I cannot wait until there are no more human drivers.

I cannot wait until there are no more human drivers. This thought initially crossed my mind when I first drove a Tesla. Lately, I think about it nearly every day, whether I’m walking, biking, or driving. During just a two mile trip this morning, I saw two blown red lights; two people swerve over the center line while texting; and two attempts to pass on the right in a bike or parking lane. That is a serious safety incident every 1/3 mile! The better self-driving technology becomes, the less safe I feel sharing the road with people.

I remember learning to drive as a kid, seeing oncoming traffic in the other lane, and being amazed at the level of trust we all put in each other with these machines. And that was before the constant distraction of smartphones. The societal value of cars has always outweighed the costs, I think by far. But within a few years we will be able to remove the safety trade-off from the equation altogether. If we have the political will.

As technology improves, the safety disparity between human drivers and machine drivers will become so glaring, so overwhelming, that fully autonomous cars will be legalized everywhere. I’m confident in this prediction. To make human drivers on open roads illegal will be harder, but I think worth trying. Car and gun fatalities in the US both come in around 40,000 per year. But the vast majority of car fatalities are accidental, while the vast majority of gun fatalities are not. So car fatalities should be more preventable. And unlike gun ownership, there is no explicit constitutional right to driving. So driving prohibition should be less legally controversial.

If it happens at all, the banning of human drivers in the US will proceed state-by-state, and may break along political lines. If it happens, the effort will likely be led by grassroots advocates, mostly families of victims–something like MADD on steroids. Car nuts can migrate to closed recreational courses, and the rest of us can text and ride, guilt free. I hope it does happen. I hope our societal attachment to the open road is less dear than our attachment to gun ownership.

I hope one day we all feel truly safe on the road, which to me would mean living in a time and place where humans aren’t allowed to drive. Until then, I’ll be cheering on Tesla and their competition as they race toward full autonomy.