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Urban Innovate TALKS explores how cities, technology, and people shape the future of mobility. Hosted by Dr. Henriette Cornet, the series features conversations with global experts on autonomous vehicles, public transit, and the human side of innovation — including insights from pulsur, our AI platform for understanding public sentiment and travel behavior.
Henriette Cornet (00:14)
Hi Rachel, nice to have you with us today in Urban Innovate Talks.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (00:20)
good afternoon, Henriette. Happy to be here.
Henriette Cornet (00:22)
You yeah, it's been it's been a while since I wanted to have you with us on this on this podcast or webinar, depending where people are listening or or watching us. And you bet it's really because Austin is special, has a very special, unique landscape when it comes to autonomous vehicles deployment. And yeah, I've been there, I visited Austin last year, end of last year.
And I was really amazed. It really feels like a testing ground with so many companies testing around, which resemble a little bit what I've I'm seeing in San Francisco, being based in San Francisco. But talking to you, I discover there is another layer in which the city is so nicely engaged with all these companies. And that's kind of the reason I wanted to have you here and share a little bit. But before going further, I think it would be worth
introducing yourself and that we get to know you a little bit better. So can you can you can you please present yourself?
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (01:19)
Absolutely.
so my name is Rachel Castignoli. I work for the city of Austin in our transportation and public works department. I've been working with our automated vehicles group. I started our automated vehicles group in 2023 when we had our cruise deployment. so I've been working on that now for three years, which doesn't seem like a lot of time, but it's a enormous amount of time in the AV world. and I'm an attorney. that's kind of how I'm trained and how I come at things from a risk perspective.
perspective I guess. and previous to that I I worked on the public work side doing infrastructure work and things like that and data. So I've been around transportation for a long time. I've been in Austin for 14 years. So I've got to see it grow a lot and change a lot and I'm really excited about the work we do.
Henriette Cornet (02:08)
Yeah, awesome, awesome. Yeah, and being a lawyer I can I can see how it brings a a different lens on on the more engineering kind of of tech discussions So we're we're gonna talk about that and on topic of like incident reporting, etc. I'm sure that that will come within the the discussion.
But first could you share with us a bit what's happening in Austin these days? There are so many companies deploying there, not only for people mobility, also some goods, goods transport. So which are the ones that comes to your mind when when I mean you know them all and you are in touch
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (02:44)
Sure.
Henriette Cornet (02:45)
with with them all. So can you can you share a bit?
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (02:47)
Absolutely.
So right now in Austin we have a Waymo through the Uber app. about 300 of those vehicles. We've got Tesla robotaxis. And then if you're in Austin right now, you see a lot of cyber cabs around that are are testing. So we've got the Tesla Robo Taxis that are deployed as well as the Cybercabs testing, and we expect their deployment soon. And then we have the Zoox Vehicle Robo Taxi deployed here as well. and everyone's also still
kind of testing larger areas and and expansions to their ODD. We have AV Ride testing here and Volkswagen, which will be in LA, I believe, later this year. But we've got the Volkswagen ADMT vehicles as and then we have got our sidewalk robots. so those that are doing some goods delivery, AV ride and serve. and
think that our next thing will be drones. So we'll have a lot of
Henriette Cornet (03:41)
wow.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (03:41)
yeah, different we have a lot of different emerging mobility tech in our right-of-way.
Henriette Cornet (03:47)
that's impressive. You know, the topic of drones, when I heard that and and I got interviewed in this in this matter, I'm always a little bit like scared about them in a sense of really how it will impact the landscape, like the urban landscape when we go in this direction. So I I think we'll keep that for another interview once they are deployed in Austin.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (04:03)
Mm-hmm.
Henriette Cornet (04:07)
And you'll be probably the first I will ask about how is it going. Let's focus on road road transportation.
And you mentioned Waymo, which I'm personally familiar with living in San Francisco, but as you said in Austin is through the Uber app. So it's for me already a very interesting partnership that's happening. This idea of having Uber and you can have for sometime a manually driven ride-hailing service coming to your door or a Waymo that's already
a nice mindset of having like a fleet that is hybrid between human and and autonomous vehicles. And then Tesla it's still a bit
of a mystery for me, the path they are going, because they are coming really from the automotive sector rather than the tech ADS sector. And I still wonder what their business model will be in the future. And seeing them deploying fleets, robotaxi fleets, it's yeah, it makes me curious. Are they operating with or without safety driver in Austin right now?
