 Before we begin, I just like to ask everyone to just turn off your cell phones and beepers and the like. We are recording live for Facebook. So when we do come around for the Q&A, please wait for the microphone, okay? All right, we'll be starting momentarily. Good evening, welcome to the Mechanics Institute. My name is Ralph Lewin and I'm the director here. And you know what, the core of the dream of Mechanics Institute is the hope that through education and conversation that we can create a better society. And we established that dream about 160 years ago here at Mechanics. And what amazes me is the founders, they created this place when the gold brush had busted. And there was something like 70% unemployment. And so they wanted to think of a way to get out of it. And the way they decided to get out of that situation was to create a library. So I love that radical notion, the idea that through self-improvement, through education, that we can create a better society. And they ask that kind of age old question, what kind of society do we want to be? And in many ways tonight, we're asking that same question except through transportation. What kind of society do we want to be in transportation? So if you love that question, what kind of society do you want to be? You're probably a perfect fit for the Mechanics Institute. And I want to encourage you all to become members if you're not already, if you are a member to tell your friends to become members because that's how we've survived for 160 years. I also wanted to say that this membership is probably one of the coolest gifts you could ever give a friend. So think about that, you'll be giving them a gift not only to be part of the library or 160,000 books that we have downstairs to have a shared workspace and also to be part of the largest social club for introverts in the world. So with that, let me hand it over to Laura Shepard and she'll introduce the panel. Thanks a lot. Thank you, Ralph. So good evening and welcome to the Mechanics Institute at 57 Post Street. I'm Laura Shepard, Director of Events, and I'm pleased to welcome you to our program, Transforming SF, The Future of Transportation. This program is moderated by Walter Thompson of Hoodline with panelists, Senator Scott Wiener, Evan Golden of Chariot, Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez of the San Francisco Examiner, and Charles Rathbone, Medallion Holders Association. This new series, Transforming SF, explores the Bay Area's evolving culture and what trends and movements will influence how we live in California, the nation, and the world. Upcoming events also include The Future of Privacy and Security on April 27th and The Future of the City cosponsored with AIA San Francisco on June 29th. So please see our website for details and pick up our calendar, which is right at the doorway. Once again, for those of you who are new, we encourage you to come on Wednesday for the free tour of the Mechanics Institute Library, and you'll also find out more about our history, as Ralph has mentioned, and find out more about what we have to offer. So we have our general interest library on the second and third floors, an international chess club down the hallway. Our programs include author events, a series like this, Cinema Lit Film Series on Friday night, author programs, book clubs, writers groups, computer classes, and of course the chess tournaments and classes that are going on throughout the week. So we hope that you'll join us, become a member, and take the tour. So after the program, we would like to welcome you to come down to the Dada Bar, which is in our retail space on the first floor, and members receive a 10% discount on drinks. Just a perk. And now I'd like to introduce our moderator, Walter Thompson. Walter is a journalist who's worked with tech startups for two decades. He's the community editor for Hoodline, a hyper-local news service. His work has appeared in San Francisco Magazine, and he is also working on Golden City, a documentary about technology, how technology has transformed housing and transportation in San Francisco. So please a warm welcome to Walter and our panel. Thanks everyone for being here. Can you all hear me? This is my first question. Great. Excellent. All right. So here's our fantastic panel. Sitting next to me is Evan Golden. He's director of product at Chariot, a service now used by thousands of commuters and dozens of companies around the San Francisco Bay Area in Austin, Texas. Chariot was recently acquired by Ford Smart Mobility and will expand nationwide this year to eight markets total. Before Chariot, he was the first product manager at Lyft, ride-hailing service, helping scale Lyft service to hundreds of cities nationwide and creating Lyft for Work, a platform that makes it possible for companies to use Lyft for business travel and commuting. He's also born and raised on the peninsula. Next to Evan is Senator Scott Wiener, representing District 11 in the state senate. He was previously a member of the board of supervisors in San Francisco, where he was a champion for creating housing policy to make housing more affordable, improving the reliability and capacity of public transportation, ensuring neighborhood safety, fighting against the impacts of climate change and the drought, and safeguarding and expanding the rights of all communities, including the LGBT community. Wiener has lived in the Castro for nearly 20 years. Next to Senator Wiener, Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez, another San Francisco native, board and race, a staff writer at the Bay Guardian, now writes as the examiner's political column on guard. He's also a transportation beat reporter who covers pedestrians, muni, barred bikes, and anything with wheels. And finally on the end we have Charles Rathbone, who's lived in the Bay Area since the late 60s. He's worked in the taxi industry since 1975 as a driver and as a labor organizer and later as an assistant manager for Luxor Cab for nine years or so I think he said, until he retired last year. His website taxilibrary.org covers the history, culture and regulation of the industry worldwide. In 2011 he traveled to Rio de Janeiro as part of a United Nations expert group on sustainable urban transport. Charles represented the taxis on the 2014 late night transportation working group and currently serves on the board of the Medallion Holders Association. Thanks everyone for being here this evening. So let's just dive in. Before we start with the conversation, I kind of wanted to kind of get an overview of the city's transportation matrix, the different ways we all get around. So we've got muni, SFMTA, which is I think the eighth largest possibly in the, I'm not sure I shouldn't say, but I know it's not the fastest. The average fleet-wide speed is eight miles per hour, I believe, the fleet-wide speed, meaning you might be able to out walk a bus for short periods of time. And beyond that it carries about, let's see, 70, it's in stats, 702,000 people a day. The Enjuta is the most populous line, carries about 40,000 riders a day. And when it was started in 1928, the Enjuta would take you from La Playa, the beach, to Ferry Building in 36 minutes. Today it's 43 minutes. According to the mix, there are about 45,000 ride-hailing vehicles, Lyft, Sidecar, and not Side, Lyft, Uber, Chariot, other few operations. 1,200 muni vehicles, and 1,820 medallion vehicles. And this is more or less how people, and people walk, I think about five or six percent of San Franciscoans regularly bicycle, 25 percent of us take a cab once a month at least. So these are the ways we all get around, but show of hands, this evening, how many of you took muni to get here tonight? All right. How many of you took a private vehicle, a privately owned vehicle, you own yourself, the paperwork? Wow. Wow. Nobody. Not a single one. We know this crowd. How many of you? How many of you used a ride-hailing service like Lyft or Uber? Okay. Interesting. Don't forget. Yes. And how many walked, of course. And how many took a cab? And how many took a cab? So a taxi. Yes. Anyone? Medallion taxi. One person? Two people. Two people. Okay. Okay. That's a pretty good mix of, it's a pretty good slice of life, I suppose, in San Francisco. And it kind of does lead us right into the first question, which is, what's working well as far as our transportation matrix? What is the good part of using our transportation network? And what is not working? And let's start with you, Evan, from your perspective as a product person for a private company. Yeah. I mean, in terms of what's working well, I think mobility is at least working well. I think technology has allowed us to add a lot of new mobility options for people. We're not, it doesn't seem like traffic is better now than it was five years ago, but it seems like there are at least a lot more ways for people to get places. So I think that's working well. And at least from the chariot perspective, we're offering people a fast way to get to work and to get home in a high capacity vehicle that's taking cars up the road. So, Senator, to you. Sure. Hi, everyone. I think in some ways, what's working well is also what's not working well, which is our public transportation systems. So in addition to the 700,000 daily riders on uni, it's about over 400,000 on BART, which grew much faster than anyone anticipated. And about, I think it's about 65,000 or so daily riders on Caltrain. And then, of course, you have AC Transit and other bus systems. And in a way, and I've been a regular muti rider for 20 years before I took office in the State Senate. It was seven days a week. Now it's more like three or four days a week, because you can't take it up there in Sacramento. And I think sometimes we're all critics of uni, we're all critics of BART, but compared to almost any other city, we have the amazing public transportation bones. And the fact that you can get really anywhere on transit is amazing in many ways. And so we should be, I'm very grateful to live in a city that has so much public transportation infrastructure. The challenge is that we have come to rely on these systems so dramatically for our economy for everything. We can't function without these systems. And we haven't kept them up. We haven't modernized them. We haven't expanded them. And so we did these brilliant visionary things in the 70s by opening up the BART system and the Market Street subway, for example. And then we proceeded to not touch them for decades. And to the point that BART is really falling apart. It's getting short up now, but we're playing catch-up in a major way. Uni fell way behind. Caltrain is still in some ways operating like it's in the 1950s. And just to be clear, we have a lot of great efforts on the way to modernize and improve all of these systems, but we're playing catch-up. And we can see it in so many ways with the overcrowding on the end, Judah or on BART, where you physically can't get onto a vehicle, the breakdowns that happen. And it's just not keeping up with the explosive population growth that we've had in San Francisco and the Bay Area over the last multi-decades. So that's a good thing, but a challenging thing. And so the private transportation systems that have come in will carry it. The employee shuttles, including the tech shuttles, Uber, Lyft, really are a reflection of some of the deficiencies that we have in our transit system that you can't always get where you want to go in an efficient way. And so other systems will come in to fill in the gaps. And so that's a good thing, that those gaps are being filled and people can get around. But it is a reflection on some of the challenges that we've had, particularly around our public transportation systems. You know, I think it's a way to frame this, and I think it's really useful when we talk about is transportation working? It's useful to frame for who and where. Because when we're talking about transportation, we're talking about commuters from one point in San Francisco to another point, usually from an outer lying neighborhood to the urban core, but not always. And we're also talking about commuters in the outer regions, which you then have to divide into East Bay, South Bay, and North Bay into San Francisco for work. So when we talk about is transportation working, you have to go, well, actually maybe working a little better within the city, within the city itself, less so than out of the city into San Francisco, and then for who? And then that measure, again, is better subdivided by working families. If I'm a single person, and I've been taking Muni my whole life, I was practically born on a Muni bus, and I definitely learned to walk on a Muni bus. I got my Muni legs really early. But can you raise kids and use a Muni bus to take your kids to school and then go to work? Could you do that with a train? Or if you're elderly and or you're a senior, can you take Muni? If you use it for a commute and in certain neighborhoods can't do. And that's, I think that's the useful way to be cutting it. And the better Muni and the better public transit, better BART gets, the more you see them cut into those groups that have more burdens, more transportation burdens. And that's what you hear the most when I'm at board meetings with the MTA. And we've got one board member of the MTA here tonight, Noel Ramos, who's here in the back there. But not to call you out, man, but that's why I hear the most when I'm at those meetings is like, well, I've got to hang on to my car because I've got to drop two kids off here and there and I can't take the bus. So if you're prioritizing the bus over the car, then we can't make that work. And once you see public transit better for some of those groups, that's when you can say it's truly reaching a peak and being at its best. Well, I agree 100% with Joe that it depends a lot on who you're talking about. For instance, people with disabilities have a particularly difficult time these days getting around. I'm happy to say that the taxis still provide wheelchair accessible service. We also do tens of thousands of trips every week that are largely uneventful. I'm very happy to say that. I used to work the complaint desk at Luxor Cabs. I'm happy to say that not too many complaints these days. One of the things that's not working so well for us in the taxi industry is that we have a very hard time finding drivers these days. And an indication of why that might be, I went this morning to the Lyft web page to see what incentives they're offering to new drivers. $1,000 sign-up bonus and free use of a car, including insurance and maintenance. So this is pretty tough for us to compete with. It also goes away to explain why Lyft is losing $50 million a month. And the other company, Uber, is losing a quarter of a billion dollars a month. It has to do with these tremendous subsidies that are going into supporting the drivers. So the good news is from the taxi view, again, is we're still here. We intend to stay here. I believe that within a couple of years, the tremendous amount of funding that is flowing into the rideshare services will start to dry up. Their investors are going to require a return on their investment. At that time, I believe that there will be a resurgence of the taxis. Our cost structure is much lower than the rideshare services. So I think that we will still do quite well. The other thing that I think is working well in our industry is the transparency of our pricing. Our pricing is set by law. It doesn't go up and down according to the weather. It certainly doesn't go up and down according to transportation emergencies like the BART shutdown earlier this week, which resulted in tremendous increases in the fares that our competitors charge. Obviously, many of the people in San Francisco really like the service of rideshare. There's no question that it's good service. It's very prompt. It's much faster than a taxi cab. Taxis have about 1,800 cabs now. If we had 45,000 cabs, we could be at your door before the phone is off the hook. Unfortunately, we cannot. I think that pretty much says... It does. I want to go back to one of the things you mentioned. You were talking about paratransit. This is purely anecdotal. I don't have data backing this up. In conversations I've had with disabled people in San Francisco who were aligned paratransit services, what I've come to understand for some of them is that the weight they have for... Look, I only stopped for a second. As far as I understand, paratransit is basically a cooperation between taxi companies and the city. Is that more or less correct? The city pays taxi companies to provide services for paratransit. That is correct. What I've heard is that anecdotally, because there are fewer drivers in the job, there are fewer paratransit drivers available as well, fewer people who are certified to drive wheelchair ramp vehicles, which means if you live in the Richmond and you want to get to your doctor appointment on the lawn, you'll wait longer for a ride than you used to because there are fewer drivers available. Is that something you've heard as well? That is correct. It's also a function of fewer numbers of vehicles. A couple of years ago, there were at least 100 wheelchair-accessible cabs in San Francisco. We're down to, I believe, 42 now. The cabs themselves are very expensive to buy. They're extremely expensive to maintain. They have a lot of moving parts on the lifts and so on, the ramps and the tie-downs and so on. It's also very challenging for the driver. The driver has a much more physically demanding job to assist the people into the car. How do I say this, Adele? The customers tend to be more difficult to satisfy and they're more likely to have concerns about the service and so on. It takes a special driver with a special temperament and the company that's willing to absorb the cost, they're not profitable for taxi companies to operate. Bringing Senator back in, when the ride-hailing companies, when they launched, they weren't required or were they required to provide paratransit as far as picking up people who had, like I said, guide dogs, for example. They weren't and just to be clear, the taxis are regulated by the city, the rideshares are regulated by the state and I think the California Public Utilities Commission, which has about an enormous number of different responsibilities, was tasked with doing it and frankly, for a while, was not doing it particularly well. I think the regulations have improved, but there's still work to do, but I think it's also important to be clear and I'm someone who I continue to this day, my first choice is to try to take a cab, but the reality is sometimes you can get a cab, sometimes you can't get a cab and this is a balance. Let's talk about the bar closure whenever we have that kind of system meltdown and people want to get a ride somewhere. It is absolutely true that the cabs will not do surge pricing, but I can also, especially before say five years ago when we really didn't have the ride sharing, it would have been almost impossible to actually get a cab and that was so many people would have been competing for a very limited number of cabs, you would not have been able to get a cab. Now you can get a ride share and if you don't want to pay more, you can make that choice, you can say I'm going to pay more, I'm going to wait for things to calm down and I think it's very important to just recognize that the ride shares didn't just happen. Having lived in the city for 20 years and someone who I like taking cabs and there were so many years where you could not rely on getting a cab, not because the cab companies weren't working really hard, of course they were, but there weren't enough cabs and the cab companies wanted to get more cabs. We were always working hard to try to get more cabs, but there were people who consistently bought that and so there were times when even you were downtown, you were in a saturated part of the city and you could not get a cab and so having the ride shares in addition to the cabs together, you have so much more service and I know people who gave up their cars because they now know that they're going to be able to get where they want to go when they want to get there. So it's changed everything. I want to see the cabs survive. I want to see the cabs system survive, to modernize and be able to compete and survive and I am cautiously optimistic that that will happen. If I may, unfortunately one thing we're seeing in this change though is that people with disabilities are being left behind. I've done stories and you can Google them later if you care to that show a significant drop, a significant drop in wheelchair taxi trips, but the demand hasn't gone away. The NTA is confirmed for me. The demand has not gone away. What's happening is there are less cabs to take them somewhere and an Uber and Lyft who, you know, you can have just simply not picked up that slack. There are no Uber and Lyft vehicles. In fact, no, I'm sorry. Please, I'm going to correct myself. There is one Uber vehicle in San Francisco that is wheelchair van equipped, is driven by a woman named Jennifer Mendoza who has personally been trying to lobby Uber to actually have wheelchair equipment herself with her husband Peter who's kind of a bit of a prolific wheelchair advocate for Golden Gate Transit and with Muni in the early 90s and Uber is kind of expressing this kind of chicken and the egg problem. They don't feel like they see demand for wheelchair service but they're not getting the man. Jennifer says at least and others because they people wheelchairs don't think they can get them from Uber. And I think one doesn't get the other. And I think it's a very valid point. I think it's government's responsibility to make sure that there is paratransit service through a combination of regulation and mandates but also public subsidies and I think that I think as government we have a responsibility to ensure through some mix of the two that that paratransit service is available. If the market isn't providing it which it's not not going to do in the way that we need it to do that is up to government to make sure that it happens and that is an absolute responsibility for the city and for the state. I want to bring Evan in. Is this a chariot wheelchair accessible? Not currently but that's that's something that that would definitely help will change and I'd also add so I actually worked on the wheelchair accessibility when I was at Lyft. Of course I don't work there anymore. I'm not speaking in any official capacity there but you know that was you know that's a market that right sharing very much wants to serve and as we as those apps added a way to try to hail a vehicle if you can mark yourself as wheelchair accessible we tried to find drivers and there were just almost no drivers that would that would drive for the service and there were no public subsidies available. So it's a it's definitely a chicken chicken in the egg problem of you know there was no demand to sustain drivers and there were no drivers to come in and serve that demand. Here's a question so are our TNCs transportation network companies which are they catch all that the PUCs to describe Lyft and Uber and the other companies are our TNCs bound by the Americans with Disabilities Act are they required to provide service for someone who asks for service? I do not know. That's another question people have pushed I mean Uber was recently sued by a man who some of us with this you know know Jonathan Lyons who is a blind man with a service dog who was passed up by a number of ubers because he had a dog and they wouldn't provide him service. He sued them and one I would imagine I don't know for sure but I had to have some bearing and I would that would be an interesting case to look into to see if I had that. I mean I would imagine they're subject to the law I don't know if the law says that type of service has to has to provide a wheelchair accessible vehicles but I'd also add that you know in this discussion I think we also lose sight of the fact that there people with disabilities they're not in a wheelchair that are actually much better served now than they were five years ago there are people that have low visibility problems people that you know wanted to take a taxi but couldn't didn't really have a way to know if the taxi was on the curve those kind of situations and the blind the people that are much better served now I think with ridesharing being available and services like chariot than they were five years ago so I think there's also a little bit of a nuanced piece of another part of the population that's much less discussed that I think is is much better served today shift gears a little bit to the sorry did you want to if I may going beyond the disabled population again uber and lyft are fantastically popular and for good reason they're very cheap they're very fast the drivers are very polite to a fault perhaps there's another side of this though and I think it it's a broader policy question that we have now a whole generation of younger people who have basically abandoned public transit and I think that there are long term consequences to that you have needs for funding these these folks will be voters they are voters and I think that the turning away from public transit is a somewhat ominous ominous thing on that point Lyft just this week kind of pseudo and now very very on the low key announced a new service I hope you guys have heard of it it's a lift shuttle and lift shuttle allows you kind of similar lift line which is where people can kind of get in together on a carpool and split the cost of a lift you can go on a fixed route so if I live like I live on down below I'm Anza and I want to go down to Geary I can summon a lift it'll cross it'll go down Geary I'll have to run down to Geary and grab it and I'll carpool with people to downtown it's a fixed route but because you say that you want to ride it they'll they'll know to stop for you on whatever your cross street is let's say Fifth Avenue say so it's kind of replicating muni lines and right now it goes they have one that goes from the marina and a line that goes from I believe Fillmore and circles round Alamo Square and to to downtown and back for a community. I think it is very premature to predict the depth of public transportation as anyone you know we take it as I know you do as I know most people in this room do public transportation in San Francisco is not suffering from lack of ridership it's suffering from lack of investment and I like to talk about that but in terms of ridership muni ridership has only gone up Bart hit 400,000 daily riders 10 years before they projected Caltrain has almost dealt with its ridership when when we were fighting about the tech shuttles in city hall when I was on the board of supervisors and people were like just have them take Caltrain and putting aside you know the issues in terms of getting to and from Caltrain and putting that aside we got if I recall I think I got a letter from Caltrain saying basically we can't fit them because those cars are so crowded I have friends who live in Berkeley and work in downtown San Francisco they no longer take part they take the AC transit bus instead because they physically can't get on the bar I have you know in addition to all of my muni ridership having just come off a long citywide campaign where I spent a lot of time from 7 to 9 a.m at bus stops and and LRV stops and a number of lines where people struggle just to get on and including an enormous number of young people where young people are riding transit they also take Uber and Lyft and whatever bike and whatever else but they are taking transit that is not our problem ridership the problem is that our transportation funding system is completely and utterly broken the federal government funding has collapsed the federal gas tax in real terms is worth about half of what it was 25 years ago state funding has been anemic and at times has gone down we have set up a structure in California making it incredibly hard for local governments to raise funds for public transportation by requiring a two-thirds vote of the people I have a constitutional amendment I'm sponsoring to lower that to 55% and we we need to get it together in this country with funding transportation our roads are in terrible shape the free ways it's not just transit we have just abandoned transportation investment after doing these major things in the 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s building interstate highway system building public transportation systems we have to get back to basics and I was just closed by just saying we are we have a bill that's going to come up in the state senate next Wednesday to basically generate in all new revenue five billion dollars additional a year in state funding for public transportation almost almost a billion a year in new state funding for transit three billion a year for roads so local communities can help fix their roads and then other needs as well it's not everything we we need we need a lot more but it's a big step forward and that's stunning because many transit agencies in the in the era of Trump were really fearing especially because he was because he was signaling especially in his budget he was signaling massive cuts to starts funding which is you know very wonky but essentially is the funding that helps fund new capital projects for transit agencies all across the country I mean that touches I mean new starts funding that that's the central subway that's new bart cars that's the new bart tube that is a twinkle in someone's some planners I they get a second tube across the bay for Bart I mean that funding is so key to just about every transit project we have in the bay area and the country and the fact that that new funding is coming is making a lot of transit planners go yeah yeah I do want to get into like a deeper conversation about funding but talking about like the kind of competition factor for again I know that Bart was trying to do kind of late night service and they extend their service and think until 4am possibly and they had they were looking at dialing it back because they weren't seeing people turn out for the riders or people who wanted to come into San Francisco and you know enjoy a half good time would rather take a car across the bridge as it turns out and so want to lead to the question of do we basically have a multi-tiered transportation network where you've got one level of service where I pay 225 for muting or 250 and I get you know a one level of service on a bus maybe I get a seat maybe I don't maybe it smells maybe it doesn't and so and so forth versus you know a lift line which might be twice as much from the same distance versus a private lift versus an uber black versus it seems like there's different levels of transportation depending on what I'm willing to spend or put up with I think there are options and if you're especially if you're with other people or doing a some sort of share it's not that much more expensive depending where you're going to do a share than to take public transportation at time sometimes it's significantly more expensive in terms of overnight service and and Charles thank you for serving on the on the task force we I had authored the legislation to create that late night transportation task force because that is its own problem that you know muni and bart service in terms of the subways and trains shuts down around 1am and we don't have that overnight service and even though we do have the overnight bus service there are times when people you have to wait just a very long period of time and if someone has to wait 45 minutes an hour to get a bus it's going to make a whole bunch of stops and they can just instead get into a cab or a uber or a lift some are going to choose that option so I think for overnight in particular having not just cabs but also ride sharing has been transformational for late night transportation because we have not done the greatest job for public transportation overnight and for people now you know when I first moved to san francisco in the 90s people would like within san francisco would drive to go out that was really common I came and imagine that now no one I know drives to go out and that's because you know you're going to be able to get a ride there you know that at 2am stay out that late I don't really do that much anymore you're not going to you know have that nightmare of not being able to get a ride you're going to be able to get a ride and and that's also why I have another bill in the legislature to allow local communities the local control to decide whether or not to allow bars and clubs to go past 2am up to 4am pure local control and one of the really powerful things is that you know because of these expanded options it makes that more feasible I wish I had some whiskey so I could play about how many plugs for scott's bills we're in bill season so you know the multi-tier question is interesting because it's like I said in the beginning it really depends where you are a quick story muni is undergoing which is run by the mta is undergoing this new expansion that's been undergoing for the past year and a half or so or maybe two years called muni forward it doesn't sound like much and maybe you turn that down selectly it doesn't sound like much when you look at each little bus improvement oh we're going to reroute this bus here and this bus there and a little more service here and there but taken as a whole muni forward is a transformational improvement in muni the likes we haven't seen since they built a subway under market street like it's really that much more service it's an incredible leap and down but while making those changes they had to make some hard choices because even though it was an increase in service it's not an infinite resource so around lake merced there's the 18 bus anyone ever taken the 18 on lake merced now you have a few people okay we know it all right scott's taking it it's probably leaf living there and but uh the 18 used to go around the south side of lake merced and pick up a number of people there there's some thousands of people living on the south side of lake merced when muni forward was uh when the muni forward program managers were looking at the numbers they saw oh there's actually been like a boon a boost of people who now live north of lake merced now they can't put a second bus there they didn't have the resources for that they had to decide to make the 18 go around the north side and this had the effect of not having it go anywhere near these people who lived on the south side uh at all for a good for a good part of the day like it all of a sudden they had a from a 20 minute from their south side of the lake to barb to an hour and a half commute or an hour commute depending this is a huge change this disenfranchised a lot of folks but it re it did infranchise a lot more folks on the other side you have to make these hard choices but because they're in the south uh this the far southwest of the city they're by lake merced there's not a lot of other transit options for them the density of uber and lift is not there in any large number uh uber and lift if you have any uber lift driver show you their map and i've had many many many uber and lift driver show me their little app on their phone the areas of density where the ubers and lifts are the most are the marina the mission case valley the castro and downtown and south of market that's where you go when you want to get money when you want to make money and you want to get as many trips as you can't you're still even now even as many people say this of cabs too i've heard this particular the taxi industry so they're not innocent in this you still don't see as much service on the southwest and southeast and the western side so it's multi-tiered depending on where you are depending on who you are so if it is multi-tiered and i think we there's some agreement that it is kind of multi-tiered even whether that's good or bad it just is if that's the case how sustainable is that going forward if you've got and this is a question for everyone really how sustainable is that going forward you've got one level of service it's basically heavily subsidized by venture capital what happens when the market changes when interest rates change substantially you know what happens when there's less transportation funding federally and statewide if spending on the vagaries what happens in the white house as far as you know central subway and extending that or mark the beach or a second tube so is it if we have it if is a second it's a multi-tiered system the goal and if it is the goal is it sustainable is the question i have for each of you i certainly don't think it's the goal i think the goal is to enhance mobility and i think a lot of services have done that i mean there's so many more options you have these days i mean i remember you know when i was 22 and living in san francisco and standing on the street corner for two hours at new years you know trying to hail a cab that's not typically something you have to do anymore because now you have the option to pay you know more money for a ride home if you want to do that and it's you know from chariot's perspective i mean we are i think a very different story from ride hailing companies i mean we are creating a self-sustaining transit system i mean we put 14 people in our vehicles they are sitting very tightly you know packed together and covering the costs of the of transiting them so you know i think that's something that we want to broaden and happen in more places but it's it's a self-sustaining network that we think is you know picking up for what public transportation hasn't been able to do in some cases and in other cases it's taking people out of their cars and you know i would there was an earlier point that you know i think uh or that uh millennials have given up on public transportation i don't think that's true by any means i mean people want to take public transportation but uh to the center's point investment has just not kept up and i think that's why services like lift and chariot have kind of sprouted up to fill that gap before before i can fill the question to you how can you maybe you can't say the answer to the question how much of every dollar uh for i pay for a chariot ride is subsidized by four uh i don't know the numbers off the top of my head i'd have to look at it again but unfortunately i mean uh no i mean or we were when you look at lift and uber those are companies that raised billions and billions of dollars chariot raised i think it was before i was even there but i think three million dollars and you know we transport tens of thousands of people uh every week so there's uh you know the the costs the riders are covering the costs themselves and that's that's our goal is to have a system that's not you know fueled by outside money but fueled by the riders themselves and giving people the ability to have another option other than driving we find that you know our riders really want to take mass transit they just find that a lot of them don't have that option so the taxis are quite different we're the the only form of transit that i'm aware of you know the ones that we're talking about that we are almost fully self-sustaining we have some subsidies for paratransit but almost uh almost every every dollar we get is from our own or we generate our ourselves we don't have any good donors in the background are there any venture capital folks in the room buy me a drink so senator the question to you is is a multi-tier system that we have now is that sustainable and is it the goal or do we want something i'm not sure you mean my multi-tier i don't mean i mean as far as like the options are the options are great but i i guess more the question of so for example in the question of late night transportation can you have that if you have the does the convenience outweigh the factor of it would be good to take part at a late hour but the convenience factor kind of tips the balance for a lot of well i think it would be and so for example if you try to take i mean this is and this is a battle i've been fighting with muni for a long time where muni and i don't want to be too critical because some of it is funding because we as a society have decided we're going to systematically defund transportation muni has taken the view that once you're outside of the peak hours let's say at eight o'clock on a wednesday or at four o'clock on a saturday or set or you know nine o'clock on a saturday or friday night because the ridership is down it's not at the explosive level that it is during rush hour therefore we can just really scale back everything because we have less ridership while the reality is that even if and the most extreme is when you have sprint this makes me completely nuts during like spring break or winter break well you know people are on vacation with their kids or kids aren't going to school so less ridership so we're going to scale it back and what about the people that need to take it and and if we really want people to rely on transit they have to be able to rely on it at all times that doesn't mean that you're going to have the same level of service at eight o'clock at night that you're going to have at eight o'clock and on a weekday morning of course not but to go to this other extreme where you have just sometimes you you know a very very long wait for an evening train not talking three in the morning i'm talking about eight or nine at night and that dissuades people from using public transportation and it explains perfectly why people want these other services so that they don't have to rely just on that our job is to invest in these systems and to beef up that service and give people a viable option as a personal aside the only time in my life that i never had a month regularly bought a monthly muni pass whether it be the old school pass pass or the new school clipper card for those that remember the paper pass passes was when i used to work in a a a cafe in the presidio and i had to get from the enrichment to the presidio at like five in the morning and there was no bus that's really running regularly enough the 28 a little bit the 43 not yet and i just had to walk i just had to walk i just had to walk from the enrichment to the presidio every day i had killer thighs it was great but the you know i couldn't afford a cab every day it was before the days of uber and lyft um and and just to say this this um this question of who we serve and where and how in this multi-tiered service you know not to get too philosophical on you but it really is a question to the soul of muni to who they serve and it's a question they've been struggling with for a long while because they transit planners and muni planners when you talk to them will say in order to speed up the bus we have got to take away bus stops we've got to take them away so that bus the 38 zooms down gearie and gets downtown and that's good for the riders dependent for the community but then other riders seniors people with disabilities may not be able to walk to those to the stops that are three blocks away now four blocks away now it disenfranchises them to a bit they will say um and then muni ends up needing to straddle the difference of both those riderships of both the ones who want a speedy quick efficient service and the ones who want to walk and it's a very difficult thing to straddle when the resources are not infinite i don't think they've really been able to solve that and then we see these other services pop up that leaves open the space for chariot to pop up for those power users who want to commute quick and that's when you get chariot that's when you get lift shuttle and if you look at chariot's routes if you look online at their routes a lot of them mirror where express lines actually already do exist but just not enough the 30 i think i believe in correct me if i'm wrong one of the earlier routes was the the 30 the 30x is route kind of mirrored the marina to financial district route for chariot and that already has an express route but for years people in the marina and you may not have much pity for people in the marina and i grew up there i know i don't like to say oh no the 30 it never comes by the time it hits me at at at octavia it's already full i can't get on perfect opportunity for chariot to move in and that's why we're that's one of the reasons we see the rise of these companies is muni can't meet that particular market a question for you charles and i know i think was it this week or last week that yellow cab announced that yellow cab san francisco is basically for sale was that do i have it correct it is uh more than for sale it's bankrupt and it's in dissolution now and it's uh it's not really a problem of competition with the ride share it's the result of the collisions uh they had some liability issues or really bad collisions yeah well they had a certain form of insurance as a self-insurance so they assumed full liability for all these collisions that were occurring unlike other taxi companies so while there is pressure for uber and lyft that's affecting all the cab industry they in particular suffered a number of multimillion dollar collisions that kind of did them in including one for a woman named ida fuah who was won an eight million dollar settlement for being paralyzed along the left side of her body after being hit by a yellow cab and uh she's like one of the sole uh uh uh people who is driving this um when you look at the bankruptcy in court documents she's one of the creditors who's uh making some of the most demands you know that that uh brings to mind a an important difference between the ride shares and the taxis and we're actually looking carefully at what ride share does it when you when you uh signed up for uber lyft and you you click to accept uh you're actually giving away your constitutional right to a trial by jury uh you are forced into arbitration in the event of a of an injury not so with taxis uh if you get hurt in one of our cabs you can take us to court and ida did in fact do that and so we are don't really like it too much but we're starting to move a little bit in that direction of the the taxi apps now all have similar clauses in them and the day may come when you know before you can get a taxi ride you have to sign away your rights i i hope that doesn't the day doesn't arrive but it's it's a real concern and uh it's it's not theoretical you see what happened to yellow cab or the day may come when government says you can't force everyone in the arbitration now i'd be another we'll see with actually this leads to another good question i think uh if you say so myself um is this industry of transportation network companies ride hailing is this now a mature industry uh what do you think that is your mature industry uh i guess it depends what your how we define a mature industry i mean it's okay i'll ask i'll ask a different way are these companies still startups got it uh i mean i would think at this point no i mean they're you know they have global presences they do you know millions and millions of rides and i think they've you know there's a clear they you know they have a fit in in the marketplace and a lot of people want to use them um so i you know i think in chariot's case we're not a mature company i think we're in you know we're in two cities san francisco and austin texas uh and we're still very much trying to figure out how to you know make chariot work everywhere uh that's a harder challenge i think than getting people to hop into honda civic getting people to hop in a 14 cedar band is is you know a tougher sell in austin texas than it is in san francisco uh so you know we're trying to figure out how to make that work and i think we are very much um still a startup as for the ride hailing companies i think that's probably you know less true although unless you know if your definition of a startup is they're still private then i guess that's true senator um i think operationally uh they strike me as mature um but in terms of a business model and regulation etc not um it is amazing though you can you know yes it's it's your it's going to be much faster to get an uber and or a lift in you know downtown or in the caster of the mission but uh you can get one in any part of this maybe you have to wait six or seven minutes or or or 10 minutes instead of two or three or four minutes uh but you're going to get one and you can get one in the suburbs people get them in the suburbs uh my uh my parents live in a suburban part of new jersey and uh and they when they have one car and my mom is working my dad can call an uber in suburbia um and uh and so i think in that sense it's pretty mature operation but i don't i don't think that this that these companies are going to be the same in three or four years as they are now i think there's still a lot of transition going just in terms of financial uh stability in addition to the regulation but are we still i guess culturally and in terms of regulation are they still being treated i guess like startups i think they're cut a lot of slack um because uh and i think no and i don't say that that's that's a i think cutting someone's slack is a good thing it can be a bad thing it can be a neutral thing i say it in a neutral way uh because i think for a you know i think sometimes when new things come along there's a tendency and our instinct is that we have to treat it like something that already exists and apply the same rules to it and just force it into that box and and if you do that too fast you can put an end to something that is really good uh and so i think we've been cautious in not wanting to act too quickly um on the other hand you you do have to uh you know acknowledge what's there and then regulate it appropriately and it's really striking that balance and so you cut some slack but not too much slack quick question actually hold that thought charles question for you about in 2000 or so what was uh if you wanted to buy a medallion in san francisco what was the cost around ballpark 2000 i you could not buy it for a lover money they were not transferable they became transferable and somebody helped me out was it 2010 2000 2010 first time in uh at least a generation that the medallions became transferable you know the the uh transferability of medallions is a is an interesting subject because it presents an opportunity for to generate a great deal of money i think it's i'm not exaggerating to say that we're not for the the current uh competition with the rideshare the medallion program could easily generate a billion dollars in revenue for the city that money is sorely needed now especially as we go into the time where the city is looking at shortfalls of hundreds of millions of dollars a year thanks to our our friends in washington but that that program has has stalled now to to use the the gentle word so what happened what happened to the like the perceived value i guess of uh as an asset uh as a piece of as a chunk of wealth a medallion what was it relatively worth i suppose 15 years ago compared to today relatively speaking i don't know what it would have have been worth 15 years ago what the the price that is set by regulation in san francisco is 250 000 the drivers perceive that as a store of value a way to accumulate the money for their retirement it makes a lot of sense to a driver uh to to stop renting my cab and have his own cab and that makes makes a lot of sense to many drivers in fact i believe approximately 700 actually purchased and they're rather rather distressed right now so but so from your perspective and i'll bring this back to the rest of the panel from your perspective what's easier uh starting your own cab company or starting your own transportation network company which has more barriers i think it's easier to start a a cab company and as as to the question of whether whether the tncs are mature they'll be mature companies once they make a profit i think that will happen within a few years but the the companies will change their their business model and the processes of my prediction become more like premium taxi services okay yeah you know what you're talking a little bit about uber right and lives in terms of regulations uh the cpu c has what they call their their phase one two and three proceedings and uh right now they're in phase three phase one started around when um the tncs uber and lipp were first beginning to be regulated and other tncs you know who existed at the time wings and a whole bunch of other sidecar whole bunch of defunct tncs that fall by the wayside over the years um but each of those phases considered very particular things in this last phase we saw decided right as they were coming to a decision about it uh state legislature kind of swoop in and decide for them that uh uber and lipp could use rented vehicles uh rented or lease vehicles to to uh kind of ride share which i think is fascinating right because a whole proposition when it first started was i have a vehicle i drive to work uh on my way to work maybe i'll give someone a ride ride share and then they'll give me some bucks um but now you can go out and rent a car or lease a car and use that as your main mode of making money and that's they still kind of use this rideshare monitor which i find interesting it's funny actually so here's a good