Felix But so let's start Kara with your column which is a year old now. Yeah, where you pledged to give up your car, and you are Kara Swisher so you never do anything for more than a year. So what has changed since then?

Kara I still don't have a car. I don't have any car. It's been an interesting challenge during COVID-19 because it actually makes my life a lot easier. You don't go anywhere. There's nowhere to drive to really, and I don't really, you know, go to the store...which I think the biggest use I had of cars was going to the store and getting things essentially and putting him in the back of the car and driving home. So you know, it's really kind of fascinating because all the trends that I've been talking about are really being accelerated by COVID-19--the the delivery issues, the strength of Amazon, the ability not to necessarily have so much stuff. I'm not one who needs to hoard toilet paper. I feel like there's probably an end in sight for our toilet paper drought. And so I found it's worked out really well. But one thing is, you know, again, I use public transportation all the time. I'm not using public transportation right now because a lot of people aren't. But I was using it quite heavily. And I was using scooters, the Citi bikes, some of the electric bikes.

<img src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5bac680293a6320da2f1c7b4/1588564806216-J5K3FVM1K8J9FSXWIO6E/Screen+Shot+2020-05-03+at+8.59.24+PM.png" alt="Screen Shot 2020-05-03 at 8.59.24 PM.png" />

<img src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5bac680293a6320da2f1c7b4/1588564813039-22Z71142WDDJZ84USKJM/tern.jpg" alt="ternbicycles.com" />

ternbicycles.com

My next column on this--I'm going to do an update after a year--will be on electric bikes, which I think are really something that is going to take a big boom here. I'm going to be testing out a couple. Tern is one I'll be testing--I think they're really interesting. And I suspect especially the adding of baby child's stuff and cargo stuff on it will be...I'll be interested to see how I do with that.

Felix So your baby is how old now?

Kara I have two teenagers. My teenager has a car. I don't want to force my things on him. But he doesn't use it that often. And I have a 17 year old, a 14 year old and a six month old.

Felix And you're cool with taking the six-month-old on ebikes.

Kara I will be...yeah, I think not yet. Not quite yet. I walk with with her where she goes. I mean, we have a stroller we have one. It's interesting. I got a Doona stroller, which actually becomes a car seat. So instead of having all these different items that you need for a kid, if we get in a car like an Uber, which we haven't been doing, or a cab in New York, you can make the Doona...it collapses and then it's slightly heavier and goes into a car really easily. So that's been great that a lot of new technologies around car seats have worked out really well.

Felix Because you're not...giving up on driving...and cars...

Kara I said that yes, I was talking about the idea of car ownership. I don't ride a lot of cars though I ride in fewer cars for sure. You know if you have a car, you use it I guess. And so I don't take cars very often. If I have another choice, I tend to walk--I walk a lot. You know, I live in cities, so that makes it easier. If I lived in the suburbs or other places. I when I wrote those original columns, I got sort of 103,000 emails from people in rural areas talking about their trucks, their pickup trucks, and I don't care. They can have their pickup trucks if they want to go to COVID-IOT, you know, get togethers, that's fine. But that's not what I was talking about.

And eventually I do think those will all be autonomous those trucks and things like that eventually, but I live in a city so I can walk everywhere I can walk where I want to go and then you find that you don't need especially when combined with delivery. You really don't need that much of an ability to walk that far. I look like an old lady...I've got a cart that I carry--I have two carts now. So I do groceries with carts. So I don't use a car very often but if I need one I do use one. If you're visiting friends who live a little further away, the walk is long, and if you can't use public transportation, that's a problem. But I tend to use public transit whenever I can. And right now I'm just not doing it because everybody's not doing it.

Felix So you wrote this column before this newfound love affair, or may or may not be a love affair we'll find out, with ebikes. So ebikes wasn't the impetus like what changed between say, five years ago, and last year that soured you on car ownership?

Kara It wasn't "sours" so much as... Years ago, I wrote this in the column... Everyone had landline phones and phones at the office desks. Everybody had those ridiculously complex phones that no one ever understood. I forget what they were called--centrex or whatever--they had some ridiculous name. You only used them to call out essentially. And so I wrote a piece many years ago saying you're going to have mobile phones. Like I had been using a suitcase phone, and then the slightly larger phones, the smaller phone, but still large, sort of the Gordon Gekko style phone and then I got a smaller phone.

And so I wrote a piece for the journal so long ago, right way long time ago, saying when I got there in 1997 98, something like that, saying, you're not going to have these phones in the home, you're going to have this mobile device and it's going to get ever smaller, and you're going to carry it around in your pocket. It's going to be a computer. So I think it was this idea. So I like to try to write about directional stuff. And I think the idea of owning a car will be over eventually, just like a lot of things that you don't own anymore is over.

And that includes things like insurance and all and so that journey you know--I still ride in cars--so I have liability insurance. It just costs a couple hundred dollars versus thousands of dollars for car insurance. And so I think directionally car ownership is not going to exist that you will summon autonomous cars, and you will not have a car, you will do rentals or short term things or use Ubers or things like that.

