The Trial of the Driverless Car

[MUSIC] 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 the driver. A driver who is also going to evolve and change due to the machinations of some different West Coast tech companies, the difference is that this driver is a human being. Chapter one, Obdia Z's. [MUSIC] I met Obdia Z's 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. I'm professional. I've been driving for 30 years now. >> 30 years? >> Yes. I had a limo service for 10 years. And then I was doing a five years follow cap, a taxi. [MUSIC] And then one day in 2011, Obdia Z 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 Obdia came, I remember by 2011, they came to the airport. We were in the waiting area at the log and we have a designated parking lot where we wait the fast. So they come there and they say, hey, we are introducing you in a company that will do same as a taxi, but it's an app. We want you guys to join with us. And you know, you can have your own car. We will give you a phone with the app and we can assign you up and you can make money. What did you say? >> At the time, I say, it is good, but you didn't come here to help us. You came here to kill this business. [MUSIC] >> Okay, you knew. I knew. [MUSIC] >> Obdia Z 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 new fangled phone app, they didn't need them. Obdia Z's 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. [MUSIC] >> I told them, listen, I'm going to join them. I said, I see where they're going. I read a lot of articles about them. They saw from San Francisco. They went to Chicago. I say they are expanding. So we can't stop this peak. We cannot stop Uber. [MUSIC] >> So, Obdia Z is van himself working for Uber. He says someone at the company handed him his new marching orders. We're going to give you a laptop. We're going to give you 200 phones each week. So we want you to give this 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 they sign them up. Everyone that you sign you give the 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 the drivers. >> It's crazy, it's like they're kind of, they're coming to kill your business. >> City, exactly. >> I knew, I knew, I knew. [LAUGH] >> That's why I said, if you cannot beat them, join them, you know. So I'm going to join them. [MUSIC] >> Obdia Z is 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 100 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, Obdia 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 driver's variable rates. Based on what its system thought each driver would accept for a given ride. The drivers believe that Uber, once it stops showing them its take, raise that take by a lot. Uber, who we contacted for the story, maintains that their take rate is still quote, around 20%. And then what's gone up actually are government taxes and fees. But Obdia Z is to not believe them. And most drivers I've talked to share his view. Obdia Z'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 Obdia Z's 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 Obdia Z's found himself, once again, a recruiter for a disruptive new organization. So when we started, we wanted like 400 drivers, and we joined the union. You were early, you were early on Uber, you were early on the, exactly, exactly, exactly. Because I've been in the industry for, you know, quite a while, you know, 30 years. I know what is going on, you know, it is, it's my profession, you know. So, and the union, they, you know, they say, okay, call all the drivers. Let us unite, and then we're going to go to the state. Did it feel a little bit like, like when Uber was having you sign people up, and then the unions have you sign people, does it feel, does 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 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, um, back in 2022. I heard in some Francisco that they are doing testing. And what did you think? I said, okay, I mean, I'm not against technology. You know, I welcome any technology, same as Uber, when they come to business. But I knew where they're heading to. You see, when Uber came, they're almost to kill taxi business. Now Waymo is to kill the drivers. How you understand the 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 profit. 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 Abduziz's city, the first step to deployment there. When Uber had come to town, Abduziz thought, if you can't beat him, join him. Now Waymo is here, and he saw no way to join them. So he had to find a way to beat them. Fortunately for Abduziz, he's in Boston. My name is Sharon Durkin, District 8 City Councilor, and I'm the chair of the Boston City Council Committee on Planning, Development, Transportation. Chapter 2. Union Town. Boston City Councilors began meeting last summer to discuss preemptively banning Waymo from their city. The first meeting took place in July, inside Boston City Hall, a room resplendent in many hues of municipal brown. The stated agenda for the hearing, "Duck it 1141, sounded neutral to the point of boring." Order for a hearing to evaluate autonomous vehicle operations in the city of Boston. Today, the goals for today's hearing is to gather information here from stakeholders and better understand the regulatory landscape. We must explore what we're doing. Despite this very dry description, what was actually going to 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 Bealey, which is that cities in red and purple states, like Austin and Phoenix, mostly welcome WAMO, whereas places like DC and New York fight it. In cities that fight WAMO, the conversation is less about safety and much more about whether robotaxies will take away jobs. My hope was if I paid attention to Boston, maybe what was beginning here as just a fight, would evolve into politicians starting to think through some kind of compromise. I think these kinds of compromises, finding solutions for workers who AI could displace, they are probably one of the most important challenges