Chapter 1: What experiences shaped Abdi Aziz's views on driverless cars?
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.
Abdiaziz 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.
So we want you to give these phones to the drivers that you hire, but we want you to set it up. They need to bring their driver license. They need to bring their social security. And you sign them up, everyone that you sign, you give them the phone, you activate the phone, they're good to go. So they were giving you 200 iPhones a week to give out? To give out, yeah, to the drivers.
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Chapter 2: How did Uber's arrival impact the taxi industry in Boston?
New drivers signed up every day. If you didn't like it, you could leave. To Abdi Aziz and his fellow drivers, this all felt like a bait and switch. They could quit, but many of them had car loans. What they actually wanted was for the companies to raise their pay closer to what it had been before. They wanted better pay. They wanted some other concessions.
Some of the drivers started thinking about whether there might be some way to exercise power over the apps. They started talking about a union. And so Abdi Aziz found himself, once again, a recruiter for a disruptive new organization. So when we started, we were like 400 drivers, and we joined the union. So you were early, you were early on Uber, you were early on the union.
Exactly, exactly, exactly. Because I've been in the industry for, you know, quite a while, you know, 30 years. I know what is going on, you know. It is my profession, you know. So, and the union, they, you know, they say, okay, call all the drivers, let us unite, and then we're going to go to the state.
Did it feel a little bit like, like when Uber was having you sign people up and then the unions having you sign people up, does it feel, did it feel similar? Like going around, like explaining something to people, telling them what the benefits were? Absolutely. Absolutely. Exactly. Because you see a lot of, a lot of drivers, they don't know nothing about union. Things were looking promising.
They got a big ballot initiative in front of Massachusetts voters that gave them the right to even try to unionize. They were collecting signatures. But then, during this still fledgling moment in their union drive, a different tech company appeared on the horizon. Do you remember the first time you heard about Waymo? The Waymo, the first time I heard was back in 2022.
I heard in San Francisco that they are doing testing. And what did you think? I said, okay, I mean, I'm not against technology.
You know, I welcome any technology, same as Uber, when they come to business. But I knew where they're heading to. You see, when Uber came, their aim was to kill taxi business. Now Waymo is to kill the drivers.
How you understand a story, what you feel as you hear it, it's so much about where the teller chooses to start it. The driverless car in the story I'd heard had begun as a contest among academics who were not primarily driven by profit. 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.
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Chapter 3: What challenges do unions face with the introduction of autonomous vehicles?
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. I think these kinds of compromises, finding solutions for workers who AI could displace, they are probably one of the most important challenges for our politicians today. And so Boston, for me, was a test case. Are we capable?
Were our politics ready? So here's how things began. Bostonians were here today to talk about something contentious, jobs. But they started with the one thing everybody could probably agree on. Boston's streets, the battleground here, were barely fit for human driving, let alone Waymo.
Boston is one of the oldest major cities in the country, with narrow one-way streets, alleys, and the lack of a traditional grid system.
It's really, really difficult to drive. You look at the map, it looks like a child's drawing, you know?
We also have issues with double-parked cars, rideshears, delivery vehicles.
After lambasting Boston streets a while longer, the people here get to the issue that'll actually dominate these hearings. Jobs. In particular, union jobs.
We need to address potential layoffs for our union drivers with the introduction of self-driving cars.
I think it's important that, you know, we listen when we hear Teamsters and the Carmen Union, SEIU, and countless residents who feel blindsided by this.
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Chapter 4: How are Boston city councilors responding to the threat of driverless cars?
But in Boston, the Teamsters are still welded to the Democrats, and the Democrats are welded to them.
Just a few months ago, I was knocking doors with drivers across the city to give them the right to organize.
You guys just were able to unionize, and this would just be a huge blow. As the city councilors began to ask union leaders questions, you got the sense that councilors already knew some of these answers, that maybe they were asking more just to get the answers on the public record. And I'm just curious, can you talk to us a little bit about the number of conversations that you've had with Waymo?
How many times did you meet with them? This is city councilor Julia Mejia asking one of the Teamsters leaders, how many times did Waymo reach out to you before they sent mapping cars to Boston? Thank you for the question, Councilor Mejia. It rhymes with hero. Zero. Zero. So this is why I asked the question, because oftentimes things are being done to us without us, right? Chapter three.
