The Next Big Challenge For Robotaxis Is Not Driving—It’s Civic Coordination

InnovationThe Next Big Challenge For Robotaxis Is Not Driving—It’s Civic CoordinationByDavid Roberts,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)Jun 01, 2026, 09:45am EDTDavid Roberts is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Verra Mobility, a leading provider of smart mobility technology solutions. gettyOn Dec. 20, 2025, a PG&E outage knocked out traffic signals across large sections of San Francisco. The city’s 911 dispatch center began receiving calls about driverless Waymo vehicles stopped in travel lanes. By Waymo’s accounting, its fleet stopped 1,593 times for two minutes or more. Dispatchers called Waymo 31 times to get vehicles moved, and one caller was left on hold for 53 minutes.Leaving a first responder on hold for almost an hour exposes a real constraint in today’s robotaxi model. The vehicle may be driverless, but the system still depends on humans. When an autonomous vehicle (AV) gets stuck or becomes overly cautious, remote operators often become the backstop. During a widespread disruption, that backstop turns into a queue, and that queue pulls responders away from real emergencies.In a hearing before San Francisco supervisors, Waymo representatives took full responsibility for the incident. They said the company had already made staffing changes and deployed the ability to send instructions directly to vehicles in a broad outage. But with AV companies, including Zoox, Tesla, Uber and smaller startups, deploying in more cities across the U.S., there’s a need for a coordinated systemwide approach.Local governments are being asked to manage curb space, traffic flow and incident response for fleets that do not respond to a hand wave from an officer or a shouted instruction at an intersection. As San Francisco and other officials have said, we can’t rely on first-responders to act as roadside as...