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Richard Helppie
Hello, welcome to The Common Bridge. We have a returning guest from the land of lobbying, to talk about all things technology and how that fits into the future progressive society. From the Chamber of Progress we have Adam Kovacevich. Adam, it's nice to see you as always. How have you been?
Adam Kovacevich
Good to see you again. Good.
Richard Helppie
You've been busy. Lots going on on Capitol Hill, I'm sure. How did you get involved with today's topic where we're talking about autonomous vehicles? That's kind of a leap for you because last time we were talking about the Federal Trade Commission and Amazon, and before that censoring or content moderation.
Adam Kovacevich
Content moderation, that's right.
Richard Helppie
How did you leap over to autonomous vehicles? What's going on there?
Adam Kovacevich
I spent 12 years at Google at its Washington office. Google actually incubated a self-driving car program that it later spun out into the company known as Waymo today. But when I was there, the self-driving car project actually started and when it was started it was very secretive. Actually, most Google employees didn't even know about it but then it later was announced. It evolved a lot actually, at first; there was a version of the self-driving car that was a very low speed vehicle. That was it wouldn't go more than 25 miles an hour, like an advanced golf cart. Then I remember at one point they had retrofitted Toyota Priuses. They brought one to Washington and showed us what the technology was going to be like by taking us on the highway, but they still had a safety driver behind the wheel who could take control. But it was very interesting to see the promise of it. Then, as the technology got better and better, while I was at Google they had asked employees in the Bay area to be volunteers, volunteer safety drivers. So again, sitting behind the wheel, the car was doing the driving, but they needed the employee to be able to take over. Well, one of the things that they learned was - like Tesla today with their "full self-driving," which is not full level for autonomy but it's really driver assist - if you tell somebody that the vehicle is self-driving they will start, basically, checking out. So early on they started observing; the Google employees would check their email, look at themselves in the mirror. Actually, it led the leaders of that project to a very important decision which was, we're not going to pursue partial autonomy, we're going to pursue full autonomy. Because if you do partial autonomy then you are lulling the driver into a mistaken sense of how autonomous the vehicle really is, when you actually technically need them to be able to take over. They just said,let's skip over that step. Let's go for basically moonshot technology, which is what's called level four autonomy. And I think, frankly, now, because you see the direction that Waymo has gone, along with Cruz and others - Zoox - versus the direction that Tesla has gone, which is really this level two autonomy which is essentially advancements on cruise control, those are different technologies. But the exciting thing for me, as a policy specialist, when you get into this is that there are still many states where autonomous vehicles at that level four are not legal to operate so you have to persuade policymakers to make that legal. We still need to do that in a number of states. But there's also friction associated with introducing autonomous vehicles, as we've seen most especially in the Bay Area, and that's caused some policymaker and organizational resistance. So I'm very excited about the technology but there's policy friction, and we'll get into that.
Richard Helppie
Well, I know that Ford Motor Company has been one of the advanced players in building autonomous cars and I know that their strategy is centered up around specific cohorts of people like the disabled, the vision impaired and so forth, to improve their mobility. They've throttled that back a little bit. I don't know if that has to do with the power plant because, as you know, they're throttling back on electric vehicles as well. Has there been a scientific barrier and engineering barrier where people say, well, wait a minute, maybe the technology's not ready to put fully autonomous vehicles on the road, or is it something else?
