Start Up City Interview
We’re getting to the end of the year and this will be our last featured member post of 2015. Thank you to all of our members who have let me share their excellent content. We’re excited to do more of this in 2016. Check out our member blogroll for more great content from our members. If you have a blog you’d like to feature, let us know.
While I’m thanking people, I’d also like to thank the many folks who have renewed their memberships. We greatly appreciate it. We can’t do the day-to-day work we do without support from our members. If you’d like to renew or make a year-end tax-deductible donation, you can do so on our membership page.
Now, on to this week’s featured member post.
I’m a big podcast fan. One of my favorites is Talking Headways from Streetsblog. One of the more recent episodes I listened to was an interview with Gabe Klein, author of Start Up City. This guy has some great ideas on how to make things happen when it comes to improving transportation in our cities. Turns out, one of our members, Jesse Bailey, also enjoyed this episode and talked about it on his blog. I’ll let him take it from here.
For city nerds, tech geeks, policy wonks, and entrepreneurs alike – Listen to this fascinating podcast with Gabe Klein, former head of Chicago and DC departments of transportation. Gabe Klein discusses themes from his new book called Start Up City on this recent episode of the Talking Headways podcast, a Streetsblog production. Along with the Strong Towns podcast, these are my two go-to sources for what matters in the world of land use, transportation, and cities.
Some topics discussed:
- Why in the future we’ll look back at the era of car domination in our cities with horror
- Why it’s so important for a city’s engineering department to report to its planning department, and not the other way around
- Why it is important to create a transportation department, and important to hire energetic people to carryout plans
- How technology can help facilitate better and more livable cities, if deployed properly
- Why we must lead the vision for what we want our cities to be in the future, rather than the dominant technology leading for us, as happened with the automobile
- The importance of a startup approach to development of projects — testing iteratively, at low cost and low risk
- How creating vibrant cities with sustainable transportation is good for economic health, and should appeal to free market oriented types
Lots of takeaways here. Looking forward to reading this book soon.
Check out more of Jesse's articles on his blog, Walkable Palm Beach. And find more member posts on our member blog roll.