San Francisco drives tech; will it drive away robot taxis?
Send a link to a friend
[August 07, 2023] By
Greg Bensinger
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - San Francisco may be the symbolic capital of
the tech industry, and the hub of next-generation services like
artificial intelligence, but when it comes to self-driving cars, city
officials are clear: not so fast.
The question comes to a head later this week, when a state agency
decides whether to allow robot car providers Alphabet Inc’s Waymo and
General Motors’ Cruise to expand their for-pay, no-safety-driver
services to all of San Francisco, day and night.
The vote, already delayed twice, will stand as an early test of how to
regulate the fledgling industry amid pushback from safety advocates and
growing urgency from technologists.
For paid rides, Cruise is limited to the northwest third of the city,
while Waymo cannot yet charge for the rides at all. Neither is permitted
to have passengers in San Francisco's downtown financial district.
Leaders of the city’s transportation agencies, fire department, and
planning department oppose the rapid expansion, insisting the vehicles
are a menace, tying up traffic, mucking up emergency services, and
driving erratically. The companies say the unmanned vehicles are safer
than human-driven cars. Both sides say they have data to back up their
claims.
In June, for instance, the San Francisco County Transportation Authority
released data estimating that Waymo and Cruise vehicles were involved in
collisions with injuries reported at a rate higher than the national
average for vehicles driven by humans. State regulators dispute that,
saying the data doesn't account for incidents where human-drivers were
at fault.
Futuristic test vehicles from Cruise and Waymo are a common sight in
some parts of San Francisco. Adorned with whirling sensors on their
roofs and bumpers, the vehicles regularly attract gawking tourists,
dazzled by their empty driver seats and hands-free spinning steering
wheels. They have also drawn attention for their at-times unpredictable
driving patterns, including a slavish obedience to posted speed limits,
circuitous routes and a tendency to stop completely when confronted with
unexpected obstacles.
Cruise and Waymo said they have driven 3 million and 1 million miles,
respectively, without life-threatening injuries or fatalities. A Waymo
vehicle struck and killed a dog in May.
The Aug 10 vote by the California Public Utilities Commission, which
regulates autonomous vehicles, is dividing the city between
technologists, lobbyists and citizens hopeful the nascent industry may
be a boon for San Francisco, on the one hand; and on the other,
agencies, safety advocates and residents fear the city is being used as
a testing lab for an unproven tech.
The vote comes at a critical time for San Francisco, which is grappling
with thousands of tech job losses, firms leaving the city, and COVID-era
work-from-home policies that have contributed to a hollowed out
downtown.
'LITMUS TEST'
“Operating robotaxis in SF has become a litmus test for business
viability,” posted Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt on X, the social media site
formerly known as Twitter. “If it can work here, there’s little doubt it
can work just about everywhere.”
Cruise and Waymo have in recent months expanded to other cities such as
Dallas, Miami and Las Vegas and will need more testing against variables
like winter weather, driving rain and blistering heat, none of which San
Francisco can offer.
[to top of second column] |
A Cruise self-driving car, which
is owned by General Motors Corp, is seen outside the company?s
headquarters in San Francisco where it does most of its testing, in
California, U.S., September 26, 2018. REUTERS/Heather
Somerville/File Photo
The companies and others, including Ford and Tesla, have plowed
billions of dollars into developing self-driving vehicles but have
failed yet to live up to the lofty promises of usurping traditional
modes of transportation, and are desperate to find a safe and viable
business model.
Safety is the chief concern among San Francisco agencies – which
have virtually no authority to regulate autonomous vehicles and
point to traffic tie-ups and encounters with emergency services that
are social media staples.
The vehicles have been observed stopping in the middle of
intersections after traffic lights turned red, failing to fully pull
over to the curb to let passengers out, blocking bike lanes and
suddenly changing lanes or failing to yield to others, among other
hiccups.
“While San Francisco hopes that automated driving will at some point
be safer than human driving, at a minimum, based on collision
records available to the public, within the complex driving
environment of San Francisco city streets, we must conclude that the
technology is still under development and has not reached this
goal,” two local transportation agencies and the city's planning
commission wrote in a May joint letter to the CPUC.
SAFETY FIRST
Waymo and Cruise have both said they stand by their safety records
and point to a lack of serious accidents over millions of miles
traveled collectively within the city. "Humans are terrible
drivers," Cruise asserted in full-page ads in a handful of local and
national newspapers last month.
Waymo spokesperson Julia Ilina said the company hoped for a “swift
resolution” to the CPUC’s deliberations and noted the vehicles are
“reducing traffic injuries and fatalities in the places where we
operate.”
Residents also are divided. Mike Smith would like to see fewer of
the vehicles on city streets. “They’re all over my neighborhood --
they’re everywhere and just stop randomly on the road and have
caused problems with emergency services,” he said in an interview.
Activists, in viral videos, have taken to putting orange traffic
cones on the vehicles’ hoods, confusing their sensors and causing
them to stop until a human removes the cone.
Ramón Iglesias, another San Francisco resident, said that though
he’d seen the videos and some erratic behavior from the cars, he
supports the expansion and worries any further obstacles could drive
tech companies away.
“We have a very strong Luddite segment here in San Francisco and you
see places like Las Vegas and Miami go out of their way to embrace
tech,” said Iglesias, a data scientist. “We should be doing the
same.”
Mayor London Breed has called the city the “AI capital of the
world.” In a statement regarding autonomous vehicles, a city
spokesperson said Breed “generally supports the use of this
technology,” but “she remains committed to ensuring the public's
safety."
Cruise, meanwhile, is not sitting idle while the CPUC deliberates.
On Friday it announced it was expanding to Los Angeles, where some
local officials also have raised safety concerns.
(Reporting by Greg Bensinger; editing by Peter Henderson and Diane
Craft)
[© 2023 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.]
This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Thompson Reuters is solely responsible for this content. |