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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Yes, New York City may have just taken a major step toward allowing driverless cars on its streets. Are you scared yet? Mayor Eric Adams and the City's Department of Transportation unveiled a set of safety requirements for autonomous vehicle testing. They unveiled it last week. They also announced a new permitting program for companies that want to test the technology on a street near you. Now, to be clear and to be fair, these autonomous vehicles, as they're called, won't immediately be driverless anytime soon.

One of the newly released safety requirements is for a trained driver to be behind the wheel, at least for now. What exactly does driverless or autonomous mean in New York City, and what exactly are we in for? Let's ask Sam Schwartz, former longtime "Gridlock Sam" Columnist in the Daily News, former New York City Traffic Commissioner, president, and CEO of Sam Schwartz Pedestrian Traffic Management, and author of the book, which is 60 years old now. This is not a brand-new topic. No One At the Wheel: Driverless Cars and the Road of the Future. Sam, always great to have you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Sam Schwartz: Thank you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Let me ask you the 101 question first for people who are just getting their heads around even this concept. What's a driverless car, autonomous car, robocar, whatever you want to call it, how does it actually work?

Sam Schwartz: Usually has one or as many as three of the following devices, machine vision, so it can discern whether it's a person, a dog, a log in the road, a lidar, which is like light radar, and radar itself to be able to bounce off objects. Then it has an algorithm in its computer system that decides to proceed, to stop. It could read signs, it could read speed limit signs. It can do many things. When you're in an environment with no people, it works perfectly. The real problem is people.

Brian Lehrer: Because there are no robo pedestrians and humans make human errors.

Sam Schwartz: Yes. The New Yorker, first of all, the New York market is a pretty tough one. New Yorkers don't stand on the curb waiting for the light to change. They take the first few feet of the roadway. Is their trajectory going into the path of that car? Those are all decisions that have to be made by an algorithm, which has to be made by a computer geek somewhere that decides that the New York pedestrian will stop. Most of us make eye contact. We figure out they're not going. We could proceed, but a machine has a very difficult time doing that.

Brian Lehrer: The mayor and the Department of Transportation have made it clear, as I said in the intro, that for now autonomous vehicles will be required to have a so-called safety driver behind the wheel. What does the human in that role do?

Sam Schwartz: There's something called disengagements in autonomous vehicles. A disengagement is sometimes the autonomous vehicle will tell you. "Oh, oh, I don't know what to do. Take over." In some cases, you're riding in that autonomous vehicle in the driver's seat, and you see it going into a barrier or a person and you hit the brake. The purpose of that individual is to deal with both automatic disengagements by the vehicle, and disengagements based on what the driver does. That's a really tough job. The average disengagement-- I was looking at some statistics-- occurs every 600 miles.

That means for 599 miles, the person is doing nothing. For that person to then be alert on the 600th mile is pretty difficult. I've spoken to some of the operators and it's one of the worst jobs, and sadly, the person who gets hung should there be a tragedy, which happened in Phoenix, is that driver who was looking down at her phone as the car detected a pedestrian, but the algorithm said, forget about it, hit the woman. She was walking a bike across the road and killed her. The EV company did not get hung, but the operator got hung.

Brian Lehrer: Wow.

Sam Schwartz: Probably making minimum wage.

Brian Lehrer: I imagine it's a difficult decision for a person. Because if you're actually driving the car, you're looking at everything that you can see and you know that any decision that has to be made is your decision. If it's an autonomous vehicle, first, the person who's also in there behind the wheel has to decide, should I intervene or not? That takes time, right?

Sam Schwartz: Yes. It could take a half second, it could take a second, and at 60 miles an hour you're moving at 90 feet a second. A second or a fraction of a second really matters.

Brian Lehrer: In the statement from the mayor announcing the new permitting program and safety requirements, he said this of autonomous vehicles, "This technology is coming whether we like it or not, so we're going to make sure that we get it right." Quote from Mayor Adams last week, "Is the future inevitably driverless on the streets of New York City?" At least in part, the mayor suggests it is. Do you agree?

