In a Driverless World, Who Loses and Who Wins?

13:05Timothy B. Lee:After lambasting Boston streets a while longer, the people here get to the issue that'll actually dominate these hearings. Jobs. In particular, union jobs.

13:15PJ Vogt: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 and the Carmen Union, SEIU, and countless residents who feel blindsided by this.

13:30Timothy B. Lee:The app drivers' union, Abdi Aziz's union, were the stars of the hearing today.

13:35Julia Mejia:I'm a proud member of ADU, app drivers' union, and I'm here to ask you to protect your local jobs. Rideshare drivers just want the right to unionize and to fight for better wages and conditions.

13:46PJ Vogt:Robot cars threaten all of this progress.

13:50Timothy B. Lee:Abdi Aziz would show up, too, at a later hearing.

13:52PJ Vogt:I understand it is a business. It is capitalism. But not in my city at the expense of our jobs. Thank you.

14:05Timothy B. Lee: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, Teamsters 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.

14:40Timothy B. Lee:And these days 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. The way you toss off a truth so obvious it's barely worth repeating, but which you have to repeat all the time because it informs everything always. The Teamsters and the politicians just kept repeating it. Boston's a union town.

15:09PJ Vogt:Boston is a union town, and you hear the perfectly. Our city, we're a proud union city. We're proud of our workers. We're proud of Boston as a union town. We're not any of those other cities. We're a union city here in the city of Boston. We want to protect.

15:25Timothy B. Lee:And watching the hearings, I could 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.

15:40PJ Vogt:A few days ago, while on my route, I spotted a man collapse on the ground. He was unconscious and unresponsive, and it became clear that he had overdosed. I stayed with him, flagged down a homeowner who called 911. When the first responder arrived, they administered NACAN. Had I not seen him enacted quickly, he may have died. To me, a person, to Waymo, an obstacle to avoid.

16:00Timothy B. Lee: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.

16:24Timothy B. Lee: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.

16:37PJ Vogt:to organize.

16:39Timothy B. Lee:You guys just were able to unionize, and this would just be a huge blow to you all. As the city councilors began to ask union leaders questions, you got the sense that the councilors already knew some of these answers, that maybe they were asking more just to get the answers on the public record.

16:54Gabriela Coletta Zapata: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 them?

17:02Timothy B. Lee:This is city councilor Julia Mejia, asking one of the Teamsters leaders, how many times did Waymo reach out to you before they sent mapping cars to Boston?

17:10PJ Vogt:Thank you for the question, Counselor Mejia. It rhymes with hero.

17:16Gabriela Coletta Zapata:Zero.

17:17PJ Vogt:Zero.

17:18Gabriela Coletta Zapata:So this is why I asked the question, because oftentimes things are being done to us without us, right? Chapter three, Counselor Mejia.

17:29Timothy B. Lee:The counselor had arrived an hour late to the hearing. A former MTV reporter, she's noticeably hipper 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.

17:48Gabriela Coletta Zapata:If we're competing with machines, it will ultimately have an impact on our drivers.

17:55Julia Mejia:At this point, given the scale of our fleet compared to Uber and Lyfts, I can't speak to what the decrease in their revenue has been. I don't know those numbers. I can tell you that...

18:08Timothy B. Lee: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, a spiffy suit, a swoopy coif of silver hair. For most of their conversation, they're talking past each other because Matt Walsh wants to discuss safety and Counselor Mejia wants to discuss driver's jobs.

18:27Gabriela Coletta Zapata: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.

18:40Julia Mejia:I would disagree, counselor. 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 in.

18:48Gabriela Coletta Zapata:And so are we saying that our Uber and Lyft drivers and our app drivers are not safe drivers?

18:53Julia Mejia:I am not making comments specifically about the safety of Uber and Lyft. What I can say is that after 71 million miles of fully autonomous operations on U.S. roads, we know that we are five times less in injury-causing crashes than human drivers. I am not suggesting that Uber and Lyft drivers are dangerous. I am suggesting that human drivers, compared to the Waymo driver, are involved in far more collisions. But Waymo is not a driver.

