Waymo racked up 8,300+ SF parking tickets and nearly $1M in fines

This is a story about self-driving cars, not home energy upgrades, so there's no direct action for your household here. Waymo's driverless taxis have picked up more than 8,300 parking tickets in San Francisco since the start of 2025, adding up to nearly $1 million in fines. That's a sharp jump from 2024, when the fleet got just 589 tickets all year. Now it averages more than 100 tickets a week.

Most citations are for parking in bus stands, blocking traffic, double parking, or sitting in bike lanes. A few spots account for a huge share of the tickets, including one location near Fisherman's Wharf that alone drew 577 citations. The pattern suggests the cars keep making the same wrong call at certain busy pickup and drop-off points.

Waymo says it pays the fines like any other driver and is working with the city to improve. But researchers note that $1 million is a small cost for a company backed by Alphabet and valued in the tens of billions, so it's unclear how much pressure the fines actually create to change behavior. The company has also just won approval to expand its robotaxi service into 18 California counties, meaning more vehicles on more streets, and likely more of the same parking problems, unless it changes how its cars choose where to stop.