After months of debate, the California Public Utilities Commission voted on Thursday to approve an expansion that allows vehicles on the streets at all hours of the day. This weekend, as videos of robotaxi malfunctions began appearing on social media, opponents say they are seeing their fears realized.
On Friday, amid increased traffic from the Outside Lands music festival, a number of self-driving cars seemed to glitch. One TikTok user recorded a Cruise vehicle causing “mayhem” outside of the festival where it was stuck at an angle in the middle of the street. “They’re causing mad confusion over here,” the user said. A Twitter user shared a video of a Cruise vehicle nearly running over a family on a crosswalk over the weekend. In San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, as many as 10 Cruise cars blocked a main thoroughfare, stoking anger from locals.
Aaron Peskin, who represents the neighborhood on the San Francisco board of supervisors said he received a number of complaints from his constituents that night. He said on Twitter that the snafu underscored the concerns he and others raised ahead of the CPUC vote.
“Why do state commissioners think it’s OK to put people in danger + create traffic chaos on our neighborhoods streets?” he wrote. “We warned them + they refused to listen.”
In a tweet, Cruise said that the music festival caused issues with the cellphone networks the vehicles rely on for connectivity, and that it is “actively investigating and working on solutions to prevent this from happening again”. Critics pointed out that the 10-car traffic jam occurred several miles from the concert.
While the companies got the green light on Thursday to expand operations, it is unclear if they have already deployed more cars on the roads. Previously, cars were limited to driving at night and, under beta testing programs, were not charging passengers for rides.
Cruise did not respond to a request for comment on whether it has increased its ridership since Thursday. A spokesperson from Waymo, the Google-owned firm that has also been testing self-drivng vehicles in San Francisco, said the company is taking an “incremental approach” to expanding its fleet in the city, but did not clarify whether it has already added more cars to the road following the vote.
A representative from Safe Street Rebel, the anti-car activist group that has been disabling autonomous vehicles with traffic cones, said incidents like this are poised to increase. The group has started collecting reports of malfunctioning, crashing, or dangerous self-driving cars on its website.
“Given the amount of problems on the street already caused by robot cars, we have a hunch things will not go as smoothly as GM and Google hope,” they said. “The only path forward to healthier, safer, more sustainable cities is taking cars off the street, not adding new ones. And of course, more cones.”
