 Hello and welcome. Thank you for joining us for our program. At Mechanics Institute online for a brief history of motion from the wheel to the car to what comes next with author Tom standage in conversation with Dr. Moira gun was host of tech nation. I'm Laura shepherd director of events at Mechanics Institute. Today's program is a tech and the city series. And we're very pleased to cosponsor with the Gerta Institute of San Francisco and gray area, a center for art and technology. So if you're new to the Mechanics Institute, we were founded in 1854 and we're one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural centers in the heart of the city. It features a generalist interest library, our international chess club, ongoing author and literary programs, and our Friday night cinema with film series so please visit our website at my library.org for all of our various events, which most are online at this time, of course, the library is open if you want to go down check out your books. The librarians will be happy to greet you at 57 post three. This talk will be followed by q&a and hold your questions and put them in in the chat at the end. Also, if you'd like to purchase a brief history of motion by Tom standage you can purchase books at www.panderbook.com or any one of your independent bookstores. Tom's new book is a, a panoramic view of personal transportation and how that shape our societies and cultures over millennial millennium. Transportation is both a disruptor and also transformative kind of technology and we'll be talking about some of those big changes today and also talk about what's in store for the future. So I'd like to introduce both of our guests. Tom standage is deputy editor of the economist and author of six history books including writing on the wall. He is best selling a history of the world in six glasses, and an edible history of humanity, as well as the Victorian Internet, a history of the telegraph. He has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, wired and other publications standage also holds a degree in engineering and computer science from Oxford University, and he lives in London, so we welcome him from afar. Sarah gun is host of tech nation and biotech nation, which air in such venues as NPR is 24 hour program stream national public radios serious satellite radio channel and PR now, and internationally to 177 countries via American forces radio international, produced at the studios of KQED in San Francisco. And of course the program can be heard heard in over 200 domestic public stations, and throughout podcast via it conversations and other internet distribution venues. And we are so pleased to welcome Dr Moira gun on our zoom today and hope that you'll join us for many other events coming up. And two guests Tom standage and Dr Moira gun. Great. Well, thank you so much Laura I appreciate it and I know both Tom and I appreciate this invitation from the mechanics Institute and the library and the series that this represents. Tom and I of course have known each other for, well I'm afraid it goes back decades. He's been on the show a lot of times here. And, but what I didn't realize until today is that we both have some history with the mechanics Institute library so first let me ask you Tom, what's your, what's your history is here. And you're on mute. You're on mute. Oh my goodness. How do we do this. Can we unmute him. Yeah sorry about that. Because it was set up so that participants couldn't unmute themselves. I muted myself and then couldn't unmute myself. Thank you Laura for allowing me to unmute myself. Famous British, you know, manners, you decided to mute yourself and there you go. I think it's good zoom etiquette you should always, you should always mute yourself unless you're talking. Anyway, I guess I do have a history with the mechanics Institute. I'm thrilled to be doing this event with you virtually because San Francisco is the only other city I've lived in apart from London where I've lived for most of my life. And I spent several months in San Francisco in 2003 and I was writing a different book then about the history of drinking, but I did quite a lot of research for it in the mechanics Institute library so I have this great fondness for that. In fact, I kicked off the research in 2002 also in San Francisco by going to the anchor brewery and and meeting Fritz Maytag and drinking, eating weird, weird bread that he had made to make beer out of but so I have a, you know, I love San Francisco very much. And I also as an engineer feel very at home at the mechanics Institute and also in the mechanics Institute library where I spent a lot of time researching, researching beer. So it's great to be here to talk to you about this book and later book not about not about there. But the great thing is this book actually does involve mechanical engineering, unlike the beer book so so that's even more suitable. So I'm really thrilled to be here. Now a lot of people would think that both since I have a PhD in mechanical engineering I must have some relation through that to the mechanics Institute but no. I never knew about mechanical engineering, although my grandfather was one. I was an undergraduate at the University of San Francisco, and mechanics Institute library was one of three cheap hot dates listed in the fog horn that I see because it's so beautiful. And a lot of people, they, you know, their parents let them go to the library right, you know, those days, or you just could go to the library, very hush hush but you'd like sit at the USF library at the tables and sit across from each other nobody was on the internet, nobody your periodicals rooms with all the books lined up, but you could also study together at the mechanics Institute library. Very romantic place, you know so that was hard to be one of the three hot cheap dates that that that you did that I'm sure it still is I'm a professor there now I can tell people about this that could be one of your, one of your notorious places Now some of you may know that recently I interviewed Tom on this book and it went on Technation, and I thought I would take the top two comments we get all these comments coming in people talking about who's been on the show and what's going on. The first comment as people loved all the talk about chariots and one way streets in Pompeii. Okay, let's totally do that. This is also one of my favorite things we're searching this because yeah I had such a good time going through the whole history of transport from a wheeled transport, starting with the wheel but yes, I love it. When I write these big history, this is like the fourth book I've written where I basically go through the whole of world history looking at a particular thing whether it's drink or whether it's food or whether it's media, and now it's now it's transport. And I particularly enjoy I always enjoy going through the Roman period because it's just so much fun. But yes, it turns out there is this archaeologist who is specialized in looking at the way that the cobblestones and the curb stones in Pompeii have been scraped by wheels. And he's been able to reconstruct the basically the one way system of Pompeii. And when you see pictures of it you tend to see, you know, an artist impression that they saw a Roman and he's in the toga and he's like writing a chariot. The Romans did not do this right chariots had fallen out of