Jeral Poskey: Urban Transportation of the Future? Retrofitting Suburbia with Swyft Cities.

Speaker 2

Project Switch was created to find that invention out there of all the new technology. What's going to make a difference? What's going to be the thing that lets you create a better city? You're above traffic. Every trip is nonstop. They go about 30 miles an hour. That's going to be faster than anything you can do on the ground. It's just like the perfect Uber with a view. you

Speaker 1

Welcome to the Building Culture podcast, where we explore holistic solutions to crafting a more beautiful, resilient, and thriving world through the built environment. I'm your host, Austin Tennell. If you are in the market for high quality windows or doors, whether residential or commercial, new construction or remodels, I highly recommend you check out Sierra Pacific Windows, who we use at Building Culture on a lot of our projects, as well as if you are in the state of Oklahoma, check out One Source. Windows and Doors and want to thank them for sponsoring this podcast. Gerald, thanks a lot for coming on the podcast today. Thanks, Austin. It's great to be here. This is going to be a unique episode because I think you're a real kind of like pioneer and innovator. And I think a lot of people listening might start off pretty skeptical as I myself started off pretty skeptical, but the more I learned about it and thought about it, it was really an intriguing idea. And I'm being a little bit vague here because before we jump into the what I actually want to start with the origin of how this came to be. When you talked about, you know, Google campuses, walkability, stuff like that. And Can you kind of talk about where all of this came out of? And then we'll get into the actual solution you guys came up with for urban transportation in the 21st century.

Speaker 2

Sure thing. Swift cities started as Project Swift within Google's Real Estate Division. Google's Real Estate Division has its very active R &D program to think of the future of buildings, to think of the future of how we live and work. But it was only that focus was situated around Google's campus needs as an employer of hundreds of thousands of people with campuses that could have up to 75 buildings. There was a lot at stake for getting it right. We were As an example, Google's headquarters are in Mountain View and then also the Sunnyvale campus where normally 90 % of the people would drive to work in that sort of suburban environment. Probably 95 % would drive to work. Google had gotten that down below 70 % by running very, very massive fleet of employee shuttles, by having a strong bike program, by having other TDM traffic reduction programs. And so amazing things had happened. By reducing the number of cars to campus, Google is able to get permission from the city to grow. When you can do something like that and add a few million square feet of Silicon Valley office space, it's really valuable. But Google corporations, or sort of the corporate campuses, this is back in 2017, 2018, right at an inflection point. The idea of suburban office buildings surrounded by acres of parking, The writing was on the wall that that was not the future. That was not the place where employees wanted to be coming to work. So there was a future vision of what does a new campus look like? What's the right campus environment? And it was not just a corporate campus. It involved housing, it involved open space, recreation, all of those things. One of the things that centered around was not having a whole campus centered around the automobile, which means it can't be all about streets. can be all about parking. And if you go to, a thorough version of the story here, Austin, sorry, but if you needed to put all of that parking underground, then it's super expensive and it doesn't make sense. So with a lot at stake, Project Switch was created to find that invention out there of all the new technology

Speaker 2

what's gonna make a difference? What's gonna be the thing that lets you create a better city? Being within Google, I think people's first reaction was this is gonna be Waymo, second, your boat was gonna be flying cars, we were right next to Kitty Hawk. And we had to go through and say, no, actually none of those things solve the problem of movement in a tight area. They can be great for solving certain problems, but moving a lot of people around a three to five mile dense area, You know, anything on the ground is stuck in the same traffic as anything else and numerous more problems that can list with EV2OLs in that scenario. So that's when we got the permission to try something new. Okay. Yeah. No, I love running into kind the obstacles of really realizing what wasn't going to work. Yeah. So let's actually get into what is the solution. You know, we're going to dive deeper here, but kind of high level. What is the solution that you guys ended up coming up with with that turned into Swift cities? Yeah, a little harder to say in the audio format, but let me just start by saying, imagine a ski gondola where you see that cable running back and forth and the cable goes around and around and it's a line of little cabins or seats that hook onto it and it's very dumb, very dumb system. They go back and forth all day between two stations. Take that paradigm, poles, cables, very simple. Now make it where the cable's not moving, but the vehicles drive themselves along the cable. At first glance, that doesn't change a whole lot. Now let me add in the fact that every time you reach a post, you can tie in new cables. So now every time it reaches a post, that vehicle can turn and switch and go in different directions. Exactly. You're adding intersections. Yes. Into a cable based paradigm. Now the final thing we do is keep the vehicle small. So they're operating on demand.

Speaker 1

intersections.

