San Francisco Has a Problem With Robotaxis
A few weeks ago, Dan Afergan, a software engineer, met a few friends at 540 Rogues, a bar in San Francisco’s Inner Richmond neighborhood. As Afergan and his companions nursed their drinks, someone walked in with some unusual news: “There’s a Cruise out there with a cone stuck on it.”
Afergan stepped outside to check it out. Sure enough, a self-driving cab from the company Cruise, which is majority-owned by General Motors, stood frozen in the middle of the street, its hazard lights blinking. A bright-orange cone was perched on the robotaxi’s hood.
“At the time, I thought it was a dumb prank,” Afergan told me later. “But one friend said, ‘No, I’ve heard about this.’ Until then I didn’t know that there are a bunch of people who are anti–autonomous vehicles.”
[Read: Seven arguments against the autonomous-vehicle utopia]
The that Afergan witnessed was part of a campaign launched by Safe Street Rebel, a local activist group previously known for organizing protests in support of and . Now its members have turned their attention to robotaxis. According to government data reported by the news site , Cruise and its rival Waymo—a subsidiary of Google’s parent, Alphabet—together operate self-driving cabs in California. Users can hail them via an app. Service is concentrated in San Francisco, where the companies have been subject to a variety of limits imposed by the California Public Utilities Commission. The two companies now want the CPUC to remove those restrictions, despite objections from San
