This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Gillian Gillett of CalITP and Dan Baker, of the Connecticut Department of Transportation to discuss how agencies can create simpler payment and travel experiences for transit riders.  We chat about the Connecticut Integrated Mobility Project, building payment system capacity and merchant services for smaller transit agencies, and the need for digital customer first thinking in a paper based industry.

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

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

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A few discussions today about basic income in Oregon and St. Louis. St. Louis restarted a program that provides low income families $500 a month to help cover household bills but was stopped after a judge suspended the program from using public funds. The program has picked back up with donations from a private funder.

In Oregon, voters will be asked whether the state’s minimum tax on large companies should be increased to give every resident of the state a $750 tax rebate and for some residents with low incomes it could be a direct cash payment. But not everyone is a fan of the idea of universal basic income programs. A lot of elected officials including the governor have come out against it and other states have even written laws banning the practice.

For me the debate in my head over the benefits of the general idea goes back to a discussion I had with Scott Bernstein about poverty reduction where he talks about the three different ways we could go about it in the United States.

First we can invest in people’s education and job training that could help them earn more money. Scott says if people end up getting a dollar an hour or more because of it you may get $2,000 a year but some chunk of that would be reduced by taxes on that income.

Second, we could just buy down or subsidize the cost of large expenses like rent and housing or transportation whether that’s buying people a car or giving them a transit pass.

But a third way Scott says is that we could invest in a system that provides a package of services for people in poverty that reduces cost of living. In a city, if you look at people’s major expenditures, what could be done to bring down the cost of heating and cooling, transportation, child care, medical care, food and housing. If you provide those services to the tune of that theoretical $2,000 a year per person, you’re not only saving people money, they also don’t have to pay taxes on the increases in their bank accounts.

So I think that’s where the idea of universal basic income either conflicts or aligns with the stated goals of reduced poverty. On one hand you’re providing people with some money to buy down the costs of goods and services by increasing their income. But on the other hand you’re not improving the quality or value of those goods or services they are buying into and may just be perpetuating a bad existing system as is the case with a lot of transit service in the United States or housing provision.

It’s true that median incomes in the United States are much higher than a lot of other peer countries. But it’s also true that we require people to spend a LOT of money on things like transportation, health care, and housing. People talking about Red Vienna shouldn’t just mentioning the social housing, but also the robust transportation network and health care system that creates value by reducing an individual’s expenditures overall.

This week on Mondays Wes Marshall is back! We chat about his trip to Bogota Columbia, the connections between biological structure and the built environment, and of course we discuss the news from last week including climate migration, high speed rail, roundabouts, and healthy urbanism.

Check out below for the show notes including links to the items we chatted about and a full AI generated unedited transcript of this show. And don’t forget to check this out on YouTube.

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This week on Talking Headways, we’re joined by architect Vishaan Chakrabarti to talk about his book The Architecture of Urbanity: Designing for Nature, Culture, and Joy. We discuss the goldilocks density, defining urbanity, the ennui of young architects, and much much more!

How to Make Room for 1M New Yorkers – NYT | Vishaan Chakrabarti in Vital City

To listen to this episode, find it at Streetblog USA or in our hosting archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of the show:

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There’s an interesting confluence of events that has emerged around passenger rail in Texas and Mexico over the last year.

Mexico’s previous president Andrés Manuel López Obrador had built around 900 miles of passenger rail and that policy of expansion is something that the new president, Claudia Scheinbaum wishes to continue, however more aligned with her environmental goals.

Her plans include 1,850 miles of 100mph electrified passenger rail including two lines that connect Mexico City with the borders of Arizona and Texas. There are seven lines in her overall policy proposals. (Thx Cap’n) The lines would also be used for freight movement since one of Mexico’s largest exports to the United States is cars, which also puts an interesting twist on the proposed environmental goals.

Map via SntVTC

Not to be outdone, another discussion emerged in the press this week as officials from Texas and Mexico got together to discuss passenger rail between Austin, San Antonio and Monterrey Mexico. The line would be promoted as increasing commerce between the two countries.

