The Trial of the Driverless Car

Our first story was about a driver, a robot driver, who evolved over many years at the nudging and training and machinations of a team of tech people in California. The second story I want to tell you also starts with a driver. A driver who is also going to evolve and change due to the machinations of some different West Coast technologies.

The difference is that this driver is a human being. Chapter 1. Abdiya Z. I met Abdi Aziz in Boston, where he's been a driver for many decades. He was doing it all the way back in the 90s. Back then, he considered taxi driver to be a decent job. A career. Professionally, I've been driving for 30 years now. 30 years? Yes. I had a limo service for 10 years. And then I was doing five years for cab, a taxi.

And then, one day in 2011, Abdi Aziz was hanging out at the airport with the other drivers when these men from the future showed up with a plan to change his life. When Uber came. I remember by 2011 they came to the airport. Uh we were in uh the waiting area at the log and we have a a designated parking lot where we wait the So they come there and they say, hey, you know, we are introducing you in a company that will do the same as a taxi, but it's an app. uh we want you guys to join with us.

And uh you know, you can have your own car. A phone with the app. And uh we can sign you up and you can make money. What did she think? At the time, I say it is good But you didn't come here to help us. You came here to kill this business. Ok. You knew. I knew. Abdi Aziz had not been born yesterday. Here's what he understood immediately. The taxi business he operated in up until now had worked as a kind of monopoly.

In Boston, like many American cities, you legally were not allowed to drive a cab without a taxi license, a medallion. New medallions were almost never issued. So assuming you could afford to buy or rent a medallion, the city itself would make your job stable by protecting you from competition. But Uber was about to kill that system. Uber drivers just drove without medallions. The company argued that since they were picking up passengers via this newfangled phone app, they didn't need them.

Abdiziz knew that this was going to kill the industry, at least as it currently existed. Taxi driver would still be a job, but medallion owning taxi driver would not be. A wave was coming. He knew what he had to do. And so he told his fellow taxi drivers his strategy for dealing with Uber, the company that had come to kill their industry. I told them listen.

I'm going to join them. I say I see where they're going. I read a lot of articles about them. They start from San Francisco. They went to Chicago. I say they are expanding. So we can stop this be we cannot stop. So Abdiaziz found himself working for Uber. He says someone at the company handed him his new marching orders. We can give you a laptop, we can give you 200 phones each week. So we want you to give these phones. to the drivers that you hire but we want you to set it up.

They need to bring their driver license, they need to bring their social security, and you sign them up. Everyone that you sign, you give it a phone, you activate the phone, they're good to go. So they were giving you 200 iPhones a week to give out? To give out, yeah. To to the driver. It's crazy, it's like they're kind of they're coming to kill your business. Exactly. I knew, I knew, I knew, but that's why I say if you cannot beat them, join them, you know? So I'm gonna join them.

Abdi Aziz, a man who could glimpse the future clearly enough to adapt to it. He'd work recruiting for Uber for a while. Then he'd be one of the first hundred Uber drivers in Boston. Signed up for Uber Black, the premium service. Got himself a very expensive car. At first, it was an even better job than the one they destroyed. Uber, in those early days, was pretty generous.

But after a few years, Abd Z says that started to change. In 2022, Uber began rolling out a big change to its platform. Instead of taking a set percentage of each fare, Uber started using an algorithm to offer its drivers variable rates based on what its system thought each driver would accept for a given ride. Drivers believe that Uber, once it stopped showing them its take, raised that take by a lot.

Uber, who we contacted for the story, maintains that their take rate is still, quote, around twenty percent. And that what's gone up actually are government taxes and fees. But Abdiaziz does not believe them. And most drivers I've talked to share his view. Obduziz's perspective is that once Uber and Lyft had leverage, they started using it against the drivers. The market was wide open. New drivers signed up every day. If you didn't like it, you could leave.

To Abyaziz and his fellow drivers, this all felt like a bait and switch. They could quit, but many of them had car loans. What they actually wanted was for the companies to raise their pay closer to what it had been before. They wanted better pay. They wanted some other concessions. Some of the drivers started thinking about whether there might be some way to exercise power over the apps. They started talking about a union.

And so Abdi Aziz found himself, once again, a recruiter for a disruptive new organization. So we when we started we were like four hundred drivers and uh we joined the union. So you were early you were early on Uber, you were early in the U Exactly, exactly, exactly. Because I've been in the industry for, you know, quite a while, you know, thirty years. I know what is going on, you know. This it is it's my profession, you know.

And the union, they, you know, Okay, call all the drivers, let us unite. And then we're gonna go to the state And did it feel a little bit like like when Uber was having you sign people up and then the union's having you sign people up, does it feel did it feel similar like going around like explaining something to people, telling them what the benefits are? Absolutely, absolutely, exactly. Because you see a lot of a lot of drivers they don't know nothing about union.

Things were looking promising. They got a big ballot initiative in front of Massachusetts voters that gave them the right to even try to unionize.

They were collecting signatures. But then during this still fledgling moment in their union drive, a different tech company appeared on the horizon. Do you remember the first time you heard about Waymo? Uh the Waymo the first time I heard was Uh I heard in San Francisco that they are they are doing testing. What did you think? I say okay, I mean I'm not against technology. You know, I welcome any technologies, same as Uber when they come to business. But I knew where where they're heading to.

Yeah, see, when Uber came, their aim was to kill taxi business. Now Waymo is to kill the drivers. How you understand a story, what you feel as you hear it, it's so much about where the teller chooses to start it. The driverless car, in the story I'd heard, had begun as a contest among academics, who were not primarily driven by process.

