How to (Wisely) Spend a Fortune on Transit, Down Under

America’s mid-term election may have been over a week ago, but the results are still trickling in. While most House and Senate candidates didn’t put transportation at the front of their agenda, the incoming Democratic majority is sure to prioritize a far more balanced approach than the outgoing congress. At the state and regional levels, transit was front and center in a number of campaigns. And when given the option, voters by and large voted for more transportation, and they were more than willing to pay for it.Washington: New Majorities, Familiar ProblemsStarting at the federal level, Democrats taking the House and Senate portends better days for public transit. With the IIJA surface transportation authorization extended through December 11th, it looks quite possible that negotiations about its replacement bill — the BUILD America 250 Act — will push into the new term. The current version sees public transit spending projected to dip; incoming Democratic majorities should press for stronger funding.Reauthorization also requires confronting the Highway Trust Fund’s structural deficit, with CBO projecting exhaustion in 2028. BUILD proposes federal registration fees on EVs and plug-in hybrids, but that wouldn’t close the gap. With gas prices still elevated, I don’t think we’ll see Dems, elected on the back of affordability concerns, pushing to raise the gas tax. A sensible compromise would be to directly tax domestic oil producers, since the cost of production hasn’t gone up alongside higher pump prices. But odds are we’ll just see more general-fund transfers.Dems also have an immediate fight over money Congress has already provided. FTA and OMB have stalled the Capital Investment Grants pipeline: in August, congressional Democrats identified more than $1.9 billion in unobligated, unallocated funding while accusing the administration of holding up qualified projects, including LA’s Southeast Gateway Line and Boston’s Green Line Transformation, for political reasons. Expect Democrats to use their congressional committees to scrutinize these delays and push to get the funds flowing once more.Those aforementioned affordability concerns could also mean the return of purchase subsidies for electric vehicles. EV sales have languished since the old credit expired in 2025. While any new act would require the President’s signature, “cheaper cars” feels like an uncontentious enough idea that it could engender a brief flash of bipartisanship.I think that comity is less likely to extend to autonomous vehicles. The SELF DRIVE Act has been kicking around for some time now; while it does have some support from Democrats in auto-making regions, its principal sponsor is Ohio Republican Bob Latta. Given the populist fracas about all things “AI,” I’d say odds are slim that the new congress looks to fully preempt the states and cities that are looking to have a say in how autonomous vehicles get deployed.States’ Rights (to Have Good Transit)Moving down to the state level, gains in Pennsylvania and Texas are particularly meaningful. In the Keystone State, Democrats have taken a trifecta, with Governor Shapiro making transportation improvements a key priority. The outgoing Republican Senate majority blocked funding for Philly and Pittsburgh’s transit agencies, forcing the two to teeter along on emergency funding fixes and diminished service. Shapiro’s existing 2026–27 budget proposal would dedicate an additional 1.75% of statewide sales-tax collections to the Public Transportation Trust Fund beginning in July 2027. Other legislation in the works, like HB 1146, would allow for local regions to further enhance transit budgets with local taxes and vehicle fees.In Texas, the situation is a bit less cut and dry; Democrats took the governorship and House, but not the state Senate. In the medium-term, Governor Elect Hinojosa and the Republicans may work out some funding packages with a bit more transport funding, but she’ll also have the opportunity to reshape the Texas Transportation Commission, which governs TxDOT and statewide transportation planning. Urban Texans will also see some real relief simply by having the state government spend less time actively antagonizing its cities: the previous administration went out of its way to stop Austin’s CapMetro from trying to build rail, while also making it easy for Dallas-area suburbs to pull out of DART.Local Measures, for Good MeasureOf course, there was plenty to celebrate on the regional level as well: 22 of the 27 measures put before voters passed. The biggest money came out of the SF Bay Area, where the region as a whole approved new sales taxes for BART and Caltrain, while SF-proper okayed parcel taxes for Muni. Seattle also approved $1.38 billion in new sales tax revenue, collected over 10 years, with 100% directed to public transit. Voters in Colorado approved billions for regional rail, connecting Denver to Fort Collins, Colorado Springs and Pueblo. Even more suburban areas, like Riverside and San Bernardino counties, as well as small towns from Michigan to Kansas, voted for more transit operations and CapEx.Congrats to Our Curb CandidatesI’d be remiss if I didn’t give a special call out to two candidates that have been particularly big advocates for improved transportation and urban land use. In San Francisco, Scott Wiener will take over Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s old seat, after a hard-fought battle against SF Supervisor Connie Chan. He joined us on The Courier podcast late last year, getting wonky about all the ways he has fought for streamlined housing production and more transit funding.And here in Los Angeles, Councilmember Nithya Raman defeated incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, tapping voter discontentment over sclerotic public services in general, while also campaigning to increase housing production and speed up transit improvements. She shared her decidedly technocratic proposals at our last Curbivore gathering in April.I dive even further into the election, as well as related news items like EV startups raising big rounds and Tesla killing off the Cybertruck, in this week’s episode of The Courier. Greg and I are also joined by Mark Goodstein, Co-Founder of Streetscope, to discuss his attempt to build a standardized benchmark for traffic safety. Listen in! 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

