Ep22: Robin Chase ‘Mobility, Cities and Social Entrepreneurship’

Transcript

'Cleaning Up' is brought to you by the Liebreich Foundation, and the Gilardini Foundation. My name is Michael Liebreich, and this is 'Cleaning Up'. My guest this week is Robin Chase. She's a co-founder of Zipcar, the world's leading car sharing company. She founded it in 1999. And it was sold in 2012, to Avis Budget for $491 million. So she's a very successful entrepreneur. She's gone on to start a number of other smart mobility companies, which we'll talk about during the course of this episode. She's also taken the lessons that she learned from Zipcar and the other companies, and thought deeply about the future of transportation, the future of cities, and the future of our societies. Please welcome Robin Chase. So Robin, thank you very much for joining us.

Hi Michael!

Yes. And where are you today? Where are you joining us from?

I'm here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, outside of Boston.

And as we film this, you've got a new president elect, right?

I'm so excited about it. Thankfully, every day I wake up feeling better and better.

So I take it you didn't vote for President Trump?

Absolutely, positively not. And I voted with a mail-in ballot, I knew my vote would be counted.

So you must still be on tenterhooks as to whether that gets disqualified some miraculous or some awful way. But most likely not. So I think we're, as we've been filming this, we've gone from the day of the election to thinking we know the results to now being pretty, you know, bulletproof certain, I think at this point.

I love the idea that he's going to be able to say in some future years, I never conceded. But yeah, he is now making the transition and we are moving ahead.

Now, Robin, we've got a lot to talk about, because you've been a successful entrepreneur and you've started a number of the companies, which are really the bedrock of new mobility, modern mobility, but you're also involved in some, I'm assuming, pro bono activities around the future of the city. So what I'd like to do is start first with those mobility startups and understand a little bit more, you know, how you got into them? Why you took that entrepreneurial route? And then I think they segue into the broader questions of what our cities look like, and how do we make sure they work well, which is what you spend a lot of time on now. So what was your first step into entrepreneurship, was it, of course, you're the founder of Zipcar, was that your first startup?

That was my first startup, and it is 20 years ago, which is just mind boggling to me. But it was through Zipcar that I understood the power of the private sector to move and shape markets in a socially positive way. I would say that wasn't my... my desire wasn't for environmental, the environmental upside of Zipcar. But I would also say that there was no way I was going to spend 100 hours a week and years and years of my life on something that didn't have positive social benefits. So I did Zipcar from 2000 till 2005. And what I realised then, and this became my new lifelong obsession was that transportation is the centre of our universe, in fact, and I look at it as the gateway to opportunity. So no matter what you care about, transportation is the glue that makes that possible. So are you interested in entrepreneurship, you know, or education or healthcare or equality? Whatever it is, its potentiality is hindered or facilitated by transportation. So I became completely hooked on it. And I would say way later than Al Gore, climate change became important to me. And then I also realised that transportation is a key contributor to emissions. So it just was wrapped up in this one industry, this one sector, all of my loves. And so I become completely fascinated by it. And I've done several successful and failed startups in urban transportation since then.

So just what were you doing before Zipcar?

I used to work in public health. So what was beautiful about Zipcar just in terms of what it teed up. And I am very proud of it. A colleague at MIT wrote a book on the Internet of Things. And he says Zipcar was one of its first expressions, that we had all these vehicles parked around that you could interact with. And Zipcar was the first, let's say a platform, a really strong platform

company. And first part of the sharing economy, our application of wireless that you couldn't make. And the internet was really, really novel when we first started. So it created a kind of fascination for me with what technology enables, what capitalism has the potential to do, in terms of changing social... impacting social values. And I want to say capitalism also has a huge amount of downsides. We may or may not ever get to that. But it, it totally sparked me. And so after that, I did a ride sharing company. And I would say everyone has failed, everyone's failed at ride sharing, except for Blablacar, who was a friend of mine, and it succeeded in Europe, for very particular reasons. Whereas in the US, no ride sharing company has really succeeded. And then I did peer to peer car sharing a company called Buzzcar in Paris. And that I was not.. we were not the number one person and we merged with Drivy.

Yeah, that became that was bought by Drivy.

Yep, drive, and then they merged with Getaround in the US. And then I did a company called Veniam, which is a vehicle communications company that's still thriving and going strong, my co- founder is CEO and they're out of Portugal, they're moving data from vehicles to the cloud. And that's an important piece of... as we move forward in increasingly connected vehicles, the networking aspect of that, the networking data aspect

That's the one that's called the Internet of Moving Things, correct?

Correct. Veniam, the Internet of Moving Things.

Okay. So let's get on. But it's so fascinating that for you, Zipcar was the kind of gateway drug into climate awareness. Is that fair to say?

It is, definitely,

For me, it was New Energy Finance, I didn't say, oh, my goodness, look at what's happening to the climate, how can I help, let me start a clean energy information company. I said, you know, there's a gap here, and I need I, you know, I need to put some runs on the board as an entrepreneur, and it looks like a good sector, and I kind of know, a few bits and pieces. And of

course, then it all started to sort of unwrap and unfold. And I thought, you know, holy moly, we really need to do something here. And, and that that pulled me in. So it sounds like you probably have something of a similar experience.

It is. And when I talk to young people, or people interested in changing their careers, or anybody about climate change, sometimes people want to say, oh, but you know, it doesn't, you could do that, because it's transportation. But this isn't something that's relevant to me. And I say, no, our entire economy is steeped in fossil fuel. And every single aspect of that, whether you're a physician or an artist, or whatever it is, we have to get fossil fuels out of that. So this is something that everyone can be participating in, in every road, there is nothing that is excluded from that conversation.

