Mobility Forum with Jinhua Zhao

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.

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 livesMichel 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 modelThe 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.

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.

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/

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/