Jeff Wood

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.

On September 30, Houston passed a new comprehensive plan, more than 14 years in the making, and ceased to be the largest city in the United States without one. Jay Crossley of Houston Tomorrow and Streetsblog Texas joins us this week to discuss Plan Houston and how it allows the city to stop "planning by pitchfork."

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).

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.

How do the places we inhabit lead to systemic public health problems?

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 make it bigger, and whether urbanism goes through cycles like fashion, with ideas from the past coming back into style.

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.

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.

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 know Louisville for bourbon, the Kentucky Derby, or college basketball rivalries, Branden gives us another view of the arts and culture that make the city great.