Speaker 2

So rather than any sort of bus schedule, train schedule, fixed route schedule, these are operating like miniature taxis. You get in one, you tell it where you're going, and this is going to take the path that works for you to go through the system. I may have started your thinking up in a mountain. So let's bring that back down to suburbia and say, you're going from a train station to Google campus, you're going from the train station to your apartment. each vehicle is going to take the right path it needs. You're above traffic. Every trip is nonstop. So they go about 30 miles an hour. That's going to be faster than anything you can do on the ground. So you get this great time as well as visual experience. And it's just like the perfect Uber with a view. That's so cool. like you said, I'm going to share. I actually haven't done this in the middle of podcast before. I'm to try to share my screen just to share the video on your website so people can kind see a little bit. So I am sharing right now for anyone that's watching on Spotify or YouTube. And if you're not, you can go to what is it? SwiftCities.com. Swift with a S-W-Y-F-T. And you can see this little video rendering of the gondolas. So you can at least have an idea. idea of what's going on here. Yeah, what you're seeing is, in fact, that's actually one of the most infrastructure intensive models I can think of where it happens to be set in a pretty dense area. I call that the Chicago view. Yeah, but it's Seal poles that connect to cables. So you get this gondola like experience, but yet it can interconnect. And the one that you're seeing is actually a four way intersection with tight turns, about as intense as it gets. But on the bottom left corner, what you're also seeing is that the stations

Speaker 2

don't need to be in the air. They're not big structures with staircases and elevators and escalators. Because of the cable rail interface, we can bring those right down to the ground level. And so they're basically the size of a bus stop. They're right there where people are, where they need to be. Very low maintenance. Like I said, everything is kept simple. The vehicles are powered by batteries on board and the cables aren't electrified or anything. As a builder yourself, one of the things that the cable system gets you is this flexibility and how far apart the posts are. So if you were building sort of, let's say a monorail or something, you need your post every 90 feet, 120 feet. And if there's power systems underground, if there's sewer systems underground, there's massive expenses in moving utilities. Here, you just make it 20 feet long or 30 feet long or 50 feet longer. You avoid, you have just great flexibility for avoiding those kinds of obstacles. that are what really kind of grind down traditional transit systems. When you think something should cost X number of dollars a mile and it comes in three or four X, it's not that the rails cost more, it's that you had to avoid some sort of obstacle. You had to move a bunch of underground utilities. It's about making the simplest infrastructure possible with the most flexibility. And while simultaneously giving the rider this great experience that works both for the rider and typically for the kind of people we're talking to, it's good for our actual customer as well. Speaking of the poll distance, that's such, you're right, you honed in on something that's a big deal, I think, for flexibility. How far can polls theoretically be from each other, like maxed out?

Speaker 2

Yeah, we'd there's almost no theoretical maximum. There's ways, but we typically keep them at 300 feet apart. Up to a thousand is certainly viable. Really? A thousand's viable. What is that? Just amount the tension on it, how deep it goes. I'm guessing it gets more expensive that farther out they are per poll, even though you're saving on the number. Because of the sag, you think you need to be 18 feet above the ground. The farther apart they are, the higher, the taller the poles need to be. So 300 feet is a good ratio to think that the top of the post is going to be 30 feet up. The vehicle is going to ride below that. Yeah, that's the kind of trade-offs. surrender feeds about a block, you know, but if you needed to go farther, you could. That's really interesting. So I'm going to kind of inject your, my thought process behind it. When I went from being like, Yeah, I wanted to hear how you went from skeptic to curious a little more.

Speaker 1

Yeah. So part of it comes from being a I'm from Houston and now I'm in Oklahoma City. And I'm you could say I'm generally part of the Yimby movement and the New Urbanist movement, all these other movements about building better, more walkable people centered places. I'm not anti car. I like cars. It's more just we should be building for humans with cars. And then I do like public transport when it works. When I go to Europe and I'm on trains or New York City or DC or something and I'm on subways, that's great. Well, most of the US has been built under a highway system with almost endless suburban sprawl. And so Oklahoma City, Dallas, Houston, whatever, and I'm just using the examples that I know, Phoenix and all these other Midwest cities are the same way. You are never going to transform those cities into mass public... infrastructure, subway cities or train cities, you can have little light rails downtown. And I'm just saying that from a practicality standpoint, if you look at the price per mile, how much space it takes easements, it's just unbelievable, particularly when most of our cities and most people don't know this, but Chuck Morrone and Strong Towns is big on this, that our cities are really not doing very well fiscally. They might even be like Oklahoma City and Edmund are in the black on paper. But when you look at their deferred infrastructure maintenance, they're 20 to $30 million, you know, even just a small city like Edmund running massive infrastructure deficits, basically. So our cities don't have a lot of money. We can't go transform a Dallas into some wonderful subway city with, you know, all this walkable urbanism. So then the practicality part starts setting in and I'm excited about autonomous vehicles as well. think that's going to lead to a lot of opportunities of less parking, more on-demand rides, stuff like that. I think that will open up a whole new realm of possible infill development and filling in, if you just look at a map of parking in a city, it's just insane. It takes up most of the area. So that will help some, it doesn't resolve all of the problems and all the traffic problems.

