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/. 

Waymo 80% Safer than Human Drivers: Why Not Switch?

 

According to Waymo, the Google division that operates self-driving robotaxis in several U. S. cities, their vehicles are involved in 80% fewer injury-causing crashes than human-driven cars.  This was a surprise to me, as it may also have been to Kelsey Piper, who writes in a substack called The Argument that if we want to reduce the number of traffic fatalities in the U. S by 80%, all we have to do is switch to Waymos.

 

At the current rate of nearly 40,000 U. S. traffic fatalities a year, that would be saving 31,000 lives a year.  But she cites a poll conducted by The Argument which found overall that only about 28% of respondents favored allowing self-driving cars in one's town or city, and 41% favored a ban, as Boston and other cities have considered doing.

 

Piper speculates that a general distaste for AI-powered things may be behind what looks like irrational opposition to self-driving cars.  Some Waymos have even been attacked by modern-day Luddites.  As she puts it, ". . . you can't vandalize ChatGPT, so anti-AI sentiment finds its expression in harrassing Waymos."

 

She realizes that anything like a wholesale move to self-driving cars would cause massive disruption to our present transportation system.  She also acknowledges the tendency of government to make optional things mandatory.  Right now, Waymo is one private company offering a specific service in a few carefully chosen markets such as Atlanta, Austin, San Francisco, and Phoenix.  With the possible exception of Atlanta, these are all locations with plenty of sunshine and relatively few days of inclement weather.  And the service in Atlanta only commenced last June, so Waymos in that city have not gone through a typical Atlanta winter, which almost always includes an ice storm, as I know from living there a couple of years.  Ice may present serious challenges to Waymo's algorithms.

 

So there are practical limitations to the areas that Waymo can operate.  As one of the commenters on Piper's article mentions, Waymo has somewhat cherry-picked markets in which it can compete while maintaining its very good safety record.  Even if Boston decided to allow Waymos, I expect a long development period would delay its deployment as the company figured out how to deal with snow, ice, and slush on the former cowpaths that are now Boston streets.  At least the Waymo cars probably wouldn't get lost as much as I did whenever I drove to Boston when I lived in New England, which was, well, pretty much every time I went there. 

 

But there's those 31,000 lives.  As Piper points out, that's more lives than are lost every year to homicides.  Wouldn't it be nice if we could eliminate all homicides?  Well, numerically, changing to self-driving cars would do that. 

 

The psychology of why we tolerate such a lot of annual deaths to traffic accidents is interesting.  People don't always act toward various risks in reasonable ways.  The classic example is driving to the airport to fly somewhere.  Unless you live within walking distance of the airport, you're going to drive or ride.  And unless you take a Waymo there, you will ride in a human-operated car.  While lots of people are afraid of flying much more than they are afraid of driving, the chances of dying in a plane crash are much lower than the chances of dying in a car wreck on the way to or from the airport. 

 

I suspect that we have gotten so used to the 40,000 or so traffic deaths every year with some variation on the notion that it always happens to someone else, and if I were in the same situation that somebody else died in, I would have been clever enough to save myself.  These are pure rationalizations, but the alternative is to experience a little squirt of adrenaline every time we buckle the seat belt and pull out of the garage. 

 

Five or ten years ago, there was a lot of hype about how every new car would be self-driving within a few years.  That obviously hasn't happened, for a variety of reasons.  One factor is the expense per vehicle.  Waymo doesn't advertise how much each of their vehicles cost, but various estimates say it's probably on the order of $160,000 to $300,000.  This puts them in the super-luxury class, and explains why they aren't deployed in areas that will not generate pretty good revenue.  Even with the carefully-chosen markets that Waymo has selected, it appears that they are not making a profit yet, which means the whole thing is still an elaborate experiment oriented toward some future situation that hasn't materialized.

 

Still, I will admit that if I could have a self-driving car that was absolutely trustworthy, a Level-5 one according to the SAE autonomous-vehicle rating system, one you could read or sleep in while the machine takes care of all driving tasks, and not pay a whole lot more for it than I'm paying now, I would at least consider it.  But in my relatively small town, which would not provide enough revenue for Waymo under its present operating circumstances, that's not going to happen.

 

Now and then on my trips to Austin, I see a Waymo eerily coasting along with nobody inside, and once I saw two in a row.  I will admit to having a flash of mischief when I saw one the first time, and wondering what would happen if you pulled in front of it and slammed on the brakes suddenly.  Probably nothing bad.  Fortunately, I was a passenger in the car I was in, not the driver, and so the experiment was never performed.

