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Chapter 1: What insights does Abdi Aziz share about the impact of Uber on taxi drivers?
there it's steven dubner last week you heard part one of a two-part series on the rise of driverless cars it was made by our friends at the search engine podcast which is hosted by pj vote if you've never listened to search engine before i would suggest you also check out their episodes on peptides and anthropic you can find them on any podcast app and now here is part two of the search engine series on driverless cars as always thanks for listening
Our first story was about a driver, a robot driver who evolved over many years at the nudging and training and machinations of a team of tech people in California. The second story I want to tell you also starts with the driver, a driver who is also going to evolve and change due to the machinations of some different West Coast tech companies. The difference is that this driver is a human being.
Chapter one, Abdi Aziz. I met Abdi Aziz in Boston, where he's been a driver for many decades. He was doing it all the way back in the 90s. Back then, he considered taxi driver to be a decent job. A career. Professionally, I've been driving for 30 years now. 30 years? Yes. I had a limo service for 10 years. And then I was doing five years for a cab, a taxi.
And then, one day in 2011, Abdi Aziz was hanging out at the airport with the other drivers when these men from the future showed up with a plan to change his life. When Uber came, I remember by 2011 they came to the airport. We were in the waiting area at the Logan. We have a designated parking lot where we wait the fares.
So they come there and they say, hey, you know, we are introducing you in a company that will do same as a taxi, but it's an app. We want you guys to join with us. And, you know, you can have your own car. We will give you a phone with the app. and we can sign you up, and you can make money. What did you think? At the time, I say, it is good, but you didn't come here to help us.
You come here to kill this business. Okay? You knew? I knew. Abdi Aziz had not been born yesterday. Here's what he understood immediately. The taxi business he operated in, up until now, had worked as a kind of monopoly. In Boston, like many American cities, you legally were not allowed to drive a cab without a taxi license, a medallion. New medallions were almost never issued.
So assuming you could afford to buy or rent a medallion, the city itself would make your job stable by protecting you from competition. But Uber was about to kill that system. Uber drivers just drove without medallions. The company argued that since they were picking up passengers via this newfangled phone app, they didn't need them.
Abdi Aziz knew that this was going to kill the industry, at least as it currently existed. Taxi driver would still be a job, but medallion-owning taxi driver would not be. A wave was coming. He knew what he had to do. And so he told his fellow taxi drivers his strategy for dealing with Uber, the company that had come to kill their industry. I tell them, listen, I'm going to join them.
I say, I see where they're going. I read a lot of articles about them. They start from San Francisco. They went to Chicago. I say, they are expanding. So we can't stop this beat. We cannot stop Uber. So Abdi Aziz found himself working for Uber. He says someone at the company handed him his new marching orders. We're going to give you a laptop. We're going to give you 200 phones each week.
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Chapter 2: How are Boston City Councilors reacting to the rise of autonomous vehicles?
Some of them had genuinely wanted to solve the problem of car accidents. Others thought that making a robot drive across a desert was just a very cool puzzle to put their minds to. Those experiments had been sharpened into a technological product inside the cushy bubble of an enormously wealthy tech company, who now had sent mapping cars to Abdi Aziz's city, the first step to deployment there.
When Uber had come to town, Abdi Aziz had thought, if you can't beat him, join him. Now Waymo was here, and he saw no way to join them. So he had to find a way to beat them. Fortunately for Abdi Aziz, he's in Boston.
My name is Sharon Durkin, District 8 City Councilor, and I'm the chair of the Boston City Council Committee on Planning, Development, and Transportation.
Chapter 2, Uniontown. Boston City Councilors began meeting last summer to discuss preemptively banning Waymo from their city. The first meeting took place in July inside Boston City Hall, a room resplendent in many hues of municipal brown. The stated agenda for the hearing, docket 1141, sounded neutral to the point of boring.
Order for a hearing to evaluate autonomous vehicle operations in the city of Boston.
The goals for today's hearing is to gather information, hear from stakeholders, and better understand the regulatory landscape. We must explore
Despite this very dry description, what was actually going to happen would be significantly more raucous. These hearings started out with the flavor and intensity of a political rally. People wanted to find a way to stop these cars. And this would be the room where they laid out the case as to why. It'd be the beginning of the fight.
