Welcome to imagination in action, where we have conversations with compelling people driving the action that will power our futures. These are successful Imaginators you want to know?
Tonight's show is on the future of transportation. And we have two distinguished professors who are doing very interesting research on the subject, both at MIT, and I'm excited to hear what they what they're researching. I know, Cathy's thinking about how cities will be different when they're everyone has an autonomous vehicle and how we should be planning for that. And some of the unintended consequences. And I know that Jin Ha has a lot of perspective. He's been in different cities, kind of researching, studying, observing, and has made some observations about what the ideal is, and I am very excited for him to share his his research. Kathy, let's start with you. This is imagination action. This is where we have people share how they're using their imagination, and what action is coming from it. And we call our honored speakers Imaginator. So, Kathy, and jinhai, you are imagining? So let's start with you, Kathy, what is involved with your research these days?
Well, first of all, thanks a lot for the invitation. It's definitely really fun to be in the this is where a lot of cool kids are right. So yeah, what my research is about today is basically using AI to try to help us understand how to build future cities, and the extent to which we can plan more proactively for future cities.
Great, thank you for that introduction. Jin, ha, can you share a little bit about your research? And what what you're so excited about when it comes to transportation?
Sure, yeah. No, Can I try some new idea that I haven't done?
We welcome new ideas. That's great. And this is being recorded. So people hear at first live, and then they can hear it over and over again, in future recording. So yes, bring it on.
So the first idea is, if you look at Boston, right, MBTA have about a saw the bus stops. Right? So the question is, are those space effective being utilized? Right? So why do we think of is what if the MBTA and the Boston Public Library to collaborate, and let's transform each of the eSATA bus dots into libraries, right, so that when people walk on the street, they see books everywhere, right? Change the way we access knowledge and access new information, right? Instead of a way when you want to write a book, read a book, you go to the library, the book, the library comes to you. Right? So each of the seven bus stops, becomes the alternate of this access to information, right? Hope the bus stops can also become the community hub that people gather, people talk to each other. And while we are you're waiting for the bus, instead of getting bored, you can read a book, right? So in that way, you can be beneficial for both of the public ridership, attracting more people to use the bus, but also significantly enlarge the access to library and to the information.
That's a great idea. Thank you for sharing it here. Can you also share like two or three other big ideas that you've been writing about or trying to spread?
Very Yeah. The second one is about the notion of can we decentralize? The whole shared mobility system, right. So for now, the shared mobility system need a center, right? Either Uber has to be in the center, or Lyft or DD in China, there's one single organization, moderate and matching between drivers and the passengers. Right. So we are working on the idea of can we decentralize it sort of thing, right? Instead of any one particular company run it can use the blockchain technology to distribute distribute the whole notion, right? So I think the technology is there, right? Can we imagine something like Wikipedia for shared mobility, right, where we use its blockchain to have this collective governance structure without one single entity monopolize to the surface?
Well, okay, so that those are two great ideas. Give us one more, and then we're going to turn to Kathy And then I want to turn to Alison and Esther to kind of react. Give us another big idea.
Okay. All right. The third line is what I call this converging industries, right? If you look at, and they give me three examples. So the first one is a car insurance industry, which is under a huge pressure to transform itself, right? The second one is the road user fee industry that's managed to land that congestion charging the toll road. And the third line is the gasoline tax, which also under pressure with the electrification, which we hope to, we would like to see, but without the guests being the tax base will be shrinking. So how do we find out the entire transparent system? So the the three I just named insurance, roll user fee and gas tax has been independent, wrong by different organizations, right. But my observation is, all three industry need to try for you 10 years or 15 years, they may have to redefine themselves. My argument that is all three industry actually share the similar requirement on data on the telecommunication infrastructure, there's a potential for the three, industry to converge or share the same the platform, that may be a lot of new business business models that emerge with either bilateral bilateral communication or collaboration or bilateral collaboration, we may imagine entirely different industry and business models that bring all the three industry together.
Wow. So people, you're getting a sense, Jin has like a an iceberg. There's a lot under the surface, a lot of ideas. Kathy, let's let's go back to you. I know, you showed me some animations of what if the super majority of cars, were self driving, you know what the implications are for that? Can you share some of your big ideas that you're thinking about transportation and AI?
Yeah. So what I found surprising when I started working in this space is that almost all research either studies problems that look at how one car one self driving, cars should move around, as in, you don't want this one car to over run, to run into a child or to over run a stop sign. Or there's research that assumes that all cars are already automated. And we basically found that the space in between was basically missing, just a fraction of vehicles being automated. And it is anticipated that that will be you know, 3040 50 years, even even longer for many parts of the world. And so it was an opportunity that we identified about five years ago, where there was just very little research. And so we started asking some very, very basic questions. Part of the motivation for this was a report that came out in 2016, by the national labs that basically did these back of the envelope calculations that indicated that when we did have all vehicles automated, we actually just had a huge amount of uncertainty as to whether it would improve or worsen our transportation systems in terms of energy consumption. And since then, I think there are similar arguments for for pollution and safety, and so on and so forth. So we started by asking, like, just like, from my perspective, very simple questions like, Okay, well, in principle, if we did have 100% cars, then we should have no more traffic congestion, right? So then what fraction of cars would also enable that outcome, like if we had 99% cars automated will be still we eliminate traffic congestion. And so we were really surprised what we found by using some reinforcement learning some AI techniques, that it's actually a rather small fraction of cars that are needed to mitigate congestion something on the order of 5%. And so since then, I mean, that's that's sort of a, the seed of an insight that has led to a ton of work there now, I don't know, maybe 50 to 100 researchers that are pushing on this idea at various universities, MIT and beyond, that are trying to make this a reality.
Kathy, thank you for sharing that. Before I turned to Alison and Esther, is there another idea out there maybe orthogonal to this one or building off of the one you just shared, that you'd like to put out there?
Yeah, there are several that I'm really excited about. And it's what my group is pushing on now. One has to do with scale. So when we did this congestion mitigation, where we actually were studying really small networks because that was enough to reproduce a traffic, the traffic congestion phenomenon. And to demonstrate this congestion mitigation outcome, but we also want to study the impact of autonomous vehicles on full scale cities. And the computational methods, the reinforcement learning methods, AI methods just aren't there. So we've been looking into various ways that we can incorporate machine learning into classical optimization techniques to scale up some of the analysis for these large, large, large scale systems. And we've been successful recently. So we had a recent paper that just came out last week, that actually allowed us to scale what are called solvers for vehicle routing problems. These are very well two solvers that have been developed over decades, and we've showed that a little bit of clever use of machine learning is able to accelerate these methods by 10 to 100 times. So I'm really excited about that work and and all the directions that, that that unlocks.
So when people think of a drone, they think of it in isolation. But when you think of bats, you think of like, a whole number of bats kind of swarming out of a cave at once. I think what you're saying is that we should think of these vehicles, not as individuals, but in networks in mesh networks, and that there are some opportunities there to understand, you know, how you can harness the network? Would that be correct?
Yeah, I think that's a really good observation. And something that that points out, that is a little bit, maybe not, what one might think of at first glance is that there are a lot of complex dynamics under the hood that occur that arise when multiple agents interact with one another. And this is actually why these problems are still open research questions. We have an OK understanding of how one car can move around and its surroundings. But once we deal with multi car interactions, especially when interacting with humans, these systems become so complex that we still need a lot of algorithmic advances.
