This week's guest is Benjamin De La Pena, deputy director for policy, planning, mobility, and right of way at Seattle DOT. We talk about SDOT’s New Mobility Playbook, which describes "strategies for shaping the future of transportation in a way that puts people first."

Blumenauer discusses how Rail~Volution got its start, how we can use congestion pricing and road user charges to pay for transportation, Vision Zero, and why urbanists should be thinking about the Farm Bill.

This week we’re joined by Abby Thorne Lyman, who manages the transit-oriented development program at BART. Abby discusses how the agency pulled together its new transit-oriented development guidelines. We talk about the importance of reduced parking, the ridership benefits of TOD, and expectations transit agencies should have for property developers.

This week, Robin Rather of Collective Strength joins the podcast to talk about missteps in the planning profession - including how things go wrong with language. Robin shares how she got to thinking about urban issues and why she believes current planning practice is stuck in the 1990s. We discuss the often jargon-filled language the profession uses, taking a paragraph from Austin’s current zoning code rewrite to illustrate.

Here's the first installment of my two-part conversation with Jonn Elledge, the editor of City Metric and the host of the Skylines podcast. In this episode Jonn interviews me about American transportation, particularly the history of urban subways and light rail, as well as transportation politics and possible futures.

For the 150th episode of the podcast, this week we welcome back Talking Headways co-founder Tanya Snyder, now a reporter at Politico Magazine. We get into the developing topic of regulating self-driving vehicles, including issues of children’s safety and state versus federal rules. We also discuss aviation legislation in the House of Representatives, what it means for drones, and whether private jets should pay more for air traffic control.