Some version of this fight has been happening with increasing frequency in American cities. Not all cities. Blue cities. There's this pattern actually observed by reporter Timothy B. Lee, which is that cities in red and purple states like Austin and Phoenix mostly welcome Waymo, whereas places like D.C. and New York fight it.
In cities that fight Waymo, the conversation is less about safety and much more about whether robo-taxis will take away jobs. My hope was if I paid attention to Boston, maybe what was beginning here as just a fight would evolve into politicians starting to think through some kind of compromise.
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Chapter 3: What arguments do union members present against Waymo's presence in Boston?
But Waymo is not a driver. Waymo is a robot. So let's... Without a doubt, you're totally correct. Let's be really clear about what it is. It's an apparatus.
When we say Waymo driver, I know the chair brought this up earlier. Let's not do that. That is what we call the technology. And I understand it has sensitivities. It's very triggering. Understood.
And heard loud and clear. I just want to make sure that we're not driving there. That's not happening. So right now, in supermarkets, they do these self-checkouts.
So Boston is like a little character, you know? I think that it could have been...
you know, CEOs versus bees, Boston would just be like, we're on the bee side.
You know, like, we're going to go hard for honey. You know, like, we're crazy like that. I got to talk to Counselor Mejia, the politician who'd been so offended by Waymo's use of the D word. We met in person in her office in Dorchester. The counselor was giving me and producer Emily Moltaire a quick lesson on Boston, this foreign country where I'd happily landed.
We are just not the type of city that just goes along to get along with certain things that we feel, especially like Boston is a union town. We're hardcore. We're adverse to outsiders. It's a city, but it's like a little old town, you know? It's like very towny here.
Well, this gets to what I want to ask you about, which is Waymo. Do you recall the first time Waymo, even as a concept, showed up on your radar?
Yeah, right before the hearing. Oh, right before. Like, I didn't know. Like, first of all, I'm not one of those people. I don't pay attention to everything. I'm not going to, you know, like, I have my own little bubble here.
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Chapter 4: How does Carl Richardson advocate for the disabled community regarding autonomous vehicles?
I'm not going to sit here and sort of speculate what their job opportunities would be.
Let's just come to terms with the fact that we are creating a hostile environment for our hardworking people who are no longer going to have work.
I appreciate the question.
I forget the guy's name, but he just felt a little bit arrogant. And I felt like, you know what, even after everybody spoke, there should have been a little bit more humility and humanity in his understanding of why people were so adverse to the idea of losing their jobs. Like, he could have won me over a little bit if he gave me a little bit more heart, and he didn't.
You really think he could have won you over? No. I'm just joking. No, nobody could win me over. Part of the issue, Matt Walsh was an outsider. Worse, an outsider from a tech company worth $126 billion. The logic of Boston politics said that nobody in this room had to listen to him. He was here in his role as a well-compensated piñata. I understood that.
At the same time, if Waymo was right, if its driver was 80% safer than a human one, that meant there would be preventable car accidents in Boston in the years to come. Accidents caused by human drivers making human mistakes. We lose our tempers. We check our phones. We think about other things while driving. We don't mean to, but we do. And sometimes that means we hurt other people.
The people we hurt would not be voting in the Democratic primary a week after this hearing, but I thought they deserved to have more of a place in the conversation than they'd had so far. Emily Malterre, my colleague who'd been observing the interview in Counselor Mejia's office, at one point she chimed in.
I feel like for me in learning about this technology, I was very skeptical about the safety of it. And, I mean, I've known people who have died in car crashes. I know someone who died in the backseat of an Uber. I don't think it was the Uber driver's fault, but...
I feel like as I learned more about the technology, I did take seriously the idea that there could be something safer about Waymo technology. Is that something that you're curious about?
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of the second city council hearing on autonomous vehicles?
Chapter four, a good fight. The second hearing would go differently. It would go differently from the beginning. One reason was because of its referee, Presiding Councilor Gabriela Coleta Zapata, who started by trying to establish some ground rules.
There will be no demonstration of approval or disapproval or signs. So thank you so much for your understanding. We appreciate you. Again, thank you so much for being here.
The union went first, a string of testimonies from all sorts of drivers, many familiar faces from the previous hearing. And of course, Counselor Julia Mejia was here, dressed today in a jaunty black beret and black glasses. I'm still in shock that I have to even have this conversation, that here we are in this day and age trying to defend ourselves from robots taking over our jobs, right?
