CPUC: Incompetence Rewarded

Euphoria gripped the autonomous vehicle development community last week in the wake of the California Public Utilities Commission’s approval of commercial service initiation and driverless taxi service expansion in San Francisco for Alphabet’s Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise.?The outlook for robotaxi advocates immediately spiked upward and to the right.

In this way, CPUC endorsed the laziest, least worthy, most entitled, over-compensated, and incompetent developers of automated vehicle technology in the global market – where nearly 40 other companies are contending for investments and support.?Executives from both Waymo and Cruise ignored the complaints and concerns of first responders (fire, ambulance, and police), the San Francisco Metropolitan Transit Authority, and the wheelchair dependent in favor of a blind embrace of technology for its own sake.

Very real objections were most notably expressed by the fire department, law enforcement, and ambulance representatives all of which shared specific data regarding circumstances where Waymo or Cruise vehicles intruded on the scenes of crimes, fires, or car crashes or other events.?Construction zones and public transit vehicles were also described as being interfered with.

CPUC completely ignored the complaints and concerns of these public service agencies – presumably accepting the statements of Cruise and Waymo that they had engaged in training first responders on how to interact with their vehicles.?Sadly, these statements were misleading to say the least.

Cruise and Waymo have provided some training, but mainly in how to “ticket” driverless taxis that violate driving rules.?As for interacting with emergency responders at the scenes of incidents, Cruise and Waymo want responders to call one of the companies that say they will then put the vehicles into “command mode” at which point the responders will be told how to guide the vehicles with hand gestures.

Aside from the absurdity of first responders being instructed in how to control an autonomous vehicle with hand gestures, fire department personnel at the scenes of fires are discouraged from carrying mobile phones.?Waymo’s and Cruise’s ignorance of these realities is but one of many measures of the incompetence of both organizations.

But this lack of awareness also speaks to the sense of entitlement of both organizations.?In their eyes, it is up to the first responders to engage with autonomous vehicles in the manner deemed acceptable to the AV operators, rather than asking those organizations how they’d prefer to interact.

It’s not as if the first responders are hard to find.?It’s not as if the concerns of the first responders arose only recently.?It’s not as if the first responders have not been dealing with the reality of robotaxi operations on a daily basis.

Job one for Waymo and Cruise ought to have been, ought to be, courting first responders, accommodating their needs, and winning their endorsement as an aid in wooing the wider San Francisco (or insert any other city here) residential population.

In fact, a solution to the problem exists in the form of the Safety Cloud solution from Haas Alert.?Haas Alert already works with 3,000 first responder and transit agencies across the U.S. to provide live traffic alerts for responding vehicles as well as dynamic geofencing of emergency response scenes.

By implementing Haas Alert’s Safety Cloud in Waymo and Cruise vehicles – or any other robotaxis or delivery bots operating in San Francisco (or anywhere else) – the vehicles could be dynamically alerted to events as they happen obviating the need for mobile phone calls and hand gestures.?CPUC could have exhibited its wisdom by making Haas Alert a condition of wider deployment and commercial operation for Cruise and Waymo.

Instead, CPUC turned in the direction of the incompetence – approving the service expansions and setting the stage for ongoing antipathy between the first responder community and robotaxi operators.?Rather than emerging as a model for robotaxi deployment globally, CPUC has shown the world what “regulatory capture” looks like.

There was no reason to approve the requests of Cruise and Waymo nearly unconditionally.?The decision suggests that CPUC “bought” the specious argument that robotaxis were safer than human-operated vehicles.?This was the sole argument made by Cruise and Waymo – which presented coordinated safety messaging in advance of the hearing.

Of course, "safety" with regard to robotaxis is a red herring. The vehicles operate in a narrowly defined operational domain and slowly at that. The problem is that these vehicles are too frequently "in the way."

Cruise and Waymo failed to present data reflecting the volume of miles driven and fares taken by taxis and human-operated ride hailing vehicles correlated to crashes and fatalities.?Cruise and Waymo simply cited national vehicle crash data statistics for all forms of driving on all types of roads etc. – thereby demonstrating their epic laziness.

This is not good policy making.?This serves the interests of investors over the needs of the public.?The representatives of CPUC should be ashamed – especially in the context of a regulatory infrastructure in California that has previously led the nation in sectors such as fuel economy, privacy, and green house gas emissions from vehicles.?It’s a sad day when incompetence, laziness, and entitlement are rewarded – but this is where we stand.