Okay, good afternoon, everyone.

This meeting will come to order.

Welcome to the March 2nd, 2026 regular meeting of the Land Use and Transportation Committee of the Board of Supervisors of San Francisco.

I am Supervisor Mirna Melgar, Chair of the Committee, joined by Vice Chair Supervisor Cheyenne Chen and Supervisor Bilal Mahmud.

The committee clerk today is John Carroll.

I would also like to thank James Kawana from SFGov TV for supporting us during this meeting.

Mr.

Clerk, would do you have any announcements?

Yes, thank you, Madam Chair.

Please ensure that you've silenced your cell phones and other electronic devices you've brought with you into the chamber today.

If you have any documents to be included as part of any of today's files, you can submit them to me.

Public comment will be taken on each of the two items on today's agenda.

When your item of interest comes up and public comment is called for that item, please line up to speak along your right-hand side of this room.

Alternatively, you may submit public comment and writing in either of the following ways.

First, you may send your comments to me via email at J-O-H-N period C-A-R-R-O-L-L at SFGOV.org.

Or you may send your written comments via U.S.

Postal Service to our office in City Hall.

The address is 1 Dr.

Carlton B.

Goodlit Place, Room 244, San Francisco, California, 94102.

If you submit public comment in writing, I will forward your comments to the members of this committee, and I'll also include your comments as part of the official file on which you are speaking.

By special arrangement, we have David Cruz here from Intergraphics to provide interpretive services for members of the public who want to give public comment in Spanish.

I'd like to briefly open the floor to David Cruz so he can give a bit of instruction about how to utilize his services.

Thank you.

If you need interpret I will be giving this in English and Spanish, if you need interpretation from English and Spanish, given that we don't have equipment available, please sit at the back corner on the left.

That way I can whisper interpretation, do whisper interpretation during the session.

Thank you so much, Mr.

Cruz.

And finally, Madam Chair, items acted upon today are expected to appear on the March 10th, 2026 agenda unless otherwise stated.

Thank you, Mr.

Clerk.

Let's start by calling item number one.

Agenda item number one is a resolution approving and authorizing a grant for a permanent easement on San Francisco Public Utilities Commission's property located at 1800 Gerald Avenue, consisting of an easement of approximately 2,944 square feet of land within SFPUC's Southeast Water Pollution Control Plant between the city and the Pacific Gas and Electric Company for the purpose of replacing and relocating SFPUC's existing solids treatment facilities at its Southeast water pollution control plant with more reliable, efficient and modern technologies and facilities at no cost for a term effective upon approval of this resolution and recognition recordation of the agreement by the city's Office of the Assessor Recorder pursuant to Charter Section 9.118 and until PGE serve surrenders or abandons the easement area or the agreement is terminated.

Determining that the grant of the easement at no cost will serve a public U purpose by delivering an increased natural gas supply to SFPUC's existing Southeast Water Pollution Control Plant and its new Biosolids Digesters facilities.

In accordance with Administrative Code 23.30, adopting findings of consistency with the general plan and the A party policies of Planning Code Section 101.1 and directing the Director of Property to execute documents, make certain modifications, and take certain actions in furtherance of the resolution as defined within the resolution text.

Madam Chair.

Thank you so much, Mr.

Clerk.

We are joined uh today by uh Dina Brazil uh from the SFPUC who will make a presentation.

Welcome.

Thank you.

Thank you, Supervisors.

Good afternoon.

The item before you today is a grant of easement to PG ⁇ E for a natural gas meter station that will serve the SFPUC exclusively.

The SFPUC is in construction on its Biosolids Digestors Facilities project, which replaces and relocates the existing solids treatment facilities at the Southeast plant.

The new biosolids facilities require an increased supply of natural gas, which requires a new connection.

The new connection needs a new gas meter station, which consists of above ground piping enclosed by a perimeter fence.

There is no public utility easement or any area within the public right-of-way where this meter station could be sighted.

So we agreed to locate it near the existing meter station that will be replaced through this process.

Because the Southeast plant is a secure facility, it's important that it be located somewhere with direct access from the street.

And because the facility will be on what is effectively private property and not within a public utility easement or right-of-way, PGE requires that it be granted an easement at no charge before construction can begin.

The proposed site of the PG ⁇ E meter station is adjacent to Gerald Avenue near the intersection with Quint Street, which you're able to see in the location map that I included in your materials.

PGE requires approximately 2,094 square feet for its meter station, as well as the right to excavate, construct, reconstruct, replace, remove, maintain, inspect, and use the meter station facilities.

We worked with the real estate team at the city attorney's office to negotiate the form of easement deed before you today, which is in its final form.

It will need to be fully executed and recorded prior to construction.

The city administrative code requires that we appraise the fair market value of any real property we seek to convey.

In this case, because the conveyance would be at no cost to PGE, the board must find that the easement furthers a proper public purpose sufficient to meet San Francisco Administrative Code Section 23.30, the market value requirements.

The facilities that will be installed under the easement deed are necessary for the operation of the city's Southeast Treatment Plant, and they will serve the SFPUC exclusively.

At this time, I'd be happy to take any questions you have about the item.

Thank you so much, Miss Brazil.

I don't see any uh one on the roster with questions or comments.

Thank you for the presentation.

It's pretty straightforward.

That being said, let's go to public comment on this item, please, Mr.

Claire.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Land use and transportation will now hear public comment specifically for agenda item number one.

If you have public comment for this item, please come forward to the lectern at this time.

Madam Chair, it appears we have no speakers for this item.

Okay.

Public comment on this item is now closed.

Uh Mr.

Clerk, I am going to make a motion that we send this out of this committee with a positive recommendation to the full board.

On the motion offered by the chair that this resolution be recommended to the Board of Supervisors, Vice Chair Chen.

Chen I, Member Machmock I, Chair Melgar.

Aye.

Melgar I, Madam Chair, there are three eyes.

That motion passes.

Thank you.

Uh Mr.

Clerk, please call item number two.

Agenda item number two is a hearing to discuss the impact of the December 2025 power outages on the transportation network and Waymo Autonomous Vehicles.

Okay, before I turn it over to the hearing sponsor, Supervisor Mahmood, I also want to welcome Supervisor Wong, representing District 4 to this committee.

Thank you for joining us today.

And thank you to both of you for um having making this hearing happen.

So over to you.

The floor is yours.

Thank you, Chair Melgar.

On December 20th, a circuit breaker at a PGE substation in Soma malfunctioned, sparking a blaze that impacted electricity across several major sections of San Francisco.

The rain conspired with dark traffic lights and eventually dark streetlights to create a difficult situation for anyone trying to get around the city.

This power outage was especially meaningful to us autonomous vehicles, which seems to have trouble with navigating many of these dark intersections.

The best way to talk about this incident is to see for ourselves what happened on our streets.

SFGov TV, can we play the video?

From Soma to the Richmond and Chinatown to the Haight, San Franciscans captured videos of vehicles stopped at intersections.

We can even see fire trucks and munibuses stuck behind helpless Waymo's.

The stoppages that made it on social media, though, are just the tip of the iceberg.

In total, according to Waymo's own data submitted to the California Public Utilities Commission, there were 1,593 stoppages during the outage period in the affected area.

These stoppages are events where vehicles were stopped for two minutes or more without human assistance.

In as many as 64 of these incidents manual retrieval was required to move cars out of the way.

Having hundreds of connected vehicles sharing a single driving platform is a technological miracle and has promising upside potential for street safety.

Out on the streets outside right now are hundreds of vehicles moving about the city like Cinderella's magical carriages.

But just like in the fairy tale, we can now see that those carriages can turn into pumpkins at the drop of a hat.

It became clear during the power outage that the nature of autonomous vehicle fleet deployment represents a unique and potentially unprecedented vulnerability to the urban transportation and emergency response systems of San Francisco.

As more vehicles are deployed, more companies enter the market, and more emergencies unfortunately befall San Francisco.

We need to be clear about what we as a city expect from AVs.

Waymo's are sharing the roads with private vehicles, minibuses, taxis, and fire engines, all of which are operated by licensed and trained human beings who know how to pull over to the side of the road if there are emergency vehicles coming, or if for whatever reason they can no longer operate the vehicle.

We need to know what these vehicles can play by the rules, and in the rare situations where they don't, our first responders aren't spending valuable time during a crisis on hold with a call center trying to move an empty car.

Unfortunately, the city cannot regulate Waymo or any other autonomous vehicle company.

Waymo is here of their own volition and an extremely rare visit to a local government body, and I thank them in advance for answering our questions.

There's three main outcomes that I want to see from this hearing today.

One, San Franciscans deserve to know what exactly happened on the streets during the outage in December 2025.

Two, I want Waymo to begin working proactively with our city's emergency response apparatus on emergency planning to become a global model for AV safety.

Three, I want the regulators, the CPUC and DMV and our representatives in Sacramento to watch this hearing and understand the need to strengthen regulations around emergency response and preparedness.

Lastly, I know there's a lot of opinions right now on Waymo and the future of transportation and a lot in the audience as well, and it's a worthy discussion.

Uh, but I do want to remind folks that the focus of today's hearing is just on the power outage and Waymo's emergency response to that outage in December 2025.

And so all questions and comments today must be focused on that incident.

And I asked the colleagues and members of the public do the same.

We'll begin by discussing the incident with first responders and then transportation agencies before hearing from Waymo themselves on what went wrong and what's being done to improve outcomes and safety.

I want to thank everyone coming from the respective departments from Waymo and from the public.

We'll first hear from my colleagues, um, if anyone's on the roster to their perspectives, and then we'll hear from Department of Emergency Management.

Supervisor Chen.

Thank you.

Thank you, Supervisor Mammu for convening this hearing.

Uh when the power outage occurred in San Francisco in December, chaos hit many of our residents, small business, and community institutions.

This instance exposed our vulnerability for when interruption to our power system occur.

Building out our infrastructure system to build a safer and more resilient future, it's critical because we know that we will continue to have some other unseen incidents, or gaffe be more severe disasters.

Like it or not, autonomous vehicles are one part of the system.

Even before the December blockouts, autonomous vehicles demonstrated some operational challenges, including instance where they have to lay emergency responders, block traffic, and create a safety hazard for pedestrians and other vehicles.

In a in a natural disaster like an earthquake, flood or fire, hundreds of a fosen uh robot techs could block emergency responders, putting lives at risk.

During the December power outage, when WAMO, which operates about thousands of robot techs in San Francisco, suspended services on Saturday evening after many of its vehicle inexplicably stop at the interruption intersections during the power outage, added to more chaos.

And I hope this hearing will continue to help us to better understand what went wrong and what let's and what challenges what lessons and changes that we need to move on from now.

Thank you.

The December outages were a clear reminder of how critical reliability is in a city like ours.

When traffic signals go dark, when power is lost across multiple neighborhoods, and when first responders are navigating unpredictable intersections, every part of our transportation network matters.

In those moments, our systems need to be steady, coordinated, and predictable.

Residents are trying to get home.

Businesses are trying to stay open.

Firefighters and paramedics are trying to reach emergencies quickly and safely.

Events like this underscore an important principle.

New technology must integrate seamlessly into our public safety infrastructure, especially during disruptions.

The standard is not how systems perform on a normal day.

The standards how they perform when conditions are strained.

We have seen reports of vehicles stopping intersections, delays in clearing roadways, and confusion around communication.

When power fails, artificial intelligence does not improvise.

It does not use judgment.

It follows programming.

And that is precisely why human workers matter.

Our firefighters, police officers, paramedics, traffic control work officers, and emergency managers are trained to adapt in real time.

They assess risk.

They communicate with one another.

They make judgment calls under pressure.

Technology should support that work, not complicated.

AI systems are tools, they are not decision makers.

They're not substitute for human experience.

When those systems cannot respond flexibly during a crisis, the burden falls back on public servants to manage the consequences.

In District 4, we rely heavily on corridors like 19th Avenue, Sunset Boulevard, and Lincoln Way.

During outages or major disruptions, there are limited alternate routes in in and out of our neighborhoods.

If vehicles vehicles are immobilized in key corridors, that has real impacts on response times and public safety in the western parts of the city.

This hearing is not about opposing innovation.

Autonomous vehicles can be part of San Francisco's transportation future.

But innovation must come with responsibility, safeguards, and clear accountability.

If vehicles cannot be moved quickly during a crisis, that is a systems gap.

If communication with emergency management is delayed, that is coordination gap.

Those gaps must be closed before we scale further.

San Franciscans expect that an emergency emergency autonomous fleets will support our public safety network, not strain it.

Today I'm asked looking for clear answers, such as finding out how such immobilized vehicles can be cleared from critical corridors, how vehicles were stalled, and what changes have been implemented that ensures this does not happen again during a major disaster or such an as an earthquake.

We owe it to our residents and to our frontline workers to get this right.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I want to first thank Supervisor Mahmood and Supervisor Wong for this hearing.

I also am appreciative of all the city departments that are here with us today, the Department of Emergency Management, FIRE, MTA, the Transportation Authority, and SFO.

And of course, Waymo.

Thank you for coming.

Since my colleagues originally called for this hearing, um, there's been additional information that we have gathered because of the respective filings from our agencies and the CPUC in Waymo at the CPUC.

So we have a little bit better understanding every day about what happened and also where we're going with this.

Thank you for clarifying the intent of this hearing, uh supervisor.

Uh and uh we need to understand what happened on December 20th, what has been done to address the causes, to identify critical next steps to prevent something similar from happening in the future.

Uh the fact is, as Supervisor Wong pointed out, um, AVs are now part of our transportation system.

And that has uh implications for our public transportation, for our uh emergency response, uh, for people on our streets trying to get around, and also for the workforce of transportation.

Uh, and that is important for us to take into account.

Ideally, we can turn these events into lessons learned uh and into something positive and constructive where we can work together and we where we as legislators can um move towards a regulatory infrastructure that works and whatever is not within our jurisdiction, we can point out uh and work with others to do that.

Um today we're gonna be hearing the accounts of both the agencies and uh Waymo and also the public uh as to how we experience these events.

Um we uh have allocated time to discuss next steps, and um I thank you again, Supervisor Rahud, and I hope today is a productive discussion.

So back to you.

Thank you, Chair Malgar.

Um, first like to call up Department of Emergency Management Director Mary Ellen Carroll and Deputy Chief Patrick Rabbit from the fire department.

Um thank you for being here.

Um starting off, just wanted to thank you again uh both for all of your work during that day uh and that entire weekend uh in serving our city and both addressing the fire and making sure getting the power back up.

Would not have been able to get that done without you and really appreciate all your workers, all your workers have been helped in that day.

Hold on.

So if more folks uh want to come in, um we will just direct them to room uh 263 and as folks move off after public comment, we can keep it flowing.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

Um starting off with director, um wanted to walk us through.

We saw some of the videos earlier today of stalled vehicles, um, and then also the uh videos of uh fire trucks that were stalled as well.

Um can you describe the process that on that day of connecting with Waymo during the outage, what it was like for your staff and what that experience was like.

I had just brief um kind of opening that lays it out if that's okay.

I can go through that and then we can dig into details if I don't cover them.

Again, good afternoon.

Thank you, Supervisors Mary Allen Carroll, the director for the Department of Emergency Management.

Um as you acknowledge, we had a power outage on December 20th that was significant across our city.

