Waymos Are Now Coming For Your Coveted San Francisco Parking Spots (sfchronicle.com)
- Reference: 0180493983
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/12/31/2232231/waymos-are-now-coming-for-your-coveted-san-francisco-parking-spots
- Source link: https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/waymo-parking-21268658.php
> A long stretch of curb in San Francisco's Mission District might contain a whole menagerie of parked vehicles: hatchbacks, SUVs, dusty pick-ups, chic Teslas. And recently, Waymo robotaxis. That's what Kyle Grochmal saw walking through the northeast Mission District on Monday afternoon. Cutting down York Street, he glimpsed a tell-tale white electric Jaguar in one of the coveted one-hour spots, its sensors spinning. The Waymo sat there for at least 20 minutes, Grochmal said. He whipped out his cell phone and started recording. After the Waymo drove off, another one [1]showed up within an hour and took the same spot .
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> "This is something I started to notice about six months ago," Grochmal said, recalling how disorienting it was to be strolling down a largely deserted sidewalk, and suddenly hear the purring motor and soft click of autonomous vehicle cameras. He'd look up to see a Waymo "just sitting there, not loading anyone." But Waymo's use of public curb space raised questions for Grochmal, who wonders whether San Franciscans are prepared to have their infrastructure dominated by autonomous vehicles. "Say Tesla gets to self-driving, so people have personal AVs," he said. "So then do people from Palo Alto get dropped off in San Francisco and let their cars drive around all day searching for free parking?"
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> Such a future seems particularly unsettling in the northeast Mission, where snug streets couldn't handle much traffic, and competition for parking is already fierce. A recent influx of Artificial Intelligence companies brought many more workers and cars, as well as robotaxis that trawl the blocks, waiting for fares. It makes sense, to Grochmal, that some of them wind up squatting in one-hour spaces. [...] Still, it's conceivable that residents will lose patience with Waymo, and other AV companies, as the fleets scale up and the vehicles compete more aggressively with humans for parking.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/waymo-parking-21268658.php
Cars are bad mmkay (Score:3)
This is something they could be doing better, but automobiles are just inherently problematic. Adding more of them demonstrates the fact. On a rail line that can handle the same number of people, you have lots of room for more cars. The cars are truly awful in every major city. They take up a terrible amount of room and even modern ones produce a lot of pollution.
(We've discussed here in the past that gasoline vehicles produce a lot of unacknowledged PM2.5 and smaller soot which is simply not found by typically used means because the bulk of it is smaller than can conveniently be detected, but I'm having trouble finding the article now due to ongoing enshittification at Google.)
The fact that adding a really frankly small percentage of additional cars can cause so many problems is an indictment against any idea which involves more of them. SF tries to solve its transport problems with buses, but its multitude of narrow and twisting streets designed to wend their way over and through the hills make that impractical for many neighborhoods. The result is that a trip that's 15 minutes by car or an hour on foot can become an hour and a half by non-car public transit because there's no convenient way to get a vehicle that large from point A to point B. I lived in Bernal Heights and worked at the foot of Potrero Hill, and I had to take a bus to get to rail to get to a bus in order to commute by MUNI. But if you ran an elevated PRT line more or less straight there, it would get you there in five minutes or so.
Alas, we let the greediest and most ruthless people run off with the money, so we can't have nice things. We clearly have the technology.
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder what the solution is for SF. I don't think gondolas would work, similar to what was in Rio for the 2016 Olympics, but they are often considered an option in Austin (which does have the land, but as mentioned, the most ruthless people ran off with the money, so nice things can't be had, and it is a matter of won't than can't.). Maybe work on a subway system? There is the idea of small EVs like Smart cars which could be used as taxis... but where they go for parking and charging is a thing. Maybe
Re: (Score:3)
"I don't think gondolas would work"
Flooding the streets *does* seem a little extreme.
Re: Cars are bad mmkay (Score:2)
Funny thing is, San Francisco has the other type of cable car. Oh wait, they did once have the in air kind.
[1]https://m.facebook.com/groups/... [facebook.com]
And apparently someone wants to do it again.
