The Wall Street Journal, the Omnibus Project, and Substack Live
An unusual issue of Off-Ramps
Welcome to Off-Ramps! Today I’ll depart from our usual format slightly. Rather than curating others’ work, I’m rounding up three conversations that I had this past week, each reaching a different audience, all on the subject of driving automation. Please enjoy all of these on your morning commute, or save them for your weekend.
This was an exciting week for me, as is it shows how the issues we discuss here every week in Changing Lanes are breaking into mainstream consciousness. Even a few months ago, automated vehicles were merely a niche curiosity for specialists or futurists. But at the end of 2025 they have broken out, to become matters of curiosity to regular people and intense interest among policymakers.
I’m glad that this break-out is happening, and I’m honoured that it’s my perspective, honed here each week at Changing Lanes, that is informing how so many different audiences are thinking about our automated future.
The Wall Street Journal: The Messy Middle
Published 3 December 2025 in WSJ Opinion | Read here
The Journal takes up, in brisk form, the argument my co-authors and I make at great length in The End of Driving and which I argued at medium length in The 50% Problem: our cities are heading toward a long transition period, potentially lasting decades, where human drivers and AVs will share the road, a period in which our streets will be worse, in terms of safety and predictability and congestion, than they are today.
That may seem perverse, but reflection will show that lack of widespread agreement about how to conduct oneself ‘behind the wheel’—as polite and risk-averse as a computer or as efficient and/or careless as a human—will lead to friction. Some cars will brake at ambiguity; others will barrel ahead, leading to confusion. Meanwhile, humans will learn to exploit machines’ abundance of caution, each driver shaving seconds off their trip while slowing everything down.
I present three policy options for managing this mess:
Acceleration, the rapid adoption of AVs in designated districts;
Containment, taking action to slow AV deployment until infrastructure matures; or
Segregation, ensuring that some spaces that are reserved for AVs while barring them from others.
None of these solutions is simple, or clean, or neatly solves all of the problems that AVs will pose. And all require public debate that hasn’t started yet.
The fact that the Wall Street Journal is interested in this subject shows that awareness we will have a problem, soon, is starting to infiltrate the corridors of power… as it should.
The Omnibus Podcast: How We Got Here
“The DARPA Grand Challenge”, released 4 December 2025 | Listen here, or watch here, or just search Omnibus in your podcatcher
They had to replace Ken Jennings, so I stepped up.
For eight years, Ken Jennings and John Roderick hosted the Omnibus: a podcast devoted to overlooked historical episodes or items, all with a good story attached. When Ken stepped back from hosting to focus on Jeopardy!, they adopted a rotating guest-host model, explicitly modeled on the period after Alex Trebek’s passing, where the quiz show had a different co-host each week. And like Ken, I was the first guest host (my episode was the first of the new area to be recorded, but third to air, due to scheduling).
The episode covers the DARPA Grand Challenge: how the launch of Sputnik back in the 1950s led to a 2004 desert race of robot cars across the desert, which in turn led to the founding of Waymo, which is now spreading across the world:
In the first DARPA race, no vehicle completed the 150-mile course;
Within three years, vehicles were navigating urban environments; and
Now we’re at more than 250,000 robotaxi rides per week, and just from a single firm.
As a former historian, I enjoyed telling this story, but what matters here is less the narrative and more helping people who don’t follow AV policy to understand what’s coming. John suggested I become Omnibus’s “transportation correspondent” for future episodes. Whether he meant it, I don’t know (though I hope he did); but the fact of the episode, and of the invitation, signals how the wider world is waking up to the fact that driving automation isn’t science fiction anymore.
Substack Live: The Policy Playbook
Recorded 2 December 2025, with Jeff Fong | Watch the 47-minute conversation
For readers who want the comprehensive policy argument, friend of Changing Lanes
, the author of Urban Proxima , and I did a Substack Live broadcast that went deep on the thesis of The End of Driving: namely, that we are headed for two futures. One is a world of privately-owned AVs (bad) versus one of shared robotaxi systems (good). And further, that we’re heading toward the bad future by default.The conversation covers the policy interventions that could change that trajectory:
regulatory harmonization, making robotaxi approval as straightforward as private AV approval;
AV superblocks, zones where only autonomous vehicles operate at pedestrian speeds; and/or
Transit transformation, the most critical challenge, since bus-based systems face existential threat from robotaxis.
We also discuss why San Francisco succeeded despite initial resistance, what to expect in 2026, and why manufacturers must accept 100% liability for AV accidents.
To watch, just click below. If you’d prefer a transcript, visit the same conversation on Jeff’s page and press the ‘transcript’ button that will appear in the lower right on the video frame.