favor quite a long time earlier. The Romans thought chariots were for sport so they had chariot racing in the, you know, in the Circus Maximus, for example. And they also used a ceremonial chariot. If you were a triumphant soldier coming back general coming back from a campaign, then you got to ride in this special chariot. And as you were pulled through the streets of Rome, but they didn't actually use chariots as as a means of transport or as a means of war fighting. And in fact, Julius Caesar, when he gets to England in Britain to fight the local people and to try and invade it and so on. He's quite amused that they're still using chariots because chariots have really fallen out of favor in most of the, you know, the rest of Europe and the Near East a few hundred years earlier. So what's happening is that Pompeii is founded in about 600 BC and originally it's not a Roman town. It's an Ostentown. It's taken into the Roman territory and the Romans start to develop it as a resort town in the 1st century AD. And so of course everyone wants to like make over their houses and, you know, just generally do all this stuff. And this involves having to have wagons come into the city and bring lots of stone and it's too noisy. And the big problem is that the streets have all been built and they're only one wagon wide. And so they introduced this one way system. We now know because of this archaeologist who's gone and looked at all the scrapes on the on the stones. And it's very like not actually not San Francisco, but it's like the actually San Francisco has this too. You know, the one way system where you have like in Manhattan, but also now I come to think of it downtown San Francisco, where you have alternating streets go in alternating directions. That's what they have in Pompeii and they have to have it because the streets are only one vehicle wide. And so you don't want to have two vehicles kind of you can't reverse a horse, right? Horse and carriage going backwards, not really a thing. So this is what they do. And so that's one of the wonderful stories that, you know, I was delighted to come across that you have these Roman. They're starting to think about traffic and they're starting to think about one way systems and they have a bypass to mean to ensure that there isn't too much traffic going through the marketplace. They build this kind of bypass for it. And so it turns out all of these, there are so many ideas about the way we think about vehicles that have these very, very deep roots. And you mentioned the chariot. The chariot is kind of the big one because that when chariots are first invented, they're invented by the Hittites. So they live in what's basically Turkey now. And up until this point, the Egyptians, they know about wheels, but they haven't been using them. And so they're like, we don't need wheels and they built the pyramids without using wheels at all. And then the Hittites have these war chariots that go really, really fast and they start invading, you know, Syria and these other neighboring countries. And the Egyptians are like, okay, we need to get to get with the program on the wheels. So they start building wheel chariots and they have the biggest chariot battle in history between the Hittites and the Egyptians. And Tutankhamun's tomb has these amazing chariots in it. Incredibly light, you know, you could lift one. And they're like 30, 30 kilograms. What's that? 65 pounds or something like that. They're like Ferraris. They're these incredibly, you know, amazingly engineered, spoked wheels and all this kind of stuff. So the Egyptians are like really into chariots. And there's this thousand year period where chariots are the awesomest thing in the world. And so all the kings want to be depicted smiting their enemies in chariots. And so Egyptian kings and Assyrian kings, you see these wall carvings and they're always in a chariot. And they're hunting and they're killing lions and they're beating their enemies and, you know, because chariots are awesome. And this is the origin of you are what you drive, right? The most powerful people drive the most awesome vehicles. And that idea has has been with us ever since. And that's, you know, it's another example of how we have these very deep origins of you are at your drive one way systems, you know, this kind of stuff. And it's been great fun to uncover all of these sort of unexpected historical references that connect with the way that we relate to vehicles today. You know, it's funny, we're here right here in San Francisco, and here, you know, close to the mechanics Institute, we have a what about how would how would we be able to look at the notches and the curves and the where. And they said, what if you were going down Kearney Street, and you were just about to cross bush bush is the one way coming this way. Kearney is one way. Well, if you were to cherry it, you could either go straight, which you probably wouldn't need the curve where you can make a right turn to be making where marks there. But there wouldn't be any where marks on the left because it's exactly. And of course, you've got these vehicles and they've got wooden wheels, but they've got a metal rim around the edge of the wheel until you get this characteristic pattern of chipping. And when you look at the corners, you can see basically whether people, you know, which way they're going and therefore you can you can figure all of this stuff out. So there's this wonderful book called the traffic systems of Pompeii, which you know, incredibly nerdy, but but I just love this stuff. Now I have to say now the second comment I did with the two top comments here the second level of comments is all the horse poop. Horse output, I believe is how I record. Well, there's many ways there's many ways we could refer to it, many of which cannot be said in a, you know, in polite conversation. But but yes, let's call it horse manure, shall we? It was actually the Victorians called it, they called it mud and the Victorian in London. So, so where where the the Economist offices is just off the strand, which is, you know, one of the main streets in central London. And there's this description from 1895 and I opened the book with it. And it's disgusting. It's the what happens when there's a rainstorm and you've already got all this horse manure on the ground. And it basically turns into what they call it mud, but it's this it's the consistency of pea soup. So it's really quite thick and obviously it's brown and smelly. And every time a vehicle goes through it, it sprays it in all directions. And so if you're a pedestrian, you know, it's not just like getting splashed by a bus. It's much worse than that. You're covered with this horrible stuff. And all of the the street along that street, all of the shops and the houses are coated with with this stuff up to like 15 feet from street level. So it really is revolting. And I wanted to open the book with just how disgusting this problem was. And in fact, my editor made me turn it down and he said, like, you know, enough with the horse manure stuff that we have about, you know, we have a bit less of it. And in fact, my wife has been, you know, this whole there's an apology to her and the acknowledgments because the whole time I've been writing this book, I've been like, I've discovered more stuff about horse manure. And I've got more quotes from people saying how horrible it