A Waymo Robotaxi Doored a Cyclist in a Bike Lane and Then Refused to Name the Passenger Who Did It
What happened
Jenifer Hanki was riding in a marked bike lane on 7th Street in San Francisco in February 2025 when a driverless Waymo robotaxi pulled to the curb ahead of her, reportedly stopping in a "No Stopping" zone inside the bike lane. A passenger stepped out and opened the door into her path. The collision left her with what her lawsuit describes as serious brain and spine injuries.
The mechanics have a name: dooring. It is one of the most common hazards cyclists face in urban traffic, and drivers bear legal responsibility for checking before they exit. This vehicle had no driver. The question of who owed Hanki that duty of care had no obvious answer at the scene, and the autonomous system compounded the situation by stopping in the bike lane to begin with, in a zone where stopping was prohibited.
An autonomous vehicle that discharges passengers beside a marked cycling lane needs safeguards that make a dangerous exit difficult: door sensors tied to the vehicle's environment map, exit-side alerts, or geofenced logic that refuses to stop where cyclists are present. A human driver can check a mirror, warn a passenger, or refuse to pull over at an unsafe spot. An AV's behavior is entirely a function of what its engineers decided to build, and those decisions are now the subject of a product liability claim. The gap between how human-centric road norms distribute responsibility and how AV-centric system design actually handles edge cases at the curb was not theoretical on 7th Street.
Waymo's conduct after the crash deepened the legal exposure. Hanki's attorneys sought to identify the passengers who had exited the vehicle, and Waymo allegedly declined to disclose their identities. That refusal added emotional distress and legal complexity to an already serious physical injury. Hanki filed suit against Waymo and its parent company Alphabet for negligence, defective product liability, battery, and emotional distress.
The case surfaces a gap that urban AV deployment has so far avoided answering directly: what records does an autonomous vehicle operator owe to someone injured by its system's choices? A human driver in a dooring incident can be named at the scene, cited, and identified in a police report. The equivalent for an AV, a provable record of what the system did, where it chose to stop, what its sensors registered at the moment a door opened, and who authored its passenger-exit logic, is accountability infrastructure that no current regulatory framework requires operators to produce. Until it does, every driverless dropoff beside a bike lane leaves an injured party at the start of a complex legal fight with no obvious way to know what the vehicle actually knew.
Reported impact
- Affected parties
- Not publicly disclosed
- Harm type
- Not publicly disclosed
- Scale
- Not publicly disclosed
- Financial impact
- Not publicly disclosed
- Regulatory action
- Not publicly disclosed
Classification
Relevant governance controls
Governance control mapping is not available for this record.
- No controls mapped
Not publicly disclosed
Control mapping is analytical. It does not state that any control would have prevented the incident.
Sources and evidence
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