These driverless taxis got 589 parking tickets in San Francisco last year

SAN FRANCISCO – Alphabet’s Waymo autonomous vehicles are programmed to follow the rules of the road as they ferry passengers around the city. They abide by speed limits, use turn signals and delight tourists.

The driverless robots also routinely violate parking rules.

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Waymo vehicles driving themselves received 589 tickets for parking violations in 2024, according to records from San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency. The company initially limited sign-ups for its robotaxi service in the city but made it open to all in June.

The robots incurred $65,065 in fines for violations such as obstructing traffic, disobeying street cleaning restrictions and parking in prohibited areas. According to a data analysis by the San Francisco Standard, nearly 1.2 million parking tickets, worth almost $119 million, were issued throughout the city in 2024.

Waymo vehicles without a driver received an additional 75 tickets in Los Angeles in 2024, with $543 in fines still outstanding, according to records from the Los Angeles Department of Transportation. The company started offering limited commercial service in Los Angeles in April and opened it to everyone in November.

Parking violations are one of the few ways to quantify how often self-driving companies’ vehicles break the rules of the road. Operators have to report any collisions that result in damage, injury or death to the California Department of Motor Vehicles. The DMV maintains a database of consumer complaints, but many incidents are never formally reported.

Some parking violations, such as overstaying in a paid spot, cause inconvenience but do not directly endanger other people. Others increase the risk of crashes, said Michael Brooks, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety.

Anytime a vehicle is obstructing the flow of traffic, other drivers might be forced to brake suddenly or change lanes, he said, creating risks for drivers, pedestrians or other road users.

While self-driving car companies tout that their vehicles don’t drive drunk or impaired, “there are a lot of issues with computer drivers that … could be as dangerous as a drunk or distracted driver,” Brooks said.

Waymo spokesman Ethan Teicher said in an email that safety is the company’s highest priority “both for people who choose to ride with us and with whom we share the streets.”

He added that Waymo’s cars are designed “to take the safest action available during the few minutes we are picking up or dropping off riders, which is when many of these parking citations occurred.”

The vehicles can detect if they’re blocking traffic and recognize appropriate parking spaces, Teicher said, but may pull over in a commercial loading zone to drop off a rider “if the only other available locations are a congested arterial road, or somewhere much further from where the rider needed to go.” The company’s vehicles can also “park briefly” between trips if far away from a Waymo facility.

Waymo is refining its “capability to better avoid parking citations,” Teicher said, adding that the company pays the citations.

Waymo has over 300 vehicles ferrying passengers in San Francisco at all hours, he said. The company’s website says its vehicles had traveled more than 10 million miles in the city as of September.

Finding a safe spot to park in a crowded city isn’t easy for humans or robot cars – and Waymo has acknowledged that its cars are still learning the social norms of the road.

The parking tickets are one of the side effects that have emerged as self-driving cars have becoming normalized in parts of California – and that may spread as Waymo and rival tech companies launch in additional U.S. cities this year. Waymo this month expanded its service to several cities south of San Francisco and also to Austin, in partnership with Uber.

San Francisco transit operators lost 2 hours and 12 minutes of service time in 2024 because of Waymo vehicles blocking or colliding with transit vehicles, according to San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) records. Autonomous vehicles have obstructed firefighters responding to emergency scenes in San Francisco, triggering city officials to ask for tougher oversight from state regulators.

Robot taxis in San Francisco and Los Angeles have been vandalized, a phenomenon that experts have theorized could be related to people’s fears of being replaced by technology. Some passengers, mostly women, have reported pedestrians catcalling them or trying to enter their vehicles.

Finding places to stop isn’t the only part of driving that Waymo vehicles can struggle with. When a Washington Post columnist recently filmed himself attempting to cross a busy street near his home, in the span of a week he documented more than a dozen Waymo cars failing to yield for him at a crosswalk.

Autonomous vehicles in California cannot receive moving violations because such citations have to be issued to a driver. A state law passed last year will allow peace officers, beginning in July 2026, to issue “notices of autonomous vehicle noncompliance” to self-driving car companies when a robot car is seen violating traffic laws. For now, the SFMTA says that it enforces parking rules in the same way for driverless and conventional vehicles.

Sterling Haywood, 45, who’s been a parking control officer with the SFMTA for 17 years, recalls giving a Waymo autonomous vehicle a parking ticket in the city’s Mission District in January. The Waymo was parked in a spot during the hours designated for street cleaning, Haywood said.

“I gave it the same courtesy I would give if there was somebody in the car,” Haywood said in a phone interview. He honked once, he said, then he honked a second time. The car didn’t move, so he placed a $96 ticket on the window.

Right after he wrote the ticket, Haywood said, a passenger hopped in the Waymo and the car drove off.

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