Billy Riggs (00:33)
Welcome everybody to Rewiring the American Edge. I'm Billy Riggs, and this is my good friend Bruce Appleyard, and we just showed up here. He's in San Diego, I'm in San Francisco, and we've been talking a lot about

the autonomous future and all of the complex opportunities it presents. And Bruce and I have started to talk about them as wicked opportunities. And I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Appleyard to introduce himself to also kind of unpack this term "wicked." Why do we use this term? Bruce, you have to first introduce yourself. Welcome to the show. And you know,

it's, you we can say it's a show, but it's just really an opportunity to talk about research in a way that meets people in a different way and to talk about what we do in a different format than in articles that people never read. Welcome.

Bruce Appleyard (01:27)
Yeah,

that's great. Thanks. It's great to be here with you, Billy. So I'm a professor of city planning and urban design at San Diego State University. And Billy and I have known each other for a long time. And I this topic on wicked opportunities is something that's really going to help shape how we look at not just autonomous vehicles, but also innovation. And a paper we're working on is called Wicked Opportunities.

the trials of innovation in the age of complexity and the case of autonomous vehicles. And should I give a little background on wicked problems?

Billy Riggs (02:00)
Well, yeah, you got to do that. I want to hear a little more about who Doc Appleyard is first before you do that. Because we have to humanize ourselves as people and you're a really likable guy. So I think you should just tell us a little more about who Doc Appleyard is and who Dr. Appleyard is. And so just to contextualize this to is that there are photos of Dr. Appleyard and I holding his daughter when she was just a wee bairn.

Bruce Appleyard (02:08)
Okay.

⁓ Thanks Billy. I appreciate that.

Billy Riggs (02:27)
And when we graduated from UC Berkeley and shout out to Dr. Professor, Robert Cervero, who was both our dissertation advisors, and we still really care about him too. But yeah, we survived Berkeley and have gone on to academic careers. But Bruce, tell us a little more about yourself. You also had a, we talked a little bit about big time college athletics because we talk about a lot of stuff. You are a college athlete as well, right? Made lots of money?

Bruce Appleyard (02:34)
Yeah.

Yeah, a long time ago, ⁓

back in the 20th century, I was a rower in high school and then I rode in college and I won three, in those days, PAC-10 championships and six national championships. And those are great memories. While they're long ago, I'm still in my spin class.

I'm clocking in some of the biggest numbers still, so I'm doing something right. But yeah, I grew up in Berkeley. My father was a professor in city planning and urban design as well. And I was able to get my bachelor's, master's, and PhD at Berkeley. But one of the things I'm proudest about is to be a father. And my two kids...

Billy Riggs (03:18)
Awesome. Awesome.

Bruce Appleyard (03:40)
are now, one's at San Diego State University, the other looks to be going to Cal State San Luis Obispo. So both in the CSU system where I teach, and I've got a great partner in Belinda Apple Yard down here in San Diego. And those are the things that really make me tick.

Billy Riggs (03:55)
Awesome, awesome, Bruce. And yeah, I can think we say, know, being a parent definitely is something that makes both of us tick. And I think we would say that, for everyone is that if your heart's in that space, your work will be in the right space too. So. ⁓

Bruce Appleyard (04:11)
Well, I also want to

say it's what makes me tick is working with friends like you. So that's always fun.

Billy Riggs (04:16)
⁓ wow, that's nice.

Yeah, well, yeah, so. I'm flattered and I'm, know, just so everybody knows I'm not the most easy work partner everybody all the time, but we there there's an old proverb that says as as iron sharpens iron, one person sharpens another. you know, I'm like, I might be rusty iron. So I I'm not sure how much I sharpen people, but, know, I'm like a

Bruce Appleyard (04:38)
Hahaha!

Billy Riggs (04:43)
I'm like a good granola and everybody knows people from Berkeley like granola. So that's why Bruce likes to work with me. But let's talk about this term wicked and why I brought it up Bruce. I mean, automated vehicles and automated vehicles aren't about perfection and they're still rolling out and we still see challenges. We still see corner cases. We are seeing that in many cases that they perform better.

Bruce Appleyard (04:48)
Right. There you go.

