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Long-time Palo Alto resident Ben Baum rose like normal before sunrise on Saturday morning, coffee in hand, as he worked from his home office in south Palo Alto. He then watched from the window as one driverless Waymo drove by outside on South Court; then a second, and a third.
In total, Baum counted about 50 passes by a Waymo vehicle from his house in the course of about an hour.
The unusually high Waymo activity continued throughout the weekend. Sometimes, the Waymos would come in groups of up to seven or eight cars, forming a line like a military convoy, Baum said. His teenage son snapped a photo of three consecutive Waymo vehicles on their residential street in the St. Claire Gardens neighborhood, and Baum said five additional Waymos had just turned right on El Verano Avenue, out of frame of the photo.
The Waymos continued to drive around the neighborhood when Baum went to bed late night Saturday. When he woke up Sunday morning, the Waymos were continuing to circle as if his neighborhood were a race track.
“I’m seeing them crisscross, they’re coming by in both directions,” Baum said in an interview. “Like 80% or 90% of all the car traffic is Waymos. And I’m like, this is weird. It’s every two or three minutes.”
The activity in Baum’s neighborhood comes just after Waymo announced last week that it expanded service to the entire Peninsula, from San Francisco to San Jose and along highways. For now, the expanded access in Silicon Valley is only available to select customers, but a Waymo spokesperson said the company will increase rider access to the full territory over the coming weeks until it becomes available to anyone.
For Baum, the spike in Waymo activity over the weekend was a major nuisance, substantially increasing traffic on a quiet residential street. He also saw it as a safety issue. While he believes the Waymos were abiding by the 25 mile-per-hour speed limit, Baum said that limit is already too fast for a narrow neighborhood street with pets, bikers, elementary school kids, and elderly people, not to mention human drivers who may not be expecting the increased traffic.
For months, Waymos had roamed the quiet residential streets of Baum’s South Palo Alto neighborhood. Baum, who is self-employed and has lived in the neighborhood with his wife and two teenage children for 14 years, serves as the block’s safety coordinator. He manages an email list of about 40 neighbors to share safety updates and address other community issues.
Baum and his neighbors have watched Waymos become an increasingly normal part of the neighborhood mise-en-scene. At first, Baum often saw human operators in the driver or passenger seat. More recently, the cars have appeared with no human manager aside from the occasional passenger. On a typical day, Baum said, several Waymo vehicles per hour can be seen circulating through the neighborhood, which Baum suspects are there for testing purposes.
“I’m all for it. I’m a fan, and we tolerate the testing that they have needed to do,” said Baum, referring to Waymo. “But I was worried that this had become a new test period with no oversight, where I was going to see that every day. And I talked to enough of my neighbors to know, yeah, that’s not acceptable.”
On Monday morning, Baum sent a complaint about the Waymo traffic to City Council members, the Palo Alto Police Department, and the city manager. By Monday afternoon, the Waymo activity had returned to normal levels, Baum said.
Over a 60-minute period on Tuesday morning, a reporter with this publication observed six Waymos driving along El Verano Avenue, a road perpendicular to the street where Baum lives. At least one of the Waymos appeared to be carrying a passenger in the back seat. Three of the Waymos took the same route in roughly 10-minute increments, driving northwest on Bryant Street, turning right onto El Verano Avenue for two blocks, and left onto Waverley Street.
Are there any regulations, or is it we just hope that something unpleasant or dangerous doesn’t happen?
ben baum, palo alto resident
City officials responded promptly to Baum’s complaint. PAPD investigated the street for signs of traffic violations, but Baum said they didn’t notice any abnormal activity. City spokesperson Meghan Horrigan-Taylor said Palo Alto police will respond to reports of traffic violations.
“After connecting with the resident on South Court, staff did not observe a convoy of vehicles, speeding or other related traffic issues,” Horrigan-Taylor wrote in an email.
A Waymo spokesperson said Wednesday afternoon that the company investigated the situation on South Court and identified a “temporary operating restriction on a nearby street” that allegedly caused vehicles to route more frequently onto South Court. The spokesperson declined to make an official available for an interview and did not provide specifics about Waymo’s testing policy, but shared additional context about the weekend activity in Baum’s neighborhood. The company, the spokesperson said, had since removed the temporary restriction, which he said “should reduce the number of traversals to normal levels.”
