San Francisco has found a nice new revenue stream: Hitting self-driving Waymos with traffic citations. The city cited Waymo vehicles 589 times in 2024 for a grand total of $65,065 in penalties. The violations ranged from blocking street traffic to parking in prohibited areas. Google-owned Waymo operates 300 vehicles in San Francisco that are available to the public, meaning that they have received less than two tickets a day on average.
Waymo told TechCrunch that they are working on the citations, which can occur for various reasons, such as when the vehicles are waiting for their next customer and briefly park in an illegal zone. They also may sometimes stop in commercial loading zones to drop off customers.
Self-driving operators, including Waymo and the now-defunct Cruise, have been subject to criticism—and vandalism— over the years for causing minor incidents as their vehicles sometimes behave in perplexing ways, such as inexplicably driving a man in endless circles or speeding off from a traffic stop. Self-driving cars need to be trained on how to respond to every possible situation they might encounter, and sometimes they do not know how to react or succumb to edge cases. It puts into perspective just how much processing humans perform when driving and how humans are able to intuit the way fellow humans will behave in a way that a computer cannot.
Waymo said last year that its vehicles have been certified to respond correctly to emergency vehicles and law enforcement.
At the very least, disruptions by Waymo have generated some revenue for the city of San Francisco. The company has been on an aggressive expansion campaign in the past year, after opening access in Los Angeles last year and in Austin, Texas, this past week, with plans to enter other cities, including Miami, shortly. Waymo is also testing its cars in regions with inclement weather including Buffalo, New York.
Self-driving services like Waymo offer the promise to make everyone safer by taking drunk drivers off the road and correcting other human errors. Women have reported loving to use Waymo over Uber, as they do not have to ride with a stranger late at night. Some say self-driving vehicles will lead to more traffic on roads and highways, however, as people could work while they ride and live further from work, for instance. And people have reportedly been having sex in them, highlighting the challenge operators will face in keeping vehicles clean when there is not a driver. City dwellers are often against private passenger vehicles as they take up a lot of real estate that could be used for housing.
Elon Musk has gone all in on autonomy and robotics as vehicle sales collapse at Tesla. The company claims it will launch a robotaxi service in Austin by the end of 2025 and has been applying for testing permits in California. Tesla employs a different form of self-driving that relies solely on cameras and neural networks, while Waymo uses more expensive LiDAR sensors that it claims can respond to hazards faster and see through fog or rain. Waymo has proven the viability of its technology much sooner than Tesla, which proclaimed in 2016 that all of its vehicles would drive themselves within three to six months, or by sometime in 2017.
