Is Waymo Ready for Another Emergency? San Francisco Supervisors Are Skeptical

As a fire at a PG&E substation plunged a third of San Francisco into darkness on the evening of Dec. 20, one of the city’s 911 dispatchers sat on hold with Waymo’s first responder hotline for 53 minutes.

The company’s systems had become overwhelmed with requests from the more than 1,500 confused robotaxis trying to navigate intersections without functioning traffic signals, rendering them inoperable for two minutes or more.

How the stalled Waymos complicated the city’s emergency response efforts and what measures the company is putting in place to prevent service stoppages during a future emergency were the subject of a meeting of the city’s Land Use and Transportation Committee on Monday.

In it, representatives from city departments revealed the severity of Waymo’s service outage and its effect on the city, which lasted overnight and into the next day.

Department of Emergency Management Executive Director Mary Ellen Carroll, whose department staffs the city’s 911 dispatch center, said she lost sleep over the incident.

“ I definitely stay awake at night thinking about things that could happen and how do we integrate this new technology into our emergency response,” Carroll told city supervisors.

Broadly, representatives from Waymo apologized for the inconveniences their vehicles caused that day and said they were putting in place safeguards to prevent a similar service outage from happening again.

“ I want to be very clear that Waymo takes full responsibility for the communication gaps that occurred that evening,” said Sam Cooper, the program manager for incident response at Waymo.

But it did little to mollify some supervisors, who expressed ire over stalled Waymos blocking intersections and the path of emergency vehicles, a problem that sometimes required intervention by first responders. The hearing came just a day after a Waymo blocked an ambulance responding to a mass shooting in Austin, Texas.

Patrick Rabbitt, the deputy chief of operations for the San Francisco Fire Department, said firefighters can call Waymo and request a remote operator to move a stalled vehicle, but they can’t always reach the company by phone, and sometimes the remote operators are unable to move the vehicle, requiring first responders to do it themselves.

Waymo spokesperson Ethan Teicher told KQED Waymo is aware of 62 manual retrievals of its stalled vehicles during the blackout, which were done by Waymo’s own roadside assistance or tow trucks. In two instances, he said, first responders had to manually move a Waymo.

Carroll and other city leaders lamented that when that happens, it forces valuable first responders to become “default roadside assistance.”

“ Anything that brings a high volume of calls to 911 can delay our response time for people that have true life-and-death situations,” Caroll said.

The main reason for the service stoppage, according to Waymo, was a high number of remote assistance requests generated by the vehicles attempting to navigate intersections without functioning streetlights, although the company did note that its vehicles traversed 7,000 darkened intersections during the blackout without incident.

The cars idled as they waited for their remote assistance requests to be fulfilled.

Remote assistance requests are handled by operators located in countries as far away as the Philippines, who can provide guidance to the autonomous vehicles. The company said it currently employs 70 remote operators, who are responsible for handling requests from its fleet of about 3,000 vehicles across the country.

San Francisco Supervisor Bilal Mahmood was incredulous that Waymo representatives didn’t think the location or number of remote operators would be an issue in future emergencies.

“If we’re reliant in an emergency situation on operators in the Philippines to have to assess the condition here, how can you explain or justify that?” Mahmood asked.

Chinmay Jain, Waymo’s director of product management, said the location of the remote assistants “had no implications” in the San Francisco power outage.

“ We do a very detailed analysis on the demand for such requests, and hence, have these dynamic systems where we can increase the supply of remote assistance accordingly,” Jain said.

But Cooper said the company did change its practices in response to the December outage in other ways. Waymo rolled out fleet-wide updates that allow its vehicles to better navigate intersections without working traffic signals, revised how its operations team responds to power outage events, and improved its staffing capabilities during significant incidents, he said.

But the representatives largely dodged questions from supervisors seeking explicit commitments. Cooper said he could not provide numbers at the time on the number of additional staff the company had hired to handle surges.

Both the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management and Fire Department recommended integrating their “avoid the area” notifications with Waymo software to prevent the driverless cars from entering emergency response zones, but Cooper said he couldn’t commit to that in the meeting.

“ We’re absolutely willing to have the conversations at the conclusion of this hearing to make sure that we are hearing everyone on the table,” he said.

Local unions and gig workers for Uber and Lyft hosted a rally on the steps of City Hall before the meeting, calling for greater regulation of Waymo.

“ We just want to be part of the conversation and make sure that these vehicles operate safely in emergencies. We can’t have roads being blocked,” said Sam Gebler, the president of San Francisco Firefighters Local 798.

The meeting also featured lengthy public comment with many speakers largely expressing their opposition to Waymo over safety and other concerns.

Kristin Hardy, the regional vice president of SEIU 1021, read a statement written by her daughter, who said her dog, Leo, was hit and killed by a Waymo in the city’s Western Addition neighborhood.

“When a self-driving car makes a mistake, who suffers? Not the company, not the executives, the community does. Safety should never come second. It should never be tested on real people in real time,” Hardy said.

Waymo said its vehicles have shown an 88% reduction in serious injury-or-worse crashes compared to human drivers in San Francisco.

That safety record, however, came into question last year when one of its vehicles ran over a beloved bodega cat in the city’s Mission District.

The incident sparked calls by city Supervisor Jackie Fielder for more local control over autonomous vehicle regulations, but she has yet to introduce a resolution that could drive that process forward. Most of the jurisdiction for regulating Waymo currently sits with state agencies, not San Francisco.

Casting a long shadow over the meeting is AB 1777, a 2024 state law that by July 1 of this year will require, among other things, that autonomous vehicle operators staff a phone line that allows first responders to reach a human operator within 30 seconds.

“The gulf between the 30 seconds that the law requires and the 50 minutes that we heard about today is massive,” Mahmood said. “The results of today show that there are dire consequences if we don’t get public safety right.”

Speaking to KQED on Tuesday at a separate event, Supervisor Myrna Melgar said she was “disappointed that Waymo had no answers at all.”

“ I feel like their whole support infrastructure — it is not adequate for disaster preparedness,” Melgar said. “It’s adequate for the day-to-day. So I hope this prompts them to rethink that.”

Editor’s Note: This story was updated to clarify the number of times first responders had to manually move a Waymo during the December power outage.