19:16Gabriela Coletta Zapata:Waymo is a robot.

19:18Julia Mejia:So let's be really clear about what it is.

19:23Gabriela Coletta Zapata:It's an apparatus.

19:24Julia Mejia:we refer when we say Waymo driver I know the chair brought this up earlier we that is the what we call the way that is what we call the technology and I understand it has sensitivities and it's very triggering understood and heard loud and clear I want to make sure that we

19:38Gabriela Coletta Zapata:we're not driving there that's not happening so right now um in supermarkets they do these self 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 B side. You know, like, we're going to go hard for honey. You know, like, we're crazy like that.

20:06Timothy B. Lee:I got to talk to Counselor 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.

20:21Gabriela Coletta Zapata: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.

20:39Timothy B. Lee:Well, 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?

20:48Gabriela Coletta Zapata:Yeah, right before the hearing. Oh, 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, potholes, 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 that I had learned that they were in other cities. I was like, damn, there are people who like this? Like, I got into Waymo car, like all excited about it.

21:25Gabriela Coletta Zapata:I'm like, wow, people like this? So I was—

21:27Timothy B. Lee:You start searching back because you're curious. And then the algorithm starts being like just videos of like happy people in driverless cars.

21:33Gabriela Coletta Zapata:I'm like, oh, wow. Who are these people really excited? getting driven around by a robot or just not even a robot. Some of these don't even have a little head. They're just like...

21:43Julia Mejia:Yeah, it's just a steering wheel.

21:44Gabriela Coletta Zapata:Yeah, that's even creepier. So that was like, ew. Yeah, no.

21:48Timothy B. Lee: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 Zoox. Those cars don't have a steering wheel. But Waymo retrofits pre-existing Jaguar SUVs. until when you get in one, there's 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 outrage, like they're watching the space where a human used to be, should still be.

22:25Timothy B. Lee:That's Julia's perspective.

22:30Timothy B. Lee: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.

22:47Gabriela Coletta Zapata: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. 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?

23:30Gabriela Coletta Zapata:When you look at it now, like, do you feel... I yell at people, too. Really? Get out of the line. What you doing there? You know that's somebody's job that you just took? They're like, lady, get out my face. I'm like, yes. But nah, man, like, it's, you know, I'm not 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.

23:55Timothy B. Lee:To Counselor Mejia, the headline of the day, really the only story, was low-wage workers. In the hearing, she asked the Waymo executive about the precedent that was wearing her, those self-checkout machines.

24:08Gabriela Coletta Zapata:So right now, in supermarkets, they do these self-checkouts.

24:13Timothy B. Lee:Correct.

24:14Gabriela Coletta Zapata:Right? And those are taking jobs from people. And it seems like there is a trend here. Yeah. 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?

24:40Julia Mejia:As I said earlier to the other counselor's question, we are committed to increasing workforce developments and job opportunities within the industry. I'm talking about for the drivers.

24:51Gabriela Coletta Zapata:How are you increasing workforce development opportunities for the drivers? Not for people who develop apps, not for people who answer phones, for people who are drivers. Like, tell me about what that looks like.

25:01Julia Mejia:We do not have workforce efforts that are specifically aimed at any part of the population. We are creating jobs for individuals that want to work in the autonomous vehicle industry.

25:15Timothy B. Lee:How you understand a story, in part, has to do with who you hear it from. For months, I'd 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 would be what he called transition for app drivers. but that it wasn't a one-to-one displacement.

25:52Timothy B. Lee: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 robo-taxis 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.

26:27Julia Mejia: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.

26:35Gabriela Coletta Zapata:And what would their job title be?

26:37Julia Mejia:I'm not going to sit here and sort of speculate what their job opportunities would be.

26:40Gabriela Coletta Zapata: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.

26:50PJ Vogt:I appreciate the question.

26:52Gabriela Coletta Zapata: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.

27:19Timothy B. Lee:You really think he could have won you over? No.

