
Jordon Wing
459 posts

Jordon Wing
@jwing_
👨💻Making permits faster @WithPulley, Volunteer @SFYimby 🥑• @S4PBayArea 🚴🚶🚄 • @GrowSF ↗️, Board @hvnavoice 🏘️



I initially retweeted reports showing Waymo vehicles stalled across San Francisco, with claims tying it directly to the power outage knocking them out like they were 'bricked.' That was too quick on my part. The vehicles weren't permanently disabled or failing due to lack of power. Instead, reports suggest the outage took down traffic signals, and Waymo's systems treated those dark lights as four-way stops per their safety rules. On such a large scale, that led to longer pauses at intersections, worsening congestion, and the company paused service in affected areas to manage it. The broader point I was trying to make still matters: As autonomy and electrification scale, mobility becomes more coupled to external infrastructure (grid, traffic-control, communications). Consumer adoption is driven by reliability in edge cases, not average-day performance despite being heavily levered to the latter. Highly visible stalls or outages can reinforce a perception of vulnerability even when the system is behaving correctly. This is beyond any one company and is more about how the whole sector builds resilience. There are anecdotal reports that other systems navigated it better (e.g., Tesla robotaxi) but seems like no firm conclusions there. The key question moving forward: what built-in redundancies and fallbacks should AV makers and cities develop to prevent outages from turning into widespread gridlock?































