At some point, I wish wonks like you and the folks at The Argument would be honest about stuff.
Waymo and other self drive technologies have two enemies. One is unions, as a retiree I belong to two unions of state employees to keep track of what is happening with my benefits. The primary goal of a union is to protect its members above all else. Teachers' unions have ruined public education. Inordinate fear of infection by some union members kept schools closed during the pandemic. Unions have a duty to protect their members when they are accused of malfeasance at work and poor workers are kept on regardless of merit. Unions ask for and often get inordinate pay because that is what members want, never mind the taxpayers. Naturally, taxi drivers unions are against waymo and teamsters are against automated trucks.
The average journalist is not very knowledgeable in my opinion. They are afraid of technology and play up stories of accidents caused by self-driving cars. Not having matured after college the average journalist has a dreamy marxist view of unions as vanguards of political progress. Besides, journalists have reason to fear technology as much as unions do because it is coming for their jobs.
Democrats depend on unions for political contributions and manpower in elections. Democratic politicians will follow the wishes of unions.
On the DC side: the DC Council just had one lawmaker introduce a bill, which is a step forward, but this also happened last year and the legislation went nowhere (McDuffie's bill got no co-sponsors and he resigned to run for Mayor). It helps that the new bill is sponsored by the relevant committee chair, but who knows if other councilmembers will support it (or the Mayor), or if they make it so unfriendly to industry (current bill imagines $6m in fees to operate in DC! nowhere else has come close to this) that it makes DC an expensive, limited market for robotaxis.
I read a lot of Substacks and this is one of my favorite posts of the year. It's a perfect illustration of how labor-saving technologies, while sometimes scary, ultimately improve people's lives.
Fears of physical safety from possible passenger attacks? Also when you are an Uber driver in a city without a lot of public bathrooms, peeing in a bottle is a helpful life hack...
People with disabilities also stand to benefit hugely from self-driving cars. Having to choose between paying through the nose for an uber, relying on infrequent or nonexistent public transit, or pleading for a ride with family or friends (which needs to be planned in advance even if they love you and are willing to help) every single time you want to go anywhere is no fun. This is an invisible problem for so many. People who can drive tend to assume every adult can, and don’t think about the implications of not being able to.
My son was hit by a human driver running a red light in the school crosswalk a couple of days ago. One of the first things he said after was 'a driverless car would have stopped.' He wrote this essay on the phone from the hospital bed in the wee hours last night after surgery to repair his leg. He'll make a full recovery and he's resting at home now. But he wants his message public if it could help speed up technology adoption that would prevent these accidents. Here's his words unedited:
Humans Can't Drive
8 May 2026
Yesterday morning, I was hit by a car. I am 17 years old. I was in a crosswalk, almost at my school, when a human-driven car ran the red light and hit me. It was the edge of the front of the car that hit me, and it knocked me onto the ground. With all the adrenaline that came with being hit by a car, I did not realize that my leg was broken until I tried to get back up and found that I could not walk and my leg was deformed. Very fortunately, I was the only person hit and my only injury was the broken right leg- my fibula and tibia both cleanly snapped, without leaving any fragments. After being driven to the hospital (not rushed, as it was merely a leg-threatening injury, not a life-threatening one) I had a surgery in the evening that put a titanium rod in my tibia to stabilize it and the doctors said I might be able to walk again (though with a limp) in a few days. I am very grateful to have such a relatively small injury. It hurt a lot, but had I been just a foot or two less advanced in the crosswalk, I might have died. The silver lining of that possibility is that I wouldn't have been in much pain for very long, although I much prefer being in pain because I am alive to not being in pain because I am dead.
I do not know why the driver of the car was unable to stop. She had a toddler in the back seat; perhaps that caused a distraction and she didn't notice the red light and group of children in the road. Perhaps she was checking her phone. I don't know why it happened. What I do know is that humans are unreliable. Every year, there are thousands of people who are not as lucky as I was. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), between 7 and 8 thousand pedestrians in the US are killed every year from being struck by cars. Some of these may be jaywalkers, but many were in the same situation as me, where the accident was only because of someone else being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was injured entirely because of human error, and most car accidents are the same.
Humans are just too unreliable. Some of us are irresponsible and text while driving or even drive drunk. But even the best of us can be distracted by checking maps, or by unpredictable occurrences both inside and outside of the vehicle. Our vision is also very limited. We have many blind spots. Without turning around or checking mirrors, which takes our eyes off of whatever is in front of us, we can only see what is in front of us. And only when the area is well-lit. A week ago, one of my friends rear-ended someone while it was dark late at night, totaling his car. Nobody was hurt, thanks to all the safety features in modern cars, but it obviously would have been better if there was never an accident in the first place. The way to ensure safe roads is not to better train human drivers. People can know every traffic law, but that is of little help when they cannot react in time to follow them. The way to guarantee safe roads is to completely ban human drivers on public roads. Aside from private racetracks where people drive their cars for fun rather than to get somewhere, all cars should be autonomous.
