California Ends Free Ride for Robotaxi Ticketing

  

For good or ill, many things that start in California spread to the rest of the U. S. sooner or later, from Hollywood movies to the Hula Hoop.  So when California's Assembly Bill No. 1777 takes effect this July, companies such as Waymo that operate robotaxis across the country may feel its effects outside just California.

 

The bill, and its implementation by the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), closes a loophole in California law that has up to now allowed driverless vehicles to escape being ticketed for traffic violations.  Previous laws assumed there would always be a driver behind the wheel to cite for illegal U-turns or other roadway malfeasance.  However, existing California law made no provision for ticketing driverless vehicles.

 

That will all change come July 1.  After that, the corporation operating the vehicle will be the designated legal recipient of any citations concerning vehicles under its control.  The ticket takes the form of a "notice of noncompliance," but the effect is the same.  To allow the DMV to track robotaxi company violations, the company must report any citations to the DMV within 72 hours of receipt.  In case a collision was involved, the window shrinks to 24 hours.  If a firm receives too many citations, the DMV is empowered to take drastic action such as limiting the firm's fleet size or even suspending its operating license. 

 

The new law also addresses the problem of how first responders can deal with driverless vehicles that get in the way at a fire or accident scene, for example.  It mandates that the operating companies must respond to calls from first responders within 30 seconds, and requires that companies observe geofencing rules that clear a designated area within two minutes.  Apparently, autonomous vehicles have obstructed the operation of fire and emergency vehicles in the past, and these new laws address that issue.

 

In the modern world, technological developments generally outpace the social infrastructure of laws and customs.  That is why robotaxis in California have been escaping traffic tickets until now, because lawyers and legislators are not prophets, and they can't expect to anticipate every possible new technological development so that the laws are waiting to be used when the technology finally comes along.

 

Most consumer technology is at least intended to have benign effects, but the good of taking people and goods from one place to another is accompanied by problems such as traffic violations.  Getting a traffic ticket is often the only interaction most law-abiding citizens have with law enforcement, but it is a little galling that robotaxis were effectively exempt from such experiences until this year in California. 

 

It's part of the normal progress of technological development for new laws to arise that deal with unexpected problems such as the ones the California bill addresses.  The issue of clearing an area for emergency operations couldn't even happen until there were enough robotaxis around that one of them got caught in such a situation, and led to frustrations and hazards that, while probably not costing a life, made enough trouble for first responders that they reported it to the appropriate authorities.  And while many uncomplimentary things can be said about the California legislature, in this case they seem to have done a good thing in mandating effective communications and actions whenever a driverless vehicle is impeding the work of first responders.

 

It's fair to say that there probably wasn't a popular groundswell of grassroots opinion demanding that robotaxis be able to receive traffic tickets.  The issue is not one to get the average Joe Public's juices going.  Contrast this matter to another technological fault line that is currently the subject of much (mostly local) legislation and discussion:  the construction of data centers around the country. 

 

As an editorial by Charles C. W. Cooke points out, data centers are not new.  In some form we've had them around for decades, and currently there are about 5,000 of them in the U. S. already, with the largest concentration in the liberal state of Virginia. 

 

Yet, to listen to discussions at city council meetings around the country or to see the "No Data Centers" signs popping up in yards, one would think that each data center is a direct portal to Dante's Inferno.  Why are people so upset at data centers, while robotaxis being immune from tickets was never a big deal?

 

Fear has something to do with it—fear of the known unknown.  For most people, robotaxi immunity from ticketing was an unknown unknown.  I didn't even know it was an issue until California fixed it with their new law.  But the publicity about data centers, and their notorious connections with the mysterious and frightening acronym AI, are well known enough, though what the consequences will be in terms of water and energy depletion or increased cost is largely unknown.  After all, if something's not built yet, you can't say exactly what will happen if you build it.

 

Opponents have rushed into that gap of ignorance with highly inflated predictions of disasters that will hit you in your pocketbook:  higher power and water prices, water shortages, and even loss of jobs as AI takes over what you and twenty of your friends do, and does it better and cheaper.  Nobody is threatened in that manner by the fact that robotaxis couldn't get traffic tickets.  Injustice somewhere else never matters as much as injustice to my bank account. 

 

So while even the California legislature can take effective action about a matter that few people knew or cared about, it's not clear that laws slowing down the construction of data centers are going to make anything better.  Saying "not in my back yard" doesn't stop construction as long as back yards don't cover the entire U. S., and that won't happen for a while.  But unless the public understands the issues well enough to make an informed decision, there is not much chance that legislation about data centers that is driven by public opinion will do much good.

 

Sources:  I referred to several articles on California Assembly Bill No. 1777, including https://driveteslacanada.ca/news/california-makes-big-changes-to-autonomous-vehicle-legislation/, https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/robotaxis-driverless-vehicles-now-ticketed-150019014.html, and https://www.carscoops.com/2026/04/california-robotaxi-citation-rules/.  Charles C. W. Cooke's article "Hatred of Data Centers Is Irrational and Self-Defeating" is at https://www.nationalreview.com/2026/04/hatred-of-data-centers-is-irrational-and-self-defeating/. 