I on that day was at the emergency operations center really shortly after the outage started.

Um our department coordinated efforts to respond to all the impacts of this outage um and then also ones that came later and days later over the holidays from storms.

Um so it was about five days of outages for our city over the Christmas holiday.

Um we uh I'll just jump into the uh the day of so on the 20th, we had we almost kind of immediately started experiencing issues with the A V fleet.

We were hearing about them mostly due to travel light outages and the and the chaos that the outage caused if anyone was out there just as the city went dark, the streets just kind of went into gridlock.

Um between about uh 3 and 8 p.m.

on that day, our dispatch center did receive multiple reports of issues involving AVs.

Um we experienced significant delays in connecting with Waymo.

Um our dispatchers were placed on hold for long periods of time and made a total of 31 calls to Waymo um to the Waymo first responder hotline over um that period.

Um staff members was on the hotline for 53 minutes on hold.

I was actually on the 911 floor, and I can uh assure that that we were having those delays in connection.

Um eventually we did make contact, and the fleet was uh on that day eventually completely removed from service.

Um in some cases, fire assisted with clearing vehicles, and Chief Rabbit will go into more detail on that.

Um, you know, uh in the week following we did meet with uh our Waymo representatives.

We talked about the issues that we experienced.

And uh subsequently for Super Bowl week, we had a Waymo representative at our emergency operations center, which was very helpful to deal in real time with those issues as they came up.

Um, I just I want to say that you know, autonomous vehicle technology is new to our city, it's new technology.

Um we are obviously learning how it will how it performs or will perform under emergency service circumstances.

Um I definitely stay awake at night thinking about things that could happen and how do we integrate this new technology, which is a physical presence on our streets into our emergency response.

And so we are actively doing that, and we are in conversation um with Waymo.

We do know that there are other companies that are waiting to come online, and so it is so imperative that we uh deal with these issues uh exercise, run through scenarios, and uh learn everything we can on how to expect the technology to perform and also how to mitigate those interruptions, those disruptions and impact to public safety when these things happen.

Thank you, Director.

Um thank you for walking us through that timeline as well.

So basically you're walking through that through between three and eight o'clock, you were getting reports um from AVs, and then you were on hold up to 53 minutes by one uh dispatcher.

When was contact finally established?

What time during the day?

Um the mayor was present at the EOC also and made phone calls to executive level at Waymo, and he was able to get that contact uh pretty immediately.

I don't have the exact time of those calls.

Um It would be safe to say there was a couple hours after trying to contact them.

And uh the thing is that we uh I think we can what I can assume is that you know, as uh the outtage grew, and as we know it grew far and wide and very quickly, um there was a lot of issues on the street, and uh our assumption is that uh you know the the emergency number there was just overwhelmed at Waymo um running the 911 dispatcher center.

Obviously, we were getting a lot of calls at that time also.

Got it.

Uh combined question might be for either fire or yourself as well.

Um what uh given they were installed vehicles in in the field, um what ability do the public safety officers in the field or other city resources have to deal with disabled vehicles if they find them?

Yeah, I'm gonna let uh Chief Rabbit speak to that.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, Chair Melgar.

Supervisor Chen, Supervisor Mahmood, and Supervisor Wong.

I'm Patrick Rabbit, the Deputy Chief of Operations for the Fire Department.

Um I'm here to discuss any questi or answer any questions you have on our response with AVs.

Uh Supervisor Mammood, I believe you just asked regarding how we interact on scene.

Uh there is a communication available to us with the vehicle.

Should they stall or should we come upon scene, we can make uh a voice communication to an operator remotely uh requesting assistance, uh, what our specific needs are uh specifically to have that vehicle either uh move directly from uh emergency scene or to proceed on their route.

Um sometimes we do not get invoice communication quickly.

Um at times uh the the AV operator is unable to move the vehicle for us remotely, and then they will put the vehicle into a manual mode where one of our uh department personnel can safely operate the vehicle and remove it from the actual scene.

Understood.

Uh let's get maybe into specifics in this context then.

Um there was an incident just outside of the substation fire mission street.

Um can you walk us through what happened there with a purportedly stalled vehicle and what was that communication process like that you just described in this context?

So related to the fire at the substation, uh one of our department personnel encountered a vehicle that was encroaching our scene.

Now, prior to the actual call at the substation at uh 217 p.m.

and avoid the area, uh alert was sent from our dispatch center uh noting to avoid the area, the mission street and Stevenson Street area for 1,500 feet.

Um our department employee came across the Waymo vehicle at this incident.

We have no timeline, our data entry into the CAD.

This was a firefighter, um, not specifically trained very well on using their portable handhold radio.

They just went to mitigate the hazard.

They did get in touch with the Waymo remote operator, and then they did initially take control of the vehicle and move it safely away from the actual fire ground incident.

Uh took that member roughly five or six minutes off task to assist with the removal of the vehicle from the scene.

Understood.

Um so it took them about it delayed their response by about five to six minutes uh and be able to access the the area.

Oh, they were on scene already?

Sorry, I will clarify.

Our personnel were already on scene operating at the substation.

However, the Waymo was within the avoid the area, um, encroaching on our scene and for safety reasons, uh firefighter from our department went and addressed the Waymo personally.

Understood.

Uh did that delay or affect any response to addressing the fire in any capacity?

Um had that incident not been occurring, what would have happened counterfactually?

Um that member would have been remained intact with his uh crew for a company integrity.

It was just that member was taken off his uh specific task at the time uh of investigating the actual uh report of the fire at the substation.

Understood.

Um your experience, how do Waymo's operate around sirens when compared to other humans uh in responding to different emergency vehicles as well?

I don't have much experience.

I'm not on a code three vehicle right now at with in my administrative role, but prior to arriving at my current assignment, I was assigned as uh division chief in the mission district, covering the south half of the city.

They will instinctively with their programming pull over and yield the vehicular right-of-way to the emergency responding apparatus.

Understood.

Question for both of you and Director Carroll.

What would you like to see from Waymo and other AV operators to lessen the impact of such events in the future?

I will share a few things and then answer that question.

So we did have, in addition to fire response, a number of a number of incidents where PD had to move uh the vehicle or have the vehicle uh towed.

Uh one at Geary and Spruce, one at Park Presidia and uh crossover, which as we know is a pretty significant intersection, um Lincoln and 34th.

Um we had uh North Point and Mason and uh a couple of others.

In these cases, SFPD was able to either um they contact, remove the vehicle or move the vehicle themselves, or have it towed.

I think the biggest concern overall I can share from a public safety perspective, and I'll defer to the chief on fire, is that what has started to happen is that our public safety officers and responders are having to be the ones to physically move.

In a sense, they're becoming a default um assistance, roadside assistance for these vehicles, which I we we do not think is tenable.

We are having these conversations with Waymo because obviously those uh that is time away from whatever it is uh that the first responders are responding to, and in this case, there was plenty to respond to.

Um in addition, these you know, anything that brings uh a high volume of calls to 911 around these kind of things, you know, can delay response, it can delay our call time for people that have you know true life and death uh situations.

So those are the things I think um that from a is uh is a concern that I have.

I think the other um and and those are day-to-day things, let's put it that way, and and as we have emergencies that escalate.

And then the other is just thinking about other scenarios.

If we had major flooding, if we had an earthquake, things that would interrupt our our transportation uh infrastructure.

These are you know, physical uh modes of transportation, vehicles that are on the ground, um, and so really thinking about what that means, how they'll perform, and you know, how we'll work together uh with these companies when these things happen.

All right.

Um Supervisor Mahmood, I'd like to just explain an avoid the area before I put forward our request.

I think it will help and clarify.

But when the avoid the areas are sent to our AV companies and Waymo, uh these are sent for incidents where our members are most likely going to be operating on the street.

Uh for instance, for a report of a fire in the building, the ATA request is 1,500 feet.

Um to a report of the fire of fire in the building, we'll send 11 apparatus, um and they all converge on that scene.

And that's due to the density of our city and the predominantly wood frame construction.

Uh other incidents, uh, we scale back the AD the avoid the areas to a thousand feet, but other incidents where we do work on the street are motor vehicle accidents, vehicle fires, shootings, and stabbings.

We do send significant resources there, but not as many for a report of a structure fire.

Um our department would just like to work with the AV engineers to teach our to teach to assist them in teaching their vehicles how our response patterns go for these and as well as build out the notifications to their vehicles directly from our computer aided dispatch system at Turk Street.

Thank you, Dr.

Chief.

Uh colleagues, any questions for emergency management?

Yeah.

Uh Super Wong.

Go ahead.

Yes.

Thank you.

And uh some of these questions relate to Waymo, so if you feel that you want to defer to Waymo, feel free to let me know, but I would just want to get from your perspective as as well.

As far as we are aware, what protocols are are triggered by Waymo during a citywide power outage or any emergency like that.

I I I think we should defer to Waymo about what their protocols are.

Okay.

And then how quickly can the city move and mobilize Waymo vehicles to be cleared from critical corridors?

Do we do do we have to coordinate with them or couldn't the city do something independently of them?

Uh I mean the way that we've described up to now, there is there is the ability for this interaction to happen with first responders so that they can go and take control of the vehicle, um, have that vehicle remove remotely if that function is happening or uh to be towed.

And you know, these are we don't have big capability to do that at any given time and Supervisor Wong to further uh Director Carroll's response.

Um during the outage, the fire department responds to roughly 450 calls a day, uh all hazards fire EMS emergencies, but for that 24-hour period, we experienced over 800.

And I know a lot of our other uh partner agencies in the city were just as busy responding.

So at times it may be very difficult to get a police officer or a parking control officer or even a tow out of the yard to get a attend to a vehicle.

Okay.

And have we gotten any information on how many vehicles were stalled that night that are blocking critical corridors?

I I think we should um I I don't have that number, and maybe Waymo can talk about it.

Got it.

Okay.

Um the other thing is I've I understand that for the remote vehicle operators for Waymo vehicles, they're ba based 8,000 miles away from San Francisco in an emergency.

How could that impact our communication with Waymo and clearing vehicles off the street or being able to do anything to to ensure that they're responsive?

Uh does that hurt our ability to respond to disasters?

I mean, I think that's just an example of the things that we are trying to run through scenarios that we want to run through.

And so I and I would direct the question more to you know, Waymo, what their resources are, but there are questions that I think we have to address.

If we have a cyber outage, if there's you know, power outage, we obviously saw there were issues.

There could be issues, you know, if there's issues with the network or the the systems that they have, uh and um, you know, as far as you know, a question that we have put forward and as I mentioned, yeah, a concern.

We don't want to have to rely on our first responders who are here to you know serve a particular role in law enforcement fire or medical to be moving another company's car.

Thank you.

Supervisor Chen?

Thank you, Supervisor Mammu.

Um Dr.

Carroll, you mentioned about you know how high volumes of call related to Waymo incense, what impact our system.

So do you know what was the volume of calls that would make 2911 related to that shops and what Waymo uh during the POW outage period?

Yeah, we had 63 calls that referenced Waymo uh within that period of time.

So how much of those 63 calls uh caught up with the system?

I'm sorry, I didn't know.

Uh, how much did the volume like the 63 calls caught up the system?

Well, as the chief said, we had a very high spike of calls during that time.

Um so that was on top of the additional calls that we were getting for alarms for stuck elevators for for other people that were just frustrated and stuck on the on the road.

So I don't have the percentage.

We can probably look that up, get that to you.

But all in all, it was a very busy day, and that was 63 additional calls during that time.

And and I know you both talk a little bit about you know the staffing capacity, but uh if in case like what are the financial you know, what would be the financial resources that were needed uh in order to help resolve some of those issues that what's created by WIMO during that time.

We haven't considered, you know, we haven't quad quantified like this cost us X amount of money.

I think uh the bigger issue is just um the time that it took for you know uh dispatch supervisor to be on hold for almost an hour when they have other jobs to do.

Um uh, you know, the first responders that were in the field uh that are paid by the city and county to you know do their job and they were in that day their job job was in you know to deal with these vehicles that were stuck.

Right, thank you.

Chair Mother?

Thank you so much.

Uh thank you for the presentation.

So we uh looked at the um report that the MTA filed at the CPUC, and we noticed at least three more incidents that you didn't talk about.

Um the response from the firefighters to the original substation fire at 218 encountered an AV blocking traffic.

Um there was some time.

I mean that was the original incident, right?

Um and then there was an ambulance near Atoma and 7th Street at uh 514 that was stopped by a disabled AV.

That was a 40-minute delay from what I read, or that was reported.

And then a fire on St.

Louis Alley and Grant Avenue.

Um again, another the dispatcher was on hold for 21 minutes.

So I'm just bringing this up because in your presentations you both talked about like the the reports.

It was 311, 911, some MTA.

Um so you're responding to complaints.

But that's not comprehensive, right?

I mean, there's folks, especially in low-income neighborhoods or when things are really critical that don't call and you just don't know like what's going on.

So I'm wondering if you have any thoughts going forward about recommendations of what else to do.

Is there any way that we can use our automated cameras, for example, or anything else that you can think of where we could get a more comprehensive uh information of what's going on when this you know critical thing is happening.

I it is possible.

I mean, we can talk to uh PD about the those things.

Um I mean, as far as you know, the cameras that we have uh throughout the city.

Um the you know, I you you're absolutely right.

We don't get all of the um incidents that are happening in the street are not recorded or called into 911 specifically.

Um, we're we did not present to you the comprehensive everything that happened here, just for sure.

In the interest of time.

Um so you know, we do feel like we do obviously we helped inform that report for MTA, working very closely with them.

Um really trying to come together within the city to share from you know a public safety perspective where we would like to inform any regulatory uh recommendations.

Um and again, as we laid out, you know, I I think that we we understand that AVs are here and uh and as long as they are, and particularly if they continue to grow, it is just critical for us to understand how they're going to perform and identify the areas that we see as weaknesses.

Um of which is just the uh I think what we've seen is that there is not a in-person, not a human body to come out and address these issues, and that is left to the city responders to do.

And that that in a major emergency is going to be critical and you know uh impact impact life safety.

And so it's yeah, and you know, because we are limited in our regulatory j jurisdiction over this thing.

I'm trying to think of ways where we could, you know, use what we have to have reach accountability, given that folks, you know, Waymo is reporting to the CPUC.

It may be comprehensive report, it may not be.

And I'm wondering like how we can double check it.

But also how do we, as you know, a public agencies that already have our hands full during a critical emergency, make the best use of information in real time, uh ease of communication inactivity because you know, I can see like waiting for somebody to call 311, call 911 before you know uh a firefighter can get in and respond to a critical fire that's happening right now versus having a uh uh easier way of communication that's electronic or that is up front required um, you know, short of that.

I this is the reason I'm asking, just because it seems to me like like the things that we've heard, the things that people happen to capture on video and put on Instagram is like you know, a partial uh telling of what happened, and then there's everything else.

And you know, we should be building the system regulatorily for the everything else, it seems.

So I don't know if you have any thoughts uh in terms of uh fire uh in in terms of like what else we could do uh for responding.

Uh yes, thank you, uh Chair Malgar.

Um related to those three incidents, the two uh the two incidents that involve the structure fires at the substation and then the other one in St.

Louis Alley.