Sam Schwartz: I agree with the fact that we may see some autonomous vehicles. I think the mayor's approach, there's some mistakes in it. First, he calls for self-certification of these vehicles, whether they've been in crashes or not. Brian, this is the most opaque industry I have ever seen in my life. They don't share anything. It's unlike when Volvo did the three-point seatbelt [unintelligible 00:06:27], it shared it with everybody. Nobody tells anybody anything. When the federal government required voluntary assessment of crashes, only 18 of 80 companies responded.

The mayor is allowing these vehicles to go on the street without the rigors that we should have that every crash must be reported. Every incident must be reported. They've already been found out that they're not being truthful. Cruise struck a woman. Actually, another car, conventional car struck a woman this is a few months ago, the woman ended up on the Cruise car. Under the Cruise car. The Cruise car stopped and then dragged the woman. Now, Cruise only reported the first part of it in the beginning, and they didn't report the second part. They were caught in a bald-faced lie. Cruise can no longer operate in San Francisco.

Waymo is probably far ahead of any of the others, but still there are problems with Waymo vehicles. The stats that I looked at, these vehicles do get into crashes more frequently than your conventional car. Your average driver does not get into a fatal crash in the United States for about 75 million miles. Now, that's a hard barrier for an autonomous vehicle to achieve going 75 million miles without a fatality. In Europe, by the way, it's like 300 or 400 million miles. Our fatality rate is really the worst among developed countries.

Brian Lehrer: Why?

Sam Schwartz: I think the whole cowboy attitudes that we have post-COVID of the 30 most developed countries in the OECD, 28 of them went down in traffic crashes. We were the only ones along with Sweden for whatever reason, that went up in traffic fatalities. In New York City, the police were writing a million summonses in 2018. Now they're writing about 700,000 summonses. There's a degree of lawlessness especially post-COVID that I'm seeing on the roads that I haven't seen in nearly 60 years, and I was a cab driver in the 1960s.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, who has a question? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Beyond that, who has an experience? Have you ever been in one? Have you ever worked on developing one? Questions or stories or your anxieties or your reassurances. Welcome here for my guest, Sam Schwartz. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text. Nate on the Lower East Side, I think has a story from what, Nate, today?

Nate: Yes, actually today. Thank you, Brian, for taking my phone call. I'm an Uber driver. I've called in before and I appreciate that I get through sometimes. Literally, when I heard this, I'm coming back from Greenwich, Connecticut. I will not drive with a passenger in the car, but Tesla is now offering full self-driving for one month to owners of Tesla's. I accepted it on my way back from dropping off a passenger. I said, "Let me give it a try." I made it back in one piece. It was incredibly almost in two-- it seemed to know what it was doing. It would pass cars. It had no trouble with merges or anything like that. It sounds like I'm countering what your guest is saying. I don't believe that it's a good idea to have self-driving in New York City at this point. Yes.

Brian Lehrer: But you had a good experience with it today?

Nate: I had a good experience with it. I also told the screener there's a difference between full self-driving and autopilot. Tesla has both and all Tesla's come with autopilot as standard equipment in the car, and that's basically an upgraded version of cruise control. You're driving along. It doesn't have to be a straight line. It will follow the roadway and whatnot, and it'll slow down when it gets next to other cars, but it won't stop at lights. It won't stop at signs or anything. One thing that I don't think is being mentioned is that you actually have to grab the wheel periodically. It makes sure that it's not like a rhythmic thing so that you're not sure when it's going to happen. The car needs to know that you're paying attention.

Brian Lehrer: Wow. You mean it randomly says, "Hey, human, touch me so I know you're there."