27:24Gabriela Coletta Zapata:I'm just joking. No. Nobody could win me over. Part of the issue, Matt Walsh was an outsider.

27:32Timothy B. Lee: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 piñata. 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 lose 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 hurt other people. The people we hurt would not be voting in the Democratic primary a week after this hearing, but I thought they deserved to have more of a place in the conversation than they'd had so far.

28:21Timothy B. Lee:Emily Maltaire, my colleague who'd been observing the interview in Counselor Mejia's office, at one point she chimed in.

28:27PJ Vogt:I feel like for me in learning about this technology, I was very skeptical about the safety of it. And, I mean, I've known people who have died in car crashes. I know someone who died in the backseat of an Uber. I don't think it was the Uber driver's fault. But I feel like as I learned more about the technology, I did take seriously the idea that there could be something safer about Waymo technology. Is that something that you're curious about?

28:53Gabriela Coletta Zapata:I'm not curious about that in any kind of way because when I think about safety, and let's 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, or it'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,

29:36Timothy B. Lee:you just trust humans more. I would hope the world would trust humans more.

29:47Timothy B. Lee:I'll see you next time.

30:12Timothy B. Lee:conversation in Boston.

30:16Timothy B. Lee:After a short break, Carl.

30:33Julia Mejia:I'm Stephen Dubner from Freakonomics Radio, and you are listening to a special episode of the podcast Search Engine.

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32:44Julia Mejia:Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner, and we are back with our friends from Search Engine. Here is host PJ Vogt. Welcome back to the show.

32:57Timothy B. Lee:Emily and I had been in Boston 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'd go outside. Very cold. It's the cold you feel in your teeth.

33:14PJ Vogt:I'm wearing long underwear. Maybe that's your problem. I'm wearing short underwear.

33:18Timothy B. Lee:Exactly as much as I was suffering, Emily Malterre 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 T to get to our interviews and harassing me with Boston transit facts.

33:40PJ Vogt:Did you know the bus in Boston is only$1.70? That's amazing. Yeah. I was working for the T when they did fare raises and one of my personal transit heroes, Laurel Padgett-Seekins, fought really hard to keep the bus fares low.

33:53Timothy B. Lee:What were they at before the raises?

33:56PJ Vogt:Well, the...

33:57Timothy B. Lee:I would cower in the warm alcoves 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, four at 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 Abdi Aziz had. They were working more hours for less money.

34:30Timothy B. Lee:But the union and non-union workers differed in some important ways. The non-union drivers didn't really have Waymo on their radar, and they were unlikely 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, the latter to their next one. So the union drivers were pretty unusual just by dint of the fact that they'd 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.

35:02This Tuesday, however, we were walking, the Boston wind playfully tearing the skin from my bones.

35:09Timothy B. Lee: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.

35:19Carl Richardson:What gave it away, did you, Carl? Hi, how are you, Emily? Nice to meet you. Hi, Carl. Good, good. How are you? Good, how are you? Good, good. Come on, buddy.

35:30Timothy B. Lee:Carl has significant hearing loss. He wears two hearing aids. He's also almost completely blind. He has a yellow Labrador with him at all times. That's his guide dog, Dayton. Carl had shown up in these hearings as a private citizen to argue in favor of autonomous vehicles. Like Counselor Julie Mejia, he'd been outraged by what he encountered, but for entirely different reasons.

35:55Timothy B. Lee:Chapter 3. The right to autonomy. Carl told me the story of the day as he'd experienced it. First of all, when I walked across City Hall Plaza,

36:07Carl Richardson:you could hear protests and rallies, union protests and rallies.

36:11PJ Vogt:To driverless cars, and yes, to human beings. Union! Power! Union! Power!

36:18Gabriela Coletta Zapata:When I say justice, you're right.

36:19Carl Richardson:Then I walked in, and I got there about an hour early on purpose so I could sign on the piece of paper. and I had my intern with me, she said I was number three on the list. So I was hoping to go early. We got there. I think they were probably, let's see, the Food and Restaurant Union was there, the App Drivers Union was there, the SEIU Union was there, the Teamster Union was there. I remember the Ambulance Driver Union being there. So the disability community was far outnumbered, And I will even tell you that a handful of disabled people left. They were so discouraged based on what they were hearing.

