Table Of Content
- More from CBS News
- ‘Sesame Street’ writers reach tentative contract deal, averting strike
- In scramble to protect workers against heat, California officials exclude prisons from new rules
- Robotaxis score a huge victory in California with approval to operate 24/7
- Meet the District 1 candidates: How can D1 help the city hit its housing goals?
Labor advocates, backed by city leaders, have also rallied against the robotaxis, claiming that they’re eliminating jobs from service workers. Earlier this week, officials for both both Cruise and Waymo sought to reassure regulators that they believe they have been able to fix most of the flaws that have cropping up and have set up response teams to help move stopped robotaxis within a few minutes. While more people will now be able to ride, don't expect to see the streets flooded with robotaxis. There will still be some geographic restrictions to where the vehicles can go as ABC7 News reporter Lyanne Melendez found out when she took test rides in Cruise and Waymo. The vehicles were unable to go to the destination that she selected because it had not yet been mapped by the companies, however, Cruise and Waymo say they are continuing to offer service to new areas.
More from CBS News
“Given their financial backing” it’s reasonable to ask Cruise and Waymo to take the time to get things right before a major expansion. The discussion centered on Cruise and Waymo vehicles’ impact on public safety amid reports of highly publicized stops in the middle of San Francisco streets that have drawn the ire of first responders. Until November 2022, the company’s operations were limited to drives between 10 PM and 6 AM. In November, Cruise received approval to operate its robotaxis during the daytime.
Robotaxi Service Expansion in SF Delayed By State Regulators - The San Francisco Standard
Robotaxi Service Expansion in SF Delayed By State Regulators.
Posted: Tue, 27 Jun 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
‘Sesame Street’ writers reach tentative contract deal, averting strike
Commission Greenlights Robotaxi Expansion in San Francisco - The San Francisco Standard
Commission Greenlights Robotaxi Expansion in San Francisco.
Posted: Thu, 10 Aug 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Cruise and Waymo have spent years running pilot programs in multiple cities and are hoping for big changes after the commission’s vote. Cruise, which is majority-owned by General Motors, has a late-night taxi service in San Francisco that it wants to expand, initially with 100 vehicles. Waymo, which shares a parent company with Google, wants to pick up paying passengers in the city for the first time with no human driver present as back-up. It said it doesn’t have a firm number of vehicles in mind, only that it has hundreds in San Francisco now for testing and that it wants to roll out the paid service incrementally. The agency’s decision comes just three months after it awarded Cruise the final necessary permits to charge passengers for robotaxi rides in San Francisco.
In scramble to protect workers against heat, California officials exclude prisons from new rules
“Cruise and Waymo, they’re both Bay Area-founded companies that have big offices in San Francisco,” said Lee Edwards, a tech investor who’s an active booster of autonomous vehicles on social media. A running theme was skepticism of big tech companies that don’t have the best interests of the city of San Francisco at heart. Opponents also dismissed the autonomous vehicles as tools of the surveillance state, festooned with cameras and other sensors that could be handed over to law enforcement upon request. But it doesn’t seem to take into account the cars’ preternatural ability to disrupt firefighters, separate and apart from all the other safe driving they do. But, for the most part, when inadvertently breaching an emergency scene, even subpar human drivers tend to listen to firefighters’ orders and get the hell out of Dodge.
The decision was a major victory for Cruise — a subsidiary of General Motors — and Waymo — a spinoff from a secret project at Google — after spending years and billions of dollars honing a technology that they believe will revolutionize transportation. For months, San Francisco city officials have been pleading with the state to delay the vote, citing a spate of incidents in which autonomous vehicles have stopped traffic, blocked buses, or obstructed emergency vehicles. The city’s transit agency and fire and police department have all logged complaints with the CPUC, calling for the commission to reconsider the plan for 24/7 service. But it ended in a major victory for Cruise — a subsidiary of General Motors — and Waymo — a spinoff from a secret project at Google — after spending years and billions of dollars honing a technology that they believe will revolutionize transportation. For months, they have been pleading with the state to delay the vote, citing a spate of incidents in which autonomous vehicles have stopped traffic, blocked buses, or obstructed emergency vehicles. In public comments at the hearing today, and in others submitted in writing ahead of the vote, a number of residents and state and local groups said they believed the robotaxis held great promise for their communities.
