New York’s public transit advocacy community has launched a new attack against robotaxis. A recently published report from Open Plans and the Sam Schwartz Transportation Program leads with an alarming claim: Waymo vehicles, they assert, “have a significantly higher rate of crashes with a serious injury or fatality than the existing New York City for-hire fleet.”

The full report largely concedes the point that robotaxis are safer than the typical human driver (an earlier point of debate) and instead focuses on the comparison with for-hire services like Uber, Lyft, and yellow taxis. Concern about the impact on jobs in this sector is the main reason that autonomous vehicles remain illegal in New York. (Waymo’s limited testing permit lapsed in March.)

But a closer look at what the report actually found shows that the safety record of robotaxis is so strong that they clear even the bar of safety compared with professional drivers in the Big Apple. Unfortunately, the report skewed the numbers to push the authors’ preferred narrative.

The study’s strongest statistical analysis looks at the risk of injury-causing crashes among different vehicle types. These data are taken from Waymo’s reporting to federal regulators and crash data from the NYPD indicating injuries or fatalities. Over 40,000 such cases occur in New York City in a typical year, allowing for a statistically sound comparison against Waymo’s record, whether deployed in San Francisco or nationwide.

The report’s key finding is that Waymos are involved in far fewer injury-causing crashes than either New York City drivers or for-hire vehicles: 0.71 crashes per million miles nationally compared with 2.15 for New York City’s taxis, Ubers, and Lyfts. This is especially striking because New York City’s lower speed limits and other infrastructure substantially reduce accidents relative to the national average. Waymo has reached a safety level that exceeds even that of New York City’s professional drivers. In fact, the authors found that Uber and Lyft drivers have slightly higher crash rates than other drivers, and yellow cab drivers have even higher crash rates than Uber and Lyft drivers. This may not be surprising because Uber and Lyft’s rating system allows for a greater reputational record than yellow taxis.

When we turn to more serious accidents resulting in death—which Vision Zero intends to eliminate—New York City has a far lower auto fatality rate than the rest of the country but still sees over 200 auto deaths a year. In a comparison of fatal crashes, Waymo, all-city drivers, and for-hire vehicles are essentially tied. Yellow taxis are slightly more deadly than New York drivers in general, while Uber and Lyft are slightly less deadly. However, given the sparse data, it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on.

Even when judged against professional drivers in New York City—a highly demanding benchmark—and even when compared using fatalities, Waymo has a superior or similar record. The report’s authors nonetheless conclude otherwise based entirely on an analysis of “Killed or Seriously Injured” (KSI).

Waymo’s entire KSI record—across 220 million driverless miles since 2020—consists of just three crashes. New York’s for-hire fleet had 16 over 1.75 billion miles in 2025. Analyzing a variable this rare doesn’t tell us much. The report, to its credit, published 95 percent confidence intervals, which show that the crash rate for New York City’s for-hire fleet is 0.005–0.015, which overlaps with a value of 0.003–0.040 for Waymo nationally and 0.004–0.108 for the Bay Area. The authors wrote that “the data cannot rule out Waymo having a comparable KSI rate.”

A deeper look at the data makes the picture even more favorable to Waymo. The serious-injury record for Waymo includes just two fatal crashes. But in neither accident was the killed passenger riding in the autonomous vehicle. In one case, a Waymo robotaxi in San Francisco was rear-ended while completely stopped and then hit other vehicles in a multi-car collision, killing one person. In the other case, a motorcyclist hit a Waymo that was signaling a turn and yielding to a pedestrian; the cyclist was then struck by another vehicle and later died.

While these cases are tragic, Waymo was not blamed for the crashes. In fact, Waymo has been judged at fault in a tiny fraction of the accidents it has been involved in —less than 5 percent, according to one analysis.

