A deadly, multi-car collision in San Francisco on Sunday evening marks the first time in the U.S. that a truly autonomous vehicle, with no one in the driver’s seat, has been involved in a fatal collision, according to federal transportation records.

A self-driving Waymo car, which is not being blamed for the crash, was among six vehicles struck when a fast-moving vehicle slammed into a line of car stopped at a traffic light at the corner of 6^th and Harrison Streets, about a mile south of the city’s famed Union Square.

While the Waymo was empty, a passenger in one of the other struck vehicles and a dog were killed. Several others also suffered injuries, according to the San Francisco Police Department.

“An unoccupied Waymo vehicle operating autonomously was in a line of stand-still traffic when it was struck from behind by a vehicle that was impacted by another vehicle traveling at an extreme rate of speed,” a Waymo spokesperson wrote in a statement.  “The trust and safety of our community remain our top priority, and we are coordinating with local safety officials.”

First responders were on the scene of a multi-vehicle collision involving a Waymo robotaxi Sunday night in San Francisco that killed one person and injured seven, according to the fire department. Alyssa Goard reports.

NHTSA tracks frequency of driverless car collisions, but not who’s at fault

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration requires self-driving car companies, like Waymo, to report each time their vehicles are involved in an accident, regardless of whether the autonomous vehicle was at fault.  According to NHTSA, which began collecting such data in July 2021, Waymo’s driverless vehicles have been involved in about 30 different collisions resulting in some type of injury.  Waymo, however, has noted that nearly all those crashes, like Sunday’s collision, were the fault of other cars driven by humans.  While NHTSA’s crash data doesn’t note whether self-driving vehicles may have been to blame, Waymo has previously noted that it only expects to pay out insurance liability claims for two previous collisions involving its driverless vehicles that resulted in injuries.

In December, Waymo touted the findings of its latest safety analysis, which determined its fleet of driverless cars continue to outperform human drivers across major safety metrics.  The report, authored by Waymo and its partners at the Swiss Reinsurance Company, reviewed insurance claim data to explore how often human drivers and autonomous vehicles are found to be liable in car collisions. According to the study, Waymo’s self-driving vehicles faced about 90% fewer insurance claims relating to property damage and bodily injuries compared to human drivers.

Another self-driving car was also involved in a fatal wreck in 2018

While Sunday’s collision marks the first fatal crash involving a driverless car, it was nearly seven years ago when another autonomous vehicle was involved in a deadly collision with a pedestrian, though that self-driving car had a human safety driver behind the wheel.  The accident, which occurred in March 2018, involved an autonomous car from Uber, which sold off its self-driving division two years later to a competitor.  The car struck and killed a pedestrian who was jaywalking at about 10pm. In a 2019 report issued by the National Transportation Safety Board, investigators cited an “inadequate safety culture” at Uber, and noted “inadequate safety risk assessment procedures, ineffective oversight of vehicle operators, and [a] lack of adequate mechanisms for addressing operators’ automation complacency.” Other contributing factors, according to the NTSB, included drugs being found in the pedestrian’s system and the “failure of the vehicle operator to monitor the driving environment and the operation of the automated driving system because she was visually distracted throughout the trip by her personal cell phone.”

Waymo’s self-driving cars first hit public roadways, without anyone in the driver’s seat, back in 2015. The company’s fleet of autonomous vehicles have traveled more than 33 million miles and have provided more than five million rides across San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Austin.  San Francisco alone is home to about 300 driverless Waymo vehicles, though they’re not all on the road at the same time.

In California, there are more than 30 companies currently permitted by the DMV to test driverless cars on the open road.  While most are still required to have safety drivers sitting in the front seat who can take over when needed, Waymo remains the only fleet of robotaxis in California to move past the state’s testing phase to, now, regularly offer paid rides to passengers.

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Temperatures in parts of the San Francisco Bay Area were expected to drop into the upper 20s to the middle 30s for the second morning in a row Tuesday, triggering a Freeze Warning and Frost Advisory.

