The Courier

Los Angeles is many things, but it’s definitely a town where diffuse power structures make it difficult to build political movements. That’s doubly true when you’re asking both local citizens and elected officials to buck the status quo, and reconsider how they get around the city. That’s why Streets for All’s success at building a coalition for safe streets and multi-modal transport systems is so inspiring, while ideally serving as a template for similar movements nationwide.

In today’s podcast, I chatted with Michael Schneider, the organization’s Founder & CEO about how to replicate his group’s success, what it took to get measure HLA passed (including lots and lots of money, something he credits to his days as a startup founder,) why LA is still struggling to reshape its streets (hint: it’s also about money, or the lack thereof) and a few wonkier topics like charter reform.

Also on the pod: Greg, Athena and Jonah dive into gender inequity across transport, eVTOLs taking off, World Cup transit troubles, super fast fundraising, Curbivore's latest speakers, and more. Listen in!

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When it comes to sustainable mobility startups, New York City finds itself in a peculiar position. Blessed with a legacy of strong public transit infrastructure, local politicos have crafted an ecosystem that encourages all sorts of clean transport and logistics innovation: bikesharing and cargo bikes, waterborne freight and delivery lockers, to name a few.

And while these urban conditions spawn all sorts of fascinating startups that work in the Tri-state, those same companies then struggle when they try to scale up and serve other parts of the country. Equally vexing: many concepts that work well in Europe or Asia might want to use NYC as a beachhead for a U.S. launch, but are then stymied by the fact that U.S. regulations or other localization factors might be too byzantine to navigate.

NYC leaders set out to solve this problem with launch of BATWorks, teaming up with the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator and Cambridge Innovation Center, effectively pairing the nation’s three biggest tech hubs outside of the SF Bay Area in a shared mission to incubate, pilot and commercialize clean technologies.

In today’s episode of Zag Talk, Jonah sat down with Alex Mitchell, Senior Vice President of LACI BATWorks, to talk about the mission, how startups can better work with governments, and his unique background in the mobility ecosystem. Plus, Sela, Greg and Jonah dig into the latest Waymo news, Egypt’s fast-growing delivery startup, gambling on traffic, and the Citrini report that temporarily popped the stock market. Listen in!

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

Some days it feels like insurance is devouring the entire mobility economy, with rising premiums taking down transportation options new and old alike. Auto insurance premiums have jumped a whopping 64% in the past five years, driven partially by a labor shortage but even more by the fact that cars have become computers on wheels, and your average sensor + chip stack doesn’t take kindly to being in a fender bender. Re-calibration of driver assistance systems in late model cars has quickly climbed to 36% of total repair estimates, averaging around $1.2-2.5k per claim.

While this can be a headache for individual car owners, collectively it can be the death knell for a fleet or shared operator. Last week, Zipcar announced it was shutting down its Boston HQ, as owner Avis streamlines its carsharing arm into its larger operations; this comes after its slow retreat from once-promising markets like the U.K.

New entrants aren’t immune from these challenges either. While robotaxi operators are aiming to be safer than human drivers, they’ll need to rack up years of driving data to realize those risk-adjusted pricing benefits. In the meantime, fixing the damage to a $100k+ AV is going to be a lot spendier than when a human TNC driver decides the 10th little dent on his or her old Camry isn’t even worth getting buffed out.

There are, of course, things that both regulators and corporate actors can do to ameliorate these issues. On today’s podcast, Jonah chats with Ed Walker, Practice Leader of Shared Economy, New Mobility and Autonomous Vehicles at Hub International, about recent state level reforms, like California’s SB 371, or a new bill in the works in Florida, that should help bring some relief to insurance prices. He and I also dig deep into what steps mobility startups can take, especially as they’re getting off the ground, to bake in the best practices that should lead to lower costs over the course of their businesses.

Elsewhere on the pod: Greg, Athena and Jonah jump in to the market’s reaction to Lyft and Uber’s latest earnings, Waymo’s latest fundraising haul, Uber Eats’ foray into Turkey, and how Jamaica is using drones to recover from Hurricane Melissa. Do tune in!

