Robotaxis keep tangling with firefighters on the streets of San Francisco, and the fire chief is fed up.
"They're not ready for prime time," Chief Jeanine Nicholson said.
Nicholson is talking about the driverless taxis from Waymo and Cruise that are picking up passengers and dropping them off in designated sections of the city. Now those companies want to rapidly expand service throughout the entire city, in unlimited numbers, in any kind of weather, day or night. And state regulators appear ready to approve their request.
City leaders are worried — not only in San Francisco, but in Los Angeles and Santa Monica, too, where Waymo and another robotaxi company, Motional, say they're
ready to
deploy their AI-operated robotaxi service as soon as state regulators flash the green light.
The robotaxi industry is being allowed to move too fast and break things, these officials say, putting more robotaxis on public streets even as they prove inept at dealing with firetrucks, ambulances and police cars. And, they say, California state agencies have set up the rules so cities have little say in autonomous vehicle regulation.
The Fire Department incidents include reports of robotaxis:
- Running through yellow emergency tape and ignoring warning signs to enter a street strewn with storm-damaged electrical wires, then driving past emergency vehicles with some of those wires snarled around rooftop lidar sensors.
- Twice blocking firehouse driveways, requiring another firehouse to dispatch an ambulance to a medical emergency.
- Sitting motionless on a one-way street and forcing a firetruck to back up and take another route to a blazing building.
- Pulling up behind a firetruck that was flashing its emergency lights and parking there, interfering with firefighters unloading ladders.
- Entering an active fire scene, then parking with one of its tires on top of a fire hose.
After a mass shooting June 9 that wounded nine people, a robotaxi blocked a lane in front of emergency responders in the city's Mission District. Another lane was open, but in a news release, the Fire Department said on a narrower street, the blockage could have been "catastrophic."
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