Stephen Dubner

But the whole reason I'd found this fight so fascinating is because I thought it was one where you really couldn't easily dismiss anybody.

For the people who believe driverless cars will save lots of lives, the human beings with jobs are an unignorable fact.

For the people who want to protect those jobs, the human beings asking for better accessibility or safer roads are also an unignorable fact.

This fantasy that there were blind people who were secret lobbyists was tempting because if that were true, it would mean the world was a simpler place.

It's not.

The chair, Councilor Koleta Zapata, said this in the room pretty explicitly.

Nobody had been paid to be there.

Counselor Coleta Zapata.

You can see her in the video.

Shoulder-length brown hair, big clear glasses.

Like Counselor Mejia, she comes from an activist background.

As the hearing closed that day, she'd gone from being just the neutral moderator to, when it was her turn, asking the Waymo executive a lot of questions.

Questions about jobs, but also just questions about the car.

How did it work?

What happened when a blind person ordered one?

How did they find it?

she seemed to be using the hearing to try to get information, which is how I'd been trying to use the hearing.

And I wondered if her experience as a participant had been at all like mine as an observer.

Can I just tell you, and I don't know if this is a question or just like a statement, when I was watching the hearings, the thing that was annoying to me was like, I felt like on Waymo's side...

They were unwilling to engage with the reality of job loss.