{"id":70210,"date":"2025-11-26T04:37:57","date_gmt":"2025-11-26T04:37:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/70210\/"},"modified":"2025-11-26T04:37:57","modified_gmt":"2025-11-26T04:37:57","slug":"how-san-francisco-became-waymo-pilled","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/70210\/","title":{"rendered":"How San Francisco became Waymo-pilled"},"content":{"rendered":"

It wasn\u2019t long ago that San Franciscans were at war with robotaxis. Fed up with the autonomous vehicles interfering with emergency responders and causing mile-long traffic jams, activists figured out a way to immobilize the machines by placing traffic cones<\/a> on their hoods.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But two years later, the vibe has shifted. San Francisco has fallen in love (opens in new tab)<\/a> with Waymo, and the robotaxi\u2019s signature silhouette has become a regular part of city life.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Public support for autonomous vehicles in San Francisco has surged, a new poll from the tech-backed, moderate-leaning political group GrowSF shows. Two-thirds of voters said they support allowing fully autonomous vehicles to operate in San Francisco. It\u2019s a significant increase from 2023, when fewer than half agreed with the sentiment.<\/p>\n

Sachin Agarwal, director of GrowSF, said the 2023 poll was intended to gauge baseline attitudes around autonomous vehicles at a time when few people had experienced the technology firsthand. GrowSF commissioned this year\u2019s poll to understand how Waymo\u2019s widespread adoption since its public launch last summer has changed attitudes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were astounded to see such a huge shift,\u201d Agarwal said. \u201cAutonomous vehicles are the future, they\u2019re here to stay, and what this research indicates is that once people experience them, they welcome this innovative technology with open arms.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Waymo superfan Alex Masmej said he rarely uses Uber. Since 2023, he\u2019s taken more than 600 Waymo rides. | Source: Amanda Andrade-Rhoades\/The Standard<\/p>\n

When asked about their reasons for supporting autonomous vehicles, 30% of those polled said driverless cars are safer than human drivers, and 16% said they\u2019re safer than ride share. Others mentioned that they\u2019re dependable, convenient, and \u201cthe way of the future.\u201d Opposition to autonomous vehicles is on the decline, the poll showed: In 2023, more than 50% of voters opposed driverless cars; now, it\u2019s 29%.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The poll, conducted in July by Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates, had more than 800 respondents.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Billy Riggs, director of the Autonomous Vehicles and the City Initiative at the University of San Francisco, said that once people experience sophisticated autonomy, \u201cthere is rapid, exponential adoption.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat our research shows is that there\u2019s a really quick comfort factor once people take that first ride and experience how safe the technology is,\u201d Riggs said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Waymo this year released peer-reviewed research (opens in new tab)<\/a> showing that its fleet is dramatically better than human drivers at avoiding a wide range of collisions on public roads. Based on six years of data and 56 million miles travelled by Waymo\u2019s vehicles, the study found that the self-driving cars experienced 82% fewer crashes with bikers and motorcyclists, and 92% fewer crashes with pedestrians, than human drivers.<\/p>\n

As of June, Waymo had driven nearly 30 million miles (opens in new tab)<\/a> in San Francisco. Parents are using the service as a robot chauffeur<\/a> for their kids, and some robotaxi addicts<\/a> have all but abandoned Uber and Lyft \u2014 barring long Waymo wait times or trips to the airport. But even those exceptions may soon disappear: More autonomous options are coming to the Bay Area, and Waymo last month secured a permit to operate at SFO<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Tesla\u2019s semi-autonomous robotaxi service has a waitlist<\/a> and, for now, a safety driver in the front seat but operates on Bay Area bridges and all the way from Marin to San Jose. Amazon-owned Zoox is expected to launch a commercial robotaxi service in 2026.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It wasn\u2019t long ago that San Franciscans were at war with robotaxis. Fed up with the autonomous vehicles…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":70211,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[41358,5989,101,103,102,104,106,105,1090,5987],"class_list":{"0":"post-70210","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-francisco","8":"tag-growsf","9":"tag-robotaxis","10":"tag-san-francisco","11":"tag-san-francisco-headlines","12":"tag-san-francisco-news","13":"tag-sf","14":"tag-sf-headlines","15":"tag-sf-news","16":"tag-tesla","17":"tag-waymo"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70210"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70210\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}