Thread by @gmarkoff

Figured it's time to tell my Unsafe Waymo story. I took this photo of a Waymo stuck facing oncoming traffic on the wrong side of the street. I took in a couple weeks ago on 17th Street in San Francisco, just east of Valencia. Follow below for what happened... 🧵 1/7

https://twitter.com/DavidZipper/status/1664683301435473925

I was driving east on 17th, getting backed up in the usual weekday morning traffic trying to cross Mission. As you can see (ironically) on Google Maps, 17th is a narrow, busy street, one lane each way, with unprotected bike lanes and parallel parking. 2/

Traffic was backed up as usual. A Waymo was directly in front of me, with a white box truck in front of it. The truck wasn't pulled over and didn't have blinkers on, it was just driving. I was far enough back that I could see that traffic backed up all the way to the light. 3/

The unmanned Waymo was directly behind the truck, where no camera, laser, or human eyeball could possibly see around it. Despite this blindness, the Waymo suddenly accelerated fast from a dead stop and swerved around the truck **into the oncoming travel lane** 4/

If a car had been coming the other way, it would have been a head-on collision. No one could have seen the Waymo before it ambushed them because it was hiding behind the truck! Thankfully, the oncoming traffic was far enough away to avoid a collision. 5/

The Waymo, clearly realizing its error and that it couldn't pass the truck (due to the line of cars ahead of it) just stopped dead. The last I saw of it as I moved forward in traffic was it sitting stuck on the wrong side of the street, serving as a goddamn roadblock. 6/

Waymo, Cruise, and the rest are endangering our people with unsafe robots that do things no driver would. And why? What do we gain from having 100s of these things clogging our streets? Nothing. It's time for a ban. Let's change state law and get these things off our streets 7/7