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (05:09)
Yeah, they're operating in an area without any a safety driver or safety engineer. I believe they're operating in a larger area with a safety engineer that might include the freeways. and then they've got these custom built cyber cabs, right, which are only two seaters. and those are in the testing phase, but they're bright they're gold, so they're very easy to see, driving around Austin right now.
Henriette Cornet (05:32)
yeah. Okay. I I want to come again and see them.
They weren't there in November last year, so I'm gonna have to travel again. Have you have you tried yourself all these services before speaking about the the city representative that you are? Also the person, the citizen. How is your take on all these services? What your opinion on them from a really customer citizen point of view? Service, yeah.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (05:53)
yeah.
I
actually don't take rideshare a lot. 'cause I'm a tri yeah, I
Henriette Cornet (05:57)
You bike, right?
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (05:58)
bike and I do transit. and I mean for me, I use rideshare mainly when I go to the airport, which currently none of the automated vehicle companies serve the airport in Austin because you need to be on the highway for that. And Texas has extremely high highway speeds, so it's not exactly similar to California there. but yeah, I have taken all of them though. you know, and they've been really great and really fun. It's it's amazing.
how quickly you just get used to no one in the driver's seat and I think as they come to more and more places in America people are gonna take them and be amazed at at what we can do.
Henriette Cornet (06:35)
Yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah. And what I remember from our past conversations is you put a big, big, big emphasis in all the work you are doing on safety and you see them as a possibility to make roads safer, correct?
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (06:48)
Yeah,
absolutely. We think that they could be like a really integral part of our vision zero strategy of, you know, getting to zero deaths. I think in 2024 we had a hundred and four roadway fatalities in Austin and that's too many. and we simply cannot, you know, continue to have this system where people are dying on our roadways and especially because we, have some of the tools to prevent this. And I think robo taxis could be a tool, especially with distracted driving and drunk driving.
Henriette Cornet (07:16)
Mm-hmm, absolutely. And also like this idea of people who can't drive, so to say, can it give them access to to mobility, which yeah.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (07:24)
Yeah, empowering them.
Henriette Cornet (07:25)
Yep.
Exactly. Mm-hmm. We'll come back to that of the topic of accessibility. But before, since we are still a bit like drawing the scene in terms of like the context that exists in Austin,
a reason why Austin has been so popular and I'm sure there are many reasons, but is a regulatory landscape, correct?
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (07:45)
Mm-hmm.
Henriette Cornet (07:46)
can you describe to us what's so special about Texas and Austin regulatory landscape
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (07:53)
under Texas law, cities don't have any regulatory power over automated vehicles. So the state didn't have much regulatory power until this month. so we're beginning to go into a system where the Texas DMV authorizes automated vehicle deployments for the first time. So previously kind of we say it's the wild west, you know, like everyone people could be operating in Austin and we wouldn't know it. So we definitely do want
To kind of have some safety controls in place. I think the biggest change from last month to this month is the requirement to share a law enforcement engagement plan. And
Henriette Cornet (08:30)
Mm-hmm.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (08:31)
those are all posted on the Texas Department of Public Safety's website. So we're really happy to see that happen. Texas has a lot of freight as well. so you know, it'd be really hard for every city and county along a highway to regulate and to have that kind of oversight of automated vehicles.
So, there's a reason there's a municipal preemption in Texas. So low regulation. you know, Austin's a very big tech city. Unlike a lot of other Texas
Henriette Cornet (08:58)
Mm-hmm.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (08:59)
cities, it's pretty dense in its center. it's pretty centralized, it's not super dependent on freeway traffic to bring folks from place to place. So it's a good launching point in Texas. and we've definitely seen AV companies coming to Austin for that reason. And it's I mean it's a really fun city, so it's a fun place
to be.
Henriette Cornet (09:17)
Yeah.
Yeah, I confirm. it's a very nice city, very dynamic, very vibrant and a lot of students, etc. And so you mentioned that things are gonna change for now. So before it was released there is not a concept of permit, meaning a company I'm just
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (09:32)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Henriette Cornet (09:34)
repeating
to make sure that it's clear to everybody because also for the for the European audience it's gonna be a bit surprising. This idea of a tech provider will build a vehicle and will be allowed to go on the road. like it's a bit of this self-assessment saying we are following the FMVSS like this standard for for road safety, and
You assess yourself saying, I am compliant with this standard and that's enough, so to say, to be on the road, correct?
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (10:01)
Yeah, you have to be registered and have insurance just like any other vehicle. But
Henriette Cornet (10:05)
yeah.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (10:05)
the rules are that no one in the state can treat an automated vehicle differently than a driven vehicle. So there's
Henriette Cornet (10:10)
Okay.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (10:11)
really no way if someone wanted to exclude them or allow them places. So yeah. The authorization I think is a pretty light touch. and it's only for deployments. People can still come and test here, without
Henriette Cornet (10:23)
Mm-hmm.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (10:24)
permit.