Adam Kovacevich
I think there are just two challenges...well, there are multiple challenges there. One, there's a technological challenge and two, you have to find the right business model, product model. There are very few people who think that there's going to be a market for selling an autonomous vehicle to you as a consumer in the next five years in terms of full autonomy, level four autonomy; nobody's really buying any of that. What you have instead are business models that are autonomous versions of existing models. What Waymo is doing is really a driverless rideshare service so it's a driverless version of Uber and Lyft. There's a company called Nuro, which is doing driverless delivery so that's a driverless version of DoorDash, Instacart. There's a company called Zoox that is doing driverless shuttles so that's more of a driverless kind of shuttle bus type of service. Then you have companies that are trying to do autonomous trucking and they are not, of course, that's a driverless trucking cab. No one is really focused too much on selling a fully autonomous vehicle, it's more like services. I think that's a function, frankly, of how expensive it is really, to build the technology that people are going to buy that. But the second challenge is technological, which is that the way autonomous driving technology works, essentially building up recognition of different types of situations. Okay, what should the vehicle do when we see this happen on the road, when we see the pedestrian at this location, when we see another car in that location, we see a sudden lane change. When you really think about it that's what we humans who've been driving, those of us have been driving for decades, that's what we've built up. I remember my dad teaching me to drive and he taught me about defensive driving. And for him, defensive driving, this idea was built up because of all the things he had seen as a driver. You become a defensive driver when you see unexpected, crazy things happening by other drivers usually. And so what autonomous vehicles are really doing is building up their learning experiences. This is why, before Waymo and Cruise ever launched a commercial service in San Francisco that actually accepted paying passengers, they drove San Francisco hundreds of thousands - maybe even millions - of miles in San Francisco with safety drivers behind the wheel. They could not only map the city, but they could build all this experience of what should we do in this situation. And all of that gets fed back into the software and makes the car itself better at knowing what to do. Those are two challenges: the business model challenge and the technological challenge.
Richard Helppie
There might even be a broader issue. I've given some thought to this. There are a couple things; anybody that's looked at the freeway system in any major city, knows every day they're going to be clogged, they're going to slow down. You've got to look at that and say the answer can't be let's build more cars and more freeways. I think we've maybe hit peak automotive. The second thing is this; as I walk about Ann Arbor, Michigan, and I see some of these homes that have been there for some time with what used to be a stable in back, now turned garage. And really, what we did with the automobile itself is we just took the horse and buggy model and put an engine in it. Same road system, same oh, that's my horse, my car, etc. And yet if you look around, how many cars do we see parked, versus actually transporting somebody or something? That to me seems to be the bigger hurdle that we've got to overcome; if we can get a ride where we want to go through a service, do we really need to own a vehicle that we have to garage, park, maintain, fuel, etc. To me, it looks like ultimately a longer term more efficient model. Maybe you and I won't live long enough to see that but I just don't see individual units of transporting people being a thing except in very lightly populated areas, completely different transportation needs.
Adam Kovacevich
I think there have been a lot of people who've tried to make better transit happen, for example, and I'm a transit fan. But I think that it doesn't fit all circumstances. It doesn't fit a suburban environment, doesn't fit a rural environment particularly well. So I do think there's...I agree with you, there are urban environments that have been built for cars, particularly the highway system. But having said that, one of the big challenges with that that's not going away anytime soon is we still have a rising number of car traffic fatalities. I believe the biggest reason for that is distracted driving and cell phones. You see a bunch of cities that have adopted what they call Vision Zero plans to try to reduce pedestrian-car related deaths to down to zero. Largely that's about speed bumps and putting up billboards and public education campaigns. But an autonomous vehicle doesn't drive distracted, it doesn't drive drunk, I believe the best thing you can actually do to cut down on pedestrian fatalities from vehicles is actually adopting autonomous vehicles. I feel very strongly about that on your point about like, horse and buggy, just applying that mindset. I do think that there are legitimate questions about this as well. But just for an example, I love Uber, I love Lyft, I use the services all the time. But what happens if you need a ride at two, three in the morning and there are not enough human drivers willing to drive those hours? What happens if you need a ride in a neighborhood which is too far out for them to make it worth their time economically? Those are good challenges for autonomous vehicles.
Richard Helppie
I'm a big fan of trains and Uber and bus and the like. By way of example, we can go to the airport in Detroit from Ann Arbor nonstop on a bus that's normally fairly full. Round trip is $25. Obviously it's subsidized but I look at 50 some people on the bus and that's 50 cars that aren't on the road, that's 50 cars that aren't parked at the airport, presuming they were all traveling separately. But if memory serves me correctly, your hometown is up in Kern County, Bakersfield area.
