No Driver? Bring It On. How Pittsburgh Became Uber’s Testing Ground
No Driver? Bring It On. How Pittsburgh Became Uber’s
Testing Ground
By CECILIA KANG SEPT. 10, 2016
PITTSBURGH — Any day now, Uber will introduce a fleet of
self-driving cars in Pittsburgh, making this former steel town the world’s
first city to let passengers hail autonomous vehicles.
So with the world watching, what has the city of 306,000
done to prepare for Uber’s unprecedented test? The answer is not much.
There have been no public service announcements or
demonstrations of the technology. Except for the mayor and one police official,
no other top city leader has seen a self-driving Uber vehicle operate up close.
Fire and emergency services don’t know where the Uber cars will travel.
It is precisely this hands-off approach that has made
Pittsburgh ideal grounds for one of Silicon Valley’s boldest experiments — and
it has ignited criticism that the city is giving away its keys to Uber, which
is testing a nascent technology and has a reputation for running roughshod over
regulators and municipalities.
“It’s not our role to throw up regulations or limit
companies like Uber,” said Bill Peduto, Pittsburgh’s mayor, who said that Uber
planned to use about 100 modified Volvo sport utility vehicles for the
passenger trials. The vehicles will also have a human monitor behind the wheel.
“You can either put up red tape or roll out the red carpet. If you want to be a
21st-century laboratory for technology, you put out the carpet.”
The mayor’s mantra highlights what it takes these days as
cities seek to shed their Rust Belt pasts and transform themselves into
technology hubs — essentially, give the tech companies lots of free rein. The
approach, described as greenlight governing, is one that Pittsburgh and the
state of Pennsylvania have nurtured over the last few years.
When Uber wanted to expand its research around autonomous
vehicles, Pittsburgh helped the company lease a large plot near the city’s
riverfront for a testing track. When state regulators tried to ban ride-sharing
services in 2014, Pittsburgh’s mayor and the state’s governor helped bat those
hurdles down. Otherwise, Pittsburgh’s politicians stay out of the way.
The approach has many benefits, allowing Pittsburgh and
Pennsylvania to position themselves at the forefront of a driverless-vehicle
movement that has swept up tech companies including automakers, Google and
Baidu of China. It has brought tech entrepreneurs to Pittsburgh and attracted
hundreds of scientists and engineers to new research centers opened in the city
in the last decade by Apple, Google, Intel and Uber.
But it also has invited criticism from those who say
Pittsburgh is giving too much power to tech companies, all for a sheen of
innovation. Some residents are on edge about Uber’s self-driving vehicles and
complain that they have been thrust into an experiment with potential safety
risks.
“I feel like we were pushed into being part of this by
the city,” said Montana Michniak, a recent college graduate who works at a cafe
in the city’s South Side neighborhood.
How Pittsburgh handles the unveiling of Uber’s self-driving
fleet is being closely watched by other tech and auto companies that are doing
their own driverless experiments in places like California and Michigan
(although Apple is said to have laid off dozens of employees in its
self-driving car project and to be rethinking its strategy). Depressed cities
around the nation are watching to see if the Pittsburgh story can be a
blueprint for their own transitions into tech hubs.
“This is the first mayor in Pittsburgh to really get it,
and that’s a big reason why the city has become the best case of Rust Belt
revival,” said Richard Florida, a professor of urban studies at the University
of Toronto, who previously taught at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
He said he was “frankly surprised at how long a leash” Uber got.
Mr. Peduto said Uber did not have too much power in
Pittsburgh and said the city would be safe because there would be a human
monitor in the Uber test cars. The mayor also has his eye on a bigger safety
goal.
“There is no technology that is fail-proof and there is
no tech that can guarantee there won’t be accidents, but right now there are
3,287 people who die in automobile-related accidents around the world each day,
and there has to be a better way,” he said.
In a statement, Uber said of Pittsburgh, “Our work would
not be possible without the support we’ve received from city leaders.”
Uber came to Pittsburgh in early 2015, drawn by the
engineering talent at Carnegie Mellon. The university started a robotics
department 30 years ago, when driverless cars seemed like a fantasy, but
robotics has since proved crucial for the systems that let vehicles navigate
streets on their own.
By this decade, the university’s expertise in computer
science had attracted not only Uber but also General Motors, Google and Intel,
some of which embedded at Carnegie Mellon. Google and Uber later opened
research centers, hiring dozens of Carnegie Mellon professors and graduate
students.
Today, Uber has 500 employees at a center in Pittsburgh’s
industrial Strip District working on autonomous vehicles, according to Mr.
Peduto. Uber will have 1,000 employees at the site, known as the Advanced
Technology Center, within a few years and plans to increase investments to $1
billion from hundreds of millions of dollars in a decade, he said.
For driverless car tests, Pennsylvania also held a legal
advantage. Specifically, the state’s transportation rules did not explicitly
ban driverless cars, as long as someone was behind the wheel to take over if
needed.
Officials from Pennsylvania’s transportation agency said
they interpreted that silence on driverless technology as a green light. Some
state officials said they also believed that driverless cars could be safer
than those steered by drivers, helping avoid driver-related deaths.
“We’d be committing governmental malpractice if we didn’t
pursue this technology,” said Roger Cohen, the policy director of the
Pennsylvania Department of Transportation.
In Pittsburgh, Mr. Peduto fostered a close relationship
with Uber. In Mr. Peduto’s first meeting in early 2015 with Uber’s chief
executive, Travis Kalanick, Mr. Kalanick said he had noticed efforts by Mr.
Peduto and other officials to fight the state public utilities commission’s
proposed ban on ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft in 2014. Mr. Kalanick
also laid out a plan for Uber’s driverless cars.
“Travis’s vision was to build out the autonomous vehicles
industry in 10 years,” Mr. Peduto said. “We shared a vision to do it in a way
that would be a benefit for society.”
Weeks later, in a meeting with President Obama at a
conference for the National League of Cities, Mr. Peduto urged Mr. Obama to
support autonomous vehicles and declared Pittsburgh’s intention to be a testing
ground.
Since then, Pittsburgh has showed its friendliness to Uber’s
efforts. Last year, it also worked with the city’s police department on plans
to install a ride-hailing kiosk in the lively South Side district, for the use
of people who had been drinking and would prefer not to drive home. Pittsburgh
International Airport last year also designated waiting areas for Uber and Lyft
passengers.
Yet Uber has mostly gone ahead with its self-driving-car
plans in Pittsburgh alone. Driverless cars with Uber’s logo have cruised around
town for months, in part to get the public used to seeing them. With cameras
and GPS units mounted on the roofs, the vehicles collect mapping data on plants
and trees, the conditions of sidewalks, and traffic markings for nearly every
street.
“There’s really not been a whole lot of collaboration on
the actual testing,” said Scott Schuster, Pittsburgh’s assistant chief of
police, who rode in one of the Uber vehicles last June and signed a
nondisclosure agreement to do so.
Last month, Uber officially announced that the
self-driving fleet would go into action in Pittsburgh. Mr. Peduto, who had been
informed a few days earlier by Uber, sent a congratulatory text message to Mr.
Kalanick. Uber’s chief was in Pittsburgh at the time and invited the mayor to
be the city’s first driverless-car passenger.
After the two-mile ride home, Mr. Peduto posted on
Twitter that he ended that day as the world’s first mayor chauffeured by an
autonomous Uber car.
“I feel fortunate that I have the ear of a C.E.O. of one
of the biggest privately held companies,” he said.
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
A version of this article appears in print on September
11, 2016, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: No Driver?
Bring It On. How Pittsburgh Became Uber’s Test City.
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