Billy Riggs (05:08)
than human drivers, but we still see challenges and we should put that out there. When I use the phrase automated or autonomous vehicles, I'd make a real big distinction that I'm not talking about like the Tesla autopilots of the world. I'm not talking about stuff that's not like level four automation. And some people sometimes tell me like, well, if I'm in a vehicle and I'm feeling uncomfortable the way it's driving, then.

Bruce Appleyard (05:10)
Right. Right.

Billy Riggs (05:35)
then that's a problem. And I think it's a problem too. And my answer to that is if your government has probably allowed the vehicle to be on a road in a way the passengers are uncomfortable, it's probably not a level four vehicle. So that's probably my answer to that is that you probably need to amp up your licensing standards. my narrative here is to say, fortunately in the state of California and many other, I think some other jurisdictions in the US,

Bruce Appleyard (05:50)
Right. Right.

Billy Riggs (06:05)
actually developed a pretty good licensing system for the driving function and now the passenger function. But I think what Bruce is bringing up is that many of the systems that we're dealing with are not systems of the vehicle, they're systems of the city. Bruce and I have been really talking about this because systems of the city, they're when any technology starts to break down. And so, Bruce, I'm going to say, what is a wicked problem when we deal with cities?

Bruce Appleyard (06:24)
Yeah.

Well, gosh, well, wicked problems where this all started back in 1973 theorists, Horace Riddle and Mel Weber introduced the idea of wicked problems and their paper dilemmas in a general theory of planning. And basically a wicked problem is a complex social or policy challenge that resists straightforward resolution. It's wicked, doesn't mean it's evil, just refers to a stubborn resistance to being solved. So unlike a tame problem like equation or

winning a chess match. It has no clear definition, no definitive solution, and no way to know when you're actually done. And I saw this as being related to the experience of not just autonomous vehicles, but AI, of adoptions and innovation. That's why the paper is titled Wicked Opportunities, the Trials of Innovation in the Age of Complexity. And even talking about how it's

autonomous vehicles are adopted by the public, it's a complex myriad of double standards, symbolism, folklore in some respects, right? So it's not a clean and easy solution. It's a very complex and ever-changing opportunity itself. So I basically started writing out this paper on

on wicked opportunities think in talking about not just autonomous vehicle innovation, but also other innovations.

Billy Riggs (07:58)
Yeah, that's a good start. then, so I'm going to come back to this when we turn to why substitute problems for opportunities. I want to come back to that. But I want to kind of also ask a question because I was actually talking to just to tell the listeners something interesting happened last week. And it's great that we're talking about this opportunity piece. that California is constantly evolving its policy. And as

Bruce Appleyard (08:09)
Right.

Billy Riggs (08:28)
all governments should policy should evolve. And I make sometimes the argument in the policy should evolve at the speed of technology. And it does it many times. And that's part of what what is the problem in a fast paced technology environment is policy doesn't adapt the pace of change. And fortunately, in California, the Department of Motor Vehicles has has now evolved based on about a nine to nine to 12 months of

public processes has iterated and responded to some feedback and is now allowing a more perhaps a more robust and thorough reporting process, but has also provided a light way for say local law enforcement to provide a at least a notice of non-compliance when vehicles perhaps

don't completely abide by the stated laws of the road. Now, the question here and the wicked problem that we can potentially anticipate is that driving is a dynamic function. And we as drivers deal with ambiguity all the time and the dynamic driving function as a human.

requires that we deal with ambiguous situations that happen in the real world. And so when there's a tree obstructing a sign or when there's low light, it has limited visibility or when there's an obstacle in the road and there's a double line that you have to cross to avoid it, technically you're bending the rules of driving. Now what happens now when we constrain the automated vehicle based on policy to strictly

Bruce Appleyard (09:57)
Mm-hmm.

Billy Riggs (10:05)
limit them to only the physical rules that are written. And so right now we've actually allowed some levity for the dynamic driving test to make automated drivers more human like. But now we're in this a bit of a double bind, a true wicked problem. What happens if we make automated drivers less human like where they can't adapt to ambiguous situations?

This in itself is another wicked problem, right Bruce?

