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Pennsylvania Task Force Should Consider Effect of Driverless Vehicles on Jobs

About 5.8 million Americans make their living as commercial drivers. As their vehicles are replaced with autonomous ones, where will those jobs go?

(TNS) — PennDOT has gotten ahead of the highway curve by creating a task force to deal with safety and regulatory issues from the seemingly inevitable rise of driverless cars, trucks and buses.

State government officials believe that doing so will give the state an opportunity to derive some economic development projects from companies engaged in developing and implementing the driverless technology.

Clearly, safety will be enhanced if autonomous vehicle technology is perfected, since federal statistics show that 94 percent of all vehicle crashes involve human error.

The state task force, however, should include an examination of another aspect of the technology, in that many driverless vehicles also will be jobless vehicles.

According to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, about 5.8 million Americans make their living as commercial drivers. For perspective, that is about twice as many people whose jobs would have been lost in auto manufacturing and its related supply chain if the federal government had allowed General Motors and other auto manufacturers to go out of business in 2008.

Technology inevitably creates job displacement but it rarely is on the scale that faces the transportation industry. The state government should get ahead of that cure, as well.

©2016 The Citizens' Voice (Wilkes-Barre, Pa.), Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.