Seven Waymo robotaxis blocked traffic moving onto the Potrero Avenue 101 on-ramp in San Francisco on Tuesday at 9:30 p.m., according to video of the incident posted to Reddit and confirmation from Waymo.
California regulators recently approved Waymo to operate its autonomous robotaxi service on San Francisco freeways without a human driver, but the company is still only testing on freeways with a human driver in the front seat.
After hitting the road closure, the first Waymo vehicle in the lineup then pulled over out of the traffic lane that was blocked by cones, followed by six other Waymo robotaxis.
It’s not the first time Waymo vehicles have caused a road blockage, but this is the first documented incident involving a freeway.
In San Francisco, there must be a driver in the car in order to issue a citation.
Waymo, the self-driving company under Alphabet, began testing its robotaxis in Atlanta on Tuesday, adding another city to its ever-expanding testing and deployment domain.
Read about our cross-country training program:… pic.twitter.com/ORNxAbjJ3A — Waymo (@Waymo) April 16, 2024Like many other states, Georgia’s regulation of AVs is almost nonexistent, meaning Waymo can technically drop fully autonomous vehicles on the streets today without a safety driver, provided it meets the state’s minimal risk conditions.
Earlier this month, Waymo began mapping Washington, D.C., and in November 2023, the company began winter testing robotaxis in Buffalo.
In March, California regulators approved Waymo to grow its commercial robotaxi service across the San Francisco peninsula and on San Francisco freeways, which unlocks a route to San Francisco International Airport.
A Waymo robotaxi also hit and killed a dog in June 2023.
Cruise is redeploying robotaxis in Phoenix after nearly five months of paused operations, the company said in a blog post.
Cruise will resume manual driving of its autonomous vehicles to create maps and gather road information in certain cities, starting with Phoenix, the company said Tuesday.
Cruise has not announced when or where it will resume driverless operations.
The company’s main operations were historically based in San Francisco, but Cruise lost its permits to operate there following the accident.
Cruise began expanding its paid service area in the Phoenix area in August 2023.
Y Combinator President Garry Tan took to the social platform X Tuesday to again express his displeasure at elected officials representing San Francisco, where the storied accelerator is based.
This time, he was lambasting California state assembly member Matt Haney, over a proposed late-night email bill he authored.
Haney represents San Francisco in the state’s house-of-representatives equivalent.
Meaning they’d have the legal right to ignore calls, emails, texts or messages sent after that time, unless an emergency, and employers in violation could be subject to fines, The San Francisco Standard reported.
He went on a rant in January on X about seven San Francisco supervisors that took a violent tone.
Waymo will begin offering a robotaxi service to the public in Los Angeles this week and in Austin by the end of the year, the company’s co-CEO Tekedra Mawakan said Wednesday at SXSW.
Opening up a robotaxi service means the public will be able to hail a ride in a driverless car via the Waymo One app.
Austin will become the fourth city where Waymo operates a commercial driverless service.
Waymo also operates a robotaxi service in Phoenix, San Francisco and soon Los Angeles.
Unlike Texas, regulators in California require companies hoping to deploy commercial robotaxi services to attain a number of permits.
Waymo received approval Friday afternoon from the California Public Utilities Commission to operate a commercial robotaxi service in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Peninsula and on San Francisco freeways.
Importantly, it opens up new territory for Waymo in one of the country’s largest cities and unlocks a route to the San Francisco Airport.
Waymo has operated a commercial service 24 hours a day, seven days a week throughout the city of San Francisco since receiving approval from the commission in August.
Waymo is also allowed to give people free driverless rides in parts of Los Angeles.
Until today’s approval, it was not able to charge for rides in Los Angeles.
But errors in the geofence warrant applications that go before a judge can violate the privacy of vastly more people — in one case almost two miles away.
It’s not known which law enforcement agency requested the nearly two-mile-long geofence warrant, or for how long the warrant was in effect.
The ACLU attorneys reviewed thousands of geofence warrants filed in San Francisco Criminal Court that were issued over three years between 2018 and mid-2021, which they say was likely only a fraction of geofence warrants used in San Francisco during that time.
The attorneys’ findings also showed the geofence warrants disproportionately targeted certain San Francisco neighborhoods more than others, particularly immigrant-heavy areas like Portola.
Other tech companies that store troves of users’ location data — like Uber, Microsoft and Yahoo (which owns TechCrunch) — are known to receive geofence warrants.
