I mean, really. [applause] there are serious issues facing our state. Funding education appropriately, protecting our environment, making sure we have ethical and honest leaders. If hes going to give it to me, m going to take it. This is not a platform for one candidate. We are hoping Governor Scott will join us on the stage but i am told he will. In all fairness, i was shown a copy of the rules that said there would be no fans on the odium. Very strange. My understanding is that Governor Scott will be coming out. Have you ever seen anything like this . I havent. It seems remarkable over a trivial issue. No matter which side you are n. We were placed in the awkward situation to decide this and i dont think its our role. [applause] thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that has to be the most unique beginning to any debate, not only in florida but anywhere in the country. Let us start. Cspans 2014 coverage include more than 100 debates for the control of congress. Stay on touch and on top of the debate and engaged. Follow us on twitter at cspan and like us on facebook. Com cspan. On tuesday the Cato Institute hosted a discussion on selfdriving cars. The panelists discuss the technology, the urban transit and security concerns. Following their remarks they took questions from the audience. This is an hour and 25. 25 minutes. What i hope will be an interesting discussion on self driving cars. Its an interesting topic because we are at a stage we are asking when the questions not if when it comes to the widespread use of the vehicles and we have three exits to talk about it. Before we begin i would like you to turn off your cell phones so we will not be interrupted. I would also like to say that we will be giving a session at the end after all the speakers have had their turn at which point i will be calling on you. The three speakers we have our randy otoole and adam thierer discussing a range of issues including the transit and regional planning, the legal and regulatory issues as well as privacy. Now the first speaker is randal otoole. I will be introducing each of them before they speak. He works on urban growth and transportation issues and is the uthor of books including gridlock, stopping traffic and what to do about it, vanishing automobile and other myths and most recently held government undermines the dream of home ownership. His writings have appeared in the National Journals and newspapers and is the author of the most recent analyst that will be out later and the policy implications upon the vehicles randall was educated at Oregon State University and in economics at the university of art. Now we have to wait for this live slideshow to come up. I hope you are ready for Driverless Cars and the issues behind them. What i want to do is get in depth into how selfdriving cars are going to impact our economy and in particular, urban areas. Already four Different Companies have received licenses to operate selfdriving cars on an experimental basis in california and nevada and other companies have said that they are working on selfdriving cars and demonstrated them in various forms and google in particular has published a lot of it demonstrations of videos of self driving cars dealing with things like getting around traffic detours, bicycles, obstructions in the road and so on and so forth. I think the important thing to understand if you are not really familiar with the technology is that its been 11 cars have all of the computing on board. Hey are not connected to a central computer telling them hat to do. Its all on board which means that is happening with the car is dealing solely with the car sees and knows about the area. Now the implications of selfdriving cars are first we may see a major reduction in congestion because the speedy 11 cars have faster reflexes than humans and most most is due to slow human reflexes. We are going to see an expansion of ability. Right now only about two out of three americans have a drivers license. This will enable nonlicensed people to travel just as much as licensed people. Im looking forward to the day i will be able to put my dogs in the car and send them to the vet. There are cars that dont have a human driven capability and so they will be specifically or specially for people who dont have drivers licenses. So for example this gentleman is legally blind yet he is happily driving the new car without human driven options. Another implication of the selfdriving cars is that it will change the way we look at transportation. Right now about half of all americans say their main constraint on travel is not cost ime. Its not the monetary cost of the time cost of travel. And with selfdriving cars come at, the time cost largely goes away. You can play games with your children, train your dog on board the car while youre traveling if you have selfdriving cars. That will change how we look at ransportation and instead of trying to live any place that is near where we work or where we do anything, we can have a fairly remote home and have a long commute. If we want to get groceries we send the car to get the groceries and they dont have to actually send ourselves. We are also probably going to see a confluence of self driving cars and car sharing and some people think that in the future all cars will be shared. Am not quite so sure. I think a lot of people will still want to own their own cars but people that dont want to own their own cars will be able to use car sharing and thats going to change the calculus of driving. Right now most people if they own a car, the cost of taking a trip in the car is the marginal or the variable cost which is only about a third of the cost, the total cost of the car ownership. O come if you are car sharing, the cost is going to be the average cost for the total of the fixed and variable cost that means you probably arent going to drive as much or travel as much as you are car sharing van if you are not. That in itself might be one reason some people are going to not want to car share. They are going