An NBC Bay Area report in May detailed that 25% of SF school crossing guards said they or their school children had nearly been hit by self-driving Waymos, and now Mayor Breed is promising to hold the Google subsidiary more accountable.
As self-driving car companies like Waymo and Cruise use San Francisco as their guinea pig testing lab, NBC Bay Area has stood out as a local media outlet that’s broken news that the self-driving car companies would rather not see in the headlines.
In February, that station broke the story of a seven-year-old who was nearly hit by a self-driving Cruise vehicle. And in May of this year, NBC Bay Area also broke an investigative report that 25% of SF school crossing guards said that they or the children they were helping cross the street had almost been hit by self-driving Waymos on at least one occasion (often more than one occasion).
That May report is having some impact. NBC Bay Area reports this week that San Francisco Mayor London Breed wants the city of SF to have some say in regulating Waymos, particularly with regards to school crossing safety. Currently, only state and federal officials can set the rules around self-driving cars.
“Of course, it concerns me,” Breed told NBC Bay Area. “We are doing everything we can within our authority to hold them accountable.”
She added that “The autonomous vehicle companies have been pretty good about working with us on certain things, but not necessarily with providing us the kind of data we need to understand exactly the kinds of incidents that you are talking about.”
Currently, only three self-driving car companies are permitted to operate in San Francisco: Waymo, Cruise (which is currently sidelined), and Amazon’s Zoox (which does not have much of a fleet yet). So right now, Waymo more or less has this game to themselves.
And according to NBC Bay Area, the SFMTA and the mayor’s office are going to have a meeting with Waymo about these near-collisions at school pedestrian crossings “in mid August.” We’ll see if anything comes of it.
The self-driving car companies are required to report all collisions to the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), but they aren’t required to report near-collisions. So NBC Bay Area did the digging through all the complaints about autonomous vehicles made to the California DMV in 2023.
Out of more than 200 of these complaints, about 30% were regarding the self-driving cars’ behavior at crosswalks. And about one in five of these crosswalk complaints were about Waymo cars. The rest, unsurprisingly, were Cruise complaints.
There is currently a bill in the California legislature that would allow cities to regulate self-driving cars if the cars operate in those cities, that bill has passed the state Senate and is on to the Assembly. The self-driving car companies hate the idea, citing the old “that would stifle innovation” argument.
But SF parents whose kids use those crosswalks think there are more important things than tech innovation.
“There’s some things that you can cut corners on, like self-checkout,” parent Jessica Torres told NBC Bay Area. “Not transit… people could die.”
Image via Waymo
