Post-gubernatorial debate analysis, LAPD chief finalists, where to grab an NY slice in LA

Let's start with immigration, where you had Travis Allen saying that we need to build the wall, and that he would not expand preschool to undocumented children. You had both Republicans saying they oppose DACA; you had both Allen and John Cox saying that the first thing they'd do is get rid of the sanctuary state policy. 



They disagreed completely on high-speed rail with all four Democrats basically embracing it saying they'd get it done. Both Republicans said 'the second thing I'm gonna do is kill that Jerry Brown train to nowhere.'



The one area there was bipartisan agreement was on this privacy question — a ballot measure that's likely to be before voters in November, basically giving consumers more control over the data that companies like Facebook and Google have. All six candidates embraced that. 

This is another Space Act Agreement that we’ve signed with them. And the focus of this one is specifically urban air mobility, whereas the previous one was more generally looking at traffic management … How would a system like this really work and integrate into an existing air control environment. NASA is bringing their simulation capabilities and their knowledge of air space management to better think about safety and the effects on existing air traffic control systems in some specific areas.

We’re actually going to start piloted, so all of our vehicles will have pilots in them when we launch, both our demonstration flights in 2020 as well as our actual commercial service that we have announced we’ll be launching in 2023.

Our director of air space operations is a 20-year NASA veteran who was leading a lot of the air space work they were doing at one of their research centers. He’s looking at different concepts of these different aerial lanes -- dynamically allocated spaces in the sky that can handle pretty high through-put of vehicles and the system will take care of the conflicts. It will be dynamically routed and automated for vehicles on our network.



The air space is pretty big, so there’s a bunch of different concepts that we’ve looked at. Clearly, we want to take advantage of the 3D space of the air. That’s one of the main advantages of this mode of transportation is that you’re not limited by the built infrastructure on the ground that is really the source of most congestion, so we have different concepts along those lines that we’re looking at.



Pipistrel, based in Slovenia, is one of several aircraft makers that has partnered with Uber on a flying ride-hail service. The new Pipistrel concept unveiled during the Uber Elevate conference in L.A. can carry between 2 and 6 passengers and co go longer distances at higher speeds than previous models.

Probably 1,500 to 2,000 feet. Somewhere in that range. That’s kind of the typical height of a light helicopter today. It would be way above any built up infrastructure. Height for these electric airplanes, you won’t hear them either. If you’re on the ground, they’ll be essentially silent.

We think that’s a major, major requirement that we are putting onto our vehicle partners. We have to hit these noise targets. One of the blockers of being able to scale this is community acceptance, so we have to take that really seriously from the very beginning.



We’re still doing some foundational work on how quiet they need to be. We’ve laid specific targets out for our vehicle partners. We haven’t released those publicly at this point. From the white paper we put out last year, the goal is to have these be quiet enough that they essentially are not much more noticeable outside the urban background noise that exits. We’re doing surveys of background noise-scapes in different urban areas to build up our understanding of that so we can better tune the requirements we’re giving our vehicle partners.

The vehicles themselves will cruise once they take off and get up and become wing born. They’ll cruise at something like 150 mph is a target we’ve set for that. But the overall trip time is going to be a function of other things. We’re doing a lot of modeling. What is the first and last mile -- that initial distance you have to get to the sky port to get to the vehicle and then where the sky port is relative to your final destination.

We’re actually modeling all of this out to be able to site the sky ports to minimize that so our riders have a magical experience end to end so you can push a button and significantly reduce the travel time for these highly congested areas.



We haven’t set any specific numbers yet, but what we’re doing for sky port siting and location is deep data analysis to understand the tradeoffs. And we’re also developing partnerships with infrastructure folks. 



We’re looking at concepts both on top of buildings and on the ground, so we’ve done a bunch of different studies on this and we think the right answer will be a heterogeneous network. Some things will be on the ground and other things will be on the tops of buildings. There’s a lot of valuable unused real estate on top of buildings that we think could be put to pretty good use in this regard.

What we’ve targeted for operation on our network is four passenger seats and a pilot, so five seats total. And some of the partners are designing variants for other potential uses. 



What we rolled out today is something we’re calling our ECRM 3, which is ... a fully battery-propelled airplane. 

I think that the city’s pretty supportive of what we’re doing and we’re engaging with them pretty heavily with our local policy team. In fact, Mayor Garcetti gave us an opening statement that we showed at the start of the summit.

The greatest challenge is we’re trying to build an eco system. I think that one of the reasons we’re putting on this summit is to continue to build that eco system and to push people forward to be excited about this and to want to be part of this eco system, because we strongly believe that no one can do this alone. We’re trying to build a new system of transportation, so it’s going to require a lot of people investing in different spaces simultaneously altogether to make this happen. 

I had a very bi-coastal reaction to this. The New Yorker in me was like, 'What, are you kiddin' me? L.A. is so freakin' fancy, they need to fly their pizza in on a jet?'



The Angeleno in me was like, 'Can you think of the environmental impact of ordering pizza from across the country?' Either way, my reaction was like, 'Why is this a thing?'

• Joe Peeps in Valley Village. Their pizza tastes like the real thing and has the feel of a New York City pizzeria. I could easily see myself as a kid getting a slice there after school.
• If you love a cheesy pizza, Echo Park's Pizza Buona is really satisfying, just like a hearty New York slice.
• If you really want a New York classic brought to the west coast, without paying JetBlue for it, there's the legendary of Joe's Pizza. It's the pizza I grew up eating in Greenwich Village, which has many locations out here.