SAN ANTONIO – A KSAT viewer raised a safety concern after recording video of a Waymo autonomous vehicle traveling the wrong way in a school zone.
Pam Antal told KSAT the incident happened as she was dropping her daughter off at Cambridge Elementary School in the Alamo Heights Independent School District on Wednesday morning.
She said their local crosswalk cop stopped her vehicle as he attempted to direct a Waymo car away from students and from entering a one-way street.
Antal provided a video that shows the Waymo traveling down Townsend Avenue between two rows of cars facing the opposite direction.
“This is a Waymo car not taking instruction from a cop who tried to redirect it and went backwards in a school zone,” she says in the video, which can be seen in the video player above.
Antal told KSAT it “created a scary and dangerous” situation near the front of the school.
KSAT has reached out to Waymo and Alamo Heights ISD for more information.
Waymo has a fleet of fully autonomous vehicles that officially launched in the Alamo City in February.
The vehicles serve riders across more than 60 square miles in San Antonio, including areas from North Star Mall down to the San Antonio Rodeo fairgrounds, the Frost Bank Center, downtown, the River Walk, the Alamo and the Henry B. González Convention Center.
Service expanded to the San Antonio International Airport this week.
The launch in San Antonio is part of a broader expansion across the U.S.
Questions over Waymo were raised last month after a vehicle was seen blocking first responders in the aftermath of a deadly shooting in Austin. A gunman killed three people and injured 15 others.
In a viral video on TikTok, a Waymo vehicle is seen blocking emergency vehicles after it got stuck in the middle of West Sixth Street and Nueces Street.
“This is why we should not have self-driving cars,” an onlooker says in the video.
A police officer is then seen entering the vehicle before driving it into a nearby garage.