WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Auto Talk: Should Lawmakers Embrace Autonomous Vehicles?

Episode Date: February 3, 2025

On this episode, Donald Kimball, Communications Manager for Washington Policy Center, joins the show to discuss his recent essay, "Lawmakers should embrace autonomous vehicles, not kneecap them."

Welcome back to Auto Talk Radio. I'm David. I'm Ross. And this week we are joined by Donald Kimball. Is that correct? That's correct. Perfect. From state of Washington. So Donald kind of has a perspective for us on autonomous vehicles and then also Senate Bill 5042, which is about human safety operators in autonomous vehicles. So welcome, Donald. Thanks so much for having me. Really looking forward to our conversation here. Awesome. Me as well. So it's no secret. that Ross and I are car guys, so, you know, we're interested in everything that moves, everything that, you know, everything, he's laughing because my car doesn't like to move that frequently.

Well, you know, I'm very familiar. My dad's a car guy who has had an on and off relationship with his D. Tomaso Pantera for years. Oh, yeah. Half the time it's moving. Half the time it's not. So I get it. That's up my alley. You're speaking Ross's language right now. Yeah, so honestly, you come from an automotive background, obviously. How do you feel, just first off, before we get into talking about Senate bill, how do you feel about autonomous vehicles as a whole?

You know, it's interesting because I hadn't really considered autonomous vehicles for a long time. One of the interesting things is that as much of an innovative state as Washington is when it comes to things like technology, we are notably lacking in autonomous vehicles. And so as the rest of the country has been moving forward with autonomous vehicles, I found myself sort of behind in the thinking until recently. And, you know, the Senate bill that we'll discuss in a bit is kind of what had woken me up to some degree. I always sort of had a generally positive idea of them in the sense that I think that down the line they could be great. And there's a lot of potential. But I also recognize the scary sort of reality that is, you know, a car with no driver.

and the scary reality of a potential future in which people aren't able to operate their own vehicle. So I definitely understand both sides of it, but I'm also kind of a yes and guy. I think that allowing people to still drive their own cars, but incorporating autonomous vehicles into the mainstream in a safe and reasonable way can offer a lot of benefits.

So I don't want to artificially stop it. I kind of want people who are skeptical. You can stay skeptical. You don't have to step in one. I never want to force anyone into that. But I also don't want to force, artificially force us to not adopt them when they can provide some really cool things. Have you ever, obviously you've experienced riding in an autonomous vehicle, I would assume, correct? I haven't. I have not had the opportunity because we don't have them in Washington State.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I've wanted to. I've traveled to, I think California most recently where I saw some, but we didn't ever have any need to get into a vehicle for that. So I have not. I've only been able to study up on them, read and look. all the data, all that kind of stuff. But I'm yet to be in one. I'm looking forward to my first chance, to be really exciting. And it's honestly something that kind of piques my interest a little bit about autonomous vehicles. And I don't know how you feel, Ross. We're in Michigan, right? We're in kind of the city that put the world on wheels, right? As they say, with Detroit here. And Detroit has a really interesting issue with mass transit. And so, you know, I think that autonomous vehicles

could really play a big, big role in kind of alleviating some of that stress. And we recently just went through revamping our people mover system in the city of Detroit, which is an elevated, um, an elevated rail system. And it really, that was what connected the city. We, we didn't have, we have now the queue line, which is a streetcar that runs along, um, but it really runs along woodward and that's about it. And so I think that it could really, you know, having something like Waymo or having a service like that could really help alleviate some of those issues, but also making it cost effective, right, for, for people to take part in and use on a regular basis. So, Awesome. Well, with that in mind, I do want to start talking about Senate Bill 5042. So basically, based on my reading, it requires a human safety operator in autonomous vehicles. You suggest that this could limit autonomous vehicles efficiency. Can you explain in more detail, kind of how this requirement could actually hinder the very benefit that autonomous vehicles promise?

Definitely. Absolutely. Well, and at some point, I definitely want to get back to the transit conversation because that's also a piece. part of the piece of this op-ed, and you're bringing up great points there. But to go to your specific question, the safety, the operator that is required to be in the car at all times requirement is something that is fairly typical amongst early testing phases of autonomous vehicles. When autonomous vehicles were first being built and floated around, legislatures in California and Arizona, I believe, required this that every autonomous vehicle that was tested or being driven, had to have a human safety operator. And the idea is it's someone who's monitoring.