Nate: Right. You have to grip the wheel and there isn't an exact spot where you need to grip, so you'll find yourself gripping at the wheel. The way that they want you to do it is when you're using a full self-driving as you actually have your hands on the wheel, and they have eye tracking. Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Thank you. Keep calling us. Nate, stay safe out there as an Uber driver. We love our Uber and Lyft and taxi drivers. No matter what kind of vehicle you drive, you're always welcome to call this show and talk about your experiences, drivers out there taking passengers for a living. We got that call, Sam, really interesting and we got this text also about Tesla. I've had a Tesla Model 3 since 2020. Most days, I experience driving situations that simply won't be decipherable by an autonomous vehicle. Can a car make eye contact and decipher a hand gesture suggesting, go ahead?

This technology is long, long, long way from being road ready. Writes that listener. I do have a question about that. Because advocates for autonomous vehicles say it could make streets safer for everybody if there was enough of a concentration of them, a critical mass of autonomous vehicles. Because even though they feel unsafe, because we don't have control, that's a psychological thing on the part of human beings. They are statistically much safer drivers than human beings. Is there evidence one way or another about that?

Sam Schwartz: Yes. Statistically so far, they're not. I've been able to count about 25 fatalities, many of them in Tesla's. There is no central reporting of it. When I look at how often a Waymo or a Cruise gets into a crash, it's about every 50,000 miles driven, whereas your average driver is every 500,000 miles. There is no evidence yet other than what is reported by the companies. Now, Brian, this self-certification is crazy. Imagine if drug companies did self-certification and we didn't have some oversight. For the mayor, and this mayor's not alone, just about everybody has said, "Go ahead with self-certification. We'll trust you."

Brian Lehrer: Why?

Sam Schwartz: There is this belief that the technology is going to provide us with gardens of Eden, where there'll be no pollution, there'll be no traffic jams. Brian, you can cut down on fatalities by 95% per mile traveled. You know how? Get on the subway. Subways are 95% safer even with the murders than going in a car. You can save lives. If we look at France, France is already down by two-thirds in terms of the number of fatalities compared to us. Sweden is about one-seventh of us in fatalities. We're just allowing bigger cars, faster cars, and we're corralling pedestrians-- not here in New York. New York has one piece of good news. Pedestrian fatalities have doubled since 2010 in the United States. In New York City, they've gone down. That's pretty impressive.

Brian Lehrer: Vision Zero from better intersection engineering and things like that?

Sam Schwartz: Yes. Particularly when they do things like put these traffic islands in the middle, make narrower lanes, don't follow the federal standards of 12-foot lanes leading pedestrian intervals. The city's done a damn good job in terms of pedestrians. Not such a good job in terms of occupant fatalities, motorcycle fatalities, and bike fatalities.

Brian Lehrer: Lisa in New Rochelle has an experience to share. Lisa, you're on WNYC. Hi there.

Lisa: Hi. We just got the full self-driving update two days ago. Me and my 16-year-old son have been using it a lot and loving it. It seems so much safer than an ordinary driver because it sees everything, and it anticipates things. We've been driving in a very congested city, downtown New Rochelle, and near his high school. If people are waiting on the side to cross in a crosswalk, it will stop. Where I might not have stopped. I might have thought, "Oh, there's plenty of time to get through, but it will stop. Or we drove past a construction site, and one of the workers standing really close to the side of the road.

I would've kept going and just waited. I think he was going to let me pass, but the car decided to stop for this person and let him go. I hope I don't sound like a bad driver. The truth is, I just felt like it was driving so well, it was more cautious. It seems to know when it could make the turn and when a right turn on red was allowed, and it was even able to double park which my 16-year-old son can't even do yet. We were really, really impressed with it, and it seems to me to be much safer than a human.

Brian Lehrer: There's a question. Who would you trust more on autonomous car or a 16-year-old? [laughs] Lisa, thank you very much for your anecdote. It leads me to a question that I hadn't thought of until she was talking, Sam, and that is, can you set your autonomous vehicle for different levels of caution? Computers are so programmable in so many ways, and we know that different human beings drive very differently in terms of levels of caution, even if they're driving legally in every case. Can they be programmed that way?