[2]https://ohlonesky.com/ [ohlonesky.com]
[1] https://m.facebook.com/groups/remembered/posts/3317601818441646/
[2] https://ohlonesky.com/
Re: (Score:2)
They have a subway in the places where it's practical, but there are two problems. First, a bunch of SF is on landfill. Second, lots of it is on hills where you can't send the subway. That means the only thing you could really retrofit in would be elevated PRT with some type of steel [1]truss [washington.edu] railway. Elevated PRT is especially interesting because it can share existing rights of way, or be placed where you cannot create one because of the requirements on the ground.
You can't solve the parking problem with a si
[1] https://faculty.washington.edu/jbs/itrans/prt-guideway-design.pdf
Re: (Score:2)
> They have a subway in the places where it's practical, but there are two problems. First, a bunch of SF is on landfill. Second, lots of it is on hills where you can't send the subway.
Sure you can. It's just expensive. After you build a line up to the bottom of the hill, you just need to use a boring machine to extend the line out to an area near the shaft, make a concrete-lined vertical elevator shaft some distance away, and dig out an underground station near the tunnel that connects them. Don't forget to include vertical shafts for utilities. Also consider an additional set of sloping bores for escalators.
Yes, it's way cheaper to build a subway system where you can dig down from t
Re: (Score:2)
> You can't solve the parking problem with a single garage btw, because then you're increasing traffic for the vehicles going to and from it. You'd need a bunch of them in different boroughs, and SF is not really known for having a lot of unused space. The only available land is public park land, and giving that over to a private company for their beta test slightly-self-driving taxis would be offensive.
The issue is that SF needs more parking. Waymo is just the latest reason for people to complain about it. The way you solve it is by either using zoning pressure to force tear-downs to be replaced by parking garages or buying up buildings and tearing them down to build municipal parking garages.
The real problem is that SF thinks it is NYC. They think they can get away with not having cars, despite having almost no usable subway coverage. Getting around SF is miserable no matter how you do it.
Cars don't
Re: (Score:2)
> Cars don't work because a bunch of well-meaning but clearly either incredibly stupid or incredibly lazy politicians have butchered the road system with utterly idiotic ideas like letting pedestrians start crossing before the cars go
The humans in the cars are not more important than the humans in the cars. If the humans go after the cars then you just have people in cars waiting for people not in cars at a different phase of the use of the intersection, it doesn't actually improve anything.
> Fixing parking is a heck of a lot cheaper than fixing any of the alternatives.
If you don't care about the noise, pollution, and use of space from the cars then that must seem true.
Re: (Score:2)
>> Cars don't work because a bunch of well-meaning but clearly either incredibly stupid or incredibly lazy politicians have butchered the road system with utterly idiotic ideas like letting pedestrians start crossing before the cars go
> The humans in the cars are not more important than the humans in the cars. If the humans go after the cars then you just have people in cars waiting for people not in cars at a different phase of the use of the intersection, it doesn't actually improve anything.
Sure it does. You haven't fully thought this through. Traffic flow is all about minimizing latency. Say you have a two-cycle light:
30 seconds in direction A
30 seconds in direction B
A pedestrian crosses the road in cycle A, preventing the traffic in that direction from turning, which prevents the cars behind from going straight. Those cars wait for 30 seconds in direction A, then 30 seconds in direction B. Latency is 60 seconds.
Worse, nothing prevents this from happening two cycles in a row. Latency c
Re: (Score:2)
> I've sometimes had to wait at the same intersection in SF for as many as three cycles in a row because of pedestrians preventing cars from turning right.
That's a problem on the narrowest streets, while the others can and should have turning lanes. But I'd argue that you shouldn't have cars where the streets have to be that narrow to begin with, see below.
> unless you mean the streets themselves, in which case I would point out that streets provide natural light for the buildings. They aren't wasted space. They're a health necessity.
The spaces are, but the streets as they are now aren't. They're only a car necessity. For example, you could have plants in half of that space improving air quality instead of decreasing it, while still leaving a full width lane which could be used to bring in emergency vehicles, and which otherwise functio
Re: (Score:2)
>> I've sometimes had to wait at the same intersection in SF for as many as three cycles in a row because of pedestrians preventing cars from turning right.
