Jaywalking Is About To Change

My former employer, Cruise, has been in the news a bunch recently. They’re expanding rapidly to new cities. And in their home city of San Francisco, they’re carrying lots of delighted passengers. But they’re also making headlines for blocking traffic and occasionally colliding with things.

NHTSA recently opened an investigation into some of these Cruise collisions.

The only documentation available about the investigation, so far, comes from the legally-mandates reports Cruise filed. In both reported cases, Cruise’s (subtly but clearly stated) perspective is that the incidents resulted from jaywalking.

There are a bunch of interesting angles to these reports: the incidents took place at night, Cruise’s reports seem accurate but maybe understated relative to the severity of at least one collision, and in both cases the pedestrians were allegedly jaywalking.

The jaywalking aspect of these incidents has some interesting broader implications.

Jaywalking is currently, I think, an intentionally overlooked issue. It’s rarely enforced, except maybe pretextually. When jaywalking leads to collisions with human drivers, I suspect those collisions often go unreported (as do most minor collisions). And when the jaywalking collisions do get reported, they don’t make the news – they’re a routine, uneventful, and regrettable aspect of urban life.

But the presence of self-driving cars raises the stakes for these types of collisions. A collision that would pass unremarked upon when John Q. Public is the pedestrian and Jane Q. Human is the driver becomes a news event when a robot is driving and Waymo or Cruise is involved.

At some point maybe the newsworthiness of these collisions will fade. But the presence of deep-pocketed corporations will, I suspect, continue to keep politicians’ and regulators’ and plaintiffs attorneys’ attention.

And that attention, I think, might ultimately be what changes the stakes for jaywalking. What is currently a tacitly-accepted nuisance traffic violation might start to receive a lot more scrutiny. And that might motivate both more enforcement and also more solutions, pushed by all sides.

Solve for the equilibirum, as Tyler Cowen likes to write.