I'm about to call on Esther. But before I do, Jin, Ha, what do you make of Cathy's research? And Kathy, what do you make of Jen has research? Sometimes academics are in competition and are threatened by one another?
I very much enjoy Cassius research. I like it. I just want to like comment on the first idea. Casey mentioned, to me the urban temptation there to kind of a contracting School of Fox keep right? The first school says that let's treat CTE as a machine. Right? Let's use the control theory, try to sense gather data and control the entire system. Right? The other thought says, no, no, cities are messy, right? People are intuitive. We want to do things spontaneously, right? For a long time, I thought the two schools of thought are kind of a contract to each other the competitive thoughts, right. But for now, I take a view that they actually complimentary to each other, in the sense that in order for the pedestrians, cyclists are the one who enjoy the city in a spontaneous way to really enjoy the city have the freedom, you need to exert control for other side of the tractor system. So for example, the autonomous vehicles, private cars, for more these can be controlled and effectively improve the efficiency of a system, the more that pedestrians basically have really enjoyed the messiness and the the intuition and the spontaneity.
Great, Kathy, I don't know if you heard Jim has suggestions, one was putting books in 1000 locations in Boston, and maybe do it similarly in other cities. And then a second and third idea, any reactions to those ideas?
Yeah, actually, I love that idea. Jake. actually reminds me, so I run quite a bit. And around Cambridge, I'm sure many other places, there are a lot of these little libraries, these free libraries that folks construct and just put outside their houses. So these aren't necessarily at public transit stations. But I find myself stopping during my runs to just check out the books and from time to time, and it's, it's really nice to just see what everyone else is looking at. And it would be wonderful if there were other people there as well. But these are not in mark locations. It would be wonderful if these rapid stops.
Can you make me think of newspapers years ago, there was something called classifieds that were just identified as part of the newspaper. But then Google and you know, other internet companies kind of took took that out, took that over and now newspapers don't have classifieds as much if ever, and they don't depend on it for for readership. So you know, why not combine it's kind of like Reese's peanut butter and chocolate, combining transportation with these libraries and these little book stations that you just refer to it's it's a very intimate one on one experience, you know, they're not others, they're waiting in line to look at the books. Kathy, when when you said you, you go to them by combining them at the stations, where there's more density, there could be more interactivity. And suddenly you can think of transportation as also a way to connect with people around books. So that that's interesting. Let's turn to Esther, you know, Esther, you you've been a serial entrepreneur, you've started a lot of companies. I think you started a lot of transportation companies find, you know, floating in space type things. What are you? What are your thoughts on? What are two MIT professors have shared? And is there any idea that you'd like to share and get their reaction?
Yeah, well, my My dream is to pilot a spacecraft landed and say, Please, someone bring a car and driver because I can't drive a car, which is true. I love mass transit. And I'm, I'm curious, just this, this whole discussion about independent agents and interactions and complexity, and so forth, it seems to me the only way for driverless cars really to be safe is for them to be the only vehicles in the lanes that are allowed in I mean, because then they're predictable, as long as they're all following the same rules. Otherwise, you get these complex, which equals dangerous interactions between cars and unpredictable people. And so I'm curious what you think about that. And then the second is this whole congestion issue. I'm very skeptical of models, because I think there's some point at which people, people will create congestion sort of at the margin, and so you'll, you'll never be able to really eliminate it. And probably the best response to that is some kind of pricing, which means, yes, you know, congestion pricing or people going in and out of the city or whatever. Because that at least is decentralized. And I wonder what your reaction to that is.
Imaginators imagining
how I can comment on, I can comment on both. So first, about safety, it is true that self driving cars will not be as safe as very as sort of a responsible human driver, probably for quite some time.
No, that was his arguing it was I think they will be safer. But only if you get rid of the human drivers who are inherently unpredictable, get heart attacks, you don't have spells of intention,
or texting while driving. Yes, or listening
to clubhouse while driving. Because in theory, you don't need to look at it. But it's so engaging that you your attention wanders from the street to the fascinating people you're listening to.
I mean, that is I would say that's part of the challenge, to build to build that in to the self driving systems. And these systems are not considered operational or ready for deployment until they can handle more and more of these situations. And so at the very least, there are certain domains in which there are fewer uncertainties in human driving. So for instance, highway driving, even without dedicated lanes, there's a lot less uncertainty than then on city streets. And so I think we shouldn't think about deployment of solid driving cars as a monolithic decision of one or zero, it's, I think it's going to happen very, very slowly. We can tell from limos, pilots, and increasingly, some of the other players that are gradually mapping out, like one township at a time, a few streets at a time. And so it's going to happen very gradually, as we reduce the uncertainty including of the human behavior. There sort of billions of hours of sort of driver simulation time happening to verify safety. And, you know, it's still in it's still in development.
Yeah, um,
you know, do you want to do how do you want to react to Esther? Sure. Comments?
Yes. Several things. Yeah. So first of all, I'm so glad that you like like mass transit, right. I ran the transit lab at MIT, a big promoter of that relate to automation, though AI automation that one thing is translated into should be the first one to automate right? Transit they actually have a macro structure environment into the technology that may be easier to or more effective to automate that. And also, indeed, if there's a contract with the US versus the US, development in the US the focus more on automated private cars, but a Europe, there are many great efforts in automating public transit.
Right. And it is also it takes more predictable routes. But I still believe firmly that people are just unpredictable. And right.
On the second point on the I think one of the key difficulty of the today's AI is the social intelligence, we apply to transportation, right, for example, so both cars making the right turn, and there's a pedestrian crossing this the street, we as human beings, we make eye contact with each other with a subtle gesture, we understand each other's intent, right? For now, I think now for machine to understand people's gesture or eye contact, the intent is to challenge right, then to our second point on the pricing as a tool to address congestion. Right. That's been discussed for a long time. I economically I think there's a lot of is well established this Pigouvian tax to address the externality. The problem with us is, anytime we talk about congestion pricing, it quickly become a political issue. It's so difficult to do anything about it. But New York City is attempting at this right with the idea I mentioned the beginning of converting industry between car insurance and the reducer fee at a gasoline tax is trying to say Brian, this way we toppled industry, it's a private market issue, why we talk about congestion trying to become a public debate. If you convert that, is there a way we can utilize this acceptance of market mechanism as a way to introduce a congestion charging without going through the difficult political process? That's one
great way you pay for parking when you buy an apartment. Maybe you should also pay some kind of driving fee along with your parking fee. Right? Yeah.
Great to to the audience. You can see Kathy in Jin Ha have a lot of experience here and can handle any question. Let's stack a few questions. Jin Han and Kathy, if you can have a paper and pen out. We're gonna have a few people pose questions and you guys can decide how you want to answer them. Whether you do a summary answer or you take them one at a time. I'm going to throw two questions in one what is transportation look like? 50 years from now? Will our major highways become bike paths? And like high lines, and we'll be using flying jetpacks and quad copters, personal quadcopters and flying cars and VT halls? So that's that's one question. And then Lin Lin used to be a TV anchor in China, interviewed Jack Ma and a lot of the other top business leaders in China. She's done a great job but kind of bridging the US and China. Lin, do you have a question? Lin, you're on mute if you have a question.