was. But this is a serious point. And the reason I start the book with it is that is that in the 1890s in the in the big fast growing cities of the western world, horse manure is turning into a real problem. It's piling up on the streets. It's, you know, you can't get rid of it because you've got more and more and more horses in these cities. The number of horses per person is going up and it's growing faster than the population. And you've got to get rid of the horse poo. And no one wants to use it as fertilizer anymore because they're using guano instead. So you literally have it piling up in these dumps, enormous piles of it which stink. And in New York you've got genteel women complaining that their neighborhood has been ruined by this enormous pile of poo on the corner that, you know, where they've built a manure dump. And they're worried about the health impact of this and the flies. And then you've also got more and more traffic in the streets with all of these horse-drawn vehicles. And of course, railroads have been invented. You'd have thought that would help. But in fact, that makes it worse because the more goods and people you've got coming in and out of a city, the more you need horses within the city to move them around. So it's recognized in the 1890s that this is unsustainable and something has to change. And we are in a similar situation now, not because of the horse manure, but because of the emissions from the vehicles that we rely on now, the cars, and the buses and the trucks and everything else. But, you know, the emissions aren't as visible and smelly as the horse manure and they're not splattered all over the streets in the strand. But they are causing this big problem because the carbon dioxide emissions are warming the planet. And it's a very similar situation to where we were in the 1890s, where we've recognized that the way we handle our urban transport systems has to change. And we're not quite sure what to change to. And we've got all these different options and we don't know what the consequences are going to be of choosing different approaches. And so that's why I think it's really useful at this particular moment in time to go back and look at what happened, how the car became as dominant as it did in the 20th century, and how it sort of caused all of these unexpected changes, so that we don't make some of those same mistakes again and we can make a more informed choice by learning the lessons of history. So that's what I'm trying to do in the book. But yeah, it all starts with horse manure. I was about to say no something, but I can't say that here. Anyway, but I think what's so important about that is we tend to look at the horses, we tend to look at the cars, it's the transition that's like, whoa, here's where a lot of the lessons are. So, so at its peak in the 1890s, we have 300,000 horses on the streets of London, New York City, 150,000 horses. I mean, they're all, it's just, it's a mass of horses. And then we start to have the car, we're transitioning to the car. One day the horses don't leave and the car shows up. We have a transition period just as today, we're transitioning to other modes of transportation and different uses. So let's talk about that transition, what we might learn about today. Yeah, so actually in the case of San Francisco, we have, there's that famous film driving along Market Street, and it's a few days before the big earthquake. But what's wonderful about it is you can see this mixture, you can see the transition underway, you can see some cars, you can see some horse-drawn vehicles, you can see some bicycles, you can see people selling things on the street, you can see lots of pedestrians weaving in and out. Everyone's moving at about the same speed, which is sort of walking speed. There may be some street cars in there too, actually come to think of it. But that's the way the world looked before the cars took over the roads. And I think it's particularly apt that recently there have been these changes and Market Street is now banned for private cars, right? It's just, yeah, I think that's a really... The fact that this could happen in the most car-loving parts of California, of the most car-loving country in the world, I think tells you something that we're starting to think about. Your Uber and Lyft driver and taxi driver tell you, I can't drop you off on Market Street. Right. It's like, what? Yeah, but anyway, so the transition is interesting because people don't know what to expect. And all of these promises, so obviously proponents of the car are like, well, obviously the thing to do is switch to cars. And they make these extraordinary claims. And they say that if you switch to cars, obviously you get rid of horse manure. So you've got, you solve the pollution problem. So that's a good thing. And then they also say it's going to get rid of traffic jams. And this is because when you've got a horse and a carriage, and you get rid of the horse and you have a horseless carriage, it takes up half as much space. So in effect, you've doubled the amount of road area. So that means there's going to be less traffic, right? That's the theory. And Thomas Edison, there's an interview with Thomas Edison. He says, yeah, yeah, cars are going to, you know, automobiles, motor vehicles are going to take over. And he predicts that downtown Manhattan is going to look like, like a desert island. It's going to look deserted. The streets are going to be like empty because there's going to be so little traffic. And then there are other claims that are made are that this is going to be much safer because obviously a horse, if it gets scared or confused, it can bolt and it can kick people and you can't scare a car. So this is going to be an end to road accidents and road deaths. And then finally, it's going to be much quieter because you've got all of these vehicles with with wooden wheels, but with metal rims around them. And as they're going over the cobblestones, I mean, even when you've got a carpet of horse manure on them, it can be very, very loud. And so cars, by contrast, have rubber tires. And so it was also going to be quiet. So this is a utopia that was being promised that all of these problems associated with horse and all vehicles were just going to go away and everything else would go on as normal. It'd be wonderful. And of course, that's not what happened at all. And the introduction of the car had all of these other consequences from shopping malls to fast food to supermarkets to all of the car culture that we associate with the 20th century. And it's kind of hard for us to imagine it because we've all grown up in a world shaped by the car. So we can't imagine it any other way. And what I think is interesting is that today we have all of these options again, whether it's ride hailing, whether it's scooters, whether it's electric bikes and dockless bikes and then autonomous cars. And again, if you look at what the autonomous car people are saying, they're saying autonomous cars are going to get rid of traffic. They're going to get rid of accidents. They're going to get rid of pollution because they're going to be electric. And it's all the same things that people said about cars. Now, maybe you can make autonomous cars work in that way. But all I'm saying is we've kind of heard this story before, right? So I think we need to, as we go into this transition, be a bit more