San Francisco’s race for robotaxis cleaves sharp divide over safety
- Using traffic cones stolen from the streets, the activists have been disabling driverless taxis operated by Waymo and Cruise
- A critical decision on whether to further expand Waymo and Cruise’s services was due by the end of June, but has been postponed twice
A driverless taxi slows down on a dark San Francisco street and is quickly surrounded by a group of masked figures.
One of them places a traffic cone on the hood of the car. Its hazard lights flick on, and the car stops in the middle of the road, disabled.
This bizarre scene has been repeated dozens of times across the US tech capital this past week – the work of activists protesting against the proliferation of robot cars, which they consider unsafe.
“We believe that all cars are bad, no matter who or what is driving,” said the activist, who asked to be referred to by the pseudonym Alex to protect his identity.
His anti-car activist group, “Safe Street Rebel,” is radically pro-pedestrian and pro-bike, and not impressed by widespread claims that driverless cars are a “new revolutionary mode of transport”.
Alex sees their arrival “just as another way to entrench car dominance”.