And right here, this is the first line of defense, because first they come for the poor jobs, right? You know, I'm always ready for a good fight, so I walked in ready. I'm like, this is one-two punch. I'm going to take them all out this time, you know.
Counselor Mejia, in Spanish, says they start by attacking the poorest, but from there, they keep picking us off. That the city of Boston is not going to let anyone take away the income of its people.
Please, no clapping. Por favor, no problema, please. The chair of that hearing made it very clear. We're going to listen to everybody. We're going to take it in the order of testimony. Everybody's going to get three minutes. There are going to be no outbursts. They control the hearing much better.
Your testimony and your contributions. We're going to transition because we do have a long list to public testimony. So thank you. Thank you so much.
After the union had spoken, everyone else who put their names on the list got their chance to talk.
So in closing, if you do do a study, look at not only how it would negatively impact people, but look how it would positively impact people. Because to me, autonomous vehicles is not a dystopian future. There's a second side of the story. It's a legitimate side of the story. And I felt like I wasn't going to be alone because I had a lot of people with disabilities in the room with me that day.
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Chapter 6: How do the perspectives of drivers differ on the introduction of driverless cars?
Kausar Mejia pressed. She wanted him to answer, how could Waymo create new technology that would improve life for blind people without using driverless cars? That's the question.
I'm not that technology advanced to answer that question.
But you're the CEO of a technology company. No, I'm not.
I'm the president and CEO of the Carroll Center for the Blind.
I was going to say, Gary, that I am... It's Greg.
Greg, oh my God.
So somebody gave me the wrong piece of paper because they got you as the CEO of Waymo and the Greg. My team better get it together. Okay, so let's go back. Let me just stay with you real quick, right? I think there is a white guy who had on a suit. I just made all types of assumptions. Oh, my God. So he was going on and on about his stuff. And I think I even think I even said his name wrong.
I didn't know who he was. And I felt like, you know, when you have egg in your face, like I had to pick up my face and put it back on because I was like, embarrassing. Because you were giving him a hard time. I was giving him a hard time. I think. He has to say to you, I don't work for Waymo. I was like, well, okay, then. I'm still mad at you, though. It was embarrassing.
I mean, you know what it was? It was like because it sounded like he worked for Waymo because he was there advocating fiercely for that community in ways that made me feel like he was part of their team.
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Chapter 7: What challenges do city officials face in regulating autonomous vehicles?
You could do a lot of things. But whatever we're going to do, I did not find the seeds of that new compromise in Boston. It also does not exist in D.C., which has been delaying driverless cars with bureaucratic hurdles. Or in New York, where my governor talked briefly about allowing driverless cars, then retreated under pressure. But these are the places where a bargain could likely be struck.
These are where drivers, Democrats, and Teamsters have, for a few more years at least, leverage. They should use it, but they'll have to be inventive. They'll have to imagine visions of the future more vivid than the word no. That again was PJ Vogt and a special two-part feed drop from the Search Engine podcast. Let us know what you think. Our email is radio at Freakonomics.com.
You can also leave a comment on your favorite podcast app. Big thanks to PJ and his team for sharing this series with us. You can find the Search Engine podcast on your favorite podcast app also. Coming up next time on the show, until all cars are autonomous cars, we humans are still in charge. So we look at a new research paper which finds that driving on certain days is particularly dangerous.
What days am I talking about? Album release days are basically natural experiments.
They're moments where millions of people suddenly now have a reason to pick up their phone and interact with it, sometimes while driving.
So, do Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny have blood on their hands? That's next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself. And, if you can, someone else, too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app. It's also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish transcripts and show notes. For Search Engine, this episode was produced by Emily Malter.
The show was created by PJ Vogt and Shruthi Pinamaneni. Garrett Graham is their senior producer. Leah Reese Dennis is their executive producer. Fact-checking was done by Mary Mathis. And sound design and original composition by Armin Bizarian. Their production intern is Piper Dumont. For Freakonomics Radio, this episode was produced by Dalvin Abouaji and edited by Ellen Frankman.
The Freakonomics Radio network staff also includes Augusta Chapman, Eleanor Osborne, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Ellaria Montenacourt, Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, Tao Jacobs, and Zach Lipinski. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by The Hitchhikers, and our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thanks for listening.
The central neighborhoods of Boston, I think, are like one of the most walkable places in the entire country.
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