The Courier

Australia and America have a lot in common: sprawling suburbs, a deep love affair with the automobile and like just about everywhere in the Anglosphere — an inability to build infrastructure at reasonable costs. But despite the big price tags, Australia (and the United Kingdom) have done a far better job of figuring out what to build and actually ponying up the money needed to get it done. Australia’s largest cities have spent the past couple decades building new metros, light rail lines and other transit infrastructure, while the UK has found creative ways to fund major projects through development and land value capture. Of course, that doesn’t mean every project is perfect, or that the money will last forever.

To better understand the similarities and differences, this week’s podcast guest is Russell King, an acclaimed transport strategist and the man behind Transport Leaders. Russell has spent much of his career at the intersection of transportation and public policy, first as a councillor in London, where he expanded the city’s iconic bikesharing scheme south of the Thames and advanced a largely developer-funded extension of the Underground to Battersea. He later moved to Sydney, where he helped oversee a multibillion-dollar infrastructure boom and reforms to everything from taxi regulations to transit fares.

We dig into Australia’s rapid adoption of Chinese electric vehicles, why a country that pioneered autonomous trucks in its mines has made so little progress putting robotaxis on its streets, and how neighboring New Zealand is tackling road-user charges and congestion pricing. We also explore Australia’s impressive recent rail-building spree, why the pipeline of new projects may be drying up and the country’s plans to spend astronomical sums on high-speed rail. As a Californian, it’s comforting to know we’re not the only ones struggling to figure out how to build a train… Listen in!

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An autonomous vehicle can have the greatest lidar and cameras in the world, but how does it “understand” what it’s looking at? Robotaxis and delivery bots alike need a source of ground truth that lets them comprehend the state of the world. Properly equipped, an AV can ideally enter a new space for the first time, and instead of having to figure it out the way a human would, it can pull up a rich history of how that location has looked over the years.

Building that knowledge is complicated, requiring constant scanning of real world locations. But what if folks had been serendipitously scanning their streets and cities all along? That’s the premise behind Niantic Spatial, borne out of the company that popularized the hit mobile Pokémon Go, which sent millions of people into their neighborhoods, smartphones in hand.

For the latest episode of The Courier, I caught up with Brian McClendon, Niantic Spatial’s CTO. Beyond visual positioning systems for bots and cars, Brian has an incredibly rich history across the geospatial industry, having previously spearheaded iconic efforts like Google Maps, Google Earth, Keyhole and SGI. Listen in for a fascinating conversation about the future of mapping and location intelligence!

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Building the world’s biggest RV rental platform would be ambitious enough. But what if you also launched a suite of fleet-management tools, and then an entirely new division insuring autonomous vehicles, with rates that automatically drop whenever self-driving is engaged?

That’s the story of The Ride Platform, the company once known as Outdoorsy, which has since launched brands like Wheelbase and Roamly FSD. Once I sat down with Jeff Cavins, the company’s founder and CEO, I realized his ambitions spanned even beyond mobility. From inventing the special effects in many of your favorite 90s blockbusters, to building out reams of data centers before they became an AI-related hot potato, to working with Steve Jobs to popularize corporate video calls, Jeff’s been at the forefront of many of the technologies that have become indispensable over the past few decades. Given that impressive track record, I’d say expect The Ride Platform to soon be a household name.

Jeff and I chatted for the premiere of the latest season of The Courier podcast, following Greg and I catching listeners up on all the greatest mobility news they may have missed over the summer. Listen in to the season premiere, and be sure to also catch our partners at The Ride Platform when they join us at the Urban Autonomy Summit — Austin.

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It’s been a rocky road for new mobility startups these past few years. Late 2020 until early 2022 saw rock bottom interest rates fuel massive funding for all sorts of new companies: many raised far more cash than their fundamentals ever justified. When rates shot up, many companies languished on the vine. They couldn’t raise new cash, but they had enough in the bank to make their deaths rather drawn out.

While that played out, the stronger players clawed their way to profitability. From ridehailing to food delivery, to micromobility and beyond, there are finally impressive transportation businesses growing in both footprint and profitability. That’s why, for this season of Zag Talk’s final episode, Jonah sat down with Florent Roulet. He’s Managing Director at Stifel’s Global Technology Group, where he puts together transactions across the mobility tech landscape, including interesting deals like Getaround’s recent merger with GoMore.

He and Jonah talk about how the new mobility landscape has matured, why he thinks that today’s best startups have the “luxury of optionality” whereby they are fully in control of their destinies and what’s next for the sector. Wrapping things up: Greg, Athena and Jonah also get into SpaceX’s IPO, ponder the fate of Mexico’s cheap new EV and revisit the biggest developments of the year thus far. Listen in!

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Far too many bike shops treat two-wheelers like they’re high-end sporting equipment: sleek and expensive pieces of hardware that are meant to be stored in the closet when not out bounding trails. As electric bicycling takes off, brands are finding they need new pathways to get consumers to treat these machines like something that can replace a car: take it to work, use it to run errands, and feel confident that when something goes wrong, it’ll be easy to fix.

Dan Carr, Co-Founder and CEO of Wombi, has been working to fix that, as he’s scaled his company across Australia, before taking it stateside. In today’s episode of Zag Talk, Jonah sat down with him in his Culver City bike-shop and HQ, and we get into what it takes to build the financial and operational layers to offer bikes on a subscription basis, how biking compares in the U.S. versus down under, how the bike industry has recovered these past few years, and the current fundraising environment. Jonah's had the pleasure of knowing Dan since he first started kicking the tires on a U.S. market launch, so it was a real delight that the team at MobilityVC could participate in Wombi's most recent funding round.