They're not driving themselves, but they're there to help navigate any sticky situations. States like California and Arizona removed that requirement because they were already testing at high enough safety levels that it was no longer necessary in 2018. So seven years ago, they removed the requirement that Washington State is now finally trying to implement in order to allow these cars to operate.

in Washington State. I think that if we wanted to be a bit more innovative and forward thinking and try to catch up, it would behoove us to make those requirements only necessary if the vehicles that are operating don't have a track record. They don't already have the kind of data reporting that these major companies like Waymo already have that demonstrate the safety. Maybe if you wanted to reasonably have this kind of limit, you could say, during testing phases. Or the other option would be to.

the sunset it, to say, you know, for the first year of operation, they have to have this, and in one calendar year we're going to remove this requirement, assuming there's no catastrophic reason to extend it by law. But by adding this requirement in, you're effectively adding in a lot of cost to driverless car companies that have to now pay someone to be present in a driverless vehicle, which is the entire point of having a driverless vehicles, you don't need someone in there, and that it can be a little bit more nimble and quick and cost effective and efficient. So again, in the beginning of autonomous vehicles and their introduction, I understand the want for this.

And studies have shown that that is actually the safest combination period. But when we are at a point now in 2025, when most states that are using autonomous vehicles have removed this requirement years and years ago, I think it's a little bit backwards to artificially throw in this barrier that's going to prevent autonomous vehicles from making a dent in our transit and transit. transportation picture here in Washington. So you brought something up that I'm going to let Ross go, but you brought something up that kind of like piqued my interest a little bit. So you're talking about, you know, taking people out of the equation, right? And so is there an opportunity, though, for this to create kind of like a solid job for folks

in the beginning for a little while at least? And so maybe we do repeal this, right? And we walk this back. But is that, do you think being an operator for an autonomous vehicle, is that like a potential job we could see in the future for a short, obviously a short time period? It's definitely possible. My thought is that companies like Waymo will probably use existing employees in that space. But even as far as it does create a temporary job, the government creating jobs in this manner isn't actively helping the overall economy if it's adding cost to other people.

We have to consider the opportunity cost of where we're creating a job here, we're raising expenses for the people who would benefit from the service. or you're increasing the cost of what a transit agency is going to need to spend to employ these kinds of things. And so that gets taken out of taxes. So on the one hand, yes, you are potentially creating jobs, but you're also offsetting a lot of the benefit that could be going elsewhere in the economy. And so I don't really, it seems at best you're taking resources from one place, putting them in another. It doesn't seem to actually be generating a lot of value in and of itself.

It's more of just creating a job for the sake of creating a job. Okay, okay. Okay, yeah, yeah. So when we, when David and I were having a conversation earlier, we did bring up, I don't know if you've seen this video, but there was a video going viral recently of Waymo that had reached the destination of the person who was in it, and it was just circling around the parking lot. And obviously that's, you know, kind of funny. But is, like, would you say that, um, would you say that, um,

AVs are at a point right now where, like, they're technologically sound enough that we should just allow for there to be no human operators in every state at this point? Or do you think there's, at right, right now, do you think there's, you know, some discrepancies between the technological, like, state of these things? Well, the first thing I have to say is that video came out the day this op-ed was published. The irony could not be greater. It was pretty funny. But I want to address several aspects of that.

The first is what I also found funny about that video is they were making a big deal about how he missed his flight. But from what I could tell, the video only went on about five minutes. I think he'd been trapped in there for maybe five or ten minutes. So if you're missing your flight on that, that's on you. I agree. But yeah, the interesting thing is, so when you're talking about the overall safety and reliability,

you're going to see stories like this pop up. And they are sort of sensationalistic. They are notable. They're going to be a grabian headline for headlines and attention grabbing and all that sort of viral quality to them. The reason why we don't see that with human drivers is because someone falling asleep in the morning traffic, causing an accident on the I-5 and causing hours delay, isn't news. It's traffic news to let people know, but it's not news in the same way because it's so common.