Henriette Cornet (10:25)
okay, okay. This doesn't change. The testing doesn't change. It's more like for the the commercial deployment that you will have to get a permit for commercial deployment. Okay. Okay.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (10:34)
They don't use the word permit, they use the word authorization, the Texas
DMV. And so that seems fair because, you know, Texas that's who licenses drivers, right? The Texas DMV. So, I think that there, you know, when Cruise had the crash in San Francisco in October of 2023 the state of California, though the CPUC, shut down Cruise essentially and said, Wait a minute, like let's hold on. But no one in Texas had that authority. So Cruise was still operating here for weeks.
after that and then they they decided to shut down. And I think that gave the legislature some desire for someone to kind of hold the the authority to say like, wait a minute, you know, there's been an incident and we need to review things.
Henriette Cornet (11:15)
Yeah, okay, I see. And from what happening now this month, it's gonna be possible. It's gonna give okay, okay, that's awesome. That's reassuring in a sense I would say. It's great.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (11:24)
Yeah. Yeah, we got a lot
of phone calls in October of 2023 that were saying I saw this happened in California, why are these still on our streets? And, you know, we're
Henriette Cornet (11:34)
And you mentioned the interaction, particularly the interaction with first responder. that's also something that in California is gonna get stronger now, this expectation for AV providers to comply and to really explain how they will interact with first responders.
I remember that you were also doing a lot of work around around like
education but like more like workshops, with the people involved from the first responder, emergency, etc. to talk to these AV companies. I remember hearing from this type of initiative that the city of Austin was in charge, correct? Can you tell us more about this type of engagement that you organized?
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (12:17)
Absolutely.
We have a stakeholder meeting every year where we bring all the vehicles out and we bring in kind of the main stakeholders, which are a lot of first responders, our infrastructure owner operators, our electric charging folks, right? these vehicles almost all require a lot of charging. and then our disability communities, our transit folks, you know, our bike folks, just bringing everyone together to talk about you know, like what's happening, like who you can talk to if you have an issue, if you want.
automated vehicles to do more pickup and drop offs and we we've really heard this from disability communities like how can we identify a good spot you know where folks can consistently get them so it's really great people love to see the cars right we bring all the vehicles to a lot and when the first responders are able to go into them we do do a lot of first responder training here my you know generally we say we don't want anyone's first experience with an automated vehicle to be during an emergency
We want everyone to
Henriette Cornet (13:18)
Mm-hmm.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (13:18)
have seen the vehicle, touched the vehicle, asked the questions they need to ask before. so and because of the way firefighters work 24-hour shifts, we typically have three to six trainings in a row just so that we can make sure everyone gets through. And those have been very successful. I've heard a lot from police officers and firefighters that, I knew from my training how to, access the car. I knew from my training what to do. So we're we're pretty happy with.
with
that and I'm excited to see it in California as well.
Henriette Cornet (13:48)
Yeah, exactly.
I think it inspired a lot of of other cities to do so and this trainings are extremely important and it it touched also in the topic of what you said about this workshop in like public education,
I don't know if you have this impression that we may be as experts a little bit in our bubbles, but I really hope also with this type of webinars and podcasts that more people will hear about it and will get curious about it and get into in touch with people like you, like stakeholders like you to understand better how the vehicles work.
We have also talk about the topic of workforce development.
and how these AV may disrupt the job situation, so to say. And I know you have work in this area. If you could share something about it, that would be awesome.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (14:34)
Yeah,
the automated vehicles will displace some workers and they'll also create some jobs. And so it's really a matter of being intentional as we can. And I think you see it right now very strongly in the surface reauthorization bill, Build America 250 that there's a lot in there about retraining truck drivers and other folks who work in commercial freight to support automated freight.
Currently these folks are on the road a lot. You know, it's a dangerous job and they could be closer to home, you know, like doing a lot of these high skill level technical things and we need to give them the tools to do that. We're, you know, like
Henriette Cornet (15:11)
Mm-hmm.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (15:12)
making a huge change to how people who drive professionally are operating. And, we need to be intentional about how we're doing it. And so I was really happy to see that first responder unions are engaged with that work and to see a reflection in that bill.
