Posted on 06/11/2025 7:14:15 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
If you live in Northern California, you know this already. In a few years, driverless cars will be everywhere. You will likely use them if you travel to the city. If you live in a town of any substantial size, you or someone you know will likely use them.
The numbers on the increase where they are currently permitted are simply amazing. In less than a year, the Google company called Waymo has increased its weekly ride volume from 10,000 in August 2023 to more than 250,000 today. It has passed 10 million successful trips. These cars are everywhere on the streets of San Francisco. They are coming to many other cities including Austin, Atlanta, Miami, and Washington, D.C..
There is competition with Uber and Tesla for the same.
Those who have taken them report relief from painful conversations with drivers and safety concerns that come with eccentrics behind the wheel. You can get work done and have conversations without distraction with a super-safe AI driver that gets you where you need to be without tailgating, risk-taking, or missed turns.
That this is our future seems absolutely certain to me. And the core reason is precisely the one that has long vexed this technology: safety.
As a young driver, I had the mentality of every boy that age. The road is mine. I will master this machine and drive as fast and far as I am able. I will never get into a crash. Those are for other people. I will weave in and out of traffic with my experience and destination as my only concern.
There was some point in my adulthood when I was on an interstate highway where the traffic speed was pushing 85 miles per hour. The cars were close to others’ bumpers. People were moving in and out of lanes quickly, accelerating and decelerating. Off-ramps and on-ramps were feeding cars into this frenzy every few miles.
At some point, I conceptualized the whole of it. And then I realized. This is utter madness. In a culture in which everyone obsesses over safety—terrified of playgrounds and disease and strangers—we are all happily engaged in the craziest imaginable experiment.
We were handed the keys to two-ton piles of steel on wheels to every comer after a short test, taken one time in a lifetime. We invite anyone to enter onto giant slabs of hardened tar and do whatever they want with only painted lines as guides. And these people accelerate as fast as they can get away with, and otherwise follow whatever rules they want, with the only enforcement mechanism being a police car that randomly appears to check on things.
The mystery is not that there are 6.1 million automobile crashes in the United States every year. The mystery is why there are not 61 million or more! That the roads are as safe as they are is a tribute to self-interest and the magic of self-organizing systems. Somehow people have managed to work it out and not be in a constant state of panic!
After realizing this, I could never go back. I became a super-safe driver, avoiding all packs of cars and staying in the least-used lanes, backing quickly away from any car that was moving erratically or otherwise in some kind of hurry. I never, ever, pick fights with drivers and never get angry no matter what happens. My one and only concern is to get home safely.
This experience has caused me to look more carefully into the history of the Interstate Highway System. It was conceived in the years immediately following the Second World War, when elites became suddenly and wildly over-impressed by American achievements in the realm of the automobile. It was said to embody the ideals of freedom and individualism.
President Eisenhower embarked on the world’s largest infrastructure program that fundamentally changed life in America. It was radical and sweeping and took fully 40 years to complete. The federal government confiscated enough land to cover the whole state of Delaware and moved enough dirt to be knee deep in the whole state of Connecticut.
All of this happened without much political objection or controversy, which seems utterly amazing in retrospect. Not even the partisans of free enterprise or libertarianism blinked an eye about a central plan that would have made Mussolini blush.
The United States had led the world in passenger trains for a century. Suddenly no one even cared about those old things. Countless thousands of small towns with beautiful train stations—now turned into breweries or antique shops or left to decay—were completely wrecked. The suburb was born along with the franchise businesses that serve them.
The whole system was pitched as a way to make our lives more convenient but the opposite happened. We moved further away from work and cities, and our commutes got ever longer. The family homestead was no more. Vast swaths of our lives became consumed by auto debt, repairs, vast stretches of tar and concrete that could stretch to the moon and back 10 times, and popup communities with cookie-cutter houses and brand-name businesses.
The project utterly changed the country. Many communities never recovered. It seems remarkable that the entire project unfolded without much thought. A deeper reason, of course, concerned national security during the Cold War. Our leaders wanted roads for easy evacuations and for moving military equipment but it wasn’t sold that way. It was sold as the key to a better life.
The entire experience, part genius and part boondoggle, is not without benefits. But it is not without costs, including 42,000 traffic fatalities every year. Given that, and given the horror of the scene that unfolds before our eyes daily coast to coast, I’m amazed that there is not more concern and opposition than there is.
In any case, you are likely as worried about the safety side of this as I am. Remarkably, this is how autonomous driving figures into the mix. There have long been safety concerns. Those have been solved so much that it is indisputably true that they are vastly safer than cars operated by humans.
If you think about it, the driverless car is nothing but a little train made just for us. It is going forward but it is also going back, away from the randomness of human volition and toward a machine that is on an established path that thus removes the exigencies of human misjudgment.
