Waymo vehicles idle at Baker and Hayes streets in San Francisco on Saturday after a power outage knocked out traffic signals in many parts of the city.

When a citywide power outage hit San Francisco over the weekend, it did more than turn off the lights. It left traffic signals dark and with them Waymo cars stalled in intersections and lanes, blocking turns and backing up traffic for hours.

No serious injuries have been reported so far, but it’s not hard to imagine how this could have gone differently. If a blackout like this were triggered by a major earthquake, a large fire or another emergency, the last thing San Francisco needs is hundreds of vehicles frozen in place, forcing firefighters, ambulances and public works crews to navigate around them.

The city is almost certainly going to investigate what happened and what safeguards are needed so autonomous vehicles do not impede emergency response. But if we only talk about Waymo, we will miss a critical, broader conversation around how San Francisco’s innovation policy still treats the city as a laboratory first and a community second.

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San Francisco has been a proving ground for new technology for years. In the early 2010s, the second dot-com boom brought a flood of startups that used the city’s public space as a platform. Ride-hailing, short-term rentals, scooters and app-based delivery services all scaled quickly in the city. Now we are living through a new wave: autonomous vehicles, drones, artificial intelligence tools embedded in workplaces and public services, and more.

Some of these technologies have........

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