So it seems to me that in terms of the directional forecast, the big thing that hasn't happened so far is autonomous vehicles. The thing which is beginning to happen is bike shares and scooters...

Yeah, alternative mobility. Urban mobility is large.

Felix The big thing that is in the past that has happened and which has made giving up personal cars possible now in the way that it was just not possible a few years ago is Uber.

Kara Yeah, Uber and Lyft and other, you know, wherever you live--Ola or Didi or whatever--yeah, that's certainly been a boon. And in other countries, they offer more transportation alternatives. Like it's not just cars there, it's all kinds of things and here we just have essentially scooters, bikes and cars with Uber and I forget what Lyft has, but yeah.

Felix Lyft has Citi bike in New York.

Kara Yes, Lyft has Citi Bike yeah. Citi Bike is great, and I'm a massive, massive Citi Bike user and fan. It's transformed the way I get around the city--not that I ever did drive around the city, but it's definitely increased the amount I use public transport. I guess my question is like, you're not just talking about your own sort of evolution, you're making a decision about how the world is going to change.

Felix Yes, exactly. And, it's not just in connection, it's not just looking at how the world has changed because people still do own cars, but, on its own, Uber hasn't sufficed to decrease personal car ownership that much. Do you think that Uber, on its own, being around for a long time will cause people to give up on personal car ownership and that people will stop buying cars, or do you think we need more than that?

Kara No, I think we obviously need more than that. But the idea is...I think it starts off in sort of concentric circles. You start up in urban areas where car ownership is just really expensive and there's too many cars. It's like so obvious from a climate change point of view, from a commuting point of view, from a just a general rage point of view. And so you start in these these major metropolitan areas which are going to get bigger and bigger over time. They just are. Every demographic. Although, there are stories of people moving back to Pittsburgh or whatever...

These cities are where things are going to happen. And so there has to be a real thought about how these cities should be configured. And so new versions of urban mobility have to be thought about when you're planning any city or the future of a city. And so that's why you're seeing more bike lanes. That's why you're seeing more of all kinds of alternative urban mobility if you want to talk about it in the large basket...including vertical lift and takeoff vehicles--which they're also developing--we'll see where they go.

But it's there--the idea is there, and people scoff at it now, but I think you'll be using them in 20 years. And these are these things that lift off from the tops of buildings and everything. So I'm talking...first it starts in the city, and then it moves to the suburb, and then it moves broader. To me, autonomous is the direction eventually. But I don't mean to say there's not going to be car rentals. I know people have tried this, and some of them have failed...that doesn't mean they're a failure, it means that it's not ready yet.

Felix I do think there's going to be a difference in the suburbs and that you're going to find much more ebike ownership.

Kara Yes. They get stolen easily, that's one of the things I'm talking about in the column. Everyone I talked to that has one has had one stolen from them.

Felix But one of the things you've been mentioning is more bike lanes a lot of public intervention...So the big headline today, I don't know if you saw it was from Milan and they're like, "We have shut down the land. It has done wonders for air pollution." It's a really polluted city. It's done wonders with traffic congestion there in the heart of Lombardi, which is, which is the heart of the COVID outbreak in Italy. And they've said, "Okay, we are going to reopen but we're not going to reopen the way we were before. We're going to put in a lot more bike lanes. We're going to widen the pedestrian sidewalk. We're going to give people a lot more scope to be doing social distancing on the sidewalk. We're going to really minimize number of cars that we try and have when we reopen and the new Milan is not going to look like the old Milan."

COVID is an opportunity to reset urban design. My question for you is, how much do we need municipal governments to make this happen? And, how much is it going to happen--even with someone like Bill Deblasio, who doesn't seem to care about these things at all?

Kara Well, he doesn't not care, I did a good podcast with him talking about this in detail. There's some people that are more pro this than he is--he's more focused on "elderly need cars" and everything like that, which of course wasn't really answering the question. I think it has to have both federal and local-- mostly local intervention--city-to-city and then people can use best practices. You know, the idea... mayors do cooperate, governors do cooperate as it turns out... There's sort of best practices depending on the city. I mean, there's different challenges in every city, whether it's Los Angeles or San Francisco, totally different challenges--hills, the distance that happens in Los Angeles, obviously... there's tons and tons of stuff experimenting there, by the way more than a lot of places... so, it'll depend on local leadership, I think to figure it out. When the scooters first got here--I wrote a column last year about the scooters attacking Paris when I happen to be in Paris--they sorted it out, you know what I mean? Like, that's the thing. And so it has to be the mayor's... working with other mayors figuring out what the best way to do this is. But I think every municipality is going to have to do their own thing in this environment... there's sort of a commonality of mass transit across the world, but there's also individual interventions, and it depends on what's good for the city.

Felix We have a question in the q&a here asking: "If you just look at the cities around the world, do any of them jump out at you it's doing a really good job at a municipal level of enabling people to not own a car or need a car?"

