Re: Dashcam Footage Shows Driverless Cars Clogging Nancy Pelosi Represented San Francisco

[Pelosi-Newsom Gulag San Francisco]

Trump 88 <patr...@protonmail.com> wrote in
news:umqllm$1jis6$1...@dont-email.me:

> It's just another scam to take your cars and freedoms away from you by
> California socialist Democrats.

THE BUS WAS stuck. San Francisco’s eastbound 54 Felton line was heading
up a narrow residential street when a white SUV coming the other way
stopped in the middle of the road. It was a rainy Sunday evening last
month, and the bus driver leaned up to the windshield and peered through
the haze at the SUV’s pulsing hazard lights before slumping back and
exclaiming in surprise, "What the hell? No driver of the car?!"

The 54, brought to a halt by an autonomous vehicle belonging to
Alphabet’s Waymo, isn’t the only bus that’s run into trouble with San
Francisco’s growing crowd of driverless vehicles. Bus and train
surveillance videos obtained by WIRED through public records requests
show a litany of incidents since September in which anxiety and
confusion stirred up by driverless cars has spilled onto the streets of
the US city that has become the epicenter for testing them.

As the incidents stack up, the companies behind the autonomous vehicles,
such as Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise, want to add more robotaxis to
San Francisco’s streets, cover more territory, and run at all hours.
Waymo and Cruise say they learn from every incident. Each has logged
over 1 million driverless miles and say their cars are safe enough to
keep powering forward. But expansions are subject to approval from
California state regulators, which have been pressed by San Francisco
officials for years to restrict autonomous vehicles until issues
subside.

Driverless cars have completed thousands of journeys in San
Francisco—taking people to work, to school, and to and from dates. They
have also proven to be a glitchy nuisance, snarling traffic and creeping
into hazardous terrain such as construction zones and downed power
lines. Autonomous cars in San Francisco made 92 unplanned stops between
May and December 2022—88 percent of them on streets with transit
service, according to city transportation authorities, who collected the
data from social media reports, 911 calls, and other sources, because
companies aren’t required to report all the breakdowns.

“We're seeing a significant uptick in chaos on our streets.”

JEFFREY TUMLIN, DIRECTOR OF TRANSPORTATION, SAN FRANCISCO
The records obtained by WIRED are more focused. They follow a previously
unreported directive to staff of the San Francisco Municipal
Transportation Agency handed down last October to improve record keeping
of incidents involving autonomous vehicles. Muni, as the agency is
known, standardized the term “driverless car” when staff report
“near-misses, collisions or other incidents resulting in transit delay,”
according to the directive. Agency logs show 12 “driverless” reports
from September 2022 through March 8, 2023, though Muni video was
provided for only eight of these cases. Overall, the incidents resulted
in at least 83 minutes of direct delays for Muni riders, records show.

That data likely doesn’t reflect the true scale of the problem. Muni
staff don’t follow every directive to the letter, and a single delay can
slow other lines, worsening the blow. Buses and trains cannot weave
around blockages as easily as pedestrians, other motorists, and
cyclists, saddling transit-dependent travelers with some of the biggest
headaches caused by errant driverless cars, according to transit
advocates.

San Francisco officials say they want to be supportive of new
technology, but they first want to be shown progress on addressing
failures—like random stops in front of buses and trains. “What we're
seeing is a significant uptick in traffic and other kinds of chaos on
our streets,” says Jeffrey Tumlin, Muni’s director of transportation.
“We are very concerned that if autonomous vehicles are allowed
limitless, driverless operations in San Francisco that the traffic
impacts grow exponentially.”

“This one not smart yet. Not good.”

A BUS DRIVER COMMENTS ON A SELF-DRIVING CAR BLOCKING THE ROUTE.
For Muni’s 54 bus, which traverses San Francisco’s southern edge, the
vehicle blocking its way early last month was a driverless Waymo that
got stranded between rows of parked cars. A human driver would have
reversed, clearing space for the bus, which isn’t allowed to back up
without a supervisor. Instead, the Waymo Driver, as the company calls
its technology, alerted a remote “fleet response specialist” to help.
Waymo spokesperson Sandy Karp says that this worker provided guidance to
the car that “was not ideal under the circumstances” and made it
challenging to resume driving.