Speaker 1

So this really in my mind kind of layers on top of all of that. We have the upcoming, know, autonomous vehicles, which will be great. Maybe autonomous bussage, which will be great. But part of it is like bus, people do not love riding buses and they're also actually very expensive to operate if you're going to create a really big network. And so multiple things with land, with cost, with the comfort of riding, you literally have a pole. I don't know how big those poles are, the diameter of the pole. I mean, what do you need a five? foot by five foot easement to put a pole. Yeah, they're about four feet wide. so depending on the soil conditions, your foundation can vary, but you're right on. Yeah, mean, so you can put that in a sidewalk. You can put it in the middle of the road. You could take up on a private easement or government easement. know, there's just, it's so dynamic. I'm not saying like, I think this could, if you were building a city from scratch, I don't know. haven't thought about it enough to say, if you were building from a scratch, is this the way you would do it? I don't know. But when I do look around at the solutions out there, I'm going, this actually makes a lot of sense. And of course the self-driving things, the network of them, the almost Uber-like taxi nature of them. that me and my wife or me and my kids could call one and we could get in it. you know, cause my first question I get when I, I've told other people this, they're like, I don't want to be up in the middle of the air with strangers. Like, what if it stops? And it's just like me and this other person and they're a weird person. You're like, Hey, fair. I, you know, I get that. But I think you've actually kind of solved a lot of these, these things and the technologies where it needs to be, where some of this can work.

Speaker 2

Yeah, think things that you said several things in there that are worth hitting on. So a rail infrastructure, especially is very hard to retrofit on cities, but we're trying. And so where we have it, and I'll pick Dallas as an example, we've got to maximize it. Where rail really can fit into cities. And you look at what some things they've done in Los Angeles is when you can take an existing or an old rail line, then it can be pretty cheap and fast to put that in. The problem being that it often went to the backside of warehouses and things. So you can have the rail, but now you're a half mile or a mile or two miles from where you really wanted to be. I was remembering during COVID, there were no rental cars available. So I flew into Dallas, I took the train to downtown and there's a stop called University of Dallas. I know University of Dallas, it has a little tower. I looked out the window to find it and realized, I don't know where the University of Dallas is, but it's not at this stop that is labeled University of Dallas. It's got almost a mile connection. in the Texas heat, it's not a friendly place to be. So one of the ways that we work is by making that last mile connection fast, efficient, and affordable to put in that infrastructure. It's going to say if you could spend 10 % extra on your train system, you could probably double ridership by doing something like this that solves that last mile connection. That's a great point. I'm not trying to speak against trains or subways or something. It's more like where you can do them, great, but it's so kind of sparse. So you really do need something else layered on that can help get people where they need to go in various weather conditions too and get them a lot closer to their final stop. And then there's a second category of public sector customers that we have that's now, we've got one, two, three, four, five, six cities that fit a different description, which is they were all fast growing suburbs focusing on greenfield development. And for 30, 40 years, they've been the place to be new developments all the time, one right after another, not just housing, but you know, then you get these pocket sets of high rises out in the suburbs, master planned giant streets. And then

Speaker 2

All six of them are right at the point where there's somewhere between 95 and 100 % built out. And they look at the economic model that built the city, which is, come here and build new things. And we're just going to roll out all this infrastructure. And I think they all look at it and go, our city's basically all the empty land is full. Our economic model has been about bringing new growth. The only way we can do new growth is to infill. And if we're going to infill, we're putting more traffic on those streets that we so carefully planned 50 years ago that we're going to be all about cars. But that's not going to work. And we never left room for trains. And because of our sprawling suburban patterns, buses are never really going to be effective. And they're just like, no, what do we do? There's no option out there for us until this came along. And so there's a few use cases and it's about economics in cities. Yeah, this was designed as a, for a private sector real estate owner operator. who has ROI. Cities think in the same terms. It's financial. It may be more tax-based and tax revenue. It's a different set of dollars, but they've got to make the hard decisions just like a private sector customer would do as well. I think that's a great point that you said that cities have been expanding and bringing more people, you know, building to kind of like generate the income to cover everything. But now that they're hitting the limits of that. In order to even maintain what they have, they actually are going to have to add density. But like you saying, traffic just gets worse if you try to just put more cars in the same streets that you designed 50 years ago. I'm going to share a little trick we use at building culture. So if you're designing a house, you have to have egress windows or egress in any bedroom, for example. And the problem with that is egress windows are very large, especially if it's a double hung window or something like that. And because of design constraints, sometimes we want a smaller window if it's in a dormer or just for the hierarchy of the elevations. Well, a really cool trick that we use with our Sierra Pacific windows is we'll take

