Here's a scene that perfectly captures the current state of San Francisco streets: a Waymo sits patiently at a crosswalk, dutifully waiting for a pedestrian to pass, while the human driver behind it lays on the horn screaming at the robot to "fucking go" — directly through the crosswalk someone is currently walking in.

Let that sink in. The machine had better judgment than the human. And honestly? That's not even surprising anymore.

Walk around this city long enough and you develop a sixth sense for which drivers are about to do something stupid. The guy checking his phone. The rideshare driver scanning for his pickup. The delivery van double-parked with the door swinging open. Every intersection is a little game of Russian roulette — except now, a growing number of the cars in that chamber are guaranteed blanks.

As one SF resident put it bluntly: "The Waymo has no sense of moral judgment and will simply yield. A human being will kill you if they perceive it to be 'your fault.'" That's dark. It's also completely accurate.

Another local shared a story about a pedestrian who walked right in front of a Waymo at a red light while texting — never even looked up. "The Waymo stopped! Dude didn't even realize he could have been hit by a human driving a car. Just kept texting away."

Look, we're not here to tell you autonomous vehicles are flawless. They're not. They occasionally do weird things, they block traffic in odd spots, and the regulatory framework around them is still a work in progress. But the safety data is increasingly hard to argue with, and the lived experience of pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists is telling a consistent story: these cars are more predictable, more law-abiding, and less dangerous than their human counterparts.

This is what market-driven innovation actually looks like when it works. No government mandate forced Waymo to yield at that crosswalk. No new crosswalk regulation was needed. The technology simply does what it's supposed to do — follow the rules — which apparently sets a higher bar than most licensed drivers in this city can clear.

For a town that loves to regulate everything from gas stoves to happy meals, maybe the real lesson here is that sometimes the best safety improvement isn't another law. It's better technology, deployed by private companies, doing exactly what decades of traffic enforcement never could: making drivers actually stop for pedestrians.