Why is US public transit successful in some places and not in others? Christof Spieler believes the answer lies in how leaders deal with public opinion, why they build transit infrastructure in the first place, and the metrics they use to measure success.

From the private sector to the public sector, Gillian Gillett has found that her willingness to point out that the emperor has no clothes is an important tool to use to get the ball rolling on important issues like transportation, housing, and equity.

City of Los Angeles’ Diego de la Garza and City of Oakland’s Ryan Russo are executives working in the transportation trenches every day. They are not only deploying mobility, but they are doing it equitably. How does thinking bigger than transportation bring us closer to The City of Tomorrow?

Without someone to help translate between the private sector that can move fast and the public sector that is more measured, we may never reach The City of Tomorrow. The ability to translate is the superpower of Jeffrey Tumlin, a principal at consulting firm Nelson Nygaard.

John Yi, executive director of advocacy group Los Angeles Walks, and Jason Zogg, an urban planner at Ford, share tools to interact with the community around us, including the largest public space in our communities: our streets.

Adonia Lugo and Romel Pasqual built CicLAvia, an event that catalyzes vibrant public spaces, active transportation, and good health through car-free street events. The event has helped over 1.6 million people access their streets in a different way and made them open to everyone. What can our streets look like in The City of Tomorrow?

From Sarah Kaufman’s start helping to make NYC transit data more accessible to her groundbreaking research on women’s challenges in mobility, she ensures that diversity, openness, and courage are critical elements in how we’ll build the future.

Rob Puentes of the Eno Center for Transportation recognizes that relying on the federal government to provide solutions for transportation problems is a major barrier to overcoming them. Instead, we need to think about how we frame the problems and the solutions.

Matt Brezina’s superpower of recognizing good ideas and amplifying them helped him see the potential of a “Hands Across America,” but for bike lanes, to highlight the need for better bike infrastructure and make advocacy more salient to more people.

From growing up in an immigrant family in car-centric upstate NY to a fortuitous ice cream cone on a Boston sidewalk, Shin-pei Tsay has felt the impact of public spaces on belonging and committed her career to building spaces to “make you feel like you belong.”