skeptical. And we also need to look at how things worked in the past and learn the lessons of history. And that's really what I'm doing in this book. I'm mapping out the consequences of the introduction of the car, of which there are many. And it's, you know, they're very interesting. And the world looks the way it does because of cars. The analogy I like to use is fish. They fish when we're out in water and they don't know what water is. They just assume that that's the natural way of things, that you're just surrounded by water all the time. And that's how we are with cars. And we can't imagine the world a different way. So I'm kind of pointing out the water to the fish and saying, you know, we really need to be thinking about this transition a little bit more. And we need to be thinking about, you know, we really need to be thinking about this transition. And in particular, we shouldn't be betting all of our chips on one solution to replace, you know, the way we do things now. It's because that's what we did before. We just went from horse-drawn vehicles to, to this very, very heavy emphasis on cars. You know, you do have public transport and bicycles and other things too. But basically the main thing was the car. And we need to have a more diverse, I think, transport approach in the future. We're very fortunate here in San Francisco to be at the forefront of this transition. And that's a shock for some people to think, oh, that can't be. You've got, you know, we've got all these hills. Oh, doesn't matter. We have it all. We've all the startups here, all the new tech, and we're all right here in this urban area. And so we see it from the, you know, those little unicycles. You're like, how could that person, oh, he's got a new cycle down there. But also the self-driving cars have to be told about the hills, because when you're going up, they're so steep, right? I mean, they really are unbelievably steep, aren't they? And when you're driving up a hill, the self-driving car thinks, because it's so steep, it just sees the hill in front of it and thinks it's a wall. And so they actually had to adjust the autonomous cars to make them drive on the steep hill. Otherwise they'd just stop and go, I can't go any further. There's a wall. Tell Google Maps something is wrong. I can see it. I can see it. And so there's a lot, you know, people have said to me, you know, are they really being used? I mean, are they really useful? I mean, it's like, you know, it's like, if you don't use them, you know, it's like, then you don't see it. And I have, I must say that for the last three or four years, now this year we all have all of us journalists, we all have advisors, people we talk to, they're in on the end. My brother-in-law, I'm outing him and now, for the last three or four years has been the number one bike share user in the San Francisco Bay Area. And he averages between 1200 and 1500 rides per year. That's like 25 rides a week. So you would say, well, you know, is this all he has to do is just to keep trying to ride? Well, he's got a big selection of bikes when he walks out of his house. He's got a big, and right there, there's a bike rack in front of his business. And then, you know, he's got this like 25 rides a week, you know, he just goes everywhere. And when this first emerged, we gave him a hard time about it. He is just telling me about what's- He's living in the future. That's totally, it's living in the future. And I think the answer that I, the direction I think we need to move in, and you know, many cities is doing this, including San Francisco, is having this mixture of different modes of transport. So you've got public transport, you've got bikes, and you've got all bike lanes down, you've got bike sharing, so you don't need to even necessarily own a bike. You've got the scooters, you've got ride hailing. And, you know, in the future, maybe we'll have autonomous cars and flying, you know, passenger drones, and who knows what we'll have. And the main thing that's changed is that we have the ability to stitch all of these things together using this. And, you know, even just public transport on its own is much more usable when you have Google Maps or another, you know, transport planning app, because you know when the next bus is going to come or the next muni or whatever. And so it's not so much of a, you know, you're not taking a chance of just going to a stop and hoping that something's going to show up. And if you can then weave all of these other things in there as well, and this is, of course, an example, which is they want you to buy all of their, all of your transport from them. And we're seeing this in some cities like Berlin and Helsinki. They have these unified ticketing systems where you pay basically a monthly subscription like a cell phone plan and you pay like 50 or 60 euros and you have access to all of the public transport systems and all the bike share systems. And then you pay a bit more and you can have a car on the weekends if you want to be able to do trips out of town and that kind of thing. So I call this the Internet of Motion where you basically interconnect all of these different transport networks in the same way that the internet is lots of different interconnected transport systems, sorry, interconnected transport systems for data. So it's a, you know, that I think is the answer that it's not a single answer. It's this tapestry of different forms of transport woven together by the smartphone. And so in a sense when people say, you know, what is the thing that comes after the car? It's sort of the smartphone. I mean, the smartphone does a lot of the features that cars did for people, particularly young people in the 20th century. So it's how you meet people. It's how you socialize. It's how you buy food. It's how you go shopping. You know, it's a place to escape to and have fun because you can play online games and so on. And it also gives you this ability to move in the physical world as well because it allows you to, through these various apps, actually, you know, access the transport systems that you need. So that's what I'm arguing in the book that we need to kind of move towards this more diversified system of transport, which makes us less car dependent. And what's really striking is that car ownership is becoming more expensive and less convenient, whereas using apps and various transport services to move around is becoming less expensive and more convenient. And so, you know, even in America, we're seeing the number of cars, even though the number of miles driven per year is going up, the number of people and the number of vehicles is growing more slowly. And what that tells you is that the number of vehicles, sorry, it's the other way around, the people and the vehicles are growing more quickly. So the number of miles driven per vehicle is falling each year. The number of miles driven per person is falling each year. And even in the U.S., these peaked in 2004. So I think there's, and in Europe, it was in the 1990s. So I think there is sort of strong evidence that people are falling out of love with a car and we are moving into a future where we're less dependent on it. Not that cars are going to go away, but I just think, you know, we can have fewer of them and be less dependent on them in the future. Well, it will be of interest to some members of the Mechanics Institute that I own in 