Even including fatalities Waymo wasn’t responsible for, Waymo is still statistically much safer than New York City drivers overall. It is only at parity with for-hire drivers, who are about ten times less risky than all drivers in Open Plans’ analysis on KSI. This finding should cause some confusion. If yellow taxi drivers cause more crashes with injuries than all drivers—and lead to more fatalities than all drivers—how do they show up as ten times less risky in an analysis on serious injuries?

The problem here lies in a comparison of two dissimilar sources, as Jonathan Nolan has pointed out. The all-vehicle KSI measure (3,188 crashes) comes from applying a “modified New York State Department of Motor Vehicles (NYS DMV) severity formula” to raw NYPD collision records. This is a broad severity category that includes everything from concussions, fractures, severe lacerations, internal injuries, semiconsciousness, etc.

But for for-hire vehicles, the report uses data from the Taxi and Limousine Commission, which mandates crash reporting for licensed vehicles, where the relevant category from Local Law 31 is critical injury. This is defined as a “severe injury that poses an immediate threat to life or is likely to cause long-term impairment or disability.” These two categories are not comparable.

A simple way to see the mismatch is to examine the implied ratio of serious-injury crashes to fatal crashes. For all New York City vehicles, it’s about 13 to 1 (3,188 KSI to 252 fatal). With professional drivers, it’s 1.07 to 1 (16 to 15). If you take the data literally, it suggests that taxi drivers almost never seriously injure someone without also killing them, which is both physically absurd and exactly what you would expect if the “serious injury” definition for for-hire vehicles is actually measuring closer to fatality.

Suppose we instead make a simple assumption: that for-hire vehicles result in serious injuries in the same proportion to deaths as the citywide fleet. That would imply roughly 190 KSI crashes, not 16, at a rate of 0.11 per million miles. By that measure, Waymo, at 0.014 nationally, is not 1.5 times worse than the professionals (as the report claims), but about eight times better.

To be sure, accurately assessing the risk of for-hire vehicles against the citywide average (including speeding teenagers, drunk drivers, and motorcycles) is a challenging task. Professional drivers have higher reporting requirements for accidents, which might put them at a disadvantage against all drivers in this comparison. It’s plausible that professional drivers may indeed be slightly safer when measured against some categories of injury. But Waymo easily clears this benchmark as long as comparable statistics are used. While assessing the true impacts on mortality will take more time, we can still reason from the substantial improvements in milder accidents that safety is getting better.

The report’s second argument is that robotaxis will worsen congestion. While this may happen, the arguments used here are similarly tenuous.

The comparison is between Waymo’s fleet, which drives empty 42 percent of the time, versus 33 percent for New York City’s Uber and Lyfts. However, this compares Waymo’s operations in a sprawling, lower-density service area against one of the densest ride-hail markets on earth. “Deadheading,” as it’s called, is the result of trip density, not whether a person or a robot is driving the car. If we deploy Waymo’s fleet in Manhattan, we will see the share of empty miles fall.

Robotaxis might even improve the situation. The report finds that yellow taxis are empty 59 percent of the time, and that they drive empty for 1.43 miles for each mile that they have a passenger. By that logic, replacing yellow taxis with robotaxis (even at the utilization rate they achieve in places like California) would reduce miles travelled by nearly a third. This finding highlights an unintended benefit of ride-hailing technologies like Uber, Lyft, or Waymo: by reducing the need for yellow taxis to circle the streets to find passengers, they can substantially reduce congestion.

While its streets are indeed safer than those of other major cities, New York still recorded 205 traffic deaths last year and tens of thousands of injuries, overwhelmingly caused by driver error. Robotaxis would lower this rate, if not to zero, then to something much closer to it.

Waymo’s technology isn’t perfect and needs additional testing on city roads and improvements over time. However, state law still requires a human driver behind the wheel, and Waymo’s modest safety-driver permit expired in March, with no follow-up framework. And the local policy conversation is being shaped by reports, such as the one from Open Plans, that paint a misleading picture of Waymo’s true safety record. Albany simultaneously demands that Waymo provide a statistical certainty of safety that is only possible after many billions of miles while prohibiting Waymo from actually producing that record.

