Sunday, Oct. 30, 2023
42nd edition of the 11th year of SmartDrivingCars eLetter
S. Aquino, Oct. 25, “ … As someone who has covered both Cruise and Waymo for this column on multiple occasions, and especially as someone who has low vision, I fully admit to feeling frustration over the myopic viewpoint dominating this issue. It should be obvious safety is an important aspect of developing, deploying, and ultimately riding in an autonomous vehicle. Of course people want to be as safe as possible. The problem is nobody accepts safety is but one side of the coin; there is another consideration to take into account that people are predictably—infuriatingly so—missing.
That consideration, as ever, is accessibility.
While members of the disability community have raised safety concerns, the strident opposition by many in City Hall (and, again, residents) to autonomous vehicles overlooks the very real, and very valid, accessibility benefits of using so-called “robotaxis.” The reality is, to claim the concerns are paramountly about safety helps obfuscate any general ignorance towards how disabled people get around. The protestors and naysayers yell and scream about how awful companies such as Cruise are because they can—they’re able to drive their cars or walk down the street or take the bus or otherwise get here and there about town with resistance. Their lifestyle, and more pointedly, their privilege, is such they believe there are other, friendlier, more feasible modes of transportation that ostensibly “everyone” can access in equal favor…” Read more
Hmmmm…. Thank you Forbes for publishing this perspective. Recall it was a human driver who hit the pedestrian and then drove away. Human drivers kill an average of more than 100 people every day in the USA. [see below for another recent tragedy] Alain