37:00Carl Richardson:They didn't even want to testify.

37:01Timothy B. Lee:Why? What did they find specifically discouraging?

37:04Carl Richardson:I think that they felt like the city councilors 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 story to tell.

37:23Timothy B. Lee:Carl, in the room that day, kept waiting to speak. He had expected that because of his early sign-up, 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.

37:38PJ Vogt:Carl Richardson, you have two minutes. Nice to see you.

37:43Carl Richardson:Yes, hi, my name is Carl Richardson. I am the Massachusetts Statehouse ABA coordinator and also an advisory board member for Mayors.

37:50Timothy B. Lee:You see Carl. He's wearing a light blue button-up and a tie.

37:53Carl Richardson: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 it would impact in favor of. 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 winged it. 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...

38:20Timothy B. Lee: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.

38:38Carl Richardson:I agree that Uber drivers and paratrans are 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 denying me my civil rights. I often get denied access, too, because they won't go beyond the city limit because they're worried about maximizing their revenue and 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...

39:09Timothy B. Lee: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 it would 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 denials, 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.

39:42Timothy B. Lee:Carl was born with a genetic condition called Usher syndrome, type 2. 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 more loss is just ahead. That whatever you get used to, you'll need to get used to more. There was a time in Carl's adult life, for instance, when he had a driver's license.

40:09Carl Richardson:So I drove. I had 20-20 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 of freedom and independence and mobility I know what I've lost and I want that back but it's not people deal with it differently and I have a sister who has it, 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, screw it. I'm going to drive. I'm going to work in film and television. I'm going to do everything I can.

40:48Timothy B. Lee:What type of car did you drive?

40:51Carl Richardson:Well, whatever I hadn't totaled.

40:56Carl Richardson:I drove, what, 10, 12 years? I think I totaled five cars. Because I remember, I was slowly going blind, but I was in denial. So I'm lucky to be alive and sitting here with you today.

41:07Timothy B. Lee:It was hard to let go of driving?

41:10Carl Richardson:Yeah. But what finally happened is I sat behind the wheel of a car one day, getting ready to go to work.

41:20Carl Richardson:And I actually said to myself, am I going to get to work alive today? And I sat there, and I couldn't answer it. So I called out sick, and I never drove again.

41:34Timothy B. Lee:It's a hard thing to give up.

41:36Carl Richardson: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 eyesight 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 has a father where they say, Dad, I don't know if you should drive anymore. Everybody has a teenager who's texting on their phone. See, we're not even beginning to think about the possibilities of what autonomous vehicles could do.

42:17Carl Richardson:The other reason I don't want to ban autonomous vehicles in the city of Boston is because I think eventually it'll lead to personal ownership.

42:26Timothy B. Lee:And is that what you really want?

42:28Carl Richardson:Oh, you bet. I'm not kidding when I say I have a savings account where I put aside 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 a living, go to school, go to medical appointments, go to the beach on a Sunday, go visit my mom in a nursing home, whatever, with the flexibility that everybody else had.

43:00Timothy B. Lee:Carl 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. 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.

43:26Carl Richardson:Imagine that you're blind and your mother calls you at 7 o 'clock on a Sunday night and says, I just heard from the sheriff's department, I'm going to 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 an option because it was late on a 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.

44:06Carl Richardson:So, yes, 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.

44:16PJ Vogt:Thank you so much, Carla.

44:18Timothy B. Lee:How do you think the politicians in the room saw you?

44:22Carl Richardson:Well, I don't think they were there to hear my speech. The only one that was there to hear was the chair of their hearing.

44:31PJ Vogt:So I'm here alone now, so I think it's time to adjourn the hearing.

44:36Timothy B. Lee:All the other city councilors had left before Carl's testimony. Many of them had announced in the hearing that they had to go attend a different Teamsters event, a strike by the sanitation workers. Boston's a union town.