Speaker 1

something from their urban casement line and we'll put what's called a piano hinge on it. And so rather than kind of a normal casement that kind of slides open where only part of the window is open, this is almost like a door hinge. And so the entire window opens and you can meet egress with a two foot by four foot window, a 2040 window. It's the smallest possible egress window anyone makes. And that's a nice little design trick. If you're as nerdy as I am, you will actually think that's really cool. So check out Sierra Pacific Windows and if you are in the state of Oklahoma, check out one source Windows and Doors. We at Build New Culture use both of them regularly. What's interesting about this, and I hadn't really thought about this till we were talking, but it seems like something that could certainly start in a small area. Like it's not like, hey, you've to cover all of Dallas with this. You know, it's like you could really start in a, like you said, a three mile. radius and start a system like this and then add on to it or maybe it's even a closed system that then once again gets connected by trains or whatever other autonomous vehicles stuff like that. Is that how you think about it that it really could kind of start off in a small district or neighborhood or city center or something like that and then be added on to? Yeah, the modularity I didn't highlight, but that really is another piece that's kind of the game changer designed like Legos that anywhere you built the system, maybe it's just three or four stations to start, but you can add on in any direction. And that's very valuable because your cost of adding on actually goes down a little bit. You've put in the early maintenance station and things like that, but your ridership potential goes up exponentially. So if you had four stations, that's 12 different pairs of trips you can match. If you double that to eight stations, that's 56. You're going up more than 4X as you grow. So you get this, it's called network effects. And you kind of saw it from, I guess early, probably telegraphs and telephones and then fax machines, social networks, the more people who are in the network, the more places it connects, the more valuable the network becomes. You don't often see that in infrastructure. And yet,

Speaker 2

you're going to see that in infrastructure that we kind of work through this with some of the real estate people at Google of boy, you know, if it's three or four stations, it's a, it's a nice to have, but as it gets a little bit bigger, well, the next apartment building along the way, they want to be connected because now you've got all those jobs that people could go back and forth between. And once you have a few apartment buildings connected, well, now the next real estate developer who's building office really wants to be connected. And it just has this way of this, of just exponentially growing the demand. And really there's no ultimate limit to how much of the demand we can serve. really interesting. I'm assuming that software and kind of like AI is very helpful and kind of generating. It's not like someone's managing the network. If someone calls it on their phone, kind of like an Uber or a taxi, the system is working out the most efficient unit to call to that location, pickup location. How does that work? Yeah, that's where I've been in this field for 20 years and the last few years have really allowed a lot of things to happen that wouldn't have been difficult before. And so we start from a paradigm though where all the vehicle movement is based on very prescriptive written code for safety regulatory point of view. You wanna be where somebody can look at the code and be sure that vehicles are not gonna collide. But what about this scenario? Here's the code that's gonna kick in. But there's a layer above that, that we've planned in to say, all right, this is your machine learning layer, your AI layer that can at the surface level see, okay, every day at 8.13, the train arrives and there's a big demand. need to start moving vehicles that way, you know, five, six minutes ahead of time. But also all the things that can't be predicted, that things don't happen the same every day. That extra AI layer is looking to add another 30 % of efficiency into what we're doing. And

Speaker 2

The system's very efficient, very economical, but improving it by 30 % is just truly game changing. We're seeing situations where systems can pay for themselves. I wouldn't want to say it's the base case, but you take that, those are going to be probably most of our early adopters. And now you add, you can cut costs by 30 % below that or improve efficiency. Now you've just expanded the number of possible systems where that meets. And then there's a whole other category that maybe they don't pay for the infrastructure, but they certainly cover their operational costs. By cutting costs 30%, you greatly expand the number of systems that would meet that criteria. That's really interesting. Speaking of cost and people are not gonna, if you say it cost a million dollars a mile or something, people aren't gonna be able to relate that to anything. So maybe the best way to relate is say compared to a bus system that you have to operate the buses and the people driving the buses and all that, is there a way to kind of say like compared to X, this is X amount of the cost. mean, the people we're talking to, it's often they're comparing it to a parking garage. Should I build another thousand space garage? Should I spend another $200 million on a parking structure? Or should I spend $60 million on this thing that not only might prevent the need for that parking structure, but gives people a great experience. And I can now reuse the space for that structure for something that's valuable and additive to the property. So that's really the kind of trade-off that people are making in the world that I'm in.

Speaker 1

Wow. Yeah. One, I want to touch on the stops because I think that one's like hard to imagine for people, know, there isn't in the video, but like it was when you said, or I think it was when I was on the call and you said, basically takes up the room of a bus stop. That's where I'm like, you know, that was a kind of one of those big moments for me too, where I'm like, maybe this really is like a very interesting solution. Can you talk about how those work? Yeah, I mean, just to re-emphasize too, to make it clear, the main line is still going by overhead, but only the people who need to go to that stop, they're merging off to the side, they're dropping down on a piece of rail, which is where we can go at a 30 degree grade. And then you're out of the way quickly. You now need basically 22 to 28 feet. Could give you two vehicles stopping at a time at a platform that's just a simple Again, concrete pad, like a bus stop. In some situations, it'll have awnings and power and lighting and we'll recharge vehicles there, but it's not necessary. It can just be a simple pad. And then the vehicles are able to go back up the rail on the other side and merge back into the main system. that piece of, just that segment was all that was needed for a station. Wow. said it right, really think of it as a stop. I do use the word station. Sometimes you'll need the big station with the ticket machines and all sorts of things, but often it's just considered a stop.