Some of them had genuinely wanted to solve the problem of car accidents. Others thought that making a robot drive across a desert was just a very cool puzzle to put their minds to. Those experiments had been sharpened into a technological product inside the cushy bubble of an enormously wealthy tech company, who now had sent mapping cars to Abdi Azizas City, the first step to deployment there.

When Uber had come to town, Abdiziz had thought, if you can't beat him, join him. Now Waymo is here, and he saw no way to join them. So we had to find a way to beat them. Fortunately for Abdi Aziz, he's in Boston.

Record my name is Sharon Durkin, District Eight City Councilor, and I'm the chair of the Boston City Council Committee on Planning, Development, and Transportation. Chapter two July twenty fourth. Boston city councillors began meeting last summer to discuss preemptively banning Waymo from their city. The first meeting took place in July inside Boston City Hall. If you were a room resplendent in many hues of municipal brown.

The stated agenda for the hearing, docket one one four one, sounded neutral to the point of boring. We must explore. Despite this very dry description, what was actually gonna happen would be significantly more raucous. These hearings started out with the flavor and intensity of a political rally. People wanted to find a way to stop these cars. And this would be the room where they laid out the case as to why. It'd be the beginning of the fight.

Some version of this fight has been happening with increasing frequency in American cities. Not all cities. Blue cities. There's this pattern actually observed by reporter Timothy B. Lee, which is that cities in red and purple states like Austin and Phoenix mostly welcome Waymo. Whereas places like DC and New York fight it. In cities that fight Waymo, the conversation is less about safety and much more about whether robotaxis will take away jobs.

My hope was if I paid attention to Boston. Maybe what was beginning here as just fight would evolve into politicians starting to think through some kind of compromise. these kinds of compromises, finding solutions for workers who AI could displace. They are probably one of the most important for a politician. And so Boston for me was a test case. Are we capable? Were our politics ready?

So here's how things began. Bostonians were here today to talk about something contentious, just But they started with the one thing everybody could probably agree on Boston's streets, the battleground here. were barely fit for human driving, let alone Waymo. Boston is one of the oldest major cities in the country with narrow one-way streets, alleys, and the lack of a traditional grid system. It's really, really difficult to drive. You look at the map, it looks like a child's

drawing, you know? We also have issues with double park cars, ride shares, delivery vehicles. After lambasting Boston streets a while longer, the people here get to the issue that'll actually dominate these hearings. Jobs. In particular, union jobs. We need to address potential layoffs for our union.

The introduction of self-driving cause. I think it's important that you know we listen when we hear Teamsters in the Carmen Union, SCIU, and countless residents who feel blindsided by this. The App Drivers Union, Abdia's Easy's Union. I'm a proud member of ADU at Drivers Union and I'm here to ask you to protect our local jobs. Rideshair drivers just won the right to unionize and to fight for better wages and conditions.

Robot cars threaten all of this progress. Ob Disease would show up to at a later hearing. I understand it is a business, it is capitalism, but not in my city. At the expense of our general The app drivers were not officially a union yet. in the process of forming. But the threat from Waymo seemed so dire that this larger coalition had been created that included a bunch of historic unions. It was called Labor United Against Waymo. Every driver's union in Boston united against the Bible.

to kill Waymo here. At the tip of the spear, the teamster. Nationally, Teamsters are the largest union of drivers in America. 1.4 million members. Boston's one of their biggest strongholds. This is the union that started out as workers driving teams of horses. but evolved to represent workers who drive cars and trucks, and these days represents lots and lots of blue-collar union jobs.

Boston's a union town. Everybody said this to me over and over, in the same quick, matter-of-fact way that people where I'm from say New York's expensive. The way you toss off a truth so obvious it's barely worth repeating. Which you have to repeat all the time because it informs everything always. The teamsters and the politicians just kept repeating it. Boston's a union town.

Boston is a is a union town and you you hear the perfectly where Waymo ex our city we're proud of union city. We're proud of our workers, we're proud of Boston is a union town, we're not any of those other cities. So we're a union city here in the city of Boston. Uh we wanna protect and watching the hearings I could see part of what was so beautiful about Boston being a union town.

As driver after driver testified about their jobs, there's just something moving to me anyway, about watching people talk about the dignity and importance of human work. A few days ago, while on my route, I spotted a man collapsed on the ground. He was unconscious and unresponsive, and it became clear that he had overdose. I stayed with him, flagged on a homeowner who called nine one one. When the first responder arrived, they administered knock and had I not seen him and acted quickly.

He may have died. To me a person To Weimu, an obstacle to avoid. You had union members who drove UPS trucks, ambulances, and while these Teamsters were not immediately under threat from Waymo's robo taxi service, they knew that driverless technology was not gonna stop there. We see the writing on the wall. We know that driverless car and truck companies are salivating at the idea that they could eliminate Teamster jobs.

In addition to the Nationally, the Teamsters actually sat out the last presidential race. But in Boston, the Teamsters are still welded to the Democrats. And the Democrats are welded to them. You guys just were able to unionize. And this would just be a huge blow.

Can you talk to us a little bit about the number of conversations that you've had with Waymo? How many times did you meet with them? This is City Councillor Julia Mejia. Asking one of the Teamsters leaders, how many times did Waymo reach out to you before they sent mapping cars to Boston? Thank you for the uh question, Councillor Mejia. It rhymes with hero.

Zero. Zero. So this is this is why I asked the question, because oftentimes things are being done to us without us, right? And so I'm curious what words of advice. Counselor Mahia. The counsellor had arrived an hour late to the hearing.