Richard Helppie
That's right. Kern County, now I live in the DC area. That's right.
Richard Helppie
And isn't that the high speed rail? Isn't that now like Modesto to Bakersfield or something crazy like that?
Adam Kovacevich
Yeah, it's kind of a joke of a project.
Richard Helppie
The multibillion dollar taxpayer joke. But yeah, we just don't travel point to point very much anymore. I wanted to contrast...getting to the airport is one thing. That's a great point to point application for a bus or a train but people don't generally travel that way. That's why Uber and Lyft are so popular.
Adam Kovacevich
That's right. We've been conditioned to expect on demand travel. Our geography is built around it, as you said. I think there are some geographies where improved train service does make sense. South Florida has a new-ish service called Brightline trains that's working quite well. It's private, it's a private sector train. It's a private company but also its response, I think it's one of the reasons why it's been popular because there's pretty significant traffic congestion in that area. That's not true in Kern County, Central Valley, California. So I do think that it has to be the right...it has to make sense as a solution.
Richard Helppie
Brightline train, there are more places asking for stations. And a train does not blow its horn when it goes through communities. That was one of the things, when the Brightline first came up every time it went through a railroad crossing it blew the horn. Now there's a sign there that says the train is not going to blow its horn when it comes through here and after a couple of fairly well-publicized crashes, people are pretty much clued into that. Look, when you talk about the AI that could drive an autonomous vehicle, to me, that's engineering, that is computer capacity. We're going to get there. We can't stop the guy in the crosswalk who never looked right or left, on his phone, looking down. We've got to train the car not to hit that guy. I don't think the car would be tempted like some angry drivers I've seen, but I can see that. Wouldn't a world of autonomous vehicles almost require that there mostly be autonomous vehicles out there so your vehicle would know where the other vehicles are? Is that part of the plan?
Adam Kovacevich
No. I mean, there have been people who've advocated, for example, smart roads and building in a whole network of sensors and/or vehicle to vehicle communications where maybe each vehicle is equipped with some kind of wireless signal that sends out notification to other vehicles. That hasn't worked and also requires either some kind of national standard, which hasn't been established, or, frankly, expensive building, things like infrastructure. So what Waymo, Cruise, Zoox are doing, they're assuming those things don't exist and that every other vehicle on the road is a human driven vehicle. Their technology doesn't - the success of autonomous vehicles - does not depend on other vehicles being autonomous. That's really important.
Richard Helppie
The autonomous vehicle is also a means of, we need fewer vehicles, because we don't need to park them when they're not being used. Look, I've been on golf courses, for example, where my golf cart knew where all the other golf carts were, because I have to have somebody less than 300 yards away or I'm in danger of hitting them with a seven iron - part of that's not true, by the way. But it can tell you if someone's 250 yards away or 200, when it's safe to hit a ball. Same kind of concept; it knows where all the other carts are on the course. An autonomous vehicle is going to know that because it's going to have a geo-located service, it's going to know where everybody else is, going to know what rate of speed it's moving. When you're entering the freeway in a congested place, let's say Detroit, for example, people literally go down those ramps at 90 miles an hour and 30 miles an hour and you're coming along at your 75 or 80; you got to figure out which one of those it is and seeing a void is not always effective. So I'm really cheered by the increased safety that comes with more technology in a car, including navigation. Look, where cruise control is right now, we're getting there a little bit. But what's the controversy or the legislation or the other issues that you face as a person involved with the creation of legislation? Who hires you and what is it that they'd like you to do? What are you running into in terms of objections?