 

Unless something radical happens in the areas of AI, sensors, or legislation regarding the right to drive your own vehicle, it looks like Waymo and similar autonomous vehicle companies may not spread their wares much farther than they've already done.  And that's too bad for the 40,000 or so people who die on roadways each year.  Some ideas look good in theory, but when you start examining everything that would have to change to put them into practice, it just falls apart.  And converting our fleet of vehicles to nearly 100% self-driving looks like another one of those nice ideas that has had an unfortunate encounter with reality.

 

Sources:  A note in the online magazine The Dispatch referred me to Kelsey Piper's article "Please let the robots have this one," at https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/please-let-the-robots-have-this-one.  I also referred to a Reddit item on the estimated cost of Waymo vehicles at https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1g8vv7o/where_did_the_whole_talk_about_the_cost_of_waymo/, and the Wikipedia article "Waymo."

Waymo Comes to Austin

 

In March, the robotaxi company Waymo announced that it was teaming for the first time with the ride-hailing service Uber to provide rides in Austin, Texas.  Waymo traces its roots to a secret project started by Google in 2009, with some key staffers having participated in the 2004 Stanford Self-Driving Car Project.  It is now a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google.  Uber, along with Lyft, provides app-based ride-hailing services outside the usual taxi structure.  Waymo's driverless taxis operated commercially first in San Francisco, and now provide service in U. S. cities such as Phoenix, Los Angeles, Miami, and now Austin.

 

Last week, I rode with a friend, who was driving, from north Austin to the University of Texas main campus just north of downtown.  Our route went along Burnet Road, which is in many ways the prototypical Austin street:  four lanes, a center median in some blocks, all kinds of one-story retail businesses along the way with multiple parking-lot entrances in each block, and fairly heavy traffic. 

 

We pulled up at a red traffic signal, and a few feet ahead of us in the lane to our right were two Waymo driverless cars, one in front of the other.  There were no passengers and of course, no driver.  They are easy to spot from a distance, even if you can't see whether anyone is in the driver's seat.  A thing like a black police gumball on top of the roof spins constantly, as do smaller gizmos on each side of the car, and it bristles with wide-angle camera lenses and less identifiable technology, as well as logos letting you know what it is.  The Wikipedia article on Waymo says the vehicles are equipped with 360-degree lidar (light-based radar) with a nearly 1000-foot (300-meter) range, radio-type radars, and an extremely sophisticated AI processing system.  Also, some stray comments on a Reddit page indicates there are human "remote monitors" who are responsible for several cars each.  So yes, they look completely autonomous, but somewhere in the background there's a human ready to intervene if something unusual happens. 

 

I didn't know all of that as I gazed at a technology that has been on the streets in some form for at least a decade.  But I have never actually seen a driverless car that close, let alone two of them. 

 

The car in front was facing the intersection when the red light changed to green, and sure enough, it knew to start going, just like somebody was driving it.  This is not a true-confession column, but I have to admit something here.  Seeing those driverless cars acting so normal gave me the perverse urge to try to mess them up somehow, to wave a hand in front of one of the cars or something just to see how clever it was.  It was only a brief stray thought, but its strangeness struck me.  I am normally a live-and-let-live type of person, not given to vandalizing-type ideas.  But there is a radical difference between reading about things and seeing them for yourself.

 

Philosophers make a distinction between two types of knowing.  Knowing by description is what you would learn about riding a bicycle, say, by reading a book on how to ride a bicycle.  You might understand the physics of bicycles, you could answer detailed questions on bicycle dynamics, but if you had never actually sat on a bicycle or tried to ride one, your knowing about bicycles is only the first kind of knowledge: knowledge by description.

 

On the other hand, knowing by acquaintance requires a personal physical encounter with the thing known.  Up to last Wednesday, I had known a lot about autonomous vehicles.  I have blogged about them probably dozens of times.  But all my knowledge was by description, not acquaintance. 

 

Seeing those two Waymo cars in the flesh, so to speak, was qualitatively different than any amount of reading or watching YouTube videos.  I was right there, not twenty feet away from them, and if something happened to go wacky with one of them, I could be personally in danger. 

 

Not that Waymo has had too much trouble along those lines.  Wary of how one spate of bad publicity can ruin an entire project, Waymo has been very cautious in choosing its operating locations and in keeping a nearly spotless safety record so far.  According to Wikipedia, the only fatal accident involving a Waymo driverless car happened when an unoccupied Waymo vehicle was involved in a multiple-car pileup set off by a Tesla driver who was going 98 MPH before the crash.  Waymo can hardly be blamed for that.