Kara Amsterdam is the first one you go to, they sort of went "all bike" a million years ago, but they've been doing a lot more than that. I think, "there's a city that's physically difficult to have a car"--and I was just recently there. I think they don't allow scooters yet, I think they're sort of waiting, because it could be a disaster in Amsterdam.

Felix It was just announced that what they do have a lot of is ebikes. And... you know, the classic Dutch bicycle is very heavy and moves very slowly and that's okay, you don't need it to move fast. Even in that medium, the ebike has taken off amazingly. You go around Germany, especially--like everyone has an ebike. Ebikes do seem to be incredibly transformative and that is a technology that just didn't really exist just a few years ago.

Kara No, it didn't. And they're great. I just started using them. I love them. I have to say, it's not because I'm lazy... but it does create a situation where it's easier to do things and you can... bike yourself. But it also gives you this assist that makes the difference. It's a such a slight assist and such a slight difference, or it can be a very strong assist. I think you know if you get the dual battery--in terms of length of time-- that makes a heavier bike, obviously. ...I think ebikes are really interesting, especially when you start to outfit them--with cargo, with child, with different safety things--it becomes kind of a quasi motorcycle, but not.

And especially when combined with bike lanes, it becomes a relatively safe choice. I don't like riding bikes in any city that doesn't have bike lanes--the mix between cars and bikes still is sort of fatal and deadly for a lot of people. So, in San Francisco they have a lot of bike lanes, and I use scooters and ebikes there quite a bit, when I can find a bike actually--there's not as many as there needs to be. And so, it just depends... a lot of these Europeans lend themselves beautifully to all those solutions. Los Angeles is a different challenge, but San Francisco certainly is an interesting place to try these things. The issue with San Francisco is the power because of the hills. If you ever use a scooter in San Francisco, it's slow go. You do not get up those hills. I mean, the one I live on... I have to stop the scooter and walk up the hill essentially. Or, you can think of New York, I think there's big problems in New York because of the amount of people, and the amount of cars, and the amount of activity and so you have to think really hard about doing things... because people naturally go on sidewalks--scooters especially. You have to really think hard about all of New York--in Brooklyn, it works better than it does in Manhattan. Manhattan with scooters and ebikes is problematic, I think, especially because of all the cars, so the question is are you going to close down streets... or make them smaller for car use and then devote more space to other things.

Felix Ebikes are still pretty expensive and you said that everyone you know who has had one has had one stolen?

Kara Yeah, I was talking to delivery guys. Delivery guys all have them stolen, you know.

Felix And the delivery--at least in Manhattan, they're illegal...

Kara They have them.

Felix but they're sort of the Chinatown ebikes, which are much cheaper than the ones you can buy retail, the ones you see everywhere... This is another question we've gotten in q&a--Have you seen anything like exciting that you think is promising when it comes to best technology and security?

Kara No, I don't. I haven't done enough reporting on it. I think... they're perfect for stealing, they can be picked up... Even though they're somewhat heavy, they're not as heavy as motorists, so it's kind of perfect for stealing. I think there might be some shut down--I need to do reporting on that so I don't know--but I'm assuming there's some motor shutdown things, but those probably can be overridden by a good mechanic and things like that... all I see is giant chains, and I think that's a problem, those can be broken. Putting them in the back of your house, that kind of stuff, that's the solution I have I have a blocked thing like lock and lock and lock. And so, it's still a vulnerable device no matter how you slice it. Same thing with scooters, by the way.

Felix The one great anti-theft device--by far the best anti theft device that I've ever come across, certainly in the New York context--is not owning a bike and just using the shared bikes... the electric bikes are now slowly rolling out around around the world, including in New York. Is that, in and of itself, a reason why we should be incredibly bullish on shared ebikes?

Kara Yeah, I think they're interesting. Of course now everyone's sort of nervous with COVID-19 but eventually that will pass. I do think about that, but you can't get them, that's the issue, there's not enough of them. Right now, I can find it... now I can get a JUMP bike because... nobody's going anywhere so I've noticed I can get one. But yeah, I think it is an easy problem to solve, they're super popular for people especially who don't want to ride scooters... who think that scooters are a little difficult. Then the other issue with Revel--which is this motor scooter one--is the helmet issue... I was watching two people put on Revel helmets last night and I was like, "Oh wow, how do you make that clean in this environment?" I don't know if COVID-19 could be distributed through hair but it's certainly...

Felix Yeah and you're breathing into that thing.

Kara Yeah, I was like, "No thank you for this one." I was trying to think how they deal with that. I carry helmets. I have these collapsible helmets Lime has been manufacturing.

Felix Let me ask you the topical question about about COVID, because I think it's going to be a long time before we go back to feeling comfortable jamming into crowded subways and buses and sharing things. One of the things about car ownership and owning your own personal car is it is your car--you have your bubble around you, no one else is in that bubble and you're not gonna catch any horrible virus or germs from it. That is looking increasingly attractive right now.

