Kea, Hey guys, it's Kea Wilson, welcome back to the break. So I'm doing something a little bit different today. I just thought the summer would be a good time to experiment. I'm gonna do a solo podcast today. I don't have a guest. I would be curious to hear what you think of this format, but I wrote something on social media the other day that touched off a little bit of, I won't say controversy, but a strong reaction from the folks that read my blue sky account that I wanted to take a minute to just expand on here, because I think it's a really tricky, rich concept that gets at the intersection between what I'm all about, which is the movement and car dependency, and questions about technology and childhood independence And what we want our transportation system to be for the next generation. And this is about an article that I read on wired.com called the teens are taking waymos now. And the subheading, I think I had a pretty emotional reaction to maybe you will too. It is alphabet self driving car company launches what it hopes will be lucrative individual teen accounts and maybe a whole lot of social change in the process. So just to summarize the article briefly, for those who haven't read it, I'll leave a link to it in the show notes as well. But basically the premise of it is that the self driving car company Waymo has launched a product line specifically aimed at drivers between the ages of 14 and about 17, which in most states would mean that you either can't drive on your own without an adult present, or you have a very restricted graduated driver's license, Right? And you know, this is meeting a real need. The article notes that the percentage of us drivers under 19 has fallen by more than a quarter in recent years. The teens are scared to drive in at least one expert's estimation coded in this article. And you know, this is a population that because we built a pretty car dependent world is really struggling to get around and their families are struggling to get them where they need to be. In our last podcast, we talked to Todd Lipman about what he called the parental chauffeur burden, which is basically that we expect so many parents across America to drop everything and take their kids to school, to work, to the soccer practice, to whatever activity isn't within easy walking, biking transit distance of their homes, and as our world grows increasingly car dependent, nothing is Within easy walking, biking, transit, distance of our homes. Right on top of that, teens between the ages of 16 and 19 are already like three times more likely to be killed while they're driving than when they're just 20 years old and older than that. And on top of that, frankly, parents are already doing this. They're already looking at waymos. And you know, we should broaden it out to taxis, maybe as a solution to getting their kids where they need to be in a safe, individual, climate controlled area, even if it violates the terms of service of these companies, which it absolutely does in a lot of cases. And this article, which, by the way, was written by the great journalist Aryan Marshall, who I'm a fan of, takes pains to note that, you know, teens in this day and age are coming of age in a really weird era. A lot of them hit middle school or high school at the peak of the quarantine era. They are isolated, they are stressed. They are trying to rebuild, or in some cases, build a new social networks and social skills that they really didn't have an opportunity to work on when they were locked in their living rooms on Zoom school for several years of their lives, several critical years of their lives, to be clear, but Waymo thinks weirdly that it can help with that. There's a quote in here from Naomi Guthrie, who identifies herself as Waymo product and customer research manager, and she says that Waymo doesn't want to have teens siloed, which is that a Waymo can, quote, be a space to unwind or relax and to have any pent up stress that you might have from your day to day or school day release and just be by yourself. So I can't really make we don't want to have teens siloed, and it's great to be by yourself compute in my mind, but maybe you'll have more luck than me. But again, to Marshall's credit, he questions this line, right? He's. Because in a country where so much of the transportation system depends on access to cars, and where many people, including those too young to have a driver's license, are limited in what they can do and where they can go because of it, the move both promises and threatens to reorder young adult life, putting kids in waymos with a dedicated product line both promises and threatens to reorder young adult life. So it will probably surprise no one that I come down a little bit more heavily on the side of this threatens to reorder young adult life, right? Like not promises to not in a good way. It's a negative thing. It's a bad thing and a bad idea to give teens Waymo accounts in a lot of American life. Obviously, that's not universal. I can think of some use cases where for reasons of ability, or maybe certain kinds of landscapes where, yeah, everybody depends on cars and you have to and that's not going to change anytime soon. Sure, there's no transit network. Let's use this as a stop cop solution. But by and large, this whole thing makes me kind of angry, and I wrote something on blue sky about it that I'm just going to read because I got a little feisty. I wrote, I'm sorry, but this whole thing makes me feel insane. Let's be real. We stole basic independence from generations of kids and teenagers by intentionally making our cities deadly and impossible to travel outside of a car, and now corporations are selling a worse version of it back to them at a price. So as always, when I pop off on a posting platform. This touched a little bit of a nerve. It got liked about 650 times. It was reposted about 150 times, and it got a pretty wide range of feedback, most of which was supportive, people who kind of agreed with me, but some of which touched on some kind of nuanced issues that I thought it would be better to just talk out in an essay or a verbal essay, which is, I guess, what I'm doing right now. So the first one that I think just needs to be just sort of quashed right away was the feedback that, basically, we can walk and chew gum at the same time that Waymo isn't trying to replace the neighborhood roll down the street to your neighborhood school when you're six with a, you know, $50 cab ride in a pod. That what they're really trying to do is provide a stop gap solution while we work really hard to retrofit our communities to reduce car dependence, to quote, one person on there, while making it safer to be in and around these death traps, namely, not robot cars. Robot cars will save 1000s of lives each year, is how the argument goes to that. I say, Where is Waymo operating? Right now, right? You might have noticed earlier in this monolog that Waymo has a lot of cars in San Francisco, a place where you have many transit agencies to choose from, where you are able to safely walk and bike in very large sections of the city. And yet, all of these AV companies are obsessed with optimizing their product line for a dense urban environment and putting it in the tech capital of the country. I don't think that that is incidental. Personally, I don't think it's just because, you know, companies like alphabet and other multinational AV companies happen to have a very big Silicon Valley presence. And they want to make sure their employees and their neighbors can access this technology. I think they want to replace a lot of dense urban mobility with cars, automated cars that they own, that they operate, that they profit off of. And they want to show that if they can do it there, they can do it everywhere, because that is how their product scales, and that is how their product profits.