Some of the report’s recommendations are reasonable and should be supported. Requiring public-data reporting from operators is reasonable, and the city should provide TLC and NYPD crash data using consistent definitions to provide clearer benchmarks. But what New York has chosen instead is a ban through paralysis. New Yorkers should not let three crashes in the rest of the country determine the future of their streets.

America’s defense-industrial base has real problems. Production capacity is inadequate in critical areas, competition has declined, and supply chains remain vulnerable. Important weapons systems arrive late and over budget: the Government Accountability Office’s 2026 assessment found persistent schedule delays across major programs and an average delivery time exceeding 12 years. Contractors and government officials share blame for these failures.

But not all solutions to the problem are equal. Section 815 of the Senate’s version of the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act tries to solve the problem by barring the Pentagon from contracting with a company unless the contractor agrees not to repurchase its publicly traded shares or other capital distributions, including dividends.

The proposal has bipartisan support and an intelligible premise: money returned to shareholders is money that could instead expand production. But the idea rests on a faulty assumption: that the cash a contractor can’t distribute in the form of stock buybacks or dividends will become productive defense investment. Neither standard corporate-finance theory nor evidence supports that assumption. Congress should, therefore, look elsewhere for fixes to our defense-industrial base.

In standard theory, companies ordinarily decide which projects are worth undertaking first, then how much liquidity they need, and only afterward what to do with any remaining cash. When a firm lacks additional projects expected to earn more than their cost of capital, it may distribute the excess to investors, who can redeploy the funds elsewhere. A dollar retained by a corporation is therefore not necessarily a dollar invested productively. It may remain as cash, pay down debt, finance an acquisition, increase compensation, or perhaps worst of all, support a project whose expected return does not justify its cost.

The leading empirical studies generally support this account. Alon Brav, John Graham, Campbell Harvey, and Roni Michaely found that financial executives typically viewed distributions as residual—that is, made after investment and liquidity needs had been met. Jesse Fried and Charles Wang showed that claims that public companies distributed nearly all their earnings ignored the capital flowing back through equity issuances. Once those inflows were counted, net shareholder payouts were much lower, while investment and cash balances both increased.

Other studies find that repurchasing firms often face declining growth opportunities, a pattern consistent with mature companies returning capital after attractive opportunities diminish. Paul Brockman, Hye Seung Lee, and Jesus Salas likewise find no evidence that repurchasing firms systematically reduce capital expenditures, research and development, or employment after accounting for their opportunity sets. These findings accord with Michael Jensen’s account of the agency costs of free cash flow: managers sometimes control more cash than they can deploy productively, and returning excess capital can help prevent empire-building and poor acquisitions.

These findings do not vindicate every repurchase. Research shows that managers sometimes sacrifice investment opportunities to meet earnings-per-share targets or to support the price at which executives sell their own shares. But those studies support targeted responses—not Section 815’s enterprise-wide rule, which would apply without regard to earnings targets, compensation design, insider sales, the price paid for shares, the contractor’s investment opportunities, or the performance of the contract that triggers the restriction.

Indeed, Section 815 reverses the ordinary presumption that boards may return excess cash to shareholders when there are no efficient investment opportunities. Unless the Pentagon approves a qualifying investment plan, a contractor who wishes to continue doing business with the government must retain capital it otherwise would have distributed. The provision thus transfers part of the authority to allocate corporate capital from boards and markets to procurement officials.

The strongest argument for Section 815 is that defense production is not an ordinary market. Capacity can be expensive and difficult to rebuild. A production line may have substantial national-security value even when it does not promise an adequate private return. Contractors may rationally hesitate to invest when appropriations are uncertain, orders fluctuate, technical requirements change, or the government will not commit to buying the resulting output.

