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A Cruise autonomous taxi in San Francisco.

New York
CNN
 — 

San Francisco residents were caught off guard this weekend after Cruise self-driving cars caused a traffic jam, according to social media posts. The obstruction came a few days after California regulators approved robotaxi companies to operate their driverless cars 24/7 throughout the city.

Videos posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, show at least 10 Cruise vehicles not moving with their hazard lights blinking in the city’s North Beach neighborhood, near where the Outside Lands music festival was happening. One account, FriscoLive415, said the incident was a “complete meltdown.”

Witnesses told CNN affiliate KPIX-TV that the driverless cars were blocking intersections Friday evening for about 15 minutes, causing concern that driverless cars could impede emergency vehicles from accessing the area.

Cruise responded on X, writing that the music festival “posed wireless bandwidth constraints causing delayed connectivity to our vehicles.” The company added that it’s “actively investigating and working on solutions to prevent this from happening again.”

“We apologize to those who were impacted,” Cruise said.

Cruise didn’t immediately respond to a CNN request for comment.

The company recently posted on X that its vehicles had surpassed four million driverless miles, and the company is now exceeding one million driverless miles per month.

“They’re deploying hundreds of cars on our streets. They should take a timeout and a pause, until they perfect this technology,” Aaron Peskin, the President of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, told KPIX-TV. He represents North Beach on the board.

Peskin also told the Los Angeles Times that he’s concerned about an emergency if this happens again. “Our houses in North Beach are made of sticks,” he told the newspaper. He added that he’s pursuing “every means” to have the state’s decision reversed and might seek a court injunction.

The incident came a day after the the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which regulates self-driving cars in the state, voted 3-to-1 in favor of Waymo and Cruise expanding their operations. That means residents and visitors to San Francisco will be able to pay a fare to ride in a driverless taxi, ushering in new automated competition to cab and ridehail drivers.

Cruise spokesperson Drew Pusateri previously told CNN that the 24/7 driverless service is a “historic industry milestone” that puts Cruise “in a position to compete with traditional ridehail, and challenge an unsafe, inaccessible transportation status quo.”

Despite the state’s approval, local officials also expressed their dissent.

The San Francisco Police Officers Association, San Francisco Deputy Sheriffs’ Association and the San Francisco Fire Fighters Local 798 all wrote letters to the CPUC expressing concerns that autonomous vehicles could impede emergency responders.

“The time that it takes for an officer or any other public safety employee to try and interact with an autonomous vehicle is frustrating in the best-case scenario, but when they can not comprehend our demands to move to the side of the roadway and are stopped in the middle of the roadway blocking emergency response units, then it rises to another level of danger,” wrote Tracy McCray, President of the San Francisco Police Officers Association, “and that is unacceptable.”

The San Francisco Fire Department has recorded 55 incidents of driverless vehicles interfering with their emergency responses in 2023 as of last week, the department confirmed to CNN.

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A busy night in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood proved too much for Cruise cars on Friday.

Several social media videos showed nearly a dozen robotaxis stopping in the middle of the street or trying to maneuver out of tight spots around Vallejo Street, Grant Avenue, and Columbus Avenue.

Cruise told NBC Bay Area on Saturday that it was suffering from wireless connectivity issues, which caused delays to cars. It added it’s working to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

This traffic jam coincided with San Francisco’s Outside Lands Music Festival which is going on about four miles away at Golden Gate Park.

On the social media platform X on Saturday, Cruise said that a “large festival posed wireless bandwidth constraints causing delayed connectivity to our vehicles.”

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Hi @friscolive415 – A large festival posed wireless bandwidth constraints causing delayed connectivity to our vehicles. We are actively investigating and working on solutions to prevent this from happening again. We apologize to those who were impacted.

— cruise (@Cruise) August 12, 2023

New York resident Valerie Jacobson, who was visiting San Francisco on Friday, says it was a confusing mess.

“As we were walking back to our hotel, there was this huge jam up of about ten cars and I looked and there were no drivers in them,” Jacobson recalled.

“One of them was like pretty much stuck up against one of the sidewalk sheds and trying to maneuver out of it but couldn’t,” she said. “There was also a huge lineup ahead of it. One of them was stopped at the top of the hill for no apparent reason. This had created a huge backlog.”

Witnesses of this incident told NBC Bay Area they noticed the traffic snarl just before 11 p.m. on Friday.

One witness provided this photo to NBC Bay Area of several Cruise robotaxis stalled on Vallejo Street in San Francisco’s North Beach just before 11 p.m. on Friday August 11.

“Other than being an inconvenience, it’s dangerous,” said San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, who said he immediately received complaints from his constituents about the robotaxi jam.

The incident happened the day after the California Public Utilities Commission ruled in a 3-1 vote to allow Cruise and Waymo to expand robotaxi operations in San Francisco and part of San Mateo County 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Cruise is owned by General Motors and Waymo is owned by Alphabet.

“There was just a total meltdown,” said Peskin of the incident Friday, “which shows that San Francisco’s government that petitioned for an incremental approach –that we’re right.”

“These things are not ready for prime time,” Peskin said of the autonomous vehicles.

He also said the notion that wireless issues caused this backup “is scary as heck if you think about the fact that moving these vehicles out of traffic requires cell service.”

Peskin worries about what would happen if a natural disaster, for example, knocked out cell service. He referred to autonomous vehicles as “amazing devices,” but is among the local leaders arguing that “they should not be expanded until the technology has been worked out.” 

Peskin noted that local leaders are pushing at the state and federal levels, calling for more oversight of driverless cars.

In the meantime, he has an ask directly for California’s governor.

“At the end of the day, the five members of California’s Public Utilities Commission are appointed directly by the Governor of the State of California, and I think Gavin Newsom needs to do something about this before somebody gets killed,” Peskin said.

A busy night in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood proved too much for Cruise cars on Friday.

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