San Francisco neighbors claim that honking Waymo driverless taxis kept them awake again early Sunday morning. This comes after Waymo issued several fixes this past week, which the company said should have helped.
NBC Bay Area first broke the story last weekend about the repeated honking from autonomous vehicles keeping residents awake in the South of Market neighborhood. Since that time, a global audience has tuned in, thanks in large part due to a creative effort by a resident documenting what's happening.
Three neighbors in the buildings off of Second Street near Harrison Street told NBC Bay Area that they heard repeated honking at around 5 a.m. Sunday, and video footage from neighbors show several stretches of continuous honking. The video shows a large stream of Waymo vehicles attempting to turn from Second Street into the lot, one by one at that time. One repeated stream of honks continued for about 20 seconds, then picked up again about 30 seconds later.
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The incidents were captured on resident Sophia Tung's YouTube live stream which is up at all hours of the day, capturing the parking lot below her residence. Tung and her neighbors said that the Waymo vehicles have been showing up at that parking lot to rest overnight since late July. For the first few weeks,
Tung added these vehicles would honk daily, with the highest frequencies happening at around 4 in the morning when the vehicles appeared to be moving into and out of the lot in large numbers.
Tung and many of her neighbors said that they are Waymo customers and actually like the Waymo technology. But what they don't like is the repeated, overnight noise.
"I would love to have a good night of sleep not having to worry about being woken up at 4 or 5 in the morning," Tung said.
She set up the live feed soon after the Waymo vehicles arrived in her neighborhood, starting with a webcam taped to her window.
"I thought it would be really funny as a meme, since I can do this, to set up a camera that is just pointed at the lot," Tung recalled.
Tung added music to the live stream and eventually added in more cameras to offer more perspectives for viewers. At first, she said, she was one of the only people viewing the stream. But in the past week, as more national and international press began to cover the honking vehicles, Tung said the feed has developed a global following.
“There’s people from Japan, Singapore, people from the UK, and France," she noted. Now, she said, the livestream has more than 111,000 unique views.
Tung even said that she has heard from Waymo employees who've told her they watch her feed and want her to keep it going.
After continous complaints from neighbors and press coverage, a Waymo spokesperson said on Tuesday, "We've updated the software, so our electric vehicles should keep the noise down for our neighbors moving forward."
But Wednesday morning, neighbors say the honking continued, not in the lot, but in the adjacent cul-de-sac. Video from Tung's livestream shows the Waymo cars getting stuck at the end of the street and struggling to exit. On Wednesday, Waymo told NBC Bay Area that it had implemented a fix for this seconday issue too.
Neighbors say Waymo threw an ice cream party for them on Friday. Sunday morning, they were surprised to hear the honking start back up again. On the live feed, a particularly long stream of Waymo vehicles can be seen attempting to enter the lot at just as the honking picked up on Sunday.
"They send a lot of them at once, I don’t know why exactly that is," Tung said.
She thinks there is hunger for more transparency about how these autonomous vehicles work. Tung says on Monday at 2:30 p.m. PST Waymo's Director of Product Management, Vishay Nihalani, will join her on the live feed for an interview. Tung has been recieving questions from interested viewers around the world ahead of this interview.
Of the Waymo vehicles, Tung said, "We like having them there, they’re really fun to look at."
"We’d just like them to stop honking," she continued.
