Driving Communities Forward with Ed Hutchinson

Welcome to another edition of Driving Communities Forward. This month, I’m thrilled to feature my colleague Ed Hutchison , public safety partnerships manager at Cruise . As you will see, Ed's journey is making an impact on society, through his relentless pursuit of safer roadways.

Read on to hear about Ed’s journey, from his early days working with the National Sheriffs' Association to his groundbreaking research on the impact of rideshare services. Ed's passion for saving lives has led him to the forefront of the autonomous vehicle revolution.

What gets you up in the morning and what's a typical day in your role?

What a great question. At this stage of my professional and personal life, I have a more conscious effort surrounding the amount of time I have left to reach the goals I've set for myself, which include trying to curb fatalities, catastrophic injuries and crashes on our roadways.?

When I started working with the National Sheriffs' Association, I was looking to save lives on our roadways, focusing on high-visibility enforcement, impaired driving checkpoints, championing education for traffic enforcement, influencing laws that supported curbing impaired driving, speeding, seatbelts, and establishing policy and procedures for the office of sheriff and others.?

After 20 years supporting these efforts, I realized that when I began this mission in 1998, we lost 41,471 lives on our roadways. Looking back to the very first highway safety bill, we lost 49,163 lives. Fast forward to today, and we now have 42,514 human beings lost to, what I refer to as willful human error, for the most part. In short, despite all the work to make vehicles and infrastructure safer and years of traffic enforcement, we are moving in the wrong direction, and all of the countermeasures we've laid in place haven't really slowed human loss due to these poor choices made while driving. As a result, finding new inroads to reach those 18 to 35 who choose to speed, drive impaired, distracted, drowsy, recklessly, and not to utilize seatbelts, has been my focus for a professional lifetime.?

Searching for new ways to impact that human loss we experience each year is what motivates me and led me to Cruise, a company making autonomous vehicles for ridehail and other transportation purposes.

So what does that look like? While working with the NSA, I had the opportunity to look at some cursory data that supported what we were hearing from law enforcement on the road already. When rideshare or ridehail enters a community, anecdotal evidence shows that impaired driving deaths, catastrophic injuries due to impaired driving, and crashes were trending downward for that community.?

After about a year of finding evidence to support this, we formalized this into a study utilizing researchers from the National District Attorneys Association's National Traffic Law Center. Turning over internal data and overlaying that with regional crash data, FARS data, and other sources two years prior and two years after rideshare entered a community, we published one of the first reports of its kind in California that laid out a correlation between rideshare entering a community and a reduction of DUI incidents - at a rate of about 37 percent as an average.?

The most exciting part of this research was the fact that we could also connect it to a demographic using rideshare - that very demographic every entity working on roadway safety identifies as most impacted by those willful human errors - 18 to 35 demographic - who were also using rideshare. It was very exciting to see.?

After my 20 year tenure with the NSA, I went to Lyft to explore that further and focused on producing a total of three reports underscoring the same thing, in Chicago, Fort Worth, Atlanta, and finally, in three cities in Massachusetts which also counted in Uber data - a comprehensive first of its kind report from both rideshare companies.??

The work I did there, focused on reaching that demographic with an alternative to impaired driving and validating it through systemic research for law enforcement and first responders, remains one of my most memorable impacts on roadway safety. Still, given that the human driver element is still prone to drive impaired, recklessly, distracted, drowsy, to speed, and choosing not to wear seatbelts, I knew there was more that we had to do.??

Following this, I had the remarkable good fortune to join all-electric autonomous vehicle company Cruise last year, intent on removing those willful human errors by eliminating the need for a human to drive the vehicle. Today I’m focused on building out relationships with first responders and increasing understanding on how AVs operate and interact with first responders, how first responders can interact with our AVs to gain compliance or redirect the vehicle, and to find answers or solutions to their questions, concerns, and suggestions.?

I've rarely felt such unity between my personal life mission and professional mission to save lives on our roadways, as autonomous vehicles don't speed, focus only on driving, obviously aren't impaired, drowsy, reckless, and passengers must buckle up to ride! Every day is focused on building out third-party support for Cruise's commitment to safety with our first responders and that aligns so perfectly with my personal mission.?

Who inspires you?