Speaker 1

Man, that's pretty wild. Okay, yeah, and that's cool. The main line goes by overhead, so you're not creating traffic jams or something by people coming down. Where are you imagining, and I know this is kind of new in a lot of ways, so you're still figuring things out as you go, and you've got real use cases, but I mean in clients, but extra vehicles and things like that. You mentioned you've got AI and predictive analysis of... train stops, you're gonna start sending things there. Do these things kind of float around? Do they stay at a charging station somewhere? And I'm sure it just depends on the application too, but what are some of the ways you're thinking about that? The notion of, and it kind of depends if you're in a place that might get a hurricane where you need 100 % of them be able to be stored in a weatherproof area. I think generally throughout the day, the more dispersed they are, it's only during those moments of rush hour, morning and evening that they're all out at once. So you want to make sure like battery life, we're making sure that it can work all the way through the rush hour periods. And then after that, smaller distributed, wherever you have pockets of space in the network. put on a siding to put on a small maintenance facility or small charging area. It's very flexible. think there's one more thing about costs. When you think of other forms of motor rail, people movers, trains, whatever infrastructure, 90 something percent of the cost was in the infrastructure. So once you've built it, the number of trains you're running doesn't really make that many, that much of a difference. For us, The infrastructure is really inexpensive. It's going to be the car. So now you have a much tighter control over how much I'm spending. If I'm only moving a few people, maybe I just have one small remote parking lot that I'm serving. You just need a few cars and your costs are low. If you're moving thousands of people because you really went all in and you move your parking to the fridge and you've got thousands of trips, you're going to need a lot more vehicles, but that's okay because you're getting the value from it. So the ability to match your expenditures

Speaker 2

with the actual demand and the actual value you're getting from it. I think it's a great piece of flexibility that just, it was a bonus for how it was designed. just re-emphasizes that the design works so well in so many ways. When I was talking to someone about transportation not long ago, right before I came across you, we were talking about how ideally, know, to put, especially in these Midwest cities where, you know, where I am, um, in California too, I mean, uh, it's a very car centric city, LA, for example, um, to have, to have an experience that could perhaps even be nicer than a car because people do generally like having a car and having this private thing they can get and go in. And one of the things about buses and mass transportation, especially people that are not used to it, sometimes they really don't love that experience. You don't know who you're around and all that. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing. I'm just kind of talking about general cultural issues. These, in my mind, maybe have the potential to be that nicer than a car experience. I mean, you're a pie, you're in this private suite, you're kind of going by things, gliding along. It seems like it could be very nice experience. Yeah, and it's going to have to be the competition. You're referencing, you know, bus or train as competition. The reality is the competition for us and the competition for buses and trains and for anyone is going to be inexpensive self-driving cars. The way modification of cities. I mean, I will completely defend safety, way up mobility, especially for people who may have been too young, too old, didn't have a license, were incapacitated in some way.

Speaker 2

their ability to get around cities now with a low cost transportation mode will be way up. Evidence is pretty clear that you're looking at triple the vehicle miles traveled, which if you've got empty streets, it's not a problem. If you've got congestion, it's about to go through the roof. And so that world where people don't mind, they're playing video games in the car, they're watching movies in the car, they don't mind being stuck in traffic like they used to, it's a pretty scary world. And that's the place where if we want to have cities that move, that function well. we've got to make sure that we outperform that point of comparison. And I very much worry what's gonna happen to our bus and train systems as those become more widespread because early evidence is a lot of people are skipping their mass transit. They're not getting out of their cars and taking away, Mo. They're getting out of mass transit taking away, Mo. Yep. That's a, I didn't know that statistic, but that makes sense to me. And the truth is it's like our cities and our transportation, suburbia works until more people come and all of our cities are growing. Our population is not going down. I know it slowed down some, but in America, at least in the U S our population is growing and it's probably going to be growing for a while. And our cities are going to continue to grow as you've kind of got the rural going towards urban centers. Even if some of the smaller towns are starting to grow again, it's still like an urbanization pattern that's happening. And so I think you're right. If we're 20, 30, 50 years down the line, it's just going to get so much, so much worse. And I was recently driving through Dallas and was reminded, cause even though I grew up there, I been, I don't spend much time there. was just reminded of how with that much growth and that, building an urban pattern, how terrible traffic gets. And I think people do get used to it because you kind of have to, because

Speaker 1

You can't be in a rage every day, although I think that happens, but I mean, you know, you just kind of adapt, but it really is a tremendous time suck. It's stressful. It's destructive on, I mean, in a lot of ways, random question. Can you bring like a bike onto one of these or something? Yeah, our design focuses around you have to be able to support the wheelchair and that gives you a form factor that at that point can accommodate a couple of bikes that's made for five adults. So yeah, you've got a flexibility in what you put in the vehicle. And have you figured out conditioning yet of like how they are, you know, heated or cooled or how are you thinking about that? Just that we're going to need to. mean, that's a factor. It's mostly a design criteria on the battery life, on the battery size. That can be pretty intensive. More than moving the vehicle, more energy may go to heating and cooling, depending on your environment. It might be a hard, but it's like, we've got plenty of air conditioning in small units. It's just a matter figuring out how to exactly do it with these vehicles. So I don't know if you can talk about what, which, some maybe you can, some maybe you can't. Some of the clients that you're talking to, and I know you've said you started off in some in the private sector of people reaching out about their building, I don't know, a really big campus, casino or developer, some kind of development. And then also,

