Self-driving cars were born in San Francisco. Companies like Cruz and Waymo are creating something that will literally save lives. But some San Francisco politicians hate technology so much they're literally willing to make up statistics, lying to the public to justify banning them.
This is a technology built right here in San Francisco that will change the world. Yet some of the most ideologically driven elected officials want to stamp it out. It's a lesson in killing the Golden Goose. But we're gonna turn it back here. And even if you don't live in SF, it's a blueprint for how you can turn it back where you live.
Let's dive deeper. The head of SF's Metropolitan Transit Association is named Jeffrey Timlin. That's him. On May 31, his department released a report fraudulently claiming Cruz's accident rate was 6.3 times more than national average. What you're looking at is the actual table they put in their report. But there's a big problem embedded in this screenshot. Here's my friend Lee Edwards from Root Ventures talking about what they got wrong.
So in the first 1 million miles, there were four incidents reported. Of those four, three were the fault of the other drivers, the human drivers, and in zero of them were there even a minor injury sustained. Literally three of those incidents involved an autonomous car being rear ended, not at all the fault of the autonomous car. And in the fourth, no collision between vehicles even occurred.
What's lucky here is that Timlin and San Francisco's officials are not at all involved in regulating self-driving cars. The state has a commission called the California Public Utilities Commission, and they very publicly called Timlin out. Here's Anatang from Reuters who broke the story first. And last week, the state actually clapped back. So the CPUC issued up two very long letters saying accusing the city basically of manipulating data and performing really shoddy data analysis.
One of the issues that was stated in the letter from the state CPUC was that the city of San Francisco's data analysis had a quote, unacceptably high degree of statistical error and uncertainty. And so the reason why is because the national data they were using is crashes per 100 million miles, but the city only had their data for less than 1 million miles. So they just basically multiplied the number of injury accidents by 100 something. And so the state was basically saying what the city should have taken to account factors like road type and what type of area it was. So was it rural, urban or suburban when they were doing that. And basically the way they were doing it was very shoddy.
San Francisco's officials are going out of their way to inject themselves into a situation where they have no jurisdiction over and manufacturing fraudulent and misleading statistics to support it. This isn't the only place where it's happening. At one point, one of the supervisors shared on Twitter that there were 18 incidents involving Waymo. He was including nine of those were non-moving incidents. And what his definition of incident was included an incident where a stop sign was blown over by the wind and hit the waymo.
So I don't actually believe that the supervisors and that our our local transportation chief are engaging in this conversation in good faith. And again, that's not my opinion. The state said that in multiple letters to the city. Self-driving cars are proving to be safe and tracking to be far safer than human drivers. Yet powers in this city are so desperate to politicize and remove them from our streets, they're coordinating to stop them from happening.
I think it's been interesting to see SFPD and SF Fire Department in the past have tweeted a lot of Tory things about these companies. And in fact, the Fire Department Union posted a photo with Waymo employees because Waymo and the Fire Department co-created a training course that they took together. And the Fire Department Union thanked Waymo for this. This is three weeks ago. Yesterday they deleted it. Something is changing about how SF is handling self-driving cars. It makes you wonder, who's really behind this?
Supervisor Aaron Peskin claims he's not against tech, but his fingers are all over this shift. If you follow me on Twitter, you'll understand to what degree these supervisors and public officials have operated with nearly no check or balance for more than half a decade. This is why you and I have got to pay attention. Let's ask the questions. What's really going on? Why are they lying and what's the end game?
San Francisco is governed as both a city and a county, so instead of a city council, we have a board of supervisors and a mayor. The mayor is actually far less powerful than most executive branches and especially in cities of this size. And that's been a consistent problem for the city.
In San Francisco, it's the supervisors and the board of supervisors that determine a lot and the most anti-tech ones have control of that board. The worst of them is someone who seems to work at every turn to destroy business of all kind, whether it's tech or small business. He's against it.
My elected supervisor in D5 came up through the San Francisco DSA, which was so extreme. It has expelled some of my friends who consider themselves socialist. They read books by Mao Zedong as a sort of guide. My partner at the firm, Kain, noticed that there was a book. There was a book club reading of Mao Zedong that was being held and run entirely by white people. His family, Taiwan, they were actually murdered.
