On a recent Friday evening, a driverless car pulled up alongside an outdoor dining shed in the Mission district of San Francisco, put on its hazard lights, and waited. As traffic began to pile up behind the vehicle, a man smoking a cigarette outside a nearby bar rolled his eyes.
“I don’t drive a car,” he grumbled, “so I don’t really care about these things.”
Other residents of this hilly city by the bay are not so ambivalent about the coming onslaught of autonomous cars. The…