 

Austin is a good choice for Waymo's initial teaming with Uber, as it is full of technophiles who will take a driverless Uber ride just for the thrill of it.  The annual international futurefest called SXSW (originally South by Southwest) was held in Austin in March, and I'm sure many of the out-of-town participants were tickled to get Uber rides in Waymos, which was probably one of the main reasons they were rolled out that month. 

 

There are still some people like me who will have generally negative feelings towards robotaxis.  For one thing, you're not going to have the huge variety of interpersonal experiences that riding in a human-driven cab provides. 

 

Just for example, a couple of weeks ago I flew to Lawrence, Kansas, and the closest airport was in Kansas City, a 50-mile-or-so drive away.  The place I was visiting hired a limo service to pick me up at the airport, and for the hour or so drive to Lawrence I had a fascinating conversation with a native of Veracruz, Mexico, who was as full of local and international tourist-type info as he was curious about various exotic places I'd been. 

 

Waymo isn't going to do that.  All you're greeted with is an empty car with a few control buttons, and no conversation.  At least not yet, but maybe they'll add a Cab-Chat app for people who miss the old days of human drivers.

 

Sources:  The Associated Press carried an article describing Waymo's teaming with Uber in Austin at https://apnews.com/article/uber-waymo-robotaxis-austin-texas-988aba46988e649be8cf59979587a8e5.  I found a reference to human monitors of Waymo cars at https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/1f3ur68/current_waymo_revenue_per_car/?rdt=36096.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Waymo and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-acquaindescrip/. 

Human And Autonomous Driving: A Deadly Mix?

"Who's in charge here?"  If people in an organization can't give a clear answer to that question, chances are the organization is in trouble.  And something along those lines may apply to cars as well as to human organizations.  That's the lesson we can draw from the preliminary report released by the U. S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) last Thursday, May 24, concerning the fatal collision between a pedestrian and a semi-autonomous vehicle operated by Uber in Tempe, Arizona last March 18. 

To summarize the accident, around 9:39 PM on that Sunday night, Elaine Hertzberg chose to walk her bicycle across a divided street in between crosswalks, in a section of road that was poorly illuminated by streetlights.  She was not wearing reflective clothing and her bicycle had no side reflectors.  She apparently did not see the oncoming car until just before the collision.  Subsequent toxicology tests showed traces of marijuana and methamphetamine in her system.  Regardless of her condition, it's the responsibility of drivers (or the car's computer) to look out for the behavior of all pedestrians, even those who aren't behaving with normal alertness.  And if this responsibility is split or ambiguous, trouble is brewing.

An in-cab video released after the accident shows that the car's driver was studying something below the windshield in the cab until she saw the pedestrian just before the accident.  In my earlier blog on this incident, I mistakenly speculated that she was looking at her cellphone instead of the road, but it turns out she was monitoring a display of the self-driving car's behavior, as part of what was basically a research project in which the driver would take the car out on prescribed routes to test its systems. 

The most informative piece of evidence in the NTSB preliminary report concerns the state the car was in just before the crash.  The Volvo was equipped both with the latest Volvo-engineered safety systems, including a collision-avoidance system, and also with Uber-installed computer control.  Probably to avoid interference between the two systems, the Volvo safety controls were disabled when the Uber computer was set to operate the vehicle.  The Uber computer system is able to determine when emergency (hard) braking maneuvers are needed, and is capable of executing them.  But at the time of the accident, the emergency braking function was disabled, as Uber found it had led to erratic behavior.  The operator was apparently aware of this setting and of her responsibility to take emergency actions as needed, in addition to monitoring the vehicle's operations on the screen and "tagging events of interest for subsequent review." 

People can do only so much at once.  Abundant research has shown that too many distractions degrade a driver's ability to respond to unexpected emergencies.  Uber was basically running an experiment requiring significant driver attention while operating their vehicles on public roads.  It didn't take too long for the unfortunate combination of a driver distracted by monitoring tasks to coincide with a pedestrian whose attention was clouded to lead to a tragedy, and to suspension of Uber's experimental autonomous-car program, plus numerous calls on the part of state and federal lawmakers for a slowdown in the deployment of autonomous vehicles.