44:47PJ Vogt:Docket 1141 is adjourned. At that hearing, I didn't feel like the disability voice or perspective was heard.

44:57Carl Richardson:And it was then that I decided I was going to go back and bring even more people with me to the second hearing.

45:09Timothy B. Lee:The second hearing. In July, two city councilors had unveiled a fairly bold anti-Waymo ordinance. The ordinance decreed 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. That's after a short break.

45:44Julia Mejia:I'm Stephen Dubner from Freakonomics Radio. You are listening to part two of a series on driverless cars from our friends at the podcast Search Engine. We'll be right back.

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47:04Gabriela Coletta Zapata:On Decoder Ring, we dive down rabbit holes and obsessively explore questions hiding in plain sight. Like, why is protein in everything these days? And are British teeth really as bad as Americans like to think they are? And why, in the late 1990s, did people suddenly become re-obsessed with swing music? All that and more on decodering. Listen to new episodes every two weeks where you listen to podcasts.

47:31Julia Mejia:Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner. And here again is the host of the Search Engine podcast, PJ Vogt.

47:37Timothy B. Lee:Welcome back to the show and to a crisp late October day in Boston.

47:42PJ Vogt:For the record, my name is Gabriella Coletta Zapata, District 1 City Councilor. I'm the chair of the Boston City Council Committee on Government Operations. Today is October 28th, 2025. Chapter 4, A Good Fight.

47:55Timothy B. Lee:The second hearing would go differently. It would go differently from the beginning. One reason was because of its referee. Presiding Councillor Gabriela Coletta Zapata, who started by trying to establish some ground rules.

48:07PJ Vogt: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.

48:16Timothy B. Lee:The union went first, a string of testimonies from all sorts of drivers, many familiar faces from the previous hearing. And of course, Councillor Julia Mejia was here, dressed today in a jaunty black beret and black glasses.

48:28Gabriela Coletta Zapata: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, because first they come for the poor jobs, right? You know, I'm always ready for a good fight, so I walked in ready. I'm like, this is one-two punch. I'm going to take them all out this time, you know?

48:55Timothy B. Lee:Counselor Mejia, in Spanish, says they start by attacking the poorest. But from there, they keep picking us off. That the city of Boston is not going to let anyone take away the income of its people.

49:05Gabriela Coletta Zapata:No clapping, no clapping. I don't want no problems with this person. Please, no clapping. Por favor, no problem, please.

49:12Carl Richardson:The chair of the Agena made it very clear, we're going to listen to everybody. We're going to take it in the order of testimony. Everybody's going to get three minutes. There are going to be no outbursts. They control the human much better.

49:23PJ Vogt:Your testimony and your contributions. We're going to transition because we do have a long list to public testimony. So thank you. Thank you so much.

49:31Timothy B. Lee:After the union had spoken, everyone else who put their names on the list got their chance to talk.

49:35Carl Richardson:So in closing, if you do do a study, look at not only how it would negatively impact people, but look how it would positively impact people. Because to me, autonomous vehicles is not a dystopian future. There's a second side of the story. It's a legitimate side of the story. And I felt like I wasn't going to be alone because I had a lot of people with disabilities in the room with me that day.

49:57PJ Vogt:There must be more accessible, affordable, and reliable transportation.

50:01Timothy B. Lee:Carl had done his version of what the unions had done so well in the first round. He summoned his own coalition.

50:07PJ Vogt:Hello, my name is Stephen Yorke.

50:09Timothy B. Lee:These were people from Best Buddies, an organization for people with intellectual disabilities. They were citizens from Boston's blind community.

50:16PJ Vogt: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 in what 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 Waymo can go where the ride can't go.

50:51Carl Richardson:There was even a mother against drunk driving who spoke on one of the panels, right?

50:55Gabriela Coletta Zapata:Autonomous vehicles represent another important tool in the effort to eliminate impaired driving.

51:00PJ Vogt:Will you welcome Waymo into new communities?

51:01Carl Richardson:I mean, what are you going to say to a mother? You don't have a right to want autonomous vehicles since your son died?

