San Francisco to DMV: How should cops deal with self-driving cars that park wrong?

Enlarge / Autodesk VRED Design 2017. (credit: Waymo)

At a recent public comment hearing before the California Department of Motor Vehicles, numerous car manufacturers and tech firms urged the state to ease proposed regulations for the testing of autonomous vehicles, or AVs. Some even went as far as to suggest that such rule-making be left solely to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

However, some safety and consumer groups, as well as city governments, pushed for a more cautious and local approach. The dozens of filings to the DMV, made as part of the public comment period, were only made available on Friday.

One of the more interesting proposals came from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, which oversees the city's public transit infrastructure. In its nine-page letter, the MTA noted that autonomous vehicles must be able to navigate "pedestrians, buses, cable cars, bicyclists, and trucks" and that there be "maximum transparency" with private companies that wish to deploy autonomous cars. To that end, San Francisco wants local police to be able to access, without a warrant, "the autonomous technology data and/or video recordings... immediately... in the event of a collision."

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