Month: March 2018

If March 18 was a typical day on America’s roadways, about 90 people lost their lives in car accidents during that 24-hour span.

Unless you were unfortunate enough to know one of them, you probably didn’t hear about the vast majority of those crashes. But you’ve probably heard about the accident that killed Elaine Hertzberg, a 49-year-old Arizona woman who was struck and killed by an autonomous Uber vehicle undergoing testing in Tempe. Video of the incident released by police shows that Hertzberg was crossing the street outside of designated crosswalks, and that neither the self-driving car nor the human back-up driver stationed in it had time to detect Herzberg before the collision took place. Police determined that the pedestrian was at fault.

It was an unfortunate accident, the kind that unfortunately happens every day on roads all over America. The fact that the vehicle was a self-driving car has made the accident a national news story, but policy makers should try not to overreact. Self-driving cars have an incredible potential to save lives, and officials should not put that prospect at risk.

Already, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, has suspended Uber’s self-driving car testing privileges in his state, citing concerns about public safety. That move is a “a major step back from his embrace of self-driving vehicles,” notes Melissa Daniels of the Associated Press. Ducey had previously welcomed autonomous driving tests to the state after they were subjected to strict regulation in California.

Meanwhile, four state senators introduced a bill this week to ban autonomous vehicles from being tested in Minnesota. “Arizona confirmed my concerns,” state Sen. Jim Abeler (R-Anoka) told Minnesota Public Radio. “I’ve been hearing about this and am very worried about it. And very frankly the idea of driving home while you ride in the back seat is just a recipe for trouble.”

Want to hear an even bigger recipe for trouble? Driving home while he rides in the driver’s seat.

To err is human, and human error is the cause of 90 percent of car crashes. “We should be concerned about automated vehicles,” University of South Carolina law professor Bryant Walker Smith told the Associated Press in 2016. “But we should be terrified about today’s drivers.”

If driverless cars can amass a better safety record than that, they will literally save lives. Unfortunately, those futures lives saved are invisible relative to lives lost in the present, which have significantly more weight for governors, legislators, and regulators.

In aggregate, car accidents are a massive public health problem. And I don’t just mean the deaths they case. Americans spend $230 billion annually to cover the costs of accidents, accounting for approximately 2 to 3 percent of the country’s GDP.

Driverless cars will not be perfect. Certainly, they won’t be perfect when human beings are darting out into traffic on dimly lit streets where there’s no crosswalk, as Hertzberg apparently did. But we shouldn’t expect perfection. If they can be better than human drivers—and that’s a low bar—then they should continue to be tested and developed. They will only get better.

And even if you’re skeptical of the assumption that computers can drive better than human beings, the only way to find out for sure is to allow more testing. As Megan McArdle of The Washington Post points out, Americans drove 3.2 trillion miles in 2016, with a 1.18 fatalities for every 100 million miles driven. How far have driverless cars driven since they began being tested? Fewer than 100 million miles. It sounds like a lot, but it’s a very small sample size. To get a better perspective, we need a bigger sample.

Prior to the accident earlier this month, Arizonans seemed willing to give autonomous vehicles that chance. A February poll sponsored by the Consumer Choice Center found that 51 percent of Arizonans favored testing self-driving cars in the state, while 42 percent were opposed. Residents aged 18 to 44 were far more likely to support self-driving cars than older residents were.

Those feelings may shift in the wake of Hertzberg’s death, but officials should keep the long-term perspective in mind.

As Reason‘s Ron Bailey wrote in a prescient July 2016 article, driverless cars have the power to make us richer, less stressed, more independent, and safer. “Unless,” he added, “lawmakers and regulators manage to screw everything up.”

Remember when the FBI went before a judge to demand that Apple break its own encryption and force access into a terrorist’s iPhone? A newly released report from the Justice Department suggests that the bureau may have deliberately avoided alternative solutions in order to go to court and create a precedent.

