Welcome, auto-mobiles
The mayor who so ambitiously seeks to shrink traffic fatalities he calls the effort Vision Zero refuses to see beyond his nose on the power of autonomous vehicles to make the streets safer. Apropos of no evidence, Mayor de Blasio says a proposal to the state Department of Motor Vehicles from GM and Cruise Automation for test runs in lower Manhattan early next year “creates a danger” so grave that “We will use all means at our disposal to stop this from happening.”
Self-driving cars were once the stuff of science fiction. Now it’s New York’s mayor who’s trafficking in fantasy of the most alarmist kind.
For months going on years, cities such as San Francisco and Pittsburgh have served as realworld proving grounds for autonomous vehicle technology that aids biological brains with artificial intelligence, to adhere to speed limits, avoid collisions and correct for human error and occasional impairment.
No one’s jumping out of the driver’s seat just yet. At this stage of the game, think of it as autocorrect for your steering wheel, helping avert dangerous mistakes while honing the technology that’ll ultimately enable people to get ferried around without a human at the wheel.
Now a few short trials are rolling out around New York State under a temporary law passed last year and expiring in April.
Working with Gov. Cuomo’s chief technologist, the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles set cautious ground rules, requiring not only that every test vehicle have two human passengers, one behind the wheel ready to drive, but also be accompanied by a state trooper’s vehicle, paid for by the car companies.
Adding a belt to the suspenders, the state’s requiring GM to add in $5 million insurance policies.
But de Blasio says if and only if his NYPD and Department of Transportation approve the test run will he rest satisfied that New Yorkers’ lives are not on the line. We’ll save him time: they won’t be. A recent San Francisco fender-bender captures the mundane reality: When the operator of a semi-autonomous Uber stopped manually to allow a pedestrian to cross, it got rear-ended by the 100% human-guided car behind it.
A GM car there got rear-ended this month when another driver cut it off and the driver behind didn’t brake in time because of a leg cramp. (Humans!) Past collisions happened when other drivers, and one cyclist, tried to cut off the autonomous cars, or tailgated, or chatted on phones. And most important: No one got hurt.
Even de Blasio’s own transportation commissioner, Polly Trottenberg, sounds more resigned than concerned when she says of the GM test: “I don’t think much will go wrong.”
Her problem, and we empathize, is that neither GM nor Cuomo’s office has yet publicly revealed exactly how many cars will roll, or where, or when. Responsible for keeping city streets flowing, Trottenberg shouldn’t have to drive in the dark.
But with his theatrics, de Blasio makes reasoned cooperation nigh impossible. Let the robots roll.