On cspan 3. Working with cable affiliate and visiting cities across the country. This past september, the national Highway Traffic Safety Administration mentioned guidelines for Autonomous Vehicles. Experts and consultant sat down to talk about driverless, shared and electric vehicles and the future of transportation. This took place at Common Wealth club of california in San Francisco. Good even aeng welcome to tonights meeting of the Common Wealth club of california. The place where you and we are all in the know. We are online, at commonwealthclub. Org, on facebook, twitter and check out the Common Wealth club youtube channel. Im janette shaw. Ceo of techolicy and your moderator for Autonomous Vehicles and the future of transport. Ive been in technology for over 30 years. Techolicy provides stake holder engagement to meet the needs of the individual sector such as Autonomous Vehicles. Prior to techolicy, i worked for a fortune 500 company and chosen by Kleiner Perkins to establish tech net, otherwise known as technology network, an National Tech focused toek until ji organization. And this evening, i am going to be honored to introduce such a wonderful panel and once i introduce the panel, were going to go ahead and review the definition of what an Autonomous Vehicle is, so well set the stage and then each panelist will have three to five minutes to talk about their vision and what the landscape looks to them for Autonomous Vehicles. Following the panelist openings, well then have q and a and that will include audience questions that youll have written on the cards and will be passed up. So with that, id like to start with and introduce emily castor. Emily is the director of transportation policy at lyft. Emily has been on the front of ride sharing policies since the birth of the industry. Thats a long time. Its not so long. Thats whats scary. In dog years maybe. She leads lyfts work with transportation agencies to integrate shared mobility and measure its impacts. Emily believes lyft is a critical tool to expand transportation access, reduce car ownership and cut carbon emissions. Emily is an Advisory Board member at the institute of transportation studies at ucla on the sharing Economy Advisory Network and on the Leadership Council of the National Center for Sustainable Transportation among many other board positions. I also had the opportunity to ask each board member panelist about a fun fact about them and emilys fun fact is that she has a hidden talent for saying the alphabet backwards very, very fast. We need to have you do that at the end of the program. Afterparty. There we go. And shes also addicted to ice cream and can recommend at least five recommended ice cream shops here in San Francisco. I think can i list a few. Ice cream bar, mitchells, mr. And mrs. Miscellaneous, buy right and smitten. Next is clair. Shes at auto recently purchased by uber. She brings robotics to the team. After graduating from epsi in france with an ms in computer engineering, clair worked on Autonomous Cars and robots for tempura, Stanford Research and gostay. And several Companies Including next to robots, robotics valley. And most recently, a Staff Software engineer for google where she led several innovative robotic projects. I can only imagine what that would have been like. Would be fun to be a fly on the wall. And a fun fact about claire. When she was younger, choosing between veterinary sigh answers Computer Science, and despite her love of nature, she actually ultimately chose Computer Science and thankfully because we have a robotics project today, so welcome. Thank you. Our next panelist, no stranger to the Autonomous Vehicle world is lauren isaac. The manager of Sustainable Transportation at w. S. P. Parason springerhof. And involved in advanced Technology Products that can improve mobility in many cities in 2015, awarded the William Barkley parsons fellowship for driving toward driverless. In addition, lauren maintains the blog driving towards driverless. Thats got to be a fulltime job. And on this topic in more than 30 industry conferences. She recently did a ted ex talk and it published in forbes, New York Times and the chicago tribu tribune among other publications. A master of engineering degree in operations, research, and Industrial Engineering and bachelors degree in the same discipline from cornell university. The two engineers in the center of our panel. And the fun fact about lauren as well, congratulations, just got married a few weeks ago. And she was on a mission to get a driverless vehicle at her wedding. Emily was recently engaged, i think youll have to do the same. At least youll get there by lyft. And despite having multiple companies and people in the industry working hard to make it happen, seems she might have been just a little early. So a couple of the companies though, thankfully, have promised her a driverless vehicle at the oneyear anniversary celebration. And then our final panelist introduction is lindsey willis, the director of external affairs at Contra Costa Transportation Authority and lindsey is responsible for directing communication, advocacy, and Community Engagement efforts. Her leadership has produced Award Winning public engagement, programs at International Recognition for the innovative utilization of technology and if you havent been on Contra Costa CountyAuthority Transportation web site, i recommend it because the technology is amazing that lindsey has put together. Lindsey is responsible for increasing Brand Awareness for the 1. 