Sarah Blake LaRose

Today’s post is a bit of a departure from my stories about my experiences with dog guides. Part of my goal for this series was to communicate about travel and things that affect me as a blind person who travels. That is something I want to do today.

During my adult life, I have taken a lot of taxis. I remember wishing often that I could spend my riding time just thinking. Things rarely worked out this way. Wherever I go, it seems that I am some kind of ambassador whether I want to be or not. People ask all kinds of questions, and I usually feel that it is polite to answer–even the rude and far-too-personal ones.

One day, a taxi driver asked me whether I might like to be able to drive. I thought it was a good question until he added that perhaps someone could take me driving in a parking lot so that I would know what it felt like to drive a car.

I spent the remainder of the day feeling that I would like to make a great public display of breaking something and magnify the sound of the glass shattering, and perhaps replay it over the radio in the taxi a few times.

I wondered whether the taxi driver might like to drive his taxi around in a parking lot in the event that he lost his sight, just so that he could remember what it felt like to drive.

I have always been a person who appreciates function. I am very rarely interested in doing something just for the thrill if the something has a meaningful function. When I was a young teenager, I made a video in which I pretended to drive in the country. In reality, someone else had complete control of the car and made the video as if to show me driving. I was too short to have seen over the steering wheel even if I had been sighted; and at that time in my life it was amusing. But in my adulthood, when I struggled with the daily implications of lack of transportation, the idea of doing anything simply to find out what the sensation of driving felt like was emotionally insulting.

Today, there is a fresh insult. Some people go so far as to think that it may solve all of our navigation problems.

The self-driving Google car. Once it is ready for general use, perhaps we won’t need to use dog guides anymore!

I have put forth several practical problems with the concept of outfitting a bunch of blind people with Google cars in various discussions on social media. It is time that I laid them out in one place. Some are serious ethical considerations that blind and sighted people should be considering together in intelligent dialogue.

These cars rely heavily on computer technology. When that technology fails, as technology inevitably does, this leaves a person who does not have adequate sight for driving behind the wheel of a car that is either careening down the road or at an abrupt stop. What happens then?

If the self-driving car has an accident, who is responsible? If someone is killed in the accident, who is responsible for the death? More importantly, who pays the penalty for the wrongful death?

People who are blind from birth or early childhood have not ever had the responsibility–financially or otherwise–of car payment, car insurance, car maintenance, or all the things that go with these. Who will insure a new owner of a self-driving car who is blind? Can we be confident that insurance rates will not skyrocket because of concerns over what will happen if the car’s technology fails? I certainly am not.

On a very closely related note, the cars are currently extremely expensive. How many blind people will be able to afford them given the 70 or so per cent unemployment rate and potentially high insurance costs?

In this article about Google’s self-driving car craching, there is a note that the driver is “required by law to be in the driver’s seat”. So can one sleep while the car drives? Is the sleeper then responsible for the crash? In this case, the driver simply thought the bus would yield to the car. Incidentally, blind people assume this about drivers sometimes, thinking that laws simply require that drivers yield because a person who is blind has the right of way. More on this in a future post. This kind of law is very vague, and the bus driver and passengers are fortunate. Is this the kind of risk we want to take with people’s lives in society?

People treat the self-driving car like a potential magic bullet. But I am not sure it is a magic bullet I want–or a magic bullet I could ever get.

This Series