Admittedly, current technology is far from perfect, but it is much less far from perfect than humans are, and it will only improve in the future. Admittedly, autonomous vehicles are involved in more accidents than regular cars, but there is a low sample size and a vast majority of those accidents are from humans hitting them. That wouldn't be an issue if all cars on the road were self-driving. Self-driving cars can have a 360° field of “vision” no matter how dark it is. They can also react much faster than humans can. If someone ran in front of one, it would be able to react instantly and, if not come to a complete stop, at least slow down enough to greatly reduce the force of the collision, unlike the human driver who hit me.
In addition to improved safety, the efficiency of self-driving cars is incomparable to that of human-driven ones- it is likely that in the future all self-driving cars near each other will share information with each other, so when one slows down, stops, or starts moving, all those behind it slow down, stop, or start moving at the exact same time, which would greatly reduce travel time and completely eliminate phantom traffic. Estimating that it takes cars 2-3 seconds to accelerate after a light turns from red to green, and there being up to 10 cars at a red light, 20-30 seconds could be saved per red light when all the cars accelerate in unison, which is simply not possible for humans to safely coordinate. And if all cars were not just self-driving cars, but self driving taxis, like Waymo, society as a whole would actually spend less money on vehicles, even though self-driving cars cost more than manual ones- especially if a carpool system was in place. Most people only spend a fraction of their day in a car. Even during rush hour, a majority of cars are passively sitting in a garage or parking lot, not being used. Having one car per person is just unnecessary and a waste of money and resources. Ideally, we could have one car per five (or more) driving people, greatly increasing efficiency and reducing cost.
Something I read about in Sam Kean's book, “The Disappearing Spoon,” a few months ago was the usefulness of palladium. It's amazing for electronics, jewelry, dentistry, and medicine, but nearly all palladium is used in cars. If all cars were self-driving carpooling taxis, we wouldn't need nearly as many cars, and could use all that palladium elsewhere. I could probably find a lot more similar examples of valuable resources we would save by having fewer cars, and while there aren't many more productive things I can do while I'm lying in the hospital bed, there are many less productive but more entertaining things I prefer to do. And of course, there are plenty of things people could spend their money on if they didn't have to buy their own cars. For instance, healthcare or education.
Society would be better off if there were no human drivers. It is illogical for people to disagree because they “don't trust” technology. The alternative is trusting humans. Even before I became a victim of the unreliability of human driving, I knew humans were untrustworthy in this regard. I had seen the data. Now, I’m a part of the data and I know even better, and feel stronger (metaphorically, not physically) that humans should not be allowed to drive. We already have the technology for self-driving cars. It's only a matter of time before we have enough of them.
Have you ever been a mother? Have you experienced the mind blowing boredom of being cooped up in a house with kids. Do you ever think about who controls the robots, the computers in the cars?? Cuddly Corporations?? This old gal has done all that. Yikes! My first office computer was a whole building running reel to reel. Reviewing code burned in the mantra “Garbage in; Garbage out.” These were the old Timothy Leary days of hallucinations. Guess I’m part of the 58%. After marriage and kids, we were in the car together a lot. One child enjoyed math and strategy; the other one was inventive with language. We played word games and math games in the car. We all liked to sing sometimes producing laughs. My 30 yr old granddaughter just visited SF and told me how much her CA friends use and love Waymo’s. Super. Just please don’t trap this old woman in a house with restless kids or pretend that sending those children off in a robot car is a great experience.
Seems like a short-term benefit in exchange for permanently clogged roads and a lifetime subscription service that siphons money away from localities and towards San Francisco. Pass.
I am as pro-Waymo and pro-automated driving as they come (I would support the state finding ways to encourage and then force adoption). But I wanted to push back a bit on a piece of the argument deployed
"Women who already want larger families are more likely to have them if raising kids feels manageable, especially if it’s easier to combine that responsibility with a career".
I think family/men/women's time is subject to a version of induced demand. That is to say that, the more time available, the more people (mostly women) will cram family activities/"must do" parascolar activities till all the newly freed time is consumed.
