You've heard a lot of these stories by now, but we have yet another situation in which a robocar disrupted civil society in San Francisco and caused actual humans to have trouble getting where they need to go.
This situation appears to have happened over the weekend, and video from the incident was posted Sunday to Reddit. (KRON4 subsequently picked up the news.)
The Waymo taxi in question, with no driver on board, appears to have gotten stuck without a clue what to do next in the Nob Hill intersection of Clay and Leavenworth streets. A Muni bus trying to turn could then not make its turn, and all the passengers on the city bus had to get off.
You can hear someone in the background of the cellphone video saying, "You'd better turn that shit around, friend," but it's not clear that Waymo's vehicles are capable of responding to such human suggestions.
[OC] Self-driving car parks in intersection and blocks traffic
by u/mFanch in sanfrancisco
As Mission Local reported last month, a Waymo car came upon the aftermath of that February explosion in the Sunset, and an SF cop spent some untold number of minutes standing in front of it and yelling "stop" to keep the thing from driving willy-nilly over an active fire hose.
And just last week, SF Fire Department Chief Jeanine Nicholson went on the record as being very anti-robotaxi, saying that the cars are "not ready for prime time" and she is concerned that "someone is going to get really severely injured or killed because we cannot properly respond to an incident" because of an autonomous vehicle in the way.
Update: Waymo has a statement about this incident from last week, and it is blaming the Muni bus.
"The June 19 interaction began when the bus reversed into an intersection that it had just turned through, blocking all traffic including our vehicle from clearing the intersection in that direction. Though unclear why, passengers began exiting the bus within about 15 seconds of the bus stopping in the intersection. At that point, it was clear that the bus would not begin moving again and that our vehicle would need to take a different route. From that point, our vehicle was stopped for about a minute before it navigated around the bus and proceeded through the intersection."
We do not have the Muni driver's perspective to corroborate this.
Related: SF Fire Chief Fumes Over Self-Driving Robotaxis Blocking First Responders Dozens of Times This Year