But while Mexico’s president has declared that she will push forward with their passenger rail program, Texas Department of Transportation officials and local advocates wonder where the money would come from for a Texas leg.  A nascent proposal for a high speed line between Dallas and Houston sponsored by TXDOT seems to have all the current energy the state and Amtrak can muster and the politics of such a program are likely to get messy given the current state of immigration discussions in the United States.

I’m interested to see how this plays out but I’m also excited that more countries are coming around to a technology that connects places near and far physically and economically. Ultimately it’s an investment in connecting people and that’s always something I can appreciate.

We’re flashing back to Talking Headways Episode 246 from five years ago and chat with Andrew Own of the Accessibility Observatory about access as a metric! Wes Marshall will be back next week but in the meantime we’ve got you covered with some great information.

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This week we’re joined by Cameron Mays, lead singer of the Transit Themed band The Frans. We chat about transit in Cleveland, the song writing process for transit music, and the parking lot in Erie Pennsylvania that inspired him.

To listen to this episode, visit Streetsblog USA or find it in our hosing archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated episode transcript:

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I think there have been a lot of people that are optimistic about the potential for climate havens though many of the items we’ve shared here do have a healthy dose of skepticism.

But after Hurricane Helene shot through Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina and left tragedy and floodwaters in its wake this past weekend, it seems my mom’s old adage of “pick your natural disaster” wherever you live around the country is even more apt. There’s really nowhere safe from climate impacts or extreme weather and though some places may have more risk than others, there’s still a chance.

So I was also struck by an item that included maps from the New York Times which displayed population growth over climate hazards like the potential for hurricanes, extreme heat, or flooding from torrential rainfall. Sure the population growth and change is what you would expect, but I didn’t expect to be hit in the face so hard with the sprawl.

The maps show that cities have been on net losing population, even in fast growing states like Texas which as the article mentions puts a strain on all kinds of infrastructure systems, not just transportation and housing but energy resources. But all this suburban and exurban growth continues apace and has a steep price.

We used to talk about these as the costs of sprawl and how urban development was more efficient, but I think now that accounting may be too simplistic. Perhaps now we should be looking past basic costs on their own and look at how climate change is going to force a restructure of whole systems. Building codes, home insurance, emergency management, energy systems. There’s a whole reworking of society going on underneath the surface that perhaps we won’t see in its totality until after it’s happened.

And some sectors, unless they change, could be left behind. During a recent conversation on the podcast with my friend and developer Jim Kumon (Part 1 | Part 2 ), he discussed the development process, structured capital, and a coming new era as this suburban version flames out. “Our built environment is a production of an outcome of the way that we structured capital. And so we keep getting the same thing because the money keeps being set up to do the same thing.”

That same thing seems to be the sprawl. It’s relentless. Bolstered by transportation departments expanding roads through self fulfilling travel forecasts. It’s also bringing new risks.

As Jim mentioned…”And so humanity has a pretty good cycle about every 70 to 80 years where we flip a switch and something serious happens. You know, whether it’s the industrial revolution to things that happened around post-Civil war and the railroads, and then World War II and suburbia, and we’re kind of running on the fumes of that last 80 year cycle, right? We’re kind of past due. And now the pandemic and other things that have changed about now, we’re into a new cycle. We don’t really know what that is yet.”

My family got me a collapsible wagon for my birthday a few years ago and it’s seriously one of my favorite urban living car free solutions ever. From an access standpoint, it also allows me to walk right up to the grocery store doors and lock it folded up to the rack just like a bike. And it doesn’t take much space in my closet or need a big garage.

It’s also just easier to carry things. It can be hard to hold both grocery bags without getting hand lacerations and bringing pumpkins home for Halloween is infinitely easier than strapping them onto the bike rack with bungee cords, hoping that a bounce doesn’t smash it into smithereens.

Apparently it also allows me to transport my daughter’s car seat as it is too heavy to carry to my friend’s house on the rare occasion when I do need to borrow their car. Just pop it in the wagon and go!

This week we’re joined by Cassidy Boulan and Thom Stead of the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC). We chat about their work in Philadelphia, Trenton, and greater New Jersey related to complete streets and creating safe infrastructure for biking and bus drivers.

To listen to this episode, find it at Streetsblog USA or our hosting archive at Libsyn.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:

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