Oh, sorry. I was busy with something else. I don't have a question right now. I will let you know when I have a question.
Thank you. Great. Hey, Lynn. Yeah. When you interviewed Jack Ma, did you ask him about transportation?
Yeah, future how, you know, they actually I think they did some projects in China about IoT, you know how to connect cars. All the internet companies in China are doing are thinking of how they envision the future of transportation.
They will come back to you on that. Roland, do you have a question?
I'm not particularly but thank you, Allison for bringing me on stage. And since you ask a question, the question I would put to Jin Ha. And Esther would be the following. Since you've talked about, you know, how cars and transport could potentially change. I would like to come at it from a different perspective, which is the business model. If you're talking about introducing new taxes for driving and, and, and use of parking and roads. What about the dependency equation, especially for governments, local authorities that see this as a source of income. And when we move, the congestion charge today was predicated on pollution when we move to non polluting types of vehicles. What would be the source of revenue then? And how do we build this business models down? Because it takes time to change behavior. It takes time to change allocation of resources. Thank you. I'm done.
Rolling. Excellent question. Looking forward to hearing responses to that. Jennifer and Cassidy. Do either of you have questions?
Thanks. Hi, thanks for bringing me up. I actually was in San Francisco. And it was the congestion was actually based on congestion, just too many cars in a parking but, and apartments did have, or homes were built with one parking garage. Two Insight was sort of the stick versus the carrot. But my question would be, do we see more of a hybrid model coming in? Because as Jenna was said, there is this sort of social, social aspect to driving that unless everything is automated, and that's under the same rules and those rules can be executed. There are going to be sort of looser wildcards. And so would it be some sort of hybrid and then also, following loons comment? The whole IoT aspect, because as security issues become more forward, especially in cars, I mean, cars are a big vector, right? So if you a lot of IoT, a lot of engineering and computers going on there to make these automated and so they just seemed that that would be a big issue as well. So I'm kind of wondering what, whether we see securities holding that back and moving it forward to make that work. Straight question then also whether we see more of a hybrid model, versus straight automation. I love the idea of Highline and freeways becoming for bikes. That'd be awesome.
Yep. Yeah. Jennifer, thank you. Well, we'll put Cassidy and Somas. Do either of you have questions?
I'm going to go ahead and pass this amaz just because I'm in a place where I can't speak. But thank you for the opportunity.
No worries so much.
Hi. Um,
okay, so I used to work for an autonomous vehicle company. And there's this huge move towards autonomous trucking.
Hi, everyone.
Hello. I lost my train of thought.
Autonomous trucking?
Yes. Okay. So I have returned them memory loss anyways. Um, so do you see that kind of being the future of transportation for more remote destinations and not necessarily urban areas? And I asked, I say this coming from, I just don't see autonomous vehicles ever being not ever, at least in the next five years really taking off in busier cities, maybe a little bit more in destinations where there's not a lot of foot traffic and pedestrians. So do you think autonomous trucking will actually be the future of transportation? Are we still focusing on autonomous vehicles in general? Does that make
great you know, great question so much. So I'm going to turn to Nina to ask her first, the last question of this stack. And Nina, we so appreciated you two weeks ago, you're very thoughtful. Welcome. Your question.
Thank you. My question is, and I apologize, because I missed a little bit of this conversation. But my question is how consumer sentiment plays into this, if you think about a car, and I say this full disclosure, someone whose father wrote for car and driver for many decades, but my dad and his colleagues used to always say, you know, people love cars, they feel emotional attachment toward cars. Cars are one of the few things people put pictures of up on their wall when they're little. And they dream about they don't do that with other kinds of big ticket, you know, refrigerators, things like that. And I wonder if you have looked at seeing changes, if there are different changes in different parts of the globe, about attitudes toward vehicles. Certainly in America, the idea of the car is being a symbol of freedom, you know, goes through our music or literature film, but I definitely see maybe millennials and younger having less of an emotional attachment toward cars, you know, sort of anecdotally, but I'm wondering if this is something that you're looking at, and how that plays into the larger issues. Thanks.
Great question. You know, and, you know, I definitely saw millennials and Gen Z. less interested in cars and non reading current drivers out there. Yeah, with the pandemic, I also think, you know, I heard that the car became almost like an extension of your mask and, and became like oxygen. So I wonder if some of those trends are going to change with the new normal command of the pandemic jinhai Gina and Kathy you know, we got some great questions teed up. You know, you don't you're not being graded. I know you grade your students. You're not being graded on how how thoroughly you answer These you don't have to answer them all. But I want you to see where our audience is coming from any reactions to those thoughts, Gina?
Sure. Yeah, a couple of things. One is about 50 years later, right. So for that there's somebody's imagination on the technology side, right. But for now, let me emphasize one thing that I like to see, right? If you look at the city, what makes the city interesting is people bumping into each other people interact with each other. Right? And if you look at one of the public spaces in city where people do that, it turns out much of our public spaces, our transportation space, right, that's very important thing, I want to differentiate C transportation as moving people from A to B, versus transportation as the public space where people mingle and interact with each other. Right? One thing in this science fiction movie, we see the people flying the cars getting from A to B, that's great potential for throughput, but they'll be disaster in terms of human interaction, right? Human interact, when we walk each other by see each other will waves shatter those parts, I hope that in 50 years, the city will enable us more to do those things right. Then Then, you contrast in the trucking in the supply side, supply chain side, we talked about the supply chain chaos today, right? The autonomous trucking makes a lot of sense, that may again be one of the early areas automation technology can be mature and applied. And that should definitely be encouraged and try to solve this supply chain problem. So the passenger side and the supply chain, so should be stocked definitely. Right? That's one. The second one is one of the audience asked the about the different targeting, like the gasoline charge the parking charge user fee. So here we think about all aspects of travel, right? Men of the general thinks analogy. And for each aspect, we design some fee for it. So for example, in order to address accident, we have insurances to charge. In order to address the parking we have a parking fee. In order to address the ownership issue, we have the ownership fee, like in Singapore in Shanghai, whenever we want to address congestion, we have a real user fee. So we have a spectrum of this tarjous that we developed each wrong mostly segmented from each other. Right. Now the question is, can you integrate them together with the good sensing the data and really have a rational pricing structure for transportation, compared to many other commodity market transportation is grossly mispriced. We don't utilize the basic market to to adjust our transportation resources. That's Eric clearly should should kind of innovate that there's a lot of room for that. Lastly, on the on the consumer sentiment, right, John Werner, we, two weeks ago, invited to give a talk at the TEDx literally titled emotional travel, try to really conceptualize the notion that people buy car not just for moving from A to B, there's so many social emotional sentiment attached to cars, right? For that I want to differentiate between taking pride as a demonstration of social status, versus taking the pride in terms of treating cars the toy, right, I just enjoy playing with it. Right? For each other aspect, I think, because of the climate change player, if one, every one of the 7.7 billion people all want a car, as part of a successful life, no technology there to satisfy the desire without destroying the world. So that's taking a car, as part of your pride and the definition of social life is really out of date. We have to replace it with something other area for people to feel pride, feel confident, for example, how about this sustainable travel, decarbonizing travel, treat those behavior as somewhere you take Friday? Right? That's all my comments for
excellent points, and people are getting a sense of how knowledgeable or Imaginators are, you know, jinhai, I think, you know, challenges that people derive such an identity from the cars they drive. And what you're saying is if we if people derive their identity from other things, we may not have these cars be such sources of challenges around sustainability and climate change and congestion, and pollution and so on. I like where you're going with that. Kathy, do you? Is there anything that you want to comment on? That maybe didn't didn't comment on or any additional thoughts or, or do you have a different perspective? And you think Jen has wrong?