Speaker 1

some public municipalities and cities, are you able to share anything about those first projects? Broadly, I'll just sort of categorize the private sector, all these to fill some sort of transportation function. And yet the fact that you're doing it with something that gives a great user experience is a tremendous bonus. So ski resorts, a good example where in that market, it's about being able to move people, but it's really about arranging your space differently. Ski resorts are always in very hilly mountainous areas. They're very constrained. They have pockets of land here and there. So often they may have like, here's a little place I could build a hotel or a parking lot, but I can't put both together. I have another place over here that could be one or the other. So the notion that you no longer have to have your parking next to your lodge, next to your village, next to your, like that gives them flexibility. We're not gonna go up the mountains and over huge gorges like a traditional gondola. but we're really helping move people around the base and keeping them off that one two lane road that typically runs through the town. Other examples, beach area, entertainment area, mean, it's sort of all that situation. We may be replacing some sort of the little circulator bus that makes 15 stops and goes in a circle and only comes every 20 minutes, but you're trying to only go a half mile. So it's not, those aren't often that popular. That's sort of the private sector side of it. There are some that are much more like traditional real estate development for there. Just as I mentioned, trying to reduce parking, trying to keep people on site longer and give them a good experience. Then in the public sector, as I mentioned, there's the fast growing suburban cities. and then there's some last mile connectors from transit and all of those. What surprised me is that even in a city setting, giving people that great experience matters to them, giving them a way to say, you know, this city.

Speaker 2

is on the forefront of giving people a good experience. They're to remember it. They're going to use it more often. They're going to bring their friends. It's not just something that a tourism destination finds valuable. It's actually anybody who wants their city to have a great transportation system that people look forward to using for change. Yeah, very. And I don't know if you're there. There's some places and I think Texas, are you able to like share any of that or no? And that's fine if you can't. Widely reported Frisco, Plano, Texas are in suburbs in North Texas. Sugarland is down in the Houston area. I have Sugarloaf is the one that I'm familiar with because I grew up there. so that's when I was, didn't know if I could say it. should have asked you ahead of time, but that's, that's pretty interesting. They're doing a study, right? Because they maxed out on just what they can do and there is no space to expand roads. And there is a good example and you can, if you're familiar with anything in that part of the country where two freeways come together and now you've got development on all four corners, but you really can't interconnect any of those. It's really hard to move. We have the same thing in Frisco and Plano where you've got lots of development happening, but the freeway might as well be a river or a gorge or some natural obstacle because it's really hard to get across it. And yet you've got all this activity in a very

Speaker 2

diameter of a circle and yet it has these bifurcations in both directions and you need something that lets you make that activity center connected. so crossing railroad tracks, crossing rivers, crossing highways is another thing we do really well. I had not connected that about the highway specifically. That's a really good use case because you were so right. They really are massive obstacles and there are studies out there that show how big of obstacles they are. And I'm even thinking of local examples of that, of a way to manage that and allow people to move more freely in a pretty cost effective and comfortable way. That's what's still interesting to me is you can do these kind of small scale projects. and larger scale projects and also kind of like add on and an infill around some of these things. I think that's really the magic of it is how you can, how easily you can retrofit it because there's just no other solutions period. Like whether someone likes this solution or not, like there's just not other things you can do to retrofit this easily and not nowhere close to this easily that I can think of or have ever come across. Yeah. Sometimes I almost wish we didn't have as many positive features. You want to say we offer better service, but we have a higher cost. It make it very clear what I was like, what my sales pitch would be, but just like we offer better service and lower cost. And we didn't even talk about faster installation times. We have our first project set to be in place in 2027. And now three of our top five have said, well, if they can get in 2027, I want it in 2027. And the other, so the other one started a little ahead of you and like, yeah, but you can do it and kind of look at the calendar and that's, we're not going to say February of 2020, not 24 months from now, but like 28 to 30 months, it can get done. And just the fact that you can move that quickly, maybe it doesn't go as far, but each piece can add on and you can actually, people can see tangible results, as an elected official.

Speaker 2

You don't have to say in my first term as mayor, I started the first study and in my second term as mayor, we will see the results of that first study. You can get the whole thing done in one term as mayor. So like it just changes in them. The driving factor was as a real estate developer, if I build a million square feet and it's five years until the transportation system comes in, then I have to build all of those 3000 parking spaces. I would have needed for that million square feet. doesn't help me that years later, I won't need them all. So you have to be at a speed that respects the fact that development's on a two to three year cycle. And if the building starts under construction, and you start the transportation system under construction, they better all be delivered at the same time. guys. That's a great point in that how time consuming, difficult and disruptive typical infrastructure installation is of streets or especially expanding streets or highways. I remember the I-10 expansion in Houston was something like 10 or 12 or something years. I mean, that's moving a lot of people. But this is actually pretty non-disruptive. You got to have clothes long enough to put in the pole and then things can go back to normal even if the whole system's not up yet. That's a really good point. So what have been some of the biggest, what is people's first response? What do I'm trying to figure out like first response and then kind of overall response that you're receiving on this as you kind of get the word out there a little bit. I know you're not really shouting about it yet. I don't think, you know, it seems like you're kind of talking strategically with people and you've got some stuff out there, but what is, what has been people's general response? Well, I'll say let's make it a sample size of one. What was your initial skepticism and then your conversion I'll say to being a fan.