Sam Schwartz: Well, I think that's what government has to insist upon. That's exactly one of my recommendations is that we have street typology. What that means is there are some streets that are pedestrian only. There are some streets in which you can't go more than a walking speed five miles an hour. Some are school streets at 15 or 20 miles an hour. All that is doable. They tried to do speed governors in the 1920s in Cincinnati, in the auto industry, beat them back. I think if we're going to allow autonomous vehicles, we have to be able to control the autonomous vehicles.

Set a street typology and make them all follow that. I'm not against autonomous vehicles. I don't want you to get that wrong. I just believe we shouldn't be doing the cars first. We should be doing it as transit. Still have an operator, but all the technology that would make a bus safer can easily be installed in buses, and the driver just needs practically to drive it like you drive a train. You merely make it go forward and you stop it. You open the doors, and you close the doors.

Brian Lehrer: The Transport Workers Union would have something to say about that idea, right?

Sam Schwartz: Well, that's why I keep an operator on the vehicle. There is technology now in which the vehicle can follow such a precise path. You'll still have the bus driver or bus operator there. That person will be watching the doors. That person will be accelerating, decelerating. The Port Authority did do a test of connected autonomous buses. I attended that out in JFK Airport and they work beautifully. The first bus stopped the second bus, and the third bus-- but then a pigeon flew between the two buses and the bus stopped.

There's lots of different things that happen that you as a driver wouldn't hesitate to continue to go or you may even not stop. Imagine a tree branch that's waving in front of you. Well, the trajectory of that tree branch by physics looks like it's going to land in front of you. The vehicle may stop. I do want to say something about those Tesla drivers. Keep your eye on the road. Tesla's have been known to crash into emergency vehicles on highways. My belief is that the algorithm, they're following a vehicle doing 70 miles an hour.

That vehicle sees an emergency vehicle, the vehicle in front of them pulls out, the Tesla vehicle's decision making says, “Wait, the vehicle was going at 70, now it's going at zero. Ignore that,” and crashes into these vehicles. Tesla's done amazing things, but Tesla actually had a warning until last year that said, “Full self-driving may do the wrong thing at the worst time. Keep your eyes on the road and your hands by the wheel.”

Brian Lehrer: We have 30 seconds left. Just tell us, by way of background, if Mayor Adams is making this announcement now because it says it's inevitable for it to come to New York. Where in America are autonomous vehicles already on the road and who's behind this? Is it the taxi-ish companies like Uber who mostly want this? Is it delivery companies delivering for Amazon or something like that? Is it already happening in other cities? 30 seconds.

Sam Schwartz: Yes, it's already happening in San Francisco, Waymo, and until recently, Cruise, which got kicked off places with good weather. Los Angeles is the next big city that's being tried. Tempe, Arizona, Phoenix, some Austin and a few others, they are trying it in good weather conditions. They don't know yet if it'll work when we have snow on the ground or horrible fog and rain.

Brian Lehrer: Who's making the money? Who's got the vested interest, just to finish that question?

Sam Schwartz: Right now it's the tech companies, but there are about 300 different companies that are investing in this area. Some of them are going out of business pretty quickly. The intent is to get rid of the Uber, the Lyft driver, the taxi driver, and have Robotaxis.

Brian Lehrer: Sam Schwartz, former longtime "Gridlock Sam" columnist in the Daily News, former New York City Traffic Commissioner, president and CEO of Sam Schwartz Pedestrian Traffic Management, and author of the book, No One at the Wheel: Driverless Cars and the Road of the Future, which is now the road of the very near future in New York City after Mayor Adams announcement last week. Sam, thanks a lot.

Sam Schwartz: You're quite welcome, Brian.

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