One of the things that has been so fascinating about these 'Cleaning Up' talks is just how people kind of, you know, achieve the whatever you call it consciousness, or their kind of the worldview that they've got those. This is reminding me very strongly of conversation with Kandeh Yumkella. I think it's number, I'm going to say number 18, 'Cleaning Up' number 18. Because he kind of woke up over a period of years to the realisation that energy is the red thread in development, all of the Sustainable Development Goals you can't do without energy. And you've had a similar experience, where you've sort of woken up to the fact that transport is like, oh, if we don't solve this, we solve nothing. And actually, a lot of the problems stem from transportation, maybe done badly, or in an old fashioned way, or in a way that doesn't price externalities, right?

It's interesting when you talk about that, I think both... all of our stories is this hidden, 'aha!' moment around things that are embedded in incredibly important and underappreciated. And so just on this transportation point, I was part of a World Economic Forum Global Advisory Council, and they had 700 of these, I think they had 100 of them. And there are 700 people, all meeting together in Abu Dhabi. And at one point you were supposed to meet with other groups that were related. And I of course, think transportation is the centre of everything. So are you talking about women's empowerment? Education? Cities? Urban development? Poverty? Crime? Like whatever, that you would want to talk to transportation. And it turned out no one came to talk to us. And I was agog I, was agog, that people were so underappreciating that there was nothing that they were hoping to do for which transportation was not an important impediment that they needed to get around.

See, the thing is I was also on an Agenda Council, I was on the Agenda Council for Alternative Energy, where our first point of action was, we refused to meet as the Alternative Energy Agenda Council we demanded to be called sustainable energy or clean energy. But I wanted to talk to the financiers, you know, I didn't want to go and talk to transport, even though they're, of course, you know, linked like this, I needed to go and talk to the central bankers, to the Pension Agenda Council, etc, etc, because that was our problem.

And to the same point, that Council that you didn't want to be on. Mine was, I think, the future of transportation. And then they changed it after three years to be the future of cars. And I said, I'm out. Like, I'm not interested in the future of cars, I'm interested in the future of mobility or transportation.

I want to come to NUMO in a second, because I think that's where, you know, you're sort of understanding of the system nature and the externalities, the downs, the need to get it right, on a much broader network, a much broader basis comes together. But before we do that, if I might, you are a very successful woman entrepreneur. And I mean, is that you, when I say that, do you think, you know, do you bridle at that and just say, Look, I'm just an entrepreneur, I'm just, you know, or is there a part of your story that is specific to the fact that you're a woman.

When I was doing all of those startups, I didn't feel that I was discriminated against. And I was kind of irritated when people would bring it up. The farther I get from those moments, the more I appreciate that I was an incredibly outlying person, and that a huge amount of my issues came from the fact that I was a woman. And when a man did that same thing, it was considered simple and straightforward, or I want to say that absolutely, I was discriminated against when I was fundraising. In particular, I'd say particularly with fundraising. I was discriminated against. And to this piece, I just, I want to say that some venture capitalists, in their minds are thinking that they are not discriminatory. But one time I had... So let me tell you this story, I went to visit a venture capitalist in Harvard Square, which is about a mile from my house. And I decided to ride my bike. And I got there early, because I got there so fast. So I was sitting in the reception area, waiting. And as I was sitting in waiting, I was watching the VCs come and interact with the receptionist in that area. And it was the most striking thing. All the all of VCs were men. And they were coming the receptionist and the conversations were Oh, I see they've swapped out two new recycling receptacles? Aren't those pretty? What's for lunch? And what's the lunch being brought in? And what you know, when is it coming? And what is the bathroom code? Meanwhile, I was also saying other conversations that were between the men, and the conversations between the VC men Oh, did you see that company and the other guy came in? And did you talk about this deal plan?

And I was realising that their interactions with women, were all I want to say, mundane, nothing to do with business and economics and innovation. So I feel that men, and I would say, and women, and I want to say, entrepreneurs, women entrepreneurs who have children, we have a kind of super bond. And so when I talk to a female entrepreneur, I have a stronger bond than when I talk to an entrepreneur who's a man. And if I talk to an entrepreneur who's also a mother simultaneously as I was, I have a super bond. So I feel like that is an underappreciated thing. And then when I watched my successor at Zipcar, all these relationships that I had created over my time, he walked into and in a minute and a half. Oh, yeah, we went to the same schools, we played the same sports and we blah, blah, blah, and it was like this instant and I thought, like, I thought I had a bond with these guys. But it was a bond that was slower to make and harder to do because I was a woman.

Do you think just the ideas of shared vehicles and the way you've built your businesses, you know, would a guy have seen that opportunity and understood the value proposition in the same way? Do you think that there was an advantage there?

Well, when we go to stereotypes, of course not. So I'm sure it's some men, some men did, and some men started these companies. But as I look at it, I just feel like at Zipcar, we did so many beautiful, beautiful things. And it was because I was doing things in what we think of as more feminine ways that relationships really mattered to me, providing a value proposition that was very firm, treating people with extreme respect, and not lying. All of those things I would say, I would say that to be...

There must be practical things like also just thinking through the security aspect of being somewhere and having to sort of not fumble for keys, but fumble for a code and just you know that you're going to be...