Councilor Mejia. The counselor had arrived an hour late to the hearing. A former MTV reporter, she's noticeably hipper than the median municipal politician, standing out in the beige sea of the city council room. She'd come to listen to the heroes, the drivers. But more than that, she'd come to make a meal out of the people she saw as the villains, Waymo's executives.
If we're competing with machines, it will ultimately have an impact on our drivers. At this point, given the scale of our fleet compared to Uber and Lyft's, I can't speak to what the decrease in their revenue has been. I don't know those numbers. The person on the receiving end of these questions is Matt Walsh, Waymo's regional head of state and local public policy.
Walsh looks the part of the tech exec. A spiffy suit, a swoopy coif of silver hair. For most of their conversation, they're talking past each other because Matt Walsh wants to discuss safety and Councilor Mejia wants to discuss drivers' jobs. What we are doing is creating an opportunity for people to choose to not support humans and the workforce. That is the choice that we're giving people.
I would disagree, counselor. I would say the choice we're giving people is they can make a decision if they want to be in a safer vehicle that they feel safer in and that meets their needs. And so are we saying that our Uber and Lyft drivers and our app drivers are not safe drivers? I am not making comments specifically about the safety of Uber and Lyft.
What I can say is that after 71 million miles of fully autonomous operations on U.S. roads, we know that we are five times less in injury-causing crashes than human drivers. I am not suggesting that Uber and Lyft drivers are dangerous. I am suggesting that human drivers, compared to the Waymo driver, are involved in far more collisions. But Waymo is not a driver. Waymo is a robot.
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Chapter 5: What unique perspectives do disabled individuals bring to the discussion on autonomous vehicles?
Julia talks about her mom a lot, how from her mom, she inherited an understanding of her mission, to protect working people's jobs. I used to work at McDonald's. I used to clean offices with my mom. I did all of that. Those were low-entry jobs that I could get. And I saw that with the self-checkout in the supermarkets, right?
Those jobs were occupied oftentimes by people who were retired or high school students or young people with disabilities, right? And now those jobs are being replaced by a self-checkout. And And there's a sense of, for me, it's a moral issue too, right?
That should be at the center of the AI conversation is that morally, while it's exciting and we could do all of this and we could save lots of money, but what is the unintended consequence of that, right? When you look at it now, like do you- I yell at people too. Really? Get out of the line. Okay. What you doing there? You know that's somebody's job that you just took?
The Latin lady, get out my face. I'm like, yes. But no, man, like it's, you know, I'm not the moral police, but I just feel like we are not thinking about other people. We're often just thinking about ourselves and what is the quickest way to get out. To Councilor Mejia, the headline of the day, really the only story, was low-wage workers.
In the hearing, she asked the Waymo executive about the precedent that was worrying her, those self-checkout machines. So right now, in supermarkets, they do these self-checkouts. Correct. Right? And those are taking jobs from people. And it seems like there is a trend here.
And my biggest concern as someone who had to have two to three jobs growing up just to make ends meet is that what we are doing is creating financial hardships for people who are already struggling. And so I'm just curious, how are you reconciling with that impact that you're making on already low-wage workers?
As I said earlier to the other counselor's question, we are committed to increasing workforce developments and job opportunities within the industry. I'm talking about for the drivers. How are you increasing workforce development opportunities for the drivers? Not for people who develop apps, not for people who answer phones, for people who are drivers. Tell me about what that looks like.
We do not have workforce efforts that are specifically aimed at any part of the population. We are creating jobs for individuals that want to work in the autonomous vehicle industry. How you understand a story, in part, has to do with who you hear it from. For months, I'd been listening to the engineers who first dreamed up these driverless cars.
From their perspective, they'd only ever really had one question. Could they build a car that drove itself more safely than humans could? Waymo believed the answer was now yes. But Boston had a different question. What about jobs? I did speak to Waymo's Northeast policy manager, Anthony Perez, who said he didn't want to be disingenuous.
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Chapter 6: What arguments are made for and against the regulation of driverless cars?
There'd been one person whose testimony she just hadn't heard. Someone who would speak for two brief minutes and who would begin to change the entire conversation in Boston. After a short break, Carl.
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Welcome back to the show. Emily and I had been in Boston a couple days now. The cold snap here was at a level I found frankly offensive. I dressed wrong for it and was getting those full-body jitterbug shivers vibrating down the sidewalk when we'd go outside. Very cold. It's the cold you feel in your teeth. I'm wearing long underwear. Maybe that's your problem. I'm wearing short underwear.