They don't like corporations. Every idea they have is to make things public. They block private housing. They don't want private developers. They want the city to own more land. They want to start public banks. These things in isolation in and of themselves may be good ideas. If you listen to them, if you listen to them, actually talk. I think ultimately what they want to do is kneecap the private sector.
In San Francisco, elections are actually called by 100 votes here and there. Dean Preston isn't the only one working hard to expand the tentacles of the city to block progress, which is why this is so solvable. What they're doing here with self-driving cars is exactly what they do with blocking housing of every kind, both affordable and market rate. It's the same people fighting against public safety and access to advanced math in middle schools.
Self-driving cars is just one of many innovations San Franciscans have created and that represents progress and abundance. We've got to protect it. We have the opportunity to regulate this correctly in a way that actually saves lives and promotes safety even as we are developing and improving this technology.
But the state has said that it's their purview. It's not the cities and the state did this on purpose because the state didn't want Waymo and Cruz and other AV providers to have to negotiate with every city in California, every HOA. The state said this is a statewide issue. We're going to do it. San Francisco is thumbing their nose at it and saying, actually, we're thumbing our nose at the ideas of buying federalism and we're going to try to take power in a way that we're not supposed to.
Dean Preston's hard left political machine actually works very closely with the rest of the extremist supervisors who run the city, Aaron Pescan, Connie Chan, Shimon Walton, Hillary Ronan and Myrna Melger. Each in their own way seemed to support not merely blocking autonomous cars in progress but actively support the death spiral that's taking a hold of San Francisco right now.
San Francisco is a place where smart builders and engineers come from around the world to build the future. SF is really the birthplace of autonomous vehicles and if you are someone that lives or spends a lot of time in San Francisco, you will see these things everywhere. It's kind of just become the fabric of life in San Francisco and you'll see people hopping in and out of them going to events.
There's a reason why Star Trek placed Starfleet Command in San Francisco and it's because dreamers and doers are here to create things like self-driving cars, a technology that is poised to bring accessibility of transportation to everyone.
Something you learn in engineering, there's no policy, there's no decision you can ever make that doesn't have a cost or a trade-off. It's impossible. And so if we want to save over a million lives a year globally, are we willing to accept disruption to the current economy? And the unions say no unequivocally.
The City of San Francisco has several electeds who are willing to lie in order to support that claim rather than engage in good faith. This is proof positive for all builders out there even if you succeed at the near impossible building self-driving cars that will save millions of lives, you still have to deal with this maxim. First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win.
Most cities would do exactly the opposite of what San Francisco has done. We have killed the Golden Goose. The lucky thing is it's not too late. People ask me what tech people can do about this especially early in their careers. Hey, if you're early focus on building, but for those of us who have built something, it's up to us to now protect tech from those who want to stamp it out. We need you to get vocal, get active, organize, and get involved.
Friends of mine started a political club called Grow SF. I'm donating $50,000 to their pack focused on unseating Dean Preston in SF's District 5, and we're seeing the progress.
I was the first donor to the Chase Aboudin District Attorney Recall in San Francisco that put a common sense DA, Brooke Jenkins in for SF, and she's undoing the rot.
I was an early donor to the school board recalls that got rid of virtue signolars, Allison Collins, and Gabriela Lopez. These ideologues blocked Algebra from middle schools and drove hard to remove the concept of merit from schools entirely.
We want two contested seats from hard leftists in the SF Board of Supervisors, when Joel and Gario did the impossible, unseating and incumbent, hard leftist named Gordon Maher, an Asian American supervisor who sold out his own people.
In Soma, a common sense hard charger, Matt Dorsey defeated a hard leftist to win his seat too. This is in Soma, the tenderloin. When you think about the doom loop, it all starts in Soma and the tenderloin.
This is a full-on voter revolt, and we're gonna win. And in November of 2024, we're gonna take three to five more seats to wipe out the Preston-Paskin hard left cabal. Preston, Paskin, Chan, Walton, Milger, Ronan. Your days are numbered.
You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. It's time to stand up.
你可能对政治不感兴趣,但政治却对你感兴趣。是时候站出来了。
San Francisco will be San Francisco. We will bring technology, progress, and abundance to the center of this beautiful city. And along the way, create prosperity for every citizen in San Francisco.