For some residents of San Francisco, the robotic future of driving is just a tap away. Ride-hailing services from GM subsidiary Cruise and Alphabet company Waymo allow them to summon a driverless ride with an app. But some riders have become perhaps too comfortable with the technology.

In a letter filed with a California regulator yesterday, city agencies complained that on three separate occasions since December, cruise staff called 911 after a passenger in one of its driverless vehicles became “unresponsive” to the two-way voice link installed in each car. Each time, police and firefighters rushed to the scene but found the same thing: a passenger who had fallen asleep in their robot ride.

The agencies’ letter complains that the incidents wasted public money and potentially diverted resources from people truly in need. “Taxpayer funded emergency response resources used for nonemergencies undermine their availability to members of the public in true nee[d],” wrote the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, and the Mayor’s Office on Disability.

The letter was one of a series sent to the California Public Utilities Commission this week by transportation officials in San Francisco and Los Angeles seeking to pump the brakes on Cruise and Waymo’s requests to expand their paid robotaxi services in both cities. The cities say they’re worried the technology isn’t ready. And they want the companies to be required to share more data about the performance of their cars, and meet specific benchmarks, before service can be expanded.

The San Francisco agencies cite a number of unsettling and previously unreported incidents, including the false alarms over snoozing riders and two incidents in which self-driving vehicles from Cruise appear to have impeded firefighters from doing their jobs.

One incident occurred in June of last year, a few days after the state gave Cruise permission to pick up paying passengers in the city. One of the company’s robotaxis ran over a fire hose in use at an active fire scene, the agencies’ letter says, an action that “can seriously injure firefighters.”

In the second incident, just last week, the city says firefighters attending a major fire in the Western Addition neighborhood saw a driverless cruise vehicle approaching. They “made efforts to prevent the Cruise AV from driving over their hoses and were not able to do so until they shattered a front window of the Cruise AV,” the San Francisco agencies wrote in their letter.

San Francisco Fire Department spokesperson Jonathan Baxter confirmed that the two incidents occurred. He says that in the most recent it took approximately two minutes for the autonomous vehicle to stop, and that the department is in touch with Cruise about both encounters with firefighters. Cruise spokesperson Hannah Lindow says the vehicle was stationary by the time a firefighter broke its glass. WIRED previously reported that a Cruise vehicle blocked one of the department’s fire engines on the way to a major blaze for roughly 25 seconds last spring.

Lindow says that some data Cruise provides to regulators must be kept private for customer safety, and to protect “proprietary information.” She wrote in a statement that the company has “driven millions of miles in an extremely complex urban environment with zero life-threatening injuries or fatalities.”

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My adventure on San Francisco Bay Area public transportation to see how the system is recovering after Covid-19 did not begin auspiciously. It was about 8:30 a.m. on the last Tuesday in September, and I was waiting at a bus stop on Silicon Valley’s main drag, El Camino Real, in Mountain View. Nearly a dozen people were waiting with me. Then a shiny unmarked bus with “RIDE MPK” on its electronic destination sign pulled up, and almost all of them got in — headed, I guessed, for the sprawling Menlo Park office campus of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp parent Meta Platforms Inc.Together with one other guy at the stop, I watched in anticipation as a Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority 22 bus to Palo Alto pulled up behind the RIDE MPK bus, then in dismay as it switched lanes and proceeded to the next intersection. After the other guy asked the driver of the private bus if he could drop us off in Palo Alto (answer: no), the two of us sprinted about 50 yards to where the VTA 22 bus was still waiting at what turned out to be a helpfully long red light. The driver let us on (with no apology for skipping our stop), and the rest of the ride to Palo Alto’s California Avenue shopping district, where I was meeting a friend for coffee, was uneventful.