51:07Timothy B. Lee: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

51:18Gabriela Coletta Zapata:honest like I thought I was going to get more of the last go around 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 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, hmm, they're all saying the same thing. I've seen this action. Thank you, Madam Chair. And I want to first start off by thanking the public testimony. I think to my colleague's earlier point is so important.

51:58Timothy B. Lee:So, Counselor 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.

52:06Gabriela Coletta Zapata:The people that are not the people that we're trying to serve or the people that we're trying to protect. So I just want to name that. That was very poor taste, in my personal, humble opinion. While I think it's important for us to get that on the record, I think what it did is provide...

52:21Timothy B. Lee:I think the words you used in the hearing is that you said you felt like it was in poor taste.

52:26Gabriela Coletta Zapata:I really did say poor taste? I did. Oh my God. Everybody needs therapy after they get done with my hearings. 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

52:51Timothy B. Lee:I don't know how to ask this question it's like slightly delicate but also

52:54Carl Richardson:I think I don't

52:57Timothy B. Lee:I'm not worried about like Waymo is not an accessibility company. It's not as if they're inventing autonomous vehicles for accessibility reasons. They want to reach a large market. Accessibility is part of it. It's also the fact of the accessibility issue and the fact of disabled people as allies for them is convenient.

53:25Carl Richardson:Sure, but there is AARP when they push certain things, right? And they have elderly spoke persons.

53:35Carl Richardson: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 what I'm getting into. I know that Waymo is a line in themselves. I'm not going to stay using this because I'm not, if you listen to me talk, you can't take advantage of me unless I want to 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 independence. Okay? Is Waymo reaching out to the blind community? Yes. Are they perhaps giving donations to the American Council for the Blind?

54:23Carl Richardson:Yes. But the individuals aren't making a dime. The money's going to nonprofits, right? organization. So, does that answer your question?

54:35Timothy B. Lee:Yeah, and I don't, it's like, I personally, I feel like it's just, it's a question.

54:40Carl Richardson: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 held my hands. Nobody gave me coaching. And to my knowledge, a handful of people that I recruited that testified, none of them got coaching either.

55:07Timothy B. Lee: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 ire.

55:15Gabriela Coletta Zapata:So I just want to name that that was very poor taste to utilize folks who are already vulnerable to fight on behalf of those who have so much more than any of us here.

55:24Timothy B. Lee:She directed some very strong words at the man sitting across from her, the man in a suit with gray hair.

55:31Gabriela Coletta Zapata: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?

55:45PJ Vogt:I think utilizing Waymo in an autonomous vehicle opens the door for elimination of practices, illegal practices of discrimination.

55:58Gabriela Coletta Zapata:No, that's not the question. The question is, right, because you talk about your technology and your ability.

56:04Timothy B. Lee: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.

56:15PJ Vogt:I'm not that technology advanced to answer that question.

56:18Gabriela Coletta Zapata:But you're the CEO of a technology company. No, I'm not.

56:22PJ Vogt:I'm the president and CEO of the Carroll Center for the Blind.

56:25Gabriela Coletta Zapata:I was going to say, Gary, that I am...

56:29PJ Vogt:It's Greg. Greg, oh my God.

56:31Gabriela Coletta Zapata:So somebody gave me the wrong piece of paper because they got you as the CEO of Waymo and the Greg. My team better get it together. Okay, so let's go back. Let me just stay with you real quick, right? Like, I think there is a - There was a white guy who had on a suit. 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 didn't know who he was. And I felt like, you know how when you have egg in your face? I had to pick up my face and put it back on because I was like, embarrassing.

57:04Timothy B. Lee:Because you were giving him a hard time.

57:06Gabriela Coletta Zapata:I was giving him a hard time.

57:07Timothy B. Lee:And then he has to say to you, I don't work for Waymo.

57:10Gabriela Coletta Zapata:I was like, well, okay, then. I'm still mad at you, though. It was embarrassing. 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.

57:42Timothy B. Lee:I think that if I try to sympathize with the feeling Counselor 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.

