Eiffel Over

I can't think of metropolitan landscape that offers more varied and exciting opportunities for designing transport infrastructure than San Francisco, with its steep hills, its bay, its rapidly changing economy and its tantalisingly separated land masses. In this episode I catch up San Francisco-based transport engineer and old friend Andrew Kosinski and we geek out on transport-related talking points including:

• Bridgoff: Bay vs. Golden Gate
• Tearing down freeways
• Bringing cycling into San Francisco
• Is driving a right and it is a freedom?
• The phenomenon of 'parklets'
• Tunnelling through ships
• Building towers on weak and shifting sands
• The creative bubble of silicon valley and the unintended consequences
• Autonomous vehicles
• Using firms like Uber to replace under-productive bus routes
• Becoming passive consumers of cities

Ditching google maps + riding the bart + cycling downtown + Golden Gate Bridge + big trains + hidden cognitive demand of team work and collaboration + measuring student brave waves + what is reality + the latest from Paolo Alto

Song writer and piano player Ellie Westgarth-Flynn and I talk creative musical strategies, instruments as extensions of our bodies, the tension between technical mastery and creativity and the importance of audience feedback. We also have a jam.

Show notes and more details available from the blog: eiffelover.com

In this episode I attempt a sonic recreation of a part of the London Underground that never got built, a stretch of the Northern Line that would have run from Moorgate to Alexandra Palace. En route I reflect on the transport infrastructure shapes our experience of the city and the difference between what engineers plan and what actually gets built.

Photographer and photojournalist Nick Cobbing talks about photographing the Arctic, what happens to photographic equipment at minus 38 degrees, using drones to take photos, the role of the audience in the creative process, being reduced to tears by the beauty of the planet, the best places to swing dance north of the Arctic, life hacks for creative people working on their own and whether penguins tango or waltz.

Ever since I saw my first one zoom past as a boy I've loved TGVs. In January I travelled from one side of France to the other and back by high-speed train to get to a conference, and used the chance to try to capture some of what I love about fast trains in France. It's a mash up of travel diary, interviews and engineering history, all stitched together with familiar SNCF noises. Close your eyes and bon voyage...

Andrew is a filmmaker specialising in the built environment. Andrew seems to have interviewed or met almost all of my engineering design heroes (except Eiffel), and so I was equally delighted and nervous when he agreed to let me interview him! In this podcast we explore one of Andrew's passions, the identification and celebration of engineering culture. Along the way way we get in to some great stories about designers, what they design and how they do it.