In July The Safe Street Rebels started the Week of Cone pranks (which went viral on TikTok and Twitter). TechCrunch called it “attempt to raise awareness and invite more angry San Franciscans to submit public comments” to regulatory agencies.
But NPR sees a broader context:
The cone-shaped driverless cars fit into a long history of protests against the tech industry’s impact on San Francisco. Over the years, activists have blocks Google’s private city buses from gathering employees in the city. And when scooter companies flooded the sidewalks with electric scooters, people did threw them into San Francisco Bay. “Then there was the burning of Lime scooters in front of a Google bus,” said Manisa Maharawal, an assistant professor at American University who is study these protests.
She points out that when tech companies test their products in the city, residents don’t have much of a say in making those decisions: “There are different iterations of it where it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, let’s try this again in San Francisco,’ with very little input from everyone who lives here…” Waymo already drives in Phoenix and tests with human safety drivers in Los Angeles and Austin. And Cruise offers rides in Phoenix and Austin and tests in Dallas, Houston, Miami, Nashville and Charlotte .
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Safe Street Rebel members continue to go out at night and stalk vehicles one cone at a time.
Apparently they are cycling activists, judging from their website, advocating for “car-free spaces, transit equity, and the end of car dominance.” (“We regularly protest the ill-advised reopening of the upper major freeway to cars from the city, slowing traffic to show how unnecessary that road is.”) Their long-term goal is to expand the group “to the point where we can make a city, where people can safely walk, cycle and use public transport, not a car-dominated city…”
The last half century has been a failed experiment in car dominance. They are bankrupting our cities, ruining our environment and forcing working people to sacrifice an unacceptable amount of their income to pay for basic transpiration. It’s time to end our dependence on cars and reimagine our streets around public transport, walking and cycling.
Their demands include unredacted data from self-driving car companies on safety-related incidents (and a better reporting system) — plus a mechanism to actually cite the robotics for traffic violations. But they also express concerns about surveillance, noting the possibility of a “city-wide, mobile network that monitors and analyzes everything.”
Their webpage says they also want to see studies on the pollution impact of self-driving cars – and whether AVs will augment the car use. They support the concerns of the San Francisco Taxi Workers Alliance about the possibility of job losses and increased congestion.
And they cause another concern:
Their cars are not wheelchair accessible and do not stop at the curb. Profit-driven companies view accessibility as an afterthought. Without implementation, their promises for the future will likely never materialize. Paratransit and transit are accountable to the public, but Cruise and Waymo are accountable only to shareholders.
But their list of concerns is followed by a comprehensive list of 266 robotics incidents documented with links to news articles and social media reports. (“Cars have I’m going through a red light, hit a bus from behind and blocked crosswalks and bike lanes,” NPR reported. “In one incident, dozens of cars were involved gathered in a residential cul-de-sac, clogging the street. In another, Waymo ran over and killed a dog.”)
The NPR article adds one final note. “Neither Cruise nor Waymo answered questions about why cars could be blocked by cones.”
Thanks to a Slashdot reader Tony Isaac to share the news.
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