Driverless cars create different set of woes

I tumbled out of bed early one day last week and made it to an issues-and-eggs type of breakfast, this piece of policy jawboning offered by the Urban Land Institute on the topic of autonomous vehicles.

Three experts and a moderator worked through the implications and prospects for that particular transportation innovation, and they had some intriguing thoughts that I’ll share with you here. But with a few days to digest it all, I found myself coming around to a Steve Jobs aphorism, circa 1997.

“A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them,” the late Apple founder said to Businessweek magazine.

But what if you show it to them, repeatedly and over a period of several years, and still they don’t appear to want it all that much? Like, in this case, cars that drive themselves. Especially if each of those cars will cost tens of thousands of dollars more than the billions of human-operated vehicles plying the earth’s surface at this moment.

Yes, I know. Almost no such cars are on the market now, at least not the kind where autopilot is the only option, so perhaps people just don’t know yet.

But Tesla vehicles can be put in full self-driving mode — two people have died in accidents when their Teslas were in autonomous operation — and there are public road experiments going on. And several major car manufacturers are talking about bringing self-driving cars to the market within two or three years. For the man and woman on the street, though, autonomous vehicles as a viable purchasing option — or even as a ride-for-hire possibility — are still mostly out there in the mist somewhere.

At the same time, we’ve all been hearing about this coming Big Thing for roughly a decade now. Google researchers jumped into it in a big way in 2009, and a spinoff company, Waymo, has self-driving taxis on the ground in Arizona. Uber and Toyota had test vehicles working in Arizona, too, until an Uber vehicle killed a pedestrian in March.

But all that noise, research and business interest has generated almost no buzz among the public. Do you know anyone on pins and needles waiting for the opportunity to buy, rent or ride in a self-driving car, someone who has brought it up in casual conversation? I don’t, certainly.

Contrast that with ride-hailing, which went from what-is-it to gotta-have-it more or less overnight when Uber and Lyft moved into Austin in 2014. Or those electric rental scooters, which launched unannounced here in April and instantly 1. What is the paid sick leave ordinance?

Set to take effect Oct. 1, the ordinance made Austin the first city in Texas to regulate sick leave. Many businesses will be required to offer 64 hours of sick time each year. Businesses with 15 or fewer employees must offer 48 hours of paid sick leave. 2. Who sued the city?

Some political leaders have filed paperwork in opposition to Austin’s paid sick leave ordinance. Leading the way has been Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has also filed to join the lawsuit and probably will have staffers in court Monday to argue against the ordinance. On the other side, the Workers Defense Project, a nonprofit organization that has been a strong proponent of the ordinance, 4. What are the arguments?

The business groups are calling for the court to strike down the ordinance, saying it violates the Texas Minimum Wage Act, which prohibits cities from requiring employers to pay minimum wages above federal standards. 5. What’s the city’s response?

The city’s legal team has filed paperwork stating that paid sick leave is not a wage and should not be subject to the Texas Minimum Wage Act.