San Francisco has been the unofficial proving ground for autonomous vehicle technology for years, and for the most part, the city has played along. Waymo’s white, sensor-laden robotaxis have become a fixture of the urban landscape, racking up millions of trips and generally managing to avoid the kind of catastrophic headlines that skeptics anticipated. The company has positioned itself as a good neighbor, a phrase that appears in nearly every public statement it releases, and to its credit, the safety record has been hard to dispute.
But living next to a good neighbor and sharing a parking garage with an entire fleet of them are two very different things. Residents of SoMa Grand, a condominium community at 1160 Mission Street in San Francisco, have been raising complaints about sharing their parking garage with Waymo vehicles, describing the experience as frustrating and, in the words of at least one resident, simply terrible. The core issue is not philosophical opposition to autonomous vehicles. It is far more practical: people are trying to get to work, and a fleet of robots is blocking the exit.
One resident, Margarita, said she was late to work after spending 20 minutes trapped in the garage behind a cluster of Waymos, one of which had apparently gotten confused by the garage environment. That kind of real-world friction is exactly what does not show up in controlled testing or press releases, and it gets at a genuine tension in the broader rollout of autonomous vehicle technology: what happens when the infrastructure built for human drivers has to absorb an entirely different kind of machine operator…