The Courier

If you think about the transportation world as “new mobility” and “old mobility,” it often seems that despite all the innovation of the past few years, it often happens in its own silo, leaving the classic world of American transportation — car dealers — unaffected. So that’s why this announcement, that Connexion Mobility has launched a partnership with Uber, caught our eye. This allows car dealers to dispatch courtesy vehicles for customers who’ve brought their own cars in for service, tapping into Uber’s pool of gig drivers, as opposed to forcing dealerships to maintain their own clunky networks of shuttles (or deal with maintaining a loaner fleet.)

Jonah Bliss chats with Connexion’s CEO Aaryn Nanioa about the launch, plus he gets into his own non-traditional path to the mobility world, as well as what it’s like running a publicly listed company.

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In this week’s edition of The Courier, Jonah chats with Rick Neubauer, Founder and CEO of Umojo. Rick’s mobility journey is an interesting one, with Umojo getting its start in the glamorous world of parking management. But as the action shifted to the curb, Rick sensed an opportunity, and now Umojo’s NexCity software helps cities like Boulder and Sacramento keep their streets and sidewalks well orchestrated. With an eye to the future, Rick also senses a few complementary uses for his tech that most cities haven’t unlocked yet, either.

Rick starts at 20:45; before that hear the latest from Greg and Jonah on transit ballot measures, supply chains, and the financial results from the likes of Uber and Yum! Brands.

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Alex Roy knows two things — how the mobility world works, and how to tell a damn good story. On the first front, he established himself on the legendary Cannonball Run race, held the record for fastest lap around Manhattan and served as Director of Special Operations for Argo AI. On the latter, he chaired the board of storytelling org The Moth, co-founded The Drive, co-hosts The Autonocast and even opened iconic nightclub The Box (I’d argue that few businesses rely on stories and mythos more than nightlife.)

Now he’s brought those two passions together with a new early stage venture fund — NIVC — that he’s started with ex-Rivian manufacturing maestro Patrick Hunt. Alex is looking to invest in companies that have what he calls “narrative command,” meaning they drive the conversation around their entire vertical. As Alex tells, it’s why the Ubers and Teslas of the world succeed, while the Argos don’t make it. Tune in (starting at the 17:10 mark) for a wide ranging conversation on mobility investments, AV regulations, semantics, charismatic leadership and more.

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With respect to the dozens of other companies that go by Kyte or Kite, the car rental via delivery startup Kyte looks like it may have hit a very bumpy road. Last week, Los Angeles-area customers received word the company was pulling out of the market — the nation’s largest for car usage — after about four years of local operations.

Intrigued, I headed to their website, where even earlier this week the homepage still touted their availability in other major markets like Chicago and Boston. But while those cities still have landing pages up, punch in a rental date after 11/7 and you’ll see that no cars are available. Other regions that seem to have lost service include Philadelphia, Atlanta, DC and Seattle.

It’s possible the company’s been hunting for fresh cash for some time now, despite closing on a $250 million debt facility in March. While the company’s reportedly been doing the rounds for traditional venture investment, it also seems to have kicked the tires on a crowdfunding campaign via StartEngine. Equity crowdfunding has a mixed track record, but at least with consumer-oriented, hardware-focused brands you can make the case that consumers are buying into a product they like and getting a physical perk out of it; Kyte’s investment perks are discounts on car rentals, that’s about as exciting as when the local little league team sells of those books of coupons to nearby businesses.

As I learned at Turo, renting and sharing cars is a tough biz, even the big guys like Hertz and Avis are facing slumping sales these days. Other upstarts have seen worse fates: Fluid Truck just filed for Chapter 11, Upshift — which also delivers cars to users — seems to be pivoting to fleet software (Greg shares more in the podcast.)

One big challenge for operators in this space is figuring out if you’re appealing to locals or travelers. If you’re going after travelers, you need to be available at the airport, and you plant the flag in tourist-heavy cities like Vegas and Orlando, even though they have smaller local populations. Kyte seemed more focused on serving locals, trying to get car-light denizens of coastal cities to use the service when they needed a ride for a special occasion.