58:13Timothy B. Lee:But the whole reason I 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 Coletta Zapata, said this in the room pretty explicitly.

58:56Timothy B. Lee:Nobody had been paid to be there.

58:57PJ Vogt: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.

59:12Timothy B. Lee:Counselor Coletta Zapata. You can see her in the video. Shoulder length, brown hair, big clear glasses. Like Counselor 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? What happened when a blind person ordered 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.

59:48Timothy B. Lee:Can 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 felt like on Waymo's 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 core trade-offs here when you talk about this could be really good or this could be really bad.

1:00:23PJ Vogt: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.

1:00:42Timothy B. Lee: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?

1:00:54PJ Vogt:I love the magic wand question. Because it always talks about 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 I had a magic wand, how many folks would this employ? How many folks would ultimately lose their job? And 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?

1:01:35PJ Vogt:Because I think that's a central question to, okay, is 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 behooves 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.

1:02:05Timothy B. Lee: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, that finding a solution would mean 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 Coletta Zapata's 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.

1:02:41Timothy B. Lee:Emily and I left Boston. As we zipped down I-95 in a human-driven car, talking about what we'd seen, here's where things stood back in Beantown. 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 counselors had spent eight hours speaking in full-throated support of. 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.

1:03:21Timothy B. Lee:Essentially a ban. driving home i had a realization about what we'd seen there emily and i had sat for days with different people who all believed they'd glimpsed a vision of the future abdiaziz 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 counselor mejia had an ominous vision where 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 B.

1:04:03Timothy B. Lee:Lee. 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 will 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 allowed to drive?

1:04:27PJ Vogt: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 to get a driver's license has been 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 their livelihood might depend on it. But once driverless taxis are cheap or once you can buy a driverless vehicle, a judge might be much more comfortable saying, like, the penalty for your first instance of direct driving is a lifetime ban on driving a car.

1:04:54PJ Vogt:Like, you can have a driverless car that takes wherever you want, but you just can't get behind the wheel.

1:05:02Timothy B. Lee:In Timothy's vision, change comes fast. In about five years, driverless cars are as common as Uber'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 shared 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 Uber 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 it displaces.

1:05:50Timothy B. Lee:There are precedents for this. When containerization put a ton of longshoremen out of 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 D.C., which has been delaying driverless cars with bureaucratic hurdles.

1:06:25Timothy B. Lee:Or in New York, where my governor talked briefly about allowing driverless cars then retreated under pressure.

1:06:35Timothy B. Lee: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 no.

1:07:07Thank you.

1:07:50Julia Mejia:That, again, was PJ Vogt and a special two-part feed drop from the Search Engine podcast. Let us know what you think. Our email is radio at Freakonomics.com. You can also leave a comment on your favorite podcast app. Big thanks to PJ and his team for sharing this series with us. You can find Search Engine Podcast on your favorite podcast app also. Coming up next time on the show, until all cars are autonomous cars, we humans are still in charge. So we look at a new research paper which finds that driving on certain days is particularly dangerous. What days am I talking about?

1:08:32PJ Vogt:Album release days are basically natural experiments. They're moments where millions of people suddenly now have a reason to pick up their phone and interact with it, sometimes while driving.

1:08:42Julia Mejia:So, do Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny have blood on their hands? That's next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself. And, if you can, someone else, too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app. It's also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish transcripts and show notes. For Search Engine, this episode was produced by Emily Malter. The show was created by PJ Vogt and Shruthi Pinamaneni. Garrett Graham is their senior producer. Leah Reese Dennis is their executive producer. Fact-checking was done by Mary Mathis. And sound design and original composition by Armin Bizarian.

1:09:21Julia Mejia:Their production intern is Piper Dumont. For Freakonomics Radio, this episode was produced by Dalvin Abawaji and edited by Ellen Frankman. The Freakonomics Radio network staff also includes Augusta Chapman, Eleanor Osborne, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Elaria Montenacourt, Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, Tao Jacobs, and Zach Lipinski. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by The Hitchhikers, and our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thanks for listening.

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