Uncovered records reveal the hidden costs of Waymo robotaxis on San Francisco streets
In the past few years, while navigating the streets of San Francisco, bus and trolley operators have documented a growing presence on the city’s streets: Waymo robotaxis, often devoid of any front-seat human driver, causing problems. Sometimes, they report the cars for signs of an illegal maneuver, like when in September, a driver operating the city’s 45 electric bus noticed a Waymo trying to pass on double solid yellow lines at Stockton and Columbus, an intersection along its route. Or for a near miss—like, when, last December, a Waymo was caught by a city light rail train’s video camera making a dangerous left turn at “high speed.” Very often, transit operators flag a stalled robotaxi, or several, blocking a public street.
Clearing the vehicle might require a transportation official to reach out to a Waymo call center, or even the cops, for help. This process, which involves the city’s Transit Management Center (TMC), can take as long as an hour to resolve. Back in 2024, the city’s MTA even created a new dedicated dispatch category to log these reports: “Driverless Car Incident.”
The sight of a stalled Waymo isn’t new. But a TMC database, obtained by Fast Company via a public records request, suggests that reports of problematic robotaxis are being filed more often, and that the procedure for handling stalled vehicles is not yet seamless. Fixing the robotaxi blockage can involve waiting for a remote Waymo assistance team helping the vehicle’s AI get moving again, a transit dispatcher complaining to a Waymo call center, or even a cop taking control of the vehicle themselves and driving it away.
When the smart city goes dark
Last December, Waymo and the city’s approach to this problem was pushed to the brink when a partial blackout in San Francisco knocked out city traffic lights—and left Waymos across the city in a confused standstill and government officials on hold with the company’s call center in the middle of an emergency. Concern that Waymos can disrupt public services came up again recently, after one of the robotaxis was recorded briefly blocking an ambulance in the aftermath of the Austin mass shooting.
“In recent years we implemented new reporting mechanisms for our operators to report incidents that involve driverless vehicles,” the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority tells Fast Company. “By doing so, we’re adapting to the evolving landscape in San Francisco and making sure that we can provide the best service possible for our customers.”
“Waymo is committed to continuous improvement,” Lety Cavalcante, who serves as Waymo’s director of operations and head of its operators center, tells Fast Company. “We established even closer communication with San Francisco emergency officials, and are developing additional capabilities to facilitate smoother interactions between our operations and transit workers when on-road issues arise.” The company says it’s also implemented changes to ensure that both first responders and transit operators are prioritized when they call Waymo for help.
Still, Waymo disputes the descriptions of some of the events described in documents, and says the public transit operators’ reports are not a useful way of characterizing how their vehicles actually behave on the road. In regards to the first case—the robotaxi that allegedly passed on solid yellow—Waymo said its car was actually waiting behind the bus while it picked up passengers, and that the car was slowly trying to pass around the left side of the bus. Before the car was actually next to the bus, the public transit vehicle began to move, and the Waymo returned to its original lane. In regards to the second incident—the dangerous left turn near a train—Waymo says the train was in an opposing lane and the car was about 100 feet away.
Of course, the promise of self-driving cars is that they’re supposed to be safer than human drivers. Indeed, some of the issues documented in the database, like Waymos allegedly cutting off buses, or parking in areas reserved for public transit, are infractions that humans also commit, and possibly far more often. Research suggests that autonomous cars can outperform human drivers, and are even less likely to be involved in serious accidents. Waymo says it’s reduced serious crashes, airbag deployments, and collisions that injure pedestrians. (It was also spotlighted as one of Fast Company‘s Most Innovative Companies last year.)
But self-driving cars are also a different sort of beast: They are powered via AI, deployed as a coordinated fleet that’s monitored by a single company. And they’re growing evermore popular: Waymo, which raised $16 billion earlier this year, is now successfully operating across the U.S., including in Phoenix, Arizona, and Atlanta. Meanwhile, competing AV companies like Tesla and Zoox are also operating, though they all remain far behind Waymo in San Francisco: Tesla vehicles don’t operate without human drivers yet, and Zoox only has a small number of cars on the road.
Waymo’s success has made the once-futuristic idea of autonomous vehicles relatively commonplace in cities. But next-generation cars also introduce next-generation traffic jams. Which means interactions that once felt surreal—“honking at a driverless car makes me feel insane,” as one constituent, in an email obtained through a public records request, recently wrote to the San Francisco MTA—are poised to become a routine, and increasingly consequential, part of everyday life.
Waymo’s trolleycar problem
Waymo acknowledges its self-driving cars sometimes cause issues for public transit operators. This is where the company’s event response team, which Waymo describes as a specialized subunit within a larger remote assistance team, comes in: First responders and transit operators have access to a hotline number that reaches this team. That team is then supposed to help get a vehicle moving again, which might involve having Waymo personnel come physically drive the car away. Waymo says that, at the request of law enforcement, police officers and other first responders also have the ability to manually take over its robotaxis.
