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This is a bad faith argument.

Transit is not down because of self-driving cars, but due to remote work. Cell traffic at city center is dramatically lower in SF compared to pre-pandemic baselines as compared to other major cities.

That’s not to say WFH is bad. But that’s the reality the city is facing.

Transit cars are not being blocked by self-driving vehicles at any appreciable rate. I ride transit every day and have never encounter it. I have encountered transit cars getting stuck due to mentally ill unhoused people refusing to move from the tracks.

This head-in-the-sand mentality squandered a decade of tax revenues driven by tech on vanity projects and ineffective non-profits.

It is further compounded by a severe lack of safety on public transit. What chief problems people are experiencing on transit are not a result of self-driving vehicles.

I can personally name six people who have been assaulted on public transit, been victimized by robbery, or had their homes or vehicles burglarized.

The entire mindset espoused in your post a fundamentally unserious attempt to make facts fit a narrative.

“Driverless cars sabotaged transit” is a fever dream untethered to reality. The state set targets for safety and interference with services. The companies met those targets.

And now the people opposed to tech generally, with no specific reasonable objection to self-driving cars, are trying to modify the agreed standards at the eleventh hour out of simple animus.

Transit overall is down because of remote work and people moving. In specific incidents, failures of self driving cars in the way of transit vehicles, including on muni tracks, have caused delays. For people stuck inside those trains and buses (which won't let them off away from a stop), the frustration at self driving cars is legit ... As it would be towards a human driver that stopped on the tracks and refused to move. A person experiencing a mental health crisis on the tracks can at least be moved. An intentionally stopped vehicle cannot.

Theft and burglary, esp of vehicles and homes doesn't seem relevant here. I have also been a victim of theft in the city multiple times. I don't see how self driving cars relates to that at all.

"Driverless cars transporting neither people or goods are a departure from wasteful tech vanity projects" is a fever dream untethered to reality.

I should be clear: I'm am not against all self-driving cars in the city. I'm against empty cars on the road, and when they cause issues, they should have to show that they're actually resolving them before more unsupervised operation can resume. If the problems are as soluble as their companies claim, this should be doable. If not ... Then we shouldn't have to live with them. Given that incidents keep occurring, I think guerilla actions like this are at least as reasonable as tech's history of starting programs in cities first and lobbying for those efforts to become legal after (eg Uber, Airbnb, some of the scooters...)

So the last point is a fair one. Tech companies have a history of skirting laws to achieve market share, then using their customer base to get the law changed.

That isn’t what’s happening here though. The driverless car companies don’t have customers yet except for a small pool of beta testers, so there’s no constituency to advocate for them like there was with Uber/Lyft.

The State of California, anticipating that the development of self-driving cars would inevitable cause tensions, set up an expert board within the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC.)

This board is empowered to set safety and operations standards. These standards lay out rules for approval, including for accident safety, data reporting, and disruptions to city services such as the ones you mentioned.)

The driverless car companies have to meet these standards to be able to expand their operations in SF.

The driverless car companies have made significant improvements, empowered by better auto-segmentation and labeling. This incidents do occur less, are on their way to being totally eliminated, and the data now shows that they are safer than human drivers in SF.

The driverless car companies are seeking to expand operations, having met the criteria the State of California itself laid out, including for safety and prevention of disrupting public services.

Let me be clear: I am not opposed to guerrilla protest action in and of itself. And frankly this was a really cool hack in many ways: in effect, use of materials readily at hand, and virality potential.

But on this topic, the driverless car companies did things the right way. We should reward them for regulatory cooperation to reinforce that behavior in the future.

And they delivered an awesome piece of tech!

It’s a car that doesn’t need a driver! Just goes where you tell it while you relax!

It’s a miracle, and we built it here in SF.

For now, our community is bleeding people, tax dollars, and soon public services. We all want to prevent that.

To do so, we all need to row in the same direction for a while. We need the hacking cleverness of this campaign put toward getting SF back on its feet, and a big part of that is selling complex tech only our people can make to other cities that need it, then using that money to fund everything else we want to do here.

I'm really unsympathetic to the idea that "we all need to row in the same direction" which just happens to be the direction that the monied interests want.

When these companies actually make money, do you think they'll pay the people living in the areas that they treated as test courses? If not, if they think their responsibility is to investors only, then why should anyone else pull for their private interests? You're framing silencing criticism of public road AV tests as some kind of civic good, but these companies don't work for the public.

There is no data to indicate that self-driving cars have caused delays on public transit at any greater rate than human drivers, so that seems irrelevant.

Re: relevancy of theft and burglary, addressed in prior responses below.

