What Outgoing Muni Chief Jeffrey Tumlin Really Thinks of Autonomous Vehicles

Outgoing Head of SFMTA Jeffrey Tumlin had his work cut out for him. Tumlin earned the title in 2019 and faced considerable challenges, the pandemic being the greatest. Meanwhile, through the fallout of Muni’s mid-COVID implosion, the Valencia Street bike lane saga continued. As if it wasn’t hard enough being Tumlin, Waymo, Cruise and Zoox began operating autonomous cars on hazardous city streets. With driverless cars roving San Francisco, his job became that much more unpredictable. 

Before Tumlin stepped down from his post, he shared some parting thoughts with Bloomberg on the autonomous vehicle (AV) industry. Here’s a few:

The autonomous vehicle industry is terrible for public transit.

Unsurprisingly, they repeatedly present a hassle to Muni bus and LRV operators. AVs represent the latest takeover of public resources for private gain. They join Uber, Lyft, Amazon, Doordash, Grubhub and others in bloating city streets with corporate-branded traffic makers. It’s like these companies left skyscrapers for offices with wheels, only Waymo and the like don’t have drivers to pay. How much more of San Francisco’s crowded street grid will Muni have to surrender?

Regarding whether AVs are a positive or negative for San Francisco, Tumlin was not optimistic about their impact on SFMTA. “So far, there is no net positive for the transportation system that we’ve been able to identify. The robotaxis create greater convenience for the privileged, but they create problems for the efficiency of the transportation system as a whole,” he said. 

If commercial traffic keeps swelling, preventing city streets from serving their chief civic purpose, shouldn’t those companies pay up? 

AV companies are too cagey with their findings.

Tumlin first grew suspicious when Kyle Vogt, original CEO of Cruise, had an outburst during one City Hall meeting. 

“I was in City Hall trying to lay out the case why good data supports public trust, and explaining why I didn’t expect robotaxi companies to be perfect. San Francisco streets can handle a good deal of chaos, but I can’t have dozens of Cruise vehicles being immobilized in traffic and blocking my train lines.”

“He [Vogt] leaned across the table from me, pounded his fist on this heavy oak table, and said, ‘Jeff Tumlin, you are the single greatest threat to the American autonomous vehicle industry.’”

Tumlin “can handle myself in almost any situation, but I was just tongue-tied. I was trying to be a good bureaucrat while supporting the industry—being a partner with prudence. I didn’t even know that he had any idea who I was. So it was a very strange first meeting, and I think it set the tone for the challenges that we had following that with Cruise.”

State officials accused Cruise of withholding valuable information about one vehicle that hit and dragged a woman in October 2023. The woman was badly injured. Afterwards, General Motors severed ties with Cruise, forcing the company to terminate AV operations. Bloomberg reached out to an associate at Cruise, who offered no comment. 

If you rely on Lyft and/or Waymo to get around, move to Phoenix.

In much the same way that Lyft and Uber severely strained the taxicab economy, Waymo strains an already suffering agency. It’s a symptom of this ever-worsening antisocial sickness pervading cities like San Francisco. We’re eager to dispossess countless others of their mobility for a quiet and homeless person-free ride from a faceless robot. It begs the question, why bother living in a city if you’re only willing to interact with people like yourself? 

If that describes you, consider moving to Phoenix, Arizona. It’s the only other city where Waymo operates, and where xenophobia is all the rage. When asked if autonomous vehicles belong on such demanding streets as ours, Tumlin pointed to Arizona. 

“Self-driving technology seems to work really well in a system like Phoenix that was designed for cars. The level of complexity that AVs have to deal with in a city like Phoenix is far lower than in a city like San Francisco.”

Waymo is useless in walkable cities, of which the United States has very few, and we’re one of them. Car-centric cities with undesirable zip codes might as well lean in. If you’re set on rolling your way to adult-onset obesity, Phoenix is calling your name. Tumlin said it more politely: 

“AVs might thrive accommodating automobile-dependent cities in a way that’s not soul-destroying. Being stuck in traffic congestion while having to operate a motor vehicle every day is exhausting. If you no longer need to worry about operating the vehicle and can make productive use of that time, it could create an interesting new economic model for cities like Phoenix.”