The two bills that are circulating in the state legislature that effectively would ban autonomous, self-driving vehicles in the state not only are short-sighted, but they also will serve to perpetuate the carnage on our dangerous and deadly roads.
It is ironic that the Mass. legislature is setting up roadblocks to the implementation of a technological innovation that is sweeping across the country. Waymo already is operating in six cities with plans to expand into many more.
We in Massachusetts have always taken pride in embracing scientific achievements in the fields of tech and biotech, anchored by our world-class universities. But the legislature wants to prevent autonomous vehicles from coming to Mass. — really???
Self-driving cars are not the wave of the future — they already are here — and banning them would establish our state as a backwater that refuses to move forward as we approach the middle of the 21st century.
Even more significantly, self-driving vehicles are far safer than those operated by humans, and it’s not even close. Our highways and roadways are trails of death and destruction that kill 40,000 Americans each and every year (that’s more than 100 deaths per day, every day) and maim hundreds of thousands more, thanks to human operators who drive drunk, distracted, and negligently.
By contrast, Waymo’s accident and injury rate, based on millions of miles of real-world experience, is a small fraction of the human rate. In addition, a big plus for passengers — especially women — is that they do not have to contend with human operators (we’ll leave it at that).
As we have noted in the past, we were skeptical about Waymo until we used it extensively on a visit to San Francisco two years ago and became convinced of the safety of self-driving vehicles (which have the added benefit of being good for the environment because they are electric).
We understand that the ride-share human operators are worried about being replaced by the robots (which is ironic, because they displaced taxi operators 20 years ago).
But in our view, public safety should be the top concern of our public officials and should take precedence over everything else.
