That's why I'm suggesting we regulate and help people transition smoothly from commercial (uber/lyft/doordash/whatever) drivers into new jobs. Maybe we push harder for UBI! But if we just sit and wait for them, we're definitely going to lose more than just those jobs.

Then we get run over by the behemoth tech companies. Remember what happened with uber/airbnb/lime/etc? They just showed up in cities and paid whatever fines the cities threw at them as cities raced to put together shoddy regulation. Let's embrace change and regulate it early instead.

I actually agree with you 100% that we need better public transit and non-car infrastructure, but getting rid of cars completely is a very long term goal and we shouldn't ignore stop gap measures like autonomous vehicles.

To be clear, I'm not saying we should just let them come run our city. I think self driving vehicles are inevitable, so we shouldn't just move to ban them and instead attempt to regulate them. Work to phase out human driven cars and get former commercial drivers into new jobs.

The point of me posting that article is to show that you can't take a single data point to drive a narrative. Humans didn't just "drive bad", they drove with actual intention to kill, not unlike the people in your article who stopped a Waymo with intention to do bad things.

Jason I appreciate that you want to be at the forefront of this issue, but I think you should hesitate to use this line of thinking. Try applying it to another much maligned industry like coal, or even mining in the BWCA. Jobs shouldn't be the end all be all when we can make the world a safer place.

It's a bit disingenuous to pick this single story out of the pile to frame your narrative. Just this year a human was charged with intentionally running people down in her car in Minneapolis. Sure she got charged, but someone still died and many lives were affected.

www.mprnews.org/story/2025/0...