This post originally appeared at https://www.badgerinstitute.org/antiquated-wisconsin-law-doesnt-allow-driverless-vehicles/
State stuck at red light
As self-driving taxis roll out across much of America, Wisconsinites won’t be seeing them without some changes to existing law.
“That’s definitely one part of it,” said Andrea Bill of the Traffic Operations and Safety Laboratory, or TOPS, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Right now, our state statute says that there has to be a human behind the wheel.”
Waymo first appeared on Phoenix streets in 2020 and since then has targeted technology centers and Sun Belt cities such as Atlanta, Austin, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Waymo is coming to Washington, D.C., Miami and Tokyo next year and testing has begun or will begin soon in Las Vegas, San Diego, New York and seven other cities, according to Waymo officials.
With five of the country’s 15 most populous cities, Texas got an early start, passing legislation making way for autonomous vehicles in 2017. Waymo launched its service this spring in Austin, but it isn’t the only player.
Aurora Innovation has begun regular driverless semi-truck routes from Dallas to Houston and intends to expand its service to El Paso and Phoenix before the end of this year. Kodiak Robotics is running heavy trucks without drivers in Texas’ oil and gas-rich Permian Basin.
“What we’re looking for is places that are going to challenge our system and look very, very different,” Nick Rose, a product manager for Waymo, said when he announced testing and expansion plans.
Wisconsin has less than a handful of driverless vehicles used for testing and research. Bill’s lab has a single van and two sedans. Gateway Technical College has a six-passenger electric shuttle, the Racine Badger, housed at Gateway Technical College, that has been tooling around Racine since 2021.
“The sensors have a little bit of a hard time with giant puddles in the roadway because it doesn’t know how deep it is,” said Bill, the traffic safety engineer research program manager at TOPS. Reflections off the water can confuse the vehicle.
Her team is working on getting the machine, which always has a standby driver poised at the wheel, to understand how to deal with Racine’s drawbridges.
Winter is also an unconquered problem. Several pilot systems are being tested in Minnesota, including one in the northern paper-mill town of Grand Rapids, where for a couple of years a company called May Mobility has been running minivans outfitted with sensors.
“The ice and snow piece is definitely one where there needs to be more work,” said Kyle Shelton, director of the Center for Transportation at the University of Minnesota. Glare off of ice can compel the standby driver, required by Minnesota law, to take over.
Not all the questions relate to technology. Bill notes that the Badger test vehicle “is very accurate, so it can go right next to another vehicle with about two inches to spare.” The question there is what riders will find comfortable.
“My younger colleagues are like, ‘It’s totally fine.’”
There have been much-publicized reports of stalls and passengers locked into their Waymos in Austin and other cities. However, the city is tracking Waymo incidents and of the 122 reported, only eight of them involved a Waymo colliding with another vehicle, none of them with injuries. Although they don’t provide a comparison, it’s a tiny fraction compared to city traffic involving vehicles with drivers.
Waymo says in the 71 million miles covered by its vehicles, in comparison to human drivers over the same distance in the same cities, its cars produced 88% fewer crashes that lead to serious injuries or death.
The standards autonomous vehicles are being held to, said Minnesota’s Shelton, “are far closer to something like the airline industry, where it’s like no level of risk of accident is tolerated.” He doesn’t say this is inappropriate. As UW-Madison’s Bill puts it, even though human drivers make many mistakes, new technology is under the burden of having prove its safety, especially to regulators and the public. “It does not take a lot for one piece of technology to be seen as, ‘Oh, it’s unsafe because it made one mistake.’”
The payoff, though, can be benefits far beyond “cool-kids” neighborhoods in major cities. Particularly in rural areas, said Shelton, “if you don’t have access to a vehicle or if you cannot drive, you are really dependent on friends or neighbors or whatever system is in place to move you.” Human-driven buses and taxis are costly, and perhaps autonomous vehicles can be less so. Bill cited paratransit — van-based special transit for the disabled — as a market, where staff could be attendants rather than having to drive.
Both researchers said the time is now for officials and lawmakers to consider what self-driving vehicles can do for mobility, including in places where Waymo’s expansion may be years away.
There’s “a whole spectrum of different opportunities to use automated transportation” in places from urban to rural, said Bill. “We need to be thinking about how to do that.”
Bill believes Wisconsin policymakers need to get ready.
“I would say that the technology and science piece of it is ready now,” she said. “It will continue to get better and better.”
How law and bureaucracies deal with the possibilities is not as close to resolution in Wisconsin.
Patrick McIlheran is the Director of Policy at the Badger Institute; Mark Lisheron is its Managing Editor.
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