Over the past year or so, an annoying sight has become commonplace in San Francisco: driverless cars buzzing the city’s streets with no drivers and an expensive array of electronic sensors guiding the way.
But a plan by two companies to expand driverless taxi services in San Francisco has met strong opposition from city officials and some activists. The fight has become a Rorschach test for local tolerance of the tech industry’s new ideas: Are driverless cars an interesting and safe transportation alternative? Or are they a nuisance and a traffic-blocking disaster waiting to happen?
With more than 800,000 residents, hilly San Francisco is the second most populous city in the country. Whether self-driving cars can succeed in the city will be a harbinger for their viability in other communities. And the victory in San Francisco could provide, for the first time, a sign that the billions invested by the tech and auto industries in autonomous driving technology may eventually pay off.
The California Public Utilities Commission, the state agency responsible for regulating self-driving vehicles in the city, is set to vote Thursday on a plan to allow Cruise and Waymo owned by General Motors, which is backed by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, to charge for driverless rides across cities, around the clock. For now, Cruise can offer paid rides at night in the northwest part of the city, while Waymo only offers free rides.
The companies also operate their driverless cars without passengers in seemingly endless loops through San Francisco neighborhoods, using the cars’ real-world experiences to improve their autonomous technology.
Although driverless cars are not blamed for any serious injuries or crashes, local news media have reported several incidents causing concern that cars, when presented with an unexpected obstacle – road wiresfire hoses or even thick cloud — just close and won’t move.
Ahead of Monday’s CPUC hearing, civic groups demonstrated outside the commission’s offices in San Francisco. Among them are taxi drivers, who fear their jobs will be replaced by the artificial intelligence behind autonomous vehicles, and public transport activists. One of the activist groups, Safe Street Rebel, has even found a way to shut down cars in a simple way. placing a traffic cone in their hood. Waymo called the traffic cone pranks vandalism.
That the state — and not the city — has the final say on whether to expand driverless car services has also disappointed community groups that, among other things, successfully fought for the expansion of the bicycle-only lanes throughout the city.
“I strongly believe the process is flawed,” said Janelle Wong, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. “It certainly puts the power on the members of the state who don’t live in these local cities or towns and experience what it’s like to have these autonomous vehicles around our streets.”
The five-member CPUC was supposed to decide on the expansion in June but delayed their vote until Thursday. The commission declined to comment on the pending vote.
At Monday’s hearing, city officials argued that the vehicles were blocking emergency responders and that the companies operating them were too slow to do anything about it. The San Francisco Fire Department has recorded 55 incidents this year in which firefighters have had to deal with a self-driving car — including five reports this past weekend.
In January, a Cruise self-driving vehicle drove into an area where firefighters were working and did not stop until a firefighter began “slamming its hood and smashing the vehicle’s window,” according to city records . In May, a Waymo driverless vehicle blocked a fire vehicle as it backed into a station.
“It’s not our job to take care of their cars,” said Jeanine Nicholson, chief of the San Francisco Fire Department. He said the instances where firefighters had to attend to self-driving vehicles that didn’t move for 30 minutes were “unacceptable.”
City officials say they have also documented about 600 incidents involving self-driving cars, including when the vehicles stop unexpectedly or make illegal turns.
The average response time to an accident is 10 minutes for Waymo and 14 minutes for Cruise, representatives of the companies said at the hearing. While technicians can offer some guidance with AI systems in cars, they cannot operate the vehicles remotely.
From Jan. 1 to July 18, Cruise reported 177 rides where its vehicle got stuck on the road and had to be extricated — 26 of which had passengers inside. Waymo said it identified 58 incidents in the first six months of 2023 where a vehicle with a passenger inside had to be towed.
Julia Ilina, a Waymo spokeswoman, said in a statement that the company had no injuries to report in its first million miles of fully autonomous driving, and that each collision was caused by “rule violations or dangerous driving.” -behavior on the part of people. drivers.”
Drew Pusateri, a spokesman for Cruise, said the company has reported more data to regulators “than many other vehicles on the road today.”
But Julia Friedlander, senior manager of automated driving policy at the Municipal Transportation Agency, said the companies’ data is incomplete. Waymo and Cruise are required to report the total number of collisions and incidents each quarter, but only when the incidents “affect the safety of either a passenger in the vehicle or the public.”
After Cruise and Waymo’s applications to expand their services in December, the city’s planning commission, along with the two transportation agencies, said in a letter to the CPUC that the self-driving technology companies would have to -report additional data for officials to decide if the cars are safe enough to operate across the city.
In another joint letter to the CPUC in May, the agencies concluded from an analysis by the San Francisco County Transportation Authority that self-driving vehicles, on average, resulted in more injuries than vehicles operated by human drivers. human driver But the CPUC said in June that the data city officials based their analysis on was “problematic” because it did not include incidents involving self-driving cars where human drivers were at fault.
The local technology community is generally supportive of driverless car programs. Garry Tan, chief executive of venture capital fund Y Combinator, said in a YouTube video that officials who opposed the expansion were “ideologically driven” and “hate technologies.”