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In a Driverless World, Who Loses and Who Wins?

Freakonomics Radio

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  • Abdi Aziz Joined Uber To Survive The Taxi Collapse
    • Abdi Aziz saw Uber as an extinction event for Boston taxis and joined early because he believed resistance was futile.
    • Uber gave him a laptop and 200 phones a week to recruit drivers into the very app he thought would kill his old business. Transcript: PJ Vogt I met Abdi Aziz in Boston, where he’s been a driver for many decades. He was doing it all the way back in the 90s. Back then, he considered taxi driver to be a decent job. A career. Abdi Aziz Professionally, I’ve been driving for 30 years now. 30 years? Yes. I had a limo service for 10 years. And then I was doing five years for a cab, a taxi. PJ Vogt And then, one day in 2011, Abdi Aziz was hanging out at the airport with the other drivers when these men from the future showed up with a plan to change his life. Abdi Aziz When Uber came, I remember by 2011, they came to the airport. We were in the waiting area at the Logan. We have a designated parking lot where we wait the fares. So they come there and they say, hey, you know, we are introducing you in a company that will do the same as a taxi, but it’s an app. We want you guys to join with us. And, you know, you can have your own car. We will give you a phone with the app, and we can sign you up, and you can make money. What did you think? At the time, I say, it is good, but you didn’t come here to help us. You come here to kill this business. Okay? You knew. I knew. PJ Vogt Abdi Aziz had not been born yesterday. Here’s what he understood immediately. The taxi business he operated in up until now had worked as a kind of monopoly. In Boston, like many American cities, you legally were not allowed to drive a cab without a taxi license, a medallion. New medallions were almost never issued. So assuming you could afford to buy or rent a medallion, the city itself would make your job stable by protecting you from competition. But Uber was about to kill that system. Uber drivers just drove without medallions. The company argued that since they were picking up passengers via this newfangled phone app, they didn’t need them. Abdi Aziz knew that this was going to kill the industry, at least as it currently existed. Taxi driver would still be a job, but medallion-owning taxi driver would not be. A wave was coming. He knew what he had to do. And so he told his fellow taxi drivers his strategy for dealing with Uber, the company that had come to kill their industry. Abdi Aziz I told them, listen, I’m going to join them. I said, I see where they’re going. I read a lot of articles about them. They start from San Francisco. They went to Chicago. I say, they are expanding. So we can’t stop this. We cannot stop Uber. PJ Vogt So Abdi Aziz found himself working for Uber. He says someone at the company handed him his new marching orders. Abdi Aziz We’re going to give you a laptop. We’re going to give you 200 phones each week. So we want you to give these phones to the drivers that you hire. But we want you to set it up. They need to bring their driver license. They need to bring their social security. And you sign them up. Everyone that you sign, you give them the phone, you activate the phone. They’re good to go. PJ Vogt So they were giving you 200 iPhones a week to give out? To give out, yeah, to the drivers. So it’s crazy. It’s like they’re coming to kill your business. Exactly. I knew. I knew. Speaker 6 I knew. Abdi Aziz That’s why I said, if you cannot beat them, join them, you know? (Time 0:02:28)
  • Uber Taught Drivers How Platform Power Turns On Workers
    • Abdi Aziz says Uber first lured drivers with generous pay, then used algorithmic pricing and oversupply to squeeze them.