But all of these are contracting problems, not payout problems. Preventing a dividend does not make future demand more predictable, compensate a firm for maintaining idle capacity, resolve technical uncertainty, or identify which expenditure would relieve a genuine production constraint. Nor does it create a positive-return project where none exists. A diversified contractor may retain the money and use it elsewhere, repay debt, acquire another business, or simply hold more cash.

Nor does Section 815’s waiver mechanism—which applies to contractors with an approved defense-investment plan covering facilities, equipment, research, workforce training, or strategic stockpiles—solve this problem. It requires the Pentagon to decide not only what product it wants, at what price, and on what schedule, but also whether a contractor’s proposed investment plan justifies permitting firm-wide dividends or repurchases. Those judgments require forecasts about demand, financing, opportunity cost, and investment returns that procurement officials are poorly positioned to make. The process will also favor expenditures that fit statutory categories, not necessarily those that create the greatest value.

Section 815 is also likely to generate costly reactions. Contractors will devote resources to obtaining waivers, reclassify ordinary spending as qualifying investment, and select projects that satisfy statutory categories. Some firms—especially diversified companies, for which defense sales are small—may decide that Pentagon work is not worth an enterprise-wide restriction on financial policy. This could deter the commercial entrants and dual-use suppliers that policymakers otherwise seek to attract. The remaining contractors’ added costs will appear in higher bids, reduced entry, a less diverse supplier base, more conservative financing, and a higher cost of capital.

The more direct response is for the Pentagon to contract for the capacity the government values. Multiyear purchase commitments can reduce demand risk. Capacity-reservation contracts can pay firms to maintain surge capability. Advance commitments, milestone financing, co-investment, and cost sharing can make socially valuable investments privately worthwhile. These tools address the reason a contractor may decline to invest far better than a payout prohibition would.

Section 815 originates from a legitimate concern: national defense should not suffer because contractors prefer short-term financial rewards to necessary investment. The evidence confirms that distorted repurchases can occur, but it does not show that payouts generally crowd out productive investment, or that preventing a distribution will convert retained cash into factories, research, or weapons.

Congress should condition defense contracts on the capacity, cost, and delivery it needs, and tie consequences to actual underperformance. Section 815 instead regulates an observable financial decision because it is easier to police than the procurement failures Congress wants to correct. That’s a weak substitute for procurement reform—and a consequential expansion of political authority over private capital allocation.

Democrats and Republicans now largely agree: the United States takes too long and pays too much to build housing, power plants, transmission lines, and everything else. Many within the “abundance” movement agree on the source of the problem: the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires federal agencies to study the environmental effects of major projects before approving them.

I have spent more than four decades helping clients obtain permits to build in California. The abundance movement’s central claim—that America has regulated itself out of the capacity to build—matches my experience in this work.

But NEPA is just one statute within a much larger legal framework governing permits. Stop with NEPA, and the same obstruction will simply flow through different channels. We can meet stringent environmental standards and still build quickly and efficiently, but only by making five fundamental changes to permitting law itself.

The law governing permits traces back to the Constitution’s prohibition on taking private property without just compensation. In the permitting context, courts have interpreted agency authority generously: an agency may demand fees, mitigation, or other exactions—concessions it requires from a developer as a condition of approval—provided that there is a “nexus” between the demand and the project, and that the exaction is roughly “proportionate” to what the developer seeks.

The two leading Supreme Court cases here are approaching their 40th birthdays—Nollan v. California Coastal Commission (1987) and Dolan v. City of Tigard (1994). Yet in the decades since, courts have established few practical limits to what satisfies the nexus-and-proportionality standard. As a result, an agency can withhold approval indefinitely until it gets what it wants.

Nor is this the only vague standard blocking development. If a developer gets past an agency, third-party opponents, whether NIMBY groups or special-interest advocates, can then sue to block the approved permit anyway. They simply must shift from the nexus-and-proportionality vocabulary of takings law to the impact-and-mitigation vocabulary of NEPA, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and other environmental statutes, which in effect impose the same broad restrictions.

