An actual human need no longer be behind the steering wheel of a motor vehicle in Alameda.

A $GOOG subsidiary is, as of Friday, legally allowed to pilot moving vehicles across all the public roadways of Alameda and the greater Bay Area using a mix of on-board sensors and computers, along with remotely situated (and likely poorly paid) contract operators:

No, you can't use your phone today to hail a Waymo vehicle in Alameda for a robotically chauffeured ride to, say, your artist's retreat at Sea Ranch. While the DMV announced this massively expanded "Approved Areas of Operation for Driverless Testing and Deployment" that stretches all the way to the northern reaches of the Sonoma coast, the California Public Utilities Commission has not issued permits to Waymo to open those vehicles to the public in all these locations. Given the CPUC's business-friendly approach to autonomous vehicle passenger service (as well as many other areas of public concern), there's little doubt the expansion will be permitted soon.

Still, even when the expansion of for-hire passenger transport is permitted, there's the open question of whether Waymo will be able to or even want to supply service across such broad swaths of city, suburb, and automotively accessible pastoral hinterlands like Sea Ranch. Waymo's recent flurry of expansion announcements across the country read almost more like planting legal flags in new territory. We hereby claim the suburbs of Phoenix for Alphabet Inc! We hereby claim Austin, Texas for Alphabet Inc! We hereby claim Atlanta for Alphabet Inc!

Can they actually deliver service that is safe, reliable, and available — let alone profitable — across such diverse and large territories? Who cares! This is the only one of Alphabet's "other bets" that hasn't brought embarrassment upon the leadership of X: The Layoff Factory. Just as with large language models, the overall corporate goal is to own as high a percentage of the future potential market as possible (emphasis on percentage, not on actual absolute size of whatever eventually is the serviceable market).

But this primarily isn't a blog post about autonomous vehicles (which I have skeptical but not wholly negative impressions of) or a blog post about fake autonomous vehicles (as promoted by Tesla's erratic CEO). This also isn't a blog post about public automotive regulators (which face different challenges in D.C., Sacramento, and San Francisco, but all likely suffer from being under-resourced and under-staffed with the technical capabilities they need in order to proactively regulate this industry, rather than rubber-stamp press releases).

This is a blog post about how we are an island!

Go back up to that map and note that Waymo's new legal turf covers almost all of Los Angeles County... but excludes Catalina Island.

Perhaps it's because Waymo's customized Jaguar SUVs can't travel through water. The permit also applies to Waymo's shuttle-like vehicles that are built for them by a mainland Chinese company. Those likely also cannot travel through water. (After taking another dose of whatever kind of drugs he's consuming, Elon Musk will probably insist that his car could easily swim and/or fly to Catalina! But joking aside, his car was recently responsible for fatally drowning the billionaire sister-in-law of Mitch McConnell.)

Here's another more specific reason why Waymo's vehicles aren't necessarily coming to Catalina: the City of Avalon is the one municipality in all of California that has the legal ability to control which vehicles are allowed to operate on its public roadways.

To visitors, it appears in the form of the assorted golf carts that people drive around:

To state lawyers, it appears as CVC §21100.5

Neither Catalina nor Avalon are actually named in the California Vehicle Code. Rather, the special grant of capabilities in this section apply to "any city which is":

• "on a natural island"
• "with an area in excess of 20,000 acres"
• "and which is within a county having a population in excess of 4,000,000"

Almost as if by chance, Catalina Island is the only island, Avalon is the only city, and Los Angeles County is the only county that meet these criteria. Therefore, Avalon gains extremely powerful capabilities to regulate the vehicles on its public roadways.

From the perspective of this island where I live, I wonder if we could simply use track-changes and make three small edits to this statute:

Voilà. After the state accepts those three edits, the City of Alameda can decide for itself when and whether to permit autonomous vehicles on our public roadways. Even more importantly, we'd gain the capability to decide to ban certain types of lifted trucks and a small number of other vehicle designs that are extremely dangerous — whether they're driven by humans or computers. That would be very beneficial to pedestrians and cyclists, especially to kids and the elderly.

This topic started getting more local press last month, when a Waymo vehicle ran over and killed a bodega cat named "KitKat" in the Mission. Does the cat's name matter? Not exactly — but it speaks to the power of a negative story that's finding cultural purchase.

For what it's worth, the co-CEO of Waymo had proudly said the very day before the cat-killing that they expect to eventually kill a human and figure it'll be acceptable — so it's a test run, of a morbid sort, for their PR team:

Our country's automotively-oriented transportation network injures and kills too many, especially when compared to our peer countries. That status quo is the problem. And against that status quo, Waymo is perhaps a rounding error in both their current potential risks and their current potential gains. (Tesla, on the other hand, is a substantive cause of real and present risk.)

While there will be PR about Waymo's robotic cars expanding around the entire Bay, I'm just not sure it matters that much. (If I were a betting person, I'd wager that fully autonomous ride-hail is not going to succeed as currently envisioned for a bunch of mundane and miscellaneous reasons, and this technology will instead work its way into sensor and control packages in somewhat more conventional vehicles and operational contexts.)

Still, just as opponents of Waymo in San Francisco aren't letting the tragedy of KitKat go to waste, this blog will use the fanfare of Waymo's expansion into Alameda to pursue its own rhetorical ends...

Did you realize that the bureaucrats of the DMV suddenly said on Friday that driverless cars can operate immediately throughout Alameda?! Would you like to have advance warning and a say in this?! And of lasting importance [the point that I do seriously propose], would you like your local leaders to have the ability to keep a small but dangerous handful of vehicle designs — designs that off-island regulators are completely failing to control — out of Alameda?

It's merely a matter of Assemblymember Bonta and Senator Arreguín introducing three simple edits to the California Vehicle Code.

We are an island — and we deserve the powers to regulate vehicles that California state law already grants to island cities.