Uh our department uses an internal reporting system on autonomous vehicles so we could track how many of these are coming up, but that's only at an incident where either we are arriving on scene or we're already operating.

Um should we encounter uh an autonomous vehicle not uh behaving exactly how we would expect the human, we would just navigate our our apparatus around and proceed to our destination where we're calling.

If we can.

Um the second the what the third one was a uh medical call that was outside uh of the avoid the area and it was uh code two, which means a non-emergent response.

However, it was very close to the avoid the area, and we had to find that because that was one of our um partners in San Francisco, a private medical uh provider on the ambulance.

But we found that through the CAD detail uh searching for AVs and Waymo's.

Um but I think what what I mentioned before to Supervisor Mahmood related to our computer aided dispatch system notifying the AVs in real time because we could send an ATA, but we need to have some confirmation that it is received.

But if we could integrate our dispatch, our cat a computer aided dispatch system with the ATAs and the technology of the AVs, I think that could be something we could work moving towards uh between our agencies here in San Francisco and the AV companies, as well as when we get on scene.

Uh we let's we do have times where humans we we may have a language barrier, they may be panicked on scene because there's a lot of red lights, and that is nerve-wracking to uh to a driver.

Um so perhaps when we do try to notify um the attendant or the uh the company that we have a problem with their vehicle if we can get a human response within a set short set of time so we could actively assist them to get that vehicle out of the air, out of the uh scene for us would be great.

Sure.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

One last question, uh just wrapping up.

So it seems like the things that you both have expressed needing are that one making sure our first responders are not in the business of roadside assistance.

Um second, uh thinking about other scenarios that this might happen again and having an emergency response from A B companies like Waymo, and third, maybe having a direct integration of your notification systems between fire to the AV system as well.

Um thing I didn't hear was that I mean, in the beginning you were talking about the long delay time maybe in receiving a response and necessitating our mayor to directly call Waymo.

Do you have any thoughts on how to reduce that feedback loop?

Is it based on your experience thus far with the Super Bowl or like what other things can we do to tighten that feedback loop in your opinion?

So since since December, we have had you know multiple meetings with Waymo, and I would say that they've been um very collaborative and cooperative.

Uh the next, you know, we we obviously brought everyone together, I believe it was that evening because we didn't want to experience that again.

Um and we were given a human being to call, all of that.

Um we disasters are chaotic.

Um we may not know when they happen, we may know not know the nature of them.

And when we do have a catastrophic uh disaster, you know, all resources are going to go toward immediately saving life and property.

Um it's just critical that we know that that we learn from these things, that we advocate for regulations that are on the side of public safety.

Um to do that with new technology, we we have to work together.

We have to talk, we have to understand, they need to understand, and we have talked to them and feel like they're hearing us.

Like this is our situation.

This is how we look at this.

This is our uh our mandate.

This is how we have to govern, this is how we have to respond um to our constituents and anyone that's in the city.

And so um, you know, it's difficult.

We, you know, these are difficult conversations, um, but I think we need to be committed to working together because they're here.

Um just as we know with other utilities that we can have difficult and frustrating experiences with, you know, we can't go into our separate corners.

We have to continue to keep that dialogue and work together for solutions.

Thank you, Doctor.

Um sounds like so having a human in the loop uh is important.

Thank you.

Thank you both for your your answers, and thank you again for all your service uh on that weekend.

Um next up would like to call um on the transportation side, uh Julia Friedlander, uh AV manager at SFMTA and Tilly Chang, director of the SFCTA.

Good afternoon.

Good afternoon members.

I was told that you would not need me, but I'm here and I'm happy to answer any questions that you are interested in asking.

No appreciate it Julia.

I think we have a couple questions.

I mean we heard how the first section was about how did the autonomous vehicle response affect emergency operations.

What we saw videos as well was that it was also affecting Muni.

On that day I was actually taking the seven with my wife to go on a date and it was stalled for a little bit because of the ABs that were blocking some of the traffic.

And so I wanted to hear better from from your perspective what was the impact from your perspective on of Waymo and Thomas vehicles stalling issues on the Muni network that weekend and start there.

So first I think the important thing to say is um as with FIRE and DEM what we have to report and what actually happened are two very very different things.

We have always known that we have you know a very small subsection of the events that actually happen on the street.

There are many reasons for that one is just that some of the incidents may actually be relatively short and make clear without you know very significant disruptions.

Another is just that our our public workers are doing their jobs and their job number one for transit operators for example and for our transportation management center is to do everything we possibly can to maintain the continuity of service to serve the public.

So there are a number of city workers who have positions where you know they don't have the opportunity to just sit down and like write a note of of a license plate or where exactly a vehicle was or how many AVs were stopped at a particular place because they are they are either driving or they are actively trying to direct traffic for example in the street.

We know that SFPD has had a lot of difficulty with failure to respond to human traffic control and nobody who is doing human traffic control is able to sit down in the middle of their shift and write out a report.

So I think that um from my perspective it's always been very important for us to consider all information sources so the public information sources the calls to 911 to 311 the calls from a 911 from our 911 dispatchers to companies and then most importantly the companies themselves we appreciate that the uh DMV and the public utilities commission have required certain reporting we welcome uh we we believe that uh a lot of that information can and should be made available to the public to facilitate and support for example DEM's efforts uh at planning and resilience um so there's um there's no we we don't have a an omniscient narrator narrator in this film we don't have one player who can tell us everything that happened so you may not have the how can you speak to anecdotally what was the effect on the network in that sense so um we also because of issues about our our surveillance technology policy we don't keep track we don't monitor and maintain video of everything that happens on our streets and that's because of San Francisco's policy commitments to uh privacy and autonomy um and so uh we I can't tell you um the actual impacts on the overall network of the street um that is something that one would have to piece together all these information sources and it's not a perfect picture I think the key thing um from our comments that we filed collaboratively with uh police and fire and uh DEM is that really our focus has to be on preventing this in the future and that this was a kind of a lucky honestly on some level I know it was not it was had all kinds of problems to San Franciscans and I don't want to trivialize the impacts of the outage but it was lucky that we had this opportunity to make sure that we start investing in the resiliency going forward and making sure that there are for example um emergency uh operations plans for our AV companies that are consistent with the size of their fleet and therefore the potential impacts that they've been reviewed by local governments that they've been approved through a public process so that we can feel confident that five years from now if we have five times or ten times as many vehicles on our street we're prepared to handle the consequences in the event of an emergency like this.

Okay.

Sounds like we don't any other questions from my colleagues?

Yeah just well another question that I was wondering about so a few of the vehicles like 68 I think were manually retrieved.

And were what was the MTA actually keeping track of when they were being cleared?

So we get information from DEM and from FIRE, and we have we we are keeping track in the same way that you and I know that we're talking to each other right now, but we don't necessarily remember that tomorrow exactly what happened.

So we are keeping track for the purposes of trying to get um our streets operational, our our emergency responders to the places they need to go to be effective uh in protecting the public, to get our transit network so that it is serving our our uh riders.

Um and and that the data gathering that comes along with that is really designed to uh to facilitate our effective service delivery and not to kind of draw a comprehensive picture of all the impacts.

All right.

Well, so that's interesting.

So if if I could just restate that, like in real time, you know, it was it was a mess that day um when there was stoppages uh that impeded the path of like a bus or something.

You the um central MTA command transportation management center that's a lot of like was keeping track, right?

Because your operators would call and say this is what's happening, and so you you like followed that until resolution.

But for the streets where it was just like the neighbors or whatever, that's not necessarily what would happen.

You wouldn't follow that up until like somebody complained somewhere.

Um you didn't have like a comprehensive picture.

It was just like a crisis.

It's it's really very idiosyncratic what we know of and what we don't know of.

Um and our trend our transit operators, um, you know, their focus really is on service delivery, so they will see if they can make their way around a vehicle that is stalled in the way.

Um that's obviously you know something they need to be very careful about in protecting their passengers and and also their desire to meet their schedule.

Yeah.

So that's really their focus.

And the the information that we get from that is just not at all comprehensive.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you.

Um I'll just close off by saying it it is if I'm correct hearing you right, it is concerning to me that we don't have data on what happened on that day from MTA.

Um just want to express that that's what I'm hearing, right?

We we do have we have we have a few reports and we know they're underreported, just as the fire department reported.

And so we have uh reports that came in from our transit operators.

Um, but we we know that there were other incidents and um and and that's just the kind of the nature of of the operation.

We do appreciate that DMV and particular C particularly CPUC have required operators to submit a very significant amount of uh data to them.

Um at this time, most of that data is not available to the city because the uh permittees have claimed that they have uh uh have made claims of confidential treatment to that.

We appreciate that WAMO has provided a few very you know, very isolated data points.

They do help us understand the scope of the impact around the city that uh 1,500 plus uh stoppage events, but we'd like the ability to really examine that and look at at patterns and uh in ways that would help us with our disaster and resilience planning.

Okay.

We'll move on.

Thank you.

Uh Tilly, love to uh director of CTA.

Um forward looking in this context of transportation.

Um I was hoping for a little bit more context on the problem today, but I'm not sure we're gonna get it.

Uh what is your perspective on a timeline for PUC integration based on city comments to future regulation in this context, in the context of emergency and preparedness response?

Oh thank you so much, Supervisor.

The question being the timeline for CPUC.

Um I would probably uh best refer that question to to them, but we're hopeful that it will be a timely part of their rulemaking.

They just the CPUC has been taking input on the scoping of the next generation of uh autonomous vehicle uh regulation.

So this certainly came up in Judge Mason's hearing that was conducted a couple of months ago at the CPUC.

We appreciated that line of questioning.

Um so we will continue to file together with SFMTA to press for a timely uh addressing of these needs.

Based on everything you heard today from different departments, what would be your recommendation in terms of future regulation to affect emergency response as we saw it in the context of this weekend?

Yes, thank you so much.

We you know this really does build on already a lot of work that has been undertaken on just emergency scene coordination from a solo location standpoint.

Now we have a fleet-wide and really the order of magnitude, of course, is exponential.

So it is imperative, we think to follow up on some of those initial um good efforts that followed, particularly Assemblymember Phil Teen's bill, AB 1777 from 2024, which was passed.

Um there still needs to be some codification and some formalization of those types of uh solutions and now even expansion of those solutions to multi-site uh sort of operational failures rather than just single single site emergency scenes.

And if I might, for that reason, we had already been um pleased to partner with our sister agency in Contra Costa to apply for a federal grant, um, which they did receive from the Federal Highway Administration to try and demonstrate and develop collaboratively with industry protocols for just single site emergency scene coordination, which we would like to propose to expand to multi-site or resilience type fleet-wide type coordination and protocol uh solutions.

Have you already engaged with Waymo on that uh that that program?

Not yet, no.

Uh we were just in the hallway talking about it.

There was some coordination on the city side, uh, but we would love to invite them and all AV providers who are interested to participate in that process.

What would be the result of that type of grant work process?

What would be the net result if that process goes ahead?

Yes, great.

So again, CCTA was awarded this uh $3.3 million federal grant for planning and demonstration activities as part of the uh Safe Streets for All program to demonstrate you know new technology solutions as well as uh process protocol type solutions.

Um model communication and coordination protocols for large-scale resilience events uh such as what we saw here, or even even larger events perhaps in the future would be one potential uh output as well as resilience action plans, the types of model plans that regulators could require of AV companies as part of their permitting system, uh, which would need to be, of course, as um uh DEM and SFMTA also referred to developed in close coordination with local agencies in each of these jurisdictions.

Technology demonstrations uh would also be on um a possibility to demonstrate the solution to help maintain those communication protocols that um that the fire department mentioned as well as the chair you were asking about to try and find a better way to collectively have better real-time coordination and information exchange uh as well as in the aftermath to be able to analyze uh the situation better.

So those are some examples of what we would hope um could e could result could result from this project.

Thank you, Jilly.

Any other questions for my colleagues uh to CTA?

Thank you.

Thank you, Director Chang uh for being here.

So um the TA's role in our uh, you know, structure in the city is the plan for transportation uh infrastructure for our city.

And so now that um, you know, AVs are part of our system.

Uh you your staff did some pretty groundbreaking work uh last year to uh put forward, you know, sort of best practices and things that other municipalities should be thinking about.

Um are you thinking of perhaps updating some of that given what we've learned uh to incorporate emergency management and or response to natural disasters and any technological additions that we could make to that framework?

Thank you so much for the question and thank you to the uh Transportation Authority Board for adopting that study was which was the autonomous vehicle safety focused um conceptual permitting framework in which we advocated to particularly regulators, but to to industry and all stakeholders, an incremental performance-based approach to permitting.

Uh certainly things like uh crashes and and and individual vehicle uh stalls and conflicts was part of that framework.

Now I I would absolutely agree that we should be considering adding these types of resilience events to that framework as part of this ability for regulators and the public to have confidence that these um advanced planning considerations are fully taken into account and transparently and inclusively consulted with local government developed so that we can have more confidence again that as not just WAMO but other autonomous vehicle companies continue to come to San Francisco, we can all have better assurance that they are ready.

Uh and together we are ready as a city for the scale of perhaps you know multiple companies operating in our city.

So that's really important.

I appreciate the question, um, and we we would be glad to work on that as the congestion management agency also charged with monitoring and analyzing performance of our streets.

Thank you.

Thank you, Director.

Thank you, Director.

Appreciate um coming forward and sharing your perspectives as well.

Uh next up, I would like to bring any other questions for my colleagues?

No.

Uh I'd like to bring up Waymo.

Um appreciate you being here.

Um I believe we have a presentation to start.

Um then we will uh go from questions from there.

Appreciate it.

Uh good afternoon, Supervisor Mahmood, members of the committee.

Uh thank you for the opportunity to speak before the committee today.

My name is Michael McGee.

I lead Waymo's public policy engagement California.

Uh we appreciate the board convening this hearing to address the PGE power outage that occurred on December 20th.

We understand that as a new technology, the performance of our fleet during extraordinary events like a widespread and persistent power failure is a matter of public concern, and we hope our participation today is productive and informative.

Uh, I also want to take a moment to thank uh the agencies that are participating today, DEM, uh FIRE, MTA, CTA, um, and for their continued partnership and collaboration on this issue.

Uh I want to begin by reiterating Waymo's mission is to be the world's most trusted driver, and achieving that mission starts with safety.

As of today, we've driven nearly 200 million fully autonomous miles on public roads, and we've served over 20 million trips to riders across the country in cities where we operate.

In the San Francisco Bay Area alone, we've driven over 40 million autonomous miles and have served millions of trips without a driver behind the wheel.

Last year, we served on the order of six million trips in the San Francisco Bay Area.

As you're all aware, there's a seemingly relentless and all too tragic human toll from traffic accidents on our roadways.

Today, many millions of miles into the deployment of Waymo's technology, the data show that our automated driving system, the Waymo driver, is making roads safer where we operate.

Data from our first 127 million fully autonomous miles has indicated that our driver is involved in 90% fewer serious injury or worse causing crashes compared to human drivers where we operate, and 92% fewer injury causing crashes involving a pedestrian.

In San Francisco specifically, the data show that an 88% reduction in serious injury or worse crashes compared to human drivers.

We're heartened by these safety systems, excuse me.

We're heartened by these safety statistics and know that improved operations during emergency events, the critical topic that we're here today to discuss will help us advance our safety mission.