Also on the pod, Greg and Jonah chat about Walmart’s expansion into 30-minute delivery (inadvertently predicting that they would soon start offering food delivery, we swear we recorded this a day before that news went live) and tear into Matternet and SpaceX’s public listings, while Sela reports on the latest developments at Micromobility Europe. Listen in!

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As the world transitions to autonomous mobility, consumer uptake rests on four core pillars: affordability, accessibility, safety and sustainability. In a bold new report, Ani Kelkar and Darius Scurtu, from our partners at the McKinsey Center for Future Mobility, argue that AVs will perform so well, that they will in fact be deflationary, driving down the cost of transportation and disrupting car ownership.

In today’s podcast, Jonah Bliss chats with Ani and Darius, as they get into why they think this is the moment that robotaxis truly take off. And the three of them dive into the tricky downstream effects that could come along for the ride: would cheaper mobility just mean endless congestion? Are voters and policymakers ready for these sorts of massive changes?

Also in the episode, Jonah, Greg and Athena analyze Q1’s financial reports, assess Lime’s pending IPO, discuss all the latest American transport trends headed to Europe and celebrate riding the D. Listen in!

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Los Angeles has always been the city of the future, offering the world a vision of what’s to come, for both better and worse. Lately, while the region has still delivered on some audacious goals — building dozens of new transit stations, transitioning the nation’s largest municipally owned utility to green energy while maintaining reasonable rates — many feel local leaders have come up short when it comes to the day-to-day items that make a city feel livable. Streets, even when they have new bike lanes, are often pockmarked; permits for housing take forever despite the need to house a large homeless population; local businesses are struggling.

The city is now at an inflection point, with voting in the first round of a mayoral election set for June 2nd. The three most viable candidates are Karen Bass, the incumbent mayor and a former congressperson; Nithya Raman, an urban planner turned city councilperson; and Spencer Pratt, a reality TV star who’s punched his way into the conversation thanks to high name recognition and money to burn.

In today’s episode, we hear from Councilmember Raman, who currently represents District Four, stretching from the iconic Hollywood Hills to the beautiful San Fernando Valley. In her six years in office, she’s built a progressive track record, working to improve governance, build safer streets, create housing and push towards a greener economy.

Before we get to the interview, recorded at Curbivore 2026, Jonah chats with Greg and Sela about the ITS European Congress, Helsinki’s glamorous new car-free bridge, Amazon’s supply chain push, Spirit’s bankruptcy, robotaxi pricing and more. Listen in!

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Third party delivery has gone on a wild ride over the last decade, going from an urban niche to a worldwide must-have. Along the way, the array of items that consumers can get at the push of a button has grown from restaurant meals, to grocery items, to just about any SKU you can dream of: hardware, toys, liquor, electronics, you name it.

Beryl Sanders, Uber’s Head of Grocery & Retail Partnerships, has led that charge, scaling up Uber Eats into novel verticals with new merchant relationships. Jonah Bliss sat down with her, live at Curbivore 2026, to hear what’s next for the delivery and mobility giant, including its just-launched returns feature (reverse logistics: so hot right now!)

Also on the pod, Jonah, Greg and Sela dig into the latest robotaxi news, share what’s working for micromobility operators in LatAm and Europe, and chew over Upshift’s pivot to tele-ops. Listen in!

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As AVs start to impact everything from traditional ridesharing, to mobility more broadly, to even delivery and city-scale systems, it's time to think about how public and private players can best prepare for this new autonomous future.

In today's podcast episode, Jonah Bliss and Harry Campbell (founder of The Rideshare Guy and The Driverless Digest) tear into these heady trends, tease which of them will get center stage at Curbivore, and retrace how the industry has evolved since the pandemic.

Also on the pod, Jonah, Greg and Athena dig into Also's latest fundraising haul for autonomous cargo bikes, WeRide's move into Dubai, Manna's $50M haul, encouraging road safety stats and more.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thecurbivore.com

There’s nothing worse than an almost perfect machine. If a machine misbehaves consistently, users will know not to trust it. But if it works right 99.9% of the time, by the time it fails, most humans will have given up on closely monitoring it. Professor Missy Cummings knows exactly how high those stakes can be — having famously served as one of the U.S. Navy’s first female fighter pilots, before moving on to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and now serving as Director of George Mason University’s Autonomy and Robotics Center.

In today’s episode, we dive deep into what she sees as the hidden dangers lurking behind AVs: humans that are too quick to trust fallible machines, too much latency between vehicles and their remote operators, incomplete regulations and a desire to keep costs in line. (These are topics so important that we’ll be revisiting them at Curbivore in April, where we’re bringing together regulators from the CPUC, alongside AV and delivery bot leaders.)

Also on the pod, Greg, Sela and Jonah dive into London’s new microhub alliance, Florida’s senile new speed limits, delivery cos pushing into physical AI, high gas prices and more. Listen in!

Curbivore is just three weeks away, and we’re excited to share more of the iconic speakers joining us April 16 & 17 in Downtown Los Angeles. Hear from leaders pushing delivery robotics, micromobility, gig work, next-gen parking, and even the Olympic Games forward! Check out all our speakers, and secure your tickets now!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thecurbivore.com