Jeff Wood

Clifton Lemon and Steve Lawton of LightPlace Advisors join me this week to talk about how lighting is going to change in cities with the advent of the LED. We learn about what fire and light means to humans and why the street light might become one of the most valuable assets a city has.

Christof Spieler joins me again to continue our discussion of Houston. This time we talk transportation and all the great things Houston is working on. Uptown, home to the highest building in the U.S. outside of a central business district, will soon be getting true Bus Rapid Transit, and people on bikes are now rolling next to the bayous and connecting to Houston’s new downtown protected bike lane.

This week and next I’m joined by Christof Spieler, a vice president of Morris Architects who serves on the board of Houston Metro, to talk about Houston. Everything is bigger in Texas, including the podcasts.

This week on the Talking Headways Podcast I’m joined by Joe Cortright of City Observatory to nerd out on employment data and discuss their most recent report, Surging City Center Job Growth. We learn how employment cores for many cities are growing and why this looks like a long-term shift.

This week on the podcast I’m joined by Dr. Mariela Alfonzo to discuss her recent paper, "Walkability, Obesity and Urban Design in Chinese Neighborhoods," in the journal Preventive Medicine. The findings on both cycling and obesity might surprise you.

This week Ann Cheng of the California advocacy group Transform joins me to talk about their GreenTRIP program. Ann is a planner and the former mayor of El Cerrito, as well as one of San Francisco Business Times “40 Under Forty” in 2014. On the podcast she discusses how housing developers can build less parking and more housing by giving residents better travel options through GreenTRIP Certification.

Mariia Zimmerman of MZ Strategies joins me to chat about her new report on local advocacy for transportation reform called Transportation Transformation. Mariia, former deputy director for the Office of Sustainable Communities at HUD as well as former chief of staff to Congressman Earl Blumenauer, spent a year probing the local transportation advocacy landscape to see what issues people are working on and which regions are the most innovative. Her in-depth case studies look at the San Francisco Bay Area and the Washington DC region.

Guest host Randy Simes, owner of UrbanCincy.com and headlines writer for Streetsblog Ohio, joins me from South Korea to give his thoughts on his current home in the Gangnam district of Seoul and his previous one in Atlanta. We cover Keith Parker’s turnaround of Atlanta’s transit agency MARTA, the Belt Line and the people who won’t leave the cozy boundary it creates, and the best place to get southern hospitality in town.

Guest host Tim Halbur, formerly of Planetizen and CNU fame, joins me this week to chat about the process engineers use to designate speed limits, as recently examined by Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight. We’re 85 percent sure it's not good.

In this week’s Talking Headways, Tanya and I discuss Uber's planned data release, wondering whether it's a boon to cities or just a clever PR move on the part of a company trying to deal with poor public perception.