On the ground, resolving these issues, and getting public transit moving again, can sometimes take a while, according to an analysis of the data obtained by Fast Company. The city’s Transit Management Center (TMC), which receives calls about roadway obstructions from public transit operators, can take about 20 minutes, on average, and haven’t significantly improved between 2024 and 2025, according to an analysis by Mary Cummings, an engineering professor who studies autonomous vehicles at Carnegie Mellon University. In busy cities, delays can slow down dozens of public transit riders, and other cars, too.
The TMC database shows complaints of blocked vehicles date back to at least 2023. The SF MTA has, for years, flagged its concerns about hazardous “unplanned stops,” including to the California Public Utilities Commission, the state’s main autonomous vehicle regulator. In 2024, the MTA began tracking a new dispatch category called “Driverless Car Incident.” That decision was made a few months after Waymo started pulling its precautionary safety drivers from its cars, and truly driverless service began, an official at the MTA tells Fast Company. It was at that point, they say, that the transportation agency started seeing the real challenges introduced by AVs.
“Robotaxis impose burdens on other road users that are not there with human drivers,” argues Philip Koopman, an engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon. “Now, maybe the benefits outweigh the burdens, but you have to recognize the burdens are being posed.”
City streets are chaotic places, and Waymos are only a tiny fraction of the problems that get reported to San Francisco’s traffic control center. Also, incidents involving Waymos aren’t always the fault of Waymo. The reports appear to reflect preliminary descriptions, and aren’t the results of full investigations. Still, they reveal what can be a convoluted workflow. When public transit drivers encounter a Waymo problem, they report it to the city’s traffic control center, an SF MTA official explains. Traffic controllers can then contact Waymo’s call center for the event response team, which may help guide the vehicle away remotely or dispatch an employee to move it manually. But, in the case of a delay, or if they’ve had difficulty reaching Waymo, they may also call a first responder.
Several of the reports include complaints about the quality of the Waymo call center. “Waymo contacted and was ZERO help,” noted one complaint, which came after a public transit operator reported a robotaxi blocking the street in both directions. “Waymo was attempted but kept being routed to a call center that was no help,” noted another report, which came at an intersection where traffic signals needed to be reset. Several reports discuss cops getting involved. This is not something police should be involved in, but sometimes the situation requires it, the San Francisco MTA official says.
One report references a separate Waymo call center number that reaches an enterprise support team. Waymo did not explain why the number was referenced in the report, but says it’s for a team that supports it for Waymo test drivers—not first responders or transit operators. For now, Waymo transit operators are supposed to contact the same first responder number that police use, though it’s working on creating a separate hotline for transit operators and government officials. The San Francisco Police Department, which is referenced repeatedly in the document, did not respond to a request for comment.
Blackout blues
On December 20 of last year, a circuit breaker at an indoor substation operated by California utility provider, PG&E ignited, sparking a fire that knocked out power across much of San Francisco. This mass outage caused serious problems for the city’s Waymo fleet. When Waymos encountered the temporarily disabled traffic lights, many stalled, waiting for confirmations from the company’s remote assistance team. In some areas, squads of robotaxis sat with their hazard lights flashing, clogging streets, according to footage later uploaded online.
Some incidents were reported to the Transit Management Center, including one trolleybus driver who was blocked by four stalled Waymos. The city’s traffic control office contacted Waymo support but was unable to resolve the situation, the report noted, and a city inspector eventually showed up to clear the scene. Overall, there were at least 42 reported incidents involving autonomous vehicles between 2 p.m. and midnight on the day of the blackout, according to a city filing viewed by Fast Company. Firefighters also needed to move a robotaxi blocking them from the very substation fire that originally caused the blackout. One Waymo delayed an ambulance by 40 minutes, the city says.
There were other problems: The Department of Emergency Management, the city’s 911 service, did try to engage Waymo, but the company was unresponsive, a city official tells Fast Company.
Eventually, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie both called and texted Tekedra Mawakana, co-CEO of the company, about the issue. In the messages, which were viewed by Fast Company, he flagged all the locations where the cars had caused problems, which she subsequently thumbs up. “All cars are pulled over or actively headed back to base,” she later wrote. “Trips are done—no hailing.”
The issues continued even after service was suspended, the filing states. Ultimately, the city’s 911 service placed more than 31 calls to Waymo’s first responder hotline and spent more than two hours and 36 minutes of call time trying to contact the company. “While we cannot document this in detail, a large majority of this time was spent on hold; one SFDEM staff person remained on the Waymo first responder hotline for 53 minutes—most of that time on hold,” noted the city. Though many were resolved quickly, Waymo has said that there were ultimately more than 1,500 stoppage events during the blackout.
Pete Wilson, president of TWU Local 250A, which represents the city’s transit workers, said robotaxis repeatedly stalled when traffic lights failed, causing them to stack up and block streets, buses, and rail lines. “During the blackout they did not know what to do when the stop lights went out, so they just stopped,” he tells Fast Company. “Then another Waymo would come and pull up next to the first one and stop.”