After coffee, I resumed my planned circumnavigation of the San Francisco Bay by walking a couple of blocks to the California Ave. Caltrain station, walking through an underpass that looked as if it would take me to the northbound platform, walking back through that underpass after a nice woman walking her dog informed me that I couldn’t get to the train that way (she said people frequently make that mistake), then walking through the correct underpass. From there I traveled by:

• Caltrain to Fourth Street in San Francisco

• San Francisco Muni N-Judah light-rail train to Embarcadero station

• Golden Gate Transit ferry to Larkspur

• Golden Gate Transit 580 bus to the El Cerrito Del Norte Bay Area Rapid Transit station

• BART orange line train to the Berryessa/North San Jose station

• Lyft Bay Wheels bike to San Jose Diridon Station

• VTA Rapid 522 bus back to my hotel in Mountain View

The journey took about 10 hours, including that coffee in Palo Alto; a break for lunch, emailing and phone charging at Bloomberg’s office on the Embarcadero not far from the Ferry Building in San Francisco; some book shopping at the Marin Country Mart in Larkspur while I killed time waiting for a Marin Transit 228 bus, followed by a mile-long walk to Bellam Blvd. in San Rafael, mostly on a bike path, after Google Maps informed me that the 228 bus was running late and would miss the connection to the next bus to El Cerrito; and a couple of ride-extending wrong turns in San Jose (where I could also have traveled by bus or light rail but chose the bike for variety’s sake).

The approximate distance traveled was 160 miles (257 kilometers). The total cost was $32.52, which would have been about $45 but for the half-price fares BART was charging during September in celebration of its 50th birthday and the discount on bike rides afforded by my Lyft Pink membership, which I have because Lyft also operates the Citi Bike service in New York, where I live. I could have paid for all of it through the Clipper account in my iPhone wallet, but I didn’t do so with the bike because my way was cheaper, and I ended up buying my Caltrain ticket with a credit card because I couldn’t figure out how to use the Clipper reader — although I subsequently saw enough other people succeeding at this to believe the problem lay more with me than with Caltrain.

All in all it was a pleasant, often scenic experience, with Larkspur the only bad connection. And no, I never had trouble finding a seat. I was on the two VTA buses at rush hour, and at times most seats on them were occupied, but they never felt crowded. The same was true on BART as we rode through Berkeley and Oakland, but after Warm Springs/South Fremont I was the only person in my train car during its late-afternoon journey to the last two stations on the line, both of which have been in service only since June 2020.

My motivation for all this (other than that I enjoy riding on trains and boats) was to explore the situation with the US public transportation network that has taken the biggest hit from the pandemic and accompanying shift to remote work. In 2019, the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley metropolitan area, which consists of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco and San Mateo counties, was second only to metropolitan New York City in the percentage of employed people who travel to work primarily by public transportation, at 18.9%. It then experienced the steepest drop in that percentage among the top public transportation metros, with its transit share falling to just 4.9% in 2021, behind Boston-Cambridge and even the great metropolis of Ithaca, New York.

The other metropolitan area through which I traveled, San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara — also known as Santa Clara County or, roughly, Silicon Valley — had only a 1.1% transit share in 2021, down from 4.7%  in 2019. And yes, the people in the Ride MPK bus count as public transportation users in these statistics, which are from the American Community Survey conducted annually by the US Census Bureau. Respondents are supposed to check “bus” if that’s the main way they got to work and not asked whether that bus was public or private.

What drove commuting by transit down was mainly a huge increase in working from home, with the percentage of workers doing so jumping to about 35% last year in both the San Francisco and San Jose metropolitan areas from 7.2% and 4.8%, respectively, in 2019, higher than in any other large US metro area, and topping 45% in parts of San Francisco, San Jose and some suburbs. 

Here’s complete(ish) transit ridership data through June of this year for the entire nine-county San Francisco Bay Area, which encompasses the two metropolitan areas already mentioned as well as three smaller ones along the north side of the bay: Santa Rosa, Napa and Vallejo.

Bay Area bus ridership in June was 62% of what it was before the pandemic in June 2019, and ferry ridership was 56%. Rail ridership was at only 35%. That’s because trains in the Bay Area were used mainly by white-collar commuters, and of course they were the ones most able to stop commuting and work from home. Another way to see this is by transit agency, of which there are reputedly 27 in the Bay Area (a trio of San Francisco Chronicle journalists tried to ride as many as they could the day after my journey and made it on to 17), although only 16 appear to report ridership data to the Federal Transit Administration.(1)

Commuter-focused rail services BART and Caltrain have experienced the steepest ridership declines since 2019. Golden Gate Transit, which operates ferries and intercounty commuter buses, is next. The Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s Bay Area Vanpool, which subsidizes and helps bring together groups of people commuting together with unpaid drivers, has been the only service to report an increase in ridership. Apart from that, agencies focused on local bus service have generally done best, with Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit (SMART) an exception that can probably be explained by the fact that it only went into full service in August 2017 and people were still figuring out that it existed in June 2019. (It was certainly a surprise to me when I encountered a station on my walk from Larkspur to San Rafael.)

