A fine that can’t be contested and doesn’t change behavior isn’t enforcement; it’s a permit with a per-diem, or worse.
SFMTA is now on an $860k/year revenue line that depends on Waymo continuing to break laws such as parking illegally. The public regulator’s incentive is flipped by a wealthy corporation to the opposite of the public interest.
Waymo has been slapped with more than 8,300 parking tickets since January 2025. With fines of nearly $1 million for various violations, the robotaxi company says it’s cooperating with the city…
The 577 tickets reported at 85 North Point alone, over 565 days, is one citation per day at one address a block from Pier 39. That’s not a fleet-wide learning problem; that’s a single PCO walking the same block every morning and finding the same car in the same Waymo employee queue. Waymo knows the address. So does SFMTA.
Reporters give us AV safety experts like Koopman, who says money is nothing to Waymo. Just look at the reclusive elites who work there and how much they find ways to cheat public infrastructure costs. Remember how Google buses poached city bus stops, blocking city buses, and refused to allow non-Google staff to ride? The smarter reporting is that money is something to SFMTA.
Whatever “the Waymo Driver continues to learn from every mile” means, it is not learning how to stop breaking the law. It’s perhaps the exact opposite, learning how to corrupt and destroy the public systems that enforce laws for public benefit.
2026 pace: 4,131 tickets in 200 days = 20.7/day = 145/week, annualizing to 7,500. That’s 2025 (4,178, 80/week) × 1.8, on a fleet that grew 1.5× (800 → 1,200+).
Per-vehicle rate went up: 5.2 tickets/car/year in 2025 to 6.3 in 2026.
$957,008 over 8,309 tickets = $115 per ticket (2024 was $110, so fine escalation is nil). 2026 run rate ≈ $860k/year. Spread across 1,200 cars that is $1.96 per car per day. Cheaper than any garage in the Wharf. Or to put it another way:
…most common infraction for Waymos in the city, with 2,038 tickets, was “parking in stands,” aka taking up a space intended for a specific type of vehicle such as a… bus. The other top infractions were parking in a prohibited space, obstructing traffic, double parking, and blocking bike lanes. …the second-most common address (with 369 citations) was just two blocks away at 150 Beach St., outside a parking garage.
Waymo is literally blocking the bus while cheating the car garage model.
