Here's a fun exercise: name the single safest category of driver on San Francisco's streets right now.

If you said Waymo, congratulations — you're paying attention. The autonomous vehicles have racked up millions of miles in the city with a safety record that makes the average human driver look like they're playing bumper cars. Studies consistently show they're involved in fewer collisions per mile, cause fewer injuries, and — critically — don't drive drunk, don't text, and don't road-rage their way through the Tenderloin at 60 mph.

So naturally, San Francisco's political class has decided these are the vehicles that need more scrutiny.

Look, nobody's saying autonomous vehicles should operate in a regulatory vacuum. There are legitimate questions about data, liability, and labor displacement worth hashing out. But let's be honest about proportionality. In 2024, human drivers in SF were responsible for dozens of traffic fatalities. Pedestrians are being struck and killed at intersections that have been flagged as dangerous for years. The city's own Vision Zero goal — zero traffic deaths by 2024 — quietly sailed past its deadline with, shall we say, room for improvement.

And yet the bulk of the political energy, the hearings, the breathless media cycles, the supervisorial grandstanding — it all gets aimed at the robot cars that are statistically least likely to kill you.

Why? Because Waymo is a visible, novel, easy target. It's a lot simpler to hold a press conference about a driverless car blocking a fire truck than it is to fix the systemic infrastructure failures, the unaddressed speeding, and the DUI problem that actually fills hospital beds.

This is what happens when city government optimizes for optics instead of outcomes. You get a regulatory framework that's inversely proportional to actual risk. The safest drivers get the most red tape, while the deadliest intersections get another round of "community input sessions."

San Francisco doesn't have a Waymo problem. It has a priorities problem. And until City Hall is willing to spend as much political capital on proven dangers as it does on futuristic ones, pedestrians will keep paying the price — hit not by algorithms, but by good old-fashioned human negligence that nobody wants to confront.