About the Author
Upon returning from a conference in California and seeing the high number of autonomous vehicles (AVs), WPC's Transportation Director Charles Prestrud remarked to me "it is clear evidence that the tsunami of change is already underway."
This transportation tsunami of change is one that our state's legislature seems to want to resist. Pre-filed Senate Bill 5042 puts onerous or redundant constraints on AVs, not the least of which is a human safety operator present in every vehicle.
Our latest piece in The Seattle Times points out how transit agencies and lawmakers should embrace AVs as a part of a forward-looking transportation plan for the state rather than attempting to shackle AVs at the get-go. Between badly needed cost savings, environmental benefit, and safety considerations, AVs have the potential to fill a lot of the holes our current transportation networks have growing.
If legislators choose to adopt this bill, they should consider the following changes:
- Where possible streamline the self-certifying process by adopting a standard from states like California, Texas and Florida.
- Add national data to Washington’s Autonomous Vehicle assessment required in RCW 46.92,010.
- Remove the human safety operator requirement for preplanned, reported testing periods.
- Automatically sunset the human safety operator requirement on all AV usage after one year.
- Establish state-wide certification and operation authority for AVs (to prevent a patchwork of burdensome and hard to enforce local ordinances).