to want to own their own car so they can reduce the marginal cost as a variable ost. But what is going to be the implication of self driving cars on urban transit . Right now we have urban transit in every city in the country in fact a lot of cities have urban transit and yet outside of new york the urban transit placed a fairly minor role in the transportation. In the new york earth at an area 32 is done, ten or even present a dozen of all travel is done by transit. The next highest is San Francisco at about 18 . These numbers are commuting but when you talk about all travel, the numbers are about one third of the commuting shares which means that in most of the driven areas transit carry is only about 1 or 2 or less of all travel. Its pretty insignificant. Or been transit was mostly private before 1970. Since 1970 eight the nationalized or municipal and and weve put almost a trillion dollars of subsidies into the urban transit and we have seen per capita transit trips ball from about 50 trips a year to about 40. So its not in a high success. Right now at one time urban transit was mainly for people who didnt have cars. Ight now only about four and a half of workers live in households without cars and most of them dont take transit to ork. Only about 41 of them take transit to work for transit use and even important for people who dont have cars much less for people who do have cars. If you think what income people are the main users of transit, public turns out youre most likely to use transit to get to work if you are more than 75,000 a year. More likely than if you earn less than 25,000 a year. So, when you subsidize transit to some degree youre subsidizing the rich rather than he poor. If you think transit is a good way of saving energy, it turns out to transit seems hardly any energy at all over driving. If you want to save energy you encourage people to buy uelefficient cars such as a prius. It costs more than three times as much as passenger mile per driving so thats when you count the subsidies of course. We subsidize the transit to a far greater degree than we do driving and thats in order to make it appear competitive with driving costs. So what happens when we take this heavily subsidized and largely failed transit industry and add Driverless Cars to the mix . When you look at manhattan where there is 2 million jobs and about seven square miles and three fourths of them take transit. Its hard to imagine we could substitute the self driving cars for transit. Its always going to be important for manhattan as long as theres 2 million jobs but that is the denser job market of america. He second dentist is the chicago loop where theres 500,000 jobs and about half of them take transit to work. Gain we probably cant see the self driving cars taking all those people to work but it might help for some. Downtown washington has a 380,000 jobs. About half of them take transit to work. Boston has about 240,000 about half of them take transit to ork. Philadelphia, 240,000 jobs about half take transit to work. In these cases i dont see selfdriving cars as an ultimate replacement for transit. Owever, thats it. Thats pretty much the wind. Those five or six cities where the transit makes a big difference in where trying to get rid of transit and replacing it with selfdriving cars is going to cause too much congestion. For most of those cities outside of new york the bus transit makes more sense but thats another issue. Then we got out of the window. 173,000 jobs in downtown Orlando League of atlanta but only 17 ake the transit to work. So if we substitute the cars and have less congestion, while i dont think youre going to see any increase in the congestion you will probably see the reduction in congestion. 170,000 jobs only 13 take the transit to work. Denver, 120,000, 20 take transit to work but thats not going to be big enough of a market to support transit in the uture. So basically outside of the five or six cities i dont see transit as being a viable lternative to the self driving cars in the future. I see car sharing and self driving cars is almost completely replacing transit verywhere except for those few places. So we have to think about how are we going to wind down transit and change the transit in the future to be able to adopt the self driving cars. We also have to think about longrange transportation planning. Or years mandated that urban areas have metropolitan planning organizations that engage in 20 year Regional Transportation Plans and about three righties plans every five years. A few years ago i went through the plans for the 70 largest urban areas in the country and i found that about half of them based of their plans at their plans on what i call the fantasy model which is we will imagine a World Without cars and hope people follow our imagination for examples that come into work this plan in 2006 and they specifically said theyve engaged in this fantasy they can live without cars for the last 25 years which means for the last five iterations of the Regional Transportation Plan and for some reason it didnt work out. People are driving more and more even though they are not uilding more roads and theres more congestion were still driving even though they are spending lots of money so their solution was to continue the policies of the previous plan and we see this over and over again in a cities across the country engaging in the fantasy rather than the reality building light rail despite the fact Construction Costs are growing to be extremely high. My former hometown of portland in particular seems to be in a race to seattle to see who can build the most expensive lightrail in the universe. Seattle is winning but portland s coming back with a plan that will have a 2 billiondollar tunnel and i dont see any of the plans being viable in the future when we have self driving cars i dont see why we are going to need to have lightrail or anything like that. This is not a surprise. It should be totally predictable but if you engage in fantasy planning people arent going to