San Franciscans disable robotaxis by placing a traffic cone on the hood
This wasn’t organic. It was organized by a tiny group of activists looking for an anti-tech flashpoint.<p>It’s a hoax. A fiction. An attempt to portray widespread safety concerns among the populace that do not exist.<p>Here’s the local context.<p>There’s a hearing coming up at the board the state of California appointed regarding expansion of the robotaxis.<p>Alongside that vote, the city’s quality of operation has noticeably deteriorated. Encampments are more common, drug intoxication to the point of collapse and physical decay is highly visible. Robberies have become commonplace.<p>These effects are now beyond the point where they be explained by pointing at flat trend data, or as a temporary effect of more severe pandemic measures.<p>A number of local politicians have been facing significant heat over this dysfunction.<p>National and international media publications have begun to distrust local publications for papering over issues and have amplified that pressure.<p>At that point, those SF politicians began a sudden unified push attacking self-driving cars. Self-driving cars have recently become more reliable than manually driven taxis in SF in terms of accidents per miles driven.<p>The attacks escalated to the point that false data was submitted against robotaxis to the California board, mischaracterizing accidents where another driver impacted the self-driven car while stopped. That falsehood was later discovered.<p>When those same people began promoting this “night of the cone” meme, the origin was obvious to even the most casual observer.<p>Robotaxis have been up and operating for some time. The city is in trouble and it needs the revenue innovation brings.<p>We need to stop playing games.