Editorial: The robotaxi revolution is here. L.A., other cities need to be able to regulate driverless cars

A Waymo driverless taxi stops on a street in San Francisco on Feb. 15 for several minutes because the back door was not completely shut, while traffic backs up behind it. One day after California officials allowed a massive expansion of autonomous vehicle taxi service in San Francisco earlier this month, nearly a dozen self-driving Cruise vehicles came to a stop in the middle of a busy neighborhood, blocking other cars and tying up traffic for about 15 minutes until the cars woke up and moved along. Cities have to rely on the willingness of companies to collaborate; they have little power to curtail robotaxi operations if vehicles continuously block traffic, impede bike and bus lanes or flood a particular neighborhood. That’s one reason why San Francisco officials urged the California Public Utilities Commission to slow the expansion of Cruise and Waymo self-driving taxis until the vehicles perform better and the companies turned over more detailed information on their operational snafus. There’s an assumption that autonomous vehicles will ultimately be such a significant improvement over human-driven cars — providing safer, cheaper, more efficient transportation that can replace car ownership — that we should give companies leeway to experiment and we should tolerate a period of disruption.