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

Your favorite podcast — Zag Talk — is back for an all new season. Today we kick things off by chatting with Seth Cohen, Co-Founder of Sweetfin, a 15-unit fast casual restaurant chain focused on poké, raw fish and bowls. Oftentimes on the podcast we talk about delivery innovations — new robotics, product launches, policy changes, etc. — but Seth takes us through the nitty-gritty of making delivery actually work for a real business. And no surprise: it’s not easy! While “the economics used to be very clear,” he makes the case that it’s now very hard to understand how much you’re actually paying for a delivery order, and whether or not restaurants have become overly reliant on price-conscious consumers scrolling the 3PD apps just looking for the best deal.

There’s plenty of other industry news to bite into this week as well: I’m joined by Greg and Sela as we discuss the latest robotaxi trials and tribulations (in both the U.S. and Europe,) TrueCar’s interesting go-private deal, and why India and China are trying to crack down on super-fast / super-cheap delivery. Listen in!

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HOT INDUSTRY NEWS & GOSSIP

AV overload! Yesterday’s Urban Autonomy Summit was a huge success! Thank you to everyone that came out, we’ll be releasing recordings and photos shortly. In the meantime, some of the most recent news that our esteemed panelists got into: Waabi raised $1 billion (a record for Canadian startups) and plans to move its AV trucking tech into robotaxis for Uber. Meanwhile Lyft and the City of Hamburg are pioneering a framework to launch AV taxis in Germany, while Gatik started commercial autonomous trucking operations. Down in San Diego, the local transportation operator has come out against self-driving vehicles, while Waymos just went live in Miami.

Man vs machine: New reports from our partners at Obi and Gridwise paint an interesting picture of the evolving dynamic as AVs and human-powered ridehails go head-to-head. Obi’s data shows Waymo’s price premium over Uber and Lyft has narrowed to 12-27%, while Gridwise showed that driver earnings came down in cities where humans face robotic competition.

Micromobility keeps on spinning: Third Lane Mobility, the parent co. of shared micromobility operators Bird and Spin, just raised $20 million in new funding, powering plans to deploy 35,000 new vehicles this year, in markets like Atlanta, LA, Nashville, Seattle, Rome and Tel Aviv. While not the humongous rounds of the ZIRP era, this is a nice validation that the company’s found sustainable financial footing. Third Lane’s also creating a new Transportation Advisory Board, helmed by Gabe Klein, to work with cities on better plans and processes.

The sky’s the limit! Drone deliverer Zipline just hauled in $600 million, bringing its total funding to a cool $7.6B. Zipline has now made over two million deliveries, and plans to expand to Houston and Phoenix in the coming months.

The world keeps building transit: The Transport Politic has charted out all the new public transit lines that opened in 2025, with China managing to cut the ribbon on a whopping 930 kilometers of new metro and light rail service. Meanwhile, we should give some honorable mentions to cities like Tampere, Finland which inaugurated 4.7 km of new light rail, and Ahvaz, Iran which should open 23.3 km of new metro in 2026. In 1990, America boasted four of the world’s top twenty metro systems; in another few years we’ll have zero…

Why can’t we have nice things too? Because we lost the state capacity to keep costs in check! Two fresh examples… LA Metro approved (yay) the Sepulveda Pass Transit Corridor, connecting the San Fernando Valley with the Basin via heavy rail. But the board opted for a modified project, cutting a few miles (and multiple useful rail connections) off the project, which had swollen from an estimated $6 billion to a whopping $24.2 billion (and even that’s in 2023 dollars.) The project is now only about 9 miles, and includes just four stations, so it’ll be unclear what they can blame the costs on when the newest estimates come out. Meanwhile, Arizona legislators pulled the plug on a rail extension that had ballooned to about $400M for just three quarters of a mile of street-running operations.

Tesla sturm und drang: Oh Elon… the automaker pulled its safety drivers out of its Austin robotaxi pilot, only for it to be revealed they’re instead just trailing behind in another car (optics, baby!) Meanwhile, at the behest of CA regulators, the company is renaming and rejiggering some of its ADAS products, making its lane-keeping feature only available via subscription. And maybe Tesla doesn’t even want to be an automaker any more; yesterday’s quarterly earnings update saw car sales tumble 9%, with the company planning to discontinue its Model S and X and instead make humanoids and offer transportation as a service. One spot of good news, depending on your perspective, Alex Roy did just managed to drive a Model 3 cross-country without a single disengagement.

Not so SMART: In a sad development, SMART grant funding has been zeroed out in 2026 Transportation, Housing and Urban Development (THUD) funding, with the remaining $204M in funds reallocated to other programs. SMART grants have been a big driver of cities’ curbside innovations, alongside other tech-forward deployments. Overall transit funding notched a slight gain in funding, working out to about seven tenths of a percent.

