In San Francisco, a fleet of autonomous vehicles “drift languidly through the streets day and night,” annawiener writes. “There is something subaquatic about the vehicles, which seem to travel in small schools.”
The desk where I work in San Francisco overlooks Cesar Chavez Street, a four-lane thoroughfare that starts at the eastern edge of the city, in the Bayview, and runs west at a jag for about three miles. Formerly known as Army Street, it is a largely charmless artery. In recent years, owing to procrastination, distraction, or general malaise, I’ve often found myself staring out at it, idly watching the traffic.
Outside of the Cruise robo-fleet, most of the autonomous vehicles in San Francisco are never entirely autonomous. Instead, they are occupied by contract operators—drivers who sit behind the wheel, toggling between manual and autonomous modes. Pedestrians, cyclists, and fellow-motorists have no way of knowing whether any given vehicle is in self-driving mode. The main tell, of course, is if the vehicle is moving while the person inside has his hands off the wheel.
I came to find the cars symbolically interesting—to wonder what it meant that an idealized transportation model, touted as the future, was one that minimized human interaction. Suppose the fully autonomous future never arrived—then what, or whom, would the cars be for? Earlier this year, Vicethat the San Francisco Police Department was making use of the footage captured by Waymo and Cruise cars.
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