Kara I think people are gonna go right back to it. You're gonna be licking telephone poles,

Felix, like you like to do, very soon.

Felix I mean... one of the things I really miss is licking telephone poles.

Kara People will forget it like that. They will be back in those cars--maybe they'll be wearing masks in them--but I do think people will be right back to using these things... I think it'll be slower going, but I think people just tend to forget.

Felix It's gonna be like childbirth, you just put it behind.

Kara Yeah, the hardest thing you ever have is the easiest to forget... not the people who lost loved ones and things like that. I'm talking about just generalized use and behavior. I think... subways work, buses work... there wasn't like an enormous dislike of them. I think what's happening... on a broader term is things that were already happening are accelerated in this environment. And so, delivery--accelerated, going to movie theaters/not going to movie theaters--accelerated. That kind of stuff, that was already happening.

Felix So, COVID you don't see necessarily as an accelerant and it's just gonna be this kind of interregnum and then we just go back to the status quo ante and the trends that we were on before.

Kara I suspect... there's enormous economic damage in that timeframe... I would be nervous if I was a Lyft investor right now, for sure... it's got to consolidate I suspect that you're going to see a consolidation in ride sharing. I don't know how you can't, this is... getting drivers back in the cars... stopping it turned out to be rather quick. Getting started again is going to be a longer term thing, but I still think from a directional point of view... people like these things... I just think the problem that Uber and all the others have is that economically, as you know... the numbers don't add up, at the prices. They do take advantage of people...It has brought into sharp relief people that don't have healthcare, they don't have rights that they need to have and stuff like that. And so that's another issue they're gonna have to deal with going forward is that we have created a permanent underclass, whether it's delivery, or cars, or people who service scooters or whatever, who are like serfs, and we're the lords and we're getting these prices that are just not accurate to what they actually should cost.

Felix Right. And if anything has changed about making car ownership less, or making the lack of car ownership more attractive, up until now, it has overwhelmingly been Uber. And Uber has been problematic because it's created all of these underclass issues, and at the same time, it has burned through how many billions of dollars now? Something like 20. It is economically unsustainable. One of the things about financial crises is they do tend to put a stop to things that are economically unsustainable.

Kara They certainly can.

Felix Doesn't that run the risk of, you know, Lyft was on a big thing, and it bought Citi Bike--which has lost money since inception--because they're like "We're a mobility solution and we like burning through money and that's what we do!" And now suddenly burning through money is less attractive than it used to be.

Kara Well look at Uber, though, it has delivery... if they can move like Amazon... That to me is like figuring out what your AWS is, like, what is their AWS, There are businesses that will emerge from these it's just a question of whether there's the time and money to be able to afford that stream, right? That's what the issue is, you could look at Amazon.

Felix Do you think that... the business model here is fundamentally profitable? Like without self driving cars they can make money.

Kara It could be, well, self-driving cars will make it great. As Travis told me in that famous interview, if we get to get rid of the guy in the front seat, we'd be golden. I think that's what he said in this lovely way that he always seems to articulate things... Yes, I do, I think there is room for this business. The prices have to change, and therefore the growth isn't the same, and therefore the stock isn't the same. It's sort of like looking at a WeWork. It's not a bad idea, it's a great idea, it's just the fundamentals of... we're not aligned in terms of what the actual size of the business really is, and what it really should be worth. And that's an investor problem...

Felix Yeah, I'm not super interested in the Uber or Lyft share price. It's gonna be what its gonna be. So as long as it's positive, that's great. If they keep on losing money, then definitely no, that's not great. I think what you're saying is that the price the service is going to have to go up in order to make the business economical Kara People like the product, that's what I'm interested in.

Felix One of the things I've seen a lot is people literally doing the math on a car ownership, and they're saying, it costs me this much to own and operate a car, it cost me that much to take Uber's when I need to, it is cheaper for me to just Uber when I need to than it is to own a car. If the price goes up, and if the price of gas stays as low as it is right now, that calculus changes and suddenly ownership looks relatively attractive, Kara Except for the convenience factor, the storage factor, if you can park on the streets, that just depends on what your other costs are. Right?...I am so happy I don't have a car. I just don't need a car. I guess I want to escape the city when it outbreaks and all hell breaks loose, but it seems like that's not happening. It's the convenience to me... there's the extra thing of owning something else. I do think ownership of a lot of stuff is not going to be the same... the fact that everyone has to have a car. I just don't think that's in people's minds in the same way that it used to be. In some places it is, in other places it isn't.

Felix Anecdotally, there's actually numbers about the prices of secondhand cars coming down. But by the same token, people are buying those cars. They are moving... in terms of just you New York Times folks... there are no people saying, "I'm buying a car. I am not going to get back on the subway anytime soon. I have kids I need to put them in car seats." Like, I feel like we can get our way around in general. The bigger picture, for me at least, is that if you have rising crisis for car share, if you have less ability for companies like Uber and Lyft to subsidize scooters and bikes, if you have declining gasoline prices, all of those at the margins mitigate against your thesis...

