Welcome to The Weekly Journey - your two-minute journey through the world of mobility and beyond. Use it to stay informed, find a new go-to source, or just have a peek inside how we think. Brought to you by the team at Journey.

Journey is hiring a mid-career parking and TDM strategist to join our growing West Coast practice.

This position will support our portfolio of parking code, shared-parking analysis, major-event mobility planning, and TDM program design projects on the West Coast. We’re looking for a candidate with approximately ten years of parking and TDM planning experience that is based in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, or Seattle.

Check out the LinkedIn posting to learn more about the position and find out how to apply. We’d also appreciate if you share the posting with folks in your network. Thanks!

Meg reminded us that so much of our work is negotiation—between developers and neighbors, between public agencies, between stakeholders who all want something different from the same 108 feet of right-of-way. Getting to Yes frames that work through principled negotiation, a mindset that keeps conversations from becoming oppositional: 

Meg emphasized that the skill planners most often neglect is discovery. Show up to first meetings like Rick Steves on a new island—curious, agenda-free, and listening hard. The better you can articulate their case back to your own team, the better a negotiator you become.

She also connected negotiation to the BATNA—your Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement. In Texas, the threat of a lawsuit is often the other side’s BATNA; for infrastructure projects, eminent domain can be a BATNA. But leaning on power rarely works long-term. Projects live and die on relationships, memory, and whether we treated people right in previous generations of planning. 

Meg shared stories of adversarial stakeholders—some who flipped once they saw the economic upside, and some who never would. But even a partial shift in tone can keep a project alive. Sometimes the breakthrough is technical clarity; other times it’s pure human connection, like realizing you and the person trying to kill your project showed up wearing the same shoes. 

At Journey, we see every day that people make better decisions when they truly understand the options (the premise of our engagement practice Journey Together). Meg pushed us to remember that negotiation is deeply human work. Our value isn’t just the technical models—we bring empathy, curiosity, and lived experience to incredibly sticky problems. That’s something AI can’t touch. 

📦 Project Delivery: Great insights from Jeff Tumlin on the barriers to building good transit from the latest episode of Roadmaps and Roadblocks with Beth Osborne of Smart Growth America & Martha Roskowski of The Funders Network.

🛴 Micromobility: Anne Brown and Niels van Oort interviewed 25 professionals across North America and Europe to highlight best practices for integrating micromobility and public transit.

🏙️ TOD in NYC: Check out this awesome map of all the transit-oriented car parking lots in New York City.

🪙 Transit Integration: The next generation of Clipper cards just rolled out across the Bay Area. The new fare system will greatly enhance the customer experience - with new features made possible through a complex web of technology, financial, and governance agreements. Congrats to all involved in making Clipper 2.0 a reality!

🚗 Car Sharing: Zipcar announced it will shut down operations in London - a good reminder of the pressures faced by commercial car sharing operations around the globe.

Lauren hosts the Association for Commuter Transportation Book Club. On February 4th at 2 PM eastern, the book club will host Ruth Miller of Jawnt to discuss The Smart Enough City by Ben Green. Ruth will explore how TDM professionals can thoughtfully navigate both the promises and the limitations of smart city technologies. ACT members, feel free to join whether or not you get a chance to read the book! Not an ACT member but curious? Reach out to Journey as we often can offer a couple of comp entries to our partners.

Lauren co-hosts the Chicago City Builders Book Club with our friends at Arup. The book club is diving into the Chicago classic, Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon, across their next three meetings. Join them for their upcoming discussions on: