 thanks to our exhibition sponsors. The Road Ahead is made possible by the generosity of the Ehrenkranz Fund, Barbara and Morton Mandel Design Gallery Endowment Fund, the Lilliochenklaas Foundation and the August Heckscher Exhibition Fund. We've had a very exciting day here at the museum. Perhaps some of you noticed in the exhibition, there are five student projects in sort of our more historical concept part of the exhibition. And in conjunction with the Road Ahead, Cooper Hewitt invited undergraduate and graduate level university students to answer the question, how might automation change the mobility of people, goods and services? Students from around the country submitted designs and five were selected to be part of the mobility exhibition. Today, the five selected projects from Arizona, State University, Harvard, University of Michigan, Kane University and the University of Washington participated in a design review with tonight's panel of experts. Many of these designers, young designers are in the audience with us tonight. It's a little hard to see where the light's off but maybe you can just raise your hands. See a few of them out there. Let's give them a round of applause. And perhaps this has jumpstarted your career in the future of mobility. Tonight we are delighted to have three of the leaders in the field who are exploring the future of mobility. Each has groundbreaking and inspiring projects represented in the Road Ahead. Jack Robbins is a principal and the director of Urban Design at NYC based FX Collaborative. He works with public and private clients to create vibrant sustainable cities, bringing a design oriented approach to creatively solving complex challenges. He leads mixed use development projects spanning urban infrastructure, transportation, multifamily residential developments and large scale master plans. He offers a keen understanding of the designer's responsibility to the public. He's an active voice in the wider design community and also currently teaches in the real estate program at NYU. Ryan Powell leads a user experience design team for Waymo in Mountain View, California where a talented group of researchers and designers are taking a human centered approach to designing the world's first driverless ride hailing service. The primary goal is safety. Ryan's passion for people design and the belief that technology can improve the everyday life have been at the center of his career for the past 20 plus years. He's especially adept at helping organizations figure out how to create simple, delightful and differentiate experiences that appeal to consumers across a variety of global markets. Prior to Waymo, Ryan led teams at Google, Samsung, Xbox and Motorola. Sarah Williams is an associate professor of technology and urban planning and director of the Civic Data Design Lab at MIT's School of Architecture and Planning which works with data, maps and mobile technologies to develop interactive design and communication strategies to reveal urban policy issues to broader audiences. Trained as a geographer, landscape architect and urban planner, she combines geographic analysis and design in particularly insightful projects. She is best known for her work as part of the million dollar blocks team that highlighted the cost of incarceration, digital metatars which developed the first data set on an informal transit system, searchable on Google Maps, and more recently she is using social media data to understand housing vacancy in ghost cities in China. Sarah's design work has been widely exhibited including here at Cooper Hewitt. Tonight's moderator is Cynthia E. Smith, Cooper Hewitt's curator of socially responsible design and one of the three co-curators for The Road Ahead. The exhibition's third curator is our esteemed colleague, Julie Pastor. To begin, Jack, Ryan and Sarah will each give a short overview about their innovative mobility work joined by Cynthia for a conversation and then we will leave 15 minutes at the end for Q and A. Thank you all for coming and hope to see you on the 12th. Thank you and thank you for this opportunity. Thrilled to be here. I'm Jack Robbins. I'm the director of urban design for FX Collaborative and I wanna talk about mobility and this sort of new era of mobility that we're entering into and public space. We're at the dawn of this period of tremendous change in mobility. There are all of these new technologies coming on and they're going to impact how we move around. How are they gonna impact how we move around? Well, no one really knows and with this caveat, I will indulge in a little speculation and a little creative thinking. The future of autonomous vehicles in particular is gonna have the biggest impact and Robin Chase and others have characterized these as sort of a heaven and a hell scenario, right? The heaven scenario is that autonomous vehicles means fewer cars, fewer vehicle miles traveled, more space for other things. The hell scenario is more vehicles, more vehicle miles traveled. It could be one or both of those but the autonomous vehicles will be circling around with or without people in them and it's gonna just cause more of the kinds of traffic problems that we already have. There are a lot of different companies getting into this. It's a very kind of crowded field, all different aspects of AV technology and there's a tremendous amount of money being spent. This Brookings Institute report said that $80 billion spent in a three year period by these private companies on AV technology. The public sector is way behind on this, both in spending and I think in kind of creativity and thinking. If we look at the kinds of things that AV companies are promising that will make our lives better and we look at what kind of companies are making those promises, car companies, tech and software companies, ride service companies and then think about how each of those makes their money. I think there's a real disconnect between what's on the right side of the screen and what's on the left side of the screen and that's the disconnect that we need to be aware of. If we look back 100 years or so to the last time there was a major revolution, a major change in mobility when the automobile started to take over our streets and our way of life and our way of building, it forced things like transit, like the streetcar systems out of business. Some of that was just people preferring cars. Some of that was some very competitive and questionable business practices by the companies that stood to profit. This is a map by the way of all of the streetcar lines in Brooklyn. We're now struggling to get just one line built in Brooklyn. And this really led to the destruction and the spantling of public streetcar lines in cities across the country, not just New York. So here we are now, the city of New York, one of the sponsors for the Driverless Future competition. How should cities respond to this coming future of driverless vehicles? At my firm, we were interested in this idea. It was just beginning to sort of have an impact on the work that we do, especially for the sort of longer range planning that I do. If you're planning a district for 50 years out, how much parking do you plan for? What kind of roadways? We have no idea. So we really wanted to get our heads around it. And we spent several sessions over beers, kind of drinking and brainstorming and trying to wrap our heads around what this new technology would mean. And one of the things that we found is that we kept coming back to drawing more green space and more open space. And we said, what if we had a way, a unitized systematic way to create that green space? And what we came up with is public square, which you can see in the exhibit upstairs. This is a modular system for taking over vehicle space as green pedestrian space. And particularly for taking over parking space, because whether you believe in the heaven scenario or the hell scenario, there is no reason with autonomous vehicles for them to park on the street. That street parking becomes space that's available. And by creating a platform, a module, it becomes an open source for all kinds of creativity invention. These modules can have different surface applications from bathrooms to bike stands to kiosks to green space to community gardens. We're building on proven technologies. So the kind of modular systems that bike share stands represent that can be deployed and taken away and moved around relatively easily. We're building on the popularity of street seat programs that repurpose parking spaces for pedestrian activities. And the general trend in New York and in other cities for reclaiming vehicular space for pedestrian space like the DOT Plaza program. With these modules, these can be recombined in lots of different ways to make whatever different kind of environment and it can be incremental. The RPA estimated that New York City has 24 square miles of on-street parking. Think about that. 24 square miles of public-owned city land that is used for the temporary storage of private vehicles. If you were to take just one out of every 20 spaces, just 5% of that land and convert it with public square to open green space, that is the equivalent of adding another central park to the city. Small amounts of change can make a big change. One of the things that we're excited about since we won that competition is the potential for stormwater benefits because as you incrementally add public square units to the street, you can deal with the stormwater system. You can absorb it, you can evaporate it, you can use it for the plant material that's there. And one of the reasons that we're excited about that is because this is something that actually has a lot of money behind it. Cities are spending large amounts of money to solve their stormwater problems. And if we can make this as a way to solve that problem, it becomes something that it's worth cities investing in. So I'm gonna leave you with this. Our five principles for a driverless future. One is to plan for change. Cities and governments need to be experimental and figure out how to plan for incremental change. The second is that it's gotta be used to enhance the public realm. So much of the dialogue and the discussion is about the technology and not about the space that we live in. It's a tremendous opportunity, as I talked about with stormwater, to enhance environmental sustainability. We need to prioritize shared and public resources and that includes the streets, the transit systems and shared vehicles. And lastly, it's gotta be done with public private alliances. The private sector is investing in this. The public sector is just beginning to wake up to it, but they really are gonna need to work together. The street is ultimately the place where the public and the private come together. Thank you. Thanks so much for coming out on this windy evening tonight. I'm Ryan Powell and I lead up our user research design team at Waymo. And it's my first time actually at the Cooper Hewitt. So I'm really excited to be here with everybody tonight. So our goal at Waymo is to make it safe and easy for everything to get around. So we think about people, we think about packages and goods and that's really the core of what we're trying to do at Waymo. We're approaching this from a technology perspective. So we're very much in a mindset where we think about creating the world's most experienced driver in terms of our technology versus like an actual vehicle. And so our goal, our vision is that we can integrate our technology with a lot of different partners to then bring a lot of different services to market. The designers and researchers that work on my team are very motivated by our mission. And when you take a look at some of these numbers, you can begin to understand why. So in the US, about 94% of auto accidents involve some type of human error. We have about three million Americans over the age of 40 that are blind or have low vision. And on average, people tend to spend or waste about 42 hours a year in traffic. And that of course can be much higher if you're from like San Francisco like I am. So a lot of you may know that Waymo was started out as Google's self-driving car project. So since 2009, we've driven 10 million autonomous miles. And we have a program in Phoenix today where we have hundreds of riders that are using our service every month to do things like go to work, to go to school, to go out and meet friends on the weekends. And they do that through an app that they use to hail our car to pick them up from point A and to go to point B. So when we think about autonomy and this service, our very much sort of, my day-to-day life is very much breathing and sort of sleeping all these problems about sort of how do you bring a technology like this to a city and solve some of these near-terms problems that we're focused on. So the way that self-driving technology works is it's a combination of LiDAR and cameras and radar. And so those sensors, they all have different strengths and weaknesses. And they sort of work in concert together to give the vehicle basically its vision or its sight. And so our vehicles, for example, can see 360 degrees around itself. We can see up the three football fields away. And an example, radar's really good at looking at objects that are very, very far away and to tell you what kind of speed that that object is traveling towards you. That's why on the highway when you see a police officer and they're using a radar gun, LiDAR, of course, is able to kind of paint a picture of what's happening around the vehicles. And so the video upstairs kind of goes through those different sensors and talks about how we take a, again, kind of give the vehicle sight. And then, of course, at the same time, once a vehicle sort of understands its environment, a big part in what the technology is doing is it's also predicting behavior. And so when we can recognize an object, so say it's an adult versus a child, those objects have different behavior profiles. And so the way that an adult might move is gonna be much different than how a child would move. And so when the car thinks about predicting sort of the different trajectories for those different objects, that's what it's taking into account by sort of classifying the different objects that are around it. Same thing with like pedestrians or cyclists that are around you, they all have different behavior patterns. And that's what the car is doing and that's what this video talks a lot about. And so I often get asked like when I'm home for like the holidays, what's it like to ride in a self-driving car? How does it feel? And it feels, for the most part, just like you would in a car that's driven by a human. There are times where our vehicles, of course, they are, we obey all the traffic rules and stuff. And so when a curb says, there's no pulling over or stopping between six a.m. and six p.m., we won't do that. So our vehicles are very courteous. And so you kind of become more aware, I think as you ride around in a self-driving car, of just how much we as humans tend to kind of bend the rules occasionally and make a lot of assumptions about our environment. But the car is also, because it has almost like these super human sort of attributes or abilities, it does at times kind of navigate the environment a little bit differently. But what I usually tell people is that, again, it's because the car can see all the way around it, it can see much farther than a human can see. And if we as humans were able to have access to what the car understands about its environment, we would probably change our behavior today in terms of how we drive. And so for the most part, it feels, we work very hard to make it feel like a trip that is driven by a human. And so my team spends a lot of time also thinking about when you put people into a self-driving car and there is no human there, what are their needs? And so when you drive with somebody that you're in a car, there's a lot of communication that happens between you and the driver. There's direct communication in terms of you asking the driver, hey, which route are we going to take? Or it can be indirect communication where you notice the driver sort of reposition their hands on the steering wheel. And so when you think about, and you know that's a signal that the car, the driver's route ready to make a turn. And so we think a lot about that communication as designers when we think about the interface that you see in the car and how do we directly communicate with you in terms of this is the route that we're going to take or it's safe to get out of the car now or that the front door was left open versus some of the indirect things around in terms of, hey, this is everything that the car can see and as a means to sort of generate trust between the rider and our technology. That's a big theme in the work that I do back in Mountain View. So if you come back and take a look at this video, it does a nice three minute job of trying to summarize some of those things. But yeah, again, I'm excited to be here and it's nice to see such a big turnout for the conversation tonight. Hi everybody. My name is Sarah Williams. I run the Civic Data Design Lab at MIT. And my research lab is very interested in how we can use data to affect policy change. So we are really interested in the massive amount of data that's been created by driver's lot cars, which was probably a very similar video that we were just going to see. And as you move through the environment, as these cars move through the environment, they're creating essentially a whole other reality, a kind of digital reality. This reality is what they need to get around in the cars. The robotic systems need to have a digital version of the landscape in order to know how to navigate, to see humans on the street, to avoid them. And this data, if you can think about the mass amount of data that it is, as every car is recreating this landscape, not just one car creating it one time, but in real time. And it's equivalent to all of the tweets that we currently have in one year, just one hour of that is the data. You can see here are some other kinds of visualizations that we've created as we're driving along the roadway. Self-driverless cars even create their own landscape as we have virtual worlds that they use to train themselves on. So it's not just training themselves in the real world on these cases, but they've created virtual landscapes that they train themselves through machine learning. And Waymo has a video game itself to help train the cars. And all of this really amounts to what I would consider a new digital infrastructure. Very similar to the turn of the century when we had electricity and electricity was becoming this new resource. This new digital landscape is a new resource, I would argue, in the same way that electricity has been and it can be tapped into all kinds of uses. So if we have a digital landscape, we can provide advertisements and augmented reality applications as we're driving through the environment. By having this digital landscape, we can insert different kinds of services into our world that is based off of this digital world. Google has already started to create an augmented reality app out of this digital landscape. Have anybody seen the Fox? And so instead of having directions on your Google phone, you follow the Fox through an augmented space. And that's really because we have this digital landscape that's available made from cars and other kinds of applications. Another example of an application is we're using the landscape. This is a person who is seeing impaired and is using a headset to navigate because that digital world exists, the headphones can tell her how to move through the environment where there's a trash can, where there might be services provided. And so if you think about it, this new landscape can provide all kinds of public goods. I just showed you two options, but I imagine you guys are all really creative and can start thinking of different services. And I like to think of it, not just as a new electricity infrastructure, but even think about it as the internet. It's a new platform in which lots of services will be built upon. But the question is, who owns this public good? We haven't, right now it's Waymo's creating the data. They own this public good. I mean, it's very surely within their hands. They've made the technology to develop it and they're storing it. And so how do we make relationships with the many businesses that are collecting this data to help create and improve services in our urban spaces? At the same time, as we saw autonomous vehicles can be good or evil, then we saw the halo and the double horns earlier. But one thing I'm not sure people realize is many cities over 50% of their budget comes from transit related costs, right? So the parking meter, your taxes for your car, parking lots, parking tickets, all kinds of translated. And so there's a lot of discussion about what happens when we don't have that budget or revenue coming in and who's in charge of that? Is that money now going to a private company and how do cities make a relationship with these private company to ensure that, well, this is a dramatic, they don't turn into financial ruin. But what's the incentive for a business to do something like that? They've spent the money, data is their business, this is their value. And I think what it really is up to us as cities and citizens to start to make relationships with private organizations to ensure that this public good has the benefit for us. So would it be regulation? Nobody likes to hear that word. Probably Waymo doesn't like it or you can tell us later. But I think regulation at this point is really important. Cities need to realize that this public good exists when they allow companies and AV vehicles to come into their cities. They need to make relationships to have co-ownership or co-access to the data. They are in fact running on our city streets that are paid with tax dollars. How can we create a win situation between both? But we've already seen that regulations have gone out the door in many places. For example, in Virginia, lawmakers have taken a completely hands-off approach to autonomous vehicles and they wanna encourage innovation. And encouraging innovation is good. We should certainly do that. So we need to think about what happens in the lack of regulation. And I do a lot of work in Nairobi where there's no regulation on these kind of Uber-like matatus that run through the city. So as we saw in previous presentations, simply put, building cities around cars increases congestion, discourages the use of public transit, encourages sprawl, all of which urban planners generally disapprove. The odd thing is that AVs could either reverse or accelerate each one of these trends. So there's good and bad. But I think that I'd like to make a call to everybody to say that we own the city of the future and we must co-own the data that's generated from it. Thank you. Wow, that was incredible. Thank you all, Sarah, Ryan and Jack. So I wanna get started right away. We don't have a lot of time. I am hoping that we can have some Q&A at the end. We're right at 7.30. We're gonna go up till eight. So we organized the exhibition along six distinct provocations. If any of you've been up to the exhibition, each of your talks hit on one or more of those open-ended questions. How might we design new mobility experiences? How might shared data improve urban design? How might new mobility systems change the design of streets? Each of these elements are becoming more and more interwoven. My question to you all is, what do we need to get fundamentally right today to ensure that in five, 10, 15, 20 years from now we're living in a more utopian world with safer, cleaner, more connected, equitable, accessible mobility options? Sure, I can start with that. I think that paying attention to public space is a big part of it. It's where the city lives and understanding how these technologies are going to affect that public space and getting the city governments that own and control the public space to think about that and to loosen up a little bit. I think there's gonna be a period, in this period of tremendous change, there's gonna need to be experimentation. And the tech sector comes at it with a philosophy of fail faster so that they can iterate and go through things. That's the last thing that the city government would ever wanna do, right? They're like, don't fail and if you do fail, I didn't do it, someone else's fault. So I think there needs to be a real mind shift in being creative about how to solve these problems, being aware of the problems, being creative about how to solve them and doing it in a kind of collaborative and creative way. That's interesting, because I think Seattle is one city that's trying to put together contracts a little bit different, these smaller contracts so that they can try things out, prototype things, and then if they fail, they can quickly switch to doing something different. So there are some locations that are- There is hope. Yes, attempting. I mean, kind of seconding what Jack is saying here. I think designing with an awareness that things are changing and so you're really not designing a thing that might, well, you're making something that might only serve a purpose for the next five years or seven years and then once you sort of transition to the next stage, how does that sort of evolve, that thing evolve with the rest of what's changing? So I think that's super important but I like the idea of experimentation. I mean on a small scale, in San Francisco where I live, there's sort of a main street in one of the neighborhoods where it's super popular with restaurants and a lot of shops and things and they have stopped allowing ride-hailing companies to stop on that street because it was just causing too much congestion and so what they're experimenting with is having those vehicles pick folks up on sort of the side subsidiary streets and so having to walk a little bit of a short distance is something that they're trying and it's actually not as bad as it sounds. I did it just this, yeah, exactly. So I think those types of experiments or where you're just kind of trying things where there's a low cost but there could be a high benefit is something, I think that cities could take into account. I think that, as you said, cities are kind of adverse to change and I think this is kind of the argument I'm trying to make with the data sets too is that if they don't start making, I really think they need to start making these kind of incremental moves or they'll be way behind, their public space will be lost to them, right, in a way they'll be reappropriated, reacquired. So how do we make sure that the public realm remains a public realm in the way that we wanna see it in cities? So I think starting to think about what happens in the parking space is something that cities are avoiding because they're waiting for the technology and then they'll be responsive rather than kind of thinking about them being proactive and I think TNCs are a very good example of that. Like now we have TNCs in the airport but I mean it took a crisis to make some of these kind of design and I think we wanna not get into that kind of crisis situation I think I had. So in the US, 30% of individuals with disabilities have difficulty accessing transportation. One of the promises of new mobility is improved access. Can each of you tell us more about how designs incorporating shared data and new technologies like autonomous vehicles, electric vehicles, connected vehicles and streetcapes could improve access for people living with physical and cognitive disabilities? I can start. So it's definitely something that one of the big things that motivates me at Waymo is I like the fact that what we're starting out with as our first sort of application of our technology is a service and so that makes it much more accessible than to people with different needs or different backgrounds and versus a vehicle that you would go out and purchase and have to potentially sink a lot of money into. And so I think the switch from ownership to service I think is one thing to think about and certainly as we think about like our user experience and we're designing that end-to-end user experience we do take into consideration a lot of people that have different needs and how do we make our service more accessible? And so I think what's exciting about it is the fact that or the opportunity for people to have more flexibility and freedom than they might have today. I mean, as I showed in my presentation I mean the potential services that can benefit people who have disabilities are huge. You're creating a digital landscape that can help visually, hearing impaired, other kinds of impairments really get around and that's a great potential. But the question is how then do we provide that, how do people access that or afford that, right? And I think this is where I get nervous is that like this is a great service that's created by a private company and it's amazing now cities need to make sure that they help support that. But then whose responsibility is it for us to help support that? Is it the government's responsibility? Is it Waymo's responsibility? These questions are still in the air but it has this huge potential to really help the public. Yeah, I would just agree with that. The potential is tremendous, really unlimited and I think it's not just people with disabilities it starts to get to the larger picture of equity and we have an opportunity here where we're redesigning the world of mobility, right? There's this tremendous potential to really make it work better and work better for everyone but there's also tremendous risk and pitfalls and a question of who's setting the agenda? Yeah, there was a, and it was actually an article that you showed in your PowerPoint about the city in France, Bordeaux, I believe it was that charges a flat fee, $50 a month for unlimited access to multiple modes of transit from trains to bikes to ferries to buses. So this is the mobility as a service, a good example and an equitable version. But here in the US and there ridership is up because of this. They've had to increase a lot of more infrastructure but ridership is up. But here in the US, San Francisco, public transit ridership is down in large part to ride hailing. With the advent of the AV fleets there could be even further decline. Kind of what you all showed in each of your, well, both of you showed in your presentations. So how do we, can the US do some sort of mass transit effort like this? Like they did in Bordeaux where they connected all of this Finland's doing something similar so that mass transit can continue to fit into the equation. Each city is very different. New York City is primarily a mass transit city. LA is different from New York. Can we do this in the United States? We're a very different country. We have Dallas's and Houston's and where people are driving cars. There are examples of some cities that are doing this actually. Minneapolis has, you can pay one for one card and you can go through them your bike. They have actually a car sharing program that's included in that. Maybe they don't have a Uber-like surface that goes with it. There are cities that are trying to start doing that in the US. It's what's interesting is I had just had a student who did their thesis about it. The problem is technology integration. Like one of the biggest limitations is integrating the technology for your metro card that then goes to your bike card then goes. So it's actually something like a limitation that we can make more open. I'm very pessimistic about this integration. It's great that some cities are trying but I think they're about to be overrun by the juggernaut of autonomous vehicles. Google and Alphabet are the parent company of Google and Waymo are the largest single investor, single company investor in autonomous vehicle technology. So let's take a quick poll. How many of you in this room used Google in the last 24 hours? How many of you paid Google for that service? Yeah, exactly. The companies are in the business of selling advertising and harvesting data. The idea that they are gonna contribute to first and last mile for transit is total BS. They will price the ride so that it does not make sense for you to get out of an autonomous vehicle and onto public transit. They will keep you in that vehicle to harvest data, to push advertising. It's how they make their money. It's how the company is set up. I don't think it's inherently evil. It's just what they do. But it is not compatible with transit. Well, that is Google's business model. And that Google makes money through display ads. But Waymo is a separate company. We are under the Alphabet umbrella. And I can tell you as somebody from the inside, we really are focused on that mission of first and foremost making it safe for people and things to get around. And so I think of like San Francisco where we don't benefit from a transportation network like you have here in New York where you could rely pretty much on that network. We have a lot of last mile problems in San Francisco. And so I kind of see at least in the near term, I'm more optimistic where I do think that even if there's not this great integration between these where I can pay once and kind of move throughout these transition points, I do think users will find workarounds in ways like I do when I take the CalTrain home at night. And then for my last one and a half miles, I will take a lift line or an Uber pull ride to get home. And so I think that's where those combinations are where it gets easy. And I think it's kind of already happening. So I'm a little bit more optimistic. I mean, I think though what's important to remember is that we still have the lever as the public to help work with private companies to see the kinds of services that we want. We haven't given away our city yet, right? And so I kind of am in this position where I feel like the data is being collected but how can that benefit other kinds of city services? How can we work together to get, let's say provide some of the last mile within some kinds of constraints? But I feel like cities are not, let's say some of them, not all of them are taking the positions like, oh, well it's private against public but is there some kind of in between? But I mean, cities do still have controls. They can say Uber's cannot come in I think that that needs to be in the conversation because what is it that we want to see from Waymo? It's not up for Waymo to decide that. It's up to our city planners to think about how do we want Waymo to be in our city? And then take it from there and say, okay, Waymo, you can't use all your data for X or whatever, put in the regulations that we need or not to help make some of those decisions. Are you all familiar with the Los Angeles Mobility Data Specification? I think this is where they're trying to have a handle on this that they work collaboratively, public and private groups together came up with this shared language where if you wanna be one of these private companies to do business in Los Angeles, the city of Los Angeles, you have to share the data with the city so that the city can then in real time manage the traffic and build infrastructure that matches up. And I think this, in fact, we actually, it's one of the projects in the exhibition, maybe a direction that other cities can take. I just wanna say, I don't see my colleagues here. We're gonna probably open up to questions now. We're a quarter till eight. Do we have somebody with a microphone that? Great. So, while we're waiting for that, I wanna just say, are there any questions you're dying to ask each other? Maybe you can ask each other a question or two while we're waiting for people to think about their questions in the audience. I'm interested from Sarah, what you think the best leverage that cities and city governments have in the world of data? What do they control that the companies who are amassing the data want? Well, they can tell you whether you can operate on the city streets or not. It's huge, right? I mean, the ability for Waymo to come to New York City is dependent on a contract that you would make. And so, I think cities need to be smart about these contracts. And they obviously want to have the services to benefit to them, to have the service. There's a win-win, but also to not give the data away when they do that. So there's, because the cities are operating the infrastructure that Waymo will be using, the streets, they have a partnership with you to make sure the streets are maintained. You have a partnership with them to share data or work in certain kinds of regulatory fashion to recover some of the costs that will potentially be lost in terms of parking meters, other kinds of traffic. Cities stand a lot of potential loss, but a lot of potential gain, and that needs to be factored. So why don't we open up? I know a lot of people have their hands up. We'll take the first, maybe we'll take a couple questions. Hello. Hi, my name is David. This question is for everybody. You mentioned Google and Alphabet as a parent company. Can you speak on your involvement if there is any on the city of the future that merging the digital and physical in Toronto that's happening and what your thoughts about it are for the future? Why don't we take another question? I have a question about the single payment system. You mentioned briefly before. For cities, do you think the city or the government should own the payment system and invite private partners to join the system? And also for Waymo as a private company, would you be interested in joining this kind of system to work with the city? Thank you. I can just briefly take the question about the sidewalk labs development in Toronto. I don't know any more about it than what's sort of been published. I think it's very interesting. We actually talked to them at one point about Public Square and they've actually developed their own version of the same idea. It's a sort of hexagonal street paving system that has infrastructure embedded. Public hexagon doesn't have quite the same ring to it, but other than that, it's a very good idea. And I think maybe the ones who actually get it to work. Yeah, I don't know much about sidewalk labs on the day-to-day specifics of what they're doing, but I think it's encouraging to see that type of a project and it goes back to that experimentation and trying different things that I think is really, really interesting. A couple more questions. Hi, my name is Clara. We spoke a lot about digital infrastructure today, but I'm very interested in your thoughts on the very physical infrastructure that we still need. Even a self-driving car is still driving on a road. So I'm wondering what your thoughts are and how tech companies can contribute to that infrastructure rather than just profiting off of it. I can start with maybe sort of a practical sort of problem that we think a lot about is that pickup and drop-off experience that I mentioned earlier. And so is there, how do you make for a good pickup and drop-off experience? And I think that's one where it does take collaboration between whether it be businesses or the city to think about that and to come up with a solution that works for not only autonomous vehicles, but of course for vehicles that are driven by humans. For the next while, we are going to be in this hybrid state where you're going to have autonomous vehicles, you're going to have people driving cars on the road, and that I think will be an interesting sort of phase of development to see what solutions come in place there. Other question? Yeah, it's kind of a follow-up on that one. How do you handle, this is more for Ryan. How do you handle the ethical dilemmas that happen in that hybrid state where you have autonomous vehicles and human-powered vehicles and humans are the cause of most accidents? And you talked about how you read an adult versus a child versus a bicycle, but the anomaly is going to happen where an adult makes a strange move that's not accounted for and then you have accidents and you have liabilities with that. How do you tackle that problem? Well, there was a good article in the Atlantic. I want to say it was maybe about two years ago where it talked about, and I think Sarah kind of mentioned this in her presentation. We have a very large simulation engine, and so when our cars are out driving around in the real world, what we're doing is is we are taking that data and we have a simulated environment where we run different, as we are making changes to our software, we run those changes through that simulated environment and we try to uncover scenarios where we might have to make refinements. And so that Atlantic article did a great job of going into the detail around how we do that and how we really kind of, again, when we think about building the world's most experienced driver, it's not just the driving that we do on the roads, but it's also this simulated environment that we leverage as well to really help us hone what we're doing. Isn't it true, like with artificial intelligence and you have these fleets, that all of the cars are everything that one car learns that can be translated to the rest of the fleet? Yeah, that's true. It's like a good example would be if there's a construction, maybe a sort of ad hoc construction site pops up during the day on a certain street. And if one of our vehicles encounters that situation, it can let the rest of the fleet know and maybe we would wanna avoid that for some reason. And so we're able to sort of learn that in real time. Kind of deep learning. Other question? Hi, my name is Eric. I just love to hear thoughts about the total disruption of some industries that AV will deliver, such as trucking, which directly or indirectly employs five million people and the impact socially and economically and otherwise. Yeah, I think it's gonna have a huge impact. And it's not just the sort of long distance trucking but all kinds of goods and service deliveries. And there are gonna be a lot of people out of work. My hope is that that change comes in a sort of slow and gradual enough way that we can adjust and the labor market and retraining can adjust to some of that. But it's definitely gonna put some people out of work. Yeah, we were just talking earlier today about the shift from getting money, going inside of a bank and getting withdrawing cash or making a deposit versus the way we do it now with ATMs or taking a photo of a check. And so I don't know, I tend to be an optimist in the sense that I think as, I think you have to be very aware of the effect that you will have on different industries. But I also think as things sort of evolve, that as doors close, other ones open up. And I guess that's how I think about it. I'm just gonna say, I think there's a good example of this from some of my work in Nairobi and Africa. I do a lot of work at the Informal Transit and they move from Informal Transit to Mass Transit. So there's hundred of thousand drivers in Nairobi. You're moving it to a BRT system, they're gonna have a decrease. And you need to have job training. So you need to have active, you can't say like it's gonna happen. This is again where I'm saying governments need to remember there are play in this and that pushing certain people in order to make those job training programs happen. Rather than saying, it'll evolve, it'll happen, these people will have new jobs in Nairobi, you have to actually actively help them figure out new markets in which to be part of the labor market. I think we have time for maybe one or two more. Hi, my name is Kenny. I have a question about mobility in general. This is for all the panelists, but how do you view the mobility needs over a life course? For example, do you want little school children taking AVs to school? Or do you want them to go to a bus and do it the traditional way? And also I guess for let's say senior citizens who might have to, who can't drive anymore, but then you still need to go out shopping, they can, I can see the AV application for there, but let's say for, I can also see for let's say for a golf course where you have seniors who can't drive anymore to the golf course regularly, that can be offered as a service by the golf course itself. Yeah, for me at least that's, I think that's where things get interesting is again kind of going back to that idea of a service. So having access to a fleet of vehicles that might have different purposes, I think that's where things really get interesting, right? So you might have a vehicle that's easier to get in and out of, right? That might be geared towards people with, that have issues there. Or if you're moving right into a new apartment and you want a vehicle where you can kind of load more things into it. But that's what I get excited about. I mean, it's kind of weird talking about that in New York City because most of you probably don't own cars. I have a car, it's sitting in my garage and it sits there most of the time, but back in San Francisco there still is sort of a need for a vehicle for different scenarios. And I think that idea of a service versus ownership is one that I get excited about. I think there's real applications in the health sector too with orphaned seniors, where these are seniors who live alone and you can bring health services to them. We have an inclusion in the exhibition, this AEM concept vehicle, which is a unit that you can, it comes to you and provides diagnosis. So there's all kinds of ways in all different sectors that this could be applied. One more, another question. Okay, I'm Oli Hakanen. I come from Finland, which is nice because our cultures may be easier to make it a desirable future. But after listening to you here and experts in general in New York, I would ask you, what do you think? Shouldn't we take our conceptual thinking in a higher level? And my own suggestion is that we should begin to start to plan people flow master plan, which is vehicle independent. It's not relying on vehicles, but it's looking just the performance of people flow and the excellence of people flow. I think you have to, you ultimately have to look at moving people and how those flows work, but it's gotta be across lots of different modes. So it's gotta include walking, biking, cars, transit, all of that. Yeah, ultimately what you're looking at is moving people or if you're talking about goods and services, that's another kind of mobility. And it works better when those systems work together when transfers between one and the other are easier. We've struggled for decades in New York to try and get a one seat ride to the airport, still hasn't happened. Most other major cities in the US, in the world, maybe not in the US, have that experience one seat ride to the airport. So the systems have to work together.