3 billion in transportation programs including directing the launch of go momentum station in concord, california, the nations largest secured connected vehicle in Autonomous Vehicle test bed. Got to be an amazing place to sit and watch. Some people watch airplanes. I think could you just watch Autonomous Vehicles go by. In prior to 2013, developed Strategic Partnership for the capital corridor joint powers authority. Fun fact about lindsey, lindseys first introduction to transportation other than sharing the backseat of a Station Wagon with her three sisters, had to have been exciting, was a train trip from california to vancouver for the 1986 world fair. Many years later, her first job in transportation was with the capital corridor Train Service which is here in california. That is our panelists. So at this time, ook, so what is an Autonomous Vehicle. It has other names too such as driverless vehicle, selfdriving vehicle, highly automated vehicle, a new term we recently have seen from the federal government or robotic car. Do you think of johnny cab in total recall, featuring former governor, arnold schwarzenegger, when you hear Autonomous Vehicle . That sometimes comes to my mind. So what is it . An Autonomous Car is a vehicle thats capable of sensing its environment and navigating without human interaction. They can detect their surroundings using a variety of techniques including radar, sensors and communication networks. So now id like to go down the line starting with emily and if you could paint a picture of how to define and what you see in the future of Autonomous Vehicles looking alike. Sure. Well, im really excited to be here and share a little bit about lyfts vision for Autonomous Vehicles and i think its easy to imagine an entry point into that because ride sharing that started to lay the groundwork in that recession and mobility and next few years, autonomous. If you think about it, its the beginning of a major transition away from the relationship with vehicles being one of ownership toward a relationship of transportation as a service. So lyft has taught people to have that kind of relationship over the last few years as weve rolled out ondemand mobility through a digital interface, tap a button, have a driver show up and theres not a huge difference between that behavior and the behavior of tapping a button on our phone and having an Autonomous Vehicle show up. Youre not driving it, youre not owning it. Youre accessing that when you need it and only when you need it. So were excited about the fact that the network we built laid the groundwork for what can later be layered on top as Autonomous Technology becomes available. And our founder, john zimmer, spoke recently and published his thoughts recently about what we see as this coming transportation revolution. First, the country experienced was the development of trains and canals that facilitated interstate commerce and the second is the one that were all living in now and grown up in of the automobile. Interstate highways that cut up our cities. And really change the relationship of people to the urban environment and what many might say was a negative way and what we experience now on the cusp of is an opportunity to reclaim the urban vitality weve lost to restructure our environment so its no longer centered around car ownership and can take the space, devote it to new more productive uses. If you think about the parklets that proliferate on the streets here in San Francisco, and are wonderful in restoring common spaces, thats a small taste of what we expect well be able to enjoy as cities, urban dwellers in the future as the need for parking is eliminated. The need for car ownership is eliminated and use it to build green space and this can be toward leveraging autonomous in many ways and a new mode thats available on top of lyfts existing platform and not an adrupt transition for our users. Instead it can be gradual. In environment where is this is something we believe we can test successfully in the early deployments, there may be corridors, fixed routes or zones extensively mapped and monitored for the quality and capability of the infrastructure in the locations to make sure theyre appropriate for autonomous in the beginning and generate consumer acceptance and then gradually expand it to the point where its available anywhere and do so in a way you might associate with Wireless Networks online and slow edge data connection and then it just dropped on to your phone. You didnt have to go out and buy new technology. This is something could you tap into. And something were excited to see seeing to democratizing access to. This is a cost of getting a lyft comes down with the very significance of autonomy. I guess ill leave it at that. All right, why dont i Start Talking about truck instead of cars . So what is an autonomous truck . Well, an autonomous truck would be like is baysically like the old truck that we all know with a lot of censor, able to perceive the environment like much bigger than a human would do. Just because we see with laser, we see with radar, we see with