Scapegoating tech makes for a popular distraction from the increasingly dire real world issues facing the city.

Let me give a concrete example. Two weeks ago nine people were shot at a street fair in the Mission. It appears tied to organized gang activity.

The SF papers ran with a story about “self-driving car obstructs emergency response” more prominently placed than the actual shooting.

The Fire Chief personally debunked the story, but it was syndicated across online outlets, and remains un-retracted.

On the final point, self-driving cars running empty are racking up the miles to prove safety to the state to carry large numbers of human passengers.

Those passengers can be carried more efficiently, and within electric vehicle platforms, than with existing private automobiles.

It is the first step to vastly reducing the number of cars necessary to serve a growing population, while maintaining the lifestyle consumers demand, and dramatically reducing environmental impact.

> "Who cares if you're safer per mile driven if you're driving miles that serve no purpose other than to demonstrate your ability to drive?"

You make a very compelling argument against student drivers.

You also seem to miss the MAJOR point that once cars are an on-demand service and not a 4,000lb accessory every adult carries with them everywhere they go, we can finally see a reduction in the vast parking lots that have eaten up most of our urban and suburban spaces.

There's already a solution to this that doesn't involve replacing personal transportation with private interests that control all movement. San Francisco in particular used to be famous for it.

Sure, now apply that model to the several thousand sparse suburbs where a hundred million Americans live instead of cherry-picking the 2nd densest city in America (which is still, by the way, VERY car-dependent despite one of the best mass transit systems in the country).

Didn't people say that about Uber a decade ago? Somehow it didn't take. We were supposed to see higher vehicle utilisation and less need for car ownership in the sharing economy. Why should I believe it this time?

Because ubiquitous autonomous cars is not identical to extra taxis, so comparing the two would be silly.

There is a strong monetary incentive to make sure every car has a high utilization time. The cars driving around empty are there so they can collect data to prove the safety. No one is targeting transit. Autonomous cars will also have a place in transit. Its highly likely one day you will be relying on an autonomous car to get you somewhere for cheaper than transit does today. AVs have real potential to get people to forgo personal car ownership which actually will reduce traffic, emissions and restore millions of sqft in parking spaces to be reclaimed for parks and housing.

High utilization time is irrelevant; autonomous vehicles further encourage low-occupancy vehicle use (both additional trips and trips that are converted from walking/bicycling/mass transit), and should not have 'a place in transit' except in limited cases like, for example, rural transportation for senior citizens. They have no place in urban environs; there's no need for them beyond profit.

Ride-share vehicles crippled the world's cities by causing a massive increase in low-occupancy vehicle trips, increasing vehicle ownership, etc.

> No one is targeting transit.

Uh, there's been a concerted effort since the 1940's by the automotive industry to kill public transit, but ok.

Whether they intend to or not is irrelevant; these self-driving-car companies are clogging up our roads because apparently it's acceptable to "fail fast"

https://insideevs.com/news/670739/cruise-robotaxi-stuck-musk...

https://insideevs.com/news/625602/gm-cruise-chevy-bolt-gets-...

https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/14/22726534/waymo-autonomou...

https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/14/22436584/waymo-driverless...

You won't be satisfied until you accept that the public has demonstrated that they want low occupancy vehicles by using there dollars.

People enjoy the privacy, flexibility, convenience, and safety of having a vehicle space to themselves vs public transport. Even in economies which have heavily incentivized public transport (Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong), people still pay large costs to get access to the incentives I mentioned above. AVs are much better than personal car ownership and will play a big role in improving transportation.

I get throwing conjecture out there makes it seem like you found a real problem, but you have no solution. Even if you increased public transit with more rail lines and busses, you can't solve the privacy, convenience and safety factor with something that is public. There a reason we have locks on our doors and don't share our homes, even though most of our home is empty and we can only occupy one room at a time.

We need real solutions (which AVs are a part of) and not people swooning over idealisms.

> AVs are much better than personal car ownership and will play a big role in improving transportation.

But again what makes you think that AVs won't be personal cars with the same ownership model? GM is suddenly going to be cool with selling 1/10000th of the cars they sell today?

There is more money longer term in a complete AV system then in personal car ownership. You can see it in GM market capitalization today. They are worth ~30 billion while Cruise is estimated to also be worth 30 billion. Making money off each mile is way more lucrative then selling a vehicles most people don't update for 3-7 years at a time. And it will be better for the consumer because it means more miles per vehicles which = less total vehicles.

