Safety, congestion, and jobs.
No, it’s not the title of the latest New Order album. Rather, they were the issues at hand at a hearing held at City Hall on Monday afternoon to discuss robotaxi provider Waymo’s spectacular failures during last December’s power blackouts. While public safety and traffic efficiency were top-line issues, so was another — the effect of the robotaxi industry on jobs, thanks to organized labor’s presence at the meeting.
Last Dec. 20, San Francisco endured a massive power outage caused by a fire at a Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) substation in the Mission, leaving over 130,000 residents without power for three days. The outage also caused almost 1,600 stoppages of Waymo robotaxis across the city. Many were stalled at intersections or blocked emergency services.
Convened by the Board of Supervisors’ Land Use Committee and sponsored by Supervisors Bilal Mahmood and Alan Wong, the hearing took up most of the committee’s three-hour session on Monday. Committee members grilled representatives from Waymo, a division of Alphabet, as well as city department heads, including the Department of Emergency Management (DEM).
Mahmood began the hearing with remarks that epitomized the paradox posed by the new technology seen on Dec. 20.
“Out on the streets outside right now are hundreds of vehicles moving about the city, like Cinderella’s magical carriages. But just like in the fairy tale, we can now see that those carriages can turn into pumpkins at the drop of a hat,” he told colleagues. “It became clear during the outage that autonomous vehicle fleet deployment represents a unique, and potentially unprecedented vulnerability to the urban transportation and emergency response systems of San Francisco. … Unfortunately, the city cannot regulate Waymo or any other autonomous vehicle company.”
Also shown to the committee as part of the opening remarks was a video compilation of the social media reports of Waymos blocking intersections and other thoroughfares during the blackout.
Mahmood’s opening remarks also highlighted one of the more basic tensions between the city and robotaxi providers: that the state’s Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has controlled the entire regulation of robotaxi services since the initial pilot programs were established in 2018. He disclosed up front that “according to Waymo’s own data submitted to the California Public Utilities Commission, there were 1,593 stoppages during the outage period in the affected area.” (A spokesperson for the robotaxi operator told The Voice that just over 800 robotaxis entered the outage zone between noon and 11:00 p.m. on Dec. 20, indicating that some were involved in multiple stoppages.)
That data point became the subject of a judge’s reprimand of the company when they refused to disclose it during an administrative hearing in January, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, claiming it was a trade secret.
Despite this, it was the city’s first responders who were left to pick up the pieces when Waymo had its mass failure during the Dec. 20 outage, according to DEM Director Mary Ellen Carroll.
“On the 20th, we almost immediately started experiencing issues with the AV fleet, Carroll told the supervisors. “Just as the city went dark, the streets just kind of went into gridlock … our dispatch center did receive multiple reports of issues involving AVs, and we experienced significant delays in connecting with Waymo.”
“We were placed on hold for long periods of time, and made a total of 31 calls to the Waymo first responder hotline over that period,” Carroll added. One of our staff members was on the hotline for 53 minutes on hold.” The delays were such that Mayor Daniel Lurie himself had to try to contact executive-level contacts at Waymo. “He was able to get that contact pretty immediately,” said Carroll.
In the meantime, Carroll added, city responders ended up having to move many of the stalled vehicles out of the way of responding emergency vehicles or just to keep roads clear, in her words, becoming “a default roadside assistance for these vehicles, which we do not think is tenable,” and can “delay our call time for people that have, you know, true life and death situations.”
It was then up to Waymo to explain itself, starting with Michael Magee, the company’s government relations director for California. Of course, he started with the good news:
“In San Francisco, specifically, the data show that there is an 88 percent reduction in serious injury or worse crashes compared to human drivers. We’re heartened by these safety statistics and know that improved operations during emergency events, a critical topic that we’re here today to discuss, will help us advance our safety mission,” a statement which also seemed to reinforce how Waymo, San Francisco, and its residents are all in the same boat, as it were, in beta testing this grand experiment.
