Delivering Where It Matters: Why I’m Joining Nuro’s Policy Team

I was born and raised in the Central Valley of California, the region that produces most of the Golden State’s agriculture, but is often overshadowed by its more glamorous neighbors to the north and south. I’m proud of my roots: my grandma was a line worker at an olive canning facility, my grandfather was an orange farmer, and my dad is a factory worker. This fertile land and its residents feed people around the globe, year round, earning a reputation as a breadbasket of the world.

Tragically, this breadbasket is also ground zero for food insecurity. The poverty rate in Tulare County, where I grew up, is a staggering 22% — almost twice the national average — and many residents across the Central Valley struggle to put food on their own tables. One study found that 45% of farmworkers in Fresno are food insecure due to income barriers and the lack of public transportation to access distant grocery stores. Like too many other communities, it’s a place where car ownership is simultaneously a necessity and a luxury that many cannot afford.

I believe that a person’s ability to access fresh groceries, prescriptions, and other essentials shouldn’t be contingent on owning a car. That’s why I’m thrilled to be joining the policy team at Nuro.

This role is a dream come true.

I was the first in my family to go to college and graduate with a four-year degree. After completing my Bachelor’s in Political Economy at UC Berkeley, I followed my long-held dream of moving to Washington, DC to get involved in politics. What I soon realized is that it wasn’t politics I was interested in pursuing, but policy — crafting laws and regulations to achieve meaningful outcomes.

While I was working in DC at a government affairs firm, a close friend called me to ask what I thought about self-driving cars.

“Well, Patrick…” I paused. “I don’t.”

It was December 2014 and, like many at the time, I did not know nor care about self-driving vehicles. But over the course of the next hour, we explored how transportation in the United States does not serve everyone — and in fact hurts all of us in different ways:

• Nearly 40,000 lives are senselessly lost every year in fatal collisions — many of which are caused by human error or choices like speeding, driving under the influence, and distraction.
• Transportation is the single largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.
• Americans waste an average of 100 hours every year in traffic.
• Our transition to a car-dependent society left behind many people with disabilities, seniors, and low-income families.

That was the moment I decided to focus my career on improving transportation and maximizing the social good of transportation technologies. I did what any millennial would do: I quit my comfortable job at the firm, signed up to drive for Uber and Lyft, and bought a URL to start blogging about transportation and technology. I drove during commuting hours and late nights on the weekends to pay the bills.

What stood out to me during my time as a rideshare driver was the number of essential trips to grocery stores, pharmacies, and shopping centers that were too far for a person to walk and too difficult to access on public transit. On a few occasions, passengers asked me to wait in the parking lot while they shopped because it could take 30 minutes to finally get a driver who wouldn’t cancel after seeing their location. I was happy to wait and drive them home — no one should have to face these obstacles just to access fresh food or prescriptions.

I also came to realize how much of our urban space is wasted on parking, and that we will need to prepare our city streets for the new types of trips that are emerging. I proposed a new idea for managing our curb space, called Shared Use Mobility Zones (SUM Zones). While it didn’t win a policy shark tank, I’m happy to see this concept is now being implemented in cities like San Francisco and Washington, DC.

A year later I joined the Eno Center for Transportation, a nonprofit think tank dedicated to transportation policy. I co-wrote one of the first comprehensive reports on how governments can support the safe deployment of autonomous vehicles and realize their full benefits. I later joined Securing America’s Future Energy (SAFE) to help address the economic and national security risks of America’s dependence on oil, and advocate for policies to support an autonomous and electric vehicle future.

After several years of working with industry experts, academics, and policymakers on the multitude of issues in our transportation sector, it became clear to me that Nuro has the right solution, the right people, and the right mission to deliver on the promises of autonomy. I was inspired by a blog post from one of our founders, Dave Ferguson:

Our mission as a company is to accelerate the benefits of robotics for everyday life. We will measure our success by how many people’s lives are substantially improved by our products. We’re not building fancy gadgets for those who already have everything. We’re developing technology to improve the quality of life for everyone.

Transportation technology might be my interest, but making sure it’s used to improve people’s lives is my passion. On The Mobility Podcast, my co-hosts and I have interviewed dozens of industry leaders, academics, and government officials and elevated discussions about how to create a transportation ecosystem that serves everyone. The common theme is that technology must be used to serve people, not the other way around.

That’s why I’m excited to join Nuro to advance self-driving deliveries of groceries in food deserts like those in my hometown, medicine for seniors aging in place, and the other essential items for our everyday lives. Self-driving technology is not a silver bullet for all of our systemic problems, but there is a lot that we can do in our corner of the world to help.

Let’s get to work.