Mayor Karen Bass sent a letter to the California Public Utilities Commission Wednesday to voice her concerns over the increase of driverless cars.
She said that allowing autonomous vehicles to operate in Los Angeles without local regulation, and a collaborative deployment plan, could negatively impact Angelenos.
“To date, local jurisdictions like Los Angeles have had little to no input in AV deployment and are already seeing significant harm and disruption,” Bass said in the letter.
She also highlighted an incident in L.A. when a driverless car didn't recognize a traffic officer at an intersection where the signal was out. Bass also mentioned incidents where these cars ignored warning signs, blocked driveways to fire stations, created traffic jams, and even parked right next to active fires.
Philip Koopman, a professor at Carnegie Mellon who has researched driverless cars for years, explained companies are aware of the problems with their vehicles.
“And what we've seen is that the problems have been fixed more slowly than they scale,” Koopman said. “So if you have one car, that's a problem. Well, it's one car. But if you don't fix the problem and now you have 100 cars, you just made the problem 100 times worse.”
He recommended that the city should keep a list of all incidents involving driverless cars to make the state aware.
Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez also raised similar concerns last week when he introduced a motion asking the city of L.A. to join legal action that is currently happening in San Francisco to challenge autonomous vehicles in California.
The California Department of Motor Vehicles immediately suspended testing permits for a driverless taxi company last week, citing safety concerns.
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