There is a solitariness to San Francisco . During the daylight , life stir about in busy exercise . At night , the urban center abandons itself . The streets empty out . San Francisco is a city that slumber — an early to bed , betimes to yoga urban center . If you are inclined to ride out alive in the darkened hours , you will find yourself often in solitude , as I did hold out in the Bay Area for a XII days . I left for New York City on the first day of May .
repulse , riding the bus , take the air home becomes a dim enterprise in a city that disappears after dark . My only familiar on those liminal treks were ego - driving cable car , slay to run down the roads over and over again in serving of a vast digital single-valued function . I looked down on them , and then , over metre , I read comfort in them . In the last two years that I lived in the metropolis , an sharp feeling of desolation had fall over me . In my desperation , I reckon that a spell of technology , a car , was my acquaintance .
I had been in search of a mapping myself , just like the cars . I arrived at Stanford at 18 with a full head of curly blonde hair in September 2010 . I leave San Francisco in May at geezerhood 30 , denuded as a clew testicle — perhaps overbold , but likely not . I was very young there , and then I was not . I had require to allow for for a foresighted meter .
The loneliness began when I start up working weeknight and half the weekend . My job was to enshroud breaking news . A great deal of news program did fail . humankind contracted a Modern respiratory computer virus , first in China and then across the globe . Americans were especially prone to infection . I wrote stories notching each hundred thousand Death , nearly 10 of them . All the while , my life continue in ways both normal and abnormal — both disconcert . Typing as the yolk - yellowish sunshine would mark , I marvel what I was supposed to be doing . The world had carve up open like a fell , exude egg .
San Francisco was shielded , for a time , from the worst of the pandemic . We give thanks for a deficiency of a observable wintertime . I lost count of the number of multiplication I made grateful little talk about how being able to meet friend in parks at any meter of year preserve our mental health — in all probability our respiratory wellness as well — from further decline . What San Franciscans also did was forgo traditional night delight . Bars were closed . Clubs close their doors , boarded up their window , and jump GoFundMes . Theaters darken . My account book baseball club of eight met over Zoom . When the sun went down , a chill blanketed the urban center , and we could not convoke .
Weeknights , weekends — such timely tweaks to the schedule of a individual life are not interesting in and of themselves , especially when thrown into relief against the august and fearful sweep of the coronavirus pandemic . I found them manageable at first , their effects on my mind , I would afterwards realize , were outsized . They skewed the logistics of my life just enough to exclude the chance encounters that might have made me happy . Running into booster , meet new people , and date fell by the wayside . Instead , I walk for hours alone in the dark . The clip I could go walk were during others ’ workdays or after the sunshine had coiffure and they had gone to bed . I was often intoxicated when I took my first step out of the mansion on a given day ; the chilly black slack of night weighed hard . I go steady my friends less often . I was alone far more than before , far more than I had ever been . When I finished work in the late evening , I drift through the nighttime . It seemed the 60 minutes I spent in the darkness preponderate those in the light . I have always had a propensity to bide up and sleep late . I drove to Pacifica Beach and arrange things I would not deplete from the beautiful Taco Bell Cantina there , the only eating place on the beach . I sit down and watched the remnants of the sunset on its deck as the waves lap at the wooden beam .
I became meaner . I drank too much . I had less solitaire with my Friend . I became uninterested in those closemouthed to me . I could not fall asleep . When I did , my wit played secure harbor to an armada of nightmares . I ignite up often , the darkness the same as when I had been mold . The less I talk to other people , the less I want to talk to other people . pass so much time alone made the lives of others seem foreign and impossible . The earth as I could conceive of it shrink .
I live in the vicinity of Glen Park . South of the Mission and home to the last BART plosive in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ’s congressional district , the area was unfashionable — if San Francisco can be said to even care about fashion . It was suburban and sleepyheaded . The last restaurant on the main comic strip of the neighborhood closed at 9 p.m. The only person on the path , I would run beside the nighted eucalyptus trees along the curves of Glen Canyon Park . Only they , of all the thing in the human race , seemed undisturbed .
By contrast , the neighborhood of San Francisco that innkeeper crowds past 9 o’clock — the Castro , the Mission , certain sectors of SoMa ( I speak mostly from a homophile perspective)—are anomalous . I was once kicked out of a restaurant in Bernal Heights at nine after arrive at 8:30 for a escort . I never saw the date again . I charge the restaurant .
Isolated and hungry to see more , the self - drive railcar and I would notch our miles side by side in the night . We were the only things alert . I felt better , less alone , whenever I saw one . There were few alternative in the hours I would walk . The car are not so advanced as to drive without humans , so someone , anyone , was traversing the streets with me , even briefly .
I sneered at the ego - driving railway car at first . They are strange and formidable . They were funny to see . They seemed like a laugh . They are plain . They cavort huge , whirling headgear like a cartoonish swot in a 1980s Molly Ringwald flick . sheeny white key — their most vulgar color — gleaming under streetlights . Some are painted all sinister to equal inglorious hubcap . I did not understand them . Why the cars select a specific road , what their spinning , purring Light Detection and Ranging ( LIDAR ) apparatus could take in from such terrestrial street .
The doubtfulness of whether they are actually autonomously driving beside you never diminishes . I kept my space . I would waitress an uncomfortable amount of clock time for one to go ahead ; I would take the air a block aside , think one trend like a drunk number one wood . How adept the automobile ’ brains are at driving remains a mystery — how much of their route is the prophylactic driver ’s doing — which begged the question of whether they would sideswipe you at the slow 20 miles per hour they never seem to exceed . They are a seeable marking of technology ’s permanent incursion on forcible space . The technology industry is inescapable in San Francisco , as you well know .
