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...
5 days 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...
21 days 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...
12 months 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....
12 months 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...
12 months ago • 4 min read