Cruise needs control

West Campus reached soaring new heights on Sept. 17: The traffic got even worse. After the Texas Longhorns football game, droves of cars flooded the narrow streets of West Campus, only to be trapped in a jam of epic proportions near the intersection of San Gabriel and 23rd streets. Instead of confused and frustrated young drivers blocking the roads, the real offenders were 20 self-driving robotaxis that had simultaneously stopped. 

The scene had been caught on camera by West Campus residents, generating buzz on TikTok. One video, posted by the Real Housewives of Austin profile, shows a line of self-driving cars stopped by two self-driving cars frozen in the middle of the intersection, barely a foot away from colliding. A cacophony of blaring horns and embittered shouts fills the background. The video’s caption reads: “This is getting [out] of hand.” And it certainly is. 

These vehicles — identified by the red stripes on their sides — come from the company Cruise, which announced at SXSW on March 14 its plans to debut a driverless robotaxi service in Austin this summer alongside its parent company, Waymo. Cruise is currently in the testing phase and chose to use Austin’s streets as a research playground.  

Since July, 19 complaints and counting from Austin residents filed against Cruise surged into the email inboxes of City Council staff members. The community expressed fears that these vehicles have not been tested enough and that the city does not have enough infrastructure to keep people safe on the roads. One claims that they saw a robotaxi behaving erratically with “no appropriate reasoning.” Austin must start issuing citations and commercial limitations on Cruise cars until they are verified safe.

After the gridlock in West Campus, Cruise issued an emailed statement saying it was aware of the incident and that they “were able to address it and all vehicles departed the area autonomously.” But, there was no mention of what caused their automated vehicles (AVs) to stop. 

The anonymous group Safe Street Rebel in San Francisco has been protesting the testing of Cruise self-driving taxis in that city by placing traffic cones over the  AVs  hood, which prevents them from moving. The group has cataloged numerous incidents involving robotaxis: they have run red lights, rear-ended a bus, blocked crosswalks and one tragic accident involved a Waymo car killing a dog.

Neither Cruise nor Waymo have released any responses about why their cars can be rendered inoperable so easily or how they plan to fix these issues. People cannot confidently order a robotaxi if these companies have a history of being aware of their faults while failing to be transparent. 

“Anything that we do differently than humans is being sensationalized,” Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt proclaimed in a Sept. 7 interview with the Washington Post. But, the differences AVs have compared to humans are exactly the root of the issue. 

Cruise cars are equipped with sensors that can see 360 degrees and hundreds of feet ahead, and this information is interpreted to create instructions which are sent to the steering wheel. But, sensors are not the same as human eyes. Drivers signal their peers on the road through their dashboards with gestures and eye contact. A simple sensor can’t detect and adapt to these nuances. Accidents are imminent if something impedes these sensors or sudden unexpected activity occurs on the road.

Cruise claimed at SXSW that its AVs get into 73% fewer crashes with “meaningful risks of injury” than traditional vehicles. But the data proves otherwise. In fact, since Cruise arrived in San Francisco, the injury crash rate for robotaxis has increased to 6.3 times the national average, according to a document from the Public Utilities Commission of the State of California released on May 31. 

Currently, the City of Austin cannot take specific action targeting AVs due to a section of the Texas Transportation Code that impedes state agencies from regulating traditional vehicles or automated driving systems. However, cities hold the constitutional power to control the local rules of the road. Austin needs to incite change at a smaller level by monitoring local roads and enforcing citations on Cruise, forcing them to take some form of accountability for their testing failures. 

Robots can’t be issued traffic tickets. If AVs break local traffic laws, Austin can consider the vehicle’s owner to be the operator, a spokesperson for Austin Transportation and Public Works told Axios in August, but the city is not doing that. Cruise needs to have their free pass from consequences revoked quickly before their testing takes a life. 

This article was submitted as an assignment for the Reporting Capstone course at the University of Texas at Austin taught by professor Kevin Robbins.