The first fix is to separate two kinds of demand that permitting law currently lets agencies blur together: conditions tied to the physical project itself and exactions that ask for something unrelated to it Those unrelated demands—“public benefit” exactions for off-site land conservation, community benefits, and the like—should be converted into a single fee, capped at a set share of construction costs (say, 3 percent) covering all public benefits collectively. Disputes over money then could not be used to halt an approved project.

Second, replace subjective standards with objective ones—both for what an application must contain and for what approval requires. Taxpayers face objective standards every April: each line of a tax form demands a factually correct answer. By contrast, the NEPA framework and most environmental permit criteria are rife with subjective, unknown, and often unknowable requirements that agencies themselves interpret inconsistently.

The result is an arbitrary regime. How much environmental impact study is enough? How much mitigation is enough? Litigants and judges reinterpret these standards with each case, establishing regulatory mandates from the bench without rulemaking or legislative authorization.

The practical consequences can be significant. Lawmakers may believe they have required a decision within one year, but an agency can simply decline to deem an application “complete” until two or more years of additional study are finished. If an agency’s application genuinely requires a two-year study, applicants should be on notice to complete it while designing the project—not to design the project, apply, and only then learn what’s missing.

Objective criteria don’t need to be lenient. The Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act effectively require the best available, feasible pollution controls. Agencies can specify the most recently approved control technology for each application type and offer a fast-track, 90-day pre-application review for applicants proposing something newer. That preserves “technology-forcing” standards inside an objective approval regime.

Third, confine the permit to the project that is actually proposed. Because permit law is only lightly bounded by the Constitution and dominated by subjective criteria, applicants seeking to build something new, or to modernize what exists, routinely receive a wish list from agency staff and stakeholders with requests well outside the project’s ambit.

These demands can include dedicating underutilized land to a nonprofit, shutting down an unrelated portion of a plant, or capping new sewer hookups for reasons of anti-growth politics rather than actual capacity. Such demands are often justified by loose concepts—“cumulative” and “growth-inducing” impacts—that have become formidable obstacles to timely agency action and inviting targets for policy-minded litigants and judges.

Fixing this does not require an agency to approve actually objectionable features of a project. If adding a pollution source to a factory would push the facility past a numerical emissions or toxic-risk threshold, the agency can deny the application on that objective ground. But whether a carpool lane belongs on a freeway is a policy question, and it should be decided as one—not litigated through a fictionalized world of modeled projections about the lane’s “growth-inducing impacts,” untethered from measured conditions.

Fourth, return permit enforcement to a law-enforcement model and end the era of environmental lawfare. That lawfare is conducted by just a handful of opportunistic plaintiffs with a clear agenda. In a 2025 analysis of 387 appellate NEPA cases by the Breakthrough Institute and attorneys at Holland & Knight, environmental nonprofits appeared as plaintiffs in roughly three-quarters of court judgments, and just ten organizations accounted for 35 percent of all cases. Only about a quarter of rulings found any legal flaw in the agency’s review.

The point of these suits is not to force a few more months of study or another modest condition, but to block the project or others like it. Some environmental organizations sue to thwart wind, solar, and transmission projects. Others sue to block oil, gas, manufacturing, or roads. Still others fight vegetation management meant to prevent catastrophic wildfire. Individuals and local groups sue to stop whatever is new and preserve whatever is old.

Whether an agency has complied with NEPA or permit law is a law-enforcement question, and suits to block projects on that basis should be reserved to the U.S. or state attorneys general. Individuals who allege individual harm from a project would retain their due-process rights, but the judicial remedy would be an order requiring the agency to address the harm, through compensation, relocation, or project modification—not by voiding the approval. Rescinding an approved project would be the rare exception, available only where no lesser remedy cures an unlawful harm.

