Heartland Urbanist

We all know the frustration: you’re making great time on the bus until someone parks in the bus lane “just for a minute.” In Chicago, those minutes have added up to decades of declining speeds—but that’s about to change. In part two of our Chic...

Chicago is making a historic move. Leveraging Illinois's recent $1.5 billion investment in Chicago transit, they're working to turn Metra from commuter rail into a true regional rail network. For 40 years, Metra has been the definition of commu...

Kansas City usually shows up on urbanist channels' “worst of” lists. After all, it has more highway-lanes per person than any other city in America. But Kansas City has been taking big swings at addressing its past mistakes for years and it’s star...

It’s been a discouraging few months for people who care about transit and urbanism. With the grim political news from Washington and many of our transit systems facing fiscal cliffs, it can be hard to stay motivated. But whatever garbage is comin...

In this video, we’re going to break down how the Midwest is on the verge of a passenger rail revolution - zooming in on Ohio as a case study. We’ll be talking with local expert and advocate, Elliot Lewis from the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commiss...

The Midwest is filled with cities that are often overlooked by coastal taste makers and urbanists nationwide. But there’s maybe no city with more urbanist strengths to offer but less attention than Milwaukee. Like many Midwestern cities, 100 ye...

A few weeks ago, the fantastic channel "Oh the Urbanity" posted a video—"How We Got Around Car-Free with a Baby (and Didn’t Regret It)"—about their experience as new parents living car-free in Montreal. There is so little urbanist content out ther...

Operating a public transit agency for a city the size of Columbus isn’t easy. For all the talk online, including on this channel, about how to make transit better, it’s a lot easier to talk about making major changes to our transit systems than it...

St Louis was once the fourth largest city in the nation. Today, it’s the fourth largest city in the midwest and also home to the second biggest subway system in the Midwest - behind only Chicago of course. And it wasn’t built when or how you’d exp...

Cities around the world use electric trolley systems to make their buses quieter, cleaner, and cheaper to maintain. But while dozens of US cities once embraced trolley buses, today Dayton, Ohio is one of only four cities in the US with this climat...

This channels second video covered Cleveland’s successful BRT called the HealthLine and some of Cleveland’s other transit and urbanism strengths. This video examines the future of transit in Cleveland with insights from Sam Smucny, the Secretary o...

Like many cities, Cincinnati has strayed far from its urbanist roots over the past century. And like many cities, it’s slowly working its way back. For this video, we’ll dive into Cincinnati—its urban heritage, its sprawl-y present, and its sl...

Following our last video on the shortcomings of Vision Zero to reverse the rising tide of bike and pedestrian deaths, in this video we’ll be talking about how our cities could be rebuilt not just to reduce deaths but to make people walking and bik...

How can you get 250 bicyclists together? Easy, provide a safe place for them to ride! 
In May, 250 bicyclists got together to ride their bikes here in Columbus. It was very safe, because of the large number of riders and because of the police pre...

In this series, I share full (nearly) unedited interviews, so you can see every bit of the great conversations I have when creating videos for this channel. In this video, I interviewed Kim Irwin, Executive Director of Health By Design. Health By ...

Indianapolis may not be the first city you think of when you think of good transit or urbanism. But Indianapolis has some great urbanist assets and it's making real progress on urbanist issues. That's in spite of some very real challenges, includi...

In this new series, I'll be sharing full (nearly) unedited interviews, so you can see every bit of the great conversations I have when creating videos for this channel. For this first video, I interviewed MJ Carpio, Campaign Manager with Move Minn...

There’s something special happening in the Upper Midwest. The Twin Cities has seen some massive wins for urbanism in the last few weeks—accelerating the region’s transformation, already the most exciting in the Midwest, into a less car dependent, ...

Brick streets are better streets. Slower, safer, quieter. The city is resurfacing a street in our neighborhood that’s typically loud with fast, dangerous traffic. With the street torn up you can see the bricks beneath and folks are driving slo...

On May 1st, 2023, Vivek Murthy, the US Surgeon General declared an Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation. And it's easy to understand why—many of us live our lives separated from one another by the ways our cities and communities are designed. Park...