Kara Right now. I think right now absolutely, no one expected this...by the way those gas prices are going to go right back up as people start moving again. This is an unprecedented situation that people aren't actually moving, see, look at those pictures from India around the blue sky, suddenly, you know what I mean? You're like, whoa, that's going to be gray again... people are going to be moving again. And so those prices are gonna go up, that's a temporary thing. I don't think everyone's suddenly going to go "Oh, perhaps we shouldn't move anymore." That is not happening. I do think that there's some interesting stuff if there was a different kind of car or car manufactured in a different way... I've been looking at some of these autonomous cars and they're made of parts that you can just slap together like Legos, which is really interesting, and of stuff that's easily manufactured or disposable... To me the idea is the way we manufacture and make cars is sort of antiquated. If... everybody had cars that were a little less... big as they are and made them more disposable, that would be interesting to me. But I do think that right now, yes, it's better probably to own a car, but at the same time, then I will have the car and I don't want to have the car. I agree. It's it depends on where you are. But I do think the demographic trends around cities are so obvious where most people are gonna live. And I don't mean to say that everybody's not going to have a car. I'm just thinking that as the demographics change, and people move into cities, which could easily change. You could also say people aren't going to live in cities anymore because of COVID, or they're worried about pandemics.

Felix So let's talk about that, because, the three cities that you have been living in--New York, San Francisco, and Washington DC--all of which predate the car, and any city which predates the car is much more likely to be walkable. And the number one way that you get around is walking, the same as me. Most cities actually don't predate the car and the cities that post date the car and not walkable. So Los Angeles is an interesting example...

Kara parts of it are parts of it aren't

Felix ...One of the things that we see living in a capitalist society is that money drives and capitalism drives everything. So what you saw in LA was the enormous profits that the car companies had, helped drive out the rail system in LA. They really encouraged car culture to grow in not just LA but in cities around the country, you know Atlanta or Nashville, or you name it...Phoenix.

Kara actually Nashville is a very walkable city, but go ahead

Felix The question I have for you is: Given the problems that Uber and Lyft and anyone else in this space seems to have with with achieving massive profitability is, "Where is the capitalist incentive to change everything--the car companies were so profitable, they really architected entire cities around the car--where is the money in architecting entire cities around bicycles?"

Kara Well, that's the problem. Obviously, I would say that's not necessarily a financial incentive. It's climate change, eventually... this will be something we have to do and unless we create a series of guards that are better for the environment. And I think we're right in the middle of this pandemic. So I don't want to add a disaster onto it. One of the things I've been talking about is climate change tech and how climate change changes everything. And I do think this is the existential crisis of our of our world. I think, on some level, the idea of public transit needs to be something that isn't just a money pit--that people need to see it as an addition and an economic incentive to create better cities, better work environments, and better living conditions for people. There's not a capitalist sentiment here, it's the societal sentiment that we can no longer tolerate this many cars on the road. It's problematic in other cities across the globe more than ours... I guess Los Angeles would be the prime example of the car city, I'm trying to think of another city in this country because a lot of them have much more robust public transportation systems. It's a question of whether politicians will embrace this idea around infrastructure and the building out of public transportation. I think it does go hand-in-hand with inequality--wealthy people having the ability to afford this and less wealthy people not. And so you're right. There's no particular capitalist incentive, but there is certainly a societal incentive within climate change, and I think a lot of young people do have that.

Felix The magic bullet when it comes to public transportation--and this is much bigger than scooters, much bigger than bikes, much bigger than subways--the thing that can really transform cities is buses. We've seen this in Bogota, we've seen this in a bunch of different places. Bus rapid transit and medium investing in robust bus systems, with dedicated bus lanes, really manages to transform cities on a budget that's achievable--unlike something like a subway system where no one can afford to put them and and it costs $2 billion to add a single stop in Hudson Yards or something like that. Do you foresee a world where Americans, in general, regularly take the bus?

Kara No, we've gotten so used to cars, I don't know. Yes, I suppose, yeah--any behavior can change. Look, we've changed our behavior on mobile phones, we change behaviors all the time, more than you think. I don't think we're as entrenched as you imagine into cars as people think we are. I use buses a lot. I love buses. It's certainly being used by people with less money than others. Anyone who has money gets in an Uber, or has their own car, or whatever they do. I do think there's some really interesting when you go to any other city. There's many other cities in Europe that use them in really interesting ways. What's interesting is in other cities, you see different economic strata using buses. It's not a thing that the poor use. In this country, if you go to any city, a bus is used by people who are much poorer than others, you don't see the mix that you would see. You do see more of a mix on a subway in New York, lots of people use the subway. You can see the economic strata there pretty clearly but I think it's a question of whether you can design buses, light rail, the street cars and things like that in ways that will attract the whole of society to them. I think that's one of the problems around public transit--that who uses it gets the attention. Same thing with schools or anything else.