A former MTV reporter, she's noticeably hipper than the median municipal politician, standing out in the beige sea of the city council room. She'd come to listen to the heroes, the drivers, but more than that, she'd come to make a meal out of the people she saw as the villains. Way most executives. If if we're competing with machines, it will ultimately have an impact on our drivers. I I can't

can't speak to what the the the the decrease in their revenue has been. I don't know those numbers. I can tell you that Walsh, Weymouth's regional head of state and local public policy. Walsh looks the part of the tech exec. a spiffy suit, a swoopy quaff of silver hair. For most of their conversation, they're talking past each other because Matt Walsh wants to discuss safety and Counselor Mejia wants to discuss drivers jobs. What we are doing is creating an opportunity for people

To choose to not support humans and the workforce. That is the choice that we're giving people. I I would disagree, counselor. I would say the choice we're giving people is they can make a decision if they want to be in a safer vehicle that they feel safer in and that meets the needs of the other.

I am not making comments specifically about the safety of urban lift. What I can say is that over s after seventy one million miles of fully autonomous operations on US roads, we know that we are five times less in f injury causing crashes than human drivers. I am not suggesting that Uber and Lyft drivers are dangerous. I am suggesting that human drivers compared to the Waymo driver are involved

is not a driver. Waymo is a robot. So let's let's let's let's without it you're you're totally clear. It's an apparatus We refer when we say Waymo driver, I know the chair brought this up earlier. We that is the what we call the Waymo that is what we call the technology. And I understand it has sensitivities and we're triggering understood and lo heard loud and clear. We're we're we're not dry there. So right now um in supermarkets.

So Boston is a f like a little character, you know? I think that It could have been... you know, s CEOs versus B's. Boston would just be like, we're on the B side, you know, like we're gonna go hard for honey, you know, like we're crazy like that. I got to talk to Councillor Mejia, the politician who'd been so offended by Waymo's use of the D word. We met in person in her office in Dorchester.

The counselor was giving me and producer Emily Moltaire a quick lesson on Boston, this foreign country where I'd happily landed. We are just not the type of city that just goes along to get along with certain things that we feel. Especially like y Boston is a union town. We're hardcore. We don't we're adverse to outsiders.

It's a city, but it's like a little old town, you know? It's like very towny here. Well, this gets to what I want to ask you about, which is Waymo. Like when do you recall the first time Waymo, even as a concept, showed up on your radar? Yeah, right before the the hearing. Oh, right before. Like I didn't know like first of all, I'm not one of those people I don't pay attention to everything. I'm not gonna you know, like

I have my own little bubble here, you know, I'm dealing with education issues, potholes, like murder, you know, like real life issues that impact the quality of life of my constituents. And so It wasn't until recently when there was some rumblings of Waymo wanting to set up shop here in Boston. that I had learned that they were in other cities. I was like, damn, there are people who like this. Like I got in a way more car. I like all excited about them. Like, wow, people like this. So

I was you start searching about because you're curious and then the algorithm starts being like just videos of like happy people in driverless cars. I'm like, oh wow, like who are these people really excited?

getting driven around by a robot or just a not even a robot. They d some of these don't even have a little head. They're just like Yeah, it's just their steering head. Yeah, that's even creepier. So that was like ew yeah, no. I've talked to a few people who feel this way when they see videos of Waymo. Part of this is a quirk of design. There are other models of driverless cars that were fully designed to be driverless, like Amazon Zooks. Those cars don't have a steering wheel.

But Waymo retrofits pre-existing Jaguar SUVs. And so when you get in one, there's still a steering wheel. As a passenger, you watch it turn itself, as if guided by an invisible pair of hands. Watching that wheel turn, some people feel wonder, like they're seeing the work of a very impressive engineer. Others feel outrage, like they're watching the space where a human used to be, should still be. That's Julia's perspective.

When Julia was five, she and her mom moved to Boston from the Dominican Republic. Her mother was undocumented for most of her childhood. She cleaned offices for a living. Julia talks about her mom a lot. How from her mom, she inherited an understanding of her mission to protect working people's jobs. I used to work at McDonald's. I used to clean offices with my mom. I did all of that. Those were low entry jobs that I could get.

And I saw that with the the self checkout in the supermarkets, right? those jobs were occupied oftentimes by people who were retired, um, or high school students or young people with disabilities, right? And now those jobs are being replaced by a self-checkout. And there's a sense of for me, it's a moral issue too, right? That should be at the center of the AI conversation: is that morally, while it's exciting and we could do all of this and we could save lots of money.

But what is the unintended consequence of that, right? When you look at it now like this I yell at people too. Really? Get out of the line. What you doing there? You know that somebody's job that you just took the black lady get out my face. I'm like, yes. But nah man, like it's You know, I'm not the moral police, but I just feel like we are not thinking about other people. We're often just thinking about ourselves and what is the quickest way to get out.

To Counselor Mejia, the headline of the day, really the only story was low wage workers. In the hearing, she asked the Waymo executive about the precedent that was worrying her, those self checkout machines. So right now um in supermarkets they do these self checkouts. Correct. Right? And those are taking jobs from people. And it seems like there is a trend here. And my biggest concern as someone who had to have two to three jobs growing up just to make ends meet.

Is that what we are doing? Is creating financial hardships for people who are already struggling? And so I'm just curious: how are you reconciling with that impact? that you're making on already low wage workers. I I as I said earlier to the other counselor's question, we are committed to increasing workforce developments and job opportunities within the industry.

For the drivers. How are you increasing workforce development opportunities for the drivers, not for people who develop apps, not for people who answer phones. For people who are drivers, like tell me about what that looks like. We do not have workforce efforts that are specifically aimed at any part of the population. We have we are creating jobs for individuals that want to work in the autonomous vehicle industry. If drivers that currently, yeah.

