When You Can't Drive in America's Hottest City (Mayor Kate Gallego)
The Brake: A Streetsblog Podcast
Release Date: 12/17/2024
What Will It Take to Prepare Our Cities For the Impending Influx of Seniors? (Greg Shill)
The Brake: A Streetsblog Podcast
As the Baby Boomer set ages out of driving, are American cities ready to support their changing transportation needs — and what policies should they be writing right now to help seniors and their neighbors weather the silver tsunami? Today, we're posting an extended audio version of our earlier with the fantastic author, attorney, and law professor Greg Shill about his contributions to the new book “. And in it, we dig into thorny questions about whether we need to reject what he calls “design essentialism” and accept the necessity of traffic enforcement; what it will...
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How One Transportation Emergency Can Keep Parents From Achieving Their College Dreams (Abigail Seldin)
The Brake: A Streetsblog Podcast
One in five U.S. college students are also parents with children of their own — and in many cases, a single unexpected expense can be enough to force them to drop out before they earn their degrees. And too often, that emergency comes in the form of a transportation challenge like a cancelled bus route or a flat tire that keeps them from ever reaching the classroom. In honor of Mother's Day and Father's Day on The Brake, we're talking to Abigail Seldin of Scholarship America about the 3.8 million students who are earning degrees while raising families, and how they're helping them access...
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Where Does 'Motonormativity' Come From — And Which Country Has It Worst? (Marco te Brömmelstroet and Ian Walker)
The Brake: A Streetsblog Podcast
Are Americans really more "car-brained" than their peers in the UK or the Netherlands — and if they are, what can make us change? The Brake is back from its spring hiatus with the return of two of our all-time favorite guests: researchers Ian Walker and Marco te Brömmelstroet, who teamed up for a new paper about how "motonormativity" manifests across their respective nations and the US. And along the way, they learned some fascinating insights about where our autocentric attitudes come from in all those coutnries — and what it would really take to change them. Tune in now, ,...
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How Media and Culture Contribute to Traffic Violence (Myron Levin)
The Brake: A Streetsblog Podcast
How does our popular media normalize dangerous behavior on our roads — and does it even help create it? Today on The Brake, we're talking about the role of culture in driving our road violence crisis, including car ads that make reckless driving seem like it never has deadly consequences, action movies, video games, and even social media trends. And my guest today, documentarian and journalist Myron Levin, wrapped all of that into a really fascinating, full length documentary that you can
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How Highways Tear Our Social Fabric Apart — and the Challenge of Measuring It (Luca Maria Aiello)
The Brake: A Streetsblog Podcast
Decades of research prove that highways tear apart the physical fabric of our cities, segregating neighborhoods by race and income and making it harder for anyone outside a car to access the jobs, services and communities they rely on — at least if those things happen to be located on the other side of a dangerous road. But what impact do highways have on the invisible social fabric of our places — and does the internet provide a bridge between these disconnected communities, or only a digital mirror of the sharp divides that highways draw between our neighborhoods? Today on...
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Does 'Vision Zero' Need a Reset? (David Harkey)
The Brake: A Streetsblog Podcast
Cities across America have been trying — and mostly failing — to achieve Vision Zero for more than a decade. But is it really time to trade the goal of ending road deaths and serious injuries for the aim of reducing them 30 percent by 2030? And would we be better positioned to eliminate the other 70 percent of fatalities if we made that strategic shift, or not? Today on the Brake, we sit down with the presdient of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, David Harkey, to talk about his organization's to push for a five-year full-court press on traffic violence, and why he...
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The Missing Ingredients In America's 'Minimobility' Revolution (Benjie De La Peña and Karina Ricks)
The Brake: A Streetsblog Podcast
What’s a little bigger than a bike, a lot smaller than a car, and might be the tool you didn’t know you needed to get a big haul home from the grocery store two miles away in the pouring rain? The answer is actually an entire category of vehicles that aren't common on U.S. roads — but with the right mix of policy, code, and infrastructure reform, we could see a lot more of them. Today on the Brake, we sit down with Karina Ricks of CityFi and Benjie De La Peña of the Shared Use Mobility Center to talk about all things mini-mobility, also known as light urban vehicles (LUVs),...
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Everything You Need to Know About Keeping VRUS Safe In Your State in One Document (Michael Kelley)
The Brake: A Streetsblog Podcast
What if there were a single document that told every U.S. resident exactly how safe their state is — or isn't— for pedestrians, bicyclists, and other vulnerable road users, as well as what that state is doing to save lives ? Turns out there is: the Vulnerable Road User Safety Assessment, or VRUSA. And since the passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, every DOT in the U.S. has been legally required to write one – even if they don't always do it in ways that are particularly helpful to transportation reform advocates, Today on the Brake, we're sitting down with Michael...
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What's Missing From the 'Safe Systems' Approach (Roger Millar)
The Brake: A Streetsblog Podcast
If you’ve been following Streetsblog for a while, you might have heard of famed planner/engineer/all-around transportation superstar Roger Millar, not least for his recent leadership as the head of the Washington state DOT. But you might not have heard that, while at WashDOT, Millar and his team did something quietly radical: they challenged every decision maker in their state to confront the role of land use in saving lives in our roads, by changing the very framework on which the state’s Vision Zero program rests. On this episode of The Brake, we sit down with Secretary Millar on the eve...
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When You Can't Drive in America's Hottest City (Mayor Kate Gallego)
The Brake: A Streetsblog Podcast
More than a decade ago, Kate Gallego had a seizure that temporarily cost her the ability to drive – and opened her eyes to the difficulty of getting around her city of Phoenix, Arizona without a car. Now, in her third term as Phoenix's mayor, she's pushed for some of the most aggressive multimodal transportaiton investments in the city's history, including a new to tackle the impact of the community's notoriously sweltering heat on people who walk, roll, orwait for a ride. On this episode of The Brake, we dive deep into how Phoenix is using next-level data to put shade...
info_outlineMore than a decade ago, Kate Gallego had a seizure that temporarily cost her the ability to drive – and opened her eyes to the difficulty of getting around her city of Phoenix, Arizona without a car. Now, in her third term as Phoenix's mayor, she's pushed for some of the most aggressive multimodal transportaiton investments in the city's history, including a new shade plan to tackle the impact of the community's notoriously sweltering heat on people who walk, roll, orwait for a ride.
On this episode of The Brake, we dive deep into how Phoenix is using next-level data to put shade investments into the neighborhoods that need them most, how shade structures can do double-duty as public art and play space, and the cultural challenges of fighting for multimodality in a place built around the car.
Check it out, and if you appreciated this show, include Streetsblog USA in your holiday giving, or sign up to be the first to know when our new SB-branded rain gear is available from Cleverhood.