Australia and America have a lot in common: sprawling suburbs, a deep love affair with the automobile and like just about everywhere in the Anglosphere — an inability to build infrastructure at reasonable costs. But despite the big price tags, Australia (and the United Kingdom) have done a far better job of figuring out what to build and actually ponying up the money needed to get it done. Australia’s largest cities have spent the past couple decades building new metros, light rail lines and other transit infrastructure, while the UK has found creative ways to fund major projects through development and land value capture. Of course, that doesn’t mean every project is perfect, or that the money will last forever.To better understand the similarities and differences, this week’s podcast guest is Russell King, an acclaimed transport strategist and the man behind Transport Leaders. Russell has spent much of his career at the intersection of transportation and public policy, first as a councillor in London, where he expanded the city’s iconic bikesharing scheme south of the Thames and advanced a largely developer-funded extension of the Underground to Battersea. He later moved to Sydney, where he helped oversee a multibillion-dollar infrastructure boom and reforms to everything from taxi regulations to transit fares.We dig into Australia’s rapid adoption of Chinese electric vehicles, why a country that pioneered autonomous trucks in its mines has made so little progress putting robotaxis on its streets, and how neighboring New Zealand is tackling road-user charges and congestion pricing. We also explore Australia’s impressive recent rail-building spree, why the pipeline of new projects may be drying up and the country’s plans to spend astronomical sums on high-speed rail. As a Californian, it’s comforting to know we’re not the only ones struggling to figure out how to build a train… Listen in! 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

An autonomous vehicle can have the greatest lidar and cameras in the world, but how does it “understand” what it’s looking at? Robotaxis and delivery bots alike need a source of ground truth that lets them comprehend the state of the world. Properly equipped, an AV can ideally enter a new space for the first time, and instead of having to figure it out the way a human would, it can pull up a rich history of how that location has looked over the years.Building that knowledge is complicated, requiring constant scanning of real world locations. But what if folks had been serendipitously scanning their streets and cities all along? That’s the premise behind Niantic Spatial, borne out of the company that popularized the hit mobile Pokémon Go, which sent millions of people into their neighborhoods, smartphones in hand.For the latest episode of The Courier, I caught up with Brian McClendon, Niantic Spatial’s CTO. Beyond visual positioning systems for bots and cars, Brian has an incredibly rich history across the geospatial industry, having previously spearheaded iconic efforts like Google Maps, Google Earth, Keyhole and SGI. Listen in for a fascinating conversation about the future of mapping and location intelligence! 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

Building the world’s biggest RV rental platform would be ambitious enough. But what if you also launched a suite of fleet-management tools, and then an entirely new division insuring autonomous vehicles, with rates that automatically drop whenever self-driving is engaged?That’s the story of The Ride Platform, the company once known as Outdoorsy, which has since launched brands like Wheelbase and Roamly FSD. Once I sat down with Jeff Cavins, the company’s founder and CEO, I realized his ambitions spanned even beyond mobility. From inventing the special effects in many of your favorite 90s blockbusters, to building out reams of data centers before they became an AI-related hot potato, to working with Steve Jobs to popularize corporate video calls, Jeff’s been at the forefront of many of the technologies that have become indispensable over the past few decades. Given that impressive track record, I’d say expect The Ride Platform to soon be a household name.Jeff and I chatted for the premiere of the latest season of The Courier podcast, following Greg and I catching listeners up on all the greatest mobility news they may have missed over the summer. Listen in to the season premiere, and be sure to also catch our partners at The Ride Platform when they join us at the Urban Autonomy Summit — Austin. 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

It’s been a rocky road for new mobility startups these past few years. Late 2020 until early 2022 saw rock bottom interest rates fuel massive funding for all sorts of new companies: many raised far more cash than their fundamentals ever justified. When rates shot up, many companies languished on the vine. They couldn’t raise new cash, but they had enough in the bank to make their deaths rather drawn out.While that played out, the stronger players clawed their way to profitability. From ridehailing to food delivery, to micromobility and beyond, there are finally impressive transportation businesses growing in both footprint and profitability. That’s why, for this season of Zag Talk’s final episode, Jonah sat down with Florent Roulet. He’s Managing Director at Stifel’s Global Technology Group, where he puts together transactions across the mobility tech landscape, including interesting deals like Getaround’s recent merger with GoMore.He and Jonah talk about how the new mobility landscape has matured, why he thinks that today’s best startups have the “luxury of optionality” whereby they are fully in control of their destinies and what’s next for the sector. Wrapping things up: Greg, Athena and Jonah also get into SpaceX’s IPO, ponder the fate of Mexico’s cheap new EV and revisit the biggest developments of the year thus far. Listen in! 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