The Bay Area office of the National Weather Service issued the warning and advisory shortly before noon.

Similar to what happened in the early hours of Monday morning, weather officials said the Freeze Warning will specifically impact the southern Salinas Valley. The Frost Advisory will cover the North Bay valleys, interior East Bay, the Santa Clara Valley, the eastern Santa Clara Hills, the northern Salinas Valley, the Hollister Valley, interior Monterey and San Benito Counties, and the Santa Lucia range. Both will be in effect from 1 a.m. to 9 a.m. Tuesday morning due to temperatures in the upper 20s to the middle 30s.

The cold temperatures will create “hazardous conditions for unsheltered populations and those without access to adequate heating,” according to the National Weather Service. Residents were advised to protect people, plants, pets and pipes.

The cold weather warning and advisory will take effect just after the ongoing Wind Advisory expires. Offshore winds increased Monday morning, with the North Bay getting the strongest winds. The advisory was issued for the North Bay interior mountains from 4 a.m. Monday through 1 a.m. Tuesday due to northerly winds of 20 to 30 mph with gusts up to 35 to 50 mph. 

Stronger gusts as high as 66 mph at Mt. Helena were measured between Sunday night and Monday morning, with additional high gusts in the East Bay.

Pacific Coast beaches were also seeing long period westerly swells posing moderate to high risk of sneaker waves and an increased risk of rip currents. Through 7 p.m. Monday, a Beach Hazards Statement is in effect in San Francisco, coastal North Bay including Point Reyes National Seashore, San Francisco Peninsula Coast, Northern Monterey Bay, Southern Monterey Bay and Big Sur Coast. 

According to the National Weather Service, dry weather will continue through the week, with a slight warming trend from Tuesday to Friday.

In the days leading up to Daniel Lurie’s swearing-in, political types about town said that, in order to be a successful mayor, he’d have to lead differently than he campaigned. As Mayor Lurie, rather than Candidate Lurie, it would no longer be enough to present broad and vague messaging. A mayor, at some point, has to say not just what they’re going to do but how they’re going to do it. 

Last week saw the introduction of Lurie’s first piece of legislation, which ostensibly aims to combat fentanyl and mental illness on the streets, boost law-enforcement hiring and other laudable goals by speeding up contracting. But, beyond speeding up contracting, there are no specifics about how this plan would actually accomplish its underlying goals. As such, all this plan is missing — is a plan. 

But there’s plenty of stuff in here about stripping away oversights of whatever it is the city chooses to spend money on. It was not until Board President Rafael Mandelman asked for it that the Board of Supervisors was given any say — at all — in the rapid-fire assignment of contracts worth scores of millions of dollars.

What’s that mean? It means that Lurie, who has never before worked in government and, prior to his swearing-in, had never held conventional employment, was calling for no oversight whatsoever for his department heads to enter into an unlimited number of no-bid contracts. You could call Lurie’s ask “audacious” — if you were generously inclined. 

Of note, Mohammed Nuru, Tom Hui, Barbara Garcia and Sheryl Davis were all department heads in San Francisco. And now they aren’t. Nuru, of course, is in prison. It’s a bit mind-boggling that he’s the only one.

So, it’s all a bit on the nose, really: It’s exactly like Lurie’s campaign. Not only is it broad and vague, it’s expensive. The contracts he proposed to be ratified sans oversight could be for up to 10 years and up to $50 million; with this kind of money the city could re-sign Klay Thompson.

As a means of shedding oversight and allowing department heads to expediently enter into good-sized pacts or leases, this legislation is a great plan. It’s ingenious if I understand it correctly. It’s a Swiss watch. But you’d expect it to be: This is what you get when you have an experienced government savant like Ben Rosenfield on your mayoral transition team. 

Rosenfield is great at what he does, but — and this is important — it wasn’t his job to specify where the money should go or, more fundamentally, where it’s going to come from. Yes, there are waivers in here that would allow Lurie et al. to privately fundraise, but that’s not likely to cover more than a sliver of the money needed to rapidly expand shelter beds, treat street drug-users or any of the other goals herein. San Francisco’s deficit is hovering a shade under $1 billion and, guess what? Donald Trump is getting sworn in today and could stiff San Francisco or claw back some $415 million in reimbursements for FEMA money that we’ve already spent.

