Professional conversations on safer, smarter mobility.
ITE Talks Transportation brings transportation professionals into focused conversations about the systems behind everyday mobility. Its episodes move from street design and roadway safety to workforce development, AI, rural highways, bike networks, and the manuals practitioners actually use.
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ITE Talks Transportation is a monthly professional interview show about how transportation systems are planned, built, measured, maintained, and improved. Bernie Wagonblast keeps the pace clear and orderly. The conversations are aimed at people who care about the working details behind mobility: engineers, planners, public works leaders, consultants, safety advocates, and students entering the field. Recent episodes concentrate on practical questions with broad civic consequences. How does a profession attract new talent and keep experienced people engaged? How can mentorship, internships, co-ops, and broader education help transportation careers stay flexible? What happens when residential streets are designed for rare edge cases instead of everyday users? The show spends real time on safety. Guests talk about roadway deaths as preventable, the safe system approach, vulnerable road users, traffic calming, emergency access, and the value of community buy-in when street changes feel inconvenient. It also follows the data side of the field. AI, advanced analytics, spatial temporal data, privacy, and regulation appear as tools and guardrails for better decision-making. Leadership is another recurring thread. Episodes connect technical work to ethics, trust, public responsibility, negotiation, organizational culture, and the challenge of staying out of the weeds when a leader needs to see the larger system. The show is not limited to big-city mobility. Rural road agencies, pothole priorities, federal safety funding, long-term maintenance, and resource-sharing agreements all get attention. Built examples give the series texture. Seville's protected bike lane network becomes a case study in treating bikes as everyday transportation, while the ITE Trip Generation Manual opens a discussion of e-commerce, pandemic-era travel shifts, drones, delivery robots, and missing data submissions. The result is calm, technical, and concrete. It suits listeners who want the transportation profession in full: policy, pavement, people, data, safety, and the difficult choices between them.
Made for: For transportation engineers, planners, public works staff, consultants, safety professionals, and students who want grounded conversations about mobility practice. It also suits civic leaders tracking how street design, data, and policy affect communities.
What sets it apart: The show stands out by pairing a calm trade-publication style with detailed practitioner examples: lane widths, trip generation, rural maintenance, AI data use, and protected bike networks. It is less about hot takes and more about how transportation decisions actually get made.
ITE Talks Transportation is a collaboration between ITE and Bernie Wagenblast, founder and editor of the Transportation Communication Newsletter and host of Transportation Radio. Each month, a new podcast features a thought leader within the transportation industry. In keeping with #transportationtuesday, a new episode will be available the 4th Tuesday of every month.
That twelve-foot neighborhood lane has an explanation to give, and you get to hear it.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A practical look at street width as a safety choice shaped by everyday roadway use.
Street safety becomes a matter of city design in ITE Talks Transportation, as Menifee's Assistant City Manager makes the case for neighborhoods shaped around everyday roadway users and workable emergency access.
A transportation leader makes the case for seeing organizational gaps before they become leadership failures.
Transportation leadership comes through here as a shift in vantage point: Michael Sanderson moves from the close work of technical problem-solving to the broader responsibility of seeing what an organization needs next.
A systems-minded case for treating roadway deaths as a preventable public-health crisis.
Roadway safety is framed here as a systems problem with public-health stakes, and Lorraine Martin, president and CEO of the National Safety Council, keeps the argument grounded in design choices that shape everyday risk.
A practical look at how multimodal data, e-commerce, and delivery robots are reshaping trip generation work.
The 12th edition of the ITE Trip Generation Manual gets a grounded, practical treatment, with attention shifting from the manual's traditional vehicle-trip focus toward broader data by travel mode.
A grounded look at rural road technology that has to keep working after the funding arrives.
Rural roads become a technology story when the tools have to stretch across long distances, limited staff expertise, scarce funding access, and a pothole-first public agenda.
Seville's protected bike network shows how connected street design can make cycling feel like everyday transportation.
Seville's bike-lane network comes through as a practical case for changing behavior by first changing the street. Manuel Calvo, the sustainability mobility consultant closely tied to its design, makes the central point plainly: cycling grows when people can rely on a connected,…
Safety standards meet real-world emergencies.
Tolling, plate cameras and road data, with TTI's editors.
Underground delivery to rooftop landing pads, as executives see it
Eric Rensel discusses the need for fresh talent in transportation and ITE's efforts through the Engineering Workforce Consortium to attract and retain workers.
["ITE Talks Transportation host Bernie Wagonblast talks with Brian Jones, Assistant City Manager of Menifee, California, about the ITE Journal article \"Safer Streets Through Abundance\" and the tension between street safety, fire access, and neighborhood design.", "Jones says widening a four-lane road to six lanes can raise speeds, increase crash severity, add police and fire burden, and push maintenance costs up by 30 to 40 percent.", "He argues that California's one-size-fits-all roadway and fire-code approach does not fit places like Humboldt, Paradise, Menifee, Los Angeles County, and San Diego, and he points to grid connectivity, trees, and shade as better tools for livable streets.", "Jones closes by urging transportation professionals to work across disciplines, start with the question \"What can we do?\", and borrow ideas from places like Fresno and Davis instead of staying inside silos."]
Michael Sanderson, CEO of Sandbell and the 2018 ITE International president, argues that transportation leaders need "trust and inspire" leadership rather than command-and-control management.
Jean-Paul Brissett discusses the evolution of data's role in transportation decision-making, from traditional sensors to big data and AI.
Lorraine Martin, president and CEO of the National Safety Council, tells Bernie Weigenblast on ITE Talks Transportation that roadway deaths should be treated as a public health crisis, and she compares the toll to a 747 going down every four days.
ITE Talks Transportation on the 12th edition of the ITE Trip Generation Manual centers on Chris Bramer of Kittleson & Associates and Eric Tripi of GHD, who say the update adds truck parking, high-volume fast food restaurants, pickleball courts, dog parks, and rental car facilities while dropping pre-1990 data.
Bernie Wagonblast opens "ITE Talks Transportation" by saying rural highways move freight, connect cities, and account for about 40 percent of traffic fatalities in the United States.
Manuel Calvo explains how Seville, Spain built a connected 50-mile protected bike-lane network between 2006 and 2008, adding about 40 kilometers in 2010.
Kathy Falk discusses the significant changes in the 11th edition of the MUTCD, the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices.
Greg Johnson discusses the Interstate Bridge Replacement Program, which aims to replace a 106-year-old bridge on I-5 connecting Washington and Oregon.
Rob McInerney discusses IRAP's mission to eliminate high-risk roads globally using a Safe System Approach, focusing on rural road safety and the star rating methodology.
Kelley Coyner discusses the state of autonomous vehicle development and deployment, focusing on low-speed AVs in transit and the need for innovation in shared mobility.
Jeff Lindley, ITE Chief Technical Officer, discusses the history and importance of the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) as the national standard for traffic signs, signals, and markings.