A 2024 NBC survey of 30 San Francisco crossing guards found nearly 25% reported close calls with Waymos while guiding children through crosswalks. They didn’t specify if it has been trending upwards.
Then, after a year and a half of “learning”, in January 2026 a Waymo hit a student near a Santa Monica school. Police blamed the child (“outside the available crosswalk”), running a script the auto industry wrote in the 1920s when it invented the myth of “jaywalking” to shift blame from machines onto the people they crashed into.
California gutted enforcement of that script in 2023 with the Freedom to Walk Act, which was passed with data showing police citations were racist. In Los Angeles, Black residents were being saddled with jaywalking tickets at more than triple their share of the population, according to the campaigns that passed AB 2147. That illustrates how race-based police doctrine gets repealed by legislators, yet still seeps into a Santa Monica report of a Waymo crash.
Side note: the 1860s Kansas term “jayhawkers” included the men recruited into the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteers, who were killing Slaveholder Rebellion Confederates at Island Mound in October 1862 before the federal government formally allowed it.
Who could have seen a child going to school would be crashed into by a Waymo? Not Waymo, apparently. NHTSA has opened an investigation of Waymo, but nobody seems to have addressed police using racist framing to blame a child and protect a car company. Notably, the police also claimed non-injury, while Waymo’s own required report to NHTSA explained the child sustained minor injuries.
And now a 2-year-old fell face down in the crosswalk at Sanchez and Duncan in Noe Valley around 9:30 last Friday morning; as a Waymo drove toward her, her father pushed their stroller into its path and the car stopped just feet from running over the child. Waymo announced its vehicle did nothing wrong, which seems like a PR campaign more than any actual data point.
Waymo keeps the telemetry secret, so that’s a good reason to believe all the people reporting what they saw, versus the corporation spinning a story on something nobody can see. GM’s Cruise ran the same play in 2023, claiming its records showed no driverless car present where a family reported one accelerating at their 7-year-old, before regulators penalized Cruise $112,500 for withholding collision information.
Cruise was then cancelled.
Who will be the next person, and the next, and the next to jump in front of a Waymo to save a child’s life?
Who are the modern day jayhawkers on our streets to stop Google’s robots from making streets unsafe?