Tune in to the podcast for more thoughts on why that’s so challenging a model. Greg and I also chat about Walmart vs Amazon, and then Placer.ai’s Head of Analytical Research R.J. Hottovy stops by to talk about other winners and losers, both on the retail brand level and in terms of metropolitan areas. Listen in!

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Making delivery work is darn difficult: even when everything’s going well with the customers and the kitchens, you still have to manage hundreds of thousands of very loosely managed workers. With unaligned incentives, why should a courier make sure an order is right, or wait around for a customer that’s running late, or even verify that a would-be scammer actually did receive their order?

One potential solution to this problem would be to convert 3PDs to a delivery service partner (DSP) model, similar to the one used by Amazon or FedEx. That leads to local businesses owning their routes in different cities, keeping management closer to customers and workers. We’ve actually just seen DoorDash start exploring this concept, as it launched its Local Service Partner program in Austin and Fresno.

This week I sat down with First Delivery’s CEO Andrew Nakkache to game out how this system might work at scale, and to learn more about how he’s built his own delivery software business.

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When’s the last time you pulled up to a gas station and the pump didn’t work? While that’s a very rare occasion indeed, it’s sadly all too frequent an occurrence in the world of electric vehicle charging. And if people aren’t confident they can power up their cars, they’re not going to want to switch from gas-powered vehicles.

Kameale C. Terry saw first hand just how many of those reliability problems were relatively easy to solve, and so she started ChargerHelp! to partner with charging networks nationwide to help them get their uptime stats into acceptable territory. She joined me to “nerd out” about EV charging hardware, workforce development and scaling a labor-intensive business.

Plus, Greg and Jonah pontificate about exactly what sort of vaporware Tesla might reveal at tonight’s “We, Robot” event on the WB backlot, and get into the weeds with all the latest developments from Amazon, Uber, Waymo, DoorDash, camera-based bus lane enforcement and more.

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Anyone that’s been following the news knows it’s been an interesting time in New York City governance, to say the least. At the state level, Governor Hochul killed congestion pricing at the last second, and now a federal indictment of Mayor Adams has made things even more complicated.

Despite that, every day thousands of city workers show up and put in the hard work it takes to make city life — transportation, the environment, public space, delivery logistics — function a bit better. That’s why I was so excited to sit down with Dawn Miller, Senior Advisor to NYC's Chief Climate Officer, about all the amazing mobility initiatives still being pushed forward: the electrification of delivery and micromobility, a climate resilience plan, reducing indirect emissions, and so much more.

Prior to her current role, Dawn served as Deputy Chief of Staff to the Mayor, VP of Policy and Partnerships at Coord and Chief of Staff at the Taxi and Limousine Commission, so she also shares a number of helpful insights into how to sell a mobility or curb solution to government.

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After a brief summer break, The Courier is back in action. Jonah Bliss and Greg Lindsay explore what makes the urbanism of France — both old and new — work so well. But, might there be somewhere exotic in America that offers a taste of that progress? Then, Jordan Justus, CEO and Co-Founder of Automotus, drops by to discuss the state of curb management worldwide.

Tune in for the full discussion, but scroll through on thecurbivore.com some images of great French streetscapes for a full visual accompaniment.

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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

Want all your hottest urbanism, delivery, mobility and tech policy news in audio form?! Well you’re in luck, because Greg Lindsay and I are back with a new podcast — The Courier — now live. Listen in with the player above.

In episode one we dive in to some spicy topics: can the Olympics be car free, what does it mean for delivery and automation that the Chipotle CEO has hopped to Starbucks, how can cities keep cool, and more. Plus, I chat with Gary Chaglasyan about how PizzaBox AI’s new subscription platform is giving local restaurants a new tool to fight back against rising costs.

Think of this as a bit of a preview episode… we’ll be pushing The Courier to all your favorite podcast platforms shortly. In the meantime, Greg and I are on the hunt for great guests working on interesting projects; if you know someone we should talk to, please reply to this email with your suggestion! (And if you want some more inspo for what our past topics of interest have been, check out our earlier appearances together on the CoMotion Fast Forward podcast.)

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HOT INDUSTRY NEWS & GOSSIP

Car-free Olympics? With the Paris Olympics all wrapped up, all eyes are now on LA, where local leaders are promising a games sans automobiles. That may sound daunting, but SoCal pulled off a similar feat back for the ‘84 Olympics, and that was before the region had built hundreds of miles of new transit infrastructure. Check out the transit Service Guide to the 1984 Olympics here.