The ridership recovery at BART and especially Caltrain has also lagged behind those at other commuter-oriented rail operations across the country such as New Jersey Transit and the Washington Metro.

These numbers are through July (the Bay Area transit charts stop at June because the National Transit Database didn’t have any July numbers for AC Transit). Since then, some large Bay Area corporations have been leaning harder on employees to come into the office at least two or three days a week, and daily BART statistics show that September ridership was back to about 40% of normal at midweek and more than 60% of normal on weekends. (And, yes, tickets were half price in September, but so far October doesn’t seem much different.) Here’s how that stacks up against the rail services operated by New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is also nice enough to report daily ridership stats.

So far BART, the MTA and other transit agencies nationwide have been able to keep running despite the ridership declines thanks to almost $70 billion in federal pandemic aid. But starting in the middle of next year, they will face a financial reckoning, and it turns out BART and Caltrain are among the most vulnerable large US transit agencies because, before the pandemic, fares covered almost three-quarters of their operating expenses. The following chart is adapted from a recent analysis of the looming public transportation fiscal cliff by Garett Shrode of the Eno Center for Transportation in Washington. It shows all the US transit agencies that had (1) operating expenses of $100 million or more in 2019 and (2) farebox revenue that covered 40% or more of those expenses.

The New York City subway, by the way, had a farebox recovery rate of 70% in 2019; buses dragged NYC Transit’s score down to 53%. The largest transit agency with the lowest farebox recovery in 2019 was the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority, at 15%. The San Francisco Muni was fourth lowest, at 23%. LA Metro, which I rode on and wrote about in February, is a bus-focused operation that caters to a much poorer ridership than Caltrain or BART, and this is to a lesser extent true of SF Muni as well. These agencies provide essential services, and their lower farebox recovery rates aren’t necessarily a sign of failure. But it does seem a little perverse that Caltrain and BART, the two large US transit agencies that have been most successful in getting riders to pay the bills, now face perhaps the most dire budget outlook.

One way to remedy that, of course, would be to get more riders. Barring a spectacular reversal of the work-from-home trend, this will require bringing aboard more non-commuters, and there are big obstacles to that. I can report from ample personal experience that BART is the most efficient way to travel at rush hour from Lafayette, the East Bay suburb where I grew up, to downtown San Francisco and back. At other times of the day, and between other destinations in the Bay Area, a car will usually get you there quicker. The region experienced most of its growth after the arrival of the automobile and is thus laid out to favor car transport over other modes — as is true of all but a few US metropolitan areas.

California is in the early stages of a bold effort to change this by forcing its cities and suburbs to become denser, adopting legislation that allows homeowners in most of the state to add dwelling units to existing homes as well as divide their lots in two and build duplexes on each lot. It also streamlines housing approvals in commercially zoned areas and bans local governments from requiring parking spaces for residential and commercial developments within half a mile of major transit stops, among other things. If you squint, it’s possible to see a future in which many more Bay Area residents can walk to transit. And, let’s be honest, getting places by car is much more of a hassle.

In the meantime, the simplest way to make transit more convenient outside of rush hour is to increase its frequency. Low ridership and budgetary pressures are pushing Bay Area transit agencies in the opposite direction, but the data showing a much stronger recovery in ridership on weekends rather than weekdays at BART and the New York commuter railroads indicate that some schedule rejiggering away from peak commuting hours to other periods might entice new riders — as well as save money, given that peak service costs more to provide than off-peak does.

