Factually! with Adam Conover - Transportation, Autonomous Cars and Nerdy Commuter Fantasies w/ Seleta Reynolds

Episode Date: June 5, 2019

Seleta Reynolds, General Manager of the LADOT joins Adam this week to talk about Elon Musk's boring tunnel, the "vomit rule" and induced demand. Plus, learning from The Lord of the Rings, the issues with Uber and Lyft and being a subway boy vs a bus boy. This episode is brought to you by Kiwi Co (www.kiwico.com/FACTUALLY). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually, the show for curious people who never stop asking questions. I am your host, Adam Conover, and I have an admission to make. I don't like cars. They are huge, they're expensive, they're contributing to climate change on a massive scale, and they have an upsetting habit of turning otherwise normal people into murderers. I just don't like them, and that's a tough thing to say in America because America is

a car country. We're the car country, frankly. I think if you sorted every structure in America by type, we'd be a third car dealerships, a third parking lots, and then a third freeways to drive from one to the other. Our big cities, and especially our smaller cities that surround them, were created by people, but they were designed for cars with city plans that are basically only navigable if you're behind the wheel. Many people in this country literally can't get around their own communities without purchasing and piloting one of these super expensive murder machines. It's really, really frustrating. Well, personally, I got so frustrated that I actually quit driving. In Los Angeles, I quit driving.

That's like saying, hey, I live in Atlantis, but I'm not going to swim to work, you know? But I'm doing it. Instead of driving, I take the bus. I took the bus here to record this today. I am a bus boy. And honestly, it has a lot of advantages. First of all, it's way cheaper than driving. Driving, you got to pay gas, insurance, repairs, plus the dang thing costs 20 grand to begin with the bus costs under two bucks but

more importantly when you get on the bus and this is huge you don't have to drive the bus they don't give you a job at all instead someone else drives it for you and you just sit there and read a magazine if you want so relaxing and even bigger seriously i might blow your mind with this one when you get off the bus you don't have to figure out where to park the bus. For all intents and purposes, it just disappears. Poof, you just go on your merry way. It's incredible. It changed my life doing this.

Now look, I know I'm a weirdo and I don't expect everyone else to do what I do at all. And I know that public transit has its disadvantages too. You know, so many people have said to me, I would take transit if it were better, but there aren't enough routes by me and it's way too slow. I get that. Heck, even I often find myself in a situation where, you know, I'm trying to go less than three miles, but the only available combo of bus routes would take me 90 minutes to get there, which is why I

have to admit that I do have one dirty little secret. My all transit lifestyle is only possible because I occasionally take a Lyft. Yes, I said it. Now, look, in a lot of ways, Uber and Lyft seem like they could be part of the answer, right, to our car problem. Because when these services first came on the scene, it started to seem like they would enable people to ditch their cars altogether and reduce the amount of driving, right? But unfortunately, now that they've been around for a few years, we know that's not really how these apps work. In fact, they end up putting even more cars on the road.

A study found that ride-sharing apps are actually increasing traffic in a number of major cities, and estimates that ride-sharing apps have contributed to an annual 5.7 billion miles more driven in those cities. Now, the big, obvious, and difficult solution to America's climate-killing car addiction is, of course, mass transit. But in many, many cities, like LA, for example, where I live, ridership on the LA Metro's bus system has seen a drop of nearly 21% over five years. So, what all of this speaks to is that even though we know

that cars and trucks are contributing to 20% of our emissions and hastening the climate apocalypse, untangling exactly how to get people out of them and provide other transit options is a lot harder than it seems. How do we create innovative solutions for transportation without accidentally causing more driving? How do we fix the fact that transit projects cost more here than they do in other rich countries? Do we want congestion pricing? Do we want taxes on Uber and Lyfts? There are so many complicated questions that we need to be asking and so few clear answers.

Well, with me here today to help pull back the curtain on how we're going to solve some of these massive challenges, we have one of the smartest transportation minds I have ever met. Her name is Salita Reynolds, and she is the general manager of LA's Department of Transportation. She took time out of her busy schedule to come down and talk to me today. Let's get to the interview. So Salita, you are the general manager of the LA Department of Transportation. True. You came on the very first episode, I believe the first episode of my last podcast, and that was a couple years ago. And a lot of things have changed in LA Transit since, and it still continues to be a big issue.

And so we thought it'd be wonderful to have you back and help us kick off the new podcast. Thank you very much. And I will point out that I made fun of VR goggles then, and I will make fun of them again now. Oh, you can make even more fun of VR goggles now. Because they're still not a thing. They're less of a thing than they were. They're really not a thing. Oh my gosh, that would be a whole great episode of this show. It was incredible

to think that three years ago, people were like, there'll be VR movies! There'll be everything VR! AR, VR, QR codes, everything that ends with an R has completely ended. No one is. No more.

No more. The money has fallen out of VR. Yeah, yeah. All the investment has dried up. No venture capitalists are putting money in it anymore. It must be Nostradamus. You must. I'm a video game guy, so I've been tracking it.

I actually read on a video game website, someone said an I wrote I read an article by an editor who said if you even write an article about VR people won't even click on it so it's like deader than it was so stupid those goggles well that was gonna be a real thing I bought I bought a VR goggle set because I'm a gamer. Good for you. And I bought a used Oculus at one point because there was one game that I wanted to play. It's called Star Trek Bridge Crew. It was actually very fun for the time that I played it. But the problem is even when you're in your own home and you're all alone, when you have the goggles on, it's uncomfortable. You don't want to do it for more than half an hour.

A, because it makes you sick. it for more than half an hour, A, because it makes you sick, but B, because you're constantly terrified that someone is going to walk into the room and touch you while you're wearing them. You never let go of the fear. You could be all alone in your house. You're like, someone could be in here right now, and I will never know because I've got the goggles on. It's an unsettling amount of disconnection from reality. You know what? I think it's hilarious that so many of these technology innovations, and I'll include Hyperloop in this category, have not overcome some real basic things about humans, which include the fact that our brains and our bodies need to say the same thing,

need to be in agreement about whether or not we are moving. And if we don't do that, we get sick. So you're wearing your VR goggles and you're like, it's half an hour in. And your brain and your body are telling each other two different things about whether or not you're moving. And you're like, I feel sick. You're in the hyperloop and you're going real fast, but there's no windows in the vacuum. And so your eyes are telling you, no, we're just sitting here in this chair and there's nothing going on.

And your body's like, no, we're going 200 miles an hour. This is terrifying. I can feel it. Yes. And when I asked him about that, I was like, so how are you going to deal with the vomit problem? They were like, our engineers are working on it. And I was like, all right, good luck with that.

Can we just be honest about the fact that we shouldn't, if your transportation problem includes solving vomiting, maybe go back to the drawing board. I'm just saying. Yeah. Or at least to have a plan, you need to have a plan of, you need to have a plan of some kind. Yes. You told me, I mean, I guess we'll just jump into the Elon Musk stuff right away. It was my favorite topic of conversation. But you told me last time we were hanging out that one of the things with the – and this, by the way, gets to the point that I want to hit on this episode,

which is about the sort of unintended consequences of transit solutions and how it's more complicated than it appears, including, I think, when the government puts together a transit solution. Absolutely. It's more complicated than when it appears, including, I think, when the government puts together a transit solution. Absolutely. It's more complicated than when it appears. But so one that you pointed out to me that was fascinating, that's a beautiful example of this, is Elon Musk's tunnels that he wants to build

for his transit solution. And one of the keystones that he has built the entire pitch on is he can build them so fast and so cheap, right? I have developed an entirely new way to build a tunnel that no one else can do. And it's super, super fast. And you said, you told me, well, actually what he's done is he's actually just bought an off the shelf boring machine that he's made some adjustments to. And the real reason it's faster is because it's a small tunnel compared to most subway tunnels. Congratulations. You built a sewer tunnel. Yeah. And they're actually moving into the boring company. People are like, actually, we're thinking of like,

