"Skyrocket" is a word people use when they don't have the data to support their claim, but want to make it sound as extreme as possible.
When I hear "skyrocket" I think "several orders of magnitude in a very short time". But the source of the quote with skyrocket, basically admits that they didn't have any quantitative evidence to support a massive change in incidents.
Remember: reality is banal. Things are far better explained by sampling error, bias, and base rates, than they are by sudden, dramatic shifts caused by a single factor.
Absolutely right. To situate in terms of recent events, there have been three stages of trying to delay / influence the California CPUC robotaxi expansion approval vote:
1. Tried a politician scare campaign. Failed because it was too transparent it was an attempted distraction from their terrible public safety record.
2. Tried coning and disabling the vehicles. Failed because it was too transparently astroturfed, legal liability.
3. Now attempting leaks of cherry-picked vanity metrics so massaged they can’t fairly be called “statistics” to friendly anti-tech local media.
Will fail because national and international media no longer trust our local journalists, and will investigate independently.
The cars work. The incident data meets the standards set forth by the state of California.
Local politicians need to find another anti-tech boogeyman. This one is too vital to the revitalization of SF.
I am not talking my book, have zero stake here.
It’s just saddening to watch a nascent technology finally start working well and then get kneecapped by political games.
I don't know why the other reply to this post got downvoted to hell.
THe person has a point.
Fully autonomous cars are cool... don't get me wrong.
But electric cars and autonomous electric/gas cars are probably not the right solution to our person transport needs.
using energy to move a 4000 lb vehicle to transport one or two 200 lb humans is not energy-efficient... most of the energy is spent just moving the vehicle.
A 60lb e-bike can also transport a 200 lb person whilst using far less resources (both to make the vehicle and to operate it) and space.
Public transport also has better resource metrics than person car-based transport.
> A 60lb e-bike can also transport a 200 lb person whilst using far less resources (both to make the vehicle and to operate it) and space.
E-bikes are great for the situations, climates, and people who can use them.
E-bikes are not a substitute for the majority of people’s transportation needs.
I think the young, healthy people who live in moderate climates with good weather, short commutes, and little need to haul anything often forget that they’re own transportation needs don’t match the average person’s.
They work for the majority of people of all ages who live in cities where the infrastructure has been properly built to accommodate bikes.
Most people rarely need to haul anything and can use carshare when they do.
I've demoed a multistory house down to the bricks and re-built it from the outside in without a car.
Hired someone to haul off a dumpster several times.
For major materials deliveries, like beams or windows, usually it was the better part of a flatbed truck anyway, so I wasn't going to be doing that in a car. Most of the rest I did with a cargo bike. I only two or three times even bothered to use carshare (e.g. for a load of tiles) even though it's cheap.
I'm not at all proposing that professional builders work this way, but also a relatively small proportion of the population are professional builders. And doing it this way wasn't any kind of a drag for me.
I have been driving my children to daycare for past 3 years. I will be driving my children to daycare for at least 3 more years. Bicycle is not a viable replacement for this use case, sorry. My situation is far from unique, raising children is quite universal human experience.
I mean, maybe? I bike my two children to preschool + elementary on a cargo e-bike, weather permitting, and it's fantastic. Sometimes I take both at the same time, sometimes my wife and I split them up. Works great. When the weather sucks we drive or bus but it handles more than 50% of our trips.
The cargo + electric combo is really amazing.
The bike, a Tern GSD with a big two passenger seat for the kids, wasn't cheap ($6k) but it lets us get away with owning only one car using far less uber'ing, and is way less expensive and hassle than a second car.
(This is in Pittsburgh - it's hilly and we have weather, but we don't have too many bike-hostile drivers in the city)
But you still need a car for the other amount of time. Until that problem is solved, "we bike on a nice day" and it works 50% of the time is not really a counter argument...
Sure it is - it's less CO2, I'm in better shape, it's less wear on the roads, I don't take up parking spaces as much, and it lets us avoid buying a second car. (And it's a lot cheaper per mile)
The perfect is the enemy of the good. E-bikes are good. They're not perfect on their own and that's ok.
Edited to add: and I left off: they're WAY more fun! It's delightful riding around on it compared to being stuck in a car in rush hour traffic. :-) the bike is almost never stopped. and we get to say hi to more people we know as we pass by. Much better experience, even if a big rainstorm sends us back into the car.
I never said it’s not awesome that you cut your car usage in half. I’m saying you didn't eliminate it so it’s not like you could go carless, which was the strong assertion a few comments up.
How is going from 2 cars to 1 car not a positive? And using that single car only when absolutely necessary also not a positive? Nobody is claiming cars should be banned outright. We’re only claiming cars are overused in the US.
I said reducing your car usage by half doesn't eliminate your need for a car. You still have to buy the car. You still have the need for the car. We’re in a thread under “most people don’t need a car”.
No. At best most people use a car more than necessary, unless you live in a dense city, maybe then you don't need a car. But then you aren't most people.
It technically did eliminate their need for -a- car, although they do still need a car.
And frankly that -is- a point worth remembering. I know lots of couples that could be able to get by with a single vehicle instead of two at a significant financial benefit to them as well as an environmental benefit.
I know in my late 20s I was able to ride my -normal- bike to and from Meijer and get 40-80$ of groceries (2008 dollars mind you) in a trip. Back then that lasted the two of us a week, although yes I had to hoof it back for the sake of perishables. And yes I balanced triple bagged items along the handlebars.
But, frankly, if I had the money for even a small 'trailer' that wouldn't have even been an issue. It's amazing how much volume a child trailer has for groceries/etc when there isn't an actual child involved.
Edited to add: maybe the bigger questions are why we have economic and social pressures for single folks to have a car and DINKs (ESPECIALLY SINKs) to have two cars.
I bike a lot because of a game I play (Turfgame.com). On my trips I have noticed that almost every house has space for two cars. If it's winter I see tracks of two cars outside most houses. They also have at least one snow mobile and in the summer there is motorbikes and a special class of car that can be driven by youth (I forget what age though). Every third also have some sort of camper parked on the side of the house. And a lot of them also have a boat since it's close to the coast.
And this in a city that has max 500 m to a busstop frequented at least once per hour but mostly every 5-10 minutes. And bike roads covering the whole town. It's just a status symbol with social pressure. You have to have a House, Kids, Car and a dog/cats or you are a looser.
I also do most shopping with the bike, have baskets on the back of it. Works really nice. The kid bikes to school until the ice shows up, then it's bus time. Bigger things still go in the car and I have a job that involves needing the car to transport handicapped people now and then so can't get rid of it yet.
If the whole family is going somewhere we also choose the car because the bus is much more expensive and usually it also involves shopping for the grandma 60 km away.
Side note but I’m so glad you mentioned turfgame. I was into turf.ly long ago and have always missed it after it went down. I like how this one has a cyclic cadence to it.
I live in a rural-ish area.
School is a solid 15min drive, there are many steep hills and the nearest store is more than a mile away. My kid is at the end of pre-teen years and I bought an ebike, carful to get one that is legal for children to ride in my state. I also bought MotoCross-level safety gear(helmet, gloves, upper body armor, eye pro)
The child takes the bike to school, practice, activities and friends houses when the North East weather cooperates. For me, the closest dropoff event is 4 miles. 1mile to drop off, 1 mile to get home, and the same to pick up. This milage increases rapidly as the base distance increases.
I havent gotten rid of either of our two SUVs (NorthEast Winter sucks), but I have a remarkable reduction in gas usage. Selfishly, I dont have to stop what Im doing to transport the child.
I didnt do this for ecological reasons, but to give my child some freedom and the ability to get out on their own. The ebike is 3 months old and has 350 miles on it already. Those are all miles that didnt come out of my gas tank or go into the environment.
I mean the challenge was that “most people don't need a car”. I’m not saying don't ride a bike and reduce your car dependence… that’s awesome. I’m saying that cutting usage in half doesn't support the “most people don't need a car” angle. Most people still need a car.
I think that is a touchy angle. The statement is probably better as "most people shouldn't need a car"
The touchy part is be ause the logic often goes, because 100% can't get off cars, the necessary infrastructure to allow the 20% who could, won't be built.
It's like public transit, it sucks due to shoe string funding, ridership is low because it sucks, funding is then reduced because ridership is low.
There are about 1.1 billion passenger cars in the work and over 8 billion people. Thus most people don’t need a car.
The requirement for “most people need a car” depends on the definition of most people. Live in a small town in Arizona? Sure you need a car. Live in TriBeCa? You don’t need a car.
I'd be terrified of having a $6000 ebike stolen. I'm already in my third one after having two stolen from my apartment complex, and it's wasn't in a bad neighborhood.
It could happen. I don't leave it parked outside very much - it stays in my garage at home and a lot of my uses for it are short, like dropping kids at school or taking kids to brief activity (this morning I'm talking 10yo to Kung Fu). I use a heavy chain lock with it -- I don't mind a little extra weight since the bike is already 85+ lbs.
I think of and treat this bike as my second car more than as a typical "bike".
(It's kind of funny that with the huge size of cars in the US these days, our car won't fit into the garage, so the e-bike gets to share it with a rack of computers. :-)
Does that math include repairs, gas, insurance, etc? The average monthly cost of owning a car in California is ~$500.
It also sounds like you might be an outlier, the average used car cost is much higher than that[2], let alone new[3]. It's ok to not fall on the average, but it is important to notice when you do.
I chose the expensive one. The RadPower is a lot - a LOT - cheaper. The Tern is a bit nicer but not 3x nicer; just as with cars, there's diminishing returns on price, but I had the money and wanted to get the nicer one.
But at $0.10 vs $0.50 per mile of operating costs, the TCO is much lower than an equivalently priced car. I bought the bike planning on getting at least 10 years out of it. My road bike is 17 years old and going strong, which is better than I can say for any car I've owned
I assume this depends on where you live. Around here, it's very doable. I see a lot of ebikes with 1 or 2 child seats, and carriages for up to 3 extra children or groceries.
I have 1 kid, and we always went to the daycare by bike. Last year, age almost 5, I bought a followme, and it works great. He's 6 now. When we bike more than a few km or when it rains, he gets connected to the followme, otherwise he bikes by himself. My ebike did 2500km in what's now almost a year, easily paying itself by the gas we didn't buy. The car is mostly used for big groceries every 2 weeks.
Most roads have bike paths. On the way to school, 1.5km away, there are still 2 places where we have to cross unsafe car roads. Ironically, one is the school entrance. I think 1 parent in 3 or 4 still come by car, and their driving makes it harder for the others.
Raising children is universal, but the environments differ significantly.
I took my child to daycare by pushing a pram 500m. Later I'd half-carry him, and half let him walk. After he was walking consistently he later started to cycle there himself, as I walked alongside.
In a few weeks he'll be walking to his school himself, again a distance of approximately 400-500m - with only one road to cross.
I've seen children take themselves to school from age seven by bus, tram, cycles, or walking here. It is common-place.
Maybe that isn't possible in America because the houses and the schools/daycares are too distant. But that's certainly not universal.
> Maybe that isn't possible in America because the houses and the schools/daycares are too distant.
I live in a small college town in New England. I bike our toddler to/from daycare, our first grader either rides her bike or walks (about 500m). They’ll be able to walk to school through ninth grade, at which point she can ride a bike or take the bus or hitch a ride with mom. It’s definitely possible in much of America, if you simply choose to do it.
I would argue that the root problem here is: why are there no daycares within walking distance of you? In an ideal world you would neither drive nor bike to it, you would just walk. Surely the large distances that parents have to go to get their children to school are not an inevitability but rather a consequence of bad urban planning.
There are a couple of daycares that are significantly closer to me than the one than the one I drive to. One is 20 minutes walk. However, none of them are viable options for me, for different reasons, which I could go into, but then people here will only start second guessing me, knowing hardly anything about my situation.
Now, suppose I did manage to get my kids to daycare that I could conceivably ride a bike too, and suppose I manage to fit three on a bike, including an infant that’s not even one year old. What then, how do I actually get to my afterwards job? Yep, I still need to drive.
Ultimately, I could probably design my life around the goal of not owning a car. I could move to a place that’s close enough to my job to walk (and hope that all my future jobs are similarly close), and also find a daycare that’s close enough. I would probably have to compromise on housing size, quality and/or cost, distance to my friends and family, my hobbies that require indoor and outdoor space, but why would I, when I can hit a pretty good trade off with everything else, just by getting a car?
I'm not going to judge you, or anyone else, for doing what works best for yourself.
I'm going to say one thing, though: I would appreciate it if car owners were a bit more conscious of the externalities of their way of life. When I walk or bike around my neighbourhood, every car I encounter is a nuisance to me. They are noisy, they are scary, they are everywhere. So it's not just about your comfort, it's also about mine. If I understand that your car makes your life easier, and you understand that your car makes my life worse, maybe we can arrive to a productive compromise rather than think that the other is out to get us.
Thing is, the car-centric lifestyle, when taken to its extreme, is so space-intensive that it becomes the ruination of other lifestyles. The more people drive, the less amenities need to be near them, the more space is taken up by roads and parking, the less walkable the area becomes, the more people drive, and so on, until no one can walk anywhere. We have to be cognizant of that and make sure it doesn't get to that point. Part of that is making sure that e.g. as many people as possible have daycares at a walking distance from them.
Now, if you don't have any daycares at a walking distance, do what you must, I'm not the one who is going to judge (what would that achieve?) But in the grand scheme of things, it highlights a problem. Let's keep it in mind, you know. Let's try to solve it at some point, maybe.
> The more people drive, the less amenities need to be near them, the more space is taken up by roads and parking, the less walkable the area becomes, the more people drive, and so on, until no one can walk anywhere. We have to be cognizant of that and make sure it doesn't get to that point.
But why? You seem to assume it to be universally accepted that everyone wants to live in walkable places, but the evidence in front of you is simply contradicting this. People routinely move to non-walkable places by the millions, with the expectation that they will be driving everywhere, and they don't mind it at all. I think you are so deeply emotionally embedded in your anti-car lifestyle (especially given how you describe them as "scary, noisy nuisances") that it might be hard for you to conceive that people might prefer this to the alternative you describe.
> Part of that is making sure that e.g. as many people as possible have daycares at a walking distance from them.
No, because it is very much unclear that people actually want that more than other things. If you ask people whether they want to have a nice daycare in a walking distance, most will answer "yes", this much is true. However, this is not necessarily compatible with many other things people want, like, for example, big houses, low costs, low noise, low traffic (including public transit and foot traffic), or generally living in a place with fewer people and less churn, so that you can actually get to know your neighbors.
Given all these preferences and constrains, what most people are aiming for is a satisfactory trade-off. Your proposal about making sure that as many people as possible have daycares at a walking distance from them is basically trying to force on them your preferences, and ignoring the trade-off that they choose.
Going back to your description of this vicious (to you) cycle of car-centric lifestyle, I can also describe virtous cycle, where a walkable place pulls more people into it, resulting in more businesses and amenities setting shop there, which pulls even more people, and adds more transit options which are now economical due to existing density etc. Now imagine that someone helpfully tries to "make sure" that as many people as possible have a car parking spot close to where they want to be, and institute parking minimums on businesses. After all, if you ask people whether they want to have cheap and plentiful parking anywhere they need to go, most people will answer yes, just like when asked about daycares within walking distance.
Of course, as you almost certainly realize, you can either have daycares in a walking distance, or free and plentiful parking everywhere, but not both at the same time. Thus, if you understand the mechanics of this, you'll oppose the parking minimums (which, by the way, I oppose too). However, for the same reason, many people will oppose your plans of densification and daycares at walking distance, because they simply don't like it as much as they like other stuff, and they understand that there's a trade-off involved.
> But in the grand scheme of things, it highlights a problem. Let's keep it in mind, you know. Let's try to solve it at some point, maybe.
Yes, let's keep in mind that there are trade-offs, and figure out a way to eliminate it, so that people can satisfy more of their preferences. Often technology helps; for example, cars eliminated huge part of a trade-off between being able to live in calmer, less dense places, and access to amenities. Future technology might help here in other ways.
You do understand that there exist other capitalist countries where being able to walk, bicycle, or take a tram everywhere is the norm for many, many people, and having to hop into a 2-ton gas-powered mobile living room for virtually every last thing would be considered absurd?
I am glad that you live in such a utopia. I drive about 10 km to get my child to daycare. It was the closest that had available room when he was born. There are I think 3 closer ( totally unavailable to me but closer ).
I am nor sure what you consider “walking distance” but I am going to assume there is a greater population density where you live.
Yes, there are areas that are nicely planned for parents.
I have lived in several different towns and know a few more in the area. The town that was 1300 people had plenty of daycare within walking distance (500 m). The town with 150 people had about 1 km to the daycare but we didn't use it, had no kids at the time. The other towns I know: 10k ppl, plenty of daycare within 1 km wherever you live. 500 ppl, two day care at least, all in 500 m. Starting to guess population now but around 500 ppl and I saw at least two daycare when passing through. Surface similar to the other 500 ppl.
Where we live now is planned and built around 1980 and we have five daycare within 1 km. Three of them are less than 200 m away. Many of the younger kids gets walked there by their slightly older siblings that just continue to school after leaving them at daycare. This city have 100 k ppl, we live in the most populated areas of town with mixed single house and bigger appartment buildings with around 10 k ppl.
They all had space for our kid without having to wait or book a place before birth. The state is required to have space for all kids so they keep track of how many births and plan accordingly.
All this in northern Sweden.
I also know a few towns in Germany with similar situations except less bicycle-friendly roads and a lot more population. Didn't have the kid in daycare there though.
I live in a town of 7000 - so the population density is likely far higher here in the UK than where you are. But here there are 3 private day care centres I could walk to, plus a school based one, (for kids from 3yo, that is free).
I am pretty well travelled but I have never been a parent anywhere else. So, I guess I am just ignorant of what is available everywhere else.
I do not think there is anything that is not a private residence within 200 m of me. It is well over a kilometre to the nearest school. It is more than 2 to the closest business. I am having trouble relating to a world that has all these services available a short stroll from my front door.
Oh, and with regards to the poster from the UK with the free daycare, I pay $800 per month for one child ( and have 4 ).
So yes, these places are very much sounding like utopia to me.
Well, can't we at least acknowledge that this is a problem? I don't believe I've said anything beyond that: I think it's a problem that people don't have available daycares that they can walk to and I think we should work towards solving it. Maybe not for everyone, maybe not immediately, but we can't just throw our hands in the air and say nothing can be done every time someone raises an issue.
Not really no. This would strike someone living in the densest urban core as a problem and they'd be right. At the average population density of a mid-sized US city or smaller, the notion is ludicrous based on nothing more than the number of people within a walkable radius of any particular point where a business could be constructed, and this doesn't and cannot change without getting out a drag line and scraping entire suburban regions flat and starting from scratch.
I would argue that the root problem here is: why isn't one parent able to stay home with the children? We shouldn't need nearly as many daycares as we currently do. It's simply a consequence of bad economic and social planning.
People could elect to do that. Overwhelmingly, they do not in the US, I think from a mix of many people find raising young kids tedious and that you would be out-bid for housing, goods, and services that you want by all the two-income families.
I love my kids dearly, but I'm not cut out to stay at home raising them full-time from age 0.25 through 5.
I would argue that the fact that any of us have to work at all is just poor societal planning.
I mean, societies have been a thing for thousands of years already. At this point, I should be able to argue on the Internet that we should behave as if all problems have been solved by now because—-I mean, why haven’t they been?
The fact that so many parents live so far from available daycares that they need to drive to them is not ideal. It is a problem worth solving and there is no fundamental impossibility in solving it: part of the reason daycares are far is because cars exist, but it is unhealthy for a society to let the option to have a car degenerate into a requirement to have a car.
In any case, I never said the problem was solved or that anyone should act as if it was solved. I'm just pointing it out, because we're not going to solve any issue we refuse to even acknowledge.
Counterpoint- I have three children (one still not biking in his own) and have exclusively used a cargo bike to cart them to school since Kinder unless it was exceptionally icy roads.
That said, I live in a very bike friendly city now, close to their school, can afford a cargo bike, etc.
> My situation is far from unique, raising children is quite universal human experience.
And yet your experience of it is totally foreign to me. There are a half dozen daycares within walking distance of my house. My sibling who lives overseas has the same thing.
When my kid hits school age the local primary school is next to the tram line that will take me to my office.
> I have been driving my children to daycare for past 3 years. I will be driving my children to daycare for at least 3 more years. Bicycle is not a viable replacement for this use case, sorry.
In countries like the Netherlands, urban areas in Germany or anywhere else that has a public infrastructure not exclusively focused on cars (aka, the services required for daily life not being mega-sized and requiring a car to get there, but small and distributed) it is a perfectly viable option. Hell I 'member walking to kindergarten. On my own, in the outskirts of Munich. I had never been driven to school by car.
Raising kids without driving them anywhere, but instead teaching them to walk early, walk often and walk far is also easy - and really good in lots of ways - unless you live in one of those awful places with no sidewalk/pavement, in which case move or campaign for one. Raising children without cars is still something of a majority experience in the world and was universal for millennia. They have legs, and are portable until well after you've raised them to use them.
It’s a planning failure that you have to drive to access daycare. Cities have been designed for cars so it isn’t really your fault that you need a car to live in it… but that doesn’t mean it always must be like this.
Many of us drive our kids to daycare on an e-bike. It works great. On days when I have to use our car instead for some reason, the kids complain that they want the bike.
Self driving electric cars are much better than car shares as they'll have significantly higher usage rates and eliminate much of the need for parking spots in dense downtown areas.
If you believe car shares are part of an efficient transportation future then self-driving cars are part of it!
Clearly, you have never been a performing musician.
I'm not either anymore, btw. I gave up that dream long ago. It wasn't because I was broke (I was broke, but that wasn't the reason), it was because I found out that I'm not a good musician compared to the folks who pass through Austin, TX. I wasn't even close.
Most people aren't performing musicians, regardless of whether or not I have been one. I don't follow your logic.
However, in any case, I do have a good friend who is a performing musician (classical). I often go to gigs where he and his collaborators are performing. None of them has a car. They bring their tubas, oboes, bass cellos and the like on bikes. Then they bring them to a bar or someone's house on a bike to have a drink after, and then they bring them back home on bikes.
You are not responsible for transporting children and / or their gear I see.
At least one leg of every trip I make requires a larger vehicle.
Oh, and I commute about 50 km each way ( 100 km total ) on a road heavily used by large trucks. I am not sure how small a vehicle I want to be in for that trip, especially after dark.
OP is suggesting that it's more efficient to change our whole road infrastructure in order to accommodate a partial solution he likes, instead of having an incremental upgrade that's so compatible with the existing infrastructure that you literally can't tell without looking up the model.
I use electric scooters extensively. I love them. I own an electric MTB. I really really wish all city centers would be for pedestrians and bikes only. But for the love of god, I cannot understand people who pretend that ebikes are a full solution to any transportation issues.
Cars are a solution for somewhere north of 90% of trips in places designed for Americans.
I'm not saying that I love it; as a family of four, we average about 6K miles on one of our cars and 3K on the other per year. I'd be hard pressed to cut that usage in half without significant sacrifice and it would be practically impossible to cut it to 25% or less. Winter skiing alone is probably 2.5K of those miles (10 trips @ 250 miles R/T) and there's not a practical substitute to get from here to there for a weekend of the kids' skiing.
> Most people rarely need to haul anything and can use carshare when they do.
Heavy citation needed. I've been remodeling my home for the last 2 years and I'd say on regular (every other week or so) basis I've needed to pick up something from the hardware store that can't be biked home. When I buy groceries for the family for the week, I cannot bike those home. When I need to take a large package to the UPS store a bike doesn't work. When I buy a new lawn mower, that box can't be biked. When I need to go more than 3 miles quickly, a bike doesn't work. Baby (in the winter nonetheless), bike's a no-go. Etc.
It's awesome that you live somewhere where you can make due with a bike and hired labor. But you are frankly out of touch if you think that most people rarely need to transport things that are too big for a bike. And you're conveniently ignoring the fact that plenty of people have trucks, SUVs, hatchbacks, etc. for the cargo space so saying "you can't do that in a car" is neither here nor there.
Most people don’t take 2 years to remodel their own home. Most people don’t remodel their home at all.
A cargo bike is more than adequate to pick up groceries or drop off a package. It might even haul the lawn mower, though I’ll concede a car might work better. But if you buy a lawn mower more than once every 20 years, you need to find a better mower.
Even if someone isn't remodeling their home, they probably still do things like go camping or surfing, take the kids to school, pick their parents up from the airport, go to the local home depot to get supplies for home maintenance or gardening, etc.
Arguing that people should give up cars is arguing for a huge loss of personal freedom.
An argument was given as to why cars were a poor solution to the problem of personal transportation, and you've made it into an argument about personal freedom. The point is we can't design a system that optimises for both efficient personal transportation and widespread car usage (I'd argue we can't design a system for widespread car use at all, but that's by the way). So, as a society we make choices. Each choice we make impacts someone's personal freedom in some way, be that through making it harder to drive somewhere, or indeed making it harder to cycle or walk somewhere. Based on your perspective, any given change you might think is appalling or a very good thing; a curtailment of your personal freedom or a liberation.
So what should we do? My response is we should think holistically about the problem. How should most people get about most of the time? Optimise for that case, whilst allowing for the edge cases. Should is doing a lot in that previous statement, but thinking about efficiency and resource allocation is probably a good route towards establishing a reasonable "should".
Let's not get hung up on "freedom" rhetoric. It's not helpful.
Cars are, by far, the best and most universal solution to most people's transport needs. That's why they're so prolific. Because every other option has an asterisk next to it for certain use cases. If they weren't the best solution, we would be talking about something else.
So society has already made that choice, which is why it's the status quo. It's not perfect, but it's what we have. This discussion amounts to a relatively privileged minority decreeing that what the rest of society has settled on is, in fact, not the best solution, based on a fairly narrow set of criteria that doesn't take other people's circumstances into account.
If you don't want people driving cars as often, alternative transport solutions can take some of the load off. But take it from a guy who's lived in Asian megacities and didn't own a car until his thirties, people still own cars in those places because they either have responsibilities that mandate it, or because they don't want their movement dictated to them by where the train line ends.
>Because every other option has an asterisk next to it for certain use cases. If they weren't the best solution, we would be talking about something else.
This is the most North-american thing I've read today.
Where I live cars are probably the least useful thing for most people's transport need, we take the tram here.
>So society has already made that choice, which is why it's the status quo.
And yet I'd be willing to bet that cars are still commonplace where you live. I also live somewhere that has trams, and even used them myself for many years. They're still not a replacement for a car. And again, this isn't really a point that needs to be defended, because odds are you saw plenty of cars driving around today. Even if you yourself don't use one, you're relying on other people to do so for you. If you're not picking someone up from the airport yourself, you're paying someone else to do so. In a car. Or you're having your goods delivered to you, by car. I think you get my drift.
Cars allow us to do things that wouldn't be possible in their absence. The only real argument here is to what degree we can minimize the need for cars so that more people can opt to go without, but I think that's a losing battle. People vote with their wallets. Not only have they overwhelmingly voted for cars, but global urban density is actually decreasing, and is likely to do so for the next three decades. Trying to take away the freedom that a car provides is going to be a losing battle outside of notable exceptions (Singapore, HK, etc.).
The point isn't that cars aren't useful. The point is we shouldn't optimise for cars. People's individual choices are a poor guide for transport policy decisions. See Braess's paradox, and Downs-Thomson paradox (neither of which are actual paradoxes, just a noting of how individual rational decisions result in a net reduction in utility for all, including the individual).
It's not self-evident to me that we shouldn't optimize for cars. Again, global urban density has been falling for decades, and is likely to keep falling for decades further. There are many, many reasons for this, but at least one of them is that when push comes to shove, many people decide that owning a car is a worthwhile investment, and that additional mobility allows them to live further out. In order to nudge more people into forgoing car ownership, you would need to make cars less useful and less worthwhile, because as long as that advantage is present, people will want them, utilize them, and demand infrastructure for them.
Cars are already optional. I didn't own a car until my thirties. But the things you can do with a car are so much more expansive than the things you can do without a car.
I mean, have you ever tried to move house without one? You're either relying on friends, or you're forking out for a removalist. And that's just one small example. As long as that difference in capability exists (and it always will) we'll have a need for cars or something like them. Remember, cars only really filled the social and economic niche that was occupied by horses, so that need was already there.
You can rent a small van for 2 days, that's it for moving. By small van I mean Fiat Doblo or similar, bigger if you have larger furniture. Super big furniture: can't move that with a car, you need a box truck anyway, you'd rent that.
Definitely cheaper than owning a car 24/7.
And horses were owned by a minority of (generally rich) people.
50% of people didn't have, nor need, horses, unlike cars now.
Cars are great, but again, they should be optional. When did the 3 teens in the suburbs "option" to have to drive everywhere? Never, they didn't, their parents chose for them.
