The effectiveness with which AVs have been able to test and spread despite local municipalities being fairly luddite about them does provide positive evidence for the idea that states are the right level of government for many of these decisions. If this had been entirely up to Bay Area municipalities it would have been infeasible, and this outcome and the lives consequently saved will be due to state-level decision-makers being able to make better decisions than local municipal decision-makers.

If the urban sprawl of the Bay Area were (correctly, in my opinion) represented as a single fused city-county like Tokyo, I think we would have better governance, but highly fragmented municipalities means we have a lot of free-rider vetos.

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BurningFrog 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe. It would still not be governed by Japanese politicians...

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aetherson an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I enjoy my trips to Japan as much as the next guy, but the idea that Japan is a model of great governance is at the very best arguable.

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piva00 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Also, if state government was Tokyo-level of public service then CA would have had decent public transportation a very long time ago, eradicating a huge part of the value proposal of Waymo.

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astrange 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Japan Rail is public-private and many of the other train lines are fully private. "Public" is kind of an empty distinction here, Americans associate the two concepts because they think mass transit is a kind of gift you give to poor people instead of something everyone actually uses.

But there is plenty of need for car-shaped transit in Japan and people take taxis and use cars all the time. You might have luggage/equipment to take somewhere, it might be raining and you don't want to walk the last mile, etc.

(It's surprisingly hard to take luggage through transit in Tokyo. For instance, maps apps won't give you a transit route that uses elevators, even though everyone with a baby carrier would use it.)

	▲	arjie 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Americans associate the two concepts because they think mass transit is a kind of gift you give to poor people instead of something everyone actually uses. Huh, funny. This model actually explains American behavior to me greatly. Now I understand why the emphasis on transit in the US is primarily on cost and shelter rather than on quality of service. I always thought it seemed odd that they'd emphasize making things that are not useful free rather than making them as costly as is required to make them useful. But I was modeling 'useful' as optimal transportation across fare-classes. They are modeling 'useful' as 'compassion to the less well-off'. This also explains opposition to HOT lanes and so on.

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gretch an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Maybe, but Tokyo, despite being literally tokyo with tokyo's politicians and tokyo's transit system has allowed Waymo to come in: https://waymo.com/waymo-in-japan/

So I guess it's still pretty valuable

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jerlam 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't see any reason that individual Bay Area cities cannot pass laws against Waymo operating there. Why they would do so is a different matter. I'm hopeful though.

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arjie 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I suspect the reason is that California cities do not, in fact, have control over this aspect of regulation. I won't claim to be a policy expert, but the failed SB-915[0] seems to imply that this is the case. SB-915 was a proposed bill to allow cities to permit or regulate AVs. It seems reasonable that if a law was attempted to be passed to permit cities to regulate AVs and the bill fails even after modification that it was the case that cities were previously unable to regulate AVs and cities remain unable to regulate AVs. Absent greater knowledge on the subject, that is.

0: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

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polishTar 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Municipalities are generally preempted from regulating matters of statewide concern. In CA, the state decided to have the CA DMV regulate operational safety and the CPUC regulate the commercial service. Individual cities are prevented from enacting local laws that encroach upon state authority.

	▲	jeffbee an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The bar for "statewide concern" is also extremely low. It basically includes whatever the state government choose to pay attention to.