Given that human drivers stop in bike lanes, Waymo then has a tradeoff:

1) Be the only ones to follow the letter of the law, break a lot of people's expectations, and catch backlash for disrupting traffic.

2) Follow the most common expectation, even if wrong, and incrementally add to the problem.

IMO, cyclists shouldn't lobby Waymo directly, but should lobby cities to actually enforce the rules on everyone. Then Waymo would fall in line naturally. And if they're inclined to take direct action against Waymo's they should also act against Uber and DoorDash drivers who are a far bigger problem by volume (and wait time for deliveries).

Dylan Taylor, a beloved Menlo-Atherton High School football coach, was killed last year in one of these collisions:

https://www.almanacnews.com/atherton/2025/05/08/m-a-athletic...

(Scroll down to the comment by "T R" which describes better than the article itself what likely happened.)

Unfortunately, I've almost never seen a driver follow this law. Everyone studiously avoids the bike lane and then cuts across it.

The bike lane marker changes from a solid white stripe to a dashed line as you approach an intersection. This is supposed to be a hint to merge into the bike lane. It isn't working.

I post a reminder on Nextdoor once or twice a year about this. I'm taking the opportunity to also post it here for my California neighbors.

It would be interesting to see if the Waymo Driver follows this law. My bet is that it does.

The San Francisco Bike Coalition has an excellent page on this topic:

https://sfbike.org/news/bike-lanes-and-right-turns/

It’s a now third-hand paraphrase from an SF bike advocate who says he heard it from some unnamed representative of Waymo.

If someone has something more direct, happy to read it, since this seems to be clickbait napalm at the moment.

While it’s annoying in the moment to pedal around a parked car, I’m fine with it. However, having a Waymo dropping off clear of the bike lane sounds good, until the exiting passenger accidentally doors a cyclist who isn’t prepared for that possibility.

I suppose I’d rather suffer the inconvenience of going around a parked car than risk the devastation of being doored.

In San Francisco, the vehicles often pull into bike lanes to pick up and drop off passengers — because that’s what they’re programmed to do, according to advocates who’ve asked the company for an explanation.

Waymo has told advocates that expecting it to respect bike lanes is “too high a bar” because customers expect to be dropped off in them, said Christopher White, executive director of the San Francisco Bike Coalition.

“People always point out that unlike human driven cars, the AVs stop at lights and obey the speed limit. However, they are really only as good and effective and safe as they are programmed to be,” White said. “Waymos pull over into bike lanes all the time for pickups and drop-offs and that’s neither legal nor safe but the companies say that is a normal practice and that’s what customers expect.”

Can't find a Waymo article about this, but Lyft and Uber (let alone trad taxis) also do this. I'm not sure that this is a particularly autonomous-car-shaped sin.

Consider it a two lane road, where you give way when you merge into the other lane and you slow down behind slower traffic that's in your lane. Except that when both lanes are available each type of traffic prefers "their" lane due to the speed difference.

That speed difference is decreasing in the bigger cities recently. Ebikes drive 25 km/h and many shared streets are reducing from 50 to 30 km/h for cars. It probably helps that a lot of the bigger streets aren't shared, there are many separated bike lanes here.

The principal thing that changes in this story is that Waymo centralizes the responsibility for the risk-taking, and therefore is easier to hold accountable than a horde of interchangable gig workers, impulsive teenagers, etc. When a Waymo car actually does damage, they don't enjoy the same cost structure as the rest of us. The probability is high that they reached a utilitarian conclusion on the bike lane issue favoring their current approach as "the best across all key metrics". Those metrics can be changed by enforcement, or by fixing the streets. They can use words like "unrealistic" but they are mostly speaking within a particular legislative and infrastructural reality. That reality can change if we expect it to, but it means going back on the individual-responsibility outlook.

So the solution is either make it impossible for a car to drive into the bike lane through barriers, or just allow cars into the bike lanes anyways.

Assuming we can’t significantly reduce car usage (and noting that you can still prioritize bike/pedestrian-friendliness and assume this), we really need regular car equivalents to bus stops. For Waymo or human rideshare drivers, or just non-transactional human families, say, dropping grandma off at a brunch restaurant. And significant fines + license points for anyone who stops anywhere outside them, like they do now, once established. The idea is no different than frequent trash cans and significant littering fines, really.

(I’m just spitballing here and am open to being wrong, just putting the idea out there as someone who’s noticed how much worse driving in cities has become over time.)

Maybe just run over cyclists & pedestrians too while you're at it because it makes the code simpler?

Kinda had it with these shitty big tech companies that feel they don't need to respect local laws when they're not convenient.

The law is the law. Passengers should be dropped off somewhere where the car can legally pull over and let them out. The law doesn't allow any other car to stop in a bike lane to drop off passengers, why should a robo-taxi be given an exemption to do so?

Also seeing a lot of ignorance about cycling here in the comments. Would recommend some people to watch some Not Just Bikes videos. Building better cycle infrastructure is better for everyone, cars and cyclists included. Less people die, and cars don't have to deal with cyclists on the road. Ex https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k

This should be excepted fork that goal. If this is accepted, what would be the next thing to be deemed unrealistic?

I have a fuzzy memory of lanes being shared in the UK. Overlapping bike, parking, bus stops, etc. Not claiming that's better, only that's what I recall.

I don't recall what Amsterdam does, but the bike lanes were mostly separated, so I imagine they have dedicated short-term parking. They also have a good light rail system in the city, so much less need for taxis.