note so the ap associated press they have a style guide for how reporters are supposed to refer to businesses people places whatever it is and so the ap style guide last year changed ridesharing to ride hailing which we use in the examiner and and and a hoodline as well who want me for not saying it up here but i wasn't here to think away but yes you wanted to chime in or uh well it's uh there's also a hyphen there let's not forget about that the ap is going to get you um but no i mean i think i think that um you know these services are providing a big need that the taxis were not filling and i'd also point out that they're providing much more innovative solutions as well i mean i don't think we'd want everyone in this room to have taken a taxi here that would have been a lot of taxis on the road and everybody probably would have been in their own taxi these services allow you to share a ride with somebody else they allow you to joe's example they these days actually do both have products that allow you to offer rides to people on your way i live personally as an anecdote i live in memo park and once a week i need a car because i need to go play hockey after work and i turn on my uber and lift app and i put in my destination and i give people ride up to san francisco uh and was actually a this week uh the one the one time i did it on tuesday morning caltrain had broken down so you know four years ago five years ago when i was taking caltrain and i had to sit on the train for two three four hours after a breakdown now there are options and i got to swoop in and pick somebody up and take them all turned out he worked a block away from me and that's that's something that would have never happened five years ago and that you know we haven't seen taxis been able to facilitate so i think that's been that's been an upside that there are these other solutions and they are trying things like lift shuttle and you know i think chariot has kind of shown the greatest ability to try to solve the traffic problem and take a lot of you know put a lot of people in one car to do the idea of the maturation regulations and uh you know a lot of folks in san francisco an hour point congestion i think scott made this agree with this but some folks uh uh out there in san francisco officials uh someone s of mta and i think uh supervisor and peskin have questioned you know how much uber and lift contribute to traffic congestion downtown especially when we have 45 000 active vehicles which was kind of scoop that our paper had when we first asked for data from the treasurer's office to see how many business licenses they had requested um and uh to see if that number of vehicles is actually impacting downtown because when you think about it they have a heat map of places that they will congregate in the most you've got tens of thousands of vehicles and they're in one or two or three neighborhoods how much does that affect traffic but uber and lift don't share that data because they consider a proprietary um uber is afraid that lift will get their data and scoop them on something and lift is afraid uber will get their data and scoop them on something which actually does happen a lot there was a uh i believe when lift was first announcing lift line and that could be wrong as you need to double check and help pull me on this book when lift was first announcing lift line as the story goes uber pool uber got wind of it and then launched their own uber pool service which had no information behind it and was just kind of a name and we're gonna carpool because they heard about lift announcing line so it is very cutthroat but the result of that is is that the state gets that trip data the cpc gets the trip data the data that could tell traffic planners and transit planners whether or not it's adding to congestion how they can reshape the streets to better make uber and lift more convenient for people and they kind of keep it behind lock and key it's all redacted if you request it's all blacked out blacked out blacked out the city has asked for this data mta has lobbied uh lobby way not exactly but has asked for this data many times and uh has made requests of the cpc i think 26 separate times have filed legal claims uh during a phase two proceeding of regulation to get this type of information and other information and has been largely denied i want to turn to the future of transportation as the title promised um charles i died without your best guess in in 20 years what do you think uh will be the biggest change in the city's taxi industry good question um one thing that uh i hope changes is that as it is now a taxi the taxi driving occupation is overwhelmingly male that's a big problem for us it basically is because of cash cash attracts robbers the industry has a history of being targets of criminals one of the the questions that i would want to pose to the people in the room is uh what would you what would you think if the taxis stopped accepting cash all together as a way to get access to that other half of the workforce that that might come to drive taxis and perhaps improve service improve safety for drivers would you be comfortable with the taxi industry that no longer accepted cash let's see a heads going no no no yes that is correct you you need to pay with a credit card or a stored value card or a clipper card at the beginning of the trip so that there would be no cash in the vehicle and no no no targeting no reason to target a driver for a robbery but i think that's one of the things that um if i had my way we would be moving in that direction and i know that's a very controversial point of view but well actually so what's what's stopping them given that we live in a we right now i wouldn't say this is a cashless city right but i can get along pretty well most days in san francisco and never have to go to the atm to actually draw cash out for anything most places a point of sale something or other square whatever might be what's stopping that happening today making the cash making taking a cab a kind of a cashless frictionless transaction what's the blocker the biggest obstacle is the that's a very conservative industry we've been in business the industry has has operated since at least the 1600s and remarkably little has changed the vehicles have changed but the basic business structures are very similar so a follow-up question then do you think given the lack of innovation in the transportation industry um how much how much do you blame who's to blame i suppose for the state of the taxi industry in your mind who's just primarily responsible for the state of the taxi industry well i mean certainly we we share some blame for our own fate but uh one thing that's that's not well known is that perhaps folks remember that in 2008 luxer cab introduced a an e-mail app called taxi magic it was worked very well unfortunately we had no idea just how important that was it seemed to us a kind of a kind of a niche market where people people are using their phones or their their smartphones to order a cab but that was 2008 later that year green cab introduced the cabulus app which is now called flywheel it was two full years later before uber introduced its app which was functionally identical to flywheel and cabular to the taxi magic so i don't think that it's it's fair to say that i don't innovate we we do innovate and so that's that's something that that that we are actually kind of proud of i just wish that we had realized the importance of what we had and we did not joe to you and in 20 years how do you think you'll be getting to work most days uh i'm gonna punt a little bit and and and refer to a really fascinating uh a pitch i saw from sf mta a while back that wrote about a while back called the smart cities was a grant that the city was going for and didn't get but within that kind of pitch that mta had for what the future of san francisco would look like there were uh self-driving cars with lanes specifically for self-driving cars there were shuttles that were kind of short-term kind of uh a ferry building to the wharf across market street little mini shuttles that were also self-driving and would take you to little shops and things and even the buses were which did exist in sf mta's idealized version of itself in the in 20 or 30 years existed as self-driving buses able to maneuver in and out of lanes at will with bikes and buffered bike lanes and and more room for pedestrians everywhere it was it's a fascinating proposal i i suggest you all google it if you get a chance you're interested in seeing what the future sf transit is called the smart cities proposal so sf mta's smart city proposal and you can see in a piece i wrote on it if you google as an examiner with that and they had a whole uh i believe what the fellow saying was pitching it said it's a total moonshot it really was excuse me um i think it's going to be a mix of things i think there are some people who will say oh why are we investing in rail we don't need that it's going to be the hyperloop and autonomous vehicles and that's going to be everything uh and i do think that autonomous vehicles are going to play a huge role in a lot less than uh than 20 years and you know let's for another panel about the millions and millions of americans who work in driving in some form or another and what we're going to do when we have autonomous trucks and autonomous buses and autonomous everything it's going to it's going to create a real challenge but i i think it's going to be a mix of um some version of public transportation uh and autonomous vehicles um and uh and biking we haven't talked about biking a lot let's not forget about it that's been an existence for many centuries and will continue to be um i do think one thing i will say is i think the bay area will have um and this is contingent on uh getting rid of donald trump if i may be political getting a better federal government and keeping the state the momentum we're building in the state i think we'll have a much better and more integrated regional rail network um we'll you know bart which we're going to fix uh we're going to connect caltrain and ultimately high-speed rail and i do believe high-speed rail will happen um to the trans bay terminal we're going to get it the train downtown and then we're going to get it across the second trans bay tube that will not only allow bart to run 24 hours but will allow us to connect caltrain uh to the capital corridor and and ultimately get high-speed rail uh to the east bay and up north um you shouldn't have to take three transit systems to get from san francisco uh to sacramento i'm a little being a little selfish when i say that but it's true for a lot of people we'll go back and forth to and it's not acceptable so i i think we're going to see a much more integrated regional rail system and a lot of autonomous vehicles cool uh well i mean i think faking into the future you know 20 years as i glide into the trans bay on my brand new high-speed rail train uh i'm super excited i first of all hope that we our public space is really different 20 years from now than it is today an unbelievable amount of space in this city and all over the country all over the world is devoted to parking you know you look at every single block i mean this block included i walked down i walked down post and center all the time and even though almost nobody is driving to market and post almost all of the curb space is devoted to parking and i hope that you know with ride hailing with chariot services with autonomous uh you know we can redevote that space to public good we can make you know dedicated bikeways we can make places that these autonomous vehicles or taxis or anybody that can pull over safely that's that's a you know a big issue for chariots is just we have you know often the the spots are taken by private cars that have been parked in a passenger loading zone and you know i will we want to see that space rededicated to the to the public and i you know i hope that we'll be living in a world where rides are safe and they're affordable you know it's one of chariot's big missions but i you know i really hope we the public to vote so much money to just getting around these days and i really hope that the cost of that you know drops significantly but i'm also worried that you know with autonomous vehicles and with high speed rail you know if you can get from downtown fresno to trans bay in an hour i may just move to downtown fresno you know that's that's probably not what we want to do with our cities so i think we need to think very carefully as we enter this space about how we can make sure that we still encourage density and we make it easy for people to walk you know and uh we have the infrastructure for high capacity vehicles so that if you know lyft and uber are rolling out autonomous vehicles we're all not just hopping in those and quadrupling the number of vehicles in san francisco um so you know i'm i'm really excited about it i i think it'll be a better place but we have to put in the work now uh to make sure that happens great before we throw out the questions i've last one last question of the panel you remember it's kind of a yes or no question uh if it were available and the technology was proven would you want a flying car it's the hallmark of future technology everyone always says so i had to ask i can start that off i