for our politicians today. And so Boston for me was a test case. Are we capable? Where are politics ready? So here's how things began. Bostonians were here today to talk about something contentious, and 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 WAMO. Boston is one of the oldest major cities in the country, with narrow one-way street salaries in the lack of a traditional grid system. It's really, really difficult to drive. You will get the map, it looks like a child's drawing, you know? We also have issues with double park cars, rides, shears, delivery vehicles. After lambasting Boston's 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 drivers with the introduction of self-driving cars. I think it's important that, you know, we listen when we hear teamsters in the Carmen Union, SCIU, and countless residents who feel line-sided by this. The app drivers union, Habitatis, Isis union, were the stars of the hearing today. I'm a pro-member ADU, ad driver's union, and I'm here to ask you to particular local jobs. Ride-chair drivers just want the right to unionize and to fight for better wages and conditions. Robot cars threaten all of this progress. I'm the Azizou Chab too, at a later hearing. I understand it is a business, it is capitalism, but not in my city, at the expense of our jobs. Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING] The app drivers were not officially a union yet. Technically, they were still 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, uniting to try to kill Waymo here. At the tip of the spear, the teamsters. Nationally, teamssters 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, it 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. Do I U-toss off a truth so obvious it's barely worth repeating? But what you have to repeat all the time, because it informs everything always. The teamsters and the politicians just kept repeating it. Boston is a union town. And you hear it's a perfectly wearable, waymo. Our city we're proud of union city. We're proud of our workers. Boston is a union town for not any of those other cities. Yeah, we're a union city here in the city of Boston. We want to protect. And watching the hearings, I can 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 collapse on the ground. He was unconscious and unresponsive. And if he came clear, they eat overdhost. I stayed with him, flagged on a homeowner who called 911. When the first responder arrived, they administered not and had I not seen him enacted quickly, you may have died. To me, a person to waimu 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 going to 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. 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. Just a few months ago, I was knocking doors with drivers across the city to get them the right to organize. You guys just were able to unionize. And this would just be a huge blow to you all. As the city councillors began to ask union leaders questions, you got the sense that counselors already knew some of these answers. That maybe they were asking more just to get the answers on the public record. And I'm just curious, 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 that? This is city councillor Julia Mekia. Asking one of the teamsters leaders, how many times did Waymo reach out to you before they sent mapping cars to Boston? Thank you very quick. Thank you for the question, Councillor Mekia. It rhymes with hero. Zero. Zero. So this is why I ask the question, because oftentimes things are being done to us without us. And so-- Chapter three. What words of advice do you have? Councillor Mekia. Now that you have the mic. The councillor had arrived and hour-late to the hearing. A former MTV reporter, she's noticeably hip-hopper 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. Waymo's executives. If we're competing with machines, it will ultimately have an impact on our drivers. At this point, given the sense, the scale of our fleet compared to Uber and Lips, I can't speak to what the decrease in their revenue has been. I don't know those numbers. I can tell you that-- The person on the receiving end of these questions is Matt Walsh. Waymo's regional head of state and local public policy. Walsh looks the part of the tech exec. 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 Councillor 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 would disagree, Councillor. 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 and that meets the needs. And so are we saying that our Uber and Lips drivers and our app drivers are not safe? I am not making comments specifically about the safety of Uber and Lips. What I can say is that, after 71 million miles of fully autonomous operations on US roads, we know that we are five times less in injury, causing crashes than human drivers. I am not suggesting that Uber and Lips drivers are dangerous. I am suggesting that human drivers compared to the Waymo driver are involved in foreign work. But Waymo is not a driver. Waymo is a robot. So let's be really clear about what it is, it's an apparatus. We refer, when we say Waymo driver, I know that Chair brought this up earlier. That is what we call the waymo, that is what we call the technology. And I understand it has sensitivities and we-- It's very triggering. Understood. And we'll have to make sure that we're not driving there. That's not happening. So right now, in supermarkets, they do these self-character-- So Boston is like a little character, you know? I think that it could have been, you know, CEOs versus bees. Boston would just be like, we're on the bee side. You know, like, we're going to 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 Maltaire, 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 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. 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 hearing. 