With me today are my colleagues, uh Chin May Jane and Sam Cooper, two of our technical experts who are here to help answer specific questions around our response to the power outage on December 20th and the subsequent improvements that we've made in our emergency response.

I want to note that over the last two months, our team has worked diligently to determine the root causes, effects, and any learnings from this outage.

Additionally, we've been working closely with state and local stakeholders, including many of the colleagues from San Francisco here today, uh, to provide detailed briefings on the outage.

We've not only briefed uh San Francisco stakeholders, uh, but I want to note that we've also provided briefings and information on this issue uh to the governor's office, to Calsta, the DMV and CHP, as well as the CPUC in an effort to be responsive to the questions raised around this event and to communicate the steps we've taken since then.

I'll turn it over now to Mr.

Jane to provide details on the day of incident, uh, and then to Mr.

Cooper to discuss our learnings and next steps we've taken to improve our operations.

Thank you.

Uh thank you, Michael.

Uh hello, supervisors.

My name is Chin Mae Jan.

Uh I'm a director of product management at Waymo, and I want to provide an overview of what happened during the outage uh from Waymo's perspective.

Uh as you know, on December 28th, a fire at the PGNE station uh caused a widespread outage, affecting approximately one-third of San Francisco.

PGNE's power failure caused traffic lights to stop functioning, leading to a gridlock uh in locations across the city.

Residents were advised by the Department of Emergency Management to stay home during the outage, which underscores the extraordinary nature of the weekend's disruption.

Waymo first became aware of the outage in San Francisco at approximately 2.15 p.m.

through an alert to our security team.

Waymo took several steps over the course of the afternoon on December 20 in response to the outage.

These steps initially included initiating defleeting efforts, which means removing some vehicles from service and sending them back to depots.

And this started approximately at 3 p.m.

During this initial period of outage, our driving operations were not significantly impacted.

This ability for the fleet to continue operating wasn't unexpected.

Waymo's autonomous driving system is designed to handle issues caused by power failures, including uh by treating disabled traffic signals as four-way stops.

And so Waymo vehicles were able to navigate intersections with non-functioning traffic signals during the early period of the outage without much disruption.

However, as the power outage persisted into the evening, the scale of the blackout conditions experienced on the 20th, coupled with our system's cautious approach to intersections uh with fully docked traffic signals, presented a unique challenge.

The Waymo driver is designed with safety as its foundation.

In these blackout conditions, our vehicles acted cautiously as design, and in some occasions, they requested a confirmation check from our remote assistant agents before proceeding through the intersection with darkened traffic lights.

The approach prioritizes a high degree of certainty before entering an intersection with fully dark traffic signals.

In a more routine scenario, when the Waymo AV encounters this situation, the conformation check is answered quickly, and the Waymo AV proceeds safely on its way.

But on December 28th, the widespread and persistent outage resulted in an accumulation of these requests to remote assistance, especially between 5 p.m.

and 6 p.m.

This resulted in longer than typical response times, which caused some of our vehicles to remain stationary at intersections, contributing to cities congestion.

As PGNE's estimate for restoring part continued to slip, and we heard directly from Mayor Leori's office, uh, we took additional steps, including temporarily pausing the service in the area.

Additionally, we directed our fleet to pull over and park so we could return vehicles to our depots when congestion had eased.

We made this decision in order to avoid further adding to congestion or inadvertently interfering with utility and city personal during the peak of power restoration effort.

We resumed the service the next day when the power was restored to most of the city.

Now let me introduce my colleague Sam Cooper, who will talk about our learnings and next steps.

Thank you, Jinmei.

Uh good afternoon.

My name is Sam Cooper, and I am the program manager of incident response at Waymo.

I want to be very clear that Waymo takes full responsibility for the communication gaps that occurred that evening.

Specifically, we acknowledge the difficulty the Department of Emergency Management and other agencies experienced in reaching us.

We have heard the city's frustrations clearly in our recent debriefs, particularly regarding the need for a direct, reliable line of communication during a crisis.

However, we recognize our delay in establishing clear proactive communications with the city was unacceptable.

We are committed to ensuring that this does not happen again.

Following the outage, Waymo took immediate steps to improve our performance during an event like this.

While our driver already handles dark traffic signals as four-way stops, we have rolled out additional fleet-wide updates that give our vehicles even more context about regional outages, allowing them to understand when something like a blackout is occurring.

This is so they can navigate these intersections much more decisively.

We've also revised our internal escalation pathways for power outage events and improved our automated alerting systems to notify operations teams immediately when AVs detect an unexpected spike in traffic light related or unanswered requests.

We have also expanded our first responder engagement too.

To date, we've trained more than 30,000 first responders globally on how to interact with Waymo, including almost a thousand San Francisco fire and police personnel.

As we discover learnings from this and other widespread events, we'll continue updating our first responder training accordingly.

We continue to improve, incorporating lessons learned from this event, and we'll continue to coordinate with Mayor Lurie's office, first responders in the fire and police departments, the Department of Emergency Management, as well as SFMTA and CTA to identify areas of greater collaboration in our existing emergency preparedness plans.

Thank you.

And uh we are available to answer any questions that you have.

Thank you.

Um let's dive in first into uh my questions will be technical and then operations.

Um the technical side, it seems that again you said you were notified at 2.15 and then three or three o'clock started to remove vehicles.

Um, but then there was when there was a surge in the evening.

Um, my understanding meaning the reports is there was some surge to your system that caused these vehicles to stall.

Is that a technical limitation of your product?

Uh and if so, um, what was that technical limitation and how did you resolve it?

Uh thank you for your question, supervisor.

So just to directly answer the question first, this is not a technical limitation of the system.

And in these cases, uh it is able to take those decisions on its own, but in minority of cases, a request is sent to a remote assistance.

And that request is to confirm the state of the traffic light.

In this case, uh again, in general, this works really well, but in this case, because this was a fleet-wide uh outtage, and a lot of these requests were being sent to remote assistance.

What happened was that uh there was a backlog of requests created to remote assistance, and so there was delay in their response to the cars at the intersection.

And that is what caused this case of uh what we see in these videos of uh AVs stopped at intersection because they were waiting for uh input from remote assistance.

So how do you resolve?

I mean, in the context of APIs, and you set rate limits and you increase that.

Are you um when you encounter backlogs going forward, have you like at a universal threshold increase your API rate limit, or are you kind of doing a different process?

Absolutely, absolutely.

So uh I would say I think uh we are doing at least three things here.

Uh one is uh as soon as we get the information about anything around this, let's say any kind of remote assistance requests spiking and going up, those alerts would now directly go to the operations team who can then take uh reasonable steps, like let's say increasing supply of remote assistance.

Uh the second uh thing is as uh Sam was mentioning earlier, if there is uh uh region wise outage, we want to uh we can now communicate to the fleet that there is an outage, and so uh in cases where they encounter these uh dark traffic lights, they do need even need to reach out to remote assistance.

And this is the part of decreasing the you know demand for remote assistance.

And so they can make more decise take more decisive actions without needing remote assistance.

And lastly, to your point, as you were alluding to, which is uh we have also given power to our on call teams to be able to differentiate between the high priority and low priority requests and cut down on low priority requests to remote assistance in such times.

For instance, a low priority request would be uh is this car dirty?

Or uh how many passengers are in the car?

And that helps us prioritize better the responses that are more important, such as uh the response to a traffic light query.

So it's helpful to know that you are changed some emergency protocol procedures in terms of the technical limitations.

But what we did also hear is that you have remote operators on the other side of the call that have to respond uh to assess some of the issues as they happen.

And I think one of the things that's I think salient in the context here is that there's been articles in the telegraph um that talked about your expansion of some of these operators in the UK.

Uh and then um Waymo representatives uh mentioned uh also that there were operators based in the Philippines.

Um so if we're reliant in an emergency situation on operators in the Philippines to have to assess a condition here, how how can you explain or justify that?

Yeah, thank you for the question, Supervisor.

I mean, at a high level, I would say the location of the remote assistance has no implications, especially talking about this uh case of uh SF outage.

Uh there was uh uh no relation of location of the remote assistance with that.

Uh having said that, uh I'll mention how many operators do you have in each of these locations specifically in the Philippines as well?

So uh what I can tell you is um that we have overall 70 operators working at any point in time uh to respond to these remote assistance queries.

And it's just again, just for context, these are remote assistance.

These are not San Francisco or the whole country.

Whole whole fleet, everything that we drive.

Everywhere, okay.

Right.

And uh uh I'll just like to highlight that again, these are remote assistance.

When these are not driving the cars, uh they are just providing guidance to the car when the AV asks for a question, and then the final decision of whether to accept or reject that guidance remains with the AV.

You don't see a problem with having 70 globally to respond to an emergency situation in this context.

I think uh so again, uh as you think about this, uh as I said, they are not monitoring the cars all the time.

They are only responding to a question from the car.

We do a very detailed analysis on what's the uh uh you know uh demand for such requests like and hence you know have these dynamic systems where uh we can increase the supply of remote assistance accordingly.

Okay.

Um let's get into the emergency response during the day.

Um you just like you said you decided to pull vehicles about 5.55 p.m.

Um as we've heard a couple times, it it took 55 minutes for one of the dispatchers to actually hear a response.

um as we've heard a couple times it uh it took 55 minutes for one of the dispatchers to actually hear a response um it took our mayor calling the CEO of Waymo directly to get the fleets off uh the street I know you were starting to you said you're starting to pull some vehicles off at three but the full uh response to pull them wasn't until after the mayor called um how are you adjusting your pro protocols going forward so that we don't have to rely on the mayor of our city to call you to actually uh get a response in terms of this response yes uh thank you for your question um supervisor uh so Waymo conducted a a very thorough uh after action review uh in the wake of the the PG and E outage to to adequately understand the situation and the causal factors and as well as identify any rapid improvements that we need to make the the first thing we did is is is we expanded our playbooks and revised our playbooks to rely less on PGE outage uh uh resumption figures that that we were stated.

Uh frankly we were over reliant on on the resumption numbers that we were presented by PG and E.

So we immediately uh made those made that change uh in our tactical guidance and our escalation protocols to make sure the right people are aware that this problem is is occurring.

You're speaking to that PGE's notifications themselves were incorrect, right?

Uh correct it's specifically on the resumption times we were um uh being uh we being uh overly reliant on those resumption times and that was informing our response decisions probably to it uh to a too high of a uh of a degree understood um I mean I'm still wanting to know more specifically how are your humans in the loop in this process because we can't it's unacceptable to have 91 dispatchers waiting an uh nearly an hour for a response what are you doing to solve that specific problem?

Yes uh thank you for the question and and we absolutely understand the concern and just to reiterate that that hold time that we had uh for our um uh our public safety officials was entirely unacceptable and and we completely acknowledge that um as uh I think you've you've heard from uh executive director Carroll you know we have been working uh tirelessly to to absolutely improve and rebuild some of that trust with with the city uh so that when you need us we are there uh that wait time was unacceptable uh we are not uh uh proud of uh that response on on the day.

But what are you doing to fix it?

Yeah to to to address that head on um you know simply put we've we've also made the the uh improvements to our surge staffing capabilities so that we've trained more folks to answer phones uh when we have um uh a a significant incident going on we've also you're saying the the issue was staffing availability in terms of response time as is as we've heard from uh other uh officials here today we we have uh experienced the same surge uh in in calls around that sort of between five to six p.m period that did uh push our uh our current um uh capacity over the limit to what was acceptable for us have you already hired additional staff to operate to be ready for such a surge going forward I I do not have the the the numbers on the on the specifics of the hiring of the remote assistance staff but we'd uh we'd we'd be willing to to absolutely work work with your office to get you those numbers um understood um getting into the number of retrievals uh it was noted by emergency management and fire that there were sixty four incidents that required manual retrieval on that day um and we heard how we one of the main requests coming from the city is that we don't want our police officers to be in the business of roadside assistance.

What are you doing to make sure that there is more available resources on your end to assist on that capacity so our first responders can be helping people in the note of a crisis.

Yes uh thank you for the question and it is a completely valid um concern.

I also just want to acknowledge that that blocking any first responder's path is is entirely unacceptable.

And um as a first responder uh myself uh previously I I totally understand the importance of reaching whatever scene you're you're moving to uh rapidly I also want to confirm that we also heard reports of this which prompted our incident response team actions to pull our vehicles over uh as as well as D fleet um and and pause our service um we we were also aware of of two incident two instances where first responders moved our ADBs and certainly not here to to dispute any of the figures that that the that the officials mentioned earlier um uh I think we you know have a have a shared mission in safety uh on the roads and and in our communities and we absolutely want to work very closely with them um to make sure that that the the uh our our response or our um issues uh with blocking uh first responders does not happen again I appreciate the commitment to do so what are the actions you are taking to assure us that we will not re-reliant on our first responders to do roadside assistance.

What are the actions you are taking to assure us that we will not re-reliant on our first responders to do roadside assistance?

Yeah.

Um I think what to adequately answer your question, I think just moving back to our training uh that we uh uh have with first responders.

We have trained almost a thousand um first responders here in San Francisco and over 30,000 um globally.

Um we also have worked with local first responders on the design uh and that and that mechanism we have for them to in extremely emergent situations to move our vehicles, acknowledging that that is an unacceptable reliance that we we do not factor into any operations.

We simply want to give them the capability in that event to adequately move that vehicle from the scene and make that scene safe so that they're able to do their jobs.

I mean, there is reports uh CMBC reported last month that you've partnered with DoorDash to close vehicle doors when they're left ajar.

Um and then you also partner with a company called Honk, a roadside assistance company uh for vehicle maintenance.

Is there opportunities to leverage those types of partnerships so that we don't have to be doing that work in that context in the context of an emergency response?

Yeah, I think that's that's uh that's an excellent question, something we'd certainly be willing to explore um with with the city officials.

Uh I I also want to state that that is that is not my area of expertise um and I would defer to my other colleagues who who have uh much more expertise in that.

Um further into the interactions with emergency services.

Um there was context from what we heard uh from the fire department that NDEM that they have a request for better interlinking or integration of their software system uh from their end for notifications with your system.

Is that a commitment you can make to the fire department today?

Yeah, I think in and and first off, um, as uh as the the officials have have rightly mentioned um earlier, um we have had extensive conversations uh with them on on how to to best improve that service, and we are certainly open to uh to to ensuring that our relationships um uh uh are able to um take take that next uh step towards uh increased collaboration and and and again towards that shared mission of uh public safety in our in our communities and on the roads.

So will you interlink your systems?

It's it it's it's obviously extremely challenging for me to give that commitment to you today uh as an incident response uh manager.

Again, that is outside uh my my direct scope as it relates to technology integrations, but absolutely willing to have the conversations uh at the conclusion of this hearing to make sure that uh we're hearing everyone on the on on the uh table.

As you heard from the fire department, it's one of the major things that will help them uh to have better closed closed loop communication.

Um the CTA brought up um Assembly Bill 1777, um, which is a law sponsored by Assembly Member uh Ting, former assembly member, and sign into the governor that will take an effect uh four months from now.

Um the legislation includes a requirement that Waymo avoid a particular area within two minutes of getting a warning from dispatchers of events like structural fires.

Um it doesn't seem like from December's incident that you are ready to be in compliance with that law.

Um what are you doing to be in compliance in four months from now?

