In Transit: Self-Driving Taxis and Trucks Take the Wheel

KQED's Forum

KQED

News, Politics, News Commentary

4.2 • 726 Ratings

🗓️ 29 March 2023

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In San Francisco, self-driving taxis with no human operator are accelerating around city streets day and night. Google-owned Waymo expanded to L.A. last month, and General Motors’s Cruise has applied to widen its testing to cities across California. There’s a magic to seeing a steering wheel turn on its own, and many in the transit world are excited about the benefits autonomous vehicles could bring. But truck and taxi drivers have concerns. We’ll learn about the latest self-driving technology, how it’s being legislated and what will drive its future. Guests: Ethan Elkind, director of the Climate Program at the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment, UC Berkeley School of Law; podcast host, Climate Break Christopher Beale, studio engineer, producer and reporter, KQED - reported for Bay Curious a piece, "You're Not Imagining It: There Are More Driverless Cars in SF Now" Trish Blinstrub, political director, Teamsters Joint Council 7 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for KQED podcasts comes from San Francisco International Airport.
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0:33.7	From KQED.
0:50.2	Music From KQED. From KQED in San Francisco, this is Forum.
0:53.5	I'm Mina Kim. If you've been in San Francisco
0:56.1	lately, you may have seen cars turning, stopping, merging without a driver inside. Those
1:02.5	driverless taxis are now starting up in Los Angeles. Waymo, the self-driving car company by Google,
1:08.1	got a permit to test its taxis there last month, and Cruise,
1:11.9	a subsidiary of General Motors, has applied to test its cars in cities across California.
1:18.0	So does this mean the autonomous vehicle revolution we've been told about has finally begun?
1:24.0	Not quite.
1:24.8	We'll tell you why after this news.
1:41.4	Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.
1:45.9	More Californians will get a sense of what San Franciscans have been seeing for months now, self-driving taxis tooling around city streets as companies like Waymo and
	...

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