Residents say Waymo robotaxis are driving them mad

CNN

3 hours ago

It's nearing midnight as the young man scurries through a dark alley. He wears a mask and overalls and is armed with a roll of duct tape. As he nears his target – a driverless robot taxi – he tears off some tape to disable the futuristic car's sensors.
'We just want the Waymos to stop beeping at night,' he says. 'They're really disturbing us. They're disturbing our neighbors.'
The man and others call themselves 'stackers,' and most nights you'll find them, faces masked from security cameras, on a mission. They stand in the way of robotaxis, so the cars are forced to line up in a stack in an alley and can't access two charging lots near downtown Santa Monica that Waymo opened in January, with little fanfare and apparently zero prior public awareness. 'We'll try lasering the next one,' one stacker says to another. 'We're just running some routine experiments to see what it takes to properly stack a Waymo.'
Waymo — owned by Google's parent company Alphabet — now has about 300 robotaxis roaming the streets of Los Angeles County. They've become very popular with riders, but very unpopular with some residents who say human beings are kept awake at night by the robots' honking, flashing lights and back-up beeps, as well as the general hubbub generated by the robots' human attendants, who plug them in to charge and vacuum them between rides.
'When they began operating the lots, it was by complete surprise and all of us stopped sleeping,' says the original stacker, who goes by the handle Stacker One. He asked us not to use his real name. 'Beep, beep, beep all night long,' says Stacker One, who says he now hears the back-up noises in his head even when he's far away from his Santa Monica home. 'Like some of the other neighbors reported, I've had like phantom beeps during my drowsy days.'
Waymo has tried, and so far failed, to get a restraining order against Stacker One. The stacking continues.
Santa Monica officials say the back-up beeping isn't loud enough to violate the city's noise ordinance. But Stacker One points to another local law saying there can be no 'business support operations' between the hours of 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. within 100 feet of a residence. 'And there's no mention of an exception that says if you get a robot to yell for you, you're allowed to do that at night,' he says.
In the face of complaints, Waymo says it has bought quieter vacuums for the humans who clean the robotaxis, limited the speed they drive in the alleys to 10 mph and limited the late-night use of the lot that was drawing the most complaints. The company has also planted some bamboo, hoping to muffle the noise of both the robotaxis and their human attendants.
'We strive to be good neighbors,' a Waymo spokesperson told CNN. 'We are in ongoing conversation with the city's Department of Transportation and are actively working with the agency as we explore and implement mitigations that address neighbors' concerns.' But the lots continue to operate, and the robots continue to beep when they back up.
'They've not done enough,' says Nancy Taylor, a long-time local who likens the nighttime disturbance to a Las Vegas light show. 'In fact, last night it was worse.' She now sleeps with a white noise machine, and behind newly installed blackout drapes.
This Waymo war in Santa Monica is an example of how humans are still trying to figure out how to live alongside and legislate technology in this nascent age of artificial intelligence.
The first issue: who regulates what when it comes to new, revolutionary inventions like motor vehicles that aren't driven by humans?
A spokesperson for Santa Monica told me: 'The city has no jurisdiction to regulate Waymo's operations, as autonomous vehicle/robotaxi services are exclusively permitted in California by the California Public Utilities Commission and the Department of Motor Vehicles.' The Public Utilities Commission say they only handle passenger safety. And the DMV referred us back to Waymo and local law enforcement.
The back-up beeping is the main issue for people who live around the lots in Santa Monica. And that is a stipulation of federal law: all autonomous electric vehicles — just like large delivery trucks — must beep when they're backing up for the safety of the pedestrians around them. One exasperated and under-slept local questioned the need: pointing out that robots can see just as clearly when they're going backwards as forwards, that they're not piloted by a human straining to look over their shoulder, and they're programmed not to hit any human who might walk in their way.
With driverless cars spreading across the nation, some laws will need to be tweaked. In New York State, for example, the law says a driver must have at least one hand on the steering wheel at all times. An AI algorithm, of course, doesn't have a hand.
As we were wrapping up chatting to Stacker One on a recent sunny afternoon in Santa Monica, we saw Waymos gathering, gridlocked around the gate of the already overflowing charging lot. A Santa Monica Police Department parking enforcement officer was frantically printing out parking tickets and slipping them under the robots' windshield wipers. The offence: parked in an alley without a driver behind the wheel. If there were human drivers inside, she couldn't give the cars a parking ticket. She can give them to robots.
But a parking ticket is, right now, the only ticket a cop can give to a Waymo. Robots, under current California law, can't get traffic tickets. State legislators are currently mulling a bill that would, among other things, 'Require the individual car violating the law to be assessed fines and points in the same manner as a human driver.' But would a $300 ticket be as strong a disincentive to a corporation that owns a robot as it is to a human driver who is paying out of their own, much smaller pocket?
'The solution is to treat these cars like they're cars,' says Grayson Small, a musician who lives on an alley that leads to the Waymo lots. He's too far away to be bothered by the noise but worries about safety. 'You can watch it even now,' he said, pointing to a Waymo inching into a crosswalk. 'It didn't stop at all at the stop sign! It's rolling!'
Helping policymakers and the public understand the challenges that are coming is the job of Hamid Ekbia, director of the Autonomous Systems Policy Institute and a professor at Syracuse University. 'The public should be involved in conversations before the fact, before these technologies are let loose,' he says. 'All AI technologies should go through this process.'
Residents say public consultation has not happened. At least not in Santa Monica, at least not regarding Waymo. 'I asked if I could come to their city council meeting to ask questions,' Taylor tells CNN. 'They said, 'Oh they have a waiver, there's not going to be a city council meeting.'' And there wasn't.
'Many of us have also appealed to each relevant department of the city,' says Stacker One. 'We didn't immediately engage in protests, constitutionally protected activity. That was not our first step.'
Ekbia worries that other new AI technologies are not visible, so the public can't stand in front of them to protest.
'This is just the tip of the iceberg,' he says of the Waymo standoffs. 'People could react, respond, because they can see it, and they can hear it. There are going to be systems where the effects, the impacts are not going to be visible. So we better do something before it's too late. Even if it is at the expense of slowing things down. You know, what's the rush?'
'People need to care about people,' says Stacker One. 'Government works for the people … and not for something else.'
Small, the musician, says: 'Doing things that we've never been able to do in the past is great.' However, he's anxious he'll get run over by a robot when taking his trash out to the alley. 'But if it comes at the expense of humanity and human happiness and joy and being able to live life and not being inconvenienced constantly: what's the point?'