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 going to, you know, like-- I have my own little bubble here, you know? I'm dealing with education issues, pot holes, 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. And I hadn't learned that they were in other cities. I was like, damn, they're people who like this? Like, I got in a Waymo car. Like, all excited about them. Like, wow, people like this. So I was-- You start searching back, 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 my robot or just not even a robot. Some of these don't even have a little head. They're just like, "Yeah, it's just a steering wheel." 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 Waymos. 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, they're 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 outraged, like they're watching the space where a human used to be. Should still be. That's Julius 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 self-checkout in the supermarkets, right? Those jobs were occupied oftentimes by people who were retired, 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, do you feel like people, too? Really? Get out of the line. What you're doing there? You know that's somebody's job that you just took, that like, lady, get out my face. I'm like, yes. But nah, man, like, it's, you know, I'm at 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 Councilor Mejia, the headline of the day, really the only story was low wage workers. In the hearing, she asked the way more executive about the precedent that was worrying her, those self-checkout machines. So right now, 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, as I said earlier to the other Councilor's question, we are committed to increasing workforce developments and job opportunities with the industry. No. But I think it's perfect. I'm talking about, for the drivers, how are you increasing workforce development opportunities for the drivers, not for people who develop apps, never who wears their 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 work for the industry. How you understand a story, in part, has to do with who you hear it from. For months, I've 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'd be what he called transition for app 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 rollootaxies might create one job. But he was also careful to say that it was just very hard to predict the future. 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 or Lyft should decide that they want to work in the autonomous vehicle industry, there will be opportunities for them to do so. And what will their job title be? I'm not going to sit here and sort to speculate what their job opportunities be. So let's just come to terms with the fact that we are creating a hostile environment for our hardworking people who are no longer going to have work. I appreciate the question. I forget the guy's name, but he just felt a little bit arrogant. And I felt like, you know what, even after everybody spoke, there should have been a little bit more humility and 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've lost 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 heard other people. The people we heard would not be voting in the Democratic primary a week after the hearing, but I thought they deserved to have more of a place in the conversation than they'd had so far. Emily Maltair, my colleague who'd been observing the interview in Councilor Mahia's office, at one point she chimed it. I'm not curious about that in any kind of way, because when I think about safety, unless you just 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, there's not even a robot. It's just a wheel. Who would be there to help support the consumer? Who? What? How? So, I don't think the safety concern is a good compelling argument for me. For you, it's like, I don't think there's anything they would show you where you would think. You just trust humans, Mark. I would hope the world would trust humans more. Councilor Mahia told us when she left that first hearing, she was pretty sure her sided one. The unions, the app drivers, had made their case against the robots, the Waymo executives had clearly been outmatched. The thing was, though, Councilor Mahia had missed something. There'd been one person who's testimony she just hadn't heard. Someone who'd speak for two brief minutes, and who'd begin to change the entire conversation in Boston. After a short break, Carl. [Music] I'm Catherine Nicholai, 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. Welcome back to the show. (upbeat music) Emily and I had been embossed in 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. (groaning) Very cold. It's the cold you feel in your teeth. - I'm wearing long underwear, maybe that's your-- - 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 Boston transit facts. - Did you know the bus in Boston is only $1.70? - That's amazing. - Yeah, I was working for the tee when they did fair raises and one of my personal transit heroes, Laurel Paget Seekens, fought really hard to keep the bus fairs low. - What were they at before the raises? - Well, the-- - I would cower in the warm out-ofs 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 for 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 Opti-AZ's had. 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 way more in their radar, and they were only 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 dint of the fact that they made a career out of this. 