Okay, now try doing that in monsoonal rains like the ones I grew up with as a kid. Between India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Brazil, several billion people live in heavy rainfall regions close to the equator. Most people in those regions would already know the reality of having to haul goods by bicycle in the rain, and I'd put money on them choosing a car if given the choice.
And that's kind of the point. Can you do this stuff by bicycle or other modes of transport? Sure, many do. Would most people make that choice? Probably not, so you have to take it away from them once they have the means to choose a car instead. That's a tough sell.
The curse of being human is that we need to do uncomfortable things to grow and maintain ourselves all while avoiding things we enjoy but are bad for us. It's a catch 22 if you like.
Imagine how nice it is to get home after the monsoonal cargo cycling, how happy you are to see the family, how nice they are to you drenched and exhausted, how good the food tastes, the cardiovascular perks.
With a car you carry your mood wherever you go, there is no hard reset. You correct your sensitivity to register signals the monsoon would "normally" drown out until everything becomes a stress signal and you need Prozac or Valium to deal with it.
Car owners can workout too of course but it's an entirely different game if you have to fuel it with discipline in stead of necessity.
Errr... Maybe try telling this to the people in developing countries who already do this and more because they have no choice. Think of the lesson you'll have learned if you make it out with your life!
Any plan that relies on humanity to collectively go through some kind of personal growth prescribed by you, the individual, is bound for failure. You can't force people to give a shit, and you'll have a hard time convincing the guy pulling tuktuks through the rain that he actually has a better deal than the local taxi drivers. And he's not even the guy you really need to convince. We can't even convince billionaires who supposedly believe in climate change that maybe there are alternatives to private jets.
If you really want people to drive less, the only thing you can really do is provide alternatives and hope people hop on board, which is how the car originally spread in the first place. Spoiler though, they probably won't in any scalable long term capacity, because despite their flaws, cars are inherently a force multiplier. They just let you do a lot more, and as long as that remains true, people will be willing to pay the price of ownership.
I live a mile from the local school complex. There are zero road crossings to get there (ped tunnel and nice paths) and people still drive. It’s stupid.
Airport pick-ups can be done with car share, taxi, or rentals.
What you’ve argued is freedom to spend a fortune on a car and drive everywhere outweighs freedom to not do so and freedom to walk or cycle. There’s a balance but right now we’re very much on the car side.
I didn't own a car until I was in my thirties. If that's economic slavery, it's not a very effective system. The reality is that a car opens up doors and opportunities that aren't available without one. As long as that remains true, there will be a need for them, or something that fits the same societal niche (e.g. horses).
These comments are quite revealing. The things I see every day are not as obvious as I thought they were.
It is probably awesome to drive around in a well paved place build specifically for mass car use but if you get out of the car its just asphalt everywhere. It's not very exciting when not driving?
If I can't cycle it from the hardware store I have it delivered. The hardware store doesn't have 99.99% of things and its expensive.
People without cars [usually] don't get groceries for a whole week. I did hear people do it but it doesn't sound very appealing/appetizing/healthy/fresh. Someone calculated that if one does 20 min worth of exercise per day the life expectancy goes up by about the same. I live near a store, perhaps I chose to, perhaps we have enough cyclists to make it worth it - I don't know.
Be it Groceries or lawn mowers, just have it delivered.
I've never had to send a package so large but you can just schedule a parcel collection with UPS.
> When I need to go more than 3 miles quickly, a bike doesn't work.
I always point to the (mind blowing) 24 hour cycling distance record: 1026.21 km or 637.66 miles. He didn't just get off the sofa and did that of course. It took quite a bit of conditioning. Could he really be 1000 times more fit? I can't imagine.
I see bike trailers full of babies the year round. I just see a bike with one on the front, one on the back and 2 tiny humans on their own bike in front of it.
People go camping on their bike, there are trailers for your surf board.
kids cycle themselves to school.
There is no need to pick parents up from the airport, if you just let them stand there then they will figure out how to get home themselves in no time. Rent a car, take a taxi/uber?
I suppose it would be cool to own your own airstrip and aircraft and fly the parents wherever they want to go. Of course it would be noisy and take up a huge amount of space. Other peoples personal freedom would have to step aside.
I wonder at what age kids can safely be allowed outside in the destruction derby meat grinder that is car traffic. You cant drive a mile without guts spilled all over the road. Globally we are killing something like one person every 25 seconds and god knows how many animals. In the Netherlands roughly the same amount of drivers, cyclists and pedestrians die in traffic accidents but they are all killed by cars. The odd part to me is that 2/3 of those must be in the city where cars are the least useful.
It probably needs 2 documentary films to show cycling countries how things work in car countries and the other way around. I hear people drive down their driveway to get the mail. Sounds surreal to me.
Last year I wanted to buy some new weights for my home gym.
I was a little proud of myself that I waited until January to do so, because that meant I could collect the box from the post-office, and rather than have to deal with renting a taxi, or dealing with the huge weight on my bicycle, I could put it on a (childs) sledge and drag it home over the ice/snow.
Perhaps that wouldn't work for a lawn-mower, which I guess you need to buy "immediately" if the previous one was unrepairable, and it would presumably only be used in summer. But still for a random life hack "Buy bulky stuff in winter, and use a sledge" is hard to beat!
That’s why I added a bunch of other examples, not just remodeling. I think I painted a pretty standard picture of what a 30s some adult family routine looks like.
Have you tried renting a truck from Home Depot before? There's no way to reserve one in advance. Most Home Depots have one or maybe two trucks, you just have to show up and hope that it's available.
Uhaul is much more reliable, but in my experience renting from them is expensive and very time consuming. Each checkout usually takes me 20-30 minutes, even when I use the app ahead of time (their app is horrible).
Where I live, I'd say trucks make up 30% of the vehicles on the road. It's a big part of the culture here and extremely practical. There are no practical rental options. Lots of places in the US are like that. That's what led me to eventually buy a pickup for myself.
Someone needs to create Zipcar for trucks for those of us not living in dense urban cores.
If you order from a slightly more upscale hardware place they'll do delivery for a reasonable price usually next day. Seattle has a place called Dunn's. Their lumber is somewhat more expensive but it's all premium grade or better and you don't have to sort through 50 2x4s to find 5 good ones. In fact everything I've had delivered was high quality except one piece. I called them back and they swapped it out at no charge to me. Better if you're ordering with a truck you can fit much larger pieces like beams or 20' trex pieces that you can't get in a pickup. Delivery is $75-150 depending on how much of the truck you use last I checked. I stopped getting anything but instant fixed from Lowes or home Depot. For any big project thses places also discount in bulk better. We put in a 1k sqft paver patio. Was half as much buying from a local supplier who delivered for $50 on 5 pallets. No way I could have gotten that in a pickup with or without a forklift. Had a dingo delivered. Sure I could have trailered that but I'd have to rent and return a trailer. It was dropped off by a rental place and picked up a month later included in the rental. 8 minutes of my time. 15 total if you include the phone call to rent. I've spent an hour renting a chipper from home Depot.
Same for metal working. Moving sheet steel by yourself is stupid unless you want to slice up yourself and your vehicle. Deliver trucks have cranes. Even better you can get 24' lengths of tube steel which really cuts down on price. They put the pavers 30 feet from the street sneaking under power line easily.
If your doing a house how many trips are you making with a pickup full of drywall. How much are you racking up in gas in that sucker going to hd?
For startup on home remodeling, if you don't have access to a shop then yeah you are going to want to have a flat bed truck and/or trailer. Car just doesn't cut it, if it does you are mostly buying small tools or the like.
Everything else can be shipped, albeit for higher fees.
For groceries, you do need to have one within a reasonable distance, but a daily trip to the store more than suffices. You waste less, too. Since such a thing became locally available to us I have made almost no trips to the grocery store by car - those I have have been for specialty shops at longer distance, or the rare case of being tired/lazy/already out.
Transportation of large heavy packages and inclement weather are two areas there are no standard solutions, however there are enclosed designs, tricycles, and e-bikes - a small heating apparatus is all that's necessary to hold back e.g. the cold.
I think the point does stand, in that no its not "needed". It's mainly just a giant PITA when a bunch of unsafe half ton steel death traps are the "norm". The long distances between shops are also a function of the car.
On the flip side, no I don't think ride-share should be the only option, but a lot of people would fare much better without a car payment they don't really want or need.
In dense cities, there are multiple grocery stores withing walking distance. What people do is come back from the office (or anywhere else), get off the subway or bus, and on the 2 block walk home pop into the shop for fresh produce. Yes people absolutely get things like fresh bread on the daily.
I buy fresh food daily. Fruits and veggies from whichever stall in the local street market has the best options, bread from the baker, meat from the butcher. Packaged goods from one of the many supermarkets within easy walking distance.
It takes me a few minutes on the way home from whatever I'm doing. Less work than getting into a car and driving 15 minutes somewhere once a week. Plus everything is fresh, we only buy what we need and basically throw away zero food.
Cities can be organised differently, including in ways that facilitate more responsible life choices.
It's not that people can't imagine better ways. I'd love it if there was a grocery store a 5 min walk from where I live. But there isn't. It'd be a 35-minute walk. Some people live further, many miles, from a grocery store.
But that is not an immutable fact of life. It's not "cultural" either. I see the main reason there aren't grocery stores on every other corner to be single family zoning. Not wanting to have "noise" around your house, pushing any kind of business away from your neighborhood, and not wanting "shadows" pushing away denser kind of buildings that can easily support local business. Change the zoning, and the built environment will change, I would argue for the better.
Takes me 5-10 minutes max to get from my kitchen to the supermarket and back home, on foot. The streets are safe due to low car usage so if I needed something else while cooking, I could send my kids on their own from when they were about seven (prior to that I wouldn't worry about their safety but I would worry about them bringing the right thing back and not deciding to stop off in a playground).
Meat tastes considerably better within 48 hours. Milk considerably better within 3-4 days. Eggwhites become runny consistency about 10 days after lay, but the ones you get from the shop are already several days old at best.
What I do think however is that our perspective why and when a car is needed has been heavily influenced by media.
I just had a conversation with someone who lives in the center of Vienna and he was perplexed that I had to find a parking spot because he did not realize that was even driving a car.
So we should not make assumptions on the need of a car in either direction
Agreed. They appear to live in a bubble world where everything "just works". They don't seem to realize that outside of their bubble the world does still need to turn, and that isn't currently going to happen in the nice way they'd like it to (on uhh... bicycles).
The "bubble" is a place where planners worked hard to make things work well.
There's nothing magical about it. Political and technical decisions make the difference between people having to waste time and risk everyone's lives moving around in cars, vs being able to accomplish their daily needs quickly and easily on foot or bike.
The fact that such places exist proves it is possible. They weren't always this way, but they wanted it to be this way, and they made it so. The same can happen almost anywhere, given faith and commitment.
> The fact that such places exist proves it is possible.
No one claimed that it is impossible to exploit the masses for the gain of the few. What I am saying is that you wouldn't have those things without a much dirtier world providing them.
This goes both ways. Suburban and rural living is the minority globally. Car owners are the minority globally. Single family homes are the minority of housing globally. Are you sure it's not you living in a bubble?
The world looks very different depending on where you live. Where I live I could do without a car if I really tried. I know lots of people don't even have a drivers license (at the age of 65). The E-Bike is a good solution for most older people, the younger ones can still use the normal bikes. We have winters with lots of snow and temperatures below -20 C. The road network is built for bicycles, I can get from one side of town to the other without ever following the same road as cars. I might have to cross a road a few times but often that is done on a different level than the cars, I just have to do a little planning. The roads are cleared of snow within a few hours of snowfall unless it's apocalyptic ammounts which happens about once or twice per winter. Then it can take 1-2 days before all roads are useable. But it's still possible to take the main bike roads into the city center and hospital where most of the jobs are.
I guess it's just confusing everyone why you seem to keep denigrating bike advocates instead of the planners, consultants, and bureaucratic systems that made biking so bad for you in your part of the world.
There is a difference between denigrating a thing, and critiquing it realistically. I think that humans riding bicycles is a good thing. I also recognize that we cannot transport goods in such a fashion to keep the world running as we know it.
Considering that the vast majority of US cities were built with cars in mind, we probably aren’t in a position to use bikes anytime soon. And this isn’t just about the availability of bike lanes, but also things like the density of housing, the location of shopping, the infrastructure for big box stores, etc. These things will take decades to change, at best, so improving cars in the meantime is worthwhile.
This is true, but ROI on improving infrastructure and city-planning to revolve more around bikes and other alternative forms of transportation is going to be way higher in the long run if done thoughtfully. Especially as e-bikes continue to get better and more affordable. It's definitely a "porque no los dos" situation.
And while I'll grant you I'm no expert, some things I've read strongly suggest that improvements to city planning that making it more friendly for bikes, pedestrians, and transit commuters also tend to benefit the vast majority of drivers in various ways.
This too is a policy choice. Oulu is colder and snowier than Minneapolis but because they have prioritized a built environment where cold weather cyclists get top priority, more people cycle year round:
A large fraction of humanity is young or old. Like, >50% of people are not really safe to ride a bike on their own, let alone at -25C. There are people who can do it, but as a solution it lacks generality.
Are you serious? My mother is 72 and pretty much bikes everywhere. If you walk or bike around in many European cities you'll see people from 2-90 on bikes. Have a look a Videos from Finland where you see people of all ages biking around in sub - 10 C.
It's also hilarious how - 25 C is being brought up as not suitable for people to bike around. Like how many people in Europe/Northern America actually encounter these temperature even once (let alone regularly that it should determine our traffic policies). These are the same arguments that ICE car proponents make against electric cars, "I might want to make a cross country road trip once every 5 years and so every car with a range of less than 800km on a single charge is not suitable".
The level of risk your mother is willing to take with a body that can’t bounce back from injuries very easily does not generalize to an obligation for others to accept the same level of personal risk.
Sedentary behavior is in itself risk factors for dying. If you break your hip bones, then your health is going to spiral downward because you can't walk.
You need to load your body. A car takes load off of you.
What don’t I accept? You’re reading too much into things. A lot of people don’t exercise enough. But countless millions of people stay at an acceptable weight without walking everywhere. Mostly it involves simply eating modest portions of balanced foods.
I am making a narrow, targeted argument in the context of a thread that has diverged into claims about the viability of bicycles as a primary means of transport, particularly for some sub populations. Fitting that question into a broad explanatory framework for widespread weight issues is outside the scope of that, and would only be a small part of such a framework in any case.
What don’t I accept? You’re reading too much into things. A lot of people don’t exercise enough. But countless millions of people stay at an acceptable weight without walking everywhere. Mostly it involves simply eating modest portions of balanced foods.
Exercise only account for a small portion of our time. The rest is spent on doing daily living. Time spent outside exercise are going to matter more.
Having an environment that encourages walking and biking keeps the population healthier than an environment that encourages sedentary behaviors.
The elderly especially need physical load bearing activities of some kind, or otherwise their bones are going to deteriorate to the point of hip fractures.
Some can, not all, and that too is still irellevant: the on-topic question for this side thread are the risks associated with bikes in particular as a primary means of transport for certain sub populations. look above and you will see that’s the context of my original response.
Cycling is the whole point of this little sub thread. Specifically with respect to the increased risks or lack of accessibility it offers for some sub populations. Besides, public transport is not an option for many people. I have a grocery store 3 miles away from me, and no public transport to get there, but again that wasn’t the topic.
Car travel is risky. For 2020 NHTSA put the number of medically attended injuries at roughly 400x the number of traffic deaths. For 2021 NSC puts that number at closer to 115x or 5.4 million injuries per 47,000 traffic related fatalities.
Harvard puts the number of deaths due to "a result of exposure to ozone and fine particulate matter from vehicle emissions in 2016" at around 7,000 on the East Coast alone.
Meanwhile with bicycles the NSC puts the annual deaths at around 1,300 with about 800 of those (or nearly two thirds) as a result of "motor-vehicle traffic crashes".
Bicycles aren't riskier, society has just normalized automobile hazards. The answer to "bikes are dangerous because you could get hit by a car" isn't "just use a car".
You can't just pull part of my comment out from that part of the sentence. A few words back you will see I was writing about sub populations for whom riding is riskier. Of course you would think what I'm saying makes no sense if you are getting caught up on one phrase and interpret it to mean I'm making a broad, general statement that riding a bike is dangerous compared to cars.
As a cyclist, they sort of can, it requires proper separated bike infrastructure, comprehensively linked.
Still have to deal with cars at some intersections, and on streets that are so narrow that their full width from curb to curb is only one lane, but things move slowly on those streets and good intersection design takes a lot of the risk away.
I lived in Beijing for 10 years, where it regularly gets to -10 or -20C for a few months, and I did commute by bike through those winters, and it is extremely taxing and hard. I don't think you'll succeed in convincing more than say 20% of the population to do that in reality. If you think you have the power to convince more, please go for it!
Yes, I am. What percent of people have dementia or alzheimer's - it's at least 5-10% right? What about Parkinson's? What about cancer? What percent are not able to manage their own lives and need constant oversight (psychological, etc.) What percent are <10 years old? these are huge chunks of humanity.
The problem with that argument is that in places that are setup for it, it clearly works because people do it. So we have to ask whether there is something unusual about the people in those places, or the infrastructure. It apparently isn't something wrong with being young or old, within obvious limits.
I have always, and will always own a Pickup truck. do i need that truck function every day no, not at all
but as an example recently my Air Conditioning went out, the part to replace it was on back order so I was going to be with out AC in VERY hot weather for about a week..
Well I got in my truck, drove down to the local hardware store, bought a couple of portable AC Units and huled them back. I did this on a weekend where no truck rentals were an option, and I did not have to wait for deliver etc.
Over the years there have been TONS to situations where having a truck at my ready disposal to use has really saved me lots of anguish, and inconvenience.
So in short, could I survive with just an ebike, or something sure. However I have no desire to live that style of life, and would find that to be MUCH MUCH less enjoyable, and to be of lower quality of life then if I just continue to drive my Truck instead.
> I think the young, healthy people who live in moderate climates with good weather, short commutes, and little need to haul anything
The old dutch people riding their bakfietsen around in the snow show this is much more a cultural thing than a hard fact of weather and human nature - and culture can change as the need arises.
At everyone who can't imagine how life without a car could be possible: Watch this video! (The video linked in my parent post.) It really captures how different transportation and everyday life can be.
As a whole, reading this biking thread is an amazing example in failure to understand how a lot of small lifestyle decision lock you in a particular mode of living. I know that much of northern America is not really bike friendly. But, damn, looking at it from a German urban perspective, it does not seem like you were even trying. (And I can't blame you for that because you were missing the role models to follow.)
Half of my friends don't own a car, many of them have children. They started out by not ever having a car in the first place. We chose the cities we live in, the jobs we work for, the daycare facilities we commute our children to, all with the implicit assumption that owning a car is not desirable.
A second factor that is really underappreciated is habit. After about one and a half years of commuting to work by e-bike in various tolerable weather situations, I encountered the first really harsh road conditions. Not just snowy, but icy ground everywhere (which was definitely not fun for cars either). But because I was so used to dealing with bike challenges by then, overcoming yet another (though harder) bike challenge was so much more comfortable to me than working out the alternatives. Same with the day I was somewhat sick and there was intense, icy rain. (Nowadays I would have the decency to stay home when being sick, even though they "need" me at work).
So basically the answer to "How could biking ever work?" is "We make it work" – like with everything in life. And in the right environments, the upsides are enormous.
You are giving culture an awful lot of credit while completely omitting geography. Culture is locally adapted, and countries that are flat as literal pancakes are particularly logical places for a bike friendly culture to develop.
Parent didn't mention geography. I was mostly replying to the comment about weather, age, and cargo capacity. Obviously the difference between the Netherlands and some other flat cold place is culture, though you are right hills can impact things. One thing we can do to reduce the issue with hills is set better (higher) power limits for ebikes. The current limit in the USA of 750 watts is way too low for cargo bikes. Even for my normal ebike which I run at 1400 watts, I find it feels safer as I can keep up with the flow of traffic on city streets (though I have a lot of lighting, safety gear, and experience and I would support licensing restrictions for higher powers). The power restrictions are even worse in the UK at maximum 250 watts, which is terribly low.
I disagree, I think they’re completely adequate for the majority of people. Between that and a backbone of busses and subways and trains, cars in the city basically don’t need to exist. They act as a crutch for shitty city planning, since you don’t have to (and sometime can’t) build communities where what you need is close to where you live.
The dutch created the cargo bike for this very reason. But they have the climate and biking infrastructure to support that kind of lifestyle. We (Americans) don't, I wish we did.
The climate isn't a big deal, finland has the climate for biking too, it's mostly about having the infrastructure and maintaining it.
If cold was a problem, cars wouldn't work either because they'd be unable to handle snow. However, we maintain our car infrastructure and plow the roads
Cars have heaters. Bikes don’t. Transporting a baby in freezing rain on a bike is a non-starter. I’m sure it could be done, but why? Cars represent progress. Bikes as a primary form of transportation is a regression.
A car is progress for the car's driver, but it is a regression for everybody else: cars are loud, dangerous and they take insane amounts of space. In sparsely populated regions, sure, that is not a big deal compared to the upsides, but in dense cities, cars are basically a public nuisance.
> Transporting a baby in freezing rain on a bike is a non-starter.
My reaction is the opposite. You’d stick a baby in a car to go a distance you could travel by bike?
If you’re going to the next town over, by all mean, go with the car. But I wouldn’t drive to the store with the car when the bike would do (or I’m particularly lazy that day)
Of course I would. My trip would be 2 minutes each way instead of 20, I wouldn’t be considered about weather, and I’m far less limited in what I can purchase on this trip.
Now sure if I want to spend a nice leisurely Saturday afternoon riding a back then maybe I’d take a bike but that would make my intent the bike ride rather than shopping.
Until everybody insists like you on driving. Because of the increased traffic, it now takes longer. Not to mention trying to find parking. And with the extra traffic, it's dangerous to bike now. Oh well.
It depends on the density. If it is a desirable place to live, that will definitely happen. If it isn't, you can still drive and more people won't necessarily join you in driving. The secret is to just live in a so-so place.
Since we're talking about e-bikes, more and more of them can maintain 20 mph with or without pedal assist and some can get up to 27 mph with pedal assist. But either way, you'd have to be a snail-pace rider for a 2-minute car ride to take you 20 on a bike, unless you are like 1 block from a freeway that doesn't get backed up routinely and has an exit near your destination.
Nothing wrong with snail paced riding of course. But going fast is pretty damn fun in a city with decent infrastructure that makes it reasonably safe. I routinely keep pace or beat traffic on shorter trips on my road bike. It's not really that hard to maintain 18mph if you do a lot of riding and have a moderately well-maintained bike (mine isn't even nice lol, it was like $400 used and is almost 50 years old, with a few choice part upgrades). And a lot of city traffic is stuck at that speed or lower during congestion hours in many areas. Granted, I'm closer to 12 mph on the trip home if I'm hauling several days worth of groceries.
For reference, my commute within SF used to take me 45 minutes due to traffic by car. On my bike it was 50. Include finding parking and it was a wash. By bus+wall it took about the same. I didn't drive. If the bus was faster (because it didn't get stuck on traffic), I would have used it exclusively.
Consumerism sounds like progress to me. It’s the reason I don’t wake up and farm my land or sew my own clothes. Sure, there is a lot of shit products nowadays but that seems caused by corporate profit seeking and globalism.
The metaphor doesn't work all well for tailpipe emissions, but the reality that cars externalise their impact is obviously true for things like congestion, the cost of road maintenance & so on.
> A bike lane is a street you don’t let cars drive on.
This is the reason why motorists lose their minds over bike lanes. It takes up space on THEIR roads and they hate when they can't use roads they personally paid for with THEIR taxes.
I personally find it hilarious they think their taxes cover the maintenance of even 1/10th of a km of a road let alone all of them they drive on all year.
Most motorists I know love bike lines because it means they won't have to deal with bikes behaving badly in the street. If the amount of space the bike lane takes up really does narrow the road enough to be a problem that road should be expanded, redesigned, or moved so that there's plenty of room for both. We do pay taxes so that we can have nice infrastructure and that makes us entitled to it. We should be upset when it's substandard. Cities just need to do their jobs and put our tax money to work for us.
I love My car. Glad I don’t have to wait in the boiling hot weather for a streetcar going to wherever the streetcar goes. Especially these days when many US cities are cesspools of crime, addiction, and homelessness.
> Especially these days when many US cities are cesspools of crime, addiction, and homelessness.
So are many rural areas, but since you don't have to get out of your car, you don't see it. Also, cities with mild climates (not boiling hot) where people are biking, walking, and taking public transit, are going to necessarily have larger homelessness problems than cities with crappy weather (I'll leave it to the reader to reason about why).
I love my car, to the point of it being a little weird, but driving it in stop and go traffic, for hours on end, every single day sucks. Or endless highways, like on the drive from Boston to San Francisco. I bet a couple of readers have a route immediately in their minds when I said that. Glad I don't have to do that and can ride a train/bus/subway/trolly/scooter/ebike/bike/onewheel, especially when many US highways are a cesspool of highways and mcmansions.
My family has a single car (paid for 2016 4Runner). When school is in my wife drives it to work since she’s a school teacher and I’m a wfh engineer. When she has the car I’m on foot or bike with plenty of coffee shops and lunch spots within walking distance. It’s ok until it’s not. Hot, cold, or wet weather screws up everything.
I love my car too, for all the same reasons. Plus, I can get 4 people and luggage very far pretty cheap. Two tanks of gas can put me in the desert, mountains, or beach from where I live. I enjoy a walkable neighborhood but I won’t be giving up a vehicle in my lifetime for sure.
Most Americans buy insanely large SUVs or pickup trucks as their family car though, for that 1 time a year they need to tow something or possibly carry something big.
I'd rather not spend all my money on a rapidly depreciating asset that harms the environment around me, is hard to park, and runs the risk of running over children because I can't see them over the hood... but what do I know. Apparently supporting car alternatives is being "opposed to progress" in this country.
> Most Americans buy insanely large SUVs or pickup trucks as their family car though, for that 1 time a year they need to tow something or possibly carry something big.
Myth that SUVs have big baggage space is a just that, a myth. Most of them have essentially less space than normal cars with similar usage pattern. Station wagons, vans and many other are better in this regards and also are safer for users and pedestrians alike.
We are talking about crossovers here, which are all almost universally modeled after the Outback, the only station wagon brand that is still actually producing cars.
Slightly raised car like vehicles with a full fold down back row, I can and have moved regular sheet ply in one.
That's regional. The most popular SUVs are slightly raised sub-compacts (cross overs), where I live most people still have sedans (mostly sub-compact or compact).
You can get really popular as the one guy/girl with a pickup who people can call on to help them move that one time a year. I know someone who met his wife that way.
When I haul lumber—small homeowner amounts, not construction crew amounts—I always use my bike because with my bike trailer I can haul lumber of any length, while it's not safe to use my car for anything longer than 8 feet.
Believe it or not I've seen it done with a burly e-bike and custom made bike trailer. I've even seen someone hauling a 12" tall potted tree on a trailer, and that was back before e-bikes were a thing.
Not that I'm arguing it's super practical, but it's kind of neat that there are open possibilities for those who are determined and creative.
> Why do people insist on lowering the standard of living?
As someone who lives in a dense city, other people's cars are lowering MY standard of living. Can't cross in the middle of the street. Can't enjoy that nice terrace to the fullest because of the traffic noise. Can't have room to bike safely because of the long line of metal boxes littering the curb and which are apparently more important than I am. These drivers don't even pay fully for the damn space, I'm subsidizing them with my taxes.
You have to look beyond your own comfort a little bit and realize there are externalities to it. Cars require a ton of space that could be used for nice things like trees, terraces, bike lanes, gardens or extra housing. They cause a lot of noise pollution and they just make it a lot less pleasant for those of us who actually want to walk or bike.
Ok then pay the proper cost for it and don't expect the cost to be externalised to society. That's the funny thing about the arguments of why should I care about everyone else (because that is what your argument boils down to, screw future generations, screw people concerned about car deaths, screw people who want liveable cities...), you still want everyone else to pick up the cost.
Your car gives you a private benefit at a public cost. That's the problem.
Car infrastructure is ruinously expensive and the effects of driving harm everyone, either from the pollution generated in the long-term or in the short-term when statistically you are 100-300x more likely to kill someone than if you were on a bicycle.
Point of order, all infrastructure in the United States is ruinously expensive. There are zero forms of transport infrastructure other than private shuttles that maintain fare box equilibrium
Maybe. It seems to me that the development of cars has coincided with radical improvement of human wellbeing on every conceivable measure. Yes, you would pollute less if you rode a bike. And even less if you walked. And even less if you never left the house. But having a car opens up a world of possibilities and luxuries that a hundred years ago were simply unimaginable. Most reasonable people would agree that those extraordinary benefits merit some trade-offs.
> having a car opens up a world of possibilities and luxuries that a hundred years ago were simply unimaginable.
