By Tim Binnall
Residents of an Atlanta neighborhood say their streets are being overrun by empty Waymo cars that weirdly wander around their community. According to a local media report, the strange situation began about two months ago, when people living in the northwest part of the city began noticing the self-driving vehicles cruising through the area with seemingly nowhere to go. What started as an occasional oddity turned into a worrisome trend when, as if word had spread among the Waymos, wave after wave of the autonomous cars began flocking to the neighborhood and circling cul-de-sacs like moths to a flame.
"It’s almost every little cul-de-sac in our area," one resident of the neighborhood said, "so I think it's a problem." This was echoed by another person in the community who reported seeing a staggering 50 of the veritable zombie cars cruise through the community in just an hour. Hoping to thwart the Waymos, one homeowner placed a sign in the street, but the tactic backfired when it wound up baffling the empty vehicles. "We had, at one point, eight Waymos that were stuck trying to figure out how to turn around," the resident recalled. As one might imagine, people in the neighborhood are fed up with the unnecessary increase in traffic and the possible trouble the clearly confused cars could cause.
"We’re families, we have small animals and pets, got kids getting on the bus in the morning," a resident explained, "it just doesn’t feel safe to have that traffic." Attempts to put a stop to the situation have proved futile, as calls to Waymo went unanswered and local officials also had no answer for irritated people living in the neighborhood. Fortunately, after the issue was revealed by a local TV station this week, the company responded with a statement wherein it asserted that the problematic "routing behavior" had been addressed and, presumably, the weird Waymo wandering should hopefully have come to an end.