The case against self-driving taxis isn't worse than the average driver

At the turn of the century, named Y2K out of a combination of brevity and panic, we were told that the world’s computers would go berserk, planes would fall from the sky and missiles might fire off on their own. Instead, that era produced something even worse: minivan drivers.

Whether it was because they were distracted by kids, hauling shifting cargo or approaching ages normally associated with U.S. presidential candidates, they were notoriously awful, a menace to everything on the road. Even possums would turn around and run back into the woods when they saw one of them careening down the highway.

My point is, we escaped this era scarred but battle-hardened, and if we can survive them, in my view we can survive driverless cars as well.

But in San Francisco, state officials are not so sure. This week the state of California pulled the permits of self-driving taxis, stating that they represented an “unreasonable risk” to public safety. In other words, the City by the Bay was at risk of becoming the City in the Bay.

The Washington Post called it a “major setback” for General Motors’ autonomous car company Cruise after the quip “cruisin’ for a bruisin’” became all too plausible.

“This move comes months after state regulators opened an investigation into a spate of ‘concerning incidents’ involving Cruise vehicles in San Francisco and ordered the company to cut its fleet by 50 percent," the post reported.

The Cruise taxis operate on information supplied by Google, which explains a lot. It may not know where you’re going, but it knows that you were searching “fun with gerbils” at 2 a.m. and is willing to sell that information to the highest bidder.

I don’t know that I’m totally comfortable with self-driving cars, especially the ones that appear to have a 19th century threshing machine on the roof. I know the technology will improve in time, but right now they look less like basic transportation than some sort of middle-school science fair entry.

The state says the driverless taxis are still allowed on the road if they have a driver, which sort of defeats the point. It’s like ordering you to follow your Roomba around the living room.

Cruise executives, meanwhile, say the judgment against autonomous taxis is “overblown” and that news reporting of incidents involving these driverless cars has been “sensationalized.”

Normally I would never take the side of some greedy CEO against the humble Fourth Estate, but I wonder if maybe he doesn’t have a point.

The accident that prompted the DMV’s action involved a human driver who hit a jaywalker and knocked her into the path of an oncoming robotaxi. I take it that when something weird happens, these taxis are programmed just to park and await further instructions — which 99 times out of 100 is going to be the right move, the exception being when you have a human being hanging from your chassis.

But is anyone blaming the jaywalker? No. Is anyone blaming the person who hit her? No. The robotaxi is taking the fall for real-person mistakes.

Of course there have been other incidents as well. The Post reported that “In August, a driverless car entered the intersection of a green light and was struck by a firetruck on its way to an emergency scene. A few days prior, a car got stuck in wet concrete and had to be retrieved by a Cruise employee. Around the same time, several vehicles stalled in traffic in a busy intersection on a weekend night.

OK, and this sort of thing is different from normal, human taxi drivers’ behavior — how?

In baseball, we have this statistic called “Wins Above Replacement” which values players by how much of an improvement they are over the average Joe. So if robotaxis have 10 “incidents,” but the same number of human taxi drivers have 12, aren’t we better off?

Yes, on every planet except San Francisco.

Got your broomstick ready? We've got a cauldron full of local Halloween fun this weekend.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Have you seen other drivers? Robotaxis really aren't that bad