Perhaps no local public official embodies this more than State Sen. Jeff Brandes, R-St. Petersburg, who lauds such technology as a solution to the area's traffic and transit woes.
That's why it shouldn't be all that surprising that Brandes wants others to keep an open mind in the wake of an autonomous Uber vehicle killing a woman in Tempe, Arizona on Sunday.
Brandes told the Tampa Bay Times this week that while the technology isn't perfect, neither are human drivers, and that the incident can help the industry learn how to make it safer.
"Our focus is to make sure that any time there is a specific incident like that, we learn everything we can to make an entire fleet of vehicles better so it never happens again," he told the newspaper.
Advocates of driverless vehicles tend to argue that a computer-operated car would drive with more precision and efficiency. Thus, the element of human error — inarguably a factor in many if not most crashes — is removed from the equation.
It's unclear what caused the autonomous Uber to strike a 49-year-old woman as she walked a bicycle across the street. Raising even more questions is the fact that there was a human driver behind the wheel, which was supposed to safeguard against such incidents.
Yet authorities appear to believe that Uber was not at fault, and that the 49-year-old woman who was hit may have endangered herself by stepping out in front of the vehicle before there was a chance for it — or the driver — to react.
Brandes and other fans of the nascent transportation mode argue that the technology and the pilot programs that use them are all still new, and can only get safer.
Plus, human-driven cars are still pretty deadly.
Meanwhile, driverless technology appears set to launch in the Tampa Bay region.
A driverless shuttle is slated to come to downtown Tampa as soon as this summer. The Lee Roy Selmon Expressway, meanwhile, is expected to be the site of an experimental autonomous vehicle pilot program thanks to a federal grant.
This article appears in Mar 15-22, 2018.