[citation needed]
Many wonderful cities and regions around the world are perfectly enjoyable with no need for cars. Or are you telling me that people living in central Paris, or London, or New York, or Valencia are suffering a substandard life because they use public transit and walk or bike to their destinations instead?
Even regional travel can be easily done without a car - I recently traveled from Edinburgh, to Glasgow, all the way up to Fort William, then back from Skye all the way back to Edinburgh with no car. At no point did I wish I had one. Why is this so hard for us in the US to accomplish?
Having just returned from both London and Paris -- yes, having the ability to tow my motorboat to the reservoir is awesome! And having the ability to just drive out of the city whenever I want is awesome! And having the ability to get to work in a/c without dressing for the weather is awesome. Traveling around without being in close proximity to sick people is awesome! Having cars, and the infrastructure to support them, is decidedly better in my assessment than relying on an e-bike, mass transit, and rental services. I think most people would agree with me.
Like a decent number of Londoners I own a car. I love my car and I love driving. But I use my car once, maybe twice a month, almost always to leave the city.
I lend it to friends when they need a car too. Many people who don’t own a car use rentals and car clubs for the same things.
So I agree, it’s great to have a car to get out to a lake, beach, or mountain or to transport stuff and people to the countryside, go camping, pick up heavy things, etc.
But that’s a tiny fraction of journeys. My contribution to traffic and pollution is minimal.
I walk or cycle 90% of my journeys within the city and use public transport for almost all of the rest. I regularly take trains to other cities and towns rather than drive.
Do I want a world no cars at all?
Of course not!
Do I want infrastructure, policies, and costs/taxation on car use to reduce the amount of totally unnecessary, selfish car use that makes the city noisier, more dangerous, more polluted, and less pleasant for everyone except the driver, even when there’s a perfectly good walking/cycling/transit alternative for that journey?
Your argument does not scale. There can never be enough car infrastructure, the more you have the longer you have to drive to get outside the city. Luxury is very much about perception, it is not obviously true that having your own steel cage with a/c is better.
For me living near other people and the rich human culture that comes from that is luxury. If you need a car for that you might just have made other choices in life, they are still choices.
> And having the ability to just drive out of the city whenever I want is awesome!
This is what does it for me. And a rental just doesnt cut it. My family and I enjoy road trips, even just weekend getaways, and owning a vehicle makes that possible. Also, just regular things like getting kids to rowing practice after school makes all alternatives impractical. There’s no way to get them there on time with public transit and it’s def. too far for an e-bike to get there on time.
The period of one's life during which one needs to drive the kids to rowing practice passes by fairly rapidly, in the course of the entire life. Structuring our entire society around the use cases of the very few isn't a good idea. Indeed, it would be highly beneficial to busy parents of busy kids if everyone else would get the hell off the road. Most of the people on the road have little reason to be there, other than that we've made it the default choice and outlawed everything else. If people could easily walk to the grocery store, or bicycle to the dentist, or ride a bus to their office, your trip to the boathouse would be ever so much easier.
Why not long train ride in the countryside? Or a train tour through the mountain peak. If we're talking luxuries, it's possible to make trains luxurious. They have sleeper trains for example.
A lot of thing are possible or the equivalent in a train oriented society.
Because the American dream includes a spacious single family home with land. That plus a growing population and rising housing costs means plummeting density that is infeasible to cover with public transportation. You can try to fight the river here but but this aspect of our culture is so deeply ingrained that it practically defines the American experience. Any "solution" that necessitates taking this away is never going to happen. Despite what the special relationship might imply the US and Europe are culturally very different once you leave "urban cores." We are a country of homesteaders. Living in an apartment is the "thing young people do until they can afford their own house" rather than a kind of permanent residence.
I personally don't see this as a good or bad thing, just a cultural difference that necessitates a different approach like electric cars over public transportation.
> Any "solution" that necessitates taking this away is never going to happen.
The solution is 'if you want it, pay for it'. It should be immensely more expensive to drive long distances to do everything and even though it isn't, it surely isn't getting any cheaper. If you can afford it and don't care about the effects, then do it, but it I don't think most people realistically can much longer.
I think the issue with this kind of argument is that we are paying for it right now. That money doesn't come from nowhere, the roads are paid for by the property and gas taxes of those burbs. There's no substance to this plan other than "disincentivize a lifestyle I don't approve of by imposing artificial costs." Such a plan will go nowhere because most people want this lifestyle. Compared to living in a house becoming an apartment dweller is seen as a massive step down in quality of life (and I think they're right, having land, space, no shared walls or landlord is awesome I'm saving for a house and super jealous of my friends who already own). Even my friends who live in the city are planning to move out and settle down eventually. Tanking property values is also a fast track to another recession. No one will vote for your plan. This is what I mean by it being part of our culture. Anything that takes away like the goal for most Americans will be dead on arrival.
> That money doesn't come from nowhere, the roads are paid for by the property and gas taxes of those burbs.
Two points: many roads get federal and state funding from the general tax fund meaning we all pay for them whether we drive or not, and the suburbs are going bankrupt because car infrastructure is so expensive. https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI
As for your other complaints, why is living in an apartment you own in a city with shared public spaces rather than owning private land such a downgrade?
For context I grew up in a single family home in a burb but now live in a city.
* No green space, having a shared public park is very different than being surrounded by mature trees, gardens, (and woods depending on where you are).
* $/sq ft is uneconomical to actually do anything in an apartment except live there. Maker spaces are overpriced and a huge pain in the ass to actually use.
* It's not my land so I can't do what I want with it like pant vegetables, install a hot tub, add a fire pit and grill.
* I can make loud noise at all hours of the night. Sure I'll be a good neighbor and not blast the sound system into my yard at 2am but I can watch movies, play video games, or play loud music (or honestly, have sex) whenever I want.
* Ventilation is a million times better which is needed if you like to cook and have a gas range.
* Having the space for a large fridge and chest freezer lets me buy much nicer food because I have a place to store it.
* Being able to have real real gym equipment lowers the barrier to making a habit of exercising. Dragging myself to the gym after work is such a hassle.
* Having extra bedrooms means we can host family who are too old to crash on a couch or take friends in who are between apartments or struggling financially.
* The schools are just nicer, not just from an education perspective but having acres of land for sports, recess, and playground equipment is totally different.
* A lifestyle where you have a car makes you a lot more mobile for weekend trips. I can pack the car and in two hours be on a lake.
I don't care about greenspaces and I think you are giving way too much credit to lawns in suburbs. It is not usually a 'green space' any more than a city park is.
I live in a very tiny apartment and I can do almost all of the things you are claiming you want to. I don't want to dox myself, but for much cheaper than a home in the burbs I have pretty much every amenity you described plus 24/7 security which handles visitors and deliveries, plus all the things found in a normal home (including a full gym) and more within one elevator ride. I can't do my laundry in my underwear but putting on sweatpants isn't difficult.
On top of that, everything I want to do or need to do is just a step outside or at most a few minutes on a transit line or a few tens of minutes on a bike ride.
All big box stores deliver and grocery stores too, and I think a tip + delivery fee is a tad cheaper than gas + insurance + maintainance.
Also, you might be surprised regarding schools in US cities...plenty of people go to public schools in cities and get great educations, plus they also experience diversity and when they get old enough they can walk themselves there.
But what's great is we can all choose. What's not so great is that my lifestyle is sustainable and most suburban lifestyles aren't.
The issue is that once you want to do one thing that isn't feasible in an apartment (I'm a metalworker) it's game over. All my stuff is set up at one of my friend's garages. That same friend's whole backyard is entirely vegetables and their front is fruit trees. Everyone has that one thing. My sister in law raises chickens and goats, my boss who lives on the edge of a public wood hunts and processes the meat. My dad collects rare books and my childhood basement is set up control humidity and temperature.
> plus they also experience diversity and when they get old enough they can walk themselves there
I was in the minority as a white girl in my suburban elementary school and I walked there starting in 4th grade. I biked then drove myself in high school. All the best schools in my state are in the rich burbs and so if/when I want to have kids I'll be looking to buy my way into that.
I think people have weird ideas about suburban life being just lifeless cookie-cutter rows of identical houses but I loved the diverse community of really cool and interesting families I grew up with.
Those things are not what I am talking about -- they seem more akin to rural than 'suburban'. To get on the same page, this is what I am specifically talking about:
I accept that we should remove the subsidies to cars (but somehow the same people think it’s fine to subsidise public transport?). Car owners should pay for pollution and parking. Then we can let the market sort it out.
The same people who complain about subsidies to public transport don't bat an eye at hundreds of millions spent on extra highway lanes. The typical argument there is "the economic benefit of mobility pays for it!" Yet that same case doesn't apply to public transit, somehow, where the costs are lower and the number of people moved is higher.
(and good luck on the parking, considering my neighbors are up in arms over a proposal to increase yearly parking sticker fees from $40ish to $70ish and the true cost of a parking space is more like $500...)
It never ceases to amaze me how these concerns about the climate can be so casually dismissed when other people half-way across the world are literally waiting for their homes to disappear forever.
Whole countries, usually poor, that contributed peanuts to our greenhouse gas emissions, some of which (Nauru) have been transformed into a hellscape by foreign mining operations, will disappear underwater in the coming decades.
Others, already economically fragile, will see most of their infrastructure and economic investment underwater in the next decades.
And given the inertia of these phenomenon, nothing can be done anymore. Stopping all carbon and methane emissions wouldn’t change a thing.
I totally get that we don’t have to agree with your so-called "climate alarmists" solutions and methods. But I cannot understand how one can dismiss the issue itself so casually.
Even those suffering the largest consequences of carbon emissions are desperate to realize the profound benefits that accrue to an energy intensive lifestyle. Even when measured one directly against the other, the trade-offs are usually worth it.
1) We don’t have to agree with their proposed solutions of technological and quality of life regressions. I am all for sustainable technological solutions that could help us preserve the best environment for us while keeping or even improving our living standards.
Here’s the relevant quote for you:
> "I totally get that we don’t have to agree with your so-called "climate alarmists" solutions and methods."
2) The problems posed by climate change are nonetheless real. They are dramatically affecting some people’s every day lives today. They will be totally and irrevocably ruining entire countries' tomorrow. There is nothing that can be done about it anymore. So anyone calling anyone else a "climate alarmist" can only be explained by either ignorance, lack of awareness, or a difficult to describe self-absorbed absence of care and consideration for others.
> "But I cannot understand how one can dismiss the issue itself so casually."
Regarding your so-called argument. People smoke. All over the world. People eat crap. All over the world. People drink excessively and too often. All over the world. People even pay bribes and elect corrupt officials. All over the world.
While I do consider that people are free to do whatever they want, to both their themselves, their bodies, and our world, whatever people really isn’t necessarily right or beneficial. Simply because a behavior is prevalent doesn't make it ethical, healthy, or in the best interest of the individuals themselves or society in general.
I supposed there is somehow a profound benefit of being stuck in traffic, of dealing with the daily stress of driving and the countless potential near miss. It's a wonder that motor accidents are as low as it is in our society.
Meanwhile, I can get on the train and largely vegetate, or do work, despite all the flaws and travesty that is typical in a North America metro system.
We are the richest society on Earth. We can move heaven and earth in making the best mass transit transportation system in the world.
Yes, everyone wants to be rich. It isn't sustainable without some kind of cheap and infinite on-demand clean energy source. Until we get that we need to cut back on doing some things. Can you help or are you too entitled and selfish?
In Park City, Utah you can get from any place to any other place on a bike path without crossing a road with cars. It is one of the snowiest places in North America. The residents are also the wealthiest people in America. They use E-bikes year round. Fat tires in the winter.
E-bikes and indeed bikes in general are mobility devices. About half the U.S. population is unable to drive a car for some reason: age too old or young, disability, licensure, or economic. The majority of disabled people who cannot operate a car can operate a bicycle instead. Bicycling is much more inclusive than driving.
Not parent poster but I can imagine for one thing that electric cycling is an excellent way for frail people to keep their strenght while still having a practical way to go about their business.
For people who have had accidents it’s proably also a good physical therapy tool.
My father is 83 and struggles to walk more an a mile these days due to a leg injury and the need for knee replacements.
But on his electric three wheeled bicycle, he covers a few miles each day. No matter the weather he heads out in the morning and buys a paper, milk and bread. Mid day he'll do a supermarket run for my mother, and in the afternoon they will take a 'walk' together down to the sea, where she will walk and he will cycle slowly along side her.
In the rain he wears a raincoat. At the back of the trike he has a huge basket that can carry their whole weekly shop, and in the front he has one that he throws his bag in.
I'll admit we are lucky to live in a town that is walkable and the distances he covers are mot vast on even UK averages, but electric bikes and tricycles are suitable for all sorts of people and covering all sorts of uses. The trike could not replace their car entirely, but it means they can go weeks without using it.
People’s transportation needs have been built around the existence of the car. The actual needs — commuting, running errands, visiting friends — can be accomplished just as easily on an e bike, if only we built cities without cars in mind.
This is a silly oft-repeated notion. The city of Portland had maintained bikes alongside cars for decades and was the most bike friendly city in the country - still primarily built for cars because of the snow we get up here. That only ended when we expanded buses and trains alongside getting rid of our cities traffic division.
I almost convinced myself you were talking about Portland, Maine because what you're saying doesn't fit at all with my experience here. We get one stretch of 3 days of snow per year on average, usually 2" or less when it comes at all. Many, many years there is nothing that sticks. Rarely do we get a week or more. IDK about the city's traffic division, but Trimet expansion has not exactly been off the charts compared to how it's been the previous 3 decades. Also, most people don't know this but Trimet is funded by Metro, not the city government (Metro is an small regional government that spans parts of several -edit 23 - cities and three counties, including Portland and nearby suburbs).
Also, there is an absurd notion that you can't bike in the snow... you absolutely can. You wouldn't want to be doing much more than 5 miles unless you are in great shape, I'll grant you that, because it's much harder going. But extremely doable, you just need some basic snow-appropriate tires and gear just like you would want for your vehicle. Anyway, over half the city shuts down when we get bad snow but Trimet keeps running. Can always throw your bike on a bus (or skip the bus entirely) if the snow days happen to fall midweek, and your work needs you in. If Trimet actually shuts down that means like 90% of the city or more is also shut down, and that happens maybe once a decade.
The city has never been bike friendly like Europe, with a significant percentage of routes fully physically separated from cars (eg concrete barriers). But the city is as bike friendly today as it has ever been. Potholes notwithstanding. At least that's how it seems to me, and I do get around. It's easier than ever to chart a route that avoids major arterials but has decent roads that aren't full of constant stop signs and bad infrastructure for riding quick and easy.
The proliferation of greenways in the past 5-10 years has been great, and in more recent years they've created some one-ways, concrete barriers, and other impediments for drivers who try to beat traffic by blowing through the intended bike routes. I get it, traffic is terrible and getting worse all the time, but the city certainly is making an effort to make things safer for bikers and peds despite the awful commute situation and seemingly ever-shortening tempers.
I'd argue the speed limit reduction to 20mph in residential areas and liberal use of speed bumps and other measures on the few remaining 25mph residential streets has done wonders for bike-friendliness that probably doesn't get as much attention as it should. They are even slowly changing stop-sign positioning on residential streets to better inhibit cars trying to cut through going parallel to major arterials and facilitate better bike-routes where you can keep the right of way for most of the route between major intersections.
Sure, traffic keeps getting worse and drivers keep getting more impatient and careless. But the city keeps investing in reasonably bike-friendly infrastructure, despite the vocal minority who always complain about it. There are more safe-ish bike routes than ever. If only more drivers would look carefully both ways while doing their rolling stop at the stop sign to get across the greenway I'm riding down with the right of way...
If we lost our "bike friendliest city" title I imagine that just means somewhere else is doing way better, not that we are doing particularly worse. Don't get me wrong, we could and should do MUCH better. I just don't expect much from city hall these days. We've never really recovered from the popularity and and growth that came in the early-mid 2000's.
> People’s transportation needs have been built around the existence of the car.
That's kind of like saying that the needs of the people who traversed the Oregon Trail were built around wagons. The wagon didn't come first. First came the need to transport goods.
Growing up in Detroit (a city built for 2M people with only 0.62M today, and with a natural affection for cars), I used to think cars were obviously right and only contrarian hippies, crust punks, and ultramarathoners would assert bikes are viable mass transit.
But then I went on vacation to Copenhagen and found I could safely get anywhere in the city in under 30 minutes on a bike. And I was constantly getting passed by people of all ages including many 80+ year olds. People were so fit! It was shockingly liberating to get around this way! I assumed it was a fluke, but no, Amsterdam, Oslo, and Rotterdam were all equally great to bike in.
You should experience it. You won't be able to see how superior that transit mode is until you experience it.
> You should experience it. You won't be able to see how superior that transit mode is until you experience it.
I definitely believe you, but I live in Texas. It was 103 degrees Fahrenheit today. Riding a bike to work in Texas in the summertime is decidedly not superior than driving to work in an air conditioned car, I can assure you.
It isn’t just inferior here, it is legitimately dangerous to human life. We regularly get black flag weather here in the southern U.S., where the wet bulb temp is so high that the human body can no longer shed heat via perspiration.
I love being outdoors, but I am very careful in conditions like we’ve had recently with 100+ temperatures and high humidity. Even fit persons can get heat stroke very easily. The UV index has also been incredibly high lately, I have to soak sunscreen on or I burn and my skin type is normally easily tans rarely burns.
It was about that here too. I biked to work. The thing is, it was 103 at 8am, when I biked to work. I definitely got sweaty on the way home, but that's pretty much fine.
Greater Sacramento region. I don't know how to check the wet bulb temperature at the moment. Humidity is relatively low here. It would be different in Florida or something.
I've spent a decent amount of time in Singapore, where forget biking - if you're quick you can rock most of the way across the city state on foot.
It's really cool, but Singapore isn't exactly a model for the world.
Similarly - you should consider that Copenhagens all bike infrastructure both supports and is supported by the society around it, and a lot more would have to change than just the surface level things that you find good to make it happen.
Yeah, I figure it would take at least 10-15 years to significantly increase the number of daily bike trips in a city (like in NYC, where there were ~170k daily bike trips in 2005 up to ~510k in 2018 [0]).
The most magical part of Copenhagen was that its bike infrastructure was so incredibly attainable. Over ~30 years, they built ~350km of curbed off bike paths, ~25km of on-street bike paths, and put out consistent bike traffic light signals [1]. None of the things were hard, and roads have to get redone every 10-20 years anyway, so it's super easy to start updating a city. And it doesn't just make the city more pleasant to live it, it also saves many lives and adds years to biker's lives.
> Similarly - you should consider that Copenhagens all bike infrastructure both supports and is supported by the society around it, and a lot more would have to change than just the surface level things that you find good to make it happen.
So let's start doing that and maybe our kids will have awesome cities.
Those changes are not ones that would be politically popular in the same groups that are demanding urbanism.
You need transit to be safe and clean so you get ridership from people who are middle class and up, and urban living to be a safe, clean, desirable experience.
This is very challenging, because the combination of increased policing and social programs needed to get there would not be plausible under either Democrat or Republican administrations.
The transitions in the Dutch cities that were triggered in the 60s (safer biking routes mostly through grade separation and traffic calming retrofits) really began to bear fruit in the 1980s.
I’ve been visiting Copenhagen long enough to see the same transition over a couple of decades there too.
Start now, and even in US urban areas you’ll see the payoff in the next couple of decades, which is an absurdly short timeframe for urban planning outcomes.
But even if they just solve the problem for the average person, that still makes the roads that much better for your edge cases that do need to rely on cars.
For what it’s worth, it’s not that uncommon for European city centres to be pedestrianised. So it’s not like your options are driverless cars or nothing.
Not only that, but clearly they don't live in outback, rural areas. They live in high cost of living cities. Old estimates claim that 55% of the worlds occupants live in urban areas, while 45% live in rural areas. The proposed solution leaves nearly half the population of the world shit out of luck.
None of this is a real requirement.
Elderly disabled people can use bikes as well.
Same goes for people in very cold climates.
Clothing helps against bad weather.
Long commutes are possible, too (maybe using a Velomobile).
And with cargo bikes (can also be shared) you can haul a lot.
Go ahead and downvote me all to hell, but the comments in this thread from bike enthusiasts sound like Trump apologists - they are alike in their adamant refusal to acknowledge reality. Do you think any amount or quality of bike infrastructure is going to make most people willing to bike in harsh winter climates? And no, Copenhagen nor Amsterdam have harsh winter climates. Look, I too think it’s crazy that we’ve built our society around cars, but saying that everyone should ride e bikes year round is such an ageist, ableist load of horse shit that I don’t know why I’m even surprised to see it on HN.
Yes. Just look at Oulu, which is much snowier/colder than most cities in the states.
But also remember that the objective isn't to have all or even necessarily a majority of trips by bike. Not even Amsterdam has most trips by bike IIRC.
Widespread bike adoption, especially in the US, is idealistic, but it’s still more realistic than self driving cars being able to solve our transportation woes anytime soon
They're also ignoring that they smell terrible when arriving to the office. Nothing like showing up to work all sweaty and stinking all day because you're a "cyclist", somehow their coworkers are meant to tolerate this abhorrent behavior.
Downvote all you want; it violates the unwritten social contract you accept when working in a shared office with fellow humans. Furthermore, the spandex looks silly and is worthy of ridicule.
As another commenter mentioned, you don’t have to bike (or walk) so fast you turn up drenched in sweat.
But even if you do, since cycling exploded in popularity over the last decade or so, many (most?) offices here in London now have showers, and those that don’t are getting upgraded fast (as tenants are generally not interested in offices without them).
Cities adapt to the needs of their citizens, it becomes a non-issue.
The point of autonomous electric vehicles isn't to revolutionize personal transportation. Everyone's not just sitting around trying to re-think how we can improve our lives as aggressively as possible.
As radical as it is removing a driver in terms of what it means for people's economic relationship to cars and for business operations it's still an incremental adjustment in human behaviour...for regular people. That's how technology gets adopted in the real world.
You don't need to think hard and long about why ebikes are still going to be limited to downtown-living urbanites and recreational casual riders [1]. Basically in an ideal world it will significantly expanding the existing niche biking population in American cities, taking existing riders further/long (ramping up average usage) and introducing tons of new riders to the streets. But still not enough to significantly take cars off roads in a macro-context, especially considering how many people live in suburbs or city neighbourhoods which are glorified suburbs.
[1] I'm just trying to imagine 95% of my family members even getting on an e-bike for recreation let alone as a serious alternative to using a car.
I hadn't even considered a bike in SF due to the rampant theft, despite not having a car and taking MUNI/BART daily. And SF is not alone in this. As a country we need to figure out how to bring out crime levels down.
The few times I do call an Uber (or Waymo/Cruise if available), I am likely intoxicated or needing to get somewhere ASAP. We are very far away from public transit always be faster and biking while intoxicated is very unsafe, especially when sharing the road with human (and AI) drivers.
Sure. But that should be proposed independently of AV, it’s not an argument against AV.
Personally this line of reasoning is something I see all the time in SF when the local NIMBYs want to hand wring about something - they’ll reject something saying we should do X instead when X is not even being proposed or discussed, and they certainly aren’t trying to make X happen either. It’s not really about X to them, it’s just a rhetorical tool to stop the thing they want to stop. I’m not saying you’re doing that but given it’s prevalence in SF and the recent media surge against AV in SF I think this phenomenon is starting to rear it’s ugly head.
I'm not very concerned with energy efficiency, at least when it comes to moving people around, honestly I think that's pretty fine.
I'm far more concerned about a more precious resource in a city: space.
Cars an atrocious, inefficient, deadly use of space. They simply do not scale to the densities needed for the amenities of a city. Sure, maybe 5% of the population can use them, but that 5% does it at a huge cost of space and safety for the remaining 95%, and greatly detract from what can be accomplished in a city otherwise.
Personal car transport is only realistic for low density, low amenity living with access to few people. Rather than cars being a gateway to freedom, their space greediness end up hemming in everyone by taking up far too much space, at least when you want a city with high culture and high access to lots of people and things.
E-bikes are a non-started due to theft problems. If you think coning of a robo-taxi is bad, have a few prowlers coming by every hour looking for a bike to poach, it is much worse for the e-bike crowd.
If you are going with taxis/ubers/personal transit anyways, I think autonomous makes a lot of sense. They basically allow you to optimize your road bandwidth if taken to an extreme level (which I'm sure more authoritarian countries with huge traffic problems will jump on). But you are right: the better answer is mass transit, for optimizing roadway bandwidth (and energy resources).
I for one look forward to a day where I can have my car drive us from Seattle to Yellowstone. I know I probably should have flown and rented a car onsite, it is really whimsical, but I want to try that at least once.
Unless we're ever ready to start treating bike thieves like horse thieves, that's unlikely to ever change. And I doubt we'll ever have the political will to do that, or even a kinder gentler version of it.
Ya, but that just means I'm more likely to have an EV car than E-bike. The former is must less likely to get stolen, and the latter can still be very expensive (although not as expensive as the EV car).
You’re comparing the merits of apples to oranges and not thinking about whether the soil or terrain is suitable for an apple tree or an orange tree.
We should have public transit improvements across the board, and we should have ebikes/more bikelanes and more mixed used land.
The reality is that there is too much red tape/bureaucracy, too much nimbyism, and not enough political firepower to build out that infrastructure.
The majority of the US is car dependent, and we are stuck in that local optima. Self driving cars will ease the burden by making it realistic to not own a car (you just rideshare for cheap). Less car owners means there will be more demand for better public transportation infrastructure.
It doesn’t actually take that much energy to move a 4000 lb vehicle. 15,000 miles per year * 1 kWh / 4 miles ~= 10.3 kWh per day ~= 430 watts 24/7. Few loads are 24/7 but a single crypto mining PC can easily use several times that.
Seems like we need all the transportation improvements we can get and that a single mode of transportation would not suffice.
Blind, old, drunk people, people with kids and or lots of groceries, people traveling long distances, and actual kids cannot simply take an e bike (I have two and love them btw).
People going on ski trips or with significant luggage cannot hop on an e bike.
So I for one welcome the reduction in pollution, cost and human error an electric autonomous car can provide.
I also think that vehicles could be much smaller, but still electric and autonomous vehicles which would agree partially with what you seem to think would be best.
A autonomous electric capsule that is weather protected traveling in its own protected lane programmed to go anywhere in a city seems ideal. These would likely be more efficient than buses and more precise in destination.
I’m astonished nowhere has done this, at least to my knowledge
A bicycle does all the things an electric capsule could do and much more. You can add weather protection to a bicycle if you need. You can add electrification. No need to reinvent the wheel.
It would also be more efficient if everyone lived in boarding houses and huddled together for warmth in the winter instead of using a heater. Fortunately we were born into a wealthy society with technology that lets us produce all the energy we need so we can optimize for things like comfort, convenience and quality of life instead of focusing purely on efficiency.
The few local accounts that I gathered point to older people using e-bikes (or even so-called fast bikes) and going too fast compared to their situational awareness.
It's the same problem as with elderly drivers, just more pronounced because bicycles give little to no protection.
We'll never get self-driving, at-grade public buses unless and until the technology is commoditized through private investment in self-driving cars.
Here in SF the Geary BRT line has yet to break ground on fully dedicated lanes despite the original timeline showing (IIRC) 2011 as the completion date. After the debacle with the Van Ness BRT, which only opened last year, it seems most politicians and city officials assume Geary BRT is dead. From a technology perspective, and after untold millions, the best the city has been able to accomplish on major bus lines is specialized signaling at a few intersections, saving a couple of minutes on a typically 45+ minute run--a run that takes 20-25 minutes max in a car.
For the past 3 years, since COVID-19, I've been leasing a parking spot downtown in the Financial District and driving to work every day. But I received my Cruise invite last month. I cancelled my parking rental as of July 1 in favor of taking the bus downtown, and either the bus or Cruise home. (I often work late.) Even if a Cruise ride was $20 and I took it every night, I'd still come out even with the price of the parking spot, but currently Cruise is free so I come out way ahead.
The Cruise ride is slow as molasses--about 30-35 minutes, which is the fastest any 38 Geary bus (i.e. 38AX--still suspended--or a very early morning 38R or 38) can do on my route, bus stop to bus stop (i.e. not including walking to the stop or waiting), in even the most optimal conditions. But Cruise is clean and I don't have to worry about standing out on Market St at midnight to catch the 38 Geary, or squeezing onto a packed 1 California--the much slower but "safe" bus. Also, interestingly, at least judging by the few Ubers I took in 2022 and my few Cruise rides so far, Cruise has similar or better availability from the downtown Financial District after midnight. (Years ago I often frequently caught a traditional cab at the taxi stand in front of the BofA building, as until about 2AM I could reliably walk up and jump into a waiting cab. But by 2020 Uber had killed that taxi stand, and presumably all others. So ironically it takes longer to catch a late-night, middle-of-the-week cab in the FiDi now than it did 10 years ago.)
