Uh, how about having their remote driver staff take over?

> but an explicit choice was made not to do so for safety.

You know this how?

That’s what they usually do. The assumption here is that due to the blackout or some other related issue the human drivers were unavailable.

However even if that’s not true if they have more cars than human drivers there’s gonna be a problem until they work through the queue. And the bigger that ratio, the longer it will take.

This only works if they have cell service and enough human drivers to handle all of their cars.