Gabe Klein Keynote Speaker

Gabe Klein is a renowned thought leader in urban mobility. Gabe was the executive director of the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation (2-22-2025), where he oversaw efforts to align resources and expertise across the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Transportation to support programs that seek to deploy a network of electric vehicle chargers, zero-emission fueling infrastructure, and zero-emission transit and school buses.

Gabe is the former Commissioner of the Chicago and Washington DC Departments of Transportation. In both cities he revamped technology platforms and government processes while focusing on putting people first vs. automobiles on city streets. This included launching two of the first and largest bikeshare systems in the U.S. and building protected bike lanes and better pedestrian infrastructure for vulnerable citizens citywide, as well as facilitating private services like carshare and rideshare that could help each cities mobility goals.  As Commissioner, he has worked to bring a new Riverwalk to Chicago as well as the breathtaking Bloomingdale Trail, 100’s of miles of bike lanes, and new policies combined with technology solutions to revamp parking, permitting, and many other arcane government processes in both cities.

Gabe honed his creativity and leadership skills working in business, including Zipcar, where he served as Vice President for four years, Bikes USA as the national Director of Stores and his own electric powered, organic food truck chain, On The Fly.

Post-government, and after an enriching fellowship with the Urban Land Institute in 2014, Gabe joined Fontinalis Partners as a Special Venture Partner on their $100 million 2nd fund. Gabe also advises governments and companies worldwide on innovation in cities including Singapore where Gabe has been a visiting fellow for the Centre For Livable Cities, working on creating a “car-lite” city-state.  In 2015, Gabe also published Start-Up City with David Vega-Barachowitz on Island Press, a manifesto on revamping how (and how fast) we innovate in cities and rethinking public-private partnerships with a triple-bottom line approach as technology shapes a dramatically different future.

In 2016 Gabe co-founded CityFi to help governments, mayors and ceos with urban change management. In a recent article, Gabe has said that the team’s ambitions, are to give cities, departments, developers and private-sector companies collaborating with governments real-world innovation insights and tactics. Gabe was also recently featured in a CNN tv and web series on autonomous vehicles. 

Gabe sits on the boards of Streetsblog, Carma, and the advisory boards of NACTO, Sensity Systems, Zendrive, Phone2Action and Transit Screen.  Gabe holds a degree in Marketing Management from Virginia Tech, a certificate from The Wharton Transportation Executive Program and is a Member of the Urban Land Institute.