Paul Comfort’s Transit Unplugged is a podcast for transit industry professionals. He just did a two-part interview of me, where we talked about how our thinking about transit goals, and our measures of success, need to adapt to the post-pandemic world. It’s in two podcasts
Part 1, from 7:10 to 22:10. (Ends at a moment of suspense!)
Part 2, from 8:03 to 18:10.
Hope you enjoy!
Well, this isn’t your average interview.
“Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone” is a comedy podcast series spun off by the US National Public Radio game show Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. A while back they called out of the blue. Apparently they had done an interview with a parking garage designer, and a listener replied by asking them why they don’t interview the Human Transit guy, for balance I guess. I had all the leeriness of comedy that you might expect, but it came off better than I expected, and it was fun.
The podcast is here. After half an hour of comic banter between the hosts, the segment starts at 31:53 to 1:02:00.
“Getting excited about technology is often a way of distracting ourselves from the actual problems before us.”
I’m not known for the glorifying mass disruption, but I guess I’m a disruptor now. Matt Ward’s podcast The Disruptors interviewed me this fall. We talked about driverless cars, flying cars, Uber, scooters, “super mini micro smartcar pods,” and whether the whole interview was a Turing test. Matt asked me especially tough questions about what might be possible in the future.
Something about Matt’s style got me talking a little fast, but it was fun. It starts at 5:15 with John F. Kennedy pretending to be me, and then I get going at 5:30. There’s one irritating ad early on, and then it’s uninterrupted.
Harry Campbell, who calls himself “The Rideshare Guy,” runs a blog and podcast specifically for Uber and Lyft drivers. In a new podcast, he interviews me a broad range of topics, not just Uber and Lyft. He gets me going on how transit works, and how I got into the business, in addition to the effects of rideshare.
You can listen right here. We get going at 3:20.
If you’d be interested in the sound of my voice, ruminating broadly about transit and cities in the serenity of my own livingroom, there’s now quite a good podcast by Colin Marshall in the Notebook on Cities and Culture series. You can download an mp3 from Colin’s site here, or get it from iTunes here.
Colin’s a brilliant interviewer, asking great and often surprising questions. He draws me out on my own living arrangements, my complex relationships with Portland and with Los Angeles, some notes on my global transit travels, and finally onto really substantive topics about what transit is and how it relates to the larger question of what cities are. It’s all feels very public-radio …
Colin’s whole series of downloadable podcasts looks like it’s worth a look, as he’s put me in some impressive company …