> You won't be satisfied until you accept that the public has demonstrated that they want low occupancy vehicles by using there dollar

What the public wants is irrelevant; the public wants to eat its cake and have it as well, all the while riding a magical flying unicorn. Low occupancy vehicle use in urban areas is not sustainable, and never has been. There simply isn't enough road space. In the space of 2-3 cars which likely only contain 2-3 people, a bus can carry fifty or more people: https://danielbowen.com/2012/09/19/road-space-photo/

...and you can't build your way out of the problem, because capacity does not increase anywhere near a linear rate as lanes are added: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/06/21/the-science-is-clear-...

The problem is so bad that SimCity creators had to massively fudge road capacity and parking, pretending that there are massive underground parking lots everywhere: https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/x6ao05/simcitys_c...

Climate emissions goals aren't achievable without a significant curtailing in low occupancy vehicle use, as well. The most efficient production EV, a Model 3, gets about 4 miles per kWHr. An e-bike...even a cargo e-bike...will get around 60 miles per kWHr.

Further: we can't afford it. At least in the US, a huge amount of infrastructure hasn't received the maintenance funding it needs, and we vastly overbuilt our road network - paving to everyone's driveway and building more and more roads as traffic increased - without thinking whether the long-term expenses were sustainable. In the near future, bridges are going to start collapsing because nobody wanted to pay for the upkeep they needed and now we can't pay for it.

> We need real solutions (which AVs are a part of) and not people swooning over idealisms.

Aside from the fact that our current road network is based on not just idealism but outright sticking one's head in the sand and not paying the maintenance costs...

There are "real solutions" working just fine in most of Europe and especially the Netherlands and Denmark.

> AVs are much better than personal car ownership and will play a big role in improving transportation.

The only thing AVs "improve" is eliminating labor costs and a potential increase in safety. They address none of the congestion and energy efficiency problems of low occupancy vehicle use, and by reducing the cost, the technology either increases profits or lowers the cost, both of which will lead to their greater use.

Safety isn't relevant in this discussion because people fear crime and rubbing elbows with smelly people who don't look like them. The reality is that public transit is orders of magnitude safer than low occupancy vehicle travel because collisions are far more common than crime, and public transit drivers are involved in collisions with pedestrians and cyclists far less than other drivers.

> There is a strong monetary incentive to make sure every car has a high utilization time

Not based on real utilization of cars today (5% utilization, 95% parked)

There is a stronger monetary incentive to sell at least one car to every single person :)

> Restore millions of sqft in parking spaces to be reclaimed for parks and housing.

That was also my hope. I don't think it'll happen. People will use autonomous cars like they use uber/lyft/taxis but they will still have their personal cars... Those will need the same amount of parking, or more given electrification and long charge times.

Because if they don't have their own vehicle then prices will rise for using uber/lyft/taxis.

We make special lanes for cars with multiple passengers b/c we think driving alone contributes to congestion, emissions etc. Driving with 0 passengers might be best for the companies, but for the same reasons, is not in the public interest. I think it's entirely appropriate for the public to place stringent restrictions on rides which do not move people or goods usefully. If you need high utilization, figure out deliveries and freight. Do _something _ useful.

It might be cool if someone developed a human-like robot that walked and talked independently ... But not cool if that robot walks in crowded places, doing nothing in particular, and stopping inexplicably. I would expect it to be shoved down a stairwell on day one. It just turns out cars are a little more challenging to shove.

There are only a couple hundred AV cars on the road. They are not causing the level of congestion you are trying to suggest.

Remember that these companies cannot earn money from rides right now because the CPUC has not given them the permit to do so. Once that permit is granted, the monetary incentive will be very strong. There is cost to the company for also operating an empty vehicle that they will not want to pay either. I think the incentives are aligned on both sides.

I think it varies a lot by neighborhood though. In some areas you see them a lot. Perhaps there are specific routes or locations that are considered high value as test cases? The density is high enough that as a pedestrian and casual observer it's easy to see them do stupid stuff a human would know not to do with some regularity.

Sure it makes sense that density per neighborhood would vary for testing and in the future will vary by demand.

Any new technology is going to have challenges as it scales. I think the expectation that the system is only used in public once its perfect is extremely ideal. The systems are doing really well at being safe (there are no human deaths linked to AVs nor any severe accidents despite over 1 million + miles driven).

Do you think people living in the places that are disproportionately impacted, who are being used as a test course, and who don't receive benefit in exchange for inconveniences imposed have a reason to be upset?

I think a small, non-destructive direct action, social media push and telling people they can make a public comment on official proceedings is reasonable and appropriate.

There also needs to be a person/people on standby to support riders or pedestrians in case of issue. Last thing the world needs is another supportless automated monolith where you're simply fucked if anything happens