respond to your fantasies. As economist david brown stone says of the link use and transportation is too small to be useful trying to relieve congestion, reduce and renounce gas emissions or save energy. And so, what happens when we introduced the selfdriving cars to urban areas that have been engaging in fantasy planning which means about half of the urban areas of the country . Are people going to drive less because the car sharing and there is going to have a higher marginal cost of travel or are they going to drive more because people will have access to the self driving cars . Are they going to drive more because the travel budget is different . The cost isnt the issue, time is the issue and now they can travel and be productive while they are traveling. Nobody knows the answer to these questions come and urban planners are ignoring them. Ot a single regional nobody knows the answer to these questions come and urban planners are ignoring them. Not a single regional ransportation plan that ive ever seen has even mentioned the possibility of selfdriving cars in the future. Most of them none of them are trying to model it. If you have them have asked these questions questions have thrown up their hands and said there is no answer to these questions, so about 60 American Cities are planning for 19th Century Technology like streetcars and lightrail rather than planning for 21st century echnology. What should they be doing instead . I argue that they should do is ocus on down infrastructure. What do we mean by dumb nfrastructure . Well, the system does the French Version of the internet is an example of smart infrastructure. They gave everybody in france and dumb terminal to access a smart system that would allow them to do things like explaining reservations, make restaurant reservations, buy theater tickets and things like that but the company that was managing it had to keep up the technology. They had to keep the smart infrastructure up and they couldnt afford to give it. O they abandoned it and what was it about the 2003 and today france like everybody else relies on the internet which has the smarts in your terminal and the internet itself is a dumb ommunications infrastructure that doesnt contain the intelligence needed to do what you want it to do on the nternet. In the same way, highways can be smart or dumb to be a dumb payday dumb highway basically a statement and a smart comes in a car that knows how to do with the pavement. A smart he has all kind of Communication Systems that tells your car come electronically tells you cars things like if theres an accident or a red light up ahead or if there is congestion or whatever. The problem is that maintaining that smart infrastructure is going to be very expensive and its not going to work very well. So it is much better to have dumb infrastructure and let the smarts to be in the vehicle. Another example of dumb infrastructure is excuse me, smart israel transit. It only goes to please as we build the rail lines. The trains go there reliably as long as we keep them maintained that she cant afford to do so via the 60 billion maintenance backlog on the Railroad Transit systems. Instead, try and to provide smart infrastructure just provide basic dumb infrastructure which means keep the streets paved, keep the pavement smooth, keep the stripes on the dividing lines in plain sight and try to use a consistent form of signage across the country so that your smart card that works in california also will work in new york and virginia. In short, but he we should do is try to solve todays roblems. Today dont try to perceive the distant future. Instead, just try to leave the future with as many options as possible so that they can solve their problems without being encumbered by a huge debt we put out today to buy something that turns out not to be worthwhile t all. Build and maintain the dumb infrastructure and i dont know why you didnt show the last places dont mandate the Vehicle Infrastructure communications which is one of the things i think the next speaker will talk about a little bit more. Next up we have a Research Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute where he works on transportation and land use into the Communications Policy issues. Hes written for usa today, the washington ost and the washington review and his work has been cited by the wall street journal, the law should post comments Angeles Times and the congressional quarterly, politico. He rightly cited the bbc, cspan and more and received his undergraduate degree in economics and philosophy from George Washington university. Thank you all for being ere. I am going to talk about some of the issues that we have coming up and i am not going o talking about the regulatory developments at the state levels the follow up with some discussion of the national highway trace the vehicle Traffic Safety administration and some of the traditional safety philosophy at the federal level. Then im going to give some examples of how we are already potentially screwing up the regulation of Automated Vehicles nd then i will close with some principles for the sound public olicy. A recent automation specific hey said automation specific policy developments the states in green are states that have enacted legislation that specifically recognizes the identity of the vehicles and the states in yellow considered similar legislation. So implementing the statutes we have a few examples so far nevada was first out of the gate in 2012 and california has released the first part of its rules earlier this year that came into effect last month in the manufacture of testing and then the District Of Columbia has proposed rules in april. They havent gone anywhere yet. I think youll see why. There are some problems with hem. At the federal level we havent seen any specific regulations yet. They did issue a statement of olicy back in may of 2013. Among other things, but they did is basically cautioned the states about overregulating over legislating at this early stage, and they also beat out the