Of you know, we we see where this is going and we really want people to have good local jobs, and and that's what
Henriette Cornet (15:34)
Mm-hmm.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (15:35)
we're working on. So I'm excited to see that. and I do think that the other, you know, another workforce aspect is this really helps a lot of folks who are disabled to get places independently and things like that. It opens up access for a lot of different folks to get to their jobs. So there's
Henriette Cornet (15:49)
Mm-hmm. yeah. Yeah.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (15:52)
a a bunch of really interesting ways in which this doesn't have to be
negative for a workforce and I'd love to see the federal government taking the lead there instead of like us cities trying to to figure it out.
Henriette Cornet (16:04)
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
I And you mentioned the word the unions and you know Many of my clients are public transit agencies, and when I engage with them and tell them, are you exploring the topic of autonomous vehicles, of self driving? That I feel a little bit of
like going a bit back because of the unions because it has been criticized I don't know if it's more in the past and it's it has changed now as a possibility for this self-driving technology could remove jobs from
the truck industry but also in the public transit sector as bus driver. So we haven't touched in detail the topic of of transit and I I'd like to do so also because Cap Metro has interesting projects. But these unions you talked to you felt that they were open.
to see what the technology could impact the different sector or what have you heard from them?
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (16:56)
have
not heard much much from them, but I do think that in the discussion leading up to the latest draft of the Build America 250 act, you can see what unions are asking for, right? Which is that workforce support for the transition. Like the transition
Henriette Cornet (17:12)
Mm-hmm.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (17:13)
they understand is inevitable around and I mean that only applies to commercial vehicles.
Henriette Cornet (17:16)
do they?
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (17:16)
Yeah. And those vehicles are over 10,000 pounds. So I don't think it doesn't apply to school buses. you know, that's
The person who drives a bus does a lot of jobs besides driving, right? Like they're
Henriette Cornet (17:29)
Absolutely.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (17:29)
they're managing, you know, a pretty complex group of strangers through the city. So there's I think that bus drivers are little harder to swap out than truck drivers. but even so, you can see that unions are beginning to do less like no and more like okay, how do we engage with creating a
workforce of the future and how do we engage with the jobs that can be built from this technology.
Henriette Cornet (18:00)
Yes, yes, yes.
I love that. And when you see all the different technologies that have been implemented in the past, like starting with the the smartphone and and all this revolution that we had the past twenty years, there have been so many jobs created out of that. And you say a word that is extremely important is the adjective inevitable, because I think at some point
That will be a technology that will come out. And all the work I've been doing in the past years, where really to say it's gonna come, we need to discuss it, we need to really say what we want. And mostly from public sector, I really appreciate when the public sector says concretely, okay, that is our expectations. Like that's what we want. And also the the way you do it, I love it in the terms of like.
pose it optimistic way. Like we see the advantages of this technology and that that's our kind of requirement for that.
I know Cabmetro is doing various projects. Have you followed followed them? Have you experienced
them?
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (19:02)
Absolutely. Yeah,
I rode on the automated bus, which was really fun last year. So Cat Metro had a grant from the Federal Transit Association and Perrone Robotics installed some automation on some buses. And the reason there is the Cap Metro is moving to electric buses like many cities. and but the buses have to be, you know, kind of charged all night. And so they go through and someone's on at the
Yard all night long, driving the buses under the charger, the charger comes down on them. So automating movements around the yard, which is what this this project was, is really helpful and not threatening so much of the main driving of the bus. because it's it's this nighttime activity. It lets them park the buses like significantly closer together. so they have more room in the yard for other things. It means they don't need to buy land or you know, they can do more efficient uses of it. So
It's very cool. I mean, it was really fun to watch and and especially thinking about like chargers are expensive. So you if you can buy fewer to do more buses, if you can automate
Henriette Cornet (20:11)
Mm-hmm.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (20:12)
that progress of getting the bus under the charger, lowering it, you know, it's there for an hour, hour and a half, and then it goes through. So if you could do that overnight without a person, you know, like you've you've really saved a lot of time and a lot of space. And so it's
Henriette Cornet (20:27)
Yeah.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (20:27)
a really cool project, you know, we hope that other
transit agencies take a look at it as well and and start thinking how because you can dip your toe into automation that way, right? Of like how
does it work with with my
Henriette Cornet (20:37)
Yes, absolutely. Yeah.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (20:39)
buses in my yard before, you know, we talk about sending buses out on routes.
Henriette Cornet (20:44)
Yeah, absolutely.
