Apparently, for Waymo, this remains an unsolved problem.
In a private meeting with federal regulators last month, emergency first responders from San Francisco and Austin painted a troubling picture of autonomous vehicle performance — one that's not improving but actually deteriorating. SF Fire Chief Patrick Rabbitt told NHTSA officials that Waymos are "frequently now blocking our fire stations from access" and that the vehicles' default behavior when confused is simply to freeze in place. When seconds count during an emergency, a locked-up robot car between a firetruck and a burning building isn't a quirky tech hiccup. It's a life-safety problem.
Mary Ellen Carroll, executive director of San Francisco's Department of Emergency Management, was blunt: the city is seeing "backsliding" on issues that had previously improved, including more traffic violations. Over in Austin, police report that Waymos routinely fail to recognize officers' hand signals — directly contradicting what the company told first responders to expect.
Look, we're not anti-Waymo at The Dissent. The technology is genuinely impressive, and the safety statistics for individual driving are compelling. As one SF resident put it, "I am a fan of Waymos and use them often, but I fully support more rigorous government oversight for issues like interfering with first responders. There is zero reason a Waymo should block a fire house more than one time."
That's exactly right. And it captures where most reasonable San Franciscans land on this: you can love the product and still demand accountability from the company.
Another local offered a sharper framing: "The actual driving of a Waymo is safer than a human driver, but these broader issues are substantial. The risk of an individual accident is lower; the risk of causing delays in bigger emergencies is greater."
This is the tension nobody at Waymo wants to talk about. Individual ride safety is the stat they love to cite. But systemic risk — the cascading delays when a frozen AV blocks an intersection during a five-alarm fire — doesn't show up neatly in their dashboards.
The real failure here isn't just Waymo's. It's regulatory. NHTSA has the authority to hold autonomous vehicle operators to strict performance standards, and so far the federal response has been painfully slow. San Francisco's own agencies are raising alarms in closed-door meetings rather than imposing real consequences. If a human taxi driver repeatedly blocked fire stations and ignored police signals, their license would be revoked. Why does a billion-dollar tech company get infinite mulligans?
Waymo has been operating commercially in SF for over a year. "Backsliding" isn't a beta-test problem — it's a governance problem. The city and federal regulators need to stop treating these meetings like therapy sessions and start treating them like enforcement actions.