Anyhow, my point is that self-driving cars seem like the only realistic path to better transit in San Francisco, if not the entire United States. San Francisco (and most American cities) is demonstrably incapable of adequately improving public transit by building fixed infrastructure. The way forward is almost certainly through automation; SFMTA labor costs already exceed capital expenditures, and the gap is growing. Despite self-driving cars being the worst option imaginable when judged in isolation, they're the key toward realizing the best option--better intracity mass transit.
> But electric cars and autonomous electric/gas cars are probably not the right solution to our person transport needs. using energy to move a 4000 lb vehicle to transport one or two 200 lb humans is not energy-efficient... most of the energy is spent just moving the vehicle.
Silly early morning thought: if the local government has failed to provide adequate public transportation (buses, trams etc.), what's preventing the private sector from stepping up?
I mean, even in the form of vans that would seat around 10 people or so, or smaller buses that don't have many infrastructure requirements like trams would.
If all of these modern ride companies are so good at aggregating data about trips and have modern apps, then surely they'd be able to come up with profitable routes and get people where they need to go. Of course, buying their own fleet of vehicles would be challenging, but what's the actual dealbreaker here?
> what's preventing the private sector from stepping up?
Government has been providing adequate infrastructure for private interests to sell cars in instead of providing adequate public transportation.
Roads, parking spots, traffic signs and lights, and all the administration and policing and legal apparatus required to make motorized individual transport a reality do not just magically exist.
Personally, I believe our transport needs present many problems, with many factors, requiring many solutions. I wouldn't expect any one thing to be "the right solution." Autonomous vehicles offer productivity gains, safety gains, and even energy efficiency gains. If that's all they do, personally I regard that as progress.
I’m just imagining going out on an ebike in the local weather here… lol. Maybe e-bikes are a good solution in SF where the weather is great year round but not in most places in the world.
E-bikes outsell EVs and with a CAGR of 10% they will soon have a majority share of the bicycle market. This is not weather-dependent. The e-bike share of the bicycle market in Finland is 15%, and e-bike unit sales in that country are about triple EV unit sales. The population centers of Finland are all north of the continental United States and virtually all of Canada.
Something people often forget about Helsinki, Finland is that the weather is quite nice year round. Anyway I wasn’t even thinking about e-bikes in winter, but rather what it would be like near my residence in monsoon season (which is currently ongoing). Traveling on an e-bike in steamy heat with wind and rain just sounds terrible.
Revolutionary solutions like "everyone just get an e-bike" rarely turn out well. There are too many unknowns. Is your grandmother going to strap on a helmet and ride an e-bike? Are we going to be able to stop bike theft at that scale? Will we need to invent special snow plows to keep the bike lanes clear in winter? Will we have to deal with e-bike accidents? People riding e-bikes drunk? People getting heat exhaustion in summer? Will we have to deal with abandoned e-bikes clogging up the bike lanes? Will everything slow to a crawl because people will be contending for limited bike lock-up spaces?
Meanwhile, an autonomous vehicle, well we know how those will work: Exactly like bedrivered cars, but with a few differences. I like that vision of the future. Maybe once we have this incremental improvement, we can start thinking about further improvements.
> A 60lb e-bike can also transport a 200 lb person whilst using far less resources (both to make the vehicle and to operate it) and space.
Have you ever ridden bikes in SF? I have. Even though I was an occasional rider, I got into 2 accidents that could have seriously hurt me (just through pure luck I didn't end up with hospitalization-worthy injuries). Both not my fault (one a dooring; another a driver turning into me without looking). Ask any rider in SF, and they'll tell you that SF is quite dangerous for bicyclists.
SF can't build a public toilet without it turning into a national debacle. I wouldn't be holding my breath for city-wide infrastructure for biking improving anytime soon with the amount of grifting and NIMBYism in the city.
Uber and Cruise are the market's response to public infrastructure not meeting the population's needs due to politics, rent-seeking et al. The media love to disparage them, but as consumers they are exactly what many of us needed in this city.
A more civilized solution might be possible elsewhere, but not here in SF.
SFMTA is trying and literally making anti infrastructure, such as Valencia. I agree with your solution, but politically it's going nowhere. Self driving cars exist because our politicians are inept.
You think cars just transport humans? I can’t tow trailers with an e-bike (or a city bus.) An e-bike doesn’t protect you from the weather. Regarding public transit — nice of you’re in Zurich. A nightmare in Los Angeles. Even in public-transport-friendly Europe, unless you live in a major city, public transport is a hassle. I get it, certain segments of people hate private transportation. But being under the illusion that the entire world can become “walkable” and “bike-able” to suit so naïve Sim City vision of the future is just not reality. Farmers getting tending their farms, buying machine parts, transporting things — are they going to do that on a bike or a bus? How about people that need to move furniture, or take their large dogs to the vet. Are they going to do that on bikes? What about people that go camping, rock climbing, or like to ride dirt bikes in the desert? Does the public bus go to Zion National Park? Or even people buying a week’s worth of groceries for a family of six, are they going to ride bikes in 100 degree weather to do that?
Publix transportation has a place for sure, but this idea that we need to end cars is just silly. The freedom of movement is fundamental to freedom in general. Having lived through Paris transit strikes, as well as numerous major storms — the idea that cars should be replaced is madness. I remember when I lived in Jersey City during Superstorm Sandy and my wife’s due date was the day the storm arrived. The ability for us to quickly evacuate to Albany was critical. If I relied on public transportation, my wife and I would have been stranded in a blacked out city with no means to get anywhere.
If this is about “climate,” then perhaps tell China to clean up their act and when that happens, then we can talk about lowering our quality of life to prevent some hypothetical “emergency.”
Resource utilization metrics that ignore human desirability metrics are doomed to fail without extreme scarcity. When energy is plentiful enough that the cost of the utilization of the wasteful metric is far below the human desirability and willingness to spend for the service - it’s a losing discussion every single time. I sadly agree with some folks in generally don’t agree with in these matters - cheap, plentiful, renewable, environmentally friendly energy and efficient enough utilization to be practical from a cost and infrastructure point of view will win out of over raw optimality. I’d much rather take an air conditioned robo taxi than a loud spewing bus filled with other people that drops me off within walking distance if I pay close enough attention to the cryptic maps and unannounced stops, peering madly at the street sign we just passed. I’m sorry. I wish the world were better than that. But it won’t change no matter what the efficiency metrics say.
The whole “you don’t need a car” discussion again? It is boring, nobody having it ever acknowledges that anyone else has valid arguments, and some of the arguments brought up on both side are ridiculous. Some people can do fine without a car most of the time, and have options available when they don’t. Some people need a car on a daily basis. Arguing that “sure you can do the schoolrun for your 3 kids on a cargo bike” is stupid (someone mentions further down below) as is the argument “but what if I need to carry 20 tonnes granite daily?!?” (slight exaggeration)
I keep hearing about some grand conspiracy about stopping fully autonomous vehicles, but it is not at all clear who would be behind this, and why. I do see a lot of reports about these things getting stuck, and responders being forever away, causing chaos.
I would do anything to keep a personal vehicle and live with land separating me and my neighbors. I have a 20-30% incident rate taking the BART in the last year. If public transit isn't similar in safety to the japanese system I have no interest in bus/train systems.
Unless we suddenly get rid of cars, there is no way I am riding an e-bike around the streets of Los Angeles with my kids. It is way too dangerous, with huge cars driving very fast and recklessly. So many people I know who ride bikes around here have been hit by cars and seriously injured.
While I understand your point is likely that sidewalks would come before later advancements (like support for bikes) I want to make it clear that bikes do not belong on sidewalks.
If you ride a bike please ride it in the street with other vehicles. This is the law in some jurisdictions (such as where I live) but frequently ignored.
Failure to do this poses a serious risk to pedestrians. Please do not use sidewalks as an alternative road.
I've stopped advising people to not ride bikes on sidewalks, especially opposite the direction of traffic, even in situations where it's legally permitted (for example, kids in my area are allowed to ride on sidewalks).
People get really worked up when you ask them to stop, really angry! Which I find so odd because if somebody comes up to me and says something is both illegal and unsafe, I check the laws, and put some critical thought into what the risks could be, and then typically comply if I'm convinced, or simply respond with "I have heard what you are asking, but it's not absolutely required, so I will continue to do so."
You're not wrong. It's not clear why we're not building something slightly heavier, but still lightweight that is inherently slightly more stable at a stop or very low speed (ie an electric tricycle). It would seem that something like that with an integrated roll cage would be a better solution.
That said, the problem with better solutions is that they need to not only compete with the existing solutions, but also coexist.
The problem with cars? People decided that bigger cars are safer: cars have gotten bigger and bigger.
Look at what a Toyota Camry looks like from 1987 vs. 2023.
1997: 174", 2235lbs.
2023: 192", 3284lbs.
That means a car grew 1.5 feet... 10%. But the mass? Up 50%, over 1000 lbs.
edit: (okay lbs are not mass, its force... but you know what I mean. Nobody talks in slugs)
We aren't talking about public spending on self-driving car infrastructure vs. bikes and mass-transit infrastructure. I would much rather fund the latter with public money.
What we're talking about is erecting regulatory barriers for a technology that could solve one very large problem (auto safety), just because that technology doesn't solve some other problem (climate). This is like saying data privacy protections on a social networking site are not the right solution, because they don't really solve the misinformation problem.
My parents who live out in the burbs can only drive for so much longer. I sure hope they aren't as stubborn as my grandparent who drove to the age of 90 and got into an accident (fortunately with only a parked car), but either way I don't think finally learning to ride a bike at the age of 70 is the answer either.
We should move forward with rolling self-driving cars as quickly as we safely can. Speaking as someone who does not own a car and has no desire to ever own a car, I think it would benefit me a lot too, by making it less likely for me to get run over while I walk or bike around, the fear of the latter being the biggest obstacle preventing most people I know from biking more too.
Baby steps. Once people learn to delegate transport entirely to a third party, that third party can more easily facilitate the transition to more efficient transport vehicles. Do you care what type of airplane you fly in?
Cool, you have an affordable, tenuously waterproofed, chinese mass produced e-bike, it's your only available mode of transportation, you need to go into the office for a meeting, and it's raining.
Welcome to hell.
Also, not sure if you've used public transportation recently, but man, it SUCKS. Far less time efficient than a car, often crowded during the times you want to use it, and ZERO enforcement of proper etiquette or rules or regulations as far as riders are concerned.
If you could promise me a pleasant public transportation service, clean, no panhandling, no dude blasting music from his shitty offbrand bluetooth speaker, not unbearably hot/cold, armed security keeping the peace, then sure, I'll ride it every day. We both know that is literally never going to happen, and public transport will continue to be a minimally viable pipe dream that we spend far too much money on.
TL;DR; Cars are here to stay, you need to make the cities work with them. Yes it's a harder problem to solve, but it's the problem you've got.
> Cool, you have an affordable, tenuously waterproofed, chinese mass produced e-bike, it's your only available mode of transportation, you need to go into the office for a meeting, and it's raining. Welcome to hell.
It's raining half the time here in the Netherlands. You can stand under a convenient overhang in the banking district of Amsterdam at 8am and watch the bankers pour into the underground bike parking lots. They use cheap and readily available outerwear that covers their clothes - including shoes - and keeps them dry. Suits, skirts, high heels, whatever.
Bicycle commuting in the rain would be no big deal except for all the 4000lb vehicles you have to share the road with.
You can put rain gear on. Braking and steering are hardly affected. You can't go fast enough for hydroplaning to happen.
Your visibility is impaired, but visibility on a bike saddle is already infinitely less obstructed compared to a driver's seat. You don't even need windshield wipers!
About 11 years ago I road some rush hour subways in China for a couple weeks while working in an office out there for a project.
It was clean, people were quiet, all the sort of "crime" or "etiquette" concerns seemed addressed from my POV.
It was still terrible because it was crowded as hell and we were packed in and standing up for 20-40 minutes. From talking to locals, people's commute time tolerance still stretched out and with cost of living and demand and all that, it was no "just take a jaunty 5 minute walk to work" paradise compared to the US.
Maybe that 40 min standing is better for my long-term posture and joint health than sitting in a car? But it would still be a really really really hard sell.
Yeah, this. I've done the Asian subway commute thing, and it's pretty crap. Tolerable, but only because using a car in those places is mostly untenable. It's even worse in western countries, because we don't have the commitment to rock-solid subway schedules that places like Japan and Korea do. Here we get poorly planned maintenance works, and commute times that can balloon out by hours because you're taking replacement buses. That's before we get into factors like assaults and harassment.
I will never use public transport for commuting in my home country again. I got a car at the onset of COVID, and I'm not going back. As for the suggestion of using bikes, well... I grew up the monsoon zone. Good luck convincing people that a bike will fit their needs for the 5 months of the year when it's raining. People honestly forget what a miracle cars are. They're not perfect, but they're reliable, they get the job done, and there's a car that can meet just about anybody's needs. Even if you made an e-bike with some kind of weather protection, I'd be willing to bet that at some point, you just end up with a downsized car. Bikes just aren't the universal workhorses that cars are.
It's not that hard to do. I ride in the rain and fog here in SF (the city under discussion), but you need dry pants. The real thing is that this is not an AV vs. ebike thing. Almost all people who ride bikes/ebikes here are pro-AV. It's mostly people not from SF and people who don't ride who are anti-AV.
AVs are so much safer and predictable than human drivers.
I'd be cautious, considering Teslas in "self driving" have a nasty habit of running over single track vehicles (motorcycles and bicycles) because their systems don't recognize that anything narrower than a car exists.
Something like the West Coast Express train in Vancouver is what you want - tables, washrooms, AC plugs for charging your stuff, etc. It's a great way to commute.
The problem here is your attitude: it sucks. I’d elaborate on this, but it’s enough to read your post. Instead of baselessly concluding that everything you dislike and feel inconvenienced by will suck forever, have you considered feeling hope and optimism instead?
Hope and optimism from the climate alarmist crowd? We’ve been told since Al Gore that the world should have already ended. That people want to take us back to the 1800s in transport tech isn’t very optimistic to me. People would rather have a train than airplanes. People would rather ride a bike in crappy weather than a comfortable car. People would rather we set our thermostats to 78 degrees than enjoy whatever temperatures we want in our house. There are people exciting about eating bugs because apparently cows are going to make the planet explode.
Not much hope and optimism these days when the sky is perpetually falling.
That's rich considering we just set a global record for highest average temperature ever recorded. Have you watched the record flooding recently?
Just because your personal personal upper class bubble world hasn't ended yet, doesn't mean people's lives aren't being upended by climate change. How selfish of you.
(and trains are infinitely better than airplanes for short (<300) mile trips. regular schedules, less expensive tickets, no baggage checking and getting lost, no endless and invasive security procedures? yes please.)
Heh one person berating the op for not being optimistic enough and another berating them for not being doom/gloom enough. What a perfect example of social media “engagement”.
> Also, not sure if you've used public transportation recently, but man, it SUCKS. Far less time efficient than a car, often crowded during the times you want to use it, and ZERO enforcement of proper etiquette or rules or regulations as far as riders are concerned.
I've been using public transportation for 13 years and it's better than its ever been in terms of speed, reliability, and the crowds.
Where have you experienced public transportation that is worse off today than it was in the past?
Have your tried driving? everyday, in stop and go traffic, bumper to bumper, with assholes waving in and out, impatiently, or sitting there for literal hours on a highway with turns but no distraction besides the podcast about some inane bullshittery? rather be sitting uninterrupted on public transportation, with an app or timer to warn, and then tell me when to get off, than sit in a car as a driver, having to pay half attention. it's enough to drive someone to drink. not that I would while driving, the repercussions are too steep.
Oh no, I sit there and play with my phone on the bus and ignore people. Guess what I'm going to go home to do from my couch. the same except except be lonely while doing it.
I drive every day, and I've made it a point to pick places to live that are near-ish to where I work. Current commute is right around 15 minutes, but, I've lived places an hour from work, commuting every day. It wasn't the best, mainly from a time-optimization standpoint, got in the way of socialization, but, I listened to a ton of audiobooks and podcasts, so, wasn't exactly suffering in any way.
Personally, I don't spend that much time "plugged in" to my phone these days. I don't have social media (HN is as close as it gets), and I keep most of my e-socializing to group messages between various friend groups on signal. So an hour on a train/bus/etc would likely be too much downtime for me.
I do have an uncle who lives in Chicago, at the end of the line, train wise, so, it's over an hour to get into the city. He just catches the train and goes to sleep, because he's riding the whole thing to the end, sets an alarm, earbuds in, +1hour nap. Nice side benefit, but, truth is, he'd drive if he could, but the way chicago is laid out, he'd be walking a half mile from parking, and it's only like a 2 block walk from the end of the line to get to his work, so, makes alot of sense for him. For most, makes zero sense.
Understand that, time is the only truly non-renewable resource. Everything else can be replaced, somehow, someway, but time is irreplaceable. Ultimately, if you're going to have universally viable public transport, it needs to be clean, safe, comfortable, and at least as fast as owning a car. So far, after decades of advancement, it's still none of those things for most people.
No it doesn't. If it takes an hour by bus or 30 minutes by car, that 1 hour is more useful to me and way less stress. Until I didn't have to drive every day due to Covid, I didn't realize how costly driving, especially in traffic or long distances, was to my mental health.
It sounds like you're not able to take advantage of the Internet on your smartphone to the same degree as I am. Between the web browser, and all the apps, especially Gmail, there's enough there that I can take care of some chores/errands. I'm not talking about burning time on social media, though that's certainly available. With hotspot functionality, I'm able to do real work on my laptop, anywhere there's cellphone service and also some company shuttles have wifi.
Look, cars are luxuriously convenient but having to drive isn't. We have Stockholm syndrome with it, and think it's a good deal. But we're commenting on an article about self driving cars because it isn't.
Wow that sounds fun! I think I might try it next time I need to go somewhere.
You have no idea how long I've been sitting on public transit wishing that _I_ was the person controlling the bus in stop and go traffic and having to put my 100% undivided attention on the road in front of me. I stare at the bus driver, and I bet he can feel my daggers piercing his back, my disdain for him that I'm forced to sit here on my phone reading people's stupid opinions on HN and Reddit and pointlessly arguing with them. Trying to change the mind of an idiot who doesn't even want to change their mind.
I had no idea you could go out and buy those things people drive around everywhere. I thought you got them on your tax return if the government owes you > $20k, so thanks for the TIL.
SF, every time I visit. LA, often when I visit. LV, when I don't feel like driving. SD, when I'm there visiting, NYC which admittedly has been several years, Chicago metro area, which admittedly is the best of all of them and still very much has all of the problems I have detailed and aside from traveling outside of the city I much prefer a cab or a car, and several places in mexico, touristy and not touristy, which weren't markedly better or worse than american examples.
That leads me to think these problems are endemic, and you, yourself, are either really lucky, or just used to the discomfort after so much time. You should treat yourself to some perspective, go out and take an uber home, then ask yourself if it was better.
> That leads me to think these problems are endemic, and you, yourself, are either really lucky, or just used to the discomfort after so much time. You should treat yourself to some perspective, go out and take an uber home, then ask yourself if it was better.
Your replies lead me to think that you, yourself, are either really sheltered, or just used to the privilege of not having to interact with people you feel like are "below" you. I suggest you go outside and touch some grass or get your hands a little dirty.
I have used Uber in all the places you mentioned as well as transit. I can tell you that I would rather spend $4 on a 1 hour transit ride than $25 on a 40 minute Uber literally everywhere. That will be the typical travel times in NYC, Toronto, LV, SF, Chicago, Tokyo, London etc. for both Uber and transit to go anywhere that's worth taking an Uber for.
Unless I'm wasted out of my mind at 3am or in an unfamiliar area or not in a state to take transit home or the Uber ride is exceptionally cheaper than normal Ubers or faster than transit I will choose the cheaper public transit every time.
I've been working since I was 12 1/2 (under the table summer gigs, eventually payrolled at 15 with a work permit, zero free summers in highschool), parents were on government assistance, declared bankruptcy twice, I went to public schools where I was the victim of overt acts of violence due to the color of my skin on multiple occasions, parent's had their house foreclosed on and I squatted there for 9 months before I got evicted and had to couch surf, my first car was a van with no door locks and a carburetor with a worn out accelerator pump and the only gauge that worked was oil pressure. I kept a 5 gallon jerry can in the back because I never really knew if I was going to run out of gas.
In my life I've been mugged 3x, stabbed once, spat on several times (only spat on while riding the bus funny enough), had a full coke thrown at me while I was riding my bike to walmart (which was worse than being stabbed because I wasn't stabbed that bad and being sticky really sucked). I've been hassled by the cops (because that van was super sketchy looking) countless times, never arrested because I was never doing anything wrong, but no less unpleasant having to put your car back together on the side of the road because you look like you're driving a drug dealer van (which, I did tbh).
These days I volunteer at the local food bank, handing food and diapers and sanitary products who are in need of them. It keeps me grounded, because some of those people are fantastic humans, the real salt of the earth, most are regular folks like you and I, and some are remarkably unpleasant, but I get that they're havin a bad time and that it's not really personal (though the guy who told me I looked like an "r-slured cross between drake and mr bean" because we were out of eggs kinda stung, not gonna lie). I highly recommend doing that sort of thing, those places all need extra help, even if it's just a few hours, and they mostly have zero ways to reach out and get it.
As to where this privilege, where this shelter is that you speak of comes from? That's a mystery to me, I fought to get where I am, I've existed on the good will of others, I've been hungry and dirty, and tired and quasi homeless. I remember where I came from, I know how bad things can get and how much better they are now. My friend, if I were to touch more grass, I would have to become grass itself first.
In terms of time, if 1hr transit = 40min uber, you're spending 21 bucks for 20 minutes of time, so, 63 bucks an hour. Is your time worth less than that or more than that? And that's valuing safety and comfort at $0, which is probably unfair, but harder to quantify. Personally, I'm at a point where I can afford the extra 21 bucks, so I just uber. I also drop like 300 bucks a month on a car, plus gas, including insurance, but timewise, if I didn't I'd be valuing myself somewheres around 18 bucks an hour with how my commute works out with public transport. Haven't been paid that low in years now, no plan on going back. That and, it has the added benefit of being able to go anywhere, anytime, without any real restrictions. Zero public transport options are like that.
But hey, maybe I'm wrong and sitting on an uncomfortable plastic seat for hours every day, getting hassled, maybe stabbed, maybe spat on, would be good for me, doesn't sound like it though.
That ebike can barely protect itself let alone be autonomous and run for more than a few miles at slow speeds. Not realistic any way but purely efficiency based way which you pointed out, still unrealistic for 99% of US population unfortunately.
Maybe in Europe where places are more walkable.
OK, great. Go build an e-bike company, lobby for government investment in e-bikes, for bike lanes, whatever. Don't interfere with private companies spending their own money, improving road safety, and advancing the world forward just because they're not working on the perfect solution to all of the world's problems.
This argument assumes that there’s an alternative world where people can go from A to B without that extra mass. But given the highway and road system we have and the inherent danger of driving on it (hence the mass) I fail to see how you propose to achieve that.
We have rental ebikes in San Francisco. I commute daily by them.
My friend has some good footage he'll post today to show you what it's like. The best drivers to share the road with on an e-bike are AVs. They are polite, allow for bike lane to sharrow merges, give room, etc.
e-bikes and e-scooters are bullshit entertainment and convenience devices. For folks living outside all but the most heavily congested urban areas they serve literally no purpose.
Edit: downvotes are fine and all but any time one of y'all wants to jump in about how e-horseshit personal conveyances can credibly handle grocery shopping, car lines, or literally any other aspect of life that doesn't involve living with no children in a major metro area I'd be delighted to hear it.
> [Autonomous taxis are] too vital to the revitalization of SF
As an expat from London - Jesus Christ, what a fucking bleak situation. To be clear, I'm not disagreeing, I think you're probably correct - the best way to get people out and spending their tech salaries in SF's service industries is to give them a fast, cheap, convenient way to get directly from their door to the bar/restaurant/club without having to set foot on the street or (heaven forbid!) public transit - but God, what an staggering failure of public policy that this is the case.
My take is that this isn't so much about privately owned cars and/or taxis, but the real politics is in over the road trucking, and these incremental steps are just part of that.
If self driving over the road trucking happens (and that's sort of inevitable), politicians seem to legitimately believe it will collapse our economy. It seems like all self-driving anything gets lumped in with that.
I suspect this is why the road trucking divisions have been deprioritized at companies such as Waymo. The truck-drivers are better organized than the cabbies+ridesharing drivers, so even if highway driving is technically easier it is politically less feasible. I suppose it could just be that intrastate trucking is too small of an opportunity and interstate trucking obviously requires lobbying in multiple contiguous states.
Considering that the most popular job in the USA is "truck driver", they might have some clue about what the damage might be. Eventually they can retrain, but we are going to be throwing a whole generation out of work without a very good alternative.
I think it depends on how you cluster job categories. If you make a giant retail job category, then of course it will be the largest. From the article:
> The Bureau of Labor Statistics has a system, but it’s a bit arbitrary. The BLS classification system attempts to group together workers who have similar duties and skills, but it’s as much art as it is science.
> For instance, the BLS sorts 7 million teachers into more than 80 separate occupations. (Special-ed teachers in elementary schools have a different occupation than special-ed teachers in preschools, middle schools or high schools, for instance.) But all 4 million retail salespersons are lumped into one large category, whether they sell lumber or lingerie.
> That’s where NPR was led astray. NPR looked at a data set that aggregated various kinds of truck drivers into a single category but that didn’t aggregate other occupations in the same way. The sorting was inconsistent, so the comparison isn’t a legitimate one, and it makes us think that truck driving is the most common occupation in many states.
On some of these surveys, I've seen Computer Programmer come up as the most common job in my state, which is definitely not true :).
No, autonomous cars don't work particularly well. Anecdotally, I saw some crap stuck in the high tension wires atop a utility pole the other day. So I called PG&E and reported it. On my way back from the store I saw the lineman had arrived and was doing his thing. This street had two lanes and was a one way street, and the PG&E bucket truck occupied one of those lanes. Shortly after a Cruise car pulled up behind the truck and stopped. At various points the turn signals and four way flashers were on with no rhyme or reason. Eventually it decided to pass the truck so it navigated into the other lane and just stopped. So now both lanes were blocked, various turn signal incantations went on, and the blocked traffic started honking.
After that… I watched as another Cruise car go full tilt through another intersection and stop a few feet from a pedestrian in the crosswalk. Way too close for comfort. Autonomous cars aren't inherently bad but they shouldn't be beta tested on public roads.
Second point – no, more cars will not revitalize anything. More cars will contribute to more decay no matter what is driving. Take a look at the Embarcadero now versus when it was designed to prioritize cars over people and had an interstate running along it.
“This one is too vital to the revitalization of SF.”
Nothing against the technology but can you explain this a bit more? I fail to see how driverless cars are going to be vital to SF’s revitalization when Uber/Lyft are readily available and haven’t seemed to move the needle much in that regard.
whose public safety record? the politicians'? or, who would even be materially interested to lobby against robocars and Google? honest q.
automakers seem to be generally onboard with robocars and trying their own. Cabbies have been wiped out as a force by Uber. Even Uber seems generally onboard with robocars. So who is this mysterious powerful Luddite villain?
SF anti-tech “activists.” I was going to post a sarcastic description, but I’ll just say they tend to have a lot of student debt and are frequently devoted Marxists. They also tend to sincerely believe that if tech imploded, the homeless would all suddenly be able to afford apartments.
It's always funny to see people so openly display their lack of effort in understanding the arguments of the people they're supposedly opposed to. The lack of self-awareness is disappointing but not surprising considering the way it is expressed.
I’m just describing the arguments I’ve heard straight out of people’s mouths. Their arguments come from a place of deep, deep passion, but they lack no understanding of economics nor apparently human behavior. They want to buy into an easy story that a certain group is the source of all ills. In that way they are just like the radicals on the other side who are their sworn enemies.
> 3. Now attempting leaks of cherry-picked vanity metrics so massaged they can’t fairly be called “statistics” to friendly anti-tech local media.
The situations where they do stupid stuff are also relatively rare. But they are programs, won't they do the same stupid stuff in those situations when they come across them again? If they run over fire hoses in one case, shouldn't that be a show stopper? This isn't some silly app or website, the whole move fast and break things attitude shouldn't be allowed for driverless cars. They should be acknowledging their shortcomings and striving for perfection.
> Local politicians need to find another anti-tech boogeyman. This one is too vital to the revitalization of SF.
How does it help the revitalization of SF? Doesn't it take away jobs for those in the lower rung of society? The only people I can possibly see benefiting are the people that work at the companies that make the cars.
When I hear "skyrocket" I think "several orders of magnitude in a very short time".
The article actually has quantitative data that shows reports of "incidents where driverless cars disrupt traffic, transit and emergency responders" rising by a couple orders of magnitude in a year.
Yeah, the city officials have to cover their asses and make disclaimers about what they can and cannot conclude, because all they know is that they're getting more reports of incidents; they don't have access to Waymo's data. But given that we know driverless car activity has increased substantially, it seems silly to assume that it must just be a random coincidence that people are now reporting correspondingly more problems.