And during the day, the technology could still help for like more like driving assistance, and you can use all the sensors for more what we call L2 and I have an episode on another level of automation for those who are not familiar with it, where the driver is still in charge, but then is assisted by by the by the technology and then at night as you describe.
it's done automatically where ultimately the driver is really paid to drive and not to do all this maintenance steps that you describe. I think that's very, very meaningful and yeah,
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (21:17)
Yeah, we want to spend
our transit money on providing transit services. And so anything that can save
Henriette Cornet (21:21)
Yes.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (21:22)
us, you know, on the admin side and the yard maintenance side helps us.
Henriette Cornet (21:25)
so now moving a little bit to the topic of you know how I mentioned earlier this how to encourage cities to look at this technology, to think about this technology. What if
There is a mid-sized city somewhere, and it could be both U.S. and Europe. And sometimes I don't like how we put the two continents kind of apart because I think many cities from their size are very similar in the way. They rely partly on transit, but a lot on car, etc. So they're very similar landscape in many, many aspects. You would have an ADS provider, an AV provider like Waymo, Zoox, whatever.
Planning to come to the city and similarly the city will not have any regulatory power to do much about it. Or if they do, they may be very curious and say, no, actually we would like to have them because it will provide new mobility options.
What would you recommend them to do in terms of what should they look for? Particularly I'm interested in the topic of infrastructure, the physical and the digital infrastructure. Can they already prepare for that? And what have you learned the past years on really on the topic of all the digital digitalization of a city, data sharing, etc., but also the physical infrastructure?
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (22:40)
Yeah,
we do talk to a lot of other cities in America that are beginning to get automated vehicles and even if you don't have regulatory authority, you should still ask for what you want, right? I mean, that's the worst that could happen is they say no. And you know, you've you've made it clear what your values are that way and and what you need. You know, like for us we feel really strongly we need those first responder trainings. you know, we need to be able to know how to pull over the car, access the vehicle, get into the or cut the vehicle if we have to. So that's a priority for us. We always ask for it when folks
Are coming in. for digital infrastructure, right? Everyone comes in and says we don't need anything from the city. The car, you know, is gonna learn it all, don't worry about it. but we do do a lot of communication around road closures, around special events, around emergencies, just like in California and Phoenix, we really want AVs to have all the information they need to operate safely. And they're not they're not driving like drivers quite yet, right?
They're
not seamlessly understanding a complex situation in the right of way where, you know, like there's a work zone. Yeah. So there's
Henriette Cornet (23:45)
Constriction work or something. Yeah.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (23:47)
there's all sorts of cases where, you know, as a driver, you're like, okay, I kind of see what's happening here and an AV might struggle, especially around like hand signals or or anything when you kind of have a police officer kind of putting you against the signal or asking you to do something that's not typically done in that location. So we try to to solve that at the beginning with
especially around all of our events like Austin City Limits and University of Texas football and things like that. And I think that's something that we're increasing increasingly automating via, you know, digital right now we've you can sign up for our API and we'll push it out to you. But increasingly we're trying to use, you know
better digital communication live to
Henriette Cornet (24:30)
Mm-hmm.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (24:30)
show where our work zones are, where our emergencies are happening and things like that. So that's really exciting. I think with things like roadside units and onboard units, you know, we already have a lot of tech in our city fleet, including our fire trucks and our police vehicles. So they speak to the signals right now. We've got signal preemption in Austin where a fire truck rolling up to a signal can typically turn that signal green.
Henriette Cornet (24:54)
mm-hmm.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (24:55)
yeah and so why if it can talk to the signal, why can't it talk to
An automated vehicle, so that's an option. But I would say that it's a lot, it's money to spend and infrastructure to maintain for these very wealthy companies, like you know, Waymo's owned by Google, Zoox is owned by Amazon. So we would rather invest the money in our physical infrastructure, which helps drivers as well as automated vehicles. And we have done a lot of analysis here about what we think the needs are, looking at like where incidents occur again and again. we have done some research.
striping especially around our fire stations just because we think like clarity about where you can and can't stop really helps our drivers and it really helps our automated vehicles who sometimes you know are faced with a fire truck that is maybe has lights on maybe it doesn't maybe has sirens on maybe it doesn't so we're trying to give everyone the clues
Henriette Cornet (25:47)
Mm-hmm.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (25:47)
that they need in the right of way to help them like behave correctly so we have put up more signs due to automated vehicles we've tried to be clear
about our signs and and what they're saying, what they're asking. we really have gone to more cones over kind of hand signals because that really helps and that helps drivers as well and it helps our first responders kind of have less of a burden on them so
We have made changes and I think we'll continue to make changes in the future. And I would say to cities like this is coming and you need to start talking about it as soon as possible so that you're ready and that you're ready to start the infrastructure we build today will last a hundred years. So we've
Henriette Cornet (26:29)
Yeah.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (26:30)
gotta the who knows what the right of way will look like in a hundred years. So we've really gotta build for the future and not for today. Sorry.
