A Zoox vehicle was recently spotted stopped — with zero passengers — smack in a San Francisco bike lane, despite a safer pullover spot sitting right next to it. No emergency. No pickup. Just a multi-billion-dollar autonomous vehicle deciding that the bike lane was a perfectly fine place to hang out.

Look, we're not anti-driverless car. The technology is genuinely promising, and the long-term safety gains could be enormous. But that's precisely why the companies behind these vehicles need to be held to a higher standard than your average Uber driver who can't be bothered to pull over properly. A robot car doesn't make split-second judgment errors born of laziness or distraction — it follows its programming. Which means if a Zoox is parked in a bike lane, someone either coded that behavior in or failed to code it out. Either way, that's on the company.

As one SF resident put it, the city should "implement a system like New York that allows people to report bad driver behaviors and be rewarded for it. Waiting for parking enforcement to show up an hour later means no one faces real consequences and the bad behavior continues."

Here's what makes this especially galling: San Francisco brands itself as a Vision Zero city — committed to eliminating traffic deaths. SFMTA already made it legal for taxis to stop in bike lanes for passenger pickup, a policy that one local noted "doesn't officially extend to autonomous taxis, but Waymo does this too and SFMTA doesn't care, so it effectively is legal for them too. Truly ridiculous for a city that claims to want zero traffic deaths."

The fix isn't complicated. Require autonomous vehicle companies to self-report every time their cars enter a bike lane, make sudden unexplained stops, or require remote operator intervention — complete with video. Make the data public. And when violations happen, issue real fines, not wrist-slaps that amount to a rounding error on Zoox's balance sheet.

Autonomous vehicles generate massive amounts of data. There is literally no excuse for not knowing exactly when and why these cars break traffic laws. If Silicon Valley wants San Francisco to be its testing ground, the least it can do is follow the rules of the road. All of them.