Community Engagement

When you’re putting a product into the world, and when you’re asking a diverse set of communities with a diverse set of attributes to all adopt a technology that you believe can improve their lives, I think it’s a two-way street. One is we have to go out and understand what those diverse pain points are that people are experiencing.

Have they been excluded from the transit systems of today? Is there a disproportionate impact on access to jobs, access to opportunity? If so, how can this technology help address that? And how can we engage skeptics because of past transportation platforms that didn’t reach them earlier, ever? How can we make them early riders? How can we solicit their feedback?

And so that’s sort of part of it, is what is the engagement path with the community? And how do we keep our ears open? We don’t have all the answers. And so engaging in that partnership with the community.

Second is there are specific use cases for this technology for people who will turn 16 and not be able to drive. And so, we know that? So how do we partner with those organizations: foundation for blind children being one of them? How do we partner early so we can learn? What actually defines independence?

It’s so easy for me to say, “Well, I get it, that person is visually impaired, they can take an Uber or Lyft.” And it’s like, right, that’s the same experience as having your uncle or your aunt or your friend drive you.

And so, when you have someone who hasn’t been able to be completely alone in a vehicle ever, who now is in a Waymo without any human in the car with them, that’s the exhilarating experience of independence I have learned.

That wasn’t my own lived experience, but now I’ve learned that and I really appreciate it. And so I think having a two way street and open dialogue, understanding with deep humility that we don’t have all the answers and recognizing that this is a product that will get co-created with the communities like that.