On Saturday, the first in a series of storms aimed at the Bay Area brought power outages across San Francisco. The first reports came in at 10:10 AM, and by 2:45 PM, 130,000 customers were affected. Meanwhile, outages suspended BART and Muni Metro services. Then Waymo ordered a system shutdown, bringing their autonomous vehicles to a standstill. Ironically, some Waymo riders reported price gouging amid the bad weather (one end of downtown to the other for $51).
What’s worse, these cars came to a halt where they were, promptly jamming traffic behind them. “Power out in San Francisco, the Waymos are crazy. They’re just like, stopped,” said Twitter user @_iagomaciel. “They cannot move. There’s like, a massive traffic jam caused by them.” Waymos were blocking intersections in North Beach, the Tenderloin, Hayes Valley and elsewhere in SF. At most, it presented an inconvenience—this time. Next time, we may not be so lucky.
A Waymo vehicle operates in a designated Muni bus lane, a private company appropriating public space for personal profit. The smallest vehicle in Muni’s main fleet accommodates 25 people. This Waymo can hold five. Creative commons.
Incident, or omen?
The weekend’s mishaps were not disastrous, but they did unfold like it. That is to say, one event seemed to trigger another; storms begat outages begat Waymo shutdown begat gridlock. What a terrible time to be stuck on the road behind one of these beasts of public burden. Imagine the commuters made late on their weary drive home. You just want to take your pants off and eat in front of your laptop, but these goddamn robots keep blocking the street!
Now, a true emergency. You’re awaiting the paramedics you called when you still had some use of your hands, except now you have none. In severe strokes, you get precious little time before permanent brain damage sets in, much less with an aneurysm. Your ambulance is coming, but multiple Waymo vehicles have stalled out on a street already curbed with parked cars. You hear the scream of sirens through the hypoxia, thinking help is on its way. Any minute now. You may have stood a chance, had Waymo not rendered your street impassable. Instead, you die staring at your front door, praying someone will kick it down.
At least when protesters shut down traffic, they can disperse. People still press charges against demonstrators, if only for the inconvenience. It won’t be difficult to find Waymo supporters even after the weekend’s debacle. But would Waymo accept responsibility for delaying rescue in case of medical crises and house fires, thereby costing lives?
In worst-case scenarios, Waymos only harm
If a couple of Waymos cost EMS even a few extra minutes, that brief window could mean life or death. Similar consequences can happen on a citywide scale. I shudder to think of how stalled Waymo vehicles could complicate rescue operations in the wake of a major earthquake. As of August 2025, Google was operating around 800 Waymo vehicles in San Francisco, with current figures estimated at over 1,000.
That’s at least 1,000 more obstacles in addition to fallen debris, fissured pavement, and other abandoned cars. Each of these can impede or worse, prevent life-saving help from reaching people who need it. The minutes following a serious earthquake are crucial to survival. Fire is an earthquake’s malevolent twin. It moves supernaturally fast, appearing once the shaking stops and you believe the worst is over. If a building collapsed on you but you’re still alive, you don’t have long before flames finish you off. You could’ve lived, but EMS is too busy navigating streets clogged by Google’s litter to save you.
In another worst-case scenario, Waymo vehicles themselves become firestarters—bad news in a city with a historically poor post-quake water supply. Compare that to how Muni helped commuters get around after the Loma Prieta earthquake with increased service and ferry connections. What will Waymo do for San Francisco when the time comes? How will they account for the problems they present the people whose city this company used as their testing ground?
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry chats with Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin and a leader of Google's Self-Driving Car Project while sitting inside one of Google's self-driving cars at the 2016 Global Entrepreneurship's Innovation Marketplace. Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, June 23, 2016. Creative commons.
Right now, Waymos “help” a select few, i.e. those people who prefer and can afford them. For us walkers, drivers, public transit-takers and especially EMS workers, they are just another tentacle of the A.I. monster. Waymo is a pain in the ass, and that’s on a good day. Where will they be on a bad day, one that affects us all?