Adam Kovacevich
Sure, well, to your point you just made now, about a year ago I was in Phoenix - which is a big city for autonomous vehicles, there are many, many Waymo vehicles there - and I was in a Waymo vehicle. It was pulling out of a driveway and it was going to make a right turn onto a two lane road, I think, or two lanes each direction. And so what it was really trying to do is figure out...there were many cars coming; at what point is it safe to pull out? We, as human drivers, are going to look, okay, well, how much space between me and them? How fast are they moving? Do I really have an open window here? We're making that calculation in our head; the car is doing the same calculation but with the benefit of software. It's a better predictor so it can tell me. We kind of eyeball that and we say okay, well, I think I might have a window there but I'm not sure. The car can tell you exactly if you do. And that's it. That's the power of the technology with respect to the policy issues that we work on. Again, I think there's a number of states where full autonomous operations in terms of commercial operations are not yet legal. Largely, those are in the Northeast. New York, Massachusetts, Washington State, Illinois, you're allowed to test but not fully to operate. We advocate for laws that will make a ton of basically commercial rideshare services possible and allowed. But the other thing we deal with is there has been a lot of resistance to autonomous vehicles. There have been efforts largely by organized labor and the Teamsters, to try to pass bills in states that say, essentially, an autonomous vehicle has to have a driver, a human driver in it, which means effectively, that you cannot have autonomous vehicles. So that essentially a would be a legislative ban on a true autonomous vehicle. We've seen the Teamsters advance this bill, this type of bill - human driver required - probably in about half a dozen states this year and last year. Thankfully, none of them passed, which we're grateful for but it's an ongoing challenge. The other thing I would say is that in California there's a particular bill - and look, we can talk about it in more detail - that would essentially give city governments a veto power over autonomous vehicles, which I believe would be used by cities to block autonomous vehicles. We oppose that kind of bill as well.
Richard Helppie
I see. So the Teamsters, it's part of can AI replaced jobs; that more global societal issue that we'll all be grappling with. The Teamsters are saying, look, our members drive trucks and other vehicles and we don't want a machine taking over. We're going to try to use our political powers to basically thwart that next wave of technology.
Adam Kovacevich
That's right. I think there's some nuance there. Interestingly enough, many truck drivers are not Teamsters members, they're independent contractors. Independent contracting is pretty pervasive in trucking. A lot of delivery drivers UPS in particular, are Teamsters. That's probably the biggest category of Teamster driving jobs is UPS positions. We saw in California there was a bill that would basically advance autonomous trucks and that was very much unsupported by Teamsters, California Teamsters. Governor Newsom ended up vetoing that bill. That's back this year. The bill that we also have concerns about is a local control bill. But, I mean, I think with respect to ride sharing services, the jobs that could be affected by more robo-taxi services are really rideshare jobs. But those drivers are not really a big force behind these bills.
Richard Helppie
They're not organized, and you can't be an independent contractor and drive a truck in California. That's obviously why we had the back-ups at the Port of Los Angeles during COVID because the truck drivers weren't allowed to drive their trucks there, which was a probably an unintended consequence...I hope it was unintended. When you think about this and you couple it with the electric vehicles that are becoming more prevalent, and that you see the car companies coming back, and now you're seeing - I'm sure you're seeing the same things I've been seeing - that we can't possibly make enough copper to build all the power plants of all the cars. But I'd like to take that one step further. Do we need to build that many cars? Many people own multiple vehicles because that's what they need if there's more than one driver in the home, or they've got a pleasure car and a work car, or whatever they might have. To me this gets down to political leadership; who can paint that vision of the future to say, look, we don't need to transport ourselves this way. There's a new day that can come that if we make a quarter of the cars that we make today, we've got enough copper - I don't know if my math holds up, just as an example - also, if they're autonomous and they know where everybody is, we're going to eliminate all that space that we use for parking, all that space that we use for storage in your homes. Think about that, couple that with what we're dealing with not having enough affordable housing in the country. I mean, it could unleash a higher, better use of the capital of the country.
