Andrew Miller

The good scenario depends on Waymo being available quickly and cheaply to everyone.

If there's a hard cap on the number of Waymos, you don't get there.

So regulators need to be willing to say, no, a future where every other car is a robo-taxi is a good thing, and they don't try to prevent that outcome.

And so I say it's related because the other side of it is what do public transit agencies do?

Do they see robo-taxis as the enemy that has to be kept out?

Or do you go with what they called in the 20th century the soft embrace and say, we're going to bring these in?

We don't run long feeder buses anymore that come twice an hour and take 35 minutes to get to the nearest hub.

Instead, we replace that with...

We own some robo-taxis or we license some robo-taxis and anyone can get a robo-taxi trip that takes them to or from the nearest higher order station.

So we began to bring automated driving into our transit.

Our buses.

Yeah, that's a really hard row to hoe because public transit agencies are some of the most unionized environments in this country.

They're going to see this as a threat to their livelihoods, which it is.

So what I hope we can do then is instead of...

We shouldn't just throw them out en masse.

I'm a transit advocate.

I want there to be good transit systems, but I also want transit to have benefit of the best technology available.

If that means doing a big buyout package one time, we should do that.

We should take that deal.

but it might be a hard sell in an era of limited budgets.