More From Bloomberg Opinion:

• Is Your CEO Taking the Subway to Work?: Sarah Green Carmichael

• We Should Keep Wearing Masks on the Subway Forever: Justin Fox

• You Can Learn a Lot Taking a Bus to the Super Bowl: Justin Fox

(1) I’ve used the brand names of some services because they’re shorter than the formal names, but I realize that some may seem a bit cryptic to outsiders. Among those I don’t mention elsewhere in the column, AC Transit is the Alameda-Contra Costa Transit District, SamTrans is the San Mateo County Transit District, SolTrans is Solano County Transit and WestCat is the Western Contra Costa Transit Authority.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business. A former editorial director of Harvard Business Review, he has written for Time, Fortune and American Banker. He is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com/opinion

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SAN FRANCISCO — Supervisors voted Tuesday to ban motorists from a popular road in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, making permanent a closure that started in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic when people needed space to exercise and distance socially.

After a 12-hour meeting, the Board of Supervisors voted 7-4 for Mayor London Breed’s proposal. The majority sided with supporters who said a car-free promenade was in keeping with the city’s commitment to safer roads and cleaner climate.

Other roads in the park — which sees more than 24 million visitors a year — will stay open to drivers.

Critics argued that permanently closing the 1.5-mile (2.4-kilometer) portion of John F. Kennedy Drive would cut off park access to people who are disabled, elderly or live farther away while benefiting select bicyclists and runners.

Some people asked for a compromise to keep the road car-free on weekends only, saying drivers needed access during the week.

“To close down portions of the park says to a certain geography, says to a certain class of people, says to a certain race of people here in San Francisco that you weren’t welcome before and you’re still not welcome,” Board President Shamann Walton, who represents one of the most diverse and low-income parts of the city, said during the meeting.

The battle between motorists and pedestrians and bicyclists has raged in San Francisco for roughly two years. In August, Breed announced that a stretch of coastal highway that was closed to cars in 2020 would reopen to vehicles during the week.

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Here’s how to sign up

Photo: Courtesy Thomas Smith

CRuise, a department of General Motors, today officially opened its San Francisco driverless car service to the public. Registrations began this morning for a public waitlist for those seeking to use the company’s driverless car service in the city.

If you live, work, or move through San Francisco, you’ve almost certainly seen Cruise’s cars in action. They’re little white vehicles emblazoned with a big orange Cruise logo on the side, and bristling with sensors and scanners. The equipment attached to each vehicle includes cameras and LIDAR sensors that let the cars “see” the road around them as they navigate the city. Although the cars have been capable of self-driving in San Francisco for some time, most were shuttling around safety drivers or members of the Cruise team.

Until now. This morning, a Cruise spokesperson told me in an email that “As of today we are now offering the opportunity for members of the public to take free fully driverless rides in Cruise vehicles.” A few members of the public have already participated; according to the spokesperson, team members “have been nominating public riders over the past few days, and a few non-employees already have participated in this opportunity.”

Cruise’s new move allows the company to open up its driverless rides more broadly. It’s unclear exactly when this will happen, but the program is dubbed the “Cruise Rider Community program” and anyone in San Francisco can sign up at https://www.getcruise.com/. You need to enter a bit about your location and driving habits (where you live and work in the city, for example) and provide an email address to sign up for the list. The spokesperson told me that “people who are nominated by employees or sign up on the waitlist will be incorporated into the pipeline to be among our first public riders.” So unless you have a friend at Cruise, jump on the list now if you want to try out a driverless ride.

Initially, rides are likely to be free for some time. The spokesperson told me that “we are the only AV company in California to receive a permit (via the CA DMV) that allows for driverless vehicles to carry members of the public.” The spokesperson told me that Cruise has applied for an additional permit to charge for driverless rides, but has not yet received that permit. Down the road, Cruise likely envisions this becoming a replacement for services like Uber and Lyft, with paying customers moving around cities in their driverless cars.

What’s a Cruise driverless ride like? I have no idea, since Cruise hasn’t let me ride yet, despite lots of pleading and cajoling. For a sense of the experience, you can check out a blog post from Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt. In the post, Vogt also shares that Cruise has raised $1.35 billion in investment to continue building their driverless car service.

San Francisco is likely to be a major testing group for Cruise for a while. In an earlier conversation with Cruise, I learned that the company chose to test its cars in San Francisco in part because of the city’s challenging geography (think nearly vertical hills and, well, Lombard Street). As of June of last year, the cars have racked up over 2 million miles of driving in the city. That means Cruise probably knows San Francisco better than any other place in the world. For better or worse, we’re likely to be one of the first places these kinds of driverless cars roll out.

