodes 129 and 130 of Talking Headways about seeing high speed rail station areas as projects of national significance.
More below the fold…
This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re at the Mpact conference in Phoenix and joined by Ron Brooks of Accessible Avenue. We chat about service animal etiquette, the negotiation and implementation of ADA, and including people with disabilities in the equity conversation.
To listen to this episode, find it at Streetsblog USA or on our hosting site.
Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:
Listen to the Talking Headways Podcast
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