The SFMTA (San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency) office of inovation who are going to launch driverless cars in future is looking for new head for company.
The head of company’s self-driving car project Tim Papandreou has been announced this at the SFMTA Board of Directors meeting in late June that now he is going to join Google X.
He was the main lead to contact with Google and other tech innovators to discuss the developing policies on driverless car project and other transit innovations.
On this, Ratna Amin director of transportation policy at SPUR wrote in an email, “There could be a lag,” but not if “someone else is made accountable soon.” She also wrote that “We can’t rely on one person to hold the entire vision”.
Papandreou said “It was really hard decision to leave” after woking for a great seven and a half years experience. He told to board that now he will work as a new head of partenerships for Google X. He said “I believe the future is automation. I want to get ahead of it.”
The reason behind his departure is failure in a national contest known as “Smart Cities Challenge” held on 21st June. It was an unsuccessful bid by San Francisco for a $50 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation. There were seven finalists pitching tech-oriented solutions. San Francisco was one of them to launch transportation systems of the future. ‘Ohio’ the city of Columbus was the winner of that contest.
Ed Reiskin SFMTA Director of Transportation said he was disappointed because San Francisco did not won the challenge but although they got many ideas from the challenge.
From this SFMTA draft a rough idea of San Francisco’s Street where semi-autonomous Muni buses connected by wireless technology, increased shared bike access, driverless Uber and Lyft vehicles and shuttles to connect less dense neighborhoods to core transit lines. They also pitched a mobile app to access this theme.
Many companies like Google, Uber, Lyft and General Motors partnershiped with San Francisco for this challenge.
On this Reiskin Said, “The immediate reaction we had from our partners was, ‘Let’s continue forward in any case”.
Where Tom Nolan chairman of SFMTA Board of Directors congratulated Papandreou for his new job. And said, “Can we each get one of those new driverless cars? We can test them for you!”
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