1974 and a half, Jensen Healy. I'm not selling it, Tom. Someone else is going to have to sell it, but not me. I still love that car as well. Anybody from the Mechanics Institute who wants to view it, I'll be happy to, it actually runs, it runs. So that's very exciting. I saw a DeLorean on the motorway in England the other day. And yeah, I thought like there were still DeLoreans that work. I mean, that was, you know, yeah, it was awesome. Yeah, so I'm with you. I mean, I have, you know, there's a car nerd. I'm a car nerd at heart as well. Yeah, I appreciate these things. Now, let me ask you, certainly the smartphone is essential to all the applications you're talking about where we're going. So it's not just, can you afford the technology? Can you understand? Can you read literacy, education? You know, all of these things, you know, maybe if the, we can make the smartphone a little dumbest is some of the less smart people can use it. And maybe other ways to do the same kind of apps can be evolving in the future. But there's this intelligence and you and what's out there to move with. So, but we already have some experience, you know, we've been working on this five, 10 years and in real life. Do we know some things that haven't worked? And do we know some things that do work? Well, I think we know, I think we have some kind of interesting pointers for where things might go. Firstly, I think you're going to have a different mixture of transport modes in different places. So if you call a, if you hail a ride using an app in Lagos, for example, in Nigeria, then you will, you may end up with a motorbike taxi, right? Because that's an easier way of moving around. And so, and, you know, maybe in Dubai, they'll go with the passenger drones. And, you know, you've got more public transport in some cities than others. So, you know, I think one of the benefits of having a tapestry of different transport modes is that, is you can introduce new ones. You haven't bet the farm on a single way of doing things like, like happened with automobiles in the 20th century. And it also means that you can have different answers in different places. So I, and there are all sorts of interesting ways of mixing them with, you know, we've seen some cities experimenting with subsidizing Uber and Lyft rides to take people to transit stops so that they can then get on, on light rail or whatever. So you can, you can integrate these things in different ways. And you can also have funding models where cities can, you know, subsidize different sorts of rides. So it may be that, you know, when I ask the Uber app, if you want to go from here to the other side of London, what's the best way to do it? It might give me a bunch of options that, you know, take different amounts of time and cost different amounts of money. And in some cases, it may be that the, you know, the transport authority in London is subsidizing me to say, you know, we are trying to get more people to use bikes because it's good for fitness. So, you know, if you take the bike option, we'll, the bike will be free. And these sorts of things. So there, this is, Right now. So the thing is the flip side of this. So you asked kind of one of the lessons. I think the flip side of this is that we have to recognize that that's a very powerful policy tool. And you could use basically price incentives to encourage some kinds of behavior that you want, like more cycling and discourage other kinds of behavior that you don't want. For example, you could have a zombie tax on autonomous cars. So they're not allowed. You can't have autonomous taxis driving around downtown with nobody in them. Or if they do, they have to pay a charge per mile a zombie tax because there's no nobody in them. And that would discourage, you know, the scenario where I take my car down, my autonomous car downtown. And while I'm popping into the shops, I have it drive around the block because I can't find parking, you know, that we want to discourage certain kinds of behavior and that kind of stuff. The scary thing is, though, that if you, if you have a situation where you have all these policy levers you can pull to, to encourage people to use transport in a particular way, that whole system could also be abused. And so you can imagine that an authoritarian government could do things like say, well, these people, these sorts of people aren't allowed to go to that part of town. Or if you say something rude about the government, we're not going to let you use, you know, a transport system at all. And you can see signs of this in China. So the social credit system in China, if you, if you say something on social media that the government doesn't like, they can revoke your ability to use the high speed train network and the internal domestic aviation. And so, you know, this is, it's a powerful tool for, for say, encouraging people to walk more and use active transit and cycle more and reduce emissions and all sorts of, you know, noble policy goals like that. But there's exactly the same policy levers would also allow you to do bad things. And so that's why I think we have to watch the politics of transport very, very closely. There's a brewing argument about this happening already. Los Angeles has this system called MDS that it invented, which essentially is a data sharing system between the operators of the E-scooter systems. And because obviously, you know, the scooter people want to know where the road works going to be, which roads are you going to close. And then the city wants to know how are people using scooters and are there, you know, should we replan the bus lines because so many people are taking scooters from here to here and no one's using this bus line over here. So maybe we should move the bus line. So you can see the rationale for sharing data, but the scooter companies and the mobility companies are quite reluctant to share this with cities in many cases because they don't have proprietary information. And then the privacy and the civil liberties people are worried that this basically allows cities to track where people are and what they're doing and who was where, when and this kind of thing. And it's a similar argument to, you know, telecoms traffic. And we have rules about you have to, you know, if you want to get data on how somebody was using the internet or their cell phone records or whatever, you have to go to a judge and, you know, all this kind of stuff. If you think about it, this fits into the pattern. We go back to the horse poo again. I'm afraid we're back to the horse manure. So we were caught out with the horses. The horse manure was a big problem. The exhaust was piling up, you know, and then we had this problem with the cars that there was this exhaust in the form of CO2. And the exhaust that we get from mobility systems, these new mobility systems is in the form of data. And so we need to watch out that we don't get caught out by the same thing again, which is the exhaust products. So in this case it's data. And it sounds esoteric and you go, well, come on, you know, is this really an issue? Isn't this just something where the EFF is getting a B in its bonnet about it? But you know, back in 1900, people, you know, the idea that this invisible carbon dioxide gas that was coming out of cars was going to cause a problem in the long term would also have sounded quite an esoteric concern to people. And of