How you understand a story in part has to do with who you hear it from. For months, I'd been listening to the engineers who first dreamed up these driverless cars. From their perspective, they'd only ever really had one question. Could they build a car that drove itself more safely than humans could? Waymo believed the answer was now yes.

But Boston had a different question. What about jobs? I did speak to Waymo's Northeast policy manager, Anthony Perez, who said he didn't want to be disingenuous. He expected over time there would be what he called transition. Drivers, but that it wasn't a one to one displacement. He said Waymo would also create jobs cleaning the cars, maintaining the sensors, repairing the vehicles.

The estimate he pointed me to said every five robotaxis might create one job. But he was also careful to say that it was just very hard to predict the. Different cities would be different. He wasn't trying to be evasive, he explained. He was trying to be honest about real uncertainty. But in the hearing that day, as Counselor Mejia pressed Waymo's Matt Walsh to describe exactly what jobs his company could provide the existing Uber and Lyft drivers. Matt Walsh came up short.

If drivers that currently work for Uber Lyft should decide that they want to work in the autonomous vehicle industry, there will be opportunities for them to do so. And what would their job title be? I I'm not gonna sit here and sort to speculate what their job opportunities are. I appreciate the question I forget the guy's name, but he's he just felt a little bit arrogant and I felt like, you know what, you even after everybody spoke, there should have been a little bit more humility.

in humanity, in his understanding of Why people were so adverse to the idea of losing their jobs. Like he could have won me over a little bit if he gave me a little bit more heart and he didn't. You really think he could have won you over? No. I'm just joking. No. Nobody could win me over. Part of the issue, Matt Walsh was an outsider. Worse, an outsider from a tech company worth$126 billion.

The logic of Boston politics said that nobody in this room had to listen to him. He was here in his role as a well-compensated pinata. I understood that. At the same time, if Waymo was right, if its driver was 80% safer than a human one, that meant there would be preventable car accidents in Boston in the years to come. Accidents caused by human drivers making human mistakes.

We lose our tempers. We check our phones. We think about other things while driving. We don't mean to, but we do. And sometimes that means we hurt other people. The people we hurt would not be voting in the Democratic primary a week after this hearing, but I thought they deserved to have more of a place in the conversation than they'd had so far.

Emily Maltaire, my colleague who'd been observing the interview in Counselor Mejia's office, at one point she chimed in. I feel like for me in learning about this technology, I was very skeptical about the safety of it.

And I mean, I've known people who have died in car crashes. I know someone who died in the backseat of an Uber. I don't think it was the Uber driver's fault, but I feel like as I learned more about the technology, I did take seriously the idea that there could be something safer about Waymo technology. Is that something that you're curious about? I don't know. I'm not curious about that in any kind of way because

When I think about safety and let's just g give you the example of the car accident, I don't see someone instinctually coming out of the car to get someone out. Like if it was a Waymo Robot? Well not that's not even a robot, it's just a wheel. Who would be there to help support the consumer? Who? What? How? So I I I don't I don't think the safety concern is a good compelling argument for me. For you, you're it's like I don't think there's anything they would show you where you would think

You just trust humans more. I would hope the world would trust humans more. Councillor Mejia told us when she left that first hearing, she was pretty sure her side had won. The unions, the app drivers had made their case against the robots. The Waymo executives had clearly been outmatched.

The thing was though, Counselor Mejia had missed something. There'd been one person whose testimony she just hadn't heard, someone who would speak for two brief minutes and who would begin to change the entire conversation in Boston. After a short break. I'm Catherine Nikolai, and I help millions of people around the world sleep better, rest their nervous systems, and shut their brains off when they won't stop spinning.

On my podcast, nothing much happens. I tell cozy, calming stories, where nothing dramatic ever happens. Just soft narration, sensory detail, and gentle repetition designed to lull you to sleep. There's no plot to follow, nothing to figure out, just peace. Listen to nothing much happens wherever you get your podcasts. Hello search engine listeners. I am here to tell you about a podcast I love. It's called This American Life. It's hosted by Ira Glass and his team of some of the best producers.

Each week they choose a theme and bring you a variety of stories on that theme. Stories that are funny, moving, big, small, but above all I literally used to burn the CDRs of this American Life and then on my 14 hour drives from Philadelphia to Montreal and back, I would just listen to 14 hours of the show back to back. I've listened to more of this American life than I've listened to. Any other piece of media? It's where I learned to love audio. It's where I learned to do the thing that I do.

It feels a little bit like people try summer vacation. Please check it out. If you're a search engine listener has not heard this American Very happy to be the bear. Please go listen and tell them we said. Welcome back to the show. Emily and I had been in Boston a couple days now. The cold snap here was at a level I found frankly offensive. I dressed wrong for it and was getting those full body jitterbug shivers vibrating down the sidewalk when we go outside.

Very cold. It's the cold you feel in your teeth. I'm wearing long underwear, maybe that's right. I'm wearing short underwear. Exactly as much as I was suffering. Emily Maltaire was thriving. Emily, a devoted public transportation nerd, she actually worked for a time in Boston's transit agency. Emily was just happy to be here. A mental tropical vacation. She kept Cheerfully suggesting we ride the tee to get to our interviews, and harassing me with a few

Boston transit tax. Did you know the bus in Boston is only a dollar seventy? That's amazing. Yeah. I was working for the T when they did fare raises and my one of my personal transit heroes, Laurel Paget Seekins, fought really hard to keep the bus fares low. What were they at before? before the races. Uh well the um I would cower in the warm alcoves of whatever local business would let me, then hustle into Ubers whenever possible, insisting that taking cabs here was not a luxury or weakness.

