The Waymo in the Surf Parking Lot: Autonomous Vehicles, Government Licensing and the Future of Getting to the Beach

California’s DMV Regulation of Autonomous Vehicles Illustrates How Incumbent Interests Use Regulation to Slow Innovation That Serves Consumers

Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

LOS ANGELES — A woman found a man hiding in the trunk of a self-driving Waymo last week in Los Angeles, which is the kind of incident that generates excellent coverage and terrible policy conclusions. The incident is being discussed in the context of autonomous vehicle safety — whether Waymos are safe, whether the internal camera system should have detected the stowaway, whether Waymo’s terms of service adequately address the scenario. The libertarian question is different: why is Waymo, a technology that has driven tens of millions of miles with safety records comparable to or better than human-driven vehicles, still subject to a regulatory approval process that has permitted commercial operation in only a fraction of its potential market years after the technology demonstrated commercial readiness?

The AV Regulatory Apparatus and Who Benefits From It

California’s autonomous vehicle regulatory framework, administered by the Department of Motor Vehicles, requires extensive testing, permitting, and reporting before commercial AV operations can be expanded. The framework has produced a well-documented safety record from the AV companies that have operated within it, and has enabled the accumulation of safety data that informs ongoing regulatory development. It has also produced a regulatory timeline that has consistently trailed the technology’s demonstrated capability, creating a gap between what the vehicles can do and what the regulatory framework permits them to do that benefits incumbents — primarily the human-driven taxi and rideshare industries — whose competitive position relative to AVs improves with each year of regulatory delay.

The economic analysis of regulatory timing is well-developed in the libertarian literature: incumbent industries consistently use the regulatory process to slow the entry of competitive technologies, characterizing safety concerns as their primary motivation while the primary effect of their advocacy is the protection of market position. The taxi industry’s opposition to Uber and Lyft followed this pattern. The rideshare industry’s own advocacy on autonomous vehicle regulation is following the same pattern: support for safety regulation that requires years of approval process, which delays the AV technology that threatens their business model. The safety concerns are real. They are also disproportionate to the documented safety record of deployed AVs, and the regulatory response is calibrated not to the actual risk but to the political economy of incumbent advocacy.

What AVs Mean for Surf Access

The surf access implication of autonomous vehicles is underappreciated: a fully deployed AV taxi system in Los Angeles would allow surfers to get to beach breaks without the parking fee, without the parking search, without the carbon emissions of a solo vehicle trip, and without the need for a private vehicle at a destination where the primary activity requires no vehicle. You would summon an AV, travel to the beach, surf, summon another AV to return. The beach parking lot as revenue source and access barrier would be replaced by a curb at PCH and a booking on an app. The economic model of beach access changes. The current parking lot model — in which state parks revenue depends on charging for vehicle access to public beaches — becomes obsolete. The state parks system, recognizing this, has an institutional interest in the continued inadequacy of public transit and AV service to beaches that contradicts its nominal public access mission.

The technology for this future exists. The Waymo operating in Los Angeles demonstrates it. The regulatory pathway to make it a viable alternative to private vehicle beach access has been managed at a pace that protects incumbent transportation models. According to the Cato Institute‘s transportation policy analysis, the appropriate regulatory standard for autonomous vehicles is outcomes-based — requiring demonstrated safety performance — rather than process-based — requiring specific technology architectures, testing periods, and approval sequences whose primary function is delay. Outcomes-based regulation would allow AVs that demonstrate safety to operate commercially without waiting for regulatory processes designed for a technology environment that no longer exists. The surfers would get to the beach more easily. The parking lot revenue would need alternative sources. The state parks system would need to think about beach access differently. These are not insurmountable challenges. They are the challenges that regulatory reform requires engaging with rather than avoiding through process barriers that protect the status quo.

The Stowaway and What He Tells Us About Trust

The man found in the Waymo trunk raises a legitimate safety question about autonomous vehicle security that the regulatory process has not fully addressed: how does an AV without a driver detect and respond to unauthorized occupants? The Waymo’s interior camera system did not apparently detect the man before the booking passenger did. This is a real gap. It should be addressed through Waymo’s safety engineering and disclosed to users and regulators. What it should not produce is a regulatory conclusion that AV deployment should be slowed because one incident demonstrated a specific security gap, when the equivalent incidents involving human-driven vehicles — including carjackings, assaults, and violations of passenger safety — are more frequent and produce no comparable regulatory response. The standard applied to AVs should be the same standard applied to human-driven alternatives. On safety, AVs are already meeting or exceeding that standard on most metrics. The trunk stowaway is a design problem to fix. It is not an argument for perpetuating the regulatory framework that delays the technology’s broader deployment at the cost of the consumers who would benefit from it. Libertarianism.org has documented multiple instances of safety-based regulatory arguments that systematically favor incumbents over new entrants across transportation technology history. The AV regulatory story follows a well-documented pattern.

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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/