Bruce Appleyard (10:34)
Right, right. And it's part of the wicked opportunity that, you know, it's like this ability to innovate with autonomous vehicles, but it's, you know, there's no definitive formulation of the opportunity. There's no stopping rule. Solutions aren't true or false or only better or worse. So there's all these complexities that it's hard to define where you're going with the opportunity itself, because the landscape is kind of, is always changing. There's interdependencies with other opportunities.

Acceptance is political. Symbolic. It has double standards. It's not a really, it's not a clearly solved opportunity itself. The landscape's always changing and it's hard to fully realize the opportunity as it's always changing like this. It's really difficult. These are some of the things that are written up in the paper.

Billy Riggs (11:18)
That's interesting.

So what do you think then, since you've the word and we've chosen the word in this kind of in this conceptual paper that we're going to throw out this idea of talking about opportunities that are hard to define. They're wicked. They put us in a double bind. You know, we now have the safest driver on the road and yet we want to make it more human like and yet humans are

Bruce Appleyard (11:32)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Billy Riggs (11:42)
the worst drivers on the road. And so therein lies a wicked problem. What do you think the biggest opportunity is?

Bruce Appleyard (11:50)
Well, I gosh, think the safety aspect is one of the biggest opportunities. mean, we could save 40,000 people a year if we were to go adopt autonomous vehicle technology, or at least take some of the speed assistance and limiting technology and putting in regular vehicles. I even think I like the concept that autonomous vehicles can be a form of traffic calming because they have lower speeds.

So, but, I also think what's interesting about the history of autonomous vehicles and the way they've, the way they've been treated and accepted or not accepted has a lot to do with how it was the rise of auto, automobility in the 20th century. And a lot of people felt that, um, this was just going to be extension of business as usual in the way that cars take over the roads. And I think

Billy Riggs (12:37)
Mm.

Bruce Appleyard (12:37)
Providing those warnings and concerns about what could happen seems to have led a lot of autonomous vehicle companies to try to make sure their cars travel very safely. What do you think?

Billy Riggs (12:49)
Yeah,

and I think you said something there that was interesting that most people don't realize. I think most people get confused in the fact that most in the US, most autonomous vehicle companies don't produce vehicles, right? Like they're producing a software, but then actually is deployed on a vehicle. And so if we were to

step back and look at where the industry is. The leading players in this industry really have no interest in what type of vehicle their software sits on. And so, I mean, I think this this does present an opportunity for, and I always say, that it's an opportunity for transit agencies to finally take agency.

Bruce Appleyard (13:18)
Mm-hmm.

Billy Riggs (13:32)
And so stop complaining agency, take agency. and so, so get, get off the sideline and be a part of the discussion. take, take agency in, the issue. And this is what's happening in Europe. Transit agencies are just saying we want automated services to actually become solutions to our service to bring.

Bruce Appleyard (13:36)
Ha!

Mm-hmm.

Billy Riggs (13:56)
higher capacity service, particularly where there's lower capacity service and particularly bring higher fidelity to lower fidelity routes that can then feed high capacity routes and increase reliability as well as revenue. And we're already seeing that with a number of pilots

Bruce Appleyard (14:03)
Mm-hmm.

Billy Riggs (14:17)
both in Oslo and Hamburg and in other places in Europe. And I think that's just going to filter over to the US.

Bruce Appleyard (14:23)
Yes, and you bring up another interesting point that I think, you know, lot of some, one of the concerns about autonomous vehicles is, leading to more driving and higher VMT because of deadheading and things like that. But then the solution would be to have better pricing and autonomous vehicles seem to have that ability to, actually engage in a pricing system more readily. What do you think about that?

Billy Riggs (14:39)
yeah, yeah.

Well,

yeah, I mean, I think that's a no-brainer, yeah. Well, I think that there's a lot of, you're pushing my buttons now, Bruce. You're not supposed to push my buttons. I'm supposed to push your buttons. So we can be honest, there's a lot of noise out there in the media people talking about,

Bruce Appleyard (14:51)
Yeah.

Well,

Billy Riggs (15:05)
runaway vehicle miles traveled, runaway vehicle kilometers traveled from automation. I'm going to myth dispel and I think, Bruce and I have been around the block in planning. We aren't journalists; we're academics. And I think we've seen it time and time again. The sky is never falling. It's always kind of going to be kind of a big poop emoji. No, it's going to, it's going to be.

