Jeff Wood
Recent Posts
Talking Headways Podcast: The Most Exhilarating Transit Ride in America
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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 […]
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 […]
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: Louisville’s Urbanism Derby
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This week’s guest is Branden Klayko, founder of Streetsblog Network member site Broken Sidewalk, which covers transportation and urbanist issues in Louisville, Kentucky. Louisville is one of the oldest American cities west of the Appalachians, and we discuss the history of the city and its urban heritage. (Is it southern? Is it in the Midwest?) While many may […]
Talking Headways Podcast: Your Brain on Two Legs
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Antonia Malchik’s recent piece in Aeon Magazine, The End of Walking, went viral in urbanist circles, touching on several themes related to our “right to walk.” In her turn on Talking Headways, Antonia talks about how she became addicted to walking and her experiences walking in Russia, Austria, Upstate New York, and the American West. We also discuss how our […]
Talking Headways Podcast: Gentrification, Transit, and Property Values
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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 […]
Talking Headways Podcast: The Freeway That Never Was
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This week we’re talking with Brendan Wittstruck about St. Louis’s never built freeway, I-755, which he recently wrote about at Streetsblog member NextSTL. Brendan discusses the history of the project and how drawing lines on maps can be seductive to planners, who always have to be careful about trying to “fix” cities. He also talks about the racial politics of freeway […]
Talking Headways Podcast: Building Relationships to Build a Better City
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This week’s guest is Janne Flisrand, an independent consultant and writer at Streets.mn. In her work as a “network weaver,” Janne thinks about how to elevate different voices and make sure everyone in a movement has a place to share their expertise and opinions. In this episode we talk about the importance of relationships in cities — between neighbors and between […]
Talking Headways Podcast: Charlotte’s Urban Web
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Mary Newsom of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute joins me this week to discuss everything Charlotte, from its beginnings as a crossroads of Native American pathways to its current incarnation as a fast-growing metropolis. The enormous growth of the region, she says, includes a recent surge of suburban subdivisions that were lying in wait during the recession. Transit is expanding in Charlotte, […]
Talking Headways Podcast: St. Louis Is Awesome! You Just Don’t Realize It
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This week we’re joined by Tara Pham, a San Francisco native who took her talents to St. Louis for college and stuck around. She talks about her company CTY, which creates tools for tracking local data, and how living in St. Louis and the perception of neighborhoods led her and her friends to the idea of […]
Talking Headways Podcast: Metro Areas — True Laboratories of Democracy
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This week I’m joined by Bruce Katz, vice president of the Brookings Institution and founder of its Metropolitan Policy Program. We chat about devolution in Great Britain –the idea of moving power away from national bureaucracies and towards metropolitan governance — and the power of metropolitan areas around the world. There is much that America could learn from […]
Talking Headways Podcast: A Positive Vibe For Chicago TOD
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On this week’s podcast, Yonah Freemark of the Metropolitan Planning Council (you may know him from The Transport Politic) shares the scoop on transit-oriented development in Chicago. In a recent post, Yonah writes that in order to break the pattern of slow growth but ever-increasing demand, more development should happen near Chicago’s extensive transit system. We talk about why […]