can say definitively no i mean my i i live in a one car household right now and i would love to get that to zero if we can you know bring the cost of transportation down uh i try my wife uses the car so it's not just me having one car um so you know i've and if everybody has a flying car where are we going to put these things uh and and where and i worry quite a bit about the drivers uh and you know we have enough of a problem keeping people driving safely on the streets they're above the streets i'd be a little worried yeah i'd worry about air i don't know if it's car rage air rage i love the Jetsons when i was a kid so yeah i haven't had a driver's license since 2011 so i would probably say no and then for the second reason i just rode in a stunt jet that was not quite the blue angels fast but just about that fast yeah above mount diablo it was pretty cool but uh after about 20 minutes i didn't have to use the uh i did have to use the sickness bag so no charles uh no no no flying cars from me i being i worry about collisions being in a collision in a car is bad enough i don't want to have a big ball part of the collision thank you all very much for this discussion i really feel it was a really good talk so now open for questions we'll start on the front and work our way back please limit your no comments limited to questions think uh senator indus said that there are 400 000 people using the muni every day that's a little correct i spoke to someone who works for the mta and i want to know is it solving he says they're losing money why does the mta lose money if they have 400 000 people using the new well it's it's 700 000 so fares for muni they call it fair box recovery the percentage of the systems costs that are paid for by fares is about it's like 25 or 28 percent so as with most public transportation it is heavily subsidized it's a public good it should be subsidized and so about three quarters of muni's costs are not recovered in the fair box bar it has a much higher fair box recovery because unlike muni bar is it's a regional orphan system that is not backed by any general fund and that is actually when you look at the problems that bar it has that that shows you why when you have the really high fair box recovery that's not necessarily a good thing that means that you don't have a government actually backing you up and the system you have your fares and they have their little quarter-cent sales tax and that's about it and so they start falling apart and so it's about public subsidies i would like to ask what role state plays in protecting the public charlotte spoke about the fact that if you're in an accident in a cab you know you have a right to pursue that legally and of course you have the same right if you're in a Uber or a Lyft but Uber and Lyft have already proven you're kind of on your own if anything happens with them and also in terms of the insurance and the maintenance of the cars the background checks of the drivers which are questionable i simply don't believe that they do the background checks that the cab companies do they're not fingerprinting they're not doing any of those things so why has this been allowed to go on as long as it's been going on you know all the relative unfairness of the cab industry and all these other things are the environment issues which no one wants to talk about is something else but i'm very very concerned with public safety and i'm not hearing that you know insurance is required they're now for ride hailing always say ap term and it is available now initially there was really it was hard to even find a product and insurance should be required and so you know i think the regulation is better than it was it still has a way to go but it has been improving one thing i do want to say you know as someone who i've been riding cabs and ubers and now for many many years there are unbelievably great cab drivers and there are cab drivers that are not so great there are wait let me just finish there are unbelievably good uber and lyft drivers and ones that are not so great there are cab drivers you know a large majority who drive very safely and there are ones that don't there are uber lyft cab drivers who who treat people with respect and those that don't i've you know so there are there are good and safe and respectful people in all of these industries and ones that are not so much so i just don't want to broad brush but with that said i agree we we have been improving the regulations and the safety regulations in particular and there's more work to do when uber and lyft first started all right um there are 45 000 uber and lyft drivers what do you say about limiting the uber and lyft drivers to only San Francisco residents and um what do you think about the idea of having uber and lyft drivers or some kind of jitney service be sort of the last mile service from buses and trains and that should be limited to that you know live for a long time painted itself as kind of last mile solution and you know they really did try they have in many cities had partnerships with different public transit agencies in order to do that to actually be there and have it be systematic we are here for when you get off your bar we're going to take you that last mile to home and that's kind of what we're there for um i remember doing a few tech conferences uh emily castor who's a you know maybe your former boss at lyft good friend you good friend audio thing you're unplugged i'm unplugged let's go acoustic all right we're gonna go acoustic again sorry good audio guy i followed that um but uh uh spoke a lot about that last mile solution but it's interesting to see to make that shift now with the lyft shuttle does now it's perhaps showing that and i'm just speculating but if that that last mile solution hasn't turned into as many rides as happened because now they're they're uh replicating some units or this which is interesting fast and well i mean i'd add to that i mean there there are 40 i think it was was it just lyft i don't know if that was lyft and uber um but we have a little less than 150 chariots in the road in san francisco so we are you know if you focus on high capacity vehicles chariots really able to do to get a lot more people places than a ride a ride sharing a ride hailing service and i'd add to you know your question about limiting to san francisco i think that you know a lot of the problems with taxis have actually resulted from cities setting boundaries on things and i think that's why the state has regulated this industry because if you allow cities to set up borders that creates a lot of problems if i live at the border and just want to go across well that's you know if can i not get arrived for my neighbor who lives in hillsborough or south san francisco because he's right across the way and you know i wouldn't i live in menlo park would i not be able to drive my neighbor up to san francisco and operate in san francisco or drive you know my neighbor back home to menlo park i think there'd be a lot of there'd be a lot of negative implications so although what's fascinating is seeing how far people will drive to come in san francisco driver and live people during the super bowl came up from los angeles to drive i've actually i've had drivers on lift from fresno so it's stunning quite quickly a question for charles actually what's the certification process for having a tax driver in san francisco background check the fingerprint based background check is a training program the geography rules customer service there's also a drug test am i missing something so it's a higher bar than becoming a a tnc driver yes it is and that's uh that's that's good for the public it's a little a little bit difficult for us because it takes longer if you sign up for a little bit of lift driver like that it's very quick for us well it's not quite like that because you do have to pass a background check and that can take time right but there's a difference in the background check there's a third-party background check done by tnc's which usually use kind of like independent businesses who scroll through public records but maybe not to the same depth of records that the department of justice has and then the department of justice database is utilized by the taxi caps which use thumb prints versus the tnc's the ridehills which use names and social security numbers the district attorney recently sued uber and lyft saying that they were fault using false advertising for saying that they were you know the safest option because of this kind of discrepancy in the background checks and was you showed you know people who had uh been accused had been convicted of a certain degree i think like second degree murder people who are rapists people who are all sorts of different high degrees of crimes who were a little who made it through the tnc background check system and that you know what uber and lyft would argue is well hey shouldn't people who were formerly convicted of crimes be given a second chance why are you clamping down on people who you know are just pay their debt to society why can't they work again which you know you get to take the argument right away yeah there's also the state does limit how far back you can look so that's yeah that's part of the justice database that goes back a hundred years and goes through all the United States yes please i've spent time in amsterdam and i love the bicycles in the city i'd like to figure out how to make san francisco more than way it's just too dangerous i would need to work every day out of my um and then spend time in london and the zone pricing i thought was a very interesting idea so it's very expensive during congestion pricing you mean pardon congestion pricing so it's very expensive during a car into london during rush hour and as a result it's much safer to bicycle in london than it was even 10 years ago so i'd love to see some thinking in terms of how do we do incentives and so forth to get more of us on bicycles you know i need to lose 20 pounds if i were biking amen well and because in london because there are fewer cars in the downtown zone the taking a bus in london can be faster than taking the tube they're they're very very fast yeah i mean i i would add on to that you know we have a problem where you know if you want to take a chariot you may be sitting behind the lift that's sitting behind a single occupancy vehicle and there's no in in most of the city there's we don't have any infrastructure to encourage high capacity transportation methods and that includes bicycling i mean i take i use bike share all the time and i'm regularly feeling like i'm risking my life doing so i think it's it's still i find bicycling to be one of the best ways to travel regardless of that but most people don't feel like that and you know my my parents probably don't feel like that my sister probably doesn't feel like that and i think we really need to do a lot more to make a city bike friendly and get people out of their cars it's it's a very important part of the puzzle question here thank you and thanks to all the panels and the mechanics institute for having us this is a wonderful panel um given the fact that muni uh the the more crowded the more traffic that that comes from these um tncs that are flooding the city the slower traffic goes the slower buses go the more expensive they get the harder it is to provide service um and uh particularly to serve people with disabilities is my primary concern um that i don't think that we figured out yet and i'm as as my parents i was so excited to take my mother on to the end judo the other day and the thing pulled up and she couldn't lift her leg up to get on to it we ended up having to rent a wheelchair for her later and um my concern is is that to the gentleman from from chariot you said we hope it will happen and i'm wondering if you can tell us what deliberate intentional efforts you're making to make sure that this happens because these guys are you know the writing's on the wall almost from and i appreciate mr rathbone we're so lucky to have him in the in the taxi industry um i wish they would have gotten with taxi cab and taxi magic and all these apps but what are you doing to to help us um address this problem apart from hoping yeah i mean i think we're trying to figure out how um it's a little hard for me to comment because it's not quite my my department but you know we're trying to figure out i think we much like lyft and uber did if when they first started fall into a different space we're not quite a bust we're not quite lyft and uber and we're trying to figure out how we can serve that population we really want to and i don't think there's there's a great solution for i think riding paratransit is you know off it can be slower and i think we want to try to figure out how we can accommodate that population and our regular riders and i think we're it is something we're working on so i need to clarify one thing or else uh the head of taxi services at mta will take off my head next time i talk to her and that is that uh the paratransit services that we're talking about that are not being served are the at will kind of randomly you know i want to go here today at you know on a whim kind of services taxis ride hails those are the ones that wheelchair accessible people can't get there are fixed services that you can ask for like a week