The city assigned a guy to go around and document every time an AV does something. That's why the "skyrocketing". They didn't count them before and now they do.
If some SFFD guy just stood around documenting all driver stupidity it would a significantly different report.
> The city assigned a guy to go around and document every time an AV does something
Want to provide a citation to back that up?
> They didn't count them before and now they do.
They've apparently been counting since spring of 2022; the large increase in incidents started a year later.
> If some SFFD guy just stood around documenting all driver stupidity it would a significantly different report.
Lovely dose of whataboutism. We know that drivers do stupid things and more or less what the consequences are. It's incredibly useful -- and critical -- to find out what AVs do that are stupid, and in what ways those stupid things differ from what human drivers do. The example of the AV driving through yellow caution tape, hooking a Muni wire, and then continuing to drive another block before stopping is illustrative. We can maybe imagine an unlikely-but-possible scenario where a human driver might do the same thing, but that would be an outlier.
That also raises another point: as an example, we know that some drivers text while driving. Not all drivers do this; hopefully it's a minority. But a bad behavior that one AV does, all of them (running the same software) will do. That's a much worse problem than bad behaviors that a minority of drivers exhibit. (On the other hand, though, if fixing it in an AV is straightforward, you eliminate the problem... that sort of thing doesn't work with human drivers.)
> The example of the AV driving through yellow caution tape, hooking a Muni wire, and then continuing to drive another block before stopping is illustrative. We can maybe imagine an unlikely-but-possible scenario where a human driver might do the same thing, but that would be an outlier.
Are you joking? Do you live in SF? People are constantly driving into subway tunnels.
People are just inured to the omnipresent stupidity of drivers. Imagine how blinded by ideology you would need to be to write down that Waymo is bad because it stopped in a driving lane on three different occasions. As if DoorDash wasn't a global enterprise dedicated to double-parking intentionally!
> People are just inured to the omnipresent stupidity of drivers.
Tell me at least a little about the ideology that starts with omnipresent human stupidity and improves safety by adding a new class of proprietary, intractable-decision-makers to that same system.
You are imputing upon me a philosophy I do not hold. I don't think AVs should be added to MeatVs. I think as soon as AVs reach a practicable level, human drivers of private cars should be banned in cities.
If you want to live in a prison, fine. Don't try to impose it on the rest of us. And don't imagine it's for some greater good. The world you envision is vile.
Send this article to someone trying to argue that cyclists never follow the law and should have licenses and be prepared to roll your eyes at the excuses they come up with...
People don't even consider cars speeding 10km/h over or rolling stop signs or right at red lights going 10km/h a crime, but if a cyclist rolls a stop sign going 5km/h it's goddamn anarchy that needed a solution yesterday.
> That also raises another point: as an example, we know that some drivers text while driving. Not all drivers do this; hopefully it's a minority.
I would be surprised if it was a minority. I am an extremely active pedestrian and cyclist in Toronto and if you pay attention to people in their cars stopped at red lights you'll find a majority will be glancing down at something. It could be a phone.. could be the radio.. could be something on their dash panel.. but when you start noticing how many people react to green lights based on hearing the car in front of them go rather than their sight (because their head is down) it doesn't make me optimistic that they're looking at anything other than their phone.
Sure you shouldn’t be distracted while driving, but distractions occur, and some of them may require attention e.g driving directions don’t make sense, or music too loud. The best time to service this kind of distraction is at a stop light because you have a couple seconds of acceptable reaction time unlike just about any other time while driving. I’m not surprised or concerned about distractions at stop lights, I have seen very little evidence of accidents caused by that kind of distraction. I’m concerned about distractions while moving (especially at speed), and the two are not necessarily correlated.
> I have seen very little evidence of accidents caused by that kind of distraction.
One of the very few actual collisions in SF involving a Waymo was a rear-end accident where the guy behind the Waymo was staring at a phone at a stop, then when the cars in the next lane started moving, he started moving without knowing what was happening. Which is quite common. Looking down at your phone or at the car's console while stopped at an intersection is a bad idea. If you are forced to do it, it's important to keep in mind the need to look around for a moment before you begin moving again.
Based on personal experience, yes if an AV is susceptible to a problem, then all of them are susceptible on at least the same software and hardware configuration. This is the same in every safety-critical field.
The comment is a bit naive though.
What is your statistical model for such failures? let's go with the example and assume that from now henceforth forevermore, all AVs will run through caution tape (which is obviously not true).
What is the frequency of caution tape being drawn across the road in front of an AV vs. the frequency of JUST drivers driving drunk, or JUST speed violations, or JUST texting violations, or JUST distracted driving, etc.?
Though, we definitely ought to hold companies' feet to the fire when they are liable for incidents like this. Which we aren't really doing.
> we definitely ought to hold companies' feet to the fire
To clarify my position, even though I oppose SFMTA's reactionary stance on this topic, I do think Cruise should be sent to the penalty box. Most of these incidents and all of the serious ones like driving through the caution tape were Cruise incidents. I think they should produce a public post-mortem report on that and demonstrate in virtual and practical simulation on closed courses that their thing doesn't do that any more. And I am sure Waymo already incorporates Cruises failure scenarios into their simulations. Call me a Waymo partisan but I don't think Cruise is up to Waymo standards.
The Waymo "incidents" are that it stopped somewhere it should not have, which I view as much less serious.
The reality is that in order to make the technology safe, you need to be able to expose it to the conditions under which it will operate. To me, this is not the issue. The issue is whether companies have the requisite technology in place to prevent a minor problem from becoming a major problem.
The optics to me look as though most of them are scaling their fleets too quickly and assuming they are capable of more generalized problems than they actually are. I believe that they know this and, in essence, nobody is seriously capable of stopping them because there is not enough interest to do so. Part of that is because the companies are so secretive of their technologies and capabilities.
Voluntary reports are not the answer to this. They will always find a way to fudge them. The only answer that will work without stifling innovation with uninformed laws is to simply hold them to a high standard and give them the stiffest penalties the law allows in each infraction. I think this will have the natural effect of forcing them to have smaller fleets they can better control, or at least have safety drivers (which also would reuse fleet size).
IANAL, so I don't know how to make this actually have teeth since I think traditionally the driver bears the liability.
I dojn't think that chart represents anything informative. It's at least partly based on "social media reports" and they say it's "incomplete". Any number of alternative explanations for that chart (which isn't a "skyrocket") explain the results better, such as increased awareness of the cars, increased numbers of miles driven (so the complaint rate per mile is roughly constant), and negative press coverage of incidents.
so the complaint rate per mile is roughly constant
Sure, if the complaint rate per mile is constant, but the number of driverless cars increases exponentially, then yeah we might expect the number of complaints to increase exponentially. That doesn't mean this isn't a problem.
they say it's "incomplete"
Okay, so maybe there are more problems than are represented in the chart, but that doesn't seem to paint any prettier of a picture here.
> The companies point out that, in a city that sees dozens of traffic deaths caused by human-driven cars each year, their driverless taxis have never killed or seriously injured anyone in the millions of miles they’ve traveled.
So, by your logic, the public policy we should be looking at is reducing human diven car miles to a minimum.
If you ignore the rate at which the events are occuring and don't bother to collect any data on the relative rates of other things like standard taxis and delivery vehicles, then your "data" is worthless from a public policy perspective.
If self-driving cars are really safer than human drivers, then tech companies need to prove it by releasing more data than necessary, rather than less. Why won't they release sufficient data instead of forcing the city to gather their own data? This doesn't smell well...
That seems odd. Surely the authority that licenses this sort of activity should have access to all the data that allows proper evaluation of its safety?
Access to such data should be a prerequisite for the agreement.
It’s such a new area legally that there aren’t precedents for this. Consider dietary supplements as an example of a product that doesn’t have to provide their own safety data.
If you actually look at the article, it has the numbers in absolute terms. In April '22 (the earliest month on the chart) there were 3 reports. Following that, we have something that looks like an exponential curve leading to a year later where it's nearly 100 per month.
We can split hairs all day about what constitutes an order of magnitude or what percentage increases mean or whatever, but this doesn't appear to just be statistical noise.
I'm with ya normally, but literally a few paragraphs in they have the chart source: the TA, going from 3 to 91 "incidents" over a year. If you turn it on its side, it kinda looks like rocket blasting off.
That's not a rocket blasting off, it's a rocket failing to reach orbit by barely clearing the launch platform.
More importantly: that chart isn't normalized by miles driven. As the companies have been ramping up, you'd expect (under a random model) that incidents would go up.
It could also be explained by greater knowledge of SDCs, increased news coverage, and more awareness of how to report incidents.
More importantly, I wasn't considering the chart, I was considering what the source of the quote said:
Julia Friedlander, SFMTA’s senior manager of automated driving policy, told state regulators in late June that driverless taxi incidents began “skyrocketing” this year. Though city leaders suspect it coincides with a rise in driverless activity, Friedlander said the city can’t make definitive conclusions because it doesn’t have detailed data.
You can normalize the report by miles driven, but if the number of miles driven by those services increases rapidly then you can expect the number of incidents to increase just as rapidly, and that is what appears to be happening. There is a level at which this becomes untenable and that level is a direct function of the number of miles driven.
So unless you see some kind of cap to the number of miles driven (which given the ambition to scale up is not something I would subscribe to) I believe this is an early indication of something that may well develop into an actual problem in a relatively short amount of time.
I think this is not taking the analysis far enough. You need to compare incidents per passenger mile, with humans vs. AV.
If AVs are safer, and you increase the AV miles driven, presumably you mostly displace human miles driven (e.g. Uber). In this possible word you would see the missing graph of human-driven harm go down, but you’d still see the graph from the OP go up. Indeed in this scenario the more the AV mischief goes up, the better, as that would be implying that there are fewer humans on the road. (Obviously it’s not only displacement but I think that’s the first-order effect.)
Without quantifying the level of human-related mischief, I don’t think it’s wise to draw strong conclusions.
Per mile incident rate is a measure only the companies care about. Why wouldn't the city care about an increase in the total number of traffic incidents? Especially when the self-driving cars are not displacing human drivers, so at the end of the day the roads are getting less safe.
>Per mile incident rate is a measure only the companies care about
This is a very frustrating sentence to read. If the per mile incident rate of driverless cars is 1 and the per mile incident rate for normal cars is 2. What happens when you do a 1:1 replacement of all normal cars with driveless cars? The number of incidences halves. i.e the total number of traffic incidences halves.
You assume that a driverless mile replaces a human driven mile. I'm not sure that's a reasonable assumption. (I'd assume people would drive more miles if they don't need to worry about parking or paying for a human driver)
>Especially when the self-driving cars are not displacing human drivers, so at the end of the day the roads are getting less safe.
what makes you think that? "Driverless taxis" imply they're being used to transport passengers. A robotaxi taking a fare means that there isn't a human taxi taking the same fare, so human drivers are essentially being displaced.
Robotaxis are cheaper than human taxis (in the long run), don't need to take breaks, etc. There's no reason to assume that taxi rides would remain flat if cost falls and availability increases.
If you care about absolute numbers, then you need to compare it against human-caused incidents too. If there's 100,000 human-caused incidents then AVs going from 3 -> 300 isn't even a blip.
I reviewed a couple dozen incidents and in every case human drivers are to blame. The most extreme example of this was an incident in which a manually operated vehicle repeatedly rear-ended an autonomous vehicle out of spite, then followed it back to the dispatch lot and made a variety of verbal threats.
I think creating anything that doesn’t have the potential to anger American drivers is a ridiculously high bar. People have literally shot other drivers for the most insane “reasons.”
Tbh this seems like the opposite argument I think you’re making. Humans (on average) are not really competent to be in command of a large deadly machine and road rage just proves my point.
Human driven cars have been "sharing" space with pedestrians and cyclists with gory results. AVs mildly annoy human drivers, but are much better behaved. In fact they annoy drivers BECAUSE they are much better behaved.
> Human driven cars have been "sharing" space with pedestrians and cyclists with gory results.
That's why in places with good infrastructure, the infrastructure is separated.
Pedestrians are on tall sidewalks with few ingress points for cars (unlike in the US where every corner has a lowered curb for 20m just in case some random truck needs to go on the sidewalk??). Sidewalks are on streets with traffic calming, frequently separated from the actual road by a nice hedge or trees or a patch of grass.
Bike lanes are completely separated from roads and intersections are also traffic calmed (no slip lanes, roundabouts, multiple lanes separated so that the intersection doesn't require crossing 6-8 dangerous lanes at once).
Etc, etc.
Do you think it's realistic to maintain 2 sets of road infra for cars (human vs AI)? We can barely maintain 1 set and it's already forcing many places into deeper and deeper debt or even bankruptcy.
I'm not sure where you live, but we don't have any separate infrastructure here. It's all car infrastructure, and cars suck at sharing. Let them share with road users they can't bully for once.
> Corners have ramps for wheelchair accessibility.
Yes, but they don't need 20m of lowered curbs. I'm from Europe and you just need a small 2m corridor to each direction. Otherwise what's the point of the curb if there is no curb for so long in a dangerous spot such as an intersection? :-(
The numbers they gave is more than a doubling, while they were quite clear about the limitations of their data. That includes not knowing how many AVs are on the road, which is something that the companies should be able to provide.
Also look at the claims that AVs have not caused death or serious injury. (I noticed that they did not claim that AVs have not caused injury.) That is great, except I would not expect any given corporate vehicle fleet, autonomous or human controlled, to have a record of causing death or serious injury over a short period of time. The sample size is just too small.
Either way, there's not enough data to prove anything. On the other hand, we have a group with a clear conflict of interest (the makers of AVs) up against a group which has noted concerning incidents but has not been provided with the data they need even when it should be available. Then we have a third group who are being asked to let an experiment on the general public proceed. I doubt that it would pass many academic ethics committees, but if you have money, well, go ahead!
In February they hit 1,000,000 miles cumulative for all previous years. Last week they hit 3,000,000 miles.
Cars kill about as many Americans as the Vietnam War, but every year. Aside from guns, I can't think of anything else so deadly that we give to our children as they enter adulthood.
It is common, it is not part of the news cycle. We care more about the unlikely terrorist. People are bad with numbers.
Personally, I think it would a huge ethics violation to not be running tests of autonomous cars (not talking Telsa toy driving stuff).
A cumulative 3,000,000 miles is nothing. The US Bureau of Transportation Statistics estimates there are over 3,000,000,000,000 miles of vehicle traffic per year.[1] The estimated number of fatalities is around 50,000. There is no way to assess whether there will be fewer or more traffic fatalities with current AV technology given the limited amount of data.
As for the unlikely terrorist bit, just in case you weren't around when 911 happened: even mathematically inclined people were shocked. Not only was it the most lethal attack on American soil (nearly 3,000 dead), it was a foreign attack. People genuinely didn't know what was going to happen and were living in fear for a while. Unfortunately, some people still carry those fears to this day. Even though the numbers don't back them up, I wouldn't be so quick to
dismiss their emotions and I certainly wouldn't attack them for the all too human mistake of misattributing risk.
Humans average 60,000,000 miles between fatalitys [1]. It is a average of 1.25 million miles between injurys. 3 million miles is not a statistically significant amount of data to make a valid estimate, not even close.
That is not to say that safe testing can not proceed or that they are being unsafe in their testing or validation process, but people are bad with numbers, so it is important to realize the actual magnitude of the status quo and what we are comparing against.
Anecdotally, I feel much safer around AVs as a pedestrian or cyclist than human driven vehicles. Way more predictable, especially post pandemic when it seems like half of drivers have some behavioral issue.
Driving condition matter since they vary from place to place. It matters for people, and it most likely matters for autonomous vehicles (either due to training data sets or direct programming of traffic regulations). To choose a mundane example, that is admittedly more likely to affect people, consider how many people try to make a left turn into a (North American) roundabout or who park in a bike lane. (Sometimes it is deliberate, but sometimes it is an out of town person who has never dealt with it before.)
That said, I would expect a San Fransisco decision to be based upon San Francisco data.
Anyone seen the rushing dash cam videos where pedestrians are throwing themselves at cars in order to get legal liability payouts. Not that I'm accusing all of the reports here of being something like that, but I wonder if robotaxis are going to result in something like that and actually make the entire driving world a lot less ethical.
You will always have opportunists. This article is not about that. The specific incident described by the article is about a car going through caution tape and getting caught up in a fallen overhead powerline. There's very little chance of payouts there, though there probably should be if considerable damage was caused. When it comes to interference with emergency responders, I also doubt it being a case of people looking for payouts.
A lot of AV enthusiasts seem to be painting the world as against them, when the reality is that people don't like being unwilling experimental subjects. If there was proof that AVs were safe, I could imagine people jumping on them in droves. Why would one reject having a vehicle where you have the option to drive yourself or have the driving being done for you? (I realize this article isn't about that scenario.) On the other hand, the tech industry's mantra of moving fast and breaking things - something that existed in practice long before the likes of Facebook - has bred an incredible amount of distrust. That distrust has only grown as it has shifted from the technology itself into grand social experiments.
> If there was proof that AVs were safe, I could imagine people jumping on them in droves
These services have waiting lists.
San Francisco is simply a city that can’t help but distract from its endemic problems by torching those who bet on it. (That said, I blame these firms for choosing San Francisco.)
Waymo and Cruise won't actually release comprehensive data. So anecdotes are all we have to go by... and they don't look particularly good. These are egregious driving mistakes that a human driver would almost never make.
Everyone needs to experience these things for themselves before unleashing them on the public. I want them to work, but in their current state, they are an absolute menace.
That’s really awful. These kind of incidents need to be investigated. Whatever situation caused the car to just run into the path of a pedestrian in a crosswalk can’t be allowed.
The article includes a month-by-month graph of incident counts, broken down by company, that shows the "skyrocketing" behavior starting in March of this year.
The article notes that the data is incomplete, but that only means that there are more incidents than the graph shows.
And I'd also expect that part of the reason for the increase is that there are many more miles driven now by AVs than a year ago. But in a way that doesn't matter: an absolute increase in incidents is a problem, regardless of how much driving is going on.
This is especially the case when we're talking about things that human drivers are less likely to do, like driving through caution tape and snagging Muni wires. Not sure how often human drivers run over fire hoses or drive directly into active fire scenes, but I'd expect it's not often when compared with AV software that seems to just not know it's supposed to avoid those things.
> The article notes that the data is incomplete, but that only means that there are more incidents than the graph shows.
But what it doesn't note is where the data is incomplete.
If they started actively looking for incidents in March of this year, and the previous months are just whatever they happened to notice on social media, then it could be both true that "the data is incomplete" and that "there has not been a skyrocketing of incidents".
"Self driving cars were born in San Francisco. Companies like Cruise and Waymo are creating something that will literally save lives. But some San Francisco politicians hate technology so much, they’re literally willing to make up statistics lying to the public to justify banning them. It’s a lesson in killing the golden goose."
- Garry Tan
https://youtu.be/rjgUPUKD-Sc
I've commented elsewhere I don't think the chart is informative (and listed several good reasons why). But all you're describing is a 300% increase, not several orders of magnitude increase.
If you look at Google's QPS chart (maintained in crayon by the original engineers!) you will see that they frequently had to rescale the chart by factors of ten because their growth rate in the early days was exponential.
The chart is not an example of exponential growth.
Exponential growth, several orders of magnitude... these are not what "skyrocketing" means, in actuality. So you are correct, none of those phrases describe the graph here, but none of those phrases matter.
It's a sudden, alarming, and seemingly sustained trend, and it's worth writing an article over.
Have you ever looked at the chart of the velocity of a rocket?
Rockets accelerate from 0 to 17,000 mph in ~5-6 minutes. the initial phase is exponential.
(it's not useful being pedantic here, I think I've captured what people think when they hear the word "skyrocket"; it's intentionally used to frame the discussion)
Solid rockets are pretty much binary in terms of thrust (they are either 100% or 0%), so they would accelerate fastest at low speeds, and accelerate slower as they encounter air resistance, and then begin to accelerate faster as they move into thinner air. But the rate of acceleration is, to my understanding, going to be highest in the first few seconds when air resistance is negligible, and about the same when they reach space where air resistance is 0. Exponential velocity increases mean that the rate of acceleration has to increase, which isn't something that is happening with rockets.
A "skyrocket" implies something different than a "spacerocket". Anything going 17,000 miles per hour is in LEO and no longer in the sky. Using this definition we should look at "fox 3" class missiles as they are launched from the sky at targets in the sky. Hypersonic missiles are actually air-breathing, and not rocket powered so they are excluded. Those missiles have an acceleration graph that is basically linear, but they start out already travelling several hundred miles per hour at a minimum, they then accelerate using a solid rocket motor (providing roughly equal thrust throughout its burn) up to a top speed of Mach 4 or so. After that they then use momentum to reach their target, but generally only lose speed after the engine cuts off.
So I posit that "skyrocketing" is starting from a fixed base, rapid linear increase, followed by a gradual decrease.
Solid rocket motors aren't binary, they just can't be dynamically throttled(early KSP was wrong).
In SRMs, usually a hole is left in the center so that the entire length burns towards inside-out rather than bottom-top so to avoid shifting center of gravity, and the shape of the hole is chosen so change in circumference length matches desired thrust profile. This usually means a star shape; the total lengths of edges in the star is longer than what with a simple circular hole, but the points erode faster and decreases reaction surface.
I think the more useful visualization is that a rocket flies at constant dv^2/dt ~ 1.4, with velocity following an exponential. The first derivative being constant satisfies the criteria for an exponential something.
Now imagine making a chart that adds a 100x multiplier to that rocket's data! Only that chart now can be called "skyrocketing" then, because it dwarfs the rocket's original data...
The fact that more "skyrocketing" things exist doesn't invalidate that the word "skyrocketing" could apply to what's presented here, and it does accurately frame the discussion around the sudden, alarming trend of self driving car incidents over time.
The various causes of the data jump/spike/skyrocket/whatever are fairly discussed in the article, and based on what's there it seems reasonable to conclude that there are much more complicated forces at play here other than, "self driving cars bad". The chart illustrates the sudden change, but explicitly tries to provide a number of very different possible explanations for the data.
Hard to get alarmed without knowing what the rate is. If the growth in miles driven is outpacing the growth in incidents, it's cause for the opposite of alarm.
"Skyrocketing" is not a well-defined term. Nowhere is exponential growth required to qualify. A 300% increase in a month on this sort of metric would absolutely qualify as skyrocketing to me.
It's really bizarre how the dominant discussion here is based on some people seeing a huge increase in incidents and trying to debate that "skyrocketing" is the wrong word.
It’s also language that the mainstream media uses to install as much anxiety and terror into as many people as it possibly can. These publications want you to be permanently miserable, outraged, and most importantly constantly refreshing your phone.
I think it's absolutely critical that public officials report what they see: a dramatic increase in reported incidents. Maybe - probably imo - this is "just" due to an increase in miles driven, but without access to data to support it, public officials can't draw conclusions and they should talk about it. The public cannot simply entrust safety to commercial taxi operators i.e. take Waymo's word for it (or the taxicab mafia's word, for that matter).
"in that month of March, dangerous self-driving car incidents increased more than 300% over the previous month (30 such incidents in February, 96 in March)."
The parent comment is saying that the 300% increase is tied to a 300% increase in amount of driveless car activity. In which case, of course incidents increased. If you add 3x as many normal cars on the road the traffic incidents would increase in the same way!
> If you add 3x as many normal cars on the road the traffic incidents would increase in the same way!
Are you sure? In a lot of cases you would get traffic jams. The rate of incidents in a traffic jam are likely different from non-traffic jam conditions.
A study from Australia says: "Results showed an approximately linear relationship between traffic volume and accident frequency at lower traffic volumes. In the highest traffic volumes, poisson and negative binomial models showed a significant quadratic explanatory term as accident frequency increases at a higher rate." [1]
What's worse, a big point in the article is that we don't know exactly what the denominator is on the incident rate, and we are not even really sure what the numerator is either. The companies running these protracted live-road experiments are not being forthcoming with their data on how many cars they are running, when, and exactly what the incident count is.
Quoting the article:
"The city is left in the dark about the exact number of driverless taxis operating in its streets, and the miles they’ve traveled. Data captured by state regulators, officials say, doesn’t capture the extent of the vehicles’ disruption and potential hazard on city streets."
Your last paragraph perfectly describes what for me was the key epiphany of my adult life. When I gained the scientific maturity to read papers and I realized how shaky the ground was upon which most studies stand, it was pretty enlightening.
There may not be data to support this, but on the other hand, informal perceptions -- even if unsupported by data -- matters a great deal with products and systems.
But I would ask the people living there what they perceive, not just relying on a news reporter.
I live in SF and have experience taking cruise rides so I can provide some (obviously anecdotal) information. Overall I'm a big fan of the autonomous vehicles companies but there are downsides with their current abilities.
Pros:
- As mentioned in the article, the cars generally follow traffic laws. I see a lot of drivers run red lights around my apartment, but at this point I'm fairly confident that a Cruise won't accidentally run a light and hit me. The article starts with a story of a Cruise ignoring dangerous road conditions and caution tape, but that behavior could be hopefully be fixed by working with SDC companies to standardize how road hazards are marked.
- They're electric. We've got some serious climate issues to deal with and if these companies can give people more non-ICE ride options, then I think we should be working to normalize them. I feel similarly about the electric scooters in the city.
- There's no one in them but me. I definitely fall in the camp of people that prefer not to have to talk to my Uber/Lyft drivers so that's a plus in my book. I also like the tagline mentioned in the article that the cars never drive drunk, drowsy, or distracted. I don't have to worry about who my driver is or what state of mind they're in.
- Cost. The rides are cheaper than equivalent Uber/Lyft rides in my experience. One could argue that they're going to make driving for ride-sharing companies unviable as a way to make a living, but that's true for most new automation in a given industry.
Cons:
- I'm a cyclist, and I often make eye contact with drivers to ensure they're aware of me. Without a driver, there's not a good way to ensure the car knows I'm there. That being said, I've personally never had a close call with one on my bike.
- As mentioned in the article, they can get in the way of first responders. I don't think that's justifiable and should be something that these companies prioritize before expanding their operating hours and range.
So yeah, a couple anecdotes and thoughts from someone in the area. They're not perfect, but I think the upside potential is great and the city should be working to accommodate them and get human drivers off the roads as much as possible.
> As mentioned in the article, they can get in the way of first responders. I don't think that's justifiable and should be something that these companies prioritize
However I also don't want them sideswiping a cyclist in a rush to get out of the way of an ambulance.
informal perceptions are about the last thing you want when making decisions about large-scale technology roll-outs. Instead, people should be informed with the highest quality data, and need to be reminded that informal perceptions are often biased and skewed.
A study of the formalism called Promise Theory will quickly show how that is not true.
Autonomous agents -- humans or otherwise -- base their decision on the imperfect information they have. No one has a global, perfect view of everything, and so the perception of how well other agents fulfill their promises (formally defined as intentions made known to an audience) will always be based upon local, imperfect information.
I can mention other frameworks -- Cynefine, and the error where one confuses a Complicated domain (that can still be accurately modeled) with a Complex domain (that is impossible to accurately model). Or what James C Scott discusses an idea called "legibility" and the fallacy in imposing legibility on complex systems in his book, Seeing Like a State.
Perceptions matter. Blaming the participants of a system for their being uninformed will not lead to voluntary cooperation, much less reliable systems that involve both machines and humans.
> Autonomous agents -- humans or otherwise -- base their decision on the imperfect information they have. No one has a global, perfect view of everything, and so the perception of how well other agents fulfill their promises (formally defined as intentions made known to an audience) will always be based upon local, imperfect information.
There's going to have to be (or there may already be) a rule against accusing people of being ChatGPT, but I can't believe that this is an argument that the "imperfect information" that average people have about some condition or event is somehow more important than the actuality of the condition or event precisely because of how wrong average people can be?
Because voluntary cooperation? I should only be concerned with that if I'm doing PR work for these companies. It's their job to sell safety, the only thing I'm concerned with is when people are lying. Or intentionally confusing the public about some fact, polling the confused public about what they think the facts are, then reporting the poll to further confuse the fact in lieu of simply reporting the data.
At the end of the day, people always make decisions based on emotion, because every decision involves assessing risk, including the risk of things that were not thought of testing. Data only tells you about the past while decisions only affect your future.
There's a difference between making a decision based on emotion, and making a decision based on wisdom and data. Frequently, when I have a hard decision to make, I wait a while until I'm feeling "less emotional", so that my normal knee-jerk reactions don't dominate.
I have no particular data to support this, but anecdotally, my biggest issue with Cruise testing a couple years ago was that it was excessively cautious - randomly braking for no obvious reason, dithering at intersections trying to yield, that kind of thing. I could live with that.
Now (literally yesterday) a driverless Cruise car trying to make a left turn was yielding to me walking across the intersection, and then suddenly decided to go before I'd cleared the intersection. Would it have hit me if I hadn't scurried out of the way? I don't know, but it didn't inspire confidence, and it doesn't take many experiences like this to turn public opinion. Cruise in particular seems to have made their cars more aggressive in my small personal sample size.
