A driverless Cruise vehicle signaling a turn veered into the opposite lane on Congress Avenue in downtown Austin during a recent evening, prompting a cyclist to record and share video that drew widespread attention online.
Marshall Geyer said he noticed the Cruise car while riding his bike downtown and began recording as he approached, capturing the vehicle putting on its blinker and drifting across lane lines. Geyer posted the clip in a reply to another social media post showing a Cruise vehicle drifting into a bike lane, and his video quickly reached tens of thousands of views, adding to ongoing concerns among cyclists about how autonomous vehicles operate around vulnerable road users.
Geyer said the driving behavior he recorded has become more common since Cruise, the General Motors-backed autonomous vehicle company, removed in-car operators from its Austin fleet, leaving vehicles to drive without a person behind the wheel. Cruise first entered the Austin market in September with operators and began offering driverless rides to “friends and family of Cruisers” in mid-December, according to Megan Prichard, the company’s vice president of ridehail. Cruise vehicles at that level of automation typically rely on collision-detection sensors.
The footage has intensified local debate over micromobility and pedestrian safety on streets that already mix cars, bikes, scooters and foot traffic, particularly in the downtown core. Geyer said he wants the city to intervene, but the Austin Transportation Department has said its ability to regulate autonomous vehicle operations is limited under state law. At the same time, the public reaction to Cruise’s rollout has unfolded alongside separate scrutiny in Austin of other driverless systems and how they interact with infrastructure and safety rules, including rail crossings.
“I think just in the general Austin cycling and micromobility community, there’s a lot of concern that I and others have about these just being a little bit erratic when it comes to handling things like bikes, pedestrians,” said Marshall Geyer. Cruise said it is reviewing the lane mapping in areas shown in social media videos, according to a company spokesperson. A Cruise vehicle “can handle both the mundane elements of driving as well as the most unexpected, and is able to generalize to new and previously unseen scenarios and cities,” said Megan Prichard, vice president of ridehail at Cruise. “This means we aren’t starting from scratch in each new city; instead, we’re working off the 800,000 driverless miles our fleet has driven and continuously learns off of, and the comprehensive tech, operational, and hardware expertise developed over years,” Prichard said.
“When introducing our driverless service, we start slow, in smaller parts of the city and typically at night so we can ensure every aspect of the experience is smooth and efficient before expanding,” said Megan Prichard, vice president of ridehail at Cruise. “We also actively engage with our communities, and with local, state, and national advocates and organizations for road, pedestrian, and bicyclist safety to hear their ideas and feedback for making our services as safe as possible,” Prichard said. Still, Geyer said he believes Cruise should return operators to its vehicles until the behavior he and others have observed is addressed. “I feel like a very straightforward, and probably unsatisfactory for Cruise, solution for them here would be to just simply have people in their cars still until their erratic bike lane behavior is addressed,” said Marshall Geyer.
“In 2017, the Texas Legislature passed Senate Bill 2205 to amend the Texas Transportation Code with new policies governing the operation of autonomous vehicles (AVs). State law preempts local authority of self-driving vehicles,” said an Austin Transportation Department spokesperson. The department said it has offered its expertise to autonomous vehicle companies, but the preemption framework means most operational decisions remain with the companies and the state.
As previously reported in Waymo-confirms-two-Austin-incidents-in-which-driverless-cars-stopped-past-lowered-rail-crossing-gates-CapMetro-calls-for-immediate-action, Austin agencies and residents have also scrutinized how other driverless vehicles respond to rail infrastructure and safety controls. In another dispute first covered in Waymo-keeps-passing-Austin-ISD-school-busesdespite-updates-a-recall-and-mounting-pressure-to-pause-service, Austin ISD officials pressed Waymo over alleged school bus stop-arm violations and sought operating limits during school transportation windows.
Cruise said it will continue expanding cautiously as it evaluates performance in Austin, while Geyer said he hopes officials and the company will slow deployment until cyclists and pedestrians have more confidence in how the vehicles behave in mixed traffic. When asked about bringing back operators, Cruise said it believes its technology continues to improve and that it is “proud of [its] safety record,” Prichard said.