Government-watchers with long institutional memories have told us that they can’t think of a precedent for a mayor to ask for significant new powers, as Lurie has done, without offering any specifics on what they will be used for. 

But here’s the thing: They’ll be granted. It’s likely that Lurie will essentially get what he wants.

We’ll have to wait and see if the board, or anyone else, asks about the scant details that we do know. Thus far, they’ve brought about more questions than answers. 

Bolstering law-enforcement hiring is a goal of the mayor’s legislation, but it’s not immediately clear what private fund-raising or no-bid contracting could do about that. It’s not as if the beaver fur top hat will be passed among the city’s wealthy elites to supplement cops’ salaries. The more intuitive steps would be outsourcing background checks or the hiring of recruiters — but the city already does this. In recent years, in fact, the city has done an awful lot and put significant resources into recruitment and retention. And yet, here we are: San Francisco has not quite 1,600 sworn officers and the most recent academy class graduated 11 officers of an initial 45 recruits — an alarming 75 percent attrition rate 

(It warrants mentioning that the city’s crime rates are at near-historic lows. Also, accidental overdose death numbers are at a five-year low. But it seems nobody’s in the mood to hear about this.). 

Lurie also wandered off the map when he last week told reporters that San Francisco could “add beds” to General Hospital — which left actual medical professionals at General Hospital gobsmacked. In fact, the Department of Public Health has already submitted half a dozen applications to get up to $140 million in state money for behavioral health beds. But adding these 180-odd beds — at half a dozen or more sites citywide, not just at the General — would require mounting significant procedural, logistical and political hurdles. And, also, it would require that money, from the state. That’s coming on the state’s dime and on the state’s time — that is, not fast. 

These are all major challenges, which is why Lurie’s job is majorly challenging. Yet, barring unforeseen lunacy, his initial legislation will pass. And now all that remains is saying what he wants to do. And how he intends to do it. 

Following pushback, there is now a provision in here that the board has 45 days to review a potential contract and vote it up or down. Without that, the board had zero input. So the supes hve that going for them. Which is nice.

Truth be told, the board, which must approve city contracts of $10 million or more, does not spike all that many of them — or, for that matter, reject all that many mayoral appointments. But the oversight provision, in and of itself, can serve as a deterrent for corruption or ineptitude. Put another way: Does anyone think it’s a grand idea for the city to begin rapidly spending lots and lots of money while specifically telling all parties ahead of time that nobody is going to be doing any front-end oversight? Hopefully nobody who reads the news would say that. 

So that’s kind of a big deal — and to cast that obligation to the wind would’ve been a wholesale abdication of the board’s responsibilities. Expect more pushback, starting at the Budget Committee. Expect board members to call for reductions in the 10 years and $50 million limits for the no-bid contracts. 

But nobody is going to try to derail this. Nobody wants to open up the board to charges of obstructionism.

That seems wise, at least politically. With 45 days to review a contract, anything egregious ought to be bird-dogged by the supervisors. Concerns about abandoning competitive bidding are somewhat mitigated by the fact that the sorts of outfits that can minister to drug-users or oversee shelter beds are not great in number — and, more likely than not, are already here and already have city contracts. No one is pushing to bring Halliburton in to do this work.  

The Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, meanwhile, already has license from the Board of Supervisors to ignore competitive bidding requirements on contracts regarding homeless services (A cynic would note “and here we are.”). Lurie’s legislation would expand that ability to other departments. 

When all is said and done, the board will retain one of its core raisons d’être. If time and money limits are reduced, its members can claim they mitigated the potential damage if and when things go sideways. And Lurie can claim the political win after the board passes what he and his people continue to — unfortunately — refer to as a “state of emergency” ordinance.

But is this going to actually help solve the problems? Will this make things better? Those do seem to be the $50 million questions.