The case involved a locked work iPhone in the possession of Syed Farook, one of the terrorists responsible for killing 14 people at a San Bernardino Christmas party in 2015. When the FBI asked Apple to help them break into the phone, Apple refused, arguing that doing so would render all their customers vulnerable to intrusion. The bureau eventually gained access with the assistance of a third-party contractor.

Cybersecurity and privacy experts speculated that the FBI was deliberately trying to create a precedent for forcing tech companies to weaken their encryption on demand. An inquiry by the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Justice should fuel those concerns further.

The purpose of the Justice Department’s investigation was to determine whether then–FBI Director James Comey spoke accurately in February 2016, when he testified before Congress that the FBI was unable to unlock Farook’s phone. The report concludes that Comey was telling the truth at the time. But it also highlights a fair amount of foot-dragging. (The FBI waited til mid-February before looking for outside assistance in unlocking the phone.) The chief of the cryptographic unit, it concludes, did not want a third-party solution. The chief wanted to use the case to force Apple’s compliance:

[Executive Assistant Director Amy Hess] became concerned that the [Cryptographic and Electronic Analysis Unit] Chief did not seem to want to find a technical solution, and that perhaps he knew of a solution but remained silent in order to pursue his own agenda of obtaining a favorable court ruling against Apple. According to EAD Hess, the problem with the Farook iPhone encryption was the “poster child” for the Going Dark challenge.

“Going Dark” is law enforcement jargon used to describe their inability to bypass encryption and cybersecurity tools to engage in surveillance or access data of targets of investigation.

The chief apparently became frustrated when the third-party solution undercut the legal challenge, reportedly asking another official: “Why did you do that for?”

Apple was put under enormous political pressure to comply with the FBI. Donald Trump, then still a presidential candidate, called for a boycott on Apple. Other GOP candidates demanded that Apple cooperate with the feds. Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Richard Burr (R–N.C.) crafted terrible legislation that would require tech companies to follow the feds’ demands that they weaken their cybersecurity. The bill failed, fortunately.

During that whole public fight, some FBI officials were deliberately trying to fail. All to sell a narrative that they had no choice but to make Apple weaken its own security—and yours as well.

Read the inspector general report here.

Uber has come under fire everything from its safety record to its disruptive effect on transit agencies. But those sins don’t even scratch the surface, Steven Hill writes in The New York Times. The ride-sharing service is rotten to the core, he says, thanks to “a business model that harms drivers, and the environment, and drains away passengers and revenue from public transportation.”

According to Hill, Uber is waging a “predatory price war” aimed at achieving a “transportation monopoly.” It’s shutting out the competition—in this case, saintly public transportation agencies—by charging artificially low fares. In the process, the company is worsening traffic congestion and harming the planet. Only by using regulation to forcibly dismantle Uber’s business model can we write these wrongs and get riders back on buses and trains where they belong.

Or so says Hill. He leaves a few things out.

For starters, for all that he writes about Uber’s low fares, Hill spills not a drop of ink on the fact that those public transportation services are themselves subsidized up to their eyeballs. Unlike Uber, whose losses are covered by shareholders voluntarily sinking cash into the company, transit subsidies come straight from taxpayers, whether they ride it or not.

I am aware of no transit agency in the United States that turns a profit. Few are even able to cover half of their operating expenses with traditional farebox revenue.

Take New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), which runs the city’s buses and subway system. It’s the most heavily used transit system in the country, and it services America’s most densely populated major city, yet it covers only 40 percent of its operating expenses through with farebox revenue.

Hill mentions a colleague who expresses a preference for a $5 Uber ride over a $2.25 bus ride. Hill asks his friend whether he’d make the same choice if that Uber ride was an unsubsidized $10. Given that MTA’s bus service covers less than a quarter of its operating expenses with ticket sales, perhaps Hill should have asked his colleague whether he would prefer a $10 Uber ride or a $10 ride on the bus.

This example is telling in more ways than one. The fact that Uber rides—whatever their level of subsidy—are still more expensive than public transit suggests that price is not the only thing encouraging people to make the switch. Uber and other ride-hailing services offer added comfort while traveling, plus the convenience of being taken directly from point A to point B at a time of your choosing.

