San Francisco PG&E Blackout Exposes Remote-Operator Bottleneck: 1,593 Waymo Stops, 31 Dispatcher Calls, 53-Minute Hold

Headline Finding

On 20 December 2025, a PG&E power outage knocked out traffic signals across large sections of San Francisco, triggering a cascade of autonomous-vehicle failures that exposed a structural weakness in the robotaxi governance model: the remote-operator backstop. Waymo’s fleet stopped 1,593 times for two minutes or more; San Francisco’s 911 dispatch center called Waymo 31 times to get vehicles moved; and one caller — a first responder — was left on hold for 53 minutes. The incident is direct evidence that the legitimacy and spatial-allocation levers are being mismanaged: a fleet that cannot be commanded at speed by public-safety officials occupies public road space on terms the city did not negotiate and cannot enforce in real time.

Detail

The 20 December 2025 PG&E outage disabled traffic signals across large sections of San Francisco. The city’s 911 dispatch center began receiving calls about driverless Waymo vehicles stopped in travel lanes. By Waymo’s own accounting, its fleet stopped 1,593 times for two minutes or more during the event. Dispatchers called Waymo 31 times to request that vehicles be moved, and one caller was left on hold for 53 minutes — nearly an hour during which a first responder was diverted from other emergencies.

In a subsequent hearing before San Francisco supervisors, Waymo representatives accepted full responsibility and stated that the company had already made staffing changes and deployed the ability to send instructions directly to vehicles during a broad outage. The author — David Roberts, President and CEO of Verra Mobility — frames the incident as illustrative of a systemic constraint: when an AV gets stuck or becomes overly cautious, remote operators become the backstop; during a widespread disruption, that backstop becomes a queue, pulling responders away from real emergencies. The source notes that AV companies including Zoox, Tesla, Uber, and smaller startups are deploying in more cities across the U.S., amplifying the risk that this bottleneck will recur at greater scale.

Governance Implication

1. The spatial-allocation lever is being moved against the public interest: Waymo vehicles occupied travel lanes for extended periods — 1,593 stops of two minutes or more — without any mechanism for city officials to clear them at speed, demonstrating that curb and lane allocation for AV fleets lacks enforceable real-time governance.
2. The legitimacy lever is under acute pressure: a 53-minute hold placed on a first responder is a concrete, quantifiable harm to public trust, and Waymo’s after-the-fact acceptance of responsibility at a supervisors’ hearing is a reactive legitimacy repair rather than a proactive governance instrument.
3. The incident reveals a fleet-coherence failure: the remote-operator model, which functions adequately under normal conditions, degrades non-linearly under citywide disruption — the very conditions (major outages, mass events, emergencies) when city control is most needed.
4. For cities and regulators, the implication is that operator-licensing and performance-based-permitting frameworks must include mandatory response-time SLAs for emergency dispatch contacts, not merely crash-reporting obligations — the NHTSA Standing General Order’s crash-threshold trigger would not have captured any of the 1,593 stops in this incident.
5. The pacing problem (chapter 1) is directly illustrated: Waymo’s fleet was large enough to generate 1,593 disruptive stops in a single outage before the governance infrastructure — staffing levels, direct-vehicle-command capability, city-operator communication protocols — was in place to manage it.

Sources

https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2026/06/01/the-next-big-challenge-for-robotaxis-is-not-driving-its-civic-coordination/ https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/waymo-power-outage-20027389.php https://www.theverge.com/2025/12/21/waymo-san-francisco-blackout-stopped-vehicles