I should be clear: I'm am not against all self-driving cars in the city. I'm against empty cars on the road, and when they cause issues, they should have to show that they're actually resolving them before more unsupervised operation can resume. If the problems are as soluble as their companies claim, this should be doable. If not ... Then we shouldn't have to live with them. Given that incidents keep occurring, I think guerilla actions like this are at least as reasonable as tech's history of starting programs in cities first and lobbying for those efforts to become legal after (eg Uber, Airbnb, some of the scooters...)
So the last point is a fair one. Tech companies have a history of skirting laws to achieve market share, then using their customer base to get the law changed.
That isn’t what’s happening here though. The driverless car companies don’t have customers yet except for a small pool of beta testers, so there’s no constituency to advocate for them like there was with Uber/Lyft.
The State of California, anticipating that the development of self-driving cars would inevitable cause tensions, set up an expert board within the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC.)
This board is empowered to set safety and operations standards. These standards lay out rules for approval, including for accident safety, data reporting, and disruptions to city services such as the ones you mentioned.)
The driverless car companies have to meet these standards to be able to expand their operations in SF.
The driverless car companies have made significant improvements, empowered by better auto-segmentation and labeling. This incidents do occur less, are on their way to being totally eliminated, and the data now shows that they are safer than human drivers in SF.
The driverless car companies are seeking to expand operations, having met the criteria the State of California itself laid out, including for safety and prevention of disrupting public services.
Let me be clear: I am not opposed to guerrilla protest action in and of itself. And frankly this was a really cool hack in many ways: in effect, use of materials readily at hand, and virality potential.
But on this topic, the driverless car companies did things the right way. We should reward them for regulatory cooperation to reinforce that behavior in the future.
And they delivered an awesome piece of tech!
It’s a car that doesn’t need a driver! Just goes where you tell it while you relax!
It’s a miracle, and we built it here in SF.
For now, our community is bleeding people, tax dollars, and soon public services. We all want to prevent that.
To do so, we all need to row in the same direction for a while. We need the hacking cleverness of this campaign put toward getting SF back on its feet, and a big part of that is selling complex tech only our people can make to other cities that need it, then using that money to fund everything else we want to do here.
I'm really unsympathetic to the idea that "we all need to row in the same direction" which just happens to be the direction that the monied interests want.
When these companies actually make money, do you think they'll pay the people living in the areas that they treated as test courses? If not, if they think their responsibility is to investors only, then why should anyone else pull for their private interests? You're framing silencing criticism of public road AV tests as some kind of civic good, but these companies don't work for the public.