Relying on the mayor to text a company’s CEO is not a great emergency response plan, and other municipalities don’t necessarily have leaders as connected to Big Tech as Lurie. Waymo has since promised to be more responsive in future emergencies, a city official told Fast Company, and the Department of Emergency Management says it’s since had “productive” conversations with the company. The wait time experienced by emergency dispatchers was unacceptable, Waymo told Fast Company, and the company plans to improve its emergency operations.
“We’re encouraged by our recent preparedness performance demonstrated during subsequent power outages, city-wide protests, and other large scale events in San Francisco, including the Super Bowl,” adds Cavalcante, from the company. Waymo says it’s briefed a bevy of agencies, as well as the Governor’s office, since the blackout, and says it will deploy dedicated incident management personnel on site in the future.
Communication overload
As Waymo explains it, when the company’s robotaxis encounter trouble or a confusing situation, they’re supposed to seek confirmation from a team of remote assistant agents staffed by humans. But, as first reported by Fast Company, the December blackout highlighted a gap in defenses: When communications networks and systems are overwhelmed—which often happens during emergencies—vehicles can’t quickly connect to the remote teams that help the cars’ software navigate confusing situations. There can also be challenges with reaching the specific team that helps first responders.
The company tells Fast Company that it’s making improvements to the Waymo Driver that will enable more decisive and efficient navigation during future events. Still, the emergency has raised questions about who should pick up the slack when a Waymo stalls, whether it’s confused by a troubling intersection, and blocking a bus, or because it can’t make out the traffic lights during a blackout.
Critically, Waymo maintains that its cars are autonomous, so even when the remote assistant agents are called into help, they are simply advising the car, and not remotely driving the vehicle. Some lawmakers have raised concerns that some of these workers are based in the Philippines. Several people affiliated with Waymo are mentioned by name in the MTA reports, but Waymo did not comment on where, specifically, they were based. Waymo says that employees on the event response team, which interfaces directly with first responders, are based in the U.S.
The California DMV is currently developing regulations for remote drivers and remote assistance, a spokesperson says, and the agency is still engaging AV manufacturers on emergency response. In the aftermath of that blackout, the San Francisco MTA has urged the California Public Utilities Commission, which serves as the main regulator of the technology in the state, to consider how autonomous vehicle providers approach disaster preparedness, especially in a case of “fleet-wide failure.” Terrie Prosper, a spokesperson for the California Public Utilities Commission, says the agency “continues to gather information from Waymo related to the power outage in San Francisco.” The SF County Transportation Authority has called for more transparency into the frequency of AV stoppages, but has since deferred conversations to Bilal Mahmood, a San Francisco city supervisor.
Mahmood, for his part, recently compared the robotaxis to the carriage from Cinderella. “Just like in the fairy tale, we can now see that those carriages can turn into pumpkins at the drop of a hat,” he said during his introductory remarks at a city hearing focused on the blackout’s impact on AVs. There, Mary Ellen Carroll, the head of the city’s emergency response office, said she remains concerned about the impact of Waymos on first responders who have to remove vehicles, and about what might happen in a future emergency, including a cyber outage.
Offshore remote control
The public still doesn’t know how often Waymos block traffic. While Waymo publicly reports a range of data to the California Public Utilities Commission, the company reports stoppage data, along with other trip detail data, to the agency confidentially. At a public hearing in January, an attorney representing the company claimed that the stoppage data could inadvertently reveal data about “fleet utilization” and, if shared publicly, could reveal trade secrets. Indeed, the numbers obtained by Fast Company only tell part of the story. It’s possible that some public transit operators don’t even make these reports. These operators are a minority of the drivers on San Francisco streets.
When asked whether it seemed like Waymo cared about the impact its vehicles might have on public transit, the official at the San Francisco MTA said it was difficult to tell. They recalled a social media post from a while back, which saw customers on the phone with Waymo—reporting on their car inferring with public transit—and receiving remarkable service. But it’s hard to tell if that’s the norm, the official tells Fast Company, since that’s data the city just doesn’t have. Waymo did not tell Fast Company how often its cars stall or block transit, but said its robotaxis have completed 40 million miles of autonomous driving throughout the three years covered by the TMC reports.
There’s little the SF MTA can do to change this workflow, the city agency says. “California law gives permitting authority over AVs to the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) and the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC),” the transportation agency tells Fast Company in a statement. “San Francisco does not regulate AVs or set conditions on their operations – either day to day or in relation to disaster and emergency response.”
Still, Waymo behavior is a big enough problem that, inside the San Francisco MTA—which maintains oversight of the city’s streets—even staffers sometimes grumble about them. In one December email obtained via public records request, Ricardo Olea, a city traffic engineer, remarked on one recent email, complaining that Waymos had been stopping in a no-stopping lane. “[N]ot a good place to block traffic,” wrote Olea. “The bigger problem is that Waymo has decided that the NO STOPPING signs don’t apply to them, so who knows what other bad places they stop at.”