    • That pressure pushed drivers toward unionizing just as Waymo appeared, now threatening to eliminate drivers entirely rather than just medallions. Transcript: PJ Vogt In 2022, Uber began rolling out a big change to its platform. Instead of taking a set percentage of each fare, Uber started using an algorithm to offer its drivers variable rates based on what its system thought each driver would accept for a given Ride. The drivers believe that Uber, once it stops showing them its take, raised that take by a lot. Uber, who we contacted for the story, maintains that their take rate is still, quote, around 20 percent, and that what’s gone up actually are government taxes and fees. But Abdi Aziz does not believe them. And most drivers I’ve talked to share his view. Abdi Aziz’s perspective is that once Uber and Lyft had leverage, they started using it against the drivers. The market was wide open. New drivers signed up every day. If you didn’t like it, you could leave. To Abdi Aziz and his fellow drivers, this all felt like a bait-and They could quit, but many of them had car loans. What they actually wanted was for the companies to raise their pay closer to what it had been before. They wanted better pay. They wanted some other concessions. Some of the drivers started thinking about whether there might be some way to exercise power over the apps. They started talking about a union. And so Abdi Aziz found himself, once again, a recruiter for a disruptive new organization. Abdi Aziz So when we started, we were like 400 drivers. PJ Vogt And we joined the union. So you were early on Uber, you were early in the union. Abdi Aziz Exactly, exactly, exactly. Because I’ve been in the industry for, you know, quite a while, you know, 30 years. I know what is going on. You know, it is, it’s my profession, you know? So, and the union, they, you know, they say, okay, call all the drivers, let us unite, and then we’re going to go to the state. PJ Vogt And did it feel a little bit like, like when Uber was having you sign people up and then the unions having you sign people up, did it feel similar? Like going around, like explaining something to people, telling them what the benefits are? Absolutely. Absolutely. Exactly. Because you see a lot of drivers, they don’t know nothing about union. Things were looking promising. They got a big ballot initiative in front of Massachusetts voters that gave them the right to even try to unionize. They were collecting signatures. But then, during this still-fledgling moment in their union drive, a different tech company appeared on the horizon. Do you remember the first time you heard about Waymo? Abdi Aziz The Waymo, the first time I heard was back in 2022. I heard in San Francisco that they are doing testing. PJ Vogt What did you think? Abdi Aziz I said, okay, I mean, I’m not against technology. You know, I welcome any technology, same as Uber, when they come to business. But I knew where they’re heading to. You know, see, when Uber came, their aim was to kill taxi business. Now Waymo is to kill the drivers. (Time 0:06:34)
  • In Blue Cities The Waymo Debate Is Really About Jobs
    • PJ Vogt found that in blue cities the autonomous-vehicle fight centers less on safety than on protecting union jobs.
    • Boston hearings became a labor rally, with Teamsters and app drivers framing Waymo as a threat to hard-won organizing power. Transcript: PJ Vogt Boston City Councilors began meeting last summer to discuss preemptively banning Waymo from their city. The first meeting took place in July inside Boston City Hall, a room resplendent in many hues of municipal Brown. The stated agenda for the hearing, docket 1141, sounded neutral to the point of boring. Order for a hearing to evaluate autonomous vehicle operations in the city of Boston. Speaker 6 The goals for today’s hearing is to gather information, hear from stakeholders, and better understand the regulatory landscape. PJ Vogt Despite this very dry description, what was actually going to happen would be significantly more raucous. These hearings started out with the flavor and intensity of a political rally. People wanted to find a way to stop these cars. And this would be the room where they laid out the case as to why. It’d be the beginning of the fight. Some version of this fight has been happening with increasing frequency in American cities. Not all cities. Blue cities. There’s this pattern, actually observed by reporter Timothy B. Lee, which is that cities in red and purple states like Austin and Phoenix mostly welcome Waymo, whereas places like D.C. And New York fight it. In cities that fight Waymo, the conversation is less about safety and much more about whether robo-taxis will take away jobs. My hope was if I paid attention to Boston, maybe what was beginning here as just a fight would evolve into politicians starting to think through some kind of compromise. I think these kinds of compromises, finding solutions for workers who AI could displace, they are probably one of the most important challenges for our politicians today. And so Boston, for me, was a test case. Are we capable? Were our politics ready? So here’s how things began. Bostonians were here today to talk about something contentious, jobs. But they started with the one thing everybody could probably agree on. Boston’s streets, the battleground here, were barely fit for human driving, let alone Waymo. Boston is one of the oldest major cities in the country, with narrow one-way streets, alleys, and the lack of a traditional grid system. Gabriela Coletta Zapata It’s really, really difficult to drive. Stephen J. Dubner You look at the map, it looks like a child’s drawing, you know? Carl Richardson We also have issues with double park cars, ride shares, delivery vehicles. PJ Vogt 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. We need to address potential layoffs for our union drivers with the introduction of self-driving cars. Gabriela Coletta Zapata 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. PJ Vogt The App Drivers Union, Abdi Aziz’s union, were the stars of the hearing today. Carl Richardson I’m a proud member of ADU, App Drivers Union, and I’m here to ask you to particular local jobs. Stephen J. Dubner Rideshare drivers just want the right to unionize and to fight for better wages and conditions. Robot cars threaten all of this progress. PJ Vogt Abdi Aziz would show up too at a later hearing. Abdi Aziz I understand it is a business, it is capitalism, but not in my city at the expense of our jobs. PJ Vogt Thank you. 