Waymo’s robotaxis have collected more than 8,300 parking tickets in San Francisco since the start of 2025, running up close to $1 million in fines along the way.
The citations tracked the fleet’s rapid growth across the city. In 2024, Waymo caught just 589 tickets. It’s now averaging more than 100 a week.
The figures come from San Francisco parking records obtained by the Gazetteer covering January 2025 through mid-July 2026. Over that stretch, Waymo’s driverless cars picked up 8,309 tickets worth $957,008 in fines. The company took 4,178 of them in 2025, then another 4,131 in the first six and a half months of 2026 alone.
For context, those 589 tickets in all of 2024 cost Waymo $65,065. The company is now paying that much roughly every month.
Where the robotaxis keep getting caught
The single most common violation was parking in stands, spots reserved for buses and specific vehicles, with 2,038 tickets. The rest of the list reads like a catalog of dense-city curbside problems: parking in prohibited zones, obstructing traffic, double parking, and blocking bike lanes.
A handful of addresses account for an outsized share. A spot at 85 North Point Street near Fisherman’s Wharf drew 577 citations on its own. Another at 150 Beach Street got 369, and a stretch of Drumm Street in the Financial District picked up 288.
That clustering matters. It points to specific pickup and drop-off spots where the Waymo Driver keeps making the same call, in places with heavy foot traffic and little legal curb space.
A cost of scale, not a safety story
The ticket count is a byproduct of how big Waymo has gotten in San Francisco. The company now runs more than 1,200 vehicles across the Bay Area, and it recently won California approval to expand its robotaxi service across 18 counties. In January, it started carrying passengers to and from SFO, one of the busiest curbside environments in the state.
More cars doing more pickups in more places means more chances to stop somewhere they shouldn’t.
Waymo says it pays the tickets “like any other driver” and works with the SFMTA’s Fleet Program on the problem. “The Waymo Driver continues to learn from every mile traveled, and we are continuously working to improve our performance,” the company said.
But the fines don’t appear to be changing the behavior fast. Safety researcher Phil Koopman put it plainly: “the amount of money for a ticket is nothing to Waymo.” Nearly $1 million sounds like a lot until you set it against a company valued in the tens of billions and backed by Alphabet.
Electrek’s Take
Parking tickets are not crashes and for the most part, not safety critical, but it just became an interesting new benchmark for me.
Autonomous ride-hailing services shouldn’t be nuisances, and if you are racking up so many tickets, you probably are doing something wrong. Waymo pays them, which is fine, but I hope it’s a problem they are actively trying to solve. The Waymo driver should know it’s stopping in a bus lane.
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