SF won’t have power to regulate robotaxis anytime soon

San Francisco and other California cities won’t be getting the power to regulate robotaxis services like Waymo’s anytime soon.

State Sen. Dave Cortese, D-San Jose, pulled from the Assembly’s consideration Senate Bill 915 on Monday. The bill would have allowed the state’s larger cities and their neighbors to limit the number of commercially operated self-driving cars on their roads, set maximum fares for rides offered by them and fine operators for moving violations.

Cortese pulled the bill, which had already passed the state Senate, in the face of staunch industry opposition and after Assembly Transportation Committee staff proposed amendments that would have removed the local control aspects of the legislation.

“They basically gutted the bill,” Cortese told The Examiner on Tuesday. Given that the committee was likely to vote in favor of that stripped down version, he continued, “there wasn’t a path forward.”

Currently, the Department of Motor Vehicles regulates the licensing and operation of autonomous vehicles on California roads and the California Public Utilities Commission regulates the offering of commercial robotaxi services. But neither agency restricts the number of vehicles services can deploy nor sets fares.

By contrast, Cortese’s bill would have given cities and state airports similar control over robotaxi services that they’ve long had over taxis.

As part of a panel discussion Tuesday sponsored by Politico, Assemblymember Lori Wilson, D-Suisun City, who chairs the Transportation Committee, said she was concerned the bill as it passed the Senate was too broad.

Echoing charges made by industry lobbyists, she argued SB 915 would effectively give cities the ability to ban robotaxi services. Imagine, Wilson said, if Suisun City banned robotaxis and people from neighboring Fairfield couldn’t take a ride in one between the two cities.

“That is the type of control that this bill would have given them,” Wilson said. “I didn’t want to see something like that.”

The bill would have only applied to cities with 250,000 or more people and municipalities that border those bigger cities. The largest city in Solano County — where Suisun City and Fairfield are located — is Vallejo, with about 126,000 people.

SB 915 also would have allowed cities to cap the number of such vehicles on their streets so that they didn’t add to congestion. But, as Cortese noted during the panel discussion, the legislation would have explicitly prohibited localities from banning robotaxis entirely.

Industry figures cheered Cortese’s move, which effectively killed the bill. The Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association, which had been actively lobbying against SB 915, had argued that it would allow wide swaths of the state to effectively prohibit robotaxis.

“We are encouraged that SB 915 will not move forward,” Jeff Farrah, CEO of the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association, said in a statement.

Thanks to the bill’s death, California’s will be able to “continue enjoying the benefits of AVs,” Waymo spokeswoman Anjelica Price-Rocha said in a statement.

“We thank the legislature for taking a careful and considerate approach to its review of SB 915,” Price-Rocha said. “Waymo will continue collaborating with regulators and policymakers as we safely and thoughtfully scale our service over time.”

Representatives of Waymo rivals Cruise and Zoox did not respond to requests for comment.

The death of SB 915 comes amid growing concerns about the safety of autonomous vehicles. In recent months, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration has launched investigations into all three of the major robotaxi service developers — Alphabet-owned Waymo , GM-owned Cruise and Amazon-owned Zoox — in the wake of collisions, pedestrian injuries, and reportedly erratic and unsafe driving.

Last week, Waymo recalled 672 of its vehicles over an inability to detect utility poles after one of them reportedly struck such a pole in Phoenix . The recall came four months after Waymo recalled 444 of its vehicles over a problem with its software that made its vehicles more likely to crash with towed vehicles — a move that followed two minor collisions in Arizona involving the company’s self-driving cars , Reuters reported at the time. Around the same time, one of the company’s vehicles hit a bicyclist in San Francisco .

Meanwhile, the CPUC and DMV suspended Cruise’s licenses after one of the company’s cars struck and dragged a pedestrian 20 feet in San Francisco last fall .

Despite such concerns and incidents, the CPUC in March gave Waymo the green light to expand its service outside of San Francisco to the Peninsula and Los Angeles.

In a post on X, Waymo asserted that its latest data indicates its cars are 3.5 times less likely to be involved in an injury-producing crash and two times less likely to be involved in a crash that would be reported to police than human drivers.

Cortese’s primary concern is with safety, he told The Examiner. Without the ability of municipalities to enforce local traffic ordinances and have some kind of control over robotaxis, the types of safety incidents involving autonomous vehicles are only going to get worse, he said. He said worries about a vehicle hitting a kid chasing after a ball because the car either doesn’t identify the kid or can’t even see the child because of the location of its sensors, he said.

Unfortunately, it might take something like that for the Legislature to act, he said.

“That’s when things will change,” Cortese said. “We’re not far off from there now. I pick up the paper everyday expecting to see the next big tragedy.”

Wilson said during the panel discussion that she, too, is concerned about safety. She said she wants to make sure that California has the proper safety regulations in place at the state level, as well as figuring out what the appropriate should be for local governments, she said.

Several other bills are moving through the legislature that would focus on some of the public-safety aspects that were also a part of SB 915, she noted.

“Safety is paramount,” she said. “We have to keep people safe.”