Nico Larco, an architecture professor at the University of Oregon and co-director of the school's Sustainable Cities Initiative, joins us this week to talk about how autonomous vehicles and e-commerce will affect street design, parking, and land values.

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.

This week's guest is Lee Einsweiler of Code Studio in Austin, Texas. We talk about all things land use and zoning -- what goes into a land use code, the approaches to zoning in different countries, and of course the dreaded topic of parking.

This week's guest on Talking Headways is Zack Wasserman, head of global business development at Via, a ride-hailing company headquartered in New York. We talk about Via’s role as a trip provider, as well as a software builder for transit agencies, and how we can get more people sharing rides. We also discuss how transportation systems are likely to change in lower density places and the role of technological and policy innovation in both the public and private transportation sectors.

This week we’re coming to you from the UITP Global Transport Summit in Montreal with guest Projjal Dutta, director of sustainability at the New York MTA. We chat about the idea of "transit-avoided carbon," how you measure emissions, and the impact of Superstorm Sandy on sustainability thinking in the New York region.

This week Beth Osborne of T4America and Kevin DeGood of The Center for American Progress join us to discuss infrastructure and the new administration. We talk about the budget process -- "skinny" or "thick"? -- the possible benefits and drawbacks of public-private partnerships, and the difference between funding and financing.

This week we’re joined by Patrick Oliva, co-founder of the Paris Process on Mobility and Climate, to talk about the decarbonization of transport. The conversation touches on the electrification of the transportation sector and what it means for climate change, the role cities need to play in the Paris process and what levels of government work best to address climate change, and what the focus should be for mayors in the coming decade.

This week I'm joined by Matthew Heins, author of The Globalization of American Infrastructure: The Shipping Container and Freight Transportation. Matthew talks about how the American highway and rail systems created a global standard for shipping containers, containerization’s effects on labor and relevance to an automated trucking future, and the massive intermodal freight terminals in cities like Chicago.

This week's guest is Dr. Lisa Schweitzer of USC's Sol Price School of Public Policy. In the first of a two-part series, Dr. Schweitzer talks about how her students respond to urban planning classes, what a recent controversy in a Los Angeles City Council election reveals about bike advocacy, and autonomous vehicles and land use policy.