The final report from NTSB on this fatal accident will probably not come out until next year.  But their preliminary report shows how things can go wrong tragically under the current regime of what are called level-2 and level-3 autonomous driving systems.  The five-level ranking system goes from Level 0, which is what I can do in our 1955 Oldsmobile (no computer within miles) to the hypothetical Level 5, the yet-to-be-realized situation in which the self-driving car performs absolutely all driving functions and the passenger's participation is limited to telling the car where to go when he or she gets in. 

No one has yet deployed a Level 5 vehicle, and getting there will require extensive testing of lower-level systems in the real world.  Testing involves risks and unknowns—otherwise you wouldn't learn anything from it.  The dicey problem faced by autonomous-vehicle developers has always been to strike the right balance between exposing their systems to a wide enough variety of real-life situations to learn enough to improve them, and not taking so many risks that one of the close calls turns into a severe injury or fatality, as the Uber accident did.

One of the fond hopes of self-driving-car promoters is that once we get to the point where their well-designed systems are extensively employed, automotive fatality rates should start to decline steeply.  Nobody (well, almost nobody except a few suicidal maniacs) wants to die in a car wreck, and so from a utilitarian perspective, if a few people die during early-phase testing of self-driving cars, but then as a result thousands get to live who would otherwise have been killed by cars driven by people, that's a good tradeoff.

But that cold mathematical view doesn't appeal to our emotional side, and so the media and legislators react to a single fatality in a way that seems out of proportion.  I'm not sure it is, though.

What we may be seeing is part of a very normal process of social self-regulating feedback that has led to improvements in safety ever since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.  The first thing that has to happen in this process, unfortunately, is that somebody gets killed.  And the reason they were killed has to do with a new technology.  The bad publicity attracts attention from the public, who is now less inclined to welcome the new technology; those in the position to regulate the technology, such as legislators;  and the promoters of the technology itself, who are moved to improve safety out of self-preservation.  Laws or regulations are enacted by legislators or private entities such as insurance companies, and the new industry sometimes imposes new rules on itself.   The causes of the original fatalities are mitigated or removed, and life goes on with the new technology, which in the course of time becomes old and familiar.  This happened with steamboats in the 1800s, it happened with human-driven automobiles in the early 1900s, and it appears to be happening with self-driving cars now.

As long as we don't get into some kind of prohibition panic and ban all self-driving cars forever, reasonable rules about testing new systems and deploying market-ready ones can be devised.  Compromises will have to be made.  Even if all cars were Level-5 quality tomorrow, a few people would still die in car accidents.  But chances are there would be a lot fewer than 40,000 or so per year, which is what the U. S. automobile fatality rate is running at today.  And many of those fatalities are caused by distracted drivers, including the Uber driver who had too many things to watch on the dashboard, and failed to see the pedestrian until it was too late.

Sources:  A news report summarizing the NTSB findings appeared on May 24 on the Reuters website at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-crash/ntsb-uber-self-driving-car-failed-to-recognize-pedestrian-brake-idUSKCN1IP26K.  The preliminary report itself can be downloaded at https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/HWY18MH010-prelim.pdf.  I first blogged on this incident on Mar. 26, 2018 at http://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2018/03/self-driving-car-kills-pedestrian.html.

Is GM Building A Roadblock for Self-Driving Cars?

General Motors is trying to do something about self-driving cars, otherwise known as autonomous vehicles.  Besides their technical R&D efforts, a recent Associated Press report revealed that GM lobbyists have been busy in numerous U. S. states trying to get a particular bill passed that allegedly would protect the public from self-driving-car hazards.  But what it's really supposed to do is to protect GM from having to compete with other self-driving car makers and experimenters.

This is a big deal, because decisions made at the state legislative level today could have profound implications for the development of the infant autonomous vehicle business in the U. S. for decades.  I won't quite say the bill would strangle the infant in its crib, but it comes close.

What GM proposes is to allow mainly fleets of automaker-leased autonomous vehicles on the road.  These would be fully self-driving machines—no operator standing by—and in targeting centrally-owned fleets, GM has singled out what is the most likely initial application of these vehicles.  The first commercially deployed autonomous vehicles are operating in just such a fleet-style mode in a densely-populated section of Singapore, for example.  But the kicker is that the law would require that the maker of the cars retain ownership of them, even if they were deployed only for testing purposes.

Other autonomous-vehicle promoters, including major car companies such as Ford, Volvo, and Audi, oppose the bill, saying it's an attempt to slant the playing field in favor of GM.  It's also opposed by Uber, Lyft, and other organizations such as Google that don't make cars but are still interested in autonomous vehicles for various reasons. 