you know, maybe getting into digging sewer tunnels and like electricity tunnels. And that'll be a big part of our business. Perfect. Fine. Do that. That's great. But there are already companies that do that. That's not an invention. Yeah. And that the innovation is like the one of the innovations was one of the most expensive parts of digging a tunnel is what to do with the dirt. Once you get the dirt, what are you going to do with the dirt? We'll haul these. We got, and so there's just like miles of trucks that line up and you dump the dirt into the trucks. And then the trucks go off to a, a God knows where, and they dump the dirt and they come back and it's expensive and inefficient and dirty and terrible. And so the innovation was, we're going to take the dirt. We're going to make something with it on site. They make bricks with it on site. And then

those bricks can be used as building material. Weren't they like giving out free bricks at the opening and stuff? You can have a brick. Everybody gets a brick. You get a brick. You get a brick. I get a brick. Oh my God, I got a brick. I got a brick. Yeah. But you know what? If that's the innovation that comes out of that, that's a fine and worthy innovation to make tunnel building cleaner and more efficient and more sustainable. Great. Good job. But you pointed out that the problem with a small tunnel is emergency exits. subway tunnel, for instance, or an LA subway tunnel. If the train stops in the middle,

there's that little rim on the side so you can get out and you could, if it catches on fire, you could walk a hundred feet down or, or a crew could come down with, you know, emergency equipment and stuff like that. But I've seen the, you know, the Boring Company tunnel that there is not room for that. If your car gets stuck, if your car stalls in the middle of the Boring Company tunnel, you are stuck there. And so I just, fun a while ago just started tweeting at elon like once every couple days like hey what's the emergency evacuation plan for a boring company tunnel in the event of fire how'd that go for you uh you know a lot of a lot of uh a lot of people with anime avatars tweeted back at me why do you he's gonna figure it out why you have to ask so many questions?

But, you know, I wasn't asking in a hostile way. I was actually curious. Yeah, what's your plan? That's my biggest question. And there was not a plan offered. No. And so that's, I think, a perfect example of, you know, when we, okay, we can offer this plan that seems very futuristic and exciting, but there's so many considerations that we don't have, you know, that we don't know how it's going to play out. And something I talked about in the intro to the show is about how, for instance,

you know, ride sharing, everyone's assumption was kind of, hey, this is going to result in less cars on the road because people won't have to own cars. And instead, they'll just be a small fleet flying around and like, great, I'll only need to sort of use a car when I need to use it. I'll summon it and I'll pay a couple bucks and, you know, to have someone else drive me or I'll use someone else's car. Shouldn't that result in less cars on the road? We now know that it results in more cars on the road. And so that's bad right and being that our goal ultimately needs to be to get less people we have to drive less we have to drive less and everybody wants

that because everyone even if you're not a green person as everyone should be but even if you don't care about emissions and carbon you want there to be less traffic so you want less people to drive that would be good for you too um but then even with that goal, LA currently, or in the time that I've been here, is making this relatively heroic effort to build train lines and add more innovative kinds of buses. And it feels like, I'm sure there's other cities doing it better. It feels like a relatively progressive activist city in terms of, you know, we're trying to add transit. And yet transit fell. Transit ridership fell last year, which shocked me because in the last year I started, I stopped driving and I started taking the bus personally.

What's your bus line? I took the two here. Me too. I can't believe we missed each other. Oh, were you taking it west or east? I was taking it from Silver Lake. Oh, I was taking it west or east? I was taking it from Silver Lake. Oh, I was taking it as well. So I was probably on the one right after you. You were probably on the one right after me. That would have been

so fun if I had... Oh my gosh! There we go. Bus friends. But then we would have had to talk to each other the whole way. It would have been so awkward. When really I just want to be looking at Twitter. You can just leave me alone. But you know, and I get on the bus and the train and I'm like, these are nice systems.

There's people on them. We certainly could. It seems like people could be using them. Yet we are not. It's supposed to be if you build it, they will come. Seems like we've built it and less people are coming. So how do we what is our approach to solving this problem? Oh, sure.

Adam, no big deal. Yeah. In a sentence and then we'll wrap it up. I'll just turn around five years of massive declines in transit ridership across every major U.S. transit system in, I don't know, two minutes. Wow.

Is that the case? I didn't know it was that dire. It is definitely a strong trend. There's certainly cities that are exceptions to the rule. So Seattle has actually seen an increase in transit ridership. They also have Uber and Lyft, right, at the same time. City of Houston has done some really interesting things to improve ridership on their buses. But yeah, in general, you know, this goal that Uber and Lyft set out to, or at least, you know, what

they said, and I believe them, was, you know our goal is to uh decrease the number of empty seats in cars right that was the original idea it was like carpooling on steroids it's like hey i'm going here anyway and you can book and get into my car there's all this unused space in the cars and guess what instead of one person in a car there's going to be two or three or four two or three or four yeah and won't it be great and we'll use technology uh because you know lyft's origin story is about those uh uh shout out to generation xers who will remember this those cork boards in college that would say i'm driving to providence next weekend who wants to roll with me right and you would do this weird like ride matching thing on like gopher rode with some weird kids in college

i rode with some weird kids in college i wrote some weird kids in college yeah totally uh it was i'm sure delightful for you and for them um but the i'm sure you're just ruining things all the way talk about how to make conversation for two hours again with that guy i'm a bad car seat guest i'm a bad road trip guest um but instead what they did is create a lot of empty seats on transit. And the reasons for transit ridership declining, and in particular in Los Angeles, that is really heavily focused on the bus system. So the rail system, the blue line is struggling a little bit, but the expo line has really good ridership. That's the newest one, right?

It's the one that goes from downtown to the beach. Yeah. So the challenge on the bus system, though, is that a few things are happening. One, as soon as wages rose even a little bit, people fled the system to buy cheap cars because cars in Los Angeles and in most American cities just get you access to orders of magnitude more jobs, opportunities, things. Right. opportunities things. And then the second thing that happened is that a lot of the folks who are riding the bus, lower income folks are displaced out of the city. So the number two and the number four line, the one we were just talking about, those lines go through the heart of Echo Park and Silver Lake and East Hollywood. Massive gentrification. All neighborhoods that have

had massive gentrification. And so people who take the bus no longer can afford to live in those neighborhoods. And so they're moving to neighborhoods where there's even worse bus service. Yeah. And so that's another reason for the decline. But then over and over again, the data from San Francisco and other places in New York is that Uber and Lyft are also responsible for some of that decline. Because it gets back to another thing that I found, just I had a little giggle about

when I was reading all the coverage of Elon's tunnel. This other really basic rule. So we talked about the vomit rule earlier. There's this other, I don't know, there's a better way of talking about that. I love the vomit rule. Inner ear vertigo, I don't know. It's the first thing they tell you

when you become the LA manager, general manager of the LADOT. Hey, the vomit problem. Because when people are riding alone in those autonomous vehicles and there's no human in the loop, no chaperone, it's late at night, that there was a lot of stuff happening. Wow, really? In the autonomous cars. And so they've solved all of that, right? This is a vision of the future. Oh, but they have solved it.

In the future. Oh, they will? In his imaginary future. You know, this is one of those, like, when you write a book report in school about him. It's the year 2060 and the vomit problem has been solved. But I never thought of that. It's true. It could be like the sort of like cabbie when you're in a cab and the guy's got a really heavy foot, you know, on the break and you feel sick.

That happens to me all the time. Or you're really drunk. You're super over-served. And you've stumbled out of a bar and it's two in the morning. And you, you know, that's what happens, right? People need chaperones. Can we just make that another rule? Anyway, the rule I was getting to is, so Elon, when people were asking him, okay, well, how are you going to deal with the fact that we actually have a sort of point-to-point, very wide, efficient system to move cars right now.

