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More than a week after a self-driving Uber hit and killed a woman crossing the street in Tempe, Arizona, the company is facing the consequences. Today, on the orders of Arizona governor Doug Ducey, the Arizona Department of Transportation commanded Uber to suspend its testing of autonomous and highly automated vehicles on the state’s roadways.
It’s an obvious setback for Uber’s embattled self-driving program, which does much of its testing in Arizona, but the kibosh job also signals how local and state politicians elsewhere will be looking to control a new technology that comes with the promise of great safety and economic benefits—but also the potential to destroy jobs and, when it fails, to kill.
And it’s an unexpected blow from Ducey, who until the crash had championed the technology and encouraged companies like Uber to do their testing work in Arizona, where virtually no rules dictate what they can do where and when, and where they face no requirements to report or disclose anything about their programs, including crashes. In 2015, Ducey signed an executive order telling all state agencies to “undertake any necessary steps to support the testing and operation of self-driving cars.”
In December 2016, after the California DMV banned Uber’s self-driving cars from San Francisco because the company refused to apply for an autonomous testing permit, Ducey pitched his state as a sort of sandy Amsterdam for Silicon Valley types tired of the Golden State’s rules. “Arizona welcomes Uber self-driving cars with open arms and wide open roads. While California puts the brakes on innovation and change with more bureaucracy and more regulation, Arizona is paving the way for new technology and new businesses,” he said in a statement. “California may not want you, but we do.”
And just this month, Ducey updated his original executive order to explicitly allow cars without human safety drivers inside. (An Uber vehicle operator was behind the wheel of the car that killed 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg. Video from the moments leading up to the crash shows her not looking at the road.)
The indefinite suspension applies only to Uber. Waymo, General Motors, and Intel, who also like Arizona’s minimal rules, calm traffic, and good weather, can carry on their work. For example, Waymo, which is testing in the Phoenix metropolitan area without anybody at the wheel, plans to launch a commercial service in Arizona this year. But Ducey’s reversal should concern every company developing this technology, because it makes clear that politicians at all levels will have reservations about driverless cars and want to take action—if only to appeal to hand-wringing voters. (It’s worth noting that Ducey is up for reelection in November.)
The move is an early example of what promises to be a flood of incremental, local self-driving-car rules that start to patchwork the country. Even if Congress finally gets its act together and writes national rules governing robocars, local actors will have plenty of ways to block, or at least constrain, their deployment. Everytown, USA, may not be able to ban all AVs from its streets, but it could do everything from charging them extra fees to making it harder to get the requisite business license for them to tote people around and charge them money.
Let’s take a step back into history, to a time when the rapid spread of the automobile itself triggered many of the same questions that come with human-free wheels: What should regulators do about safety, speed, and the allocation of space? Cities and towns have been making their own rules about cars ever since cars were governed, as Silas Flint’s book The First Auto Laws in the United States makes clear. Pasadena required motorcars be equipped with bells. In 1899, Boston banned cars from parks between 10:30 am and 9 at night, and Chicago invented the driver’s license. New York followed with vehicle registrations, plus a reduced, 10 mph speed limit when passing by a church or school. Within half a mile of a post office, the limit dropped to 8 mph. (Flint also describes a raft of early car-related lawsuits and tort cases—expect plenty of those to come with robodriving tech.)
In recent years, cities have again worked up a frenzy of local laws, this time to confront another technology changing life on their streets: the ride-hailing businesses threatening to gut their local taxi industries, worsen congestion, and possibly endanger their citizens. Austin, Texas, required drivers be fingerprinted, pushing Uber and Lyft to quit the city in protest. (They later came back, after more lax statewide regulation superseded Austin’s.) France briefly required Uber drivers wait 15 minutes between accepting a ride request and picking the passenger up, to limit its advantage over traditional taxi services. In September, London declined to renew Uber’s right to operate in the city, citing safety and legal concerns. “Providing an innovative service is not an excuse for not following the rules," Mayor Sadiq Khan said in a statement at the time. (Uber appealed the decision, and has continued operating in the city in the meantime.)
And already self-driving cars have faced challenges at the local level. When the California DMV announced that companies could test vehicles without human monitors inside, San Francisco mayor Mark Farrell asked companies operating in the city to take part in a “safety assessment exercise” that would include working with first responders, transit operators, and officials to explain their tech in depth. When Uber started testing this tech in Pittsburgh in late 2016, mayor Bill Peduto cheered it on.
“Local officials are always going to be responsive to the people within their cities. They want to make sure they’re being responsive if community members have concerns,” Brooks Rainwater, who oversees the National League of Cities' Center for City Solutions, told WIRED this month. That goes for state officials, too, as Governor Ducey proved today.
If history is any guide, many of those knee-jerk rules will be short-lived. The courts will strike some down. State or federal laws will supersede others. Those who have been to Pasadena know the cars there don’t jingle. But plenty of those early regulations live on, in some form. We still have to slow down in school zones. We still need driver’s licenses and registrations.
And as self-driving cars evolve and spread around the country and world, their creators will have to accept limitations here and there—even in the wild wild Southwest.
- The unavoidable folly of making humans train self-driving cars
- The lose-lose ethics of testing robo-cars on public roads
- Cities need to take the wheel as we head into the driverless future