I have to hand it to GM for their political insight, however.  State legislatures tend to be pushovers for corporate-friendly laws, a tradition going back at least to the early twentieth century.  For example, it's a fact that Tesla Motors cannot sell its cars directly to Texas consumers.  Why not?  Because way back when the first car dealerships were being established in the 1910s and 1920s, they banded together in most states and got laws passed that prohibited large, powerful auto companies from selling cars directly to consumers.  In this way, a specific group of businesses got a law passed that was nominally for consumer protection but in fact was a special favor to the group.  Ties between car dealers and state legislatures have been close ever since, and GM is using this continuing closeness to try to get its law passed. 

The AP article cites numerous legislators who have received contributions from GM and also favor GM's legislation.  It's an open secret, at least in Texas, that quid-pro-quo legislation in response to contributions (or less legal kinds of influence) goes on all the time, and so it's not surprising that GM has made considerable progress with its attempts to get its legislation passed.  But now that we know about it, a consideration of the parties involved can show just how bad an idea it could be.

The groups significantly affected by this matter are:  (1) the Big Three U. S. automakers (Ford, Chrysler, and GM), (2)  other organizations that don't make cars but are interested in autonomous vehicles for various reasons (Google, Uber, and other experimenters and inventors), (3)  state legislatures, who hold the main responsibility for laws regulating driving and drivers, (4) the federal government, which has so far mostly stayed out of the way of this matter, at least with regard to formal legislation, and (5) the car-driving or car-riding public.  From the public's point of view, it makes sense to have the widest safe variety of options available for self-driving cars:  partially self-driving vehicles owned by the driver/rider, wholly self-driving cars owned and operated by a fleet manager, leased self-driving cars, retrofitted self-driving cars, and whatever else can safely be done in this area to see which usage models work economically and which don't. 

While the focus up to now has been mostly on the technology, astute observers have pointed out the possibility that self-driving cars could revolutionize the whole economic makeup of the auto industry.  Car ownership in the future might be as quaint or peculiar-looking now as ownership of a private electric-power plant looks today, but that's the way many privately-owned homes of the rich were provided with electricity in the very early days of electric lighting.  Some forecasters see visions of autonomous vehicles, like mini-buses or cabs, showing up on command at your doorstep, with everybody living in apartments without garages or parking lots.  Nobody has satisfactorily explained to me where all these garageless vehicles will go at night when demand is down, but I suppose there must go someplace.  At the minimum, they could park themselves in dense ranks instead of regular lots, which have to allow any-time access for any vehicle and consequently are at least 70% or so open space.

Whatever the details, GM has realized that autonomous vehicles are a potential threat to their current business model.  Hence their rather clumsy attempt to get ahead of the curve with legislation that would favor automakers to the exclusion of nearly everyone else.  Needless to say, if GM's proposals turn into law in every state, it will severely hamper all the other models of large-scale deployment of autonomous vehicles, but we might just be stuck with it, like we're stuck with locally-owned car dealerships to this day, whether it makes sense to sell cars that way or not. 

I don't know if this matter merits a citizens' letter-writing campaign, but at the very least we should be aware that GM is trying to throw up a big legislative roadblock in the path of self-driving cars.  Let's hope that state legislators all across the country do the statesman-like thing and resist the temptation to give in to one special interest at the price of inconvenience, or worse, for the general public.

Sources:  The Associated Press article by Joan Lowy to which I referred was carried by numerous outlets including ABC News, where it was titled "INFLUENCE GAME:  GM bill is self-driving and self-interested."  It was posted on Feb. 23, 2017 at http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/gm-pushing-driving-car-rules-undercut-competitors-45680319.  I also referred to a Washington Post article on auto dealership laws at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/05/14/auto-dealers-and-state-legislatures-conspire-to-make-cars-more-expensive-can-tesla-change-that/.

Can the Digital Future of Cars Save Lives and Time?

Despite all the positive changes the automobile has wrought, there are still a few big problems.  Leading the list is the rate of automotive fatalities and injuries—thousands of people die in car crashes every year, and many times that number are seriously injured.  Next on my list is the millions of person-hours wasted each year by people sitting in slow traffic—needlessly long commute times.  Add the carbon footprint of each car to that picture, and you can see plenty of room for improvement in the way we use machines to get around. 

At a one-day event called AutoMobilityLA held at the annual Los Angeles Auto show that runs through Nov. 27, New York Times reporter Tom Volek surveyed a number of digital technologies that promise to deal with all of these problems.  But as with many nice ideas, the difficulty is how we're going to get from here to there without making things worse before they get better.

