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Even though Cruise is voluntarily taking driverless vehicles off Austin's streets, the halt is only temporary. Austin officials said residents complained about the cars not operating properly. The company’s suspension follows the launch of a federal investigation into incidents with pedestrians in San Francisco. This is not the first time that Cruise vehicles have caused a traffic jam like this.
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The company has also been cutting contract workers that supported the company’s ride-hailing services. The company did not say if Austin workers were affected or how many positions were cut. As Cruise's fleet has expanded in Austin, formal and informal complaints — along with viral videos of cars stalling out or veering into lanes — have followed suit. Austin City Council member Paige Ellis, who chairs the city’s mobility committee, said Austinites had complained the city wasn’t doing enough to vet Cruise. The city is limited in its ability to regulate self-driving cars, she said.
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The pauses came after one of the company’s vehicles was involved in a high-profile incident in early October where a Cruise vehicle hit and dragged a pedestrian in California. After that incident, Cruise has been working to “rebuild public trust." Austin is in a bind as it relates to autonomous vehicles, as state law prevents cities in Texas from regulating them.
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The pedestrian was then launched in front of an autonomous Cruise vehicle which braked but still collided with the pedestrian, and then pulled over after stopping, dragging the pedestrian forward about 20 feet. As of Wednesday, the Austin Transportation and Public Works Department had received 42 complaints about Cruise vehicles since July. None of those incidents have resulted in injury, the department said. Unfortunately, more and more Cruise robotaxis flooded the narrow Austin street to meet the peak demand, only to join in the traffic jam. Cruise states that at the time, there were limited routes going north and south through the city, and a detour from an alternative route led the EVs to the same doomed parkway.
The region, which has been a testbed of self-driving technology, is currently being used by Waymo and Volkswagen to test its vehicles. All three council members expressed concerns related to public safety, complaints from the community and the city’s inability to regulate the vehicles. ““We think it’s the right thing to do during a period when we need to be extra vigilant when it comes to risk, relentlessly focused on safety, & taking steps to rebuild public trust,” the company said. Concerns over the vehicles driving recklessly through downtown were raised after videos on social media showed cars stopping in the middle of traffic and swerving into bike lanes. AUSTIN, Texas — Austin is now looking into regulating driverless vehicles on city streets. The city says it has no record of anyone being hurt by an autonomous vehicle in Austin.
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He pointed to Cruise's tendency to avoid larger streets, special events, higher volume traffic and inclement weather. City data showed more pedestrians and cyclists were killed or seriously injured in crashes in 2022 than in any other recorded year, as they launched "Vision Zero" in an effort to reduce the number of people hurt or killed in crashes. Austin's mayor pro tem, Paige Ellis, called the issue a matter of "public trust."
Cruise first announced it would expand to Austin in September 2022 and began offering fully autonomous rideshare services in December. Its rideshare service operates similarly to other rideshare services such as Uber or Lyft where users are able to request a ride in Cruise’s app and then be picked up and dropped off at specific locations. In Austin, Cruise has been operating in select areas of downtown, Central and East Austin between 9 p.m. At least four driverless car companies are testing vehicles in Austin. Cruise, which is mostly owned by General Motors, was the only one without humans behind the wheel, city staff said. Waymo, Volkswagen's ADMT and AV Ride have 25, 10 and 4 vehicles in Austin, respectively, all with test drivers.
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Cruise says it takes all incidents seriously and argues it has a good track record after more than 5 million driverless miles. Austin's internal reporting system was one of several improvised responses by local officials powerless to regulate an experimental new industry that's using Austin's streets as a laboratory. The Texas Legislature stopped cities from regulating self-driving cars in 2017. After waves of complaints from residents in Austin and elsewhere, Cruise announced Thursday it was suspending self-driving taxi operations nationwide to build "public trust." According to the team at Cruise, the fleet ended up in a high-demand area, which also brought with it a slew of pedestrian and passenger vehicle traffic.
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The California DMV accused Cruise of not disclosing or showing full footage of the incident, including its pullover maneuver, according to the USAToday report. Other reported incidents depict time-consuming responses to unusual situations. Cruise vehicles will no longer be on Austin streets – at least for now. Our expanded ODD will help to reduce concentration of vehicles and provide more services to the places customers want to be.
"It's unfortunate that state law doesn't allow us to regulate this unproven technology on our streets." A lieutenant with the fire station at 506 West Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard even fretted in an internal e-mail that driverless vehicles were presenting an issue for fire trucks leaving the station, because the cars would stop in place when they detected emergency lights. Cruise said the incident occurred when a car, driven by a human, collided with a pedestrian crossing a street against a red light.
The department has since reached out to equivalent bodies in Phoenix, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington D.C. A host of autonomous prototypes deployed by Cruise in Austin, Texas have been captured on film stuck in the middle of a street in what looks like some kind of twisted, dystopian traffic jam. Friday morning, a Cruise spokesperson confirmed rideshare was paused in Austin. The Cruise app also read "We've temporarily paused our service," with an option to be notified once it restarted. So firefighters couldn't roll the vehicle out of the intersection. Cruise emphasized the decision to suspend AV operations "isn't related to any new on-road incidents."
Unfortunately, some of Cruise’s growing pains in Austin were caught on camera as a swarm of robotaxis flooded a congested area. We spoke to Cruise and got the lowdown about what exactly happened.
"It is very alarming with how close the [Cruise] vehicles are getting," a firefighter wrote on Sept. 2. "The Cruise vehicle's actions are not predictable and there is no mutual communication with them." Austin's first responders grappled with how to manage Cruise's robot cars and their "alarming" behavior, records obtained by KUT show. Learn about The Texas Tribune’s policies, including our partnership with The Trust Project to increase transparency in news. But I think having a conversation with our state, you know, counterparts is extremely important for me, for them to kind of raise the alarm bells on this. And I think it’s extremely important for constituents,” said Qadri.
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