Some of those things. But I would, you know, so now there's many studies out on women entrepreneurs, and they say women run much leaner companies, that we waste money less, we have less turnover in our companies. Women are famous for multitasking and being able to do longer term strategies, I feel like all those counted,

I have an angel investment in a woman CEO led company, it is also the only company where the CEO is absolutely on top of the variable costs and the unit profitability from day one from month one from six months one. And there's none of this kind of, oh, I'm just going to go and talk to some bro and get another million dollars if I haven't figured it out, because I'm going to move fast and break things. It's like, No, you know, it's just it is. I don't know, like, obviously, that's too small a data point to know if that's because she's a woman. But But my God, I will say

Profoundly, profoundly for me, that was exactly the case is that I knew all of these things. And I was just reading some... a parody article on all brands now, trying to become being authentic and thinking about their consumers and caring and I thought we were that from day zero, because I really did care about my consumers. And I really, they were the number ones. And I actually think of those consumers at the time as partners. But it was very much... so I'd say all those women's tendencies. Yeah, it's stereotypes. But yes.

This is a really important topic. And I'm also… I’m going to think about the guests that I can bring in. Because we've had Nancy Pfund - was the 2006, first investor in Tesla. And I asked her similar questions to say, well, you know, did you see that opportunity, all the other VCs laughed at a car company and she saw it and I asked her whether it was just a different perspective, and so on. But we've got a problem still, just the sheer math, the arithmetic of how many women VCs, and how many women entrepreneurs or C-suite in entrepreneurial startups there are, it's still dramatically underrepresented. And I don't know what to do about it.

There was an interesting article I read just this morning, I think in the New Yorker that I would encourage you to read, that is about the venture capital realm, and it was using WeWork, which I want to say is the most extreme, extreme, extreme example of all the bad things that can happen. But I would

More extreme than Uber!

Which was extreme. And if we... I just as we talked about this gender piece of both investors and VCs, I would say the excesses of a WeWork's investors and the excesses of WeWork's founders would be... so we would be so hard pressed to imagine women doing those things. Yeah, that so I feel like they're just as I was reading this article, and they don't mention gender at all. But I was just reading and I was just thinking, it's kind of inconceivable to me that I would walk in and after

a 15 minute conversation say, I'll give you $1.4 billion. Like, no matter how clever I thought I was, I just could not imagine doing it. Or spending money on... as a CEO spending money on all sorts of crazy, crazy things that I feel like my investors' money. I felt so much responsibility to do well by that money. Like it was another huge burden in there

The funny thing is, I felt those things which you know, in a way you're now characterising as sort of the women's approach to entrepreneurship when I was at New Energy Finance, but I was in my 40s and I can almost guarantee, hand on heart, had I started company at 25. I don't want to say out I would have been a <beep>, but there's a very good chance I would have been a <beep>.

Yeah, but I started Zipcar when I was 42. So maybe I was also cleverer than.

Okay, great topic for later, for another 'Cleaning Up' sort of, you know, what, what are the, you know, what are the age trajectories, gender differences in VCs and entrepreneurs, we will come back to that. Let's move on now to NUMO. And that stands for new urban mobility. And that's very proud because I worked that out, a little help from Google. And I suspect that a lot of... I just thought it, that's a cute name, that's great. But then I thought, well, there's probably, knowing Robin, there's more to it than that. So talk me through how you went from Zipcar. And then these other startups. And then suddenly, you're doing this kind of network of cities and stakeholders, and so on around the design of our future cities, and what were the steps in between.

So NUMO was created, because as I flew around the world, with a big carbon footprint, and talk to different governments, and I'd say, innovative companies, what was striking to me in the realm of urban transportation, was that cities were so angry at some of the startups, as you know, so Uber and Lyft. And then the scooter companies, and the shared bicycles, they were so angry that you companies are coming in, and you're destroying all these things we had. Yet, when I talked to the CEOs and policy people in those companies, they would say, cities never tell us what they want, they have no idea what they want. And there's just this complete disconnect. So NUMO was... So because of that, I convened 10 of the world's largest city and transportation NGOs. And we spent seven months pounding out something called the shared mobility principles for livable cities. And so there are 10 of them. And the idea was to have these 10 principles that were high level were applicable to 95% of the cities, to which cities and business and NGOs could jointly agree, here's where we want to go. And so I'll tell you, some of you know, some of them are things like, when we build, we build cities and transportation together. So we build buildings and transportation together, we don't do them without thinking about the other. Or we move people

and not cars. Or we make efficient use of all of our assets, meaning streets and curbs, and vehicles. So we want to make efficient use of things. So there are these 10. And we have today, I think, 400 some very large, and many innovative companies that signed on. And so NUMO is this alliance of entities that share common values, and through that sharing... can we through the shared values, can we more quickly get to this? I'd say that the mission statement is you know, we want to build sustainable, just and equitable cities. And here's an in transportation realm, here are 10 principles that help you get there. So NUMO has been doing that. And of course, that's a huge, crazy giant ask, and that's why it's an alliance. So we've been working with a number of partners, at different paces, in different depths. C40, I think this London based among them. Right now, one of the things that NUMO is thinking a lot about for this upcoming year, are I'd say two points. One is addressing systemic racism in the US that's come up, which I... we will note exists in every country. Sometimes it's black people, sometimes it's people of colour, sometimes it's indigenous. But that type of keeping a certain class and group down is kind of ubiquitous. And the other piece, because we really focus on urban transportation, is to get us all looking more at the journeys that are less than three miles in distance, five commerce in distance, which are 50% of the trips, that right now, in wealthy countries are being done by car everywhere. So I can discuss this thesis with you more.

So one of the things as you were talking about the shared principles, right, we just go back to the shared principles that you mentioned. One of the things that you actually emailed me an early version. And in preparation for this, I went back to my emails, and I looked at my comments on it, which were.. which... and they evolved. I love the 10 principles. Absolutely love them. And by the way, what we'll do is we'll put a link into the shownotes. And so, you know, everybody can log in, and they can look at them and marvel at how fantastic they are. And then presumably, they can join NUMO.