How does your nearest station stack up? There’s a hot new trend on the internet, where folks map out the number of riders making use of each station in a given public transit system. Here’s DC — looking not too shabby. And here’s LA — where 7th/Metro Center at this point may be the busiest American station outside NYC. Here’s SF BART — which hasn’t recovered too well from the pandemic. But BART looks amazing compared to San Jose’s VTA, where some stations get 24 riders per day (twenty four, not a typo.) Finally, gander at Vancouver’s ridership for a reminder of how much more sensible our neighbors to the north are.

Service cuts might only drive those numbers lower… A number of American transit operators are staring at bleak budget forecasts. Philly’s SEPTA has a $187 million shortfall starting in June ‘25. Boston’s MBTA may be short as much as $900 million by 2029. (And though the article blames transport woes for the city’s population loss, it’s not like the places people are moving to have great transit…) Not wanting to be left out, suburban towns surrounding Dallas are looking to cut their funding to DART, hoping to make the region’s paltry transit even worse.

Beantown bikes: The City of Boston just launched a new initiative to subsidize ebikes, using ARPA dollars to slash the cost of an electric bike or e-cargo bike by $800 to $1500. This comes hot off the heels of CargoB, the nation’s first shared cargo bike platform, launching in the region.

More pedestrian plazas, please! LA’s finally breaking ground on a project that will pedestrianize Broxton Avenue, in Westwood. With tens of thousands of UCLA students just up the street and a subway station under construction, Westwood Village is so close to being an urban oasis.

Cool curb partner news: Congrats to our friends at Itselectric for bringing their curbside chargers to Alameda, CA, right after a big win in Boston. Meanwhile, Automotus is taking its curbside analytics to Lincoln, Nebraska.

Shade inequity: A new study shows that the 400 hottest bus stops in NYC are a whopping 14.5 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the coolest 400. No surprise that the chill and leafy stops are generally in Manhattan and other wealthy neighborhoods, while the outer boroughs are left to bake. Maybe it’s time to bring La Sombrita to the Bronx?

Speaking of hot… Cities across the country aren’t just getting hotter, they’re getting particularly warmer at night. Towns like Vegas, Austin, Raleigh and Orlando have seen the number of hot nights spike, accelerated by the paving over of permeable surfaces to make way for new roads and SFHs. If you showed the pattern below to a radiologist, she’d scream.

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Now for some thoughts on economic mobility: A new study charts the diverging outcomes for the young adults born to low-income parents. In 38 of America’s 50 largest metro areas, 27 year olds born in 1992 are worse off than were those born in 1978. (Although on the positive side, white-Black earnings gaps for children from low-income families fell by 30%.) Play around with the interactive Opportunity Atlas to see how your region does; Tampa Bay, DC, San Diego, Las Vegas and Philadelphia all seem to have had the roughest economic fall in the past quarter century.

A big part of the change is of course due to our devolved Federalism, which has seen states with weaker labor laws poach jobs from those with more stringent protections. If a job paying 50k in Philly moves to Atlanta and now pays 45k, that may look like a “win” for Georgia, but the country as a whole is still worse off. When you factor in that these numbers don’t consider rising expenses for essentials like housing and transportation, you’ll remember why it’s all so important that we keep fighting the good fight. :)

A few good links: Indian p2p carsharer Zoomcar starts new distribution method: physical fulfillment centers. NJ Transit takes over abandoned bus routes after Coach USA bankruptcy. For sale for all you foamers: one gently used Caltrain locomotive. NYC curbs to get big new trash bins. Colorado Springs, military mecca, set to get new downtown bike lanes. Sign of the times — EV leaser Autonomy pivots to SaaS. Russian startup Whoosh looks to reintroduce micromobility to Brazil. MBTA service delayed due to cute baby whale. Flytrex hits 100K drone deliveries. Starship and Serve score new partners. Atlanta mayor questions budgetary feasibility of long-promised rail on Beltline. New Passport data shows curb activity heating up in summery beach towns.

Until next week!

- Jonah Bliss & The Curbivore Crew

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