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 is 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. 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 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. Stephen J. Dubner Boston is a union town. And you hear the… Our city, we’re proud of Union City. We’re proud of our workers. We’re proud of… PJ Vogt Boston is a union town. We’re not any of those other cities. Speaker 6 We’re a union city here in the city of Boston. We want to protect… PJ Vogt 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. Speaker 6 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. Julia Mejia When the first responder arrived, they administered NACAN. Had I not seen him and acted quickly, he may have died. Stephen J. Dubner To me, a person, to Waymo, an obstacle to avoid. PJ Vogt 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. Stephen J. Dubner We see the writing on the wall. We know that driverless car and truck companies are salivating at the idea that they could eliminate Teamster jobs. PJ Vogt 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. Stephen J. Dubner Just a few months ago, I was knocking doors with drivers across the city to give them the right to organize. PJ Vogt 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 the councilors already knew some of these answers. That maybe they were asking more just to get the answers on the public record. Julia Mejia 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? PJ Vogt 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? Stephen J. Dubner Thank you for the question, Counselor Mejia. It rhymes with hero. Julia Mejia Zero. Stephen J. Dubner Zero. Julia Mejia So this is why I asked the question, because oftentimes things are being done to us without us, right? (Time 0:10:37)
  • Julia Mejia Framed Robotaxis As A Moral Fight Over Work
    • Julia Mejia treated Waymo as part of a broader moral pattern where automation strips low-wage workers of entry-level jobs.
    • She compared robo-taxis to self-checkout machines and repeatedly demanded a concrete replacement job path for current drivers; Waymo offered none. Transcript: PJ Vogt 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. Julia Mejia If we’re competing with machines, it will ultimately have an impact on our drivers. Speaker 6 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… PJ Vogt 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. Julia Mejia 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. Speaker 6 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 and that meets the needs. Julia Mejia Are we saying that our Uber and Lyft drivers and our app drivers are not safe drivers? Speaker 6 I am not making comments specifically about the safety of Uber and Lyft. What I can say is that over 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. Julia Mejia Waymo is a robot. So let’s, let’s, let’s, let’s. Without a, you’re totally correct. Let’s be really clear about what it is. It’s an apparatus. Speaker 6 We refer, when we say Waymo driver, I know the chair brought this up earlier. Let’s not do that. We, that is the, what we call the way, that is what we call technology. And I understand it has sensitivities. It’s very triggering. Understood and heard loud and clear. Julia Mejia I just want to make sure that we’re not driving. That’s not happening. So right now in supermarkets, they do these self-check. 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 bee side. You know, like, we’re going to go hard for honey. You know, like, we’re crazy like that. PJ Vogt 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 Maltair a quick lesson on Boston, this foreign country where I’d happily landed. Julia Mejia We’re 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. PJ Vogt 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? Julia Mejia Yeah, right before the hearing. 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 gonna, 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 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. I’m like, wow, people like this. So I was- You start searching back because you’re curious. PJ Vogt And then the algorithm starts being like just videos of like happy people in driverless cars. Julia Mejia I’m like, oh, wow. Like, 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… Yeah, that’s even creepier. So that was like, ew. Yeah, no. PJ Vogt 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. And so 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. That’s Julia’s perspective. 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. Julia Mejia 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, right? 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? When you look at it now, like do you feel- I tell people too. Really? Get out of the line. What you doing there? You know that’s somebody’s job that you just took? The 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. PJ Vogt 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 worrying her, those self-checkout machines. Julia Mejia So right now, in supermarkets, they do these self-checkouts. Correct. Right? And those are taking jobs from people. And it seems like there is a trend here. 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 (Time 0:17:20)
  • Safety Evidence Struggled To Break Through Boston Politics
    • PJ Vogt argues Boston politics gave job loss far more airtime than lives potentially saved by safer autonomous driving.
