Waymo expands into San Mateo County

Service expansion from San Francisco into San Mateo County includes surface streets only. It does not include driving on highways.

According to Bill Silverfarb, a spokesperson for Canepa, Waymo did not engage with the public, police or fire officials before beginning the service. He said the company sent out an email on Monday and contacted law enforcement just before starting service.

“In the best of all worlds, you message it properly and then you do the training and then you roll it out,” Broadmoor Police Chief Michael Connolly said, who was visited by a Waymo law enforcement ambassador on Monday to start talking about training officers how to respond to autonomous vehicle emergencies.

Connolly said they will plan a future session to teach officers how to manage incidents, including how to override a stranded vehicle to move it.

“I think Waymo has some improvements in the field and preparedness that they need to look at,” he said.

Waymo LLC, a self-driving car company owned by Google parent company Alphabet, has been operating in San Francisco since 2022. On Jan. 19, the company asked the California Public Utilities Commission for permission to expand into San Mateo County, which the commission granted despite protests from local governments.

Waymo spokesperson Ethan Teicher said the rollout into San Mateo County will not immediately add more cars, it is an expansion of the existing pickup and delivery zone.

On Jan. 9, Senate Bill 915, the Autonomous Vehicle Service Deployment and Data Transparency Act, was introduced by Dave Cortese, D-San Jose, chair of the Senate Committee on Transportation.

The law would have drawn regulatory power for autonomous vehicle services into the hands of local governments. San Mateo County joined Los Angeles County in passing resolutions in support of the bill.

Cortese pulled the bill from committee on June 17, saying the legislation was amended in committee to strip local governments of their power to regulate autonomous vehicles.

“We pushed the bill hard and got it through the Senate process including all committees and floor votes. But then it went to Assembly for hearings and the transportation chair Lori Wilson killed it,” Cortese said.

On April 9, the counties of San Mateo and San Francisco filed an amicus brief in the state Court of Appeal saying the CPUC failed to adequately consider, respond to and account for public safety concerns raised by Waymo’s expansion and was an abuse of discretion and contrary to law.

“Because CPUC has approved Waymo’s expansion in San Francisco, Waymo’s advice letter petition to expand to San Mateo County did not require full commission review,” the brief said. “Instead, the Consumer Protection Enforcement Division was empowered to and did approve the expansion without Commission review.”

The brief continued, “In light of this even more truncated process, stakeholders like San Mateo County had even fewer opportunities to provide input and evidence relevant to the expansion, causing CPUC to further err in its conclusions regarding the need for public safety protections in San Mateo County.”

Prior to the CPUC’s March 1 approval, Waymo representatives met with three members of the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors and with the county executive regarding its interest in expanding its commercial operations into San Mateo County. According to the company, the briefing included a 12-slide presentation that showed how the technology works. One slide contained a map of the larger service area across the Peninsula.

“As you can see on slide 11, they showed the map of Waymo’s expansion plans in the Peninsula,” a Waymo spokesperson said in a Feb. 15 email.