Yeah, I'm happy to speak to that.

Um AB 1777, so we worked very closely with the Assembly Member's office um on the entirety of that bill.

Uh as far as your question on what we're doing, it's uh our current practice to be in compliance uh with those geofencing regulations.

Um so I think as Sam mentioned, uh in the instance during the power outage, there's a number of staffing concerns uh around this.

Um but our systems are currently set up to be able to comply with those geofencing messages.

Um I think that's more of an operational concern than a technical limitation.

Understood.

There's also a requirement in that bill that calls from dispatchers have to be picked up within 30 seconds.

We just heard that it took 50 minutes.

Um how are you going to be ready by July 1st to answer calls within 30 seconds?

Yeah, I think again, uh similar similar solution here is that's an operational concern, not a technical limitation.

Uh and so there's uh uh a staffing issue.

Uh it does take people.

Um there's also uh the the other procedures that um Chinmei and Sam mentioned around shedding the lower priority requests, uh making sure that folks are during an emergency response focused on uh the very specific and high priority issues.

Um it would be um uh do you have a sense of how much staffing you need to increase by?

Because that's what I'm hearing right now is that you don't have adequate staff to respond in time during an emergency on the operator line.

What is the level that you need to get up to from the seven that you have today to comply and be able to handle this type of surge going forward?

Yeah, I don't have a specific percentage.

Um I don't know if my colleagues have more to add on that.

Um but I think there's a like I said, an element of making sure that the folks are focused on what they need to be focused on and not assessing something like a dirty car um or a writer support issue um being able to respond to the top priority during an emergency.

Um but I don't know if there's any other context to add here.

Um before handing off my colleagues, I mean, looking forward um during the later days leading up to the Super Bowl, it was my understanding that Waymo was president at the emergency operations center.

Um what did you learn from that experience to be partnering with the city on a event by event basis?

And what commitments can you make today to the city on making it easier for our first responders to access vehicles?

Because frankly, what I'm hearing mostly is that you kind of still expect our first responders to do roadside assistance, and you are just gonna help us train them better to do that.

Um I'm not really hearing a response about how you can take on some of that responsibility as well.

Yes, uh thank you for the question.

Um I I think you know, just to address the first component of your question.

Um we we have heard loud and clear that we were not proactive enough in establishing communications with uh the cities, in particular the Department of Emergency Management.

Um as uh we know we we need communication first in order to be able to coordinate these these large scale events um appropriately.

Uh so absolutely we're here to say that we we did not perform um uh well uh in that regard on the December 20th PG in the outage.

Uh the the steps we've taken you know since then is we've we've ensured that we have uh a line of communication always open uh to the Department of Emergency Management for large scale events moving forward such as the Super Bowl.

Uh can you describe more what that line of communication means?

What does that mean in terms of staffing?

What does it mean in terms of procedures?

Absolutely.

So in the in the instance of the Super Bowl, as we know is a a very successful um event for the city, uh we actually uh positioned a uh our emergency management expert with over 25 years of experience in the EOC for an in-person presence.

And that individual was then able to effectively coordinate uh a lot of the requests that we were getting from the city um to avoid any incidents.

So we're very proud to be able to do that, and we we look to continue to roll that out uh more formally uh through through the Trevor Burrus, would you consider having that person be available every day, not just in the context of events?

The the model we are um uh committed to investing uh is on you know within uh an hour we will be able to uh have either an in-person presence and obviously much quicker from uh from a virtual perspective to ensure that we're able to adequately coordinate and communicate um any issues that that may arise uh with the city.

So with an hour of an incident going forward, you will always dedicate one resource to be within emergency management to be available as a direct liaison.

This is the plan that we're looking to to uh to anchor on to ensure that we're able to do that uh that coordination effectively, firstly, that relies on that that line of communication into the city.

Uh acknowledging that that hour is a a target and obviously EOC activations may take some time to get the adequate resourcing in there, but we want to commit to be able to have that individual there in person or at least virtually.

Thank you.

Um I might have some more questions later, but I'll hand it over to Supervisor Wong.

Thank you.

Um what protocols are triggered by Waymo during a citywide power outage?

Yes.

Um maybe be helpful if I walk through the the the broader sort of incident management uh approach that we have.

So uh from an incident management perspective, uh we have a team of experts uh of uh former public safety officials, emergency managers uh who are able to respond 24-7 to Waymo's most critical events.

They are also supported by um over 120 subject matter experts from across the company uh who are available uh from a 24-7 capacity.

So uh bringing this back to the the PG ⁇ E uh outage, uh we convened that team uh around about 3 p.m.

uh that day and started initiating uh what Chim May uh referred to as that D fleet process, which was removing vehicles off the road.

As initially we just saw uh impacts to three of our facilities.

Um when we saw that surge uh in in requests around about sort of 5 p.m.

coinciding with the the the dark uh hours, um we then uh also uh initiated between 5 and 6 p.m.

a a further uh engagement of that incident response team to begin taking those response actions in relation to the power outage.

Going forward, how quickly can immobilized vehicles be re cleared from critical corridors if there's such an incident.

Um I uh that's that's a difficult question for me to to answer in my my my current role.

Uh I I would uh suggest you know what we we could do in this instance is follow up with with your office to make sure that we're able to provide you with that that accurate information.

So the send there's no clear if something like that triggered again, there's no clear timeline or ability to ensure that the vehicles can be got taken off our roads.

Uh I I don't have those those uh those timelines that I'm able to share with you today.

What what I will say at a very high level is is um you know trying to distill this this technical process a little bit.

We have three core levers that we can pull in these in these uh different incidents.

The first is uh we we're able to uh defleet those vehicles, so remove the vehicles from the from the situation.

Uh we also can place avoid uh the area sort of uh notices down to our vehicles, and then we also can initiate a a service pause.

Okay.

And uh do you have a count of how many vehicles were stalled that night.

Um thank you for a question.

Uh supervisor just give me a moment.

Um, yeah, with respect to uh how many vehicles, I think uh what we can say is just some more context before I answer this.

Uh, that uh on December 28th, specifically we completed around 15,000 trips in the San Francisco Bay Area.

And uh as we were reducing the number of trips later in the day, uh I think uh we had around 3,000 trips that occurred post the during the outage period.

And with respect to uh, you know, out of these hundred thousands of trips, we have identified less than 70 cases in which our riders faced significant delays during their trip and cancellation in some cases.

Uh does that answer your question?

Yes.

Uh it was 1500.

Yeah.

So that's 1500 or something.

So I think yeah, I do I want to be clear.

I think that's why there are various ways to look at the same data.

What I just mentioned was how many riders were impacted, uh, right?

And so the 1500 stoppage number, I want to be clear that uh that's a new data point that uh uh was created by California state regulator.

I want to be clear about two points there.

One is it's a very difficult metric to measure.

So it can include cases which are very justified cases of stop, uh especially in urban driving, like let's say stop for a very long uh stack of traffic.

And so it's not a perfect metric.

And then secondly, uh especially for this 1500 number on the day of outage, uh it gives you a sense that this was a higher number than normal, so it you know gels well with the anecdotal evidence, but it is not necessary that all these stops were due to the power outage or due to, you know, all these stops were at the intersection.

I just want to make sure we understand the distinction.

But as you said, this 1500.

You could do a counterfactual how many stoppages happen during a regular hour to know what the differential would be.

So do you have a sense of that?

Sure.

I don't have that number, but yeah, I mean that that would be a way to get a better perspective on the impact.

Thank you for sharing the information.

The theme I hear is that as Supervisor McMood has mentioned, our first responders should not be triple A roadside uh assistance.

So and I I recently uh heard about an incident in in Austin where a Waymo vehicle blocked traffic as first responders were going to uh Austin uh bar mass shooting where there are three killed and and 13.

I would indicate again that we have to focus on the blackout.

Uh so direct your questions got the blackout today.

Roger that.

Um there is an incident and so with the 70 operators that we discussed earlier that are 8,000 miles away, how familiar are they with United States or in this case California vehicle codes or other more localized policies that we have that pertain to emergencies and uh how can uh how distant they are, how can they be responsive to for such such an incident, how can they be more responsive in in the future?

Absolutely.

Uh that's a very fair question, something that we deeply care about.

And so with respect to uh you know the location of the remote assistance.

I mean, as I said earlier, that has no bearing on the incidence of the uh PG and E outage.

In general, all our uh remote assistants doesn't matter where they are, they are trained really, really well to be able to then respond to the queries that they are getting from the Vemo driver.

And then again, just to remind again, they are not driving.

They're just giving a guidance, answering a question to the Waymo, and that's really what they are trained on.

Thank you.

Supervisor Chan?

Thank you, Super Supervisor Balot.

You uh I just want to I just have a follow-up question on the uh thousand five hundred stoppage.

So you mentioned that it's not a perfect metric that you are currently measuring for data.

So have you have Waymo internally discuss how to do better metric so then we can come up with better data.

This outage is not a single case.

Uh we will have unfortunately like other emergencies like fire, earthquake.

So have you guys discussed any other ways how to have better metrics and how to better support the system?

Just so that I'm clear about your question, you're saying given the stoppage, as I mentioned, some gaps in the stoppage metric, you're saying could there be a better metric that Waymo is thinking about?

Yeah, so I mean, of course, internally we're discussing many metrics, hundreds of metrics to be able to uh understand the situation.

A, the real world is very chaotic.

It's very difficult to come up with a single metric that you can automate it or in an automatic manner calculate and describe the incident.

So within Waymo, of course, we look at a lot more data.

Uh I think this particular stoppage data, uh, as I said earlier, uh was created based on inputs from the C state regulator.

And there were, of course, a lot of discussions on that too.

Uh but very precisely, yes, we uh we look into a lot more data and try to be more precise uh internally.

So then with that, I I want to know what is the contingency plan currently for addressing the needs for writer who are strength, especially vulnerable communities such as senior or people with disabilities.

Right.

Just uh thank you for your question, uh supervisor.

I think um, you know, uh first off, maybe maybe addressing uh you know the the hazards that that we face in the community.

Uh so we we maintain plans based on the hazards that we're likely to encounter in the community.

And and I just want to also uh reaffirm that the commitment to working with the city uh to jointly exercise this and collaborate moving forward.

I think it's really important that that we uh don't just speak about these things, we actually have to do this, and and this is definitely a public commitment to work closer with the city.

Uh we have met with uh all of the public safety officials uh that that spoken uh today.

And um we we absolutely want to want to renew that commitment to doing that moving forward as it relates to uh the the individuals with uh access and functional needs requirements, we we we take that into into consideration uh with uh our our operations plans.

Uh we also train writer support folks on that to ensure that we're able to adequately support those those members of the community.

So am I clear that you currently don't have a plan?

I know you we we you were we you know we're working together, but like um is there if any things uh you know a disabled seniors that is in a car that need assistant, what is the current contingency plan to support the riders?

We we have operational plans that we'd we'd be 100% willing to follow up with your office on the internet.

Thank you.

Um then my next question, uh we mentioned about we mentioned about 70 uh global operators.

How many current how many vehicles currently the 70 global uh operators are supporting?

Uh thank you for your question.

I don't remember the number of vehicles, but I said those 70 operators uh are supporting our whole fleet across.

And you don't have a number of how many vehicles?

Total number, uh not at the top of my mind, but it's an easy number to uh uh come back to you with.

Okay.

Um then my question uh my uh follow-um up question is like how and what do you train your remote personnel to manage a large-scale multi-agent failure rather than an isolate isolated one vehicle incidents?

What are the training and how are you training your personnel?

So that I'm clear, you're saying how could remote assistance work on work on the what kind of training and how are you training them?

Like people in Philippines and helping us in San Francisco.

Right.

For the for the remote assistance, right?

With a remote, I mean, whatever assistant that is Waymo is supporting uh our you know, to make sure that uh our streets safe, our passengers are safe.

Right.

Uh I'm sorry, I'm still not 100% clear about the question.

In terms of training for remote assistance, I can give you context, which is again uh remote assistants are trained specifically for the questions or requests they could get from the Waymo vehicle.

And that's of course a very detailed training that happens for every remote assistance that remote assistant person that becomes the part of that group, right?

And uh that uh as I said earlier, it was uh mostly about answering questions like is this traffic light really off or not?

Or providing some guidance to say can you go here or there?

Those kinds of things are what they are trained on.

And that's why you train the operator.

Yeah.

Um and how do you train them?

Is it virtual in person?

Do they come to the headquarters, get to know San Francisco?

Yeah, it's a good question.

My my sense is we train them in person through virtual, like all you know, okay.

We have all the uh all the kinds of trainings for them.

Right.

And I'm sorry, this is probably another operation question.

How often do we renew your employees?

Uh all like the operative uh trainings.

I do not have that answer right now.

No, I I think if I understand you correctly, it's it's the training schedules of the remote assistance operators.

It's because I think um what you know, does the row uh we uh we also have like rope planning, like uh the CTA, SFMTA is constantly on like project construction work and also upgrading our infrastructures.

So like it's also very important to know how often you do training and you conduct training and you renew training, so then we make sure that you're operative uh effective and efficient.

I I'd add in there, I think I'm echoing everything Sarajar Shannon is saying is that we just heard a lot about how you need to update your emergency protocols after today's meeting.

How long is it gonna take for your remote operators to adjust the new protocols that you're committing to today?

Yeah, I I I totally understand the question, and thank you for the clarification as well.

I I I do not have those specific numbers to to share today, but this is a a uh an easy follow-up with your office to make sure that we're absolutely a hundred uh percent correct.

Right.

Thank you.

I'm sorry, members of the public.

I know that there's lots of feelings, and we all have uh strong opinions about these, but we do have a rule at the board of no audible um outbursts.

So you will get your two minutes of public comment, I promise.

But if we could just keep this going, that would be really great.

Thank you.

Comment again, please say the public comment.

Yeah, appreciate it.

Thank you.

Uh Chair Melgar, your questions.

Thank you.

So I do have uh a few questions.

Um thinking back uh Mr.

McGee at your initial presentation as a private company providing transportation services, uh, it seems that you are looking at the sort of risk um and output or you know, investment risk uh calculation uh in terms of the number of miles that you provided this service everywhere over time, in that your safety uh, you know, uh uh uh numbers based on uh on that that you know framework are are low.

And I get that.

Um for our you know, Office of Emergency Management, our fire department, our police department, the calculation of course is diff different, completely different, because we're assessing loss of life and safety based on incident or you know, particular uh uh moments where their loss of life potential is great.

So that's how we are assessing it.

And if any particular actor is in the way of that, you know, our calculation is really different.

So when you talked about uh incident management protocols, Mr.

Cooper, you are talking about incidents, like individual incidents, and you have you know, 70 people based in the Philippines in Arizona, in Michigan, doing the management of those individual incidents all over the country.

But you see how that calculation is so different when you assess it, you know, based on like one potential catastrophic incident with high potential loss of life versus a system that's built on individual, you know, incidents here and there where there's like one car having problems in Austin or you know, so so I it seems to me that your system is built for something entirely and you haven't really thought about the possibility of this.

So of course, I'm wondering if any of you actually live in San Francisco Bay Area.

Do you?

Yeah.

So you know that we're in earthquake territory.

So I am the oldest member of this committee, and I was here during the 1989 um the Ma Prieta earthquake, where we had catastrophic loss of power, but also loss of life in San Francisco and in LA County at the same time.