Hardly anyone considers a deeper truth. Maybe we made a mistake in 1957. Maybe we should never have abandoned the passenger train system that we already had in place. Maybe all those highway deaths were unnecessary and maybe the creation of the suburbs as well was too much.
Americans instead have done what we always do. Rather than reversing errors, we have innovated around them, creating new technologies and plans to fix the problems created by the old technologies and plans.
Sure, I’ll hail a robotaxi. But I would much rather have a passenger train system that is humane, efficient, functional, and safe. Once at the train stations, cars get us the rest of the way, just as they did in the 1930s.
Yes, I am aware that there is no going back. And maybe these new driving robots will help repair some damage.
Here’s an interesting little factoid that is true for now and only adds a point of irony. These driverless cars are not yet allowed on highways. The reason is local regulations that survive.
Authorities are still committed to the idea that daily you must risk your life on these monstrosities they created long ago and service constantly with your tax dollars. It’s error upon error.
Probably there are going to be terrible downsides to robotaxies that we cannot yet foresee. On the other hand, maybe they will peak for the urban tech set and go the way of many briefly fashionable experiments before.
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I’d love to see an Uber make it to my house in the dead of winter or in mud season. Much hilarity will ensue. That’s why I drive an F350 dually.
I think I’d rather take my chances with AI software than with some of the drunk, drugged-up, non-English speaking illegals who are being given drivers licenses.
“I started taking driving defensively very serious”
Me, too. It’s paid off a lot. Just three days ago, I was headed through Cortina Ridge (part of the broader North Coast Ranges) east of Clearlake, CA to the Williams, CA in the Central Valley. After just getting down out of the mountains, I saw a guy coming toward me passing a car. He didn’t have enough room. Facing a head-on, I jammed the brakes and dove onto the right shoulder narrowly avoiding the accident. A mile farther on, a guy was stopped on the right side a cross road intersection. He stopped at the stop sign, but I’m always wary and hover the brakes with my left foot. Sure enough, he started pulling out right in front of me and got halfway into my lane. This time I hit the brakes and dodged him to the left, again just missing the accident. I can’t remember the last time I had close calls like that. Situational awareness, being prepared, and extreme defensive driving pay off.
If only my son would pick up some of these habits.
I never, ever had that attitude.
Well, on the bright side, maybe enough WAYMObiles will get burned up in the riots that Google will decide it isn’t worth the effort.
I am 76, live in the central part of a suburban city, two blocks from City Hall and the Police Department building.
I look forward to greater automation in vehicles as I feel it will extend the time that I can retain my mobility and independence. Yes, I can order groceries by computer and get them delivered, but I still enjoy going out and doing things or visiting friends.
As a professional engineer, I also know the limitations of automated vehicles. They don’t work well when the road is covered with snow, leaves or other things that obscure the lane markings, or visibility/sonar is impaired. Newer generations require sharing information with other vehicles on the road as well.
Still I think they are more positive for the elderly than dumb cars.
Jeffrey Tucker is a whiny little b*tch. I wish he would never write another sniveling weeping article. Hopefully Jeffrey will choke himself while committing adultery with his own pen in the fashion of the greeks.
We've had 15 Minute Cities for centuries. Some of our finer examples are Detroit, Camden, Chicago, Portland, San Francisco, Oakland, etc.
Waymo just needs to add self-driving hearses for 15 Minute Cities, ones where they can automatically paint an outline of a body on the ground before scooping the body up into the back.
Until you're in the computer controlled car and the drunk, drugged-up, non-English speaking illegal is barreling down on you.
You can scream at the dashboard to no avail while the computer keeps repeating, "I don't understand."
Will the driverless cars put chains or snowtires on when it snows?
It's programmed to slow down, stop, and "take the hit" because the car maker will be sued into oblivion the first time the car takes an overt action based on a "live or die" formula and someone gets killed.
The recent incident where a self-driving car swerved out of the way of traffic, it dragged a pedestrian down the block. Fortunately, the pedestrian survived.
“That’s why I drive an F350 dually”
The choice of seasonal tires is fundamental.
I like to point out to "mass transit" fans that personally owned vehicles are, in fact, a form of mass transit. It works pretty well outside of congested urban areas.
Both are characteristics of driving.
When it comes to the Urban stuff, it’s all about Free Parking [that which made America great.]
You need to plan to live closer to your kids....
Are you saying that steering a motor vehicle provides significant upper-body exercise?!
Regards,
Some “new” lives are worse than the old ones!
“I think they are more positive for the elderly than dumb cars.”
Agree 100%. Dependable driverless cars can make the difference between merely existing confined to home, and having a life worth living.
I’d have one in a heartbeat.
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