On December 20, 2025, a massive blackout ripped through San Francisco after a fire at a PG&E substation left roughly 130,000 homes and businesses without power, plunging whole neighborhoods into darkness and chaos. The outage wasn’t a minor inconvenience — it shut down traffic signals, stalled transit, and forced emergency responses across the city as officials scrambled to restore service. This is yet another example of failing infrastructure that city elites keep pretending is someone else’s problem.
As the city went dark, Waymo’s fleet of driverless taxis exposed the cold, mechanized heart of the so-called smart city experiment: dozens of robotaxis came to a halt in intersections, flashing hazards and blocking traffic as helpless human drivers had to weave around them. Videos swamped social media of Waymo vehicles stranded in the middle of streets, and the company had to suspend service while it sorted out the mess. If you build an economy that routes itself around algorithms and not common sense, expect the system to break when the power goes out.
This incident raises the exact questions conservatives have warned about for years: who bears responsibility when corporate tech experiments run roughshod over public safety? Regulators are now probing what went wrong, and experts have called the fleet’s behavior an “operational management failure” that should have been anticipated and mitigated. The political class rushes to greenlight every shiny prototype while leaving ordinary citizens to fend for themselves when those prototypes fail.
PG&E deserves no pass in this fiasco either; a substation fire that takes down a third of a major American city is a failure of maintenance, oversight, and urgency. Even as crews worked to restore power, city leaders rightly demanded answers about preparedness and why equipment was taken offline in ways that worsened the outage. Homeowners and small businesses pay the bills and deserve reliable service, not excuses and automatic credits after the damage is done.
Let’s also be blunt about priorities: unions and first responders have long warned that autonomous vehicles are unproven in emergency conditions, and last weekend’s blackout validated those warnings. Human drivers use judgment honed by real-world experience; machines follow rules and can be paralyzed by edge-case failures like a citywide power loss. We should listen to those on the ground, not the venture capitalists and regulators who treat public streets as testing grounds.
Waymo restarted service after pausing operations, but resuming a rolling experiment is not the same as fixing the systemic problems revealed by this outage. The company and the regulators must be held accountable: require robust contingency plans, meaningful oversight, and limits on where and when these vehicles can operate until they prove safe in every sort of emergency. Citizens should expect their cities to prioritize people over profit and public safety over Silicon Valley marketing.
As hardworking Americans watch the footage of robot taxis stranded while traffic lights blinked out, remember who pays the price for these failures: ordinary families, businesses, and first responders. San Francisco’s blackout should be a wake-up call — to fix aging infrastructure, to slow down risky rollouts of unproven technology, and to insist that our streets remain safe for people, not playgrounds for tech experiments. Elected officials, utility managers, and the companies involved must answer to the public and act with urgency and common sense.