Both cities where you have a pretty large footprint.

So I like actually like uh Mary Ellen Kerr, Director Carroll, at loose sleep sometimes over like our systems and what we do.

Imagine that tomorrow, and this is totally possible.

We have a catastrophic event, you know, where we have loss of life and the possibility of having to mobilize emergency responders and protocols at the same time as there's a power outage in San Francisco and LA at the same time, with 70 support personnel in Arizona, Michigan, and the Philippines supporting us all.

So we would be in trouble, right?

So it seems like we would have to, you know, almost rebuild the system that you have to address both the need for individual, you know, um incident management protocols and also like the potential for a catastrophic event.

So in addition to earthquakes, you know, we have climate change, and that is leading to floods, you know, all sorts of other catastrophic things that happen with our infrastructure.

So it seems like you know, it would in terms of the risk, you know, uh you are at risk for not just municipal regulation to address these issues, but also perhaps you know, private legal risk from folks who may be caught in situations where they wouldn't have otherwise.

So I'm wondering, you know, I know you can't make commitments and give us numbers off the bat right now, but is there a willingness to engage in that you know, uh visioning uh not just with our municipality, but people around it too to address this, you know, um lack of infrastructure, you know, in terms of your company for these um potential events.

Yeah, I'm happy to address that and um defer to my colleagues if they have more to add.

Um absolutely, yes, there's a willingness.

Um and as you mentioned, you know, our intent today is uh not to deflect questions or anything like that, but we recognize it's difficult to answer a hypothetical scenario of you know, if a car were in this instance or if this certain type of natural disaster was happening.

Um our aim is to have robust resiliency procedures that will stand up to any type of incident.

Um we've acknowledged today again that you know these did not meet our standards um during the outage, um, but to your question, yes, there is a willingness.

Uh the other things I wanted to mention um you asked about um San Francisco Bay Area.

I'm a native of the Bay Area.

Um absolutely it's not lost on us that uh earthquake territory is is paramount here.

Um it's something that we are thinking about.

Our company is from the Bay Area, um, we have offices here.

Um many, many of our employees are here.

Um you mentioned climate change.

There's a reason our fleet is 100% electric vehicles.

Um we're concerned about that as well.

We're thinking about that as well.

Um and to the earlier question around uh the remote assistance operators, uh, I just want to mention uh the vast majority of responses um to the power outage was coming from operators in the United States.

Uh Chinmei has already addressed this multiple times, I think, uh, but I just want to be clear that there is no uh none of none of the issues that were uh happening during the outage were due to uh those operators being abroad.

So um apologies for the longer answer, but the short one is yes, we're we're absolutely willing to consider those consider that uh what you mentioned.

Okay, thank you.

No, I I mean I think that's really great.

Um, you know, we of course, as legislators, we're like eager to legislate and you know uh regulate.

Um because your fleet goes between county lines, um, I am particularly interested uh in the fact that we have just extended Waymo to our airport, which is not within our county lines, it is in the unincorporated area of San Mateo County.

I do have uh lots of questions, and I will ask uh of SFO staff who I I understand are here about how we're dealing with that, because we heard from you know our director of emergency management, our fire uh folks, you know, I don't I have lots of questions how all those things would happen, you know, uh at SFO.

Uh but it would behoove us to have your system be able to respond no matter where Waymo's are, or if they're in between counties or making trips between San Mateo County, San Francisco County or Marin or Alamite or wherever it is that you expand to because you know that would be the easiest or or or most efficient way to save human life if you know something terrible were about to happen.

So I what I want you to respond to us.

I also sort of want to re you to respond to the moment and uh be able to build a system that is um you know responsive.

Okay, uh Supervisor Chen, I guess.

So just one more question.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair Malga.

Just one more question.

So I just learned that the cars are all EV car, I mean all um uh electric cars.

So what is the contingency plan if the charging station itself is at a power outage?

Like how are you depositing on the cards back to I just want to love to learn more.

Yes, yes, uh and and thank you for the question.

Um if you remember back to when we we mentioned uh around 3 p.m.

we we initiated that D fleet.

A large region uh reason for that was because we experienced uh a loss of power at some of those facilities.

So we were removing those vehicles uh from service to prevent any operational issues or further congestion uh that that could be appearing on the streets.

Uh so that that was in response to the PG and the outage.

Uh we did have uh site impact and we were actively responding to that.

Also at that time we we were not seeing uh large uh operational issues as it relates to uh uh uh congestion from our vehicles, et cetera, that that we did see uh at approximately that 5 p.m.

to 6 p.m.

time frame.

Um so just to just to be direct, we we were responding to that site um uh power outage by removing vehicles uh from the fleet to mitigate any any charging issues that we may have I actually have a one follow-up question on that um because in the PUC filings um directly related to Supervisor Chen's good question.

Um there was power outages at Waymo facilities on that day as well.

Um did that also affect the operations of of the vehicles on the fleet as well?

So so we were removing the vehicles uh because of those power outages at those Waymo facilities?

From the fleet in in response to the power outages.

And is there backup power at the facilities themselves?

I uh I do not have the specifics on on backup generation powers uh for for those particular sites and facilities.

And um what is the contingency plan when these types of outages happen?

Do you we talked a lot about today about contingency plans for the vehicle fleet?

What are the contingency plans for when your facilities are out of power?

Yes.

Uh thank you for the question, Supervisor.

Um in terms of understanding the the the concern of the question, is this in relation to uh our specific sites or uh uh headquarters, those things?

Yes, so uh as I mentioned, and maybe a good point to clarify as well that the incident response team of those individuals that were uh uh called into action, you know, from in response to the PG and E outage.

As I mentioned, we we have some 120 plus staff uh who um are some of our most senior uh individuals at the company who convene to to work out a lot of these uh uh challenges.

We also have uh emergency action plans as well that we all enact.

Uh we also have a facilities on call function that we will bring in for extra consult to ensure the the safety of our of our staff first and foremost.

So we're doing that going forward.

We we we do that today.

Okay.

Thanks.

Uh Chair Melgar, um you wanted to invite the airport to follow up on your questions.

I mean, I actually just wanted to follow up a question.

So you mentioned you have hundred-plus uh staff member.

You also have an emergency action team.

Um how many people isn't that an emergency action team are they based in San Francisco?

In in terms of the the emergency action team, will I when I refer to the You were just mentioning I just want to understand a little bit more about yeah the the staffing um uh understood.

Uh so we have we have the instant coordinators who come in to to uh ensure that we have adequate command and control um over a high impact event.

Uh the majority of those staff are are based in the United States uh with uh I haven't got the exact percentage breakdown uh on on the top of my head, uh but a lot of those staff are also based in the Bay Area.

So the hundred plus 120 plus staff.

It's it's in in the state.

Uh uh just to be clear on the on the differentiation.

We we have 120 plus subject matter experts, which are which are a variety of different on-call teams representing like operations, facilities, uh engineering, th those types.

Uh then we also have a separate uh cater of of emergency response folks uh who are able to respond to initiate that that command and control at the same time.

So how many of the coordinators were involved in the December outage?

Uh it in for the December 20th out of the U.S.

December 20th outage.

Yeah, we we had we had two uh coordinators involved in that direct response.

Um those just to be clear, those those are just the coordinators uh of the incident.

We had multiple on-call teams involved.

Uh I don't have the exact numbers off the top of my head, but it's safe to assume it's it's it's uh it's a big number.

Thank you.

Chair Melgar.

Yeah.

Uh yeah.

So uh as I mentioned, I do have specific questions.

Uh thank you, uh Mr.

Cooper, Mr.

Jane, um uh of uh the airport folks.

So I see Diana here.

Um I don't know if it's you or Nora.

Thank you.

So uh Diana, thank you for being here today.

Um so I know that SFO has a pretty robust emergency management plan.

Yes.

And I know that you just um you know extended the uh right to operate to to Waymo.

So I'm wondering if your emergency management plans uh involves um Waymo.

Um and looking back at the December 20th incident, which predated both of those things, um I am wondering if you're looking at updating that differently based on what had happened.

If there is a loss of power or access um in San Mateo County and the unincorporated area of San Mateo County, you know, if that changes what you guys are thinking in terms of protocols.

Thank you, Supervisor Melgar.

Deanna Volick, government affairs manager with SFO.

So after listening to a lot of the conversations with our first responders team, I will go through some of the specifics that have come up that are related to SFO.

Uh one, as you said, we have a very sophisticated emergency and communications response team that has been actively in communication with Waymo's team ever since they were allowed to go through phase three, which is the autonomous vehicles without a driver present.

They have been uh mapping and having drive the uh drivers present for the last year.

So now phase three was in as you mentioned, January 29th.

Uh we've have participated in multiple first responder trainings between our airport personnel and Waymo.

Uh we have direct contact with the Waymo's remote assistance team.

They actually have an on-site um Waymo rescue team that's present during the day and they are required to respond to an event within 10 minutes.

Um if the event requires towing, the Waymo rescue team has resources, but SFO actually has our own on-site tow trucks as well as a contractor with a tow company to respond to incidents.

Um as you can imagine, any type of blockage or power outage uh we are prepared for just in a general um situation.

We have backup power generators to support our traffic signals in the event that happens.

Um we have on-site police and fire departments, as you know, who are stationed on-site to respond to any event 24-7.

So our campus is a little more enclosed and tightly controlled as a power as opposed to a citywide incident.

But we are in active communications learning from the experience of our um city in December and ongoing um uh reactions to that.

Um I can show you in if it's helpful on the projector.

That our terminals are located about a mile and a half from the actual pickup and drop-off location of Waymo.

They are currently at our rental car center.

Um so that was also uh a decision to keep that separate in the event if an incident happens.

There uh a geofencing was also brought up.

So in the event that an incident happens, we can um contact our Waymo um center and let them know that that geofence needs to be initiated.

Um I think that is a lot of the discussions that our current city departments are having with Waymo, but because the airport has a different permitting system for its property, we have integrated a lot of these um systems into play with our current system.

Thank you so much.

That was very uh clear.

Incomprehensive uh overview.

So uh people who are getting off an airplane will take the air tram to the rental car center, and that's where they would get so there, you know, it is an actual physical place where the Waymo's are.

Correct.

Um and there's no um role for any electronic managing of where the Waymo's are within the airport because they're gonna be at the rental car center.

Yes, right now they are directed to go to the rental car center um and access the terminals through the the air train, but there's no virtual queuing system or anything like that.

But in terms of drop-offs, people are coming to the terminals in Waymo.

All rental car center.

So pickups and drop-offs, same location.

Both.

Okay.

So uh you mentioned, thank you, that's really helpful.

So in terms of uh you uh mentioned that in your negotiations to building these protocols, uh you have a built-in uh contractor in case there is a possibility or uh um necessity for towing or getting an AV.

Is that is that what I heard you say?

No, that's what we have already because of the um our enclosed system and it's a circular path.

We already have on site two on site tow trucks and a contract with the tow company in case any situation happens.

Okay, but we can employ that in the event uh Waymo does not work.

In the event it were a Waymo that was disabled that needed to be towed.

Um would you then pass on the cost to Waymo?

Is that part of your uh deal or your understanding?

That I do not I'm not aware of, but I can follow up and get the question.

Thank you.

Yes, that's it.

Okay, thank you very much.

Those are my questions, and thank you for the clarity and the presentation.

No problem.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Um other questions?

Thanks.

Um wanna thank um uh Waymo and all the city departments for coming here as well and answering uh the questions.

Um I'll have some comments um after public comment, but we will now open to public comment uh so people can line up and this uh for speaking for two minutes each.

Um focus your comments in the context of the December 2025 blackout.

Um that is what this hearing is agendized for.

Um love to hear how what your experience was like that day.

Um but I know there's a lot of feelings about autonomous vehicles more badly, but we have to keep the comments focused on that facet.

Just a moment.

So land use and transportation will now hear public comment on agenda item number two.

Before we begin, I do want to real quick invite David Cruz back up to address the audience real quick to introduce his services for folks who are speaking Spanish.

And everyone, if you want to participate in the discussion, please line up to speak along that western wall.

It is challenging to hear the speaker.

So if you can keep it down out there and also not interrupt our proceedings with applause or uh any other uh interruptions.

Let's get David Cruz if you could please on the mic.

Okay.

Seguimos manteniendo la ciudad in movimiento.

Eso quiere decir que por más que Wemo trate de mejorar con lo que han explicado ellos todavía está in prueba.

Y para mí, Wemo nunca va a ser una realidad porque nunca van a superar al humano.

Ellos son machines, nosotros no.

Nosotros reaccionamos al momento con sentido, los sentidos.

Todavía no está in prueba.

Mr.

Cruz, can we get interpretation in the comments, please?

Yes.

Um good afternoon.

My name is Jose Enrique.

I've been a driver for more than ten years.

Uh I've had more than one experience with Waymo outside of December's, and there are many unreported events that have gone by.

What we have heard from the representatives from Waymo and the city representatives is uh it's something that we can understand that is very clear that the outage messed up the city's ability to work, and us drivers were the ones that continue working that kept the city moving.

As much as Waymo wants to uh wants to be better, they are still under trial.

There'll never be a reality for me because they can supersede what humans can do.

We react at the moment and they can't.

Based on that, you need to legislate and safety depends on the drivers.

A robot doesn't give the same level of priority as humans do.

And December 20th was very clear that they are still on trial and the city cannot just continue just being on trials.

Thank you so much for your comments.

Do we have anyone else who will be using Spanish interpretation?

Okay, thank you so much.

Let's have the next speaker, please.

Hi, I'm Joel Camisher, the union representative of SEIU 1021 for the school crossing guards.

I'm happy to hear that you and the Waymo people are working together to try and improve things because these disasters can and will happen at any time.

I'm sorry, the Waymo people left because I wanted to say that I appreciate your working with them, but in the future, I think you should include some representatives from the unions like SEIU and the Teamsters who represent thousands of city workers.

And some of these issues might slightly vary from the initial intent, but people have come here for several hours, so I hope you will have a little bit of uh leeway to for some people to discuss some specific issues that weren't from the uh December incident but could happen in the future.

As for me, uh the school crossing guards uh are a vital part of uh of the this protection, and we've heard that there have been some incidents in the past where Waymo cars didn't recognize the uh crossing guards.

There was NBC TV investigation, I think they found about 30 people had had close calls, and there were probably more people that didn't report them because uh they just figured, well, it was a close call, but I wasn't hurt, and I'm hoping the Waymo people would work with us to try and deal with this unique issue.

Uh as for uh the school crossing guards, um, as I said, we are a vital part of public safety, and I'd like to make sure they meet with us and take care that we would we can be included to try and help uh protect people.

So uh I will just uh pass it on to our union president here and uh the other.

Thank you, Mr.

Camusho.

Let's have your next speaker, please.

Good afternoon, Supervisors, Supervisor Melgar, good to see you again.

Uh thank you for this hearing.

I just want to first my name is Teresa Rutherford, president of SEIU 1021.

Uh we represent over 60,000 uh members across Northern California.

I want to speak to quickly um the inherent danger that Waymo um poses um to citizens and to fellow pedestrians.

Um the December 20th incident highlights that clearly.

Um in the medical field, there is a term called the golden hour.