No, I think shapefiles totally, totally right on this. And I think despite despite the fact that I do focus on autonomous vehicles, in my research, I do believe that we're ultimately doing this for people that people that live in, in cities and in rural areas. And so I hope that in the next 50 years, we can actually shift the focus of, of what we're doing meaning from cars back to cities and back to people. And I really hope that we can look at look at these problems that we've long had for four decades more holistically and more, more at a system level. And so I do anticipate that we'll return more to active transportation, biking, walking, and E emobility, micro mobility, and so on. And I think there's something that I really, that sort of is with me every day as I do research, which is this idea that we, we have 30,000 people that die every year in the US from car accidents. And it's not just that is 30,000 people, but I think we sort of accept it. And we don't really, like, think there's much to do about it. And I don't agree with that. I mean, it's it's sort of interesting that as we've improved safety in cars, as we've introduced safety mechanisms, automatic braking and whatnot, like it actually has not changed the number of deaths from traffic fatalities over the last dozen years or so. And so I think that's really interesting. And further automation. Like, I don't actually even mean that self driving cars will be safer. But I think that as we integrate automation sensing into cities, these systems can become safer, like, intersections are extraordinarily prone to accidents. But if there were, you know, intelligently use sensors, radar, cameras and whatnot, that could communicate the activities of pedestrians with cars, I think a lot of accidents could be prevented. And so I hope that in the next 50 years, we can take a ton of the negative externalities that we have accumulated over the last 100 years from, from our roads, and we can actually, you know, eliminate them, we can be a lot more energy efficient, we can get rid of air pollution, we can save a lot of fuel, we can save a lot of people's time, and we can make these systems safer. So that's, that's mostly what I hope to see in the next few years. And I'm gonna do my best to help us get there.
Great. In a moment, I'm going to call on Alison. But, Kathy, can you just let people know we have some new people in the room? What is it the research? What's the research that you focus on? I found it fascinating. And I think it's a little counterintuitive. And I think you're really onto something.
Yeah. Thanks, John. So yeah, for the folks. One key result that we've come across in the last few years is just this idea that a few autonomous agents can make a big impact in a system with humans in it. And so in the context of autonomous vehicles, what we're finding is that a small fraction of vehicles can basically eliminate traffic congestion. And this could ultimately translate to billions of gallons of fuel saved, billions of hours saved, and so on. We're at, you know, we're not, we're still in the early stages there. And this is powered through some new techniques in artificial intelligence, namely, reinforcement learning. And there are there's a lot more that that we're investigating, sort of starting from this seed of that this idea that just just introducing a few autonomous vehicles, or even even not, not even fully autonomous vehicles, potentially, potentially, forms of automation that are already on the market, these adaptive cruise control systems Tesla's and, and whatnot, potentially even lower forms of autonomy, potentially human drivers given smartphone apps. And, and I'm really, really curious. This is one of my key priorities right now is to understand, like how soon can we realize these benefits? Like we were just talking about benefits in 50 years, how many of these accidents can we can we eliminate now or in the next you know, three years, five years with just with really intelligently using the levels of sensing and automation that are mature today.
Great, thank you. And Jinho, I'm gonna do the same for you ask you to maybe summarize some of your research. Before I do. I'm gonna ask Allison, to comment on what we've heard so far. And for those who are just joining jinhai showed up to the event, not with one talk, but with two talks, because he had so much to say, for time I did the modeling in terms of COVID, we decided we didn't want to be in the room for more than three hours. So we didn't get to give a second talk. But he got a standing ovation. He has a big following at MIT. Allison, any observations on some of the some of what we've talked about or what people are asking about?
First of all, thank you so much for all the thoughts on Transportation Innovation,
I'll see maybe speak a little closer to the mic.
Oh, is that better? Can you hear me now?
You sound like you're underwater a little bit? You sound okay. But a little louder would be good.
Okay. Just a question for you guys. The world of Transportation Innovation sounds fascinating. And I love the fact that you track on so many levels, from technology to cities to providers. But I'd love to know where you both see the most innovation happening. So which cities which companies other than Tesla, which individuals, which universities, which technologies, what do you think are going to be the places and people that radically change transportation in the next 15 years?
So I feel like you just gave a layup to Jin Han? Like he like he has he has answers to that. So Jenna, I'm gonna call on you. And then maybe you can weave in some of your research to you're on mute Jenna.
Yeah. Oh, thank you. Addison. I really like your question there. There's a fascinating innovation happening in different places. Right. But let me give you one comment before I get to the different city places, just a couple years ago, I do observe some, some sense of arrogance in the industry, right? Some Congress says, Oh, I I'm I invented autonomous vehicle, I can solve all the problems, no other people need to exist, right. Some other company says, Oh, I have this idea of sharing, I can solve all the problems that I just you guys don't don't need to discuss anymore, right? Only I think only past 234 years, I observe that the industry start to acquire some degree of humility here. Right? The reason I say that is transportation, contrasting to the pure digital system. For example, if someone like Google invented Gmail, literally them and no other email should exist is the one thing serve all these people. But transportation is a combination of a digital and a physical system, you cannot sing take it's a pure digital innovation ideas, then say one person just solved the problem. So that means is you need to take an ecosystem solution perspective, you have to work between different players, both of the industry, the government, particularly also the citizen has, you're part of the story here, right, each of the resident has to contribute to this. So in the word ICs, exciting moment in this. So while I was say Singapore, Singapore, I said has been a classic poster child on this, where the the the government, the industry, and the local resident can really work in together towards a very nice, effective and sustainable system. Right? This has been there for decades, they continue to lead the water in many regard. The second area, I do want to mention Paris, as the CDI, you guys may be reading the news, Paris has transformed itself to be a paradigm of bicycles. Right for that, I think I'm really proud of the effort there. It's a great example where the city crafted can do a lot right at the mega city level, a lot of problem there a lot of congestion, but the citizens the government can work together to achieve a really interesting girl, that the last one to say the role of the the the academic here, right? My thought is society allocate risk in two different parties, right? The government is has the risk tolerance of risk, their job is stability, right? Your industry takes some degree of risk, but they still have the bottom line to protect. But academics like me, Tassie, me in the way we are paid to fail. We shouldn't have the highest tolerance risk, so that when we fail, other people don't need to do that on their own. So that's where I think university still should play the key role of imagining a different system or a different future here.
That was so beautiful. You said you
Maybe the jury's still out on various Junhua with regard to bicycles
I think we lost job right, our moderator
since we excuse me, since we have lost John mashfique. Surely, yes. Has anyone considered resonant propulsion vehicles? Because I can make them. And I'm perfectly willing to do that. If you look at my GoFundMe campaign, that would certainly ease the congestion, he would also solve the gas crisis. So I'm just curious why people haven't looked into this because it is a reality.