Bruce Appleyard (15:10)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Billy Riggs (15:30)
It's usually a kind of a shade of gray. And but I think the biggest advice I would have for cities, for public transit agencies is really the more you plan early and often, the better you can mitigate some of this. And pricing helps. Getting out and talking to some of these companies help. But the market does function like it's supposed to.

A lot of the reason why Uber and Lyft and ride share companies in general were successful is because they provided a product that met a lot of needs, for reliability and convenience, of service, during hours and

in places where people really were demanding services and where we saw contraction in the transit economy. We saw contraction in the mobility economy and there were needs that weren't being met. And I think if public transit agencies were just honest about that, they would figure out ways to serve those needs better. And in my mind, there are ways for us to have honest discussions about meeting mobility needs that aren't

degrowth, no growth, but they are enabling an approach that allows for people that have unmet mobility needs to get those mobility needs met, but also to get them met in the most sustainable way. And that's where I see a future of automation. Yes. Pricing is a part of it and

Bruce Appleyard (16:46)
Mm-hmm.

Billy Riggs (16:49)
I think there's a lot of different ways to do that. and we'll have to do that on another episode. But there's also, a lot of speculation on deadheading right now. I definitely have seen some posts and media articles over the last couple of weeks about problems with deadheading. Bruce, I'd be interested in your opinion because deadheading in general is a momentary feature

in the scaling of a fleet. And I think most, most people don't understand if you are running a shared fleet, you may have a certain amount of, excess VMT. So it's excess VMT in your network.

But the more efficient your network is, the more you compress your excess VMT And that is the benefit of automation, is that you can rest your vehicles, you can compress your excess VMT and your business model supports that. So I think the people that say deadheading will be an issue in the AV future, don't understand the fleet model.

Fleet economics have to compress deadheading to work.

You pressed a button there, Bruce. But I think I want to press your button a little bit. Let me press here. So I'm where maybe I'll push a little bit. I think one thing that I've seen a little bit in ether is

Bruce Appleyard (17:47)
Yeah, I know. Okay.

Billy Riggs (17:56)
just miles traveled in general and our ability as a society to absorb more miles? And what is our approach as a society to

Bruce Appleyard (18:05)
Mm-hmm.

Billy Riggs (18:09)
either induced demand or latent demand. How does how do automated vehicles fit into this?

Bruce Appleyard (18:20)
Right, taking a step back, this discussion about increased VMT and all is, as I mentioned, of, it's fueled by people's past perceptions and the sort of, the stories that feel plausible about autonomous vehicles. And that's again, what's part of how autonomous vehicles are wicked opportunity because they're subject to this imperfect interpretation of the future,

of different interdependencies. Again, a wicked opportunity. And I could list off some of the rules about wicked opportunities if you're interested.

Billy Riggs (18:53)
Yeah, it goes with this idea of planning under uncertainty. I would love to hear you list some of the rules.

Bruce Appleyard (18:59)
So wicked opportunities are hard or even impossible to fully realize. You really have to manage or accept the trade-offs. So basically the ethical challenges posed by Thomas Fecals are not temporary obstacles awaiting a technical fix. They are built into the wicked opportunity itself. So there's different sort of ethical challenges.

The next one is the costs aren't always visible upfront. The downside often only becomes clear after commitment or at scale. So the costs are not visible upfront is one of the big problems, right? So one of the big problems, consequential problems of congestion is this idea that you might be traveling more and more. And it goes back to another rule about wicked problems, which is your interpretation of what the future is gonna hold is,

is up to a lot of interpretation by different viewpoints, right? And different values and what's the story you're telling yourself about this? And I think the legacy of the rise of automobility in the 20th century is what's fueling a lot of people's concern about autonomous vehicles. And that in and of itself is part of it being a wicked problem, right? Then the next one.

Billy Riggs (19:50)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, interesting.

Bruce Appleyard (20:11)
Ignoring the costs do not make them go away. They tend to find someone. In the 2010s, autonomous vehicle companies really aggressively try to deploy new vehicles, but they had a lot of high profile incidents, involving AV systems. And that was a legacy that then triggered regulatory responses and generate sustained public skepticism. So again,

sometimes these things happen and then it's sort of there's a legacy and a stigma that Right, right. So that makes it tough too The benefits and costs fall in different people so the idea of like unequal distribution of AV deployments into higher more affluent higher income more half affluent areas Wider higher income areas

Billy Riggs (20:40)
stays in the collective memory. Yeah.