Far too many bike shops treat two-wheelers like they’re high-end sporting equipment: sleek and expensive pieces of hardware that are meant to be stored in the closet when not out bounding trails. As electric bicycling takes off, brands are finding they need new pathways to get consumers to treat these machines like something that can replace a car: take it to work, use it to run errands, and feel confident that when something goes wrong, it’ll be easy to fix.Dan Carr, Co-Founder and CEO of Wombi, has been working to fix that, as he’s scaled his company across Australia, before taking it stateside. In today’s episode of Zag Talk, Jonah sat down with him in his Culver City bike-shop and HQ, and we get into what it takes to build the financial and operational layers to offer bikes on a subscription basis, how biking compares in the U.S. versus down under, how the bike industry has recovered these past few years, and the current fundraising environment. Jonah's had the pleasure of knowing Dan since he first started kicking the tires on a U.S. market launch, so it was a real delight that the team at MobilityVC could participate in Wombi's most recent funding round.Also on the pod, Greg and Jonah chat about Walmart’s expansion into 30-minute delivery (inadvertently predicting that they would soon start offering food delivery, we swear we recorded this a day before that news went live) and tear into Matternet and SpaceX’s public listings, while Sela reports on the latest developments at Micromobility Europe. Listen in! 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

As the world transitions to autonomous mobility, consumer uptake rests on four core pillars: affordability, accessibility, safety and sustainability. In a bold new report, Ani Kelkar and Darius Scurtu, from our partners at the McKinsey Center for Future Mobility, argue that AVs will perform so well, that they will in fact be deflationary, driving down the cost of transportation and disrupting car ownership.In today’s podcast, Jonah Bliss chats with Ani and Darius, as they get into why they think this is the moment that robotaxis truly take off. And the three of them dive into the tricky downstream effects that could come along for the ride: would cheaper mobility just mean endless congestion? Are voters and policymakers ready for these sorts of massive changes?Also in the episode, Jonah, Greg and Athena analyze Q1’s financial reports, assess Lime’s pending IPO, discuss all the latest American transport trends headed to Europe and celebrate riding the D. Listen in! 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

Los Angeles has always been the city of the future, offering the world a vision of what’s to come, for both better and worse. Lately, while the region has still delivered on some audacious goals — building dozens of new transit stations, transitioning the nation’s largest municipally owned utility to green energy while maintaining reasonable rates — many feel local leaders have come up short when it comes to the day-to-day items that make a city feel livable. Streets, even when they have new bike lanes, are often pockmarked; permits for housing take forever despite the need to house a large homeless population; local businesses are struggling.The city is now at an inflection point, with voting in the first round of a mayoral election set for June 2nd. The three most viable candidates are Karen Bass, the incumbent mayor and a former congressperson; Nithya Raman, an urban planner turned city councilperson; and Spencer Pratt, a reality TV star who’s punched his way into the conversation thanks to high name recognition and money to burn.In today’s episode, we hear from Councilmember Raman, who currently represents District Four, stretching from the iconic Hollywood Hills to the beautiful San Fernando Valley. In her six years in office, she’s built a progressive track record, working to improve governance, build safer streets, create housing and push towards a greener economy.Before we get to the interview, recorded at Curbivore 2026, Jonah chats with Greg and Sela about the ITS European Congress, Helsinki’s glamorous new car-free bridge, Amazon’s supply chain push, Spirit’s bankruptcy, robotaxi pricing and more. Listen in! 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

Third party delivery has gone on a wild ride over the last decade, going from an urban niche to a worldwide must-have. Along the way, the array of items that consumers can get at the push of a button has grown from restaurant meals, to grocery items, to just about any SKU you can dream of: hardware, toys, liquor, electronics, you name it.Beryl Sanders, Uber’s Head of Grocery & Retail Partnerships, has led that charge, scaling up Uber Eats into novel verticals with new merchant relationships. Jonah Bliss sat down with her, live at Curbivore 2026, to hear what’s next for the delivery and mobility giant, including its just-launched returns feature (reverse logistics: so hot right now!)Also on the pod, Jonah, Greg and Sela dig into the latest robotaxi news, share what’s working for micromobility operators in LatAm and Europe, and chew over Upshift’s pivot to tele-ops. Listen in! 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

As AVs start to impact everything from traditional ridesharing, to mobility more broadly, to even delivery and city-scale systems, it's time to think about how public and private players can best prepare for this new autonomous future.In today's podcast episode, Jonah Bliss and Harry Campbell (founder of The Rideshare Guy and The Driverless Digest) tear into these heady trends, tease which of them will get center stage at Curbivore, and retrace how the industry has evolved since the pandemic.Also on the pod, Jonah, Greg and Athena dig into Also's latest fundraising haul for autonomous cargo bikes, WeRide's move into Dubai, Manna's $50M haul, encouraging road safety stats and more. 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