I have to say I am amused that when it’s news articles of cars running through construction we suddenly start thinking about statistics and when it’s crime in S.F. we jump straight to how the police need to crack down.
Trying to engage more constructively... Do you think that this is essentially a scare-piece (and is no way supported by the relatively limited data that is available [which is a concern in of itself])?
Second question, what if the word 'skyrocket' were replaced with 'increased', would that change your perspective?
For the data we have, year on year increase of 30x, from 3 to 90, is not enough orders of magnitude for you to object saying "sky rocket" - that you call it a scare campaign?
It is part of the point the city is missing data, these AI car companies have not been transparent with what they know.
1 crash to 8 crashes is 800%. In percentage terms, it's kind of accurate to say "skyrocket". But in absolute terms, it might not mean anything, especially if the number of taxis is up 1000%.
I'm wary about using public roads to test these, but I think the way the data is presented is misleading. I'm not sure how it's misleading, but separating "incidents" into categories (safety, traffic, accident, etc) might be a good start.
For example, I could start coning cruise cars, and cause these numbers to skyrocket. While that's an inconvenience to other drivers, it's not a safety issue at all.
By the way, as a motorcyclist (and thus hyper annoyed at bad driving), I find Uber/Lyft/Food drivers to be both much more dangerous and inconveniencing than these self driving cars. We should have scrutiny on the safety of these machines, but they're hardly the biggest problem facing SF.
> For example, I could start coning cruise cars, and cause these numbers to skyrocket
And why would that not be a valid data point? Cars driving on public roads need to successfully handle all regular day-to-day situations, not just the happy path. It seems like almost every day I run into some Cruise or Waymo (mostly Cruise) vehicle stuck in the middle of the street blocking traffic, and that should not be excused as "oh it's just learning".
Self driving car companies love to release reports comparing themselves against regular drivers when it comes to collisions and deaths, but conveniently skip over every other aspect of driving. The way things are today, if we continue to release more and more of them into San Francisco it will basically lead up to a total traffic deadlock, and yet people will still keep repeating "oh but they kill 0.1 fewer people per million miles so it's an improvement".
During the height of Critical Mass, bicyclists would surround minivans and keep them from leaving. Drivers don't know what to do because if they push too hard they'll knock over and injure a cyclist. I don't expect self-driving cars to deal any better with cones, or any hostile action towards a car.
I've participated and watched critical mass any number of times. I've never seen cyclists target cars randomly.
The only time you will be surrounded in a minivan is if you try to drive through the cyclists, or otherwise act aggressively or unsafely.
Critical mass is a protest movement. If you drive your vehicle into the middle of a protest against vehicles in a way that puts people in danger, don't be surprised when people react defensively.
> Drivers don't know what to do because if they push too hard they'll knock over and injure a cyclist.
They should do nothing. You cannot knock over a cyclist in a stationary car.
Swarming a car and preventing it from moving- sure, the safest thing for the car to do is stop driving, but... I don't think that's really a good defense of confrontational bikers.
Most of the incidents involving cars were instigated by the drivers of cars. I couldn't find an instance where a car wasn't trying to ride through the cyclists, or the driver hadn't picked a fight verbally.
Can you highlight an incident where cyclists antagonized an otherwise passive observer in a car?
> a mother from Redwood City, California, traveling with her two young daughters in the vehicle, tried to drive through the mass of riders. A witness claimed to have observed the driver strike a cyclist and flee before cyclists chased and surrounded her vehicle.[68][69] The driver denied striking a cyclist
Like I said: the incidents are largely instigated by drivers. It is unclear if she hit someone, but it IS clear that she drove into a mass of cyclists. Again, don’t drive your vehicle into an anti vehicle protest, or any protest for that matter. It sounds like if she had just done nothing, nothing would have happened. I’m not saying the cyclists are in the right. I am saying that if you drive a multi ton vehicle into a mass of cyclists protesting the dominance of multi ton vehicles it is an actual and perceived threat to their safety. Even if the driver doesn’t think it is. You shouldn’t be surprised when people respond.
"It's a peaceful protest as long as you don't engage with it". This is you. What actual reason is there for society to find this kind of attitude acceptable or compelling?
Not sure what you expect here. If you become violent in response to provocation, you are still a peaceful protester (within some limit of violence, which surrounding a car so it can't move certainly fits with).
A non-peaceful protest is one where protesters actively attack people and property that are not engaging with them in any conceivable way.
If protestors organized in front of a police station to protest police violence and then attacked a police officer who tried to make her way through the crowd to the office, would you still be defending the protestors?
It’s not an excuse to just be in the way and then attack people who try to get through.
If they in any way used disproportionate force? Yes.
This is what needs to be understood: a car moving through a group of cyclists can easily cause death or injury, and regularly does. The cyclists aren’t going after people who disagree with them. They are going after people who willfully try to use a multi ton vehicle against the human body to get their way.
The two critical mass's I participated in blocking traffic was limited to everyone passing through an intersection and then continuing on. Annoying for drivers no doubt but never as egregious as locking someone in specifically for an extended amount of time.
The riders tend to move pretty quickly so it was at most a few minutes and never swarming vehicles to a standstill.
I kinda think a vehicle being surrounded by people on bicycles is a much different situation than someone putting a traffic cone on the hood.
I think you're actually disproving your own point: a human driver would immediately know what to do if someone put a cone on their hood. But both a human driver and AV would have a similarly difficult time when faced with a bunch of cyclists surrounding them.
Uhhh... if you're surrounding by multiple layers of cyclists and try to drive your way out hitting a few cyclists, the cyclists are going to swarm your car and kill you.
To be fair, I think this only happened a few times and it was caused by a small number of bad players, while the majority of Critical Mass participants were ethically (if somewhat inconveniently) demonstrating their collective power.
What happens when you cross an autonomous car and stand-your-ground gun laws? Through in some citizens united where a corporation is a person, and you might have cars that fight back...
The future must be interesting, I feel bad we only get to see the 20's, like whoever lived in the 20's in the last century and died before the 70's saw nothing!
> And why would that not be a valid data point? Cars driving on public roads need to successfully handle all regular day-to-day situations, not just the happy path
Are you considering someone putting a traffic cone on a vehicle a day-to-day situation?
What would you do if you were stopped at an intersection and someone put a traffic cone in front of you? Sit there for the rest of your life blocking everyone behind you, or move it/drive around it? Same for literally every example that deviates from the happy path, no matter how minor. Construction work, something fallen on the road, a delivery van stopped on the side, temporary street closures. These cars are nowhere close to being intelligent enough to handle city driving, and won't be for a very long time.
They put the cone on the hood, it's not an obstacle on the road. The car could try to shake it off, maybe, but is shaking it into the middle of the street and creating an obstacle really the right move? Should self-driving cars be required to have a robotic arm capable of moving a traffic cone from a car surface to the sidewalk to handle this specific situation?
Also the anti-car activists can easily move on to a wide variety of other methods to obstruct sensors.
> Should self-driving cars be required to have a robotic arm
That does raise the question of what kinds of adverse situations an AV should have specialized hardware or software to handle. Maybe they should have a robotic arm! I dunno, probably not, but maybe!
A less silly example might be if the car breaks down. When a human driver is in the car, they can put the car in neutral, get out, and push it to the side of the road, out of the way of traffic. An AV will just sit there, blocking traffic, until a tow truck can arrive (which in most places can take 45 minutes or more). Granted, in this case, I don't think there is anything an AV can do. But I think these sorts of things are worth thinking about.
I'd be interested to know how Waymo/Cruise currently sense and respond to catastrophic failure. A blown tire? Brake failure? Broken timing belt?
Which isn't to say that humans respond especially well to these things, but at scale, AV should be able to handle them not just as well as humans do but much better.
If we can have it give a little shake or window knock to the car in front of me, stopped at the light that's turned green, checking texts - consider me on board!
Putting cone on self driving car is vandalism and should be punished accordingly. Self driving companies have footage of people doing it. Is SFPD looking for these people? Self driving companies shouldn't need to be able to deal with criminals trying to actively disable it. These cars weren't designed to drive in a warzone. Most businesses are not able to operate when criminals try to actively interfere with its operations. Some basic level of law and order is required for modern society to exist.
Vandalism in California requires "maliciously damaging, destroying or defacing someone else's property". A cone on a hood does none of those things.
It might be some other crime, but we can't slap people with charges that won't stick in a court of law.
The counterpoint to the argument is that you shouldn't be deploying deadly machinery on public roads with no ability to handle common issues and expecting it to be a problem for the SFPD/CHP.
It would be amusing to see how humans react if you run up to their cars while stopped, put a traffic cone on the hood, and run away. Would most people try to shake it off while driving away, or stop in the middle of traffic? What's actually the right thing to do, both as a person and as an AV?
More pertinently, should it be legal for people to go up and put traffic cones on top of actively driven vehicles, intentionally to confuse or disrupt the driver? Or should they be punished?
> It would be amusing to see how humans react if you run up to their cars while stopped, put a traffic cone on the hood, and run away.
Hah, good call. I'm thinking that if I was at a traffic light or stop sign, and it wasn't a major road with other lanes of cars and lots of traffic whizzing by, I'd hop out, move the cone, and go about my day. If I didn't feel safe, I'd accelerate slowly enough so as not to shake off the cone, and move to the side of the road and deal with it there.
> More pertinently, should it be legal for people to go up and put traffic cones on top of actively driven vehicles
No, it absolutely shouldn't. In the case at hand, what if one of these AVs with a cone on it ended up blocking traffic and delaying an ambulance or fire truck, causing someone to die? I get that this is a protest movement, but I wouldn't want that on my conscience. And people protest in all kinds of ways that aren't legal (often called "civil disobedience"). People who do that should expect to suffer consequences, and accept that outcome as a part of the protest.
It's a lot higher than 0.1 people. 40 people died in SF last year due to traffic accidents. I've yet to hear about a self driving car killing someone despite how many there are in the city.
I also disagree that coning a self-driving car's sensor is a "regular day to day situation". Throwing paint on someone's windshield or slashing their tires is a crime.
It looks like neither Waymo or Cruise has driven enough miles (>70M miles driven per fatality) to really expect to see a fatality if the SDCs are roughly the same as an average driver?
If you start putting cones on the hoods of human driven taxis at red lights, that will also cause traffic diversions. The tendency of humans to pester the driverless taxis more than the drivered ones doesn’t seem like any metric related to the technology’s performance. Someone putting a traffic cone on the hood of your car is more than a typical deviation from the happy path.
As to your personal anecdote, all I can say is it’s different from my own experience driving in SF or riding in my partner’s car. We see plenty of driverless vehicles, and generally they’re behaving smarter than the average SF Saturday morning driver, not worse. I don’t live in a cruise-populated neighborhood so I’m sure your experience may vary elsewhere.
On that note, my neighborhood doesn’t have much transit at all. It’s a 30m walk to a grocery store or 25 to the 3rd st muni. We only get limited bus service. So I would be very happy to see additional transit options in SF.
I wouldn't call it daily from my observations, but it's common enough in the Mission that it's not a surprise (I'm probably within a mile of the garages that Cruise and Waymo use).
Depending where someone put a cone on my car i would possibly just run them over or drive off unsafely if i felt that it was an attempt to rob me or steal my car.
Having things like that categorized differently makes sense because it’s caused by humans being dicks. But maybe you are right and that is the new reality we live in where none of us get to advance because of a small group of angry and stupid people.
Man, and further up this post there was someone talking about running over groups of cyclists if they maliciously surrounded their car.
Try to remain calm. You’re generally not allowed to just _murder_ people who attempt to inconvenience, detain, or rob you, even though they are ‘being dicks’. That’s not how crime is dealt with in a stable society. It’s not a ‘new reality’.
I really hope we’re not devolving into a place where more people think this way…
How far gone are you to think that kidnapping and robbery aren't violent acts that justify violent responses? If you try to detain me illegally (also known as false imprisonment) you're just asking for a face full of lead. But 'Murder' is unlawful killing. This would be self-defense.
Right, but the law doesn't allow you (in California, at least) to assume that someone (for example) putting a cone on your car is also intending to rob or kidnap or kill you.
And even then, you are not legally allowed to use deadly force to protect your belongings; you can only do so if your life is in danger.
Certainly some places have "stand your ground" and "castle doctrine" laws that give you more latitude to use self-defense as legal justification, but even in places like that, it's not absolute.
The acts I listed [edit: or the one in the grandparent post - it’s literally talking about putting a cone on a car…] don’t necessarily involve violence.
Even if they do, self-defense has to be proportional. Laws obviously differ in different places, but, generally, yes, you can defend yourself. You generally can’t kill someone unless you yourself are under a plausible threat of death though.
Thanks for that link. Points 8, 9 and 10 seem so appropriate.
I often feel that we’re similarly in danger of forgetting the adage that “it is better to let the crime of a guilty person go unpunished than to condemn the innocent.”
I’m not sure we really are ‘that far gone’ though. I’m hopeful that people just always feel like this a little, to greater and lesser extents. Both the world and America have been through darker periods in the past.
Equally we seem to be devolving to a place where more people think doing things like this is ok. The solution isn’t to run them over - your advice to remain calm is good.
But we need harsh penalties for people that intentionally block traffic. Prison and life altering fines are a first step. This will absolutely deter this type of behavior.
You want life-altering fines and prison for inconveniencing cars? Do you think the US judicial system is at all capable of applying this fairly? That law would exist for a day before someone deemed "undesirable" is arrested for not getting across the street faster than the crosswalk signal.
Mental breakdown in the street? Jail
Cyclist riding in a way the cops don't like? Jail
Grandma can't get her wheelchair up the curb ramp? Jail
I’m saying organized, pre-meditated action designed to disrupt traffic. Laying in the street to protest, for example. Someone could be blocked while driving to a hospital etc.
People should have the courage of their convictions. This allows that.
Not as a protest obviously, but that's irrelevant. If the fire truck can't get to the fire because the car blocks the road, it can't get to the fire.
Responsibility stops with the CEO, so we need to hold them accountable. The alternative is to say that driverless can do any and all harm and nobody can be ever held reponsible simply because there is no driver.
> we need harsh penalties for people that intentionally block traffic
They were talking about people intentionally messing with SDVs and causing incidents
You tried to turn it on them by saying
> So for instance, the CEO of the self-driving car company should go to jail whenever one of their cars blocks a fire truck. Right?
Presumably equating a SDV having an issue with people intentionally blocking traffic.
I commented on that with a tongue-in-cheek statement about the CEO intentionally blocking firetrucks as a protest.
You replied with
> Not as a protest obviously, but that's irrelevant.
The other commenter said
> Intent matters.
You profess confusion about how their comment follows the thread, but that's the whole point. You said CEOs should be responsible for their vehicles blocking traffic in response to a message about people intentionally blocking traffic. That gives the appearance that you think a fault in a SDV is equivalent to intentionally blocking traffic. A SDV having a fault is like your car breaking down. Are you personally liable if your broken vehicle blocks a fire truck? You may be subject to the ire of the FD and they may destroy your vehicle in the execution of their duty, but you aren't treated like you intended to block traffic. You just happened to have a vehicle that decided to stop working.
If that's the penalty for delaying traffic, a DUI or texting while driving should be life in prison. Delaying traffic is much less likely to get someone killed.
Prison and life altering fines are already in place for those. If you kill a person while DD you will be charged for that and face years/decades in prison.
The GP said DUI or texting alone would have to involve life sentences, regardless if anyone was hurt or killed.
The point is that punishments that aren't in proportion to the crime don't lead to a particularly good society to live in. A society that imposes a "life altering fine" for delaying traffic is not a society I'd like to live in, and I suspect many others would agree with me.
I think if you said you’ll throw activists that intentionally block traffic in prison for 1 year you’d get 70%+ approval for the position. People are sick of the lawlessness and the excuses for it and inaction. Times up.
Putting large vision-blocking objects on people's cars while they're using it is absolutely in the class of things that will get people killed entirely gratuitously, and while I wouldn't go as far as to say that it's right to kill the perpetrator, they certainly have no right to complain if happen not to survive the encounter.
> I'm not sure how it's misleading, but separating "incidents" into categories
The premise is that these vehicles would be unilaterally "better" than human drivers and that would justify their creation and use. If that's not the case, then perhaps we need to fully reevaluate the value proposition here.
> While that's an inconvenience to other drivers, it's not a safety issue at all.
It hasn't proved to be a safety issue _yet_. We don't actually have enough data to forecast with here. I see this as a safety signal with troubling implications.
> as a motorcyclist (and thus hyper annoyed at bad driving)
This is another safety signal I would be wary of... unless "hyper annoyed" is just hyperbole for it's own sake.
> We should have scrutiny on the safety of these machines, but they're hardly the biggest problem facing SF.
The problem with automation is small problems have a tendency to combine into massive emergent problems once you start scaling your fleet up.
> The problem with automation is small problems have a tendency to combine into massive emergent problems once you start scaling your fleet up.
Not in this case, no. Every driver has a small problem. Each ai driver is just another driver, replacing some driver.
Unless the ai driver problem is not small but actually quite big, I don't see how automation economics would worsen the situation. On the contrary, them all being identical and automated makes fixing the small problems much more viable.
> For example, I could start coning cruise cars, and cause these numbers to skyrocket.
Google could get tough about that. If you have Google Play Services on your phone, they know who you are. "Your Google account has been terminated for violation of Google's terms of service."
I moved out of SF ~2018, and only recently revisited, and the increased frequency with which I saw robocars was immediately concerning to me, largely based on the potential for things to go wrong, and with just how frequent they were.
My second thought was, after hearing friends and family still there echo nothing for disdain for them, "how long before someone starts setting these on fire?" as some sort of nuisance campaign against the things. Turns out, 1) you don't need fire, and 2) not that long, since the cone thing started happening about a week afterwards.
I know this is a tired argument, but it's not wrong: There is equal or greater cause for concern with cars driven by people, we're just used to those horrors and reluctant to trade them for a different set of horrors, even if they are conclusively less horrible.
I lived carless in downtown SF for 10 years, usually with a walking commute, and it was not pleasant. Packed streets full of angry, stressed drivers honking and swerving and practically revving their engines as lights change so they can gun it past cyclists and pedestrians down the next narrow street. Anyone trying to replace these agro drivers with marginally-safer robots has my support.
Depending on driverless taxis instead of having emotional people who need parking all the time seems to be a win, as long as they are safe and someone is held accountable when they mess up.
I am very unwilling to change 'people are flawed but (mostly) held accountable' to 'a corporation owned robot car ran someone over because of a software glitch and it is nobody's fault'. The problems with 'oops we got hacked or lost your data or locked you out of a service or deprecated a product because we spend no money on things that are not income generating' can not be passed on to such a system.
Suppose it's the near future and driverless cars are causing 5x fewer injuries per mile than human drivers. (5x fewer != 0, so some injuries and deaths still occur)
What accountability would you like to see in that situation?
If there is an investigation and if it is found that someone said 'don't bother with those tests just push to market' or 'let's fire the legacy system patching team because they make no money even though the cars are still driving around' and that caused directly or indirectly a car to glitch and run someone over or to get hacked and used for a crime then someone goes to prison and/or the company gets liquidated or something in between that is reasonable to ensure that it is not tempting for another company to do it again.
I am not a lawyer or a legislator and I cannot come with a regulation or law or something that would do this, but I am sure someone can.
It's a lot easier to hold a single corporation accountible than it is for the distributed responsibility of individuals. Uber killed someone and they had to leave the industry. Tesla is being actively investigated for their fly by night approach.
Additionally, when one of these cars fucks up, these companies know exactly what happened because they are collecting data about the cars performance 24/7.
> Additionally, when one of these cars fucks up, these companies know exactly what happened because they are collecting data about the cars performance 24/7.
And if it turns out they had data that showed that they knew someone was gonna get killed, but they would make more money not fixing the bug -- I would want someone to go to jail.
I have no dog in this fight. If anything, my final takeaway was that my impressions were entirely anecdotal and/or experiential, and not based on any sort of legitimate analysis with useful data. It should probably be done, but my point was more that it's only getting more complicated as people take action based on their perception, whether that perception is supported rationally or not. So now, on top of a reasonably already complex engineering problem is an additional layer to correct for: irrational human reaction.
I don't think that complicates anything from a policy perspective. If self-driving cars are good (i.e. safer than human drivers), we should be rolling them out. If a small number of people interfere with them or damage them, we should just arrest those people and prosecute them for the relevant crimes. I don't think that vandalism of self-driving cars is going to be a serious issue long term, given that anyone vandalizing them is going to be on camera, plus people will just get used to them and find other things to be mad about.
SFPD won't do anything about property crimes, to include vandalism, other than to take a preliminary report, on a schedule determined by the department (eg: you call them, they show up 8-12 hours later, uninterested in taking your report). This is because, currently, their DA's office isn't going to prosecute any property crimes.
That can all change, but speculating about the nature or timing of any changes like that is well outside my area, so I'll sit and watch from a distance.
And, again, I'm not vested in any outcome here. It'll work out however it works out, and I'm 2000+ miles away from it, so it won't have much effect on my life.
>There is equal or greater cause for concern with cars driven by people
No there isn't. Driverless cars drive under a fraction of the conditions and in self selected locations precisely because the tech is still shoddy. Not to mention they only function at all because they're vastly outnumbered by humans who know how to respond to them.
Let's do an actual experiment to compare. 100% driverless cars with current tech, from different companies on all road conditions that humans drive on during busy hours in a city and see how that goes. To even attempt to compare driverless cars to human drivers without seeing the dynamics of a non-trivial amount of them interacting, which humans need to do all the time, is meaningless.
Given the millions of miles driven since the start and a single pedestrian death in 2018, I would hesitate to call the tech shoddy. SF alone has 20-30 pedestrian deaths per year despite their well funded and almost completely ineffectual "vision zero" program. If there's been a second pedestrian fatality since I can't find it online.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, millions of miles for autonomous vehicles is a miniscule drop in the vast ocean of miles driven per year in just the US. It's essentially where you'd round the number to.
In 2020, a very down year, the Bureau of Transportation stats[1] give 1,934,743 MILLION miles driven. This Verge article[2] shows for 2020 autonomous vehicles drove 1.99 million miles in California. Let's be generous and assume across the rest of the US it's equal to double that, given Cali is the hotbed of testing at the moment. That puts us up to basically 6 million miles driven.
You're attempting to compare:
1,934,743,000,000 to
6,000,000
The data is not in yet on current generation autonomous vehicles.
Indeed you are correct: we have statistically significant samples and the autonomous vehicles are matching or exceeding fatality rates for miles driven. Meeting or exceeding human error rates would appear to support the hypothesis that it is not "shoddy".
That's not really true. They now do drive the entirety of San Francisco, 24/7, in all weather conditions. I think it's a pretty apples to apples comparison.
The one point where I agree is there aren't as many of them as there are human cars, and it's possible that in large numbers there could be some unintended consequences. Think 1000 of them getting stuck at the same location. There should be provisions limiting how fast they can scale up to make sure that doesn't happen.
Uber performed self driving car tests in downtown San Francisco for a bit. I personally saw an error where self driving cars turning right on red failed to yield to pedestrians in the crosswalk who had right of way.
It was a bug. The driver looped and tried again while I was standing there and it happened again.
It was an incident.
It was a safety incident.
Getting killed by a robot breaking the rules is no less dead than if it were a human. And there’s no comfort in the thought that it might happen less often with a robot driving.
Your argument that human drivers suck commits the fallacy of whataboutism.
Your argument that not all incidents are safety incidents is misleading.
> turning right on red failed to yield to pedestrians in the crosswalk who had right of way.
> Getting killed by a robot breaking the rules is no less dead than if it were a human.
This "fail to yield to pedistrians" happens way way way too much though! At least the bug in the robo-taxi could, in theory of course, eventually be fixed. The bug in the human drivers will certainly never be fixed, since this has been a frequent problem since forever and will continue to be a problem as long as human drives (or maybe the USA can just give up on right turns on red like much of the rest of the world).
> Your argument that human drivers suck commits the fallacy of whataboutism.
No, it doesn't. Self-driving cars are potential substitutes for human-driven cars. If self-driving cars cause fewer injuries/accidents/etc. per mile driven, then everyone will be safer if we replace human-driven cars with them. If you object to self-driving cars being on the road even if they're safer than human-driven cars, you are implicitly saying that your preference is for more people to be injured.
You start with a common, but controversial hypothetical, that in the future self-driving cars may be safer than humans, and then conclude with that opposing self-driving cars today, which of course are not the hypothetical safer than humans car, is advocating for actual humans to be injured or killed.
No, you just didn't read what I wrote. At no point did I assert anything about the relative safety of self driving cars. I said that if you oppose self-driving cars EVEN IF they're safer...
That's called the conditional. It means that I'm not saying that thing is true; rather, it means that I am saying that if we take that thing to be true, then something follows logically.
The concept of things being conditional is pretty simple, so I guess in that sense it's undergrad level.
I remember reading somewhere that some large percentage of people can’t understand conditionals - I found it hard to believe, but I’ve been noticing it more and more.
It doesn't commit the fallacy of whataboutism - it's the same issue and a direct substitute.
Any safety incident is unacceptable is not a realistic standard, and I am not sure why a lower rate of incident is not a convincing argument for you. Yes, getting killed by a robot leaves you no less dead, but if 5 people are killed by robots where 10 people would have been killed by people, isn't that a net positive?
If 10 people were killed by people, then there could be 10 wrongful-death lawsuits and 10 car insurance claims and 10 cases of liability and 10 criminal investigations and 10 driver's licenses sanctioned, where each and every human behind the wheel must accept responsibility and assume liability for the harm caused to other human beings, and/or property.
If 5 people are killed by SDCs, then 5 executors will need to visit our website, create an account, and submit a request for reimbursement for funeral expenses. Please upload your death certificate and all itemized receipts. Our best AI will absolutely make its best efforts to find out which remote human operator caused those cars to begin driving, and then we will launch an internal investigation into whether their pay should be cut, or maybe we'll put them on paid leave instead and connect them with a grief counselor. Thank you for choosing WayMo. Scan this QR code to install our app!
You're introducing a new claim, that it will be harder for families to have justice and be compensated when a death is caused by a robotaxi rather than a human. I don't see any reason to assume this. If anything, it ought to be easier to get a rich, large, well known corporate robotaxi company to provide compensation than a random individual who might even be driving uninsured
The rich corporation is going to use their riches to exhaust your money supply on lawyers, and in the chance that you survive that test of endurance, offer a measly settlement with an NDA attached.
That's not my only claim. The additional gotcha is that the supposedly responsible human being is remote from the incident, and the regulators may find it more difficult to determine responsibility and assign liability to someone somewhere inside some very large company with a lot of network connectivity and an equal helping of plausible deniability. Compare that with a human at the wheel who hopefully carries a driver's license and proof of insurance?
Anyway, a "rich, large, well-known" company is always going to calculate the cost of a human life taken, vs. the cost of doing business, and run the margin right up to a rounding error. I don't doubt that their actuaries are just as good as GEICO's.
So you are saying that you are completely fine with 5 more people being killed, if their family gets money? I don't think thats as ethical a position as you think it is. You are putting human burocracy ahead of human lives.
It's not about "getting money". It's about recourse to the law, it's about humans who take responsibility, and it's about properly assigning liability. A single human life is precious and worth more than gold; you can't put a price on a human life. But in human burocracys, they do that. Perhaps it would be more just if the human drivers were killed in retribution? Death penalty for vehicular manslaughter? I mean, the families don't have to get money. Instead they could just receive front-row tickets in the lethal injection chamber? Is that more just, with less burocracy? We could destroy the cars that kill people, too. How's that? You could crush the car up in a compactor, then extract all the valuable minerals and other material, and award it to the families of the deceased.
Look greiskul, I don't appreciate your attempt to set up a Trolley Problem with my ridiculous and hypothetical scenario that will totally never happen in real life. My comment was intended to highlight the difference of human responsibility, assignment of liability, and recourse to legal means when someone is wronged. Just because the numbers were different in the GP, doesn't change my scenario one iota if you make it 10 and 10, or if you make it 6 minorities and 10 white male landowners, or if you make it 101 Dalmatians and a breeding pair of Tyrannosauri Rex. That wasn't the point.
greiskul, I'll thank you not to make insinuations about my ethical beliefs, especially when those insinuations serve your Trolley Problem agenda. I'm not making an ethical judgement on the state of things today here, I'm simply describing the situation as I see it. The justice system in these United States is set up a certain way, along with insurance adjusters, and the DMV/DOT, and the auto manufacturers and all the regulatory agencies that handle them. Since human dignity is inviolable, and a human life is priceless, I concur that it appears immoral for an insurance company to put a price on that human life, especially a lowball, profitable price.
They say that "money can't buy happiness" but it's a lot more comfortable to do my crying in a Mercedes than on a bicycle.