So, while I welcome Waymo/self driving cars on security grounds (very much including women's safety from male taxi drivers), I would seriously doubt that this'll do anything for mothers - they'll find a way to increase Keeping-up-with-the-Jones style competition till all extra leasure time is gone.
Totally agree, which is why it was smart the author included a line about moms riding in the Waymo with their kids being able to focus more on the kids instead of driving. I bet that's exactly what true helicopter parents will do.
Here in San Francisco, kids under 19 can take Muni (bus and light rail) for free; while Waymo/other ridehails certainly fill in some gaps I think it's great that the baseline is for kids to have their own autonomy and ability to get around on their own!
This take is spot on, and the section about moms driving 10+ hours a week really hit home for me. I definitely drive that much. It's a task that eats into both mornings and evenings. It's also completely invisible to the non-moms in my life, so it's nice to read a piece spelling out how onerous this part of parenting can be.
When I think about picking up more work hours, I have to calculate whether it's worth it for my spouse to step back at work in order to do the afternoon driving, which is what would currently have to happen for moms like me who are lucky enough to have a spouse but not wealthy enough to buy an extra car and pay an after-school nanny to do the schlepping. Self-driving cars could solve this problem and offer huge savings in time and money.
When people pooh-pooh the benefits of self-driving cars, I'm reminded of the guy I met at Sam's Club about six years ago who couldn't figure out why the store was being reconfigured to allow for curbside pickup. He looked like he was about sixty, and he clearly couldn't imagine why shoppers wouldn't just get out of their cars and go in to buy what they wanted. The answer, of course, is that the world looks really different to people with little kids in the back seat.
Maybe resistance to driverless cars will evolve like resistance to answering machines in the 1970's. My parents and their friends reacted to the first answering machines with anger, "How rude! I'm not going to talk to a machine! Why are they too lazy to pick up the phone?!?!?" A couple years later, "Why doesn't Bob have an answering machine? How rude! I can't be expected to keep calling!" The objection to driverless cars is different, but the adaptation to the convenience will be the same.
Yes. With respect to 3 children rather than 2, a major problem is that a normal car will not hold three children's car seats in back, which in many places poses a legal challenge.
At some point, I wish wonks like you and the folks at The Argument would be honest about stuff.
Waymo and other self drive technologies have two enemies. One is unions, as a retiree I belong to two unions of state employees to keep track of what is happening with my benefits. The primary goal of a union is to protect its members above all else. Teachers' unions have ruined public education. Inordinate fear of infection by some union members kept schools closed during the pandemic. Unions have a duty to protect their members when they are accused of malfeasance at work and poor workers are kept on regardless of merit. Unions ask for and often get inordinate pay because that is what members want, never mind the taxpayers. Naturally, taxi drivers unions are against waymo and teamsters are against automated trucks.
The average journalist is not very knowledgeable in my opinion. They are afraid of technology and play up stories of accidents caused by self-driving cars. Not having matured after college the average journalist has a dreamy marxist view of unions as vanguards of political progress. Besides, journalists have reason to fear technology as much as unions do because it is coming for their jobs.
Democrats depend on unions for political contributions and manpower in elections. Democratic politicians will follow the wishes of unions.
Loved the article, great points and insight.
On the DC side: the DC Council just had one lawmaker introduce a bill, which is a step forward, but this also happened last year and the legislation went nowhere (McDuffie's bill got no co-sponsors and he resigned to run for Mayor). It helps that the new bill is sponsored by the relevant committee chair, but who knows if other councilmembers will support it (or the Mayor), or if they make it so unfriendly to industry (current bill imagines $6m in fees to operate in DC! nowhere else has come close to this) that it makes DC an expensive, limited market for robotaxis.
Great information! Thank you!
I read a lot of Substacks and this is one of my favorite posts of the year. It's a perfect illustration of how labor-saving technologies, while sometimes scary, ultimately improve people's lives.
Thank you so much, Lionel! That means a lot!
Why are the vast majority of uber drivers male?
It doesn't involve any physical strength or any other thing that makes a job more likely to be male dominated.
Fears of physical safety from possible passenger attacks? Also when you are an Uber driver in a city without a lot of public bathrooms, peeing in a bottle is a helpful life hack...
People with disabilities also stand to benefit hugely from self-driving cars. Having to choose between paying through the nose for an uber, relying on infrequent or nonexistent public transit, or pleading for a ride with family or friends (which needs to be planned in advance even if they love you and are willing to help) every single time you want to go anywhere is no fun. This is an invisible problem for so many. People who can drive tend to assume every adult can, and don’t think about the implications of not being able to.
