A self-driving car killed a beloved SF cat. It’s part of a long history of tech companies using the Bay as a testing ground at our expense. People have had enough.
A self-driving car killed a beloved SF cat. It’s part of a long history of tech companies using the Bay as a testing ground at our expense. People have had enough.
Late in the evening of October 27, a self-driving car swerved in front of Randa's Market at 16th Street and Valencia in San Francisco. The Google-owned Waymo ran over a beloved member of the Mission community: KitKat, the store feline. According to bystanders and a 311 incident report, the car "did not even try to stop." Delirium bartender Sheau-Wha Mau rushed him to a 24-hour vet, where Randa's owner Mike Zeidan met them minutes later. But KitKat didn't make it.
The Mission was (and still is) devastated. KitKat was a neighborhood fixture, even making a 2020 list of best shop cats in the city. Randa's Market's Instagram is full of pictures of the gray-and-black-striped kitty, sprawled on a heating pad in a chair, paws neatly tucked under his torso on the counter, or perched watchfully atop a nearby car. A shrine to KitKat emerged overnight: a tiny pile of pictures, candles, and flowers for the "Mayor of 16th Street." The next evening, a small gathering of mourners stood watch next to the shrine. A sign placed on the shrine read "Kill a Waymo! Save a Cat!", while a woman yelled "Kitty cats, not killer cars!" as she walked past.
KitKat's tragic martyrdom highlights an ongoing struggle for the heart of the city, not solely between a single tech company and a bodega, but between the tech industry and the public space it occupies.
Virulent hatred of Waymo is as palpable online as it is in the Mission. Comments on the Instagram post from Randa's Market read as invectives against the company: "BY A WAYMO? this means war," "How can we sue Waymo? How can we achieve justice? Someone must be held accountable for this devastating loss,” and "@waymo your safety features don't include animals around the city. We demand a review of the accident." Or more simply: "DEATH TO WAYMO."
The ways that mobility and transportation have reshaped the Bay Area have long been reflected in how tech has altered the geography of the city, and how tech companies have evaded accountability for their takeover of public space.
Rapid gentrification in San Francisco, foisted onto the city by the collusion of tech companies, real estate developers, and weak intervention by City Hall, has perhaps been most obvious in the Mission, where tech workers employed in the South Bay have been displacing mostly working-class Latinos for decades. The UC Berkeley's Urban Displacement Project documents the whitening of the Mission: the percentage of non-white people in the neighborhood dropped from 71.8 in 1990 to 57.3 in 2013. In the same year, median household income from the project was reported at roughly $74,000. As of UDP's 2018 update, median household income in the Mission has risen to $103,134. In an April 2014 report authored by the tenants' rights organization Causa Justa::Just Cause and the Alameda County Public Health Department, the organizations found that the number of white homeownership doubled between 1990 and 2011.
With the rise of cushy tech jobs proffered by Google, Apple, Facebook, and Genentech, transport of their young, white and Asian workforces was facilitated by the development of so-called "Google buses:" tall, often-unmarked coach buses with WiFi, chartered by each company, which move through stops in San Francisco (and similarly, quickly-gentrifying parts of Oakland and the greater Bay Area) picking up tech workers to cart them down to offices in Sunnyvale, Menlo Park, Mountain View, and Cupertino. (Full disclosure: I worked at Google from 2018 to 2022 and rode these buses from North Oakland for a year).
KitKat's tragic martyrdom highlights an ongoing struggle for the heart of the city, not solely between a single tech company and a bodega, but between the tech industry and the public space it occupies.
Between December 2013 to April 2014, protests organized by a group called "Heart of the City," blockaded these buses, especially at major flash thoroughways in the Mission, such as 24th and Valencia. In a December 2013 blogpost, the group discussed how the buses became a stand-in for systemic dispossession: "The shuttles are symbols of deeper problems: a gaping wealth divide, worsening housing crisis and rampant displacement." Protesters marched towards city hall and blocked traffic with signs that read "Stop Displacement Now," "Warning: Rents and evictions up near private shuttle stops," and more simply, "Fuck off, Google." At issue was not only displacement and how techies were using the Mission as a bedroom community as they worked in Silicon Valley, but also how the buses relied on and typically blocked Muni bus stops maintained by the SFMTA. Sharing the same physical transit infrastructure also heightened the city’s stark class divide, as residents paying a fare to get on poorly maintained and underfunded public buses watched techies — heads down, noses in phones — waltzing onto their free chartered transports.