cameras, we see where a truck with gps and with all this information, the truck get a very like where it is and surrounding environment. So that what we put in the cars. This is why uber decided to acquire auto to transfer technology and to basically send like a dimension and push the av space forward. So there is a lot of potential. And this is not like the car to imagine without a driver and look at the road and so we already started. The current car that we already have, we call them Aid Assistance to driving. But we accumulating little by little, technology called bricks that are essential to make a vehicle fleet, so like a gradual process. There is a lot of things that have to evolve around the vehicle. Like when you think about the word, the word was designed for humans. Everything we see was designed for humans. Like stop signs. Lights. The pedestrian. Everything for the human. But if we want to make an Autonomous Vehicle, like the mass market, the Autonomous Vehicles, we will also have to change faster and to adapt it to make it more meshing friendly, i would say. So that the robot can adjust in the environment easier. So that would be the technique. I talked a lot about social impacts. I will let the panel give theyre point of view. Okay. Thank you. So i come at this from a different angle. A piece of what we do is consulting for Government Agencies on advising them on transportation and infrastructure projects. Ive been in this space my whole career and about 2 1 2 years ago i started reading about driverless vehicles. And what was clear at the time is the technology was advancing quickly but our clients, the Government Agencies, were really at that time not very aware of that technology and if you look at the headlines from back then, it was all about, you know, whos putting the most test miling on the road but almost nothing about what the government is doing so thats about when i started my research about what government can do to plan for driverless vehicles. Im happy to say, fast forward to where we are today, government has been involved. Jeannette just talked about the federal policy. Ive been really interested in focusing on the local and state governments can do partially because we see the technology out on the streets now but if you look at most agencies long, short, and long range plans from fiveyear plans to 40 and 50 year plans, over 90 dont acknowledge that driverless vehicles are coming. So when you think about that, when you think about the impact that they can have on society, those positive and negative. Theres a lot of impacts there are going to be really symbiotic and improve safety, mobility for different populations like elderly and disabled people but theres also some risks and i think its really important that Government Agencies start to become aware of what these are. If we have a society where lyft and uber dont end up with the other automakers and doing more but if we see a society similar to what we have today with a lot of vehicle ownership and single occupancy vehicle trips and then with what driverless vehicles present which is zero occupancy trips being allowed, we have a risk of a huge increase in vehicle miles traveled and im one of the biggest fans of driverless vehicles and i cant wait to see them proliferate in society but i think government has an Important Role to play. In terms of managing the benefits. Making sure we reap the benefits of them but also mitigate the risks. So when i first met lauren, her question to me was why is a county Government Agency involved in driverless vehicles . What do you guys have to do with this . I want to give some background for those of you who dont know who the contra costa authority is or maybe not as famous as the other companies that im sharing the stage with tonight. So in 1988, voters chose to tax themselves with a sales tax to pay for transportation and our agency plans, funds, and delivers those transportation improvements, that the voters voted for. And in california, theres actually 20 counties that tax them through sales tax to help pay for transportation or the bay area. San francisco is one of them and they play a critical part in keeping california moving. They invest about 3 billion to 4 billion a year into the Transportation System and infrastructure. So how that kind of rolls out, fast forward to 2004, that 1988 measure was about to expire, went back out to voters to ask them to decide to renew the sales tax for another 25 years and you may be able to get people to choose to tax themselves once but if youre not delivering on the promises, theyre not going to give you another chance to do that and im proud to say 71 of voters in contra costa decided to continue that tax and continue to Fund Transportation improvements. And our job is to make this happen and in addition, to making the improvements happen, part of our responsibility involved being the Congestion Management Agency for the county so finding ways to mitigate traffic and the Long Range Planning agency so staff of only 20 people, were pretty busy. But those last responsibilities led to the interest in Autonomous Vehicles. As lauren mentioned, not many agencies kind of look forward as they develop their long range plans, the tendency is to take todays technology and embed it into a plan for the next 2