Unfortunately, SDCs are an excellent method to remove human dignity and living beings from the equation. For better or worse, the roads will be increasingly automated, and there will be fewer humans taking responsibility for their actions on the road. Corporations are people, though, so let's just give them the right to vote and be done with it?
In my experience living in SF, these cars are much safer than the typical drivers in my neighborhood for pedestrians. Most human drivers around here don't even bother to stop at stop signs, and instead just slow slightly. With the cruise and Waymo cars, I feel like the risk is a bit lower when I'm on my bike or walking.
I have witnessed a Cruise car stopping in the middle of the road when faced with an oncoming emergency vehicle, so I totally buy that they aren't ready for prime time yet.
Honestly, I'd prefer if we prioritized enforcing existing traffic laws for regular vehicles.
I live in "the outside lands" [1] so I see them all the time. I think they do a lot of testing out here. I can only think of one time that a Cruise acted erratically and put me on guard. But honestly they drive so gradually and predictably that I am confident I could have got out of the way. I don't recall a single sketchy moment with a Waymo, but I'm a Googler so maybe we just chalk that up as incentivized blindspot and render that as inadmissible in the court of HN.
On the other hand, every day I see human drivers needlessly endangering themselves and others. Every. Single. Day.
Maybe the equation changes with more robo-drivers and less human drivers. I would take the other side of that bet any day.
I moved here from Europe and I am absolutely shocked at how reckless the drivers are. In the old country I think I saw a car run a red light once in 20 years of driving. Here is seems I see it every other day.
>Cruise and Waymo say city officials have mischaracterized their safety track records. Their driverless taxis, the companies say, have lower collision rates than human drivers and public transit.
This is comparing the mean driverless incident rate to the mean human driver incident rate. This is disingenuous, since a small minority of human drivers cause the vast majority of incidents, thereby severely inflating the mean human incident rate.
Today's self-driving cars may be safer than the mean human driver, but I would wager they are far from the median human driver, and absolutely nowhere close to the top 10% of human drivers. It may be possible (but very difficult) to beat the median human with dramatic improvements to current self-driving algorithms, but beating the top 10% of human drivers will require AGI.
>This is comparing the mean driverless incident rate to the mean human driver incident rate. This is disingenuous, since a small minority of human drivers cause the vast majority of incidents, thereby severely inflating the mean human incident rate.
Why is this disingenuous? Unless you're also for advocating for banning those top 10% of drivers from driving, you can't just cherry pick only the good drivers.
Mean is the relevant metric, though. If it's only the bottom 10% of human drivers who cause all crashes and driverless cars are as safe as the 20p human driver, you can replace all human drivers with autonomous ones and eliminate all crashes.
That's to say nothing of the fact that driverless cars will improve from their current level, and the fact that companies operating them can be held liable for crashes and forced to account for their actions in a way that the worst human drivers cannot (which provides a strong incentive for them to improve).
> According to the NHTSA, 19% of motor vehicle fatalities involved drivers with invalid licenses. Furthermore, drivers with invalid licenses comprise 13% of all drivers in fatal crashes.
I'm all for more rigorous driving standards. However, the USA is car centric and people need jobs.
To really do what you're suggesting, the USA would need to regulate car companies to validate driving licenses while the car was in use. AND THEN, the USA would need to figure out what to do with all of these upset newly unemployed and aggressive people.
It's much worse in SF. When the SFPD runs (ran, really, because they no longer do traffic ops at all) crosswalk stings, the majority of drivers who violate the crossing pedestrian's right of way are unlicensed. Losing your license in California has virtually no influence on whether you continue to drive.
Lyft just quoted me: $20 for 3.5 miles, in 15mins. That is a reasonable daily commute. 2 * $20 = $40 per day round trip. $40 * 5 = $200 per week. $200 * 50 = $10,000 per year.
For a 45 min commute: that is $30k per year.
Clearly should buy a vehicle.
However, with 10x cheaper Lyfts: at 1-3k per year; that is the cost of maintenance, registration, and insurance. Then the car payments on top of that... Owning a car would be inordinately expensive.
This doesn't even include the benefit of getting 45-90 mins back to learn or play while commuting.
I don't think Lyfts get 10x cheaper with robocars. It's not like 90% of your fare goes to driver net profit. Maybe a factor of 2, but I'm not even sure that will be true (robocars will generally be more expensive, and require additional remote monitoring).
https://irle.berkeley.edu/files/2020/07/Parrott-Reich-Seattl... suggests that net driver pay is less than half of gross pay, which doesn't account for the portion that Lyft takes. Taking that at face value, maybe it gets 40% cheaper? Driving is expensive!
There are some economies of scale in maintenance/procurement (but at the same time, you need all-new, likely more expensive vehicles than the mean Lyft driver), and for infrequent users who pay for parking then that can make a big difference, but unless the robocar operator makes no profit, it's hard to imagine robocars being significantly cheaper than owning a car if you are using it regularly.
Couldn’t we just take taxi prices in the developing world as a proxy for Robo-taxi costs? The cars are more expensive (higher taxes), gas is more costly, but driver salaries and maintenance costs are cheaper. Then say an 80-100 RMB one way commute cost sounds more reasonable for Robo taxis (so let’s say 200 RMB/day = $28). These costs are conservative, in 2016 I was only spending 100 RMB a day on taxis in Beijing, which would have been my parking costs if I drove instead.
>https://irle.berkeley.edu/files/2020/07/Parrott-Reich-Seattl... suggests that net driver pay is less than half of gross pay, which doesn't account for the portion that Lyft takes. Taking that at face value, maybe it gets 40% cheaper? Driving is expensive!
I'm not sure what expenses goes into calculating "net driver pay", but based on a quick skim there are some questionable items in there. "Exhibit 28 Total Seattle TNC driver expenses" lists stuff like "health insurance costs" and "independent contractor taxes", which obviously wouldn't be needed for robotaxis. If we drill down into "vehicle operating costs", there are also some questionable items, like $1560/year expense for "cellphone". I agree that robotaxis being 90% cheaper is unlikely, but 66%-75% cheaper (ie. a quarter to a third of the price) seems to be within the realm of possibility.
> I don't think Lyfts get 10x cheaper with robocars. It's not like 90% of your fare goes to driver net profit.
Ok let’s do this one more time:
Lyft currently takes 25% of the fare. The driver and the car take the other 75%.
Lyft’s 25% includes R&D for building the platform, support issues, and solving the chicken and egg problem in new launch regions. ie Lyft operates at a loss in a new city to attract drivers so riders can start using the app. This loss is roughly made up for by profitable cities like LA. 1. There is no chicken and egg problem with robotaxis. It’s just a matter of capital cost and ROI time horizons. 2. The robotaxi will be more consistent and as reduced support costs. 3. The platform will have been built, and limited R&D for KTLO. 4. Competition in the space between large robotaxi fleets will push down margins, reducing overall profits.
It’s very easy to see Lyft only requiring 5% rather than 25% to continue being profitable and competitive.
Meanwhile, regarding the driver and car: Robotaxis require roughly $10-20k more in car manufacturing, but can also be used 24/7 so better capital utilization on the initial investment for the car (it really is hard to imagine the worth of a car that is used 99% of the time rather than parked 95% of the time). Maintenance costs reduce with scale (+in house mechanics to improve margins). Maintenance costs reduce with electric drive trains. Maintenance costs reduce with better initial manufacturing (to optimize overall car costs rather than optimizing for initial sale costs to sell to individuals).
Increased scale can mean reduced margins i.e. Amazon. Vertical integration also yields better efficiency: When robotaxis have been real for a decade, car manufacturers will build and run robotaxi fleets. Unlike today, vertical integration of manufacturing, maintenance, recycling and operating the fleet of cars creates a lot of consistent demand and can bring significant economic advantages. Even the car manufacturers goals change. Rather than optimizing to sell cars (have them degrade and sell more), cars will be optimized for durability, maximum materials reuse, lowest variable cost per ride, ergonomic rides. A professional driver can put on 25k-50k miles per year[1]. Compared to 10k-15k miles per year on average[2]. Meaning professional drivers hit the car’s mileage limit, 200k-300k in 6-8 years. Already it would be better for them to have cars that are optimized for cleaning, maintainability, and longer lifespans. And this doesn’t even talk about lifespans of wheels or the expedited cost of maintenance.
Taking this math further: This is targeting 40 hour work weeks for professional drivers. If we targeted 75% (a lower bound) of the total hours in a week 168, we see robotaxis will drive 3-4x the miles of today’s Uber drivers. Setting lifespans of 2-4 years per taxi.
Large robotaxi fleet operators will likely become manufacturers but regardless they will change the mental model of how car manufacturing currently operates.
Robotaxis will not only absorb the profits of the taxi industry but also the profits from the car manufacturing industry, car maintenance industry, car rental industry, last-mile delivery (including food delivery) industry, rental housing industry, and more. Fleet operators will also optimize the cars for most recycling ability.
Just look at the trend with a manufacturing company like Apple. Metal frames not only look good but also recycle better and are better for business as a whole.
Apple has an iPhone tradein program because recycling materials can be cost effective for them. The scale will eventually be unimaginable, allowing the margins to be astonishingly low.
Utilization levels will be driven by peak demand, as the usage patterns are highly nonuniform so I don't think they'll be that different. Also remember that even during peak hours, cars will be traveling between fares, potentially half the time (since demand is often mismatched during peak hours). Because most of the costs scale per mile, I don't think the immense cost savings will materialize.
Now robobuses is an idea I can get behind, since labor costs do dominate there.
If we had 10x cheaper Lyfts (and that's a big if) then they will likely cause more fatalities than humans even if somewhat safer, on account of a lot more private vehicle urban miles
About a month ago a human driver ran into me while I was riding a bike and sped away (luckily I was unharmed, aside from a scrape or two). How exactly would stricter driving tests or revocation of licenses have prevented that?
If a Waymo had done that, on the other hand, it'd have stopped and I'd be getting a nice big check from Google.
traffic enforcement cameras (e.g. automatic tickets for speeding, running red lights, hitting cyclists etc.) would probably help, but for some reason motorists are against that.
I guess the nice thing about robocars is that they can be effectively regulated not to drive at unsafe speeds (though probably people would be mad about that too...).
When they were common here in Phoenix, most people would just throw the ticket directly in the garbage. Law enforcement knew they were pretty unenforceable but if they got a small percentage of suckers I guess it was worth it.
Rear end crashes are much more survivable than t-bones though, and this study doesn't consider pedestrian injuries. To me it sounds like the cameras should also be fining people who are stopping too quickly, as it implies they were going at an unsafe speed for the condition.
Anyway, relatively few people run red lights. Speed cameras would likely have a much higher safety return.
Unless you move them around drivers will just slow down at the camera and then commence speeding. What works is strategically placed cameras that measure average speed over a distance. We have these a few places in Norway and most people stick to the speed limit or a bit below between the cameras.
Reading your first sentence, I immediately thought "this is easy to deal with using checkpointed cameras." And then I read the next part. Curious how well that works out, all told.
it would also be relatively straightforward to require cars to self-report speeding (keep a speed/position log, have it be read out at annual inspection). There are some issues around tunnels and poor GPS geolocation in urban areas, but it would work great for things like highways...
I had that exact thought as I was typing my post! :D
That said, I can see many reasons that is not liked. Amusingly, as you add more and more detection systems to cars for stuff like this, you are backing into autonomous vehicles.
Detecting out of spec driving is a much simpler (and cheaper to solve) problem than autonomous driving, and may have higher safety benefits? Yes there are privacy concerns but the same concerns exist with autonomous driving.
This is literally within the boundaries of the city of San Francisco, where having a car is only a prerequisite for success if your job is “driving”.
If you’re going to lament the car-focused society we have created, I understand and sympathize emotionally — but you should really take care to relent in those places that are most like the world you would prefer.
I think a key disconnect is that the 'incidents' being complained of most are not collisions, but they can still be disruptive, and indeed dangerous.
Suppose one were to just install brightly painted immobile bollards on streets, and insist they were "driving" just very very slowly. They wouldn't hit anyone. They wouldn't kill anyone. They would piss everyone off.
This disconnect is repeatedly part of where this conversation gets tripped up.
> “Cruise’s safety record is publicly reported and includes having driven millions of miles in an extremely complex urban environment with zero life-threatening injuries or fatalities,” Cruise spokesperson Hannah Lindow told The Chronicle.
> The city’s transportation agencies documented several incidents where driverless cars disrupted Muni service. During the night of Sept. 23, five Cruise cars blocked traffic lanes on Mission Street in Bernal Heights, stalling a Muni bus for 45 minutes. On at least three different occasions, Cruise cars stopped on Muni light-rail tracks, halting service.
Ok great, they didn't kill or injure people which is nice, but they were _disruptive_ in a way which a human driver would not have been. And critically, we can't _have_ a fact-based conversation around those non-collision incidents because these companies aren't even required to report them:
> But officials said it’s been difficult to assess their effectiveness because companies aren’t required to report unplanned stop incidents — some of which have been captured on social media — when they happen.
> San Francisco officials want the state to require that companies report incidents when they happen.
I've certainly seen cases where self-driving cars behaved in a way that I would consider reckless if a human was at the wheel, but were not collisions, did not result in injury, and I expect will not form part of any statistics reported to any government body ... but I think that's too low a bar.
I've certainly seen cases where self-driving cars behaved in a way that I would consider reckless if a human was at the wheel, but were not collisions, did not result in injury, and I expect will not form part of any statistics reported to any government body
A few weeks ago I saw one blow a red light. Nobody hurt or killed, so it wasn't reported to any responsible agency. It might not have even been tallied by the company, if the car thought there wasn't a problem. But its action was clearly unsafe.
It's hard to get a grip on the problem when the data is so faulty.
Someone posted an example of a self-driving Cruise car that appeared to run a red light https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/14wyyzw/just_.... Although in that example, technically the self-driving car was guilty of entering the intersection without sufficient space on the other side, rather than of crossing the limit line while facing a red light.
> beating the top 10% of human drivers will require AGI.
even if it is true, this doesn't matter at all.
if they can beat the median driver and you replaced all drivers with driverless vehicles, they would eliminate whatever bottom percentile driver is responsible for most of the accidents and the world would be vastly safer.
by your own assertion, the 10% best drivers don't matter because they already don't cause accidents.
They also conveniently ignore everything except collisions. For example number of traffic jams caused because your car got confused and decided to stop in the middle of the street.
I care about the overall mean though. Do you know what we call the bottom 10% drivers? Drivers! So long as overall they are better, then get humans off the road, sure the top 10% are worse off, but overall I'm better off as I will never have to deal with that bottom 10%.
Why does it require AGI? That's a bold, unsubstantiated claim. Let me make my own bold claim: Simple common sense reasoning is very close to being solved with our latest LLMs. You would need AGI if you wanted to replace the team developing your self-driving car. A decent LLM, with vision input that's been fine-tuned on driving scenarios, will be more than sufficient for Level 5 driving.
You need AGI for good self-driving because driving requires predicting the actions of other human drivers at an extremely high level. This is second-nature for humans so we barely notice that we are doing it, but it is extraordinarily difficult for non-humans.
I think the reality is somewhere in the middle. You need to be able to accurately predict behavior of humans _following some conventions_, and to be wary of the behavior of humans when they violate those conventions.
An example I saw:
- At the start of a construction area, a guy wearing a hi-viz vest holds a stop sign. A self-driving car stops at the sign.
- The guy _lowers_ the sign a bit while looking over his shoulder down the street towards others on his crew.
At this point a _human_ guesses that the sign is lowered only b/c the guy has seen that the car stopped, and expects the car to stay stopped until some further signal (e.g. a waving gesture, or flipping the sign to show the "slow" side). The human driver understands that stop sign guy is looking to coordinate with someone else nearby. There's a "script" for this kind of interaction.
... but the self-driving car starts moving as soon as the road crew guy lowers the sign. In this case nothing seriously bad happened. But it was not following The Conventions.
This doesn't take full general intelligence perhaps -- but it takes some greater reasoning about what people are doing than the cars seem to have currently, and so sometimes they drive into a zone that the fire department is actively using to fight a fire, and get in the way.
No you don’t. I can feed images of crazy driving scenarios into LLaVA and get reasonable responses. That’s a general purpose LLM with $500 worth of fine tuning running locally on my PC. You should look into what can be done with the current state of the art LLMs. Your intuition for what’s possible is out of date.
If I can do that with open source LLaMA variants, I can only imagine what’s possible if you have an actual annotated dataset of driving scenarios. Imagine a LLaMA model thats been fine tuned for lane selection, AEB, etc.
You getting six nines of accuracy on that with good latency? Did you watch the “how our large driving model deals with stop signs” from Tesla AI department? Given the multiplicative effect of driving decisions and the weird real world out there, it has be extremely reliable and robust to be a good driver as the miles mount up.
The reason you would insert an LLM into the vision stack is to deal with the weird and unexpected. Tesla’s current stop sign approach is to train a classifier from scratch on thousands of stop signs images. It’s not surprising that architecture can’t deal with stop signs that fall outside the distribution.
LLMs with vision work completely differently. You’re leveraging the world model, built from a terabyte of text data, to aid your classification. The classic example of an image they handle well is a man ironing clothes on the back of a taxi. Where traditional image classifiers wouldn’t have a hope of handling that, vision LLMs describe it with ease.
But also ambiguous and from time to time requiring judgment. Should I let that dumb ass driver go next or pull around them? I agree it’s insane not to allow the automated driving use more sensors than humans have. I wish I had vision that can cut thru rain and glare.
I don't think anybody has demonstrated convincingly that a self-driving car would specifically need AGI to acheive what really matters: statistically better results on a wide range of metrics. I don't expect SDCs to solve trolley problems (or human drivers to solve them either) or deal with truly exceptional situations. To me that's just setting up an unnecessarily high bar.
I roughly agree. I think the only other piece, that is critical to mention, would be remote humans for support in extremely awkward situations to help get the car get back on track as RLHF.
This requires the car can always come to a safe stop, which I think the LLM-based driver should be very capable of doing.
Automatic emergency braking would be a good first step, it would certainly solve the case in article where the car drives though downed power lines.
I think the logical next step is to have the LLM output the driving path similar to how GPT4 outputs SVGs. Feed in everything you have, raw images, depth maps, VRU positions, nav cues, and ask the LLM output a path.
> I would wager they are far from the median human driver, and absolutely nowhere close to the top 10% of human drivers.
I think you would likely lose that wager. In the information Waymo has published about their safety methodology, they benchmark themselves against an always-attentive driver (this already rules out most accidents), which they still outperform by a large margin. Even a driver who is never distracted doesn't have constant 360 degree vision or near-instant reaction times.
> since a small minority of human drivers cause the vast majority of incidents
It's tough to find anything relevant on DDG or google, they come up with information about racial disparities in traffic stops...can you link anything to read about this?
Hmm, I think that, in fact, this comparison is disingenuous! If you want to reduce net collisions, you want to compare to the mean, not median. In that case, once you've produced a self-driving car that's better than the mean, you're saving lives. You don't need to create a self-driving car which is better than every driver, ever.
SDC will only move the average upwards if they're taking less safe drivers off the road. If a 40% safe SDC replaces a 50% safe human driver, then you've shifted the average downwards.
I left SF a year ago but had Cruise and Waymo cars in my neighborhood constantly. They were a total nuisance. They'd jerk towards pedestrians in crosswalks leading to this uncomfortable standoff where no one in the neighborhood would ever step in front of one. I'd wager any stats here are way lower than real incidences as I was nearly hit multiple times and never got to the "report it" stage as there are so many barriers to doing so.
I have similar experiences (as a pedestrian) crossing in front of Cruise cars, especially at 4-way stops when there aren't crosswalks explicitly drawn. It's odd because the cars are generally excruciatingly cautious, but for some reason as I'm crossing they seem to calculate exactly how fast they can take off such that they pass me right as I'm clear of their path -- whereas most drivers might wait for the pedestrian to reach the sidewalk before passing.
What would happen if I "dropped" my wallet and turned around to pick it up? But also, given that they have all those cameras, I wouldn't dare do anything "unusual" like that because it'd probably run me over and say it was my fault, and here's the proof.
I don't doubt the cars' ability to calculate it exactly, but it's a different experience for sure.
I thought California law was to let the pedestrian fully cross, but apparently not:
> In California, the law does not state that a driver must wait for the pedestrian to fully exit the crosswalk or the street before they proceed on their way in their lane. A pedestrian must be safely out of the driver's path of travel for them to begin driving again.
If you had to wait for all pedestrians to be out of the crosswalk, there's plenty of places where turning would be essentially impossible -- and there's an argument to be made that anywhere with that much foot traffic ought to be turned into a pedestrian-only zone, well, right now there are both cars and pedestrians and requiring the crosswalk be clear before going would make things even worse.
NY prohibits driving in the occupied half of a crosswalk. i.e. from center line to the curb. This is almost impossible to obey in NYC with heavy ped flows but it is a sensible way to combat drivers clipping you from behind.
> whereas most drivers might wait for the pedestrian to reach the sidewalk before passing.
You're joking right? No one wait for you to clear the street. Hell most driving start advancing when you're going to be clear by the time they make it to you.
> What would happen if I "dropped" my wallet and turned around to pick it up?
Same thing a human would; hit you or slam on the brakes. They'll just do it faster and harder.
> whereas most drivers might wait for the pedestrian to reach the sidewalk before passing.
You're joking right? No one wait for you to clear the street. Hell most driving start advancing when you're going to be clear by the time they make it to you.
> What would happen if I "dropped" my wallet and turned around to pick it up?
Same thing a human would; hit you or slam on the brakes. They'll just do it faster and harder.
So it's worth remembering that when the pundits say their self-driving car will be better than human drivers- that's a really low bar! Similarly, when they say it'll obey all the road rules, it means they will game them.
Not in San Jose. A few drivers will only wait for you to cross their half but they are an asshole minority and at any rate are not aiming to minimize things.
I have the opposite experience, I live by a bunch of 4way stops that drivers get very pushy about if you try to use as a pedestrian. The driverless cars never put me in a dangerous situation at those intersections but human driven cars do very frequently.
> What would happen if I "dropped" my wallet and turned around to pick it up?
That would be an extremely stupid thing to do in San Francisco. I would not trust drivers here at all to pick it up. I would just wait until all the cars were gone.
For what it's worth, my own anecdata is the opposite. My neighborhood (alamo square / wester addition) is rife with Cruise cars and I usually pass 2-3 every night while walking my dog for 30 minutes. They've been, without fail, polite and normal "drivers." I've not felt any concern walking in front of them in crosswalks or biking alongside them when leaving the neighborhood.
My issues were mostly between Divisadero and Masonic north of the Panhandle, so different strokes. I was doing two half-hour walks per day during most of the pandemic, either to GGP or Alamo Square, so that's the context of my anecdata. Of course, no discounting they're just better now :)
It's unclear that there's a consensus on something that reliably works across cultural contexts, though - which, to be fair, is also a problem with human-human interactions!
This isn’t an example of shooting the messenger because you dislike the message. The SF Chronicle just has a track record of anti SF bias, then turning around and complaining about the effects of their own reporting https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2023/sf-downtown-doom-l...
It’s sadly not a trustworthy source on these matters
While technically this makes them not at fault, it may represent some evidence of erratic braking behavior. Anecdotally, drivers have reported Waymo cars having a propensity for "brake checking" — not with ill intent of course, but risking accidents anyway.
I went ahead and read the accident reports, just because I was curious.
In one case the AV was stopped at a red light when it was rear ended.
In the second case AV slowed down for a person pushing a shopping cart into the street.
In the third case the AV slowed down for pedestrians in a crosswalk.
All the reports are in the report the person you are responding to posted. I do wish we had video footage of the events, while the first one is pretty clear cut, the other two are really dependent on what "slowing down" looks like, and what the pedestrians were actually doing.
Thanks for the additional context. It appears that in the second case, the AV was in manual mode anyway, so whatever happened cannot possibly be attributed to autonomous driving.
Laws are written and designed for humans who constantly try to push it to the limit and get away with things. These cars are all over the place and I've been caught stuck on a street in Bernal Heights because it couldn't quite fit and just froze in place. I had to back out of the street because there wasn't any room for me to go around it.
Yes it may be following laws to the letter, but not only was I grumpy about having to carefully back out of a street, there wasn't any way to communicate with the car. It doesn't have any feedback mechanism for me, so it just looks like a confused dead robot in the middle of the street.
I think Waymo and Cruise are both happily working on hard problems in this space with limitless VC funding (or daddy GM money) thrown their way. So I support their efforts, because at the very least, they'll enrich our understanding of self-driving cars even if it were to fail in the marketplace long term.
I'm curious how profitable it will be in practice once the VC money dries up. Paying half a million dollar salaries to employees who need to keep these things up to date adds up. That, on top of hardware costs for precise sensors that will fail fast in harsh weather conditions. On top of normal wear and tear of people in and out of the cars all day for cars that won't need down time.
Lastly, I'll end my thoughts with this... why are we obsessed with the idea of self driving cars anyway?! What human problem does this solve? I am 100% on board with building autonomous cruise-control for my own car, so I'm not against the tech. I just find the taxi angle to be weird. All I see so far in my mind is a product that just takes away an entire class of job opportunities with no actual gain.
We can drive people and goods around without having a human waste his time driving stuff around.
Not wasting money paying people to do stupid stuff is gigantic gain.
The person the tech is replacing will still need to work and earn a wage to afford the goods the system that replaced them is delivering. It's not replacing a relatively high risk job or allowing that driver to scale themselves and improve their efficiency in any way. It's just eliminating their job, because.
As a passenger in a driverless taxi, instead of having someone in the car who might improve the journey slightly by being an interesting person to chat with, I'll likely sit in the car all alone. Worse, I'll probably be shoved ads in my face. So, this new taxi doesn't really add anything new of value to me as a consumer.
I know automated systems have replaced all kinds of jobs, and the closest analogy I can think of is self-check out lines at grocery stores, or ATM machines before that. However, those actually did free up cashiers so they could wander the store and help out in other ways, or restock, or funny enough, help someone self-check out.
Taxis are kind of an island to themselves, and not only will this impact the driver who won't have anything related to jump to, it will hurt the businesses who rely on drivers waiting for the next passenger. Then there's the urban centers these cars are zipping around in. These cars have no employee to generate business tax revenue from, so the cars are consuming infrastructure for no benefit to the cities.
Anyway, thanks for reading my random thoughts. I'm sure things will balance out in the end, but if you work in the industry and have some cool insights, feel free to share.
> As a passenger in a driverless taxi, instead of having someone in the car who might improve the journey slightly by being an interesting person to chat with, I'll likely sit in the car all alone.
This sounds like a feature to me. Include a minibar and it’ll be my own personal limo.
Isn’t the gain that those folks can find another job that’s more useful?
What makes you think that if finding another job that they are capable of doing was so easy they wouldn't have already done so? Because they were waiting for some tech billionaire to throw them on the unemployment line?
No, they wouldn't have already done so, because their current job still exists and it's easier to maintain the status quo.
Major structural employment changes don't happen overnight. This will take decades. AVs will decrease the demand for Uber drivers, but it doesn't mean they will all be out of a job overnight, just that incentives will slowly push workers towards other jobs.
Uber and Lyft kind of did shutdown the taxi cartels across the world in one big grassroots swing.
It took insane levels of lobbying and political power of taxis to keep a hold on some of their biggest cities, and there are now few places where non-uber/lyft style systems are still in place.
If AI taxi's are cheaper and more convenient, there's no way they won't just completely replace human taxi drivers. Cruise and Waymo have huge incentives to undercut whatever Uber would try to do. So I don't share your optimism that it will happen slowly over decades. If this self-driving system is easily repeatable elsewhere, it will likely be fast and swift.
It's easier to maintain the status quo, but there is also job enjoyment.
I am neither a deliverator nor a cab driver, but I do enjoy driving. When the org I work for needs stuff transported, I often volunteer for the task. Driving in silence, or to music, or while listening to podcast; for work, for recreation, or merely to enjoy the drive; it's all good. Of course, I also live in an area close to mountains and while going toward the city nearby is hell due to traffic, going toward the mountains is blissful and beautiful.
So it's funny, when they first started rolling these out folks were interested, intrigued even. Folks walking would give them deference, mostly not run in front of them if they saw them, very unlike how they treat regular drivers. But now folks are getting sick of them.
So they were modeling all their behavior and driving around cooperative pedestrians and cars (mostly) now they have to model for an adversarial public.
They are MUCH more aggressive now. It used to be that if you saw one, you could be 99% sure it would stop and wait for the path to be fully clear. Now, they will buzz right by you within a foot or two. Very alarming how quickly they progressed to being careless.
The AI alignment problem for a decade used to be that AGI doesn't end humanity as a side effect. Now that the mainstream has caught on, it's been diluted.
Ha we don't even have "alignment" among humans. In the Kantian style of "humans are an end in themselves, not a means toward the ends of others" kind of way.
Again, that's a much more subtle version of alignment than what the term originally was used for. It used to refer to things like the paper clip maximizer and the strawberry problem which are much worse and fundamental.