Felix Cecily Lloyd Jones in the q&a here has a great question asking, "How can the company's--whoever they are in the micromobility or the mobility space--how can they work with the governments because, obviously, so much of this needs to be done at the municipal level?" You need to build out these bus routes, bus lanes, bike lanes, widen sidewalks, do all of the stuff that we're talking about in order to make the car less attractive, there are two different things that needs to happen, one, everything else needs to become more attractive, and number two, the car cannot be the fastest way of getting from A to B because as long as it's the fastest way of getting from A to B, people are going to go, "Oh, I have to jump in the car because I'm in a hurry." So how do you manage to get constructive collaboration and cooperation between mobility companies and and municipal governments and have you seen that anywhere?

Kara Well, no, Uber was trying if you recall, to be the app you pay for public transit with too. There was some schemes around that. There were other bus companies in China where they were mimicking popular public transportation bus routes with private buses. There's a lot of private buses all over the world that mimic popular things. I think the problem is, because they're poor profit, they only do the popular ones and not where everybody needs to go, which is typical. Again, it's sort of anti poor--people tend to not have buses go to places that that aren't going to make as much money. That's the problem when you privatize a lot of these things. It can't be a fully private thing because it has to have more larger social goals, which is everybody. It's sort of like the idea of whether we should have the post office. There's that debate going on because of the billions of dollars it's losing right now.

Felix It's not real billions by the way, it's all pension.

Kara Yeah. But in any case, there's the debate of whether they should privatize the post office. Everybody should have the right to get mail for however much a stamp costs, which is rising in price, but, it still is a pretty good deal to mail a letter. You have to balance bigger societal questions out with privatizing. To me, public-private partnerships are really one of the most interesting things to emerge from this COVID thing--sometimes not really working very well, sometimes working very well. There has to be a better idea of how to do public-private partnerships where the goal is to aid the shareholders--who are the taxpayers--versus just these companies. You get disasters like private prisons--where we look away, but what's happening there is really appalling--but we look away because it's prisons. But we are not going to be able to look away from a badly rolled out public transportation scheme that is also facilitated by private entities. But I don't see how you can do it without private entities involved. Governments are probably pretty incapable of doing this on a big scale these days, especially now with these deficits.

Felix I'm just having a lot of difficulty trying to think of a public-private partnership anywhere in the world that has actually worked in terms of mobility and transportation. The one which springs to mind is Citi Bike. Which is a private company. The interesting thing about Citi Bike is that the New York City Government insisted from day one that it received no public subsidy whatsoever, and that has severely hampered the rollout of Citi Bike, because Citi bank doesn't particularly want to have all of its ads all over Queens and the Bronx where people actually really need these bikes and therefore they don't go out to those areas because it's expensive to do that...the government isn't subsidizing...it if we can't even make this work in New York, where we're spending billions of dollars on the subway and literally zero on the bike network, like, how is it even conceivable that it's gonna work anywhere--these fees?

Kara New York is like the Olympics of difficulty. --Where would be easy? It would be interesting to start in a city that needed better transportation--a smaller city, like a Pittsburgh or something like that--where you can start to do a testing around a lot of these things--autonomous vehicles. That's why they're doing them in these smaller cities, which is interesting. (Felix: That's where Carnegie Mellon is) --right, exactly in that case, but Arizona is another place to do them. Phoenix I think is where they're trying them. Interestingly, there's a lot more autonomous tests being done in the streets of San Francisco than you realize, like actual autonomous testing on routes and things like that. You definitely have to have a sort of proof case--one place where it does work--and then try to iterate the concept around the world. But you're right. Just because it hasn't worked doesn't mean it couldn't work. Governments are gonna have to be more rather than funders of everything, monitors of everything. Versus that.

Felix What's your prognostication for the effect of autonomous vehicles on traffic? Does it cause more traffic or less traffic?

Kara I think right now it causes more--I think that's the idea. Especially if they're not shared, eventually, when they're autonomous, what becomes an interesting question is if they won't get into as many accidents. I think the problem we're going to have is when they're sharing the roads with humans. But that happened when we had carriages and cars, there was that whole series of constant accidents and different things. So I suspect once we go almost fully autonomous, you're gonna see a lot of those problems. But until then, there's definitely going to be issues around accidents and the intersection of humans with autonomous vehicles,

Felix On a sort of normative level, if what we're trying to encourage is people spending less time in cars and different forms of last mile mobility and all of that kind of stuff...In your whole thesis of private car ownership declining, what's the implication of that for traffic? Is traffic on some level like a good thing that makes it less attractive to drive and therefore drives us? Is it bad to have traffic?

Kara It's energy sucking--there's nothing good about traffic. I think efficient movement of vehicles would be better for society. I think that it's interesting to think about all the other things though. You have the gas stations that people use, you have parking garages, think about all the parking garages, like in a city like San Francisco, we have so many parking garages and not enough homes. Like, that's interesting--what could you do with it? What could you do if everyone didn't have to park a car? If cars go in and out as fleets and go to a site that's slightly further out in the parking lot and they just sit there until they're needed? You know, you can think of lots of creative ways to do this, but there's also peripheral effects around traffic. I don't think you can make an argument for traffic.