The Waymo spokesperson also said the company was not doing any sort of testing in Baum’s neighborhood and that the vehicles were operating as part of normal service. The spokesperson disputed the fact that there were no passengers in the vehicles that were curling Baum’s neighborhood, noting that with the vehicles’ rear window tint, it’s difficult to tell if the vehicle has passengers or not. If the vehicles were empty, they were likely headed to a passenger pickup location or routing to a designated parking location, he said.
Baum, who was interviewed Wednesday morning before the Waymo spokesperson provided information, said he is glad the Waymo traffic has been reduced as of mid-week. Still, the experience reinforced for Baum that there is a lack of information about who regulates Waymo, whether there are any regulations in place at all, and where citizens should direct concerns.
“Does anybody set any norms around how many cars you can send, or how often you can buzz a block? Because nobody asked for this,” Baum said. “Are there any regulations, or is it we just hope that something unpleasant or dangerous doesn’t happen?”
Horrigan-Taylor said the California Public Utilities Commission and the California Department of Motor Vehicles are the regulatory bodies responsible for evaluating and approving the operation of autonomous vehicles. The CPUC oversees autonomous vehicles used for passenger transportation, including passenger complaints, pilot programs, commercial deployment, and safety and data-reporting rules. The California DMV, meanwhile, sets and enforces testing regulations. Its Autonomous Vehicles Program issues permits for companies to test and deploy driverless vehicles on public roads.
According to the DMV’s website, six companies hold driverless testing permits. Only Waymo and Nuro are authorized to test in Palo Alto, Mountain View, or Menlo Park; the others are limited to San Francisco or San Jose.
This publication asked the DMV when, where, and how often Waymo may test its vehicles, particularly in residential areas, and requested a response by the Wednesday evening print deadline. The DMV replied:
“Thank you for your inquiry. We cannot guarantee a deadline. Please consider reaching out to Waymo as well as this is an operational question.”
Palo Alto City Council member Julie Lythcott-Haims said in an email that it came as a surprise to her that there was effectively no “local control” on this issue. Lythcott-Haims said she took a tour of the Waymo’s Mountain View headquarters a few months ago, and has since made a habit of communicating any concerns about Waymo directly to the community, including Baum’s complaint.
“Regardless of the regulatory framework, Council still has a role to play,” Lythcott-Haims said in an email. “We can be good listeners to community concerns, and we can lobby Waymo to be responsive and accountable to the public.”
Members of the community with Waymo concerns can reach out to the company’s community support team at support@waymo.com.
For Baum’s part, he doubts that the DMV and the CPUC spend time thinking about his neighborhood in South Court. He said he tried to submit a complaint to the DMV using an online form but had not received a response as of Wednesday.
“I don’t have faith that this kind of thing is totally unpoliced, unregulated, no local control,” Baum said. “And I have no idea what the thinking is at Waymo. It’s not transparent.”
Since Waymos don’t fly, shouldn’t it be a herd of waymos vs. a flock?
The cars were driving safely under the speed limit but somehow were unsafe? If I go drive a bunch on Ben’s street is he going to call the city on me for ‘overuse’?
LOL. Imagine having such a hard life that you feel it necessary to complain about electric cars drive quietly and safely down your street. Doing nothing extraordinary. It’s a hard life living in Palo Alto.
Imagine living in the Mountain View neighborhood next to Waymo where they’ve been testing these cars for years. We have had to deal with this nuisance for close to a decade so it’s hard for me to feel much sympathy for a Palo Alto neighborhood that has had to deal with the cars for less than a week.
Welcome to the club. I’ve had autonomous vehicles driving by dozens, sometimes hundreds of times per day where I live in downtown Mountain View for well over a decade. There has been at least a dozen companies testing in Mountain View and for some reason our intersection has proved tricky to all of them, so they circle the block repeatedly. Funny now that Waymo is in full service, we actually don’t get as many driving by now.
It must be a slow news day to focus on an old guy’s rant. If these cars were all different makes and models and colors (like Uber) he wouldn’t notice.
This sort of activity happens when you are selected to be the test street or the common path for the heard of test vehicles when they… need to charge or park. The cars will form a common routine and while some people see 5 -10 visit is not a bother try 50 -100. This also happened when the big companies in the bay established a commuter bus system for their workers. No one is bothered by 1 or 2 luxury commute bus passes on your street, until it is the main route to the daily parking area where 100s of buses park each day. Needless to say the roads are torn up and the traffic of 5 buses in a row clogs the intersections. It is actually worse as they create their own bus stops along common streets. They do not have flashing lights or bus stops so they often just block the road.