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. What gear are you going to wear to Carl? How are you? Where am I going? Nice to meet you. Hi, Carl. How are you? Good. Good. Good. Come on, put it on. Carl has significant hearing loss. He wears two hearing aids. He's also almost completely blind. He has a yellow labyrinth in him at all times. That's his guide, Doug. Dayton. Carl had shown up in these hearings as a private citizen to argue in favor of autonomous vehicles. Lake counselor Julie Mahia, he'd been outraged by what he encountered, but for entirely different reasons. Chapter three, the right to autonomy. Carl told me the story of the day as he'd experienced it. First of all, when I walked across the D'Halle Plata, you can hear Protessom Alley, Union Protessom Alley. Did you drive in this car? And yes, you did. You did. When did I say justice? Then I walked in, and I got there about an hour early on purpose, so I could sign on the pizza paper. And I had my intern with me. She said I was number three on the lift. So I was hoping to go early. We got there. I think there were probably-- let's see, the Food and Restaurant Union was there, the App Drivers Union was there, the FDIU Union was there, the Team Street Union was there. I remember the Ambulance Driver Union being there. So the disability community was far outnumbered. And I will let me 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 do they find specifically discouraging? I think that they felt like the city counselors had already made up their mind. And I think they heard anger in the room. So some of the people didn't stay. I felt outnumbered. But I still felt like I had an important door to tell. Carl in the room that day kept waiting to speak. He had expected that because of his early signup, 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. Here. Carl Richardson, you have two minutes. Nice to see you. Yeah, hi. My name is Carl Richardson. I am the Massachusetts Day Health ABA coordinator and also an advisory board member for-- You see, Carl, he's wearing a light blue button up in 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 that would impact and favor up. Not only people with physical disabilities, like myself, but people with mental health. And by the time I testified, I threw out my written prepared remarks. And I just went back. We keep talking about employment. I want to 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. The Uber driver and parent-traumat to doing an amazing job. But not always. At least once a week, I get denied access to Uber and Lyft because they refuse to take me because I have a service dog. And then denying me my civil life. I often get denied access to because they won't go beyond the city limits because they're worried about maximizing their revenue in the ability to pick up a return fare. My life is not limited to the city limit. And the other thing it would do, it would increase. 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 we take extra time to help them load in. Blind people whose rides are canceled once the drivers see a service dog. A spokesperson at Uber said they have a zero tolerance policy for confirmed service to Niles. 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 two. 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 moral loss is just a head 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 he had a driver's license. So I drove. I had 2020 vision up until I was about 30, 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. I've freed them in an independent mobility. I know what I've lost, you know? So, and I want that back. So, but it's not that people deal with it differently. And I have a sister who doesn't have that. She never took up driving, because she knew she was going to have to give that up someday. And she didn't want to have her heart broken. I said, "Good, I'm going to drive. I'm going to work in film and television. I'm going to do everything I can." What type of car did you drive? Well, whatever I had in total. [LAUGHTER] I drove what? 10, 12 years? I think I totaled five cars, because I remember. I was slowly going blind, but I was denial. So I'm lucky to be alive and fit in here with you today. It was hard to go of driving. Yeah. But what finally happened is I stepped behind the wheel of a car one day, get him ready to go to work. And I actually said to myself, am I going to get to work alive today? And I thought that. And I couldn't answer it. So 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 my sight 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. Have the father where they say, Dad, I don't know if you should drive anymore. Everybody have the teenager who's texting on their phone. See, we're not even being human to think about the possibilities of what autonomous vehicles could do. The other reason I don't want to bam 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? Or is you bet? I'm not kidding when I say I have a savings account where I put a side 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 going to ban me from the right to drive, earn all living, go to school, go to medical appointment, go to the beach on a Sunday, go visit my mom on the nurse and home, whatever. We'll see you. flexibility that everybody else had. - Harro 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 again. - Lead your activity for people like myself. - 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 called you at seven o'clock on a Sunday night and said, 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 I got denied three times in a row while I was trying to get out to my mother. Public transportation was not seen 'cause it was late on the 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 yeah, 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, Carla. (audience applauding) How do you think the politicians in the room saw you? - Well, I don't think they were there to hear my speech. The only one that was there to hear was the chair there here. - I'm your testimony. So I'm here alone now, so I think it's time to adjourn the hearing. - All the other city counselors that left before Carl's testimony, many of them had announced in the hearing that they had to go attend a different team source event, strike by the sanitation workers. - Docket 1141 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 counselors had unveiled a fairly bold anti-WAMO ordinance. The ordinance to create 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 Gabrielle Clad as an author, district one city