Then Chinmay Jain, Waymo’s director of product for driving behavior, took the podium to address what happened on Dec. 20. While the robotaxis were able to navigate early stages of the blackout without many hang-ups, Jain told supervisors that “as the car outage persisted into the evening, the scale of the blackout conditions experienced on the 20th, coupled with our system’s cautious approach to intersections with fully dark traffic signals presented a unique challenge.”
In the early stages of the blackout, the robotaxis simply treated blacked-out intersections as four-way stops and proceeded with their trips. But as the number of encounters increased by evening, more autonomous vehicles made remote assistance checks, which increasingly overloaded the system.
‘So if we’re reliant in an emergency situation on operators in the Philippines, to have to assess a condition here, how can you explain or justify that?’ Mahmood asked Cooper.
“This resulted in longer than typical response times, which caused some of our vehicles to remain stationary at intersections, contributing to congestion,” Jain added. It was also found around this time that PG&E’s estimates for restoring service were overly optimistic, and Waymo decided to suspend all service and “de-fleet” the cars to get them off the street.
Sam Cooper, program manager for incident response at Waymo, told supervisors the company “takes full responsibility for the communication gaps that occurred that evening.”
“We have heard the city’s frustrations clearly in our recent debriefs, particularly regarding the need for a direct, reliable line of communication during a crisis,” he added. “Our protocol is to ensure riders reach their destinations safely, which is why we did not immediately cancel trips that were in progress and pause service. However, we recognize that our delay in establishing clear, proactive communications with this city was unacceptable. We are committed to ensuring that this does not happen again.”
Further questioning by supervisors revealed both possible solutions, such as Waymo partnering with companies like DoorDash to provide ad hoc assistance to stalled robotaxis and improving communications with city services in emergencies, and complications, including the use of remote operators who could literally be half a world away to assist the robotaxis during contingencies.
Further questioning revealed that Waymo maintains a cadre of about 70 remote assistants, located in Arizona, Michigan, and the Philippines.
“So if we’re reliant in an emergency situation on operators in the Philippines, to have to assess a condition here, how can you explain or justify that?” Mahmood asked Cooper.
The remote assistance issue also opened the door to airing other labor-based concerns, especially during public comment, despite admonishments from supervisors not to.
Activists from organized labor, including the Teamsters and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1021, held a rally outside City Hall before the hearing and made sure public comment was almost exclusively about concerns that autonomous vehicles were soaking up cab driver, delivery driver, and other service jobs, especially as Waymo’s service expands to San Francisco International Airport. Meanwhile, human drivers in this category are now allowed to organize and form unions in California under recently passed legislation.
SEIU 1021’s president, Theresa Rutherford, described the current state of autonomous vehicle technology as “presenting inherent dangers,” in terms of both possible impeding of emergency services as well as “impacting the livelihoods of drivers who created this industry,” and “are now facing the impacts of having AV replacing them as human beings.”
Union deputy executive director, Josie Mooney, reiterated that message toward the end of the public comment period.
“The livelihood of these 800,000 drivers, who are now working to form a union, so that they can get fair wages, fair working conditions, depends on your solidarity with them. It does not depend on the success of Waymo. I have a kid who worked for Cruise [the autonomous vehicle company run by General Motors] for 10 years. I know a lot about this industry, and I am telling you that no autonomous vehicle can replace the mind, the heart, the commitment, the dedication, and the talent of these drivers.”
Mahmood wrapped up the hearing, noting ongoing concerns that another recently passed state law would create new safety mandates for robotaxis, including “emergency geofencing” requests from first responders that would require autonomous vehicles to avoid crisis areas.
“The gulf between the 30 seconds that the law requires and the 50 minutes that we heard about today is massive,” he told colleagues. “It’s clear that Waymo needs to expand staffing and be able to flex to a much larger workforce in emergencies. I hope they live up to their commitments to expand staffing, but also to the other requests that departments had today.”
This article has been updated.