course, look what happened. Well, with the horse poo, we did have a lot of things going on. We had a lot of transportation that was set up in all the system and all the investment in that infrastructure and for those businesses. And so we're still talking legacies. I mean, will there always be a London underground? Oh, I think so. I mean, I mean, London underground is that's a relatively sustainable form of transit, right? And it's, it's electric and it's it carries. And it carries large numbers of people in the city. And, you know, there are a few exceptions in the US as well, like like San Francisco and New York have invested a lot in their public transit systems. And, and, and, you know, that's that's a good thing when you have a dense city, it makes more sense to invest in those things. And the big problem with, you know, suburban sprawl is that when you've got, and this is really interesting. So, so, so Gavin Newsom has just signed this thing today, hasn't he? Basically ending the zoning of the single housing system because it reduces, you know, it limits the, the density of housing. And so once you can start to have, you know, two family homes on the same lot or apartment blocks or whatever, then you get higher density and then public transport starts to make more sense because you can have a transit stop that serves lots of people and that, you know, it makes sense in a way that it doesn't. So densification, you know, is it is good in the sense that it drives you to the city. So, you know, it is good in the sense that the necessity to own a private car, you know, goes away for some people. So again, it brings us to this, this idea that, you know, I'm not saying cars are going to go away, but at the margin, there are going to be some people for whom owning a car is no longer necessary, and they can use these alternatives which are getting better and easier and cheaper and more convenient. Now, you were bringing this up about, you know, how it works in San Francisco versus what it may be like elsewhere. Now, if you go to Switzerland, you might check into a hotel in Geneva or Zurich or Basel, and with, when you check in, they also give you a transit card. You can get on any bus. And the buses, they, they don't, you get on the bus and there is no, nobody's sitting there saying, okay, what's your ticket? Have you done this? Have you, you just get on the bus, you just walk straight and they have, they have signs that, they have displays, so you can say, okay, we're here, and here's the next queue, and this is how, I mean, you know exactly where you are, and then you just get off and they're constantly running, people are using them constantly, they're all right, all very level, everything is terrific, and nobody ever asks you for anything, but if they ask you and you don't have your card or you're a citizen and you haven't paid your ticket, everything really moves. And so this is part of the problem with how we design this, that is everything is pay as you go, even if you have a pass, you can make it on and show it, yeah. So in London the way they've done it is that you can use the, you can just tap into everything with the, with your phone, and then it caps the payment. So, so I could get on to any bus and get on to any train and go into the tube and go on the Uber boat and whatever else, and then it caps it at like, you know, eight pounds a day or 30 pounds a week. So you don't have to think about it anymore, you don't have to buy a ticket, you just wave your phone and it all works, and, you know, more and more cities are moving in that direction, and so I'm sure that's where, if San Francisco is not there already, that's where it's going to end up. I mean, moving towards being able to just use your phone to pay on the New York subway, I think that's coming. You do have to upgrade all of the turnstiles everywhere, so it takes a while. The cities are starting to do is basically free public transport, and you just say, you know what, we're not going to bother, we're just going to get rid of the whole having to pay for it, and then having to enforce payment for it, and that's a way of encouraging people to use it more. And, you know, that's something, again, that some European countries have, you know, have to varying extent. So I think there's lots of scope here for different models and different ways of paying for things, and if you look at those cities like Helsinki and Berlin that have kind of all-in systems, it's very much like buying a cell phone plan. And in fact, Uber has experimented with, and Uber and Lyft have talked about having subscription plans where you pay $50 a month and you get a certain number of rides or a certain number of miles, and the whole game is like with your cell phone plan, guessing what the amount of consumption you're going to need is in advance. But I think there's a lot of, this is basically becoming a software problem in a lot of ways, and stitching together all of these different transport systems effectively is basically about spending a lot of money there and a billing layer. And once you can do that, then all sorts of new possibilities open up, and it becomes much more convenient to the barriers to using these systems evaporate, and it's wonderful. Well, free is a very good price, but what if you lose your cell phone? What if you don't have a charge on your cell phone? Yeah, yeah, that is true. You have got a problem then. So that's this is why you have to watch out for your, and you can use your watch as well. So we're all over there. Now, what is the one kind of technology or access of the future that people have been asking you about as you've been going around doing these kind of events? I suppose people are asking, you know, what's going on with the autonomous cars, because we heard such a lot about them a few years ago, and I did a lot of research into them and reporting on them and, you know, I find them a very interesting technology and I've written in a few of them and you see them on the streets in San Francisco, right? You still see them going around about the Zooks ones and one of the other ones. There's a whole bunch of them and you can sort of, you know, you can see the technology developing in real time in front of you if you're in downtown San Francisco, how many of them are there? How many different companies are there? Are they all switching to trucks instead, this kind of stuff? And I think there is a what happens if they manage to get this technology to work and it works about 95% under the time, the difficulty is it doesn't work the rest of the time, so it's not safe to just let them go. But if they do then, you know, what will happen? Will they make traffic better? Will they make it worse? And it really does depend on the rules and the pricing and I think San Francisco is interesting in that regard with what happened with the scooters, right? So you remember when all the scooters were just piling up on the street corners because there was this complete free for all with the scooters and there were all of these companies that were just trying to, you know, take market share and so the streets. And then the city did a really smart thing and it said, well, we're going to have a limit to how many scooter companies we can have. We're going to have this process where we just give out a certain number of licenses and you all have to bid for them and you only get the license