Speaker 1

My initial thought was gondolas. But the way you said it, even I think that was a great way to say like, Hey, imagine this gondola. That's pretty dumb. Right. And so that's a great, I think you taking it through the steps of is pretty smart. And so it was really just adding up all the pieces and thinking about what it solves and what other just the problem of transportation, there might not be a perfect thing. People might say, I don't like things up high or something, but you're like, well, if it's going down the center of a road and you got traffic below it and you're cruising along, but it's not like it's messing up your skyline or something. And so for me, it's like one lack of nothing better that I can think of. And it really solves a unique problem, I think, and is a unique solution that overlays on top of autonomous vehicles and driving and maybe some bus mass transit too, you still need that other. And this seems to do that. I don't know, that's kind of my conversion experience. The bus, the Uber aspect that is the taxi, the intersections, the adaptability of it, the low cost, the ease of installing and retrofitting. Yeah, I think that the The biggest obstacle is people who you just see the gondola. I actually had a call this morning with the university that has a split campus and one person was in the planning department and one person was in a different department. And afterwards we're going through the planning person is totally going through this list of benefits and how they could shift their parking and they could connect their campuses better. And they paused for a question from the other person. The other person said, now how is this different than a gondola? Cause they just had not absorbed all of these things to say.

Speaker 2

you see it, you make a bunch of assumptions, then you have to undo them all. So that's probably thinking, helping people think through that. I think a lot of people say in the private sector, real estate world, you know, may have a conversion moment like yours. People who are from the gondola world, the traditional mass transit world, I think still, actually even people from, you know, the rest of the transportation world, spend a lot of time focused on the 20 mile commute problem. Those are like 3 % of daily trips. And yet a lot of people want to solve that trip. They want a flying car to get you from the suburbs to downtown. They want a big train to get you from the suburbs to downtown. They want bigger highways to get you from the suburbs to downtown. That really isn't the majority of trips. It's actually a pretty small percentage of trips. And I think a lot of people just don't realize the facts around transportation, where the gaps are, where the challenges are. So we're filling a gap. that no one else is touching, which is awesome. We're also solving your problem that no one knew they had. And so you first have to educate them that actually your pain point was local. Not everybody's pain point. Your brain's gonna quit. But no, no, no. My pain point was that I10 was congested for an hour. But yeah, but that's one set of pain points. This is entirely other set of pain points that no one ever had a solution for. And then we show up and when the light bulb goes off, It goes on very brightly and it shines. That's cool. You actually made me think of something that I think is important to bring up. You talked about the commute from suburbs to downtown. When I was telling some people that was the first thing they brought up, but like, what about downtown? They only go 30 miles an hour. I'm like, well, that's not necessarily the problem this is trying to solve. to, know, I, I, whenever I think about city building, you really, I, people should be thinking about it on a hundred plus your timeline because it takes so long to do. then, and then that

Speaker 1

pattern is imprinted for a very long time and it's hard to change. And so I just think about what do cities over the next 20, 50, 100 years look like? And yes, right now we've got really strong downtowns and then just endless low density suburban sprawl. And I'm not saying in 50 years we're not going to have highly intense and the most dense downtowns. You'll still have that. But I do see as the suburban cities kind of max out on how much they can sprawl out, they do have to start infilling. How do they start infilling? you start creating moments of density, know, districts around the cities that become more intense and a little bit more dense and grow outwardly slow with all this kind of like suburban neighborhoods between and connecting all these districts, which once again, for me, so a little bit more localized where, where, where neighborhoods and people's lives do over time. This could happen over decades, become a little bit more localized. And once again, I think this solution actually can work very well with, with something like that. And it's about choices. It's about land use. It's about being part of a system. Yeah, I everything from bikes and walking on one end, trains, mass transit on the other. The system has to match the geography, has to match the land use, the land use has to match the transportation. There's some data we came up with at Google. We struggled to even understand it for a while. And it basically says, developers are building the largest portion of development happens at the highest density that the transportation network supports. That's typically a car dominated area. It's a certain level of density and it's still sprawling and spread out. If you can push that a little bit to the right, push that curve to the right and say, now I can do 20 % of the people through another mode. You don't just get 20 % more density. You get 20 % more density and 20 % less parking. And you actually create some pretty awesome places to be