Is Baba speaking, I'm here in Germany. A couple of things I'd like to say. One might be that you're going up against a very, very powerful, embedded industry, the motor industry is hugely powerful. Over here, in Germany, it's considered a sacred cow. I'm in Munich. And if you'll notice the roads in Munich, they're all super, super smooth. And there's a reason for that. So so the German cars have nice smooth roads to go on. I just like to comment on what Jim Hall said earlier about people using cars as status symbols. Yes, people do use cars as status symbols. But then people use anything and more or less everything as a status symbol, the clothes on our backs, the homes that we live in the area in which we live in, within a particular neighborhood, our homes themselves, even the water that we drink, can sometimes be used as a status symbol to distinguish ourselves from anybody else. So to turn around and say, well, let's remove cars as a status symbol, maybe have something else as a status symbol. We have a plethora of things, watches, clothes, etc, etc. The list is endless.
Indeed, yeah, just just building off of that the Nano, I don't know how many people are familiar with that car. But Tata came out with it. And it was a it was a lower entry car. That was less expensive. And I know Tata had high hopes for it. But it didn't do well, because people thought it was an embarrassing car to drive. Because it screamed that it was less expensive. So that's getting a little bit at, I think some of the status stuff, but excellent question, Baba. Arjun, fac, and Tanisha. I'm sorry if I didn't say that name. Right. Do you all have questions?
Yeah, I have a question I'd like to ask. But it's about driverless trucking more so then about driverless cars,
you know, feel free. So let's go to ESA. Or gin, fac, and then David. So, yes, ask your driverless car or your truck question. A friend of mine was at Tesla, and he got fired. And I know he's now at a driverless truck company. And he's doing very well.
Thank you, John. Yeah, I'm Tanisha. And I'm interested to know, if persons are aware of some of the moves that have been happening in the transport, specifically, freight area. So, so thinking about where freight has been and where it is going, it's in a little bit of a different place in comparison to normal cars, or let's say it's driverless cars. So with trucking, they've been able to create spaces, whether it's in Silicon Valley, or different areas, where they can create this infrastructure where they can use freight, these driverless trucks, in different transportation or in different places. So if we think about on a highway, they've been able to specify the grid system on a highway to ensure that the truck can drive smoothly. In Silicon Valley, Valley, it's very much like segregated, they can create their own grading system. And yeah, they can move the truck. But my question is, how is it that driverless trucking with the timeline that I've read, which is between like five to 10 years, I think it could be possible to do to completely driverless and not just manned because at the minute, you're able to have a man driverless vehicle, which is basically the driverless vehicle can move but there's somebody there inside the truck just in case something goes wrong. In the other case, how is it? Or when is it, I believe that it's going to be possible for actual driverless trucks, or it's not going to need the Manning of a person in the air? And how does that look in terms of infrastructure in, let's say, countries, which are more where their roads are a little bit more? I don't know the best word to use, but better, I don't know if that's the best word to use. But that that, that they could be worked on more easily, because that's straight because they're not as bumpy and etc, etc. But it will get to know if anybody does know the answer to that.
Great. Thank you for that question. Our June fac, and then David.
He'll, for one, I've really been enjoying this conversation Jeonhwa, you made an interesting point, in my mind is that who owns the risk? And the idea that colleges can be more experimental or universities? I wholeheartedly agree. And I think that we need to be running lots of experiments. I'm not sold on the idea of autonomous vehicles being our solution. I think that we need to explore micro mobility and figure out what are the alternatives? I see, in my mind, at least the gap of what I see as like cargo bikes, electric bikes, and then you know, what could be maybe more than a single person or two person mover? And I don't think that we have come to that solution yet. Like when when you look at the scale of vehicles, you have maybe cargo bikes is like 70 pounds, then like a scooter is measly, 300 400 pounds. And I don't understand why there isn't something an interim in between that I think is more efficient for mobility and exploring that micro mobility. So if I were to put money on this, I would put money on micro mobility over autonomous vehicles.
Great. Fac, did you have a question?
Oh, yes, I was just curious as to why people think that resident propulsion vehicles are a threat to status symbols. Lot of options can be applied to them. They can be made to hovered lowly and beat to be used much like a car, you could go to the moon, you can go underneath the water deeper than any submarine. I just think this is where the revolution is at. And it's the answer to our problems. All of the one speaking.
Great, thank you. Thank you, David, do you have a question? And then we'll go to our Imaginators.
I do. I do. In fact, if you get to it, and Esther's on stage, really nice to be on stage with you and the other the other guests Kathy Jean, Allison, John, and everybody else. My just given the facts that y'all are experts. And you're looking at everything I wanted to, to to just point out the difference between innovation and commercialization. I was in the, in the Valley for like, over three decades. And you know, what gets all the news and headlines is, hey, some cool innovation a press release? Yeah, you know, let's go. But you know, commercialization is really where it's at. And so, in your studies, in terms of the the deployment, the massive deployment of some of these innovations is, is are there any that you think are something that can just get scaled? Right? Because there's there's a lot of specifics with any kind of transportation. So that's why it's one of my questions is, you know, from a commercialization of because you have to go through a bunch of just all the legal things, right. And just there's a whole bunch of hurdles that have to happen before something gets massively commercialized. But I'm just wondering if there's been studies around that. That might be enlightening. But that's, that's, that's one of my questions. And if it if the micro to come back to me later, I'd love to ask another question, John. Thank you.
Great, thanks. So Katherine Jin waha. Would you like to respond to some of those comments?