It's called the freeways. And we know it doesn't really work because when we add capacity to the freeways, cars, you know, sometimes you'll hear people say, well, traffic is like water. It just follows to the path of least resistance. I think traffic's more like gas. It just expands to fill whatever space you give it. We widen the 405, people fill it right back up. It's this thing called induced demand. It's another real basic rule of transportation.

And that is the more capacity there is, the more people say, hey, well, now I can get from A to B. Why don't I go from A to B? Like using my car rather than taking the train or taking the bus or, you know, hey, there's an extra lane on the freeway. Might as well go use that lane. Yeah.

And then people, and so because the ability exists now, suddenly there's demand for it and it fills up. That's right. And it's a resource everybody wants. It's pretty much free and there's bottomless demand. We've also known this since like the 50s. It's not new information. Yeah. Right.

This is real well-established science. I read about this when they're about the first, I learned about this in the context of like Robert Moses in New York City, the stuff that he was building in the middle of the last century, induced demand was an issue with it. So, yeah. Right. So this is not a secret, but our friend Elon Musk was talking about, about, you know, how he will handle this, this concept of induced demand. Well, you create this open place for cars to go? Isn't it just going to fill up with traffic? Look at the 405.

And he said, I think induced demand is a red herring. It's not a red herring, homie. It's science. And second of all, I'll just build more tunnels. And I was like, to the molten core of the earth? Where does it stop, right? But Uber and Lyft are violating the same basic rule, which is-

I just want to add that I love this. I just want to expand on that point because he said, I can build tunnels in 3D. When you go underground, you can build in 3D. And so you can build an infinite number of tunnels, right? And I was listening to, there's a wonderful podcast called LA Podcast that I really love.

Alyssa Walker said on that podcast- She's awesome. She pointed out, I love her. And she was just on Adam Ruins Everything on an episode that'll come out later this year. Oh, awesome. Yeah, she was great. She was talking about traffic deaths.

Really light topic. But she said, look, have you ever like walked under a freeway overpass? Freeways are already in 3D. Freeways are flying through the sky all around us. Massive feats of engineering. Yeah. Like muscular things that we built. Yeah, they're already in 3D. Freeways are flying through the sky all around us. Massive feats of engineering. Yeah. Like muscular things that we built.

Yeah. They're already in 3D. We could build lots of them. You know, it's not different that they're underground. So I'm sorry. Please go on. Also, did the Lord of the Rings teach us nothing? You know, when the Balrog comes up from the mines of Moria, it's because we went too deep, right?

Like chill out on the tunnels that are going to stack on top of each other. And one of their staff told me, no lie. I was like, well, so how many do you think it's going to take? And they said, 200. 200 tunnels? I was like, cool. That's cool. All right.

200 tunnels. I was like, cool. That's cool. All right. 200 channels. But to bring it back to Uber and Lyft, they're violating the same basic rule, which is when you make it easier for people to drive, or in this case, for people to book and call. To be in a car. Really cheap. To travel by car.

Then people drive more. It's the same reason why when we provide more parking, people drive more. When parking is free, people drive more, right? It's the same reason why when we provide more parking, people drive more. When parking is free, people drive more. When anything we do that makes it easier for people to drive, that removes any friction, then we see more people driving. And any transportation planner worth their salt can tell you that and could have told you,

hey, unless we build in some real price incentives for carpooling on these platforms, what's probably going to happen is that we're going to see an increase in the overall number of trips that people are taking. So trips they never would have taken before. Yeah. Which you could argue can be a good thing. Totally. Maybe you're going to go have lunch with a friend across town, and that's good for a local business. have lunch with a friend across town and that's good for a local business. Or you can go out, I mean, the best use case for Uber and Lyft is you can go to the bar and get home safely without drunk driving. That's right. And maybe you go to the friend's birthday because

you know you can get there safely and back at 11 p.m. on a Friday. Yeah. And that's an enhancement to life that I don't think we should downplay. But ideally, you should be taking the bus there and then maybe taking that back, right? But it's so easy and it's so cheap and it's so ubiquitous that it's much, much better to just, you know, people just want to hit the button on their smartphone. I mean, I use Lyft the most when I, you know, I go to set and my, you know, our set, we shoot in a different place in Los Angeles every day. And sometimes, you know, we were shooting, for instance, you know, for three days in Acton. And, you know, my call time is six in the morning. Right. And I'm a bad driver.

And I was like, I realized once we started shooting, I'm just never going to be able to make these trips at six in the morning. And so, you know, the lift will take me like I because I, you know, I'm a New Yorker. I only learned to drive recently. I'm a bad driver. I'm uncomfortable on the freeway and I'm not going to make it that far. Right. And so that's what I take. That's what I take lift to, you know, and that is, um, and you're the talent you need to arrive like fresh and not freaked out because of LA freeway traffic. Yeah. I'm sleeping in the car, you know? I get it. Totally. And so that's a case in which, you know, it is, it is providing that enhancement, right? But I see the point of there are so many cases in which, yeah, we're, we're just adding people to the road. But let me ask you this. I tweeted the link that I saw about, you know, how Uber and Lyft have created more traffic. And so many people replied and said, well, I would take public transit more if public transit were better.

In my town, public transit sucks. Is garbage. Is garbage. And I can't get around. And now let's say some of those people, because I like to tell people in LA, hey, just open Google Maps or get the Go LA Transit app. Just give it a whirl. And just look, you know, because that's what we rarely do. And like often, oh, my God, there's a bus that goes right from here to right or a subway.

Right. I was, you know, I've made the same trip over and over again for months before I finally did that and realized, oh, I could have been taking a bus the whole time. Right now. But let's say that's some small percentage. There's still a lot of people who are living in places that were transit. Isn't that good. And like you say, cars do give people access because, you know, despite the fact that they're hideously expensive, prone to breakdown dangerous and contribute to climate change, they can take you from any point A to any point B,

you know, whereas no bus line is ever going to cover every single you know little location um and so i understand emotionally why some people say hey uh you know traffic sucks but overall this is more accessible and what if we all just switch to driving teslas and we're electric cars right and won't that be the you're pounding your head on the mic? But I understand where people are coming from when they make that argument. And I don't want to be the person who's saying to people, well, you just should take the bus like me and be green. All that virtue signaling. Yeah. It's real tired.

That's not I mean, I don't want everyone. I take the reason I take the bus is because I'm more comfortable in public transit and I feel more like myself. And that's how I prefer to get around. I understand why people don't, especially when people say I don't feel safe on public transit. Some people feel that way. I know a few people who've had very dangerous incidents on public transit. So how do you how do you respond to that argument that, hey, public transit isn't good enough? Cars give you so much more access. And really what we need to do is make that system greener and bigger and better.

So the answer is we have to do both. And when people tell me, you know, oh, public transit is just trash and I can't ever take it. And I asked them, well, when's the last time you actually tried took it? Yeah. And, you know, well, when's the last time you actually took it? And, you know, I'll get different answers. The same thing happens when I ask people, you know, well, you know, I don't know, those damn bicyclists and those damn bike lanes. And I'm like, well, when's the last time

you rode a bike? Oh, like 40 years ago, right? And it's like, okay, well, you need to be able to have, we have to have more sort of what I'll call modal empathy, right? We have to be able to have, we have to have more sort of what I'll call modal empathy, right? We have to be able to understand what it's like for other people to get around. Because the reason why public transit is so terrible and driving is so easy is because we socially engineered it that way. And, you know, when people say, well, can't we just all be in EVs?