They can check this out and say 'I want to be part of the Shared Mobility Principles'.

yes. But you know, in the early versions, the thing that sort of triggered me because I come at this as a sort of either, you know, partly as a conservative, but also thinking about, well, you want to build a big tent, you're also going to need people who are on the centre-right. And on the right of the political divide, and you have a number of things in there, that I was like umm, a red flag, you know, all data will be pooled, only renewable energy will be used, every shared vehicle, every autonomous vehicle must be shared, and it

That's still there. Number 10.

They're not really still there. Some of them are not, or at least you managed...

Right, some no. And that was, that was what happens when you work with 10 people for three hours every two weeks, over seven months from different cultures and different backgrounds. And it was torturous work of negotiation, and conciliation. Yes.

Yeah, you know, if those principles are still there, you've removed the hot button language, the red flags, you know, because I can sit here and say, you know, I could say, I see nothing objectionable. It is clearly one of the things that's very interesting, you do have to have one, you do have to accept one starting point, which is that the city is full of shared resources, or that the city is, you know, that it's not an individualistic created entity in the sense that there are externalities to almost everything you do in a city, you don't put your garbage out right. There's an externality, you're gonna get rats and your neighbours gonna complain. You don't park right. It's all micromanaging those externalities, which even a conservative has to accept that there are externalities. If you don't accept that, then you check out from the whole thing, I guess.

Michael, this was an interesting analysis, I just read about the current the recent election, the US circles back to that, that people who live in cities recognise the huge importance of government, because at each and every moment, we're having to negotiate with a whole bunch of people and those rules make sense. And government's part in those rules makes sense. If you live in a rural area, you think that government doesn't exist, and you don't ever see your neighbours, who are all far away. And so it feels to people in rural areas as though the government is irrelevant and don't get in my business. And I had just never thought about that. As where you live and where your everyday interaction is... Those of us who live in dense urban areas think, wow, we really need to have a set of rules here, so that we can work together. Just a side observation.

Yeah, no, it's a good one I was having an observation about there was if you look at the correlation between wind power per capita, and political choices, what you actually find is it's the red states with more wind. And so what somebody was trying to hypothesise was that the red states love wind, whereas I was thinking, well hang on a second. They're just rural and rural areas are better for wind, and there's probably no causal correlation at all. But yours...

Then you have the offshore wind. And you have offshore wind, which is where dense conurbations can see them. And yeah, I think that we are selfless in many ways, right? It's not in my backyard. I love this idea until you want to do it next door, and then suddenly, I don't like it anymore.

Yeah. Well, well, you know, one thing, there's a subtext here, which is that this polarisation somehow, you know, people like you, people like me, we're gonna have to sort of help to bring sides together, because this fragmentation is really, really damaging.

Hey, let me tell you the story that's triggering the thing that I've been working on recently. So it was still pre pandemic days, and I was leaving the Washington DC airport, I had just gone through security. And the person immediately behind me in the security line was Elizabeth Warren. And so I turned to her. She looks famous, I don't look famous. It's I turned around. I said, Elizabeth, I've been really wanting to talk to you about your transportation policy. And she said, oh, what do you think about raising gas, the gas tax? So you and I, the fuel tax, I'd say for British audiences. And you and I will know that in America, the fuel tax has been desperately low, completely out of whack. Anybody who's ever worked in transportation is constantly, constantly wanting to raise the fuel tax. Here was amazing part. One of the one of the amazing parts was I thought about it for a minute and then I said, you know what, I don't think you should raise the gas tax. Because it's ... I'm forgetting the word now. It's becoming...it's an obsoleting tax, and so don't lose any political capital on this because it's an obsoleting tax.

It's going to become irrelevant.

And then she said to me, Oh, thank goodness, because I'm really worried about the rural poor. Then we said goodbye. And then I went and sat by myself in my own plane going to wherever I was going. But what struck me at that moment was, wow, when you're a politician running at a national level for president, why transportation is never discussed is because it's a very polarising depending on where you live. And so I was thinking long and hard for the next months. And then I came up with an idea and I've been working on last year, what is a transportation issue that would be universally liked, and is relevant to people in rural areas, people in suburban areas and people in urban areas? Are you ready?

Yes, let's go for it. And what did you come up with that is the unifying principle of transportation?

So my unifying principle is, there's a piece of infrastructure that we need that is completely lacking at this moment, which is a a network of sidewalks, cycle tracks, lanes and trails that are available to pedestrians and people who don't own a driver's licence and unlicensed vehicles. And then let me just paint that for you a little more than 50% of the population right now, as we're sitting talking, either doesn't have a driver's licence, or doesn't have access to a car at this minute. 50% of the population is completely trapped in a car dominant environment. And so I'm trying to elevate up that this is something that... So who are the 50%? So 20% are children less than 16. 19% are people with physical impairments, who will never be able to get a driver's licence. There's something like 9% and this is going to depend on different countries, who've lost their licences, perhaps temporarily, because they were driving under the influence or had you know, drug issues. There are people who, here coming to the US. So in the US, across the whole US, 8% of the households don't have a car. And we might say 8% is a small percentage, we don't care about them, but we do. But it turns out, it's 20% of the black households that don't have a car. Then we could say, okay, what about households where they have one car, 40% of the households have one car, when you're living in a household with more than one person and the person took the car, you're screwed. So just as I've been reflecting on this, we in transportation, we're always talking about cars and car travel, and public transportation, completely leaving out this thing that I'm trying to call the Freedom Network, which enables us to travel for no money or low cost, and without the need of a driver's licence. And so it's and to this place where I think I started 50% of all trips are less than five kilometres. So it's not a small amount of travel. And with the rise of e- bikes, which is booming around the world. I heard a number yesterday, which I'm going to repeat, but I haven't fact checked yet, which was 40 million bikes were sold last year, which is one bike for every two cars, it was the biggest year for bikes, ever. So I feel like with the rise of e-bikes, which completely transforms the equation and the distances and the ease. I think we have this ability to really get people. I think with all those single occupancy vehicles, people do love autonomy, and they do love to go around, can we convert them into e-bikes? And they would if we had the infrastructure.