Is this what Garry Tan's video (The Truth and Lies About Driverless Cars in SF [1]) was all about? I find him to be pretty credible in general, and he makes a strong case that there are some folks within the city government who are misrepresenting the safety record of self-driving cars. I don't know much about the situation, and I'm glad this testing isn't happening where I live (we do have tons of testing on the peninsula, but it's with humans in the vehicle). But I think it's important for companies and regulators to be honest about what is happening, whichever way the facts come out.
Tangential: This article made me curious about who owns the Chronicle these days. Looks like it's the Hearst family now [1] which is amusing because I'm pretty sure the Examiner and the Chronicle used to be sworn archenemies back in the 1800s. The Hearsts owned the Examiner back then.
I lost count of how many times there was a comment about a lack of data
> The city is left in the dark about the exact number of driverless taxis operating in its streets, and the miles they’ve traveled.
> city transportation leaders this time around informally collect their own incident data using 911 and 311 calls
> Friedlander said the city can’t make definitive conclusions because it doesn’t have detailed data.
Yet Google and GM say things like
> “Every single day of delay in deploying this life-saving autonomous driving technology has critical impacts on road safety,” Waymo said in a statement.
Or Google and GM have the data, but aren't sharing it because people will overreact because despite it being an order of magnitude safer than human drivers, it still has some incidents that people will focus in on.
California law requires all accidents of autonomous cars resulting in "property damage, bodily injury, or death" be reported within ten days.
All of this accident data is publicly available with details about every accident. For example, Waymo had four accidents in May and four accidents in June.
There is no way to truly evaluate safety being an order of magnitude better until we have 1 billion miles driven.
You can crash less often (reduce fender benders) but kill more people (have rare but egregious errors) so I am not interested in seeing statistics about incidents or collisions.
Sounds like an extremely arrogant and biased comment showing the blind righteousness of tech and its followers. How else can tech build trust with the public than via transparency? Think about this for a moment.
These companies cannot be trusted to be honest about incidents or near incidents. They like to crow about safety, but the safety they want credit for is entirely hypothetical.
There is no good reason to believe that autonomous vehicles are actually safer. They haven’t yet been tested enough, and the testing that has been done cannot be generalized to new situations.
I believe they would be safer if all roads were fully digitized, controlled, with no pedestrians and no other human drivers. We have something like that, now, called railroads.
They are already required to report every accident to a public agency in California.
And the safety is not hypothetical. Waymo is driving millions of miles a month in places like Phoenix. They have a ton of data to support the fact that their cars are significantly safer than human drivers.
They are required to report every accident, but not every mile these cars drive and in what conditions, so this data is unfortunately insufficient to make valid comparisons with human drivers...
Really, the problem is the transparency of tech companies. If self-driving cars are really safer, then tech companies need to prove it by releasing more data than necessary, rather than less!
They are not required to report incidents which have a negative impact on other road users. The SFFD is collecting that data, and it shows that these cars are not able to interact correctly with public safety vehicles and personnel.
> In San Francisco, those problems can mean self-driving cars blocking traffic, transit and emergency responders, as well as erratic behavior resulting in close calls with cyclists, pedestrians or other vehicles.
I have mixed feelings about how to test self-driving vehicles (mostly stemming from ignorance). But at some point don't you have to get this stuff out in the wild to see how it behaves or else we are resigned to not making progress on this (or very very slow progress)? And considering that "no one was hurt" and "driverless taxis have never killed or seriously injured anyone in the millions of miles they’ve traveled" are were now there?
> at some point don't you have to get this stuff out in the wild to see how it behaves or else we are resigned to not making progress on this
It's not my problem whether Waymo makes progress on their technology, but they make it my problem when they hit me with their car.
I do have sympathy for wanting to make the progress: we might make better pacemakers faster by testing out 20 designs on 20 people. But nobody wants to be the one that gets the one that doesn't work. And in this case the victims aren't even involved. They didn't opt-in to beta testing the road full of half-baked robots, they're just trying to get to work.
In the interest of having a discussion, let's assume that AVs are a meaningful goal to work towards for whatever reason. But given that, how do we get vehicles from the drawing board to actually being viable products without on-road testing? I've never seen a complex product that went from non-existent to perfect in the first deployment, so it doesn't seem realistic to expect that here.
Instead, they should be developed iteratively, with design prototypes that proceed from closed-course testing to supervised public testing to closed course autonomous testing, to on-road autonomy over the course of many years. This is what Waymo did. There's a reasonable argument to be made that they did this too quickly, but I can't reconcile that with your argument that they shouldn't have done it at all.
In an ideal world, there'd also be effective government oversight and public safety monitoring at every stage of the above process. Regulators haven't stepped up to do this, though AV companies have done quite a bit to stymie the oversight process as well.
Sadly, I come only with problems and not solutions. I take it as axiomatic that beta-testing with peoples' lives that didn't agree to do so is unacceptable. That closes off a lot of the solution space that you're proposing. That sucks and you're free to disagree but again I take it ethically unassailable.
Teleportation would also be a societal game changer but if the only way there is to beta test it on unwilling participants I'd also believe that, well, we just don't get teleportation then.
It's up to Waymo to figure out how to get there, not to me. I do not take it as axiomatic that just because it'd be useful that the ends justify the means. And it certainly isn't up to Waymo whether you or I can be sacrificed.
And Waymo and Cruise are only rolling out gradually into settings they have reason to think they can handle. And unlike for humans, every time they learn a new lesson, the improvement spreads to their whole fleet. Humans lack that ability -- in a sense, we're the ones who are untrainable.
(If you want to point at Uber before they stopped, I agree they were irresponsible.)
Uber’s driverless vehicle killed someone jaywalking at night in another state. So you can’t say they’ve never killed anyone. Plus Teslas have killed their own occupants plenty of times.
I'm debating about renewing my truck license for this reason. If it's taking this long for automobiles to be approved and accepted, it'll be 30 years before trucking is automated.
The two decades during which human oversight of automated systems will be mandatory would be long enough for me to finish off my career getting paid to drive while I sit in a cab writing code, periodically checking over the status of my lead truck and the two or three slaved trucks following me.
I'm debating about renewing my truck license for this reason. If it's taking this long for automobiles to be approved and accepted, it'll be 30 years before trucking is automated.
Trucks and cars are different. They've been running automated big rigs between Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and El Paso for a few years now.
Given the significant weight and danger of death for other drivers, it'll be years until legislators allow their "safety drivers" to be eliminated from the equation. This makes the AI system more akin to enhanced cruise control than robotic trucking.
It's been in the newspapers down there quite a bit. Mostly Houston and San Antonio.
Here's one article about Volvo:
"Companies such as IKEA, UPS and FedEx have begun using autonomous trucks to make long haul trips across Texas, most often along I-45 between Dallas and Houston. In 2017, the U.S. Department of Transportation designated Texas as one of that nation's 10 proving grounds for autonomous vehicle testing. And Texas lawmakers have encouraged autonomous-vehicle development by making sure traffic laws do not encumber the companies."
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/retail/article/vol...
I think there will be a strong demand for truck drivers long after most people would expect.
We’re far from self driving vehicles still, and trucks will be the last to be automated, and once they are, I expect they’ll require human supervision just like you predict.
This is a good point. The statement I made about not killing anyone (in quotes) is from the article, which is only a subset of the overall domain we're talking about.
Can anybody find the data set from which they created the graph?
I tried browsing https://data.sfgov.org/browse but there's nothing that immediately refers to "autonomous vehicles", "incidents" or the like...
(I'm trying to piece the data together for myself, and I'm a bit suspicious that their graph stops in April. I'd also want to cross reference to number of vehicles on the road, because if there's been a ramp up since e.g. January, you would expect more incidents to happen).
I've just got to say I'm so impressed with both Waymo and Cruise. Last year they did 4.5 million miles put together in California with zero fatalities. This is an incredible achievement.
While OPs statement did make me laugh a bit (I've personally driven almost a million miles myself and I don't think my odds of killing someone were 1 in 4), we do have to realize that MOST miles that make up the 100 million mile stats are done at highway speeds far away from pedestrians.
If I had to do 4 million miles in SF, I just might have hit someone by now.
Americans drove 3.2 trillion miles in 2021 and 42,795 people died in traffic fatalities (both values are estimates, and likely do not include every single mile driven or fatality that occurred, depending on how you prefer to count).
So humans drive average of 74 million miles before a person gets killed, and Waymo's driven somewhere above 20M miles but probably fewer than 74M. At this point, I'd expect no self-driving car traffic fatalities, statistically, if the SDC fleet is an average driver.
In some sense Waymo and Cruise are basically waiting around for a fatality (not that they want one) so they start having a denominator that isn't zero.
Your statistic (vehicle miles versus passenger miles) is probably more relevant, but now I'm curious whether the passenger miles of driverless vehicles are more or less than the vehicle miles, in aggregate.
(Although maybe passenger miles is the correct metric -- a driverless, passengerless vehicle could hypothetically plow into an overpass at a speed that would result in a fatality, if anyone were inside; since the passengers of a vehicle are a large chunk of the people who die if that vehicle has an accident, should we car how many people don't die when vehicles are empty?)
Regardless of whatever the current fatal accident statistics are in the U.S., being able to build a robot that drives that far in traffic without killing anyone is an incredible technical accomplishment. The progress over the past ten years is simply astounding.
> Although 20 percent of people in the U.S. live in rural areas and 32 percent of the vehicle miles traveled occur in rural areas, 40 percent of crash deaths occur there.
> Compared with urban areas, crash deaths in rural areas in 2021 were less likely to occur on interstates and freeways (14 percent compared with 21 percent) and on other arterial roads (23 percent compared with 58 percent) and more likely to occur on collector roads (44 percent compared with 11 percent) and local roads (19 percent compared with 11 percent).
In other words, majority of rural traffic deaths are not on freeways.
Yes, but I still reject the idea that San Francisco is an especially fatal city to drive in.
Looking for statistics on San Francisco in particular, in 2016 the city averaged an estimated 5.6 million vehicle miles per day, and an average of 29 traffic fatalities per year. That puts it at about 1.4 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles, smack dab in between the national averages for urban (1.2) and rural (1.7) traffic fatalities.
So 5 million vehicle miles continues to be a small sample size, with an estimated 0.07 deaths for San Francisco.
(I'm also not sure the drill down that urban fatalities happen on freeway & arterial roads and rural fatalities happen on local & collector roads helps the self-driving cars in SF; it seems like the speed-limited self-driving cars should be spending most of their time on the absurdly safe local roads in the city.)
There are only a few miles of freeway in the entire city of San Francisco, so I doubt too many of the accidents in SF are from them. Yes, driving 25mph in a modern car with crumple zones and 10 airbags is generally very safe. If you look at the statistics [1], most traffic fatalities in the city are either pedestrians or bicycles. Avoiding pedestrians and bicycles is one of the tougher challenges of making a safe AV, and San Francisco is one of the most challenging places in the country for this.
I will provide a dissenting voice. I was riding a Cruise with a friend the other night, leaving a bar - they only serve a nighttime crowd right now. suddenly a drunk hippie on Haight street started banging on the windows. Rather than get on our way and get us out of there like a Homan driver would, the cruise stopped, powered down - as in unlocked the doors, and called customer service. I shudder to think what would have happened if the hippie hadn't been drunk/inconsequentially high and was on PCP or something. This was a real thing that happened. I reported it to customer support. I can only imagine the conversations internally of this incident. (maybe I should get a job as an sre there.)
There's also the other possibility that it's a firefighter banging on the doors, trying to stop the car from driving into a dangerous area. I'd argue that's the more dangerous scenario too. PCP doesn't magically turn someone into a maniacal killer.
Now that you mention it, this makes me think of all kinds of edge cases and how SDCs should handle them, and how they would detect them... hard problems. Of course, it seems like we humans are requiring the SDCs to be better than we are and not be our equals. I am not sure why. I do not know if that standard is good or bad; just making an observation. For example, a person could be banging on a window screaming for help. Many people would just speed away, some would stop and try to help, and in a few places in this country such aggressive behavior could get the person screaming for help killed.
Yeah. That's why I much prefer an L4 car that you still own and sit in the driver seat with steering wheel, than a taxi I rent and have no control over.
(obviously there's no such L4 car yet, but I'm sure tesla/mobileye/etc will get there eventually)
If you're not going to have a steering wheel, then you should have a "keep summer safe" mode.
They include incidents where the car has caused traffic disruption. Recently, people have been throwing cones on top of the cars causing them to stop and impede traffic. This includes SF city officials, which is wild.
I feel like I'm being gaslit by the AV companies, especially Cruise. If these cars are so safe, why do I constantly seem them doing sketchy stuff on public roads? Why are there so many videos on Twitter and Reddit of pedestrians literally dodging out of the way to avoid being run over? It doesn't pass the smell test.
I'm sure there is a selection bias. But if AVs are really an improvement, Cruise should prove it to the CPUC with actual data. Otherwise, I'll continue to believe outrageous videos [like this](https://twitter.com/flrent/status/1677483882109882368) over Cruise's claims.
If you're designing planes, they shouldn't just be doing a bit of casual swerving towards the terminal during taxing. We're engineering solutions, not making kind of working stuff.
I am on my 3rd Tesla- been driving them since 2015- and frequently use FSD beta. I’ve watched autopilot develop into FSD.
The thing that baffles me about all current autonomous vehicle efforts is how resistant they are to having any sort of environmental feedback engineered specifically to help driverless cars.
For instance, in addition to flashing lights, what if fire trucks broadcast a “keep away” radio signal? Perhaps engineered specifically to be easy to determine distance and direction. Perhaps driverless car companies would have to pitch in to pay for the transponder refit for every fire truck. This is just an idea from a layperson and probably unworkable in this form but you should get the drift of my suggestion.
Also, reading this story, why didn’t the city place orange cones in addition to caution tape? I seriously doubt any driverless car company is training their vehicles on caution tape; as a driver for 40 years I have never encountered caution tape in a way to influence my driving. If the city is allowing driverless cars maybe they should have rudimentary training and standards for personnel to avoid unsafe situations.
Ditto for the firemen and fire hoses - ORANGE CONES are what tells me not to drive somewhere.
There are laws regarding traffic markers. Cities can’t just do arbitrarily obscure things and expect drivers to figure out what they want.
One could easily argue that the liability associated with hitting caution tape is just the cost of replacing the caution tape itself (and not additional fines for driving through whatever poorly marked area you went into).
Anything other than vision from cameras for self-driving is the wrong way to approach it. The vision capabilities of these cars has to be advanced enough to recognize and respond to the unknown and unexpected, to work even where roads have changed overnight, to work in adverse conditions where it's hard to see, etc. Recognizing emergency vehicles is very far down on the list of difficult things to do, and is not difficult at all compared to many other challenges.
Having transponders is just another thing to do fail, or to forget to turn on, or to be impacted by other things, or to give false positives, or to be abused by drivers, etc. Really nothing can be relied upon other than what you see.
I worked as a software engineering tech lead on the "Ground Truth" team at GM Cruise for a short period in 2018.
During orientation, the founder (Kyle Vogt) told us all that the cars don't need to be better than a human driver, they only need to be "not worse" than a human driver. In fact, when questioned about it, he said that the sooner we could get robot cars on the streets of SF the sooner the software could improve.
The idea was that the more dangerous, "not worse than a human" era would be a necessary sacrifice of safety (compared to waiting forever until we had 100% perfect driving robot cars) -- so we could fast-forward to major improvements in the robot cars' capabilities.
That (IMO) cavalier attitude, a lack of rigor in the way software for the vehicles was being developed, and the fact that we had constant meetings about "diversity and inclusion" rather than on robustness, safety, ethics and quality pushed me to resign abruptly and go my own way.
Very disappointing experience - as I had hoped to see "The Future" before joining GM Cruise and even a fat paycheck and RSUs weren't enough to sooth my scruples.
Yes, a few people will die. More than a few. But I would bet anything that even in the short-term, and especially in the long-term, far fewer will die than if there were human drivers in those cars.
Over a million people a year die from traffic related incidents. It's arguably the most dangerous things many people do aside from poor diets and smoking. We need to bring this number down, and quickly. It's not going to happen as long as humans are driving.
The average SF resident probably works for a tech company considering how many natives have been driven out by high housing costs. Tech companies are an enormous source of tax revenue for the city and many public services quite literally depend on that revenue. One of the major issues in the city now is the city government's obstinate refusal to approve more housing development. The idea that tech workers are gentrifying one of the most expensive cities in the world is frankly absurd.
A public schoolteacher in San Francisco needs to make 30,000 a year more than they are getting paid now just to be above the poverty level. Maybe it's bad for the teachers and other people not in tech if there are that many people running around spending tons of money.
But it's not a question. Most people in SF (let alone those who commute in) do not work for tech companies.
Edit: Teachers need to make 25,000 a year more to no longer qualify for need-based government aid. Not 30,000.
You might be underestimating the effect of prop 13. There's a large number of older SF residents who aren't techies, but can easily afford to live here because they bought property here 20+ years ago when it was much cheaper and now pay almost zero property tax. To be sure there are a lot of people in tech jobs, but there are lots of other well-paying jobs in the city in areas like finance, law, consulting, etc.
I’m not sympathetic to tax dodgers that set up a pyramid scheme (prop 13) that I (as a California homeowner of working age) am a victim of.
The hypothetical person in your example must be making way under local poverty level income to have trouble living in SF without housing and tax expenses.
They could get a job, or move out and extract rent from a techie.
From my perspective, they are sitting on a winning lottery ticket and whining about how they don’t want to spend it, but want all the other benefits.
The incidents mentioned in the story would have been shared via first responder dispatchers. Seems like the way forward here would be for the city to make this data available to all driverless cars- maybe some sort of data registration with the city- and for the vendors to make it possible to drop these new hazards into the cars' maps promptly. I don't know how these systems work, or if they can work together, but I can write a computer program and there is clearly a looping input that is lacking in this system.
Mapping apps (Google/Wayze) already have a reporting feature for accidents and hazards, it doesn't seem like that big a leap to either providing first responders with something like or creating some kind of gamified crowd sourced version.
My stance have shifted a bit lately, from "concerns/what ifs" to "let's see", I began to look at it through "the sooner the better" lenses.
Advancements like these are inevitable and have been on the radar for a long time. The more people familiar and informed about the tech, the better they are equipped in order to put the right regulations.
I'm definitely a skeptic when it comes to putting an AI in charge with no manual override of a 3 ton vehicle with humans on board, but having said that, this article didn't provide any meaningful information if these "incidents" per mile driven are higher compared with human drivers? They say they saw "huge increase in incidents". Perhaps there was a "huge" increase in miles driven by these cars?
It is possible likely hood of such incidents per car/mile increased due to a software update or tweaking of some parameters. I heard people often complain self driving cars drive too cautiously. Try to address this, it is pretty certain there will be more incidents. But is it what happened here? We have no idea.
In general I feel the quality of journalist output diminishes in time, or perhaps it was always horrible? How can one do research, spend time talking to people, write an article and don't provide basic numbers?
I’m not sure looking at the absolute number of incidents is very informative. How did the total number of miles-per-day from autonomous vehicles vary in the same timespan?
Hmm. I always thought these self-driving taxis were competing with regular taxis. But Cruise is saying "They also never drive distracted, drowsy or drunk," which makes me think they don't think they're competing with taxis, but with random drivers coming home from the bar at 2AM. I'm not sure I quite understand their argument here.
The easiest solution is to just pull Cruise's licenses because they've been and continue to be the worst offender -- the only reason they got significantly faster approval than Waymo to do things even more autonomously was because they're GM and leveraged their massive lobbying power to get away with breaking shit in production.
What's the problem that autonomous cars aim to solve? Almost everybody today is able to drive. Most people are safely navigating billions of kilometers everyday. People who are physically disabled or don't want to drive for whatever reason have the option to order an Uber. So what is it that will change if we attain a 100% human-like AI driver?
Almost 43,000 people died in car accidents in the USA in 2022. Many people hope autonomous cars can reduce that number. The goal is not a 100% human-like driver. It is a driver that is better than humans.
Driverless cars are probably safer in the US, because ppl here suck at driving :)
In Germany you have to take driving lessons with professional instructors, including highway and night drives.
The driving test in the US is ridiculously easy. You don't even need to be able to reverse-park.
I don't understand how these driverless cars don't have some sort of override for public safety officials to move them in an emergency. It seems like that would go a long way to reducing concern? Or is this just rabblerousing?
Now present the data in incidents per vehicle mile and compare it to human drivers please? Very difficult to take anything seriously that doesn't compare this technology to humans when it comes to safety. We're terrible drivers on the whole.
I miss Uber pool. It was $5 for a ride across town and it was a great way to meet people. Why do we need this self driving Taxi shit? Would much prefer my own car to have that functionality than to rent it out on a per-ride basis
I think it depends upon the person. Owning a car is very expensive and many would rather not if they only need it once or twice each month. Others, like myself, need a vehicle almost every single day. I will definitely prefer to own one.
At some point we will need separate emergency technologies to deal with automated vehicles as a fill in for exceptional cases. the situations described here are such cases
I’ll get really pissed if i get run over by a robotaxy (and if I survive of course) but who gets the blame? And is this being equivalent to being harmed by robots? What the hell have we done and what the hell are we searching for, we already have people who could, need and should be doing those jobs. Most likely technology will get there but it better be tested and retested for decades before being widely adopted.
My kneejerk was to say, yeah 1->3 is a tripling. In modern journalistic terms that is 'skyrocketing'.
Then I read TFA. Yep 30->90. 'skyrocketing'.
That's not to say it isn't concerning. The downed wire incident that is the highlight of the story seems quite bad. But human drivers do much, much worse things, with very high frequency. Weekly sideshows, for example. The article is very unfair.
I'm on the streets of SF for hours a day, every day, mostly on bicycle. Often at night, when these AVs are at their peak output. The difference in their behavior is scary noticeable, especially within the last 30 days. I'm very curious about the programming reason behind it.
i have no basis for this guess, but i'd suppose it's more miles being driven, not a significant programming update.
<checking>
yep, TFA linkes to another article that there was a recent significant increase in miles driven.
i guess that doesn't necessarily jibe with your perception of a noticeable difference in singular behavior, but our brains do funny things. when you buy a certain new make of car, suddenly you wonder why so many of them are on the road. (they always were)
But in this case, everyone seems to agree that behavior changed, and data about incident reports matches it. It matches my experience too. It wasn't a subtle change. Cruise cars rapidly went from being timid and predictable to unpredictable.
okay now let's look at "per capita" stats. how many more cars are running? the fact that sf chronicle is even running this without actual info is kinda silly. maybe they're not safe but hard to assess without knowing that.
Stopped at the paywall. But is this likely a case of the number of driverless taxis skyrocketing itself, and the number of incidents per driverless taxi mile being more or less constant?
Basically in an ideal world it will significantly expanding the existing niche biking population in American cities, taking existing riders further/long (ramping up average usage) and introducing tons of new riders to the streets. But still not enough to significantly take cars off roads in a macro-context, especially considering how many people live in suburbs or city neighbourhoods which are glorified suburbs.
Everyone I know in SF is excited it's really only the officials and some news stories. The wait list to join the App is crazy long demand outpaces the number of cars they have on the road. You're just seeing a very skewed narrative.
I'm not in SF, or even inte US - but the view I get from the internet reading stories, posts and comments is that only people in the NIMBY community really gets to voice their opinions in SF.
I'm not sure how one would go about substantiating that "nobody wants them there". It's hard to get the pulse of it outside of the media bubble which tends to be tech-negative.
Wouldn’t get your hopes up on it being 90% cheaper—typically Waymo cost the same or slightly more than Uber for me. Obviously the economics change as time goes on but I doubt they will make it that much cheaper.
Without the need of a driver, cars will increasingly be offered as a rental service rather than an ownership object. In a good month, the only expenses I pay for my car is gas, which is 150-200 USD. Do you think driverless car services will somehow be immune to the pressures every other rentier model (actual rent, SaaS, Netflix, etc etc etc) succumbs to?
> Cruise and Waymo say city officials have mischaracterized their safety track records
Also, Cruise and Waymo refuse to release their safety records. I'll believe the city officials in this case, since they actually have some data. The car companies just have hand waves.
> Cruise and Waymo refuse to release their safety records.
This is not true. They monthly release accidents and disengagement reports to the state.
SF officials, on the other hand, have been caught more or less fabricating a story and misusing data. From the Public Utilities Commission, which oversees the process and AV companies are required to report all incidents to:
> Regarding collision responsibility, San Francisco’s analysis appears to omit or overlook relevant facts present in the data and collision narratives that are critical for understanding the context of the cited incidents. The examples of two injury collisions upon which it seems San Francisco bases its analysis of Waymo’s relative injury collision rate (included below in Appendix A as entries for June 2022 and July 2022) are problematic in this regard. According to Waymo’s account as submitted to NHTSA, the June 2022 collision does not appear to involve any contact with the Waymo AV. indicates the Waymo AV was rear-ended by another vehicle, which immediately left the scene. Note that no determination of fault, of the AV or otherwise, is evident through these reports.
Given that in any high traffic environment driving is as much a social problem as anything else, it should be no surprise that anything short of Artificial General Intelligence cannot cope and causes disruption.
Considering how little progress has been made with AGI to date, perhaps it's time to call off the self driving experiment.
GPT 4 can't be trusted to set the menu for dinner without supervision, but we aren't expecting all sorts of wacky carnage by setting pre-alpha KITT loose on the streets?
Everyone's complaining that the number of total incidents is still small, but the change in those mirrors my own experience driving near those cars, which does not show up in the small number of worst incidents. Meaning the small, but rapidly growing data in the article reflects just the tip of the iceberg.
About the time that the graph shows incidents blowing up, the cruise at least went from a cool thing to drive near to a very unpredictable thing that would act up every time I was near one (which was daily). For each of those ~100/mo reported incidents, there's surely a ton more going unreported, and even more non-'incident' nuisances. Which seem to be skyrocketing as well.
Second, yeah, it's bananas to test large, fast, heavy robots on public streets. The only reason we let it happen is because the robots look like cars.
Third, it's bananas to have large, fast, heavy vehicles everywhere mixed in with all the other traffic. The only reason we let it happen is a mass-marketing campaign (see "The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime" (Adam Ruins Everything) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM )
Here is a film "a Trip down Market Street" recorded in San Francisco on April 14, 1906, just before the Great Earthquake. The source of the problem is clear: cars accelerate much faster than horses. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO_1AdYRGW8
They're not very fast at all, unfortunately, at least for the riders. And they seem to try to pick the longest, least congested paths to get to destination to avoid bumping into too many tough turns that might get them in trouble. Takes easily 2x as long as with an Uber.
I regularly (like daily) see empty cars (Waymo & Cruise) driving around residential areas by Lake Merced while I'm driving to pick up/drop off my kid from summer school... that's between the hours 8am and noon. Also see them in the Ingleside neighborhoods during the day: they have been completely empty when I've seen them. So maybe they can't carry passengers other than those other times, but they are definitely driving around outside of the hours you cite.
Having said that, I've not seen any bad driving from them. There are certainly far worse human drivers, motorcyclists, bicyclists, and pedestrians out there on a regular basis, so I'm not against the self-driving cars being on the street.
Yeah, I think they don’t carry passengers outside of those nighttime hours, but they are still testing them in some areas during the day (which makes sense, need to test them then if they eventually want to operate then)
What I think they should do (what I would do if I were in charge at a AI-car co.): There's a whole ersatz city out in the desert somewhere the whole purpose of which is to allow in situ modelling of new "smart" hardware. (This is a real thing, but I forgot what it's called and I'm too lazy to look it up, I apologize for my barbarism.) The people that "live" there are actually paid employees. That's where you test your self-driving cars.
Further, I would have started by making self-driving golf carts made out of nerf that can't go faster than, say, two miles per hour, and then iterated. It's reckless to immediately attempt to make Knight Industries Two Thousand, in my opinion. The potential for mayhem and death goes up with the kinetic energy, eh? Both speed and mass contribute to the "killer robot" aspect of these machines. Start small and light.
As far as I'm aware, all L4 AV companies have done years of closed course testing. You can (not) see these vehicles being tested in places like GoMentum station in Concord, Altamont Raceway in Livermore, and TRC in Merced, not to mention other courses in Vegas, Seattle, Tahoe, AZ, Florida, Michigan, and China.
Of course, companies also started with small, slow vehicles like the Waymo firefly and the Nuro R vehicles. Voyage (acquired by Cruise) was doing their testing in a low speed access controlled retirement community, with essentially golf carts.
Probably because "training" implies direct and constant supervision, which would almost completely avoid any chance of incidents because the human is in charge at all times.
Deploying an unsupervised robot on the general public for training purposes is even worse than for testing purposes.
When I hear "skyrocket" I think "several orders of magnitude in a very short time". But the source of the quote with skyrocket, basically admits that they didn't have any quantitative evidence to support a massive change in incidents.
Remember: reality is banal. Things are far better explained by sampling error, bias, and base rates, than they are by sudden, dramatic shifts caused by a single factor.