Absolutely, we have to get to, we have to electrify the fleet. We have to make it easy to cheaply charge your electric vehicle, which gets into all kinds of really interesting topics about smart grids and energy and changes that we need to make there. But the fact of the matter is that electrification is hard, but it is not controversial at all. And if we only choose to do things that are hard, but not controversial, we will never, ever, ever get to the place we need to be around climate. And we won't have a planet that we can leave to any future generations. It's not going to be enough just to electrify the cars that we currently have, especially because as we've talked about at Adam Ruins Everything, there's a huge carbon impact of building the cars to begin with, especially when people are on a three-year new lease car upgrade cycle. They're getting a new car every three years. And there's a huge impact of even just that. Of building and powering them, right? And I saw something that said that there is a tipping point where electric vehicles actually are no longer, in terms of their overall sustainability profile and footprint, they're no longer superior to diesel.

I think we're really, or gas, we're a really long way away from that. Especially in the United States where we don't, we're de-escalating our reliance on coal. I think that's less true. However, just imagine with me for a moment, we're gazing upon the 405 at 5.30 this afternoon. Now imagine all the cars are electric. Yeah. So what? Yeah. Right?

I mean, the Californians buy over half of the EVs that are made in this country. And yet we've still seen tailpipe emissions go up 5% since 2013. Really? They've gone up in that time. They've gone up. And this is despite people doing a lot of work to try and change that narrative. I mean, California is probably one of the most sort of out there states in terms of emissions requirements and commitment to clean air and all those other things. However, we got to drive less. Our way of life has to change. And in order to make driving and taking transit a little bit more competitive, we have to do things that are

controversial and not just hard, like take away a lane from cars and give it exclusively to buses. Because if the bus has to sit in the same congestion as a car does, then the car always wins. I fantasize about that constantly, just my own commute on sunset. If there was one... You have some really nerdy fantasies. That's what I do on a Friday night. That's what they tell me. That's what I do on a Friday night. That's what they tell me.

Yeah, I mean, just if you imagine a bus that has its own lane that other cars, that at least can't be clogged in traffic. On sunset, right? On a major spine like sunset. It would be competitive with a subway even. It wouldn't be quite that fast, but you could go miles in minutes. Yes, you could. You could probably shave off 20% off of the overall travel time. And then people, and if you did that, and at the same time you ran more buses so that you didn't have to know a schedule, you could just show up and know that there would be

a bus on one of those major spines and then have a network of other mobility options to get you the rest of the way there, whether that's a microtransit, a scooter, a bike, whatever, then you would free up a lot of capacity for people who need to drive when they need to drive because people do need to drive for different reasons. Right, because if people say, okay, you remove that lane. I think I understand what you're saying. People say, hold on a second.

If you remove that one lane, there's how many lanes are there in Sunset? Two or three? Four to six. Okay. So people say, hey, if you remove that one lane, that's going to clog all the other lanes. So traffic's going to be really bad for me if I'm not taking the bus. But then you would say back to them, well, hold on a second. You're forgetting how many people who are, you know, just hopping on.

If the bus was that much better, right. And it was really quick. You'd be removing so many people from their cars because they'd be able to take the bus to go to the farmer's market or their brunch or whatever it is. Um, because people forget how many cars one bus equals. Like a bus is, you can fit 50 what, 50, 60 people on a Metro? Easy. And that's 50 or 60 cars.

That's like, imagine 50 or 60 cars compared to the size of one bus. Yes, you in a car take up nine times as much space as you in a bus or you on a bike or you on foot or you traveling in some more efficient mode. So when I look at a street like Van Nuys in Pacoima and Panorama City, where those buses are at crush load capacity, right? You're moving a ton of humans in every single one of those buses, and they are having to sit and wait behind a line of cars that has one or two people in them. That's just a geometry problem, right? We just don't have the space to do it that way. If we're going to keep growing,

we have to figure out a way to favor the more efficient way of moving people. Yeah, the thing that the box that has 100 people in it should get to go a little faster than the box that has one people in it. Yeah, and the box that has one person in it should get to go a little faster than the box that has one people in it. Is the argument. Yeah. And the box that has one person in it.

I said it wrong. One people in it. It doesn't matter if that box is autonomous or electric or is an Uber. It's still taking up exactly the same amount of space, right? Yeah. Whereas the box that's carrying 100 people is taking up way less space and can be, first of all, more social, more enjoyable. It can be more delightful to travel on public transit, I think, because when you don't have to deal with traffic turbulence, you can spend your time reading or you can spend your time thinking. We don't get to have enough time

where we're bored anymore, where we're just staring out the window of a bus and people watching. That has a value. I really do feel that way about, that's what I enjoy about taking the bus. And actually the bus is even, I was always a subway boy,

but now I've become more of a bus boy. I take the bus a little more often. And I actually didn't realize how much more social and experienced the bus is, especially when I was living in my previous home. I realized when I switched from driving to taking the bus, I was driving. It was a short commute. It was like a 15- minute drive from my place in Echo park to our, to our office downtown. Um, and, uh, quick and easy, even a, even a nervous

driver like me could handle it. But then one day I had like a bad experience where like there was a bicyclist who was in the lane and I was trying to give them room and people behind me were honking. So I tried to go around them and then someone else was zooming on my left and they honked at me. And I was just I was just freaked out. I was like, I fucking hate this. I don't like to do it. I don't want to do it anymore. Let me just see if there's a bus.

It turns out that there was a dash bus, which is one of one of yours, I believe. Product placement. Yeah. Right there. Not paid for. A dash bus. Because I'm government and I couldn't. A dash bus being it's separate from the Metro buses.

They're more neighborhood buses, right? And there's a dash bus that basically went from my house to my office. Oh, you had a dash commute? Very lucky. Yeah, I had a dash commute. 35 cents. 35 cents. 35 cents.

35 cents fare. And, you know, sure, I was waiting on the curb a little bit, you know, but I figured out the system to text to find out when it was coming and then would get on. And you know what I realized is I would start to see the same bus drivers. I started to recognize the bus drivers. There was one who was very nice and he would say good morning to everybody who got on the bus. And he would say, I don't speak Spanish, so I don't remember. I could I could recognize what he was saying in Spanish, but I can't repeat it.

But I remember he would say to children who were getting on the bus, like, get on board, children, like that. That's amazing. And then the most beautiful thing happened to me once. He would – the drivers were so kind, whether it be an elderly person or a person in a wheelchair, you know, to help them get on the bus. And, you know, I saw so many moments of small kindness between people. And I saw this one time where the bus was pulling away from the stop and someone runs up and they bang on the door, right? And the bus driver stops and the person gets on.

They're holding a bouquet of flowers and they get on and they give it to another passenger. And then they get off and they say goodbye. Thank you to everybody. I don't know what that was. And then she rode the rest of the ride with her bouquet of flowers. Oh, that was the best. I don't know what it was, but I was like, this is a neighborhood.

You know, these are just sort of, you know, folks who are going down to the park for the day or whatever. And, you know, I'd say, oh, here's where the school kids get on. And it was it was really, really nice. And I know that, hey, sometimes people again have scary encounters on, uh, you know, on transit, especially. Yeah, it's definitely a real issue, particularly for women. Yes. Um, and on transit, you know, there's a, it's one of the places where, uh, our homeless neighbors and our non-homeless neighbors come into interaction the most, which can be uncomfortable to people that happens too. But at the same time, having that connection with your community is

something that I really valued once I started doing it. And yeah, that's, that's. Yeah. And it feels good to get out. When I get off the bus, I look at the driver and I say, thank you. And that feels amazing. I feel like I've really done something to make everybody else, to feel superior to everybody else on the bus, you know, both in terms of my manners and just morally in general, which is always a nice charge for me because I'm a bureaucrat. I don't get to do that. But it also just feels nice to thank somebody, to be able to thank somebody for doing a job that can be really incredibly difficult.