And my question is... That a that's a great, I mean, the observations are all spot on. And then the question is, what do you do with that observation? Is it a business opportunity? Is it a is it new services, or because you know that a lot of discussion in Europe at least is around what they call the 15 minutes city? So we say well...

So coming to what for me right now... Given this stimulus money that's about to happen worldwide. I would like to see this. If you remember after 2008 I don't know what it was like for you in Europe. But in the US, I remember travelling in like 2010 after lots of money have been spent, and I was in Florida and I left the airport and I was on this highway that looked like it had been cleaned with a toothbrush and you could have dinner off of it. Basically, all the shovel ready projects were let's build wider, more sparkling, more spectacular highways to the depths of everything else. So I think, yes, some of this infrastructure money should go towards maintaining highways and maintaining bridges for that. In our wealthy countries, we could be spending some of that money on building up this network. And city's part of that.

Right, but let me play devil's advocate here, you know, we've got this discussion going on, in spades at the moment in in the UK, right, because during the pandemic, there were various stories around the world of countries that were doing pop up bike lanes and so on, and making it more walkable, you know, extending pavements or rest of it. And, astonishingly, the UK got on board with that, instead of just saying that's, you know, that's all that change, we don't like change and so on. Actually, at the level of the council and even you know, the Secretary... the Department of Transport, Grant Shapps, put a lot of money, nearly couple hundred million pounds into bike lanes and so on. And for a while everybody was very excited about that. And I'll tell you something the backlash against that now is extreme. It's absurd. It's totally off the scale. It's, you know, it's accusing anybody who, you know, the councils who've put in, you know, bike lane to... what they did is they changed the law and said, instead of having to do a consultation before, you could put in the bike lane today, and then do the consultation afterwards, right? Because the pandemic was going on, if you had to do a consultation for 12 weeks, forget it, it was too long. So the pushback. And the reason for the pushback is the car, the proponents of the car city, see it a zero sum, either there's a bicycle lane, or we get to continue our lives as normal, and there's no middle ground at...No middle ground at all in that discussion. So how do you get over that? How do you persuade them, that what you're talking about is not an existential threat to their own businesses and way of life and, you know, convenience and whatever.

Exactly, and this is what I've been trying to work on. I feel, I feel like marketing is everything, right? That we... you can sell people anything, sadly, with good marketing. And I think there's cost benefits of everything. And we need to elevate the costs and elevate the benefits depending on which side. And so this is the piece with this Freedom Network that I'm really trying to push is I'm really trying to make and I have to do a better job. But honestly, in people's own households, they should be able to recognise and see themselves, their children, their parents, their brother in law, in this group of trapped people. That, um, I've been thinking that, you know, over the last

100 years, we've made it safer to cross the ocean than to cross the street. And that people are... So to this piece around the the 'bikelash' a friend of mine, coined that Janette Sadik-Khan . I think there is 'bikelash'. And there's two reasons one, car drivers really don't want to run over pedestrians or cyclists. And so whenever they see bicycles on the road, they're thinking, Oh, my God, now I have to be more careful, I have to go slower, or I have to like... so there is this anxiety when cyclist is on the road, no matter what they want to run them over. And we did take away lanes from cars. But we just need... And is London has sometimes done a good job of this. But everywhere, I feel like we have to elevate the fact that not everyone has a car. Not everyone has a driver's licence. Not everyone has a car that they can get into at this minute. And we're trapped without it.

But here's the thing. There's also: not everyone has a bike. And this is what I think, I'm going to kind of slightly answer my own question, which is that, you know, this debate is very often, most often, at least in the UK, it's bikes versus cars. Right? And the fact is that bikes are this much, cars are this much, but the vast majority actually, whether they might use a bike or car as well, it's not the issue, but the majority of people do things walking. And so you know, I nearly stood for Mayor a few years ago. And I was going to... Here was my strategy every time anybody said: so Michael, would you do lots of bike lanes? My strategy was going to be: I love walking. Isn't it important that we should just be able to get places walking. Now don't we need to start by being able to walk and for kids to walk to school and the rest of it, maybe scooters are part of walking and so on. But why talk about bicycles? That was a piece of the puzzle.

But wait, Michael, that was... So last January, I was at something called the TRB Transportation Research Board conference where 35,000 people come from all around the world in January. And I was sitting there talking to someone. And that's when I had my 'aha!' moment that I need to be talking about a network that is for pedestrians and unlicensed vehicles. And once I say unlicensed vehicles, what I know is it has to be light, and it has to be slow, because it has to be able to work with pedestrians. Otherwise, I'm going to make <inaudible>

Whatever you do, I'm with you. Because I think that what you've got to look at disability vehicles, you got to look at scooters, kids scooters, kids bicycles, we're getting all this kind of caught up in this kind of the bikelash versus car wars, but... And then you've got the other one, which I think is really interesting. It's autonomous delivery, the little, the little, you know, delivery vehicles, because everybody gets all excited about drones and they think they're going to get their next Amazon or their pizza by drone. No, what you're going to get is a little thing that trundles along the pavement.

Oh, Michael, let's have an argument. Let's go. You ready to have a fight right now?

Oh, yeah, for sure. For sure, I'm up for one!