Henriette Cornet (26:38)
I love that. Wow. I'll take I'll take this quote. I I I love it. And
and I want to repeat something you say that is so central in my opinion with in this entire discussion.
when you said what's helpful for AVs in terms of physical infrastructure will be helpful for human drivers as well. And having a good lane marking, having clear signal, etc., it's helpful for everybody. And when we travel in cities, we know the situation where you arrive at an intersection and you're completely lost and you are not really sure where to go, etc. yeah, that's the worst and that's where accidents happen. So I like this idea
when you retrofit kind of make the physical infrastructure better. What about all the topic of like pickup and drop-off? It's a big topic in San Francisco. what it's called in the field, like the curb management curb issue. So, how is that going in Austin? do you have complaints about the
vehicles blocking the lanes, etc. How is that solved or addressed?
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (27:40)
Yeah, of course. We have complaints about vehicles blocking lanes and you know, the first kind of analysis is like, is this something a human rideshare driver would do? Like, is this something that is happening? Well,
Henriette Cornet (27:48)
I love that. I love that you started. Yeah.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (27:51)
I mean, they sh also shouldn't do it. So if it's something
Henriette Cornet (27:53)
Yes.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (27:54)
a human rideshare driver does and and does, you know, w do we need a no stopping, no standing sign there? Do we need to like designate that curb differently? you know, but
Honestly, like the complaints help us understand like where people need and are picking up ride shares, right? So when I get complaints repeatedly that like, an AV is blocking this road 'cause it's picking someone up or dropping someone off, that really tells us like we need to modify this block to have a pickup drop-off location instead of all parking or instead of its current use. and, you know, that's one of the number one things we see is that people are using ride share more, especially to get to events where they don't want to park. And like we need to be identifying like very
clearly with our rideshare partners and with our AV partners like what would be a good place for you to pick up and drop off
Henriette Cornet (28:40)
Mm-hmm.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (28:41)
like what's an accessible place for people to access things like that so increasingly we're working with them as well as as our rideshare partners to to figure it out we're in the middle of a comprehensive curb management plan so it's like very much a a big topic now on you know how can we how can the curb be used most efficiently but yeah we definitely want to provide it close to our
people want to be. but there are simply places where, you know, it's either unsafe or that's parking. or
Henriette Cornet (29:10)
Yeah.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (29:11)
one one we have a lot is that they go into valet zones and you know someone paying the city for that valet zone. So we really it helps us know we need to identify better where an
Henriette Cornet (29:21)
Mm-hmm.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (29:21)
appropriate place to pick up and drop off is because I don't like sending an email saying hey you can't pick up and drop off here without offering another location nearby.
Henriette Cornet (29:29)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I love that. And I really, like how you put all the rideshare services together and not differentiating who is driving or not, so to say that I think that's very, very s smart way to move forward and also to be very fair for the different players. Are you also investigating kind of monetization of the curb, you know, like depending how long the the ride share would stay, etc.? I I'm kind of interested in this type of
Of concept.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (29:56)
Yeah, so you know, Waymo's typically stay two to five minutes as they wait for someone and that is typically long enough to give them a ticket if they're five minutes definitely is so which a human driver would usually doesn't stay that long or at least moves, does the block thing. So but yeah, I think that that would be right now we don't have any way to collect fees from automated vehicles and I think that that was that's one of them, to collect fees from all vehicles. And again, like pricing the curb correctly is
is this
Henriette Cornet (30:26)
Yes.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (30:26)
part of efficient use of the curb. and we definitely want to do that along with like what's safe for pulling over and dropping off. We've got areas of Austin where you're pulling into a bike lane. And we've had a lot of really good conversations with our automated vehicle partners about like when is it okay to pull into a bike lane? You know, like people do it. you know, and we can't monitor all of them all the time, but like what information would we want you to have about, you know, do you see a cyclist within 200 yards?
or whatever your sensors show. So I don't want the excuse to be like, I saw an Uber do it, so I get to do it. I want us all to like move towards like what's the safest and most efficient use of pickup drop off. What gets people to as close as they can get you know, safely.
Henriette Cornet (31:13)
I think I mentioned at the beginning something also unique about the work you're doing you have this AV incident dashboard. can you share a little bit about it and tell us where why you started doing that and who is contributing to it? How has it been received?
should it be understood as policing the AVs at the end or like what's the mindset behind this dashboard?
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (31:34)
Yeah.
