Waymo’s driverless cars could soon be offering taxi service 24/7 in San Francisco.
Jessica Christian/The ChronicleI’m not accustomed to being awkwardly gaped at, but that was my experience on Monday as I took a drive through San Francisco. Kids pulled on their parents’ arms and pointed. Drivers grabbed their smartphones and snapped pictures. People walking through crosswalks did a double take and whipped around to get a better look.
In fairness, it was the driver’s seat that was attracting all the attention — because it was empty. The gleaming white Jaguar I was riding in alongside venture capitalist Lee Edwards was autonomous.
Edwards is a beta tester for Waymo, the self-driving car company owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google — which, along with General Motors-owned Cruise, operates hundreds of driverless cars on the streets of San Francisco.
Soon, however, there could be many more.
On June 29, California regulators are poised to sign off on resolutions allowing Waymo and Cruise to offer 24/7 paid robotaxi service throughout San Francisco — a move opposed by city transportation officials who say the companies should first commit to more robust data reporting requirements and meet stricter safety and performance benchmarks.
Reported incidents involving driverless Cruise and Waymo vehicles nearly quadrupled from January to April, according to city figures. Last week, a Cruise vehicle complicated emergency personnel’s response to a Mission District mass shooting, and in late May a Waymo car hit and killed a dog. In March, a Cruise car rear-ended a Muni bus, and in April five Waymo vehicles ground to a halt in the middle of a residential street amid dense fog. Self-driving cars have also entered active firefighting scenes, construction sites and bus lanes, and brought traffic to a standstill for as long as 21 minutes, a Chronicle review found.
Given this track record, I was a little jumpy about taking a spin in a self-driving car, jokingly but not-so-jokingly telling my editor to make preparations for my funeral.
But not only did I survive the ride, I enjoyed it.
Sure, there were a couple of eyebrow-raising moments during my hour-long ride. On several occasions, the car braked harder than necessary for no apparent reason, and the windshield wipers also randomly activated themselves despite a lack of rain. The car also didn’t always choose the safest spots for passenger loading and unloading: It double-parked when picking me up and dropping me off, despite an open spot against the curb just a few feet away.
Overall, however, the drive was smooth.
At times, the Waymo was more perceptive than I was. On multiple occasions, it braked for pedestrians about to enter the roadway whom I hadn’t even noticed. It responded well to cars jutting out of driveways or suddenly attempting to parallel park in busy streets. It navigated narrow, hilly roads — one of my top anxieties as a driver — with ease, despite jumbles of parked cars, bikers and vehicles racing in the opposite direction.
The experience actually felt significantly safer than the two Lyft rides with human drivers I took that day.
The Waymo made a full stop at each stop sign and stoplight, signaled before each turn and lane change, and didn’t appear ever to surpass the speed limit — regulations my Lyft drivers didn’t always adhere to.
When I asked one of the drivers what he thought about autonomous cars, he broke out laughing.
“They are better drivers than me,” he said.
The juxtaposition of my Lyft and Waymo rides put many of my safety concerns to rest. Autonomous vehicles clearly have the potential to create safer roads; as much anxiety as there is over robots controlling the wheel, it’s humans who aren’t very good drivers. An estimated 43,000 people died in U.S. car crashes in 2022. San Francisco had 39 traffic fatalities last year — the most since 2014. Deployed at scale, self-driving cars — which are programmed to always follow the rules and can’t drink or text while driving — could considerably reduce this death toll. And, because they’re electric, they could speed up the decarbonization of our transportation sector.
Still, more self-driving cars on the road means more cars on the road. Autonomous vehicles don’t solve the “fundamental geometric limits of mobility on urban streets,” Jeffrey Tumlin, director of transportation at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, told me.
Not only do cars take up 10 times as much roadway space as buses, bikes or pedestrians, Tumlin said, but autonomous rideshare vehicles will also likely be empty at least half the time as they search for passengers.
“Autonomous vehicles grossly worsen our traffic congestion problem under the best-case scenario,” Tumlin said.
Edwards characterized this as an “anti-incrementalism” argument that uses “NIMBY” talking points to forestall the development of life-saving technology. He said self-driving cars could ultimately eliminate the need for parking lots and personal vehicles altogether.
The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Autonomous vehicles won’t be the downfall of San Francisco streets, but neither will they be the savior. For all their radical potential, they represent something far more commonplace: tech companies’ increasing control over — and insight into – our lives.
Ultimately, self-driving cars are just another way to feed more of our personal data to companies like Google. It’s easy to envision a future in which a self-driving car recommends that I stop to buy products from a store I’m passing by — and monitors my every move to harvest as much information as possible.
As I rode in the Waymo, I couldn’t stop thinking about a recent New Yorker short story in which an autonomous vehicle begins regulating its passenger’s behavior, restricting who she can let in and when and where she can enter or exit.
Far-fetched? Perhaps. But, then again, so was the sign on the Jaguar’s steering wheel: “Please keep your hands off the wheel,” it read. “The Waymo Driver is in control at all times.”
Reach Emily Hoeven: emily.hoeven@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @emily_hoeven