Riggs says San Francisco fixates on robotaxis while human drivers kill pedestrians

At Fourth and Channel streets in Mission Bay, the death of a 2-year-old girl in a crosswalk has become part of a larger argument over what San Francisco treats as an emergency. William Riggs says the city has grown far more fixated on Waymo robotaxis than on the human drivers who keep killing pedestrians on neighborhood streets.

Riggs argues that San Francisco has settled into a dangerous habit of shrugging at deadly crashes caused by people behind the wheel while reacting far more intensely to autonomous vehicle incidents. He points to a string of recent deaths, including a man killed on a North Beach sidewalk after an SUV reversed downhill at speed, a woman killed in a hit-and-run in the Outer Mission, a pedestrian killed by a Muni bus, and another pedestrian killed in South of Market before the driver fled.

The 2024 West Portal case, in which a driver traveling 75 mph killed a family of four, sharpened that contrast. The driver later received a license suspension, two years of probation and 200 hours of community service. Riggs’s point is blunt: San Francisco has built a culture that treats deadly human driving as tragedy but routine, while robotaxi missteps trigger immediate political alarm.

That tension collides with the city’s own road-safety record. San Francisco adopted Vision Zero in 2014 and promised zero traffic fatalities by 2024, but the city ended 2024 with 43 traffic deaths, the highest toll since 2005. Since Vision Zero began, 369 people have died on San Francisco roads. The city’s traffic-fatality dashboard says freeway deaths are not included in Vision Zero counts, narrowing the official picture of street danger even further.

Officials have started to use tougher tools. Automated speed cameras began rolling out on March 20, 2025 on high-injury streets, with warnings issued during a 60-day grace period before citations and fines begin. By March 31, 2025, the city had recorded seven traffic deaths, down from 12 by the end of March 2024. But the broader enforcement picture still looks weak to critics who note that police traffic citations reportedly fell 95% over the past decade, and that the city later suspended its residential traffic-calming program amid budget cuts.

Waymo, meanwhile, keeps expanding in the Bay Area and says its data show the Waymo Driver is safer than human drivers in the places where it operates. Through December 2025, the company said it had logged 53.52 million rider-only miles in the San Francisco Bay Area and claimed lower crash rates than human benchmarks, including fewer serious-injury-or-worse crashes and fewer pedestrian crashes with injuries.

The backlash has widened beyond the cat killed by a Waymo in the Mission District. In November 2025, Supervisor Jackie Fielder held a “Justice for KitKat” rally and said she wanted state lawmakers to give counties more say over whether autonomous vehicles can operate on local roads. In March 2026, supervisors also grilled Waymo over a December power outage that left hundreds of autonomous vehicles stalled on city streets. The deeper test for City Hall is whether it will keep treating robotaxis as the main symbol of danger, or redirect its enforcement and street redesign efforts toward the human driving behavior that is still killing far more people.