This can done with carve outs/ gaps for public service buses, a somewhat cheap implementation are Pop-Up bikelanes but concrete barriers of 10-15 cm also do the job well.

(Submitted title was "Waymo says expecting driverless taxis to stay out of bike lanes is unrealistic", but this leaves out the reason they give.)

Would cities be willing to give up on the parking fines revenue they are generating right now? How should cities be incentivized to change with the changing mobilities needs of the people living inside dense cities?

This is less of an issue for Waymo, because the passenger rating doesn’t mean as much except customer satisfaction with the service as a whole.

I live in a city with bike lanes. But some of them are one-lane (well, one vehicle lane, one bike lane), one-way streets. If a car or taxi or delivery vehicle or anything at all is going to pull over, it's necessarily going to be in the bike lane. (It's either that, or stop literally all traffic on the street.)

As a cyclist, I quickly stopped getting mad at it. I just, you know, go around it. Most streets don't have bike lanes. So turning into the regular lane is not a problem. Even when I drive a car, sometimes I'll have to drive around a car stopped in a regular lane. Such is life.

Obviously if Waymo is pulling over into a bike lane when there's no other place to pull over, it's fine. The highway code in the article literally says it's allowed when it is "unavoidable".

Without seeing examples of where Waymo is actually pulling over, and if there are safer alternatives it should be using instead, I can't judge whether it's misbehaving or not.

“Waymo won’t avoid bike lanes…” would be much more accurate.

obviously the can’t part would be nonsense. they can avoid lanes where traffic flows the opposite direction so obviously they can.

to me this means we should take their license away. if they said “we won’t avoid oncoming traffic, we would take their license away. just like one way streets are for cars traveling in one direction, bike lanes are for bikes.

if you or i drove the wrong way down a one way repeatedly we would rightfully be in trouble. why do these companies keep behaving like they don’t have to follow the same rules you and i do?

Weirdly, the U.S.-nationwide enemy behind the curtain here is AAA, the driver’s association that’s spent member fees for decades lobbying against automated ticketing systems that would force everyone, not just Waymo, to start honoring the traffic laws it avoids. How crass of Waymo to so brazenly exploit that, but certainly their argument lacks fault from a corporate non-person’s “you can’t hurt me in any way that matters” viewpoint.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyclingMikey

I want Waymo to succeed but you don't do that by bending over to the passengers' whim!

Asking companies nicely to stop being dickbags is never going to work. You have to regulate them - directly via new and targeted laws, or indirectly via accountability for existing laws. If Waymo started getting tickets for obstructing bike lanes every time it happened, they’d stop immediately.

This is why I’m generally in favor of citizen reward schemes like NYC does for some violations. Give citizens a slice of the fine, and you’ll both reduce bad behavior and improve civic engagement, all without creating creepy mass surveillance systems like Flock.

> if(scofflaw) { .. }

And this is already a solved problem.

The city I live in (Bratislava, Slovakia) has some pedestrian-only zones in the "old town", and if you're in one of them, calling an Uber/Bolt forces you to pick a pickup spot where cars can go...

(arguably this still has issues with Uber/Bolt allowing you to choose bus stops as pickup spots, which is explicitly illegal - only buses can stop on bus stops, but it's still better than driving onto a road which does not allow cars in the first place).

EDIT: i mistakenly thought this was about driving on dedicated bike paths, idk why, but this is still a solved problem, the applications already allow to designate some roads as places which can't be picked as pickup/dropoff points...

I'm sure they just get away with it because of the low chance of 'getting caught', getting a ticket.

But in fact the evidence is in the GPS logs, so they should be either required to stop doing something illegal, or prosecuted using that data.

The YouTube Channel "Not Just Bikes" calls these abominations 'Painted Bicycle Gutters'. They should be completely abolished in favor of multiuse pathways.

And the AI peddlers are amazed why people seem to hate them. That right here is the answer.

it's obviously safer (for cyclists) for taxis or even carpools to drop off and pick up at the far right, ie into the bike lane. i think we can generally consider it to be "parking" not "driving" and thus within the letter of the law as well. (parking is explicitly allowed.)

we know this very well, and that's why there are curb-separated lanes and they tried a center lane on van ness for awhile.

it just generally sucks to share bikes and cars and we have to live with compromises.

Well if waymo was in my city, I will make sure I ride my bike in the middle of the lane in front of a waymo vehicle. Doing that is legal were I am.

If waymos are dropping off in bike lanes, it’s because that’s the behavior in that city

It’s far better that the robots aren’t literal pedants. They act far smarter than a neurodivergent savant trying to do everything literally legal because being unadaptable is not intelligence

And yes, I have numbers. In Seattle, the business receipts from areas with bike lanes declined faster than receipts from areas nearby that do NOT have bike lanes.

Correlation shmorellation.... I bet you were going to cite studies that were showing how bike lanes improved the business and how proprietors were surprised at the percentage of customers on bikes, right?

Cyclists here regularly ignore red lights and also go the wrong way on streets and even in bike lanes.

Self driving cars are only safer than regular cars in the US because your standards of driving are so bad.

It’s very unlikely to be the case in the UK.

road.cc seems to be a cycling news site primarily for U.K.

When I am driving a car or use a rideshare I expect to share the bike lane when turning or getting off.

I wish the title had included these additional words "In some situations..."