And, you know, I don't think that when people talk about how we're going to make transit so cheap because it's all going to be driverless. And I think, well, you know, and then I, I asked them, well, who's going to do all these amazing things that you just articulated, very specific, beautiful examples of what a transit operator does to, to give that sense of cohesion, to set the tone for everybody, to how to behave with each other, you know, to be friendly, to give you a lift, a boost. Watson is not going to do that. Watson's not going to give you a break on your fare when you, Adam, show up and you're like, Alexa, I'm in a wheelchair. Help me on. Yeah. Whatever. Who cares? Right. And that,

that I think is important. And then the other thing that you got at, which I think is really, I think is invisible, is that what happens to your brain when you get behind the wheel of a car? And I don't know that I haven't seen any enough really good work on what happens. I've seen a little, a few different pieces, but there's a couple of things that happen in quick succession that you're not even aware of. Thing one is you become anonymous because you're just a license plate. You're not having a social human interaction with people. And therefore, you're communicating with this huge piece of steel or a horn. You lose your ability to communicate. Suddenly, it's like you become face blind, you become deaf, and you become mute, and all you can do is yell, honk, honk, honk, and that's your only means of communication. You don't even have body language. You don't even have – well, there's definitely gestures that you can use.

Sure, sure, sure. And can I just tell you, pro tip, the middle finger is not nearly as effective as the thumbs down, I'll just say. The middle finger, you give somebody the middle finger thumbs down. I'll just say the middle finger. You give somebody the middle finger and they're like, yeah, you're a jerk and whatever. I don't even need to listen to you. Give somebody the thumbs down and people feel shamed. I'm going to start feeling like, oh, man, it's like your mom gave you because I use I tend to use the middle finger as a pedestrian because it's sort of one. I feel like one of your only tools and thumbs down, I think is better. Thumbs down. Yeah. But, you know, internet comment and chat rooms have shown us in, you know, full technicolor how humans behave when they think they're anonymous.

Right. And I often think about that when I'm on the road, like what you just described, I'm here and there's a, I'm trying to be nice to this poor vulnerable person, but everybody's being mean and honking and people are swerving around me. That's like a comment section of the, on an article in the, on the internet, right? People are just empowered to, to sort of amplify the worst part of their natures and be incredibly selfish and anonymous. Now, having said all of this, this is in no way this whole thread justification for

the relatively abysmal job that we've done in the United States in providing good transit. There's a lot of great things about transit. We have done a really crappy job. And that is why Uber and Lyft were so successful in pulling people off of it. Because it's not a pleasant experience for most folks. We have to do better. But we should be doubling down on that strategy and how to do that better. Because doubling down on a strategy where everybody has universal access to cars and it's the default choice instead of the choice of last resort is what's gotten us into a lot of this trouble. But if we don't, there's this really interesting, there's this guy named Alex Roy. He also has a podcast called The Autonicast, and he's amazing and a character.

And he has this idea called universal basic mobility. So there's this idea of universal basic income, right? Where you sort of pay everybody a basic income so that they can they're freed up to do other things. But his idea is, instead of that, why don't we come up with an idea for universal basic mobility, so that everybody has access to truly equitable, reliable, safe options that work for them, that are that also work for the greater good. that also work for the greater good. Because people who don't have, who are low income, have to pay a time penalty by riding public transit. Right.

And that just exacerbates this wealth gap that we have because unlocking access to the transportation system unlocks economic mobility. Right. So we have to do a better job though in how we fund, prioritize, plan, and design public transit, because if we don't, then, you know, we'll we'll get what we deserve.

Yeah. And I often want to say to those folks who, you know, tweeted me, well, the public transit public transit is terrible. So, you know, what else am I going to do? Right. I want to say, well, support public transit. That shouldn't be a stopping point for us. You don't even need to take it every day. Just take it a couple times a month and it would make a huge difference. And vote for it. That so many places have bond issues or referenda or people running on improving public transit. Sometimes those motions are defeated running on improving public transit. Sometimes those motions are defeated and having support for improving it. Or, hey, don't show up to the neighborhood council meeting

and yell about the bus lane. Or the bike lane. Or the bike lane, yeah. Because even in LA, when we're really pretty good at voting for the right things, we voted to tax ourselves to build out subway and light rail. We voted to tax ourselves to build bridge housing for people who are, you know, presently homeless.

Yes. We voted to do all of those things. But when, you know, Mike Bonin, who is the council member who represents the West side of Los Angeles and Venice, has one of the highest concentrations of people who are living, you know, intense and are homeless. He made this proposal to create a bridge housing over in his district and just unleashed holy hell. And these are probably people who voted to fund that. But when it comes home to roost down the street, whether it's a bus lane and they have to give something up or they feel like they have to change their way of life, then all of a sudden we revert to sort of this lizard brain.

Like our rational brain gets turned off completely. We forget about how we need to be, in this kind of anonymous place where our way of life feels threatened and we're not willing to accept that. Yeah. But we should be thinking about it as, I'm glad that you said that, you know, we need to do a better job of creating transit. I assume you mean we sort of the civic, of creating transit. I assume you mean we sort of the civic, you're the avatar of government with a mouth saying that.

But I think that I extend that to everybody, you know, that we, like the government is an expression of ourselves. It's a shared responsibility. As a society. And we all should be, you know, providing, trying to provide those more means of transit for each other.

Well, on that note, let's take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more from Salida Reynolds. I don't know anything. I don't know anything. Okay, we're back. So let's recap and move forward. We want to reduce the number of people driving, but we don't want to simply shame at them and yell at them and say, you shouldn't be driving. And we don't want to make it harder for them to move around their communities and take away options. What we actually want to do is we want to, correct me if I'm wrong, increase transit options so that people are able to move around just as fluidly and even, dare I say,

better without cars, right? We want to make driving by yourself the choice of last resort, not your default choice. So how do we do that? And how are we trying to do that right now in Los Angeles? So I think, first of all, you have to give people real choices. And that may or may not be something that the public sector does. There are actually a lot of great examples of really interesting mobility innovations that come from the private sector. And we're in this unprecedented moment, which we talked about before, where there's literally billions of dollars of venture capital being poured into transportation startups, you know, of every color and ilk. I just saw a brand new, like I was just walking around and I saw a bike, like a private bike

rental thing that like a bike appeared before me. Like I walked away and I walked back and someone had left like a bike that I could rent for a job. I didn't even know this existed. It was like suddenly the tech industry just dropped a bike on the street. Voila. Yeah. There it is. And yeah, you're right.

People are really funding these things. There's a lot of money behind them. Yes. And I'm hoping, I mean, part of me is really excited because, you know, we toiled away in transportation for a really long time. And I would go around and ask private companies, well, would you be interested in giving us a few pennies, sir, for this bike lane? And they would be like, get out of my office, you're garbage. But now these companies are really interested in it.

And they're starting to figure it out. But I don't want to really totally spoil the party. But it's actually really hard to make money in public transit. Transportation is not this huge money-making venture unless you're like Japan and you unlock and are able to capture the value of the land that transit creates. So in a transit station, so in Japan, they do this really, they have this really interesting model where the rail company, which is privatized, I'm pretty sure, is also the company that is developing the land around all of the transit stations. And one thing we know about transit is that it does increase the value, especially rail transit and those stations, they increase the value, especially rail transit and those stations.

They increase the value and they increase the attractiveness of development to come in and invest in those communities for better and for worse. Totally. But when you're looking for a place and it's right there in the realtor ad, hey, steps from transit. That's right. And that's why we're going to be able to charge an extra 50 grand for this home or whatever, because it's so close to the train. It's so close to the train. And because at least in California, we've done a That's huge. And they're tied together, transportation and land use. Transportation and housing. Of course. They're really intimately linked. But the effect that we're talking about where transit increases the land use value is amplified in a place where you have low supply overall.

have low supply overall. And so we've created these really beautiful, precious communities called transit-oriented communities and made them really desirable. But then people, we've perhaps had some unintended consequences where we've displaced folks from their neighborhood because they can no longer live there. Transit doesn't create displacement, but it is a really good predictor of where it's going to happen, where there is that kind of housing instability and the arrival of transit portends that those folks are potentially going to get. It's another unintended consequence. Yes, of a good thing, of public transit. Yeah. Metro is doing some really interesting work in this arena. thing of public transit. Yeah. Metro is doing some really interesting work in this arena.

