Podcast appearances and mentions of jeff tumlin

Jeff Tumlin became director of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency in December 2019, just months before the pandemic sent ridership plummeting, creating huge financial challenges and forcing unprecedented change. Tumlin, who has just stepped down as director, was at times a lightning rod for controversies about pedestrian safety, bike lanes, closing streets to car traffic and transit service. But Muni ridership has recovered much better than BART and though the agency faces severe financial troubles, Tumlin managed Muni through a brutal period for public transportation in every city. He'll join us to talk about his tenure and the future of transit in San Francisco. Guests: Jeff Tumlin, director of transportation, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA)

It's a new year, and in our first episode of 2025, we take a look at the tenure of San Francisco Director of Transportation Jeff Tumlin. Director Tumlin announced in mid-December that he would step down from his position at the end of the month. We spend this episode speaking with him about his five years with the SFMTA and with other agency staffers about working with him. 

SF MTA director Jeff Tumlin on the Valencia St. Center Bike Lane. Can office-to-residential conversions in downtown San Francisco work? Local author William Gee Wong about his new book Sons of Chinatown: A Memoir Rooted in China and America.

For the past few years, many of our conversations about transit in the Bay Area have been about how the various agencies are struggling… with funding shortfalls, lower ridership, and the possibility of massive service cuts as fiscal cliffs loom…  Now, it's no secret that the COVID pandemic played a huge role in pushing transit agencies to the brink… but the aftereffects presented a question to us all – what will it take to ensure that transit in the Bay Area survives? That's a big question, of course, and a financial lifeline… to the tune of around 747 million dollars… is planned to be split up among several agencies… but the real saving grace will be getting more people on those buses and trains…  So… in these tough times that seem to keep on going… are we seeing any improvement? Is a recovery to pre-pandemic numbers still possible? For the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency… the answer just might be yes… To give us an update on all things SFMTA, we're joined by Jeff Tumlin… director of transportation with the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency…

“Is it safe to take the bus?” That’s the question on people’s minds as we enter into the seventh month of the pandemic in the Bay Area. With ridership down, revenue across all Bay Area transit agencies has taken a huge hit that they may never recover from. Host Ethan Elkind talks to Jeff Tumlin, the director of the San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency, about how MUNI is coping with all of these changes and planning for the future.

“Is it safe to take the bus?” That’s the question on people’s minds as we enter into the seventh month of the pandemic in the Bay Area. With ridership down, revenue across all Bay Area transit agencies has taken a huge hit that they may never recover from. Host Ethan Elkind talks to Jeff Tumlin, the director of the San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency, about how MUNI is coping with all of these changes and planning for the future.

Episode 1: Redesigning Cities with Autonomous Vehicles is a conversation between Jeff Tumlin, Principal and Director of Strategy at Nelson Nygaard, and Harriett Tregoning, immediate past Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of CPD at HUD, on the convergence of mobility, technology, and design. For more information visit: https://arch.gatech.edu/redesigning-cities-speedwell-foundation-talks-georgia-tech-0

“Google ‘Tumlin NIMBY’ or ‘Tumlin Santa Monica’, and you can see a little bit of the story arc.”An effective stage-setting for a dialogue earlier this month, in front of a small gathering at Gord’s West End apartment, with Jeff Tumlin, Principal and Director of Strategy for Nelson Nygaard.One in a long-running series of Price Tags Soirées, and our first live audience recording, the chat included a Q&A with a few special guests well-known to #vanpoli followers.Tumlin, raised in LA and happily transplanted to San Francisco via Stanford university in the late 1980’s, survived the recession of the early ’90s by (essentially) growing a branch of the transportation demand management tree — he was able to, over time, convert Stanford’s campus-wide parking into more money to support the implementation of a multi-modal transportation strategy.Parking = $$$, and he turned it into a generous bankroll for university, and a career for himself with one of North America’s most-respected transportation consulting firms. He’s become an expert in helping communities move from discord to agreement about the future of transportation, and in the conversation you can hear he loves the challenge.  Calling inequity and privilege for what it is and, in the fight for public space, using compassion and humour to move forward.True, he tacitly acknowledges, sometimes it doesn’t work, as with Santa Monica. But eventually his clients seem to get there, one way or another.** Spoiler alert: North Shore policy and politics do indeed come up. Why do you think he was in town? Read more »

What does our future really look like when autonomous vehicles take over the roads? Molly and Jim take us on a tour of the less-considered effects: vomit, sex, and criminalized pedestrians. But also: Will self-driving cars carry our groceries before they carry us? They talk with Nan Ransohoff, the head of product at AV startup Nuro, and Jeff Tumlin, a transportation consultant focused on sustainability. For more information on this episode, visit citylab.com/podcasts/technopolis. And email us your feedback to technopolis@citylab.com. 

