Self-driving vehicles may reshape transportation, whether the cities that host them like it or not

Connie Llanos sees the potential of the self-driving future and the peril of its present state.

The interim general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation believes robotaxis can improve safety on the city's streets and provide independence for disabled and elderly citizens — someday.

Now, she looks at ongoing problems with driverless deployments in San Francisco and sees a gap between promises and reality.

"I don't yet have a proof of concept that I'm able to get those benefits," Llanos told Automotive News. "What I do know is there are some very real tension points."

Those include friction between city officials who want data from robotaxi companies on their operations and figuring out a more collaborative approach to how autonomous driving technology can shape transportation.

That kind of collaboration is not happening in San Francisco, and officials like Llanos fear some of the problems there might soon replicate elsewhere.

Concerns grew last week when the California Public Utilities Commission approved substantial expansions of the commercial services that self-driving tech companies Cruise and Waymo offer throughout San Francisco.

Those expansions were approved over the objections of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency and emergency responders, who fear an increased robotaxi presence will lead to more congestion and more frequent interference with police officers and firefighters.

But even as San Francisco officials field complaints about such interference or handle 911 calls when cars block traffic, they have little recourse.

"We have no ability to enforce rules when [autonomous vehicles] break them," said Jeffrey Tumlin, director of transportation at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. "AVs exist in a complete Wild West area of the current legal code."

Similar to most states, California regulates autonomous vehicles at the state level. Its Department of Motor Vehicles oversees AVs operating on public roadways, while the Public Utilities Commission regulates their commercial activities.

Leaving cities without a voice in the process — and beholden to more business-friendly state regulations — is a critical mistake that will ultimately slow widespread adoption of AVs, said Bryan Reimer, a research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies automated driving technology.

Instead of public-private collaboration, "We have public versus private," Reimer said. "The city of San Francisco is dealing with all the calamities of the technology's deployments. Some of these are growing pains, which are being solved, but all you're doing is putting the city in a tinderbox waiting for the next major public mishap."

Case in point: One day after the California Public Utilities Commission made its approvals, as many as 10 Cruise vehicles stopped in the middle of Grant Avenue in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood following an experience with "wireless connectivity issues," according to the company.

Those problems arose because a large number of people attended a nearby music festival, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Given any number of ballgames, concerts or festivals that occur in cities, intermittent connectivity should not be considered anomalous.

It's the kind of complication that worries Llanos.

"We see what can happen when the system shuts down," she said. "It creates utter chaos, and as cities, we have to figure out how to pick up the pieces."

Los Angeles has a particular interest in the evolving robotaxi rollout. Waymo and Motional, a joint venture between Hyundai and Aptiv, have signaled they intend to commercially deploy driverless vehicles in Los Angeles at a future date.

When they're ready, both will need regulatory approval from the California Public Utilities Commission. In watching what's transpired in San Francisco, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation has already documented some concerns.

Cruise vehicles "regularly engage in illegal behavior" by picking up and dropping off passengers in travel lanes, the city said in a filing with the commission, while double-parked AVs pose a safety risk to other vehicles and vulnerable road users.

As Los Angeles anticipates problems, the city may also hold the blueprint for a solution.

When scooter companies flooded certain Los Angeles streets and neighborhoods years ago with their two-wheeled vehicles, "it completely created chaos," Llanos said.

In response, the city created the Mobility Data Specification, which allowed it to collect anonymized data through an application programming interface on scooter whereabouts, vehicle utilization and customer costs from the companies.

It was not without controversy. Companies sued Los Angeles in attempts to stop its data collection efforts. But the city's argument that it held the right and responsibility to manage the public right of way resonated with the court, and the Mobility Data Specification has now been adopted elsewhere.

Granular data has helped the city manage — and in some cases, limit — the number of scooters in certain areas, incentivize service in other areas and create designated parking locations for scooters, Llanos said.

"We have some order to the chaos we saw years ago," she said.

A similar data exchange could be created for robotaxis, providing information that helps manage traffic congestion, determine where service is needed and where cars are logging zero-occupant miles.

So far, such data sharing for robotaxis has been a sticking point. San Francisco officials have asked AV companies to share data, including that on some of the traffic blockages and incidents with first responders. But beyond federal reporting requirements on crashes involving automated vehicles, there are no data reporting mandates.

Data could unearth insights on the ripple effects from the deployment of AVs, Tumlin said.

"In a system that's as complex as transportation, the secondary impacts are often greater than the primary," he said.

Whether it's measuring the impact on first responders or understanding the ramifications of slower travel speeds on other road users, Reimer said more examination of how AVs affect the rest of the transportation system is badly needed, particularly in the safety realm.

Such big-picture consideration would dovetail with recent federal efforts to adopt a "safe system approach" to improving transportation instead of focusing on the vehicles themselves.

But AV companies such as Waymo and Cruise talk about vehicle safety. That's the status quo.

"We need to move from the question of 'How do we create vehicles that are safer than the average driver?' to 'How do we create vehicles that enable a safer system?' " Reimer said.

The public and private sectors need to work together to establish a trusted environment to make that happen, he added, but if San Francisco is any indication, "we're not doing that."

In some respects, it may be presumptive to think that San Francisco's experience is representative of robotaxi deployments in other cities.

San Francisco's urban density and hilly topography make its operating design domain something of an outlier, while company-by-company differences in technical competence and operations may also play a role in how AVs roll out elsewhere.

Officials in Arizona recount a smoother experience in metro Phoenix, the only other U.S. market that has seen widespread deployment of driverless vehicles in commercial service. Waymo launched the nation's first commercial driverless service there in December 2018.

The company conducted a "long engagement with the community," said Marisa Walker, a senior executive with the Arizona Commerce Authority. Waymo placed an emphasis on building relationships with first responders, which went beyond teaching them about AVs, she said.

"It was reversed, where Waymo engineers rode with first responders to understand how hectic and challenging that experience is when seconds really matter," Walker said in remarks at an Automated Road Transportation Symposium in July.

How that approach translates into self-driving performance remains open for further study. But in theory, it is the sort of collaborative spirit city officials want as they weigh their appetite for innovation with roadway risks on the self-driving frontier.

"We want to be open to innovation and say yes," Llanos said. "What we also know is we can't do that at the expense of the quality of life in our communities, and certainly not at the expense of public safety."