And so when we're talking about the safety of autonomous vehicles, when we're talking about the potential pitfalls that they may uniquely fall into, we have to not fall into the trap of thinking, we're comparing autonomous vehicles and all of their unique challenges to a blank slate. It's compared to what? It's compared to human drivers who are notorious for being distracted while driving,

being tired while driving, being drunk and driving, being on other substances and driving. There's all kinds of ways that humans can introduce what the equivalent of a mistake from a driverless car would be, or even a hack for a driverless car. So we're not just comparing the potential. for hacking, the potential for mistakes on autonomous vehicles to a perfect driver. In fact, all of the studies show that per miles driven, autonomous vehicles are much safer than

human drivers. When it comes to property damage, the rate was about 0.78 crashes per mile average on autonomous vehicles for property damage versus a 3.26 crash per mile rate of humans. And when it came to human injury, the test actually showed a 0% for the autonomous vehicles versus around 1% for humans. So that's one thing to consider when we're talking about that. And as far as broad deployment across all states, I think that it probably depends on the state. And I think that there are ways that you can introduce these cars

with safety in mind without necessarily going and just releasing the hounds, as it were. If Washington's law was saying something along the lines of, we're going to have a deployment period where this is required again for a year and then it's going to sunset, or we're going to require a certain period of time for companies to test their autonomous vehicles in our state with this, and once they pass this threshold, we're good. That can be valuable.

I think the more that cities in particular are streamlining their infrastructure for autonomous vehicles, the smoother that transition will go. But having a one-size sort of block or artificial barrier that I think this human safety operator requirement is, I think that's the wrong way to do it, which is it's almost guilty until proven innocent. And so that's one consideration there. You brought up one other thing that I wanted to also mention too,

which is that when local cities are adopting autonomous vehicles and whether or not they can be safe in this, you know what, I completely last my train of thought. Let's just move on. So I'm sorry. So basically, now I want to jump into, I have kind of a question that's been burning a little bit throughout this entire conversation.

is how are we going to not only, you know, form companies like Waymo, is this going to turn into, like, owning a taxi placard? Is this going to turn? How are we going to regulate this new business? Because this is turning into a business. And it's turning kind of what we see as, you know, these great beacons of hope, these vehicles, right? It's turning them more into appliances, um, that people can hop in, hop out, use, which in big cities will be more efficient. But, you know, for for folks that actually want to purchase an own and enjoy a vehicle, it's kind of, um, against all everything that's in their DNA. So, you know, what do you, what do you see about kind of like the future of the business side of this? Yeah. Well, I think I think there's a few opportunities. I think the first is that you, like you mentioned, in high density areas, it actually can help a lot. You mentioned, and we'll go back now to the transit point you brought up earlier because I think this is really relevant. When we're talking about cost overruns from transit agencies, you look at King County, which is where Seattle is.

and they have had a significant fall-off on ridership since the COVID era, and that ridership has never gone back to pre-COVID levels. The cost for operating is about $200 per bus service hour, and Fairbox revenue is covering less than 10% of that. There are routes that are extremely low in ridership that's costing a lot of money for a big bus to get there. And on top of all that, on top of all the cost aspects, on top of all the congestion implications, there's an environmental

impact. And so in King County, Seattle wants to electrify the buses, which also costs even more, but it doesn't help with congestion and it doesn't help with the ridership numbers. This is where something like autonomous vehicles as a service, as a business, as the future, could really help if these agencies employed either through third-party operators like Waymo or they themselves purchased autonomous vehicles, they could use these as ways to address low traffic routes that they don't want to abandon altogether. They could be on demand service and they could be smaller vehicles. They would be more cost effective. They would also be greener in that sense. A lot of autonomous vehicles are already electric as well. And so you're having fewer,

bigger vehicles taking low ridership routes and you actually would help congestion in that way by only having these cars deployed when they're needed. And the same thing can go for rural areas. You know, I was able to travel to France with my family a few years ago, and we took the train from Germany over to France. We got out with all our luggage, and our hotel was about a mile and a half away. And so we call up a taxi, and no one was around. There were no Ubers, no lifts, no taxis.

No one wanted to work that particular afternoon. And so it's situations like that where an autonomous vehicle, you don't need to have someone who's able or willing to work in that. you can have in these lower density areas vehicles that can provide that kind of transportation. And so this also can help not only with low density areas that have one-off type routes, but also it enables an entirely new segment of the population who are disabled or unable to get around a much more cost-effective way than taking an Uber or a lift every time. Autonomous vehicles really can open up the doors for people to have transportation who might

otherwise be impaired as well. So there's a lot of opportunities, I think, both in sort of the transit and like metropolitan areas, but as well as the rural low density areas, particularly when transit agencies have these cost overruns and have to figure, you know, is it worth still servicing this one really rural route that a lot of people rely on, but not enough people to justify the cost. If you can have on-demand autonomous vehicle type services working there, you can really help solve both of those problems, both the cost and the need aspects. That's great.

