Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

Posted by rwoll 12/21/2025

Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams(missionlocal.org)

319 points | 456 commentspage 2

markdown 12/22/2025|

I don't understand why everyone is talking about the cars when the bigger issue is why the critical infrastructure (lights) don't have batteries for backup.

NetMageSCW 12/22/2025|

Because that would be prohibitively expensive (possibly even after the arrival of LED bulbs).

ChrisArchitect 12/21/2025||

More discussion:

PG&E outages in S.F. leave 130k without electricity

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46342022

scoofy 12/21/2025||

I live in SF in an area that was affected by the blackout. I saw four different Waymos stopped. Three were in the middle of the street. One was along the curb.

My personal opinion. With number of cars I saw flying through blacked out intersection -- major intersections -- I'm very happy that Waymo had a fail safe protocol for such a "white swan"-style event (that is extremely rare, but known-to-happen event).

I saw a damn Muni bus blow through an minor intersection, and was just shaking my head. So many dumbasses behind the wheel, it's miracle no one was killed, and everyone seems to be concerned with "the flow of traffic."

jeffbee 12/21/2025||

Pretty much no aspect of this event was "extremely rare". PG&E spends the whole year smoking $100 bills and laughing their assess off, then as soon as it rains even a little bit their junk explodes and they pretend they could not have foreseen water existing on Earth. This is not even the first, or second time that this specific substation has burned in living memory. It already burned in 1996 and 2003.

scoofy 12/21/2025|||

I'm not going to have a semantic argument with you, but I'd consider anything rarer than "a few hours per year" as an "extremely rare event" for the purposes of training autonomous vehicles.

jeffbee 12/21/2025||

OK well let's argue about the semantics of "autonomous" instead. To me, it means the vehicle's on-board systems should generalize to safe and non-disruptive behaviors under all circumstances. In this instance they should have been able to either navigate to a depot or at least pull off the road.

scoofy 12/21/2025||

I think that’s a perfectly reasonable standard for a normal operating environment.

In emergencies I think “safe” is preferable to “non-disruptive.”

NetMageSCW 12/22/2025|||

Every 20 years seems extremely rare to me.

TZubiri 12/22/2025||

"But think of the thousands that will run late!"

necovek 12/22/2025||

Most intersections I've seen in Serbia cities like Belgrade have "preferential" roads even if they are equally loaded and similarly sized: so, one direction will have either "stop" or "yield" signs, and another will not. Everyone slows down because you don't see the stop/yield sign for the orthogonal streets until you come closer to the intersection.

Perhaps we are just more used to traffic lights being off/broken (and we are, as this is, anecdotally, more like a weekly occurrence at some point during your trip to work, for instance)?

watermelon0 12/22/2025|

Priority road sign (yellow diamond) is generally used throughout Europe.

shuckles 12/21/2025||

Waymo's performance in this outage was horrible. 6 hours into the blackout there were still many intersections where a Waymo was blocking traffic, unable to navigate out of the way. This should never happen again.

joshribakoff 12/21/2025||

This was very annoying, and made things feel unsafe. Having vehicles stopped blocking visibility when there is no light. Its bad enough we tolerate them stopping and waiting for a pickup and blocking lanes under normal conditions. I had a hard time seeing if there are pedestrians when they’re literally in the cross walk stopped.

uqual 12/21/2025||

Interestingly in one of the videos online there are several (five I think) Waymos blocking the right two lanes entering the intersection (along with a few others around the other parts of the intersection). While its hazards are still blinking, one of these vehicles moves forward (admittedly just a few feet).

Is this a violation of the California Vehicle Code? Generally it seems to disallow non-emergency vehicles from traveling with blinking lights except for turn signals (and brake lights responding to a braking action).

aag 12/22/2025|

There are situations where it is allowed:

https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/vehicle-code/veh-sect-25251/

The_President 12/25/2025||

Current driving model realism could be greatly improved with a few real world training styles to consider in order to offset the Austin Left Lane Hippie driver model:

- New Orleans taxi cab driver

- Houston gang banger

- Los Angeles traffic weaver

and most importantly,

- Saudi Arabia Toyota Camry driver and 360 drift hobbiest (with bonus 2 wheel tire change)

cindyllm 12/25/2025|

[dead]

alexweberk 12/22/2025||

Waymo aside, it's sad to hear that some parts of the world still have blackouts. Which third-world country does "SF" belong to?

dyauspitr 12/22/2025|

Not texas, that’s for sure.

chopete3 12/21/2025|

To get permit to operate in cities, Do these companies submit the list of edge-cases they handle?

Each city will have its own nuances.

Why don't the regulators publish the list?

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