Waymos Are Now Coming For Your Coveted San Francisco Parking Spots

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the San Francisco Chronicle: A long stretch of curb in San Francisco's Mission District might contain a whole menagerie of parked vehicles: hatchbacks, SUVs, dusty pick-ups, chic Teslas. And recently, Waymo robotaxis. That's what Kyle Grochmal saw walking through the northeast Mission District on Monday afternoon. Cutting down York Street, he glimpsed a tell-tale white electric Jaguar in one of the coveted one-hour spots, its sensors spinning. The Waymo sat there for at least 20 minutes, Grochmal said. He whipped out his cell phone and started recording. After the Waymo drove off, another one showed up within an hour and took the same spot.

'This is something I started to notice about six months ago,' Grochmal said, recalling how disorienting it was to be strolling down a largely deserted sidewalk, and suddenly hear the purring motor and soft click of autonomous vehicle cameras. He'd look up to see a Waymo 'just sitting there, not loading anyone.' But Waymo's use of public curb space raised questions for Grochmal, who wonders whether San Franciscans are prepared to have their infrastructure dominated by autonomous vehicles. 'Say Tesla gets to self-driving, so people have personal AVs,' he said. 'So then do people from Palo Alto get dropped off in San Francisco and let their cars drive around all day searching for free parking?'

Such a future seems particularly unsettling in the northeast Mission, where snug streets couldn't handle much traffic, and competition for parking is already fierce. A recent influx of Artificial Intelligence companies brought many more workers and cars, as well as robotaxis that trawl the blocks, waiting for fares. It makes sense, to Grochmal, that some of them wind up squatting in one-hour spaces. Still, it's conceivable that residents will lose patience with Waymo, and other AV companies, as the fleets scale up and the vehicles compete more aggressively with humans for parking.

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