They're actually using transportation dollars to try and build not just housing, but invest in other things that people who are in the neighborhood now might need, like daycare centers or other kinds of funds, community land trusts and other things to try and keep people in place. But nobody has solved this. And until we build enough supply, then we're not going to get there. The other interesting thing is that the more expensive sort of higher income households generate more car trips overall. And we looked at this data in Los Angeles and actually market rate and affordable multifamily housing. So like apartments use far fewer parking spaces than higher income condos and apartments.

So we build these apartments near transit because we want people to be able to live near the train because that's good for everybody. They're driving less, but guess what? If they're really expensive, we might have actually diluted even that kind of beneficial benefit. Because those people are going to drive because they're wealthy. Yeah, exactly. Or there's just more, like the person that cleans their house drives over, the person that take their nanny needs a car. Right. They have other services and other people who, you know, are part of their household or, you know, participate in their household that are also creating trips. So if we're not really careful about how we're developing those areas, even when we build the transit, we might not be getting as many rides as we want.

Right. And we might not get that kind of benefit of lowering the number of people who are driving. But you were saying these for-profit companies can't make their money on transit. Well, and we're in this really interesting moment where both Lyft and Uber are on a run-up to initial public offerings. Are they really?

And so they're starting to disclose, you know, their numbers. And it's an open secret. This is not new information. But both of those companies have actually lost quite a bit of money. Oh, yeah. Because they have to, you know, they're subsidizing those rides. Those rides are not as cheap as they appear on your phone. Right.

Well, and sometimes they're just in a straight up price war. Like I've been in times where they're, you know, they're a couple of years ago, Lyft and Uber were just competing to have the lowest rate. Right. Um, then, so what you see them doing now, which is really interesting, this you were talking, we're talking about mobility innovation is that they're both getting into the scooter and bike business. So that bike you saw was, I'm going to guess it was red. It was red, yeah. I'm going to guess it said jump on it. I think so.

That is a company that Uber owns. And when you open the Uber app and you want to get an Uber ride, those bikes will pop up in your app. It'll say, want to take a bike ride instead? Or in addition, and actually they came out with some data last week that in the city of Sacramento, there are more people using those jump bikes than actually taking Uber trips. Now, I don't know where that data is coming from. I don't know whose data that is. I haven't dug into that data, but it is a really interesting data point. So, but again, here's this thing that we have to balance. That's good, right? That people are now, maybe they have a different choice for a short trip and it's right there and it's cheap and it's easy and they can

take advantage of it. And maybe they're not calling for a car, which is a good thing. However, if Uber and Lyft create an effective duopoly on those kinds of modes. We call those walled gardens. Or God forbid one buys the other one out. Or a monopoly, right. Or there's some other company, right, Didi, or some other company that comes in from somewhere else and buys them. And Didi is the Chinese ride-hailing giant

that basically made it so that Uber doesn't operate in China. But anyway, then we have a monopoly, and that's a bad thing. Yeah. Right? That's not a good thing for mobility. Yeah. So in LA, what we've been trying to do is figure out how do we create a way to encourage that new mobility and that innovation to come in,

but be really clear about the principles under which we want that to happen. And then how can we build an elegant way of managing and sharing data in two directions with those new mobility providers as they open up in the app store that is the public realm, right? That is the public realm that I manage.

The apps of life. If you will. You take the good, you take the bad. The apps of life. We can't get the rights. Don't sing anymore. No, we can't get the rights. It'll be fine.

It'll be fine. Yeah, I mean. We can't get the rights. But come on, Adam. That was perfect. That was the apps of life. It was mean, that was perfect. It was perfect. It was perfect. But if you sing more than two bars, the lawyers come.

Who's the Mrs. Garrett of the apps of life? Oh my gosh. Could that be me? I totally could. Could I be Mrs. Garrett? Cause I would be super into that. What are the rest of the names? Uber could be Joe.

They're all named like Tootie and Pootie or something like that. That's enough. Tootie is an icon who went around on roller skates because she was too short. Joe was the sort of tomboy. And then there was Blair who had the blonde hair. So I think maybe Uber is Blair

and maybe Lyft is Tootie. And you're running the house. And I'm Mrs. Garrett. I love that. And I'm Mrs. Garrett. This is a really good political cartoon, I think. I'd love to see this rendered. If someone wants to draw it and send it in.

Anyway, so we've come up with this idea using APIs, which are really just is a way of saying I think of it as, and my chief technologist is going to cringe, but I think of it as just robot language. Yeah. It's how different data services talk to each other. Yes. They use an API to do it. Because these companies, and there's 11 of them, by the way,

who have applied to operate, to have bikes and scooters, 38,000 bikes and scooters in Los Angeles. Lime, Bird, Jump, and a bunch of others. Uber, Lyft, and there's just Spin, which is owned by Ford. There's this one called Clout. They all have one. Clever.

They all have one word names. Yeah, one word names. Yeah. That's the trend now. And they're, right. And they're, you know, it's totally fascinating. And I'm really excited that we're going to get so many of them in Los Angeles because I think we're going to learn a ton about how people move around. But it gave us this opportunity.

Those systems are all – every single one of those shared devices is talking to each other and talking to their mothership and telling the mothership, here's where I am right now, and here's where I just was, and here's where I went, and here's how I'm moving. They're creating, in effect, a new map of the city that I really want to be able to understand, both as a planner and somebody who wants to go build safe places for people to ride, but also as a regulator. Because there are some places that they're not allowed to be. And there might be some places that are underserving that you want to say, hey, no, you guys, if you want to run, you've got to be over here. You have to make, you got to put

your scooters in this neighborhood because these people need them. And I know you don't want to go there, but you gotta. But you gotta. Yeah. So that idea that the city would now have a version of our own APIs that where we're talking to these services and we're telling them and, you know, we're giving them information and we're getting information from them is a really new idea. I don't, I mean, I guess maybe I could be in the scooter business. I don't really think it's my role to be the scooter czarina of Los Angeles and try and manufacture and deploy my own scooters. Yeah. Instead, I should make it really easy to, for these companies to come in and operate and be successful. In ways that actually reduce traffic. Yeah.

And driving. Exactly. In ways that actually reduce traffic. Yeah. And driving. Exactly. Because you could see scooters are not the first new mobility idea and they won't be the last. You know, there's a whole bunch of other types of devices that people want to operate. Little golf carts. I'm not joking.

Little pods. Hoverboards. Zip lines. Eventually, yeah, drones, right? All that kind of stuff people always ask me because they know I care about public transit

and then I've done it on the show people say oh what do you think about the scooters and I'm like look when they came

to my neighborhood I got on one once and I went literally three feet and I hopped off and I said no

done I felt so unsafe like I just don't you know skateboard I've never been on a skateboard me neither I've never been on a skateboard. Me neither.

I'm pretty uncomfortable on a bike, frankly. I'm just like, I have sort of a, like a motion, you know, I'd like to be on my own feet. Right. That's what makes me comfortable. And having had that experience, I was like, look, I'm a, I'm a 35 year old man. And I could, you know, I'm the type of person who could use these. What about if you look at the number of people who can use those scooters, it's very small. You know, it's not, you know, anyone over the age of 50 is not riding.

Or let's even say a little bit older. If you've got a bad hip, you shouldn't be on one of the scooters, right? You need good balance. You need to be in good shape. You need to be comfortable riding one of those things on the street. Pretty ableist. Yeah. To think everybody can use them.

Yeah, exactly. So if you look at the number of people, even the target market for these, it's probably going to be, what, 20% of people in Los Angeles. Max. But, hey, if those people can use it, maybe that's a piece.

