I’ve spent over 20 years operating on people after car crashes. I know what a steering column does to a chest, what a windshield does to a brain, what happens to a spine when a car rolls. The human body is no match for physics and two tons of steel. I’ve told families their teenager isn’t coming home. You do this enough times and you start to wonder: Does it have to be this way? Surgeons don’t often spend their free time analyzing spreadsheets. But when the self-driving company Waymo released nearly 100 million miles of driverless vehicle data this year, I couldn’t resist. I downloaded the raw data files and started running my own analysis. The results seemed almost too good to be true: 91 percent fewer crashes producing serious injury or death, 96 percent fewer collisions causing injury at intersections. I kept looking for the catch. I shared my findings on social media, and the response stunned me. The post got over a million views. People I’d never met were sending it to researchers, journalists and engineers. Clearly this wasn’t interesting just to me. I realized that most people think about autonomous vehicles as a technology story. Would the cars work? Would people trust them? Would they kill jobs? All of these are important questions, but almost nobody was framing this as a public health story — as an intervention that could eliminate car crashes as a leading cause of death in the United States. That’s the framing I wanted to bring to my recent Times Opinion guest essay, as one of the thousands of medical workers who have seen too many preventable deaths. The data is strong enough that if this was a medicine, we’d stop a clinical trial and encourage people to start using it. We need to begin building for this future right now. The people we’re going to lose can’t wait.
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