    • Julia Mejia rejected that tradeoff, saying she trusts humans more because a machine cannot instinctively help after a crash. Transcript: PJ Vogt Of the issue, Matt Walsh was an outsider. 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 pinata. 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. Emily Maltaire, my colleague who’d been observing the interview in Counselor Mejia’s office, at one point she chimed in. Gabriela Coletta Zapata 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? No. Julia Mejia 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, 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. PJ Vogt For you, it’s like, I don’t think there’s anything they would show you where you would think you just trust humans more. I (Time 0:27:20)
  • Carl Richardson Sees Autonomous Cars As Lost Freedom Returned
    • Carl Richardson, who is nearly blind and hard of hearing, sees autonomous vehicles as a path back to freedom he lost when he stopped driving.
    • He recalls asking himself, before one last commute, whether he would get to work alive and never driving again. Transcript: Carl Richardson Hi, how are you Emily? Nice to meet you. Hi Carl, PJ. PJ, how are you? Good, how are you? Good, good. Come on buddy, let’s go. But I recognized him when I saw him. PJ Vogt 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. Chapter 3, The Right to Autonomy. Carl told me the story of the day as he’d experienced it. Carl Richardson First of all, when I walked across City Hall Plaza, you could hear protests and rallies, union protests and rallies. Stephen J. Dubner To driverless cars, and yes, to human beings. Union. Power. Union. Power. Julia Mejia When I say justice, you’re right. Carl Richardson You’re right! 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. They didn’t even want to testify. Why? PJ Vogt What did they find specifically discouraging? Carl 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. PJ Vogt 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. Abdi Aziz Carl Richardson, you have two minutes. Nice to see you. Carl Richardson Yes, hi, my name is Carl Richardson. I am the Massachusetts Statehouse ADA coordinator and also an advisory board member for May. PJ Vogt You see Carl. He’s wearing a light blue button-up and a tie. Carl 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 I’ve done? PJ Vogt 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. Carl 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 deny me my civil rights. I often get denied access, too, because they won’t go beyond the city limits because they’re worried about maximizing their revenue and the ability to pick up a return fare. PJ Vogt 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. 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. Carl 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, you know, and I want that back. But 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. PJ Vogt What type of car did you drive? Carl Richardson Well, whatever I hadn’t totaled. I drove, what, 10, 12 years? I think I totaled five cars 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. PJ Vogt It was hard to let go of driving? Yeah. Carl Richardson But what finally happened is I stepped behind the wheel of a car one day to get them ready to go to work. 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 thick, and I never drove again. PJ Vogt It’s a hard thing to give up. Yeah. Carl Richardson 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. The other reason I don’t want to ban autonomous vehicles in the city of Boston is because I think eventually (Time 0:35:15)
  • For Disabled Riders The Current System Already Fails
    • Carl Richardson says transportation barriers cost disabled people jobs and basic autonomy, even when ride-hailing technically exists.
