Members of Safe Street Rebel place a cone on a self-driving Cruise automobile in San Francisco.

Josh Edelson/AFP by way of Getty Images

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Josh Edelson/AFP by way of Getty Images

Members of Safe Street Rebel place a cone on a self-driving Cruise automobile in San Francisco.

Josh Edelson/AFP by way of Getty Images

Two individuals wearing darkish colours and sporting masks dart right into a busy avenue on a hill in San Francisco. One of them hauls a giant orange visitors cone. They dash towards a driverless car and rapidly set the cone on the hood.

The automobile’s facet lights burst on and begin flashing orange. And then, it sits there motionless.

“All right, looks good,” one in every of them says after ensuring nobody is inside. “Let’s get out of here.” They hop on e-bikes and pedal off.

All it takes to render the technology-packed self-driving automobile inoperable is a visitors cone. If all goes in accordance with plan, it’ll keep there, frozen, till somebody comes and removes it.

An nameless activist group referred to as Safe Street Rebel is accountable for this so-called coning incident and dozens of others over the previous few months. The group’s aim is to incapacitate the driverless vehicles roaming San Francisco’s streets as a protest towards town getting used as a testing floor for this rising expertise.

Over the previous couple of years, driverless vehicles have grow to be ubiquitous all through San Francisco. It started with human security drivers on board who had been there to ensure all the things ran easily. And then, many vehicles began working with no people in any respect.

They’re principally run by Cruise, which is owned by GM, and Waymo, which is owned by Google dad or mum firm Alphabet. Both corporations have poured billions of dollars into creating these autonomous automobiles. Neither Cruise nor Waymo responded to questions on why the vehicles could be disabled by visitors cones.

Waymo says it has a allow for 250 vehicles and it deploys about 100 at any given time. Cruise says it runs 100 in San Francisco through the day and 300 at evening. The Department of Motor Vehicles made Cruise cut that number in half after one in every of its vehicles collided with a firetruck final week.

Street theater protests are nothing new in San Francisco

Earlier this month, the California Public Utilities Commission voted 3-1 to let the 2 corporations run their vehicles at all hours of the day choosing up passengers like taxis.

The lead-up to the fee’s vote prompted the Safe Street Rebel group to begin “coning,” as they name it. Members have lengthy used avenue theater shenanigans to achieve consideration of their struggle towards vehicles and to advertise public transportation.

Coning driverless vehicles suits in keeping with an extended historical past of protests towards the impression of the tech business on San Francisco. Throughout the years, activists have blockaded Google’s private commuter buses from choosing up workers within the metropolis. And when scooter corporations flooded the sidewalks with electrical scooters, individuals threw them into San Francisco Bay.

“Then there was the burning of Lime scooters in front of a Google bus,” says Manissa Maharawal, an assistant professor at American University who has studied these protests.

She factors out that when tech corporations check their merchandise within the metropolis, residents do not have a lot say in these choices: “There’s been various iterations of this where it’s like, ‘Oh, yep, let’s try that out in San Francisco again,’ with very little input from anyone who lives here.”

That will get to the crux of Safe Street Rebel’s protest. The group solely agreed to talk to NPR if they may stay nameless as a result of it is unclear if what they’re doing is authorized.

“We thought that putting cones on these [driverless cars] was a funny image that could captivate people,” says one organizer. “One of these self-driving cars with billions of dollars of venture capital investment money and R&D, just being disabled by a common traffic cone.”

First responders aren’t pleased with driverless vehicles

Safe Street Rebel has cataloged hundreds of near misses and blunders with Cruise and Waymo automobiles over the previous few months — even with out visitors cones.

The vehicles have run red lights, rear-ended a bus and blocked crosswalks and bike paths. In one incident, dozens of confused vehicles congregated in a residential cul-de-sac, clogging the road. In one other, a Waymo ran over and killed a dog.

“We don’t really need traffic cones to show how vulnerable they are,” says the Safe Street Rebel organizer.

Both Cruise and Waymo say their automobiles are far safer than human drivers and in comparison with people they’ve had comparatively few incidents. They say they’ve pushed thousands and thousands of driverless miles with none human fatalities or life-threatening accidents. An Uber self-driving automobile, working in full autonomous mode and with a security driver within the automobile, killed a pedestrian in Arizona in 2018.

A Waymo driverless automobile will get coned in San Francisco.

Dara Kerr/NPR

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Dara Kerr/NPR

A Waymo driverless automobile will get coned in San Francisco.

Dara Kerr/NPR

Safe Street Rebel is not the one group that is had points with the autonomous automobiles. San Francisco’s police and hearth departments have additionally stated the vehicles aren’t yet ready for public roads. They’ve tallied 55 incidents where self-driving cars have gotten in the way of rescue operations in simply the previous six months.

Those incidents embrace driving via yellow emergency tape, blocking firehouse driveways, running over fire hoses and refusing to maneuver for first responders.

Autonomous automobiles are programmed to be overly conservative

Ziwen Wan, a Ph.D. candidate in pc science at University of California, Irvine, has studied why driverless cars may be acting this way. He used open supply information for his analysis, so his findings aren’t based mostly particularly on Cruise and Waymo. Wan discovered that extraordinary objects on the highway can result in harmful driving conduct. Part of this, he says, is as a result of the vehicles are programmed to be overly conservative.

“The software can make the autonomous vehicle behave as conservatively as possible because a safety violation would be very serious,” Wan says. “But this may lead to concerns on the other side, like in some cases, even though it’s safe it will fail to drive normally.”

That irregular driving contains abrupt halts, swerves, erratic conduct or simply stopping in the midst of the highway.

“The traffic cone protest is an example of how things in the real world can really confound machines, even ones as sophisticated and finely tuned as this,” says Margaret O’Mara, a historical past professor on the University of Washington who studies the tech industry. “It’s a reminder that in this very high-tech world, the most low-tech things can literally put a wrench in the machine.”

Despite the bumps within the highway, each Waymo and Cruise are quickly increasing their robo-taxi applications all through the U.S. Waymo is already giving rides in Phoenix and is testing with human security drivers in Los Angeles and Austin. And Cruise is providing rides in Phoenix and Austin and testing in Dallas, Houston, Miami, Nashville and Charlotte.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, members of Safe Street Rebel proceed to exit at evening and stalk the automobiles one cone at a time.