The bus was related. San Francisco’s eastbound Felton 54 line was heading down a narrow residential street when a white SUV coming in the other direction stopped in the middle of the lane. It was a rainy Sunday evening last month, and the bus driver leaned to the windshield and peered through the haze at the SUV’s pulsating hazard lights before backing away and exclaiming in surprise, “What the hell is this? No driver for the car?!”
The 54, which was stopped by Alphabet’s Waymo’s autonomous vehicle, isn’t the only bus having trouble with San Francisco’s growing crowd of self-driving vehicles. Bus and train surveillance videos WIRED obtained through public records requests show a string of incidents since September, as the anxiety and confusion sparked by self-driving cars spilled onto the streets of the US city that became the epicenter of their testing.
As accidents pile up, the companies behind self-driving vehicles, like Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise, want to add more robo-taxis to San Francisco’s streets, cover more areas, and have them running at all times. Waymo and Cruz say they learn from every incident. They each log more than a million driverless miles and say their cars are safe enough to keep going. But the expansions are subject to approval from California regulators, which San Francisco officials have pressured for years to restrict self-driving vehicles until the problems subside.
Self-driving cars have completed thousands of trips in San Francisco – getting people to work and school and to and from dates. They’ve also proven to be a false nuisance, jamming traffic, and crawling into dangerous terrain like construction zones and downed power lines. San Francisco’s self-driving cars made 92 unplanned stops between May and December 2022 — 88% of which were on streets with ride-hailing, according to the city’s transportation authorities, which compiled data from social media reports, 911 calls, and other sources, because the companies are not. present. No need to report all crashes.
The records obtained by WIRED are more focused. They follow a previously unreported directive to San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency employees issued last October to improve record-keeping for accidents involving self-driving vehicles. Muni, as the agency is known, has standardized the term “driverless car” when employees report “near misses, collisions, or other incidents that result in transit delays,” according to the directive. Agency records show 12 “driverless” reports from September 2022 through March 8, 2023, though Muni video is available for only eight of those cases. Overall, the accidents resulted in at least 83 minutes of direct delay for Muni’s passengers, records show.
This data may not reflect the true scale of the problem. Muni employees don’t follow every direction in the letter, and a one-off delay can slow down other lines, exacerbating the blow. Buses and trains can’t navigate around obstacles as easily as pedestrians, other motorists, and cyclists, leaving transit-dependent commuters with some of the biggest headaches of nefarious driverless cars, according to transportation advocates.
San Francisco officials say they want to be supportive of the new technology, but first they want to show progress in addressing failures — such as random stops in front of buses and trains. “What we’re seeing is a huge increase in traffic and other types of chaos on our streets,” says Jeffrey Tomlin, Muni’s director of transportation. “We are very concerned that if self-driving vehicles are allowed unlimited, driverless operations in San Francisco, the traffic impacts will grow exponentially.”
For Muni’s Bus No. 54, which crosses the southern edge of San Francisco, the vehicle blocking its path early last month was a driverless Waymo that was stranded among rows of parked cars. The human driver would have reversed, giving way to the bus, which is not allowed to reverse without a supervisor. Instead, the Waymo Driver, as the company calls its technology, remotely alerted a “Fleet Response Specialist” to assist. Waymo spokeswoman Sandy Karp says this factor provided guidance for the car that “wasn’t ideal given the circumstances” and made it difficult to resume driving.
That driver left Mooney in a bind. “I can’t move the bus,” the driver said to one of the bus passengers. “The car is running automatically.” The driver called the managers and took off their hoods: “Wosh… half an hour, one hour. I don’t know. Nothing to do.” Thirty-eight stops and about five miles left in front of the 54. The driver, looking at Waymo, expressed disappointment: “That wasn’t smart yet. Not smart. Not good.”