    • He says drivers deny him at least weekly for traveling with a guide dog, and three cancellations once delayed him from reaching his distressed mother. Transcript: PJ Vogt Done? 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. Carl 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 deny me my civil rights. I often get denied access, too, because they won’t go beyond the city limits because they’re worried about maximizing their revenue and the ability to pick up a return fare. PJ Vogt 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. 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. Carl 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, you know, and I want that back. But 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. PJ Vogt What type of car did you drive? Carl Richardson Well, whatever I hadn’t totaled. I drove, what, 10, 12 years? I think I totaled five cars 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. PJ Vogt It was hard to let go of driving? Yeah. Carl Richardson But what finally happened is I stepped behind the wheel of a car one day to get them ready to go to work. 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 thick, and I never drove again. PJ Vogt It’s a hard thing to give up. Yeah. Carl Richardson 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. 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. PJ Vogt And is that what you really want? Carl 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 appointment, go to the beach on a Sunday, go visit my Mom in a nursing home, whatever, with the flexibility that everybody else has. PJ Vogt 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. Carl Richardson Imagine that you’re blind and your mother called you at seven o’clock on a Sunday night and said, 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. 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. (Time 0:38:13)
  • Disability Testimony Changed The Energy Of The Second Hearing
    • The second Boston hearing changed when disability advocates arrived in force and made autonomy, access, and drunk-driving prevention impossible to ignore.
    • Carl Richardson said the room experienced a seismic shift as blind riders, Best Buddies members, and a mother against drunk driving testified. Transcript: PJ Vogt 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. Stephen J. Dubner The driverless car in Boston was on trial. PJ Vogt That’s after a short break. Stephen J. Dubner I’m Stephen Dubner from Freakonomics Radio. You are listening to part two of the series on driverless cars from our friends at the podcast Search Engine. We’ll be right back. Speaker 6 Tires matter. 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Speaker 6 Adobe Acrobat, your new foundation. Use PDF spaces to generate a presentation. Grab your dots, your permits, your moves. AI levels up your pitch, gets it in a groove. Choose a template with your timeless cool. Come on now, let’s flex those tunes. Drive, design, deliver, make it sing. AI builds the deck so you can build that thing. Do that, do that, do that with Acrobat. Stephen J. Dubner Learn more at adobe.com/do that with Acrobat. Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner, and here again is the host of the Search Engine podcast, PJ Vogt. PJ Vogt Welcome back to the show and to a crisp late October day in Boston. Gabriela Coletta Zapata For the record, my name is Gabriela Coletta Zapata, District 1 City Councilor, and I’m the chair of the Boston City Council Committee on Government Operations. Today is October 28th, 2025. PJ Vogt Chapter 4, A Good Fight. The second hearing would go differently. It would go differently from the beginning. One reason was because of its referee, presiding counselor Gabriela Coletta Zapata, who started by trying to establish some ground rules. Gabriela Coletta Zapata 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. PJ Vogt The union went first, a string of testimonies from all sorts of drivers, many familiar faces from the previous hearing. And of course, Counselor Julia Mejia was here, dressed today in a jaunty black beret and black glasses. Julia Mejia 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? PJ Vogt 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. Carl Richardson No clapping, no clapping. Julia Mejia I want no problems with this people. Please, no clapping. Por favor, no problem, please. Carl 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 hearing much better. Gabriela Coletta Zapata 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. PJ Vogt After the union had spoken, everyone else who put their names on the list got their chance to talk. Carl 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. It is my… 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. There must be more accessible, affordable, and reliable transportation. PJ Vogt Carl had done his version of what the unions had done so well in the first round. He summoned his own coalition. Abdi Aziz Hello, my name is Stephen Yorty from the… PJ Vogt These were people from Best Buddies, an organization for people with intellectual disabilities. They were citizens from Boston’s blind community. Gabriela Coletta Zapata 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… Carl Richardson I felt the room had a almost what I would call a seismic shift. Gabriela Coletta Zapata Autonomous vehicles have the potential to give me and other people with disabilities increased independence, mobility, and flexibility. Carl Richardson I think we can go where the ride can’t go. There was even a mother against drunk driving who spoke on one of the panels, right? Gabriela Coletta Zapata Autonomous vehicles represent another important tool in the effort to eliminate impaired driving. Carl 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? PJ Vogt What were you just, like, feeling watching them talk? Julia Mejia So, you know, to be honest with you, at first, I didn’t know what I was walking into. Like, to be 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 it was very, you know, scripted. And I haven’t worked in this space to 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, it’s so important. PJ Vogt So, Councillor 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. Julia Mejia The people that we’re trying to benefit from (Time 0:45:01)
  • The Real Tradeoff Requires Challenging Every Side
    • The hearings exposed a real policy conflict: workers facing displacement versus disabled riders and safer roads, with no side easy to dismiss.
