A video from Sunday shows a self-driving Waymo robotaxi driving in the red ‘bus only’ lane on Van Ness Avenue, and apparently about to engage in an illegal left-hand turn.
It's been about two weeks since the last self-driving Waymo mishap, or at least, the last one that the public knew about because video of the incident surfaced online. But the latest of these comes from KGO, detailing a Sunday incident on the new-ish red Van Ness Avenue bus lanes. As seen in the video below, the Waymo was driving in the red bus lane, and then appears to be making an illegal left-hand turn.
The video segment is a little over two minutes long, but the incriminating snippet is only a couple seconds. (It’s played a few times in the segment.) The Waymo is spotted at Van Ness Avenue and Post Street, sitting square in the middle of the red bus lane. It is stopping to make a left-hand turn onto Post Street, though the corner has signage posted stating that such a turn is illegal. The actual left-hand turn is not documented in the video, but the Waymo is smack dab in the middle of the bus lane, where non-bus vehicles are not supposed to be.
"We're seeing a lot of loose ends that the technology isn't quite there,” Carnegie Mellon computer engineering professor Phil Koopeman told KGO. “The companies are claiming it's safer, but things like driving the wrong way down the street as long as there is no crash they would say don't count for unsafe."
He’s got a point, as the robotaxi parent companies like Google and Cruise are not required to be terribly forthcoming about what gets reported as an “unsafe” incident. And as Koopman adds, "I think there is no such thing as public road testing without a driver, either you're testing or you're done and deployed."
Waymo did not return comment to KGO about the incident. But there are many academics in the engineering field who feel Waymo’s testing has been responsible, safe, and largely without problems.
"In my opinion, as of today it is pretty safe and it's going to get safer in my opinion along the way," Cal State East Bay Computer Science Department chair Levent Ertaul told KGO.
That video has thus far only surfaced in a KGO report — it hasn’t been all over Reddit or social media, and it has not gone particularly viral. So not much may come of this. But it indicates that these self-driving cars may have a blind spot with bus-only lanes, at a time when Waymo is looking to expand to more communities and their freeways.
Related: Another Waymo Decided to Park In the Middle of an Intersection, Blocking Muni Bus [SFist]
Image: Joe Kukura, SFist