Sure, I kind of try to feel them and Cassie, please jump in. Right? Maybe the first one is the micro mobility income, the fiscal form of the vehicle or device versus automation? I don't think the two are contradicting each other. Right? They're just two different dimensions. In fact, at MIT, there's a group of scholars who are designing automated bicycles, tricycles, right, so So I took this automation as a general general technology, you can apply to trends to buses, to cars to trucks to micro mobility as well, right so that the One. The second way is on the on the freight and passenger I, I'm not an expert on the free side. So but but I want to given today well imagine the future, right? I want to propose the thought of this, this free to end passenger system hibernation. Let them give me there's some existing example already, right? If you look at Uber, Uber is a passenger company or a food delivery company, I mean, depend on where you how you count it, it's already doing most of them. But I won't give you a more concrete thought is to, for example, a person today I want to buy a bottle of milk, right? My option could include I walk to my grocery to buy, or I drive to Costco to buy, I each have a different carbon emission consequence, right. But also, I have the option of buying it online through this, Amazon and use a car etc. Right? So for most people, now, we don't think about these terms in this combined way. Even though they're solving the fundament the same problem, I just want a moderate bottle of milk, right. But I could solve this problem through passenger, sir, travel or solid strong logistic system. Right? So here, I think we should bring it together. Particularly, we should label the carbon emission consequences for each of the option so that when I make a decision, do I walked into it? Or do I click the button on Amazon? I can make an informed judgment based on the spectrum of options that's available to me. That's all for me. Yeah, Kathy,
I can pick up on this target. Let's trucking problem. So one of the really challenging pieces, when designing what as we progress in building autonomous vehicles is what's called this handoff problem, which is, if we're thinking about so called level three, autonomy, where, or level four autonomy where the vehicle is not, you know, fully capable of doing everything. And thus, there are some situations where the vehicle must hand over control back to a driver. This becomes very tricky when we can make no assumptions on who is the driver. And so I think this is where there's a big distinction between driverless trucking versus passenger driverless vehicles, where in the passenger drivers, driverless vehicles, we can't really assume anything, the person could be asleep. And, you know, that's, that's no good. Whereas in the trucking context, there can be some training done on the on the drive for the drivers that can ease this transition as the technology matures. So that actually enables the trucking industry to move forward with testing and prototyping and rolling out this technology. And, you know, for the time being, these drivers are still going to be part of the process, they'll, they'll be on the trucks, they'll there are a lot of aspects of the job that are that go beyond beyond driving for these workers as well. Yeah, and I also wanted to make a comment on innovation versus commercialization. Thanks for the question, David. And I think, yeah, it's commercialization and, and in particular, like, the translation between innovation and impact is extremely hairy as I'm, I'm just sort of starting to learn myself, there's one idea that I think could go a long way that just sort of needs some sort of scaling. And this has to do with work. It has nothing to do with automation. It has more to do with sustainability and, and our environmental concerns, which is this idea of eco driving. Eco driving is I mean, it's it's not a fixed definition, but it's a set of driving practices that they're they're cut, they're, you know, half a dozen, actually multiple dozen studies that show that this small set of driving practices can shave off fuel consumption by something like 10 to 15% On average, this is like breaking less driving with your windows rolled up. And, you know, driving at the opposite optimal speed for for your engine. And this can go a long way like, you know, if we can now with no new technology, nothing, no, you know, no, no one needs to buy new cars. No one needs to, like adopt any technology that is potentially more or less safe. This, this could potentially, you know, trim our co2 emissions also by 10 to 15% with basically no cost And the only thing we need to do as far as my understanding is like to get the word out and maybe sponsor some training programs. And there's a faculty at MIT Jessica transit, who's done quite a bit of really nice analysis on this work as well. Joe?
Yep, yeah. Jin Jin, right? Yep.
Yes, sir. Because I need to run the minute I just add one thing. And when we're talking about the future of mobility, which is the transition equity issue, AI automation that because now we have the technology of autonomous vehicle can drive across the continent, we can fly people to the mall, but we still fail to let a 30 year old, single mom with kids to go to the hospital. Right? As the mobility is the urban trap seen as a system as how fail to deliver for the poor, the old, the young and the disabled? Right? So here, I hope that all this technology, discussion, business model innovation, can have a clear focus on this part, right. I think we were making good strides on this, but there's a lot more to be done in that area as well. And also, I would actually enjoy the conversation here.
Yeah, yeah. And I know you have an international call. So for the next few minutes, Esther, who is the patron saint of just of innovation, I'm deferring to you to either throw down the gauntlet and say something profound about transportation, or ask Kathy some questions, or ask some of the audience to, to weigh in. But Esther, thank you, I know you've been just about all our shows to date, and, and are going to help facilitate for the next few minutes. So
thank you, John. This is like, suddenly I'm becoming the driver of this vehicle. But you need to give me the green, the green star so that I can call people like Kelly close up if she's interested. Wonderful. And I will, I'll take the steering wheel if you want. And probably all yours. Okay, thank you guys so much. We're going to tilt this car in a slightly different direction. But it's going to be the same exciting conversation with Kathy and with many of you. So the I would love to hear some of you ask questions about some particular questions I have. But I'm also eager to hear other questions you might have. The first one, though, is insurance. Because insurance I see is a really big player in managing humans behaviors, you know, things like wearing seat belts, things like how you drive if your insurance rates go up, if you're caught thing, how can we make driving safer through insurance? And Kathy, I guess you're the first one and then some other people might have some follow up questions on that.
Yeah, I'm definitely not expert here. I've looked into the insurance industry, just a small amount. Yeah, it's it's absolutely the case that insurance has a lot of influence on on human behavior. And so to some extent, they have, you know, with great power comes great responsibility. So right now, I think there's a bunch of passive monitoring drivers, that's, that's being rolled out these telematics tools that are embedded into consumer vehicles. So earlier, my comment on eco driving, there is some analysis around how eco driving can connect to safer driving as well. And so I think what will be really interesting in this next phase is when it's not just like, how one is taught to drive safely, that makes a difference in terms of insurance, but potentially actively driving safer for such that the roads are safer for other vehicles as well. Yeah. And so I think that'll be really interesting. I don't know how it will be incorporated or taken up by the insurance industry and I admittedly, I think this is still open research and a place for academics to to hash it out a little bit more before we involve insurance companies.
Well, you might not need to. I mean, some insurance companies are already looking at these things they're looking at, for example, our drivers taking their meds there. This works especially well, obviously with commercial drivers. You know, how, how much sleep are they getting? If they agree to wear? And yes, there's a bargain here, if they agree to wear monitors to check their sleep or their blood sugar level, they get they are there. The companies that employ them get better insurance rates. And I think you're gonna see this happen with Uber and Lyft. Who are losing a lot of money right now, basically, so much of the ride sharing business is being subsidized by venture capitalists, which is great while it lasts.
Yeah. Okay. Agree.
Any comments or any, any anyone else?
Can I try? Minister? Yes, please, Roland, here? Great. Well, my my personal view is that private venture capitalists are losing money, subsidizing the ride sharing business. Because to start with, the way the ride sharing business was conceived, was not disruptive, disruptive innovation typically happens at the edges. The only thing that the Ubers and Lyfts did was digitize your ability to get a taxi from your doorstep, rather than having to walk to the taxi stop. That was the major change. And at that, I would question whether that was even a good change, because it led the human being to doing less exercise. And whether that contributes to the benefit of a healthy human being is a different question that needs to be explored in a separate room. That said, the big question is more about whether there is potential within that business model to be more innovative, and deliver better, better value to the customer. But at the same time, you will notice that more governments begin to enforce that companies like Uber, Lyft, etc, need to really think about whether their employee is the gig worker, or a full time employee, and what impact that has in their cost model to be innovative. Hope that helps that.
Kathy, any any response?
I mean, I think those are really good points. I apologize. I'm not sure I caught if there was a question in there. I can, I can respond? Generally,
you can argue,
are here. Yes. Um, I mean. So from the standpoint, from where I sit in academia, I do tend to shy away from, like, very Corporation specific questions, in terms of in terms of research. Like, I think I generally share this viewpoint that companies will do, like they sort of have to do what's best for their bottom line or for their shareholders. And I do, I mean, part of what I view as the role of universities and academics, is to empower governments to set the rules that will help to shape what corporations can do if they were to optimize for their bottom line, because we know they will continue to do so. So the extent to which governments can set rules around accountability and around social responsibility and setting metrics like, like emission standards and, and whatnot, setting a carbon price. And these are ways in which I think that from where I said, there's a lot more work that can be done to to inform how companies will innovate moving forward. How long that will take? I don't know.
Okay, well, thank you. Lawrence has a question and then not older.