Every time, every time this, I feel like on Twitter, every once in a while there'll be a new company that's coming up, and it has the picture of the little grocery delivery drone going down the sidewalk. And every time that comes up, I say... People have a special name for it. And then I say, Oh, is this as opposed to and then you have the little wire basket that grandma has been carrying behind her for the last 150 years? And I look at it, and I think how challenging is that? Like, do we need drones? Our sidewalks are already incredibly crowded. And if you like, particularly in cities, that we don't... Why are we so lazy in cities that we need to have everything brought to us? Like can't you go walk those two blocks? Go do it! Why? And I'm being driven crazy. And I just heard that I think it's Amazon is actually doing experiments with drones delivering things like toilet paper and toothbrushes, which is what I've been joking about forever.

See, I have a I have a solution to that, which is just that, you know, when they're doing their deliveries of you know, a toothbrush, that this is about curbside pricing. You know, there's lots of talk about lane pricing and you know, dynamic road pricing. The problem is that it's very different challenge to charge somebody for driving down a road is one thing, but if they stop and they block the traffic and they double-park, that's a very different externality, a much higher cost to society. And so in my world of the city, my vision of the city is that you have these delivery and pickup bays and if you want to use it, it costs you a buck, or it costs you a pound, or whatever it is. And then you can go deliver your toothbrush and you'll double its cost. But you know for me that's a source of revenue a

I agree with you!

And the same with the pavement if you want to have a little thing trundles along use it. The sidewalks are not that crowded in urban, in residential areas. And if that one if you want to do the toothpaste delivery by little autonomous thing that rolls along the pavement. Why not? Who does it harm? I mean, if they pay a pound to the city, you know, good luck.

Let me tell you, I was having this argument with my colleague who is the head of transportation for the city of Pittsburgh because she... And out of Pittsburgh, there was a startup which we will make all these things nameless. And they were doing the little curbs a little sidewalk drone thing. And then there was the most terrible

Robot, just to be clear for the audience. These are things on wheels not flying, right?

Right, things on wheels running on a sidewalk. So a young student who goes to Carnegie Mellon is wheelchair bound. And she had... She posted onto Twitter, a little video she took of herself trying to cross... She was in the crosswalk where the lane curbs goes up. And right in front of her was this little drone. And the drone was trying to decide I guess whether it wanted to go in the crosswalk, turn left turn right whatever the drone was sitting in the curb cut at that moment for like, for some minutes. She was in the crosswalk and the light changed and she could not get up past it. So she was just so I mean it was... I want to say it was amusing that this woman was... She's a very smart, well-educated woman who's in a wheelchair. And she was... she did it... she was talking about in an amusing... This is a real problem. I know it's a startup, but it was a very funny little counter to my point on drones

The reason <inaudible> complicated is your earlier answer, which is let her walk to the shops to get her toothpaste, her milk, whatever. Well, actually, maybe she should be able to stay at home and not have to do that. Sounds like a, you know.., she might want to go to the shops, she may not. The point is...

You know what, Michael, when we charge the pound per delivery and I want to even make it higher. if you're disabled, you won't have to pay that. If we think about all the externalities you and I are always talking about. They're due to scarcity, like you would tax them due to scarcity or externalities. So one of the things that's been driving me crazy that the pandemic has... It was making me really anxious before and the pandemic has completely said 'Robin, too late' Which is all of the shopping online and on demand services, because it's the complete ruination of urban retail. And if I lived in a country, shopping online is not a problem. But for those of us who live in cities, we do actually value having a corner store, or having retail, which Amazon and other delivery services is completely wiping out. And so we can think about the pandemic, all of us have now learned and got these ingrained habits where we want everything delivered, and we'll never go outside of our house. But when I was thinking about this, a tax for this, or how to think about

this, I want to throw up to you, one of my dream policy things. So in dense urban areas, where there is this scarcity of space, and where I'd like to see retail, I would like to charge, I'm gonna make up a number, £2.5 per delivery. With three exceptions, exception number one is delivered by the Postal Service, because now it's all consolidated, one delivery per day, you don't have to pay for it. Number two, you do it in a zero emission micromobility. In other words, all those bike lanes that now been building, you're going to go from the big truck to a small, a small bike thing, and so no delivery charge there. Or number three, if it's coming from a place, which has a retail footprint in my city, so I'm putting my thumb on the scale for retail stores and retail delivery. So as we've moved to this space, with the ubiquity of on demand delivery, and I was in Manhattan once with my daughter, who I will say was in the hospital have just delivered her baby. But there were six deliveries a day, at that day at her house. And cities can't and shouldn't accommodate that kind of volume.

So for me, the solution to this is curbside pricing, because there's this big discussion about lane, dynamic lane pricing, dynamic road pricing. And I just don't think that the debate is sophisticated enough, it doesn't yet include this idea of curbside pricing. Because to be honest, that double- parked vehicle that backs up all the traffic could be an Uber pickup or a Lyft pickup, it could be delivery, it could be essential groceries not essential... In my sort of policy ask, it's that we separate those two, and we say, okay, I don't think it's controversial to say dynamic road pricing, lane pricing, but also curb pricing, because then what you get is, as you move to those shared vehicles, and you don't need so many cars and so many parked cars, you can start to add bays, where people can do all those pickups and all those drop offs, they can pull in, do all that stuff, not creating a traffic problem, which costs society enormously, but they have to fund then, they have to pay their booking fee. And that then funds, the city services, the road upkeep and all those, you know, bike lanes and so on.

So Michael, I would I would say I agree with you. And I would come at it a different way. every vehicle has three modes. mode number one, it's moving, mode number two, it's parked mode number, or it's at the curb mode number three, it's stored. In dense urban areas, we're going to be charging you. Where there's scarcity, I'm going to be charging you differentially for each one of those, but they are separate. So when people are always saying build, you know, I want more parking in my neighbourhood I think okay, so you're saying you want more parking, but that's going to mean more cars are moving. And to your point, the double-parking in the curb space is another scarce resource, and we need to decide how we're going to meter that.