Adam Kovacevich
I think part of thing that is really important is I don't see many politicians being eager to tell people what they should do. I think having your own car traditionally is a sense of...it's an autonomy thing. I don't think politicians would be wise to tell people no, you don't need a car. What I think instead, policy makers who are trying to maybe discourage as many cars, particularly emissions and they're trying to incentivize a better path, is to try to incentivize alternatives. If you make transit better, if you make rideshare better, more accessible, if you make autonomous vehicles more accessible, then particularly, maybe, a younger person might be more willing to say, do I really need to buy a car? Before they buy their first car they may be more likely to conclude over time that they don't need one. Similarly, maybe an older person who's driven and then can't drive anymore because they lose the ability to do so or can't see as well. That used to be a sentence for immobility and now there are so many more options. So you know, I think that's a great thing.
Richard Helppie
We're already getting there with younger people forming households, they can't afford a car. That used to be like a rite of passage, hey, I got my first car...I got a good job, my first new car...but when you put the numbers together for even a basic vehicle and then you insure it, the numbers are out of the reach of most middle class people on their way up. Instead of saying you can't have a car, I said leadership presenting it as look, we have a better, cheaper, faster way for you to get going where you want to go. I don't know how old you are but I know when I was coming up it was all about, get your own wheels, because then you could go do what you want to do and go where you want to go. That was great for that time but today you're not going to buy a solid used car for a price that you can afford. And if you can buy it, can you insure it and maintain it and fuel it, which all of those things are just moving out of the range of the average person. We need to get a hold of that versus the political system pointing backwards and saying, we have to go back to 1960. I'd imagine, in a rural environment, you probably were driving things when you were 11 or 12, would be my guess.
Adam Kovacevich
I had to take my driver's test at 15 like everybody else, but I actually failed it the first time I tried to take it. But no, Iook, I think we are, as you say, we already see more and more young people saying, I'm not going to get my license, that's not important to me, I don't really need it, I can get rideshare. If you don't live in an urban environment, I can use micro-mobility, like scooters. I worked at a scooter company so I do think like that's already happening. But it really comes down to people's lifestyle; are they in a position where they need the car? Now I'm a suburban dad and I have to spend time shuttling my kids around to practices in school and things like that. It'd be very hard for me to be without a car. But that's the thing, I think you want to make...create more options for people. I think that's why the autonomous vehicle space is so interesting, exciting, because we don't totally know how it will be, how they'll be used and adopted by people. But the cities and states that are off to an early start are going to figure that out first. Phoenix, arguably the greater Phoenix metro, is probably the country's leading - the world's leading, I'm going to say - autonomous vehicle city, because they have the foresight to legalize them early, make a very friendly climate for them. They are the first city in the United States where you can arrive at the airport and hail an autonomous vehicle from the airport. That's really...it's a real differentiator for them.
Richard Helppie
You mentioned the climate for it, I know they will have wind storms and the like, but it's generally clear. Here in the upper Midwest we don't enjoy that 12 months a year, we get a lot of things that come out of the sky, including local weather forecaster, one time, saying that there was sleet and hail and whatnot falling. That was a trained meteorologist calling whatever was coming down "whatnot." That stuff sticks on your car, it sticks on your sensors, your backup sensors and your cameras and it renders that stuff not operable. Certainly that's a challenge that has to be overcome as well.
Adam Kovacevich
That's right. And like I said, I think that this is what's frustrating me, you have, for example, again, states like California that really have been real leaders and legalized autonomous vehicles very early on. They put that decision in the hands of the state, not cities. Last year, the state gave Waymo and Cruise the permission to operate commercially in San Francisco. And the city government was opposed, I think, because they couldn't control it. Under the law, they didn't have the ability to stop it. So they, in my view, threw up objections that were pretextual, like Waymos create traffic jams for fire engines, which I think is not a pervasive problem. Immediately, once autonomous vehicles were allowed to operate commercially in San Francisco, they were a huge hit. They've been a hit with not only residents, but tourists. In fact, the New York Times wrote a piece about three weeks ago about Waymo vehicles driving tourism in San Francisco which actually needs tourists to come back. I think that you see a gap between the resistance of some office holders and what I consider to be normal people's opinions, which is actually a kind of curiosity, in some cases even excitement.