Um, thanks, Esther. So my question is, is pretty much centered on a number of the points that have been discussed earlier, especially, pertaining to autonomous systems? Well, because we do know that the software is the brains behind autonomous vehicles. And that is probably the most complex elements where the true value lies and that's autonomy. So So Kathy is an academic because I'm an academic as well. What are some of your concerns about the software that forms the bedrock of the autonomous systems? Are you concerned about security issues? And based on your research thus far, what are the advancements? In just software for autonomous systems?
I'm very concerned about security. It's not my area of research, there's a lot of great work that points out how bad and how, how easily hacked. Our communication systems are, our systems are not designed, our communication systems are not designed to be secure. And so I think there are a lot of vulnerabilities that will be exposed as these technologies get get rolled out. I'm not an expert on this in this area, though, I have other concerns. So Esther, you had raised a really nice point of beginning about safety of these vehicles and of these systems. And I think that's that mean, that is one of the biggest challenges. Humans are super safe, I believe in the US is like one fatality every, like 80 million miles driven or something like that. And so that sort of implies that self driving cars have to drive 80 million miles without, without a fatality, in order to demonstrate safety record as good as the average human. Just want. So we want to do that multiple times. And I think we already failed that. So you know, we have a long way to go in terms of software wise, how do we, how do we verify safety? Because driving a million miles, multiple times over and over again, is just not going to cut it? I don't have any Thank you. Yeah,
I mean, there's there are other things. It's not just people making mistakes, it's people attacking you. And messing with your software controlling you remotely, that kind of stuff.
Yeah.
Let's go into all that. Now, I don't know if this is what your question is going to be. But one, one interesting. We're talking about cars and deliveries and logistics and so forth. And one thing that really changes logistics, because it allows you to make things locally rather than mass produce them and take them somewhere else. Is 3d printing. I don't know whether that's what you were going to ask about alter, but whatever it is, go ahead.
Yeah, thanks for bringing me up. So actually, I was I was responding to, I was gonna respond to a role in just a moment. I, as someone who grew up in like, East, nowhere Connecticut, you know, the idea that, that people, you know, that Uber and lifts being able to just make Oh, well, you know, taxes already accessible, that, you know, self driving cars will really enable a huge number of small towns be able to access something that otherwise would be, you know, only accessible to someone who grew up or is used to somewhere in, you know, big city, I remember in my town, you know, the the only taxi service in my area, Connecticut 860-666-6666. That was the only way if you didn't have a car, you could get around anywhere. But anyway. And yes. So like, you definitely raised the point where, as we're seeing this rise of on trend, manufacturing, I make micro factories, I have a stake and I have a stake in this game. But we are seeing lots of communities that are saying, hey, you know, we want to be able to make things locally, the you know, as someone who spent all of 2020, making PPE and getting it out to local communities, people are sick and tired of being reliant on, you know, having to ship overseas or from different states, they want to be able to make things locally. And if you're looking at the number of jobs in, you know, how many states is the most common jobs truck driver, it's definitely something that we need to consider as we, as we move forward to this both, you know, more autonomous world but also more localized world so that that's what I came up to, to add into the conversation. Great conversation so far.
Thank you. And I see, Arjun was flashing his his mic. Was that on purpose, or, as it was just
to acknowledge that I really enjoyed that point that I think that the localization of manufacturing is an important element of this. And I feel that that is an integral part of dealing with where we're at currently, not just for economic viability, but also because of our current supply chain issues. It makes sense to me that we really think about how to integrate Great are local systems and make things that work for people. So yeah.
Interesting. And for what it's worth, I invested in a company called OnDemand pharmaceuticals that makes drugs that way. So that rather than manufacturing them overseas, this is generics and shipping them somewhere. Originally it was, so you can use them on the, you know, out in the field if you were in the military, but you can also use them in Eastern Connecticut, if you even if you can't ship them in some more questions for Kathy or actually, for other people who rolling You look as if you're flashing again? Yes,
I did. I did have a question. So just to give a bit quick background, I'm based in Europe. So my perspective is much more European than North American. When you look at transport in Europe, local authorities, the public sector plays an important role. I was wondering whether Kathy or anyone else has any perspective on when you think about the future, we are definitely going to get a dearth of new technologies and new transport solutions. But the big challenge I see in Europe, at least having engaged with more than 40 cities, talking about micro mobility, talking about electric cars or autonomous transport, both pre pandemic and during the pandemic is IC signant, significant resistance to change how you envision overcoming this challenge. Thank you.
Kathy. Lawrence.
All right. Now find out. I'll let, I'll let Kathy go for
it, Roland, thanks for the question. It's, it's a really big one. So I came across a concept about a year ago, of legacy sectors. It was I was just starting to learn about innovation systems and Public Policy at the time. And what struck me as pretty interesting is that I mean, I was pretty on the fence before this point about the role of innovation in solving or in addressing societal issues. But what I came to realize is that one way that we do accept change is through innovation and technology. Like, the example I go to a lot is just how many of us have a smartphone today, we didn't have wheat, like, we didn't have these things like 15 years ago. It's true that like traffic lights operate about the same as they did, like probably 30 years ago. But we have smartphones, and we didn't before. And so there's some parts of the world that where we don't resist change, and others do. And so I think that's really interesting to think about moving forward as well. Part of the reason that I work on autonomous vehicles, even though because are typically, like it's sort of car centered, it's, it's it's not the typical thing to work on, if you do care about, ultimately, people in a city, but what I see in autonomous vehicles is that it may happen, because it is a form of innovation, there's a trillion dollar industries sort of pushing on it, and and hoping to make it happen. Same with electric vehicles. These are these are innovations. And so they've got like, there's a better chance of these happening than some of these sort of lower tech solutions that have had the opportunity to happen for four decades now. And so I think it's, I think that the jury is still out. But the the mechanism for which innovation can provide a window for change is by just like sheer reduction of cost. And, and it just gets adopted. And so I don't know that we'll be able to encounter we'll be able to sort of bypass every resistance to change. But I do think that we want to think very carefully about when we do have these windows of opportunity where we have new technologies that that can drive down costs, how can we alongside driving down those costs, also, make sure that they're benefiting cities and people how they can actually make our system safer and more environmentally friendly and whatnot.
So that's interesting. I have one, one short question and one long one. The short question is, actually aren't trapped. Lights operating differently because they are more coordinated? And, or, you know, like, there's a lot more real time scheduling of traffic lights according to where the traffic is and find to give certain routes preference and so forth to reduce congestion.
Yeah, I probably spend through that. So I have a huge amount of respect for traffic engineers who are hard at work on these problems. So like, it's just very variable, like, there are a lot of traffic signal systems that do operate as a, as a have sort of on like fixed timing patterns. There are very advanced traffic systems as well. I don't mean to imply that across the board, yeah, yeah.
And so, I mean, I'm, I'm really interested in this whole question around pricing. And, you know, rather than have rules about asking people to count how many grams of carbon or whatever they use, just price it into either the fuel or, you know, the cost per, I mean, it's somehow use a price signal, just kind of all in where people are without kind of noticing it, other than in the pricing, seeing the costs. They're imposing and congestion and use of carbon, in use of streets. The cost of bridges. I mean, I think that, as you said, the biggest way to foster change is to price it in and then people will respond to those price signals. And it's up to the government to figure out how to price those externalities in.
Esther, can I
I'm sorry. Yeah, go ahead. David.