Super-app-ifragilisticexpialidocious: InDrive, the bid-based ridehailing platform that’s big in emerging markets, is the latest mobility platform to set its sights on becoming a “super app.” The company’s recently launched grocery delivery and in-app advertising (love those margins!) which has helped grow these new revenue streams to 15% of the overall sales mix.

Calling all climate-tech founders! Our friends at the L.A. Cleantech Incubator are launching their Brooklyn Army Terminal innovation hub (talk about an east coast - west coast collab!) and now they’re about to start their first round of pilots. Learn more on Feb. 5 about BATWorks’ plan to support companies deploying technology in live operating environments while building traction with NYC based partners.

Well this won’t help our cities rebound… U.S. population growth slowed to some of the lowest levels in history, fueled largely by a huge outflow of immigrants. In a move that will only worsen matters, states like Texas and Florida are now looking to curtail H-1B visa holders. Maaaaybe this immigration and civil rights crack down has gone far enough to shake a few Republicans from the cause: “Latinas for Trump” Co-Founder and Florida State Senator Ileana Garcia says “It’s gone too far” (after she was profiled by TSA at the airport.) I guess the meme about leopards eating faces has finally come true…

Still golden: Startup seed funding deal sizes have reached record bigness, with over 40% of seed and Series A investment in the year so far going to rounds of $100M+. And despite all the naysayers, California-based companies pulled in 63% of all startup funding last year, a record high.

A few good links: Austin gets ok from feds for watered down light rail. Brightline bonds downgraded to junk. On the need for autonomy-focused infrastructure. Atlanta officials secretly paused plans to advance voter-backed light rail project. Luna raises €1.5M for AI-powered bike and motorcycle rider assistance. Automotus and INRIX partner on real-time curb occupancy data. Foxconn and Mitsubishi Fuso plan EV bus. Trump Admin plans to redevelop DC neighborhood. Jascha Franklin-Hodge steps down as Boston’s Chief of Streets. Samsung scales up food delivery bot. Three years after opening of $12B+ opening, NYC’s East Side Access hasn’t resulted in improved travel times for most commuters. NJ to require e-bike licenses. SF reconsidering delivery bots. New data shows EV adoption results in better air locally. To…

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Over the past few months we’ve had the distinct pleasure of digging deep in the world of sustainable delivery: we’ve kicked the tires on the new Honda Fastport, snuck in to Amazon’s NYC equad operations and studied how cities and third party delivery networks are working together to get couriers onto e-bikes.

That’s all well and good… but those are huge companies that have big bucks to spend on pilots (or worse yet, PR stunts masquerading as pilots.) What about the every day businesses that want to move their goods a bit more sustainably? And what of the hard scrabble logistics businesses that need green mobility to be not just “the right thing to do,” but actually work profitably?

That’s why Jonah was pleased to sit down with Kevin Savage, the COO of Delivery Mates, for the final episode of this season of the Zag Talk podcast. Many others have tried, with a rather spotty track record, to make carbon-free deliveries work. Delivery Mates, with its fleet of electric vans, e-mopeds and equads, and some special sauce around its in-house software, may just have cracked the code on making it work.

Do give the episode a listen; Kevin shares plenty of insights from decades in the logistics biz. Plus, Sela and Jonah go deep on London’s latest plan to tackle congestion, the newest sad SPAC saga (hint: it’s Luminar,) Starship’s partnership with Uber and much 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

As robotaxis race towards becoming a regular part of our mobility landscape, it at first looked like Lyft had no interest in joining the competition, instead letting deep pocked competitors like Waymo and Uber push ahead (while wisely avoiding the costly mistakes that took down others like Cruise and Argo AI.) But in the past year, the pink mustache has emerged as a serious AV contender, striking up meaningful partnerships with the likes of May Mobility, Mobileye, Nexar, Tensor, Benteler, Baidu and even Waymo itself. Lyft-branded robotaxis are now rolling around Midtown Atlanta, with more geographies set to come online shortly.

Stephen Hayes, Lyft’s VP of Autonomous, Fleets, and Driver Operations, has been leading that charge, alongside other weighty responsibilities like orchestrating the company’s fleet management platform for tens of thousands of vehicles, while trying to keep Lyft’s human drivers from sweating too much about the idea of mechanical competition. (Talk about a tricky job!)

