ModeShift

Across America, millions of families are feeling the effects of an affordability crisis. As the cost of living continues to rise, one-quarter of us have no savings, and over half couldn’t afford a $1,000 emergency. 

As we scramble for solutions, one bold idea is staring us in the face: transit. 

In today’s episode, Adie Tomer, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies land-use and transportation, offers case studies and historical context to show how leaning into transit can put money back in Americans’ pockets and expand opportunities for employment and wage growth. With Adie as our guide, we travel from Florida to London, and from Ohio to an experimental housing project outside of Phoenix, to learn how transit can truly be an engine of prosperity.

Listen to ModeShift on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you listen to podcasts.

Few technological advances have captured our attention like the rise of autonomous robotaxis. From San Francisco to Austin, Los Angeles to Miami, you can now hail a white Jaguar Waymo driven by…no one. 

Yet for Arielle Fleisher, AVs are about much more than cool technology: she sees them as a means to making streets safer. She also sees them as part of a broader integrated transit strategy that gives people more options.

In this episode, Fleisher, who serves as policy development and research manager at Waymo, unpacks several initiatives that strengthen the bonds between Waymo and public transit, and explains how Waymos can be a boon for public health.

Listen to ModeShift on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you listen to podcasts.

It’s no secret that America’s streets are dangerous: roughly 40,000 people die on our roads every year. In response, over the past couple of decades, 60 cities have embraced VisionZero — a framework for road safety developed in Sweden — to make roads safer by slowing down cars and expanding curbs and other infrastructure that makes pedestrians and cyclists more visible.

Although VisionZero has a mixed record in America, the tiny, dense city of Hoboken, New Jersey has emerged as proof that VisionZero can save lives and cut down on injuries. 

Much of that success can be attributed to the work of Ravi Bhalla, who served as mayor from 2018 until earlier this year. Bhalla added bumpouts to intersections, crosswalks and slowed speed limits across the city. As a result, Hoboken hasn’t seen a single road death since 2017 and drastically cut serious injuries. 

In this episode, Bhalla explains how a lack of safety was hurting Hoboken, the resistance he confronted in his pursuit of new policies, and their cascading impacts on the community.

Listen to ModeShift on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you listen to podcasts.

Across America, small and medium-sized cities are growing at a rapid clip. In many of them, transit services have failed to keep up. 

In Sioux Falls, South Dakota, that is not the case. In this episode, we hear from Paul TenHaken, the city’s outspoken and candid mayor. Under TenHaken’s watch, Sioux Falls has overhauled its transit system with remarkable results. 

In partnership with Via, Sioux Falls added more paratransit services, made bus routes more flexible, and boosted its on-demand services; the result is a system that works hand in hand with the city as it grows.

Listen to ModeShift on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you listen to podcasts.

America is hooked on parking. There are roughly two billion parking spaces in the United States; that’s about eight spots for every single car. All of that parking takes up a lot of space; roughly a third of the land in our cities. 

For Henry Grabar, the acclaimed author of “Paved Paradise,” our fixation is fueled by what he calls the parking trilemma: our quest for a parking space that is convenient, available and free. Yet, for Grabar, this trilemma has eroded the very communities it aims to make accessible. 

In this episode, Grabar digs into the history of parking to explain our unquenchable thirst for it, the cascading impacts of all that parking and case studies that demonstrate we can change the parking status quo.

Listen to ModeShift on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you listen to podcasts.