Round 2 a.m. on March 19, Adam Wooden, a San Francisco firefighter on obligation, acquired a 911 name and raced to the town’s Mission neighborhood to assist a male who was having a medical emergency. After loading the affected person into an ambulance, a black-and-white automobile pulled up and blocked the trail.
It was a driverless automobile operated by Waymo, an autonomous automobile firm that Google’s guardian, Alphabet, owned. With no human driver to instruct to maneuver out of the way in which, Mr. Wooden spoke by a tool within the automobile to a distant operator, who stated somebody would come take the automobile away.
As a substitute, one other autonomous Waymo automobile arrived and blocked the opposite aspect of the road, Mr. Wooden stated. The ambulance was lastly in a position to depart after being compelled to again up, and the affected person, who was not in crucial situation, made it to the hospital. However the self-driving vehicles added seven minutes to the emergency response, he stated.
“All that was misplaced time for no motive,” Mr. Wooden, 55, stated.
His expertise was an indication of how self-driving taxis are more and more beginning to take a toll on metropolis providers. In San Francisco and Austin, Texas, the place passengers can hail autonomous autos, the vehicles have slowed down emergency response occasions, induced accidents, elevated congestion and added to the workloads of native officers, stated cops, firefighters and different metropolis staff.
In San Francisco, greater than 600 self-driving automobile incidents have been documented from June 2022 to June 2023, in keeping with the town’s Municipal Transportation Company. After one episode the place a driverless automobile from Cruise, a subsidiary of Normal Motors, ran over and dragged a pedestrian, California regulators ordered the corporate to droop its service final month. Kyle Vogt, Cruise’s chief government, resigned on Sunday.
In Austin, metropolis officers stated there have been 52 autonomous automobile incidents from July 8 to Oct. 24, together with a first-of-its-kind crash by a prototype robotaxi with no steering wheel right into a “small electrical constructing.”
To deal with the fallout, San Francisco has designated at the least one metropolis worker to work on autonomous automobile insurance policies and requested two transportation businesses to compile and handle a database of incidents based mostly on 911 calls, social media posts and worker stories. This summer time, Austin additionally shaped an inner activity pressure to assist log driverless automobile incidents.
“Lots of people on the duty pressure are juggling this in addition to different regular day-to-day operations,” stated Matthew McElearney, a coaching captain on the Austin Fireplace Division. “In my job description, it doesn’t say ‘a activity pressure member.’”
San Francisco and Austin provide a preview of what to anticipate elsewhere. Whereas self-driving vehicles have been examined in additional than two dozen U.S. cities through the years, these trials have moved into a more moderen section the place human drivers — who as soon as rode alongside on autonomous automobile rides — now not keep within the vehicles throughout rides. Waymo and Cruise then began providing totally driverless taxi providers in some cities with these vehicles.
Cruise has since suspended its autonomous automobile operations. However Waymo and others proceed creating and testing their vehicles in potential markets and the expertise will unfold, stated Bryant Walker Smith, a College of South Carolina professor who has suggested the federal authorities on automated driving.
Cruise had examined its driverless taxis in San Francisco, Austin and Phoenix and deliberate to develop to Houston, Dallas and Miami. Waymo, which offers driverless rides in Phoenix and San Francisco, stated it could subsequent roll out its providers in Los Angeles and Austin. Zoox, one other self-driving automobile firm, stated it deliberate to introduce robotaxis in San Francisco and Las Vegas however didn’t present a time-frame.
Different cities the place self-driving vehicles have been examined are making ready for when robotaxis are totally deployed. The Nashville Fireplace Division stated it was creating an annual coaching for firefighters in regards to the vehicles. Seattle’s Fireplace Division stated it had added issues of safety with driverless vehicles to the tasks of an worker throughout every shift.
Some cities stated their expertise with robotaxis had been smoother. Kate Gallego, the mayor of Phoenix, the place Waymo has run autonomous taxi providers since 2020, stated the corporate met extensively with native officers and performed security assessments earlier than deploying a fleet of 200 autos to places together with the airport.
“Our residents have usually actually appreciated this service,” she stated.
Waymo, Cruise and Zoox stated they’d labored intently with officers in lots of cities and continued to enhance their autos to attenuate the results on native providers. Waymo added that it had “no proof of our autos blocking an ambulance” on March 19 in San Francisco.
Few cities have grappled extra with self-driving vehicles than San Francisco. Google, whose headquarters are in close by Silicon Valley, began testing driverless autos within the metropolis in 2009 and launched robotaxi providers in November 2022. Cruise, based in San Francisco in 2013, began testing its autos on the town’s roads in 2015 and provided its first driverless trip to passengers in February 2022.
Lots of of the vehicles have since wound their means by San Francisco streets. At one level, Waymo had 250 driverless autos within the metropolis, whereas Cruise had 300 out throughout the day and 100 at evening. Residents incessantly noticed the vehicles — sedans outfitted with greater than a dozen cameras and high-tech sensors, some spinning on their roofs — driving by.
In July 2018, the town’s Municipal Transportation Company requested Julia Friedlander, a transportation coverage veteran, to work on understanding how San Francisco could be affected by self-driving vehicles. She met with autonomous automobile corporations and state regulators, who problem permits to the businesses for testing and working their autos, to debate the town’s considerations about security and congestion.
After 5 years, there are nonetheless no systematic state security and incident reporting requirements for driverless vehicles in California, Ms. Friedlander stated. “That is such a dramatic sort of change in transportation that it’s going to take a few years for the regulatory construction to actually be finalized,” she stated.
Final yr, the variety of 911 calls from San Francisco residents about robotaxis started rising, metropolis officers stated. In a single three-month interval, 28 incidents have been reported, in keeping with a letter that metropolis officers despatched to the Nationwide Freeway Site visitors Security Administration.
By June, autonomous automobile incidents in San Francisco had risen to such a “regarding degree” that the town’s Fireplace Division created a separate autonomous automobile incident kind, stated Darius Luttropp, a deputy chief of the division. As of Oct. 15, 87 incidents had been recorded with the shape.
“We transfer ahead with expectations that this surprise expertise will function like a human driver,” Mr. Luttropp stated. “That didn’t transform the case.”
Mr. Wooden, the firefighter, attended a weeklong coaching session held by Waymo in June on the Fireplace Division’s coaching middle to study extra in regards to the self-driving autos. However he stated he was disillusioned.
“None of us walked away from the coaching with any technique to get a stalled automobile to maneuver,” he stated, including that manually taking up the automobile takes 10 minutes, which is simply too lengthy in an emergency.
His fundamental takeaway was that he ought to bang on the automobile’s window or faucet on its door so he may speak to the automobile’s distant operator, he stated. The operator would then attempt to remotely re-engage the automobile or ship somebody to manually override it, he stated.
Waymo stated it had rolled out a software program replace to its vehicles in October that may let firefighters and different authorities take management of the autos inside seconds.
After the California Public Utilities Fee, a state regulator, voted in August to permit an growth of robotaxi providers in San Francisco, Waymo and Cruise began assembly each two weeks with the town’s hearth, police and emergency administration departments.
Jeanine Nicholson, San Francisco’s hearth chief, stated her division was now at a “respectable place” with the businesses and added that Cruise’s suspension provided extra time to work out points with the vehicles in emergency conditions. However she anticipated extra conferences and changes as different self-driving corporations moved in.
“Time goes to be taken up, and we now have a complete hearth division — a complete metropolis — to run,” Ms. Nicholson stated.