> That's a problem on the narrowest streets, while the others can and should have turning lanes. But I'd argue that you shouldn't have cars where the streets have to be that narrow to begin with, see below.
That's probably a third of SF. And before you say "make them one way", that is likely to [1]increase pedestrian deaths [growsf.org].
>> unless you mean the streets themselves, in which case I would point out that streets provide natural light for the buildings. They aren't wasted space. They're a health necessity.
> The spaces are, but the streets as they are now aren't. They're only a car necessity. For example, you could have plants in half of that space improving air quality instead of decreasing it, while still leaving a full width lane which could be used to bring in emergency vehicles, and which otherwise function as paths for cycles and scooters and whatnot.
True. But buses also use those streets. So while you could theoretically do this, you'd have to start by building a proper subway system. The cost of doing so would likely be infeasible. It would probably be orders of magnitude cheaper to build a second-story pedestrian walkway system with stairs and elevators down to the sidewalks in every block. :-)
Additionally, there's the ADA problem.
[1] https://growsf.org/research/2025-05-05-one-way-streets/
Re: (Score:2)
Buses use very few of the narrow streets in SF, and where they do, they're terrible. For example, when the bus leaves Bernal Heights it takes FOR. EVER. winding its way out of there, ugh.
The tight streets of SF are also already inaccessible for the disabled, because of all the homes with narrow tall staircases where there's no room for a stairmaster.
Re: (Score:3)
> SF tries to solve its transport problems with buses, but its multitude of narrow and twisting streets designed to wend their way over and through the hills make that impractical for many neighborhoods.
SF doesn't try very hard. One street over from York Street mentioned in the article is Bryant, which is wide enough for 2 lanes of cars plus two bus lanes if not for the parked cars hogging the street. They should also run the bus at 10 minute or shorter headways during peak travel periods, and run the bus ov
Re: (Score:2)
> They should also run the bus at 10 minute or shorter headways during peak travel periods, and run the bus overnight so people don't get stranded if they miss the last one. Then more people would ride the bus, eliminating the need for so much street parking and reducing traffic congestion for everyone.
Yes, I was just saying something similar in a discussion about public transport in Humboldt, where I now live. In particular, the city (which it officially is, based on the number of residents) I live in now only gets a bus every two hours. Meanwhile, there is an abandoned rail line which could reasonably be restored between here and at least the town past the next city without dramatic expense. (Going farther south would require a substantial bridge project. I haven't surveyed the former line too much furt
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Public transit is great for people
Somewhere between awful and impossible for people with cargo
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> Somewhere between awful and impossible for people with cargo
I envision the ideal size of PRT vehicle about like a shortish minivan. (put the motors on the track bogey, and the battery under the floor.) If you made some of the seats fold up you could get fairly large items into it. There's also no reason you couldn't have lightweight cargo cars delivered by the same network, which might be a better idea overall. If you don't actually eliminate the streets, and instead cut them down to a single lane with a siding in the middle of the block (or more than one for long b
Re: Cars are bad mmkay (Score:1)
If you live anywhere but the urban core, cars are a necessity. I live in a small city and most of my family are in suburbs or the countryside. Living without a car is a non-starter for every one of us. And in order to live in the urban core without a car⦠thousands of cars and trucks must deliver everything to the core.
Congestion Pricing (Score:2)
Is probably going to be the answer, especially as NYC racks up a full year using it to what seems to be success.
Not a real problem (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone who travels to SF frequently, I believe the crux of the "problem" with Waymo in SF are people like this Grochmal dude who, seemingly, reflexively go apesh*t whenever they spot a Waymo doing anything. They're so desperate to find something to complain about. If it wasn't Waymo, they'd be griping about something else, perhaps the introduction of imported bee pollen on their locally-baked whole-grain naturally-fermented wheatgrass bagel with artisan honey.
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SF is a gripe-worthy rich environment. He will be happy as a clam.
