PD Editorial: Let police ticket driverless vehicles

If a car speeds through a school zone or breaks some other traffic law, the driver should get a ticket. But what if there is no driver? That’s the challenge confronting state lawmakers as California’s laws aren’t ready for autonomous vehicles. At least one lawmaker wants to fix it.

Assemblymember Phil Ting, a Democrat whose district includes parts of San Francisco and San Mateo County, has introduced Assembly Bill 1777 to allow police to ticket autonomous vehicles that break traffic laws. Now, because there is no driver to ticket, police can’t do much about driverless taxis or other vehicles that don’t follow the rules.

Ting’s bill is just a shell at the moment, an aspirational placeholder expressing the intent of the Legislature to “enact enforcement provisions pertaining to autonomous vehicles.” He wants those vehicles to comply with all traffic laws. When they break a law, there’d be fines and points applied, just as happens to human drivers. In the case of driverless vehicles, though, whoever holds the permit to operate it would have to pay the fine.

It doesn’t get much more common sense than that. Every vehicle on the road should have to follow the same rules. When they do, it creates predictability and safety for drivers, bikers and pedestrians.

Part of successfully navigating the public right of way is situational awareness grounded in an understanding of what everyone around you is most likely to do next. Motorists expect that other vehicles will drive no more than certain speeds, will obey stop signs and so on. That allows traffic to flow and people to avoid running into each other. If someone breaks the rules, things can go downhill quickly, like when a driver blows through a red light.

Some states, notably Texas and Arizona, already have updated their laws to address the problem.

People with a bit of resentment toward driverless vehicles might take a bit of guilty pleasure in the fact that police could hold them to a tougher standard than human motorists. With no driver, there’s no point letting them off with a warning. That might change someday if cars are programmed with artificial intelligence systems trained to talk an officer out of giving them a ticket, but for now there’s reason to cut them a break.

Lawmakers shouldn’t dally filling in the details of Ting’s bill and passing it. Autonomous vehicles are quickly becoming more commonplace as the technology matures.

In order to streamline legislative debate and maximize the chance of passage, Ting should drop plans to require companies that operate the vehicles to share proprietary data with state and local agencies.

California has a penchant for forcing companies to give up data, especially transportation companies. Inevitably that proves controversial, raising privacy, data security and competitive concerns. See, for example, data disclosure imposed on ride sharing, e-bike and e-scooter companies.

Maybe there’s a case to make for collecting more data from autonomous vehicle permit holders, but lawmakers can take that up in subsequent legislation so that the more important bill can pass quickly and police can start ticketing cars and trucks that break the law whether there’s a human or a computer behind the wheel.

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