Felix I'm not trying to make an argument for traffic. But, one of the interesting things I've seen is London with the congestion pricing in London.

Kara What happened I don't even know what's happened there?

Felix Basically everyone stopped driving private cars into central London into the congestion zone. And, you know, the traffic went up.

Kara Because there were all these other cars. Yeah.

Felix Because you have like a massive uptick in Ubers, you have a lot more buses--which is good, but they can't go very fast because there's Ubers in the way--and importantly, you have a massive uptick in everyone ordering Amazon deliveries to their offices and homes and everything. And so, there's all of these price insensitive vehicles that have to be there because that's their job, and you can cut private car driving down to zero and still have a huge amount of traffic.

Kara Yes, that's absolutely true. I think on the delivery stuff it's fewer cars because everyone's going out to get their ham sandwich or whatever. If one person delivers ham sandwiches to all that's very different.

Felix One thing that good cities do--and you do this in Italy quite a lot--you have hours that you can have commercial deliveries. During rush hour it's not allowed, somehow that seems to be un-American.

Kara I wish we could have redone the cities again and have tunnels underneath with all the delivery.

Felix Well they did that in Boston, how did that work?

Kara Well that's different, they don't deliver below. Like you would actually have tunnels underneath everything, like secret tunnels where autonomous trucks that they just wheel like a train, that comes in and they deliver things, and things go up. That's never going to happen.

Felix Tokyo. I feel like Tokyo supposes.

Kara Yeah, I guess that would be pretty cool. If you could restart a city, you'd have a network of tunnels underneath the cities that made deliveries. Trucks are the bane of people's lives in New York. Trucks pull over and it depends on the mayor who's Mayor at the time, whether they're going to be worse or better.

Felix Luke, should we move on to Q's and A's because I know there's a bunch of people wanting to ask questions? Luke Yeah, you did a really great job so far weaving them into the Q&A. If there's anything jumping out at you..

Felix This is a good one: "Do you think all of the shared scooter companies will go out of business?"

Kara Not all of them, no, because people like them--here's the thing: it's a great product, right? I love scooters. I think people who use them love them. They find them super convenient. They like them. And there's more than one kind of scooter, there's some sit-down ones...I don't know if you've seen them, Los Angeles had a whole bunch of sit-down ones. Again, it's the wrong price or if there's enough money to fund it. At some point, there will be one that people like to use. I suspect it's gotta be affiliated with like an Uber or Lyft so it's all integrated. I tend to use more Uber ones because it's in my app, so that I don't have 50 different apps. I don't think they're a bad idea. I think the money is going to run out for them, and they're going to be right-sized: two or more.

Felix This is a question for the woman who quite publicly toyed with the idea of running for mayor of San Francisco: "What would it take for city governments to more quickly reallocate street space to make it safer for people on scooters and bikes and ebikes? Even in a city like San Francisco, this has been a painfully slow process."

Kara It's not been that slow, people are so impatient. It's as city--come on, like give me a break. The amount of stuff they put up there, no one ever is happy. There's an enormous amount of space devoted to bikes now compared to just a year ago and the year before that. Anyone who uses the streets can see that it's certainly not enough and there's certainly still too many cars. It's slower in New York for sure. I think it's because Mayor de Blasio is not as for it, but there's certainly been much more aggressive bike lanes throughout that city. There's been more and more bike lanes everywhere you go. They're not fast enough, certainly, but they've been moving in a pace that has been much faster than previously. I don't know what to say, city governments are city governments and they have all kinds of liability issues, they've got building issues, they've got funding issues. I'm not going to like kick them in the teeth for not going fast enough on this. I think people do care about it. I do. That's why I'd be a terrible mayor. I'd be like give me a f'ing break. --Every time someone complains.

Felix How's London Breed doing? Good. Interesting. She's gotten a lot of good press around the COVID thing of course because of San Francisco now around the homeless issues. I just did a podcast with her about it and she answered it pretty clearly. It's very hard to do homeless people from a social distance, especially ones with drug and mental illness problems. So, essentially, she said, "Give me a f'ing break. We're doing a better job than everyone else." But, you know, there's some controversy around that. In general, she seems to be on top of a lot of things.

Horace Yeah, great, guys. Thanks for coming on. I love the conversation. I just wanted to touch on Kara's very, very interesting point about the the old landline phones and how we're moving beyond thinking about transportation as sort of these old-fashioned vehicles. So we use this metaphor: we call it the smartphone on wheels.

I guess, she's envisioning already you know, the phone on wheels because that's how we're moving to mobile phone on wheels. And so, the thing that excites me is that we went to a phone which is filled with software as opposed to just being a little bit more mobile--powered by a battery and so on. So do you think this is really becoming a software game? Because that's really exciting if these machines that move us around get injected with software and network effects and platforms and communications and all these other things. That's been the dream of the car guys for years and years, but they can't move fast enough because these machines take forever to get cycled in and out of use. Do you think that's going to be exciting?