That left the Muni driver in a bind. “I can’t move the bus,” the driver
said to one of two riders on board. “The car is automatic driving.” The
driver radioed managers and doffed their cap: “Whoosh … Half hour, one
hour. I don’t know. Nothing to do.” Thirty-eight stops and about five
miles remained ahead for the 54. The driver, looking out at the Waymo,
expressed disappointment: “This one not smart yet. Not smart. Not good.”


Waymo’s Karp says one of the company’s roadside assistance crews arrived
within 11 minutes of being dispatched to drive the SUV, clearing the
blockage about 15 minutes after it began. Karp declined to elaborate on
why the remote responder’s guidance failed but said engineers have since
introduced an unspecified change that allows addressing “these rare
situations faster and with more flexibility.”

The Transport Workers Union, which represents Muni train and bus
drivers, deferred comment for this story to Muni. The agency declined to
make drivers described in this story available for comment. But Tumlin,
the Muni director, says San Francisco’s transit workers are frustrated.
“When you encounter a vehicle with no human on board, it is dispiriting
and disempowering,” he says. “There's no one there to communicate with
at all.”

Muni drivers can honk at other hindrances, including Uber, Lyft, and
delivery drivers, and reliably expect that they will move. But
driverless cars, while they can hear sounds, leave everyone guessing as
to when they will give way. Tumlin wants companies operating driverless
vehicles to prioritize responding to problems along key transit routes
and worries that crews will struggle to keep up if fleets expand.
There’s a lot at stake. Delays affect perceptions of reliability for
public transit, driving away riders with other options. That could
worsen transit funding shortfalls caused by soaring inflation and
declining usage since the start of the pandemic. Similar driverless
services are also being tested in other major US transit cities,
including Austin, Los Angeles, and New York.

Even seemingly small incidents can have outsize impacts. On September
30, 2022, a Muni light-rail train, or streetcar, that was full of
celebrating baseball fans began driving from a station into an
intersection. An empty Cruise robotaxi at a stop sign to the train’s
left then also drove forward, video shows.

Five seconds later, brakes slammed on both vehicles. Cruise spokesperson
Hannah Lindow says the Cruise came to a complete stop first, averting a
near collision. The sudden stop by the train, which was traveling at 7
mph, alarmed some of its 50-or-so riders, a number of whom shouted
“whoa!” in unison.

The driver danced in relief, swaying their arms and letting off a big
breath, “Wooo,” before radioing in that “it came close, but no contact.”

Cruise employees arrived within one minute, Lindow says, and there were
no injuries or damage, nor would there likely have been in a collision
because of the slow speeds involved, according to Carl Berkowitz, a
transit accident reconstruction expert who reviewed the footage for
WIRED.

At least a dozen pedestrians and passengers took to the intersection to
snap images of Cruise’s Chevy Bolt, which was blocking the front side of
the train car. One transit rider flipped a middle finger at the Bolt and
dropped their face mask to yell something in its direction before
storming off. Inside the train, one passenger asked, “Why are we still
at this spot? Why are we not moving?”

The ordeal wouldn’t be over for the light-rail train driver until much
later. “That’s what pisses me off,” the driver told a rider, referring
to having to file a report at the end of their shift about the incident.
“Now I’ve got to take an hour and write this crap up even though I
didn’t hit. He hit me. It’s one of those cars that drive itself.”

It was seven minutes before the driverless car cleared the track and the
train started again, drawing cheers from riders. The train driver was
apparently left shaken. Nine minutes after the service resumed, they can
be heard repeatedly whispering, “That was close.” Drivers are held
responsible if any decision they made contributed to a collision,
putting stress on them to be perfect.

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Though drivers were not made available for interview, Tumlin says that
at least one, known as “Mack” on Twitter, has not held back on
expressing their concerns. Last month, Mack commented about a Muni bus
that had just been rear-ended hard enough by a Cruise driverless car to
crumple its hood, an incident from which no injuries were reported.
“When an autonomous vehicle causes a collision, it wasn’t tired, or
intoxicated, it didn’t get distracted or try to get away with something
it knew better than to do,” Mack tweeted. “It ‘believed’ it was driving
correctly. They don’t work as advertised, and they shouldn’t be on the
road.”

Cruise said in a blog post on April 7 that the bus’s movements had not
been unusual but that its vehicle braked too late due to an “error
related to predicting the movement of articulated vehicles.” The company
says a software update rolled out across its fleet fixed the issue.