counselor on the chair of the Boston City Council Committee on government operations. Today is October 28th, 2024. - Chapter four, a good fight. The second hearing would go differently. It would go differently from the beginning. One reason was because of its referee, presiding counselor Gabrielle Clad as a pada, who started by trying to establish some ground 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. - The union went first. A string of testimonies from all sorts of drivers. Many familiar faces from the previous hearing. And of course, counselor 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? - First 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 this time. You know, the handler de most tal, que la ciudad de most, don't mind. - Counselor Mejia in Spanish says, they start by attacking the poorest. But from there, they keep picking us off. The city of Boston is not gonna let anyone take away the income of its people. - The chair of the Achaeana 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's gonna be no outbursts. They control the hearing much better. - Testimony and contributions. We're gonna transition because we do have a long list to public testimony. So 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 Cloden, if you do do a study, look at not only how it negatively impact people, but look how it would positively impact people. Because to me, autonomous vehicles is not a dystopian future. - The second side of the story, the legitimate side of the story. And I felt like I wasn't gonna be alone 'cause I had a lot of people with disabilities in the room with me that day. - There must be more accessible, affordable, and reliable transportation. - Carl had done his version of what the unions had done so well in the first round. He summons his own coalition. - Hello, my name is Steve Newerty from that. - These were people from Best Buddies and organization for people with intellectual disabilities and their citizens from Boston's blind community. - As a legally blind guide dog user in Boston, I have fewer transportation options than I did 10 years ago. - I came from New Hampshire and while I used to call transportation desert, where I only had to rely on my family to help me get back and forth to be able to-- - 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. - I think we can go, uh, where the ride can't go. - There was even a mother against drunk driving who broke one of the panels, right? - Autonomous vehicles represent another important tool in the effort to eliminate impaired driving. - We welcome Waymo and-- - I mean, what are you gonna say to her mother? You don't have a right to want autonomous vehicles for just some doubt? - Mad values are partnership. - What were you just like feeling watching them talk? - So, 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 of it was very, you know, scripted and I haven't worked in this space understand how you set up all of your advocates to all be on the same message. So I felt like, you know, they're all saying the same thing. I've seen this action. - Thank you, Madam Chair. And I wanna first start off by thanking the public testimony. I think to my colleagues earlier point is so important. - So, Councillor Mejia, who says what she thinks, told the room that what she thought she'd just seen was a show, a show put on by Waymo. - Benefit from that are not the people that were trying to serve or the people that were trying to protect. So I just wanna name that, that was very port taste in my personal humble opinion. Well, I think it's important for us to get that on the record. I think what it did is provide. - I think the words you used in that hearing is that you said you felt like it was in port taste. - Well, I really just say port taste. - I did. - Oh my God. Everybody needs therapy after they get done with my hearing's 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. It's wrong. Period. - I don't know if I asked this question. It's like slightly delicate, but also I'm. - I don't know for it. - But I don't wanna get through an open hearing. - I think I'm not worried about it. (laughs) Like 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 part of it. It's also the fact of the accessibility issue and the fact of like disabled people as allies for them is convenient. Like do you? - Sure, but though it is AARP when they push certain things, right, and they have elderly spoke persons. 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 when I'm getting into it. I know that Waymo is aligned in themselves. I'm not gonna say you, it's enough. 'Cause I'm not, if you listen to me talk, you can't take advantage of me unless I wanna 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 independent. Okay, this Waymo reaching out to the blind community. Yes. Are they perhaps given donations to the American Council for the Blind? Yes. But the individual aren't making a done. The money's going to non-profit, right, organization. So, did that answer your question? Yeah, and I don't, it's like, I personally, I feel like it's just, it's a question. I don't 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's gonna say that. We held my hand, nobody gave me coaching, and to my knowledge, the hand full of people that I recruited that testified. None of them got coaching either. 