+100
My son was hit by a human driver running a red light in the school crosswalk a couple of days ago. One of the first things he said after was 'a driverless car would have stopped.' He wrote this essay on the phone from the hospital bed in the wee hours last night after surgery to repair his leg. He'll make a full recovery and he's resting at home now. But he wants his message public if it could help speed up technology adoption that would prevent these accidents. Here's his words unedited:
Humans Can't Drive
8 May 2026
Yesterday morning, I was hit by a car. I am 17 years old. I was in a crosswalk, almost at my school, when a human-driven car ran the red light and hit me. It was the edge of the front of the car that hit me, and it knocked me onto the ground. With all the adrenaline that came with being hit by a car, I did not realize that my leg was broken until I tried to get back up and found that I could not walk and my leg was deformed. Very fortunately, I was the only person hit and my only injury was the broken right leg- my fibula and tibia both cleanly snapped, without leaving any fragments. After being driven to the hospital (not rushed, as it was merely a leg-threatening injury, not a life-threatening one) I had a surgery in the evening that put a titanium rod in my tibia to stabilize it and the doctors said I might be able to walk again (though with a limp) in a few days. I am very grateful to have such a relatively small injury. It hurt a lot, but had I been just a foot or two less advanced in the crosswalk, I might have died. The silver lining of that possibility is that I wouldn't have been in much pain for very long, although I much prefer being in pain because I am alive to not being in pain because I am dead.
I do not know why the driver of the car was unable to stop. She had a toddler in the back seat; perhaps that caused a distraction and she didn't notice the red light and group of children in the road. Perhaps she was checking her phone. I don't know why it happened. What I do know is that humans are unreliable. Every year, there are thousands of people who are not as lucky as I was. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), between 7 and 8 thousand pedestrians in the US are killed every year from being struck by cars. Some of these may be jaywalkers, but many were in the same situation as me, where the accident was only because of someone else being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was injured entirely because of human error, and most car accidents are the same.
Humans are just too unreliable. Some of us are irresponsible and text while driving or even drive drunk. But even the best of us can be distracted by checking maps, or by unpredictable occurrences both inside and outside of the vehicle. Our vision is also very limited. We have many blind spots. Without turning around or checking mirrors, which takes our eyes off of whatever is in front of us, we can only see what is in front of us. And only when the area is well-lit. A week ago, one of my friends rear-ended someone while it was dark late at night, totaling his car. Nobody was hurt, thanks to all the safety features in modern cars, but it obviously would have been better if there was never an accident in the first place. The way to ensure safe roads is not to better train human drivers. People can know every traffic law, but that is of little help when they cannot react in time to follow them. The way to guarantee safe roads is to completely ban human drivers on public roads. Aside from private racetracks where people drive their cars for fun rather than to get somewhere, all cars should be autonomous.
Admittedly, current technology is far from perfect, but it is much less far from perfect than humans are, and it will only improve in the future. Admittedly, autonomous vehicles are involved in more accidents than regular cars, but there is a low sample size and a vast majority of those accidents are from humans hitting them. That wouldn't be an issue if all cars on the road were self-driving. Self-driving cars can have a 360° field of “vision” no matter how dark it is. They can also react much faster than humans can. If someone ran in front of one, it would be able to react instantly and, if not come to a complete stop, at least slow down enough to greatly reduce the force of the collision, unlike the human driver who hit me.
In addition to improved safety, the efficiency of self-driving cars is incomparable to that of human-driven ones- it is likely that in the future all self-driving cars near each other will share information with each other, so when one slows down, stops, or starts moving, all those behind it slow down, stop, or start moving at the exact same time, which would greatly reduce travel time and completely eliminate phantom traffic. Estimating that it takes cars 2-3 seconds to accelerate after a light turns from red to green, and there being up to 10 cars at a red light, 20-30 seconds could be saved per red light when all the cars accelerate in unison, which is simply not possible for humans to safely coordinate. And if all cars were not just self-driving cars, but self driving taxis, like Waymo, society as a whole would actually spend less money on vehicles, even though self-driving cars cost more than manual ones- especially if a carpool system was in place. Most people only spend a fraction of their day in a car. Even during rush hour, a majority of cars are passively sitting in a garage or parking lot, not being used. Having one car per person is just unnecessary and a waste of money and resources. Ideally, we could have one car per five (or more) driving people, greatly increasing efficiency and reducing cost.