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Cruise might be the first off the gate, but they have plenty of competition. Google spinoff Waymo has been testing its own driverless cars in the city for some time, too. They’re made by Jaguar, and are a good deal fancier looking than Cruises’ vehicles. It’s likely that they’ll begin testing out public driverless rides soon, too.

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Bloomberg/Contributor via Getty

Moveable explores the future of transportation, infrastructure, energy, and cities.

For the last five years, driverless car companies have been testing their vehicles on public roads. These vehicles constantly roam neighborhoods while loading with a variety of sensors including video cameras capturing everything going on around them in order to operate safely and analyze instances where they don’t.

While the companies themselves, such as Alphabet’s Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise, tout the potential transportation benefits their services may offer one day, they don’t publicize another use case, one that is far less hypothetical: Mobile surveillance cameras for police departments.

“Autonomous vehicles are recording their surroundings continuously and have the potential to help with investigative leads,” says a San Francisco Police department training document obtained by Motherboard via a public records request. “Investigations has already done this several times.”

The document released to Motherboard is a three-page guide for how officers should interact with autonomous vehicles (AVs), especially ones that have no human driver inside. It outlines basic procedures such as how to interact with the vehicles (”Do not open the vehicle for non-emergency issues” and ”Do not pull vehicles over unless a legitimate law enforcement action exists”) as well as whether to issue a citation for a moving violation for a car with no human driver (“No citation can be issued at this time if the vehicle has no one in the driver’s seat” but an incident report should be written instead). And the section titled “Investigations” has two bullet points advising officers of their usefulness in collecting footage.

Privacy advocates say the revelation that police are actively using AV footage is cause for alarm.

“This is very concerning,” Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) senior staff attorney Adam Schwartz told Motherboard. He said cars in general are troves of personal consumer data, but autonomous vehicles will have even more of that data from capturing the details of the world around them. “So when we see any police department identify AVs as a new source of evidence, that’s very concerning.”

“​​As companies continue to make public roadways their grounds testing for these vehicles, everyone should understand them for what they are—rolling surveillance devices that expand existing widespread spying technologies,” said Chris Gilliard, Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center . “Law enforcement agencies already have access to automated license plate readers, geofence warrants, ring doorbell footage, as well as the ability to purchase location data. This practice will extend the reach of an already pervasive web of surveillance.”

Waymo and Cruise are the two AV companies mentioned in the training document, although more have permits to test driverless cars in California (the state grants permission through the DMV, not the city). A Waymo spokesperson told Motherboard the company “requires law enforcement agencies who seek information and data from Waymo to follow valid legal processes in making such requests (eg secure and present a valid warrant, etc.). Our policy is to challenge, limit or reject requests that do not have a valid legal basis or are overly broad.” The company spokesperson also says they do not collect data “to identify individuals.” A Cruise spokesperson told Motherboard, “We are working closely with law enforcement on our common goal of making our roads safer. We share footage and other information when we are served with a valid warrant or subpoena, and we may voluntarily share information if public safety is at risk. Cruise has always worked closely with the communities we serve to make transportation safer, cleaner, and more accessible and will continue to do so.”

SFPD’s use of AVs as mobile surveillance cameras follows the practices of the Chandler Police Department in Arizona, where Waymo has been testing AVs since 2017. But previous reports indicated these were rare instances involving traffic crimes like hit and runs. SPFD did not respond to a Motherboard email asking for more details on when and how often it sought footage from AVs.

The use of AVs as an investigative tool echoes how Ring, a doorbell and home security company owned by Amazon, became a key partner with law enforcement around the country by turning individual consumer products into a network of cameras with comprehensive coverage of American neighborhoods easily accessible to police. Police departments around the country use automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) to track the movements of vehicles. The EFF has sued the SFPD for accessing business improvement district live cameras to spy on protestors.

Privacy advocates and researchers have long warned about the implications of increasingly sophisticated cars, but many of these warnings are essentially extensions of the privacy concerns of smartphones, where consumer technology tracks your movements and behavior, anonymizes it, and sells it to third parties in a manner that can be reverse engineered to identify individuals. They rarely imagine a scenario where cars on the road are constantly recording the world around them for later use by police departments.

