On Thursday, the California Public Utilities Commission voted 3-1 in favor of allowing Alphabet Inc's Waymo and General Motors' Cruise to provide paid robotaxi services with unmanned self-driving vehicles throughout San Francisco, despite strong opposition from the city's transportation and safety agencies and numerous residents. This ruling takes effect immediately, meaning the companies can begin providing citywide taxi services at any point as of Thursday. To date, Cruise and Waymo have been running pilot services which were restricted in terms of time and location. This marks a crucial step in the regulation of robot cars, which have been gradually rolled out in cities and states across the country. San Francisco, a symbolic tech center housing 500 autonomous vehicles, is a particularly important test site for these cars, as its complex urban landscape allows for extensive real-world testing of the technology.
San Francisco's fire department, planning commission, transit agencies, and other organizations had urged the commission assigned with overseeing autonomous vehicles on a state-level to reduce deployment of the vehicles due to multiple reports of hindrance to fire trucks, police activity, and unsteady driving. Cruise and Waymo will now be offering rides via phone app, going up against local contenders Uber and Lyft. Despite the locals’ annoyance of their city being utilized as a trial ground for this allegedly untested technology, it is still evident that the self-operating cars, with clear driver seats and rotating wheels, are around the city and are frequently presented on social media. Cruise declared at a public assembly that it has approximately 300 cars running at night and around 100 during the day, while Waymo said it has around 250 and 100 in operation during the day, and these figures are predicted to rise now that the commission has granted the proposal. There have been arguments that the utilization of this symbolical technology hub could bring about fewer car accidents and injuries.
On Tuesday, the commission heard from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency that it had documented close to 600 incidents involving autonomous vehicles since spring of 2022 and that they presume it is merely the "tip of the iceberg." Jeanine Nicholson, the Fire Department Chief, declared that "it is not the responsibility of my people to get in one of your vehicles and take it over." At the hearing room in San Francisco, hundreds of citizens and representatives of various organizations took to the floor to give their opinions on the issue, including matters such as accessibility for the disabled, safety, software coding, union activity, conflicts of interest and many more. Those who favored the deployment of autonomous vehicles argued that it would assist San Francisco financially and bring in jobs, citing the move of Uber to Arizona in 2016, where Governor Doug Ducey promised a lack of regulation, as an example.
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