Legislators are grappling with how to foster a high-tech industry that has found a fertile home in Pennsylvania while filling a gap in the law largely silent on the issue beyond a basic requirement that every car have a human in the driver’s seat.
Police currently face an “enforcement void” because no current laws “enable, prohibit or regulate the testing of [highly automated vehicles] on commonwealth highways,” said Maj. Edward Hoke, director of the patrol bureau for the Pennsylvania State Police. Legislation is necessary to close that gap, he said.
The hearing’s primary focus was Senate Bill 427, which would create standards for testing autonomous vehicles on public roads, but does not address next steps, like deployment and broader public adoption.
The current draft of the bill touches on features unique to the dawning era of driving without human hands on the wheel: establishing tiers of control over cars, whether in person or remotely; defining who counts as a “driver” for liability reasons; requiring officials to be notified of cybersecurity breaches; and limiting which roadways can be used to test “platooning” — a wirelessly connected caravan of self-driving trucks behind a human driver.
Eleven states and Washington, D.C., have passed some type of legislation related to self-driving vehicles.
The Senate bill incorporates ideas from those other state laws, as well as recommendations from a Pennsylvania Department of Transportation task force report published in December, federal policies, and organizations like Carnegie Mellon University and Uber that are testing self-driving vehicles in Pittsburgh.
“This technology is changing not on a yearly basis, and frankly not even on a weekly basis, but in some cases on a daily basis,” said PennDOT deputy secretary Kurt Myers, who helped lead the state task force. “We believe very strongly that policy” — not the drawn-out process of regulation — “is the appropriate approach here, and the Senate bill obviously addresses that,” he said.
The bill gives PennDOT broad authority to issue and revise policies for self-driving cars and establishes a safety advisory committee that can react with new policy recommendations as the technology is developed.
But industry representatives said the bill creates onerous standards that threaten to erase the openness that brought them to the state. Their disagreements with the bill range from details they find confusing in the draft to whether lawmaking is even the proper path to achieving the safety protections legislators are seeking.
One promise of automated vehicles is that they are expected to dramatically reduce the 94 percent of vehicle crashes that are due to human error.
“The safety focus in this area should be on the 1,200 roadway deaths that the commonwealth had in 2015, or the 1,195 they had the year before or the 1,210 the year before that,” said Wayne Weikel, senior director of state government affairs for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers.
“The goal of policymakers should be to help automakers bring this technology to market as quickly as possible.”
The bill’s prime sponsor, Sen. Randy Vulakovich, R-Shaler, signaled he is open to ideas for improving the draft before it gets to the point of a vote.
“We’ll work together on this issue,” he said in the middle of the hearing. “It’s new.”
©2017 the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
