Waymo's Parking Predicament: Nearly 600 Tickets in SF. Oops!

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Waymo, the AI-powered ride-hailing service headquartered in Traitors’ Alley, aka Silicon Valley, thinks it can embrace the future by sending over 300 driverless vehicles to whisk passengers around San Francisco. However, it seems their autonomous bots are great at navigating the roads but abysmal when it comes to parking etiquette.
According to official city records reported by the Washington Post, these shiny, rolling disco balls of tech received a staggering 589 parking tickets last year. Overall, they managed to rack up fines amounting to a nauseating $65,065, primarily for the classic San Francisco offenses: blocking traffic, ignoring street-cleaning restrictions, and attempting to park where no parking should ever happen. Clearly, these cars have taken the mantra of “move fast and break things” a tad too literally.
Let’s give Waymo some credit: scoring a parking ticket in San Francisco is practically a rite of passage. Last year alone, the city sent out around 1.2 million tickets, according to the San Francisco Standard. If you’re not getting ticketed, are you even trying?
A Waymo spokesperson assures the masses that they’re actively working on tackling this issue, but we’re just going to name it: this probably won’t go away until every last one of us human drivers fades into the sunset. In their defense, the Waymo fleet sometimes has no choice but to drop off riders in cramped commercial loading zones, as these poor autonomous beings have to navigate congested streets or find a spot that’s less than a mile away from their designated pit stop.
And don’t forget about those brief “parking” moments between rides if they’re too far from a Waymo facility. Newsflash: humans do this too! But we doubt there’s a human driver that’s ever received more than a couple of pesky tickets amidst all the congestion.
As cool as it is to ride around in a driverless car, let’s be real: Waymo’s issues aren’t going away anytime soon. Until our robot overlords learn to park, expect those parking bailiffs to stay busy. The future might be driverless, but that doesn’t mean it’s ticket-free.
AUTHOR: mpp
SOURCE: TechCrunch