The next autonomous vehicle scandal likely to start causing some noise in the new year is this: idle Waymos parking in coveted curbside parking spaces while waiting to be hailed for their next ride.
There are few things that get SF residents’ as fuming mad as transit meltdowns and street parking being removed — well, and also the closing of thoroughfares by the ocean to turn them into parks. And after a couple years in which Waymo managed to avoid any real scandals or cause widespread outrage, the company might do just that if its cars start hogging much coveted street-parking spaces in neighborhoods where permit holders can leave their cars for a week or more — until the next street-cleaning day.
Anyone with a car, or anyone who’s ever borrowed or rented car for that matter, in San Francisco, knows the sometimes painful exercise of hunting for a parking space in their neighborhood when it’s time for a street-cleaning day, or when returning to town from a commute or a trip. Residents learn the tricks, like particular windows of time after a street-cleaning session when it’s open season on entire blocks.
And now, as the Chronicle reports via local resident Kyle Grochmal, Waymos have been observed tucking themselves into these curbside spaces, albeit obeying any one-hour or two hour limits — not while waiting for a pickup, but while in between fares. Grochmal observed not one but two Waymos, one after the other, come to occupy the same one-hour parking spot on York Street in the Mission on Monday, staying for around 20 minutes while waiting to be summoned somewhere.
One Waymo sat, sensors whirring, in the spot on York, and when it left, another Waymo soon arrived and took the same spot — so clearly they’ve been programmed to know where such convenient idling spaces may be.
This is nice for Waymo, in terms of conserving battery life on its cars, and it’s nice for the cars to not be clogging traffic while doing circles around town with no one inside. But Waymo has its own designated parking lots and recharging stations, and residents looking for parking are not going to take it lightly if robocars start hogging these street-parking spaces.
Tellingly, Waymo hasn’t commented on the matter. But it’s an issue likely to become a big one in public conversations about self-driving cars, and Grochmal raises another potential, down-the-road problem with this, speaking to the Chronicle.
“Say Tesla gets to self-driving, so people have personal AVs. So then do people from Palo Alto get dropped off in San Francisco and let their cars drive around all day searching for free parking?” Grochmal asks.
Eek, right?
Cue the Board of Supervisors telling Waymo, and all AV companies, that street parking is for humans only, but will there be legal fights over this later on?
Take this issue on top of the recent revelation about how the cars behave in a power-outage emergency, and the Waymo in LA that drove through a police standoff, and the recent outcry over the Waymo that killed a beloved bodega cat, soon followed by an unleashed dog, and Waymo might be looking at some growing pains in the near term.
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