Exactly as much as I was suffering, Emily Malterre was thriving. Emily, a devoted public transportation nerd, she actually worked for a time in Boston's transit agency. Emily was just happy to be here. A mental tropical vacation. She kept cheerfully suggesting we ride the T to get to our interviews and harassing me with Boston transit facts. Did you know the bus in Boston is only $1.70?
That's amazing. Yeah. I was working for the T when they did fare raises, and one of my personal transit heroes, Laurel Padgett Seekins, fought really hard to keep the bus fares low. What were they at before the raises? I would cower in the warm alcoves of whatever local business would let me, then hustle into Ubers whenever possible, insisting that taking cabs here was not a luxury or a weakness.
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Chapter 7: How do councilors plan to balance innovation with job protection?
I am the Massachusetts Statehouse ABA coordinator and also an advisory board member for Mayor... You see Carl. He's wearing a light blue button-up and a tie. We've heard a lot about the impact on the union and the drivers and the workforce. Let's talk about the communities I think it would impact in favor of.
Not only people with physical disabilities like myself, but people with mental health... And by the time I testified, I threw out my written prepared remarks, and I just winged it. ...would impact... We keep talking about employment. I want to have that discussion. Do you know how many jobs I've turned down because I can't get there?
If you spend time talking to Carl, you learn a lot about unemployment in the disability community. It's high. Their unemployment rate is twice as high as the rest of the workforce. One contributing factor to that number that a lot of people don't think about is just transportation. You can't do a job if you can't reliably get to it.
I agree that Uber drivers and paratransit do an amazing job, but not always. At least once a week, I get denied access to Uber and Lyft because they refuse to take me because I have a service dog and denying me my civil rights. I often get denied access too because they won't go beyond the city limit because they're worried about maximizing their revenue and the ability to pick up a return fare.
My life is not limited to the city limit. And the other thing it would do, it would increase There's actually been pretty well-documented issues with discrimination by Uber drivers against disabled people. There's an active DOJ lawsuit about it right now. Wheelchair users whose rides are canceled because it would take extra time to help them load in.
Blind people whose rides are canceled once the drivers see a service dog. A spokesperson at Uber said they have a zero-tolerance policy for confirmed service denials, and that Uber fundamentally disagrees with the DOJ's allegations. In the meantime, Carl says he spends a lot of time trying to strategize ways to stop Uber drivers from passing him by.
Carl was born with a genetic condition called Usher syndrome type two. It meant he was destined to lose his vision and hearing, but gradually and as an adult. It's a difficult diagnosis in part because psychologically it requires you to accept so much, to accept loss knowing that more loss is just ahead, that whatever you get used to, you'll need to get used to more.
There was a time in Carl's adult life, for instance, when he had a driver's license. So I drove. I had 20-20 vision up until I was about 30, which is one of the reasons why autonomous vehicles are a big deal to me because I want that feeling that I used to have when I drove. of freedom and independence and mobility. I know what I've lost. And I want that back.
But people deal with it differently. And I have a sister who has it. She never took up driving because she knew she was going to have to give that up someday. And she didn't want to have her heart broken. I said, screw it. I'm going to drive. I'm going to work in film and television. I'm going to do everything I can. What type of car did you drive? Well, whatever I hadn't totaled.
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Chapter 8: What does the future hold for driverless cars in Boston?
The plan was to vote on the ordinance after the second hearing, which would take place in October. The driverless car in Boston was on trial. For the record, my name is Gabriella Coletta Zapata, District 1 City Councilor, and I'm the chair of the Boston City Council Committee on Government Operations. Today is October 28th, 2025. Chapter 4, 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. 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.
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. The second side of the story. Carl had done his version of what the unions had done so well in the first round. He summons his own coalition. These were people from Best Buddies, an organization for people with intellectual disabilities. They were citizens from Boston's blind community.
As a legally blind guide dog user in Boston, I have fewer transportation options than I did 10 years ago. I came from New Hampshire in what I used to call transportation desert, where I only had to rely on my family to help me get back and forth to be able to... I felt the room had a... almost what I would call a seismic shift.
Autonomous vehicles have the potential to give me and other people with disabilities increased independence, mobility and flexibility.
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