for whatever it is two or three years and if we don't like the way you handle the system then we take it away from you, you give it to someone else. So that was a really pioneering model because I think, you know, one of the dangers with these new transport technologies is that if you have a total free for cars funded by VC firms and all we're going to have is scooters or the sky's going to be full of flying, God knows what. And so I think you have to have a kind of sensible way of allowing people to try new things but also regulating it. And I think, you know, this sort of sandbox approach to regulation that San Francisco has been doing has been a good example of that. It's been brave. Sort of the tragedy, what you said with the scooters is the tragedy of the commons but replayed with the scooters. Yes, because essentially they're all using the common space of the sidewalks as parking spaces and it just became a big mess. And the same happened in China. I was in Shenzhen when dockless bikes first came in there and there were literally these piles of bicycles, like mountains of bicycles, under trees next to some of the subway stops. And I said to the people I was with, what is that? And they said it's these bikes and you unlock them with your phone. And at the time they were all free to use because they were VC firms who were backing these bike companies. And they were all trying to take market share. And they were trying to get you to use their network. And they were subsidising the bikes with, you know, if you take this bike we'll give you a voucher at the other end and you can get a free coffee. And, you know, they were really throwing money at customer acquisition and the result was piles and piles of bicycles. And, you know, a lot of those companies went past and there were all these stories and pictures of the mountains of bicycles that went into landfill and, you know, so there does need to be some sort of, you know, exploration and some regulation for this stuff because we are talking about limited amounts of street space here. That's right. We're all ready to go to questions. So I hope everybody has time. Let me just look up here in the chat. I believe we have some as this. Oh, here's one. Yes. Oh, are you going to read it, Laura? You read it, Laura. Well, I was, I was, I was going to Trisha asks if the cell phone is central to future transportation doesn't that, well, you've already covered that. In other words, if the network is hacked or an earthquake takes down the towers, it shouldn't take too much dependency. Then doesn't too much dependency on one thing makes us very vulnerable. All access to navigation transportation would stop. Yeah, that's true. But I mean, we're very dependent on things like electricity now. So, you know, I mean, that's the, that's the choice we make. We're very dependent on technologies in lots of ways. I suppose the risk is this de-skills people. They don't know how to get around their own city because they're just reliant on the phone to tell them where to go. I mean, actually, you know, Google Maps, if the cell phone network goes down, Google Maps, if you, you know, if it's got the map on the device, it will still work. It's just using GPS and you can still pay for things without an internet connection in the background. So it's not quite as dependent on being connected to the internet all the time as you might think it is. But yes, I appreciate the, I appreciate that. And the reason, and the reason you can pay for things is that with your phone, you have something called Bluetooth, which is short distances. It's not even short, it's not even Bluetooth. It's NFC, right? So it's the, it's the, it's a near field communication chip that is what's doing the payment. And, and that doesn't require, I mean, you can pay for things, you know, underground where there's no, in the, in the London underground, there's no cell coverage, you know, inside the stations, but I appreciate that. Well, the next question is from Laura. Could you talk about the impact of trains and rail and the rail rail variants on how industrialist and politics shaped urban development and consolidated wealth in this country, which continues today? Yes. I mean, the interesting thing about the railways is that they connect cities. They are not, you know, predominantly used for transport within cities. And so what's really striking is when railways start to appear in Europe and North America, it changes the geography of those countries because if there's a fast railing between two cities, suddenly they're in effect much closer together. And so you get, you know, the emergence of the railroad, railroad cities where their development is very much driven by the fact that they have access to this fast network and you get, you know, lots of immigrants going to say Chicago, because there are suddenly lots of jobs in things like meatpacking as a, by virtue of the fact that they're, there are railroad connections. So yes, I don't go into, you know, my book is predominantly a history of cars. I go into railroads to the extent that they are, there are people trying to build steam vehicles that go on roads and the problem is that they're very, very heavy, they're very hard to steer, they tend to crash and they tend to tear up the roads. And so people realize in the early 1800s that the way around all of this is to put these steam vehicles on rails and you have to worry about the steering and you don't have to worry about the steering and you get the railway, the railway boom and it also shows that transport can be very fast and so people get very excited about high speed transport and then at around the same time in the early 1800s you get the invention of the bicycle and that just gets better and better throughout the 1800s and by the 1880s you've got these essentially modern looking bicycles. And both of those technologies, you know, are what make people think in the 1890s, could we have a vehicle that's, you know, that allows us to use as personal as a car, sorry, it's personal as a bicycle, but is as fast as a train. And that, of course, is the promise that the automobile holds out, that you can have the best of all of these worlds. And so, you know, but actually if you look at the first automobiles, they're actually built using the main market has bicycle wheels and bicycle brakes. So it turns out that cars are more connected to bicycles than they are to trains funnily enough. But yes, the the urban development and the sort of sprawl is more driven, I think, by street cars and, you know, and cars and suburbanization and so on. The shape of cities is more determined by those other modes of transport rather than railroads themselves. Mark Mavrutis asks, which cities around the world do you think will successfully get the leap first? Which, oh, to this sort of future of transport. Well, I think the places to go and see it are, Helsinki is probably the best place at the moment. So Helsinki has this city pass system and you can use it on all the public transport. You can use it for bikes, you can use it for, you know, for scooters. You can use it on the ferry system. So they have really integrated all of it into one system because they're trying to say to people, look, you really don't need to own a car. And if you look at the center of Helsinki, a lot of it's pedestrianized and you can drive there with a car but you won't find anywhere