Quoted in USA Today: Ride-hailing has a friend in Chao, but does self-driving?

Third times a charm: I'm honored to have been quoted three times in the past year in USA Today, a paper with a reach of 45 million people, according to my media analytics tool Meltwater. The first time was about the city of the future and then about Uber and Lyft being forced out of Austin.

Today I was quoted in an article about Donald Trump's pick for transportation secretary that made Page 2B of the hard-copy edition (which isn't easy to do; have you seen the hard-copy lately? It's about 20 pages). Some of the highlights of the article were republished from my gig over at Mobility Lab. The same thing appears here.

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In today’s USA Today, technology and culture reporter Marco della Cava notes that although incoming U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao’s “public service record is extensive, her leadership tenure as Labor secretary and at the head of organizations such as the United Way and the Peace Corps doesn’t shed much light on how she would rule on autonomous driving issues.”

In September, the U.S. DOT released “a book-length document that served as the Obama Administration’s endorsement of self-driving cars as a safe and environmentally friendly alternative to human-piloted machines, which kill some 30,000 people a year. In stark contrast, the 2016 Republican platform chastises the current administration for “its ill-named Livability Initiative (that) is meant to ‘coerce people out of their cars.'””

della Cava goes on to ask me whether Chao, if confirmed, would stick by the party line and look to scrap the document and start over?

“She could in theory, but everyone recognizes this is going to happen one way or the other,” says Paul Mackie, spokesman for Mobility Lab, a publicly funded research institute that provides information about transportation alternatives and solutions.

It’s an intriguing dilemma for Chao. The last two DOT secretaries, one a Republican and one a Democrat, agreed that making bikeability, walkability, and mass transit far better was a non-partisan issue and would be great for the economy and people in general.

Mackie suggested that the movement towards funding better biking, walking, and transit conditions might not change much with a new DOT secretary in place. He said Chao’s role is more as “cheerleader” given that many of the nitty gritty decisions about how municipalities go about solving mobility challenges remain at the state and local level.

The Republican platform also opines that DOT funding is incorrectly used for bikeshare programs, sidewalks, recreational trails, landscaping, and historical renovations. della Cava and I also discussed how getting rid of federal funding for transportation elements that promote so many societal benefits “would seem to run counter to what the President-elect Donald Trump might value, given he is a real-estate developer.”

“True quality of life improvement in cities comes from walkability, which improves health, happiness and real-estate values,” Mackie says. “Real estate is hottest where mass transit is. You’d like to think Trump would understand that as a builder.”

Read the complete article at USA TODAY (Page 2B of the hard-copy edition)

USA Today asks me about how Uber and Lyft leaving Austin could play out

As I've become more of a transportation-expert spokesperson for Mobility Lab, it's been a pretty good run lately, including twice being quoted in America's biggest newspaper, USA Today.

In my latest commentary, I was asked by the paper's Austin beat reporter, Rick Jervis, about the national perspective on Uber and Lyft leaving the Texas city because of a conflict over whether or not their drivers should be fingerprinted like traditional taxi drivers (the companies contend they should not be fingerprinted).

Mobility Lab's take on it is that this is a very disruptive time in the transportation industry and we're still in the very early days of seeing all this play out.

• Will the desire of Millennials for less car ownership (and ownership in general) than older generations translate into more carpooling, ridesharing, pickup services like transit, and quick-hop options like bikesharing? 
• Will electric and autonomous vehicles create the possibility of less ownership and more flexible public-transportation fleets? 
• And will others step in to provide the kinds of technology that have made Uber and Lyft so wildly successful, while playing more nicely with local governments?

When Uber and Lyft left Austin, a non-profit tech group called RideAustin was right there to take their place, within 15 to 20 days. That's pretty amazing, and my point that the USA Today author got across nicely was that other cities could very easily follow this lead if Uber and Lyft prove to be politically unpopular.

While it seems these options are every bit as safe as, if not safer than, traditional taxis, the public in Austin spoke through a vote that just being tracked on GPS is not enough and that drivers should be fingerprinted.

Here's the whole article, Austin hunted for solutions in run up to ride-hailing vote (it also ran in the Burlington Free Press and the Des Moines Register), and here's how I was quoted in the start of it:

Major cities such as Los Angeles and Philadelphia — where both companies currently operate — have faced similar clashes when trying to regulate the popular ride-hailing companies. But the Austin standoff is unique for the city’s resistance to the corporations and the innovative ideas spawned from the drama, said Paul Mackie of the Mobility Lab, an Arlington-based transportation think tank. 

“It’s kind of exposing Uber and Lyft,” he said. “It will show city leaders (across the USA) that there could be other options that could step in and do the same thing that Uber and Lyft can do.”

The City of the Future is Closer, Calmer Than You Think

I was quoted in this fascinating USA Today article about the future of cities, which really could be like the Jetsons we have always imagined. It was also published in about 40 other Gannett papers in local markets throughout the country.

You really should watch the 1:30 animated video that shows what city transportation networks will look like. If that inspires you, my quotes are about halfway down in the middle of lots of other truly expert opinions:

Most transportation researchers agree that livability in urban centers is directly tied to “reducing the number of vehicles in those cities,” says Paul Mackie of Mobility Lab, a research startup funded by Arlington County, Va.

“It all starts with technology,” he says. “Transit data has to be open and shared, so we all know what (transportation) is where. We’ve been programmed for so long not to consider public transit options because we aren’t sure if we can count on them. Once we can efficiently get somewhere by transferring between a variety of options, everything will change.”

How Does Social Media Fit in to Traditional Public Relations?

I spoke on a really impressive panel on how social media is reshaping the world of public-relations this morning at the Mid-America Marketing Summit at USA Today's headquarters. 

Public Relations in a Social World (left to right)- Kevin Dando, Director, Digital Marketing & Communications, PBS
- Paul Mackie, Director of Communications, Mobility Lab
- Mike Smith, CEO, MSBD
- Elizabeth Shea, President and CEO, SpeakerBox
- Moderator: Jeff Davis, Partner, Sawmill Marketing Public Relations

It was an honor to be asked to speak on a panel with the likes of PBS's digital marketing director and other pros.

My main points were:

• That PR work is more transparent than ever, especially with social media
• Be great at social media, don't simply hand it over to an intern because it's simply too crucial to your full suite of strategic communications
• One of the most important traits of a consistently great PR person is the ability to be friendly, helpful, and a person who gets great stories out of himself and clients
• The ability to build an army of collaborators to help you spread your messages (on both social media and in person)
• Make your issues relevant, no matter how hard your organization may push back on that
• Practice and hone your storytelling and writing by having your own blog (on whatever topic you like)

Conference sponsor Speakerbox also covers our panel nicely here.