This City Was Sick of Tech Disruptors. So It Decided to Become One.

In spring 2018, Seleta Reynolds, the general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, issued a grave warning about the new generation of urban transportation companies such as Uber.

“A lot of these private actors and companies are not mobility companies,” Reynolds told an audience at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. “They are data companies. And they are building new empires on top of a platform that we are absolutely not ready for.”

The power dynamics must shift, she continued. “We have to bust our ways of thinking inside government in particular.”