In the third episode of the APA Podcast series Planning the Autonomous Future, hosts Jennifer Henaghan and Kelley Coyner take stock of multiple autonomous-vehicle-focused sessions from the 2018 National Shared Mobility Summit, which took place March 12–14 in Chicago. Later on in the episode, they welcome Jeff Tumlin, principal and director of strategy at ‎NelsonNygaard, to the table. Jeff moderated the summit plenary session called "The (Shared) Road Ahead: An Electrified, Connected, Autonomous, and Accessible Vision of Transit," and he discussed the topic with Jennifer and Kelley, touching on what could happen if autonomous vehicles aren't shared, why we need to prioritize space-efficient modes of transportation for AVs to work, and why planners need to take sprawl seriously when planning for automated vehicles.

This week we’re at the National Shared Mobility Summit in Chicago.  Jeff Tumlin of Nelson Nygaard moderates a panel of experts on new mobility including Carla Bailo from the Center for Automotive Research, Krista Huhtala-Jenks from the Finland Ministry of Transport and Communications, Dick Alexander from Trandev, and Justin Erlich from Uber.  They talk about the new business model of shared mobility, actually moving people versus selling things, what are the pieces that go into transportation and mobility services as well as the future of moving people around.  You might also hear amazing references to MacGyver and heavy metal bands.

Welcome to the third podcast in our end-of-year-fundraising series in which we address questions from you, our readers, about almost anything you want to know. Today our editors Damien Newton, Jason Islas, Melanie Curry, and Kristopher Fortin answer a few ringers in some perhaps unexpected ways. Damien thinks we may have gone off the rails a bit, but it all comes together to make some sense in the end. We addressed a question from Kathleen Ferrier, who asks:  (block quote) What are the top three strategies for countering inflammatory NIMBYism? What have you seen work? Jason, who has had plenty of experience in his advocacy work with Santa Monica Next, thinks the first strategy is to get rid of labels. Our answers, in brief: pay attention, don't assume, and be human. While “Not In My Backyard” knee-jerk opposition to efforts to fix things is definitely a problem, it doesn't always stem from the reasons you might suspect, and you have to listen to find out what underlies people's objections to change. Our second question is kind of related, in that it demands a human response. Jeff Tumlin asks: Why don’t we talk more about the neuroscience of mobility? Like how being stuck in congestion triggers our fight-or-flight responses, shutting down the prefrontal cortex of the brain and reducing our ability to think through the consequences of our actions? Or why hopping on a bike can bring simple joy, and trigger the biological precursors of social trust? Listen in to hear how we think this should play out—and to hear about what might or might not have been a response to last week's podcast about sidewalks. And don't forget that we are asking for donations to keep Streetsblog California alive and well into the next year. Please support our work by clicking here and donating today. Do you have a question you want us to talk about? Submit it in the comments below, or by email to melanie [at] streetsblog.org, or tweet them @streetsblogcal Support journalism that covers the issues you want to know about. Streetsblog California reports on issues few media outlets cover, and we can't do it without you. Click here to donate today.  

Jeff Tumlin of Nelson/Nygaard talks about the nuances of the Trinity Toll Road, the cognitive dissonance of parking and using performance metrics to make good local decisions.

Whether you’re building an office tower or a new transit line in California, you’re going to run up against the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The law determines how much environmental analysis you need to do for new projects. But sadly, it’s better at supporting auto oriented development than it is at determining environmental impacts.  That’s because instead of looking at a project’s impact on the environment, it looks mostly at its impact on traffic. And the measures CEQA uses to determine traffic impact focus on individual intersections, instead of the region as a whole. As a result, they end up penalizing urban infill development and transit projects while promoting sprawl and road expansion.  Here’s the good news: This traffic measure, known as Level of Service (LOS), is set to be overhauled in California. Last year, Governor Brown signed into law SB743. Mostly what that bill does is allow the Sacramento Kings to build a new stadium. But the other thing it does is allow for the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research to come up with a new measure to replace LOS. We’ve discussed this on Streetsblog before, and this week’s Talking Headways is a special podcast episode all about how LOS works against sustainable development patterns and what is being done to change it.  Jeff produced this podcast for the NRDC Urban Solutions Program. Guests include Jeff Tumlin of NelsonNygaard, Amanda Eaken of NRDC, and Chris Ganson of the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research. Hope you enjoy it. Catch us on iTunes, Stitcher, and the RSS feed. And we'll see you on Twitter.