Three Days on the Couch and the Cars Learned the Freeway

The thermometer said 101.2 and the local news said the robots were on the freeway, and for most of Tuesday afternoon I honestly could not tell which of those was the fever.

I'd been down since the weekend. The kind of cold that starts as a polite tickle and by nightfall has you bargaining with a box of H-E-B store-brand tissues, the ones with the lotion that makes your nose look shellacked. Three days on the couch. Three days of saltines in the cushions. Three days where my most ambitious civic act was getting up to refill a water glass and then forgetting why I was standing in the kitchen.

So I missed a few things. Mostly I missed that on September 22, the self-driving cab company began running trips on Austin freeways. The Chronicle reported it in its weekly news roundup, tucked between other items like it was a road-paving notice and not, technically, the arrival of driverless cars at highway speed in a city where human drivers still treat the merge lane as a philosophical suggestion.

That was not the line that got me out of bed, though. The line that got me out of bed was this one: the company is sharing pothole reports with the city.

I read that sentence four times. I was on decongestants, but I read it four times.

My Pothole Has a Name

There is a pothole at the end of my street. I have lived near it long enough that it has a name. I call it Lyndon, because it is large, Texan, and has never once backed down from anything.

Lyndon started as a crack. Then a dip. Then a crater with a lip on it, the kind you hear before you feel, a hollow ka-chunk that tells every driver on the block about their tie rods. In a heavy rain Lyndon holds about a mop bucket of water. Grackles bathe in it. A kid on a scooter once looked into it the way you'd look over the rail at Hamilton Pool.

I have reported Lyndon to 311. I have reported Lyndon with photos. I have reported Lyndon with a photo that included my own shoe for scale, which in retrospect may have read as a cry for help. Each time I got a ticket number, a pleasant automated message, and the deep spiritual stillness of being heard by no one in particular.

I'm not saying nobody ever fixes potholes. Crews fix them. I've watched them. A truck pulls up, two guys shovel in some cold patch, tamp it down with the back of a shovel, and leave. Three weeks later, Lyndon spits the patch out like a sunflower seed shell.

What I have never had is a relationship. A data partnership. An arrangement.

A Direct Line for the Fleet

Let's set aside the robots on the freeway. People are going to have big feelings about that. Some will love it. Some will clutch the door handle on their own truck when one passes. My feelings are mostly fever-adjacent and, for once, not very loud.

What got my attention is the shape of the deal. A private company's cars roll around the city all day, and the potholes they encounter now flow to the people who fill potholes. That is, objectively, a useful thing. Potholes are bad. Knowing where they are is good. I'm not against information.

I'm against the vibe.

Because here is how pothole reporting has worked for the rest of us. You hit one. You swear. You tell yourself you'll report it. You forget. Then you hit it again on the way home from the Fiesta on 38th and a half, and this time you pull over, open the app, drop a pin that lands three houses off, fill out a little form, and send it into the municipal ether like a message in a bottle chucked into Shoal Creek during a drought.

Now a corporation gets to be the city's eyes on the street. A fleet of very polite cars with spinning hats does the noticing the rest of us have been doing, unpaid, with our suspension systems, for decades. The difference is that their report shows up as data, and mine shows up as a resident complaint.

Same hole. Different tone of voice.

Things I Did Instead of Getting Better

I'll admit the cold made me petty. Around hour sixty I started composing a 311 report written the way I imagine a robot would write one, on the theory that maybe tone was the problem.

Surface anomaly detected. Depth: concerning. Diameter: one grackle bath. Persistence: since at least the second Adler administration. Recommend: asphalt.

I did not send it. I took more medicine and watched a full hour of the city council meeting archive, which I don't recommend while feverish, because at one point I became convinced the dais was rotating.

I also thought about the freeway part, because you can't not. Every Austinite has a private map of the highway places that frighten them. The I-35 lanes that shift around under construction like a card trick. The MoPac on-ramps short enough to qualify as a dare. The flyover where you suddenly find yourself headed to Pflugerville with no memory of choosing Pflugerville. I've been driving these roads since gas was under a dollar and I still pray at a couple of them.

And now a car with no one in it is going to do the same roads, presumably without praying. Which is either reassuring or deeply insulting, depending on how much you've invested in your own white-knuckle mythology.

The Part Where I Got Up

Wednesday evening the fever broke. I took a shower long enough to qualify as a water feature, put on real pants, and walked to the end of the street to visit Lyndon like an old friend I owed an apology.

Lyndon was fine. Lyndon is always fine. A fresh ring of gravel around the rim, a single crushed La Croix in the bottom, the faint glint of last week's rain. A woman walking her dog swung wide around it out of pure muscle memory. A guy on a bike hopped it without looking down. Our whole block has a choreography for this hole. It is the most coordinated civic behavior in the neighborhood, and nobody organized it.

Lyndon is not on a freeway, and I have no idea whether one of the robot cabs has ever rolled over it. Maybe one has. Maybe it's already a data point somewhere, sitting in a spreadsheet next to a hundred other holes, finally recognized by a system that only listens to systems.

If so, good. I'd honestly be thrilled to see it filled. I'd throw a party. I'd bring queso. I'd invite the grackles, who will be furious.

But I'd also like it noted, for the record, in whatever form the record accepts, that some of us have been filing pothole reports for years with nothing but a shoe for scale and a sincere belief that the city reads its mail. We were the original sensors. We just came without a partnership agreement and with a bad habit of saying "son of a" at the moment of impact.

So here's my plan, now that I can breathe through at least one nostril. I'm going to save up, summon one of those cars, and ask it to take me to the end of my own street and back. Very slowly. Twice.

If that's what it takes to get Lyndon a hearing, I'll pay the fare and tip the hat.