Jinhua's Memo August 7, 2026 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. 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...
18 days ago • 3 min read
Jinhua's Memo July 9, 2026 The Transit Fiscal Cliff, Nine Months On: Chicago has climbed off. San Francisco is about to ask its voters for a rope. You cannot cut your way off a structural gap, and revenue that all rises and falls with downtown was never really diversified. Both cities answered by making service visibly better, then building the political case for new, downturn-proof revenue. Chicago won in the statehouse and San Francisco now takes to the ballot. Inside are the moves you can...
about 2 months ago • 7 min read
Jinhua's Memo July 2nd, 2026 Your Gas Tax Is Going to Zero. Oregon Spent 25 Years Building the Replacement. A new tax is the hardest thing a legislature ever passes. Oregon got one through anyway. Here are the three design decisions that determine whether a per-mile road charge gets through in your state. A new tax is the hardest thing a legislature ever passes. Everyone suspects the same thing: that they will pay more so that someone else can pay less. The opposition is loud, bipartisan, and...
about 2 months ago • 6 min read
Jinhua's Memo June 27th 2026 A Transit Playbook for Mid-Size Cities: What a City That Voted It Down Three Times Can Teach Every DOT How Arlington, Texas (400,000 people, 99 square miles, 3 failed transit votes) built citywide public transit for a fifth of the cost: four moves and one discipline any mid-size city can copy. Most transit stories are big-city stories: New York’s subway, London’s congestion charge, the trains of Tokyo and Paris. The places where most Americans actually live, the...
about 2 months ago • 7 min read
Jinhua Zhao 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 Cities keep copying London's transport. They're copying the wrong layer. The lessons that actually transfer: fund transit on agglomeration instead of minutes saved, respect the availability trap, ask the question you can't answer and treat governance as a question of power. The thing worth taking home isn't the Oyster card or the congestion...
3 months ago • 10 min read
JZ / Issue #3 Human Agency and AV Deployment When you step into an autonomous vehicle (AV), you relinquish lower-level controls—acceleration, braking, lane changes. Most riders barely notice and happily let go. When an AV chooses your route, most people accept it—though some may insist, “I’d rather take the scenic river road.” Meanwhile: Liberty Mutual, an insurance company, would steer you along the path with the lowest crash probability; Climate Action Network (CAN) would choose the route...
about 1 year ago • 2 min read
Jinhua Zhao Six Governance Models for AV Deployment in Cities AVs are not the problem. Governing them is. We’ve studied global experiments in London, Boston, Singapore, Stockholm, and beyond—and developed six governance models for AV deployment in cities: 🔹 1. Laissez-Faire No public intervention. Pure market competition. AV providers cherry-pick the most profitable areas. Innovation thrives—but often with little regard for public interest. Can an open AV market self-correct? Unlikely. 🔹 2....
about 1 year ago • 1 min read
Jinhua Zhao Cities Aren’t Ready for Autonomous Vehicles. Here’s why that’s a problem and how they can be. Autonomous vehicles are arriving, but cities aren’t ready. Ten years ago, cities were energized by the promise of autonomous vehicles. In 2015, the buzz was loud. Cities ran pilots, hosted workshops, and published white papers. But the tech wasn’t ready. Cities grew disillusioned. Now the tech is real—and scaling. But the cities? Here is a sobering reality: most U.S. cities have no AV...
about 1 year ago • 4 min read