It was in fact important research. That's what the story was about. It was a joke, but it wasn't. I did want to talk to as many drivers as I could while I was in Boston. I'd end up interviewing eight. Four at the union's office and a random sample of four out in the world. Nearly all the drivers described the job as having recently gotten harder, just like Abdia Ziz has. They were working more hours for less money. But the union and non-union workers differed in some important ways.

The non-union drivers didn't really have Waymo on their radar, and they were unlikely to think of driving as a long-term career. This matches the data we have. A 2018 study found that the average Uber driver drives for three months. It's a lot of people's first job in our country, a ladder to their next one. So the union drivers were pretty unusual, just by dent of the fact that they'd made a career out of that.

Those were the things I learned in the cabs I could persuade Emily to take, and in the studies I read about those cabs. This Tuesday, however, we were walking, the Boston wind playfully tearing the skin from my bones. Our mission that morning was to meet a man named Carl Richardson for an interview that was thankfully indoors. he met us in the lobby We'd never met in person before, but I recognized him when I saw him.

Hi, how are you, Emily? Hi Carl, TJ. PJ, how are you? Good. Good, good. Come on, buddy, let's go. Carl has significant hearing loss. He wears two hearing aids. He's also almost completely blind. He has a yellow labrador with him at all times. That's his guide dog, Dayton. Carl had shown up in these hearings as a private citizen to argue in favor of autonomous vehicles. Like Counselor Julie Mejia, he'd been outraged by what he encountered, but for entirely different reasons.

Chapter 3. The Right to Autonomy Carl told me the story of the day as he'd experienced it. First of all, when I walked across City Hall Plaza, you could hear protests and rallies, Union protests and rallies. And yes, you say power union. Um then I walked in and I got there about an hour early on purpose so I could sign on the piece of paper and I had my intern with me. She said I was number three on the So I was hoping to go early.

We got there. I think they were probably let's see the food and restaurant union was there, the app drivers union was there, the FDIU union was there, the Teamster Union was there. I remember the ambulance driver union being there. So The disability community was far outnumbered and I will ever even tell you that a handful of disabled people left. They were so discouraged.

based on what they were hearing, they didn't even want to testify. Why? What what did they find specifically discouraging? I think that they felt like the the city council had already made up their mind. And I think they heard anger in the room. I so some some of the people didn't stay. I felt outnumbered. But I still felt like I had an important story to tell.

Carl in the room that day kept waiting to speak. He had expected that because of his early sign up, he'd be one of the first speakers. Instead, he waited nearly the entire four hours. For some reason, they'd slotted him almost at the very end. Carl Richardson, you have two minutes, nice to see you. Yes, hi. My name is Carl Richardson. I am the Massachusetts State Health AVA Coordinator and also an advisory board member.

You see Carl, he's wearing a light blue button up and a tie. We've heard a lot about the impact on the union and the drivers and the workforce. Let's talk about the communities I think it would impact in favor of. Not only people with physical disabilities like myself, but people with mental disability. And by the time I testified I threw out my written prepared remarks. And I just wanna

We keep talking about employment. I wanna have that discussion. Do you know how many jobs I've turned down because I can't get there? Or how many interviews If you spend time talking to Carl, you learn a lot about unemployment in the disability community. It's high. Their unemployment rate is twice as high as the rest of the workforce. One contributing factor to that number that a lot of people don't think about is just transportation. You can't do a job if you can't reliably get to it.

I agree that Uber drivers and and Paratram to do an amazing job, but not always, at least once a week. I get denied access to Uber and Lyp because they refuse to take me because I have a service dog and denying me my civil rights. I often get denied access too because they won't go beyond the city limits because they're worried about maximizing their revenue and the ability to pick up a return fare. My life is not limited. Two to three limits.

And the other thing it would do, it would increase lead your own. There's actually been pretty well documented issues with discrimination by Uber drivers against disabled people. There's an active DOJ lawsuit about it right now. Wheelchair users whose rides are canceled because it would take extra time to help them load in.

Blind people whose rides are canceled once the drivers see a service dog. A spokesperson in Uber said they have a zero-tolerance policy for confirmed service denials, and that Uber fundamentally disagrees with the DOJ's allegations. In the meantime,

Carl says he spends a lot of time trying to strategize ways to stop Uber drivers from passing him by. Carl was born with a genetic condition called Usher syndrome, type 2. It meant he was destined to lose his vision and hearing, but gradually, and as an adult,

It's a difficult diagnosis, in part because psychologically, it requires you to accept so much. To accept loss knowing that more loss is just ahead. That whatever you get used to, you'll need to get used to more. There's a time in Carl's adult life. For instance, when you had a driver's license. So I drove. I had twenty twenty vision up until I was about thirty. Which is one of the reasons why autonomous vehicles are a big deal to me, because I want that feeling that I used to have when I drove.

of freedom and independence and mobility. I know what I've lost, you know, so so and I want that back. So so I people but it it's not necess people deal with it differently. Yeah. And I ha I have a sister who has it. She never took up driving. 'Cause she knew she was gonna have to give that up someday. And she didn't want to have her heart broken. I said, screw it, I'm gonna drive, I'm gonna work in film and television, I'm gonna do everything I can. What type of car did you drive?

Well whatever I haven't totaled. I drove what, ten, twelve years? I think I totaled five cars because I w remember I was slowly going blind, but I was in denial. So I'm lucky to be alive and sitting here with you today. It was hard to let go of driving. Yeah. But what finally happened is I sat behind the wheel of a car one day, get him ready to go to work. And I actually said to myself, Am I gonna get to work alive today? And I sat there and I couldn't answer it.

Though I called out thick, and I never drove again. It's a hard thing to give up. Yeah. And I want it back. And I never thought I'd get it back, but I now believe someday within my lifetime We might have to convince the politicians you don't need to have eyesight to be able to have the ability to drive an autonomous vehicle, but I think we can do it.