While working with the National Sheriffs' Association, Sheriff John Whetsel, now retired sheriff from Oklahoma County, was my mentor on how to align personal mission with a professional one. He too has dedicated his life to saving lives on our roadways and has had tremendous influence on how I conduct my professional and personal life.??

He has often shared that while he was a police chief for Chocktaw, he responded to a fatal crash in his community. When he arrived, he found out that his wife and one of his two children were victims in that crash. His story is a strong reminder that these "numbers" of fatalities on our roadways are people we know and care about.???

My own "Mission Moment" as Mothers Against Drunk Driving calls it, occurred when I was about 10 years old at Sunday dinner with family at my great grandmother's house. My aunt needed to get her 13-month-old twins to get to bed. As we were saying our goodbyes from the front porch, my aunt was struck and killed in front of us. The boy driving the vehicle was 19 years old, poly-impaired, and wanted to see how close he could get to her. Striking her at approximately 80mph, the carnage inflicted on her and on her family was something no human should experience. Knowing that we can hopefully prevent just one of those similar experiences for others is what motivates Sheriff Whetsel, me and so many others.??

Buckle up. Slow down. Put down that phone. We've heard these phrases so many times, we become immune. I think that affects how people still choose to drive today. While I often think about the damage inflicted on our family, I also wonder about the terrible effects that boy must still be living with, making those poor human-led decisions.

What do you wish people knew about your field?

There is an urgency, an immediacy to this roadway fatality and catastrophic injury pandemic we are living with and to which I believe we have grown inured. When I tell my story, inevitably someone also tells me their personal tragedy - friends from high school or college, a parent killed by an impaired driver, losing a child to a crash caused by impaired driving, or texting, or speeding. Losing 42,000 human beings to a cause each year is not normal; it shouldn't be perceived as the cost of doing the business of driving.??

There are excellent alternatives but we must make the right decisions and demand that of others. During my tenure at Lyft we did a survey that found individuals used rideshare because they didn't want to look for parking or they didn't want to risk the approximate $10,000+ in fees and fines for a DUI. But no matter the reason, these individuals become one less risk of a fatal crash. And the promise of autonomous vehicle impact on this pandemic is so incredible.?

Being able to champion the promise of autonomous vehicles and the benefits of removing the human element from driving is something I love to be able to share with everyone who gets behind the wheel.

What is your vision for the future of road safety?

I envision, in three dimensions, an orderly state of our roadways in which the mundane obligations of driving to get to people, places, and things we care about, occurs without having to take on the responsibility of driving ourselves there. I can see a future where this task is rightfully left up to intelligent mechanisms that have only one function - transport us in a way that is safer than if we do this task ourselves.?

Imagine applying the hours we spend behind the wheel to other tasks, to other priorities, and to do so with fewer risks to our safety. I imagine an autonomous transportation system that allows older adults to get to doctors appointments - one of the leading causes of missed appointments is lack of reliable transportation - to visit friends and family, increasing older adult longevity and quality of life; a system of autonomous transportation where disabilities are no barrier to movement and function and quality of life; a system where we deconstruct racial equity barriers artificially applied to our communities based on demographics or neighborhood or financial worth.

I believe with every fiber of my being that we can accomplish this in my lifetime and the benefits of autonomy can help us achieve that.

How can we support your work?

I remember reading a Wall Street Journal anecdote when trains were first introduced to society, there was a line of thinking that women's bodies were too fragile to travel at 50 miles per hour, and that organs would literally be ejected from their bodies at that speed. Preposterous, we would all agree today. But what we accept today was a fearsome thing for those first experiencing that phenomenon.??

The most beneficial element of new technology is building out the scientific basis that refutes the mistrust humans sometimes have for technology. That an autonomous vehicle, for example, can remain focused on all driving elements at the same time, can "see," "hear," and "think" at a much faster pace than humans, does not break traffic laws due to human will and therefore are safer than a human driver is critical to build the foundation of trust for that new technology.?

Any advances on research and foundational structure that refutes the "what if" factor helps to drive that cause. Educating the public on the ability to eliminate roadway deaths, catastrophic injuries, and crashes due to a whole host of human error factors by instituting autonomous vehicles further advances my work. And most importantly, it saves lives, which touches all of us.