Notices by Safe Street Rebel (safestreetrebel@sfba.social)

happy saturday fuck cars

these aren't "odd" laws, they're crucial ones for pedestrian safety. and Waymo regularly fails to follow them. this type of reporting seriously misses the mark, it's basically free advertising at this point

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/s-f-waymo-first-time-ride-19539040.php

https://twitter.com/Truthx16x/status/1799539236443660529

https://twitter.com/HaydenM16/status/1805747701667315817?

not to mention how it seems to be intentionally programmed to stop in bike lanes

https://sfba.social/@SafeStreetRebel/112634004752866771

https://carfree.city/@brett/111440816956028155

from just a few minutes ago, Waymo blocking the crosswalk and the bike lane. a two-fer! stayed there for a full light cycle

Today, we’re launching a new campaign to make the Wiggle–San Francisco’s premier east/west bike artery–safer for all. If you want to see the city install safe pedestrian and bike infrastructure like it, use this 1 click link to send an email to SFMTA- http://tinyurl.com/SSRwiggle/

The Wiggle connects the Mission and SOMA to Haight-Ashbury and the entire west side. Everyone who bikes in SF relies on it, and yet with just two exceptions, every part prioritizes cars over bikes and pedestrians.

they wanna be trains so bad 😢

image source: https://twitter.com/SafeStreetRebel/status/1721786326759149772

This Thursday, the CUPC is being asked to override the concerns of the city of San Francisco and expand this barely regulated program, giving the city no power to control the experiment these corporations are inflicting on us.

Even if you're pro AV, you're probably imagining an AV subject to regulations, made for the benefit of the public. That's not what we're getting right now. In fact, they’re trying to push ahead and expand before any regulations can be written.

This is why we're doing this now, the week before the CUPC hearing:

https://tinyurl.com/WeekOfCone

(which links to https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/events-and-meetings/cpuc-voting-meeting-2023-07-13)

#weekOfCone

Another huge problem with AVs is not about the technology, but about corporate impunity. Corporations expect to be above the law, to "move fast and break things".

Self-driving cars can't be cited for traffic violations. They share as little incident data as possible, so we only know the extent of the problems they cause from the news or social media. They are somehow exempt from accessibility requirements, and won't even pull to the curb to drop people off or pick them up.

Anecdotally, they seem to have become more aggressive as soon as they have started taking customers. Suddenly they're forcing pedestrians out of crosswalks, for instance. But they don't have to tell the public about any such changes.

We know that there's no market for safe cars. Cars are designed to speed, and Tesla "self-driving" already has a mode for breaking the law. If customers expect cars to drive fast and recklessly, and it's profitable for the corporations to oblige, that's what we're going to get.

#weekOfCone

Remember how jaywalking was invented by car companies to avoid having to address their safety problems? Public space was taken away from pedestrians and reserved for corporate interests by the law. There's already talk of how laws that protect pedestrians are inconvenient for self-driving cars.

Recently, gig companies like Uber and Lyft spent tens of millions of dollars to push through laws that allow them to better exploit workers.

What new laws are self-driving car companies going to introduce? What do you take for granted today that will be criminalized tomorrow?

On the subject of corporations and the law, they might be above the law, but they also expect the law to promote their interests.

There are no regulations around self-driving cars, but they think this lack of regulation shouldn't apply to actual humans. Nobody has been able to find a law that is broken by putting a cone on a stationary, empty car. The self-driving car companies have still demanded the cops put a stop to this.

To give a bit more context for people outside of San Francisco, in addition to being guinea pigs for self-driving cars, SF has also become a testbed for the future of the surveillance state. In SF it's now legal for the police to monitor private surveillance cameras in real time: https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/23/23368603/san-francisco-police-private-surveillance-cameras-vote

In addition to the well-known problem with Ring cameras, the SFPD have spun off and funded a "private" nonprofit to set up cameras: https://sfsafe.org/our-mission/.

The SFPD has a history of using these cameras to surveil totally legal protests despite claiming that department policy doesn't allow that:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/sfpd-obtained-live-access-business-camera-network-anticipation-tyre-nichols

Really, just look over all the EFF headlines for San Francisco, and then it'll be clear that we can't let the city be blanketed in surveillance bots.

We love that the media is covering #weekOfCone, but they're mostly avoiding talking about one of the biggest problems: surveillance.

A self-driving car network is a city-wide surveillance network under corporate control (as summarized in the SF police department's own training materials!)

A world where cars are all replaced with surveillance robots is a world where everything you are doing is being watched. Where they watch you go from your home to a protest, or to get gender-affirming care, or to get an abortion. And because they're a private entity, who knows what (if any) restrictions there will be on what they do with that data.

Article (with linked SFPD document): https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7dw8x/san-francisco-police-are-using-driverless-cars-as-mobile-surveillance-cameras

STOP driving on the Great Highway

* Sand dunes were not supposed to be paved over

* YEARS of fixing car infrastructure yet NO REAL WORLD USE found for taking a scenic detour and then speeding through it as fast as possible

* Wanted to go faster for a laugh? We had a tool for that: it was called "TAKING THE BUS"

"We are picking up sand in big trucks and moving it to the other end of the road."
"We have to clean the road because it was a bit windy by the ocean" They have played us for absolute fools

A lot has happened in 2022, so here’s a thread looking back at what we've accomplished ?.

This year, we grew from the Great Walkway Civil Disobedience Society to Safe Street Rebel- but we still got in a few good slow rides. We took over the Great Highway with bikes and pedestrians, bringing the Great Highway Park back for a few nights, sharing cake with our neighbors, and successfully killing a plan to get rid of Friday Great Walkways.