in advance that are very robust and that the city provides yeah as far as the ride hailing services go i think there's a little bit of an elephant in the room something that charles alluded to you if lyft is losing 50 million dollars a month and uber 250 million dollars a month i read an article that said a ride with uber is only 40 percent covered by the cost of the fair what's the landscape going to look like in a few years when a ten dollar uber ride costs 25 or 30 or 35 dollars i think the answer is that there will be essentially premium taxi services service will be very similar to what it is now but it will be quite a bit more expensive it it has to be more expensive and when you when you think about the cost when you have a vehicle it doesn't matter if it's a taxi or a rideshare vehicle cost is there the fuel is not going to there's no real difference there's no real difference in the the cost of labor whether you're paying the person a commission or a wage or whatever the rideshare driver the taxi driver all of those costs are are there and and what's different is that for instance uh the soto flywheel cab their facility is located in the bayview district underneath a freeway next to a railroad track that's adjacent to a giant recycling center it's some of the cheapest real estate in san francisco if you look at our friends at uber they have two office buildings under construction and mission bay they just announced that they're going to release two more buildings at the the warrior's site that's fantastically expensive their their costs are vastly more it's a difference between a local small local company and a giant global organization their costs are much higher than ours so when their investors finally demand a return on the investment some of them have been waiting eight years now their costs will have to be higher than a taxi and they're not going to go away people love them and for good reasons but the cheap ride is going to go away i believe my my my guess is two or three years that that transition will occur and that's why i'm staying in the game for now so it's like without speaking for the tech for the tnc industry i think at least what i've read or researched it seems as though uber at least is kind of existentially banking on advances in technology to make self-driving vehicles much more of a reality um and i think that's that that's what i get i can't i'm not a uber employee but i think as a market watcher just many observes they're banking on that bar by becoming like much lower immediately and to be honest i frankly thought it would be about i don't know uh 10 or 15 years before those were viable um and so i was kind of i'm sure a lot of us were kind of shocked to see that tesla actually has self-driving cars on the road today um and i think that's probably is kind of part of their plan i mean gulls would probably speak that more like that yeah i mean i think that's that's likely the long game but you know i also i think those articles also mentioned and charles mentioned it that a lot of that money goes to pay for these driver incentives um so i think you know at least look at the rides that i give from from menlo park to san francisco or san francisco to oakland i mean those companies are they're taking like 30 percent of of the ride and not you know i imagine there some of that goes to insurance but you know on a per ride basis it may be profitable they just may pay a lot to get people like me to actually sign up in the first place um so as the business is mature and more of those people stick around potentially they become profitable or and i selfishly hope they don't do this from my business perspective but or they put more people in the vehicles uh and you know we figured out a way to have a transportation service that covers its costs and it's a very affordable transportation service men chariot the average rides around four dollars uh i mean it's you know up there with they're probably cheaper than a lot um so i think there are ways to make these new services affordable um and i think that's that's a great thing if you do and if there is this function we can't call it in the office it would be late big money is not in the space of it we need to translate the technology with wires into tunnels or around the csm sorry been fixed on the other hand i want you i congratulate mtg for the newly hybrid electric because it's once there almost parallel to the street well but let's quickly about bars if it's it contrasts deeply to the magnificent engineering effect now when we're on bars when they announce the stations it's hardly hearable and my question is my question is why can't there be a better competition for our passengers to know the name of the station or the size of a modern the new bar trains address some of this they have the bar's fleet of the future which is which is coming they swear our we'll have you know more prominent displays lcd computer displays color coding it's gonna look it's gonna look much more new york like in terms of like having better branding what station you're at and the new bar cars they say will not make you go deaf as you're having a long-term process system in addition in terms of the muni and the lack of reception in this in the tunnel honestly that's a new mta does many things well and is doing many things better they're going to fix that that was a just a major failure by the agency that for so many years they just really just didn't care it wasn't a priority to do that and so you're stuck in the tunnel and you can't even text your you know co-workers that you're going to be late fortunately better late than ever they're fixing that that was due to some legislation by supervisor London greedably oh one funny thing about the tunnels the future is actually here when you're in a muni train in the tunnels that's that's computer controlled it's only driver controlled when it's outside of the tunnels which i think is interesting this all the discussion about the future of self driving well it's easier on a fixed guy yeah absolutely we have a question here and i'm just going to ask you just make your question short and fast we'll get to everybody Tom Framsky Silicon Valley watcher why don't we talk about telecommuting at all all these big corporate buses why doesn't the city say hey you're losing using our lanes our base let your workers work from home at least one day a week that would take that would help a lot wouldn't it could could we demand or ask for that kind of thing from the companies yeah i was i can take that real quickly but there's actually more people in california telecommuting now than taking public transit every day so public transit there there's a lower percent of people taking it now than there were 35 years ago whereas telecommuting i think is just shy of six percent and was you know for maybe obvious reasons near zero 35 years ago but i think that's a it's a great solution and it's actually been if you look at the numbers a more effective way to take cars off the road than transit has been unfortunately and i think there's a lot that we could be doing you know that the government could be doing to incentivize that there's enormous telecommuting happening already it's enormous living in san francisco with the family especially children under nine years old is very challenging for a lot of reasons but transit is one of them taking a kid cross town at the peak hours of meeting is very difficult and challenging but i could if i was on by myself get a subsidized chariot ride i could get a subsidized bus pass uh because it's not as uncomfortable to be with the small child what does a future hold for families in san francisco as they're on the decline and there's a lot of challenges for us to remain here i mean actually the the the number of kids in san francisco is actually going up like the school district for example school enrollment in san francisco has been going up uh the challenge has been that the we're seeing i think disproportionate more than in the past it's higher income families that are can afford to raise kids in the city it's just very very expensive and so the the challenge is for everyone but particularly for more middle class and lower income families about how you raise kids in the city and you know i think if we if we do it right with transit and these other options uh you know there there are families who need to drive and and and if if you are someone who needs to drive for whatever reason and there are many um it's in your interest more than anyone that have great transit transit is not for everyone all the time that's why we have to have numerous different options because different people of different needs and the same person might have different needs at different points in the day depending on where they're going or how they're getting there or whether they have a little person with them and whether they're four-year-old with them or not have their four-year-old with them and so that's why having those numerous options and not squashing you know efforts to create new modes of transportation is so important on that topic there are there is a riot there is a new proposal kind of or a kind of a study going on right now to look at reviving shuttles uh school buses but in for the private sector in san francisco uh i believe that supervisor gay tang loses uh and the sfc ta the county transportation authority who are looking into ways to subsidize the shuttle service or otherwise spur the creation of a quasi-public-private uh partnership to create shuttles for kids again and he knows if you we had school buses once again maybe the parents can set their kids off on a school bus and take a bus themselves to work okay i'd like to thank the panel let's head a quick question for the panel about potential interest level i'm actually doing um like research right now in the the population of what type of vehicles are out in the road right now i've actually conducted maybe like five hours of like observation from like various elevated points in the city i find out like i mean one in three cars in this neighborhood is actually like a t and c one out of three holding city after looking for like 500 frames so i was like what would your interest level be and like maybe like seeing that's on that data too and potentially um you know even for senator weiner you're potentially on you know requiring you know on a state level that counties be allowed you know access to that data the cpc is denied in order to uh calculate wear and turn roads into construction well so okay so let's talk about downtown san francisco if that if that is the case that one in three vehicles in downtown san francisco is a t and c that may or may not that could be a good thing it could be a bad thing i mean if we're talking about that fewer people are driving their own cars into downtown san francisco because they're taking t and c's again there are actually benefits to that because those t and c's aren't taking up parking spaces we don't have to have as much parking downtown if fewer people are driving their car so i think having in terms of the proportion of vehicles that doesn't necessarily tell you a lot other than that a higher portion of people are not driving their own cars there it's really about the number of vehicles overall and how is congestion in downtown san francisco now compared to what it used to be i think it's always been really bad we have more people in the city than we ever have we have 200 000 more people san francisco than we had 30 years ago we have many more jobs in san francisco than we used to have we have more people coming here and commuting here so there are a lot of reasons why there's more congestion in the city but frankly if we don't if we have fewer people or a smaller percentage of people driving their own cars downtown looking for parking and then having to have space for that car to park that that can be a really good thing you know one thing that's not mentioned when the fewer cars are on the road argument is made for uber and lyft which is a very strong argument and absolutely cars being taken off the road as congestion increases is an aim that many public agencies and governments have is this idea of latent demand and a lot of folks really don't mention that when they mention oh this method or that method whether it's uber lyft or biking or whatever takes cars off the road but latent demand is kind of the idea that your service is so good it's so cheap that you're actually spurring demand that didn't exist if certain amount of people used to drive to work a certain amount of people used to bus to work a certain amount of people telecommuted but ubers and lifts are so cheap now that it actually spurs people maybe who used to telecommute say oh actually i can't go to work today because it's so cheap and convenient they never used to transport before but now they're hopping in uber lyft or they yet never used to or they used to take the bus and now they're hopping in uber lyft you're creating demand for a service that didn't exist before because it's so cheap and convenient and some studies of traffic of created by uber and lyft have cited the idea of latent demand which is fascinating and we may see soon how how large a factor that is just a study coming out soon from UC Berkeley from their transportation department from Susan Shaheen who's largely