Getting to the Truth about AI Water Use

   

It might have been Mark Twain who said, or at least repeated, that a lie will get halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its pants.  And that expression finds no better example than the way water usage by data centers has been portrayed over the last couple of years.

 

I live in Texas, which has seen some of the most rapid growth of data centers in the U. S.  There has even been a local controversy here in San Marcos, with citizen groups organizing rallies and protests against the construction of new data centers.  Every day when I go on my bike-exercise route, I pass two or three signs saying "No Data Centers" showing a big faucet with a single drop of water coming out.  Unfortunately, that sign represents about the typical level of discourse that prevails in discussions about the environmental concerns raised by data centers, specifically their water use. 

 

Last May, a book by Karen Hao, Empire of AI, hit the market and received a wildly enthusiastic reception.  Amazon currently ranks it the No. 1 best seller in International Economics and No. 3 in General Technology and Reference, a very broad category.  It won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2025. 

 

And yet it contains numerous factual errors, many of which blogger Andy Masley pointed out in detail in his Substack blog over a period of months.  In discussing plans Google had for a data center in a town in Chile, Hao wrote that the data center would use 1,000 times more water than the city of 88,000 used. 

 

Masley, a close reader of the technical stuff in such a book, thought this looked strange, although it is not out of line with similar claims by others for the vast quantities of water that data centers will supposedly use.  So he looked into the problem.

 

When he took the number that Hao said was the city's total water usage and divided it by the population of 88,000, he got the result that each citizen was using less than a half-cup of water (0.2 liters) per day.  That is nonsense, of course.  When he found the original data, it turned out that the city's consumption was stated in cubic meters, not liters.  As later confirmed by Hao, someone on her staff of assistants mistook the cubic-meter consumption for liter consumption. 

 

As every student of the metric system knows, one cubic meter contains 1,000 liters, hence the error by a factor of 1,000. 

 

What Masley then wanted to know was how such an egregious error made it past the fact-checkers acknowledged in Hao's book, and the more than 1,000 reviews on Amazon, the adulatory comments in prominent media outlets such as the New York Times and The New Yorker, and the people who decide on the National Book Critics Circle award.

 

The only answer he could come up with is that the people writing the reviews don't give a flip about numbers.  And the people who care about numbers don't write book reviews, except for him, evidently.

 

Hao has since admitted that the error happened in the manner Masley suspected.  But that's a little bit like apologizing for not wiping your feet on the welcome mat after you burn your host's house down.  Masley has spent what amounts to a fulltime job calling out and correcting this and innumerable other errors in the vast outpouring of what may well be called propaganda opposing the construction of new data centers.  His words are finally gaining some traction in the media, which is why I now know about his work.

 

But something is way out of whack with public discourse if one side of a controversy can put out tons of material that is chock-full of factual errors, and these errors can go unchallenged for months or years before one person with the willingness to do the math and find and expose the errors gets enough attention to be heard from.

 

This story reveals laziness and groupthink among those who control prominent media outlets, plus something that could be called math avoidance.  You would think that at a time when mathematics has never been as vital an underpinning to civilization as it is now, that most people would be at least somewhat used to doing math when some issue that vitally involves math comes up.

 

But this story about liters and cubic meters shows that a lot of people who should do their math homework before blatting the glories of a book, or taking sides in a controversy, simply don't.  They find an expert whose vibes agree with their own and enthusiastically fall in line without the slightest regard for accuracy or healthy skepticism. 

 

I don't know what the future of data centers holds.  Their wild growth is starting to look to me like some sort of bubble, much as we had a wild growth of fiber-cable capacity in the early days of fiber-optics, and for years the industry contended with the problem of "dark fiber"—too much capacity.  Dark fiber cables don't use water or power—they just lie there.  But data centers need both, and it's possible that we may find ourselves awash in surplus data-center capacity and the boom will become a bust. 

 

But so far, there seems to be no limit to the appetite for "compute," as the experts call it, that AI wizards have.  The only limit at this point will be economic.  If the people who build the capacity can't figure out how to make money with it, they'll eventually quit adding capacity.  But as long as the public and corporations are willing to get more AI results—and so far, they are—the demand will drive the supply and more data centers will be built.

 

That is, unless people keep on believing the nonsensical claims of the more extreme opposition to data centers, and do something like getting a nationwide ban on new construction passed.  Then we'll get to see what a data-center shortage looks like, and it might be worse than you think.

 

Sources:  Numerous news outlets have covered Andy Masley's debunking efforts directed at correcting errors in the claims of data-center opponents.  The details of the particular Empire of AI error described herein can be found at his Substack post https://blog.andymasley.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-misleading. 

Data Centers On the Grid: Ballast or Essential Cargo?

 

Back in the days of sailing ships, the captain had a choice when a storm became so severe that it threatened to sink the ship.  He could throw the cargo overboard, lightening the ship enough to save it and its crew for another day.  But doing that would ruin any chance of profiting from the voyage. 