What do you say to those people who say, you know, Robin, Michael, you're completely... This is all nonsense, because we're going to have autonomous driverless, you know, electric taxis. Nobody's going to own a car because you'd be stupid to own a car because you'll click your fingers on a digital app, and the car will appear and it'll be wonderful. They won't have a driver, because they don't need a driver and all of these problems, they just magically go away? Don't they?

Yeah, so that was my that was my work of the last year, wasn't it? So my work of the last year is, if we had autonomous vehicles, that was no driver. What I learned when I was doing Zipcar is that everyone decides to use their car. All the costs are sunk cost, so we only care about the marginal cost. And the marginal cost is, what does it cost to park. If it's expensive to park, I don't want to take my car down there, or what is the price of fuel, I'm driving some long distance. Of fuel, tolls and parking. That's how I evaluate it. Once you have an autonomous vehicle, all of those costs, the marginal cost of an electric vehicle is about a penny and a half a kilometre, so it's a penny half a mile a penny a kilometre. We have now suddenly taken up the single greatest cost with my human self. And so when that is no longer in that autonomous vehicle, my marginal cost of moving that vehicle is this one cent a kilometre. And if you live in the city, Michael, for £0.5, where would I not go? Where would I not send that vehicle? I will definitely have it, go get the toothbrush, get a shoelace go circle around the box 45 times because I don't care. I'm never gonna pay for parking, because parking will always be more expensive than me just keeping the vehicle circling, moving. It's because of the advent of autonomous vehicles that I've been saying, we need to get at the root issues that apply to cars today and are going to apply triply to autonomous vehicles, which are the moving costs when you're in a congested space, we absolutely have to do congestion pricing when you're moving vehicles, we absolutely have to do curbside pricing for vehicles today, all those parking ones. And we also have to get the storage prices right, which might disappear with autonomous vehicles. But we have to get that balance because in fact, the balance of storage versus moving costs because otherwise people will just keep them moving, right. So so those are the three components and the autonomous vehicle future for me. I very much look forward to it in terms of reducing car accidents and adding mobility to people who don't have it. But if we don't get that pricing right, it is a 100% worst case scenario, because people will just use them for any old thing.

And that's the genesis of the 10 principles is it not?

Yes. And which is what I said, and now you're yelling at me that in dense urban areas, autonomous vehicles should be electric and shared. Um, yeah. But we really have to get this pricing right.

Yeah, yeah. I'm not yelling at you now. I was yelling at you then because some of the language was fairly sort of coercive language, as opposed to principles language.

So this ties back though to something else when you're talking about the bikelash? As I've been talking to people over the last three years about this, what's been really striking to me talking to local government officials, is they so hate, and are terrorised of the idea of raising prices for congestion pricing, or the cost of parking that they would rather do lane reallocation. And lane reallocation accomplishes the same thing. So as to say, you know what, I don't want to have three lanes of vehicles because they're moving one human at a time, or have zero people in them. So I'm going to do lane reallocation, I'm going to say, this is a bike lane, I'm taking two car lanes, and I'm turning them into one car lane and two moving bike lanes. Or we've taken on street parking, which is what Oslo has been doing very, very successfully and Stockholm did successfully, right. We're just taking away the on street parking, which means you can never stop in my city, so you won't drive through anymore. Because I want to I want to be clear that if you hate the words coming out of my mouth, Robin, you're constantly talking about user fees and taxes. And that's terrible. Okay. The alternative is, we take away the space for cars, and we reassign it for people, moving people and not cars. So we think about how do we move the most people in these dense urban areas? How do we make sure that people have mobility? And I'm not going to focus on whether it's by car or not.

I mean, the things that were triggering me back in the early versions of the 10 principles were just things like sort of, you know, saying that all autonomous vehicles had to be shared. And I was thinking, well, what about, you know, trades people who have, you know, a very specific vehicle, I use the example of a glass, you know, one of those vehicles that carries panes of glass, you know, can you really force that person to share that vehicle just because they want to use an autonomous vehicle, they want to send that vehicle out. So there were some examples, it was just some red hot button there. But I think, you know, one of the things that I think, you know, we just in the interest of time, we're going to need to draw to a close this question of the politics. You know, you can kind of as technocrats and you know, technocrats and visionaries in your case, you can kind of come up with the right answers. But the politicians, I mean, parking is an absolute, you know, it's a third rail issue. It's just any politic, any local politician that says, I want to be elected, and I'm going to remove your parking. Even though there's relatively small, you know, less than 50% of people have cars. Guaranteed their political career will be over quicker than you know: how do you get this stuff done?

This is why we're going to circle back round to my Freedom Network, I recognise that people who drive their cars right now think, if you take my car away, or if you make it more expensive, I have no other options. I am 100%...

But can I challenge that? Robin, I'm gonna challenge because I tell you why. Because, you know, I'm my sister's very active in Chiswick, which I don't know if you're familiar with London's, it's west London, and there's a bike lane war going on where you know. What the local priest said that this was more damaging to the community, putting in a bike lane was more damaging to the community and to the infrastructure of Chiswick than the Blitz. It was a priest who said that, right. And we've got the same thing going on in Kensington. And you know, you can go out there and you can say, look, the data shows that everybody manages to do their shopping, that the shops do well, that the rents go up. If you have a bike lane, that amazingly, people on bicycles are more likely to stop and do some shopping

Cause they don't have to park.

You can share as much data as you want. It serves nothing, it just enrages.

