In their 2022 book “The Road to Nowhere,” tech critic Paris Marx considered the implications of the death of Elaine Herzberg, a woman who was killed by an experimental Volkswagen operated by Uber — the first pedestrian death involving an autonomous vehicle.
“The actions of Uber executives and engineers,” Marx writes, “are in line with the ‘move fast and break things’ culture that is promoted in Silicon Valley, one which is motivated first and foremost by beating competitors to market by launching a minimum viable product and capturing market share as quickly as possible in the pursuit of monopoly.”
That incident occurred in 2018. Since then, thousands of self-driving vehicles have flooded our roadways as part of a grand corporate experiment, turning pedestrians and drivers alike into potential statistics. Now in 2026, the bill is coming due: self-driving cars are no longer just a dangerous beta test unfolding on public roads, they’re a resource drain diverting time, money, and personnel away from the public in search of profits.
Take San Francisco, where autonomous vehicles are draining city resources at an alarming rate. According to Fast Company, which obtained data from the city’s Traffic Management Center (TMC), Google’s Waymo continues to take advantage of municipal agencies in a way no private citizen ever could.
One of the main ways Waymo saps public resources, FastCo notes, is via stalled cars. To track those incidents — like the time three Waymo taxis became stuck in a standoff, blocking traffic — the TMC first began flagging community complaints of “unplanned stops.”
After Waymo phased out in-car safety monitors from its taxis in June of 2024, the city’s Municipal Transportation Agency faced an influx of unplanned stop complaints, forcing it to create a new category for emergency and transit dispatchers known as “Driverless Car Incidents.” Since that year, call times from the TMC to Waymo to resolve these issues have averaged about 20 minutes, and show no sign of falling anytime soon.
“Robotaxis impose burdens on other road users that are not there with human drivers,” Carnegie Mellon engineering professor Philip Kooperman told FastCo. “Now, maybe the benefits outweigh the burdens, but you have to recognize the burdens are being posed.”
That burden doesn’t just impact San Francisco’s transit authorities, but demands the attention of first responders, the Department of Emergency Management (DEM), and even the mayor’s office.
When a random blackout took out traffic lights throughout the city, for example, Waymo taxis effectively became four-wheeled bricks cluttering the roadways with nearly 1,600 separate stoppage incidents. The situation elicited a plea from San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, FastCo reported, after 31 calls from the DEM went unanswered. Altogether, those calls represented hours of call time that could have been spent elsewhere during the chaos of the city-wide power outage.
“While we cannot document this in detail, a large majority of this time was spent on hold,” a city spokesperson told FastCo. “One SFDEM staff person remained on the Waymo first responder hotline for 53 minutes — most of that time on hold.”
After texting and calling Waymo CEO Tekedra Mawakana with the location of all known Waymo stall-outs, Lurie finally received a response from the company in the form of a “thumbs-up” react.
Responding to FastCo‘s inquiries, a Waymo spokesperson said that they’ve “established even closer communication with San Francisco emergency officials” in the aftermath of the blackout, and are “developing additional capabilities to facilitate smoother interactions between our operations and transit workers when on-road issues arise.”
All told, the self-driving racket identified by Paris Marx now seems to come with an added indignity. The public isn’t merely playing the crash-test dummy, but also the underwriter, sponsoring the debugging process while tech companies like Google’s Waymo take home the profits.
More on self-driving cars: Tesla Robotaxis Crashing Vastly More Often Than Human Drivers