It's part of the solution. Maybe that's part of the puzzle, right? Yes. And so that's sort of my ambivalence about it. But if you have a whole bunch of solutions like that, and then there's also something for, you know, yeah, folks in wheelchairs, folks that, you know, the elderly,

and they have ways to get around comfortably themselves and everyone has their own little weird thing that they use other than driving. And we're not violating, you know, older adults in particular, when they, you know, lose their driver's license or they're low-income older adults, they walk and they take transit.

And they may use a mobility assist device. They got a walker. They got a wheelchair. They got a cane. They got a who knows what, right? All those kinds of things. When scooters have motors, these scooters have motors, and they go 17 miles an hour.

Some of them may be a little faster. And they're on the sidewalk going that fast. Yeah going that fast, then you've created this imbalance. Part of the reason that exists is because we've given over so much space to cars that all the other modes have to fight it out for this one little eight feet of sidewalk. And sometimes there isn't a sidewalk. In many places in Los Angeles, there simply is not a sidewalk. Yes. And then when these things park, I mean, you described like I turned around and voila,

there it was. Right. And there's no, there's no, if you're a person who's hopefully you're considerate and you park that thing or you leave it out of the middle of the sidewalk. Yeah. But I just saw that there's a group of disability advocates in San Diego that just brought a lawsuit against the scooters because they're impeding the accessible right-of-way. So there's all of these things.

It is really important to get this stuff right when you're trying to manage the public realm and that you think about everybody who has to use it because it can work. But the folks who manage the streets gotta be in there and i think the tech the sort of tech mindset is um that they would they would just as soon prefer that we were not of course oh yeah we we disrupt we uh run over regulation you know we don't we'll just ignore it they're not all like that but better to know it's a i get it it's easier for them better to apologize than ask permission mindset um which is not great when the people that you're apologizing to are real people who are being hurt in manifest ways and vulnerable people. But at the same time, I'm often skeptical of public-private partnerships in general between government business, because usually it's the businesses that are winning. Right. And they've like captured whatever bureau they're working with and, you know, they're running roughshod over them.

But in transit, like I do have to say, like you as the manager of, hey, I'm going to make sure all these play nice together. I'm going to make sure that they're actually serving our needs, actually getting people out of cars because I've got the public interest at heart, even though the company, the companies are trying to make money as much as they care about the public interest. They put money first. You put public interest first. Can we work together? I have to say I'm less skeptical because public transit in America has historically been a public private partnership. I mean, the subways in New York were originally private rail lines. That's right. And so were the red car lines in Los Angeles. Yeah. And then, you know, people stopped using them

and there was no longer a profit motive. There was no longer money to be made. And so they were dismantled, right? And this is a really interesting narrative that you'll hear, you know, who framed Roger Rabbit, all that, that the tire companies came in and dismantled the red car. People tell me that all the time. They say, they say oh adam you talk about streetcars but you

didn't talk about this conspiracy i learned it in this great movie who framed roger rabbit you got to check it out it's a documentary on netflix but there's like there's like some amount scholar bob huskins yeah no jessica rabbit uh-uh um the i think that that what actually happened It's Scholar Bob Hoskins. Yeah, no. Jessica Rabbit. Uh-uh. I think that what actually happened is that people stopped using them as much. And that's because Los Angeles in particular, we've shaped this city in the image of the big disruption of that time, which was cars. Yeah. And we created all of these separated motorways we criminalized jaywalking i think la was the first city in the united states to make it a crime to step off the corner wherever you wanted imagine that like to live in a world

where hey yeah everyone gets to use the street and suddenly it's a crime it's a step into the street and when i tell people i do this talk and I tell people that fact, and I just pause there always and remind, I said, just please remember this, that it was the American Automobile Club and the vehicle manufacturers that created this term and that made it, and then cities made it a crime. Remember that whenever you hear anybody working on an autonomous vehicle software stack who says, I just can't solve for those pesky pedestrians. What are we going to do about that? And it just makes me think that there's another,

whatever the autonomous vehicle version of jaywalking is, you know, maybe it's that you can't cross the street unless you're wearing some weird beacon or something that a car can, an autonomous vehicle can detect you. That's the fear about autonomous vehicles, right, that I have, is that they're going to get them 95% of the way towards working and being safe. And then the rest of us are going to have to fill in the other 5% by accounting for, you know, trying to figure out how the algorithms work

and redesigning our streets and making everything, hold on a second, well, robots are driving on these now, so we really can't have any interruptions. So we better fence it off and make sure no one can go in these things because, you know, essentially these have to be pneumatic tubes, essentially, and we have to, you know. Yeah, because to program truly unfettered autonomous vehicles that can go anywhere, whether or not it's mapped in their LIDAR brains and that can move around sort of with impunity, the level of complexity to program that in an urban environment which has limitless edge cases. Yeah, it's the real world.

I joke about this, but it's kind of true. You kind of can't get there until the singularity, like the human brain, the complexity of the thing is so crazy that it's gonna exceed our ability to program. And until robots can do the programming for these AVs, we're not going to actually get to that. And so that means that we're going to get to something less than that, which is going to place all these weird convoluted requirements on how infrastructure

works and how cities work if we're not really careful. And it really bothers me. One of the things that bothers me the most about Elon Musk is that- Really? To come back to him. We're going to bring it back to Elon? It all comes back to Elon Musk. It always comes back to him. No, bless his heart.

But it's not just him. It's this industry in general. If I'm the avatar for government, then he's the avatar for that sort of Silicon Valley mindset. And man, I would be so on his side with all these transit issues if I felt like he was listening to folks who know their business about transit. But when he says things like induced demand is a myth or when he sloughs off that, you know, being a good partner in that way, that's what frustrates me. Because I do think the role is there, right? I really do in the way that I said.

Like, you know, hey, the, you know, I'd be interested in tunnels if it weren't becoming increasingly clear that these are just private roads for Teslas to drive down. And that that's not going to solve congestion. Yeah. And that they seem so resistant to listening to the message that we've known. Just do your homework. Do your homework, please. There's this value that's like, if you do your homework, somehow that will violate you as a disruptor and it'll, it'll pollute your pure disruptor brain and you won't be able to effectively disrupt whatever you're disrupting. You're, you're a rational, right?

You're rational science-based person. That's what he's all about. Well then listen to the scientists and be rational about it. But the thing that bothers me the most that I was in the sentence that I was saying earlier was how quickly they go to blaming the people when the autonomous cars kill them, right? That like, it's always, every single time someone dies in an autonomous vehicle,

oh, well, they were just, you know, they weren't paying attention. They were watching a movie. They shouldn't have been crossing the street. They shouldn't, no, no, no. No, you're the car was driving. So the car and the car crashed. Right. I think I think the person who designed the car that killed the person should say, I'm sorry.

Whoops. We'll try to we'll try to make a better one. You know, we'll try. Maybe we shouldn't brand something autopilot when it isn't. Yeah, exactly. Right. And give people this false false notion that they can sleep and they can watch a movie. And there was that, what was that movie, Bird Box, right?

Yeah, where they're covering the eyes. Covering the eyes. And then I saw on social media, people are doing this Bird Box challenge in their Teslas where they're like, look, I'm doing the Bird Box challenge blindfolded. Because look, the human factors, again, back to the science, the human factors research is really, really clear. And I had this discussion actually about somebody who was in, and this is several years ago, I don't know if they're still there, but was in Tesla's legal department. And I said, y'all know that humans are not good at maintaining constant vigilance.

