‘Lost time for no reason:’ how self-driving taxis are putting pressure on cities

Around 2 a.m. on March 19, Adam Wood, an on-duty San Francisco firefighter, received a 911 call and rushed to the city’s Mission neighborhood to help a man who was having a medical emergency. After the patient was loaded into an ambulance, a black and white car stopped and blocked the path.

It was a self-driving car from Waymo, an autonomous car company owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet. With no human driver to give orders to get out of the way, Mr. Wood spoke through a device in the car to an operator, who said someone would come pick up the vehicle.

Instead, another autonomous Waymo car arrived and blocked the other side of the street, Mr. Wood said. The ambulance was finally able to leave after being forced to reverse, and the patient, who was not in critical condition, reached the hospital. But the self-driving cars added seven minutes to the emergency response, he said.

“That was all wasted time for no reason,” said the 55-year-old Mr. Wood.

His experience was a sign of how self-driving taxis are increasingly beginning to take a toll on city services. In San Francisco and Austin, Texas, where passengers can hail autonomous vehicles, the cars have slowed emergency response times, caused accidents, increased congestion and increased the workload of local officials, according to police officers, firefighters and other city employees.

More than 600 incidents involving self-driving vehicles were documented in San Francisco between June 2022 and June 2023, according to the city’s Municipal Transportation Agency. After an episode in which a self-driving car from Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, ran over and dragged a pedestrian, regulators in California ordered the company last month to suspend service. Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt resigned on Sunday.

In Austin, city officials said there were 52 autonomous car incidents between July 8 and October 24, including a unique crash of a prototype robotaxi without a steering wheel into a “small electric building.”

To deal with the fallout, San Francisco has assigned at least one city employee to work on autonomous car policies and asked two transportation agencies to compile and manage a database of incidents based on 911 calls, social media posts and employee reports. This summer, Austin also formed an internal task force to help record incidents involving driverless vehicles.

“Many people on the task force are juggling this and other normal day-to-day operations,” said Matthew McElearney, training captain with the Austin Fire Department. “My job description does not say ‘a task force member.’”

San Francisco and Austin offer a taste of what to expect in other places. While self-driving cars have been tested in more than two dozen U.S. cities over the years, these tests have entered a newer phase in which human drivers — who once rode along on autonomous vehicle rides — no longer remain in the car during rides. Waymo and Cruise then started offering fully self-driving taxi services with those cars in some cities.

Cruise has since suspended its autonomous vehicle operations. But Waymo and others continue to develop and test their cars in potential markets and the technology will spread, said Bryant Walker Smith, a professor at the University of South Carolina who has advised the federal government on automated driving.

Cruise had tested its driverless taxis in San Francisco, Austin and Phoenix and planned to expand to Houston, Dallas and Miami. Waymo, which offers driverless rides in Phoenix and San Francisco, said it would next roll out its services in Los Angeles and Austin. Zoox, another self-driving car company, said it planned to introduce robotaxis in San Francisco and Las Vegas, but did not provide a time frame.

Other cities where self-driving cars have been tested are preparing for robotaxis to be fully deployed. The Nashville Fire Department said it was organizing annual training for firefighters about the cars. The Seattle Fire Department said it had added safety concerns with self-driving cars to an employee’s responsibilities during each shift.

Some cities said their experience with robotaxis had been smoother. Kate Gallego, the mayor of Phoenix, where Waymo has operated autonomous taxi services since 2020, said the company spoke extensively with local officials and conducted safety tests before deploying a fleet of 200 vehicles to locations including the airport.

“Our residents have generally appreciated this service,” she said.

Waymo, Cruise and Zoox said they had worked closely with officials in many cities and continued to improve their vehicles to minimize impacts on local services. Waymo added that it had “no evidence of our vehicles blocking an ambulance” on March 19 in San Francisco.

Few cities have struggled more with self-driving cars than San Francisco. Google, headquartered in nearby Silicon Valley, began tested self-driving vehicles in the city in 2009 and introduced robotaxi services in November 2022. Founded in San Francisco in 2013, Cruise began testing its vehicles on the city’s roads in 2015, offering its first driverless ride to passengers in February 2022.

Hundreds of cars have since made their way through the streets of San Francisco. At one point, Waymo had 250 self-driving vehicles in the city, while Cruise had 300 during the day and 100 at night. Residents regularly saw the cars – sedans equipped with more than a dozen cameras and high-tech sensors, some of which rotated on their roofs – passing by.

In July 2018, the city’s municipal transportation department asked Julia Friedlander, a transportation policy veteran, to study how San Francisco would be affected by self-driving cars. She met with autonomous car companies and government agencies, which issue permits to the companies to test and drive their vehicles, to discuss the city’s concerns about safety and traffic congestion.

After five years, there are still no systematic safety and incident reporting standards for self-driving cars in California, Ms. Friedlander said. “This is such a dramatic change in the transportation industry that it will take many years for the regulatory structure to really be finalized,” she said.

Last year, the number of 911 calls from San Francisco residents about robotaxis began to rise, city officials said. Over a three-month period, 28 incidents were reported, according to a letter city officials sent to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

By June, incidents involving autonomous cars in San Francisco had risen to such a “concerning level” that the city’s fire department created a separate incident form for autonomous vehicles, said Darius Luttropp, deputy chief of the department. On October 15, 87 incidents had been registered with the form.

“We move forward with the expectation that this wonder technology will work like a human driver,” Mr. Luttropp said. “That turned out not to be the case.”

Mr. Wood, the firefighter, attended a week-long training session held by Waymo at the fire department’s training center in June to learn more about the self-driving vehicles. But he said he was disappointed.

“None of us walked away from the training with a way to get a stuck car moving,” he said, adding that manually taking control of the car takes ten minutes, which is too long in an emergency.

His main conclusion was that he had to bang on the car window or tap on the door so he could talk to the car’s remote control, he said. The operator would then attempt to rearm the vehicle remotely or send someone to manually override it, he said.

Waymo said it rolled out a software update to its cars in October that allowed firefighters and other authorities to take control of the vehicles in seconds.

After the California Public Utilities Commission, a state regulator, voted in August to expand robotaxi services in San Francisco, Waymo and Cruise began meeting every two weeks with the city’s fire, police and emergency management departments.

Jeanine Nicholson, San Francisco’s fire chief, said her department is now in a “decent place” with the companies and added that Cruise’s suspension allowed more time to resolve problems with the cars in emergency situations. But she expected more meetings and adjustments as other self-driving companies move in.

“It takes time and we have a whole fire station – a whole city – to run,” Ms Nicholson said.