Fifth, provide mandatory tracking of outcomes. Every permitting agency should be required to publish a dashboard showing, for each project, the initial application date, the date the application was deemed complete, the date of final action, whether post-approval litigation is pending, when construction began, and when it finished. Nothing more is needed—not how many notices went out or how many community meetings were held. Where an applicant supplies estimated capital costs at each stage, the agency should publish those on the same dashboard.

Agencies that fail to act on applications in a timely way should be required, within 12 months, to amend their own regulations to speed things up. Congress has imposed a version of this discipline on the IRS, which must track the most litigated tax issues and recommend clarifications or amendments to reduce future challenges.

None of these proposals weakens a single environmental standard. Rather, each rebuilds the legal infrastructure of permitting around qualities the current system doesn’t deliver: objectivity, transparency, and accountability.

The abundance agenda now rests on a bipartisan acceptance that America needs to build—and quickly. But until Congress changes the legal framework that makes permitting so slow, each NEPA fix will only redirect the delay, not end it.

In his opening remarks at last week’s State Department ministerial on “the resurgence of political terrorism,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio contrasted “overt” forms of left-wing terrorism such as “bombings, assassinations, and organized violence in our streets” with “quieter” forms, like efforts to “suppress speech, intimidate political opposition, and sabotage our national institutions.” But he identified both as terrorism: breaking laws to achieve political goals through coercion.

I’m glad that the Secretary of State is on board with the recognition that we should treat these “quieter” forms, which I call civil terrorism, as a serious threat to our national security and the integrity of our political institutions.

Nothing is exaggerated or overblown about this characterization of the threat. On the very day of Secretary Rubio’s remarks, Washington Representative Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services committee, put out a statement explaining why he had voted the day before to cut American aid to Israel. “My family and I have had our home vandalized, a fire has been set in my driveway, my neighbors’ lives have been disrupted by demonstrations in the middle of the night, town halls meant to be forums for dialogue have been shut down, and a staff member has been physically assaulted.”

This is a remarkable admission. A member of Congress has admitted that he cast an important vote—in a “very close” call—at least in part because he had been targeted by lawless anti-Israel fanatics. The vandals, arsonists, and demonstrators wanted Representative Smith to know that he could not feel secure until he gave up his long-running support for the Jewish state. They figured that he would eventually conclude that harboring views at odds with theirs—even if they remain views held by millions of Americans—was not worth the trouble, the threats, the danger. And they were right.

There are at least two scandals here. The first is that Smith capitulated to his tormentors. He claims to be “deeply concerned about the tactics used by those on the far left to advocate cutting off aid to Israel.” Yet he is not so concerned as to deter their future use. He should have dug in his heels and vowed that each act of civil terrorism would lead only to a swift action from law enforcement officers and more military credits for Israel. Civil terrorists are not trying to persuade you but to strongarm you. Once you show them that you can be coerced, you have only made yourself—and, in this case, other lawmakers—a likelier target for future intimidation.

The second scandal is that no institutions stepped up to eliminate this despicable threat to our democratic system before it began swaying congressional votes. Legislators can and must be persuaded by citizens—when those citizens make reasoned arguments and explain why their way is better than the alternative. Shameful as it is that Smith had to suffer threats and violence against his family, it is even worse that Americans are choosing to tolerate a systematic, lawless effort to circumvent the proper channels for political change. Civil terrorism is an assault on our democracy.

States, including Representative Smith’s Washington, must crack down on civil terrorism by increasing penalties for crimes committed with the intent to intimidate or coerce. Vandalizing anyone’s house is bad enough; vandalizing an elected official’s house to send a message about the costs of supporting a particular policy is much worse, yet authorities usually treat the latter as misdemeanors not worth prosecuting.

Utah recently passed a bill making acts of civil terrorism into felonies, ensuring that they will be deterred or met with severe punishment. Every state should follow suit, and the federal government should consider its own parallel actions.

Each act of civil terrorism that goes unpunished only emboldens the perpetrators further to disfigure our politics and sabotage our nation.