Hundred percent. so we do have what I believe to be the only like AV incident dashboard right now in the US, at least the only public one. I suspect other cities have it and they're using it internally. and ours is public because our city council, you know, we showed it to them one time and they're like, We this needs to be a public dashboard so people can see it. and what happens is we get a lot of phone calls about how automated vehicles are and those can be anything from what we call nuisance complaints of there's a AV parked in front of my house or I'm a where
About surveillance, you know, things like that that aren't necessarily safety complaints, but just like I do not like this, all the way up through collisions. And so, you know, like near misses, safety concerns, issues with school crossing guards or school buses. And what we wanted was information we could use to make changes
Henriette Cornet (32:23)
Mm-hmm.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (32:24)
to our processes and procedures, to make changes to our infrastructure, so that we could really understand: like, is the the whatever's repeatedly causing the same issue here? Is that a software?
Issue for our OEM or AV partners to fix? Is it an infrastructure issue for us? Is it a process issue with how you know like the temporary traffic control was working here? So that's been very helpful for that. We meet once a month and we go over all of the latest incidents and we have it, it's mapped out, which is great. but I would say that
you know, it's it's definitely a mix of every time someone calls me I put it in because I don't feel like I I'm a good judge of what's serious and what's not serious to people and we do send all of those incidents on to all the AV companies saying, Hey, you know, you should know that people are calling about X, Y, or Z, or they say that, you know, this car did not slow for a crosswalk and then they're A you know, that's why we always ask for time, date, and location so that the AV companies
Henriette Cornet (33:21)
Mm-hmm.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (33:21)
can pull the video on their side and figure out like what happened
And why. And so I really, my favorite thing about the dashboard, right, is hearing back like, hey, we looked at this incident, we identified this problem, we've just done a software patch. And I'm like, that's great. Because that makes us partners in like
Henriette Cornet (33:37)
That's awesome. Yeah.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (33:38)
continuous improvement. And if, you know, AV companies call me sometimes and they say, I we can't see the stop sign, it's obscured by foliage, or you know, like we're having a problem here, and then I solve problems for them. So you know, as long as we're working together to make the right-of-way safer, I'm really happy. And I
I don't want the dashboard to be like a gotcha. It's not I mean, it really isn't. It's a way for everyone to see and hopefully one day it's a way for us to see that things are improving and that we're having fewer
Henriette Cornet (34:06)
Mm-hmm.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (34:07)
issues. You know, as a early adoption city, we I think that you know, there's a lot of things that we've solved for already and and there'll be things we solve for in the next few years and hopefully the dashboard will tell that story.
Henriette Cornet (34:20)
So mainly it's it's really nice and so mainly the reporting is made by the public.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (34:27)
Yeah, a lot of it's also firefighters, police officers, and like city employee like parking folks, people who are in the field for work. but yeah, mostly the public. Yeah.
Henriette Cornet (34:33)
Okay. But anybody in Austin could also kind of file
a okay, and they would have to identify the company, or if they don't, is that okay?
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (34:43)
If they don't, I mean I I can't really put it in until they have a company or a location. But you know, someone'll be like, I just don't like this and I'm like, Okay, like you know, like take it off with the state. But yeah, if you call three one one, that's we're really asking you for it helps us and it helps them to know the location and the time and the date. 'Cause we can like take a look at the signal, you know, like we've got video cameras at them. We can there's a lot of things we can do to look further into
Henriette Cornet (35:10)
Yeah.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (35:11)
places where there's repeated issues.
Henriette Cornet (35:13)
Yeah,
the kind of a continuous improvement. I I really, really like that. And it speaks to me a lot a lot when you say that people will even mention surveillance concern, which goes in the direction of bit of trust, etc., because we are at at Urban Innovate at the moment we are conducting a project on safety perception of AVs, comparing how people perceive safety in AVs in ride hailing in manually driven ride hailing services like Uber or Lyft.
And in transit.
And so the goal was really to compare these different modes based on narratives of people, based on social media and how people speak about these different transportation modes. And then we realized when we were gathering all the data, it's not always about accident. And there's a lot about, yeah, people are asking, like, where's the footage going? Where is it stored? And they complained about very different.
different things which I do think there is a indirect link about how you feel safe so to say how you feel comfortable and and safe. So I would love to see some of this more qualitative feedback of the people in Austin to compare of the studies that we are running in the Bay Area. That would be super interesting and it could feed
really this concept of when do we feel safe as human like listen to the people's voice and making like a back and forth discussion like really congratulations for that it's very very nice I think that's a a fantastic way to move forward and very inspirational for other cities.
