On Monday, Chamber of Progress sent a letter to the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD), San Francisco Department of Public Health (SFDPH), San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA), and the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), urging state and local agencies to update publicly available human-driver crash data in California. As policymakers consider the future of autonomous vehicles in San Francisco and the state of California, Chamber of Progress highlights the importance of making available points of comparison on the track record of human drivers in the same area.

Read the full letter to SF and CA agencies here.

From the letter:

“Tragically, as Vision Zero nears its tenth year, the city and state’s transparency efforts on crash data appear to have stalled. Public records stipulate that San Francisco’s data on traffic crashes resulting in injury should be made publicly available approximately a month after the end of the previous quarter. Unfortunately, no data has been released by the city since the first quarter of 2023. Similarly, CPUC’s TNC Data Portal, which tracks rideshare incidents in the state of California, is significantly out of date. There, the most recent data released is from 2021.”

Unlike human drivers, crash reports for autonomous vehicles in California are required to be publicly filed within 10 days of an incident. In order to accurately measure the relative safety of AV vehicles – which have caused zero fatalities this year compared with twenty caused by human drivers – the letter notes that human driver crash data from San Francisco will be key to making an apples-to-apples assessment.

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Chamber of Progress (progresschamber.org) is a center-left tech industry policy coalition promoting technology’s progressive future.  We work to ensure that all Americans benefit from technological leaps, and that the tech industry operates responsibly and fairly.  

Our corporate partners do not have a vote on or veto over our positions. We do not speak for individual partner companies and remain true to our stated principles even when our partners disagree.