This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by SFMTA Director of Transportation Julie Kirschbaum. She discusses making system improvements, rising customer satisfaction, lessons from the pandemic on ridership and operations, as well as Muni’s cultural connection to the city.

You can listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA.

You can also find it and every previous episode in our archives.

Below is a full AI generated transcript, unedited but still quite good.

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Right now insurance is a window into the public psyche. As the values and prices of homes and cars go up, as well as the cost of replacement, insurance rates follow. Often harshly. This leads us to look for solutions and new ideas for reducing cost burdens because we don’t really want to talk about the actual problem.

An item in Washington Monthly profiling San Francisco’s Jane Kim discusses her run for state insurance commissioner with a bold idea, public disaster insurance inspired by New Zealand’s natural hazards cover program. Private insurers would still provide most coverage, but a disaster layer would be added on top above the median California home value.

But if those extra payments might not be enough to cover the cost of a disaster, that idea could open up the state, and taxpayers, to great financial risk, which impacts other interests in the long run such as bond funding for housing or transportation investments.

There’s a lot of interesting ideas and thoughts in the article so I do suggest reading the it, but the real discussion that we need to have begins at the bottom of the page with a passing glance. Avoidance. Addressing climate change and our built environment.

No one really wants to talk about what it would take to make insurance or housing or transportation affordable because it would require tradeoffs and tough choices. And the way things are going we’ll keep coming up with new ideas that aren’t fixing the original problem and might actually compound them as we add more layers of bureaucracy and regulation.

I realize if you’re reading this I’m probably telling you things you may already think and know. But we can’t keep expecting the emergency room to cure us when the work on our health should have started years before. The best time to start is now, so for the insurance problem, let’s look at the systemic issue of how we’ve laid out how we live and start from there.

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This week on the Mondays show Han Solo is back and we’re going through some news from the last month or so.  Some really super interesting items to share in news format from what’s in the ROAD to Housing Act that recently passed, night time transportation, the difference between Costco and Amazon logistics, and what makes an authentic place.  There’s much much more so how about diving in?

Show notes and links below the fold:

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This Week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Bill Fulton who has worn many hats including mayor, planning director, think tank director, publisher, professor and currently can be found writing on Substack at The Future of Where. We chat the impacts of work from home on cities, changing migration patterns and the south’s new role as the “National Suburb”, tax policy and burdens, 100 years of zoning law, and much much more.

You can listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA

Find all of the episodes and this one in our archive.

And below is a full unedited AI generated transcript, that’s pretty good actually…

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at the University of Iowa, and Jonathan Levine, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Michigan to talk about their paper, First Principals of Transportation Law and Policy. We talk about how to rethink transportation metrics towards accessibility, how the law has embedded mobility in transportation, and why we really travel.

Hey everyone!  This is an episode we put out in February of 2023 with Greg Shill and Jonathan Levine about their paper discussing how to rethink transportation metrics by putting forward accessibility.  One of the things I’ve gotten out of this one for the long term is that we travel not just for kicks, but mostly to reach destinations.  I referenced this show in a recent post on my blog so I thought the July 4th weekend replay would be a good place to share it again.

The original transcript is here.

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Leroy Marion of autoblog notes that electric vehicles which have higher torque and heavy batteries are much faster than their internal combustion counterparts and becoming more dangerous on public streets. Part of the reason is that in order to move that heavy battery quickly, larger motors are required. No one needs that much power. And as Marion says, “automakers are using extreme electric thrust to hide the fact that drivers are essentially piloting rolling bank vaults.”

We already know that these vehicles will win in a race with those that came before. But it’s now more interesting and impressive to design a lightweight and affordable vehicle. This is the same argument I always make when I see another issue on Mount Everest.

Many people have already climbed that mountain and it’s not impressive. It’s actually exploitative and selfish to do so. What’s more impressive to me now later in life is to run a marathon, a slow, excruciating, and exacting journey that proves true endurance. And even though you’re legs are responsible for getting you to the finish line, you’re doing it together with the community running with you and those cheering you on.

If car companies and regulators cared about the communities they served, they would give them priority over individual desires that could be satisfied at a race track.

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This week on Mondays at The Overhead Wire, Tracy McMillan is back on the show to talk about a number of items including a piece on the role of the built environment in population decline, the kids of the Netherlands taking part in a four day national walking festival, the prevalence of growing vehicles in the United States and in Europe, and a significant pollution reduction in London on account of low emissions policies including vehicle limits.

News Items below the fold

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This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Will Poff-Webster of the Institute for Progress to talk about their new collection of ideas to bring transit project costs down entitled the Transit Abundance Playbook. We discuss how to translate ideas into legislation, how these ideas fit into the current transportation bill, the importance of building public sector capacity, and how to cut costs in order to build more transit projects.

Listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA

Find this episode and past entries in our archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of this episode:

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This week we’re joined by Ryan Puzycki, who writes at The City of Yes. We have a discussion on urban disorder, how it manifests, and how to address the upstream impacts instead of when it’s too late. We also talk about enforcing norms and the impacts of media on our perceptions.

Listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA

Or find it and every episode in our archive, don’t be afraid to start wherever!

Below is a full AI generated unedited transcript of this episode: (more…)

This week on the Mondays show we’re joined by Kate Gasparro of the Building Better Cities podcast. We talk about the potential for land value taxes, research on car commutes from the Pottsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, 15 minute cities and the importance of destinations, and big Japanese megadevelopments.

Show notes below the jump…

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