This year, somewhere in Los Angeles, someone who otherwise wouldn't have made it home is coming home. You will never learn his name. There will be no headlines, no celebration, no council resolution; just a nondescript Tuesday that ends the way Tuesdays are supposed to end. The same story will eventually play out in more than a dozen other metropolitan areas where autonomous vehicles will serve as taxis.
Last year36,640 Americans died in traffic accidents. It was the fewest since 2019, but still equals more than 100 deaths per day. The new generation of vehicles quietly racking up mileage on our streets offers enormous promise to reduce this number each year.
In Marginal Revolution, economist Alex Tabarrok remember us that as of March, Waymo self-driving vehicles had recorded more than 220 million miles in five of its key areas of operation. Compared to human drivers on the same roads over the same period, and counting each crash regardless of fault, Waymos was involved in 94% fewer crashes that caused serious or fatal injuries. They also experienced 93% fewer injury crashes involving pedestrians and 82% fewer airbag deployments.
Waymo's data covers only mapped city streets, and serious accidents are rare enough that the counts behind these percentages are small. But it is analyzesone of which was made together with the reinsurance company Swiss ReThey are peer-reviewed, accident reports go to federal regulators, and no one has produced a competing data set that shows anything different.
So who is working to stop this happy development? Tabarrok points to trial lawyers. The American Association. for Justice has been lobbying against audiovisual legislation for the better part of a decade. American auto insurance pays out between $180 billion and $220 billion each year, and litigating ordinary collisions is big business. (Tabarrok's solution is elegant and has been used in Britain since 2018: insure the vehicle instead of the driver, pay the victim directly and let the insurer recover from the manufacturer if the software got it wrong.)
But here the lawyers turn out to be the junior partners. Brian Chautechnology policy expert and CEO of Alliance for the Futureexamined the documents and found that unions represent 78% of the entities that oppose autonomous vehicles in various forms, 54% of those involved in lobbying activities, and about 70% of the money spent. While Chau admits his measurements are imperfect, they are directionally correct.
Behind the anti-AV campaign is the fear of job losses for union members. That fear is understandable for the more than 4 million Americans who drive for a living, including long-haul truckers, delivery drivers, bus drivers and chauffeurs. At the same time, automation tends to replace tasks rather than entire occupations, as MIT's David Autor demonstrated in his notable article from 2015“Why are there still so many jobs?”
Author maintains that making a step in a chain cheaper thanks to automation increases the value of each step that still requires a person, such as loading, the last kilometer of transit, distribution or dispatch. And autonomous vehicles go only where streets have been mapped block by block. Therefore, we may end up with fewer drivers but just as many good transportation jobs.
We've seen this movie before. When ATMs began to spread across American banks, it seemed obvious that the cash-dispensing machine would dispense with the bank teller. Something more interesting happened: As ATMs made it cheaper to operate branches, banks opened more. Cashiers spent less time counting twenties and more time performing tasks that machines couldn't. They became more involved in customer service, sales and other forms of banking relationships.
Technology automated a task and reorganized work around it. The country has gone through this process on a large scale with the automation of agriculture.
It didn't happen without displacement or pain. But protecting workers is not the same as protecting every job exactly as it exists today.
This is where I think the unions are making a mistake. A labor movement built for the modern economy could be dedicated to training, certification, and helping workers acquire skills that become more valuable as technology changes. It could help a truck driver become a fleet supervisor, remote operator, logistics specialist, or any other occupation emerging around autonomous transportation that neither you nor I can predict today.
Instead, too many unions choose political power as their business model. Faced with a technology that threatens existing employment, they pressure the government to preserve employment. That's bad economics in any industry. In this case it carries an additional cost. Delaying AV deployment might protect jobs in its current form, at least for a while, but it prolongs the use of what we will one day recognize was a primitive technology that killed tens of thousands of Americans each year.
Rugy Veronica He is a senior fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate.
