People First's anti-robotaxi website shares a strong production trail with an Uber-funded campaign (CAR) Public website records connect People First Transportation Alliance's site with Citizens for Affordable Rates, which disclosed $11.6 million from Uber in the first half of 2026. They don't identify who commissioned or paid for People First's site. People First Transportation Alliance has spent the fall campaigning against robotaxis in Washington, D.C. The RSVP page for its Oct 6 rally at the Wilson Building reads "People First, Not Robotaxis," and its flyer reads "Against Waymo's Robotaxis." On Oct 19, the Washington Post asked who is behind the group, and several listed "founding members" told the Post they aren't part of it. I went through the group's website: code, image files, timestamps and domain records, plus the lobbying filings of the people around it. I couldn't find a document that says who pays People First's bills, and I've filed three public records requests that might turn one up. What the records do show is a production trail linking People First's website to the website of Citizens for Affordable Rates, a New York advocacy group whose filings name Uber as its only disclosed funder. - Shared accounts. Both sites' posts are credited to the same Squarespace author account. People First's site was created by an account created at the same second that author ID encodes. - Shared designer. Both sites' logos carry the same named Canva design identity, "pamela.stamoulis." So does a billboard ad for Citizens for Affordable Rates (CAR). - A shared date. One People First post carries the exact anomalous date of a CAR post, down to the millisecond. That strongly suggests a reused post or a common source. Citizens for Affordable Rates (CAR) launched in January 2025 as an "Uber-led coalition" to cut New York's car insurance costs. Its filing for January–June 2026 lists $11,615,454 from Uber, the only funder disclosed in that filing. Amelia Adams, a New York consultant and former registered Uber lobbyist, told the Post she helps run People First. CAR's January–June 2026 filing lists expense rows to her firm, Adams Advisors, totaling $213,872 for "civic engagement/community organizing." Two of those rows share the same date and amount, so the actual total paid may be lower. Adams and Uber told the Post that this work is unrelated to autonomous vehicles or People First. Uber also said it wasn't involved in People First's website or its D.C. protest. 1. The same accounts appear on both sites Squarespace sites expose internal data to anyone who adds `?format=json` to a page address. Comparing that data: - The same author account. All four of People First's news posts, and 134 of CAR's 192 posts, are credited to one Squarespace author account (ID `558b041e…`). - The same creator account. People First's site settings include a field recording when the account that created the site was itself created: June 24, 2015, 19:25:18 UTC. That matches, to the second, the time encoded in the author ID. A profile created just for one site would carry a much later date. So the account that created People First's site is very likely the same account credited with CAR's posts. - The same designer. People First's logo and favicon, and seven CAR image files from five Canva designs, carry embedded Canva export data with the same user ID and the name "pamela.stamoulis." One of them is a CAR billboard ad (more below). The Post first reported the "pamela.stamoulis" username, noted that a digital strategist named Pamela Stamoulis has ties to New York and Washington, and said she didn't respond. Federal campaign-finance records show a Pamela Stamoulis paid as staff by Senate Majority PAC in 2017–18 and by Biden for President in 2019–20. She lists herself as a self-employed consultant on donation records since 2021. 2. A People First post carries a CAR post's anomalous date Every Squarespace post has a visible date field the author can change. On CAR's site, clipped news stories are often backdated to the original article's date. - May 12, 2025. CAR's site gets a clip of New York Post letters about Councilman Yusef Salaam. Its date field is set to Jan 17, 2024, 3:21 p.m. That date is wrong for the clip, since the letters ran almost two weeks later. The system stores it as `1705522860395`. - People First's site. Its New York Post story about California drivers protesting Waymo, from January 2026, carries the same date value, `1705522860395`, down to the millisecond. No other CAR post has it. A match that precise isn't a coincidence. Together with the shared accounts, it strongly suggests the People First post started as a reused CAR post, or that both came from a common source. The public records don't show how it was copied. A direct duplicate, an intermediate copy, a template or an import could each preserve the value. None of the Salaam text remains. What about January? Three of People First's other posts have date fields reading Jan 10, 2026, 1:27–1:34 p.m. That's shortly after the articles they clip were published; the newest went up at 11:15 a.m. that day. The copied post's thumbnail is a file named "Screenshot 2026-01-10 at 11.53.03." That's consistent with the clips being made on Jan 10, months before People First had a website. But date fields can survive copying and file names can be kept, so it doesn't prove when the Waymo text was written. The posts' internal IDs point to May 3, 2026, the day after People First's site was created; all four were created within 14 seconds of each other. 3. The same design account made CAR's billboard One of CAR's images carries the same Canva identity and is titled "FINAL_CAR_SOMOS_BILLBOARDS_1728 x 512 px." It reads "Car insurance is fueling our affordability crisis" and "Paid For By Citizens For Affordable Rates." CAR announced a "six-figure ad campaign" aimed at New York officials attending the SOMOS conference in Puerto Rico in November 2025. That ties the billboard's design file to the same named Canva identity as People First's logo. It doesn't show who bought the ads or ran the campaign. CAR's lobbying report for July–December 2025 lists $8,489 in expenses, none of them a separately identified SOMOS ad buy. It also says CAR didn't have to name its funders that period because it was under the spending threshold. 4. Author names changed on both sites When the Post reported its story, the site's metadata credited the posts to an author named "Pamela" with the display name "PS," and the Post says it asked Pamela Stamoulis for comment several times. By 11:31 a.m. ET on Oct 19, the morning the story ran, fresh copies of both sites showed "Misc" instead. Archived copies show "PS" as late as mid-September, so the change came sometime between then and that morning. Public data doesn't show the exact day, or why it was made. There was one timestamped change on the evening of Oct 19. At 9:36 p.m. ET, a CAR post's author was switched from a second account, displayed as "Laila ElGohary," to the shared "Misc" account. The post's text didn't change. By late that night, that second account's display name read "TJ." I can't say who made these changes or why. 5. Overlapping organizations CAR's press releases and People First's own materials name some of the same organizations and people: - Rev. Conrad Tillard signed a CAR clergy letter and is quoted in its releases. He's a listed People First member and, per the Post, recruited clergy for its Albany trip. - New York Communities for Change appears in both. - The Yemeni American Merchants Association is quoted in CAR's January 2026 coalition release. It's named under "Standing together" on People First's D.C. rally RSVP page. You can verify this yourself: - Open `peoplefirsttranspo.com/news?…` and find the New York Post post. Its `"publishOn"` value is `1705522860395`. - Open `citizensforaffordablerates.c…` and page to the oldest post, the Salaam letters clip. It has the same value. - Open `peoplefirsttranspo.com/?form…` and find `creatorAccountCreationDate`: `1435173918522` (June 24, 2015, 19:25:18 UTC). The first eight characters of the author ID, `558b041e`, convert from hexadecimal to the same second. I saved timestamped copies of both sites' data, with checksums, in case either site changes.

Robotaxi service is getting so good in Austin that most of my remaining complaints are UI/UX stuff. Pickups/dropoffs are getting better but still some odd and very inconvenient nonexistent pins in front of major businesses though Two examples from recent trips: 30.2356908, -97.7909666 30.2330930, -97.7917354