Another kind of area that popped up that Ross and I were talking about before we came on was congestion pricing in New York City. So congestion pricing was kind of just put in, brought out of the scene for the first time in the United States. We'd seen it in Europe, specifically big city, London, has congestion pricing. It was just introduced in New York City. Immediately there was a big drop off in folks that wanted to drive their cars downtown, specifically the commissioner of the fire, the New York City Fire Department is calling for it to be kind of a are kind of gotten rid of just specifically for their their members. Do you think how are they going to generate? Because, you know, autonomous vehicles are soon going to sweep around. You know, do you think that this will affect that and will affect their revenue stream potentially from,

from this congestion pricing? Yeah, you know, I'm sure it will. It's one of those things where in principle, it's not that far-fetched. The idea of congestion pricing, you know, in sort of economic theory, it's like, well, if there is higher demand for something, the cost is probably going to go up as if the supply is inelastic. But of course, when we're talking about the government here, we're also already talking about something that people ostensibly pay for with their taxes. And so it's a little bit like they're double dipping in some degree and feels cheap. And then that puts burden on the suppliers. And I think it's better if you have services, as we're seeing with like Uber and Lyft and probably with Waymo. again, I haven't had direct experience myself, but when there's going to be higher traffic times,

the cost for those services will go up. And so I don't think we need government congestion pricing for this. And in fact, if electric, excuse me, autonomous vehicle adoption is high enough in cities, that almost helps solve the problem right there because there will sort of be that built-in economic check without having to go through the government's coffers, which we know that there are so many examples of governments using these kinds of systems to generate revenue rather than actually reduce congestion. In Washington State, for instance,

we have had HOV lanes, you know, you have to have more than one person. And in their targeted goals, over the years, they've sort of adopted and new ones and reformed them, to the point where they've lost the goal of reducing congestion with them. That's not even in their target of what they're trying to accomplish with it.

There are all kinds of things about making it seem equitable or environmental benefit, raising revenues for certain transportation projects, but actually reducing congestion, which is the original idea of an HOV lane to incentivize people to carpool, that's not even in their goals anymore. So we know that these kinds of programs

can very quickly spiral from a good intention, even if that's where it started, into something that's more focused on generating revenue. Whereas when it's a simple economic reality with something like lift, ways, or autonomous vehicles, it's really more down just to the nitty-gritty, We can afford to do this because it's less empty on the, or it's more empty on the roads right now, or we're going to need to charge you more because it's a little busier.

The incentives are a little bit more clear in the business sector, I think. Yeah, totally. So we thought that we would ask you, you know, one final question here. And that is, you know, if you could give one piece of advice to the lawmakers in Washington regarding the autonomous vehicles and the legislation that applies to them, like what would that be? Wow, only one. There's a tough thing. I will, I'll cheat your thing and say that.

I have laid out in some other, on the other posts, you know, just like some basic amendments for this bill. So I'll read them out because it's not one, but it's, but they're bullet points here. Yeah. So the first is where possible, streamline self, the self-certifying process by adopting a standard from states like California, Texas, and Florida. We've done licensure compact type things for nurses and for physical, therapist assistance and things like that, I think that adopting those kinds of licensure compacts

with other states that have done a lot of good work in this would be a first step. Second, adding national data to Washington's autonomous vehicle assessment required in an existing law, I think that helps, again, provide data that is already out there to outline what is safe and what is necessary. Three, remove the human safety operator requirement, and if not removing it altogether, put a sunset on the period of time. Again, we talked about that a little bit already. And then establish statewide certification and operation authority for autonomous vehicles so that we sort of circumvent getting a bunch of local cities trying to do their own things and allowing here, disallowing

there. I think giving a statewide certification for this would be getting ahead of that and allowing them to operate a little bit more effectively. Well, thank you so much, Donald. We really appreciate you taking the time to join us. Where can people find you? Because this has been, I've really enjoyed this conversation. I'm going to continue to read more articles and more op-eds and such that you've done. Where can people find more information about you? Well, thank you so much. It's been honestly so much fun talking with you guys. You can follow my work at kimballdollad.com or follow me on X at Kimball Donald. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Yeah. Thanks for joining us for Auto Talk Radio. See you next year.