Richard Helppie
In Phoenix or San Francisco if someone wanted to experience what it's like to be a passenger in autonomous vehicle, how they would go about doing that?
Adam Kovacevich
Well, right now, it's as simple as downloading the Waymo app and hailing one.
Richard Helppie
Okay. W-A-Y-M-O?
Adam Kovacevich
Yeah, that's right.
Richard Helppie
Then download Waymo if you want to try this.
Adam Kovacevich
In Phoenix I believe it's open to everyone. In San Francisco, I believe it might be more of a wait list, but they're processing people off the wait list very quickly. So if you're going to go to San Francisco probably sign up in advance in the hopes you can get off the wait list before your trip starts. The thing is I've ridden one several times now and at first you're just like, this is incredible. Then after a couple minutes, you're kind of like, I'm going to just go back to my phone. It becomes ordinary and that's really what technology should try to become, it should become more ordinary. That's a benefit. I mean, it really debunks a lot of the hysteria and concern about them because once you ride, when you realize it's driving more safely than a human driver, all of the fear really goes out the window.
Richard Helppie
When we had first cruise control, people thought, oh, that's the end of driving, it's all going to crash into cars. Well, now, it's like every car has got cruise control, it has the adaptable cruise control, slows you down, keeps your following distance. I also like to look at... I've been a driver in a four season climate and always had a four wheel drive vehicle once I could afford them. I know I want to be able to control how I set that, so Jeep came out with basically a computer to do that. I want to be able to override that; it's so much better and so much faster at diagnosing what was going on than I ever could have diagnosed and then made the adjustment. It was just futile. It's like, okay, I'm good with letting the vehicle figure out what I need in terms of the drive train. To me, this is just the natural extension of it. One thing I like to do on the show is to bring people's awareness to things that are being worked on. Progress can be scary but we have to move beyond imagining that the future is going to look like the past. All four of my grandparents were alive when the Wright Brothers made the first flight; two of them were adults. All four were still alive when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon and I don't think any of them looked at the Wright brothers when they flew 30 yards, six feet off the ground, and thought, I guess we're going to the moon. Similarly, when we think about transportation, we all know people that lived in the horse and buggy era, although they're mostly dead now, I guess, but all throughout automotive history and now to different power sources and such, and now more and more automation in the car. Do we really need to keep building on the old model or do we need to move on to something else?
Adam Kovacevich
Well, you raise an interesting point, which is actually another policy question in the autonomous vehicle space, which is when you really think about it an autonomous vehicle doesn't need to have a steering wheel, a brake, pedal, side mirrors, all these kinds of things. But there is, unfortunately, a limitation under federal law. Federal law currently says that those things have to be present in the build of a vehicle. So the companies that have built autonomous vehicles like that - including Nuro which is a lower speed vehicle that doesn't have any of those things and it is delivery only - they've had to go get exemptions from NITSA, the Highway Authority, and it's very limited. It actually caps the number of vehicles that can be built without those things. Again, there's no logical reason for those things. That's the reason why Waymo and Cruise have chosen to retrofit existing vehicles because they're not subject to that cap but it's illogical. My hope is that federal law can be changed to ultimately eliminate that cap because you're not actually encouraging innovation to really rethink what do you even need in a vehicle. You don't need those things anymore.
Richard Helppie
Good. I think it's a great thought piece, Adam. As we move to the end of our chat today, what message or messages do you want the listeners and the readers and the viewers of The Common Bridge to takeaway from our talk today?
