SITTING in the back seat of the self-driving Uber as it navigates narrow streets in Pittsburgh’s old industrial heart, the Strip District, is surreal. The global ride-sharing firm chose the area as the spot to develop and test driverless cars, and picked up its first customers on September 14th. Your correspondent got a ride the day before. The vehicle moves smoothly down busy Penn Avenue, stopping at four-way stop signs and traffic lights, slowing to allow other cars to parallel park. It navigates around double-parked delivery vans. It even stops to allow jaywalking pedestrians to cross.

The cars are not truly driverless yet. During the trial an Uber employee sits behind the wheel, ready to take over should something go wrong. A second employee, a sort of co-pilot, sits in the front passenger seat, monitoring a screen, alerting the pilot to what the car “sees”, including other cars, upcoming traffic, potential obstacles and elevation—Pittsburgh is very hilly. Another monitor in the back seat allows passengers to see what the car is seeing.

By the end of the year, 100 Volvos will be on the road, but in the meantime a fleet of Ford Fusions are picking up passengers. A large rotating laser (that strongly echoes the flux-capacitor from the film “Back to the Future”) is mounted on the roof. The car is also fitted with 20 external cameras, measurement devices for acceleration and orientation, 360-degree radar sensors and separate antennae for GPS positioning and wireless data.

Pittsburgh is ideal for the tests. It has the talent, because Uber poached Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics department last year. Raffi Krikorian, who heads up the company’s research centre in Pittsburgh, calls the city the “double-black diamond of driving”. It has a winding road system, extreme weather conditions and lots of traffic. Drivers there are used to odd quirks like the “Pittsburgh left”, as it is known, where oncoming traffic yields to cars making left-hand turns. If Uber can master autonomous driving in Pittsburgh, Mr Krikorian says, it can make it almost anywhere.

Having City Hall’s support for the urban lab helps. Even before Uber came to Pittsburgh, Bill Peduto, the mayor, was fighting state lawmakers to allow ride-sharing. Local government must take risks and behave like a startup, he says. “Regulation will never be ahead of innovation. If you sit and wait, the innovation will happen, but somewhere else.” The city is small enough that it can get things done, but large enough that the world should notice.

Put in the actual driver’s seat, for a short spell, your correspondent did need to intervene when midway through a turn, the traffic light turned red and the car suddenly stopped. But The Economist felt very safe. Not all Pittsburghers are convinced. “I’d want to know that it’s 100% foolproof before I’d get in,” says Shelby Rocco, a student. Mike Taylor, a banker, who uses Uber all the time, has no reservations. He feels bad for the drivers, who he suspects may lose their jobs, but “it’ll be nice not to have to keep up any more awkward conversations.”