Robotaxis score a huge victory in California with approval to operate 24/7
Cruise has said it will bring its self-driving services to Los Angeles, Dallas, Austin, Miami, Atlanta, and Nashville. Waymo said earlier this month that it would expand into Austin, in addition to an already planned expansion in LA. “They are still not ready for prime time because of the way they have impacted our operations,” Nicholson said during a four-hour hearing held Monday in advance of Thursday’s pivotal vote. “They’re not ready for prime time,” San Francisco Fire Chief Jeanine Nicholson told the Los Angeles Times recently. The department has logged 66 incidents since May 2022 in which robotaxis have interfered with firetrucks, according to The Washington Post. Local regulators have largely had to watch from the sidewalks, and they’ve been loud about their frustration (PDF).
The historic decision makes San Francisco the first city in the world to have two companies offering fully operational paid autonomous driving taxi services and put autonomous vehicles on the fast track towards widespread use in California. Though they provide the same self-driving services as their competitors, Zoox’s robotaxis are “purpose-built,” meaning they have no traditional driving controls such as a steering wheel and pedals. They claim to have been the first company to operate their purpose-built cars with passengers on public roads. The arguments for and against robotaxis break down along complicated lines.
CAPITOL RIVER CRUISES
Cruise has said that, in simulation, its AVs were involved in 92% fewer collisions as the primary contributor and 54% fewer collisions overall when benchmarked against human drivers in comparable driving environments. The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) voted 3-to-1 in favor of allowing the two companies to operate their vehicles at any hour of the day throughout the city of San Francisco while charging for rides. Perhaps the most frustrating part of the song and dance leading up to last week’s CPUC vote — other than the preordained nature of it — was the blurring of “safety” with driverless cars’ persistent and pervasive problems with emergency responders. On a July 25 earnings call, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said San Francisco could easily handle “several thousand” Cruise autonomous vehicles — perhaps a tenfold increase from the present total of 303. Last week’s vote by the state Public Utilities Commission smoothed the road for this aspiration. For all the high-tech wizardry behind self-driving cars, their road to approval by a state regulatory agency was low-tech.
Here’s what Cruise, Waymo are saying about San Francisco expansion plans
They said most of their self-driving vehicles pull over to the side of the road and respond accordingly to oncoming first responders. Autonomous-vehicle representatives added that they are continuing to collaborate with police and fire department officials to remedy any ongoing issues. “Safety continues to improve despite increasing complexity,” said Vogt two weeks ago. “Our analysis of the first 1 million miles shows AVs experienced 54% fewer collisions than human drivers in similar environments, and 92% fewer where the AV was the primary contributor. In other words, the vast majority of collisions are caused by inattentive human drivers, not the AV.” Vogt envisioned a day when people will find it more affordable to take robotaxis instead of owning cars. In a June 22 letter, the president of the union for San Francisco police officers warned of potentially dire consequences if Cruise and Waymo are allowed to expand throughout the city.
The company’s future expansion timeline is murky, however, even with the state’s recent stamp of approval. And though Vogt enticed investors with his ambitious vision for Cruise’s expansion, company spokespeople at a recent California Public Utilities Commission hearing with city officials struck a more conservative tone. San Francisco is far behind its goal of eliminating road deaths, and human drivers are almost always at fault when there’s a collision between them and a driverless car such as a Cruise or Waymo.
But the proposed San Francisco expansion has been facing increasingly staunch resistance, prompting regulators to postpone two previously scheduled votes on the issue in June and July. "I'm also a mother of two children, one of whom is blind. I myself am blind," one woman said. "Driverless vehicles would be an amazing advantage for us getting around, a family with two car seats." Much of it came from those with disabilities, who offered starkly different views on what this emerging technology means to them.
A month after Cruise received its CPUC permit, the city of San Francisco formally requested state regulators redo their decision. Applicants to the Driverless Pilot Program and the Driverless Phase I Deployment Program are required to submit Passenger Safety Plans that outline their plans to protect passenger safety. We're a nonprofit newsroom that has been covering San Francisco since 2008, digging deep to bring you the political analysis, investigative stories, follow-up reporting, and neighborhood news you won't get elsewhere. About 3/4 of our total budget comes from individual donors, keeping us independent and giving us the freedom to carry out the hard-hitting reporting you've gotten used to. So it’s not as simple as “safe” or “not safe.” Ghost Cars’ baffling misadventures and inability to stay out of emergency scenes, until fixed, ought to be a disqualifying problem. Ben Pimentel’s new weekly newsletter covering the biggest technology stories in San Francisco, Silicon Valley and beyond.
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