Zag Talk

At this point it’s not exactly news that it’s a tough fundraising environment out there for new mobility startups, especially ones with a hardware focus. That’s what makes it all the more impressive that Joseph Cohen was able to raise $9 million for Infinite Machine , with the round led by a16z. While Joe might not have a transport hardware background, he dreamt up an eye-catching vehicle — the P1...

Tatiana Peralta Quirós has had quite the impressive career: educated at both MIT and Harvard, thoughtful research works with the likes of Gensler and the World Bank, before going on to advise the President of Costa Rica on urban mobility and technology, modernizing LatAm’s automotive giant’s Grupo Purdy Motor as Chief Innovation Officer and then launching Kinto in Costa Rica, helping push Toyota t...

If you think about the transportation world as “new mobility” and “old mobility,” it often seems that despite all the innovation of the past few years, it often happens in its own silo, leaving the classic world of American transportation — car dealers — unaffected. So that’s why this announcement, that Connexion Mobility has launched a partnership with Uber , caught our eye. This allows car deale...

In this week’s edition of The Courier , Jonah chats with Rick Neubauer, Founder and CEO of Umojo . Rick’s mobility journey is an interesting one, with Umojo getting its start in the glamorous world of parking management. But as the action shifted to the curb, Rick sensed an opportunity, and now Umojo’s NexCity software helps cities like Boulder and Sacramento keep their streets and sidewalks well...

Alex Roy knows two things — how the mobility world works, and how to tell a damn good story. On the first front, he established himself on the legendary Cannonball Run race, held the record for fastest lap around Manhattan and served as Director of Special Operations for Argo AI. On the latter, he chaired the board of storytelling org The Moth, co-founded The Drive, co-hosts The Autonocast and eve...

With respect to the dozens of other companies that go by Kyte or Kite, the car rental via delivery startup Kyte looks like it may have hit a very bumpy road. Last week, Los Angeles-area customers received word the company was pulling out of the market — the nation’s largest for car usage — after about four years of local operations . Intrigued, I headed to their website, where even earlier this we...

Making delivery work is darn difficult: even when everything’s going well with the customers and the kitchens, you still have to manage hundreds of thousands of very loosely managed workers. With unaligned incentives, why should a courier make sure an order is right, or wait around for a customer that’s running late, or even verify that a would-be scammer actually did receive their order? One pote...

When’s the last time you pulled up to a gas station and the pump didn’t work? While that’s a very rare occasion indeed, it’s sadly all too frequent an occurrence in the world of electric vehicle charging. And if people aren’t confident they can power up their cars, they’re not going to want to switch from gas-powered vehicles. Kameale C. Terry saw first hand just how many of those reliability prob...

Anyone that’s been following the news knows it’s been an interesting time in New York City governance, to say the least. At the state level, Governor Hochul killed congestion pricing at the last second, and now a federal indictment of Mayor Adams has made things even more complicated. Despite that, every day thousands of city workers show up and put in the hard work it takes to make city life — tr...

After a brief summer break, The Courier is back in action. Jonah Bliss and Greg Lindsay explore what makes the urbanism of France — both old and new — work so well. But, might there be somewhere exotic in America that offers a taste of that progress? Then, Jordan Justus, CEO and Co-Founder of Automotus , drops by to discuss the state of curb management worldwide. Tune in for the full discussion, b...

Want all your hottest urbanism, delivery, mobility and tech policy news in audio form?! Well you’re in luck, because Greg Lindsay and I are back with a new podcast — The Courier — now live. Listen in with the player above. In episode one we dive in to some spicy topics: can the Olympics be car free, what does it mean for delivery and automation that the Chipotle CEO has hopped to Starbucks, how ca...