Want to get rid of a traffic ticket in California? Don’t drive.
Okay, this might seem a little obvious, so let me rephrase it: Under current California law, self-driving cars are not subject to California traffic tickets, According to NBC Bay Area reports. The loophole has led activists to urge the state to pass new laws and set up regulators to more strictly regulate self-driving cars.
NBC Bay Area Investigative Team obtained an internal memo from San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott instructing officers to “if [autonomous vehicle] Operating in driverless mode. ”
California DMV mandates fewer self-driving cars on roads
“Technology evolves rapidly, sometimes faster than legislation or regulations can adapt to change,” Scott added, according to NBC Bay Area.
According to a June report in the San Francisco Standard, part of the reason the city doesn’t list self-driving cars as a violation is because there’s actually no one to cite.
“When you’re a police officer and you see a vehicle on scene with a vehicle code violation, which happens every day in San Francisco, who do you ticket?” SFMTA Transportation Director Jeffrey Tumlin told the media. “More work needs to be done to clarify what happens when self-driving cars break the law.”
It makes sense that it would be difficult to pass good legislation for such a rapidly changing technology, but it is not impossible. After all, according to NBC News, both Texas and Arizona have rewritten their states’ traffic laws to ensure that driverless cars can be ticketed if they break the law on the road.
This new directive appears to be a change in policy. In 2018, a passenger in a Cruise self-driving car was ticketed for driving illegally in a self-driving car, which may not be the best policy either.Even more confusing, self-driving cars in California able You still get parking tickets – they’re just not affected by moving violations. But mobility is indeed the problem for many self-driving cars.
exist August 2023Later, California regulators began allowing Waymo and Cruise, two of the more popular self-driving car companies, to provide 24/7 taxi services in San Francisco.Just ten days later, a Cruising self-driving cars and fire trucks collide in city The California Department of Motor Vehicles requires the company to reduce the number of driverless cars on the road.
On the one hand, the makers of these self-driving cars say the cars need more miles to get better. But campaigners argue that, sure, cars may need more mileage, but do those miles have to be logged on busy roads where humans drive and pedestrians walk? Shouldn’t there be a way to ensure that even if these cars break the law, they are held to the same standards as humans?