Adam Kovacevich
Well, first, I think if you ask most people how do you feel about riding in a driverless car? I still suspect maybe a slight majority of people would say they're not ready for that. It's a little too scary. And I understand that. I'll just tell you from experience, it's a technology that when you experience it the first time it's just magical. You just can't believe that you're sitting in a car and it's driving itself. It's just so, so impressive in the millions of hours of engineering, people power that's really gone into that technology; it's just incredible. I think a second thing is that a lot of people's exposure to this space is Tesla. They think of Tesla. Teslas are not autonomous vehicles, they're doing advanced driver assistance. But what companies like Waymo, and Cruise and Zoox are building is called level four autonomy, where there is no driver; you as a human do not need to pay attention to the road at all. That's really different than what Tesla is doing today and [different] I believe, than where this kind of autonomous space is heading. Now, knock on wood, what Tesla's doing, it's very impressive, but it's not autonomous driving. Then I think the third point is that we still, unfortunately, have a traffic safety crisis in this country with pedestrian deaths. I believe that is because of distracted driving, largely because of people using their cell phones. But an autonomous vehicle doesn't drive drunk and it doesn't drive distracted. Cities and states are serious about reducing pedestrian deaths but unfortunately, we become numb to the most important thing they can do which is to allow and welcome and invite autonomous vehicles to their cities and states.
Richard Helppie
Well, I think that's well said. Look, I've been going down the freeway and there's someone driving a semi, they're clearly distracted and those things are weaving around. I think these are good points. I think about framing the issue. Look, people are going to naturally be fearful of a change of this magnitude. I think, as a trained lobbyist you should know how to help frame the question a little better. It's not do you want to get an autonomous vehicle? But can you name five of your friends that you'd rather be in an autonomous vehicle than be a passenger in their car? Because we could all do that. [Laughter]
Adam Kovacevich
And by the way, I don't even think it's that, to be honest, like, I hate to say it, but I've driven distracted too. So I mean, I think we've all been there. I think it's just a very human thing and I think phones are probably the biggest culprit of it. I, of course, fully support all the campaigns to encourage people to put the phones away, all that, but I just think it's a pervasive thing, and I don't think it's going to get any better through public education campaigns. Really, I think this is an area where technology can play a really important role in increasing safety.
Richard Helppie
I hope that you have continued success as being a change agent. It's a difficult job. The old saying that the only person that likes change is a baby with a dirty diaper, that's kind of what you're you're facing. Any final words or comments for our listeners, readers and viewers or anything we didn't cover today that you'd like to make mention of?
Adam Kovacevich
I just think that one of the interesting things is there have been really interesting studies now, in cities like Phoenix and San Francisco, we didn't talk about but we can now compare humans to robots. These are two states where we've seen how they compare and the research is very clear that autonomous vehicles reduced injury by about 85%. They reduce accidents by about 57%. So we've looked at that data and we've said, okay, well, if you apply that to a state like California, AVS would have saved 1300 lives in California for the last two years. We've done a similar analysis in New York, we've also looked, frankly, at the jobs question, because I think there's been concern again, organizations like the Teamsters, but these are also going to create a lot of new jobs. There are jobs in building them, there are jobs maintaining them, jobs charging them. We actually looked at the types of jobs that will be created and put out a study earlier this year that found that for every 1000 autonomous vehicles on the streets, approximately 190 workers will be needed for manufacturing and servicing these vehicles. These are new types of jobs and those jobs typically pay over the median wage. So we're going to see that some jobs will go away but there are new types of jobs created by autonomous vehicles.
Richard Helppie
Just to top off this episode, a young person today, they're going to work in industries that haven't been invented yet, for jobs that haven't been invented. I always like to cite the early 1900s; 50% of the workforce was in agriculture and now it's like two percent. So theoretically, 48% of people should be unemployed. There's always a thing that has to be done out there. I don't envy a younger person coming into adulthood at this time, because the future is going to be so much different and there's going to be so much change. But I'm confident that if we can speak with clarity, if we can rely on science and engineering and good mathematics and, hopefully someday, good government, that we can get that better world ahead of us.
Adam Kovacevich
That's right. That's right. I think that this is an area where I really do believe we're going to see significant strides not only in safety, but also like people's accessibility of transportation and I'm really excited to see that.
Richard Helppie
We've been talking today with Adam Kovacevich of the Chamber of Progress. He's a very learned man about all kinds of things with technology. He's in the inside game here and he's got a view of the future and a view of what the players are doing today. And with that, this is your host, Rich Helppie, signing off on The Common Bridge.
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