Yeah, and I would say that's,

you think about that, it's interesting to think about more in terms of

large city versus small municipality. You know, we are having a very, a very large coastal dialogue that is focused on multimodal perspectives. And then when we, transpose this on middle America, people depend on cars a lot.

Bruce Appleyard (21:19)
Right.

Right. Right. Right.

Billy Riggs (21:21)
but they don't have access to automated vehicles. To them,

it blows their mind still. this whole dialogue is not only a wicked problem, it's just something that just it's out of them.

There's been dialogue in New York, there's been dialogue in Boston, there's a dialogue all these kind of elite cities on coastal areas, and yet, what about the rest of the world?

Bruce Appleyard (21:41)
Right.

Yeah absolutely. And then the next rule about wicked opportunities is that complexity grows over time. That wicked opportunities tend to get more complex over time, not simpler. And early decisions shape the path in ways that were hard to reverse. basically, successive phases of development has generated new questions and new forms of complexity rather than reducing them.

The basic questions of safety and technical performance is given away to contested questions about liability, insurance, cybersecurity, infrastructure design, social equity, all these things kind of cascading in on the wicked opportunity itself. ⁓

Billy Riggs (22:19)
Yeah,

yeah. I think those last couple you mentioned are where we are too right now with all these systems issues that relate to, everything that we're dialoguing from the city to the curb to built infrastructure. And we talked a lot about in the first part of this, part one of this episode about

Bruce Appleyard (22:26)
Right.

Billy Riggs (22:37)
the breakdown in December of 2025, when there was a redundancy issue with PG &E. And just this volatility we have with our electrical grid right now is in fact a systems issue that is one we never dreamed we'd have.

Bruce Appleyard (22:55)
Right, right. So again, part of the Wicked Opportunity itself, it's never fully realized. It's hard to or almost impossible to fully realize your ideal about your Wicked Opportunity. this is again, it's not just, it's Wicked Opportunity, we can talk about AI in terms of Wicked Opportunities. We can talk about Airbnb. We can talk about any number of different deployments of innovation.

So number six is there's no neutral choice, even not pursuing the opportunity as consequences because someone else will. And this has a lot to do with talking about cities that declined to plan for AVs don't really preserve the pre-AV environment. They simply lose the opportunity to shape how the technology integrates with the street network, transit systems, and land use patterns. So deciding not to do anything about AVs is basically a policy.

And you're not really incorporating in what your future might hold. So that's an important thing to consider as well.

Billy Riggs (23:47)
I think it's even bigger

than that, Bruce. think it's a global, this is a geopolitical issue because as you know, the best AV technology is in China. And if we don't shape the technology, we will be steamrolled by the technology. And so this technology is coming.

Bruce Appleyard (23:55)
Great.

That's a really, yeah.

I actually have that in the paper. So yeah, we can talk more about that as well. That's a really good point. we don't engage in what this can bring, then we're going to be behind the eight ball, so to speak. Number seven is ongoing moral and strategic judgment is required. Wicked opportunities require ongoing judgment, not a one-time decision.

Billy Riggs (24:07)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Bruce Appleyard (24:24)
reassessing as the trade-off shift. So again, it's sort of, it's, you know, basically, your deployment can't be treated as a finish line. need to keep adjusting as you're going forward through your milestones and, adaptive regulatory frameworks are needed and, need to be capable of updating in response to new evidence. So that's another big part of it. It's just always shifting. It's always moving.

Billy Riggs (24:48)
Yeah.

Bruce Appleyard (24:51)
And then finally, the last one we have at this point, and I'm interested in having more, is that public acceptance of the wicked opportunity faces a complex landscape of hyperbole, symbolism, and double standards. Does that make sense to you? Yeah?

Billy Riggs (25:06)
Yeah. Well, and

I think, you know, I think this is where a lot of people have, you know, I've been very involved with the launch of automated vehicles for probably in California and in the US for almost, you know, 12 to 15 years and have become more and more engaged with global policy on the issue.

