Driverless cars could soon be zipping around New Jersey roadways under a proposed three-year pilot program intended to give testers time to ensure the vehicles' safety. The Senate transportation committee on Monday unanimously advanced a bill that would also create a task force to help state transportation officials establish protocols on autonomous vehicle crashes, cyberattacks, operational disruptions, liability, and guidelines to ensure the safety of pedestrians and others. If the discussion sparked déjà vu, that's because New Jersey has been here before. Legislators in 2019 passed a law that also created a task force with a similar mission. But that task force issued its report the same day in March 2020 that New Jersey confirmed its first case of COVID-19. In the ensuing pandemic and shutdowns, the report was largely ignored and forgotten. This article from the New Jersey Monitor was published through the NJ News Commons, a collaborative network of digital news publishers in the state. Sen. Andrew Zwicker (D-Middlesex) was a chief sponsor of both the 2019 law and the current bill. "100% of our attention was on trying to keep people alive and find medical equipment," Zwicker said of the forgotten 2019 report. But autonomous vehicle technology and safety have advanced quite a bit in the six years since the first task force made its recommendations, and driverless cars also have become more widely accepted by the public, Zwicker said. That makes now the right time to get them on Garden State roads, he added. "We're talking about a transformative way to transport people and goods in the densest state in the country," he said. His current bill has embraced some of the recommendations in the task force's 2020 report, including requiring the vehicles to be road-tested before the state allows widespread public use and enacting protections