How do they pay (Score:2)
> a tell-tale white electric Jaguar in one of the coveted one-hour spots
... to park in one of those one hour spots? Even for only 20 minutes.
Tragedy of the commons strikes again (Score:2, Insightful)
As usual big tech has found a way to maximize its use of the commons to the detriment of others. Anything but surprising. And because, well google, they can optimize like no mere information starved human can. Those thousands of "eyes" constantly scanning the roads know exactly where every parking space in the city is. And waymo can camp on one whenever most convenient for waymo. Waymo can also coordinate with waze and google's branded map app to predict incoming humans needing spaces. They just need to get
Re: (Score:2)
> Those thousands of "eyes" constantly scanning the roads know exactly where every parking space in the city is... They just need to get their car in a space before a human arrives.
That resembles both [1]RealPage-style collusion [slashdot.org] and [2]MonkeyParking's predatory private market for public parking spaces. [wikipedia.org] except the cars are colluding just between themselves and not paying each other any money.
[1] https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/11/25/1827251/realpage-agrees-to-settle-federal-rent-collusion-case
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MonkeyParking
Re:Tragedy of the commons strikes again (Score:4, Interesting)
This issue has already been posted on slashdot. And I will say again, Waymo is missing a trick. They can now monetize those city spaces by offering a parking service. Need a space? Waymo can tell you where one is and hold it for you.
Search for a traffic jam (Score:2)
> and let their cars drive around all day searching for free parking
Or just find the nearest traffic jam, the problem with looking for parking is that if there isn't a space you've got to keep driving. But if you just use whatever traffic information there is to find the most congested bit of the road, you've got "free parking" without needing to park at all.
Re: (Score:3)
And if its a downhill grade, that's even better because you can be in regen-braking the entire time.
Or they can drive to the nearest accident, get in line, and just wait.
Or they can, with an appropriate license, use taxi ranks at LAX, restaurants, and hotels.
What the author missed is that Waymo knows where every parking space is, and which ones are empty. They know when you pulled into a 1-hour space, and with the right integration, they can know when you leave the building and start back to your car.
Denial of service via vehicles (Score:2)
When will the autonomous vehicles congregate and clog up the streets of a particular area of town?
[1]https://www.the-independent.co... [the-independent.com]
Road to nowhere: Prankster sends 50 Waymo driverless taxis to dead-end street in San Francisco
Riley Walz, a young software engineer, announced that he was behind the stunt - Mike Bedigan - Tuesday 14 October 2025 16:06 EDT
"“The plan? At dusk, 50 people went to San Francisco's longest dead-end street and all ordered a Waymo at the same time,” Walz wrote Tuesday on X.
[1] https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/waymo-robotaxi-prank-san-francisco-b2845332.html
Re: Search for a traffic jam (Score:2)
The Waymo parked for 20 minutes, left the spot, and then an hour later another Waymo parked in the same spot... so what?
A car parked for 20 minutes in a one hour parking space... then it left, leaving the spot open for a period of time approaching an hour and another Waymo parked there... again, so what?
Why does a Waymo have lesser parking rights than any other car? The Waymo obeyed the 1 hour limit, and anyone could use the spot before the next Waymo arrived (Waymo's didn't coordinate to monopolize the par
Re: (Score:2)
Imagine Waymo vehicles and a row of 10 1hr streetside parking spaces. If a space becomes available, a Waymo takes it for 55 minutes. At the 55th minute, a Waymo arrives and waits while the parked Waymo vacates the space, it then takes the space for 55 minutes. Now imagine that ever time a non-Waymo car vacates a spot, a Waymo car appears to take it. Once all ten spaces are filled with Waymo cars, every 55 minutes, the lead Waymo leaves, the remaining 9 pull forward one space, and an 11th Waymo takes the 1
Re: Search for a traffic jam (Score:2)
Why would they do that? Taxiâ(TM)s operate on demand. If thereâ(TM)s so little demand in an area for such an extended period of time, the more likely scenario is for Waymo (or whatever robo taxi company) to either send the vehicle to a different location with more current demand, or back to the main hub and power down.