Mobility Forum with Jinhua Zhao

Jinhua Zhao
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Education
  • Updated Weekly

Welcome to the Mobility Forum, where the leading minds in transportation come together to shape how we move. About Me: zhaojinhua.com Mobility Forum Newsletter signup: https://zhaojinhua.com/mf/

Episodes

  1. 3d ago

    What Does It Take to Operate a Driverless Fleet? Inside the Infrastructure of AV Fleet Operations with Ming Maa, CEO of Moove

    What does it take to keep a fleet of driverless vehicles running 24/7? Much of the autonomous vehicle conversation focuses on the technology inside the car. But once AV begin operating at scale, an entirely different set of challenges emerges: Where do they charge? Who cleans and maintains them? How do operators manage hundreds of vehicles across multiple facilities? Where does the electricity come from? And what must cities do to prepare? In this episode of Mobility Forum, Jinhua Zhao speaks with Ming Ma, co-founder and CEO of Moove AV, which operates Waymo fleet in Phoenix, Miami, and Las Vegas. Ming takes us behind the scenes of autonomous mobility—from charging, maintenance, sensor cleaning, parking, and fleet orchestration to power constraints, workforce needs, weather, deadheading, and the economics of operating robotaxis at scale. The autonomous vehicle itself may account for only 30–40% of its total five-year cost of operation. The remaining 60–70% comes from the operational ecosystem around it. The conversation also explores what this transition means for cities. Power availability, zoning, parking, pickup and drop-off design, and coordination with AV operators could increasingly determine how quickly and how effectively autonomous mobility scales. The autonomous vehicle may drive itself. But the system around it does not operate itself.

  2. 4d ago

    The Next Generation of Activity-Based Travel Demand Modeling with Michel Bierlaire

    EPFL's Michel Bierlaire — creator of Biogeme and one of the field's foundational voices in discrete choice modeling — joins Jinhua Zhao to lay out the next generation of travel demand models. The shift: from individual trips to full-day activity schedulesfrom an assumed decision hierarchy to every decision on the same level, with the data deciding the orderfrom isolated travelers to households, colleagues, and social networksfrom a static population snapshot to synthetic populations that live whole lives Michel explains: how to manage the choice set explosion in four moves: Formulate → Optimize → Choose → Estimate: billions of possible daily schedules written as constraints, solved without enumeration, simulated for random utility, and estimated from a sampled choice set.why the payoff is the broader set of questions a model can pose, not forecast precision: telework as a change in the primary activity, who wins and who loses below the segment average, trip chaining, school hours, off-peak rail demandhow a synthetic population acquires a life course: demographic priors updated against each censuswhat happened when the Swiss Federal Railways tested the method inside its own activity-based model The question for transportation agencies is not whether the latest activity based model is more precise. It is whether it allows us to ask—and answer—questions we could not before.

  3. Aug 2

    Canada Carries Twice the Transit Ridership Per Capita: What Vancouver and Toronto Do That US Cities Can Learn

    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.

  4. Jun 26

    Gas Tax Is Going to Zero, Oregon DOT Spent 25 Years Building the Replacement: Road Usage Charge

    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. If we want to joint live session of Mobility Forum, subscribe here: https://zhaojinhua.com/mobility-forum/

  5. Jun 22

    The Fiscal Cliff Playbook: Inside Chicago and San Francisco's Transit Reset with Tom McKone & Julie Kirschbaum

    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.If we want to joint live session of Mobility Forum, subscribe here: https://zhaojinhua.com/mobility-forum/

  6. Jun 14

    Microtransit at Scale: Via CEO Daniel Ramot on Citywide Transit and the AI in the Control Room

    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. If we want to joint live session of Mobility Forum, subscribe here: https://zhaojinhua.com/mobility-forum/

  7. Jun 11

    Stop Benchmarking Copenhagen: The Cities You Should Be Learning From Instead

    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. If we want to joint live session of Mobility Forum, subscribe here: https://zhaojinhua.com/mobility-forum/

  8. Jun 11

    Robotaxis Are Here: AV Lessons From San Francisco, Austin, and Washington

    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. If you want to join us live at Mobility Forum or receive updates, subscribe at ⁠zhaojinhua.com/newsletter⁠

  9. Jun 11

    Governing Autonomous Vehicle: Heaven, Hell and Who Decides

    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. If you want to join us live at Mobility Forum or receive updates, subscribe at zhaojinhua.com/newsletter

  10. Jun 11

    Research Stack Powering the World's Most Experienced Autonomous Driver

    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. If you want to join us live at Mobility Forum or receive updates, subscribe at ⁠zhaojinhua.com/newsletter⁠

    Research Stack Powering the World's Most Experienced Autonomous Driver

  11. Jun 10

    Inside Transport for London's Secret Sauce: How TfL Got London’s Businesses to Fund a £19B Railway, and the 4 Moves US Cities Can Steal

    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. If we want to joint live session of Mobility Forum, subscribe here: https://zhaojinhua.com/mobility-forum/

  • 11 Episodes

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

Welcome to the Mobility Forum, where the leading minds in transportation come together to shape how we move. About Me: zhaojinhua.com Mobility Forum Newsletter signup: https://zhaojinhua.com/mf/

Information