Because it isn't just about blind people. Everybody has a mother they have to take away their driving from. Everybody has a father where they say, Dad, I don't know if you should drive anymore. Everybody has a teenager. Who texting on their phone? They were not even beginning to think about the possibilities of what autonomous vehicles could do. The other reason I don't want to ban autonomous vehicles in the city of Boston is because I think eventually it'll lead to personal ownership.

And is that what you really want? Oh, you bet. I'm not kidding when I say I have a a savings account where I put aside a few hundred bucks a month just for the ability for me to buy an autonomous vehicle someday. And if they ban autonomous vehicles, then they're gonna ban me from the right to drive, earn a living. Go to school, go to medical appointment, go to the beach on a Sunday, go visit my mom and the nursing home, whatever. With the flexibility that everybody else has.

Carl wanted me to know that even though Waymo had become the subject of this fight, he did not care if Waymo specifically came to Boston. Any autonomous car company would do. He just wanted to be able to hail a taxi that couldn't pass him by. And he wanted one day to own a car and get it. In the hearing near the end of his allotted time, he told a story about something that had happened to him recently.

An emergency when he needed a ride. Imagine that you're blind and your mother calls you at seven o'clock on a Sunday night and says, I just heard from the sheriff department I'm gonna get arrested unless I come up with some money right away. She got a call, she believed it. I'm the primary caregiver in my family. I had to figure out a way to get out there. And the...

I got denied three times in a row while I was trying to get out to my mother. Public transportation was an option'cause it was a late on a Sunday night. All I wanted the ability was to be able to go home. To my mom and say, you're okay, and I love you. And that would be the positive impact.

of autonomous vehicles. So yes, definitely think about the human component and the people component, but think about it for the whole community at large, not just the union. Thank you. Thank you so much, Carl. How do you think the politicians in the room saw you? Well, I I don't think they were there to hear my speech. The only one that was there to hear was the chair of their hearing. Tony. Um so I uh I'm I'm here alone now, so I think it's time to adjourn the hearing.

All the other city councillors had left before Carl's testimony. Many of them had announced in the hearing that they had to go attend a different team source event, a strike by the sanitation workers. Boston's a union town. Docket one one four one is adjourned. At that hearing I didn't feel like the disability voice or perspective was heard. And it was then that I decided I was gonna go back and bring even more people with me to the second hearing.

The second hearing. In July, two city councilors had unveiled a fairly bold anti Waymo ordinance. The ordinance decreed that any driverless car in Boston had to have a human driver in the driver's seat at all times. and called for a feasibility study of the tech, which would include organized labor, but not the disability community.

If passed, functionally, this would be a ban. The plan was to vote on the ordinance after the second hearing, which would take place in October. The driverless car in Boston was on trial. For the record, my name is Gabriela Caleda Zapata, District 1 City Councilor, and I'm the chair of the Boston City Council Committee on Government Operations. Today is October 28th, 2020. Yeah. The second hearing would go differently. It would go differently from the beginning.

One reason was because of its referee, presiding counselor Gabriela Coleta Zapata, who started by trying to establish Council rules there will be no demonstration of approval or disapproval or signs. So thank you so much for your understanding. We appreciate you. Again, thank you so much for being here.

From the previous hearing. And of course, Councillor Julia Mejia was here, dressed today in a jaunty black beret and black glasses. I'm still in shock that I have to even have this conversation that here we are in this day and age trying to defend

ourselves from robots taking over our jobs, right? And right here, this is the first line of defense. Cause first they come for the poor jobs, right? I'm always ready for a good fight. So I walked in ready. I'm like, this is one-two punch, I'ma take them all out. Councillor Mejía in Spanish says they start by attacking the poorest, but from there they keep picking us off. That the city of Boston is not gonna let anyone take away the income of its people.

The chair of that hearing made it very clear we're gonna listen to everybody, we're gonna take it in the order of testimony, everybody's gonna get three minutes, there are gonna be no outbursts, they control the hearing much better.

Testimony and your contributions. Um, we're gonna transition because we do have a long list to public testimony. So thank you. Thank you so much. After the union had spoken, everyone else who put their names on the list got their chance to talk. So in closing, if you do do a study Look at not only how it would negatively impact people, but look how it would positively impact people. Because to me, autonomous vehicles is not a dystopian. Das ist die zweite Seite der Geschichte.

It's a legitimate side of the story. felt like I wasn't gonna be alone'cause I had a lot of people with disabilities in the room with me that day. Carl had done his version of what the unions had done so well in the first round. He summoned his own coalition. These were people from Best Buddies. an organization for people with intellectual disabilities. They were citizens from Boston's blind community.

As a legally blind guide dog user in Boston, I have fewer transportation options than I did ten years ago. I came from New Hampshire and what I used to call transportation desert where I only had to rely on I felt the room had a Almost what I would call a seismic shift. Autonomous vehicles have the potential to give me and other people with disabilities increased independence, mobility, and flexibility.

Where the ride can't go. There was even a mother against drunk driving who spoke on one of the panels. Right. Autonomous vehicles represent another important tool in the effort to eliminate impaired driving. Will you welcome Waymo into the case? our partnership. You know To be honest with you, at first

I didn't know what I was walking into, like to be honest. Like I thought I was gonna get more of the last go-round. But the second hearing, they were more strategic. And when I started hearing from some of the disability community members, You know, I also felt like some it was very you know, scripted and I having worked in this space understand how you set up all of your advocates to all be on the same message. So I felt like they're all saying the same thing. I've seen this action.