Mack was not involved in that Cruise incident, but on one trip in
December that he tweeted about he slowed his bus to 5 mph from 19 mph
when a Waymo at a stop sign took a left turn in front of him, according
to the Muni footage obtained by WIRED. The Waymo “pulled out
inappropriately,” Mack radioed managers while stopped to report the
incident. “It was definitely a hazardous condition.”

Waymo spokesperson Karp says the company’s driverless vehicle spotted
the bus over 300 feet away and completed the turn 78 feet ahead of the
bus. The company confirmed in a virtual simulation after the fact, Karp
says, that “regardless of whether the bus slowed down or continued at
its original speed, there was enough clearance for the Waymo Driver to
execute its turn safely.” A bus driver, however, has to react within a
split second using their own judgment of an incident’s potential
outcomes.

Other incidents captured on closed-circuit television are less
disputable. On January 22, a Cruise at a green light wouldn’t budge,
preventing a San Francisco light-rail train from moving for nearly 16
minutes. As the train driver headed out to investigate, a passenger
said, “Nobody in there, huh?” Over a span of 10 minutes, the driver
chatted with passengers, checked with managers over the radio, and
walked around the motionless Cruise vehicle. Someone wearing a
reflective vest and holding a tablet eventually got into the Cruise and
drove it away.

Cruise spokesperson Lindow says its self-driving system was designed to
be conservative and come to what it deems a safe stop when the
technology “isn’t extremely confident in how to proceed.” The company
aims to have staff on scene within 15 minutes in such incidents and
alerts San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management when traffic
is significantly affected. “Ensuring our vehicles are operating safely
with as minimal impact to public transit and city services as possible
has been a point of emphasis,” she says.

On January 21, a Muni bus with a couple of riders aboard had lost six
minutes because a Cruise was lingering across an intersection crowded by
police and fire vehicles, video shows. While other cars maneuvered past,
the Cruise did not. “I have one of those autonomous cars in front of me,
so I’m stuck,” the driver radioed. “I could make this turn on Sixth
Avenue if this car wasn't in front of me.” The bus was finally able to
pass after the Cruise moved slightly.

Footage obtained by WIRED also shows passengers unnerved by delays
caused by the driverless cars. In December, a Cruise paused beside a
temporary stop sign and blocked a bus for over three minutes before
inching away. A Muni passenger, who apparently did not notice the robot
vehicle, feared that the bus was experiencing mechanical problems.
“Something must be wrong with the bus,” the rider can be heard saying
while wearing headphones. “I hope this bus is OK. I am not about to get
off. It’s too cold to be standing around.”

In November, one light-rail passenger called it quits after waiting
nearly six minutes for a Cruise driverless car in front to move.
“There’s nobody in the car,” the driver told the person as they stepped
off the train. Another passenger was more forgiving. “It’s not you,”
that rider told the driver.

Cruise’s Lindow apologized for inconveniences to transit riders.
Autonomous vehicles “are still novel, and certain behavior
understandably attracts a lot of attention, but we’re proud of our
safety record and remain committed to doing everything possible to make
roads safer,” she says.

As driverless cars keep racking up the miles, San Francisco transit
advocates propose a variety of measures to lessen their impact. Jaime
Viloria of Equity on Public Transit, a grassroots group of riders in the
Tenderloin neighborhood, says companies operating autonomous vehicles
should be fined for causing delays. “They need to learn from their
mistakes,” he says. Bob Feinbaum, president of Save Muni, a small group
of riders that meets monthly to discuss the agency, suggests letting
authorities enter a code to move driverless cars to the side. “It’s
crazy that these vehicles can stop in the middle of the road and police
can show up and have no way of dealing with it,” he says.

Giving transit more priority on the roads of San Francisco and across
the US—for example by creating more transit-only lanes—would also help.
“We don't need to blame the new guy entirely for a problem that was
really created by our fixation and focus on cars for so long,” says
Richard Marcantonio, managing attorney for Public Advocates, a group
that sues for transit improvements.

The issues and delays caused by robotaxis plaguing San Francisco do not
seem to be abating, and the thirst for more data and understanding about
the emerging technology is growing. Tumlin hopes driverless car
companies work with the city to set performance goals, on which
expansions would be contingent. “If we don't help industry do a better
job of performing on urban streets,” he says, “public opinion will
rapidly turn against this very important technology.”

https://www.wired.com/story/dashcam-footage-shows-driverless-cars-cruise-
waymo-clogging-san-francisco/