    • Gabriela Coletta Zapata argued good policymaking means challenging corporations, unions, and advocates instead of granting any camp blanket deference. Transcript: PJ Vogt I don’t know how to ask this question. It’s like slightly delicate, but also I’m… Carl Richardson Go for it. If I don’t want to answer it, I’ll figure it out. PJ Vogt I think I don’t, I’m not worried about… Like Waymo is not an accessibility company. Like it’s not as if they’re inventing autonomous vehicles for accessibility reasons. They want to reach a large market. Like 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. Carl Richardson Sure, but so is AARP when they push certain things, right? And they have elderly spoke persons. 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? There’s way more reaching out to the blind community. Yes. Are they perhaps giving donations to the American Council for the Blind? Yes. But the individuals aren’t making a dime. The money’s going to a nonprofit organization. So does that answer your question? PJ Vogt Yeah, and I don’t, it’s like I personally, I feel like it’s just, it’s a question. I don’t feel like I’m being used if that’s what you’re getting at. They never said how to testify. Carl Richardson 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, the handful of people that I recruited that testified, none of them got coaching either. PJ Vogt 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. Julia Mejia 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. PJ Vogt She directed some very strong words at the man sitting across from her. The man in a suit with gray hair. Julia Mejia 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? Speaker 6 I think utilizing Waymo in an autonomous vehicle opens the door for elimination of practices, the legal practices of discrimination. Julia Mejia No, that’s not the question. The question is, right, because you talk about your technology and your ability. PJ Vogt 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? Speaker 6 That’s the question. I’m not that technology to answer that question. But you’re the CEO of a technology company. Julia Mejia No, I’m not. Abdi Aziz No, I’m the president and CEO of the Carroll Center for the Blind. Julia Mejia Well, I was going to say, Gary, that I am… It’s Greg. Abdi Aziz Greg, oh my God. Julia Mejia So somebody gave me the wrong piece of paper, because they got you as the CEO of Waymo and the Greg. Like, my team better get it together. Okay, so let’s go back. Let me just stay with you real quick. 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. PJ Vogt Because you were giving him a hard time. Julia Mejia I was giving him a hard time. PJ Vogt And then he has to say to you, I don’t work for Waymo. Julia Mejia 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. PJ Vogt 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. But the whole reason I’d 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. Nobody had been paid to be there. Gabriela Coletta Zapata 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. PJ Vogt 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. Can I just tell you, and I don’t know if this is a question or just like a statement, when I was (Time 0:52:47)
  • If Robotaxis Are Coming The Fight Should Shift To Compensation
    • PJ Vogt concludes driverless cars will likely spread anyway, so the real task is bargaining over who shares the gains and who absorbs the losses.
    • He points to the longshore union’s containerization deal as a model: accept the machines, but fund job guarantees and early retirements. Transcript: PJ Vogt 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. Abdi Aziz 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. 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 we’ll 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? I do think that society’s tolerance for bad driving is going to go down. Stephen J. Dubner 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 drunk driving Is a lifetime ban on driving a car. PJ Vogt Like, you can have a driverless car that takes it wherever you want, but you just can’t get behind the wheel. 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 at this places. 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. Or in New York, where my governor talked briefly about allowing driverless cars, then retreated under pressure. 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. (Time 1:03:19)