Something I read about in Sam Kean's book, “The Disappearing Spoon,” a few months ago was the usefulness of palladium. It's amazing for electronics, jewelry, dentistry, and medicine, but nearly all palladium is used in cars. If all cars were self-driving carpooling taxis, we wouldn't need nearly as many cars, and could use all that palladium elsewhere. I could probably find a lot more similar examples of valuable resources we would save by having fewer cars, and while there aren't many more productive things I can do while I'm lying in the hospital bed, there are many less productive but more entertaining things I prefer to do. And of course, there are plenty of things people could spend their money on if they didn't have to buy their own cars. For instance, healthcare or education.
Society would be better off if there were no human drivers. It is illogical for people to disagree because they “don't trust” technology. The alternative is trusting humans. Even before I became a victim of the unreliability of human driving, I knew humans were untrustworthy in this regard. I had seen the data. Now, I’m a part of the data and I know even better, and feel stronger (metaphorically, not physically) that humans should not be allowed to drive. We already have the technology for self-driving cars. It's only a matter of time before we have enough of them.
Have you ever been a mother? Have you experienced the mind blowing boredom of being cooped up in a house with kids. Do you ever think about who controls the robots, the computers in the cars?? Cuddly Corporations?? This old gal has done all that. Yikes! My first office computer was a whole building running reel to reel. Reviewing code burned in the mantra “Garbage in; Garbage out.” These were the old Timothy Leary days of hallucinations. Guess I’m part of the 58%. After marriage and kids, we were in the car together a lot. One child enjoyed math and strategy; the other one was inventive with language. We played word games and math games in the car. We all liked to sing sometimes producing laughs. My 30 yr old granddaughter just visited SF and told me how much her CA friends use and love Waymo’s. Super. Just please don’t trap this old woman in a house with restless kids or pretend that sending those children off in a robot car is a great experience.
Seems like a short-term benefit in exchange for permanently clogged roads and a lifetime subscription service that siphons money away from localities and towards San Francisco. Pass.
I am as pro-Waymo and pro-automated driving as they come (I would support the state finding ways to encourage and then force adoption). But I wanted to push back a bit on a piece of the argument deployed
"Women who already want larger families are more likely to have them if raising kids feels manageable, especially if it’s easier to combine that responsibility with a career".
I think family/men/women's time is subject to a version of induced demand. That is to say that, the more time available, the more people (mostly women) will cram family activities/"must do" parascolar activities till all the newly freed time is consumed.
So, while I welcome Waymo/self driving cars on security grounds (very much including women's safety from male taxi drivers), I would seriously doubt that this'll do anything for mothers - they'll find a way to increase Keeping-up-with-the-Jones style competition till all extra leasure time is gone.
Totally agree, which is why it was smart the author included a line about moms riding in the Waymo with their kids being able to focus more on the kids instead of driving. I bet that's exactly what true helicopter parents will do.
Here in San Francisco, kids under 19 can take Muni (bus and light rail) for free; while Waymo/other ridehails certainly fill in some gaps I think it's great that the baseline is for kids to have their own autonomy and ability to get around on their own!
This take is spot on, and the section about moms driving 10+ hours a week really hit home for me. I definitely drive that much. It's a task that eats into both mornings and evenings. It's also completely invisible to the non-moms in my life, so it's nice to read a piece spelling out how onerous this part of parenting can be.
When I think about picking up more work hours, I have to calculate whether it's worth it for my spouse to step back at work in order to do the afternoon driving, which is what would currently have to happen for moms like me who are lucky enough to have a spouse but not wealthy enough to buy an extra car and pay an after-school nanny to do the schlepping. Self-driving cars could solve this problem and offer huge savings in time and money.
When people pooh-pooh the benefits of self-driving cars, I'm reminded of the guy I met at Sam's Club about six years ago who couldn't figure out why the store was being reconfigured to allow for curbside pickup. He looked like he was about sixty, and he clearly couldn't imagine why shoppers wouldn't just get out of their cars and go in to buy what they wanted. The answer, of course, is that the world looks really different to people with little kids in the back seat.
Maybe resistance to driverless cars will evolve like resistance to answering machines in the 1970's. My parents and their friends reacted to the first answering machines with anger, "How rude! I'm not going to talk to a machine! Why are they too lazy to pick up the phone?!?!?" A couple years later, "Why doesn't Bob have an answering machine? How rude! I can't be expected to keep calling!" The objection to driverless cars is different, but the adaptation to the convenience will be the same.
100%. I remember my Boomer family members saying they would never have a cell phone.
This is my kind of feminism!
Yes. With respect to 3 children rather than 2, a major problem is that a normal car will not hold three children's car seats in back, which in many places poses a legal challenge.
amen.
It's a nice idea, but I'll bet that moms are one of the demographics most *opposed* to any sort of self-driving car technology.