California Invoice Bans Self-Driving Vehicles. San Francisco Supervisors Block Waymo. Does Luddism Reign?
trucks. A proposed law says they must have a driver by at least 2029 codes
The California Convention passed AB 316 by a vote of 54 to 3. The bill includes a provision mandating the presence of a human driver in autonomous trucks during testing, which the Teamsters union had campaigned for. This is just an Assembly bill: to become law, it would need a Senate equivalent and the governor’s signature.
Earlier, San Francisco regulators, also lobbied by the Teamsters, turned down a petition by Waymo to convert warehouse space into employee parking at a new facility in an industrial area in southwest San Francisco. The parking had already been overwhelmingly approved by lower bodies, but descriptions of the meeting suggest the conflict between the Robotaxi companies and the city has escalated, and the denial of that parking request makes it seem like that’s about it and not about it about whether these parking spaces exist spaces are appropriate.
Robocar developers always anticipated that there would be a backlash as the technology became more real. Some of the backlash will be emotional or come from those who feel commercially threatened by the technology. Some will be entitled to the public safety and traffic disruption issues to be expected when trying out new technologies like this. On the issue of job preservation – many drivers drive drivers for a living – there is sympathy on both sides for those who feel their careers are threatened, but concerns about efforts to protect a dangerous and uncomfortable job just to keep jobs alive can stay. Such efforts have typically not stood the test of history, nor have they been retrospectively counted as good when they did.
For trucking, having drivers in trucks controlled by computers is obviously ridiculous in the long run. All teams are currently doing this to ensure safety. Their systems are immature and they know it. But all plans depend on that driver eventually being removed, as has already happened for robotaxis around the city. If the law passes, the driver will have to be there at least until 2029, when the DMV can issue a report with recommendations to remove the driver recommendation.
Outside of the state, several trucking companies are already conducting driverless tests, and one company, Gatik, is making regular daily deliveries without a security driver in the vehicle. Waiting until 2029 in California essentially pushes the tech out of the state, even though many of the companies have a strong presence there. Once something is banned, it becomes very difficult to get the ban lifted, as the officials who lift the ban practically take responsibility if something goes wrong. So they are afraid of it. They don’t want to take any risks, even legitimate risks, and face the consequences.
In fact, all of the companies that develop trucks have protested this bill and hope the governor will refuse to sign the bill. California is the world leader in autonomous driving technology and needs serious thought about deliberately giving up that lead as a union tries to keep jobs for its members. You should look for other ways to lessen the burden on these union members. The hard truth is that 2,000 people die in truck accidents every year in the US – many of them truck drivers. Keeping jobs is one thing, but keeping a job that kills so many people is harder to justify. It’s different than getting jobs that don’t cause deaths.
SF vs Robotaxi
It is likely that the fight in San Francisco will continue to escalate. The state has the right to regulate the roads, not the city. This has frustrated the city, which wants more influence over how robotic taxis work there. The city is frustrated at their powerlessness and seems to feel that the Robotaxi companies took advantage of them and didn’t show the city enough respect. Whether that’s true or not, feelings and perceptions matter more in such a battle, and the city has no means of asserting itself against the companies that operate there.
San Francisco executives meeting in San Francisco (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu) The vote to block Waymo was unanimous among those present.Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved
The jurisdictional boundary between state and city exists for a reason. If each city had too much power for different road rules, it could create chaos for motorists and businesses dealing with a difficult patchwork of regulators. Waymo and Cruise are based in the SF Bay Area, and that city is by far the best testing ground for both, but they may be starting to regret the issues that come with it. Despite being the big city in the high-tech capital of the world, San Francisco has a surprisingly insane history as a proving ground for the new technologies being manufactured there. That’s his choice, but it makes it harder for companies to work there.
In the past, that wasn’t a problem for SF. It had more than enough reputation to deter a few companies. Today, the shift to working from home has emptied downtown San Francisco more than any other city in the US, and one has to be wary of scaring companies even more to work there. SF has shown that even if it can’t regulate your technology, it will use its more mundane powers like planning permission to get what it wants. And they should win this fight if they want to and oust the companies – the real question is why would they want that. Yes, being the beta tester of such technology comes with problems. But a study by the SF Transportation Authority, which asked their drivers to log any problems with the robo-taxis, found surprisingly few incidents. Companies make mistakes and have many teething troubles, but it seems to be anecdotal, not a pattern, it is mistaken for a pattern.
The city must decide how many childhood illnesses it can tolerate, and then grit its teeth and tolerate them. As long as no one is harmed, technology promises to significantly reduce traffic risk in the future, and a few blunders may well be worth it, for society and even for the city.
A passive-aggressive struggle, with cities scrambling to find another way to get rid of these companies, isn’t good for either side. The sides should reconcile or separate, costly as that may be. Waymo may already be hoping for a better time in Los Angeles — that remains to be seen. Arizona and Texas have already shown they are ready to move forward. The problem is that San Francisco didn’t ask for tech to come to the city — it was born there, so it was never a welcome immigrant. A background fight does no harm to anyone.
Waymo will solve his parking problem. In fact, an obvious solution is to use a staging lot and have Waymo vehicles pick up employees from there. It’s a bit cumbersome, but a good test of a mode that will be necessary as robo-taxis prepare to handle things like stadiums and large buildings with high peak traffic. Doing it on a small scale is more expensive – you don’t want employees to have to wait more than a few minutes for a shuttle, but at this point that cost can be managed. But in the long run, finding a way to get SF on board is important.
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I founded ClariNet, the world’s first Internet-based company, am Chair Emeritus of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a Fellow of the Foresight Institute. My current passion are self-driving vehicles and robots. I worked on Google’s auto team in the early years and am a consultant and/or investor for automakers and many of the top startups in robocars, sensors, delivery robots and even some flying cars. Plus AR/VR and software. I found the faculty and computer science chair at Singularity University and I write, consult and speak on robocar technology around the globe.
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