Stephen and Jonah chat all about that, Lyft’s evolution over the past decade and a half, the lessons learned from running Flexdrive and much more in a must-listen episode of the podcast. Plus, Zag’s Athena Browning and Jonah Bliss get into all the latest mobility news: what to make of Q3 earnings, the boom in used bikes and top takeaways from Smart City Expo 2025.

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

A city can spend all the money in the world on making its streets multi-modal, on transit investments and the like, but if all the jobs are still located out in the burbs, commuters will likely opt to stick with their cars. That’s why corporate mobility is so important — the interplay between governments and employers that can nudge workers onto greener mobility options.

For this episode of Zag Talk, Jonah Bliss chats with Maria Angelica, an urban planner and consultant at Factual about the challenges that cities, workers and employers face, the carrots and sticks that can be deployed (which can really vary depending on if you’ve got a single job site or a distributed workforce) and innovative approaches being deployed in Europe and worldwide.

More importantly, Maria has authored a new course on Corporate Mobility for UMX, the European Union’s free, self-guided educational platform for all things transportation. Interested parties can take a crack at the course now.

Also on this week’s pod, Zag Daily Editor Sela Musa and Jonah chat about high-end two-wheelers like Also and Infinite Machine, big transportation changes headed to the U.K., Grubhub’s new partnership with Instacart, the latest plans for California Forever and more. Tune in above, and thank you to our episode sponsors at EITC Urban Mobility.

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

Dense housing and public transit: two great tastes that taste better together. You’d think this classic combo would be a no-brainer, as building mid-rise housing helps with affordability and locating it near rail stations lets folks cut down on commuting costs, while putting more commuters near each metro stop leads to improved transit ridership. Talk about a virtuous cycle!

And yet in California, and the nation as a whole, this has been an oddly hard sell. You’ll see rapid transit stations, some over a century old, surrounded by incredibly expensive single family homes. Finally, finally, this is set to change, with Governor Newsom just signing Senate Bill (SB) 79, the Abundant & Affordable Homes Near Transit Act. Championed by state Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco,) this hard-fought win comes after nearly a decade of trying, with similar bills not quite making it all the way to the finish line.

On the eve of the bill’s passage, Jonah Bliss caught up with Senator Wiener, to discuss the statecraft that went into creating this landmark legislation, what’s changed to finally get other state leaders ready to embrace more housing, how California can continue to lead the nation, the role he views for the state in an era of a hostile federal government (not to mention a few hostile tech leaders in his home district,) and much more.

This is a must-listen conversation, please do tune in to the full thing (which also includes a few news items of the week: new transit routes, air races and drone regulations, and the role of AI in transportation.

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

Managing policy for DoorDash is no mean feat; the globe-spanning 3PD often finds itself interfacing with cities across all sorts of issues: traffic / road safety, merchant relationships, courier behavior and more (and as the company continues to push into new territory — like drones or its in-house delivery bot — the regulatory interactions will only grow.)

That’s why we were delighted to sit down with Max Rettig, Vice President, Head of Global Public Policy at DoorDash, to understand how the company views the policy landscape. Under his leadership, DoorDash has advanced some quite novel policy that has the opportunity — including portable benefits — to ensure gig workers receive health and safety net contributions — that stay with them even as they hop between competing platforms.

Also on the pod… Jonah chats with Sela Musa about driverless trains, the latest spac-tacular startup, Telo trucks, the state of micromobility in the UK, and more. Listen in!

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

Delivery is tough work, especially in dense, urban environments. Couriers and policymakers often find themselves pulled between competing priorities: cash-strapped workers often don’t have the resources to invest in a good e-bike, driving them to cheaper alternatives that aren’t reliable enough to get the job done and are prone to dangerous battery fires.

That’s where Whizz comes in, offering courier-oriented e-bike rentals, while bundling in tricky things like maintenance and charging. And while renting is already easier on the wallet, Whizz is working with both the 3PDs and select cities to further subsidize their bikes, putting sustainable options into the hands of those that need it most.

With the Zag Daily podcast now back from its summer break, Jonah caught up with Whizz’s co-founder Mike Peregudov to hear about the company’s latest expansion plans, the lessons he’s learned as he’s scaled the business, what it’s like to work with the big apps and even bigger cities, plus much more. Greg and Jonah also chat about Via’s IPO, while Athena Browning stops by to fill us in on all things connected and aerial.

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