 

It was a hard decision then, and an equally hard decision is facing operators of U. S. power grids as they try to cope with increasing demand for reliable power from data centers, many of which are being built to power the next generation of artificial-intelligence (AI) technologies. 

 

An Associated Press report by Marc Levy reveals that one option many grid operators are considering is to write into their agreements with new data centers an option to cut off power to them in emergencies. 

 

Texas, which is served by a power grid which is largely independent of the rest of the country's networks, recently passed a law that prescribes situations in which the grid operator can disconnect big electricity users such as semiconductor-fab plants and data centers.  This is not an entirely new practice.  For some years, large utility customers have taken the option of being disconnected in emergencies such as extremely hot or cold days that put a peak strain on the grid.  Typically they receive a discount for normal power usage when they allow the grid operator to have that option.

 

But according to Levy, the practice is being considered in other parts of the country as well.  A large grid operator called PJM Interconnection serves 65 million customers in the mid-Atlantic region.  They have proposed a rule similar to the one adopted in Texas for their data-center customers.  But an organization called the Digital Power Network, which includes data-center operators and bitcoin miners, another big energy user class, complained that if PJM adopts this policy, it may scare off future investment in data centers and cause them to flee to other parts of the U. S. 

 

Another concern is rising electricity prices, which some attribute to the increased demand by data centers.  These prices are being borne by the average consumer, who in effect is subsidizing the gargantuan power needs of data centers, which typically pay less than residential consumers per kilowatt anyway.

 

In a way, this issue is just an extreme example of a problem that power-grid operators have faced since there were power grids:  how to handle peak loads.  Historically, electricity has to be generated at the same time it's consumed, although there is some progress recently in battery storage of electricity, though not enough to make much of a large-scale difference yet.  This immediacy requires a power grid to have enough generating capacity to supply the peak load—the most electricity they will ever have to supply on the hottest (or coldest) day under worst-case situations. 

 

The problem with peak loads from an economic view is that many of those generating facilities sit idle most of the time, not producing a return on their investment.  So it's always been a tradeoff between taking a chance that your grid will manage the peak load and scrimping on capacity, versus spending enough to make sure you have margin even with the worst peak load imaginable, but having a lot of useless generators and network stuff on your hands most of the time.

 

When the electric utility business was highly regulated and companies had a guaranteed rate of return, they could build excess capacity without being punished by the market.  But since the deregulatory era of the 1970s, and especially in hyper-free-market environments such as Texas, the grids no longer have this luxury.  This is one reason why load-shedding (the practice of cutting off certain big customers in emergencies) looks so attractive now:  instead of building excess capacity, the grid operator can simply throw some switches and pull through an emergency while ticking off only a few big customers, rather than cutting it off to everybody, including the old ladies who might freeze or die of heat exhaustion without power. 

 

Understandably, the data-center operators are upset.  They don't want to spend the money on backup generators that they would rather the grid operators spend.  But the semiconductor manufacturers have learned how to do this already, and build costs for giant emergency-generation facilities into their budgets from the start. 

 

Some data-center operators are starting to build their own backup generators so that they can agree to go off-grid in emergencies without interrupting their operations.  After all, it's a lot easier to restart a data center after a shutdown than a semiconductor plant, which could suffer extreme damage after a disorganized shutdown that could put it out of action for months and cost many millions of dollars. 

 

Compared to plants that make real stuff, data centers can easily offload work to other centers in different parts of the country, or even outside the U. S.  So if there is a regional power emergency, and a global operation such as Google has to shut down one data center, they have plenty more to take up the slack. 

 

It looks to me like the data centers don't have much of a rhetorical leg to stand on when they argue that they shouldn't be subjected to load-shedding agreements like many other large power users tolerate already.  We are probably seeing the usual huffing and puffing that accompanies an industry-wide shift to a policy that makes sense for consumers, power-grid operators, and even the data centers themselves, if they agree to take more responsibility for their own power in emergencies. 

 

If electricity gets expensive enough, data-center operators will have an incentive to figure out how to do what they do more efficiently.  There's plenty of low-power technology out there developed for the Internet of Things and personal electronics.  We all want cheap electricity, but if it's too cheap it leads to inefficiencies that are wasteful on a large scale.  Parts of California in the 1970s had water bills that were practically indistinguishable from zero.  When I moved out there to school in 1972 from water-conscious Texas, I was amazed to see shopkeepers cleaning their sidewalks every morning, not with a broom, or a leafblower, but with a spray hose, washing down the whole sidewalk. 

 

I don't think they do that anymore, and I don't think we should guarantee all data centers that they'll never lose power in an emergency either.

 

Sources:  Marc Levy's article "US electric grids under pressure from power-hungry data centers" appeared on the Associated Press website on Sept. 13 at https://apnews.com/article/big-tech-data-centers-electricity-energy-power-texas-pennsylvania-46b42f141d0301d4c59314cc90e3eab5.