May 21, 2024
The Honorable Gary Peters, Chair
The Honorable Todd Young, Ranking Member
Subcommittee on Surface Transportation, Maritime, Freight, and Ports
U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation
Washington, DC 20510
RE: Hearing on Examining the Roadway Safety Crisis and Highlighting Community Solutions
Dear Chair Peters and Ranking Member Young,
On behalf of more than 155,000 members of the Transport Workers Union of America (TWU), I am writing to offer the following statement for the record as part of your hearing on Examining the Roadway Safety Crisis and Highlighting Community Solutions. This topic deeply effects every TWU member across the country – including bikeshare workers who maintain systems built for vulnerable road users and transit operators who maneuver through our communities. We appreciate your work to address not just the safety of individuals within a car, but that of the workers, riders, bikers, commuters, and others along who share our roads.
TWU workers operate, service, and maintain transportation systems across the country benefitting from the Safe Streets and Roads for All grant program. These communities are redesigning busy intersections to prioritize transit vehicles; building bikeshare infrastructure to prevent roadway accidents; adding physical protections for pedestrians to reduce bus knockdowns; and reconfiguring sidewalks to better separate vulnerable road users from motor vehicles. Our members are the essential layer of safety tying together the mechanical, behavioral, and physical preventions necessary to reduce road deaths.
Technology is an essential part of this work. The TWU is proud to vociferously advocate for new equipment, software, and practices that raise the level of safety on our roads. Our locals regularly use their own voice through the collective bargaining process to force our employers to purchase and implement advanced driver assistance systems and other technology to increase safety on our properties. Automatic emergency breaking, rear view cameras, and many other advanced features would not exist in our transit systems today absent the work of the TWU. These proven safety features come with immediate increased costs in procurement, maintenance, and training that cash-strapped transit agencies do not prioritize unless forced to by frontline workers and their riders.
While we work hard to implement functional, market-ready technology with proven safety benefits, we are often forced to fight back against bad, but richly funded, new technologies. Expensive marketing campaigns from the companies who profit off these technologies ignore existing dangers and over-sell future potential in an effort to rush deployment – a process that makes the travelling public effectively guinea pigs for the technology and undermines the safety of our streets. Most recently, autonomous vehicle companies have been the main perpratators of these high-gloss, low-substance campaigns.
As of today, autonomous vehicles are a public safety menace on our roads. The autonomous vehicle industry has presented no real solutions, just unproven talking points that serve to bolster the bottom line of billion-dollar tech companies who want zero accountability when their robotaxis hit and injure people. Their safety record for vulnerable road users is especially terrible – a pedestrian dragged under a car, hitting a pet, and the death of a cyclist. Communities in San Francisco and Los Angeles have come together in massive demonstrations to reduce the number of AVs on their streets. Many other communities have actively opposed their introduction. A federal framework to regulate these vehicles is urgently needed to ensure that these vehicles are meeting the same standards we place on comparable vehicles.
This is especially true for commercial vehicles. Buses, trucks, and other commercial motor vehicles are operated by licensed professionals and have a SIGNFICANTLY better safety record than personal car operators. We have often seen AV companies reference a false narrative of human-caused accidents – an incredibly misleading and disingenuous argument – but they simultaneously ignore the reality that commercial motor vehicles go farther between accidents, cause fewer deaths, and generally have better safety outcomes when accidents do occur. An AV company seeking to perform the job of a commercial bus operator or truck driver should be held to the same standard our members are held to before their technology is widely deployed.
We appreciate your commitment to ensuring the safety of our roads. Protecting the traveling public outside of cars is an essential topic to address – but the AV industry has zero goods to back up their claims that driverless cars will lead to safer streets. The TWU strongly believes that a federal framework that would hold AV manufacturers accountable to their marketing claims, collect the data necessary to enable regulators to make informed safety decisions, recognize that commercial vehicles must be held to their own standard, and prioritize workers’ involvement in the deployment of these vehicles is urgently needed.
Sincerely,
John Samuelsen
International President