So yeah, moving towards a bit the end of our discussion. you know
every quarter I publish an overview of the ADS use cases, I call it like that. So it's kind of an expert jargon, like the automated driving system that are currently operating. So I'm not focusing on pilots. I'm really looking at what is ongoing worldwide in the field of AVs, being from the from the ride hailing services, transit, like more shared mobility, microtransit, even paratransit.
or buses, automated buses, but also goods. And I like to ask my guests, what use cases these days do you find the most exciting? Is there one or even one coming that you're like, I'm looking forward to this one. I'm gonna follow it a bit more closely. Is there any you have any use case in mind?
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (37:32)
Yeah, I'm I'm pretty excited about automated freight. I think we know that high speeds and large vehicles combined to be particularly unsafe. So if we can enhance safety there, I think that we we make a big impact, right? I I love my rideshare folks, but they're traveling through the city doing twenty five. so you know, the the freight and then we have the opportunity to run the freight at times where you wouldn't necessarily want humans driving like through the night. and so a lot of what's happening
at
the federal level with creating a a nationwide freight automated freight
Henriette Cornet (38:06)
Mm-hmm.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (38:07)
framework is is interesting to me we all remember co well I remember COVID like a resilience in that that freight system of of not you know being as reliant on humans or being as reliant on humans to drive and being more reliant on
Henriette Cornet (38:21)
Mm-hmm.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (38:21)
humans to to pack and unpack. So I think there's a lot of really cool stuff that could happen there. and there's a lot of opportunities to put that
Smart infrastructure into freeways that are frequented by freight. and to use, I think the coolest thing we could do with automated vehicles is to use them as sensors for emergencies, you know, think like
Henriette Cornet (38:40)
yeah.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (38:41)
the LA fires or for flooding here. Because we, you know, if we could send them in and they have all this video of seeing what's going on, getting eyes on it would be so useful to us. So I think that the next step could really be like, how do we use this for in our emergencies and our preparedness and our
disaster relief and things like that, like getting goods in, getting information out. that could be huge. So I'm really excited about you know, where we go from there and and as well as freight. I think that we could see a big safety impact on the highways. So
Henriette Cornet (39:15)
Thanks for that.
Yeah, I love that, definitely. And also beyond the disasters, also they are kind of simple, more day to day road maintenance, correct? Identifying like defect in the roads, etcetera. I think this vehicle could help tremendously with that. Yeah.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (39:29)
Yeah, and Waymo started
doing that and we've we've worked through that data. you know, they're identifying potholes for us and and we're working through on, you know, making sure that those potholes aren't duplicated in our system and filling them and things like that. So we really appreciate any of that and it's great. They have, you know, very detail rich 3D maps of the city and and they've we've talked about a lot of
Henriette Cornet (39:50)
Yes.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (39:50)
different data we could share. They know a lot about bikes and and who's biking where and maybe identifying places where we could create bike infrastructure or
pedestrian infrastructure based on use, based on what they're seeing. So I'm excited
Henriette Cornet (40:03)
Mm-hmm.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (40:04)
to to be sharing data with all of them. I think that they, you know, have so many ideas but also like so many insights into how this how people move around the city that we could use to help on the infrastructure side.
Henriette Cornet (40:17)
Yes, that's awesome. So everything what you shared with us today, a word that maybe summarized it is I have the impression you really you are really looking forward to create synergies. And I think that
is so interesting and how can we like public, private, everybody's together also. I know you collaborate also with academic partners, etc. This idea of a synergetic ecosystem creating win-win situations for everybody. I love that.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (40:45)
It's awesome.
Henriette Cornet (40:46)
Thank you so much, Rachel, for your time for sharing all that with us. I would advise everybody to follow up your work, everything that's happening in Austin. If you don't mind also I would invite the people who are listening to us to contact you. Like if they are like city other city representatives and have questions. And I know you host a lot of delegation from all over the world. So yeah, there is Austin is definitely a city to to visit for
many reasons and also the AV landscape for sure so thanks for your time yeah yes
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (41:15)
Yeah, I would invite every everyone to come to Austin. We're we're
really building amazing things here. So I'm I'm really excited to, you know, that we do get to lead in this space, but also to learn from other cities. I'd really love to know how other cities are are handling their stuff as well.
Henriette Cornet (41:32)
Yeah,
awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks for your time and I hope we talk again about when the drones are everywhere in the city. Thank you so much. Okay, okay, I will. take care. Bye bye.
Rachel Castignoli - Austin, TX (41:38)
Yes. No, you find a better city than us, and I'll listen to that one. Thanks, Henriette. Bye.