We're not even in autonomous cars now and we can't do it. We're always peeking at our phones or looking at our radio or whatever it is. And now you've given them a permission slip that makes them think they can, they will. And the research is really, these experiments are really fascinating where, you know, they'll have a human in a car on a track, and then the person is trying to figure out what is it going to take for the human to re-engage in the act of driving when the car hits a moment that it cannot, it can't manage. It's too complicated or whatever. How do you get the person to take the wheel again? Right. And there really isn't a good way of doing it with immediacy because what happens is,

you know, the car will beep. They try all kinds of things, noises, bright lights, like all kinds of stuff. And usually what happens is the person is like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But let me just finish this email. Right. It's like there's still this sense that, or they're asleep in the back seat of the car and there's no, we just know that's what humans do. And there's this weird conflict where the point of autonomous driving, hey, you won't have to drive the car. You will get to tune out, right? But then once there is an incident, well, they weren't paying attention and they should have grabbed the wheel once they saw the thing happening. Well, which one is it? Tune out, but not tune out.

And we can't, we're just not good at that. There was some case where, and I might be misremembering, this is something I read months ago, but it was a case where I think a person was killed in an autonomous vehicle. And it hits, you know, where a lane splits for an exit. And there's like a little, you know, there's like a post, like a stanchion, like a thing. It's called a gore. A gore, okay.

And so the guy's car drove right into it. And he had said in previous days, he was like, that's funny. Whenever I go by this, my car seems to want to steer into it. Oh gosh. Because there's something that's tricking the AI. And then one day it happened

and he didn't correct for it. Yeah. Oh, that's so sad. Again, this is my memory and I don't want to misrepresent the facts of a real case. And so I'd have to Google the exact incident to figure out what it was. Beep, boop, boop, beep. Yeah, beep, boop, beep. But, you know, that's, again, unintended consequences, right?

Once we – it's easy to imagine autonomous vehicles are going to solve all of this. Autonomous electric vehicles are going to solve all of this. Autonomous electric vehicles are going to solve all this. But we don't know, in the same way that we had no idea that Uber and Lyft would lead to more cars on the road until we tried it, we don't know what autonomous vehicles are going to do to our roads, to our way of life, to our safety until they're actually out there. And it's incumbent upon the people who are building them to make sure that those impacts aren't negative. And we can't rely on them to do that. Right.

We've seen over and over again that they want to throw their hands up. They're not going to self-police. They're just not. Right. And so government has to be in there in a realistic way. And I think that, you know, the Tesla autopilot is a really good example. Right. This is, you know, these are not even unintended consequences.

You know that humans are not going to be as vigilant as you need them to be. And Tesla even, and maybe National Traffic Safety Board, both released this statistic about how Teslas were X percent safer. And then lo and behold, behold and lo, come to find out that was just a false stat. And so there's just this mutually reinforcing kind of inertia towards these things are really good and we should be deploying them at scale without sort of somebody standing over in the corner saying, hey, but we know that people are not going to be capable of dealing with the technology and the way that you're deploying it and what you're calling it. So whenever the car is in, you know, quote unquote autopilot mode or whatever we're going to label it, then there should be a speed governor on that car. Right. And it shouldn't be able to go fast enough to kill somebody because we know the tech is not perfect. Now, no auto manufacturer, including Tesla, which has an insane mode on their car, and who wanted to build a sexy, fast electric vehicle, is going to do that.

And so, for that reason alone, government needs to be in there to say, okay, we're going to hold everybody accountable and be the grownup in the room. So let me, let me end with this question. Because talking to you is very, makes me feel real good because you know your shit so well, you're on top of it. You are talking about all these services. It's all an illusion. I just sit around watching Facts of Life. I'm like, she's got, hearing you hearing you I'm like she's got the scooters

and the bike people and the lift and everything wrapped around her little finger and she's keeping tabs on all of them and Salida's here making sure that she's the watchdog and so but even if I grant that right and allow myself

to live in that world is that happening in other cities? Is that happening nationally? Do you feel that the governments, the city, state, and national governments are stepping up to what needs to be done here? Yes and no. I think that for most people who sit in my seat, you're talking about folks who have spent a lifetime in transportation. They really know what they're doing. But not every city has a Department of Transportation. Some cities house transportation inside a public works department.

So you'll have your leader be a guy or a woman who knows a lot about sewers, just to bring it back to sewers. Yeah. Or, you know, other respond to emergencies, to make sure that when your transportation planners are out there trying to plan a bike lane that they don't get covered in rotten tomatoes when they go to public meetings, to make sure that you're evaluating your development properly and keeping your city council and your mayor or your city manager happy. That's just enough right there. They don't have time to learn about what an API is or how a city could behave more like a product company and how that might benefit a city and a product company. And what levers to use to kind of nudge product companies to behave more like cities, right? So it's not so much a failing of creativity or talent. It's just a failing of time and training. And so I think there's a lot of opportunities there.

And what I see is that there are some incredible leaders in transportation departments at the city level across the U.S. who are doing really good stuff and who are sharing information. So cities are not like private companies and we share, you know, we're better when we share information and we have frameworks to do that really effectively. At the national level, I have some questions. And I'll just give a couple of examples. Example number one is the folks at the USDOT and National Traffic Safety Bureau and National Highway Traffic Safety Association have known for a really long time that the reason why pedestrian deaths are spiking in the United States is because we're buying more SUVs. spiking in the United States is because we're buying more SUVs. However, they have steadily put out information to imply that the reason people are dying when they're walking is because

they're distracted by their phones. Elaine Chao, who's the Secretary of Transportation for the US, has said about autonomous vehicles that she wants to create a system where they sort of self-certify because that has worked really well in aviation. And that is such a broad misread of why airplanes are safe that it just makes me wonder, is there really somebody at the national level that is bringing the care and rigor required to these kinds of issues? Or is it, you know, sort of a, is there heavy influence from sort of the private sector? And then globally, I think that Europe is doing some really interesting stuff, both around privacy, as well as they just came out with a potential requirement for cars to have speed governors on them in Europe. I saw that. Right? So those kind of moves. It's such a basic thing that when you realize that we don't have it, like, hold on a second, breaking the speed limit is against the

law. The faster you go, the more people you kill, right? So so why not if the speed limit is you know uh you know speed limit 60 everyone drives 70 fine make it 70 you know even even that much right why not just make the cars not be able to go faster than 70 70s fast you know we all know that's fast i understand you really hey maybe you're late for the airport or whatever but like 70 miles is fast yeah why not just make it so the cars can't go that fast. And then you realize, okay, well that's something that the auto manufacturers have been fighting against.

And that's the, I mean, that's one of the reasons that they fought back against jaywalking because cities were talking or so that they created the idea of jaywalking cities. We're talking about in the thirties, Hey, we should just put speed governors on these things because when they go over 30 miles an hour,

they tend to kill children in the streets. Right. Um, and it was in response- Maybe we don't want to do that. It was in response specifically to that, that they started the campaign to blame the pedestrians. Yes. And so when you realize, oh, wait, why not just do it?

It really reconfigures the way you think about our relationship with these vehicles. With these vehicles. I think then, you know, when you start thinking about Asia and China in particular, that's a whole nother thing, right? Beijing is in the middle of trying to solve their traffic problem by forcibly moving people out of the city. there's a rich tapestry, if you will, of work being done. And I think that the position that we have in Los Angeles that I think is hopefully will make you feel better is that, you know, the biggest city in the biggest state. And when we published, for example, those APIs that I mentioned earlier, about 15 other cities in the United States and a

couple of them globally adopted them. Wow. And so we have the power to nudge the market and to try and change the relationship between public and private if we are able to sort of have the courage to do it. All right. Well, thank you so much for being a part of that change. And thanks for coming to talk to us about it. Thank you. Well, thank you so much to Salida for coming on the show. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. We will be back next week with more mind-blowing facts and more great interviews. And remember, we are a brand new show.

So please remember to rate and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can follow me on Twitter at Adam Conover. Thank you to our producer, Dana Wickens, our researcher, Sam Roudman, and to the party god, Andrew WK, for our theme song. We'll see you next week. Thanks so much for listening. That was a HateGum podcast.