San Francisco has become ground zero for the development of human-less Robotaxi. Offerings from the likes of Waymo and Cruise ply the streets 24 hours a day, seven days a week without the need for the driver to go for meals or on comfort breaks. Of late, though, the inexorable march of technology has been on a bit of a bumpy road. Now, a new group called the “Safe Street Rebels” have entered the fray and have figured out how to stop these high-tech robots in a real low-tech way—the ubiquitous traffic cone.
Dressed in dark colours, the activists prowl the nighttime streets on their e-bikes armed with only their weapon of choice, the humble traffic cone. Their mission: to stop the invasion of the Robotaxis. All it takes is for them to position the cone on the bonnet (sorry, hood, if you are American) and the Robotaxi lights start to flash orange and the car sits there immobile. Mission accomplished.
Mass attack!
The “Safe Street Rebels” is an anonymous group of street activists determined to reclaim the streets for non-motorised vehicles, and particularly to stop the city of San Francisco becoming the global testing bed for the emerging technology for driverless cars, which they claim have made the streets less safe.
Companies like Waymo, owned by Alphabet (which also owns Google), and Cruise (owned by GM) have poured billions of dollars into the technology of driverless taxis. Over the years, the technology was initially piloted by a human, but recently the need for human supervision has been dropped. Waymo has a permit for 250 Robotaxis at any one time, but says it deploys about 100 at a time. Cruise can send 100 out during the day and 300 at night.
It was just earlier this month that the San Francisco City Council voted to allow the 24-hour-a-day operation of the taxis. This prompted the Safe Street Rebel loonies to start coming (as they term it). This is not the first time that the group has been active. They have a long history of protests, particularly against tech companies. One of their previous actions saw them block private buses sent into the City to pick up Google employees. When the City licensed e-scooters and the pavements were flooded with the annoying little beasties, Safe Street Rebel simply picked them up and threw them into the San Francisco Bay; other scooters were burned in front of the Google buses.
Cruise and Waymo’s PR departments constantly tell us that driverless taxis are safer than normal taxis. The local Police and Fire Departments beg to differ and have issued statements condemning the taxis, saying they are not ready for the open road and detailed 55 incidents in which a Robotaxi hampered rescue operations of some sort. Love or hate them, I think that we will all probably have to unfortunately embrace this technology of the future as we adopt technology for the sake of technology.
