So what I'm really impressed about you, Rachel, is that by creating this dashboard on the website, Austin has built an invaluable database of documented AV incidents, right? So what are the most important discoveries you've made that AV companies aren't telling you or to the public?

Yeah.

And I will say that I don't, not sure there's like an intention to deceive occurring here, really.

I think that, you know, it's just the nature of the business.

But I will say that there are really great things about the dashboard, namely that it gives us a lot of geographic information about our infrastructure and how AVs interact with our infrastructure.

A problem with the dashboard is things only come to us if they're reported to the city.

So you call 311 or a firefighter police officer, see something and knows to report it.

What types of incidents should they be trucking, in your opinion?

So why do you think Austin has become such like a testing ground for autonomous vehicles? Because, I mean, I travel a lot, and I see more autonomous vehicles here than I do anywhere else that I go.

Texas law is very permissive of autonomous vehicles, so the cities are banned from creating any specific rules about AVs.

Um, so Texas really invites them in and is happy to have them, um, and has a whole program to kind of bring automated vehicles into Texas.

Um, and then we have a very dense downtown compared to other Texas cities.

We have excellent infrastructure, right? 'Cause the AVs are using our striping and our signage to navigate around the city.

Striping, like the road stripes on the stri- you know, street.

So and then of course, like we have a young population, a tech-friendly population with the university and all that, so it's a good location to do testing and to do deployments.

[laughs] State law prevents Texas cities from regulating AVs, so what can Austin do?

So it's a lot for any city, but it's something that we're all trying to share out so that everybody can learn from everybody else's lesson.

My name is Rachel Castignoli.

I'm a senior consultant with Transportation and Public Works in Austin.

This really is the wild west for autonomous vehicles.

We don't know how many AVs are in Austin.

There's no state laws at all.

In fact, cities and the TxDOT are banned from making any regulations for autonomous vehicles.

Rich, if you have the chance to convince the Texas state government to do something for you, what would that be?