Stephen Dubner

But on the app drivers union side, I found myself being annoyed because I didn't see them engaging with the question of safety.

The idea that these cars could prevent death or that they could be good for disabled people.

It was like neither side wanted to, they just kept skipping what to me felt like the core trade-offs here when you talk about this could be really good or this could be really bad.

What do you feel like you need, like if you had a magic wand to just get exactly the information you want to have to be able to make a decision about whether autonomous vehicles are right for Boston, what's the data you'd want to see?

And how does that stack up to the existing safety and traffic instances that are already happening in the city of Boston?

I mean, there's a lot.

There's a lot.

And yeah, how much money is Waymo going to make off of this?

Because I think that's a central question, too.

Okay, is one company is going to benefit, and then there could be potentially hundreds of workers that are out of a job, and what that means for our local economy.

This was the only time in Boston I really heard anyone say this, that to get to a good answer, every single side would need to be challenged, that finding a solution would mean refusing to offer any group blanket deference.

I'd now heard the 20-year story of these cars, I'd read the safety data, and I'd done my best in Boston to just listen.

In general, I wasn't very satisfied with what I'd heard, but I appreciated Counselor Coletta Zapata's prescription, that everyone try to calm their passions, to ask good questions.

And Councilor Mejia, for her part, said that she would like to bring all stakeholders to the table, including disability activists.

Emily and I left Boston.

As we zipped down I-95 in a human-driven car, talking about what we'd seen, here's where things stood back in Beantown.

At the end of the second hearing, the city council had chosen not to vote on the ordinance, the functional Waymo ban that many of the councilors had spent eight hours speaking in full-throated support of.

It seemed possible they'd noticed that passing an ordinance that so thoroughly excluded the disability community was not politically wise.

The decision on Waymo now seems to be moving to the state level.

There, we now have competing bills, one that would approve driverless cars, the other that would require a human being behind the wheel at all times, essentially a ban.