Thank you, Madam Chair, and I wanna first start off by uh thanking the public testimony. I think to my colleague's earlier point is so important. Counselor Mejia, who says what she thinks. So I just want to name that. That was very poor taste. In my personal humble opinion, while I think it's important for us to get that on the record, I think what it did is provide the words you used in the hearing is that you said you felt like it was in poor taste.

Well I really did say poor taste? I did. Oh my god. Everybody needs therapy after they get done with my hearings. Lord have mercy. So yeah, I do believe that they are utilizing the disability community to their advantage. And you don't do that to people. This is wrong. Period. I don't know how to ask this question. It's like slightly delicate, but also I'm I'm not gonna go for it. But I don't want to answer it. I'll take it.

Waymo is not an accessibility company. Like it's not as if they're inventing autonomous vehicles for accessibility reasons. They want to reach a large market. Like accessibility is is part of it. It's also the fact of the accessibility issue and the fact of like disabled people as allies for them is Convenience? Like do you Sure. But so is AARP when they push certain things, right? And they have elderly spokespersons. And

Yes, it's convenient that the two things align together, and I hear you. And maybe that's a little selfish for Waymo. But I'm going into this knowing what I'm getting into. is aligning themselves. I'm not going to say using us because I'm not if you listen to me talk, you can't take advantage of me unless I want to be. Right? So I know what I'm getting into when I present on behalf of autonomous vehicles. I don't care if they make a profit if it means my mobility, my freedom and my independence.

Okay, there's way more reaching out to the blind community. Yes. Are they perhaps giving donations to the American Council for the Blind? Yes. But the individuals aren't making a dime. the money's going to non profit, right? Organizations. So, um did that answer your question? Yeah, and I don't it's like I I personally

I feel like it it's just it's a question. I feel like I'm being used if that's what you're getting at. They never said how to testify. They never once told me what to say. They just said please testify. on behalf of autonomous vehicles. That's all. That's it. Nobody held my hands, nobody gave me coaching. And I to my knowledge, the handful of people that I recruited that testified

So that's Carl's position. Counselor Mejia though in the room that day was very fired up, very focused on the target of her ire. So I just want to name that that was very poor taste. To utilize Folks who are already vulnerable to fight on behalf of those who have so much more than any of us here. She directed some very strong words at the man sitting across from her. The man in a suit with gray hair. Way more. And I'll start with the C E O maybe.

How can we utilize Waymo instead of replacing our app drivers to improve the quality of experiences for those folks who? have complained. I I think utilizing Waymo in an autonomous vehicle opens the door for Elimination of practices, the legal practices of discrimination. No, that's not the question. She wanted him to answer. How could Waymo create new technology that would improve life for blind people without using driverless cars?

That I'm not that technology advanced today. But you're the CEO of a technology company. That's gonna be no I'm um I'm the president and CEO of the Carroll Center for the Blinds. Well I was gonna say, Gary, um that I I am it's just gre it It's Greg, just Greg, oh my God. So somebody gave me the wrong piece of paper because they got you as the CEO of Waymo and the Greg like what my team better get it together. Okay, so let's go back. Let me just stay with you real quick, right? I think

There is a There was a white guy which who had on a suit. I just made all types of assumptions. Oh my God. So he was going on and on about his stuff. I I even think I even said his name wrong. I didn't know who he was. And I felt like you know how when you have egg in your face? Like over I had to pick up my face and put it back on because I was like embarrassing.'Cause you were giving him a hard time. I was giving him a hard time.

he has to say to you I'm I don't work for Waymo. I was like, well, okay then. I'm still mad at you though. I it was embarrassing. Not really. I mean you know what it was? It was like because It sounded like he worked for Waymo because he was there advocating fiercely for that community

in ways that made me feel like he was part of their team. So yeah, I mean, I was like, okay, you're on the other side of this, but you're not really on the other side because you're sitting on the Waymo panel anyway. So you're still part of them.

I think that if I try to sympathize with the feeling Councilor Mejia is expressing here, this is how I understand it. It can be annoying when the other side is a mix of people you're allowed to dismiss out of hand, tech executives, allied with people you're not, disability advocates. And when those advocates are all saying similar things, when it's your people, that sounds like solidarity. When it's them, it can sound phony. It can sound orchestrated.

But the whole reason I'd found this fight so fascinating is because I thought it was one where easily dismiss anybody. For the people who believe driverless cars will save lots of lives, Human beings with jobs are an unignorable fact. The human beings asking for better accessibility or safer roads are also an unignorable fact.

This fantasy that there were blind people who were secret lobbyists was tempting because if that were true, it would mean I think for the advocates that have been here and that have provided public testimony, especially maybe from on those in favor of this, I think it's important to say that everybody has their own individual agency and they were here on their own accord.

Counselor Coletta is a potter. You can see her in the video. Shoulder length brown hair, big clear glasses. Like Counselor Mejia, she comes from an from this background. As the hearing closed that day, she'd gone from being just the neutral moderator to, when it was her turn, asking the Waymo executive a lot of questions. Questions about jobs, but also just questions about the car. How did it work? What happened when a blind person ordered one? How did they find it?

She seemed to be using the hearing to try to get information, which is how I'd been trying to use the hearing. And I wondered if her experience as a participant had been at all like mine as an observer. Can I just tell you and I don't know if this is a question or just like a statement. When I was watching the hearings, the thing that was annoying to me was like I felt like on Waymo's side

they were unwilling to engage with the reality of job loss. But on the app drivers union side, I found myself being annoyed because I didn't see them engaging with the question of safety. The idea that these cars could prevent death or that they could be good for disabled people. It was like neither side wanted to they just kept skipping what to me felt like the core trade offs here when you talk about this could be really good or this could be really bad. Yeah.

