Driverless cars can’t be ticketed in California: Report
- To whom does officer issue ticket: San Francisco police chief
- Advocates are urging the state to pass new laws
- 'Technology evolves rapidly, faster than regulations can adapt'
San Francisco, CA, USA – July 24, 2023: A Waymo self-driving autonomous car drives on a Battery Street in downtown San Francisco just before the California Public Utilities Commission is set to vote to allow Waymo and Cruise the ability to charge fares in San Francisco for complete driverless rides in the City.
Testing on staging11
(NewsNation) — Current laws in California protect driverless cars from being ticketed, NBC News reported.
Advocates are now urging the state to pass new laws that will closely govern driverless cars.
“No citation for a moving violation can be issued if the (autonomous vehicle) is being operated in a driverless mode,” read an internal memo from San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott, obtained by the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit.
“Technology evolves rapidly and, at times, faster than legislation or regulations can adapt to the changes,” Scott added.
Over the summer, The San Francisco Standard, an online news organization, investigated why the city doesn’t ticket self-driving cars.
“When you’re a police officer out there in the field, and there’s a vehicle that has violated the vehicle code, which happens every day in San Francisco, who do you give the citation to?” Tumlin told The San Francisco Standard. “There is additional work that needs to be done to clarify what happens when an autonomous vehicle breaks the law.”
Changing the law is possible. Texas and Arizona rewrote traffic laws to allow ticketing of driverless cars, NBC News reports.
NewsNation has reached out to the San Francisco Police Department for more details but has yet to hear back.