New California law aims to hold driverless car companies accountable for traffic violations

By Max Darrow

A new law is set to take effect in California next year that would hold driverless car companies accountable for traffic violations.

The legislation comes after police on the Peninsula tried to ticket a self-driving vehicle for an illegal U-turn. Computers inside these vehicles are still learning. So, too are those charged with making sure they obey the rules of the road.

Exhibit A? The San Bruno police officers were unsure how to deal with a driverless Waymo they spotted making an illegal U-turn a few blocks away from El Camino Real, a major thoroughfare through San Mateo County.   

According to police, the officers were in a marked patrol vehicle at a red light southbound on Huntington Ave. at San Bruno Ave, which had a no U-turn sign posted. Officers said they saw the autonomous vehicle make a U-turn against the posted sign. 

But the California law they were enforcing was written for vehicles with human drivers, and with no one behind the wheel, the officers couldn’t issue a ticket.

“Right now, in California, it is not possible to give a robotaxi a traffic ticket. It turns out the law, for more or less accidental historical reasons, works in California where you have to give the ticket to a human driver, but there’s no human driver so you can’t give the ticket,” said Phil Koopman, faculty emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University and a specialist on self-driving car safety issues.

“I don’t think anyone in California ever sat down and said, ‘Oh, we shouldn’t give tickets to robotaxis.’ This is a historical legacy – it just kind of turned out that way because of the way the law was written back when we were going from horses to cars, right?” he said. “It’s not that someone decided to do this very dysfunctional thing, but it is where we are.”

Local driving safety advocates have broadly welcomed the Waymo robotaxis as they venture further down the Peninsula.

“Anecdotally, they seem to drive fine to me. I’ve certainly seen a lot worse from humans,” said Mike Swire, who lost a loved one to a drunk driver years ago. 

He points out that Waymos perform well even in the “challenging” driving conditions on El Camino Real. From his standpoint, autonomous vehicles should be a part of the picture, as long as they are operating properly.

“The most common causes of crashes are distracted driving, speeding, driving while inebriated, not paying attention. All of those, potentially, could go away someday in an autonomous vehicle world,” he said. “So, I’m very bullish on the technology, but it will take some time to get where we need to get.”

Legislation is set to take effect next summer that will change the status quo and enable officers to issue a “notice of autonomous vehicle noncompliance” to the AV operator for a robotaxi that breaks a traffic law.

“With thousands of cars, you can’t ignore bad behavior. Will they be perfect? No. Do we expect them to be perfect? No. But they should be held accountable the same as human drivers,” Koopman said.

Swire agrees, the rules of the road should be the same for all that are operating vehicles on it, whether there’s a driver behind the wheel or not.

“Maybe it’s not a ticket, but we need some mechanism whereby City of San Mateo can say to Waymo or another AV operator, ‘hey, this happened, it’s not okay, we don’t want this to happen again, and if it continues to happen then there is some type of penalty.’ That’s the way we manage our streets today,” he said.

Waymo declined CBS News Bay Area’s request for an interview about the incident, but provided the following statement:

“Waymo’s autonomous driving system, the Waymo Driver, is designed to respect the rules of the road. We are looking into this situation and are committed to improving road safety through our ongoing learnings and experience.”