to park and everyone will give you very funny looks. But it's very nice, you know, it's a very nice environment walking around there and they had zero road deaths in Helsinki in 2019. The same is true in the city of Oslo where they've also done many of the same things. But what I think is particularly cool about these systems, the Helsinki system as well, there's a student pass and then there's this kind of, you know, young family pass which gives you access to a car share or a car on the weekends if you want to do road trips with your kids and go out to the country and that sort of thing. So I think if you want to see the future, you know, this idea that the future's already here, it's unevenly distributed, then probably Helsinki would be a good place to go and look right now for what this future might look like. I was wondering, you know, transportation shapes, modes of transportation shapes the shape of cities. I mean, the suburbs, my understanding is the suburbs were kind of invented and the ability to live a long way from where they were working was, you know, no longer within walking distance. Do you think that this will cause that cities will, it will, there are ways that this will change the design of cities? I mean, we saw that in San Francisco after the 89 quake when taking down the freeway reconnected the waterfront with downtown. So it turns out that there's quite a long history of this. It's something called Marquetti's Law that the size of cities is limited by essentially how quickly you can travel and the diameter of the city is basically equal to how long it would take to, how far you can go in an hour. So, and this is Italian scientist and he plotted the size of cities over time and what he found was when people could only move around by walking you get this sort of limit on the size of cities because people at the edge of the city are prepared to spend half an hour walking to the middle to spend any longer than that. And as soon as you start to have things like horse buses and street cars then suddenly you could go a lot further in your half an hour so you can make the city bigger. And if you look at the history in the US the history of urban development is driven by street car, well, what would often happen is that property developers would build a new development on the outskirts of a town and then they would run a street car line to it and the street car line would get you in an area in less than half an hour. And so you can suddenly make the city a lot bigger and every time you double the speed of urban transport you can make the city four times bigger. And so this is what we saw that first it was horse buses which are basically carriages that can seat lots of people pulled along by horses then they put them on rails which allowed them to travel about twice as fast because there's less friction and so that increased the size of cities again and then of course you've got the electrified street cars starting in the 1880s and that led to expansion of a lot of American cities because suddenly you could build suburbs that were further out but you could still get to the downtown area within half an hour. Now the thing is that this model which suggests that you have suburbs around the outside where people live and then you have a downtown area where they work isn't actually what American cities look like anymore. Most people who commute in American cities commute from one suburb to another. It's not commuting from the outside to the center. So patterns I think have got more complicated and then of course the pandemic has really changed the logic of this living in the suburbs and not having to commute means that living in the suburbs is more attractive and so we may see and we're seeing this already economic activity in cities is spreading out and coffee shops in downtown areas are closing but there are more coffee shops opening in sort of the edges of cities and in suburban areas of cities. So if you go to the center of some cities now there will be fewer sandwich shops because there's fewer people going into offices but they are staying at home and they want to go out and get a sandwich at lunchtime and so we're seeing the coffee chains and the sandwich chains are changing the distribution of where they put things and that reflects the distribution change about where people live. Now how much of this is permanent it's very very hard to say but these patterns have changed all the time and I think the great thing about cities is they're these incredibly resilient machines and they reinvent themselves and we'll find new uses for that downtown for offices. We can use it for housing we can use it for we can have parks, we can get rid of things we don't need like parking lots and so on and so on. So cities are incredibly resilient and people have called the death of the city many times but they've always been wrong. I don't really see any other questions unless somebody has one they would like to type into the any additional questions they want to type into the chat. Don't you want to know what the other two cheap hot dates are? Yes. Definitely. At the time the number one cheap hot date if you had a car this was always is that you can't do it today because they've changed the direction of one way streets and that kind of thing is you could go you could drive up to the top of Lombard Street which is that crooked street and then you could go straight along that street and we dried up to the top of Coyt Tower and so you could park in the parking lot and take the view and then make your move I guess would be the hot part of the cheap date so that was pretty cheap but that took up a good hour you weren't spending any money that's a good thing and then the other cheap hot date was to take your date to the ballgame the Giants game at Candlestick Park because you know there were like direct buses there and that didn't cost like 35 cents or something like that and when nonstop it was great when she got out of the main part of the city lots of buses going and the Bleacher cheap were the cheapest you know so they had all this thing well we were like this is really you know this is really insulting and then we figured out suddenly all of us were getting invited to go to the ballgame so then we figured it out at the time you know you had the real newspaper and in fact the sports section the sporting green which was entirely green right out of the middle of the and what we would do for the few days before the date we would read the sporting green about the baseball team and who was coming and then you would wait until like the fourth inning and somebody would get up to that and then they'd like run to first base and go isn't that amazing you would think with that injury he had last year that he wouldn't be able to do that we never went out with those guys again but we got them we got them on you know how to make your cheap date not worthwhile well I'm so glad to hear that Mechanics Institute was one of the three cheap hot date places and I hope that we can once again live up to that to that wonderful credit to all the undergraduates at USF as we get back into the building also I want to thank Dr. Moira Gunn for all of her wonderful hosting today and also to Tom Standage for his wonderful new book here is the book just in case you haven't seen the cover here we are and you can purchase at our local bookstore alexanderbook.com