This week on Talking Headways we’re joined by Bridget Marquis, Director of Reimagining the Civic Commons. Bridget chats with us about connecting public assets, the importance of creating metrics that matter, and better ways to think about community engagement.

You can listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA and in our archive.

below is a full unedited transcript of the episode!

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Two everlasting symbols of California are the sequoia and redwood trees. People know the giants from popular culture and national parks but the trees, which are not the same species but related, should also be seen as examples of the ultimate in evolutionary sustainability.

The earliest known sequoia fossil is from over 200 million years ago and the trees have evolved to drink water from the air and regenerate from the stumps of dead trees. The most impressive fact about these trees is that they also use fire to reseed areas underneath their canopies. Unfortunately recent high temperature fires have damaged seeds beyond the ability to germinate but the feat still remains an important result of their evolutionary process.

Jeff why are you talking about these trees? Because we could learn something from them.

With the fires happening in Los Angeles, I immediately thought of redwood and sequoia trees and how they come back after fires. As one tree falls several are likely to rise up in their place. Which makes yesterday’s orders from Governor Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass all the more disheartening.

They have decided to suspend environmental review and allow residents to expedite permitting for reconstruction only if the home or business is rebuilt the same size as it was before. I believe this will exacerbate these problems even more.

The amount of materials and labor needed should be considered over the next few years and if we are going to build, why not use existing footprints to build a bit more than what was there at a much higher standard of sustainability. There will now be a competition for these goods between projects in and outside the fire zones due to a momentous rebuilding effort.

This is the lesson of the trees. After a fire or a felling, grow back stronger and evolution will reward your for it. Become more sustainable. Drink from the air and cleanse it. These trees have survived this long and ultimately were pushed into California about 2 million years ago. I hope five thousand years of humans isn’t their undoing and ours.

A lot of news coverage rightfully on the fires in Los Angeles and a lot of different angles to discuss the issue from insurance to prevention. One thing I’ve been thinking about from an overall perspective that’s not just tied to this catastrophe but to climate change, housing, and transportation issues more generally is there’s so much to learn about how you can make things better. A lot of times we just haven’t learned about or been introduced to them yet.

Unfortunately unless you’re deep into something and it’s not an immediate problem, it’s hard to wrap your head around something that might be important down the line. My wife and I recently renovated our basement and our architects helped us figure out many of the requests we had for indoor air filtration and other issues, but when I told the insurance company that we were almost finished they wanted other protections including a water intrusion monitor. Information that would have been helpful when the walls were opened up.

And even recently when reading Mike Eliason’s wonderful new book Building for People (podcast coming soon) there were a number of other things I wish we would have considered but that building codes and city standards haven’t caught up with yet. Exterior shading for the windows? More solar panels? Heat pump water heater enclosures that don’t conflict with fire codes?

The same thing goes for neighborhood and transportation construction at a much bigger scale. The things you want to think of but don’t until after the project is finished and you are using it are the most frustrating. Which is one reason why systems thinking is important, but also difficult when there are soooo many systems to consider and decisions to make. Sometimes those underlying systems like street networks are really hard to change after the fact!

There are going to be a lot of decisions made about insurance and building codes and development and even transportation over the next several months and years. And not just in LA but around the country as summer heat waves come back and climate change continues. But it might be worth it to think about all the systems that need to be interconnected in ways that make life more sustainable and just plain better.

We’re Han Solo this week but have a lot to share from the end of December and the start of 2025.  As we get back into the new year we cover new ways to think about housing construction, transit expansion from Yonah Freemark, and worries about the brightness of headlights.

Check out the show notes below.

Transit Openings 2025 – Transport Politic

Radical construction rethink – Common Edge

Property tax rethink – Slate

Intergenerational living arrangement – Maclean’s Canada

Forever chemicals in drinking water – New York Times

Why it’s hard to stop driving – Slate

Headlights getting brighter – The Ringer

The great abandonment – The Guardian

Hidden cause of Food Deserts – The Atlantic

Bonus Items

Virtual power purchase agreements – Smart Cities Dive

Car dependence and life satisfaction – Travel Behavior and Society

Illegal to stop in Philly bike lanes – Philadelphia Inquirer

Location key to walking more – Men’s Health

DC tackled a child care crunch – NPR

Universal Pre-K – New York Magazine

Miami condos sinking – Miami Herald

AT&T to end landline service – Urban Milwaukee

MNDOT won’t remove I-94 – Minneapolis Star Tribune

Corn isn’t a good solar panel – Need to Know

NACTO Launches urban bikeway guide – NACTO

Raleigh can’t find BRT contractor – News and Observer

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Ben Ross and Joe Cortright to discuss their article in Dissent Magazine discussing how modeling is being used to expand highways around the country. We chat about their critiques of highway modeling, politics, and some potential solutions to the problem.

You can listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or find it on our hosting site.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:

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I posted a piece in the New York Times that was shared by Shannon Mattern on Bluesky written by Jon Klassen about board books for babies. Jon is the author of one of my favorite books to read to my daughter “I Want My Hat Back”. We’ve read a lot of books thousands of times over but “I Want My Hat Back” stands out to me in that I didn’t get super board of reading it over and over like I do other books that cross our paths.

But there’s also a lesson he imparts that I really should listen to more often. Sometimes the moral, story, or idea you’re trying to explain could be simpler and easier, just imagine you have a baby sitting in front of you yelling “too long!” The wandering attention span seems like a good indicator.

This is something folks like Jarrett Walker do well and he noted just recently not to overwhelm the normies with our jargon and phrasing that means nothing to the outside world. But there’s also the art of telling a story, something that can be hard if you don’t have the writing chops or complex ideas are hard to simplify. For some people this comes easy, for others it’s a struggle.

Babies are of course not our target audience, but perhaps telling a simpler story will lead you in a new direction you never thought existed and help you connect in ways you never thought you could.

This week we’re joined by Professor Sara Bronin to talk about her book Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World. We chat about all the ways that land is regulated. And why zoning is an opportunity for people to reshape their communities. We also chat about food policy, connecting the street to property, and the relationship between land and natural systems.

You can listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or find it in our hosting archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:

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This week for our holiday break we’re going back in time to episode 108 which we recorded in Cambridge England with Daniele Quercia and Luca Aiello of Bell Labs. We chatted about using social media to map sensory experiences in cities including smells and soundscapes.

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This week on Talking Headways we’re joined by Austin Gibble, currently of Stantec but formerly of the City of Indianapolis and IndyGo. We chat about the history of planning for BRT in Indy, the Cultural Trail bike network, transit and infrastructure costs, and the interpersonal relationships that can make or break projects.

Listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or find it in the hosting archive.

Below is a full unedited transcript from the episode:

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This week we’re going back to 2021 to chat with Professor Andres Sevtsuk of MIT about his book Street Commerce: Creating Vibrant Urban Sidewalks.  I really liked this discussion and he just had an MIT News profile out yesterday about his work so I thought it might be of interest to folks.  We chat the importance of location in urban retail, the city factors that might determine a store’s success, and why urban retail should be studied more in planning school.

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Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, Instagram, YouTube, Flickr … @theoverheadwire

Follow us on Mastadon [email protected]

Support the show on Patreon

http://patreon.com/theoverheadwire

Buy books on our Bookshop.org Affiliate site!

And get our Cars are Cholesterol shirt at Tee-Public!

And everything else at http://theoverheadwire.com