regarded as one of the leaders in ride hail expertise in car sharing and she's she's looking into this and has unique data from uber and lyft that no one has ever been given access to before so it's really it's really fascinating oh the latent demand can also mean that your system was not adequate before correct and it's better now absolutely yeah give me a few different things slightly a different perspective on that is that at 45 000 vehicles the TNCs are by far the largest single commercial users of our streets and because of the regulation at the state level there's no collection of any kind of fees or taxes on the local level myself i pay approximately i think it's around $1,300 a year in fees to the city for my taxi licenses which i don't think is particularly unreasonable it's fine with me but i a little bit irked that the the other guys are paying nothing and at 45 000 i did a little arithmetic today because i i read the article a couple of days ago about the shortfall on the late night plus service that ac transit runs on behalf of the park that's facing a $500,000 i believe this the statement from the bark person but they need another $500,000 to people running for a year if you collected $1 a month from 45 000 TNCs that would more than cover that i don't think it's there should be a contribution to the to the broader transit system from the from the TNCs and the taxis make that they should be able to get that the kind of contribution they should be able to do that too well hi there was a statement on the panel earlier that it takes a special type of a taxi driver with a special attitude to serve disabled passengers that's not true all taxi drivers should be prepared to serve disabled passengers as they would a black passenger or a trans passenger given that and given the opaque answer that chariot gave to an earlier question what are concrete examples of what the taxi industry is doing and that chariot is doing to work with the disability community to improve access well as far as what the taxi industry is doing i can really only speak for the company that i've worked for until i retired last year luxer cap luxer's general manager and its assistant manager both serve on the pcc the paratransit coordinating council have done so for years it's a it's a genuine effort to reach out and to understand and to be a part of that community that actually stems from a family issue with the luxer cap one of our former general manager became a wheelchair user herself and was unable to use her own calves so there's a sensitivity to the needs of people who use wheelchairs that runs pretty deep in our in our company i hope that is responsive yeah i mean i don't i don't think i'm gonna add too much more and it is something we're working on it's just not it's another team that's working on it so hopefully we'll have you know more details to share yeah i talked to a lot of taxi drivers and i haven't begun to hear about their plight which is huge okay they're working six seven days a week some of them for free because they're not even making the gates they're daily rental they're driving from far away sacramento san jose they feel they're being screwed by mta being screwed by the city in part because the mayor's relative has an investment in uber they feel that uber drivers can't drive don't know the city are turned downtown to a parking lot what immediate help can anybody give them there is a uh you know it's interesting there's a taxi fund that uh taxi uh uh company has been paying into recently i did not recently for for many years and then that fund uh it was put up to a vote by a certain i think taxi taxi drivers maybe i correct me when we're on task force this task force thank you and that that amount of money is going to come into some relief for the local taxi industry so that that might help there's there's no big thing on the horizon but that pot of money at least is going to help some people at the short term i'm not going to answer that question because i think we spent a huge amount of time talking about tax season very little talking about transitor bikes so i would love to answer questions on transitor bikes i'm going to ask you about climate change i've been seeing a lot of especially with uber and lyft uh new vehicles they don't even have license plates yet and everyone has made comments about people driving in from miles and miles away has there been any research done to see what the effects that's having on then the atmosphere in the city and our quality of air i just feel like there's more cars on the road and that's kind of defeating the purpose of ride um yeah so do you have any research on that there's a new law that requires temporary license plates when you drive off the dealers lot that was a hole in california law where people could drive off without having any kind of identifying and so that um then goes through the bay bridge for you yeah and so that that problem is is in the process of being fixed and it took way too many years to get that law passed you know i i think to me the if the goal is to get people around and to do it in an environmentally sustainable way it's not about saying there are too many ubers or lifts or buses or anything else on the road it's about saying how are we going to have vehicles that are as environmentally friendly as possible we know that california has always been in the lead in terms of fuel efficiency moving towards electric vehicles etc um we have federal government is now trying to take our legs out on that and we're going to have a war with donald trump over whether we can continue to drive the auto industry to more and more fuel efficiency and the auto industry should be a shame of itself for even having that conversation with donald trump i'm really just furious that they're even involved and so to me the goal is electrification electrification of our public transportation systems electrification of vehicles and just really driving that through public policy and through incentives to get vehicles whether they're an uber lift private vehicle a bus a train anything else away from fossil fuels electrified and and and then making sure that we have a revenue system as gas tax starts to decline so that we can still pay for our roads and our transit system that's just my tip and if you want to be environmentally friendly you don't need to look farther than muni for someone who's really kind of leading in that way and and uh you know that you see the buses with the with the poles the bunny ears you know on the wires it's actually really hard for mta to purchase those um it's we're one of the few cities if not one of only two cities in the entire country that really heavily depends on those buses it's easier to purchase buses when you purchase them in bulk so we've partnered in terms of purchasing other types of buses hybrid elect a hybrid fuel buses um with king county uh in seattle in order to kind of double you know san francisco's purchasing power so they get kind of a deal on buses but we use we are one of the most bus dependent and and trolley bus dependent transit systems in the country and it's it's fascinating um what hoops they have to go through in order to get those environmentally friendly buses two last questions here and there and we're wrapped i have a question about bikes uh so that it was perfect that you said that so the question of passenger loading uh in bike lanes when there are streets with bike lanes especially when there are streets with bike lanes and parking uh is it seems really difficult especially when the parking interests are are pretty uh pretty loud and they come to meetings but even without parking there's still a difficult challenge of how to deal with safe efficient passenger loading without putting bikes at risk uh from their safety and their efficiency as well so how do you how do you recommend we we deal with uh passenger loading and bike lanes you know i mean there are two things first of all uh it's the wild west in terms of double parking in san francisco um there's really almost no enforcement and i when i was the most supervisor sort of pounded on sfpd and mta uh to increase their enforcement they really never did so there was a lot of lip service but sfpd in particular just i just think isn't interested in doing robust consistent double parking enforcement and it's such a it blocks bike lanes but it also causes traffic jams it blocks muni it's a it's a big problem and our city government just has not the administrative agencies have just not shown the will to really do double parking enforcement so uh we we can design streets in a way where you can have both loading and unloading and safe cycling and and lack of double parking to block traffic we we can do that with loading zones there's always going to be some conflict but but you know i the number of times where i have seen we all have everyone in here a delivery truck double park blocking a lane of traffic even though there's an available loading zone they just don't want to pull over because it's less convenient it happens all the time so without the enforcement we'll never see change hi so i have a question about sustainability but i'm wondering about sustainability along the park park with virtual vehicles and with community sustainability um anecdotally it seems to me that almost all of the tnc drivers like under 40 there's relatives and they probably have something beyond the nice performance um and i'm wondering about the shift of labor from like full-time jobs for taxi drivers and a city that's having a hard time rotating all our new wash jobs to a side gate for people who will probably go out in the streets that's i'm just wondering well let's share an observation that the taxi workers are disproportionately new americans and often with large families and i'm very happy that we're able to provide an entree into the economy and what else can i say the tnc industry does has shown that it can work really well for people who only need it for part-time gigs and there's it's replete with stories of folks who are teachers and have other jobs and need side money and like like this fellow here are deciding to drive someone up on their on their way to hockey or whatever the heck they're doing um but that's and and those and for those people and that may even account for the large numbers we're seeing 45 000 registered drivers i don't know how many of those are full-time we don't we don't have data on that or how many of those are part-time it may be that a good many of them are part-time and driving only two hours a week to make a few extra bucks so that they can take a vacation to hawaii or whatever but um or to pay the rent but for the folks who are driving full-time it's more and more we're seeing that that's not a full-value proposition for them the amount of maintenance for the car the the amount it takes for gas and other amenities all of that you know we there are reports that are hard to verify but there are reports out there of high burn-through rates for uber and lyft that they lose drivers in a very very quick basis because they've drive for a while and they do the math and they go oh actually well maybe this is not so great hard to verify but you hear a lot about it you see a lot of reports about it you hear it a lot from the drivers that after a year or so they realize it doesn't pencil out and so for those full-time drivers who are awaiting the rise of the self-driving cars put them completely on work um it may not be a value proposition but there is something to be said for those people who are making the temporary money we're making the the side gig money uh and people may poo-poo that but there are a fair amount of people who do make a uh make that little extra bit using uber and lyft and i would just add i mean i think chariot took a very different tack than uber and lyft and we hire only w2 employees and those that work full-time get healthcare they get training and we're you know we're able to you know if they need to be retrained on something like double parking we can do that with our staff and that's not something that ride hailing companies are able to do uh and then i'd also just add that i think you know a lot of it may actually tie back to housing it's really really expensive to live in the city and people like not just in the city but in the state and people are desperate to find other ways to pay those bills um and so i think a lot of this relates back to that and i think we'll need to work hard to try to make living here more affordable so that people don't need to rely on those on those services to make money but i also think they've they've changed the mix of who's picking you up as well uh you you know you might have a lot more college educated people because maybe you have people giving rides on their way i always when i when i give a ride to someone in a lift i'm always very confused because the first thing they usually say is are you busy and i'm giving one ride you know to work so i don't really know how to answer that question yes uh so i think it's also really changed the dynamic of who's the person giving you ride well thank you all very much thanks for attending i really feel like we had a great conversation tonight thanks for our panel i'd like to thank you for an engaging conversation continue your questions and engage with us in future programs thank you hi