That is the first 60 minutes where um you can actually save a life.

It speaks to stroke, it speaks to heart attacks.

Um within those 60 minutes um there is the greatest chance for survival.

And so to have emergency vehicles being blocked to not be able to respond poses an inherent life and debt risk to all citizens in San Francisco and by extension in the United States or wherever Waymo operates.

Waymo also impacts the livelihood of the drivers who created this industry, who made this industry functional, and who are now facing the impacts of having uh AV replacing them as human beings.

And these are real workers.

So we urge you to hold them accountable and we urge you to create checks and balance for Waymo as this process is rolled out.

Thank you.

Thank you so much to the next speaker, please.

Just a reminder, we need to move on to the next speaker.

Please don't interrupt with your applause.

Next speaker, please.

Julie Fisher, SEIU 2015.

It just so happens on that day.

I was in a paratransit van accompanying my partner.

We're being driven home, and when the driver, and they are the best drivers, reached Market Street, getting ready to cross Market Street, probably close to the Civic Center.

Three Waymo's, definitely two, but I believe three were holding the traffic on one lane.

And we were behind the third one.

Um because these drivers know what they're doing, they navigated in spite of the fact that people were having trouble doing a respectful job on the uh four-way stops.

So I want to thank you for your questions today, supervisors.

And I want to thank everybody who's come because this is still an issue that is harming our community.

You know, we arrived home safely because we had a competent driver, but that intersection, and I imagine all the intersections were extremely complicated.

People weren't re weren't in tune with what they needed to do.

We needed more staff than we had on the streets for the traffic control, just like Waymo needs more staff to protect us in these circumstances.

So thank you again for your time.

Thank you.

Thank you for your comments.

Next speaker, please.

Thank you, Supervisors.

Mark Ruburg, cab driver and uh board member of the San Francisco Taxi Workers Alliance.

And we have been participating in the CPUC's rulemaking proceedings around uh autonomous vehicles in Waymo uh right from the start.

And we have been calling this uh an immature technology.

I think the events of uh December 20th prove that uh it's an incompetent technology.

It's an incompetent technology and it's an inadequate system to handle events of this magnitude.

And and this is just a foretaste.

Uh if and when uh a truly major disaster happens, and then it's probably a when something like an earthquake, um they they will be uh completely unable to to to handle it, and they will be bollocksing up the city in ways that uh are going to cost lives.

Um, they talked about 1,593 stops uh during that that period of time on December 20th.

And those were only the stops of two minutes and more.

They're not telling you about all the the others that maybe were a minute, a minute and a half, even 30 seconds uh, you know, can impede a first responder uh and and and and and cause problems.

Now imagine that uh Waymo is going to grow in the same way that Uber and Lyft have grown.

Uh you know, with thousands or tens of thousands of vehicles on the street.

Uh this is going to explode.

It's not just Waymo.

Uh behind them is Zeux and behind them is Tesla, and behind them there are 30 other companies that have testing permits from the CPUC.

And the CPUC is is is not going to do very much about this.

Uh I believe you need to go to the State Legislature and get some legislation that gives the city some power over these vehicles.

Thank you.

Next speaker, please.

Good afternoon, committee.

My name is Kristen Hardy.

I am currently the regional vice president for San Francisco 10 to 1, but I am standing here as a San Francisco native and a proud parent.

My daughter here is Kayla Craig.

Um our daughter, our dog Leo was killed by um one of the Waymo's in the Western edition, so my kid wrote a few words.

She's a little shy, I'm gonna read them on her behalf.

Good afternoon, everyone.

We are here today because our streets are not safe.

And what happened recently makes that very clear.

On November 30th, in the Western edition, my dog was hit by a self-driving car operated by Waymo.

This was heartbreaking.

But more than that, it was frightening.

If a car cannot see and avoid a dog on a neighborhood street, how can we trust it around children, seniors, people with disabilities, cyclists, and pedestrians?

Street safety is not just numbers in a report, it is real life.

It is the people who walk these sidewalks every day.

It is the families who cross these streets.

Our neighborhoods are built for people, not for experiments.

Self-driving cars are being put on streets that are already busy and complicated as a trial for rollout of other cities and states.

We have narrow roads, double park cars, construction areas, slow streets, school zones, and most importantly, emergency vehicles that need to be able to properly respond to emergencies within our city and communities.

People who make quick decisions.

Real life is not perfect or predictable, and robot taxis do not have instincts or reflex to be able to properly respond or stop in impredictable instances.

There is no human driver behind the wheel to react with a common sense or quick judgment.

So when a self-driving car makes a mistake, who suffers?

Not the company, not the executive, the community does.

Safety should never come second.

It should never be tested on real people in real time.

The people of San Francisco deserve streets that put people over profit, safety over speed, responsibility over experiments.

We are not against technology.

We are against putting lives at risk without our permission.

Thank you so much.

Speaker's time is concluded.

Thank you.

Let's hear free speaker, please.

Good afternoon.

Um I'm Ashley, the proud sister of Kayla.

Um so I wasn't going to say anything, but after today, we learned there were response delays, we learned there are gaps in training, we learned there are operational issues still being fixed, and yet these vehicles are still on our streets.

This may have started as an exciting vision, a futuristic idea funded by people with resources and influence, but innovation without execution is negligence.

Community should not be the testing ground for a dream that was not fully prepared for real-world consequences.

Because as of today, two animals are already dead.

We should not have to wait for a human life to be lost before action is taken.

Safety must come before ambition.

So as of today, we have to ask what will it take for real change?

And I do appreciate all of you for the intentional questions that you asked today.

Excited or grateful to be here, so thank you again.

Thank you so much for your comments.

Let's have the next speaker, please.

Hi, how are you, Board of Directors?

Good afternoon.

My name is Hector Castellanos.

I'm a driver from Uber and Leaf for more than a decade from the 10 years.

And there is one thing that they Waymo, they never gonna be replaced, is the human factor.

So we know what to do when it's an outreach, when is the light is not working?

Absolutely.

We just go and get uh a passenger that have disability.

We can just go down and help the passenger to get into the car.

Waymo is never gonna do that.

So it's very important to support the drivers and get our streets safe.

And also please protect our jobs.

I it's a scary to hear how Waymo have already millions of uh drive uh drivers and I mean millions of uh rights.

That's or job, you know, please protect our job.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for your comments.

Good afternoon.

First, I'd like to thank SEIU 721 for allowing me to come here today.

And to the committee for having this hearing.

My name is Mike Letendre, and I'm from San Diego.

Understanding the parameters of this hearing, I'm gonna ask the committee for a little leniency and indulgence while I read a brief statement.

I empathize with the city of San Francisco for being the petri dish for autonomous vehicles.

While we do not currently have autonomous vehicles operating in San Diego, they are currently mapping out the city for possible deployment in early summer of this year.

Hence the outcome of these hearings will affect us also.

All robotics use artificial intelligence, meaning they are given a set of commands to result in a specific outcome.

They are reactive.

A human being has perception.

When all of us in the room hear a siren, we immediately become hyper alert.

We look in our rear view mirrors, we check down the streets, we ascertain where the vehicle is coming from, then we look for an exit strategy to allow that vehicle time to pass safely.

Waymo does not.

Maybe when we develop AGI, artificially generated intelligence, for those of you who watched iRobot, that's what that was.

They will possess the ability to be perceptive, to read a room, and to react accordingly to not pr in impede progress of a vehicle.

Thank you.

Thank you for your comments to the next speaker, please.

My name is Mike Robinson, and I'm a lift driver for eleven years, and I've been with the SCIU since 2017 in the California Gig Workers Union.

I strongly urge you to stand with the California Gig Workers Union, FCIU and the Teamsters to keep our streets safe in California.

Thank you.

Thank you for your comments.

Next speaker, please.

Thank you, Supervisors.

Good afternoon, David Cannum, 10 to 2.

Um it's clear based on the testimony of Uber today that they were not ready.

They they are clearly not prepared for major incidences like the December 20th incident.

And anywhere else, including San Francisco, you'd think that by now they would have been taken off the streets pending you looking into uh them being actually ready for an incidence like that could happen.

Instead, they've been given they've been rewarded for incidences like December 20th.

They have been given greater access to the airport, greater access to Market Street instead of limited uh access.

We we we we want to work with you supervisors.

I know you don't make the decision.

CPSU, which is in bed with these folks, they're completely bored off.

They they are not gonna stop them until we change the the composition of that body.

But we wanted to join states like New York, uh, Illinois, Washington, Virginia, where they're contemplating limiting uh auto autonomous vehicles, not increasing autonomous vehicles.

But we also want you as San Franciscans.

I'm sure most San Franciscans also care about the drivers.

We have 800,000 drivers in California who's livelihood whose families depend on them providing the service that they provide.

This industry could be completely wiped out in a matter of a few years if these vehicles are not restricted.

So we hope by the way, I want to tell you that we have not found any we we don't know how the airport granted that permits to to Uber to Waymo.

We have no idea we cannot find any record of any legit process that was followed for them to be given that permit.

Just so you know.

You may want to look into that.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for your comments.

Tevin, next speaker, please.

My name is John Conley.

I've been with Uber approximately six years.

I have over 17,000 trips, uh, 95% of those being in city here.

WAMO is based on three factors electricity, a cell connection, and programming.

If no cell connection, they become a paperweight on the road.

Program doesn't understand what's going on, they become a paperweight on the road.

They block traffic and will continue to do so.

There's nothing that they can program that can be contingent on every aspect that you would experience on the road.

Driving is a dynamic task.

They are attempting to apply a linear program to a dynamic task.

It is an impossibility for them to make a rational decision where a human driver says, Well, I'm not gonna drive into that construction zone, or I'm about to cross that police tape, or I'll take my car into an act of shootout with police with bad guys.

That endangers the drivers, that endangers the passengers, and where's WAMO doing?

That's where they go, because they don't have any type of rationale to do anything different.

I'm also a certified medic.

Response time is everything.

What I heard from WAMO today is pick up a phone and wait.

Seconds, minutes, hours count.

If you're in a fire situation, if you're in a medical situation, especially here in San Francisco, one block road can lead to several block roads all over the system.

And that's just a fact.

And when WAMO indicated this red light uh contingency of when lights are out, this is my personal experience.

Thank you so much for your comments.

Thank you for uh having me.

Let's have the next speaker, please.

Thank you.

Uh good afternoon, supervisors.

My name is Joseph Bagusso, and I'm a right chair driver in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I've been driving for about 10 years.

I drive for both Uber and Lyft, and uh I have like 25,000 rides.

Uh I know you guys wanted to concentrate on the blackout.

But you know, I have to bring something up because it's been it really bothers me.

I've been person my personal experience is that I had a near collision.

This was in the D Bose triangle.

I have a passenger and I'm driving, and I have to slam on the brakes.

A Waymo dashes in front of me, runs a red light, I almost hit it.

Now initially I just thought, well, this is some kind of crazy thing that uh you know I should have saved the tape and whatnot, but a couple weeks later I'm driving down Market Street, and the same thing happened to a vehicle in front of me had a slam on the brakes near knowing market.

So these things are running red lights, and it's just it's just driving me nuts because I talk to first responders, police men, and I ask them, does this does this happen?

They say, Yes, it does.

And I'm you know, what kind of who is regulating these people?

Who says that they can run through red lights?

I mean, and this has been going on, and as far as I know, it still happens every once in a while.

I just find that absolutely incredible.

I hope maybe you guys can find out who approved that and and do something about that, because I just think that's just wild.

Uh also I just want to mention I'm deeply concerned about the expansion of these vehicles.

And one of the things I want to do is expand to the airports, and all the airports um rides to the right share drivers are still the few rides that we consider profitable, most of us, and if they are allowed to go to the airport, you're gonna take one of the last ways that we can make a living.

Many of us drivers will suffer a lot.

Just want you to know that.

Um we may be exiting the business.

Thank you for what happened.

Thank you so much.

Next speaker, please.

Good afternoon, uh board communities.

My name is Nicholas Cowbler.

I'm from Stockton, California.

I was in 1994, 17 years old.

Been driving since then, all the way, I'm about to be 50 this year.

So you know, my concern is the safety because we're accountable.

We get driver's license, we get tested.

Um we get regulated by Uber and Lyft.

If we get do something really funky, we get suspended.

And so like each for me, my concern with Waymo, they just get a full license for all the cars, like it's one entity.

So why not each vehicle be treated like a driver and be penalized?

We don't get penalized.

So that's my concern right there.

So I don't know why uh DMV or I know the national transportation, highway transportation, uh, and DMV doesn't allow them to be on the freeways, but sooner later that's going to get bumped out and they're gonna be able to go in those freeways too.

So if this is going to be a concern on the roads, we know like for example, like Burnell Heights, Twin Peaks, they have two-way traffics and the space is physically only for one lane.

What does the one emergency needs service needs to go up there?

They're stuck.

They're stuck.

So you know that's my concern.

That's the only thing, you know.

So um thank you for your time.

I made it short and brief for you, so you know the next person has another concern.

So have a good one.

Take care.

Thank you for coming.

Next speaker, please.

Hello.

Thanks for listening to me.

My name is Elias Nagash.

I'm originally from country called Addis Ababa by Ethiopia.

I moved here in 1971.

And uh because my brother was going to UC Berkeley studying, and my uncle was working at San Francisco State, and they were on the side they were doing transportation.

Uh they had a taxi medallion.

And so they were trying to convince me to put my name for a medallion list.

So finally in 1994, I put my name.

And uh first is uh I was doing shuttle in San Francisco, and then I started driving taxi, and uh eventually my medallion came and I managed to do taxi medallion, but then finally there was it was 250,000.

That so I managed to sell my medallion.

I was very fortunate, but I was studying music here, and uh so the bottom line, you know, I I love technology, that's good, but it's that you can't make a living doing Uber anymore.

Right now, Uber takes sixty percent of the drivers.

So uh now with YEMO or Waymo coming up and doing all of this, that's not good for you know, for us.

So anyway, think about it.

Waymo technology is nice, but we have to make a living too as Uber and Lyft drivers, which I've done for many many years.

Thanks for your time.

Thank you so much for your comments.

Hi, my name is Elena Del Campo.

I live in Redwood City and I work as an Uber and Lyft driver for the last 10 years up here in San Francisco.

Um what I would really like to know is if the federal aviation has had autopilot in the air airplanes for over 60 years, but still require a pilot to be in the cockpit at all times.

Why do these cars, why are they any different?

They're not any safer.

We're actually safer in the air than behind these cars.

I see these cars on a daily basis, run red lights, almost hit pedestrians as they're edging forward, about ready to run the red light.

They cross into my lane, almost broadsiding me.

I've actually had jokes and bets with riders in my car, betting them that I'll bet you this Uber, this l this Waymo right next to me, is gonna cross over in the middle of the the intersection and try to cut me off.

Sure enough, I win the bet every single time.

They are the worst cars, and why are they allowed to drive in the taxi lanes when we are not?

We are the same.

That's it.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for your comments.

Stephanie, next speaker, please.

So resident of San Francisco.

Gracias y tengo buenos.

Okay.

So my name is Jo Andres.

I'm a resident of San Francisco.

I'm here because I w I witnessed what happened in December 20th.

And I'm here to tell you that they're not safe because on that day, um, I'm one of the persons that experienced what happened on the intersection of King and Harrison.

