Metro Vancouver: 153 transit trips per resident. Metro Boston: 54.

Calgary: ~77. Denver: ~21. The cities look remarkably similar. Their transit outcomes don't.

In this episode of the Mobility Forum, I spoke with Jeff Busby (COO, TransLink), Josh Colle (Chief Strategy & Customer Experience Officer, Toronto Transit Commission), and David Cooper (Leading Mobility Consulting) about Canada's experience: Better transit doesn't always require bigger infrastructure. More often, it comes from better operational decisions.

Four takeaways:

• Better service, not cheaper service, has been Canada's biggest ridership advantage.
• A painted bus lane can demonstrate demand long before a multi-billion-dollar rail project opens.
• Protect bus speed. Congestion is an operating cost, not just a customer inconvenience. Signal priority and dedicated lanes often deliver some of the highest returns on investment.
• Fund transit as regional infrastructure. Transit creates value beyond its riders—from reduced congestion to stronger local economies—so its funding should reflect those broader benefits.

The lessons are Canadian in origin, but highly relevant to agencies across the United States.

In November 2025, Oregon made a per-mile road usage charge mandatory for EVs and hybrids — 2.3 cents a mile, starting July 2027. This episode of Mobility Forum, Jim Whitty, who began the work in 2001, and Frederic Charlier, CEO of ClearRoad told us how it finally happened.

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Chicago and San Francisco turned a funding emergency into their fastest service reforms in decades. The frequent-bus, transit-lane, and headway-management moves you can borrow — plus the revenue strategy underneath them.

Tom McKone, CFO of the Chicago Transit Authority, and Julie Kirschbaum, who runs the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, run the most ambitious service reforms their agencies have attempted in decades. My conversation with them covers:

• The cliff is structural and not a passing dip, you can't cut your way off it,
• the service-quality playbook working right now in Chicago and San Francisco,
• the revenue fight that decides whether any of it lasts.

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How a DOT with no transit history, no appetite for risk, and a skeptical public built a microtransit system that works ?

Arlington, Texas with 400,000 people, 99 square miles, 3 failed transit votes over 25 years— built citywide public transit for a fraction of the cost of conventional fixed-route transit. A ride is now available within a two-block walk of every resident.

I sits down with Daniel Ramot, CEO of Via, and Alicia Winkelblech, Director of Transportation for the City of Arlington, Texas, who lived the transition firsthand. Via now serves 800+ cities across 30+ countries, powering microtransit, paratransit, school bus, transit planning, and autonomous-vehicle networks, and went public on the NYSE in 2025.

This episode is for the practitioner staring at a bus network bleeding both ridership and budget. It walks Arlington's route from the inside: how to procure for outcomes instead of vehicles; how to de-risk a launch so a skeptical public will tolerate it; and whether on-demand transit can scale to meet the needs of growing cities, and what role it plays alongside fixed-route systems.

We also covers the role of AI in the next generation of public transit. How Via is using it to reshape planning, scheduling, and real-time decision-making for DOT and cities.

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Adam Millard-Ball mapped walking and cycling across 11,587 cities in 121 countries. The results may surprise you: density and bike networks matter far more than climate, walking delivers most of the emissions gains, and your best peer city is probably one you've never studied.

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Today’s episode is my conversations with three city leaders sitting at three different phases of AV deployment: Rachel Castignoli in Austin, Tilly Chang in San Francisco, and Stephanie Dock in Washington, D.C. We’ll walk each city in turn — the Wild West, the rulebook, and the capital.

Three cities, three phases of deployment — and the same three gaps: no data, no first-responder protocol, and no authority to fix either.

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Today's episode is my conversation with Kara Kockelman and Robin Chase. With AVs, the technology won't decide whether a city gets Heaven or Hell. The governance will.

Here's the lever cities finally have, the empty miles to watch, and the pricing fight worth having.

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As of Nov 2025, Waymo is delivering over 250,000 rides a week. In today's episode, I sit down with Drago Anguelov Head of Research at Waymo to unpack the AI behind autonomous driving: from 3D Sensing & Spatial Reasoning to AI foundation models and Social Intelligence.

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What does it take to build a world-class transportation system - and keep it world-class for 25 years? I am Jinhua Zhao, Welcome to the Mobility Forum - where the leading minds in transportation come together to shape how cities move.

Today, I sit down with Shashi Verma, Chief Technology Officer of Transport for London - the man who has personally touched every major innovation TfL has delivered over the past two decades. from Oyster Card, contactless payment to Crossrail and congestion charging.

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A common myth: “China’s Electric Vehicle industry succeeded only because of top-down governance.”

Wrong.

China succeeded:

NOT through authoritarian mandates

NOT through subsidies alone

But through ecosystem alignment—of markets, policies, and consumers

As tariffs escalate between the U.S. and China, electric vehicles (EVs) are the newest casualty.

But the real threat isn’t foreign competition—it’s domestic inaction.

While the U.S. protects its turf, China is building an electric future.

Trade wars don’t build industries. Ecosystem alignments do.

Five Reasons China Pulled Ahead and What it can Teach the U.S.