It is the combination of using fixed location camera networks with rolling networks of autonomous vehicle cameras and data that scares privacy advocates most. “​​The holistic outcome of these combined moving and fixed networks is a threat that is greater than the sum of its parts,” Schwartz said. “Working together, [they can] more effectively turn our lives into open books.”

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Photo: Amy Osborne/AFP (Getty Images)

Have you ever wondered if we live in a cyberpunk dystopia? Could you ever imagine the modern world being called “a dehumanized, high-tech future,” or picture incredibly advanced technology existing only to serve the whims of the few while the many live as workers or keyboard cowboy outlaws? Does the quote “The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed” feel at all relevant to your daily life?

While you ponder those questions, consider this:The San Francisco Police Department is now using footage from autonomous vehicle tests in criminal investigations. Those Cruise and Waymo cars, recently permitted to shuttle passengers around the city, now serve double duty as roving 24/7 police surveillance. Phillip K Dick, eat your heart out.

Photo: Justin Sullivan (Getty Images)

As reported by former Jalop Aaron Gordon at Vice’s motherboard, the San Francisco Police Department has written up a series of guidelines for how its officers should interact with autonomous vehicles. Among the other entries in the list (“Do not pull vehicles over unless a legitimate law enforcement action exists” is my personal favorite) the department mentions AVs’ uses in investigations — and states that SFPD has already used them for surveillance. From motherboard:

the document released to Motherboard is a three-page guide for how officers should interact with autonomous vehicles (AVs), especially ones that have no human driver inside. It outlines basic procedures such as how to interact with the vehicles (”Do not open the vehicle for non-emergency issues” and ”Do not pull vehicles over unless a legitimate law enforcement action exists”) as well as whether to issue a citation for a moving violation for a car with no human driver (“No citation can be issued at this time if the vehicle has no one in the driver’s seat” but an incident report should be written instead). And the section titled “Investigations” has two bullet points advising officers of their usefulness in collecting footage.

Privacy advocates say the revelation that police are actively using AV footage is cause for alarm.

Give the whole piece over at motherboard a read, and then start stocking up on cheetah prints and chain wallets. The future is now.

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Passengers waited in long lines Monday as they eagerly waited their turn to board the iconic cable cars in San Francisco.

According to the Associated Press, “25 million tourists visited San Francisco annually before the pandemic, with many of them riding the cable cars. About 17,000 riders packed onto the cable cars daily before they were parked in March 2020 as the city locked down and sheltered in place. It was the longest shutdown since the 1980s, when the system was fully reconstructed, according to the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Agency.”

“Our cable cars are part of what makes San Francisco a world-class destination, and their return is just the latest sign that our city is bouncing back,” said San Francisco Mayor London Breed.

Visitors from cities such as Houston and Washington boarded the Powell-Hyde line and rode the cars all the way to the end of the line. The cable cars currently are free to ride and are on limited service. However, starting in September, they will return to full service from 7 am to 10 pm on all three cable car lines; the fare is $8.

A San Francisco cable car on the Powell-Hyde line is turned around near Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco on Monday, Aug. 2, 2021. The world-famous cars returned to service after a 16-month shutdown because of the pandemic. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)
Passengers hold on tight while riding a cable car on the Powell-Hyde line Monday in San Francisco. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)
Lisa Abrams, of Los Angeles, points to a landmark to her daughter Rose, 6, as they ride a cable car on the Powell-Hyde line Monday in San Francisco. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)
Francis Givens, a cable car gripman, rings the bell while during a trip along the Powell-Hyde line Monday in San Francisco. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)
Lafayette Allen, 15, of Houston, rides a cable car on the Powell-Hyde line Monday in San Francisco. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)
Passengers huddle close as they ride a cable car Monday on the Powell-Hyde line in San Francisco. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)
Hundreds of passengers line up as they wait to board the cable cars Monday on Powell Street in San Francisco. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)

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A video recently posted online shows what happens when police try to apprehend an autonomous vehicle – only to find nobody inside.

Police in San Francisco stopped a vehicle operated by Cruise, an autonomous car company backed by General Motors, in a video posted on April 1. Officers approached the car, which had been driving without headlights, only to find it was empty.

“Ain’t nobody in it – this is crazy,” a bystander can be heard saying in the video. The car then speeds away to the other side of the intersection, leaving the police behind.