There was so much craziness going on that the person that was driving behind me hit me.

It wasn't it wasn't uh big accident, nothing bad happened.

But I'm saying that it's not safe because they cut you off, they don't use the signals when they're turning, they don't so I don't understand how we're working here, right?

They park wherever they want, the cops don't issue them tickets, and the way the way more workers here they said the they said whatever they were thinking and they left they didn't wait for the drivers to be heard by them and the safety concerns that we have because and all the questions that you had they didn't answer in in exactitude, they didn't give you exact numbers or stats.

All they did was evade evade evade the answers.

Thank you for the interpretation.

Let's have the next speaker, please.

Incluso casi taking for culpa de ellos.

Gracias.

Okay.

So my name is Julia.

Given that what's happening, it's not just given what's happening, it's not just here in San Francisco, but also in Sunnyvale.

I drive inside and outside this area.

I feel that uh these things, and I cannot call them cars because they're not driven by a by a human.

They they break the driving rules on Thursday.

I saw that a car was turning left and almost lost control in an intersection that was heavily heavily that was heavily busy by by what by people walking, and a lady almost was taken out when she was trying to cross, and then the car didn't know what to do, it didn't know whether if it was to go forward or back.

Um we need we we here we need to drive defensively because of all the people walking, all the people driving.

We as drivers are the ones responsible for all of those around us and inside the car.

So the car is a ticking bomb.

It's a ticking bomb, and we need to be fully cautious to be able to operate them, but they're just creating problems, and I almost got a ticket because of them.

Thank you so much for your comments.

Thanks once again for the interpretation.

Let's have the next speaker, please.

Somos part of the economy de San Francisco y de la Bahia.

Somos conductores professionales y prestamos un excelente service de calidad para las personas, adultas, mayores anders.

Somos professionales y les prestamos el service adecuado in the moment.

Okay.

Hello, my good afternoon.

My name is Manuel.

We have with Waymo, we have been affected economically.

We are professional drivers and give quality service to all older, older individuals, children, people with disabilities, medical conditions.

And we provide the utmost uh quality service.

Safety is not an option.

It's our priority.

Thank you so much for your comments.

Hello, uh my name is Alejandra.

I do work for more than twelve years.

I start uh working uh for these companies and because uh I'm single mother.

I have kids waiting for me every day at home.

But in the past I working eight hours a day.

I can rest two days a week.

But now I'm working for 12 hours because in the city I take Waymo take the 80% of the trips.

And I I can work in the city.

I'm going to work in the airport, and I stay for 16 minutes waiting for a one trip, just for one trip each hour.

And now wemo going to the airport.

So where I need to go to work, I need to support my family.

I pay my taxes in this city.

I need support.

I need protect communities, protect the drivers.

I'm not the only people.

There's so many drivers that work, sleep in the car, eating in the car.

They're almost living in the car.

So what is the future for our families?

So just I want to let us know this is a big problem, but the city, they're growing for communities, for families.

And I can speak about Waymo because everybody knows about the issues.

Maybe I'd be arrested in my license, lost.

How Weymouth can do this.

Thank you.

Thank you for your comments.

So the next speaker, please.

My name is Sena Reyes.

Gracias.

Okay.

Now I'm more now I'm earning about a hundred and eighty dollars working approximately sixteen hours.

We deal with uh the lift and uber exploitation and now we're deal with we're dealing with Waymo coming in.

We don't know where we're gonna end up.

We are being exploited and now we are being reduced uh our out our w our earnings this year from uh almost now and even more so now with about earning a hundred and eighty dollars to two hundred that I used to earn.

Now I'm really earning about a hundred and fifty.

I don't know how much uh how much we can take uh we have people to feed, we have families to feed.

Thank you for your comments to the next speaker, please.

Thank you.

Just a reminder to everyone to please focus public comment on the context of the blackout and emergency vehicle response in this time.

Hi, thank you guys.

I appreciate um today.

Um my name is Janice, and I'm originally from San Francisco, born and raised, but I now live in Sacramento County California.

Pull up your mic.

Pull up your mic.

Okay.

Okay, so my name is Janice Jackson and I'm originally from San Francisco, but I now reside in Sacramento, California.

I've been driving for Uber for um over ten years.

And my major concern is um Waymo is not in Sacramento as of yet.

And me listening to all the concerns and all the accidents that's going on here in San Francisco.

I would really like it for you guys to make sure that they have some better laws in place before they do get into Sacramento.

Um that is a very real big concern for me because um listening like I said, listening to all the other concerns in the people and the accidents that would went on before me, and especially what happened on the twentieth of December, it's it's great concerning that no one is behind the steering wheel of those cars and that it's n it's no safety coming out of any of that.

Thank you.

Thank you for your comments to the next speaker, please.

Hello, uh my name is Jason.

I'm uh Uber and Lyft driver.

I'm here representing the 20,000 members of Right Here Drivers United as well.

Um I'm a San Francisco resident, District Five.

Um I came here to get some answers today.

I don't feel like we really got a lot of those answers.

Um you look at the way artificial intelligence works, it takes the average of previous events and tries to construct what to do at a given time.

But when there's an emergency, by definition, that's not what's going on.

And maybe a company can try to fix that by having thousands of people in a faraway country um try to manage when things don't go well.

I think we heard about how that went on December twentieth and didn't really get any insight into what we might change about that.

So we spent a lot of time talking about the problems that this has caused, the problems that Waymo causes, and I'm just not sure what they solve.

We suddenly have all these problems when we're solving pro uh something that isn't there.

So I'm just not quite sure how to move forward, but I think we do need to get more answers and and I uh appreciate this.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for your comments.

So the next speaker, please.

Good afternoon, supervisors.

My name is Darius Kemo Barake.

I'm from San Jose, California.

I'm also a member of SCIU California Geek Workers Union.

We all know what happened on December twentieth, twenty twenty-five.

Everybody has been talking about it.

San Francisco traffic situation was paralyzed.

Pets and pedestrians are being hit with the VMO vehicles, and uh as with any job where safety comes first, but we have not yet achieved safety for our community community members driving and crossing our streets.

VMO vehicles are known to be breaking traffic laws and interfere with the fire department, police, as well as medical personal responses.

There should be limitations on the number of vehic uh Vamo vehicles on our streets so that the Uber and Lyft drivers paid does not get affected.

I asked that the board stand with the geek drivers and other workers to make sure that our streets are safe and that we protect jobs for the drivers.

Thank you.

Thank you for your comments.

Next speaker, please.

Good afternoon, Board of Supervisors.

My name is Jamahia.

I've been a driver for almost eleven years for Uber and Lyft.

Thank you for asking pointed questions of Waymo.

They are able to do whatever they want without laws that affect them.

You know, they hit a child, they block emergency vehicles.

Hopefully, what you guys ask and what you your conversations with emergency um teams and with the CPUC will help Waymo be accountable like we drivers are.

And thank you because that too might help the drivers in the Bay Area alone.

There's 250,000 drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area.

They I know this is not specifically to the what happened, but again, they they pay wages, they they put food on the table for their family.

So thank you for raising questions that might help them keep their jobs and make Waymo accountable.

Thank you.

Thank you for your comments.

The next speaker, please.

Hello, uh good afternoon, supervisors.

Uh my name is Guru Preet, and uh I'm a ride share driver from Sacramento.

Everyone in this room remembers the power outage uh this past December while the city was in the dark, the truth about Waymo came to light.

The second the grid flickered the these genius machines turned into multi-ton obstacles that paralyzed our streets.

The harsh truth is that Waymo failed the city when we needed transportation the most.

When the traffic lights went out, Waymo didn't know how to navigate, they didn't know how to yield, they simply stopped blocking emergency lanes and creating gridlock that could have cost lives.

They are programmed for a perfect world that doesn't exist.

But do you know who didn't stop?

We didn't.

Human drivers.

The people Waymo wants to replace.

We're the ones out there in the dark.

We used our judgment to navigate dead in intersections.

We got people home to their families.

We were the safety net that got San Francisco while these expensive robots sat on uh uselessly in the middle of the road.

You cannot claim these vehicles are safer when they are the first things to break during the crisis.

If you approve the their expansion, you are knowingly trading human reliability for corporate liability.

We are the ones who keep the city moving.

Wamo just gets in the way.

So as you know, uh first of all, you all the questions you guys asked today, we loved it.

But I think we got the.

Speaker's time is concluded.

Thank you so much.

Next speaker, please.

Good afternoon, board of supervisor.

Uh, my name is Tashudorje.

And uh I'm a right share driver since now almost like uh 10 years.

And uh as a Buddhist philosophy, first we are telling that uh self before others.

So on behalf of all the divers today, I'm here sharing my some few my knowledge and my words for all of you.

So today, almost like two hours, we are spending here like on the December 28th, what happened in San Francisco City on that day, I was also driving.

So I don't want to more share about that, because that that day I was felt I'm driving to India or Nepal.

So not only December 28th, on that uh I saw many incidents before that in San Francisco when the driverless come in the city.

And uh for me, you know, as a human driver, you know, in future, if we lose the job, how we can survive, how we save our life, our family.

Then we have to fight for the our stomach of hungry, you know.

So we had a while, we had a pandemic.

Now, in AI and robot taxi, whatever, if the humans lose the job, we have to fight for the food one day.

And to people we become a homeless, people will come to the streets.

That's why I feel not safe.

You know, in the future, if the robot has come like that or AI, whatever.

So also top of that, as a human driver, as my chair, I would raise short uh my incidents before three years.

I saved one life of my cost uh customer when they travel to Napa.

He got us truck when we cross the Bay Bridge.

I called the 911, I could save his life.

If the robot can do that uh do that or not, that's my question and constant to all of us.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for your comments.

So the next speaker, please.

Good afternoon, supervisors.

I want to start out by thanking you for your time, your commitment, your steadfastness and working and standing up for drivers whose livelihood depends on safe driving conditions.

I was driving the night of December 20th, and I tell you it was anything but safe.

I drove down Van S and I saw a pile of Waymo's.

So I was personally stuck, uh Supervisor.

I know you want us to speak to that.

I you don't want to hear my actual comment on the public record.

Uh but I do want to say that the livelihood of these 800,000 drivers who are now working to form a union so that they can get fair wages, fair working conditions, depends on your solidarity with them.

It does not depend on the success of Waymo.

I have a kid who worked for crews for 10 years.

I know a lot about this industry.

And I am telling you that no autonomous vehicle can replace the mind, the heart, the commitment, the dedication, and the talent of these drivers.

So I hope that you will continue to stand with them and that you will consider to take the kinds of actions that other cities have taken that are limiting their scope or abandoning their scope as opposed to expanding their scope, which we just did at the airport.

And I believe that David was correct without permit.

I do want to say the airport has been cooperating with us around the conditions of the drivers very well, and I want you to know that we very much appreciate your continue and rely on your continued commitment to make sure that these drivers' livelihood is protected and that the streets are safe for the rest of us.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for your comments to the next speaker, please.

And if we have anyone else after this speaker who wants to give public comment from whom we have not yet heard, you can let it speak along that Western Wall.

Please begin.

Good afternoon, um Chair.

Members of the committee, thank you so much for holding this hearing, um, Supervisor Makmood.

Um, and for your really thoughtful questions.

I think a lot of answers were concerning to me and probably to many folks, particularly around um outsourcing of labor.

I think we need a lot more information around that.

I know it's very concerning for workers here, conditions and the numbers of folks who are being outsourced to developing countries around this type of technology.

Furthermore, um you heard a lot of concerns about what happened the night of December 20th.

I live in the neighborhood.

It was extremely concerning and chaotic.

But this is not just about this one night you heard from many workers tonight.

This is a series of years, decades of workers fighting for the right to organize from huge rideshare corporations like Uber and Lyft, and then finally winning the right to organize into a union after millions and billions of dollars from these corporations against the rights of workers to organize.

Finally, we've won the right, and now our industry, their industry is being degraded by these um autonomous vehicle corporations.

And it's extremely concerning, not just about what happened on December 20th, but it's interrelated, it's interrelated right to all of these issues around affordability.

Drivers having to come from Stockton, from Modesto just to try to make a living here in San Francisco.

Drivers living in their cars, and now this is the next fight around human dignity and drivers trying to make a living wage is the outsourcing of jobs, the degradation of jobs and labor, and now the safety on our streets, which we all pay taxes for.

Um, you know, these emergencies happening.

So please, I know it's frustrating you can't do that much, but let's limit their scope and let's prioritize human workers and labor.

Thank you.

Thank you for your comments.

Do we have anyone else who has public comment for agenda item number two?

Madam Chair.

Okay, thank you so much.

Thank you for everyone in the community who came to uh give us public comment on these issues.

And again, thank you to uh Waymo and to our uh departments for having a very good and productive hearing.

Um I will turn it over to uh Supervisor Mahmoud to give uh oh I'm sorry, close public comment.

Thank you.

Public comment is now closed.

And I will turn it over to Supervisor Mahmoud to provide any closing remarks.

Thank you, Chair, and thank you to everyone who came out and gave public comment today.

Your voices are heard.

I also want to thank Waymo for coming.

Uh, you see your presence today is a commitment to safety going forward.

Um but I hope you also take it as a call to action in your role as a major player in San Francisco.

The role, the results of today will hopefully um be heard, but also shows that there are dire consequences if we don't get public safety right in the context of emergency response.

We heard today how from Waymo about how a team of about 70 remote assistants helped their entire fleet manage tricky driving situations.

We heard that that was not enough to handle the backlog that we saw during an outage from stock vehicles and emergency dispatchers.

We heard clear asks from our city departments about what they need from AV operators like Waymo.

When a 911 dispatcher or firefighter picks up the phone, there needs to be someone on the other line.

This is essential to the safe operation of A V service.

We are concerned, or I'm concerned about compliance with AB 1777, which will take effect on July 1st.

The requirements that the law put in place are meaningful step forward to a safer and more productive relationship between AVs and the city.

But it's I didn't have as much hope as I was hoping that those requirements may be met.

The gulf between the 30 seconds that the law requires and the 50 minutes that we heard about today is massive.

And to get to the point that we need to actually resolve that issue, it's clear that Waymo needs to expand staffing and be able to flex to a much larger workforce in emergencies.

In the meantime, I hope Waymo lives up to their commitments to expand staffing, but also to the other requests that departments had today.

Interlinking systems between the fire department and Waymo, and also making improvements in collaboration with PD and other city departments so that we are not reliant on our first responders for roadside assistance.

The rest, I move to file the hearing uh with your permission, Chair.

Thank you.

Uh Supervisor Chen.

Thank you, Chair Malga.

I also just want to express my appreciation for Supervisor Makmo for holding this hearing, and also my great appreciation for all the voices of labor that show up this afternoon.

And also thank you to the Waymo for sharing um uh for sharing uh and coming today.

And I do look forward to the next steps to address the operational and regulatory regulatory changes that I much needed moving forward.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Uh we have a motion.

The motion offered by Member Machmood that the hearing be heard and filed, Vice Chair Chen.

Chen I, Member Makmood.

Machmood I, Chair Melgar.

I.

Madam Chair, there are three ayes.

Okay.

That motion passes.

Thank you.

Mr.

Clerk, do we have any other items on our agenda today?

There is no further business.

Okay, we are adjourned.

Thank you.