The bus was caught. San Francisco’s eastbound 54 Felton line was heading up a slender residential avenue when a white SUV coming the opposite method stopped in the course of the street. It was a wet Sunday night final month, and the bus driver leaned as much as the windshield and peered by the haze on the SUV’s pulsing hazard lights earlier than slumping again and exclaiming in shock, “What the hell? No driver of the car?!”

The 54, dropped at a halt by an autonomous car belonging to Alphabet’s Waymo, isn’t the one bus that’s run into hassle with San Francisco’s rising crowd of driverless automobiles. Bus and prepare surveillance movies obtained by WIRED by public data requests present a litany of incidents since September through which nervousness and confusion stirred up by driverless automobiles has spilled onto the streets of the US metropolis that has grow to be the epicenter for testing them.

As the incidents stack up, the businesses behind the autonomous automobiles, equivalent to Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise, need to add more robotaxis to San Francisco’s streets, cowl extra territory, and run at all hours. Waymo and Cruise say they study from each incident. Each has logged over 1 million driverless miles and say their automobiles are protected sufficient to maintain powering ahead. But expansions are topic to approval from California state regulators, which have been pressed by San Francisco officers for years to restrict autonomous vehicles till points subside.

Driverless automobiles have accomplished 1000’s of journeys in San Francisco—taking folks to work, to high school, and to and from dates. They have additionally confirmed to be a glitchy nuisance, snarling traffic and creeping into hazardous terrain such as construction zones and downed power lines. Autonomous automobiles in San Francisco made 92 unplanned stops between May and December 2022—88 % of them on streets with transit service, in line with metropolis transportation authorities, who collected the information from social media reviews, 911 calls, and different sources, as a result of corporations aren’t required to report all of the breakdowns.

The data obtained by WIRED are extra targeted. They observe a beforehand unreported directive to workers of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency handed down final October to enhance file conserving of incidents involving autonomous automobiles. Muni, because the company is understood, standardized the time period “driverless car” when workers report “near-misses, collisions or other incidents resulting in transit delay,” in line with the directive. Agency logs present 12 “driverless” reviews from September 2022 by March 8, 2023, although Muni video was offered for under eight of those circumstances. Overall, the incidents resulted in a minimum of 83 minutes of direct delays for Muni riders, data present. 

That information probably doesn’t replicate the true scale of the issue. Muni workers don’t observe each directive to the letter, and a single delay can sluggish different strains, worsening the blow. Buses and trains can’t weave round blockages as simply as pedestrians, different motorists, and cyclists, saddling transit-dependent vacationers with a number of the largest complications brought on by errant driverless automobiles, in line with transit advocates.

San Francisco officers say they need to be supportive of latest expertise, however they first need to be proven progress on addressing failures—like random stops in entrance of buses and trains. “What we’re seeing is a significant uptick in traffic and other kinds of chaos on our streets,” says Jeffrey Tumlin, Muni’s director of transportation. “We are very concerned that if autonomous vehicles are allowed limitless, driverless operations in San Francisco that the traffic impacts grow exponentially.”

For Muni’s 54 bus, which traverses San Francisco’s southern edge, the car blocking its method early final month was a driverless Waymo that obtained stranded between rows of parked automobiles. A human driver would have reversed, clearing house for the bus, which isn’t allowed to again up with out a supervisor. Instead, the Waymo Driver, as the corporate calls its expertise, alerted a distant “fleet response specialist” to assist. Waymo spokesperson Sandy Karp says that this employee offered steering to the automotive that “was not ideal under the circumstances” and made it difficult to renew driving. 

That left the Muni driver in a bind. “I can’t move the bus,” the motive force mentioned to certainly one of two riders on board. “The car is automatic driving.” The driver radioed managers and doffed their cap: “Whoosh … Half hour, one hour. I don’t know. Nothing to do.” Thirty-eight stops and about 5 miles remained forward for the 54. The driver, looking on the Waymo, expressed disappointment: “This one not smart yet. Not smart. Not good.”