Mobility Forum with Jinhua Zhao
I am Jinhua Zhao. Welcome to the Mobility Forum, where the leading minds in transportation come together to shape how people move. zhaojinhua.com
Episodes
Grounded AI in State DOTs: What California, Texas, and Utah Are Learning
What does it actually take to make AI work inside a transportation agency?In this episode, Jinhua brings together AI leaders from Caltrans, Texas DOT, and Utah DOT to explore how state transportation department are moving from AI experimentation to implementation.TxDOT is saving money through AI-powered invoice processing. Caltrans is exploring AI-enabled traffic management as an alternative to co
From Building Models to Judging Results: Fantastic AI Frontier in Transportation Research
AI in transportation research has gone through four eras: pre-DNN models, deep neural networks, large language models, and now AI agents. Each one changed what AI could do. Each one also changed the role of our theory.In the pre-DNN era, the analyst wrote the model: the variables, the equations, the form of the utility function. Data estimated a relatively small number of parameters.In the DNN e
80% of Heavy Trucks Can't See Cyclists in Bike Lanes: Direct Vision, Blind Zones, and Truck Safety Laws
The trucks on our streets are getting larger, their blind zones are increasing, and the risk of more — and more serious - crashes are on the rise.But what can a city or a state do?Massachusetts is in the midst of reckoning with this issue. Through the implementation of a first-in-nation type law on truck safety devices and the largest study of medium and heavy-duty truck direct vision in the cou
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
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, coll
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
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/
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 age
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 Ra
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/
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 a
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 ov
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