The bus had fixed. The 54 Felton line eastbound from San Francisco was traveling down a narrow residential street when a white SUV coming the other way stopped in the middle of the road. It was a rainy Sunday night last month and the bus driver leaned against the windshield and peered through the haze at the SUV’s pulsing hazard lights before sinking back and exclaiming in astonishment, “What the hell? No driver of the car?!”
The 54, brought to a stop by an autonomous vehicle from Alphabet’s Waymo, isn’t the only bus to run afoul of San Francisco’s growing crowd of self-driving vehicles. Bus and train surveillance videos obtained by WIRED through public records requests since September show a litany of incidents in which fear and confusion caused by self-driving cars have spilled onto the streets of the US city that has become the epicenter for its testing.
As the incidents pile up, the companies behind the autonomous vehicles, such as Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise, want to add more robot taxis to the streets of San Francisco, cover more territory, and operate on an hourly basis. Waymo and Cruise say they learn from every incident. Each has traveled more than 1 million miles driverless and says their cars are safe enough to keep moving forward. But expansions depend on the approval of California state regulators, who have been pressuring for years by San Francisco officials to restrict autonomous vehicles until the problems subside.
Self-driving cars have made thousands of trips in San Francisco – taking people to work, to school, and to and from dates. They’ve also proven to be a glitchy nuisance, grunting traffic and creeping into dangerous terrain like construction zones and downed power lines. Autonomous cars in San Francisco made 92 unscheduled stops between May and December 2022, 88 percent of them on public transit streets, according to the city’s transit authorities, which gathered the data from social media reports, 911 calls and other sources, because companies aren’t required to report all malfunctions.
The records obtained by WIRED are more focused. They follow a previously unreported guideline to San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency staff issued last October to improve the record keeping of autonomous vehicle incidents. Muni, as the agency is known, has standardized the term “driverless car” when staff report “near misses, collisions or other transit delay incidents,” according to the directive. The agency’s logs show 12 driverless reports from September 2022 through March 8, 2023, though Muni video was provided for only eight of these cases. Overall, the incidents resulted in at least 83 minutes of direct delays for Muni riders, the data shows.
That data probably doesn’t reflect the true magnitude of the problem. Muni employees don’t follow every directive to the letter, and a single delay can slow down other lines, making the blow worse. Buses and trains can’t get around blockages as easily as pedestrians, other motorists and cyclists, leaving travelers who rely on public transportation with some of the biggest headaches caused by errant self-driving cars, according to public transportation advocates.
San Francisco officials say they want to support new technology, but they want to see progress in addressing disruptions, such as random stops for buses and trains, first. “What we’re seeing is a significant increase in traffic and other forms of chaos on our streets,” said Jeffrey Tumlin, Muni’s director of transportation. “We are deeply concerned that if autonomous vehicles are allowed unrestricted, driverless operations in San Francisco, traffic impacts will increase exponentially.”
For Muni’s 54 bus, which traverses the southern outskirts of San Francisco, the vehicle blocking the road early last month was a self-driving Waymo that became stranded between rows of parked cars. A human driver would have reversed to clear space for the bus, which is not allowed to reverse without an attendant. Instead, the Waymo Driver, as the company calls its technology, alerted a third-party “fleet response specialist” to help. Waymo spokesperson Sandy Karp says this employee guided the car which was “not ideal in the circumstances” and made it challenging to get back on the road.
That caused the Muni driver to get into trouble. “I can’t move the bus,” the driver told one of the two occupants. “The car drives automatically.” The driver radioed managers and tipped their caps, “Whoosh… Half an hour, an hour. Don’t know. Nothing to do.” Thirty-eight stops and about five miles remained for the 54. The driver, looking out at the Waymo, expressed disappointment: “This one isn’t smart yet. Not smart. Not good.”
