{"id":3488916,"date":"2026-03-29T17:35:44","date_gmt":"2026-03-29T17:35:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/29\/a-school-districts-effort-to-educate-waymos-to-halt-for-school-buses-did-not-succeed\/"},"modified":"2026-03-29T17:35:44","modified_gmt":"2026-03-29T17:35:44","slug":"a-school-districts-effort-to-educate-waymos-to-halt-for-school-buses-did-not-succeed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/2026\/03\/29\/a-school-districts-effort-to-educate-waymos-to-halt-for-school-buses-did-not-succeed\/","title":{"rendered":"A School District’s Effort to Educate Waymos to Halt for School Buses Did Not Succeed"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

The claimed advantage of autonomous vehicle technology lies in the ability of each car to learn from the errors of others. As detailed on Waymo\u2019s<\/a> website<\/a>: \u201cThe Waymo Driver benefits from the shared experiences collected across our fleet, including earlier hardware versions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, in Austin, Waymo\u2019s vehicles struggled for several months to appropriately stop for school buses while picking up and dropping off students. An official from the Austin Independent School District (AISD) asserted<\/a> that in at least 19 instances, the vehicles \u201cillegally and dangerously\u201d bypassed the district\u2019s school buses while red lights were flashing and stop arms were extended, failing to make complete stops as mandated by law.<\/p>\n

In early December, Waymo even launched a federal recall concerning these incidents, acknowledging at least 12 of these<\/a> to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which oversees road safety. Federal paperwork indicates that the self-driving vehicle company’s engineers had \u201ccreated software modifications to rectify the behavior\u201d weeks earlier.<\/p>\n

However, even after the recall, reports of school bus violations continued, as noted by school officials and a report<\/a> from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), an independent federal safety organization that is also looking into the issue.<\/p>\n

Communications via email and text between school officials and Waymo, acquired by WIRED through a public records request, highlight the measures taken by the Austin public school district and Waymo to address the problem. AISD held a half-day \u201cdata collection\u201d event in a school parking lot in mid-December, as the records indicate, where several staff members set up school buses and stop-arm signals for the self-driving company to collect data on the vehicles and their flashing lights.<\/p>\n

By mid-January, one month later, the school district reported at least four additional instances of school buses being passed in Austin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<\/div>\n

The claimed advantage of autonomous vehicle technology lies in the ability of each car to learn from the errors of others. As detailed on Waymo\u2019s<\/a> website<\/a>: \u201cThe Waymo Driver benefits from the shared experiences collected across our fleet, including earlier hardware versions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, in Austin, Waymo\u2019s vehicles struggled for several months to appropriately stop for school buses while picking up and dropping off students. An official from the Austin Independent School District (AISD) asserted<\/a> that in at least 19 instances, the vehicles \u201cillegally and dangerously\u201d bypassed the district\u2019s school buses while red lights were flashing and stop arms were extended, failing to make complete stops as mandated by law.<\/p>\n

In early December, Waymo even launched a federal recall concerning these incidents, acknowledging at least 12 of these<\/a> to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which oversees road safety. Federal paperwork indicates that the self-driving vehicle company’s engineers had \u201ccreated software modifications to rectify the behavior\u201d weeks earlier.<\/p>\n

However, even after the recall, reports of school bus violations continued, as noted by school officials and a report<\/a> from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), an independent federal safety organization that is also looking into the issue.<\/p>\n

Communications via email and text between school officials and Waymo, acquired by WIRED through a public records request, highlight the measures taken by the Austin public school district and Waymo to address the problem. AISD held a half-day \u201cdata collection\u201d event in a school parking lot in mid-December, as the records indicate, where several staff members set up school buses and stop-arm signals for the self-driving company to collect data on the vehicles and their flashing lights.<\/p>\n

By mid-January, one month later, the school district reported at least four additional instances of school buses being passed in Austin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3488917,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"Default","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[325,326,59,328,324,175,323,327],"class_list":["post-3488916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-autonomous-cars","tag-autonomous-vehicles","tag-cars","tag-driving","tag-safety","tag-schools","tag-self-driving-cars","tag-waymo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3488916"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3488916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3488916\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3488917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3488916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3488916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techingeek.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3488916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}