Now a veteran of driverless rides, Rep. Buckner touts three-year test for self-driving vehicles in Illinois

When State Rep. Kam Buckner took his first of two rides in a self-driving car in Silicon Valley last year, he felt a bit like George Jetson.

He wasn’t scared for his present-day safety. And he was intrigued about the transportation future.

“It was different… It’s not going to be for everybody. Like when I go to the store — I like the fact that there are self check-out lanes, but I don’t use those. I want to talk to a person,” Buckner (D-Chicago) said Thursday. “ It’ll be different if we decide to move forward with it. But it’s worth us having a conversation now, so we’re not blindsided in the future.”

On Thursday, Buckner made the case for state legislation he is championing that would make a test of driverless cars possible in five Illinois counties: Cook, Sangamon, Madison, St. Clair and Monroe.

The still-pending bill would set the stage for a three-year pilot program in those counties to test the consumer appetite for autonomous vehicles, and gather a host of information about the impact on traffic congestion, jobs and safety.

Buckner called it a “test case to see if things work and what we need to do different” than the 29 other states that have authorized driverless vehicles.

Chicago and other municipalities would still need to authorize driverless vehicles and establish their own safety and regulatory rules.

Waymo’s self-driving cars hit the streets of Chicago this week — with drivers, for now — to begin the process of mapping the city for the switch to autonomous vehicles.

“When California did... they didn’t do this type of pilot. They just kind of rolled it out. When Arizona did it, they did the same thing. Same with Texas,” Buckner told the Sun-Times.

"This is obviously coming to Illinois. They’re going to at least attempt to. So we should get ahead of the curve here and make sure that we are dictating the pace and the conversation," Buckner continued. "We should have at least three years of data, three years of experience and some real understanding of how these work here within our state lines to see if it makes sense for Illinois.”

Driverless vehicles have generated controversy for a host of reasons that range from concerns about safety and consumer cost to the impact on jobs. Buckner said he has “the same concerns when it comes to labor and safety.” Which is why he favors a go-slow approach.

“I’m not just trying to fill the streets with these cars and knock people out of their jobs. In fact, I’m chief sponsor of another bill that would unionize ride share drivers in Illinois. We can do both," he said.

Self-driving vehicles operated by Waymo, Uber Tesla and other companies have traveled a rocky road for the last decade, with a documented history of crashes that have triggered dozens of fatalities and injuries.

In 2018, a 49-year-old woman was walking her bicycle across a road outside a designated crosswalk in Tempe, Arizona when she was struck and killed by a self-driving SUV operated by Uber with a human backup driver who was not monitoring the road.

Uber’s testing privileges were suspended by the Arizona governor. The back-up driver pleaded guilty to endangerment and was sentenced to three years of supervised probation.

Five years later, a driver hit a pedestrian in San Francisco and threw the woman into the path of a self-driving vehicle that ran the woman over. The self-driving vehicle did not detect the pedestrian and dragged her more than 20 feet at 7 miles per hour as it attempted to pull over to the side of the road. The woman suffered serious injuries, but survived.

Ald. Daniel La Spata (1st) who chairs the City Council’s Committee on Pedestrian and Traffic Safety, said his biggest concern is a state-authorized pilot program that “pre-empts home-rule regulation” of autonomous vehicles.

“I understand for a lot of folks the need to act expeditiously. But we need to have hearings on this to have those discussions and understand what are the strengths and weaknesses of autonomous vehicles,” La Spata said. “They trumpet safety benefits and statistics. At the same time, we do see those cases where children and others have been injured or killed. And we need to… take all that into account. I don’t want to move so expeditiously that we put ourselves in a position where we can’t respond to those issues.”