Take self-driving cars, for instance.  According to Dr. Alexander Hans, a blogger at a site called www.driverless-future.com, several studies have shown the potential for a self-driving taxi to perform the transportation work of six to ten privately-owned vehicles.  He also claims that the first widespread use of self-driving cars will be in fleets of self-driving taxis operating in restricted geographic areas such as densely populated districts of urban areas (think places like Singapore, where the first commercial self-driving taxi fleet debuted last August). 

Maybe these forecasts are right, but computer simulations leave out certain factors that may be decisive.  For example, there are lots of cabs in Manhattan, and there would be even more if the existing cab companies had not engaged in rent-seeking by restricting the total number of medallions available and fighting innovative unlicensed services such as Uber and Lyft.  But even if all the restrictions on cabs and taxi-like services in Manhattan were removed, I think you would still have a lot of cars clogging the streets, many of them privately owned. 

A city is a complex thing, and it is a mistake to assume everything else will stay the same if all you do is insert a change in the transportation mix.  That is why new freeways get crowded so quickly and the race to alleviate congestion by building more freeways never seems to be won.  Better and more congenial transportation attracts residential and commercial development until the new transportation mode is just as crowded as it used to be, and then people go somewhere else to repeat the cycle.

And even more important than alleviating commuting time and headaches is safety.  We are told that once most cars on the road are self-driving ones, that auto accident rates will plummet.  Given the fact that most auto fatalities are due to operator misjudgments and not mechanical failures, I can believe that.  Computers don't get drunk and try to impress their friends with their alcohol-impaired driving skills. 

But as the isolated but well-publicized fatality involving a Tesla quasi-self-driving vehicle showed last May, people can put more trust in a nearly self-driving car than is warranted.  Despite warnings to keep his hands on the wheel when the self-driving feature was engaged, Joshua Brown apparently was watching a video at the wheel of his Tesla when a truck unexpectedly crossed its path, and the system failed to recognize it in time to avoid a fatal crash.  Tesla has since made changes to their system to avoid such problems, but no system is going to be 100% safe no matter how much the software is tweaked. 

What the consumers and the auto insurance industry are waiting for is evidence that over time, truly self-driving cars that require nothing more from the passenger than to sit there and not mess with things, will lead to fewer injuries and deaths than would result if all those people were driving instead of sitting on their hands.  Despite all the self-driving car test drives and public demonstrations of the last few years, we are nowhere near the point at which a reasonably robust statistical study of this type can be made.  And until that time, neither insurers nor the general public will get interested in self-driving cars in a major way.

On the other hand, fleets owned by a single entity and driving in a specific well-mapped area can make real headway, and probably will unless entrenched interests stop them, as existing cab companies are trying to do with unlicensed services. 

           

The current situation reminds me of a scene I saw recently in a 2003 movie made mostly in Germany.  Some bicyclists come to a railroad crossing with a gate lowered across it.  Now in the U. S., railroad crossings with gates are completely automatic—some track-sensor gizmo lowers the gates when a train passes by and raises them afterwards.  But in this scene, a young man in an elevated booth next to the tracks finally looks up from the book of poetry he's reading and walks over to a crank and turns it by hand to raise the gate. 

There in a nutshell you have the two choices we face regarding self-driving vehicles.  I don't know what combination of union rules and tradition and exaggerated concerns for safety led to preserving the job of crossing-guard keeper in Germany some eighty years after the technology to eliminate that job became available.  But if in 2060, we still have medallioned cabs in Manhattan manually driven by immigrants who can't find a better job and 40,000 traffic deaths a year in the U. S., it won't be because the technology isn't available.  It will be because human organizations and political factors intervened to stifle the change for fifty years.  And if for no other reason than for the sake of those whose lives will be lost to automobile accidents in that time, that would be a shame.

Sources:  Tom Votek's article "At the Los Angeles Auto Show, Industry Ponders Its Digital Future" appeared on Nov. 17, 2016 at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/automobiles/autoshow/los-angeles-auto-show-digital-future-of-industry.html.  Dr. Hans's blog appears at http://www.driverless-future.com/ and is sponsored by Inventivio GmbH of Germany.  A report on the commercial driverless-car taxi service in Singapore appeared at http://bigstory.ap.org/article/615568b7668b452bbc8d2e2f3e5148e6/worlds-first-self-driving-taxis-debut-singapore.  The movie in which the hand-cranked crossing gate appeared is "Schultze Gets The Blues" released in 2003 and written and directed by Michael Schorr.