Kristin Miller describes how the buses became "a synecdoche” for the tech takeover, “a part that symbolized the whole, like the crown signifies the monarch — for all the ways that the most recent tech boom was altering San Francisco." The buses became a battle for what could be considered part of the commons. UC Berkeley new media professor Abigail De Kosnik describes how they are a feature of "technological privilege," and bus routes represent the ways in which "private companies dictate the uses of public space, as well as the racial, economic, and gender composition" of the city.
Waymo's introduction loosely follows the umpteenth wave of gentrification in San Francisco, this time following the rise of AI investment and a new round of frenzied cash being thrown at a new wave of mostly white and Asian computer programmers and bug-eyed founders being offered jaw-dropping salaries to the tune of nine figures. The reshaping of the city continues apace, with bidding wars for apartments and envelopes full of cash offered by tech workers trying to get in on the boom.
The wrinkle of Waymo (and with it, Cruise, Zoox, and Tesla and Uber's self-driving car divisions) are the ways in which accountability is further diluted and deferred.
In March 2018, Elaine Herzberg was killed by a "self-driving" Volvo SUV, operated by Uber, part of a pilot program of such cars operating in Tempe and the rest of Arizona. Herzberg is the first pedestrian fatality attributed to a self-driving vehicle. A National Transportation and Safety Board report determined that the car's sensors had detected an object in the road six seconds before the crash, but the software "did not include a consideration for jaywalking pedestrians." An Arizona prosecutor determined that Uber was not criminally liable for Herzberg's death, but the backup safety driver was charged with negligent homicide and eventually pled guilty to endangerment. This is what anthropologist of tech Madeleine Clare Elish calls the "moral crumple zone," the person who "protects the integrity of the technological system, at the expense of the nearest human operator."
Since then, scores of deaths, injuries, and other incidents with autonomous vehicles have been logged by government, and consumer and activist groups. The California Department of Motor Vehicles has documented 888 autonomous vehicle collision reports as of the end of October 2025. Safe Street Rebel, an organization fighting car dominance in San Francisco, documented 556 incidents between 2022 and early 2024. Cruise lost its license to operate in the city after dragging a pedestrian 20 feet. Anger over self-driving cars is palpable and has boiled over in multiple instances. In 2024, a crowd set a Waymo on fire in Chinatown by tossing a firework inside of it, and in summer 2025, multiple Waymos were set ablaze during protests against ICE.
A few days after KitKat’s passing, Waymo provided a tepid statement to PEOPLE Magazine: "We send our deepest sympathies to the cat's owner and the community who knew and loved him, and we will be making a donation to a local animal rights organization in his honor." Meanwhile, Waymo claimed, contrary to eyewitness accounts, that KitKat ran out in front of the car's tire. Waymo is again exculpating themselves from liability. KitKat had been the moral crumple zone of his own demise.
Donating to an unnamed animal rights organization and claiming penance misses the plot. It ignores the decades of dispossession that Waymo, its parent company Google, and other self-driving cars and gig work companies have wrought as the source of gentrification, displacement, and the reconfiguration of public space in San Francisco.
Donating to an unnamed animal rights organization and claiming penance misses the plot. It ignores the decades of dispossession that Waymo, its parent company Google, and other self-driving cars and gig work companies have wrought as the source of gentrification, displacement, and the reconfiguration of public space in San Francisco. And it ignores the fact that these companies treat our cities, and all the life within them, as testing grounds.
On November 4, city supervisor Jackie Fielder held a rally, flanked by 70 other people including representatives from the Teamsters. Fielder encapsulated the feeling of the crowd well: "We're here today because we cannot remain silent while corporations make choices that impact our neighborhoods without our consent."
I walked up 16th Street later that night, passing the familiar outdoor markets around the BART station. Along the street, some institutions came into view: Mother, Pancho Villa Taqueria, the Roxie Theatre. Notably absent from 16th Street — and the Mission more generally — were any Waymos.
On a light pole before Randa's, I saw a flyer printed with an illustration of a cat's striped head. Its small, flat mouth could have conveyed a smile, a frown, or glaring disapproval. Above the image: VIVA KIT KAT. And below: WAYMO OUT.
The tree where the makeshift altar had been was cleaned up, and was now wrapped in clear trash bags. Beneath them, several memorials still stood; a pencil-drawn sketch of KitKat looked up expectantly, as if for scritches, with a halo. "Save a cat... Don't ride Waymo!" On the opposing side of the tree, a bouquet of Day of the Dead marigolds.
And in the place of pride, at eye level, facing the entrance of his former home: a regal portrait of the true Mayor of San Francisco, KitKat of 16th Street.