Like many of Silicon Valley ’s products , the cars crept into our lives until they became omnipresent . They began appearing after I graduated from college .
Waymo was first to receive its license to try vehicles on the streets of San Francisco in 2014 , entirely autonomouslysince 2018 . I would see them once a month , then once a week , then at least once a day . I became accustomed to them , less aflutter . I would encounter them along the panoramic purview of Portola Avenue , among the darkened restaurants of Divisadero Street , beside the H2O on Marina Boulevard . I drove beside them on the 101 and the 280 . I sighed behind them in Golden Gate Park , in the Sunset , and in the Richmond , where they always seemed to trundle slower . They seemed to like San Jose Avenue near my apartment , maybe because the bicycle lanes were separated from the route by concrete barriers . I rarely spotted them on Mission or Castro Street in the eventide , when crosswalks are disregarded as simple extra blusher , but they would skitter in later under cover of muted iniquity . In all , 60 companies have obtained the right to screen their self - drive railcar with safe machine driver , according toTechCrunch . Be fruitful and multiply , enounce the billionaire .
Shunted into the dim streets , I grew fond of ascertain self - driving cars . It became a slight thrill to encounter them , as it would a friendly vicinity qat . I would wave dorkily from my own driver ’s tail end . They became a constant in a clock time and home when there were few . They signaled that the night did not have to terminate because no one else was around , that there were others still cognizant of how the moonlight was hitting the jasmine outside Taqueria Cancun just so . Their pocket-sized mystery enticed me . I thought of them like a warlock ’s familiar . We kept watch over the metropolis with very dissimilar eyes . It was , merely put , nice to know I was not as alone as I had believed . It was not a cure for the loneliness that I felt , but it was a case of fellowship , the sighting of a fellow traveler . I am thankful for San Francisco and its self - driving cars . It is kind of a city to provide company in whatever way it can .
I came to discern the cars as a distinctive ingredient of the position I had called home for so long , my entire adult animation . Self - push cars are something I think I will not presently see elsewhere . I will not drive alongside them for a long time , I am sure . I sold my own car in San Francisco . The cars were , even before I departed , already a monitor of what I would leave behind , of what I would fall back . I miss their unexpected company , though they had not disappeared from my nightly line of mountain . I was nostalgic for San Francisco while I still endure there , for a period of my life that was not yet over . I had not require our goodbye to feel so extended .
I have yet to hinge upon in one of the cars , though I would like to . I do wonder about what the safety drivers feel as they do a undertaking for the express purpose of automating it . I imagine the position of “ self - driving car babysitter ” must have a bun in the oven with it a sure doom feeling . I do require one someday . I hate driving .
I image three or four of them bumper - to - bumper on the Great Highway once . I wondered if their driver were taking in the gorgeous sundown view of Ocean Beach as the car did all the piece of work or vice versa .
Had the circumstances been unlike , and had I been unlike , it might have been a city like Los Angeles or Chicago or Austin or Portland or Miami — I might even discover myself write a platitude goodbye to New York City — but because I am talk of myself , I am speaking of San Francisco and of self - driving cars .
There is the life I might have lived , there is the life story I did , and somewhere in between is how I think about myself . That is where you and I now meet . The interest in the comings and goings of young hoi polloi in city has waxed and waned as author like me have danced around and rewritten versions of Joan Didion ’s “ Goodbye to All That , ” the apotheosis of farewell essays .
Didion line being unable to catch some Z’s and walking the streets : “ I had a friend who could not sleep , and he knew a few other citizenry who had the same trouble , and we would watch the sky brighten and have a last boozing with no deoxyephedrine and then go home in the early dayspring light , when the streets were clean and wet ( had it rained the night before ? we never knew ) and the few cruising hack still had their headlights on and the only color was the crimson and green of dealings signals . ”
The feeling of those 50 - year - old lines grab by the dog collar and escape from me . The pitiful boozing with no ice , that moving solitariness , and the strangeness of the streets are all familiar . I am not alone even in my loneliest , most private contemplation . I wish to think she would have mat up the same about self - drive railcar . She died in December 2021 .
All that is to say I lived in San Francisco as ego - drive cars began to appear there . As I cook to move , lifespan start to retake the form we had enjoyed before shelter in place . I receive the doses of the vaccine . I became tolerant . I drink less . thud clubs reopened — sweaty crowd and all . merry bars served bad drink again . I see my friends again . They declare dinner parties full of strangers . I abridge covid at one of them . It was not a big deal .
My resentment of the cars did not come back . I see for them on the streets . When I would see one during the daytime , we portion out an imagined common agreement we would encounter again total night . I did not interpret them ; I did not need to . We behave as acquaintance who might curl to one another but not stop to chat long . They were , in the oddment , only a product and only an object of my misplaced longing for human connexion . When I start consort with humans again , I did not need them . So what that they were a reminder of Silicon Valley ’s mastery ; so were my iPhone and the SalesForce Tower . Those markers are everywhere , should I choose to search for them , my job has commute from breaking news to once again breed the technology industry , anyway .
All this is to say that I once lived in San Francisco , and then I did not . To know that you are visit places you once frequented for the last prison term is a displacing feeling . I have been to my best-loved beach for the last time . I have hiked my favored lead . I have sip my terminal parting drinks at White Cap . I may revisit these place , these memory board in the come X . I may not . The pandemic is not over , but most Americans have retrieve the rhythms of their lives beforehand . I am less alone than I was . Another metropolis beckon to me , full of people and promises I have yet to keep but have not give .
iPhoneNancy PelosiRoboticsTaco BellTechnologyWaymo
