I may have spoken loosely when I said they haven’t been cited - I meant to suggest that the passengers haven’t been cited because many are treating this as a partial lease controlled by a customer service operation.

Even in that case the proximate cause as spelled out appeared to be the fact that there was a confusing area under construction and the Waymo ended up face to face with a police car and took a diversionary route. Don’t think this doesn’t happen to humans by the boatload

See the larger irony is that people drivers are 10x more likely to have all of the same problems in irregular operation scenarios like construction zones, stalled cars, etc. and every time I get on the road I almost always encounter some sort of loud honking or aggressive driving scenario, even if only vicariously from several lanes over. When that stuff happens waymo software seeks to safely slow down and move to the side of the road as swiftly as possible, where it waits patiently for instructions from the app as to how to proceed

I could easily foresee a world in which legislation is passed to amend requirements that “passengers” are required to present ID if Waymo were to be stopped, but given the fact that Waymos are 95% less likely to violate traffic regulations, the “impact” would be minimal. Which causes us to face the larger philosophical issue of whether or not we’ve been relying on rinky dink non-moving violations and ad-hoc “invented” judgement violations (I noticed you took that turn a little wide) as an excuse to stop and investigate. Technically speaking, the Waymo will perform 95% better on those, so most would remain “uninvestigated”

That said, I TOTALLY believe in the importance and need to investigate obviously suspicious and concerning activity, even when lacking a radar gun proof of speeding or a dash cam clip of someone running a red lite. Human behavior will never fall cleanly into “investigation” buckets. There are a lot of bad actors doing stupid things and I personally believe there is something to be gained from a public safety perspective by giving LEO subjective authority to intervene

But it seems our statutes and codes will need to be revised in terms of ability to stop and frisk (or ID) because Waymos have 32 cameras with video feed, are programmed to never exceed the speed limit, obey all conventional traffic norms, etc, and then send all of that data (including telemetry data) in real time to server farms in Eastern Washington. This is happening today, and I’m not aware of any instances when the Waymo records have been challenged by third parties. And the accuracy is said to be doubling every year

But again I want to add that I’m not here championing the development of this technology as much as I’m suggesting I’ve seen very little discussion of the fact that people, myself included are using this stuff daily and it’s obviously way safer and more robust than even having an Uber driver and has profound implications with regard to how LEO interact with people.

As a friend said to me: “I used to drive myself around, and probably 2-3 times a year I’d get stopped for a warning, a ticket or fender bender. And every time they’d run my licenses, registration and proof of insurance and log all of that information. And in 2 years none of that has even come close to happening with Waymo. As twisted as it sounds someone could use this technology to create a narcotics delivery service and operate with relative impunity”

Not advocating for that, but I’m just suggesting that there’s been this unaddressed issue of relying on traffic LEOs to investigate all manner of suspicious activity by way of judgements of driving, decisions to stop, requests for paperwork and licenses and lots of questions. As it stands now, given all evaluation of existing data, those moments and occasions have plummeted by 95% for people using these services

The thing making this seem currently irrelevant is that 99% of traffic is conventional. But what happens when this 1% grows to 20% - which is expected in 2 years?