Mobility & Transportation - Issue #65

Happy Tuesday {{first_name}} !!

I returned from Think Transit in Fort Worth recently - the Trapeze and Vontas conference for the transit sector. Terry White’s keynote was moving – talking about enabling transit with new technology to benefit everyone.

Another highlight was a trip I took to nearby Arlington, Texas, where Via and May Mobility are operating an autonomous shuttle pilot project. The shuttle had a human safety driver, but in San Francisco Google’s Waymo is launching a completely driverless shuttle service.

Also, I’ve been watching Super Pumped - a new show about the early days of Uber - partly because my favourite actor (Kyle Chandler) stars as a VC in it, and partly because of my interest in the evolution of tech companies in this space. Of course, because it’s Hollywood, I’ve remained skeptical of how many of the scenes actually happened.

During our conference, I leveraged skills learned from working with Overlap Associates to facilitate a Design Thinking workshop. We moved through the five steps of the process including empathizing, ideating, and prototyping – with Lego! It was a very powerful session because it got peer agencies talking about how their operations really feel from the view of their riders. We also identified some cool new features we look forward to telling you about in the months to come ;-) Special thanks to our participants!