Kara Cars are already full of software. I think people don't realize how much technology is embedded in cars these days on diagnostics on how they move and everything else. Whenever you meet a car company executive, they actually tell the exact same joke every time, they go, "We're the original mobile device haha." And then you move past that terrible joke. I think these cars will naturally become software vehicles.

To me more interesting is the manufacture of them. One of these car companies that I just did a podcast with, I'm totally blanking, it's the one that's making the sort of carriages. They have stuff where you just pull off a fender and plug on another fender. They just get parts. It's really Lego, in some ways, and so I think that is how we build and release cars and change them and then they can pull out one part that has a problem--including the software--and then just put another one in its place. And so that, to me, that's much more interesting than anything else. But you're going to see an increasing level of technology inside these cars--both mechanical and software engineering.

Felix I need to jump in here, because there's a really good question from Twitter. Universal basic mobility is this thing that I've been hearing a little bit about in recent months. You're seeing it I think a little bit in Helsinki, there's like one or two places where it's beginning to happen. You were talking about how there's this income inequality gap in terms of the the range of transportation options that people have. It changes radically depending on how much money they have. Is there a way of implementing a scheme where everyone basically has access to the same set of options? Like just like giving everyone basically free public transport however they like it?

Kara Well, that would be nice. But we're not very nice to poor people, are we, in our society. I mean, that would be great.

Felix One of my favorite exam proposals for the New York subway came from Charlie Komanoff who's been thinking about this for decades. He thinks that the New York subway should be free in off peak periods. All of the crowding happens in relatively short time windows. If you made it free in other time windows, that would encourage people to move their use of subway to off peak periods, and it wouldn't actually lose you much money, because most people traveling at peak times. And I think there's a lot of interesting, innovative solutions here including congestion pricing, which is I still think on the menu for New York. Who knows whether everything has changed, but they wanted to raise a billion dollars a year, which is way more than London raises.

Kara I think congestion pricing is a great idea. I think it's just an easy, low-hanging fruit for governments to start to make money and say, "We don't want cars in here and those who want to do businesses have to figure it into their business plan." I think it's one of the better ideas.

Felix I think it's a great idea. I'm highly skeptical that New York is going to make it to a billion dollars. We will see on that one if it ever happens. All right, finally here's a good one to end with: "Do you think Marc Andreessen's "It's Time to Build" piece is about bike lanes?"

Kara I still don't know what that piece was about, Felix, have you figured it out? Like, the guy said software is eating the world except now we should build things? That would be nice, but I don't Marc Andreessen's been on a bike in a long time, so, I don't know. He has a litter that carries him around.

Felix It's true. I did offer to take him on the 1 train once and he looked at me like I had three heads,

Kara He doesn't leave the 100 square feet around his house, I think. He gets carried places. I don't know if we should get our infrastructure cues from Marc Andreessen. That's my feeling.

Felix Who are the capitalists who are most interesting?

Kara Oh, in the space? People who I would like to hear their ideas on? I listen to Mark Cuban, I listen to Warren Buffett, I listen to a lot of people like, around these ideas. Bloomberg, obviously, there's been a big discussion about how cities are going to be so I'd probably want to hear from him. These are just right now. But there's all kinds of really interesting people in the space. It really is about the design of cities. Again, I know there's people in rural areas, I know there's people in suburban areas, but cities is where this is going to start to be innovated on. It has to be because of the amount of people crushed together in one space. And so the idea of moving people in and out of cities is going to be a critical question for our age and then when you sort of put climate change on top of that it's a necessity it's an absolute necessity. I wasn't doing this as a stunt but I'm not doing it for the climate. I'm glad, I want to do climate change, I'm just getting ready for inevitably what's going to happen. I'm just gonna wait until everybody catches up to the idea, so that's my plan.

Felix You're just becoming a New Yorker. New York is the only city in America where the majority of...

Kara Yes, absolutely. I was born in that area but I've lived a lot of places

Felix Well, we'll have you back and some point.

Kara Can I just say something? It's a car-related thing whenever people talk about this income inequality issue, including with transportation, I always tell really rich people who talk to like complain about it you know, you're either going to do something about this or you're going to armor-plate your Tesla, so pick. Luke Hey guys, thank you so much for being here. This was a great conversation,

Kara. Appreciate your time. Felix, appreciate your time.

Felix asked me to remind you all to check out "Succession" on AMC with Paul Giamatti...Seriously, everyone stay safe out there. Have a great day, and I'll talk to you more soon. Thanks for great call. Bye. Thanks.

Kara Bye! Felix Thanks guys.

This is the transcript for a Triple M member webinar, occurring biweekly. You can register and see other benefits of membership at: micromobility.io/triple-m

Originally aired April 21st, 2020.