Bruce Appleyard (25:11)
Thank

Billy Riggs (25:32)
California is interesting because the policy is messy. And I love the way you're framing this is because policy processes don't have to be pretty, right? They can be messy and have double standard. You they can be complex discussions that are aired out in public. And part of the policy making process is airing out grievances and talking about complex issues in public where we publicly talk about

Bruce Appleyard (25:35)
Yeah, right.

Billy Riggs (26:00)
points of contention and we get out, we get out those points of contention and come to some, some degree of consensus ⁓ or at least some degree of understanding where different sides are coming from. And I think that's really important. And that's where I think where people, what people don't acknowledge from at least the California process is it is very, despite all it's warts.

Bruce Appleyard (26:01)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Right. Right.

Billy Riggs (26:29)
And it may have warts. I don't think it has many warts, it has warts. Every policy has warts. Every policy has issues. So despite issues it has, it is a very open process. It is very deliberate process. And it's one where anybody has a voice, anybody can engage. Anybody can raise their hand and say, I have this issue. And that is actually public process. And

It's wonderful, it's beautiful and it's messy as all get out.

Bruce Appleyard (26:56)
Right, right, and that's what the wicked opportunities face, especially autonomous vehicles, because they're operating in the public realm, and they need to be held to a higher standard, and they are.

Billy Riggs (27:06)
Yeah.

And with

the complex technology that where many times perception is reality. And I think that's the problem we face many times with this, this where, and particularly in, in the, the meme generation where you can get someone who videos the situation without a full understanding of what's happening in, again, a complex dynamic driving situation. They can't see what the vehicle is observing, they, they don't know the California Vehicular Code.

So it creates situations that are ripe for misinterpretation and that are ripe for where the wrong messages can easily become amplified. And that in itself creates a wicked problem in its own right. And one that is unique to our generation because of the way it's amplified by social media.

Bruce Appleyard (28:02)
Right. And I think your article, your recent article talking about the safety of manually operated vehicles and autonomous vehicles and the sort of uneven playing field at which they're being judged. And again, think, again, stigmatized from the rise of automobility in the 20th century, I think, is that it's fueling a lot of issues that autonomous vehicles have to to overcome. And again, this is part of what makes it a wicked opportunity that

Public acceptance is a very complex, uneven playing field.

Billy Riggs (28:31)
Yeah, yeah. And it's I mean, I think this is one of those things where it's really important to acknowledge that we if we were go back and I know that we have a colleague on the East Coast that writes a lot, you know, was thinking as you were saying that we you know, he's a bit more of a critic of automated vehicles. But I know Peter Norton writes a lot about the history of the automobile. And I know he's more of a critic of

Bruce Appleyard (28:53)
Yeah, the right

Billy Riggs (28:56)
automated automated vehicles. And yet, if we were to kind of counterpoint the criticism, when the automobile was coming to market, it was a lot more easy to mass produce an automobile. It's really hard to produce an automated vehicle steel. It's really hard to scale an automated vehicle. But also, there was not as much policy and regulation at the time. And there was not as much

Bruce Appleyard (29:08)
Right.

Billy Riggs (29:21)
protection for consumers. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration did not exist at the time. There weren't as many consumer protections. And so I think it is a different environment now in terms of

entering a vehicle that is designed to be safe and consumer facing and fleet based into the market. So, you know, as a counterpoint, maybe it is a is a completely new wicked opportunity for planners to lean in and see this is more of a part of the transportation fabric.

Automobility has been a significant part of what's brought an abundance of wealth, not only to Western society, but to societies around the world. And if we had one thing that we were going to go big in macro on a lot of the point of contention, even on our global climate agreements is

whether or not we're willing to share some of the growth of that wealth with the Global South and their ability to continue to emit while we constrain our emissions. And so there's a lot of contradictions that we face as being consumers of automobility over our lives. And then saying, well, we need to wean ourselves from the automobile. And yet we've been recipients of

a lot of the benefits of that mobility as well. I think it's still one of the biggest tools we have. You've written some about this in the past. One of the biggest tools we have in our mobility toolbox is the automobile. The question is how we use it responsibly. And I don't know if that's a controversial statement, but it's one I'm willing to make.