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 eye. So I just want to name that that was very poor taste to utilize folks who are already vulnerable to fight on behalf 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. Waymo, and I'll start with the CEO, 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 think utilizing Waymo and an autonomous vehicle opens the door for elimination of practices, illegal practices, or discrimination. No, that's not the question. The question is, right? Because you talk about your technology and your ability. Counselor Mejia pressed. She wanted him to answer, "How could Waymo create new technology that would improve life for blind people without using driverless cars?" App drivers, that's the question. That technology advanced. But you're the CEO of a technology company. No, I'm not. No, I'm the president CEO of the Carroll Center for the Blind. What I was going to say, Gary, that I am. It's just Greg. Greg, oh my god. So somebody gave me the wrong piece of it because they got you as the CEO of Waymo and the like, "Well, 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. There was a white guy who had an ASU. I just made all types of assumptions. Oh my god. So he was going on and on about his stuff. And I think I even said his name wrong. I don't know who he was. And I felt like, you know, 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, "I'm embarrassing." Because you were giving him a hard time. Giving him a hard time. And then he has to say to you, "I don't work for Waymo." I was like, "Well, okay, then. I'm still mad at you, though." I was embarrassing. Now, 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 you really couldn't easily dismiss anybody. For the people who believe driverless cars will save lots of lives, the human beings with jobs are an unignorable fact. For the people who want to protect those jobs, 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 the world was a simpler place. It's not. The chair, Councillor Collette Zapata, said this in the room pretty explicitly. Nobody had been paid to be there. I'm sorry, I just drew that, but 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. Councillor Collette Zapata, you can see here in the video, shoulder length, brown hair, big, clear glasses. Like Councillor Mejia, she comes from an activist 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? It happened when a blind person awarded 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. 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've only gone waymo 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 a 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 cord 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 listen to every side. And that will require a lot of compromise and a lot of consensus, but I think that that's good policymaking. 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 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? I mean, there's a lot. There's a lot. And yeah, how much money is Waymo going to make off of this? Because I think that's a central question to, okay, one company is going to 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 behoves 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. The finding a solution would be refusing to offer any group blanket deference. I'd now heard the 20 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 Councillor Collette as a modest prescription that everyone tried to calm their passions to ask good questions. And Councillor 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 what we think stood back in bean town. 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 councilors had spent eight hours speaking full-throwed and supportive. 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. Having home, I had a realization about what we'd seen there. Emily and I had sat for days with different people who all believed the glimpsed division of the future. Obdia's ease 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. Councillor Mejia had an ominous vision. 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 the 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 out 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 is going to drive his license is 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 they likely might depend on it. But once driverless taxes are cheap or once you can buy a driverless vehicle, I judge it might be more comfortable saying like the penalty for your first instance of driving is a lifetime bad on driving a car. Like you can have a driverless car that takes it. 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 Hoover's today. In around 10 years, every new car standard just has a Waymo package, a robot driver and sensors, a button you can press if you don't want to drive. I share 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 Hoover not long ago. A lot of AI is like this. Technology too useful to ignore, even if it causes social pain. If we're going to be okay, we're going to need to envision some new futures, new compromises, new ways to share the dividends of progress with the people at this places. There are precedents for this. When containerization put a ton of longshoreman out work in the 1960s, 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 going to 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 now. [Music] [Music] "Serve Tension" is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ vote, and Truthie Pinemanini. Garrett Graham is our senior producer, Emily Maltaire is our associate producer. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armand Bazarian, just did a fantastic job on the music in these two episodes if I can say that. Our production in turn is Piper Dumont. This episode was fact-checked by Mary Mathis. Our executive producer is Leo Restennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey, Rob Merandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Conganer, Moore, Curran, Joseph Fita Friends, his Kurt Courtney and Hillary shot. Special thanks to Kim Kouple, Alfred Potter, Homer of Semi, Isabella Rabano, Erica Noel, Alejandro Tararro, and all the folks at the Boston SEIU office, plus Anthony Perez, Matt Schuminger, Alex Roy, Karen Levy, Henry, Donna, and the many other Uber drivers we've bugged for this story. If you would like to support reporting like the reporting in these two episodes, plus get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and bonus episodes, please consider signing up for incognito mode at searchengine.show. That's how we keep this thing running. Thanks for listening. We'll see you soon. [Music]