Okay, here. Here's so this is another piece that NUMO was working on last year. And London. London's done sometimes, but famously in New York, and in Stockholm was thing about congestion pricing or bike lanes is, let's and COVID has offered this opportunity, let's do some pilots. So this is just a pilot, don't worry about it, we're gonna tweak things, we're gonna see how it's gonna work is only going to be for six months, don't everyone have a heart attack. If we don't like it up to six months, we'll be able to change it or we'll be able to change things. And when people, I'm gonna say some places, bike lanes maybe don't make sense, right? But when people get... places where they do make sense, when we can finally have a pilot and people live through it, and no, everyone didn't have to go live in their basement because it was like the Blitz and half of them died. So they will get to see oh, wow, you know, my kid could go to school or could go to the library, could go their friend by themselves, or it wasn't so terrible. Or I did have my shopping, or but...

But the experience right now in London is that there is there isn't a kind of oh, well that wasn't so bad. And actually it's quite nice. And you know, my kids love it. And it's really not that it is, you know, it is it is you know what?

I need to understand why?

Here's an example from Kensington the MPs have just written a letter to whoever, I don't know, to TfL, I think to Transport the London saying 96% of their postbag was people demanding that the low traffic neighbourhood or... No, it wasn't even a low traffic neighbourhood but the bike lane is inappropriate and must be removed. 96%. It was organised and it was very vocal, and I'm sure if you actually ask, if you really polled properly you'd probably find that you're right. But the fact is, it is political. You know, just kryptonite. It's horrible.

My brother, it is horrible. And I was just hearing about it on Twitter. And I'm wondering, I'm hoping that the pedestrian and micro mobility people can get their own letter writing campaigns.

To the pedestrians. This is the problem. The cyclists are organised. But the general I want to just pop to the shops get some milk. I want to just scoot my kids to school without being you know, threatened by an SUV or by a bicyclist in lycra. Those people are not organised. They're not vocal and unorganised. They're just...

My brother has been doing bicycle lanes in Somerville, which is a city suburb of Boston. And for the streets that they wanted to put bike lanes through. He puts a flyer at every single door. And then he has these very intimate block by block community meetings. And he says when you do it block by block, there's this gigantic, but yeah, that's arduous, so

That's very interesting because that then comes down to a whole different set of issues around the revival of democracy, local democracy, engagement, inclusion, because so many of the people who benefit are actually not politically included, you know, anyway. And so that's a whole different 'Cleaning Up' that we're going to need to get out there. We have to think about, you know, who could come in and best unwrap that one.

But you were... that piece around who yells loudest. I mean this happens also in my neighbourhood, we didn't get a bike lane. And I went to the community meeting and I made... My first mistake was, I went, I was among the first two or three people to speak. And I said, You know, I work... This is my area of expertise. I work around the world. Here's the facts, here's what it means. Here, I live in this neighbourhood, here's whatever. And then the next 25 people stand up and they say, these crazy things that are not true. And it just wipes it all out. Yeah.

Okay, so there's the message that we need to get much more politically savvy, so that we can bring the political agenda and the technocrat visionary agendas all together, that's going to be the plan.

That is what I think is happening, hopefully, in the US. And actually, definitely the UK. If we think about the Extinction Rebellion, or Black Lives Matter, or the Sunrise Movement is youth who are incredibly skilled at community organising who are doing the step by step, block by block, person by person, cohort building, you know, what you, and I do know that they're gonna win in the end, and their approaches slow and steady?

Yes. And no. I mean, I think what will happen is, I see it again, you know. This is a nuance is a difference. I think that, you know, kind of they're over there, the mainstream is here, what will win in the end is actually something in between through some process that can either be painful, or less painful, and maybe that's something that we can work on. They're not going away, you know, they're saying, we got to be off CO2 by 2025. I mean, it's crazy. And it's no, they're not going to win on that, they're going to get, you know, we're gonna get off CO2 by 2050, but not by 2025.

But we do have to go faster. And I guess this comes to this piece around the vision and living, being able to live that future. And realising it's not so bad. In fact, it's great. Comes back to this status quo. So just the other piece, tying in with the pandemic, is, as I was watching, children, my young adult children and others, in the pandemic, all of these things that were cultural expectations of their future, were swept away, right. So you're not going to have a graduation, you're not going to get to go do that trip with your friends, you're not going to get to do these things that everyone's always done at this point in their life. And I was feeling very empathetic, with that transformed... that loss of a culturally built future. And I think that is our challenge, for us trying to build a sustainable future. Because the reality is the last 100 years of industrialization and capitalism have teed us at very poorly for creating a sustainable, equitable planet. And so our

expectations and visions have to change. And so that's, that's cultural work. And it's very, very challenging.

Robin, I could talk to you for hours and hours, but unfortunately, you know, we have to draw this to a close. And that's a great point, to conclude. And I'll leave it hanging whether I completely agree with you, or only mostly agree with you, or partially agree with you. But let's leave it

Next time you and I will hopefully meet in person.

Well, absolutely. Absolutely. You know, let's hope that after having that great polemic, you can jump on a plane and come to Europe.

I know... I'm not allowed, I'm not allowed.

All these things are really tough, but it's just fantastic to, you know, to engage and grapple with them with you. Thank you.

It was lovely. And I'm glad you're doing this, Michael.

Thank you. So that was Robin Chase, successful serial entrepreneur, and deep thinker, visionary thought leader on the future of mobility and of cities. My guest next week on 'Cleaning Up' is James Cameron, not the James Cameron who directed Titanic. But when it comes to climate change, he is nevertheless box office gold. Our James Cameron is a barrister. He's an advisor. I first met him when he was leading Climate Change Capital, one of the first financial institutions to deal with funding climate action. He's also an expert on trade. Please join me next week for a conversation with James Cameron.

Ep22: Robin Chase ‘Mobility, Cities and Social Entrepreneurship’

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