Bruce Appleyard (30:41)
Mm-hmm.

Right. Right.

Yeah, no, I think it's really important. I think, I mean, even just looking back and we go back 10 years when you started the AV & the City Initiative I think back then it was really unknown what would happen. There were notions about how you're going to have to have gates at the crosswalks because

Autonomous vehicles couldn't deal with pedestrians and things like that. There was a pedestrian killed back then. But things have come up now that, you the idea, like as you were talking about how autonomous vehicles could be traffic calming because they actually travel much slower. I

Waymo, I believe in Atlanta the cars were traveling much slower than the cars around them. Right? So there's this idea that you can actually, if you can get a handle on it, you can actually have, really safe vehicles. And I think that's a really interesting concept and we can make things safer on our roads because right now they're just murderous and human drivers just aren't doing a good job.

Billy Riggs (31:50)
Yeah.

We used to say there's promise and there's peril. Like Bruce said 10 years ago, when I started, you know, I started this conference and I came to the University of San Francisco on a grant from Cruise and we started doing this deep research. I thought things were more dichotomous than they are today, but I think I do see them as more a shade of gray.

Bruce Appleyard (31:54)
Mm-hmm.

Billy Riggs (32:10)
Now, I see more positive outcomes than negative outcomes. And that's still stepping back and trying to be a critic. And yet that doesn't mean that doesn't imply complacency. And because I think we do see some of the points of friction, as Bruce was saying, when he walked through those wicked opportunity concepts that we're going to begin rolling out that

it's a lot about how we think about planning and planning deliberately for the future.

Bruce Appleyard (32:42)
Yeah, and I have to say that I think the skepticism about autonomous vehicles probably had an effect on making them become as safe as possible.

Discussions we had early on 10 years ago and around the time probably made a difference, right?

Billy Riggs (32:56)
And

if folks don't know, mean, like Bruce and I did a lot of have done over the last 10 years have done a lot of work on this and engaged for the listeners. We will post a link. We wrote an article a few years back called livable streets and autonomous vehicles. And I think you can look at this issue from many scales. You can look at from a regional scale. You can look at from the sub regional scale. But one of the ways that we like to look at it is at the street level.

And I think that's where, as you started to look at the infrastructural opportunities, I think Bruce and I as people who really care about multimodal interactions, interactions with bikes and pedestrians and individuals with disabilities, individuals who may be blind or low vision, who are ingressing and egressing from vehicles, may have special needs for access. It's really important

that we provide the built environment infrastructure for those individuals as well. And a lot of that responsibility does not reside in the private sector, does not reside with private sector companies providing these mobility services. It's many times the cities in the public works organizations that are building the curbs, that are putting in the street wells, that are actually doing the curb cuts. But it's also, and I make the point, I think Bruce and I worked on a paper together.

that it can also be citizens that go out and change the streets that they live on. And Bruce lived in Portland for a little while, and Portland has great examples of citizens that just go out and just say, we're gonna own the streets we live on. We're gonna change the streets we live

Bruce Appleyard (34:29)
Right.

Yeah. And I think our paper was called "Street Livability in the Era of Driverless Cars." to tell a bit more myself, this is an update to my father's book, "Livable Streets 2.0." And Billy and I worked on a chapter together where we talk about the future issues to set up a framework for how autonomous vehicles should be adopted. And when I look back at when we worked on those pieces,

and where we are now, it feels to me that the the autonomous vehicle companies are really embracing trying to be as safe as possible.

Billy Riggs (35:00)
Yeah, I think that's maybe a good dialogue to end on. From what I've seen with my research with many of these automated vehicle companies is safety is being defined, not just as is approached to vision zero in the true kind of

Swedish context, safety is being defined as saving lives, but also traveling more sustainably. So it's reducing emissions and dealing with the downstream side of public health. So what you breathe when you're walking or cycling. So it's actually looking at like, how can we have both sustainable as well as safer commutes? And I think from what I've seen,

Bruce Appleyard (35:22)
Right.

Billy Riggs (35:41)
These companies, you know, thus far want to be a part of that solution. And that is the tricky thing here, people may say, "Dr. Riggs, you have no proof of that." Yeah, I what I can say. "Yes, I don't work for those companies. That's absolutely right. It may be it's a wicked hypothesis." But what I do know, because I work in a business school and because I took this evil path from becoming an urban planner to working in a school of management.