It also includes the numerous downsides of America’s public transit systems. Ridership on New York’s public transit systems dipped last year for the first time since 2009. In other words, ridership managed to grow for the first six years that Uber was operating in the city. That it fell in 2017 has at least as much to do with the failings of public transportation as it does with the benefits of Uber. 2017, recall, was the year of the New York subway’s “summer of hell,” which saw track fires, derailments, claustrophobic waits aboard broken trains, sewage spewing from station ceilings, and an on-time arrival rate of 65 percent.

Since then things have gotten worse. The New York Times reported this month that on-time arrivals now average 58 percent. Some lines are performing even worse, with less than 40 percent of trains arriving on time. The fact that ride-hailing companies are giving travelers an alternative to this dismal service is a positive development.

It is of course true that when more people ditching public transit for ride-sharing services, more cars are on the road, increasing congestion. But time spent in traffic is just another cost riders should be free to shoulder or shrug off, depending what works for them. For many New Yorkers, the 15 percent decrease in traffic speeds is still not enough to get them back on the subway.

That’s not to say that policy makers can’t do anything about congestion. Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Fix New York panel has recommended a $11 charge for any vehicles entering lower Manhattan. This kind of “cordon pricing” is not a terrible idea and is already in place in cities as diverse as London, Stockholm, and Singapore. A better idea might be congestion pricing, where a variable toll is charged to drivers entering the city depending on the number of vehicles on the road. Virginia is trying this out on badly congested stretches of Interstate 66 on the approach to Washington D.C.

The revenue from these fares can then be spent on adding lane-miles to highways or subsidizing bus and transit service.

Hill, by contrast, recommends capping the number of ride-sharing cars, prohibiting “subsidized fares,” regulating Uber like taxis, collecting drivers’ contact information so that it can be handed over to union activists, and forcing the company to pay drivers more.

You’ll note that these ideas have little to do with combating the supposedly negative consequences of Uber and Lyft, or even with improving public transit so that more people will consider it a viable option. They’re all designed to limit transportation options that Americans have been freely choosing.

In a repressive double play, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has both censored student speech and tried to justify its clampdown with an absurd interpretation of eminent domain law.

In Februrary, security guards at the New York college removed two students from a public sidewalk outside a hockey game for passing out buttons and fliers that criticized the university. The students were supporting the “Renew Rensselaer” campaign, an alumni group that seeks to expose adminstrative abuses of powers. When the students pointed out that they had a right to be on public property, the guards suggested that the school controlled the property through eminent domain.

This drew the attention of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which had already sent the school three letters about its restrictive approach to students’ free expression. In its fourth letter, FIRE explained that the guards’ argument was “as preposterous as it is legally incomprehensible. Eminent domain is the practice of a public body condemning and seizing real property for a public purpose, not a private institution requisitioning public lands for its own purpose.”

While the institute has not responded to FIRE’s letter, school official Richie Hunter did speak with The Washington Free Beacon about the case. She would not answer questions about the university’s odd interpretation of eminent domain. Instead she suggested that the student handbook gave the school authority to quell the protest. Because these students failed to get prior authorization, Hunter says the school was justified in removing them from the sidewalk.

One of the students who was thrown off the sidewalk later emailed Hunter, asking her to clarify what part of the student handbook she referenced. In response, she cited a section called “Use of Institute Buildings and Facilities”—a segment clearly designed to cover private property—and stated: “Activities which groups wish to promote a cause, event, etc. must work either through the Union, Dean of Students Office, or the appropriate location supervisor to receive permission.” The sidewalk in question, again, is public property.

Students at Rensselaer have been involved in an ongoing battle with the administration concerning who controls the student union. The university guarantees that it “shall not impede or obstruct students in the exercise of their fundamental rights as citizens” and that “students and student groups shall be free to examine and discuss all questions of interest to them and to express opinions publicly and privately,” but it has rejected the student body’s request to protest and it has charged a student with “operating an illegal business” to prevent him from handing out information. Videos of the administration tearing down fliers and a recording of guards ordering students not to post literature have been posted online.