First, whoever was Kathy, please?
Yeah, just Just a quick comment. I mean, I am, I think quantifying these costs is, is like, it's, it's a, it's wonderful. I think Jinka was also just describing earlier that, you know, there's just a lot of political resistance anytime. Like a pricing scheme is brought up. And so there have been a few successes in like Stockholm, and in New York City. But it will probably take a while going that route, although like sort of conceptually, it's very, very clean of an idea.
Yeah, I It's how shall I say? It's, like so many other things. It's, it's the worst idea except for every other idea. That's,
well, it's, it's a powerful, great idea of the micro economics of it, right? So it's, it will in for the reasons, Kathy said that there's no political will to get to get, you know, carbon costed into it either, right yet, yet, that that's gonna be a forcing function around one of these corners. Um, but that's one of the one of the ways to drive behavioral change. That's the kind of in your face. Great, but there's, there are others and what I was gonna if I can, if I may kind of use that as a segue into my other second question here, which was the, if you if you segment transportation into the distribution, right, the global supply chain, and what what all they're doing with is really cool item form stuff, by the way, everybody follow all their he's doing cool stuff. You know, and then commuting. And if we look at just what started to happen last March, you know, the work from home. Right? The whole work from homes. Emergence, in the telehealth emergent, the forced emergence of all this ecommerce, you know, we're not all going shopping as much as we were before. I mean, we're starting to go back to do that. But, but that's something that was something that we were forced to switch How much omachron gets us to do all those things again, but guess my point is if we just took a lens and thought of the future of the transportation that we need to survive, you know, I think that would be an interesting, interesting way to kind of focus on like, what are the top three things that we really need? And the last kind of domain of transportation I'd like to put out there is tourism and travel and people talk about eco tourism. But you know, people also started to talk about how the metaverse and new novel virtual experiences they're not going to be the same as your first trip to to Rome. They're going to be different, but, you know, different it's not going to cost you several $1,000 either. So in any case, if that's something that you might have the appetite to pass around a little bit, it's something I might think might be interesting to explore.
I'd love to hear reactions, but I just have one reaction to that. As, as Roland was saying earlier, I want my trip. This is a metaphorical me. I want my trip to the metaverse to cost a lot and I'm going to spend a lot on NF T's because I want the social status that comes from the NF T's. Other people will go on the cheap, but it's it's going to be interesting. I mean, put it this way, if Facebook ad L are running the metaverse, you can bet it's gonna cost a lot.
From my game experience, it kind of just softly put a couple little few legs on it. That in gaming, there's a there's kind of there's a lot of research that's been done over the years, we've as humans fall into different segments of motivational archetypes. So the status is absolutely one of them. But there's going to be others as well. I just wanted to put that out there just as a as a framework. Thanks.
Can I do? So yeah, I unfortunately need to jump off. Oh, maybe I'll just make a closing comment. Thank you. Thank you, Esther, and John for this wonderful session and Jean Claude earlier. I was really, really blown away with how critical these questions were from all of you in the audience. So and I think it's definitely questions of this nature. That'll keep us honest. I'll keep the industry honest, will keep government honest. And so I really want to wanted to acknowledge that. This is a really fun discussion.
Coming. Thank you. You can come in, though we're almost reaching the end because our second honored guest is departing. How are you leaving? Kathy? Are you just moving to another chat on your device?
I have another meeting.
I know. I know. But are you? Is it? Are you driving to it? Are you walking to it? Are you another route?
Yes. It's virtual. Yeah, it's a good point. Yeah, actually. Okay. So as one last comment, I think that we in transportation have focused on mobility solutions for, I don't know, 100 years or 100 years. But I think what's super interesting are also these in mobility solutions, virtual reality. And yeah, the metaverse and everything. So I think that'll become within this domain of the of consideration for the future of transportation as well. What does not need to be transported is also a really important question.
Thank you. Well, we'll have John deal with that one next time. Thank you, Kathy. Somebody just came in and then I think we're going to have our, our grand finale. Mr. Farr?
Yes. Thank you. Sorry, we're late, because I was driving through the torrential rain anyway, were you attention to the road? Yep. I was thinking to his hands free is okay. I think transportation needs to be looked at also in regionally because we cannot take transportation as a total wholesome picture by itself. What I mean is transportation in developing countries are different from transportation in the developed country. So, there has to be clear marked difference of how to handle Especially now, when it's actually a brownfield in development. So, I think not to confuse the matter, I will jump in into the developing countries because this is where they really really need, because what happens is the advent of cheap petrol and also the advent of Suburbans have actually make that people stay away from the city centers when he used to be the people who work are actually in the city and the gate only call me by walking, but ever since in 19, late 90s, where Peter Carter from today says the transit oriented development when he said transit, it did not be mean mass transit, transit, it can be bus, he can be bicycle, he can be personal mobility or even can be in any form, which is actually affordable that he can bring along and use it at any point of time in there. So, transportation in actual fact, is actually a service that is being provided part of a city service because just like rubbish collection and also the other forms of tech. So how do they provide it is because of the routes that is being provided in the city system. So what we could do is we have to look at the first mile and the last mile for a developed nation. The first mile can be very, very difficult because the area the place of work and the place of stay is quite far. And sums, he can go on to 40 kilometers, 60 kilometers. And just to get to the place of work, which is in the city, because that's actually where the employment is. So in my opinion, the future of transportation need to consider the, the transportation need probably be free, so that they do not have to pay the cost. But the cost is actually balanced out in a different form, that the developers or whoever is actually doing that land will be providing that gross money to the state in order to improvise, and also upgrade the very infrastructure that has already there. Know that for instance, routes, the transit way, the bikeway, the River Rhine. So this is where the role of the state is very, very crucial, and the political will between the state and also the private sector. And also the people sector needs to be very, very tight knit, and the tripartite understanding of all that is very, very crucial. So to do that, before you can actually even do whatever you want to do to us, or to dismantle the whole thing, the very land configuration, and also the city development methods have got to change as well. Yes, you have problems to do that. Even London has got problem of God, where you only attract the multi millionaire to live cracker god.
Okay, thank you. Thank you. It's, it's good to bring in another perspective. Unfortunately, you came in right at the tail end. And so we're about to close down. Ted, I don't know if you wanted to just say three words. Sure.
Thank you, Esther. That only speculation? Yes. Okay. I'll make it quick. When we're talking about cost, you mentioned that it's critical to be looking at all aspects of that, and not only to the cost to the consumer, right, because we look at Uber Yeah, you get a $2 ride that used to cost you 15. But at what price to society because the disrupt chin of of these ride hailing Apps has really put a wrench in the lives of people that were, you know, making decent living in major cities doing three transportation, so the cost, and also the grip of the petroleum industry, because we're returning back to electric vehicles for delivery and for for transport. And we had that in the 19, early 1900s, and 1890s. So that we have to be aware of the cost to humans, and also the cost of the environment, because we're subsidizing oil and gas throughout the world, and it's destroying the planet. So that's all Thank you very much.
Thank you for this has been a very interesting discussion. I did not know at the beginning that I was going to be running it at the end. I thank you all for staying. And I hope you enjoyed it. This was a stimulating conversation. And we look forward to seeing you next week. Thank you all very much.