And maybe some some urban planning school will someday hire me back. But what I can say is the business model for fleet doesn't work without that. really have to have that model towards shared and you really have to focus on maximizing your people miles traveled to make your economics work. And so if you're saying,

"There's no way they're going to do that. It's going to be all single occupancy trips." I'll say fine. Then they're probably not going to succeed as a company because there's just no way to make the economics work given the cost of doing business.

Bruce Appleyard (36:42)
How much does a autonomous vehicle cost? About.

Billy Riggs (36:46)
Well, that's the

that's the $500,000 question. Well, we have some research on that and we can put a plug for that, that research along with your book on on on our show notes. But, you know, the best the best number we can put on it right now is the lowest we can get in terms of numbers around 250,000. And that's when when trying to do the maximum amount of cost compression on the components.

There is a hypothesis that some people have that the cost of components will go down. I have a counter hypothesis. What we've seen from some of the most advanced companies is an acceleration in the technology on the components. That would imply that the components are not actually becoming less sophisticated, that they're becoming more sophisticated, that you're getting chip embedded AI on some of the components.

This would imply that you're not going to see as much cost compression and then you may see your cost stabilization or cost escalation because component prices won't go down as much as we think. And so it's really a wag. We don't know. And so as much as people speculate, the cost will go down on the price to manufacture an autonomous vehicle because of

the way things are going with acceleration and AI and particularly chip embedded AI. and this whole move to create a distributed AI stack and to reduce computation... on the GPU, on the general processing unit. So they're basically pushing computation out to the components of the vehicle.

I think you're going to see not much reduction in costs over the next couple of years. That's a prediction I have. ⁓ It may be true, maybe not, right now it's just still the biggest point of friction in the AV industry. Most people think there are hundreds of thousands of Waymo's crawling around San Francisco. There's not, There's not hundreds of thousands of Waymo's crawling around Atlanta or LA. So all you people out there that think that there's just like,

Bruce Appleyard (38:27)
Yeah.

Yes.

Right.

Billy Riggs (38:48)
hundreds of thousands of vehicles. It's not like the ride share revolution. You can't just like turn on your app and turn key 50,000 vehicles in a market. These are really expensive to produce. There's 800 vehicles in the entire Bay Area right now, maybe 1,000 vehicles. We don't know the precise number, which means there may be three or 400 vehicles in San Francisco proper, any one given time. We can't put a precise number on that, but you know what?

Compared to the number of private trips and private vehicles that enter and exit San Francisco every day, it's less than 1%. So maybe that's a good place to put it in terms of wicked opportunities. If we were able to think about this as a greater number of the automotive fleet, how many lives would we save?

Bruce Appleyard (39:33)
Right, good question. And you definitely laid out with the technological complexities, part of the wicked opportunity story, right? And the costs and everything.

Billy Riggs (39:47)
Well, I think a good place to end, Bruce, is maybe a final word from you, final thoughts about wicked opportunities and maybe how do we plan in this uncertain future? And we'll be sharing more about this idea going to the future, but how do we plan in this uncertainty?

Bruce Appleyard (40:05)
Well, I think, you know, again, there's a lot of different technologies, AI, Airbnb, different innovations in our autonomous vehicles that the landscape is very complex, how they're adopted, how they're viewed, the costs associated, the interdependencies with other opportunities. And our paper, when it comes out, will hopefully provide people a roadmap and the ability to understand.

not just autonomous vehicles but also how we can approach other innovations. Because we have so many other innovations that are coming online that are complexities, there's paradigms, there's paradoxes about them that we need to understand to get them adopted. Hopefully we'll be providing a roadmap with this paper on how to understand these complexities.

Billy Riggs (40:46)
That's a good place to end. We don't have to have all the answers. We can plan in uncertainty It's not a weakness. It's an opportunity. So thanks for your time, Bruce. If you enjoyed this episode, share it. Connect with us. Connect with Bruce. Continue to explore the systems that shape the future of automation and innovation.

Bruce Appleyard (40:54)
That sounds good.

Thank you all.