Speaker 2

just from shifting that curve a little bit to the right. And like, you're going to be able to see urban form that you don't even just, it just can't exist today or very rarely exist today because it can't. You're going to see a lot more of that as we get out there. I completely agree. enables different patterns. And that will be very interesting because it's not like people actually love cars in the highway system. It's the convenience. It's not the feature, it's the benefit that I can get my car and go wherever I want. And that's really nice because a train, it's so centralized. It goes a line, you can't call it on demand, all that. And this is like, maybe I walk two blocks, get on something, get dropped off. two blocks from where I want to go. And that suddenly can be a really desirable choice. Are you guys raising any money right now or in the future? Is it for anyone that might listen and be curious to invest? mean, we threw in a little bit of money for fun. right. Right. That's true. Because we want to follow along. Yes. I mean, not at this exact instant, but who knows when people are going to actually be listening to this. So if you're in that space, info at swift cities.com would be the place to get on that mailing list and see where we are at the exact moment that you're doing this. We anticipate doing kind of a small raise right now. We're keeping things again, kind of quiet while by late summer two projects should be under construction. And at that point is when we get to say, All right, welcome to the world. are under construction. have timelines, as I've already said, 2027 weeks. Once we nail down, we'll actually have vehicles running at the end of this year and some people riding in very limited fashion early next year and then full systems operating 2027. So we have a fundraising plan throughout that. So if that's your space, reach out now and you'll catch it as early as possible in the cycle.

Speaker 1

That's really exciting. Yeah, that's pretty cool. You're going to have stuff going at the end of this year. And that was really going to be my last question is, what is, and you largely answered it, but what is kind of next? What's the next, if you can't even imagine five years, know, next five years, what's the next one to five years look like in your mind, that kind of critical path and how you're thinking about this evolving? Now these first few are going to be ones that we're very hands-on deploying. These are worldwide, Asia, Middle East, the Australia area, New Zealand, I'll say specifically is one of the first five that are going to go in and then in the U.S. And so very quickly, the scales to where we're just providing the technology, local engineering, local design, local construction, people are taking over. And once they do that, and once we cross-train them, there's going to be an explosion there of the number of these that can be happening simultaneously around the world just looks tremendous. One thing that I, if you'd asked me to some month ago, I would have said was five years out was getting into the real estate side as we deploy another common theme as people, cities say, well connect or even private sector, connect these eight things that I have right now. Let's see if I can move things together. And then for phase two, we'll connect these other five things. And I look at that and say, no, no. Phase two is connecting those five empty parcels, those five way below market use parcels, the used car dealership and those sorts of things. That's going to be your next because those are going to turn into very, very valuable places when we connect them. So I said, someday we get into the real estate side of this, not as developers, but probably as your acquisition side. And we've now gotten reach out to by a good firm that's done some really some developments you would have heard of. And they're like, yeah, we want to be in on that side of it. figuring out ways to work with developers to making not just connecting what's there today, but making tomorrow happen. That's the, another exciting thing that's going to be happening way sooner than I had ever envisioned.

Speaker 1

That's amazing and I can absolutely see that. mean, it's the induced demand thing when you bring the mobility to something, it enables it. I know from a developer perspective, if you said, me a piece of land that has this next to it, it's like my mind of what we can build, it's completely different. The numbers are completely different. So yeah, can definitely see that. funny, you said induced demand in the transportation world, induced demand is always a negative. It's like you built a freeway and you induced demand for cars. I guess it just dawned on me. It doesn't have to be inherently a negative. You can induce demand for a better transportation system. It's not the car. Yeah. So yeah, we have the chance to make that not a dirty word again. Yeah, no, think you're right. I hadn't thought about that, but I've only heard it, I think, with the induced demand of highways. Gerald, I'm really excited about what you guys are doing. I think it's pioneering and I can't wait to see some of these real use places, know, applications around the world. I think it's like we always, at Building Culture, we talk about blending the best of old and new. It's not looking back and saying like, you know, just for nostalgia, we should build things like the Romans built or something, or just because it's new technology doesn't mean it's good. It's about solving the problems with the materials and tools and limitations and culture we have now. And I'm starting to wonder like, is, what if this is just, you one of the best 21st century solutions to urban transportation? I don't know, to be seen, but I think it's pretty exciting. So. Well, it was great to be on the show. I love talking about this. I love the way you asked the question. So I look forward to continuing to deliver and then we can do it again when you can actually ride one.

Speaker 1

That's me. Cool. We'll do a we'll do one in one of the carts, you Yes, actually. Sorry. Cabin. Thank you. OK. And how do people follow you? You mentioned, you know, info at Swift cities dot com to follow the newsletter. How else can people follow what you guys are up to? What

Speaker 2

Yeah, we're definitely active on Twitter and LinkedIn, Swift Cities, SWYFT Cities. Yeah, we keep the world informed through those channels. Great. Well, Gerald, thanks so much and look forward to staying in touch. All right, take care. Thanks, Austin. If you've been enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe and share with your friends. And if you're listening on Apple or Spotify, please leave us a five star review. Thanks so much for listening and catch you on the next episode.