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How safe are the streets of San Francisco?
The caravans of driverless cars from Cruise and Waymo are about to get much bigger — in spite of a rash of accidents and incidents including the cars frequently stopping in the middle of the road, driving through police crime tape and, in one recent case, striking and killing a dog.
State regulators on Thursday opened the floodgates for more robotaxis on the city’s streets with a pair of 3-1 votes allowing Alphabet Inc.’s
GOOGL,
GOOG,
Waymo and General Motors Co.
GM,
subsidiary Cruise to offer fared driverless rides across the city at all hours of the day, with an unlimited number of vehicles. San Francisco is the first U.S. city with two fleets of robotaxis that will be able to fully compete with traditional taxis and ride-hailing services.
I cringe at the prospect. Commuting downtown in the predawn hours, I recently found myself — and my car — sandwiched between two of the driverless vehicles. For several blocks, it was an unnerving experience as I tried to anticipate where the cars were headed. They both eventually ducked down side streets near Oracle Park, home of the San Francisco Giants.
Why the inclination to grip the wheel and put my head on a swivel? Since May, the San Francisco Fire Department has generated some 55 “unusual occurrence” reports documenting instances when autonomous vehicles meandered into fire and emergency scenes. In one case, firefighters were unable to respond to a call because they were blockaded into their station by a driverless vehicle.
Then there are the issues with the cars’ wifi. Last Friday night at the Outside Lands Music Festival in Golden Gate Park, at least five Cruise cars blocked traffic in the North Beach neighborhood. The driverless cars were stopped in the middle of the road, with other cars unable to drive around them. A Cruise spokesperson said the situation was due to “wireless connectivity issues.”
Big events with lots of people using their phones can slow down wifi speeds, which can prevent autonomous cars from receiving the information they need to navigate through traffic. Even San Francisco Giants games have reportedly caused outages — all the more ironic because Cruise is a sponsor of the baseball team, and the players wear Cruise patches on their uniforms.
The issue has prompted Waymo is consider establishing its own cellular network specifically for its cars.
Fire department officials have warned that the autonomous-vehicle industry has little incentive to solve the problems that are affecting public safety, which they said “are not going away and are in fact increasing.”
Cruise operates about 300 vehicles at night and 100 during the day in San Francisco, company officials told state commissioners. Waymo officials said the company has a fleet of 250 robotaxis in service. Now both companies will be able to unleash an unlimited number of cars on the road at any time.
Driverless cars were invented, in large part, to reduce traffic and make road conditions safer. But despite years of testing, doubts about their reliability have only escalated.
Several years ago at the CES tech show in Las Vegas, I took part in demonstrations of driverless cars being tested as Lyft Inc.
LYFT,
ride-share vehicles. For the most part, the rides were safe — but they were running on simple routes, and there was a safety driver in the front seat in case things went wrong.
But even then there were worrying signs: The lidar, or light detection and ranging, technology on the cars was far from perfect at detecting unpredictable movements such as those made by jaywalking pedestrians and bad drivers.
“They’re deploying hundreds of cars on our streets. They should take a time-out and a pause until they perfect this technology,” Aaron Peskin, president of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, told KPIX-TV. He added that he’s pursuing “every means” to have the state’s decision reversed, including the possibility of a court injunction.
Imagine a city full of these unpredictable robotaxis. My early-morning commute just got scarier.
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