NY Taxi Drivers: Ban Uber Self-Driving Cars

From fighting against Uber drivers … to fighting against no Uber drivers?

Fortune reports that in New York, a lobbying group that represents taxi and limo drivers is pushing to get self-driving cars off the road. For a long time. Fifty years, in fact.

As reported the Upstate Transportation Association, which focuses, well, on upstate New York, wrote in a letter to state politicians including Gov. Andrew Cuomo that jobs promised by the juggernaut of ride-hailing, Uber, remains unlikely to be realized.

Fortune said that, according to the association, those politicians are examining whether ride-hailing via firms such as Uber and Lyft should be allowed in upstate New York, where Uber has said that it can bring 13,000 new jobs — a statement that the association says does not dovetail with the thought that driverless cars are in the offing eventually. UTA President John Tomassi said in his letter that “anyone who believes Uber will create jobs should also be willing to protect them from automation,” Tomassi wrote. “If you approve a ride-sharing expansion without a ban on driverless cars, you will be turning new jobs into lost jobs.”

As has been reported, Uber has held tests of self-driving cars in San Francisco, but that testing was halted as the state department pulled registrations for those autonomous vehicles. As noted by Fortune, taxi and limo drivers would see an outsized impact, as would an additional 2 million truck drivers based in the U.S. As a side note, driverless autos were among the hot topics at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.