I saw that too. And it's my job, it's all of our jobs as folks that are trying to be thoughtful and take a comprehensive approach. to r listen to every side. Um, and that will require a lot of compromise and a lot of consensus. But I think that that's good policy making.

What do you feel like you need like if you had a magic wand to just get exactly the information you want to have to be able to make a decision of about whether autonomous vehicles are right for Boston? What's the data you'd want to see?

I love the magic wand question. Because it always talks about like the possibility of getting to a place where everybody's happy, which I don't think is ever going to happen. But I would be happy to get more data of if we could if I had a magic wand, how many folks would this employ?

how many folks would ultimately lose their job. What would be the exact number of potential crashes or safety incidences on behalf of Waymo and how does that stack up to the existing safety and traffic instances that are already happening in the city of Boston. Um there I mean there's a lot. There's a lot. And yeah, how much money is Waymo gonna make off of that?

because I think that's a central question too, okay, is one one company is gonna benefit and then there could be hundreds of potentially hundreds of workers that are out of a job and what that means for our local economy. And so it behooves us as legislators to ask these difficult questions and to challenge not just these major corporations, but challenge labor unions and to challenge advocacy organizations and to try not to get motivated by our passions.

This was the only time in Boston I really heard anyone say this, that to get to a good answer, every single side would need to be challenged, that finding a solution would mean refusing to offer any group blanket deference. I'd now heard the twenty year story of these cars, I'd read the safety data, and I'd done my best in Boston to just listen.

In general, I wasn't very satisfied with what I'd heard, but I appreciated Counselor Coletta's apata's prescription: that everyone tried to calm their passions, to ask good questions. And Counselor Mejia, for her part, said that she would like to bring all stakeholders to the table, including disability activists. Emily and I left Boston as we zipped down I-95 in a human driven car, talking about what we'd seen. Here's where things stood back in Beantown.

At the end of the second hearing, the city council had chosen not to vote on the ordinance, the functional Waymo ban that many of the councillors had spent eight hours speaking in full throated support of. It seemed possible they'd noticed that passing an ordinance that so thoroughly excluded the disability community was not politically wise.

The decision on Waymo now seems to be moving to the state level. There we now have competing bills. One that would approve driverless cars, the other that would require a human being behind the wheel at all times, essentially a ban.

Driving home, I had a realization about what we'd seen there. Emily and I had sat for days with different people who all believed they'd glimpsed a vision of the future. Abdiaziz had a vision of Waymo finishing what Uber had started, taking the market for itself. Carl had a vision of a future where he drove again, to the beach with his wife. Counselor Mejia had an ominous vision where her neighborhood was empty, the people all replaced by machines.

Everybody was here in the present, fighting for, fighting against, a movie playing in their minds. Here's a vision I see. I started to glimpse it in a conversation with reporter Timothy Bealey. We were talking about the future. He was describing his vision of how things were about to change. He pointed out how today, if a robot driver makes a mistake, footage goes viral online.

But someday soon, he imagines we'll be in a situation where the clips that go viral will be of human beings doing the kinds of things on the road that today we just tolerate. Like, can you believe this maniac is still allowed to drive? I do think that society's tolerance for bad driving is going to go down. So there's been this trend over the last few decades where the amount of training you need as a teenager to get a driver's license has been going up. I think that'll continue to go up.

And if somebody's caught drunk driving, we're pretty reluctant to take the driver's license away because their livelihood might depend on it. But once Driverless taxis are cheap or once you can buy a driverless vehicle, a judge might be much more comfortable saying like the penalty for your first instance of drug driving is a lifetime ban on on driving a car. Like you can have a driverless car that takes you wherever you want, but you just can't get behind the wheel.

In Timothy's vision, change comes fast. In about five years, driverless cars are as common as Ubers today. In around ten years, every new car, standard, just has a way mobile. a robot driver and sensors, a button you can press if you don't want to drive. I shared Timothy's vision. I believe driverless cars will soon be everywhere. Not even just because they're safer, but because of consumer demand. The same force that broke the politicians who resisted Uber not long ago.

A lot of AI is like this. Technology too useful to ignore, even if it causes social pain. If we're gonna be okay, we're gonna need to envision some new futures, new compromises, new ways to share the dividends of progress with the people at displaces. There are precedents for this. When containerization put a ton of longshoremen out of work in the 1970s,

The West Coast Union negotiated a deal. The employers could bring in the new machines, but they had to pay into a fund that guaranteed the existing workforce wouldn't be laid off and give early retirement payouts to workers whose jobs disappeared. You could do something like that. You could do a lot of things. But whatever we're gonna do, I did not find the seeds of that new compromise in Boston.

It also does not exist in DC, which has been delaying driverless cars with bureaucratic hurdles. Or in New York, where my governor talked briefly about allowing driverless cars then retreated under pressure. But these are the places where a bargain could likely be struck. These are where drivers, Democrats, and Teamsters have, for a few more years at least, leverage. They should use it, but they'll have to be inventive. They'll have to imagine visions of the future more vivid than the word no.

Surge Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vote, and Truthy Pinamini. Garrett Graham is our senior producer, Emily Maltaire is our associate producer. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Did a fantastic job on the music and the That. Our production intern is Piper Dumont. This episode was fact checked by Mary Mathis. Our executive producer. Reese Dennis, thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric.

Joe's feed of Francis Kurt Courtney and Hilary. Special thanks to... SCIU office, plus Anthony Perez, Matt Schumwinger, Alex Roy, and the French. Henry. And the many other Uber drivers. would like to support reporting like the reporting in these two episodes. Plus Please consider how we keep this thing running. We'll see you soon.