Hop, Skip, Go. Stephen Baker
data standard is now dubbed MDS, for mobility datasets.
The key to controlling networked mobility is data. But who will own it? Could one dominant player, perhaps a company like Google, become the de facto mobility platform?
The strategy in the LA government is for the city to control the data, and to share it with other players on a need-to-know basis. From Reynolds’s point of view, who else can claim to be looking out for everyone?
Transit officials in LA have in fact been working on optimizing traffic for decades. Take an elevator down four levels beneath city hall, pass through a series of security barriers, and you’ll find yourself facing walls of TV screens in the Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control Room. Set up for the 1984 Olympics and originally funded by the federal government, it provides video feeds on hundreds of intersections and problem spots in LA. Back in 1984, the data analysis was primitive: human beings looked at TVs and saw traffic jams. The tools they had to respond were also unrefined. They could lengthen red or green lights where they saw problems, or in serious cases dispatch a traffic cop to the scene.
In the modern version, the surveillance network has spread to 4,700 intersections. In addition to images, sensors send in detailed reports on the traffic conditions: the number of vehicles passing, their speed, the flow of pedestrians. An AI engine churns through this information and attempts to optimize the flow, with a priority for mass transit. If a Metro bus, for example, is running behind schedule through East Hollywood, the computers can automatically orchestrate the lights on North Vermont Avenue to hurry it along.
Over time, the system will attempt to orchestrate the movement of growing numbers of vehicles, public and private alike. Autonomous cars, for example, will be sent along the most efficient paths and rerouted at a moment’s notice. Traffic lights will flash routing instructions to other cars, as well as to cyclists, and even to pedestrians.
When it comes to surveillance and control, as we’ll see in Dubai and Shanghai, this is still kids’ stuff. But unlike those cities, where government control has long been a fact of life, LA is attempting to manage millions of people who associate driving with freedom, who often view government with suspicion, if not contempt—and who can rebel at the polls against officials who rub them the wrong way.
ON THE BUSY pedestrian walkway in the oceanside municipality of Santa Monica, a black electric scooter, a Bird, is leaned against a palm tree. The Bird company, a hometown start-up, launched its business one autumn night simply by littering hundreds of its scooters throughout the eight square miles of Santa Monica, from its Ferris-wheeled pier all the way to the Brentwood town line. Residents who stopped the next morning to inspect these two-wheeled apparitions noticed a link to a smartphone app. Many downloaded the Bird app that very morning and started activating the scooters with their phones. (As a condition in the rental agreement, they vowed to wear bicycle helmets, but residents broke that promise en masse.) Paying a dollar for each ride, plus fifteen cents a minute, they were zipping around town with very few questions asked, other than “Will it get me there?” The answer was a resounding yes.
The day after the Bird scooters descended on Santa Monica, the company’s founder, a round-faced young man named Travis VanderZanden, reached out on LinkedIn to the mayor of Santa Monica, Ted Winterer, according to an account in the Washington Post. He invited him to drop by Bird’s headquarters. It was just a few blocks away. There they could discuss Bird’s mobility strategy for the region.
First, the mayor told him, they had a few legal issues to discuss. After all, Bird had never asked for authorization, much less discussed safety issues, sidewalks, or parking with the city. The company hadn’t said boo.
It didn’t take long to recognize a familiar pattern. VanderZanden, it turned out, was a former executive at both of the ride-sharing powerhouses, Lyft, and more significantly, Uber. The practice at Uber was to launch the service first and hammer out the legal details later. This had an impeccable logic. Once a mobility start-up gained lots of riders, it could attract millions of dollars from venture funders. Then it could use that money to hire armies of lawyers and make peace with the cities—to get legal. The key was to come to these negotiations as a popular and newly rich powerhouse, and not a supplicant.
The day that Bird launched in Santa Monica, VanderZanden was still bankrolling the company with just a small round of angel funding. But that changed quickly. Within weeks he had attracted $15 million in VC money, and another $100 million soon after that. By early 2018, when the company agreed to pay a $300,000 fine to the city, its valuation topped $1 billion. By that point, the Santa Monica fine was something Travis VanderZanden could have jammed into a tip jar. He had an enthusiastic customer base, a plan to expand nationally, and a fearsome fortune. Cities would take him on at their own peril.
This model extends throughout the tech economy. Giants like Amazon, Google, and Facebook have behaved like jumbo versions of Bird. They start by providing valuable services to billions, at low cost or for free. Largely unencumbered by government regulations in their early years, they go on to build market capitalizations bigger than entire industrial economies. In a Vice News feature, Euwyn Poon, cofounder of the San Francisco scooter company Spin, called this “innovating on the regulatory side.”
What’s more, because of the services they provide, these tech companies are often more popular than governments, more trusted, and widely viewed as essential. It’s often when something goes wrong—when their autonomous machines kill someone, or a tech platform is used to spread lies or hack an election—that governments can start to regulate them. But by that point, the tech companies can fight back, with their legions of customers, advertising might, and armies of lobbyists.
This build-first, fix-later model could spell catastrophe in the mobility revolution, and especially in car towns like LA. Seleta Reynolds envisions autonomous pods, pimped out as rolling lounges, carrying people on joyrides at low prices. These pods could be small bars or restaurants, game pods with virtual reality hookups, even smoking chambers offering rich selections of California’s legal marijuana. The skies could be black with drones, some of them flying across the Santa Monica Mountains just to pick up tacos or a roll of toilet paper.
If governments fail to assert their control with taxes and regulations, cheap, ubiquitous mobility services could overwhelm the entire region, much the way the automobile did.
STILL, AFTER A century of the automobile monoculture, the region’s mobility revolution also offers opportunities to tackle some of LA’s toughest challenges, including homelessness. According to Zillow, the real estate database company, a median-earning family in Southern California must pay a staggering 46.7 percent of its income to rent median-valued housing. This is the highest such rate in the country. Some 130,000 households can no longer afford this expense and are transient or homeless. The most vivid display of this scourge is the sprawling LA tent city known as Skid Row. It occupies a square mile between downtown and the Arts District and is home to some ten thousand people in wretched conditions.
As we mentioned earlier, the physical structure of LA favors cars, in many ways, over people. But as Angelenos find other ways to move around, many of them will be left with a legacy of the automobile age: the garage. Steven Dietz, a leading venture capitalist based in Santa Monica, recently launched a start-up called United Dwelling. The business plans to convert unused garages into affordable housing. With the right incentives, he says, this could dramatically expand the housing supply within LA, reducing its century-old sprawl.
It doesn’t even have to wait for the air taxis, speeding underground trains, or other wonders of the coming age of mobility. Not long ago, Dietz, who also teaches at the University of Southern California, had his students knock on doors in LA to find out what people kept in their garages. In a study of seven hundred residences, all of them with two-car garages, only 8 percent of homeowners kept their cars in the garage. “The rest of them parked in the driveway and used the garage to store their stuff,” he says, laughing.
“This could work,” says Mayor Garcetti, back at his office. He does some quick math. “We have five hundred thousand single-family homes in LA,” he says. “If ten percent of them could convert their garages, that would be fifty thousand new housing units.”
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