The robotaxis are driving on ice
Law breaking in San Francisco: a case study of a robotaxis that was unintentionally pulled from a public parking lot
If you take a walk around San Francisco in the summer, you will see Jaguar SUVs and Chevrolet cars driving around with no one inside. The vehicles were owned and operated by both General Motor’s Cruise division and a spinoff of Waymo. Soon there will likely be a lot more of them, because last week, the companies received a state regulator’s permission to operate paid robotaxi services anywhere in the city around the clock, after years and billions spent on testing and development.
You can tell that many people in San Francisco are tired of being in contact with these tech companies. First came the ride sharing companies. Then the electric scooters. Now, it’s the driverless cars. Dozens of people waited hours for the chance to tell their part in the commission.
Lawbreaking is the only means of escape. On New Year’s Eve, the driver picked up passengers near the City Hall. Drivers were required to make a technically forbidden U-turn after the street was closed for a party. Marinho had to make his around a robotaxi idling in the middle of the road, hazard lights flashing, apparently paralyzed by its own lawfulness. “It was creating some chaos because there were a lot of drunk people walking back and forth, so there wasn’t a lot of space to maneuver around the stopped car,” he says.
Ilina, the Waymo spokesperson, acknowledged that being a good driver occasionally means being a scofflaw. The company’s robotaxis might sometimes, she says, cross a double yellow line in order to maintain a safe distance from other road users, including cyclists.
Being a good ride-hired driver requires you to know how to read people. After Popovics spent four hours trying to scrub projectile vomit off the ceiling of his car, he hired a cleaning service and started paying closer attention to passengers’ intoxication levels. After greeting each passenger, he asked how they were doing. He says he doesn’t want to know about them. I want to hear them speak if they are slurring. And he’s always equipped with plastic bags, in case someone becomes queasy.
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There is a fee of up to $150 per cleaning for vomit and other excreting liquid messes. When the company’s vehicles are being used for rides, workers use cameras inside to determine if there is a need for a cleaning, and robotica are always cleaned when they get back to their base.
Some people hunt for cars with no driver in sight. Road safety activists in July vandalized cars by sticking traffic cones on their hoods in the “Week of Cone”. Last week, the activists promised to continue the “cone-ing” now that the companies are poised to expand their paid ride service in the city.
In a post on its website in the month of August, Waymo stated that its on-road robot have a special ability to learn from road events across the entire fleet and that it is constantly updating its software. Cruise’s statement said, “Our cars never get tired, distracted, or intoxicated, and that the safety of customers and others on the road was top priority.”
Other drivers doubt most passengers will even notice the difference between the old and new cars. The majority of people want to look at their phones, says Ets-Hokin. They treat me as if I’m a robot anyway.
The people who know of this are shrugging, because they think the jobs have become too crappy to fight for, because earnings have declined and there’s no reward for sticking around. “It’s just a gig job,” says Sam Gormus, who doesn’t lose sleep over being replaced by a machine. “I could just quit and find something else.”
The day after California regulators handed driverless car companies a major victory, allowing them to expand their services without restriction in San Francisco, a herd of robotaxis decided to celebrate by breaking down in the middle of a busy street.
According to several local news reports, 10 Cruise vehicles sat paralyzed in a busy intersection near the Outside Lands Music Festival, causing a traffic jam and drawing exasperation from witnesses. The company told KPIX that the music festival caused “wireless connectivity issues” with its vehicles. In other words, festivalgoers were overwhelming the cellular networks, making it difficult for Cruise’s vehicles to send and receive information.
And it was a sign of more conflict to come, as cities that serve as ground zero for this science experiment face pushback from states that set the rules of the road for driverless cars and seek out conformity in how the technology is regulated.
A professor at a university says that every blocked traffic incident is going to add to degrading public opinion and enthusiasm for the technology. “When a large adverse event eventually happens, all that pent up public opinion is going to make it much more difficult for companies to deal with the situation.”
Other cities will follow. Waymo has its sights set on Los Angeles and New York City, while Cruise is testing its vehicles in Miami and Austin, Texas. The companies are under enormous pressure to turn on the money spigots after their parent companies have invested tens of billions of dollars for more than a decade with very little money flowing back into their coffers.
The robotaxi dilemma is also shining a light on the divided way we regulate cars in the US. The federal government creates vehicle safety rules, leaving the states to license drivers, register vehicles, and enforce the rules of the road. All that’s left for cities to do is make minor infrastructure decisions, help direct traffic — and not much else.
The companies could do themselves a big favor by doing more outreach. If you want the residents to see you as a person who cares about them, it won’t hurt to obstruct emergency vehicles, but not also to piss them off. San Francisco officials want more information about robotaxis shutting down in the middle of the street and blocking bike lanes, which they say are related to the driverless car companies reporting crashes. So far, the companies have been silent on this matter.
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Improvements on issues the public cares about are essential. “This technology will not succeed without trust, and it is much easier to lose trust with a single bad event than it is to regain it afterwards.”
The next phase is likely to be very litigious. Peskin would like to see the city slow or walk back the introduction of robot cars. That could include requesting another hearing or another vote from the CPUC. The commission is under the authority of the governor, and the city could take it to court.
In these types of fights cities will always be in a poor position. California, in particular, has shown a willingness to set aside local concerns about traffic, labor, and safety for the unimpeded progress of Big Tech companies. In 2020, voters approved a ballot measure to allow companies like Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash to continue treating their workers like independent contractors rather than employees.
There were people who were disabled who didn’t want to appear to be burying their head in the sand when new technology became available and people who didn’t trust human drivers who were there to support them. After all, disruption and inconvenience tend to go hand in hand, said Raj Rajkumar, a robotics professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Think of the advent of indoor plumbing or the installation of natural gas lines or building roads and highways.
He said that all were major societal changes and caused a lot of hassle but we can’t live without them. “Negatives get the news headlines and strong passions attract the most attention. But day-to-day convenience and usability for many customers (assuming that this comes to pass) will begin to triumph.”