The video, which has since circulated widely on social media, prompted inevitable jokes. “Welcome to the future,” quipped one Twitter user.

Cruise is working to deploy its autonomous driving technology for ride-hailing purposes, transporting riders around the city without a driver. It has been testing its vehicles with a backup driver in the front seat since 2015, but it started allowing users to hail driverless cars in San Francisco in November 2021.

The company said in a tweet that the vehicle had behaved as expected by moving to a safer location on the other side of the intersection where police were able to address their concerns.

“Our AV yielded to the police vehicle, then pulled over to the nearest safe location, as intended. An officer contacted Cruise personnel and no citation was issued,” Cruise said on its corporate Twitter account.

A Cruise spokeswoman, Tiffany Testo, told the Guardian that the vehicle “did not have its headlights on because of a human error, which was the reason the SFPD approached it, and we have fixed the issue that led to this”. She added that the company offered a phone number for police to call with questions any time a vehicle is pulled over. The SFPD did not immediately respond to request for comment about the incident or about its policies for driverless vehicles.

The viral video underscores the bumps in the road as companies race to put fully autonomous vehicles on streets.

The Cruise video comes just weeks after Waymo, another autonomous car company, announced it would deploy driverless vehicles in San Francisco. Waymo has been working on autonomous driving technology for more than a decade and running fully driverless rides in Arizona for more than a year.

But driverless car glitches have made headlines in the past, including a Waymo vehicle that became stuck at an intersection and required rescue.

Waymo said in March it would allow passengers in its driverless cars on a trial basis. To partake, interested riders must apply for a wait list and sign non-disclosure agreements to get early access.

Nuro, another autonomous car company, also has a permit for driverless vehicles in San Francisco, but is using it for self-driving delivery services rather than passenger rides. It is already making driverless deliveries in Mountain View, California.

Other driverless car firms are working on their own technology, including Elon Musk’s electronic car company Tesla and Aurora Innovation, a company based in Pittsburgh.

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – thing! Thing! The iconic San Francisco cable cars rang their bells on Monday and rolled back up the city’s hills after being incapacitated by the pandemic for 16 months.

At Powell and Market, one of the cable car stops, a line of people wound around a cable car turntable, waiting to drive to Ghirardelli Square or Fisherman’s Wharf.

“Our cable cars are part of what makes San Francisco a world-class travel destination, and their return is just the latest sign that our city is recovering,” said the Mayor of San Francisco London Breed.

Breed said it will be free to ride the cable cars in August and asked people to be patient as the service won’t follow a regular schedule until September, when the historic trams go into full operation on all three lines and one Collect the fare.

Frank Miller of San Antonio said he and six members of his family arrived in San Francisco last week and had already visited some of the city’s top attractions. They took the ferry to Angel Island and visited Pier 39 and Fisherman’s Wharf, but Miller said riding the cable cars was a highlight for him.

“I grew up on ‘full house’ so everyone knows the cable cars. We definitely want to take the trams around town,” said Miller, 40, who was waiting with his family from Powell Street and the Market drive to the fisherman’s wharf.

Before the pandemic, 25 million tourists visited San Francisco annually, many of whom rode the cable cars as synonymous with the city as Alcatraz Island and the Golden Gate Bridge.

Roughly 17,000 riders packed the cable cars daily before they were parked in March 2020 when the city was cordoned off and protected. According to the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Agency, it was the longest shutdown since the 1980s when the system was fully reconstructed.

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An influx of confused self-driving cars has swarmed through a nominally peaceful neighborhood of San Francisco for “six, eight weeks, maybe more,” according to local residents. The vehicles that are part of the Waymo robot taxi fleet pour into a cul-de-sac in the Richmond District. While some are doing a complicated multi-point turn, others are queued one after the other. KPIX 5 reported on Wednesday that on some days “up to 50” of the technology-heavy driverless cars can turn up, disrupt the routes of the drivers and disrupt local residents. “It’s literally every five minutes,” said Jennifer King, a local homeowner. “And we all work from home, so we hear this.” Waymo has yet to provide an explanation for the technological malfunctions behind the invasion. Waymo cars also regularly get confused by puddles and left turns, according to CNN.

Read it below KPIX 5

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