Senator Steven Glazer remarks on Senate Floor regarding Senate Bill 336

Senator Steven Glazer made remarks on the Senate floor regarding Senate Bill 336. The following is a full transcript of those remarks.

STEVEN GLAZER, Senator from the 7th Senate District: I regrettably rise in opposition to this bill today. First I want to thank my colleague, the senator from Napa, for raising a very important issue, which is the disruption that this technology is doing to many people who have employment in this field. There's nobody on this floor who has a bigger heart than the senator from Napa for the, the impact that that technology is having and his bill reflects that concern that he rightfully has.

This issue of how innovation and technology is coming into our world and the disruption it causes is a critical one for us as leaders of the Senate, as leaders in this state. In fact a colleague of ours from Ventura has legislation that promotes a task force about the future of work which goes to the heart of what this bill is trying to solve.

But for me the answer is to not stymie or stop technology and innovation. The answer lies in education, training, and retraining. That this disruption that's going to be caused by the, the innovations of autonomous vehicles and many other things in our world are not are not solved by putting our head in the sand and saying it shouldn't happen or we should put barriers to making that happen.

Look at the goals of autonomous vehicles, what are they? It's an attempt to lower cost, it's an attempt to improve safety, it's an effort to promote transit. If we can get people from their houses or their apartments to transit in a more efficient, effective way, we're going to promote our transit systems that are so important to our future. They're meant for that to be done in an environmentally friendly way. These autonomous vehicles are principally electric vehicles, and the technology that's going into these, the promotion of these vehicles helps California become a leader in the world, in manufacturing, in the R&D, in this whole space. Why would we want to stymie that work?

These autonomous vehicles are not something that's far into the distance. These autonomous vehicles, transit vehicles, are being tested now throughout California on streets, on property. I know in my district, both in San Ramon and in Dublin, these autonomous vehicles are being tested. And when you think about what are, in this case they are 12 passenger vehicles, they're not giant buses. They have 6 seats and 6 places where you can stand. And while we may think that this legislation is only about giant bus systems or giant buses we don't know where that technology is going to lead in the future/ Is it going to be 6 passenger, 12 passenger, 20 passenger, where does this issue stop in terms of having a transit employee on every, every one of them.

So it is true that technology is disruptive, but think about it. Would we say we wanted to defend the horse and buggy? Would we want to say we want to defend the typewriter? These things on all our desks,  this is another form of disruption of technology for all the people that we might have relied upon to write memos and letters and all the rest of the things that we count on in our work world. So I appreciate the author's commitment to work on this last mile issue but I think that the answer to this in this legislation on this area and throughout state government is to not put our head in the sand. The answer for us is to lead on education, on training and retraining. I think that's the better solution and why I can't support the bill today.